"I’m not sure about this Magic stuff…."

[climberhunt]

January 13, 2011 at 11:08 am

Blend of two shots, One for background and ‘reluctant magician’, and the other for the floating assistant.

"I’m not sure about this magic stuff…" by climberhunt (Dave Hunt), on Flickr

[markst33]

January 13, 2011 at 11:46 am

Clever and imaginative and well shot. Really great image and one I’m sure the little girl will love looking back on as the years go by.

[Broadford1]

January 13, 2011 at 12:11 pm

Very clever – well done.

[miki g]

January 13, 2011 at 10:13 pm

Magic….. :D Well done

[pelagic]

January 13, 2011 at 10:20 pm

I’m dumb tonight. How did you take the horizotal image? I can’t see where is was touching in her outlines.

[climberhunt]

January 14, 2011 at 11:15 am

pelagic wrote:

I’m dumb tonight. How did you take the horizotal image? I can’t see where is was touching in her outlines.

Ted, That’s the best compliment you could give for a shot like this ;)

Two seperate shots, one for the ‘magician’ and one for the ‘assistant’.
The assistant in the foreground was lying on a high stool with a cushion. She was able to go completely horizontal with only the stool at her lower back. The cushion was white, so using a channel I was able to create a layer mask that did most of the cut-out work for me. This is a technique that Guy Gowan uses very effectively for more things than you can imagine. Using the correct channel as layer mask can do 90% of the difficult parts of the cut-out. I then painted in white on the mask to bring in the parts of the ‘assistant’ that were not properly revealed by the mask, and painted black on the mask for the parts of the background that were obscured by the foreground image. I also used the mask to reveal the shadow of the assistant cast on the ground, as the image didn’t look quite right unless she cast a shadow in the same way as the background ‘magician’ does.

Rgds,
Dave.