First Frost

The last 2 month I did a fantasy style workshop (by MissB) to improve my Photoshop skills. I already knew a lot, but I also learned some very interesting new things! One of the first things we learned is to look in a different way to the backgrounds in a kit. Let's take First Frost by Raspberry Road Designs as an example.

For my background I combined three different papers from the kit to get a whole new scene. So at first I ended up with this:

But I wanted a bit more drama in my layout. I created an extra layer for dodge and burn. But to get the real drama on my layout I copied all my layers and merged the copied layers to one layer. I converted that layer to B&W and instead of normal I used Multiply and lowered the opacity a bit (in this case 79%).
You can also easily add an extra fill layer on top of your layers. But then you have to slide a bit with the settings to get the right result. In the way with the B&W layer I know most of the times the effect is right.

A whole other look, don't you think?