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See the final res­ult at its ori­ginal size

Down­load the Pho­toshop Work file (v2)

Let’s get Star­ted with Step 1

Open up pho­toshop and bring out your can­vas. You’ll want a lot of space to work with, so don’t be shy to start with a fairly large can­vas. Each pro­ject will dif­fer, so you’ll need to be the judge on the amount of space you want (I went with a 940 x 710 canvas).

Pic a solid col­our for your back­ground, and used the bucket tool (quick-key: ‘G’) to fill it in. If you want light­ing to show, try pick­ing a dark col­our, as it will be much easier to show it than in bright back­grounds. For this piece, we will choose the col­our black

Step 2

Now grab a fancy brush set, and use it to cre­ate a vector/pen-tool like effects around the centre of the can­vas. If you don’t know how to install brushes, read the next sec­tion at of this tutorial to get some help with that you that. If not, just skip to the next part.

Installing Brushes:

After you down­load the brush set (it should come in either a .abr file, or a .zip. If it’s a zip, unzip it to be able to get to the .abr file).

After you have that ready, go back to pho­toshop, and select the brush tool (quick key: ‘B’). Click on the drop down menu for the brushes in the top bar:

Now click on this but­ton () on the top right corner, and go down to load brushes. Select the brush set you want (the .abr file), and click ok. The brushes from that set should now be found at the end of you cur­rent brushes, and ready to be used!

Step 2 (Continued…)

As for brush sets, the one I used can be found here: http://axeraider70.deviantart.com/art/Winter-Breeze-Brushes-44617350, and full credit goes to the maker of the set.

If you are famil­iar with the Pen-tool, how­ever, draw a few line shapes flow­ing out­ward from the centre of the can­vas, as well as some small circles spread through­out. You will want a sim­ilar effect as shown below:

As for what col­our to use, again, it depends on what you want your final product to look like. If you want some­thing fiery and excit­ing, use warm col­ours (red, orange, yel­low, etc…); if you want some­thing more cool and soph­ist­ic­ated, pick colder col­ours (blue, green, purple, for example). You will have to keep these decisions in mind through­out the tutorial, but make sure you stick to a cer­tain type.

After you have your layer of the vec­tor shape, you will want to duplic­ated it (right click on the layer > duplic­ate), and flip it hori­zont­ally. One way to do this is to press Ctrl/⌘+T while edit­ing the layer you want to flip, then right click and choose Flip Hori­zont­ally. Make sure it centres nicely, as shown below:

Step 3

Now we’re going to be play­ing around with a few brush set­tings. Get out the default &ldquot;Soft Round 9 pixels&rdquot; brush (it comes pre-installed with pho­toshop), then open up the brush set­tings. Now use the fol­low­ing set­tings on your brush:

Brush around a bit in your can­vas until you get a suit­able effect. You’ll want this to cover a good area of where you’ll be work­ing. Also, make sure to brush in the col­our white. Leave this layer in Nor­mal, and set the opa­city to around 85%

Step 4

To start out our techy look, grab the pentool, and draw some shapes that come out of the centre of the image and are a techie shape. This can be hard to do with the pentool/default brushes alone, so down­load­ing a brush back is recom­men­ded. You can util­ize whichever one you prefer, but for ref­er­ence, I used these in my art­work: http://wizard-studios.deviantart.com/art/Technetronic-Brush-Set-40742521. Use a soft brush eraser to erase around the edges of some parts:

Step 5

Before we start the next part, we’ll have to go over a new type of out­side tool that can be used in graph­ics for pho­toshop: C4D renders.

If you know about these, and know how to use them, then you can skip this para­graph. If not, fol­low along my friends.

C4D is a 3D render pro­gram that allows people to cre­ate vir­tual images in very detailed 3D. The most com­mon use of this pro­gram is for mod­els, but some people also make these renders to be used in pho­toshop, to add an amaz­ing effect to a piece of art. There are two main types of C4Ds we will be deal­ing with: Effect C4Ds, and Render C4Ds. Effect C4Ds are used for light­ing, and they’re just mainly glows and reflections.

An example can be found here: http://ess3nce.deviantart.com/art/C4D-Effect-Render-4–35285672. Render C4Ds, on the other hand, are abstract renders used to imple­ment a par­tic­u­lar art work with extra effects.

Another example can be seen here as well: http://drugi.deviantart.com/art/Underwater-c4d-54685612. Again, all credit goes to the cre­at­ors of the indi­vidual art works. I won’t be able to tell you exactly which ones to use, as it is impossible to recycle C4Ds for every need. The best places to find them, how­ever, are http://www.deviantart.com/, http://planetrenders.net/, and some­times even google.

