Create a Kill Bill Style Movie Poster in Photoshop

As you might have noticed from the other photoshop tutorials on this site, I am a bit of a movie buff and enjoy recreating movie posters. In today’s tutorial I am going to show you how to make a cool Kill bill style movie poster complete with bloods, swords, and girls.

Step 1

Create a new document with the following settings: 10×8 and 72dpi.

Step 2

Find a cool close up picture of a female ninja or something of the like. I used this stock photo from Shutterstock, but there are plenty of free images just like it on Deviant Art.

Step 3

The one color that is associated with Kill Bill posters in yellow. Create a yellow Fill Layer under the image of your main subject.

Step 4

Delete any white space in your image so that the yellow background will show through.

Step 5

Now we want to Desaturate the main image. This is under Image > Adjustments > Desaturate

Step 6

To give the main image a little more punch, we are going adjust the levels to the following settings:

Image > Adjustments > Levels

Step 7

Now we are going to prepare the sword for the blood. Select the blade portion of the sword. Then create a new layer above your main image.

Step 8

For adding the blood you can easily just use some blood or paint Photoshop brushes, but I wanted to use this image from Shutterstock.

If you use a stock image, use the Paste Into Layer function on the layer we created in the last step.

Step 9

To make the blood look more realistic set the layer blending options to Multiply

Step 10

I still felt the main image was lacking as far as movie poster style goes. So I decided to spice it up a bit more by up the contrast:

And adding some noise with the Noise filter:

Step 11

Now Im going to add the main movie title text. I used the following settings:

Step 12

I wanted to make the movie release date look as though it was written in the blood on the sword. So I wrote the date with the following setting and rotated it slightly.

Step 13

Rasterize the the type on the date layer by Control Click on the layer and selecting Rasterize Layer. Next you will Command click on the layer to mask it

Step 14

Withe the text layer still masked, click on the blood layer we created earlier and then hit delete. This should cut out the lettering in the blood layer. You will need to go back and hide/delete the original text layer.