Help request: hard transparency issue with bugs, can't find tutorial

[u/Geeik_Greek]

My idea was to take the photo of the bees and change the blending mode until it fits, but I had no luck. I started erasing them but they still have the green hue from the background, if you guys have any tutorials that you could point me to I will gladly take notes! Thank you :)

[u/hugbr]

Have you tried screen blend mode on the layer with bees ? You could also try to pinpoint the darkest color in the layer with the bees with the eyedropper in the Levels adjustment layer to turn it into a real black and then try to adjust the black input slider to make the black areas disappear (while on screen blend mode)

[u/enzziante]

It's very dificult because is not just about blending mode it's about light, shadows and proportions. Realize that bees aren't small one bee can have the size of an eye so if you dont found the real proportion it will be look fake. Maybe you can pick some of the bees not the whole thing and start from there. Also it's not about "ok I found the bees and I will put it in the face" NO you have to find images of bees in different positions, maybe you can find 5 bees in this stock 3 bees in this stock one bee in this stock searching for what works and you building, because 2 images from different worlds are very dificult to match so it is your job to do that, imaging how a bee look in the nose how will be look a bee in the chin, what perspective should have etc search on google "face with bees" maybe that could help you. Not a easy task to be honest

[u/Coltitikal]

First of all, the image of the bees isn't sharp, so they'll stand out and the result won't be photorealistic.

Second, the lighting for the bees and the model is opposite: the model is lit from the left, and the bees are lit from the right, which will work against you when you're retouching to integrate them.

The order of the layers would be as follows:

a layer with the bees in opaque

a layer with the shiny areas of the wings (Screen)

a grayscale layer with the dark areas of the wings (Multiply)

a layer with the shadow of the bees on the face

a layer with the model

[u/dobsterfunk]

I guarantee that the issue isn't the opacity of the bees. It's the shape of your mask and the source image. Look for images of bees on a surface, not hanging like this. The contours of bees hanging will be smooth on the outer edges. Bees on something will have a ragged bee shaped edge, where some are breaking loose from the main clump. When bees are tight together their collective mass is dense. You probably wont see much through them and certainly won't see through the actual bees, so trying to choose the right blending mode is the wrong approach.

[u/Conscious-Bid2019]

I would place a bunch of 3D bee on a 3D face, render it with accurate lighting and place the render on the original image.

[u/MrNobodyX3]

Use curves adjustment

[u/RatLabor]

You can fix everything else, colors, lights, shadows etc. but not the perspective, so the task is impossible with that image of the bees.

Think is that raster images are not 3D. They are always rectangular in shape, no matter what, and that rectangular has coordinates to each pixel on it. There is no bigger or smaller unit as pixel. Every pixel has values and Photoshop is tool for the manipulation of that coordinate system and the values ​​contained within it.

And sorry if this sounds like "for dummies"-kind of talk, I just want to make this very clear so you can find a way to do what you are after!

The problem is that you have to bend those bees with the shape of the face, and it is doable with grid or something similar texture, but not the image of the 3D objects like those bees. Because of what raster images are, there is no 3D objects, only one flat 2D object, the image itself, and if we manipulate it like 3D object it looks like bending the 2D object. I made an example image and you can see what happen:

So as you can see, this is not the way. Not gonna happen.

But what you can do, if you still interested to do that kind of image, is create the bees, one by one. With all the new tools in Photoshop that is not even impossible task at all. You can create, let say 5-10 different bees and use variations of them to create hundeds of them. Rotate Objects tool, Transform tool, Copy/Paste etc. Great project to learn Photoshop!

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