Feathering Feathers (experiments in compositing)

[Richard Olpin]

I’m trying to improve my Photoshop skills and so I figured I’d spend a few mins this evening working on compositing, primarily as an exercise in masking and blending layers.

I had a few silhouette shots from our hawk flying session last wednesday where I’d been following the birds around a rather dull and grey sky. Most of them looked rather like this, which let’s face it, is hardly the most inspiring picture in the world.



I dug out a couple of recent sunset shots and set about dropping the falcon on top.

This was all pretty much a simple layer mask, starting from a simple magic wand selection I then tidied up the edges by hand.
It wasn't too painful, initially I spent about 20 mins using just the mouse (thank gh0d at least for Photoshop CS4’s amazingly useful canvas rotation thing) before I remembered my little Wacom tablet was sat behind the monitor – DOH! The next few mins were considerably less painful and inspire me to get a nicer and slightly larger tablet.

Anyway, 10 mins later, this was attempt #1:

linked with linkr

and #2

linked with linkr

[Nutty]

Pretty convincing to me. I really need to learn how to use PS.

[Kor]

Number 2 is really good. You've got a little bit of a halo on the bottom of the wings, but I'm not sure if that's just an artifact of the image reduction or not.

Good work though