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.
