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Firstly: All the images used in this post come from stock.xchng, a fantastically brilliant site offering free stock photos. It's a lovely little place, and greatly recommended.
And now, on with the post.
Firstly, there's this:
It's a faux negative print of a tree; I'll have to see if I can find the source image again. Still, I promised weeks ago that I'd show![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lesslikeyou what this kind of thing looks like. If you do the real thing with photopaper, it's a much nicer effect; still, you can't always get what you want.
As far as the Photoshopping for it goes, the tree image was completely unchanged. A hue/saturation adjustment layer was put on top of it, with saturation set as low as possible - this takes all the colour out without altering the original image. Over the top of this, a layer of pure white was added. The blending mode on this top layer was changed to 'exclusion', which inverts the colour and value (tone) of every pixel in the image.
And next, we have my wallpaper. First, the finished one: (click for full size)
You can follow this in a tutorial-like way if you click on the source images and download the files. Remember to make them all the same size first; it'll make things easier later.
The bottom layer of the wallpaper is this image:
I haven't a clue what it is, but it looked pretty.
And then a copy of this one goes on top:
This is a picture of some water bubbles with a lovely light effect. So, what can we do with these?
Change the blending mode on the top one to Overlay, and you get:
I quite like that; I'd almost stay right there, but there's more to be done yet.
Put this one on top of the picture:
That's a photo of a leadlight candle holder; we can use it for a beautiful broken glass effect.
But how? What about all that red? Plonk a hue/saturation adjustment layer on top, and completely desaturate the picture. In the layers palette, alt-click on the line between the adjustment layer and the glass layer; this links the adjustment to just that layer, so the ones beneath will still look blue.
Now we have this:
It's interesting, but not at all what we want.
What we'd like is for those values to all apply to the lower layers, but we don't want to change the colours at all. This is what the Luminosity blending mode is for - it just adjusts the brightness of whatever's beneath it to what it is for the same pixel on its own layer. This brings us right back here, where we started:
Confession time: I made this all up as I went along, with many more steps than this; most didn't really work, and these are the ones that will make exactly the same picture. I was browsing earlier, swiped the images, and spent about 15-20 minutes just playing with them. I liked the result, and that's why it's a wallpaper now. What? Me? Random?
And now, on with the post.
Firstly, there's this:
It's a faux negative print of a tree; I'll have to see if I can find the source image again. Still, I promised weeks ago that I'd show
lesslikeyou what this kind of thing looks like. If you do the real thing with photopaper, it's a much nicer effect; still, you can't always get what you want.As far as the Photoshopping for it goes, the tree image was completely unchanged. A hue/saturation adjustment layer was put on top of it, with saturation set as low as possible - this takes all the colour out without altering the original image. Over the top of this, a layer of pure white was added. The blending mode on this top layer was changed to 'exclusion', which inverts the colour and value (tone) of every pixel in the image.
And next, we have my wallpaper. First, the finished one: (click for full size)
You can follow this in a tutorial-like way if you click on the source images and download the files. Remember to make them all the same size first; it'll make things easier later.
The bottom layer of the wallpaper is this image:
I haven't a clue what it is, but it looked pretty.
And then a copy of this one goes on top:
This is a picture of some water bubbles with a lovely light effect. So, what can we do with these?
Change the blending mode on the top one to Overlay, and you get:
I quite like that; I'd almost stay right there, but there's more to be done yet.
Put this one on top of the picture:
That's a photo of a leadlight candle holder; we can use it for a beautiful broken glass effect.
But how? What about all that red? Plonk a hue/saturation adjustment layer on top, and completely desaturate the picture. In the layers palette, alt-click on the line between the adjustment layer and the glass layer; this links the adjustment to just that layer, so the ones beneath will still look blue.
Now we have this:
It's interesting, but not at all what we want.
What we'd like is for those values to all apply to the lower layers, but we don't want to change the colours at all. This is what the Luminosity blending mode is for - it just adjusts the brightness of whatever's beneath it to what it is for the same pixel on its own layer. This brings us right back here, where we started:
Confession time: I made this all up as I went along, with many more steps than this; most didn't really work, and these are the ones that will make exactly the same picture. I was browsing earlier, swiped the images, and spent about 15-20 minutes just playing with them. I liked the result, and that's why it's a wallpaper now. What? Me? Random?
