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tutorial: tricks and tips for making light textures III
on request of mylildementor (I'm sorry it took so long, you can email me about the other thing we've talked about if you still need them after this *g*)
(and I'm afraid I have to admit... also because it peeves me that people assume that things that took quite some time to make are 'just cropped from stock images')
how to make defocused round lights for textures
aka know your brush tool
General Notes
Step 01: Getting started
- make a new canvas, I usually make it 500x500px for things like that
- fill it with 50% gray (#808080), you can choose another base color but I'm a fan of the Hard Light blending mode for light textures and 50% gray is the neutral color for that mode (which means it will be invisible)
- you should have something like this now (larger of course)
Step 02: the Brush tool
- set your forground color to white
- choose a default round brush (for example: Hard Round 19 pixels)
- to make your life easier, we will change your brush settings a lot now
- we start with this:
- set your Opacity to 80%,
- your Flow to 70%
- and activate Airbrushing
- go to your Brushes palette (if you don't know where to find it go to Window - Brushes and it will appear magically *g*)
for your Brush Tip Shape setting:
- increase the Diameter to 30 px (this will make the brush tip larger)
- set the Spacing to 255% (so that you'll have singular dots instead of a stroke)
- check the Wet Edges option
for your Shape Dynamics:
- Set the Size Jitter to 80% (the higher this number the more various sizes you'll get)
- set the Minimum Diameter to 20% (this prevents the dots to get too small)
for your Scattering:
- set the Scatter to 355% (the dots will be placed more randomly)
- increase the count to 2 (you'll get more dots this way, but don't go overboard with this number!)
for your Other Dynamics:
- change your Opacity Jitter to 30%
- and your Flow Jitter to 70%
- save your new Brush tip: this will save you a lot of time if you want to use it again!
- just go to the little arrow next to your brush tip and then the next arrow
and choose New Brush
- give it a name
Step 03: Painting the lights
- your main work is almost done now
- make a new layer
- basically you will just paint some dots on this...
- vary the brush size!
- vary the colors (although they should be of the same range...)
- paint each color on a new layer
- change the layer blending modes
here I used three colors: #FFFFFF (white), #FA7D7D (pink), #FFDF94 (yellow)
and these blending modes: Hard Light, Soft Light, Normal, Lighten, Screen
I varied the size of our saved Brush Tip from 30 to 120
Step 04: Defocused
- time to get a bit more blurry and defocused.
- important, for each layer you're doing this you have to lower the opacity to about 30%
- you don't have to do it for each layer
- you can vary the settings...
- choose a layer you want to be more defocused
- change the Opacity to 30%
- duplicate it twice
- on the tow copies use a motion blur of around 15-20 pixels at an angle between 0 an 30°
- you can either use the same blur on both copies or changing the settings in between (that is what I recommend)
- after some work on the layers, you'll get something like this
Step 05: Details
- to get it look even better, duplicate some of the layers and use a Radial blur on it
- again you don't have to do this on each layer!
- it looks pretty nice now
- to get more glow into it, you can use the Outer Glow as layer style
- to get it even more blurry you can smudge some layers with the smudge tool to your liking
- try to rotate some layers
- to accentuate some lights paint on top some small white dots
- to make it short: be a little bit creative, I've shown you all the techniques *g*
- you want something more intense?
- adjust your levels with an adjustment layer...
- drag your left slider more to the right...
- because it's me, I usually make a new layer on top of all, fill it with 50% gray and set it to lighten to get my gray BG I'm so fond of...
Step 06: Finishing
- crop it to your liking
- normally you can use one pic for more than only one crop, just saying...
- you can change the colors now, to get even more textures from the same pic...
play around with it! *g*
if you take a look at my Light Set IV, you'll see that the variations of this are nearly endless ;)
(and I'm afraid I have to admit... also because it peeves me that people assume that things that took quite some time to make are 'just cropped from stock images')
how to make defocused round lights for textures
aka know your brush tool
General Notes
- I used Photoshop 7.0
- the only thing I know about PSP is, that I heard people claiming it exists
- the pics I'm posting are smaller than the things I'm working with
Step 01: Getting started
- make a new canvas, I usually make it 500x500px for things like that
- fill it with 50% gray (#808080), you can choose another base color but I'm a fan of the Hard Light blending mode for light textures and 50% gray is the neutral color for that mode (which means it will be invisible)
- you should have something like this now (larger of course)
Step 02: the Brush tool
- set your forground color to white
- choose a default round brush (for example: Hard Round 19 pixels)
- to make your life easier, we will change your brush settings a lot now
- we start with this:
- set your Opacity to 80%,
- your Flow to 70%
- and activate Airbrushing
- go to your Brushes palette (if you don't know where to find it go to Window - Brushes and it will appear magically *g*)
for your Brush Tip Shape setting:
- increase the Diameter to 30 px (this will make the brush tip larger)
- set the Spacing to 255% (so that you'll have singular dots instead of a stroke)
- check the Wet Edges option
for your Shape Dynamics:
- Set the Size Jitter to 80% (the higher this number the more various sizes you'll get)
- set the Minimum Diameter to 20% (this prevents the dots to get too small)
for your Scattering:
- set the Scatter to 355% (the dots will be placed more randomly)
- increase the count to 2 (you'll get more dots this way, but don't go overboard with this number!)
for your Other Dynamics:
- change your Opacity Jitter to 30%
- and your Flow Jitter to 70%
- save your new Brush tip: this will save you a lot of time if you want to use it again!
- just go to the little arrow next to your brush tip and then the next arrow
and choose New Brush
- give it a name
Step 03: Painting the lights
- your main work is almost done now
- make a new layer
- basically you will just paint some dots on this...
- vary the brush size!
- vary the colors (although they should be of the same range...)
- paint each color on a new layer
- change the layer blending modes
here I used three colors: #FFFFFF (white), #FA7D7D (pink), #FFDF94 (yellow)
and these blending modes: Hard Light, Soft Light, Normal, Lighten, Screen
I varied the size of our saved Brush Tip from 30 to 120
Step 04: Defocused
- time to get a bit more blurry and defocused.
- important, for each layer you're doing this you have to lower the opacity to about 30%
- you don't have to do it for each layer
- you can vary the settings...
- choose a layer you want to be more defocused
- change the Opacity to 30%
- duplicate it twice
- on the tow copies use a motion blur of around 15-20 pixels at an angle between 0 an 30°
- you can either use the same blur on both copies or changing the settings in between (that is what I recommend)
- after some work on the layers, you'll get something like this
Step 05: Details
- to get it look even better, duplicate some of the layers and use a Radial blur on it
- again you don't have to do this on each layer!
- it looks pretty nice now
- to get more glow into it, you can use the Outer Glow as layer style
- to get it even more blurry you can smudge some layers with the smudge tool to your liking
- try to rotate some layers
- to accentuate some lights paint on top some small white dots
- to make it short: be a little bit creative, I've shown you all the techniques *g*
- you want something more intense?
- adjust your levels with an adjustment layer...
- drag your left slider more to the right...
- because it's me, I usually make a new layer on top of all, fill it with 50% gray and set it to lighten to get my gray BG I'm so fond of...
Step 06: Finishing
- crop it to your liking
- normally you can use one pic for more than only one crop, just saying...
- you can change the colors now, to get even more textures from the same pic...
play around with it! *g*
if you take a look at my Light Set IV, you'll see that the variations of this are nearly endless ;)