Replace the scene outside

Replace a window scene with a cunning combination of layer blending and masking skills. James Paterson gets a room with a view…

Change views from a window with some Photoshop trickery

One of the best things about Photoshop is how it gives you the opportunity to transport people or objects from one place to another. We can replace a background or specific part of a photo in order to come up with new scenes that could never exist in the real world. In this simple project we’ll show you how it’s done.

The fundamental feature for this technique is layers. This cornerstone of Photoshop allows us to bring in different parts of photos and then combine them with complete control. Here we simply copy the New York city scene onto our original portrait, then use layer blending skills to fit it to the empty window.

To combine our two photos we can make use of a fantastic command in Photoshop called ‘Blend If’. This allows us to blend layers by controlling the visibility of pixels based on their brightness. With a scene like our starting image, the empty window is, of course, made up of very bright pixels. So we can simply drop our city scene on top then use Blend If to target and replace those bright pixels.

Once done, we can use a layer mask to tidy things up. Layer masks enable us to make parts of a layer transparent or semitransparent. After adding a mask, we simply paint with either black to hide areas, or white to reveal them. These simple controls make it possible to create all kinds of incredibly creative composite images.