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• The Easy Guide to Creating the Orton Effect using Photoshop - UPDATED
  by Peter Hill

  The aim of this Guide is to provide easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions to achieving the Orton Effect without the necessity of bei…

  The aim of this Guide is to provide easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions to achieving the Orton Effect without the necessity of being a Photoshop guru. I still call myself “new to Photoshop” and I have found a lot of tutorials on this topic assume a much higher level of knowledge than I have and are not very intuitive. I have revised the Tutorial to show a shortcut to the 2 Blending Option steps, which I only found myself after posting the original tutorial (doh), but I have left the long way as well, as you may wish to play around with the default settings applied by the short way. To achieve the Orton Effect you will be creating Layers, but don’t worry if you haven’t done this before. I hadn’t. The method I am about to describe is the simplest I have found. It’s not my method, but the description is all mine. When I have more time (yeh, right) I will revise this tutorial to include screenshots of the various steps. But for now, you might like to print this Guide and have it next to you while you create your first Orton Effect. I use Photoshop CS2 v9. The method described below originally came from someone using Photoshop Elements, so you can see this is not advanced stuff. The steps described below assume almost zero knowledge of Layering, and ignore other adjustments you might be making to the image, for example Sharpening the image before you start work on it (recommended). Step 1 Choose your image. Any image will do, you are just learning at this stage, but if you have that favourite flower shot or portrait – cool. Step 2 Open Photoshop. Open the image you have selected to be your first amazing Orton Effect image. Feel the excitement. This is your Background Layer. Step 3 Look for the Layer toolbox on the right hand side of the Photoshop work area. There should be a rectangular box with a small eye icon, a tiny thumbnail version of your image, and the word Background in italics. Right-click the word Background and select Duplicate Layer. A small box should immediately appear in the middle of your screen. It is asking you to Name the Duplicate Layer. Name this Layer Focus and click Enter. (Note: It doesn’t really matter what you name it, but Focus will do for our current purpose.) Step 4 There should now be a new rectangular box immediately above the original, and called Focus. (If there isn’t, stop, curse quietly, then try Step 3 again.) Pause now and look at the tiny eye icon. You will see that it is now the Focus layer on your screen, so this is the “copy” you are working on. OK, moving on ….. Right-click the Focus rectangular box and select Duplicate Layer again. This time when the naming box appears just click Enter because we will use the default name for this Layer, being Focus copy. Step 5 OK, now we are going to blend the Focus copy. There are 2 ways to do this – the long way and the short way. I will show you the long way first, just in case you want to go back and play with it after you get familiar with the process. Long way – Right-click the Focus copy rectangular box and select Blending Options. This will open a new box with lots of options. Ignore them for now. In the top part of this box you will find a window showing the Blending Mode and the default setting of Normal with a pull-down menu (A downwards arrow). Open the menu (left-click) and select Screen. Click Enter to close the box. OR Short way – look at the window which shows your layers. See the drop down menu at the top left, showing Normal as the default? Scroll down the menu and select Screen. The Focus copy layer should now have a bit of a washed-out look to it as a result of selecting Screen as the Blending Mode. (I have found that if the Screen effect still leaves a fairly good image, the Orton Effect will be enhanced. Too washed out and the Effect is diminished.) Step 6 Right-click the Focus copy rectangular box again, only this time select Merge Down (it’s near the bottom of the menu). This will collapse the Focus copy layer onto the Focus layer. Step 7 Right-click the Focus rectangular box again and select Duplicate Layer again. Name this copy Blur. Click Enter to close the box. Step 8 Now, find and open the Filter menu on the Tool bar running across the top of your screen. Select Blur. Another menu should open. Select Gaussian Blur (don’t ask). A new window should open. You will see a Preview of the image with a default blur Radius setting of 15.9. You can play around with the radius later. For now, just click OK to close the window as we will accept the 15.9 (I have found 15.9 to be right for most images anyway). The blur you are to achieve with this step should be enough to discern the shapes without the detail. Step 9 – The Magic Happens! This is the fun part. We now make one more blending option. Again, here’s the long way and the short way. Long way – Right-click the Blur rectangular box and select Blending Options. As described in Step 5, this will open a new box with lots of options. Again, ignore them for now. In the top part of this box you will find a window showing the Blending Mode and the default setting of Normal with a pull-down menu (A downwards arrow). Open the menu (left-click) again and this time select Multiply. Click Enter to close the box. OR Short way – Click on the same drop down menu you used to create the Screen effect, only this time select Multiply. You should now be able to see the Orton Effect! Step 10 If you want to accept the result, right-click the Blur rectangular box one more time and this time select Flatten Image (it’s the last option on the menu). This basically collapses all the layers into one final image and is the last thing you do in Layering. You can now save the image as normal. Does it look something like this? If it looks too dark though, you can adjust the Opacity level with the sliding bar before flattening the image. Look for the tiny Opacity tool in the top right of the Layering toolbox. But if you find you need to go below 90% the Effect is significantly lost and maybe it wasn’t the right image. Another option is to adjust the Fill and leave the Opacity at 100%. Have fun! I am. Peter

• From Good to Great (hopefully) using Photoshop CS2 Basics
  by Nikki Trexel

  By Nikki Trexel I was in North Carolina’s Outer Banks for ten days, a summer paradise …

  By Nikki Trexel I was in North Carolina’s Outer Banks for ten days, a summer paradise for one Midwestern girl who’s never been to the ocean. Many photos were captured, such as A Sandy Stairway to Heaven, and the ocean was lapping at our ankles and The Shadows Ascend. But this, one of the first taken at the beach, immediately stuck out to me as having potential: And so you can compare them side by side, here’s the final product. / / The first thing I did when I opened the photo was crop a little extra space off the bottom and left-hand side. This gives the photo a more balanced composition. The sand shouldn’t be the first thing the eye lands on. I also rotated it one or two degrees counter-clockwise to even out the horizon line (Image>Rotate Canvas>Arbitrary). These are very important steps and I recommend doing them first. (And if I hadn’t been trying to keep up polite conversation with the person showing me around, I might have even gotten it right when I took the photo.) Then I had a play in Curves (Ctrl+M or Image>Adjustments>Curves). This is a very powerful tool which, used appropriately and subtly, can create more “pop” and intensity in a bland photo. It can take a while to get the hang of, but for me, the best results are often obtained by creating two or three “pins” and dragging the line so it creates a kind of subtle S-curve like this: / / Here’s roughly how Curves works: the line represents darker tones towards the bottom and left, and lighter ones towards the top and right. So, for example, if you drag the top part of the line down, it’ll make the highlights darker; and if you drag it upwards, your bright spots will be ever brighter. Be very careful, though, not to blow out any highlights or over-darken the dark spaces. It’s easy to get carried away with the Curves tool and make your photo look pretty ridiculous. Next, I used the Replace Color tool (Image>Adjustments>Replace Color) to make my chairs a little brighter without oversaturating the blue sky. Here, you just use the dropper to select which color you’d like to alter, and make sure the “Fuzziness” slider on the Replace Color window is increased as much as possible without starting to apply to stuff you don’t want it to. Here it’s simple because there is only one pink and one green area in my photo. All I did was “grab” each color with the dropper, and slightly increase the saturation. (It might be a bug in my version of Photoshop, but you might have to close out the window, then open it again to start working on a new color.) Again, this is something you have to get the hang of, but after a while it becomes second nature. I also cloned out one or two swimmers in the distant water. Not much more than a dot or two of cloning was necessary – they were only large enough to be spots in my lovely blue water. The last, and most important thing, I did with this image was – I guess it’s pretty obvious – give it a nice sky. I kind of liked the simplicity of the plain blue sky in the original, but I wanted the image to be special. I was lucky enough to have a similar photo of the clouds, taken on the same beach but on another day. I chose it because the size, depth and lighting were mostly correct already. I had to slightly alter the color to make it match the “feel” of the original photo. Here is my new sky in its primitive form. My original sky is also a very simple one to replace. The only thing sticking into the sky area is my duo of beach chairs. (If it had been a more complicated horizon, I would have probably opted for a smooth blue sky.) My chosen method for this simple replacement was simply to Clone the new sky overtop of the other old one. (There are more complex and useful ways utilizing Layers but there is really no need for that now. Plus, I don’t know how to use those ways.) This method won’t work every time, so you’ll need to size up your options to see how you’re going to create your masterpiece. If the sky to be replaced is very simple, with not a lot of complications like trees or people or other things in front of it, then you are golden. Lastly, I did a little bit of final tweaking to the entire image to make everything feel right. That included a bit of dodging and burning in my clouds, a slight saturation increase overall, and a couple of tiny clone jobs to get rid of a few blades of grass apparently growing out of the ocean (courtesy of the foreground of my new sky). You’ll have to work with this on your own photo and see what looks best. Every photo is different, and every path from good to great is totally unique. Here is my final product again, which took me a little less than a half-hour from start to finish. / Rhapsody in Blue Thanks so much for reading!

• WOW
  by laurynwood

  I’m only new and oh so impressed with this site. / I’m loving how easy it is to use, and how great the selling area of the site is. / I’ve …

  I’m only new and oh so impressed with this site. / I’m loving how easy it is to use, and how great the selling area of the site is. / I’ve been on DeviantArt for a year now, and as much as I love the chats and stuff there, when it comes to selling, RedBubble owns it. / And I love the groups, and the fact theres a Melbourne group!! I’m hoping to make lots of new friends! -Lauryn x My DeviantArt