First Lesson of Digital Imaging

Before entering into Taylor's University, I always wanted to learn how to master Photoshop. Therefore, I've chosen Digital Imaging as my elective subject. There goes my first lesson of learning Photoshop. :)

First thing that you should know before editing a photo is to reset your workspace by setting the width and height. Then insert an image by selecting the File button and choose open. An alternative way is to directly drag the image to the Photoshop icon.

So, how do we add an image into a background and make it looks real?

Here's the steps to create a realism :

1. Copy and Paste the image on the background and change the size by selecting the Edit button > Free Transform. [ Command T ]
2. Add a mask on the image. Use the Lasso tool to cut out the unwanted part.
3. Use the brush tool to erase off the part that you want to hide it. The black colour is to hide and the white colour is to show. You can change the colour by pressing the "X" button. To change the brush size, just click on [ ] to make it smaller or enlarge it. This is a non destructive way simply because you can hide and review the image.
4. Duplicate the layer to make a reflection, then Edit > Free Transform to adjust the size.
5. Crop the masking image. Adjust the saturation of the image by selecting the Image > Adjustment > Hue/Saturation (Under the image layer) and adjust it to slightly darker.
6. To create the water ripper effect, Filter > Distort > Ripples.
7. Lastly, a little important thing to create realism is that you have to add a shadow by duplicating the image. Then Edit > Free Transform again to inverse the duplicated image and change the opacity.

This was my first attempt.

Before

 After

That's all for the first lesson. :)