Here is a preview of the final image for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Ground

City

Cloud Right

Cloud Left

Cloud Overlay

Girl

Watercolor Brushes

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1200px * 1200px, fill the background layer with Black colour. Load the Ground stock image into Photoshop, select the lower half of the image with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection onto our canvas, as shown below:

Erase the top edges of the texture, as shown below:

Name this layer as “Ground”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Load the City texture into Photoshop, select the building portion of the image as shown below:

Don’t worry if the selection is not precise, this is not important in this tutorial.

Copy and paste the selection onto our canvas, resize and position the new layer as shown below:

Now we want to hide certain portion of the city building. So we can add the following mask to this city building layer:

As you can see, here we not only used a soft round brush, but also the Watercolor Brushes we downloaded before for the edges of the building, plus a feathered rectangular marquee tool:

and here is the effect after the masking:

Name this layer as “City”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

Load the Cloud Right stock image into Photoshop, copy the entire image, and paste it onto our canvas.

Put the new layer below the “City” layer, resize and position the new layer as shown below:

Add the following layer mask to this cloud layer:

Name this layer as “Cloud Right”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

Duplicate this cloud right layer once, apply the following motion blur to the duplicated layer:

This will smoothen the cloud and add a bit more motion into the image.

Apply the same black and white adjustment layer as depicted in the original cloud right layer to the duplicated layer, reduce the opacity of the duplicate to around 40%, you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Load the Cloud Left texture image into Photoshop. Select a portion of texture with Lasso Tool (50px feather) as shown below:

Copy and paste the selection onto our canvas, put the layer above the “Cloud Right” layer, but below the “City” layer, resize it as shown below:

Erase the excessive portion with a soft brush as shown below:

Name this layer as “Cloud Left”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

here is the effect so far:

Step 5

Load the Girl texture image into Photoshop. Use the Lasso Tool to make a selection around the girl and the snake, as shown below: (set feather to 40px)

Copy and paste the selection onto our canvas, put the new layer above all other layers, resize and position it as shown below:

Name this layer as “Girl”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

and here is the effect so far:

Step 6

Load the Cloud Overlay texture image into Photoshop, copy and paste the entire image onto our canvas, as shown below:

Name this layer as “Cloud overlay”, apply the following Black and White adjustment layer to it: (make sure to tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

Change the blending mode of this layer to “Screen” and opacity to 30%, you will have the following effect:

Cloud overlay is a perfect way to add lighting dynamics and increase the depth for your image. Experiment with it and you will find it very useful when it comes to add extra flavor to your design.

Step 7

Now we pretty much set the overall layout for this city scene. Now we add some more contrast and colour onto it to make it look sci-fi.

Add the following adjustment layers (and their relevant masks) on top of all layers:

Curves

Mask

Attention: for the following 2 colour balance adjustment layer, use the watercolour brushset on the mask for more painting and realistic effect.

Colour Balance Right (set blending mode to “soft light”)

Mask

Colour Balance Rest of the image

Mask

Levels

Mask

and here is the effect so far:

Step 8

We’re nearly finished! I decided to add more contrast to the left side of the image, especially on the left edge of the high-rise in the centre. So I further added the following two adjustment layers:

Hue and Saturation

Mask

Brightness and Contrast

Mask

and here is the effect so far:

You can see now the building is highlighted and as a result, the image has more lighting depth.

Step 9

I feel the right side of the image is a bit boring compare with the left. So I create a new layer on top the background layer, and use the water colour brush to paint some textures on the centre right portion, beneath the buildings:

And you will have the following effect as a result:

That’s it for this tutorial! I sharpen the image with the “Reduce Noise” filter and add some abstract lines on the girl, and here is my final result: (click to enlarge)

Lastly, I would like to stress that you will find the “Black and White” filter and the “Water Colour” style brushsets will be extremely useful when it comes to photo manipulation. Experiment with them :)

Till next time, have a great day!

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

OK let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Beach

Mountain

Girl

Planet

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1400px * 800px, leave the background layer as white, load the “Beach” image into Photoshop. Copy and paste the entire image onto our document, resize it as shown below:

The reason we do is that we only want the sand portion of the image to show at this stage, and we will manipluate the cloud portion later on in the tutorial.

Name this layer as “beach”, add the following mask to hide the sky/cloud portion on this layer:

and here is the effect after applying this layer mask:

Add the following three adjustment layers on top of this “beach” layer:

Black and white

Set blending mode to “Soft Light” for this black and white adjustment layer.

Curves

Colour Balance

Here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Now we can tackle the sky/cloud portion of the image. We use the same texture as in the previous step, but this time we select a portion of the sky and paste it onto our canvas.

To add variartion to the image, I copy and paste two different portion of the sky onto our canvas: (One to the left, the other one to the right)

Use a soft brush to erase the edge of the sky to blending them together:

Add the following adjustmnet layer to the sky to the left:

I know when I add the mountain texture later on, the right side of the skpe will probably be covered be the mountain, the left side will therefore become a light source, so the adjustment layer is to emphasise this portion.

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

Load the “Girl” texture into Photoshop, cut out the girl using whatever selection method you prefer (don’t worry about the edge) and paste it onto the canvas as shown below:

Create a new layer on top of the girl layer called “shadow”, set the blending mode to “Soft Light” and opacity to around 60%, use a soft brush with black colour  to paint some shadow under the girl and to the right, as shown below:

Add another layer on top of the shadow layer called “light”,set the blending mode to “soft light” and opacity to 60%, this time use a soft round brush with White Colour and do a single click in the position as shown below:

and here is the overall effect so far:

Step 4

Load the “Mountain” texture into Photoshop, select the mountain portion of the image as shown below: (I used the Quick Selction Tool)

Copy the selection and paste it onto our canvas, name this new layer as “mountain right”, erase the edges with a soft eraser, as shown below:

Add the following two adjustment layers to this mountain right layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Curves

Colour Balance

add the following layer mask to the colour balance adjustment layer: (this will hide the rest the layer, and leave only the river portion)

Duplicate the “mountain right” layer once and drag it to the top, flip it horizontally and drag it to the left hand side of the canvas, erase the right and top edges as shown below:

Add the following two adjustment layers to this mountain right layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Curves

here is the effect so far:

Step 5

Now we can do some tweaks so each of the objects blend together with each other. Add the following adjustment layers (and their relevant layers masks) on top of all layers:

Vibrance

Colour Balance

Mask:

Curves

Mask

Of course with the colour balance layer, you can try out your own colour combination and see what result that brings you.

Optionally, you can add one more colour balance layer on top and add some warm colours on the bottom. Here are my settings for the second colour adjustment layer:

Mask:

and here is the overall effect so far:

Step 6

Load the planet stock image into Photoshop, cut out the plaent and paste it onto our canvas in the position as shown below:

Apply the following mask to this planet layer:

Change the blending mode to “Soft Light” and reduce the opacity to 50%, you will have the following effect:

Step 7

We can add some misty/fog effect on the image – instead of using textures, we use this fractal brushset to paint some texture around the image, as shown below: (paint on a new layer, with soft light blending mode and a 30-50% opacity)

Hint: try to mix the Warp Tool (Ctrl + T and right-click to choose warp) and the fractal brushset for better effect:

Of course you’re free to experiement and paint those fogs in a different position :)

Step 8

Now we’re pretty much done! However we can add some final adjustments to the image.

We simply flatten the image, duplicate the background layer, and apply the following High Pass filter to the duplicated layer:

Change the blending mode to “Hard light”, you will find your effect become sharpened and clearer:

That’s it! I also tried to add some colour to the image by having one more Colour Balance adjustment layer, with the following settings:

Mask

You can also try out adding more adjustment layers such as Curves or Levels to add more lighting contrast.

and here is the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hopefully you learn something out of it and find it inspirational!

Cheers and have a great day!

In this post, I will show you yet another 5 Interesting Little Photoshop Tricks to Add Extra Elegance to Your Design. These techniques are just little things that I found useful in Photoshop, and I think they’re quite beneficial to learn if you’re a PS beginner. So go ahead and have a try!

The 5 topics I will cover in this post:

1. Create 3D Stripes
2. Make Your Text Look Clearer with Stroke
3. Use Smart Sharpen Filter to add final touches
4. A Quick Way of Enhancing Lighting Contrast to Your Image
5. The Use of Highpass Filter – Another Way of Sharpen Your Image

Create 3D Stripes

Create a new document sized 800 x 600px, fill the background layer with a light colour as shown below:

Create a new layer on top of the background layer and set its blending mode to “soft light”, grab a big soft white brush and do a single click here:

Create a new layer called “stripe upper” and fill it with dark brown colour:

Apply the following gradient overlay settings to this layer:

Duplicate this layer once and rename the duplicated layer “stripe lower”, resize it and fill it with a light green colour:

Apply the following layer blending options to this layer:

and you will have the following effect:

Create a new group called “stripes” and put those two layer into it, duplicate the group and use the free transform tool to distort the whole group as shown below:

Hint: first resize it to a narrower size, then distort.

Duplicate the original stripe group once more, and put the duplicated group on the top, drag it to the left as shown below:

Now there is the intersting bit – because the light source is from the right, so we need to reduce the brightness of the middle distorted part. To do this, simply merge the two stripes layers of the centre bit, apply the following brightness and contrast adjustment to it:

and you will see the following effect:

and here is the overall effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it! Hopefully this will be use to you when it comes to adding depth to your web design.

Make Your Text Look Clearer with Stroke

Making your text look more attractive is always a great way to focus user’s attention (especially on websites). But apart from adding all sorts of drop shadow, inner shadow, bevel and emboss effect, have you considered just to use the “Stroke” blending option?

Now create a new document size 250 x 120px, fill the background layer with a light blue to dark blue gradient, as shown below:

Download a copy of this font and type some text onto it: (or you can try out differernt font if you like)

Now go to the blending options of this text layer, apply the following “Stroke” settings to it:

Hint: with the colour, choose a darker blue.

You will have the following effect:

You can the text looks better and clearer. The trick is that when you choose the colour of the stroke, always choose one that is slightly darker than the background colour.

I guess this is epecially great way to increase the clarity of the text when it comes to making web graphics.

Use Smart Sharpen Filter to add final touches

Download a copy of this model image and load it into Photoshop. As you can see this stock looks great originally, however you can probably sense that there is still thing you can do to improve it a bit.

Now let’s pretend this is a photo you have already done the majority of the retouch, and you feel there is something short. So go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen and apply this following settings:

Please make sure you choose “Advanced” instead of the default “Basic”.

Sharpen

Shadow

Highlight

And once you apply the smart sharpen shettings, you will see we brought that extra bit of detail out of the image. Belows are screenshots pointing out the areas which we can see improvements:

And here is a before and after comparison of the image:

Before

After (click to enlarge)

Of course the above smart sharpen settings are not applicable to every image, you will have to adjust them to suit your need in different cases. Experiment with them :)

A Quick Way of Enhancing Lighting Contrast to Your Image

Now we continue from the previous step – sometimes you will find although the light in the image looks quite good, you feel there is still area that you want to add more contrast to it. Here is a simple way to do it:

Create a new layer on top of every other layer, grab a soft brush (0% hardness) with black colour, do a few clicks in the areas you would like to enhance the lighting contrast:

Change the blending mode of the new layer to “overlay” or “soft light”, you will have the following effect: (click to enlarge)

You can use this method to add lighting contrast to lots of occasions, but make sure not to overdo it :)

The Use of Highpass Filter – Another Way of Sharpen Your Image

Here is a clever use of the highpass filter (which I guess most of you haven’t really use if much before) – use it to sharpen your image!

Downlaod a copy of this image and load it into Photoshop. Duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Other > High Pass and apply the following settings:

Change the blending mode of this layer to “Hard Light” and reduce its opacity to around 20%. Here is a before and after comparison:

Before

After (click to enlarge)

One thing I like about using this method is that the sharpen can be undone, due to the fact that the seperate layer was created. And the effect can be controlled by adjusting the layer opacity.

OK that’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful!

Until next time, have a great day!

Along the way, we will cover creating shattered/disintegration effect, lighting effect, how to generate more depth to your image, as well as using Pen Tool to create awesome abstract lines. This tutorial is also a great opportunity to practice your brush painting skills.

Here is the preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternatvie version with different colour scheme: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need to the following stocks:

Female Model

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1000px * 1000px, fill the background with black colour. Create a new layer on top of the background called “grunge texture”, download a choice of your grungy brushset from sites such as qbrushes.net or brusheezy.com, load it into Photoshop, and use them to paint a light-grey background on this texture layer, as shown below: (make sure you set the flow and opacity of the brush to a low level, around 20-30%)

Once you’re happy with the texture, duplicate this layer once, and resize the duplicated layer as shown below:

Now here is a trick you can use to quickly add some depth to the image – after resizing the image, don’t cancel the selection, straight-away right-click and choose “perspective”, as shown below:

Perspective your selection as shown below:

Erase the upper edge this layer as shown below, so the two layers can sort of blend together:

And you can by doing so, we add depth to the background texture so making it easier to add the model onto the canvas later on:

Step 2

Load the Female Model stock image into Photoshop, use whatever method you like to extract the gril out, copy and paste her onto our canvas, resize and position it as shown below:

Name this layer as “model”.

Apply the following Smart Sharpen filter on this model layer:

Add the following three adjustment layers on to this layer, make sure to tick the “use preivew layer as clipping mask” option:

Black and white

Make sure to change the blending mode of this Black and White layer to “Vivid Light”

Curves

Vibrance

and you will have the following effect:

duplicate the orginal model and drag the duplicated layer to the top, apply the following Spatter filter to it: (Filter > Brush Stroke > Spatter)

You will now see the whole girl image is covered by the shattered piece – of course we don’t want that. So add the following layer mask to hide those parts we don’t wish to see:

By doing so, we only leave the shoulder and the upper legs part to have shattered effect.

Change the layer blending mode of this layer to “Hard Light”, and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Duplicate the original model layer once more and drag it on top of all previous layers. Apply the following motion blur settings to it:

Add the following mask to the motion blur layer:

Change the layer blending mode this layer to “Screen”, you will have the following effect:

Optionally, you can duplicate this motion blur layer a few more times, and drag them around the model’s body for more effect.

Step 4

Now let’s create some abstract lines. Firstly turn off all previous layers (except the background grungy texture layer) we made so that we have more space to use our creativity. Create a new layer above the grungy texture layer, grab the Pen Tool and draw a path as shown below:

Stroke the path as shown below with a 3-5px soft brush: (You can choose any colour you like)

You will have the following effect or similar:

After stroking the path, duplicate it once and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to it:

You will have the following effect:

You can see by doing so we add a glowing effect to the abstract line we created.

To futher enhance this layer, we merge this two layers, duplicate the merge layer once, and change the blending mode to “Vivid Light”, you will have the following effect: (I resized this line a bit):

That’s all for create the abstract line. Then we can simply duplicate, position those lines around the model, as shown below:

Step 5

Now we can add a bit of shadow for the model because I intend to have light coming from the top. So we simply create a new layer called “shadow” just below the original model layer, grab a soft black brush, paint some shadow on the bottom:

Create a new layer, use the grungy brushset you donwloaded or choose a different brushset, paint some grungy texture around the model’s body, as shown below:

This step can be a bit tricky to complete – try mixing different brushes in the set, set the opacity and flow to a low level around 30-40%, and use the tip mentioned in the screenshot. It’s all about getting used to the brushset and find the feeling :)

Once you finish the painting, duplicate this layer once, apply the following Motion Blur setting to it:

and you will have the following effect:

Add the following three adjustment layer on top of it, with respective layer masks:

Curves

Curves Mask (Use Eraser with Grungy Brushset, along with soft round brush to create this effect)

Levels

Levels Mask

Color Balance

You will have the following effect so far:

Step 6

Now let’s add some final touch-up for the image. To do this, I decided to use Len Flare + Cloud Filter to add some highlight to the model’s body.

The trick is really simple: Create a new layer on top of all previous layers, use the Lasso Tool (with 25px feather) to create a selection, render some cloud inside it then apply the following Lens Flare settings:

and you will have the following effect:

We then change the layer blending mode to “overlay”, “color dodge” or “vivid light”, totally up to you. Make sure you duplicate this layer a few times, and move them around the model’s body for more highlights.

Below image shows the areas I chose to highlight: (I turn off color so you can see the arrows a bit better)

Important: experiment with layer blending mode with this cloud filter + lens flare layer, you will be amazed how interesting this combination would bring you :)

Here is the effect so far:

Final Step

For this final step, I flatten the image, smart sharpen it a bit, changed the color scheme and adjusted the brightness and contrast as well. I will leave those settings up to you so you can experiment with them :)

Here is the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative version: (click to enlarge)

That’s it! Hope you enjoy this tutorial! Drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out!

The key points I would like to address in this tutorial are:

1. How we can achieve great lighting effect by simply mixing custom brushset and various Photoshop filters
2. Explore different layer blending effects and the use of Pen Tool to create abstract lines
3. How to quickly and effectively render realistic star field effect in Photoshop.

Here is the preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

Alternative Version with different color scheme (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need to the following stocks:

Model

Planet 1

Planet 2

Abstract Brushset

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1400px * 800px (actually size doesn’t really matter here, you can try out other resolution if you like), fill the background layer with black color.

Load the “Model” stock image into Photoshop, use whatever method you perfer to cut the man out, and paste it onto our document:

Hint: I used a combination of Lasso Tool (set tolerence to 7-10px) and Quick Selection Tool to cut him out.

Name this layer as “model”, add the following two adjustment layer onto it: (tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

Curves

Vibrance

and you will have the following effect:

You can see now we increase the contrast a bit and reduce the colour saturation of the model. This way it’s easier to refine the color and add more effect onto it later on.

Step 2

Download a copy of this Abstract Brushset, load it into photoshop, create a new layer on top the of all previous layers, use this brushset to paint over the model’s body.

I can’t go into much detail about this painting step, however one important thing is to try out different brush blending mode – I used overlay, soft light, hard light, and Multiply). Also make sure you try out different opacity and flow settings as you go.

You can also try out Scale, Distort and Warp this paint layer to maximise its effect.

You can find those settings on the top option bar:

and here is the effect I have after the painting: (You can see I emphaise on the legs and arms)

Step 3

Create a new layer above the background layer, however below the “model” layer, use the same brushset and paint some abstract effect on the bottom.

If the effect doesn’t feel right,  try using the free tranform tool to scale, warp this layer:

also make sure you paint some shadow under the model to add more depth – to do this, simply create a new layer named “shadow” and paint over the area as show below, with a black brushset:

here is the effect I have so far:

Step 4

Load the “planet 1″ image into Photoshop, drag it onto our document and put it just below the “Model” layer, but above the “shadow” layer. Resize and position  it as shown below:

Name this layer as “model”, add the following two adjustment layer onto it:  (tick the “use previous layer as clipping mask” option)

Black and White

Curves

You will have the following effect:

Optionally, you can make a duplication of the this planet layer and resize the duplicated layer to a smaller size, and position it as shown below:

Step 5

This is an optinal step. I personally like to add some abstract lines extending from the model’s arm :)

To do this, simply create a new layer below the model layer, then use the Pen Tool to draw a path as shown below on the newly created layer:

Stroke the path with a 5px soft round brush with White color:

and here is the effect after the stroke:

Once you’re happy with shape, you can duplicate this line layer a few times and adjust their position and size, as shown below:

Step 6

Load the “planet 2″ image into Photoshop and drag it on our document. Resize and position the layer as shown below:

Name this layer as “planet 2″ and duplicate it once, resize it as shown below:

Desaturate and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

Reduce the layer opacity to around 90%, you will have the following effect:

Then add the following two adjustment layers to it:

Curves

Levels

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 7

Let’s render the star field now :) To do this, go and add a new layer on top of all other layers and name it “star field”, then go to Filter > Noise > Add noise and apply the following settings:

Apply the following Levels settings to this layer:

To reduce the density of the star a bit, we can apply the following Curves adjustments:

You should have the following effect so far:

Change the blending mode of the layer to “Screen”, you should have the following effect:

Step 8

To wrap up this design, we can add some color onto the image by adding some more layers (with “soft light” blending mode) on top of all layers, make sure to try out different color combinations.

