Photoshop Tutorial: Airbrushed Film Poster Style Photo Effect

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How's it going everyone this is Chris from Spoon Graphics with another video tutorial. Now I've always loved the style of those classic movie posters that were drawn by hand with advanced air brushing techniques, from master artists like Drew Struzan. Imagine the poster art for original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones movies, and pretty much any action/adventure film from the 80s! They all feature incredibly life-like depictions of the the actors and characters, which are almost like photos, but they have a clear hand painted appearance with subtle brush strokes, outlining marks and quite high contrast with vibrant colours. In today's Photoshop tutorial I'm going to show you a mix of filters and adjustments we can apply to a photograph to mimic that retro style airbrushed painted look. The effect works best with quite dark and low key photos, especially those with a lots of grainy details, rather than clean and bright studio shots with perfect skin tones. The image I'll be working with is this stock photo of an old western cowboy from Shutterstock. So begin by opening your chosen image in Adobe Photoshop. Since the effect works best with gruff details, start by adding a High Pass overlay to bring out the details. Drag the background layer onto the new layer icon to make a duplicate, then go to Filter > Other > High Pass. Enter 2 pixels so you can just see the image emerging from the grey overlay. Change this layer's blending mode to Linear Light to dramatically sharpen the image. Create a snapshot of the image as a new layer by going to Layer > Merge Visible, but hold the ALT key while clicking the option to create a copy at the top of the layer stack. The first key ingredient for this effect is the Oil Paint filter, which helps move the picture from a photo to a hand painted image. Go to Filter > Stylize > Oil Paint. Change the Stylization option to 2, the leave the rest of the settings at 10. Drag this Oil Paint layer over the new icon, or use the shortcut CMD+J to make a duplicate, then change the blending mode to Overlay to darken the image and boost the colours and contrast. Switch over to the Channels panel, then hold the CMD key while clicking on the RGB thumbnail to load a selection of the highlights of the subject. Switch back to the Layers panel and Copy and Paste this channels selection onto a new layer. Change the blending mode of this highlights layer to Vivid Light to increase the colours and contrast even further, which helps replicate the tones of a hand painted image. Tone it down slightly by reducing the opacity to around 80%. Head to the Select menu, then choose Reselect the load the channels selection again, then create a new layer. Fill this selection with pure white using the CMD+Backspace shortcut. Change this layer's blending mode to Soft Light to tone down some of the vibrancy and bring back some brightness to the image. Use the Merge Visible command while holding the ALT key to make a new snapshot, or using the finger contorting shortcut CMD+ALT+Shift+E. We'll use this layer to add some brushed outlines to the effect. Head to Filter > Filter Gallery, then navigate to the Poster Edges effect under the Artistic menu. Change the settings to 0 Edge Thickness and 0 Edge Intensity, then max out the Posterization. This effect adds some nice darker outlining marks, but another key aesthetic of those real airbrushed posters is similar highlight strokes. Create a duplicate of this Poster Edges layer, then go to Image > Adjustment > Desaturate. Head back to the Filter Gallery, and go to Stylize > Glowing Edges. Change the settings to 1 Edge Width, 2 Edge Brightness and 1 Smoothness. Change this layer's blending mode to Screen to render the black areas transparent, leaving just the white highlight lines. Reduce the opacity to around 70%. Another common theme of classic film posters is a heavy grain texture. Create a new layer then go to Edit > Fill. Change the drop down menu to 50% Gray. Head to Filter > Noise > Add Noise and configure the settings to 20% with the Gaussian and Monochromatic options checked. Change the blending mode of this layer to Overlay to allow the underlying artwork to show through. To finish off the effect, we can overlay an old paper texture to replicate the aged look of those real poster prints. You can find this paper texture image for free from Pexels.com. Paste it into the document, then change the blending mode to Soft Light. The final result does a great job of mimicking the airbrushed effect seen on those retro film posters. The initial oil paint filter did a lot of the work by adding brushed strokes to the photograph, then a range of contrast and colour boosts, along with the outlining marks helped further replicate the hand painted look. The grainy overlay and paper texture finished it off nicely with a tactile printed poster appearance. So I hope you have some fun using this effect in your projects. If you enjoyed the video or learnt anything new be sure to subscribe to the Spoon Graphics Youtube channel to stick around for more, and visit my website at Spoon.Graphics to find more written tutorials and free design resources. Big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. If you want to set up a great looking portfolio, website or online store, remember to make use of the code Spooner to get 10% off. So as always thank you very much for watching, and I'll catch you all later.
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Channel: Spoon Graphics
Views: 412,233
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: photoshop, adobe photoshop, photoshop tutorial, adobe photoshop tutorial, photoshop photo effect tutorial, photo effect tutorial, photoshop photo effect, photoshop airbrushed effect, photoshop film poster, photoshop movie poster, photoshop film poster effect, photoshop movie poster effect, photoshop retro photo effect, photoshop vintage photo effect, photoshop film poster photo effect, photoshop film poster photo effect tutorial, film poster effect, drew struzan effect, tutorial
Id: QHF8_OY6Mw4
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 5min 39sec (339 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 21 2017
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