This is Seth (on the left), I met him a couple of years ago at Kennesaw Mt. National Battlefield, NW of Atlanta. Still dutifully manning his artillery postion after 140 years, he insisted on reading me a letter from home. He doesn’t know he’s a ghost and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Atlanta would fall a few short months later.
Seth reading me his letter from home
So, whats this tongue in cheek silliness all about? Be wary before you fall for photo “proof” of something fantastic and unbelievable. Just about anything can be faked these days and quite easily at that. But then you probably already knew that. It is fun to mess around with though.
My Simple Photoshop Ghost Recipe
1) In Photoshop I opened the Civil War photo file, selected the soldier and dragged him into the photo file with me by the cannon. Doing this creates a new layer.
2) After sizing and positioning the soldier I added a layer mask and masked out parts of him by painting on the mask to make him fit behind the cannon barrel.
3) I made a copy of the soldier layer and added a horizontal motion blur value of about 60 or so to the copy. I set the opacity of this blurred layer to about 70% and put it beneath the original in the layer order, offsetting the blurred layer by just a hair so that it wasn’t perfectly lined up with the original on top.
4) The original soldier layer I set to an opacity of about 60% and then I painted on the layer mask with a soft airbrush to fade out areas I wished to be even more transparent or vanish altogether.
5) To add a sepia tone to all the Photoshop layers simply add a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer at the top, click the colorize check box and adjust the hue and saturation until you get the color you want.
