Over at Ken Stone’s tutorial site, Mark Spencer has an awesome video tutorial on preparing still images in Adobe Photoshop for use in 3D montages and animation. The tutorial is aimed at Apple Motion users, but the concepts shown will work for an Adobe After Effects user as well. Mark quickly and succinctly explains how to use Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso tool to create a rough selection of your subject, and then how to fine tune that selection by painting in Quick Mask mode before lifting your cutout to a new layer. He finishes by demonstrating how to fill in empty area of your image with the Clone Stamp tool, and saving it out as a PSD for use in Motion (or After Effects for that matter).

The tutorial is entitled “Motion 3 - Photoshop Prep for 3D Animation”, unfortunately it’s an embedded video and there is no simple direct link available. You’ll have to look for it on the index page. For more information on how to do 3D photo animation in Motion, Mark recommends Ripple Training’s “Motion 3 Fast Forward” instructional DVD.