A Work in Progress: Crop Circling

This guide was made for entry:
Crop Circling
In Contest:
ufo hoax

step 1 of 20

I cut out the hull of the helicopter (source provided) and used replace color to turn the yellow to grey.

NOTE: The background here is different from the final image. The reason for this is that I changed my mind after finishing the image and stuck everything onto a different scene.

sources used for this step:

: source
1: source 1

step 2 of 20

Cut and pasted the left wing of the airplane (source provided) copied it, and mirrored it to make one larger wing.

sources used for this step:

2: source 2

step 3 of 20

Copying more instances of the wings, I used distort and liquify to bend 3 pairs of wings into shape.

step 4 of 20

Cut out the lenses and overlay-blended them with a redish hue.

step 5 of 20

Changed my mind here and decided to make the lenses green. Use hue/saturation adjustments then an array of filters (forgot which, I'm afraid) to give them an alien look.

step 6 of 20

Added shadows on seperate masked layers with a transparent, soft brush.

step 7 of 20

Cut and pasted part of the vacuum hose from the mentioned picture.

sources used for this step:

3: source 3

step 8 of 20

Adjusted hue and saturation of the hose to turn it green, then fitted it underneath the ship. Needed to erase part of it here. Finally, added some touch-up shadows with a soft, transparent brush.

step 9 of 20

Dabbed the edges of the wings with a green brush, then gave them a normal-blend glow effect. I set the blend mode of the layer to screen and erased parts of the green brush blobs to fit the shape of the lights. Opacity is lowered slightly in the final result.

step 10 of 20

Painted the tractor beam with a large, hard, bright-green brush. Duplicated the layer, then patterned with a bubble pattern. Bubble pattern is set on top. I merged the bubble pattern layer with a blank layer to make the effect permanent.

step 11 of 20

Used a vertical motion blur on the bubble pattern layer.

step 12 of 20

Set the bubble pattern layer to screen over the bright-green tractor beam.

step 13 of 20

Used a very large soft eraser to delete the sides of the tractor beam and give it a more straight shape. Also lowered opacity slightly.

step 14 of 20

Used same process in step 9 to make headlights on the front of the hull.

step 15 of 20

Duplicated a merged layer copy of the spaceship, distorted it, and moved it onto the field. This will be the shadow.

step 16 of 20

Alot was done here. First, I cropped the entire image to mage it more of a landscape picture, added an omni lighting effect in the top-left corner, and gave the picture a lens flare. Shadow was made by filling in the duplicated ship with black, guassian blur, and lowered opacity.

step 17 of 20

Some more contrast adjustments and more blur to the shadow.

step 18 of 20

At this point, as you can see, I decided that the old background was lame and switched the tractor beam and spaceship onto a new background, this time containing a crop circle.

sources used for this step:

4: source 4

step 19 of 20

This is basically a repeat of step 16. Re-added the omni and the lens flare, desaturated the field a tad, and re-added the shadow. I made the rays coming up from the ground by duplicated the tractor beam a few times and distorting them over the crop circles. Touch-ups with a large, soft eraser.

step 20 of 20

To finish the whole image off, I added box blur, slight noise, over-exposure, and a warming filter. Also added a date stamp in the corner which is simply a "Courier New font" text string with a red glow. When I saved the final image, I did so with a low-quality setting to make it appear more like a photograph.

Final result

Votes

user	voted
iquraishi
pearlie
hereisanoop
erikuri
Score: 10

Comments

hereisanoop says:

awesome

(5 years and 3615 days ago)

author says:

Thanks alot everyone!

(5 years and 3614 days ago)

Pxleyes

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