ART148_tut_4.pdf

Creative skills Hyper-real images

Photoshop

Combine

photos to

create

surrealist

landscapes

The hyper-real look is

back in style. Mike

Harrison adds a touch of

the surreal in his

compositions

Photo-manipulation has taken many forms over the years. The

latest trend involves using several stock images to create a

composition. There are a number of techniques that are useful for

this, but the most important thing to remember is that you need to

pay a great deal of attention to detail if you want to convince the

viewer that they’re looking at a realistic landscape, no matter how

surreal your work becomes.

You can only do this by studying the real world around

you to get a feel for the factors that will affect the look of your piece,

such as lighting, shadows and colours. This project demonstrates

how I combine stock images to construct a landscape, outlining

some simple but extremely useful techniques that will help you in

your own compositions.

Mike Harrison

A designer and

illustrator from

Plymouth in the UK,

Mike Harrison

freelances for a

number of clients.

See www.destill.net

to ﬁ nd out more.

Time needed

3-4 hours

Skills

Blending

multiple images

Layer masks

Realistic

shadows and

lighting

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Technique

01 Before you start it’s a good idea to gather a bunch of

stock images together. As well as saving time, it keeps the

creativity ﬂ owing because you don’t have to keep stopping to

search for imagery while you’re actually making the piece.

02 I started my composition by

creating a document about 18x9 inches

at 300DPI, then dragged in a landscape

JPEG. I scaled it up to ﬁ t the canvas,

applied a Sharpen ﬁ lter and upped the

contrast slightly to make it pop.

03 I wanted to incorporate a

bottle, but the photo I found had a

background. I cut the bottle out using

the Pen tool and dropped it into the

main document. I had to scale it up

slightly and do some more sharpening.

04 Next I blended my bottle with my background. I created a layer mask on the

bottle and brushed some of the bottom so that it blended into the grass. I then brought

in a PSD of some more grass, resizing and positioning it where I just brushed.

05 It’s important when creating a photorealistic composition that you work out

where the light source is so you can accurately apply shadows and lighting. I decided

that in my background image the light was coming from the right. I added a shadow to

the base of the bottle by creating a circle using the Ellipse tool, Gaussian Blurring it by

35, and setting its opacity to 80%.

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Creative skills Hyper-real images

06 Next I did more work on the lighting of the bottle.

First I Ctrl-clicked on the bottle layer to create a selection

around it. Then I created a layer with the layer mode set to

Overlay, grabbed a brush of about size 200 and gently brushed

the right edge. This gave the bottle an instant boost of light.

07 While working on the light, I also took the Gradient

tool, set the gradient from white to transparent and, from the

top right, created an extra boost of Sun to reinforce the lighting

set-up. Then I duplicated that layer and set the new layer to

Overlay to boost the colours.

09 Next I dropped in a picture of a lake, just below the

bottle, and cut it out again using the Pen tool. Then I brought

my image of grass in again, scaling it and placing it around the

edges of the lake to blend it in. I also added some shine to the

water using a brush on a new layer set to Overlay.

08 Next I wanted to add a

waterfall coming out of the bottle and

desaturate the bottle top. I found JPEGs

of a couple of waterfalls, brought them

in and used Select>ColorRange to

choose only the white of the spray.

Then I added layer masks to both and

blended them coming out of the bottle.

Color Range

10 I didn’t want the Coca-Cola branding on the bottle,

so I chose the Clone Stamp tool, selected the red areas and

painted over the logo. I also wanted to add some foliage and

moss, so I dropped in images of both, then used a layer mask

for the moss, and positioned/rotated some of the foliage

around the bottle.

11 Now I added my JPEG of a

tree, applying a layer mask again and

removing the background using brushes

of various sizes. I copied the shadows

from the bottle, scaling them down and

applying them to the tree’s base. For

lighting, I used the Dodge tool lightly on

the right and the Burn tool on the left.

Color Range is a great way of

grabbing a single object from a scene or

photograph based on a selection of

colours. I’ve used it to select the white

spray of water, but it’s equally effective on

things like clouds or ﬁ re. Play with the

fuzziness control to get different effects.

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Technique

12 My landscape was looking

empty so I added some animals: ﬁ sh,

ducks, birds, rabbits and cows. Because

it’s a surreal image I could use them at

any size I wanted. For shadows and

lighting I used the same technique as

for the tree.

13 It still felt a bit empty, so I

added more objects. One was a

mushroom – I used the Magic Wand to

get rid of its photo’s background image.

I used the shadows and lighting trick

again, and added my grass and moss to

help the elements blend.

14 I also had a photo of a white

shoebox, so added it to my piece. I used

Levels to give it better deﬁ nition and, on

a new layer, drew some shadow around

it. I duplicated the box and scaled it

down to make a second, smaller one.

I then added some grass and moss.

15 I thought it would be a nice touch to have a rainbow running from the

distance into the lake. I drew the shape in the screenshot using the Pen tool, added

a Gaussian Blur of 75 and set the blending mode to Screen. Finally, I toned down the

opacity until I was happy with the look.

16 The end was in sight! Now I added some more detail

in the way of trees, plants and ﬂ owers, dropped in from other

images, scaled down and scattered accordingly. I even put

some ﬂ owers coming out of my stack of shoeboxes.

17 I added some wrappers and crisp packets to the tree.

It was important to duplicate them to different sizes so the

arrangement didn’t look too uniform and planned out.

18 To add some more depth and

body to the landscape, I put some

mountains and hills far in the

background, masking their bottom

sections so they sat behind the trees.

I also applied a colour overlay with the

colour behind them, and an opacity of

around 50%.

19 I ﬁ nished off my composition

by adding more details, including birds

and foliage. Finally, at the very top of the

layer stack I created a Brightness/

Contrast adjustment layer with both

sliders set to 5 for extra impact.

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