398
S
UPERMARKETS ARE BIG BUSINESS.
Which means the financial pages of
Sunday newspapers are full of them. Which
means shopping baskets… aaargh!
Shopping baskets and shopping carts are
a nightmare to work with. They’re about the
most fiddly object in the world to cut out, and
you can’t use standard erasing techniques such
as the Background Eraser because there’s so
much white in the chrome bars. So, after years
(literally) of cursing the things, I bit the bullet
and spent a couple of hours laboriously cutting
this basket from its background.
Then I went one step further: I separated
the front two sides from the rest of the basket,
and saved the result as a layered PSD file. Now,
every time I need one, I can pull it straight
out of the folder and fill it with groceries,
supermarket managers or anything I like. And
now I’m giving it to you, so you can fill it with
your own groceries.
It’s not just carts and baskets: plenty of
other objects benefit from the front-and-back
technique.
Front and back
1
I use hands a lot in my work – holding pieces of paper,
poles, placards, whatever. So my favorite hands are saved
not as JPEG files with clipping paths, but as layered PSD files:
the hand and fingers are copied to separate layers, one above
the other, and linked so they both move together.
4
And so to the shopping basket. To begin, I created a new
layer, filled with a strong color, behind the basket to see
the cutout better. It was then a process of using the Brush tool,
in QuickMask mode, to paint a line down each of the bars –
click at one end, then hold S and click at the other.
14
Advanced techniques
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
399
HOT TIP
Splitting layers
into two primary
components
in this way is
nothing new
for Photoshop
users; but saving
everyday objects
in this format,
for later use,
easily repays the
time put into
the process. It’s
not necessary to
delete the front
element from the
back, of course
– those fingers
are still there on
the rear hand.
The only thing
to remember is
that when you
adjust the color
on the fingers to
match a head, you
need to repeat
the adjustment
identically on the
hand as well.
2
Now, every time I need a holding hand, I choose one
from the right angle and drag it into my composition.
When making this particular hand, I split the thumb and
fingers into two separate layers. That way I can have it holding
objects in front of or behind the thumb.
3
I can also use just the fingers by themselves to link two
characters together. Here, although I photographed the
man and woman at different times, I’m able to place them in
the same scene by giving the impression he has his hand on
her shoulder.
5
I then duplicated the basket and hid the original. Now,
I made a Layer Mask and painted out everything except
the front set of bars (and the front of the handles). This made
the front half. The back half could remain at it was – still with
the front bars present. No need to erase them.
6
Once again, the two layers were linked together and
saved as a layered PSD document. Now it’s an easy
matter to drag whatever items I need between the two layers.
Whatever I put in there looks convincingly as if it belongs in
the basket – even if it’s patently absurd.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.