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Tutorials
Making an aerial landscape.
Oct 18th 2005
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Creating an Aerial View Landscape:
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1.
I'm going to show you how
to create this aerial view of land and water. My little screen shot looks OK, but doesn't really do
the image justice. You've got to try this in a larger size to appreciate the detail. Let's do
it. |
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2.
I was experimenting with
the kind of randomly generated organic patterns you can get if you apply filters and other image
adjustments to the clouds effect. A land & waterscape is a natural goal, since the shapes of geographic and aquatic formations are organic in nature.
First, create a file whatever size you want. I'd say 4" x 6", 72 ppi minimum. With your color swatches set to the default Black & White, fill your file with Filter: Render: Clouds. Next I used Image: Adjust: Curves... to increase the amount of contrast in the image, making the light areas Whiter and the dark areas Blacker. You can see what my curve looked like to the left here.
On the bottom, you can see what the image looks like after the Curves adjustment. You can achieve similar results by cranking up the contrast slider using the Brightness/ Contrast command. |
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3.
Now I'm going to select
the dark areas. With Black as my foreground color, the easiest way to do this is to choose Select: Color Range. You can see a portion of the Color Range Dialog box to the left I had the Fuzziness Slider up to around 58 and the portion of the image that will be selected appears white in the preview.
After clicking OK in the Color Range Dialog, I made the edges of the selection softer by feathering the selection a few pixels with Select: Feather.
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4.
Within the selected area, I applied
the clouds filter again. These areas are going to be the water eventually and the clouds filter will
provide some value variety once we get that far.
First I'm going to take
care of the landscape portion of our scene. I started by choosing Select: Inverse to select the
opposite areas. Then I apply Filter: Render: Difference Clouds.
Like the value variations in the water, the difference clouds will give us highlight and shadow areas in the landscape, making the land appear somewhat three dimensional, having hills and valleys. |
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5.
Now I'm going to colorize
the terra firma using the Image: Adjust: Hue/Saturation command. I chose to make the earth appear green, as if covered by plant life. I clicked the Colorize option and set the sliders as you see to the left. Next I gave the ground some texture by applying Filter: Noise: Add Noise as you see here:
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6.
Continuing to add texture
to the dry land, I next applied Craquelure, one of the Texture Filters. Craquelure mimics a high-relief plaster surface, producing a fine network of cracks that follow the contours of the image. You can see what my slider settings were, and how it affected my image to the left.
We're done with the solid ground portion of our aerial view. Now let's deal with the sea water. |
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7.
As before I'm going to
use the Image: Adjust: Hue/Saturation command to colorize this area. With the settings to the left, and the colorize box checked I was able to get a pretty good aqua color. |
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8.
Now let's try to give our nice colored sea
water a little surface disturbance. Hmm... what could I used to give the water ripples? Hey, here's an
idea: the Ocean Ripple Filter! It's in the Distort group of filters and you can see its dialog box to the left. Your settings will depend on the size and resolution of your image, but you can see I chose a Ripple Size of 2 and a Ripple Magnitude of 10 for my 5" x 8", 72ppi image. |
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9.
Alright, we're done and
it looks cool! I tried to get a couple of close up screen shots here so you could see some of the
detail. Notice how the lights and darks in the image in Step 8 above make the Ocean floor look as if
it has varying depth. In the two images here, notice how our surface ripples look and how the
shoreline looks. All in all, a good day's work.
Now what can you do? Experiment with different hues for the land and water. How about a different texture for the mainland? Lots of possibilities. Hopefully I've given you a good start. |
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Latest Forums Clone YourselfThat is quit nice. But I think that can be more easy to do.. |
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