Tutorial 1: Matting and Composition, the Basic

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In this tutorial, we will learn the usage of tools, the conception of layer and the workflow of composition.

We have a foreground picture with a sparrow in it :

And we have a background picture here:

Now we want to cut the sparrow out and paste it into the background. ( Maybe there are no such small sparrow in real world, it doesn't matter ).

First, open the background photo, the program will ask what is it. Select 'It's background' and the program will let you choose the foreground photo. Then you select the sparrow and open. After the two files were loaded, the are organized into layers, The base layer and the 'Layer 1', layer 1 over base layer.

Next, click layer 1 with sparrow to set it as current layer. Select 'Polygon Selection' tool to make a selection for sparrow. Notice，1，Use wheel button of mouse to zoom in/out for more accurate selection.2，Contract from the shape rather than include non-object pixels.:

Click left button align the edge until it come back to the start point, click the start point or double click to end:

Key Step: We don't need the original background out of the selection/sparrow, call menu command 'Selection - Delete Inverse' to delete them. and the call 'Selection - Select None' or press Ctrl+D to cancel selection(the unwanted part has been deleted, so we don't need selection any more):

Choose 'Transform Tool' to adjust the size and location of the sparrow. The position can be adjusted by move tool too, so in this step, the most important goal is size and orientation:

Double click or click OK icon button on property window to finish the adjustment.

Save the results.

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