Terragen Post Processing

This is a short tutorial, showing a simple method of merging two images, one being a Terragen render used as the background. I am using Paint Shop Pro 6, but the the method and tools are much the same whatever program you use. If you are familiar with 'Layers' this will be a doddle (translation :- easy )

So fire up your paint proggy & Here We Go

I am going to use a old photo that was rather flat looking, the sky was lifeless and the foreground needed something ? Here are the two images I am going to use.

First make sure both images are the same dimensions, note :- I know you've heard it before :-) but it's always wise to use copies, just in case. Make your Terragen image the background layer then copy and paste the second image as another layer, you may want to name this to whatever your image is ( if you are going to use several images, make a separate layer for each one ).

Now we have to remove the unwanted areas, there are several ways to do this, for the sky, in the castle photo, I used the magic wand tool with the tolerance set to '20' and feather '0', for this image a left click in the sky area highlighted most of the sky, hit delete and it's gone. I had to do this a couple of times which got rid of most of the sky, there was some residual areas left along the skyline, so to eliminate these I zoomed in and removed them with the eraser tool.

Next we have to do the same for the foreground, but this time I found it easier, on this image, to use the freehand tool. Antialias unchecked, feather set to '0' and set for freehand, draw around everything to be removed, making sure to finish up where you start from to complete a loop and hit delete. If you have a graphics tablet this is a doddle too ( see above ). Now to make the blend with the background smoother, I go back to the magic wand, set tolerance to '0' and feather '0'. Holding down the shift key, left click in both the blank area's, go to selections/ modify/ feather and set pixels to '2', press OK.

Note:- Depending on your images, it maybe easier to see what you are doing if you have a layer between the two images, in a solid color, so that when you remove an area it's easy to see the edges. When you are happy with the layer you are working on, just delete the layer with the solid color.

To complete the image I had to play around with the color settings on the old photo, i.e. brightness and contrast, with a final tweaking of hue and saturation. There you have it, if you would like to see a larger finished image click here. I hope you have found this tutorial helpful, the information can be applied to any type of image blending, so jump in, experiment and have fun, it's a doddle ;-}