As of late there has not been much action going on with the Tenacious Creations site. Other projects and hobbies have place constraints on my time. Unfortunately Tenacious Creations has kind of been left out in the cold.

 But as another year comes to an end it is time to take a look back at some of the most popular posts of the year.

 These were the top three posts of 2008. I am hoping to get some new posts happening in 2009. However as with most New Years resolutions this one may get broken before it is started.

 Thank you to all who have read and commented on my posts through out 2008, I wish you a prosperous New Year and I hope you will continue to rad my posts for 2009.

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 Well it is time for the weekly photoshop post on Tenacious Creations. Filters and Actions are tools a photoshop artist can use to speed up their production. Although all the things that actions and filters can do can be done manually with photoshop (and most times a better result is achieved). Filters and Actions can greatly reduce the amount of time required to do these things.

 There are some things that I find just so much easier to use filters or actions for and some cases where I would prefer to do it by hand. I have a mix of bought filters and actions as well as free ones. Here is a list of sites of actions and filters that I find useful.

1. Action Central – this is the main site I use for many free actions.
2. The Plug in Site – another good resource with several free and commercial plug ins and filters
3. Alien Skin – These are all plug ins you have to buy but they are well worth it. They have 30 demos of most of their plug ins available for download from their site. I have all of their Eye Candy plug ins and they are probably the plug ins I use the most.
4. The Light is Right Studio – this site has numerous tools that make my life easier. From scripts, and plug ins to brush presets. This is definitely a resource you should check out.
5. Panos Fx – While making sure these links work for this post I noticed there are a bunch of new filters and effects listing here that I really want to try out. This is yet another excellent resource for photoshop artists.

 These are the five sites that I have drawn over 90% of the filters, actions and plug ins that I use for photoshop. I am always keen to check out other resources so if you have some please share.

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 I frequently get asked what web sites I use as resources when I use Adobe photo shop and if I can pass them along. Well the truth is I have over two hundred different sites book marked in my photoshop resources folder. Now some contain multiple different tutorials and some are just photoshopped images that I use as reference. So to pass these one would be quite useless.

 Instead I thought I would present a list of sites I submit my tutorials too after I write them. Now this is only a partial list, but these sites have many tutorials listed. In some cases the tutorials may be repeated from site to site. That is because other photo shop tutorial publishers like myself tend to submit their tutorials to all these sites. Any ways lets get on with the list.

 Here they are in no particular order:

1. http://tutorials.tutorialblog.org/
2. http://www.tipclique.com/
3. http://www.tutorialman.com/
4. http://www.fstutorials.com/
5. http://life2pixel.info/
6. http://www.tutorio.com/
7. http://www.photoshopdepot.com/index.php?id=submit
8. http://nututorials.com/tutorials/Photoshop
9. http://www.tutorial-index.com/
10. http://www.pslover.com/



11. http://tutorialoutpost.com/tutorials/photoshop/
12. http://www.totaltutorial.com/cat/1/adobe-photoshop-tutorials/
13. http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Photoshop/1
14. http://www.tutorialkit.com/categories/Photoshop-Tutorials-All-Tutorials.html
15. http://www.pixel2life.com/
16. http://good-tutorials.com/

 With in that list I am sure you’ll find hours and hours of photoshop fun and inspiration. I would like to say that is the complete list that I submit too. However I have a list of over 60 different sites that I submit too, but these tend to send me the best traffic and have the most tutorials. If you have other resources please include them in the comments.

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 Recently I made a similar graphic to the one above for a friend to use on her website. She was very grateful and sent me an e-mail full of praise for spending my time to do that for her. I had to tell her that it is really simple and I cannot take all the credit because I did use a photo shop action. So I figured I would write a tutorial to show just how easy it is to create this nice effect.

1. First thing you need to do is to go to addictedtodesign.com and download the free Polaroid 600 action. If you have never installed an action in photo shop before I recommend you read addictedtodesign.com’s guide.
2. Now that you have the action installed select the Polaroid 600 action and press the
   Play button



3. All you have to do now as follow the steps as the action runs. It will ask you to select the photo you want to use. Then it will ask you to adjust the handles to crop the photo so it is the right size for the Polaroid.


all the photos used here are from http://www.sxc.hu/




4. Run this action on all the photos you want to use in the spread of Polaroids. Make sure you do not close the images as you make them.
5. After you have the images you want to use converted to Polaroid like pictures, create a new image by going File > New Image. I made mine 6000 px wide by 2500 px tall with a transparent background. How big you make it is dependent on how big your Polaroid images are. Mine worked out to be about 1051 px wide each. Do not worry if yours are not all the same size as you be able to resize them when you drag them to your new image.


 

6. Now select the Move tool . Move one of your Polaroid images onto your new image. Adjust it so it looks like it was randomly thrown there. Once you have it positioned hit the enter key.
7. After you have pressed the enter key double click on the layer (click on the icon of the image) to bring up the layer properties. Then select drop shadow and check the box next to it. Now play with the settings until the shadow looks right.


 
 

 
 


8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you have placed all the images you want to use. Remember to adjust them so they look like they were randomly dropped.


9. After all you images are placed use the crop tool to cut out any extra blank space from your image and you are done. Now if this is going on a web site you can fill the first layer with whatever color the background of the site is to ensure it looks good. But I would recommend saving it with a transparent background. That way it the site changes background color it will still look like it belongs. Below is the finished project

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 With this PhotoShop tutorial I hope to equip you with the necessary tools to create your own hybrid morphed animals. This can be a lot of fun and you can create some really unique looking creatures. As with anything in photoshop the more time you spend on the details the better your end result.

 Now I bet you were thinking we were going to combine an elephant with a camel. Well you would be wrong. Instead we are going to make an Eleguanna. That is an elephant combined with an Iguana. Why? Well I just like combining large mammals with lizards. Besides this gives me the opportunity to share a few more neat tricks. The hardest part of this tutorial is find the pictures you are going to use. I scoured over www.sxu.hu to find these two images. You want to make sure that the parts you are going to attempt to morph are following roughly the same angles. If you click on the thumbnails below you with get the two original images I started with.

1. Once you have these two images opened in Photoshop it is time to crop out the elephants head. Now you’ll notice the elephant is facing the wrong way in relation to our iguana. No worries, just go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Horizontal. Now use what ever tool you are comfortable with to crop out the elephants head. I used the pen tool and then made it into a selection.
2. Once you have the elephants head selected, go to Edit > Copy. Then go to the image of the iguana and go Edit > Paste.

 

 

3. Now we have to position the elephants head over that of the iguanas. To make this easier reduce the opacity of the elephant head layer. Now you may have to rotate it a bit and resize as you go. If you are resizing make sure you hold down the shift key. This will keep the proportions relative. With PhotoShop CS 3 as soon as you paste the elephant head it goes to Free Transform mode. By moving the handles on the box around the elephants head you are able to resize and rotate.


 
 

 
 

4. Make sure you have the elephant head layer selected and click on the mask icon in the layer palette. Then make sure you foreground color is black, and choose a good sized soft brush. With this mask out all areas of the elephant head that you do not want visible. make sure to go along the edges where the elephants skin meets the iguanas. This will help blend it together.

