Julie Langford

Ok – First I want to pay credit to both Susan Davies , who provided the base image of Castell Coch and to Rose Moxon , who kindly created the 3D dragons that I used in this composition. Thank you both – I could’nt have created this without you guys.

I used Photoshop CS2 to create this image

I started with Susan’s image below



I used a duplicate layer [made the background invisible with the eye icon in the layer palette], and used a medium hardness eraser to erase all of the backgroung behind the castle to produce the image below.



Then, I had to remove all those trees from the image, that were covereing the castle. For this I used various sized, soft clone brushes and fine paintbrushes to paint back in detail that was lost due to the cloning process – Very time consuming, but also very rewarding at the end of it. The image then looked like the one below.



I then wanted to place the castle onto a rock tower, so I used a shot that I took at a local beach in the summer of 2007. This rock is only about 12 ft high.



I pasted this rock image onto my composition as a new layer behind the castle, then again used the eraser to remove the parts that I didnt want, until I reached the result below.



I then merged these two layers and used the edit transform perspective tool to change to perspective of the image – I wanted the image to look as if I were looking up at the caste slightly and I wanted the rocks to appear large and towering. The result is below.



Now for the sky – I used an image that I took of a sunset in Cameroon in November 2006



I placed this sky image behind the castle – rock layer to produce the image below.



Next I worked on the sky and castle layer in turn and adjusted the colour, using edit adjustments colour balance, until I created a nice tone for each layer, which both balanced with each other. I also adjusted the exposure slightly on the sky layer to give it a bit more kick. The image now looked like the one below.



I wasn’t happy with the shadows and highlights on the castle in relation to the sky, so next I worked on both layers in turn and used dodge to add highlights and burn to add dark shadows and gloomy clouds.


I then adjusted the levels to make the castle layer a bit darker so it blended in with the sky – the result then became my base image which you can see below.



I now wanted to add atmosphere to the image, so I created a new fill layer and used a very soft brush to paint in a light green fill at about 30% opacity, covering the whole layer in one go. I added a litttle noise and changed the blend of this layer to Colour Burn. The result was a deep rich feel that you can see below.



I then flattened the image and just went over it to add any final highlights and shadows with the dodge and burn tools.

I then used two dragon images that Rose kindly created for me – you can see them below.





I placed these images onto the composition, using edit, free transform to resize them and then added a new layer to create some foggy mist around them. For this I used a lasoo tool, with feathering set to 30 to select the area that I wanted to have mist and filled it with white at about 30% opacity. I then added noise and added a box blur. I then added a glowing edge with a high spread to this layer by adding a layer style. The last step was to erase any mist that had covered the dragons with a fine eraser and using the dodge tool once more to bring out highlights on the creatures, before flattening and saving the image as Guardians

To see the finished piece, click Here