Disgruntled Dots

This is a moderately advanced Photoshop tutorial. The effects in this lesson are very flexible, so you must be creative to achieve unique effects.

For this tutorial, save the hoopy water image I rendered, on the left side, and open it in Photoshop.

If you don't know how:

1. Right click on the image, and click Save Picture As...
2. Save the image to your desktop
3. Run photoshop, and open the image file

Now, open the Channels window.

1. Create a new Channel
2. Grab the rectangular marquee selection tool
3. • hold down shift and select a box 18x18 pixels, and fill it with white
   • grab the Elliptical marquee tool [] by clicking and holding on the rectangular marquee tool button
   • with the Elliptical marquee tool, hold down shift, and select a circle inside the white box
   •fill the circular selection with black

Make sure your results look similar to mine.

Grab the rectangular marquee tool again.

1. Select around the original box, and in the menu go Edit > Define Pattern
2. Create a new channel, and grab the Paint bucket tool. In the Paint Bucket tool option window (Window > Show Options), select pattern fill contents
3. Click in the new channel to fill it with the pattern and then on your keyboard hold down Ctrl+I to invert the colors.

Go back to the Layers window. Drag the Background layer onto the new layer button []

Select the layer Background copy, and go Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic... 18 pixels

Go to the Channels window, hold down Ctrl, and click on the channel Alpha 2, or the channel with the pattern. A selection outlining the pattern should appear all over your document.

Now, go back to the Layers window and select the layer Background copy, the layer with the mosaic effect. Go Edit > Copy, or Ctrl+C on the keyboard, to copy the pixels to clipboard.

Paste the contents of the clipboard, by selecting Edit > Paste from the menu, or pressing Ctrl+V on the keyboard. Photoshop will automatically create a new layer, and paste the dots into it.

Make sure your layers resemble those in the picture to the left. If they don't, see if you missed a step.

Next, delete the Background copy layer, by dragging it onto the little trash icon at the bottom right of the layers window. []

Finally, click on the Background layer and Gaussian blur it. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... 9 pixels

Here I've customized the effects, with a description of the effect and how it was achieved in the caption. Enjoy!

Change the blending mode on the dot layer (Layer 1) to Lighten. Make a copy of the dots layer and change the blending mode on the copied layer to Color Dodge, and set the opacity on it to 20%.

I added the Photoshop stock Inner Glow effect to the dots layer, and filled in all the lighter dots with the same light blue.