Browsed by
Category: Tutorials

Creating Cracked Rock Text, Faces, Orbs and other objects in Corel Photopaint!

Creating Cracked Rock Text, Faces, Orbs and other objects in Corel Photopaint!

Comments 2 comments

Welcome to another Corel Photopaint tutorial by yours truly, and today we’re going to show you a VERY cool effect that is a breeze to pull off.  I’m going to show you how to apply a cracks to text, photos and other objects by using a simply texture and some layer blending.  This is easy as pie, but can be used to create some fairly complicated photo manipulations.  This is especially popular for people that like making those dark zombie style photo manipulation projects, but this is also great for creating rock text and other fun effects.

What you need to know

This is probably my 20th Photopaint tutorial, so I think the need to describe and illustrate each and every click is becoming a bit redundant don’t you think?  From now on I’ll gloss over items we’ve already discussed in great detail and dedicate the time on areas we haven’t explored together.  What I will do though, is mention what other tutorials you should know before-hand as the lessons taught on those tutorials are applicable to the current lesson.

In this tutorial, we’ll be adding some gradient style text effects with the Interactive Transparency Tool and creating a simple reflection effect, so if you’re not familiar with how to do this, please read my tutorial on creating the Sheen Text Effect. This tutorial covers these tricks in greater detail.

With that said, let’s get started!

Step 1: Our first step will be to open up Photopaint and create a new canvas with a black background.  I find the cracks stand out better on a black background, but nothing is stopping you from applying this to a white one either.  So let’s go with a black background and write out some dark grey text:

Step 2: Now go find yourself a nice photo of cracks!  NO not THAT kind of crack.. *shakes head*  This Kind!  Once you find a texture you want to work with, go ahead and paste it right over top of the text we created in Photopaint:

Here is the texture I used:

And here it is copied in to my project:

Step 3: And now we start the magic!  Change the object layer that contains the texture to Overlay and this will apply an overlay blending mode of this object layer to the object layer below it:

Ta-Da!

Now theoretically, you could save your text now and call it a day, but that’s more than a little boring, I think we need to jazz up this effect a bit more and make it grittier and just more interesting overall.  The first thing we need to do before we play is crop out the part of the texture image that we don’t need.

Step 4: Make sure you click on the text object layer on the object docker and hit Ctrl-M to generate a mask around the text:

Now click on the texture object layer and select the mask tool:

Now hit Ctrl-X (You’ll suddenly see your original grey text) and then Ctrl-V (and your cracks are back!).  You just did a cut and paste function…  At first it will appear that nothing has really changed:

But if you look at your Object Docker, you’ll see that crack text part is now in a new layer and is separate from the main texture image you started off with:

Now just click on the main texture object layer and delete it, you don’t need it anymore:

WARNING: At this point, our overlay layer is gone and you can choose to re-apply it to the object layer that has the cracked tex, or you can leave it normal.  You might be asking what the difference is… if you set the layer to Overlay, any textures or details on the layer below it will be blended with the top layer.  This is what you HAVE to do when applying the cracks to a photo.  But in this example, the grey text layer is completely solid so we don’t need to re-apply the overlay.

Step 5: Now combine the two text object layers and you are now ready to add some highlights to the text!

Step 6: Ok first off, we’ll add some dark gradient to our text.. so go ahead and do a copy/paste of the text and darken it up, and make a gradient from it.  If you don’t know how to do this, I recommment you read this tutorial, which covers the procedure of creating gradient text in detail.

Dark layer:

Step 7: Now you can go with that or add some dark shadows to the bottom of the text… this is a bit different to how I normally do this, so lets go a bit in detail on how it’s done.  First, create a duplicate of the text and decrease it’s brightness 100% so that the text is solid black:

Now go ahead and apply a Gaussian Blur effect to the text… a pixel radius of about 4 should do it:

Use the Interactive Transparency Tool to add the gradient fade to the blurred shadow:

And finally, open up the objet’s properties window and adjust the opacity to tone it down a bit:

And there you have it!

Step 7: In this next step, I’ll show you how to brush on some effects to your text and have it only apply to the text instead of the entire canvas.  In this case, we’ll add a splatter of blood to the text.  You start off by combining all the text layers together in to a single object layer, then hit Ctrl-M to add a mask around the next like this:

Now grab a blood splatter brush, choose your color and opacity and add a bit of good ol’ violence to your text!

PRO TIP: You can download a blood splatter nib set from my blog site at www.danrichard.com!

Add a bit more to the other corner:

Step 8: Now just add a little reflection (You can read my tutorial on reflections here) and you are done!

Now those of you may be wondering why I said it could be applied to text, objects, photos etc… when so far all I did was text.  Well, because if you experiment with various layer styles, you can use this exact same technique to add cracks and other textures to anything you want!  Here are some additional images I applied the exact same trick to, along with what they looked like before:

 

That’s it for this one, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed!  Remember to post a comment or use the buttons below to share.

