The photo above was my tribute to my old Pontiac Sunfire. You see… It was time to trade it in for something a little newer. It had treated me well for nearly 8 years and over 154,000 miles. It got me from point A to point B for many years and only had a problem keeping fuel pumps (had it replace 3 times during its lifetime). That was the only problem I had with it other than regular maintenance.

You may be wondering, “How did you Clone yourself eight times around your car?” The process is fairly easy. All you need is a digital camera, a tripod (if you can find a place to prop your camera, that will work too) and a computer with Photoshop installed (You might be able to do this with other photo manipulation programs, but I used Photoshop).

Step 1: Take the Pictures. Set up your camera in one spot. Set the timer and take a dozen or so photos of you in different places within the frame.

Step 2: Load your Photos onto your computer.

Step 3: Find 5-8 of your favorite poses and open all of them into Photoshop. Choose one photo to be your base photo.

Step 4: Pick a photo other than your base photo and select everything by pressing Control-A (Apple-A for you Mac Users) Then Copy (Control-C).

Step 5: On your Base photo paste the new content. Everything should be the same except your pose. The reason everything is the same is because you were taking the photos on a tripod. You didn’t change the point of view.

Step 6: Take the Polygonal Lasso Tool, set feathering to 20 or more and roughly cut out your new pose.

Before you hit the delete button, go to the Select Menu and Hit Inverse. When you hit the delete hey, everything in that layer except you will disappear showing the previous layers. The feathering will blur the edges of what you cut out so you will be able to blend the new image with the background or base image. If you have a version of you right behind another clone of you, you may have to reset the feathering to 0 and cut around part of the clone in front so the layer above the one in front doesn’t show the background in front of previous layer.

Step 7: Open the levels tool on that layer. You can either his Control-L or go to the image menu. Touch adjustments and then Levels. Adjust the levels in this window till the layer matches the background perfectly. This will make the image look seamless.

Step 8: Repeat Steps 4-7 for all of your poses till you have them all on one image.

Step 9: Play with some shading, especially around the versions of you that are in front of other yous. This will only make the image look more realistic.

Step 1: Open Your Image in Photoshop

Step 2: Select the Polygon Lasso Tool

Step 3: Point by point, click your away around the object you are trying to put the clipping path on. In this case it is the girl and the tree.

Note: when you have gone all the way around the object your will see a moving dotted line moving around the selection. This is good.

Step 4: Go to your Path window. There is a little circle with an arrow pointing to the right. Click it. Select Make Work Path.

Step 5: A small box will pop up. Set the tollerance to .5 (The larger the number, the less acurate the clipping path will be)

Step 6: Go back to your Path window and select Save Path

Step 7: Another box will pop up. Give the Path a name. It is good for multiple paths. Usually I just leave it Path 1

Step 8: Go back to the Path window. Select Clipping Path

Step 9: Choose the path you want the Clipping Path to be. You can set the Flatness, but I usuallt leave it blank.

Now you can import that image into InDesign, Quark and many other programs and place an image, color or anything else you like behind it. See the pink below.