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Lately I’ve been doing some design for a printer cartridge site, and one of the things I realised is how boring printer cartridges are. With a site that sells clothes for example it’s not too hard to make it look sexy, but with printer cartridges it’s close to impossible.

So I decided to try to make an image that made printer cartridges look just a bit more exiting, and the result was this:

Ok it’s still a printer cartridge, nothing amazing but it does make it a bit more appealing to the eye and this technique would probably work with any product be it toilet role or filing cabinets. So here is how I did it.

Starting out

First I started out with the background image of the pyramids, you can use pretty much any image as long as it has space for your boring product, but the image I used can be found here.  As well as the pyramid image I used a couple of images of random rocks to create the rubble around the base of the cartridge you can find some good quality images on sxc.hu for this, try to look for images that colours match the pyramid image, but we will adjust this later anyway.

The image of the cartridge I took myself, but you can use whatever you want for this.

Preparing the images
I started by editing the cartridge image, removing the white background is pretty easy but I am using cs5 which makes it a bit easier.

Select the item you are using, either with the new quick selection tool, magic wand or manually with the lasso tool. Then go to select > refine edge and smooth out your selection trying to make the edges as neat as possible. Here’s the options I used to get it to look right:

Once you think you’ve got it right click ok and it will change the selection you previously made. Invert the selection (select >inverse) and hit delete on your keyboard. This should get rid of most if not all of your background. You should end up with something similar to the image below.

Next you need to tidy the image up a bit, get rid of any background left over with the eraser and smooth out any edges.

Now you want to open up your pyramid image within Photoshop. Copy your cartridge (or other item) and paste it in the pyramid image, scale it to whatever size you like and rotate it. From here onwards you have as much freedom as you like, so here’s what I’ve got so far.

Next we want to edit the cartridges colours so that they match the deserts bright and exotic colours. Select the cartridge layer and go to image>adjustments>color balance and an adjustment window will pop up, if you are using the pyramid image you will want to bring up the yellow and possibly a bit of red. After doing this go to image>adjustment>Hue/Saturation and bring down the saturation to about -20 and click ok.

Something else I realised I needed to do was adjust the lighting on the cartridge, the light source in the pyramid image is coming from the left and the cartridge had a light source from above/front. All I did to make the cartridge look right was select the part of the cartridge that should have been darker and create a new layer and fill the selection with black.

Then change the new layers blend mode to soft light, hopefully you should end up with a cartridge that looks a bit more like it is in the background image.

For the next step we want to ‘bury’ the cartridge, so you will need to merge the cartridge layer with the black filled layer, to do this select both layers in the layers panel right click and select merge layers. Name this merged layer ‘cartridge’ and then add a layer mask (layer>layer mask>reveal all).

By using a layer mask you can hide parts of a layer without erasing or deleting them. Just make sure you have the layer mask selected and use a black paintbrush to hide the bottom section of the cartridge, try to make it as rough and natural as you can, although we will be adding rubble round the base of the cartridge soon. You should now have something looking like this hopefully:

Now we need to add the rubble round the base of the cartridge, this will help the cartridge blend in a bit more and look like it’s in the picture. All I did for this stage was grab a couple of images of rubble and copy and paste separate rocks/stones until I thought it looked right, the secret behind this was getting rocks that were roughly the same color as the desert. Try to create something similar to what I’ve done below.

Once you think your rubble is looking right we need to add a shadow. As you can see if you are using the same pyramid image as I am, the guy with the camels is casting some quite big shadows; we need to do the same with the cartridge, so here’s how.

Make a selection of your cartridge layer (ctrl click on the layer) and then create a new blank layer and fill the selection with black. Deselect, and then you want to distort the layer (edit>transform>distort) so that it matches the angle of the camel shadows.

You may also want to warp the layer so that it doesn’t look so straight and fake. Once it roughly matches you then need to lower the opacity of the layer until again it matches that of the shadow, I went down to 30% to get it right. Then we want to blur the edges, go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set the radius to about 2.5 pixels. Finally make a selection of the cartridge layer again (ctrl click on the layer in the layers panel) click on the shadow layer and hit the delete. This will get rid of any of the shadow that overlaps the cartridge, and should leave you with something similar to this:

That’s the image almost finished, you could leave it like it is if you wanted, but next we will add some effects.

Merge all the layers apart from the background layer, to do this select them in the layers panel, right click and select merge layers. Now with the merged layer selected go to image>adjustments>hue/saturation and lower the saturation to around -20 and click ok. With the same layer selected go to image>adjustments>exposure and apply the following settings:

You should end up with something similar to this:

Now duplicate the layer and add a lens blur (filter>blur>lens blur) with the following settings:

Apply the lens blur and add a layer mask to this layer (layer>layer mask>reveal all),set your foreground color to black and then use your paintbrush tool (I used 1000px size with 0% hardness) to make the parts of the image clearer as if the camera is focusing on the object. You should get something like this:

Now we can move onto the final step. Create a new layer and fill it with black, reduce the layer opacity to 30% and add a layer mask. Do the same as you did with the lens blur layer and use a brush to hide some of the layer; again you want it to look like the cartridge is the centre of attention.

If everything went to plan then you should have ended up with an image similar to the one below.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial and have learnt something useful!

Sorry for the delay, but I have selected the winner for the $25 prize a few days ago, but haven’t had the time to make an announcement.

And the winner is……..

David Millar, with his comment:

I would probably get business cards made with a design I already have made up – I’m just not sure if I would go for the rounded corners or not.

You will be contacted by representatives from NextDayFlyers shortly, and I wish you the best of luck with your free business cards! Stay tuned everyone, as we will host future giveaways that will offer more chances to win!