How It Was Done (Part Two)

Written by: Tiffany Joyce

Finishing up with what I started on the 10th, here are the techniques used for the last two photographs that I featured:

Photo #3:

“Light writing” is really easy and pretty darned entertaining. All you need is a light source (a glow stick or a flashlight works well), a dark room (or outside at night), and a camera that allows you to take a long exposure. Set your camera up on a tripod, and set the exposure time for at least ten seconds, or up to thirty seconds (you might have to play with this a bit). Set the ISO to 100, and use a small aperture. This will help prevent over-exposure.

Then stand in front of the camera, release the shutter (it helps to have a remote shutter but you can release the shutter manually and hop in front of the camera), and “draw” with the light source. It might take a try or two to get the effect you’re looking for. Be patient, and have fun with it!

Photo #4:

This was Athena’s first attempt at creating a curled edge effect in Photoshop. I have recreated this tutorial on a picture of my own.

I started with opening this picture in Photoshop:

I unlocked the layers by double clicking on the padlock icon, and clicking “okay”.

Then with the rectangular marquee selection tool, I drew a box in the corner that I wanted to apply the curl. Then I applied a grayscale gradient to that corner.

After “deselecting” the grayscale box, I went to the Edit menu and chose Transform, then Warp. Then I clicked and dragged the bottom left of the grayscale box’s corner in towards the opposite corner to create the curled effect.

Finally I applied a drop shadow to increase the curled edge effect (Layer/Layer Style/Drop Shadow), using the following settings:

This is the final result:

Give these two techniques a try, as well as the two I posted about on Friday, and let us know how you did in the comments. Enjoy!

Previous Post: How It Was Done (Part One)