It may be frustrating for some that this isn’t an actual tutorial, but the real deal on some of these images is that they are EASY. More or less, you could create something similar with basic masking techniques in Photoshop. It’s not tough stuff.
The purpose of adding graphic elements to photos is up to you. Does your client want ‘something different?’ Do you want to make art to hang on the wall? It doesn’t really matter why you do it, but the fact is you can do some amazing things to photos and make them look completely different using Photoshop or other software. Let’s take a look at a few that I’ve done. These were just for fun.
First, I used a pretty cool picture of one of my favorite guitarists, Joe Satriani, which had a lot of negative space and decided to use that area for some graphic elements and typography. Here’s the original photo:
Pretty good stuff, right? Using very simple masking, vector shapes, free brushes, and a basic sans-serif font, I added to the image a a sense of motion, impact, and excitement. I also made the image monochrome to draw out the texture of the wall and the high detail in the image. Here’s what I ended up with:
Nice. I dig it. Let’s move on to something more drastic, where the final image has only a vague resemblance to the original photo, and you may not have even guessed that the final image came from a photo at all! You can find a very large library of free stock photos and graphics at sxc.hu, which is where I found this creepy photo of a gothy looking girl screaming exaggeratedly:
I had already decided that I wanted to try to make a cool Resident Evil style zombie image, inspired by the work of illustrator Stephen Gammell, so I opened my original photo in Photoshop, and went to work. Admittedly, this one took more complex knowledge of Photoshop, but not much. I used the the selection tool exaggerate just the shape of the mouth with the warp tool, lots of textures and blend modes, brushes, masking, and layering. Bypassing an outbreak or years of bio-research, here’s the zombie I created:
Click to see the finished zombie image larger
BRAINS! Somebody call S.T.A.R.S! Ha! So you can see that with some experimentation and very, very simple Photoshop tools, you can transform and enhance your photos in amazing ways.
When faced with editing your photos, is it like once again entering the world of survival horror? Leave a comment below!
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