Tips & Tricks – Layer masks to fix group photos!

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Hi, Beckie here.  I had 10 beautiful princesses in attendance at my daughter’s birthday party last month.  Cute as they all are, getting that many people – kids at that – to all smile and look at the camera at the same time is a tough task.  My solution to the perfect group photo?  MASK IT!

It’s hard to see the details in the photos above – but in the photo that was the overall best picture of the entire group, two girls have their eyes closed.  Luckily I planned ahead and shot in burst mode, so I have plenty other photos where their eyes are open.  With a little layer masking, we can “remove” the eyes and/or faces from the original photo and replace them with the parts from other photos!

Best of all – its much easier than you might think! The idea is this:  we’ll use a layer mask to hide the “bad” portions of our best photo and reveal the better portions of the supplemental photos beneath it.

First step: Open all of the photos you’ll need and put them in the following sequence (your layers pallette should look like this):

• Best group photo -TOP
• Supplemental photo with open eyes
• (add additional supplemental photos as necessary)

Once you get your photos arranged in layers as described above, we need to position them so that the parts we need (eyes/face) are positioned directly beneath the top level photo.  This way, as we remove the bad parts of the top photo the good parts will be right where we want them.

Second Step: Lower the opacity of the top layer (around 20-30% to start off) and use the arrow keys to move the supplemental photo around until major features are aligned with the top photo.  In my case, I aligned the girls ears since their expressions had changed slightly between the photos.  Don’t stress out too much over this part, but you do want things as close as you can make them.

{note:  if you’re trying to replace two faces, as in my example here, it helps to have one separate replacement photo for each person.  One of the girls had moved to the right in the photo so I needed to create two separate layers so that I could perfectly position each of the faces beneath the top layer. Being able to move each face independently of the others is critical to get this just right.}

Here’s what my workspace looked like after this step:

The best group photo is on the top and I have the opacity of that top layer reduced so that I can tell that the two supplemental photos below are positioned pretty closely to each girl’s face.

Third Step: Create the layer mask!

With the top layer selected, click on the “Add Layer Mask” button in the bottom toolbar of the layers palette.  You’ll see a white rectangle pop up in the layer image (as above).  You’ll also notice that your colors have changed and your current foreground color is white and the background color is black.  These colors are very important for masking!  White is visible and black is removed.  So you never permanently damage/erase any of the photo  – you simply brush with black to remove and add back in by brushing with white if you need to!

Fourth Step:  Use the brush tool to reveal the better face underneath our top layer!

Toggle your foreground/background colors so that black is the foreground color.  Press the “b” button to select your brush tool, use the “]” key to increase the size of the brush to 75 or 100 pixels.  Set hardness of the brush to 0.   Use Ctrl +  to zoom in on the photo so that you can see the face you’re going to work on nice and large on your screen.  In the layers palette, be sure that your top layer is selected, set the opacity to 100%, then finally…click on the little white rectangle in the layers palette that represents your layer mask. This ensures that as you brush you’re working on the layer mask and not the image itself.  Now start brushing!  You’ll see the the top layer disappear as the layer below becomes visible.  Remove too much? no problem!  Simply toggle the colors again so that white is the foreground color and then brush the area with white to make it visible again.

I brushed over the full face of each girl to reveal the “new” face beneath, leaving their hair in tact from the top level photo.  With only the top layer visible, this is what my layer mask looks like after I finished brushing over their faces:

And when all layers are visible and the image flattened, here’s the final image!

You should DEFINITELY check out layer masks, as the same exact technique can be used for “erasing” parts of scrapbook elements on your page!  Wrapping ribbons around other embellishments, hiding portions of pins or paperlips…a layer mask is a wonderful “non-destructive” way to hide parts of an element!

Thanks so much for stopping by today!  Be sure to check back tomorrow when Karen joins us with some brand new scrappin’ inspiration!

BeckieTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 17 Comments