In the previous message Dany P. Wu wrote:
Hi folks,
I’m currently trying very hard to design "nice" looking websites. Unfortunately I am a software developer by trade and have very few artistic bones in my body.
In Photoshop I would like to create a "swirling ribbon" shape. I probably can’t describe it properly but if you go to
http://www.srilankatourism.org/ you can see what I mean. It’s a bit like the purple ribbon at the bottom edge of the header banner.
Can someone please point me in the right direction? I’m a bit lost as to where to start!
Any comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Dany.
Dany,
I’m not a complete novice w/ photoshop but I’m also far from being an expert… I tried to find some tutorials for something like what you are describing but didn’t see any… However, a few tutorials gave me some ideas so I tried this:
I chose a flower image for this and made a blank layer over it…
On my chosen blank layer I made a 50 pixel line across the bottom of the image about 50 or so pixels up from the bottom… I stretched the line beyond the image borders so when I manipulated it I didn’t wind up with blank edges on the sides…
Then I used the distort>wave filter with these parameters: number generations: 1
wavelength: min: 607 max: 999
amplitude: min: 1 max: 211
scale: horizon and vertical both 100%
repeat edge pixels
type: sine
Then I made a copy of that layer… With the new layer I chose select>color range and chose the color of the reshaped line then rotated it (using edit>transform>rotate) until I got it so that the shape, when I erased it, would cause the left part of the ribbon I’m trying to create to be smaller than the right part… Hope that makes sense…
Anyway, once I had that top layer rotated the way I wanted I then deleted that layer so that the marching ants were now transferred to the lower ribbon layer… I then did select>inverse so that anything I erased would be around that ribbon shape and not within the shape… Then I erased the lower part of that ribbon to get the spape you see now…
Then I chose some colors from my flower (one dark and one light) so I could make a gradient out of it… I then hid all layers but my ribbon layer and did the select>color range again and chose the color of the ribbon… Now that the ribbon is chosen I used the gradient tool using the foreground and background colors I had previously chosen and used the reflected gradient choice… I played with that until I got what I wanted so that the part over the flower was lighter than the rest of the ribbon…
Then I played with the layer properties and chose multiply to get the effect I have in the image…
I’m very very sure there’s an easier way to do this so I’m hoping someone will tell us how to do it because I sure would like to know!
I’ve uploaded my experiemental image and it’s psd file so you can see what I did… I hope someone tells me (and you) what should have been done instead because this sure seems awfully complex for a seemingly simple shape… But it was fun to try and figure out!
Images are below (I didn’t zip up the psd file because it’s not much smaller when zipped):
http://www.fractalfairy.com/photoshop/ Babs