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Thanks for purchasing the SnapGrounds Xtra brushes for photoshop!

To help you get the very best out of this product I thought a little tutorial and
some examples would be a good idea.

So grab yourself a cup of drink..and sit back and relax….this should be fun!

First the easy bit! Open Photoshop and LOAD your chosen brushes. There are
36 brushes in the Xtra set! Mountains, water, birds and plants. With the addi-
tion of the pre rendered skies you can make literally hundreds of original back-
grounds in seconds!

First off start by opening a blank canvas the size you wish your final image to
be: the pre rendered skies are 2000 pixels wide...but being a BMP file they can
easily be rescaled to suit virtually any image.

Choose your pre rendered background and copy and paste it into your canvas...
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With the background in place you

need to select a MOUNTAIN from
your brushes!

If you ZOOM out from your im-

age even the larger of the brushes
will be displayed as an OUT-
LINE...you can quickly decide
which brush will work best for
you and start to create your back-
ground faster this way!

For the MOUNTAINS use the

COLOUR PICKER to grab a dark shade of your background and then make it
slightly darker still along the same tonal range:

3 clicks of the mouse later and we have a

mountain range in our back-
ground….ALWAYS put new items of your
background onto LAYERS! That way you
can easily change the way things look and
alter anything you need to without damag-
ing anything else you have worked hard to
produce!
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Now we can start to
get clever! Use the
MARQUEE tool to
select an area infront
of the mountains to
create a lake in.
ERASE out the
waste mountains and
then create a new
layer.
Use one of the WA-
TER brushes to snap
in a lake….use ei-
ther a dark tone of
the image or a
lighter one depending on your final choice!

Because the water is on a separate layer you can always go back to a layer UN-
DERNEATH it and paint in a lighter area to create the suns reflection if need
be!

Now for the clever bit!

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DUPLICATE your MOUNTAIN layer and then FLIP it vertically!
With the mountains flipped, add a
vertical MOTION BLUR and
then slightly lower the OPACITY
to suit your image. Instant reflec-
tions!

Using the FIR TREE brush

from the original Snapgrounds
set you can start to create a
landscape. Start small and far
away..then make the brush lar-
ger and work towards the edge
of the screen. Use a darker
shade of the tonal range of your
image so far!
Once this is down duplicate the
layer and flip it like you did the
mountains! Then add you verti-
cal MOTION BLUR!

Move the blurred layers

into place as reflections!
Finally use a colour se-
lection of the lighter
shade of your image to
add small ripples along
the waters edge between
the land and the water!
Add a slight horizontal
motion blur to this.
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On a new layer, use the top edge of
a MOUNTAIN brush with a nice
dark tone to put in some foreground
land.
Now choose some suitable plants/
bushes/trees and add some foliage
in the darker tones.

Finally you can add some birds with

a slight MOTION blur in their di-
rection of flight to finish your im-
age!

I hope this gives you some ideas and some inspiration!

Have fun with the brushes!