Creating a Dotted Swoosh with photoshop
This tutorial is a bit on the advanced side, as we will be using a variety of tools and techniques
to create a "swoosh" that is made up of round dots. You can see the result above - it
can be used to add fantasy elements to photos. Note that the dots start off close together at the
left of the picture, and become smaller and more spread out towards the right.
We start off by downloading a picture to which we'd like to add a swoosh. The picture I used is
one of a lady looking out on the sea, and is free courtesy of
www.sxc.hu.
Next, we need to create a smooth vector swoosh. We will use the pen tool for that, and you can see what its
icon looks like in the picture.
The pen tool is complex, but very powerful. Once you select it, click on a point on or off the canvas, then, click
on another spot. A line will form between the two points, and if you move the mouse while holding down the left
button, you will be able to buckle and curve that line. These handles that you see in the picture (coming out of
our second point) show us the stretch and direction of the curve, we can actually click on them and play with the
line.
If you wish to erase a spot, press DELETE or CTRL-ALT-Z (to go back a step in history). If you stopped drawing
a curve for a while, you can resume drawing it by clicking on an end point with the pen tool. Experiment with ALT-clicking on
the handles that come out of each end point, you will be able to make them shorter and make the angles tighter, thus
making sharper curves than before.
Notice in the picture above, how we can create sharper curves by ALT-clicking on the handle
Keep creating a smooth curve, and then going back and making the return path generally follow the path of the
first one. Connect the path - have a look at the swoosh that we created overtop the picture.
Go to [ Window->Show Paths ], you will be able to see the swoosh that we created in the path window. The paths
look a bit like layers in their list. Double click it and give the path a name - or else it will disappear in the future.
In the picture, you can see that I named it "swish".
Have a look at the bottom of the Paths window:
That dark circle on the very left allows us to fill the inside of our swoosh with a color. The middle one lets us
apply a stroke to the outline of the swoosh, and the last button - the one we'll be using - allows us to turn our
path into a selection.
Create a new layer overtop the picture, return to the Paths window, select our path and click that " turn into
selection " button. We now have a swoosh area selected, which we will fill with a gradient.
Above you can see that I have selected the gradient tool, a plain black & white gradient and I am applying
it diagonally with the flow of the swoosh. Later on we will transform that gradient so that the dark areas turn
into dense dots and the light areas are sparse dots.
Our filled swoosh:
