Combining two photos

[gwpriester]

I like to photograph my lunch when I eat out and post it on my Facebook page (if the food is worth mentioning).

I had a corned beef Reuben sandwich in Santa Fe that was pretty OK. But by the time the sandwich arrived, my beer was half gone. Fortunately, I photographed the beer first (well after a few sips). I created a mask of the first beer photo to drop out all but the glass and the beer. Then I skewed and resized the beer photo until it was more or less the size of the food photo. I subtracted the parts of the beer (using transparency with the beer photo to see through) that overlapped the glass.

I did this using Designer Pro X10.

[Gamerprinter]

A couple years ago, I had a customer to my graphics shop that wanted her son-in-law added to her other daughters wedding photo - since in reality the son-in-law hates his sister-in-law so didn't attend her wedding, though his wife (her sister did). So I pulled him from his wedding picture and placed him next to his wife in the other wedding photo. I actually already knew all the people involved, personally. Needless to say, the son-in-law in question was not pleased with me...

[Egg Bramhill]

Do you mind if I join you Gary?

[steve.ledger]

Xara Designer Pro X10 certainly is the fastest at this sort of composting task.
It's also a lot of fun..
That sandwich looks tasty, but I'd be careful of that salad!

[Egg Bramhill]

[gwpriester]

gameprinter - I have a photo of my wife and my brother and myself the last time my brother came for a visit. It's been a few years and I am not certain which figure was stripped in. I raise a pint to you Egg. And the salad was better than it looked.

[Ed S.]

Gary,

This is awesome! Would you be up for posting a tutorial on how you did this? I find masking and photo manipulation far easier in other programs so I avoid doing any photo work in Xara, but I'll be the first to admit that this may be due to my limited understanding on how Xara can uses masks.

[gwpriester]

Hi Ed

I did not keep the photos. But here's an old Workbook tutorial that explains the process http://www.xaraxone.com/webxealot/workbook36/page_4.htm

Basically you use the Shape Tool (in this old tutorial it was called the Shape Editor Tool) to create a closed path (the last control point is placed on top of the first point) shape that covers the part of the image you want to save. Then you select the mask shape and the photo and from the Arrange menu, select Combine Shapes > Intersect Shapes.

Once I had the glass singled out, I resized and used the skew handles to distort the glass to the same size as the original glass.

[Ed S.]

Thanks, Gary!

[Egg Bramhill]

I too had deleted my drawing but I found it in the backup folder, so I've created a video tutorial based on this as there's slightly more to creating this effect than Garys straight mask overlayed on an image. I used a lot of Layers to assist in making the video which isn't obvious from watching it but I hope it gives you a clue.

Watch in HD