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How to: Get a piercing done in Photoshop

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

  • Updated:

Last year I wrote a Photoshop tutorial about how to get a virtual tattoo which seems to be quite successful amongst our readers. This is why I thought about the perfect complement: a tutorial on how to get a piercing done in Photoshop. In fact, this might come in handy if you’re considering the possibility of having a real piercing done – or just to make fun of a friend. Simply load up a picture in Photoshop and follow these steps:

1. Select the Marquee tool, change it to the elliptical shape and draw a circle where you want your piercing to be. Make sure you change style to “Fixed aspect ratio” and set width and height to 1.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

2. Go to Select >Modify > Border and add a 3px wide border to your selection.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

3. Now create a new layer and go to Edit > Fill. In the menu, select “50% grey”. You can then unselect the area by pressing Ctrl+D.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

4. Time to add a bit more realism to the piercing! First, adjust the perspective with Edit > Transform > Perspective.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

5. Then, remove the extra nose area by using a layer mask.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

6.  One more step: add a Bevel and Emboss layer style to create the illusion of depth. You may want to tweak the gloss contour and the light angle to obtain a more realistic result.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

7. Finally, use the Burn tool to add a fake “hole” to the end of the piercing.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

8. Our virtual piercing is done! If you want, you can change the color of the ring by using a Color Overlay layer style. Remember too, you can use this same technique for piercings on eyebrows, lips or any other place you can think of.

Virtual piercing Photoshop tutorial

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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