Looking for technical digital editing advice

[pegkerr]

I posted this at the soulcollaging community and then figured, what the heck, I might as well post it here, too. There are more people reading this journal than that one at the moment who might actually be able to answer the question:

Okay, here's a question particular for those of you who are experienced at manipulating digital images.

What I really want to do in making a Community card for Fiona is this: I took her to the dojo and took a whole bunch of pictures of her spinning and kicking, in her birthday dress, using the mirror to capture reflections (Fiona LOVES to spin; she's done it for years). I want to layer the images, but I don't know how/don't have a program that will extract the images of just her figure and then layer them, transparently. I tried to do it with a very crude photo editing program I have, but it was very crude, trying to manually erase pixels, and extremely tedious, and the outlines are all blurring.

Anyway, these are a couple of the images I am starting with (and I have several others I'd like to layer in):

Fiona spinning at dojo

and

Fiona spinning at dojo

This is my crude mock up first attempt. Anyone have any ideas of a program or technique I can use to achieve the effect I want to achieve?

Fiona rough draft

(And apropos of nothing, isn't she damn beautiful?)

Comments

[ceilidh]

I have no idea how to make it work, but she really is gorgeous, and that is a lovely dress. :)

[schnoogle.livejournal.com]

I'm not terribly good at this sort of thing, but maybe using a darker background would make the outlines look neater?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Masking a figure to separate it from the background is one of the black arts. Experts spend hours doing it using hundreds of dollars of specialized Photoshop plugins.

But you can get 80% as good for a LOT less than 20% the time and money. It's mostly hand work, rather than magic software, though (although it does look to me like the magnetic lasso tool might work on a good portion of the outline in these photos.

In Photoshop I'd just put each figure on a separate layer, and adjust layer transparency. I can also move them around independently.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

What you said.

It's pretty literally how I did this one—hours of work with the lasso and other selection tools, remembering to feather as I went:

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[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

If I'd just asked the question that Peg asked, I'd be pissed at this answer. It's the "I'd just put each figure in a separate layer" glibness that would be so annoying, because that's the little technical bit that I wouldn't know how to do, and your answer would be no help at all.

Heh, maybe I'm over-reacting. Peg didn't ask for instructions, it's true: She asked for "any ideas of a program or technique." So I suppose she can look up "masking" and "lasso tool" and figure it out.

For myself, I've done this sort of thing in the past, and have lots of books and references to help me figure it out if I wanted to figure it out again, as it's been a few years. But I'm confident I can get myself there. But that confidence is not an assumption I make for other people.

(PS to Peg: What's your OS? And what photo manipulation software do you have?)

K.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

Yes, she's very beautiful. And looks quite like her parents' daughter to boot.

(I notice she also has rather long hair—not unlike another young woman about her age I know…)

[morganmalfoy.livejournal.com]

i don't think I have a steady enough hand on the mouse for any of this business.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I just checked my email. Morgan, you ROCK! Thank you!