By Jim Zuckerman
For many years, I have had an image in my mind of a knight and a horse in armor standing or galloping in a foggy forest. This kind of thing isn’t easy to do. Even if I made arrangements to photograph the medieval scene, fog isn’t something one can order on-demand. So, I got tired of waiting and decided to use Photoshop to create my vision.
Last year I took a shot at a Renaissance Faire of two knights facing each other. The background made the photograph unusable, and I almost trashed it. However in revisiting the image, I decided to give it a try and combine it with a foggy forest I photographed in Italy at dawn. This landscape was originally horizontal, but in Image > image size I resized it vertically.
Using the pen tool (I describe how to do this in my course Creative Techniques in Photoshop here at Betterphoto) I was able to precisely cut out the two figures, including the feathers in their helmets, and then I used the cut and paste procedure to place them in the forest. With Image > adjustments > color balance, I made the knights as blue as the background, and then using Edit > fill I added some ‘low lying mist’ at the bottom of the frame. I filled this area with white at 30% opacity.
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