| Al's Photoshop Tutorial | Old Course (Versions 4.0 through 6.x) |
The Photo Background
This isn't just limited to Photos, of course. You can use any image as a background, such
as a computer rendering or a scanned painting. Here I just found a crappy swimming pool
picture on the net.
Save your work first; This step may be a bit damaging. Use File » Save As to save this
version under a different name. Now, make sure all the layers for your character are
turned on (Ink, Color, Shade, etc) but do not have the backgrounds on. In the layer
window menu, select Merge Visible. This should give you a nicely transparent character.
Call up the picture you want in the background, and make sure its mode is RGB color. Then
go to the layers window menu, to Duplicate layer. You'll want to change the Destination
document to the one that has your character. Once this is done, you can close the
background picture file, which should now also be in the character window. Be
sure the background layer is behind your character's layer.
Now you can use Edit » Transform » Scale (under the Layer menu in versions 4 and below)
to scale and align the background to the picture, and the picture to the background
depending on which layer you start from.
