Photoshop Tutorials

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.

1. First take a picture of your choice. I used a very bad shot from my own collection, but you can pic any streetlight photo from Digital Free Photo stock.

2. Go to Filter >> Render >> Lightening effect , and apply the setting as shown below, when center of the spot of your light-point is placed exactly where your street lamp is.

You should have something like this (illustration nr. 3):

3. Duplicate the layer, and apply the very same settings as you did before once again. Remember tpl place the spot light in the middle of the streetlamp or any other source of light you have on your photo (such as car lights, candles, etc). if you won’t place the light correct, the effect will not look natural, and we do want to achieve a perfectly natural looking night shot.

4. After applying the spot light once again, your image will become much darker. Reduce the opacity of the upper layer a little, as shown on the screen shot below. After that, flatten the image.

5. Make sure your bother layers were flattened, and apply the light spot effect as before, only this time make the circle smaller (look at the illustration for exact parameters).

After applying the filter 3 times, and following all the steps below, you should have something like this. The main target is to darken the entire image except for the glowing area around the lamp (or candle, or whatever you use on your photo).

6. Now to a more artistic part of the photo manipulation. Since we want the picture to look more like a night shot, we have to remember that pictures taken at night usually have a dark green or dark blue hue. In this case, we want to go for a greenish hue, which is often seen in old town streets.

So, press Ctrl + L to go to Channels’ panel. Apply the settings below to get the desired colored effect.

That’s it.

Above you can see our result, but of course yours could look different and I hope better. Eventually it looks as if the sun is setting behind the tower, but this is not a bad effect either. I hope You enjoyed the tutorial!

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.

Step 7 – make the face pale. There are quite a few techniques to make the face pale, however, we don’t want to add “defuse glow” and get an unevenly spread stains of white colour, we want our witch / vampire’s face to look bluish. So, same like we did in Step 5, make a new layer, take a small brush with blue hue, any of your choice, we used #406eb9, and go over the girl’s face without touching the eyes or the lips. Now, as we only want to add a hue, not a color, set the blue face layer’s blending options to Color Dodge, and reduce the opacity to about 65%, or less / more, depending on your image’s initial lightness.

Step 8 – Red lips. Any vampire should have beautiful red lips, so what we gonna do it, add a new layer, select a dark red (#af0512 is what we used) and cover the lips with your brush. Then, set the blending options to Multiply, to give it a deep effect, as we want the lips to be dark and stand out.

Step 9 – Making glassy eyes. Ok, a vampire, ghost, witch or whoever we are trying to create here, should have pale, glassy, dead-looking eyes. This effect is very easy to achieve. Select the initial layer with girls photo and choose the Dodge tool. Zoom on the eyes and use a small dodge tool brush to go over the area inside the eyeball. My dodge tool was set to 19% exposure, and i applied it a several times until I got the desired effect.
If you followed all the steps so far more or less precisely, you should get something like this by now. Of course your result could be looking different, because the initial photo might be of a different lightness or contrast. If you have any questions, please leave a comment bellow, I will try to get back to everyone who has a problem.

Step 10 – The atmosphere. Last step is creating the appropriate atmosphere, mainly by just changing the background. What I did here is just cropped the image using the magnetic lasso tool, and added a dark and somber image of a forest to the background. This step is also optional, as you may want to leave your current background or replace it with something different. My cropping as a bad example because it’s not very accurate, it was just for example purposes.

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 ranging from photo correction to stylish glossy orbs, covering a wide variety of Photoshop aspects and answering to many questions that newbies, as well as advanced users may have. The tutorials are really incredible, but don’t take my word for it, go and look for yourself! DP Studios’s DeviantArt page.

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Additionally to the useful tutorials, you will also wind a lot of other, generously offered material such as wallpapers, graphics and even prints, which you can buy. Bottom line: visiting is a must!

This tutorial was made after 5am in the morning, so I apologize for the grungy voice and the maybe slightly drunk talking (and hey, I was sooo drunk) but it’s not like it’s a lot better when sober…lol

Anyway, this is a very short and basic tutorial, for which I used a photo made by cherieroberts .

Tutorial Author: Liza Kliko aka Lorelei. For more tutorials, please visit my forum – Lorelei Web.

Hope can make sense from it and find it useful.

E

ven though there are only a few simple steps, this tutorial is more advanced users, in my opinion. Today, you will learn how to take an ordinary photo and turn it into an artistic sketch on a rough canvas.

The purpose of this tutorial is to use all the filters that highlight the main lines of the photo and turn then into a flat line upon a one-colour canvas.

1. For the start, open your photo. It does not have to be black ond white like in our example but it must have a good contrast.

2. Go to Filter >> Artistic >> Photocopy and set these settings for photocopy effect.

3. After clicking “OK”, go again to Filter >> Artistic >> Cutout and apply these settings for a smoother cutout effect:

This should give your image, which was turned to a photocopy, more visible edges and wil outline the main curves of the photo.

4. Go to Image >> Adjustments >> Brightness / Contrast and dramatically reduce the brightness.

5. Duplicate the Layer, so that you will be able to apply layer styles.

6. Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Bevel and Emboss and apply these settings for emboss and then for texture. This will give our canvas a feeling of rough texture, as if it was really drawn on paper.

The Texture emboss filling is what important here:

7. Flatten the image, and now let’s give it a warm hue. The easiest way is to go to Image >> Adjustment >> Photofilter and add a default warm filter 81.

8. Last thing is very simple yet in my opinion shouldn’t be skipped. When an artist is making a sketch with a pen, he is often smudges the edges, trying to give the canvas some more depth… we will do the same here, only without getting the hands dirty. So, for the final touch, go to Filter >> Artistic >> Plastic wrap and set these settings, using any pleasantly light colour.

That’s it, here is your result…

T

his is probably the easiest tutoral ever. We are going to take a simple and well known gold effect, but because of we will use an artistic, hand-brushed font – Broken Stick (Download it free at dafont.com), this will give the letters a bit of a melting, liquid effect.

Free .PSD File of this tutorial is available for Lorelei Web Forum members.

So, we will be making this text effect in mere 4 steps.

Make a new canvas – 450*150 px. Fill it with the black colour. The background hue is optional, but this particular tutorial won’t look good on a light background, as the text’s shine will not be visible.

1. 
2. Type your word inside this black box, using the “Broken Stick” font.
3. Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Options, and apply these settings:
4. Use #eab000 for the Inner Shadow settings.
5. 
6. Outer Glow is what will give the gold text it’s shine. We used the #febf01 colour but you may want to choose a darker hue to give it less “pimpy” effect.
7. 
8. Use the “Roling Slope – Descending” gloss contour for shading effect.
9. 
10. Last but not least – Gradient Effect. This will give the text, what I call – “hot honey” (not ment erotically! ) effect. The colors are #000000 to #fcb904.

Guess what? That’s it! The image is ready. Lorelei members can download the .PSD file for free.