Photoshop Tricks, Part 2 - Trick 7: Creating a Bronze Guy
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Don't be misled by this trick's title. You are not going to send a pale New Yorker to Fort Lauderdale for a weekend. Instead, I'm going to show you a behind-the-scenes piece of magic I created in a past Inside Photoshop book. You would need Poser and a modeling program such as trueSpace to complete this example.
First of all, the assignment was to remove a person from his clothing—um, so the clothing remained. This is a family book, you understand. It was a superbly surrealistic sight to see clothing marching down a road. But smart-aleck me had to improve upon the scene for the color plate section and fill this empty clothing with a sort of blobby bronze guy.
I received email out the Eudora asking me how I created the bronze-stylized character, mostly because the reflections in the bronze were accurate, and none of the readers thought I'd actually posed a bronze blob on the road.
Let's back up to the gracious Gary Kubicek, co-author of record with the Inside Photoshop series. In Figure 24.40, Gare was kind enough to flail his arms and legs while he walked because I knew once I'd deleted him from the clothes, the clothes themselves would have to have an indicative, forced posture. Thanks, Gare!
Figure 24.40 Gary K. thinks, "How do I let Bouton talk me into this embarrassing stuff?"
Using the photo and a lot of the Clone Stamp tool, I removed all fleshy parts, desaturated the collar (where flesh tones were reflecting off the white collar—think about that detail...the little stuff counts), and before long, a phantom Gary was trucking down the street. See Figure 24.41 for both the top and bottom halves of the trickery.
Figure 24.41 About the only thing missing here is a name tag on the inside of the shirt collar.
In the earlier book, we left the tutorial at that. But I had an interesting idea: What if I dress a Poser model in similar clothing and put bronze blobs out of his clothing to reflect the scene of the photo that had been taken long before I got this idea?
Enter Figure 24.42. This is a screen capture of the Poser figure posing in trueSpace, without its head, arms, or wallet. (trueSpace is one of those affordable modeling programs that performs accurate reflection calculations.) I set up the background with a rough photo-collage of what the surroundings in the original picture looked like, and then I colored the sky a brilliant reddish-purple, which is technically inaccurate, but it made the blobs I added look like bronze.
Figure 24.42 Setting up a simulated scene of the original enables you to create exactly the right reflections you want in the pieces to be added later.
As you can see, the reflections are not perfect, but they are close enough to fool even the most discriminating viewer. I rendered the scene once for the reflections and then a second time to create an alpha channel that would help me separate the bronze components from the background.
In Figure 24.43, Gare is back on the road, but wow, where did he go to get that tan?
I also added the shadow, based on my modeling work and the shadows that Gare's "proxy" cast in the trueSpace scene.
Figure 24.43 Reflections that are accurate enough to fool the casual viewer's eye can produce startling results when the whole image is presented.
 This chapter is from Inside Photoshop CS, by Gary Bouton (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672326442). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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Next: Trick 8: Creating Images Using Adobe Dimensions with Photoshop CS >>
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