Using your old photo repair skills for fun

May 13th, 2009

Once you have developed a set of photo restoration skills you can use them to create a realistic photomontage.

In the following photoshop tutorial I will help you create a never ending staircase.

Never ending staircase

Photo restorations are my speciality but today I thought I would create a tutorial on making a never ending staircase from PhotoShop, Textured with wood, stone, grass or whatever you choose. Sometimes when you see photo restorations, you wonder how they were done, its the same for illusions. Here is how to make your own photo montage illusion.

Create a document in photo shop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

We need to show the rulers and change to centimetres.

View / rulers Then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We need to show the gird now. View / show grid

Now go to View / Snap to / Grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent.

To check that your screen settings are the same as mine go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers

copy these settings in the above image

Back to the image.

On a new layer draw with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette, a diamond. Use 5×3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work.

On new layers, draw the other two shapes as per the image above. Now merge the layers. Select the freshly drawn layers in the layers palette and merge them using Layer / merge layers.

Copy the layer and paste and repeat this and arrange the steps as the image below.

Select all these layers in the layers pallet and duplicate them all. Right click in the layers palette and select, duplicate layers. With the layers still selected flip them. Edit / transform / flip horizontal. Use this process by ordering your layers and copying and pasting to get the result below.

Now let’s use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy (sorry I won’t be explaining how to use these tools here – but search the net I am sure you find what you are looking for)

Now repeat the steps we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others and you will have your staircase. Now use it creatively! You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the stair case using the grid we first set up.