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Creating Visual Action: Using Layer Transparency
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Creating Visual Action: Using Layer Transparency:
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1.
I want to add a sense of
action to this somewhat static photo of one black belt about to introduce his foot to another's face.
I want to give it some visible movement; to make it seem like the guy's leg is moving as it's about to
hit. You can do this many ways in Photoshop. Here's three: you could use the Motion Blur Filter to
blur the leg in the direction you want. You could use the History Brush and Palette to move the leg,
then paint it back in, drawing on previous history states. Or you could use multiple layers and vary
the layer's opacity settings, as I'm going to do here.
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2.
In the tutorial where I
used the History Palette to do this, I took a selection of the leg we need for this and pasted it on
its own layer. Here it is.
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3.
The name of that layer is "Leg." Here, I've duplicated the layer three times. I'm going to make it seem like we're seeing the leg move by showing it from four different positions- each with a different transparency. |
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4.
I start by taking the uppermost of my
copied layers and choosing Edit: Transform: Rotate to rotate and reposition it slightly up and to the right.
Notice that I've renamed my copied layers. There's going to be three different legs eventually, all at different opacities: closest, middle, & farthest. The layer I just worked on, "Closest" is set to 75% Opacity. |
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5.
Now I take on the "middle" leg. I rotate and move this one a little further than I did the last one and set the layer's Opacity to 50%.
You can see what the image looks like so far. |
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Now that last "farthest" layer is dealt with. I rotate and reposition the leg a little further than the previous two and I set the Opacity of that layer to 25%. |
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7.
Take a look at the kick
now. We're given sort of a strobe-light effect, seeing how the leg moved as it swung towards it's
target.
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8.
Here's a shrunken shot of
the whole image. It looks pretty good. Can't you just hear the old Six Million Dollar Man sound effect
when you look at that leg moving?
here's always more than one approach to a job when you're using Photoshop. Be sure to check out the companion tutorials to this one to see other ways to achieve this effect. |
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9.
Using a combination of
layer transparency and the Motion Blur Filter I created the image below (with some help from the
Lens Flare Filter). Want to fight?!?! Fight Me!!!
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