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Photoshop Tips
Add Glow with Layering and Gaussian Blurs in Photoshop
Dateline: September 23, 2005
Version: Photoshop CS
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| London-based illustrator Jason Cook achieved a luminous glow in his editorial
illustration through intense layering and Gaussian Blurs in Photoshop.
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Cook began by importing
a frame rendering of a female
android’s head from Poser,
which was used to create a
finished android head in Cinema
4D. “A lot of my work
comprises 3D-rendered
elements to help build up my
Photoshop images,” Cook
says. After bringing in both
the frame from Poser and
the finished andriod head,
Cook made three duplicates
of the finished android head.
He then changed the original
finished head’s blending
mode to Lighten and moved
the frame layer to the top of
the layer stack.
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On the first duplicate, he used
a Hue/Saturation adjustment to
drastically desaturate in Hue, then
brightened it slightly by increasing
Lightness. He applied a medium-sized
Gaussian Blur and changed the layer
blending mode to Overlay so the
duplicate appeared as if it were underneath
the original. For the second
duplicate layer, Cook simply changed
the Opacity to 11%. On the third, he
applied a medium Gaussian Blur and
set the layer’s blending mode to Soft
Light. He finished the head composite
by setting the top frame’s layer blending
mode to Overlay at 53% Opacity
so if would appear as if the wire was
showing through the female android’s
outer covering.
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To create the look
of a portion of the
android’s face being
pulled off on the right
side, Cook duplicated
the original, and pumped
up the Contrast and
Brightness to nearly
100 in order to blow
out detail and lose all
the lighter tones in the
image. Cook then used
the Lasso tool to select
portions of the duplicate
and deleted them to create
the fragment of the
android’s outer covering,
then set the layer blending
mode to Luminosity. Click to enlarge the image at left.
The final image is shown below (click to enlarge).
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Jason Jaroslav Cook is a self-described digital illustrator and pixel pusher based in London, England.
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