Day 7: Add the Cliff

Welcome back to day 7 of Thingadailies. Want to play along? The full video is here.

Today's starting point: 6:54

Ending point: 7:47

I have to say, even though I'm doing the equivalent of paint-by-numbers for photomanipulation, I'm really pleased with how this is going.

Let's get on with things! Here's what we started with today:

Step 1: Add fog

Create a new layer (yes, I forgot this the first time through and had to back up), pick a sort of steel blue color, and then use the airbrush tool with a large (500 px) brush and a very low flow (4%) to add some haze to the forest and along the right side.

I'd never really used the airbrush tool before, so I didn't realize you could turn the flow down like that. (Okay, yeah, that should have been obvious, but it wasn't.) It probably would have been better if I'd gotten out the drawing tablet because my airbrush strokes were choppy since I had to keep moving my thumb on the mouse. But I think it's fine.

Step 2: Get the cliff

This is the image we started with.

From there, I added a mask to remove the background and used the clone tool (poorly) to get rid of some of the vegetation, and ended up with this:

Step 3: Copy the cliff into the main image

My first attempt to copy the image only copied the black and white mask. My second attempt only copied the original image. I created a "new layer from visible" and copied that. (My other option would have been to apply the layer mask first, but if I'd needed to recover something I'd masked out, it would have been a pain.) Anyhow, I'm writing all this here because I suspect there's a way to copy the visible image without going through a second layer, but I don't know how to do it yet.

Anyhow, I copied and scaled into the lower right corner, then added a second copy (flipped) into the lower left corner, and ended up with this:

Tomorrow there will be much masking and changing the stuff I added today so the light source is correct, but I think things are going well.

Tip of the day:

Turn the flow down on the airbrush if you're trying to add haze to your image.