Learn how to create a Dark Photo Manipulation of lost ship in Photoshop. In this Photoshop tutorial you’ll learn how to achieve a dark, misty and mysterious scene of lost ship using range of photo manipulation techniques. You’ll also learn how to use adjustment layers, layer mask, blend modes and layer opacity to make the scene more believable and realistic.
Note : This tutorial assume you’ve completed our all Basic level Photoshop tutorial. Otherwise we assume you are an intermediate level of Photoshop user. Also, you’ll need Photoshop CS3 or higher to follow this tutorial.
Preparing a Dark Background
Create a new document in Photoshop with height 900px and width of 1500px by selecting File > New .
Place the lake to main document by selecting File > Place Embedded. Also, enlarge it using Transform Tool (CTRL + T) to make it fit for our canvas. You can see the below image for reference.
Results so far :
Adding Sky to Make the Scene Misty
You can notice that to achieve a misty and dark scene, we need to use the sky image which should be misty and suitable for dark background as the existing sky doesn’t seems to be okay. To achieve this, we need to hide the sky parts of lake. Now add Layer Mask (click on second button at bottom of layer panel) and activate the Brush Tool (B). Using a soft round black brush, mask the selected sky parts of lake.
Now open the sky image in Photoshop. Drag it into our main document using Move Tool (V) and place the sky layer under the lake.
Instead of this process, you can also place the sky layer under the lake, first and then you can use layer mask to reveal the sky layer. So do it in which way you like most.
Everyone can clearly notice that colors of sky not matching with the rest. To fix this, make a Hue/Saturation (click the third button at bottom of layer panel) adjustment layer and reduce the saturation of sky. Set the Saturation slider to -100.
Make a Curves adjustment layer to sky and reduce its brightness little bit. Use the following settings :
To add some mist to scene, create a new layer between sky and lake then name it ‘mist’. Set your foreground color to #b7b1b1. Use a soft round brush to paint some misty as shown below.
Add a Layer Mask to misty layer. Now go to Filter > Render > Clouds (make sure you’ve selected the layer mask of mist layer. Also, make sure that your foreground and background set to black and white) and apply the cloud filter on the layer mask of mist layer. Here are the results :
Now head back to lake layer and make a Curves adjustment layer to lake as clipping mask (click the red button as shown below). Simply reduce its brightness as it looks too bright at the moment.
Reduce the opacity of Curves to 33%. Results :