This tutorial describes how to use Photoshop and a Wacom Intuos2 A4 drawing tablet to create a digital matte painting. If there is no drawing tablet, it may be more troublesome to express the hand-painted effect.
Note: In every step of the tutorial, unless otherwise reminded, you should create a new layer, so that it is easy to modify and avoid wasting all your efforts due to a small mistake.
Let’s take a look at the effect first:
Complete effect
original photo image
1. Open the above photo in Photoshop. You can find some photos you like, but the shape should be similar to an old castle.
2. First detach the house from the background and place it on a new layer. Here I used the Polygonal Lasso Tool to select the house and a softer Eraser Tool to erase the background.
3. Now you need a new background. You can choose one from the material library or draw it yourself. To save time, I used a ready-made image from the Internet here.
4. Place the sky behind the house (put the sky layer below the house layer) and add a little perspective distortion effect to the sky to add depth to the background. The pictures of the house in the tutorial are from a lower perspective, which makes our job a little easier.
5. Pay attention to the edge of the house. There is still some original sky color left on it. Let's fix it.
6. Use the magic wand tool to select an empty space on the house layer, and then execute the Select > Modify > Expand command to expand the selection range. Enter a suitable value so that the selection range can include the edge of the house that needs color correction. Execute the Image > Adjust > Hue / Saturation command to adjust the color of the edge to be consistent with the color of the roof.
7. Continue using Hue/Saturation to adjust the colors of the house and sky so that they blend harmoniously with each other.
