PS How to create lifelike handsome tattoo

Many of today's video works are "forged", and most of the time we can't define them as false. Although the ever-popular Photoshop sites and contests now seem a bit outdated.

The ability to design any conceivable visual image is a great power. Especially when we create things in wonderful ways, such as creating as vivid a picture as possible, of course they are not real. An artificial tattoo, conceived or originated from ancient readings, is one example. If you can do it well, the PS tattoo will look as lifelike as a real tattoo.

As we've seen, a tattoo can add a lot of interesting visual elements to a mediocre, mediocre pattern, making the tattoo particularly beautiful. In fact, tattoos have a long history, but in the past 10 years, tattoos have not entered into people's sight as before. Now, however, tattoos have received more media coverage, including television stations like inked.

Tattoos are one of the options for designing images with visual impact, and tattoos can be sexy regardless of sex. In many cases, we add a tattoo to a picture, which is actually a gimmick. The author is very good at many with visual explosion point of the picture through the PS to become a tattoo effect of the picture, this issue of foreign quality translation tutorials to share with you how to create lifelike tattoo through PS.

　One, why artificial tattoos easy?

Look at the tattoos on those characters in the picture. You will realize that most of the tattoos may look fake, but in fact some of them are true.

The author means that tattoos are not a natural part of the human body. So the nature of the tattoo is "false". When we see the picture, we see the "fake" tattoo created by the tattoo artist. And now what we as a digital designer to do is just the tattoo "stickers" up. In both cases, the tattoos are "fake", and our brains have to understand well and accept the nature of the tattoos in both cases. This will help us to design.

As shown in Figure 01, a real tattoo looks a bit like a fake, because it's like a hand-drawn piece.

Figure 01

Another thing that makes design easier is that our brains have enough space to imagine how tattoos get stabbed. And, because this is not true in itself, normal physical effects do not react, at least not very accurately.

For example, you put a picture of a chair in a photo of a room. The size, angle, cover and other factors must be exactly the same, so that the Chair seems to be in the room. And for tattoos, obviously there is no very standard law can be implemented, even if the real tattoo is man-made to strange, creative full of stripes up. So visually, we have learned to receive what is seen as true.

　Second, how to design tattoos

Here are a few ways to add tattoos. There are simple ways to add tattoos, depending on tattoo patterns and the need to meet the accuracy requirements. We'll take a closer look at the following. But the first step in each approach is to choose and prepare.

　　1. Select

The pattern of choosing a tattoo depends on the idea and the effect you want to achieve, perhaps you will design your own tattoo, perhaps you are engaged in tattoo design, just put them into practice.

In this PS tutorial, we will set the search route and search criteria from Google, "mark for reuse and change", we find a good choice from Pixabay, which has a lot of good free resources.

Figure 02

2. Prepare

The patterns we prepare are very simple, even the novice will feel that can be handled well. At the same time we have to ensure that the resolution of these patterns is high enough, but of course some will be exceptional, because few tattoo patterns are clear enough. So the size OK can be, as long as the margin is not serrated on it. It's best if the pattern comes with an alpha channel or a mask, but we all apply a multiply mixed layer option to these patterns, so it's not difficult.

Most pictures are not opened in Black-and-white photos. For example, the need to remove the gray background of motorcycles, of course, this is also very easy. Don't stop, there are a lot of interesting experiments to enhance the artistic sense of the pattern.

　3. Example: Simple Overlay

The easiest way to do this is to put the positive superimposed pattern on the skin surface directly. If the position of the tattoo is relatively flat, then the effect should be good.

But this is by no means a simple superposition of work, we need to do a lot of work to make the tattoo lifelike. Tattoos have never been perfect. Tattoo inks often have damage to the skin, look at the picture below, ink causes some of the skin began to change color. Unless the ink is new, otherwise the ink will quickly fade away. And some of the ink will be immersed in the skin outside the tattoo.

Figure 03

To get a nice effect, you want to keep trying a series of PS filters until you're satisfied with the results. For example, to make the edge of a tattoo less perfect, you can select the contour of the tattoo and save it as a channel. Apply the filter > Filter Gallery > Splash filter to create a new tattoo profile with the alpha channel.

As the following illustration shows, the splash filter can make the edges more varied.

Figure 04

The cute boy shown below is the author's son, because of his youth, so there is no skin texture of the elderly. This adds some texture to the tattoo by duplicating the layer and applying a mesh filter that creates skin effects. Place these under the Tattoo master layer (set to normal mode), set the color scale enhancement contrast, and adjust the opacity of the main layer.

Figure 05

By copying the image to add a snug mesh effect to the entire skin, apply the filter and then place the house on top of the original layer, setting the blending mode to soft light, opacity 30%. The continuity of the skin texture will help make the picture and the tattoo integrated.

Figure 06

The edge of the tattoo also requires a smear effect to be more realistic. This is divided into two steps: first apply the Gaussian blur with a radius of 0.5 pixels, and then set a darker warm glow outside.

There is much more to be done. For example, the tattoo will be a bit shiny. So the tattoo is a chance to have a high light effect. But in this case, this is not the right thing to do, so I didn't do it. The following figure is an image that is not yet finished.

Figure 07

　　4. Example: 2D skew

If each tattoo is in a flat reply, of course, is the best. But it's not going to be so smooth every time. If you want to design a tattoo on the skin with a curved surface, you will naturally have to "twist" the tattoo.

There are several ways to do this in almost universal Photoshop. There are all kinds of twisted tools, such as distortion, perspective, deformation and so on in the free transformation. As shown in the following picture, it is a schematic of the tattoo pattern from original to distorted to final positioning.

Figure 08

PS image processing software also offers other creative ways to distort your tattoo art with human anatomy. This includes smearing (such as finger) tools, liquefaction, and very powerful puppet warp group controls.

In addition to the free changes, Photoshop has other tools to achieve tattoo deformation, to adapt to the changes in human skin. This includes a smudge (or finger) tool, a liquefaction tool, and a powerful control-distortion setting.

　5. Example: 3D skew

Trying to find a 2D finish and creating a 3D effect can be very time-consuming and difficult. However, we can design a near-three-dimensional 3D tattoo with 3D design software. Independent 3D design software can provide maximum design operations, and Photoshop can provide a range of 3D tools to solve the problem.

In this last example, I added a tattoo pattern for a tribal band and converted it into a three-dimensional cylindrical shape, as shown in the following figure to generate a planar image of a three-dimensional mesh.

Figure 09

Figure 10

As we need to design, any 3D design requires constant creation and accumulation. But if other designs do not work, then the accumulation in the front will be the final solution to the design. (Note: This is actually an older version of the PS design.) Finally, although there are not many examples accompanying the tutorials, in fact for a tattoo, we may be more focused on the image itself with the tattoo. Because these images are the real test of our difficulties.

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