Photo Manipulation Tutorial: Turn an Ordinary Photo into a Dramatic Urban Scene

As the title says, in this tutorial i’m going to show you how to make a dramatic urban scene using an ordinary photo taken with a compact camera. (I used a similar tehnique when i made the wallpaper April in Transylvania for Smashing Magazine, you might want to check it out). You’re going to learn how to replace the sky, how to increase the dramatic feel by boosting the contrast and how to add a vignette effect.

You can see below what we are going to achieve:

and this is the original image that we are going to use:

Time: 45 minutes * Level: Beginner / Intermediate

What you need:

• Original Image (right-click, save link as)
• Sky Image
• Texture (optional)

Well let’s get started!

1. Download the original image and open it in Adobe Photoshop. As you can see the sky is pretty boring and we are going to replace it with one more cloudy to give the image a dramatic feel. To do that we need first to cut the sky out, so duplicate the background layer. Now you’ll have 2 layers with the same image: Background and Background copy. Now delete the first layer and change the other layer’s name from Background copy to Original. Now press P to choose the pen tool and make sure your that your paths option is selected (see below).

2. Now we are going to start to make a path along the building edges to separate them from the sky. Zoom in to be more precise and ignore the wires, we don’t need them (we won’t see them anyway in the final image). This is going to take some time but remember, patience is a virtue :)

3. Now after your path is done close it into a shape like the one below and then with your path selected, right-click, and choose make selection, and then press Backspace to remove the sky.

4. Now we need the image with the sky. Download it, open it in photoshop, copy and paste it into our project. (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, go to our project and press Ctrl+V). Now we have a new layer that we are going to name “clouds”. Drag it below the “Original” layer. Make it bigger if you need to, so it would be visible just the sky and not the green field. (press M, then right click free transform, drag one of the corners holding shift to re dimension it proportionally, then hit enter).  Press V to select the Move tool and then drag the cloud layer and position it so the best part of the sky would be visible. You should have something like this:

5. Now you have 2 layers, the first shoud be “clouds” and on top of it the layer “original” with the street and buildings. Now we need to make them match visually, so desaturate both layers (image, adjustments, desaturate or press Shift+Ctrl+U). Now we’re going to change the contrast and the brightness (image -> adjustments -> brightness/contrast) to both layers so choose these values for the layer with the buildings:

and the following values for the clouds layer:

6. Now after we increased the contrast so much some edge imperfections could me more visible. If you zoom in and your cutout is not perfect, we’re going to do a little trick that I bet you didn’t know about:). As you can see below my cutout is not perfect either, there is a thin white line at the edges that doesn’t look good, so we can automatically cut the building edges with 1 px (or 2 if needed).

Right click on the layer with the buildings and click select pixels.

Now go to Select -> Modify -> Contract and contract by 1 pixels and hit OK:

Now we need to inverse the selection so hit Shift+Ctrl+I to do that. Now we have selected just the 1 pixel thin edge that we want to get rid off. So hit backspace do delete it. If you still have unwanted white edges you can repeat the operation.

7. In this step we are going to add a vignette effect to the image so make an eliptical selection choosing the eliptical marquee tool and with the maximum feather which is 250 px:

Make a selection like the one below and then invert it (Shift+Ctrl+I)

Create a new layer and go to Edit -> Fill choose Black and hit OK. Name this new layer “vignette”.  If you feel that the vignette effect is too strong you can reduce the opacity of the layer.

8. Now we are going to colorize the image a little bit so make a new layer and set its blending mode to color, and name the layer “color”. Go to your foreground color and set it to #4a3900 and hit OK. Press G to select the Paint Bucket Tool and then make a click on the surface of the image to fill it with the foreground color. Reduce the opacity of the color layer to 67% (or other value if you want the color stronger, or more desaturated) Your layers should look like this:

and your image like this:

If you’re not satisfied with this color you can go to image -> adjustments -> hue and saturation and change the hue values and make it blueish, purpleish or whatever color you want.

9. Now if you want you can texturize the image a little bit by placing this texture, on our image. Open the texture in photoshop and copy it in our project, pressing Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (the same as you did with the cloud image). Right-click -> Free Transform -> Right-click again and choose rotate 90 degrees CCW so the darker side would be up. Change the blending mode to multiply. Drag the corners and transform the texture until the edges of our project, or you can make it even bigger and move it so you can choose the zone of the texture that you like more. Now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness and Contrast and increase the brightness and the contrast of the image until you’re satisfied with the effect. I used these values:

This should be your final result:

10. We’re done with the image now and you can use it for a wallpaper for instance. Just place it on a 1920 × 1200 new document to have a widescreen wallpaper like this one:

That’s it, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. You can download the Hi Res PSD clicking the link below:

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