Worth1000.com | Photoshop Contests | Are you Worthy™ | tutorial
Page 9: Making the old guy cast a shadow. Oh my, it looks like he is floating. Don't make the mistake of leaving him standing on that step without casting a shadow. Using the same dark color you used for your original shadows, go back to your building shadows layer and use a medium density airbrush of appropriate size to draw in some shadows on the steps. Be sure to pay attention to the angle of the light source and also the fact that his body gets bigger above his feet. Also the light rays will spread with distance so make the shadow even wider as it gets further from him. Your image will probably look like this when you are done.
Page 10: Let there be water. Yippie, we now have enough of the image done to make the water, so lets make some water. Start by saving a copy of the current cabin image with no compression. Now load that image as a new layer of the cabin file and name the layer "water". Flip that layer on the vertical and move it to make it look like the pic below.
You will notice that the perspective of the reflection doesn't jive with the cabin. Open the layer transform "skew" tool and tweak and move the layer until you get this. The idea is to follow the perspective of the bottom of the building and to make all of the parts of the building line up properly. You will notice that the perspective of the reflection of the porch and railing looks messed up, but don't worry about it as it will be covered up by a boat and it's shadow.
Page 11: Adding a boat. A boat you say? Yes, how else can an old guy living in the middle of a swamp get to where he needs to go. It so happens that the old geezer found a very nice boat on Google. All you have to do for him is cut it out, scale it, rotate it to fit his surroundings, and do some nice lighting for him. The top image in the illustration below shows his boat cut out and ready to get it's shadows, green indicates the part of the hull that was cut off to imply that the boat is partially submerged in the water. The bottom part of the illustration shows how the boat looks with shadows. To make the shadows select all of the areas with the shadows using the polygon lasso tool, then render lighting effects with the same settings as before with the light completely off the boat.
Page 12: Inserting the boat and adding shadows. Now go ahead and make a new layer above the water layer in the cabin file and paste in that boat. Use the layer free transform tool to scale and roate it to your liking. Your end result should look something like this.
That boat looks a bit like it's just hovering over the water. Lets add some shadows to make it feel right at home (Note: we won't be adding a reflection of the boat because nothing that is highlighted on the boat would even be visible at this angle in a reflection). Create a new blank layer just under the boat layer and name it "boat shadow", leaving the blending mode in normal and opacity at 100%. Use the polygon lasso tool to draw the outline of the shadow, set the feather level to 3, then fill the selection with the same dark color that you have been using for the rest of the shadows.
Page 13: Adding realism to the water. That water looks way too calm. Perhaps there's some critters moving around out there stirring up the water a little bit. Deselect the shadow of the boat merge the shadow layer down to the water layer. With the water layer selected, open up filter/distort/ocean ripple, use a ripple size of 15 and a magnatude of 8, then apply to the water layer. Now run the gaussian blur filter over the water layer at a level of 1.6 pixels to soften everything up. Tweak the levels a little to make the water slightly darker. Your image should now look something like this.
Page 14: The final touches, a night sky. We are almost done now. We just need to add some interest to the sky, just don't go overboard with a moon or anything crazy like that, you don't want to detract from the lighting effects you worked so hard on. All we need are a few faint stars. Create a new blank layer and name it stars, leaving the blending mode to normal and the opacity set at 100%. Use a small soft airbrush set to pure white, with a very low opacity setting. Now paint in a few faint stars, leaving some brighter than the others. Stars are never pure white so using a slightly smaller airbrush with random vibrant colors, paint a color highlight onto just a few of the brighter stars. Your final image will look something like this.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did making it. Please feel free to e-mail or message me if you have any questions about this tutorial. Additional information on the following pages describes how to deal with free-standing and multiple light sources.
Page 15: Day to Night Part 2 How to deal with free-standing and multiple light sources. This addition to the tutorial will be simplified a bit since you already learned most of what you need to know in part 1. To begin, copy the image shown below into Photoshop or other graphic editing program.
Make a copy of that layer and place it directly above your original layer. With the duplicate layer selected, open the lighting effects filter and select the default light settings. Move the light source so that no part of it intersects your image, then hit enter. You should now have something resembling the image below.
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