Project 52 Week 15 “How other’s see you”

I love my friends, they make me laugh. When I knew what this week’s P52 theme was I thought I might as well ask a few people for suggestions and boy did they come up with some great descriptions!

There were two consistent themes. One was about me being a multi-tasker who plays many roles; mother, photography, chicken keeper and so on. And the other theme was that I’m fun and just a little bit mad!

So based on that here is my take on this week’s project 52 theme “How other’s see you”

How did I take this photo? It’s pretty easy, just needs a bit of planning and use of a photo editing software that lets you use layers and masks. I used Photoshop but Elements and Paint Shop Pro would work fine too.

To make this effect you stack photos on top of each other in layers and use masks to control what is visible in each photo. For this shot I wanted it to look like all the Rebecca’s were in the room at the same time (what a scary thought!) and having a consistent exposure makes this look more convincing. So I used a tripod to ensure my camera stayed in exactly the same position and pre-set my white balance in camera so it didn’t change if the lighting conditions changed during the time it took me to shoot all the exposures. You don’t have to set an exact white balance, just don’t use auto wb.

First I took a shot of the room without me in it, this works as your bottom layer/background. I used a remote release to take each photo once I was in position – you can see it in my hand in a number of the shots. A trick I’ve found works is to have a large cuddly toy that you can put into position first so you can set your focus as it can be tricky to get good focus when taking a self portrait.

Here is my empty room, my background for the photo.

Once you’ve got all your photos open in your editing software copy and paste them so they are all in the same document with the empty room as the bottom layer. From now on you’ll need to use layer masks – give every layer except the bottom one a mask. In CS5 select your layer and then click this

to add a layer mask. Then invert the layer mask so it’s now black not white – invert is in your mask options.

In the land of masks “black conceals and white reveals”, so as you should now have a load of black masks with each photo the view on your screen should be the bottom background layer – our empty room. Now take a soft white brush and starting with any one of your layers click on the layer mask to ensure it’s selected, then back on your photo use your white brush to paint where your figure is to make it visible. As you used a tripod you should find you don’t need to be too accurate as the background is the same for both pictures but if you do make a mistake just switch your brush to black and paint back over your mistake on the mask layer to hide it again. Next you need to do the same for each layer, slowly revealing the part of the photo with the person in it.

When I’d finished painting the Rebecca’s back in my photo and the layers looked like this. Note only the background and top layer (the balloon photo) are currently turned on which is why you can only see the balloon photo.

Here is a closeup of the mask on that balloon layer.

And a close up of all my layer masks so you can hopefully get a better idea for which bit of each photo has been painted white and therefore revealed.

That’s about it. I saved a PSD layered file so I had everything still available if I wanted to change it again and then saved myself a jpeg. On that jpeg I ran Jodi’s MCP Fusion Action One Click Color and then cropped it slightly, resized for Flickr and stuck on a little watermark.

Took me about 30 mins to shoot the photos and about the same again to edit it. I hope you like the result! If you are inspired to try this please post a link in the comments to your photo as I’d love to see it.