In honour of it being Halloween month, I wanted to share a tutorial that I thought would fit that theme: stained glass!
This effect looks beautiful and complicated but luckily, it’s not that hard once you know how to do it.
Step 1
As always, we want to start with a base image. For this tutorial, I’m using a royalty-free picture of a Jack O Lantern.
This is usually where I tell you to use whatever picture you want, and technically, you can! But I want to warn you that this effect will look better if the picture isn’t too real life looking. Think cartoon, or clearly already drawn.
Once you have the picture you want set up on your document, you’ll want to get rid of the background, if there is one. In my case, this was achieved by just using the Quick Select tool on my Jack O Lantern and then Erasing the background.
Step 2
This is the part where we’re actually going to make the stained glass. We can do this one of two ways. The first way, takes forever and involves creating all the shapes yourself using the Line Tool.
The way I’m going to show you, however, is far easier. Just go on up to the top menu and go to Filter then click on Filter Gallery.
Once the Filter Gallery opens, you’ll want to open the folger on the right-hand side that’s labelled Texture and then click on the effect that says Stained Glass.
You’ll want to play around with the values that are listed all the way in the right-side panel to get the correct effect for your image.
The Cell Size changes the size of the stained glass ‘pieces’, Border Thickness changes the line thickness and Light Intensity as the name implies, changes the light.
For my image, I used the following values:
Cell Size: 6
Border Thickness: 4
Light Intensity: 2
Once you’re happy with the effect, click the OK button in the top right to generate it and take you back to the normal work screen.
Step 3
Technically, you can be done at this stage. You’ve successfully applied the stained glass effect to your foreground image. You can save it with a transparent background so you can drag and drop it into any of your other projects.
Or, if you’d like to leave this object as it’s own work file/image, you may want to follow the steps to make the background match. As I’m sure you can see, the white background is kind of ruining the magic of the effect.
To fix this, you’ll want to go to the bottom of your Layer’s Panel and click on the Add New Fill or Adjustment Layer button, then select Gradient from the pop-up menu.
In the Gradient Fill box that appears, you’ll want to select either a gradient you already have, or make a new one if you don’t have one that matches your images theme.
If you don’t know how to make a new Gradient, follow Step 4. If you already know how to make one, and/or already have one you’d like to use, skip to Step 5.
Step 4
To make a new Gradient, double click on whatever the current Gradient is that’s showing in the box to bring up the Gradient Editor.
To change the colours being used in the Gradient, click on the Colour Stop and choose a new colour from the Colour Picker that opens.
To keep with the Halloween theme, I’m going to make an Orange to Black gradient, so those will be the colours I select for each of my Colour Stoppers.
Once you’re happy with the colours of your Gradient, you can click the OK button to apply them.
If you think you’ll use this Gradient again in the future, you can also save it by giving it a name and clicking the New button at the end of the Name field.
Step 5
Now that you have a Gradient for the background you want to use, in the Gradient Fill box, you can play around with the Angle and Style to see what fits with your picture best.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I decided to keep it simple, so I kept the Style as Linear, and didn’t change the Angle.
Once you’re happy with these settings, click OK.
Step 6
Now all we’re going to do is apply the Stained Glass filter to the background image. You may need to change the values used for the Cell Size and Light Intensity, that’s okay!
Play around with them and see what matches your image best. Or, if you’d like, you can change the values so that instead of matching your foreground object exactly, you can make it stand out slightly.
For example, I made my background values as follows:
Cell Size: 10
Border Thickness: 4
Light Intensity: 5
As you can see, I changed the values, and here is what it looks like:
If you’re curious, here is what the image looks like when I used the same values for both the fore- and background:
Step 7
My image doesn’t look quite as right as I think it could, so I’m just going to change my Jack O Lantern’s Layer Type from Normal to Hard Light.
If your image looks like it doesn’t need anything after adding the stained glass effect to the background, feel free to skip this step and go right to saving because we’re done!
As I said earlier, this last little tweak (and some little ones above) will depend on the image you started with, do to the difference in colours, style, etc. So feel free to play around with the values to find what works best for you!
Like this tutorial? Check out more here!
If you noticed my Layers panel has an extra layer, this is because I created 2 tear drop shapes. The first one I forgot to fill with white, and then wondered why Step 3 wasn’t working. I had to go back and re-draw the tear, so it will be a different shape for the rest of the tutorial. Also see? Even us pros mess up!
The option Merge Layers shouldn’t be greyed out if you have both selected. My option is greyed out because my computer is dumb sometimes and won’t show a click drop-down menu when I want it to. The picture above is my options while only having 1 layer selected.
Gradient Editor
Double click Colour Stop to bring up Colour Picker
