flops

Will this tutorial be useful? Probably not. Will I make it anyway? Hell yeah.

also, please don't think too hard about whether or not this is Actually cyber futurism. i'm not like, an expert on y2k aesthetics. that's the closest i could come up with to explain this tutorial.

I'm using Photopea because it's free and accessible to everyone but you can probably use photoshop as well (but i'm NOOOOT paying for a subscription so i dont have it anymore RIP). maybe this would work with GIMP but i havent touched GIMP since like 2017 so IDK.

step one: open your image and duplicate the background layer. For the y2k cyber look, I prefer something that's heavy on one single color. bonus points if it's blue. always do this in case you mess up real bad and want to start over. im using this random screenshot from a Waterparks video

step 2: add a brightness and contrast layer and crank that shit up super high. i dont like to give specific numbers because it depends on your image

step 3: add a vibrance/ saturation layer and also go crazy with it. it should look very....unnatural. but not tooooo much

this is how mine is looking

step 4*: you can merge both of those down if you want. i like to do this because i hate having like 100 different layers. if you think you might want to adjust later, you can skip this step

step 5: add some glow! duplicate your top layer, click on filter > blur >gaussian blur > set it kind of low (i set it to 3.3) set that layer to soft light

it should have a very airbrushed look like this.

if you're comfortable enough go ahead and flatten your image. if you couldn't tell, i'm the kind of person who hates having more than like, 4 tabs open at a time. if you're still unsure, just merge everything except your background layer.

step 6: now, i really want this to be more cyan. go to layer > new adjustment layer > color balance and click on the little drop down that says "range" and choose "highlights" slide the cyan - red slider towards cyan. i set mine to -50. i only do the highlights because i just want a subtle change. i still want to keep a lot of the contrasting red tones in his face.

step 7: add text if you want. Jorge Villareal is my go-to for free y2k style fonts. i chose Protomo. i'm not getting into a whole tutorial on editing text with blending modes (unless someone is interested. pls send me an ask on adamlazzara.tumblr.com and i can do it)

here's a random screenshot I took from an interview i was going to gif but never did. I don't like the coloring at all and it's blurry. (It's also not a great shot but I'm not watching the whole 11 minutes to get the perfect frame)

I think there are AI programs you can use to "enhance" the image. I've never used them myself but I've seen them used and I think it always looks really obvious and ugly </3 It makes things look really blobby idk. I used to use the FUCK out of Topaz Clean back in like 2015 for comic book effects so I can't even talk shit. I'm pretty sure I have a tutorial somewhere on here lmao. anyways, this looks pretty bad.

add a black and white layer. black and white fixes almost everything imo. remember, this is just a simple little thing to try when i desperately CANNOT get my edits to look right.

add brightness + contrast. the setting depend on your image but i do it super high contrast. the blacks need to be black and the whites need to be white. if there's too much grey, it looks a little muddy

click on your image layer and click filters > noise > add noise

I add a very, very small amount of noise. usually between 4-6%. It gives this kind of photocopy type of look. you can totally stop here. this is where i merge all my layers

you could also just say "fuck it" , duplicate your image and add a tiny bit of motion blur for a nightmarish look

and if you reaaallly want to fuck it up, duplicate THAT layer, set it to soft light and just ever so slightly move the layer over a few pixels by pressing your left or right arrow key a few times.

this is what i ended up with after some coloring and stuff

is it perfect? no. but it gives a certain "vibe" and it's pretty forgiving.

ok i just took a random screenshot from an interview with bert for this. this will only really work if you have a high quality video to work with.

first open your screenshot on photopea. pretty simple.

right click the layer and duplicate it. that way, if you want to experiment a little, you always have the original to go back to

now you should have a layer on top of that called "Layer 1"

at the top of photopea, click Layer > New Adjustment layer > brightness/ contrast. unless i'm doing some kind of pastel edit or i'm using gradient maps, adjusting the brightness and contrast always gives the image a brighter look without oversaturating the colors too much

the values you use will depend on your image obviously so i can't tell you EXACTLY what numbers to use but this is mine. usually i increase the brightness way more than the contrast

see how much brighter it looks? it also kinda washes out the busy background a little so the focus is more on bert instead of all of the cute little decorations.

you can honestly stop here but i wanna change the colors just a little bit

go to layers > new adjustment layer > gradient map

this is what comes up. want a black and white edit? this is perfect! you can stop here. i still want to color this, though.

i won't mess with the gradient at all this time because that's a whole different tutorial and i'm trying to make this quick and simple. just leave it as it is and set the graidient map layer to soft light

see how it's darker? if you feel like it's too dark, you can lower the opacity to your liking. i didn't screenshot it for this tutorial but i set it to 70%

now click on Layer 1 again to edit that layer. if you try to do this with the gradient map or brightness/contrast layers it won't even work lol

go to filter > smart sharpen

again, it really depends on your image but these were my adjustments.

you really don't want to do toooo much with sharpening or else it looks Crunchy

i left the amount the same and just barely adjusted the radius. do i have a clue what any of that means? no. it's just trial and error.