First decide on the main theme of your flyer and pic a picture that will do the trick. It can be a beach if its a summer party, a swimming pool, a snowed-up mountain, well you get the idea. We will use a city picture for an urban themed flyer.

Start a new project File->New , and set the frame of your flyer to the standard paper size for flyers. Thats 8.5inches in width and 11 inches in height.

Next grab your Paint Bucket Tool and choose black color as background for your new project and create a new layer.

Open your main theme picture if you dont have it open already and by using the Move Tool drug the image into your black flyer.

You will probably notice that the picture does not precisely fit in the flyer’s canvas. To solve this we will resize the image to fit exactly into the canvas. Hit CTRL+T (Command on Mac) or Edit->Free Transform to dynamically resize the image by good ol’ clicking and dragging.

Next rearrange your layers by pulling Layer 1 over Layer 2 on your Layers window.
Now we will blend the two layers by using the Gradient Tool.

First click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool and select the area around the image. Once done choose the Gradient Tool and make sure the colors sequence is from black to white. Hold down Shift and Click and Drag a line from the centre of your canvas half way up creating a straight line.

Once you are happy with the result, go to your layers window and click on the Layer Blending Mode and from the drop down menu choose Multiply and once done merge the two layers (the image and the canvas) into one by hitting Ctrl+E , alternatively link the two layers by clicking on the tick box next to the eye icon of your layers this will bring up a chain do this on both layer and finally click on Layers menu and Merge. This will create a beautiful smooth effect between the two layers.

And you are almost done. What is left is the message of the flyer for which we will use the Type Tool.

The possibilities here are truly endless you may want to use a standard Fonts Format or go for something more extravagant in which case you can consult one of our other tutorials on, 3D typography, Fire text or Burning Neon Effect. The idea is to use the black area of your canvas for your message! So go on be creative and have a great party!

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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.