“The props will have to be arranged exactly as shown in the sketch we’ve sent you. Uh and we want everything to be totally snowed in. And by snowed in we are talking about a vast blizzard.”
Sometimes clients can be really specific about their wishes, and not too rarely you will find yourself seesawing in your chair, musing about how to shoot a snow scene on such short notice when you’re stuck in “don’t-know-snow-San Francisco”.
There is a solution to everything.
A Summer to Winter Touch-Up is a painstaking process, you’ll have to go back and forth, be nit-picky with your own flaws and probably redo some parts entirely.
The realistic look of your final result will stand and fall with the lighting. Your shadows look odd: your objects won’t look like they’re touching the ground. Your highlights are off: the things you mounted in will look like they come from another world. Hence we’ll get rid of our warm colors first. We’ve shot our picture in RAW mode, so we can easily change the color temperature using the file’s raw settings in Photoshop (you’ll need the Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw plugin to do so, get it for free here). We talked about tweaking the settings in one of our previous posts, you can refer to it here as we won’t go into the details this time.
Do you feel the frosty breeze? No? Well, we do. Seems like it’s not always that sunny
in Cali after all.
Anyways, let’s draw in our ground planes to analyze the basic changes in orientation of our floor so we can bring in our snow textures in right perspective.
Next we’ll concentrate on the sky replacement. We create a Layer Mask by selecting a Color Range, eyedropping a color from the old sky, in order to matte our future sky.
We look up a suitable sky we can grey out and darken up for a blizzard kind of mood. Every free source for textures and footage is precious, and if you are looking for good skies free wallpaper sites are always a good tip. We grabbed ours from interfacelift. Also it’s a good idea to overlay several skies to get the effect you want.
Now that we have our sky in place let’s extract the bus from its background as he is going to get a big part of our attention. We used the pen tool to get the outline and refined the mask with the brush to make it look a bit more organic.
Let’s go back and work on the street, shall we? We usually don’t recommend using the Google Picture search as you will end up with copyrighted stuff mostly, but when you already know beforehand that the parts of an image you’ll use will be small and heavily modified, you can be pretty sure no one will come to bother you saying » Hey, the 10 pixels on the left corner look very much like a distorted, recolored and stamped version of one of our images. You’ll hear from our lawyers. «
So bring in whatever you can find for snow on the streets and use Transform > Warp to match the perspective and a soft brush in the layer mask to smoothly blend several textures together.
Once we’ve done this we add a track for the bus so we won’t get mails from people questioning where the hell the bus was coming from.
When you replace the tires with winter tires be careful with the perspective – if it doesn’t match a hundred percent it won’t be believable.
To make the bus stick to the ground we have to give it a soft shadow. We are saying soft because the light in winter is dispersed which means the illumination will be very soft and flat. We could draw out the basic shape and fool around with the different Blur filters, but why reinvent the wheel? The shadow from the original picture will do just fine, we’ll just have to soften it in order to match the new lighting situation. We roughly select the shadow from the warmer image (has the best contrast between shadow and street) and go through the different channels.
We are looking for the channel with the highest contrast so we can pull a neat little mask. The red channel seems to be a perfect fit.
Copy the red channel and tweak the Levels until you can use it as a mask. You might need to clean it up with the brush tool not to pick up too much of the street’s structure before you blur the mask. Fill the layer itself with a dark grey and you have your shadow setup.
Alright, let’s add a subtle layer with snow lying on our objects and the façade. Create a new layer atop your background and fill it with white. Go into your layer’s Blending Options and change the Blend If property to Blue.
Now slide the left handle of the Underlying Layer property to the right to pull a tolerance key.
You’ll see immediately how our layer of lying snow starts to build up.
Now the problem with that is that the edges are too hard, we are not only missing anti-alias but also the snow on the street should be fading out a bit. Hold the ALT key while you drag the handle of the Underlying Layer property to create a range of fading pixels.
Change the blend mode of the layer to Overlay and turn down the opacity. Notice how we won the illusion of snow covering parts of the Coke sign and the front of the building!
Look for jutties and ledges or basically anything where snow could pile up and bring in some reference pictures. Mask them and Transform > Distort them to bring them into right perspective.
To get some snow on the sidewalk, we drew out a mask to preserve the people on it and brushed some snow on it, using a graphic tablet. You can create your own snow brushes by creating a new file with a snow texture and saving it via Edit > Define Brush Preset.
