lighting in Photoshop

D
Posted By
dido
Sep 2, 2005
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181
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2
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Closed
Hello

I often mess around planting people from one Photo to another , with Hilarious results , I once superimposed George W Bush’s Head on an ex- president , humorously alluding to the point that this guy could never be Pres, alas the joke was on me ,,,,, But seriously the lighting is always incredibly difficult to adjust when , matching one images to another’s , anybody know an easy way ? Or Is it just trial and error

TIA

D

Ps * The opening sentence of this post was just a joke and is not based on any real person ( Literally)
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O
OcTavO
Sep 3, 2005
"dido" wrote in message
But seriously the lighting is always
incredibly difficult to adjust when , matching one images to another’s , anybody know an easy way ? Or Is it just trial and error

There’s no quick way to produce a truly realistic fake. But it doesn’t have to be trial and error. If you really want to be able to make compositions look real there’s no substitute for taking some art classes and learning to be able to see how light falls and all the complexities of the shadows it casts.

If the light source is similar on both images in the first place, then some subtle dodging and burning can make it work. But if you begin with a head lit from the left and a body lit from the right then nothing short of repainting the entire image is going to fool the eye into thinking it’s real. So the first step is always trying to ensure that your source images are similarly lit.

Along with light direction, the biggest novice flaw in fakes is differing tonal values and color hues. Always adjust your levels to match the contrast of the images, and play with your hue/sat and color balance to get the color tones matching.

Another flaw is in image quality. If you put a 72 dpi jpg head onto a 300 dpi tiff body, you’ll have a mismatch in the clarity and pixelation of the images. Since there’s no convincing way to make a low quality image clearer, your best bet in this scenario is to make the higher quality of the two images a little worse. There are many ways to do this, personally I use the noise filter to add monochromatic gaussian noise, then gaussian blur the image until I match the lesser quality image.

One of the biggest problems I notice is that people just get the body proportions wrong. Fake heads are usually too small or too large… it only has to be a tiny proportion off for the human eye to send up the red flags. Just like lighting direction, there’s no magic filter for this, you just have to develop an eye for photorealism and apply it. Pencil and paper illustration classes are one of the most effective ways for photoshop users to up their game, IMO.

A couple of final cheap tricks – after faking as best you can, use the lighting filter to gloabbly re-light the image. This can sometimes hide mismatching values and colors. And if you truly can’t get it to look right, just desturate everything to black and white. With no color values, there’s less potential for the eye to pick up errors.
D
dido
Sep 3, 2005
"OcTavO" wrote >> But seriously the lighting is always
incredibly difficult to adjust when , matching one

Thanks for the advice I`ll keep trying
cheers
d

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