In this tutorial I will show you how to combine photos with simple 3D elements to get realistic looking picture. I will also show you different ways how to set lights and shadows and how to adjust colors and apply texture to unify the overall look. Let’s get started!

Download the picture of the ground and open it in Photoshop. First of all we need to remove the current sky which is boring and really uninteresting so we can replace it with more dramatic one in next steps. Cutting the sky out with Lasso Tool or Pen Tool would be really time consuming and hard. To avoid that we use Channels.

Click on the Channels palette. If you don´t see it go to Window > Channels and it will appear. On the palette you can see separated red, green and blue channel. Full Tutorial>>