Selection Brush Tutorial, Part 2 by Dave C.

[gheartland]

I really appreciate and learn from Dave’s Tutorials. I finally got around to trying a real life pic using this method of making the windows of a car that I selected from one pic and moved to a different pic/ background see-through. After selecting the portion of a window that I want to be able to see through I used the Edit menu, chose Fill selection, white, changed the blending mode to Clear, and the opacity to 20%.

The window that I selected originally had a bright and vivid reflection in it that I wanted to get rid of. When I filled the selection using 20% opacity I could still see the original reflection. In order to get rid of the original reflection I had to increase the opacity to almost 100% which left me with the new background showing through the window, but it looked too clear and therefore artificial. I used a Gaussian blur, but still didn’t get the results I was anticipating. Any thoughts about why the 20% opacity or less suggested by Dave isn’t working? I tried this a second time with different pics and still had to use a higher opacity. Thanks for any tips about what I might be missing in this really useful tutorial.

[Wendy]

You are not missing anything ... Usually you see things through the glass plus a little reflection on the glass and Dave's method is brilliant for that .... strong reflections on the the glass are another matter and using that method will fade them somewhat but not remove them.

You may have to try another method, work on a duplicate of your image :

Select the window (except for where the inside of the car shows through) then do Edit>Cut.
Use the burn tool to darken the inside of the car (where it is seen through the glass)
Create a new layer below the cut out car and using the lasso do a selection the same size as the cut out window.
Using a soft brush set to low opacity paint white streaks diagonally across the glass.
If the effect is too strong then lower the layer opacity.

Wendy