Basic effect is pretty simple.
Select your person (always the hardest part of any technique). Copy. Then paste into pic you want it to appear in. (or you can drag the selected person into the pic).
Will paste in as new layer, then just adjust opacity to make a ghost person.
Desaturate that layer if you want it to be grayscale looking on otherwise color pic.
You can move the ghost around . You can resize the ghost person. Smaller is okay, larger means you didn’t have enough pixels to begin with in relation to the other pic, and you are upsampling, best to rescan the ghost image at higher rez and start over.
There are lots of more sophisticated nuances, but this is the basic technique.
Mac
True, Mac.
But most of the pics look like the person was already there. In that case you’ve got a lot of work to do.
First select the person and put them on their own layer. Turn the layer off and then you need to re-create the background. Not a task for a beginner and depending upon the surrounding areas in the pic could prove quite a challenge for anyone.
Bob
Good points…
But I’m assuming the OP does NOT have the pic of his loved one already in the graveyard. Otherwise, he’d already have a REAL ghost pic!
Mac
Yeah i dont already have a picture of my dad in the graveyard. Just his headstone. See the picture i am using is one of me kneeling with my hand on his grave stone. I wanted to take a picture of my dad and put him in there and make him look like a ghost..kinda like he’s watching over me from heaven (which i hope he is.) I just dont want it to look unrealistic. In the examples that i gave, like that website, those people actually look like they could’ve been spirits that were there. That’s the effect i am after.
Any more pointers?
I’d say if you do what I layed out, you’ll get what you want.
M
You might try to add a realistic shadow to the figure; of course it would be very faint. This could help to visually ground the figure into the scene. You could also vary the transparency of the figure instead of just taking the whole layer opacity down. I’m thinking it would look more organic that way, but I haven’t tried it. Try to get the lighting to match as much as possible. When you have the figure done (and opacity set), you might have to add some film grain or whatever effect is needed to fully integrate the figure into the picture.
One possibility – to get that ghostly glimmer around the figure, duplicate ghost, gaussian blur the ghost layer fairly heavily and then set to screen mode – adjust opacity to get the desired effect (I ended up with two layers, both in screen mode, one heavily blurred and the other slightly, with the opacity of the lower ( more in focus) layer fading off towards the feet – I used a gradient on a layer mask to accomplish this.
Susan S
