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The first thing to do was to bring the six frames into CS5
from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 as stacked Layers (Photo/Edit In/Open As
Layers In Photoshop). This will save the
hassle of opening each image and doing any sort of Copy and Paste to get all
the images into one document. They will
go into CS5 in the order they were taken.
From back to front (from lowest number in the sequence to the highest
number). That puts the rear image on the
top of the Layer Stack. Just the opposite
way we'd need them. So, the first thing
(in CS5) that needs to be done is to rearrange the order so that the closet
image is at the top of the stack and the stack descends back to the furthest
image being on the bottom.
Because I was panning as a followed the rider the edges of
the shots don't lineup. They look a
little like a stair step sequence going from low at the left to high at the
right. We'll fix that later. To figure out where the alignment falls we
need to pairs, starting at the two bottom Layers and turning off all the
others. To get into the general area I
lowered the Opacity of the upper Layer to about 50%. The ruts above the rider remained in one
place. I used that as a key and moved
the upper image up to match ruts. One I
got it close I brought the Opacity back up to 100% and changed the Blend Mode
to Difference. With the Move Tool (V)
selected I used the left, right, up and down cursor control keys to nudge the
Layer until the area over the ruts went back.
To check I went one click further in each direction to confirm the
placement.
The next step was to make a Layer Mask. Using the Quick Selection Tool (W) the target
cursor was pulled down through the rider on the lowest Layer. Once the selection was cleaned up I right
clicked inside the selection. This
brought up a dialog box and Save Selection was clicked. This produces an Alpha Channel. If you are using Adobe Photoshop Elements 9
you can go to Select/Save Selection and you too will have an Alpha
Channel. It's the way selections are
saved, if Adobe lets you see the Channels or not. This process was repeated up through the
entire set of Layers.
From there, each Layer was given a Layer Mask based on the
Selection that had been made for that particular Layer. This showed each iteration of the rider. Each Mask was then painted with Black using
the Brush Tool (B) beneath the rider, revealing the rider's shadow. This is actually the trickier part of the
masking.
One thing that happened was that the top of the lower left
was lower than the head of the rider in the third frame. Therefore the canvas had to be expanded. Rather than going to the dialog box
(Image/Canvas Size), an easier method (when the dimensions are unknown) is to
use the Crop Tool (C). With the entire
visible image selected, grab the upper middle "handle" and pull up
out of the image rather than down into the image. As soon as the mouse click is lifted
additional canvas is added and the rest of the image revealed. I had to do this twice as I was building
today's image. The second time I had to
go up and to the right. I just grabbed
the handle in the upper right corner and pulled.
The "stair step" was handled using Content Aware
Fill. The first try resulted in riders
heads in the lower right corner. A Layer
Mask was put on the image masking out the riders. That gave a better result, but not great. The next attempt was taking small chunks and
doing CAF to about a half dozen pieces to make it look right.
The image was brought back
into LR3 and tones, brightness, colors, sharpness, clarity, etc brought up
there. The upper left and lower right
were darkened to put the emphasis on the riders to complete the scene.
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