The Creative Process of “Worship” Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

The article is written exclusively for PSD Vault by Tristan Kromopawiro. In this post, Tristan explains the creative process of his “Worship” artwork using Photoshop. You can check out his portfolio work at http://www.phonoric.com.

Please note that this article is not a full tutorial, and it’s purely about the how idea and concepts are formed, in order to create this artwork.

Technology is all around us, most of us depend on it. Although there are big parts of the world where technology isn’t a big part of everyday life, I feel that technology could help improve their life. Whereas in other parts of the world people obsess over it, letting it control their lives.

I wanted to create an image keeping in mind the relationship between humanity and technology. The cliff represents earth, the woman represents mankind and the third “being” represents technology. Below I will explain my thoughts behind the creation process. Bear in that while I did have a concept for this image, I didn’t sketch anything out or have a clear picture in my head of what it was going to look like. I made most of it up as I went along. This was entirely made in Adobe Photoshop.

I wanted to create a somewhat abstract being. It should represent technology so I went looking for stock photos of all things related. Cables, wires, engines, you name it. I always try to make sure the quality of the images used is consistent. When I’ve extracted what I need from the stock photos I place them on the canvas and make sure they blend nicely together, using color correction, curves or anything else wherever necessary. Below you will find a small selection of the stock photos I’ve used and how I used them for my image. I re-sized and rotated the extracted elements and used the warp tool to transform them to my liking.

At this point I kind of knew what I wanted the image to look like. With the main composition established, I kept adding more mechanical parts to the entity.

I wanted technology to have a face of some sorts, so I went looking and I came across this perfect steampunk mask made by www.thedarkpower.com.

Because of the concept behind the image, I wanted mankind (the woman) depicted small in comparison to technology (the entity). Like I said earlier, some people almost worship technology, hence the composition: The woman looking up to the entity, almost throwing herself at it.

At this stage, as seen above, I started to work on shading, highlights, details and coloring where necessary. For this image I wanted to have a slightly painted, distressed look. So I added various textures. The entity had to emerge from the sky, so I used a combination of cloud brushes, default Photoshop brushes and cloud stock photos to create the background. I tried to add some depth by making some clouds overlap the entity, as if it were really coming down through the clouds.

I added some last details and made sure there were no “mistakes”, such as rough edges, or areas not blended properly. Finally, I used the “unsharp mask” option to sharpen the image as a whole a bit.

And that’s basically how I created this image. Below you can find the final image again. I hope you enjoyed this article!