Halloween photos

Well this time I wanted to take a step back from all of that stuff and have a little fun. Since its Halloween I thought a nice effect you can use to spice up the Halloween pictures you send to your family would be appropriate. You don't need Photoshop CS for this - heck, you could do this with Photoshop 5 or 6 if you wanted. All you'll need to start with is a picture of a pumpkin.

Step 1: Start off by creating a new canvas and importing/opening your pumpkin picture. Here is the one I chose. One of the first things I did was to select out the background and made it black because I felt it was more appropriate.

Step 2: Next, you need a photograph of some sort that you want to overlay on tip of the pumpkin. We want to make it seem as though this pumpkin was carved by using this pattern. And be creative - this is a really easy effect to do if you just want to cut shapes in the pumpkin and make them glow. But we can do more with it.

I chose this photograph of an eagle that ships with photoshop. This is also a fun effect to do with a photograph of yourself or a friend.

Step 3: Next we need to do some prep work on the Photograph. First I ran a brightness/contrast adjustment on it by choosing Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast. I used the following settings but yours may differ. The goal here is to try to accentuate the highlights in the picture - but don't take it too far and totally wash out the picture. Here are several screenshots for you to see what I mean.

Step 4: Next, I ran the diffuse filter on it by choosing Filter > Stylize > Diffuse. I chose the "Anisotropic" option. This smooths things out a bit.

Step 5: Then I chose Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and used the following settings. I've also included a screenshot of what you should have so far.

Step 6: Next I chose Image > Adjustments > Desaturate to make the picture black and white.

Step 7: Then I chose Image > Adjustments > Posterize. I enetered in a value of 8 for the levels setting.

Step 8: Finally, you need to make sure your background is all one color - white. It also works well if you have a slightly free formed shape to your picture instead of square. So I selected the parts of the background that weren't white and filled them with white.

Step 9: Then, I used the eliptical marquee tool and made a quick oval selection around the head and the body. I hit Ctrl + Shift + I to invert the selection and hit delete to rid rid of the surrounding area.

Step 10: Then hit Ctrl + I to invert the color. Yes, I know... its going to look really wierd but trust me on this one.

Step 11: OK, now bring that image over into your pumpkin image and fit it into place. You may need to hit Ctrl + T to bring up the free transform tool and size it down a bit.

Step 12: Great - hope you're following along. Now, all you need to do is change the layer blending mode of your picture to Linear Dodge. All of the whites should now look like they have been carved out. The midtones and grey areas should look like they haven't been totally carved through, and the dark colors should be transparent, thus showing the pumpkin's texture and not having been carved at all.

Step 13: So this is great and all but if we have a light source inside shouldn't our carving glow? I thought so too. Thats an easy one to fix. Just change the blend mode of the eagle layer back to normal for a minute. Now hide all of the other layers. Make sure the eagle layer is active and choose Select > Color Range. Change the select setting to highlights as I have in this screenshot. Click OK.

Step 14: Now you should have a selection around some of the highlight areas. First, create a new layer on top of the others. Fill that selection with white. Hit CTrl + D to deselect. Double click the layer to bring up the layer styles dialog box and enter the following settings for an outer glow layer style. The orange color I used in the outer glow setting is #FFDE00.

Step 15: Now, unhide your other layers. Change your eagle layer blend mode back to linear dodge and you should be set - a glowing pumpkin carving. I mentioned before to try this with people as well. Here is another pumpkin I created with a photo for the carving.