Compositing with Floofie

Athena Before

I've been trying my hand at compositing images lately, but the issues I've run into are the backgrounds. While green and blue screens are great for video compositing, they suck for still photography. The light bouncing off the backdrop creates color contamination around the outlines of the model that is difficult to remove during the editing process. Black is better, but then you have the problem of dark hair or clothes blending into the background causing problems with selecting just the model. White could work with very controlled lighting and distance, but is a real pain to set-up. So, I decided to experiment with a couple of different gray backdrops that I have in my inventory. 

Athena After

I started with Floofie using a patterned gray portrait backdrop. Since I'm still working on improving the goddess concept, I chose the costumes and props for that inspiration and added some new items I thought would add to the fantasy. I shot this is my home studio (basically my living room where I set up the backdrops and lights withing the confines of the room's furniture). It's not ideal due to the space constraints, but hey, you've got to work with what you've got. 

After having Floofie play dress up for a couple of hours while I took a few hundred shots of her poses, the more challenging work began. Now, I've been working with Photoshop since version 6.0 was released 23 years ago, and I've taken quite a few lessons and attended several seminars. I don't consider myself an expert, but I mostly know my way around the program and I can usually get decent results. Selecting images and compositing them into a coherent and harmonious final shot requires more complex conceptualizations than simply editing an image.

Celtic Witch Before

When compositing, not only must you separate the initial image from the background, you also must consider the angle of the light hitting the subject, the color of the light source, the density of the shadows, and any reflections in the subject. Once you've chosen the background, you then have to match the perspectives and then harmonize the colors between the background and the subject. I'm definitely still learning, but I think my results are much better than my original attempts a couple of years ago.  

Celtic Witch After

The images you see here are simple composites, though. I'm certainly not to the skill level required to add multiple elements to the composite. I'll need to get much better before I attempt that. Anyway, you can see my results in the images posted.