hello everybody welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we are going
to basically look at how to remove the lead and the human when you have followed
the steps from a previous video which means that compositing is straightforward.
that was a really confusing introduction essentially in this video we're basically going to
go through how to do composites this is Zara she is a fox terrier and she is awesome as part of
this shoot she needed to remain on lead the whole time so she's on lead here with the owner stood
here now in an ideal world the lead would be more like this coming out the back of the dog's head
and to be honest with you it makes sense for me to use that picture rather than this one
but we're gonna do this one anyway so I need to basically remove the owner and the lead
you absolutely could go ahead and clone all of this out but that's gonna take some time and I'm
all for efficiency so if I've got a dog on a lead I will make sure that any of my setups are done
in a way that I take a second picture the second picture is always taken using back button focus
on the camera so that the focus point and the focus plane doesn't move so in this situation my
second picture was this one which is an empty shot it's not perfectly lined up so there is some work
to do there but other than that it's pretty solid the same thing happened with the little dashhund
where there were empty shots taken from that one as well and essentially what we're going to do is
remove the owner and the lead from this in a clean straightforward and efficient fashion because
if you're wasting time doing things like this guys you've got better things to spend your time on
so as you can see from this empty shot here there is actually slightly more
of the lower edge of the log and the angle isn't perfect that's fine because that's
basically we're just going to fix that through you could use this exact same technique for removing
you know dogs from pictures for doing head swaps for doing eye swaps for doing anything
you want so essentially what we do is we need to open both of those images up into
photoshop remember that the treatment on both should be the same so this has had the same
exposure and white balance adjustments on as this one and it has also been run through topaz labs AI
denoise because we were in the woods and it was raining so we'll open those up when we are in
photoshop we will have both of those pictures now you can see that they aren't lined up right
this one is angled up slightly this one is lower so what we need to do is match them now I actually
prefer more of the log being in shot and therefore instead of putting the clear background version
onto the busy version I'm gonna do the other way around and I'm actually gonna put the dog
into my other one so how do we do that well guys you need to select all of one of your pictures to
select all press control and A or command an A on your keyboard that will make sure that there
is a little marching ants around the entire frame when you've done that you need to copy now just
use your keyboard shortcuts which are command C or ctrl V on a windows go to your other image
and paste so that's command V or ctrl V if you're on a windows what that's done is that's put my dog
on my empty picture there right so if we line them up perfectly again like so you will see
that we're out of line let's look a little bit closer here at the log can you see we are out of
line however can you also see that the focus point remains in the exact same section of that log?
Right so we need to line it up and we need to line it up as best as we possibly can so look
for objects and elements that don't move so for me I tend to look for landmarks I guess
so I'm looking at this edge over here and I'm also looking probably at the back of the log here and
potentially this groove in the bark you need to have at least two or three different things that
you're looking at then make sure that your top layer is at low opacity so maybe 50% thereabouts
and you can see that there's loads of this that doesn't match up now so what you need to do is
match up kind of as best you can somewhere so that's pretty much there matched up but
then all of this is wrong right and you can see that there's a rotational shift so if we zoom out
and look at that rotation so Zara needs to rotate this way to make this composite work
so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do command T
or ctrl T which brings up your transform options here and I'm going to start to rotate
and when you do that you can fine tune where you're putting it
and assess do we need any more yes we do need a little bit more
do it in little bits
now there is a slightly different angle of view so we're not going to get it perfect
but our focus needs to be on these landmarks
which is pretty much there I think
slightly higher up
I'm using my keyboard just to nudge
that is as good as this shot is gonna get because there's a rotation
over the log there so if we turn that on and put it up to full
there's still a shift but it's because the angle of the shot changed this is why it's
super important to stay still between your shots but this is absolutely fine and we
can work with this this is not a problem at all so with that done and your lines done
you then need to mask out things you don't want therefore that includes any hard edges
like that any hard edges and the human on the lead so we just add a mask down here at the
bottom and with a mask on at this layer that we've got on the top grab a brush a big soft
brush it's very important that it's soft at this stage
and the mask is white therefore you paint with black and you just want to start to bring
bits that you want back in taking away the hard edges
and then when you get to the lead you need to be much more careful
much more careful I can't stress how careful you need to be here guys and you need to go through
your general edges and you'll clean it now you could absolutely add your mask masking around
hair which I'll link above you could absolutely add your hair mask to this section to speed up
going around the edge of the dog and on a wiry dog like this that mask will act perfectly and
we just blend it out so we can get a bit of a bigger brush and remember bokeh is circular
so therefore we need to make the circle complete and bring some of that through so with that done
because we're focusing on the area where the two connect that is pretty solid so then
the last thing to do is clean up your objects which are sharp because there's a shift there
right so what I tend to do is I actually use a harder brush right and I start to bring through
working with the hard edges in the reference document
to reference image which is the just the blank clog and I start to bring through
chunks with hard edges so the hard edge gives you a better cut I guess of objects that are sharp
so now there is a nice soft line that follows actually the shadow of the dog which is great
down there and you would never guess that that is a composite you would just never guess that
so then what I do because I think it's worthwhile mentioning I duplicate both of those layers
so that there's two copies of my layers I then merge the top two and that becomes my working
document and then I group the bottom two layers so you will need to have a new background so
you can either duplicate that or just double click to unlock the layer and then select those two and
then command G or control G to group and then I will call that my composite without a capital O
and what that does is that keeps that safe if you ever need to go back to it but this
is then our working document right and then you continue with your edit and that's literally it
so if you had a situation where you had two dogs you would do the exact same thing where you could
do head swaps and whatnot from one picture to another by overlaying one on the other and then
masking through the finished version of this image should be on the screen now for you guys so you
can see where it went after being edited if you have any questions please do drop them down in the
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