You can download the simplistic brush we created for this tutorial here:
.And some outrageous grunge and dirt brushes from SpoonGraphics here.
The transition between street and sidewalk still looks bad and the lying snow still could need a little more variety. We can solve both those problems at once by mounting in some little snow piles and adding a bit of snow dust to cover up transitions. It is crucial that you color match the footage you bring in – flatten out the contrast and clamp the white levels using the Curves (see image above). We’ve been using Transform > Warp and the Smudge tool a lot to create the snow dust and to sculpt the snow piles.
The tree has a dense foliage; even if there is much snow falling he won’t be covered entirely. Luckily we have a lot of light and shadow information in our original shot, so we can select the brightest leaves of the three with our Magic Wand tool and a low tolerance around 8. Don’t forget to uncheck Contiguous, otherwise it will only select a small cluster of leaves.
Okay, let’s work on the most interesting part: the bus. Add some little lines of piled snow on the ledges of the windows first:
Look up a few images showing fogged windows and distort them to fit the shape of the bus’ windows.
Create a mask shaped like the window and set the blend mode to Screen. Repeat that for the other windows and the doors.
We used our snow brush and some textures of snow to cover up the windshield…
…and wiped out the area where the wipers have been working using a layer mask…
…before we extracted the wipers and put them on top again.
Apply the same technique to the sign above the windshield.
Let’s create some atmosphere. The further objects are from the camera the softer they should look, since we will be looking through several layers of falling snow / snow dust. Blur the cars in the background using the Blur tool.
We now make use of the tree mask we created earlier. Use it as a layer mask for a new layer. We draw in a gradient going from a light grey to completely transparent. Your atmospheric fog should look like this:
See how the tree stands out and doesn’t seem to blend in our scene yet. The edge should be covered with fog as well to get some depth. To do so use a big brush with a hardness of 0 and draw a soft white glare on top of it:
Add a new layer atop of the others and make a second gradient, creating big fog in the foreground. This will reduce the amount of detail on the left hand street and add some depth and blizzardy feeling.
Almost there! But what would a blizzard be without snow flying through the air? Right, something else than a blizzard. You can transform virtually any image into a cloud of floating snow. When we tweaked them we even ran across a biker caught by a snow storm – pulling the levels we were able to perpetuate him in form of snow flakes in our final image (sigh)…
We’ve grabbed our references from sxc.hu, see the example of the picture above here. After adjusting the layers we scaled down the saturation and set the blend mode to Screen. Create a bunch of varied layers and scale them differently in order to get a sense of depth. You especially want to put much snow (and hence much attention) to the area where we blurred the background to create the impression of dusty snow walls diffusing the view. Also place big big chunky flakes in front so the eye has something to relate to in nearer distance!
To create faster snow, we applied a Motion Blur to a few of the layers and distorted them using Transform > Warp – we don’t wanted them to just look too directional (and computed).
Finally, all we have left to do is some final color grading to enhance the winterly mood. In winter we usually don’t perceive that much different colors, so we created a layer filled in a dark greyish blue and set its blend mode to Color at an opacity of about 48%. Duplicate that layer and set its blend mode to Overlay and you get an additional blue tint.
Using additional Curves and Exposure Layers, we boosted the contrast, added a little red in the light areas, removed a little blue in the dark areas and crushed both the dark and the light areas to get to the final result:
If you want to push realism a step further, you can do as we did in the PSD file you can download at the end of this post and add headlights.
. the final PSD file
Jake & Dan
Awesome work! I can’t help but state that trees loose their leaves in the Fall, so it would be impossible for that tree to be as leafy in the Winter… But I understand how difficult this task would be!
Good work…
Good point, it wouldnt be too difficult to brush out that tree and import a bare, winter tree.
Well – a sudden snowfall has been observed before the trees had a chance to loose their leaves, so the picture would still be valid. Still a valid point though
Would like to say there is permanent leafy trees as Olives and many kinds
Thanks
Very nice work, and profissional designer
Thank you
Great work!!! I love the details you went into!
Thank you for sharing!
How long did it take you to do it?
Thanks for the compliment. It took us approximately 15 hours to finish this piece.
thanks for your reply!
Now i’m even more impressed!
awesome work, definitely will bookmark and keep as a reference.
and no, not all trees lose their leaves in winter. Christmas tree anyone?? (i will accept they’re more needles than leaves, but still, they dont drop)
Great tutorial, dudes. I can definitely use this in an upcoming project.
Keep up the goo work.
