Photoshop Tutorials

In Greek mythology, the centaurs were a fierce race of creatures, a fusion of human and horse. Centaurs, according to Greek mythology, were said to be the offspring of Ixion, son of Ares, and a cloud. These strange creatures had the head arms and chest of a man but the legs and lower half of a horse.

These Man-Horse beasts lived in Thessaly, fed on meat and were given to riotous revelries. They came to symbolize the dark, unruly forces of nature. They were usually depicted as drunken followers of Dionysus, except for Cheiron who was the tutor to several heroes…

In this tutorial you will learn some basic extraction techniques. How to use blend modes and masks to create deep atmospheric effects. I will also show you how two meld two creatures together to make a mythical half man half horse Centaur.

Step 1

First of all we are going to cut out the elements we are going to use for the main composition. Open ‘horse-23434-12.jpg’ and grab the pen tool ( P ). Being as careful as you can, slowly plot a path around the horse.

When you get the head of the horse don’t worry too much about being neat, this part of the horse will be masked out later on.

Step 2

Right click in the middle of the path and select Make Selection. With a selection around horse, Cut the horse ( CTRL + X ) and create a new Document for our main composition. Any size will do as long as we have enough space to play around in. Mine was 25cm x 25cm. Paste the horse on to the new canvas ( CRTL – V ).

Step 3

Once the horse in in your man canvas make sure you remove any remainder background using pen tool.

Step 4

Open ‘man-katana.jpg’ and using the Pen Tool ( P ) with same method above cut out the man and the sword, make sure you remove the sun glasses on his head.

Cut and Paste the Man and his Katana into the main canvas.

Step 5

Make sure the images you cut out are nice and clean. To Remove the dog tags from mans torso use the  Spot Healing Tool by sampling with the ALT key then painting it out with single clicks. Constant Re-sampling next to where the pixels you want to replace will give the best results.

Step 6

Use Edit > Free Transform > Scale to make the images fit together. Making the horse smaller and tilting the man so it looks like the horses front legs and model are one.

Using the lasso tool ( L ), create a selection around the horses head. Making sure you leave an inch between the models waist and the horses neck to help with blending. Lowered the opacity of the model layer to help. Use a mask or delete the head off the horse.

Step 7

Pick a soft edge brush with around 20% opacity and color set to black. Slowly paint / merge the horse and man together at the waist.

Take the Lasso Tool ( L ) and make a selection on the horse where the torso meets the horses neck. Copy the area you selected ( Control -C ) Then past it on to its own layer naming it ‘ Horse Skin Blend’

Step 8

Change the horse skin blend layer to an Overlay Blend mode and create a mask ( the icon and the bottom of the layers palette that has  a square with a circle in it ).  Grab a soft edge brush and set the opacity to around 10-15%.

Take your time and blend the horse skin into the human skin. Take note of the skins contours and shadows.

Press CTRL – ALT + E to combine these layers into a new layer. Call this layer ‘ Centaur’.

Step 9

Time to adjust the shadows and highlights. Go to image > Adjustments > Shadows / Highlights.

Set the Shadow amount to 12%  Highlights to 23% and The Midtone Contrast to +34. Click OK.

Now open up the Levels ( CTRL + L ) and input

10| 1.00 | 220

Duplicate your Centaur layer by dragging the centaur layer to the Create a new layer icon on the bottom of the layer palette.

With the Centaur copy layer active go to Image > Adjustments > De-saturate and open the levels panel ( CTRL + L ). Input these settings.

32 | 1.00 | 200

Step 11

Inverse the gray scale layer ( CTRL + I ) and select Filter > Blue > Gaussian Blur with a Radius of 10 pixels.

Step 12

Apply an Overlay Blend mode to the layer at 58% Opacity, and 58% Fill. With the Centaur copy layer selected, control click the Centaur layer below and press CTRL – SHIFT + I to inverse the selection. Press delete to remove any blur on the outside of the centaur.

Step 13

Merge the two layers and grab the burn tool. Using a soft brush with the opacity set to about 15-20% with midtone range selected, apply to all the shadows on your centaur.

Now grab the dodge tool and set highlights at 15% and apply to the highlighted areas like the top of muscles.

Step 14

Duplicate the layer again and go to Image > Adjustments > Hue / Saturation ( CTRL + U ).

Set the hue and saturation value to 30. Click OK

Apply an Overlay blend mode with an opacity of around 50-60%.

Merge these into a new layer.

Step 15

Now we are going to apply some Tattoos / war paint. Create a new Layer called Tattoos.