     




5. Now you will notice there is still some of the iguanas head peeking through from behind. To remove this we are going to use the Clone Stamp Tool . First make sure you select the iguana layer. Then holding down the Alt Key select an area above the part you want to clone out. Then click over the areas you want to clone out. Do not worry about cloning out the elephant head as the clone tool will only clone the layer you have selected.

 

 
 

6. Looking pretty good so far. But now we want to match the color. First make sure your elephant head layer is selected. This part takes some time and experimentation. Holding down the Alt Key click on this icon . Then select Color Balance, when the dialog appears make sure you have a check mark to use the previous layer as a clipping mask. You’ll have to adjust the shadows, highlights, and mid tones. Try and get it as close as possible.

 

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

7. You see that some areas have the color changed and we don’t really want them to be green. Places like the eye, and the straw in the truck. To fix this select your color balance layer and then click the mask button on the bottom of the layers palette. With black selected as your foreground color, just paint the areas you want the original color back.

 

 
 

8. Now click on your top most layer, then add a new layer. Double click on your foreground color to bring up your color picker tool. Select a nice soft blue color. I find blue tends to bring out details. In the picture below I have my color picker set to Web Safe colors but you don’t have to.

 

 
 

9. Using the Paint Bucket tool fill this layer with the soft blue. Then change the Layer Mode to Overlay . Now adjust the Opacity till you the details pop and the layers blend nicely.

 

 

 
 

10. Now click on your top most layer, then add a new layer. Double click on your foreground color to bring up your color picker tool. Select a dark pale yellow color.
11. Using the Paint Bucket tool fill this layer with the soft blue. Then change the Layer Mode to Overlay . Now adjust the Opacity till the layers blend a bit more.

 Viola, you should have an image looking like mine or even better. Now there are several different ways to do the same thing in PhotoShop, so if your methods differed a bit don’t worry.

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 Believe it or not there was a time before digital cameras. In the age of film cameras after you had used up your roll of film you had to process it or get it processed. This resulted in photographs printed to actual paper and not just saved as in an electronic format. How do you get those printed masterpieces to digital format so you can share them with the world? Well I hope to answer that for you with the following tutorial.

 The advantage of scanning a picture directly to Photoshop is that you can then carry out fixing and touching up the picture directly. Plus PhotoShop gives you many more options when it comes to resizing the picture and formats to save it in.

1. Open up Adobe PhotoShop and go to File > Import from there you should be able to see your scanner as an option. Select your scanner.
2. Now all scanner software is a bit a different so I will just go over the settings you should use. It is up to you to figure out how to set them in your scanner software. The basic procedure is to do a preview of what is in your scanning area. Then you select the picture you want to scan. Now here comes the tricky part. The resolution you scan the photo at depends on what you plan to do with it.
3. If you are just going to e-mail it then 72 pixel resolution is what you want to choose.
4. If you are planning to send the photo directly to your printer than you want to scan it at 300 pixel resolution.
5. If you want to do some retouching then you’ll want to scan it at 600 pixel resolution. This will allow you to a large image to work with. It will also give you the detail needed if you are require to really zoom in on parts of it.
6. After you have selected your resolution scan the photo. Be aware that if you are scanning at 600 pixel resolution this can take some time.

 These six simple tricks can greatly increase the quality of your scanned images.

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 As with anything in Photoshop there are multiple ways to achieve the same effect. What we are going to do here is turn a color photo to black and white, then restore color in the area we want to draw attention to. There are several different ways you can high light with color. I will show you a very simple way and my preferred method in this tutorial.

 Below is the original image that I am going to use to demonstrated highlighting with color. Open up the image you want to do this to in Photoshop and follow along.

 
 

 
 

1. First thing to do is to make a copy of the original layer. Select the layer in the Layers Palette and type Ctrl + J.
2. Then make sure your new layer is selected and type Shift+Ctrl+U to desaturate the image.

 
 


 


3. Now we want to restore the color in the part of the photo we want to draw attention to. In my case I am going to use the focal point of the picture – the little boy. But this is a great technique to use to draw your viewers attention away from the center of the photo. To restore the color select the Eraser Tool . Set the brush size to a little smaller than the area you want to highlight.

 
 

 
 

4. Now you need to decide if you want the color separation from the black and white to hard and crisp or soft and flowing. For my example I will go with hard and crisp, to do this I make sure the hardness of my eraser brush is 100%. If I wanted it soft I would lower the hardness of my eraser brush. Now you simple erase away the black and white to reveal the color in the areas you want.

 Like I said in the beginning this is a very easy effect to achieve. If you don’t feel comfortable using the eraser you can also make a quick mask and then delete that area. Below is the finished picture.

 
 

 

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 We are going to take this nice photo here on the right and through the magic of photo shop turn it into a hot sexy glamorous picture like you find in magazines. If you want to follow along click on the picture to get the full size original that I started with.

 As there are many different things we need to do to achieve our final image. I have broken this down into smaller tutorials to make it easier for you to follow along. In some cases you may not want to or need to use all the steps outlined here.

1. The Eyes- I find that if you can make the eyes draw the attention of the viewer the over all effect of the portrait is that much better. So it is a good place to start.Click Here to go to the Eyebrow Shaping and Eye Enhancing Tutorial
2. The Teeth and Smile – With time, drinking coffee or smoking our teeth tend to yellow. There is a whole market of dental care products out there just to whiten your teeth. Well I’ll save you the expense and show you how to do it in photo shop. Click Here to go to the Whitening Teeth Tutorial.
  
3. 
   The Hair – We need to add some shine and body to our models hair. This is a subtle effect but it really does add to the over all image. Click here to go to the tutorial on adding body and shine to hair.
4. The Skin – Now we start on the human body’s largest organ, the skin. Ever notice in magazine ads how flawless and smooth the models complexion and skin are? We thats not just good genetics, the photo has been airbrushed to look that way. Well in the old days it would be airbrushed, but can achieve the same effect in photo shop. Click Here to go to the tutorial on glamour skin softening.

I hope you enjoyed this series of tutorials on making a glamour photo, hopefully you learned some tips and tricks you can apply else where.

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 In this tutorial we will add body and shine to our models hair to aid us in achieving our over all glamour photo effect.

 As in the other tutorials in this glamour series we will continue to use the same photo on the right. I found this photo on http://www.sxc.hu/. If you click on the image to the right it will take you to the original that I started with if you want to follow along.

Alright so let us get started….

• First open the image in photo shop and make a copy of the background layer. Then turn off the background layer by clicking on the eye next to it. This is a good practice to get into just in case something goes really really bad. Things only seem to go really really bad for me when I skip this step .
• Go to Filter < Liquify and select the Freeze Mask Tool and paint over the face and any skin close to the hair. By doing this we are protecting the face and skin from any distortions we make to the hair.

 

 


• Now select the Bloat Tool and set your brush size just large enough to cover the width of the hair. Now go over the hair and click. This will slightly expand the hair giving it more body. If you hold done the mouse it will expand rapidly so I prefer to just click until I have achieved the look I want. If you expand it too much you can use the Reconstruct Tool to reduce the bloating.

