Photoshop Inspiration : Nik Ainley
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 16, 2007 | 3 Comments
Nik Ainley is a UK based designer and illustrator whose photoshop work I greatly admire. Check out his stuff at Shiny Binary.
Photoshop Tutorial : Creating a haunted gritty look
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 15, 2007 | 8 Comments
A very popular look I’ve noticed recently is a sort of haunted, gritty photo look. I saw an advertisement in a magazine for “House” the TV program with Hugh Laurie and it uses this effect of grittiness combined with bright coloured eyes.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make something similar in Photoshop.
1. Open an image. I got this picture of a beautiful little girl from morgue file.
http://www.morguefile.com/archive/?display=144861& Thank you to the photographer!
2. Make a duplicate by pressing Ctrl + J (windows), Cmd + J (mac).
3. With the duplicate layer selected, choose Filter > Other > High Pass. Enter 10 pixels in the dialog box and then click OK. Change the blending mode to Overlay.
4. Make another duplicate of the original background image and drag it to the top of the layer stack.
5. With the top layer selected, choose Image > Adjustments > Desaturate to remove all colour from this layer. Then set the blending mode to Hard Light.
6. Select all the layers and click on the layer palette menu. Choose Flatten Image from the menu. You should now have one single layer.
7. Duplicate the layer and with the new layer selected, choose Filter > High Pass (this should be a the very top of the list of filters because it was the last one you used.)
8. Set the blend mode of the top layer to Overlay.
9. Select the two layers in the palette and once again on the palette menu, choose Flatten Image.
10. Now we’re going to add an adjustment layer. Click on the Create New Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choose Curves.
11. On the curves chart, click on the line near the top right and drag the line to the left. This will dramatically lighten the image.
12. Click on the adjustment layer thumbnail (the white square) to select it. Now press Ctrl + I (windows) or Cmd + I (mac) to invert the adjustment layer. It will appear fully black on thumbnail.
13. Now select a small soft brush, set the foreground colour to white and paint on the girl’s eyes. You should see some very bright colour eyes appearing. If you see white appearing then Undo (Ctrl Z), click on the black thumbnail and try again.
14. Click on the background layer and use one of the selection tools to select each of the girl’s iris’. Hold down Shift to make more than one selection.
15. Press Ctrl + Shift + I to invert the selection. Choose Image > Adjustments > Desaturate to remove colour from everywhere except the eyes.
And that completes the image!
This method works very well on older faces where you can really see the creases and lines. Here’s another example achieved using the same steps as above.
Cool Photoshop Brush of the Week
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 13, 2007 | Leave A Comment
This is a great set of Photoshop brushes created from ads in a 1940s edition of Cosmopolitan. The ads from this era are so full of character and there are 48 brushes in the set. The brushes were made by Moolis and you can see lots of his other good stuff over on his deviant art site.
Below you can see a sample brush with a little bit of “colouring in” by me.
Photoshop Tip : Layer Palette Thumbnails
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 10, 2007 | 1 Comment
When you look at the thumbnail on the Layers palette in Photoshop you see a small preview of what appears on each layer. If you find that the thumbnails on the Layers palette are too small (or possibly too big) you can change the thumbnail size. Click on the Layers palette menu (the triangle in the upper right corner) and choose Palette Options.
The Layers Palette Options dialog box opens and you can choose from Small, Medium, Large or No thumbnails. Choose whichever option suits you best. I generally use the Large thumbnails if I only have a few layers to deal with because it gives me a better preview of what’s on the layer. If you have a LOT of layers you might want to use the Small or No Thumnails option so that you don’t have to do a lot of scrolling through your layers.
Photoshop Tutorial : Blending Modes & Opacity
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 9, 2007 | 3 Comments
In this tutorial, I’m taking a brief look at opacity and blending modes in Photoshop and how you can create different image effects by using them. I’m not going to look at each of the blending modes – there are 23 of them – but more an overview of how they work.
When you blend layers you are changing the way pixels on the different layers mix with each other and this gives us some cool (and unusual) results. Blending modes can be a great way to compose multiple-image artwork.
