That being said let’s get down to business.

What we will be making

What we need for this project:

• Castle from imageafter.com
• Hot air balloon from pixmac.com
• RA2 Kirov from cncguild.net StoneDragon.jpg from EA forums
• Elephant from pixmac.com
• PSD file from the skyscape tutorial

“Previously on Prodigal Concepts” we found and used this landscape stock image that we got from pixmac.com

and with the help of Photoshop we duplicated, flipped and cloned parts of the image to make it look like one single shot that would fit nicely in our 2560px work area so that we could finally have this

after that we populated the heavens with stars, planets, clouds and colorful gasses.

So finally we are almost at the end of our journey and moving on to the last stages of our composition. But before we continue make sure you group the previous layers accordingly “landscape” and “skyscape” you can do this by selecting the layers you want to group together then drag them to the folder looking icon at the bottom of the layers panel.

Update the water reflection

Now check out the reflection of the sky and mountain on our body of water. It’s not the same sky right? So first thing we will do is take care of that problem.

If you have your “Ninth Planet” .PSD file open. Create a new layer at the very top of the layers panel and rename it “reflection-sky” then simply Select All or Ctrl + A and make a copy of the entire file or merged layers Ctrl + Shift + C then paste it Ctrl + V to the “reflection-sky” layer we’ve just created, this will be the first layer on the third group which we will call “realm”.

Flip the “reflection-sky” layer image vertically Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical, then reduce the Opacity to around 50% or less so we can see through the image. Start moving it downwards Shift + Down Arrow until the mountain edges of the reflections align, it’s not going to be perfect so just try the closest you can get.

Now let’s add a layer mask to “reflection-sky” layer and with a soft brush tool, brush off all the excess areas that is not part of the water reflection. Use the Blending Mode “Stroke” to help you trim the edges, like what we did for the sky of the original background in the “skyscape” tutorial. Don’t hesitate to zoom in if you need to. Turn Opacity back to 100% when you’re done masking.

Apply Filter Effects

Our “reflection-sky” layer desperately needs some texture. To give it that ripples effect, like there’s a very light breeze running over it. We will add some “Smart Filters” to create this effect, Smart Filters is a non destructive way to add a filter to your images. It will help us preserve the quality of the original image and will give us the option to make adjustments to the filter settings later when we need to. So while the “reflection-sky” layer is still selected go to Filter > Convert for Smart Filters, then click OK. Our layer is now converted to a “Smart Object”.

Now go to Filter > Brush Strokes > Sprayed Strokes and make the following adjustments.

Next lets give it some “Plastic Wrap” filter, go to Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap and use the following settings.

For an extra touch add Filter > Blur > Motion Blur, set Angle: 0 and Distance: 2

You should have something similar to this.

Adding details

Now for the fun part, placing the last elements that would finally complete this project. If you guys haven’t done so, you may begin downloading the required stock photos and extract the images from their backgrounds I suggest starting with the “Castle” photo.

Castle

Place the isolated copy of “Castle” photo on our working file, make sure it’s at the top most layer rename the layer “Castle”. Reduce it’s size a bit, I suggest 18% – 20%, and place it on the right hand side just by the edge of our lake.

Lets tweak it a bit, click on the “Create new fill or adjustment layer” button, select “Curves…” click OK then clip it to the “Castle” layer (hold ALT then click on the line between the two layers) open “Curves…” again (double click on the adjustment layer) and try to match these settings.

It doesn’t have to perfect. Your monitor might show a different result anyway so use your judgement here. Click OK. What we are trying to achieve is to make it blend with our background’s exposure.

OK now zoom in near the bottom of the “Castle”, notice the way I cut it out of the background left it with some really sharp edges that doesn’t look nice. For this grab your Smudge Tool (R), but if you placed your “Castle” image the same way I did which is File > Place… (location of the image) chances are your “Castle” layer is in “Smart Object” state. Right click on it first and then select Rasterize Layer now it’s just a regular image and ready for our Smudge Tool (R).

By the way before you click on Smudge Tool (R) make sure your Brush (B) tip is set to Soft Round use the Brackets [ ] keys to increase or decrease the brush tip whenever necessary.

Start smudging, try to stay close to the edge and smudge away. Maintain random strokes and spaces. Spot the difference? After smudging the bottom edge looks more blended to the ground.

Duplicate the “Castle” layer (don’t forget to include the curve adjustment layer.) Select both layer copies “Castle-copy” and “adjustment layer-copy” then Right Click > Merge Layers rename it “Castle-ref” and drag it below the original “Castle” layer.

Now flip it vertically, Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical and move it down, Shift + Down Arrow right before a gap shows between your two images.

Then repeat the steps we made in “Apply Filter Effects”. Add a Layer-Mask so we can Brush off excess of the reflection that’s not touching the water. Like the left part of the “Castle-ref”.

Do the same for the rest of our images. Unless they’re not supposed to be seen from the reflection on our “Lake”.

I will be placing a couple of elephants on the field, I will give some shadows with the help of brushes and the elephants outline selection.

The hot air balloons will be on the top left hand side. I gave it a dash of clouds from the “cloud” brush pack by JavierZhX, we’ve downloaded from deviantart that we used on the second part of this tutorial.

The rest is just some last minute changes, I went back to the “skyscape” group and using a large soft brush I dabbed on the top most left hand side. Using yellow, purple and green respectively. Gave it a Blending Mode: Overlay, and Opacity: 90%.

After my new year wallpaper tutorial I’ve decided to give this final piece some Optic Flare effects for extra character, that you can get from psdbox.com’s optic flares. Since I’m still in the “skyscape” group folder anyway I figure it’s a good time to include these effects.

And finally we’re done

Finishing touches: Ctrl + (N) a new layer, then get your “Gradient Tool” and set the Foreground color to #5e758c and the Background color to #165a9e now drag it across diagonally starting from the bottom right ending at the top left corner. Set the Blending Mode: Soft Light to give it a more dreamy feel.

Concluded: Part 3 of 3

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A Happy New Year to all the readers and visitors of Prodigal Concepts. I wish you all the best this coming year as we are ushered into the year of the Dragon – 2012.

The holidays are blurring out, (but the holiday weight seems to be staying longer than necessary) and before we all move on to the challenges of the coming year let us go with a bang and celebrate one last time with an out of this world wallpaper tutorial.

What we will be making

What we need

Font
Federation Font from Legacy of Defeat

Textures

Stainless from Photo Bucket

Concrete from deviantart.com

Grunge tile from Lost and Taken

Optic flares

The genius behind psdbox.com came up with some out of this world optic flares that you may find really useful in your future projects get it here.

Nebula
For the second time we will be calling on the Nebula which we are borrowing again from the uber awesome tutorial of Patrick Monkel Making a Superhero Movie Teaser Poster from wegraphics.net. Last used here on A photo manipulation tutorial, skyscape – The Ninth Planet

Set the stage

Open Photoshop and create a new document Ctrl + Shift + (N), make it 1280 x 800 pixels. Name it whatever you like, I’m going to call mine “2012 wallpaper”

Create the mood

Start with a new layer Ctrl + (N) and call it “background”, then set your foreground color to #797978 and your background color to #1a1a1a. Take your Gradient Tool (G) and from the gradient picker choose Foreground to Background and set style to Radial Gradient.

Drag your mouse from the center going diagonal to the lower right hand corner.

Create another layer Ctrl + (N) and call it “gradient-light”, set your foreground color to #c6c05c and the background color to #05394e. Keep the rest as it is and drag your mouse like before. Change the Blending Mode to Overlay.

Mystify the background

Ctrl + (N) a new layer and call it “cloud”, set your foreground color to #835d2c and the background color to #261501. Go to Filter > Render > Clouds, set Blending Mode to Overlay. You should get something like this.

Make another layer call it “gradient-blue” and set your foreground color to #698aab and the background color to #1a5c9f. Get your Gradient Tool (G) and set style to Linear Gradient. Drag it across your stage from top left diagonally to your bottom right. Set Blending Mode to Multiply.

