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)

The purpose of this tutorial is to go through some advanced photo manipulation techniques; you will learn to work with masks, filters, selections, etc.
This tutorial is a follow-up of “how to change the skin texture” tutorial that I’ve posted last week. If you haven’t read that one yet, I strongly suggest you do it before going through this one, since I’m going to refer to the techniques shown there, later.

Here are the images I’ve used for this tutorial. You can either use these, or find others on stock images websites.

First you will need to make some selection sets. You can start by selecting the skin using the lasso tool, or magnetic lasso tool.
After having finished the selecting, click on “select”, “save selection” and type “skin”.
Without deselecting it, hold “shift” and start selecting the other parts of person as well (in this case, the hat and cloths), using the same tools.
When you are done save this selection as well and name it “person”.

What we need to do next, is to make new layers for each of the selections above. Therefore, with the last selection still active, click on “layer” (located in the menu above, between “image” and “select”), then click on “new” and choose “layer via copy”
Alternatively you can use the shortcut (ctrl+J).
Load the other selection (named skin) and repeat the process. You should end up with 3 layers like in the screen capture below.

Decomposing the skin into small chunks

This part is quite boring to be honest, but try to have patience because it determines the way the final image will look.
Select the skin layer and using the lasso tool or the polygonal lasso tool, start selecting pieces of the skin and move them apart, like in the screen capture bellow.
It would be a good idea to hide the other layers while doing this.

Place the bigger chunks further away from the face and the smaller ones closer to it. Also, decrease the distance between the pieces as they get smaller. Take a look at the image bellow to have an idea regarding what you should be ending above with, after about 20 minutes of work.

Having finished this step, select all the pieces you’ve created (by surrounding all them with either the lasso tool or the polygonal lasso tool), and make an new layer from this selection (like we did for the skin, only this time choose “layer via cut”)
Rename the new layer “chunks”

Adding the illusion of motion
Without suggesting motion, the image looks like a jigsaw puzzle. First, make a copy of the new “chunks” layer, and rename it “motion blur”. As you have guessed apply a motion blur filter. At the moment, all the pieces that you have previously decomposed look like they are moving very fast. We can improve the effect even more, by making the pieces “decelerate” as they get closer to the face.
Create a layer mask (by selecting “layer”, “layer mask” and “reveal all”). You will notice the icon of the mask next to the layer in the stack. Make sure it is active (so that you work on the mask and not on the actual layer) and draw a gradient, from white to black, using the gradient tool (from left to right, like in the screen capture bellow)

You should end up with an image similar to the following

Notice that I have painted the background in black for now, since we are going to replace in anyway later in this tutorial.

Fine tuning
In order make the effect more convincing you need to add a texture with cracks. Open the desired texture in photoshop and drag it over your psd file as a new layer (name it “texture1”). Change the blending mode from normal to overlay.
Hold “Ctrl” and click on the icon of the “skin” layer. Choose “select inverse” and delete the parts of the “texture1” layer that are not covering the face.
Using the eraser tool with a soft brush, delete the right part the texture. You should end up with something similar to the following image:

It is starting to look ok, but the left part of the face still lacks depth. Select the skin again (by holding Ctrl and clicking on the layer icon) and make a new layer, just above “texture1”.
With the selection still active, choose a very smooth brush and paint the recently create layer with black, just around the left edge of the face.
When you are done, change the opacity to about 80% and you should obtain something like this:

In order to make it look like a zombie, apply another texture to the face of the character using the technique learnt in the tutorial named How to change the skin texture in photoshop (that I have mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial).
In this case I have used an old copper texture, and came up with the following image:

Unhide the layer named “person”. Click on “select”, “load selection” and choose “skin”. With the “person” layer active, click delete. This way you will keep only the clothes of the character, since you have been working on the skin in an upper layer.

Background
Open the background image in photoshop and drag it over your psd file, under the layer named “person”.
Adjust the color balance and curves so that it will blend well with your character.  After a few minor touches in some places (like color burn and color dodge) you should obtain something similar to this:

(click on the image to view a higher resolution one)

In this short photoshop tutorial you will learn some basic photo-manipulation techniques that you will be able to use in order to create much more complex images (combining images, layer blending modes, color burn, color dodge, selection sets, etc.)

For this tutorial you will need a photo of a person, and a texture that you will use for replacing his skin.

Open the first photo in photoshop, and using the magnetic selection tool, make a selection of the skin area.
You can also use the lasso tool or the polygonal lasso tool, to refine the selection if it is needed.
Once the selection is complete save it (click on “select”, “save selection” and type an appropriate name).

With the selection active, click on “image”, “adjustments”, “color balance” and change the color to a green hue, like in the image bellow:

Open the other image (the texture) and drag it as a new layer, over the first photo, placing it on top of the person’s face.
Now load the selection that you have previously saved, click on “select”, “inverse” and press delete. You should end up with something similar to the following image:

Change the blending mode of the texture layer from “normal” to “multiply” and set the opacity to 80%

It is starting to look good, but the new texture looks a little flat, so you will need to give it some depth. For this, you need to use a soft brush white color set to “color dodge” and paint over the highlighted areas. Following the same principle, use another soft brush, black color, set to “color burn” and paint over the darker areas.

You can experiment with various opacity values for the brushes, depending on the results you get. Here is what I came up with.

