Real World Compositing with Adobe Photoshop CS4

Obscuring Extra Pixels

Once you’ve placed, scaled, and positioned your images in a way that is consistent with your composite vision, there’s a good chance that some of the layers will have content that is not relevant to your scene. As noted in Chapter 7, “Processing Raw Source Files,” we try not to worry about how the non-critical parts of an image look while editing colors or tonality in ACR. This is because we intend to completely mask, or otherwise remove, these regions of extra pixel data when compositing them.

This process of creating “seamless edges” between subjects is what most people focus on when producing their first composites, and understandably so. This is the stage where a coherent visual picture of the final concept comes into ...