Creating Convincing Composites

Composite Photos

In the 1800’s Albert Bierstadt imagined landscapes that never really existed. This German-American painter was perhaps one of the world’s first composite artists choosing artistic vision over purity by combining elements from different parts of the world.

Blending layers in Photoshop well is a skill like any other, because a number of give-aways can ruin the message you want to deliver. Artifacts like halo’s, exposures not matching or even incorrect colors plague most composite pictures. But aside from covering such basics, we’ll take it up several notches.

In this composite landscape photography tutorial, you will learn to blend layers in Photoshop like the pro’s. With three completely different photo composites in my signature moody visual style, we’ll do everything we can to convince the viewer this is one picture.

We’ll specifically go into hard to blend areas like trees that cross the horizon. We’ll go into difficult sky replacements, twilight blending and adding light effects. Even reflection matching is part of this tutorial video. And of course we will match exposure, saturation and hue, to create truly convincing composites, before treating each blend as one and applying my dark mood aesthetic to each image composite.

This video is definitely not for photo purists. Progressive thinking and an open minde are encouraged. Resized PSDs and DNG raw-files are included for all images. All videos are fully narrated and annotated/subtitled (English only) to explain what’s going on.