How to Add a Mermaid to a Dark Bleak Landscape

Have you ever wanted to create those stark and dramatic landscapes? In this tutorial you'll learn how to combine different stock photos and lighting styles to create dramatic, movie like photo manipulation. Let's get started!

Preview of Final Results

Tutorial Resources

Step 1 - Preparing the Document

Open Photoshop and create a new document (File > New...). Set its dimensions on 3500 x 2300px. Press OK. Download the stock photo of rocks listed in the beginning of the tutorial under Tutorial Resources and drag it into your new document. Name this new layer ROCKS and place it on the top of all layers. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontally to have the same direction as on the preview picture.

Step 2 - Adjusting the Rocks

Let's focus on colors of the layer ROCKS you've added in previous step. In this photo manipulation you want to create strong dramatic atmosphere and I believe you can achieve it better with photos with less saturated colors. Add new adjustment layer Vibrance on the top of all layers. (You can find the button Add new fill or adjustment layer on the bottom part of your layers palette.)

Set the value Vibrance on - 30 and change its Blending Mode on Color. By choosing this blending mode the adjustment change only color and not lightness of your image.

To lower saturation of cyan tones even more add new adjustment layer Hue/Saturation and set the value Saturation of Cyan tones on -70. By this adjustment you'll create stronger feel of "before the storm" weather.

After this step your photo manipulation should look like on the following image.

Step 3 - Adding Waves

Download stock photo of waves listed in the beginning of the tutorial and drag it into your photo manipulation. Name this new layer WAVES and place it on the top of all layers. Go to Edit > Free Transform (or press Ctrl + T on your keyboard) and resize waves on proper size. After you're done press Enter to apply the changes. You should get something similar to the picture below.

Add layer mask to WAVES. You can find the button Add layer mask on the bottom part of the palette Layers (next to the button Add new fill or adjustment layer you've used in previous step).

Grab the Brush Tool (B), select some soft round brush, set its Size on 500px and Opacity on 100%.

Pick black color. Make sure the layer mask of WAVES is active (Just click on it). Start painting over the areas of waves you want to hide.

If you're not sure where you should paint take a look at the picture below. I highlighted these areas with red color.

After this step your photo manipulation should be similar to the one shown below.

Step 4 - Blending Waves

As you can see the photo of waves you've added in previous step is bluer and darker than the rest of the image. You'll fix it in this step. Let's start with lightening. Add new adjustment layer Curves on the top of all layers and set it as shown below.

You want to adjust only WAVES and not the rest of the image. To achieve that click on the button This adjustment clips to the layer. I've circled the button in the image above. To lower the saturation of WAVES add new adjustment layer Hue/Saturation on the top of all layers and set the value Saturation on -45. Create clipping mask from this adjustment layer too!

12 comments on “How to Add a Mermaid to a Dark Bleak Landscape”

Anonymous says:

May 14, 2020 at 6:08 am

Thanks for this idea

Maidul Islam says:

October 17, 2014 at 9:39 pm

Beautiful, creative and acutely enjoy able!

Kevin says:

April 6, 2014 at 10:44 am

I really love your tutorials ... I think it explains very well for a photoshop beginner like me, and it makes me really happy that you continued to publish tutorials on photoshop it helps to learn ..

Looking says:

March 27, 2014 at 11:17 pm

Thank you very inspirational. Ended up doing something completely different but using your techniques.

bla says:

March 7, 2014 at 6:10 pm

hard to use a FREE tutorial when you have to BUY the content in order to follow it...

Michael says:

March 5, 2014 at 4:18 am

Helpful

Ed Poska says:

March 3, 2014 at 6:08 pm

Tutorial started by asking if you wanted to add a mermaid to a landscape.
Ended with a landscape, no mermaid.
Where'd she go?

1. anonymous says:
  
  March 5, 2014 at 9:51 pm
  
  lol click the next page
Withinboy says:

February 28, 2014 at 9:40 am

Thanks, it is very helpful!!

Anonymous says:

February 25, 2014 at 11:19 am

donde?

Rokaiya says:

February 24, 2014 at 9:42 pm

Helpful for Photoshop learner.

Timothy Mensah says:

February 24, 2014 at 5:06 am

Very educative