Tutorials
Both of these were made using CS5, but some steps will be easily translateable, whilst others won't be.
Tutorial One
to
With nearly all images, start by duplicating the base and setting to screen. Then copy+merge and paste, and set this layer to soft light. For a lot of averagely lit images, this gives depth and contrast, without being too extreme. Play with the opacity to achieve a decent starting point. Here's my image now.
Now, if I don't have any other major adjustments to do, I'll start playing around with colourings. There's no real pattern to how I choose what way to go with colouring; I mostly just play around. Sometimes I know I wanna go with yellow, or green or whatever, but I start by bringing out the natural colours in the image and going from there. Lately I really haven't been using normal colours, I've been having fun with the extremes and seeing what comes out. But, for this image I played around and got this:
Most people might leave it at that, but I duplicated and placed it under all the colouring layers again at 50% and, with a little tweaking, got this:
And once again I go perilously close to over saturation and contrast, which I personally love, and some others hate. Make them how you want to, not how others tell you. Which is why I'm not listing of a bunch of figures and settings for colouring.
Right, now, I decide I want to focus him more in the centre, and smaller, cause I think negative space would look effective. So I shrink him down with the free transform tool (holding shift to keep it in ratio). You can only resize once with free transform, then it loses quality and sharpness and looks awful.
Anyway, I kept my original picture underneath, so now we have something like this:
I figure with this image, clone stamp brush would work best. I extend up the main yellow line, and then do the greenery. But when I finish, it really doesnt look right. So I get out my smudge tool and fix it up, and now it looks a lot better. something like this (without colouring):
but if I take away that extra head layer from the first cropping, it looks like this:
without this underneath:
So basically, keep in mind other layers can come in handy to achieve different effects at times, such as here, where smudging the background all the way would look a lot less realistic then using the image cropped differently.
But I thought the background was taking away a little, so I drew black all around the top, blurred it and set to soft light. Like this:
+
=
Well, I think it could do with a bit more depth, so in comes Mr. Lightblob to lend a hand. First I get a brush, about 5-10 pixels, and draw white blobs to the right of his head where the light comes in, and around the place where I think he could with some shine. then I gaussian blur them at around 6-8, and motion blur ataround 10-12, with an angle from north-west to south-east. Motion blur is a great tool, and you can get really interesting effects from it. I suggest experimenting wherever you can. Then I set that to soft light 60%, duplicated and blurred some more and set to 40% on screen. Then I made some black blobs in the same way and set to soft light.
Here it is, finished:
(And yes, I think with my images I mixed up the order of the last two steps, so the images aren't quite correct, but the steps are all there)
Tutorial two - Simple blue/purple colouring
to
This won't work for all images, but it is a super easy way to get a blue/purple colouring.
Most important later is first. a curves layer. Curves are you friend, use them a lot. And gradient maps too.
The curves box on the top right of the cap show the settings I used to achieve the blue colour. Curves are also great to achieve contrast in addition to colour. Note the blue is up very high.
Now I feel this is too dark, so here come light layers. Now here's a picture of my light layer cause I have no idea how to describe it:
Rather unusually, for this image I set it to lighter colour at 50%. Other images will need screen or lighten, as this just won't work, but when it suits an image it gives a really cool shiny effect.
I duplicated my light colour layer and set to soft light at 70%, just to bring all the colours out and focus it a bit. I then copy merged and set to soft light at 20%.
I added texture, which I'm not sure where it' from, since my computer deleted the original folder:
Then a brightness and contrast layer and set both to 12, to lighten and add contrast without overdoing it. I also added a vibrance layer, because they are your friend and you should use them everywhere. They're the easiest way to make colours pop without oversaturating.
I then added a final layer, a selective colouring layer, where the only difference was made to the magentas. settings were -10, +26, +14, and -8. but that doesn't really matter, or help to much. Basically I brought out the lighter purplish tones more, particularly on his face.
And there it is:
If you desperately need a psd for this one, I can upload it if you need it, because I understand curves layers can be an absolute pain.
