Open a front facing photo of yourself or anyone else for all that matters. The eyes and nose are the most crucial features we will be manipulating on this tutorial so make sure you have a clear view of them.

Eyes shape

• First select the Elliptical marquee tool and select the eyes. Use the Feather tool with approx. 10pixels. Copy and Paste them on a new layer.
• Select Edit -> Transform and the Scale to give them an elliptical shape and make them bigger. You may want to use an avatar poster for this exercise to get the right shape and scale.

• Select each eye separately and use Skew to give them their final shape. You will find the Skew selection under Edit->Transform.

Eyebrows

• If you have to thin out the eyebrows use the Clone Stamp Tool.
• Create a new layer and lighten the eyebrows color using a soft round brush. Choose white color and opacity around 20-25%, adjust the brush size to fit the eyebrows width.

• Next equally crucial step is the navi nose. We will use the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the nose. Set the feather tool with pixel set at 10pxls. Copy and paste it on a new layer.
• To change its shape and size we will use Edit->Transform and then Scale and Perspective.

Eyes Color

1. Next you want to create the Avatar eyes. Create a new layer and choose use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to select the iris (thats the colored part of the eye) .
2. Next take a soft round brush and choose a grey-blue color and paint all over the iris.
3. On the same layer choose the elliptical marquee tool and after choosing black as a color paint the centre of the iris (thats the black bit of the eye)
4. Create a new layer, paint lines on the iris with a soft brush and use a color slightly lighter than the existing iris color.
5. Use the smudge tool to smudge over the lines you just drew. Also smudge the black part of the iris.

Use the image below to help you visualize the steps above.

• Here is a very cool trick that will save you loads of time. Merge all the layers of the eye you just edited, replicate the new merged layer and use flip to apply this layer to the other eye as well.
• Zoom out of the eyes area.

Skin

• Now lets do some face painting! Create a new adjustment layer and choose Gradient Map. Choose the color settings as shown below.

• Create a new layer and choose a soft round brush with white color  and width approx. 9 pixels. And throw draw dots on your Navi face. Change the blending mode into Overlay.

• Create a new layer and choose a soft round brush with a deep blue color like #002542. Draw the lines on the face to your liking. Here is where you can get really creative!
• Apply a gaussian blur of 5 pixels and reduce the opacity of your new layer to around 20-30% .
• Go to your blending mode drop down menu on your layer and change this to Vivid light.

Congratulations on creating your Avatar Navi persona!

Step 1
First we need to create a new canvas with black background. The following settings are recommended:

Step 2
Create your type mask text using the Horizontal Type Mask tool as shown in the picture below:

Using the Horizontal Type Mask tool pick an area where you want your title to appear and type away.

Step 3
Using the Fill tool, fill the inside of your letters with white colour.

Step 4
Next pick the Smudge tool and smudge the edges of your text. For this pick a big brush area around 35cm diameter.

Step 5
Next step is to colourize your text. Bring up the Color Balance dialogue menu from the bottom right bar of your PS, and play around with the Shadows, the Midtones and Highlights as shown and hit OK. This will give you the burning effect.

Step 6
Moving on we will add some Gaussian Blur effect. Simply go to the Filter menu from the top toolbar, hit Blur and then Gaussian Blur and OK.

Step 7
To create the Neon effect you will need to duplicate your image and choose Linear Dodge on the copied layer. This will give the outline of your layer a neon like fluorescent look.

Step 8
Using the Horizontal Type Tool this time we will create another text layer to fill in the Neon fonts we created in the previous step. Choose the same font size and type the same word/words with your original text and overlay the new layer on top of your original one.

Step 9
Finally we will add the glow to our text. Double click on the layer of your Neon object and scroll down to “Outer Glow”. Change the glow color to a red glow. Your Burning Neon Effect is complete!

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But don’t be too disappointed. With some good photography skills and a little digital editing, you can create great looking pictures on your own. In this tutorial we’ll look at how you can fix your make up after the pictures are taken. This is called airbrushing in the digital editing world. We’ll start with a picture of a girl, note that her face has some blemishes that we’ll need to fix to make her skin smooth and silky.

Open the picture that you wish to edit in Photoshop. Create a duplicate layer start working with that. Photoshop has a very useful tool which is called “spot healing tool” to remove spots from skin. Use it to remove any obvious spots. Dont’ worry if you couldn’t remove all of them, we’ll get to them a bit further down in this tutorial. To achieve a soft skin look, we will use the filter Noise -> Dust & Scratches, keep the radius just enough - making the skin look soft and graded, don’t care about the eyes.

Now we will do further removal by bluring the image. Use the Filter Blur -> Gaussian Blur with a radius around 3 depending on the size your image. Tweak to find the right value.

Also, make sure to add a natural look. To do this we’ll put a uniform noise to the picture. This is achieved using Filter -> Add Noise, use the settings below:

Our skin is ready, now we need to graft it on the picture. Make sure you’re on the skin layer. Add a layer mask to it. Fill the mask with black color using the paint bucket. This will hide your skin layer and the original picture will appear. Select the brush tool and start painting over the skin with white color. Your new smoother skin will start appearing as you paint. Paint only the skin part leaving the eyes and the lips intact. To check out what you have painted, change the blend mode of your masked layer to ‘difference’ and the opacity to 75%. You can now clearly see what part has been painted and what haven’t.

