Vingardium leviosa

"Levitation" is a kind of mini-genre where the point is to cancel gravity and make something fly.

The simplest method is to take one picture of the background, one picture of the thing that is going to fly - without moving the camera a millimeter - and then put the pictures on top of each other in Photoshop and blur out what supports the person or object.

But you can also take the technique further by adding more objects, adding shadows and special effects that make the whole thing more believable, more impressive or more visually striking - here only the imagination sets the limits.

New tools in Photoshop give, for example, much greater freedom to cut together objects from many different images, without them having to be taken in the same place, with the same light and without the camera moving.

Perfect Photoshop assignment

Levitation is a perfect task for learning a whole range of clever Photoshop techniques, including masks, blending modes, filters and various tools to clone, fill, move, highlight and paste different elements from multiple images.

Do you want to try?

1. You need a tripod, camera, a background, a subject and something that can make the subject float (a chair, stool, etc...)
2. Take a picture of the background without the subject itself
3. Take a photo of the subject while it is propped up, preferably in front of the exact same background if you want to keep it as simple as possible. If not, go ahead and take the background and foreground image completely separately.
4. Take any extra photos of subjects, e.g. leaves in the air if you want to clip it. Remember that the more similar the light and colors are in each image, the easier it is to combine them later.
5. Open the background image in Photoshop. You can then drag and drop each image into the program so that they are on their own layer.
6. Make a selection around the subject (object selection tool, lasso tool, quick selection tool, etc.) and click on the Mask button at the bottom of the Layers window.
7. Repeat for each motif to be entered. Move, scale the size of the objects and apply blur to give the impression of depth.

Some student projects