Chapter 4
Senior Portrait
STEP SEVEN: Okay, things are looking better, but we need to help the portrait fit into the background better. Part of what’s wrong here is that his skin tone has too much color compared to the muted background we’re using. This is why I love working with Smart Objects when doing my composites. Since we originally opened the basketball player photo as a Smart Object, it’s easy enough to adjust. Double-click on the Smart Object thumbnail to reopen the photo in Camera Raw. Drag the Vibrance slider to –40 and it’ll take some of the red out, and then increase the Temperature slider to 5250 to warm the photo up a little, too. Click OK when you’re done to go back to Photoshop.
STEP EIGHT: It’s looking better, but we still need to add some contrast/edginess and a little more of that desaturated look. We’ll need a duplicate of the basketball player layer for this trick, but you can’t just duplicate the layer the way we’re used to doing it, because it’s a Smart Object. Instead, Right-click on the Smart Object layer and, from the pop-up menu, choose New Smart Object via Copy. That makes a duplicate that we can work with and not affect the original layer.
1 08 > P HOTO S H O P C O M PO S I T I N G S E C R E T S