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Vector Tuts Photoshop Tutorial – Adding a Bokeh Effect to your image

Yay! I am finally back again doing tutorial reviews which I love. It’s one of my favourite blogging posts because I like to have a record of what I’m learning and how I’m improving as I go.

This tutorial was a great choice for several reasons, the first being I had never created a Bokeh effect of my own from scratch before. I have used Bokeh effects in my images with someone else’s actions so I was really happy to learn this technique. Secondly, ALL of the assets were available online! If you recall my last attempt at a tutorial, it went very badly and I ended up wasting valuable time doing nothing at all because the tutorial was too old and all of the assets were no longer available online. So I have become better prepared for this situation by choosing tutorials more wisely to blog about.

Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=62&v=dndTpLFnYTo 

Time: 15 minutes

Level: Beginner

Comment: I really enjoyed this tutorial but I can’t give it a full.10 out of 10 rating because not all of the steps were included in either the video tutorial or the written tutorial. It took some time to actually get all of the settings correct before being able to complete it. So for that reason, it’s getting an 8 out of 10. However, I was very pleased to see all of the assets available to download so you can get to creating right away.

Rating: 8/10

Here is the before stock image:

girl-1245835_1920.jpg

And my edit with the Bokeh effect applied:

BOKEH GIRL.png

 

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Another Star Wars is Poetry edit

It’s really lovely to be able to use all of the edits I so painstakingly created for my new blog. It actually feels like all those hours I put into editing in Photoshop is somehow paying off (except just not in a monetary way), and I’m very okay with that.

I was a little disappointed to go on Reddit the other day to see one of my edits posted there straight from this website without a single credit, not even to the original artist! That really annoyed me. Firstly because well, it was my edit, and secondly because the art actually belongs to someone! This is just really awful to do. I actually had to stop venturing out to specific social media sites because I couldn’t handle seeing all of my edits on other people’s blogs with their names taking credit for making them.

So there is a dark side to sharing your art or edits or anything you create online. I know this which is why I prefer to just stick to my own blog and upload my creations or whatever and be thankful that people appreciate them enough to steal 😂I guess that’s really the only way to look at it positively.

So here is my edit for the day – I remember making this one, and it took ages to clean the image up and make it look half decent. I also just realised I didn’t crop it correctly on the left-hand side, but I’m too tired to change it now so I’ll fix it up tomorrow 🤣 Fixed!

 

REYTHELASTJEDI.png

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Tutorial reviews are proving to be a taxing experience

As you know, one of the things I love to do on my blog is tutorial reviews of Adobe products, mostly using Photoshop but I plan to venture out into other areas as well including Illustrator and Adobe After Effects (assuming I can find tutorials that work).

Well, I had two tutorial reviews all lined up to do, and I spent so much time trying to find assets for these particular tutorials that I ended up not doing anything at all. I was extremely frustrated, to say the least. The reason why this process is so frustrating is because a lot of the tutorials I choose are older tutorials where the assets used to make the end product are no longer available. This makes it a much more taxing experience and particularly time consuming which is the most annoying part. Trying to find matching images that will look as good in the end result is much more difficult than you would think, and when you finally do find the right image, you can’t use it for free, you have to pay for it.

So for now, my edits will have to do until I can find a tutorial I can actually review on the Adobe site or via Design Tuts.

Here’s a quick edit I did of Kylo Ren from The Last Jedi taken from the Topps trading card Chrome Edition – you would be amazed at how beautiful some of the Topps cards are, although this one I’m pretty sure is just a screenshot of Adam Driver from the film

My Edit:

KYLORENTOPPSTLJCHROME.png

And the original image:

EBqKO7WXUAIn2Oj

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PiXimperfect Tutorial – Luke Skywalker Edit – A New Hope

I wanted to apply this colour grading tutorial to a stunning image of Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, but I wanted the image to be of just Luke. So I edited out C3-P0 and the annoying branding which was pretty easy to do and voila! Luke was ready for adjustments.

Here is the before image:

18AUTH-Promo-Cards-Resubmit-07-09-18_Page_03.jpg

And here is the after image:

LUKESKYWALKERNEWHOPEEDIT01.png

Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he6HCZz5bZ8

Time: 20 minutes

Level: Intermediate

Comment: There is so much you can learn from playing with colours, adjustment layers and adding shadows and highlights to an image. Unmesh takes you through a colour grading tutorial on an image which you can see above looks pretty washed out and dull to begin with but just comes to life after the editing has been done. I hoped to achieve the same effect with the image I edited of Luke, and I think it came out OK. I even created edits with masking on the eyes to bring out Luke’s pretty blue eyes a little more.

Rating: 10/10

Now the image is ready for social media posts or just about anywhere really.

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Just so that you know I am still alive…

So for the last week or so I’ve been going straight to bed from work trying to get over this horrible flu. Everyone in my team has had it, and some people have had more than a week off work. So I haven’t been writing or doing much of anything during this time, and I am only starting to feel slightly better.

I thought I’d edit a poster for something different to do and not about Star Wars. Spider-Man Far From Home released recently, and I really love this poster of Tom Holland, so I decided to edit it and remove the text to make it textless. I also edited the colours, brightness and a few other things to make the colour more vibrant and more aesthetically pleasing for Instagram. What d’ya think?

Here’s the original image:

spiderman_far_from_home_ver8_xxlg.jpg

And my edit:

SPIDERMANFFHTEXTLESSPOSTER.png

I am hoping to be back to my usual, creative self soon. A warm welcome to my new followers and an “I’ll be back soon” to all my friends and supporters 😊

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PiXimperfect Duotone Preset Tutorial – Rey – The Rise of Skywalker Edit

I’m slowly getting back into my routine again of adding Adobe tutorials to the site once more. I have actually really missed doing these tutorials, so I am hyped to get this one posted.

For those of you unfamiliar with Photoshop or unfamiliar with using duotones, this tutorial is a good one to learn from. I’ve used duotones before in edits I’ve done but Unmesh Dinda always finds a way to shine a light on different tools in photoshop in fun and unique ways. Before I used this tutorial, I didn’t know that Photoshop actually comes with a whole lot (100 plus) of preset Duotone and Tritone templates built in. No need to use any external resources (if you don’t want to).

How to use Photoshop’s built-in Duotone presets

Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he6HCZz5bZ8

Time: 10 minutes

Level: Beginner

Comment: Using Duotones in image creation is one of the most commonly used trends in digital and graphic design today. If you want your images to have a special and unique look, duotones and tritone colours will certainly give your image that special lift to make your images look funky and professional.

Unmesh’s tutorial is great because not only does he show you how to use the duotones in your images, but he also shares tips and tricks on how to blend duotone colours into an original image to make it look even better.

Rating: 9/10

Here’s the before image (I didn’t like the brownish/reddish tint this image had originally and wanted to give it a more sombre look)

REYTROSEDIT06

And the after image:

REYTROSEDIT07

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Kylo Ren’s Mask gets a Glowing Effect

Further to this post where I learned how to create the “glowing” effect in Photoshop, you can add this effect to just about anything to make it stand out. Here’s a small example of an image that looks OK as is but stands out a lot more with added glowing lines:

Image without glow effect:

tumblr_p29h3triyN1wcck74o1_640

Image with glow effect added:

Untitled1.gif

It’s not meant to look perfect, that’s the idea, it’s just meant to be a rough outline of the mask itself with blue and red glowing lines to represent the dark and light side of the force (as Kylo Ren is a conflicted character who is still fighting his demons, I think this is a nice representation of that inner conflict).

What do you think?