*** From the Archives ***

This article is from December 23, 2009, and is no longer current.

Mask a Glass & Blend It with a New Background

In this tutorial, you’ll start with a glassware image and remove its white background using Adobe Photoshop CS4. Because the glass was photographed as red wine was being poured into it, you’ll have to master some tricky masking techniques to make the results look realistic.
The second objective of this how-to is to help you blend the glass of red wine into a new background — a shot of an Italian vineyard flooded with sunshine. You’ll learn how to manipulate light so that the glass, its contents, and the new background all make a unified new image.
Here’s the before and after:

Click the image below to open the tutorial movie in a new window:

 

RUSSELL BROWN is the Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems, and an Emmy Award-winning instructor. He shares his delight in testing the creative limits of his tools, and his in-depth design knowledge and zany presentation style has won him a regular following among beginning, intermediate, and advanced users alike.
  • Anonymous says:

    Russell’s tutorial is one of the best and easiest to follow I’ve ever used. Please continue to post these ideas.

  • Anonymous says:

    Great tutorial… easy to follow. Perfect timing… I have a water bottle project – putting 5 water bottles in front of waterfall stream. My less effective workaround was lowering opacity of water bottles, layer mask, with 40% opacity brush, and selectively brushing out bottle so background came through. Not nearly as effective as Russell’s method. Thank you Russell!

  • Anonymous says:

    No video, just audio. Is that intentional?

  • Anonymous says:

    I had to download the file locally then it played in video mode in QuickTime. Something to do with Safari I guess.

    5 stars!

  • Anonymous says:

    Great tutorial – just too bad we have to pay iStock to download sample files to follow along with :(

  • Anonymous says:

    It is amazing what you see on the web and at CreativePro. Thank you all for a chance to learn a bit more.

    Steve

  • Anonymous says:

    Extraordinarily simple with exceptional results.
    Thanks so much!

  • Anonymous says:

    Great stuff! Thanks very much! Keep them coming.

  • Anonymous says:

    What a delight it is to be reminded of Russell Brown with his cool tutorial here! I have only touched base with his brilliant work from time-to-time, either with a post like yours here or only occasionally dropping by his site (The Russell Brown Show). He is consistently one of the few P’shop-related folks online, and by way of his road-tours, that harnesses this magical application in ways others just seem to skip past. ALL his ideas are SO ‘out of the box’! Thanks for sharing this with us. I feel better about my new year already!

  • Anonymous says:

    It’s become all the rage, having movie tutorials, and at one time I would have loved that. However, I am hearing impaired and the movies simply don’t work for me and have no closed captioning.

    When can we expect closed captioning to become common on movies? Thanks, Jann

  • Anonymous says:

    I mailed the link to my coworkers.

  • Anonymous says:

    Russel, you simply R O C K ! What a great tutorial and so easy to follow by your explanations! Great work of a great man and a great artist!
    May God Bless You for your patience and love of sharing your knowledge with us!
    Thanks a lot, Carlos.

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