This tutorial will show you how to take a low quality, lifeless and dull shot and turn it into a vivid night shot, with street lamp lightening.

Just look at the example below and see how can the most terrible, blurred, lifeless pixelated shot be turned into a professional photo with unique effects. I actually recommend that you’d take a really bad photo, perhaps old, scanned (not digital) so that you will be able to estimate the true value of this tutorial.

It’s about time to produce a new tutorial and I was thinking about something that no one has done before me and came to realize that most of the themes have already been touched upon. It’s pretty hard to come up with an original idea that no one ever thought about before, but since I made it at night, I thought… has anyone ever made a “midnight text effect”? I did not find it anywhere on the Internet, so here it is, you can see the example above.

As a part of my Fantasy Art tutorials series (mostly posted at Lorelei Web Forum), following many requests, I decided to make a tutorial that will show you how to turn a woman into a vampire / witch. Well, only visually

Step 1 – starting… Take a photo of a girl you are going to work with. Traditionally I am using Becca’s photo, you can also avail of her free stock at DeviantArt.com. We will only be working with a face, hence we are using only the upper part of her photo.

Step 2 – smoothing the image. Let’s smooth the image. We want to avoid using blur settings, what we will do is just “smoothing” the photo, same effect as we used in Like in Magazines tutorial. Go to Filter >> Noise >> Reduce noise and apply the settings you see on the image. We will only use 5px noise reduction as we don’t want to smooth it too much.

Step 3 – removing black eyes. Our image had black areas under the eyes, which we want to remove prior to applying our own scary effects. Using the Healing Brush tool, Press “Alt” near the eye (where there is no dark area) and, using a brush with soft edge, about 30px, make a few “stamps” around the eyes, which will remove the dark parts. It will probably take a few times ’til you succeed to do it properly, if you see you are not managing, just skip this step. On the left side you can see the result after applying the healing brush.

Step 4 – removing redness. Photos rarely come in excellent colors, and here, for a vampire look, we most definitely need to add a bit coldness to the image’s colors before we start off with the main effects. Press Ctrl + L to go to Levels panel. Reduce the redness from your photo, by selecting the “red” channel and dragging the left arrow a bit rightwards.

Step 5 – The doodle part. Make a new layer (Shft + Ctrl + N) and select a brush tool, approximately 20px, or smaller (depends on your image, and just go over the hair of the girl, covering all that area, as shown on the illustration.

Step 6 – Merging settings, gray hair. As we don’t want the hair to be just black and look like a real kid’s doodle, while the upper (hair layer) is selected, change the layer’s blending options to “Color”, this way, you will get grey, old looking hair. While most tutorials on the internet show how to remove gray hair and make one look younger and better, I decided to show how to do it the other way around. So, hair is now gray. If you see that at some parts you missed with the brush, just remove it carefully with eraser tool.

This tutorial will show you how to easily make frame such as the one you now see in Windows Vista releases or the so-called “aero vista” style design. There are a several techniques for making these semi- transparent frames around the picture with rounded edges, I will show you the technique I use.

After having created a few tutorials related to fantasy art, such as Sinking moon eclipse, Sleeping sun, and the most famous – Mysterious moonlit landscape – which won a lot of attention, I decided to make yet another one.  I love the idea behind this tutorial, it’s both mysterious and dark, yet has a bit of an angelic touch that I am sure a lot of authors and designers

After some pretty successful

Video tutorials are normally a lot easier to follow. Unlike images and text based tuts, you can fully follow your “teacher”, step by step, without skipping any step and therefore the result after video tutorial is a lot more accurate.

Recently, I came across a tremendously talented artist – Steve H., who’s Deviant Art page astonished me. First I found him while searching for high quality wallpapers but this week he released a several video tutorials, which are just impossible to pass by. The tutorials are