Create a travel Ad

In this case, I went to Edit: Transform and did some flipping of the layers. I purposely want to have that sun up in the corner as a source of light. Note how it still works as upside down to kind of give the feeling of weightlessness or falling (cool huh?).

 

Now create a Hue adjustment layer. Colorize it and choose the settings you see here (to get the exact shade of blue).

Since I am going to be doing some blending modes, I sometimes like to have two copies of a layer. Duplicate the layer of the girl..this will give even more different effects with blending modes.

 

Fill the background layer with black and create a layer mask on the upside down sky layer above. Now use the gradient masking technique with the radial gradient tool to hide pixels on the sky layer to let the black darkness layer show through. The red is once again the rubylith which shows you what kind of masking job you are doing.

 

You just gotta love these photos from photos.com I am very impressed and excited about all of them I've chosen and what I can do with them in the future. I feel this image is going to work really well with the final design. As a Photoshop Designer, you should start to 'feel' and 'envision' what would work when piecing together different elements into a design.

Edit: Scale that bad boy down to a smaller size and place it where you can further blend it into the design...with; you guessed it-layer masking! Note that it is blue because of its location in the layers palette being Under the blue hue adjustment layer (which is a global adjustment to all visible layers beneath it).

 

Here you can see that I'm using the linear gradient tool with a layer mask to hide the rough, rectangular edges of the layer. You'll want to come in from each perpendicular angle and swipe to get rid of those harsh 'lines' or 'edges'. Instantly is has become much more natural. Do note that we are on the layer that we've just pulled in. I didn't hide the layer of her (on top in the layers palette) because I want you to start understanding and seeing the importance of layer order.

Change to Linear Dodge blending mode; this will allow the lighter properties of the layers to blend together.  Please understand the layer that is selected in the layers palette is the sky layer which we are now masking and you can't see the edge of the image's lines.

Now I'm just taking things a little further by doing a little light-bleeding. This can easily be done when you have a light layer (or ie. portion of sun, light..) beneath by creating a layer mask. I almost always use the diamond gradient tool on full black as the foreground color. This will help give the illusion of 'light' rays shining through. Note the layer which I am doing the light bleeding on in the layers palette. Can you see it on the layer mask icon?

Because both layers of her are on blending modes there will be some transparency, but to get the light bleed itself I want to mask to let the light shine on through, or so to say.  You can see the diamond gradient 'masking' on the rubylith here to cover up areas of the layer.

Above you can see areas where I've masked on the bottom layer of her (with hard light mode on). With hard light mode on there will definitely visible and sharp pixels remaining. When you start masking them, you will easily allow anything else beneath to bleed through. Keep in mind that we still have the soft light blending mode on that will retain the shape of the girl from the hard light areas that are masked. 

Layer masking is covered in depth in the Basic Photoshop training program.  It is important to have a solid grasp and working knowledge of layer masking for advanced work.