Time to get our “bw-nebula” image out, just go to File > Place (navigate to the location of the bw-nebula image) then click Place. Make sure it’s centered, now we will Edit > Transform > Rotate 180° and change the Blending Mode to Screen.

Add another layer and name it “4gradients”, then get your Gradient Tool (G) from the Tools Palette and click on the gradient picker, the gradient editor window should pop up. Choose a 4 colored gradient then replace each color from left to right with something like Blue (or Cyan), Green, Yellow, Red.

Now starting from the top left drag it across diagonally to the bottom right. And set the Blending Mode to Overlay.

And on the 7th layer we almost rested… but not, because we will make one final layer for the background and call it “light-effects” fill this layer with #ffffff, then go to Filter > Render > Light Effects. Change style to RGB Lights, and set Intensity to 60 and Focus to 96 click OK. Go back to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur give it a Radius of 100% then set the Blending Mode to Overlay and reduce the Opacity to 75%.

Type treatment

Take your Type Tool and set the font family to the Federation font we downloaded from “Legacy of Defeat”. Set your font size to 130px and font tracking to 100.

Since it’s just a couple of days till the year ends why don’t we welcome the coming year by typing

Turn this into a selection, Ctrl + click on the type layer, then go to Select > Modify > Expand (Expand by: 5px). Now create a layer below the type and name it “outline” fill your selection with white. Temporarily hide the type layer by poking the eye on the left of the layer.

Go to Blending Options and set the following settings:

Drop Shadow > Blend Mode: Multiply, Opacity: 75%, Angle: 45°, Distance: 20px, Size: 10px

Inner Glow > Blend Mode: Screen, Color: White

Bevel and Emboss > Style: Inner Bevel, Technique: Smooth, Depth: 100%, Size: 25px, Soften: 10px, Angle: 45°,

Color Overlay > Blend Mode: Screen, Color: #3f464d

Stroke > Size: 1px, Position: Outside, Color: #dddddd

Place the Grunge tile texture above the “outline” layer and make sure the entire selection is covered now clip it to the outline by using Alt + click between the two layers. Add an Adjustment Layer – Brightness and Contrast then clip this to the Grunge tile texture and give it a -75 Brightness and -24 Contrast.

Unhide the type layer, and set the following

Blending Options > Drop Shadow > Distance: 21px, Size: 21px, Angle: 45°

Then place the Stainless texture above this type layer and clip it.

Blending Options > Color Overlay > Blend Mode: Soft Light, Color:#001d29

Do the same for the Concrete texture after placing it above the Stainless texture, clip it then set the Blend Mode to Overlay.

Group this set and call it “content”.

Give it some POW!

On a new layer with your Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) draw a very thin ellipse, I made mine around 206 x 19 pixels, deselect then go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur Set Angle to 0° and Distance to 90px click OK. Duplicate this layer then Edit > Transform > Rotate 90°, duplicate this layer then rotate 45° to the left.

Shrink the last copy to around 40% and the first copy to 60%. Group them together and name the group “glint” now duplicate this group 6 times (or more) and place them randomly on our content somewhere around the edges of the type layer.

And finally, place some of psdbox.com‘s Optic Flare effects, I will be using Optical-4b and Optical-8c. Just set the flares Blending Mode to Screen and drag it to where you feel it could give the optimum effect. Play with it until you are satisfied.

That’s it I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and be sure to share it.

A very Happy New Year to everyone!

May this coming year bring us all closer to our dreams, woot, woot, woot.

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What we will be making

What we need for this project:

• The “landscape” we made from the previous tutorial.
• Planets (image pack) by Obsidiandawn
• Clouds by JavierZhX from devianart.com
• Grunge Tile texture from unsigneddesign.com
• Brick Tile texture from premiumpixels.com
• Nebula which we are borrowing from the awesome tutorial of Patrick Monkel Making a Superhero Movie Teaser Poster from wegraphics.net.

It’s time to re-open our “Ninth Planet” .PSD file. First create a new layer below our “landscape” layer and then place the downloaded “bw-nebula” image we borrowed from Patrick Monkel’s tutorial by going to File > Place > (image file location) luckily for us its dimension fits our working canvas so we don’t have to work on it much, in addition the layer is converted to a “Smart Object”. Rename this new layer “nebula”.

Flip our “nebula” image using Transform > Flip Vertical, then nudge it upward. Do this while holding down the Shift key then with the Up Arrow key nudge it up 20 times.

With the help of a nice soft brush, we will mask the “landscape” layer’s sky a bit. To do this make sure you have your “landscape” layer selected and then click the button that resembles a Japanese flag to Add a layer mask to it.

Get your Soft Brush and make its diameter around 300px. Set your foreground color to #000000. Start brushing away some of the sky. Follow the curves of the mountain as close as you can. To make sure you don’t miss any stray pixels use the Blending Options and add a Stroke.

Clean up the stray pixels then remove the Stroke, Right Click on the layer Clear layer style.

Our sky needs a thin atmosphere, so create a new layer above the “nebula” layer and rename it “atmosphere” set your Foreground color to #a0c7fe and with the Gradient Tool set to Foreground to Transparent, drag it vertically starting from the bottom going up.

The skyscape feels a bit dull, it needs more tint or color. Let’s give it a nice gradient map. Set your Foreground color to #4a94f9 and the Background color to #32445c. And make sure the “nebula” layer is selected, simply click on the “Create fill or adjustment layer” button below the layers palette, it’s the one that looks a bit like a Yin / Yang symbol next to the “Add layer mask” button.

Choose Gradient Map…, this will create an adjustment layer using the foreground and background colors we have set on top of the nebula image. And since we only need this for the nebula layer we have to clip it.

To do this hold down Alt key and hover your mouse over to the line between the “Gradient Map” adjustment layer and the “nebula” layer, the cursor will change to a black arrow with two small circles over lapping each other, click your mouse. The “Gradient Map” adjustment layer will now have an arrow pointing down. This means that it’s clipped to our “nebula” layer.

It’s still feels a bit weird let’s add another “adjustment layer”, repeat the previous step this time using “Hue/Saturation”. First tick on the Colorize box then set

Hue: 215
Saturation: 45
Lightness: +5

To finish it off, add another “adjustment layer” this time a “Curve”, give it an

Output of 150 and an
Input of 120. Don’t forget to clip it.

I think we got it now, time to add some clouds using the cloud brush pack by JavierZhX that we have found on deviantart.com.

Create a new layer at the very top, and rename it “clouds”, now I will leave you guys the option which cloud style to use just make sure you cover the entire width of our work area. Start brushing the clouds above the mountain range, you can use more than one style (mix it up) don’t worry if it overlaps the mountains. We can clean it up inside a mask with a brush afterwards.

I would like to add a mystical effect behind the clouds, first duplicate the “clouds” layer and rename it “aurora” place it behind the clouds layer then go to Filter > Blur > Motion Blur and set the following;

Angle to 45° and the
Distance to 250, click OK.

Now open your Blending Options… for “aurora” and give it a Gradient Overlay, use these settings;

Blend Mode: Exclusion, and set gradient to
Rainbow to Transparent
Style: Linear
un-check Align with Layer
Angle to -45°

You should have something like this.

We are now ready to add some planets, initially I was all set up to use Obsidian Dawn’s image pack (Planets) but when I placed the Mars2 image which was what I used with the original “Ninth Planet” photo manipulation it was dwarfed in comparison simply because the canvas of this tutorial is four times the size of the original piece. What a predicament!

Let’s improvise and make our own! Open the Grunge Tile texture in Photoshop. Turn this into a Selection (Ctrl + A) to see the dimension on your Info Palette, it shows that we have 3264 X 2448. So while the image is still selected Copy (Ctrl + C) it then Create a new file (Ctrl + N) and make the dimension 2448 X 2448 (square) and Paste (Ctrl + V) our texture here.

We have to center our image so turn it into a Selection (Ctrl + A) then make sure you have your Move Tool (V) selected hit Align horizontal centers button located at the top of the staging area.

