It’s All a Matter of Perspective – for Photoshop Shading, That Is
Shading in Photoshop is a tool that has many dimensions. It helps create sharpness for photos by creating contrast, and it can help give the illusion of 3-D images. The number of uses for shading is actually limited only by the number of ways Photoshop artists can conceive of to apply it. One way it is often used by designers is to help create perspective.
The discussion of creating perspective in Photoshop is a very complicated one and has many variables depending on what the image is and how it is intended to be used. But however you will be using shading to create perspective, the first thing you will need to do is create a shading brush. To do this, you will need to start with a soft round brush in a large size – about 200 pixels. Make the foreground color black by selecting it from the color square found in the toolbox. From there, click the “brushes” tab and then “brush tip shape.” Set the spacing for the brush tip to 28%. Click on “options” and set opacity at 100% and flow to 28%. Make sure the airbrushed option is turned on. Save the brush you have created by clicking “tool preset picker” and then “new tool preset.” Name the brush whatever you like and save it by selecting “save new tool” in the tool preset flyout menu. This will give you a basic shading brush to work with; once you become more familiar with shading and have an idea of what kind of shading you will be doing most often, you can create new brushes to suit your needs.
Now that you have your shading brush, you can begin to use it to create perspective. When you are just learning how to use this tool, it is easiest to practice on a simple shape line drawing in gray. First, draw your shape. Open your shading brush in dodge tool mode, and tap up and down the center of the shape with your shading brush. You’ll begin to see an effect as though light was shining on the center of your shape. Tap more heavily near the top center of the shape, to give the effect that the strongest light is hitting it there. Your shape should look like the center is raised. At this point, tap the brush along the top edge of the shape, branching out from the middle, with the most light nearest the center and with the lightness fading as it approaches the edges. Once you have completed this along the top edge, you can repeat this process down to the bottom edge of the shape, but you should make the area that appears lit increasingly narrower as you approach the bottom edge. If you 200-pixel brush is too large for this task, then you can crate a new, smaller brush to use.
Once you have completed this, close your dodge tool, and open your shading brush in the burn tool. You want to use the burn tool to build some shadows and darker tones around the light you have added into your image. Set the range to “highlights” and exposure to 52%. Now, use the brush to build shadows into your image wherever to think it would create the greatest effect, avoiding the very top edge. You will need to experiment with this until your desired effect is achieved – there is no right or wrong answer, just a matter of opinion.
Follow these tips and soon you will be using your shading brush to make your flat images pop off the page!
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