A while back, the furrygoat sent me a link to PanosFX. Panos has a number of freely downloadable actions for Photoshop ( I use CS2) that are out of this world. This tutorial covers how to use the PanosFX B&Big action combined with my own twist to produce the following image:

A while back, the furrygoat sent me a link to PanosFX. Panos has a number of freely downloadable actions for Photoshop ( I use CS2) that are out of this world. This tutorial covers how to use the PanosFX B&Big action combined with my own twist to produce the following image:

From beginning to end, it only took me about 1/2 hour to create this picture. Putting together this blog post took way more time than the image editing

I started with a basic flower picture that I took last summer:

I ran the custom action on it, which produced the following results.

Next, I spread a chroma key green screen out, sat my son down on it, holding a piece of card board (a prop to simulate one of the picture ‘pieces’. I took 5 or 6 shots from different angles and this is the one that I chose for the piece:

Since I used a green screen, it only took a couple of minutes to crop and remove the background using the magic wand tool in photoshop giving me the following result:

I resized the portrait of my son down to the appropriate scale and pasted him into the flower picture as a layer.

The Panos action generated a composite image, with each ‘puzzle piece’ consisting of a layer. I chose the piece/layer that I wanted my son to hold and I selected it in the layer pallete.
Next I moved it [the layer] to the top of the stack so that it would always be visible.
I then used the Edit/Transform/Perspective feature to move the layer over the cardboard “placeholder”. While the layer was still selected, I changed it’s opacity to 60% and erased the portion of the picture that was covering up my sons fingers. I then changed the opacity back to 100%, changed the background color to black, flattened the image and exported it as .jpg. Here’s a larger version of the finished product:

View image

If you were interested in making the image more realistic, you could add a gradient based gaussian blur to introduce a realistic depth of field. Lighting effects would also add to the realism.

Let me know if you have any questions and have fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Digital Photography, Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.