Pixiq

As a wildlife photographer, it is eternally frustrating and disappointing that I will never be able to look up at a dinosaur in the wild and be awed by it's impressive size and power. When I photograph chameleons and other exotic reptiles, I imagine them one hundred times their size and think how cool it would be to see them lumbering around a forest, making the ground shake beneath my feet. Unfortunately, I was born too late ... and so was George Eastman, for that matter.  Oh well, the question now is what to do about it.

Since my space-time continuum machine isn't perfected yet, my only option was to find online or in hobby stores detailed models of various species of dinosaurs and then combine them with landscape images from my files.  The photo at the top of this blog is of a triceratops placed behind a tree I photographed in Kenya.  The way I place a subject behind another element is to select the background in Photoshop and then, once the subject (the dinosaur in this case) is placed into the clipboard with Edit > copy, I then activate the tree photo and use the pull down menu command Edit > paste special > paste into (in CS5).

The two important elements to making an image like this look believable are:

1.  The lighting on the dinosaur and the lighting in the landscape must be the same. 

2.  The selection of the background must be made with the pen tool.  This is the most precise way to separate a subject from its background.

Don't let the pen tool intimidate you.  I know it does many photographers, but it is incredibly easy to use.  I work at 300% magnification for maximum precision, and when the pen tool is selected it's a simple matter to place dots along the edge of the element to be separated (in this case the tree).  Once I had placed these dots along each opening in the tree branches, this created paths -- not selections yet.  To convert the paths into selections, I chose the paths palette.  In the upper right corner of the paths palette, there is a tiny icon that allows you to pull down a submenu (see below).  It is here that you will find the command make selection. When this is chosen, the paths become a selection. You are asked what the feather radius should be, and I always choose one pixel.

Now the triceratops could be pasted into the selection with the command Edit > paste special > paste into.