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Sitting a Cat on a Mat
A Persian long-haired cat on a flying carpet over the white cliffs of Dover – happens every day.
- The carpet was placed on a undulating surface and the cat was photographed on the carpet. Cats can't be trained like dogs so that sort of thing can take time.
- A flight in a small plane was necessary to fly over the coast of south England to photograph the white cliffs of Dover.
- The tricky bit was to cut out the cat and the carpet.
There are a number of techniques which can be used to select hard-edged subjects but the Extract Tool comes into its own when delicate subjects like animal fur or hair need to be separated from the background.
- The Edge Highlighter Tool was used to do the initial outlining of the fluffy edges.
Smart Highlighting worked well on the carpet with its stronger edges.
All right, now there is the Refine Mask function from CS5 onwards, but not everyone has got that and the Extract Filter has a lot of fans.
Although it is a very useful tool, the Extract Filter is no complete magic bullet. A fair bit of manual work is needed on a subject like this.
Just how the flying carpet image was created is covered in great detail in a tutorial in the
Photoshop In A Day
manual.
- When the background had been removed and cleaned up, the cat on the carpet image was dragged on to the aerial landscape.
- It was resized, then flipped horizontally, as it appeared to work better that way.
- A little bit of Layer Matting helped merge the images together.
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