Oh, fun -- a useless tutorial! [ I know -- I know, sorry. ]

I've been wanting to post some sort of tutorial, but I couldn't decide on what-- at ALL. I worked on this for a few hours, thought it was fun -- and only required three things: Photoshop, Google image search, and a Wacom tablet. Of course, the last is optional, but makes this SO much easier.

Here's one version of the final composite.

I've posted pretty much my entire process after the jump >>>

I picked a few images for the background-- land / sky / and an interesting landmark-- and ugly old tree.

I used paths to roughly trim out the part of the image I needed and placed them in a file together. As you can see, colors don't even matter at this point. :]

Pretty crazy looking, right? I know, but there's a quick fix! Black and White filter adjustment layer + Photo filter adjustment layer [a bit daker than the default orange] + Levels adjustment layer [to your satisfaction]. 

 

Still looks like something from Photoshop disasters blog. I removed the distraction of the tree to fuse the ground and cloud layers.

 Now that it's a little better, here's the tree!

It does look like someone tried to fake an HDR, but I'm okay with that. Here are a few variations on some contextual details. For the next part [and to finish it up] I used the Dodge/Burn tool and lots of 20px Brush Eraser.

 

 

 

After looking at it, I don't really care for the last one, but I guess that isn't the point.

The most difficult part was finding images I liked that also had rougly the same light source. I mirrored a few of the images and used the Dodge/Burn tool to help with the rest.

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That's it, maybe I'll have a more informative/extreme one next time!