Photocompositions are one of the primary uses of photoshop: to integrate seamlessly several images to produce a new reality represented in the resulting image. Look through your Sunday advertisements, I guarantee you will find dozens of instances of this; this morning I found the Hulk sitting on a couch to watch his namesake film with a family in a Best Buy ad.

The foremost challenge to creating images of this nature is that the photos to be integrated have to have a kind of interplay already. When dealing with objects that will interact with each other, they must be able to achieve realistic proportion, form and lighting. To some extent, we can manipulate these three factors, but in the end, if the photo isn’t right, those efforts will be moot.

I’ll be going through some basic concepts and steps to create this composition I put together.
View full-size here.

I used 4 images from stock.xchng, my favorite stock photo site: the sink, the hole, the wall texture, and the head.

I began with the sink image as my foundation. The lack of vertical perspective (seeing into the sink or under the sink) can be challenging or very easy to work with, depending on the availability of photos that compliment this angle. Many of the texture sets on stock.xchng are taken head-on, with no vertical perspective, so using the Distort or Perspective from Edit > Transform can very easily allow them to match up with whatever vertical and horizontal perspectives you’re working with.

In my case, I needed only to put the texture above my sink layer and set layer blending to Linear Burn. All that was left was to apply a mask to the texture layer and mask out the sink area.

Next up was the insertion of the head. Thinking of the shape of the sink, I figured that the head wouldn’t be able to sit in it totally upright. I rotated and then masked accordingly, trying to achieve a natural look to the way the head was positioned in the sink. I lucked out on the lighting used in the original photo, as the directions of light and shadow is mostly accurate. Watching out for shadows and dark areas on photos you plan to integrate is a major consideration to make. As best as you can, try to approximate the direction that the light source is coming from, and judge its suitability from there. Many times, it doesn’t make or break an image since the application of the Burn and Dodge tool can fix it enough so as to be less noticeable.

It’s missing a little something–shadows. On two layers, one above the head and one below, I added shadows using the brush tool to add a shadowcast on the wall behind the head and one on the head from the inside edge of the sink.

The last component was the hole in the wall. This particular photo is a real find, since it appears to be without any vertical perspective, but has a slight amount of horizontal perspective to show off the great textures along the inside of the wall where the hole was made. After setting the hole layer blending to Multiply, I positioned the image where I wanted, and masked everything on that layer except the hole itself. I used the Dry Media brush set that comes with Photoshop to touch up the mask around the hole.

All in all, it is a simple photocomposition, but the more elements that are added, the more important it becomes that a cohesive balance is kept in regards to the three principles I mentioned earlier: proportion, form and lighting. I continued to embellish the image and arrived to this final composition–perfectly spooky for Halloween!