I was pretty excited when I was handed this project.  The company sells advertising on outdoor air conditioning units. They needed a full page AD for a magazine. I mean, hello, what makes more sense than to put ice all over the place?

THE ICE EFFECT. Took about 12 hours to invent this technique.  The owner of the company looked at the ad and was asking me how I did it, so if you’re curious too:

The method was pretty much: First I had to figure out where I wanted the ice condition unit to show through (I had to clone stamp some of the grass at the bottom to make the picture tall enough.  I then strolled over to my favorite site  SXC and grabbed a photo of ice .  I saturated the photo to make it look really blue, this is an old project but I think I just used a blue photo filter to do that.

I duplicated the layer 3 times.  Set the top photo to a low opacity, and the next layer down, to a slightly higher opacity.  I used a layer mask, and erased away where I wanted the “hole” to be.  To do this I used a soft, sponge textured brush, setting it to lower and lower opacities as I got close to the edges.

The top most layer (the one set to lowest opacity) had the least amount erased, because it was meant to be the very edge, or to look very clear, almost like it was water.

That is a simple explanation, and I’m sure some steps are missing, but hey i didn’t intend for it to be a tutorial.