The tutorial of Photoshop synthetic Unreal city map

This tutorial is mainly based on synthetic images as the core technology to achieve surreal photo effects.

In this tutorial, I'll show you some steps to design an unreal city. This tutorial is mainly based on synthetic images as the core technology to achieve surreal photo effects.
This tutorial covers layer blending options, image adjustments, filter effects, and lighting rendering techniques. The tutorial itself is simple, but the end result looks pretty good!
Here is the final result preview:

Final effect 1

Final Effect 2
Black and white version:

Final Effect 3

1. Below are four footage images:

Material 1

Material 2

Material 3

Material 4

A picture loaded into Photoshop "Material 1", copied once, and the blending mode of the background layer is set to "multiply":
Save this file to a new PSD file and name it "City".

Figure 1-1
Save this file to a new PSD file and name it "City".
2. Load the "footage" in Photoshop, drag it into the file and use the Free Transform tool (press CTRL + T) to adjust the entire image until it conforms to the canvas size:

Figure 2-1
Name this layer "city" and change the layer blending mode "light". You will get the following effects:

Figure 2-2
3. In the "City" layer, press CTRL +alt + Shift + B to build the pop-up black and white adjustment tool (try to use the Monochrome Channel Mixer option) and apply the following settings:

Figure 3-1
Then press CTRL + M to eject the curve tool and adjust the red channel:

Figure 3-2
The following are the effects that are set:

Figure 3-3

4. After copying the "city" layer, use the following "Gaussian Blur" to set the replication layer:

Figure 4-1
Copy this layer, merge them again, and then blend the merged layer mode to "darken." You will have the following effects:

Figure 4-2
5. Load the image into Photoshop "Material 2", drag onto our canvas, adjust the entire image and erase (large soft brush) pictures except all the images on the building. (Note that you can use the layer mask to implement this feature) the layer name is set to "top".
We again use black and white to adjust this layer, with the same settings as the previous layer: (Please make sure you set to RGB color mode)

Figure 5-1
The effect after setting:

Figure 5-2

6. Change the blending mode to "overlay", you can see the following effects:

Figure 6-1
To make the image dynamic and deep, we can duplicate the "top" layer several times, resizing and positioning to get the image shown below:

Figure 6-2
7. Load "Material 3" image to Photoshop. We drag the entire image onto our canvas again, but this time we don't resize it.

Figure 7-1
Erase the Sky section, the soft pen, and change the layer blending option "strong light".
So far, the effect is as follows:

Figure 7-2
Name this layer "little girl" and copy this layer once, set the duplicate layer blending mode "overlay", you will have the following effects:

Figure 7-3

8. Finally, we can add the effect of the glorious image so that it will not look a bit dull. To do this, create a new layer called "lighting effect", using a 40px-pixel lasso tool, at the top of the image (I chose a constituency that has a line with this girl's eye) to render clouds and lens halos:

Figure 8-1
Change the layer blending mode to color dodge and apply the following Gaussian blur settings:

Figure 8-2
You will have the following effects:

Figure 8-3
Copy the layers several times and drag them to the selection, and you'll get this effect:

Figure 8-4
Adjust the image tones to get this effect:

Figure 8-5
Black and white effect:

Figure 8-6
Of course you can also use some filter effects, or merge some background textures, it is entirely up to you:
I hope you like this tutorial, please give me a comment, if you have any questions, I will do my best to help you. Hope you have a nice day!