Topic: Creating Petroglyphs in Photoshop (Page 1 of 1)

I've a few ideas but I'm looking around for others to create our own petroglyph style designs on photos of local rock faces. This is for an upcoming event in our area and we have decided to use a historical theme to celebrate an historical group.

However as I've been sidetracked by too many things I'm out of practice and creating effects in photoshop is not quite as natural an activity any longer so I'm soliciting suggestions on the best way to create petroglyph effects on pictures of rock faces.

(I'm a former member that cannot remember what user name I used to have. Thus the new identity.)

(Edited by MyDigitalParadise on 09-09-2008 22:21)

Can I ask what is your level of expertise with photoshop?

I'd say it depends largely on the kind of images you'd be using but the main principles would remain more or less the same: get or draw some black and white images of petroglyphs, select, warp and place on the image, select a blending mode and adjust color to your liking, you may also want to paint the background rock a darker color just like seen on many photos, then diffusion methods ... and you also need some relief. (I used bas relief and texturizer with scaled down sandstone pattern)

So I did what you should be doing. I looked at some of the pictures I could find on the net and tried to replicate the look.

First I found 2 images that I could use:
linky
linky

Then played around until I had this:

background layer


petroglyph layer


some masking


(+ soft lighting blending mode)

and here's the result:


big resulting image and .PSD (.rar)

(Edited by Arthurio on 09-10-2008 00:26)