Tag Archives: book cover help

Writing, Writing Tips

Changing Eye Colour (PHSH Effect #8)

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Found the perfect royalty free image that fits your character, but they have the wrong coloured eyes? Tired of wading through endless ‘guy with beard’ pics trying to find the perfect one?

This tutorials’ for you!

This month, I’ll show you how to change any picture of a person, (or animal, or anything else with an iris) eye colour.

As I’m hoping you’ve picked up at this point in this series, these effects aren’t nearly as hard as one might think. There is more than one way to achieve this, but I’ll show you the easier way that I’ve found.

 

Alright, so to go from this:

to this:

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Purple Eye - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Follow below:

 

Step 1. Open your image in Photoshop. Make a duplicate layer of it. (Just in case you mess up) For this tutorial, I’ll just be using the dog photo from above.

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Duplicate Dog - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 2. Using the Eliptical Marque Tool, draw a circle around the iris (the part of the eye with colour).

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Iris Selected - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 3. Go to the top Menu bar and go to Select – Modify – Feather and set it to 10px. The circle you drew should get a tad smaller – don’t worry, it’s supposed to.

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Select Modify Feather - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Feather 10px - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 4. Go back up to the top Menu and go to Layer – Create Clipping Mask

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Layers Create Clipping Mask - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 5. Once you did that, then go back up to Image, and this time go to Adjustments – Black and White, and make all the values 0.

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Image Adjustments Black and White - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Changing Eye Colour - Black and White 0 - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 6. Now to actually change the eye colour. Go to the Layers panel, down at the bottom, and go to Solid Colour, and pick a colour. Literally any colour you want.

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Layers, Solid Colour - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help, changing eye colour

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Solid Colour - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Step 7. If the colour goes outside the iris, that’s okay. If that happens, you can just use the Eraser tool and erase around the part that’s outside the eye. Also, if the colour is very clearly over the pupil, you can erase that part too, to make it look more realistic. Or, (sometimes) you can get away with changing the Opacity of the colour, so it’s not so obviously over the pupil.

AterImber.com - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Opacity - phsh effect, phsh tutorial, phsh help, writing help

Aaaand, that’s it! Yep, told you it was easy. Now you can delete the duplicated layer and don’t forget the most important step of all: Save!

Like this tutorial? Check out more here!

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Writing, Writing Tips

Removing a Foreground Object (PHSH Effect #6)

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Last month, I showed you how to make a transparent background, this month, I’ll show you how to remove a foreground object.

You’ll learn how to turn this:

To that.

Don’t worry, like most of the effects I’ve shown you so far, it’s very simple to do, and is an amazing time saver.

Step 1. To keep things simple, I’ll just use the same beach picture.

Step 2. Choose the Lasso tool, and draw a circle around the object you want to remove. Be sure to get a bit of the background into the selection.

AterImber.com - Writing - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Removing a Foreground Object - Lasso Tool

AterImber.com - Writing - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Removing a Foreground Object - Lasso Selection

Step 3. Go up to Edit – Fill, and choose Content Aware from the drop-down.

AterImber.com - Writing - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Removing a Foreground Object - Edit - Fill

AterImber.com - Writing - Writing Tips - PHSH Effect Series - Removing a Foreground Object - Content Aware Box

Click ‘Okay’ and the object should have disappeared, and now should be replaced with the background. Click back to the Lasso tool and Deselect, and you can now save your new foreground object removed picture.

And that’s it! Told you it was easy.

It does get a little trickier if there’s different parts to the background. For example, if you’re trying to remove multiple objects from a more complicated image, it may get ‘confused’ and remove an object in the sky by replacing it with ground, and an object on the ground with sky. This is slightly annoying, but you can always undo and redo this effect as many times as needed until you get the object out. I actually had this problem while I was working on my newest book (The Haunted Corpse) cover.

This was the original image:

The Haunted Corpse Original Picture

And this is my cover:

The Haunted Corpse Cover

I got the moon and birds out without much issue, but the lady standing to the very right of the castle was a different story. Because I’d replaced objects in the sky, every time I tried to replace her, it kept replacing her with clouds, instead of with trees. It took a while, but I finally got it. If that happens to you, I recommend removing the objects one at a time. So, remove an object from the image, save, re-open, remove the second object, save, etc. It takes longer, but it will keep photoshop from getting confused. (Hopefully)

Next month, I’ll show you the opposite, how to remove backgrounds from the image.

Like this tutorial? Check out the rest of the series here!

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