Final Image:

This is what the final image looks like. You can download the full-sized wallpaper for free here.

Step 1:

Open a new document, I chose the dimensions 1280X800px. Paste in your photo of musical notation onto a new layer to use as the basis for your background. Use the transform tool to resize the photo to fit nicely on your canvas.

Step 2:

Now go to image > adjustments > desaturate to grayscale your image. Go to brightness/contrast settings and reduce the layers brightness to -40, and increase the contrast to +50.

Step 3:

Select the radial gradient tool and specify a gradient going from 100% black to 0% light gray. Then drag the gradient from the bottom left of your image to achieve the effect below:

Step 4:

Next paste your abstract image of musical notes onto a new layer. Use the transform tool to resize the image until it looks good. Then change this layers blending mode to ‘multiply’. The parts of your original background image not concealed by the radial gradient should show through and create an eerie lighting effect.

Step 5:

Open your photo of the man with headphones.

Step 6:

Copy this image onto a new layer in your original document and then use the lasso tool to select around the head and delete the parts of the photo around your selection by going to the menu: select > inverse then hit backspace.

Step 7:

Now we want to dark the man’s face to try and create a bit more depth to this high angle shot. To do this select the magic wand tool and click somewhere outside of your photo. This will select all parts of the document apart from your photo. Then go to select > inverse to invert the selection, making the head selected. Now select your brush tool (set to around 30px in dimension), and in brush settings select ‘color burn’. Set the brush’s opacity to around 20% and brush over the face a few times, paying particular attention to the most shadowed areas, to really emphasis them.

Step 8:

Now with your photo layer selected and bounding box in place, hold shift and drag inwards to resize your head image and make it smaller. Then select a 2px white brush and make a mark roughly 100px below the bottom of your photo.

Step 9:

Now duplicate this layer and rotate it 72 degrees by going to edit > transform > rotate. With the rotate option selected in your tool options go to the box where you can input your own custom rotation, and set it to 72. This input box is highlighted in the diagram below:

Step 10:

Now with your duplicated image selected move it so that the 2px dot beneath it is overlapping the dot in the first image. Can you see where this is going yet? By marking that 2px dot we can easily duplicate our images and rotate them around a set point, easy as that!

Step 11:

Now, to save you some time repeating this rotation process you can actually go to edit > transform > again, and it will repeat the exact transform effect that you’ve last done.

Step 12:

To complete your circle of heads simply keep duplicating, transforming, and lining up that middle 2px dot! As you can see from the image below the 5 heads create a perfect circle. To achieve this I simply divided up the 360 degrees that make up a circle. 360 divided by 5 = 72. If I’d wanted 10 heads instead of 5 I could have specified a 36 degree rotation, but then the heads would have overlapped due to their size.

Step 13:

Now open up your image of the record. Select the white outer part of the image using the magic wand tool and then invert your selection so that the record itself is selected. Paste this image into your original document and resize it to fit nicely inside the circle of heads. To centralize the record image perfectly, select the inner white circle of the record using the magic wand tool and delete it so that you can see through to the layers beneath this one. Then just align the hole with the 2px dot from the head image layers. Finally desaturate this image layer.

Step 14:

Now open up your photo of the row of speakers.

Step 15:

Select around the part of the image that you want and paste this into your original document. Desaturate this image layer and rotate/resize the speakers so that the fit nicely with the rest of your image. Be sure to put this image layer beneath your record/heads layers. Finally hide your top ‘record’ layer so that you can clearly see the middle 2px white dot, and then select your brush tool and make this white dot again for your speakers layer.

Step 16:

Now if we look at our speakers image it looks good, but lacks any 3d depth, as the side of the speaker was not in our original photo. To fix this we’re going to create a very simple side to the speaker to add a little more depth to the image. Use the lasso selection tool to create a selection that gets more narrow as it gets further away from the speaker photo. Fill this selection with a linear gradient going from light gray (C4C4C4) to 0% opacity black. Finally, to give the joining point at the edge of the speaker more definition create a line roughly 3-4px wide using the lasso tool and fill this with dark gray. The result should look something like the image below:

Step 17:

Then reduce your speaker image layer’s opacity to 60%. Edit the brightness/contrast settings to brightness -15 and contrast +20.

Step 18:

Now simply repeat the rotation technique that I showed you earlier for the speaker image until you have 5 speakers in a circle around the head images.

Then make the record image layer visible again.

Step 19:

Now create a new layer above all of the current layers called ‘light circles’. Select the circle selection tool and then place your cursor in the center of the record (on the 2px white dot). Drag outwards holding alt+shift to create a perfect circular selection around this central point. Then go to select > modify > contract by 1px. Delete this new selection to leave a 1px thick white ring.

Step 20:

Now select a 50px sized eraser brush set at 20% opacity. You want to start erasing the areas of the white circle that overlap the speakers. But very importantly – try to leave some of the ‘light ring’ in tact where it comes into contact with the speaker, and only erase the light ring entirely in the center of each speaker. This way you achieve the effect that the light ring is actually going into each speaker. Check out the effect below:

Step 21:

Now go to the ‘light circles’ layer’s blending options and use an ‘outer glow’ with the following settings. You can see the result below:

Step 22:

Now duplicate this layer, and resize it to make a smaller ‘light circle’ within the original circle. To keep a perfect circle remember to hold shift and alt as you resize your image.

Step 23:

This looks pretty good, but due to the original circle being cut off by the bottom of the document the smaller circle isn’t complete (see the bottom). We could take the time to complete the circle, but it will look just as good if we use the erased brush to simply fade away the harsh edges that are there. Then reduce this layers opacity to 50% to achieve something like this:

Step 24:

Duplicate and shrink this layer as just demonstrated before to achieve a 3rd smaller circle, and reduce this layer’s opacity to around 30%.

Step 25:

Select the top ‘head image’ layer, and merge the layer down. Keep doing this until all of the ‘head layers’ are merged into a single layer. Then use the selection tool to select the 2px white dot in the center and delete it. Do the same for the speaker layers. This should leave a nice black center to the record.

Step 26:

Now add some text to the bottom right of the document. I chose our logo’s font, Tahoma. To give it a little depth add a gradient overlay and inner shadow using the settings show below:

Finished!

And we’re done! The beauty of this technique is that it can be done with any theme in mind using virtually any images. The concept was originally based off of an advert I saw for fruit yoghurt, where the rotation/circle technique was used on little pieces of fruit. Play around with it and let me know what you come up with!

I hope that you found this tutorial useful and learned some useful new techniques!

Final Image:

Here is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up your background image. For this particular example I’ve chosen this lovely example of a mouldy wall.

Step 2:

Go to image > adjustments > desaturate to grayscale your image. Then go to adjustments > brightness/contrast and reduce the brightness to -100, and contrast to -90.

Step 3:

Now I want to add some text to the center of my document. An easy way to do this is to drag from one edge of your document to the other using the horizontal type tool. Then simple align any text that you’re going to type to center. I’ve chosen a nice larger, bold Tahoma font, mostly because it matches my logo.

Step 4:

Next go to layer blending modes, and select an inner shadow, inner glow, and gradient overlay with the settings shown below. The outcome will look something like this:

Step 5:

Open up your original mould image again and paste it onto a new layer above your text layer. Make sure that you resize it to be roughly the same width as your text.

