Home Photoshop Drawing Techniques Realistic Headphones

Realistic Headphones

Author: TutorialStream.com More by this author

Added: Jun 04, 2007 Rating:

Level: Experienced Software: Photoshop

In this tutorial we'll create a realistic headphone.

No need to say that I was inspired by the headphones of my mp3 player lying on my laptop... Let's start opening a blank document of 500 x 500 px, with a white background.

Create a new layer and name it Body.

Pick the Rectangular Marquee Tool and draw a selection similar to mine.

Now select the Gradient Tool and choose a linear gradient like this:

Draw it vertically from top to bottom inside the selection, holding Shift pressed in order todraw it straight.

You should now have this gradient.

Now select the Rectangular Marquee Tool, select the "Intersect with selection" mode

and draw a rectangle that overlaps 1/3 of the gradient, starting from left (see the following image)

Now hit Select > Transform Selection and move it just out of the gradient with the left arrow of the keyboard.

Create a new layer and name it Cone.

Now pick the Gradient Tool again, edit the central bright color to #D8D8D8 and make it wider

Draw is like before, from top to bottom and you'll have another gradient, a little more opaque. I chose to make it this way because my headphones have their final part in a different kind of plastic, more rough.

Now, still with the left part selected, click Edit > Transform > Perspective and move the lower left corner up a bit

and press Enter to confirm.

Now click on the Body layer and hit Edit > Free Transform, hold Shift pressed and, moving the mouse around one of its corners rotate it of 45ï¿½ (holding Shift will help you with the rotation). Do the same with the Cone layer and after that move it to reach the position it had before, aside the Body gradient.

Now pick the Circular Marquee Tool and draw a circle at the top of the headphone body, hold Shift to have a perfect circle.

Hit Select > Inverse, choose the Paint Bucket Tool and choose the color #1F1F1F, then create a new layer named Circle and click on the image, everything but the circle will be covered.

Now click Select > Inverse, then Select > Modify > Expand by 7px; now hit again Select > Inverse and press CANC on your keyboard.

Choose Select > Inverse again and Select > Modify > Contract by 3px: we'll save this selection to use it later.

Hit Select > Save Selection and name it Inside

Create a new layer and name it CircleBG, pick the Paint Bucket Tool and fill this selection with #4A4A4A then move this layer below the one named Circle.

Create a new layer and name it BGCenter, pick the Elliptical Marquee Tool and holding Shift draw a circle in the middle of the CircleBG;

now pick the Gradient Tool, set it to Radial

and draw it from the top left corner of the small circle to the lower right one.

You should have something like this

Open a new document, 4px x 4px, transparent background, choose the Pencil Tool, set it to 1 px and choose #E7E7E7 as foreground color, then fill the top right and the 2 lower pixels as in the sample (zoom in to 1600% to make this).

Go to Edit > Define Pattern and name it as you prefer.

Come back to the headphone file, make Select > Load Selection, choose Inside as Channel and press OK.

Now go to Edit > Fill and select the pattern you just created

and set this layer's opacity to 50%.

Now hold CTRL and press on this layer and go to Filter > Render > Lighting Effects and position the source like in the following screenshot.

You should have a lighting effect similar to this one

You can obtain cool different grids slightly rotating this layer, see this:

Now we only need to add a wire that enters the headphone, this is done with the pen tool and is really easy and fast.

Create a new layer and name it Wire. Pick the Pen Tool and set it to Paths.

Draw a path like this

Reset your brushes and select a round brush of 5px from the list, now pick the Pen Tool again and right click on the path, choose Stroke Path and select Brush.