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Create a Dali-esque photo montage

by Tom Lynch - Tutorials

Creating a successful photo montage may not be as easy as it might seem at first. Follow this tutorial that is going to explain the subtleties and tricks you have at your disposal in Photoshop to learn how to do it.

A succesful photomontage is a combination of lots of different things. You’ve got to firstly chosoe the right images to use in your piece.For this you’ve got to have a general idea in your head of what you want to make. You also have to think of the small details. Shadows, grassreflections etc. Your lighting must be correct, and the more you pay attention to these things, the more succesful your montage will be. Over the course of this tutorial, I will try to enlighten you to some of the things you need to think about when making a piece like this

What you’ll need:

• Adobe Photoshop (CS or above is fine)
• A general idea in your head
• The stock images you want to use
• A good few hours (if you want it to be good)

What you’ll learn:

• How to create a natural looking backdrop
• Blending strange objects into different scenes
• Effective use of layer masks
• Correct use of the Dodge and Burn tools
• To spot where to add shadows to your images

So, lets begin

Step One – Set up your canvas and background

Ok, now this will be a bit of a long one, so bare with me guys, we’ll get there in the end. Also, because of the length, I’m not going to explain every minute detail, so I’m assuming you have at least a moderate amount of Photoshop knowledge. Give me a shout if you need more explanation

Right, set up your canvas, however big you want it to be. I used 2560 x 1440 for mine, mainly so it was suitable to be used on the largestscreen resolutions, but use whatever you’re comfortable with. From here, go ahead and set up your background

I aimed to have a mountain range in the background, with some grasslands in the near area of the image, with a lake, or ocean at the midground.

To pull it off, I found an image of a mountain range with a lake in the foreground (foundhere) and another image of a grasslands (found here) both from sxc.hu. From there, I positioned the first image, then added the second one to it and masked out the upper area, to leave me with my final
background

Step Two – Adding Elements (Phonebox and clock)

Now we have our background, it’s time to start adding in the surreal elements. I thought some weird things to find would be an old english phonebox, a sagging clock (Dali style) and a lighthouse. I went to sxc.hu again to find my images, all of which are linked later on. Time to start adding them to our image. One thing to remember, is that you don’t want them to be too cluttered, as this stops us from adding enough detail.

I added my phonebox to the right side of my image, like so;

Phonebox Link

From here, it’s just a case of getting rid of those excess areas of the image that we don’t want. But wait, what are you doing?! Don’t you dare reach for the Eraser tool! We’re going to use masks to get rid of what we don’t want. Take your pen tool, or your lasso tool, whichever you’re most comfortable with, and mask around the areas to get rid of. I selected the phonebox, then inverted the selection. Paint black over these bits on your layer mask, not forgetting to mask out areas like the windows, so that we don’t have remnants of the old image in there

Now I’m going to add the strange clock to it. I want it resting droopily on the floor against the phonebox. So let’s get to it! First I got an image of a clock (this one actually) and cut it out from it’s original background. From there, paste it into the piece and hit Filter > Liquify. This is the fun bit now. Using the forward warp tool (W) click and drag the clock into a nice gooey looking shape, that will fit against your phonebox, or whatever you’re using in your piece. Once you have it nicely positioned, duplicate the layer, hold Ctrl + click on the layer thumbnail to select it. Paint all over it in black, then put this layer below the original, offset it a little and reduce the opactiy and voila! You have a perfect shadow to tie it into the image.

If like me you’re using grass, you may want to mask over the clock to give the impression some of the grass is infront of the clock face, it’s entirely up to you. Small details like that are what make these images the most impressive.

Step Three – Lighthouse

As you can guess, the next couple of steps involve adding more elements to the image. Remember, the whole idea behind this piece is surrealism, so think about what you wouldn’t expect to see in your piece. No-one would expect to see a phonebox in a deserted grasslands after all. The next thing I’m going to add to this piece is a lighthouse. One way I intend to make it more surreal, is to make it seem a similar height to the phonebox. First of all add the image to your piece;

Lighthouse Link

Once you’ve got it in a decent placement, add a layer mask to it and proceed to mask out the areas you don’t want. Ignore things like lighting for now, just focus on getting it perfectly masked, and stuff like grass masked well

Voila, the lighthouse is finished!

Step Four – Boat and Chess Piece

I’m going to roll these two things together, as the description is pretty much the same as the previous additions. The next thing I decided to add was a beached boat. I found a picture of one on sxc again and dragged it into my piece (links under the image). As you’ll see, the boat was rested with grass in front of it. I took advantage of this by not masking that out, and changing the colours to match the grass in my image.

Tricks like that will save you plenty of time in this sort of thing

Boat Link

Unless you’re using the same images as me, these settings will be useless to you, but it’s just to illustrate how I pulled off the effect. I added the following adjustment layers, but masked out all but the grass on the image, so that they only applied to the grass

Hue/Saturation

• Hue – 0
• Saturation – -100
• Lightness – +34

Photo Filter

• Colour – #ffb155
• Strength – 100%
• Preserve Luminosity – Checked

Now that’s all set up, I’m going to add my chess piece. As you’ll see from the image link, the original is upright, so I’ve had to transform it to fit the picture. Again, thinking of the surreal idea, I’ve made it rather large. As before, mask it, remembering things like grass and other small details. Ignore lighting and shadows for now

Chess Piece Link

Step Five – Fist Mountains

I thought it would be good to add a faint image of a fist in the mountains at the back left of the piece. I used
this image from sxc.hu again. As before, mask out the unwanted areas and place it on your piece. I duplicated mine and made it smaller to fit the mountains shape as below

From there, it’s a case of sorting the blending modes. All I did was desaturate the images, and set them to Hard Light. After that, I reduced the opacity to around 10-15% depending on the placement to blend them into the image. To give the surreal effect they don’t have to be blindingly obvious, people should be able to wander their eyes over your image and find new things tucked away all over the place. If I had more time to spend on this piece then you’d see it riddled with random hidden objects, unforunately time waits for no man, not even me it seems!

Step Six – Lighting and Shadows

At the moment, you’ve probably got conflicting light sources on all your images and they look very pasted on and unnatural. Well nows the time for that to change. First off we’re going to play with the lighting. The first thing you need to decide is where you want your light to be coming from. This will have to be universal across all the elements in the end. Try to think about the background you’ve set up when deciding where to have your light source. To start, what I’m going to do is create a new layer, get a brush with some red colour at 15% opacity and just brush over the areas I want to adjust as a guide, like so;

Luckily for me, a lot of the lighting is done for me, and I just need to play with the dodge tool. Firstly, the side of the boat opposite to the light needs to be darkened. Using the Dodge tool, select Highlights from the drop down at the top, and lower the strength to a low number.

Start off small and get it to the level you want. Similar things were the sides of my lighthouse. They were too bright from the old image, so again using the Dodge tool we can bring it to a more universal lighting

Time for shadows. I did the same again with the new layer of faint red, painting where I wanted to add shadows

From here, it was simply a case of selecting the area I wanted to have as a shadow and filling it with black. Then, just give it a small amount of Gaussian Blur and lower the opacity until it looks natural. Remember if one of your objects is in front of another, it will cast a shadow on that object, so remember to add those to keep the perspective of the piece (example is on the lighthouse, shadow cast from the boat)

Step Seven – Final Adjustments

Ok guys, home stretch now, I promise. From here we have a few minor adjustments to do then we’re done

First adjustment layer I used was a Hue/Saturation layer. Again unless you’ve used the same images as me, the settings are probably meaningless to you, but nonetheless I shall include them in a moment regardless. The aim of this layer was to strengthen the colours a little, making them a little more vibrant. After this, and for the same reason, I added a Colour Balance layer (settings below). Be sure to play around with the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights options on this, it’s a very powerful adjustment layer if used correctly

Hue/Saturation

• Hue – 0
• Saturation – +9
• Lightness – -3

Colour Balance

• Shadows
  
  • +7
  • 0
  • -10
• Midtones
  
  • +1
  • 0
  • 0
• Highlights
  
  • -6
  • 0
  • 0

Another thing I wanted to add, was a textured feel to the whole image. To do this, I created a new layer, and went to Image > Apply Image.

This creates a copy of whats on screen on the selected layer. Following this, just go to Filter > Texture > Texturizer, and play around with the settings until you find something you like

LAST STEP! Create a new layer, add some black brushing to the edges ensuring it fades into your focal area. Set it to Overlay, Soft Light, or whatever looks the best, and reduce the opacity slightly. It doesn’t want to be staggeringly obvious at first, just subtly draw the viewers eyes into the center

Now just another 5 steps…no, I’m just kidding. If you’ve read this all the way through, then firstly, massive thanks for your dedication, and also well done! Hopefully now you’ve picked up some tricks for making your own images like this, or even just adding little things to your own style of art

As always I’m available right here on Tutsarena if you need any help or have any questions about anything. And if you do decide to follow this tutorial through and come up with your own outcome, please let us know, I’d love to see them!

Have fun and take care guys!

Download

You can download the small version of a Photoshop .PSD file here. Sorry, the original was over 100M in size and we seriously doubt anyone would want it.

Wallpapers

Here are also wallpapers of this montage in different sizes that you can put on your desktop:
800×600 1024×768 1280×1024 1440×900 1600×1200 1680×1050 2560×1440