Photoshop Experiment

Experimenting with Photoshop

I decided to try creating a title screen for our film as well as typography in Photoshop CS6. As some of our trailer is set in a shed, I started off with this plain wooden background.

I then edited the exposure, brightness and contrast to make it darker.

Then, I duplicated the layer, desaturated it, used the blend mode Linear Light and decreased the opacity to give it a more gloomy look. I also created a layer mask to create a vignette effect and finally added a plain red overlay in Soft Light.

Using a small, jittery brush I wrote the current working title of our film - 'Red Room' - onto the wood, in an attempt to make it seem scratched into the surface. In layer styles, I fiddled with the inner shadow and satin settings until I was satisfied with it.

In blend mode Soft Light, I then painted over the words in the surrounding colours so that it looked more natural.

Finally, to fit with horror genre conventions, I added blood smears from Google into the background. I removed the white background, and used blend mode Darken as well as decreasing the opacity and using the burn tool to make sure they fit with the background.

While I'm not too satisfied with the outcome, I think this was good practice and I would like to use what I have learnt in our final typography as I like the idea of scratching the title into wood, and it took a lot of attempts to do it decently. Experimenting with blend modes was also interesting. Next time, I'd like to use my drawing tablet to scratch the words in to make it more realistic, because this time I just used a mouse which made it quite difficult.