For Assignment #2, we were supposed to find a photo background of a snowy field, add a person (or character), add the person’s shadow, and then create snow with a Photoshop brush.
I found my background on Pixabay. Did a sky replacement because it was whited out and the snowflakes I was going to create wouldn’t have stood out. Next, I created a HDR image from the background that I could use as my lighting in my 3D environment. That way the background and the character are lighted the same. Since I created the HDR, the lighting created the character’s shadow for me automatically in my 3D software. I adjusted the hue of the character in Photoshop to make her match the lighting in the background image. I then blurred the foreground a bit and progressively blurred the background the farther away from the subject it got. Next, I create some snow effects around her boots to make it look like her weight had her sinking into the snow. The final steps were to create 3 different layers of snowflakes at 3 different sizes to cover the background and my character.
Until next time blessings and healing