|
Step 1:
- Take your silhouette images. These are any images you've reduced
to black and white. These particular images happen to come from the
massive Dover collection.
- Select one of the images, if needs be set it to 16M colours, and convert
the image to a layer.
- Create a new layer, and move it so it is the lowest layer. I suggest for
clarity at this stage you colour this layer blue.
Step 2:
- With the magic wand, select the black area. You may need to follow up
with Selections, Modify, Select Similar to make sure you have all the black portion
- Cut-out the selected area. The blue layer below should appear.
Step 3:
- Invert the selection (shift-Ctrl-I)
- Apply Drop Shadow (Opacity=100, Blur=10, Offset=3) in this case. You will need
to adjust though, especially based on the size of the image.
Step 4:
- Now, with the selection still inverted, delete that too.
- You may want to apply another drop shadow at this stage to darken
up the drop area and provide a little more clarity.
- If you have trouble seeing what is happening, don't forget you
can turn the selection marquee (the "marching ants") on and off with Shift-Ctrl-M.
- We can now do the interesting stuff. In the following variations
try not to lose the selection, you might want to return to the selection
and try some other things with it.
Step 5:
- Next step is to overlay the "carved" silhouette over some other images.
- You have a couple of choices here. You could just copy (Ctrl-C) the top
layer and paste as a new layer (Ctrl-C) over other images, which is certainly the
easiest.
- You can also apply patterns to new layers on your existing image. That's what we
will do here, because it simplifies the tutorial.
- Copy the wood layer, and paste it as a new layer onto the silhoutte image,
move the layer until it is above the blue and below the silhouette.
- This gives us the general effect, and is very quick to set up.
But now we have a target to aim for, I want to go back and make the
effect better.
Step 6:
- Returning to the silhoette layer, you can re-apply the drop shadow
effect, but in this case, we want to add a white drop shadow coming from the
lower left, instead of the upper right. So, Opacity=100, Blur=10, Offsets are -1,
and crucially, the shadow being white.
- This version gives a light shade on the "upward" side of the engraving.
- Undo this, and re-apply the same settings for the drop shadow, but this time
in black, this hardens up the edge of the engraving.
Either version may be suitable for your uses, it depends where you are going with
your engraving.
Variations:
- Obviously one point here is that you can freely swap the background layer.
- Or you can swap the engraving layer.
- Or both
You might also be interested in the simpler Embossing in Wood.
|
