Tutorial: Interview with the Vampire Wallpaper Start to Finish
Okay so I haven't written a wallpaper tutorial in a while and I can be a bit long winded and overly detailed so bear with me.
Also it should go without saying, but sometimes it has to be said, please don't use this as an opportunity to duplicate this
piece and repost it as your own. It's is an instructional tool to teach techniques, tips, and tricks, and I would love if you
were to use it and apply to your own style and experiments! Thank you in advance for your awesome cooperation. Also you
should know that I use Adobe Photoshop CS2, and though I will try to make this as understandable as possible, you will need
atleast a basic understanding of said program or your similar graphics program. I am pretty finicky and anal about them so if
at any time I'm being just plain nitpicky, skip ahead and ignore my possibly uneccessary tweaking. I will try to leave that
stuff out as much as I can.
I am going to take you step by step through the process used to create this wallpaper.
1. First things first, I opened a blank canvas at 1024 by 768 pixels and made the background black. I use a black background
75% of the time because most of my wallpapers are dark and also black is usually just easier to use.
2. I opened seven screencaps (yes seven, I know it's a lot) that I snagged from the always useful Screencap Paradise. Thanks
to Rosely and Line Bine for having caps of this movie because for some reason I couldn't find them anywhere. I digress. Those images are: Cap 1, Cap 2, Cap 3, Cap 4, Cap 5, Cap 6, Cap 7.
So, as I said seven caps is alot, but with practice comes a better understanding of placement and what is and isn't overcrowded.
I played around with the caps and tried a few different setups before deciding I would be able to use them all, and they
would be set up like so.
3. Next I go about correcting the grainy, pixelyness of them. Screencaps can be a pain to work with, especially in dark
movies, tv shows, so a knowledge and willfulness to spend extra time working on the pictures themselves is neccessary. My
first step is to make the lighting a little nicer and more even. Also I need the lighting of all caps to be similar to one
another. I open a fun and helpful tool called curves which can be found under IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - CURVES. Curves is a
little more difficult to use than the brightness and contrast tools but ultimately you can do more with it and have more control over your lighting.
As you can see here, bringing up the line at the middle, and bringing it lower on the bottom will brighten your lights and
darken your darks. It has a smiliar effect as changing the contrast but like I said with a lot more control. It's not
neccessary to move the line much normally, a little pull in either direction will make a lot of difference. After repeating
this step on all seven caps for the desired lighting, I move on.
4. I decide smart blur is a good place to go with the graininess of the caps, and you can find that under FILTER - BLUR -
SMART BLUR. I leave the radius set to 3.0 and the threshold on 4.1. You get a really helpful little box that shows you a
preview of what you are doing so you can see if it looks the way you want it to look ahead of time. I repeat this step with
all caps. Smudge tool is your friend. Heck even blur tool is your friend, but I prefer my little smudgy finger. Sometimes
smart blur and/or paint daubs can leave hard lines and the finger just below the eraser is a good way to go in and manually
smooth those lines. I leave mine set to 20% and smooth out any distracting hard lines on the face.
5. Selective Coloring, also your friend. You can find that under IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - SELECTIVE COLORING. I set the colors
to BLACKS from the dropdown menu. Below that are a buncha little bars with colors next to them. I set the bars to +7 cyan, +9
magenta, +4 yellow, +1 black, and leave the method on relative. I repeat this step with each cap, give or take a few numbers
up or down a little to get the desired color consistency for all the caps.
6. Now that I've changed the coloring a bit, I notice Lestat is just kinda awkward. His coloring is a lot different from
Claudia's and she appears much whiter than he does. To avoid bringing up the color on his entire cap, I use a trick I learned
from a tutorial somewhere years ago and if someone could tell me where I would be much obliged. Ctrl-Alt-Tilde Key (which is
the little squiggly line that looks like ~) will bring up a bunch of dotted flashing lines on your entire piece. These lines
are highlighting and selecting the lightest parts of your piece. On the Big awkward Lestat cap with this highlighted go to
FILTERS - DISTORT - DIFFUSE GLOW. Make sure your undercolor on the color palette is white or something close to it, depending
on what color you want my glow to give out. For this piece, I went with white and my palette looked something like this.
7. Now as you can see, my colors are much nicer and Lestat's color is a bit better and has a dead guy kind of sheen about
him. So, Still with the awkwardness of him, Lestat is too big and overpowering so I enable bounding boxes on the toolbar, and
while holding shift to make sure the image retains it's proportions, downsize him slightly and bring him up and to the right
some.
