Day 303: Halloween Poster

Fun stuff for Halloween.

Tutorial link

Day 302: Abstract Texture Background

I combined several textures together to create the background. I applied a gradient map to my "stamped" copy of all layers. I used Pixel Bender to twirl a black rectangle to make the abstract swoosh. I copied the background into the swoosh and inverted the colors then applied an inner shadow. Dropping a soft light vignette and the script font completed the design.

Day 301: Light Text

One of my students turned me on to this tutorial. The steps were a bit hard to follow and I ended up spending way too much time trying to find a font and position the radial blur in the right spot.Not a bad effect but I think the text needs more variations in its height in order to get a a better "burst effect". I dropped in a grungy text and dropped the opacity to create a film grain type of effect without using the filter.

Tutorial link

Day 300: Fake 300

The tutorial I "followed" was rather weak. I used the basic idea for inspiration and then went off in my own direction. I found several cloud images and used channel selections to make various layers of clouds. I used the dust and scratch filter to distort the image. Heavy use of color range combined with adjustment layers and additional filters applied to the other portions of the image created the other effects.

Day 299: Faux Movie Poster

A simple grid design with a cardboard texture in the middle combined with some text variations of HelveticaNeue  and a few layer styles for the title and the "actor" text boxes.

Tutorial link

Day 298: Text Displacement Map

I started by making a displacement map of the image (but first I burned the areas around his eyes, brow, hands and arms). I then added text using a cool dummy text generator called Blind Text Generator. I masked out everything but his face, hands, arms and rosary and changed the blending mode to overlay. I duplicated this layer, inverted the selection and masked everything except the shoulders, chest, eyes and rosary. I applied a gaussian blur and changed the blending mode to subtract. I created a 50% grey layer above everything and applied a 105mm Lens flare and set the blending mode to Linear light and erased the parts of the lens flare that went over his forehead. I dropped an old paper texture on top and masked out his fingernails and eyes and changed the blending mode to Soft Light. I finished off by creating a soft black vignette to frame the image. Wow, that was easier said than done :)

Day 297: Photoshop Lesson Answer Keys

Since I've completely retooled the introductory Photoshop lessons for my class I also needed to create new answer keys to grade them. Rather than use hand scribbled notes I decided to step it up a notch and do a  consistent layout. Not necessarily "Photoshop beauty" but the functionality and consistency are nice