Photoshop brushes are a brilliant way to add interest to your photos but did you know you can use brushes on layer masks? Say, for example, you want to create a bird made of fire, you could take a picture of fire, add a black layer mask to it and then using a bird-shaped brush paint with white on the mask to reveal the fire in just the shape of the bird. Here, let me show you what I mean … [gallery columns="2" link="none" size="medium" ids="2112,2113"]
* Fire stock and bird brush courtesy of DeviantArt.
Yeah, phoenix baby! Using brushes on layer masks you can create a fun dispersion effect that makes your subject look like they're breaking into pieces and scattering away. Perfect for those moments when something really awkward has happened and you wish you could dissolve away into nothing.
My base image[/caption]
Pretty[/caption]
Dispersion effect on liquify layer[/caption]
Bats added[/caption]
One of Photoshop’s coolest features is the ability to customise and import different brushes. Until now you might only have used Photoshop’s standard round brush to paint masks that hide and reveal layers. But if you spend some time with the brush panels you’ll discover that using different brushes not only makes your work easier but will give life to your photography in ways you’d never dreamed were possible. And the best part is you don’t even have to be able to paint or draw! Hooray!
Here are some examples of Photoshop brushes. With a single mouse click I created grass, smoke, the moon, scattered leaves, hair, birds, blood and ink spatters, clouds, stars, fire trees and snow. And that’s just a small sample of the brushes available. You can then customise these further by playing around in the brush options, adding colour, and using the transform tool to move and warp the brush as you desire.
Edit>Fill the canvas with white (if it isn't already). Using black, draw the shape you wish to turn into a brush. Vary the opacity of your brush to give areas of transparency for depth. If you don't like to draw an easier way is to make a selection from another photo and drag that onto your blank canvas. Use Edit>Transform to resize the selection to fit your canvas and then Image>Adjustments>Desaturate. Whatever is white becomes invisible so you may need to go to Image>Adjustments>Invert to swap white to black (and vice versa) and then play around with Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast to get your tones as desired.
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Then go to Edit>Define Brush Preset, name your brush, press OK and your brush will now be at the bottom of the Brush Preset Picker ready to use!
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Define new brush preset[/caption]
If you have Photoshop CC you can also download the Adobe Brush CC app on your phone or tablet to create brushes that sync with Photoshop (although I found it I bit hard to create anything usable).
Shape dynamics[/caption]
Scattering[/caption]
Color dynamics[/caption]
Transfer[/caption]
These are the options you’ll probably use the most but there are other options in the menu you may wish to play around with such as adding texture, noise and wet edges to your brush.
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If you use a tablet with Photoshop you can use the brush panel to control how your pen pressure affects the brush tool so it will mimic your drawing. (I highly recommend using a tablet by the way – I have a small Wacom Intuos Pro which I love but sadly no desk to put it on! So I usually get by without it *sad face*)
Use a Color blending mode to add colour by hand[/caption]
Use gradient map to add a range of colour tones.[/caption]
And that's it for my round up on brushes! Brushes are brilliant in compositing for tasks like drawing hair (because selecting real hair is too difficult), for drawing grass in front of your subject to make them look like they were really in a scene or drawing trees along a horizon line to hide a seam between your foreground layer and a replaced sky. Endless possibilities!
About ‘The Endless Delight of Delirium’
This week’s image is based on the character ‘Delirium’ from the greatest graphic novel series ever written, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I’ve always wanted to create a photo around Delirium because she’s so visually interesting, often surrounded by fish and butterflies (and sometimes frogs and bubbles). Because each of the Sandman comics was illustrated by a different artist the appearance of the characters change, so in researching this image I looked at many different interpretations of Delirium and designed my costume around the common elements. For example she has red hair, sometimes shaved on one side, sometimes with stripes of colour. She has one green and one blue eye. She is always wearing fishnets, and sometimes mismatched socks and a tutu. Watercolour and swirls are used to allude to her delirious mental state. I shot the images of myself and the bubbles in my garage with a Speedlite.
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The brushes I found in various places on the Internet but after they were added I felt the image lacked depth so I composited in some real photos of fish I photographed at Underwater World, Mooloolaba and butterflies photographed at Penang Butterfly Farm in Malaysia. The background is a paper texture from Lost & Taken.
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Composited fish and butterflies[/caption]
Working on this image was a joy from start to finish. Let me know what you think!
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Ugh[/caption]
A few week’s ago armed with my camera, my mother (who was convinced I was going to get murdered) and a $20 piece of fabric I disappeared into a forest to try and build a dress. But we got there too early and the sun was all wrong and I had to shoot all the components three different times because although I kept moving out of the sun the sun kept following me and my props weren’t working and the mosquitoes kept biting and my makeshift dress kept falling off and tripping me, and really, the whole thing was just a disaster. And it makes me wonder how many photos are born out of similar stories. Certainly most of mine.
However, were I a more emotional person, I would probably weep with joy on a daily basis at Photoshop’s magical powers. Honestly, I don’t know why they haven’t changed their motto to … “It turns out you CAN shine sh*t!’ Because so often I’ve taken a photo I wasn’t feeling good about and watched Photoshop transform it into something well beyond expectation. For example, I can buy a $20 piece of fabric, throw it around in a forest and manage to create a beautiful, unique, priceless dress fit for any mosquito-bitten princess.
