Create this “City to Country” Photo Manipulation with Photoshop

This tutorial will show you how to create a beautiful “city to country” composition using several images. You’ll accomplish this by combining & blending images, and also creating a few lighting/color effects.

Preview of Final Results

Tutorial Title

Resources

Ally door – Door

The bright blue skylight – Skylight
The Landscape – Landscape
The moon – The moon
Person – Person
Nebula Texture – Nebula

Step 1 – Open and set up door image

Let’s start out by opening up the image “Door”. Once opened, duplicate this layer and name it “Door Copy”. Once duplicated, we are going to add a few adjustments. We are going to start with Image > Adjustments > Levels (Ctrl/Cmd+L).

The second adjustment, is Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast.

The third adjustment we are going to apply is Image > Adjustment > Photo Filter.

Step 2 – Darken and soften up the door

The door is a bit bright, so we are going to make it a little darker while adding softness to it. So to start, duplicate the “Door Copy”. Then apply Blur > Gaussian Blur > 20px. Once you’ve added the blur, set this layers opacity to 65%. So you don’t add clutter to your layers palette, merge your “Blur” and “Door Copy” layers together. You should have a composition like this.

We are going to go a little bit further and add another adjustment to darken it even more. To do this, we are going to apply Layer > Adjustment > Levels.

Step 3 – Mask out the door

So we can add in the inside images, we have to create a mask on the door. So to do this we are going to use the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L), and create a rectangle around the door like so. You should have marching ants around the door.

SIDE NOTE: Be sure to zoom in so you are able to get exaCtrly the door outline.

Once you’ve got the door outlined with your marching ants, we are going to mask this out. To do this, go to Layer > Layer Mask > Hide Selection. This will cut out that part of the door. SIDE NOTE: You will still see the original door from the “Background” layer, which is okay. You can either choose to delete this layer, or hide it. It is not needed anymore. This is what it will look like hidden/deleted.

Step 4 – Add your country landscape

Now that the door is masked out, we can begin to add the country environment in the door. So let’s open up the image “Landscape.jpg” and drag it into our composition. Name this layer “Landscape”. For now, put this layer above your “Door Copy” layer so we can see it’s size. It’s very large, so we must make it smaller. To do this, to go Image > Transform > Scale (Ctrl/Cmd+T). We want to align it like the image below.