As I go through the steps to edit the image, I will also explain some fairly basic techniques. I hope that doesnt make things drag too slowly for experienced users, but I dont want to assume too much either. Youve heard this from other tutorials, but Ill say it again: I discuss the steps from the standpoint of I did this or that rather than you should do blah blah blah, because many of the techniques are very subjective and reflect personal taste. You would very likely do things differently to suit your taste and comfort level. I use Adobe Photoshop 6 on a Macintosh, so some of the tool & menu details may be different if you have another version or computer platform. Refer to the last page of the document for any footnote references.
I double-clicked the background layer & clicked OK to turn it into a regular layer. Then I created a new layer mask (See Footnote 1) and made the sky and tree branches transparent. When isolating an object from its background, I usually prefer to paint directly on the mask rather than use the lasso tool. I feel this give me more control over the hardness or softness of the edges and the shape of the mask.
There were still tree branches overlapping the house that I didnt want. So I zoomed in very close and used the clone tool (See Footnote 2) to remove the branches. In an area that has lots of noisy, contrasty detail like the shingles on the roof, I use a hard-edged paintbrush for the clone tool. I find that a soft-edge brush unrealistically softens the detail along the edges of the cloned area. The only other key is sampling the clone tool in areas that have the same luminosity and color as the destination...and choosing those sample areas as randomly as possible to prevent any patterns from becoming obvious.
Next, I wanted to paint the undamaged parts of the house so it looked lived-in. To do this, I made three new Color Balance adjustment layers (See Footnote 3) above the house layer: one for the siding, one for the trim and one for the shingles (See Figure 1). For each adjustment layer, I made a preliminary color shift which affected the whole house and yard. I then selected the layer mask and filled it with black to hide the color effect. I then painted in the layer mask with white to bring the color back into the desired areas. To make things realistic, I made sure to paint up into the shadows under the eaves even though there was no color to be seen there...but this did darken up the shadow enough to match the color changes that were happening in adjacent areas. After painting the layer mask, I fine-tuned the Color Balance layer to make it look realistic and appealing.Color Balance can glaze things over if you have to make a big shift to get the color you want. If that happens, you can try adding a complimentary (See Footnote 4) color or another primary (See Footnote 5) color in the shadows to neutralize it a bit. Since I really pumped up red in the midtones for the siding, I added a little green in the shadows so that the grain of the wood darkened back up, thus adding some depth and desaturating the color enough to look realistic.
I had a digital picture of some storm clouds that I was able to use thereby saving myself the aggravation of a lengthy Google search. (Ive found that good, hi-res storm pictures on the web are aggressively copyrighted.) Although, after the alterations in this image, it would be next to impossible to say whose image it originally was anyway. So, whatever.I pasted the clouds into a layer behind the house, and scaled it down to fit. The clouds were too light (See Progressive 4), so I added a new Curves (See Footnote 6) Adjustment Layer to darken them up. It has been my experience that many people prefer to use Levels rather than Curves, and this works fine for many basic lightness/darkness, or hilight/shadow adjustments. Im more comfortable with curves because they can fine tune things to a degree that levels cant. By holding down the option/alt key and moving the cursor across the clouds, a circle appears on the curve, showing where the clouds sit on the curve (See Figure 3). I wanted to darken and increase the contrast in that portion of the curve. So I added two points that bounded the area where the circle indicated the clouds existed. (Note that I orient my curves dialog box so that the hilights are to the lower left and shadows to the upper right. By default, RGB curves are oriented the opposite. To change the orientation back and forth, click the shaded bar with the arrows below the curves graph. See Figure 4.) To darken the clouds, I dragged the upper right point sharply upward to strongly darken the clouds. I dragged the lower right point down just a bit (See Figure 3). The end result is a curve that is very steep in the area where the clouds sit. The steep portion of the curve adds contrast, and that helped make them really punchy, in addition to darkening them.
To add the illusion of rain, I made a new layer above the house and sky and ran the Render>Clouds filter (Making sure my foreground and background colors were black and white so that I would get a contrasty gray pattern). To this layer, I ran the Noise>Add Noise... filter set to 30%, Gaussian, Monochromatic. Then I selected a small portion of the noise layer and enlarged that to fill the whole layer to get some large noise blobs. Next I applied the Blur>Motion Blur filter. I dont recall the settings, but I angled it so the rain was nearly horizontal, and so the streaks were fairly long (See Figure 5). Finally, I set the layer to Overlay (See Footnote 7) mode at 64% opacity.
The house and landscape were too light by this point, so I added a Curves adjustment layer above the house to darken it and remove contrast. I made sure to group the adjustment layer with the house layer so it didnt affect the sky. Moving the left curve endpoint strongly upward both darkens the hilights of the image, and removes contrast. I added another point in the middle to put a little contrast back into the house, and darken its shadows up some more (See Figure 6). Since I only added one middle point, this adjustment could have easily been done with Levels too, but I default to curves, so there you go.
