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Create a Dark Landscape Matte Painting with Photoshop

Hey PSDFANs, In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a misty landscape matte painting with a dark castle. We’ll create a misty scene with the layered mountains and the light from afar. The main technique here is blending with adjustment layers, masking and brushes. There are something basic you should know about contrast, distance, intensity etc, and we’ll dive into all of those in today’s lesson! Final Image As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating: Resources Used In This Tutorial Sky Mountains 1 Mountains 2 Mountains 3 Mountains 4 Castle Birds Step 1 Create a new document in Photoshop with the given settings: Step 2 Open the sky image. Use the Move Tool (V) to drag it into our white canvas, use the Free Transform Tool (Cmd/Ctrl+T) to enlarge it as shown below: Step 3 I used an adjustment layer to darken the sky. Go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves: Step 4 Drag the mountains 1 image into our main document and place it as shown below: Click the second button at the bottom of the Layers Panel to add a mask to this layer. Use a basic, soft brush with black color to erase its sky and mountain part as the screenshot below shows: Step 5 I used an adjustment layer with Clipping Mask to reduce the mountains saturation a little: Step 6 I used Curves (Clipping Mask) to darken the mountains: On this layer mask use a soft black brush with a very low opacity (10-15%) to reduce the effect on the top of the mountains: Step 7 Isolate the mountains 2 image and place it in the foreground: Add a layer mask and use a soft black brush with a very low opacity (10-15%) to erase the top of the mountains as shown below: Step 8 I used Hue/Saturation for these mountains: Step 9 I used Color Balance to add some cyan/blue to these mountains: Step 10 You can see that the mountains contrast does not fit the dark background. I used a Curves adjustment layer to solve it: Step 11 Make a new layer, change the mode to Overlay 100% and fill with 50% gray: Active the Burn Tool (O) with Midtones Range, Exposure about 15-20% to darken a part on the top of a mountain. You can see how I did it with Normal mode and the result with Overlay mode: Step 12 Open the mountains 3 image. Place it over the working document as shown below: Use a layer mask to blend it with another mountains, we need the layered mountains on the left: Step 13 I used Hue/Saturation for these mountains: Step 14 I used Curves to darken them: Step 15 Add the mountains 4 image to our main document: Mask off some parts of the image to get a similar result like below: Step 16 I used Curves to increase the contrast of these mountains.

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Create a Dark Landscape Matte Painting with Photoshop