Intro to Matte Painting

Photobashing gets a bad rap these days, but Maxx is determined to change that. In this lesson, Maxx will show you his advanced techniques for integrating photos from different sources into a single piece, and how to give them a consistent look and feel. Building upon your concept from the previous lesson, use advanced Photoshop techniques to achieve seamless color, atmosphere, and lighting effects to finish your matte painting.

Realistic perspective is critical to achieving lifelike quality in your matte paintings. In this lesson, Maxx will teach you all the fundamentals of one, two, and three-point perspective and what the differences are between them. From there, you'll learn how to prepare an image plate with perspective grids, break up source images into orthographic views, and retrofit them into your paintings with the proper perspective.

When creating matte paintings, you'll often be asked to completely change the lighting of a scene. While this may seem like a daunting task, Maxx will show you his techniques to do so with relative ease. Using the cityscape created in the previous lesson, you'll learn to do what's called a "day for night," where you'll study the principles of primary and secondary lighting, and add atmospheric and interactive light to your scene.