Thanks,
Dan

How to create a diagonal opening blinds transition effect for images in Flash

How to create a diagonal opening blinds transition effect for images in Flash

Comments 7 comments

Introduction

Welcome to my first tutorial in quite awhile!  Today I’m going to crack open something I haven’t used in a VERY long time, and that’s Flash.  For those of you unfamiliar with my design background, I was a very heavy Flash designer and used to be quite specialized in ActionScript and coding massive desktop emulation style web layouts entirely in Flash.  I’ve also put together many presentations and movies with Flash, and sometimes it’s fun to crack it open for a few minutes and mess around before I’m reminded how tedious working in Flash is and I close it for another year or two.  In fact, when I stopped developing in Flash as a primary focus, it was back when Flash 5 was just being launched, so that gives you an idea of how long it’s been.

But with that said, it’s very much like riding a bike… you still remember how to do it even if you haven’t touched it for years.  I have to admit the advanced ActionScript I once lived and breathed like a religion has complete slipped my memory beyond the Geturl and Stop commands, so luckily today I am going with a strictly animation style tutorial.

The first thing I want to mention is that my programmers love to giggle at my complete ignorance when it comes to PHP and other joys of website coding, and I’m fairly sure they do it on purpose to give me cryptic and code filled answers when I ask why something is broken and see if I pretend to understand.  They might as well be clicking it out in Dolphin speak, as I’d have equal chances of understanding anyhow.  So you can imagine the satisfaction when one of my friendly programmers asked if I still did Flash and if I knew how to re-create an effect he had seen on another website.  It was a fairly simple transition effect and I knew instantly how to go about it. which I started hammering out in MSN.  This was met with a confused mutter by the programmer who was clearly getting a taste of his own medicine.  So without much nose rubbing, I quickly made him an example and thought I’d share this with everyone in the form of a tutorial.

What we are going to do is create an animated transition effect where it looks like a diagonal row of blinds is opening to reveal an image below.  This can be used when loading a site banner, for buttons or as a photo gallery transition effect.  Granted I’m going to be a tad sloppy about this, but you can create some very clean versions of this by using more masks to control the overflowing lines and such.  I’ll also show you a couple of variants on this effect by adding a fade out as the blinds open.

Tools

For this tutorial, I will be using Adobe Flash CS3, but this technique can be used in any version of Flash, it’s all the same.

I would also like to give a shout-out to my friends at GoMedia.com, which is where I got the wallpaper I am using for this tutorial.  Check out their stuff, they’ve got some WICKED artwork in their portfolio and some gorgeous Vector Packs, Texture Packs and more you can purchase, as well as some free goodies.

We’ll also have some project files for this tutorial, which are demo packs that include the .FLA, .SWF, and .HTML files needed to view each step.  To use these packs, simply unzip the contents to a temp folder and you can either open the HTML file or the SWF file directly.  Here are the files, which I will repeat when they become relevant to the tutorial:

File Download: Project Files 1
File Download: Project Files 2

Experience Required:
Since this is my first Flash tutorial, I’m going to make it very basic and assume you can barely navigate Flash.  Each step and each click will be documented, but any future tutorials will assume you know how to perform simple tasks like creating new layers, converting items, working with frame functions etc.

All set?  Just strike a pose, there’s nothing to it, VOGUE!

…

Read More Read More

New Tutorial – How to make Dan’s Masking Tape Effect!

New Tutorial – How to make Dan’s Masking Tape Effect!

Comments 4 comments

Welcome to another Corel Photopaint tutorial!  Today’s lesson is actually a tutorial request from a P2L community member, and despite there already being a couple of tutorial listed on P2L on how to do this, they felt mine was more realistic and wanted my recipe.  As always, you should be able to follow this pretty closely in Photoshop as both applications share very similar tools and concepts.

On a side note, I am currently sick as a dog while I write this, so please bear that in mind when you shake your head at any grammatical errors among my usual rantings.  I’m heavily dosed with NyQuil and Reactine (That’s about as hard as drugs get when you’re married), so things are a tad hazy at the moment.  But fear not!  Not even a cold medication induced stupor shall stop the typing!

Without further chatter, let’s proceed with masking tape goodness!  Here is the final result we’re aiming for:

For those of you that read my blog or news articles, you’ve probably seen me use this effect quite a bit.  What can I say?  It’s a classic!  If you’re ready to re-create this effect yourself, read on…

Step 1 – Let’s start off with a new canvas… Let’s go with 640 x 480 on a white background:

Step 2 – Next up, we’ll need to pick a color for your masking tape…  masking tape tends to be a sandy color, something like sandstone, so I’ll go with RGB color code 227 215 140.  Make this your background and foreground color:

Step 3 – Once you have your colors all picked out, draw the general shape of your tape with the rectangle tool:

Step 4 – This next step is very important… If you happen to have some masking tape around, peel off a piece and gentle stick it to something, but don’t press it down.  Notice that the color of the tape is pretty uniform?  Ok, now press the tape down firmly against the surface and you’ll now see that the tape has slightly dark splotches where it’s making better contact than other areas of the tape.  Well, that’s what we’re going to create here.

Start off by selecting the Paint Tool and be sure you are using a Standard Art Brush:

Then select the following Nib, which is pre-built in to Photopaint:

Step 5 – We only want our pen tool to apply strokes to the surface of the tape, so we need to apply a mask to the tape object we created.  Simply click on Mask > Create > Mask from Object (or hit Ctrl-M) and you now have a mask around the object:

Step 6 – Now take a slightly darker foreground color than the standard sandstone you were using to create the initial object (double-click the foreground color and click edit to select a darker shade of your current color) and start brushing on the darker color:

WARNING: DO NOT click and hold the mouse button and drag the mouse around.  Put your mouse in the spot you want to apply the color and do a normal click.  Then move your mouse to a different position and click again.

