525 Combining Multiple Group Photos

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, and welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, I'm gonna show you how to combine multiple group photos to great effect, inside Photoshop. So by way of an example here, I've got this photograph of my entire nuclear family, so there's me, there's my partner Colleen, and these are our various kids in between. Now notice that we're being captured from up above, which would have required either another person and there was nobody around, quite frankly, but even if there were, I don't necessarily trust other people's compositional skills.

And otherwise I would need a tripod so I could set the timer but we didn't have a tripod either. So here's what we did. I went ahead and set up the shot in the first place, leaving room for myself, which of course, I didn't necessarily do very well. My compositional skills apparently need work as well, because I can barely fit in this shot. And then I traded the camera with Colleen, and she took a photo. Now obviously we took many photos apiece to make sure we got things more or less right, but you can see we didn't. My shot shows the people at an angle, and hers is straight on more or less, and the angle of the wall is totally wrong, and everything, and even so, you can automatically align those photographs and then mask them together inside Photoshop.

Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's the final composite group photo. And here are the shots where first I, and then Colleen, had stepped behind the camera to take the picture. And so the first thing we need to do is combine the images into a single composition. Armed with my rectangular marquee tool here, I'm gonna right-click inside the image and choose Duplicate Layer, and then I'll switch the document to family shot one, which is the one without me, and then I'll just go ahead and name this layer mcclellands, after my family, and now click OK.

Now I'll go ahead and switch over to the family shot one dot jpeg image, and we need to turn the background into an independent layer by double-clicking on it, and then I'll go ahead and call this one wheelers after Colleen's family. Now I just want you to notice how very off these two images are, they aren't even mildly aligned, as you can see, and the kids have slightly different expressions and so forth. And yet, we can have Photoshop line these images up automatically just by turning both the layers on, and making sure they're both selected, so I'll just go ahead and shift click on the top layer.

And then you wanna go up to the Edit menu and choose Auto-Align Layers. Now these images started off as RAW files, so I've already run lens correction on them, so we don't need to do that. And in fact, we really don't need to do much of anything, just make sure projection is set to Auto as by default. And then click OK in order to let Photoshop do its thing, and you can see that the two images are now pretty darn well aligned, and it's not just a function of rotating and scaling the two images with respect to each other, there's some four-point distortion going on as well.

Alright now what we wanna do is just mask these two images together and so what I'm gonna do here is click on the top layer to make it active, and then give it a layer mask by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel, and clicking on it, and then I'm gonna select the brush tool. And then just go ahead and right-click inside the image window and crank the hardness value all the way up to 100% and then you can press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to accept that change. Alright now what we want to do is mask away Wheeler, that's the tall kid in red right here.

We wanna mask him away to reveal the Wheeler in the background. And so I'm gonna start things off right here, along Max's jacket. Basically we're gonna paint along it, but notice right now the foreground color is white, I need it to be black, so I'll just go ahead and press the X key in order to swap those two colors. And then I'll start painting right here, which isn't really gonna give me the results I'm looking for, but we'll come back to this later, and try to make it better. In the meantime I'm just going to paint along here, you may also find it helpful to click in locations or click and shift click in order to paint in straight lines as I'm doing right here.

And so I'm just gonna paint my way down here, along the edge of Max's jacket. And I'm gonna continue painting, of course, until I get all the way down his sleeve, which is very important here, and ultimately, down next to his hand. And so I'm gonna zoom in here a little bit and then I'll just go ahead and paint down the hand like so. And I am clicking and shift clicking, by the way, in order to make this work. And then of course, I want to keep Max's jeans, so I'll just go ahead and paint along the darker pair of jeans here and it looks like I'm going a little far in at this point because his jeans extend outward but that's gonna work out just fine, so I'll just g ahead and paint along down to here, let's say, aboout that location should work out pretty nicely.

