How to Create a Slice of Nature Photo Manipulation

核心提示： The idea I had for this was pretty a simple. A twisted tree looming over a small slice of land, probably grass covered, maybe with a little river fl

The idea I had for this was pretty a simple. A twisted tree looming over a small slice of land, probably grass covered, maybe with a little river flowing, all with roots sticking out of the slice. I also wanted a brooding sky, dark and stormy. I can't really draw for a lick, but I had a pretty good picture in my head. So I headed off to find some stock.

I wanted a bonsai tree as they had the ancient and twisted look I was going after. I searched for a good shot for free from sxc.hu, but didn't have any luck. Finally I settled on this one from iStockphoto.

Next I was on to the slice of ground. I wasn't sure if I wanted just uprooted ground or maybe something that had been pulled out of a pot. I hunted high and low on sxc.hu until I found this.

Dark and brooding sky. Thanks to night-fate for this one!

Cracked desert landscape, river, and grassy hills.

While searching through sxc.hu I decided I wanted a waterfall to fall from the tree.

Step 1

To begin with we need to prep the files. This is the part that designers dread, or at least I do.

First off, I started with the tree as I knew it was going to be the most time consuming. Everyone has their own tricks and tools that they like to use when extracting an image.

For the tree I used a two part approach. For the base and limbs I used the Pen Tool zoomed in to 400% and as many points as I needed. You can see that I try to cut the fuzzy edge of the image to give it a clean look.