The Art Group » Discussions


Tutorial: Photoshopping A Background

Tags: #Broken Gallery  #Tutorial 
  • March 22, 2014

    No picture is complete without a background, whether its a simple color gradient or a fully detailed scene. 

    For this quick simple tutorial I've already completed the subject of the picture. For a quick recap of how I go about drawing and coloring my characters check out my previous tutorial HERE

    I'm a huge fan of Skyrim's many snowly fields and mountains. I can get so lost and immersed sometimes as I wander through a snowstorm, eviscerating anything that moves . But as much as I love these winter scenes, they take quite a bit of time patience and experience to draw (I'm lazy). 

    Luckily there's a way around all that, and you wont need much more than basic proficiency with photoshop to do it. Lets get started. 

    For starters, here's the back ground I'd like to use. At first glance it doesn't look like sometime you'd pick to stick your newly drawn character art in front of. For one this picture already has a subject standing right in the middle of it. No worries. With a few tweaks we can fix that. Im going to go ahead and horizontally flip the background image because reasons....

    Next step is to throw in my character. To do that we first have to snip away that white background. Select your magic wand tool and click the white space around the image, then right click and cut it or press delete. 

    Next you'll want to create a new layer and add in the background behind your character. In this piece my background came out to be much smaller than the character so I just expanded the background. Resolution isnt too important to me in this so I don't mind the poor quality at large size.

    So here we have the picture and background together. Looks like shit but we'll fix that. 

    Next up we have to get that noob dragonborn out of the picture. To do that Im going to copy a chunk of the icy ground around him and on a new layer paste it over him like so....

    Now that he's out of the way, merge those cropped pieces of ground into the background layer (right click a layer ---> merge down). I want to tilt the bckground a bit since I think it will look awesome that way.

    To do that Im going to select my background layer then Edit ----> transform ----> rotate ( ctrl+t works also), and Im going to tilt the image clockwise a bit. After that Im going to shrink the canvas size slightly to hide the blank canvas spaces that emerged from shifting the background.

    Next we're going to give our background that nice scenic blur effect. Select Filter --> Blur ---> Lens Blur. You will be able to see a preview of what will happen. Adjust the levels until you're satisfied. I came up with something like this.....

    Its looking a lot better but we're not done yet. At this point Im going to go ahead and merge my character to the background. Next Im going to add some lense flare to emphasis the sunlight breaking through the clouds.

    Make a new layer on top of the newly merged layer and color it pitch black. Next select Filter ---> Render ---> Lens Flare. You should see what I have in the image below. Have 105mm Prime selected and adjust the brightness until you're satisfied. 

    There are a mind boggling number of effects you can add with filters spice up a picture. Lets add a snow storm. Create a new layer on top of everything and again color it black. Select Filter ---> Noise --> Add Noise. Set the bar to 200% and select gaussian noise and monochromatic. 

    Next select Filter --> Blur ---> Gausian Blur to smudge all the noise specks together. Press Ctrl+L to bring up the lighting adjuster. You want your blacks around 120 ish, your mid tones at around 0.75 and your whites at about 170 ish. 

    Select Filter --> Blur --> Motion Blur. Set you distance to about 10 pixels to simulale snow falling and adjust your angle as you like. 

    This video tutorial HERE will explain everything for those of you who got lost.

    Ok. Tying that all together this is what we've got.....

    Its looking great from here. At this point I go about adding minor things here and there to make the character look less out of place and more a part of the scene. 

    I touch up here and there with the dodge tool to add lighting where appropriate. I also repeat the previous step with a low flow air brush set to scatter to add in larger snow flakes in the foreground. 

    I take a very low opacity brush (around 30%) and with pen pressure enabled I add in a very light whisp of breathe.

    ...And before long we arrive at the end product!  With enough practice you'll barely be able to recognize your original background. It took me roughly 40 minutes to arrive at this point ( I work slow, leave me alone).

    Killing and wandering - the two reasons I can't get anything productive done in this game. 

    I hope you enjoyed my quick simple tutorial. Theres way more you can do with photoshop and backgrounds than what I went over. So I encourage any aspiring digital artist to search the web and learn. With enough practice you'll master the basics and move on to more advanced techniques. You might even show up Mason one day!