Urban Renewal was an image that I had wanted to do for a while. The image of this tree growing in an old building in an abandoned city seemed like a really cool notion; a little bit fantasy, a little bit post-apocalyptic. I mean, who doesn’t like post-apocalyptic fantasies?
When working on images like this I tend to visualise an entire scene – how it would be as if I saw it in a movie or was there in ‘real life’. From there I spend a lot of time searching for the background image to find one that matches more-or-less the scene in my head. So because I see the entire scene, the actual composition of the shot will change based on the background plate.
Once I’ve found or taken an image, I do a really, really rough sketch just to start seeing what elements I’ll need, proportions etc. Then I spend a long time looking for the elements (mostly creative commons images on flickr, some free stock images and sometimes I bite the bullet and buy images on iStockphoto).
Then we start masking out bits…
And give the image a quick grade as a basis for the rest of the image. Shadows are also painted in.
Adding background elements. They are of differing quality and didn’t have a lot of colour information, but they’re going to be pretty indistinct anyway.
Adding in the hero tree. And yes, that was masked by hand and using colour extractions.
Some lighting effects are started to be added.
Sky plate… Just some storm clouds.
Dust clouds added to give more depth to the image to help separate the background elements.
Detailing. Flocks of birds are becoming a bit of a thing for me – I tend to put them in most images simply because it seems to make them that bit more dynamic and alive.
Lots more dust and light rays added just by painting them in. Gaussian blur is yor friend.
Here I flatten the image as a new layer with the original layers still preserved and the flattened version above everything else. I then crunch the curves or levels so I just have the highlights. This is then given a heavy gaussian blur and the layer is set to screen so it blooms out the highlights. This helps give the atmosphere more volume. In this case it’s pretty heavy-handed because I wanted it to look quite dusty.
Finally I like to crunch the blacks relatively heavily, because 1) I like contrasty images, and 2) in this case it hid a few dodgy bits. I also like to put a bit of a texture overlayed over the top to give the image a bit more character that makes it hard for the viewer to put their finger on (ie: be subtle).
So there you have it. This took about a day all up. Of course I’ve glossed over a few things here such as adjustment layers, but there are about 100 layers in this PSD so this is really just a broad overview.
I like to finish the images within the space of a day or two (almost always done over a weekend when I’ve got nothing else to do) simply because beyond that they have a tendency to drag on with little benefit to the final image. But this really depends on how people are going to view it – if it’s going to be printed as a large print or seen in the cinema then, yeah – you’ll have to spend longer and really make sure all the edges are cleaned up because otherwise people will notice. Or at least, you’ll notice. In this case, though – it’s only really designed to be seen as an A4 print or on screen so you can get away with a bit.
Anyway, I hope this has been insightful and you’re inspired to do some photoshopping!