Compositing Quick Tips - The Photoshop: Professional Retouching and Compositing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques - page 283

grass; how to add realistic shadows (an unavoidable and essential compositing skill); and
two techniques using color to seamlessly blend images together for a realistic composite.
Creating a Horizon Line
You might think that a horizon line is perfectly straight, but when the ground is something
like a field, the horizon line is made up of distant blades of grass of varying sizes and
angles.
You can mimic this look very easily using brushes that are included with Photoshop, but
rather than manually painting the horizon line we can make the process much quicker using
the Pen tool.
1. With the grass (ground) layer already open in Photoshop, grab the Pen tool (P) and
make sure that the Path option is selected from the options at the top of the screen
( Figure 5.1 ) .
Figure 5.1
2. Starting from just outside the left side of the image and finishing just outside the
right of the image, draw a path across the width of the grass just below the horizon
line. Do this by adding numerous points and creating slight angles to join them so
that the path isn't perfectly straight ( Figure 5.2 ) .
Figure 5.2