Design an Awesome Urban City Photo-Montage In Photoshop

Posted on February 22nd, 2009 under Abstracts, Photo Effect, it has 48 Comments and 56,391 Views so far.

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to design this cool-looking, urban city photo-montage in Ph0toshop. You will learn how to combine several stock images together to achieve surreal photo effect.

This tutorial involves techniques such as layer blending options, image adjustments, tranformation techniques, filter effects and lighting effect rendering. The tutorial itself is quite simple but the end result looks good in my opinion, have a go!

Here is a preview of the final results:

urban-city-montage-final-5

urban-city-montage-final-4

Black and White version:

urban-city-montage-final-3

OK let’s get started!

Step 1

We start off by download the following four stock images from stockvault.net and cgtexture.com:

Load the “Grunge Splatter” image into Photoshop, duplicate the Background layer once and set the blending mode to “Overlay”:

1-duplicate1

Save this document to a new psd file and name it “urban city”.

Step 2

Load the “City Image” into Photoshop, drag the entire image onto the “urban city” document, use the free transform tool (Ctrl + T) to resize it until it fits the canvas size:

2-transform

Name this layer as “city” and change the layer blending option to “vivid light”. You will have the following effect:

2-effect4

Step 3

On the “City” layer, hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B and bring up the Black and White adjustment tool (for those who don’t have CS3, try use the Channel Mixer with Monochrome option enabled), apply the following settings:

3-bw

Then hit Ctrl + M and bring up the Curves tool, adjust the Red channel a bit:

3-curve-red

And here is the effect so far:

3-effect4

Step 4

Duplicate the “city” layer once, apply the following Gaussian Blur Setting to the duplicated layer:

4-gau-blur

Duplicate this layer once more and merge them together, then change the blending mode of the merged layer to “Darken”. You will have the following effect:

4-effect5

Step 5

Load the “high-rise image” into the Photoshop, drag the entire image onto our canvas, resize and erase (with a big soft brush) the cloud/sky + bottom part of the image. (please also note that you can use layer mask to achieve this) Name this layer as “high-rise”.

Again we apply the black and white adjustments to this layer using the same settings as in the previous layer: (Make sure you set the whole document as RGB color mode)

5-bw

And the effect so far should look like this:

5-effect6

Step 6

Change blending mode of the “high-rise” layer to “overlay” and you should see the high-rise image blend into the grunge texture:

6-blend

To add some shape dynamics and depth onto the image, we can duplicate the high-rise layer a few more times, resize and position the duplicated layers as shown below:

6-duplicate

Step 7

Load the “Little Girl” image into Photoshop. Again we drag the entire image onto our canvas, but this time we don’t resize it. Instead, we move the image to the position as shown below: (where we see only the girl and the sky)

7-drag

Erase the sky portion as well as the build to right using a soft brush, and change the layer blending option to “Hard Light”.

The effect so far will look like this:

7-effect-22

Name this layer as “little girl” and duplicate this layer once, set the blending mode of the duplicate layer to “overlay” and you will have the following effect:

7-effect4

Step 8

Lastly we can add a bit of shining effect to the image so it won’t look boring. To do this, create a new layer called “lighting effect”, use the Lasso Tool with a 40px feather, draw a selection in any area (I chose a place where it meets with the direction the girl is looking towards) and render some cloud and lens flare in:

8-cloud

Change the layer blending mode to “Color Dodge” and apply the following gaussian blur settings:

8-gau-blur

You will have the following effect:

8-effect2

Duplicate the layer a few more times and drag them in areas you would like to lightup, and you will have this result image:

urban-city-montage-final

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! I further adjusted the image hue/satuation a bit and here is my final result: (click to enlarge)

urban-city-montage-final-4

Black and White version: (click to enlarge)

urban-city-montage-final-3

You can of course further enhance this text effect by applying some more filter effects, or combining it with some background texture, that’s totally up to you :)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

Andreyco Says:
since the title says it i have nothing to say… anyway, awesome!
admin Says:
Thanks Andreyco!
Jeno Says:
Awesome!
PROMETHEVS Says:
this i’ll have to try
psaddict Says:
Added to http://www.psaddict.com
Ines Says:
Very, very good.! Thanks for teaching so well!
Caufield04 Says:
cool.
Illustrator tutorials Says:
Thanks for tutorial, it’s very nice.
hieronymus Says:
Dude….. your stuff is addicted… great work and i really love following your tutorials.

