Shortly after I wrote my first Photoshop tutorial, Broch sent me an e-mail with one line: “Quick question, exactly HOW do you do this in Photoshop???” The answer was simple enough. All you need is a tripod and, well, a camera.

Silly me. I don’t have a camera. I couldn’t very well show him how to do that, now can I? Of course I can. I have a digital crapera, which is just as good.

So I asked my friend Woody to model for me; we picked out a scenic spot over at the Carr-Alien Resort, and I took these fauxtos of him in various poses. I took care not to move the tripod or the crapera in between shots, and I took care to choose a spot void of wind and noticeable movement, so the only difference in each shot is Woody and his reflections or shadows.

Next, I took all the images in Photoshop and placed them as individual layers in a single file. I simply dragged and dropped each image onto the first one while holding the Shift key to keep them all aligned properly. Here’s what my layer palette looked like:

Then, I made only the bottom two images, Layers 1 and 2, visible. The rest I hid from view. I clicked on Layer 2 to work on it and created a mask for it by clicking on the mask icon at the bottom of the layer palette:

With the mask active (you’ll know it’s active if the mask icon, instead of the paintbrush icon, shows up next to the layer’s thumbnail), I took the Paintbrush tool (while leaving black as my foreground color) and painted directly on the second layer Woody, effectively masking him out. As I paint, the layer palette looks like this:

…and the actual image looks a bit like this:

When I completely painted Woody, his reflections and his shadows out (leaving the rest of the scenery alone), I hit Ctrl-I (or Command-I) to invert the mask, like so:

…which reveals the Woody I painted out and the layer beneath, like so:

How this works: anything white on the actual mask, which is to the right of the layer thumbnail, shows up, and anything black on the mask is “erased.”

One by one, I worked on the other layers in the same fashion, creating masks for them, too, until my layer palette looked like this:

…and my image looked like this:

See? Really simple. My thanks go to Woody for being such a great model and to Broch for asking how to do this. If you have any more Photoshop questions, feel free to send them my way.

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