In this tutorial, we’re going to explore some non-destructive image editing. With these techniques, you can bring out the best in an image, or absolutely destroy the graphic, but still keep the original photo intact.

So to begin, find a photo that you’d like to make dirty. Something that might feel bland as is, and could use more of a grungy feel. Here is what I’ll be using:

Crank the Colors

Now, we want to increase the contrast and the intensify colors of the photo, but do it in a non-destructive way (by non-destructive, I simply mean we do not want to lose the data from the original image as we modify the appearance of our graphic). How do we do this? We use layers, of course.

First, Duplicate the Layer. Then, go to the layer’s blend modes and select Hard Light. This setting will multiply any color darker than 50% grey and screen any color lighter. In this case, since both the base layer and the blend layer are identical, the light colors become lighter and the dark colors become darker, with no quality lost.

As you can see, we’ve increased the image’s sharpness as well as its saturation.

High Pass for Sharpness

The High Pass filter gives a photo that refined, sharp look that is hard to obtain using only a camera. Once again, this is a non-destructive way of adding more life to your photos.

Make a new duplicate of the original layer. For now, you can make the first duplicate invisible. Set the new duplicate’s blend to Hard Light as well.

Now, Go to Filters > Other > High Pass.

The High Pass filter sets it’s source image to 50% grey, and as you increase the amount on the slider, it reveals more of the image, in higher contrast areas at first, such as edges or lines.

The amount you should use of the filters varies. Too little causes no effect. To much, and the image gets halo’s and uneven blotches of more intense color. The the amount you should use really just depends on the kind of results you desire.

Tint and Grain

Now that our photo is more defined and sharper, we can add the finishing touches to really grunge it up.

Create a new layer and set its blend mode to Overlayd. Pick two similar colors, one light and one dark to paint as a gradient. For this photo, I picked two browns, to give the image an earthen tone.

Fill the blank layer with the gradient. It can be vertical, horizontal, radial, whatever you find looks good. For this I chose a nice horizontal fade. If the color is a bit stronger than what you wanted, just lower the Fill amount to the point you’d like.

Now, the image is tinted, and looking fantastic. It’s time to mess it up a little. Go to Filter > Noise > Add noise. Make the noise monochromatic, and set it so somewhere around 30%.

The resulting grain looks good, but it’s a bit too unnatural. A Guassian Blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) at about 2 pixels smooths it all out, and viola!

We have a natural, sharp, dirty photo, and with very little effort!

Did you know that you could scale a vector graphic to the moon and back, and it wouldn’t lose any of it’s clarity or ultra smooth edges? Well, they don’t make printers that big… but at least you can create vector graphics from photographs in just a few simple steps! Here’s how!

I absolutely love finding graffiti. I try to capture and re-use simple tags or stencils in any way I can. Isolating and vectoring a tag like this, though, can often times be tedious and painful.

Or is it?

Here’s a quick how-to on vectoring photographs in just a few steps. With this technique, you could cut your work time in half, and the final results typically look great!

Step 1 – Getting Started

It’s usually easier to demonstrate these sorts of things with a real world example, so in this tutorial, we’re going to convert part of a photo I took with my phone. If you didn’t already know, phones typically don’t take crystal clear photos, but by the time we’re done converting things into vector format, we’ll have a graphic with great clarity.

In this tutorial, we’re going to isolate and vectorize the “Pirate Radio” text from the photograph.

First, we have to select the color of the object we want to isolate. For this, we’ll use the eyedropper tool and select the black lettering.

Step 2 -Sampling Colors

Once you’ve sampled the color, use Select Color Range to select the colors that compose the object you’re looking to vectorize.

The selection may look a little rough, but try to clean it up as best you can to select the areas as clearly as possible. If needed, you can add additional colors to your Color Range using the eyedropper tool with a plus symbol next to it (or remove sampled colors with the eyedropper tool with a negative symbol by it). The fuzziness value will allow you to select similar colors to the colors you’ve already sampled.

Step 3 – Clean Up!

You may notice that the “Select Color Range” picked up some extraneous parts of your image with similar colors. Using the selection tools, go back and get rid of these areas (Hold Ctrl + Minus for negative selections).

Disable your photograph’s layer, and create a new one on top of a white background. Using the Fill Tool, fill your selection to make sure you didn’t miss any huge extraneous parts.

Step 4 – Convert to Work Path

Okay, so our desired graphic is isolated, and we have a good selection to work with. Time to convert to Vector.

Go to your Paths Palette (Window > Paths if not already open), and click Make Work Path… This will convert your selection into a vector based work path.

Path Tolerance determines the work path’s fidelity. The lower the number, the closer the path stays to the pixels. It would be best to try this multiple times at different levels until you find a good looking path.

Here we have our beautiful path!

Select the Pen Tool from the toolbox, and while you have the path selected, right click anywhere inside of the working image area and select Define Custom Shape. After naming your custom shape, it will become visible in your custom shapes option bar.

To use your shape, select the Custom Shapes Tool, and select your shape from the options bar. Then drag it anywhere in your working image area to make a vector shape (Note: Holding shift will constrain the shape to it’s original proportions).

Here’s finished product, with a couple tweaks:

This is a great technique you can use in many scenarios Here are a few other situations I’ve used it in:

Enjoy, folks!