All the C4Ds I used can be seen in the .psd file provided along with the tutorial, so if you wish to use them, or want to see what they look like, just check the layers.

Now to move onto actu­ally using these. Find a nice and flowy Render C4D, and make sure it is in a bright col­our. You’ll want it to flow along with the dir­ec­tion of the pre­vi­ously drawn red Pentool shapes. Res­ize it, and erase parts of it that don’t fit, to get some­thing like this:

Just as it was done with the red Pentool, flip it hori­zont­ally and place it to that it flows nicely off the middle of the canvas:

Step 6

Now it’s time to grab another c4d. Pick one that flows nicely with the image, and has a col­our you want for the final product. Make sure it’s a com­pact one, and doesn’t have too many parts flow­ing out of it. Place it in the centre of the image, then set the blend­ing mode of the layer to Lighten. To change blend­ing modes of lay­ers, there is a drop down bar in the lay­ers window:

The just go down the the layer mode you need, and select it. This will be a tech­nique used through­out the tutorial, so make sure to remem­ber how to do it. Next, go Fil­ters > Dis­tort > Ocean Ripple, and use these set­tings on it:

As always, erase what you don’t like with a soft brush, and the res­ult should come out some­thing like this:

Step 7

You guessed it: it’s time for another C4D. How­ever, this is an import­ant one, so much sure you chose it wisely. You’re going to want one that sort of acts like a case for your product. We’re going to be pla­cing the iPhone on the centre of the can­vas, so the &ldquot;shell&rdquot; C4D must appear to sort of circle around the product. It’s hard to explain, but if you look at the .psd file and the image below, you will see what I mean.

If any part of this C4D is going to be erased, you should use a Hard brush instead of the Soft brushes we’ve been gen­er­ally using.

Once you have your C4D picked out, place it prop­erly in the can­vas, while try­ing to envi­sion where your product will be placed. You should have some­thing like this:

To help with pick­ing out your shell C4D, here’s a view of only it on a black background:

Step 8

It may no seem like we have much now, but it’s all about to come together soon. This is the import­ant step where you will place your product. To pre­pare the product, first take a nice pic­ture of it on a plain background.

After you open this in a dif­fer­ent file, first thing you should do is right click on the only layer (should be labelled back­ground), and go to Layer from Back­ground. Click Ok, and you will now be able to use trans­par­ency in your pic­ture. Grab the crop tool ©, and make a selec­tion around the pic­ture you want to use. After you’ve selec­ted, simply right click and go to crop. You should have the area around your product now

Now, if your pic­ture is in a plain back­ground, you may be able to get away with just using the magic wand tool (W). Play around with the Tol­er­ance (the more tol­er­ance, the more of dif­fer­ent col­ours sim­ilar to the one you picked it will select. After your selec­tion is done, erase it. You should now have an image of your product on a trans­par­ent back­ground now. If your image is not just a plain col­oured back­ground you can erase, you’ll have to use the pen tool. Grab it, and then make points around the product to select only it. Make sure you hold down shift and click and time you want to make straight lines, and hold down and drag after mak­ing the point to make curves. A fin­ished path should look like this:

Now right click on any of the points (with the pen tool), and click on Make Selec­tion. Press ok, and you should have a selec­tion around the product. Press ⌘-⇧-I (Ctrl+⇧+I) to reverse the selec­tion around the product, and then erase it.

Now place your product into your image. Try to get it as centreed as pos­sible, so that the product will be the centre of the ad.

Now, remem­ber the shell C4D dis­cussed above? Well this is where it comes in. With a very small soft brush eraser (make sure you’re zoomed in), erase cer­tain parts of your product that the shell C4D goes over. This will give your ad a much more dynamic view and effect. It may help to lower the opa­city of the product layer so that you can see which spots over­lap. After eras­ing the parts you want, you should have some­thing like this:

An altern­ate method is to simply duplic­ate the C4D shell layer, and bring the copy layer above the iPhone. Now just erase the parts you DON’T want. Some people find this much easier to do, so it’s up to you

Step 9

You can see that it looks a lot more pro­fes­sional now, doesn’t it? How­ever, we’re not done yet. It’s time to spice it up and give it some fla­vor! Grab your pentool, and use it to make some shapes around your product. These shapes will be col­oured in black, and will be used to settle down the crowded look of the piece. Your shapes should look some­thing like this:

After mak­ing some of these around one side, just simply flip them hori­zont­ally and place them sym­met­ric­ally on the other side as well. As always, repla­cing the pentool­ing with brushes is also a good idea

Step 10

Now we’re going to be adding some light­ing and some more vec­tor shapes around the product. Grab a 200 px soft brush, and pick a light cold col­our. I per­son­ally used a light shade of purple. Put the opa­city of the brush down to around 40–50%. Brush softly around the bot­tom area of the product, as such:

Put this layer blend­ing on col­our Dodge, and play around with the opa­city until it looks good.

Step 11

Time to bring out your trusty pentool out again. Much like the pentool layer in black, we’re going to make another two sets (or more if you want to add to your piece). Use solid bright col­ours on these. You’ll also notice I played with the opa­city of some of the shapes as well, so give it a more dynamic look. As always, brush sets work fine as well. Also, remem­ber to use sym­metry (copy the stuff you made on one side to the other). These are the two sets of shapes I made:

You can use a large soft brush to erase if you want as well.

Step 12

Time to add some gradi­ent maps to our image. To do this, click on the but­ton on the bot­tom of the lay­ers win­dow, then click on Gradi­ent Map. We’ll be adding two maps in this part. They are as follows:

This should give a nice effect to your image. You should have some­thing that looks a bit darker and more shaded now. Don’t worry about the orange-redish tint; we’ll fix it later.

Step 13

Grab a large (around 200px) soft brush, and pick about 2 — 3 light col­ours, and 1 — 2 darker ones. We’ll be adding points of light­ing around the image now. If there was a step that the .psd file really helps with, it’s this one, so make sure to check it out if you’re hav­ing any prob­lems. You want to make some brush­ing around corner and side areas of the product. Here’s a couple of examples:

After you’re all done, you should have some­thing like this:

Change all these light­ing lay­ers to Lin­ear Dodge (Add) blend­ing mode, and play around with their opa­city until they each look good and fit. Your res­ult should be:

Step 14

This step is optional, but can really help out with the look of your out­come. Find two C4Ds that are the same style as the shell C4D we used before. Place them in the corners of your product where you didn’t add light­ing. Res­ize these to a fairly small size, and set them to a blend­ing mode of screen:

Step 15

Add another one of those Black & White gradi­ent maps we added above, except leave it at 45 — 55% opa­city in lumin­os­ity. Next, add a col­our bal­ance layer (you can do this the same way as adding Gradi­ent Maps). Make the more prom­in­ent col­ours in your piece more heavy ori­ented using the bars. For example, green and cyan are the col­ours we want this piece to rep­res­ent, so the set­tings below were used:

Now is also the time to add any other pentool­ing or shap­ing you would like to, since the piece is near­ing com­ple­tion. After you are all done, you should have some­thing like this:

Step 16

Make a new layer, and go to Image > Apply Image. In this new layer, click Fil­ter > Blue > Gaus­sian Blur. Set this layer to col­our Dodge, and 70 — 80% opa­city. Erase all the parts that don’t look good/are too strong, and come out with a res­ult like this:

Step 17

Here’s the part where you add text. You may want to do so, you may not, it’s up to you. This tutorial isn’t really meant to con­vey advanced text tech­niques (that is for another day!). So for the sake of sim­pli­city, we will add some simple text. You can look at the .psd to see how the text was done. Either way, make a new layer, and grab a soft black brush (or whichever other col­our you chose as a back­ground). Brush around this new layer to ‘erase’ parts you don’t like about the piece. This is an import­ant step to clean­ing up the over­all product. This is what I came out with at the end:

Step 18

Now it’s time to make a reflec­tion. Apply the image to another layer, and flip it ver­tic­ally the same way that you flipped the image hori­zont­ally a couple of steps back. Set this image in a pos­i­tion when a reflec­tion would be believ­able. Set this layer to screen at around 15 — 20% opa­city, and you should have this:

Apply a Gaus­sian blur of around .3 on it, then erase most of it with a soft brush, set to around 60% opa­city. This is just for extra effect, not a real reflec­tion (for real reflec­tions to work nicely, there’s a lot of steps involved which won’t be covered here). Your end res­ult should be this:

Final Step

One last thing we must do. Apply image again, then go Fil­ter > Sharpen > Sharpen. Leave this layer on nor­mal, and change the opa­city of it until it looks good. Also, use a soft brush to erase parts that you don’t want sharpen. This will add the final touch to the product, so make sure to take your time. Add any­thing else you want along with the image, and we are done!

Final Piece:

Clos­ing Remarks

I hope you enjoy the tutorial, and I hope you learned plenty from it. If there are any ques­tions or con­cerns, I’d be happy to answer you if you con­tact me. Ways to reach me can be found on the provided jpg. Well, until next time, farewell!

Rafael Zanatta