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Use the turkey baster (i-dropper) and click it on certain parts of the image. What it’s doing is selecting a color range, shows the closest color in the dialog box (peachy pink) and shows the selected area in the display box. Try clicking elsewhere in the picture. What it’s doing is mapping or selecting that color range throughout the entire image and showing you the selected area in the beat box I mean black box as light areas and deselected as dark.

Here is an example where the trees are selected. At this point they automatically become ‘light’ because they are the selected portion. Now that you select a certain color, since you are in the replace color command, you can replace the ‘selected’ color. Click around parts of the face that give you the best selection of their skin.

Now you are ready to create Bruce Banner getting mad or the Shrek family. You can choose a color by moving the sliders to choose your replacement: Green!

I could add some more bulging muscles and rip the tux but that gets more complicated. You could now try liquify on bloat to turn them closer to Shrek. NOTE: Please only do this to loving family members!!!

But you see what I did? Understand that you can use the replace color command to select an area with ONE CLICK! and you can replace the color. So much less painstaking than the cowboy (lasso) tool.

Make sure you make another duplicate layer to fool around with.  Check out my other tutorial on replace color right here on my new AdvancedPhotoshop.

Go to the filter menu and choose Sketch: Chrome. Because I have Photoshop CS, I’m using the Filter Gallery. (Don’t ask me why it’s twice as large as your computer monitor because I don’t know).

Press OK and change the blending mode to something like linear light and you have a creepy Manson-esque photo. A few paper shreds and tears would complete the effect. Once again make sure they are friends or family members (hehe).

You can try out different options in the new filter gallery in Photoshop CS. You can now combine filters. Here I’ve chosen Cutout which instantly gives me a preview. You can create a new preview layer by pressing the New Icon as shown. You can then turn on or off each layer by clicking the seeing eyeball. You can also change the order of them but having them both on will show you what the effect will look like when combined with different stiflers I mean filters.

Try out colored pencil for the look that we’re going for. Looks kinda overdone? Don’t worry about it because we have the power of the blending modes at our service!

Here I’ve put the filtered layer on Linear Dodge to bring up the lighter aspects (with mixes with the layer below), I’ve duplicated the layer again (I do this a lot) and try out another blending mode. This helps balance the effect out to where I want it...usually I’ll just shuttle through the blending modes but Hard Light works in most instances for me.

Since the Linear Dodge layer is a little too strong on the light (I used it b/c I wanted to bring up the light values..you could also use levels) you can go ahead and lower the opacity as shown.

Create a layer mask on the filtered layer above the original and use the radial gradient tool with a light grey as the foreground color. What we’re going to do is hide or ‘mask’ parts of their faces to let the original layer shine through. Keeping a lighter shade of grey means it’s only going to mask a little bit and will retain most of its opacity but the filter effect won’t be as strong. This helps bridge the gap between fantasy and reality. Gradient layer masking is one of the most important things you could EVER learn in Photoshop. It is covered extensively in the Basic Photoshop DVD Training and no Photoshop Designer should be without it.