Imagine being in a hurry for finals, and don’t know what else to do for your projects, because time is essential. . Well we got you, like always. Create a landscape architecture site plan with this very short tutorial. Or if you have time, you can also take a look at this other site plan tutorial.
Look at how we took a site plan from Autocad to create this in Photoshop! Watch the video tutorial here.

1. Get Site Plan

1.1 From Autocad we exported our site plan. We exported two different files, one for the topographic lines and the other one for the buildings. Check that the files are in good size when exporting them.

1.2 Once you’ve exported the topography lines and the buildings to photoshop, you can increase the canvas size with the crop tool. Take a look at some Photoshop shortcuts here.

1.3 Standing on the buildings layer, with the bucket, paint them.

1.4 With both layers visible, erase the unwanted lines. You can use the marquee tool, or the lasso tool, whichever is your preference.
2. Texture

2.1 If you have a texture library on your computer, then use the grass texture to put it on top of the topography lines. We also have some cool sites that you can download textures from, read them here.

2.3 After you’re done putting the grass texture, you can combine all of them, and then mask it out to erase the unwanted areas. Use the clone tool to erase the visible seams in the grass texture.
3. Final adjustments

3.1 Drag the topography lines on top of the texture and press ctrl +I to make them white.

3.2 With a brightness and contrast adjustment layer, we started coloring the shadows in the site plan.

3.3 We created a new layer on top of the buildings layer, and we started creating some shadows. You can use the same method as the previous step, or you can also use the Drop shadow option to add them to the buildings.

3.4 Finally also using a brightness and contrast adjustment layer, paint some circles, this is to give the impression of trees.

We added a road, just to give a more realistic look to the site plan. Was it easy? Have you done something like this before? Look at the video tutorial on how to do this below!
Also, did you know that we have a premium course on Architectural Site Plan? If not, find more info to enroll here.