Digital Painting in Photoshop: Day for Night

- Hi, I'm Steve Caplan, and I'm a freelance digital artist. I'm also the author of the best selling how to cheat in Photoshop series, as well as several other series on Photoshop and digital illustration. Most of my freelance illustration is for national and international newspapers and magazines. And this means, I often have to produce high quality, finished art work in a matter of hours. Over the years, I've developed a range of techniques, that allow me to work faster, more accurately, and more efficiently.

To start our image off, we first need to remove the original sky. But what's the best way of doing this? There are two key methods that I use with both the background eraser and the automatic color-based layer masking, introduced in Photostop CS4. We'll look at both these techniques so you can master them, and choose which is the most appropriate for your own work. To create the basic day to night affect, we'll use an adjustment layer, to darken and tint the scene. And that's because an adjustment layer gives us the flexibility to alter the settings later.

And also because it allows us to hide parts of the affect selectively. For example, to let the windows shine with light. We'll go on to add some rain, a damp road, and some running water, as well as a human figure, whom we'll clothe in a plastic raincoat. And of course, we'll draw all these elements directly in Photoshop. This should be an informative and entertaining workshop, and I'm sure you'll get some real value from it.