Step 6:

Now hide this new mould image layer to reveal the text underneath. Select your text layer. Use the magic wand selection tool to select around the text, and also the areas within the text (the gaps within the P, D and A). With your selection in place go back to your new mould image layer. Go to layer > add layer mask > hide selection. This will hide the area around your text, meaning that your mould image now is in the shape of your text.

Step 7:

Change your mould imagery layer blending mode to ‘hard light’ and reduce it’s opacity to 50%.

Step 8:

I now want my finished text complete with effects/textures to be on one easy to edit layer. I can’t merge layers down to achieve this as it will mess up some of my layer styles. Instead I simply hide my background layer and go to layer > merge visible.

Step 9:

Now duplicate your merged text layer. Move your duplicate layer beneath the original and use edit > transform resize to resize your duplicated text layer to about half the size of the original. Position this below the ‘PSD’ part of your original larger text. Duplicate the smaller text layer and position this about the ‘FAN’ part of the larger original. Resize a tiny bit where necessary to get it to fit nicely above the letters.

Step 10:

Repeat this resizing technique, positioning the smaller text below the PSD of the bottom text, and above the FAN of the top text.

Step 11:

Keep repeating this until you can’t go any smaller. You will need to magnify in to work with the ultra small text after repeating this a few times. Finally go to layer > merge down and merge all of these text layers into one single layer.

Step 12:

Now create a new layer above your text layer and make a large custom shape that covers most of your text. It’s important that the custom shape allows much of the text through, despite almost being the same size. I’ve made the shape pink in the example below just so that you can see it more clearly.

Step 13:

Rasterize your custom shape layer and select around the shape using the magic wand tool. Then hide the custom shape layer and go back to your merged text layer, selection still in place.

Step 14:

Then go to image > adjustments > hue/saturation. Make the hue -10, saturation +20 and lightness -10. The outcome should look like the example below:

Step 15:

Duplicate your text layer. Go back to the original layer underneath the duplicate and go to image > adjustments > brightness/contrast. Reduce brightness to -100 and up the contrast to +100. This will make the text completely black. Then using the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the layer down 2px and right 2px. Duplicate this layer and do the same. Keep repeating this until you have a kind of 3d shadow effect coming from the top text layer, which is still in tact. Finally merge all of these black text layers into one.

Step 16:

Now go to the layer blending options for this ‘black text’ layer and apply a white stroke, size=1, opacity=6%. You should get something like the outcome below:

Step 17:

Now paste onto a new layer an image of some sticky tape. Select the white background using the magic wand tool and delete it. Resize and move the tape to an appropriate place and reduce the layer’s opacity to 25%.

Step 18:

I wanted to add a little something to the background of my image, so I grabbed an awesome image of a paint splatter. Credit goes to Didi90, and the original image can be found here: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/906249. I pasted this paint splatter onto a new layer below my text layers, but above my original mould background.

And we’re done!

To blend the splatter image nicely I simply set the layer’s blending mode to ‘multiply’. I hope that you found this tutorial useful, and as always would love to see people recreate my work! Please click the image below if you would like to download the full sized version free!

Intro:

The outcome of this tutorial is pretty cool, but along the way a few things didn’t turn out quite how I expected. One of the things to learn from this tutorial is that with some creativity and a few cool Photoshop techniques it doesn’t matter if things don’t go your way, it’s important to learn to adapt with your designs.

Final Image:

Here’s the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up your background image, I’ve chosen a nice image of some crumpled paper as we’re going to be working with the watercolor medium.

Step 2:

Now I create a new layer and drag a radial gradient from the center of my image to the edge. The gradient is going from 0% opacity to 50% opacity dark brown.

Step 3:

Now I paste an image of a person into the center of my image. To make the image exactly central I go to magnify settings and then right click > fit to screen. When my entire image is displayed I simply paste my photo and it is pasted automatically into the center of my document.

Step 4:

Now I want to get rid of the white background around my photo. I try setting my layer’s mode to ‘multiply’ but it’s not quite good enough, leaving a faint white square around my image. Then I try using the magic wand tool, but the white edges of my photo get selected (the shoes and highlights on the guy’s hands). As a final resort I just cut the image out using the lasso tool:

Step 5:

Go to image > adjustments > brightness/contrast and then increase the brightness and contrast by +25.

Step 6:

Now I download a watercolor brush set from: http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-hi-res-watercolor-photoshop-brushes/. I create a new layer above my photo layer called ‘watercolor basics’. With opacity set to 35% (the brushes deault), and use the eyedropper tool and grab the color from various parts of my photo. Then I paint over each area very rougly. I tried to use different brushes to help distinguish each area. The outcome should look something like the image below. I’ve left the face area blank for reasons that you will see later in the tutorial.

Step 7:

Watercolor painting is all about layering, so it’s ok that the image looks very rough and unattractive so far… Next I create a layer called ‘watercolor rough darks’. I keep my brushes at 35% opacity as when layered on top of the existing watercolor layer it will darker and build up a nice watercolor effect. I concentrate on the dark parts of each area, and paint over them quite roughly, selecting my brush color using the eyedropper tool. I paint over the shadows of the clothes, shoes, hands, and hair, again leaving the face untouched. The result should look something like the image below, note that the original ‘watercolor basics’ layer, and photo layer have both been hidden to show the effect.

Step 8:

So what’s next? You guessed it! I create a layer called ‘watercolor rough lights’, and repeat the same technique, but painting over the lighter areas of the photo in a rough fashion. The image below shows the result of making all 3 watercolor layers visible: base, rough darks, and rough lights.

Step 9:

Now I create a new layer called ‘watercolor details’. I use the same technique as the previous layers, but use a much smaller brush and brush in details such as the shoe laces and defining lines between his clothes, sharp shadows etc… I also up the brushes opacity to around 60%. The trick here is to not try and be too fiddly, but to use large sweeping brush strokes that show where the original details are, but don’t simply trace over them.

Step 10:

So to recap where we’re are so far, the image below shows the original photo layer hidden, and all watercolor layers in tact. You can see that it still looks quite rough, but we’re really aiming for this kind of rough look, with some shape lines and details thrown in. A good idea is to keep hiding your water color layers and referring back to your original photo.

Step 11:

Now grab your photo layer and move it so that is is above all of your watercolor layers. Set the layer’s blending mode to ‘hard light’.

Step 12:

Now, this is the tricky part. You want to select the eraser tool, using one of the brushes from the watercolor set. Erase away various parts of your photo layer to reveal the watercolor layers underneath. Make sure to keep your face perfectly in tact. The trick here is to use various opacities in your erasing, to try and create subtle transitions between photograph and watercolor. Personally I wanted to keep the hands, face and shoes pretty much in touch, so I didn’t erase those much. However, I erased large parts of the legs and torso. I good idea is to work with the perspectives and layers of the photo. For instance, erase more of the red tshirt than the black top which goes over it. This way it creates the illusion that underneath the black top is a watercolor body. The stage below shows the image after using the eraser brush at 50% opacity. The image below that shows the watercolor layers hidden and the main photo layer after being partially erased.

Step 13:

I realize that my ‘watercolor details’ layer is too bold, and is taking away from some of the other layers. I reduce it’s opacity to around 40%

Step 14:

I don’t really like the hair in my image so far, so grab some more watercolor brushes, create a new layer called ‘hair’ and play around with applying some rough strokes.

Step 15:

I’m pretty happy with how the image is looking, particularly the lower part and the hands. However, the torso and especially the hair still isn’t looking right. I decide to try something a little different. I select some nice large watercolor brushes, up the opacity to 100% and apply large strokes over my image on a new layer called ‘hair new’. Notice how the tops of my large strokes are fitting roughly with where the guy’s hair is.

Step 16:

Now obviously we can’t have these large brush strokes overlapping out image and ruining it. I select my main photo layer, but because I don’t like the hair on it, I use the lasso tool to select the hair above his face and delete it. Then I select around the man using the magic wand tool. Then I go to select > inverse to invert my selection so that the man is selected. I then go back to my ‘hair new’ layer, and hit backspace, deleting the parts of the large brush strokes that overlap my photo. Finally, I move my original ‘hair’ layer above the ‘hair new’ layer, to add a little more definition to the general hair area.

Step 17:

The hair area still isn’t look good though. I like how the large brush strokes seem to be exploding outwards from the man, so decide to have some larger brush strokes seemingly pouring onto him from the top of the document. Remember to apply brush strokes on seperate layers, otherwise the opacities combine and you get an ugly black overlap between brush strokes.

Step 18:

Ok, I’m finally pretty happy with how the watercolor effect is looking. I create a text layer beneath the watercolor layers and photo layer, and create some centrally aligned text. I chose Tahoma, bold, with -100 kerning to replicate our logo. I position the text so that it slightly overlaps with my watercolor image. The transparency of the watercolor allows parts of the text show through, which creates quite a nice effect.

Step 19:

Next I add a quick tagline, and then create a new layer behind my text layers and apply a wash with a large brush at a low opacity.

Step 20:

Finally, to add to the watercolor theme, I select the letters of my ‘PSDFAN’ text using the magic wand tool. I then create a new layer above this one, and with the selection in place paint over the layers using a large white brush, with very low opacity. The brush will only paint inside the selected letters, and consequently a very nice effect is achieved.

And we’re done!

You can see the finished piece below. I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, and would love to know your thoughts on it.

Final Image

Here is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up a new document 600X600px in size and using the magnify tool select ‘fit to screen’. Then when the entire document is showing paste your image of a bottle and it will automatically be pasted on to a new layer and be positioned in the center of your document.

Step 2:

Select the white part of your image around the bottle using the magic wand tool and delete it. Then go to layer blending modes and using ‘color overlay’ overlay a solid black color over the bottle. This is really just so that the original bottle photo doesn’t distract from the rest of the work we’ll be doing, it’s nothing permanent.

Step 3:

Next select the Photoshop leaf textured brush from the brushes menu, with the settings shown below:

Step 4:

With a brush of hex code 98701A selected, drag your brush from the top of your bottle shape to the bottom. The leafs should be scattered as shown below:

Step 5:

Now drag up from the bottom to the top of the bottle using the same brush but with the hex code D9A943. Now drag back down using a hex code 473A1D brush. Now back up using a hex code 5C8121 brush. And finally back down using a brush with the hex code ADDA65. The result should be something like the image below:

Step 6:

Now to add some images around the bottle. I select a nice photo of a rhino (http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1028793) and paste the image onto a new layer ABOVE my bottle layer. Then I cut around the rhino using the lasso tool and get delete the white background, leaving only the animal remaning.

Step 7:

Now I resize my rhino using the transform tool and rotate it to fit in a nice position, being careful to slightly overlap the side of the bottle with the image. I also go to layer blending options and apply a gradient overlay, ranging from colors EDBC3A to B1840C.

Step 8:

Now use the same technique to place a palm tree over your bottle image.

Step 9:

Now I repeat the same technique, placing a beach umbrella, woman in a bikini, a cocktail glass and a guitar. I also select my palm tree layer and go to edit > transform > flip vertical, and then resize the tree to fit nicely below the original. I then duplicate this layer and move/rotate it to fit at the top of the bottle. You can experiment with different objects, but just remember to make the edge of each overlap with the bottle slightly.

Step 10:

The leaf pattern in the background is a little distracting right now, so I reduce the layer opacity to 65%

Step 11:

Now I find a great image of a cocktail glass after searching for ‘splash’. You can see the original photo here: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/577436. I paste the image onto a new layer above all my current layers and move it so that the splashing liquid is over my bottle/images surrounding it.

Step 12:

Now I changing the layer blending mode to ‘overlay’ and as you can see the splashes from the photo are combined nicely with the images below. Move the photo around until you are satisfied with the result.

Step 13:

Create a new top layer. Now select the radial gradient tool, and create a gradient ranging from colors CF9F0C to 8B5C00. Drag this gradient from the center to the edge of your image to achieve the effect below:

Step 14:

Now set the layer’s blending mode to overlay. This achieves a really nice effect, giving the images below far more saturation and intensity. What I was going for was a swirl of color and energy, with the movement of liquid being poured.

Step 15:

There were two leafs that looked a little out of place in the top-left of my image, so I simply went to the layer with my leaf pattern on, selecting these 2 leafs and deleted them.

Step 16:

Now I want to merge all of my layers together except the bottle layer. I can’t simply ‘merge down’ as this will mess up all of my layer blending modes, ruining the final effect. Instead, I simply hide my bottle layer, and then go to layer > merge visible. This will merge all of the layers that are visible, but not my bottle layer which has visibility turned off.

Step 17:

Now, because the background layer was visible, it was merged with the other layers. We don’t want to be editing a background layer, so I simply duplicate my background layer, creating a new layer that I can edit above my background layer. Then I go back to my background layer, select it all, hit delete to get rid of my original merged image and leave a plain white background. This way I have a new layer which is better to edit, and have reverted to my original white background layer. You can see the stages of this in my layers palette below:

Step 18:

Now I make my bottle layer visible again. I select the area around the bottle by clicking outside of the bottle shape using the magic wand tool. Then I go to select > inverse to invert my selection, leaving only the bottle shape selected. Then I go to my layer containing the cool splash image and hit delete, leaving a bottle shape in the middle of my splash. I go back to my bottle layer and make that invisible to let my image show through.

Step 19:

Now I create a custom shape in roughly the center of the bottle, and apply a gradient overlay in the layer blending options. I use the settings shown below:

And we’re done!

To finish it off I add a little text.

Intro:

For this tutorial we’ll be trying to replicate an awesome piece of photo manipulation suggested by one of our users. If you would like to see your suggestions made into a tutorial please drop me a comment here.

I’ll be the first to admit that this kind of thing is far from my area of expertise, and consequently I had no idea how this tutorial would turn out. Photo manipulation is very tricky, but hopefully this tutorial will teach the average Photoshop user some cool techniques to try and achieve a similar effect.

Finally, it should be pointed out that this is the longest and most complex tutorial I’ve ever written. You may be staring at the slow page load in horror, but please bear with it, as hopefully the outcome is worth the wait!

Final Image

Here is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up your image of a tree, making sure to crop and resize the image to fit nicely within your document.

