Paste Into Selection

Now there is an official looking title to a post.

Saturday I put up some images of the 5D MkII and on one of those I put one of my images into the camera rear screen. This gave me an idea for a little tutorial on how easy that process is.

One of the first process in using an image is getting the background out of the way. We turn to the Background Eraser Tool. I like to start out at a tolerance of 40% and Contiguous to prevent colors on the portion of the image I want to keep from being lifted. It is best to have a solid color as a background but you just have to tweak the Tolerance if it is not. There is usually a fringe of background remaining (especially if you are working with a jpg from an online capture). Once the background is removed, select the layer and go to Refine Edge and reduce the selection by 2 or 3%. Invert the selection and hit Delete a couple of times. With each deletion more of the fringe will be remove. If you do this too much you will end up giving your object a feathered edge.

That part was free as it did not have anything to do with the posting. Start by having both images you want to work with open. Select all of the image you want to copy (Cmd or Ctrl-A), use Edit-Copy (Cmd or Ctrl-C) to copy it to the clip-board and then you can exit that image.

Now go to the image you want the clip-board image to be pasted into. make a selection by what ever means you like. What this is doing is setting up the process where the pasted image will be clipped by the selection you have just made.

Now simply go to Edit-Paste Into Selection to drop the copied image into the current image. Note that when using the Paste Into Selection, the copied image is not put on it's own layer. rather it's dropped into the selection.

The selection lines (marching ants) in the image below represent the copied image from the original file. Obviously we need to resize the image to fit the clipping. Do not worry that the selection on the camera layer went away, it simply defined where the clipping would take place.

The key here is to transform the newly imported selection. Using Cmd or Ctrl-T resize the image as necessary and click return. The inserted image will remain a selection until you cancel it.

Position the image while you resize and it looks as though you took the picture with your own camera... Which you actually did but now it looks like you took it using swanky high end camera gear.

*  *  *  *  B L O G G I N G   N O T E  *  *  *  *   

I am going to be working on my office for the next couple of weeks so I am going to limit the amount of blogging I am doing. I will try and get some shots up of my progress but don't expect blow by blow coverage of my progress.

Cya... Doug