And here is the tape completely brushed:

If you’re happy with the brushed effect and you’re ready for the next step, remove the mask:

Step 7 – Next we create the torn edges of the tape.  A lot of tape tutorials will show you a technique where the end result is this weird shredded effect that, in reality, looks nothing like tape.  If you take a piece of tape and tear it, it’s usually a pretty straight line or maybe a bit irregular, but it certainly doesn’t look like the end of a shag carpet!

So, let’s start off by select the Freehand Mask Tool:

Step 8 – Now click the mouse where you want to start your mask (I started at the top) and drag it to a point farther down and click again.  You’ll see your mask has started to form…  down go down a bit more and click again until you are completely past the bottom of the tape.  Now click around the outside of the tape to complete the mask and double-click on the last connection point:

QUICK TIP: In the sample above, I started at the very top and slowly clicked my way towards the bottom left.  Once I was past the bottom of the tape, I then masked off the right side and double-clicked on the spot where I had first started the mask.

Once your mask is complete, hit the delete key on your keyboard and you now have a torn edge!

Here’s how it looks zoomed out:

Now do the same thing on the other side:

And now both sides have been torn off!

Step 9 – Let’s detail out our torn edges a bit… if you happen to have that piece of real masking tape I had you use to test out the “pressing down” effect, look at it again and you will notice that the torn edges are a big lighter that the rest of the tape.  This is because the tape is slightly thinner where you tear it, as it tears diagonally, not straight through.  Look at the illustration below, maybe that will help explain things…

So if you’re looking at the tape from the side with a REALLY good magnifying glass, you’d see that the tape doesn’t tear straight down, it’s actually diagonal, sort of like a knife’s edge.  That causes the edge of the tape to be slightly thinner, making it more transparent.  More light gets through, so it looks slightly brighter.

See?  I told you I ramble!

So with that out of the way, let’s lighten up the edges by grabbing the Eraser Tool:

Select a grainy Nib, like the one I am using below:

Step 10 – Now carefully erase the edge of the tape by clicking once, moving down a bit and click again.  In this screenshot you can see the outline of the nib (No idea why it won’t capture) but you should be able to see it fine as you work.  You only want the very edge of the nib to touch the tape as you erase the edge.

And here you can see the entire edge has been done:

Now do the other side:

Our torn edges are done!

Step 10 – With our edges done, it’s time for a fairly minor step, but one I feel helps dial up the look of the tape a bit, especially if you’re using this tape on a light background.  We’re basically going to give it a tony bit of a drop shadow, just to subtly outline the tape.  Start by creating a duplicate of the tape object by doing a copy/paste:

Step 11 – Open up the Brightness/Contrast/Intensity tool and turn the brightness dial all the way down so our new object copy is black:

Step 12 – We’ll soften it a bit by adding a 1 pixel radius sized Gaussian Blur:

Step 13 – Move the new object that we’ve just darkened and blurred down behind the primary tape object layer in the docker:

Step 14 – The black background is way too strong, so lets dial that down a bit by opening the properties of that object and lowering the opacity to around 50%.

Step 15 – Now combine the two object layers together and our tape is done!

Now with that out of the way, I’ll show you how I use this piece of digital tape to “stick” photos and images to a webpage!

Step 16 – Paste in the image you want to stick…  at this point, make sure the background color of your image is the same as the background color of the layout you’ll be putting this image in.  In this example, I’ll assume the background is white:

Step 17 – The tape is going to be on top of the image, not under it, so move the new image object below the tape object in the Object Docker:

Here’s where we’re at so far:

Step 18 – Now click on the image until you get the rotation arrows showing on each corner of the image like this (you’ll also notice in the next screenshot that I moved the tape out of the way a bit):

Step 19 – Click and hold the bottom right rotation arrow and drag your mouse upwards and you’ll see your image rotate.  Once you’ve reached an angle you like, release the mouse button and right-click and press apply.

Step 20 – Repeat steps 18 and 19 on the masking tape object and place it on top of the image:

Step 21 – You may have noticed that when we rotated the tape, it got a bit bit blurry on us.  No worries, we can sharpen that up again by applying an Adaptive Unsharp at around 70% – 100%:

Step 22 – Next up, we’ll add a bit of a 3D element to this effect by adding a shadow to the image.  This will make the image look as though it’s slightly lifted off the background where it’s not taped down.  Do a copy/paste of the pic so that we now have a second copy of the image object layer and once again, turn the brightness of the object all the way down to black:

Step 23 – We’ll want this to be a blurry shadow, so apply a Guassian Blur with a radius of 3 or 4 pixels:

Step 24 – Now move the shadow object layer all the way to the bottom of the Object Docker:

Step 25 – We can now get our shadow layer in to the correct position.  Hit the down arrow on your keyboard 3 or 4 times and then hit the right arrow button the same number of times:

Step 26 – Our shadow is a bit too dark and demanding, so let’s tone that down by lowering it’s opacity to 60%:

Step 27 – This next step is a bit tricky…  Seeing as the effect we’re after will make the image appear to be lifting off the background as we get further from the tape, it’s only logical that the shadow would be smaller as we get closer to where the tape is holding down the image.  So this means we need to reduce the amount of shadow we see at the top.

