Making use of portals with Photoshop

The fact that the how technology evolved so much that the things you can do and create with its help is so fascinating. In the world of graphic design, the birth of computer and especially utilising a computer to manipulate graphics had been beyond anyone’s reach until the home computer became popular and software like Adobe Photoshop came into existence.

Photoshop alone is one of the most fascinating inventions of the human kind.

Start with your Photoshop wormhole

The amount of things you are able to do with Adobe Photoshop is only limited by your imagination. Today we are going to look at a trick that will allow you to create a portal or wormhole-like effect with Photoshop. The technique that will be shown here can be used as a template and you can create anything of that kind using it. You can save it as a template too. Grab a cup of coffee and open up you Photoshop. Let’s poke around and build a portal.

As for the assets, grab any landscape, city, hilly or anything of your choice. A picture of a single planet. Later on you can add as much as things you want to add here. Open up the picture of landscape. Now go ahead, select tools like Polygon Lasso Selection and draw out the whole sky and the edge of the horizon where the sky meets the landscape and delete it. You can do so by pressing “backspace”.

Creating space for your portal

Now with the frame being selected, go to the ratio settings which you may find on the top left corner of the bar, click “original ratio” and you will have a drop down menu. From there select, ‘W x H x Resolution’, which stands for ‘width and height resolution’. Now go ahead and stretch the top part of the frame, particularly in the place of the sky. Make room for our portal.

Starting to implement the effect

Next, you want to pick your picture with clouds, or long exposure taillights of vehicles or anything that you feel like will give you that portal like visualisation. For our purpose, let’s stick with a sky full of clouds. Just clouds. Now, for this to work, make a perfect square in any part of the image and crop it. Ensure that the “Delete cropped pixel” is checked. Now, for the fun part, go ahead and select the drop down menu for the filter on the top most menu. Now look for “distort” and then look for “polar coordinates”.  Play around with the number or amount, play around with radio box there as well. For this, you want to drop down the amount to around 12% or something so. This will create the portal like effect.