7.) Natural Looking Ground Plane Occlusion: My favorite way of creating convincing occlusion is to use a Curves Adjustment Layer in conjunction with a gradient mask. You can create a Curves Adjustment Layer from the bottom of layers palette. Name it occlusion and make sure it is on the top of the layer stack.
- Grab to top right handle and slide it down the right hand side to drop the white point of the affected areas. Click on the center of the curve line to create a new handle, and pull it toward the lower right corner to drop the midtones.
- Use the Gradient Tool to quickly draw a mask to define your occluded area.
- Set the curves adjustment layer's blend mode to Luminosity. I use curves adjustments for a lot of things, and setting it's blend mode to luminosity will keep it from affecting color and saturation shifts when you don't want it to.

8.) Stress Fracture: Time to paint some cracks around the window. Create a new blank layer ( ctrl+shift+n ) and rename it to cracks.
- Set the foreground color to 50% gray. Grab a hard edged brush and set it's size jitter to pen pressure, and make sure there is not opacity jitter. We want to create a completely solid gray line that varies in thickness. Paint a few natural looking cracks that come from the corners and sides of the window.
- Set the cracks layer's blend mode to overlay, and double click on it to add some layer styles.
- Add a Bevel and Emboss style. Make sure it's set to inner bevel, set the depth to 600%, size to 1, and the shadow mode to 100% opacity. Set the light to 90 Degrees and 30 for top down lighting.
- Add an Inner Shadow style. Set it's distance and size both to 0.
- Add an Outer Glow style. Set it's blend mode to Linear Dodge ( add ), it's opacity to 25%, color to white and size to 5.
- You can duplicate the cracks layer and overlay it on top of itself to get it to pop a little more. Adjust the top copy's opacity until proper depth is achieved.

9.) Staining: Open up drips.jpg and use the marquee tool to copy a drippy area. Paste the drips into your canvas.
-Name the layer drips and set it's blend mode to Linear Burn.
- Adjust the layer's levels ( ctrl+l ) to make the drip feel like it's staining the concrete.
- Lower the black point by setting the output levels to 128 and 255.
- Slide the input levels highlight handle to the left until the background starts to disappear, and only the drips are blending into the composite image.
- Continue to adjust all three input levels handles until desired blend is achieved.
- Adjust the hue of the stain by bringing up the hue / saturation adjustment ( ctrl+u ), and adjusting the hue and saturation sliders until desired color is achieved.
- Clean it up by adding a layer mask and painting it out to blend it nicely into the image composite

10.) Demolition: Time to break up that concrete and expose the brick! Open up brokenArea.jpg. Copy and paste it into your canvas and name the new layer brokenArea. Desaturate ( ctrl+shift+u ) the layer and place it about where you want the exposed brick to be. White areas will represent the concrete, and black will represent exposed brick. To help gets is position correct, you can drop the opacity of the layer, just remember to bring it back up after.

- Create a layer mask on the group ConAll_GRP.
- If you moved the brokenArea image layer so that there are transparent pixels visible, fill in them in with white. Select the entire canvas ( ctrl+a ), copy the brokenArea layer, alt+left click on the ConAll_GRP layer mask, and paste the image into the mask. Click anywhere else on the layer to see the rgb image composite again.
- History Tip: I like to keep this layer around until the texture is final, and the canvas is cropped to erase information outside of the canvas borders ( reduces file size ). After I paste the image into the layer mask, it will lose any image information that exists outside of the canvas border. So, if I find that later in the process i need to move it, I can go back to the original layer, move it, paste it back in and adjust.
- With the rgb composite visible in the canvas, select the layer mask, and adjust the input level sliders until the desired look is achieved.
- Clean up hard edges, and weird areas by painting or using the clone stamp tool inside the layer mask.