Photoshop layer masking lets you be in 45 places at once

In what has become a family tradition, my family and I try to do something creative for our annual Christmas card.  Last year’s effort took an extra amount of planning to make it look like it was a room filled with lots and lots of us!

Full size image

The inspiration

I love those Where’s Waldo-type books where there is a dizzying amount of detail in the photo and you have to find Waldo and various other things.  I thought it would be fun to somehow create our own scene where we acted out a few family highlights from the year in a way that felt like a Where’s Waldo scene.

The setup

The strategy boiled down to this: 1) put the camera on a tripod. 2) take a bunch of a photos of us in different places, and 3) mash them up in Photoshop with selective reveals using layer masking.  If that last part totally doesn’t make sense, hang with me…I’ll explain.

Fortunately we had access to a large room with lots of tables and chairs.  We needed a big room to create a big scene, and all of the tables and chairs would help make the scene extra “busy.”  Even better, this room had a balcony where I could set up the camera nice and high to overlook the action below.

Problem #1: Even with being up in a balcony, I still had to use the widest focal length of my zoom lens (18mm).  Ugh.  I really wanted to be far enough away so that I could zoom in.  This would have minimized the difference between the closest subjects and the farthest subjects. (In the Where’s Waldo scenes, all those little guys are the same size regardless of where they are on the page).  At 18mm, the stuff nearest to the camera will look a lot bigger than the stuff at the back of the room.  Bummer, but onward.

Problem #2: The lighting was really poor in the room, so I knew I would have to use my strobe lights.  I don’t own the best lights in the world, and they certainly don’t have the muscle to light up a room that size.  My test shots showed a serious vignette—the center of the frame was well-lit but the corners of the frame were much darker:

Normally, I find that there is no easier way to sexy up an image than to add or exaggerate a vignette.  It not only adds depth, but it also directs the viewer’s eye to the main subject of the photos.  But this is exactly why I did NOT want any vignette; I don’t want the viewer’s eye to be drawn anywhere.  To the contrary, I want it to be quite confusing!  Bummer again, but I had to keep moving.  I’d just have to fix it later in Photoshop.

The shoot

The rules were simple: don’t move any furniture, do something random, and leave a Post-it note where you stood.  The Post-it note procedure would prevent us from being in a spot that had been occupied in a previous photo and it allowed us to evaluate how “full” the room was getting.  I had a remote control that would start the timer on the camera, giving us a few seconds to get in place before the camera snapped.  Here’s a quick time lapse of the roughly 100 photos we shot over the course of a couple hours.

Reviewing the photos

After tossing out all of the near-duplicates and those that just weren’t that interesting, I had 45 great images to work with.  Cool!  5 family members times 45 shots equals 225 people filling up the room.  Nice.  However, now that I was viewing the images on my monitor I noticed another problem.

Problem #3: The image quality in the corners and outer edges of the frame showed some serious distortion and softness.  The center of the frame looks good with nice detail:

…but the edges look terrible.  Softness, noise, distortion, darkness, plague, pestilence:

I don’t know whether this was because I don’t have a million dollar lens (it’s just the standard 18mm – 55mm that came with my camera), or whether all lenses do this at 18mm, but this meant I’d have to do some selective Photoshop sharpening in those areas.

Problem #4: Although I had set my white balance to match my lights as I normally do, something about all the wood in that room just made everything seem way yellow and muddy.

I decided to tackle all of these problems—the vignette, the soft corners, the muddy color—as a final step once everything else was done.  For now, it was time to start mashing up these photos in Photoshop to see if this was even going to work.

Using layer masks in Photoshop

I decided that the last shot—the posed family group shot—was the most important one, so I used this as the starting point.

Knowing that this photo would be the bottom layer in what would be my master Photoshop file, I did a Save As to a Photoshop .PSD file.  I opened the next photo and immediately did a Shift+drag from the its Layers pallet and dropped it on the master file Photoshop file.

This creates a second layer in the master Photoshop file.  Holding the Shift key down while doing this makes the edges of the dragged layer snap to the edges of the photo where it’s dropped.  And because these two photos were taken using a tripod, everything lines up perfectly.

So now I have a 2-layer Photoshop file, with one layer merely covering the layer underneath it.  The first thing I do with this new layer, however, is completely hide it using a layer mask filled with pure black:

Making sure the mask is selected (just click on the mask in the layers pallet), I use a soft-edge white paintbrush to paint on the mask which reveals the parts of the image that I want to show.

Here is the 2nd layer shown by itself so you can see what I’ve revealed by painting on the mask:

As you can see, I don’t even have to be particularly accurate at this point with my paintbrush.  Because the photos were all taken using a tripod, everything lines up perfectly:

I repeat this same process for all subsequent photos: 1) open the next photo, 2) Shift+drag it to the master Photoshop file, 3) hide the layer with a black mask, 4) paint white on the mask in the spots that I want to show.  The only time I have to be careful is when I’m revealing something on a layer that touches or overlaps another spot that I’ve revealed on a previous layer.

The more photos I add, the more “crowded” it gets, and the more careful I have to be with my mask painting to make it look real.  It’s time consuming, but the effect is pretty cool, I think:

Finishing touches

To finish up the image, I correct the vignette and softness around the edges…

…and neutralize the muddy yellow color cast…

…and added a whimsical candy cane frame around the whole thing:

Full size image

There’s a lot of ground to cover in just those last few steps that I’ll save for another tutorial.  The goal of this tutorial was to show how tripod photography and selective “reveals” via layer masking can create an interesting illusion.  In this case, the illusion of a family of 5 looking like a crowd of 225.

Lessons learned:

• My two studio strobe lights are not bright enough to light up a huge room.
• I should have bumped the exposure up a few ticks.  For example, to fix the vignette, I brightened the edges.  It would have been better if the edges were properly exposed and instead I reduced the brightness of the an over-exposed middle.  The end result would have been the same, with the exception of less grain/image noise.
• Once this type of photo shoot starts, don’t move anything!  There were a couple of chairs that got bumped between photos at some point, and this required some delicate Photoshop surgery to fix.  Fortunately, it was just in a few spots, but it added extra work that could have been avoided.
• Not necessarily learned but confirmed: feed the kids directly before a photo shoot.  Normally, they quickly lose their patience with me and I end up going Christian Bale on them (ok, maybe not that bad).  I was amazed at their level of cooperation, and for that I thank the pizza.

Lingering questions:

• Do all wide angle lenses create optical distortion around the edges, or just cheapo ones?