Floating in Photoshop (or 'A Room With a Stu!')

Special effects photography and montage workshop
15 November (studio) and 22 November (digital workshop)

Image 1: The 'empty' shot (bottom layer)

This shot is the background layer, later when the unwanted items from your 'set-up' shot layer are erased you will see parts of this shot underneath.

Image 2: The 'set-up' shot (Top layer)

Here you can still see the chair but we'll erase it later in Photoshop/Elements to make it look like Stu is standing on the wardrobe door and defying the laws of gravity!

Image 3: The basic edit

This is the result of combining both shots, it only took a few minutes to do in Photoshop or Elements
and is pretty straight forwards.

Image 4 & 5: Taking it further

So you can stop there, or experiment and have lot's of Pototochop fun by adding different backgrounds, new elements, using layers, masks and plug-in effects you can have lots more pototochop fun!
Here are a couple of examples.

Click on this big image to view more examples and larger versions.

Using a tripod
The importance of shooting from a tripod is two fold, firstly the camera doesn't move so it makes it a lot easier to align your 'empty' shot to your 'set-up' shot. It's possible to do this without a tripod, but it's tricky, it will make more work for you at the editing stage and your likely to achieve lower quality results.

Secondly, the light levels will be quite low on the night and as we won't be using flash photography for this, using a tripod means you can shoot at slower speeds without camera shake, and achieve less noisy results but please bring your flash units if you plan to work in the studio. Bring your standard/portrait lens, not macro.

Post-camera editing in Photoshop or Elements
You will be working towards getting 2 images (Images 1 & 2) that you can work on at the digital workshop on 15 November

All you need to do is download your 'empty' shot and the 'set-up' shot to your laptop and our Photoshop Gurus (!) will talk you through the process outlined above. A selection of backgrounds and textures will be provided for you to work into your image but by all means bring some along with you.

It will be easier to use a mouse or a pen & tablet rather than a finger-pad as you may need to do some fine 'cutting-out' around parts of your image.

The club laptop will be available for those who are 'lappy-light' - you can bring along your images on a memory stick or a CDROM.

If you're not particualary interested in this 'special effects' photography we also plan to run a portraiture session in the studio with a model.

Enjoy!

(Stu and Marshall)