I've gotten a lot of positive response to this collage which is really at heart a very simple little piece, so I thought, hey, wouldn't it be fun to demystify it? As a new graphic artist (or even an experienced one!), looking at a finished product can be very daunting, like you wouldn't know how to even begin to create something like that of your own, despite the fact that the individual steps are actually pretty easy. So for this tutorial, I'm going to start at the bottom, layer by layer, and show you step by step how this rather pink-and-fluffy-for-me collage came into being. Hopefully in the process you'll pick up some skills, and most importantly, some confidence! And alas, I may well lose some of my ps goddess cachet when you see how easy it all is, but if that's the price I have to pay to have more pretty art to look at, I'll do it willingly!
2006 Update!: the challenge group that inspired this tutorial is gone, but you can grab the caps here: 1, 2, & 3. See also the very end of this page for updated versions of the collage.
Phase 1: Initial Layout
First, I selected 3 caps from the lovely assortment provided for the challenge by Holly. I resisted the urge to use the nifty close-ups, and opted for the midrange images instead, thereby avoiding having to figure out something to do about missing foreheads etc and the dreaded floating head syndrome. I used my standard masking procedure to feather out the edges. I made the bottom-most image a little larger by using control-T to bring up the transformation box, so that that one would anchor the arrangement a bit. Which, btw, resizing certain elements in relation to others can do wonders for your balance, never forget that that's an option! Note that I don't try to fill up every inch with cap. This was my number one mistake when I was starting out, every single piece was jam-packed with faces. Now I know that sometimes you need to leave yourself a good chunk of free space to play with and that all-face-close-ups equals "boring". The background color I selected from the beam behind Spike's bottle of beer using the eye-dropper. Since these caps were so dark, I wanted something dark to begin with that would help lessen the distinction between "cap" and "non cap".
As you can see, at this stage, there's nothing particularly impressive about it. It's just a run of the mill collection of caps, and a lot of people would just add some text and/or run a filter on it and call it done. But they're missing out on all the fun, we're only just beginning! So lets get on with it, shall we?
Phase 2: Filling in the Gaps
Next, I canvassed the screen shots looking for visually interesting bits of wall, steps, lamp, etc from the backgrounds. I made feathered selections and copy-pasted to my main canvas, duplicating some, flipping/rotating others until I'd filled in all the gaps to my satisfaction (image above).
Then I decided to add a ghostly version of the dancing crowd cap up in the top left corner, with opacity set way down:
Once I was sure there were no hard edges showing, I linked all those layers together, and used the "merge linked layers" command so that I wouldn't have to deal with a zillion unnecessary separate layers later on.
Phase 3: Lightening
Caps are notorious for being too dark and too low in contrast, even if they're nice enough not to be particularly grainy, so you should almost always do something to rectify that. You'd probably have to put them side-by-side to note the difference, but the above is a touch lighter than the shot from the previous step. When lightening, I've found it's good to do it in tiny increments. Seems to help reduce grain. For this round (image above), I made an adjustment layer (control click on the "new layer" icon) and selected "levels". Then I slid the left end in a bit and the right end in a bit, and moved the central one a bit left till I liked the little pick-me-up it gave.
The next round (image above) is a little more dramatic, but still hard to see... take my word on it, this one *is* rather a bit lighter than the last. I did this one with "Softness/glowiness: method 3" from the Glowiness Tutorial although I kept the median blur *very* minimal, just a few pixels. Then I repeated the steps, this time editing the selection using Quick Mask and the Levels dialogue to select only the more definite highlights, and being a bit more exteme on the median filter, giving the following:
Phase 4: Coloring
I decided I really liked the red coloring from the lamp shade, so I decided to spread that around some. So I used the technique described in the second part of "Softness/glowiness: method 3" from the Glowiness Tutorial (wherein you select the luminosity mask, and then fill with a solid color) except that instead of using white, I used a shade of red selected from the lampshade. On its own, it would look like this (except that the white parts in this cap would be translucent):
I then set this layer to screen, where it intereacts with the underlying layers to produce the following:
That was a little *too* pink for me, so I added a new adjustment layer (control-click on the new layer icon), this time selective color and tweaked the black, white and neutral sliders to emphasize the cyan/magenta until I got the following:
Phase 5: More balance work
At this point, I decided I need to do some more to balance things out and add interest. The dancing crowd had pretty well lost its definition, so I copied a new layer on top and increased the opacity some. I also added a bit of taunty Buffy lip to the lower left corner:
Phase 6: Stock Image Magic
Okay, things were shaping up, time to add a little zing. And stock images are always good for zing. Since this was for a club scene, I thought something sparkly would be apropos. So I searched my collection and came up with the following:
It was originally black and white, I just used the hue/saturation: colorize function to get it in sync with the existing collage color scheme. I added this as a new layer above the existing layers, set to screen, added a layer mask and brushed out the edges and the parts that were falling over facial details. The image wasn't large enough to cover my entire canvas, so I made a duplicate copy and shifted it over so that I got two groups of sparkles, one by Buffy's head in the top right corner and one at the small of her back in the "beer" cap.
Then I repeated the process with another stock image, also originally black and white, but colorized:
Put this on its own layer set to screen in the top left corner to give:
And finally, I added
to the lower right corner to give:
Phase 7: More brightness/Color tweaks
With the sparkles in place, I felt it was time to highten the glow they added by repeating the lightening tricks I'd already used in Phase 3. Which gave me:
Then I added a new adjustment layer, this time hue/saturation, and punched up the saturation a bit to give it a bit more zing:
Phase 7: a quick change of venue
As I was quite happy with the way the piece was shaping up, I decided to give myself some breathing room for the final stages by starting a new psd file. So I did a copy-merge, and pasted a flattened copy of the collage into a new psd file, saving the layered version of the collage so far as a back up in case I needed to go back to it and closing it. In the new file, I added a mask to the collage layer, and used one of roshiweb's custom brushes to partially erase the bottom left and upper right corner, giving me:
Phase 8: decorations
I decided it still needed a little something, so I added a new layer, and added a vertical line using the line tool. Then I used the marquee tool to select boxes and rectangles, and then stroked them, building my little interlaced boxes. Then I added a very slight blood red color-burn drop shadow to the layer.
This was a little too 3-d for me, so I added a mask to the layer, and used the aforementioned roshiweb brush to scuff the lines a bit for that weathered, set-in look.
Phase 9: text
I then used the text tool to create my text, adding interest by making the text in different sizes, offsetting the text so that it wasn't all just straight lines like in a word-processor, and making some text of lower opacity to add some depth. I also added a bit of a drop shadow (color-burn with a periwinkle color) and added a little variation to the color by dusting some blue on a layer just above each text layer, clipping that layer to the text layer by alt-clicking on the line between the two in the layers pallet, and setting the layer to color-burn.
Next, I added a new layer above all the text layers, and control clicked on one of the text layers in the layers pallet to select it. I then used the stroke command to outline in white. I repeated the process for each of the text layers in Pepita (the large font), giving me:
That wasn't bad, but I decided I wanted a little less dimension than that, so I merge-copied the whole collage, ran motion blur (horizontal) on it, set it to screen and then masked out most of it, leaving just a bit of brightness over the font. And there you have it!
The full sized version of the finished piece. Click to view. When displayed, click on the image to pull up the associated notes page. |
2006 Update
Someone asked me about the images for this tutorial since the challenge group they came from is long gone, and since I'm *so* over the glowy soft-focus look, I decided that since it's been 4 years since I wrote this originally, I should spend 10-15 minutes making a new version. And here it is:
The steps were pretty much exactly as above, though I didn't do any glow-work, just adjusted the contrast and then played around with colors and adding a bit of noise.
And while I was at it, I tried another 10-minute collage in a horizontal layout, minus the sparklies.
Just goes to prove, (A) you're never done learning and (B) the same basic elements can be combined and re-combined in so many ways, there's always a new way to try.