Matte Painting 101: Basic Extraction and Composition Techniques
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Matte Painting 101: Basic Extraction and Composition Techniques

on Apr 28th 2011 with 33 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
  • Difficulty: Beginner
  • Estimated Completion Time: 20 Minutes

Final Product What You'll Be Creating

Download Source Files

Matte painting is a technique that filmmakers use to create backgrounds for scenes that can’t or don’t exist in real life. In the early days, matte paintings were actually painted onto glass. Today, modern filmmakers use digital applications such as Photoshop to produce the backdrops that they need. We have published many matte painting tutorials on this site meant for intermediate and advanced users. This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials that we will be publishing on this meant for those of you who may be relatively new to Photoshop or matte painting in general.

Today’s tutorial, Matte Painting 101: Basic Extraction and Composition Techniques will teach you some quick ways to extract objects from their background and combine them with other images to produce the scene that you need. Let’s get started!

Tutorial Assets

The following assets were used during the production of this tutorial.

 
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Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

I was born in Mexico City, worked and studied photography at Eastman Kodak while training in minilab management and traditional darkroom techniques. Now I am steadily growing in the freelance world on matte painting, digital art/illustration and even some 3d modeling.  

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  • Lucky

    thats good but not very well we want extra ordanary work

  • Marco

    this is the worst matte painting i’ve ever seen in my life o.O

    • http://alexanderjb.tk Hydrox24

      lucky that it’s a tutorial then, hey!
      I am sure that the creator could make a far better one, but that would be far to tedious for a tutorial.
      P.S Great tut Ed!

  • http://marketplace.tutsplus.com/user/Zeplix Zeplin

    Gotta admit, I was a bit disappointed here.
    I do however admit, that is also my own fault. I did not read carefully enough, that this would be such a basic tutorial, aimed at complete newbies. So in that, my disappointment has me to blame.
    When I saw the finished photo first, I thought “Hey, that looks really good!”, but sadly, that’s because it didn’t really need any editing to begin with. This was basically a 25 minute tutorial on how to mask out objects (and not even that effectively).
    I admired the finished photo first, because I thought it consisted of around 7 different photos (the man, the rock he’s standing on, the left middle ground, the right middle ground, the river, the back mountains, and the sky), not 3 photo’s. Even more, the 3 photo’s actually fit together very very nicely without any real need for editing. I was expecting you to cover editing light sources, shadows, colour correcting the images to fit together, perspective, and so on.

  • http://www.inspiks.com loswl

    Very nice tutorial, great tips for creating images from multiple source files.
    Love the animation at the end :)

  • http://www.ideagfx.com ideaGFX

    that’s great …

  • http://mokshasolutions.com Moksha

    Good tutorial but very slow.

  • http://psd.tutsplus.com/ Grant Friedman

    Thanks for the comments guys. Keep in mind that this tutorial is meant for beginners.

  • http://edwinhollen.com edwinhollen

    Great beginning tutorial. Talks about the basics of masking, which is the keystone of Photoshop.

    Awesome tut in that regard.

  • http://itcutives.com Jatin

    I saw the tutorial, and was a bit disappointed.

    Afterwards, I read comment from Grant, and was convinced that the tutorial was meant for beginners.

    BTW, Good tutorial.

  • http://www.adipurdila.com AdiPurdila

    I gotta say I’ve always had a thing for matte painting, I’m just amazed on some of the images you can make with it and I’ve read some written tuts here, but seing a video is so much better.

    I think it’s a great idea to make a basics series for beginners like me who want to learn this, keep up the good work :)

    Oh, a suggestion: can you turn off the mouse clicks in ScreenFlow? It’s kinda distracting especially when you use them alot. I imagine they might be useful for the viewers to show them when to click/release when using a brush to mask for example, but other than that… it’s just a pesky noise.

    Adi

  • http://www.timrizzo.de Tim

    If you are into matte painting, you should check out Sven Sauer at http://www.mattepainting-studio.com

  • http://www.timrizzo.de Tim

    I almost forgot: nice tutorial for the beginners!