And then, what you wanna do is go ahead and switch to the mask so you're seeing the mask independently of the rest of the image, and you do that by alt or option clicking on that layer mask thumbnail right there. And now you can see the masked portion, represented by that black brush stroke. And now just click and shift click with the larger brush, and I was able to achieve a larger brush by pressing the right bracket key a few times. So I'll just go ahead and paint up here some more. And what I'm trying to do is just fill in details along this edge so I don't make a mess of anything that I've done so far.

Then you can pretty much just paint all over the place here, but if you wanna see what you're doing, just alt or option click on that layer mask thumbnail again, so that you can see the actual image as you reveal it. So I'll just go ahead and paint like so up Wheeler's body so that I get his head, and I'll paint down into his feet, just so that we have the proper feet here. And we'll just go ahead and reveal Colleen as well, which is pretty fun, actually, frankly, to paint in people like this so very easily.

Now I don't necessarily want this paint to go this far out over here. But actually it's working out pretty well. I do need a little bit of blur at some point, so what I'm gonna do after I get done painting in some grass down here in the foreground, is I will right-click inside the image window, and I'll reduce the hardness value to 0%, so that we can get a soft transition right up here at this wall, and then I'll increase the size of my brush a little bit, and paint on the wall like so. So that we are doing a nice reveal here.

Alright now, just to make sure you've gotten everything in good shape, go ahead and press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and click on that layer mask thumbnail once again, to make sure that you don't have any holes as I do. And then what I'm gonna do is right-click inside the image window and crank the hardness value back up to 100%, and the reason I keep going back and forth between zero and 100% is because typically, when you're doing this kind of hand brushing, you either want very soft transitions, or very sharp ones. And whenever we're painting fine details, the sharp transitions are gonna be the way to go.

Alright now that we've got things filled in, I'll alt or option click on that layer mask again, so that we can see the problem area of this specific image, which includes this repetition of the side of Max's face right here, which is obviously something we don't want. So what I'm gonna need to do is paint that away, actually I'm painting in the wrong color, I'm painting him in, so I'll go ahead and undo that change, and I'll press the X key so that I'm painting with white, and that way I can paint this portion of Max away, because after all, I'm painting in the grass from the active layer.

You can make your own subjective decisions about what the side of Wheeler's coat looks like. But I'm gonna go ahead and reduce the size of this brush and press the X key and paint away this layer in order to reveal the red in the background, the red sleeve in the background. Now here's where things get truly tricky indeed, because somehow you've gotta make some kind of decision about repetition of detail in Max's jacket. What I'm gonna do here is increase the size of the brush a little bit and paint along this detail right there so that it appears as if he's got another kind of lapel back over here on the right hand side, tucked behind this fold in his jacket.

And then I'll go ahead and reveal some more of this sleeve and this shoulder detail as well. At some point you just have to call it and decide that's the way it's gonna be. What we don't want is an epic Photoshop fail, of course, where we have any repetition of facial details or anything like that. I think this little bit of detail right there is something that we can get away with, without attracting too much attention. Now I'm gonna switch to the lasso tool, and I'm just gonna try to select this area right there by alt clicking around it, that'd be an option click on a Mac, so I'm just keeping the alt or option key down.

Now I've forgotten whether I need to fill it with white or back, I'll try black first by pressing alt backspace or option delete on the Mac, and that looks okay, it's not quite right, but it's more or less what we're looking for. I'll just go ahead and press control D, or command D on the Mac to deselect the image. And then I'll switch back to my brush tool, again, you can get that by pressing the B key, and I'm gonna reduce the size of my cursor by pressing the left bracket key, and I don't wanna paint with this color obviously, so I'll press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change, and I'll press the X key so that I'm painting with white, and then I'll just click and shift click down this collar right there.

And that looks pretty darn good to me, especially when we start zooming out. Alright now we need to fill in some missing details, cause you can see that we need some more grass, of course, and then we need some more sky as well. I'm gonna go ahead and select the Spot Healing Brush tool, this guy right here, top of the list, and then I will create a new layer, by pressing control shift N, or command shift N on the Mac, and I'll call this layer healing, and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, and then I'll turn on the Sample All Layers checkbox up here in the options bar.

