Placing the Foliage Around the Front of the House

Once the house image has been rendered, place it into photoshop (and mix the AO, reflection, refraction layers together in my Photoshop scene, I collapsed them after I was done so that all the layers wouldn't get in the way). Find a transparent image of shrubs online and then place them along the wall at the front of the house as seen in the image below. Use the distort transformation tool to match the perspective of the image.

Use the curves to try and match the lighting of the scene.

Also use the greyscale to help adjust the brightness as well.

To create the shadows, simply duplicate the layer, flip it vertically then hold alt, shit and then press delete to make which will make the layer black (make sure the current colour is black). Then change the layer mode to soft light so that the layer will become transparent like a shadow and use the distort transformation tool to make the shadow look like its being cast by the lighting.