Here is Little Too sleeping on her favorite $100 blanket.

Well, no, not really.

As you might have guessed, I created this image in Adobe® Photoshop. I’m using version CS3, but this technique will work in earlier versions too.

First, I took two photos. One of Little Too sleeping on the chair and another of a $100 bill.

I took the photo of Little Too and used it as the base. I then opened the $100 bill photo and deleted everything but the bill itself. In other words, I deleted the background. I then copied the image and pasted it as a layer over the Little Too photo.

Next, I copied Little Too’s photo and pasted it as a layer above the $100 bill.

So, now there are three layers:

1. Little Too
2. $100 bill
3. Little Too

On the top layer, I deleted the chair, which is the light beige fabric color you see in the bottom right corner. I selected the entire deleted area and expanded the selection by one pixel. I applied a Gaussian blur to eliminate the jagged edges where the chair was cut out. Finally, I applied a very slight drop shadow to darken the edges a bit, aligning the shadow to where the original shadows fell in the original image.

Next, I worked on the $100 bill layer. First, I rotated and moved the image into position. Then, I applied a texture filter, giving it a burlap texture to make it look more like a blanket and less like paper. Next, I applied a warp filter to distort it such that it roughly matched the curves of the chair, so that it looked somewhat naturally curved over the chair. I then applied a drop shadow (in the approximate opposite direction of the drop shadow used on Little Too’s layer). This last drop shadow was used to create the illusion of depth to the $100 bill image, so it looks like it has some thickness to it.

Finally, I also set the opacity of the $100 bill layer at 85%. This subdued the color of the $100 image (you could also adjust colors or desaturate, but this seemed to work best for this particular image) so that it matched the tone of the photo better.

Presto! Chihuahua puppy sleeping on a $100 bill blanket.

You could also use the “Match Color…” adjustment in Photoshop to better match the colors. While the layered photo was open, I also opened the original photo of Little Too. Working on the $100 bill layer, I chose “Match Color…” and used the original photo of Little Too as the source. That resulted in the below image, which matches even better than the top photo, I think.

And, there you go!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:56 am and is filed under Tech Tuesday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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