Step 2:

Now, duplicate this background image so that you can retain your original tree photo should you happen to mess up anything in the next stages. Be sure to hide the original background photo layer.

THIS BIT IS IMPORTANT! – We are going to be using the extract tool, a very useful tool that may be new to many of you. Before you do anything else you have to watch this video in order to understand the next few stages of the tutorial. I could have posted a written version here, but the video is so clear and easy to understand I figured it would be more beneficial just to watch and duplicate it.

The 3 images below show the various stages of following the video link above.

Extracting edges. I’m using the highlighter tool within extract to select the edges of the part of my image that I want to extract. I’m also highlighting all of the tiny areas of the tree that are showing through parts of the sky, as I want my new background to show through these areas too.

I choose the ‘fill section’ tool within extract to retain the part of the image I want to keep:

This is my extracted image, now on a transparent background.

Again, if these steps don’t make sense to you, but sure to watch the video link provided at the start of Step 2.

Step 3:

When I try using the history brush to repair parts of my extracted image, I get a Photoshop error message “Could not use the history brush because the current canvas size idoes not match that of history state.”. This is pretty annoying, and none of the solutions I found to fix this problem seem to work. However, you’ll always run into problems in design, and the trick is to find an alternate solution to work around them!

To assess the damage that the extraction has caused I create a new layer below my extracted tree image layer and fill it with black. Surprisingly it doesn’t actually look too bad!

Step 4:

However, I want to tidy things up as much as possible. I start by selecting the eraser tool and getting rid of the object that looks like a lamp just to the left by my tree trunk. Then I use the clone stamp tool to duplicate solid areas of the tree and cover up most of the white patches left from the extraction. To use the clone stamp tool simply select it from the toolbar and hold ‘alt’ whilst clicking on a solid part of your tree, then click over a part that you want to repair. I also clone parts of the tree to cover up parts of the black background showing through, just because the edges here look a little jagged.

Step 5:

Now we want to liven up our tree image. Create a new layer above your tree layer called ‘tree colors’. Select a very large, soft brush, of color 81F8FF and apply it rough in the center of your tree image. Next apply a brush stroke 0697A0. Now apply two more brush strokes of color 062AA0 around the top left of your tree. Apply two brush strokes of color F2F460 to the bottom right of your tree. Two more brush strokes of color 925281 to the top right. Then finally 2 more to the left of your tree of color 6C9252. The outcome should look something like the image below:

Step 6:

Now reduce your brush strokes layer’s opacity to 70% and set the layer blending mode to ‘screen’.

Step 7:

Now go back to your tree image layer and select around your tree using the magic wand tool. Then go back to your brush strokes layer and delete this selection, leaving only brush strokes over your tree, not around it.

Step 8:

The brush strokes are a little intense so I reduce the layer’s opacity to 50%.

Step 9:

Now duplicate your ‘tree colors’ layer containing your brush strokes. Go to the layer blending options for the duplicate layer and set a color overlay to white.

Step 10:

Select a large, soft, eraser brush and erase most of your duplicated tree layer except for right at the very bottom, leaving the trunk completely in tact. Then up your layer’s opacity from 50% to 100% to create a nice silhuotte effect at the base.

Step 11:

Next, use the pen tool to create a nice curved line going across your image. I won’t go into how to use the pen tool in this tutorial, but if you’re not familiar with it here are some good tutorials for you to look at:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/basics/pen-tool-selections/
http://www.freetimefoto.com/photoshop/tool_box/shape_and_pen_tool.html
http://www.tutorial9.net/photoshop/pen-tool-basics-in-photoshop/

Step 12:

Now with your path tool selected right click somewhere on your path and click ‘stroke path’. Make sure that your brush tool is selected and that ‘simulated pressure’ is unchecked. You will end up with a nice white line like the image below.

Step 13:

Now go to the layer blending options and apply an outer glow with the settings shown below. Then reduce your layer’s opacity to 50%.

Step 14:

Now go to edit > transform>perspective and change the perspective so that the image appears close to you in the center, and then gets further away at the edges. Stretch your line wider if it moves away from the edges of your document.

Step 15:

Now duplicate this layer to create more lines, and then move them around, play with sizes, rotations and outer glow sizes until you have a real mixture of lines overlapping. I moved some of the line layers behind my tree image so that they appeared to be behind it. Some of my line layers I upped the layer opacity to make them stand out more.

Step 16:

Now hide all of your layers except your original background layer (the layer containing the original tree photo and field, sky etc…). Go to image > adjustments > desaturate to grayscale the layer. Then adjust the brightness/contrast and increase the contrast by 40.

Step 17:

Now go to image > adjustments > color balance and apply the settings shown below. The outcome is also shown below:

Step 18:

Make all of your hidden layers visible again, and then selecting the ‘black background’ layer that covers your original photo, use a large soft eraser brush to erase the black image, following the path lines and revealing the background beneath.

Step 19:

The bottom of the tree is looking a little dull, so to brighten it up I select the layer with the white color overlay which we were working with earlier and duplicate it 4 times. This builds up layers of white, making it overall brighter. Then I merge down until I just have one layer.

Step 20:

The image is looking ok so far, but I’m not happy with the background that was exposed by erasing the black layer. The horizon between field/sky in the background is distracting from my tree image and lines of light. I want to move my tree to the bottom right of my image, but remember that the final tree image consists of several layers. I want to retain each individual layer so can’t merge down, so I simply create a layer set containing all my different tree images and then select my entire set and move all images to where I want them.

Step 21:

I still don’t like the way that the sky is showing through in my background, so I select an area of my grass just before the horizon using the lasso tool and copy/paste it onto a new layer. I repeat this process until all parts of the sky/horizon are hidden, leaving just grass showing. These new images blend together pretty well, but to get rid of any subtle edges between them I merge them down into just one layer, and then select the smudge tool (10px brush, 25% opacity) to quickly smudge away any harsh edges.

Step 22:

Now I want to give the grass around my tree base some more light as this will be the lightest part of my end image. Simply go back to my ‘black background’ layer and use a soft eraser brush in a kind of oval shape around the base of my tree.

Step 23:

However, I don’t want the lines to continue right past the tree (well at least not all of them). I want some to stop at the base of the tree in a kind of light explosion, and a couple to continue past to the edge of the image. I select some of my pen line layers and just use the marquee selection tool to delete them from the point that they reach the tree.

Step 24:

Now I select a large, soft black brush and select my ‘black background’ layer. I paint over the right edge of my image, and reduce the amount of background showing through near the left edge of my ‘light lights’. The trick to achieving more realistic, subtle shadowing is to paint from the edge inwards, gradually reducing the opacity of your brush. So paint a brush stroke around the edge of your image at 100% opacity, then a step in reduced to 65% opacity, then again reduce to 30% opacity and so on. The end result is a far less harsh barrier between light/shadow. I’ve applied this effect to most of my image’s shadow, you can see the result below:

Step 25:

My light lines are looking a little flat and boring, so I change the outer glow on some of them to A2F3FD.

Step 26:

I really want my lines to look a lot busier, and less sparse than they currently are. Again, I don’t want to merge all my layers quite yet, so I group all of my light line layers in a layer set. Then I duplicate this entire layer set, and reduce the opacity of the bottom set to 25%, being sure to move it slightly upwards to fill some of the space.

