8 Step GUIDE Blend Images and Create Composites Like a Pro with Photoshop

In this video I'm going to show you how to create this design step by step. But more importantly, I'll show you the exact details that make your work look professional. So we're going to build this fantasy scene step by step with each other, how to correct the colors, how to correct the lighting, how to paint the fog, the atmosphere, and how to paint light precisely. And finally, how to put the final touches and color grading. So without any further ado, let's dig into business. Hello everyone, welcome to my channel. My name is Noor and this is Noor Art's channel. All right guys, before we start, let's have a look at the final output. The main idea behind this piece was simple. I wanted to create like a dark cinematic fantasy mood design. Something that looks mysterious, epic, and realistic at the same time. So the focal point is the castle. I wanted to focus on the storytelling of the visual by guiding your eye using the rider with the road and the moonlight to drive the entire lighting direction. Because whenever you are building a scene like this, you are not just placing images together. You are actually directing light. Now it's time to build the design step by step with each other. You will find all the images that I'm going to use in the link in the description so that you can download them and follow along with me. I'll create a new project with these dimensions, 4000 widths and the height should be 2250. The coloring is 16 bit to give me flexibility in coloring and press create. I like to start with not white canvas because this irritates my eye and it's a good idea actually to start with a gray color in the background if you are making a dark scene. So we're going to start with the castle. Let's bring it to Photoshop here and I really like this perspective of the castle you know because this makes it like it looks huge and gigantic. Can you see the vertical lines are not straight because of the perspective is three point perspective. So let's start by choosing the object selection tool and from here I'm going to choose select subject but with the cloud option and then let's press select subject. This gives me a really detailed selection depending on Adobe AI for selecting the object as you can see right now. Then create a mask very nice and then we can simply use the hard rounded brush and paint over these areas because we're going to need them later. Very nice. I'm not caring about the lighting right now I'm just caring about putting images together and making the main focal points and then we will care about the lighting and the color matching. So let's bring the road put it right here I guess just okay I guess we need to make the castle smaller. Just right here. Very nice. The road should be right here and then we can create a mask. Using the mask I'm going to just paint over these areas. So let's just mask this part and we will use the grass brush to mask it properly later but I'm just gonna now right now I'm just putting everything in position trying to get the perspective and the composition right. So I'm just press alt and duplicate this layer like this and let's use the grass brush. I'll leave all the brushes as well as a gift for you in the description so that you can follow along with me as well. The brush options I'm going to remove the transfer and the color dynamics because I just want the brush only. I just want to mask this part using the brush here as well maybe we can make it smaller here. Press X to toggle between the light and black to paint with the grass right. Let me show you the end result here. Can you see that this effect this you can never get this effect without using the grass brushes or something similar. All right. So let's mask this part as well like this which will make it look like it's part of the design or the ground you know so very gentle. This is the number one thing that differentiate between the professional artist and the beginner one. The selections should be perfectly done without any fringes without any white edges or something like this. Not bad. Let's select all the layers press CTRL T and we can now press CTRL T to make it bigger like this. I'm not sure about the castle but maybe the castle needs to be shifted a little bit to the left. Maybe it should be smaller so something like this should be rotated that is good and let's move this to the road. Let's make it bigger. Now I'm doing my best to get the composition right because this is the most tricky part in this visual. That's very nice. I intentionally wanted to create this design using the least number of images possible because when you are just starting for manipulation you are having a lot of ambitious ideas but you get stuck because you are not skilled enough to execute these ideas. That's why I always recommend you to start with simple ideas with low number of images to blend together. This will make your progress gradual and you will be improved step by step because the last thing we want is you lose your passion. The next step we are going to get the horse, the man with the horse and let's put him here. Press ENTER and we are going to select it using as well the select subject tool with the cloud option. This makes a really nice selection and actually it saves us a lot of time. So let's create a mask and now press CTRL T to make it smaller so let's put him right here. That's very nice. Now I guess everything looks nice. If we use the composition rule, the rule of third which is dividing your canvas into three by three grid. So something like this and here the main focal points should be in these four points and this rule of third is really good in terms of showing your subject and at the same time showing its relation with the environment. It shows you the whole context. Let's bring the sky which will be the main source of light. Let's