Posts Tagged "Photo Effects"

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,

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 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.