Step 27:

Select a soft eraser brush (opacity 10%) and eraser parts of each light line. Pay particular attention to the curves that get further away from you.

Step 28:

I did a quick search for ‘pattern’ and found quite a nice retro image. I paste the image onto a new layer behind my tree layers and above my ‘black background layer’. Then I desaturate my image and go to image > adjustments > color balance and apply a subtle blue tint.

Step 29:

Then a select about 1/3 of the pattern from the left side using the marquee selection tool and go to edit > transform > skew, and move the corners upwards to create a cool perspective. I repeat this technique with the right third of my pattern image. The result is a nice 3d effect to my pattern.

Step 30:

Then a up the contrast by +50, reduce the opacity of the layer to 14%, reduce the saturation by -50 and use a large, soft eraser brush to erased away the edges and carefully blend the bottom of the pattern image into my grass background.

Step 31:

Now, you may have gotten the impression so far that I can’t stay put working on just one area of this image. You’d be right, I do like to dart around and work on one area a bit, then come back to it later. The important thing is that this just doesn’t matter too much with photo manipulation. Just work on an area until you get bored, and then feel free to come back to it later, just keep improving your image over time. So without further ado… I’m going to start making these ‘light lines’ look a little better!

A go to my brushes and select the stars brush set, applying the setting shown below:

Step 32:

I paint in some stars along various parts of my lines, and then apply an outer glow to my stars layer with the settings shown below. Finally I reduce the layer opacity to 60% and use a small eraser brush to reduce the number of stars showing, to make them stand out better.

Step 33:

Now using the path techniques demonstrated earlier create some small random lines around the base of your tree. Apply the outer glow settings shown below:

Step 34:

Now duplicate this new layer containing your small lines of light. Go to the original layer underneath your duplicate and reduce the layer opacity to around 25%. Then use the smudge brush (65% strength) to smudge the light lines upwards to the base of your tree. Change the outer glow color of your smudged layer to B4FDFD. Finally duplicate your layer containing the stars that you made earlier. Move this new layer above the layers containing your light lines at the base of your tree and up it’s opacity to 100%. Erase away any excess stars until you are satisfied with how things look.

Step 35:

Next go back to your original ‘tree’ layer (the layer containing the actual photo of your tree, the one below your color overlay effects layer). Select a soft white brush with the settings shown below and brush around the bottom leafs of your tree, paying particular attention to the area around the light explosion we’ve created around the trunk.

Step 36:

Now create a new layer called ‘light oval’. Create an oval shape using your circular selection tool and fill it with a radial gradient ranging from 100% white at the center to 0% green at the edges. I’ve positioned the result over the black background so that you can see it more easily.

Step 37:

Now go to edit > transform>perspective and warp the image so that it has similar perspective to the grass in your main background. Then just transform the image by stretching/resizing it until you have something like the image below:

Step 38:

Now move this layer below your ‘tree’ layer and position it so that the brightness part of your light oval is directly behind your light explosion at the base of the tree. Then simply reduce the layer’s opacity to 70% and use a soft eraser brush to get rid of any harsh edges caused by the oval. The result is that the grass in your background image appears to be being lit up by the light of your ‘light lines’.

Step 39:

Now I want to add some cool flowers and objects into the branches of my tree image. I paste in a picture of some flowers that I like:

Step 40:

I use the lasso tool to cut out each flower, and then resize my flowers and fit them nicely over my tree image. Finally I go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and then make the use -180 to give the flowers a nice purple tone.

Step 41:

Then I select a soft eraser brush (15px in size, 50% opacity) and gently erase parts of my flowers so that they appear to be coming out of the tree. Then I reduce my layer opacity to 78% to blend them better.

Step 42:

Now repeat this exact technique with other flowers that you add to your tree, just playing around with opacities, erasing, and hue.

Step 43:

I want to create an awesome background, so I paste in this great photo of some fireworks.

Step 44:

Now, obviously we don’t want our background covering up our entire image, so I move the background image below our tree layers and retro pattern layer, but above my ‘black background’ layer. I then reduce the layer opacity to 40%. Don’t worry about the image still being too imposed on our image, that will be sorted out shortly.

Step 45:

I go to layer>add layer mask>reveal all and drag upwards along my image using a black to transparent gradient. This masks off the bottom of my fireworks image, leaving only the top of it remaining.

Step 46:

I don’t want to have just a boring linear fade on my background image, so grab a large, soft, eraser brush with a 10% opacity and begin erasing parts of the background around my tree, this creates a nice radial fade in my background, drawing more attention to my tree image.

Step 47:

I want to add some lightning to my image, so select a nice photo and paste this onto a new layer set above all other layers.

Step 48:

I use the lasso tool to cut out the central bit of lightening, and then rotate it so that it is coming straight down into the center of my tree.

Step 49:

Then apply the outer glow settings shown below to achieve the outcome below:

Step 50:

Then to finish things off I reduce the width of my lightning to make it more realistic. I use a soft eraser brush to make it blend nicely into the top of my tree. Then I copy the bottom half of the lightning and position this down the middle of my tree. This way it looks as if one peice of lightning if going through my tree to create the huge light explosion at the base. I erase most of this second piece of lightning to make it look as if it is in the middle of the tree and not in front of it.

And we’re done!

To finish off the image I upped the contrast of my lightning background image by 10 and erased away most of the firework explosions as they were a bit distracted.

I really hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, and if you have any questions please let me know.

Final Image:

Here is the final image that we will be creating:

Step 1:

Open up a new document 1000px wide and 600px high. Then paste an image of a laptop into your document. Create a new layer set called ‘laptop’ and put the layer containing your laptop image into this layer set.

Step 2:

Now I want to create a vanishing point for the screen of the laptop. Many Photoshop users, including myself, don’t yet have Photoshop CS2 or CS3, so this tutorial won’t utilize the useful vanishing point filter available in these versions. Instead, we’re going to manually create a fake vanishing point.

Select the screen part of your laptop using the lasso tool. Then copy your selection, create a new photoshop document, and paste in the selection. Go to image>image size and double whatever your image size is. In this case the original screen was 204px wide, so I simply doubled this to 408px.

Then paste this new larger screen back into your original document. Positioning it roughly where you think it looks good in terms of perspective.

Step 3:

Now select your line tool and a nice bright color for it and draw lines each corner of your large screen through to the matching corner of the original screen and past to a vanishing point. Do this with each corner of the laptop screen, until you have something like the image below:

Step 4:

Now duplicate your larger laptop screen and select edit>free transform. Then in the menu near the top of your screen (see diagram below) change the W (width) and H (height) percentages from 100% to 90%.

Move this resized image so that it matches up with the perspective lines that you created earlier. Be sure to place this resized screen layer behind the largest screen layer but above your original laptop photo layer.

Repeat this process of duplicating/resizing/aligning using the resizing percentages of 80%, 70%, and 60% from your large screen layer. Remember that your original laptop photo is 50% of this large screen layer.

This is how your image should look after you have created this new screens and lined them up correctly:

Step 5:

Now create a new layer set called ‘photo 1′. Paste in the image that you want to manipulate. View a grid over your image and then use the free transform tool to resize your photo to fit nicely into the grid squares. Make sure that the photo fits into an even number of grid squares for it’s height and width. In this example the photo is resized to be 8 grid squares wide and 6 high.

Step 6:

Now duplicate your photo layer, as you want to retain a copy. Be sure to hide the duplicate layer and go back to your original. Select your single column marquee tool from your selection palette (it’s under the Rectangle and Elliptical marquee tools). Using your grid click the grid line that marks the center point of your image and delete a central 1px column. Then switch to the single row marquee tool and do the same to delete a 1px line across the center of your image. You want these lines to be a little larger than 1px though, so grab your magic wand tool and click somewhere outside of your photo image. This will select all of the area surrounding the photo, but also the 1px lines cutting through it. Then go to select>modify>expand and expand the selection by 3px. Then hit delete to achieve an effect like the image below:

Step 7:

Now hide all of your duplicate laptop screens except the smallest one (the one that is 60% of the size of your largest). With your photo layer selected (the one you’ve just cut up using the grid) go to edit>transform>distort and distort the photo so that it fits exactly over this smallest laptop screen image. To fit it well you make need to reduce the layer’s opacity to allow the screen underneath to show though. The image below shows the transformed photo layer at 57% opacity, allowing some of the screen underneath to show through. Be sure to move this photo layer below the next largest laptop screen layer, so that it is mostly covered by it.

Step 8:

Now go back to your original photo layer. Duplicate it again, and using the same technique as before with the single row/column marquee tools cut it into 2X2 squares using the grid. As the image is 8 squares wide and 6 high, this will result in 12 squares each 4 grid squares in size. Again, use your magic wand tool to select the area around the photo and the lines cutting through it, then expand your selection by 3px and hit delete. Then use the distort transform tool to fit your new image to the 2nd smallest laptop screen. Remember again to move this photo layer behind the next largest laptop screen layer. The image below shows the result of this, with the photo layer again at 57% to allow me to nicely fit it to the screen image beneath.

Step 9:

Now repeat these steps, but make your squares half the size each time. So using the grid that will then be 1X1, 1/2X1/2, 1/4X1/4. To cut the photo into 1/2 and 1/4 grid square pieces I would recommend just using your judgement, but if you want to be really picky you can use rulers. Another tip is to duplicate the photo after cutting it into the squares, as this will save you having to repeat the slicing process right from the start each time.

Step 10:

Here is the same image but with all duplicate laptop screen image layers hidden and all photo layer’s with 100% opacity.

Step 11:

Now is the time-consuming part. Hide all of your photo layers except for your smallest photo layer. Use your magic wand tool set at 255 tolerance to select entire squares and delete them to leave a checkerboard effect. To do this simply go down each column deleting squares, being sure to leave a square remaining between each two that you delete. Then move onto the next column and repeat, but make sure that no squares you delete are next to an already deleted square, deleted squares should be diagonal to each other. The image below shows the various stages of doing this with each photo layer:

Step 12:

You should still have your original photo layer, as it was duplicated for safe keeping near the start of the tutorial. Duplicate the layer again, and move it so that it is the first layer above your laptop image layer. Then go to edit>transform>distort and fit the photo nicely over the laptop screen. Then hide all of your vanishing point guidelines and make sure that all of your checkerboard photo layers are visible. Seeing as all these layers are within the same layer set select the layer set and drag it to make the graphic more central in your document.

Step 13:

Right click on one of your photo squares layers and click blending options. Apply the drop shadow settings shown below. Then once this has been applied right click on the drop shadow shown in your layers palette, select ‘copy layer style’ and paste the layer style to all of your other photo squares layers. The outcome is shown below:

Step 14:

Now create a new layer set below your laptop/photos layer set called ‘background’. Hide your laptop/photos layer set. Create a new layer and fill it with a white to light gray radial blur.

Step 15:

Paste a metal texture onto a new layer above your radial gradient layer and reduce it’s opacity to 20% for a subtle textured effect.

Step 16:

Now create some bendy lines across your background using the pen tool. Be sure to have a white 1px brush selected and then once you have created your bendy pen line right click on it and select ‘stroke path’. Then simply duplicate your line layer until you have multiple white lines across your background. I merged all of my line layers together and reduced the merged layer opacity to 30% for a more subtle effect.

And we’re done!

To finish things off I added some cool text. Click the image below if you want the full sized version.

Intro:

Today’s tutorial will be slightly shorter than most that I write, but I feel that it shows some really useful techniques that are worth learning.

Final Image

This is the final image that we are going to be created:

Step 1:

Create a new document and paste in a photo of a woman’s face. Make sure that it’s roughly centrally aligned.

Step 2:

Now grab an image of an ink splatter and paste it into your document. Drag the image so that the main part of the splatter goes over the woman’s eye. It’s very important that your splatter is black on a white background, and that the contrast is set to +100.

Now we want to cut out the ink splatter from it’s background. This would be impossible using the lasso or magic wand selection tools, so I go to select > color range and then choose ‘shadows’ and make sure that ‘selection’ is checked. Photoshop then automatically selects the black parts of my image – in this case the paint splatter. It’s very important to hide the layer containing the photo of the woman, as the color range selection will pick up the dark parts of this image despite it being on a different layer. Also, be sure to check ‘invert’ so that the selected area is your white background and not the ink splatter, this way you can simply hit delete and delete the area around the splatter.

Step 3:

Then duplicate your ink splatter layer and go to edit > transform > flip horizontal. Move the flipped image so that it covers the woman’s other eye.

Step 4:

Now find other images of ink splatters and position them over the nose/mouth and between the eyes. When you’ve done this merge all of your ink splatter layers together and then using the color range technique select the area around them. Then go to select > save selection and save it as ‘splatter’.

Step 5:

Hide your ink splatter layer and select the layer with the photo of the woman. Load your ‘splatter’ selection then hit delete achieve the outcome below:

Step 6:

Now create a new layer called ‘watercolor’ and select a set of watercolor brushes set at black, 100% opacity. Paint over your photo until it’s covered:

Step 7:

Then increase the contrast by 100 and set the layer’s blending mode to overlay, and opacity to 50%. Load your ‘splatter’ selection and hit delete to delete the parts of the watercolor brushes going past your photo of the woman.

Step 8:

Now go back to your ink splatter layer which has been hidden. Make it visible again and move it below your photo layer and watercolor overlay layer. Then go to edit > transform > rotate and rotate it round like this:

Step 9:

Now go to layer blending options and apply a color overlay effect of the color AEDF43.

Step 10:

Now duplicate your layer and go to edit > transform > rotate 180 degrees. Change your color overlay color to B75CBD.

And we’re done!

To finish up add a paper texture as a background and paste in a photo of a paintbrush to complete the arty look.

I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, and as always I’d love to hear what you think!

Final Image:

This is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up a new document, 600X600px. Create a new layer called ‘background’ and select filter>render>clouds.

Step 2:

Go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and lower the brightness to -100 and the contrast to -75. Then go to the layer’s blending options and apply a gradient overlay effect ranging from 080F1A to 162A4B. Set the blend mode of the gradient to ‘overlay’ and make it’s opacity 90%. The outcome should look like the image below:

Step 3:

Paste a photo of a cool looking car into the center of your image. Cut it out from it’s background using the magic wand tool or lasso tool (whichever you prefer) and be sure not to leave any harsh edges. I had to go in with the lasso tool and cut away very thin remains of my white background so that it blended better with my dark image background.

