Favorite FREE Photo Effects?

[PhotosbyChuck]

The "Digital Deviations" forum doesn't get as much attention as it should...so I thought I'd post a photo effect and ask you to post one of yours! Perhaps we'll all pick up a thing or two to add something new to our bag of tricks! Here the effect...

The Collage



Now, I've done this kind of thing by hand...and let me tell you it can really take some time! Select, copy to new layer, select, copy to new layer....then select, inverse, modify, border, select, inverse, modify, border....it gets tedious!

Getting the Effect Yourself

Well, PanosF/X makes it easy with The B&Big Picture! Just save this free PhotoShop action to a place on your computer (can be anywhere) and then load the action into PS for easy collage work!

I converted the image to black and white myself. Color or B&W, the action will simply take a photograph and chops it up for you. It puts the little white borders around the edges of each mini photo and creates the "bend" in the photos complete with shadows. While the default is to display on a grey background, you can change the canvas to any other color or (as I have done here) remove the canvas completely for a transparent image that will look nice on any color site!

Each mini photo is created in its own layer, so it's real easy to change any of the mini photos. For example, the original effect returned a grid of 25 photos. I hid all of the photos that had only background to leave behind what you see here. I also manually transformed a few of the photos to give it slightly less of an organized look.

PanosF/X has a ton of free effects from puzzle pieces to Rubik's cubes and artistic edges to photos. They do sell commercial versions of some of their tools, but a lot of it is completely free!

Your Turn
Have a favorite free effect you'd like to share?

[Electricseashell]

Nice thanks for sharing.

[BlueCrow]

Cool effect, I tried a different one.

[PhotosbyChuck]

Nice. One thing I like about the Panos effects is they're all very clean and most put the background on a separate layer so you can easily eliminate it for transparency. Here is their cube effect (same as yours above) only I deleted the white canvas so that the background will now be the color of where the image is posted.

[RSStory]

Originally Posted by PhotosbyChuck

Nice. One thing I like about the Panos effects is they're all very clean and most put the background on a separate layer so you can easily eliminate it for transparency. Here is their cube effect (same as yours above) only I deleted the white canvas so that the background will now be the color of where the image is posted.

One thing to note when doing the background transparent... jpg's cant do that. You have to save it as a gif. Perhaps you could explain how to make the background transparent for those that dont know...

Scott

[RSStory]

Here is one that I like from the same place as Chuck's

[BlueCrow]

Originally Posted by RSStory

One thing to note when doing the background transparent... jpg's cant do that. You have to save it as a gif. Perhaps you could explain how to make the background transparent for those that dont know...

Scott

Yes, being able to make the background transparent would make the image look better.

[r_fredrick_smith]

Originally Posted by BlueCrow

Yes, being able to make the background transparent would make the image look better.

On most of these effects, once you're done rendering it, it will be on a white background (or a uniform color background). In that case the fastest way to make that background transparent is to use the Magic Eraser and click on the white background. It will go transparent.

But even easier, since you usually one usually uses Save to Web for the images is to do it there. So open Save for Web with the image. Click on Gif to save it in that format (since you want the transparency to work). Now click on the eyedropper on the left. Now click on the white area or background area around the effect. Then click on the transparency icon and its done.



Here is the image in the screen shot with transparent background:



Cheers,
rfs

[BlueCrow]

Now this is what I'm talking about!

[RSStory]

Good job Bill....