 

 

 

• Once you feel you have added enough body click Ok to apply the changes and exit the liquify filter. We have now successfully added body. Although the changes may seem subtle that is the name of the game. All these subtle changes combine to give the over all glamour effect.
• Now our next step is to give the hair a little bit of healthy shine. Select the Dodge Tool . Now pick a brush a tad smaller than the expanded hair. Set the brush exposure around 20%, and the range to Highlights

 

 

 

• Now change the exposure to 10% and change the range to midtones and brush over the hair again.

 

 

• Select the Burn Tool . Set the Exposure to 10% and the range to shadows. Now brush over the hair to darken the shadows which will make the hair look thick and shiny.

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 This effect may look subtle and in all reality it is. But when used with the other effects in this glamour series it plays a large part in the over all look.

Follow the entire glamour photo series by clicking on the links below:

1. The Eyes
2. The Teeth and Smile
3. The Hair
4. The Skin

Back to the Glamour Photo Tutorial

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 In this tutorial we are going to whiten this models teeth in continuing with making a sexy glamour photo. If you are following the whole series I will be using this same photograph on the right through out the series. Clicking on this image will take you to the full size picture that I got from www.sxc.hu.

• First open your image in photo shop and use Ctrl+J to duplicate the layer so you have something to fall back on if you mess up horribly. The turn off your background layer by clicking on the eye next to it.
• Use the Zoom Tool to zoom into the models teeth. Now select the Magnetic Lasso Tool . Using the Magnetic Lasso select the teeth and only the teeth.

 

 

• Now go to Image < Adjustments < Hue/Saturation or press Ctrl +U to bring up the Hue / Saturation dialog.

 

 

• Select Yellows in the edit box and move the Saturation slider to the left to remove the yellow tinge to the teeth.

 


 

 


• Then select Master in the edit box and move the Lightness slider to the right to brighten the whites of the teeth.

 

 
 

 
 
After

 Now we have successfully managed to remove the yellowing stains of time from our models teeth and given her a sexy white smile. All this with out the use of white strips messy gels or costly painful trips to the dentist.

Follow the entire glamour photo series by clicking on the links below:

1. The Eyes
2. The Teeth and Smile
3. The Hair
4. The Skin

Back to the Glamour Photo Tutorial

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 If you have ever looked a pictures in a magazine you will have no doubt noticed how smooth the models skin looks. Well this is by some sort of genetic accident, it has undoubtedly been photo manipulated to look that way. In this tutorial I will show you one way to achieve that effect.

 If you are following the whole series I will be using this same photograph on the right through out the series. Clicking on this image will take you to the full size picture that I got from www.sxc.hu.

 As you can see it is a good looking portrait in its one right, but never one you’d see in a magazine or as a head shot of an actor. I am sure if we could see the before being photo-shopped pictures or models in magazine we wouldn’t take for granted all the work that a graphic artist puts into making these pictures awesome.

 So let’s get started….

• First thing first, open the image you want to soften the skin on in photoshop. Now double click on the background layer. When the Layer dialog appears name it background and click OK

• Now we are going to make the skin perfect by removing all the blemishes. Use the Zoom tool to enlarge the face so it fills your entire work area.
• Next select the Spot Healing Brush . Change the mode to lighten(next to the brush size). In some cases lighten just won’t do it so you may have to change the mode back to normal. Set the brush size to be slightly larger than the blemish you are fixing, hover over the blemish and click. In my experience this method fixes about 95% of the blemishes I have run in too. No make sure your clean up the acne, scratches on the skin, and if you want the moles and birth marks.



• Now we need to make some duplicates of this layer. Type Ctrl+J 3 time to make three copies. Then turn off the visibility of your layers except the background copy 2 layer by clicking on the eye next to it. Your layers palette will look similar to the one below.
 


• Make your background copy 2 layer active by clicking on it. In the Layers palette switch the Blend mode from Normal to Darken. Then go to Filter < Blur < Gaussian Blur and apply a 40 pixel blur to the picture. Then hide this layer by clicking on the eye to the left of it.


 
 
 


• Now click the box to the left of background copy 3 to turn it back on and make this layer active. Change the Blend Mode to Lighten. Now again use the Gaussian Blur filter but this time to a 60 pixel blur.
• Turn on the layer Background copy 2 and lower its opacity to 40%. Then turn on your background copy layer. Now at this stage it really doesn’t look like much, but we are almost done.



 



• Make sure you have the layer background copy 3 active. Press Ctrl+E to merge this layer with background copy 2. Now click on the Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette.
• Press D on your keyboard and then X to make your foreground color black. Then using the Fill Tool click somewhere on the image. You see the whole image become unblurred. This because by filling with black we essentially masked out all of our blur effects.
• Now its time to bring back the blur over the areas of the skin where we want it. Press X to make your foreground color white. Now select the brush tool .Choose a soft brush that covers the area of skin you want to soften and paint in the softness. Be sure to leave detailed areas like the eyes,eye brows, lips, hair, and any other area you don’t want softened. Don’t worry if you see color blur around the edges where her clothing meets her skin. We’ll fix that in the next step.


 
 

 
 
 

 
 

• Now that you have your mask painted in over all the places of skin you want soften lower the Opacity of this layer to somewhere between 60 and 70% depending on your what you feel looks good. You can really see the effect the skin softening has on the image below.

 

 

 

Follow the entire glamour photo series by clicking on the links below:

1. The Eyes
2. The Teeth and Smile
3. The Hair
4. The Skin

Back to the Glamour Photo Tutorial

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 If your a woman you already know this, but listen up guys. Women spend a lot of time making themselves attractive and one of the things they do is shape their eyebrows by plucking or waxing. Well in the first part of this tutorial on eyes for a sexy glamour photo I am going to show you how to use Adobe Photo Shop to shape eyebrows.

 I will be using the photo on the right for this entire glamour series. I found this image on www.sxc.hu. As you can see as a basic portrait it is a good picture. However through out this glamour tutorial series we will change it in to a sexy glamour portrait.

 In this tutorial we will shape her eyebrows and we will enhance and brighten her eyes.So lets begin by shaping the eyebrows, and I promise you it will be painless.

• It is always a good idea to make a duplicate of your image in case you mess something up so bad you have to start fresh. Press Ctrl+J to duplicate your background layer. Then turn off your background layer by clicking the eye to the left of it.
• Use the Zoom Tool and zoom into to her eyebrows. Then press Q to enter quick mask mode. Press D to reset your foreground and background colors.
• Make sure Black is set as your foreground color. Now select the Brush tool . After selecting an appropriate size soft brush paint black over the parts of the eyebrows you want to keep. A graphics tablet comes in real handy for this. If you paint the mask in where you don’t want it simple switch to white and paint over the areas of the mask you do not want there.




• Press Alt+Ctrl+D to bring up the feather dialog. Enter a value around 4. Now select the Clone Stamp Too . Now determine if you are going to work on the top edge of the eyebrows or the bottom edge. In my case I have no eyebrow to remove some I am going to work on the bottom.Choose a soft edge brush and holding done the Alt key click on a clean area of skin beneath the eyebrow. Now clone the skin over the portion of eyebrow you don’t want. Don’t worry about going over the masked are as the clone tool will only clone up to it.


 


• Once you are happy with the shape of the eyebrows press Ctrl+D to deselect the area. Now we are going to move on to enhancing the eyes. In this photo you can see our model has a bit of Red Eye. Its a simple matter with photo shop to clear this up. Under the spot healing brush you’ll find the Red Eye Tool . Select this tool, place the cross hairs in the center of the pupil and as if by magic the red eye disappears.
• Copy your working layer by pressing Ctrl+J. Now select the Brush Tool and pick a small hard edged brush. Press Q to enter quick mask mode. With your foreground color set to black paint over the eyes, just the eyes. To do this I used a really small hard brush to outline the edge of the eye and then a larger brush to fill in the center.



• Now press Shift+Ctrl+I to inverse your selection so you will actually be working with the eyes. Now go to Filter < Sharpen < Unsharp Mask. Use the same settings as I used below.

 

 

• Now if the eyes still do not appear bright and crisp you can run the UnSharp Mask filter again. But be careful if you run it too many times the eyes really become creepy looking.

 

 

 

 There you have it, reshaped eyebrows and enhanced eyes.

Follow the entire glamour photo series by clicking on the links below:

1. The Eyes
2. The Teeth and Smile
3. The Hair
4. The Skin

Back to the Glamour Photo Tutorial

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A new trend I have been seeing lately is to have irregular edges around photographs that gives it a more artistic look. It is a real easy effect to achieve with Photo Shop, in this tutorial I’ll show you just how easy it is.

• The first thing we need to do is open the picture we want to make the stylized edges on in Photoshop.






• Now Double Click on your background layer in the Layers pallet. When the layers dialog appears click OK. This unlocks your background layer.
• Now create a new layer by clicking on the New layer Icon and drag this layer below your background layer.
• Next select your background layer and using the Crop Tool make a selection around your picture. Then drag the handles away from the edges to enlarge your canvas. Once you have dragged the edges out a bit double click in the square and your canvas will be enlarged.





• Next select on the New Layer you created and using the Fill tool fill it with white.
• Now Double click on your layer with your picture to bring up the Layer Styles dialog. Select Drop Shadow and play with the settings until you achieve a nice shadow behind your image making it look as though it is above the page.


  


• Now you may choose to stop here if you like this effect for your photo. But from here you can do many other things. For example use the Lasso tool and make jagged edges around your photo on the photo layer.


• Now go to Select > Inverse and then press the Delete Key. This will give you the result below.

 


• However you may not want the jagged edge look. You can also use the Elliptical Marquee Tool or what ever selection tool you want to achieve numerous effects, such as these below.

Elliptical Marquee Tool

 


 

Elliptical marquee Tool and Feather

 You can try all kinds of different shapes to create different effects. This is a very easy technique to do so have fun and experiment with it.

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 There are numerous tutorials out there showing you how to make a virtual tattoo using Photo Shop. Many of these use overlay in the blending modes to achieve this. The only problem with most of the tutorials out there is that the virtual tattoo looks sort of, well overlaid and not actually following the contour of the body it is place on.

 I have however seen one tutorial where the virtual tattoo seem to follow the contours of the body but alas it was in black and white only. Not that black and white tattoos and pictures don’t look good but they don’t suit all purposes.

 In this tutorial I will show you a method using the displace filter to make a virtual tattoo look as though it follows the contours of the body. So let’s get started….

• The first thing you need to do is locate an image of a person that you want to place the tattoo on. I went to www.sxc.hu to find one. Make sure you choose one with lots of exposed skin so you have more areas to place the virtual tattoo.
• The next thing you need is the image of the virtual tattoo. Since I am a little lazy sometimes I just looked through my hard drive and found this image of a Fighting Hell Fish (if your a Simpson’s Fan you probably just got a good laugh.).

• Now open the picture of the person you want to place the virtual tattoo on in Photo Shop. Duplicate the layer, you can do this by dragging the layer to the New Layer Icon . Now click on the eye next to the original layer to turn off its visibility. I always try and do this so if I do a major screw up I still have the original image in tact.
• Make sure you are working on your duplicate layer by clicking on it. Now might be a good time to change its name to person or woman, or something descriptive. This is a good practice to get into so when you are working with numerous layers you know whats what. Now in the Layers Pallet select the channels tab.
• Now click on each channel until you find the one that gives you the most contrast. This means that the bright areas are their brightest and the dark areas are there darkest. In my case it was the Reds channel.
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• Right Click or Ctrl Click on the channel that gives you the best contrast, then select Duplicate Channel. When the Duplicate Channel dialog box appears make sure under Destination, Document is set to New. You can then name it. I went with Tattoo map for a name. This document will become the displacement map for the tattoo.

• On you new image which should have open automatically click the Layers tab to go back to the layers. Now press Crtl+L to bring up the levels dialog. Here we will tweak the contrast a little bit. To do this you’ll move the far left and far right arrows under the Input Levels graph. The far left will control the darkness and the far right will make it lighter. Don’t over do it, on some images you may not have to do it at all. Want you want to be able to see is the curves of the body getting gradually darker as they move away from you.



• As you can see I really didn’t change it too much. But you can see that the image gets darker as it rolls of the shoulder. This should make for a good displacement map. Now be sure to Save this image. I called mine tattomap.psd . You can close it if you wish as we will no longer be working on it.
• Go back to the image of the person you want to place the tattoo on. Now go back to Channels and select RGB to turn the colors back on. Then click back on layers and select your duplicated layer.
• If you haven’t already open the image of the tattoo you want to place. Now using the Move tool drag your tattoo image onto the the picture of the person you want to virtual tattoo (I had removed the background from my tattoo image – and if you haven’t you need to do this). Using the Move Tool place the tattoo where you want. You may have to resize and rotate it so it fits. For my image I am placing it on her shoulder.


• If you adjusted the size or rated the tattoo you now need to press Enter to accept the changes. Now tattoos seldom have clearly defined edges (most likely because the ink spreads a little on the skin). So go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and blur it any where from .5 to 2 pixels. Depending on the image you have chosen for your tattoo, in my case I blurred it about 1.5 pixels.
• Now we are going to use the Displace filter. Go to Filters > Distort > Displace. Make sure your settings are the same as mine below.





• Press Okay and when it asks you for the displacement map file choose the one you created from the channels. Mine was the tattoomap.psd file. Then in the layer blending mode change it to Multiply in the Layers Pallet. Then adjust the opacity to around 75%. This should result in a really realistic looking tattoo.

 The Displace filter is a really powerful feature and you can use it to many more things. I hope this tutorial has shown you a better way to use photo shop to make a virtual tattoo. Happy Virtual Tattooing.

For more tutorials from this site Click Here

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 In this tutorial we are going to create an image where flesh appears to be melting off a hand revealing the bone beneath. Since this site has a diverse audience I have not made this image gory, or extreme in any manner so it will continue to appeal to all.

 This looks harder than it actually is to do so do not be scared off by that. Basically we are going to use layers, layer masks, and explore brush presets a little. Brushes in photo shop are very powerful tools however they are seldom used to their full potential. We will just scratch the surface of brushes with this tutorial.

• First we need to locate the images that we want to use. Basically we need a skeleton hand and a real hand. I found the skeleton hand image here. As for the flesh hand I used a picture of my hand after a day of work so it would have a dirty look to it. I would recommend you use a picture of your own hand as you can pose it to a similar shape as the skeleton hand.
• Then using your favorite method extract both the skeleton hand and the flesh hand from there backgrounds. Unless of course you want to use the background in the picture of your flesh hand. (I have thought about writing a tutorial on removing items from their backgrounds, but as there are many out there already I don’t see a need. However if you my readers feel you’d like me to write one let me know and I will)
   
• Now we are going to select the bones that make up the individual fingers on the skeleton hand. I used the Polygon Lasso tool to draw a rough selection around the little finger. (I added a layer of white in my image to show the selection lines better) Don’t worry about being to precise because there should be nothing in the background that will interfere.
     
• After you have your selection hit Crtl+C and this will copy it to your clip board. Then click on your flesh hand image and hit Ctrl+V and it will paste the selection to its own layer. Now click on the layer name in the layers pallet and rename it to little finger. Then using the Move tool , move the little finger bones over the flesh little finger. You may have to resize and rotate the bones to fit. If you need to resize howver your mouse over the corner box till the cursor changes to two arrows. Then hold down the shift key and drag away to make bigger or in to make smaller. To rotate however your mouse just outside the little box until it turns to rounded arrows then click your mouse and rotate. You can use the flesh finger joints and the bone finger joints as a guide to resize and rotate.


• You repeat this procedure for all the fingers and thumb. I cheated for the index finger as in my picture the thumb bones kind of cover it. Instead I just made another copy of the middle finger bones and resized it accordingly. Your image should look close to mine above. Now you should notice that the bones do not cover the whole hand. I just want the skin to be melting off the finger tips so I don’t require a lot of bones in my example. You may want to have the skin melting off more than just the finger tips in which case you’ll need more bones.
• Next Right Click on your flesh hand layer and select Duplicate. Drag this layer above all the layers of your individual finger bone layers. Turn off your first flesh hand layer by clicking on eye next to it.
• Double Click on your new hand layer to bring up the Layer Style menu. In the layer style menu select drop shadow. This will add a little bit of depth for our next step.

• Now select the Eraser tool . Now click on the brush drop down menu. Then click on the little arrow pointing to the right. This will bring up all the brush sets that come preloaded with Photo Shop. If you have never done this before I am sure you’ll be surprised at how many there are. From this menu select Natural Brushes. When Photo Shop asks you if you want to replace the current brushes select Okay. Don’t worry you won’t lose the brushes you previously had. Select the brush that is 59 pixels.
    


• Using this brush erase the tips of the fingers to reveal as much bones you like. By using this brush you achieve a rough edge that almost looks as though it is dripping already.

• Now Right Click on this layer and Duplicate it. Turn off the layer original. I do this so when (notice I said when not if) I make a big mistake while doing the drips I don’t have to start over again.
• First we need to reset our brushes. So again click the brush drop down and then the right arrow to bring up a list of brushes. Then just select Reset Brushes, this sets your brushes as before. Select the Smudge Tool . Then if you do not have your brush pallet displayed, click on the Brush Pallet Toggle . From here select Shape Dynamics and make sure it has a check mark next to it. Change Control to Fade. Now you’ll want to keep this dialog open as you’ll want to change the Minimum Diameter and the Fade Amount as you go. I started with 25 as a fade amount and the minimum diameter set to 26%.


• Now all you do is with the smudge tool start on a piece of flesh of the hand and slowly drag down. If you want the melting flesh drips to be straight after you click hold down the Shift key. It’ll take some experimenting to get your drips right, change the Fade settings until you get the result you want.

• Take your time with getting the drips as you want. Now drips normally have that little bubble on the end of them. In order to get this we need to paint it in. So using the Eyedropper tool select one of the drips. This sets your color to the same as the drips. Now select a brush and set the Hardness to about 90%. Make sure you have the size to about the size of the drips. Go the bottom of the drip and paint in the bubble.
• Now create a New Layer and name it highlights. Press D on your key board to reset your colors and then press X to make white your foreground color. Make sure to turn the Hardness of your brush down. Then paint in the highlights. If you are unsure of where they should go just imagine where the light would be hitting. Now light is never really straight when it hits something, so select the Eraser tool and with a large soft brush erase a long the edges of your highlights. I then turn down the Opacity of my high lights layer to about 50%.



• Now you can take your hand with the melted flesh and place it in what ever back ground you want. Perhaps dipping in a barrel of toxic waste or something. I just placed it on a black background to make it stand out a bit.

  Now you could add some blood drops, or maybe a pool of melted flesh beneath the hand to improve the over all effect. But I did not want to make this image too extreme. I would like to see any images created with this technique. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. For more tutorials on this site Click Here.

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 Now I know there are several tutorials out there that show you how to make an image looked cracked and peeling away. But I have never seen one that demonstrates how to reveal another image beneath the cracks and peels. Hopefully that is what this tutorial will teach you to do just that.

• Well the first thing we have to do is find the images we want to use. This is the normally the most important and difficult step. You’ll need the image you want to crack and peel (I picked a
  portrait of a woman), you’ll need an image for the texture you want to use for the cracks (I picked the dried and cracked mud picture), then you need the image you want to reveal underneath the peels (for this I picked a circuit board). I got all my images from http://www.sxc.hu. If you click on the thumbnails of them below it will take you to the full size images I used.
   


• First off lets open the image with the circuit board (in photo shop of course). What we are going to do here is blend the circuit board into the holes in the rust. So open up the image of the rust and use the Move Tool to drag a copy of the rust over the circuit board. Position it over the circuit board where you will have the most flakes. You can also resize it to just cover the circuit board. I want to achieve an effect of a large peel so I didn’t resize it. In the image below I have reduced the opacity of the rust layer so you can see how I positioned it over the circuit board. You DO NOT have to do this.

 



 
• Now what we want to do is let the Circuit board show through beneath the areas where the rust has peeled away. We will do this by using a layer mask as it is easy to fix mistakes as we make them. Click the Layer Mask Button at the bottom of your Layers palette.

 



 
• Now select a soft brush that will fit in the rust hole hole and begin to paint black to reveal the circuit board beneath as in the above image. You may have to adjust the size of the brush as you go. I like to use the [ and ] keys to change the size as I go. Try to get close to the edge, if you go over switch to white to remove any part of the circuit board that extends outside of the rust hole. Pay attention to not reveal the circuit board on the inside of the flakes that are hanging there. I first take a small soft brush and go along the edges, once I have all the edges done I select a harder larger brush to fill in the center. Clicking on the Brush Drop Down allows you to change the hardness or softness of your brush.

 




 
• Take your time doing this masking, the more attention to detail you give it the better the end result. Above is my masking almost complete. Once your masking is done go to Layer > Merge Flatten Image. Its a good idea to save this image at this point so we can use it later.

 



 
• Now if you haven’t already opened the portrait picture and the cracked earth picture in photo shop, do so now. Again using the Move drag the cracked earth image over the portrait image. I then used the handles to transform it to fit completely over the woman’s skin. Go to your Layers Palette and select Multiply in the blending mode and adjust the opacity to about 50%.

