“Frozen Valley” – A Guide to Landscape Manips

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 | Filed under Articles, Lessons, Misc

My most recent photomanip Frozen Valley was created using a few simple steps, that are described in this post. Please note: This is not a step-by-step guide meant to be followed to the letter just so you can create your own “Frozen Valley” (I wouldn’t be happy to see copies popping up all over the net to be honest) – it is instead meant to help you find your way in the fascinating world of photomanips, so you can start creating your own images according to your own visions.

Frozen Valley - progress animation of the photomanipulation

The idea was to use the image of the Norwegian hut by MJ Ranum and put it into a serene landscape – which landscape that was going to be only became clear to me when I went browsing sxc.hu for landscape stock to use as background. I found two wonderful images of a mountain range with a glacier at the front and just knew “this is it”.

I started by putting my background together, first blending the two images and then extending the background to cover the top of the square canvas, too. For blending images, I always use layer masks because this way I do not have to actually erase anything, but can just “hide” what I don’t need/want. This way, if I make a mistake, I don’t have to start all over again from scratch. On top of that, you have way more control over a mask than over the eraser tool – for example, you can use gradients on the mask (transparent-to-black/white or white-to-black) to get really soft transitions in a heartbeat. A tutorial I wrote years ago (still on PS7) can be found here. The background-extension was mainly done using a colour layer below the images and then using a combination of masks and soft brushing with sky colours to create a soft transition. Did you know that when using the brush tool, holding down the alt-key will let you pick colours from your canvas?

Time to insert the already cut-out Norwegian hut. The image was extracted from its background using the pen tool in the original image (this way you can save the path with the original jpg just in case you need that hut again). A tutorial on the pen tool can be found here. Then it was scaled down to be placed at the back of the valley – it would look strange to put it on the glacier itself as no one in his right mind would build upon meters of ice.

Keeping in mind the sunlight’s direction, a shadow was added. It is not enough to put a shadow below the structure – you need one on the building (right side, facing away from the sun), too! Especially in lighting conditions like this, having too much light on the “wrong side” of the house would look very odd. On the other hand, the harsh light from the sun would make the parts nearest the sun “glow”, so this was added, too. Finally, the colour values of the original hut image do not match the desaturated steely blue tones of the valley and have to be adjusted. There are different ways to do that, one is to use an adjustment layer like colour balance, another is to use gradient or solid colour layers set to Soft Light or Overlay on top of the hut image. Whichever way you choose to go, you can group the adjustment layers with the hut layer so they won’t affect the background by hovering your cursor between the layers in the layers palette while holding down alt. The cursor should change shape and if you click then, it’ll group the layers. It’s a bit hard to explain, but it is shown in this video along with an explanation about adjustment layers.

The sky still looked a bit boring, so I found a picture of clouds and inserted it into the scene. Again I used layer masks for blending, but in addition, I set the blend mode to Screen and used the Level adjustment (on the image itself this time, not as an adjustment layer) to create the right amount of contrast. To add to the effect of the sun lighting up the clouds’ edges, I used a new layer set to Colour Dodge and brushed around the rim. I used two or three of these layers set to lower opacities instead of one full on to not overwhelm the image with the effect.

The last steps consisted of adding various Adjustment Layers on top of the whole image to adjust lighting and contrast and colours. Amoung the adjustments used were the following: Hue/Saturation, Curves, Levels, Colour Balance and Gradients set to various blend modes. his last part is something you cannot learn to do right – mainly because there is no “right way” to begin with. All you can do is experiment until you find a combination that fits the image. In time you’ll also get more experience concerning which Adjustment to use for which effect and you’ll most likely develop a style based on your way to combine adjustments. It is a highly intuitive development based on your knowledge & use of the different options Photoshop gives you.

As I said in the beginning, this is not meant to be a step-by-step tutorial. I just wanted to show you how I work or at least how I worked on this manip. I hope you can see that while there is a lot of individual choices in this (which colour scheme, which clouds, which background, where to place the hut etc), the basis is to get to know your options in Photoshop. And when you read those tutorials that are step-by-step-guides, look at the techniques used – don’t just follow the tutorial through from start to finish to get results quickly. You’ll find your own style if you find your prefered methods of colouring and cutting and blending and of choosing stock. That said, if you feel that this tutorial inspired you or gave you some points to think over or whatever, please do comment as I’d love to hear your thoughts! Aaaaand I’d LOVE to see if you create something that this little guide might’ve helped with.

Tags: art, blend modes, brush, colour, cutting, gradients, layer mask, light & shadow, photomanipulation, photoshop, tutorial

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