In this tutorial, I will show you a rather useful technique I use in Photoshop to make perfect human selection, which requires the combination of channel mask and the quick selection tool available in Photoshop CS3.

I have received a number of emails lately in regards to this topic and I have decided to post this short tutorial with a step-by-step guide for beginners. Once you master this skill, you can apply it to pretty much every human image you want to selection/extract.

Meanwhile, if you have any tips/tricks about making selections, you’re more than welcome to share your experience with us, just drop a comment below :)

Although this is not a formal photo effect tutorial but rather a tip/trick, I have created a final image here:

OK let’s get started!

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

Girl

Step 1

Load the Girl stock image into Photoshop. We know the ultimate goal is to seperate the girl from the rest of the image, but how do we start. Firstly let’s take a look at the image:

1. The overall lighting is quite good and it doesn’t have a lot of colour variation.
2. This is a human portrait so that means taking out the hairs and making selection around it will be difficult.
3. You may think of using Pen Tool, but what happen if you’re just not that good at it??

After those thoughts above, it’s time to get down to business. To begin with, let’s take a look at the channels in the channel palatte and select the “Blue” channel as shown below:

The reason I chose the “Blue” channel here is because it provide the biggest contrast from the model to the background, comparing with the Red and Green channel.

Step 2

Now we’re are on the blue channel. The second thing we’re going to do is to increase the contrast as much as we can, while preserving the hair bits. To  do this, we can make a duplication of the “Blue” Channel by right-click and choose “Duplicate channel”.

On the “Blue Copy” channel, go to Image > Adjustment > Brightness /Contrast  and apply the following settings:

Then hit Ctrl + L and bring up the level adjustments tool, apply the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now we will have to use the power of the Quick Selection tool to select the light colour part of the girl’s body. To do this, simply grab the Quick Selection tool (W) from the tool box, set the brush size to 2px and tick “Auto-Enhance” option, make a selection of the white part as shown below:

Hint: make use the + and – quick selection tool available on the option bar for adjustments, don’t worry about the hair bits on the outside as they’re already in black colour.

When you finish the selection, simply fill it with black colour:

De-select the image when you’re done, if you see a white gap on the girl body, simply use a black brush to fill it.

Step 4

Now you will see around the girl’s body (which is in Black), there are some areas cover in dark grey colour. We must get rid of them in order to make our selection better. To do this, simply use the Quick Selection Tool to make a selection around the girl, then press Ctrl + Shift + I and inverse this selection. Grab the Eraser Tool to gently erase those dark grey bits off:

The reason we make the selection is that by doing so, we will not accidentally erase the parts on the girl’s body.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we have successfully completed a Channel Mask, which we

Step 5

Now we can go back to the layer palatte, go to select > load selection and choose the following:

and you will see now the model is selected:

Press Ctrl + J and make a duplication of the selection, and create a new layer in between and fill it with white colour, you will see we have now successfully make a pretty good selection for the girl model:

Step 6

Now we can of course fine tune the image a bit by using the Sharpen Filter. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen and apply the following settings:

Also add a series of adjustment layers on top of it will help to bring out extra light and contrast: (Go to Layer > Adjustment Layer)

For all adjustment layers, make sure to tick the “Use previous layer as clipping mask” option.

Black and White:

Levels

Curves

Hue and Saturation

and here is the effect so far:

Step 7

Now we have a perfect girl image, without any background and great to work on as a starting point. It’s time to use your imagination and creativity :) I simply use some custom brushsets from qbrushes.com and add some patterns in the background, adjusted the colour balance a bit.

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 tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to design this awesome Fantasy style Castle Scene with icy background texture, space and debris brushsets.

Together we will be using a variety of Photoshop techqinues such as layer blending mode, selection methods, filter effects, masking technqiues and image adjustments. Again this is an intermediate tutorial so some of the steps can be a bit tricky, but it doesn’t hurt to have a try!

Here is a preview of my final result for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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

Castle

Icy Background

And these two brushsets:

Space Brushset

Debris Brushset

Step 1

Firstly let’s prepare our background texture. Load the “Icy Background” texture into Photoshop, duplicate the background layer once and set the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “soft light”.

Go to Layer > New adjustment layer > Curves and apply the following settings:

Set the blending mode the adjustment layer to “Multiply” and you will have the following effect:

Now go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Colour Balance and apply the following settings:

Change the blending mode of the newly created colour balance adjustment layer to “soft light” and you will have the following effect:

You can see now the image has more colour depth and much more eye-catching than the original one.

Step 2

Now let’a add an ancient castle in. Load the “Castle” image into Photoshop, use the Magic Wand tool to select the sky portion of the image: (Hint: hold down “Shift” Key to add onto the existing selection)

Then press Shift + Ctrl + I to do an inverse selection, then grab the Rectangular Marquee Tool and hold down the Alt key and make a selection of the bottom part of the image.

This will substract the bottom part of the selection off , as shown below:

After the substraction, press Ctrl + Alt + R to bring up the Refine Edge Tool, apply the following settings:

After the edge-refinemetn, copy and paste the selection on to our document, resize and position it as shown below:

Name this layer as “Castle” and change its blending mode to “Hard Light”.

Add a vector mask onto this layer, grab the Gradient Tool (G) and set the foreground colour to “Black” and background colour Transparent, apply the following gradient effect on the mask:

And you will see the untidy bit on the left side of the castle disappeared:

Step 3

Duplicate the “Castle” layer once, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and apply the following settings:

Keep the Blending mode of the duplicated layer as “Hard Light”, however drop the opacity to 70%, and you will have the following effect:

Now go back to the orginal castle layer and make a duplicate of it once more, drag the duplicated layer above all other layers, go Edit > Tranform > Flip Horizontal and flip this layer horizontally once, set the blending mode of this layer to “overlay” and opacity 65%.

You will have the followinge effect: (This add a bit more depth to the image)

Step 4

Now let’s add some mist/fog around the castle and add a bit of distant feeling to it. Create a new layer named “Mist”, grab the Lasso Tool with 50px feather, draw a selection as shown below:

Go to Filter > Render > Cloud and render some cloud  inside it (White as Foreground Colour, Black and background colour),  set the blending mode of this layer to “Screen” with 70% opacity:

Then duplicate the “Mist” layer once, put the duplicated layer below the orginal Mist layer and change its blending mode to “Color Dodge” , you will see now we also have some shining effect for the castle and this make the image more vibrant:

Step 5

Now load the “Debris Brushset” into Photoshop. Create a new layer and grab a brush of your choice from the set, paint over the newly created layer as shown below:

Change the blending mode of this layer to “Soft Light” and drop the opacity to 40%, you will have the following effect:

Then load the “Space Brushset” into Photoshop, create a new layer with “overlay” blending mode on top of every other layer, simply paint over the layer with any brush you like from the set:

Step 6

Now you may feel the left side of the image looks a bit empty. To fill this, I simply duplicate the background layer once more, flip the duplicated layer horizontally once and change its blending mode to “Darker Color”:

Add the followinge vector mask to the duplicated layer to add some lighting dynamics to the image:

You will have 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 balance and add a few Pen Tool lins in the background) – Click to enlarge:

Also if you like to have some extra practices of making those Pen Tool lines, you can take a look at my other post here.

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 demonstrate the processes I used to design this snowy rock text effect in Photoshop. The inspiration of this design came from a snowy mountain photo I saw the other day, and I thought I could create a similar text effect which might look interesting!

Along the way, we will use various layer blending options, some selection techniques, a number of filter effects and brush dynamics. It’s a simple tutorial suitable for Photoshop beginners. Have a try :)

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

Here is alternative version which I added a bit of cloud and colour onto it:

Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800 x 800 px, fill the background layer with Black Colour.

Let’s create some lighting effect for the background to work with. Use the Gradient Tool (G) tool and select the Radial Gradient options, Fill the background layer as shown below:

Step 2

Download a copy of this font from dafont.com and type some texts onto the background layer. Resize (if necessary) and position it in the centre of the canvas:

On the text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Outer Glow

Inner Glow

Bevel and Emboss

Gradient Overlay

Here is the effect so far:

Step 3

Donwload a copy of this rock image from cgtextures.com and load it into Photoshop.  Then go back to our document and load the selection of the our text layer (holding down your Ctrl key and left-click on the thumbnail of the text layer in the layer palette):

Then drag the selection onto the rock image we just loaded:

Copy and paste the selection back to our text document and name the newly created layer “rock texture”.  You will see the following effect:

Step 4

Duplicate the “rock texture” layer once.  Hide the duplicated layer for now.

Go back to  the original rock texture layer, apply the following Black and White adjustment options:

Change the blending option of this layer to “Screen”.

Unhide the “rock texture copy” layer, change its blending option to “overlay”. The effect now should look like this:

Step 5

Pfrom the previous step, we can see the white part of the text looks like snow, but it is not realistic enough in my opinion and we can add some more texture to make it look better!

To do this, download a copy of this snow image from cgtextures.com and load it into Photoshop. Then Go back to our text document and use the same method described in Step 3 to load the text selection. This time we go one step further with the text selection: select the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M), hold down the Alt key and at the same time draw a rectangular selection for the lower part of the text. (We would like to preserve this part of the rock texture and leave the upper part for the snowy effect)

The selection will now look like this:

Hit Alt + Ctrl + D and assign a 10px feather to the selection. Drag this selection onto the snow image we just loaded, copy and paste some snow back to our text document:

If you feel there isn’t enough snow on the text, you can use the Clone Stamp Tool (S) with a small soft brush to clone some more: (Tip: load the selection of the text again, and clone inside the selection so the snow won’t go beyond the text border)

Name this layer as “snow texture” and apply the following Curves adjustment settings:

The effect so far will look like this:

Step 6

To add a bit more dynamic to the text effect, we can simply create a new layer called “falling snow”, grab a 3px soft round brush with the following brush dynamics:

Also Tick the “Smoothing” option.

On the “falling snow”, use this brush to paint around the text layer as shown below:

To add a bit of softness to the falling snow, we can duplicate the “falling snow” layer once and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings:

The effect will now look like this:

Ok that’s pretty much it for this tutorial. I added some more rocky texture down the bottom, also did minor adjustment for hue and saturation and alter the angle of the text.

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

Here is alternative version which I added a bit of cloud and colour onto it:

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!

Along the way, we will be looking into techniques such as layer blending effects, loading and expanding selection and image adjustments.

Below is a preview of the final result:

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Ok let’s get started!

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1000 x 400 pixel, fill the background layer with Black colour and type some texts onto it. You may use any font you like, I chose this beautiful font from dafont.com.

Position the text as shown below: (You may hit Ctrl + t to bring up the free transformation tool to resize the text a bit)

Step 2

On the text layer, apply the following layer blending options:

Inner Shadow

Outer Glow

Bevel and Emboss

Color Overlay

The effect so far will look like this:

Step 3

Now we’re going to make a selection of the text, which we can use later in the tutorial.

Move your mouse over the text layer, hold down the Ctrl key and left-click on the layer (See below image for the position where you do the left-click):

You will also notice the cursor will change into a hand with a rectangular marquee.

This will load the selection of the text (as shown below): If you are having trouble with this, there is an article on the web you might find useful.

Then go to Select > Modify > Expand (Path shown below)

Apply the following setting:

And the selection of the text should now look a bit wider than before:

Step 4

Now we’re going to add some texture to create some ancient feeling for the text.

Download a copy of this image and load it into photoshop. Go back to our own document and press the “M” key to select the Rectangular Marquee Tool, then move your mouse over the text until the cursor turns into a rectangular marquee shape: (see image below)

Then hold down your left mouse button and drag the entire selection over to the newly loaded texture:

Copy and Paste selected area over to our document – This action will automatically create a new layer, name it as “texture”.

Set the blending mode of this layer to “Overlay” and you should have the following effect so far:

Step 5

Duplicate the “texture” layer three times. Apply changes to layer blending as following:

Change the layer blending mode for “texture copy” layer to “Color Dodge”, with an opacity of 40%

Keey the layer blending mode for “texture copy 2″ layer as “Overlay”, with an opacity of 100%

Change the layer blending mode for “texture copy 3″ layer to “Soft Light”, with an opacity of 90%.

And you should now have the following effect:

Step 6

This is an optional step. I feel like adding some depth into the text, so I duplicate the “texture copy 3″ layer once, then hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B to bring up the Black and White adjustment tool and apply the following settings on the duplicted layer:

The effect will now look like this:

OK that’s it for this tutorial! The rest is left upon your own creativity, you can add some more texture, adjust colour balance, etc. Totally up to you :)

Below is my final result for this tutorial: (I added a background texture and further adjusted the colour balance)

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

As usual, if you have any question, just leave me a comment below.

Thanks very much and have a nice day!