Software Used: Photoshop 5.5 (Any version with layers will work)
This tutorial was prompted by a visitor to the site who had recently purchased Corel Knockout, and was having difficulty understanding how to manipulate the knocked out object after placing it into another image in Photoshop. I'm using Photoshop version 5.5 for Windows, but this should also work in Photoshop 4 and higher versions for Windows or Mac. I believe the transform command was moved to a different menu in version 5, so I'll be using the keyboard shortcut which is the same in either version. (Continued below...)
1.) The first step is to open both images you'll be working with. My two images are shown below. The red fish on the left is the knocked out image exported to Photoshop format from Corel Knockout.
 |
 |
|
2.) If you make the knocked out image active, then look at the channels palette, you'll see there is a fourth channel named Alpha 1. (If you can't find your channel palette, go to Window > Show Channels.) In the screen shot to the right, the alpha channel is outlined in red. An alpha channel is a grayscale representation of a selection that can be saved with an image. To use the selection, we'll need to load it first. |
 |
3.) To load the selection, go to Select > Load selection and choose Alpha 1 from the channel drop down menu.
|
4.) A selection marquee will surround your object.
5.) Select the
|
 |
|
Here's my result after dragging the selected object into the new image. Looking at the layers palette, you can see that the object was placed onto a new layer, above the background layer.
|
 |
|
6.) To transform the layer, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-T (Command-T for Mac users).
The object in your active layer will have a bounding box around it with square "handles" on the sides and corners. When you are in transformation mode, there are several ways you can manipulate the image... |
 |
move tool. Click on the selected object and drag and drop it onto the
other image. When the move tool is still active you can move the object
around above the background.
| When the cursor is placed inside the bounding box, it becomes a solid black pointer. When you see this cursor, you can use it to move the object around within the layer. |  |
| When the cursor is held directly above a handle, it becomes a two-way pointing arrow. This allows you to stretch and scale the object. If you hold the shift key while dragging a handle, the object can be scaled without distorting the proportions. |  |
| When the cursor is held just outside one of the handles it will change to a two-way curved arrow which allows you to rotate the image. |  |
|
7.) After scaling rotating and moving the object into place, double click inside the bounding box to apply the changes. It's best to make all your transformations before applying them since repeated transformations can degrade the quality. |
You
can also get a pop-up menu with more options by right clicking inside
the bounding box. (Mac users Control-click)And here is the completed image after applying the transformations:
 |
 |
Questions? Comments? Post to the Forum!
