Hey all you crazy cats and dogs out there! In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to add something into an image, and make sure it doesn't look really messed up and glowy. I'm using Photoshop 7 because I'm too cheap to buy anything else; most likely, you will be able to use this tutorial with other fine products such as Photoshop CS and Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Let's begin, shall we?
To begin, you need to have a chop. What I'm going to do is add myself to a street scene, making sure of course to try and match those little things that stand out when you forget them.This is the product of about 15 minutes of masking and a but of cloning (to get rid of shinies):Not bad, huh? But something seems a bit off... I think I'm a tad glowy for this scene; it's cloudy out, and I'm too lit. So, what I'll do is go to Image > Adjustments > Brigntness/Contrast and change the Brightness slider to -14. This is what I'll have:That's kind of better, but now I look too colorful. Can you see the man in the back, wearing all black? Well, I'm wearing a black shirt too, but my shirt is much...well, blacker. This is where contrast comes in: contrast basically determines the difference between colors. So, if I slide the contrast slider all the way to the left, I get nothing but pure gray. If I slide it to the right, I get more contrasting colors. Play around with it yourself. For my chop, I'm going to slide it left until my black matches the man's black; about -20.Now the black matches, but I'm too dark now! The Brightness/Contrast settings often change how the other looks, so you have to fiddle with them a bit before it looks "right." I'm going to tweak my settings for a little bit, and try to figure out where they each belong. For my image, I think Brightness -10 and Contrast -16 look good:Try this out with your own images!