Photomontage Tutorial
In this tutorial we will learn how to create a photomontage by combining several images and blend them together into one final result.
For this particular tutorial we will create a flying Pegasus, using 3 images: a landscape, a horse and a wing. The wing and the horse are already cropped from photos found on stock photos websites. You can either use the ones that I have used, or browse trough stock photos websites to find others that you like
Download the photos in photoshop format
Open the landscape image in photoshop and create a new layer.
Make sure you have a white color for the foreground and black for the background.
Using the lasso tool, make an irregular selection similar to the red shape in the image below.
With the new layer selected, and the selection active, click on “select”, “feather” and type a value of about 35-40 (this value works for an image of about 2500 px width, but feel free to experiment)
Go to “Filters”, “render” and select clouds. Now change the blending mode of the layer to “screen”. You should end up with something similar to the following image
In order to add more variation to the clouds, make 2 copies of the clouds layer, and play with the opacities and sizes until you get a pleasing results. After a few tweaks like this, I have obtained the following result.
Open the horse image and paste it as a new layer in the psd file that you’ve been working on, just bellow the clouds layers.
There’s not much to do on this except maybe for making it a little whiter by adjusting the brightness and contrast.
Open the cropped image of the wing, and paste it over the layer of the horse. Rename the new layer “left wing” and adjust the position and rotation until you are happy with it.
Using the eraser tool with a smooth brush, delete a little part of the wing (where the wing meets the body of the horse), so that it blends well.
As a fine adjustment, you can apply a subtle motion blur to create the illusion of motion
Make a copy of the “left wing” layer, and rename it “right wing”. Drag the layer below the “horse” layer, and rotate and scale it until it looks ok. You should have something like in the image below.
Final touches
Add 3 more layers above the entire stack. Paint the first one red, the second one blue and the top one green. Change the blending mode from “normal” to “color” for each of them and the opacities to 22%.
Using the eraser tool with a large soft brush, delete the lower left corners of the red and blue layers; your stack should look similar to the screen shot below:
That’s it! We’re done.
Below is the final result of our photomontage:
(click the image to view a higher resolution one)