Here are two versions I have for this tutorial:

Version 1

Version 2

I decided to go with version 2 and the final step I took is to apply a smart sharpen filter to the flattened image:

and here is the final effect for this tutorial (click to enlarge):

Alternative Version with different color scheme (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial! Drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out!

Along the way, we will be using tons of layer blending techniques, filter effects, image adjustments, and various tools from the toolbox. You will learn how to combine those techniques into one and make awesome looking artwork in Photoshop.

Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

Alternative version which I adjusted the color saturation: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Before we begin, I’d like to introduce a bit of concept behind this artwork:

1. our hero arrives in hell, in front of him is a flaming river filled wit lava
2. he must somehow get across the river and reach the island in the far distance, guarded by fearsome monsters,
3. he then has to get inside the castle on top of the island to rescue his lover.

Ok once you understand the concept, let’’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Foggy Plain

Cloud

Cliff

Castle

Dragon

Skull

Warrior

Step 1

Create a new document size 1400px * 800px, fill the background layer with black. Load the “Foggy Plain” image into Photoshop, then copy and paste the entire image onto our document, resize it to fix the canvas size.

Name this layer as “plain”, apply the following “Reduce Noise” settings to it to get rid of the noisy bits and add some gloomy effect to it:

And you will have the following effect:

Use the Spot Healing tool to remove the dots on the image:

And you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this plain layer once, change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Multiply”, this way will darken the image. Add a layer mask to the duplicate layer to hide the top sky portion so it remains bright:

And here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Now let’s load the “cliff” iamge into Photoshop, then drag the entire image onto our canvas, resize and position it as shown below:

Here comes the interesting bit: grab a really soft (0% hardness), big round brush, erase the ocean part and the edges of the cliff off – the ulimate goal is to try and blend the cliff into our image as seamless as possible:

Now we have the cliff texture here, however it looks quite boring to me with just a single bit sort of sticking out. So I decided to extend it a bit to cover the entire lower portion of the canvas.

This is probably the most tricky part of the tutorial – The goal we got to achieve is to take this cliff texture and somehow make it longer to cover the lower portion.

To do this, following the following steps:

1. make serveral duplicates of the original cliff layer
2. use the same method as described in the previous step to erase the edge portion
3. on each duplicated layer, use Ctrl + T to free transform them so they look different.
4. Then drag them to across the canvas to form a joint cliff

You can make as many duplicated layers as you want.

Also try to experiment layer blending mode with each layer, you will discover how powerful those layer blending modes are.

Here is my effect after the blending and duplicating: (This effect is made by around 10 duplicated cliff layer texture)

Add the following three image adjustment layer and their respective layer mask to it:

Color Balance (Drop opacity to 70%)

Levels

Brightness and Contrast

and here is the effect so far:

You can see I delibrately produce those color and lighting dynamics through layer masking and blending options – they will be used in future steps.

Step 3

Now let’s load the “cloud” image into Photoshop and drag it onto our document, name the new layer as “cloud”. Desaturate this cloud layer and use a big soft brush to erase the outer portion of the cloud, leave the bits as show below:

Change the blending mode to “color burn” and you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this cloud layer a few more times, position the duplicated layer around the edge of the cliff, adjust their blending mode as shown below:

add a curves adjustment layer to it with mask as shown below:

You will have the following effect:

Step 4

Now let’s produce some Lave and Flaming effect to the image. Create a new layer called “lava” and fill it with Black, render some cloud using the cloud filter, as shown below:

Then render some difference cloud afterwards: (try press Ctrl + F a few more times for different result)

Apply the following colour balance settings to it:

Then resize this layer “lava” to a very small size and position it into the centre of the canvas, erase the edges with a small soft brush, you will have the following effect:

change its blending mode to “color dodge”, you will have the following effect:

Again we duplicate this lava layer, rotate and resize the duplicated layer, until it covers the center area:

Step 5

Now load the “castle” image into Photoshop and select the upper portion of the image without the lake, copy and paste it onto our document. Desaturate it and change its layer blending mode to “hard light”, you will have the following effect:

erase the edges off with a soft brush:

add following three image adjustment layer with relevant mask attached to them, to the castle layer as clipping mask:

Curves

Levels

Brightness and Contrast

Go back to the orignal “lava” layer and make a few more duplcations, drag those duplicated lava layer on top of the castle layer, change their layer blending mode to “soft light”, apart from the one on the bottom – set it to “screen”:

Now we can add some smoke effect to the image. To do this, create a new layer called “smoke” and render some cloud on it,  add a lens flare in the centre top:

Add the following mask to this cloud layer:

Change the blending mode of this cloud layer to “color burn”, you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now let’s add some skulls to the scene. Load the “Skull” image into Photoshop, drag it onto our document, resize and position it as shown below: (I have already erased the edge off and desaturate it)

Add the following two adjustment layer to it as clipping mask:

Curves

Color Balance

Create a new layer called “skull shadow” below the skull layer, use a black brush with 30% flow and opacity, gently paint some shadow for the skull:

Put those skulls stuff into a folder, then duplicate the folder and scatter the skull around the canvas (make sure to adjust the shadow position accordingly)

You can duplicate as many as you want, I only did it once for demonstrate purpose here:

Step 7

Now let’s add some flying monster to the image. Load the “Dragon” image into photoshop, drag it onto our document on name the layer “dragon”. Desaturate the layer and change its blending mode to “Hard Light”, you will have the following effect:

Add the following two adjustment layers as clipping mask to the dragon layer:

Colour Balance

Curves

You will have the following effect:

To add some motion to the monster, we can dupliate the dragon layer once and put it on top of the adjustment layers, apply the following motion blur settings to the duplicated layer:

change the blending mode to “color dodge” and duplicate it a few more times:

Make a folder and put all dragon layers into it, duplicate the folder and resize and rotate it, postion it to the left, as show below: (don’t forget reduce the opacity of the dragon a bit, because it’s a bit further away)

Step 8

Now let’s add our hero onto the image. Load the “Warrior” image into Photoshop, drag it onto our canvas and name the layer “hero”, resize it and put it to the position as shown below: (erase and desaturate as usual, set blending mode to “Vivid Light”)

Duplicate this layer twice, keep the blending mode as “vivid light”. You wll have the following effect:

Use the same method as used for the skull, paint some shadow under the hero by make a new layer called “hero shadow”:

Step 9

That’s pretty much it! To spice up the image a bit, I added a few more lighting layers by simply creating a new layer with the overlay blending mode, grab a white big soft brush, and paint over the following areas:

Finally I flatten the image, reduce the noise of the image a bit with the following settings:

and here is my final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative version which I adjusted the color saturation: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out!