  • MAHDI

    Great Job eD!

  • http://www.parasuniversal.com Paras

    I’m a beginner in Matte painting and found this vid very hard to follow. Some tips to improve the vid.
    1 – first of all that clicking sound is annoying.
    2 – i found it very hard to follow tutor because when he… talks… he has a lot… of gaps… and pauses.
    3 – i was glad he sped things up after 8 minutes.
    4 – more relevant details on whats going on instead of just filling up the silence.

    No offence intended but I had to stop watching this vid.

  • zacate

    nice final picture…

    but

    too much time for a very few to learn

    long ant tedious in the most simple tasks

    and then

    too short in the complex ones
    mouse flyning over the screen,
    changing levels, tones, animation

    if you dont wanna teach, dont show it… (or is it only a show?)

    consider show the material to someone before postit
    and then make adjustments…

    good for a begginer: the new teacher

    try again you have the talent…

  • Daniel

    This sort of tutorial is great for a beginner to get started with layer comps, I’m a premium member but that content is way too hard for me, I,m premium because I like to support sites like this.

    I’m new to PhotoShop, I’ve been playing with it for a few months, I’ve got fragments of information scattered throughout my mind and just starting to put the pieces together. The vector masking technique has just jelled, I was using the rubber before this. Mind you I’ve got the Layers book by Matt Kloskowski in from of me but I’m not up to the vector mask section yet.

  • Daniel

    I commented above.

    When you make the screencast, can you explain what tool you are selecting and make the selections slower. The quality of the video is not the good so I need to play it a few times to work out what you’ve done in each step. Just pause for a little while when you select the tool.

  • Guyo

    Hi,

    Great tutorial! How do you animate the files?

  • ELI

    Great work, this helps a lot!

  • http://www.lileddesign.com ED
    Author

    Thanks for the constructive feedback guys I will take all your points and come up with solutions for your concerns. Also as I have said in the tutorials, shoot me a mail if you need some help or are stuck in something; ill do my best to try and help out.
    @Guyo animation was done in After Effects.

    • http://www.parasuniversal.com Paras Universal

      Hey Ed,

      I finally managed to watch the whole thing through and I have to say… I loved the ending. The Painting itself is excellent. Glad to see you taking the constructive criticism with a pinch of salt. I promise to watch the rest till the end ;oP All the best.

    • http://www.youtube.com/ghap4a Judy

      Do you thing it is posible to make a tutorial of the rain animation? This is a wonderful tutorial!!!

  • David

    I really liked the tutorial Ed :) My only criticism would be that for us beginners, you went a bit too fast. I know this was so that the tut wouldn’t be too long, but would love to see maybe a series in the future where you go a bit slower.

    As for the people complaining about the final product, all I can say is lol.

  • http://www.mundocaco.com MundoCaco

    I love the way you work, respecting the original image and converting a simple composion in into something very special and cinematic. Thanks

  • Metehan

    You must watch Martin Perhiniak’s tutorails before starting recording a new tutorial.

  • http://be.net/lucasloyola Lucas Loyola

    I think the final image it’s very unrealistic. On the next tutorial you should focus on more realistic outcome, with more work on ilumination.

  • http://www.logandesigns.co.uk Mark

    I understand some peoples frustration about the tutorial but sometimes tutorials like this can really help beginners. This site isn’t just for the advanced photoshop users

  • http://www.arke1.com.au arke1

    Yea this is more of a beginner tutorial in matte painting and should be treated as such. It’s a decent result and gives readers a pretty good understandings of the basics.

  • Coral

    This is great! Thank you!

  • H3rmit

    The author says very clear “for those of you who may be relatively new to Photoshop or matte painting in general”.
    So thank you very much for sharing this FREE tutorial again! :)

  • satya

    you could have used a pen tool rateher…

  • dom

    it shall have his figure of the detouré by plan of colour it shall have ete more quickly damage than this site do not be egalement in francais for understand it am tutoriel