How to Change Ordinary Photo into Fantasy Photo Manipulation

As you can surely see your image is lighter than before applying the texture. It’s because background of the texture isn’t pure black but has some shade of dark grey.

To make the image darker again add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and darken the image. Values of Input Levels would depend on what texture you used. For me it was OK to set them on 32; 0,94; 255 but you should definitely set it depending on lightness of your image.

On the following picture you can see how the mania looks so far.

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Step 15 – Cyan for Lights

As you can see on the preview picture glow of the butterfly isn’t white but cyan. Right now lights on your picture are only lighter version of original color. It would look better if they have more cyan tones.

Add new layer on the top of all layers and name it e.g. CYAN FOR LIGHTS. Grab the Brush Tool (B), set the Master Diameter on about 40 pixels and the Opacity on 15%. Pick some light cyan color and paint over the lights.

You can get the inspiration where to paint on the the picture below. I put black background under the picture in the middle to make changes better visible.

As you can see lights become also more visible and thus contrast is higher. All because of such a simple step.

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Step 16 – Cyan Color

If you want to create impression of night there should be more blue/cyan colors in the picture. You’ll change it in this step.

First add new adjustment layer Color Balance on the top of all layers and set it as on the following image.

Because of the Color Balance adjustment the picture is little over saturated. To fix it add new adjustment layer Hue/Saturation and set the value Saturation on -20.

Here you can see how these two adjustments affect the picture.

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Step 17 – Darkening Lighter Spots

Before we move back on adding more elements to the picture there is one more adjustment which needs to be done. There are some lighter spots in the manipulation which cause that it looks unbalanced. You can see them highlighted on the following picture.

To make these spots darker add new adjustment layer Levels on the top of all layers and set the Input Levels on 0; 0,67; 255.

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