Featured Photoshop Tutorials

First thing you need to remember that every photo or digital artwork must have 1 point that catches the viewer’s attention. It can be (and mostly is) face or the eyes, but it can also be any other spot, that is the leitmotif of the canvas. When having too many points that catch the visitor’s attention, your artwork loses it’s charm and simply may lack the zest it would otherwise have with less accents on the canvas. So first thing you need to remember that in art, mostly, less is more.

Second thing to bear in mind is the depth of field. When you concentrate your look on a certain point, the rest becomes a little blurred in your vision, especially if the rest of the objects lay far behind. This is what we call — depth of field. In other words, human face cannot be just as sharp on the picture, as the background house that appears to be a few miles behind the figure. Although this isn’t always true and we have different variations of art (and sometimes the unusual is the best looking surreal concept!) but I am giving this little info so you will understand WHY we blur certain points and why we play with light the way we do, in this Photoshop Tutorial.

Ingredients:

http://dracoart-stock.deviantart.com/art/Asbury-Park-NJ-5-118481560

http://liam-stock.deviantart.com/art/Faballa-4-111550452

http://flordelys-stock.deviantart.com/art/sky-017-62717553

http://dracoart-stock.deviantart.com/art/Balloon-Festival-30-102183167

Get started.

We were working on a rather big canvas, we started with 1024px × 764px new layer as these were the dimensions of our base image. However you may feel more comfortable working with smaller or bigger images.

Take the image with fence and sand and paste it unto your Canvas:

Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, crop out and delete the sky and water upper half of the layer:

Don’t worry about the rough unnatural layer, we will work this out a bit later.

The next step is take the image with sky (from our ingredients list), and paste it on top of the  previous layer with sand. Using Eraser Tool with a small soft brush, remove the lower part so that you will have an image consisting from sky and sand, just as you see below:

The way our image looks now, it’s very far yet from been an organically blended scene, so let’s start blending the layers into one another.

To make the sand less cheery, the easiest way is to simply match colors with the clouds, so this is exactly what we are going to do. While the sand layer is selected, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Color and apply the following settings:

if you have already unselected, select the layer with sand again, and go to Curves. Using the RGB channel, darken the image by dragging the curve down somewhere in the middle. We used Output: 113 and Input:143.

Today we are going to make a tutorial on frosty text effect. While it’s still cold and wintry outside, I thought it would be high time to supply some more wintry text effects for our readers.

So, begin with making  a new canvas of any desired size, and for now please use plain white (#ffffff) background. Later on we will add a custom texture or picture to the background, but for now, it will be much easier for your to work and see all the effects against the white canvas.

Select the typing tool and using Arial Rounded MT Bold font, set to “sharp”, use very big letters, say over 100. For the purpose of the tutorial we used 115, however if you choose to download out PSD, you will see that our original canvas consists from letters with font size 195.

Type your word.

The main part of this Photoshop tutorial consists from precise application of the layer styles as we are going to work with custom designed curved, textures (default) and a lot of other features. Let’s begin and please try to follow us throughout the tutorial if you wish to achieve the same result.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles, and start off with “Drop Shadow” options. Apply the settings as you see below. For the shadow here we used a very dark blue, almost black color: #003059. However, feel free to chose a different hue if you are going to work with a light background canvas afterward.

Switch the tab to Inner Shadow. For Inner shadow we used a gray-blue color #0a7eaf, which will nicely complement the overall wintry feel of this text. Please pay attention to the fact that we are using “Noise” here at 3%, to add to the grainy / snowy effect.

Switch to Outer Glow and apply a very dark outer glow effect, we used #0a1732 with 35% which gave us light yet dark outlined shade.

Working our way down (in Photoshop..), to Inner Glow settings. This one gives our text effect the feeling of light and reflection, yet this is not going to be a direct spotlight, rather a cold reflection as you are used to seeing when looking on ice. Also here please note that we have applied a 17%, very visible noise.

Add Bevel and Emboss settings for extremely curved effect.

I really like the rainbows and compositions combined from flowers and beautiful women, so today we will be making a composition titled “Welcome to Thailand”. We will make a combination based on 3 simple photos, work with Curves, Brushes, Layer Styles and Blending options. This tutorial is suitable for beginners as well as advanced users and if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and ask, I will be happy to help you out, if I can.

We will be making this (full view)

Ingredients:

Step 1:

As always the first step for creating a composition is cropping out the main characters, so using the magnetic marquee Tool or Pen Tool (whichever you find more useful), crop the lady out…

if you are using CS3 + version of Photoshop, it will be much easier for you to follow our today’s tutorial as a lot of features we are working with are simply unavailable in previous versions of Photoshop. One of them is the “Refine Edge” facility. Once the selection is loaded, go to refine Edges and add apply the following settings. Please note that setting vary depending on the selection you have made, let alone photo you are working with. if you used Magnetic Marquee Tool for cropping, use the same settings as we have here:

Step 2:

Next step is go to Levels by pressing Ctrl + L and apply these settings. Our purpose is to make the image a little more professional looking by adding light since the original image is extremely dark and pixelated. We will refine our photo by working with Curves and Levels, but lets start with levels, to get an overall lighter hue:

Step 3:

Next, go to Curves and using the RGB channel, lighten the image up, just the way you see on the illustration below:

Step 4:

Right now it looks far more professional, less dark and more vivid, almost like a real studio shot. it’s time to take the second image from our stock for this tutorial, the sky shot, and place it on your canvas, just below the cropped lady image.

