cehwiedel: Opinion, Analysis, Humor,
Satire, Mystery, Fantasy & Facts
Photoshop CS2
In the Tips and Tricks department of the
November/December 2005 deadtree edition of Layers magazine, a trick to create quick
backgrounds is described:
Need a quick and easy (yet visually
interesting) background? Open a new document, somewhat larger
than your project. Drag a gradient — any gradient.
(Really! This trick works with two-color, rainbow, even
black-to-white gradients, and of any shape.) Duplicate the
layer (Command-J [PC: Control-J]). Use the Edit>Transform
commands to flip the upper layer vertically or horizontally, or
rotate. Change the upper layer’s blend mode to Exclusion
in the Layers palette. Press Command-E (PC: Control-E) to merge
the layers. Apply the Plastic Wrap filter
(Filter>Artistic>Plastic Wrap). I generally start with
the settings Highlight Strength: 20, Detail: 7, Smoothness: 2,
and adjust from there. Sharpen. Select a section that looks
good, copy-and-paste it into your working document, and scale
as necessary.
Next to the text in the magazine are nine
wonderful examples showing the results possible using the
technique — but when I tried it, I couldn’t get
anything that I really liked.
On a whim, instead of a gradient, I tried
using a cropped photo of a flower, and varying not only the
blend mode (from Exclusion to Difference) but also the number
of layers (from 2 up to 4) and the Artistic Filter (sometime
none, sometime Plastic Wrap, sometime Dry Bush, sometime Smudge
Sticks, sometime Poster Edges).
The key, from my point of view, is to
pick a photo (or gradient) that will interact in an interesting
way when rotated or flipped, then blended. Applying the filter
and sharpening give a finish, but that interesting interaction
has to be there first.
