Here are the first 3 videos in our series of Photoshop matte painting tutorials. These were created as entries into a contest by Tubetape, and each tutorial is no longer than 5 minutes, and is on a basic to intermediate level.

Per Wikipedia, Matte paintings are artist-created representations of landscapes, architecture or scenery that are combined with live-action footage in movies and film to create or enhance an environment that doesn’t exist, or would be too dangerous or expensive to film in reality.

Simple matte painting tutorials

I had looked online for other matte painting tutorials, and found a lot of the shorter videos were time lapsed – Nothing against time-lapse tutorials, but I wanted to create a few basic tutorials of my own. These tutorials edit and composite video using only Photoshop® CS4. As we use nothing but photoshop for adding matte paintings to these videos, it is suggested that you shoot your footage with a tripod, and do not move the camera. If you are doing moving, longer, or more complex shots, I suggest using After Effects in addition to Photoshop.

Photoshop: Matte Painting Tutorial: Moon

Photoshop: Matte Painting Tutorial: Mountains

Photoshop: Matte Painting Tutorial: Signs

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Photoshop® CS4 was used for this tutorial: Video footage shot using a pocket HD camera (Kodak Zi8): tutorial screencast recording using Camtasia for Mac: microphone used is a Samson GoMic.

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Ok, for those of you who don’t know I am a HUGE Bobby Chiu fan! I have been following his work and career since I first saw his “Big, Bad, Bunny Eater” in ImagineFX magazine. Anyway, he has plenty of Youtube videos out there, and if you are looking for some AWESOME inspiration, listen to what he is saying during the video. He has never really taught technique on these videos, and instead saves it for students who take his classes at the online school he helped create, Schoolism.com… until now. He has released a FREE tutorial on his other brainchild of a site Sketchoholic.com. Sign up to be a member of Sketchoholic (also FREE) and watch his 76min demo “Designing Creatures for Live Action Films”.
By the way, what does Bobby Chiu know about the subject?? he worked as a Character Designer on this low-budget flick with this Tim Burton dude, I think it was called Alice in Wonderland, lol.

On a side note, I got this video from my good friend Marcus, meeting Bobby at a show last year. You can see how cool Bobby really is, enjoy.

Here is a basic Photoshop tutorial using blending modes & layer masks to lighten photos. I’m using CS4, but this technique is doable in earlier versions of Photoshop as well, (even before any CS version).
6:17 minutes/28.5MB… be patient while loading