Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950′s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.

This technique works best with photos shot from a high-ish angle, and will give particularly good results with fairly regular subject matter such as buildings and careful landscaping. Also, England. I think it’s the combination of UK architecture and the very green grass there, but the country just seems to lend itself to being converted into tiny model villages.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed, shot from the train from York to Edinburgh:

York, sans scaffold-covered Minster:

A very mini Mini:

And, last but not least, something from the other side of the pond: the lovely Jersey City parking lot.

We’re not going for Great Art here, though, just something that’s a whole lot more artistic-looking than what you get by slapping “Smudge Stick” on a jpg and calling it a night. A sort of happy medium, if you will.

I’m going to show you how to turn this:

Into this:

(Click for big.)

FIRST THINGS FIRST

We need to prep our source material, in this case a slightly-tilted, slightly-washed-out image of the Brooklyn Bridge I snapped from a tour boat. (A perfect cliche image!)

1. Rotate and crop the image to improve composition and make it look a bit less like a casual snapshot. See Get it Straight for a how-to.

2. This photo’s still looking pretty blah and gray, which is no good when we’re aiming for something impressionistic. Add a Levels adjustment layer (or just hit ctrl+L if you aren’t too worried about permanence), and bring the black point up a bit.

3. Tweak the Curves tool (adjustment layer or ctrl+M) to increase the contrast, like so:

4. Bring the saturation up with Hue/Saturation (adjustment layer or ctrl+U):

(Normally, when restoring/retouching a photo, this would be way, way too high — but we’re not exactly going for realism here.)

5. This is the point of no return, so it’s a good idea to save before you begin this step. Select all layers and hit ctrl+E to flatten. If you don’t plan to print your painting, resize your photo to something appropriate for screen resolution — in this case, I’m working at 640×448. Your mileage may vary.

TIME TO START PAINTING

The real key to this effect is the Art History Brush. It allows you to choose a particular step from the history of your image, select a brush and ‘paint’ with your image as a source for both colors and contours.

6. On the History palette, click the box next to the most recent step to set it as the brush source.

7. Choose a brush. Feel free to experiment — the options are virtually endless, and different brush settings can produce anything from soft watercolor effects to wildly colorful impressionistic results. In this case, we’re not going for anything particularly wild, but adding a texture and a tiny bit of hue/saturation/brightness jitter (the Texture and Color Dynamics tabs of the Brushes palette, respectively) helps add realism.

In addition to the approximately eight billion options on the Brushes palette, the Art History Brush asks you to choose a style: Tight Short, Medium and Long tend to be the most useful, but the others can be interesting on occasion. Tight Curl results in something akin to painting with Cheerios.

It’s generally best to start with a reasonably large, loose brush set to Tight Long or Tight Medium, paint in the rough shapes of the image, then go back and add the detail with a smaller brush. Before you begin painting, drop the opacity down a bit to get a more layered effect — I usually set it around 70% or so.

8. Choose a big, fat textury brush and paint away! Just drag loosely around the image — Photoshop will trace contours for you. Paint until you’ve covered the entire image and no photo shows through.

It’s okay if it looks like a big smudge at this point. Since the Art History Brush is still drawing from the history state you selected earlier, you haven’t lost any source information by starting with a large brush.

9. Drop the brush size way down, to around 15 or so, and paint over the areas where you want more detail. For a softer effect, lower the opacity a bit.

10. Choose an even smaller brush (10ish), lower the opacity to around 40% and change the style to either Tight Short or Medium. Paint in the areas where you want even finer detail.

FINISHING TOUCHES

11. Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer to give the image a blue cast.

Create a custom gradient by clicking on the color bar in the dialog box (A). Click the small box with an arrow at the bottom left of the gradient (B). Click to change the color (C), then choose 010006 for the hex code (D). Repeat with 84a7ce for the middle box (if there isn’t already one there, click underneat the bottom of the gradient and Photoshop will create one) and f7e9cf for the box on the right. The final gradient should look like this:

12. To add to the natural media illusion, give the painting some texture. The best choice for this is a full-size image you scanned yourself from an actual piece of canvas or textured paper — nothing computer-generated quite approaches the realism that provides. But if you want to stay well within our “okay” standard, you can use one of the patterns built into Photoshop.

Choose “Pattern Fill” from the adjustment layer menu.

Load the “Artist Surfaces” preset (A), then select the preset called “Canvas” (B). Click ok, then change the layer blend mode to Soft Light.

FINAL RESULTS

That’s it! You’re done! Now go put on some black clothes and drink a chai latte. Well, maybe one from a mix. Save the fancy drinks for your real paintings.

He’s sort of my large, square mascot. Expect him to make the occasional appearance in future tutorials.

This particular graphic came about while experimenting with mosaic effects. Aside from the photo of Hector, everything’s Photoshop-generated, and this file’s rapidly approaching 30 layers. I even managed to use several filters that normally fall well within the “Tacky Awful Effects” category: Patchwork, Clouds and Motion Blur. Lesson of the day: all in moderation, all in moderation.

After a fair amount of experimentation, it turns out it’s not that hard to do — but it does take a little tweaking. The final results are surprisingly versatile.

In this tutorial, we’re going to make the this header for a fictitious sewing blog:

GET THE FILES

To follow along, you’re going to need this brush and this layer style. (Right click and choose “Save Link As…”/”Save Target As…” to download.) You can also grab them both together as a 4kb zip file here.

START SEWING

1. Create a new file, 900×500. Fill the background with black.

2. Add the text (T) you want to make look embroidered. Use a really thin font for this — the stitch effect traces the outsides of the letters, and if you use something too bold you’re only going to get embroidered outlines. I’m working with Nobel Light. Make sure there’s enough space between your letters to avoid overlapping piles of thread.

3. Click the text warp button on the Options bar.

Choose “Arc” from the drop-down menu and set the Bend slider to about 19.

(You can skip this and the following step if you just want straight letters.)

4. Hit Ctrl+T, rotate the text a bit and hit enter.

5. With the type layer selected, choose Layer > Type > Create Work Path.

You have now created a path based on the outlines of the text.

6. Select the brush tool and load the brush file you downloaded. Change the size to 8pt or so. Make sure your foreground color is the same as your text color.

7. Create a new layer. (Shift+Ctrl+N)

8. Choose the pen tool (P), then right-click on the image and choose “Stroke Path…”.

Make sure “Brush” is selected and the “Simulate Pressure” box is checked.

Click OK. Yay, fuzzy text!

9. Load the layer style you downloaded, and apply it to the stroke layer (not the type layer).

Select the text layer underneath and make the font color a little lighter.

And there you have it. Shiny embroidered text:

10. Find a home for your fine sewing work, like this blog template:

Keep in mind that the brush preset also works as, well, a brush, and you can also use it to draw embroidered-looking things on its own — for instance, the RSS feed icon in the example. Just be sure to drop the layer style on top for shine.

Happy stitching!

So, I was on a tour boat. Boats + handheld cameras… not an ideal combination:

We need to straighten things out a bit.

1. Grab the Measure Tool (I).

Draw a line along the image’s horizon, like so:

2. Choose Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary…

The rotation value will already be filled in based on the measure tool — all you need to do is click ok, and your image will be nice and straight!

3. Crop (C) the picture to get rid of the rotated edges and improve the composition a bit.

That’s all there is to it! (Well, this picture still needs color correction, but that’s another tutorial…)

So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:

My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.

Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.