Click on the shadow until you see the Free Transform Arrows show up at each corner of the image (don’t confuse these arrows with the Rotation Arrows):

Now click and hold on the top right arrow and slowly drag your mouse to the left maybe 10 pixels or so and release.  You’ll see that the shadow has now moved inwards at the top:

If you’re happy with the results, right-click and click on Apply:

Our shadow is done!

Step 28 – And for the FINAL touch of realism, we’ll make the tape SLIGHTLY transparent by clicking on the tape object, opening the properties, and setting the opacity to 85% – 90%:

And we are done like bacon!  Add some text and whatever other elements you want and you’ve got yourself some realistic masking tape holding up a picture on your website.

Thanks for reading, please make sure to leave a comment below or share this tutorial!

Dan

Smoothing Skin, Enhancing Eye Color, Sketch Effect, Contrast and Color Isolation in Corel Photopaint!

Smoothing Skin, Enhancing Eye Color, Sketch Effect, Contrast and Color Isolation in Corel Photopaint!

Comments 2 comments

Welcome to another Corel Photopaint tutorial!  In today’s lesson, we’re going to be using Corel Photopaint v12 to look at some of the basic tricks for editing your photos that are fairly common and should be part of your basic graphic knowledge.  In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to smooth skin like a magazine cover, how to enhance eye color with the airbrush, create a greyed out desaturated look with isolated colors, enhance photos with contrast, and finally, how to convert a photo to a pencil sketch.  I’m going to cut down on repeating keyboard shortcuts and basic functions, such as how to copy/paste, so if you don’t know how to perform there simple functions, please read some of my older tutorials that details these areas.

Now the master plan here is to perform all these effects, one right after the other to create a final piece, but feel free to stop anywhere in this tutorial if you’ve already reached the desired effect.  For example, the first part of this tutorial covers how to smooth out skin, so if that’s what you needed to learn, then you don’t really need to go any further.  After that we’ll cover the eye enhancement and then just keep going through various tricks that can be combined into one final photo manipulation.

We’re going to start off with a photo I downloaded from a free stock website some time ago, which is of a beautiful girl with amazing eyes and textured skin that will work very well for this tutorial.  The harsh sunlight really raised the bumps and pores of her skin more than an average photo, so this will work quite well for our lesson:

And once we’re done playing with all our tricks, we’re going to end up with a final photo that looks like this:

Now this is going to be quite a large tutorial with over 75 images in total, so we’re going to split this up into several sections and pages.  I’m going to break this down as follows:

  • Part 1 – Skin Smoothing
  • Part 2 – Eye Enhancement and Airbrushing
  • Part 3 – Desaturation and Color Isolation
  • Part 4 – Contrast Enhancement and Softening
  • Part 5 – Sketch Effect

So let’s get started!

Part 1 – Skin Smoothing

Step 1 – Let’s start off by opening up our source image in Corel Photopaint and making 2 duplicate objects of the photo.  So in all, you should have the background layer, which is the photo, and two additional copies of the photo as extra objects:

We’re going to actually only touch the 2 object layers, but I like to make 1 extra copy just in case I need the original photo for something.  So in this case we’ll be working on the two object copies, and we’ll leave the background copy alone for the time being.  Before you continue, be sure you select the top object layer as that’s our first level of attack in this tutorial.

Step 2 – The first step in creating our smooth skin is to create a primary layer of smooth skin, and we do this by applying a fairly significant Gaussian blur to the photo.  Go ahead and click on Effects > Blur > Gaussian Blur:

Slowly increase the pixel radius control button until you get a level that obliterates all the rough bumps and skin textures.  Don’t worry about stuff like the eyes and hair getting too blurry, it won’t matter as you’ll find out in later steps.  For this particular photo, the level of smoothness I wanted kicked in at a pixel radius of 7.  Click OK and your blue is applied.

Step 3 – We now have a basic smooth skin layer, but we’ve lost a lot of detail in areas we didn’t want to smooth out.  So let’s fix this up by selecting the eraser tool:

Grab a nib that is fairly large, but don’t go too huge or else you’ll lose control on the parts you’re erasing and you’ll go too wide.  I’ll go with a 57 pixel nib with a very soft circular gradient effect:

Now start with the eyes… slowly click and move the mouse around the eye, being sure to erase the entire eyeball, eye lashes and other details around the eye socket:

Don’t forget the eyebrows and hair line:

Now we work the other side:

Along the cheek:

The lips:

Nostrils and tip of the nose:

Work in the details of the nose ridges:

And finish off by erasing along all remaining hairlines:

With that done, we’re now brought back the detailed areas we want to keep, BUT we’ve revealed some areas of skin that need smoothing again.  Click on Page 2 and we’ll fix up these detailed areas and finalize the skin smoothing portion of this tutorial.

Step 4 – For this step, we’re going to detail the skin smoothing with the Touch-Up Brush, which is a no-brainer tool to quickly fix up blemishes, uneven surfaces and much more.  It’s extremely handy for photo editing and you’ll definitely want to have this tool as part of your know-how arsenal!  So let’s start by selecting the Touch-Up Brush and selecting the brush’s application settings.

I’m going to select a size 50 nib for decent coverage… this is a good sized photo so a tiny brush nib isn’t required.

And finally, select the desired brush strength… the higher you set the strength, the more intense the smoothing action will be.  We don’t want to go too nuts, so I’ll keep the strength low:

WARNING: Before you start to brush, make sure you pick the middle layer!

Be sure you select the layer UNDER the main smooth skin object or else you’ll just be trying to smooth that blurred out object layer.  So click on the second object in your object docker before continuing:

Step 5 – OK, let’s zoom right in and start with the nose area.  Start by slowly brushing any bumpy textures you see along the nose… be sure not to run the brush over the areas that separate light and dark, or it will blur the lines you want to keep crisp.

Here we see the results of brushing the nose with the Touch-Up Brush:

Now do along the eyes and lips… If necessary, you can reduce the size of your nib to get into tighter spots:

And you’re done!  Here’s what I ended up with:

Now, before we continue on to the next part, let’s see a before and after image of our skin smoothing:

As you can see, we’ve completely transformed this photo into a beautiful smooth complexion that’s ready for any magazine cover!  This now ends the skin smoothing portion of the tutorial.  Please continue to Part 2 – Eye Enhancement and Airbrushing.

Part 2 – Eye Enhancement and Airbrushing

As someone who uses a real airbrush for model painting, I can honestly say that you should approach digital airbrushing in the same manner.  You want to keep your paint thin and slowly build up color, rather than paint thick and opaque.  Unfortunately, many beginners make the mistake of rushing the airbrushing technique and piling on color too quickly and basically get frustrated and not use this handy tool.  If you take your time, you can learn how to master the airbrush very quickly and use it for professional touch-ups and beautiful artwork pieces.  In this part of the tutorial we won’t go too far into airbrushing, but we’ll look at how to use it to enhance eye color for gorgeous portraits and hopefully that will nudge you into expanding your airbrush use for all out drawing and photo enhancing.

Step 1 – Go ahead and select the Paint Tool and then set up your airbrush settings:

In the Paint Tool properties bar, select the Airbrush brush style nib and set it to 10 – 15 pixels wide:

And here is the key…  set the transparency to a very high 95% – 99%.  This means that your brush strokes will be BARELY visible and it will take multiple strokes before the color you are airbrushing is actually visible.  For this tutorial, I’m going to work with a 98% transparency.  Remember, the trick is to build up the color very slowly and highlight the color that’s already there… we’re not changing the eye color, we’re enhancing it and making the color pop out.

Now select a light color to match the eye…  For this photo I could go with a green or blue, so I chose a mid-level cyan hue:

You’re now ready to airbrush the enhancement color!

Step 2 – Now, start to apply the airbrush in complete sweeps around all the blue areas of the iris.  As you continue to sweep the cursor back and forth, you’ll start to see the color build up and slowly brighten up the eye.  Don’t goo too nuts, keep it realistic!  Once I had the blue/green popping out the way I wanted, I switched to a yellow color and worked the yellowish interior of the iris to enhance that color as well:

Then take some white and light airbrush the white of the eyes to brighten it up just a touch.  Don’t go too crazy and completely whiten the eye or it will look unnatural.

Step 3 – Next we’ll want to clear up some of the red veins within the white area of the eyes, so grab the touch up brush again and clean up the white:

Don’t forget the other side!

Step 4 – That’s about it!  Now step back and set your zoom to 100% and check out your handy-work… everything look good?  Zoom back in and touch up any remaining spots you may have missed and your eye enhancement is complete!

Now before we move on to the next step, I want to point out a small tip that some folks may feel is a worthy step… Some people may feel that the skin is a touch too unnaturally smooth, so before we merge all our layer objects together, we can add just a slight touch of skin texture for a subtle realistic touch.  It’s a simple trick, and you can play around with it and completely vary the amount of texture you add to the skin.

Simply right click on the top object layer and go the object properties:

Now move the Opacity slider down and you’ll see the textures pop out as you reduce the opacity.  I’d recommend staying at 80%, but you can play around and see what looks best for you.  Click OK when you have an opacity level you want to stick with or just click cancel to stick with 100%.

Step 5 – Now combine the 2 object layers together and VOILA! You’ve got airbrushed enhanced eyes with gorgeous realistic colors:

 

Ready to keep going?  Please continue to Part 3 – Desaturation and Color Isolation!

Part 3 – Desaturation and Color Isolation

In this section, we’re going to learn how to create a desaturated toned effect with color isolation.  I’m sure you’ve seen this effect before where the photo or image is black and white except for a 1 or two elements that are full color.  It’s a very popular effect that looks quite dramatic when pulled off right.  Let’s get started!

Step 1 – Start off my making a duplicate of the main object layer we’ve been working with.  We’ll be applying our desaturation filter to this new copy.

Step 2 – Let’s desaturate the new copy… click on Image > Adjust > Desaturate and to apply the effect:

You now have a greyscale copy of our photo piece.

Step 3 – This isn’t really a necessary step, but I like adding just a hint of toned color to the overall desaturated layer.  You can do this by opening up the object properties and lower the opacity to the 80% range.  Play around with various opacity ranges and see what you like, or just leave it at 100% greyscale.

Step 4 – OK, time to let our colors shine through!  Click on the eraser tool and adjust the size to around 20 pixels with a circular fading nib.  You don’t HAVE to go with those settings, but it’s my preferred style for erasing.

