In this tutorial i’ll explain how to accomplish a simple “out of bounds” or as some may call it an extrude. The objective is to give a 3D effect to the composition, using nothing more than simple masking.

You can start by downloading the 2 images below:

* Click on the images to open them, and then right-click to save them to your hard-drive. Both images were reduced for this tutorial, you can find these images if you do a search on google images ( http://images.google.com ) in a much better resolution.

Create a new file in Photoshop with these properties:

From the FILE menu, open both images in photoshop. Select the first image (the laptop), go to the SELECT menu and choose ALL (or use the hot-key CTRL+A). Press CTRL+C to copy the contents. Now select the file you’ve just created and paste the image, with CTRL+V. Do the same with the second image. By now, your layers palette should look like this:

I’ve renamed the layers just to make it cleaner. To rename a layer double-click on its name and enter your desired name.

Turn off the visibility of the “spiderman layer” (click on the little eye to the left of the layer) and then select the laptop layer:

With the pen tool draw a shape around the laptop’s screen, in vector mask mode:

Pen tool…

…in vector mask mode.

Then, right-click this layer (the shape with the vector mask) and choose “rasterize layer”. The result should be:

Dont bother about the color, any color will do as this area will be ahowing the spiderman image.

Now for the mask: CTRL+CLICK the shape layer to select it (you need to click exactily on the thumbnail). You will notice the dashed selection around the green shape. Now click on the spiderman layer to select it and click on the “Add layer mask” icon on the layers palette:

The area of the spiderman’s layer is now masked and you’ll only see whats painted in white in the mask:

Looking closer at the layers palette:

This is a very simple effect that can be used in a lot of compositions. Now lets put that spiderman layer in scale and position so we can put spiderman’s hand outside tha laptop’s screen.

You can also delete the shape layer now, you wont need it anymore.

As you can see from the above picture, the spiderman’s layer is way to big, so we need to make it a little smaller and drag it a little to the left.

Select the spideman layer (the thumbnail with the spiderman image, not the mask). Now you need to unlock the mask. Press the little lock between the image thumbnail and the mask to unlock the layer mask:

Now press CTRL+T (Free transform) or if you want to go by the book, go to the EDIT menu, choose TRANSFORM and then SCALE. Grab the corner handles, and with the SHIFT key pressed (don’t forget this or you will distort the image) resize the spiderman a little bit, and move it a little to the left, like this:

Working with layer masks is a beauty in photoshop. You can show and hide portions of a layer without messing with the layer’s content. When in mask mode you can use a simple brush, painting in black or white (or gray if you want transparency) to hide or show portions of the layer. If you take a closer look at the spiderman layer and the layer mask, you’ll notice that the portions of the mask painted in black are hidden, and the portions painted in white are shown. Another thing you’ll notice is that when you click on the layers mask, your color picker automatically changes to black and white - in the mask you can only paint in black and white, or gray. You can try to select any color but you’ll only get black, white and grays.

So, make a zoom at the spiderman’s fist, click on the spiderman’s layer mask, select white color as your foreground color, and choose a small brush, about 10 pixels, with 75% hardness:

With the brush, paint along the spiderman finger and hand. Dont bother about detail for now, you only want to see the hand, you’ll take care of the extra background that will also be revealed later.

This is what you should get:

So, if when you paint with white in the mask you are revealing the layer’s content, what will happen when you paint in black? Exactly, you will hide it! The extra area that we revealed when painting with white we’re now going to hide it painting in black. And we can do this as many times as we want without messeing with the image. So go on and correct it. You may want to choose a smaller brush tip to be more precise. Here’s my result:

To add a drop shadow to that and lets start by selecting the spiderman layer, but now lets select the image thumbnail, not the mask.

Now select your lasso tool and create a selection like this:

With this selection loaded create a new layer. Select the new layer, select Black for your foreground color and fill up the selection with the Paint Bucket tool (click inside the selected area):

Now, as this layer is on top of all others you will see the black area. You need to bring this layer down, so click on it to grab it and drag it just below the spiderman layer:

Now you shouldnt be able to see this layer. So, lets move it down a little bit and give it some perspective.

Use the Move tool to push it down a bit.

Go to the EDIT menu, TRANSFORM and then DISTORT to give that layer some perspective:

Now, lets apply a simple filter to blur the shadow. Go to the FILTER menu, choose BLUR and the GAUSSIAN BLUR. I used 4 pixels for radius and it looks nice:

Now just lower the layer’s opacity, lets say to about 65%:

There’s only one small thing to correct. The shadow of the thumb is going outside the laptop… so just delete it with the eraser tool.

To finish it, i removed the white background on the laptop layer (with the magic wand tool) and filled the background layer in black.

Then i added an outer glow effect to the laptop layer, and here’s the final result:

Just a remark to finnish: the images are in low resolution and the shadow gets a little fuzzy with the gaussian blur because you really dont have many pixels to blur, but if you use a nice medium or high resolution image you’ll get a great and very sharp effect.

Hope you enjoyed this one, be sure to come back for more! Have fun