Top 5 Photoshop Ancillaries to Make Fast & Easy Photo Composites!

Five powerful ancillary software options to help you create super-realistic composites. Saving you long hours of grunt work.

Photoshop is the most popular software people use to do composites. As a photographer you know, how time-consuming of a process it is to create a composite that doesn’t become a meme material.

Photoshop fail meme image

Although this may be an extreme example.

Everybody starts from here on our design journey. Not knowing how to use masks, layers, or different blend modes flawlessly.

 When working on composites:

• Removing a subject from its background,
• Matching images to a single cohesive color tone, and
• Using the right blur effects and sharpness to give the final image a raw look

are a few menial tasks that beginners find difficult to do when starting out. It requires the utilization of various tools & techniques that beginners may not be familiar with.

For pros, these tasks may be time-consuming as it has to be done on a subjective basis for each project or asset.

But now, with computer vision and machine learning improving there are a plethora of tools that allow you to do these tasks instantly, regardless of your experience or expertise. They save you boatloads of time and hours of grunt work.

Here are five of the best photoshop ancillary tools, you can use to accelerate your photo compositing process. Making these menial tasks super-fast and easy for anybody at any skill level.

 

Top Five Ancillary Tools to Accelerate Your Photo Composite Process.

 

1.      Online - Removal.ai

This is one of the best online cloud-based AI background removal tools out there to get your background removal task done.

This tool also allows you to remove backgrounds from a single image, do batch edits, and they even offer manual background removal if necessary.

You can use it to edit one image for free and then buy a subscription or get a lifetime pass to use it thereafter.

Demo image:

 

2.      Offline - CutOut Pro

This software is exclusively made for extracting subjects from their backgrounds with the ability to do necessary tweaks to your image even after extraction.

The major highlight of CutOut is that it allows you to seamlessly transfer the extracted images into photoshop; enabling a fast and smooth compositing experience.

Demo image:

3.      Offline - Nature Effects

This software allows you to achieve multiple weather effects on your background image without spending hours on finding good overlays and grading.

Demo images:

           

Even though this may not be a necessary tool for you from the initial get-go. This is definitely a tool that can save you a lot of time, especially if you’re working on surrealistic composites.

4.      Offline - Fixel Recolor 1

This is one of the smartest photoshop plugins out there. Because it takes the guesswork out from the color grading of assets in your composite.

Demo image:

 

 

Fixel Recolor analyzes an image and identifies its dominant colors and displays it as swatches. After which you can easily apply the same colors, a different shade of it, or even a complementary color of the same onto another asset.

This allows for a whole new level of precision which works better than an expert’s instinct when it comes to color grading.

Make your assets blend flawlessly, without making them stick out like a sore thumb.

 

5.      Offline - Anamorphic Pro  (For Mac) & AKVIS Refocus AI (For Windows)

Both these software options excel when it comes to adding realistic or stylistic blur effects to your composite. Both options automatically detect subjects from the background and offer various blur effects from normal lens blurs to stylish bokeh effects.

Demo image (Anamorphic Pro):

These software options can add a realistic or stylistic touch to your composites by refocusing your images to make your subjects stand out. Giving a raw feel to your composites without requiring any additional effort.

 

BONUS: Tools for sharpening, and final grading.

These are added as bonuses because you can achieve the same effects in PS. But if you’re in splurge mode, these are definitely some good to have tools when working on composites.

• Color Projects 6 – For color normalization, preset overlays, and final color grading.
• Sharpen Projects 3 – For advanced sharpening options, haze & fog correction, and more.

Create the best composites, right from the get-go irrespective of your level of experience or expertise. These tools are bound to save you tons of time and catapult you over the learning curve. Try these out, and share your comments/feedback as well.