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We've had a few requests to do a tutorial that illustrates how Matt did the spirals on his gallery page. The final result will depend on a number of random factors such as the strokes you paint and the settings you use, so it might take some exploration and experimentation. This is a Photoshop specific tutorial that needn't use any third party filters. You may be able to replicate this using other packages. |
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Strokes. The spiral is constructed from repeated copies and transformations of a single 'arm'. That arm starts off life as a paint stroke that we edit a bit before applying the the spiral effect. In a new, blank image of 1000 pixels width and height, paint a simple set of black strokes on to the white background layer, using a 5 pixel brush. The number of strokes and how close they are together will define how complex the result is. Try to leave a border around the strokes so that you're not painting up against the edge. A thin brush will create a more delicate spiral, while a thick brush tends to reduce the detail somewhat. |
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Distortion. The basic strokes won't look that impressive as they are. When you paint you sometimes end up with sharp edges to the stroke and those aren't going to look very good in the final spiral. To fix this, we can apply various Distortion filters to change the shape of the stroke. Let's apply a Wave filter to the layer to improve its look. Select Filter/Distort/Wave. If you're not using Photoshop, any kind of wave type distortion, or large scale distortion will do. We want fairly large waves to avoid the stroke breaking up too much. Set the settings to:
The result you get will probably not be identical to the result indicted in our image here, but if the size of the waves is similar the result will be close enough. |
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Smoothing. At this point the stroke may have broken up slightly due to the distortion, and have a few grey faded areas. We want to make sure that the stroke is completely solid, so to fix this we're going to smooth it out by clamping. Because we painted black on to white in the background, we can use Photoshop's Curves command to smooth the result. The Curves command can be used to clamp the value of pixels based on their current luminance.
What we need to do is set up a curve that clamps everything darker than around 50% to black, with a slight ramp down to everything lighter than 50% being white. This will give us smooth edges to the stroke. |
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The curve you see there was used to clamp our stroke. We added two extra points and dragged the rightmost one to the top, and the leftmost one to the bottom. The distance between those two points (they're fairly close in our curve) defines how smooth the edges of the stroke are, whether they are aliased or have slight falloff to simulate antialiasing. The thickness of the stroke depends on how far right those two extra points are. The result depends strongly on the thickness of your original stroke. We had to shift them quite far right to get a reasonable result, you may need to move them left slightly. Here's our result. |
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If you have a couple of areas of the stroke that are disconnected from others, you can paint them out with white to avoid having floating bits in your spiral. We've got one but we're going to leave it in for the moment. |
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Removing the Background. Because we make the spiral by layering multiple copies of your edited stroke on top of each other, we need to get rid of the white background. Because we've added black strokes on a white background, we can covert the entire image in to a selection really easily. A quick way of doing this is to convert it in to a quick mask:
Now you've got a selection set based on your stroke. Quick Mask can be set to generate either a selected area or masked area depending on your preference, if your selection is selecting everything but the stroke, press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + i to invert your selection and select the stroke. We want to recreate our stroke on a new layer, with a reasonable colour for the operation. Select a mid to light grey (around brightness 70%, RGB of 179). Now create a new, blank layer and select Edit/Fill to fill your stroke with the Foreground Colour you selected. We'll clear the background layer later when we do background effects, so don't worry about that having a copy of the stroke in for the moment. The centre of the spiral will be the centre of the stroke, so use the Move tool and shift the stroke in to the middle of your image if it's out of place. If you don't have a reasonable gap between the edge of the image and the edge of the stroke, scale down your stroke slightly to fit. TIP: If you want to quickly centre the spiral, select its layer, select everything on the layer with Cmd/Ctrl + A (or Select/Select All), cut with Cmd/Ctrl + X, then paste with Cmd/Ctrl + V. Photoshop will paste the stroke back in at the centre of its layer. The last step before we duplicate the layer is to add a slight bevel to break up the colour. From the Layers menu, select Layer Style/Bevel & Emboss. Give the stroke layer a 'Smooth' Inner Bevel, with a Depth of 50%, Direction of Up, Size of 1 pixel, and Soften of 2 pixels. This gives a slight edge to the stroke. You can always play around with those settings later and paste them in to your other layers. |
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