Learnings: Photo to sketch, and a variety of "faux art" effect

By zander esteban (that's me)

Photoshop is a very good tool to make fool-proof artistic effects. A variety of tools that are used to be on your art materials drawer can be found in Filter>Filter Gallery. These effects include but are not limited to watercolor, charcoal, colored pencils, and other sketchy sketch effects.

While it will be much nicer if you'd first try creating a real art with real art materials (I've tried the tools listed above, most are not easy to put up with) just for the sake of saying "Well, I tried."

Another very sketchy tool you can use is the art history brush tool. It provides a variety of brush strokes to use. And it's easy to use too as it works just like a normal brush tool.

Learnings: Text Portraiture

You may not mask the text outside of the pic. by Jerm Narvaez

The art of text portraiture is easily to be mistaken as a bunch of work when in fact it is a click-this-click-that-and-you're-done kind of job. Just get your desired picture, make sure to replace the background with white (if it's not already white). Now desaturate it and save it as a .psd file - this is essential for the displacing you're going to do later. Now create a new layer that is filled with black. Then start carefully and randomly placing the text, you can use a single line or quote, name, whatever your heart desires, or a variety of them. You can just duplicate these text by holding alt (which will transform your cursor into a double cursor) and clicking on the text and dragging the text. Make sure to use a varitey of sizes. AND MAKE SURE THE TEXT IS WHITE. Now once you feel you've covered your subject, merge all your text with the black layer , go to Filter>Distort>Displace, put in the value 15 on both horizontal and vertical displacement. Select the black and white .psd file you created. Now change the blending mode of the merged text to light burn. Mask the text outside of your subject and you're done.

This was what I was working with. The finished file aswell as the .psd raw file got lost while I was transferring files from my flash drive to my laptop =( This screenshot was the only thing left of its whole text portrait glory.

Wait, that IS a lot of work.

refer to this tutorial.

Learnings: Using the Vanishing Point

One of the Photoshop power tools is the ultimately helpful and magical Clone tool, used to make just about anything unwanted to disappear and/or make something double (triple, quadruple and so on...) by cloning. But one problem that we often encounter is that the clone tool basically works on a flat plane.

Worry no more because the Vanishing Point "tool" is here to rescue. Found in Filter tab in Photoshop, the vanishing point allows you to place vanishing points, by mapping planes according to the perspective of your picture. With this, you can now clone in perspective, no more uneven clones that result to weird photos.

Also, you can basically add anything to your photo, like layouting a wall in perspective by pasting and moving whatever the heck you want to put in your picture.

With Photoshop, you've got the power!

Learnings: 3D Anaglyphs

3D Anaglyphs are photos that have a three-dimensional effect often used to emphasize a certain part of the photo. Now, the only 3D anaglyphs we consider legit are the ones that actually work, and using effect generators (such as your easily accessible apps on your smartphones) will be considered cheating.

Put your 3D glasses on! Oscar selfie 3D anaglyph style*. By yours truly.

3D anaglyphs can be made with Photoshop. This effect can be achieved by first making a depth map, that is, a black-to-white rendering of the picture. You paint those you want to appear in front white and those you want to recede in the background (remain flat) black. You can use a variety of shades of gray as a middle ground and/or to have a smooth transition that allows a popping out-of-the-pic effect. This depth map is then to be saved as a .psd file. This is essential for the next step which is displacing the red and blue channels to the left and right, respectively. By going to Filter>Distort>Displace, then typing how much do you want the picture to be displaced horizontally. Select the depth map .psd file and voila! You now have your legit and working 3D anaglyph.

Of course to be viewed with 3D glasses (not polarized)

Check out this moving 3D pic of rapper M.I.A. by Romain Gavras. Cool!

*issues with viewing to be blamed to the internet :p