Frank's Wurger at Berlin Gatow

Hi all,

I have taken the liberty of copying one of Frank Crenshaw's Fw 190 A-8 photos in an earlier post to illustrate how a model may be dropped into a background.

Here is the finished product after about 20 minutes work in Photoshop (CS3).





The steps I followed were:

1. I adjusted the angle of Frank's original image so that the horizon line on his groundwork was horizontal. This actually makes a surprisingly big difference to the realism of the final product, even if only sub-consciously.

2. The light blue sections of the original image, including all the difficult small areas between aircraft and accumulator trolley parts, were highlighted with the Magic Wand too. The canopy parts were not highlighted at this stage.

3. The blue sections were right clicked and "Select Inverse" was selected. This selection included the "grass" in Frank's photo.

4. I opened a photograph that I took at Berlin Gatow airport a few years ago.

5. I copied the selected area of Frank's model photograph and pasted it onto the Berlin Gatow airport background.

6. The aircraft was moved to a spot where it looked natural (or, at least, possible). If necessary, the aircraft could have been resized smaller or larger, but it looked okay to my eye as it was.

7. The bluish canopy sections were highlighted, the Cut from the image.

8. The canopy sections were then Pasted back into the image and moved back into the correct position. The canopy layer was right clicked from the menu bar on the right hand side of Photoshop, and "Blending Options" was chosen.

9. The "Opacity" bar was slid back to 50%.

10. The aircraft layer was selected and "Auto Adjust" was applied. The hue, colour and saturation were adjusted so that the grass on the pasted patch matched the grass in the Berlin Gatow background photo.

11. Random patches of the pasted grass were deleted (taking care not to interfere with the shadow of the aircraft) to help blend the real and the artificial grass.

11. The edges of the aircraft and grass were highlighted and blurred slightly using Gaussian Blur set to around 1.5.

12. The image was touched up with the clone stamp tool

13. The layers were flattened.

14. The image was resized to 800 pixels wide.

15. The entire image had the Auto Adjust tool applied, plus a few more adjustments to saturation (reduced) and hue (slightly increased).

16. Photo blur (Hexagonal setting, radius of 3) was also applied to the entire image before saving as a .jpg file.

As far as I am concerned, there is no substitute for Photoshop when creating these composite images. It is hideously expensive but fantastically flexible.

Trial and error is the best way to get the most realistic result.

I hope that this will be helpful.

Bye for now,

Brett

Brett Green - Editor
HyperScale http://www.hyperscale.com