Creating prairie in photoshop

[Jonathan Nelsen]

Does anyone have any links or ideas that can help in creating a realistic looking prairie in Photoshop?  I’m trying to add some prairie grasses into a perspective drawing I’m working on and haven’t figured out a really good way of doing it.  Anyone come across any tutorials or anything that discuss this?

[nca]

Well,

The easiest way might be to find or take a picture of a prairie you like and create a photoshop montage with it.

The way I have used more in the past is to create custom brushes in photoshop. There are videos online about creating custom brushes. If you create a grass brush, which there may already be one by defauly in your brushes palette you can use that with a pressure sensitive tablet (or mouse) to ‘paint’ grass texture horiszontally. It’s really very complicated to explain in text or even with pictures.

Once you learn about brushes, you should think about painting with strokes horizontally and building contrast in the grass to build texture..I’ll see if I can find some examples of my own work which I did this..

[nca]

I did this a few years ago for a student park project. Everything except for the sky is done from scratch with photoshop brushes I made or borrowed from the default library. There are also a few filters here and there. I can answer specific questions if you have any. That might be more helpful.

[nca]

[Bob Luther]

Yeah I think Nick hit it on the head, the key is brushes, especially grass brush that you can “scattter” and “jitter” the hue/saturation for variation. You can also use the clone stamp from an existing image and “stamp” it into your image but this require more practice and a keen eye to get it to look natural.

[Wes Arola, RLA]

The key is to find or create the correct brush and vary the size of it using the brackets [ ] to make it larger or smaller as you sample for a photo of an actual prairie. That way you will sample the real colors and textures from the picture. Good luck! Post it up when you’re done!

[Bob Luther]

ahh I found one I did with grass brush and cloning… here is my input to the visual discussion the first is the photo of the site the second is the proposed landscape with meadow in the mid and foreground all “painted” along with all other landscape in photoshop.

[Rooney]

I went looking for the same thing a while back and found this

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/475869/realistic_grass_effect_using_photoshop/

I found it good and straight forward considering my limited knowledge of photoshop at the time although it will take alot of tweaking and practice to produce the quality shown in the posts previous to this! Hope it helps

Dec

[Ryland Fox]

Definitely brushes. you can download free sets from many places.

Here is a link to a bunch
http://designm.ag/resources/photoshop-nature-brushes/

[nca]

Wow..good find.

[Steve_White]

This is what I like to see around here.

thanks nick

[Jonathan Nelsen]

So I forgot about this thread, but came across it again and decided to post my prairie results. The first image is the before…just a base sketch up model. The second is after photoshopping. I used that great video link that Declan Rooney provided as a guide in creating my prairie. It turned out pretty good. Could use a little more work but I’m much happier with it now than when it was just sketchup. Thanks for all the insight everyone!

[Wyatt Thompson, PLA]

Good job on the grasses. The structure doesn’t appear to cast a shadow.

[Jonathan Nelsen]

yea, thats the part that I need to complete still. Working on trying to get those shadows correct.. Thanks for the compliment on the grasses, I have always struggled with portraying them in renderings.

[Tanya Olson]

Following the aside….Tall grass prairie hasn’t fared as well as short grass – Wind Cave National Park shortgrass prairie complete with native herbivores, yes a few invasives, but not bad, not bad. Buffalo Gap National Grasslands – shortgrass – great plant diversity, some grazing, mostly antelope. WY and MT aren’t too bad. Nothin’ there to disturb the prairie but the wind.
What? You’re giving clues to your secret location? ha! The bat cave will never be the same.

[Author]

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