Photoshop Premium Designers

In this tutorial, I will show you a rather useful technique I use in Photoshop to make perfect human selection, which requires the combination of channel mask and the quick selection tool available in Photoshop CS3.

I have received a number of emails lately in regards to this topic and I have decided to post this short tutorial with a step-by-step guide for beginners. Once you master this skill, you can apply it to pretty much every human image you want to selection/extract.

Meanwhile, if you have any tips/tricks about making selections, you’re more than welcome to share your experience with us, just drop a comment below :)

Although this is not a formal photo effect tutorial but rather a tip/trick, I have created a final image here:

OK let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need to the following stock image:

Girl

Step 1

Load the Girl stock image into Photoshop. We know the ultimate goal is to seperate the girl from the rest of the image, but how do we start. Firstly let’s take a look at the image:

1. The overall lighting is quite good and it doesn’t have a lot of colour variation.
2. This is a human portrait so that means taking out the hairs and making selection around it will be difficult.
3. You may think of using Pen Tool, but what happen if you’re just not that good at it??

After those thoughts above, it’s time to get down to business. To begin with, let’s take a look at the channels in the channel palatte and select the “Blue” channel as shown below:

The reason I chose the “Blue” channel here is because it provide the biggest contrast from the model to the background, comparing with the Red and Green channel.

Step 2

Now we’re are on the blue channel. The second thing we’re going to do is to increase the contrast as much as we can, while preserving the hair bits. To do this, we can make a duplication of the “Blue” Channel by right-click and choose “Duplicate channel”.

On the “Blue Copy” channel, go to Image > Adjustment > Brightness /Contrast and apply the following settings:

Then hit Ctrl + L and bring up the level adjustments tool, apply the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now we will have to use the power of the Quick Selection tool to select the light colour part of the girl’s body. To do this, simply grab the Quick Selection tool (W) from the tool box, set the brush size to 2px and tick “Auto-Enhance” option, make a selection of the white part as shown below:

Hint: make use the + and – quick selection tool available on the option bar for adjustments, don’t worry about the hair bits on the outside as they’re already in black colour.

When you finish the selection, simply fill it with black colour:

De-select the image when you’re done, if you see a white gap on the girl body, simply use a black brush to fill it.

Step 4

Now you will see around the girl’s body (which is in Black), there are some areas cover in dark grey colour. We must get rid of them in order to make our selection better. To do this, simply use the Quick Selection Tool to make a selection around the girl, then press Ctrl + Shift + I and inverse this selection. Grab the Eraser Tool to gently erase those dark grey bits off:

The reason we make the selection is that by doing so, we will not accidentally erase the parts on the girl’s body.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we have successfully completed a Channel Mask, which we

Step 5

Now we can go back to the layer palatte, go to select > load selection and choose the following:

and you will see now the model is selected:

Press Ctrl + J and make a duplication of the selection, and create a new layer in between and fill it with white colour, you will see we have now successfully make a pretty good selection for the girl model:

Step 6

Now we can of course fine tune the image a bit by using the Sharpen Filter. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen and apply the following settings:

Also add a series of adjustment layers on top of it will help to bring out extra light and contrast: (Go to Layer > Adjustment Layer)

For all adjustment layers, make sure to tick the “Use previous layer as clipping mask” option.

Black and White:

Levels

Curves

Hue and Saturation

and here is the effect so far:

Step 7

Now we have a perfect girl image, without any background and great to work on as a starting point. It’s time to use your imagination and creativity :) I simply use some custom brushsets from qbrushes.com and add some patterns in the background, adjusted the colour balance a bit.

That’s for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

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Other titles I thought of for this Photoshop fire tutorial were “Burning Down the House”, “The Roof Is On Fire”, and “Fire! Fire! Fire”, but then I realized how cliche that would be.I obtained my house photo from PhotoSpin.com (PhotoSpin #0780029).

First we’ll isolate the house by selecting it and putting it on it’s own layer [Ctrl + J]. Hide the background layer and open your Channels palette [Window > Channels].

Hold the [Ctrl] key and click on the Channel that has the most contrast. Press [Ctrl + Shift + I] toinverse the selection .

Click on the RGB channel to return to normal. Go back to your Layers Palette and create a new Solid Color Adjustment layer. Make the color white.

Go to [Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CW]. Then go to [Filter > Stylize > Wind].

Run the Wind Filter 1 or 2 more times by pressing [Ctrl + F]. Rotate the canvas back by going [Image > Rotate Canvas > 90° CCW].

Create a new Solid Color Adjustment layer and make the color a burnt orange-red, fire type of color. I used #AB3D07. Set the Layer Mode to Color Burn.

Duplicate the layer you applied the Wind Filter to [Ctrl + J] and hide one of the copied layers. Select the Smudge Tool [R]. Go to the Brushes Palette [Window > Brushes].

Under “Shape Dynamics”, drag the Size Jitter up; Angle Jitter up; Roundness Jitter up. Click on “Scattering” and alter the settings until you get something similar to this:

Now start Smudging the layer. You should get an effect similar to this:

Unhide the layer you hid earlier. Run a slight Gaussian Blur [Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur] of around 2-pixels.

Now go to [Filter > Liquify] or [Ctrl + Shift + X]. Select the Twirl Clockwise Tool and lower Brushe Pressure to around 40%. Now add a little bit of craziness to your image.

You may want to add a slight Motion Blur [Filter > Blur > Motion Blur] or a slight Gaussian Blur [Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur] if you still have some harsh lines.

Now create another Solid Color Adjustment layer below your “fire” layers. Make the color something similar to your fire color or darker. I used #522A04. Use the Brush Tool [B] with a Black foreground to paint away some of the areas of the house, so that certain areas show through. You might want to lower the Layer Opacity too.

That’s pretty much it. I know I might have gotten a little confusing with the Layers, so here’s a shot of my Layers Palette for reference.

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In this tutorial, I will show you the processes I used to design this awesome space dancer scene with Nebula Texture in Photoshop. The inspiration of the tutorial in fact came from the latest “Prince of Persia” game cover (and yes, I do love this game very much!)

Together we will be using image adjustment options, layer blending, masking and filter effect. I will also like to emphasise that it’s very importance to choose the right stock texture for your design, as they will contribute and improve your final effect dramatically.

This is an fairly easy tutorial and I hope you enjoy it! Have a try!

Here is the preview of the final result:

alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Dancer

Nebula Texture 1

Nebula Texture 2

Step 1

Load the dancer image into Photoshop and resize the image to 1200px * 1477px. The purpose of resizing image is to make it rough the same size as the textures we’re going to apply on it.

Make a duplication of the background layer, hit Ctrl + Alt + Shift + B and apply the Black and White adjustment Tool with following settings:

Name this duplicated layer “black and white”. Make another two duplications of this “black and white” layer and change the blending mode of those two duplicated to “Hard Light”.

You will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

Load the “Nebula texture 1″ image into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document. This will create a new layer and let’s name it “nebula texture 1″.

On this “nebula texture 1″ layer, go to Edit > Transform > Free Transform (or Ctrl + T), resize, rotate this layer as you wish, the ultimate goal is to find a position where the outer part of the nebula image is surrounding the model.

When you’re satisfied, right-click this nebula texture 1 layer and choose “create clipping mask”.

Here is the effect so far:

Now we can go on and add some image adjustments layers for the nebula layer, so as to make it more stand-out.

From bottom to top, we add the following image adjustment layers: (make sure you tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option for every one of them)

Color Balance

Levels

On this Levels adjustment layer, apply the following layer mask:

Brightness and Contrast

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 3

Load the “Nebula Texture 2″ into Photoshop, copy and paste it onto our dancer document and use the Free Transform Tool (Ctrl + T) to resize, rotate until it fits into the canvas.

Name this layer as “nebula texture 2″ and change its blending mode to “soft light” and you will have the following effect: (I hide the previous “nebula texture 1″ layer and its related adjustment layers)

To add a bit more contrast to this “Nebula Texture 2″ layer, we can add a Curve Adjustment layer (Make sure to tick the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option) with the following settings:

Here is the effect afterwards:

Step 4

Make all layers visible, you image should now look like this:

Now we can do some retouch of the image. I personally feel the colour contrast is a bit too much, so I add another Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer on top of all layers, with the following settings:

You will now have this effect:

You can of course try out other adjustment tools and see what result that bring you.

Step 5

Now we can add some motion into the image. To do this, flatten the image (I would suggest before you flatten the image, save a copy of the existing file, then the save the flattened image as a new psd file), duplicate the background layer once and go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur and apply the following options:

Change the blending mode of the duplicated layer to “Screen” and opacity to 80%, you will have the following final effect:

OK, that’s it for this tutorial! You can of course add some of your own texture or filter effect and see what the end results are! Remember to always keep your own creativity!

Here is an alternative version I have: (adjusted the colour balance and add two planets into it)

Hope you enjoy this tutorial, drop me a comment if you have any question, I will try my best to help you out.

Cheers and have a nice day!

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