Adjusting the eraser nib size:

Now zoom right in and start erasing the areas where you want your color to come through!  I’m going to work on the eyes, eye shadow, and lips…
Iris of the eyes:

Here we see how it looks with one iris done:

Now I have both eyes done and the eye shadow areas:

Now zoom in and do the mouth:

I like to do around the edges of the mouth with a semi-transparent brush… it helps blend the colored lips into the desaturated skin tones.  So here I adjust the transparency to half:

Then I brush the outer edges of the lips:

And we’re done!  You’ve now desaturated the photo and isolated specific colored areas to give the photo an entirely new dramatic look!

You can now move on to the next page to see how I use a simple trick for an additional professional touch in Part 4 – Contrast Enhancement and Softening.

Part 4 – Contrast Enhancement and Softening

In this section, I’m going to show you a simple trick that I use on photos quite a bit… it’s super easy and it’s a great way to add a professional touch to your photos.  This works on portraits, stills and all kinds of other photographic applications.  In our case, it’s just going to make the enhanced elements of our piece stand out even more and add a soft glow to the photo.  This type of trick is also know as the “Dreamy Photo” effect or “Angelic Photo” effect.

Step 1 – Before we get cooking on this portion of the tutorial, let’s combine our two main object layers together again:

And once again, create a duplicate of our merged object layer and make sure you’ve got the top object layer selected:

Step 2 – Pop open the Brightness/Contrast/Intensity adjustment tool (located under Image > Adjust >) and crack up the contrast all the way up and increase intensity about halfway.  You can mess around with the contrast and intensity to see how the tool works and how it affects the image you’re working with.  Once you’ve got a combo you like, hit OK.

Step 3 – We now need to apply a small Gaussian Blur to the object… around a 3 pixel radius should do it, but feel free to play around.  The larger the pixel radius, the more glow you give the photo… just bear in mind that if you go too high, the object will thin out too much and you’ll lose the effect.  I wouldn’t recommend going past a 6 or so.

Going with a pixel radius of 3:

Step 4 – Now open up the object properties of our blurred layer and turn down the opacity to around 40%.  We want to have a soft glow to the photo, not blur it right out!

Step 5 – OK, now you need to grab the eraser tool and erase any are where you want the details to pop out and not be fuzzy:

We’ll work the eyes and eye brows:

Hair:

Her lips and the lip stud and you’re done!

Zoom back out and you can see your photo now has a dreamy soft glow to it with deeper overall contrasting shadows.  You can actually click the visibility icon (the little eye) on the object docker of the top layer to see how it looks with and without the effect.  If you’re happy, it’s time to move on to the final part of this tutorial!

Part 5 – Sketch Effect

To end off this Photo Editing 101 tutorial, I’m going to show you how to turn a photo into a sketch in just a couple of clicks and then we’ll blend that into our photo project for a nifty little effect.

Step 1 – Now, instead of combining both object layers together, we’re actually going to blend both into the background this time:

And then create a single duplicate of the background layer:

Step 2 – Alrighty then, time to turn this photo into a sketch!  Click on Effects > Art Strokes > Sketch Pad:

And easy as pie, your photo is now a sketch… play around with the various sliders and see how they affect the look of your sketch.  Once you hit a configuration you like, click OK to apply the effect to the object layer.

Your photo is now a pencil sketch!  But, we didn’t do all that work just to end up with a simple pencil sketch did we??  Let’s blend this sketch into our colored photo and create a cool grungy effect.

Step 3 – Grab the Interactive Object Transparency Tool (you didn’t think I could write a tutorial without using my favorite tool did you?!) and we’ll apply a transparency gradient across the entire layer.

Apply your transparency:

Step 4 – You can then grab your eraser tool and clean up the photo piece a bit… in this example, I cleaned up the white of the eyes and the thicker portion of the lips:

Guess what?  We are done like bacon!  From here you can continue to apply effects, brush in some grunge effects, add text or whatever else comes to mind!

Well that concludes another tutorial from little ol’ moi, so I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to fairly basic and useful photo editing tricks and I hop you look forward to my next tutorial!  Until then, keep practising and thank you for reading. Please don’t forget to comment below!

Dan

Guide to Video Tutorials – Avoiding common errors and issues when creating video tutorials!

Guide to Video Tutorials – Avoiding common errors and issues when creating video tutorials!

Comments 1 comment

I’ve been writing articles and tutorials for a couple of years now on writing quality tutorials and content that will very likely be accepted in to tutorial indexes, generate loads of traffic, and in general, be actually USEFUL to the reader.  You can read one of my most popular articles on tutorial writing on my personal blog.As high bandwidth connections become even more dominant and software makes recording live desktop actions easier to do, we’re starting to see more and more video based tutorials.  Unfortunately this phenomenal learning tool also presents us with a whole new set of issues, and some of them are becoming the plague of video tutorial production.  In this article, I would like to call attention to these issues in the hopes that anyone who currently records video tutorials, or is considering getting into this gig, is able to put these suggestions to good use!So let’s talk about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

First off, let’s talk about what is good about this exciting new medium and how it brings a whole new dimension to the tutorial writing community.  With tons of new software coming out that makes recording desktop movement a snap, video tutorials are becoming a very popular choice for authors.  Let’s go over some of the positive things that video tutorials bring to the learning environment:

Personal Communication:

With the author now able to speak directly to the audience, you can easily attain a level of personal connection with the viewer that is more difficult to achieve through written text.  It’s easier and more natural to add extra insight and perhaps amusing anecdotes and personal references that will come to mind as you create your audio on the fly.  I’ve always found that tutorials with a certain amount of ad-lib content are the best to listen to.  Something about comparing celery to congress is always a great way to start a tutorial!

