Day #99 @ Photography Project 365

I bet you've never seen this in Munich. Well, you may at least recognize parts of it but you probably feel that it just doesn't seem to fit. Here's the secret: I superimposed the golden statue against from Marienplatz against the sky from Ammersee. Of course, I took both photos on separate occasions.

I've been trying to master layers in Photoshop for some time now. The (extremely) tedious part has always been erasing and getting rid of the unwanted parts (and pixels) in a particular photo. I've always thought to myself that there must be an easier way than to manually eliminate pixel by pixel. There are Photoshop plug-ins that apparently make this task easier but I've never tried them.

Anyway, I went through a "Photoshop Masterclass" DVD that was included in Digital Photo magazine recently and discovered some new tricks. Surprisingly, the lessons provided in the DVD always emphasized the manual pixel-by-pixel-elimination approach. However, they did indirectly highlight some tools within Photoshop that would make this task a lot easier.

Two very important tools are the magnetic lasso and magic wand. I've used the magnetic lasso in some previous photos before but this time I decided to go with the magic wand since the distinction between the object and its surrounding was pretty prominent. So, I used the magic wand to select a part of the background, right-clicked on the other parts that were not selected and chose "add to selection", and continued on until the entire background was selected. I then inverted my selection using the Select menu.

Now comes the new part, for me anyways. I clicked on the Refine Edge button towards the top of the window. By playing around with the feathering and expanding/contracting sliders, I was able to refine the selection (i.e. the selected object in this case was the golden statue). I chose the settings that looked ideal for me, copied the selection (i.e. the golden statue) and pasted it onto the image with the sky. Several further adjustments later, I got this photo.

joel@shutteria.com