Next we will squeeze our texture image to fit our square canvas, go to Transform (Ctrl + T) then highlight the Width option and start squeezing using the Down Arrow keys up to around 75%.

Next go to Filter > Distort > Spherize, with the following settings;

Amount: 100%
Mode: Normal

Hit Ctrl + F to do it one more time. To extract our sphere from the rest of our image, we will use the Ellipse Tool, just drag it across our canvas while holding the Shift key starting from the top left corner. It doesn’t have to be perfect but try to get as much of the sphere as you can. Use “Vertical and Horizontal align centers” to keep it centered, Ctrl + Enter to turn the ellipse into a selection. Select the texture layer and Add layer mask to isolate the sphere.

There you go, instant planet! We can now use this in our project.

Place the planet image below the “atmosphere” layer and rename it “planet-x”, position it to the far right and make adjustments as you see fit. I wanted the bottom left to be seen with what looks like craters so I rotated my “planet-x”. Now we will add Blending Options.

Outer Glow
Blend Mode: Screen
Color: #FFFFFF
Size: 60px

Inner Glow
Blend Mode: Overlay
Color: #FFFFFF
Size: 250px

Almost there, set the Foreground color to #3399ff and the Background to #a0c7fe create a new layer and rename it “x-atmosphere” then go to Filter > Render > Clouds and clip it to our “planet-x” layer, use Multiply for the Blend Mode.

To give it a dark side (of the moon-ish effect), add another layer above the “x-atmosphere” layer then select the outline of our planet (inside the mask) and turn it into a Selection (Ctrl + click), now set your Foreground color to #0e1722 and your Gradient Tool to Foreground to Transparent. Drag a gradient starting from somewhere in the middle of the selection going diagonally up and left, use your judgment here. Add Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, Radius: 25px, then clip it.

Now that we have an imposing planet I think it’s safe to use our stock planet images from Obsidiandawn I will be using Mars2 and Saturn3. So start isolating your planets. If you’re not sure how to do this check out my article on How to extract an image from its background in Photoshop.

Once you have isolated the planets, start incorporating them to our work stage. Make sure you place them below the “atmosphere” layer. I’m going to start with Mars and place it off center near the left hand side. I think we need to add some color to Mars by giving it an “adjustment layer”,

Hue/Saturation
Colorize tick it on
Hue: 360
Saturation: 23
Lightness: 0

You may want to give it the same treatments as “planet-x” from this point on, the settings would vary but basically we will use the same glow elements. Do the same for “Saturn3″. You can add more planets using other textures like what we have done for “planet-x”.

Final result

Click the image for a closer inspection and enjoy.

To be continued: Part 3 – A photo manipulation tutorial, realm – The Ninth Planet

The Ninth Planet

We will be recreating it here step by step, but with a bit of a twist, using my trusted laptop and all its 1280×800 resolution we will make a 2560×1600 version (everyone goes whoa!). So if you guys are ready for this trip start your engines and let’s get crack’n.

I’ve decided that I will post this tutorial in parts so we could focus on the task details before moving on to the different stages needed to complete the scene. So for today we will start with the background particularly the landscape.

What we will be making

What we need for this project:

Stock photo of a landscape from pixmac.com

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Open Photoshop and create a new file with 2560×1600 dimensions and rename it “ninth planet”. Now open your landscape stock image and copy it to our “ninth planet” file.

The landscape

As you can see, our Landscape stock image in all it’s 1920×1200 is too small for our work area. Stretching the image is not an option here because it will not look good.

What we will do is position our landscape on the right bottom part of our work area by selecting all Ctrl + A then with your Move tool (V) selected go to your Alignment options and choose Align bottom edges and Align right edges. (Note: Icons highlighted in blue)

To make the landscape fill the empty space duplicate your Landscape layer. Then with your Landscape layer copy selected go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Now move it to the left with the left arrow key or Shift + left arrow key until the edge of your Copy layer touches the end of your original Landscape layer. Merge the two layers and rename it “Landscape”.

Now we have a full width landscape. Weird looking yeah, but we can take care of that easy. Grab your Lasso tool (L) then set your Feather radius to around 35px, anti alias ticked and round up a small part of river bank where your two landscape images were joined.

Copy this selection, Ctrl + C, and paste it on a new layer Ctrl + V then move it to the left. Just use your judgment to align it to the direction of the river bank of your right side image (arrow keys Up, Down, Left, Right), better Zoom in to clearly see your work.

Duplicate it Ctrl + J (3 to 4) times or as many times as you need to make it reach the edge of the work canvas something like this.

The next problem we have is that patch of water remaining from our original Landscape image. It’s time to merge our layers so we don’t have to go back and forth from layer to layer. Then make sure you have a soft round brush selected. This time we need to call upon the services of our Clone stamp tool (S). Pick a nice spot of dry grass the thicker the better. That area where we joined our two landscapes looks promising. Zoom in close to that area then just click anywhere while you hold down the Alt key and release. You can start brushing away the patch of water. Feel free to increase or decrease your brush size to optimize the effect.

Now that’s done check out this screenshot…

We need to fix the areas circled in blue, we don’t really need those houses, and the mountain where we merged the two landscapes look unnatural. So with the same technique we used to fix the patch of water previously we will repeat here using the trees to reforest these areas.

And that’s it, time to admire your work, we will leave the top half as it is for now, save your work and next time we will continue working on our projects Stratosphere with “Skyscape”.

To be continued: Part 2 – A photo manipulation tutorial, skyscape – The Ninth Planet

Which brings me to (LOL) “10 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts Saturday” issue #1. Starting today I will post 10 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that I know of every Saturday. It will benefit those who likes to dabble on some personal Photoshop projects over the weekend. This will help you guys reduce the time it takes you to navigate through Photoshop. Be warned that it takes some getting use to if you’ve been smitten by “the mouse”, but if you learn this it will immensely help you in the long run, especially on large projects.

I’m not sure how to effectively categorize the list because I know we all have different ways of filing things by importance. I suggest you make a soft copy file cheat sheet that you can save somewhere for reference as I post them here.

(Disclaimer: As I’m using CS3 there could be some slight difference with other Photoshop versions reactions, also I’m on a PC so MAC users just change some of the combo keys on your side. ex. Ctrl on a PC = Cmd on a MAC etc…)

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A very special “thank you” to freevector.com for the Photoshop tool icons we will be using in this guide.

Starting alphabetically:

A

This will open your

Path tool

Direct Selection Tool

Shift + A

By holding the Shift key you can switch between Path tool and Direction tool as you click on A.

Ctrl + A

Will Select All, when activated is usually represented by marching ants around the canvass.

Alt + Shift + A

Applies the Blending Mode Linear Burn

B

Opens your trusty and very useful,

Brush tool

Pencil tool

Shift + B

By holding the Shift key you can switch between Brush tool and Pencil tool as you click on B.

Ctrl + B

Opens your Color Balance option screen

Ctrl + Alt + B

This will show your Color Balance last settings

Ctrl + Shift + B

Applies Auto Color to your image.

Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B

Will open your Black & White control options.

*Bonus

Alt + Shift + B

Applies the Blending Mode Color Burn

Well there you go, 10 + 1 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts, I hope this would help you minimize the time you spend on your projects. See you again next Saturday for another set of 10 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts. And remember “it’s all about the end result”.

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What are the best images to use for this type of project?

1. All Hi-Res (High Resolution) images are great for extraction projects because you really need to get in there when you are cropping out subjects from a background and zooming-in works best with Hi-Res images.

2. Images on a white background are uber awesome, although obtaining the right image would be difficult because there is only so much resource you can find out there on a white background. Patience is the key as well as the right stock image provider. Combine white background with Hi-Res and we have a definite winner. You won’t miss a pixel of your subjects outline.

What images are bad for this type of projects?

1. The opposite of Hi-Res, but as you get better with Photoshop you will be able to work with Medium-Res and if you’re desperate enough even Low-Res photos.

2. Images with inner shadows on a dark background are the worst; you won’t be able to tell where you’re subjects outline starts or where the background ends. It’s almost unusable unless you only need to get part of your image, then it’s cool.

So now that image selection is done it’s time to open your Photoshop. There are numerous ways and tools to extract an image in Photoshop, each one unique and effective in their own way.

So let’s begin, I have here an image of an old style brougham on a white background (Download the image here or click on the stock photo below). It’s available for free at pixmac.com check them out for your future stock image needs.

Open your copy of old style brougham image in Photoshop, our image has a width of 1633 x height of 1225 this will do for our purpose today but take note that the bigger the file dimension size the better.

By default Photoshop opens image files fitted to your screen, (duplicate your image so we can go back to the original if something goes wrong, then turn off the original image layer and work on the copy) select your Zoom Tool from the Tools Palette or hit Z from your keyboard. Then click on your image or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + + maybe 3 – 4 times until you are zoomed in up to 300% at this level you can see the pixels of your image’s outline. Zoom in some more until you are in a comfortable level to see your image outlines.

Our image at 500% Zoom

Lasso Tool (L)

One of the basic Photoshop Path selection tool is the Lasso Tool (L). We need to create a path of our image outline to turn into a selection so we can remove the background. The Lasso Tool has 3 options the Lasso, Polygonal and Magnetic Tool.

How to use it

Lasso Tool: It can be tricky as it requires a good command of the mouse since this is how you will trace your image’s outline.

Polygonal Tool: Is more like the game connect the dots or can be compared to using a needle and a thread you can lay out your paths from point to point, I suggest Zooming in and place your points as close to each other as possible especially for curved Paths.

Magnetic Tool: This one would seem like the perfect choice as it literally hugs your outlines to create a path, all you need to do is hover over your images outline as close as you can and it will stick a path to it.

Once you have selected your path (I suggest go around your image piece by piece) hit delete to remove the background or use Ctrl + Shift + I and apply a Layer Mask to hide your background then for the rest of the pieces just fill em with black after selection.

Conclusion

A very good tool to use when starting out, great for images isolated on a white background like the one we have. Needs some practice to master, useless tool for extraction with regular images on a busy background.

Magic Wand (W)

This is great for beginners too (not the best tool to use though) but it can get the job done to a certain degree. Its brother the Quick Selection Tool can be used together with the Magic Wand when necessary.

How to use it

Zoom out a bit up to 100% and click anywhere in your white area. You will notice that your image outline is selected. Now use Ctrl + Shift + I to invert this selection then go to your layers option and apply Add Layer Mask. The selected background is now hidden behind the layer mask.

Continue selecting the smaller parts of the background and fill it with black inside your Layer Mask, until you have all the white background hidden inside the mask. You need to Zoom in closer for the smaller parts try to get help from the Quick Selection Tool in tight corners.

Conclusion

The result is not 100% clean try to create a new layer behind it and fill it with black to see the edges. And remember as long as there is a clear contrast between your image and its background the Magic Wand will do the trick. But this tool won’t be advisable, in fact it would just be plain useless if you have a busy background.

Extract Filter (Ctrl + Alt + X)

I believe this is no longer available in CS4+ but you can add it back in as an optional plugin. This one is a cool extracting tool best used for images that are difficult to trace ex. Fuzzy hair styles. Just go to Filter > Extract or use the shortcut Ctrl + Alt + X it will open your image on the Extract Tool work area.

How to use it

For this example let’s just take one of the wheels, the right front wheel would do great. Inside the Extract Filter work area get your Edge Highlighter Tool (B) and cover the outline of the wheel, make sure you don’t have any gaps in your highlight. Use the Eraser Tool to remove unnecessary highlights. Zoom in closer to get a better view of your work. Once you have the entire outline covered, get your Fill Tool and fill the rest of our target image.

It will come out a bit destroyed, but don’t you worry the History Brush (Y) will help you fix it. Use a nice sized brush and brush over the destroyed image. Take note to brush only the parts you want to recover.

Additional resources

Extract an object from its background

Conclusion

So you see although the Filter > Extract is a cool tool to remove an image from its background, it’s a bit complicated to use and takes a lot of practice to make it look pretty. But this will come really handy for extracting images with furry or fuzzy edges.

Layer Mask using Brush

A bit unconventional, but this could help you in sticky situations, say you used the previously mentioned tools and you have a few strays then you can use this to clean up your image.

How to use it

Simply add a Layer Mask to your image and make sure you have Black as your foreground color then with the brush tool start tracing the edge of your image, kind of like the reverse of what we did for the Filter > Extract option where we traced the image and left the rest out.

Conclusion

You can definitely use this to help you clean up an image, and if you have a good control of your mouse even extract an image.

Pen Tool (P)

This tool should be your best friend in Photoshop you can create a lot of neat things with it, and one of the things it can do is help you create a path, straight, curved, corner or whatever this is your Swiss knife of tracing.

Learn or rather master the Pen Tool from the resource links we have here and you will be able to extract any subject from any background no matter how busy, and even if it’s a low-res image. (I wouldn’t advise it, but it can be done.)

Related articles

Improve your grip on PEN TOOL a short but good tutorial

Pen Tool TUT Part 2

Conclusion

The Pen Tool is your best friend learn it, master it. It’s all in the wrist.

After the extraction

I placed my extracted image in another background, Red Square from pixmac.com and gave it a bit of texture, some shadows, light effects and presto!

So there you go tools to help you create artistic renditions to extract a subject from a stock photo then combine multiple images to come up with a new and exciting concepts, I hope you like it.

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The picture details are so vivid that I wondered how it’s even possible to capture an image with that quality. So I crawled around Google and discovered that HDR or High Dynamic Range images are composed of multiple layers of the same image merged into one.

High-dynamic-range photographs are generally achieved by capturing multiple standard photographs, often using exposure bracketing, and then merging them into an HDR image. Digital photographs are often encoded in a camera’s raw image format, because 8 bit JPEG encoding doesn’t offer enough values to allow fine transitions (and also introduces undesirable effects due to the lossy compression). – Wikipedia

OK let’s try to understand this in layman’s terms, our vision can only focus on a set of details in a particular scene, we can’t see every detail with one look but we have our memory to remember the elements of what we see and we can combine it in our mind. This is the same with a camera lens, a camera can only focus on a set of details, not the whole scene. Which is why in photography we focus on a subject to make it stand out from it’s environment.

With the help of software apps we can create a detailed version of an image taken with a digital camera and combine them together to show all the details in one image.

To simplify here’s an example, let’s pretend we are shooting outdoors, we have the sky, clouds, water, buildings, statues, lots of textures and colors are everywhere. For this we need a tripod or any stable platform you can rest your camera on. Take a shot of the scene setting the exposure and focus for the sky + clouds, next shot exact same scene focus this time on clouds + water, then water + buildings and statues. So you will end up with at least 5 images of the same scene with different points of focus and exposure.

Then you need to blend all this together with the help of a software like Photoshop and Lightroom another software you can use for this is Photomatix. It’s not easy but with practice and a little investment on software applications needed to merge these, one can achieve a good quality HDR image in no time.

Helpful readings on “How to achieve HDR images”

HDR Tutorial – Everything you need to know about HDR photography

8 Easy Steps to Fake an HDR Look in Photoshop

Easy HDR Technique by Cristian Iancu

If everything I said sounds complicated (coz, it is) and if you feel that HDR photography is just for professionals, maybe, but then again that line of thought is totally wrong! Anyone (including you) who can use a 1. digital camera (even point and shoot), a 2. computer and tweak around with 3. Photoshop can create High Dynamic Range images with the help of an amazing Photoshop plugin called Topaz Adjust by Topaz Labs, you can even have mind blowing pictures using only one photograph.

I know a lot of purists will be shaking their heads just about now, and say in their big voice, “What? Use a plugin to make HDR images? That’s preposterous! An abomination! Get the torches and the forks, gather the women and children, assemble at the town hall!”

Well, we can’t all go back to the stone age can we? At least not until Sir Richard Branson pays for the development of a commercially available “Time Machine”. Anyway the more hardcore of purist still thinks post processing is not professional, they say that Photoshop is the work of the devil and pictures that were processed after being taken by the “Photographer” is not photography. Duh!

Moving on Topaz Labs came out with a wide array of software products you can use with Photoshop to make your pictures stand out. One of them is Topaz Adjust which I had the pleasure to test drive for a month and I just have to say “if it was a car it handles really well”. It’s fairly simple to use, its user interface is sleek and straight forward you will be able to navigate through the controls without a hitch and the result is just brilliant. Plus with the price that’s less than $50 I think we have a winner here (a 30 day trial version is available for you to wet your lips on).

Let me introduce you to Topaz Labs – Topaz Adjust 4

What does it do? Simply put it makes your photos pop in less time it takes a purist and a hardcore purist to say Photoshop Photography Post Processing. Adjust can optimize image exposure, it’s color, and detail strength for stunning image results. Topaz Adjust makes this process simple, fun, even highly rewarding.

Let’s have a short walk through on how to use Topaz Adjust. What you will need:

1. A nice image you want to play with preferably an outdoor scene with lots of textures and colors
2. A copy of Photoshop
3. and of course Topaz Adjust (use the 30 day trial version just for kicks)

Get your copy of Topaz Adjust here

Assuming you already have Photoshop installed (I’m using CS3 for this exercise) Run the setup file of Topaz Adjust and install it to your machine.

Here is our sample image

Immediately you will notice that our sample image is overexposed, and whatever details and drama the photographer saw when this picture was taken is now lost in all the brightness of the background.

When Topaz Adjust setup is complete open your image in Photoshop and create a duplicate image of your original layer, this way if something goes wrong you still have your original image. (You are welcome to use my image for this walk through).

Then simply go to Filter > Topaz Labs > Topaz Adjust it will take you to the Topaz Adjust interface.

As you can see it’s very self explanatory…

Left side panel

On the left side panel, from the Top you have your Preview options for the main image at the center of your screen. With it you can go back and forth from your original image to the modified image and vice versa.

The thumb preview screen is a cool feature, it allows you to see image changes as you hover over the preset menu. Only when you click on the Preset of your choice will it be applied on your image. It takes a lot of computer memory to generate a modified image especially if it’s a very large file (DSLR output). So this thumb preview screen will give you an idea how your image would look before you apply the changes.

Then you have the Preset menu options this is where the magic happens, each preset will give you an awesome photograph effect, from the simple Exposure Correction to the more artistic Psychedelic results and of course two settings for HDR that will make your ordinary photographs become extraordinary.

The Other Options buttons will allow you to add and delete presets, you can create your own preset using the manual sliders on the right side and save it in your Preset menu for future use.

Right side panel

On the right side panel you have your Information thumb screen, much like Photoshop’s information thumb panel it allows you to see which part of the main image you are working on if you are zoomed in.

Then you have your viewing options if you really want to get in there and see your main image up close or from a distance this buttons will let you specify your viewing preference.

Then you have undo, redo buttons we don’t have to go there.

Another juicy part of this interface is the Manual sliders, if you want to go without the presets and go old school using your gifted sight to achieve great results then this is your guy. You have sliders for “Exposure”, “Details”, “Color” and “Noise” to play around with. You can even save your settings to the Preset menu using the other option buttons on the left panel. And if your feeling adventurous you can even pick a preset and start your manual adjustments from there.

When you’re satisfied with your changes, just click “OK” and it will take you back to Photoshop, you can now save your new and improve photo as you wish or use it in a project while your still in Photoshop.

Check out what happened to the sample image after modifying it in Topaz Adjust using some of the “Presets” options:

Sample

Our sample is an overexposed snapshot where almost all the details were lost.

Spicify

Psychedelic

HDR

These are just 3 of the presets I like to use, I didn’t even touch the manual sliders to get these results but as you can see the output is amazing compared to the original photo. Test it yourself, I’m sure you will enjoy it as much as I did.

“If you use Topaz Adjust to modify your photographs share your work here at the comment section, just leave the URL for us to enjoy. Thanks”

Acknowledgements:

My wife Grace for taking that sample image, she has full rights to it but she’s generous enough to lend it to us for this exercise.

Of course Topaz Labs for the Topaz Adjust test drive.

And all the readers and friends who stopped by and shared this article.

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For the first part of the year 2011, I would like to thank each and everyone of my friends and regular readers who drop by here every now and then to check out what’s new at prodigalconcepts.com and I wish you all good things this year and please continue to support my site and help me spread the word by sharing the articles you find interesting with your friends!

Today we will be creating a very cool “Pin Wheel” in Photoshop with the help of the Pen Tool. And to make it easy for us we will borrow this image of a pinwheel from the NewarkLibrary blog or download it here!

Final Image

Difficulty: Beginner – Intermediate

Duration: 45 mins (plus or minus)

Basics

Open your pinwheel image in Photoshop. Then create a new layer above it and rename it “Outline” now grab your Pen tool from your tools pallete or just hit (P) on your keyboard.

Try to zoom in (Ctrl +) to see the edge of the “Pin Wheel” clearly, now start tracing the outline of the “Blade” or the “Leaf” (I have no idea what it’s called). Start wherever it’s comfortable for you, I’m going to start from the top left going down. Just click on a point in the outer part of the Pin Wheel “Blade” (I decided to call it Blade for duration of this tutorial) and trace the edges point to point (if it’s a straight line).

If it’s a curve,try to get a wide area from your outline and without releasing your mouse drag its handles out to match your images curve.

To continue working on your path, hold Alt key and Click on your original point to cut a corner, (while holding Alt key hover your mouse to the last point you created it should show ^ symbol, click on the point.) Your drag handle will disappear so you can now continue tracing your outline.

Once you have outlined the entire “Blade” you can close your path by joining your last point with your original anchor point, you should see a small circle, like a degree symbol ° this means your are about to close your path.

If you are satisfied with the outline of your shape, turn your path into a selection (Ctrl + Enter). Turn off your Pin Wheel “Background” layer image by poking the eye next to it and you should have something like this.

Then make sure you have your “Outline” layer selected, fill this selection with a nice Pastel Green like #9ffc71.

Next we will trace the outline of the part of the blade I’m calling Flap (for lack of any other word for it). I see 2 ways we can do this, the Hard way is to retrace the part of the flap using the Pen Tool the same way we did the “Outline” which is a good exercise. Then there is the easy way which will cut corners and save us some time, since I’ve already shown you how to trace the entire outline I’m cutting corners for the “Flap” and take the easy way.

First duplicate your “Outline” layer and rename it “Flap” bring down its Opacity to around 50%, then turn off your “Outline” layer and then turn on the Pin Wheel “Background” layer.

Get your Pen Tool out, and use the Pin Wheel “Background” layer image for reference, trace the inside curve of the Flap. We are only after the curve, so here it’s OK to go outside the “Flap” layer and once you have cleared the image just circle around the rest of your image to close off your path.

Then turn it into a selection, we only need the part of the image inside our selection and discard the rest. So you can do two things add a layer mask to hide the unselected part or use Select > Inverse (Ctrl +Shift + I) and delete the part we wont need.

Now we can bring the Opacity back to 100% for our “Flap” image layer. And begin adding details. Use a nice light color to make a background of our work area so we can better see what were doing while adding details. Mine will be #fefdfd for the Foreground and #cefbb8 for the Background then apply it with a Radial gradient effect starting from the middle going out. Something like this.

Colors and shades

So we are ready, first lets give our “Outline” layer a bit of light and shade. To do this, create a new layer on top of the “Outline” layer and rename it “Outline-light” make a selection with your “Outline” layer by (Ctrl + click) your image from the Layers panel you will see the running ants will start marching.

Make your Foreground color a light shade of green like #d7fbc6, then set your Gradient tool to Linear gradient and your gradient picker is set to Linear to Transparent. Start outside the selection from the lower right of the image in a diagonal motion going in. This will give your image a nice 2 tone green.

We need to add some shadows, create a new layer on top of the “Light” layer and rename it “Shadow”. Then make a selection with your “Outline” layer again by (Ctrl + click) your image from the Layers panel one more time. This time set your Foreground color to Black #000000, and with the same Gradient tool settings as the light (except for the color) apply the gradient starting from the opposite direction, upper left diagonal motion going down. Then bring down your “Shadow” layers opacity to around 75%.

