I am going to show you one of the tricks photographers use to get the most unbelievable shots. It’s photoshop magic! Many of todays most popular portrait poses look almost too good to be true! Most of the time they are!! I am going to show you step by step how to get amazing portraits with photoshop. This is the final image.

Step 1: Get Your Background Image

I don’t have images of the first few steps in this process, but I will tell you that my assistant went into the woods and drug this LIMB into the studio! We cleaned it up and let it dry for a few days. In the meantime we went to Hobby Lobby and picked out some silk flower bunches that we liked. When we got back to the studio, Brandi (my creative studio manager) proceeded to patiently plucked off the silk flowers and glue gunned them to this branch hanging out in our camera room! After that we were ready to shoot!!

So now for the fun stuff! We started by taking a photo of the limb – camera on tripod to keep the same distance and height, etc. The image below is what we used as the base image.

Step 2: Get the Baby in the Image!

Next we moved in a giant bean bag and the baby! you can see what we got in the next photograph. Again, camera in same location, same lighting, same white balance, etc.

WOW! Lots of stuff to clone!! NO NO, its much easier than that! In the next photo you will see how I used the lasso tool to circle the baby and a bit of the surrounding area. Then switch to the selection too and drag the part you have circled with the lasso onto the base image. as in the following photo.

Step 3: Clean It Up and Voila!

As you can see the baby is too large for the background image. Simply hit the shortcut “ctl/cmd T” on your keyboard and resize the layer to fit nicely into your background photo. Then just use your erase tool on soft edges to take away the excess around the baby until it all blends nicely. Flatten your image and VOILA! Baby hanging in a tree!! I save my limb/background image in case I want to use again- I won’t have to repeat that step. Feel free to email me www.spiritphotographers.com if you have any questions! Happy Photoshop-ing!