Learn a simple, yet beautiful photography trick to create mushrooms from water and add some photoshop magic to it.
In this tutorial we are going to create mushrooms from ... water. For this, you will need a camera and an empty plastic bottle. If you don't have either, you can always skip to the second part of the tutorial, but it will not be as fun as doing this yourself.
Part 1 - Creating mushrooms with water
Go to a place where you can play with water. For the best results, choose a place with as few colors in the background as possible. Set your camera to high shutter speed and enable flash. If you have a simple point-and-shoot camera, you'll need to learn how to use high speed shooting on it. We will need this, because we'll have to focus and shoot the water very fast. Usually, when you press the shoot button on a point-to-shoot camera halfway down, it starts focusing an object, fucuses it, but does not shoot yet. Then you press the button a little more and it quickly shoots the image (it no longer needs to focus it). For professional cameras you can just set a manual focus and avoid all this trouble. Now this is a tricky part so i recommend you train a little. Take a full with water plastic bottle in your non-dominant hand and the camera to the other. Now point the camera to the top of the bottle. Make sure the bottle is in the center of the image, because this is where the cameras usually focus. Press the shoot button halfway and see your bottle getting focused. A macro mode would probably also be a good idea. When you focus the camera, you can move both bottle and the camera itself anywhere as long as you keep the distance between them similar to the one it was focused. When you're done your practice - here's the theory on how to shoot a mushroom. Look at the picture below:
In the first part we see the bottle in its original state. In this state, you point the camera at the top of it and focus.
Now quickly squeeze the bottle (part 2 of the image) so that the water would shoot out of it. Do not squeeze to hard, because the final result might be out of range when you make the picture. Now release your squeeze to allow the bottle to return to its original state. What happens now is that there's no more force, making the water go up and the gravitation starts doing its job. The water on the top of the "fountain" starts falling down (part 3 of the picture), forming a shape of a mushroom head. This is a moment when you push the shoot button harder and take the picture. Remember, all of this is done very quickly and needs a lot of practice to perfect. The final result might look something like the examples below:
Part 2 - Photoshop
Now we can do something with our mushrooms in photoshop. In this example, i'll just show you how to make them glow. If you couldn't make a mushroom yourself, feel free to use this one:
First, take the pen tool
from tools palette and in the top of the photoshop window find the pen settings
. In this picture, the first button (shape layers) is selected. That's not good, select the second button (paths). Now by clicking on the edge of the mushroom, select it with the help of the pen tool.
Rigght-click anywhere on the image and choose
Make Selection .... Set
feather to 0 and check the
Anti-aliased checkbox. The mushroom is now selected. Press
CTRL+J on your keyboard. This will create a new layer with only the contents of our selection on it. Select the layer below it and fill it with black. By now you should have something like this:
Select the top layer and pres
CTRL+U. It will bring up the
hue/saturation dialog. In my picture, i've used these settings:
Don't use them :) Be more creative and select a color that you like and not the color i tell you to select :) This really won't screw anything up. If you're using my image, it will need some contrast to be added. From main menu, select
Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast .... Set the contrast to something you like (mine was 35) and press OK. Now with the mushroom layer selected, press
CTRL+J. This duplicates the layer. Now select the lower mushroom layer and go to
Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur ... in the main menu. I've applied a 9,9 pixel blur to the image, but with preview selected, apply it to whatever looks nice for you. Here's what you get after all the steps:
So here we have it - a glowing mushroom. After a little more experimenting, you can get something like the picture below or even better.
