How to Create Realism in Photoshop

5 simple tips to achieve surreal imagery.

By FunkyFocus via Pixabay

As the program of choice for many artists, Adobe Photoshop has an impressive array of capabilities. In particular, its release heralded a new standard of photo editing. Unique compilations blurred the lines of reality through advanced masking and alterations.

A Photoshopped Scene: Before vs. After (‘The Colours of Snow’)

How exactly does one acquire such a realistic effect? In this tutorial, I outline five key factors to producing the aforementioned outcome: perspective, angle, shadows, tone, and erasing. This may be referred to as the PASTE process.

To illustrate the PASTE process, a scene will be created in Photoshop CC 2015 using the following images:

By Myriams-Fotos and jplenio via Pixabay (Note: The bee will already have a mask applied in this tutorial)

1. Perspective

Guiding Questions

• Which objects are in the foreground versus the background?
• How much distance exists between objects?
• Are the object’s dimensions accurate based on relative sizing?