First of all Special Thanks to Digital Dave for permission of the images in this tutorial. Digital Dave used these images and this technique in his film "The Customer is Always Right." This tutorial will show you how to do this in Photoshop step by step. Your version of Photoshop shouldn't really matter and in gimp the basics of this tutorial are essentially the same. The key to this tutorial is having a "plate" shot and the shot of your talent and whatever is holding them up, maybe an object up or what have you. The idea is to hold something in the air with a wire, more bricks, etc. and then take a clean plate of the shot without the object of whats holding them up in the shot. If you don't have those images and you just want to follow along use the images below for reference:
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Step 1. Getting ready.
These are the two images we will use (Thanx Dave), to get rid of the wire holding the pickle in the air. First open Photoshop, and open up your two images. You should now have both of them open and ready to use.
Step 2. Setting up.
Hit the "Move" tool which is the upper right tool in the toolbar on the left. Click inside of the image box of your pickle with a wire. Drag it into the box of the background. You will see it appear over your background image. Use the move tool to line up the pickle image with the background. You can do this in your layer toolbar by clicking the pickle image and lower the opacity which is in the upper right. Move it to something from 40%-50% so you can see both. Now make sure that the pickle image is highlighted in the "Layers" toolbar (It should be the one on top). After you have lined them up you should hit the "Eye" in the layers bar next to the background layer so its unviewable. Set the opacity settings all to 100% again.
Step 3. The Key.
Now choose the "Polygonal Lasso" tool. Its in the toolbar again where the move tool was. It should look like a little coat hanger. Click that. Click on the image and highlight the spot where the wire is. After you complete the highlighting of it you should see a glowing dotted line where you highlighted. Hit backspace and it should get rid of what you highlighted showing the background image behind it.
Step 4. Almost there.
If you see a color where you highlighted then hit the "Magic Wand Tool." If not then go to the next step. That looks like just what its named. Click it and click in the area where the color appeared. Then hit the backspace again and it should get rid of the color that appeared there. You should now see this: (Where you see white in my picture you should see grey and white checkers)
Step 5. Finishing up.
Your pretty much done. Now all you have to do is pluck the eye back in in the backgrounds layer to see the background shown through. Now the pickel seems to be floating. Now you can touch up anything you missed if you did miss anything and save your image. Obviously youd have to do this over and over for each frame of an animation, but in the end this is much more accurate than bluescreening since you would have to match the pickle to the minifigs and also get the bluescreening to look right without any spills or reflections. If the pickle was just flying in the scene without people and was just floating then bluescreening could be used. After all of this is done you should see this:
This is the end result (from David's Film)
MOV- Final Shot (67kb)
This tutorial is an excerpt, please visit Kyle Prohaska's Site Here for the Full Tutorial
