This article was written 21.11.25, please excuse any reference/joke that’s no longer applicable.
Now that it’s summer and we’re finally getting to go back outside in the nice weather, the timing couldn’t be more perfect to pivot away from the ‘depressing’ rain effect I showed you last time, and show you how to make something much ‘happier’: Glitter!
Also, Pride is this month, so it seemed extra fitting, albeit a little cliché.
Let’s get started!
Step 1
First step for this effect, is you’ll need to find a Glitter Texture picture, and have a picture you want to add glitter to. For simplicity, I’m going to be doing this tutorial with a picture of an eye, and apply the glitter to look like eye shadow.
That said, you can definitely use this technique to add glitter in more fantasy-based pictures, if needed. (I’ll show you an example at the end of the tutorial)
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this yet or not, but if you haven’t found a good royalty-free website to get pictures from (unfortunately you can’t just use Google-d pictures for book covers), Pixabay and Pexels are great websites.
Once you have both pictures, open a new PHSH project, and place both the glitter, and base picture into it, and resize if necessary. Then, (if needed), drag the glitter layer so it’s on top of the base picture.
You can also change the glitter layer’s Opacity so you can see the base picture through the layer.
Step 2
Once you have your pictures set, we’re going to use the Eraser tool to erase parts of the glitter picture we don’t need. Using a pretty big sized brush, and a high percent of Hardness, start erasing the parts of the glitter picture you don’t need.
In my case, this would be everything except for the part of the picture that’s covering the upper eyelid.
Step 3
Once you’ve erased everything on the glitter layer you don’t need, you can go ahead and change it’s Opacity back to 100%.
While still in the Layers panel, go over to the Blend Mode (which is the drop-down menu directly to the left of the Opacity), and change it from Normal to Overlay, or Screen. Use whichever one looks best with the picture you have. In my case, I used Overlay.
Step 4
Once this is done, go ahead and clean up the edges of the glitter layer, if needed. You can also slightly lower the Opacity if you need to. Depending on your image, I wouldn’t make it too low, though, since you want the glitter to be seen over the picture.
And there you have it! A simple way to add glitter to most pictures.
Obviously, this is a pretty simple way to show you how to add glitter to something. However, the steps are almost exactly the same, even if you, for example, wanted to make a vampire/give a person glittery skin.
For this image, I started with the exact same steps as above, but I ended up lowering the Opacity a little more, and, I also right-clicked on the glitter layer and used the Warp function to give it a slightly ‘bent’ appearance, so it would look more like it was attached to the girl’s skin.
Warping the glitter layer is an optional step. I’ve found it tends to only work with certain images, while on others, you can’t tell at all that it was used.
But go ahead and play around to see what works best for you.
You’ll want to get pretty good at applying glitter to images, because the next tutorial I’m gonna be showing you is an effect that just so happens to pair well with this one:
Like this tutorial? Check out the rest of them here!
While this tutorial isn’t too realistic (we’re not adding this effect to a person or animal), I still want to say that if seeing blood makes you nauseous, faint or is in any way triggering for you, please skip this tutorial, or continue with caution.
The purpose of these tutorials is to be helpful, not to negatively affect a persons’ health or cause anyone any harm.
This is the last PHSH tutorial for 2020, so please feel free to check out the other tutorials while you wait for the next one, which will be coming some time next year.
Keep an eye on my Twitter account for posting updates and anouncements!
Since we’re in October now, I thought what better PHSH effect to teach you then to add blood drips to an image?
It also just so happened to work out that this is the 13th tutorial – it’s like it was meant to be!
As with most of these other tutorials, it isn’t actually that hard, once you know how to do it. There’s just a few very precise steps you need to follow. And, as always, practice makes perfect, so the more times you do it, the better you’ll get!
Let’s get into it.
Step 1:
This will either work on text or an image, but for the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to stick with a plain text layer. The technique is the same whether you’re doing a basic picture or something more complicated, so it’s best to start simple, and work your way up.
Starting with Step 1, which is opening a new document, and adding some type/a word to a layer. To keep with today’s theme, I’m just going to type Halloween. The colour doesn’t matter, but it may look more realistic to use a closer-to-blood colour.
Step 2:
Using your brush tool (and a shade of red), hold down SHIFT and make vertical lines coming out of the ends of the words. (Holding down SHIFT will make the lines perfectly straight) You’ll also want to vary the length of the lines and the size of the brush you use, so it looks more realistic.
