Last September, I created an image for the International Compost Awareness Week poster contest. I planned to take a stock photo of a person cupping compost in their hands and having an actual tree (in small scale) growing from within the compost. I spent a lot of time looking for stock photos with trees on knocked-out backgrounds, but couldn’t find any I liked.

Instead, I decided on a stock image which seemed manageable to remove the background easily enough… Or so I thought at the time. My plan was to use the Pen Tool to create a Mask and remove it from the background. I realized quickly (well, actually not that quickly) that this particular item was way too complicated for the Pen Tool treatment.

Here's the Tree Stock Image I started with.

All I wanted was the tree; the sky and ground had to go, including the sky behind the tiny little branches. Now, because this was for a printed poster, the image is large, and has to be very detailed even when viewed close, so there wasn’t much room to fudge the details; I needed to remove the sky from behind each and every branch…

My first attempt was to use the Pen Tool and try to mask out the tree. But after 3 hours of work, this is all I had done…

Cellphone photo of Tree Mask using Pen Tool.

This was just ridiculous, at this rate I would have been masking out this tree for 6-7 hours and been less-than-satisfied with the final result; because of this, I gave up immediately on this method (scratch 3 hours from my life… but better to save the rest than continue on with a poor method).

(more…)

Today I’m going to walk you through the steps to create a StickyNote paper with realistic shadow using Photoshop CS3. This tutorial will work with any version of the Creative Suite too, you’re tools may be located slightly different however. I also have the Photoshop CS3 file for download at the end if you’d prefer to work on the original.

(more…)

On the way to my kid’s school, there is an abandoned building with a really nice graffiti piece across the front. Today I decided to take some high-res photos of the graf for you to download to use as texture or stock photo.

I started by taking all the images I had taken, and used Photoshop to photo-merge them into a single panorama; the graf art is very wide.

[TIP] To Photo Merge many files into one, with all the files open inside Photoshop, click File -> Automate -> Photomerge and choose the type of layout, then click “Add open files” … The box will populate with the filenames of all open documents -> Click OK

I have the finished piece available in 300 dpi JPG image at 11,629 x 1,707 pixels, and the rest available in 3 separate sections in 2,500 pix wide, 300 dpi PNG files with transparent backgrounds.

Get Graffiti Wide JPG (340) 3MB
Get Graf 01 PNG (295) 4MB	Get Graf 02 PNG (290) 3MB	Get Graf 03 PNG (275) 3MB

Check out Media Militia for a great Graffiti Brushes/Texture resource.

I recently searched for a Polaroid Image template to use for a project and found a tutorial for creating a collage of Polaroid images from one stock image. This gave me an idea on how to integrate their idea within my design.

I quickly lost interest in the tutorial as it was overly complicated and spread across 5 pages with little visual aid. Having lost interest in their way of creating this effect, but still wanting to do the effect myself, I set about figuring out the fastest way of achieving the same result.

Below is the final result of my tutorial; click through after the jump to learn the process and download the final PSD file if you prefer that way.

(more…)

(more…)

This weekend I was playing around; I wanted to try some new ideas floating around in my head.

My daughter’s favorite movie (right now) is The Parent Trap (remake) with Lindsay Lohan (debut film). It was actually pretty hard explaining to my kid that Hallie and Annie are actually the same actress… So what better way to convince her than to make a twin out of an only-child?

This was actually a pretty easy setup; I took the first picture of her, taped the area and had her go change clothes. We then snapped the second picture and later I laid the two images on top of one another, then using the layer mask and the paintbrush I carefully masked one picture into the other.

Pretty fun experience actually. But now my kid thinks Mary-Kate and Ashley are the same ha!