The Making Of - The Incident at Base 42

[Tiermann]

I told Tonguello I would post some behind the scenes images. I have also in the past said I would post a quick how to about my process for background replacement.
Here are a couple shots of the diorama table as it was set up for the story.





The background hills are made by wadding up plastic bags and stuffing them under the ground cloth. The base of the structure is on a light gray rock. That is the color I have the least of, so I knew there wouldn't be enough to make a decent setting. That's why I ended up using the red rocks, and also my few cream ones. I mixed in my light grey and it ended up looking ok, like different rocks left from the explosion that created the crater.

[Tiermann]

Here is the editing process I use. I've found that the white walls actually work pretty well, they keep the space as light as possible while being fairly easy to select out in editing.

Here is the photo I'm going to edit in Photoshop Elements 6

[Tiermann]

I use the Crop tool to cut down the image to just the part I am going to want, getting rid of any extra stuff that may be showing at the edges, and trying to create a nice composition.

[Tiermann]

The next thing I will do is a little color adjustment. It doesn't always work, but the easiest way is to use the Auto Levels and Auto Contrast controls



You can see how much brighter it looks compared to the previous step

[Tiermann]

There are a series of tools that are used to select things. I use the magic wand tool to start, with settings that let it select contiguous areas only and within a pretty narrow range of color/light. It often takes multiple selections to get the whole area, and I sometimes use the selection paintbrush as well.
Here I've done all the selecting of the white background wall, and to show it better to you I've created a semi-transparent fill layer of pink

[Tiermann]

The next thing I do is create a copy of the background by dragging the background layer onto the New Layer button. Then I create a new empty layer between the two, and turn off the lower background. Then on the top copy of the background I just hit the delete button and it takes away the selected area. You get the checkerboard pattern when an area is clear to see through to lower layers.

[Tiermann]

Next I am going to resize the image to the size I want it to be for posting. I usually go with somewhere between 650 and 800 pixels wide for forum posting. I choose Image/Resize/Image Size and change the width to the right pixel count.  Be sure Constrain Proportions is checked or you will get a real strange looking image.

[Tiermann]

Next we need a sky to put in the background. It's possible to just fill in with a solid color, but using an actual sky image looks better. Even for a plain blue sky there is color variation towards the horizon. Here I am using a sunset photo taken in Zirndorf Germany last year. As yo see the cloud layer is a faded peach color that should look good with the desert setting. I select the area of the sky I want to use and copy it.

[Tiermann]

I return to my image and select the empty layer I had created underneath the main image. I Paste and the sky shows up in that layer. Usually I have to resize the reulting sky image to make it fit with the other. In this case it was way too big so I had to use the control corners and reduce the size until it fit nicely. The highlighted box is the actual size of the sky image. Sometimes I have to adjust the brightness of the sky to make it look right. In this case I got lucky and it looks great as it is. The clouds blend very nicely with the ground cloth color so it looks like you are looking deeper into the desert with the horizon line fading out. If I had realized it would look that good I may have used it instead of the plain blue sky I used in the actual story

[Tiermann]

Next it needs to be saved. I use the Save for Web option since it reduces the resulting file size a lot. That way it takes less time to load and less storage space.



You can see how much using this tool can reduce the file size without really degrading the image quality for the web at all.



If you were going to use this for print you would want to save the biggest version possible. In that case I wouldn't have resized it at the beginning, and just saved it as a full size jpg.