January 6: Dispersion (Technique Challenge)

Can we use stock photos (from sites like Pixabay, Pexels etc) in this or any other challenge?
@IntenseMagic @mrs2a50

 

I am not getting this one at all and it's very frustrating.

I am stuck at this point.

Now we are going back to the top copy we made and select just the subject. I used the quick selection tool to isolate my granddaughter. You can do this however is easiest for you, and you don’t have to be absolutely exact. Once the selection is made, make 2 of copies of just your subject using ctrl-j or cmd-j. Once you make the copies of the subject, you don't need that second background copy, so just hide it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

oh goodness. I will try that tomorrow with a fresh brain I think lol.
thank you <3<3

 

I want to redo this and replay with making my own brushes, but it is MOC and there is NOT time! lol but I have used other techniques and they are tough..this is a great one @IntenseMagic ! Thank you for all your work!

 

Ohhhhhhh, this really is a challenge! And I LOVE it! Never did this before, thank you so much for learning new techniques!

 

I spent a half of day to understand the technique. Truly, i am still not clearly the technique. @IntenseMagic Please let me know my page was correct or not.

 

@IntenseMagic - that was a very well written tutorial. Such a fascinating technique plus I had to teach myself how to make brushes out of some of the png splatters I had, so double learning. Thanks!

 

Ok. Well I have spent hours trying to accomplish this technique and am pulling my hair out! I work in PSE 11. I have extracted my subject OK, but my version of PSE does not have content aware, so I have tried my best to use the clone tool and managed fairly well, but getting past next stage is proving a stumbling block! I am trying to use the brush on my extracted layers and nothing is happening, in fact my distorted layer disappears??? Is there another way to achieve this look, or can you suggest another instruction video? I have watched countless videos and these have not helped much at all. It is not easy to look up close to your pictures showing the layer details either. It is really frustrating! My work space looks like this. As you can see my distorted picture does not show up. HELP!

 

@nanascrapper With the top layer being a copy of the original (from what I can see) you need to make it invisible. Otherwise you won't see what you are doing underneath.

edit: just realized it IS invisible. Sorry, I thought it was visible because I am not used to the red stroke through the eye...
See my next post though.

 

@nanascrapper Oh, and right now, your distorted layer doesn't show up because it is totally masked out. One you have made the top layer invisible you start removing the non-distorted bits by using a black brush on the white mask (2.nd layer from top), and then you bring the distorted dispersed pieces to show by using a white brush on the black mask (3rd layer from top).

 

Hi @nanascrapper I'm in pse11 - I could try to help .. my layers palette ended up looking like this (I have renamed my copy1 and copy2 for explanation reasons). I'm up for another half an hour if I can help out.

 

@IntenseMagic must it be a photo? Could it be an element, a balloon or kite perhaps? And, if it must be a photo, must it be our own?

 

Totally happy to be corrected but I think the aim of this step is to remove the subject from the photo. So one way those of us who don't have content aware could do this would be to use the clone tool to 'cover over' where the subject was in the photo. So in my second bottom layer in the example I provided above I have removed the subject by stamping over the area the cicada was with the clone stamp (helps that he was on such a plain background). Does that help?

 

Here is mine, for some reason I ended up with butterflies around the rooster... Hmmmm. @IntenseMagic Is this okay?