40 Spine-chilling Horror Photoshop Effects
It’s that special time of year where we revel all things dark and creepy. To celebrate, we’ve collected 40 Photoshop techniques and effects to help you add a splash of macabre to your work. From twisted horror faces to ghosts, damned souls and zombies, you’ll find it all here.
1. Mongrel Horror Face
2. Dark Eyes
3. ‘The Ring’ Corpse Blue Effect
4. Cannibal Clown
5. Damned Soul
6. Broken Earth Face
7. Entombed in Stone
8. Trapped Spirit
9. Horriffic Burns
10. Beautiful Wraith
11. Burning Flesh Effect
12. Mysterious Creature
13. Dead Stare
14. Succubus Transform
15. Blood-drenched Wall
16. Mutated Human
17. Death Omen
18. Raging Zombie Girl
19. Crumbling Face
20. Infected Effect
21. Decaying Beauty
22. CCTV Ghost Capture
23. Demon Girl
24. Sunken Face
39. Shattered Skin
26. Crawling Zombie
27. Psycho Splatters
28. Blood Trails
29. Phrixos and Helle
30. Nightmare Villain
31. Skeletal Thinker
32. Rotting Flesh Effect
33. Dark Chompers
34. Vampiric Transform
35. Vampiric Makeup
36. Dark Witch Portraits
37. Skeletal Cyborg
38. Alien Head
39. Hell Transform
40. Tormented Eyes
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By Danny Outlaw
Danny Outlaw is best known for his work at Outlaw Design Blog. Aside from blogging, he also works full time as a Wordpress designer. Danny has freelanced from all over the world and is working on a book and website in which he will share his experience about Freelancing Abroad. Danny also has an unhealthy obsession with toys, LOST, and Sharpie markers.
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Wow, absolutely amazing effects. thanks for sharing.
Jif
http://www.online-anonymity.kr.tc
Great effects. Broken Earth Face is the best. I would like to see some fire effects too.
Great list! :) I’ll have to try a few of these out and see what I can do.
And to everyone complaining about the tuts on this list being to amateur, please think of this: what are the beginners supposed to do if PSDtuts only comes out with tutorials for experienced PS users? I’m not that great with PS, but I’m trying to learn, and these will help me learn how to do thinks I had never thought of. Just because EVERY post doesn’t cater to your skill level doesn’t mean you can bash the people at Envato. They are taking their time so people of ALL skill levels can further develop their PS skills, and on top of that they let us view it for FREE.
I’ve been working professionally with Photoshop since version 2.51 (yup, I’m really THAT old ;-) and would say that I know a thing or two about PS.
Yet, there is always more to learn and in the 6 months or so that I have been a PSDTUTS reader I’ve picked up quite a few gems from talented PS artists. (I guess you really can teach an old dog a trick or two. hehe)
However, as much as I love PS as well as Halloween, I remain as cold as a Zombie to this list.
Most of these tutorials are scary alright, but not for the right reasons…
I guess we were getting spoiled here at PSDTUTS and it’s good in a way to get a reality check and thus learn to appreciate the quality we usually find here.
A low water marker for sure but I’m already looking forward to the next one. (Can’t get worse, right? hehehe ;-P )
Happy Halloween everyone!!!
Some nice tutorials
oohhh evil ….yet nice effects
More bad than good tutorials. I expected better from this site.
The blood trails is the best!! Nice work on that one!!
Quality of tutorials arent taking any down spiral, dark art tutorials just suck in general (You cant expect them to be realistic). Though there are some good ones in this list too.
Very cool list. Gonna try some of these out for sure.
Lots of good stuff here, but some of the tutorials did not deserve to be on this list. Especially those where important steps are missing. Anyway, thanks a bunch for the good ones :)
Not intending to be negative here, but the quality of these tutorials and final effects are quite poor. Power to you if you can learn something from it, but I would’ve expected better from psdtuts.
To all of you who say that “negative†comments should not be posted clearly have never dealt with being critiqued…call it tough love if you want. You can never become better when all you get is flattery (false or not)…… constructive critisism IS beneficial….just ask any REAL designer out there.
As of late I see more and more dissapointed readers, and that means that overall quality of the posts/tutorials is declining. Personally I agree with those who prefer quality over quantity, I would rather see less tutorials posted but of suprerrior quality than daily posts of poor quality. Same goes for lists, sometimes LESS IS MORE.
Free doesn’t mean not PROFITABLE, believe me no one is running this blog out of charity, so in order to keep the existing traffic and drive new one PSDTUTS absolutly has to cater to its’ readers. And how exactly do you expect to know how good of a job you are doing without HONEST critisism? Posting ONLY positive comment won’t help anyone scince eventually those of us who are dissapointe will leave. Saying things like “don’t say anything unless you can do better†or “don’t read it if you don’t like it†is purely childish…… try taking a real design class and see how that flies…..
