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All right, the first step in transforming the plain drab Stanley Hotel into
that hotel that turns a mild mannered winter caretaker into an axe-wielding
crazy man, is to bring in the rolling hills. Bring those rolling hills from
that other photograph into this one so that we can cover up all of this
foreground nonsense, the top of this SUV and this caterpillar over there and
there is the FedEx like van or something along those lines and we have all the
strip mall garbage going on here, let's get rid of it. Let's cover it up.
So I am going to switch over to my rolling hills image. I shot this photograph
in Rocky Mountain National Park, which is only a few miles away from Estes
Park, however you can see that it's much more tranquil and it's much more
isolated and distant from society, so that works for us.
Now what I want to do is I want to select the obvious foreground right here
that ends at this line of trees and I have already done that in advance and I
save that selection out as a mask. Let me show you what I am talking about. I
will press Shift+Tab to retrieve my palettes over here in the right side of the
screen and I should mention just FYI, in Photoshop CS4, Adobe now calls these
things panels. I am going to continue to call them palettes and it's not just
because I am a crusty old man and I can't get with the program, it's a little
more nuance than that. I think we have to be careful with our language and
panels already has a meaning inside of Photoshop and some of the other Adobe
programs. So it's not like the term is just sitting there waiting for a definition.
All right, so anyway I am going to switch over to the Channels palette and I am
going to click on this palette right here called Mask, and when you save a
selection outline white indicates the area that's selected and black indicates
the area that's not selected, and believe you me, we are going to review
selection outlines and masks in a lot more detail in this and the other
Photoshop one-on-one series. But for now, I am going to go ahead and load
this mask as the selection outline by pressing the Ctrl key here on the PC or
the Command key on the Mac and clicking on this thumbnail. Now we have a
selection. Now I will go back to the RGB composite image. I want to drag this selected
region independently of the rest of the image into the Stanley.jpg file,
so I need to be able to see both of the images at the same time. I will go
up to the Application bar, which is new to Photoshop CS4 and I will click on this
Arrange Documents icon and then I will click on 2 Up and I will be able to see
two images at the same time. Now I will go up to the Move tool and grab
it and notice that, if I drag it inside the selection, I can actually move
the selected area independently of the deselected area and I am going to drag
it and drop it into the other image. Now you will notice that the top image is
now active because its title tab right here is lighter than the one below.
So to focus just on the top image, I can go back to this Arrange Documents icon,
click on it and choose Consolidate All. All right, so got a little bit of a problem,
I am going to Shift+Tab away my palettes for a moment. The problem is that
I am covering up too much of the image, not only am I covering up the strip
malls and all that other garbage down there at the bottom, but I am covering
up the Stanley Hotel and the good portion of the foothills in the background.
I want to drag these rolling hills downward like so and I have actually gone
ahead and giving myself a guideline, I have created this in advance. I will go
up to the View menu and I will choose Show and I will choose Guides, so I can
see this one horizontal guideline that I have put into place and I will go
ahead and drag the trees and rolling hills down far there until they snap into
alignment with that guide right there, it's good.
Now I don't need the guide anymore, so I will go up to the View menu and I will
choose Show and I will choose Guides to turn it off. All right, now I am going
to zoom-in on the image and I will tell you all about navigation later but for
now I am just going to zoom-in and notice that we have these trees and they are
pretty articulated, I have done a good job by selecting the trees but that
doesn't mean that this composition looks right. For example, we still have a little bit of
what turns out to be a bank building, showing through in the background
and if I pan over to the left side of the image, you can see other buildings
that are popping up as well, including for example Safeway back here and
we have just these bratty transitions around these trees, just doesn't
look right. If I zoom out a little bit, you can see that
the color of the foreground trees doesn't match to the color of the background
trees either, so that's another problem and that turns out to be the problem
that we are going to address in the next exercise when we modify the colors
inside of this foreground image, stay tuned.