You’re Never Alone: Easy-peasy Photoshop Tutorial #1

How to make a Paul Smith style multiple. :)

1. Organise your location, and get a willing model, someone who doesn’t mind a bit of hammy acting. Robbie Williams wasn’t free, so I asked Laura, and a few days later Oliver also gave his Texas hold ‘em alter ego a go.

2. Do some exposure tests, and shoot several background shots for use later, making sure you haven’t got any extraneous tat in the frame, and that the light isn’t likely to change. Indoors is better for that, natch, but get your off-camera flash fired up and working.

3. With your camera on a tripod, and using a wide angled lens, something like 28mm is probably wide enough, photograph your model several times in several different positions, if possible, wearing different clothes and certainly with different facial expressions and poses. Two is enough to make an interesting composite, providing your subject is suitable and you have a good idea.

4. Download all your photos into Photoshop. I used CS2 for this, don’t know what differences there might be for other versions, sorry.

5. Select your favourite or most suitable background shot and make that your background in PS. My version does that automagically when you click on it.

6. Click on your left hand ‘clone’ and select the ‘move’ tool, and holding down the shift key, drop it onto your background photo.

7. Select ‘Layer’ from the menu bar, and Layer Mask and Hide All. The photograph with your model on will disappear.

8. Select the brush tool and reduce the opacity and flow to around 60-70%.

9. Brush over the photo where you know your model is, and he or she will magically start appearing through the background layer. Keep brushing until you have the whole of the model, increasing the size using the zoom tool so that you can see more detail. To make fine adjustment, reduce the size of the brush tool.

10. If you go over the edge, there shouldn’t be too much dissonance if your background was shot in constant light conditions, but you can toggle back to the previous layer by clicking on the arrow above the double black/white squares in the toolbar menu. To see or not which layer you’re on, useful for the later ones if you’re doing more than 2 ‘clones’, you can click on the eye icon on the layers palette.

11. Once you’re happy with the result, ‘Merge Down’ and then grab the next photo in your series in exactly the same way.

12. Rinse and repeat n times where n is the number of Lauras or Olivers you want in your picture. It is better to have decided that in advance, so that your establishing background frame has enough chairs in it, or enough space, but do feel free to improvise.

13. When you’ve finished fine tuning, Flatten and then adjust curves and levels.

Ace(s).

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