Girl in a Suit
Although it looks like a straightforward shot, there
was quite a lot of retouching work to do afterwards.
I suppose I could have asked the girl to cut her,
very long, hair but she might not have been too happy
about that so I had to 'give her a haircut' in Photoshop.
The problem then was that it was difficult to blend
the bits where I had taken out the hair with the original
background which was sort of white but not quite.
So I decided to remove all the background.
There is an 'automatic' way of selecting backgrounds
and skies and other plain areas using the 'magic wand'
in Photoshop but it seldom seems to give exactly the
selection I want. So I usually end up doing it by
hand.
The best way to do this is with a 'layer mask' (see
the tripods
tutorial for a full explanation), the advantage
of using a layer mask is that, if you make a mistake
and remove something you didn't intend to, you can
put it back using the opposite colour.
The most important thing to get right when you are
painting round an object is to get the right amount
of blur on the outline, you do this by adjusting the
'hardness' of the brush. If the outline is not blurred
the subject will look as though it has been cut out
and pasted on to the new background, if the outline
is too blurred you will see it and it will have the
same effect, it won't look natural.
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