Tutorial - Special Effects with PSE

This is tutorial for yesterday's post. I used PSE6, a photo, and a texture. For this tutorial, I used a digital paper by Jessica Sprague.

1) Open your picture.


2) Make your photo black and white.
On the layers pallete on the bottom right side of the window, you will see a half-white/half-back circle. Click it and choose "Threshold...". You will see a histogram and a little white arrow at the bottom. Move it to the right or left until you are happy with what you see. Click OK.



3) Clean your image (optional step)
Do you see all these white bits in the background? I am going to get rid of them:
In the layers pallete, select the Threshould layer, right click on it and select "Merge down".
Set the background colour to black. (If your background is mostly white, set the foreground colour to white.) Select the paintbrush tool
paint all the undesired bits.


4) Open your texture file.

5)Copy texture file into your picture:
See the little icon with the texture file in the layers pallete? Drag it to your picture.
This should cover your picture completely, if it doesn't move it or resize it until it does.


6)The final step
In the layers pallete, make sure that the texture layer is selected. See the little drop down menu in the layers pallete, saying "Normal". Change it to "Screen" That's it. Done!


The final final picture:



OK, I made another change. I didn't like the texture on the eyes, and lips, so I painted these bits dark red in the texture layer.

About the picture: It works better with photos where the background is reasonably plain and where there is a good contrast between the subject and the background. Dark background will turn into a final picture with mostly texture. A light coloured background will make a picture like the ones I posted yesterday.

About the texture: Can be a photo or a digital paper. Because the texture is going to replace the darkest parts of the picture, it works better is the texture is darkish.