Step 4:

Now I want to change the color/appearance of my car, so I go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and then increase the hue by 73, the saturation by 65 and reduce the lightness by -18 to achieve the effect below:

Step 5:

This is looking better, but obviously the window is wrong. I want a dark window, and so using the lasso tool select around my window shape. Then I go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and decrease the brightness to -100 and the contrast to -75.

Step 6:

Now to give the car a little more contrast and shadow I select the wheels and headlights and reduce the brightness to -35 and up the contrast to +15. To select the wheels I use my elliptical marquee tool and drag my cursor out from the center of each wheel whilst holding shift+alt (this creates a perfect circle).

Step 7:

Now paste in a photo of a man’s torso (without clothes).

Step 8:

Now cut out the arms from the man using the lasso tool and resize/rotate them to fit nicely around the car. It should ideally look like the arms are hugging the car. Be sure to delete the parts of the arms overlapping near the front of the car, but leave the hands/wrists in tact near the back so that they are overlapping the vehicle.

Step 9:

Now desaturate your arm layers and reduce the brightness/contrast of the bottom arm so that it’s lighting matches the top arm better (before it was far too light as the man was being lit from one side in the original photo).

Step 10:

Now go to image>adjustments>color balance for your arm layers and for shadows/midtones/highlights make it around 0 on the Cyan/Red level, around +25 on the Magenta/Green level and around +40 on the Yellow/Blue level. You’ll need to play around with these figures a little but this is a rough guide. Make sure ‘Preserve Luminosity’ is checked.

Step 11:

Now we want these arms to be a bit more subtle, and not obviously arms at first glance. I go to brightness/contrast adjustments and reduce the brightness to -75 for each layer, and then the contrast to -25.

Step 12:

Now I select the layer containing my top arm and use a large, soft eraser brush to brush away most of the hand, letting it slowly fade into the car instead of looking too obvious and imposing.

Step 13:

Just to make my car photo a little sharper I select it’s layer and reduce the brightness by 12 and up the contrast by 5.

Step 14:

Now I duplicate my car photo layer and move the duplicate layer above the original and my arm photo layers. I go to filter>blur>motion blur and use a horizontal blur applied at 355px in strength.

Step 15:

I go back to my original car layer and using the magic wand tool select the area around my car image. Then I invert my selection to be selecting my car. Then I go to my motion blurred car layer and hit delete, deleting the part of the blur that covers my car, and leaving the blur either side.

Step 16:

To make the edges of my arms stick out a little more I apply a 1px light blue drop shadow (10% opacity) to my bottom area to emphasize this bottom edge. Then to achieve the same effect with the top edge of the top arm I apply a 1px light blue inner shadow (10% opacity).

Step 17:

Now I duplicate my original car layer and go to edit>transform>flip vertical. I move the flipped car image down near the bottom of my image and using edit>distort drag out the bottom corners of my image to create a kind of perspective.

Step 18:

I then reduce this layer’s opacity to 4% and using a layer mask (reveal all) drag a black to white gradient downwards to fade away the bottom part of the image.

And we’re done!

To finish off I apply some text to the top of my image and in the layer’s blending options apply a light blue outer glow (opacity: 20, spread: 10, size: 21).

As always please let me know what you thought of this tutorial and I’d be happy to explain anything about it personally

Final Image:

This is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up a new document, 80X600px and paste in an image of a swan.

Step 2:

Cut the swan out from it’s background using the lasso tool, or whichever tool you might prefer. Position the cutout so that the bottom part of the swan is cut off, and the image is positioned in the bottom-left of your document.

Step 3:

Now do the same with an image of a bride. After cutting out the bride I went to edit>transform>flip horizontal so that she was facing away from the swan. Don’t worry about the photo’s original background showing through the semi-transparent veil, we’ll fix that later. Be sure to duplicate both your swan/bride layers and hide the originals just in case we need them later.

Step 4:

Now grab your pen tool, and make sure that ‘paths’ not ‘shape layers’ is selected (see image below).

Then create a path along the top line of the swan’s wing, as shown below.

Then with a dark gray, 1px brush selected right click on your path and select ‘stroke path’ with simulate pressure unchecked. Then delete your path, to leave a 1px line following the top contour of the swan’s wing.

Step 5:

Now repeat this technique of drawing and stroking paths, and be sure to leave the right edges of the wings open, don’t close them off. The images below show the paths with the photo layer visible and invisible.

Step 6:

The skin of the bride was looking a little orange so I select my ‘bride’ layer and go to adjustments>hue/saturation and reduce the saturation of my image by 30.

Step 7:

Now with your bride layer still selected click on the area surrounding her and also the space between her arm/body. Then go to select>inverse to invert the selection, leaving only the bride selected. Then select a medium sized soft brush and set the brush mode to ‘saturation’, set it’s opacity to around 70%. Then carefully brush over her veil. This technique will get rid of the blueness that was previously showing through due to the sky background in the original photo. Then with your selection in place change your brush to ‘color dodge’ and reduce it’s opacity to around 30-40%. Then brush over your veil. The veil will now have less saturation and will blend nicely with the rest of your image.

Step 8:

Now create a new top layer called ‘bride pen lines’. Repeat the path/line technique on the left side of the bride, paying particular attention to her veil and the edges of her dress. Remember to make sure that you have a 1px dark gray brush selected again for stroking your paths. The images below show the paths in place with the photo layer visible and invisible.

Step 9:

Now the tricky part. We need to join the lines between the swan and the bride. Create a new top layer called ‘joining lines’. Then drag your pen line from one point to the other as shown before. But this time, don’t let go of your mouse button after clicking your second anchor point, instead move your cursor about to bend the line you’ve created, and do this until it creates a nice arch between your two photos. Repeat this until you’ve joining up most of your lines between the swan/bride. If you remember, I said it was important now to close off the lines for either image, and this step shows you why. We want the lines of each photo not to end where the photos end, but to continue to the other photo.

Step 10:

Now, as you can see there are many lines on the swan’s wing and bride’s veil that haven’t been linked up, their positions just don’t fit. What we want to do here is continue their lines, but not make them join with the other image, simply make them continue to the edge of our document. Firstly, create a new layer called ‘swan lines behind bride’, making sure that this layer is positioned below your bride photo layer. Then you guessed it, create some large arching lines that bottom behind your bride right to the edge of your main image.

Step 11:

Now create a new layer above your bride photo layer called ‘bride veil lines’. Repeat the same technique, but this time drag lines from the veil of your bride right to the edge of your main image.

Step 12:

Now repeat this technique once again for the second wing of the swan, on a new layer called ‘swan wing 2′. Make sure that this layer is below the swan photo layer. What you should have now is one hell of a lotta lines!

Step 13:

Now select your swan photo layer and select a large, soft eraser brush with a low opacity (around 10%). Begin erasing away the edges of your wings, creating a subtle transition between photo and path lines. Repeat the same technique for the bride, erasing away the left edge of her to create a smooth transition between photo and path lines. The end result should look something like this:

Step 14:

Now select your ‘swan wing 2′ layer, and go to layer > create layer mask > reveal all. Create a gradient ranging from black to white and drag it across your image. This will fade away the lines coming out of your second swan wing, and reduce some of the busyness of the image.

