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, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels and make the background darker suing the RBG channel. This trick instantly makes the main figure standout so we focus directly on a sharp, perfectly lit object, rather than on the blurred background. This trick will also work good when you want to make someone stand out in a photo that was taken against a very vivid background that “swallows” viewer’s attention.

Finally, when you are done that, you can press Ctrl + D, to leave the selection behind.

Step 5.

Find the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” icon in Photoshop Layers Palette, click it and chose the “Black and White” option. We are going to make this photo black and white but this won’t be the ordinary black and white photo where we simply cut the colors out and make the image grayscale. We will use this smart filter to adjust each color individually.

For example, The skin consists from red and yellow tones, so by making these tons darker, your black and white photo will look as if you (or anyone you are working with on your picture) was very much tanned. You need to play it it for a while in order to really dig all the possibilities that this filter allows you, but for now, you can follow me and copy the settings..

Note that we added a mild beige Tint. Leave this option out if you want simple black and white photo, however I recommend to add the sepia effect for more professional touch.

Step 6.

While the Black & White Layer is still selected, go to Filter >> Noise >>Add Noise and… add noise! Don’t be stingy, in order to be visible, we need to add quite a lot of this noise, even though the opacity of the BW layer is set to 100%.

See how you are doing so far?

Step 7.

After you done with the BW layer and noise, find the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” icon again and click it, this time select the Curves option. make our image even darker, but not using the default Linear curve, make it a bit more rounded.

Done.

That’s it, here is your result! Hope you enjoyed this tutorial and when you try this tutorial out, try using even the most ordinary photos taken in your backyard, and you will see that the results will be impressive. Good Luck!

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.

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.

This will give our image a nice tone. The next step is — select the sky layer and go to Curves again, create a small point at the bottom and drag the RGB channel’s curve down, to make the sky dramatically darker.

Yet we got a much better toned canvas but still it is very well visible that the image consists from 2 different pieces, even if these pieces match way better in color than before.

We will be using a very old trick to merge the horizon lines of both layers. Simply create a new layer and using a big, soft brush (we are working with Brush Tool, in case I didn’t make myself clear), chose a black color and paste over the horizon line including the sand area outside the fence.

After you have brushes over that area, set this layer to”Soft Light” and you will have a much darker illusion as the view gets farther…

Next, we want to create an extremely mild HDR effect for the wood, so what we will do is create a new layer above the rest of the files, but below the dark layer we brushed with black color. Please pay attention because the sequence is important. We will not be working with masked layers at all throughout this tutorial.

Once that layer is created, click on the little “black and white” icon at the end of your layers palettes, the one that allows you to create a new fill or layer adjustment. Select “Exposure” settings. You will have a new layer with exposure settings created:

Using the “white” droplet, drag the Gamma Correction up to 0.82. See how the wood looks now, as if it’s been exposed to moon light! isn’t it beautiful?

To accompany that bright path we have in the middle, create a new layer and using your Brush Tool, white color and very big soft brush (say, 300 pixels), create a spot in the middle.

This spot should be placed above all the other layers and with blending mode set to Overlay:

Next, take out your stock photo with flying balloons, and crop them out. Don’t worry if cropping isn’t perfect, because once you placed them on your canvas, we will resize them to much small size and any imperfections will be blurred naturally.

Once they are on the canvas, you will notice that they look terribly misplaced,  and they need something that will blen them in nicely. The easiest solution (and please bear in mind that our tutorial is targetted at beginners) is to add clouds, that will “cover” the balloons, easily blending them into the composition.

So, create a new layer and go to Filter >> Render >> Clouds. With your background color set to Black and your foreground set to White (this is important!) — create clouds..

Once the clouds layer is ready, press Ctrl + T  and drag the bottom line upwards, “compressing” the clouds into a smaller strap, about half of the canvas. Set the blending mode of the clouds layer to “Pin Light”. This way, you will only see the WHITE areas of the clouds and totally won’t see the black areas.

