Placing an image into an existing document

Now that we've applied a mask to hide the girl's surroundings, we want to place girl on rock.psd into the beach image in a way that makes the girl appear as if she is walking on the beach. To accomplish this, we'll use Photoshop's Place command to import the image of the girl into beach.psd. 

We have two options for placing images — Place Embedded and Place Linked. Each of these options functions differently:

• Place Embedded allows us to place an entire image into another Photoshop document. It is treated as a Smart Object, which means that the object is embedded right in the file itself. This creates a bigger file that doesn't rely on having the secondary image separately available.
• Place Linked lets us place a link to an existing file into our Photoshop document. It makes it easier for us to update an image that might be used across a number of documents. Place Linked behaves similarly to how the Place command works in InDesign. To work properly, the secondary linked image must be available on any computer the Photoshop document is opened on – if the secondary image file is not present, the primary image file will not load properly.

For today, we'll be using Place Embedded, as we need the image to be treated as a Smart Object in order to apply a filter to it later on. Let's go ahead and place girl on rock.psd into beach.psd.

The image should look similar to the following screenshot:

There are a few things we’ll need to fix in order to make the girl look more like she belongs in the scene. First, she looks a little small in comparison to the rest of the scene, and it also looks like she’s floating in space. Additionally, the lighting on the girl seems to be coming from the left, while the lighting in the beach scene seems to be coming from the right. We can correct both of these issues.

Let’s start by resizing the girl so she fits into the scene better, then we’ll move her so she looks like she’s standing at the shoreline.

Scaling and moving the girl into position

We’ll use the Scale command to reduce the size of the girl and make her appear further away from the viewer. Once we have the girl scaled to the appropriate size, we can use the Move tool to move her to where she needs to be.

The image should look similar to the following screenshot at this point:

Next, let's address the lighting issue. We can fix this by flipping the girl horizontally, so the light appears to be coming from the same direction for both the girl and the rest of the beach scene.

With the lighting issue fixed, the image should look similar to the following screenshot:

The girl now looks a little more consistent with the rest of the scene, and we can focus on the next task: adding a reflection.