Here I’m going to show you how to create a simple foggy, grungy discolored banner for your blog/website.

The final composition will look like this:

Creating this kind of banners is pretty simple as long as we find some source images to work with. There are advanced montages which will turn in to surreal type, sci-fi and so on. But this one is a basic one so, we need only few images.

I’ve created this banner for my portfolio website and just wanted to share how I did this.

For this, I’ve collected only two images. One is an image by ‘nearsky’ which can be found in flickr under his collectionExternal Link. This is the scaled down version of that image. But any image of this kind will work fine for this.

And I found a random sky image with some nice clouds. You can find this kind of images from flickr or from any other free stock image sites.

Step – 01

Create a blank image in photoshop with 1024 x 240 pixels dimensions (you can choose any size but better go for a bigger size so, you can resize it later to fit your web page’s / blog’s width).

Step – 02

Open you main source image; select all (ctrl+a) and copy (ctrl+c) then paste it in the working image you created in the step – 01.

Step – 03

a. Since we want a discolored, grungy final output, we’ll do some small color adjustments to this image layer. Create a hue/saturation adjustment layer above the image layer and give these settings. You are free to experiment different variations though.

The layer pallet will look like this now.

When you apply any adjustments to layers, use an adjustment layer which is the non destructive way of doing it, and always adjustable in future. I’ll try to give you tips on best practices throughout the tutorials which you can use in any project.

b. Then add another adjustment layer above the hue/saturation adjustment layer with the following levels settings.

With these two settings, our image will look like this.

Step – 04

In above screen shot we can see our image’s clouds are bit over exposed. But we are going to fix it by merging the new cloud image with the original image now.

a. Open up the cloud image you downloaded; Select all (ctrl+a) , copy all (ctrl+c) and paste it above all the adjustment layers in the image. Resize the cloud image to fit the original image, just to cover the two third of it.

b. Group the layer in a folder by hitting ctrl+g and you will get a separate folder to this cloud merge process. Double click the folder name and rename it to ‘cloud-mix’ (we will be using this layer group to create some of the cloud and mist effects). While the cloud layer is still selected, create a mask which we are going to paint, to hide the unwanted part of the clouds layer in the next step.

The layer pallet will now look like this.

Click the mask to select it. Choose a soft brush with 100px black color and paint over the bottom part of the mask to hide the extra area of the cloud layer. Don’t worry about the accuracy since we are going to cover the horizon with some mist in next steps.

Painted composition will look like this. And below figure shows the layer pallet.

Step -05

Now we have to do some important color adjustments to the cloud layer before we do any mist effects.

First set the folder’s blending mode from ‘Pass through’ to ‘Normal’ . This will keep all the color changes/effects we are going to make, within the folder. ( that means, it won’t effect the layer groups or singles layers below).

Then, add a level adjustment layer immediately above the clouds layer with following settings. This will bring some details to the clouds.

And the comp will now look like this.

Now add another adjustment layer with gradient map with following colors/settings.

You can see that now we are almost done with the basic color changes.

Step – 06

Now we are going to make some mist in the horizon. To get this effect, simply create a blank layer above the gradient map adjustment layer. Name it ‘mist1′. Set the foreground color to white; choose a soft brush (100px) from the brush pallet. Make it 125px by hitting the right bracket key or dragging the slider. In the ‘mist1′ layer, draw a line from left mid corner to right mid corner exactly above the horizon. Lower the opacity of the mist1 layer to around 30%.

Create another blank layer above it and name it ‘mist2′. Now make the brush smaller by hitting the left bracket key until it comes down to 50px. Again draw a line exactly in the center line along the horizon again. This time make the ‘mist2′ layer opacity around 25%.

The mist is done.

Step – 07

The last step of creating the foggy land is giving some real fog to the scene. These are subtle effects but adding those subtle effects will add a lot of detail to the final composition.

Create another blank layer above ‘mist2′ layer and name it ‘fog’. Create a layer group by hitting ctrl+g and name it ‘fog-set’ or something distinguishable. Make the colors to default by hitting the ‘D’ key. And while the fog layer still selected, go to filters –> render –> clouds. This filter will make a nice cloud effect with the default black and white colors. Since we don’t need the black color cloud, just make the layer blend mode to screen and lower the opacity to around 7% to 12%. Create an adjustment layer above this with levels and give the setting as below.

Actually this adjustment layer make entire composition dark. To apply the levels adjustment only to the clouds layer, we need to clip the adjustment layer with it. Clip the layer by hovering over the cursor between the adjustment layer and cloud layer while holding the Alt key. You can see the cursor changes to a clipping cursor. See the screen shot. Click and apply the clipping.

The clipped layer will look like this.

Step -08

We are almost done. And the composition will look like this now.

To give a desaturated and discolored look, apply a hue/saturation adjustment layer above all the layers, with following settings. This will add some subtle change to the composition by reducing the saturation level.

Now press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+e to merge all in to a new layer above, while the last hue/saturation layer is still selected. Copy the merged comp to a new layer by hitting ctrl+j . and give a Gaussian blur to the layer with 2.0px radius. Then make that blurred layer mode to ‘Softlight’ and drop down the opacity to 70%. This will give a soft blur effect to the image. That’s it. We are done.

Look at the final composition now.

Optional:

You can now add some grungy borders and scratches if you wish. I’ll cover it in a separate tutorial later. Write your valuable comments/ suggestions so I can improve my tutorials.

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