Alright, we’re going to do a composite. I’m going to show exactly how to do a composite just like this one. There are a lot of cool, little things that go along with making a composite like this.

Now, we’re going to start with a blank canvass and we’re going to make a pinch stripe, first. I’m going to show you how that’s done. It’s a little bit complicated but bear with me I’ll show you. Now I want to grab the image here, the original image of the girl and the reason I want to do that is I’m going to go to my background color and I’m going to pick a color that’s probably right in the image, maybe part of that flower, that’s pretty good, I’m going to darken it a bit. Let’s pull out over a bit and there it is, it’s my background color and I’m going to go to image, canvass size. Now the actual pinch stripe depends on your resolution, your personal taste so you might want to experiment with it. But I’m going to—for this image, you use 0.2 and 0.2, all the way around and there it is, you can see, we’ve got a pinch stripe all the way around my open canvass here.

Next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to hit the magic wand, I’m going to hit selection and I’m going to go to inverse. So I’ve selected now only the pinch stripe and I’m going to go to copy. I’m going to go to deselect and what I should do at this point in time, just go back and in history to my clean canvass because now what I want to do is I’m going to hit D and that’s my default colors. I’m going to go to black. I’m going to go to CTRL, Select All or CTRL-A, and if I hit my backspace button, it will make it all black. Now I could have use the paint bucket tool just as well but I like to use in keyboard and shortcuts and all that stuff so.

So now I have a black canvass and that’s the color we want and I’m going to hit deselect or CTRL D. Remember I copied the pinch stripe earlier, bingo, there it is. Now we’re going to go and resize that pinch stripe to free transform of CTRL-T and let’s just size it down. You can make the pinch stripe in any shape you want, totally up to you. There we go.

Okay, where are we? We clicked off the background, make it invisible, there’s our pinch stripe, here. Move around any where we want, use the move tool, okay, now comes the tricky part, getting the images in there.

Now let’s look at this image for a second. This is the main image of the girl, if I’d have known I was going to make a composite when I did this, I would have probably shutter up against the white or like light gray background to make a nice smooth, gradient, to make my selection process a lot easier but at a time, we didn’t know that, kind of came up later. But anyway, it worked nevertheless.

So we’re going to use this magic wand, we have a lot of tones that are close, you want to lower your tolerance and I’m going to hold the—I’m going to make a selection first. I’m going to hold the SHIFT key down, I’m going to keep selection. You see there’s a plus sign when you hold the SHIFT key, well that means, adding your selections, building them on one on top of the other and you keep doing that. Now if you happen to make a mistake, push your ALT key down and you can certainly move in selections, see?

Now I’m not going to the whole process because it takes quite a bit of time and you know, if this doesn’t work for you, you can easily go to your lasso or magnetic lasso and make a selection nice and slow, you’d probably get there one way or another and once your done making your selection, go to feather, and feather at about, anywhere from 3 to 4 and so that way, it’s smoothens your selection a bit.

Okay, having said that, let’s go back to the image now. So I’m going to save you all that time, probably take me an hour to select all that, we’re going to grab this selection here, pretend that I just selected it all. You’ll notice on the bottom, see where’s the dark line right here, that’s because once I placed her, I went it and I burned. So I didn’t want that sharp, sharp edge of her body that her suite just stopping right there. So I wanted to create a soft vignette.

Now in the original image, there’s a little more of a softening effect around the girl and I’m going to show you that right now, how that’s accomplished. If you do this by the way, if you put the pinch stripe and if this is not working for you, you can easily go in and just erase it away. Just go like that. If it happens to be the only way you can get to making that on the right layer. Or in this case, it just worked out well, where if I just place to her below it, so far anyway, so far so good, these things can get a little bit complicated.

But anyways, we’re going to grab the girl and we’re going to make a duplicate layer, okay. Then go to the bottom layer, going to deselect the top layer, going to go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur and we’re going to blur her. You know what, I’m meant to really, I wanted to show the top layer, let’s click on the item, I’m going to go back and do that over again, filter, blur, Gaussian blur, okay, now we can’t see the layer that I’m blurring until I do that, then it’s really starting to show because I’m blurring the bottom layer.

It’s kind of a trick, it does two things—it softens the selection that you made in case it’s not a 100% perfect and it just kind of gives it a nice floaty and cloudy feeling to it so it’s kind of neat. So try that, it works. And there you have it.

Alright, so basically with the other images, we have this one here and we selected just her, very simple, very, very simple, just a lasso tool and we just went all the way around, okay maybe now that’s sloppy—and all the way around and you’re touching, erase here, that’s okay, we’ll build that up later, very easy to do, you just comb it back and selected it and then we wanted selection, feather, you wanted to get that feather up so that you have a nice, soft edge. You know, actually you know what, I think in this case, we’ll even go to 10, not 19—10, 9 and 0 are beside each other so but let’s go back to the image, anyway.

This is the original, you’ll see it right there, bingo, see? There she is. See how the selection was nice and soft, let’s drag it on there and let’s have a look at it, I’m going to show you what I mean.

Feels soft, that is, okay, that’s because we feathered it. Now another thing is we lower the opacity, that’s full and this one was down to 81. There we go, I accidentally moved my line. Let’s see where we’re going with this, get this image on the background—the opacity’s have been lowered so it’s kind of dream-like effect and that’s that one, same thing with the other one. All we did was we made a selection, see? And this one too. Once you made our selection, I’m kind of cheating here, I’m showing you the actual image but that’s okay, you get the idea right. So we’re just going to grab that one, bring t over and let’s grab the other one, while we’re here. There’s one more, there it is.

So we have this image here which we put on the bottom, this image here. You can tell this image here, the opacity is much lower. It’s at 42%, okay. So there, it is full and it’s way too harsh and we wanted to have a dream-like effect, the idea behind this image of course is, you know, she’s dancing and she’s getting ready for a show and she’s looking at the show that’s happening right there. So, that’s sort of what we’re going for. So that’s the final image, you see, in the nutshell. Done very fast, well considering the background issues was done in relative speed, probably total production time is an hour and a half.

Once you sit down and do a little bit of tweaking and experimenting, so again we’ve got two layers of the girl, the girl in the bottom is Gaussian blurred after we selected her and put her on the canvass, and this image here, in the dance pose we selected her with a very soft, feathering and lowered the vignette down to 81, this image here, same thing, we lowered the opacity down to 42 and this one here was a full opacity and we just kind if lay them around so that we have—basically that’s our final product, simple, very effective. Hope you enjoyed that.