Fakecations

The basic process is as follows:

1) Pick a background image.

2) Have a photo of someone

3) In Photoshop, open the photo of your subject.

4) Select the person (use the Quick Selection tool or the Select Subject option) and put them on a layer all by themselves.

- One way to do this is to do your selection and then click the Create Layer Mask button at the bottom-right of your screen. That will make everything outside the selection be hidden by a mask.

- Another way, if you're confident that your selection is accurate, is to simply duplicate that selection (CTRL-J), at which point a *new* layer is created with just your subject.

- The previous lessons ("Selection Tools") was designed to teach you how to do this part.

4) Once your subject has been selected and extracted, you need to have your background image open in another tab so that you can drag your subject layer into the other image (drag it up to the tabs where the title of the image is displayed).

5) At this point your subject should now be on its own layer within the background image file.

6) Now you can position and re-size your subject as needed (using the Move tool "V" or re-sizing or rotating using the Free Transform "Ctrl+T" command).

7) Then you have to figure out two things: Does your subject need to have its colour or brightness changed to better match the background? AND: Does your subject need to be masked so it can "interact" with background elements more realistically (e.g. sitting in a chair, standing behind someone else, etc.) like at the end of my video.

8) Using Adjustment Layers (I demonstrated Layers and Color Balance, but there are many others too) and a clipping mask, try to make the brightness and colour of your subject match the background scene.

9) Using masks, try to create a more 3D-looking scene rather than just a cutout pasted on top of a background.

STUDENT EXAMPLES: Click >>>HERE<<< for a fun Fakecations class slideshow!