Cheers and have a great day!

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this work. We will take several real world objects and seamlessly blend them together to form this artwork. We will also use a number of Photoshop brushes to spice up the effect. The techniquses involved in this tutorial include layer blending, image adjustments, filter effects, custom brush tools, adding layer mask, etc.

This is a 10 steps tutorial, very simple, yet the effect is good. Have a try!

Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

Please click here to view this tutorial on My Ink Blog.

If you have any problem, drop me a comment and I will try my best to help you out. Cheers and have a great day!

We will take a random image and apply those 5 techniques to enhance the overall effect of the photo. Here is a summary of the five topics we will cover in this tutorial:

1. Remove Black Spots with Spot Healing Brush
2. Make Your Eyes Look More Obvious
3. Use Surface Blur to Smooth Skin, instead of Gaussian Blur
4. Make Her Lips Look Even More Delicious
5. Add Colour Depth and Lighting Contrast to Hair

This is a before and after preview of the final result:

Before

After

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok Let’s get started!

In this tutorial, I use the following stock for demonstration purpose – Self 16. by ~The1stGrape-stock

The reason I chose this particular image is that it doesn’t look too bad from the beginning, however there are still things can be improved, perfect for beginners to get some practices on.

Remove Black Spots with Spot Healing Brush

Firstly if we take a look at the photo, we can see there are several black dots on her skin, as shown below:

To fix these, we can use the Spot Healing Brush tool, as shown below in the toolbox:

Simply grab the Spot Healing Brush, adjust the size of the brush to be slightly large than the black spot, and do a single-click on it:

You can see after the single-click, the black spot disappers:

Basically, what happen is that with the Spot Healing Brush tool, it takes samples of the surrounding skin colour pixels and use them to replace the black spot colour pixel. Magical, isn’t it?

Let’s use the same method to remove all black spots on her face, here is the effect so far:

Make Your Eyes Look More Obvious

Now let’s pay attention to her eyes, which are beautiful even without any retouching :) but, we can give them a bit more depth, here is how:

Duplicate the background layer once, set the blending mode as “Soft Light” for the duplicated layer, you will have the following effect:

You can see by doing so we in fact darken the whole image. However here we only want to add depth the eyes, so we need to hide the rest of the layer. To do so, go to layer > layer mask > hide all, then on the layer mask, use a White Brush to paint inside the eyes, as shown below:

By doing so we reveal the eyes portion of the layer only. Here is the effect after the painting:

Use Surface Blur to Smooth Skin, instead of Gaussian Blur

Now let’s make her skin go smoother a bit. To do so, we use Surface Blur. The reason I chose Surface Blur is because unlike Gaussian Blur (which blurs the whole image), Surface Blur retains the edge details. This eliminate the needs of adding a layer mask on the duplicated layer to reveal the edges.

So let’s duplicate the orginal background layer once, and apply the following Surface Blur settings to it:

Drop the opacity of the duplicated layer to around 70%, and you will have the following effect:

Make Her Lips Look Even More Delicious

To do so, we use the Lasso Tool to make a rough selection of the lips as shown below:

Hit Ctrl + J twice to make two duplicates of the selection, change the blending mode of the first copy to “Multiply“, with 100% opacity. Change the blending mode of the second duplicated layer to “Linear Light“, with 55% opacity.

Use a soft, round eraser to gently erase the edge of the lips, you will have the following effect:

Add another layer on top of all other layers, grab a soft round brush with White colour, gently paint around the lower lip to add some extra light:

Hint: set brush flow and opacity to both around 40%, this way we can gradually apply the brush effect.

Add Colour Depth and Lighting Contrast to Hair

Lastly, we can add some more depth to this girl’s hair. To do this, we can simply add a Curves Adjustment layer with the following settings:

Add the following layer mask to the Curves adjustment layer:

Here is our final effect: (You can see by adding the layer mask, we leave only the hair portion highlighted)

Optionally we add duplicate the orginal background layer and set the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “overlay”, reduce the opacity to 45%, you will have the following final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

Along the way, we will go through some photo retouch techniques, make a brush then tweak with the Photoshop brush engine, also we will use the cloud filter to create some awesome lighting effect.

This is an intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a bit tricky, if you get stuck, just drop a comment below and I will try my best to help you out.

Here is a preview of the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative Version:

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stock:

Rainbow Girl

Step 1

Create a new document sized  800px * 1200px and fill the background layer with Black colour. Load the Rainbow Girl image into Photoshop and cut the girl out by using whatever selection method you like to use. (I used Channel Mask technique here, if you’re interested, here is a tutorial for it)

Copy and paste the girl image onto our document, as shown below:

Name this layer as “girl”.

Step 2

Now we’re into the interesting part of retouching. As you may have noticed, we have some facial impection here as shown below:

To clean them up, simply grab the Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Healing Brush Tool, apply the following settings:

Spot Healing Brush Tool

Healing Brush Tool

With the Spot Healing Brush Tool, simply do a single click on the black spot you like to get rid of. If you found it’s not quite working, you the healing brush tool to sample a good piece of skin, then heal the black spot with it.

Here is my effect after the clean up:

Step 3

Now we can smooth her skin a bit. To do this, simply duplicate the girl layer, go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur and apply the following settings:

Because we only want her face and the should skin to be blurred, so we can hide the rest of the layer by adding a layer mask to it, as shown below:

Reduce the layer opacity of this duplicated layer to around 50%.

And here is the effect so far, you can see now we have a much better girl image:

Step 4

Let’s add some lighting effect on the image. Create a new layer called light on top of the “girl copy” layer and grab a soft white brush, paint over the area as shown below:

Set the blendng mode of this light layer to “Overlay”, drop the opacity to around 50%. Add the following two adjustment layers on top of the light layer:

Curves

Brightness and Contrast

And here is the effect so far:

Step 5

Now let’s make a simple custom brush, which we will then use to create the background of this image.

