Sparkly Wallpaper Tutorial
I was asked to make a tutorial for the following wallpaper:
I made it in PS CS, however with the exception of the exact colouring the techniques are transferable.
1. I started off with a black background and arranged the images of Fernando on it in the desired locations. In order to work out approximately where the blending would occur I lowered the opacity of the top image before increasing it again once I was happy.
2. I like to use a layer mask to hide the parts of the image that I don't want on display because unlike with erasing an image if you change your mind at a later date about what you want visible/invisible you can easily repaint the relevant area of the mask. I don't tend to have the patience to cut people out of images properly but a good way I've found to do hair ends is to use black on the background that you want erasing, and white on the person that you wish to leave in the image and then do the ends of the hair in shades of gray. Other people probably have much better methods.. Once I'd done that I sharpened, smoothed and filtered the bases as required and then duplicated them and set various layers to screen or soft light. I think I also changed the levels and colour balances a little to try and make the images more similar in appearance.
3. At this stage you could merge your images together. I opted not to. I then applied a colour balance and a selective colouring adjustment layer to change the colour of the red on the lefthand picture of Fernando.
4. I pasted this texture by The Butterfly into a new layer behind all of the images of Fernando and set it to screen, opacity 14.
5. I started to apply lots and lots of different masking and texture brushes, using a different layer for each new brush. As the background I'm using is black I used white and light grey brushes and I set the majority of them on this way to soft light as I thought it looked better, but it's perfectly fine to leave them as normal. I also played around with the opacities of the different layers. Adding the brushes took me hours and hours to do so having patience is required. Also, I had to go back and remove brushes as I added new ones that I liked and which made some of the ones I had already got on there look odd. Most of the brushes came from The Magic Box which has sadly closed, and some of them may have come from Hybrid Genesis.
I arranged the brushes at different places throughout the Fernando layers. Some of them went behind both of the pictures.
6. Some of them went above the left hand picture but beneath the right hand image.
7. The rest of the masking and texture brushes were added above both pictures of Fernando.
8. Next I added various sparkly/star brushes as new layers. Again I used either white or light grey and this time the layers were set to screen. The circles that I added were set to soft light. The brushes that I used came from The Magic Box and Hybrid Genesis.
9. To add the text I create a new layer and added a texture brush type thing and left it set on normal. I then added other brushes set to soft light and the text. I applied outer glows set to darken to the text and a couple of the brushes. I also duplicated and/or lowered the opacities of some of the text layers to get them to look different. Some of the brush layers also had masks applied to them.
10. I added a new texture below all of the brush layers and used a mask to hide all of the bits I didn't want on the wallpaper.
11. Then it was just a case of adding the colouring I desired. I added this gradient on overlay with an opacity of 14. I also gave it a layer mask. Next I added this gradient on colour burn, 25.
12. I felt that the colouring was too yellow so I added a colour balance adjustment layer with the settings:
-20 -11 +4
13. Next I added a selective colouring adjustment layer with the settings:
Reds: -74 0 53 0
Yellows: 100 0 -100 0
Greens: 100 0 -100 0
Cyans: 100 0 -100 0
Blues: 23 2 12 0
Whites: 31 0 0 0
Neutrals: 16 0 3 0
14. I added a new layer and filled it with the colour #99DDF6 and set it to Soft Light opacity 10. I added another new layer and filled it with the colour #FFAEE2 and set the layer to soft light, opacity 15. The final step was to added a brightness and contrast adjustment layer and play around with that until I was happy with the result.