Indio's gang: process 1

Original piece: [link]

You can see I decided a background was needed very late in the process. WRONG! this is the kind of stuff you should have planned ahead, it makes it easier to stay consistent with light sources, etc. I had fooled myself into believing that a flat bg would have been enough. Thankfully I had saved the layer with the solid brown silhouette, so I just painted the background on a new layer over the characters, then selected the silhouette, switched back to the top layer, and cut it with CTRL+X. Voilà, the characters had appeared again - a bit rough at the edges but easily fixable. I also tampered a bit with adjustment layers so that the pic had a better contrast.

My first idea was to have them in some sort of porch, or covered patio, or something like that, while still showing a slice of typical spaghetti western landscape on the left. I gave up after a while because I couldn't make the light sources work. Besides one of the main goals I had with this composition was to have Indio's shirt as the only solid white spot, while if I wanted to be consistent with the background, the light should have hit much harder on the left side of the pic. I guess. Anyway, I erased the landscape and just put them against a wall. This way I could do with a more diffuse light.

And here I stopped saving layers/making caps because I just wanted to finish and the file had gotten too heavy for my poor CPU.