Move the clouds in a way that will allow the white areas in clouds to lay over the balloon, this way we can see that the balloons are actually floating somewhere in the area, partly obscured by the heavy sky… Use Eraser Tool with soft edge to remove any edges of the clouds layer once it’s moved and you can also duplicate that layer and make a few of them, so you will have more cloudy effect (which is what we have done).

Next, crop our beautiful Becca.

The cropping technique will not be explained here as being pretty much basic, but we want to emphasize that if you use our particular image, the cropping will be rather complicated, since at some points (such as arms) the contrast between skin and background is minimal, which makes the cropping rather difficult and we had to use a few steps to complete this task, first we used Polygonal Lasso Tool, them Magnetic Lasso Tool, them we “refine edges” as pictured below..

Place the girl unto the canvas, and desize her so she will fit in nicely..

To add our own contrast to the image, we want to make the clothes texture more visible, less dark areas yet without losing the overall contrast and juiciness of the image, so with the girl’s image selected, we went to Image >> Adjustments >> Curves, and created a custom curve that consists from 3 points, as pictured here:

Next we need a shadow underneath her legs. Draw a circle using the round shape tool and black color as your foreground Photoshop color. make sure it’s placed correctly underneath her feet and has an elliptical shape.

Resterize the layer and go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur

Set the shadow’s opacity to Multiply 57%, and you will see that the shadow is mildly visible yet it is present and gives a more realistic illusion of the jump or fly in the air. Please also make sure that you place the shadow underneath the girl’s image!

Final Steps…

Although most of the colors we used here blended in well and eventually created an organically looking picture, we still need to equalize the layers together. What some people do, and I used to do it myself in previous tutorials, is to merge all the layers, or even flatten the image, and then work on the colorization and the levels. This is very easy and perhaps will do the trick with most beginners, but even if you are not yet that much of a pro with Photoshop,  you need to learn how to work with Layer Adjustments.

In your layers’ panel, you have a small icon below, that looks like Yin-Yang symbol.

Create a new layer on top of all the other layers, and click this icon; you have a menu with various options, select “Photo Filter” first.

Use the default “Warming Filter (85), which I think is best for any picture, if you are looking to get a quick and warm effect, and set the Density to about 25%. Basically, the rule of thumb is, if we use warm colors such as brown, pink and earthly shades, we will give our composition a warm feeling (which is our aim here!), however if you want to make your final outcome look more cold, dreadful, dramatic and morbid, use shades of blue and green.

Once this is done, white you still have a layer selected that is on top of all the others, click teh Layer Adjustments icon again, select “photo filter” one more time and this time apply plain yellow color filter, with 48% density.

Most of you might want to stop here, but we want to really make this image look awesome, so we go ahead and click the Layer Adjustments icons again, this time we pick the “Curves”. This will apply the Curve settings to ALL the layer that lay underneath these settings, which is a huge advantage as you need not go layer by layer.

Make two points, which will brighten up the image quite dramatically. Note that we are working with RGB channel.

Now, the very final touch is to give our composition a light lightly cold touch, as we spoke before, a bit of green hue will do this trick. So yes, we will click on the Layer Adjustments again, and select the RED channel this time. Darken the image a bit, using two points…

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed the tutorials, and please feel free to download the PSD file for learning purposes (1024 x 764). You can also replace the model of our tutorial with your own image, and you will have all the effects already in place. Click on the image below to full view.

Once you purchase the PSD, and complete the checkout, click the “return to merchant’s website” button — the download will start automatically. if you have any problem, please comment below and I will email you the file within 24 hours.

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.

Step 6:

We personally found her outfit a little bit to complex so we decided to remove some lines, and all we have done is just using a Brush Tool with soft edge and color that matches the clothes she is wearing. Using a medium size brush, simply go over her outfit, covering the shades and sew-marks. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look too organic yet, we will make it look blended in well later.

