I made this tutorial over a year ago, but for some reason never got to publish it and now with the major revamp of loreleiwebdesign.com I decided it’s high time to get back to this effect. I know this is maybe a bit old but since it has never been published before I do hope you will find this to be useful. We are going to design a dark, surrealistic and maybe also unrealistic “Forest Tale” scene in Photoshop. This tutorial was made in CS2 so anyone who uses an old version of Adobe — don’t worry, this tutorial will work for you, moreover we don’t have that many complex effects here that would require a higher version.

You will need a few stock photos for this tutorial:

http://darkrose42-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stormy-sea-55513661

http://liam-stock.deviantart.com/

Take the layer with the forest scene and the water scape (you can use practically any image you like. Since this tutorial was made over a year ago, I can’t recall anymore who’s images has been used so if you have an idea, please do let me know. The woman’s image however is taken from Liam Stock at Deviantart.com

So, we take the waterscape and apply it unto the forest image. Set the opacity of water to semi transparent,  so that you will be able to see the trees, and using the eraser tool remove water from the trees..

In a way that will allow you to see the trees standing in the water itself.

While the layer with the trees is selected, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Color and match the color of water scape with the forest, this way you will get an organically blended colors scheme to start with.

This is what you should see on your screen after following the previous 2 steps. The key to success here is to use a small eraser tool with soft edge, when removing bits and pieces of water from the layer. if you did it right, you should see a real flood on your forest canvas.

Nest, crop the girl’s image and place it unto the screen. We are considering the cropping technique to be rather basic and therefore won’t go step by step explaining how to do that. Roughly speaking, use Magnetic Lasso Tool or a Pen Tool with magnetic option, whoever works for you will be fine as long as the image is somewhat cropped.

Get back to the water image and using the Burn Tool, burn the edges of water layer just near the trees, to create an illusion of the trees really standing inside the water, and if they did, the area at the bottom would have been slightly darker.

Now we are going to match the color again, this time for our female figure, and we will match colors between her and the water scape, since its’ lighter and will not effect the overall color of her layer. Set “fade” to about 7 or so, if you overdo it, you will have an extremely bluish layer, so not only it will look monotone and not very organic, it also not going to be beautiful.

here is how it’s supposed to look with the layer of teh gild been matched to the color of the water:

Just like with the trees, we want to make her look as if she is standing (or even drawning) in the water. The best way to do that is take an Eraser tool and remove a part of her skirt, let us say about 1/3 and when you do that, make sure you don’t just cut a straight horizontal line, it has to be curved around her body to complement the illusion of her actually standing inside the water.

Get back to the Burn tool, and using a soft brush with parameters as below…

make sure the girl’s image is selected, and go over the edges of her skirt, making them darker. This will create the feeling of the fabric been wet, which makes sense as she is standing in the water, and also create an organic shade, allowing her to blend in nicely.

While using the same Burn Tool with the same settings, go to the water layer and make a few shadows around it as well.

Also, draw a shade falling “from” her body on the water, use your imagination or copy what we did:

Using the burn tool and a much smaller brush you can also go over te very edge of her skirt and make it darker in a way that will disallow people to see the exact edge of the skirt, this is a very old yet incredibly useful trick to hide poorly cropped layers’ edges.

here is what you got so far, it’s pretty impressive and looks nice.

Time to play around with the second image we have in stock, also crop it and place it on the canvas. Here is a tricky part, you have to place it in a way that will allow the girl in white to grab the stick our blond girl is holding… See?

Also using the Burn tool (yes, again!) draw a shadow from our new layer on the water scape.

This is what we achieved so far. Also needless to add that you have to delete the small portion of the stick that falls ON the white girls’ hand, IF you placed the layer on top of her and not underneath. Basically it doesn’t really matter as long as you achieve the right result. Since we don’t have that many layers here, the sequence of them is not crucial..

At this point — flatten the layers, all of them.

We are going to work with Levels, so instead of working with layers one by one, we will flatten all of them and work together, it saves a lot of time and hassle.

Go to Levels by pressing Ctrl + L  ( or Image >> Adjustments >> Levels) and select the “RED” channel. This is very important because our aim is to make the canvas more blueish-green and not just to increase the contrast. Once red channel is selected,  draw the dark and the white arrows a little bit closer to each other. We are not going to touch the gray arrow, it will remain on “0″ since we are not interested in adding red or on the other hand fully removing it.

This step will nicely equalize the colors on your canvas, as you can see the girl’s hair are no longer red — they are in blue shades and this makes the overall image more organic

Here is the final result (click on the image to full view). If you want to be a part of our community, please join our Facebook page and subscribe to our updates via email, to make sure you never miss a tutorial or freebie!

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Tags: fantasy art, photo effect