Wallpaper: In the middle of nowhere

Today we will make ourselves a nice wallpaper with an island in a beautiful starry sky background. Here's how it's going to look:

Preparation

To prepare for this tutorial, we'll have to find some useful images to use in this picture. We'll need: a background, a moon, a tree and some "little" kitties :) If you want to try and copy the wallpaper as thoroughly as possible, you'll be able to download all the resources that i've used. Let's start with a background. Tip-Kit contains 2 tutorials for creating a sky for a space scene. The same sky can be used in this wallpaper. You can click and follow one of the tutorials below to make your own wallpaper or use the already made picture that i've used. The tutorials:

The picture i used (for the lazy ones ;]):

Now for all the other pictures that we need to borrow: the kitties, a tree, the moon.

Finally, we will be needing a clouds brush # 1 from this tutorial:

The wallpaper

OK let's begin creating our wallpaper. Open the background image (the sky) in Photoshop and double-click on the background layer if you see a little lock next to its name. This will unlock the layer. Fire up the Hue/Saturation dialog by pressing CTRL+U and use the following settings:

Note: if you are using some other background than the one i've provided - you might get slightly different results in the above steps. This step will change the background color to something not so dramatic and bright:

Create a new layer above the background and name it island. Grab the brush tool

from the tools palette and select a hard round brush with ~50px diameter. Go to Window > Brushes and get rid of the annoying spacing by setting the spacing slider in brush tip shape tab to 1%:

Now select a white color, make sure the opacity of the brush has a 100% value and draw an island. You are drawing in white because you have a very dark background and the original black color would be difficult to see and draw. That's why you'll draw the island in white and invert the color to black after it's done. So go ahead and draw an "island" like this:

OK have you stopped laughing from this stupid looking "island"? :) Good, then let's continue. Grab a rectangular marquee tool

from the tools palette and make a selection like this:

Hit DEL to delete this area and position the island somewhere in the middle of the picture:

Finally, hit CTRL+I for color invertion and watch your island turn black. Next we will be adding some grass, but we still can't see very well so we need something to increase the contrast of the image. And that something will be clouds. Grab the brush tool

from the tools palette with the clouds brush # 3 preset (you were supposed to create it in the preparation step or have it from my previous tutorials). Again, set the color to white, opacity to 100%. We will draw the clouds on their separate layer. So create a clouds layer below the island layer:

Now click a few times around the island and change the opacity of your clouds layer to about 20%:

Now create a new layer on top of everything else and name it grass. With the brush still selected, pick a grass preset:

This brush has two bad things we don't want: it's too big and it has color dynamics enabled (it changes its color). So open the brush engine by selecting Window > Brushes from the main menu and uncheck the color dynamics checkbox:

Now press the [ bracket a couple of times to downsize the brush and start painting the grass (oh and change the brush color to black this time). Define a grass contour and don't worry if some of the grass paints below the island or something like that. Here's my result after drawing the grass:

As you can see there's some grass below the island. Don't worry about it for now. Just create another layer on top of the grass and rename it dune grass. Pick another brush preset that's called dune grass:

This grass preset has exactly the same problems as the previous one. So downsize it by pressing the [ bracket a couple of times and then remove the color dynamics as you did with the previous brush. Then start painting your dune grass until you get some satisfying rasults:

Now press CTRL+E to merge the dune grass layer with the grass layer. And once again repeat this to merge the grass layer with the island layer. So now we have our island and the grass on one layer. Time to get rid of the unwanted artifacts below the island. To do that, make a rectangular selection on the bottom of the island and press DEL to delete it. Too bad i can't provide a full screenshot for this step, but i hope you'll get the point even with the left part of it trimmed:

Next we will prepare our tree to be imported into the composition. We'll be making a silhouette out of it. Open the tree picture from the deviantart website (see the links in the preparation section) in photoshop. Pick a hard round brush, set its opacity to 100% and color to white. We want to create a contrast between the tree and the sky so we need to get rid of all the other things that we don't need. Since the tree is dark - naturally, we'll try to brighten the sky and darken the tree to get the best contrast. So in conclusion: everything that's not a tree must be as light as possible. That's why we need a white brush. Draw around the tree, coloring everything we won't use in white:

As you can see only the tree itself and some sky around it have to remain and all the rest - painted in white. Good, let's continue. As we can see the sky is pretty bright and the tree is dark so it's already looking like it'll give a very good contrast when we play with the levels adjustmens. But before that, we need to go to the channels window (Windows > Channels. Click on the red, green and blue channels separately and see which channel shows the most contrasting result. In this case the blue one is pretty good. Drag the blue channel on the new channel button

in the channels panel to duplicate it:

Now we can apply the levels adjustments. Hit CTRL+L and drag the left slider to the right and the right slider to the left until the sky becomes white and the tree - as black as possible:

Now we need to select the tree. Channels are a little different than layers. We select their contents just as we'd do with the layers: CTRL+CLICK on a thumbnail. But in the channels case, white color means opaque and black means transparent. Currently our tree is black so technically it's not visible. Press CTRL+I to invert the colors on the channel and the tree becomes white. Now CTRL+CLICK on the channel's thumbnail and return to the layers tab (Window > Layers). Create a new layer on top of the original. Don't worry if your image is showing in weird colors - that's normal. After creating the new layer, set the color to black (D on your keyboard) and press ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the selection. As a result you should get a black tree so press CTRL+A to select everything on that new layer and CTRL+X to cut. Return to the wallpaper document, select the topmost layer and press CTRL+V to paste the tree. The operation will create a new layer so rename it to tree:

I've also positioned the tree on the island right in the middle. But then i've noticed that the island is floating way too high so i've selected both the tree and the island layers and moved them down a little:

Then i've also moved the tree a little bit higher from the "ground". Now let's create some more light. Add a new layer above clouds and name it light. Pick a soft round airbrush with a size of about 500 pixels and set its color to some light blue-ish like this one:

Now move your mouse to the middle of the island and click once to add a big circle of light:

There's two problems that we can notice now: first - the light circle is visible from below the island and second - there are some empty spaces between the grass that we don't need. Your grass might look normal after this step but mine obviously didn't so i had to select the grass layer and paint in the gaps. And to get rid of the light below the island - use the same method as with the grass (select the unwanted area and delete it). Let's add a moon next. Create a layer above light and name it moon. Open the moon image from the link in the preparation section in Photoshop. Press CTRL+A, CTRL+C to select all and copy, get back to the wallpaper document and press CTRL+V to paste:

Two things we need to do here: get rid of that non-matching color and the black stuff around it. The second one is very easy: change the moon layer's blend mode to screen. As for the first problem, first press CTRL+SHIFT+U to desaturate. If it looks good for you - great. It wasn't absolutely happy with it though so i decided to give it a barely noticeable light blue-ish shade. To do that, press CTRL+U and use the following settings:

Now move the moon to a better location in the picture:

Select the light layer and pick a soft round brush with a diameter of about 100 px and the same (or not) blue-ish color that you've used for the light. Make it transparent. In other words, use something like the settings below :)

With that done, draw around the moon to add some glow to it. Don't overdo it - one click in the same place is enough. Here's what you should end up with:

It's time to add some cats. Open the tigers from the deviant art in Photoshop and double-click the layer if there's a little lock next to its title. Now grab the magic wand tool

from the tools palette and click anywhere on the white background to make a selection:

Hit DEL to delete all the white space. Now make another layer below the tigers and fill it with white (press D to default the color values, X to exchange them and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill). The result should be the same image, but now the tigers are on a separate layer and we can edit them one by one. Select the lowest layer and pick a 2 pixel soft brush with a 100% opacity. Set the foreground color to white and make a small group of pixels. You can see what you need to do in the picture below and there's a tiger's head just to let you know of how big the group of pixels should be:

