Square Extension photoshoot tutorial

Now I will show you roughly how we created those “town painting photos”. This tutorial is for people who basically understand the software (this can be done in either photoshop or pixelmator on mac). We used pixelmator. The most fun part was of course taking the pictures, and imagining (keyword here!) what can we do with them later. I strongly suggest to keep that in mind while on a photoshoot. Some amazing ideas can come at any time. The effect is supposed to be a little “unrealistic” and “neon’y” so here goes, experiment and play with it:

Then we duplicate the layer and desaturate it (making it grayscale), so it’ll look like this :

Then using either the eraser tool, or the lasso tool, we delete parts of the top (grayscale layer) so the colorful layer below can “shine through” like this:

The next step is adding some sky on a layer between the color and grayscale photo, and cut out the white sky on the top (grayscale one) out. The result?

Then we add another layer on top of all the layers, set it’s blending to overlay and paint some red on it. If you want you can use the lasso tool to limit the painting area. We liked coloring books so we did fine without it ;)

Here’s the result

Now we could finish there, but why stop yet? Let’s add some more overlay layers and paint some yellow over them. Like that:

The next step is adding some smoke from the UP sign. We looked around the web and found a realistic white smoke photo over a black background. We adjust the colors a bit to make the background as black as possible. Then the trick is to put it on another layer, this time with the “screen” blending mode. The effect ?

Now we add some fire to it, because smoke and fire go pretty well together ;) The idea is to create another layer on top, set the blending to “screen” again, and find some good fire-over-black-background photo. After pasting it in place the final effect looks sort of like  this :

And that is it boys and girls. Now you know it. Now you can go around and turn your birthday photos into a color massacre, or maybe re-decorate the apartment? Or just do some stuff ;) We won’t judge you! Hope you enjoyed it, now go and be creative about it!