Daniel
Sick Sick Sick tutorial! I’ll have to sit down and do this. Thanks a lot
[...] http://www.creatogether.com/summer-to-winter-touch-up [...]
Many thanks to the handy write-up, that must have used a while to construct with handy info.
Thxx
great work..
very nice.. can you teach me how to be good as you are..?
That’s basically what they’ve been doing here. Publishing tips and tricks on how to best achieve a realistic result in these circumstances. Try to use the techniques presented in this tutorial on another picture that doesn’t look like this one, finding your own stock, and playing around the settings to overcome the obstacles in that particular picture. Then read new tutorials and pick up their techniques, to learn to apply yourself.
This, along with playful experimentation, is the most normal way of learning to use Photoshop like a pro.
Thank you very much for this tutorial, The techniques are awesome, but where is color range?
Great i live it very much
Impresionante el trabajo.
Me encantan todos tus trabajos. ¿De donde sacas las ideas para tus trabajos?
¡Muchas Gracias! En la mayoría de los casos, sacamos nuestras ideas de consultas/demandas, a menudo cuando vemos efectos especiales también
Great tutorial… thanks!
Awesome job! I picked up some great techniques for futures projects. Thanks.
Oh I’m so impressed with your work, and as far as the trees go. I’ve seen many in bloom trees covered with snow. I am taking Web Design in college and with Photoshop is one of my classes for spring.. I’m very excited about it.
Hey I like your documentation of your work! Great work and really fast aswell, as I would say.. But I am a little disappointed though.. I was so courious about how you did the details on the Bus! The front window for example.
Any chance? Cheers, Fred
Hi Fred,
it’s fairly easy, you can use the same technique we used on the street textures. Just warp some snow on the windshield and use a small brush with a low opacity to erase the trace of the wiper. Just repeat this step for all the windows.
Great job out here!.. So impressive and dramatic,perfectly capturing that chilling blizzard atacks..Keep it up…more power
nothing to say.. really impressive..
Right you are
But how they made the light for the bus
your answer please
You’re right, we didn’t talk about this. That origins in the simplicity of this task. We wanted to show more snowflakes in the stronger lit areas, and to achieve this we found us some stock footage of a car driving through a snowy night. Extract the lights and use the “lighten” layer overlay mode to blend it in. Careful use of your brush will do the rest!
really impressive.Great job
great job….
İt was wonderful
Great tutorial! The trick is so good that at first I didn’t recognize the place although very familiar. It’s the 38 Geary inbound on O’Farrell near Taylor or Jones, AWESOME!
what a trip, this is amazing. You are incredible, how clever!
Fabu!
[...] http://www.creatogether.com/summer-to-winter-touch-up Tags: Bildbearbeitung, Photoshop, Sommer zu Winter, Tutorial Kommentare RSS [...]
The Winter-Version looks amazing – what a work!
I’m impressed! It’s nice to see someone very passionate about what they do. Trust all your future posts turn out as well.Thanks!
[...] machen einfach Spaß. Leicht kann man so seine Kreativität ausleben, wie auch im Artikel Summer to Winter Touch-Up zu sehen. Recht aufwenig erfolgt darin die Verwandlung einer Sommer- in eine Winter-Aufnahme. So [...]
Thank you guys for the innumerable amount of replies.
To finally round out the tree-topic: it is always about choice. We originally had a naked tree, but we chose to go with the one covered in snow because it’s a great way to show the accordant technique
Great post, many amusing points. I believe 6 of days ago, I have viewed a similar blog.
hey man come on this is good stuff
Spettacolare!!!!!!
[...] http://www.creatogether.com/summer-to-winter-touch-up [...]
[...] new to old is great fun. You can easily act out your creativity this way, just like in the article Summer to Winter Touch-Up. In a pretty elaborate process a summer shot is turned into a winter shot there. The entire street [...]
fuckin amazing..
[...] am Tag gemacht wurde, muss so angepasst werden, also ob die bei Nacht gemacht wurde. Die Webseite JAKE&DAN beschreibt in einem Tutorial einen ähnlichen Transformationsprozess. Dort wird jedoch nicht der Tag zur Nacht gemacht, [...]
[...] to Winter Touch-Up in Photoshop http://www.creatogether.com/summer-to-winter-touch-up [...]
[...] doesn’t just consist of highlights floating in the air. Using the brush we generated for our Summer-To-Winter tutorial (download here) we painted in some frost and snow particles (note the crisp flakes around his [...]