Pilgrim

Pilgrim

“Pilgrim” by Kuschelirmel
The Steps
Let’s take a look at the pictures I used for the base.

For the background I chose 3 pictures from my personal stock. They were all taken on the same day at roughly the same place and more importantly, all were shot with the sun behind me and to the left (you can see that best when looking at the tree’s shadow).

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To the left, you can see the pilgrim (from ailinstock.deviantart.com) as well as the castle that was supposed to appear in the distance (morguefile.com). I had to flip the castle picture to make the shadows fit. Also, it looks better composition-wise (later more).

Picture 03: The “rough cut” – using layer masks I try to fit the pieces together. As a background I use a light blue because I need to extend the sky.

Picture 04 : I used a picture of clouds (desaturated via Channel Mixer, contrast enhanced via Levels) on “Soft Light” to get some clouds in. I used the Clone Brush Tool to patch some bits and pieces together (added the path where the picture was cut off, added some trees/bushes in front of the castle).

Picture 05: I put the pilgrim into the scene – he covers the part with the rough edge between the tree picture and the path picture 😉 – the problem is that he was shot underneath some trees and the shadows and lights on his coat need to be covered up.

Picture 06: To do that, I used various tools: a soft brush on low opacity, the smudge tool, the clone and patch tools,… (I’m not such a great painter, so I use what works and try reading painting tutorials to help me out with stuff like this). Here I also added some more cloud pics (same as above) to make the sky more interesting – playing with the opacity of the soft light layers helps, too.

Picture 07: Now that the distracting shadows/light spots are eliminated, I’m ready to try and get the shadows on the pilgrim to match those of his surroundings: first off, he casts a shadow on the ground.