Efecto Photoshop

Brilliant Matte Dispersion Effects in Photoshop

Custom brushes can often be utilized on top of existing stock images to create a matte dispersion effect, where the vibrancy of the original stock is enhanced, while adding artistic flair and visual interest using dispersion.  It helps take standard stock images and can be used to create melting effects, shattering effects, and even disappearingeffects.
In this tutorial, you’ll be taken through, step by step, the creation of some custom brushes, and application of them to a stock image to create a matte dispersion effect.  You’ll learn how to create and save brushes, utilize complementary colors, and manipulate stock images for a visually stunning final result.
Hopefully you like the tutorial, and as always, show us your results in thecomments, ask us questions, or even suggest a tutorial.  We’re here to help you grow as a designer however we can.
Tools used:
* Photoshop
* Stocks
* Scanner (If you have one, works for custom brushes, not required.)
*

Step 1: Creating custom brushes
Alright so we will start off by creating our own custom brushes to use, if you have your own or a set you downloaded go aheadand use those; if not head ever to http://www.sxc.hu and grab this splatter: http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=524477 Do note that to download the stock images from Sxc you will need an account. They are free so if you don’t have one go ahead and set it up so you can follow along. Once you have downloaded or copied the image open up Photoshop and create a new document. Set the sizefor this new document to 4500*4500 as I have in the below screen shot.

Now this is one big document, but that’s ok, we will be working with different stocks at different resolutions so it’s nice to have some breathing room. Once you have created the document press ‘CRTL V’ on your keyboard, this will paste the image we have copied into our document. If you did not copy the image, just go to thefile tab and find where you saved it at and drag it into our document.

Once the image is in our new document we can start isolating it so we can make a brush out of it. Since the background is white we don’t really have to isolate the image much at all. This will be more of less a cleanup procedure so we won’t have any issues using the brush later on in the image. Start off by pressing ‘M’ onyour keyboard; this will equip the marquee tool. Be sure your marquee tool is set to the rectangle marquee and has no feather. Once you have the marquee tool set up properly we will grab the outer edges of our layer as I have, we don’t want any hard edges in the final image or any strange cut offs. Now that it is selected we can just press ‘DEL’ on the keyboard to clear this selection and move onto the next step!

Now press ‘CTRL SHIFT D’ to deselect the selection if it’s still up. Once that is done you can press ‘CTRL L’ on your keyboard, this will bring up the manual level editor. We will not be using the auto level tool for this because we want to keep the majority of the splat semi transparent. Using the auto leveler might cause the grays in our image to become absolute black whichwould not be good. So with your level editor up slide the middle triangle way over to the black triangle, not all the way though you want to stop at about ’1.44′. This will cause our image to become much brighter which is fine; it will also help if there are any strange grays around the edges that we cannot see to become pure white. And as I said before, we don’t want any strange edges.

Onceyou have hit the ok button we will start the final process. That is to remove any last remaining unwanted splats or grey lines that might linger around in the stock image. We will do this by pressing ‘E’ on our keyboard to bring out the eraser tool. Now right click on the screen and a new dialog box should appear; this dialog box will be how we adjust the settings for our eraser brush. Set your...