Another Photoshop Thing

As you can see, this is not one of my usual posts.

This started off as a normal photo. It was going to be me sitting in a pool of light with the umbrella, but then I had another idea and went for it.

This is a compilation of four photos and some filters. Firstly, there's the photo of myself with the umbrella. Pretty straight forward, strobe aimed down at me and that's it. Then there's the ground I'm on, the mountains, and the night sky. They are all separate photos stitched together.

To combine the mountains and the ground, I made a layer mask and made a gradient from white to black from the mountains to about the middle of the ground. if you look closely you can tell where the foreground pictures melds into the background picture with the mountain. To add the sky in, I selected the sky that came from the mountains, deleted it, and then added in one of my own pictures. Nothing fancy at all.

Now to add me to it. The first hurtle was the scale. I still think I'm a little small for where I am, but I'm in a time crunch so oh well. Once I put myself in place I had to paint in a shadow behind me. I did this by burning the ground layer with darkened it like a shadow would. I also burned and dodge myself in order to make a harder light effect to go with the land scape.

Speaking of lighting, I added a curves layer that raised the contrast a lot, and also added a cooling filter to make it look like night. (ish) the green/yellow don't work right. But again, it's late.

So next was the rain. Step 1. create noise. step 2. apply motion blur. step 3. adjust curves to add A LOT more contrast and make it look more like rain. step 4. fix the perspective so it's not coming straight down.

The final touch I did was to duplicate everything, merge it all, then change that layer to hard light blending mode. I make a circular gradient layer mask to make a vignette effect.

This was a really quick and dirty composite, mainly for me to relearn a lot of photo shop stuff I knew from last year. It's been a while since I've composited things. Expect some more post like this in the future as I get back into it more. That, or some heavily remastered photos.

Either way, I'll see you tomorrow with something brand new.