In today’s tutorial we will demonstrate how to create an eye-catching eco-friendly shoe advertisement using several stock images. Let’s get started!
Tutorial Assets
The following resources were used during the production of this tutorial.
- Tree
- Dirt
- Bench
- Sea Lion
- Windmill
- Caves
- Bubbles
- Dolphin
- Dog
- Valve
- City 1
- City 2
- City 3
- Bark 1
- Bark 2
- Bird
- Shoes
- Mountain
Step 1
Let’s start by creating canvas of 2000x2000px and resolution of 300px/inch. Open the shoes photo and make an accurate cut out using Pen Tool. Make sure you did good job by checking the shoe over a black background (2nd image below). Next add a Layer Mask to the cut shoe and pick some hard/dispersed like you see below. These are the standard Photoshop brushes, but you can make a custom one for this (in case of custom brush you need to make sure your edges are pretty hard). So, anyway, pick black color from the color palette and using the most suitable brush of your choice try to erase a little bit of the fur to make it look more popping out.
Step 2
If you did a good job with the extraction your shoe should look great on every single background. So remember, it’s good to give and extra attention while cutting out – this will definitely save your some troubles further and look more professional in final stage.
Now, grab Paint Bucket (G) and fill the background layer with light blue (1st image below). Next, use lighter blue and very soft (regular, rounded) brush of a large diameter to add a light spot in the middle (2nd image below). To fully set up the background, switch now to white color (#ffffff), lower the diameter a little bit and give a touch to the center of background.
Step 3
When it comes to adding shadow it’s good to have a reference. I mean, why bother thinking "how the shadow should look like" if you have everything on your original shoe photo. Let’s use it as reference and add the same kind of shadow but more suitable to our illustration. As you probably noticed in the 1st image below the red arrow indicates the original direction of shadow, and we will keep it that way. So create new layer above the background, change it’s Blending Mode to Multiply, use soft blue color, grab soft brush and paint in indicated spots (everything is shown in 2nd image below).
A short note what’s going on there: you need a to give some more shadow to the corners as the background still needs a deeper transition. About the shoe: the first shadow layer will be the softer one and we’ll cast it a little bit further from the shoe. If you did a good job you should receive a similar resulat as in 3rd image below.
Now create another new layer with Multiply Blending Mode and pick a darker blueish color. This time try to add a very deep shadow and stick closer to the shoe, paint near edge (4th image below).
