Finishing your portal effect with Photoshop

If you have gone through the previous tutorial on portal effects that can be created with the help of Photoshop, you might have noticed what we have managed to create alone does not look good at all. You will see the both side of the image has been bent into on to the top and you will see a thin line going from the centre to the top. Do not worry about it. This time, we are going to finish the effect and take care of that by using the patch tool.

Getting rid of the patch

Select the patch tool and draw out the line and place it somewhere. You might want to play around here that looks good to you. When you are done sorting out the line, go ahead to the filter and select “distort” again and look for “pinch”. Make sure your frame is selected when you are using pinch. Now again, you can play around here and make some cool changes by sliding around with slider. The higher the slider will be the further the portal will be from the frame.

Working with layers

Now select the frame and move it or impose it on top of the landscape we edited earlier. If you are having hard times moving to the back, just reorder your layers. Whatever comes second will be to the back. You can play around with various lighting adjustment with hue/saturation to give it a sharper look. Now make a copy of this layer and go to edit and select “free transform” from the top bar.

Rotate it to some 20 degree or so, and add a layer mask on this layer and press ctrl + I to invert it. You can find the layer mask at the bottom of the layer panel. You should select the brush from the tools panel and brush against the open space beneath this layer of selection. You will find the portions of the image emerging out. You can raise the brush size and opacity to adapt them to your needs.

Multiplying layers

You can duplicate layer and make multiple layer of this brushed portion on top of the existing image. Only visible changes will appear around the edge. Make sure to transform the duplicate layer and rotate them in any way you want. You can turn on the landscape to visible and see the changes that is there. You can also play around with a lot of stuff here such as colours, other filters, lighting and make proper adjustments that suits your needs.

Select all three of the layers and right click from the layers panel, merge them. Keeping a habit of renaming layers will save you a lot of time ahead.

Now as for the planet, make sure you have a transparent object. If your object is not transparent, go ahead and download one. Place the object, planet as for our purpose, in the middle of the sky. Where exactly you should put it depends on what you are working with. When you will apply a polaroid coordinated filter, you will generally find the centre anyway.

This is a very simplistic approach to create a portal.