Step 15:

Now repeat the same process for the ‘bride veil lines’ and ‘swan lines behind bride’ layers, fading them out using layer masks. The result should be something like the image below:

Step 16:

Now paste in your original swan photo layer (it should be very large) and move this below all other layers so that it makes up your background layer. Make it so that the swans wings comprise most of your background.

Step 17:

Now go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and reduce the brightness to -100 and contrast to -65.

Step 18:

Now reduce all pen line layers opacities to 60%.

Step 19:

Now go to the following pen line layers

> swan wing 2
> bride veil lines
> swan lines behind bride

and duplicate them. Move the duplicate layer below the original and then apply the outer glow effects shown below. The outcome of doing this is also shown below. It’s very important to remember to duplicate each layer AND move it below the original though. Remember also to only apply this layer effect to the 3 layers listed above, and not the other 3 layers.

Step 20:

Now select the 3 layers that weren’t given an outer glow, they should be above all of your other layers:

> pen lines swan
> pen lines bride
> joining lines

up their layer opacities to 90%

Step 21:

Now I select a small smudge brush at 50% strength and select each outer glow line layer. I then smudge each glowing line into the line it joins, to create a smoother barrier between the two. Then I select a large, soft eraser brush and erase parts of my outer glow layers that are looking too bright until the image looks right.

And we’re done!

To finish things off I reduce the original photo layers opacities to around 65% and add some simply text.

Final Image:

This is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1:

Open up a new 600X600px document and paste in an image of a girl. I used the great photo taken by ‘binababy12′, you can see the original here: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/931368. Make sure that her face is fully showing and that her fringe is also there. Resize and move the image to be in about the size/position shown below. Call this layer ‘girl photo’.

Step 2:

Create a new layer called ‘girl face’ and use the lasso tool to select around the girls face and ears. Be sure to select around the hair and fringe (‘bangs’ for any American readers). Then use the eye dropper tool to select an average shade of her face and fill in your selection.

Step 3:

Now hide your face layer and create a new layer called ‘girl eyes’. Select around one of her eyes using the lasso tool and then fill it with black. Then turn your layer’s visibility off and with the original photo showing through select the white parts of her eye (including the tiny white dot of her pupil). Then make your layer visible again and hit delete to delete this part of your black ‘girl eyes’ layer. Then create a new layer behind this layer but above your ‘girl face’ layer called ‘girl eyes white’ and you guessed, it use the lasso selection/fill tools to fill in the whites of her eyes. You can see some of the stages of this below as well as the result with ‘girl face’ layer made visible.

Step 4:

Now repeat this same technique. First create a new layer called ‘girl nostrils’ and use the selection, eye dropper and fill tools to fill in her nostrils. Then create a new layer behind this layer called ‘girl nose shadows’ and fill in the darker parts of her nose’s structure. Using the eye dropper tool for the nose’s shadows made it look too dark, so I reduced the ‘girl nose shadows’ layer’s opacity to around 30%. Then to give the nose a little more definition I create a new layer called ‘girl nose define’ which I positioned between my nostrils and nose shadows layers. I simply hid my current nose layers and face layer and then select the defining lines of the nose from the original photo. You can see the stages of this below:

Step 5:

Then I repeated the same technique for the lips, adding base color, defining lines and then shadows and highlights. You can see the stages of their construction below:

Step 6:

Now I repeat the same technique and add eyebrows and lines between her face and ears. With the right eyebrow I’m careful to avoid where her hair line is, and simply select the parts of her eyebrow showing around it. I reduce the opacity of both eyebrow and face/ear line layers until it looks right.

Step 7:

Ok so great! The face is done, now time for some funky hair. I create a new layer called ‘girl hair’ below my face layer. I select the pen tool, and make sure that ‘paths’ is the setting. Then I create anchor points spanning out sideways from about the height of the girls nose. I aim for a nice wavy outline, and am sure to make my path go beyond the sides/top of my document. Then I go to my paths, and choose ‘load path as a selection’. Once I have my selection I fill it with a gradient ranging from 270F53 to A723D2. This looks pretty cool, but I’m not happy with the shape. So I select my path tool again and change the shape, cutting out some cool stray hair parts.

Step 8:

Now create a box at the bottom half of your screen and fill it with a gradient ranging from 7A3700 to C77E29.

Step 9:

Now add some large, chunky text. Make sure that it’s white and that you move it so that it goes into your white background a little:

Step 10:

Now duplicate your text layer and move the duplicate below the original. Rasterize it, and go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast. Reduce the brightness to -100 and up the contrast to 100 to make the text black. Then using your keyboard cursors move the layer 1px down and 1px right. Duplicate this layer and move it 1px down, 1px right again. Repeat this until you have a kind of 3d effect moving downwards/right at a 45 degree angle. Now merge all of these duplicate black text layers. Then go to layer blending options and give this merged layer a gradient overlay ranging from 2F1500 to 5E2A00.

Step 11:

Now move your gradient box and text layers right beneath all layers containing parts of your vector girl illustration. Paste a new layer above these layers that contains some kind of summery imagery. Go to image>adjustments>brightness/contrast and up the brightness by 85% and the contrast by 25%.

Step 12:

Now paste in a large paper texture, position it over your summer image. Then set the blend mode to overlay and merge the two layers.

Step 13:

Now hide this merged layer and select your ‘crazy hair is back’ text layer (the text layer not the 3d shadow layer. Rasterize the layer. Then select around the text using the magic wand tool. DO NOT select the inside spaces of your letters. Fill your selection with an obvious color (I chose red). Then reduce the layer’s opacity so that you can see the gradient box below and select the area of red above the gradient box, then delete it.

Step 14:

Now with your magic wand select the red area, as well as the area between letters (but not the spaces within the letters – such as the two gaps within B or the gap within A). Then with this selection in place hide your red fill layer and select your summer image layer. Hit delete. This should leave you with some really cool text that has the fill of your summer image, including the cool paper texture overlay.

Step 15:

The gradient on the hair isn’t really going with the rest of the image, so I apply a gradient overlay to the layer, ranging the gradient from 99CCF3 to 62B2EF.

Step 16:

Now the gradients in the hair, text shadow 3d area and gradient box at the bottom are looking a little sleek when compared to the paper texture in the rest of the poster. I paste in my paper texture just above the ‘girl hair’ layer, making sure to duplicate the layer and hide the original. Then I make the layer invisible, select around the hair shape using my magic wand tool and then select my paper layer again and hit delete to leave a paper image in the shape of the girl’s hair. Then I set the layer blending mode to overlay and reduce it’s opacity to 40%. I repeat the same technique for the 3d text shadow and gradient box. Remember that you kept your original paper texture layer, so you can duplicate this again and use the original/duplicate for these other two areas.

Step 17:

Now I want to give the hair area one last final bit of texture. I paste in a free image of a sunburst that I found on a new layer above my ‘paper texture hair’ layer. Then I desaturate it and cut it out to fit the hair shape using the steps shown previously in this tutorial. Finally I set the layer’s blend mode to ‘overlay’.

And We’re Done!

Here is the finished design! I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial and would love to know your thoughts on it.