Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation of a Man Watching a Magical Sky

Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation of a Man Watching a Magical Sky
Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation of a Man Watching a Magical Sky
In this tutorial, we're going to create a surreal photo manipulation of a man watching what looks to be a magical portal to another world. This will take you through all the processes with an explanation at every step. Now... Shall we begin?

What you'll be creating

Although this artwork has been created with Adobe Photoshop CC, you should be able to follow it with older versions without any problems. The main features that we're going to use are masking and adjustment layers, masking in order to select what we need from a picture, and adjustment layers to blend it all together.

Tutorial Resources

Step 1

Let's start by creating a new document, we will use the values you see below and we will fill it with black.
step-001

Step 2

The first thing that we're going to place on the canvas is going to be the man and we'll do it by going to File > Place and place it the way I placed it. Hold Shift while you are making your image bigger, this way you'll keep the ratio. Placing your image this way automatically turns it into a Smart Object, allowing you to apply non-destructive transformations and filters.
step-002

Step 3

Since we're creating our own sky we need to mask the one that we see in the picture. A trick I like to use, that you may or may not know, is to select the area that I want to use and click the Add layer mask button at the bottom of the Layers panel. You can do the selection with the Pen Tool(P) or Lasso Tool(L).
step-003

Step 4

In order to make the edges smoother, we will paint with a soft brush with black color on the mask layer around the edges. This will help us blend the landscapes.
step-004

Step 5

This layer needs 3 adjustment layers, Hue/Saturation, Curves, and Levels. Apply them by going to Create a new fill or adjustment layer, which is a button next to the Add layer mask button. Set the values you see below. Make sure these adjustment layers only apply to this layer, right-click on them and select Create Clipping Mask.
step-005

Step 6

This is how it should look after applying the adjustment layers.
step-006

Step 7

Let's place the next picture on the canvas, which is the mountainous landscape. Move this layer under the first one in the layers panel and mask some of the top. Choose the mountains you want to display as you like.
step-007

Step 8

Now we need to apply 2 adjustment layers, Curves and Hue/Saturation.
step-008

Step 9

And this is the result.
step-009

Step 10

Place the picture with the stars under the previous layer in the layers panel and change the layer mode from Normal to Lighten.
step-010

Step 11

At the bottom of all layers and just on top of the background, place the picture with the sky on top of the stars, this layer requires no masking or adjustments layers. Having the layer with the stars on Lighten mode will make the stars slightly visible.
step-011

Step 12

Bring the cone-shaped structures on the canvas and get rid of the background, leaving only the structures. One way to do it through masking is to add the mask to this layer and paint it all black, now you won't see anything and we need to bring back only the structures. The way to do it is to disable the mask, in the layers panel, right-click on the mask and select Disable Layer Mask, now we just need to make a selection of the shapes and paint it white, this way when we enable the mask the structures will still be visible.

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15 comments on “Create a Surreal Photo Manipulation of a Man Watching a Magical Sky”

  1. I still cannot believe that the end result came from what the original photo started with. Very good work!

  2. Totally cool. Doesn't photoshop have the coolest features if you can make an image like this out of basically nothing?

  3. The tutorials are very easy to follow and I appreciate that very much. I am just getting started and sometimes I am not even sure what photoshop can really do for me. I love the results. great work

  4. The man sitting on the bench reminds me of my grandfather, who's passed away. This would be a great pic to memorialize him . Thanks for the tutorial.

    1. Have you finished this project yet? I would like to see the end results of others that have tried the tutorial.

  5. Man Watching A Magical Sky - looks like an Incomplete tutorial. Disappointed. Unable to continual after staep 14.

    1. Hehe, it's split into two pages. You needed to click "2" to get to the second page of the tutorial. Common sense really. It's a good tutorial.

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