Here is a technique for digitally adding a glass object in front of a scene and making it look like it was part of the original scene. The trick is to carefully photograph the glass, paying attention to the shine and shadows. Then, make the glass transparent and distort the scene that you see through the glass. The result is convincing, if not optically correct.
1.Photograph the glass object.
Photograph the glass in front a medium gray background—not white.Use lighting that gives the glass a three-dimensional,
shiny appearance. You want the surface of the glass to be brighter than the flat areas that you’ll eventually see the background through.
2.Create a mask.
Use any tool you like to make a selection of the object. I worked with the brush in the Quick Mask to refine the selection. Save your selection to a new channel by choosing Select > Save Selection.
3.Create a distortion texture.
Duplicate the document by going to Image > Duplicate and convert it to the grayscale mode (Image > Mode > Grayscale). Load the selection of the glass object (Select > Load Selection), invert it by choosing to Select > Inverse and fill with 50 percent gray. Deselect the glass (Ctrl+D on Win, Cmd+D on Mac), and then apply the Gaussian Blur filter (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) with a small radius to make the image softer. Save it as a .psd file—you’ll use the file later as a glass distortion texture.
4.Prepare your background image.
Open an image you’d like to use for the background. To enhance the illusion of depth, blur the background image a little. Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and then set the Radius slider for the amount of blur you want. To allow a correct perspective for the object, I added a wooden plane under it.
5.Assemble the composition.
Keep your background image open. Then, in your original glass image, load the mask as a selection (Select > Load Selection). Choose Edit > Copy, then in your background image, choose Edit > Paste to paste the glass in front of the background scene.
6.Set the glass layer blending mode to Hard Light.
In the Layers palette, select the layer with the glass on it and choose Hard Light from the blending mode menu. Usually, you’ll get a good result just by setting the glass layer to Hard Light, but you can refine the result using the Blending options. In the Layers palette, double-click the thumbnail in the glass layer to open the Layer Style dialog box. At the bottom of the Layer Style dialog box, you can move the value sliders to make refinements. Press the Alt key (Windows) or Option key (Mac) to split the sliders set the range of values that are blended.
7.Give the glass a green tint.
If you want to tint the glass, duplicate its layer by choosing Layer > Duplicate Layer. In the Layers palette, select the Lock transparent pixels icon, then fill the object with the color you like. Set the layer blending mode to Overlay and reduce the opacity until it looks realistic.
8.Distort the glass.
In the Layers palette, select the background layer, and choose Filter > Distort > Glass. Under Texture select Load Texture, and open the texture you prepared in step 3. Do not start with a selection! Scaling must be 100 percent; try distortion and smoothness until you like the result. Also see if Invert might do better. Additionally you can load the object as a selection on the background layer and experiment with the Displace-filter.
9.Remove unwanted distortion.
The Glass filter often produces artifacts at the borders. Eliminate them by loading the object as a selection on the background layer, invert it, mark a position in the history palette before the use of the filter and fill the selection with the history state.
10.Finished glass.
This is the resulting image. Though the distorted background does not really look like it would through this glass, most observers will not recognize this. It’s good enough to produce a convincing composition.
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