Adding a person to a group

[terrypin]

Hopefully this explains my question clearly:



Screenshot D is shown here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/401 ... pPhoto.jpg

I'll post again if I manage to do it myself.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[terrypin]

This is my best attempt, but it was little more than trial and error and subsequent crude editing with various tools.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/401 ... oup-4a.jpg

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[terrypin]

Anyone here regularly do this sort of 'montage' task and happy to share tips on best approach please?

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[photodrawken]

Here's proof that the royal couple are fans of the Chicago Blackhawks:

1. Select images that have the same lighting angle.
2. Paste your incoming image as a layer above the background:

3. Select the areas of the background that will obscure the added person, and promote that selection to its own layer. Move that layer to the top of the stack:

4. Adjust the colour balance, sharpness and contrast of the images so they match.
5. Work on the edges of the images with the softening brush and the smudge brush to eliminate any colour "halos" and hard edges.

[photodrawken]

Hee, hee! This gets to be a lot of fun!

You'll also want to zoom in to 400% and use the Eraser tool to completely eliminate any coloured edges around the overlapping images.

You might have to add some shadows to make it look more believable. For the Ice Crew girl on the left, I painted directly on her, then smudged the paint to create the shadow behind the little girl's head. For the wedding dress, I used a separate, empty raster layer for the paint. Use a soft brush with a very low opacity of about 16 and gradually build up the shadow.

The layers look like this. "Raster 3" is the shadow on the wedding dress.

Royal-Wedding group 02 layers.png (8.45 KiB) Viewed 3498 times

[terrypin]

Thanks very much, Ken, that's going to be extremely helpful. Plan to step through it carefully with my previous example.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[photodrawken]

Glad to help, Terry.

You're going to have trouble with the image of the photographer because the dark shadowed areas of her face don't match the rest of the people's faces. The only way to compensate is to use the Curves adjustment to lighten only the dark and midtones -- first place a point on the curve to "anchor" the highlight areas, then add another point for your modification:

After making that adjustment, you'll probably need to use either a Levels adjustment or a Histogram adjustment to slightly increase the contrast.

I added those modifications to my examples of the Ice Crew girls, but I cheated by doing it in PhotoLine, which is my primary image editing application and makes adjustments like this very easy:

[terrypin]

Thanks Ken. Yes, that inconsistent lighting of her face proved to be the most significant flaw in my result. I'll have a crack at improving it with your suggested technique.

I was so impressed with your montage that I forwarded a copy to Buckingham Palace. I guess they liked it too , as I've had a brief reply asking for your full name and address.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[photodrawken]

I was so impressed with your montage that I forwarded a copy to Buckingham Palace. I guess they too liked it, as I've had a brief reply asking for your full name and address.

If they want the original, they can forward several million euros to the casino at Monte Carlo in my name....