Creating your own Fairytale Scene

Preparations: We will be using 3 images here. Lady in white dress, snowy mountains and clouds. You need to install these brushes:Falln_BrushesFeathersSet1 (download) FallnBrushesAngelWings (download) All rights of these resources belong to their respective owners. Step 1 – Setting Up Environment: Create a new document of 750×550 pixels. Open up the snowy mountains and remove the sky along the rocky edges with a Soft Brush tool (size around 20pts). Step 2 – Adding Clouds: Insert the image of clouds below the layer of mountains. Go to Edit > Free Transform and scale the clouds proportionally till it fits the document nicely. Step 3 – Adjusting Levels: Create a new Levels Adjustment Layer. Insert the values: 7,1.38,255. This will brighten the environment and more details are shown. Step 4 – Placing the Subject: Crop the lady out using Pen tool. Place her at the position shown in the diagram. Use the Soft Brush tool with color #000000, paint some shadow around bottom of the dress. I will provide more methods to extract a subject away from its background in my next post. Step 5 – Adding the Wings: Load Brushes > FallnBrushesAngelWings and select FallnBrushesAngelWings12 with 400pts. Create a new layer and name it as wings. Choose #FFFFFF as your foreground color and paint in the angel wings. Go to Edit > Free Transform to distort the left side of the wings upwards slightly. Step 6 – Enhancing the Details: As the wings seem to be transparent, I duplicated another layer of wings and set its mode to Hard Light. Use the Soft Brush tool with color #000000 and opacity 50%, paint some shadow around the sides of lady’s arms. Step 7 – Rays of Light: Create a new layer and call it as light rays. Select Soft Brush tool with size 100pt and color #FFFFFF. Set its opacity to 40% and start drawing vertical lines across the layer. Edit > Free Transform to distort the rays in a way that the light source comes from the top-left. Step 8 – Adding the Feathers: Load Brushes > Falln_BrushesFeathersSet1 and select Falln-BrushesFeather4. With several different sizes, paint some feathers around the document. Right-click on the feathers layer and select Blending Options. Check on Outer Glow and set Blend Mode: Linear Dodge (Add), Opacity: 100%, Color: #FFFFFF, Size: 10px. Step 9 – Magical Dust: Select the Soft Brush tool with size 3pt and color #FFFFFF. Go to Brush Properties and check on Scattering. Set Scatter to 1000%. Create a new layer and call it as glowing dust. Start drawing several lines of scattered dots around the lady subject. Right-click the layer and select Blending Options. Check on Outer Glow and set Blend Mode: Linear Dodge (Add), Opacity: 100%, Color: #FFFFFF, Size: 10px. Step 10 – Adjusting the Colors: Create a new Hue/Saturation adjustment layer at the topmost. Set Hue:-17, Saturation: -38, Lightness: 0. On top of Hue/Saturation, create another Curves adjustment layer. Select the Blue channel and pull the center of the curve upwards. This is to add a blue tone effect seen in most fantasy scene