Photo Manipulation Tutorial: Creating ‘Vision of the Lens’ Wallpaper

Creating a photo manipulation tutorial requires a certain type of mood from the artist. Take me for an example, I can’t make a good photo manipulation tutorial on call, I need my favorite songs playing in the background, cool weather, a mug of columbian coffee and a lot of inspiration before I give birth to one good photo manipulation.

I feel making a photo manipulation tutorial  is even tougher than creating just an artwork that will not be converted into a tutorial. That’s because for a tutorial, I always have to keep in mind that everything should be simple, quick and easy to understand. Yet, the final result has to be eye-catching as well. All this makes designing a good photo manipulation tutorial difficult and that’s why I couldn’t make a deliver a good tutorial for a couple of weeks. But we have to bow down to public demand, don’t we?

So here I am with a wallpaper like photo manipulation tutorial, you can use it as a poster or flyer as well. If you are making it for a wallpaper, you don’t need any text written over it, otherwise the design has ample space for text and other content.

We are using premium stock images from Shutterstock. That means you’ll have to shop if you need the supreme quality images, of course they provide images on pretty affordable prices. You can also use some alternatives from other free image providers on the net. But leave all this for later, right now let me show you the tutorial.

 Final Result

Click to Enlarge

Ground Work

I opened the background image, then I duplicated the background layer, you can do this by striking CTRL+J. Now chage the new layer’s blend mode to SOFT LIGHT.

Lens

Grab a grass ball and place it on the background. Once it is set, it is time for our hero of the tutorial, the lens. I placed the lens right on top of grass ball, but resized the lens just enough to reveal a little bit of the grass.

Now I duplicated the grass ball, placed the duplicated layer on top of everything else, then switched the layer style to Overlay, and don’t forget to set opacity to 75%.

Result (so far): Photo Manipulation Tutorial

The People

I grabbed this image of a crowd. Then, using Magic Wand Tool, I extracted a some people I liked.

I selected a boy and put on top of this lens. You’ll have to scale the image (magic word is CTRL+T).

Tip: Scale it with at least 300% zoom level, otherwise you won’t get the best result. 

Here’s another boy, and a couple that I thought would look good on this design.

Green Stuff

A camera does not only do portrait photography, they do a lot of nature photography/wildlife photography as well. So I’m adding some greenry, for that I selected an image of trees.

Time for scaling once again. This time, with the trees.

I placed many trees here. If you notice, some trees are behind the people. To create this realistic touch, you’ll have to arrange layers properly. It took me about 15 minutes and a mug of coffee to do this. I think it’ll also take the same time on your side.

Animals

Didn’t I mention wildlife photography? So here are the animals. Let’s start with dears… I mean deers.

Same transformation stuff begins once again.

Wanna hear a PJ?

Q: Whats black and white and red all over?
A: A sun-burned zebra!

I grabbed a Zebra image and placed it on our graphic.

I rotated it, scaled it and placed according to my needs.

And we need a few birds as well, don’t we. I’m using a stock photo of sparrows.

I places sparrows in different amounts here and there, I also duplicated the zebra on the other side. Here’s me adding all this stuff.

Result: This is what we have made so far. This is a complete graphic / wallpaper / photo manipulation.

Making it a Poster/Flyer

To convert the image manipulation into a poster, all we have to do is add the content. For example, here I’m making it look like it is the poster of a photography contest.
Type whatever you like and whichever font you like. I typed in black color, then I duplicated the text layer. In the duplicated layer, I changed the text color to white, then I moved the layer a little to left and a little to top. The black text below will start to look like a shadow now. (Refer to next screenshot for the final result).

I repeated the same step, but this time I kept white in the background and black in front.

 Voila!

Click to Enlarge