Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding Borders

so earlier on, I mentioned about different ways of making borders on things are edges. So let's look at one other way. That is kind of interesting and we'll do it this way so you can see what's happening going to make a selection and I will fill with black. But then, while it's still selected, I'm gonna use a command called make work path which converts my selection into a path. So got it set on 0.5, click, OK, and that creates this path. One of the reasons for doing that is there are things you can do with a path that you can't do other than manually, and one of them is paint. So, for example, if we now go back to our pink brush on, let's see if we can't find brush, it's gonna do something for us here trying to find one that has a a stroke, that we might actually be able to see a little better here. Maybe one like this. Okay, now that's giant size. I want that big. Okay, So again, with fair warning, I have not tried this brush, so I'm going to see what happens. This is experimentation...

. So eventually. What I'm doing here is I want to make a shape that I can either uses a clipping mask or is a layer mask, but I'm doing it on a layer to begin with. So the layer I'm on is still active. I've gone to my paintbrush and I found some wacky brush that hopefully will do something. And I want to paint along the whole thing. But rather than me painted by hand, the reason I made a path is there's a function photo shop called Paint a long path. So the way you do it is in the Paths panel. With this work path active, the second button at the bottom is stroke path with brush. If I just click it, it will use whatever brush shape I just had and stroke around the whole thing. So let's try and see what happens. So it made not a terribly interesting shape. So let's make an alteration to our brushes. See if we can't make something happen that's a little more interesting, and he put the space a little more like that and scatter a bit more just to see what happens that that's a little more what I had in mind. So it's OK. It's kind of a nursing, but it's very even around the whole thing. So Photoshopped, if you haven't noticed this before, there's a function key and Photoshopped that often changes the behaviour of what you're doing and in photo shop. One of the best keys for that purpose is the option key on the Macal for Windows, lots of times in photo shop, where if you do some function, it works pretty well. But if you throw in the optional key, it makes some enhancement to it. So in this case, if I option, all click on the stroke path button at the bottom. Here it opens the dollar, Bond says. What would you like to stroke it with? So I still want to stroke it with my brush originally, but I want to tell it simulate pressure. So now it'll go around the edge of my path as if something's happening with the pressure sensitivity of a pen and depending on what your brush is set on. Now see what's happened over on this side. It's done quite a bit, but on the other side, nothing's happened because of the pressure sensitivity so now that's completely changed the impact of that. There's a couple of other tools in here that when I do this all down option Ault and I gotta be honest. The first time I looked at this, I was like, Why would you want to, like, use the spot healing brush around the outside of a path? I was like, That's kind of interesting But then I realized I've actually showing this another creative life class where I had a photo with drooping electrical wires. So instead of trying to follow that with my pan, I made a path and had the spot healing brush. Do it for me. So they're places for almost everything. So let's look at this one. What if I take the smudge tool and cancel us for second? Actually go to this much tools. I want to make sure the settings So this much tool has a brush that's that big. Let's make the strength a little bigger like that. Okay, so now let's try it again. Let's much along the path using simulate pressure, click OK, this one usually takes a bit longer. That's kind of neat to see how it added a little bit of an extra effect. I like it so much. Let's do it again, Smudge. This much interesting. So now I have this shape that looks like this. It's kind of OK on the other corners, this corner I'm not terribly thrilled about, but there we can fix almost anything. So let's do this. Let's just take away this corner, just deleted. I know I'm deleting again cause what's happening crazy. And then take this whole thing and just go flip horizontal. Put these two layers together and I've got more interesting corners. And again Now this becomes something I can use in a couple different ways like we talked about before. It could be a unlocked this layer. Make clipping mask to make edge that way. Or I could ad layer mask. Take this one. Copy alta pay stubs like club copy the wrong things, Ari. Pull too fast for my own good. There again, Copy based And one last thing I do, of course, but I don't really want to hold the middle. My photograph is invert and then I get shaped that way. So painting along a path is something that just gives me another set of options for trying something and without necessarily having any prediction of Oh, I know exactly what's gonna happen here, and there may be some cases where you want a prediction. That's where you use some of the pre defined shapes that are already created for use on the ones we'll talk about shortly. When you want something you know is actually happen for me