Whenever you see a catastrophe image which was made by a developer you wonder how did he made this image, right ? Now you needn’t wonder about it, as now you can also develop a image similar to that, that is making a catastrophe image from a normal image. The final image looks like the image took from a war zone. This is the tutorial which teaches you the same. Also, this tutorial works fine with adobe Photoshop CS4 and the newer versions. :)

Change an image into catastrophe image

  1. I’m taking the below image as my initial image and then it gets transformed into the final image, as shown above.

  2. Open the cloud image (not from the source image, search it on web) via photoshop and then convert it into black and white, you can do it by going to menu bar and then search for image option and then Adjustments and then you select black and white option. If you don’t have black and white tool you can download it free from internet. You can see the image as follows,

  3. Now paste the black and white image of cloud in the source image and duplicate the layer, you can duplicate layer option in the edit option in menu bar. Duplicate layer is for back up, as shown in the below image.

  4. Now delete we have to delete the sky from the image, as in a catastrophe image the sky is not in blue color, select the sky using selection tool and delete it, and then move the cloud layer below the background copy layer.

  5. Now you have to clone out, that is vanish some object from the image so that it looks more furnished. You can do it using Clone Stamp tool. You have select the pattern which you have to make transparent/vanish from the image. See the below image how does the image transform when you use Clone Stamp tool,

  6. To make the process more clear without ambiguity please rename the layer Background Copy to original, or whatever name is convenient to you, and rename clouds to Clouds to follow some pattern in naming. Now, duplicate the Clouds layer, you can do t by pressing Ctrl+T or by going to edit and then selecting free transformation and try to fill the frame as shown in the below image using lighting and blending options,

  7. Now create another duplicate layer of the cloud layer and move it to the top of the layers in the palette and rotate the layer by 180 degrees (you can do it by pressing Ctrl+I or by going to menu bar and then images and then adjustments and then select invert option), so that we can put cloud pattern in at the bottom of the image, and increase the scale to 250 or 200, depending upon your requirement and then set the opacity to 65% for this layer. The image after this step looks as shown below,

  8. Now convert the original layer into black and white, you can do it via black and white tool or Hue/Saturation or Channel Mixer. You can see these tools in the image option in the menu bar when you select adjustments.

  9. Now, we will crack the window in the image in the original layer. Mask the layer as shown in the below image,

  10. Now open the image of fire and paste it into the original layer and position it such that it looks that the fire is coming out of the broken window. You can use any fire image, I downloaded from internet and used it. And then convert the fire image also in black and white using one of the tools specified earlier. The image after this step looks as shown in the below image,

  11. Now, open Polygonal Lasso tool to create the selection of the window so that it looks the fire is coming out of the window. Select the image as shown in the below image and delete it. And then select the original layer and select blending mode to difference and then when you are done with the adjustments change it back to normal, as shown in the below image.

  12. Now use Smudge Tool to create hazardous effect and do it on any number of windows you want to show in your image. The image after this step looks as the below image,

  13. Now select the original layer and using Lasso tool create the image or figure you want to make to show the cracks on the wall, you can draw any random polygon. And then enable Bevel and Emboss style options in the layer style, so the image looks more real. The image looks something as shown in the belwo image after this step,

  14. Duplicate the layer clouds and name the duplicated layer as smoke and put this layer above the fire layer and make the adjustments so that the smoke looks real by increasing the intensity of black and white clouds.

  15. Now select some portions of the image and distort them, as shown in the below image,

  16. You can add more effects on the image by cut and paste from various images, as I did by placing mountains as the background of the image and adding some monuments around it, as shown in the below image,

  17. Now finally use the burn tool to give your image more intensity and make it more real, as shown in the below image.

And then after making the changes you could see that the original image looks like a image taken from any place where catastrophe happened or from any war zone. The final image after all the changes made in the original image looks as shown in the below image,

Just play around with the tools and add some more layers like army men, weapons, etc to learn more and to be much more creative and have more fun.. :)