In this week’s free Deke’s Techniques video, Deke celebrates his favorite holiday by showing you how to carve a ghoulish but gorgeous graphic into the face of a pumpkin using Adobe Photoshop.
First, start with an image of an otherwise unsuspecting pumpkin:
Next, draw the face you want carved into your pumpkin on a transparent background. For this evil grin, Deke used a Wacom tablet and his own vivid imagination:
With the face drawn, Deke adds the face to the original photo using the Transform command to get it to the size and angle he’s looking for:
A mask, created with the Color Range command and some hand-crafted detail, removes parts of the face that have spilled off the pumpkin onto the girl’s arm:
A variety of layer effects—a drop shadow, color overlay, and outer glow—along with an application of the Median filter, digitally carve the face into the pumpkin flesh.
The final touches are added by duplicating the mouth of the face, coloring the teeth white, and giving the teeth some transparency by changing the blend mode in the Layer Style dialog box.
For lynda.com members, Deke also has another exclusive Halloween video this week called Simulating a glowing jack-o’-lantern, in which he shows you how to create a classic glowing-eyed jack-o’-lantern effect, starting with the a fresh, faceless pumpkin image.
Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com
Suggested courses to watch next:
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Advanced
Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Deke McClelland
