Photoshop Blending: How to Use Brushes for Realistic Composites 💥

You don't need anything complicated to blend images together realistically in Photoshop. In this video I show how a very simple use of a brush, with a few basic settings, can blend images so convincingly that you can create a completely new background and composite your subject into a new scene. It's a straightforward technique, but once you've got the brush set up, it makes a real difference to how believable your composites look.

Ragnar - Viking Composite using Photoshop

Following on from the earlier article I wrote ( LINK ) showing the Behind the Scenes of a recent Viking Photo Shoot, I’ve now finished the 2nd image so thought I’d share it here for you to see …

This is a composite made using Photoshop and is a combination of several images comprising the original studio photograph of my friend Simon ‘Foxy’ Fowler dressed as the Viking, the Location Shot and several Sea Bird Photographs.

Here’s the studio photograph of Simon …

Here’s the location shot which is a part of the coastline at Three Cliffs Bay, The Gower, South Wales …

To make sure that I got the angle and height correct, when at Three Cliffs Bay, my great friend Anthony Crothers stood in the spot where I would eventually place Simon …

In the studio when photographing Foxy, my camera was on a tripod and at a height where the lens was in line with the top portion of his nearest thigh.

When on location photographing the background / scene, Anthony was stood on a rasied area of ground …

(Note: it looks precarious but actually isn’t … to the front of Anthony on the other side is a flat area that you can comfortably walk on)

… so to get the angle / height to look as though Simon was photographed higher than he actually was, the camera lens was level and aimed just below Anthony’s nearest knee.

My new compositing workflow

Returning to some compositing has seen me now approach them in a different way especially when it comes to potentially time consuming cutouts such as hair anf fur.

My new workflow sees me leaving this part to the very end and getting great results in literally a fraction of the time …

This is something that I’ll definitely be going through in my Combining Old and New : Mastering Selections and Cut Outs in 2024 class in the upcoming ( FREE ) Photoshop Virtual Summit 6 …

If you’d like to see a larger version of both images created from this photo shoot, I’ve now added them into my PORTRAITS PORTFOLIO ( LINK )

Thanks for looking in,
Glyn

💥 POWERFUL Blending and Compositing function in Photoshop that you MIGHT have missed! 😲

With so many updates coming through, it's very easy to miss things in Photoshop, and this is one function that's well worth knowing about. Auto Blend Layers is incredibly powerful and useful for blending layers together, changing the composition of a picture and compositing. Here I show what it can do with a few examples, and ask the question: do you really know how good it is?