Retouch yourself into the picture

Step 11 Add shadows and tidy up

I thought that the left hand side of my face (right as we are looking at it) was much too bright, so I masked up the cut out again (trace round with the lasso) and addedd some shadow by airbrushing black at 10% intensity using the colour "Overlay" setting on the brush so as not to obliterate any of the image features.

Shadows are important and they often give away a fake. take time to consider the shadows. If you have got the lighting of your image right, then most of the shadows should be right. However if you are standing in a picture you will have to put shadows in the background when they should have been. (another hoax mistake is to forget about shadows or forget to take out the real shadows of the part of the image that is being replaced.

In the last step I have posted an image of a rocket and you can see that that has a completely fake shadow, but that this makes the image look so real.

(Shadows generally: To add shadows, make a new layer and use the lasso mask tool with straight lines to drww the shadow. This might take a bit of practice, so it really helps if you have a shadow in your taken picture to trace round. then airbrush over it with black set on 10 or 20% intensity. Shadows tend to be darker nearer the object and more blurry farther from the object. When you are happy use a blur tool to make the edge of the shadow a bit more blended, unless it is a bright sunny day and the shadows are hard.)

I also added in a bit more jacket collar, because there was a tiny bit missing