Hair flick horror[/caption]
In both cases I had some images where the colour and luminance of one flick was wildly different to the colour of the others so I had to clip an adjustment layer to the problem images Alt click between the adjustment and image layers) and use curves or levels to make them match.
For some areas of the dress I wanted it to look as if there were many panels of fabric flying in different directions but usually I like the dress to look like it’s fully intact, so to blend your fabric together add layer masks to each fabric flick and using a low opacity and very soft brush, mask away parts of the fabric until it blends into the underlying fabric layers. Best to work through the layers one at a time while switching the other layers off. Sometimes the healing and spot healing brushes work great for blending fabric also. Just use them to paint along the seams. Be mindful to assess the direction of light in your image and how shadows are falling and ensure to replicate this in your dress.
The easiest way I’ve found to blend hair together is to vary using a brush of soft to medium hardness on a low opacity to brush around your hairs (and because I always work non-destructively I paint on the layer mask, not the layer itself). It’s not foolproof but it’s generally good enough.
If your hair is giving you real grief you can also sample a colour of the hair (alt click with paint brush tool) and use the smudge tool to paint fake hair in, or use a specially designed brush for the purpose of drawing in hair such as the one at this link.
The thing I most love about using hair and dress flicks in my images is that it adds that extra element of magic to your story by bringing motion to a static image and turning your hair and dress into characters of their own.
The majority of people with a functioning camera will at some point have snapped a panoramic photo—a process that involves swivelling the body from side to side while taking a series of photos to capture the full range of a scene so beautiful it can’t be contained. (That last bit felt like it needed to be in bold.)
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'A Bridge Just Right' by Ryan Brenizer[/caption]
Then a cunning fellow named Ryan Brenizer started using this technique for portraits, but instead of just moving side to side he moved up and down and all around while using a wide aperture to create a very shallow depth of field, and stitched the photos together later in Photoshop. Thus, the Brenizer Method was born, while Internet forums went crazy with green-eyed monsters claiming to have invented the technique first. (Those people tend to call this technique ‘bokehrama’ or ‘panoramic stitching’ because agreeing on one name is apparently too difficult.) A Google image search of any of these terms will fill your screen with examples aplenty but this one by Ryan Brenizer himself seems to be the most common example. And damn right, it’s a stunner.
50mm f/1.4 Brenizer Method[/caption]
Let’s say you’re out shooting but you only have a telephoto lens with you. Then someone says “Look at this amazing sunset! Please photograph me in front of it so I can impress my Facebook pals!” With a telephoto lens you’ll only be able take a head and shoulders portrait and miss the sunset entirely OR you’ll have to move so far away from your subject to fit everything in that they’ll barely be recognisable. The Brenizer Method lets you keep your subject close and intimate but still include as much of the scene as you want.
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Same tree with wide angle lens - the subject would be further away[/caption]
And because you’re using a wide aperture the background will be lovely and creamy and blurry so the background isn’t competing with your subject but is still adding interest and context to the scene. If you’d just used a wide angle lens your subject would be farther away than this technique allows (which is what you were thinking right?)
Individual shots[/caption]
When you’re ready take your main shot and then start taking your surrounding shots using a 40% overlap. It’s good to get into the practice of shooting in a pattern, ie in rows back and forth, but if you’re like me you’ll just shoot all around and hope for the best. Shoot slowly and be careful to ensure you have enough coverage. Another really helpful tip which I always forget to do is take a picture of your hand before the sequence and after the sequence to make it easier to identify in post.
While you’re shooting your surrounding shots it’s best not to change the camera’s position but to swivel it up, across and down from one point as if it’s anchored to a tripod (if it’s not already). I made the terrible mistake of removing my camera from my tripod and stepping side to side then shooting above my head and down low. In my mind this made the most sense, like piecing together a puzzle. But in doing so my horizon line was changing which meant putting together my final image was a nightmare I intend never to repeat.
Layer mask button[/caption]
When this process is done you’ll get an image with white lines throughout showing you the stitch points. Flattening the image removes the lines but you want to leave this until the very end. They are quite handy guides to show you where a stitch occurred so you can follow it along and check you’re happy with the results. If you’re not happy add a layer mask to the problem layer with the button at the bottom of your tools palette and either add more or remove some until the seams look realistic (more on this next lesson).
You will likely come across areas where perspective shifts (areas that won’t line up) have occurred so you’ll need to select the problem spot and use the warp tool (Edit -> Transform -> Warp) to pull areas into place.
By swivelling the camera side to side you may end up with gaps at the top and bottom of each seam. You can fill these areas in using the clone stamp or content aware fill or just crop them out.
I worked on this shot for WEEKS to make the stitches look convincing, all because I hadn’t swivelled my camera and because I’d chosen such a difficult subject to stitch. I was also relatively new to Photoshop so everything took twice as long. If I can do it, so can you.
This is a technique I use in almost all my conceptual photos, although I usually use 9 photos or less and avoid using such a wide aperture because it makes it too difficult to find accurate focus for self-portraits. If you are interested in trying this technique I’d also suggest starting small and don’t make the same stupid mistakes I did! Taking one for the team. :)
Here's another example, photographed the same day:
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Final image: The Road Less Travelled[/caption]
How often have you looked at a photo and thought, ‘how did they do that?’ Among a sea of selfies and food shots some photographs are so intriguing or beautiful that they demand your attention and make you wonder. But what might be a fleeting interest for some, for me is an obsession. I don’t usually pull things apart to see how they tick but knowing the tricks the great photographers use enhances the magic for me rather than ruining it. And after years of studying these techniques I want to share them with you so that you too can appreciate the process of creation and not just the end product. And so the ‘Exposing Illusions’ blog will see me attempt, and no doubt sometimes fail, to reproduce a photography technique each week.
My journey with photography began in high school where I spent a semester studying black and white photography before quickly realising that spending time in a stuffy dark room with a bunch of unpredictable chemicals wasn’t my idea of a good time (nightclubs excluded). Besides, back then I was more a video girl, all colour and movement, a clunky VHS video camera glued to my shoulder which eventually led to a passionate but brief career as a video editor (and probably all this back pain).
When digital photography came along I was gifted a point and shoot and proceeded to point it and shoot snaps of every willing subject. It was then that I discovered I had an eye for the vaguely interesting and this, really, is the essence of good photography - immortalising the interesting.
Now I’m the kind of person who struggles to be good at anything because I’m too impatient and if I can’t be good right away then what’s the damn use in trying. And if you’re one of these people too, I suggest you pick up a camera because cameras today are clever enough to do the hard stuff for you, which you’re not going to get from a painting or an instrument. All you need is an eye for composition and the ability to press a button and hey presto! you can trick your brain into thinking you’re already good at something and then it’s only natural to want to improve.
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The first ever photo I took with a digital camera in 2006.[/caption]
When my dad outgrew his first DSLR it became mine (cue heavenly music) and like many I was content for awhile to use my camera on full automatic mode. Even though some photographers would disagree, I believe that using your camera, whatever it may be, in auto mode is an important step in learning to hone your vision without getting weighed down by the technicality of your camera. Honestly, my non-technical brain screamed in pain every time I made efforts to understand the exposure triangle or depth of field and these concepts rattled around in my brain for years before they eventually clicked and made sense. If I’d had to understand these concepts before I ever picked up a camera than I would have given away this photography lark eons ago.
Most people are content to stay in auto and that’s perfectly fine for documenting personal events and pretty scenes but I started to get REALLY annoyed by blur and poor focus and so I put myself in the hands of the professionals and took a couple of half day beginner photography classes to learn how to control my camera manually and it was then that I became utterly hooked.
If this were a film, it’d be here you’d see the montage – me pouring over every photography book and magazine I could get my hands on, trooping around the backyard shooting everything in sight, pages flying off the calendar as I scoured the Internet and YouTube for anything vaguely photography related, crying over my bank balance when I see how much I’ve spent on photography gear (that point and shoot is a gateway drug – you’ve been warned), ending in me staring at a blank Word document wondering how to put all this passion into words.
I’ve shot it all - weddings, portraits, events, landscapes, bands, wildlife, macro, travel, street - and 95% of my photos have never been seen by another human because I’m too much of a perfectionist to share them.
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But it’s conceptual photography—the art of using models and props and lighting and Photoshop—that truly thrills me because it’s no longer enough for me to merely document; I want to create, and make magic a reality, even if just in photographic form. Each week I hope to get better and wiser and pass on what I’ve learnt to you, so I can give back to the community that’s taught me so much. And, if nothing else, I learn by making mistakes so this could potentially be a very amusing experiment.
And thus, the ‘Exposing Illusions’ blog is born. *cut the red ribbon – cue applause*
Are you ready to peek behind the curtain?
Photoshop brushes are a brilliant way to add interest to your photos but did you know you can use brushes on layer masks? Say, for example, you want to create a bird made of fire, you could take a picture of fire, add a black layer mask to it and then using a bird-shaped brush […]
One of Photoshop’s coolest features is the ability to customise and import different brushes. Until now you might only have used Photoshop’s standard round brush to paint masks that hide and reveal layers. But if you spend some time with the brush panels you’ll discover that using different brushes not only makes your work easier but will give […]
A few week’s ago armed with my camera, my mother (who was convinced I was going to get murdered) and a $20 piece of fabric I disappeared into a forest to try and build a dress. But we got there too early and the sun was all wrong and I had to shoot all […]
The majority of people with a functioning camera will at some point have snapped a panoramic photo—a process that involves swivelling the body from side to side while taking a series of photos to capture the full range of a scene so beautiful it can’t be contained. (That last bit felt like it needed to […]
How often have you looked at a photo and thought, ‘how did they do that?’ Among a sea of selfies and food shots some photographs are so intriguing or beautiful that they demand your attention and make you wonder. But what might be a fleeting interest for some, for me is an obsession. I don’t […]
