Photo Effects Tutorial [56K watch]

Fri Jul 01, 2005 8:23 am

This will give an extra something to your pictures of NBA players, musicians, or even politicians.

I will start with a picture of Kobe Bryant in shame.

Boring, right? Now we will use various overlays and blurs to give it something extra.

One of the most basic photo effects is a colour overlay. Duplicate your layer and hit ctrl-u (hue/sturation). Purple is a Lakers colour so I set it to colour on 25 saturation and about 10 lightness. Then I set it to overlay. You can set it to any blend mode you want. Just experiment. Experimentation is the key to getting better with Photoshop

In this picture all I did was duplicate the layer, gaussian blur it at either 3 or 4 pixels, and set it to overlay.

In this one I did the same thing, but I did a motion blur on Mr. Bryant instead of a gaussian blur.
Interesting effect: If you use the blur technique and then set the top layer to darken you can get a poor man's cartoon effect. I used this in my Ghostface wallpaper. Kobe example

These are a few I just experimented with.
Here I had two overlay layers. On the first I used the sharpen filter about 3 times and put it on overlay. O nthe second, it's a gaussian blur at 3-4 set to overlay. --> example

This is an advanced way of using the first technique I showed you. Ctrl-click the layer with your photo (selects all pixels) and render-clouds on a new layer. I adjusted the levels (ctrl-l) to get more contrast. Then to get a multi-colour effect I hit ctrl-b (colour balance) and set shadows to a purple colour, and the highlights colour to a yellow. I got this.

I hope you liked this tutorial. Just remember to experiment with different effects and blend modes.

Fri Jul 01, 2005 10:47 am

That should help some people, you introduced me to player effects when I first started making sigs because I had no idea what they were. These are also the basics of "Photo manips", basically tweaking interesting photos that are low quality to make them look cool. Hmm, gets me thinking, maybe I'll make a tutorial about that when I get a chance.