Photoshop Tutorials

Most of us can remember spending afternoons as children looking up at the clouds and seeing all sorts of things from people, to trains, to dragons, limited only by how far our imagination could take us. In this tutorial, we're gonna go back to our childhood and put our dreams and imagination back in the clouds where they belong.

Final Result Preview

In this example, I'm going to attempt to place this statue of a woman into the clouds. For the sake of brevity, I'll explain how I assembled her arm and hand, as the same method can be applied to the rest of the image to complete the piece. I started by loading up the image of the sky, then importing the image of the statue into this document. Using the Transformation Tool, I dragged the statue layer roughly where I wanted it in the composition.

I then set this layer's blend mode to Screen. This gave me the base for my clouds I'll work around. Then using the Transformation Tool, I resized the figure to a size I felt fit the composition well, then clicked Enter to confirm the decision.

Now came the hard part. Assembling the actual figure from portions of the clouds. I'd do this in many segments. For example, I started with the shoulder area of the figure. Judging by the contour of the figure's shoulder, I'd try to find an area of the clouds that closely resembled the shape of the shoulder. I then cut and pasted this portion of the clouds onto a new layer, but keeping my statue's Screen layer on the top layer.

Using the Statue as a guide, I used the Transformation Tool to resize and rotate my copied cloud segment to fit the direction and shape of my original figure's shoulder. Then, using the Eraser Tool set at 0 Hardness, I softened the edges to help them blend better into the scene.

I continued this process until the main part of the figure's arm was complete, then I merged these cloud segments together by holding Ctrl and selecting the cloud layers I wanted merged from the Layers Palette, then selecting Merge Layers under the Options drop-down menu. Because I wanted the clouds to encompass the highlighted areas of the figure, I erased the portions of the clouds to expose the sky in the figure's shadowed sections.

Next, I assembled the figure's hand. Because I wanted to keep the details of the hand, I kept all the finger's isolated. To do this, I needed to find an area in the original clouds that most closely resembled the shape of the fingers. I selected this area with the Lasso Selection Tool and copied it onto a new layer.

Then I continued the same process as I did for the arm using the Transformation Tool to situate this segment onto the finger area, making sure I leave the sliver of sky in between the fingers visible to keep each finger isolated.

After the arm and hand were completed, I needed to soften some of the grainyness still apparent from the statue's stone texture. Using the Liquify Tool set at 2 for Pressure, I dragged the tool in circles directly on the statue layer to soften the edges of the statue to blend it better with the clouds, and blur the visible grain.

This is what my figure looked like after I had completed this same process for the rest of the statue. I could leave it at this, but I wanted to add a little more pop to the image.

I wanted to slightly darken the shaded areas of the figure a little more. So I selected the Paintbrush Tool with black as my foreground color, 12% Alpha, and 0 Hardness, I painted in these areas to darken them on a new layer above the statue's Screen layer. Then I set this layer's blend mode to Overlay and dropped this layer's Alpha to 33%.

Then, I selected white for my foreground color and on a new layer, and with the Paintbrush Tool still selected, I painted in the edges of the clouds to enhance the brightness of these areas to create a stronger highlighted effect.

I noticed that my figure was now covering most of the sun rays that were peeking out from behind the clouds in the original image. For a final effect, I wanted to bring these rays back into the image to create the appearance they were emerging from behind my newly created cloud figure. sing the Lasso Selection Tool, I created a rough selection of the rays from the original layer, and pasted it onto a new layer behind my cloud layers. Using the Transformation Tool, I dragged this selection to the right to appear behind my figure. Then using the Eraser Tool set at 0 Hardness, I softened the edges to blend into the original sky.