New Format Stands Out:

With the bevy of text formatted tutorials, video is an exciting new medium with the possibility of creating some amazing content!  There’s a lot of new ground that can covered in this realm and I think a lot of innovation will come to this platform in the coming months and years.

Ease of Use:

With the introduction of many new recording utilities, recording a video tutorial is often MUCH quicker and less stressful than writing out a lengthy tutorial, formatting screenshots and other visual material and proof reading everything over and over again.

It’s TV!

A very important lesson I learned very early in my marketing and design training:  The more you can make something look like TV, the more audience you will gather and retain.

I’m sure there are many other valid points as to why video tutorials are superior to written format, but for me, these points are what really stand out and make video so attractive.

Time to get our hands dirty!  We’re going to look at some of the common issues that authors face with recording and publishing video tutorials, and we’ll cover some of the issues viewers have to deal with when authors didn’t really think things through.  Now most of these items are not MAJOR problems (we’ll cover those under The Ugly), but most of these will probably completely alienate any viewers you hope to capture.  And for you defensive folks that are already saying “I don’t do that!”, you’re kidding yourself…  I can honestly say that these issues crop up in 99% of the video tutorials I encounter.

Poor Presentation Voice:

I’ll admit something right off the bat here… I was a fairly horrible student and I completely tanked a goodly portion of my English and Math classes.  However, I actually won a few academic awards in a few science classes and in French language studies.  In fact, I think I also scored an award for one of my English Literature courses.  At this point I’m hoping you’re asking yourself a couple of questions:  “Why did you do so well in some classes and so poorly in others?” and “What the hell does this have to do with this tutorial?!”.  Glad you asked!  All blame aside, I always did very well in a class that had a fun and engaging teacher, and I failed miserably in my classes that had worthless, boring teachers that turned their classrooms into dust collecting conventions.  They spoke in such a brutally neutral monotone voice, that they shouldn’t be allowed to converse with other human victims, much less a classroom full of students!  This exact same principal applies to your own voice when you are recording the voice-over for your tutorials.  Above and beyond the subject at hand, your voice will make the difference between engaging your audience and effectively conveying the lesson, or boring us to tears and putting us to sleep.

Below I will list some of the key factors you need to be aware of when speaking to an audience, and this applies to both public crowd address, presentations at work, and recording video tutorials.

  • Modulate your voice.  When speaking, vary the volume, tone and pitch of your voice to keep your audience engaged.  This means raising your volume to draw attention to key points etc.  Remember that varying inflection and volume will keep your audience’s attention.
  • Watch your pace!  Be careful not to get caught up in your presentation and start speaking too quickly or babbling.  A lot of nervous folks tend to start racing through their presentation and this will just end up losing the folks trying to follow your lesson.  You can vary the pace of your speech, but you generally want to maintain an average pace in a clear and steady voice.  Remember that people are watching your video because they don’t know the subject and need to learn from you, so blazing through the lesson won’t teach anyone anything.
  • Be personal and humorous.  Remember that your audience is human, and humans like to laugh and be happy, not miserable and bored.  When speaking, smile even though the audience that is watching your video is probably not seeing your face.  If you smile when you speak, be it in a voice over or over the phone, the listener will know you’re smiling.  Add some personal anecdotes and humor to your presentations as well, it keeps the mood light and is a great way to retain the audience’s attention.

Not Talking:

OK guys, let’s get something cleared up right away…  when we’re viewing a video based tutorial, we want to WATCH the video, not read it.  So when I load up a video and rather than someone speaking I see notepad pop-up, it’s pretty much instinctive for me to click on the close button.  No one wants to sit there and slowly read you typing out your introduction to the tutorial.  it sucks, so please don’t do it.  Either do things properly and record a proper voice over narrative for your presentation or hire someone to speak for you.
Automated Speech:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD please do NOT use a text to speech application to record the audio for your tutorial, it’s BRUTAL.  I am absolutely positive that most people share my opinion that listening to something that reminds me of those annoying Sitepal ads as a way of presenting a video lesson is second only to listening to someone grinding their nails on a chalkboard for 30 minutes.  So take heed, DO NOT create a tutorial narrated by a 60’s robot!

Poor Codec Formats:

Divx, WMP or Flash.  If your tutorial video doesn’t play in either of those formats using a default codec, then you’ve just wasted your time producing your video tutorial.  I understand that some folks may feel they use a codec with awesome compression yet maintains sweet video definition, but if no one else has it, it’s worthless!  You’re very rarely going to get someone who is going to take the time to download the correct codec to play your video, even if you have a link to the codec download itself right there on your website.  Trust me.  You have no idea just how often I’ll open up a video only to have it not play, or I get audio only and no video, or the video is just massive pixels etc…  this is all caused by codec errors.  It is critical that you use a popular supported codec and once your tutorial is finalized and published on your site, TEST IT!  And I don’t mean on your machine either…  send the link to friends and have them test the video playback to ensure it works properly on various machines, operating systems and browsers.

