chrispperson

Making 'Grass' into 'Lush Grass' By ChrisPperson of Paint.NET Difficulty Level: 2.5/10.0 Plugins Needed: None! Other Needed Things: A picture with grass, and having sky in the picture may be nice to get a cool effect. Before: After: Step One: Use the Magic Wand tool to select the sky area of the picture. I set my tolerance level to the following to select the whole sky in the picture (This part is incredibly important! Do not mess this up!) And then selected the sky so that it would look like this: Step Two: :GaussianBlur: Next, use the Gaussian Blur filter on the selected sky area. The radius of the Gaussian Blur should be "145". This creates a very nice effect in the sky for later. Here is what it should look like (But do NOT deselect the sky! I just deselected it so you could see the full effect!): Step Three: :InvertSelection: After that, you will invert your selection, and select the grassy area. While doing this, you will then use the Brightness/Contrast effect. The settings will be adjusted to Brightness at -45, and Contrast at 0. This will make it very lush, but also very dark, which is what we will be fixing in just a minute. Step Four: :Glow: You will then apply a glow to the selected area. The properties should be Radius at 1, Brightness at -45, and Contrast at -15. This will make the previously 'Dry' grass now feel moist and lush! Here is a picture of my finished product (And the best part is- I have tried this 5 times and they all look exactly the same!) Explanation of Gaussian Blur on the sky: It was supposed to make a 'It has rained' kind of feel to the picture (If you don't see it, then you should notice it a little if you look real closely). That way, your field will look and feel like a moist, lush, grassy area! Also, if you think that the outcome is too blurry, just sharpen it, or use any other method to un-blur it. I hope you liked the tutorial, it was really simple

Hi. You know how you can make it so that you make a gradient with your primary color and secondary color? By any chance, can you make the secondary color transparent? If not, is there any other ways to make a gradient where one color is fading into transparency? Thanks!

Plugins Needed: Smudge. Drop Shadow Outline Selection Hi. On this tutorial, I will show you how to make text, that will look something like this: Or This. 1. Open up a new image, and make the entire image transparent. 2. Write text on that image with any font, as long as it is somewhat wide (I used Reservoir at 48). Make it a relatively light color, or else this may turn out not the way you want it. 3. Select the text. 4. Now, choose two colors. One is the color you used for the text, the other is a darker version of that color! You will then run a gradient of those on the text. Make sure the darker color is at the bottom and the lighter color is at the top! 5. After having done that, go to "Selection- Outline Selection" and outline it a DARKER VERSION OF THE PREVIOUS COLORS! 6. Duplicate that layer 7. On the duplicated layer, smudge the image! The smudges must be along the edges of the text you are writing. Example: When you are finished smudging, the text should look like this: 8. Duplicate the smudged layer, set the layer you had just made to Multiply, and 100% opacity. It should look like this now: 9. Merge the layers down :MergeDown: 10. Create a Drop Shadow. Set it to the color of the text you made in Step 2. Set it to the following properties: Offset X- 0 Offset Y- 0 Widening Radius- 10 Blur Radius- 10 Keep original Image- Checked The image should now look like this, which is your final result. Note: Results will vary based on how you did your smudging. I didn't do my smudging very well on the demo, so, it doesn't look much like the actual result.