Composite image work is rather advanced, but a great deal of fun once you understand the concepts behind it. Improperly done, it can easily look extremely amateurish and frankly, very bad, but once you practice, and actually recognize what you are doing, you can be really innovative. Composite imaging is the process by which you are photographing a background and a subject in two different shoots, then mixturing the two together in Photoshop. Uses for this are anything from a joke picture, to a complex flick poster type design. However before you go out on any sort of shoot, make certain you charge your Canon DSLR battery in a BP-511 charger.
Prior to you do anything, you need to have a concept of what the completed picture will look like. You need to work out the mood, the style, and guarantee your subject and your background fit. You might want to go for the two elements to match each other, or to have a real comparison in regards to context.
The next thing to consider is lighting and exposure, and this is undoubtedly the toughest part within the whole procedure. If either are out, you can easily anticipate to spend a long time in Photoshop attempting to reconcile the two together. One way to help this problem is to attempt and dumb down contrast and make it soft, as this will help in the blending process later on.
A necessary element is to constantly shoot in RAW format. Cards are big and affordable as anything nowadays, and so shooting in RAW should not be a problem for space. The RAW style offers you so much control and will help you with any type of exposure and white balance concerns that you could encounter in attempting to blend subject with background.
Once you have your two pictures, then it is time to get them onto your home computer to begin the composition. Open them up in your RAW editor and start by taking out as much contrast in both photos to offer a soft feel. This makes it easier in the blending procedure later on in Photoshop.
Once you have a comparable feel to each image, you can easily open both in Photoshop to tackle the last mixture. Go to your subject, and extract it from its very own background. There’s a wide variety of methods of doing this, each has its very own benefit depending on the sort of picture you have. Be sure to utilize the fine-tune edge control, as this will certainly smooth out any rough edges you might have.
When eliminated, deliver it over to your background picture and adjust the two so that they both match each other. Things like colour tones and temp are two things you can easily readjust.
Compositing does take a great deal of practice, there are numerous steps included, but once you have actually done one to a really good standard, it will certainly provide you confidence to attempt once more. But before you even go out on your shoot, make sure you utilize your BP-511 battery charger.