put it right here right where it belongs. Maybe we can make it smaller. Very nice. Now the composition is solid. The next step is going to be correcting the lightness and the color. So let's start by being organized and we'll put everything into a group and let's start by the sky. I really like how the sky looks right now. Just small tweak in the coloring. I'm going to use the hue saturation, create a cleaning mask and just going to tweak its color more towards cyanish color. That's it. Here's before and here's after. Maybe give it some saturation. Just a touch. Very nice. Let's correct the colors and the lightness of the castle. I'll start by creating curves adjustment layer, create a clipping mask and now we want the castle to be dark but at the same time we need to see its details. So the last thing I want you to make is to burn it like this because this is a mistake. I see a lot of beginners doing, you know, we cannot see any details into the shadows and that is not good. You need to make it dark but at the same time don't just burn it. So let's make it dark like this, maybe open up the shadows a little bit and that's enough I guess. We can tweak it later. Next when creating any kind of night scenes, you should know that the elements will not have so much high saturation because we are having a lot of yellows right here in the castle. So we need to get rid of this. We'll do this using hue saturation, let's create a hue saturation adjustment layer and let's decrease the saturation a little bit. Not to the point where it turns into complete gray but just a touch of yellow will be enough. Next let's correct the coloring and I'll just do this using color balance. You can use selective color, you can use even curves, whatever you want but color balance is the easiest one to use. I'm just going to add a touch of cyan and a touch of blue. That's it I guess. We don't need more than this, let's see, maybe a touch of green. Go to the shadows, add some blues, some cyan, not so much, maybe some green, let's see, no, this is enough. Now let's go to the highlights, a touch of cyan and a touch, now let's see, now we are talking. Look at this, before, after, before and after. Now it's blending in a better way, blended seamlessly. So let's see, here is before everything, here is after. Quick pause, if you are interested in creating amazing visuals using photo manipulations like this, I have good news for you because my course, The Ultimate Guide to Photo Manipulation is now released and you can find it in the link in the description. In this course you will learn how to create advertising visuals and photo manipulations like this using all the techniques that I'm explaining all the time into a practical way like 13 projects fully narrated in English, fully explained in details. Not only that, we will talk about an introduction to marketing because creating visuals is a little piece of the big puzzle, which is the marketing game. So you need to understand the basics of marketing to create visuals that sells and how to apply the branding guideline into your visuals. And we talked about visual communication meaning and understanding the brief and the elements of the brief, the graphic design principles, hierarchy, contrast, proximity, balance, etc. And how to create a design from scratch, brainstorming and making the ideas from scratch, gathering the images, the references and all this stuff. And finally, the practical part which is 13 fully explained applications into photo manipulation. And we have a section dedicated for using the basics of AI to help you get better results in faster times. And finally, how to create a presentation to show the effort that you put into your work. A link of the course is in the description. And let's get back to the video. Very nice. We're trying to do the same thing into the road. But I guess the ground and the castle are having the same base coloring, you know, they are kind of similar colors. So we can just take the curves, the same curve, the same color balance layer and press alt and drag them, take a copy and put them here. And we can take another copy and put it into the other part. Let's see. Looks good. Maybe the curves need some tweaks. So let's make this darker, maybe increase the blacks. This is a tricky part, by the way, getting the lights right. It's not easy. I guess this is not bad. Maybe into the colors we should increase the blues, see, not too much. Maybe into the shadows. This is very tricky, guys, you need to be careful because we don't want to ruin the whole visual. Make it darker, anything like this would be good. And then we can simply duplicate the same two layers, press alt and duplicate them and put them right here. Now, the next step, we're going to correct also the coloring and the lightness of the horse. So let's do this using curves as well, make it dark and same time open up the shadows a little bit. Now let's create another color balance and do the same thing. Don't forget to create a clipping mask, something like this. Go to the shadows, add also a touch of blue, a touch of cyan. Let's zoom out to see, always zooming in and zooming out to look if everything is going well. Okay. I feel like here we have a lot of greens, we need to get rid of this green. So we can do this using another hue saturation adjustment layer, create a clipping mask and then decrease the saturation of the whole image. This is better. Now we're okay. We can duplicate this layer and put it to the other one. Very nice. Now the horse, the man with the horse needs a shadow, obviously. So let's create a shadow for this man. But before that, let's decrease the lightness of the man a little bit. Okay. To make a shadow, I will just use the selection of the man layer by pressing control and pressing into the mask from here and then create a solid color adjustment layer, which will take the same shape of the man with the horse. And then I'll take any color from the ground. So something maybe like this, of course a dark one, something around this area. Yeah. And then press, okay. And press control T, try to put it into the ground. But at first we need to get this layer behind the horse layer, press control T and try to match its shape with the shape of the shadow that it should have. So maybe something like this, I guess. Press okay. The color was affected with the color balance adjustment layer, so it needs to be edited. So something, I guess, like this, and we can change the blending mode of the layer to multiply. Yeah. And then make it multiply. This gives the shadow some color, you know. Very nice. So something like this looks cool, but we need to soften the edges a little bit. So let's go to the mask. Press into the mask from here. And from the properties panel, we will increase the feathering, something like this looks better. And we can as well create a contact shadow, which is the shadow that is resulting from two surfaces connected to each other. So I'm going to use the soft rounded brush, make it smaller. And using the same solid color adjustment layer, I'm just going to paint over the areas where the horse is touching the ground. Just subtle touches will be good. Maybe use a brush and just give it some, you know, ambient shadow or something like this. Very nice. Here is before, and here is after. Not everything looks good, but, you know, we should remove it from here, see. Yeah, not bad. Now everything looks good in terms of color matching, saturation matching, and lightness matching. But the image looks very flat, not interesting at all. So the next step, we're going to paint the lights of the moon into each element. So let's start by the castle. And the main advantage we're having here is that the castle itself was having almost the same light distribution that we want. So to show you here, the castle was having the same lightness, the same shadows that we needed. We only just want to emphasize or increase the intensity of the lightness and remove this yellow tint from it, okay? So we will use this for our sake by creating a new solid color adjustment layer and choose the light color will be something like this, create a timing mask, and I guess this is very high. So let's choose the color, something like this. I'm just going to choose it from the clouds in the sky because, you know, it's really tricky to have the light intensity right, because the last thing we want to have is to have a very high lights like this, which is lower than the main source of light, which is the moon, okay? So we need something like the nearest clouds to the moon or something around this area will be okay. And then change its blending mode into screen. And next, I'm going to use Blend F to remove the light effect from the shadows. So double click into the layer and remove the effect from here. Just moving this slider to remove the light effect from the shadow areas. And we can smoothen this transition by pressing Alt and pressing into this cursor and trying to make this really smooth. Can you see that? This looks really, really nice. We can increase it like this. Here we go. Having light effect the same as we want it. Look at this. There is before and here is after. We can pump this even more, but for now, this looks okay for me. We can, of course, remove this light effect from certain areas. So let's bring the soft rounded brush and remove the effect from this area, for example, using the mask and increase the flow of the brush. I'm just using, going to remove it from here, maybe from the edges, these edges here as well. Maybe soften it in these areas. So yeah, this is very nice. We will do the same thing into the ground part. So let's take the same solid color adjustment layer and duplicate it and put it into this area. And it immediately give us great result, but we will tweak the blend if values even more because we want different distribution. So something like this. First of all, we need to do something like this. We want kinda harsh highlights. So the moon is giving us harsh highlights. So we don't want it to be very soft, you know, something like this. That's okay. And let's use the mask to paint the lights in the areas that we want. So in these grass areas, of course, here looks really nice. Maybe we can soften it like this. And we will remove it from these areas. Same thing, yeah, immediately looks very nice. Let's see, there is before, there is after, before, after. Really nice. We will leave this part because this should be even darker. So we can get to the curves. As I'm always saying, guys, this is a never ending process. You will tweak everything until you finish the whole visual, you know. You will always change things. Here, for example, this area should be darker. So let's create another curves adjustment layer. You will figure out things in the go, you know. Create a clipping mask and control I and let's just paint over this area. But we will change its blending mode into luminosity because we don't want to affect the coloring. We just want to affect on the brightness. Before, really nice. Next, let's paint the highlights into the man with the horse. And we'll take the same layer, adjustment layer, and duplicate it by pressing alt and drag it, drop it into the man. And we will do the same blend if thing we have done before. So like this. And then press alt right to distribute the light. And press control I. Using the soft rounded brush, I'm going to paint these areas here. This should not have some highlights. This is maybe some other highlights. Yeah, this is very high. That looks really decent. Now it's time to paint the absolute highlights. And for this, I'm going to use the graphic tablet and special brushes. So for this one, I'm going to use this brush I'm using all the time of Lumiere. I like this brush because it gives me like some texture into the highlights. So let's create a clipping mask. And let's choose its color to be something like this. Press okay, change its blending mode into screen. And we can see its color is very saturated and bright. So let's just take this color. Yeah, it's okay. Press control I to invert the mask. And let me show you what I mean by the texture. Can you see this texture? This makes the highlights realistic when painting them using this brush. Okay, so I'm just going to make the brush smaller. And let's paint the absolute highlights. Follow the form of the object and try to make it realistic. This can be improved by practice, nothing else. And if you don't know how to paint light and shadow, I have a full video explaining this. You'll find it into my channel. Just search for painting light, Nour art, and you'll find it. For the horse, let's mix this here. Maybe here as well. Yes, this is not. Maybe some touches here as well. This is no. Okay, that looks nice. We can also paint some highlights into the grass layer by duplicating the same layer. And put it right here. The clipping mask. And remove everything from this brush control bar. And using maybe the same brush. Let's see. No, it doesn't look right. Okay, let's remove everything. And using this grass brush, I'm going to decrease the flow. And let's paint some grass highlights. And change the angle of the brush using the arrow keys. Looks really nice. Let's paint some highlights here as well. Now we're talking. Let's see. Here is before. Here is after. Here is before. Here is after. It adds a lot to the scene. Now let's paint some highlights into the castle. So I guess you know the process. Let's bring the same layer. And put it into the castle. And let's paint the highlights. Press control A and into the mask. I'm just going to press alt backspace to remove everything from it. And using the same texture, the brush we've used before into the horse. This one. So let's double click into the layer. And remove the highlights from the absolute darks. Yeah, something like this is really nice. And now we can paint freely. Without affecting on the absolute blacks. So we can just give it a brush stroke like this. Here as well. Here. Maybe here. This edge of course. And here. The areas that are facing the moonlight directly. These are the areas that should be affected the most. Yeah. Now we are done. Let's see. Before. After. I guess this is very intense. That is nice. Now the image looks good. But at the same time. Kind of flat. It needs another color. To be cinematic. To be artistic. So we will create some fire lights here. And here. And at the same time. I guess we can have like another source of light. Should be outside of the canvas. That is reflecting some orange subtle lights into this area. Okay. So let's make this. Creating another solid color adjustment layer. Let's give it some, you know, orangy color like this. Create a clipping mask. Of course change its blending mode into maybe a linear dodge. Or color dodge. It's good. But we need to change of course the light to something like this maybe. And then double click into the layer. Use the same blend if technique. Press alt to split the cursor. Now we're done. And that's. I'm just focusing on to this area. Never mind about this part. Then press ctrl i. And using the polygonal lasso tool. I'm going to select this part only. Then paint on it. Using the mask of course. Press into the mask. Press ctrl backspace. See this is very high. We should also remove it from here. So let's remove it from here. I guess we need to paint this part manually. Let's just paint over edges here. And remove it this area. Just want the areas that are facing this. Okay. So let's remove it from here. Maybe here as well. Increase the opacity of the brush. Let's decrease it from these areas. Just want a subtle orange touch. We can as well decrease the fill. No. Just opacity. This is nice. Maybe we can paint here as well. Yeah. This is not bad. Next let's put the fire right here. And for this I'm going to take this fire and open it into a new Photoshop project. And use the same select subject. I'm always using this option recently because it gives me really, really good selection. And it saves a lot of time for me. It looks really nice. Create a selection. Create a mask. And boom. We are done. So let's take this. I guess right click convert it into a smart object first. And let's put it right here. Press control T. And let's make it very, very small. Something like this. So we will correct the color and the saturation. And for this I'm going to use curves only. Create curves adjustment layer. Create a clipping mask. Let's make it dark like this. And open its shadows like that. We are going to use the curves to correct its color. So let's give it some cyan. And at the same time let's go to blues and give it some blue. And here we go. Do the shadows as well. And let's get back to the greens. Now we're done. So it's here as before. And here as after. First looks blended. But the fire lost its brightness. So I'm going to use the same brush to mask the curves adjustment layer to reveal back the fire brightness. So like this. This is the first step. The second step I'm going to paint some foggy lights around it. So I'm going to use solid color adjustment layer with almost very desaturated bright yellowish color without any clipping mask. And change its blending mode into screen. And for this I'm going to use a fog brush. Select this one. Yeah. Let's paint some fog around this area. Increase the opacity again. And we can paint like, you know. We're going to paint some fog right here. So this should be a foggy scene. A foggy scene will have always foggy lights. Because what is fog? Fog is actually the particles into the air reflecting the lights. Right? So we should have these particles into the whole scene. I guess this color is not