Time to give the “Flap” layer a light effect too by repeating the steps we made for the “Outline-light”, create a new layer on top of the “Flap” layer and name it “Flap-light” add the same gradient effect but from the opposite direction by starting from the upper left going down in a diagonal slice.

One piece of the puzzle is complete, time to group all your layers except for the “Background” layer that we made, you can also discard the original Pin Wheel image, it has served its purpose. Select all the layers thats part of the “Blade” by selecting the top most layer then while holding the Shift key click on the last bottom layer. Now that all your layers are high-lighted drag them down to the Folder looking button below your layers panel. This will group all the “Blade” layers into one folder, rename this group “Blade-green”.

Grouping

Take the group folder “Blade-green” and duplicate it, rename the copy “Blade-blue”, while this group is still selected go to Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° CW. Move this group and use your judgement to position it as the second blade. We will need to change this groups color scheme. Expand the “Blade-blue” folder and locate the layer “Outline copy” while this layer is selected go to Blending options and apply a color overlay use #71fcbf, then copy this layer style to your “Flap copy” layer. Do the same Blending option adjustment for the “Outline-light copy” layer but you should give it a lighter shade of blue like #bcf7fb, then copy this layer style to the “Flap-light copy” image layer.

Here’s a neat trick, read carefully moving forward because this might start to get confusing as we go back and forth the two folder groups. As you can see the two “Blades” are missing a shadow where they are joined together so do this, first create a new layer above the “Shadow” layer of the group “Blade-green” and rename this “Shadow2″ then make a selection using the “Outline copy” layer from the group “Blade-blue” fill this with Black #000000 apply a Gaussian blur with 50px Radius bring down the Opacity to 50% while “Shadow2″ layer is still selected turn the layer “Outline” from the group “Blade-green” into a selection and then invert the selection hit Del you should now have a nice shadow between the 2 “Blades”.

Now repeat this steps a few more times starting from (Grouping) until you have 4 multi colored “Blades” like this.

We will now add a Pin to our image to complete our Pin-Wheel project, create a new layer on top of all the grouped layers and name it “Pin”. Take the Ellipse tool from the Shapes pallette and make a nice little circle and turn it into a selection. Make your Foreground color #cbfab9, and your Background color #3399ff, set your Gradient tool to Radial and the gradient picker to Foreground to Background, apply the gradient starting from the center going out. Next lets give it a shadow effect, (Ctrl + click) your “Pin” image and create a new layer below it, rename this “Shadow” fill it with Black #000000, then go to your Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and make the Radius: 10px then change the opacity to 75%.

Last but not the least is the nice looking handle. Create a new layer below all the grouped layers and rename it “Handle”. Get your Rectangular marquee tool and create a long vertical rectangle. Fill this with #3399ff, create a new layer and name it “hilite” (Ctrl + click) your “Handle” to make a selection, then fill it with White #ffffff, reduce it’s width to around 50% or less. Give it a Gaussian blur with a Radius of 5px, keep it a little to the left.

Time to admire your work

I hope you all like this and put it to good use, share it with your friends and if you happen to use it in one of your projects give me a shout out and I will include it here. Thank you all very much. PEACE!

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In photography, bokeh (pronounced /boʊˈkeɪ/) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light.” – Wikipedia

A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me if I know bokeh. And thinking he meant the photograph effect of lights using DOF (Depth of Field) I said “yeah sure”, only to discover in the end that he meant how to recreate the effect in Photoshop. So to make a long story short, he explained that he was following a step by step tutorial but he didn’t get the same final output. After a few bouts with “what if you do this…” ideas from the top of my head that didn’t help the situation at all, he finally sent me the link to one of Fabio Sasso’s tuts on the subject posted on September 24, 2008 titled “Awesome digital bokeh effect in Photoshop” at abduzeedo.com

So I decided to recreate it myself to have a first hand perspective of what was going wrong. Everything was great until I reached Step 5 when I saw a hex code for yellow but it was giving me blue, so I just manually picked a yellow color myself, small problem solved. Then lo and behold after step 5 I got stuck. Eventually I figured out what was causing my problem, probably something got lost in translation, go figure. I checked the comments section and saw a lot of people were experiencing the same problem so I posted my two cents, but since the tutorial was 2 years old I decided to recreate it here at prodigalconcepts.com and maybe help others get the final output right.

So here we go…

Difficulty: Beginner – Intermediate

Duration: Less than 30 minutes

Let’s set up the stage

Create a new file and name it “Bokeh” make the dimensions (width x height) 1920 pixels x 1200 pixels, this will be an awesome “Wallpaper” project.

Create a brush

OK nobody panic, you heard me, we need create our own brush tip for this to work. We will utilize the powerful brush engine built in photoshop. Let’s begin by creating a new layer, then get your Ellipse Tool (U) on your tools palette, and while holding the shift key drag your ellipse tool to the center of the stage to create a nice big circle. The size is really up to you.

Then turn it into a selection (Alt + Backspace), (let the marching ants in).

Now fill your selection with #000000, change the opacity to 50% go to Blending options, (right click layer to open Blending options) add a Stroke set color as #000000 and Size: around 10px – 15px and Position: Inside. Now we have a nice transparent circle with an inside Stroke this will be our brush tip.

We can now define our brush, just go to Edit > Define Brush and name it “Bokeh”.

We will then tweak our Brush settings just open our Brush options choose Brush Tip Shape, and make sure you have the right Brush Tip, then adjust Spacing to 100%.

Next is Shape Dynamics, move Size Jitter to 100%, Minimum Diameter to 50% the rest is set to 0%

Then we will adjust the settings for Scattering, first tick the box for Both Axes and input 1000%, set Count to 5, and finally Count Jitter to 1%

Last option we will adjust is Other Dynamics, just set Opacity Jitter and Flow Jitter to 50% and were done with the brush tip you can now turn off this circle image layer we used to create the brush tip by poking the eye next to your layer.

The foreground and background

Now is the tricky part, we will create a foreground that will act as the background, confused yet? No worries! Let’s create a new layer on top of everything else and name it “Foreground” fill this layer (I’m using black), then on the Blending Options menu add a gradient effect, you can fill it with any color you like but for this tutorial I’m using a 4 shade gradient, Yellow, Blue, Purple, and Orange, I wont use any Hex Codes for the colors so you guys can just go crazy. Now set the gradient’s Blend Mode to Overlay, Opacity to 100%, Style is Linear, Angle at 45º then make the Fill to 0%.

Now to do the actual background, create a layer below all the other layers and fill it with a grayish black, pure black will not work well, I will be using #262626, now we are ready for the “Bokeh” effect.

Your combined “Foreground” and “Background” should look something like this, (unless you used a different color scheme “Gradient”)

The bokeh

Create a new layer between the “Foreground” and the “Background” layers and name it “Bokeh3″ we will work our way back to front, giving our image some “Faux” Depth of Field (DOE). First get the Bokeh Brush (U) (the one we made earlier) from your Tools Palette (U) and make the size around 500px – 600px (try to use the bracket keys on your keyboard for adjusting brush size. Right Square Bracket key ( ] ) to increase and Left Square Bracket key ( [ ) to decrease brush size) then just brush it across your work area (choose White for your Brush color). Then go to your Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and make the Radius: 20px, change the Blend mode to Color Dodge.

You should have something like this…

Make another layer on top of “Bokeh3″ and name this layer “Bokeh2″ make your brush slightly smaller maybe around 300px – 400px brush it across your work canvas then add a Gaussian Blur effect with a 4px Radius then Blend mode to Color Dodge.

Now for the last layer that will go on top of your “Bokeh2″ layer, name it “Bokeh1″ make your brush size slightly smaller than the previous layer, then do the brushing across the canvas then the Gaussian Blur with a Radius of 1px > Color Dodge . And your done!

