Been a little while since I have written a tutorial, so I thought I would make it a good one

I’ve been thinking again about the earlier Dave Hill tutorial that I have written and I don’t think that I did his work justice, so here’s take two Again I’m using the Topaz Adjust Filter to speed things up a little.

I looked at the Dave Hill website again (nice upgrade btw!) and carefully studied all the elements again:

• Everything is usually in focus and sharp, so foreground and background and of course the people.
• High contrast of colour
• Faux HDR look of everything

So lets get to work Firstly I thought about the kind of photo that I wanted to create and for some reason I came up with a street fighter styled idea. Here are the three stock images that I used:

Each image above links to the stock images that I used.

And here is what I ended up with:

So let’s break it down.

1. Cut out the two fighters in each of the stock images. I used the pen tool and then channels for the hair. Save the two original files with the layers and the mask in case you need to make adjustments to them.

2.Drag the two fighters to the new canvas  and resize to make them fit the background image.

3. Create two folders and name them Fighter 1 and Fighter 2. Drag each fighter layer into its own folder. This will make it easier to edit them both later on. Turn both of there folders off for now.

4. Duplicate the background layer. Now its time to make it a bit more detailed. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Crisp, then click ok.

5. Turn on Fighter 1 folder. Create a layer below the cut out  in the same folder and with the brush tool, with the opacity set at 25%, draw in a shadow.  Start darker at the foot, the lighter as it end. Apply a guassian blur of about 5px, then turn the layer opacity down to 50%.

6. Add a curves adjustment layer. Create a gentle S to bring up the contrast. Right mouse click on the curves layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.  On the mask of the curves layer, mask out the pants of the fighter.

7. Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Lower the saturation to -50%. Right mouse click on the hue/saturation layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.

8. Alt-click on the fighter layer so its the only layer active. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key. This will select the highlights in the image. Set this layer’s blend mode to screen and opacity to 65%. Apply a layer mask. On the mask of this layer, mask out the pants of the fighter again. Then turn the background layer back on.

9. Repeat steps 4 to 7 for Fighter 2 folder.

10. Now its time to blend the fighters a little bit more into the background. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E at the same time to create a new merged layer of all the layers below. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Neutraliser_by_JorgeDiaz, then click ok.

11. Create another Curves Adjustment layer and pull it down in the middle to darken the whole image a little.

12. Create a blank layer and select the elliptical marquee tool and draw a big oval. Then press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and fill it with black with the paint bucket tool.

13. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 70 px and lower the opacity of the layer to 65%.

14. Create another blank layer and fill it with 50% grey. Turn the layer’s blend mode to soft light. With the brush tool, set to 30% opacity and 30% flow and with black as the foreground colour, go over all the shadows on the two fighters and darken them a bit more. Switch the colour to white and go over the highlights to bring them out some more.

15. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E to create another merged layer copy. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key to select all the highlights of the images. Now press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and hit crtl-j to create a new layer from the selection.  Change the layers blend mode to multiply and lower the opacity of this layer to 65%.

16. All done