Welcome to a new tutorial, this time we will talk about the fundamentals of photobashing, this is what I am learning and I would like to share it with all of you. All of your comments are important to me, so don't forget to comment on what you liked or didn't like below. I leave the link to the video in case you like to see it also if it suits you more. So without further ado, let's get started ...

 

This is the first image we choose:

And this was our result:

For this tutorial I went out to take photos with my cell phone in my neighborhood or places close to where I live. Many times we think we need the highest quality photos to get started, but this is just an excuse. Today most of the people who are reading this tutorial or watching the video have a cell phone at our disposal and surely there will be something interesting near our home, the thing is to see everything with creativity. In my case, I took many photos for 3 days and I chose one of many ideas.

I decided to start with the post-apocalyptic Zombie theme, as I felt that that was the best fit with the photographs taken. You can choose and imagine absolutely whatever it is. Other ideas I had was to photograph a Gundam (Robot) and use it arriving in the city. The imagination has no limits, the point is that they get to work.

I will start with this resolution ... I would choose this depending on our equipment, if we have a computer that takes a long time to process the information then I would sacrifice resolution and / or canvas size to work more fluidly. Many times this can discourage us but really what one needs is to practice, so do not limit yourself for that.

In our first image we see the normal state of this construction, which is somewhat deteriorated and already helps us a little, so my first ideas are to add some more chaos in our history, remember that a photograph must tell us a story and be ours idea a zombie apocalypse I decided to add a car that has flat tires and is in a slightly deteriorated condition.

This will be our car:

In order to give us an idea of how this would look mounted in our scene, we will choose the "Add (brightness)" mode in our layer of the car photograph:

Which will look like this, Also reducing the opacity can simply work or you can also experiment with the other types of layers, the point here is to be able to give us an idea of how the object will look in scene.

In this case I need the car to be facing the other way so I'm going to make use of the "Flip Horizontally" function that you can find in:

     Edit> Transform> Flip Horizontal

This is our result.

Now we will use the "Scale / Rotate" function (Ctrl + T) to adjust its size and make it suitable for the scene, we have the white reference car in case we have doubts about what size it would be, and other references could be taken with respect to the size of the walls.

 

Edit> Transform> Scale / Rotate ...

 

Another tool that I want to mention is the perspective tool, which can help us adjust our image to see it in the correct perspective, sometimes we will have problems with the photos because we have not taken them at an angle that facilitates the placement. That is why I recommend that you try to take photos from the same angle and / or take many different angles of the same object since you do not know which one will work for you unless you already have your idea very clear, so yes, try to respect the angle of your scene.

Then I decided to place a few objects plus a person who will be our Zombie and some rubble to give more the idea of destruction and chaos. We will erase around these objects so as not to observe the complete photograph, I do not know bother to be precise at this moment, because we only want an approximate, then we will take care of cleaning them and blending them with the scene correctly.

We will continue adding a few objects plus a few zombies and repositioning a wall. This wall was taken completely different and was adjusted with the perspective tool.

Edit> Transform> Perspective

At this point I decided to add a new "Correction Layer" of "Hue / Saturation / Lightness" to give it that somewhat melancholic and sad feeling. For this they can be based on movies or series that resemble the type of scenes they want to make, in my case I remembered a bit some chapters of "the walking death" where the blues go to a little more greenish and slightly saturated tones.

The useful thing about creating this in a "Correction Layer" is that we affect all the objects that are under our layer and we can also correct or change it at any time we decide to do so.

This was our result:

Now, time has passed and nature as we know, nothing stops it, the herbs continue to grow through the concrete and embrace it.

 

We will place this photograph that I took on a trip I made to Cancun, but that I could well see found in a park or in a nearby forest. Fortunately, I had this photograph that made me much more useful for this situation due to the type of grass / leaves.

Remember, we put glitter and adapt it to our liking, in this case there are some edges on the left side that are not covered, but do not worry, we will correct this later.

Some tools that we can use so that the images have more cohesion regarding color, brightness, etc.

These are:

Before explaining more about the tonal correction I want to start erasing, so we will use a "Clipping Mask". We will select the layer that we want to start cutting and we will click on the button that is a box with a circle inside:

We will see on the right side of our layer as if we were seeing two layers in one, this one on the right is the clipping mask. We will use it with a brush, painting with any brush and with any color in the "clipping mask" will make the image appear, what we are looking for is to erase on this layer, so we can use the eraser or the color "transparent" that is under the colors of our brush. I'll add an image of this a little later.