If it doesn’t look like my final image, check your layers panel against mine. You only need 5 active layers, “Foreground”, “Background” “Bokeh1″, “Bokeh2″, and “Bokeh3″

Now the rest is all up to you how you would want to jazz up this wall paper, you can use it for your “Desktop”, your “iPad”, or your “iPhone” just change the dimension according to your needs. I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial, as much as enjoyed recreating it with you.

Final Output

Variations

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Difficulty: Beginner – Intermediate

Duration: 30 mins – 45 mins (plus or minus)

Setting up the stage

Let’s begin by creating a new file in Photoshop and name it “twitterBird”, then let’s give it a work area of 700 pixels x 700 pixels, we want it big so we will have enough space to play around with. Just keep the background color white for now.

We need to make sure that our rulers are in view, if not go to View > Rulers and then just click on it, or use the short cut Ctrl + R.

Next drag your ruler from the left to the stage and keep it at the center, then drag the top ruler probably 1/3 from the top of your stage like this.

Creating guidelines is a good way to get your symmetrical elements aligned, just like the way Jeff Scarterfield does in his cartoon drawing tutorials as featured in Inspiration: How to Draw Cartoons Online – Jeff Scarterfield.

For the last guide, we will need our Ellipse Tool (U), make sure that Paths is selected in your tools options. Then simply drag it on to our stage to create an Oval shaped outline keeping the cross of the ruler guides inside the Ellipse.

Hit Ctrl + Enter to turn it into a selection. You will see the running ants. Now create a new layer and name it “ellipse-outline” then go to Edit > Stroke set the width to 1px and color can be any color you want. This will be your outer guide, while the rulers are your symmetrical guide.

Start creating the Twitter bird

Your work stage should now look like this, almost everything we do from this point on should be inside the ellipse. If you have not yet centered your ellipse guide by now, just select the “ellipse-tool” layer on your layers panel. Hit (Ctrl + A) then click on Align horizontal layers option at your control selection bar near the top.

Twitter bird’s head

Now we are ready to begin, create a new layer on top of the “ellipse-outline” layer and rename it “bird-head”. Get your ellipse tool out again but this time hold the Shift key while dragging the ellipse tool inside your ellipse-outline. Drag it until you get something like a 220x220px circle path (check the info tab).

You should have something like this.

With your “bird-head” layer selected, go to Edit > Transform path > Warp (if your Photoshop is pre Warp option version play around with Distort and Skew) moving on, push the handles in, slowly and one at a time starting at the corners and work yourself around to put a light dent on our circle, if you are not sure how it should look like you can use the final output for reference.

Start warp

End warp

When you feel comfortable with the shape of the head hit the Enter key, and remember to just try and keep things clean don’t worry if it’s not perfect. We are now going to turn this into a selection by hitting Ctrl + Enter (ants should be marching here). With the “bird-head” layer selected and marching ants marching, click on the foreground option and pick a nice blue color from the color palette, I think #02A7CB will do fine then hit Alt + Backspace to fill your selection with the foreground color. Keep it centered to your cross guides. Your image’s shape should be similar to a “guitar pick” or a rounded “Dart’s wing”.

Next we need to give it some ruffled feathers for extra details, don’t be afraid it’s just a simple procedure. Create a new layer below your “bird-head” layer and name it “ruffled-feathers” then grab your Pen tool from the tools palette and starting from just below the top of our “bird-head” and the mid cross guide going to the left create a short path.

Drag out the handles to make an outward curve.

Cut one of the handles to create a corner by holding the Alt key and click on the 2nd point. You will know you’re in the right point when you see a (^) when you hover your mouse over it.

Bring it back to the head just below the 2nd point and drag the handles out again to create an inward curve. Cut the handle as before to make a corner and close it off by joining it to the primary point. You should get a shark fin looking shape.

Do another one but slightly bigger and going in the opposite direction. Then after that go to the top of your horizontal guide near the left cheek start your path from there and do two more fins but this time they should curve in the same direction like waves. Actually you can play with this and do as many as you want that you feel would compliment your drawing. But for this tutorial we’ll stick with this. So by now you should have an image similar to this.

Hit Ctrl + Enter to turn it into a selection and fill it with the same blue color. We will now merge this two layers together so while your “ruffled-feathers” layer is still selected hold your shift key and click to select the “bird-head” layer. You should have both layers hi-lighted now, right click on it to open your options menu and click merge layers.

Now it’s time to add some definition and hi-lites. Pick a darker blue for the background color, I’m using #2A8A9F then with your newly merged layer selected press Ctrl and click on the merged “bird-head” layer, this will turn the outline of your image into a selection. Click on your gradient tool or hit (G), then make sure your gradient effect is on Radial Gradient and drag you gradient horizontally starting from the upper left hand going down.

Your gradient gave your image a bit of depth, now we’ll give it some outline shadows, Right click on your layer and open your Blending Options and tick on Inner Glow then match the settings to what I used here pick a nice shade like #0C8FB7 for your color and click OK.

Twitter bird’s eyes and brow

We’re now going to add some features like eyes, eyebrow and beak. We’ll use our Ellipse Tool again and create a small version of our “ellipse-outline” layer inside the “bird-head” layer. You can zoom in a bit to get a better look of what were doing. Drag your ellipse tool until you get a nice sized ellipse. What we want is an exaggerated version of the eyes.

When you’re happy with the ellipse for the eyes go to Edit > Transform Path > Distort because we want our ellipse / egg shape wider at the top and narrow at the bottom.

Hit enter then go to your Paths tab and drag your path to your create new path button and rename it “eye” we want to save it for later.

Return to your layers panel and create a new layer on top of everything else and name it “shadow”. Go to your foreground color picker and find a nice dark blue with a hint of gray hue something like #1F4D57, then hit Ctrl + Enter to turn your path into a selection. Select gradient again then from the gradient picker at the top choose foreground to transparent and your “Gradient Effect” to linear gradient then just drag it diagonally across your selection starting from the outside of your selection.

When you get the right amount of shadows, create a new layer and call it “eye” then go back to your Paths tab and select the “eye” layer path we saved earlier. You should have the path we used to create the “shadow” layer. Turn it into a selection (Ctrl + Enter) then set your foreground color to #FEFEFE and your background color to #DCDCDC, set your gradient picker to foreground to background and gradient effect to radial, then drag it diagonally across your selection.

Reduce the size of this layer slightly until you see enough amount of the shadow layer behind it and rotate it a few degrees counter clockwise.

Go back to your “Paths” tab (you better get used to it we will be going back to the paths panel a lot in this tutorial) and select the “eye” path layer one more time, with your “eye” path layer still selected create a new layer in your layers panel and rename it “iris”. Set your foreground color to a nice blue color like #02B0E6 and your background color to a lighter version like #99DFF5 we will use the same gradient effects settings as the original “eye” layer image. Turn your path into a selection and start dragging your gradient across this selection just like before. Resize this layer to make it smaller than the “eye” layer image probably around 30% – 45% depending on what looks good to you. Rotate it clockwise leaning opposite the previous layer’s position. Use your personal judgment to make some adjustments. Right click this new layer and go to “Blending Options”, add an “Inner Glow” and use another blue color like #0B3D4B for the color glow, then set the size to 12px click OK.

This time we are going to use our “iris” layer to make a selection. So go ahead and turn it into a selection like what we’ve done for the “bird-head” outline. Then create a new layer and name this layer “gradient”. Change your foreground color to white #FFFFFF and your gradient picker to foreground to transparent then drag your gradient starting from outside the selection like what we did for the “shadow” layer, hit Ctrl + D to turn off the selection. Now take your pen tool out and make a path across the “gradient” layer. Start from the upper right hand side going to the lower left side. Then drag your handles to make a nice upward curve make a big loop outside the iris to cover the whole lower area, you can now close your path and turn it into a selection then hit “Del” or “Delete”. Change this layers opacity to somewhere around 65%. We will then link these two layers (“iris” and “gradient”) by selecting them both, and with a right click of your mouse on the highlighted layers click on the “Link Layers” option. You should be able to see link chains on your selected layers which mean we can now move these two layers together by selecting one of them.

