My 52 project photo last week was a kaleidoscope image that I had created out of a photo of jelly beans. I said I’d post a tutorial this week so here we go;
How I Created A Jelly Bean Kaleidoscope With Photoshop Elements 5.0
1. Open your photo. In the layers palette double-click on your background layer. Make that background into a layer you can work with by clicking OK in the dialog box.
2. a. Rotate your image 60° to the right. Image -> rotate -> custom (right – angle 60) -> OK.
2. b. Move your image into the upper right corner of the canvas so that the bottom two corners lay on the upper and right edges of the canvas. You now have a nice triangle shape. You may need to play a bit with your original image and crop away some of the bottom to get lots of color just where you want it.
2. c. Crop your image down to this new shape/size by using the magic wand to select the empty background then -> right-click -> select inverse and finally click image -> crop.
3. Resize the canvas by clicking image -> resize -> canvas size; select a width that is at least 4 times the original size, a height that is at least twice the original size, and select the top center anchor point before resizing. I think I may have made my canvas larger than this so I’d be sure to have room to work; you will crop away the extra later so it won’t hurt at all to make it bigger.
4. Duplicate this layer to a new layer. On that new layer grab the left center point of your triangle-shaped image and pull it towards the right until the ”w” in your tool bar = -100%. Merge these two layers together. All you are doing here is flipping this layer around to create a mirror image; make sure it’s up tight against the first one so that when merged they will become one image.
5. a. Duplicate this new layer and rotate it 60°. Image -> transform -> free transform then in the tool bar select the bottom center point of the 9 points -> check constrain proportions and set the angle to 60.
5. b. Duplicate the bottom layer again and repeat step 5. a. but this time set your angle to 120°.
5. c. and again with the angle set to 180°
5. d. and again with the angle set to -60°
5. e. and again with the angle set to -120° Make sure you are duplicating the bottom layer each time.
6. Add a new layer and move it into the bottom position; this layer is for filling in your background color.
7. Merge all layers.
8. Crop.
9. One last touch! Filter -> distort -> spherize -> (20% – mode normal) This last step is not a must and I’ve found some images look better with this little extra boost and some do not. You’ll just want to play around with it a bit.
10. Name it and save it!
You can take this a little further by layering the image over itself and resizing it smaller and smaller as you go to add rings of color inside. I’ve even tucked another copy of the kaleidoscope behind the original and stretched it out to fill in the space on the outside edges. See More Kaleidoscope Fun for ideas.
Now that I’ve figured out the basics of this one I’ll be testing it out on other images, I think a floral kaleidoscope might be nice.
Have fun; if you create a kaleidoscope I’d love to see it! you can link to your image in the comments below.
Here’s another one made with the same jelly bean photo; flipped upside down before I started to create the kaleidoscope image.
Thank you for this tutorial. I never would have been able to follow the documentation to do this. Your photos accompanying the step-by-step made the whole process much more accessible and, for my part, possible.
John, if you give it a try let me know. I’d love to see what you come up with!