Jeff St John 
ePhotoPros Staff
The OC
Forum Fanatic
Posts:535
 | | 07/14/2008 8:45 PM |
| OK, so I just watched Lord Of The Rings for the umpteenth time. But what actually inspired to create this image was seeing one of those iPod ads in which there is a silhouette of a man or a woman and some shapes and swirling patterns behind them. I just took this idea in a different direction.
- First thing I did was duplicate the blue channel in Channels to give me a new alpha channel. I then used Levels to darken the inside of the girl and lighten the outside. Next I painted in the rest of the girl's silhouette with black and inverted the entire alpha channel (since I wanted her to be the selection, I needed her to be all white).
- On a new layer, I filled the shape of the girl with white.
- Next, I added a new layer under the white shape layer, selected a blue and a gray for my foreground/background colors, rendered some clouds and added a slight gaussian blur to them. I then duplicated this layer, set the blend mode to Multiply and added a layer mask. On the layer mask I used a soft round brush with black as my foreground color to paint away the middle of the dark layer, creating a sort of vignette effect. To intensify the effect, I duplicated the dark layer with the mask one more time and lowered the opacity a bit. I then merged all the clouds layers. This would be my new background.
- On a new layer under the white silhouette of the girl, I used a small, soft round brush with some tweaked brush settings. I increased the spacing, checked the size jitter box, enabled scattering for both axes and turned on opacity jitter as well. Then I painted "fairy dust" around and behind the white silhouette.
- Next, I used the custom shape tool set to shape layers, and dragged out a Photoshop custom shape. I then free transformed the shape using the Perspective setting and free transform. Next, holding ALT and Shift, (that would be Option and Shift on a Mac) I dragged out a copy of the shape using the move tool. I then went under Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal to mirror the new shape. Finally I mergerd the two "wings" lowered the opacity, and added an outside glow layerstyle using white as the glow color.
- I then duplicated the wings layer and transformed the duplicated shape so that it was slightly offset from the other wings layer. I dragged this new wings layer under the original wings layer, blurred it slightly, got rid of the glow layerstyle and lowered the opacity.
- With the remaining time I had left, I added some more "fairy dust" to the wings on a new layer and lowered the opacity to taste.
Stay tuned next week when I finish up the fantasy effect.
jefe
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