Photoshop Tutorials

It’s been a while since the last time that I made a chrome-like text effect so i though let’s do something with metal elements again, since this is an effect that will never go out of fashion. Let’s make a quick but very useful tutorial, using gradients that will allow you to easily create any metallic effect later.

make a new Canvas and fill it with a dark color, we used dark gray with a little light spot in the middle to outline the effect. We are using 600 x 500 cnvas (and this is the size of the psd you can download, just scroll all the way down).

Using  a curvy font and very big letters, type your word. We used the Harrington font with 260 pixels size, however in this particular effect, the biggest is your font, the better viewable is the result. Worry not about the color you are using at the moment for typing since we will overlay it with metallic gradients, which we designed specifically for this tutorial.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Blending Options and begin applying the effects…

Our Inner Shadow is pretty important so pay attention to the size and Quality.

We decided that default “Linear” curve doesn’t really outline the effect good enough, so we used a “half Round” curve. If you don’t have it pre-installed in your Photoshop, please use our mapping:

For outer glow, we use gradient from black (#000000) to white (#ffffff). The outer glow in this case creates an additional stroke around the text, which looks slightly rounded and with a mild gradient. Without these settings, your effect will not look complete and moreover look rather poor.

And, a Rolling Slope Contour, please note that we are using the “descending” path, otherwise we will have a totally different result..

A mild touch of inner glow, just to smooth out the shadows at the edges of the text..

Now we are getting to the hardest and most essential part of this tutorial — the gradient overlay.

For beginners, it could be a little difficult to copy these gradients, but I strongly recommend that you won’t give up and try to copy them as close as possible since they will allow you to add a nice metallic touch to any text or object later. Just don’t forget to save them as a new gradient, for future use!

For Stroke effect we also used a gradient of metallic shades, however, not only it will be a different gradient (not like the one we just set up for the inner filling), but also we will set the style to “Reflected”. This allows us to have the gradient mirror-repeated, without having to set too many shades.

What’s good about these layer style settings is that it will look good on ANY font size, for example here we zoomed in using a font of nearly 700 pixel and you see all the curves, shades and gradients so neatly….

Here is our result! I hope you enjoyed the tutorial and if you decide to download the psd, please remember to click “return to merchant’s website” after you complete the transaction, so that the download will start instantly. Also, please join our Facebook page and subscribe free for future updates!

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:

Next, add Layer Mask to the blurred image. Make sure your foreground color is BLACK, and using a round brush with soft edge (we used about 100 pixel brush), start painting over the canvas, removing the blur from the upper layer.

Just for better visualization, we removed blur from our J Lo and also from tiger’s face, so this is how (more or less) your blur application should eventually look:

While the upper layer (blurred) is still selected, go to Image >> Image Adjustments >> Levels. Select the RED channel and remove red shades as much as possible, we pretty much pushed it to zero.

Click on “Create new fill or adjustment layer” icon at the bottom of your layers panel

This one should be created on top of all the other layers:

Set the photo filter to RED to give the picture a very warm, slightly natural feel… Don’t use 100% density as it will look a bit overdone, we used 88% here but even 70%+ will do the trick in our case.

And, that is it, you are done! Here is your result, hope you enjoyed this ultra quick tutorial.

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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.

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…