I’m using a Photoshop file that has two layers. One layer contains an image of an old building with an orange coloured wall and the other layer contains a staircase on the outside of an apartment block. When you’re trying this out yourself, just use any Photoshop image with two different layers, with something on each layer.
It’s always a good idea to give your layers a descriptive name. Don’t just leave each layer with it’s default of Layer 1, Layer 2, Layer 3 and so on. When you’re dealing with an image with 20 layers this becomes very tiresome when you’re trying to figure out what’s on each layer.
1. To rename a layer, double-click the layer name in the Layers palette. A bounding box will appear around the words Layer 1 . Type a new name and Press Return or Enter .
Note: Make sure you click directly on the layer name, otherwise you will open the Layer Style dialog box and you won’t be able to rename the layer.
2. When I click on the eye icon on the newly-named Stairs layers. The image of stairs appears in the image and the Orange Wall is hidden.
3. With the Stairs layer selected in the Layers palette, click on the arrow beside the opacity field and drag the slider to 40%. Notice that everything on this layer - the stairs and the wall they are attached to becomes less opaque (more see-through).
4. Lowering the opacity of a layer makes the artwork on that layer more translucent, so that the layers beneath it show through.
5. Drag the opacity slider back to 100% so that you can see the Stairs normally.
6. On the layers palette, click on the down arrow beside the field that says “ Normal”. By default, layer appear with a blending mode of Normal.
7. From the drop down menu that appears, choose Hard Mix.
The image changes quite dramatically.
Take a few minutes to try out different blending modes and see how the image is affect. Below you can see Overlay and Multiply modes.
The Multiply mode is probably one of the most often used blending modes. It blends layers to produce a darker colour, except where there are white pixels. The white pixels will disappear.
When you have found a blending mode that produces an effect you like, click on the Stairs palette to select it. Click on the “Create a New Layer” button at the bottom of the Layers palette.
A new empty layer appears in the Layers palette just above the Stairs layer, but nothing has changed on your image in the document window. When you add a new layer, by default the layer is empty and transparent. You’re now going to use this new layer to draw a border around the image you’ve been working on. The benefit to drawing on this layer, as opposed to drawing on any of the other layers, is that it can be isolated on its own - turned on or off, transparency adjusted and other adjustments applied to the layer.
Make sure that the new empty layer is selected. Select the Brush tool from the Toolbox (or hit B on the keyboard). On the tool options bar, click on the Brush Preset Picker and select a rough looking brush. (I picked a Dry Brush Light Flow) and set the master diameter to about 100 pixels. On the toolbox, set the foreground colour to black by hitting “D” on the keyboard – this sets the foreground and background colours to their default – black and white. Start drawing around the edge of the image to create a rough border.
Rename the layer as “B order”. (Yes, I know I’m nagging about the naming of layers but it’s good practice!)
The benefit to drawing on this new empty layer is if you don’t like your work you can turn it off without affecting your entire image. You could also reduce the opacity to see how that looks.
Take some time to try adding another layer to your image and draw some more. Pick different brushes and colours and choose some blending modes.
So that’s it for an intro to blending modes and opacity. The best way to find out how they work is, of course to experiment and check out all the different effects you can achieve.
Catching up with a few Photoshop items …
Posted by Jennifer Farley | August 8, 2007 | Leave A Comment
I’ve been having a daily battle with my blog (behind the scenes) trying to get things sorted since I moved all of my Photoshop tutorials over here. I had to finally stand over it with my hands on my hips in a threatening manner. However, I think the crisis is over and the blog is (kinda) behaving itself. So I plan to be getting back to the business of posting Photoshop tutorials from today. In the meantime, here’s a couple of Photoshop related items I found interesting….
A good old rant about Photoshop excess on The Online Photographer.
A collection of 80 Photoshop text effects on Photoshop Roadmap.
The inspirational portfolio of Adhemas Batista in Brazil.
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About
Hi, my name is Jennifer Farley and I am a designer and design instructor based in Ireland. Read more about Laughing Lion Design .
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view my portfolio:
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