Inspiration: Although today’s horror movies are all quite cheesy, very predictable and always disappointing,  I drew my inspiration from one of the infamous and unpopular movies – “Long Distance“, starring the beautiful Monica Keena. Don’t be surprised if it does not ring a bell, I’d be surprised if it did. I myself however love the cover / poster of this movie, the original plot and I decided to make my own little scenery with my own little plot, which is more or less reflected in the film’s poster.

So, let’s get started. The canvas size is really your choice, you may want to make it slightly longer or even bigger, because we initially work wit ha small image here.

Paint your canvas in dark color, we used #211f1f.

Take one of the grungy backgrounds you like to use, make sure it’s pale enough and not too dark. We used a great image from here.

You don’t need to use a stained old paper, like I used here. You can also use bricks surface, old wood or any other old-looking texture because this is not going to be your leitmotif, we just need something to be on the background.

Now, once you have downloaded the texture you want to use, let’s move to the next step.

Paste the background you downloaded unto the dark canvas you are working with. You will need to either resize or de-size it. I didn’t bother downloading the full version of this background, so I just took the small image and stretched it across the canvas, because in this case, we don’t mind to lose a bit of quality.

Once pasted and resized, set the lending options of the background to “Overlay“. You should have it looking like this..

Once this background has been blended, let’s add some more horror – grunge effects. If the hue of your canvas turns to be different — don’t worry, eventually we will overwrite it all with black and white so the colors are irrelevant at the moment.

Next, we took this nice finger prints image, called “Tint black 2″. Again, paste it onto your canvas, resize, position slightly above the middle…

Set the blending options to “Darker Color” and Opacity to 80%.

This is more or less how it should look.

Next thing we need is a model for our main character in the movie. Here I really can’t advice you, feel free to use any photo you really like, if you want — use your own and then print it up as a poster, this could be a great idea for your bedroom! So… Choose a picture of a girl. We wanted to go with a dramatic look so we chose a fantastic photo taken by Zsolt Dreher of a woman under the rain. You can download it here.

When printing through Photoshop there’s one thing you need to be aware of, the dots per inch (dpi). This refers to how many dots per inch of paper, your printer can print. If you want a clearer image then you want more dots per inch. The more dots a printer can print in an inch of paper the better the quality. Printers are clarified according to the dots per inch they print. A printer which prints more dots per inch is generally better and more expensive.

The most commonly used dpi value for image printing is 300 dpi. Meaning that the printer will print 300 dots per inch of paper. That is, if your printer can actually print in that resolution which is very likely, unless you own a really old printer.

You can set the dpi of an image through the Photoshop menu:

Image ? Image Size..? Resolution

In the Resolution input box enter the value you want for your image. Your version of Photoshop might not mention dots per inch but pixels per inch, which is the same thing.

Now let’s talk about the quality of ink for your image. This depends on your printer type. Inkjet printers for example can be cheap and they use jets of ink that they spray on paper. Ink quality is medium. Dye printers are more expensive than Inkjet printers and use a system to melt dots of dye that can generate over 16 million of colors. Ink quality is medium to high. Laser printers are very popular these days and they print in good quality. Ink quality is high. Last but not least there are the Thermal Wax printers that use blocks of wax that melt on the paper.

Now let’s say you want to print an image through Photoshop. Before doing anything else go to:

File ? Print with Preview

A dialog opens. Through that dialog you can set all kinds of properties for your image. For example you can define the position of the image on the piece of paper. You can specify the space you want to be left blank from top or bottom or you can let Photoshop center the image by ticking the “Center Image” check box.

Then you can define the scale of the image, it’s height and width. I use the “Scale to Fit Media” check box a lot, since it lets Photoshop automatically adjust the printable size of the image.

Depending on your image you might want to print on portrait or landscape. You can change that through the “Page Setup…” button on the right of the dialog. A new dialog will appear that also allows you to choose the type and the size of paper you will use for printing.

Well, that’s about it. All you have to do now is click the “Print…” button. Depending on your printer, a dialog will appear that will let you customize printer properties. For example you might want to print three copies of the image or tell the printer to use more or less ink. It’s really easy to print images through Photoshop. I use this software all the time mostly for the “Scale to Fit Media” check box I mentioned above.

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