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Hi there. Whether you've gotten here through a generic site search or through this thread, welcome.
In this thread, you'll find links to tutorials about matte painting in Photoshop. This is particularly useful for anyone seeking to create a new shot or replace/extend the background of an existing shot. Your matte paintings can then be exported into the compositing program of your choice (After Effects is particularly good at this, since they were designed to work together), or you can even work with them in Photoshop for Video if you have CS4 or above.
This thread could also be useful for helping to create custom covers in PS.
I know we have a lot of great artists out there; if you have any tips that could help create better, more seamless matte paintings, feel free to share!
First up is a series of great tutorials by Ed Lopez called Matte Painting 101. He has a lot of great matte painting tutorials, but he usually records them at high speed and with no sound, so they're mostly for advanced users.
In this series, though, he does record a voiceover, and he breaks things down in ways that are both helpful and easy to understand.
First, here's a tutorial in which Lopez takes a basic shot of his "talent" on a rock looking over a vista, and he completely replaces the background, including the sky and all other features. He goes over important techniques such as creating clean edges, adding haze to increase a feeling of distance, using adjustment layers, and color grading with photo filters to achieve multiple looks with the same shot: Matte Painting 101: Basic Extraction and Composition Techniques
Please note: In this tutorial and all other MP 101 tutorials, Ed Lopez uses Photoshop CS5, which is (to date) the most recent version. Most of the ideas he talks about apply no matter what version of PS you are using, though; you just may not have all the fancy tools that make the process a bit easier.
Screenshots:
Original shot:
Erasing the background:
The finished matte painting, complete with digital rain added:
Here's part two of Matte Painting 101, featuring a matte painting in which Ed Lopez destroys the Brooklyn Bridge and floods Lower Manhattan. This will teach you a lot about cloning out elements you don't want, as well as special techniques for creating a weathered/ruined look: