7 Steps to successful compositing

Combining images opens the door to endless creative possibilities. The sky is the limit. You can fix myriad problems in your photographic images, create fantasy worlds, change atmospheric conditions, put subjects in places where they’ve never been, and even create a bit of humor.

I know Photoshop is intimidating to many people and that many photographers stick with Lightroom because it’s easier. However, LR doesn’t have the same funtionality as Photoshop. For example, you can’t do sophisticated compositing. To add an egret and it’s reflection in a Louisiana swamp, below, and a Cuban ballerina to a room in the Kremlin in Moscow, next page, you have to work in Photoshop.

What follows are the 7 steps you must become familiar with in order to make successful composite images. Practice does make perfect, but the number one thing you have to be good at is critiquing your own work. Hon-

estly and critically assess your images.

Step 1. The most important part of compositing is choosing elements that work together, that make sense. Even if you like to create fantasy images like the unicorn above, make sure the elements look right based on your knowledge of photography:

a. Lighting. The lighting has to match. In other words, you shouldn’t combine an element captured in sunset lighting with a background taken during the middle of the day. The light on all the elements should be the same in terms of time of day, direction of the light, and how the shadows fall on each element. If one element is lit by sidelighting coming from the right, don’t combine it with something else where sidelighting is coming from the left. Similarly, if you photographed a subject using indoor lighting, it won’t look correct to make a composite in which the background was taken in daylight.

b. Depth of field. If you subscribe to this publication, I assume you know enough about

depth of field to know what it looks like given the optical characteristics of our lenses. There are only three possibilities for depth of field: 1) Everything is sharp; 2) the subject is totally sharp and the background blurred; or 3) the immediate foreground is out of focus, the subject is sharp, and the background is blurred.

Here is what you can’t have: The front of the subject is sharp, the rear of the subject is blurred, and the background is sharp. In other words, you can’t make a composite that is sharp-blurred-sharp.

An example of this is the polar bear composite below. I replaced the sky, but I included too much of the ground. In the original shot taken with a 500mm focal length, the bear is sharp as is the surrounding snow and rocks. But the red arrow points to a more distant portion of the ground that is soft due to shallow depth of field. If realism is the goal, this kind of focus juxtaposition isn’t possible based on the lenses we use. If that area of the ground were soft due to focus falloff, the sky also wouldn’t be sharp. It’s important to pay attention to this kind of detail. This is a very easy mistake to make.

c. Perspective. Pay attention to the perspective from which you shoot various elements when making composites. For example, if you are shooting down on a subject, such as a child, an animal, a car, etc., it’s not going to look right if you composite that with a background photographed at eye level.

The photograph of a 1959 Cadillac on the next page is an example. I photographed the classic car from a height looking down on it, and the background from Croatia was also photographed with that same downward angle. Therefore, this is a believable composite be-

Step 2. Making a selection of a subject or an element is just as important as choosing subjects that work together. A poor selection will make your composite look amateurish. It won’t be believable.

There are 5 manual selection tools in Photoshop: Rectangular/elliptical marquee tool; lasso tool; quick selection tool; magic wand tool; and the pen tool. In addition, Select > subject is an artifiical intelligence command in Photoshop that is good much of the time. Too often, though, it is not precise. That’s why I don’t use it. When a new background is pasted behind the subject, the edges between the two aren’t natural looking in many cases.

For the ultimate in accurancy, the pen tool is the best. It is laborious and time consuming, but it allows you to work at great magnification to precisely define the borders of the subject. When I’m working on a composite that I want to be absolutely perfect, like the combination of images in the Cadillac shot, I use the pen tool to select, in this case, the car.

I also use the quick selection tool a lot. It’s not perfect, and I usually have to make minor corrections with the lasso tool. The result can be just as perfect as the pen tool, and this is often faster.

The secret to making perfect selections is this: Once the subject selection is made -- not the background, but the subject -- use the pulldown command Select > modify > contract. This moves the ‘marching ants’ away from the background as you can see in the screen capture on the next page. This means when a background is composited with the subject,

the demarcation line where the two elements join won’t show a telltail line that’s a remnant of the original background.

Before you paste the background behind the subject, and after you’ve contracted the selection, there is one more operation you have to do to make a composite believable. The selection has to be feathered by one pixel: Select > modify > feather. This softens the edges of the subject ever so slightly, so when the new background abuts the subject, the transition from one color to another is natural looking.

Step 3. When the selection is complete, choose the pulldown menu command, Edit > copy. This places the selected image into the ‘clipboard’, Photoshop’s temporary holding place for a picture or part of a picture.

Step 4. Choose either Edit > paste, or Edit > paste special > paste into. The former is used to place the clipboard image anywhere in the frame. That’s what I used to place the acacia tree in front of the Namibian sand dune, below. From there, you can move the element any-

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where in the frame you want. I also used Edit > paste when I placed the ballerina into the background on page 5.

The command Edit > paste special > paste into is used when you want to place the clipboard image into a particular selection. I used this for the image below. I selected the area in the window and then pasted the model into it.

Make sure when you select an area into which the clipboard element will be pasted that you first feather the edge of the background selection (Select > modify > feather) by one pixel only. If you don’t do this, the juncture of the background and the subject will seem unnaturally sharp, and it won’t look real.

Step 5. Using the pulldown menu command, Edit > transform > scale (or the shortcut Command/Ctrl T), a box forms around the pasted in subject or element. Grab one of the corners of the box and resize it according to your artistic judgement.

If you are using the ‘legacy’ setting in Photoshop, hold down the shift key as you drag a corner. This maintains the proportions.

Step 6. Move the pasted in element to the correct position by activating the move tool in the tools palette. If you’ve placed the element inside a selection, you can only move it within the boundaries of the selection itself.

Step. 7. At this point you may have to touch up areas where the elements meet. Cloning, adjusting the exposure, tweaking areas of color, etc. may be needed to make the composite perfect. §