So I build each of the individual character pieces in a separate file from the template, mostly to prevent over taxing my scratch disk memory. This is the first card backer I made several years ago for a friends birthday present. My friend is paraplegic so I thought it would be fun to make a Jedi figure with robot legs.
I included a shot of the figure. I used a General Zod figure for the head, an Obi Wan Kenobi for the torso arms, hands & lower tunic, and the legs are from a Doideka figure.
For the card art, I had his wife send me a few photos of my friends. I google searched for a Jedi Photos and found a production still of Ewan McGregor with his lightsaber. I had originally planned to include the droideka legs in the photo, but it just worked out naturally that the border would cut him off around the waist. So I found the picture of my friend whose head angle most matched Ewar McGregors and knocked it out from the background.
I used the Selection Mask tool, which allows you to “paint” what you want to be selected, usually in a red filter over the photo. This allows you to adjust the selection on the fly rather than having to undo if you accidentally erase something. In this case it was easy, because my friend has a close cropped hair cut. Later on I can give some tricks for more complicated knockouts. Anyhow, once the head is selected out, I made the background a layer and deleted everything that was not the head. I them copied and pasted that onto the Ewan McGregor photo.
Next I used Levels to adjust the contrast on the head photo to match the contrast of the Ewan McGregor shot. I use levels a lot for this, it lets you set your black point and white point and then adjust the middle tones. Then I used Hue and saturation to match the skin tones. You can also use curves in place of Levels & Hue/Saturation, and frank that is more accurate, but that requires a lot of practice and skill.
The other thing I do a lot is use the Burn tool to darken the edges of the pasted head. Professional photographers typically push the black out all the way. Most personal photograph are not this way, so the Burn Tool lets you darken the edges of the head to blend with the back ground picture. Set the percent low … 25% otherwise it will get too dark too quick. Use a soft edged brush too and use a rotating motion to soften the edges.
In this case the heads didn’t line up exactly, so I used the clone tool to get rid of Ewan McGregor’s head, behind my friends. Also the back ground did not extend far enough to the left to fill the whole card, so I used the clone too to create a second row of lights and more of the wall. I didn’t want to just paint that area black, because wasn’t going to look natural.
So anyhow once that’s all done, I dropped the art into the back layer of the template. I used Ariel for the Name text. Ta-da!
