Compositing Walkthrough in PaintShop Pro

Compositing Walkthrough in PaintShop Pro

View the youtube video here: Spider Girl Video

This tutorial will cover a number of different techniques for compositing a handful of disparate images to generate a cool looking poster image of a modern day spider-girl.

Extracting the Girl

So the first step is to remove the girl from her original environment, hanging from a playground structure.  This ca be done many ways, perhaps some combination of the background eraser and other eraser tools, or purely by selection and fine tuning with edit selection.

Build the Environment

Now with the girl extracted, we can add her to a scene that we can build from a number of different stock images.  I found a background image and a ledge for her to be landing on from Pexels (which is where I get most of my stock photos).

These images can be added as layers, and scaled to fit the scene.

Replace the Hand

Next since her hand is still holding a bar form the climbing structure, this won't blend well with the scene, especially since she should be holding a web instead.  So this is where we are going to replace her hand with another image.

Getting this right and convincing takes a bit of effort.  For one, the new hand is much brighter and has more contrast than the original.  As well, blending this takes a combination of using the shape modifiers with the Pick tool, as well as using the eraser.  Normally this would be best suited if PaintShop Pro had a localized Mesh Warp capability (but it doesn't).

Blur the Background

Next, to create some separation we're going to blur the background.  For photo-realistic art I prefer to blur backgrounds with the Depth of Field (DOF) tool since its blur type mimics similar to camera lens induced blur.

Color Cast

The next step to give the whole scene more of a night-time feel is to apply a color cast.  To do this, I create a new raster layer and use the Fill tool with a solid color, and set the blend layer to Soft Light.  In this case I selected the color for the cast based on the dark blue/green of the sky near the lit skyscraper.  This gave a nice nightime mood to the whole scene.  Note that when using Soft Light blend layers, it will also have the effect of subtly increasing the contrast.

Once applying the color cast I realized that the replaced hand stood out a little too much, so I had to go back in and fix that to make it more subtle.

Draw the Web

Next was drawing the web that the girl was holding, and this is just a matter of drawing many different vector lines with the Pen tool, with varying levels of color and shape.  Some straight lines, some Bezier curve lines.  This is definitely an area of experimentation.

Add Graphics

This next phase is just about being creative and adding more abstract elements.  The things I added are:

• Vector Shapes (circle)
• Image of Web Pattern
• PaintBrush Splatter (from Brusheezy)
• Spider-man logo

All of these items I just added, tweaked and experimented with to see what came together.  There are other things that I tried and didn't like that are not included in this tutorial or the video.  What is you see is what I settled on after numerous attempts.

Adjust Contrast

Next is adjusting contrast.  In a lot of ways, contrast brings out the depth an image, or in a particular part of the image.  There are many different ways to apply contrast in PaintShop Pro, I'm going to use Curves on the girl to bring out the detail.

As well I've added a few more color cast layers to shift the color and darken the image.  All of these layers are Soft Light blended, and have varying levels of opacity.

Add the Text

For the final step, I used Blender 3D to create the text for the "Spider-Girl" words.  I'm not going to explain how I did that here, but mostly just wanted to introduce you to the most powerful 3D modeling software out there that is FREE.

The final render with all the text, and contrast and color cast manipulations in place.