Part 1:

Before you start, you will need a collection of relevant photographs from which you can take cuttings and textures. Either download them from a stock photo site or, better yet, take them all yourself.

For demonstration purposes, I decided to work on a stock image of Venice and transform it into a broken and deteriorated industrial scene. You can work in colour from the onset, but for the sake of simplicity, I chose to work in greyscale and desaturate all my photographic materials to match.

My first step was to extract my foreground from the sky using the extract filter. This allowed me to add a more gloomy sky and some industrial chimneys and frame in the background. I scaled these images to size and adjusted the tone and brightness using the levels sliders.

I began cutting and pasting some details, such as broken edges of old ruins, which I set behind the foreground image. I adjusted the brightness and blended through the foreground layer using the eraser tool.


I copied and pasted some broken windows and blended them into the scene using brightness and contrast sliders. I softened the edges with the eraser tool and a soft brush (lowering the opacity sometimes helps). To align certain cuttings, I used the transform tools, such as scale, perspective, warp and skew.

I cut more broken edges, junk and rubble from photos and blended them into the scene using the same techniques previously demonstrated. Some pieces just don’t fit - it’s better to delete them than force them in somewhere.

I replaced the canal with more dirty looking water and removed the overlapping edges using the eraser tool, then covered up the incongruent window reflections using pieces of the same layer and the clone tool.

I cut the bridge from the main foreground layer, flipped it, adjusted the layer transparency and blended it with the eraser tool and a soft brush. I repeated this process with some sky. This creates a reflection and helps the water look as if it belongs in its surroundings (always important to remember).