Photoshop Tutorial: How I made

Today I am going to write about my picture “Passage” and how I created it using some of the different techniques I’ve discussed in earlier blog posts.





My background consists of three different images. The ground, the sky and the mountains. I start by placing the ground where I want it. I usually let the ground cover one third of the image for a natural looking perspective. To make the horizon softer I select the empty space above the ground, and apply a feather to the selection. I then press backspace until the edge looks soft enough. I have described the feather tool in this blog post.





Since the final picture will have a centered composition (you can read more about composition here) I thought it would nice with a symmetrical sky. I start out with the sky in a new layer, covering exactly half of the image. I duplicate this layer and then flip it horizontally to make a nice mirrored sky.





The final part of the background is the mountains. I place this picture in a new layer between the ground and the sky. To make my sky show behind the mountains I add a layer mask to the mountain-layer and with a big soft black brush with a low opacity I paint on the layer mask, revealing the layers underneath.





Next it is time to place my subway entrance. I use the exact same technique as I described in this blog post . I start out with the picture of the entrance and proceed by doing a cut-out (with layer masks) with the lasso tool or the pen tool (with a bit of feather), removing parts of the image by selecting them and pressing the backspace key. I save almost all of the pavement since I am going to use it to blend it together with the new background.





Next I copy the subway exit layer into the file containing the background by dragging it from the layer palette and dropping it onto the other document. As you can see, the new ground and the old one is well matched in tone, so it is just a matter of removing any sharp edges, blending them. I do this by selecting the layer mask and then with a soft, black brush set at about 20-30 % opacity painting over the edges until it looks good.





The next step is to add some depth to the scene, as I describe in this blog post. I add “fog” by painting with a soft white brush at a low opacity In a new layer between the subway exit and the background. I have also cloned out some text from the signs.





I think the hat adds that little extra to the scene. I photographed the hat in my little home-studio using the lighting technique I describe here. I tried to photograph it in a position similar to the one it has in the final montage, it is always easier to make as much work as possible when shooting the source files.





This is how the final image looks after some finishing touches. As you can see you can do quite a lot in Photoshop with fairly basic techniques. I left out how I worked with shadows and the reflections in the light posts, but I am going to describe this in future tutorials.

Stay tuned and happy Photoshoping!