In this tutorial, I will show you 5 very simple, however very important techniques for Photoshop beginners when it comes to photo retouch. You will discover how easy it is to add more contrast and depths to the image to make it look better. This tutorial is really simple but effective, Have a try!

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

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 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!

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!

In this tutorial, I will show you the method I use to quickly and effectively clean out Body Hair in Photoshop, which you can use for a wide range of occasions in your Photoshop Retouch works. The method itself is really easy (done in 3 steps and I’m sure you will have no problem in acquiring it :)

There are a lot of tutorials out there showing how you can do so by using the Healing Brush Tool. However in my opinion, healing brush tool is only useful when the area you try to heal is reletively small, and it can be a bit difficulty to adjust the source position.

Here I’m going to show you  an alternative way via the Smudge Tool and the Blur Tool to tackle the shortcomings of the Healing Brush Tool. Have a try :)

Here is a preview of the before and after effect:

Before

After

OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, we will need the following stock image:

Female Hand

Step 1

Load the Hand Image we just downloand into Photoshop and duplicate the background layer once (always a good habit, just in case something goes wrong).  The resolution of this image is quite high, and that brings the attention to the hair on the forearm (especially when you zoom in):

So our task here to remove them with the quickest possible method and make it as clean as possible.

Step 2

We need to make a selection around the hand and the arm. The reason we do this because later on when we apply the smudge tool, we only want to apply it on the arm and hand, not anywhere else.

So we can grab the Quick Selection Tool (W key) and make a selection outside and the hand, and hit Ctrl + Shift + I to inverse the selection:

Then Grab the Smudge Tool from the Toolbox and apply the following settings:

Increase the brush size to approximately the same as the width of the arm (as shown below):

Left-click and hold, and move the Brush toward the position as shown below:

You will see all the hair magically disappeared! But it doesn’t end here, we still have a bit retouch job to do to make it look better

Step 3

You will see around the Bracelet area, we still have some hair left. To remove them, simply grab the Blur Tool and set its strength to 100%, gently brush arcoss the surface around the bracelet:

Also under the palm there is a bit of hair there, we can remove them using the Blur Tool as well:

Maintain the selection, hit Ctrl + J to make a Layer via Copy and apply following Surface Blur Settings to this layer:

Change the layer blending mode of this layer to “Screen” and reduce the opacity of 60%, you will have the following effect:

Add a layer mask to this layer as shown below, this will create a better lighting contrast for the hand and make this overall image look better:

And here is the effect after apply the mask:

OK that’s it for this tutorial! Of course the retouch won’t just stop here, there are still plenty of methods you can try out to make the picture even better.

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!

Cinema4D, together with Photoshop, is able to produce some visually stunning designs that simply can not be created seperately in each application. In this post, I will show you 20 Astounding Artworks Demonstrating the Combined Power of Cinema4D and Photoshop from DevaintArt. Although most of them are abstract designs, they’re absolutely amazing and I’m sure they will inspire you deeply!

To view the original work on DevaintArt, simply click on the image.

That’s it for this post! Lastly I would like to say that I’m an absolute beginner in terms of cinema4D and this post is purely a showcase of those wonderful works I love, which are rendered in Cinema4D and retouched in Photoshop.

Hope you enjoy this showcase and find it inspirational! Till next time, have a great day!

This mood/colour tones changing method can be particularly useful for images that are reletively dark and lack of colour depth. We will be using a lof image adjustment tool, masking techniques and layer blending options. Have a go!

Here is a previous of the before and after effect:

Before

After

And alternative version with reduced colour saturation:

Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will the following stock:

Mountain

Cloud Brush

Step 1

Load the “Mountain” image into Photoshop, duplicate the background layer once.

Now we can see there are some hard rock/stone on the left bottom corner. Because the overall effect we would like to achieve for the final image is a soft, misty mountain scene,  we should first tackle this particular area of the photo.

So on the duplicated layer, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, apply the following settings:

Stay on the duplicated layer, add a layer mask onto it and on the mask, grab the Eraser Tool with a soft round brush setting, gently eraser the following area:

Drop the layer opacity of this duplicated layer to 55%, you can see the left bottom cornor because softer:

Step 2

Duplicate the background layer three times and drag all three duplicated layers above the previous blurred layer.

From bottom to top, change the blending mode of the first duplicated layer to “Color Dodge” and you will have the following effect:

Change the blending mode the second duplicate layer to “Multiply” and you will have the following effect:

On the third duplicated layer, change the blending mode to “Screen” and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings:

Again we add a layer mask to it, and use the Eraser Tool with a soft round brushset to erase the following area:

Drop the layer opacity to 75% and you will have the following effect so far:

You can see now the overall image is much softer than the original and this is exactly what we want.

