Rabu, 04 Mei 2011

Tutorial Photoshop; Astral Projection



This is a simple tutorial that will show you techniques to improve your work. It may help you with the details of your digital artwork, such as lighting, cropping and blending of textures and colors, and shapes. It is a simple and quick tutorial. If you already have basic knowledge of Photoshop and its main tools, you should not face any problems going through it.


Picking your stock pictures
I generally find this step is not fun at all. For your
manipulation to turn into a great ones, instead of just good, you will have to be patient and be picky about the stock you choose. But, fear not! In this tutorial, I will provide you with all the stock resources you need.


The first steps is to organize the document
Open Photoshop and follow the steps: The easiest way is to just open the stock picture in Photoshop. Go to the navigation menu in Photoshop, select the menu File>Open and open the image of our model. Or, you can just drag the stock image Closeportrait_katlovestockdeviantart into Photoshop and start working on the
same document. Duplicate the layer we have and set the original to invisible. You do this by clicking once over the little eye icon you see at the left side of the
layer. (It is always good to have a backup of the original picture so you can always go back and get another duplicate of the original in case you need, or in case you just mess things up!) Select the image we are working with by pressing the [Ctrl]+[T] shortcut, then lower its position just a little bit. (We are doing this in order to let our tree have some more space to be noticed on the top of the head.) Let's make a new layer group by hitting [Ctrl-G] and putting our model picture inside. (I renamed the group to Model contrast, because we will do just that – boost the contrast of the details with the Photoshop default blending modes. You may rename this folder to whatever you please.)

Reworking our stock, boosting contrast and lightning.
Model... model... model! Head over to the group of layers we just made and duplicate the layer of our model. Now select the newly duplicated layer on the top, and set its blending mode to Screen. (This will bring a whole new life to the lightning and contrast levels of our model, but we are not done yet!'

Cropping with the Pen tool and masking.
(If you already know cropping using the pen tool and masks, this step may be skipped, otherwise I will be explaining it next.) It is about time that we get rid of the white background from the stock picture. The one way I have found to remove backgrounds in an image is to use the Photoshop Masks and Pen tool. Don't worry, I will guide you through it! Select our Model group(Make sure the group is selected, not the layer, but the whole group) and apply a Photoshop Mask to it. You do this by clicking on the icon shown in the picture. Now make sure you click the white rectangle that has appeared after the name of the layers group (Also known as Photoshop Mask). We have to make sure we have it selected so we apply the crop to the mask and not the picture. Using the Pen tool ([P] key on your keyboard), start laying out dots over the white background that you want to remove and around the model. (I recommend you to zoom in a bit to get a more accurate sight of what you are selecting.) Tip for more accurate cropping with the Pen tool:
Notice in the picture that I am laying out the dots on the end of each curve of the shape of the model. That is all we need, really. Let's see why in this next step: Now that we have our selection, we are going to convert all those plain lines into curves. Hold the mouse over the Pen tool icon for a second and pick the Convert tool point tool. Then start converting, as shown in picture. Once everything is done, you may right click over your image with the same tool still selected and pick the option called Make Selection Select the Mask you have after your group folder and take out your Brush tool to proceed to paint the background with pure black. (This works as sort of like an Eraser tool, the problem is, that if you mess things up with Eraser and remove something you did not want to, you cannot go back to have that piece you deleted, unless you perform an Undo. This is not always available. With masks, you can just paint the mask with a pure white color and watch your background you just removed, coming back to life!)


Applying textures and keeping shapes!
Our next step is going to be importing the textures that come with the Stock folder of this tutorial. Import them to the Photoshop document, create a group for them and send the model group to the back of our texture collection. Drag the texture Vintage3-03 to the bottom of our texture group and set the blending mode to Hue, followed by Fill of about 40%. (This will darken the shape of our model a bit, so the textures which we are going to apply will not make her look too bright.) What happens now is that our texture is not large enough to cover all the image! Stretching it is out of question, since you would lose minor details. This is important to make a great looking manipulation from an okay looking manipulation! But, enough of all that, select our current texture layer and duplicate it. Then proceed to Edit> Transform and flip the texture on the vertical. After all that, merge the two layers and re-position the texture to cover the whole image area. Now that we begin to have that funky look, let's repeat the previous 5.3 step, to enlarge our other texture Vintage3-02. Duplicate the new texture three times. Set the layer next to the Vintage3-02 texture to Hard Light and the others on the top of it to Soft Light. Set the texture layer on the top to a Fill value of 46%. And if you did everything as mentioned, it should look like what is shown in the snapshot! Notice now that the textures are not correctly blending to the model's skin. So, we need to find a way to keep the color and texture details, but also bring out the shading of the skin more. Don't worry, it is actually pretty simple. Duplicate our Model contrast group and bring it to the top of the Layers palette. Open the group and delete the layer that is in Screen mode. You now have your model in normal blending mode, but now set it now to Luminosity. Looking better already, but still not quite what we want. The original shading of the model's skin is now stronger than the textures. This can be easily fixed by Saturating the image. ([Ctrl]+[Shift]+[U]) The look is still too dark, so we will fix this by heading to the top navigation menu of Photoshop: Image>Adjustments>Brightness and Contrast, as shown in the picture. You may also play with the Curves and Exposure options within the same menu, until you get the look you are after.


Boosting details

With the Luminosity layer of your model still selected, select your Dodge Tool, (Press [O] on your keyboard) and start painting some of the light areas over the skin as shown. (Works very well with a soft brush along with a soft opacity level over the already brighter parts of the skin.) It is time to remove that background from the texture, to do this, simply press [Ctrl] key on your keyboard and click once over the mask of the model. This will give you the same selection you made with the Pen tool in a previous step, now it is much easier to remove the backgrounds. Make sure you invert the selection ([Ctrl]+[Shift]+[I]) before going to the textures group and removing that background. Looking pretty good so far, huh? But, we are not finished yet. Notice the lack of shading between the belly and the chest? We can fix that by painting the surroundings with a soft black brush. If you have some custom painting brushes, it will make the task much easier and you can easily find many of them for free on DeviantART. When you are finished, set your painted shadows to Multiply.


The Background
Finally, we will add a real background for our work, personally, since I do not feel like spending a whole lot of time manipulating my very own spacescape, I opted to use one that you may find in the Stock folder. Simply import it to Photoshop and drag it all way down in your layers palette. Bringing it down behind your subject. We are almost there! It is starting to get the mood we want and we now have to do the same with the textures, since before they where too small to fit the whole image size. Duplicate the layer and flip it vertically.


The Tree
The tree is actually pretty simple to blend. Import the tree and resize it to fit the area above the head as you see fit. After doing this, simply set the blending mode of the tree layer to Darken. (This works perfectly to remove any white background. You may also try to duplicate the tree layer and play around with the blending modes for different effects.)


The Petals.
I could not find where I got the petals from, but I believe it was from the www.sxc.hu site. This is actually a pretty simple step. Just crop them around, one by one, by duplicating the petals layer and playing around with the blending modes, until they fit the lightning. Use the friendly dodge and burn tool to emphasis this effect. Adding movement to the petals is also easy. Go to Filter>Blur>Motion Blur menu and play with the settings until you are pleased with the preview and click OK! Congratulations. We made it! Picture of the final work attached to here.


Stock credits:
• www.sxc.hu – Additional stocks, such as tree and petals
• http://cloaks.deviantart.com/ – The textures
• http://katlovestock.deviantart.com/ – The model
• http://resurgere.deviantart.com/ – The background

0 komentar:

Posting Komentar