Tip: Before you use the brush tool on your Type Layer, you may get a dialogue box that says something like ‘you must rasterize this layer before proceeding, and it will no longer be editable as a Type Layer’. Just click ‘Okay’. This just means you can’t use the type tool to edit the layer anymore, but that’s okay. If you mess up you can always delete this layer and make a new Type layer.
Or if you like, you can paint the lines/drips in a new blank layer, so you don’t mess up the text.
Example:
Compared to:
See the difference? The varied length and size already is starting to look like blood!
Step 3:
Now that you have your lines, we’re gonna go up to Filter – Liquify.
You may get a dialogue box that says something like ‘Liquify supports hardware acceleration to improve performance. Verify that ‘Use Graphics Processor’ is enabled in Performance Preferences.’ Just click okay, and then once it opens, set the following values in the Tool Options panel on the right hand side:
Brush Size: 40
Brush Density: 25
Brush Pressure: 48
Brush Rate: 28
The lines you made may show up by themselves in the Liquify panel, this is okay! It’s just because I painted them in a different layer than the Type Layer, just in case I needed to change something.
This technique will work whether they’re attached to the word or not.
Step 4:
Now that you’ve set the Tool Options, select the Pucker tool from the left side menu, and drag it down the line you made, stopping just short of the end. Do this for all the lines you made. To do this step, we don’t need to keep the lines perfectly straight, because blood doesn’t drip in a perfectly straight line. So, try your best to make the lines look a bit ‘wiggly’ or just non-straight.
You may also have to hold the brush an extra second above the bottom, just so this part is the most puckered. (You can also change the Brush Size if needed)
Step 5:
Now to make the actual blood droplets, use the Bloat Tool (directly underneath the Pucker Tool) and hold on the ends (or wherever you want blood drops) until you get the desired blood drop size.
Repeat on all the lines, and then once you’re done, click Okay. If you need to, you can always re-pucker parts of the lines, or if you accidentally puckered part of the line too much, you can use the Bloat Tool to make it more even.
Step 6:
This is looking pretty good, but they’re still not quite as realistic as they could be. So now, we’re just going to add a simple Drop Shadow to the layer.
If you need help in doing this, head back on over to my Drop Shadow tutorial.
Be sure to un-check the box marked Use Global Light, and then play with the Distance, Spread and Size until it looks right for your document. You can also change the Opacity to 100%, and the shadow Colour by clicking on the colour square, and selecting a new colour.
I’m going to make the new colour a darker shade of red, instead of pure black.
Once you’re happy with how the drop shadow looks, click Okay.
If you did the blood drips on a separate layer like I did, then you will also have to add a Drop Shadow to the word Halloween (or whatever word you typed), because as you can see right now, it looks a bit odd to have a drop shadow on the blood, and not on the word.
These next few steps are optional, but I feel it helps take things a step further, and makes the effect look better. However, this completely depends on what you’re adding blood drips to, so it may not be needed. This is why I always suggest playing around with the effects, so you find what works best for you. That said, this is a Halloween themed tutorial, so I think the extra steps below help add that extra ‘creepy’ vibe.
Step 7:
We’re going to go back into the Blending Options, and this time we’re going to click Bevel and Emboss.
Set the Levels to the settings below:
Inner Bevel
Technique: Smooth
Depth: 590
Up
Size: 10
Soften: 7
Shading:
Angle: 120, 30
Highlight Mode: Hard Light, Opacity: 63
Shadow Mode: Overlay, Opacity: 80
Then set the Contour to the below:
Gaussian (Round one that looks like a hill)
Range: 0
Step 8:
And finally, we’re going to add a Gradient Overlay, with the below settings:
Soft Light
Opacity: 24
And add it to the Type layer as well:
And to add just that little extra ‘oomph’ to the image, I’m going to change the background colour to black, so the red colour really pops.
As always, don’t forget to save your work! (Both as a PHSH file, and as a JPEG/PNG)
Then you can use the image to show your friends, and keeping the photoshop file is always a must, just in case you forget how some of the steps, or if the picture file somehow gets corrupt, or you need to quickly go back and change something.
And ta-da! That’s it. Not too hard, eh? I would suggest to practice this technique with different text, and then once you feel comfortable, to move on to actual pictures. Since this is the last tutorial of the year, you’ll have lots of time to practice!
In keeping with the theme from last month, we’ll be continuing with text manipulations (check out the basics here). Specifically, we’ll be going through the different kinds of Warping Text there is.
Now, there are 15 different options to warp text in PHSH, I’m going to go through all of them, but will try to keep it brief. You can play around with the settings yourself and see what you like best.
Like the Drop Shadow, Warping Text isn’t the hardest PHSH effect to learn, but can definitely come in handy.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Step 1: Make a new document/project. (Mine is 6in x 6in, for simplicity)
Step 2: Using the Type tool, add text to the document. For the sake of the tutorial, I’m going to just work with ‘warp text’. The Warp Text effect will work with whatever you type, so if you need to say add text to a book cover (or poster), it won’t matter.
To keep things basic, I’m also just going to stick with black text on a white background, and Times New Roman, but again, this effect will work with almost every font/colour/background.
Step 3: While still using the Type tool, right click in the text box, then select Warp Text from the options.
Step 4: From the Style drop-down menu, first warp option we’ll be using is the Arc. (If you’re using a different version of PHSH, the order of the effects may change, and/or you may not have all the effects listed)
Once you click on the Arc option, you’ll notice your text is well, arced. See those Bend, Horizontal Distortion and Vertical Distortion options? These are the things we’ll be using for all the effects in this dialogue box. And, depending on the values, they’ll change how the text looks.
For example, my default Bend value is +50. This made the text arc so wide that it’s now cut off from the document. To get it back on the document, I can either lessen the Bend value, or, I can click ‘Okay’ (if you’re happy with the warping done) and then I could easily just move the text layer over so it’s no longer off the edge of the document.
Because this is just a tutorial, I’ll ‘fix’ it by lessening the Bend. To do this, just click and drag the arrow along the line, and you should be able to see the text change with the changing Bend in real time.
See how the text is getting less Arced? If you go past the 0 on the scale, it will begin to Arc down.
Once you get the right Bend you need, you can move on to if you need to Horizontally or Vertically Distort the Warp. The Horizontal Distortion values will either squish, or enlarge one side of the text, while the Vertical Distortion will make the text look like it’s flying at, or away from you. (Like the scrolling text at the beginning of Star Wars).
I left the Bend at 0 for the following pictures so you can see each value by itself.
Now that you know what these values do, you can use them in conjunction with each other.
The below pictures are the text with a Bend + Vertical and Bend + Horizontal Distortions.
That’s how those values act with the Arc Style. If we choose another Style from the drop-down, the options will remain the same, but the way the text is warped will change.
To keep things simple, I’m just going to go down the list in order, and show the effect with Bend only. The Horizontal and Vertical Distortions do the same thing for each, and I don’t want the pictures to get too repetitive.
You can also change the options from being applied horizontally to vertically, at the top, just under the Style selection.
Feel free to play around with these on your own as needed, too. And, once you find a style of warping you like, don’t forget to save!
Next month I’ll be sticking with the text effects and show you how to make this:
Like this article? Check out the rest of the photoshop tutorial series here!
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You’ve just finished writing this amazing novel, and are so pumped to get it out and into the world. All your dedication, time and energy has been poured into this baby of yours, and you want nothing more then to see it flourish.
Now there’s only one problem: It needs a cover.
But, you’re a writer, you don’t know how to design a book cover! You can barely crop an image in Photoshop – maybe you don’t even have Photoshop. And you definitely can’t shell out a bunch of money to hire somebody design it for you. (There’s a reason ‘starving artist’ is the phrase and not ‘stuffed artist’)
Well, today’s your lucky day – you’ve found the beginnings of an article series I’m just starting to help people exactly in your shoes learn how to make a cover.
No, I didn’t take any marketing courses, nor do I have any formal training. I took a Media Arts class in gr. 10 and learned how to use Photoshop. However, I was requested by JD Stanley to help with their book covers. Before I helped, JD could barely erase a background. Oh, and I made all my own covers, too. (Not to mention the book posters and collages on this website)
Bottom line, I’m not professionally trained – but I know my way around enough to do things myself. It was actually JD who told me I could start this series! (Seriously, some of JD’s questions boggled my mind – what do you mean you don’t know how to zoom in?)
Fear not, I’ll be giving you the low-down throughout the next few months on how you too can not-suck at using Photoshop.
Let’s start at the very beginning: Making a New Document.
Step 1: Do you have Photoshop? If not, you should go download it. (I use CS6, so if you have a newer/older version some details may differ) If you already have it, you’re part-way there!
