This tutorial will teach you how to create a stylish and eye-catchy Surfing Fashion Label Tag. As I live in a country where surfing is quite popular, I can confidently assure you that surfing fashion is different from other fashion brands, you will never mix a surfing fashion store with any other, both by color and style, so let’s get started..

Step 1.

Pick a photo with a surfer. We picked a surfer girl (original photo by Chris Aschenbrener), and since our photo did not have a very strong contrast, we modified the levels a little bit.

Step 2.

Now we want to add sun rays that “shine” from the main character or figure. So create a new layer, and using the  custom shape tool, select the shape called “Registration target 2″ (comes default in Photoshop), draw a circle as shown on the image below.

Leaving the rays just like this would be too plan and simple, so  we decided to create a more of a 3D, “in motion” effect and align the rays in same angle as the surfer slides down the waves.Press Ctrl + T and Right mouse click >> Distort. Pull the angles of the circle more or less as shown below to create the flying effect.

Press Enter to leave the shape as you distorted it.

Resterize the layer with the shape so that you’d be able to erase parts of it, and using the soft-edge big eraser brush, remove the edges of the rays to create a natural fading beams effect. Also, remove the parts of the rays that go over the main figure.

Finally, set the blending options of the rays layer to Soft.

 Step 3.

Adding twirly shapes. Choose any of the twirly (or other shapes you like) that you have in your Photoshop collection and, using a new layer, draw a medium size shape. If you like the shape we used here, you can download it in PSD format, please not that this is a shape so you can enlarge it to any dimension you want without losing quality.

Now, remember the angle you used for aligning the rays shape? This time repeat this procedure with the twirly shape, again pressing Ctrl + T, Distort and creating an angle that will blend and merge nicely with the rays.

If you are using this shape, I’d suggest to add another one horizontally transformed to add more symmetry and proportion to the shape image. After you have done with that, rasterize both twirly shapes layers and using the eraser tool remove the shape from girl’s body surface, this will create the illusion that the shape is “behind” her, however, as I did — I suggest o leave one of the lines in the shape over the girl’s image, this will give the illustration a better look, more professional and deep.

Step 4.

Add outer glow to your twirls.

Step 5.

Make a new layer on top of the others and using a big, soft brush make a few lines in different colours, as I did here:

Don’t worry if it does not look good as you will organize it very easily. Load a selection of the twirly shapes by holding the Ctrl key and pressing on the shapes layer. Now, go to Select >> Inverse. Press “Delete” on your keyboard to leave the colors only on the shapes.

Set the blending options of the colorful layer to Vivid. Yes, we don’t want this rainbow aura to be visible too much.

Also, I strongly recommend to blur the layer a little bit by going to Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur and set it approximately to 1. This will give the colors more mystic aura rather than dodge edge.

Step 6.

The next step in our Photoshop tutorial is adding some style to the image.  In your layers palette, select the background image (surfing girl, in our case) and duplicate this layer. Go to Filter >> Blur >> Motion Blur.. and apply the following setting (remember, the blur won’t affect other layers, which is what we want).

Set the blending options of the blurred layer style to “Overlay”, if your layers pallet. This will give a lot of bright yet naturally shiny contrast. Here is how your outcome so far should should look:

Step 7. (optional)

Just because our particular photo did not have enough breeze and spray, we felt it’s a bit empty and decided to add a little bit of splashing ocean drops behind the girl and set the layer opacity to 80% and Overlay. But yet again, this is optional and only if you feel the photo miss a few drops here and there.

Step 8.

Now,  make sure everything looks ok and if you are sure you won’t be playing around with any of teh layers anymore, Flatten Image (in your Photoshop — Right Click on the layers palette >> Flatten Image).  This will give us the opportunity to work with image as a whole and what we are going to do now is adjust the hues of the photo in Levels Panel.  Press Ctrl+L to open the levels panel and apply the following settings to give it a bit of a Lomo Photography bluish effect.

Press OK.

The next step is making the photo truly looking lomo and oldish, exactly like you often see in the Surf company’s adverts (example 1, example 2, example 3). We are going to achieve this yellowing look of the 70’s in only one click but it may take a few attempts until you get it right. Open the levels palette (Ctrl + L) and in the RGB mod, select the gray droplet tool. with this droplet tool, we are going to define WHAT is our desired middle hue in this photo. I clicked on the darkest blue shade I found on the sea background to achieve a nice yellowing look. You can try clicking in other places and each time the effect will be different but essentially you need to pick a relatively dark and blue color, to achieve a result as below.

If it does not work out, you can always undo, thanks to the Ctrl + Z options, work in Photoshop was made a lot easier especially if you are trying in the trial and error technique.

Step 9.

Using the shapes or pen tool, add curved lines as we did below. Important tip: pick only colors that already present in your  photo / image, this is how we came up with this palette for our frame:

#42514a - Dark green-blue - this shade was chaotically picked from the darker side of the ocean background.

#979856 - Dirty beige - this is the hue of our water in front of the girl.

#c14c20 - dark-dirty orange - this color, as unbelievably as it sounds, was picked from girl’s body, as you can see, she is actually of a dirty orange color.

After you have completed painting the curves (We will not teach using the pen tool here as we are arrogant and assume it’s a very basic technique you should know), add a shadow to the INNER, beige lines, so that the shadow will stand between the photo and the colorful frame, giving the composition more depth. See below the drop shadow settings:

So, we have it ready! Just add text (in same colors as the frame!) and crop the corners, if you want to have a more tag-like look of a label, and you are done.

Click to full view: