One of the most fun -- and challenging -- tasks in Photoshop is combining multiple photographs into a single image. Called a composite, the resulting image can either look fanciful to deliberately distort reality or authentic to convincingly mimic reality. Whatever the intention, the techniques employed are the same for either genre.

John Lund's work falls somewhere in between. He creates composites that are metaphors for experiences yet he presents them in an ultra-realistic way. He began his career as an advertising photographer and then with the introduction of the Macintosh switched gears into composited stock photography. His work is published by Getty Images and Corbis.

Lund has trained his photographic eye to look for what he calls "parts' -- individual images that can be used over and over again to achieve a particular effect. In the example shown in this excerpt, Lund pulls from his files photos of bricks, explosions, and flames taken at various times during his career. The central image is a crash test dummy photographed for an assignment shoot many years ago.

Here you'll see how Lund conceives an image and how the parts combine to form the whole. You'll also see a detail of an aspect of Lund's Photoshop style (which is a bit idiosyncratic at times) to colorize the flames.

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Excerpted from "Adobe Master Class: Photoshop Compositing with John Lund" © 2004 John Lund and Pamela Pfiffner. Reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Peachpit Press. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.