Creating realistic cloud effect in Photoshop  

After following the next tutorial, you will know how to create realistic clouds. Photoshop has a filter you can use to create clouds, the cloud filter. This tool can be useful if you want to generate few fuzzy looking clouds. If you want to create clouds which look very realistic, you have to go deeper. You will still use the cloud filter in this tutorial, but only to create a cloud brush.

In the first phase you will create the clouds brush that you will use to paint the clouds. Create a new document: go to the File menu on top of the main Photoshop window and select the “New” option. From the dialog box that will appear select “640 * 480” and click “OK”.

You now need to set the foreground color to black and the background color to white by pressing the D key. Now go to the main Photoshop menu and select Filter > Render > Clouds. Select the “lasso tool” (which you will find in the Tool bar) and make an egg-shaped selection. Make sure that the areas you select with the lasso tool is not all grey, but also include both lighter and darker areas. The size of the selection should be around 1/3 of the document’s height.

Chose from the Photoshop main menu “Select” > “Feather” . From the “Feather" Dialog box chose a “Radius” value of 10 and click “OK” to soften the edge of the area you are going to copy.

Copy your selection (Ctrl+C) to the clipboard. Next create a new layer (click on the “Create a new layer” icon which you will see in the layers palette) and paste (Ctrl+V) the content of your clipboard to the new layer. Click on the eye icon which you will find in front of the layer to make the “Background” layer invisible.