Photoshop Tutorial - Easy as Pie

Hello my fellow scrap-a-holics.  I'm here this week to tempt you with a visually sweet dessert.  It's a little slice of heaven.

Little Slice of Heaven by Miss Behaving

I've had a lot of requests for the recipe of my visual pie.  Luckily for us, it's fat-free but oh so satisfying. ;)

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how I went about "baking" my pie.  Not every single step, (there are about a bazillion layers ... at least it felt like it at the time!  For reals ... Oy!)  but enough to get you cooking.

It's pretty labor intensive, but like most things in life that are worth doing right ... are.  ;)  If I wrote every step, this tutorial would be really, really, REALLY long and my brain would be fried.  Don't you just LOVE my puns!!  Hahahaha  I may be half baked as it is!  Heh

What were we talking about?

Oh yeah ... this tutorial is going to show the basic construction process I went through to make a Just Dessert.  (I am on fire!)

The first thing ... find a "piece of pie" picture.  I used this picture as a reference guide to draw "pie" shapes.  Google is my best friend.  Heh

 

Trace or draw the outline of your pie by sections.  I'm going to start with the "filling".  I know that I'm going to put my "ocean" here, so I need it to be larger.  I've made it bigger (and probably a lot more fattening ... heh) by expanding the outline upwards and outwards for the ocean part.  I've also made the base line curve (slope) for the ocean floor.

Go to the Paths Palette.  Your current pen tool path is labeled as a "Work  Path".  We need to save it as a Path.  Work Path = You are going to lose  your path and haftta draw it all over again.  BOO!

 

*IMPORTANT* -- Make sure to save your Paths in the Paths Palette.  If you don't save the path NOW, the next time you draw a path, it will draw OVER your current path and the path you just drew will be gone.  *POOF*

Friends don't let friends not save.

TO SAVE YOUR PATH ... Double - Click to bring up the Save Path Dialog box.  Then type in the name you want to save it as.

Fill in the path with a color to create a shape.

First, choose the foreground color you want to use.

I went with blue for the filling.

Go to your Layer Palette.

Go to the bottom right hand corner of the layer palette and left-click on the "Create a new layer" button.

Go to the bottom right hand side of your work space in the Paths palette and click on the "Fill path with foreground color" button.

And we're off!  Stage one of your recipe is done.  :D

Continue to draw your outline and fill it in.  I will show you a progression of screen caps of the steps I used while "baking" my pie.

 

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Congratulations!  You now have all you need to create your pie.  We've got the base down and are ready to start "baking".

With the shape of our pie complete ... we are now going to simply clip background papers onto them.

Let's start with the ocean floor.  This is the path that was called "Beach-Ocean floor".  Activate or "Un-hide" this layer.

Find a background paper with fabulous oceanic colors. 

Open your background paper in Photoshop.  Press "Ctrl+A"  - to select the paper.  Then press "Ctrl + C" to copy the paper.

Go back to your Ocean Floor image and press "Ctrl+V" to paste it on a new layer above your ocean floor shape.

Now head over to the Layer Palette and position your mouse between these two layers and hold down the "Alt" key until you see two overlapping circles (I call it a bug).  This is your clipping mask option.   Once you see the "bug", left-click to clip the background to your shape.

As you can see in the layer palette, I've also rotated the background paper to where I think it looks best.  Here's what I have so far.

To get the water reflecting off of the surface and onto the ocean floor, I took a photo of the ocean water, Desaturated it, clipped it to the background paper and changed the Blending Mode to "Overlay".

This is what we have now.  Niiiiiicccceeee!

Now you're probably thinking, "MissB ... umm ... how do I put this nicely ... you're nuts! ... that doesn't look so hot".  Don't worry ...  we'll be covering up the clouds, etc. a little bit later with "frosting" such as: a few waves, and the extraction.  So no worries!  :)  However, if you're worried, just erase the portions you don't want to show.

Next I'm going to build up the  sandy side of the pie.  Activate or "Un-hide" this layer.

I love love LOVE the texture of the back of this paper.  In fact, I'm going to be using this paper for the rest of the clippings.