However, to avoid your painting over clothes look out of place, we are going to swap the blending mode of this layer from normal to Screen…

Step 7:

Fixing the girl’s skin is going to be our next step in this tutorial. Using the Blur Tool, go over her skin and blur it, especially in places that got pixelated because of the JPG compression, that is to say — near the transition to other colors.

This should be your result so far, with the skin nicely smoothed, whitened outfit, overall photo adjustment of the layer:

Step 7:

We also want to add a nice twirly shape which will add some twist to our composition, so select any twirly shape you have in your arsenal, something that won’t be too complex or too. If you wish to avail of the same brush we have use, feel free to download the PSD file at the end of this tutorial.

Place the Shape onto the canvas, using White color as your Foreground color:

Step 8:

Press Ctrl + T to start transforming, Right Mouse Click to see the menu and select the “Distort” option, distorting the shape in just as you see below:

Go to Layer Styles option for this shape and apply glow using white color as well.

Step 9:

As any modern artwork, it should consist from plenty of layers with many little details. so Select the brush tool, and using the maple leaves brush, go to brush presets, apply the following settings:

and scatter it, just like this:

Step 10:

Use baby blue as your foreground and white as background colors, chaotically work with your brush across the canvas, trying to follow the flower and shape lines.

Step 11:

Set the blending mode of these leaves to “Screen”, in order to give it a nice semi-transparent yet vividly visible effect.

Using a much smaller  brush, and a darker baby-blue hue, create a new layer and go with the brush over the canvas again, concentrating on the lady’s layer:

Se the blending mode of the newly applies leaves to “Hard Mix”.

Step 12:

At this point, flatten your image.

We, however, since we wanted to make the PSD available for a download, grouped all the layers and duplicated the group. the first group got flattened and this is the layer we are going to work with, while the second group with all the layer intact remained hidden. In case anything goes wrong, you can always go back to the fully layered version and work from there.

So, the flattened canvas now has no layers, and we are using one image. Go to Curves again, and reduce the Red Channel, in the same manner as you see on the screenshot below:

Step 13:

After that, switch to RGB channel and lighten the image up a little bit:

Step 14:

Create a New Layer. Select the Gradient Tool, and using one of the default gradients called “medium Spectrum” (which is mild rainbow gradient), we are going to fill the new canvas with this gradient.

Simply pull the line from left to right, adding rainbow across the entire canvas.

Step 15:

Set the blending mode of rainbow layer to Screen. Now it’s semi visible, and we can see the angelic our artworks becomes:

Step 16:

Flatten the image once more (or, if you created group with unmerged layers before, simply merge the rainbow layer with the image below).

using your merged layer, go to Curves once more, and darken the image by pulling the RGB’s channel line downwards:

Step 17:

Go to Filter >> Sharpen >> Smart Sharpen…

Apply the following sharpening settings. This won’t only give you a very nicely sharp image, but thanks to the smart sharpening settings, it gives depth to colors by giving the field more gradient towards the colored edges:

Step 18:

Duplicate the layer.

Using the upper layer, go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur and apply 3.7 pixels blur.

Step 19:

Set the blending mode of the upper layer (the blurred one) to Multiply. This will add a nice glowy effect without disturbing the sharpness of the image.

Done!

And here is our final outcome — Welcome to Thailand!

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and please feel free to download the PSD file below, however it’s only distributed for learning purpose, commercial use is strictly prohibited. Stock images are the copyright property of their respective owners.

Play around with this tutorial and don’t forget to join our Facebook group and Flickr pool

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.

Step 5

Applied the shadow? Pressed “Enter”? Great, now Go to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur and apply mild blur — remember that shadows can never really be sharp.

Reduce the opacity of the shadow and set the blending mode to “Multiply”.

Step 6

Next, we are going to add these little twirls. Now the most common problem most beginner Photoshop users encounter is that in order to draw these twirly lines you need to have a great deal of experience with Photoshop. We are going to use Twirly shapes which you can download here.

