Making Magic - A Photoshop Tutorial (11/19/01)
This tutorial illustrates different techniques to create the photo collage shown here. The collage was created based on a idea by my wife Dina for our holiday card this year and in celebration of our enjoyment this weekend of the screening of "Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone", a greatly anticipated event that was thouroughly enjoyed by our whole family. If you enjoy this tutorial, or learn anything new from it, or need something explained in more detail, please let me know!
Here are the steps:
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The Source Images
All the source images were shot using the Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. This camera is a 2.1 Megapixel camera, (low to average resolution by today's standards) giving you a maximum original image size of 1600x1200 pixels. For photo collage, more pixels are better, so if this is one of the main uses for a digital camera you are considering purchasing, go for high resolution. When you create a collage from different images, you'll be surprised how you'll want to incorporate some background detail, like a tree or a swingset or person. The higher rez the original image, the more detail you will have captured, so when you crop a bit of the picture, you'll have more to work with.
The model for Harry is my son Zach. He is Harry Potter, right down to the lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead and the fact that we make him sleep in the cupboard under the stairs. OK, those last 2 bits aren't really true, but he does look like Harry. My daughter Samantha was Herminone Granger. I had to shoot the kids separately because we only had one Hogwarts robe and tie and white shirt! (We were able to spring for 2 wands by breaking them off a tree in the back yard...)
Zach as Harry
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Samantha as Hermione |
Fluffy, Hagrid's 3 headed dog who guards the Sorcerer's Stone, was played by our Golden Retriever, Mac, the Geocaching Wonderdog. I wanted to have him sitting upright with his head facing in several directions. We enticed him with treats. As Dina walked around behind me, he dutifully sat in place (sorta) and followed her with his eyes. While it wasn't really neccessary to have him holding still, I figured that this would make splicing additional heads on his body a bit easier as his fur would line up nicely. It turned out to be less relevant since the images I selected had different orientations of his body as shown below. Notice also by the angle of the house in the background that I didn't even have my tripod level in my haste to capture the dog during the 2 minutes that he actually behaved.
The grounds of Hogwarts were created from some images I took when visiting England this past spring.
The first image was taken at Glastonbury Abbey. The second is from atop one of the turrets at Conwy Castle in North Wales.
Masking out Harry & Hermione
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I created a new Photoshop document, starting out with a larger image size than I think I will ultimately need. This allows me to experiment with element placement. I opened all the source images. For each one, select all, copy and paste into the new document. Pasting each source image will create a separate layer for each image. Layers are your friend. Use them. Always. I renamed the layers to something meaningful by right clicking and choosing "Layer Properties" and typing in the layer name.
Save your work. Now. And Often.
There are many ways to remove backgrounds from your subject, from 3rd party tools like Corel Knockout, to using quickmasks. Though tedious, I like to use the pen tool to create paths around the subject, then convert the paths to selections and delete the selection. I zoom into the image, in this example, to 300% to be able to see the smaller details. You don't have to do this in one step. Make several paths, convert, delete, repeat. Save your work. I do not feather the selection prior to deleting the contents. We'll do that later. I end up with the subject having harsh edges. Now I select the transparent area around Zach and feather it by a few pixels to soften the transition between his body and whatever I end up positioning behind him. Here is the final Zach image with the background removed and the feathering applied.
Repeat this for the Samantha layer, the Mac 2 layer and parts of the Glastonbury layer. (see below)
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Hogwarts walls
I am describing building up the walls and image background now, but I actually didn't do this step until later when I actually created the image. I originally wanted a darker dungeon look as described in the book and the movie, but as I experimented with different background images, I liked how the castle walls ended up looking, so I went with that. The upper left corner elements of the Glastonbury layer were removed and feathered as decribed above leaving a hole into which additional background could be placed. I created a rectangular selection of the the stone wall in Conwy Castle and removed the rest of it. I rearranged the layers, by dragging them up and down in the layers palette and ended up with Conwy below (and hence, behind) Glastonbury. The Conwy bricks now fill the blank Glastonbury hole.
Creating Fluffy, the 3 headed dog
The final image doesn't really have Fluffy staring down (with all 6 of his eyes) Harry and Hermione. I took a little theatrical liberty and have all the characters facing us, the audience in a 3/4 view so we can see their cute faces. I did use the 3rd head (taked from Mac1 layer) in profile so make it look at if Samantha's wand was spellbinding him.
Do a rough selection around the head in the Mac1 and Mac3 layers. Invert the selection and delete the backgound. Don't worry about excess background now, we'll want to reposition and rotate the heads before masking so that when we rotate the layer, we don't lose the crispness of the masking. You can rotate/skew/distort individual layers under the Edit->Transform menu. Note the difference with this function and Image->Rotate which rotates the entire canvas and all layers equally. To create Fluffy, I made great use of the Edit->Transform functions. I flipped Mac2 and Mac3 horizonatally so he was facing the kids. I rotated the Mac1 head down about 60 degrees so he would end up looking down at Samantha's wand. I then positioned the heads in positions I liked, and did the cleanup work on the layers. Here's an early version:
The only problem now is that the 3 headed monster dog is about the same size as the kids! Not too fierce yet, is he? He needs to be giant. I could scale the dog layers up a bit - Photoshop can do a decent job without too much image degradation. I try that but it ends up looking too pixelated after all. So on to the next best thing - I save a copy of the file, open it and scale the whole image down (using Image->Image Size) by about 20 percent. I then reopen the original file and bring in the now "giant" dog layers. This technique is only a good idea if you have a high enough resolution file to begin with. As I decrease the image size, I forfeit the ability to print out (if that is my intent) a larger, better quality image. Since this is for the web and some 4x6 holiday cards we'll be printing, my scaled down image size will still look good.
Details, Details
The feathering of Zach, Samantha and Mac do a nice job of blending these layers over the castle background but the kids still look a bit artificial. I want to blend their feet in with the grass a bit and create some shadows under them to help fool the eye a bit.
No details. Note the feet. Bad. |
Shadows and grass added. Better. |
For the grass, I selected some other grassy areas with a feather selection, copy and pasted into a new layer and positioned in fron of their feet. I played with transparency on the layer until it looked OK.
I created a new layer for the shadows by copying the Samantha and Zach layers, filling them with black, Gaussian blurring them and distorting them down 90 degrees. Then I cleaned up areas I didn't like with the eraser and added some with a black airbrush. I then played with transparency on the shadows as well.
Magic discharges from the wands
This part was fun. To create the magical stuff coming out of the wands, I created a couple of new layers. Samantha's is a simple rectangle filled black. Then I applied a lens flare. I can now move the flare to the tip of her wand and change the layer blending option to "Screen" This makes everything black transparent and everything else (the flare) show up. This creates a nice "Luminous" spell to hypnotize Fluffy's third head. Zach's magic cone was a bit more involved. Here are the steps:
- One layer had a small white filled rectangle.
- I then added purple dots to it using the paintbrush.
- I applied heavy gaussian blur and glowing edges filters to create a white and purplish cloud.
- I distorted the layer into a triangular shape to get the cone effect. It looked pretty good, but not magical enough.
- I created a black rectangle filled with yellow dots.
- Next, I would create a rectangular selection around each dot, centering the selection differently each time. Some would be above and left of the dot, above right, centered on the dot, etc.
- Then apply Filter->Distort->Twirl with different settings to create magical eddies.
- Finally, Edit->Transform->Distort to create the triangle for the cone. Once again, apply a screen setting to mask out the black and leave the yellow.
Finally, position all the layers, crop the image to the final proportions, add text for a holiday greeting and amaze and astound your friends and family!
Like these shots? I'm happy to make any image available to you as high quality prints.
Contact me at the link below or leave a comment on an individual image and I'll let you know about price and size availability.
Some prints are already available at my storefront at DPCPrints.com, where you can see price and size availablity.
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