Gain a deeper understanding of the process of setting up alternative scenes for graphic projects by following the steps in creating a hiker and crane scene. The article presents a detailed practice using an image of a West Coast town, highlighting how to deal with common challenges like overexposed skies and removing unwanted areas from the selection.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the process of setting up a scene using an image of a West Coast town, including steps on renaming and saving work, and locking the original image for reference.
- It emphasizes the importance of adding a mask to select and remove unwanted sections from the image. Tools like the Magic Wand tool and Polygonal Lasso tool are used to achieve this.
- The article underlines techniques for dealing with problems in the image, such as an overexposed sky. The 'fill' function is used to replace these areas and prepare the image for the addition of a new background sky.
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In this video, we’re going to be setting up an alternative scene for our hiker and crane. So let’s begin.
We’ll go to File, Open, and in this situation, we’re going to be opening up our West Coast Town JPEG. We’ll select it and click Open. With this image, we can see that we clearly have a nice sidewalk for our hiker to be standing on, as well as we have an open right area for the crane to be situated on the right.
However, we do have a blown out or overexposed sky, so we’re going to want to replace this sky for our image. So let’s begin working on this image. To do so, we’re first going to drag the background image into a new layer, and we’ll retitle this West Coast Scene, and hit ENTER.
Next, let’s retitle our background West Coast Original, and hit ENTER. Finally, we’ll lock the original, change the visibility, and with West Coast Scene selected, let’s now save our work using Control + S on the keyboard to save, and we’ll retitle this West Coast Scene.psd, and hit ENTER, and Enter. We’re now ready to begin removing our white sky from the background.
In order to do this, we’ll first add a mask, so with West Coast Scene selected, let’s go down to add a mask, and with the mask selected, we’re now ready to select the white area from the background. To do this, we’ll first use the Magic Wand tool, and clicking, we’ll see that it selects more than just the white blown out sky, but it also selects additional pixels throughout our image. In order to change this, we want to change it to contiguous in our options bar, meaning that the pixels will all be connected together, rather than searching for pixels that are within the tolerance of the pixels we selected within the entire image.
We’ll hit Control + D to deselect, and now, with contiguous selected, let’s now click on the white background. As we can see, it’s now contained within this space, so let’s zoom in to see a closer look. If we look on the bottom, it seems that we’ve missed part of the top of our building here.
However, we can remove it from the selection by zooming in, and then by using the Polygonal Lasso tool. In this case, we’ll go to the options bar, and we’ll select Subtract from selection, as we want to remove this part of the building from our selection. Therefore, any polygon that we add will be subtracted from the selection.
So, to do so, we’ll click, and simply add a polygon according to our building. I’ll hold Shift to move straight across, move to the top, down, over, and up, and we’ll create a polygon. Add in all of these elements.
Sometimes, if we can’t find the end of our point here, we can simply hold Control, and if we click, we’ll finish the selection. We’ve now added it to our selection. Let’s scroll to the right to continue looking.
All of this looks good. Let’s continue scrolling, and we’ll zoom out. It looks like we missed part of this building up top, so let’s zoom in, scroll up, and we’re simply going to add this part of our building, and remove it from the selection by creating a polygon around it.
We’ve now done so. Let’s zoom out, and this looks pretty good. If we zoom out further, we’ll see that although it does highlight part of the sky up top, we’re missing some of the sky on the bottom right-hand side within the trees.
As our next step, we’ll start working to select some of this white area through the trees. However, for now, let’s remove the white background. To do so, we’ll zoom out, and making sure that we have the mask highlighted, we’ll right-click, select Fill, and hit ENTER.
We can now see the transparent checkerboard in the background, signifying that we’ve done our work well. Let’s hit Control + D to deselect, and now let’s work on the bottom right-hand side where we can see some of the area here where there’s white in the trees. Let’s zoom in, and scroll to the right, and now we want to highlight specifically this white within the trees.
To do so, let’s use our Magic Wand tool, and we specifically want to highlight the white. If we click, we’ll see that we can only select a small section of the white. However, if we uncheck Contiguous, and hit Control + D, we’ll select pixels that are white within all of the area.
For this case, however, we only want to select areas within this bottom right-hand side of the tree. Therefore, let’s use the Polygonal Lasso tool again, and in this case, we’re going to select Intersect with selection to make sure that whatever shape we draw only selects pixels within that shape as well as the previous selection we’ve already identified. So, let’s create a polygon, dragging from the far left-hand corner to the top here, and we want to make sure we hit all of the white, and at this point, we’re simply going to drag around the tree, and finish the polygon off.
Now, if we zoom out, we’ll see that we’ve only selected around the tree. However, we have selected all of the white areas around the tree. So, if we now right-click and select Fill, we can make sure that black is the contents that’s filled, and click OK.
Hitting Control + D, we can see we’ve deselected all of the white background of our image. Let’s zoom out, and we’re now ready to add background sky to our image. Let’s hit Control + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we’re going to be adding a sky to the background of our image.
See you there!