Creating the floating-castle using Photoshop

In the tutorials before I already showed that the options of Photoshop are almost unlimited and that these options are only bounded by your imagination. To proceed with this I decided to create a tutorial where we will create a floating castle by manipulating and merging multiple images together. Although we already were merging different images together this one is a bit different. The difference consist in the art how we will proceed. The first step is of course the idea of the final image and this step is also very important. The initial condition which we will set for the final image will also guide our workflow. Our idea is to create a floating castle in a mountain environment and for this we also need the corresponding images to do so. If we choose the images which we could use to create our final image, the Photoshop work will begin. At first we will cut off the castle from the background using some masking technique.

The advantage of masking in this case is the option to preserve the whole image and to be able to cut more or less in the next step from it. After creating the mask we will use the same technique to cut off a mountain which will be the bottom of our castle. As you can see my idea was to place the castle on a rock to create the illusion of this part to be floating. When we will finish the masking we will place both images inside one file and start to adjust and merge these two separate objects together. Some transforming will be needed of course but also some adjustment of the colours together with the shadows and highlights. After the images will blend together we will place our new formed object inside the mountain environment. Now this part is a bit tricky because we are placing the new object inside a complete different environment. After placing the object inside the new environment we will adjust the colours and lightning to fit inside the new environment and also cut off clouds and place them in front of our castle. Like this we will achieve a nice merge and fitting in of our new object and finalize the image. I should also mention that you should take a “second” look on the image after a while to fix some small bugs which can occur by this process and which you probably didn’t saw at the first time.