Composting in Photoshop CS4

[lexington1709]

I usually do everything in lightwave but since some wonderful backgrounds came out, I'd like to use them instead. However, I've not gotten down how I can composite what I rendered in LW onto the background in Photoshop. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Much obliged.

[Jedi2016]

The easiest way to do it is to export your rendered object as a 32-bit image with embedded alpha (RGBA, something like TIFF32). That way, the transparency of the background is part of the render and you just drop it in like any other layer.

Of course, there's a lot of subtle tricks to compositing, but there's tons of tutorials on the 'net about it. I keep saying I'll write a compositing tutorial some day (for After Effects, but most of the same principles apply to Photoshop), but I never seem to get around to it.