Photoshop Tip: Putting Yourself In Another Photo

One of the coolest tricks you can do with Photoshop is to extract a picture of yourself from one photo and put yourself into another photo. People do this all the time and is often referred to as ‘masking’. There are lots of ways to do this, but I will show you how I do it – quick and easy. (I use Photoshop 7)

1. Open the photo of the person you want to put into another photo. Then go to Filter | Extract.

2. Once you are in the Extract window, use the Edge Highlighter (it’s in the upper right hand corner) to trace the edges around the person. Don’t trace too close to the person because you want to give yourself some room for error. Make sure you make a complete trace around the person.

3. Now you need to tell Photoshop what you want to extract. Select the Fill tool (again in the upper right hand corner and it looks like a paint bucket) and click it once inside the traced image of the person you want to extract. This should turn the person you traced blue. This is what will be extracted. If the whole picture turns blue, it means that your person is not completely closed in.

4. You can click the preview button to see how it will look or just hit ok.

5. Next open up the other photo where you want to put your extracted person into.

6. Put the images side by side so you can see both of them.

7.Go to the Layer palette and drag your extracted image on top of the other image.(The other image should be the background layer)

8. Now you have your new complete photo! Use the eraser tool (and make sure you select the extracted image layer or else you will erase your background) and erase around the extracted image so it will blend in. The hair is always the most difficult but most of the time you really can’t notice some small leftover artifacts.(Does this picture look familiar?)