Well this started off as a response to Kent C who said it might be useful to provide a “general workflow” and somehow managed to end up as a fairly lengthy tutorial… apologies! Here is the original thread:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=9034085

First of all I started with the main background of my computer screen (which was switched off when I took the photo) and the two speakers. Then I took a screen grab of photoshop which was fitted onto the black screen by using edit>transform>distort. The next stage was to get the picture of me holding the camera to look as if it was opened in photoshop. I masked out the toolbars on the left and right (i.e. so they were made visible), as well as along the bottom of the picture, but leaving the lens of the camera so as to make it look like it was coming out of the screen.

The next stage was to open up the other individual pictures of me. I used the pen tool to create a nice outline of the figures. I then turned this into a selection and added a mask. By adding a mask with a selection made this automatically fills the masked background in black, so that only the figure should be visible now (note it may be a good idea to feather your selection so that it doesn't look too cut out). I then selected the figure by holding ctrl and left clicking on the layer mask, copying it to the clipboard. I pasted it into my background and resized it (ctrl+t). For the figure hiding behind the speaker I just added a layer mask and 'deleted' the parts covered by the speaker.

If you left it like this it would still look pretty nice, but I thought it would be cool to add some shadows. Here's what I did... (I thought I was keeping this brief here!). I added the pictures because I thought my explanation was getting slightly confusing!

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/1_G.jpg

I selected the outlines of the figures again and pasted them into my document. I made sure that the background colour was black and pressed ctrl+backspace to fill the figure so that it is now black. Make sure that this layer is in front of the background layer, but behind your coloured figures.

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/2_G.jpg

I then aligned the shadow so that it was directly behind the figures.

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/3_G.jpg

I selected edit>transform>distort again and distorted it from the top left and top right points. In other words, I did not change the bottom points so that the shadow starts closely from the feet and moves further away. It's a good idea at this stage to look at the other shadows in your picture and guess what your shadow should look like.

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/4_G.jpg

I then changed the opacity, 50% looked nice in mine, but you can change it to suit you. I also changed the blending mode to soft light, but again, play with some other ones to see what you like.

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/5_G.jpg
As a final step I applied a guassian blur to remove the sharp edge. As fievel noted, in my picture the shadows are perhaps a little too sharp, so next time I’ll blur my shadows a little more.

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/various/6_G.jpg

As an afterthought, you could even play with your shadows so that they are more blurred the further away they get from the figure.

You can have fun playing about with your shadows. For my top figure sitting on the computer I actually added two shadows... one for the head and shoulders you can see on the back wall (looking at this again I should have blurred this a LOT more) and shadows for the legs on the computer screen. A couple of shadows were used for the figure sitting behind the speaker as well.

Well there you go! It started off as a brief outline and somehow managed to end up being this very lengthy explanation. Hope you find this helpful, and apologies if I’ve not explained anything very clearly. If so, let me know and I’ll do my best to clear it up. If you’ve got any other suggestions then please share. I’ve learnt a lot from this forum, but am no where near as knowledgeable or skilful as a lot of the folk here, so thanks for all your help!

Here’s what my final pic looked like:

http://john.stuwee.org/albums/fujimugs/fujimugspic_web.sized.jpg
Bigger version available here:
http://john.stuwee.org/fujimugs/fujimugspic_web?full=1


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Cheers,

yirmon

http://john.stuwee.org
http://john.stuwee.org/photography