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Paint Shop Pro X
Multiply yourself
Requirements: a camera with a timer or someone other than the subject (you) to shoot the photos.
Here’s a fun beginner exercise that you can do to improve both your shooting and photo manipulation skills.
First of all, choose a location to shoot.
Set your camera on a tripod.
Shoot the location as it is and keep both camera position and settings for all the next photos.
My location.
Not the fanciest location on the planet but I don’t really know of safe places to shoot in the new city I’m in…
Now set your camera timer and position yourself for the next shots.
Use visual marks for determining if you are positioning yourself on the same spot on different photos. In my case I used the floor tiles as a reference.
My shots.
Not the most creative of all times, but for a first exercise they work well ;)
Once the shots are in your computer, open the location photo (the first shot), hit Ctrl + D to duplicate it and close the original.
Open the other photos and, on each one, hit Ctrl + C to copy, active the location photo and hit Ctrl + L to paste as a new layer.
Hide all layers except for the first bottom two (location and “first pose”).
Decrease the opacity of the “first pose” to about 50 to check whether details from the location have been changed. Whatever has changed, except for yourself :), delete by making a selection around the item and hitting the delete key.
For the next layers, make a selection around yourself, invert it and hit delete.
Because the background is always the same, you don’t need to make a perfect selection except on areas where you overlay yourself, in which case you can either use the selection tool, the eraser, or any other method you feel comfortable with.
As an example, here’s one of my selections:
How my layers look like in the end:
As you can see, only the last layer has a more “precise” selection (not 100% precise because I was feeling rather lazy), since I appeared lying on the couch and also in front of me sitting on the floor. Weird text, huh? This could easily become a surrealist story :D
Once all layers have been handled, turn their opacity back to 100.
Me, myself, I and me again :)
The effect I added after flattening all layers. I duplicated the resulting layer, added a Gaussian Blur, changed the blend mode to Overlay and the lowered the opacity; duplicated the modified layer, set the saturation to 0 and lowered the opacity a little bit more.
Additional stuff
As you can see, this wasn’t a very fancy result…
In order to get more interesting pictures, try using props and visual marks (such as “X“s on the floor/ground) in order to be able to interact with yourself, add more people to the scene, pets, etc.
You can also try shooting at different times of the day or night, or you can even make this a long-term project and shoot in Winter and in Summer to get a blend from snow to “no snow”.
As long as the camera is in the same position, combining different objects, people, poses, weather elements, etc., is relatively easy ;)
Photo Manipulation · Aug 03, 2007 ·