How to Make a Ship in Bottle in Photoshop

Have you ever wondered how modelers get ships in those tiny bottles? It isn't easy unless you have a graphics application like Photoshop. You may not be able to put a real ship in a real bottle, but you can definitely produce the picture as proof that you did.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Prepare your images. You need an image of a transparent bottle and an image of a ship. Choose carefully, you want the body of the bottle to be big enough to fit the ship (a jug would be perfect.)
2. Drag the ship image into the bottle image. The ship image should become the top layer. Make sure the ship image fits comfortably in the bottle or scale it down to fit. If the ship has to be scaled up, find a better image.
3. Mask the ship. Select the elements you want to keep and click the "Add Layer Mask" button in the Layers palette. If you need to edit the mask, paint with black to mask and white to reveal directly on the layer mask.
4. Duplicate the background (bottle) layer. Move the duplicate layer to the top so that it covers the ship. Mask the bottle in the top layer the same way you masked the ship.
5. Change the top layer's blend mode. You can select a new blend mode from the blend mode pulldown menu in the layers palette. "Soft Light" or "Overlay" usually produce the best effects, but you can experiment with other modes.
6. Tweak the layer opacity. The value is displayed in the field next to the blend modes menu. You will have to experiment to get the best look, but you want to be able see the ship through the bottle without losing the bottle outline.

Tips & Warnings

• Choose images with similar sizes and resolution. You don't want to have to scale either the bottle or the ship up because this will degrade your image.
• Layer masking allows you to always recover pixels in case you made a mistake. You won't have to go back and recopy and reselect the ship image if you discover later that you made a mistake.
• Once you've mastered the basic trick, try putting the bottle in a photo of a table or mantelpiece. You will have to blend the bottle and refract the photo area behind it to make the picture super realistic.
• It's easier to do this trick with stock images, rather than trying to photograph your own. You can find a number of sites that provide high-resolution, high quality free and inexpensive stock photos on the web, including iStockPhoto, StockExchange and StockExpert.

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