Kaleidascope tutorial

[pyrocrow]

Firstly, I take ZERO credit for this tutorial. the works and images were created by a friend named Klaus and have been brought to you with his knowledge and consent.

Secondly...

OK this is a pretty basic technique but it can produce some surprisingly-cool results. This will show you how to use PhotoShop to make a "kaleioscope"-style picture. To show that it can truly change the look of any picture, I'm going to use a shot of my cat Gerka as the example in this tutorial :

OK open your pic in PS and duplicate the layer, then go to Edit>Transform>Flip horizontal and then go to the layers palette and set the opacity of the new layer to 50%. [Note: if your picture is dark, you might want to try setting the layer to "linear dodge" and leaving the opacity at 100% instead. It depends on the picture in question -- sometimes a setting of "overlay", "soft light", or "hard light" will look better. Check at each stage, but for the purposes of this tut i'll assume that just setting the opacity to 50% is the way to go. Mess around with this as you go, it will vary from pic to pic...}

Then go to Layers>Flatten image and make it one layer. This is the rather-creepy result so far lol:


Now duplicate the layer again, and go to Edit>Transform>Flip vertical and then repeat the opacity and flatten-image steps again... Here's the result in my example:

Now click on the move tool and make sure the "show bounding box" box is checked:

Then click on one of the corner handles:

and enter 90 in the rotation box that appears in the menu bar:

...and then pull on the center handles and bring the edge of the new layer to match the overall edges [not necessary if your pic is square, of course...] Repeat the opacity and flatten image steps one last time... and the result:


now you can go in and do normal PS work, in this case I desaturated and colored it, and messed with the levels and sharpness to get this result, no longer recognizeable as the world's greatest cat:

If you use colorful pics or renders and experiment with the layer setting as indicated above, you can get some wonderful results... here's some examples of what you can do:




I hope you find this useful!