Tough Guy - The Photoshop: Professional Retouching and Compositing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques - page 354

Compositing is becoming increasingly popular among photographers and retouchers. The
ability to combine images and create one final picture allows us to produce work that would
once have been impossible.
Of course, to make it happen we need to grasp fundamental Photoshop skills, such as mak-
ing selections and cutouts. But I also believe that we can learn much by simply observing.
Taking the time to look around, and see how shadows and light behave in the real world,
can remove the need for guesswork in Photoshop.
In this chapter, we'll create a composite by using blend modes. This technique was a game-
changer for me—a way to create composites without spending most of my time making
tricky selections and cutouts. This meant I could work on the more creative aspects, such
as lighting effects, special effects, and so on.
RAW Conversion and Retouch
Camera Raw is where every image retouch starts.
1. Open the raw file toughguy.dng in Camera Raw. With the Crop tool (making sure
that the tool's settings are set to Normal in the menu), reduce the amount of back-
ground above the model's head and from the bottom—just above the curve in the
seamless roll of gray paper. Press Return/Enter. (Don't worry about the area on the
right side of the picture, because we'll be working on that later.)
2. The clothing our model is wearing is very dark, so we're going to bring out more
detail. In the Basics tab, move the Blacks slider to +100 and the Shadows slider to
+85. This reveals more details but has also brightened the highlights, so take the
Highlights slider to -25 ( Figures 7.1 and 7.2 ).