Not sure what a  codec is?  Google it!

I would like to take a minute to mention the use of Camtasia.  Camtasia is the extremely popular desktop video capture software that is designed specifically for recording video tutorials on your PC.  It’s a great piece of software, but too many people are using old pirated copies that simply output worthless files.  Guys, if you’re going to use this software, buy a legitimate copy (I’ve seen it for $150 or cheaper) and make sure it’s up-to-date.  This program is indeed super easy to use, but I am constantly seeing exported videos preload but not play, have audio only etc… this is because you’re running an old version, UPGRADE!

Recycled Material:

Sure, recycling is great for the environment and all that tree-hugging goodness, but in the tutorial world, it’s a giant waste of time.  Done to death tutorials will still be old even if you do it in the form of a video… a scanline tutorial is a scanline tutorial be it written out or recorded live on video.  If it’s been done over and over again, please don’t recycle it in video format, you’re not fooling anyone.  Get some fresh material, I know you can do it!

Background Noise:

I certainly don’t expect you to be recording your tutorials in a sound studio, but I also think you can find the time to record voice overs at a time when we don’t hear your kid sister screaming at you in the background to get off the PC so she can check her MySpace profile for new friends.  You may have trained yourself to ignore her and other common background sounds out effectively, but we sure haven’t and it’s annoying and distracting.  If you get interrupted during a voice recording, redo that part and use a sound editor to correct the issue.

Your Mic:

Do NOT use one of those Price is Right looking $10 mics, they sound like complete garbage.  Spend a few extra bucks for a decent mic and it will improve the sound of your tutorials tenfold.

No Copy/Paste:

When it comes to coding tutorials, video tutorials are probably not the way to go unless you also supply your code in a separate file.  Remeber people can’t copy/paste the code you’re typing in your video!

And now we get into the real NASTY stuff I find in the tutorial world that you need to avoid at all costs.  I can pretty much guarantee that the only person that will watch a tutorial with these issues is yourself.

Loud Obnoxious Music:

You might think that blasting Hip-Hop or Death Metal is wonderful studying music, but kindly spare the rest of us that think this music is nothing but a huge distraction very similar to a jack hammer in a library.  Aside from soft ambient loops, keep that junk AWAY from your video tutorials, because it SUCKS.  I don’t want to hear gangsta rap while I’m trying to learn how you airbrushed that eyeball or head-bang while I learn how to draw a horse.  You know how it’s a major taboo to have music on a website?  Same thing applies here.  Maybe try actually talking in your tutorial and explaining what the heck you’re doing instead of trying to deafen us.

Tiny Resolution:

You know those tiny videos on YouTube with the horrible compression and ultra pixelated playback?  Yeah those… they are WORTHLESS for teaching!  Seriously, why on earth would you think that showing us how to do something in Photoshop in a 250 x 250 video would makes sense?  You can’t see anything, and if we can’t see what you’re doing, it renders that video fairly worthless wouldn’t you say?  And for those screaming “Yeah but click on the full-screen button to enlarge it!”, have you actually every done that?  All is does is magnify the vomit-like video quality into giant pixelated squares sort of popping around the screen.  It’s USELESS, so for the love of god host your own videos and use a decent resolution and compression level.  I would recommend a video in the 800 x 600 range and keep the compression at a level where the text elements of the tutorial (like text on icons for example) is easily readable.  Check out some demo videos from Learnflash.com or Totaltraining.com for examples of what your videos SHOULD look like!

Swearing:

The other day I was approving a series of tutorials from a site that will remain unnamed, and in a single tutorial, they said the n word (racial slur) and swore about 20 times.  What are you thinking when you do this?  Not to be terribly insulting, but you sound like an ignorant tool when you swear in your tutorials like that.  Keep your tutorials relatively clean and professional and we’ll be far better off in the long run.

Final Notes:

I’d like to finish off this article with a few additional considerations you should bear in mind when creating video tutorials that perhaps you might not have thought of right away.

Hosting:

As with written tutorials with images, you should host your own videos.  Just bear in mind that video tutorials take up MUCH more space than images and your bandwidth will grow exponentially.  Ensure that your account will handle the new demands of video hosting and adjust accordingly.  As mentioned before, whatever you do, avoid using places like YouTube at all costs!

Breaking New Ground:

The world of video tutorials is very much unexplored in my opinion and there is just so much that can be done that most have no seen before.  Try and be innovative in your videos and you’ll definitely make your mark in the community.  As an example, how about having your video tutorial and having a small “picture in picture” stream of your face in the top corner showing you as you record your voice-over and such.  What about bloopers at the end where you pooched your tutorial by accident?  How about adding some amusing video effects such as rudimentary green-screen effects?  The possibilities are only limited by imagination, there is so much you can do for next to nothing aside from time.  Don’t be lazy and you videos will rock.

Well that’s about it for me folks, I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial!  For you young folks wondering about who these guys are that within the tutorial, you’re missing out on one of the most famous and iconic western films ever created, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  For the rest of you, I’m sure you’ll agree it was a fitting theme for this article and I hope it gave a chuckle or two.
Thanks again for reading and we’ll see you on another article!
Dan