Select a Chalk Brush at about 14px and zoom right in. Select the color you want and while applying the tattoo reduce the size of your brush as you use it ( Use the [ ] keys to do this ).

Once your happy with the application, change the blend mode to Color.

Step 16

Its at this point that I realized I didn’t like the sword that came with the stock model. So we will change it !

Open up Japanese-swords.jpg and using the pen tool, draw a path around the blade. Create a selection as we did with horse and model layer.

Cut and paste it into the main composition . Do the same for the hilt of the sword and paste them into their own layers. Name them accordingly.

Step 17

Select the Sword layer, and using the Free transform tool rotate the sword and scale it down to fit in place where the old katana used to be. Do the same with the hilt.

Create a mask for sword and hilt layers. Then paint black with a hard edged brush to mask out any overlapping out place sword or hilt.

Create a mask on the centaur layer and mask out the old sword. While also using the burn tool to create a new shadow on the chest right under the new sword, doing the same for the hilt as well.

After this we will merge the centaur one more time into a new layer ( CTRL – Alt + E ). To help clean things up we will create a folder to put all our centaur aspects in to a group.

And there is our complete Centaur. Its now time to create a background.

Step 18

Open ‘greek-ruins.jpg’ and place it behind the Centaur layer and move it to the top left hand comer of the canvas.  Name the layer Ruins.

Hide the centaur layer and using the pen tool we are going to create a path to remove the background from the background…. Yes I did say that!

Right click in the center of your path with the pen tool still selected. Click Make Selection. Then Press delete to remove the backgrounds background thus giving us room for the sky.

Step 19

Open ‘sky-4345.jpg’ and cut and paste it in to your composition. Place it below your ruins layer. Name the layer sky.

Now press CTRL + T and re size the sky layer so it fits in to your comp as shown below Making sure you leave about 1 inch underneath the ruins layer for blending.

Step 20

Select Photo Filter from the Create new fill or adjustments layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. Make sure its above the ruins layer. Apply a Deep Red color and unclick Preserve Luminosity.

Apply a Screen Layer Blend mode with an opacity of 75% on the photo Filter Layer.

Step 21

Select the sky layer and open the hue and saturation box ( Control – U ). Apply these settings.

Add a gradient form the add a layer style menu at the bottom of the layers palette. Apply the gradient in the picture. It’s the standard orange yellow orange preset.

Step 22

Now would be a good time to check and make sure you background is where you want it be in the final image.

Select a soft edge brush with black as your color and opacity of about 12%, select the ruins later and create a mask with the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette. Start softening / blending the edges with the sky layer. You should hide the Centaur in this step to make it easier to see.

Step 23

Now once you are happy with the background,  it would be a good time to Crop your image into a more manageable size.

Grab the CROP tool and crop the image so the scene looks complete.

Once again merge all of the background layers into one layer ( CTRL – Alt + E ) name it Background.

Step 24

Duplicate your background layer and set a multiply blend mode with an opacity of 80% to darken the background.

Step 25

Merge the 2 background layers again ( CTRL + Alt + E ) and duplicate the layer. Set the Blend mode to Multiply with an opacity of 20% – This adds more Atmosphere to the clouds

After this merge all the background layers into one layer.

Step 26

Create a mask on the background layer, and with a soft black brush and around 15% opacity paint some highlights in the sky. Try and paint over any blues and purple.

Step 27

One last time we are going to Duplicate the background layer, and give it an overlay blend mode with a 40% opacity.

Merge the background layers.

Step 28

We are now going to create a shadow for the centaur on the ground.. Create a new layer under the centaur and name it Centaur Shadow. Grab a soft edged black brush with an opacity of 10% and slowly made a shadow.

Keep in mind where the light is coming from. In this case it’s the top left hand corner.

Once you have finished, lower the opacity to around 75% or until it looks natural.

Step 29

Now to finish the manipulation create a fill layer, select Layer > new Layer Fill > Solid Color. Click OK

Select a solid black and click ok.

Set the opacity to 75% and with a white soft edge brush start painting in the light.

Step 30

Apply a Warming photo filter above all layers with a density of 45%

Step 31

For the last step I decided to add some rays of light…

Grab the pen tool and on a new layer named heavens roughly map out a ray of light.

Right click with in the path and click make section with a feather of 5px

Fill this with white and press CTRL + D to remove the selection.

Apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 10. Drop the opacity of the layer to 28%.

Then move the Heavens layer below the photo filter layer.

Step 32

Take this opportunity to mask in more shadows or highlights where you think necessary! Create a black boarder or add some extra background elements. Experiment to make your centaur unique.