Add Fear to Your Photos (just in time for Halloween)

Mwahahaha!

Let’s do some diabolical photo manipulating of your favorite photos. Let’s turn them scary and creepy! Are you ready? I’m ready!  Hopefully you’ve seen the example I posted up in the blog thread and/or in the gallery.  I totally love what happened to this image of my son!

Let’s see what we can do. Here’s another picture:

This is a part of a statue I found along a bicycle path in Burbank, CA. It’s not too scary. But we’ll see if we can change that. *cue evil laugh*

Okay, here we go!  Here’s the recipe I used for this picture:

Layer one: the original untouched photograph

Layer two: I converted the image to black and white > went into Photo Effects in my Style Palate and chose a gray-green color > THEN I set the layer to DIFFERENCE at 100%

Layer three: I added a free scratched up texture layer by Shadowhouse (Black Magick Texture Layer), set the layer on LINEAR DODGE 100% and that was it! 

Comment: the process seemed to work better on my son’s photograph. He got glowier than this image. But, that’s okay. I can go back and play with the settings some more. Using the same settings for two different photos will not give you same the results.

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This picture was interesting. It had more layers and used a couple of filters I’d never used before:

Layer one: the original photograph.

Layer two: Neon Filter, glow size set to -18, brightness set to 23. I also chose to set the color to a creepy green.

Layer three: Stained Glass filter; cell size 8, border thickness 3, light intensity 3 > then the layer was turned gray-green via the Photo Effects in the Style Palate (same as the others).  SOFT LIGHT at 65%

Layer four: Here’s where the real fun happened. EXTRUDE filter, set on blocks, pixel size 30, depth 30 pixels.

Layer five: Shadowhouse’s Black Magick Texture layer again, LINEAR DODGE 100%.

Comment: This was a lot of fun to experiment with. I did use the Burn Tool on Layer Four around the statue’s eyes to accentuate the creepiness. It helped. Again, I pretty much used the same process on this image as I did the one with my son in the layout BUT I did have to tweak here and there.

Please post your own experiments on the forum thread for this blog post, and show us what you can do! Think of all the cool layouts you can do with all the Halloween goodies you have in your stash (and will add to your stash!).

Your partner in Fearful Filtering Fun Effects,

Julie