#1 BUILD YOUR OWN IMAGE STOCK
BANK…
Start taking your camera everywhere with you. Start collecting a bank of
images of anything and everything because you never know what you’ll end
up using for composites, from a beautiful lit sky and breathtaking
landscapes to a simple hole in the ground or a brick wall, it’s all got
potential for future composites. When you next go out, look at the world
and be inspired by it, be imaginative in taking pictures of things that you
can eventually add to later images.
#2 TUTORIALS, TUTORIALS AND MORE
TUTORIALS…
Honestly, I couldn't tell you how many hours I’ve sat down watching Photoshop tutorials. The way
I see it, the more you understand Photoshop and photo editing in general, the more creative
you’re allowing yourself to be with your images.
The main tutorials you’ll more than likely going to want to be watching when wanting to do
composites are the ‘how to cut out & how to make a selection’ ones. There are loads of different
tools & techniques for making selections for composites and people often ask me what is the
best way to cut out something in an image. Really, they’re all amazing but it just depends on what
you’re making a selection on. I recommend www.phlearn.com and also www.glyndewis.com for
some great tutorials on compositing and Photoshop in general.
You can also find some of my tutorials i’ve done at
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCySQkETI7op-roSpH6PdBUw/videos
When it comes to compositing, it’s not just as simple as cutting out objects and then placing
them in to another image. The cut out image has to make sense for it to fit in to another image, it
has to look like it belongs where you’re placing it. So knowing how to manipulate colours, light,
shadows, perspective and much more is essential to transforming your composite from a good
composite to a super awesomely epic composite. Now this ties in to my top tip 3…