The Last Jedi Effect in PaintShop Pro

Creating the Last Jedi Effect in PaintShop Pro

View the video on youtube at: The Last Jedi Effect

This tutorial will cover how to create the style found in the Star Wars Last Jedi posters.  We'll take the stock photo shown below and generate the look on the right.

Separate into Layers

The first step is to isolate the subject from the background.  Because there is a good difference of luminance between the subject and the background, this is a good candidate for using the background eraser.  Default Background Eraser settings will work here with a sharpness of about 70.

Crop the image so that it matches the Jedi composition.

Duplicate the layer then Colorize with the following settings:

• Hue: 0
• Saturation: 255

Now erase the head with a standard eraser.  This creates a layer for just the shirt that is now red.

On the bottom layer, erase the shirt.  This will come into play when we are adding the paint brush strokes.

At this stage, we have three layers:  the shirt, the head and the background.  Now we can apply some contrast to make the effect more dramatic.

Contrast Stage

Starting with the shirt, lets use Curves to increase the contrast, and really "punch" the intensity of the red.  This can be done by adjusting the curve like so:

For the face, I did a series of contrast adjustments, but in hindsight the last two aren't that necessary.  One could simply use the curves tool as we did above, but if you want to replicate more exactly what I did, you'll want to add some Clarify:

• Fill Light: 0
• Clarity: 31

I completed the contrast adjustment stage by adding a new raster layer above the head, and painting some black with the standard paintbrush, but set the Blend Layer to Burn.  This has the effect of darkening his hair without changing the color.

Add Background Paint

For the background I essentially stamped all over with a custom brush that i got from Brusheezy.  The particular one I used is this one:  Paint Swatches PS Brushes

This part is really to your preference.  The only considerations I held were to keep the brush strokes up and down, and to vary the gray color as I went along.  This generated the following image.

Add Foreground Paint

Painting the foreground had a few sub-stages.  The first sub-stage is to paint red onto the shirt but with one the custom brushes used for the background.  I went light on this one.  It's just to give it a little bit of texture.

Next, we want to begin erasing the bottom of the shirt using the same paint brush to give it a disintegrating effect, and blend better with the background.  To do this, add a mask layer that is Show All, and begin painting into the mask layer with a dark gray with the paintbrush.

Doing this will produce the following effect.

The final steps is to create a new raster layer at the top and just begin adding more paint brushes to either lighten the foreground or add detail.  You'll want to make sure that whatever you paint in the foreground can blend in with the background.

The final image should look something like the following.

If necessary, you can add a logo as a bonus.