Wallpaper: A romantic virtual photogallery

In this tutorial we're going to be creating a romantic virtual reality wallpaper. It's a wallpaper of a girl lying on the grass and seeing (or maybe dreaming of) all these romantic virtual pictures right before her eyes. Anyway, let's leave the interpretation for someone else and let's get down to business :). This is what we will be making:

Resources

We will be needing lots of resources for this wallpaper. You don't have to create a romantic picture if you don't want to, you can just find any pictures you want or you could create this from your girlfriend's pictures as a romantic gift to her. Well, it's up to you, but i'm going to give you the links to the resources i used anyway. First of all, the girl on the grass and then pictures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10

Part 1 - Creating the background

A background in this picture is simply the girl in the gras. But as you can see, the girl in the preview picture is rotated a little and if we rotate a picture - some empty space will appear and we'll have to fix it by filling the gaps with grass. So create a new transparent document with the size of your screen resolution. I will be working on a widescreen 1280x800 document. Paste the picture of the girl in the grass on the document:

There are empty gaps on both of the sides already and they will not magically disappear unless we do something about it. But that's a little later. We still need to rotate the girl a little. Press CTRL+T, move your mouse cursor outside of the transformation rectangle so that the cursor would change to a rotation cursor. Now rotate the image to the right a bit and position it like shown below:

And now it's time to add some grass on the empty space. It's very easy. Just grab the clone tool

from the tools palette and in the top of Photoshop's window define these settings:

The clone brush works in the following way: a) choose an area you want to clone the grass from (make sure it doesn't overlap with anything else); b) position your cursor in that area; c) hold ALT and click once (this actually selects the area); d) choose an area you want to copy the source to; e) position your cursor over the destination area and click to draw. You'll have to repeat the same process lots of times until you clone the grass completely. Here's how my image looks after the cloning:

Next, press CTRL+SHIFT+U. This will desaturate the image (make it grayscale). Now pick up a soft rond brush with the settings shown below:

Start drawing on the sides of the image. You need to make the sides darker like this:

And that's it for the background. Next comes a more difficult part.

Part 2 - The virtual picture template

In this part we will create a template for our virtual picture frame. We will use it to prepare all of the pictures in the gallery and then we will simply hide it. So begin by creating a new folder named Picture and a new layer shape inside it:

Take a rounded rectangle tool

from the tools palette and set its mode to paths in the tool settings window:

Zoom in on the girl and draw an about 600x300 rectangle. You can see the dimentions while drawing in the info window (Window > Info). Right click in the rectangle and choose Make Selection .... Here's what you should have now:

Change the foreground color to black (D key) and fill the selection (ALT+BACKSPACE). Press CTRL+D to deselect and you should end up with a nice rounded rectangle.

Now grab a polygonal lasso tool

from the tools palette and make a selection like this:

Hit DEL to delete the little corner from the shape:

Now duplicate the shape layer by pressing CTRL+J. Change the duplicate's fill value to 0% and the original shape layer's opacity value to 50%. Actually the opacity for the shape will have to increase later, but leave it as is for now, because i already have my preview images in this opacity and only fix it later. Here's what you should have now:

Double-click the shape's duplicate and define the following layer styles:

Your shape should now be glowing:

Next we need to center the shape in a current viewport. This will make things easier when we create another similar shape and will need to align them. If you're not seeing an entire shape - zoom out a little. Then perform the following procedure with both shape layers: press CTRL+A, CTRL+X, CTRL+V. This will cut the contents and paste them centered in the viewport. Now it's important that you dont scroll the image for now and don't change the zoom! Create a layer below shape and name it glass frame. Use a rounded rectangle tool to draw a slightly bigger shape than the one we already have:

Right-click inside it and and choose Make Selection .... After that, fill the selection with white (D, X, ALT+BACKSPACE). Finally, press CTRL+A, CTRL+X, CTRL+V on this layer as well. You should now have the shape aligned with the glass frame:

Now feel free to zoom or scroll the image, the alignment job is done. Set the fill of the glass frame to 7% and double-click to apply the following layer style:

Here's how the whole thing looks now:

Create a new layer above the glass frame and name it highlight. CTRL+CLICK a thumbnail on a glass frame layer to load its selection. Now grab any selection tool (M key) and move the selection down and right by 4 pixels (you can press DOWN and RIGHT keys on your keyboard 4 times):

Press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert the selection. We will be painting on the top left corner of the glass frame so we want the selection to only overlap with it by 4 pixels. Grab a big soft white brush with an about 15% opacity and click a few times on the top left corner of the frame:

As you can see our inverted selection prevents the white brush from going further inside the shape. Now CTRL+CLICK the glass frame layer's thumbnail again and press CTRL+SHIFT+I. This will now select anything outside of the glass frame, including our white spot. But this white spot is overlapping the glass frame by 4 pixels so when you invert the selection and hit DEL key to delete the white spot, you'll get a nice highlight like this:

OK i lied - this is definately not a nice highlight :) We still need to make it a little nicer. To do that, we need to make it thinner. I know i know we could've done that earlier, but as i've mentioned before, i already have images in the flow that i did this thing so some corrections are unavoidable. Grab a move tool

from the tools palette and press LEFT and TOP keys two times. Now CTRL+CLICK the glass frame, press CTRL+SHIFT+I to invert and hit DEL again. Your highlight looks better now:

Blur it a little. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur ... and apply a 0.5 - 1 pixel blur. Here's our final highlight:

Duplicate it (CTRL+J) and flip both ways (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal and Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical). Grab the move tool and position the new highlight on the bottom right corner. Then press CTRL+E to merge it with the original highlight. Here's the glass frame with both highlights:

Remebmer i said that the opacity of the shape layer is incorrect? Well this is the point when i realised it and fixed the problem. So change the opacity of the shape layer to 70%, because otherwise you will see slightly different results than mine. The shape should become a little darker:

Create a new layer above glass frame and name it label. CTRL+CLICK on the glass frame to select it, then grab the polygonal lasso tool

from the tools palette. We need to substract from this selection so follow the instructions on the image below:

The effect this will have is a selection on the top right corner like this:

Press D, X and ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the selection with white and change the fill of the label layer something between 20 and 30 percent:

Double-click the label layer and add a bevel and emboss like the one below:

Take the text tool

from the tools palette and define the following settings:

Now create a new layer above label and name it text. Set the foreground to white (D, X) and click on the document. Type in some text. Since this is a label for the picture i've typed in a date. You could type a short title if you like, but have in mind that it will be placed on the top right corner so it must be very short. I've typed in some date and then flipped the layer horizontally (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal):

I've flipped it because the images are supposed to be faced to the girl so that means she's seeing a mirrored view from what we're seeing from the top. Now press CTRL+T and rotate/position the text on the corner:

In theory for every photo we'll frame this text should be different but i was lazy as usual and left the date the same. Also i've decided to change the color of the text to black and the opacity of its layer to about 60%:

And guess what? The frame is done ... finally! It's about time to frame some pictures.

Part 3 - Preparing (framing) the pictures

Now we will be framing all the pictures we want to use in the virtual gallery. To do that you need to disable the background layer first (yes, the one with the girl :). Click on a little eye next to it and the layer will hide. Now select the shape layer and paste any of the pictures on it. Use CTRL+T to downsize and position the picture:

Press CTRL+SHIFT+U to convert the picture to grayscale (desaturate) and then go to Layer > Create Clipping Mask. Your picture will now be "trapped" within the boundaries of the shape layer and will inherit its opacity:

Next, press CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+C, CTRL+N, CTRL+V. That will select the entire image, copy the contents of all layers (that's why we've hidden the background), create a new document exactly the size of the copied contents and paste the image in it. And you have the first picture prepared. Don't worry that it can be barely seen - it's supposed to be transparent. Delete the layer above the shape (the one with the picture) and repeat the same procedure with all other pictures. When you're done, re-enable the background layer and disable the picture folder. You will now once again have only the girl in the document. But you'll also have framed pictures in other open documents. Time to start throwing the pictures in.

Part 4 - Final composition

The last part of the tutorial is putting all the things together. Select a background layer and paste your first picture (or last, or second, or fifth :).

Press CTRL+T, downsize the picture and, while holding the SHIFT key, rotate the picture clockwise two times:

Position the picture somewhere on the document and do the same thing with a few other pictures. Just try to resize them all to be about the same size. Here's my result so far:

You will notice lots of new layers created. Select all of them (except the ones in the picture folder and the background) and press CTRL+E to merge them. Rename the merged layer to set 1. Now paste some more images but this time make them a little bigger:

Once again, select all the new layers (this time also leave set 1 unselected) and merge them down to a layer set 2. Set 2 should be on top of set 1. That way we're creating an illusion of depth: the larger images look closer to us than the smaller ones. Anyway, the depth itself can't yet be fully visible, because we will finalie it when all the picture sets will be created. So create a set 3 the same way you did the two previous and once again make the pictures in it larger then in the previous one:

And create two final sets (set 4 and set 5) with even larger pictures (unresized at all). I've used one picture per set (the girl in the top left and the bottommost kissing couple):

It's time to increase the depth illusion. Select set 5 layer and apply a 1 pixel Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur .... I'm blurring the topmost picture set because i've decided that the set below should be the one in focus. In other words, if we had the topmost layer focused and all others blurred, it wouldn't look as dramatic as a layer in the middle in focus and all the others not. So we will have set 4 in focus. That means yo can skip it and select the set 3. This set is in the same distance from the focused area as set 5 so we will be applying the same blur to it. Press CTRL+F to repeat the blur effect. Select the set 2 and apply the blur (CTRL+F) twice. Apply 3 blurs to the set 3. Here's what you have so far:

To me it looks great but some people with logics will probably start questioning this thing so let's take one optional step of the depth illusion. As you can see the pictures in focus are on the 4th set and all the others are either above or below them. But the girl is below all the pictures as well. That means in real world she would be blurred out as well. If you're streaming for realism, select the girl's layer and press CTRL+F 4 times. Personally for me the result is better when she's not blurred, but that kinda conflicts with the laws of physics :) And the last thing, select the picture folder (because it's the topmost thing of all) and press the create new fill or adjustment layer

button in the layers panel. Use the following settings:

And there you have it, the final result:

Hope you enjoyed it, see you next time!