Step 2: Open Photoshop. (… Double click on the desktop icon)
Step 3: Go to File listed in the top menu and select New from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: In the box that popped up, give your file a name. I just chose to keep it simple.
Tip: PHSH = short form for Photoshop. From here on out, I’ll be referring to the program by the short form, because it’s faster to type.
You’ll also want to set the dimensions. My dimensions are set to 1920×1080 (pixels) by default because I was taking screen-shots of myself opening PHSH for this tutorial. You can make the dimensions however big/small you want. You also don’t have to use ‘pixels’ as the unit of measure. I typically use inches. I would suggest you make your dimensions 10x10in for simplicity.
Also, if your Resolution is set to 72px by default, you’ll most likely want to change it to 300px – this will make the image clearer.
Once you do this, click the Okay button.
Step 5: Now that this is done, you should see a white page that’s to your specified dimensions. This is your document size.
If you can’t see the edges of your document, you might be zoomed in. Hold down CTRL and press the minus button (beside the 0 on the keyboard) to Zoom Out. Zoom Out until you can see the edges of the document. This will make working easier.
Congratulations, you just made your first PHSH file! That wasn’t so hard, was it?
Alright, now I’ll be going through the Tools on the Toolbar that are listed down the left-side of the program.
This first one is the Pointer/Mouse function. It does exactly what you’d think – let’s you use your mouse as normal within the document. Allows you to click on different things, etc. You’ll be switching back to this a lot while you work, so it’s important you know what it does.
Next you have the Selection Tool. This allows you to make a selection around a certain part of an image, cut/crop/copy and/or protect a section of a picture from being Erased.
Actually, wait, I’m not gonna go through all the tools right now – I forgot a step. To show you what some of these tools do, you’re gonna need a picture!
Okay, so to Insert a Picture into a document:
Step 1: First, I want you to right click on the image below, and select Save Image As… from the menu. Give it a name, and save it to your Desktop, for simplicity.
Step 2: Now you have the image, go back up to File, and this time, instead of clicking ‘New’, click on Open.
This should bring you to your Desktop. Click on the image I just had you save, and then hit ‘Open’. This will open the image in a new PHSH document.
See those tabs? Anytime you have more then 1 PHSH file open, you’ll be able to switch between them by clicking on the tabs.
Step 3: Okay, now we have the image, and our blank document. You’re gonna want to move the picture to the new document.
To do this, you’ll want to click on the tab that’s the picture, and drag it off the line, a little to the left. Then let go – this makes the file open in a new PHSH window. (If you’ve ever accidentally opened a link in a new Window instead of Tab on your browser, it’s exactly the same as that, but in PHSH. If you haven’t done that, don’t worry.)
Now, click on the image itself, not the tab, and drag the image into the blank document. Let go once it’s there, and you should see a New Layer with the image was created in your blank document (which should now have the picture)
Now that we have the image in our document, you can Exit the image that’s still open in the window – we don’t need it anymore.
To center the image, click on Layer 1 (if it’s highlighted in Blue that layer is already selected) then, go back to your image, and drag it down into the document until it’s centered.
And that’s how you move a picture into your PHSH file!
Okay, now that we’ve covered that, I’ll be going back to some of the Tools.
I’ll go back to showing you the Select Tool.
Now that we have an image, I’m going to show you how to erase part of the image. (Especially because the PHSH pictures inside a PHSH picture is starting to confuse me, so we’re gonna fix that)
Okay, first: See the Rulers that are around the edges of the file? Click and drag down from the top Ruler – a turquoise/green line should now be on the document – this is called a Guideline. If you don’t have Rulers showing, go up to View and click on the Ruler option listed. (There should now be a check mark next to the option – this means it’s turned on)
You’ll want to drag this Guideline to the edge of the image we centered. Then, go back up to the top, and drag another one to the bottom. Drag two more Guidelines out from the left-side Ruler, so now the image should be completely boxed in by the Guidelines.
Now that you have your Guidelines in place, go over to the Toolbar, and click on the Select Tool.
Click and drag the outline box to the dimensions of the Guidelines. (It might ‘snap’ once you get close to the lines, that’s okay) Let go, and now you should see a dotted box along the Guidelines.
Right-click in the Selected box/Guideline area, and select the Select Inverse option. You should notice that now there’s a bigger perforated box outlining the whole picture.
Now comes the less confusing part. Go back to your Toolbar, and select the Eraser tool.