Step 3

Now we’re onto the interesting part of this tutorial – adding the Mist! The method I use here is simply the Gradient Fill tool :)

So we go to Layer > New Fill layer > Gradient Fill and add a new gradient fill layer with the following settings on top of all other layers:

Duplicate this Gradient Fill layer Three Times.

On the first duplicated layer, apply the following layer mask:

Change the blending mode of this layer to “Screen” and drop its opacity to 35%, you will have the following effect:

On the second duplicated layer, apply the following layer mask:

Change its blending mode to “Color Dodge” and opacity to 60%, you will have the following effect:

On the third duplicated layer, apply the following layer mask: (Use the Cloud Brush we downloaded for some fine-tuning and create uneven effect)

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

You will see now we have created some very realstic misty effect for our image.

Step 4

To add more depths to the image, we can add a new Curve Adjusment layer by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves and apply the following settings:

Here is the effect after applying the Curves adjustment:

Optional: I feel the bottom part of the image is a bit dark, so I apply the following mask to this Curves adjustment layer:

And here is the effect so far:

Step 5

You may now think: umm, the top left part of the sky looks a bit empty! No problem, we can easily fix this by using the Cloud Brushes we download and add some cloud over there.

Use the Eyedropper Tool (I) and left-click the following spot:

And grab any of those cloud brushsets you like and drop its opacity to 50% and flow to 50%, create a new layer and simply paint over the empty portion of the sky:

We can further adjust the colour balance of the image a bit. So go ahead and add a new Color Balance adjustment layer (Layer > Adjustment layer > Color balance) and apply the following settings:

Shadows

Midtones

Highlights

And here is the final effect:

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are!

Here is my final image for this tutorial: (I slightly adjusted the colour contrast and add some more cloudy effect ) – Click to enlarge:

And alternative version with reduced colour saturation:

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!

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to design this cool-looking, urban city photo-montage in Ph0toshop. You will learn how to combine several stock images together to achieve surreal photo effect.

This tutorial involves techniques such as layer blending options, image adjustments, transformation techniques, filter effects and lighting effect rendering. The tutorial itself is quite simple but the end result looks good in my opinion, have a go!

Here is a preview of the final results:

Black and White version:

PSD File Download

You can download the PSD File for this tutorial via the VIP Members Area for only $6.95/Month (or less)! You will not only get this PSD File, but also 70+ other PSD Files + Extra Goodies + Exclusive Photoshop tutorial there. Signup now and get exclusive :) Find out more about the VIP Members Areas

OK let’s get started!

Step 1

We start off by download the following four stock images from stockvault.net and cgtexture.com:

City Image

High-rise Image

Little Girl Image

Grunge Splatter

Load the “Grunge Splatter” image into Photoshop, duplicate the Background layer once and set the blending mode to “Overlay”:

Save this document to a new psd file and name it “urban city”.

Step 2

Load the “City Image” into Photoshop, drag the entire image onto the “urban city” document, use the free transform tool (Ctrl + T) to resize it until it fits the canvas size:

Name this layer as “city” and change the layer blending option to “vivid light”. You will have the following effect:

Step 3

On the “City” layer, hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B and bring up the Black and White adjustment tool (for those who don’t have CS3, try use the Channel Mixer with Monochrome option enabled), apply the following settings:

Then hit Ctrl + M and bring up the Curves tool, adjust the Red channel a bit:

And here is the effect so far:

Step 4

Duplicate the “city” layer once, apply the following Gaussian Blur Setting to the duplicated layer:

Duplicate this layer once more and merge them together, then change the blending mode of the merged layer to “Darken”. You will have the following effect:

Step 5

Load the “high-rise image” into the Photoshop, drag the entire image onto our canvas, resize and erase (with a big soft brush) the cloud/sky + bottom part of the image. (please also note that you can use layer mask to achieve this) Name this layer as “high-rise”.

Again we apply the black and white adjustments to this layer using the same settings as in the previous layer: (Make sure you set the whole document as RGB color mode)

And the effect so far should look like this:

Step 6

Change blending mode of the “high-rise” layer to “overlay” and you should see the high-rise image blend into the grunge texture:

To add some shape dynamics and depth onto the image, we can duplicate the high-rise layer a few more times, resize and position the duplicated layers as shown below:

Step 7

Load the “Little Girl” image into Photoshop. Again we drag the entire image onto our canvas, but this time we don’t resize it. Instead, we move the image to the position as shown below: (where we see only the girl and the sky)

Erase the sky portion as well as the build to right using a soft brush, and change the layer blending option to “Hard Light”.

The effect so far will look like this:

Name this layer as “little girl” and duplicate this layer once, set the blending mode of the duplicate layer to “overlay” and you will have the following effect:

Step 8

Lastly we can add a bit of shining effect to the image so it won’t look boring. To do this, create a new layer called “lighting effect”, use the Lasso Tool with a 40px feather, draw a selection in any area (I chose a place where it meets with the direction the girl is looking towards) and render some cloud and lens flare in:

Change the layer blending mode to “Color Dodge” and apply the following gaussian blur settings:

You will have the following effect:

Duplicate the layer a few more times and drag them in areas you would like to lightup, and you will have this result image:

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! I further adjusted the image hue/satuation a bit and here is my final result: (click to enlarge)

Black and White version: (click to enlarge)

You can of course further enhance this text effect by applying some more filter effects, or combining it with some background texture, that’s totally up to you :)

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!

Together, we will explore a variety of Photoshop techniques such as image adjustment option, a number of filter effect and some basic selection skills. This is an intermediate tutorial and some steps could be a bit tricky, but why not just have a go? ;)

Meanwhile, I would like to take this opportunity to raise the attention to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal, as you may have already known. If you would like to make a donation, you can do so throught the Australian Redcross Website.

Here is a preview of before and after images:

Before

After (Click to enlarge)

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Download a copy of this city image from stockvault.net and load it into Photoshop. Once loaded, duplicate the background layer once and name the duplicated layer as “Black and White”.

On the “Background Copy” layer,  hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B and bring up the Black and White image adjustment tool (If you’re using an earlier version than CS3, you can use Channel Mixer instead, just make sure you tick the “monochrome” option down the bottom).

Apply the following Black and White image adjustments:

Change the layer blending option of this duplicated layer to “Multiply” and you will have the following effect:

Step 2

Duplicate the “Black and White” layer once and name the duplicated layer “Curves”, hit Ctrl + M and bring up the Curves Image Adjustments, apply the following image adjustments:

Keep the blending option of this layer as “Multiply” and you will see the image darkens further:

Step 3

Now let’s add some particles on the image. Duplicate the “Curves” layer three times. On the “Curves Copy” layer, go to Filter > Distort > Glass and apply the following settings:

Change the layer blending option to “Screen” and reduce the layer opacity to 70% and you will have the following effect:

Then on “Curves Copy 2″ layer, go to Filter > Brush Strokes > Spatter and apply the following settings:

Change the blending option of this layer to “Screen”  and you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Grab the Lasso Tool and set its feather to 40px. Make a selection on the Sky area and the high rises as shown below:

While maintaining the selection, hit Ctrl + J and make a layer via copy. Name this newly created layer as “Smoke” and go to Filter > Render > Cloud and render some cloud:

Duplicate the “Somke” layer once. On the duplicated layer, go to Filter > Render > Difference Cloud. Apply this filter a few times and change the layer blending option of this layer to “color burn”.

You will see an effect similar to the following image:

Step 5

On the the duplicated “Smoke” layer, hit Ctrl + B and apply the following Colour Balance:

To reduct the noise a bit on the smoke, we can apply the following medium (Filter > Noise > Medium) settings:

You can see the noise has been reduced:

Step 6

Now we can add some fire effect to the image. Download a copy of this fire image from cgtexture.com and load it into Photoshop.

Drag the entire image on our document and name newly-created layer “fire”. Set the layer blending option to “Screen”.

Grab the Eraser Tool (E) with a big brush, erase the black part of the fire image and leave just the fire:

Then use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) with different size of brushes, flow and opacity, clone this fire until it reaches desired burning effect:

Step 7

To add a bit more dynamics to the image, I duplicate the background layer once more and put it just below the “Curves” layer in Step 2, then apply the following Radial Blur Settings:

Desaturate the layer and change its blending option to “Screen” and you will have the following effect:

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course continue enhancing the image by adding some more effects, such as filter, texture or just have a play with its hue and saturation!

Below is my final image for this tutorial: (Click to enlarge, I added a planet of the sky, adjusting the hue and saturation of image)

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 take about interesting ways of darken your image and reduce noise non-destructively, and also a simple way of rendering rain effect and making. water splashes. Have a try :)

Here is a before and after preview:

Before

After

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Download a copy of this image and load it into Photoshop.

Because we’re creating a rainy image, so firstly we can make the image a bit darker.

