4.) Laying Brick: Let's move on from the concrete and make the brick that will be revealed underneath it. Minimize the con_GRP group and create a new group called Brick_GRP for the brick layers. Open up brickWall.jpg and paste it into the canvas. Uniformly scale it so that it is slightly taller than the height of the canvas. Rename the layer to brick.
- Notice that the mortar lines toward the bottom start to go off at an angle. To straighten the wall out, go to Edit>Transform>Skew and move the bottom left handle up slightly until the wall is straight.

- Adjustable Layer Sharpening: The brick texture will need to be sharpened, but it's unclear how much at this point. We don't want it to be too sharp and stand out above the concrete layer later on, so we will make and adjustable sharpening layer. Duplicate the brick layer and name it brickSharp. With the brickSharp layer selected, run Filter>Other>High Pass. Set the radius to 1.0 and click OK. Set the layer's blend mode to linear light, and it's opacity to 50% for now.

- The brick layer has a very yellow color cast to it. To color correct it a little let's create another Photo Filter set to Cooling Filter (82). Yea, this is one of my favorite filters! Adjust the photo filter layer's opacity until the mortar looks like a nice neutral gray. I chose 75%.
- To punch the red up a little bit, create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer from the layers palette. Choose Reds from the Color Drop down menu, set the Cyan Amount to -40%, Magenta Amount to +15%, and Yellow Amount to +20%. You should end up with an image similar to the one below.

5.) Chip Away the Concrete: This first pass at chipping away the concrete will be a light general wear pass. We will really break it up in a few steps. Minimize the Brick_GRP group and open up the concreteMask.jpg. Paste it into your canvas and place it above your Con_GRP. This is going to become a layer mask that we will assign to the entire Con_GRP group.
- Move and scale the layer in place. Duplicate it. Name the top copy mask, and the bottom copy height. We are going to need two copies of this texture, each for different effects. I also like to perform destructive tasks on copies of layers so that I have a backup of the original, can execute a task a few different ways, and finally compare different results.
- Desarurate ( ctrl+shift+u ) the mask copy and invert ( ctrl+i ).
- Adjust the mask levels ( ctrl+l ) to suite. White will represent concrete areas and black will be brick areas. I chose to remap the input values to 0, 0.5, 110. I wanted to stay on the light side, and show a few hints of the brick below here and there.
- With the mask layer selected, press ctrl+a to select the entire canvas, and copy the mask layer.
- Select the Con_GRP group and go to Layer>Add Layer Mask> Reveal All. Alt+Left Click the new layer mask to view it, and paste the mask copy inside. Left Click anywhere else on the layer to return to your rgb image view.
- You can Shift+Left Click to enable and disable the layer mask to analyze it's affects.

- For a little extra kick, let's go back to that height layer. Place it outside and on top of Con_GRP. Desaturate and invert this layer as well.
- We want to adjust this layer's levels too, but this time start off by clamping it's white point. We are going to be overlaying this on top of the image composite for added contrast and detail to seperate the layers of concrete and brick. Set the new white point to 200, and raise the midtones. We don't want to the effect to be too crazy so I targeted values near 50% gray.
- Set the layer's blend mode to overlay. I also dropped it's opacity to 75%.
_ Give it a little extra punch by running Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen on it. Use an amount of 150% and a radius of 0.3. Another favorite filter!
- Keep everything nice and neat by deleting the mask layer, shift selecting the Con_GRP and the height layer and grouping ( ctrl+g ) them together. Name the group ConAll_GRP.

- Room With a View: Time to add a window. This one is pretty straight forward. It's just a straight up linear alpha blend ontop of the concrete.
- Open up windowOrnate.jpg, and use the marquee tool ( m ) to swipe an area about 20% larger than the window itself. There are lots of little natural cracks and details outside the immediate window area that we want to keep in order to help make our texture composite look natural. Copy the selected area and paste it into your canvas. Name it window, and scale and place appropriately.

- Sharpening: If you downsampled like I did, ( and even if you didn't ) you probably want to sharpen it up and recover some of that detail. I find that for broad areas and bold shapes, Unsharp Mask works better than Smart Sharpen. Smart Sharpen works really well on tight detailed textures like concrete and grass, it is also a mandatory step ( for me anyway ) toward preparing low resolution images for the web. Next time you go to save a photo under 800 pixels, try a little of that Smart Sharpen @ 150 and 0.3. Thanks to Ken Rockwell for that one!
- Select the window layer, and run Filter>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask @ 150 and 0.3. Try both sharpening techniques and compare them. The difference is subtle, but it's there.

- Painting in Layer Masks: Create a Reveal All Layer Mask for the window layer. Set the foreground color to black, make sure the mask is selected and start painting away the areas you don't want to see. I always use this approach over erasing for it's editability. I also generally prefer to not spend time making custom brushes. I prefer to just paint and play with the existing ones that have worked great for me so far. In fact, open up any of my source files and you are sure to find some leaves in there! These two brushes below along with a soft edge brush is usually all i ever need. Once layers are blended, you'll never be able to tell they were there!

- Exposure adjustment: The window seems slightly underexposed to me in this environment. After you have your mask painted, you can expose the photograph of the window a little more. Simply duplicate the window layer on top of itself and set the top copy's blend mode to screen. Set it's opacity to about 25%.
- Keep everything neat and clean by shift selecting both window layers and group them inside of a window_GRP.