Many thanks
Caufield04 Says:
hey your stuff here, they’re amazing really helpful. great job but do you have sample works or tuts how to make photorealistic architectural rendering/presentation? sorry, i’m a little desperate here. thanks.

peace!
=)
Paul Thomas Says:
So to get step 3 to work for me in CS4 you need to state that the whole .psd document is RGB or you can not access the black and white color tool. Took me a bit to figure that out.
admin Says:
@Paul: Thanks for pointing this out! I will make modification immediately.
JoDee Martin Says:
I am really new to Photoshop and love being able to read a tutorial and see results. This was incredibly well written! Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!
zharif Says:
oh my God!

speechless…
jessseme Says:
very very good. thankyou for teaching so nicely.
Vibushan Says:
Thanks a lot! I tried it out and it came out really awesome :)
sandylem Says:
I’m form china

学到东西了！！！谢谢哦！
admin Says:
@sandylem: hello, 不用谢^^
slavewire Says:
The tutorial was amazing. I learned so much from this one tutorial. I knew nothing about layers and blending images together before today. However, I got a bit carried away along the way, that I started playing around with a few things and added my own final picture instead of the one with the little girl. Is there a way to send you this picture so you could see the end result of your creation? You’d be proud.
My pictures will never be the same again…
admin Says:
@slavewire: hi~ yeah i’m really glad you find the tutorial helpful! You can upload your image to hosting service such as imageshack, and send the link to me. You can post the link here if you like, and more people can see it as well :)
slavewire Says:
Hey, here’s a link to my final result as part of your tutorial http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h206/slavewire/Olascity3.jpg adding a picture of my gf instead of the little girl.
And here’s my first try at doing something of my own with what I learned so far. Although I feel I could’ve done something bigger and better. Maybe next time.
http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h206/slavewire/ForgottenCity.jpg
Mel Says:
Awesome! One question though… I’m having trouble with step 4 if anyone would explain it in detail that would help. Thanks!
Brochure Printing Says:
Excellent work, as always! Your creativity never ceases to amaze me! Your designs are really something else. Thanks for sharing this!
Large Format Printing Says:
Very pro! Thanks for sharing…
jonaokt Says:
Mel: go to filter, with the “city” layer celected. Go down to blur, and there you can choose “Gaussian Blur”.
admin Says:
@Mel: Sorry about the late reply, I acutally missed you comment….

With Step 4: you will need to apply the Gaussian Blur on the duplicated “City” layer, not the original “city” layer. The filter is located under Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

@Jonaokt: Thanks for helpinng out!
huwaw69 Says:
The sky effect is great man! good job!
photo retouching Says:
Great bit of work! Please keep these highly informative posts coming!
Gavo704 Says:
Can someone please help…it seem like Step 4 is still a little unclear. Do you duplicate the ‘city’ layer (the vivid blended layer) then take that duplicated layer and add the blur??

Afterwards which city layer do you dupilcate? The one with a blur on it already or the regular ‘vivid light blended one”
Felfire Says:
Wow, this is most certainly impressive! Congratulations on your epic work!
AlbGraphic Says:
As usual a unique tutorial. Good job !!!
Stephen York Says:
Can anyone re upload the Grudge Splatter?
Pseudodreams Says:
Yeah I can’t get Grudge Splatter either?????
James Says:
@Pseudodreams: the link has broken… i will try and see if I can find the original link. Do apologise for this.
sandeep Says:
it’s a good tutorial & i am your fan now.
taryarL Says:
thank a lot :)
it’s always great to follow ur tutorial
IZ Says:
I’m still waiting for the Grudge link to be working
James Says:
@IZ: the link should be working now.