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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 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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 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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  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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 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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I would like to take this opportunity to welcome everyone to the new and improve Tenacious Creations. I am taking this site a whole new direction. I plan to post useful tutorials for the average user, and maybe some for the not so average user.
I have a series of tutorials showing some neat effects in Photo shop and the Gimp for you to use on your own digital pictures. Whats the Gimp you say? Well it is an open source graphics manipulation software that (get this) is freely down loadable. Well it may not be as polished as Photo shop and it may have some limitations when it comes to commercial printing it is more than powerful enough for most tasks non graphic artists will want to do with there pictures.

Whats that you say? You don’t know where, or how to install the Gimp. Never fear we have an up coming tutorial on how to do just that in Windows XP.

Another series of tutorials we are tackling are all about Open Office. All inspired by a friend of mine who whenever I ask for a copy of some document informs me “Well I can’t give it too you it is in Open Office.” To which I always respond “Its all right I can open it.”.

If you the reader has suggestions for tutorials or questions please post them in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

So what makes me qualified to write tutorials? Well nothing really other than I have finally come to realise that sadly I am a computer geek. While it is true I hold a bachelors in computer science and have worked as a professional computer programmer in past years it didn’t really dawn on me how much of a computer I am till recently.

You see many of my friends are average computer users with average computer user problems. When ever I hear them talking about their problems I can almost always talk them through to a solution. To which I am always asked “Well can you come over and show me?”. Most times for the price of a cup of coffee I agree. But I find showing some one is never really effective. More often than not when you show some one they end up forgetting and sometime in the future encounter the very same problem. I find if you teach them how to solve the problem, where to look for the solution, and how to fix it they tend to remember. Not only that, but if you teach them enough they start to solve the problems on their own. They are not always successful, but they have made the effort, and lets face it even the geekiest of computer geeks is not successful all the time either.

I look forward to you the readers comments on our future tutorials. I also look forward to hearing your suggestions for tutorials and maybe even some of you will submit your own tutorials.

I suggest you check back often as the tutorials will begin to be published shortly.

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