Now I'm gonna increase the size of my cursor by quite a bit, by pressing the right bracket key a few times and then I'll click right there at that location, and I'll shift click all the way over here in order to paint a straight line of sky, and I might fill it in a little bit right there and now I'm gonna paint in a ton of grass, you wanna watch out for the feet, though, we don't wanna paint anybody's feet away. We should be able to fill in that grass pretty easily because it's pretty forgiving stuff. If you see some kind of repetition of detail, just paint over it, you can even just click in spots.

I'm gonna paint over this area too, just cause it looks worn out. And there's some gook back here in the background that I want to get rid of, so I'll reduce the size of my cursor and click right about there, I might click here too in order to fill in that detail. And then I think some of these graves back here are a little bit distracting, so I'm just gonna go ahead and paint over this guy like so. And I'll paint into this area back and forth, just to scrub some of these details away.

I wanna get rid of that rock and pretty much everything up to this headstone right there, because we're going to actually crop that area away in just a moment. Alright, the last thing I thought I would do is take care of my incredibly pale face, it's like I never get out or anything. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the brush tool once again, and I'll increase the size of my cursor by pressing the right bracket key and I'm gonna reduce the hardness, either by right-clicking once again, and taking that hardness value down to 0%, or in case you're interested in another keyboard shortcut, you can press shift along with the left bracket key.

A total of five times, one, two, three, four, five, is it necessary every time you do it? Shift left bracket, you're reducing the hardness by 25%, so maybe four was enough. Anyway, let's create a new layer by pressing control shift N, or command shift N on the Mac, and I'll call this guy pale face and press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, then I'll just go ahead and paint my face black like that. Believe it or not, that's gonna work out beautifully if I just go ahead and change the blend mode from normal to overlay, which produces this darker effect here, and then I'm going to take this opacity value right there, in the top right corner of the layers panel, and I'm gonna take it down to 20% like so.

You can see that does a nondestructive burn and so if I turn the layer off, this is how the image looks without that layer, this is how it looks with that layer. Problem is, it makes my nose look a little red. I'm gonna switch to the eraser tool, then I'm gonna right-click inside the image window and take the hardness value down to 0% so we have a nice, soft brush, and then I'll increase the size of my cursor by pressing the right bracket key a few times, and just click on my nose. Looks so much better now. Now the only remaining pale person here is Wheeler, so I'm gonna do the same thing to him.

I'm gonna switch back to the brush tool, and I'm just gonna paint his face black, which ends up just darkening things because the layer is set to overlay at 20%, and then I'll go ahead and grab the eraser tool once again, and I will click on his nose and then I will paint over his mouth, cause there's no sense in darkening his teeth, and we end up with this effect here. Alright now we just need to crop the image to taste, and so I'm gonna go ahead and grab the crop tool, and then I'll just go ahead and drag a crop boundary that looks something like this, I think, it could be a little wider, like so.

And maybe a little deeper so that I'm not running the risk of cutting off my foot or getting anywhere near it. And then you wanna make sure delete cropped pixels is turned off for goodness' sake, we don't want to delete any pixels, and then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac in order to apply that crop to the image. And now, press shift F in order to switch to the full screen mode so that we can see the final version of the composition. And you know, at this point, it looks to me like we do have a few things I'd still like to heal, in which case, just press the J key while you're in the full-screen mode, that's gonna take you back to that spot healing brush, and then you wanna press shift tab in order to bring up the layers panel for a moment.

Just go ahead and click on a healing layer to make it active. And then press shift tab again in order to hide those panels. And now I'll just go ahead and click in a few locations here in the grass in order to smooth some of those details. And if you're feeling really fussy, you could try to heal away Max's second lapel, but I actually think it looks fine the way it is. And that is how you combine group photographs to make everybody look their absolute best here inside Photoshop.

Alright that's enough Photoshop for now. Next week, we're gonna switch over to what might be my favorite of the current crop of Adobe mobile apps, and that is Adobe Photoshop Sketch, which allows you to trace photographs using a variety of brushes, and then bring those tracings over into Photoshop itself. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.