PHOTOSHOP
Matte Painting
This tutorial
is actually a "making of" where I explain how I proceeded to achieve
this matte painting.
I use a Wacom Intuos² A4 board, if you don't have any graphic board this
is going to be hard but not impossible.
At each step of the matte painting, useless to remind you to create a new layer
so that the work will be easier and mistakes avoided !
First of all, find a good res picture. I chose to use a picture of a house I found on the web. You can find very nice pics for free, just look around ! | |
The first step is to isolate the house by putting it on a separate layer and by erasing the rest.
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Now you need a new background. You can either find a good pic, either paint one yourself.
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Put the sky behind the house (by putting the sky layer under the house layer), and apply a little perspective effect to give more depth to the sky, make it less flat.
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Now look at the edges of the house. They still are the color of the original sky. We'll fix that. |
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Using the magic wand
tool, select the empty zone of the house layer. Then, Select > Modify
> Expand, to make your selection wider. Pick a value that includes
the zone we need to color correct. |
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Still using Hue / Saturation and also Color Balance, adjust the colors of the house and sky layers so that they perfectly blend together. |
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Now we want to get rid of that palm tree that hides a part of the house. That tree has nothing to do there since we want to create a morbid mood.
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Why not add a lightning
bolt to make the scene a little more disturbing ? |
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Paint dead trees behind the house, or use existing ones from pictures. Of course, make the colors and luminosity match. |
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The fun part, now
! Let's break down the house. Well, not all of it. |
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Don't be afraid to
add broken parts ! The house is supposed to still be standing, so don't
go too far. |
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Make it look dirty. First of all, the windows. I used a non regular brush and painted the windows with a matte color. Then, change the transfer mode of the dirt layer to make sure that dirt and windows blend nicely together. For this example I chose the Luminosity mode. |
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Repeat that step,
only do it on the entire house. Paint with a dirtier color and set your
layer to Multiply. |
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Here, the porch, zoomed in. |
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The last step is to create a Levels adjustment layer to get the final contrast of the matte painting. |
Here it is ! You can compare the original image and the matte painting !
Click on the image for a highres version.