How To: The making of Discovery

In this post I am going to talk about how I made the picture ”Discovery”. The past two weeks I have gotten two questions about this picture, one about how I erased the head and one about how I achieved the airbrushed kind of light. So those are the main points I will be focusing on.

This montage is not very complex; I only used four different shots; the man, the bird and two pictures for the background. The bird and background shots are outside photographs I have taken earlier. I try to take my pictures in overcast weather, since I find harsh shadows hard to deal with when making montages.



The picture of the man is photographed in a studio with my awesome model Marcus. The picture was planned ahead, and I had a sketch of what I wanted it to look like. Here are a break-down of the most important aspects of the shot:

• I used a big softbox from above to match the diffuse light of an overcast day, making sure not to get any blown out highlights or too dark shadows.
• I tried to match the brightness of the backdrop to the brightness of the background I used in the montage. This makes the cut-out easier and I don’t get any halos or shadows around the edges of the cut-out.
• It is tricky to shoot something white against a white background; therefore I carefully tuned the exposure and light so that the shirt and background did not blend together. I often try to avoid this situation when shooting source files for montages, since I find it so difficult.

I always photograph in RAW to have the chance to make exposure adjustments retrospectively. After tuning the exposure a bit I imported the picture into Photoshop. I proceeded with removing the face, using a layer mask and a combination of the Pen tool and Lasso Tool with a feather of 1px. Layer masks are a great way to non-destructively hide parts of a layer. Unlike the eraser tool you can always revert your changes and paint back previously hidden parts. You can add a mask to any layer by selecting the layer and clicking the layer mask icon in the bottom of the layer palette.

Feather defines the ”softness” of a selection and can be used with all the selection tools in Photoshop. It can be set from select->Modify->Feather, or from the tool option bar. I always use a feather of one or two pixels when making cut-outs to make the edges look natural.







This is what the picture looks like after the cut-out and with the color discarded. As you can see, it is missing the back of the shirt and of the hat.



I recreated these by using parts of the shirt and hat, copying them to layers below the main layer and cutting out the shapes with layer masks and the Pen/lasso tool. This is really about experimenting and playing around until it looks good. It took me several tries before I was happy with the result. Sometimes when making headless people I use a slightly different technique that I have written about earlier.



This is how the picture looks with the bird and the background in place. You can see that the light is kind of flat and not very convincing. I also have a big problem with the front of the shirt neck being way to dark. When adjusting the light in “normal” photographs I use curves, but with these photomontages I am going for an airbrushy feel. The way I achieve this is by painting with different size black and white brushes. I paint in new layers and have the brushes set to an opacity of between 4-8% and a hardness of 0%. You set these values in the tool option bar (where you set the size of the brush). I do not really have a method to this, I just go by the flow trying to make it look nice, so this too takes some experimenting before getting right. Below are a side by side comparison of the picture before and after the “airbrushing”.



As a final step I add a texture. and a slight sepia tone. So there you have it, I hope this was of some help and not too brief. Feel free to post questions in the comments and I will try to answer them.