INSERTING Inserting one picture into another is one of the fun things you can also do with Photoshop. We're going to insert an image from Winnie the Pooh into the TV screen in the photo at the right. The inserting part is fairly simple ... it just involves copying and pasting. What makes this process difficult to do well is the touching-up afterwards so the final image doesn't look fake. The first step is to open the image you want to paste. We'll first open the Winnie the Pooh picture, and copy it ... this process is described below. First you want to select the entire photo. (In other circumstances you might want to select just part of the image, perhaps a head). Choose Select and All (see the pictures below); then choose Edit and Copy. Next, use the Window entry in the top menu bar to switch to the original image. Choose Edit and Paste. The Winnie the Pooh image will appear in the main photo. Now click on the four-way arrow button in the menu (see below, right) so you can move the pasted image over the TV. The next step is to rotate and skew the inserted image so it lines up with the TV screen. Rotate it using Image - Transform - Free Transform (see below left) ... move the mouse cursor around the image until you see the curved arrow. Click and drag the image around until it lines up with the TV screen Now skew the image so the left side is shorter. Choose Image - Transform - Skew. Click on a left corner and drag so the left side is smaller. (see below right). Move the image so it lines up on top of the TV. Now you want to resize it so it fits ... choose Image - Transform - Free Transform. Drag a corner of the image inwards until the size matches. (see below). You may have to repeat the previous two steps several times until the image lines up just right. When you're satisfied, click on the green check mark to accept the final image. Here's the final important step: Photoshop makes a new layer for things you're editing, and the pasted-in TV screen is actually on a different layer than the background. You'll need to merge everything together by choosing Layer - Flatten Image. What you'll see now is shown below, left. It's very hard to get the inserted picture to line up perfectly. Here's what to do if it doesn't. You're going to add some shadow and smudging. Pick the drawing brush tool (see below right). Note the settings we used: a small brush (4 pixels) with an opacity of 68%. This will give a soft grey shadow, which we're going to paint over the edge of the TV where the old TV image shows. We want to draw a straight line along the top edge of the TV screen, but it's too hard to do freehand. Instead, we're going to make the pen tool draw a perfect straight line. Click on the top left corner, (see picture at right), move your cursor to the right end of the screen, and press the 'Shift' key while you click again. You'll get a perfect line! Now repeat for the other three sides. Below are some other tools you can experiment with to add realism to the image. First we blurred the TV screen a little. We used the magnetic lasso tool (see below, left) to select the screen. Next we blurred the selected region a little bit by choosing Filter- Blur- Blur. Then we made the screen less sharp by choosing Filter - Noise - Add Noise. Below is the final result. Using Photoshop Computers | Science & Math | Worsley School