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