Select any of them which you like most and using any color (we are going to overwrite these settings later) draw the shape.

Press Ctrl + T to transform the shape so that it will have more depth, creating the illusion that it “lays” on the flow surrounding the leg.

Step 7

The easiest way we are going to do it Resterize the shape.

Then, select the eraser tool and using a brush with a sharp edge, remove the shape from ONE part of the leg. Be sure that you don’t remove from too many places otherwise the illusion of wrapping the leg will disappear..

Apply the same steps on the lady’s arm.  Don’t worry that the edges of the shapes don’t “meet” — we will complete these steps and add everything we need in next steps.

Step 8

Merge both twirl layers and go to Layer Styles, apply the following settings for Outer Glow and Color Overlay with pure white.

This will give your shape a very strong and visible glow.

Step 9

Get back to the background layer (winterscape) and go to Image >> Adjustments >> Exposure. Apply the following settings to reduce the lightness of the image, basically what reducing exposure does is simply making the image darker, while preserving the light spots, which is important in our case.

Step 10.

As you can see, now the background and the main character in our tutorial look way too different, so what we are going to do is — duplicate the lady’s layer and hide one of them for now. We will need it later so do NOT delete it. Using the layer that remained visible, go to Image >> Adjustments >> Match Color.

Match the lady’s color with the background, IN the body of your composition.

You see, not it looks so much more organic and blends in nicely into the low contrast background we currently have.

Step 11

Now we are going to add sparkles to the twirly lines. As I said in the beginners, this tutorial was designed for beginners, so we are going to use the easiest techniques here. Select the brusg tool and go to the brushes interface bu pressing F5.

Apply the following settings to the Brush Presets. Our aim is to create small, chaotically spread dots, that will eventually become sparkles. This is absolutely easy and will require only the very basic Photoshop skills, as long as you follow the right settings for “Scattering“:

Step 12

The next step is to add the sparkles. You can work directly on the layer with twirls, which will save you the work of apply the same Layer Style afterward, however if you are not sure that you will achieve the best result right away, create a new layer and simply draw twirls over the existing ones and around the lady, in places it’s not been done with the shape we used.  be sure to add sparkles to places where the cropping was poor, in our case it’s the feet area. Also, it’s a good idea to add sparkles around the hair as it makes the edges look smoother.

Once you have done that, we can move on to overall image effects and moving to the lucky step:

Step 13

Create a new layer. Using #7283a8 as your foreground color and #c3cfd7 as your background, go to Filter >> Render >> Clouds and create a full layer just filled with mild clouds. Once it’s ready, set its’ blending mode to “Overlay” and reduce the opacity to 80% (or less, if your image turns out too light).

Step 14

Merge the lady’s layer with the background and go to Image >> Adjustments >> Levels, making the whole layer darker and more dramatic, in our example we moved the middle (gray) arrow to 0.38

Step 15

Pick the last remaining image with grass, paste it unto the composition on top of all the other layers and using a big (150+ pixels soft edge brush, remove the remains of the grass leaving it only at the bottom of our collage. beginners always have a hard time cropping grass — it’s indeed a very hard task, but simply using a huge soft eraser tool does pretty much this trick as we don’t see the edges very clearly..

Step 16

Create a new layer and fill it fully with the color #1a346e. Set the blending mode of this layer to “Soft Light”. Make sure that this layer lies on top of ALL the other layers, including the grass as we want to make the composition organically blended, even if it’s not entirely realistic.

Step 17

Adding text to the girl’s leg. Using any font you find fit, but preferably an old looking one like Times New Roman, for example.

We used the font Arno Pro Semi bold.

This is going to be a detailed job. Using a big capital letter, type the first letter of your word and place it over the girl’s leg, making it look like the letter is actually standing on it. Using Ctrl + T transform command to rotate the letters in the  right tangle. Your next letter would not be in caps and it will be about 5 pixels less in sixe, just change the size of the font and place your next letter in the same fashion. You may even want to go farther and make the letters look like they lay and fall to the side, by simply overdoing the Ctrl + T command, and rotating the letter too much to the side.

