Topic awaiting preservation: Hit a wall and need help (Page 1 of 1)

I have a very active imagination, but very little graphical skill to put my plans into actions. As a member of gamers clan I wanted to create a signature that defines what I am - and though I have the right ideas it doesn't seem to work for me. I have tried every technique I could find on the web and in tutorials to make this work, but now, after three monts of experimenting I have come to my wits end, and to the end of my wife's patience.

What I want to do is pretty simple - I have as background picture a slice of my favourite weapon. I also have a drawing of a german sniper. I want to combine the two in such a manner that the background picture remains as it is, but the sniper either looks as if it was etched into it, or just shimmers through - it is really hard to explain, but I want the background picture to remain as much as it is as possible, with the sniper beind something that is seen on closer inspection.

Please community, give me a hint how I go about it since I am going nuts over what seems such a simple problem.
Here the images in question - sorry that they are relatively large, that will be changed in the final product:


Background Image:


Layer:


For all your help and advise I am grateful...

This anything like what you had in mind?





.PSD file here, for reference -
http://in-dented.com/temp/baby_bodo.psd

(Edited by DL-44 on 09-29-2004 03:22)

This is similar to what I could manage -
but I am trying to blend it into the contours of the gun and make it look more like it is edged into it (like with acid or something). Also the sniper would either be silver or even better, black - you know, barely visible, at least on first glance...

thanks for your help though - I don't think I tried angling the sniper before...

**** Don't know why, but it posted a reply twice - please remove. thanks ****

(Edited by Bodo_baby on 09-29-2004 11:49)

Something like this?



Basically, rotate the sniper picture till you have it the way you want it. Desaturate. Set to Overlay. Copy that layer. Invert. Set this layer to Screen. Move this layer one pixel down and one pixel right.

Quick and dirty.

wow - that is what I am looking for -
but now that I see the picture I got another question:

is it possible to slightly raise the ghillie suit of the sniper so that it is visible?

What I mean is this - if you look at silence's picture you need to know what it is you are looking at - but if we keep the details of the suit and have them say the same colour as the gun background, it might look perfect? What do you think and how go I about achieving it??

Thanks again for your help and input...

One thing that might clear it up is if you clean up the sniper pic.

I can tell you it took me a couple of seconds to actually see the sniper in the original pic.

What I'm proposing is to delete all the white around the figure and probably big parts of the background (grass) as well.

That ought to make the shape more apparent. At the moment the barrel of the gun for instance appears as a not-very-barrel-like shape with all the stray pixels distorting it.

Use method Silence describes and play with it! (opacity etc)

Just my 2c



(Edited by Nimraw on 09-29-2004 15:20)

Yeah, like Nimraw said. Play with the original sniper picture removing all the bits you don't want by hand. With the pic I put up, I just did a quick selection with the magic wand to get the white areas and deleted them.

For more control, try putting the ghillie suit on its own layers.

The actual trick is the fact that once the sniper picture is desaturated, the overlay and screen blending modes will let either the white or black portions show through. With the two layers, one regular and one inverted, you get an effect of depth since the white and black portions simulate shadows and highlights.

To quote: "play.fiddle.learn."

the displace filter will do wonders for matching the contour.

if you take my example, run displace on it with a copy of the gun as a map, and simply copy and invert the white layer to black, (and of course, play with opacity and blending modes until happy) things should be pretty good.

Silver would be tough, since you're saying you don't want it visible right away...silver tends to jump right out at you

The first thing I did was clean up the image of the sniper, simply by using the magic wand and selecting first the black, and deleting, and then the yellow halo.



(Edited by DL-44 on 09-29-2004 18:14)

Thanks for all your help, I am going to try your suggestions out - once I work out what exactly I am supposed to do...
'Set this layer to Screen' took a eck of a long time to decipher - and once I did it, it didn't look anything like the example - but still, as you said, practise makes perfect...

Hey, sorry if it was a bit confusing, I was in a rush.

Here's the PSD file, that might make it a bit easier to understand.

gun.psd ~ 504k file

Hey, thanks - that might actually help

I'll give it a whirl over the weekend and post the result here...

[update]
nah, tried it all weekend and didn't get anywhere. I still lack the skills to do something like this - the best result I got looked like something fell out of my nose onto a photo - and my wife is up in arms about my time in the office...
I try something else i guess...

thanks all for the effort though, much appreciated