More Tricks With Backgrounds
Use layers to swap out backgrounds and improve your photos.Dave Johnson
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Feature: Replace Your Background Using Layers
When I lived in Colorado, I had a glorious view of Pike's Peak and the front range of the Rocky Mountains out of my kitchen window. Indeed, the mountains were so close to town that downtown buildings loomed up in the foothills, giving you the impression that you could walk from the grocery store to the mountain itself in an afternoon.
Now that I live near Seattle, I still have a big mountain to stare at--Mount Rainer--but it is much farther away and looks not nearly so dramatic against the city skyline. This week, let me show you how I've been fixing that digitally. Then you can then apply this background replacement technique to your own photos.
Pick a Pair
For this week's experiment, I need two pictures: a skyline shot of Seattle and a picture of Mount Rainer to put in the background. Save them to your hard drive if you want to follow along.
The two pictures should do nicely for our project. They were taken moments apart, and the lighting in both scenes is almost identical. For the skyline shot, I picked a picture taken with the camera's lens set to a "normal" focal length: not zoomed in, not quite wide angle. This way, it looks about the way you'd see it with your own eyes. In the picture Rainer looks quite small and is positioned off to the right edge of the cityscape. After taking that picture, I zoomed as far as my camera would take me and captured a "close-up" shot of the mountain.
Stack the Pictures
To begin the editing process, load the picture of the zoomed-in mountain into your favorite image editing program. I'll use Jasc's Paint Shop Pro for my example.
Leave it in the background and load the skyscraper picture as a new layer. To do that, load the cityscape picture into Paint Shop Pro and choose Edit, Copy from the menu. Close that image file--we don't need it anymore--and choose Edit, Paste, Paste As New Layer. You should see the city of Seattle on top; the big mountain is hidden in the layer underneath.
Select the Background
Choose the Magic Wand tool (it lives in the fifth cubby from the top of the tool palette on the left side of the screen). For this picture, we'll need the wand's tolerance set to about 25 and the feather set to zero. These values are set in the Tool Options Palette, which you should see at the top of the screen. If you don't, toggle it on by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options.
Now click somewhere in the middle of the big blue sky. Much of the sky should become selected right away. Hold down the Shift key and click in the parts of the sky that aren't selected. Holding down Shift "adds" your selections together. It should take about five or six clicks in total, including one in the middle of the little Mount Rainer.
Transplanting a City
Now for the fun part. When the selection is complete, press Delete on your keyboard. The entire sky will disappear, dropping Seattle about 50 miles closer to Mount Rainer. Save the image and you've successfully altered reality.
Dave's Favorites: Pictures of the New Space Race
I'm an unabashed space junkie: I've wanted to be an astronaut from the age of five; and I even applied to be a Space Shuttle mission specialist during my time in the Air Force.
So, as you might imagine, I've been on the edge of my seat for the last few months watching Burt Rutan's gorgeous SpaceShipOne deliver the world's first commercial astronauts to space and back again.
SpaceShipOne has now officially won the Ansari X Prize, a $10 million purse for the first private team to take a reusable three-passenger spacecraft to an altitude of 100 kilometers and back again--twice in a two-week period. SpaceShipOne did it in just four days.
To celebrate, I thought I'd point you to some stunning photography and video of this historic event. It doesn't get me into space, but looking at these pictures from the Scaled.com TierOne Photo Gallery almost makes me feel like I'm there:
Q&A: Printing Scanned Slides and Negatives
In a recent column, you discussed film and slide scanners. Please tell me how you print a film negative once you have it scanned. Is this through a program like Adobe Photoshop or do you need to purchase other software? Or is the printing software included with the negative scanner?
--Jim Clawson, Canton, Ohio
It's easy, Jim.
Once you've scanned your negatives, they are digital pictures just like any other photos stored on your hard disk. Remember that when you scan a negative, it doesn't appear on your PC as a negative--the scanner software converts it to an ordinary digital image. You can crop it, edit it, print it...anything you want to do with it, with any software you usually use for your digital photos. If you don't own any special image editing software, you can use the photo printing software built into Windows.
Keep in mind that you should scan your slides and negatives with enough resolution to give you a good print. Since slides and negatives are so small, that can mean using a scanner capable of handling 2000 or even 3000 dots per inch. My Minolta film scanner captures slides at 2800 dpi, which creates 10-megapixel images. That's plenty of pixels to do some creative cropping and still print a super-sharp 8-by-10 inch print.
Hot Pic of the Week
Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
This Week's Hot Pic: "BOK Tower Reflection," by Paul Morrison, Seffner, Florida
About this week's Hot Pic, Paul says: "BOK Tower is in BOK Sanctuary in Lake Wales, Florida. It is a National Historic Landmark. I captured this picture by shooting just the reflection of the Tower in the reflecting pool at the base of the tower."
Paul used a Sony DSC-F828.