Making Clouds in Photoshop Tutorial Help Guide

Adobe Photoshop is already set to make a cloud background. The standard using Filter>Render>Clouds after setting the background to blue is very basic as you can see it here.

But I found a cool tutorial on Creating Effective Clouds that shows how to make clouds that look more realistic for a better effect. As always, I the tutored, create the image and then blog tips on how to get through the tutorial. So here goes my help guide…

Help Guide for Creating Effective Clouds in Photoshop Video Tutorial

Make A Background Gradient

The starting point was the creation of a nice gradient for the background. I’ve already learned how to create gradients in Illustrator, but creating a gradient for a background in Photoshop is a little different. Thanks to the Applying Gradient Background tutorial, I was able to set myself up a cute little background gradient for my new clouds. If you need help with making your gradient, click here.

Create A Custom Brush

A “brush dynamics tutorial” is suggested for creating the custom brush, but the suggesting the “Creating Effective Clouds Video Tutorial” at hand is pretty straight forth so it may not be necessary.

July 25, 2008 - Update: Now that I’ve made the clouds, and with a little more research, I see that I didn’t have a brush that looked like Howard’s. It was a preset. So go ahead and grab hold of the brush dynamics tutorial.

If you want a brush that’s already made, click here for a free clouds brush.

Click for Clouds

There should be two layers in the photoshop file by now, one for the background gradient, and a new layer for the clouds. I named the new layer “White Clouds” in the layer properties. According to the “Creating Effective Clouds Video Tutorial”, with the brush tool still in effect, I should have been able to brush the clouds onto the “White Clouds” layer by clicking the mouse. But it didn’t happen for me…

Click for Clouds Problem

My clicks produced clouds that were the same color of the background gradient. Even though I set the foreground color to white as the tutorial instructed, my clouds were not white.

Obviously, my new layer default settings may have differed from Howard’s. So here’s what I did…

Changing Layer Styles

I did a right click on my “White Clouds” layer and choose Blending options. I clicked Color Overlay and change the color to white.

How about playing with some other layer options? Just to see what would happen, I added a blue inner glow after darkening my gradient background. And here’s the result of it all…