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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.
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%.
Color Range
10 I didn’t want the Coca-Cola branding on the bottle, 11 Now I added my JPEG of a
so I chose the Clone Stamp tool, selected the red areas and tree, applying a layer mask again and
Color Range is a great way of painted over the logo. I also wanted to add some foliage and removing the background using brushes
grabbing a single object from a scene or moss, so I dropped in images of both, then used a layer mask of various sizes. I copied the shadows
photograph based on a selection of for the moss, and positioned/rotated some of the foliage from the bottle, scaling them down and
colours. I’ve used it to select the white around the bottle. applying them to the tree’s base. For
spray of water, but it’s equally effective on lighting, I used the Dodge tool lightly on
things like clouds or fire. Play with the
the right and the Burn tool on the left.
fuzziness control to get different effects.
12 My landscape was looking 13 It still felt a bit empty, so I 14 I also had a photo of a white
empty so I added some animals: fish, added more objects. One was a shoebox, so added it to my piece. I used
ducks, birds, rabbits and cows. Because mushroom – I used the Magic Wand to Levels to give it better definition and, on
it’s a surreal image I could use them at get rid of its photo’s background image. a new layer, drew some shadow around
any size I wanted. For shadows and I used the shadows and lighting trick it. I duplicated the box and scaled it
lighting I used the same technique as again, and added my grass and moss to down to make a second, smaller one.
for the tree. help the elements blend. 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.