Once you are finished with painting the skin. Turn back the blend mode to normal and the opacity to 100%. Here’s the results that you should see at this point:

The skin has improved drastically without losing any detail on the places which matter - like eyes and lips. Here’s the before and after picture, take a closer look at the details:

Using this technique you can improve your pictures without spending on expensive make up products. It’s reasonably easy to implement and looks great! Hope you enjoyed it.

Here’s another airbrush technique.

First thing you need to do is open your photo on photoshop, right click on layer and duplicate the photo twice by Right Click-> Duplicate -> OK.
Once this is done turn off your background layer, and now you are ready to go into the main retouching process.

First we will apply a filter to the first layer, that’s Filter -> Distort -> Diffuse Glow , which will bring up the Diffuse Glow menu as shown below.

Next you want to move the graininess slider to 0, the glow between 4 and 7 and finally the clear slider between 7 and 10 to avoid wash-out colours hit ok, and you are done with your first layer.

Moving on to your second layer, Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur and set it to 5.5 and move back to your top layer.

Select the top layer and go to blending mode to overlay and there you go your new picture glamourized with soft focus and softer light in less that 5mins!

First, open up a new document and fill it with black as the background. This is important so make sure that the background color is black. Now, type in the text you wish to apply the tutorial to, we’ll use the text “Photoshop” as you can see below.

Now, flip the text 90 degrees CCW, you can do this by using the transform tool under ‘edit’. After this we’ll apply the wind filter, you can do this by going to Filter -> Stylize -> Wind, make sure to apply wind from right to left. Repeat this step 3 times.

Flip the text back using 90 CW (edit -> transform again) and add a gaussian blur filter (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur -> 7 pixels). Now make a new layer (ctrl+shift+n) and go to Image -> Apply Image.

Now it’s time to utilize the first magic, go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation and make sure ‘colorize is selected’. Set the hue to 40 and the saturation to 100.

Duplicate this layer (ctrl+j) and go again to hue/saturation, this time set the hue to -40. Now set the layer on color doge and click ctrl+e which will merge down the layer.

After this we’ll use liquify which is placed under the filters menu, press “W”, select brush size 50, with a density of 40, you can keep the pressure at 100. We’re now going to use the dodge tool to create some cool flames by ‘dragging the wind up’. After you’ve added the first set to flames, lower the brush size to add more details to your flames, using the same technique.

After you’ve done this, type your text again, but this time in black - move your text ‘into’ your old text. Now duplicate layer 1 (the new layer, use ctrl+j again) and drag it above the other layers. Set it on screen and leave the opacity to 100%, both these things can be handled from inside the layers menu.

Now add a layer mask and take the gradient tool, take the linear gradient white to black and drag from top of the text to the bottom. After this, use the smudge tool at 60 pixels and drag over the black letters you don’t want to be black.

Create a new layer and go to Image -> Apply Image, set this new layer to screen and the opacity to 60%. On top of this we’ll use Gaussian Blur with the radius 50 pixels (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur). Again, create a new layer and go to Image -> Apply Image. We’ll now make a new layer once again and go to Image -> Apply Image, important is to set the opacity of this layer to 50% this time, after this press ctrl+t.

After this, go to Edit -> Transform -> Perspective to create a shadow effect by mirroring the image, this will make the text float and look really cool!

Hopefully, if you’ve done all the steps right, you’ll have something like this on your screen.

Average: A very handy filter is the Average: In order to estimate the average value of a filter this is very essential. It is a simple step filter and very useful in calculating the average value of the selected area, it is also useful to smooth out an area with unwanted roughness or noise.

Blur Filters

The Blur filter is also single-step filter which is used to achieve the overall blurring of an image. Use the Blur More filter to achieve a massive blurring effect on your image.

Gaussian Blur: Radius controls is provided by this filter and adjust the blurring of that image more accurately.

Lens Blur: Blurring effect that comes with the images captured through the camera can be obtained through this filter.

Motion Blur: This blur effect gives the effects which are seen in the objects which are in motion.

Radial Blur: This blur gives the effect of blur, when the image of revolving tire is taken. This filter blurs the image by rotating the pixels around the specified center point.

Smart Blur: This filter allows you to apply blurring effect to the edges and other details in an image. It can be accessed in Adobe Photoshop’s menu bar under Filter / Blur / Smart Blur.

Tip: If an image contains unnecessary noise and roughness, it is better to blur the background of the image so as to bring more sharpness in the foreground.

Sharpen Filters

To correct the imperfections in your photographs, the Sharpen Filters are useful. If the contrast between adjacent pixels is required we use sharpening filters.

Sharpen Edges: This filter works on edges and adds sharpness to the edges without changing the quality of the image.

Sharpen More: This filter increases the contrast between all pixels of the image; however, it usually gives poor results for the large images.

Un-sharp Mask: If you want more focus for image the , un-sharp mask filter can bring out the hidden details. This filter looks for edges and those areas which are sharply defined and increases the contrast. This is used mostly for high resolution images. It has three sliders: 1. Amount, 2. Radius, 3. Threshold, and can be access in Filter > Sharpen > and Un-sharp Mask. They also help putting emphasis on important elements in a design. Essentially it increases the contrast between pixels in order to clarify and better define the image edges.

In adding or reducing the noise and grain in photographs the Noise Filters take a very important role. Though Reduce Noise Filters are available to work with old, damaged photographs which require repair work, Noise Filters also work with many other creative applications to help repair work.