Tutorial 3: Wallpaper tutorial for Photoshop 7
And another wallpaper tutorial, using a wallpaper from the last batch as my previous wallpaper tutorial.
However, this one is much simpler than the other one (I think).
This wall was made for a contest, but I don’t think there were any restrictions on it, so that’s probably a moot point.
First off, open up a 1024x768 canvas and flood fill it with black. I’d already decided on the image that I was going to use, which was quite a broody picture, so I thought that the black would work quite well.
On top of the black, I pasted this image of Ronon Dex, which is a promo image from New Atlantis on, resized it using the free transform tool with the maintain aspect ratio on, and positioned it to the right of the canvas. Because it was a high quality promo, it didn’t really need any colour or sharpness adjustments.
I wasn’t too keen on the way that the edge jutted out into the black, so I hit the gradient mask button, and took a black to white gradient and masked out the edge so that it faded into the black background.
Next off I took a blueish green gradient, which I thought fitted with how Atlantis is on the sea and stuff, and put that over the entire canvas, and set it to Colour at 50% which made the really strong skin tones blend in better with the blues that were in the wall that Ronon was leaning against.
This gave me this.
Now that looks ok, but I really didn’t like the sheer amount of blank space on the left. So I took a cap of Atlantis, not sure which episode it came from, but it was quite a dark cap, so I brightened it up using Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and played with the levels until I was happy. I then used the same masking method that I used previously to get rid of the harsh edge at the bottom of the image. This layer was left at Normal, at 49% opacity.
This left me with this.
I should probably point out at this point that I’m working on a laptop, so my screen is a lot brighter than I would normally be used to. When I actually looked at it on my home monitor, I realised how dark it was, so much so that I couldn’t actually see this part of the wallpaper. So, to counter this, I duplicated the layer, set it to Screen and upped the opacity of that layer to 75%. This is something that you should play with depending on your monitor brightness, and remember that if you’re making graphics to share, to take into consideration that some people might have darker or brighter monitors that you do.
Anyway, that was good, but it still wasn’t done.
So I took three more promo pictures with Ronon in them, cropped them so that I just had his face in them, and set them in a row, I then used the masking method to blend the three pictures together, then merged the three layers together (Layers>Merge Down).
Then I duplicated this layer twice. I desaturated the middle layer (Ctrl+Shift+U) and set that to Soft Light at 100% opacity.
The second duplicated layer I set to Overlay at 100% opacity.
That gave me this, which I then positioned like this.
Then I decided that this strip of images needed a border. So, I selected the area around them with the magic wand tool, then inverted the selection and expanded it by about 10 pixels. (Select>Modify>Expand)
I then created a new layer above the cap of Atlantis, and flood filled it with white. This was somewhere close to what I wanted, but it looked a little too separate from the rest of the image, and I decided that even though I’d blended the layers together on the three separate images, I wanted them to have individual borders. So I made a new layer, and using the rectangular marquee tool, I made a narrow selection above the join between the first two pictures and flood filled it with white. I then duplicated this layer and moved it between the second and third pictures, then used Ctrl+E to merge the two layers together.
That gave me this.
Then I used the selection tool again, and made a horizontal stripe that went from the side of the border and went off the page, and flood filled this with white.
Which gave me this.
I then mirrored this on the other side, and placed it so that it was under the image of Ronon, allowing the edge of that image made it appear as though the line were fading into it. Another way to do this would be to apply a layer mask with a black to transparent gradient.
That gave me this.
And that’s the end of the tutorial. All I did after that was add some lyrics (from New Kid In Town, by The Eagles) using the font Teen. It was added under the layer of Ronon, so that the faded edge overlapped the text, just like the part of the border.
By the end my layers palette looked like this
The final wallpaper looked like this
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
However, this one is much simpler than the other one (I think).
This wall was made for a contest, but I don’t think there were any restrictions on it, so that’s probably a moot point.
First off, open up a 1024x768 canvas and flood fill it with black. I’d already decided on the image that I was going to use, which was quite a broody picture, so I thought that the black would work quite well.
On top of the black, I pasted this image of Ronon Dex, which is a promo image from New Atlantis on, resized it using the free transform tool with the maintain aspect ratio on, and positioned it to the right of the canvas. Because it was a high quality promo, it didn’t really need any colour or sharpness adjustments.
I wasn’t too keen on the way that the edge jutted out into the black, so I hit the gradient mask button, and took a black to white gradient and masked out the edge so that it faded into the black background.
Next off I took a blueish green gradient, which I thought fitted with how Atlantis is on the sea and stuff, and put that over the entire canvas, and set it to Colour at 50% which made the really strong skin tones blend in better with the blues that were in the wall that Ronon was leaning against.
This gave me this.
Now that looks ok, but I really didn’t like the sheer amount of blank space on the left. So I took a cap of Atlantis, not sure which episode it came from, but it was quite a dark cap, so I brightened it up using Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and played with the levels until I was happy. I then used the same masking method that I used previously to get rid of the harsh edge at the bottom of the image. This layer was left at Normal, at 49% opacity.
This left me with this.
I should probably point out at this point that I’m working on a laptop, so my screen is a lot brighter than I would normally be used to. When I actually looked at it on my home monitor, I realised how dark it was, so much so that I couldn’t actually see this part of the wallpaper. So, to counter this, I duplicated the layer, set it to Screen and upped the opacity of that layer to 75%. This is something that you should play with depending on your monitor brightness, and remember that if you’re making graphics to share, to take into consideration that some people might have darker or brighter monitors that you do.
Anyway, that was good, but it still wasn’t done.
So I took three more promo pictures with Ronon in them, cropped them so that I just had his face in them, and set them in a row, I then used the masking method to blend the three pictures together, then merged the three layers together (Layers>Merge Down).
Then I duplicated this layer twice. I desaturated the middle layer (Ctrl+Shift+U) and set that to Soft Light at 100% opacity.
The second duplicated layer I set to Overlay at 100% opacity.
That gave me this, which I then positioned like this.
Then I decided that this strip of images needed a border. So, I selected the area around them with the magic wand tool, then inverted the selection and expanded it by about 10 pixels. (Select>Modify>Expand)
I then created a new layer above the cap of Atlantis, and flood filled it with white. This was somewhere close to what I wanted, but it looked a little too separate from the rest of the image, and I decided that even though I’d blended the layers together on the three separate images, I wanted them to have individual borders. So I made a new layer, and using the rectangular marquee tool, I made a narrow selection above the join between the first two pictures and flood filled it with white. I then duplicated this layer and moved it between the second and third pictures, then used Ctrl+E to merge the two layers together.
That gave me this.
Then I used the selection tool again, and made a horizontal stripe that went from the side of the border and went off the page, and flood filled this with white.
Which gave me this.
I then mirrored this on the other side, and placed it so that it was under the image of Ronon, allowing the edge of that image made it appear as though the line were fading into it. Another way to do this would be to apply a layer mask with a black to transparent gradient.
That gave me this.
And that’s the end of the tutorial. All I did after that was add some lyrics (from New Kid In Town, by The Eagles) using the font Teen. It was added under the layer of Ronon, so that the faded edge overlapped the text, just like the part of the border.
By the end my layers palette looked like this
The final wallpaper looked like this
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.