Artistic effect in Photoshop

So you have this cool picture of you skating and you want to make it look a bit artsy and professional like this?

Then this is the tutorial for you! It's easy and quick.

Open your picture in Photoshop (any version will work).



First, look at the layers panel where you'll see the so called "Background" layer.

Double click it and click OK in the pop-up window.



Now go to Image -> Adjustments -> Black and white and just click OK, leaving all the default settings.



You should now have something like this. If you think it's too dark or too bright, no worries, we'll get to that!



Go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast and play around with the settings until you get a balance you like.

Obviously if the picture turned out pretty dark after the black and white, raise the brightness and play around with the contrast to see what looks best, and vice versa.



To add the big white/black border: Go to your layer panel again, but this time click on the fx icon and select the stroke option.



Depending on the size of your pic and if it is rather dark or rather light, you can change the size of the stroke and the color (black or white).

Make sure the position is set to "Inside" and Fill type set to "Colour".



If you have a big image, you'll have to make the size bigger. (You can just drag the marker to the left or right to change the size.) You can change the colour by clicking on the coloured square and then you can select any colour you want, but since we made the picture black and white, black or white will look best.

You should now have a border around your image (you can't see it in the picture below because the background of this page is also white).



You can stop here if you think it looks good!

Optional

This will either look pretty good, or will make it look bad. You could add a 1px border in the opposite colour at the very edge of your stroke.

We do this in a quite similar way. First we have to create a new layer. We do this by clicking the new layer icon in the layer panel.

In your tools panel, select the Paint bucket tool. If it is set to the gradient tool, click and hold on the icon and then you can select the Paint Bucket Tool.

Make sure you still have Layer 1 selected in your layer panel and then just click anywhere in your image, filling it completely.(Don't worry, your picture didn't disappear).

Now change the Fill in the layer panel of Layer 0 to 0%.

Let's create another stroke. Again click the fx icon and select stroke. Change the size to 1px and the position to Inside.

Depending on what colour you chose before creating the big stroke, you choose black or white (If your big stroke was White, now choose black. If it was black, now choose white). Mine was white so I selected black.



Click OK et voila! You should now have something like this:



That's it! If you think the optional step ruined the whole effect, you can just click on the eye icon next to Layer 1 in your layer panel, and it will dissapear again.