How to Make a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Poster

With the new Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie on the big screen, here’s a little tutorial for the fans or for those who have a kid, a little sis or a brother that loves Harry Potter. This could be a nice surprise for them.

All you need for that is your camera, the person you want to be in the picture and a wand (or even just a stick). A white or at least neutral background would be great. As you’ll see, it doesn’t have to be perfect, I intentionally used something very simple rather than a professional setup. Just try to use an external light source – an off-camera flash or even a halogen lamp will do. After you did that, transfer the picture to your computer and also download the cool stuff I’ve attached to this tutorial: the Harry Potter font, the background that I used and a couple of useful brushes.

So open your Photoshop and let’s get started. Select the Quick Selection Tool (W) and start selecting the area around the person in the photo.

After you’re done, you can use the Refine Edge dialog to add some feathering. If you have the new Photoshop CS5, the new Refine Edge allows you to select fine details such as hair, much easier, by simply painting over the tricky edges using the Refine Radius Tool. Just make sure your selection is conservative (includes only “inside”) areas and then paint over the transition. You can also use the Decontaminate Colors option.

Next, copy the selection with Control/Command-C, open the background image in a new window and paste the selection as a new layer with Control/Command-V.

With the new layer selected, click in the menu  Image – Adjustments – Levels (or press Ctrl + L) to  adjust the levels of the photo and make sure you have enough contrast by moving the white point and black point to the edges of the histogram; use the gray midpoint to make the midtones lighter or darker.

Now where still in the adjust area so go to Image – Adjustments – Variations and play with them until you find something you like.

Select Pen Tool (P) and go round the “wand” and the adjust its color.

Create a new layer, this will be for the wand charming glow. First of all select the brush you want by clicking B and then right click to select a small soft brush foreground color white. After that you select the Pen Tool (P) and draw the path of the charm, right click and select Stroke Path and select Brush from the options.

Right now it’s just a line. From the Brushes panel, load the brushes I’ve prepared and “stamp” them randomly hear and there. Then, double-click on the layer with the charm and play with the Layer Styles Options (Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Outer Glow) like in the images below:

You can use the same technique to add a layer of “mist” in the hallway.

Now we are going to write the text Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by using the Text button (T) - of course you can replace “Harry Potter” with the person’s name if you want to.

Make sure you download and install the font. Pick the “Harry P” text style; adjust the size and the start writing with the foreground set on white. After you arranged the text as you wanted make sure to right click on every text layer you created and chose Rasterize Type.

After you have done that by holding the Ctrl button down chose all the text layers and right click to choose Merge Layers. Double click on the layer with the text to adjust the Layer Style like in the images below:

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial about how to quickly edit yourself or your friends as a Harry Potter character.

Here are the resources you’ll need:

  HarryP.TTF (26.8 KiB, 3,555 hits)

  hpbrush.abr (498.0 KiB, 5,091 hits)

  Hogwarts.jpg (unknown, 2,480 hits)