Before I continue, keep in mind this is just fan-art and nothing to do with professional artwork for "Battlefield" games. This is just a little write up for people that are just starting at Photoshop or have minimal experience with it (or just curious how Battlefield poster is being made). This is just a quick visual guide, not instructions on how it supposed to be done. You're more than encouraged to experiment and create your own self-made Battlefield key art for your videos or projects. Experiment, go wild. For this presentation, I picked quite an easy project (one main soldier, random background), so I will do my best to explain the process.
VISUAL GUIDE HOW TO MAKE BATTLEFIELD POSTER
1. First you need to find a good quality picture of a soldier you want to put on your poster. Go online and find some screenshots or go make your own by going into Spectator mode in any Battlefield game that offers that feature. When you got your screenshot, remove the background as we will be replacing it anyway.
2. Let's give that soldier some background that works with the pose
3. Battlefield posters usually follow "blue background and orange/red highlights" rule, so when you have the chance of experiment with your background (like the aurora in the background), use it to your advantage. So we gonna change the background color to be more blueish and the aurora to be more orange and red, giving that nice effect of orange highlights that Battlefield is famous for.
4. Of course it's up to you how light you want your poster, but I prefer adding some shadows on the edges of the picture, just to make our main soldier as the focus of the picture. Again, it's up to your personal taste on how dark/lit you want your poster.
5. Now let's continue with the "blue/orange" rule that Battlefield is famous for with their posters. Copy the soldier layer in Photoshop and paste it on top of it, so we should have the two soldier active layers. Go on on that top layer and colorise it with a blue color that matches the background. Go blue as possible. Then we have our blue soldier, lower the opacity of that layer to 50% (what looks best for you) and two layers should be mixing together on your screen, being all blue, but still keeping the original colors and detail of the original soldier screenshot.
6. Add more shadows onto the soldier depending on the pose you have, depending on the imaginary light source in the background
7. Let's finally add that famous "orange fire" on the soldier that Battlefield soldiers are famous for. It's up to you how you want to do it, but I usually just create another layer, paint it with solid orange/red color, while the edges of that layer are colored yellow, just to give that a nice color balance of an actual fire. Then I blur it as much I possibly can, while making it blend with the soldier and keep the original colors of my layer. You can increase the contract a bit more to add more vibrant fire colors. After you got your colors, usually lowering the opacity would do the trick (50-80%), but play around with Layer blending settings (default option is Normal) and see what works for you best.
8. Let's continue by adding an extended orange lens flare. You either can make your own or find something online, as majority of the time, it's just lens flare (or some custom made transparent orange outline) with a bit of lowered opacity, recolored for poster purposes. I recommend finding something online and finding what kind of lens flare works for your poster. I mentioned before that you should always experiment with the background that makes sense for the soldier pose, and as the picture below shows, adding an orange lens flare on top of the soldier makes it look like it's an extension of the aurora, which gives a quite interesting look behind and in front of the main soldier.
9. Let's add a bit more detail to the lens flare, by adding more different lens flares or copy pasting, while experimenting with different sizes and shapes of the layers (lens flare layer).
10. Not that important, but I recommend adding shadows on the bottom of the screen to hide the fact that the soldier is not actually standing on some sort of surface in our replaced background. You can tell background is replaced and fake, so the least we can do is to do some hiding and bring more visual focus on the soldier itself.
11. Feels a bit empty in the background? Add anything in the background that makes sense. In our case, we have a snowy hill, lake/river and a mountain in the background. We can't really add a vehicles, unless some soldiers running in the background. But we can add some planes though. It's all up to you and how creative you want to be.
12. Technically we have our poster ready and done, but I love to go a bit extra with my posters. Because this poster was made for "Battlefield V" (2018), I decided to add a nice V logo behind the soldier, with a bit of transparency, which gives even more focus towards our main soldier.
13. Congratulations, you made a fan-made Battlefield poster. You can slap the game logo on top if you feel like it.
Now go wild and create something amazing
Hopefully you find this interesting and helpful in some way or form. If anything, you can contact me about any of this (go to contact tab on this website) and hopefully I can help. Check out some more posters below for references or inspiration.