In this walkthrough I’ll show you how I constructed this large scale city scene by working with textures, filters, and adjustment layers.

The skyscrapers were constructed from a simple, tile-able texture from cgtextures.com.

You can find the one I used here.

Once I downloaded the texture, I opened a 2400 x 5200px Photoshop document.

My aim now was to fill up the canvas with the texture, to create the surface of a skyscraper.

To avoid getting a tiled pattern, I made sure to scatter the textures randomly. I made a large block like the one above, merged the layers together, duplicated the block and repeated.

Once I had filled the canvas, I saved it, and closed it.

Next I opened a 1200 x 1600px Photoshop file, and dropped the texture in as a Smart Object.

I used the Perspective Transform tool to shape the texture into a skyscraper, then duplicated the layer to add the other two which were scaled down slightly.

For each of the skyscrapers I added a low opacity black to transparent gradient with a clipping mask.

I decreased the opacity more for the most distant skyscraper.

I added white to transparent gradients to the far edges of each skyscraper, indicating a light source beyond.

For the two skyscrapers in the foreground, I duplicated them, gave the duplicates a High Pass filter, and set them to Overlay.

I added layer masks to the high pass layers, and faded out the effect of the filter so that it was only visible in the foreground.

I also added a gaussian blur to the skyscraper layers, and added a layer mask to fade in the blur effect from the top of the image.

Next, above all the other layers, I added a Brightness/Contrast ajustment layer and increased the contrast to +50.

I also added a Hue/Saturation layer and took the saturation down to -80.

I added a radial black to transparent gradient layer set to Overlay to darken the edges of the image.

I also added 2 white to transparent linear gradients to lighten the top of the image, one set to Soft Light, and the other set to Normal at 20% opacity.

Next I added a lens flare, and used a Color Balance layer with a clipping mask to give it a blue hue.

The birds were taken from a free stock photo that I downloaded from here.

I added a cloud layer set to Screen at 20 % Opacity, then several other cloud layers of varying sizes at the top of the image, some set to Screen and some Overlay.

Finally I added a dark blue Color layer set to Overlay.

And here’s the final outcome.

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Thanks for reading :)

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