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What happens if you can't
find that perfect photograph? What if you want to make things a
little bit more active than they are in the stock photo? Here is
a little technique that should help you in those circumstances.
What I want to do is to take a photo that I have of a cheetah,
put a background behind it and then make it look as though the
cheetah is moving.
I start out with a photo of a
cheetah. The background is completely blue, which will save me a
lot of time.
Then I choose a nice background image. Here is a
shot of the the Serengeti.
Since the background on the cheetah photo is all
blue, I can use my magic wand tool to select the blue parts and
then simply hit delete. I love the magic wand tool. Here's what
it will look like.
Now I simply place my cheetah photo on a layer
above the background photo. The background photo will now show
through just perfectly.
At this point it looks pretty fake. I want to
make the image look as though I took it with a camera with a
shutter speed that was a little slow. This will give me a nice
blurred effect. Yet the only thing that is blurred should be the
cheetah. The background would not be moving, only the animal. To
achieve this, we will create a controlled blur on the cheetah.
Select your circle marquee tool and draw a oval
shaped selection around the cheetah's head.
Now we want to feather the selection a bit to make it more
realistic. Go Modify -> Feather. I gave mine a 30 pixel feather.
Now invert the selection Shift + Command + I .
Now we are going to do the blur.
We are going to give it a motion blur with the
angle at 0 degrees. This will be straight across. Look at the
dialog box above for the exact numbers I used.
Once we have completed the blur, we are done. On
this piece I decided to duplicate my first cheetah layer (with
the blue background), set it on top of the other two layers and
set the blending mode to Overlay. I also dropped down the
opacity a bit. This seems to have lightened the image a bit and
gave the whole thing a more consistent lighting that I think is
more realistic.
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