In yesterday’s blog, I discussed Breaking the Fourth Wall.  Today, I am going to use a few stock images from istockphoto.com to create a more dynamic variation … a flying baby!

Masking the baby

Using Mask Pro to cleanly knocked out the white background from the baby image.  To give the illusion of flight, I duplicated the layer and applied a motion blur to the dupe and set the Layer Opacity to 80%.  To extend the blur, I duplicated the blurred layer and set that layer’s Opacity to 50%.  The original baby layer and the blurred layers are then lined up to trail off behind him.

Create a window with a view

After using Mask Pro to knock out the white background from the window frame, I placed the frame above the field and sky background image.  Next, I resized the frame to match the background image, and added depth by applying a Blending Option with a Drop Shadow to the frame layer as follows:

Combining the photos

Drag all of the layers into the same Photoshop file.  Starting with the window and sky background, I applied a Free Transform using Perspective and transformed one side to angle towards the distance.  I then resized the window/sky to give some plenty of white space.  The baby images are resized to fit the window and whitespace.  To add a sense of realism, I duplicated the baby images and flattened them to form the shape of a complex shadow.  I then filled the shadow with black and lighten the Layer Opacity to 50%.

Final Composite

The final version of the Flying Baby is below.  It’s a bird …  it’s a plane … it’s Super-baby! I think he needs a diaper change…