Make sure that each next letter is smaller than the previous one, so that the last one will be significantly smaller than the first.

Apply the following Layer Styles to add the same glow as we did with the twirls and stars / sparkles.

This is what you will get once the Layer Styles have been applied…

Step 18

Last step is going to add a little life to our frosty blue and lifeless composition. Remember that Lady’s layer we duplicated and hid for the time being? Now it’s time to bring it back, siply enable the previous back and without changing its position on the canvas, drag it in the layers palette on top of all the others, this way you will have a much more colorful main character on a cold white background. For your convenience I am adding a list of all the layers and their sequence that you should have on your canvas.

That’s it, here is your result and I hope you enjoyed the tutorial! Please subscribe to our RSS feed by email, to get the full next tuts directly to your inbox.

After the huge success of my previous Photoshop Tutorial for perfume commercial poster, I received so many requests asking to make more tutorials in this nature, so it took a while but finally I had a muse and I came up with a nice idea for a modern, not realistic, perfume advert, you see something like this in girl’s glamorous magazines, but this is my original and hopefully successful work. Here is your final result, and in order to achieve it, you will need the following materials:

• Face by Tammy Manet
• Flowers by Nolene
• Splash by R’eyes
• Smoke Brushes
• Perfume by Rodrigo Senna

Step 1

Let’s get started, open a new canvas, of any desired size. We didn’t want to create a huge canvas so we used 700×600 pixels. It also depends if you are going to use this image as a print later or just for playing around and using on the web. If you do intend to print it, make sure CMYC is set to the right properties. So, please the face of the girl in the middle of your canvas…

Step 2

Duplicate the layer. Select the layer that is above and go to Gradient Map, by pressing Image >> Adjustments >> Gradient Map. Use gradient from black (#000000) to white (#ffffff), from left to right with NO reverse, just the way you see on the image below.

Step 3

While the upper layer is still selected, set the blending option to Multiply. This will give your image a nice darkish touch, while preserving all the hues, gradients of colors and tones — you will get a very artistic and interesting result that will instantly look like a professional photography.

Step 4

Create a new layer by pressing Shft + Ctrl + N.

Select a brush with soft edge and set the foreground color to black and carefully cover all the area beside face and neck with the black background color. We are using the soft brush here because we don’t want to have any sharp edges, we want the dark background to blend in nicely with the shadows that we see on girl’s face.

Step 5

Time to play a bit with shapes. Use any twirly shape you wish, we used free ones (sorry they are so old that I have no idea anymore where did they come from). Once selected, and using the white color as foreground, apply them in all 4 sides of the photo…

…so that you will have a nice Victoria style frame all around.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t look too smooth — it’s not supposed to be! Just give it a funky-glamorous look, the way you see on most French adverts, commercials and packs.

Step 6

Now take the flower (link is at the beginning of the tutorial), and crop the flower so that you will be able to easily extract it from the background and apply without having any pixelated sides. Since cropping is a pretty much basic Photoshop technique we will not demonstrate here how to crop, hopping you will read about it in one of our basic tutorials.

Step 7

Once cropped properly, apply the layer with flowers unto the composition you are creating. The idea is that one of the petals is located IN the lady’s month; now before you go ahead and assume this is something rude — we will have a point for this one later on, just be patient and continue reading.

Step 8

Select the flowers layer, and using the Burn Tool in your Photoshop, go over the flowering adding a little accent and depth — on the sides, edges and inside the flower. The burn tool will darken the areas you are working with, just be sure to use a Soft Brush of at least 100px and do not overdo this effect. This is something hardly visible and unseen, yet it adds depth and makes our image less shallow.

Step 9

Now, in our attempt to make the flowers layer organically blended and less shallow, we are going to add a shadow. Select the flowers layer by pressing Ctrl and selecting the layer from layers panel. Create a new layer  and place it underneath the flowers layer. Fill the selection with black color.

