Creating a zombie in Photoshop – shadows and lighting
For the last stage of our zombie I will show you a nice approach to adding shading and shadows and briefly introduce you to smart objects and filters.
Step 1:
Open up the zombie file from the other tutorials in Photoshop, add in a new layer above the background copy layer and set its blend mode to soft light. Take a nice soft brush with a low opacity of around 10% set your foreground colour to black and brush in some shading around her eyes and mouth. You can also add in some green and brown shading to make her skin look more grimey. This may be a good time to clean up your layers palette and group things together if you haven’t already done so. Your layers will look slightly different to mine in the image below as I have converted the bulk of the image to a smart object for the later part of this tutorial.
Step 2:
Once you are happy with your shading we will make some adjustments to make the image dark and more dramatic. First thing we want to do is bring down the brightness of the background, add a new group to the top of the layer stack and call it adjustments, add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer into the group and bring the brightness right down. Accept the adjustment then go in and fill the adjustment layers mask with black, now you can paint it back into the areas you want with a nice soft brush and a white foreground. It is best to do this with a fairly low brush opacity and build it up slowly.
Step 3:
Now we want to add a couple of colour adjustment layers to make it look less warm. Easiest way to do this is either with a solid color adjustment layer or a normal layer filled with a colour. First we will add a new layer above the brightness adjustment layer select a nice grey/blue colour for your foreground colour and hit alt + backspace to fill the layer. Set the layers blend mode to color and reduce the opacity until the other colours in the image are just cooled down a bit, around 30% is great. This time add in a green solid color adjustment layer and set its blend mode to overlay. Again reduce the opacity until you are happy with the effect. You should now have a set up like below without the curves layer which I will cover next.
Step 4:
Next we want to add some cool contrast to the image with a curves adjustment layer. So go ahead and add a curves layer in at the top of the adjustments group and bring the shadows down a bit and the highlights up a little with a curve like below in the RGB channel.
Step 5:
Last thing we will do is convert our image to a smart object and add a smart filter lighting effect. Select all the layers from the adjustments group to the background copy layer by clicking the top group/layer and shift clicking the background copy layer. Go to filter>Convert for Smart Filters and you will now have just one layer with the smart object thumbnail image. Now we can add filter effects to the image that can be modified and turned off whenever. You can also stack filters which is cool. So add a lighting effect filter which is found in Filter>Render>Lighting Effects. Choose settings similar to below to add a nice dramatic spotlight effect almost like cold moonlight.
Ok that’s pretty much all I’m going to cover in these tutorials, it could go a lot further but to keep it simple we will leave it there…… thanks for following along!
Posted on October 13th, 2008 under Photoshop tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
