The first thing I wanted to focus on was seeing how well Duke Nukem would fit into my Doom artwork. It basically meant I would try to put the Duke Nukem from this picture (see below).
Into this one - somewhere off to the left of Doom guy.
Getting Duke Into Hell
First of all I opened up the Duke Nukem image in Photoshop. This is as simple as going up to the File drop down menu and selecting Open. Then navigating to where the image is stored and selecting it and clicking on open in the file explorer. Pretty much the same way you would open up anything in Windows.
I renamed the file to the default layer 1 from background to allow me to edit it. To do this you just need to select the layer from the right hand side of the screen and where it says Background with a lock symbol double click on it till you get a new pop up appear. Then put it any name you wish - ideally one that gives a helpful description of what is on this layer and select ok.
Then once I had done this I wanted to try and get the sizes right and to let Photoshop resize it using any built in techniques it had for ensuring it looked as good as possible. To this end I looked at the properties of the Doom picture, specifically the pixel size. It was 751 x 1063. I then resized the Duke Nukem image to match these dimensions. To resize the Duke Nukem image in Photoshop I went to the Image drop down menu and selected image resize. I then entered a width of 751 and it automatically set the height to 1062 for me. I then selected Bicubic Sharpen in the resample option which is what it recommends when reducing picture sizes. I decided to do it this way rather than just change the size using the transform controls to ensure that the best possible sample of Duke was gotten for transplanting into the Doom picture.
Then it was time to open up the Doom picture in Photoshop ready for Duke to find himself inexplicably in hell!
Back to Duke then and now I needed to try and separate Duke from his background. To do this I would need to use a Photoshop selection tool. The one I decided to use was the Magnetic Lasso tool. This tool actually looks for edges where there is different colours and sticks to the edge allowing me to draw around the outline of Duke. This was reasonably easy using this tool. The main issue area was at the top of Duke's head and shoulders where due to the lighting reflecting off him from the atomic explosion the colours for his hair and upper shoulder were very close in colour. I had to manually left click the points for this bit pretty much free hand. When I messed one up I could use backspace to remove that point and reposition it by hand.
After I had finished I tried to use the refine edge tool to add some of the areas back in where the magnetic lasso tool had missed them. I selected the Smart radius under edge detection and tried a few settings however all it seemed to do was to put in some of the bits that I had hand crafted back into the picture - especially the bits from the top of Duke's head. Normally I would always recommend using this tool but in this case it didn't seem to improve the selection particularly.
The other major issue is that Duke's right foot is almost totally obscured by a spray of blood from an enemies head. For the time being I would have to leave this bit out and then try to see what could be done about it later. Either adding a foot back in or actually have a blood effect dripping out of the leg to make it look as though it had been blown off were initial and slightly humorous ideas I had.
With my now completed outline of him I could at least now look at the selection size and see if positioning him in the Doom picture was a possibility.
I ended up dragging Duke to this position and lost part of his right hand but it did mean that he would fit into the Doom picture and his left foot would hopefully look to be firmly planted on the same rocky outcropping as Doom guy.
Now all I had to do was get Duke into the the Doom picture. To do this I clicked on the Add Layer Mask button whilst making sure that the Doom layer was selected. This then brought up the marching ants for the Duke selection and could allow me to get the final positioning of Duke finalised.
However I could now see that Duke was head and shoulders bigger than Doom guy which looked a bit odd, even given that Doom guy is kind of squatting down slightly to brace himself whilst firing his gun whereas Duke is standing straight. However the effect just looked like they were totally mismatched.
So at this point it was up to me to either resize the image again using the Image size function or try to resize Duke when in the picture. Given that I had already used the Image resize once and I know pretty accurately how much I would have to resize Duke by (80% by my guess) I decided to do this again. So I reduced the image size to 80% of it which sadly removed my selection of Duke. I then re-selected his outline using the magnetic selection tool and could once again compare Duke's outline to the Doom image. Luckily this time the sizes matched up much better.
Now repeating the add layer mask again I finally had Duke looking the right size and he appeared to fit nicely into the Doom picture albeit off to one side as Doom guy is centred in his Picture. I then had to invert the layer mask so that Duke was going to show rather than his surroundings. This was done by pressing Ctrl + I with the layer mask selected. Now with both layers and the layer mask selected I had the below image.
I was reasonably happy with this as a first go although that missing leg did look really odd. I also noticed that on Duke's left leg there was some smoke that was wafting across it that came out of nowhere and would need to be fixed. Also Duke seemed to "pop" out the image more compared to Doom guy so I would need to try and mute the colours of Duke a bit to more closely resemble those of the Doom image.
Fixing The Issues
First off I had to do something about that missing leg. For an initial try I figured I would try to copy Duke's right leg and then mirror it and see if I could attach to his left knee area.
So I used the magnetic lasso tool again (making sure that the Duke layer was the one I was working on) to just select the bit of Duke's right leg with the boot on - most of this ended up being done by hand as the whole area is very dark. I then cloned the selection by holding down Alt and moving the selection away from where it was currently, ie attached to Duke's left knee. I could then reverse (mirror) the foot selection by making sure transform controls were selected and then clicking on one of the points of Duke's boot. This brought up the height and width controls and in width I entered -100%. (I did get help from Jamie with regards to this bit). This flipped the boot round and let me position it as though attached to Duke's right knee.
I next wanted to get rid of the little yellow Doom logo at the top of the picture.
I used the healing brush tool to select areas around the logo that were similar in colour and then just left clicked on bits of the Doom logo. I used a fairly small selection size of around 6 pixels - just enough to cover the lines that made up the Doom logo. Utilising multiple selections to try and match in with the background colour as it fades down the page from black towards the top to yellow more into the middle of the image. Afterwards whilst the Doom logo had disappeared it had left a bit of a smudgy effect. To try and neaten this up I selected a larger selection size of around 15 pixels and then just went over the whole smudged area in one big go. I didn't really expect this to do much but surprisingly Photoshop really neatened up the whole effect making it seem far more seamless.
Next I needed to try and get rid of that smoke effect on Duke's left leg. Firstly I tried the healing brush tool as it had worked so well before. However whilst I did do a few passes with it the effect was still very smudged looking like in the Doom logo and I couldn't seem to fix it properly this time.
I used the eyedropper tool to get a approximation of the colour of Duke's trousers and then with that selected used the brush tool to paint the colour onto Duke's leg. Whilst this looked pretty dark it definitely looked better than with the smoke. It's not perfect but I don't think it will be too noticeable in the main image if you aren't looking for it. If necessary I can retouch that bit taking into account the lighting a bit more and adding more shades of black / grey to try and make it look better.
Lastly I needed to try and do something about making Duke himself a bit duller - not something he would appreciate I'm sure!
So to do this with the Duke Layer selected I added an adjustment layer for brightness and contrast. I did this by selecting the brightness contrast icon just above the layers panel. I could then decrease the brightness and contrast to lower levels. I tried a few different options but in the end having both contrasty and brightness almost as low as they would good seemed to give the closest match.
With that done I now had the below image which was pretty much ready to go onto my DVD template so I saved a backup of this work so far with all the layers and then combined all the layers into one layer (Layer drop down menu and then select Merge Layers). This would make it easier for me to have it as one layer when I started adding more layers on the case for titles, logo's and the clipping masks I would need to add.
Here is the image as it looked at this point.
Next post will be about me adding it onto the DVD template.
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