Photoshop Tutorials > Textures Making Tutorials

Acheiving Depth Backround

What is depth?

What is depth? Dictionary.com says: The extent, measurement, or dimension downward, backward, or inward: dove to a depth of 30 feet; shelves with enough depth to store the large boxes. Simply put depth is how 3 dimensional (3d) something is. If you stuck your hand in a bucket of water you could see the depth of it by measuring how deep your hand goes in. Depth in graphics is all about how far you can go into the world of your graphics to look at your abstract idea's and understand the emotional backbone. When making a piece of graphics it's very important to consider the depth of your piece of work. This can be said for both visually and mentally.

Visually: This is how much depth your piece has from someone looking at it.

Mentally: This is how much depth your piece has in interpretation of what the piece means.

How much depth your piece should have is relative to the style you are trying to use the message you are trying to portray.

Ok, now how do I achieve visual depth?

There are a few ways to do this, some are based on broadening the current depth and others give you full control over depth.

Let me show you some examples: This is a quick grungy background I made with blackfuse_brush_pack_4. Some of you might be saying it looks a lot like clouds but, it'll do for this tutorial. Just as a side note, when you brush your background, you can give it more depth by clicking a brush more then one sometimes when you think an area needs to be brighter then an other or darker.

Now lets have a look at ways of broadening the current depth.

First way:

Duplicate the layer (Ctrl+J) and change the top layers blend mode to overlay (or softlight is too heavy) if you need something in between overlay and soft light, change your blend mode to overlay and lower the top layers opacity until your happy with the result.

This is my result:

As you can see the background has gained more depth, or has become more 3d than before.

Second way:

Go back to our original background

Now go to layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves and click ok.

You should get a menu like this:

By moving the top part of the line upwards you will make the brighter colors of the piece brighter, and by moving the top part of the line downwards you will make the brighter colors of the piece darker. With the part of the line, moving it up will make the darker colors brighter, and moving it down will make the darker colors darker.

I find a shape similar to this is the most beneficial, but you will find the need for different shapes the more you use this.

This is the result of that curve:

Third way:

Go back to our original background once again.

Now go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Brightness/Contrast and click ok.

You should get a menu like this:

Dragging the brightness bar forward will make your piece brighter and backward will make it darker.

Dragging your Contrast forward will give your lighter and darker colors more contrast between each other and dragging it backward should do the opposite.
So you should start by dragging your contrast bar forward a little bit, then dragging your bar forward or backward to compensate for the change to make it look slightly more natural.

My settings were:

And this is the result:

All these forms of giving your signature more depth will fairly similar results. So just pick the one that prefer. (I prefer to use curves because they give me a little more control).

Now lets move onto changing the depth be giving ourselves full control.

Ok, lets go to our original once again:

Now lets create a new layer above the our background (Ctrl+N) and set the blend mode to overlay.

Pick a random brush of your choice (doesn't matter a great deal< but different shapes can produce different results, also remember that the smaller the brush you use, the more control you have). I normally set the brush opacity to around 50% because its too strong otherwise, but it all depends on the brush you choose.

Now brush over your darker area's in black and over your lighter area's in white, make sure you make separate layers every now and again to give you further control over what you may need to do or may no longer need. The more detailed you try to make the new lighting, the better.

This is my result:

And there you have it, your piece has a lot more visual depth then before.

Now that I know how to do that, how do I achieve mental depth?

Well simply put this is how artistic you can be and how much emotion you are willing to put into your signature.

This is the signature I made from the back ground I made just before.

The dreamy blur feel I've used was to correlate to the angel. The angel is contrasted in with a fiery grungy background which may not mix with the average angel but I have added in the small sentence to relate the angel and the background together. "Will tomorrow really come?" to me means a kind of Armageddon feel. A small sentence or a piece of poetry can liven up with emotional depth of a signature and also fill some space exess space.

So when you are making a piece of work, remember to think of a theme that suits your current mood. Find a render to match it and build the background around your idea. I find that listening to music while making something can help inspire you. And remember that adding in some poetry can help increase the emotional depth and can also link two separate ideas together.