In the movies, we often see images of ruined landscapes or apocalyptic cities. What many of us don’t know however is that much of this imagery was produced not with complicated CG software but instead, using Photoshop. In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a post-apocalyptic matte painting of an old cathedral. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

• Cathedral
• Rocks
• Tombstone
• Vines
• Chains
• Brushes
• Action Essentials 2

Step 1

Create a new document. Use any size you want but for this scene I recommend using a 2:1 ratio, meaning that you can use resolutions like 2000×1000 and 1000×500. For this tutorial, I will be using the 1000×500 resolution. The color mode and bit depth do not matter for now.

First, let’s import the Cathedral image. You can see that it is a very large image. This is a good thing because it will downscale quite nicely. To resize and position the image, hit Command/Ctrl + T on your keyboard or go to Edit > Free transform. To scale an image while maintaining its proportions, hold the Shift key while resizing it. When you’re satisfied with the result, you’ve now got the base of the whole composition.

Go to Image > Adjustments > Levels. As you can see in the histogram, a lot of data is being stored in the black area which means that we’ve got an under exposured image. To get some more data out of the high and mid tones, change the value of the mid tones from 1.00 to about 1.20. Now we’re ready to go.

Step 2

As you can see we’ve got a problem. At the moment this photograph was made, two people who probably wanted to ruin our image, took a seat in the wooden seats on the bottom of the image. Obviously, we want to remove the people. To do this, we are going to use one of Photoshop’s amazing features, the content aware fill option.

To do this, use the lasso tool or hit L on your keyboard and draw a circle around the subject. Be sure to also integrate some pieces of the environment into it so that Photoshop knows what to erase. Once selected, click with the right mouse button on the selection and under the Use: tab select Content-Aware. Unfortunately, this feature is only available in Photoshop CS5 so I would recommend people who use older versions of the software to play around with the clone stamp tool. Anyway, once the content-aware fill is applied you are probably going to have some problems. This, however, can easily be solved by using the Spot Healing Brush Tool. Ultimately you want to have a result that looks good, so some cheating is okay.

Step 3

Create a new layer called ”Fog” and set the blending mode to Soft Light. Now use a big round soft brush and paint over the dark middle area of the image covering all the stuff in the back of the scene like a part of the roof and the windows. Then reduce the opacity of the layer a little bit. This will create a natural effect, because also in real life this rule generally applies: the further away you are from an object the less contrast your eyes can detect. See the comparison image below to see the effect.

Step 4

Now we’ve got to start adding elements into the scene. Let’s start by modifying some big elements in the scene by adding some vines onto the main pillars of the cathedral.

Load the vines image and position and scale it properly, so that the vines look like they actually grow around the pillars. Due to the fact that the vine image is pretty small compared to the first image you need to duplicate and rotate it some times. A helpful thing is to duplicate the image and then rotate it 180°. Then, when you’ve finished positioning the vines it’s time to apply some color correction to make them blend properly. (editor：photoshop1)