Posts by Lorelei

Sometimes you are probably familiar with this feeling, you are looking at a beautiful photo and you just know that a PRO took it. It just… looks professional. You can’t explain it, but you feel it and you see it. While it takes enormous efforts and endless practice until professional photos are coming out of your memory card in camera, when it comes to Photoshop, most of the fixes and professional effects can be applied rather quickly and easily. Today we will explain just one of the many effects that adds:

• Depth of field
• Sepia tone
• Sepia mild noise

We decided to take a photo that doesn’t look professional in the first place, but has a huge potential, for example this photo from one of the Lady Gaga’s gigs, kindly provided by Stephen Charlile.

Step 1.

Using the Magnetic Marquee Tool, create a selection all around the main figure..

Once the selection has been loaded, Inverse the Selection (Shift + Ctrl + I). Next, if you leave the selection as it is, you will have very rough and pixelated edges. So avoid that, we will click on the button that says “Refine Edges”. If you are using an old version of Photoshop — you simply won’t have that option, but I do have it in CS2 and can tell you that in some way you can replace it with the “Feather” option that was available in old Photoshop versions but it won’t really be the same as you will have a blurry edge around the selection.

Step 2.

If you have the luxurious “refine edges” function, smooth the selection out a little and add a very mild feather effect…

Step 3.

go to Filter >> Blur >> Lens Blur and apply the default settings. We are using Lens Blur and not Gaussian Blue as Lens Blur is much closer to the original blur you are getting, when the field is out of camera’s focus.

Step 4.

Remember, we are still working with the background, so with your selection still active,

This tutorial is mostly based on Layer style settings and a combination of a lot of Curves. When combined together, they give a rich, deep and glossy / beveled look to the text.

Let’s get started, create a new canvas, we used 600*500 size and filled it with very dark blue-gray color: #2d3134. We also made a little spot in the middle, to highlight the future effect.

Using Arial Rounded MT Bold font, type your word.

Since we are going to create a “liquid” metal effect, we want the letter to organically stick to each other and create the illusion of liquid material filling them, so for this purpose we seen to set the tracking for the selected characters to -40. If you are using very big font or simply another font where characters are placed more far apart, you will need to set this setting to -100 or maybe even more. Just look and see what seems to be the best option for your font.

No the most important part begins, go to layer styles palette (Layer >> Layer Styles >> Blending Options) and start applying the following values to each Option you have on the left column…

Begin with dropping the shadow. We wanted to have a relatively sharp shadow, so we set the size to 3, however if you wish to have it more blurred, chose settings of 15pixels or bigger.

For the shadow’s quality, we made a custom Contour, please see the mapping below:

Proceed to Inner Shadow…

here we used Ring – Double Contour settings for the Quality, if you don’t have these contours in your Photoshop, please see our mapping:

Inner Glow is also important, the more opacity  you are going to add, the paler your text will end up being so we decided to set it to 57%, I could have reduced it to even less but then it would be hardly visible. All depends on the initial color you are working with.

Use the following Photoshop Contour for Inner Glow settings:

Lately, after the success of my previous Photoshop Tutorial “Fallen Angel’s Dream Fly“, I got an interesting email from a girl saying that she admires my art and style, but she wish the tutorials were actually a lot more simple, with less steps and complication, a quick an interesting photo effect that a newbie can do in under 10 minutes. When I thought about it, it actually makes sense because not everyone has access to a huge database of stock photos, not everyone has hours of free time to spend with computer (and Photoshop) and not everyone eventually can follow all the complex steps, so I decided that we will be making tutorials from now on for 1. complete newbies and 2. for advanced users. here is is one for newbies, you can do this effect in about 10 minutes and use your own photo! This is probably the simplest tutorial ever. You will learn to use channel mixer settings and turn a regular photo to a pop art.

What is actually a “pop art”? classical pop art stuff were made based on a photo, where the curves and the contrast were distort so much, so that the picture turned to just black and white (or other opposite colors), with very distorted curves. Classical pop art pictures, the first ones, came in green-red colors scheme, which is what we will do today, using nothing but red channel mixer.

So, getting started, take a picture…

Go to Image >> Adjustment >> Channel Mixer.

You will be working with red channel only, to get the green-red picture. Set the following settings:

Here is your result so far, negative-like picture, only in a different colors scheme then usual:

Next we are going to duplicate the layer and while the second layer is selected, go to Filter >>  Blur >> Lens Blur. lens blur is somehow better than Gaussian blur as it looks more realistic when applied to the image, creating depth of field. Use the following settings:

I made this tutorial over a year ago, but for some reason never got to publish it and now with the major revamp of loreleiwebdesign.com I decided it’s high time to get back to this effect. I know this is maybe a bit old but since it has never been published before I do hope you will find this to be useful. We are going to design a dark, surrealistic and maybe also unrealistic “Forest Tale” scene in Photoshop. This tutorial was made in CS2 so anyone who uses an old version of Adobe — don’t worry, this tutorial will work for you, moreover we don’t have that many complex effects here that would require a higher version.

You will need a few stock photos for this tutorial:

http://darkrose42-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stormy-sea-55513661

http://liam-stock.deviantart.com/

Take the layer with the forest scene and the water scape (you can use practically any image you like. Since this tutorial was made over a year ago, I can’t recall anymore who’s images has been used so if you have an idea, please do let me know. The woman’s image however is taken from Liam Stock at Deviantart.com

So, we take the waterscape and apply it unto the forest image. Set the opacity of water to semi transparent,  so that you will be able to see the trees, and using the eraser tool remove water from the trees..

In a way that will allow you to see the trees standing in the water itself.

While the layer with the trees is selected, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Color and match the color of water scape with the forest, this way you will get an organically blended colors scheme to start with.

This is what you should see on your screen after following the previous 2 steps. The key to success here is to use a small eraser tool with soft edge, when removing bits and pieces of water from the layer. if you did it right, you should see a real flood on your forest canvas.

Nest, crop the girl’s image and place it unto the screen. We are considering the cropping technique to be rather basic and therefore won’t go step by step explaining how to do that. Roughly speaking, use Magnetic Lasso Tool or a Pen Tool with magnetic option, whoever works for you will be fine as long as the image is somewhat cropped.

Get back to the water image and using the Burn Tool, burn the edges of water layer just near the trees, to create an illusion of the trees really standing inside the water, and if they did, the area at the bottom would have been slightly darker.

Now we are going to match the color again, this time for our female figure, and we will match colors between her and the water scape, since its’ lighter and will not effect the overall color of her layer. Set “fade” to about 7 or so, if you overdo it, you will have an extremely bluish layer, so not only it will look monotone and not very organic, it also not going to be beautiful.

here is how it’s supposed to look with the layer of teh gild been matched to the color of the water:

Just like with the trees, we want to make her look as if she is standing (or even drowning) in the water. The best way to do that is take an Eraser tool and remove a part of her skirt, let us say about 1/3 and when you do that, make sure you don’t just cut a straight horizontal line, it has to be curved around her body to complement the illusion of her actually standing inside the water.

Get back to the Burn tool, and using a soft brush with parameters as below…

T

Linked checked January 2010.