Introduction 3 to PhotoShop - Filters

Monday, August 04 2008

This tutorial is part three of Introduction to PhotoShop. You can read Part Two here if you haven't already.

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This tutorial is aimed toward Adobe PhotoShop CS3, but most PhotoShop versions will largely be the same with regard to this article.
In the last part, we looked at adding text to a document and using layer styles. In this part, we will look at using Filters. We can use the document we created in part two. We will create a new layer and choose the Custom Shape tool (U or left-click and hold the Rectangle tool to open up the group, then choose Custom Shape). This will allow us to create predefined vector shapes in our document. At the top you should see the Custom Shapes bar:

From here we can choose which custom shape to use with the drop-down menu. We will choose a leaf for this example. Once we have chosen, we can then place it on our canvas - whatever size we want. Because the custom shapes are vector, they will not distort, however big we make them. We place it on our canvas by clicking and holding the left mouse button and then dragging to size the custom shape. Once we let go, the shape will be added. To maintain the correct aspect ratio of the shape, we can hold down SHIFT whilst sizing.

When you are done placing the custom shape, don't worry if it looks untidy around the edges, this is just the border of the vector mask to allow us to modify it. If we are done with the vector, we can right-click the layer and choose to Rasterize it. Let's do that now. Once that's done, the border will be gone and it will look sharper:

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Notice that the shape will take on the color you have selected, so take that into consideration when working with custom shapes. However, we can easily change the color of it by doing either of the following:
- We can hold Ctrl and left-click the layer with the custom shape to make a selection of everything in that layer. Then we can get a paintbrush or the fill bucket and choose a new color, then paint or fill the layer with that color - only the selection will be affected.
- We can also double-click the layer to open its Layer Styles and then choose color overlay to change the color. Note: this method will over-ride all colors in the layer, even if we paint on the layer at a later time.

Neither of these methods are better than having your chosen color selected before you create the custom shape.

Once we have our custom shape rasterized, we are able to do what we want with it. In this example, we are going to apply a Wind filter to it. So with the shape layer selected, goto Filter > Stylize > Wind. We will choose Wind, From the Right. This doesn't do much, but if we repeat it (or press Ctrl+F) then we get more of an effect. We will redo the Wind filter, but From the Left this time. We will end up with somethign like this:

For this example, we will undo those Wind filters using the History panel, and we will apply a different filter. Goto Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Play with the settings to get an effect you like.

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This effect is very useful for creating the illusion of movement. Another nice effect to use is the Filter > Render > Lens Flare, which will give you four different types of lenses to choose from and also the brightness of the flare.

Next, we will choose the background and goto Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. We will create a spotlight effect from the lower-right corner, to the top-left. Now click on your custom shape layer and goto its Layer Styles. Apply a drop shadow to it, but make sure the direction is opposite to where your spotlight is coming from (uncheck Use Global Light) and move the angle to match the spotlight direction. Experiment with the settings, and we have something that looks like this:

You can also add a gradient to your custom shape to make it look like it catches the light a bit more, like this:

As I'm sure you have noticed, this tutorial leaves a lot up to you, but that is the great thing about PhotoShop - to really grasp what it can do, you have to do it yourself and play with it and experiment. PhotoShop can be a lot of fun to play around with and a lot of cool things are found by doing so.

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That is pretty much it for this introduction into PhotoShop. As you probably already know, PhotoShop has a lot to it - far far too much to cover in three tutorials. Look out for other tutorials to get you started with PhotoShop.

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