Tutorial One
to
With nearly all images, start by duplicating the base and setting to screen. Then copy+merge and paste, and set this layer to soft light. For a lot of averagely lit images, this gives depth and contrast, without being too extreme. Play with the opacity to achieve a decent starting point. Here's my image now.
Now, if I don't have any other major adjustments to do, I'll start playing around with colourings. There's no real pattern to how I choose what way to go with colouring; I mostly just play around. Sometimes I know I wanna go with yellow, or green or whatever, but I start by bringing out the natural colours in the image and going from there. Lately I really haven't been using normal colours, I've been having fun with the extremes and seeing what comes out. But, for this image I played around and got this:
Most people might leave it at that, but I duplicated and placed it under all the colouring layers again at 50% and, with a little tweaking, got this:
And once again I go perilously close to over saturation and contrast, which I personally love, and some others hate. Make them how you want to, not how others tell you. Which is why I'm not listing of a bunch of figures and settings for colouring.
Right, now, I decide I want to focus him more in the centre, and smaller, cause I think negative space would look effective. So I shrink him down with the free transform tool (holding shift to keep it in ratio). You can only resize once with free transform, then it loses quality and sharpness and looks awful.
Anyway, I kept my original picture underneath, so now we have something like this:
I figure with this image, clone stamp brush would work best. I extend up the main yellow line, and then do the greenery. But when I finish, it really doesnt look right. So I get out my smudge tool and fix it up, and now it looks a lot better. something like this (without colouring):
but if I take away that extra head layer from the first cropping, it looks like this:
without this underneath:
So basically, keep in mind other layers can come in handy to achieve different effects at times, such as here, where smudging the background all the way would look a lot less realistic then using the image cropped differently.
But I thought the background was taking away a little, so I drew black all around the top, blurred it and set to soft light. Like this:
+
=
Well, I think it could do with a bit more depth, so in comes Mr. Lightblob to lend a hand. First I get a brush, about 5-10 pixels, and draw white blobs to the right of his head where the light comes in, and around the place where I think he could with some shine. then I gaussian blur them at around 6-8, and motion blur ataround 10-12, with an angle from north-west to south-east. Motion blur is a great tool, and you can get really interesting effects from it. I suggest experimenting wherever you can. Then I set that to soft light 60%, duplicated and blurred some more and set to 40% on screen. Then I made some black blobs in the same way and set to soft light.
Here it is, finished:
(And yes, I think with my images I mixed up the order of the last two steps, so the images aren't quite correct, but the steps are all there)
Tutorial two - Simple blue/purple colouring
to
This won't work for all images, but it is a super easy way to get a blue/purple colouring.
Most important later is first. a curves layer. Curves are you friend, use them a lot. And gradient maps too.
The curves box on the top right of the cap show the settings I used to achieve the blue colour. Curves are also great to achieve contrast in addition to colour. Note the blue is up very high.
Now I feel this is too dark, so here come light layers. Now here's a picture of my light layer cause I have no idea how to describe it:
Rather unusually, for this image I set it to lighter colour at 50%. Other images will need screen or lighten, as this just won't work, but when it suits an image it gives a really cool shiny effect.
I duplicated my light colour layer and set to soft light at 70%, just to bring all the colours out and focus it a bit. I then copy merged and set to soft light at 20%.
I added texture, which I'm not sure where it' from, since my computer deleted the original folder:
Then a brightness and contrast layer and set both to 12, to lighten and add contrast without overdoing it. I also added a vibrance layer, because they are your friend and you should use them everywhere. They're the easiest way to make colours pop without oversaturating.
I then added a final layer, a selective colouring layer, where the only difference was made to the magentas. settings were -10, +26, +14, and -8. but that doesn't really matter, or help to much. Basically I brought out the lighter purplish tones more, particularly on his face.
And there it is:
If you desperately need a psd for this one, I can upload it if you need it, because I understand curves layers can be an absolute pain.