Thursday, August 12, 2010

Create The Lensbaby Effect In Photoshop

Photoshop is fun and productive software that allows one to alter images to his liking. One fun tool in Photoshop is the lensbaby effect. This tool allows a user to transform an ordinary image to a striking work of digital art that would normally require expensive photo equipment.


Instructions


1. Open the photo to be altered in Photoshop. Once open, select "layer" from the main menu and from the layer menu choose "duplicate layer".


2. Increase the canvas size. When the canvas size dialogue box appears, change the percent of the height and width of the canvas to 140 percent using the dropdown menu.








3. Distort the image. Choose "filter" from the main menu. Click on "distort" in the filter menu. Select polar coordinates from the distort menu. Choose the "polar to rectangle" option. Next click "ok."








4. Blur the image in Photoshop. From the main menu select "filter". Click on "blur" from the filter menu options. Choose "motion blur" from the blur menu. This step can take some experimentation to get the preferred appearance. Also -90 needs to be the angle setting for this step.


5. Reshape the image in Photoshop. Click on "filter" from the main menu. Choose the "blur" option from the filter menu. Select the "polar coordinates" option. Set the polar coordinates to "rectangle to polar". Do not worry if the image has empty space to each side and looks strange.


6. Add layer mask to the image. Click on the "layer" option on the main menu. From the layer menu select "layer mask" and choose apply from that menu.


7. Select the elliptical marquee tool. Choose the elliptical marquee tool from the left menu panel. Highlight the area with the marquee tool that is the focal point of the image. Once highlighted, press the backspace key. The highlighted area should come back into focus.


8. Crop the image in Photoshop. Select the crop tool from the left pane menu. Choose the area of the image that is to be kept. After the area is highlighted hit "enter" on the keyboard.


9. Save the Image to the hard drive. Save the image, now that the lensbaby effect is correctly applied to the image.

Tags: main menu, filter menu, from main, from main menu, image Photoshop, marquee tool