How to Look Like You're Better with Photoshop than you Really Are.

The tutorial. By Ian Hubert

SO! We've all seen it. Some great piece of graphic design. Like, in a magazine or something. Wow! It's so impressive!

And usually it is. Most times those ads have been carefully thought out and planned, to help get the message across. But YOU! You don't have a message to get across! You need  no subliminal advertising hiding in your image! You just wanna look good!

I think it's easier than you think. At least, I think I do. Ya' think?

First... the basics. Black and white.

Most images look more artistic if they're black and white. Who knows why? Check out this picture.

Pretty bland? Yes. But make it black and white, and NOW check it out!

STILL not very impressive, but you've gotten your point across. Many times black and white means, "HEY! I'm tryin' to be ARTISTIC here! This ain't just a vacation photo!" What can help is contrast. Any picture can be made into a "Light study" if you make it black and white, then mess with the contrast. Observe.

NOW we're talking! Look at that contrast. With shadows like that, it's OBVIOUS your an artist. Throw out a little artistic BS (hint: Anything to do with "Isolation" is genius. Or discrimination, or memories of youth, or man's connection to nature, or the turmoil of conflict)

Let's take a look at another example.

Oh. Oh yeah. But it's still missing something. Aha! What's the one thing that separates PICTURES you find on the internet from ART you find on the internet? That's right! Watermarks! Add your own watermark to an image, and you got it made! Check this out.

OH! THERE we go! See that! Now you've let people know that this artwork is worth stealing.

But let's move on. Not ALL color is bad. We did the same thing as above with this one, but this time left the color (though messed with the saturation a bit). There was also a bit of lightening and darkening by hand, but only to make her face visible, and darken the man in the background. The picture was taken by Steve Bylsma, I believe

Look at both picture separately (changes become apparent when larger). Wow! That second one could be, like, a poster for a "I'm yelled at!" hotline, or something. In fact, let's do it.

One of the first things about color is that colors have mood. Red can be warm and happy, or, if too much, then irritating (they paint the insides of fast food restaurants yellow and red to encourage people to eat faster. It's true!) Blue can be cool and relaxing, or, if a lot of it, depressing. Get it? Let's give it a shot.

Notice how the first picture feels warm and inviting, and the second looks cold. If you're trying to show the pain of yelling at people, you'd want the second one. Note that I've done all of these examples and written up to here in only half an hour. This really is fast stuff.

OH WAIT! But what's that, you say? What's that BORDER around those 2 recent images? Good question. It's a file I made about a year ago, and have used in hundreds of images. If you're trying to make your picture look more grungy, you obviously need... a grungy border! A Grungy Border! Take it! It's yours! Just place it over your image, squeeze to fit, and set to "multiply". I made it off of a tutorial from some website, but I don't remember which. If you find it, let me know.

Threshold. A valuable tool. Use it well. Here, we have a picture.

An awesome picture to begin with, in fact, it probably doesn't even need what we're going to do to it done.

Three variations on a theme. Just took the image, applied threshold, and colored in the eyes. Then, to see if it'd still look cool, I inverted it. Looked okay, but not BETTER, so I undid it, changed the rest of the background color, and... tada! Grungy image. But wait... the image looks kind of flat...

This is a good gradient. You can use it for pretty much anything. I decided to slap it over the picture and set it to "Color Burn".

WOW! Unexpected result! But I like it! Red, orange, yellow and black. Very uncomfortable looking. I dig it. Which leads me to the biggest rule of pretending you know what you're doing in Photoshop. Just go with it. It's like, "WOW! That looks cool!" "Yes. That was my plan" Which I just broke, but only to prove a point.

Which leads us to our final tip. Putting images on top of other images. It's a great technique. You can get lots of weird results. Ask anyone.

Such as this. Just combined two images. Really fast. Looks weird. I dig it. But you can get much better results. Now, one of the BEST things you can do, as seen before, is put a colored gradient over your picture.

This is a gradient I've used tons of times. It's great. Just put it on "Overlay" or whatever other layer blending method you want. It looks good with lots of them.

Take a look at the following picture. Keep in mind... this image took only 5 minutes to create, start to finish, after it had been brought into Photoshop. 5 minutes max. Did some random stuff with the curves, increased the contrast, decreased the saturation, overlayed another semi-transparent image over it, and added a pre-made border set to "multiply". Voila.

So yeah! Hope this helps!

Ian