Saturday, January 10, 2009

Composites, stepping it up...

I've seen a fair few studio shots with composites of people on a simple white no shadows background. This is very simple and effective, but the result is usually a little to clinically clean for me:

So I decided to try something else:

levee2 copy

audubon1 copy

No need for a studio and fancy lighting, just a nice setting a tripod and some Photoshop work.

Create your own motion

So you took a photo of the car, but it looks boring like this:

car_side

You want to make the car look like it's moving, but you have no friends to either handle the camera while you drive or drive the car for you as you know you're the better photographer. However you do own Photoshop...

Select the car with a lasso or other freehand selection tool, and apply some motion blur:

car_side_motion_part

This looks kinda weird for two reasons:

1. You can see through the windows and nothing is "moving" here.
2. The tires are not rotating

So add the windows into the original selection to make sure what you see through the windows moves along with the rest of the background. For the tires, simply select them and apply radial blur.

car_side_motion

et voilá, your car is moving. OK there is a third reason it still looks weird, there's no driver... who needs that level of reality anyway.