Welcome to the second part of my basic compositing tutorial. If you haven’t gone through the first tutorial yet, I suggest you do so. Otherwise you will have no idea where I’m coming from or what I am doing at this halfway point. The purpose of this tutorial is to teach how you can use the various tools in Photoshop to bring more life to your composited image. We’ll go through things like setting mood, changing shadows and lighting, and the principles of depth using light and general photoshop filters. As a recap of the previous tutorial, we’ve gone through the process of selecting a background that would fit our subject, (in this case, Miko is our subject) and cut out her shape using the various lasso techniques in the previous tutorial. We also did some minor adjustments using a few of Photoshop’s adjustment menus. After we were finished, we had a fairly nice and convincing composite. But it still looked a little flat and uninteresting. Let’s add a little drama.
This tutorial assumes you know very basic photoshop skills. If you don’t know anything about Photoshop, you may have trouble following along. I will try to be as clear as possible and have images to illustrate exactly what I’m talking about where needed. This tutorial was constructed using Photoshop 7, but Photoshop CS2 and above work the same way. To see a larger image, just click on the thumbnail and a pop-up will appear. Be sure to close the pop-up before continuing. The purpose of this tutorial is the basic construction of compositing two different subject matters together into one. For this particular example, I will be using one of my figurines and compositing her on another background.
