Movie Poster - Compositing Techniques
I created a fictional sci-fi movie poster to demonstrate how masking and blending different images together can create a unified composition.
I started by layering the photo of the girl on top of the photo of the sand/alien sign. I used a layer mask on the sand photo and I set the blending mode of the photo of the girl to overlay. I then used brightness/adjustment and hue/saturation layers to get the coloring of the two photos matching and in line with the mood and feel of the poster. I used two separate brightness/adjustment masks to colorize the girl's eyes to match the man's.
For the next layer, I masked around the man's head and added the textured green photo as a clipping mask and set the blending mode to overlay. I masked out some of his facial features such as his hair, eyebrows, nostrils, and lips, and made his eyes brighter. I also played with brightness/contrast and hue/saturation of the green color to get it to my satisfaction.
For the movie title, I wanted to give the effect of it glowing. I used 3D mode to rotate the perspective of text. I then duplicated the text layer so that there were four layers of "AREA 15". The bottom layer is yellow and has a Gaussian Blur filter of 200px. The next layer is green and blur of 100px. The next layer is white and blur of 50px. The top and final layer is white and blur of 20px.
For the movie credits, I found a free PSD mockup that I worked from. You can download it here. It wasn't exactly what I wanted but I just hid what I didn't want and added additional text outside of the PSD mockup. The download comes with the fonts so that was an added bonus!
Here is the final product a little bigger for you to see. Remember, this is a fictional poster and I added some little bits of humor in the credits. See if you spot them!