Create a new document (size doesn’t matter here) and fill the background with Black. Grab the Rectangular Tool as shown below:

Create a new layer on top of the background layer, draw a rectangular shape on the canvas, then right-click it and choose “Stroke Path”, choose the option “Pencil” (Make sure you set the pencil size to be 1px, with a light grey colour)

And here is the effect after you stroke the path:

Now we want to get rid of the part outside the square. To do so, go to Image > Trim and apply the following settings:

You will see the black part outside the square is now gone. Now hide the background layer, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset and save the brushset as “square”:

And you will see the brush appears in the brush panel:

Step 6

Let apply this brushset to our image. Create a new layer named “square brush texture” under the original girl layer, click on the brush we just made, apply the following brush dynamic to it:

Shape Dynamics

Scattering

Tick “Smoothing” option.

And paint away with this brushset on the texture layer around the girl edge, adjust the brush size for variations:

Optionally, you can cancel the dynamics and just use the original brush, for different effect:

Step 7

Now we can add some cloud on top of the shapes texture layer. Create a new layer on top of the square shape texture layer called “cloud”, use the Lasso Tool with a 20px feather, draw a selection and render some cloud inside it, change the blending mode of this layer to “Colour Dodge”:

Duplicate the cloud layer once and drag it onto the feet position, so to create some highlight on her feet: (Resize it a bit with the free transform tool)

Now duplicate the cloud layer a few more times and change the blending mode of those layers to “Normal”. On each duplcated layer, hit Ctrl + T and right-click to choose the “Warp” option, warp the cloud to different shapes around the girl’s body:

This step is entirely up to you want kind of the shapes you like, here is my effect:

And here is the effect so far:

Step 8

Ok we’re almost there! Now let’s do some final adjustment for the image. On top of all previous layers, add a Black and White adjustment layer on the top:

Change the blending mode of this black and white layer to “Overlay”, apply the following layer mask to it:

You can see by adding the mask, we created some depth to the image:

Duplicate this black and white layer twice, maintain the blending mode as “Overlay”. Add aonther Vibrance adjustment layer on top of the duplicated layer:

Create a new layer on top of every other layer and set the blending mode of it to “color”, grab a big soft brush with colour of your choice and simply paint on desired area. You will have the following effect:

Step 9

OK we can do some fine-tuning of the final image by adding some light strips. To do this, simply flatten the image, duplicate the background layer once, and apply the following motion blur setting to the duplicated layer:

Change the blending mode of this motion blur layer to “Screen”. Here we don’t really want to the whole image to be covered by blur, so we add a layer mask to the motion blur layer to hide a portion of it:

And here is the effect so far:

Optional: you can duplicate this motion blur layer a few times and try out different blending mode. The result will amaze you :)

Here is my final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Alternative version: (I added some abstract brushset on the girl feet)

Further Reading

Just an interesting article I found on the net about Photoshop Brush Engine, great for beginners:

An Introduction to Photoshop Brush Engine

That’s for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

Previously I posted an interesting (well, at least I think it’s intersting) showcase displaying 30 Stunning, Absolutely Magical Photo Manipulations Focusing on Human Eye. A lot of people asked if I could produce a simple tutorial show the steps you can take to do eye makeups. Well, here it is :)

This is a faily basic tutorial and it’s designed for beginner. Tools we will be using included Spot Healing Brush, Dodge/Burn Tool, layer blending, and adjustment layers. Have a try!

Here is a preview of the before and after effect of the eye:

Before

After

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stock:

Eye

Step 1

Load the “Eye” stock image into Photoshop, now let ’s take a look at the original image and here is the analysis I came up with:

1. The image has a lot of black spots, and bits of hair that really disturbs me
2. The skin is OK, but if we can make it smoother would be bettter
3. The eye colour is perferably better in Blue, and those bloodlines in the white part of the eye can go.

After you’ve done the above analysis, duplicate the background layer once and name it as “face skin”let’s grab the Healing Brush tool (J):

Set the brush size to 15px, and hold down the Alt to define a source point as shown below:

Gently work you brush around the spots you wish to heal:

And clean up the lower part of the image as well, until you reach the following effect:

Step 2

Now we have a fairly clean face, let’s tackle the eye. Firstly duplicate the previous “face skin” layer once and name it as “eye”. Firstly we want to get rid of the bloodlines in the eye. To do this, again we use the healing brush tool, define a new source point on this layer as shown below:

Adjust the brush size accordingly to around 10-12px, work your way around the white of the eye until you reach this effect:

Step 3

Now we onto the smoothening of the skin. We have used the healing brush tool before however, for the overall effect, it’s really handy to apply the dodge/burn tool (O):

So duplicate the previous “eye” layer once and name it as “dodge and burn”, use the dodge tool with the following settings:

The secret here to to set exposure level to a very low amount.

Work your dodge tool around the area you want the skin to become smoother and lighter, until you reach the following effect:

Please note, you will have to adjust the brush size for different area, for the best result possible. Practice with it!

Step 4

Ok we can tweak the image a bit by adding some image adjustment layers:

Black and white (Set to blending mode to “Screen”)

Duplicate this Black and White adjustment layer once, and change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Hard Light”, you will have the following effect:

Now we’re on the interesting part of changing the eye colour. I simply created a new layer called “eye colour” on top of all other layers, grab a soft, round brush with a light blue colour and paint around the pupil:

Change the layer blending mode to “colour” and you will have to the following effect:

We can now add a shining reflection on the pupil. To do this, create a new layer called “reflection” on top of all other layers, grab a small white brush and paint on the centre of the eye, as shown below:

Step 5

Now we can add some dotty effect around the eye. Firstly let’s make this dynamic brushset:

Shape Dynamics

Scattering

Other Dynamics

and make sure you tick “Airbrush” and “Smoothing”.

Create a new layer, use this brushset to paint around the eye: (Set brush flow to around 40%)

and we can add a curve adjustment layer to bring some depth into the image:

and you will have the following effect:

We can add some final effect onto our eye. How about some colours?

