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Basics: Selections II

Let's put together what we've learned so far and add a little bit on top. We will be creating a product picture.

Start with downloading the photo of a phone:

1. Copy the phone as a layer

Select the white background using the Fuzzy select tool:

Invert the selection (Selection > Invert):

Copy the selected phone.

Create a new image and paste the phone in it as a new layer. Name the layer 'Phone 1'.

If necessary, scale down the phone to make it smaller.

2. Create gradient background

Select the background layer of the new image.

Pick the Blend tool and make sure you have selected black as the foreground color and white as the secondary (background) color:

Drag the mouse from top of the image to the bottom:

You should end up with this:

3. Duplicate the phone

Right click on the phone layer and pick Duplicate layer:

We now have two copies of the phone layer. Pick the Flip tool from the toolbar and select vertical in the tool options (panel below the tools).

Now click on the second phone. This will be the phone's reflection. Name the layer 'Phone 1 Reflection'.

Move the layer so that it's touching the original phone from below:

4. Create gradient mask on the reflection

Create a new mask for the Reflection layer. Now select the Blend tool again.

This time, change the colors from black/white to black/gray:

Make sure you have the mask active and not the layer. Drag the gradient from bottom to top of the reflection:

You will end up with this:

5. Make another phone in the back

Duplicate the Phone 1 layer again, make it smaller and move it behind the original phone. Name the layer Phone 2:

Now select the Phone 2 layer and apply a gaussian blur filter ( Filters > Blur > Gaussian ):

A window opens with blur parameters. Choose 5 pixels as the blur radius. The larger the radius, the blurrier the image:

Now duplicate the Phone 2 layer, name it Phone 2 Reflection and create a reflection as in steps 3 and 4.

This is what you should have by now:

6. Fix the reflection error

Look closer at the area below the first phone. The two reflections are overlapping here:

This should not be happening and we will fix it. What we want to do is hide the Phone 2 Reflection layer in the overlapping area.

We can do this by painting black color in the Phone 2 Reflection mask but we can do better than that. We will use selection.

There is a way to create a selection out of layer. We will use Phone 1 Reflection to create such a selection. Select the Phone 1 Reflection layer, right click it and look for Alpha to selection:

This will create a selection in the shape of the selected layer:

And now that we have this selection we can pick the Brush tool, select black color and paint black color to the mask of the Phone 2 Reflection layer. This is the result: