"Castles made of sand all fall into the sea...eventually"-so sang Jimi Hendrix. But with a little digital magic, we'll make sand sculptures that will last forever. Doing so will be very easy. We will NOT be using displacement maps but only a few simple techniques-masking and color adjustment that most folks should be fairly familiar with.[Edited by User on 8/5/2011 10:42:18 PM]
Ok. The first thing we'll need is to find a few sources. You can get by with two: a background and the object you want to turn into sand but a closeup of some sand as well will help you add some embellishments. Since the technique will be easy, a lot of your impact is going to need to come from your composition so pick your sources wisely. It is much easier if your source is a statue since a statue is basically a sculpture and we're creating sculptures. You don't have to eliminate textures like you would on a non-sculptural object. But if you do choose an object like that-you would want to desaturate it first. I came across the statue of Zeus well over a year before I actually used it in my entry but as soon as I saw it, I knew it would one day come in handy. I then picked up a nice beach and a closeup of some sand (all three found on Stock Exchange).
[Edited by User on 8/7/2011 7:02:56 PM]
I first open and size/crop the beach photo how I want it. Then I open the Zeus image, copy it and paste it onto a layer above the beach. When he is sized according and is where I want him, I create a layer mask (if you don't know this, there are other tutorials on it that you will need to read first) and do that task that everybody loves-masking away the parts of the background that are unwanted.
Did I just catch you looking at his winkie? Stop that![Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:10:12 PM]
Ok. Now that that horrible task is over with, show both layers so you'll see the statue on the beach. Now we want to change his color to approximate the sand. Since he's pretty much a neutral color, just adjusting the hue/saturation will not have much affect. So go to Image_Adjustments then Hue/Saturation and in that window, click the "Colorize" box. Now adjusting the hue will have a much more dramatic effect. The values you see will be dependent on the images you are using. You'll probably need to lower the saturation slider a bit as well as play with the lightness. Oh, and make sure you check the "Preview" box so you can see what you're doing.
[Edited by User on 8/8/2011 10:50:49 AM]
He's already looking a bit sandy but the next steps will "seal the deal". Go to Filter-Noise-add noise. You can see the settings I used. Make sure you check "monochromatic" and I prefer Gaussian over uniform but that's up to you. You'll want to judge by the sand in the background on just how much noise to add. Overdoing it will make it look fake. If you look at the picture below, you may be saying to yourself, "I think he did overdo it" and that's because when I was working on my entry, I started at home and my computer has a small monitor but when I brought it to work and saw it on a large monitor, it was clearly evident that I put a tad too much in. I had already saved it so what could I do? I didn't want to start over and mask the statue over again (can you tell it's not my favorite part, yet). So I just went to Filter-Blur. I think what happened was a happy accident. It cleared up my over-noisy image and that little bit of blur softened the lines in the statues up a bit which makes it a bit more believable as being made out of sand as opposed to being chiseled out of stone.
[Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:13:40 PM]
We could pretty much leave it at that and have a pretty decent image. I did a few tweaky things at this point that I won't cover in detail -such as strengthening some shadows and I burned in a few little cracks here and there. If you put in cracks, use a soft brush as the cracks won't have that hard of an edge if they are made in sand. To really make our image convincing, let's grab a source of some real sand. I copied little sections of my sand source and pasted them on separate layers above Zeus. I adjusted the hue and saturation to match and then masked these patches to blend them into the scene. I circled the areas in red where I did this.
[Edited by User on 8/7/2011 7:04:40 PM]
When you're masking things like sand (or dirt) it is helpful to use one of the spatter brushes that comes with Photoshop. They kind of look like a little pile of sand.
Ok, with a final flurry of steps we're almost done. First, I opened my sand source again, desaturated it and put it on a layer directly above Zeus (and below all those little patches of sand):
[Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:14:58 PM][Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:15:46 PM]
Now we are going to put a clipping mask on the sand. If you've never used one they are really cool. I was on the site for about a year when I heard someone mention them in the forums and now there is pretty much one in every chop I do. Right click in your layer and you'll get the menu as shown and select "create clipping mask". It will "clip" the image to whatever pixels are showing on the layer immediately BELOW it.
This is the result-cool stuff, eh?
Now, change that layer's blending mode to "Overlay" and you'll get this:
Then I created a layer mask on that same layer (you can have layer masks and clipping masks together-they get along very well) and using the sandy looking spatter brush, masked a good bit of it off where it covered some of the nice detail in the original statue and to blend it in. You can change the opacity of the brush here and there. When you are done, use the move tool and just for fun, move that layer around-you'll see that it dynamically clips it as you move it-I could do that all day.[Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:08:07 PM][Edited by User on 8/5/2011 11:16:41 PM]
You can duplicate that layer and move it to parts of the statue that weren't covered before. The final thing (outside of a few color tweaks) I did was to blur the background to give a sense of depth of field. This helped to put the focus on the foreground object. Have fun and good luck.