I was feeling in the mood to make another tutorial, and Morgana suggested that I do one for this banner.
This banner took an awful lot of work in merely getting the blend right, so my Tutorial will be in 2 parts- one for the blend, and one for the colouring
Apologies, if the first few stages look slightly different to the end result- i stupidly flattened my blend and saved it, which meant I had to remake it- and thus some images may be slightly bigger/smaller than in my finished banner
I work in Photoshop CS2, but this should be translatable for other versions:
This Is what we're aiming for
1-
Open a new canvas in photoshop- mine will be 700x250
2-
Then I grabbed my images- for this banner I used This screencap of Sam & Frodo, This Screencap of Sam and this image of Gandalf arriving at Bag End
First I pasted the Image of the shire onto my canvas. Then I flipped it, resized it and sharpened it.
As I wanted the shire to look dreamy and idylic I want to intensify the colours, so to do this I duplicated my image twice (Ctrl+J). The first (bottom most) layer copy I set the blend mode to Screen 100% and the 2nd (top copy ) I set to Overlay 100% which gives my image a more vibrant look. Then I merge all three layers.
3-
I then grabbed the Sam & Frodo pic, and pasted it on a new layer on my canvas- above the shire one. Then I re-sized it, sharpened it and flipped it horizontally, and tried to place it so that S&F sat in the middle of my canvas and that the lighter gray area sat above my image of the Shire
I then changed the blend mode of the S&F image to Darken 100%- yes it looks awful, but we'll tidy it up in a minute
4-
Now comes the tricky part- Blending. First I took my eraser tool Hardness= 0 size= 150 and removed the light grey cliffs of Mordor.
I've marked the area in red to show you what I erased, whilst the 2nd pic is what it *should* look like
Now, on the image of the shire, -using the eraser, again I take out anything that is underneath S&F. This should cleans up the image and makes a nice blend- where it looks like Mordor fades into the shire.
Again I've marked out the area I erased- this time in blue!
Then I merged all the layers. From now on I will call these my "Base"
5-
And now it's time for our subject- Sam!
I pasted him onto the canvas above the Base- resized and sharpened. Then I set the blend mode to Darken 100%.. pretty ugly huh?
Then on the base I erased any parts that covered Sam's Face or Hair. The green is roughly what I erased
6-
Now I can see all of Sam's Face I changed the Blend mode of the image to Lighten 100% which means that the dark areas of the Sam image fade into the Base one- Laziest way of blending ever!
Then I use the eraser again and remove the edge of the Sam image that overlaps the base so it merges into the base.
Now I need to deal with the light greay area at the top. To do this I took the Burn Tool Size=200, Range= Midtones, Exposure -30% and used it to darken all the pale grey. As the light grey is darkened, the base image should should become clearer and blend into the image of Sam
Nearly Done!
7- To finish the Blend- I merged all of my layers together and sharpened them. Then in order to increase the contrast of my image, I duplicated the Blend and set the top layer's blend mode to Screen 100%.
The Final Blend should look something like this:
I hope that was useful to someone
coming soon....
Part 2...
Will try it later ^^