Step 10

Press Ctrl + T to transform the selection of the shadow layer, and after right-click — use the “Skew” mode. Pull the edges of the bottom selection a little bit towards the sides but be careful not to overdo this effect — most Photoshop beginners tend to think that when following a tutorial — the more is the better, that is not quite always right.

Step 11

After you have transformed the shadow a little, apply a little Blur (Filter >> Blur >> Gausian Blur 3-4px) and set the opacity to Multiply and 15%.

Step 12

Now, select the flower layer, and while it’s selected, using the Eraser Tool with soft edge and 100px radius, erase half of the petal that it near lady’s mouth, so that it will create the illusion us fading smoke. Please see the illustration for better demonstration..

Step 13

Now, download and install the smoke brushes (at the beginning of the post) and use any one of them that you find particularly appealing. using the  white color as your foreground color in photoshop, we are going to create a new layer and apply the brush on the screen. In this Photoshop tutorial we will not explain how to install the brushes, hoping you already know how to do that..

Step 14

The brushes with smoke are already semi transperant, so you probably won’t need to set them to any opacity, other than Normal. If, however, in your partucular image settings you see that the smoke pretty much covers the girl’s face — try and reduce the opacity to about 80% or lower.

Once applied, using a big Eraser Tool’s soft brush of at least 150 px, remove smoke from girl’s cheeks — the way that it will create an illusion of smoke coming out from her mouth and not just chaotically spread covering her face. Therefore your smoke should also be erased from the chin, if there are any traces of it.

Step 15

Now we are going to work with the Brush tool. Set it to a small 3 pixels size, but using a Soft Edge. Please copy the settings for “Scattering” from the illustration below. The idea is to create a trail of dots, like pearls string, using your free hand and no pen tool.

Once these settings has been applied, just draw curvy lines from the lady’s mouth — outwards.make sure that these curves in lines complement the smoke .

Step 16

After having applied that, go to Layer Styles while the dots layer is still selected and apply a bit of outer glow using white color with 65% opacity and 6 pixel size.

Step 17

Once you have done with the glow, press Ctrl + T to transform the layer and using the “Perspective” mode (right click and select Perspective) and pull the upper corners a little bit outwards to create an illusion of a certain dimension.

Step 18

Next step is adding splashes of water. we have black background here, therefore we also picked water splashes with black background. Although, theoretically speaking, you can pick a water splash with any background and then crop and using various settings just apply it unto the composition — in our case it is tremendously easier to use back background and save the hassle of unneeded work. Apply the splashes at the bottom of our composition,  duplicate the layer a several time so that you will be able to cover the whole bottom area with water splashes and drops.

Set the opacity of the water splashes on ALL the layers you have duplicated to “Lighten“.

Step 20

Take any photo of a perfume bottle, crop it and paste into the dark and empty corner of the composition. Rotate it using the Ctrl + T functions so that the bottle will look like it’s popping out of the splashes.

Step 21

One of our last steps would be to choose a good looking horizon photo.  Here you can really take anything you like since it won’t be the leitmotif of our composition. Apply it anywhere between the fragrance bottle layer and lady’s face. Using an Eraser Tool with 65px soft edge brush, start erasing the sky layer from over the face and neck of our female  model. When you finished, set the opacity of the layer wit horizon to Lighten or Multiply, depending on the initial   darkness of your chosen  image.

As a final touch, i also added dots around the fragrance , yet without a glow.

Done! That’s it, here is the final result. i hope you enjoyed the tutorial and please don’t forget to subsribe to our RSS Feed or Email Notifications to ensure you never miss any of our new tutorials.

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:

…and here comes the hardest part, manual labour. Select the smudge tool

We used soft edged brush 9 px, but you may use a bigger one, depending on the size of your moon.
Press the Shift button, once your cursor is exactly on the right line, and “brush” the moon’s edges out a few times, so that u will make these small lines, coming out of the moon’s cut edge. This should imitate the reflection of glow against the water.

