How to Make Tie Dye in Photoshop

In this tutorial you will learn now to make a digital image that looks like tie dye. It will go on to show you how to apply that tie dye image to a digital piece of paper to be used in digital scrapbook.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Photoshop for this tutorial, but it can be done in other photo editing programs such as Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop Elements, Gimp, Paint.net and others.
• If you want to turn it into a real scrapbooking paper you will also need a blank paper to put it on.

1. First I start with a 900 x 900 pixel canvas at 300 DPI. I do 300 dpi for print. If you are only going to use this digitally you can shrink it to 72 dpi.

2. 
   Painted base for the tie dye

   Then I pick a textured brush and starting from the middle draw out a squiggly design, going out in a bullseye pattern. Then I add another layer of white on the bottom to fill in all the empty spaces I may have missed. After all, most tie dye have white as a base! When I am done with my bulls eye and white layers I merge them together.

3. 

   Next go to Filter, Blur, Radial Blur set the Amount to 30, Method zoom, Quality good. Click OK.

4. 

   Next go to Filter, Blur, Lens Blur with the settings of Faster, Source none, Blur Focal Distance 0, Shape Hexagon (6), Radius 15, Blade Curvature 22, Rotation 360, Brightness 100, Threshold 255, Noise Among 0 Distribution Uniform and *do not check* Monochromatic. Click OK.

5. 

   Then do the Radial Blur again but this time set it to 50 instead of 30. Click OK.

6. Next I open another file at 900 x 900 and 300 dpi. Again this is for print quality you can shrink it down to 72 dpi if you do not need to print.

7. 

   Using the same brush I make zig zags from the upper left corner down to the lower right corner with different colors (it helps if both files use the same colors).

8. 

   Apply the Radial Blur on this image and set the Zoom to 50. You do not need to add a white background for this one.

9. 

   Combine the two images with your newest image on top. Play with the blending options and opacity till you are happy. Each one I make is different but this one is set to Soft Light and Opacity is 50%.

10. Now merge these layers.
    
    If you just wanted tie dye you are done. If you are a digi- scrap designer continue.

11. Move your new image onto your paper. Stretch out the image till it is the full 12 x 12 size (or for tagger kits however big you need it).

12. Then play with your blending options just like you would any other overlay.

13. This is what I usually end up doing. I duplicate the Tie Dye layer overlay till I have about 5-6 of them. Then I set their blending options and opacity till I am happy.

14. 

    This one I did 5 layers of the tie dye, top layer to the bottom layer this is how I have them set.
    Soft Light 100%
    Soft Light 60%
    Soft Light 60%
    Multiply 60%
    Multiply 100%

15. 

    Depending on your paper and textures your settings should differ. I also have a grunge boarder overlay on top and a white layer on the bottom.
    This is my final paper.
    
    I hope you found my tutorial useful!

Tips & Warnings

• The steps used in this tutorial lean towards Adobe Photoshop. You should be able to do similar steps in many other programs.
• Good free graphics programs include, Paint.NET, Gimp (with plug-ins you can make it look like Photoshop) and online image editors like Pixlr
• A great online photo editing website is http://aviary.com give it a shot it has many image editing programs to use!

[etmarciniec]

on 7/24/2009 Nice idea. Thanks for this one. I like having new effects to play with in Photoshop.