I’m often asked how I achieve some of the effects that I achieve in some of my photos. Some of these effects are done using various plugins for Photoshop. Some folks have the misconception that you just turn a pluggin on and it automatically produces a finished altered image. The fact is that you still need to work with the effect to produce your vision, or interpretation, of the subject. In this tip I’m using Fractalious from Redfield Plugins. The image below contains several layers, layer masks, and layer opacity changes. The Background layer is untouched as we never work on that layer in order to preserve the original image. A background copy was made by using duplicate layer. On this layer we applied the first application of fractalious. See the layers pallet below to follow the layers and adjustments. After getting the effect that we desired, we did and adjustment layer and adjusted the saturation to the level that we felt worked well. We then created another layer (background copy 2) on this layer we applied a second and totally different fractalious effect. Once the effect was in place, we lowered the fill of this layer to allow a bit of the underlying effect to show through. At this point we liked the background of the image but was not thrilled with the rope and wooden block. We created a layer mask and used a soft brush with varying shades of black to mask out the rope and block fractalious effect on this layer and let more of the first fractalious effect show through. You can see on the layer pallet image where we painted in the mask. The darker the paint, the more it allows the underlying layer to show through. This is a powerful tool and can be used in many ways. I will discuss layer masks in the near future.
This is the Photosop layer pallet for the above image. Note the fill change mentioned, and the layer mask on the Bachground copy 2 layer.
I hope that this tricks and Tips proves useful to those who are just getting their feet wet in image manipulation. I say go for it, you’ll have a blast. Beware though that it can become quite addicting. Please stop by again, and feel free to leave a comment.
Dave
Nice work flow Dave, Great tips for the plug-in.