If you managed to reach a result close to what we did here, duplicate the layer of your moon (Layer >> Duplicate Layer…). Transform your layer vertically (Edit >> Transform >> Flip Vertical). Drag it down a bit, so that it will fully “reflect” the first layer.

Set the opacity of the flipped layer to about 30%. Could be less or more, depending on the colour of your water.

Now, select the Smudge tool again, but this time with a bigger radius, lets say 19 px. Make a few chaotic straight horizontal lines across the reflection of the moon, distorting it. Try to get the effect like we achieved on the picture below, as if the waves break the shine from the moon…

Select the Eraser Tool, approximately 100px (or more) with soft edge, and remove about half of the reflection, to give it a more natural effect, as nothing gets reflected fully, when you look from the side…

just a small cheerful note: If you managed to get this far, it won’t go wrong from here!

Next, Choose the first layer of the moon, and go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Outer Glow, apply these glow settings to give your moon a natural feeling of shine. Remember that you need not apply the shine to the reflection layer!

So, you got the moon done!

Now only the easy stuff are left.
Take a nice picture of a girl. As usual, I used a photo from Liam Stock, but this is very optional, you can use your own pic, though for our “eclipse”, it’s better to have a figure with a semi-transparent veil in hands.

Crop the girl (we assume this tut if for more advanced users so we won’t stop to explain how to crop a picture, if you are unsure, please post your question below.
After having cropped her carefully, paste her unto our canvas.

Since we want to live up to our metaphorical title – “moon eclipse”, be sure that the girl’s veil covers the moon a tiny bit.

Set the opacity of the layer with the girl to 45% (more or less, depending on your background image).

Take another girl, and repeat the previous steps: crop her, paste her unto the canvas, only in order to make her look a bit different, we did not just reduce the opacity of the layer, but we only set the blending option to “Luminosity”.

That’s it, add a title, and the image is ready:

Ok, this is the image we will be eventually making:

It’s a very easy fantasy art doodle, or rather just manipulation using some basic techniques yet achieving interesting effect.

1. Make a new canvas, 500*500.
2. Get a nice picture of ocean with foam at the shore. We used this one:

3. The most interesting effect is achieved when a picture was taken at angle, but we will create this effect artificially, by pasting the ocean photo unto our canvas and pressing Ctrl + T to rotate it a little, as shown on the photo below:

4. Next, take a photo of a girl, we use Becca from deviantArt, but you might want to use your own photo. Copy the canvas.

5. Paste the girl unto the ocean layer and then press Ctrl + T to rotate the layer with the photo and place it along line with the ocean shore, more or less, same degree.

6. Using wither magnetic tool, or eraser tool, delete the background from the layer with the girl. If the edges are not perfect, don’t worry about it, as eventually it will look as the girl was just swept away to the shore, it won’t matter and we will cover it with other layers.

7. Duplicate the layer with the ocean, and put the second, copied layer, on top of the layer with the girl.
8. Take the eraser tool with soft brush (we used 80 px) and remove the top layer with the ocean from the girl, however, (and this is important!) leave the edges covered with the upper layer, which will create the illusion of the girl actually been partly covered with teh water.

You should get something like this… I’d recommend to cover the legs with the water and not her face, or whichever part of the body looks as if it lays ON the sand.

9. While the upper layer of the ocean is still selected, Go to Levels Panel (Ctrl + L) and reduce redness as shown below…

…and adjust the Green channel as well, to give the water a deeper hue.

The water should get a little darker and bluer, however, reserving their natural look.

10. Duplicate the upper layer of the ocean, and using the copy that is not on top, go to Filter >> Blur >> Radial Blur and apply maximum Zoom blur, however, placing the blur starting point at the place where the girl is located in your canvas. The idea is to make an illusion of rays shining from under the girl.