8. I like to add controlled grain to pieces I've gone out of my way to remove grain from because I'm a freak, and because
believe it or not, controlled grain looks nice when done subtly. Grain is also a good tool on already grainy, dark caps,
because if you can atleast control it a bit, you can make it a part of your piece. So I bring up FILTER - NOISE - ADD NOISE
and leave it set pretty low on 2%. And again, repeat this step with all caps.
9. Time for some more coloring! I created a gradient map layer by clicking the little half black and white circle which is
the 4th icon on the bottom of my layer palette and selecting gradient map. I then chose this gradient which is part of the
Mix n Match set by Jenni Lou that you can download at Daydreaming. I set the opacity to 20% and the layer style to soft
light.
Then I opened the photoshop default gradient set called color harmonies 1, and selected the orange and blue gradient and made
another gradient map layer with this one set to 55% on soft light. And for yet another gradient layer, added this green and
orange gradient set on soft light at 43%. You'll notice I use a lot of gradient map layers, but always bring the opacity down
and let their effect be subtle rather than overpowering. After applying the gradients, I bring up or down the lighting of the caps to match eachother, or to be more visible.
And here is the piece now.
10. TEXTURES!! So now is the time to apply textures if you are using any in your piece. I love/can't live without textures, so they are pretty much an always with me. I create a new layer underneath the caps and paste this texture by moi on it. I desaturated it which you can find under IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - DESATURATE, and brought the opacity down to 35%. Then I took this texture by Wendy at Black Lagoon and put it OVER the caps. I leave the layer style on normal, bring the opacity down to 20% and desaurate it as well. I don't always desaturate the color on textures, they can often give you great coloring, but in this case it works for me. On this texture layer I then do a smart blur on it again set to 3.0 radius, and 4.0
threshold. and then paint daubs at Brush Size 2 and Sharpness 2 to make it stand out more. Now I used this stock photo I had in a folder of stocks which sadly I'm not sure where it came from, and placed it underneath the caps, and one of the same stock OVER the caps. I desaturate the bottom one, and on the top use my handy selective coloring to make the blues dark red. This was achieved by putting the colors on CYANS, and putting the color bars at cyan -100, magenta +82, yellow + 100, black +100.
11. I begin tweaking including things like adding a red and black gradient overtop set on 16% soft light for just a small amount of red. I also erase some of the lines created by the texture in the lower right hand corner, and fix some coloring, lighting differences. And in a last minute decision add this texture by Matilda at Mongrel Minds under the caps, over the stock image, set to overlay.
12. The images aren't as sharp as I would like, but sharpening them mkes them TOO sharp. An easy and more controlled way to get around this is to duplicate each cap, and use high pass on it, you can find this under FILTER - OTHER - HIGH PASS. Find a setting that brings out the lines of the picture somewhat, and then set that layer to soft light or overlay depending on how much you want the lines to be brought out. I learned this from someone, but I don't remember who *sheepish face* Repeat with all caps.
13. Now it's text time. I am a freak of nature who enjoys text unlike most fanartists so this part is just as fun for me as the rest of it. My main text is the quote "I'll put you in your coffin" and it is in capital letters in Garamond font set to 48pt. I also went to LAYER - LAYER STYLE - OUTER GLOW, and put an outer glow on it set to black on opacity 65%,
technique set to precise, spread 57%, and size 1px. I placed over it the quote "Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest." This is in Jane Austen font set to 24pt. I also put a black line behind it to bring the text out more. You may notice my text is somewhat spaced out. That's because I like my letters to be far apart which can be achieved by brining up this little box that lets you control your text.
The number 200 indicates the place to change your letter spacing. I like the subtle reds in the piece so much that I repeat the words goodnight sweet prince behind the text using the font
applesauce and set to 48pt in dark red. And I also add the Lestat words put me in my coffin in black garamond behind the text as well. Now we are ALMOST DONE!!
I don't always put a border on my pieces, but I did on this one because it just seemed fitting, and often times a border is a good way to bring the piece together and make it look nicer and more well rounded. This is achieved by adding a layer above all of the other ones, select all, edit stroke, 8 pixels, black, inside. deselect it. edit stroke
again, 1 pixel, dark red, set to inside again. AND NOW, we are finally finished!! I always add my name, date, and domain name to the piece, but not everyone does.
