Damien Symonds

Only the background? I would have thought the foreground needs help too?

Oh, good. I was afraid it was some of that hair nonsense again. Yes, that might be plausible, although generally such methods aren't necessary when proper single raw processing is employed. Can you provide a link to the video?

Sorry Lisa, I can't discuss this here, because it's core stuff from my classes. PLEASE take the Raw Class without any further delay.

Phew! Thanks for letting me know.

Yes, but I'm very wary of this question, whenever it arises, because often people are asking because they've been badly misguided by some random nonsense article they've found on the internet. So ... why are you asking?

How did you go?

Oh, it's great! Well done.

Got it yet?

Ok, try it again. And again. Until it works.

And you double-clicked it, but no window opened?

That's right. Is that the eyedropper you used? The white one on the left?

Oh yeah, something's gone BADLY wrong there. Do her face swap again.

It's looking great.

You're making me nervous now. May I have 100% crops from Dad's and Mum's faces?

Yeah, the hard drive space issue is cause for concern. Brian always says you should have at least 1/3rd space free. You're well below that.

It would need to be blurred a bit.

I agree with Samantha. You need to be in the Levels dialog in your Properties panel, not the Masks dialog.

Relax, that number is meaningless. Only the pixel dimensions matter. http://www.damiensymonds.net/art_resolution.html http://www.damiensymonds.net/bridge-30-day-challenge

It might be symptomatic of something else. Can you do this for me?

You can place anything, but from a workflow point of view, mostly you'd place PSDs.

Just add a new layer and draw them on, I guess?

Sorry, yes.

Right.

Oh, people will notice! Not least of all the guy himself!!!

Ok, here's my layers panel: First, I added the Hue/Saturation layer. This is going to sound a little crazy, but go to every channel in the Hue/Sat dialog (Reds, Yellows, Greens, etc) and pull the Lightness slider all the way to +100 for each one. Don't do it on the Master channel, though. That will make the photo black-and-white, and lighten the background as much as possible. It also makes the dog's tongue too light and desaturated, so mask strongly on the nose/mouth area, and lightly over the fur on the chest, to your taste. I hope you can see what I mean from the thumbnail in my screenshot. Next, add a Levels layer. Pull the white slider in aggressively, to blow out as much background as possible. And fiddle with the middle slider a bit. I used 0.80 for the middle slider and 195 for the white slider. Next, add a white Solid Color layer on top. Invert its mask to black, then start painting white where you want white. Use your best judgement for the shadow - I painted over the shadow with a 10% brush a bit, to make it a bit less strong. You'll know what you like best. At this point I returned to the Background layer and made a new blank layer above it, for cloning. That was to get rid of some of the stones on the ground, that I couldn't paint out with white. Again, this will be to your taste. Then return to the top layer. At this point, pour yourself a stiff drink, because you're going to be zooming WAY in and carefully masking around the fur for the bits of background that couldn't be made white by the Levels adjustment. I did a few easy parts, but as you can see, I left the hard parts. This will take you a while. But it'll be worth it! I can't wait to see what you achieve.