Photoshop & Faking- Tutorials

Panel 1:

I aquired this grill from Mayang's a long time ago, thought it would eventually come in handy. What I've done is duplicated the layer twice and then used the free transform tool in perspective mode to alter the perspective. I used the guide lines I created when I was hashing out the composition.

Panel 2, 3, & 4:

Throughout these panels you can see the build up of light and shadows. In this case I'm using multiply and overlay layers for my shadows. I start building the light rays using vector shapes to guide me. The first rays of light are constructed using the screen blending mode on the layers palette. In the plays I really want the lighting to take hold I create a new layer and paint in white again with my layer mode set to overlay. The lines I've used aid the perspective of the composition. They also set up the edges of the fictional or imagined 'box' that she's in.

Panel 5:

Here is where I start to paint in the hair. I want very sharp vibrant and stylistic hair. I've basically selected white and I've also sampled some of the highlight colours to clash against the dark background and set my brush to 3 with a hardness of 100%. I can get away with doing this with the wacom tablet as I can vary the strength of my brush strokes. The scene depicts a moment of intense action so I go for very dynamic brush strokes depicting movement. You can also see the white line I've put outlining the knee. It's not really based on realism, I actually did this to balance the image. It's actually a really nice anchor point, and without it your eye tends to drift to the right of the composition due to the nature of the image. Believe it or not, but I feel that line is critical to the overall success of the image and actually sat in PS for about 30 minutes with 2 versions of the picture (one with that line and one without it) contemplating which image was more successful. This image is full of stylistic choices that have absolutely nothing to do with realism. But realism isn't the intent here, it's a movie poster design.

Panel 6, 7, 8, & 9:

This just shows the various states of the BS/HS combo. This was a rather tricky image to work with, if you look at the sources used you'll see why. That HS is not the typical lighting for any hardcore BS sets. I had to find something that would 'work' and is doable and then transform it into a unified image. Since I had to drastically alter the levels, it messed around a lot with my texture and colour seperations. I had to actually 'refinish' the entire fake twice. Once after the initial fake was created (as seen in panel 6) and then once again after I altered the levels to fit the image I wanted to make which required a low saturation and high contrast. I carefully worked every surface of the skin texture over with the smudge tool set to around 25% strength...I did this twice. As you can see, I also changed the colour of the purple stockings to fit the mood of the image. That was as simple as one brown multiply layer and one brown overlay layer at varied opacities. In Panel 9 you can see where I started to lay in the perpective of the text to make the 3D appearance. Did I actually block out all the letters into fully realized 3D objects? Absolutely not. I just made sure all my ends connected to the edges of the text, and the rest of the junk you see that makes no sense is what gets covered up by the text once I lay it in. This was done using the pen tool.

Panel 10:

This is the final image, the text is overlayed on top and set to the same perspective as the box to create that bitchin' composition. Free transform tool was used to do this after rasterizing the text (turning it into non vector shapes).