How to Photoshop montage quickly and dirty…

Or rather how to lose friends and alienate people…

So you don’t know how to really use Photoshop, but you want to take the piss out of your work mates by placing their head in/on another photo? This is by no means the best way, but it’s certainly one of the quickest and it will introduce you to a world of possibilities I’m sure…

I assume that you have at least some very basic knowledge of Photoshop, if you get stuck then comment on here and I’ll try to help.

So start up Photoshop I’ll be using CS3 but it doesn’t matter which version you’re in as long as it’s version 5 or later. Although a few of my keyboard shortcuts may not work in earlier versions so be warned and apologies if they do something unintended in your version, anyway…

Open up the image of the target/soon to be ex-friend (or maybe even impressed friend) and open the image of where you want to add in their face. The advent of Camera phones makes this very easy to get a picture of your intended target and the use of something like images.google.com makes it easy to find an image e.g. a movie poster like my example. Try to make sure that both images are taken from the same point of view, or a similar pose e.g. both are facing the same way.

Start by using the marque tool – the rectangle drawn with dotted lines. This can be found on the top left of the tools palette (if hidden, go to the top of the screen and select Window form the menu and click on Tools at the bottom). Or you can press ‘M’.

Left Click and holding the mouse button down, drag and draw a rectangle around the head of your target… I mean friend, to select what you want to take from this image.

Copy and paste this in to the other document (Shortcut CTRL+C to copy, CTRL+V for paste), this should generate a new layer in your document – if it doesn’t then check your document is in RGB mode (under the Image menu on the top and then the Mode option).

One thing to remember through out, always make sure you have the right layer selected in the later stages, just click on the layer on the layer palette to make sure its selected – it’ll be highlighted in blue usually.

Using the transform tool – under the Edit menu, then Free Transform or CTRL+T, scale the face to roughly fit the area needed. Tip: keep things in scale by holding the SHIFT key down and dragging the corner points of the envelope. Press ENTER when you’re done or double click inside your selection, this will then confirm the transformation.

Another good tip for this is to reduce the opacity of the layer you’re working on to see the document underneath it, if you look for the layers palette (under the Window menu or F7 if not shown) and you should see 2 layers, select the top layer and then in the top right of the pallette you’ll see a small menu displaying the text ‘100%’. Click on this and either use the slider or enter in a new value (0-100) to alter the opacity of the layer.

You should position the layer so that it roughly fits/ covers the face/object below – keep using the Transform tool (CTRL+T) to get this aligned, remember that you can also use this tool to rotate your friends face by placing your cursor near the corner of the transform envelope and you should see this turn from a straight arrow to a curve icon. When you’re done press ENTER to confirm the transform, should take a second or two (Basically it just removes the envelope for you). Remember to move/position layers, just select the black pointer arrow from the top of your tools palette, then click, hold and drag to move your friends face around in the document.

I did something extra after this step, because my subject/target’s photo is taken from the left hand side, but my background person, in this instance Russell Crowe, has been taken from the right, the targets face will look out of place on the new body, so to quickly rectify this we can flip the image horizontally, by going to the top Edit menu, then selecting Transform and at the bottom of this sub menu select Flip Horizontal.

Now that its roughly aligned and in place, we can get rid of the edges and crap surrounding your friends face. There are numerous ways to achieve this, the simplest is to select the eraser tool from your tools pallette (or press ‘E’). Remember to set the opacity of your layer to 100!

Before erasing any of the crud, we need to make sure that the eraser is set to brush mode (the default) and that the brush has a hardness of 0 – this is done to give a gradiated/feathered edge to the object so it blends in better with the layer beneath it. Also check that the brush is not too big or small. In CS2 and later you can alter all of this in the top of your screen by clicking on the brush drop down and using the sliders to alter the master diameter and hardness. Pre CS users will need to do this in the brushes palette by double clicking on a brush and altering that.

So erase away until you think that its correct, just click and hold the mouse button down on the areas you want to remove of your selected layer. Remember that as well as using the undo command (CTRL+Z) you can also use the History palette (under Window and then select History) to go back multiple levels of undo – very, very, very useful!

Ok so now you’ve done this, you may think that the colours of your friends face and the background image don’t match, for instance your friend has a tan, but the body you’ve put them on hasn’t. You can fix this quickly (to a degree) by using some image adjustment tools.

If we go to the top of the screen and select the Image menu, then select Adjustments and then finally select Hue/Saturation (or CTRL+U) we can alter the hue of the face by using the slider, also alter the saturation and lightness of it, to get a better match with the background.

Just save the image down as JPEG/JPG and e-mail that it around the office. When saving the image, a few tips to make sure you can e-mail it and people will be able to receive and open it…

First go to the Image menu, then Mode and make sure that your image is in RGB mode, if it’s not then convert it, you’ll be prompted about merging layers, it doesn’t matter if you want to do this, but I wouldn’t personally as I like to keep separate layers.

Next go to the image menu again and select Image Size (ALT+CTRL+I) and make sure the resolution is set to 72 Pixels per Inch – this is screen resolution, any higher is not necessary unless you want to print this out professionally. You may also want to alter the document size.

When thats done go to the File menu at the top and choose Save As or you can use Export for Web/ Save for Web and Devices, then choose to save as JPEG using values of 50% or halfway – you get different options depending on what you do. We use JPEG for photos as it retains more detail in the photo than say a GIF.

And we’re done! Looks like a lot, but once you can do it, it takes only a few minutes and impresses anyone looking over your shoulder. Of course if you don’t have Photoshop you can use an alternative, or even download the Adobe trial version for 30 days here.

Any problems let me know on here, or if you’d like more screen shots to help explain things.