 




 


 
• Now if you look at the above image you’ll see the color just doesn’t seem right and some of those cracks don’t look realistic. First lets start by correcting the color hit Ctrl +L to bring up the levels adjuster. Now how you set your levels will depend greatly on the images you are using. Dragging the far left slider will darken the image, using the far right slider will lighten it. In my case I needed to lighten it a fair bit.

 



 
 
 


 
 
• Now we have to fix some of those cracks. I don’t want to have cracks through the eyes, or the lips. So once again I use a layer mask by selecting the layer mask icon . I paint the eyes with a soft black brush to remove the cracks. If I screw up I just go over that area with white. Now because a real face is 3D and a picture is 2D we have to turn our attention to the areas of the face where the height would change in 3D. For example the neck, and nose. We can’t really have a crack continue from the neck onto the chin. So zoom in to these areas and mask off the continuing cracks so they look as below.

 
 



 

 

 
 

 
 


 
 
• Alright now we have achieved a cracking effect on the face. It is now time to use the rust peel image we created. Using the Move Tool drag your peel image on the portrait. Now I changed the Opacity of this layer so I could better resize and position it. I want the main peels to be on her fore head and top of the face so by resizing and moving the peel image around I can achieve this.

 
 



 
 
• Once you have placed the circuit/rust layer and resized it to want you want hit the Enter key to accept the transformation. Now turn your Opacity up to around 90%, and select multiply from the blending level. Just as with the cracks you now have to hit Ctrl +L

 
 



 
 
• Now if you look at the above image you’ll notice a few things glaring at you. Firstly some of our peels don’t seem to blend very well. Secondly we got a bit of the blue stripe from our rust image showing. So to fix this we once again as we did with the crack image use a layer mask. Select the Layer Mask button. Using a large soft brush and having your foreground color set to black, (TipI you press the D and then X keys it will change your foreground color to black) paint out the areas you don’t want and blend the edges.

 
 



 
 
• Now you can use levels here to blend the colors and make the image appear more realistic. But in something like this I like to use color over lays. I find if can give a really nice effect. So create a new layer by clicking on the New Layer Button . Now double click on your foreground color to bring up the color picker. If you want to use the same colors I did type b79631 by the number sign in the color picker. Select the Fill Tool and click on the image. Change your Blending Mode in your Layers Pallet to color.

 
 




 
 
• Next add another new layer, and fill this layer with the same color. This time however set your Blending Mode to Overlay and adjust the Opacity until you achieve a sort of film look.

 
 

  Now you should have been able to get your image to look something like the image above. Feel free to experiment using different colors to achieve a different look. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have some time look at some of the other tutorials on this site by clicking here.

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 In this tutorial I am going to show you how to make a really nice emotional piece of parent and child. Now this really comes off better if you know both the parent and child in the images. As I didn’t have any on hand I once again went to http://www.sxc.hu/ for some stock images.

 These same techniques can be used to place a refection of anything onto a persons eye and you can achieve a myriad of possibilities. I highly recommend using this technique to add detail when doing a larger composition. So lets’ get started….

1. First lets open up both of the images you are going to use in photo shop. Both of the images I am using here are really high resolution images and that makes the whole process a lot easier. Using the move tool drag the image you want to be reflected, over the image of the eye.

 



 
2. Now using the Free Transform Tool (Edit>Free Transform) resize the image to fit over the pupil. I like to turn the opacity of this layer down a bit so I can see the size of the pupil beneath. Now in my case I don’t want to have the whole image reflected but rather just the baby’s face and head. So I resized appropriately, notice that the picture still covers most of the eye picture. But don’t worry about that we’ll deal with that as we go.

 



 

 
3. Now using the eraser tool and selecting a large soft brush erase the top and bottom of the baby image that extends outside of the eye. Don’t worry about the parts that extent off the pupil and iris just yet.

 



 


4. Now making sure you have the layer selected that you want to be the reflection go to Filter>Distort>Spherize. Now keep in mind that irises are not completely round so you may have to play with the settings till it looks right. I used 84% in this case.

 



 

 
 
5. Now you’ll have noticed that this has made our image larger. No worries, simple select the Move tool and you’ll see the free transform box come up. Holding the Shift key to constrain the proportions you can resize so that it fits again.

 



 
 
6. Now while still on the layer with your image to be reflected create a layer mask by selecting the Layer mask Button . The by hitting D you’ll return your background and foreground colors to black and white. Use a large soft brush and select black to begin masking away what you don’t want to see or what extends outside of the desired area. If you make a mistake you can bring it back by painting white.

 
 



 
 
7. Now change the blending mode of your reflection layer to hard light and play with the opacity till it looks about right. Viola you have put a reflection into an eye.


 
 

 If you followed the steps outlined you should end up with a result something like mine below.

 
 
If you liked this tutorial have a look at some of my others. I always appreciate comments on how I can improve these tutorials or if you just like them. Till next time…..

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 All right in today’s’ tutorial I am going to walk you through turning a photo of a woman, into a photo of a cat woman. So first we have to start off with our images. Now in some e-mails that I have received people have asked me where they can get royalty free stock photos. Well for this tutorial I went to http://www.sxc.hu/. Membership is free and there are a lot of good source images there.

 You’ll need a photo of a cat, and one of a woman unless you are using your own. Or you can click on the thumbnails below and use the same images I did.

 In order to do this successfully you must keep the distinguishing features or both the woman and the cat. Otherwise all you would be doing is pasting a cats head on a woman’s body and that is really not very impressive. So lets begin…

• Open both images you’ll be using and display them side by side. This way we can decide which features we want to retain from each image. I want to keep the woman’s hair, eye shape, and mouth. From the cat I want to use the pupils, whiskers, ears and nose. With any luck when I combine these together I should get a pretty convincing cat woman.

• Select the cat image to begin with. Use the elliptical marque tool by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing M. Click and drag it around the cats left eye, you don’t have to be too precise as we will fix up the edges later. Now select the MOVE tool. and drag your selection onto the picture of the woman.

 


 
• When you drag this selection onto the woman it will create a new layer. Double click on the layer name and rename it left pupil. Now select Edit > Free Transform . Holding down the shift(this constrains the proportions) key drag the bottom right corner to resize the cat eye to the size of the pupil of the woman. I like to reduce the opacity of this layer to about 60% while I do this so I can see the woman’s pupil beneath as I resize. You may have to occasionally move the pupil of the cat eye to the center of the woman’s pupil as you resize.

• Once you have the cats pupil to the right size now select the ERASER . Make sure your brush hardness is low, or even zero. Using a large brush gently erase around the edges to blend the cat pupil to the woman’s eye. Below is what my brush was set to.
  
• Now choose hard light from the drop down blending modes menu on your layers palette. Now repeat the selection, transform and blending process for the right eye.

 
 

 
 
• Go back to the image of the cat and hit the L key for the freehand lasso tool. Draw a rough selection around the cats face, and drag your selection onto the face of the woman. Rename the new layer face and set the opacity to around 50%. Press Ctrl/(Apple Key) +T to apply the free transform box. Now reposition and resize the cats face to correspond to that of thew woman’s. I like to try and line up the noses and go from there.

