In this tutorial I will be explaining how I used Photoshop 4.0 to turn Cabin 105 into a nighttime bayou scene. Start by opening the high resolution version of the original Cabin 105 theme pic.Duplicate the background layer and name the new layer "cabin edited" or whatever else you want to call it. This is the layer in which we will be doing all of the editing for the cabin itself. Since the house will be on stilts over water, the storm windows will look out of place resting against the front of the house. Go ahead and clone them out at this time, but don't worry about removing them below the bottom of the siding because that area will be covered up later. Trees are naturally a part of a swamp so leave the trees intact. Also don't be too concerned if the lines you cloned back into the siding are a little crooked, we will fix that later with heavy shadows.
Lighting up the interior of the cabin. Use the polygon lasso tool to select each pane of glass in the windows and the screen on the door. Don't forget the parts of the screen showing under the handrail. With all of the glass and screen selected, set the feather to 0.2 pixels. Hit the delete to remove all of the glass and screen. You may have to turn off the background to see that anything happened, as the background will be showing through the cutouts and will look the same. Without deselecting anything, open a new blank layer and name it "interior illumination." Set the layer mode to color dodge and layer opacity to 82%. Fill the selection with white at 100% opacity. In my illustration I painted in a green background so that the white filled areas would show up in the tutorial.
On the cabin edited layer, draw a selection around the front wall and steps and set the feather to 1. Open up the render lighting effects filter and set to floodlight. Move the floodlight around until the top of the elipse converges on the porchlight. Set the intensity to 26 and the focus to 69. Set all of the other properties to zero, except for ambience, which needs to be set to positive eight. Go ahead and hit ok and your image should now look like this.Now invert the selection and open up the lighting effects editor again. Use all of the same settings but just move the light off the page somewhere so that it casts no light on the scene, but rather allows the rest of the scene to turn into nighttime. Your image should now look like the one below. Everything looks a little bright for a nighttime pic, so go ahead and tweek the levels a bit. Move the shadows slider and the midtones slider each a bit to the right until you get something you like.
The light on the front of the house must be coming from somewhere, so lets make it look like it's coming from the porchlight. Open a new blank layer above the current layer and name it porch light and set the blend mode to luminosity. Use a very soft airbrush about size 75 with a pressure of 6% using a slightly offwhite color with a tint of yellow. Apply a very faint glow with the top of the brush just touching the light fixture, but covering the bulb. Change to the next brush size smaller and again apply a faint glow with the top of the brush just touching the light fixture. Repeat with progressively smaller brushes until you get to a brush that's the same size as the bulb. This will give the appearance that the light is emanating from the bulb rather than being cast on the building from elsewhere. The light is still not perfect though, so set the paint color to pure white, and select a brush that is just smaller than the lightbulb. Now apply a really bright spot directly over the lightbulb. Your results should look similar to the illustration below.
The lighting is still "not right" on the front of the house so we shall add some shadows to make it a bit more realistic. Open a new blank layer just above the cabin edited layer and set the blend mode to luminosity and the opacity to 84%, and name it building shadows. Use the polygon lasso tool to select areas where you want shadows and fill with a dark color borrowed from the front of the house. Be sure to pay attention to where the light is coming from and use forground color to transparent gradient fills where needed, like on the handrail. Also make sure you black out the foundation entirely as this house is supposed to be on stilts above the water (Note: we wont' be adding in the stilts because they would not be visible due to heavy shadow). Use the line tool to create the shadow lines in the siding, making sure to gradually make the lines thicker as you go down the wall. Now that all the shadows have been created, run a gaussian blur of 0.6 pixels over this layer to soften up the shadows. Your building shadows layer should now look something like the illustration below when viewed by itself.Note: Don't worry about extending the shadows too far into the dark areas, they won't show there anyway.
This old swamp house needs a swamp dweller to call it home. Lets add an old guy on the porch. I wasn't able to find a complete image that I liked so I manipulated and merged two different images as shown below. I'm not going into detail about how to do that here, IronKite goes into great detail about how to merge images and match colors in his href="http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=160992"> Archaeological Dig tutorial . I will add a note about resizing layers though. Be sure to hold down the shift key to constrain the proportions or your guy will either look squashed or stretched too much.
This old guy sure looks like he's out in the sun when it's supposed to be night in the bayou. Perhaps we ought to desaturate him a bit and do some funky stuff with his lighting. Start my drawing a selection on the side of the body that will be getting the highlights, paying careful attention to where the light would likely strike his body and clothes if this scene were not faked. Since the light is almost entirely behind him, we will only select a fine sliver of his left side, then set the feather level to 4 pixels. Invert the selection and open the lighting effects filter. Use the same settings we used on the cabin, but move the light completely off the picture so that we can darken the shadowed part of his body. Your image should now look like he first one in the series below. Now invert the selection again so that we can give him some highlights from that bright porch light. Open the lighting effects and using the same settings move the light over the upper left of his body and change the light angle so that it appear the light is coming from above and to the left of him. You should now have something that looks like the second part of the pic below. If you deselect then you will have you final old man, like in the third pic below. Don't worry if his highlights look a little bright, they will look ok when we copy him into the cabin scene.
ets copy him into our cabin scene now. Merge his head and body layers now if you haven't already done so. Do not merge the background though or you will no longer have the transparency around his body, and you'll have to cut him out again and waste a bunch of time trying to get rid of masking lines. Copy the layer with the old man, then paste it into a new layer in the cabin file. Be sure that your new layer is above any previous layers or you will have strange shadows over the old guy or just have him completely disappear. Once he's in there, be sure to scale him down to size. Make him a little shorter than the door of the cabin, then place him on one of the lower porch steps like the illustration below.
Oh my, it looks like he is floating. Don't make the mistake of leaving him standing on that step without casting a shadow. Using the same dark color you used for your original shadows, go back to your building shadows layer and use a medium density airbrush of appropriate size to draw in some shadows on the steps. Be sure to pay attention to the angle of the light source and also the fact that his body gets bigger above his feet. Also the light rays will spread with distance so make the shadow even wider as it gets further from him. Your image will probably look like this when you are done.
Yippie, we now have enough of the image done to make the water, so lets make some water. Start by saving a copy of the current cabin image with no compression. Now load that image as a new layer of the cabin file and name the layer "water". Flip that layer on the vertical and move it to make it look like the pic below.You will notice that the perspective of the reflection doesn't jive with the cabin. Open the layer transform "skew" tool and tweak and move the layer until you get this. The idea is to follow the perspective of the bottom of the building and to make all of the parts of the building line up properly. You will notice that the perspective of the reflection of the porch and railing looks messed up, but don't worry about it as it will be covered up by a boat and it's shadow.
A boat you say? Yes, how else can an old guy living in the middle of a swamp get to where he needs to go. It so happens that the old geezer found a very nice boat on Google. All you have to do for him is cut it out, scale it, rotate it to fit his surroundings, and do some nice lighting for him. The top image in the illustration below shows his boat cut out and ready to get it's shadows, green indicates the part of the hull that was cut off to imply that the boat is partially submerged in the water. The bottom part of the illustration shows how the boat looks with shadows. To make the shadows select all of the areas with the shadows using the polygon lasso tool, then render lighting effects with the same settings as before with the light completely off the boat.
Now go ahead and make a new layer above the water layer in the cabin file and paste in that boat. Use the layer free transform tool to scale and roate it to your liking. Your end result should look something like this.That boat looks a bit like it's just hovering over the water. Lets add some shadows to make it feel right at home (Note: we won't be adding a reflection of the boat because nothing that is highlighted on the boat would even be visible at this angle in a reflection). Create a new blank layer just under the boat layer and name it "boat shadow", leaving the blending mode in normal and opacity at 100%. Use the polygon lasso tool to draw the outline of the shadow, set the feather level to 3, then fill the selection with the same dark color that you have been using for the rest of the shadows.
That water looks way too calm. Perhaps there's some critters moving around out there stirring up the water a little bit. Deselect the shadow of the boat merge the shadow layer down to the water layer. With the water layer selected, open up filter/distort/ocean ripple, use a ripple size of 15 and a magnatude of 8, then apply to the water layer. Now run the gaussian blur filter over the water layer at a level of 1.6 pixels to soften everything up. Tweak the levels a little to make the water slightly darker. Your image should now look something like this.
We are almost done now. We just need to add some interest to the sky, just don't go overboard with a moon or anything crazy like that, you don't want to detract from the lighting effects you worked so hard on. All we need are a few faint stars. Create a new blank layer and name it stars, leaving the blending mode to normal and the opacity set at 100%. Use a small soft airbrush set to pure white, with a very low opacity setting. Now paint in a few faint stars, leaving some brighter than the others. Stars are never pure white so using a slightly smaller airbrush with random vibrant colors, paint a color highlight onto just a few of the brighter stars. Your final image will look something like this.I hope you enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did making it. Please feel free to e-mail or message me if you have any questions about this tutorial.Additional information on the following pages describes how to deal with free-standing and multiple light sources.
How to deal with free-standing and multiple light sources.This addition to the tutorial will be simplified a bit since you already learned most of what you need to know in part 1. To begin, copy the image shown below into Photoshop or other graphic editing program.Make a copy of that layer and place it directly above your original layer. With the duplicate layer selected, open the lighting effects filter and select the default light settings. Move the light source so that no part of it intersects your image, then hit enter. You should now have something resembling the image below.
With your darkened layer selected, create a layer mask for that layer (bottom of the layer palette, box with a dashed circle in it. May be different in other programs). Draw in your mask using soft black brushes, using selections where needed on hard edges, to create a mask similar to the one below. Note: in this image I am using red to show where the white areas of the mask would be, and transparency to show the black parts of the mask. In your image the mask will not show, just the results.The next image shows what you would see on your screen.
With the same layer mask you used to light the first lamp, select an appropriately sized soft black brush and draw in the lit areas on the ground around the light and the light itself. Note: you may need to drop brush opacity since this light is quite far from the viewer. To put light on the nearby trees we will need to use a different brush. Select an appropriate sized splatter brush and touch and release around all of the areas of the trees that should be hit by the light. Be sure not to light the whole trees, only areas that would not be in shadow. You will now have a mask looking something like this....with results looking like this.
You will notice that with this project, the sky is too bright, and the building comes out a funny color. I corrected the sky by selecting it and painting a dark midnight blue onto it. The cast of the buildings was corrected by selecting the dark layer itself (not the mask), then opening up the selective color adjustment. I selected black as the color to adjust, then increased the cyan and magenta values to give the buildings a faint bluish purple cast to simulate moonlight. The final image would look something like this.There are other things that should be done to complete this image that I won't be showing here. The original daylight shadows need to be cloned out, some of the building and skyway windows should be lit, and the sky should be a little more detailed. You are also free to add people and other objects that will make your image come to life.As always, feel free to send my an e-mail if you have any questions.--Dakotaboy88