I took this paper and you guessed it ... clipped it to the side shape.  Set the Blending Mode to "Soft Light".  Then I duplicated this layer, clipped THAT layer to the previous layer.  Set the Blending Mode to "Multiply".

This is what we have so far.

You still with me?  Is it me ... or this is the L O N G E S T  tutorial I've ever written?

It's so flippin' HUGE! Hahahaha!

Take a break, go get a drink, visit the powder room ... I'll wait for you.  ;)

Annnnddddd ... we're back.  Whew!

I'm going to pick it up from where we left off and go ahead and add more texture to the seaside sand.  I want a bit more of a grainy texture ... so I hit the "Create a New Fill or Adjustment Layer" button.

Choose Solid Color.

I chose this dark brown color.

Right-Click and choose "Rasterize layer".

Then go to the Filter Menu and choose "Noise" and "Add Noise".

These are the settings I used.

Then ... say it with me now ... Clip it to the other clips.  I changed the blending mode to "Soft Light".

Are you getting hungry yet?  Yeah ... me either.  The only hunger pangs I'm feeling is this ravenous need to be finished with this tutorial already.  Hahahaha!

Now I'm going to work on the shore line of the beach.  Create a new layer in the Layer Palette.

Change the foreground color.

Go to the Paths Palette and Fill path with foreground color.

Here's what you have so far.

Erase the parts you don't want with a big soft round brush.  I made the original layout at 1800 x 1800 pixels, so I used a size 600 soft round brush with the hardness set @ 0%.

Here you can see what portions I've erased.

Feel free to texturize this however you see fit.  I used the same Add Noise filter as before.

I'm going to pick it up from there and go ahead and activate or "Un-hide" the bottom crust layer and now I want to start building up the pie "filling".  This will be the "Pie filling-Ocean" layer.  Activate or "Un-hide" this layer.


I'm going to clip the ocean background paper that I used before to this shape.  Rotate it.  I want the "filling" to be semi-transparent, so I really lowered the transparency levels.  I left the Opacity @ 100% but change the Fill of the Shape Layer to 10%.  I also changed the Blending more of the background paper to "Multiply" and leave it at 100%.

Here is what I have so far.

I want to make the surface of the water opaque.  Soooooo, within this same set ... Duplicate the background layer and place it on TOP of the clipped layer.  Then duplicate it again and change the Blending Mode to "Soft Light" and lower the Fill to 50%.  (See "Layer Palette" screen cap below)

I'm going to cut the top portion and promote it to a new layer, leaving the sides still semi-transparent.  I used "layer via cut"  because we're going to use the sides in a minute.  But for now ... you can hide the leftover sides and just keep the top visible.

I'm really liking it so far.

Remember the left over sides from a few minutes ago?  Activate or "Un-hide" this layer.  I set the Blending Mode to "multiply" to darken the sides, yet still keep it semi-transparent.

Looks pretty yummilious.  I'm making up words as I go along folks.  The thesaurus has told me I have used my allotted vocabulary limit with this super-sized tutorial.  Heh  ;)

One more step in regards to the pie which has now changed from the Little Slice of Heaven to the HUGE tutorial from ... umm ... elsewhere.

We want to give the nice, soft ...  yet distinct edge to the pie.  Take your pen tool and draw your edgy lines.  (Don't forget to save the path ... just in case.  ;)

We have to set up the brush stroke we're going to use so go to your brush tool and I used a small brush with a hardness of 60% and set the foreground color to White.

I set the Blending Mode of the pie edges to "Soft Light".  Then duplicated it and lowered both the Opacity and Fill to 50%.

If you have not gone cross-eyed or fallen into a coma ... you should have something that looks like this.

Now comes the fun part.  The "garnishing" ... if you will.  ;)  I've covered up all my mistakes with elements and my extraction.  I've also added a plate, a fork, crumbs, and of course a background paper.  Texturized the shore a bit more, and applied the dodge and burn tools.

Just for fun, here is my layer palette recipe ... by groups.

Bon Apetit!  :D

There you have it, a recipe for your own Little Slice of Heaven.  I hope you enjoyed reading it.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment here below and I’ll answer as best as I can.

Happy creating!  :D