To add some colour around the eye, simply create a new layer on top of all other layers, set its blending mode to “overlay”, and grab some nice markup colour you like and paint around the eye:

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

Along the way, we will go through a variety of technqiues such as layer blending, image adjustments, a bit of matte painting skills and filter effects. This is an intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a bit tricky. Practices always make thing easier for the future, so go ahead and have a try :)

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

OK let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Coastal Cliff Scene

Island Sky

Rock Island

Waterfall 1

Waterfall 2

Ancient Ruin

Beautiful Sitting Lady

Step 1

Load the “Coastal Cliff Scene” stock image into Photoshop, we will use this as our starting point. Firstly I’d like to make the overall soften a bit, so I duplicate the background layer, and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

After apply the Gaussian Blur settings, duplicate this blurred layer once and change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Color Burn”, you will have the following effect:

On this colour burn layer, add a layer mask and on the layer mask, erase the area indicated above (within the selection), so that only the colour of the ocean darkened: (Hint: erase using a big, soft brush)

Now add the following adjustments layer on top of all previous layers:

Curves:

Colour Balance:

On top of the adjustment layers, add a gradient fill layer as shown below:

And you will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

Now we have a pretty nice grass on the lower part of our image, but the sky portion is simply a disaster right now. To fix this, simply load the Island Sky image into Photoshop, and drag the entire image onto our document, name this layer as “sky” and position, resize it as shown below:

Use a big soft brush to erase the bottom part of the “sky” layer, so we have the sky portion of the image left:

Add the following “Curves” adjustment layer to the “Sky” layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Duplicate the “sky” layer and drag the duplicated layer to the top, apply the following Motion Blur settings to it:

Change the motion blur sky layer’s blending mode to “Screen” and opacity to 70%, you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now we can work on adding some dynamic lighting effect to the edges of the cliff. Let’s grab the Lasso Tool (L) and set its feather to 30px, draw a selection around the bottom edge of the cliff, and render some cloud (choose a dark grey as background colour, and white as foreground colour) within it:

Name this layer as “light bottom” and drop its opacity to 70%.

Duplicate the “light bottom” layer once and change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “overlay”.

And on the cliff edge to the right, we use the same method to render some cloud around it. (For quicker result, simply duplicate the original “light bottom” layer and position it as shown below:

and change the layer name to “lighting right”, duplicate it once and change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “overlay”, you will have the following effect:

For more lighting variations, we can add a Brightness and Contrast adjustment layer with the following settings and mask:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 4

We can now add a far distance island to the ocean. Load the Rock Island image into Photoshop and drag it onto our document. Erase the surrounding and leave only the rock island and name this layer as “island”:

Add a colour balance adjustment layer to this “island” layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Now duplicate the “island” layer three times and drag them all to the top, change their blending mode as shown below:

And your effect should be similar to the following:

Step 5

Now we can add some waterfall to the island (well, it supposes to be a surreal image!). I decide to add one to each side. So load the Waterfall 1 image into Photoshop and drag it onto our document. Erase all the unnecessary parts only leave the main waterfall scene, resize and position it as shown below:

Name this layer as “waterfall 1″ and duplicate it once to make it bolder. Add the following Colour Balance adjustment layer to the duplicated layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

and you will have the following effect:

Load the Waterfall 2 image into Photoshop and again drag it to our document. Name this layer as “waterfall 2″ and put it on top of all other layers.

Again we erase all unnecessary parts of the waterfall image, and position it as shown below:

Add the following image adjustment layer to the “waterfall 2″ layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Curves

Colour Balance

To highlight the island a bit, we can add a new colour balance adjustment layer without ticking the clipping mask option on top of all other layers, with the following settings and mask:

Mask

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 6

Now we’re onto add the Ancinet Ruin part. Simply load the Ancient Ruin image into Photoshop and drag it onto our document, resize and position it as shonw below:

Name this layer as  “ruin” Erase the bottom part (use a small soft brush) and the sky portion off the image: (hint: use the magic wand tool to select the sky part, and go to Edit > Clear to get rid of it)

Optional: you can add a colour balance adjustment layer to this ruin layer, however I decide to leave it as it is for now, with the original lighting effect.

Duplicate this “ruin” layer once, flip it horizontally and rezise a bit, fit it on top of our island as shown below:

Step 7

We can now spice up the image a bit by adding the beautiful lady image outlooking the distant sea to our scene. So load the “beautiful sitting lady” image into Photoshop. Cut the lady from the rest of the image and paste it onto our document, name this layer as “lady”:

Resize and position it as shown below:

Add the following three adjustment layers to the lady layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Curves

Colour Balance

Brightness and Contrast

Duplicate the original “lady” layer once, and put it on top of all other layers, change the blending mode to “multiply”, you will have the following effect:

And now we can painting a bit of shadow for the lady. So create a new layer just below the orginal lady layer, use a soft round brush with black colour, set the brush flow and opacity to 50%, and paint in the area as shown below:

Step 8

For some final touchups, we can add two more adjustment layers with the following settings and mask:

Colour Balance

Brightness and Contrast

And you will have the following final effect:

Step 9

To further enhance the image effect, I flatten the image and apply the following smart sharpen settings to the flattened image:

And to add some sunlight, I simply duplicated the background layer, and apply the following radial blur settings:

Change the blending mode to “Screen” for this duplicated layer and drop its opacity to around 40%.

I further alter the colour balance and saturation of the image, and here is my final image result for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

The reason I put up this basic tutorial is that lately I have receive some requests from people wishing to learn some techniques involved in using adjustment layers.

Along the way, not only I will be using image adjustment layers techniques, but also I will show you some skills I use to create break-apart effects, pen tool and layer blendings. Have a try!

Here is a preview of the final effect of this tutorial:  (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

OK let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stock:

Jump

Step 1

Load the “Jump” stock image into Photoshop, double-click on the background layer inside the layer pallatte to unlock it. Then create a new layer called “bg” , fill it with black colour and put it under the background layer we just unlock.

Use whatever selection tool you perfer to clear out the surroundings, and leave just the jumping man on the canvas:

It doesn’t really matter if the selection isn’t perfect. The tutorial is not about teaching you how to make the perfect human selection (However if you do want to learn, here is a tutorial for you).

Step 2

Now let’s head straight to the image adjustment layers. You will find those options under Layer > New Adjustment Layer > … , as shown below:

In this tutorial, I will be using three adjustment layers to retouch this jumping man: colour balance, curves and brightness and contrast. In my opinion, these are probably the most frequent used adjustment layers you will be using for whatever design you’re doing.

Step 3

Let’s go ahead and apply those adjustment layers. From bottom to top,

Color Balance

Curves

Brightness and Contrast

And you will have the following effect:

You will see now the colour tone and the lightness of the image are completely changed, just by adding those three adjustment layers. And the good thing about them is that you can have more flexibility if you do want to make changes later on, because the original layer is not altered.

Also, because those adjustment layers are in fact layer, you can apply mask, or change the blending mode for them, to experience different result.

Step 4

Now I will show you a quick way I use to create this cool dis-integration effect. Firstly let’s create a custom brushset.