To do this, duplicate the background layer once and change it the blending option of the duplicated layer to “Multiply”. This will darken the whole image and the effect is shown blew:

Step 2

Then we can tackle the sky area and make it darker. Hide the “Background copy” layer for now and Press “L” to select the Lasso Tool.  Draw a selection around the sky area.

Hit Ctrl + J to make a layer via Copy, name the new layer as “sky” and drag it on top of all other layers.

Then hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B and bring up the Black and White image adjustment Tool, apply the following settings:

Then hit Ctrl + M to bring up the Curve Adjustment Tool, apply the following settings:

You can also use the Blur/Smudge Tool to patch up the “sky” layer so it blending more seamlessly to the houses and trees below:

Once you’re happy with the result, change the blending option of this “sky” layer to “Multiply”, and the effect will look like this:

Step 3

Now you will notice that we have quite  a few noise on the “Sky” layer, which you may want to get rid of. So to do this, duplicate the “Sky” layer once. On the duplicated layer, go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur and apply the following settings:

Then change the layer blending of the duplicated layer to “Hard Light” and you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Now we will add some lightning effect to image. As you may know the previous image I used for this part was removed due to copyright issue (a lesson learnt). Also thanks to the copyright owner for accepting my apology. Also if you guys are interested, you can check out his work at www.jeffsmithusa.com.

So i used an alternative image from stockvault.net instead. Download a copy of this lightning image and load it into Photoshop. Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select a portion, copy and paste the selection back to our document. Put this layer on top of all other layers and name it “Lightning”:

Then use the Eraser Tool to gently erase the unnecessary portion of the image and leave only the lightning bits:

Step 5

Still on the “lightning” layer, go to Image > Adjustment > Channel Mixer and apply te following settings:

Then change the layer blending option of this lightning layer to “Screen”, duplicate this layer a couple of times and you shoud have the following effect:

Step 6

Still on the “lightning” layer, use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) to clone a few portion from the existing lighning and create some dynamic lightning effect:

Tip: use a big soft brush and adjust the flow and opacity to make lightning more dynamic.

Step 7

Now we can render some rainy effect on the image. Create a new layer called “Rain” on top of all other layers, grab a small White brush (3px) and apply the following brush options:

Shape Dynamics

Scattering

Once you set the brush, simply paint over the sky area, then apply the following motion blur settings:

After that, change the layer blending option to “Overlay” and you will have the following effect:

Step 8

To add a bit of water splashes on the lake so it look a bit more realistic, we can duplicate the background layer once more and put the duplicated layer just above the background layer, go to Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple and apply the following settings:

And the effect should look like the following image:

Ok that’s it for this tutorial! Hope you find it useful and inspirational :)

Here is my final image for this tutorial: (I adjusted the Hue/Saturation of the image a bit) – Click to Enlarge

If you have any questions, just drop me a comment :)

Cheers and have a nice day!

We will be using techniques such as layer blending options, image adjustment tools and filters.

Here is a before-and-after preview of this tutorial:

Before:

After:

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

1. Load a photo of you choice into photoshop. You can use the above “before” image if you want to follow exactly what’s in this tutorial.

Once you load your photo, duplicate the background layer once, and change the blending option of the duplicated layer to “overlay”. The way it add a bit more colour contrast to the photo and we will be able to play with this layer further in this tutorial.

The effect will look like this:

Step 2

Still on the “Background Copy” layer, hit Ctrl + M to bring up the Curve Tool, apply the following settings:

The result so far:

Step 3

Duplicate the “Background Copy” layer once, keep the layer blending option of the duplicated layer as “Overlay”, then hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B to bring up the Black and White adjustment tool and use the following settings:

After applying Black and White Adjsutment, duplicate this layer once and apply Gaussian Blur filter on it. This is to give some extra softness to the image.

See below for detail settings:

After applying Gaussian Blur, hit Ctrl + M and bring up the curve tool again and apply the following setting:

Here is the effect so far:

Step 4

To make the watercolour effect more realistic, we can use the Glass filter on image. Duplicate the “background 3″ layer once, go to Filter > Distort > Glass and apply the following settings on the duplicated layer:

Optional: We can also adjust the layer opacity of this layer a bit:

Here is the result so far:

Step 5

Ok now you may think the sky looks a bit empty, no worries, we can grab some fantastic cloud brushsets on Qbrush.com. Create a new layer and name it “cloud”, paint some cloud using the brushes you donwloaded over the top.

Here is the result so far:

Ok, that’s it for this tutorial! You can further edit the image by adding some colour overlay or some lighting effects. That’s totally up to you.

Here is my final image of this tutorial:

Hope you enjoy this tutorial and if you have any question, drop me a line!

Cheers and have a great day!