I was inspired and here’s the result of an image composition using an image titled “Carcassonne at night” that I downloaded from sxc.hu for this project. I was over in the PSD TUTS Premium area and was looking at “Creating a Magic Night Themed Template” which can be previewed HERE. -Well I wasn’t in the mood to create a Template or a site tonight, but I was inspired, by the Moody Header Piece shown below:

I didn’t create a whole site template, this was only a quick 30 -60minute playtime project : for Photoshop-Tricks.com – It’s a simple little tutorial that I’ll put together here. I left out some of the details, but kept close to what I actually did to get the final result shown below:

So let’s begin the Tutorial part.

First off I started with a square canvas of 1024 X 1024 pixels at 72 dpi, you could make your 300 for printing purposes.

I filled the Background Layer with a Gradient of Black and a lighter Grey, maybe just 80% Black for my second swatch using the concentric circle setting. I dragged up from the lower left up towards the top right corner and ended up with a gradient similar to the one shown below:

But wait, that’s not Black and Grey you say? Right, next I went into Hue & Saturation and changed it to a nice Dark moody blue color. Okay, colorized background is ready . . .now I just needed an image of a castle of some cool looking buildings like the inspiration piece. So i headed over to SXU.hu and found this piece:

Looks okay for now, not a great shot, but still pretty nice. You can download the image here. It’s called “Carcassone at night” by Hawkeye197.

Next I needed to get the building on my canvas, but without the sky – so I just used my trusty  old magic wand, with a little lasso work and made my selection with a feather of about 4:

Selected the inverse bottom part of the photo and CUT and PASTED onto my project – additionally I duplicated the same layer and put a MOTION Blur of 90 degrees vertical and a setting of 44 to get the below image:

Still being on the Motion Blurred layer I selected along the lower Treelines and Deleted the Building part from the Blurred part. Still having the upper deleted parted selected, i selected the inverse – Now I have the Blurred water areas selected and then I Transformed them, making them taller and into the proper location – So we’re at this point so far:

Okay – looks fairly nice so far. Next we need to get some sort of sky feature in there right! So I look up Clouds on my Hard-drive, where I keep lots of stock images ( you should keep lots of your own stock images at hand), I’ve taken and select a nice sky of clouds with light rays coming out from behind them:

Okay so I open the clouds, rotate them 90 degrees counterclokwise, change the image size to 1024 – select all – COPY – close the file without saving, and I’m back to my project – I select the Background layer and paste the clouds into place – changing the layer setting to lighten, and then using my curved dialog box I darkened the Blurred Water layer a bit to arrive at the image shown below::

It’s starting to look much better . . . So I duplicate the Clouds layer, so it’s above the original lightened version and then keeping the newer version as lighten I tweak the curves a bit to my liking & made some minor color adjustments ( like removing the slight yellow cast in the sky), to the Blues under Hue & Saturation – what you do is all up to you, you don’t need to follow exact instructions – You want to create something unique!
Well – that’s it for my quick layers and adjustments Tutorial. Even though it’s not totally detailed with charts and numbers and all – You can learn lots from it!

Here’s the Final Image again: