Today we start with a tutorial to a composite image in “Sin City” style.
You will find below all the steps I did to achieve the results shown here or here.

All steps shown below do not require any special 3rd party filters or other gimmicks, just the built-in features delivered with Adobe Photoshop and an intermediate level of knowledge about using Adobe Photoshop.

Note: click on the thumbnails to get full size images (lightbox)

We start with the collection of the “requisites” for our composition. We’ll use the shots as shown below:

2 shots from Porto, a bankhouse and the promenade near Pont Louis

A Chevrolet Bel Air, shot taken in Bern, Switzerland

and finaly, a shot of myself, taken in studio in a blue screen environment.

I wanted to have this composite big enough for a poster, so I choosed the canvas size of 40 x 60 cm at 300 dpi.

As the next layer we drag the promenade shot and desaturate it

After that we drag the chevy on the left corner. Using a soft brush with 10% opacity and blending mode set to “soft light” we paint the car lights of the chevy (painting with light). With strg+u we do a partial desaturation of the chevy layer app. 30%.

We switch back to the promenade layer and add a lens blur to simulate a DOF referring to the chevy in the foreground. I used 24%.
Now we place the bank house and use the perspective function to match the perspective to the promenade. When this is done, we desaturate the layer completely using “strg+shift+u”.
Like shown above, we apply the lens blur to this layer as well.
The background is almost done but it needs some correction. Using layer masks we erase the hard borders and edges to become a “fluid surface” between the three layers.

In the next step we load the studio shot and remove the blue background color.
After that we place the new layer on the composition

We add a new layer with strg+shif+n and fill it with black color. Using a soft brush with 10% opacity and blending mode set to “soft light” we paint some lines and then apply radial blur to the layer. We have now created a kind of fog

and apply the “screen” blending mode to the layer.

At this moment we add another layer and increase the lights of the car by painting with light.

Now comes the most interesting part, the typicaly “sin city” rain. We add a new layer and fill it with black color. Then change the blending mode to disolve. Using the motion blur filter, try to adjust the rain drops trails to your needs

After applying the blur filter, change the blending mode of the layer to “linear dodge”. We add an additional layer draw some diagonal lines and process it like the fog layer mentioned above without applying the radial blur filter and set the blending mode to “screen”.

With these two layers we have now the rain and kinda helicopter lights
With a “S” curves layer we increase the contrast and make the whole composition a bit darker

As the last step I used a hue / saturation layer to give a slight blueish touch. Below you see the whole composition in photoshop with all the layers
and the final image

I hope you can follow the steps easily and use the workflow to create your own “Sin City” ideas. Feedback is very much appreciated.

Thank You, Vernon Trent

P.S.
A big “Thank You” to Mal for editorial reading and telling me that it is “perfect”. English is not my native language, so you can imagine how my ego raised. :-)

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