Background Editing: From Beach to Paradise - Part 1
By T W I
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20th Mar 2011 •
4,067 views
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10 comments
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I have always been a fan of manipulations that have a surreal, dreamy feeling to them. Who isn't? Wonderfully enough, it's possible to give the impression of a fantasy world without adding wings to the horse or having a dragon circling in the distance. All that we have to do to impress this feeling upon our viewers is to make the background more beautiful than could ever be captured in a photo.
Software: Photoshop | Skill level: Intermediate | Series number 2 | Part 1
The first step in this process is to find a perfect sky for your chosen background. Big, puffy clouds, preferably with the sun peeking out behind them are ideal for a fantasy feel, but choose whatever suits your purpose.
Now that we are equipped with a sky, we will need to remove the original one. First, make the background a layer (It should be automatically titled "background"), by right clicking on it in the layer box and choosing “layer from background” from the box that pops up.
Select the whole sky with the magnetic lasso tool, feathered to 3 pixels. If the horizon is fairly flat, you can also use the polygonal lasso (Also feathered to 3 pixels) to speed the process up. If you didn’t get the whole sky in your selection, don’t worry. You can clean up those pieces with the eraser. Now hit ‘ctrl’ + ‘x’ to remove the image within the selection.
Select the new sky and paste it in, dragging it behind the background layer. Resize using the move tool if needed.
To blend the landscape in with the new sky, rub a fuzzy blur tool on 30% strength over the horizon where the two images meet. Make sure that the place where they are blurred together isn’t obviously blurry, but blend them until they look natural together.
Now that the sky is taken care of, we can move onto the color scheme.
I wanted to make it look like sunrise so I added a nice pinkish hue. There are two ways to do this, depending on your version of Photoshop. I have Photoshop Elements 7 which has a “Quick menu”. If your version has this, simply pull the little slider that says “Temperature” to the right, towards the red side to taste. Then pull the slider that says "Tint" to the right, towards the purple side, but only a bit. Repeat the process with the sky layer.
However, if your version does not include this handy shortcut, there is another way to achieve the same effect, to some degree at least.
Duplicate both the sky and background layers and choose the top layer of either. Go to your Hue/saturation box, making sure that the drop-down edit box is on master. Now pull the slider that says “Hue” around until the background or sky (Depending on which layer you’re on) turns a pinkish color. Depending on the general color of your background, the place where your slider should end up varies, so just play with until you get the color you like. And if you still can’t find the right color, check the “Colorize” box in the lower right corner, which should give you a different variety of colors to pick from.
In most cases the pinkish color should be unrealistically overwhelming, so we will need to tone it down a bit. To do this, just put the blending mode on overlay, soft light, color, or any mode that appeals to you. Now pull down the opacity if needed.
Part 2 is coming soon! |
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13 days ago
• 2,586 views
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howaboutno
I don't have photoshop. :(
I don't have photoshop. :(
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12 days ago
• 2,578 views
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12 days ago
• 2,575 views
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12 days ago
• 2,550 views
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Spaztastic
This is a great article :) Im in love with your series :D
This is a great article :) Im in love with your series :D
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12 days ago
• 2,568 views
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T E M P E S T
Great article from the master of graphics articles!
Great article from the master of graphics articles!
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12 days ago
• 2,600 views
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11 days ago
• 2,549 views
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Isadorable
Super helpful article!
Super helpful article!
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11 days ago
• 2,565 views
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9 days ago
• 2,563 views
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Mystic56
Which do you think is better? Photoshop or GIMP??
Which do you think is better? Photoshop or GIMP??
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Nov 18, 2011
• 2,580 views
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