Posts Tagged "glow"

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:

This tutorial was originally published on loreleiweb.com and moved for technical reasons. After the huge success of the previous two fantasy art tutorials, i wanted to do something like that again, but different… hope you will like this one, feedback is as usually appreciated!

So, today we will make this:

Start off by making a new canvas, 500*500 pixels. The color is irrelevant as we will overlay it with a photo later.

Fish out a photo of clouds from somewhere. I used some free stock on DA, but since YOU will probably make a picture for private use, you can use almost any photo u find.

We are still gathering material. Next step is to find a nice girl we will turn to a fairy… As always I used liam-stock.deviantart.com but again, this is up to you, you may use your own photo just as well.

Select the clouds photo and paste it unto your 500*500 canvas. Then, crop the girl carefully, and paste it unto your canvas either, above the clouds, more or less in the center.

Make a new layer. Using a white color and a Brush Tool with a radius of about 250 px, make a “stamp” above the girl.

Now, just like we did in the Moon Eclipse Tutorial, using the eraser tool of almost the same size, cut most of the stamp you made, in order to leave a small, “young” moon.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Outer Glow, and add White Glow to your moon. See illustration HERE.

This is what you got so far…

Select the Clouds layer and go to Filter >> Renders >> Lightening Effect. Apply this lightening effect exactly on the place where you have your moon.

The trend to add glowing lines and stars seized the web design scene already a few years ago, but not as much as it is popular now. Now we can recognize the “glow” effect in many ways — digital art, HDR photography,  and many other ways, including, of course, web design graphics. During our life, we take hundreds of shots, most of which are rather dull and unappealing, we are used to the fact that photos, by default, never turn to be truly amazing, if they are taken spontaneously with non-professional camera and even those of us who are equipped with a pro-camera, are not always able to capture a breathless moment. Therefore, each time we see an image with beautiful glow effects, juicy and vibrant colors, great contrast and incredible use of proportion, what do we say? “WOW!”. Today I gathered a few photos for your inspiration, which will make you say “wow” and inspire you to aspire for taking better, vivid photos yourself! Here are a few examples of wise, neat and beautiful use of Glow effects..

Mild Glow Practice In Photography

Waianapanapa Sands – Maui photography

Purple Euphoria photography

If at first you don’t succeed…

August 18th 2008 – Inspiration pt2 photography

Summer Night City… At Home

Exaggerated Glow Practice in (HDR) Photography