Second thing to bear in mind is the depth of field. When you concentrate your look on a certain point, the rest becomes a little blurred in your vision, especially if the rest of the objects lay far behind. This is what we call — depth of field. In other words, human face cannot be just as sharp on the picture, as the background house that appears to be a few miles behind the figure. Although this isn’t always true and we have different variations of art (and sometimes the unusual is the best looking surreal concept!) but I am giving this little info so you will understand WHY we blur certain points and why we play with light the way we do, in this Photoshop Tutorial.

Ingredients:

http://dracoart-stock.deviantart.com/art/Asbury-Park-NJ-5-118481560

http://liam-stock.deviantart.com/art/Faballa-4-111550452

http://flordelys-stock.deviantart.com/art/sky-017-62717553

http://dracoart-stock.deviantart.com/art/Balloon-Festival-30-102183167

Get started.

We were working on a rather big canvas, we started with 1024px × 764px new layer as these were the dimensions of our base image. However you may feel more comfortable working with smaller or bigger images.

Take the image with fence and sand and paste it unto your Canvas:

Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, crop out and delete the sky and water upper half of the layer:

Don’t worry about the rough unnatural layer, we will work this out a bit later.

The next step is take the image with sky (from our ingredients list), and paste it on top of the  previous layer with sand. Using Eraser Tool with a small soft brush, remove the lower part so that you will have an image consisting from sky and sand, just as you see below:

The way our image looks now, it’s very far yet from been an organically blended scene, so let’s start blending the layers into one another.

To make the sand less cheery, the easiest way is to simply match colors with the clouds, so this is exactly what we are going to do. While the sand layer is selected, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Color and apply the following settings:

if you have already unselected, select the layer with sand again, and go to Curves. Using the RGB channel, darken the image by dragging the curve down somewhere in the middle. We used Output: 113 and Input:143.

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 drowning) 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…

We will be making this (full view)

Ingredients:

Step 1:

As always the first step for creating a composition is cropping out the main characters, so using the magnetic marquee Tool or Pen Tool (whichever you find more useful), crop the lady out…

if you are using CS3 + version of Photoshop, it will be much easier for you to follow our today’s tutorial as a lot of features we are working with are simply unavailable in previous versions of Photoshop. One of them is the “Refine Edge” facility. Once the selection is loaded, go to refine Edges and add apply the following settings. Please note that setting vary depending on the selection you have made, let alone photo you are working with. if you used Magnetic Marquee Tool for cropping, use the same settings as we have here:

Step 2:

Next step is go to Levels by pressing Ctrl + L and apply these settings. Our purpose is to make the image a little more professional looking by adding light since the original image is extremely dark and pixelated. We will refine our photo by working with Curves and Levels, but lets start with levels, to get an overall lighter hue:

Step 3:

Next, go to Curves and using the RGB channel, lighten the image up, just the way you see on the illustration below:

Step 4:

Right now it looks far more professional, less dark and more vivid, almost like a real studio shot. it’s time to take the second image from our stock for this tutorial, the sky shot, and place it on your canvas, just below the cropped lady image.

Step 5:

Also, crop the orchids just the same way as you did with the lady and place the flower on your canvas.

Duplicate the cropped orchid’s layer and place a few of them around the lady. We placed one on the front and the other behind her, so create the illusion as if she is surrounded by these gigantic flowers.

We will be making this tutorial, which will only be constructed from 3 images, 1 shape and a lot of basic Photoshop commands that will allow us to make a really cool composition… or shall I say — “hot”..? Please feel free to leave a comment or submit your result to our Flickr group.

Let’s get started. Photos used (All licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use):

Step 1:

Crop the girl out of the image; it does not really matter hat method you use to chop the edges and background away, as long as you have the edges defined. We are not going to get into great details here as cropping is an ultra basic technique, all I’d say is that I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to roughly extract the lady from the background. Don’t worry about the rough edges if you have any, we will be using a lot of filters so any mishaps will disappear later on.

Step 2:

Place the lady over the winter landscape and desize, according to your needs. We scaled the image down to about 60% and placed it in the middle of the canvas.

Step 3

Now we need to make the girl’s image look like it’s blending in organically,  and the easiest way to do so is to add a shadow that falls on the snow. Select the woman’s layer, and once you made the selection, create a New Layer underneath the girl’s image layer, and fill that selection with solid black color #000000.

Step 4

Now we are going to transform the selection, while the layer is still selected, press Ctrl + T and lay the shadow down, just the way you see in the illustration. Make sure that the shadow begins from lady’s legs, because when you start transforming, the shadow will move from under her legs and the only way to fix this is by dragging the bottom corners and adjusting them to “fit” to the main object.

So lets get started.
You will need two waterscapes. I used this one for the the shore edge:

and this one for the primarily background image:

The image above is watermarked, if you wish to download the full resolution image, please go HERE

Next, select and copy the first picture, and paste it unto the canvas of the second one. Erase most of it, leaving only the shore’s edges, and set the opacity of this second layer to 89%.

Making the moon:
Make a new layer. Select the brush tool, #FFFFFF color, 135 px size, and apply one stamp in te middle of your canvas.

Select the eraser tool with sharp edge, and “cut” with eraser’s tool side, most of the circle, as shown on the picture below.

Now that your moon has just started to develop a shape, using the rectangular marquee tool, select the bottom of the moon and cut it, just like we did here:

It’s a very easy fantasy art doodle, or rather just manipulation using some basic techniques yet achieving interesting effect.

1. Make a new canvas, 500*500.
2. Get a nice picture of ocean with foam at the shore. We used this one:

3. The most interesting effect is achieved when a picture was taken at angle, but we will create this effect artificially, by pasting the ocean photo unto our canvas and pressing Ctrl + T to rotate it a little, as shown on the photo below:

4. Next, take a photo of a girl, we use Becca from deviantArt, but you might want to use your own photo. Copy the canvas.

5. Paste the girl unto the ocean layer and then press Ctrl + T to rotate the layer with the photo and place it along line with the ocean shore, more or less, same degree.

6. Using wither magnetic tool, or eraser tool, delete the background from the layer with the girl. If the edges are not perfect, don’t worry about it, as eventually it will look as the girl was just swept away to the shore, it won’t matter and we will cover it with other layers.

7. Duplicate the layer with the ocean, and put the second, copied layer, on top of the layer with the girl.
8. Take the eraser tool with soft brush (we used 80 px) and remove the top layer with the ocean from the girl, however, (and this is important!) leave the edges covered with the upper layer, which will create the illusion of the girl actually been partly covered with teh water.

You should get something like this… I’d recommend to cover the legs with the water and not her face, or whichever part of the body looks as if it lays ON the sand.

9. While the upper layer of the ocean is still selected, Go to Levels Panel (Ctrl + L) and reduce redness as shown below…

…and adjust the Green channel as well, to give the water a deeper hue.

The water should get a little darker and bluer, however, reserving their natural look.

Believe it or not, but from a few ordinary photos and some primitive brushes, we will make this image (see below). OK, despite the rather impressive outcome, this is a very simple tutorial, you wont need more than a few brushes and a few pictures. Most of it is a mater of technique.

Start by creating a new canvas, 500*500 pixels, and fill it with dark blue colour, we used #060062.

Next, you need a beautiful, and preferably mysterious photo of a woman, this is what we started off with:

Copy the girl to your clipboard (Ctrl + C) and paste it (Ctrl + V) unto the blue canvas

Select the “Single Column Marquee tool” place the selection line on the edges of the picture, Press Ctrl + T to draw a line, and repeat the action from the other side as well. This is what this action will give you…

Duplicate the woman’s picture, and set BOTH layers to “Luminosity” blending option. This will turn both layers blue, as we have a blue background.
While the upper (duplicated) layer is selected, apply the Gaussian blur on it.

Select the eraser tool with a soft edge, and go over the girl’s silhouette, erasing the blurred layer from over the woman’s body. This is how it will look, but work your way with the eraser over her skirt as well.

After having finished to erase the blur over her body, this is what it will look like:

So, Let’s get started…

You will need a few stock photos to get started:

• Shore background [download]
• Girl’s photo [download]

Open the landscape photo. First we want to adjust it a little bit because the original picture is a bit, so go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels and set the following settings for RGB channel.

Now that our background has a better contrast, open the girl’s image and crop it carefully.  We used Magnetic Lasslo Tool to do the cropping but of course you can also crop using the infamous mask technique, the choice is your. Once the image is cropped…

…place the girl on the landscape canvas, where you want her to appear. Remember, that we want to capture a jump, so she should not be too close to a ground or any object, if you have any on your background image.

Despite been classed as fantasy art, this is a mere photo manipulation – make a fairy and your own mystic scenery; creating a landscape from scrap is now possible! I was inspired by the huge success of my previous fantasy art tut, which I posted in this forum last week… I got quite a few emails thanking me for it and many PS blogs featured it, so I decided to give in to repeated requests from millions of loving fans and do one more fantasy / scenery tut…

This is basically a mix of whats we call “fantasy art” and “dark/ gothic art”

I want to mention in advance that this tutorial is mostly for more experienced users, here we will need to use a lot of “hand work” and common sense; you will be working with your own images, and would need to adjust to the “needs” of your landscape.

So, lets get started… make a new canvas – 600* 400.

Fill your background layer with any dark colour, we chose to do it with blue, but you can use black as well.

Take a picture of a girl… we used this one, from Liam Stock, free photo resource.. ( http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/39058232/ <– Full resolution image)

This would depend on the image you use, but try to crop the figure accurately and remove the background.

Select the cropped girl from your canvas, and paste it unto the blue fantasy canvas we will create.

Place her in the middle, not to close to the edge, as she will be our leitmotif.

Next step, you will need different photos in order to combine a landscape.

First off, a photo of a shore. We took a pic offered free by ~gladly.

Press ctrl + a to select the entire water scape, Ctrl + c to copy it, and then , when you go to the fantasy canvas – press Ctrl + V to paste it.

The requests for Fantasy Art tutorials are enormous, I still get emails and Pms from people asking to do more Fantasy Art tuts, so here is one more, called “Plasma” (Star, not the TV!) which I hope you’d enjoy.

1. Make a new canvas, we used 600*480 px here, but the size is of course optional.

2. Select the Gradient Tool, using two shades of blue (see below), fill your canvas, so that the darker colour will be on top.

3. Take a photo of a girl. Traditionally I am using Becca‘s photo from her Deviant Art account, but you can replace her with any semi-sitting figure of your choice. Crop the figure and paste her unto your canvas. In needed, resize her so that she will fit in.

4. To get rid of the visible crappy cropping, and to give the girl more emphasis, add blueish glow to her by going to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Outer Glow and applying the following settings:

This is what you would get:

5. Make a new Layer. Make sure your primarily and secondary colours are black and white. Go to Filter >> Render >> Clouds