Today I’m going to talk about some effects I have tried during isolation and rate them in terms of level 0 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest.
The first effect I tried was the twirl effect. This is where you turn the landscape or portrait into a twirl pattern. It’s a quick and not too difficult technique. I would give This a 2/5 rating.
Next I tried the dispersion effect which took me hours. It’s where you warp part of a photo and turn it into particles. I would suggest you might struggle to attempt this if you have never used Photoshop before as for me it was 4.5/5 in difficulty.
Thirdly was a shoot with the model over FaceTime. I’d seen a few photographers on Instagram doing a full model shoot over FaceTime, so I decided to try it. This works best on an iPhone as there is a special FaceTime photo button which will take you out of the equation and only show the model when the images are taken. After the shoot I did a few quick edits in Photoshop express to enhance the image using highlights, contrast, clarity and sharpen mostly. I’d give this 1/5 because I feel a beginner photographer could do this type of shoot even without using the photoshop to edit.
My fourth effect was creating tiny planets. For this all you need is a 99p phone app called tiny planets and you can create them yourself out of any photo. Some photos work better than others like I recommend using landscapes and Street shots for this kind of technique. As this is easily accessible and you aren’t required to be a photographer, I would say in terms of level this is as zero out of five stars.
Number 5 is the orb and has to be the easiest one I’ve done on photoshop with only 4 steps you only need to spend 2 minutes on it. So, this one gets another 1/5 for me.
The next technique is the optical art face portrait which actually turns a face and pixels. A series of little geometric squares all the way across the image. As this one is a many stepped tutorials and I did end up re organising some of the layers to fit the overall look, that I wanted for the end results. I also decided to move the layers for side to side in the second image to see what would happen. I’d suggest that this should be a 4.5/5 stars in difficulty.
The optical art text effect is by far the most difficult. It has 22 steps and it doesn’t always work. For example, you have to make a word cloud on the website it wants you to use to generate this isn’t compatible on every single computer. So, I had to traipse around the Internet to try and find another website that will allow me to create word clouds to the same effect which took a lot of time. Also following the 22-step process itself takes many hours And I feel you need to be a relatively avid Photoshop user to give this one a go. This one is getting 5/5 on the difficulty level.
Lastly, I tried the double exposure technique which is where you merge a portrait with a landscape or seascape. This one should receive another 5/5 as I think its not easy to get it perfect.
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