Image Editing Tricks II
We conclude our two-part Rapid Fire special with a technique that will save you from manual-erase horrors that come with placing one photo over another. Using vector shapes and the Multiply blend mode in Adobe® Fireworks® allows us to create adjustable superimpositions and preserve the shadows of the superimposed image. This works best with photos of objects with a flat white background, standard among stock photos.
Getting Fruity
Picking up where we left off with the previous tutorial, we use our laptop composition as a base photo for this one.
Import your image to be superimposed into the canvas. For this task, choose a stock photo with the subject casting a shadow on a white backdrop. I grabbed an image of mangoes from stock.xchng; an apple is just too predictable. Convert it into a symbol (Modify > Symbol > Convert To Symbol), then give it an opacity of 50% to allow you to see underneath when positioning and resizing the image.
Use the Scale Tool
to resize the mango image down to correct scale. Rotate the mango image to ensure that the shadows and highlights of both the base and superimposed photos match light sources.
When you’re done with the placement, set it’s opacity back to 100%, and change its blend mode to Multiply. This will allow the shadow parts to blend in with the rest of the base photo. We’ll take care of the mangoes themselves in the next few steps.
Bring Back The Opacity
Now, trace a shape around the mangoes with the Pen Tool
Give your shape a nice white fill, and remove the outline that may have been there when you drew it.
Finally, move your shape layer directly below the mango layer. This brings back the full opacity of the mangoes.
Tip: At this stage, you can check and adjust your shape path to make sure that no parts of the shape are peeking outside of the mangoes (evidenced by white edges along the object outline).
Now you can enjoy watching your mangoes bask in the light of an LCD screen
Tip: If you’re superimposing a photo with a black background, use Lighten instead of Multiply as the blend mode for your photo, and fill your back shape with black instead of white. The only downside to using photos with a black background is that their shadows do not show up. You’ll have to put one in afterwards, by either using the Drop Shadow Live Effect, creating a shadow shape and applying Gaussian Blur to it, or painting it in manually.
