Photoshopping & Video Slideshow Help

[Tyr]

I'm two days from my best friends wedding, and the initial plan I had for a small "presentation" has completely fallen through. I'm now scrambling to make a comedic video slideshow (a la 60minutes news report or beyond the glory) with the stack of pictures I have of him -- essentially doing a spoof report with tidbits of a slideshow with a voicetrack. My big problem is, I have 0 photoshop skills and 0 videoslideshow skills. Thankfully, the latter seems much more simple (I'm somewhat familiar with the default windows program), but the problem still remains that I'm horrible with photoshop.

I need to know how to photoshop my friend into other photos, the standard stuff you'd see among the random image threads. Is anyone able to lend me a hand, or direct me to an extremely dumbed down guide? While on the subject, anyone have the un-editted photo of Stephen Colbert where he's pointing to his left with a giant grin?

Thanks in advance.

[Tyche]

The absolute easiest way, in my opinion, to crop out a person from a photo is to use the magic wand tool. Select all of the background, or at least what you can get before color blending, and simply delete it. Then, zoom in as close as your comfortable with, and trace him out with an eraser. Or, you can do the reverse...start out zooming it really close and tracing him out with an eraser, or trace around him with the pen tool with a really obscure color (like bright green). After you trace him out, color all the background the same obscure color (or erase). Then use the magic wand tool to select the obscure color, then select the inverse (which will be your friend) and use the pointer to drag and drop his ass into other photos.

If this is confusing, google "magic wand tool" and play with some of their tips. You'll be cropping like a champ in hours.

[Shade]

The magic wand can be useful, but don't rely on it completely. Sometimes it'll select stuff you don't really want.

Random useful stuff for "Photoshopping" off the top of my head:

1. The lasso tool is good for making selections. Lets say your ultimate goal is to trace a selection around the dude's head, and then cut/paste it to its own layer (where you can then paste it on to whatever photo you're trying to place him in). So you've drawn a selection around the area you want to cut, roughly. Holding down shift or alt will let you add or remove bits to the selection without starting over. This works with any other selection tool too.

2. Color Adjustments.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Curves. Tug the curve a little bit, and note how it changes the colors of whatever's selected. Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast is also useful. Playing with these will let you better match skin tone + the lighting of things, so your pasted in image looks more natural in its new environment.

3. Clone Stamp tool.
Choose some sort of round brush, with 50% or less opacity. Hold alt and you'll see a little target cursor pop up. Click somewhere. This defines the "source point", or where the tool will grab from to clone when you stamp it down. Your next click defines how far away your actual brush will be. Now when you start using this tool, you'll notice that it's grabbing stuff from your image from say, an inch away, and cloning/painting it to wherever you've got your brush. This is useful if you want to say, paint over some part of the picture with more sky, or sleeve, or skin, or whatever, but you dont want to actually use the brush tool and -paint- it yourself, because it'll never look like the photograph itself.

4. ZOOM IN. If you work close up, you'll be able to be more accurate. For a shortcut, ctrl+ and ctrl- lets you zoom in and out with ease. You can also hold spacebar (a hand cursor pops up) to move the canvas around without fiddling with the window's arrows/slidebars. I used Photoshop for years without learning about these... it is sad.

5. When in doubt, if you're going to make a whole pile of changes, or want to try to decide between a couple different changes, make a copy of the layer you're working on as a backup. Click on the eye icon to make the layer invisible. Then if you fuxxor up the bit you're working on, you can delete the one you wrecked and turn the extra one back on.

6. Oh yeah... Basic one. Photoshop has layers, if you're a total newb to it. Working with layers is like.. having a big stack of clear plastic sheets. And each thing on its own layer can be editted/changed/moved around individually, without affecting any other layer. Utilize this, dont try to be like some people and do everything on one layer.

7. Oh, coming off that last one... Photoshop files are big. Especially if you've got a bunch of layers. Make sure you File > Save As JPEG, or better, File > Save For Web as JPEG, for the files you'll use in the actual presentation. JPEGs are much smaller files, and all video slideshow type programs can use them. ~75% is generally a good "quality" level to save JPEGs at, if you're just displaying them on a screen. If you start to go down to 60-50%ish, you're going to see a lot of artifacting (pixellyness).

Hmm.. that's all I got. I know way more about painting in Photoshop than I do about photo editting... but I hope that helped a little.