At this point, the horizon was too light, and too distinct, and so it didnt look stormy enough. So I added a new layer between the stormy sky layer and its adjustment layer. I set the new layer to Multiply (See Footnote 8) at 100% opacity. Then using the eyedropper, I took a sample from one of the darker clouds. Setting the paintbrush to a large blurry brush, and a low opacity of around 10%, I started painting the sky increasingly darker as it approached the horizon (See Progressive 8). I added another layer between the house layer and its own adjustment layer, set it to Multiply at 100% opacity, took a color sample from the grassland and painted the prairie darker as it approached the horizon (See Progressive 9).When using a layer in Multiply mode to darken part of an image, be sure your paint color is a darker, more neutral version of whatever youre painting on top of or it may not look natural. If necessary, use the eyedropper to sample what youll paint over, then click on the foreground color square in the tool palette and drag the circle to a darker more neutral portion of the color map (See figure 7).
Now for the carnage. To make it look like the wind was ripping the shingles off, I added a new layer (Normal mode at 100% opacity) between the painted house and the rain and gave it a layer mask. I went to the layer mask, filled it with black, and used the lasso tool to draw the shapes of shredding shingles. (I use the lasso here because I wanted hard edges and sharp corners.) Then I filled the selection with white. Finally, I exited the mask, and used the clone tool to clone shingles into the new mask I just drew (See Figure 8). (Be sure the Use All Layers checkbox is checked for the clone tool so that it samples from the original roof which is several layers below. See Figure 9.)To make the shingles look curved, I made a new layer above the shingles, filled it with 50% gray, and set it to Overlay mode at 100% opacity. I option(alt)-clicked between the layers to make a Clipping Group (See Figure 10). This causes the bottom layer to act as a mask for the layer grouped above it. That way only the shredded shingles will be affected by what I do on the Overlay layer. Then, using the Dodge and Burn tools set to 7% opacity with fuzzy brushes, I started painting shading and hilights to the shredding shingles so they looked curled over. Using Dodge & Burn on a 50%-Gray Overlay layer is something that is very useful for making subtle tone changes to an image. If you use Dodge and Burn on the image itself, you have fewer options to correct your dodging and burning later. By using the separate layer, it is easier make fixes since your underlying image isnt actually modified.
I went to Google and searched for a tree that I added on a new layer beneath the rain. Since the original tree image was silhouetted against a bright sky, I opened up curves and lightened the sky until it turned white. Then I painted white on anything that wasnt part of the tree (See Figure 11), painted jaggies into the bottom of the trunk and turned the layer mode to Multiply at 100% opacity. Since Multiply sees white as transparent, the tree is the only part that shows up, and blends into the cloudy sky. This was much faster than trying to mask the tree from its background with the magic wand tool or whatever, and it looks more natural. Although, this trick wouldnt work if the tree wasnt so dark.To make the tree look like its moving, I duplicated (See Footnote 9) the layer, and used the Blur>Motion Blur filter, set to the same angle as the rain but a little shorter in length. Then set the layer to Multiply at 57% and moved the blur so that the trail only came from behind the tree.
To add the flying boards, I used the lasso tool to select portions of the side of the house, and copied them onto a new layer set to Normal mode at 100% and put it between the house and the wind. Since the copy & paste didnt pick up the Color Balance adjustments Id given the house, I had to reapply the same Color Balance settings to the wood to make it look like it came from the house. I didnt use an adjustment layer for this. I just went straight into Color Balance and did it. Then I applied Blur>Motion Blur to the wood in the same direction as the wind, but a very short distance. Since a couple of the boards overlapped the house, the two-layer (sharp & blurry) approach I took with the tree wouldnt work, so I left them as-is and it seemed to work.I did the same thing with a wagon wheel that I found on Google and masked out from its background.
To complete the illusion that the boards and wagon wheel were flying in front of the house, I added a new layer set to Multiply at 64%. Then, sampling colors from the house or yard where the shadow would hit, I painted shadows in with a soft brush. Painting shadows takes some thinking to figure out how the shadow will lay down depending on whether its on a wall, or on the ground, or wrapping around some object. There is a science to it, but who has time for shadow science when youve got to spend all your time searching for good resource images? The best thing is to just pay attention to shadows when youre away from your computer and walking around in meat-space to get a feel for how they fall.I also took the opportunity to paint some very narrow shadows along the edges of the flying shingles.
I added a debris layer (Normal mode at 100% opacity) below the rain layer, and using a 2 pixel-wide paintbrush, I drew in bits and pieces of dark green-gray crumbs in the sky. I used Blur>Gaussian Blur set to about 0.3 pixels so they didnt look so penciled-in. I duplicated the layer, and used Blur>Motion Blur in the same direction as the wind and about the same blur distance as the boards. The sharper of the two layers was too dominant, so I went back to it and set the layer opacity to 76% to tone it down.
