First, you must remember that every photo or digital artwork must have 1 point that catches the viewer’s attention. It doesn’t matter if you deal with magic (not to be confused with occultism) or surreal composition.

It can be (and mostly is) the face or the eyes, but it can also be any other spot, that is, the leitmotif of the canvas. When too many points catch the visitor’s attention, your artwork loses its charm and may lack the zest it would otherwise have with fewer accents on the canvas. So the first thing you must remember is that in art, mostly, less is more.

The second thing to bear in mind is the depth of the field. When you concentrate your look on a certain point, the rest becomes a little blurred in your vision, primarily if the rest of the objects lie far behind. This is what we call — the depth of field. In other words, the human face cannot be just as sharp in the picture as the background house that appears to be a few miles behind the figure.

Although this isn’t always true, we have different variations of art (and sometimes the unusual is the best-looking surreal concept!) In this Photoshop Tutorial, I am giving this little info so you will understand WHY we blur specific points and why we play with light the way we do.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design
https://loreleiwebdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/downloadssuccess1dollar.jpg

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 a 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 onto your Canvas:

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Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

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

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

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

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

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

The way our image looks now, it’s very far from being an organically blended scene, so let’s start combining 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 precisely what we will do. While the sand layer is selected, go to Image>> Adjustments >> Match Color and apply the following settings:

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

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.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

This will give our Image a pleasant tone. The next step is to select the sky layer and go to Curves again, create a small point at the bottom, and drag the RGB channel’s curve down to make the sky darker.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Yet we got a much better-toned canvas, but still, it is very well visible that the Image consists of 2 different pieces, even if these pieces match way better in Color than before.

We will use an ancient trick to merge the horizon lines of both layers. Create a new layer and, using a big, soft brush (we are working with Brush Tool, in case I didn’t make myself clear), choose a black color and paste it over the horizon line, including the sand area outside the fence.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

After you have brushed over that area, set this layer to”Soft Light,” you will have a much darker illusion as the view gets farther…

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Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Next, we want to create an extremely mild HDR effect for the wood, so we will create a new layer above the rest of the files, but below the dark layer, we will brush it with black. Please pay attention because the sequence is essential. We will not be working with masked layers throughout this tutorial.

Once that layer is created, click on the little “black and white” icon at the end of your layers palettes, which allows you to create a new fill or layer adjustment. Select “Exposure” settings. You will have a new layer with exposure settings made:

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Using the “white” droplet, drag the Gamma Correction up to 0.82. See how the wood looks now as if it’s been exposed to moonlight! Isn’t it beautiful?

To accompany that bright path we the middle, create a new layer a, nd uscreate a spot in the middle ing your Brush Tool, white Color a,, nd a substantial soft brush (say, 300 pixels), create a place in the middle.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

This spot should be placed above all the other layers and with blending mode set to Overlay:

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Next, please take out your free stock photo with flying balloons and crop them out. Don’t worry if cropping isn’t perfect, because once you place them on your canvas, we will resize them to aa small size,, and any imperfections will be blurred naturally.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Once they are on the canvas, you will notice they look misplaced and need something to blend them nicely. The easiest solution (and please bear in mind that our tutorial is targeted at beginners) is to add clouds that will “cover” the balloons, effortlessly blending them into the composition.

So, create a new layer and go to Filter >> Render >> Clouds. With your background color set to Black and your foreground set to White (this is important!) — create clouds.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Once the clouds layer is ready, press Ctrl + T  and drag the bottom line upwards, “compressing” the clouds into a smaller strap, about half the canvas. Set the blending mode of the clouds layer to “Pin Light.” This way, you will only see the WHITE areas of the clouds and won’t see the black areas.

Move the clouds in a way that will allow the white areas in clouds to lay over the balloon; this way, we can see that the balloons are floating somewhere in the area, partly obscured by the heavy sky… Use the Eraser Tool with a soft edge to remove any edges of the cloud layer once it’s moved, and you can also duplicate that layer and make a few of them, so you will have a more cloudy effect (which is what we have done).

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Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Next, crop our beautiful Becca.

The cropping technique will not be explained here as being pretty much essential. Still, we want to emphasize that if you use our particular Image, the cropping will be rather complicated since, at some points (such as arms), the contrast between skin and background is minimal, which makes the cropping rather tricky. We had to use a few steps to complete this task. First, we used the Polygonal Lasso Tool and the Magnetic Lasso Tool, and then we “refined edges” as pictured below.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Place the girl on the canvas and seize her so she will fit in nicely.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

To add our contrast to the Image, we want to make the clothes texture more visible and less dark areas yet without losing the overall contrast and juiciness of the Image, so with the girl’s Image selected, we went to Image>> Adjustments >> Curves, and created a custom curve that consists from 3 points, as pictured here:

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Next, we need a shadow underneath her legs. Draw a circle using the round shape tool and black Color as your foreground Photoshop color. Ensure it’s placed correctly underneath her feet and has an elliptical shape.

Rasterize the layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Set the shadow’s opacity to multiply 57%, and you will see that the shadow is mildly visible yet it is present and gives a more realistic illusion of jumping or flying in the air. Please also ensure you place the shadow underneath the girl’s Image!

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Final Steps…

Although most of the colors we used here blended in well and eventually created an organically looking picture, we still need to equalize the layers. What some people do, and I used to do it myself in previous tutorials, is to merge all the layers or even flatten the Image and then work on the colorization and the levels. This is very easy and perhaps will do the trick with most beginners, but even if you are not yet that much of a pro with Photoshop,  you need to learn how to work with Layer Adjustments.

In your layers’ panel, you have a small icon below that looks like a Yin-Yang symbol.

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Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Create a new layer on top of all the other layers, and click this icon; you have a menu with various options; select “Photo Filter” first.

Use the default “Warming Filter (85), which I think is best for any picture if you want a quick and warm effect, and set the Density to about 25%. The rule of thumb is that if we use warm colors such as brown, pink, and earthly shades, we will give our composition a warm feeling (which is our aim here!); however, if you want to make your outcome look colder, dreadful, dramatic and morbid, use shades of blue and green.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Once this is done, you still have a layer selected that is on top of all the others; click the Layer Adjustments icon again, determine “photo filter” one more time, and this time apply a plain yellow color filter with 48% density.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Most of you might want to stop here, but we want to make this Image look fabulous, so we click the Layer Adjustments icons again; this time, we pick the “Curves.” This will apply the Curve settings to ALL the layers underneath these settings, which is a massive advantage as you need not go layer by layer.

Make two points that will brighten up the Image quite dramatically. Note that we are working with the RGB channel.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

Now, the final touch is to give our composition a light, lightly cold touch; as we spoke before, a bit of green hue will do this trick. So yes, we will again click on the Layer Adjustments and select the RED channel. Darken the Image a bit, using two points…

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design

That’s it! I hope you enjoyed the tutorials, and please feel free to download the PSD file for learning purposes (1024 x 764). You can also replace the model of our tutorial with your Image, and you will have all the effects already in place. Click on the image below to view it fully.

https://loreleiwebdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/downloadssuccess1dollar.jpg

Once you purchase the PSD and complete the checkout, click the “return to merchant’s website” button, and the download will start automatically. If you have any problems, please comment below, and I will email you the file within 24 hours.

Design Surreal Composition Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly - PS Tutorials Lorelei Web Design