tutorial 005 bones
Program: Photoshop CS3
Difficulty: Easy
Translatable: Yes
PSD Included: No
0. Crop and resize your picture.
I got my picture from bones-daily.com, cropped it
and resized it to 100x100.
1. Duplicate your base and set the copy to Screen.
As always, play around with the opacity. The darker the picture the higher the opacity.
2. Duplicate your base again, drag the copy to top and set it to Soft Light, Fill: 50 %. Again, play around with the adjustment. By setting the blending mode to Soft Light you increase the contrast and emphasize the dark parts of the picture.
3. Create a Levels Layer (Layers - New Adjustment Layer - Levels),
RGB 0 | 1,20 | 255
This and the following two steps will increasingly brighten the picture. But no worries, it'll work out at the end.
4. Create a new Brightness/Contrast Layer (Layers - New Adjustment - Brightness/Contrast)
Brightness: + 85
Contrast: + 5
That'll add a lot of brightness and a bit of contrast.
5. Create a new Curves Layer (Layers - New Adjustment Layer - Curves)
RGB: Input: 135, Output: 115
When you brighten the picture, it's important to not lose all of the contrast. The Curves Layer helps to re-emphasize the darker parts of the picture.
6. Merge all layers, then copy and paste (press Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E). - Set the new layer to Multiply
That's a quite effective step which works best with bright pictures. Therefore it's important that you brighten up the picture beforehand.
7. Add a gradient texture. Set the blending mode to Soft Light.
It's up to you whether or not you add a gradient texture. But it adds another nice contrast to the picture.
Et voilà, done! :)
I hope this works for other pictures as well and so, I'd love to see your results!
And please don't ask for a .psd. It won't take you more than 10 minutes to try this on your own...I hope. ;)