darryldarko

Some of you may have wondered how some of the images in Persephone's set Possessed was done! so heres a brief and dirty short tutorial about how one achieves floating pictures via photoshop, and it only takes a basic knowledge of layers in photoshop and photography. This is meant for someone who knows a little about photoshop unfortunately because 1) i'm too lazy to give a step by step technique 2) theres probably better writers out there for tutorials like this haha..

Things you'll need before hand:
Camera (duh)
Tripod
Chair or some other ledge for the subject to sit upon
in this case we used a chairs

Step 1: take a picture of the background with no subject make sure you set your camera up on a tripod and be prepared not to move it at all.

probably the easiest thing to do but make sure you use the highest aperture as possible to get every detail you can and so theres no shifts in your view plane. F.8 or above is ideal, unfortunately it was kinda overcast that day and I had to work around with other problems a little later.

Step 2: setup the shot with the model in it, without moving your camera from the original position (hence why a tripod is important.
heres 2 examples one good and one bad
bad one first:

in this image, you'll notice I put red arrows indicating possible problem points. To setup a shot like this you need to make sure that parts of the chair are not blocking any parts of the subjects face. Also you'll notice her arm resting on the chair, this is no good because you don't want to make it look like shes obviously resting on something because the final image will look fake, at least to discerning eyes. Doing this on a bed was another tough situation I didn't figure out til afterwards. The chair legs made indentations in the mattress and sheet and thats just extra work you have to take care of later on.

Good example:

heres a better example you'll notice key points that nothing is 'flattened' by the chairs, her legs are not resting on the chair and neither are her arms or head and shes a bit forward in the chair. Also the use of a dress was a good thing because it depicts gravity and flow, and works better than pants or something else.

anyway next step is to drag the images together and place one on top of each other: you'll notice in the layers panel on the right hand side (circled) that they're layered on top of each other

next you can check to make sure things are "lined up properly by adjusting the opacity layer


You can see with the examples I'm using, something shifted, whether my camera got moved or not or the sheets got moved too much when putting the chairs on whatever, but as you can see here it's not a perfect lining up of images, but thats not TOO much of a problem.

anyway next step you wanna do is select the 'add layer mask' button

select a brush, from the toolbar on the left, choose 'black' for a color and then you can start 'erasing' parts of the image on top

you should pick a fairly 'hard' brush so you can isolate her out without losing any information on the image. Ideally these images would line up perfectly so all you'd have to do is erase the chairs, but it didn't quite workout that way. Anyway after some fine tuning you can totally erase everything but the subject (which I ended up having to do)

if you accidentally erase too much, don't worry you can always select white on the mask layer to regain the image back, thats why a 'harder' brush is more useful.
anyway after a lot of fine tuning and painting away the layer the chairs and the subject are on you'll get the final image: that'll look like this!


you can do all sorts of fun things with similar techniques like cloning:



and another example of floating



thats pretty much it! was this interesting to anyone?