New Tricks!

Tutorial by Kitten

A trick! A tip!

With photoshop, we all love our filters. Go to any design event where there’s parameters put in place and one is telling the designer they cannot use any filters, and you’re gonna hear bitching and moaning.

Photoshop is always updating, and with the most recent updates, some of our filters from the older versions don’t work on the newer version. One in particular, EdgesFX, was a cool filter that allowed you to create an edging within the avatar. You could choose different colors and work with that, but the most popular was a white thin line to give an almost pop/ethereal look.

Sadly, the newer version of PS doesn’t accept it as the filter hasn’t been updated. Well here is a tip/trick for those interested in recreating that look:

Once your av is set for the filtering process, you’re going to combine all the layers into one layer (create a new blank layer on top, have that layer selected and on your keyboard press together alt+ctrl+shift and E). You’ll see this combines them all to that one layer but leaves you the individual layers below (that gives you a chance if you don’t like the end result to delete the combined and work on the other layers).

Duplicate that combined layer (you can right click and select ‘duplicate image’ or on your keyboard ctrl+j). This creates of course a duplicate of the combined image and this is what you’ll be working on for this effect.

Go to Filter—>Stylize—>Find Edges and select. Your image is gonna look all funky, don’t worry!

Now you’re going to want to do this no matter if the image is already b&w or not. Image—>Adjustments—>Desaturate.

Next again go to Image—>Adjustments—>Invert. That will as you can see, invert the image so the lines are white.

The last step is to go to your layers window and set the image to ‘soft light’ or ‘overlay’ depending on how much you want the lines to “pop” and adjust the opacity in the range of 20 – 30%.

And there you have it! Just complete all your filtering/colorings and font after with the other combined layer, keeping our duplicated/edges one on top!

If there’s any other tricks or tips you’d like to learn, I have tutorials posted on DCD and will continue contributing to Evolution Theory!