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Several weeks ago, we received a letter from a Roman catholic church in Italy. When I opened it, there was a round trip airplane ticket and a short note that said

“Urgent. Please come help us.”

So I flew to Italy. As soon as I arrived, an old man in a robe ushered me inside their church. Then he said that they urgently needed to have stained glass on two windows. As I often say to others, I told him that I just do Photoshop stuff on Mac computers. Then he crossed his arms, shutting his eyes, and stood still. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t move an inch. I also tried to leave, but the front doors suddenly closed themselves. I said to myself “All right, fine!” I approached the window side and sat down. Then I pulled MacBook out of my backpack. In a matter of 5 minutes or less, I designed simple stained glass and embedded it in the windows in which they wanted it. And as soon as I completed the assignment, the front doors suddenly opened. Then I turned around. And the man was gone. Only his robe was there with five one hundred dollar bills on it and a note that said “Thank you.”

The following tutorial shows steps to design stained glass, using Adobe Photoshop CS2. You could simply use a combination of Noise and Stained Glass to design stained glass. Rather, we want to tackle this assignment in a different approach for a better result. In the meantime, the photo image used in this tutorial comes from Webshots.

1. First, create a new layer in the Layer Palette.
2. Let’s make selections on the windows with Quick Mask.
3. Fill the selections with sheer black.
4. Lock transparency, release the selections and apply Noise > Add Noise. Make sure Monochromatic is turned off.
5. Let’s apply Pixelate > Crystallize to enlarge colored particles.
6. Next, duplicate the stained glass layer in the Layer Palette.
7. We want to accentuate the glass edges. So apply Stylize > Find Edges.
8. We want only colored lines. So let’s use Color Range to select white on the windows. After selecting it, press the delete key.
9. Use Adjustments > Hue/Saturation to make the lines dark.
10. Switch to the stained glass layer. We want to change blend modes on this layer such that the background lattice can be seen. So change blend modes to Hard Light or Vivid Light

Video tutorial with no audio commentary

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Photoshop CS2 is a product of Adobe Systems Incorporated.