Changing background!

Petra asked me if I could be her substitute for one day. Her students where just busy with an assignment in which they needed to shoot a product shot, a background picture and combine the two in Photoshop.

On that particular day the students where to clip their product shot and paste it into the new background, adjust the looks to fit and add a shadow or reflection if needed.

So what could I do to prepare myself, and at the same time have something to show that makes it worth while for the students. Digging on my hard disks turned up this picture I once upon a long ago made for some harmless fun.

Photocredtis: Lieson Kyläkauppa by Anni Loukomies, Elephant through Google image search from www.konicaminolta.com.

Luckily I was still in possession of the layered psd file which contained the originals and the workflow to show the students.

Disclaimer: I do not own the original photo's, nor did I use the end result anywhere commercially. I just did some retouching for fun.

A great example how a clipped object gets integrated into a new background. So I could easily explain step by step how to attack such a task.

To make sure I had enough material with me for the students, I dug up another old trick just in case.

Sometimes you don't like the existing background enough and you just don't have time and money to come up with a new one. Well in those cases you can always create a new background from scratch with the materials at hand. 

From This:

To That:

Most of the times you don't need much more then a little imagination and half an hour of Photoshop. Have a look at the video below if you want to know how it was done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFsxX6lMWwQ&feature=youtu.be

If you want to give it a go yourself, get the original tulip file from overhere and follow the tutorial at HD quality on YouTube. You can also slow it down in the settings.

Good Luck!