Masking and compositing

As I was working on my street photography project, I came across some photos of a folk arts festival from some nine years ago. One of the photos of a young actor had always appealed to me, but I never shared it. It just never made the grade.

Here is a photo of a group of young dancers getting ready for their act. They were quietly going through some of their steps.

The make-ready area was a good place for getting close to the actors, and I did so with a number of them. Here are the two “warriors”.

The busy background of the pensive boy just ruined that photo. The other one had a better background, but the facial expression is not as compelling as the first one. None of these photos seemed fit for my street photography project but I decided to play with the images.

The muted background seemed that it would help the portrait of the pensive boy. I used Topaz Mask AI calling it from PaintShop Pro. That tool does a very nice job of finding edges. The fine hair of the furry costume was easily selected, as were the stray hair. Then I selected the background from the other image. I put the selections into different layers so I could position them to best effect.

I cloned some of the background areas to enlarge the background image sufficiently so it would cover the background area.

Here is resulting composite image.

A much more successful portrait. The manipulation. of course, made it unsuitable for the street photography project, but seems quite acceptable for my portrait library over at Ludwig.Gallery.

.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck

3 comments

    1. Thank you, Margaret. Actually, less than half an hour. Mask AI if pretty fast to use. You paint over the outline, then refine the selection it comes up with, just a few strokes. Finally. a bit of correcting with the eraser back in PaintShop Pro. It’s fun, not work.

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