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 […]