Build a Borrower

Use camera and editing skills to create miniature people

one of the most magical things about Photoshop is the ability it gives you to transport your subject to a different place – or in this case, a different scale. With a few simple skills you can create all kinds of fantastical composites. But it’s not just about image-editing wizardry. Much of the hard work in this project is done in-camera, and it’s here that the effect comes to life.

One of the things that makes a bad composite stand out is the mis-match of lighting or perspective – two things that have nothing to do with Photoshop. Try to plonk a person into a random shot and, chances are, it’ll look wrong. There needs to be consistency between the two. The angles need to match up and the lighting needs to look similar.

So here we’ll focus on consistency between the two main photos we need for this – one of our miniature scene, the other of our the full-size portrait. To do so we can make use of our secret weapon – a miniature posing doll.

By placing it in roughly the same pose as we’re going to shoot our full-size person, we’ll be able to capture natural shadows that fall across the scene. Then by matching up the poses, we can make the shadows look as if they belong to our full-size person!