OK you're definately wondering why we have just done that and the answer is as follows: we will turn these tigers into silhouettes as well and to make them seem more real, we'll brush out some fur so that they didn't look so flat. You don't have to do that, because the final result won't be an extremely noticeable one, but it will add some detail and the tigers will look a little better. We will be using this group of pixels as a brush to paint the fur, because it would take a lot of time to do it with a single dot brush. So to define the brush, select this group of pixels (zoom in to get a better selection):

Now go to Edit > Define Brush Preset ... and name it fur or something like that. You can now fill the selection back with white if you want or leave it as it is, because we will only use this layer as a background anyway. The next thing to do is color the tigers in black. For this select the topmost layer and click on the lock transparent pixels button

in the layers panel. Now set the foreground color to black (D on the keyboard) and press ALT+BACKSPACE to fill. The tigers are now black and you can unlock the transparent pixels by clicking on the same button again. For our composition, we'll be using the three marked tigers:

And now the real work starts :) Grab a smudge tool

from the tools palette and select your fur preset. Set the strength to about 50% and start smudging out the fur. To do that, click somewhere inside the tiger (but close to the edge) and drag out. You will see tiny bits of fur rising from the tigers. It would be easier to work if you zoomed in. So add some fur to the three tigers, but remember that it's just an optional step to add some detail and it can be skipped if you're really lazy. The result does not need to look very real - we will be downsizing the images anyway. Here's a sample of one of my smudged out kittens:

Let's import each kitten to the composition. Grab a polygonal lasso tool

from the tools palette and make a selection around the first kitten:

Press CTRL+C to copy. This will only copy the kitten, ignoring the white background (remember, the background is on another layer). Go back to the wallpaper document, select the tree layer and press CTRL+V to paste. This will create another layer so name it tiger 1. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Now press CTRL+T to activate the transformation option and, while holding the SHIFT key, drag one of the corner handles to downsize the tiger to a decent size. Put it in the left part of the island like so:

Hit ENTER to apply the transformation and import the second tiger. This time - the lying one. Just as before, select it with polygonal lasso and copy-paste on the wallpaper with the tree layer selected. Rename the new layer to tiger 2 and resize/put the tiger below the tree:

Put the third tiger on the other side of the island:

OK the composition is now complete, the last thing left to do is add a reflection. To do that, select all the layers and press CTRL+E to merge them. Rename the resulting layer to background. You're left with only one layer now. Make a selection like this:

Now press CTRL+J to transfer the selection onto a new layer. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical and move the flipped layer down to align with the bottom of the island:

Press CTRL+J to make a copy of the reflection layer. Now disable the topmost layer by clicking on an eye icon next to it - we'll need it later. Select the middle layer and go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur .... Apply this blur:

You will notice some unwanted light areas appear on the top part of the reflection. We will fix that later with the copy of the reflection layer that is currently disabled. The next filter we'll be applying to the reflection is called a ripple. It's located in Filter > Distort > Ripple .... Use these settings:

Here's how it looks now:

I've marked the problematic area with the three arrows. We'll need to get rid of this. To do that, we'll make the water completely clear near the coast and wavy away from the coast. For this, enable and select the topmost layer and press the layer mask button

in the layers panel to create a layer mask. Grab the gradient tool

from the tools palette and choose a gradient like this:

Draw a gradient like shown in the picture below (hold SHIFT to make it a straight line):

This will fade the topmost layer, exposing the layers below it. If you don't understand how this works, read my non destructive deletion with layer masks tutorial. The result should be as follows:

It's not very clear in the thumbnail what happened, but you can still obviously see that the problematic join between the island and the reflection is now gone. With the topmost layer selected, press CTRL+E to merge it with the other reflection layer. I've decided to colorize the reflection a little so i fired up the hue/saturation dialog (CTRL+U) and defined the following settings:

Now when you zoom into the image where the horizon merges with the sky - there's a clear horizon line:

Some of you might like it, some of you (like me) - won't. To get rid of this line and have a seamless merge, add a mask on the reflection layer (press the layer mask button

in the layers panel), grab a small soft round black brush with a very low opacity (about 10%) and draw on the line until it disappears:

Do the same with the other side of the island. And ... you're done! Final image: