Using various photoshop techniques. 8-17-09

This week we'll look at some of the techniques used in photoshop to achieve great looking graphics. We'll start by making this background, which I'll post for download on the homepage, then move into making the earth's various shadows and highlights as well as the explosion and the resulting fragments that come out of it including the motion they appear to have.

Cool photoshop backgrounds

Ok let's start by making our photoshop background. Start out with new file set to your desired width and height. You can use anything you'd like. Create three layers. Fill the top one with an angular gradient like shown on the right above. Set this layer to a blending mode of linear light at 80% opacity. Fill the first layer with black. You should now have something that looks like the picture to the right. The middle layer is where it gets a bit complicated. It really depends on the effect you're trying to create. I wanted a fire / explosion theme background so I used various fire colors and various brush hardnesses and sizes until I got the effect I wanted. There's no set way to achieve the exact same thing twice. You'll just have to play around with it until you get the effect you're looking for. And if all else fails you can download a lower resolution copy of mine on my homepage under the photoshop background downloads section.

When you're finished you should get something that looks like theperfect setting for your earth explosion.

Ok let's get this earth in there. To do that look for a picture of the earth that looks like what you want to use. Open it in photoshop and make a selection around it with the elliptical marquee tool and press CMD j. This will put it on it's own layer with no background. Duplicate this again, CMD j. One more time. Ok, you should have three earth layers. On the first layer (the lowest one), you need to set an outer glow. Use my settings as shown below.

photoshop innerglow

The middle earth layer should be filled in with a gradient. I used #f2fcff and #50788f as my color stops as shown below. Then apply an inner glow with the settings shown below.

photoshop gradient

photoshop inner glow

On the top earth layer we need to erase with a very large, very soft eraser brush the top right portion just a bit to let the inner glow show through a bit. Then with a similarly soft and large paint brush we need to grab a deep purple color and paint the bottom left to give some excess shadow. Then with the lasso tool we need to cut a big chunk out of the earth by holding alt and clicking various jagged points. With the selection we need to cut it and paste it on a separate layer to work on later.

Now let's add our fire explosion layers. This is just painting with the paint brush and setting the blend modes. First we want a nice bright red, set this blend mode to hard light. After you have the basic brush shapes in there use the smudge tool to work the force impression. Next we used a deeper red and set the blend mode to hard light again with an opacity of 60%. Keep using the smudge tool in conjunction with the paint brush. Next we used a yellow, again hard light 60%. Then we used white with a normal blend mode 100% opacity.

To explode out the earth just use your lasso tool to make jagged pieces and move them this way and that with the selection tool. You can rotate, size, and distort them for added effect. The real important part here is the hue saturation adjustment layer which colorize selected. Select the hue and saturation you're looking for and you're all set. To make sure this only effects your shattered earth pieces mask the adjustment layer to the earth pieces layer by making sure the adjustment layer sits right on top of the earth pieces layer and alt click the line in the layers palette that separates the two layers.

With that there is only more more step. Add a layer in between the angle gradient layer and the random brush strokes you did to create the fire effect on your background. Set the blend mode to screen and get your paint brush with a rather soft edge and small enough to paint a dot behind each of the shattered earth pieces and not be seen. After you paint your white dots, use your smudge tool to drag the white dots to give the ellusion that the objects are moving.

And there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this project and I hope you learned a little more about using photoshop.