A Work in Progress: Route 696

This guide was made for entry:
Route 696
In Contest:
old blue bus

Original image

step 1 of 17

First take the bus out of background using any tool you like, I also took out the window, because I want to add a "driver" later on for visibility and safety issues ;-)

The bus is to bright for what I want it to be, so I added two adjustment layers, one Brightness/Contrast, lowered the brightness and increased the contrast, and one Hue/Saturation layer to take out the blues, therefor I selected the BLUES and lowered the saturation and lightness on that until I was happy with the look.

step 2 of 17

Because we only have a front of a bus, I wanted it to look like a bus and found a stock photo of a bus interior. Transform and distort the image until it has a nice fit.

Because I want the background to show through the windows of the interior of the bus, I also masked out the windows.

I also added some sort of driver area/dashboard and painted that in with a soft brush and lowered the opacity. This gives the interior of the bus some depth.

sources used for this step:

: source

step 3 of 17

With the use of the elliptical marquee tool I painted the steering wheel, stroke with white and applied layer effects to it to make it look like a steering wheel. Some inner shadow, bevel and emboss to add some texture and a color overlay.

It looks a bit dark, but that will turn out just fine once we added the "driver"

step 4 of 17

Used the rectangular marquee tool to add a bus sign to the blue bus. Also used layer effects, bevel and emboss, pattern overlay and stroke to finish the sign.

step 5 of 17

This bus is going nowhere, so It would be nice to know that, so lets apply some text to the sign. I used the type "Synchro LET" for this job, It has the best feel for this particular project.

step 6 of 17

What is bus without a driver, for this I used a ghost brush (see source) and warped the image until it looked good.

sources used for this step:

1: source 1

step 7 of 17

I turned the bus into a smart object and placed it my background picture.

sources used for this step:

2: source 2

step 8 of 17

With a soft brush I added a big shadow in front of the bus.

step 9 of 17

And then.... there was light.. With a soft brush, I added some white to the headlights and the top lights of the bus.

I applied outer glow to both layers, with an orange color set to screen, and the size at 250 px..

step 10 of 17

I wanted some light beams in front of the bus coming from the headlights. I painted some stripes with a soft brush, applied a gaussian blur and outer glow.

step 11 of 17

I thought rain would be a good idea, and I made that in 3 stages. On a new layer I rendered clouds, add noise and motion blur. Lowered opacity to around 20%.

On this layer I also masked out parts of the window for the windscreen wipers, to it looks like they are actually working ;-)

step 12 of 17

For this part I made a rain drop brush. (Easy! just a dot and apply wind filter (stylize) to it a couple of times. In the brush presets you can change the scatter and scale to make it look like you want. )

I made one smaller "background" rain layer

step 13 of 17

Now for the foreground rain, the same brush, only bigger.

step 14 of 17

I thought one lonely passenger would be nice, so I placed one in the back of the bus, lowered opacity and applied some inner shadow to the lonely girl.

step 15 of 17

I wanted the sign to pop a just a bit more, I used a orange color and painted over the sign and applied a slight outer glow to it.

step 16 of 17

I wanted to give the whole image a bit of a foggy feel, so on a new layer rendered clouds and on a layer mask applied a black to white gradient.

By this time the image was finished, but descided there was still something missing. See step 17. I am not sure though if this image needs step 17. But I will let you descide, so lets see step 17.

step 17 of 17

Because I thought there was still something missing I added a "force field" to the image, to give it a more spooky feel.

I duplicated the background layer and with a elliptical marquee tool selected a circle. I applied a Radial Blur in the circle.

On a layer mask blended in the blurred part and lowered the opacity.

Final result

Votes

user	voted
locale
jcfreak6363
derdevil
Score: 10

Comments

jcfreak6363 says:

I think the radial blur effect adds more of a surreal feel. Like it!!!

(5 years and 2991 days ago)

Pxleyes

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