i cant make this metal look real
That's because of 2 specific things.
1) He's too light. There needs to be more contrast in those greytones.
2) He's not reflecting his environment. This one is the most important. You would need to take another type of similar winter scene photo and apply it to the wolfe over his body. This would be best done using the Displace filter to get all of the correct distortions on the reflection.
This isn't to say however that just by doing the above things you'll get a believeable effect. That's a tought thing to pull off in PS. But if you want to try, here's what you can do:
You'll first need to import a second snow scene similar to the original. It can basically just be a snow scene with snow covered trees and maybe a blue sky to match the original. Put this photo just above the original duplicate.
Secondly... you'll need to extract the wolfe from the scene; using the polygon selection tool should suffice.
Then copy and paste that extracted wolfe into a new document, that's the exact same size as the original photo he came from. Delete the Background layer of this new wolfe document. Your BG should be transparent.
Duplicate the wolfe layer for a backup.
Now slightly blur the top wolfe layer. Blur just eneought so that mosy of the details are slightly blurry. Not too much here though. You need some amount of shape detail to remain.
Now under the IMAGE menu choose MODE>Greyscale. When asked to flattened the document choose "Don't Flatten".
Save this document out to your Desktop now; or a working folder if you want.
Back in your original snowy wolfe photo, activate the original photo and duplicate the layer. Then open the FILTER menu and choose "Distort>Displace...". Leave the default settings for now and just click the OK button to browse to and select your greyscale wolfe document. Once selected, click OK again.
After the filter does its thing, take note of how extreme or subtle the results are. From there, if the results are not suitable, UNDO and reapply the filter, but change the settings to suit your requirements.
It may be smart to add a Layer Mask to the effected photo layer once you've applied the Displace filter to it. What you want to do is mask out any edges around the wolfe where the Displace filter has distorted the background in the scene. This can be done most easiy be simply selecting the extracted wolfe shape and while on the Layer Mask fill the selection with Black. Deselect. Now press Ctrl+I to invert the mask colours.
You can now delete the extracted wolfe layer safely.
Try this and see how you do. :B
|