Step 5:

Also, crop the orchids just the same way as you did with the lady and place the flower on your canvas.

Duplicate the cropped orchid’s layer and place a few of them around the lady. We placed one on the front and the other behind her, so create the illusion as if she is surrounded by these gigantic flowers.

I get a lot of emails from beginners who want to learn the advanced tutorials that involve glow and sparkles effects, yet they are not very familiar with the pen tool and other tools that require a little bit of experience and knowledge, even if these tools seem basic to most of you. So, I decided to put up a tutorial that will allow beginners who are not yet familiar with Photoshop, to get started, make sparkles, glow and twirls without mastering the pen tools skills any deeper.

We will be making this tutorial, which will only be constructed from 3 images, 1 shape and a lot of basic Photoshop commands that will allow us to make a really cool composition… or shall I say — “hot”..? Please feel free to leave a comment or submit your result to our Flickr group.

Let’s get started. Photos used (All licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use):

Step 1:

Crop the girl out of the image; it does not really matter hat method you use to chop the edges and background away, as long as you have the edges defined. We are not going to get into great details here as cropping is an ultra basic technique, all I’d say is that I used the Magnetic Lasso Tool to roughly extract the lady from the background. Don’t worry about the rough edges if you have any, we will be using a lot of filters so any mishaps will disappear later on.

Step 2:

Place the lady over the winter landscape and desize, according to your needs. We scaled the image down to about 60% and placed it in the middle of the canvas.

Step 3

Now we need to make the girl’s image look like it’s blending in organically,  and the easiest way to do so is to add a shadow that falls on the snow. Select the woman’s layer, and once you made the selection, create a New Layer underneath the girl’s image layer, and fill that selection with solid black color #000000.

Step 4

Now we are going to transform the selection, while the layer is still selected, press Ctrl + T and lay the shadow down, just the way you see in the illustration. Make sure that the shadow begins from lady’s legs, because when you start transforming, the shadow will move from under her legs and the only way to fix this is by dragging the bottom corners and adjusting them to “fit” to the main object.

After having made the Moon Eclipse for DeviantArt, I was asked to write this tutorial for a several times and I decided to give in and disclose the secret – how do I make the “sinking moon” effect. I tried to re-create that picture, yet naturally it did not turn to be identical… Hope you will not discover that it was disappointingly simple. Nonetheless, I must say that this tut is for more advanced users… anyway, today we will be making this masterpiece:

So lets get started.
You will need two waterscapes. I used this one for the the shore edge:

and this one for the primarily background image:

The image above is watermarked, if you wish to download the full resolution image, please go HERE

Next, select and copy the first picture, and paste it unto the canvas of the second one. Erase most of it, leaving only the shore’s edges, and set the opacity of this second layer to 89%.

Making the moon:
Make a new layer. Select the brush tool, #FFFFFF color, 135 px size, and apply one stamp in te middle of your canvas.

Select the eraser tool with sharp edge, and “cut” with eraser’s tool side, most of the circle, as shown on the picture below.

Now that your moon has just started to develop a shape, using the rectangular marquee tool, select the bottom of the moon and cut it, just like we did here:

Fantasy Art for beginners – mysterious moonlit night written by Lorelei and moved over from www.loreleiweb.com for technical reasons.

Believe it or not, but from a few ordinary photos and some primitive brushes, we will make this image (see below). OK, despite the rather impressive outcome, this is a very simple tutorial, you wont need more than a few brushes and a few pictures. Most of it is a mater of technique.

Start by creating a new canvas, 500*500 pixels, and fill it with dark blue colour, we used #060062.

Next, you need a beautiful, and preferably mysterious photo of a woman, this is what we started off with:

Copy the girl to your clipboard (Ctrl + C) and paste it (Ctrl + V) unto the blue canvas

Select the “Single Column Marquee tool” place the selection line on the edges of the picture, Press Ctrl + T to draw a line, and repeat the action from the other side as well. This is what this action will give you…

Duplicate the woman’s picture, and set BOTH layers to “Luminosity” blending option. This will turn both layers blue, as we have a blue background.
While the upper (duplicated) layer is selected, apply the Gaussian blur on it.

Select the eraser tool with a soft edge, and go over the girl’s silhouette, erasing the blurred layer from over the woman’s body. This is how it will look, but work your way with the eraser over her skirt as well.

After having finished to erase the blur over her body, this is what it will look like: