Simenon
July 14th, 2009, 09:06 PM
I'm not sure how many Villagers try to get creative with brushes - that is attempting to use a brush for a purpose other than that for which it might seem to be most commonly employed. Perhaps I am just late to the game, but here are a couple of "tricks" that I use rather often:
1) Using Bokeh brushes with a nice flowery color to add simulated flowers to a field or fence line. Yes, you could employ any odd-shaped brush, but it is often quicker to use a Bokeh brush which allows the placement of many "flowers" to be inserted at once. If the coverage area is large, rotating the brush now and then will help to disguise any repeat patterns, and colors can be mixed up if desired. Depending on your picture, you may have to slightly blur to avoid getting hexagonal shaped "flowers", but this tactic works best on background areas where the precise shape of things is beyond a sharp focus area.
2) Using smoke brushes to simulate wisps of hair or even fly-away hair that may have been lost in doing an extraction. Because of their translucent nature, smoke brushes often work better than regular hair brushes for this purpose. Use a hair color appropriate to the subject's own natural hair.
3) Using flare brushes to simulate the white spider lines in the iris of an eye. These are often quite vague or lost altogether in many photos, but this trick works especially nice in portraits and close-up shots, and it is generally faster than painting individual stroke lines. Paint with white, erase any spillover on to eyelids, etc. A slight blur often helps to enhance the edit.
4) Using a cloud brush to create a blue sky on a photo with no evidently distinct sky. Most experienced Elements users are aware that there any number of ways to replace a colorless, vague sky with something more picturesque. One simple and quick way to do this is to use a soft cloud brush set to an appropriate blue color, and to simply plant a few colored clouds over the drab sky in the picture. Adjust opacity and blend mode to suit. Generally the darkening group of blend modes yields the best results if a blend mode is to be employed; often Normal works quite satisfactorily. The formerly vague sky areas now become "clouds" and the painted clouds are now open patches of blue sky.
With any of these edits do not neglect blend modes and opacity settings to achieve the most effective result. Applying these edits on a blank layer adds editing control.
So there you have a few of my favorite tricks. Perhaps other Villagers may wish to share some of their favorite brush strategies.
~ Simenon
1) Using Bokeh brushes with a nice flowery color to add simulated flowers to a field or fence line. Yes, you could employ any odd-shaped brush, but it is often quicker to use a Bokeh brush which allows the placement of many "flowers" to be inserted at once. If the coverage area is large, rotating the brush now and then will help to disguise any repeat patterns, and colors can be mixed up if desired. Depending on your picture, you may have to slightly blur to avoid getting hexagonal shaped "flowers", but this tactic works best on background areas where the precise shape of things is beyond a sharp focus area.
2) Using smoke brushes to simulate wisps of hair or even fly-away hair that may have been lost in doing an extraction. Because of their translucent nature, smoke brushes often work better than regular hair brushes for this purpose. Use a hair color appropriate to the subject's own natural hair.
3) Using flare brushes to simulate the white spider lines in the iris of an eye. These are often quite vague or lost altogether in many photos, but this trick works especially nice in portraits and close-up shots, and it is generally faster than painting individual stroke lines. Paint with white, erase any spillover on to eyelids, etc. A slight blur often helps to enhance the edit.
4) Using a cloud brush to create a blue sky on a photo with no evidently distinct sky. Most experienced Elements users are aware that there any number of ways to replace a colorless, vague sky with something more picturesque. One simple and quick way to do this is to use a soft cloud brush set to an appropriate blue color, and to simply plant a few colored clouds over the drab sky in the picture. Adjust opacity and blend mode to suit. Generally the darkening group of blend modes yields the best results if a blend mode is to be employed; often Normal works quite satisfactorily. The formerly vague sky areas now become "clouds" and the painted clouds are now open patches of blue sky.
With any of these edits do not neglect blend modes and opacity settings to achieve the most effective result. Applying these edits on a blank layer adds editing control.
So there you have a few of my favorite tricks. Perhaps other Villagers may wish to share some of their favorite brush strategies.
~ Simenon