This is an extremely simple tutorial that will give a pretty interesting touch to your photos and designs. What we are going to do is to give more depth to photos, in an almost 3D-ish way.

1 – First of all, we’ll get our image. I chose the following one from a Paris Hilton ad (click on images to enlarge):

2 – Now create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N). Fill it with black. Adjust opacity to 45/50%.

3 – Using the lasso tool, loosely outline the figure trying to be quite away from the borders. (click below image to enlarge):

4 – Now go to Select > Feather and choose a value as you see fit. In this case, I chose 30px.

5 – With this new feathered selection, simply delete it and you’ll have a new image with great depth. Use a very soft brush to delete certain parts (I used it for the burger, small portions of hair and one of her bracelets)

6 – Done. If you want to go further, simply enhance the image. I used a very little airbrush and a level adjustment layer on top of everything and voilà! here’s the end result:

Alternatives

You may think this is all cool and dandy with dark backgrounds, but what with cleared backgrounds? The short easy answer is “cut the figure and apply it over a dark background”. But check another option you can do:

I took this beautiful hippie girl in a forest picture

and converted it into this:

How did I achieve this? I just did exactly the following I said before, only that this time the feathered layer has its blending mode set to overlay and opacity in 36%.

Experiment, try different settings and the may the force be with you!

One of the things I saw many people fails at in Photoshop is to create convincing cigarette smoke. It’s just a matter of observation, so it’s really simple when you think about it. Most people thinks about smoke like fluffy clouds. That’s OK… for fluffy clouds. They’re made of steam, while smoke is a very different thing, and cigarette smoke has its particularities. I won’t enter on the physics behind it, but let’s say that cigarette smoke is made of threads of smoke rather than clouds of smoke. And it’s white, almost 100% white.

So without further ado, let’s enter the tutorial

Creating cigarette smoke Photoshop tutorial

First, let’s open a photo with someone smoking. For this example, I took a pic of Lindsay Lohan which also needs some work, so I’ll create the smoke, manipulate it to look as letters and work on enhancing the picture, all in the same tutorial. You can’t complaint, huh?

This is my picture, feel free to choose any other you like

Now that we have the pic to work with, let’s start by the very basic:
1- Open the document
2- Press Ctrl+J to duplicate the background so you have a backup just in case
3- Name the new layer as you like

Creating the smoke
1- Press D to set your foreground and background colors to black and white
2- Create a new layer. Name it smoke
3- From the cigarette, draw an inverted triangle with the lasso tool
4- Go to Filter > Render > Clouds
5- Press Ctrl+F until you get around 70% of white and 30% of black

by now you should have something like this:

6- with the lasso area still selected, make sure you have black set as foreground color and go to Select > Color Range. Make sure you have these values: Select: Sample Colors / Fuzziness: 200 and the Selection ratio checked. Press OK and it will select a little area of your smoke. Delete it (press Del) and you’re done with this step.

7- Press Ctrl+D to deselect everything

8- Now duplicate the layer using Ctrl+J

9- Go to Filters > Distort > Wave and use the following on any one of the layers (click on the image if you don’t see the values):

10 – Select the other layer and change values slightly. From top to bottom I’ve used 5 – 10 – 137 – 15 – 20

11 – You’ll probably need to arrange the layers, maybe flip them horizontally, do it as you see it fits

12 – now set the blending options to Hard Light 100% for the lower layer and Linear Dodge 45% for the upper smoke layer (or play with the blending options as you like). If you need it, adjust curves on any of the layers to make it look as you want.

13 – That’s it! This is what I ended with so far (click to enlarge):

let’s add some pizzaz! This photo needs some retouch, so we’ll do a very fast but nice retouch in a few steps

Fast Photo Retouch

1 – Press Ctrl+A to select everything, then Ctrl+Shift+C to copy all layers combined. Then Ctrl+V to paste it (as you may notice, I use mostly keyword macros, it makes your work really fast, so be sure to learn them!)

2 – Now go to Filters > Blur > Surface Blur . Use the following values: Radius 7 / Threshold: 23 (it may be different for larger or smaller images so those are just guideline values)

3 – Set that layer to Hard Light and 60% (or adjust as desired, those are the values I used)

4 – Duplicate the layer using Ctrl+J

5 – Set the blending options to Screen 45% (or adjust as desired, those are the values I used)

6 – If you need it, create an adjustment layer on top of all layers. You can do so by going to the layers window and you can find it at the bottom. Click on that semi-circle you see with the red arrow and you’ll see a menu. Select Curves and adjust as needed

7 – Done!

Playing with this Photoshop Tutorial

Now I’m sure you can think on many ideas and usages for what you learned in this tutorial. I did something like the following by using a curvy font letter by letter, rasterized it and from there did the same steps I told you previously. It may look like a lot of work but if you learned the key macros, it’s a 3-4 minutes work, check it out!

Hope you liked it, please comment and make as many questions as you want. If you link to this tutorial, give me a shout