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Photoshopping with Mason - Part 1

Tags: #Broken Gallery  #Tutorial 
  • Member
    December 14, 2013

    Hi guys!

    It's been a long time since I've posted in this corner of the blog but recently I've been getting a fair few people commenting and asking questions on how I make some of the images for my builds.

    I promised a member recently that next time I worked on a big image I'd do my best to turn it into a tutorial here and today I stumbled upon this screenshot which I rather liked...

    Before I begin I'd like to point out that I can't illustrate, not one bit. All I've ever done is find or request nice screenshots to work with and then get cracking with some of the simple editing tools in photoshop.

    So here's the image I've found and as usual I'll be putting it together over the next few days and probably getting pretty frustrated with it.

    As I work I'll be sure to add the various steps to this thread as I go...

    1. This is a lovely image as it stands but when I think of Daedric armor I don't imagine myself walking through a meadow on a hot summers day. Yes, some things are definitely going to have to go...

    The image is a nice big one (1.1mb) which means I can zoom in close to make changes and still retain plenty of the details. Small screenshots really suck.

    I'm going to have alot of color reflections so I'm going to have to desaturate the greens/yellows so they don't mess things up. I've also noticed several patches of noise (especially on that left pauldron) that I'm going to have to fight with at some point. I'd like to make that daedric bow 'bound' if I can. At the moment I have no idea how the final image is going to look, should be fun...

    2. Started by cutting the character out. No chance of using the background eraser tool properly with such a detailed background so I've done it freestyle. Holding shift between clicks to erase in nice straight lines makes the job a little easier but daedric has plenty of awkward angles so it's slow going. I've left some of the details until later such as around the quiver of arrows because I still don't know what the background is going to look like..

    Then I've added my first adjustment layer (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue Saturation) and reduced the yellows in the image by 50% to wash that nice summer day away...

    He's looking a little more menacing already, but to go much further I'm going to have to settle on a nice background for him. I've already flipped the image horizontally once, this is because it tricks my own eyes into seeing the image for the 'first time' and it's a method I use more frequently the more changes I make to ensure I'm not making a mess...

    3. So Nelaf came forward with a nice image I could use for the actor. It's a nice dungeon, lots of cyan which I do rather like...

    As you can see when we add our actor to the background something isn't right. The background is far to dark and the screenshot for the actor was taken on a bright Skyrim day...

    ...I could spend some time trying to put this right but the more I mess with the image the worse it would likely look. Luckily our dungeon background has a set of stairs in the bottom right hand corner. I'm going to pretend that's leading up to the world above and create a light source for our actor...

    Photoshop has its own set of tools for creating light but everytime I've used it I'm unhappy with the results so I'm going to create my own light for this image. Firstly I'll create a new layer in photoshop and select the polygonal lasso tool. Then I'm going to create a cone of light like this...

    Once I've made my selection I don't want to create hard edges so I go to Select->Modify->Feather and enter a value of 20 for a nice spread of 'light'. I then use the paint bucket to fill my selection with white, it now looks like this...

    Crap yes? But once we take the 'light' layers opacity down to 10% the actor starts to look like he belongs in the image a little more. The cone of light will likely need reshaping (or doing over completely) to set the stage but the principles all the same so that's what I'll go for.

    A 48 hour break and I'm ready to start playing about more...

    I've ditched the 'cone of light' for now so I can work more on blending in the actor. Again, I don't want to fight with the characters lighting if I can help it so I decide to try and bring up the backgrounds lighting to match it. (Image->Adjustments->Brightness/Contrast->Brightness +100)

    I also add a 2px blur to the background so that the 'camera' is more focused on the actor...

    The actor still contains too many yellows and greens so I open my current hue/saturation adjustment layer and completely wipe the greens and yellows which almost turns the character to greyscale (apart from the subtle daedric reds)

    It's about now that I need some lighting in order to continue. Rather than a cone of light I decide to get trendy and do spikes of light instead (sunbeam style). I select my lasso tool again and draw some spikes. Then fill the selection with white same as with the previous cone...

    Reduce the opacity to 20% and we get...

    With all the light shining on that armor I want to create a little bit of reflection/glow so I duplicate my characters layer and set it behind the original. I then add a gaussian blur of 7px for a slight glow effect...

    The light is coming from the north-east with this image so I basically have to delete the areas that wouldn't reflect light with the eraser. I realise at this stage that the actor is also a little too sharp for the end product and add a 0.5px gaussian blur to him to soften the details a little bit...

    Time for a new adjustment layer. (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels) The character has too many blacks coming through so I tone them down with the Levels sliders. I also tweak the angle of the background layer a little more.

    There's a mysterious blue light in this dungeon and at the moment the actor isn't really reflecting that. Another adjustment layer for the actor (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Color Balance).

    Sliders for the midtones...

    And a little touch more cyan for the highlights...

    Lots of other things we could do at this point (glowing eyes/more daedric glow/bound bow) but due to lack of interest with this project (lol) I'm just going to round things off.

    I select all and hit 'copy merged' to grab all my layers and paste the complete image. I duplicate this new layer and set it to overlay to get the colors to pop...

    I then add a 6px gaussian blur to my top layer to bleed the colors together...

    I then flatten the image (Layer->Flatten Image) and add a filter that I'm rather fond of to catch some details. (Filter->Brush Strokes->Angled Strokes)

    Flip my image horizontally a final time (so the bow is in the correct hand).

    Tone image brightness down a little and add a 1px fim grain (filter->artistic->film grain) for a little noise...

    And I'm done!

  • Member
    December 14, 2013
    Finally! I've been waiting for this for ages man, but it's worth it!
  • Member
    December 14, 2013

    Ha! Well if someone can donate a nice dungeon image for him to live in I'll be most pleased...

  • Member
    December 14, 2013

    I love this so much! I suck at using CS2 and stuff, so this is a massive help!

  • Member
    December 14, 2013

    What about this?

    Dungeon Passage by nilTrace

    Here's the actual link to it though....http://niltrace.deviantart.com/art/Dungeon-Passage-280728956

  • Member
    December 14, 2013

    Yeah I think I can make that work...

  • Member
    December 15, 2013
    Speaking of versions, can they all do the same thing? Or would I need CS4 or something more advanced to do this kind of stuff? I only have elements, so I don't know if I need the newest version or not.
  • Member
    December 15, 2013

    My version is CS3 Extended. You can get an old copy of photoshop from the Adobe site I think, it shoud be perfectly serviceable for this kind of thing...

  • Member
    December 17, 2013

    Added Nelafs image and started the lighting...

    It's only when I try to write this all down that I realise how much fannying around I do with images...

  • Member
    December 17, 2013

    It's not in vain though, it looks brilliant mate! And it's teaching me alot of stuff too...I wish I could always bugger around with images, but I just suck at it, but now I'm getting better thanks to this!

    This is better than some of the best Photoshop tutorials I've actually seen....