Bottles #2 HOWTO

So here's how I made my screen transparent for my last submission to the Transparent Screens group. I'll refer to the photos as being numbered clockwise:

 

1 2

4 3

 

First, I took photo 2 (ignore the windows and the grid for now). Actually, I took about four or five shots and chose the best one.

 

Second, I removed some of the bottles, introduced the monitor, and took photo 1 (again, ignore the grid for now, and again, I actually took multiple and chose the best).

 

Then, I opened these two photos in my photo editing tool and put each one in a layer, photo 1 on top of photo 2. I did a slight bit of rotating and moving to get the backgrounds to line up. If I had a tripod, of course, they would have lined up automatically.

 

Now look at the windows and the grid in photo 1. GIMP has this great tool called "perspective transformation" that's perfect for this job; I lined up the rectangle onto the screen surface.

 

Next I switched to the other layer; see photo 2. The grid is still there, and now covers the area of the image I need to pull out. I set the transformation tool to "corrective," which causes this area to get stretched flat into a rectangular image.

 

I took this flattened image and made it the background of the monitor in photo 1. Then I had to tweak the cropping to get it right, and I had to do some colour correction. That was probably the most painful part of the whole process. The final desktop image is shown in photo 3.

 

Photo 4 shows the final setup. I moved the bottles on the left out of the way, and took the final shot from the original angle. Voila!

 

Done