How To: Create a Photo Montage

There is more than one method of creating a photo montage. Here are the two most common methods:

Cut and Paste:

This method involves selecting a part of an image and overlaying it over another image.

Start with this image and select the background:

next delete the background, so that you are left with something like the image below:

It will be necessary to clean up the selection, you can see above that in the man's left side there is still a trace of the red background left, whereas on his right I have started to clean up the selection and it is a lot cleaner.

Next open up the picture you wish to use as the background:

and simply paste (or overlay) your selection on top.

Finally a few adjustments to the man's size and the brightness and contrast finally leaves this:

And he looks like he's visiting

Layer Masks

This method is slightly more complex but it has the advantage that it is non-destructive to the original image used.

First we take the photograph of the swimmer and select the unwanted background:

A 'mask' is than created. The mask hides all the areas of the original picture where the mask is black and reveals the white areas. Note that the blue background and diving board are still there, they are merely 'masked'.:

This leaves us with:

Next we do the same for the hand (the original image uses a white background so I have only shown the mask and the masked hand here - of course being on a white background and saved as a JPEG you can't tell teh difference so you'll just have to take my word for it).

Next the masked image of the swimmer is overlaid on the masked hand image.

A few tweeks of the swimmer's mask allow the finger to appear to be in front of the swimmers legs so that it looks like she is sitting on the fingers and a bit of use of the 'burn' tool puts adds a little shadow behind the swimmer:

Finally the image of the sky is opened:

I flipped the image of the sky horizontally to give the impression that the light is coming from the correct direction

Next, the masked images of the hand and swimmer overlaid on the sky:

A few tweaks of position, colour, brightness, contrast, and I've added a little 'noise' to hide the joins and...

Well I hope she's enjoying the view.