Wallpaper: Above the clouds

Today we'll be creating a rather simple, but attractive photomanipulation to be used as a desktop wallpaper. At first let's see what we'll be making:

Resources

For our manipulation we'll need a few resources. You can download them from these links: a waterfall, blue nexus, clouds and a cityscape. Download them, open in Photoshop and you're ready.

The wallpaper

Create a new document (mine is 1280x800 as always), using a resolution of your desktop (or whatever you prefer). Rename the first transparent layer to waterfall and paste the waterfall from resources on it. Hit CTRL+T and transform / position it so that it would fit the document and the waterfall itself was in the middle. I've done my first try with a waterfall on the right and it didn't look quite good. So here's what you should do:

Next, move it up a little:

Hit the layer mask button

in the layers panel to add a layer mask to the waterfall image. Now grab a soft brush, set the color to black and start drawing on the lower part of the waterfall (as shown in the picture above). The picture should start disappearing as you draw. If you do something silly, switch the color to white and paint over the area you screwed up to get the hidden image back. Use a transparent brush:

We will be using a brush with the same transparency all over the tutorial so when i say [b]transparent[/t] later - i'll mean 10-20 percent opacity. And here's what you need to go for:

A transparent brush will help you mask some parts more than others. As you can see in the picture, i've masked the lower part of the waterfall image and a little near the rocks. You'll be able to fine tune this later when you see the clouds in the background. Now we need to get rid of that piece of a tree or smth. in the middle of our composition. To do that, grab the clone tool

from the tools palette and mask it out. It's really easy. Just ALT+CLICK on an area you want to copy from and click on the tree to copy that area on it. You should probably mask it with some parts of the waterfall. You should also use a very transparent and soft brush as you used to mask out the water. Here's what i've got so far:

I've also used the same clone tool to increase the area of the waterfall itself. Just a little, but still ... you can do that if you want as well. You can see in the image below (compare it with the image above) that the difference isn't very huge, but it adds a little more drama:

Now create a layer below waterfall and name it clouds. Paste the clouds image on it, hit CTRL+T and resize / position it as follows:

The full resolution clouds need some little tweaking to look a little better. So hide the waterfall layer by clicking on an eye next to it and let's tweak the clouds. First of all, do you see that annoying ... how do i call it ... blur perhaps in the middle of the picture?

If you've positioned the clouds like i did - you'll definitely see it. Grab the clone tool

from the tools palette and clone it with some other clouds (just like you did with the piece of wood):

Next, duplicate the clouds layer (CTRL+J) and apply a Filter > Blur > Surface Blur... on the duplicate:

Set the opacity of the duplicate to about 40% and press CTRL+E to merge it down with the clouds. Now re-enable the waterfall layer and you'll have something like this:

I know i know, looks ugly as hell, but we'll make it better at the end :) But for now, press CTRL+SHIFT+U for both layers to desaturate both the waterfall and the clouds:

Now zoom in on the image and fix any areas you don't feel are right. Let me explain that. Take a look at the following area:

As you can see, there's no clouds at all where the rocks meet the water. And there should be. So click on the waterfall layer's mask (not the layer itself, but the black and white rectangle next to the title), grab a black transparent brush and mask out areas like that. Here's how this particular area should look:

So do that for all the areas that need retouching (especially where the rocks meet the water). Here's another side retouched:

It's possible you've got it right in the first steps already when you first masked the waterfall, but it's highly unlikely since you haven't been able to see the clouds below yet. And here's our retourced document:

Now select waterfall layer and merge it down (CTRL+E) with the clouds. You can rename the result to background or whatever you like (i've named mine composition for some weird reason:). Next, create a new layer above, name it cityscape and paste in your city image. Then CTRL+T it to position / resize as shown below:

And move the cityscape below the background. Add a mask to the background layer by pressing the layer mask button

in the layers panel. Once again, take a big soft round and transparent brush and start masking out parts of the clouds so that you could see the cityscape through them. Mask some areas stronger than others (for example pick one particular building and make it almost completely visible and leave the rest just partially visible). Here's how my masked result looks like:

As you can see, in my composition the city is almost invisible in the place where the waterfall meets the clouds and it's completely invisible in the left and right part of the document. Time to add some shinyness :) Create a new layer above everything else, rename it to sky or something like that and paste your blue nexus resource. Position it as follows:

And hit CTRL+SHIFT+U:

Set the blend mode of the sky layer to multiply. Now create a mask on it (i hope you still remember how that's done) and, using a black soft transparent brush (as always), mask out everything below the rocks (we don't want the sky anywhere on the water and below):

As you can see, by setting the blend to multiply, we've darkened the rocks and added some shinyness to some specific places + the waterfall itself. Now grab a soft, transparent white brush and click on the sky layer's icon (so that the mask got deselected and the layer itself got selected. Click one or a few times on the areas, marked in the picture below:

What this does is it highlights the areas you cick on. And now - the final adjustments! Select the topmost layer and press the new adjustment layer button

in the layers panel. Pick a Hue/Saturation item from the popup menu and use these settings:

Your picture should change the colors like so:

Next, change the foreground color to #FF0000 and the background to #00FF00 and add another adjustment layer (above the previous one), but this time select Gradient Map from the popup menu. You should end up with something ugly like that:

Not to worry, blend modes will come to the rescue :) Set the blend mode of this adjustment layer to color, set the opacity to about 40% and you'll have something like this:

Add a last adjustment layer on top (this time select Levels) and use similar settings to the ones below:

This will add some contrast to the image. And there you have it. The final result: