Matte Painting process

 06/07/2020

The sky I decided to go for was a mix of 2 different photographs. 

I really liked this one but the plane wing was going to be a bit of a problem. I also felt like the sky was too murky and cloudy. after working with the image in photoshop and removing the plane wing, i began to try to stitch the two together.

After I set it to black and white and played around with contrast I was left with this. I then found another photo of the skyline with a clearer sky and tinkered with levels til I found it was about right. part of the bottom left was missing however I knew the foreground would cover it appropriately.

Combined together and with a Black and white filter, this was the end product. after this I began to work on the foreground of the shot. I decided to make it up using a cliff edge and some bushes spread around to fill out the scene

I felt the edge between the foreground and background was a little too harsh and felt empty, so I decided to add in a row of trees.  I wanted them to still follow the general shape/silhouette of the cliff so I used two copies of a row of trees and placed them in a curve type shape below the cliff

This was the end result of the three main layers. I tried my best to match the values of the image, so whil the colour version doesnt look the most natural...

I feel the Black and white one works quite well. I still need to mess with blur and adding some shadow, but I feel it might be easier to do these things in after effects itself.