good. Maybe let's make it more orangey reddish one. So yeah. We can duplicate this part. And let's just duplicate it and put it right here. Simple as this. Very nice. Now we should paint some highlights reflecting these lights into the castle itself. So we'll do this by duplicating this solid color layer. Remove everything from it. And then use any texture brush which will be this brush as well. And we should paint some reflected lights into the castle. So at first, we should paint some reflected lights here. Oops. This is very high. Decrease the flow of the brush here. Here. This is also very high. One touch here. Press shift and press into this area. And then let's erase it. Should be the highest intensity at the closest point to the source. And we should also paint some touches right here. It should be, you know, very linear. I guess this is... Maybe we can paint also here. And yeah. I should do the same thing into this part. But it has a moonlight. So we will try here as well. I guess it will look good. Yeah. Because the moonlight is bright. So we should paint it over this edge. That's it. I guess we need to get back to this. Because I really don't like these very sharp edges. So we can get rid of them using the mask from the castle mask. So from here, press select and mask. And let's try to shift the edges. Yeah. Like this. It's way better. Maybe if I value the edges a little bit more. We can also have like a lantern here. The man should be having it hanged from the horse. So let's take it and open it into a new project. Do the same selection again using the cloud. Select subject and create a mask. Then right click convert it into a smart object. Stake it and put it into our composite. Let's control T. Make it smaller. Oops. It is right here. Let's put it into the horse group. Because we are very organized. Right. Control T. Let's make it really small. Here. Perfect. Now we can mask this area. It should be hanged somewhere like this. We can now mask this area. Now let's correct its color and light. Quickly using curves. So I'm just going to create curves adjustment layer. Make it really dark. Open the shadow a little bit. Go to the reds. And add some cyans to the blues. Add some blues. Yeah. Very nice. Then we will remove the effect of the curves from the fire like this. And then we will do the same thing we have done with the castle lights. Using reddish color. Change its mode to screen. Control I. And then using maybe this fog brush again. Paint some, you know, reflected lights like this. Paint some highlights into the horse. Using this, I'll duplicate from the same layer. Create a clipping mask. Just trying to remove everything. And let's use the same texture brush we have used in every part into the visual. I'm going to paint some highlights with the flow of the brush. And let's do it like this. Very subtle. Now we are talking. Everything looks cool. And it's time to add some fog into the design. So let's create a solid color adjustment layer. And let's hide it for a moment. And let's choose a dark desaturated blue. So something like this. Which we will use into creating the fog effect. So this color I guess, yeah, looks good. So how we're going to do the fog effect is simple. Just going to paint it using the fog brush like this. But at the same time try to make it using some flow or rhythm. It shouldn't be like very random. So the next part should be erasing. Be careful because you want it to have a good look. And mysterious. And if this looks hard to you, you can use some fog overlays. Something maybe like this here. Yeah, this is going to be easier. Change its blend mode to screen. And let's put it here. Press ctrl u to change its color. Press colorize. Give it some blue-siennish color. Decrease its saturation. Decrease its brightness. Press okay. Let's hide this for a moment. Yeah, this should be really good as well. So we can create a mask. And remove some parts. Just erase these areas. And we're good to go. Now we are talking. I guess we're good right now. Let's just decrease the effect of the fog. And create a new layer. And then press alt ctrl shift e to bring everything into one layer. And right click, convert it into smart object. Now it's time to apply camera raw filter. So let's go to filter and camera raw filter. Here we're going to put the final coloring effects. So let's start by increasing the contrast, which gives us interest to the design. And maybe increase the highlights as well. What about the shadows? Let's open up the shadows. And darken the absolute blacks. And for the temperature, I'm not sure. Maybe a touch of yellow and a touch of magenta. What about the vibrance? Yeah, here's before, here's after. I guess we should also give it some final dreamy effect. Using a new layer, change its blending mode into screen. And using a really special brush called magic, magic 2. I'm going to put some magic touches. So I'm just going to pick this color and give it some touches. Like this. And then pick this color and give it some touches. Just magic touches, you know. Here as well. The moon, give it one big touch. And into the castle itself. But this time I'm going to change its shape to be something like this. Yeah, let's decrease the opacity of this effect until it's really high. Maybe give this one also a touch. Yeah, here is the final result. Here is before and here is after. Yeah, it was a long one, guys. But I really enjoyed doing this one because it's kind of different from my style. My style was always very vibrant colors, very colorful visuals. But this one is kind of moody, cinematic, desaturated colors. You may have noticed that I'm kind of trying to limit myself to not use saturated colors. Yeah, guys, if you like this video and you want more tutorials about photo manipulation, you will find it as mentioned into my course in the link in the description. Yeah, see you soon in next tutorials. Peace.