"Not my daughter, you b****!" ~Mrs. Weasley in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
{best line from the movie, hands down}
Well, if you're looking for a fun, new tutorial, then prepare to work some mischief! This is my first tutorial for photo manipulation especially for this blog, so here we go!
{swish and *flick*!}
For this tutorial, I used Paint Shop Pro, but really any tutorial like this can be used w/ any program {like the regular Photoshop}. The things I'll show you might have different names or might be in slightly different areas, but all these kinds of programs should have the same capabilities.
So I opened the original {my Deathly Hallows 2 premiere getup!!} and immediately used one of my favorite commands, "brightness and contrast" it brings out the colors quite nicely:
So it looks a lil' like this:
I usually play with the numbers depending on the original lighting, and so should you for your project. But a good first try should be -10 brightness and +10 or 20 contrast.
Next, add some textures! They can be found just about anywhere, but I get my kicks on http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/textures/. Most people post them primarily for free use, but each artist has their own rules and generally all of them want credit if you use them publicly. Like for this tutorial, or if you post a piece online, you don't want to plagorize!
So here's the ones I'm using for this tutorial:
 |
| http://ericamarieart.deviantart.com/ |
 |
| http://night-fate-stock.deviantart.com/gallery/28174591#/d2s1ccw |
I tried finding some that would fit the "vision" if you will of what I want to see when it's finished; since I'm sporting Gryfindor colors, I wanted the tones and hues to be on the red/orange side and I picked things that would do that for me. If you were doing Slytherein, you would want something that is sort of already green/dark green/black.
So I pasted each one into the project as seperate layers. You'll notice that they're all seperate for a reason; you can change each one seperately or delete one that you don't like. It's the breathing air of photomanipulators everywhere. You just go to Edit-->paste-->paste as new layer and it should do the work for you. I rename mine so I know which ones I'm dealing with. Make sure you change the sizes of the textures so it covers the whole space of the picture (some will be really big or small).
The next part is fun:
They won't start off looking like this, but next to the layers, there is the word, Normal by each of the layers. If you click on that and scroll through the different options, you can see it does really cool things to the layers, so you can see right through them to the picture, which you want. Here for example, I've got both of them on Hard Light and the top reddish layer on 68%. Like I said, you're gonna have to play around with them because each picture or texture doesn't lead to a cookie-cutter result. That's the mischief part!
You can tell that part of the texture is covering important things like--my face!
On each layer, you'll want to lightly and gently erase so you don't loose your texture's effect but you can still see the vitals.
As you can see, I fiddled w/ the layers and decided the reddish layer would be on Overlay at 84% and the tan swirled one on Hard Light at 70%. I used a relatively large eraser, but fiddled with the most important parts: Opacity and Hardness. Opacity will still erase but it won't be bold, if it's only 32% visible; it compliments the magical sense that I want, sort of smokey and awesome. The 17% Hardness will make the edges of the eraser very fuzzy. If you mess around with it, you'll know what I mean.
And you can't have a wand without MAGICAL SPARKLES! So we'll top off this project with some different colored sparkles.
For this part, I used free and downloadable brushes. It's something I'm still experimenting with, but think of this like those stamp markers from kindergarten; instead of drawing the sparkles you can use the brushes to "stamp" them there.
Again, brushes are like textures; there are a lot out there, but give the artists credit! It's beyond me how they create 'em in the first place, so they're nice enough as it is to let us use them. You can find brushes that work specifically for your program here: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/applications/
The brushes I used were a mix from this package:
If you've never used brushes, you just have to install them into your program. For Paint Shop Pro, I just go File-->Import-->Custom Brush and then I just open the brush files and it's done! When you select your regular paint brush, you can select from the drop-down menu the specific brush you want.
Now I created a whole new layer. It's different for every program, but usually you can right click a layer and select "create new layer"--something to that effect.
When you've chosen your poison so to speak, you can select the colors you want and start stampin'! I usually go dark to light, and for this I stamped some red, then orange, yellow and white, mostly white. It'll look a bit like this!
For sparkles, you keep them on the top layer and on Normal, 100% Opacity. It's how we do.
And thaaaaat's it! To save the project, you simply right click one of the layers and Merge (Flatten) your image. It makes the file not so big. If you were to save it and work on it later, you wouldn't flatten the image, but save it as a photoshop image, not jpeg. Once they're flattened, they can't be pulled apart again!
{ Mischief Managed! }
