Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | tutorial
Tip: Always clone to a new layer. Tip: Take advantage of layers and masks you already have in your image. There is no need to waste time and detail on hidden parts of the image that you will never see.
Page 13: Step 3: Insert It's now time to start working on the long spiral staircase that will end up in the middle of the lighthouse. (Yes, I know a real lighthouse would not have a single spiral staircase in the middle like this. They are not invisible either.)
Jump over to your spiral staircase source. Since we are going to be shrinking this down pretty substantially to make it fit into the lighthouse, you can be a little less than perfect at this point... i.e. cut some corners. (If you really want to be hard-core about it, take our time here and select things carefully by hand. I didn't... and I won.)
Grab the Magic Wand tool, set the tolerance to 64 and click on the black portions of the staircase. (You will have to play around with the tolerance value for things like this... if you are not getting enough selected, increase the tolerance, deselect, and try again. If you are getting too much, decrease the tolerance, deselect, and try again. For some reason I have a liking for powers of 2. Can't explain it, I just do, OK?) You should end up with a selection like this:
Copy your selection and paste it into your Lighthouse document. Rename the new layer Staircase and move it to the very top of your layer stack. It's going to look pretty rough at this point, but that's OK for now.
Page 14: Step 3: Insert (continued) Create a layer mask for your Staircase layer and mask out the portions of the image we will not need. Really, all we are looking for here is 1/2 turn. So continue masking till you've got a decent 1/2 turn of the stairs. It will be much easier to work with if we shrink the size of this turn a bit. So, with the "Staircase" layer selected, Edit>Transform>Scale to about 50% size.
Now, it's time to start building the complete staircase. Select your "Staircase" layer and duplicate it. It will automatically be named Staircase Copy, that's fine for now. Since we only have 1/2 a turn so far, we need to work on the other 1/2 of the turn. Do an Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontal on Staircase Copy. Move it around a bit so that the central post and hand rail of the staircase match up. You may need do to a little bit of mask clean up here. What you should end up with is a pretty convincing looking full turn of a spiral staircase.
file:///C|/Worth1000/21.htm (7 van 9)13-6-2006 23:17:25