- Chapter Goals
- Understanding Perspective
- Using Photomerge Guided Edits
- Matching Color
- Adding Subjects in Grass
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Adding Subjects in Grass
When you bring together photos where you show the feet of your subjects, you need to avoid creating composites where it appears the subject is floating above foreground elements. In particular, grass presents a problem. When you drag a subject to a photo with grass in the foreground, the subject looks like its feet are floating. A natural photo would show the feet sunken into the grass a little, with some grass surrounding the feet. Figure 8.29 shows the images I use for this example. Here are the steps to create this type of composite:
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FIGURE 8.29 Two photos to composite.
Bring a subject with a Layer Mask with the feet visible into a background with grass. Duplicate a selection of grass and bring it to the top of the layer stack. Cover the feet slightly with the grass copy.
Choose a brush you can use for grass. For this example, I used the 134 brush tip shown in Figure 8.30.
FIGURE 8.30 Brush settings to replicate grass.
In the Tool Options panel, click Brush Settings and move the scatter to around 10% and the Spacing to around 20%. You can make adjustments as necessary.
Create a new layer at the top of the layer stack. Set the blend mode to Multiply.
Select the Brush tool. Press Alt/Option to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper tool. Sample a color in the grass and apply brush strokes to the new empty layer at the top of the layer stack. If necessary, you can make opacity adjustments to the layer, and you can change the Opacity in the Brush tool options.
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In Figure 8.31, you can see the results of editing the photos shown in Figure 8.29.
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FIGURE 8.31 Final result of adding grass around the feet to create a more realistic view.