Another trick with the gaussian filters and alphas is that you can blur something gradually - let's say you have a picture of a car, and the depth of field is really shallow, so just the front 1/8th or 1/4 is in focus. Let's assume the car is at a 45 degree angle from the camera, front of the car toward the left of the frame. The car is the selection, and you want to paste it into a CG background. The rear end of the car has a lot more blur to it than the front. Easy way to deal with this (or at least to create a quick n dirty fake) is to have your car alpha (once you've selected it), then create an all-new alpha channel. Do a black to white gradient from left to right (so black is left, white is at right). Make this alpha the selection, then make your active channel the car selection. Now you can apply a gaussian blur to the car alpha, and it will blur more pixels where your gradient alpha was white. If this makes no sense, I can do up a screen shot tut so you can see what I mean... .m

Yeah, i just find I have more control over it with gaussian blur, plus there's a preview, which always helps...

In addition to what elizabyte said, you can also get somewhat better results by tweaking the alpha. If your render has a black background and your image is light, for example, sometimes you'll get dark fuzz at the edges of your render selection when it's pasted because of antialiasing with the black background.

Usually I copy the selection to a new document with a transparent background, paste it and do the following:

-Select All
-Save Selection
-click on the appropriate channel (whatever you named it or the default, Alpha 1) so you see the black and white
-apply a slight gaussian blur to the alpha
-go back to your regular view on the layer
-Load Selection
-Select Inverse
hit your backspace/Delete key - each time you do, a little more of the fringe will be deleted until you get the result you want.

There's probably some faster way of doing this, but I've been using Photoshop since version 2 and am stuck in my ways :)
EDIT - after all that, Select All, copy and then paste to your composite image... /EDIT
.m

Message edited on: 08/06/2005 00:13

I know it's like weeks later, but another way would be if you have Illustrator to do your array in there (it's a snap to do a rotate transformation by x # of degrees, then just duplicate the transform), open that file in PS and define that as a brush.... :m

All these are images from gettyimages.com since i had no time to shoot/create my own. They came from a "Jazz" search. Thought I should give credit where it's due. They're just comps. :m

I agree with the camera and lighting ideas - add/make one of your lights a warm color - gold or something and it'll help...

Attached Link: http://www.midazo.com/dominos/archive/slammin.html

I'm late to this, but another way is if you're using a layout app like InDesign or Quark, keep your drawings in b/w. When you import them into the layout app, there are ways to make the image be colorized there, i.e. anything black is changed to whatever color you choose. There are tutorials for each program at their websites as this is a pretty basic feature. :m

er sorry not a light feather, but have anti-aliasing on...

use the lasso tool with a light feather and select the lips. or use the want to select the lips - might take playing with the tolerance some. voila, you can do ANYTHING and it will only affect the selection.

Problem is that I'm on a mac and the file gets unzipped to my DT - NOT in th appropriate folders in the Poser folder. Then when I try to put them in the right place, I can't access them - admittedly I should read up more on that in the manual

i already forgot the question! hehe...it's pre AND post amnesia...