Sunday, February 25, 2024

Day 25: Needs More Fur

Welcome back to Thingadailies. We're currently working on a version of this Cat Butterfly Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial.

When we finished yesterday, things were looking a little odd.



Though really, can you really go wrong with a kitten in the picture? I say not.

Today is all about trying to make it look like the kitten and the background belong together.

Step 1: Darken the kitten and adjust the color balance

Presumably people who know what they're doing have a logical process for this, but I just tried to make it so the kitten and the background might possibly exist in the same universe. It still looked like I'd copied a picture of a kitten onto the background, but this made it closer.

Light will be added back later, so don't panic (yet) because it seems too dark.

Step 2: Fix the kitten's whiskers

This happens at the very end of the tutorial, but it was bugging me, so I did it now. They really ought to be a little thicker, but I think I got close.

Step 3: Add more fur. No, more than that. Keep going.

The key to making it look like this isn't a cut/paste of a kitten is using the smudge tool to recreate the kitten fuzz that got shaved off when removing the background. And the more I added, the better it looked.

So here we are!


Tomorrow, I'll add the butterfly (or whatever I use instead of a butterfly).

Tip of the day:

If you increase the flow rate above zero when using the smudge tool, it adds in the foreground color. (Yes, I found this by accident and couldn't figure out what was going on. But I can see this being useful.)

Also there's a "Sample merged" option in the smudge tool which makes it so you can smudge from any visible layer.

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