Welcome! Today we’re going to be looking at some methods and techniques to composite a si-fi crash site scene. I’ll be talking though selecting stock photos, lighting methods, and extraction methods for things like smoke. This kind of imagry is great for backgrounds but mostly these techniques will help you expand your own toolbelt to create more advanced and interesting work!

What you’ll be creating

This peice was created as an exercise in landscape imaging. Its something I’ve always wanted to try my hand at and hopefully can share some experiance about. I used Photoshop CS6 but for the most part any recent version should work with these methods. FIrst I’ll give a little info on how I like to extract things and a little bit about my workflow. Then I’ll talk about how I handle more complex cutouts like the smoke and fire. Then finally I’ll go a bit into my mastering workflow. There are a lot of different ways to go about giving your work that extra “pop” but hopefully mine will give you some ground to stand on. I also try and use stock photos that are free so that everyone can follow along properly. However I do use paid stock in this, so I will suggest some places where you can find similar pic’s to use.

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Tutorial Resources

Step 1

Lets start out by making a new document, File > New. When it comes to sizing I like to use pretty standard stuff just for ease of printing later. Also just a tip if you’re just starting out, always try and work in 300 Pixels/Inch or above, its easy to scale down later if you need too but will usually look bad trying to scale up at lower resolutions.

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Go ahead and bring in the first stock we’ll be using here, the hikers. It’s a fairly large image yet still low resolution as if it was scanned from a old photo at one point. But with some techniques we can still work with it. I like it for its great sense of scale and the leading line the hikers provide for us right off the bat.

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So lets get into cutting out that mountain and sky in the background. For more control we want to put in our own so things all blend nicely. First with the layer selected we want to go too Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All. This will give us a mask to work with on the layer (the small white box next to the thumbnail in the layers palette) By selecting that rather than the thumb you can draw the opacity using Black and White brushes. However for this tutorial I’m going to assume you’re pretty comfortable with how masks work and we will be using them for every image from here on out.

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As far as defining our lines to be masked I prefer the pen tool, in a picture like this with lots of white and similar shades the quick select tool isn’t going to be as effective or accurate at getting exactly what we want. Go ahead and use the pen tool to plot a line around the mountain and the sky in the background like you see below. When you’re happy you can right click and click on “Make Selection”, It will ask you if you want to have a feather, in this case I set mine at 0.

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With the mask selected in your layers panel and your selection in the main window you can paint (in black) in the mask to get rid of that mountain and sky. Now again with masks you can draw things back in any time you want unlike destructive editing. You’ll end up with a similar result as below.

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Lets bring in the Rock Bridge photo and do the same to get it extracted from its photo. But here we have another problem, its a desert rock, which doesn’t look very good or realistic in our snow scene. With the rock layer selected go to Image > Adjustments > Black and White to get rid of that bright orange color. Next is fixing the tone.

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For the tone I like to use the levels adjustment (Image > Adjustments > Levels) and with a good bit of adjusting we can get a good looking result that at least looks somewhat realistic. Something important to note about my work flow is that I us Clipping masks quite often. They are fairly simple, all you have to do is right click on any layer and click Create Clipping Mask. It will then only apply to the layer at the bottom of the chain. So this allows you to have adjustment layers and textures and the like all only effect one layer. In this case its the rock bridge we want to adjust and not the snow or the layers we’ll be bringing in behind it (the rock bridge layer is behind the first snow layer). At this point go ahead and bring in the mountain and mask it out. Play with a few adjustment layers clipped to the mountain on your own to get comfortable with them before moving on.

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Lets catch up a little here about our layers. Working with so many can get confusing quickly so now would even be a good time to group layers together and color code them (as I’ll do later in the tutorial) to do that just Shift select the layers you want to group and press Control + G or Command + G on mac, also available in the right click drop down. As you can see I also have a layer called Clone Stamp on top, this is the layer I used to brush out the small guy in front of the rock bridge. A tool thats pretty simple to use and a quick Google search will let you know everything you need! Lets give our landscape a background sky and some atmosphere, we can accomplish both with one photo in fact! Grab the Clouds stock photo and bring it in both on bottom and on top (as you can see in my layers below. The bottom one we’ll just throw a Black and White and Levels adjustment layers on there (both set to auto). As for using it as atmosphere you’ll have to rastersize the layer (Right click > Rastersize) and then go and do Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and Filter > Blur > Motion Blur with the settings below. Setting the layers blending mode to screen and lowering the opacity will give us a really organic and natural haze. It really should be barely noticeable but it will ad a sense of realism to the piece as a whole.

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I also want to add a sense of distance and scale to the mountain in the background but a little more intensely than the little haze we just did. So I actually took a brush with about a 20% opacity and started drawing out the mask so we can see though to the background a little bit. If you keep doing this you can get results like below where it will actually look like the clouds are coming in front of the mountain, adding a real sense of scale to the image. For the sake of the composition I also flipped the mountain horizontally and adjusted it levels so it matched the lighting in that part of the clouds as you can see below. Use this as reference before moving ahead to make any adjustments you’d like.

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For this next portion my method actually differs a good bit from what others might do. Given how big this next cutout is and how much blending will be done I actually made a new document and did all the editing in that before grouping all the layers together and bringing them into my composition to be blended in. But you’re free to to do it however you’d like! I like doing it this way just for a less cluttered environment Lets talk a little bit about extracting smoke. Because the edges are rarely “hard” edges and have varying transparency throughout, the pen tool isn’t going to be your only tool in extraction. I use it to get a general line I like and the select the area, BUT then with the wand tool I right click and use Refine Edge. More on that below. Thankfully the top part of this Smoke from deposit photos is pretty well defined (you can find a lot of thick volcanic smoke on sites like deviant art and Free Images as well) so we can use the standard pen tool to select it and mask it out.

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However its when we get to the bottom that things get more interesting. As you can see I used the pen tool to just get a general line around where I wanted and then this is where refine edge comes in handy!

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Go ahead and right click “Make Selection” then use “W” to bring up the magic wand and right click again where you can find Refine Edge.

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With this tool you can adjust a lot of options for how to fix your edging. Edge Detection looks at the pixels around the line and tries to determine which ones belong and which ones don’t based on which side of the line they’re on and color and the such. The rest of the options adjust the line itself. creating a softer or harder blend or a smoother line that doesn’t curve sharply. What I used here though is its ability to paint the edge. If you move your mouse out of them menu box (you can even move that to the side at this point) you’ll see you have a round brush. The size of the brush can be adjusted with the little menu where the normal brush size would be. As you paint with this brush you are actually sampling areas where you want the tool to readjust the edge to better match the picture. So if you stroke the brush along the edge of the clouds it will start to develop a more natural edge (like the one below). This tool is especially useful for things like smoke and hair and trees! Give it a try and when you’re happy with how the edge looks click OK. This will commit the changes to your selection, note that the marching ants line will still look like a solid line but once you start to mask out the selection you can see your real edge show! Give it a try!

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Now you can use the smoke stack you’ve cut out as is or do as I’m about to do and just add a little too it. I like to make a few copies of the originally masked layer and transform them around a little bit to make the smoke a bit “bigger”. Once you’re happy lets get into adding the flames in the explosion. Bring in the Flames Texture on top of your various smoke layers.

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