Design a Rocky and Rusty style laptop in Photoshop

In this tutorial, we explore different layer style options, selection and extraction tools and brush tool in Photoshop and create a rocky and rusty, yet colourful laptop in Photoshop.
I was experimenting different layer blending effects and testing a few filters and thought I could share some of my findings in this tutorial.

Step 1

Click on the following images and download a copy of them respectively. We will use them later in this tutorial.
The laptop:

The Rock Image:

The smoke/inky image:

Step 2

Open “the laptop” image, use pen tool to outline the laptop, then load this path as a selection. Create a new document (size doesn’t really matter, I chose 800×600px) and save it as “laptop”. Use The move tool to drag the selected laptop to the new document, this will create a new layer. Name it “laptop”. You may have to resize the laptop to fix the new document.

Step 3

Open the rock image, select any portion of the image you want, and copy it onto the newly created document, above the “laptop layer”. Name the layer “Rock” and set the the layer blending option to overlay.

Step 4

Use image >> adjustments >> curve to adjust the rock layer. See images below for details settings.


At this stage, the image should look like the following, you can try out different setting for different outcomes.

Step 5

We can now add some lighting effect onto it. Open the smoke image you downloaded, crtl+a to select the whole image, drag it to the laptop document and resize it the roughly the same width of the laptop. Position the smoke image above the laptop.

5. Use the motion blur filter to create some light beams and use the black and white adjustment tool to change the lighting density a bit. Change this smoke layer blending option to “screen”.

Detailed settings see below:

Step 6

We can futher add some more textures onto it. Create a new layer and call it “cloud”. Fill it with white and set the layer blending option to color dodge. Use lasso tool with 20px feather to create a selection and render some cloud inside it.

Step 7

Ok, we now completed the majority of the work. The rest is just playing with different brush tools and colour balances. There are plenty of free brush download site on the web, just google “photoshop brush download”!
Here I made a few different versions:



That’s it for this tutorial. I hope you enjoy it and found it useful.

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Posted by Keyla Eff, Published at 12:31 PM and have 0 comment