Tutorials: How to make a realistic flower using photoshop elements.

How to make a flower.

I always see such lovely flowers made by other designers, some which look like photographs and others that are made using photoshop, so I thought I would have a go at making some for myself as I do like to play around with different things and see what happens.

Click on my photos if you need to see them clearer and they will enlarge.

I got myself a picture of a petal, the one I used was royalty free, but you can photograph one, or get a CU one as I did from the Internet. This is the one I chose.

The good thing about this one is that it is CU and has a white background. Open in photoshop. Then drag and drop in a new window, 10 cm by 10cm, 300 dpi, transparent. Enlarge the petal.

Using the magic eraser (right click on eraser and chose the one with the star on it) I clicked on the white background and was left with just the petal. There was a little white around the edge and I used the normal eraser to clean up the edges.

Then I right clicked on the image in move option and chose edit layer style. When the style layer box came up I clicked on stroke. This puts a black line around the petal and gives you the chance to see if you have missed any pixels. Using the eraser I got rid of any stray pixels.

To clear the stroke right click again on the image and choose clear layer style. This method can be used on any picture, however plain backgrounds are better.

So I had my petal, but what I really needed was lots of different petals. I opened a new window 10cm by 10cm. At the top I started to makes lots of petals using my one petal.

I hope you can see all the layers of separate petals in the picture above, if not click on the picture and it will enlarge. I used rotate to change some to mirror image. I made some thinner. I had some overlapping, and some gaps, because I wanted it to look realistic. A few of the petals I gave a really light low shadow to, to make them appear slightly in front.

Once I had a row of petals I cut one in half and put one half at each side. This meant I could go to edit tab along the top, then save the pattern using define pattern. I named it petals.

As I have done in other tutorials I made a new layer by clicking on layer tab at the top and then new fill layer. As you can see in the photo above I could now make rows with as many petals as I wanted. This is great forward thinking as it opens up so many new projects with the ground work already done :)

I now had rows of petals, but in the layer window as they are they are not editable. I opened a new window and dragged the rows into it. Using the marquee tool I surrounded one row and clicked control J giving me a new layer with just one row of petals. Now the fun begins.

Take the row right to the top, and have them so only half the petal shows. Surround with the marquee tool and control j again. this gives one row of half petals. Hide all other layers. Go to filter, then distort, then polar coordinates. Click rectangle to polar.

You now have quite a nice realistic looking flower. I made another layer, and I sized it slightly smaller. Then in move I clicked both layers holding down the control button so that both went dark showing they are selected. I clicked on align on the top tool bar menu and aligned horizontally and vertically the centres. Then I rotated the top layer by eye until I liked the result. I gave both layers a drop shadow.

I chose a nice diamond to put in the middle of the flower, and gave that a drop shadow too. If you would like to make a button center this is also very effective

Play around with this method. Use more petals. Stretch the petals further before the polar coordinates. Make 2 or three layers of the flower, and vary the sizes. Use the align at the top to make them perfectly aligned with each other. Choose to add a drop shadows or not and a jewel for the centre.