 



 
 
• Now to blend the woman’s and cats face we are going to use a layer mask. While have the face layer selected click on the Create New Layer Mask Icon . Press the D key to ensure you have a white foreground and a black background. Select Black as your foreground color by click this icon . Select a soft brush and pint black over the areas of the cats face you wish to remove. Once you have removed most of the areas you want to remove set your opacity back to 100% and fine the mask. Do this by switch between painting with black to remove the area and white to return it. Don’t worry if the cats fur does not cover all of here face, we will fix that in the next step. Once your are happy with your layer mask right click on the layer mask icon and select Apply Layer mask

 
 



 
 
• Now with my images here I have to patch her forehead with fur. So in order to do this I used the freehand lasso tool to select an area of fur. Then right click over your selection and select Layer Via Copy, then using the Move tool and Free Transform I make this selection fit over her fore head. Notice I over lap the previous fur section. Then just as in the previous step I use a Layer Mask and a soft brush to blend the two together. Make sure you blend where the two fur sections meet or you’ll see a distinct line between the two.

 
 



 
 


 
 
• Now we have to cover the rest of her skin with cat fur. To do this go back to the picture of the Cat. Make sure you last selection is turned off by going Select > Deselect. Just as before using the Move tool drag this selection over to the picture of the woman. Reduce the opacity of this layer to around 50%. Using the Free Transform tool make this cover most of her exposed skin.

 
 




 
 
• Here again we use a layer mask to reveal the parts of the woman we want to keep. Now because she has a fair bit of loose hair strands we have to really vary the size or our brush while making our mask. The [ makes your brush larger while the ] makes your brush smaller. Hitting the X key will switch your foreground and background colors allowing you to change from adding the mask and removing the mask. The more time you spend on this part masking the better the final image. Attention to detail will definitely pay off here. When you are happy with your mask once again apply it. After doing a relatively quick masking job and changing the opacity to 100% this is my result.

 
 





 
 

• Now go back the background layer. Using the Lasso Tool select a section of hair beneath her right ear. Right click and select Layer Via Copy, using the Move tool and Free Transform I made this selection cover her right ear. Again using a layer mask try and blend this section of hair with the rest. Doing a quick job like I did here really shows.

 
 





• Now using the methods we used previously. Go back to the picture of the cat and using the lasso tool select a rough selection around the cats left ear. Using the Move tool drag the ear onto the picture of the woman. Once again use a mask and blend this in. Do the same for the cats right ear. Again the more time you spend on attention to detail the better the image will look. I was running short of time here and had to do a quick job. (I’ll come back later and fix this up)

 
 

 Now if you were not like me and took your time you should have a resonabley good looking cat woman. I hope you enjoyed this tuturial. For others click here.

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  In the previous tutorial on making square fruit I mentioned that in a future tutorial I would show how I added the shadow behind the square apple. Well folks here it is.

In this tutorial I will show you the techniques of adding a shadow behind an object. This is very useful in adding to the realism of your projects. While there are several filters on the market that you can buy that accomplish the same thing, it is always good to know how to do it the old fashioned way. Fire up Photoshop and lets get started.

1. Alright select the image you want to use and extract it from its background so that it is on its own layer. I am using another apple that I made square.

2. Now create a duplicate layer of the object you want to put a shadow behind by dragging the layer with your extracted object to the new layer icon.
3. Set your background color to Black by pressing the “D” key and then the swap arrows in the right hand corner. Now make sure you have your object layer selected not the copy and press Ctrl+Shift+Delete Mac:Cmd+Shift+Del . This will fill only where there are pixels.
4. Now I like to lower the opacity of this layer to around 50% while I manipulate the shadow so it looks more like a shadow. Go to the Edit menu and select Free Transform.

5. Manipulate the handles (the boxes on the points of the square) until your shadow falls where you want it to be. Look at my example below to get the idea.

6. Now that shadow still looks really harsh. We know that shadows in real life do not look like that so lets soften it a bit. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. I set mine to around 30 to achieve my effect but you’ll have to play with the amount depending on your image.

7. Now you have created a simple shadow effect.

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  Let’s face it, most of us use photo shop because it is fun. The other day at work a colleague and I were discussing how one would manipulate a picture of an apple to make it square. So thought “What the heck I’ll do a tutorial on it.”. So lets’ get started.

  Well first you are going to need a picture of a piece of fruit, or an object you want to change the shape of. In order to find the picture of an apple that I am going to use, I used googles
image search. You are looking for an apple with white back ground, or some other back ground that is going to be easy to remove. Once you have found your desired image and removed the back ground you can continue on with the tutorial.

• So open up the your image that you have removed the back ground from in photoshop. Keeping this image open, go to File > New and create a new image. Make it larger than your source picture to give you some extra room and select white background for background contents.


 

• Use the select tool to drag your image (in this case an apple) to your new image and place it somewhere in the center.
• Photoshop will automatically create a new layer when you drag your apple to the new image. Now we are going to draw some guide lines in order to make our apple square. Create a new layer.
• Choose a color that’s not going to interfere with your image. I like to use red, but use what ever you are comfortable with. Make sure on the top menu you have the Fill Pixels icon selected   and draw a 3D box around your apple. Don’t get too worried if it is not perfect, we are only going to use it for a guide.

• Now turn off the background layer by clicking on the eye icon. Select the layer with your apple on it. I went ahead and renamed this layer apple.
• From the filter menu choose liquify. When the liquify filter screen appears you may have to zoom in on your apple to make it easier to work with.

• Now on the Liquify screen you’ll want to change the following options.
  1. Make sure Show Backdrop is selected.
  2. Change the Use tab to the layer where your 3D box is.
  3. Change the Opacity to about 50%.
  

• Now using the warp tool we can begin to shape the apple. If you click on the image below, you can see a short clip on how I used the warp tool to both push the apple out to the box and into the box.

• Don’t worry if you make a mistake. If you want to undo something you have done use the Reconstruct Tool and it will do just that – reconstruct your image.
• You may encounter places where you just can’t seem to make it warp and still look good. In this case you can use the Bloat Tool . This will (you guessed it) bloat the image. Another useful tip is to use as big of a brush as will work, this tends to give you better edges.
• Once you are satisfied with your shaping of the apple. Select Ok and the filter will render its results. You could stop here but we can make it look a little better by adding some highlights along the square edges.
• Use the Eyedropper and select an area where the color is a good representative of the color of the entire apple.
• Double click the new color picked and the color picker will come up. Now choose a color to the left of the one selected so it will have more white in it. Select the paint brush, and choose a small, soft brush with an opacity close to 60%. make a New layer. Take this brush and paint lines where the edges of the apple should be.




• Now using the eraser, remove some of the harshness of the lines and make them look more natural.



• Now I like to turn the background layer back on. You do this by clicking on the box where the eye ball should be. Then I select the layer I put my highlights on and adjust the opacity until they blend into the light.





• At this point you can call it done, depending on if you are going to use this square apple in another image. At this point I add a bit of shadow. To see how click here.

 This techniques are not just limited to fruit, and vegetables. You can apply them on just about anything, pets people. let your imagination free and see what you can come up with.

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 In my previous post I detailed a method to place a watermark on your photos. While that method does have the advantage of making the photo unsuitable for printing it is not the method I prefer.

