Graphic and Web Designer London UK

I did this montage to illustrate marketing material that was highlighting Africa as a young and emerging economy.

I had a photo of an ordinary seedling growing out of earth in someone’s hands. I created another layer of this picture (Cmd/Ctrl-J) and cloned out the seedling using the Rubber Stamp Tool (S). I then went back to the original picture and cut around one of the leaves with the Lasso Tool (L) – there was absolutely no need to be precise with this cut out. This roughly cut out leaf was then pasted over the top layer of just the hands and earth. I then had to find an Africa shape.

Finding vector maps and images

Luckily there are some great free vector resources out there. I could give you a list here but just Google “free vector” and you’ll find some great ones. To find a map of the world in vector simply type “free vector map” or something like that and then have a look at the image search – I find this speeds things up a bit. Here you can compare at least 20 (hopefully) free vectors without having to go to the individual websites. The one at Vector Vault looked nice and simple.

Layer masks in Photoshop

Next, I simply isolated the Africa shape I wanted in Illustrator and copied and pasted it into my Photoshop document (choosing Smart Object) and sized and rotated it over the leaf I had cut out earlier. Then a Cmd/Ctrl click on the icon of the Smart Object in the Layers palette makes a selection of the shape and then a click on the Add Layer Mask icon with the leaf layer selected turns the leaf into the Africa shape. It’s at the bottom of the Layers palette and some say it looks a bit like a washing machine!

Finishing touches

Some areas of the map of Africa weren’t filled up with the leaf so I cloned areas of the leaf out to reach the edge of the Africa shape.

As the Smart Object of the Africa shape is vector I found it gave the leaf an unrealistic sharp edge. To counteract this I blurred the layer mask of the leaf not the leaf itself otherwise the sharp edge would have remained. For blurring I usually go Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and choose the Radius (usually somewhere between 0.5 and 2). I had to make sure I had the layer mask selected not the layer itself when applying the filter by clicking on the layer mask. When you’re editing the layer mask the rectangle of it will have a thicker border in the Layers palette. (If you click on the layer icon itself the thicker border will move from the layer mask on the right to the layer icon on the left so you know which one you are working on).

Lastly I added some Inner Glow to the leaves to give them a realistic yellowy edge.

Below is another one I did of a single leaf. Above you can see the layers palette from the image below – the leaf with the Africa shape layer mask is above the layer with the cloned out seedling.

So, I hope that made sense to everybody. Sometimes it’s difficult to explain Photoshop practices without doing loads of screen shots. Would anyone do this in a different way? How does this compare to your Photoshop methods?

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This article was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Photoshop.
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