Now that you’ve got the Eraser selected, click and drag your mouse (exactly how you used to do it in Paint) around the image, and you’ll begin erasing the outer-part, without touching the part we selected before. Because we inverted the selection, the part we want to keep is safe, and you’ll only erase the outside of the image, regardless of if your mouse touches the part we want to keep.
(Your background colour is hopefully white instead of red, don’t mind that. It’s typically white)
Continue erasing until just the middle part remains.
Now, go back up to the Select tool, right-click again on the image, and this time click on Deselect. Now the selected box is gone, you’re left with only the image. To get rid of the Guidelines, you can just drag them back up into the Rulers and they’ll disappear. (Make sure you switch from the Select tool back to the Mouse tool)
Now that we’ve erased the background, we need to change the dimensions of the document, to get rid of all the white space.
To do this, (the easiest way) is to drag the picture to the top left corner, and then place two Guidelines at the bottom and to the right of the image, taking note of the dimensions.
Once you’ve made a note of the Guideline dimensions, go to the menu at the top and click on Image, then go down to Canvas Size.
In the Canvas Size box, you’ll be able to change the dimensions of your canvas. Type in the dimensions you got from the Guidelines (mine were 3.89cm x 7.21cm) and click Okay.
Don’t freak out – your picture is still here! The canvas size shrunk, so now it’s outside of the canvas size. Using your Mouse tool, drag the image to be centered on the canvas again, and this time, it should be a perfect fit, with no white background showing.
The last step always: SAVE.
We’ll be saving two versions of the file. The first being a .psd or Photoshop file. Saving your work this way allows you to keep all the layers separate. This is especially handy should you need to return to the image later to edit it further. I usually label these saved files as ‘Whatever Project I’m Working On UNFlattened’ so at a glance, it’s faster to know which file is which.
The second version you’ll be saving as, is either a .png or a .jpeg. These are picture files that condense all the layers to be 1 image. These are usually the images that end up on websites, as profile pictures, and, most importantly, the ones allowed to be uploaded for your book cover. Amazon may also require a PDF version, you do it in exactly the same way, except instead of selecting PNG or JPEG from the list, you select PDF.
And there you have it! You now know how to make a new file, crop images, and save in a few different formats. That’s the most basic aspect of PHSH skills you’ll need.
Lastly, I’ll go through a few of the tools you’ll probably use the most.
I’ve already shown you the Mouse, Select and Eraser tool.
Because I don’t want this tutorial to go on too much longer, I’ll just go through the rest of Tools in point form.
Eye-Dropper – This allows you to ‘pick up’ a sample of colour from one part of the file, and use it elsewhere. You’ll notice when you use the Eye dropper, the colour you picked up is now in the Colour Swatches, allowing you to easily use the colour elsewhere in the document.
Paint-Bucket – Exactly what it used to do in Paint. It fills the entire area with whatever colour you select. (If you have it within a closed shape, it will only fill in the closed shape, not the whole canvas)
Blur/Sharpen/Smudge – Again, these do exactly as the name implies. They Blur, Sharpen and/or Smudge the picture. You can change the size of them similar to the Eraser tool. This is especially handy if say, you’re erasing a hair line, and need to not make the edges of hair so defined. (You would blur them slightly to make it look un-erased)
Dodge/Burn/Sponge – I’m not entirely sure what the Dodge or Sponge part of the this tool does (when I used the Dodge tool last, it made the picture turn a grey-er colour), but the Burn tool burns the picture like a lighter. Handy if you want to make the edges of an image appear burned, or if you want to blacken/darken the image as a whole.
Type – Allows you to add text to the picture. This is what I used to add the text on the images used in this tutorial.
Shape – Allows you to add different shapes to the canvas: Square, Rectangle, Line, etc.
Colour Squares – This is where it tells you what colours you’re currently using. The small arrow above the bigger boxes, will switch whatever colours you’re using currently to black and white.
Alight, I know that was a lot of info to take in, so take a breath – you made it all the way to end! Also, I’m sure that wasn’t nearly as daunting a task as you first thought it’d be. PHSH is funny like that, it’s such a big program, and there are a lot of different elements to it – at first glance it’s definitely intimidating. But it doesn’t need to be. All those different elements just mean you can make some kick-ass pictures with it!
I hope you enjoyed this intro to the world of PHSH, and feel free to practice and play around with the program a bit, that’s how I learned some of the stuff I know.
Next time, I’ll show you a very handy way to scale images without distorting them. You can look for that April 8th.
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