Tutorial #2: Manual Shadow and Bloom effects..

So I was just fooling around with source images and making various composite pieces, and I decided to document the making of one in particular as a tutorial for the site. In this tutorial I'll show how to make a simple piece using composited source images, and then tie them together with some nice hand-made bloom and shadow effects.

Photoshop has filters for both of these effects, but sometimes the same thing done by hand will look a million times better and more authentic. Both of these techniques are more easily achieved with a Wacom digital art tablet or similar device, but can be done by a mouse with relative ease.

First came the random idea: I'll put a giant baby seal stranded on mars with a nice space backdrop. Next I needed source images. I found a nice hubble shot of space, and a nice high res shot of mars. As always, make sure your source images are of high quality! If they're roughly the same dps that's even better. Here are the shots of mars and the baby seal, so you can see what I'm working with (though I encourage you to find different images, so your piece is unique!):

First I play with the contrast and hue of both images to get them a little more lively looking. Then I use the magic wand with a tolerance of 20 to select the black section around mars. I then go to selection -> inverse to get only mars itself. Cut the image and now go to your space background and paste it in. I situated mine in the lower left corner. I now have this:

Bloom Effect:

-Next I take the airbrush with a pressure of 5% and a size of about 100, and begin to dot in areas of light blue around the edge of mars that occludes the bright stars of the background. After this I set the color to white and the mode of the airbrush to 'color dodge' and begin to add even brighter areas within the light blue. When I'm done I have this:

-Now to finish off this effect I go to render -> lighting effects. I use the default flood light as I find that works the best 90% of the time. I set it to match the source of the light and adjust the settings to get the desired effect:

The Seal:

Now I want to paste in the seal, but I first need to select him. He has fine furry edges, but I won't worry about that for now. I'm going to use the polygonal lasso tool to select him. If you use a good number of clicks, thus making a lot of nodes on the path, you can get very clean and accurate selections. Make sure anti-aliasing IS selected:

-Once you're done with the selection, cut or copy it and paste it into the main project. Scale it down and position it.

Shadow Effect:

-Create a new layer above the planet and below the seal. Select the airbrush, the color black, and set the size to about 80. The pressure should still be around 5%. Begin to dot in shadow behind the seal. Make the shadows darkest in areas that are adjacent to dark areas on the casting object (like under the arms of the seal). Optionally, you can use a subtle gaussian blur when you're done airbrushing to blend the whole thing together. I didn't do that here though.

-Now for the seal's fur. Simply select the smudge tool, set the pressure to 95% (not 100%) and the size to 1. Go to the seal layer and begin to pull short straight lines away from the body. This will replicate the tips of the fur in the original photo:

-Repeat the bloom effect procedure along the seal's border like you did to the planet earlier. You should now have something that looks like this- almost done!:

-I like to play with the contrast and hue of the image (under the adjust menu) to see if I like something a little different better than the original scheme. I often do. Here is the final product:

Contact: mblomquist@berklee.net