3D composing in Photoshop (Tutorial): "Take-off"

In this video, you will find out what it's all about from a technical and creative point of view. We start with the photography of the initial motif and see how the entire artwork takes shape and becomes reality in time lapse.

As the church tower is to be shot into space, we need it on a separate layer. The tower is cut out in two steps, the first of which is the creation of a rough mask.

Optimizing a layer mask has almost become routine in Photoshop. But you will also see where improving the mask does not work properly and learn how to do it manually instead.

Where the church tower used to be, we now have a "hole" in the sky. This can be quickly repaired with a clever combination of traditional and modern tools.

Adding a stone floor at the bottom using Photoshop's 3D function is a little tricky. If you don't want to take this step, you can add the finished "bottom floor" to the motif on a separate layer and skip the next video in this tutorial.

In Photoshop, you can convert a selection, no matter how complex it is, into a 3D object. We take advantage of this and create an object that can be moved to the right place in the image by navigating in 3D space.

The textures of the 3D block consist of a photographed stone wall of the church. They can be easily mapped onto the 3D object, scaled and moved.

Although the lighting of 3D objects works a little awkwardly in Photoshop, just like texturing, it is easy to understand in principle. We adjust the direction of the light to the background so that everything appears as one piece.

You can get the Saturn V engine for free on the Internet. It requires some patience, but once you have understood how to move, rotate or scale a 3D object in space, it is quite easy.

Please note the information on the project files included in the first video of this training.

If you zoom into the scene, you can see that the engine still looks quite unfinished. There are ugly staircase artifacts and illogical shadows. Rendering the scene fixes all these inconsistencies.

The very clear, cloudless sky doesn't quite match the drama of the subject. We therefore use simple but effective means to draw a cloudy sky into the picture.

We now convert the daytime shot into a night-time shot using an adjustment layer. This works quickly, but to show the explosive glow of the start, the adjustment layer is masked very cleanly. Not difficult, but labor-intensive.

Instead of a real photographed take-off, we add a white cloud to the scene. However, we first have to mask it. You can learn how to do this very realistically in this video.

The cropped cloud is now inserted and placed logically in the image by scaling and rotating. A duplicate of the layer completes the impression of a rocket taking off.

We build the three exhaust jets that hiss out of the engines from a small rectangular selection, which we firstly scale one-dimensionally and secondly brighten up considerably. A simple solution - but an effective result.

Now comes one of the highlights of this training: with just two layers, we paint a realistic glow in the scene that looks incredibly bright and radiant due to the twilight. Be excited!

The previously added cloud also needs some of the warm glow. However, we need another layer based on neutral gray and a soft, low-color brush.

If you try to imagine the scene spatially, you can see where light is still missing. This creates the light on the brightened grass verge and the inconspicuous but important reflections on the cars parked in the foreground.