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set up your camera on a tripod or a stable surface, and set your exposure. focus manually.
have your subject (or your self) take several poses all over the place and shoot the pictures.
select one of your images as the base. open up all your images in photoshop so you can see them all... and drag'n'drop each picture into the base with the move tool. press shift before letting go to ensure that all images fall into the same position.
try to go from the figure in the back towards the figures in the front.
go to your layers palette and you'll see that each image is now a separate layer in your base image... you can close all the other images now.
select all your layers with the CTRL key and go to edit > auto-align layers. a menu appears: hit OK. this makes sure that the images line up in case your camera moved a bit between shots.
you might want to crop the image a bit because the edges are a little frayed from the aligning.
now... to reveal the clones:
turn off all your layers except the bottom two.
of these two, hit the one on top to highlight it and go to layer > layer mask > hide all. you'll see a black rectangle next to your layer. this is a layer mask and it's hiding the top layer.
hit white on your swatches palette. go to your paintbrush tool, select a brush, preferably a soft one. click on the black layer mask icon on your palette and start to paint with white on the mask itself to reveal the position of your subject on the top layer. you might have to get in very close with a small brush size to get the painting right. if you reveal too much and want to hide something, hit the black color and start painting again. remember: white reveals, black hides!
turn on the next layer directly above this layer in your stack. repeat the masking and revealing process.
rinse, repeat until you're all done.
any questions?
[ i shot these real quick before a class to prepare a practice session, so if something's not right with exposure/focusing, i don't want to hear it. of course, YOU will be much more skillful.]
©2010 toomanytribbles
