TUTORIAL: The Exclusion Layer

The Exclusion Layer

The exclusion layer is one of the best ways, in my opinion, to give a ‘finished’ look to a graphic. Of course, it doesn’t suit all graphics, but this tutorial will give you an idea of how it works. It’s pretty simple, so hopefully this tutorial won’t be too difficult to follow. As always, this tutorial is intended for Paint Shop Pro, but I think it’s pretty much cross-platform.

We’re going to be working towards making the following graphic:



What we need:

This picture of a timeturner

1. Open a new canvas at size 300x200.

2. Copy and paste the image of the timeturner onto the new canvas as a new layer, so that Hermione’s face is off the edge, and the positioning looks something like below:



3. Add a new raster layer, by going to Layers >> New Raster Layer.

4. Flood fill the graphic with a dark blue colour (#000040). Set the layer to exclusion, by going to Layers >> Properties >> Blend Modes. Now, doesn’t that look pretty?

5. We’re almost done – it’s that easy. Just the text to fiddle with now. The settings I used are listed below. Add each section of text on a new layer to make positioning easier.

“time, tide”: ‘violation’, #D4D4D8, size 16.
“&”: ‘violation’, #D4D4D8, size 10 bold.
“wait for no man”: ‘Existence Light’, #D4D4D8, size 10

6. To make the glowy effect around the words “wait for no man”, I simply duplicated the layer which contained that text, and set the duplicated layer at a gaussian blur of 3 pixels (image >> blur >> gaussian blur). You may need to convert the layer to raster by going to Layers >> Convert to Raster.

7. Final step! Add a new layer, and flood fill it with the same dark blue as before (#000040). Set this layer to exclusion and lower the opacity to 30%. Merge all your layers, add a 1 pixel border in the dark blue colour, and voila, you’re done! A pretty graphic with cool colouring.

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I'd love to see what you do with this tutorial! And don't forget that the blue exclusion layer works with most graphics to give it a nice colour.

I used the exclusion layer on this graphic... ignore the big ugly "Mysterious", as I merged the whole thing without meaning to and couldn't get rid of the word and I really didn't want to start the whole thing over again.

So anyway, thanks for showing us! Here's mine-

photoshop attempt:

This tutorial is now retired.