: How to improve horizon on image? I'm making a scene in Photoshop which should look something like a field of grass and the sky. However I just can't make it work. Feels like there's something

@Michele215

My 2 cents...

1) Choose the right brush!

Google a bit "grass brush photoshop" www.google.com/search?q=grass+brush+photoshop
2) The right color. Unless it is radioactive grass, the color is too happy, and too uniform. The brush tries to vary it but by just turning the grass blacker not darker.

Real grass have some sutile colour changes, a bit yellower, a bit darker green.

Fix that and try to apply the perspective trick, but before that play more with the variation of size. You did it but you need to do that a bit more.

The hill appears to be hundreds of meters away or it is a hill just about 3 meters away.

One interesting free tool to have grass out of the box is this: www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/download/index.html

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@Steve758

To supplement John Manly's answer.

If you look at landscape photography you can see that distant objects become less distinct in both detail and color and something else interesting: due to the atmosphere they become bluer.

As a quick and dirty example I grabbed John's version and did three quick changes that, while exaggerated, do lend to appearance of depth and the overall realism of the image.




You'll notice that I blurred the image toward the horizon (too abruptly, I should have taken the time to cause the gradient to fall off more slowly at first).
I desaturated the grass, also on a gradient.
The hue has also been shifted in the blue direction on the same gradient as the desaturation.


Taking some time with these three steps, plus the application of the linear perspective, you should be able to get the effect of a really convincing depth.

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@Cugini998

I would start by adding some perspective to the grass, thats the main reason it looks flat, in my eyes.

I duplicated your grass layer 4x and then merged them into one. You created the grass with a bit of an angle to it, so I used that to my advantage and placed 2x facing one way and 2 the other, so they helped create a vanishing point.



After I merged the layers, I transformed them, using Perspective (⌘+T and then right-click to select Perspective).



And then create your perspective, by dragging the top points together



I thought the grass was a bit dark, so I added a gradient to the top of it



And then I added another gradient to darken the bottom of it



I almost forgot to include these steps I took earlier, I added two adjustment layers to your grass layer. One for levels and another to bring up the saturation a bit (increasing the brightness like I did in the levels has a tendency to desaturate images)





It's not perfect and I could definitely invest a lot more time working on the grass, but if you play around with some of these things it might help, especially the perspective

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