I was shooting at my studio class and noticed that some people were taking pictures of Whitney jumping. Whitney leads her cheer group, so she is a natural at this kind of thing. We weren’t really set up for this kind of shoot. We were doing head shots before.

We had a gray muslin background, and the background light was too low and not configured correctly. I would have rathered it had a regular reflector pointing higher at the background. The background wasn’t really high enough either. To change the angle, I stood on a riser, and held my camera above my head. This way I wouldn’t have Whitney’s hands above the background.

We had to photogenics strobes in softboxes at 45deg to her that we had set up for portraits before. They still seemed to cover her well enough.

So I thought that I had a pretty good shot, but I wanted to so something with it. I didn’t like the background, and I needed a way to hide the light, so I decided to cut her out of the background.

This was harder than I thought. Well, actually just time consuming. The quick selection tool was horrible. It kept selecting parts of her. I then tried the magic wand. That was a little better, but there was still much to do. I then spent quite a bit of time with the other selection tools adding and subtracting from my selection.

Once I had her selected, I feathered the edge a few pixels, and then coppied her onto a blank layer. Another layer with a fill of white, and we were almost done.

When I looked at the edges of her legs, there was a bit of a grey line beside her jeans that didn’t look right. I replaced that grey with white. That looked much better.

Then I had an issue with her hair. I managed to “erase” some of her hair (actually did it with a mask) on the right side of her head. But, I am still not sure what to do about the grey that is still between her hair on the left side of her hair. I am sure that would show if printed.

So that wasn’t too bad, and was really what I had started out to do, but now that I had her seperated from the background, could I put her on a different background?

I looked through some older images and found one that was mostly clouds and sky. I then created another image with this sky, and added Whitney in as another layer. Because she was feathered when I cut her out, she placed pretty well on top.

Then, I expanded the canvas to give lots of space around the image. I added a drop shadow to the cloud layer and added the text at the bottom.

Voila. Cheezy poster.