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Tutorial #8 - Creating Fake Photographs

What's with this photograph? Basically its a fake! The picture of myself (on the left) and one of my customers was taken in the bar where I used to work. The scene behind was taken in a well-known town in the UK, named Knaresborough.

The idea of this tutorial is to join at least two separate photographs together without using any selection masks at all! Confused? Don't be... we will be using Layer Masks with different sized paintbrushes.

1.	Press CTRL+T to activate the Transform command and resize the layer entitled "Layer 1". When you have finished press the Enter key to accept the new settings.
2.	Press CTRL+T to activate the Transform command and resize the layer entitled "Layer 1". When you have finished press the Enter key to accept the new settings.
3.	With both images open in Photoshop, first activate the document with the two people on it. Press the V key to activate the Move tool and then drag the photograph onto the background image.
4.	Click on the Add Layer Mask icon on the Layers palette (first icon on the left). Press the B key to activate the paintbrush and choose a brush size of your choice, and press D to return the colour palette back to its default settings.
5.	From now on, treat your paintbrush as an eraser, and paint over the areas you want to remove. As with the normal eraser tool, you will see your background image come through. The main difference by using the Layer Mask against the erasers is that when you make a mistake you only have to press X to change the foreground colour to the background colour. This will now bring the original image from Layer 1 back.
6.	When you have finished removing all that needs removing, choose the Remove Layer Mask from the Layers menu. When the dialogue box appears click on either Apply (to keep the mask you have just created) or Discard (to remove the mask altogether).
7.	You can have a lot of fun by superimposing elements from one photograph onto another, or even scanned images from newspaper, magazines etc.