These Man-Horse beasts lived in Thessaly, fed on meat and were given to riotous revelries. They came to symbolize the dark, unruly forces of nature. They were usually depicted as drunken followers of Dionysus, except for Cheiron who was the tutor to several heroes…

In this tutorial you will learn some basic extraction techniques. How to use blend modes and masks to create deep atmospheric effects. I will also show you how two meld two creatures together to make a mythical half man half horse Centaur.

Download Tutorial Files : Centaur Tutorial Files (1524)

Step 1

First of all we are going to cut out the elements we are going to use for the main composition. Open ‘horse-23434-12.jpg’ and grab the pen tool ( P ). Being as careful as you can, slowly plot a path around the horse.

When you get the head of the horse don’t worry too much about being neat, this part of the horse will be masked out later on.

Step 2

Right click in the middle of the path and select Make Selection. With a selection around horse, Cut the horse ( CTRL + X ) and create a new Document for our main composition. Any size will do as long as we have enough space to play around in. Mine was 25cm x 25cm. Paste the horse on to the new canvas ( CRTL – V ).

Here is how i created this simple yet stylish image .

Step 1

First i created a new document of 500×300 pixels that I filled with white ( you can chose to create yours on a larger canvas or smaller its up to you) . Create a new layer and select the lower part of the canvas. Then Fill it with black.

Step 2

Now using brushes that i had in my collection, i painted grass and some flowers in black across the top of the black line. You can find brushes like the ones i used at deviantart.com or a similar place.

Step 3

Now create a new layer and place it under the black layer ( with the grass and flowers ). Fill the layer with white and drag the gradient below from top to bottom.

The gradient will look similar to the below picture.

This will work on any version of photoshop from 6 up. Obviously CS4 is recommended and if you haven’t tried it out you should!

Step 1

First of all ensure your back ground is set to black, it is important as the end result does vary quite considerably depending on the choice of color used. You will need to brush out a fiery shape with a white brush set to 100% opacity and 100% thickness. Having some debris flying around randomly does help add to the effect as sparks.

Try different brush setting to get interesting effects. Also having some premade brushes will help you. Search deviant art or the freebie page on simplypsd.com. But to give you a rough example, check the image below.

Step 2

The next step is still simple, duplicate you initial brushed fire shape layer, and set a new layer to overlay. Then hit Ctrl+U and check colorize using the following settings:

• Hue = 35
• Saturation = 25 (default)
• Lightness = -50

This should give you a similar effect to the image below.

Step 3

Another simple step is to just duplicate your overlay layer and set it to color burn as you can see in the image below.

Step 1

The first stage which forms the starting point for most of my digital work is a sketch done on paper. This is where I assemble any unformed ideas and decide on how the composition will be structured and try and give myself a template to begin working from. In picture below you can see a pencil sketch that I scanned in which would form the basis of my final painting. You can download the tutorial files to follow along.

For this tutorial I wanted to combine a natural looking rock face that incorporated some element of architecture that had been carved into the stone.

Step 2

The next stage was to get rid of the glaring white of the image and so I traced around the drawing and on a separate layer which I named Background, I used the Gradient tool fading from a pale to a darker green. On another new layer set to Hard Light I used a dark grey and filled in the area that makes up the rock itself and then to establish the light source I simply erased parts of this layer to reveal the white underneath, see the picture below.

It is important to define the light source as this is paramount in how the viewer reads the image and interprets the forms. Rock can be a difficult subject to paint as it varies tremendously, not only in its coloration but more importantly in its structure and the types of formations it adopts. Because its surface is so uneven with so many undulations and crevices it is easy to loose sight of the overall form and get too involved with details.

In order to keep control of the painting process I find it is best to work on a larger scale to begin with and gradually work your way down to the finer detail. In other words, decide on a light source and block in the main highlights and shadows and carve out the general structure and form of your image before concentrating on the numerous incidental passages that will help add interest and detail to the final piece.

Step 3:

In Fig03 you will notice that I have added a new layer which I called Main and begun to rough in some of the areas that fall into shadow and started to shape some of the crevices. I used warm tones ranging between those seen on the left using a standard soft round airbrush with a varied diameter.

I set the opacity to between 65 and 100% and the flow to around 50% using pen pressure to control it as shown below the brush pre-sets. It does not matter too much how rough your marks are at this stage as the painting will go through a process of refinement until it is finished.

Quick and seemingly random marks are perfectly suitable and may even inadvertently suggest part of the final outcome so be bold and carefree!

How you wish to scale your images will determine what method you use to change their dimensions if you have a strict size that you require a document to be, then the Crop Tool is the only way forward. It might sound a little obvious, but you would be surprised at how many ‘Photoshop Professionals’ we’ve seen who create a new document, copy and paste the image in and then proceed to use the Transform function to scale down the image to fit within the doc. When the dimensions don’t fit the image. they then go on to totally distort the proportions forcing it to fit. This is clearly very amateurish, time-consuming and shows a lack of understanding of the power of our beloved digital imaging package. It’s a lot like owning a Ferrari and only using two of the six gears.

Quick crops

So with that pet peeve out of the way, we’ll continue. You can also use the Crop Tool to quickly change the size of a document if you only require either the width or height – simply enter one of the required values and crop away. This approach can be a little long winded for one image, but if you have a lot you need to get through then this will save you bundles of time.

The cropping process can be automated if you aren’t that fussed about the crop. Open the Actions palette, hit Record and use the Image Size function to reduce the height and width, then the Canvas Size to crop the image. This will maintain the proportions, but you’ll lose control over what portion of the image is lost, so it can be a bit of a gamble. Still, it’s better than the ‘Photoshop Professional’ method.

When using the Image Size function, you’re most likely to put in the required amount and then hit Enter. But there’s a little drop-down menu that’s often overlooked which contains three main options:  Bi-cubic , Bi-linear and Nearest Neighbor.

Usually you won’t have to change these and leaving it on Bicubic will do the job, but mastering them will improve the quality of your images whether you’re sampling up or down. When an image is re sampled, an interpolation method is used to assign color values to any new pixels it creates, based on the color values of existing pixels in the image. The more sophisticated the method, the more quality and detail from the original image is preserved.

The image you’re working on will determine what option needs to be employed. Bicubic is used when a smooth tonal range is required, which is why it’s set as the default – it’s perfect for most photographs. When used for blowing up images, a smooth blurring effect will appear around the edges. Bilinear is much the same as Bicubic but reduces the quality more. Again, when blowing up, blurring will occur but a stepping effect will be produced. Nearest Neighbor is best used for images with solid colors such as illustration; as the sampling process preserves hard edges, this method can result in jagged effects. This becomes apparent when distorting or scaling an image or performing multiple manipulations on a selection. The last method is the only one that doesn’t produce an anti aliased effect on the edges.

In CS there are two additional options: Bicubic Smoother and Bilinear Smoother – these are pretty straightforward and self-explanatory.

Crop The Image

The Crop Tool can be used in a variety of ways. It can constrain proportions while changing the size of an image, reduce the height or width while taking full control over the resolution, and rotate and crop at the same time

Image Resolution:

The rule of thumb with image resolution is quite simple: the more info, the better the quality of the final image. Camera phones take pictures at low resolution, so upscaling is unavoidable. Digital cameras also take at a low resolution, but the document size is bigger so quality is maintained, because when the dimensions are reduced the resolution is increased.

Testing

A fantastic way to see these methods at work is to create a new document at 100x100px and 72dpi, and draw (without using the Vector Shape Tool) a black square in the center of the document leaving a white border. Now open the Image Size function and increase the size to 2500 x 2500px and 72dpi, then hit Enter. Zoom in on the edges to see what effect this has. Do this for each of the re sampling methods to see how they work.

When using the Transform Tool to scale an image, the Bicubic method is employed to re sample the image. As mentioned, this is pretty standard, but if you know another re sampling method that produces better results, first scale the image to the desired dimensions using the Transform Tool. Make a note of its new dimensions, then transform the image in its own document using the Image Size function and correct sampling method.

Resampling

As a rule, blowing up or re sampling images up is a bad idea, because there’s never enough information in the images to maintain the quality. But in this age of camera phones and the like, the occasional re sample is unavoidable, because the quality of a printed photograph at 72dpi will appear blocky, whereas a photograph sampled up to 300dpi will look better. A good way of re sampling is to do it in steps, IE from 72dpi to 200dpi then on to 300dpi. This method gives Photoshop the opportunity to fill in smaller gaps and therefore more of the quality is maintained.

Digital cameras also work at 72dpi but they overcome the resolution problem by having a higher document size, that is also referred to as resolution, such as 2500 x 1875px and 72dpi. As the document is larger, there’s more information contained within it, so when it comes to printing, the document is reduced while the resolution is increased. For example, printing an image with these values at 6 x 4 inches will increase the resolution to over 430dpi.