You can go to adobe.com and download a trial of photoshop elements which will do everything you want to do. I think it expires in 30 days. The program is like 100 bucks but worth it.
One thing that you can do that I haven’t tried yet is to place a colored sheet in the area that you don’t want to show up, say your room in the background. Blue is used quite often but you don’t want the color to match anything in the layout. Also make sure it’s evenly lighted. When you put the pic in photoshop you can pick any background and have it replace the area in blue. It will blend in with your scene. I’ve seen many samples of it but have never done it yet. I’ve painted the wall around my 8x8 section in light blue for this reason but never gotten around to trying it.
If you can, you need some kind of backdrop with a single colour that will make it easier to eliminate and replace the background. It just makes it easier to clean up the image when there is contrast between the foreground and background.
I was hoping this would be a discussion of using large flexible OLED screens along the layout backdrop to display continously moving images (clouds, smoke, moving trees, distant traffic etc) to add realistic animination.
Perhaps when this question is asked again in five years…
As someone who does manipulate his layout photos from time to time using PhotoShop, I would point out that the effort and care necessary to do so requires a lot more practice, effort and patience than most think. The problem often is in finding a background image that will suitably blend (especially concerning shadows, illumination and scale) with the modeled foreground scene and then being willing to spend perhaps a couple of hours seamlessly blending the two images together to get a single knockout photo.
In my opinion, simply employing an appropriately selected generic, moveable and mounted photo backdrop that can be slid behind the modeled scene, is often a better and certainly an easier approach than the image merging process.
Incidentally, I find that the PhotoShop “cloning” tool is, by far, the most useful of the PhotoShop features. It allows one to do much of the often necessary touching up of initial appropriately framed model scene photos.
I couldn’t agree more with CNJ831. What you see below is a quick (20-minute) effort that gets the job done but not much more… I have too many honey-do things on my list today to really spend the time necessary to do a proper job.
When taking images with the objective of combining it with a digital backdrop, a lot of care must be taken not just with finding a suitable backdrop, but also (and more importantly) with the original image. In this particular case, the depth of field on the original is only so-so, and that presents a challenge.
Often when I do images of my own like this, I discover things that I’ve overlooked. Case in point for this image: the bell is upside down, and there are cobwebs on the loco. The track is not ballasted, so that’s a bit of a give-away too. Anyway, hopefully this is a decent stopgap for now. Cheers.
I bought it in '01 and have never updated it, since it already contains 10 times more functions than I will ever use. Even back then it cost $500 or more. I think that since that time, a number of slimmed down versions have been released - Photoshop Elements and GIMP have been mentioned.
Finding a background image is your job - there’s no library to choose from. You can find backgrounds in various places: your own photos, photos on the web, photos scanned in from books, etc. Using your own photos is preferable not only because they are uniquely yours but also to avoid the unlikely but potential issue of copyright infringement. In addition, if you use your own photos, you can compose them specifically and intentionally to harmonize with the model photo… surfing the web on the other hand for a suitable image can be a tedious process and often, even if you find a suitable image, it will have a size and resolution much smaller than that of your model photo.
I suggest you try Elements or GIMP and see how it goes. Like CNJ831 said, you will find that to do it right takes practise and effort. This is particularly true if you want to add effects like smoke and steam - nothing looks worse than bad photoshopping.
If in the future you have a killer shot that you want manipulated, go ahead and send it to me and I’ll take a stab at it. I extend this offer to everyone on the forum - just don’t overwhelm me or expect same day service.
RR, thank you for the reply. Can you add fore ground to pictures as well? Thank you on the kind offer for the offer of working on other photos as well. I may take you up on the offer.
Ken, just about anything is possible. There’s no limit to the number of images that can be combined into a single photo. It’s just a question of your objective - do you want to showcase modelling or just create a nice image that happens to contain a model? You can reach a point where the modelling aspect is totally overwhelmed by digital effects - that’s completely up to the individual, as long as they’re upfront about what’s model and what’s digital. Cheers.
