How to Make Ordinary House Haunted

In this tutorial we are going to create a haunted house from the ordinary one and study some matte painting techniques. Step 1 I use 4 images from SXC: mansion, sky and two photos with dead trees – first and second. I’ve found the photos of mountain and birds in my personal photo archive. You can get them here: mountain, [...]

In this tutorial we are going to create a haunted house from the ordinary one and study some matte painting techniques.

Step 1

I use 4 images from SXC: mansion,
sky
and two photos with dead trees – first and second.

I’ve found the photos of mountain and birds in my personal photo archive. You can get them here: mountain, first rook, second rook.

Step 2

Open the photo of house. Rotate it so it will get the best look. I mirrored the image (Image – Rotate Canvas – Flip Canvas Horizontal) and then rotated it for 3 degrees clockwise (Image – Rotate Canvas – Arbitrary…)

Cut the house from the surroundings. I used pen tool for the house and the soft round eraser for the grass, trees and bushes.

Step 3
Open the mountain photo. Rotate and resize it considering that there will be mansion standing on it. I rotated the for 5 degrees counterclockwise, cropped it and then placed the layer with house over the mountain like on the picture below.

Step 4

Our mountain is too foggy, we need to reduce its brightness and add some contrast at the same time. The best tool for our purposes is Curves. Go to Image – Adjustments – Curves… and change the curve form like this:

Step 5

Erase the sky from the mountain. The fastest way to do it is to use Magic Wand Tool. Now take the sky from the photo and place it to our picture.
Remember that to make the picture look natural, you need to match the direction of the sunrays in sky to the lights on the house.

Now we have three separate layers: the mansion, the mountain and the sky. Do not merge them.

Step 6

The edges of the house have the color of the sky at original photo. Select the empty space on the house layer with the magic Wand Tool. Go to Select – Modify – Expand to expand your selection. I entered the value of 2 pixels.
Press Ctrl+U to open Hue/Saturation window and adjust the edges color so it will match with the sky.

Step 7

Adjust the colors using Hue/Saturation and Color Balance (Ctrl+B) to unite different elements with the same color spectrum.

I decreased the Saturation of the house to -70 and the mountain to -40. Also I added yellow to the highlights of the house (-13 in yellow/blue highlights Color Balance).

Step 8

Remove the unnecessary trees and branches with Clone Stamp tool.

Step 9

To make sky more expressive, darken some areas between the sunrays with Burn tool.

Step 10

Adding contrast to the picture with Curves, each layer separately.

Step 11

Take soft round brush and paint some light on the mountain. I used #EEECDD color and 15% opacity.

Step 12

Turning sunset to night. Go to Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Hue/Saturation. Set Hue 203, Saturation 34 and Lightness 0. This layer must remain over the others to the end. Set its opacity to 40%.

Step 13

Add some dead trees near to the house (don’t forget to tweak color and lights). I used the trees from stock photos.

Step 14

We’re going to break some parts to make the house look abandoned. Destroy windows, pipes, pillars. Paint a hole in the roof and tear curtains. Use Clone Stamp tool when you want to break something.

Step 15

Nobody cared for this house for a long time, so it will look dirty. Use soft round and spatter brushes when you paint dirt. Set brush color to black and use different opacity and size while painting dirt.
Paint dirt on the windows, walls and roof. Add dirty stains at the bottom of each floor and beneath the protruding parts of the roof.

Step 16

It still looks too bright. Create new layer, make selection of all white parts of the house and fill it with white. Double click on the layer to open Layer Style window. Add the effects like on the picture below.
I use Rust Flakes pattern here.

After that set layer opacity to 40% and blending mode to Linear Burn.

Step 17

Now we are adding a couple of big black birds to make it look more mysterious. Open the photos with rooks and detach birds from the surrounding. I used Magic Wand tool and hard round eraser.
Transform and resize them. Place the birds on the roof. Set layer blending mode to Soft Light to match colors.

Step 18

The light is shining from the top left corner, but the birds are completely black at this moment. We are going to fix it.
Duplicate the layer with birds, Ctrl+U and set Lightness to +30. Select Dodge/Burn tool. Darken the bottom-right part of the birds and lighten the top-left. Layer blending mode must remain at Soft Light.