playing in photoshop

As i am a big fan of the Aliens films i thought I'd do a little experiment in photoshop involving the alien design that stars in them. First i went through my collection and found a suitable photo to use as the scene; in the end i used one of my own that i shot during the snowfall last year:

 

My plan was to integrate one of the Aliens into this photo as best i could, as if i shot the photo with it there. So first i had to find a good image of an Alien to begin working on. After searching on google i quickly found the perfect photo which was used as promotional material for the movies:

To begin i opened both images in photoshop and put them on seperate layers, flipped the Alien horizontally, converted the layer to black and white to match the show photo and after positioning the image where i wanted up on the car, began to cut around it using the lasso tool and erasers with my graphics tablet. This would have been quite hard with a mouse but using a graphics tablet meant i could get a clean selection quickly and easily. The alien sat in the scene quite well but to sell it i began to add subtle elements that really help to sell it. Firstly was the reflection in the car window and condensation from it's breath. The reflection was made by cutting a section of it's mouth off, copying it to a new layer and adjusting/blending it until it looked right. The condensation is just a smoke brush with gaussian blur:

Shadows seem to be the best way to trick the eye with photoshop art so i used a selection which was copied onto a new layer, made black by using hue/sat > lightness and gaussian blurred. Then it was just a matter of using the transform tools to get the angle right so it looked as if the shadow was cast from the nearest street lamp:

Finally i used the trademark acid saliva dripping onto the floor to finish it all off. I did this mainly because I'd never created an effect like this before so it was a good learning experience and looks really cool. I did this by clone stamping the tarmac under the car onto the snow, creating small melted areas, then i used photos of cigarette smoke against a black piece of card to create the smouldering road surface. The smoke was set to screen mode so the black background vanished leaving just the white smoke visible:

To polish it all off i used the hue/sat tool set to colourise to give the whole image a slight blue tint, which is an effect seen in the first two alien films especially in scenes involving the Aliens. This was a big learning experience for me and took about a few nights to get done but it was really worth it. The final result...

 

'Dead of Night' - Jamie Osborne (click for full size)