I did a little playin' around with virtual backgrounds in photoshop today. Thought I'd share 'em with the forum. Any excuse to get pics of the girls in lingere in here

Sweet

Edit: what version photoshop U use, I just checked Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and I noticed this costs 100 Euro. Is it worth it or should I try it out first with a cheaper (free) editor? I never edited a photo so I guess it will be time consuming at start?
Edit 2: I installed a free one called photoscape

You can download photo editing software for free. Go to Download.com and search for Gimp. You can find lots of tutorials on Youtube that will show you how to do all sorts of stuff. Don't expect to do stuff as good as B-man does right away though, he's pretty good at this. It's like playing an instrument, it takes practice but it's fun. Good luck!

I'm using Photoshop CS5, a more advanced (and expensive) version. Like Beetle said, gimp is free, and does a lot of the same thing Photoshop does. I use it to do most of my comic conversions over in Coverdoll, check it out at: http://www.coverdoll.com/drupal/?q=node/1083
Elements goes for around $100 USD as well. It's a bare bones version, but I started with Elements 7 and found I could do lots of things with it. Good luck, and have fun. B~M

Wow, B-man! Those are outstanding pictures, and your girls are to-die-for! <3 to the millionth degree! Wow!

My ancient desktop from wa~ay back in the year 2000 ( ) came with an (obviously old) version of Adobe Photoshop Elements pre-installed. I should try to see if I can find the disk for that and install it on one of my far more functional laptops. I got pretty good at editing just by playing around with various features. That's the best way to learn, in my opinion, because you get to figure it out yourself.

I've never used a tutorial for Photoshop (mostly because I never took my photo editing all that seriously), but I'd imagine they would be a great help.

Once again...AMAZING work, B-man!

Here's an addendum on gimp. Using it, I turned this photo:
Into this image:
And the beauty part of it is, it's completely free, and there are tons of turorials on the web for it.

Not bad
I messed around with Gimp, I tried to cut my doll out of a picture and to put her on a background but the cutting was not good.
As I am not mr Patience I stopped after 1h, but I will give it a try again later.

The first thing what I will do now is buying an external flash as that was adviced by a friend if I want to make portraits. He told me I can turn the flash so I can make indirect light and it even works wireless meaning I can place the flash behind the doll or so.
Probably it will be this one: Speedlight SB-700

The problem with cutting dolls out to place into new backgrounds is always the hair. It's full of stray strands and soft edges. Fortunatly for me, the version of Photoshop I have has a new refine edge feature that makes finding them easy, plus there's a color decontamination tool that removes the color tinge the original background always leaves behind on the foreground image. I don't know if elements has those features. As for a flash, I never use one when photographing the dolls as the silicon skin reflects too much light. I bought a pair of photo soft box lights for lighting, there's a thread in here somewhere about making light stands for that. When making cutouts, (the damn hair again) the best way to go, is try, try, again. As Beetle and I said, there are a lot of tutorials on the net for doing different tasks with gimp, I basically just use it for the comic conversions as it is the most consistant technique I've found for that task. Keep at it, like Beetle said it's a lot of fun once you start to get the hang of it. Later my friend, B~M

Those backgrounds were added? Damn, could you tech me how to do the shadows like that? it's perfect! I can't even tell it wasn't shot against the curtain.

Bearing in mind, I did that using Photoshop CS5, when I placed the cutout of the dolls in front of the new backgrounds, I then made a duplicate of the doll layer, selected the bottom cutout layer, filled it with black, used the free transform to distort and move it out from behind the top layer a little, lowered it's opacity to around 50%, and added a little gaussian blur to soften the edges. Oh, BTW, those curtains were created with photoshop from a blank canvas, like I said, I was doing a little experimentation. I'm pretty sure the same effect can be accomplished with GIMP, I just don't know exactly how, these days, I only use GIMP for making my comic book conversions for the comic in CoverDoll. But knowing gimp, the procedure is probably real similar. If you haven't already, download GIMP, it's free, and it's a pretty good program for photo manipulation, and there are a lot of tutorials and books available for it. Once again, thanks for the use of your photos in this months comic, here's hoping we can make a habit of it. Later Bud, B~M

Bman those look great. I love how you layer the background with the shadows of your girls. I have a long way to go. I'll be doing some practicing.

I remember when you first started doing the shadow effect using Candy and your Goldwing out at Point Defiance Park. Obviously, you've perfected your technique.


Those backgrounds look wonderful. This is my favorite of the three.



Candy looks delicious!

All the girls look great, but I think it the pose and the facial expression that really works for me here. not to mention that red hot lingerie!

Those added BGs look fantastic! I think the added shadow is genius. I'm a cheapskate so I use gimp myself. If you learn to use the path tool, it might only take about 20 minutes to click around the doll. Also I like to Black and White the background.

B-Man, you got comics? Is there a link where I can I check them out?

Yea bud, it can be seen at: http://www.coverdoll.com/drupal/?q=node/1105