Some people online wanted to see how I created this photo for my project 365, which you can find here. This is actually very, very easy to do and you need to be an advanced user in photoshop or anything to create. In fact, for this tutorial, I'll be using a free program that's similar to photoshop called Gimp, which is available for both Mac and PC. I'm terrible at talking continuously, so after 50 failed tries at doing a video tutorial, my first one will be a step by step. But who knows, I'll try harder with video tutorials in the future. Click the after the jump for the tutorial.
First after taking my photo, I import my RAW image into Aperture 3. This is Apple's version of Lightroom, which I think is a lot easier to use and is just as good. I do all of my basic photo adjustments in this program first before bringing my images into photoshop. This was a taken on a Nikon D300s with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. I had an off camera Sb-600 speedlight below me, with the light bouncing off a white wall to get that soft light on the left side of my face. There's also a slight fill light from my on camera flash.
After cropping unneeded extra space from the left and bottom of the image, retouching (a pretty rushed one, I knew it didn't really matter this time anyways), and curves adjustments this is the final image that I felt happy with. Time to export.
After exporting the photo and opening your photo in photoshop/gimp/ or what have you, it's time to find the photos you want for your collage. An easy way (and the way I did it) is to gather your photos from your flickr set. Since these photos were going to be representative of the entire year's worth of photos, I could find them all in one place.
I just simply screencapped (Command+Shift+3) two separate times to evenly distribute the photos. You can find free online sites that will do photo collages for you as well, if you don't have a flickr. But I definitely suggest getting one, the community is great and the photos are amazing.
So I then open the images as separate layers in Gimp. To get that clear overlay look, set your collage layer(s) to "Screen" and lower your opacity to however much you see fit. I set both layers to 65% opacity.
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This is how your photo should look at this step. The photos I had in the background added some vibrancy to some of the images which is why I left them there.
After that, I do some slight erasing with a really soft brush set at about 30% opacity and erase around areas of my face like my eyes to emphasize the features. Editing is all about subtlety, I rarely have my brushes, layers, etc at 100%.
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| Final Image! |
And there we have it! Easy right? If you don't want to edit the colors or retouch your photo, this process is completely free using Gimp, so give it a try and feel free to send me a link of your finished result! There are definitely people out there who can produce even more creative results than me.
Awesome tutorial and very well explained. I hope to get this done some time this week. Thank you so much sharing =)
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