If you haven’t heard of the “Umbrella Man,” you really need to check this video out. But basically, he was this guy that happened to be present at the JFK assassination, and even though it was a bright and sunny day, he had an umbrella out. Conspiracy theorists, go! Well, turns out he was at Ford Theater when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, too. Man, that guy turns up everywhere!

Click for a bigger version.

So here’s what I did: I got this sketch of the Umbrella Man and this sketch from Harper’s Weekly in 1865 of Booth running across the stage after the murder. I took the Umbrella Man sketch, cut it out of the white background, and set its layer properties to “multiply” (which means it’ll automatically remove all bright colors and can only darken the image — really good if you want to quickly get rid of a lot of white). Since it’s a black sketch though, it still didn’t really fit in, so I gave it a color overlay and sampled the colors of what all the other people are, and fiddled with that until he blended in. Then I gave him a layer mask so I could get rid of his legs and make him fit into the scene without having to actually delete parts of him (in case I wanted to move him).

Trust me, it sounds a lot more complicated than it really was.