Step by Step Adding a cloud as a background texture

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing, Texture Photo

This is a step by step instruction on how to perform a similar look as the photo I enhanced a couple days ago.  First start out with your model photo.  Clean up the background or any blemishes on the model you may want to remove.

In this case the original background color is very important since that’ll be the base color the clouds will take. Overlay the clouds and change the blend mode.  In this case I used Linear Light to achieve the rich coloring.

Now we want to bring the model back to the front.  So make a selection of the model and make a new layer with a mask.  Actually we’ll need two of these.  Your selection doesn’t have to be perfect.  Since all we are doing is blending with the original image, if anything is out of place it’ll be difficult to find any errors.

The top most copy will need a little fiddling, but we’ll worry about that in a moment.  This is just the cutout of the model on top of the blended background.

Most people would stop there but it lacks some punch so the next thing to do is to make the top most copy of the model black and white.  In this case I’m going to use the top copy to enhance the lower copy.  So I don’t want the black and white to be really strong.  Just enough to heighten the shadows.

Now we change the blend mode between the two copies of the model.  I used Hard light in this case to give her a more bronzed look.  This will better match the background.

Finally you just turn all the layers on and adjust opacity as you see fit to balance things out.  To the side is all the layers I used and what I set their blend modes to if it wasn’t normal.  You can easily bring through some of the cloud texture on the model by adjusting the opacity, but in this case I didn’t like the effect.

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