Photoshop has many useful filters which are just a click away. By accessing the Filter menu you can have a play around and create cool and unusual effects. Here's a selection of some of my favourites.
Top row, left to right are - (Artistic) Poster Edges, (Artistic) Watercolour, (Stylized) Glowing Edges,
Bottom row, left to right are - (Distort) Ripple, (Artistic) Plastic Wrap, (Artistic) Sumi-e
Top row, left to right are - (Artistic) Rough Pastels, (Artistic) Sponge, (Artistic) Smudge Stick,
Bottom row, left to right are - (Artistic) Pallet Knife, (Distort) Diffuse Glow and finally (Brush Strokes) Dark Strokes.
As you can tell, I like the artistic ones the most.
Sepia
Converting images to sepia gives photographs a great old look. You can do this in a variety of ways. The most simple way that I have found of doing this is to use the Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation tool.
There are other ways to achieve this effect but I find this way is the easiest. The other way I have achieved these results is by using the black and white option from the adjustments menu and selecting the tint option at the bottom.
Merging Layers
This is where all the fun happens. By cutting and pasting images into layers you can create some fantastic pictures. To do this can take a lot of time and can be a tad tedious.
Using these awe inspiring pictures I decided to try and make something a bit more interesting. Firstly, I took the clouds and using the cropping tool I selected part of the image to use as my background. Then I accessed the new layer option in the 'LAYER' menu and added my chessboard. I used the magnetic lasso tool to select just the board and nothing else.
At this point I would love to show you some screen grabs but my laptop was having none of it.
I again used the magnetic lasso tool to cut around the photograph of the statue. Using the transform controls in the 'EDIT' menu I straightened her up a bit and popped her into the picture.
At this point I could have flattened the layers and adjusted the colours but I decided to do each layer individually. Using the 'IMAGE' menu, I selected the adjustments option and went straight to the 'black and white' option. I then decided to add a tint to the picture by ticking the little 'tint' box. I was happy with the moody look this gave me.
With the chess board and the statue I decided to play around with filters and selected one that enhanced my image. I couldn't tell you which one it was because I was too busy going, "Wow that looks cool," to myself.
Anyway, here's the final image. I'm not sure how it will look on a proper monitor because we all know laptops are a big piece of crap when it comes to these things. Whatever angle you have the screen at, the picture looks completely different. I can always play around with the brightness at a later date although I was trying to go for a dark moody image.
Text
Next up, adding text. This can be done really easily by clicking on the 'T' icon in the photoshop toolbar. You can even warp the text, change directions and colour. Here's a cover I did for a CD for my bands first EP (did I mention I was in a band? Oh I did, I apologise!).
We were going to have a cat sitting in front of the gramophone or even a dog weeing up it as a big "Up yours" to HMV. We then realised we are nice people and would never do such a thing, plus HMV have never done anything to us, once they did sell me a faulty DVD though. I couldn't take it back either because I lost the receipt.
I would like to show you more but as I said, my laptop isn't playing ball today so I cant show any screen grabs. And I thought Apple Mac's were annoying.
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