Just For Fun

Jon Adams shows how to replace a foreground

Mix ’n’ match foregrounds and backgrounds

When you’re shooting quickly to make the most of fleeting light, it’s not always possible to get a great shot all in one go. You may find a great backdrop, picked out by a winter sun, but it won’t always have the foreground detail present to lead into it and make a complete picture.

The best solution is to seek out a suitable foreground to anchor the shot, of course – but you don’t want to miss that lovely light, so I’d always suggest you shoot immediately. By doing this, you can make sure the dramatic background is safe in the can, then go on a separate search to find the ideal foreground that balances the scene. By shooting image components in this way, your end result won’t be a ‘true’ photograph, but it’s a fun way to make creative landscapes.

This approach, normally reserved for commercial photography, will get you thinking about your images.

After opening the original landscape into Photoshop CC, I looked through a selection of shots taken in similar conditions, assessing just the foregrounds of the images. Once I’d found one that had potential, I opened it up, and pasted it into the same document by pressing Ctrl/Cmd+A, Ctrl/Cmd+C, Ctrl/Cmd+W and Ctrl/Cmd +V. I then made a rough selection of the foreground using the Lasso tool, and softened the edge by using Feather under Select And Mask. In the Layers panel, I then clicked the Add Layer Mask icon, to see the new foreground superimposed over the original picture. To make it fit better, I pressed Ctrl/Cmd+T to enter Free Transform mode, and pulled the corner handles outwards to adjust the size. 1 With the foreground replaced, the image looked immediately better, but the join between the two needed more work to make the image look convincing. I selected the Brush tool and made sure that the Mask was selected in the Layers panel. I pressed D then X to set Black as the foreground colour. With a soft-edged brush, I painted onto the join, to blend the two pictures together. Using black hides the top layer and reveals the original from beneath, while white does the opposite; by switching between the two (just press X for this) and varying the brush size with the square brackets keys, I could quickly paint an effective blend.

To finish off the image, I drew a ragged margin all the way around it with the Lasso tool, and feathered this by around 370px. After pressing Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I to get the inverse of the selection, I added a Curves Adjustment Layer and pulled the curve down to darken the edges with a custom vignette. 2