Dountill Tutorials: Tutorial 1 - Combining Animals

**Dountill** · 05-05-2013, 08:50 AM

Welcome to my first tutorial. I dont go by everything in depth, but where needed ill give some info! Feel free to comment if you got any questions.

Pre-Step - Stock materials:

Bertus bird:

Chris Crocodile:

Step 1: Rough Deleting
Open our first animal and roughly delete the background on it. We can do this by make a selection using the Lasso tool. Make sure you dont have any other layers in your project.

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As you can see it is a very rough result. We are going to smoothen this up!

Step 2: Smooth things up
Its important to do this very nice. How more time you spend on this step, how better the result. We can do this by taking the Eraser Tool (hardness 100%, different sizes for every corner)

Everything smoothen and ready to place in our base image.

Step 3: Place the edit in your Base Picture
Just a simple copy and paste is enough to get you image right here. You might want to use the Free Transform Tool to set the head more in proportion.

There we go. Isnt he cute already!?

Step 3: Color Balancing
Because in this case our crocodile is green, and our Bird not (no shit!) We want to bring them blend into each other. We do this by selecting the whole layer of the
crocodile (make sure the outline is selected). No we are going to Balance the colors on ONLY THIS LAYER!!

As you can see we choose for Color Balancing under Layer Mask

Try mixing the colors until you get a nice blend. Something like this:
Tip:If you want a better result, use the Eraser Tool to delete the Color Balancing on the mouth and eye!

Some Color Corrections make a huge different!

Step 4: Stitching
Because there is still too much difference between the crocodile and the bird, we want to Stitch them together. Because there are no hard lines we can cut on i choose to use a Opacity-blend. Take a look and make a rough selection on the part you want to delete using the Lasso-Tool.

Right click your mouse and select Refine Edge

Play a little with the settings as you can see like i did. You can see that the selection you made got a nice flow on this. When you think its good, press OK.
We now simply press the Delete button on your keyboard to get rid of this selection. Repeat this process until you get a nice stitch.

Step 5: Final Result
After i did used some Burn and Dodge tools i came to the following result: