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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
1 comments:
Hi sorry to say I'm un-following you because you stopped following me a while ago. I like your photos, but I have to go.
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