Day 211: Frozen Text

Here is an oldschool text effect that a ton of my students have done. I now understand why they gravitated to this one (It took less than ten minutes to do). I like the frozen ice pattern I found for the background but the overall look is weak.

Tutorial link

Day 210: Spacy Glows and Brushes

I went off a bit from the tutorial choosing to use different brushes and effects. I like the glow but am starting to think I'm overusing the Lens Flare :)

Tutorial link

Day 209: 90's Text

The colors and geometric shape reminds me of the early 90's MTV type of style... may be a bit of a stretch. Anyways, the text effect itself was not overly complex (composed primarily of layer styles) but the background was way more work that I expected. The overall appearance is ok but not spectacular.

Tutorial link

Day 208: Sparkle Text

I'm back to doing some text effect tutorials in order to bank some for the next few days while I'm out of town. The effect is a simple scattered brush appliet to a path. The background is two separate gradients, a grunge stripe texture, a lens flare and white watercolor brush.

Tutorial link

Day 207: Broken Glass

Interesting effect but a sloppy extraction. I'm trying to play catchup from the days I missed during Comic-Con and I don't like the sloppy cuts. Ah well....

Tutorial link

Day 206: The River Doctor

Gritty, yoked and full of wisdom... liquefied, high pass filters, blurs and curves.

Day 205: Chalkboard Writing

I created a custom brush to simulate chalk. I created a path of the text and applied the stroke to the path. A few tweaks with some noise and blurs combined with a soft vignette finished off the quick design.

Day 204: Gas Masks, Nuclear Missle and Molten Lava

Thresholds, lots of erasing and a font called Flame Death.

Day 203: District Pug

Here is a metal sign inspired by the District 9 Movie poster using one of my favorite subjects. Grunge brushes and textures are always fun to work with but the stroke method was interesting as well.

Tutorial link

Day 202: Flowery Brushes

Fun textures, floral brushes and colors. I'm not sure how much the background works with the color but I'm moving on :)

Tutorial link

Day 201: Dante's Inferno

Trippy collage. I spent quite a bit longer on this than I thought I would. There are a lot of things going on in blending modes plus I took a lot of time finding and extracting images. It was good practice and resulted in a creepy final collage.

Day 200: Vampire Cherries

I can't believe I've made to to day 200!! Wow.

This was a relatively easy effect to achieve using only three images. The cherries are a bit more cartoony than I would have liked but what can you expect when adding teeth to fruit?! The title is a bit cutesy but then again I like the simple play on words... it may make me groan later but I'm smiling now.

Day 199: Creepy Shack

Better but I don't think there was enough color in the original image. Maybe I'll try again in the future but not now.

Day 198: Movie Effect

Using lens blur, noise and exposure adjustments I created a movie style effect. I'm not really impressed with the final result. I think I could have done more with a higher resolution image. I'm going to try this tutorial using a different image.

Tutorial link

Day 197: Planet Bishop

Here is a picture of river in Bishop that I took this year. This is a really simple effect using a simple rotation and polar coordinates filter. The hardest part was finding an image that would look halfway decent. I tried quite a few and this was the one that worked best.

Day 196: Light Dancer

Clouds, brushes from abstract "Flame", scattered brush dynamics combined with a Curves, Hue/Saturation and Gradient map adjustments. Sparkletastic!

Tutorial link

Day 195: Drawing Style

This effect was fun to create. I started by duplicating the original layer and applying a Find Edge filter and then creating a pattern of the original image. The canvas was made by using the texturizer filter on a brown color fill. Using the clone stamp set to Pattern I "painted" in the areas that I wanted in color. A quick vignette and a viola.

Tutorial link

Day 194: Fun with brushes

Splatter brushes, grunge brushes and distressed edges, oh my.

Day 193: Officer Brad

Nuff said.

Day 192: Bling Bokeh

Tedious and time consuming. The technique to create the diamonds was interesting however the sheer volume of diamonds and various placement made this a bit too much for me. Moving on...

Tutorial link

Day 191: River Wisdom part 3

More wisdom from the river... (Before and After shots)

The effect was created using a high pass filter, a duplicate layer set to hard light, a gradient overlay with noise added to it and a light vignette.

Day 190: Rusty Text

The tutorial was a bit weak. I like the background but had to deviate from the instructions quite a bit. The bevel effect is a bit too strong on the grungy edges around the D and Y. I think I may have exhausted the quality text effect tutorials... hopefully more will pop up soon.

Tutorial link

Day 189: Gold Text

Here is yet another Gold text effect. It was created using a simple combination of stroke, inner, shadow, stroke and gradient overlay. It's somewhat simplistic and reminds me of the crappy layer styles you would get out of a book on Photoshop 6.0

Ah well...

Tutorial link

Day 188: Chrome Text

A rather simplistic layer style that took way more tweaking than the final effect justified. I continue to tweak around with textures and filters to create the backgrounds. Although not spectacular I am enjoying the mere exploration of different ways to blend textures together. 

Tutorial link

Day 187: Brownstown Grunge

I need to catch up from the days I missed so this is a grungy photo effect. Nothing spectacular although the original picture is not too shabby.

Day 186: Lone Pine

At a gas station in Lone Pine I found a weird wagon tucked in the back of the parking lot. For the photoshop tweaks I used two different textures (one layer set to SCREEN and the other to OVERLAY. I like the photo but would have liked to spend more time trying to get the mountains to higher in the image without getting the pile of crap that was on the other side of the wagon. Ah well.

Day 185: River Retro

This is a sweet, retro effect. I used the following technique:

Layer 1: background
Layer 2: duplicate of background>SHARPEN
Layer 3: clouds
Layer 4: color fill> Blue  EXCLUSION
Layer 5: color fill> Dull yellow  OVERLAY
Layer 6: color fill> Dull Brown  MULTIPLY
Layer 7: duplicate of background, gaussian blur  OVERLAY


I then merged all of the layers, set up a quickmask with a soft edge low flow brush and selected the edges.
Layer 8: Curves adjustment (lightened RGB & red, lowered Green & Blue)


I know it's way more work than using the iPhone app but I prefer the control I get with the layer effects (oh yeah, and I don't have an iPhone)


Tutorial link1 and link 2

Day 184: Meteor Hitting Planet

Day 183: River Float Wisdom part 2

More wisdom...

Day 182: River Float Wisdom part 1

During the Bishop river float several pearls of wisdom were uttered by members of our flotilla. This was the first.

Day 181: 80's Metal Bishop

No matter how hard I tried I couldn't figure out any connection between the 80's metal look of this text effect and the Bishop trip. What can I say? I'm excited to go and the river will ROCK! The tutorial itself was time consuming and sometimes difficult to follow. I burned quite a bit of time doing this one.

Tutorial link