It’s an easy compositing process that opens up endless creative opportunities for mixing and matching people, places and times without hopefully raising too much suspicion.
Sure, deepfakes it ain’t, but it’ll certainly deepen your Photoshop skills.
We’ve used Adobe Photoshop to complete this process, which is available separately or as part of Adobe Creative Cloud. Some students are eligible for an extended free trial of Creative Cloud, and there are also ways to get Photoshop for free.
Using the Quick Selection tool, roughly select the figure you want to extract.
Figures with a clean background are generally easier to extract. If your background is busy, we recommend using the Pen Tool to make a more precise path around the figure, which you can then convert into a selection – simply right click after drawing a path and then select Make Selection.
Check that the View mode is set to Onion Skin and the Transparency setting is around 60 to 70%.
Once the dialogue closes, copy your new selection and paste it into your destination file.
Create a new layer and name it Shadow.
To do this, select the layer with the extracted figure and click on the Adjustment layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette (it’s the half-grey circle).
Note: Hold down Alt (or Option on Mac) and click on the adjustment layer. This will make sure the adjustment layer only affects the layer immediately below and not all the layers.
Use the sliders to play around with the brightness and contrast levels until you get something that, again, looks natural.
Hold Alt/Option and click on the colour balance adjustment layer again so that it only affects the extracted figure and not the background image.
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