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I ran this tutorial about 6 months ago, but as we have soooo many new readers and this is a very useful technique I am running it again.
People will often say to my wife "
you must have beautiful pictures of your girls" (
just because I own a camera or two) and her response is always the same "
the cobbler's wife has no shoes", so I decided to surprise her by photographing my girls for a canvas pano that they would give her for Mothers Day.
One of the problems I faced (
other than the fact when I talk my girls hear "blah, blah, blah") is two of my three girls wear glasses. To make it even harder Emma (
pictured above) has glasses with very wide sides (
that work great at blocking light) AND she wears them further away from her eyes because she has incredibly long eye lashes.
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So I took a few shots and was not at all liking the results at all so I decided to try something I had been shown by
Jed Taufer, I instructed Emma to try to maintain her position as best she could while reaching up and removing her eye glasses and snapped a couple shots of her with her glasses off (
this will work best if you shoot on a tripod).
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I took all the images into Photoshop and using a lasso tool made a rough selection around her eyes (
in the image without glasses).
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I copied the selection and then pasted it into the image with the glasses. I lowered the opacity of the eyes I brought into the image and this helped me get them into the correct position. Make sure you increase it back to 100% before moving on. With the layer of the imported eyes selected I created a "
hide all" (
black) layer mask by holding down the "
ALT" key and then clicking on the layer mask button.
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Then using a white brush (
with the primary/original layer selected) I carefully erased the lenses in her glasses revealing her eyes that I brought over and "
hid" in the layer mask. If you make a mistake while erasing and remove part of the frames simply change the brush to black and paint over the area you meant to keep and it will "
re-appear" (
just remember the rule "white reveals and black conceals").
Here is her finished image.
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And that was pretty much it.
The image below is the finished product, each of the girls were shot individually and them combined in Photoshop, using techniques similar to the "
Twilight Poster" shoot.
By doing it this way all three girls were lit exactly the same, I didn't have to worry about who was casting a shadow on who, or listen to the inevitable bickering that comes when three teenage girls standing to close to each other.
;)And so I would not have to worry about "
perspective" when I combined all three girls my camera was on a tripod (
and was not moved) and once I shot the first girl her position was marked and each girl that followed stood in exactly the same place.
Click on any of the images to view larger and in a new window.