One of the most exciting things about digital photography is not the camera itself, but what you can do with the photo after the fact using various software programs such as Photoshop.

I like to take multiple images and merge them together forming a composite image. You can add a sky, mountain, or flower to an interesting sky or you might add animals such as moose or squirrels where there weren’t any previously. Sometimes different landscape and nature elements are added such as a nice looking rock outcropping or cliff. Often, it’s as simple as swapping out a boring sky for one that’s much more exciting to really add to your photograph.

It’s easy to add elements to a picture, but much harder to make them look right when all of the layers are put together. Little pieces of grass and other artifacts are common and time consuming to remove. Photoshop’s Extract tool is a good place to start. It will help you remove an object from one image so that you can copy it into another. It does a decent job of getting the edges right, but you’ll need to fine tune it some. What I do is duplicate the layer, then extract the object out of the duplicate. I convert this new object to gray scale and copy it to a layer mask. A layer mask is a gray scale layer that allows portions of the layer below it to be shown. The different gray values translate to opacity values. By converting the extracted layer to gray scale, I have a pretty good representation of the object that needs to be seen. I then paint on white and/or black to the edges of the layer mask to fix any edge problems in the original extracted layer. Once I have my perfectly extracted object, I can include that layer and its mask into the composite image and position it accordingly. Sometimes there are a few pixels that seem out of place once the layers have been combined, so I’ll fix those individually by zooming in and then I use the clone stamp tool to edit out the problems.

Extracting objects is really an art form all to itself. To do this so, you’ll need to know how to use the extract tool in Photoshop and how layer masks work, which I’m sure there are countless tutorials on the Internet that show you exactly how to use both. If you don’t have Photoshop, check to see if your photo editing software supports these things. If not, you can buy Photoshop Elements for about $99. You can also use the lasso tool to extract an object if it has an obvious edge. Hair and fur are harder to do, which is where the extract tool comes in handy.

Doug Hough from my photo gallery, The Lens Flare, has a lot of really great composites, and the thumbnail in this article was created by Donwrob.