Dylan Composite Learning Experience
Another go at compositing. This one was a real pain in the arse and I just about threw in the towel several times. I decided to finish it out just to have something after spending days on it. Not exactly how I would have liked it to turn out, but I did learn something very important. Hopefully my future composite attempts will be better as a result.
What did I learn?
Make sure the background of the subject is a DARKER grey than the grey you see in my ‘before’ version.
Why? Well if you’ve watched ‘Calvinize‘ by Calvin Hollywood, and use his compositing trick, the shade of grey is very important to pull it off. I color corrected the ‘before’ background (which has a blue cast), and made it appear a proper shade of grey, or so I thought… until I tried to slip in the new background. It was then, I realized, that if the shade is too light, the composite is a complete failure. So, in the end, I had to extract an exact mask, and for the life of me, could not do so successfully. I made 3 attempts and then just settled for the last one, although it sucked. All in all, a very tedious learning experience, one I don’t care to repeat.
After:
Retouch comparison:
Background:
Set up (compliments to Studioxil for the schematic and graphics):
Photos by Regina Pagles
My husband Fred & I own Zion Cycles, a bicycle shop in Springdale, Utah - just outside of Zion National Park.
I live, eat, breath, sleep & dream about Photoshop. Sick...I know. 
Did you use refine edge? Another trick is to bring image into camera Rawls a smart object and darken it down then save as copy. Then bring that to your background and open camera raw and readjust. I think it’s in the compositing book by M kowslowski. But I honestly don’t think refine edge is that great.. Topaz remark is okay but frankly it’s a challenge for me.