Madalin Tudose is the founder of OurTuts, an excellent photososhop / design blog we have a partnership with.

This tutorial is for intermediate photoshop users. You need to know how to handle layers, masks, the basic tools and filters.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create unique wallpapers thanks to photo manipulation. Using some images from the internet, you’ll learn how to blend in different landscapes in order to create a surreal effect.

Here is what we are going to make:

I found two great images that you need to download in order to follow the tutorial: one with a castle and an other with a great waterfall:

The second picture:

Let’s begin. Drag the two pictures into Photoshop. As you can see the castle is a bit too large.

Resize the castle so that its width equals the width of the waterfall and place the waterfall above the castle, as shown bellow:

Now duplicate the castle layer and set the blending mode for the new layer to “soft light”, and then merge the two layers.
Duplicate the waterfall layer and set the blending mode for the new layer to “soft light” too.
Your layers should look like this:

And your image like this:

We made those steps to make the layers look the same. You can see that the the waterfall looks a little bit darker, so let’s make some areas of the waterfall look lighter.

Select the “soft light” waterfall layer and make a new layer mask.

Now set the foreground color to black and with the soft round brush erase the darker areas of the waterfall. The areas marked in the picture are where I used the brush.

Using the pen tool (P) make the select the mountains and delete them, because we are going to put some clouds for effect at their place.

Let’s adjust the colors a little bit. Go to Layer->New Adjustment Layer and apply the next settings:

Levels:

Hue/Saturation

Now our image should look like this one:

Now comes the magic: making the images to look like one.
What we have to do is to make a layer mask of the first waterfall layer, and using the soft round brush erase the middle area from the image. It’s a more complicated procedure which can be mastered if you practice on the image. Use your imagination.

This is how my image looks:

Now, let’s create the clouds. I’ve found a cloudy image on the internet perfect for our project.

Using the pen tool(P) cut the clouds and paste them in our image.

Make a layer mask for the clouds layer and using the soft round brushes, make their margins smoother.

We now see that the sky is incomplete. To fill it with clouds, duplicate the clouds layer, flip it horizontally to make it look different from the other layer (Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontally), make a new layer mask and apply the same treatment using the soft brush.

My sky looks like this:

Now we’re going to create some nice sunshine.
Using the rectangle tool (U) draw a white rectangle with a big height. Then go to Filter->Render->Fibers and apply the next settings:

Go to Filter->Blur->Motion blur this time and put the next parameters:

Now go to Edit->Transform->Perspective and create a perspective like in the next image. Click on the top-left corner of the rectangle and pressing the Shift Key drag to the right. Repeat the process for the bottom-left corner but drag to the left.

Set the blending mode for this layer to soft light again.
I’ve made my image look a little bit darker by applying the next adjustment (Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Brightness/Contrast):

This is how the image looks:

I searched on the internet for some gradients for the last effect and I found them here.
I used a blue one and changed the blending mode of the layer to soft light.

Enjoy the result!

I hope you like it and if you have any questions, or problems leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to answer. Have a good day…!

You can contact the author via email or visit his website