ADVANCED IMAGE EDITING SKILLS
8
Match the tones with Levels
Go to the Layers panel (Window>Layers) and highlight
the top layer. Go to Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Levels.
Use the three sliders to try to match the brightness and
contrast with the background scene. Set black point 20,
midpoint 1.16, white point 236.7
Skip Auto Match
When you’re happy, click Next. The final section
offers tools to match the colours, but don’t touch them.
Due to a bug (present at the time of press), if you make any
changes here, it severely degrades the quality of the cut-out
image. So instead, skip it and click Done.10
Open a copy in Camera Raw
To finish off the composite we’ll add a tonal
effect. To do so, we need to first save the image,
then reopen it in Camera Raw. Go to File>Save and save it as
a JPEG, then go to File>Open in Camera Raw to open it in the
Camera Raw plugin.9
Paint soft shadows
Next we’ll paint in a shadow for the feet. In Expert
mode, go to the Layers panel, highlight the Background
layer and click the New Layer icon at the top. Grab the Brush
tool. Set the colour to black and press 3 for 30
brush
opacity. Paint under the feet to add a soft shadow.12
Experiment with effects
Click Open Image. Press Cmd/Ctrl+J to duplicate
the Background layer. To finish off, use the Dodge
and Burn tools to lighten or darken areas of the image. Finally,
go to Quick mode and experiment with the Effects panel.
Here the Seasons effect works well.11
Change the tones
Composites look more convincing if you apply tonal
and colour effects once the images are merged. We
can use Camera Raw to apply a faux HDR effect. Set Exposure
+0.70, Contrast +10, Highlights -38, Shadows +48, Whites
-21, Blacks -16, Clarity +59, Vibrance +41, Saturation -9.