Click OK. This is what you got:

11. While this layer is still selected go to Image >> Adjustments >> Brightness / Contrast and make the image darker / add contrast by apply the settings as shown below.

12. Reduce the opacity of the upper (blurred) layer to 80% or a little less.

13. Take the eraser tool and remove the blurred later from girls face and body, once again, better leave the edges of her body covered with the upper layer, rather than overdo the eraser too.

This is what we got…

14. Now, go to Filter >> Render Lightening effects, and add omni-spot light with the settings shown below, to both blurred and not blurred ocean layer.

15. Take some good resolution photo of broken glass.

copy and paste the glass on top of your composition and play with the layer’s overlay settings. It would really depend on your initial photo and how dark the broken glass layer is. Pin Light or Hard Light would normally be good, but try whichever settings look best to achieve the following result:

Be sure that the broken glass cracks do not “lay” on the face, or other parts of your composition that you want to be visible.

16. Now for the final touch.
Flatten the image, and press Ctrl + L to go to levels menu. Reduce redness..

…and play with the blue level channel to give it more depth.

And, here it is, your final result:

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial, feel free to ask any questions and post your results.

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.
Lightening Effect

This will result in having darker sky around the fairy, and the only lit area would be around the glowing moon.

Now, we will try to create an illusion of stars, that were laying in the fairy’s hands and now that she has blown on then, they scattered all across the sky. So, we need star brushes. Basically any brushes you personally like on DA would be good, see the URL below for more info:
DeviantArt Free Star Brushes

After having downloaded and installed your brushed, make a new layer and apply a several stamps of brushes, close to fairy’s hand, as shown on the picture below.

Apply same glow settings as you did with the moon before.

Now some more complicated work, with Levels. As we want our sparkling stars to be really shining, and the overall atmosphere of the picture to be bluish and mysterious, we will Flatten the Image (don’t skip it!!) and then press Ctrl + L (to get to the Levels panel) and set the following settings, for…

Red channel:

We got a much blueish hue to our photo.

Take a photo of the clouds u used before, and paste it unto your canvas once again. Make sure the new layer lays above the background.

Erase 2/3 of it, so that the remaining clouds, will only cover the girls legs, partly. Use the eraser tool with soft edge, preferably big radius, to avoid sharp and awkward edges for the cloud. it’s a cloud after all!

While the new clouds layer is selected, go to Levels panel again, and adjust the red level as shown below.

The settings must be different from the background layer , to give the image more depth.

Flatten the image once more. Now it became one canvas again, without layers, so go to Filter >> Renders >> Lightening Effect and apply this light effect when the center of your light is the sparkles…

The last manipulation resulted in the following modification…

Go to Levels again, and move the settings of the red channel and shown below, to give the picture a “cold” feeling. (red hues are always more “warm”)

Also, move the blue channel settings a tiny bit towards the center… Adding blue channel intensity:

That’s it, here is your Xmas fairy, blowing sparkles right on you!
Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

After there were a few complaints about the previous action we released where people could not get the colors to work right, we decided to fix this bug with out new “PSWISH Action 4 pro”, which works on fixed colors defined in the action itself. You are going to love this one, really. Any boring, dull, lifeless shot you have can be turned into a vivid, professionally retouched photo, just like you sometimes see in photography showcase galleries but have no idea how they have done that. So what does this action actually do? First of all, it fixes contrast, so dark photo become vibrantly yet naturally bright, however, we don’t use any mask layers to fix the dark fields. Next, it adds light rainbow overlay of colors that blend in perfectly with the content of your original photo. lastly, it adds very mild grain / sand effect, which as you know is very popular among professional photographers.

If you want to share this action, please link to this page, and not to the direct download. Also, needless to remind not to sell, offer free or redistribute this action under your own credits. All credits for this action creation are reserved to LoreleiWebDesign.com. Photos used below are stock photos are are used for demonstration purposes ONLY.

Click on the following examples, to full view. As always, downloading is 100% free.