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Help appreciated for Abbey Road photo


beatles1291

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Hi there! I'm trying to shop my own version of Abbey Road (I actually woke up at 6:30am to do the shoot as to avoid traffic), but I'm having troubling making the guys blend in with the photo. The two on the left (George and Paul) still look like copy/pastes, and the right bare foot of Paul (the second guy on the left) just looks really fake against the white cross walk. The third guy from the right (Ringo) was a part of the original picture, but I think I need to adjust the shadow of his back shoe a little bit. I'm more or less happy with the guy on the right (John), but his left shoe may need a little bit of work.

Essentially, I've been staring at this for too long to really know what looks natural/fake, and I'm not good enough with Photoshop to know how to soften the edges well enough so they blend in. Any advice or adjustments would be greatly appreciated! The actual PSD file is too large, so I've uploaded it on another site so you can download it from there.

Mod edit: this link does not lead to your jpeg; it leads to a commercial website with porn popups. If you post another such link, you may subject yourself to being banned. Please read our general posting rules and specifically those related to posting spam links. Additionally, I have seen this image before, though I admit you may have been inspired by one like it to do your own. Seems like a fairly common idea.

Here's the JPG of it.

View attachment 24752

Thanks guys!
 
Last edited by a moderator:

beatles1291

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Mod:
I do apologize. The first link was to the first file upload site that I could find, and I didn't realize the link to the site would have obscene pop-ups. I will try to find a better way to upload the PSD file. Unfortunately, even the zipped file is a few MB larger than the 30mb upload limit for this site, so I will look for another third party site.

By "my own Abbey Road," I didn't mean that the idea itself was original-I was in fact inspired by the other imitations that I've seen. I only meant that I used pictures of me in the picture.

MikeMC: The JPG is below.


Here is a link to the PSD file on DropBox. Once again, sorry for the first link. Just click "Download" in the upper right hand corner. Thanks!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ummakcyzvas0k5t/Abbey Road.psd
 

Attachments

  • AbbeyRoad.jpg
    AbbeyRoad.jpg
    6.4 MB · Views: 2
Last edited:

MikeMc

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Shadows under the feet are wrong...close, but the angles are different...might need to feather your cuts a bit more, the blending is OK...just more work.
 

Tom Mann

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One thing that immediately jumped out at me was that the background is sharper than the subjects. I guess there is a small chance this was done intentionally (eg, "gee, it was just a snapshot"), but IMHO, it sure contributes to the cut-out look.

In addition, the grain structure of the subjects is completely different from the grain of the background -- definitely another no-no.

Tom M
 
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Shadows are too hard and also in wrong directions and you should alos try a border selection of maybe 2-3 pixels around subjects and feather 'em a bit and as said above grain also comes into play... to me subjects are bit warm too... Try changing background tone to match with subjects if you can't make it the other way..
 

beatles1291

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How does it look now? I made the background a bit warmer and fiddled with the shadow, but I'm not quite sure how to do the feathering. Do I simply select around an edge, do refine edge, and adjust the feather? Thanks, I really appreciate the advice.

Abbey Road1.jpg
 
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to feather : you can either do refine edge feather or select the person by ctrl+clicking it's layer thumbnail then goto select > modify > border and enter a reasonable amount of pixels then select > modify > feather and feather a bit..

the image looks a bit better now but needs more work. the problems I see are :

1. The shadow on the far left guy's foot is very harsh
2. You have a warm and a bit different color tones on the faces , maybe I'm wrong but it kinda looks like these were taken in sunshine ? but the background looks like the shot was taken on a cloudy day ??

but then again maybe I'm too much curious and it all depends on how far you wanna go ..
 

beatles1291

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Evil-Are you referring to his forward foot? Also, thanks for the feather advice, I'll try that out and see how it goes. I actually took these photos fairly early in the morning (around 6:30), all within an hour. It's weird-I did the guy on the left last, so it should've been brighter, but his original photo is the darkest. The third guy from the left is actually part of the background. Do you mean the color tones of the faces are different from each other or from the background? I don't really have an eye for this kind of stuff.

valravn-Thanks, I'll use it next time.
 
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Yeah front foot and I'm talking about face color tones differs from background , it looks like you took their images at noon while the BG is kinda cold.
 

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