Flower Manipulation
In this tutorial killspan shows you how he created the following signature.
Before starting this tutorial: this is an advanced tutorial and not every step is explained into detail, if you have a hard time following this tutorial I suggest you to try some easier tutorials first!
Creating the background
Start off making an canvas with your preffered size.I like to keep most of my sigs at a traditional size,but for manips, you can use diff sizes as long as it works with your photo .
Then the 1st thing I do is I got to filter>render>clouds. Make sure your background and foreground colors are black and white.
Adding your render
Now we are going to go photo searchin.Try to find a photo that you like, something that you know will work well in a sig. That could be just about everything, from cars to nature, all the way to city streets.
I love to work with pictures of flowers in my manipulations, I found the following stock of 2 flowers and decided to use it:
Add the stock on a new layer in your signature. Now its time to seperate the flowers from the background, to do this you can use various techniques. Some are easier and faster, other techniques give a better result.
I used the laso tool to cut out a circle around the flowers, this is not really accurate, but I will heavily alter the render anyway so it doesn’t really matter. Now after you lasoed it go to select>feather and make sure it’s set to 20px and then you hit ok. This will smoothen out the selection and blur the sides of your render.
Brushing
Now I’m going to brush around my render to colour the black and white clouds. Try using colors that agree with your render.I want to make this colorful,so I’m using some greens,yellows and oranges to make the work standout.
I started brushing with the brush tool using green colors and a rust and grunge brush (do a google search to download some if you don’t have any). Then on different layers I brushed using the yellow, orange and red colors and using various different brushes.
I changed the blending mode on all of these layers to soft light, so one color doesn’t overpower the other ones.
Some adjustments
Its beginning to look better, but lets enhance our signature at this point a bit.
Use various adjustment layers to enhance your signature at this point. I used:
- Image > adjustments > brightness and contrast
- Image > adjustments > color balance
- Image > adjustments > photo filter
Adding effects to your signature
Using various abstract brushes and the brush+smudge tool I created light radiating off the flowers. This takes some practice to make it look good!
More adjustments
Do some more color balance layers and brightness and contrast then keep on brushing with the colors you want to build the signature up.
In this step I used various different abstract and grunge brushes to enhance the background. I also used the pen tool to draw some random fuzzy lines.
Sharpen the center of your signature a bit and blur the sides using the sharpen+blur tools!
Text
For the text I used a simpel font (something like arial or verdana is fine) and picked a color that suited the rest of my signature, but was still easy to read on the background. To add some nice effects to the text I duplicated my text layer 2 times and added some blur effect on these 2 layers.
Then I moved one of the duplicated above my text, and the other one below my unblurred text.
Border
A border is easy create. Create a new layer and press CTRL+A to make a complete selection of the canvas, now go to edit>stroke to create a border.
I created my border in the following way:
- new layer > 3px stroke, inside, black
- new layer > 2px stroke, inside, white
- new layer > 1px stroke, inside, black
Line effects
I also added some lines using the pen tool (1px, hard brush) and a white color (hold shift to make a straight line) and set the blending mode of the layers with lines on it to overlay.
Here is my finalt result after adding a text, border and the line effects:
Full credits go to Killspan for making this great signature, tutorial for sigtutorials.com
That is my result. Could be bigger but I cropped a lot.
Here’s my outcome:
[IMG]http://i292.photobucket.com/albums/mm32/BlackKnight0739/Signatures/FlowerSig2.jpg[/IMG]
Apparently pasting BBCode isn’t the right way to do it, so here’s my outcome now:
My outcome
Smudging and the brushes dont work XO
My second outcome
Looking good, maybe add some more effects to the leafes
good tutorial
i tried really hard to smudge like you did but it didn’t turn out as I wanted
anyway here is my outcome:
For beginners that are looking to learn new and advanced tricks this was poorly explained.. those who were able to do this were already experienced with photoshop, I suggest explaining a little more in detail if thinking about publishing tutorials for others to learn. I gave up through layering and coloring.
it looks easy im gonna try it mabey it will work for me
Step 5) 6) is bad explained , I really couldnt get the result, even a similar one it was very hard. Please explain more
I did not create this tutorial, but I have rewritten the tutorial. Please let me know if it is easier to understand now
This tutorial is good, but a little more detail about colour balance layers [Step 4] and elaboration on Steps 5 and 6 would be so helpful and awesome!
Here are my 2 outcomes:
I understand the brightness and contrast layer part, and raising it 5-10 pts, but I don’t understand how that creates light using brushwork. Do you create a blank layer underneath the contrast layer and start making brushstrokes?
Otherwise, the tutorial is extremely well done! Thank you, Killspan!
The outcome is beautiful, BUT please can someone make a better tutorial. This one was not explained well at all.
5) Go to layer>new>adjusments layer>brightness and contrast.Raise the contrast up 5-10Using the abstract brushes I created light radiating off the flowers.
What the hell that means??
Its actually 2 steps
1) add a brightness and contrast layer and adjust the contrast
2) Load some abstract brushes and create light with it on your signature
pretty poor for this site, there normally explained a lot better, i gave up half way through !!
I really like this tutorial. Came out pretty nice. Thanks.
Great Tut! My outcome:
