Believe it or not, these are the original pictures!
OK, if you are like me you are wondering how I did it! Here are the basic steps that I took.
First I chose a gray color for the background. Then, I placed the mountain picture on top of the gray background and used my Quick Selection tool to select the sky. Once I had the sky selected I deleted it.
Next I drag the castle on top of the mountain picture. Again I used the Quick Selection tool to select the castle and the little tree on the right side of the castle. I contracted the selection by 2 pixels and feathered it by 1. Next, I inverted and deleted.
I then took my Selection Brush tool and selected the retaining wall on the left side of the castle and deleted. Now for the little tree. I used my Spot Healing Brush and went over the part of the tree that is covering the castle thus replacing the side of the castle. I then selected what was left of the tree with the Selection Brush and deleted.
Next, I moved the castle where I wanted in the picture and scaled it down. As you can see in the original castle picture, the castle is at a perspective that doesn't match the picture. To fix this, I used the distort option and pushed the bottom two corners together more until it was in the correct perspective.
Once all of the picture sizing and re-positioning was done, it was time to add fog. I used a paint brush that doesn't have a very hard falloff. Meaning a brush that is not so hard around the outside. Here is an example...
This one has too hard of an edge.
This is the kind of brush that you want too use for fog. Notice how the edges seem too fade away.
When I painted the fog, I don't just use one layer. You get more realistic looking fog if you use multiple layers. For this picture I used 9 layers of fog. After I painted a spot of fog I then Gaussian blur it by 2 pixels and change the opacity of that layer so that it somewhat transparent just like fog.
When I use layers, I place some fog layers behind the castle and some in front. Some behind the mountain so that it looks as if the fog is coming off the mountain.
After the fog is all painted in I then started to change the color levels and Hue & Saturation of the pictures so that they look like it is actually foggy.
That is the basic idea of how I did things. How do you do fog?
Wow, very cool. What did you mean by feathering and perspective?
ReplyDeleteThank you Nathan!
ReplyDeleteWhen you cut out a picture, there is always a hard edge around the outside of the picture that you cut. Feathering is softening the hard edge to a softer edge. This makes the cut out look more realistic.
When you feather a picture, you will have the option of choosing the amount of pixels you wish to feather. The more pixels you choose, the closer the feather gets to the center of your photo. For the castle, I only used one pixel.
Perspective is how the picture was taken. If you go and look at the original castle picture you will notice that the castle is much bigger than the person taking the photo. That would mean the picture was taken looking up at the castle.
In order to get the perspective to match the mountains, you have to move the two bottom corners closer together. Why? Well, because the person taking the picture was closer to the bottom of the castle, the bottom of the castle is going to be slightly wider than the top. By moving the bottom corners towards each other, you are making the top and the bottom that same size. That makes the castle look as if the picture was taken on the same plane as the castle.
In the mountain picture, the perspective is a level, straight line towards the mountains. In the castle picture you are looking up. In order to get the castle to look right with the mountains, you have to change the perspective of the castle.
Hope that makes sense:)
Nice job!
ReplyDeleteI think I will try an tackle the fog thing on gimp. That'd make a really cool addition to the pic I am working on right now. =)
Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI will look forward to hearing how your picture turns out!
I just posted my pic on my blog-- http://careystone.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteI do not know what all effects you have in Photoshop, but in GIMP, I made my fog by going to Render, Clouds, then on Screen mode.
Nice Job!!
ReplyDeleteYes, I did also use the clouds feature. However, I wanted to have more control over the fog placing and density. After I added all of the fog by hand, I matched it all together by adding a very light layer of clouds.
Ah ok!
ReplyDelete