A "Fantastic" Selfie! - Piece Breakdown

Happy Halloween everyone! In honor of the holiday spirit, I thought it would be fun to do another Photoshop breakdown of my latest photo, which is also my Halloween costume this year! As you are well aware by now, my favorite Doctor from Doctor Who is the 9th Doctor! I previously made some Psychic Paper so I decided to complete my first ever cosplay! I wanted to take a really cool portrait to feature the costume, and I thought it would be funny if the Doctor was taking a selfie on the TARDIS! Here's how I achieved that photo!

The first step was to take a photo! I set up my green screen behind me to make it easier to remove myself from the background later on! I also used three lights to get myself nicely lit so I would somewhat match the background image I picked. You can actually see my lighting setup here if you're interested!

The next step was to remove the original background and place in my new background image.

This is where I really began to make the photo blend in with the scene. I did some basic color correction, removed the green spill leftover on the jacket, and got rid of the shadow cast on my face by my Sonic Screwdriver.

Now I added some shadows to the side of me and did a final color grade of the image so it match the background.

The final step for this part of the composite, was adding a lens flare to the sonic and a slight vignette.

Now I took another photo of myself taking a selfie. I didn't have any fancy lighting set up for this one, but I did make sure I chose a lens that would leave my background nice and blurry. This was important for later

Next I cut myself out of the original photo and threw in a blurry version of my background from the other photo.

The next step was to piece the background and foreground together and do some color correction to the foreground to match the scene.

Next I added in the composite image from earlier, and recreated the iPhone camera interface. I also added a slight glow coming from the screen.

The final step was to add a flare behind the phone, integrate the screen, do a final color grade, and voilà! It was done!

I hope you guys liked this piece, I'm really really happy with it! Special thanks for my buddy Edward Boswell for giving me some great feedback while I working on the final composition!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you have a happy Halloween and as always, enjoy!

~Josh