Making a Realistic Halo
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Making a Realistic Halo
1. Open up a picture of a person (preferably looking at the camera). I'll be using this picture:
2. If the rulers arn't up already, go to View>Rulers to bring them up. Now drag out a horizontal guide and a vertical guide to make a crosshair in the approximate center of your image (drag out guides by clicking on the appropriate ruler and dragging out). Now select the Elliptical Marquee Tool (If you can't see it, it will be under the menu in the top left tool on the tool window).
click in the middle of the crosshair and drag outward. While your dragging hit the Shift Key and the Alt Key, (shift contrains the ellipe to being a perfect circle and alt centers the cirlce around the crosshair) and let go. You should be left with this:
3. Now hold Alt and the cursor should change to having a small minus sign in it. With the alt key held down before you start, do the same as last time only make the circle you select smaller, to make a halo shape (if your getting confused, the key timeline goes: Hold alt, click and hold in the center of the crosshair, drag out a bit, release alt, press shift, press alt, and drag out to a circle size smaller than the first. Confusing but necessary).
You should be left with a ring shape selected. Being careful not to deselect it, go to Layer>New>Layer... and click ok. With this new layer selected, Set your foreground colour to white and fill your shape by going to Edit>Fill... leave the settings as the default (make sure it says Use: Foreground Colour!) and click ok to fill your basic halo shape. You will be left with something like this:
4. Pull up free transform by going to Edit>Free Transform and scale the halo down to where the halo should be in you picture. You won't need the guides again, so go to View>Clear Guides to remove them. Now, create a new layer above the person layer, by highlighting the person layer and clicking create a new layer circled below. your layer order should be as follows:
5. Deselect any shape you may have highlighted and fill the new layer with black by going to Edit>Fill... and choosing Use: Black in the drop-down box. Select the Halo layer and choose 'Merge Down' from the Layer menu. Now, choose screen from the Layer Blending drop-down box and apply a Gaussian Blur to the layer, with a large radius, but not unnecessarily so.
6. Making sure that the Halo layer is selected, go to Image>Adjustments>Colour Balance. Make sure the preserve luminosity box is checked, and slide the Yellow/Blue all the way toward yellow (to -100) on Shadows, Midtones (if you have more time then play around with the colours for the best results).
7. Create a new layer and use the eye dropper tool to sample a light colour from the halo. Next choose a soft, medium size brush and paint over the top of the hair and set the Layer Blending Mode to 'Soft Light'.
Your Done!
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