Select a 5px, soft round brush, and apply the following brush dynamics to it:

Shape Dynamics

Scattering

and tick Noise, Airbrush and Smoothing options.

Now load the selection of the jumping man layer by Ctrl + left click the thumbnail image of that layer, click the rectangular marquee tool, then right-click inside the selection and choose “Make work path”:

Then define the Feather as 2px, and you will have the following effect:

After you made the work path, create a new layer called “stroke” and put it just under the jumping man layer, then click on the Pen Tool icon, and right-click on the work path and choose “stroke path”:

Make sure the brushset you just created is still selected and choose “Brush” in the next window, leave “simulate pressure” option un-checked.

Change the layer blending mode of this stroke layer to be “Screen” and drop the opacity to 40%. You will now have this effect:

Step 5

To create some motion for the image, we can duplicate the “stroke” layer from the previous layer once, drag the duplicated layer to the top of the jumping man layer, and apply the following radial blur:

Change the blending mode to “Hard Light” for this duplicated layer, and duplicate it once again. You will now have this effect:

Step 6

To add some more effect to the image, we can grab this Debris brushset and create a new layer just below the “Brightness and Contrast” adjustment layer, and paint some debris on it:

And that’s pretty much it for this tutorial! I added some abstract lines stretching from his arm to make this image more vibrant. This require some basic use of the Pen Tool, if you’re interested, I have a pretty neat tutorial here showing you how to make this sort of effect.

Here is the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

Along the way, we will be using tons of layer blending techniques, and I will show you how to merge the images together effectively and efficiently. We will also explore skills such as masking, filter effects and various custom brushsets.

This is an intermediate-level tutorial, have a try!

Here is a preview of my final effect for this tutorial: (Click to enlarge)

Alternative version

PSD File for this Tutorial

You can have this PSD File for only $2.00 via Paypal! Click the link below and you will be taken to the Paypal checkout page, after payment you will be redirect to the download page automatically.

OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Desert

Mist Brushset

Misty Rock

Sunset Sky

Distant City

Star Brushset

Lightning

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1280px * 800px, leave the background colour as White. Load the “Desert” stock image into Photoshop, copy and paste the entire image onto our document, position it as shown below:

Name the new layer as “Desert”, add a layer mask onto it. On the layer mask, use the “Mist Brushset” we have just download (any brush in the set), erase the top part of the image as shown below:

This will form a nice misty effect for the image and make it easier for the layer blending later on:

Now duplicate this “Desert” layer once and on the duplicated layer, go to filter > blur > gaussian blur and apply the following settings:

Change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Screen” and drop its opacity to 70%, you will have the following effect:

Now we have a very nice, dusty and misty desert scene with a lot of room to expand our imagination.

Step 2

To further adjust the colour balance and contrast of the desert, I add the following three adjustment layers on top of the previous two layers: (from bottom to top)

Color Balance

Curves

Levels

and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now I feel that only the desert is a bit boring, so I decided to add some object into it so to create some depth for the image. So let’s load the “misty rock” image into Photoshop, copy and paste the entire image onto our document and name the new layer as “rock”, apply the following mask on the rock layer:

Change the layer blending mode of this layer to “Hard light”, you will have the following effect:

Add a Black and White adjustment layer on top of this rock layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Then duplicate the “rock” layer once and drag it to the top, change the blending option of the duplicate layer to “overlay”, you will have the following effect so far:

Step 4

Load the “Sunset Sky” image into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our document and name this new layer as “sky”, resize and position it as shown below:

Add a layer mask to this sky layer, on the mask, use a soft round brush to gently erase the bottom part of the sky layer, as shown below:

and you will have the following effect:

Add the following two adjustment layers to the sky layer, make sure to tick “use previous layer as clipping mask” option:

Color Balance

Curves

Then duplicate the original Sky layer once and drag it to the top. On the first duplicated sky layer, apply the following motion blur setting to it:

After applying the motion blur filter, duplicate this layer once and change the duplicate layer’s blending mode to “Hard light”, you will have the following effect:

You can see now we have a very nice sky on top of the desert, which makes the image more vibrant.

Step 5

Load the Distant City stock into Photoshop, cut out the city bit with any selection tool you like to use, copy and paste the selection on our document, name the new layer as “city” and use a big, soft brush to erase the surrounding, and leave only the centre of the city selection as shown below:

Duplicate this city layer twice, change the first duplicated layer’s blending mode to “Soft light”, and leave the second layer’s blending mode as “Normal”, but drop the opacity to 45%.

You will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now we’re onto creating the energy blast. Firsty we can make some background highlight for the blast. To do this, create a new layer called “highlight” and grab a soft round brush with white colour, gently paint over the centre area above the city.

Make sure to set the blending mode of this layer to “Hard Light” with an opacity of around 35%:

Now on top of this layer, create a new layer called “laser”, grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool with a 10px feather, make a selection and fill it with white colour as shown below:

Apply the following layer blending option to this layer:

Outer glow

Inner glow

and you will now have this effect:

Step 7

Create a new layer called “Sparkle” on top of all previous layers, set its blending mode to “overlay”. Load the “Star Brushset” we download in and use it to paint around the laser line to create some sparkling effect:

Duplicate the “Sparkle” layer once, and apply the following Radial Blur setting to the duplicated layer:

Name this layer “Radial” and maintain its blending mode to “overlay” and duplicate it twice more, you will have the following effect:

Then duplicate those three layers together once, use the Free Transform Tool to transfrom them to the left side, as shown below:

Step 8

Now we want to work on to the top part (sky) of the laser energy ray. Create a new layer named “sky highlight” and again use a soft brush with white colour to paint over the top centre of the sky, and set the layer blending mode to “overlay”, with opacity around 40%:

Then create a new layer on top of all previous layer and name it as “light top”, fill the layer with black colour and go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare and apply the following settings:

Change this blending mode of this layer to “Screen”, use a soft brush to erase all areas expect the centre portion, as shown below:

Duplicate this layer once, and move it the bottom of the city and change the blending mode to “overlay”, you will have the following effect:

Step 9

Now we can add some lightning effec to the top for further effect. Load the “Lightning” stock image into Photoshop, copy and paste the entire image onto our document and use a soft brush to erase the outer portion of the image.

Change the blending mode of the new layer to “screen” and you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this layer once and free transform (Ctrl + T)  the duplicated layer as shown below:

To futher touchup the image, we can add the following adjustment layers:

Curves

Color Balance

and here is the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Of course you can further enhance the image effect by mixing lighting effect, change hue/saturation settings, etc.

Here is an alternative version I have after I change a few things: (click to enlarge)

Hope you enjoy it! Drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.