PS Actions

This piece was made from a normal picture of mushrooms which I then darkened the corners using an action I made. Then, I added a orangey-yellow layer that I then lowered the opacity on to give a sepia effect. Lastly, I added some noise and slight blur to the photo to make it look lomographic.

Easy Stainless Steel Background Tutorial

While working on a piece in photoshop, I stumbled a across an easy, and quick way to create a stainless steel background. In this tutorial, I'll show you my method.

1. Make a document about 50 pixels greater than your intended width for your document. Make the hight your intended hight. If you are using the image for web, 72 ppx is fine; for print, 300 works best.

2. Choose a light grey for your foundation of your background. If you feel the grey is too dark or too light, don't worry we'll fix it later.

3. Add some noise to your image to give us something to work with in making the background. I recommend the setting I used below.

4. To make the "grain" of the stainless steel, we are going to add a motion blur to the image. 

5. You'll notice that the left and right sides or your image are a little frayed. To fix this, go under Image ---> Canvas Size and adjust the width down to the intended size of your background. This is why we added the extra 50 pixels.

You could stop here but to add some variation to the background, add the noise and motion blur again using slightly different setting to get a better result. Also, if your image was too dark/light, add a Brightness and Contrast layer and play with the brightness slider until you're happy.

Final Result:

Enjoy.

Color Replacement Tool

Using the color replacement tool, I was able to take this flower and replace it with a designated foreground color without producing a choppy or blocky result. Normally, I would just use a Hue and Saturation set to Colorize with a layer mask but this method is far quicker.

Adobe Illustrator: Twirl Tool

   Lately, I've been trying out the features of Adobe Illustrator and what it has to offer. Illustrator is a vector based program in which graphics are made. Photoshop has limited vector capabilities such as shapes but Illustrator picks up where Photoshop left off. So far, I've mainly been using the twirl tool. I made this piece using the tool then imported the vector into Photoshop to make this 1600x900 background.