The clencher for the image was that I wanted somebody running or diving through the door. I lucked out on Google to find a guy jumping in the air with his arms spread out. It looked perfect for him to be holding onto the door frame. So after masking him out from his background, I duplicated his layer. On the top layer I chopped off his legs. On the bottom layer I chopped off his upper body. Then I repositioned the two layers so that his torso was a lot shorter so it looked like he was being pulled outward rather than floating vertically. Then I merged the two layers together and masked off his hands (See Figure 12).To look like he was positioned partially inside the door, I added another Curve adjustment layer and grouped it with him. I raised the hilight side of the curve to darken him up to mimic a shadow. Then I painted the mask so the shadow was concentrated mainly on his upper body and his legs (See Figure 13). I learned at this point that this seems to be a better way to do shadows than the Multiply-layer method I had been using.
The windows needed some broken glass, so I added a new layer set to Normal mode at 15%, filled it with white, and added a layer mask and filled that with black. I went to the layer mask, used the straight-line lasso tool to draw in jagged glass, and filled the selection with white to allow the white-filled layer to lighten the background behind the glass. To make it look like the glass was reflecting the clouds in the sky, I took a large soft brush, set the opacity to 7% and brushed in black randomly on the layer mask to vary the shading in the glass (See Figure 14).I added one more layer set to Normal mode at 100% and used a 1-pixel wide paintbrush to draw glints of light on some of the edges of the glass. Here, it was helpful to use a Wacom tablet so that the narrow lines could vary in opacity and make the reflections look more realistic. This works without the tablet, you just have to take more time to build up the fainter streaks of white and mix them with the brighter spots.
It seemed like the rain wasnt showing up very well across the face of the house and the yard. So I duplicated the rain layer and sharpened it. This made it harsher so it showed up better, but it still wasnt enough, so I changed the layer mode to Hard Light. Now it showed up great, but it covered up too many important details, like the guy in the door, and the shattered windows. So I added a layer mask, and used a very large soft brush set to an opacity of 15% and started painting black into it to hide the hard rain from the critical house areas (See Figure 15), as well as hiding the sharper rain in the sky where the first wind & rain layer already looked good enough.
Some portions of the house and yard still looked too bright, so I added a final layer filled with 50% gray to the top of the layer pallet and set it to Overlay mode at 100%. I used the Burn tool at 7% opacity with a large soft brush to darken those portions up (See Figure 16).
1. At the bottom of the layer pallet, click on the button, to add the mask to the currently selected layer (See Figure 17). The mask thumbnail will appear to the right of the layer thumbnail. Click on the mask thumbnail to modify it. Painting black on the mask makes that portion of the image transparent. Painting white shows the image. Shades in between produce varying degrees of transparency.2. The clone tool (rubber stamp) is used to copy portions of an image to another area. To determine which area you will copy from, move the cursor there, hold down the option/alt key, and click. Then when you clone in a new area, it will begin referring to the area where you option/alt-clicked. A small cross will show what portion of the image you are sampling (See Figure 18).The clone tool has two modes: aligned and non-aligned. (In Photoshop 6, the aligned checkbox appears in the tool menu when you have the clone tool selected. See Figure 19.) Aligned means that the sampled area moves in the same direction and distance as your clone brush as you continue clicking and painting. Non-aligned means that each time you release the mouse button and click again, the sample area returns to the point you first sampled. Aligned cloning tends to produce more natural results because it paints a continuous image no matter how many clicks you make. But non-aligned cloning can be useful when you dont have a very large sample area to use. You just have to be very careful because its easy to produce a pattern and scalloping in the cloned area.3. Adjustment layers allow you to apply curves, levels, hue & saturation, color balance & other adjustments to the image without actually changing the values in the original image. To make an adjustment layer, go to the layers menu, to New Adjustment Layer, and select the adjustment mode you want to use. When the New layer menu comes up, you have an option to Group With Previous Layer. If you group it, it will only modify the layer you had selected. Otherwise, it modifies everything below it (See Figure 20).Each new Adjustment layer automatically comes with a layer mask already created. You can paint varying shades on the layer mask to determine which portions of the image are affected by the adjustment. (Black hides the effect, white shows the effect.)4. Complimentary colors are colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel (Red - Cyan, Green - Magenta, Blue - Yellow). Complimentary colors that are placed next to each other in an image produce strong contrast. When these colors are overlapped or mixed together, they tend to produce neutral colors.5. There are two sets of Primary Colors that Photoshop is concerned about. Additive Primaries are Red, Green, and Blue. Subtractive Primaries are Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.6. Curves chart the lightness and darkness of an image along an adjustable line. You can lighten or darken the values of an image by clicking points along the line and dragging them up or down.7. A layer set to Overlay mode affects underlying layers as follows: Anything lighter than 50% lightens the underlying image. Anything darker than 50% darkens the underlying image. The closer the shades are to 50%, the less they effect the underlying image.8. A layer set to Multiply mode darkens underlying layers by adding the values of the two layers together. Wherever the top layer is white, nothing is done to the underlying layer. The white portion simply acts as though its transparent.9. To duplicate a layer, drag the layer onto the new layer icon at the bottom of the layer pallet (See Figure 21).