Today I would like to take this golden opportunity to share my experience in using photoshop for my wallpaper which is based on the theme of tanabata festival. If you wished to produce or create something creative and nice wallpaper, you can view all my post as I will tell you all in details on how I create my wallpaper^^.
First of all, I will select some nice images from the internet..The followings are my sources for my wallpaper.
These are the photos or images that I used for my ewallpaper. With the aid of all these nice images, I can start my progress in the assignment of creating the wallpaper.
Secondly, I went to the File tab and select New and then set the size of the wallpaper according to the size given,in this case was a4 size.
1) This was the first step:
2) Next, I changed the preset of the file from Custom to International paper and interchaged the size for the height and the width due to I want to create my wallpaper in horizontal mode. I also made some changes on the resolution.
3) As I had mentioned earlier, I changed the width to become 297mm whereas the height to be 210mm and the resolution I changed it to 72 from 300 pixels/inch.
After the settings of the file was done and the selection of images had been made, I was able to conduct my work properly.
1)I used the image of starry sky as my background:
3) I deleted the original background layer.
4) I used the first image of my source file in the photoshop. I made a full selection(by pressing control+a) on that picture as shown below:
5) Next, I pasted the image selected on my wallpaper artboard.
6)Then, I clicked on the Edit tab and select the Free transform option:
7) After I was satisfied with the transformation, I clicked ok to apply the transformation of image.
Can you see the effect after applying the free transform option?It was very obvious right?
9) While I entered the layer mask mode, I used the brush tool to create the 'effect of disappearing'. The brush would act as an eraser when I was applying the foreground color for the brush tool, however, it would reappearred while I applied the background color for the brush tool.
10) I used this mask to create the effect of disappearing all the unwanted background for the selected image so that it only left with the pink and yellow tanzaku only:
11) Then I needed to crop the paper cranes to make the wallpaper more interesting. I used the quick selection tool and magic wand tool to do the selection precisely. Since the image was rather big, I decided to used a portion of the image only.
12) After made the selection I copied it and pasted on the wallpaper page that I created:
13) Once again, I needed to do the free transformation to enlarge the image to fit the size of my wallpaper:
14) This the effect that I wanted for my wallpaper.However the feeling was not so good so I decided to duplicate one more layer and played with the opacity to make the wallpaper looked better:
15) This looked pretty much better for me, so I decided to keep this setting. Then, I proceeded with other images. The next image I used was the last source file that I posted since beginning. I tried my best in selecting the Orihime and Hikoboshi by using quick selection tool. I also used the magic want tool to select those portion which were indeed harder to be selected.
16) However, I noticed the selection was not perfect enough so I apllied the quick mask technique. I made the selection which I chosen as my selection for my mask.
17) Then, I refined this mask to make it looked smoother and nicer.
18) I zoomed in using zoom tool and continued refined the mask.
19) The refining for the mask was still kept on repeating until a smooth and nice selection done:
20) Finally the selection was perfectly done so I needed to quit the quick mask to enable the selection parts to be copied.
21) Before I pasted on the the wallpaper layer, I modified the color of the picture of Orihime and Hikoboshi by adjusting the hue and saturations.
22) I pasted on the wallpaper psd file that I had created.
23) However it was not clearly, so I rearranged the order of the layers.
24) It was still not clearly, so I modified once again the arrangement of the layer.Then I applied free transformation for the orihime and hikoboshi layer:
25) Then, I made selection again for another source of image file.
26) Once again, I used magic wand tool for the selection of the above picture:
27) I applied the technique of quick mask again for the selection of this pretty girl.
The final perfect selection done!
28) Next, I pasted the selected image to the wallpaper psd file.
29) Once again, the image needed to be edited so that it would not be too dominant in the wallpaper.
30) I would also like to show you all the way I played with fonts. First of all, I chose rasterize type.
31) I locked the layer of the Orihime and hikoboshi layer due to I did not want this layer to be moved while I adjusted the position of the typography of 'Happy Tanabata Festival'.
32) I rearranged the order for my layers once again to make my wordings pop out as the headings.
33) Next, I used the blending options.
34) In this layer I used few blending options as followed:
This stroke I used it for making the font more hightlighted since the fonts I chosen in this project was Renaissance..I want to use this effect make my wording to be a bit thicker.
I chosen orange as I wished the wording of Happy Tanabata have the color effect that similar to golden color.
This outer glow effect I want to used it was to make my typography have the glowing effect and the color I chosen was yellow because I felt that yellow combined with dark orange would produce the effect of golden color..
Next, I tried to used the effect of bevel and emboss to make the wordings have the 3dimensional effect in fact what I want was to create the feeling of solid and firm for the typography.
As for the depth and the size used were mainly due to personal preferences. If you dislike about it, you can change to other settings or effects that you liked^^
but not least, I used drop shadow as well for the typography to make the wordings to have some shadow effects.
35)Final outcomes for the typography:
36) This was consider the last step for the whole wallpaper design. I typed the date for the wallpaper and I once again rasterized this typography and used the effect of drop shadow as shown below:
37) Final assignment done- my wallpaper produced!!!^.^Hope you enjoy reading my blog..~~ thx for supporting..
Due to the requirement of flattening our image here are the steps:
Firstly go to Layer tab and select the flatten image option...See its simple right?!
Once you image is flattened, you can notice all your layers will be merged together to become merely one layer as shown below:
