Learn how to create a captivating street dance competition poster with Photoshop. You'll start with some quick and dirty tricks about selection, playing with layer blend modes, changing object color the easy way, import and place some 3d render, adding lens flare (which is so fun to do!) and many more. Throughout the tutorial, (hopefully) you can make another captivating poster design with Photoshop fast and professionally.

What you'll be creating

This image was created while playing with some stock images and resource i just found from the internet. I try to picture the spirit of freedom of Street Dancer by using symbols like wings and flying birds. The challenge is creating a captivating design by using restricted color palette like red, black and white to bring a powerful contrast. The lens flare was added in the last step, because i think it can make the composition look more sleek and cool. To follow this tutorial, you need Photoshop CS4 or newer.

Tutorial Resources

• Pigeon - rewton stock
• Dove - rewton stock
• Feather - tash11 stock
• New York CityScape - raindroppe
• Optical Lens Flares - psdbox
• Dance Stock - DeviantART
• 3d Render pack - DeviantART

Step 1

First of all, we need to extract the dancer model from this stock. Because I'm a lazy guy, I'll just do it the easy way. Using Magic Wand tool, select the background color (turn on the add selection button and reduce the Tolerance value, and make sure to check the Contiguous option on ~ follow this setting, and you'll finish the selection in no time, just a couple of clicks here and there)

Step 2

Click the Quick mask button to activate the Quick mask edit mode. In this mode, red indicates isolated areas. As you can see below, some isolated selection areas need some fix.

Step 3

The solution is simple, create a new selection on those areas with Polygonal Lasso tool. When you done creating selection, fill it with black. Remove the selection by pressing [CTRL] [D].

Step 4

Continue using Polygonal lasso tool to fix another parts of the isolated areas.

Step 5

Exit from the Quick mask mode by clicking back the Quick mask button. Right now the selection is active but if you remember, the selected areas are the background ~ not the dancing model. Fix this by inversing the selection from menu Select> Inverse.