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I’ve put together a new wallpaper pack, containing black and white versions and 3 different sizes of the horse from the album cover Dark Is The way, Light Is A Place by Anberlin.

Click the images below to download the wallpaper pack containing these sizes:

2560 x 1440 | 1600 x 1200 | 1280×1024

I take no ownership of the Anberlin Logo/Horse drawing. I simply put this together and added a texture.

Program used: Adobe Illustrator CS4
Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
Time: 30-45 minutes

The image below is what our finished photo should look like:

The first step is to start up Adobe Illustrator Cs4 and set a document size. I’ve decided to set this as A3, but this really doesn’t matter much.

Now once you have your document, we are going to draw the basic shape to create our 3D bottle. To do this, imagine a bottle of Coca-Cola from a side on view, and imagine cutting it straight down the middle so it’s in half. The shape we need is the outline of half a bottle. You’ll see why in a bit.

Firstly I would suggest downloading an image from google images to use as a reference. You should be able to Copy>Paste the image direct into your Illustrator document.

Now select the Pen tool. (If you don’t know how to use the pen tool, google it, and practice. There are many good tutorials online and practicing will really help get to grips with it.) Make sure your pen has no fill, and has a bright coloured stroke set (maybe 100% Magenta), so you can see the lines when drawing. To set the stroke colour, double click on the little box (the bottom one of the two) and choose any colour you wish:

Now you’re set to start drawing over the Coca-Cola Bottle. Don’t forget to only draw the outline of half of the bottle. You can set a ruler so you’re more accurate at drawing only half a bottle. To do this go to View > Show Rulers, or Cmd + R (for mac users), or ctrl+r (for pc users). Now where you can see a ruler at the left of your page, click and drag your mouse from there over your image and place the ruler the middle of the bottle. Select your pen and start drawing, and you should have something similar to the below image:

Select the Black selection tool (the black arrow at the top of your tools) and click on the image and hit delete. We no longer need this as we have the basic shape of our bottle.

Now click on the line you’ve drawn and change the colour to Black. With the line still selected, go to Effect > 3D > Revolve…

Set all of the values to those pictured below:

Now click OK, and you should have a shape that looks something like a Coca-Cola bottle. This is not exactly a shape in which you can edit, it’s more of an ‘Effect’, but still pretty good!

Now we need to tart this up and add the logo. Click on the link below and download the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) file.

Coca-Cola_logo.svg

Once downloaded go to File > Place and select the .svg file you’ve just saved. Click on the black selection tool, hold shift down, select a corner point and scale it down so it fits better on your page.

Click somewhere in the white area to deselect the Coca Cola Logo and then go to Window > Symbols. Click on the Coca-Cola logo and drag it into the symbols window. Another window will appear with options. Set them as shown:

Click on your bottle and go to Window > Appearance.  You should see the actions you’ve performed on the bottle, in the Appearance window that appeared. Double click on the action ’3D Revolve’ and tick the preview box.

Now Click on ‘Map Art’. This is where we will be placing our Coca Cola logo on the bottle to give it a more realistic look. At the top of this box where it says ‘Surface’, click the next arrow until you get to number 9, or what appears to be the outer of the bottle. This may be a different number depending on your drawing and shape.

Where is says ‘Symbol’ with a drop down selection, click there and scroll to the bottom where you should see the Coca Cola Logo. This will only appear here once it’s place in the symbols window which is why we did that before.

Select the image and it will appear over the grid. You need to carefully Scale this down in proportion so that it sits neatly to the left of the grid like so and click ok:

Now this won’t look amazing, but it’s starting to look more like a Coca Cola bottle. You can now delete the Coca Cola Logo that is next to your bottle as this isn’t needed anymore.

I’m going to leave it here, and let you play around and experiment with the bottle, playing around with Mapping art to create the bottle top, or maybe adding a different label etc.

Program used: Photoshop CS3
Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
Time: 15-30 minutes

The image below is what our finished photo should look like:

Now, the first thing to do is select which photograph/image you’re going to use. I selected this image of a Polar bear that I took a while back. As you can see i’ve done some nifty Photoshop work on it, but you can ignore all the swirls etc around it. My advice would be to select a photo/image that has a nice Depth of field to it, ie the foreground is sharp and as the image goes further back, it goes out of focus. This way when we convert it into 3D it will help with the illusion.

Once you’ve decided on an image to use, create a second copy of this. Rename each photo Left and Right, so both images are identical, but one is called Left, and one is called Right. This will help later on.

Now that you have both images, select them both and open them up in Photoshop. Once opened, it will be easier if you drag them side by side so you can see both images. We now need to open a blank document, but before you do this, we need it to be the exact same size as the two photographs. To do this, go to Select > All (Shortcuts for Mac users, press ⌘+A, for PC users press CTRL + A). Now go to Edit > Copy. Click File > New and Photoshop will automatically have the sizes from the Photo which we just copied.

The new dialog box will look something like this. Your image size won’t be the same as mine, so don’t worry. You don’t need to change anything here, apart from the file name if you choose to do so.

Select Ok. Now we should have our two photos and a blank document with a white background. Click on the ‘Left’ photograph with the ‘Move’ tool (should be the very top tool on the left, a black arrow) and go to Image > Mode > Grayscale (or Greyscale for us Brits). It will ask you do you want to discard the colour information. Click Discard. Now do the same for the ‘Right’ image. You should now have the following:

Once both images have been converted to Black & White, we now need to open up our Channels Window. To do this go to Window > Channels. Click on the ‘Left’ image and Select All, as before. Go to Edit > Copy. Now click on the blank document that we created. In the channels window there should be 4 setting. An RGB Mode, Red, Green and Blue. Click on the ‘Red’ channel and go to Edit > Paste. This will now paste in your photo into the Red channel only, and will look like so:

Click on the ‘Right’ image, Select all and copy as before. Now we’re going to paste this into the ’3D Image’ file. In the channels window, click on the Green channel, and while holding down shift, select the blue channel too. They should both be highlighted now, with a little eye next to them. Now Paste the right image in, by going to Edit > Paste. Now what we have is the Left image on the Red channel, and the Right image in the Green and Blue channel.

The illusion will not work until the images are offset from each other. To do this, after pasting the image on the Green and Blue layer, before clicking anywhere, simply press the left directional arrow 3 or four times on your keyboard. You should see the image move left and look like the below:

Click on the RGB Channel in the Channels window and you should see that you have a 3D image. There will be a slight gap on the right hand side where you will see a turquoise colour. To remove this, simply use the Crop tool to crop your image down. And there we are. One 3D image.

Now get your red/Green glasses and try it out. You may find that the results vary on different images, and also by how much you offset the images. Have a play around and see what results you get

Anyone fancy a bar of Dairy Milk right now?