Moreover I feel that critisism should be encouraged not bashed….. if some of you are entirely happy with the posts feel free to express it, but don’t tell those who are not to be quiet.
Love the demon girl and dark eyes.
Its amazing what can do today its
scary.
So much fun.
my favorite is the cracked earth face definitely.
hahahaha, scary enough. nice collection
I think the biggest part of these tutorials could come in handy, and for more experienced Photoshop users, you can always add your own flair and complicity to the style.
From the ones I read they aren’t engraved in stone saying “You HAVE to do it this exact way!”, no most say it’s up to you. Why bash the creators when you could send them a message with creative criticism and feedback. Which would be better for you to hear, and encourage you to improve: “This site is beginning to suck, why can’t you do better?!” or “Hey, these tutorials are on the amateur side, why not help us experienced users and add tougher tutorials?” I know if I were the creator of a site I’d rather the second option because when you bash someone it typically makes them defensive.
Anyway, off the subject of the haters: I am an extreme novice with Photoshop, only doing minor work with editing, and unfortunately I no longer have it because my current comp’s too old, but I just might play around with Paint or Nero Photosnap Viewer to attempt to do a couple of these effects. I’m working on going to school to be a graphic designer so I may as well learn now to use what I have to try and do the best work I can.
Keep up the good work, and let’s hope I can figure out how to make this work!
What relationship is betwen 28th point (Blood trails) and http://lady-dementia-stock.deviantart.com/art/My-Other-Bloody-Method-68725647 (or http://lady-dementia.deviantart.com)?
huuuuhh……. realy scary :>)
That’s good, really disturbing, especially at work. haha.
Sweet man, i have bookmarked many of your tutorial list, just can’t say more but WOW
Creepy but brilliant! I haven’t seen such incredible effects i wish i had it on Halloween.. I’ll die laughing while watching those awful faces of my friends. Great Stuff ey really scary i love it…
Great pics!
I am going to use this “things” with my
movie posters project :)
Great list. Big WOW. Results can be really interesting…
Mmm Sorry not is good
My Work is good but…. sorry this work not is good
some were really crap. but some were awesome.
u_u ñua ñua ñuaaaa, i can’t do 28. Blood Trails, because is not very expliced stip by stip, ñuañuañua, and i need translate to spanish, any video??
i loved mutated human…..wat say guys??????
U ol critikin Psd Tuts need to post ur own tuts so we kud judge u as well……..
coolest tutorials
These are all pretty low quality, and tacky. Not good, not good at all. Embarrassingly bad on some.
Those complaining about quality … when it’s a themed list like this it’s meant to be a bit of fun for Halloween … okay, so some of the effects and methods aren’t the best quality, but they’re still entertaining. If you’re so boring you can’t even take a day off on a holiday to do something just for fun get back to work and stop wasting time leaving nasty comments!
am not getting sleep. photoshop hung. some weird noise comes from the mouse.
wow…thats amazing…ive been using photoshop for 3 years and looking at this…shows that i have a long way to go…to become a real pro!!
ok but not much horrible as i felt
ultimate collection boss………………….
all of these links are broken
Every once and a while I come back here to make myself feel better about my own PS skills. There are one or two here that are really good, but most of these are the worst jobs I have ever seen… NOT KIDDING. Its hard to pick which is the worst of all. Probably the Skeletal Cyborg.
oh, and
@ Wasim
I really hope you can do better than all of these guys or else you have not been working hard enough on your PS abilities for the last three years.
Scarry an cool
These are great. Very inspiring.
Oh mah gawd! So many comments!
Really like your site! if im honest though i prefered the exploding words one in space! also i the Clown picture above the guy from House? seems like they have the same eyes!
I like this site, especially the “40 spine chilling horror photoshop effects”. Congragulations for learning and doing these things, I HONESTLY LIKE THEM and I tell everybody for this when I have a chance. GREETINGS FROM MACEDONIA.
Woah, some of those actually gave me the creeps! Testament to your work! nice.
waooooow
Great Tutorials! It’s really scarry………
Yes, some are kinda unuseful since I been working in the industry for a long time, but I consider that others wanting to get into design have a great opprotunity to learn from this post. I really enjoyed the blood trail tutorial. I would rate that one a 5/5. ;)
Hi,
Thanks for featuring my tutorial, but I have one request please. I moved the forum to a blog platform, and can’t use redirects anymore so I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to replace link of tut #2 from
http://www.loreleiweb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6221
to:
http://loreleiwebdesign.com/2009/01/22/glowing-monsters-eyes-at-night-easy-photoshop-tutorial/
Thanks a lot!!
Got that fixed.
Thanks a lot, Alex!
Quick thank you for sharing. There are not bad tuts only one’s not shared. Everyone of these has a bit to share and learn from. So thank you for taking your time to develop them and post.
Nice list of tutorials! I have a tut that is really scary http://www.psd-dude.com/tutorials/photoshop.aspx?t=the-mad-horror-clown check it out!