How to achieve "magical" effects using Photoshop?

These images are all HEAVILY "photoshopped". HEAVILY. And of course the PhotoShop Artist begins with very strong, technically perfect photographs. A neutral background in the base colour the artists wants seems to be the starting place for all but the last image. And that last image - the blurring was done in PhotoShop, not in-camera.

There are a gazillion great tutorial sites out there that specifically target this sort of artistic manipulation. You might want to get a really strong image with a neutral, un-busy, blank background and find a tutorial and practice!

 

All the swoosh, and aura, and sparkle and magic effects are just brushes. Go to deviantart, and just search for the keyword + "photoshop brush" and download a few. After that you can just play with the settings you apply the brushes - on dodge, burn, or overlay layers or modes. Sometimes they'll be so easy just as to choosing the appropriate color and stamping away

The pictures are also look overly brightened, having at least one go with an overlay layer and with the dodge tool. Or many more professional effects that I'm not aware of

 

What Zag is saying is that the work done on these images involves far, far more than just applying a simple brush tool. They are composites of several manipulated images in many layers. For example, the fire has probably not even started off as a fire, but as something completely else -- possibly several something elses -- just as convenient starting points to create an effect that looks like the kind of fire the artist was looking for.

Search terms to use might for instance be "photoshop", "compositing", "manipulation", "trick photography", just for starters.

 

Thank you, The Dragon! Exactly - the work involved in these images is multi-faceted. And much depends upon what version of PS folks are working with. I try to attend Scott Kelby's workshops whenever he comes through locally and I'm still using PS 7!

http://kelbytv.com/

 

wolf_mistress17, why not choose one of those images and we can see if we can replicate it?

I won't be much help as I have horribly roundabout ways of doing stuff in Photoshop because I have only really learned to use it by playing with it. But, for example, that blurred vignette at the end can be achieved by adding a duplicate layer above your image, blurring the bejaysus out of it (I use Gaussian Blur and bump it up to whatever looks blurry enough to me. 4pt in the case of this 600x400 image) and then erasing the bits that you want to remain looking sharp. You can adjust the hardness of the eraser to get soft edges. If you want that burned out edge, you can then tickle along the edges with the dodge tool, making sure it is large enough and soft enough to give a gentle edge. You can also lighten the edges with the Lens Correction Vignette thingy. But that doesn't look as controlled as doing it all by hand, to my eye.

If you want the vegetation too, either some fruit and flowers have been placed near the dolls and have then been shot using a very narrow depth of field, keeping the dolls in focus and the flora not (for me, the easier way to do it), or they have arranged the images on different layers (the grapes under the layer with the dolls and the flowers on the layer on top), with the unwanted bits erased. Looking at the edges of the flowers, this does look like what they have done.

I did a quick blurred vignette, which took all of two minutes. It isn't terribly exciting but could have been made to look much better if the photo had actually been taken with that in mind and had included something more interesting in the background than my friend's garden wall. Not that I have anything against my friend's garden wall. Apart from my dolls, of course.



I also did one with a HIDEOUS floral border. To do this,chose a suitably twee picture of flowers off the internet, erase the background (I use "select colour range" to get the colour of the background then use the background erase tool to get rid of it), then save it as a GIF to preserve the transparency. You can then make a border with it. In my case, the flowers were an L shape, so I copied and rotated and flipped it four times to make the four corners, erasing bits to help it blend in. Then I blurred the bejasus out of that with Gaussian Blur. Then I made a transparent layer above my photo and pasted the border onto it. Make sure you have sized it so that it will fit. You can do all the pasting and rotating on layers above your photo, if you prefer. That way it is easier to see where you are plonking your flowers down.



I am sure that there are much more efficient ways to do all of this and I would be interested to know if anyone has any other ideas.

 

Okay, I'll try to explain how this kind o' stuff works...first:
Like the others already stated, these pictures are very, very photoshopped, but they also have an excellent base photo to start with. The pictures are all very clear, sharp (the camera used is a Canon 5D btw) and arranged in a way which makes it easier to work with them.
Just a little reminder, since having a good background etc. to start with makes it also easier to photoshop in the end.

The "aura" thingies and such are actually quite easy with a bit of photoshop know-how, and some of them (like the "snow" in the Taco photo) are mostly just simple usage of brushes.
These aura brushes and swirls can be downloaded on deviantart and some of them have a description in how to get them so glowy too.
Just search for "light", "glow", "swirl" together with "sparkle" and "stars" for the effect used on the Topaz photo.
(sadly I'm not at home or else I could upload a few of the brushes I collected throughout the years and explain their usage a bit better :/)

About the last picture: MadameMauMau already said a good few things and if you look close enough at the pictures it's easy to tell that Soom added the stuff in the front afterwards (it just doesn't look like naturally blurred out parts).
You can either go this way:
Get a lense which is capable of blurring out things nicely, that's done with an aperture around f2.0 and more.
Put stuff in the background and the front of the doll, take a picture (use manual focus, or else the stuff in the front will be sharp and not the doll), tadaa.
Good: The stuff will look less photoshopped and the overall picture appearance a bit more natural.
Bad: With such an aperture it's hard to focus and to get really sharp pictures of a whole doll. Also things are waaay more blurred out and in the end all you'll see is pretty Bokeh :B

The Soom way would be the way MadameMauMau did it.
Put stuff in the background, take a picture of the doll, blurr everything afterwards with photoshop.
The stuff in the front can be added by taking pictures of it in front of a neutral background and then adding it on top of the doll photo with a new layer. Erasing, blurring, dodging etc. and you'll get such an arrangement.
Good: Sharp pictures of a doll are easier to get by doing it that way.
Bad: If done bad or poorly it just looks...kinda cheap.

When I'm back home again I might give it a try, for now that's all I can say
(thinking about it, my post might atm not be helpful at all)

 

You might want to use the Multiple Quotes button next time... ^^;;;;;;

I just want to add that the Soom photos are also heavily edited - the color balance, levels, saturation, brightness, contrast, and hues... before adding any effects. >.> You can also use the friendly Google to get photoshop brushes and stamps.

 

One simple but sometimes overlooked thing I can add about 'magical effects' is that for them to be believable, the light sources/directions have to match in all the layers. Really good thread

 

If you use brushes such as the sparkles i've always thought it was better to place the sparkles on a new layer, duplicate, gaussian blur to your liking the bottom layer and set to soft light or overlay, and lower the opacity as desired. It gives a 'glowing' look. You could also outline them in the settings. I can't remember what it's called but it's the blurred outline you can get to by double clicking the layer.The one they did on topaz seems like the bottom layer (assuming they did it this way - they could very well have used another method) is purple and the top layer is white lowered opacity slightly. As for the snow in the next image they are simple snow brushes. I find when doing snow it looks better if some are more opaque than others, and the sizes vary. They blurred them or possibly got a blurred or soft brush. For the yellow one you said looks like aura, it seems like the easiest one to me. Looks like it's just brushes (i've had a similar set that looked like this before) placed carefully around the two dolls and then set to overlay. Of course they've probably smudged or done something else to the background behind the brushes, but that seems like the way the brush bit has been done. The lightning magic effect looks like a brush that has been gradually erased to make it a circle. Or they could have possibly gotten a circle brush. Again it looks like overlay or soft light in a couple of layers of blue and white. Hope i helped I taught myself photoshop, so there's probably other ways to do things like this. But this is just how i would go about it if i was to replicate the effect ~