Members Area Tutorial: Create a Magical Giant Pop Up Story Book

The beauty of Photoshop is being to create amazing fantasy outcomes that defy the realism in our regular lives. There’s something truly satisfying about creating a magical piece that can wow your friends and colleagues.

Once you get a hand on this type of fantasy design you can really push your Photoshop skills to the next level and get more experimental with your work.

Today’s tutorial will allow you to create a beautiful fantasy pop up book, featuring a magical lake scene. You’ll learn how to bring this basic composition to life, through expert lighting, warping, professional image blending and atmospheric final touches.

Final Image

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Resources Used In This Tutorial

Step 1

Create a new file by going to the Menu Bar, click File>New or press Ctrl+N, and input these values:

Width: 2000px
Height: 2000px
Resolution:300 dpi
Color Mode:RGB Color 8 bit
Background Contents: Transparent

Step 2

Extract the old_book_stock_by_maslenitsa.jpg and open Book Stock by Maselenitsa (8). Activate the Rectangular Marquee Tool by pressing (M) and select the portion shown below:

Copy the selection and paste it to the main canvas. Activate Move Tool (V) and drag the corners, position it like the one below.

Step 3

Now, let’s put the grass over the book pages. Open hill_by_piratelotus_stock-d4ahnff.jpg. Activate the ruler (if the ruler does not appear, go to Menu Bar and click View>Ruler. To use the ruler guide, drag the Ruler located at the left side. Drag it all the way to the middle of the photo.

Copy the selection and paste it to the main canvas. Position the photo just like the one below.

We will now make the grass look like the pages of a book. We will distort and warp the photo. This is a little bit tricky so we must carefully follow the steps.

To start with, go to Menu Bar and click Edit>Transform>Distort.

The result should be similar to this.

Step 4

The grass does not look like it’s fitted to the book so we will now do the warping, but before that, let’s decrease its opacity.

Zoom it to about 30% then go to Menu Bar and click Edit>Transform>Warp.

Note: We are to pattern the grass to the shape of the book, it is okay if the grass overlaps.

After warping, this is the result.

We may have a result that is not exactly the same as this. For me, as long as the grass fits the book, it’s okay.

Step 5

We will now do the other left side. But first, let’s hide Layer 2 (the one we just warped).

Select the left portion of hill_by_piratelotus_stock-d4ahnff.jpg and extract it to the main canvas. Decrease its opacity to 70 %. We will now distort it, go to Menu Bar, click Edit>Transform>Distort.

The result:

Step 6

Let’s warp it again. Go to Menu Bar and click Edit>Transform>Warp.

Here’s the result.

Step 7

We’re almost done with the pages! So let’s unhide Layer 2 and hide Layer 3. We will now do our final touch. Activate Pen tool by pressing (P), trace the portion of the grass as shown below and hit Ctrl+Enter to make a selection; press Delete or Backspace to remove the selected portion. To deselect it, press Ctrl+D. To better understand how to use Pen tool, just visit our tutorial:

Become a Master of the Pen Tool in Under 30 Minutes