THE GHOST ENGINE BY DANNY DJELJOSEVIC AND ERIC Z

This week I’m going to go over how I put together some FX. Part of this blog is a preview of Friday’s page. Everything I do is with Photoshop CS5.

GHOSTS

Danny’s script for this page involved a conversation between Becky and our friendly apparation, William Bark, as they walked through the Maestro lab. Because of the specific style I went with when portraying ghosts, I have to draw the full backgrounds behind them.

I then turn that layer off and draw Bark on a separate layer. In the layers I have a ‘Ghost’ group that contains the line-work, the color fill and the color rendering.

I add a Layer Style glow to the fill layers. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to mask off where the glow leaks into other panels. Does anybody have a solution for this?

Because I can’t figure out how to mask off where the glow leaks into other panels, I rasterize the fill layers and just chop off the excess glow.

I then use a couple of grey multiply layers and a 20% opacity white layer to do some color rendering. I use color fill layers a lot because it allows me to easily change work I’ve done and I don’t have constantly check a color palette because the palette is engraved in the layer.

Here I’ve brought back the rest of the panel.

And here I’ve reduced the opacity of the entire Ghost layer group to 85%.