Add birds to photos in Photoshop, combine pictures and make transparent background.

This is a fun tutorial. When you have a great landscape photo, you can really add life to it by adding a flock of birds. You don’t have to worry about cutting out each bird either, this tutorial shows you how to easily hide the background and let the silhouette show through.

First up, you will need a background photo and a photo or 2 of birds. I like to carry a camera and I’m very often shooting birds and textures to build up my library. If you are doing much work in Photoshop, its also great to have a good source of images and other assets you can pull from. One that I really recommend is Envato Elements. For one low subscription, I have access to millions of photos, templates, videos an so much more. I get unlimited downloads and full commercial rights.

Here is a link to signup

Both of these Photos are from Envato Elements. First is an image of iceland. Obviously, you’ll be using your own image.

Choose File>open to open both images in Photoshop)

Here is an image of birds in the sky.

Choose the Rectangular marquee tool.

Drag a selection around the birds you want to use.

Choose the move tool (v).

Drag the selection of the birds up to the tab of the other image to move them to. Wait for the image to open and then release the mouse in the new window,

The video above shows this step (how to combine images in Photoshop)

You will see your selection of birds appear on the new document.

I purposely chose a more difficult image to work with, often your sky will be gray, white or blue.

If there is color in your sky, press Ctrl+Shift+U / Cmd+Shift+U on mac (Image>adjustments>desaturate.

This will remove the color from the selected layer.

How to make the background transparent

Now, we need to hide the background and just show the birds against transparency.

There are lots of ways to do this and I show you other ways in other tutorials, but here is the best way for this type of image.

In the Layer’s panel. where it says Normal, click and choose Darken from the menu. This changes to Darken blending mode, which hides white.

If your sky is white, it will now be invisible.

If it’s gray, do this to make the sky transparent.

Press Ctrl/Cmd+L for Levels.

Slide the white triangle to the left until the bright pixels (sky) disappears.

Click ok, its that easy!

With the move tool, (v). Hold Down the Alt (windows)/Option (Mac) key and drag out copies of the birds if you want.

I hope you enjoyed this quick little tutorial. Its always fun to do these types of tutorials.

See you at the CAFE

Colin

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