What I had was this photo of a flower. The background was O.K. but not what I wanted and the flower, well it wasn't looking the way I wanted it to either. So in Photoshop I found the background I wanted using one plugin but the flower did not look the way I wanted the final result to look. I did find that look using another plugin.
The original photo to me looks a bit washed out.
This is another variation, just not the look I was after.
I had the two results I wanted just not in the same frame together. How to fix that problem? Of course I had a way to do it, which I will show you and try to tell you the best I can.
First I used the plugin Colorwasher to create the background I wanted behind the flower. That was one layer in Photoshop.
Next I created the flower's look I was after also on a different layer in Photoshop using the plugin ContrastMaster. Great now to put them together.
I took the flower photo and removed the background, this one without having done the conversion using the plugin yet. This is how it looked before using Contrastmaster on it.
This is how it looked after using ContrastMaster on it. Of course each of these are a different layer within Photoshop.
I then merge both the background and the flower into one layer, copied it to the clipboard. Undo the merge in case I decide to do something else to this flower and background later in another life. Paste a new layer into Photoshop to have this result. That is the final layer for the result I was looking for with this photo. The finished photo has the flower standing up from the background and looking more like a drawing than a photo. This is what I was looking for when I first started working on this photo. It took fifteen layers in Photoshop this being the last layer. There were other variations of the background and of the flower until I found the right combination to suite me.
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Comments: 16
I love the 'botanical' look to the ones with the white background.
About your final result, I would have seriously washed out the background so that the cool canna stood out even more.
How did you "remove the background"? I have a graphics pad and I would have had to tediously draw around the flower to extract it. Does photoshop have a miracle "remove background" button? If it does, it might be worth the hundreds of dollars....
Gale,
Since the background is more or less one color and the flower another set of colors...in Photoshop I used the tool for erasing areas of color by clicking on that color...I think Paint Shop Pro has a similar color remover built in to it as well, don't know about other programs as I use PS for most of my graphics work. After removing the similar colors there is usually a small amount of stray pixels left either near or just around the object you want left so I enlarge the whole photo and go in and remove the left over colors that were not removed with the background remover eraser.
If the stray pixels are scattered around he whole background which can happen sometimes I use the lasso tool to outline the shape of the object and reverse select to remove the left over stray pixels.
Hope that helped...
:O)
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