Check your work against mine and do some tweaks where it’s necessary.

One more visit to the paths tab and again select our “eye” path layer, return to your “Layers” panel and create a new layer. Name this layer “pupil”, do the same procedure as what we’ve done for the “iris” layer only we will use a darker shade of gradient. For this one set your foreground color to #0D94B9 and background color to #08516B, add an “Inner Glow” of #0C8FB7, “Blend Mode” set to multiply, Opacity 45%, Size 10px. Rotate image is optional.

Let’s add some glint to give the eyes more life. Create a new layer and name it “glint” take the ellipse tool and while holding down the “Shift” key drag it inside our “iris” layer to get a small circle shape. Turn it into a selection and fill it with white #FFFFFF. Make sure you position it a little outside upper left of the “pupil”. Now go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and give it a nice 1px radius.

That should do it for the eyes, let us now work on the eyebrow. I know birds don’t have eyebrows except for the cute ones. So we will make this really simple.

Let’s create a new layer and call it “eyebrow” then take the ellipse tool again, and while holding down the shift key create a circle as wide as your “iris” layer, then turn it into a selection and fill it with #08516B. Turn off your selection and grab the handy dandy pen tool make a horizontal path halfway near the top and make a curve, make sure you have a crescent shape facing down, do a big loop to cover the entire lower portion and close the path, hit “Del”. Move the eyebrow image on top of the eyes and rotate it clockwise just a little bit to give your drawing more character.

Group your eye layers by selecting all of them (Ctrl + Click) on each layer used for the eyes including eyebrow then drag it to the Create a new group button (the folder looking button) third from left.

Rename the group folder “left eye”, then make a copy of the group folder by dragging the whole folder to the Create a new layer button beside the Create a new group button and rename the copy “right eye”. Select the group “right eye” then go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal and move it to the right and make adjustments based on your vertical guides.

Twitter bird’s beak

After you finish making final adjustments to the eyes it’s time for us to start making a beak for our Twitter bird. So create a new layer and call it “beak”.

Take the rounded rectangle from your shapes tool and make the radius around 10px. Drag it on to our stage, make it a nice rounded square up to around 50 x 50 pixels, to turn it into a selection and fill it with yellow #FDCB01.

Edit > Transform > Rotate it around 45 degrees so it becomes more like a diamond than a square.

Then Edit > Transform > Scale down to about 10% – 20%, don’t bother holding down the Shift key here because we want it to be pinched but keep the width as is.

Ctrl + click on the “beak” layer to make a selection. Then create a new layer and call it shadow. Take the “Rectangular Marquee” tool and set it to “Intersect with selection”. Drag the “Rectangular Marquee” tool starting from the bottom ending midpoint of your selection. Make sure you are at the horizontal center of your “beak” layer. Let go of the marquee tool, you will see your selection changed to only half of the “beak” layer outline. Fill the new selection with a dark yellow, almost brown #322801. Now go to Edit > Transform > Warp then push the two inside handles from the top going down. What we want is to have a nice outline of the upper beak and lower beak, when you’re done hit Enter.

Next we’ll just give our beak a very light hi-lite to give it more character. Create a new layer and name it “hilite”. Pick a light yellow for our foreground like #ECE294. Set your gradient to Foreground to transparent and use the Diamond Gradient effect. Ctrl + click on the “beak” layer so we can get a selection. Then drag your gradient across the selection from the top going down.

Take a moment to look at your work and do some adjustments that you think your drawing needs. The hard part is over. We are almost done. It’s time to give our Twitter bird a body, it’s wings and it’s feet. But first group your beak layers so we have a nice looking layers panel. And should the need to move the beak around arises we could just select the group and move it in one motion like what we’ve done for the right eye. Don’t forget to name your group, let’s just call it “beak”.

Create the Twitter bird’s body

OK for the body create a new layer above the ellipse-outline layer because we want this behind the head image layers. Name this layer “body-outline” then go back to your “Paths” tab and duplicate your “eye” path layer, just drag it down to the Create new path button and rename it “body”. Next we’ll move your body path below your Twitter bird’s head image by using Ctrl + T and then while holding down the Shift key use the arrow keys to position your path. Then Scale it up to match your heads width holding down the Shift key so it stays proportion. Now make the same adjustments we made for the head and make the top portion narrower than the bottom by using Edit > Transform > Distort. Adjust the alignment to match the head.

Then with your warp tool pull on the handles and make the bottom part less pointed and more rounded. Similar to what we did for the head.

Make sure you have the “body-outline” layer selected then turn the path into a selection and using the gradient settings we used for the head (foreground color = #02A7CB / background color = #2A8A9F / gradient effect is on Radial Gradient) fill your selection with this gradient.

Locate your “bird-head” layer select it, then Right click on it and choose Copy Layer Style now Right click on your “body-outline” layer and pick Paste Layer Style. You now have the same Blend mode effects as the head.

Now use the “body-outline” to make a new selection, create a layer on top of the “body-outline” and call it “breast” set your foreground color to a very light blue #D4F6FD and your background color to #51DEFD, gradient effect Radial, drag it from the center going out.

Edit > Transform > Scale it down 30% more or less. And check alignment.

Move it down a bit and give it some Inner Glow of #B3F0FD with 65% Opacity and 10px size.

Group the body layers and name it “body”. Now we are ready to make our Twitter bird fly.

Let’s have some Twitter bird wings

Create a new layer below the “body” group folder and call it “wing”. Take your Ellipse Tool and without the Shift key make a nice thin ellipse like a small grain.

Edit > Transform > Warp your new ellipse path to make the left side rounded and the right pointed. This would be similar to an extreme warped version of our body outline.

Turn it into a selection and fill it with gradient (foreground color = #02A7CB / background color = #2A8A9F / gradient effect is on Reflected Gradient) then Blending options set to (Inner Glow > Blend Mode to Multiply > Opacity to 45% and size to 10px).

Rotate this layer clockwise to have an angle and move it near the top of the body a few pixels below the head. Make a copy of this layer and rename it “wing 2″. Drag the image “wing 2″ below your “wing” and rotate this layer, now overlap it with the original image so it doesn’t show any space in between the two layers and try to match the original wing’s direction. Push the second wing a few pixels in. Then duplicate the second wing layer and call it “wing 3″ make the adjustments same as that of “wing 2″.

Group your wing layers and rename it “left wing”, duplicate the group and call it “right wing”. Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal the group “right wing” and move it to the other side of the body.

Now we just need to make a nice pair of feet and our Twitter bird project will be finished.

Let’s give our Twitter bird a nice pair of feet

We don’t need to make this part fancy so let’s create a new layer on top of the “ellipse-outline” and call it “left-foot”. Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) create a vertical rectangular shape and fill it with a gradient (foreground color = #FDEBA1 / background color = #FDCE10 / gradient effect is on Reflected Gradient ) start from the center going to the right.

Then take the pen tool and make “W” like cuts at the top.

Hit Ctrl + Enter to make the selection then “Del”. You will have something like a long king’s crown, now Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical and then Edit > Transform > Distort. Drag the top left and top right handles downward going to the right. Then push the top left and right handles in to make your image narrow at the top and wide at the bottom.

Now scale it down and position it under our “body”. Add some inner glow #BC9601 with 65% Opacity and 15px size. We will just duplicate our “left-foot” layer and rename the copy “right-foot”, go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal then move “right-foot” layer to the opposite side.

Hide the ruler guides by pressing Ctrl + (: ; key) then for your “ellipse-outline” just click on the eye icon of the layer, just like poking it in the eye . And now you may admire your work!

Let’s have a short recap

Aside from creating a really simple but cool drawing of a Twitter bird, we’ve also learned:

• The importance of using guides
• How to use the gradient tool
• How to play with the pen tool
• How to select, link and group layers
• How to save paths
• And how to control blending options, copy and paste it on another layer

Fini! – follow me on twitter @xzykho

In the end it’s not the final result that matters in this tutorial it’s the process, like the great Bert Monroy always says… “It’s not work, it’s play. It’s not the end result that’s important it’s how you get there.”

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