A matte painting is a backdrop that filmmakers use when the scene they need doesn’t or can’t exist in real life. In the past, they were created by actually painting a scene on a canvas. Today, they are created digitally by combining photographs to produce the scene that they need. In this premium tutorial, we will demonstrate how to create a snow-covered, coastal, mountain town scene using Photoshop. Let’s get started!
Tutorial Assets
The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.
- Base Plate 1
- Base Plate 2
- Brushes (In download files)
- Gradients (In download files)
- Stock 1
- Stock 2
- Stock 3
- Stock 4
- Stock 5
- Stock 6
- Stock 7
- Stock 8
Step 1 – Setting the Stock Images Over the Base Plate
Before we begin be sure to download all the images and files to a project folder so you can easily access what we will be working on.
OK let’s open up this image (Base Plate1) I made for us to use as a base plate, almost all matte painting its made over a base plate which in case of a movie studio it’s provided by the production from the location where the film its being made and also all images used for the final image are provided or accessed through hi quality stock.
In our case and for the purposes of the tutorial we have to find our materials on the free stock offerings so you can use them without issues, yet if you are able to go around the world taking photos, its a very good idea to build up your library, or buy a subscription to hi quality stock so you have a good choice of images available, finding the correct images that fit your project its hard work and takes quite a bit of time.
I have made the selection for you and you can find all the images in the links above for your convenience. OK now open this render I made and flip it horizontal so we get the sun on the right; that is simply the choice I made for this composition.
Now we will replace the sky with this lovely image, but first we must also flip it horizontally.
Next we will use the distort command to make the horizons match.
Once we have it in position let’s use a big soft brush to mask off what we don’t need.
You can see in the resulting mask we have eliminated everything but the sky, be sure you have completely blocked with black what we don’t need.
In places where its needed make a quick selection of the sky in the base plate so you can precisely mask off the contours of these mountains.