Occasionally for a print or website, you might require images with a white background. Usually these are easy to find, take or mask yourself, but for some things it can be more difficult.

Fire is one example. It would be very difficult to try and mask out flames from a fire photo using the pen tool or a brush, because of the organic shapes and indistinct edges.

As you will see in moment, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Using blend modes and layers, it’s very easy! So easy that I’ve turned it into an action which you can download at the end of the article if you so desire.

One

Take or find a photo of some fire (other images with a similar black background might work too – let me know in the comments if you’ve found something else on which this technique works!)

I started out with a rather nice Creative Commons licensed photo found here on Flickr.

Two

In Photoshop, you should have the default “background” layer. Duplicate it and call it something like “inverted”. Then, do just that – invert the image (CTRL + I)

Now set this “inverted” layer to the “Luminosity” blend mode.

As you can see, the whites of the fire have been dulled and it doesn’t really look very fiery. We’ll fix that in the next and final step.

Three

Duplicate the “background” layer again and drag it above the “inverted” layer. Rename it something like “Lighten”.

Finally, set this layer to the “lighten” blend mode and that’s it. You should have a nice white background on your fire photo.

Download the action

If you do, I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with, so let me know in the comments.

P.S.

If you just want the plain skull and crossbones wallpaper as seen above (maybe you don’t have Photoshop or don’t want to download the file), here it is, 1920x1600px:

I thought this idea was too good to let slip away into obscurity, so here it is and here’s one way to do it in Photoshop.

As you can see in the image, they have used balloons to outline the negative space in the shape of the OXO Tower. The design is simple, light and colourful and I really like it. The easiest way I can see to do this in Photoshop is to use a brush and play with the scatter and size settings.

To start off, I’ve created a balloon shape. This was done by drawing a circle with the Ellipse Tool, selecting the two middle points and moving them up a bit to make a balloon shape. Then I drew a little knot in the end and combined that with the balloon. Finally, I drew a bit of ribbon tied on the end using the Pen Tool. It took less time to create than it did to write this sentence, actually. But if you like, you can download the balloon Custom Shape, balloon AI vector or just go right ahead and get the balloon brush shape.

Next, I flattened the layers (ALT+L+F) and made it into a brush shape (ALT+E+B). It’s good to have the shape as a decent size, so it doesn’t get too blurry or pixilated at different sizes as a brush, so mine is about 800px tall.

Now, you’ll want something to be in the negative space so that the brush shape (balloons in this case) have something to form around. I happen to have a hot air balloon shape handy, which seems appropriate enough, so I’ll use that.

To set this up, I’ve created a blank canvas and have my hot air balloon shape in a new layer and have set it to slightly darker than white (so I can see the outline) and have a white background. I’ve also put a slight radial gradient on the background to make it show up a bit more.

With that set up, it’s back to the brush. Select the brush tool and go to the brushes palette. The newly created balloon brush should be at the bottom.

Brush Tip Shape
Depending on the size of the document, you will need to adjust your balloon size. The balloons look best far apart, so set that quite high. I’ve done about 300%

Shape Dynamics
If you’re fortunate enough to have a graphics tablet, then you can have size jitter at 100% and control it with the pen pressure. Otherwise, you can set it to fade or just manually adjust the brush size using the [ and ] keys. It’s a good idea to set a minimum diameter so you don’t get lots of tiny 1px balloons. I’ve chosen about 20%. To give the balloons a bit more of a natural look, adjust the Angle Jitter – not too much though, unless you want them going in all directions. I’ve also set the brush to Flip X Jitter so they’re not all facing the same way (Y Jitter will flip them upside down).

Scattering
To add to the natural, random look of the balloons, adjust the Scatter slider to your liking. 100% is good for me.

Color Dynamics
Finally, colour dynamics will adjust the colour of the balloons. I’ve set foreground/background jitter to 100% – this way, the balloons will be set to a colour somewhere between the colours you have chosen in the palette.

Other Dynamics
You might also like to adjust the opacity of the brush to make the balloons slightly transparent.

Now, we can finally paint some balloons! To start off with, it’s good to get some smaller balloons around the shape of the object (hot air balloon in this case). Set the foreground/background colours to black and white (press D) and paint around the shape until you’re happy with it.

Once you have a rough outline, you can go nuts – fill the entire canvas with balloons if you like! Keep in mind that it does tend to look better with some white space.

A moment ago I said to set the colours to black and white. This wasn’t to depress you or deprive you of colours – just the opposite. We can now do my patented (not really) Gradient Map trick.

Make a new Gradient Map Adjustment Layer and start scrolling through the gradients and seeing how they look – you might like one of the colour schemes. Personally, I’d like it to be lighter and brighter, so I set the Gradient Map layer to Soft Light. This will keep the background light while embiggening the balloons with colour. The default Photoshop gradients are okay, but there are some really nice ones in “Pastels” and “Simple” or you can even go to Colourlovers and get some from there.

Here are a couple of quick examples of what I came up with (Click to view 1600x1200px versions).

If you make something yourself using this method, let me know in the comments – I’d love to see what you create.

Download

Photoshop Custom Shapes: Guns
Includes: Photoshop CSH file and vector SVG file for use in other programs (Inkscape, Illustrator, Flash, etc)
Filesize: 253kb

About

Downloaded over 38,000 times on deviantart, this was the first set of Custom Shapes I made. There is quite a lot of detail in the guns, even though they are only outlines. I’ve found them very useful over the years.

See below for some examples of things people have made with them. If you’ve made something using these shapes, let me know and I’ll add it to the list!

When I started using Lightroom, I thought it would be very handy to be able to import all my Camera Raw presets into the developing room. Afterall, I’ve spent the past couple of years developing them and they’re the same options as far as I could see. Wrong.

I thought it would be a matter of copy and pasting the files from the Camera Raw folder into the Lightroom one. Which is what I initially tried. It didn’t work. So I saved a setting from Lightroom, had a look back in the folder and it has some strange .LRTEMPLATE file to store the settings.

Not sure who thought that was a good idea. It’s probably just the same Camera Raw .XMP file but with some changes to make .XMP unreadable.

As far as I can tell, the following is the only way to import the Camera Raw settings into Lightroom (at the time of writing).

Essentially, we need to get a bunch of photos, apply one preset to each photo, click done to save the XMP sidecar file, then open those files with Lightroom, go to Develop on each one (it will read the sidecar files with your Camera Raw settings) and click the plus sign to save as a Lightroom preset.

It shouldn’t take very long, depending on the number of presets you have. Personally, I had about 25 Camera Raw presets that I use and tweak further for my photos. I’m not sure if that’s a lot or not. Took me about 10 minutes to go through them all and make the Lightroom files.

Step by step

Open Photoshop and import a Raw photo, then go and check to see how many preset files you have. You’ll need to open the same number of files to apply one preset to each.

Cancel Camera Raw and go and select the number of raw files you need. In my case it was about 25. Import them into Camera Raw (don’t worry – we’re not going to be opening them all with Photoshop)

Now select the first photo, then go to the presets tab and select the first preset. Then select the second photo, apply second preset and so on, until you have one preset for each photo. Shouldn’t take too long.

When you’re done, press the Done button – not the okay button which will open all the photos in Photoshop (which, if you have a fairly slow computer like mine, could take ages). Pressing the Done button simply writes the sidecar file with the settings.

Close Photoshop and open Lightroom. Go to the folder where those Raw files and sidecar files are saved. Select the first photo and Press D to go to the develop section.

The photo should look pretty much the same as in Camera Raw (if it doesn’t, wait a few seconds for Lightroom to read the sidecar file and apply the settings).

Now click on the little plus sign to save a preset. It’s not really well labeled. I thought the plus sign would grow and shrink that palette when i first saw it.

Give it a name or a number – done. Your first preset has been created. Now, press the right arrow key to move to the next photo. Again, click the plus sign, name it, and so on through the folder.

Before too long you should have all the presets saved into Lightroom’s own strange little .LRTEMPLATE preset files.

I started using Lightroom (or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, as it likes to be called) last month. It has been great for tagging and cataloging my photo archives and getting rid of some of the useless files – although now the Lightroom archives files themselves take up over 2gb!

I was skeptical at first – I was happy opening the photos with Camera Raw and importing into Photoshop that way, but Lightroom has streamlined that. I use to come back from a day of shooting and take 2 or 3 hours going through them that way – opening, processing, trying different presets in Camera Raw, tweaking, opening in Photoshop, tweaking further, getting carried away and ending up with 20 layers of gradient maps, curves adjustment layers, then removing it all and deciding the original was fine, then saving that.

Now I can see the folder of Raw photos and get a nice overview of them. I can process them in the same program, very easily try all my presets to see which looks best just by hovering over each preset (imported from Camera Raw), do any further tweaking with all the settings in a sidebar, not get distracted by the plethora of Photoshop options and effects. When one photo is done, just click the arrow key on the keyboard to move to the next photo and do it again. The whole thing takes far less time now.

If I was just a photographer, I would say Lightroom could replace Photoshop almost entirely. Personally, I enjoy messing with photos too much; adding lomo-style effects and vintage textures, lots of layers and blending and so on, so I don’t think I will ever be able to replace Photoshop.

The photo I started with was okay, but nothing particularly interesting. The exposure was good, but the real scene was more dramatic. I’ve tried to recreate that scene the way I saw it. And, admittedly, enhance it to the way I wish I had seen it.

Step One – Shadows/Highlights

Duplicate the photo layer. Photoshop doesn’t yet have the ability to have Shadows/Highlights as an Adjustment Layer, so I like to keep a backup of the original photo for fine-tuning later on.

To give it a bit more of an HDR look (which is how our eyes see), I used the Shadows/Highlights tool . I kept the settings subtle to just bring a bit more detail into the clouds and to brighten the dark areas of the road and trees.

Step Two – Darken the Sky

Ensure your foreground colour is set to Black (press D to reset the colours to their Defaults)

Now add a Gradient Adjustment Layer . Set the gradient to “Foreground to Transparent”. I want the gradient to be going from black at the top to transparent at the bottom, so I’ve ticked “Reverse”.

Set this Adjustment Layer to Soft Light blend mode and now we have a nice dark sky. A similar effect could have been done by using a Graduated Filter on the camera when taking the photo, but a) I like the control and fine-tuning this offers and b) I don’t have a graduated filter (at least not one that fits my main lens).

Step Three – Super-Sharpen

Finally, to give the image more impact, I used some super-sharpening. My preferred method of sharpening (everyone seems to have their own way) is using the High Pass filter.

To use this, I needed to first flatten the image into a new layer above all the others (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E – a very useful shortcut!).

Then to Filters > Other (at the bottom) > High Pass. The amount depends on the size of your photo and the effect you want. A small number (0.5 or 1) is good for normal sharpening. But for this super-sharpening effect, I went with 50.

Now, you should have a mostly grayscale image with a bit of smudged colour. I prefer to keep it all grayscale, but sometimes the extra colour looks good. To remove the colour I use Ctrl+Shift+U.

Set this layer to Hard Light blend mode to see how it looks. Now, turn the layer off and on a few times to compare. The unsharpened version almost looks blurry by comparison! The difference is dramatic. Some people will like it, others might think it’s too much. You can (and I usually do) turn the opacity down to keep it subtle.

I don’t usually use that super-sharpening but for this photo it seemed to work well. The method also works well on more texture based photos.

In my original I used my vintage colour technique to adjust the colours further and tuned the opacity of layers to get it looking good to my eyes.

Hopefully this tutorial has given you a couple of new techniques to try out on your own photos. If you’ve used these techniques on one of your photos, I’d love to see what you have come up with – feel free to send me the link in the comments.

Obviously, the sky wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the photos, but it was a dark sky. The sky usually looks better when it’s darker in photos. That’s why graduated filters were made.

If you don’t have one of those, the easiest way to do that is to use a black-to-transparent linear gradient, set to Soft Light blend mode. In these photos, I’ve also added a bit of a HDR effect using the Shadows/Highlights tool and finished it off with some super-sharpening using Highpass with a Radius of 50px (then set that to Hard Light blend mode and removing the colour). Tutorial for that coming tomorrow.

This turned out to be closer to 10 minutes but I was enjoying it. Made using brushes and coloured using a Gradient Map adjustment layer. Size is 1600x1200px.

And a darker version.

Download the PSD file (4mb)

Download Blue version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download Black version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download the template

I’ve always loved these simple pattern wallpapers. They’re the only type I can stand for very long, other than a plain, solid colour.

So, I made this little template for you to make your own. Click the icon above to get a ZIP file containing the Photoshop PSD.

The PSD will open very small. This is to keep the file size down. It’s annoying on sites like deviantart when people make a wallpaper, then have it in a thousand variations of colour and every possible resolution in one ZIP file, making the download 50mb or something ridiculous.

So with this template, you can resize the image yourself to what ever size you like. It’s built with adjustment layers, so it won’t pixelate or blur. You can choose your own pattern or change the colour very easily.

The only down-side is that you need Photoshop to be able to do all this… so if you don’t have Photoshop and want it at a different size, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Pattern resources

Original pattern from 5qm.de, where you can find more patterns.

The Inspiration Gallery has some great old style patterns.

Deviantart also has a good Photoshop Pattern Resources section where you can download patterns already as Photoshop Pattern files.