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Since the ruins are in a separate layer on top of the clouds, it’s simply a mater of adding magentas and yellows in the Color Balance window to liven the ruins up a bit. The sun projects pure white light, but cloud cover can also reflect colors onto their surroundings. I also did a Select > Color Range of all the brightly lit brick faces on the left side of the ruins and boosted the brightness / contrast. Notice that I’m starting to airbrush gradations into the shadows at this point. I also selected out the background temple (probably with the polygonal lasso tool) and ran a few blur filters on it to generate some atmospheric perspective. It was also brightened and the contrast lessened somewhat.

Ruins just aren’t “ruiny” enough without an overgrowth of vines sprouting everywhere. In separate layers on top, I’m simply taking one set of barren green-colored tree branches and mangling them with a variety of distortion filters (like Wave and Ripple effects) and using the Edit > Free Transform tool to stretch and weave them together. The layers are also semitransparent so that they don’t cover up too much of the brick texture underneath. Layers are our fiends, and not just the sort of fair-weather friends who never invite you around to tea, but life-long buddies who you will cherish for the rest of your life. Layers are what make digital work so much more fun than trying to work and rework paint onto a canvas. Typically I’ll have 20 to 50 layers in my original PSD files when all is said and done. Labeling your layers as you create them can save you the headache of searching for specific layers later on. In this instance, I “merged down” the upper layers (via Control+E) into to two separate layers which I decided to call “undergrowth” and “vines of mine.”

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See, I told you there was going to be a waterfall! This layer is a photo of some rocky rapids that have mostly been erased away with some additional color and shading added on top. I also had to make the water “turn the corner” as it falls off the edge of the cliff. There is also some clone stamping taking place here. If Layers are your fiends, Photoshop’s clone tool is your BEST friend! The Clone Stamp Tool is easily the most powerful editing too ever created in the history of photo manipulation devices. But more about that later…

I wanted it to look like the lost city was stuck in the middle of a jungle, so I had to get rid of the shoreline in the background. This cluster of vegetation has been overlaid with some airbrushed white mist in keeping with my initial attempt to create some atmospheric perspective. I should also mention that the foliage is tucked behind the stone temple render layer on top of the pink cloud layer. I don’t mean to give the impression that I worked in all these layers in clear-cut stages. As I work, I’m constantly turning layers off and on, adjusting their opacities and tinkering with their brightness and contrast to see what works best. Layers are good like that.

These trees were made with a combination of customized Photoshop brushes and clone stamping functions. I’ll be describing the brush customization process in greater detail later on, but for now, notice that I’m adding yellow and pink highlights to the tree leaves to match the highlighting on the ruins. Without the matching highlights, the trees would not comfortably “settle” into the picture as much and would have a tendency to look pasted on. There is definitely a huge amount of clone stamping going on with the stamper set on a low “flow” setting and a soft edged brush shape. But the really cool clone stamping features are yet to come…

The foreground vines were looking OK, but the Stone Temple Daggits were beginning to look too pristine in comparison. So here’s where the clone stamper came in the handiest. I took one tiny set of faded green tree branches and overlaid it on top of the stone temple on the left. Then I took the Clone Stamp Tool and using that same low-flow, soft-shaped brush, began to lightly stamp the bits and pieces of the same vine pattern all over the statue. The vine pattern on the temple to the right is the exact same pattern only on a different layer with a more transparent opacity setting. And what would have taken me hours to do by hand only took me a few minutes of delicately tapping my Wacom tablet!

For the uninitiated: to use the Clone Stamp Tool, start by clicking on the area you wish to clone while holding down the Alt key. This paints your “target” for the clone stamper. Then, move your cursor over to where you wish to duplicate the targeted area. Now hold down your mouse button in earnest and whatever part of the picture you previously targeted for cloning will magically reappear in the precisely the same shape and size that you picked for the cloning stamp.

What even some veteran clone stampers don’t realize is that you can also clone from one layer to another and even select clone targets in separate windows in Photoshop. The versatility of the Clone Stamp Tool CANNOT be overstated! So if you haven’t already, learn the ways of the Clone Stamp Tool young Padawan, and the Force WILL be with you. Always!

Also note the additional layer of mist I airbrushed over the waterfall. You know what that means – time to contrast the waterfall with some nice dark foreground elements!