How I Made Snowy Stable (Advanced)

[graficalicus]

Here's a step-by-step of how I made my Snowy Stable image using Photoshop Elements 6. The full size image is linked at the bottom, and the complete tutorial with all images is in my blog here. This forum limits postings to only include 4 images, so it's tough to illustrate everything. (Also, I use several tools from a few of my actions sets for Elements, but you don't need them to complete the tutorial - it does make things easier, though.)

The original image was posted as a challenge here, so that's my starting image.

The first thing I wanted to do was make it an evening or nighttime image, so I simply created a solid color adjustment with a dark blue color, changed its blend to mode to "Color", reduced the opacity a bit, and grouped it with the original.

I also wanted to pull down the saturation and brightness of the overall image, so I created a Hue/Saturation adjustment and pulled the saturation slider way down to the left. I also adjusted the Lightness, also pulling it to the left.

I created a new layer, reset my foreground and background colors by pressing <D> on my keyboard, and ran a Clouds filter (Filters>Render>Clouds). This, of course, covered everything up, so I turned off the visibility of this layer for a minute while I did the next step....

Next, the trees and sky had to go. The sky didn't have much drama, and the trees seemed to distract a bit from the central focus - the stable. Isolating these things was pretty simply with the selection tools in PSE6 - just choose your favorite, and make the selection.

I turned the Clouds layer back on with my selection still active, and clicked it to make it the active layer.

I needed a mask to cover the sky area but reveal the stable, so I ran the Layer Mask-Reveal Selection action from Handy Actions. This instantly created my mask, revealing the clouds and hiding the areas I didn't want them to cover up:



The clouds look a little - - not right - - though. They have no perspective, and just seem to be plopped down on top (which they were, after all...!). I want to give them perspective, but not mess up my mask. Easy - simply turn off the link between the mask and the layer it's masking. This allows you to Transform the clouds layer without affecting the mask, so what's hidden and revealed stays hidden and revealed while you distort the layer contents.



Click the clouds thumbnail and press <Ctrl>+<T> to open the Transform tool. Next, right-click somewhere inside the box on your image and select "Perspective" from the pop out menu. Zoom way out and drag one of the top corner handles out until you reach the perspective you want.

I added another solid color adjustment layer to the top of my stack (again, blend mode changed to "Color" and opacity tweaked to suit the image) to give an overall bluish tint to the image.

Now for some snow on the ground. It's another simple technique. Choose the Magic Wand, make sure the "Add to selection" option is on in the toolbar at the top, reduce the tolerance to 20 ~ 25 or so, and make sure "contiguous" is ticked on. Now click a few places in the grass to make a rough selection. You don't want to select all of the grass, just some areas where snow would have accumulated:


Create a new layer with this selection still active, and fill with White (Edit>Fill, or if your background color is still set at White, press <Alt>+<Backspace>). Blur it slightly with Gaussian Blur (Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur) at a setting of about 1. There's your snow cover:



Finally, for the falling snow. I simply ran the "Snow" action, from FunFotoFX and it was done for me.


As a final step, I used the "Line Frame" action from B&W Laband the image was complete:

Click for the fullsize image:

[Bayla]

Graffi,

Thanks. I noticed this one on the PCEC site this morning. I particularly like how you did the clouds with perspective.

Bayla

[Cmcburnett]

Graffi, thank you so much for sharing your tutorial w/us. I have saved the tutorial and hope to use it soon.