 I find that the copyright mark is a bit obtrusive. Fortunately I stumbled across another way to add a watermark to your photos which is a lot less obtrusive. So fire up photoshop and lets get started.

 First off I want to state that I discovered this method on a web site so it is not truly my own. I have since lost the URL (website address). So if any of you readers know of where it came please let me know so I can give the author due credit. Besides there are lots of great tutorials on that site too that I would like to read again.

1. For this method we are going to use a feature of photoshop that I rarely use. The displace
   filter. So the first thing we have to do is create a new document. Make a new RGB document 100 pixels tall by 400 pixels wide.

2. Select Edit > Fill 50% grey . The displace filter will ignore gray.





3. Now type the text you want to watermark your photo with in this document. Merge all the layers and select Filter > Stylize > Emboss, set the height to 1 and the amount to 100%.

4. Save this image as Copyright Image.psd or a file name that you will remember. This will become our displacement map.
5. Open the image you want to place the copyright mark on. Be sure that it is a copy of the original as these changes will become permanent.
6. Now select Filter > Distort > Displace . This is where you can tell photoshop how to use the displace map. If you are using a logo you can select stretch to make it cover the entire image. I almost always select Tile. Under the “Undefined Areas” I always select “Wrap Around”. Using this method I don’t think there are any undefined areas. When you click OK photoshop will ask you for your displacement map. Point it to the file we just made.

7. Now your watermark may be a little difficult to see (which is what we wanted). But if you zoom in to a section you should be able to see it. You may have to play with the scale to find a size that best suites your photos. If it is too big you undo it and then use the displace filter again changing the scale.

8. From here you can go to the File Menu and select File Info and enter your information like we did in the previous post.
9. If you like this method then I highly recommend making it into an action. That way you can use it for batch processing of multiple images.

 Here is the finished copyright photo. I find this to be my method of choice for photos that I post to the web.

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 Has this ever happened to you? Your surfing the web looking at photos to get ideas and learn better composition. When suddenly a picture captures your eye. Wait a second you took that picture! But that’s not your name on it. Some one is trying to pass off your work as there own.

 Or here’s a more realistic scenario. some one hires you to do some photo shop work for them and wants to see the finished project. So you dutifully post the pictures to your web site to show your client that yes indeed you are doing what they want. Then you never here back from them. They have taken your posted pictures from the web and printed them off leaving you out in the cold.

  In this tutorial I will show you one way of placing a water mark right in the picture so that it will print out with the picture. Meta copyrights are great but they don’t help a hill of beans when some one prints off your work, or uses it in print media. Now a good photoshop user can in all honestly remove this watermark but it will take a bit of effort. In a later tutorial I will show you another way to put a watermark on a photo that is much more difficult and time consuming to remove.

So lets get started!

1. Fire up photoshop if you haven’t already and open the photo you want to place your watermark on.
2. Choose the Custom Shape tool from the tool box. (It is the icon that looks like a little blog right underneath a black arrow)
3. After selection the custom shape tool, go up to the options bar and select the copyright symbol.

4. Create a new blank layer bu clicking on the Create New layer button at the bottom of the layers pallet.
5. Now hit the letter “D” on your keyboard to turn your fore ground color to black and drag the copyright symbol over your photo.(use your judgement as to the size you want to go. Also keep in mind that we’ll be adding some text next to it. Below is a picture with the copyright symbol at a size I felt was good.
6. Next select the text tool, select your font and type your text. I always type the year and my name or my web sites name. When you enter the text photoshop will automatically create it on a new layer. After you have entered your text and moved it to a position that you like.



7. Now go under the filter menu and select Stylize then choose Emboss. Use the filter with the default settings of Angle 135′, Height 3 pixels, and Amount 100%. If you increase the height you’ll get a more pronounced look. When photoshop tells you that the layer must be rasterized select Okay. (Note that after you rasterize the layer you will not be able to edit the text)

8. Now select the layer with your copyright symbol and do the same as above. Once it has been embossed select your text layer and on the PC hit Ctrl + E, or Apple + E on the mac. This merges the two layers to form one.
9. Now we are going to smooth out the edges a bit to give it a little more refinement. On the layers pallet turn on the Lock Transparent Pixels. (the first icon on the left at the top in the Lock section) Then got to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and add a 2 to 3 pixel blur.

10. Make sure your copyright layer is selected and choose Hard Light from the blend menu. This will make your text and symbol transparent.
11. Now go under the File menu and Choose File Info. This will bring up the screen below.


12. Here is where you’ll enter the embedded information. Change the Copyright Status pop up menu to Copyrighted. enter your copyright notice information in the appropriate field. I usually just enter the year and my name. You can also add your web site address in the “Copyright Info URL:” box. Hit okay and all this information is recorded.
13. Now if you like this method of adding a watermark I would suggest you make this whole thing into an action so you can do it with the touch of a button. Once you have it as an action you can even apply this to a whole folder of pictures by using batch automate. We will do this in the next copyright tutorial where I’ll show you how to create the copyright that I prefer.

 Below is the finished project. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

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 Alright as promised in the camera buying guide. Here is how I have figured out how to enlarge digital pictures for poster size prints.

 If you read my camera buying guide you know that up until recently I only had 3.2 mega pixels to work with. While this worked well for most prints I always had distortion when printing 8 x 10s. I strive for perfection and this distortion was very annoying to me. So I figured out a way to reduce it so that my print outs were satisfactory to me.

 This method should work in any CS version of Photoshop, and you can probably apply the techniques in virtually any graphics editing program. This is likely not the best way to do this but I have found it to be the easiest and it gives me the results I am after.

So fire up PhotoShop and lets begin…..

1. Select the Photo you want to resize.
2. First lets check what the picture size is. We do this by going to the image drop down menu. You’ll see Image Size, select this and the following window should pop up.
   

   This picture is 4.688″ X 3.521″, which is half the desired size if we plan to print it as a 10 x 8. Now you could just type the dimensions 10 x 8 in the respective fields but I am sure you would find the out put less than desirable. However I have found a neat trick around this.

3. For some reason if you only increase the size by 10% at a time the picture does not seem to blur or get pixelated. So here is what you do. In the image size dialog make sure Resample Image is turn on. Under resample image in the drop down menu select – Bicubic Smoother (it will actually say best for enlargement). Switch the unit of measurement in the pop up windows to percent and type in 110. Your Image size window should look like the on below.
   
4. Hit OK and PhotoShop will increase the size of your photo. Now you could keep on doing this over and over again until you reach your desired size. But here is a case of something that is just screaming out to be made into an action. Go under the windows menu and choose Actions. When the action pallet appears select create new action.
   

5. Now name your new action. I named mine UpSize 110%. Then assign it to a function key, in my case I assigned it to F12.
   
6. Now click the record button and repeat step 3 remembering to hit the OK button. After the photo has resized another 10% hit the square stop button.
7. Now hit the F12 key or whatever function key you assigned to your action and your picture will resize by 10% each time that key is pressed. If you want to see my results click on the original image below and it will take you to the new image which is roughly 13″ x 10″.

 I have rarely if ever encountered any distortion by using this method. But I have been told if you do have distortion problems you can always use to sharpen to fix it it along the way. Look forward to a tutorial on photo sharpening coming soon.

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