88 Technique

Creative skills Hyper-real images

Photoshop
Combine
photos to
create
surrealist
landscapes
The hyper-real look is
back in style. Mike
Harrison adds a touch of
the surreal in his
compositions
Photo-manipulation has taken many forms over the years. The
latest trend involves using several stock images to create a
composition. There are a number of techniques that are useful for
this, but the most important thing to remember is that you need to
pay a great deal of attention to detail if you want to convince the
viewer that they’re looking at a realistic landscape, no matter how
surreal your work becomes.
You can only do this by studying the real world around
you to get a feel for the factors that will affect the look of your piece,
such as lighting, shadows and colours. This project demonstrates
how I combine stock images to construct a landscape, outlining
some simple but extremely useful techniques that will help you in
your own compositions.

Mike Harrison Time needed

A designer and freelances for a 3-4 hours
illustrator from number of clients. Skills
Plymouth in the UK, See www.destill.net Blending
Mike Harrison to find out more. multiple images
Layer masks
Realistic
shadows and
lighting

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01 Before you start it’s a good idea to gather a bunch of

stock images together. As well as saving time, it keeps the
creativity flowing because you don’t have to keep stopping to
search for imagery while you’re actually making the piece.

02 I started my composition by 03 I wanted to incorporate a

creating a document about 18x9 inches
at 300DPI, then dragged in a landscape
JPEG. I scaled it up to fit the canvas,
applied a Sharpen filter and upped the
contrast slightly to make it pop.
bottle, but the photo I found had a
background. I cut the bottle out using
the Pen tool and dropped it into the
main document. I had to scale it up
slightly and do some more sharpening.

04 Next I blended my bottle with my background. I created a layer mask on the

bottle and brushed some of the bottom so that it blended into the grass. I then brought
in a PSD of some more grass, resizing and positioning it where I just brushed.

05 It’s important when creating a photorealistic composition that you work out
where the light source is so you can accurately apply shadows and lighting. I decided
that in my background image the light was coming from the right. I added a shadow to
the base of the bottle by creating a circle using the Ellipse tool, Gaussian Blurring it by
35, and setting its opacity to 80%.

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 90 Technique
Creative skills Hyper-real images

06 Next I did more work on the lighting of the bottle.

First I Ctrl-clicked on the bottle layer to create a selection
around it. Then I created a layer with the layer mode set to
Overlay, grabbed a brush of about size 200 and gently brushed
the right edge. This gave the bottle an instant boost of light.

07 While working on the light, I also took the Gradient

tool, set the gradient from white to transparent and, from the
top right, created an extra boost of Sun to reinforce the lighting
set-up. Then I duplicated that layer and set the new layer to
Overlay to boost the colours.

09 Next I dropped in a picture of a lake, just below the

bottle, and cut it out again using the Pen tool. Then I brought
my image of grass in again, scaling it and placing it around the
edges of the lake to blend it in. I also added some shine to the
water using a brush on a new layer set to Overlay.

08 Next I wanted to add a

waterfall coming out of the bottle and
desaturate the bottle top. I found JPEGs
of a couple of waterfalls, brought them
in and used Select>ColorRange to
choose only the white of the spray.
Then I added layer masks to both and
blended them coming out of the bottle.

Color Range
Color Range is a great way of
grabbing a single object from a scene or
photograph based on a selection of
colours. I’ve used it to select the white
spray of water, but it’s equally effective on
things like clouds or fire. Play with the
fuzziness control to get different effects.
10 I didn’t want the Coca-Cola branding on the bottle,
so I chose the Clone Stamp tool, selected the red areas and
painted over the logo. I also wanted to add some foliage and
moss, so I dropped in images of both, then used a layer mask
for the moss, and positioned/rotated some of the foliage
around the bottle.
11 Now I added my JPEG of a
tree, applying a layer mask again and
removing the background using brushes
of various sizes. I copied the shadows
from the bottle, scaling them down and
applying them to the tree’s base. For
lighting, I used the Dodge tool lightly on
the right and the Burn tool on the left.

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12 My landscape was looking
empty so I added some animals: fish,
ducks, birds, rabbits and cows. Because
it’s a surreal image I could use them at
any size I wanted. For shadows and
lighting I used the same technique as
for the tree.
13 It still felt a bit empty, so I
added more objects. One was a
mushroom – I used the Magic Wand to
get rid of its photo’s background image.
I used the shadows and lighting trick
again, and added my grass and moss to
help the elements blend.
14 I also had a photo of a white
shoebox, so added it to my piece. I used
Levels to give it better definition and, on
a new layer, drew some shadow around
it. I duplicated the box and scaled it
down to make a second, smaller one.
I then added some grass and moss.

15 I thought it would be a nice touch to have a rainbow running from the 16 The end was in sight! Now I added some more detail
distance into the lake. I drew the shape in the screenshot using the Pen tool, added in the way of trees, plants and flowers, dropped in from other
a Gaussian Blur of 75 and set the blending mode to Screen. Finally, I toned down the images, scaled down and scattered accordingly. I even put
opacity until I was happy with the look. some flowers coming out of my stack of shoeboxes.

18 To add some more depth and 19 I finished off my composition

body to the landscape, I put some
mountains and hills far in the
background, masking their bottom
sections so they sat behind the trees.
I also applied a colour overlay with the
17 I added some wrappers and crisp packets to the tree. colour behind them, and an opacity of
It was important to duplicate them to different sizes so the around 50%.
arrangement didn’t look too uniform and planned out.
by adding more details, including birds
and foliage. Finally, at the very top of the
layer stack I created a Brightness/
Contrast adjustment layer with both
sliders set to 5 for extra impact.

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