For the objects I will use a "Soft round" brush that is part of the Basic brushes of Clip Studio Paint. This in order not to aggressively erase our object and to be able to merge it little by little with the environment. You can also use other brushes and this is why I highly recommend using the "transparent color" to erase in the "clipping mask".

Here we can see the brush I chose and then we can see where our transparent color is, the quick shortcut to access this color is the "C" key.

Once all our objects are placed we will begin to erase with the clipping masks to give cohesion to our image, in my case I will use the leaf brush that I do not remember exactly where I acquired but it is useful for this situation so that we erase the layer with more delicacy regarding to the context we have.

 

If you would like me to create a set of free basic brushes for the Clip Studio Paint asset store, comment at the end of this tutorial. Many times we get addicted to downloading thousands and thousands of brushes that we end up leaving in oblivion, my purpose at this time is to try everything that I acquired over time to realize what I need and create a set of brushes to suit me. .

We will return to the Hue / Saturation / Luminosity, This tool can be used to achieve the similarity between the tones of our images, for example in this case I use the tone so that it looks a bit more like the dry grass that we have on the ground, if We lower the saturation we will obtain more tones closer to gray (black and white) and if we raise it we will obtain brighter or "garish" colors.

The precise adjustments have no point in handling them because this is about experimenting, depending a lot on the light of the photos we have and the cohesion we want to achieve is what we will use, there are no shortcuts in this area, so we are doomed To experiment with these tools to understand them, do not despair and try all of them so that with practice it will be easier for you to know what you need. If you want us to go deeper into these topics, please leave it in the comments.

 

Tone curve and RGB correction can help us achieve better tonal precision, but I'm honestly still experimenting with these two tools to fully understand them. Since with the black car I had problems to be able to merge it with the image.

Something that seems useful to me, is to create a new correction layer "Hue / Saturation / Luminosity" and lower the saturation to -100 so we can see it in black and white. This helps us to perceive which elements are more alien to the scene and to be able to correct it in this case the car looks a bit out of tune, because its brightness makes it stand out, so as it will still be covered in grass, I only made a few small ones. further adjustments with the above tools.

 

Before correction and saturation -100:

Now we will use the copy stamp tool that helps us to copy other objects in the scene with a brush, so we can fill places that are empty with the same cohesion we need, we will use it for the grass in the building that was needed on the right side . With the ALT button select the point where we want to copy and when we give the brushstroke we will see a + symbol that shows the section that we are copying in addition to seeing the brush normally.

 

And we get this result:

Once we have our scene ready with cuts and the colors we want, it is time to give it the final touches with brushstrokes mainly to give it the touch we need. So here I will save with another name to have a point of return in case what I do ends up not liking it. With this in mind I can experiment as much as I want without fear of losing anything.

Duplicate my main photo and apply a clipping mask to extract the post that came in it and be able to apply the "Gaussian Blur" Filter.

You will find the filter in:

Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur ...

We obtained this result with the idea of giving depth to the image:

I will begin to remove parts of the body of my "actors" to later add details such as dust, blood stains, torn fabric and we will do all this with brushes using the "Drop Counter" tool in the colors close to where we want to paint.

And this was our result, Blood on the walls, on the clothes, we fade the skin a little, remember that we are not looking for an ultra-quality effect, because for that type of work we need high-quality RAW photos and many objects to do this even more realistic, but that's not in our budget yet. So let's do what we can with what we have.

Now we will use a layer adjusted to the lower layer to add shadows, this can also be used to add light or obtain other effects, all this that we have seen so far can be combined in many ways to obtain different results.

We will see it like this, with a red line on the left side of the layer, so we will know that this layer is being adjusted. This layer makes everything we paint inside it visible only the part where there are pixels painting in the lower layer. And we will use this to darken certain areas that have unwanted lighting since the light source of the object may come from another point than the image.

I will apply stronger shadows to all that area because the trees have very little light hitting them in addition to the fact that the Tone is different

We use the Brightness / Contrast tool in:

Edit> Tonal Correction> Brightness / Contrast to make it look even more like the tones we need.

After playing around with the tones for a bit, we got our final result.

I hope this tutorial has been useful for you, I know that we have a lot of information that does not go too deep into the details but the way I like to approach learning is to be able to see on a macro scale what I want to do and then gradually polish little details. This can go against the learning style of many but I hope it still helps you and you can write anything in the comments, since your feedback is extremely important to improve.

 

I send everyone a good vibe and to those who like hugs a hug.