In this video tutorial, watch as Redouane Naouri shows you how to add clouds in Photoshop. One of the biggest challenges in photo manipulation is creating a sense of realism. If you can add realistic atmospheric effects, then you are already on to a winner.
In the video, Naouri starts by using a stock image of a cloud and turning it into a brush. Creating your own brushes in Photoshop is something that you should all learn to do. It is simple but very effective. You can create brushes for almost anything and save them to your brushes library. The first step of any brush creation is changing your image to black and white and then inverting it. But first, you need to make sure that the blacks are very dark. This can be done with channels.
As Naouri pushes on through the tutorial, he then shows us how to make our brush act in a way that creates a cool cloud effect when painting. This is all done using the brush settings area of Photoshop. Again, if this is an area you have not yet been into, you should start to learn it. The final stage of the tutorial sees Naouri apply the effect to an image with his custom brush that he has created. I love how he can paint the clouds in and out with a few simple swipes of his brush.
This tutorial is great for intermediate Photoshop artists who want to start having a go at more advanced Photoshop photo manipulation techniques. If you have not yet played around with creating your own custom brushes, you need to start. Creating brushes is a huge part of photo manipulation.
Use a piece of someone else's photo, and paste it all over yours, then airbrush like crazy, to create a "sense of realism". Um ok.
This is exactly why I shun the "commercial world"... There's a difference between the art of photography and graphic arts (i.e. "producing graphics") which has always been the case and the advent of digital photography and manipulation doesn't change that. I enjoy photography as an artistic medium and have no interest in graphic or commercial arts.