The Making of Abstract Color Swirl Imagery
Surprisingly cheap and easy to do, and after some photoshop tricks the results look better than expected.
Video Tutorial
A quick video overview of how to create color swirls, look further down for a video on the editing
Steps
01.
Pour small amount milk into white shallow bowl, you need less than you think, it only needs to be about a centimeter deep
TIP: pour milk slowly down the side of the bowl otherwise you'll end up with bubbles that you have to pop
02.
Drop food coloring into your milk, make your drops somewhat close together
03.
Swirl colors with a small pointer, stick, tool, whatever you want, q-tip even
04.
Drop in your dish soap overtop the center of your color swirl, clear dish soap works best visually
05.
Swirl with your pointer until desired results, unfortunately adding more soap will not reproduce the "swirling" results
More examples:
Photoshop Editing
Results:
Tips
To create images with a black background instead of the white of the milk, you can use either
Image > Adjustments > Curves
Preset > Negative (RGB)
or
Image > Adjustments > Invert
which each give different results.
Often times after this step you have to play around with the hue under
Image > Adjustments > Hue/ Saturation
to get an appealing color palette.
transformation Example
Original photo
More toning
Inverting color
Some cropping & toning
