The Underwater Corroded Look

I will attempt to show you how I gave the school bus a corroded look in this entry:

Step 1.

Download these 3 high res sources:

School bus
Texture
Sea Bed

Step 2.

Open this image in Photoshop:

Step 3.

Add this texture source as a new layer:

Step 4.

Adjust the hue / saturation to give it an underwater feel like so:

Step 5.

Mask the layer so it only shows the texture on the paint part of the bus. You can do this very quickly by going to select / color range / then pick the yellow color using the eye dropper, make sure you are on the texture layer before you do this then once you click ok it will select the yellow paint areas. Then click MASK. You should end up with something like this:

Step 6.

Now duplicate the texture layer (keep the mask) and darken it using levels like so:

Step 7.

Invert the mask, but also cut/mask round the bus, with the first texture layer switched off it should look like this:

With both texture layers showing you should have something like this (below), however I also reduced the opacity of the 2nd (darker) texture to 75% The blending modes of both texture layers is "normal"

Step 8.

Now add a new layer and fill with this solid colour:

Step 9.

Change the blending mode of this layer to color and reduce the opacity to 45% and you should get this:

Step 10.

At this point I got rid of the background, you may wish to do this earlier on, I also added a new layer under the texture layers and painted some areas in solid black inside the bus like so:

Although this is just the start hopefully this should indicate the power of a good texture source, I used the same source and techniques to do the sign aswell.

I think I applied a subtle soft blur to the overall image too to give it more of an underwater feel and also masked out some of the bus towards the end against my background so it appeared like it is fading into the distance.