Background Art with Photograph

How to Make Anime Style Background From Scenery Photographs

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Norpiova

Hello everyone, I’m Norpiova. Welcome to my Clip Studio Paint Tutorial.

This is the second part of Background Art with Photograph tutorial series.

And today I will show you How to Make Manga Style Background From Scenery Photographs.

So let’s get into it!

I also made video version for this tutorial if you prefer audio-visual format.

I use Clip Studio Paint EX version 1.13. So this tutorial should be fine to follow if you use version 2.

QUICK NOTES: I assume you can draw basic clouds, trees, bush and grass so I will not explain in detail how to draw them. I only explain general rules on how to achieve anime look in this tutorial.

1. INDENTIFYING THE ANIME STYLE BACKGROUND

There are 3 rules that you must pay attention to when using photograph as a foundation for anime background.

First, make sure to take photo at the right time and at the right condition. For example, if you wanna make a sunny background for your illustration then take photo at sunny day

If you wanna make cloudy background then take photo when it’s cloudy.

This is important because for each type of condition, the shadows will be different. And you can’t manipulate the shadow in photograph. Unless you’re capable to do paintover and recalculate all the shadows. But it’s just wasting so much time honestly.

Second rule, make sure to use a bit more blue tones. The sky bounces blue light everywhere and create global illumination or environment lighting where the objects and especially their shadow have blue tones. The blue tones in real life is not that obvious, so we need to strenghten this for our backgrounds as style preference and cinematic purpose.

If it’s on sunny day, the shadows will look bluish and more saturated. Even shadow in sunset scene has blue tint in it, but it’s not as saturated as in a sunny midday. So later on we need to do color adjustment on the photograph.

Third rule, we need to redraw or paint over any natural things such as plants, sky, grounds, and trees. The unique part about this style is the unnatural or man made objects like buildings, poles, and pavement are looking a bit realistic while any organic objects like plants are not that realistic. So we need to draw the natural objects manually on top of our photo later on.

2. TURNING PHOTOGRAPHS INTO ANIME STYLE BACKGROUND

So for the first step, import your scenery photograph into Clip Studio Paint. Because I want background in sunny day condition so I use this photo.

Let’s duplicate the photo. Right click on the layer and select Duplicate layer.

Adding Artistic Effect

Now we need to add smoothing and blending effect so it looks like a painting. To add this effect go to Filter menu, choose Effect, and click Artistic.

Turn on the Preview so you can see the changes in real time. For the Process option, choose Color only. With Color only option you can ignore all of these line parameters because they won’t affect the result anymore. Go down to Number of Colors and put the max value, in this case it’s 64.

Now you need to play around Color blending and Color blur settings. The values vary from one photo to another so I can’t give you the exact numbers. But usually the value for Clor Blending is around 40 to 100 while the value for Color blur is around 20 to 90. Just make sure to get a result where the colors get blent enough while the orginal shape of the main objects is not too blurry or distorted. Click OK once you satisfied with the result.

Replacing The Sky with Our Drawing

Next step is replacing the sky with our own drawing. I use selection tool to select then delete the original sky. Then clean it up manually with eraser.

Let’s create a new raster layer first and put it under the photo. To make a new sky use Gradient tool. Clip Studio Paint has 2 default sky gradient. Choose whichever you like.

Then make one new layer and draw some clouds.

Adding Color Balance - Adjustment Layer 1

It’s time to adjust the color, brightness and contrast. First step create New Layer Folder and put the photo inside of it. We will put any adjustment effects in this layer as well later on.

As you can see my original photo looks reddish and doesn’t match the sky color. Let’s make it bluish. Right click on the layer of the photo, click New Correction Layer and choose Color Balance.

The Color Balance panel will pop out. Starting from the shadow area first, drag the slider toward blue.

For the Halftone, drag the slider toward Cyan.

And for the highlight you can either drag the slider toward green or yellow or both. Dont forget to check keep brightness option, then click OK.

Now it looks bluish.

Adding Tone Curve - Adjustment Layer 2

Let’s adjust the contrast, brightness, and make it even more bluish. Right click on layer property, click New Correction Layer and choose Tone Curves.

Click on the line to make a new point and drag it to the top left to increase the brightness of the bright area. After that, click on the line once more to make a new point and drag it to the bottom right to decrease the brightness of the dark area. With these 2 points the image now has more contrast.

Now change the RGB mode to Blue. To add more blue tones on the shadow or dark area, make a new point at the bottom half and drag it a lil bit to the top left. Then click OK.

The image now has even more blue tones.

Adding Hue/Saturation/Luminosity - Adjustment Layer 3

The last adjustment step that we need to do now is adding saturation onto the image. So right click on the layer, click New Correction Layer and choose Hue/Saturation/Luminosity.

Drag the saturation slider a bit to the right to bring more saturation. Then click OK.

Here’s the different between before and after adjustment.