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!

In this post, I will show you 20 awesome photo manipulative wallpapar from desktopography.net, hopefully you will enjoy them as much as I did and find them inspirational.

And by the way, here is an introduction of desktopography.net:

Designers and developers spend about 90% of their waking life in front of a computer so the most appealing genre for a wallpaper would be one that has beautiful design mixed with the all important aspect of being outdoors.

What we see everyday can affect our mood and state of mind, enhance your desktop with a wallpaper creation from desktopography and feel the essence of nature and the outdoor existence on your computer. Bring tranquility to your desktop, feel the wilderness and give your background a breath of fresh air..

Source: desktopography.net

Here goes the list, enjoy!

That’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy it and find it inspirational!

In the first volume of this series, I put together a collection of 25 spectacular ocean Photographs. Hope you enjoy them and find them inspirational :)

Here goes the list, enjoy!

That’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy those photos as much as I did and find them inspirational!

I personally think you will lots of creativity in those works and hopefully they can give you tons of inspiration for your next design.

Please remember, if you like those works, click on them and drop a comment or two to support those great artist, they deserve it :)

Here goes the list, enjoy!

That’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy those artworks and find them inspirational!

Cheers and 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!

Hope you enjoy them and make your desktop a vibrant place :)

Please click on individual photo to download them from their original sources.

That’s it for this post! Hope you enjoy those wallpaper!

Till next time, 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!

In this post, I will showcase 25 Absolutely Magnificant Landscape Scenary Photo Manipulation + 5 Great PS Tutorials Showing How to Make Them. Those images are hand-picked by me from deviantArt.com and I personally enjoy them very much. The tutorials are also part of my browers favourites and I hope they’re useful to you when it comes to produce great scenary photo manipulations.

Here goes the list, enjoy!

Tutorials  (From Basic to Advance)

Warm Golden Sunsets With Gradient Maps

When I think of the perfect sunset photo, my mind immediately fills with lots of warm reds, oranges and yellows as the sun gently sets across the water or beyond the hills. Sunsets are one of the most commonly photographed aspects of nature, and yet photos rarely manage to capture their intense beauty. What was once a sky filled with rich, golden hues often ends up looking cooler, less vivid, and ultimately less interesting.

- Source: photoshopessentials.com

Blending Two Different Natural Elements

Blending waterfall-castle-sky by =night-fate is an easy to follow tutorial aimed at those that are new to photomanipulation.In this tutorial night-fate explains to us just one of the many ways of how to successfully blend images together to make a seamless background for a dark an emotive scene.This is just one of the many resources she has to offer.

- Source: DeviantArt.com

Planet Integration Tutorial

In this tutorial, I won’t show you how to make planet or something like that, just how to integrate finished planet in to the photo.

- Source: DeviantArt.com

The Soft Sea Light

This lesson is about how to create by three pictures only a tender collage of sea-piece. A peculiarity of this collage is that we will do the effect of soft light. For work I took pictures from the Internet, to the authors – thank you.

- Source: psdtop.com

Add Dynamic Lighting to a Flat Photograph

In this tutorial, I will show you how to spice up a fairly dull and flat photograph. It’s very easy and fast! Go from flat photo to a uniquely lit style.

- Source: psdtuts.com

That’s all for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy this collection and find those tutorials useful. Cheers and have a great day!

Therefore, I made a few mini Photoshop tutorials and compiled them into one, big tutorial with some tricks I learnt and discovered in the past.

In this post, I will show you 5 Useful Little Photoshop Tricks to Bring Out That bit of Extra Elegance for Your Design. I think those techniques would be quite useful for a Photoshop beginner, as they give you a good starting and/or finishing point for whatever things you design. Once you learn those skills, you can apply them to a wide range of occasions. Have a try!

The topics I will be focusing on in the post include:

1. Give Your Text A Bit More Depth
2. The Light From the Top (Highlight Specific Area)
3. Clever Use of Motion Blur
4. The Cloud and Warp Tool
5. Distort Your Way into 3D

Give Your Text A Bit More Depth

Here is the problem – You typed some text onto the canvas, but somehow it looks just boring, like this text below:

(Font: Myriad Pro)

Here is how you can easily add some more depth and lighting contrast to the text itself – on the text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Bevel and Emboss

Contour

Gradient Overlay

And here is the effect after those blending options applied:

You can see just by adding those very simple layer blending options, you can make you text looks more attractive and contains more lighting depths.

The Light From the Top (Highlight Specific Area)

If you want to bring out some more extra elegance for the text above, you can add some light from the top.

To do this, simply create a new layer on top of the text layer, keep the blending mode as “Normal”, grab a big soft round brush with White colour, do a single click on the position as shown below:

And you will have the following effect: (can reduce the layer opacity to around 80% if you think the light is too bright)

This method can be used widely in lots of different occasions, for anything you want to highlight.

Clever Use of Motion Blur

Sometimes you see a display like this:

and you wonder how this nice shadow is created. Well, simple!

Basically you grab a soft round brush with a dark colour, do a single-click on a spot:

Go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and apply the following settings:

Hit Ctrl + F several times to re-apply motion blur several times, then use the free transform tool (Ctrl + T) to reduce the height if necessary. You will have the following effect:

That’s it! If you want to make a dark shadow, just use a darker brush in the beginning.

The Cloud and Warp Tool

Have you ever thought of combining the cloud rendering filter and the Warp Tool together? If not, have a try with those two now, you will be surprised what effect that brings you.

The steps are quite simple: create a new document with black background, use the Lasso Tool with a 50px feather and draw a circle, render some cloud inside it by going to it Filter > Render > Cloud: (with White as Foreground colour, Black as Background colour)

Then Hit Ctrl + T and bring up the Free Transform Tool, right-click on the cloud and choose “Warp”:

Then expriement! Use the warp tool to tweak the cloud into whatever shape you like:

Here is my effect after the warping:

Try out different angles, you will get lots of different effect as a result.

Distort Your Way into 3D

This is a really quick way of making a 3D look with the Distort option available in the Free Transform Tool.

So create a new document with White background and make some rectangular shape filled with different colour on it: (The size of the rectangular shapes are roughly half of the height the canvas)

Duplicate this shape layer, drag the duplicated shapes beneath the original shapes, resize it to fit the canvas:

On the duplicated layer, right-click and choose “Distort”:

Hold down the “Shift” key, click and drag both bottom corner of the shape until you reach the following effect:

For Lighting Contrast, simply add a new layer with blending mode set to “Color Burn”, grab a soft round brush with a dark colour and paint over the desired area:

That’s all for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find those little tricks useful and inspirational! Cheers and have a great day!

In this post, I will show you my collection of 11 Fascinating and Educational Tutorials Teaching You How to Produce Better Photo Effects. Those are tutorial that I came across months or even years ago, and until now they still reside in my firefox bookmarks. It’s a small collection, however I’m sure  you will find pretty much everything you need to make great looking photos, based on the techniques outlined in each tutorial.

Hope you enjoy them and learn lots :)

For your viewing convenience, I broke down the tutorials into three difficulty levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advance.

Here goes the list, enjoy!

Beginner Level

Basic Photo Editing Tutorial

For this tutorial I will be showing you how I personally edit my photos. These are just the basics such as removing blemishes and smoothing the skin as well as making other general adjustment.

- source: thetragictruth-of-me.deviantart.com

Finding and Identifying the Light Source

Use Photoshop to create and add a dramatic ray of light to your photos. It’s easy, accurate, and fun! This tutorial shows you how to find and identify the light source for your photo. Fairly easy, have a try!

- source: photoshoptutorials.ws

Photoshop Tutorials: Turn A Photo Into A Collage Of Polaroids

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’re going to learn how to take a single photograph and turn it into a collage of polaroids, with each polaroid containing a small section of the overall image. You can use this effect with lots of different types of images, whether it’s a photo of one person or several people. It’s great for photos of family or friends, vacation photos, or even as a creative effect for wedding photography.

- source: photoshopessentials.com

Transform Photo into Watercolor Painting

This tutorial shows a quick and easy method to transform photo into watercolour Painting by using just a few steps. The great thing about this tutorial is that you can use it pretty much any photo of your choice. Have a try!

- source: 10steps.sg

Intermediate Level

Faking HDR in Adobe Photoshop

This HDR Photoshop tutorial shows quite easy way to fake HDR photos in Photoshop. You don’t need to shoot into RAW or take multiple photos – one JPEG file is enough.

- source: nill.cz

Lighting a Giant Elephant

If you’re like me, every now and then you find yourself needing to insert a subject image into a background where the lighting between the two doesn’t quite match. Your subject image may be flatly lit, while your background contains crisp shadows and highlights — and if you don’t correct the problem you run the risk of getting a load of critical comments.

- source: worth1000.com

Fiery Photoshop Space Explosion Tutorial

Illustrating scenes from the final frontier can make for some beautiful work. In this tutorial — the longest we’ve ever published — I’ll walk you through creating a spectacular space scene featuring two planets colliding. Strap yourselves in, Photoshoppers!

- Source: psd.tutsplus.com

Seamless compositing

Learn how to fake unbelievable fantasy images, like this giant warrior lizard, using some clever Photoshop trickery.

- source: digitalartsonline.co.uk

Advance Level

Create dynamic distortion effects

In the following steps, I’ll let you in on one of the most effective and easily mastered techniques that I use to make striking, dynamic distortions of subjects – in this case I’ve used a model, although the technique can be adapted to any objects that you wish to feature in your work, such as cars or trees.

- source: computerarts.co.uk

Matte Painting

This tutorial is actually a “making of” where I explain how I proceeded to achieve this matte painting. I use a Wacom Intuos² A4 board, if you don’t have any graphic board this is going to be hard but not impossible. At each step of the matte painting, useless to remind you to create a new layer so that the work will be easier and mistakes avoided!

- source: 3dtotal.com

Create a Powerful Mental Wave Explosion Effect

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a crazy explosion, like a mix of Magneto’s ability with Peter Petrelli’s power. We will use images and filters to produce this wave explosion effect. Even though it may look like a difficult tutorial, it’s really not that hard.

And just by the way, this is the most amazing, comprehensive, absolutely beyond awesome tutorial I have ever seen so far on the interent.You’ve got to try this out.

- source: psd.tutsplus.com

Ok that’s it for this 11 Fascinating and Educational Tutorials Teaching You how to Produce Better Photo Effects post here on psdvault.com. Hope you enjoy this collection and found those tutorial interesting and useful.

Till next time, have a good night!