Illustrator Candle Jar Graphic Photoshop Post Work

By now, we have a nice candle jar vector graphic which can be resized without loss of any detail. But it does have that "vector" look which might not be good for some projects. Let's see if we can soften that "vector" look for our graphic in Photoshop.

There are several ways to get your Illustrator image into Photoshop. For this tutorial, we do not need to maintain the layers. So we can simply copy and paste the image into Photoshop. We will select all the content on both the Jar and Wax layers together and move them into Photoshop as a simple image on a transparent layer.

Starting in Illustrator, unlock both the Jar and Wax layers for your image. Then use the Selection tool to draw a rectangular marquee around everything. Click Edit – Copy.
Open Photoshop and click File – New. We want our raster image to be 500 x 500 pixels with a 300 resolution. This is a good size. It is large enough to use alone and can be reduced in size to include in another image. Set these values in the New dialog box. Now, click Edit – Paste to paste the graphic into the new window. In the Paste dialog box, choose Pixels and click OK. The graphic will appear with an large X over it. Click on the Checkmark in the Options Bar to accept the pasted image.

Now we are ready to experiment a little. Let's start with some Layer Styles. We want to add some depth to the jar and soften the "vector" look.
Click Layer – Layer Style – Drop Shadow and keep the default settings. OK, this gives our jar some depth. Let's add more styles.
Keeping the Layer Style dialog box open, click on the Inner Shadow style and keep the default settings. Good, this softened the edges of the wax.
Now, click on the Outer Glow and keep the defaults. Oh, this really brings out the edges of the jar.
Let's add the Inner Glow style. This doesn't do much. Let's adjust the Size settings to 50. OK, this really adds a glow to the wax.

At this point, you might want to go back to each style and experiment with some of the settings to see what different looks you can achieve.

Now, let's save our graphic before we move on.
We want to keep a copy of this pink candle before we make more changes. So, let's work on a duplicate. Click Image – Duplicate and give the new image any name.

We will create a few variations on the image so that we can use two or three candles together in our project. One way to do this is to adjust the Hue of the image. This will change the color of the wax.
Click Image – Adjustments – Hue/Saturation. In the dialog box, move the Hue slider from right to left to change the color and the Saturation slider to control the intensity of the color. Here are some examples.

Hue 180, Saturation -63
Hue 183, Saturation -27
Hue 31, Saturation 25