graphics other mail home

SHADING FROM PINS IN MATERIALS MOST PSP VERSIONS - SCREENSHOTS: PSP X BEGINNER LEVEL This Tutorial This tutorial will show you in a few easy steps how to add shading to materials like cloth and paper into which a pin is stuck. The shading reflects the volume of the hidden part of the pin by suggesting lightfall and shadow. Shading will make your image look more realistic, and creates a unity between pin and material. The Pin When you've got an image or a PictureTube of a pin, it will probably be whole - meaning that the part that goes underneath the material still shows. Use the Eraser Brush (see below) to erase a part in the middle, or right till the end if you don't want the pin to come out of the material again. The Hardness of the Eraser Brush will probably need to be medium, that is somewhere between 40 and 70; don't make the remaining edges of the pin too soft. Safety pins need to get part of the the bottom pin, the part that does not have the clasp, erased. The Tools You will need the Lighten/Darken Brush and the Eraser Brush. Both are in your Tools Toolbar [View, Toolbars, Tools]. You will also need to know how to activate a layer in the Layers Palette, and how to apply a Drop Shadow. Lighten/Darken Lighten/Darken will be used to create the lightfall and shadow on your material caused by the volume of the hidden pin part. Painting with the left mouse button pressed lightens, painting with the right mouse button pressed darkens. Make sure your Tool Options Palette is visible [View, Palettes, Tool Options] so you can adjust a number of settings for the Lighten/Darken Brush. Eraser Brush The eraser will be used to erase a part or parts of the Drop Shadow. You will need to have the Tool Options visible to set the size of the eraser brush, and to set the Hardness to zero. Drop Shadow A Drop Shadow created on a New layer will be applied to the visible part of the pin when the shading is done [Effects, 3D Effects, Drop Shadow]. Layers Palette The Layers Palette needs to be visible so you can switch between the layer with the pin and the layer with the material below [View, Palettes, Layers]. Clicking near the name of a layer in the Layers Palette will make this the active layer, ready for you to work on. TO WORK You can download a practice image if you want to follow these steps on an image used in this tutorial (if you want to use this image for other purposes, please limit this to personal use only). Step 1: Lighten, then Darken I'm going to presume you have an image open with two layers. The bottom layer with the material (a photo, a piece of cloth, a ribbon), and the top layer with the pin. Activate the layer with the material in your Layers Palette, then activate the Lighten/Darken Brush. In the Tool Options Palette, set the size of the Lighten/Darken Brush to slightly narrower than the pin. You'll have to do this by eye: if the part of the pin that enters (and exits) the material seems 10 pixels across, then a good size for the Lighten/Darken Brush will be between 7 and 10 pixels. Set the Hardness to zero, which is usually best. Sometimes, depending on the material, a higher Hardness creating sharper edges might be in order. Choose a low Opacity, somewhere between 9 and 30. The higher the opacity, the more visible the effect will be; usually you will not want the lightfall and shadow to stand out too much. The best setting depends on the nature of the material so you may want to give this a few tries and Undo's [Edit, Undo Lighten/Darken]. Now place your Lighten/Darken Brush at the point where the pin enters the material. Place it slightly higher so that the illusion of lighting falls just above the invisible pin part. Click with your left mouse button just once. Then press and hold the SHIFT key on your keyboard, and click with your left mouse button slightly above the point where the pin exits the material. This SHIFT method will create a straight line between the first and the second click. Picture this light line to be the material going up against the invisible pin part and thus catching the light from the north. The same method is used to place a Darken line for the shading. Place your cursor at the point where the pin enters the material, slightly below the entry point. Click the right mouse button once and then move your cursor to the end or exit point of the pin. Press and hold SHIFT and click once more on the right mouse button. Picture this dark line to be the shadow on the material going down after going over the hidden pin part. Step 2: A Drop Shadow In the Layers Palette, activate the layer with the pin. In the Drop Shadow dialog, check 'Shadow on new layer'.The shadow should not be far from the pin, and it has to be more or less in line with the Darken line you made earlier. The vertical and horizontal Offset determine where the shadow will fall: the higher the numbers, the further away it will be from your pin. Step 3: Erase After you have placed your Drop Shadow, you will notice that the Horizontal Offset makes the shadow overlap your Lighten and Darken lines at their starting point. In the screenshot below I have exaggerated the shadow so you can see. This little bit of overlap needs to be erased. Activate the Eraser Tool. Since you have placed the Drop Shadow on its own layer, this layer is already active, so you can start erasing straight away. As a shadow's edges are usually blurred, the brush tip of the eraser should not be hard either. Set the Hardness of the Eraser Brush on zero in the Tool Options Palette. DONE That is all there is to the basics of creating the illusion of depth where the pin is hidden by the material. Can you tell the difference? Different conditions In the steps above we created straight lines running along the whole length of the invisible pin part. Not all materials require shading from beginning to end. For instance, photo paper is less flexible than cloth; it won't fold around the pin like cloth does. In the image below I have both applied the method we just used, and applied short lighten and darken lines to a second pin. See which you like best and consider more realistic. A photo tends to bend near the place where the pin goes in. The image below shows that I created a faint bend with the Warp Brush to both the photo and its shadow. I set the Warp Brush size to slightly bigger than the photo height, and pushed the left side inwards and the right side outwards. I pulled the shadow slightly outwards on both sides. The Warp Brush is in your Tools Toolbar (PSP 8 and upwards; you can try and create similar effects with the Retouch Brush on Push). More flexible materials like cloth tend to fold around something that goes in (and out). Unless average cloth is glued or pinned down firmly, you won't see the straight line we used in the steps. In the image below, I used a big and narrow Lighten/Darken Brush to create splotches of lighting and darkening near the invisible part of the pin. These splotches create the illusion of the cloth folding because of the pin entering it. The Warp Brush was used to slightly nudge the piece of cloth. You have to be careful with this so the pattern won't get blurry. HAVE FUN Enjoy making your designs with pins as realistic as you can; often the suggestion of shading will go a long way. None of the examples shown in this tutorial are perfect: you will find that an extra dab of Lighten or Darken is often needed at the entry and exit points of the pin. I left them out of my images for the sake of clearly demonstrating the basic steps.

Fall 2006 Questions about instructions, scripts, and files will only be answered if they relate to the original materials offered on and downloaded from this site. Errors in stolen and altered instructions, scripts, or files found elsewhere are not our responsibility. Unless stated otherwise, all the material on this site should not be copied or spread without our permission. back to top