Just for fun, I played with the color of the person’s eyes, to give it a scary look (like in the “eyes color change tutorial” I posted some time ago)

Thanks for following the tutorial, and I hope you had fun with it.

In this tutorial I have tried to explain the process of turning a photo from a day shot into a night image using photoshop. Bellow is the image that we start with.

1) Sky color
The first thing that we need to do is to change the sky color to a much darker tone.
For this we need to select it first; I usually start with the wand tool with a tolerance of about 22, and refine the selection using the magnetic lasso tool or the polygonal lasso.
After having completed the selection it would be a good idea to save the selection set (click on “selection, save selection, and type “sky”)
With the selection active, you can either paint the sky in a new layer, or paste a photo of the sky taken at night time.

2) Environment color
Click on “select”, “inverse” and create a new layer). Change the blending mode of the new layer from “normal” to “color”. Using the brush tool paint the new layer with a shade of dark blue. If you need more chromatic variety you can combine several shades with the brush hardness set to “0”.
You should obtain something similar to the image bellow:

The color is starting to look ok, but as you notice, the building needs to be a little bit darker. You can do this easily by selecting the “background” layer (the base layer that represents the original photo) and click on “Image”, “Adjustments”, “Brightness/Contrast”. Drag the “brightness” slider to the left until you obtain a result that you are happy with.

3) Placing lights inside the building
At the moment the picture already looks like a night photo, but due to the fact that there are no lights inside the building, the place looks deserted.
What we need to do at this point is to select the windows of the rooms that you want to place lights inside. You don’t need to select all the windows, because just like in real life the probability that every light in a building is on, is quite small. After having selected everything you need, save the selection set as “windows”.
Now comes the fun part; with the windows selection still active, make a new layer above the stack and start painting with shades of yellow, orange and very light blue. You need this kind of diversity in color, because in real life, different types of light sources produce different light colors. For example tungsten light bulbs cast an orange/yellowish light, while neon produces white/light blue hue and so on.
After having finished with the painting, change the blending mode of the layer, from “normal” to “linear light” and change the opacity to around 80%.
Here is what we have so far:

For more realism, we can add a subtle glow to the light in the windows; make a copy of the last layer and add a gaussian blur (in this case I have used a 20 a radius of 20 pixels for it). As you can see, the widows look much too bright. We can adjust this by loading the “windows” selection set, and press delete. This way there will be no overlapping between the new layer and the previous one, and we will only keep the glow around the windows.

Here is how it looks:

You can take this even further by cropping windows from other photos of buildings taken at night and compositing them in your imag.
4) Final touches
We’re almost there…
However, there is one more thing to do. If you look at photos taken at night you will notice that the bottom parts have a subtle orange/yellowish hue, due to the artificial lights cast by the street lights, car lights and neighboring buildings.
You can simulate this, by making a “foreground to transparent” gradient tool (with the foreground color set to orange), in a new layer, dragged from bottom to top. Change the blending mode to “color” and adjust the opacity to around 50% (or whatever looks good to you) and you are done.

Here is the final result:

Here is a simple tutorial that will show you how to change the license plate of a car in photoshop. The actual purpose of this tutorial is to show you the basics of combining elements from different photos into a single one. Following the photoshop technique shown bellow you can do a lot of other fun stuff, like changing street names on street signs, change labels, traffic signs, billboards, etc.

1) For this tutorial you need to photos: one with a car that you want it’s license to be replaced, and another photo with a new license plate.

2) Make a selection around the new license plate like in the screen capture bellow. You can do this with either the wand tool, magnetic lasso

tool, polygonal tool or lasso tool, depending on your photo. In this case I have used the magnetic tool.

3) With the selection active, click on the “move tool” and drag the selection over the other image

4) As you can see, the new license plate is too big so we obviously need to scale it. Press “ctrl+T” and drag the start scaling it starting from one corner. Make sure you hold shift while scaling, so that it will be done proportionally. After having it scaled down to approximately the size of the old one, position it over, like in the screen capture bellow.

5) We are almost there. At this point we need to adjust the perspective of the new plate to match the old one. You can do this easily using the skew modifier

6) The position, the dimensions and the perspective look ok at this point, but in order to “blend” it better, we need to decrease the contrast and the brightness a bit (image, adjustments, brightness and contrast)

That’s it! We’re done!

Do you have brown eyes but always wished to have blue eyes? Are you curious to see how you would look with a different eyes color?
Here a few simple steps that will show you how to do it quickly in photoshop.

Bellow is the image that I started with. If you don’t have a proper photo yet, feel free to use mine:

1)    Open the photo in photoshop and make a copy of the “background” layer.

2)    Using the lasso tool, select the eyes, like in the photo bellow:

3)    After having completed the selection for both eyes, go to “image”, “adjustments”, “color balance” and play with the sliders until you obtain a result you like. You can also adjust the brightness and contrast, or the saturation (both can be found in “image” > “adjustments” menus).
Bellow are some results I have obtained using the steps shown above.

In case you are wondering why we have made a copy of the original layer at the beginning of the tutorial, the answer is “it’s just good practice”. It is always better to keep the original photo at the bottom of the stack, just in case something goes wrong, you can always go back and start over.

Read the tutorial now!

Read the tutorial now!

Read the tutorial now!

Read the tutorial now!