Invitation Tutorial, Challenge 06, by rissa_jennings
Many thanks to pensnest for inviting me to write a tutorial for you all! I really liked this challenge because it was the first time I’ve made textures, and I got to play around with a lot of Photoshop filters that I’d never used before.
This tutorial is for Photoshop 7; having never used PSP, I’m not sure if there are the same or similar filters available, so I’m not sure if it’s translatable.
We’ll be going from this picture to textures like these:
or
.
First, choose a part of your picture you want to work with. I decided I wanted to focus first on the corner of the wall, where the berries fall over the side. Select the area you want, and go to Image < Crop.
Now that we have our base, let’s make the colors go crazy, shall we?
Next, I duplicated the base three times, setting the top layer to soft light, the middle layer to screen, and the next-to-the-bottom layer to multiply. I got this trick from a tutorial by green_queen, and it’s how I start working with any picture. It adds brightness and contrast, and while it doesn’t work with every image, it’s a good place to start. That leaves us with this:
Select the image (Select < All) and Copy Merged (Edit < Copy Merged) and paste this copy as a new layer. This lets you play around with the image without touching the layers beneath it, so if you use a filter you end up not liking later, you can just delete it and start again. With this layer, I used the Dry Brush filter, which can be found under Filter < Artistic < Dry Brush. These were my settings:
Brush Size: 2
Detail: 8
Texture: 1
This gives us:
Set this layer to exclusion:
Crazy colors have commenced! But I was still experimenting, and I didn’t like all the dark greens in here. Remember how we copied our brightened base, to start working with filters? Paste that image again, on top of the exclusion/dry brush layer. With this new layer, I used the Difference Clouds filter, found under Filter < Render < Difference Clouds. This gives us:
Much brighter, and very pink. I changed the blending mode to overlay to get this:
I added just one more filter layer, because while I loved the colors in this - especially the deep, dark reds - I wanted to blur the details of the berries and flowers a little. Select All and Copy Merged, duplicating your new super-filtered image, and paste this as a new layer. Using the Gaussian Blur filter, found under Filter < Blur < Gaussian Blur, I used a radius of 5 pixels to make the details a little hazy.
Everything’s all fuzzy now, and I still wanted some of the details to show through. I set this layer to Linear Dodge. Leaving the opacity at 100 percent was way too bright for my tastes, so I lowered it to 60 percent. This gives us our final coloring:
From here, I cropped what parts of the picture I wanted to use for my textures, and saved them as individual files. I tried to pick the brightest spots of the image, and also where there were differences in texture. Rather than having eight images of all berries, I made sure to pick out some of the bricks, the leaves, wherever struck my fancy.
Here’s where all my textures were cropped from:
And the final set of textures:
Let me know if anyone found this helpful! I realize it’s a very wild coloring to use on icons, but maybe it’ll help with texture making. If I didn’t explain something, let me know and I’ll be glad to help!
This tutorial is for Photoshop 7; having never used PSP, I’m not sure if there are the same or similar filters available, so I’m not sure if it’s translatable.
We’ll be going from this picture to textures like these:
or
.
First, choose a part of your picture you want to work with. I decided I wanted to focus first on the corner of the wall, where the berries fall over the side. Select the area you want, and go to Image < Crop.
Now that we have our base, let’s make the colors go crazy, shall we?
Next, I duplicated the base three times, setting the top layer to soft light, the middle layer to screen, and the next-to-the-bottom layer to multiply. I got this trick from a tutorial by green_queen, and it’s how I start working with any picture. It adds brightness and contrast, and while it doesn’t work with every image, it’s a good place to start. That leaves us with this:
Select the image (Select < All) and Copy Merged (Edit < Copy Merged) and paste this copy as a new layer. This lets you play around with the image without touching the layers beneath it, so if you use a filter you end up not liking later, you can just delete it and start again. With this layer, I used the Dry Brush filter, which can be found under Filter < Artistic < Dry Brush. These were my settings:
Brush Size: 2
Detail: 8
Texture: 1
This gives us:
Set this layer to exclusion:
Crazy colors have commenced! But I was still experimenting, and I didn’t like all the dark greens in here. Remember how we copied our brightened base, to start working with filters? Paste that image again, on top of the exclusion/dry brush layer. With this new layer, I used the Difference Clouds filter, found under Filter < Render < Difference Clouds. This gives us:
Much brighter, and very pink. I changed the blending mode to overlay to get this:
I added just one more filter layer, because while I loved the colors in this - especially the deep, dark reds - I wanted to blur the details of the berries and flowers a little. Select All and Copy Merged, duplicating your new super-filtered image, and paste this as a new layer. Using the Gaussian Blur filter, found under Filter < Blur < Gaussian Blur, I used a radius of 5 pixels to make the details a little hazy.
Everything’s all fuzzy now, and I still wanted some of the details to show through. I set this layer to Linear Dodge. Leaving the opacity at 100 percent was way too bright for my tastes, so I lowered it to 60 percent. This gives us our final coloring:
From here, I cropped what parts of the picture I wanted to use for my textures, and saved them as individual files. I tried to pick the brightest spots of the image, and also where there were differences in texture. Rather than having eight images of all berries, I made sure to pick out some of the bricks, the leaves, wherever struck my fancy.
Here’s where all my textures were cropped from:
And the final set of textures:
Let me know if anyone found this helpful! I realize it’s a very wild coloring to use on icons, but maybe it’ll help with texture making. If I didn’t explain something, let me know and I’ll be glad to help!