More of a personal than an official project. Some WIPs.

I tried two Photoshop tutorials from abduzeedo.com today, one Smoke Effect and the other Magic Lighting Effect. The Magic Lighting Effect actually incorporated the Smoke Effect, so I tried the Smoke Effect tutorial first.

The Smoke Effect

The Smoke Effect incorporates a Photoshop filter called Liquify. This is something I am extremely unfamiliar with (in fact, I am unfamiliar with all of the filters). Because of this unfamiliarity, I was quite stuck half way through the tutorial. I was literally staring at the Liquify dialogue and really hesitating to do anything with it.

In order to know what the heck Liquify really was, I did a little research. I found that this filter was actually available since version 6 of Photoshop, and I absolutely had no idea whatsoever of its existence back then. I also found a video tutorial on YouTube teaching the basics of this filter. It is a very nice beginner tutorial as it demonstrates some of the most basic and commonly-used tools in this filter. Here are some notes:

• “Brush Size” refers to how big your brush is.
• “Brush Density” refers to how big within your brush the filter is applied. A value of 100 means the filter will be applied from the centre of the brush all the way to the edge. (video tutorial 1:40)
• “Brush Pressure” refers to how sensitive should the filter be applied as per your mouse moving speed. (video tutorial 3:20)
• There is also a quick reference to the Liquify command.

Here is what I ended up with:

Smoke Effect take 1

Smoke Effect take 2

As shown, take 1 was quite a failure, though take 2 doesn’t really achieve much smoke effect, either. The Liquify filter in Photoshop really needs time to harness.

The Magic Lighting Effect

This tutorial was actually a little bit easier than the Smoke Effect one, partially because it uses less Liquify effect; partially I have explored the Liquify filter a bit. In this Magic Lighting effect, I fooled around with:

1. The Wave filter (Filter > Distort > Wave) applied on text
2. Color Dodge layer blending mode
3. Creating a new brush that makes small particles

It is also interesting to note that the tutorial author used Cloud filter (Filter > Render > Cloud) in a 80px-feather marquee and applied Gaussian Blur to two additional distorted text layers to create the atmosphere of magic. The Smoke Effect was also incorporated to increase this magic feeling.

Here is what I ended up with:

Magic Lighting Effect take 1

Not too bad, I reckon.