Invitation Tutorial, Challenge #97, by stripped

[stripped]

This was actually a nicely simple icon to make. It was done using Photoshop CS4 on a Mac.

I began by rotating the image 30 degrees counter-clockwise, then cropping out my base.



Next I made a copy of that layer so I could preserve the original crop and did a radial blur with a setting of 10.



I made a second crop of the clouds from the image, and modified those with a Distort / Twirl with a setting of -330 (I needed negative to make it rotate the right direction).



I set that layer to a blend mode of multiply over the top of the blurred image.



At this point, I was afraid I was losing the snowboarder, so I grabbed a copy of my original background crop and brought it up, and set it to overlay.



It still needed something, some dot of brightness, because it looked a little muddy to me. I didn't want to brighten the whole thing, so I made an amalgam layer of all the layers so far (Cmd-Optn-Shift-E) and then applied a Render/Lens Flare to that layer with settings of a 105mm lens and picking to center the brightest spot right about the boarder's knees.



And that was it!

Comments

[pensnest]

People keep reminding me of cool things in their tutorials—I've not done much with the Lens Flare, but it is very effective here. Nice.

[stripped]

Thank you! Lens Flare is one of those things where half the time I try to use it, it looks hideous... and a teeny percent of the time it totally saves the icon. :) I think I just love lighting effects (like my love affair with outer glow on blending effects *laughs*).