Kai OOB

[Bilsen]

This is Kai, a 2 year old Shep who likes to run with wolves. He works at the Wolf Conservation Center in Westchester County, NY.

[Jandybean]

Fantastic photo, great looking dog. Would you mind sharing how you get the dog out of the original pic like that? I love those type of photos. Nice job!

[Bilsen]

Jandy,

It takes some practice and a lot of ruined stuff but basically here's how I do it:

1) Duplicate the main layer
2) Carefully draw a selection around the main subject (in this case the dog) and copy and paste it on a top layer.
3) Create a new layer above the background layer and fill it with whatever you want (in this case a blue/white gradient pattern)
4) Scale and distort the duplicate of the original shot until the subject is outside it. Then stroke the picture with some color (in this case white) to about 10-12 pixels to create the frame.
5) Duplicate the cut out subject and move the copy below the subject. Then darken it into a shadow, adjust opacity and placement to your liking and then apply a Gaussian Blur to gve it a more shadowy effect.
6) Feather or blur the edges of the top subject and there you are.

As I said, I ruined a ton of images (still do) getting this technique usable. Mostly just have fun with it.

Good luck.

[Jandybean]

Awesome! Thanks, I was wondering about the shadows but now I understand. Was hoping there was an easier way to do this, but i see it is alot of work. Thank you so much for the explanation!