personally, I love the fact that I don't exactly know what's gonna happen when I say Let's pick this brushing, go along the path and then smudge and see what happens. And sometimes ago, it undo sometimes like, Yeah, that's awesome. And then once it's created, then again, same rules. Before I could say I like think I'm gonna use this again So why not duplicate this into a separate document and someone who was smarter than me once when I showed him said, Could I make one docking with like, eight layers? And each layer is one of these shapes. I'm like, Why, yes, you could, and I'm going to steal that idea from now on and do it all the time so you could easily create a layer document called clipping mask shapes or something, And know that within that one document, you've got 45 different shapes ready to be used by dragging him into a different document. Okay, that makes sense. Okay, We're good. We're good. A quick question that just came in. Ah, one of the users who is falling along wants to know. Why would my refine edge be great out Any ideas? Um, refine. It has to start with the selection, and it can't be a smart object. So if it's a smart object, that's probably likely the reason Because you can't technically make a selection on a smart object in the same way as you normally could. So that's more likely or not, I would think. Great. Thank you. Okay, so we're going to start transitioning, show you one example now and then after lunch, do some mawr of when I just want to make kind of a border. So I'm gonna keep my existing photograph, but I want to add kind of a border on top of it. So let's use this one. So what I want to do is just have something visible around the outside. Now, if I That's most plain boring method I could make a selection and then go in here and shoes stroke until it be this wide like that. And you get a lot. Okay, Who? Awesome. But that's kind of like, yeah, on the boring side. So I want to do something that's a little more interesting than that. And we're going to look at a couple of different various, including using some of the shapes that you get is your bonus So you can see how you can use those illustrator ones with photo shop. But instead, for now, I'm gonna look in my folder of what I call resources, which are photographs that I might not otherwise have a use for, but might be interesting possibility, like this one here, they'll use before is that clipping mask or, as you say, that the displacement filter. I'm just gonna open this up as is. So what I want to end up with here is a border that's made up. It looks like a grungy black. That's a shape that I created. So instead of I suppose I could, you know, just make a rectangle, fill it with black and then try and distort it in some ways. But I want to use elements that already exist. So this is the photo that I've got here, and I deliberately picked it because it's got a lot of stuff going on. Doesn't matter that it's a little out of focus again, because it's not gonna look anything like a photograph in a moment. So Photoshopped has this filter. Sorry, this adjustment layer called Threshold, which most people try wants to know. Why would I ever use this? Because what the threshold adjustment here doesn't say. Take away all shades of gray and issues do either black or white, that's all. Now, normally, why would you want do that to a photograph? But if you look at this in the context of shapes, if I start moving this around, I can see some interesting place in here where there's a whole combination of shapes. So I take my selection tool and I make a selection. I usually tend to do it like this, make it a little wider or tolerate issued, say that I really want I want the border to be skinnier than this, but I start wider and I'm looking now just that area. So this again, where quick mask might be able to help you kind of visualize. And this this function, I should say, takes a couple of tries to figure out the best logistics of where to do things. For the first time we try like I have no idea where Where should I be pushing this should be mostly blacks and mostly white. This is what comes with a bit of experimentation. So in this case, what I want to do is I want to copy those pixels with the threshold adjustment layer in place. And unfortunately, the way Photoshopped works is if I click on this layer and do copy, it'll still just copy from that layer. So somehow I have to tell Photoshopped I want to copy exactly what I'm seeing not in other words, with the effect of the adjustment, I don't want to merge them. In this case, I would be able to come back to this adjustment and try different settings. So they function that we use is actually called copy merged. When that does, is treated as if those two layers are merged together and copy the cumulative effect of both of them. So when I do copy merged Now I come back to this document and I hit paste, and I've got this giant thing in here which weaken scale, down to fit a little better. Let's move it up to where we're going to use it as our top border is probably still a little bit wide. Okay, enter. And I've got this weird looking thing. And if I just left it like that, you might think, Do you have any aesthetic feelings at all? Because it just looks really like I'm not terribly interesting. What I want to do is I want to be just the black. I don't want the white there. So any thoughts of how we might remove the white from this fairly easily, Maybe the blend if sliders DoubleClick, part of the white, I can push it really far because it really is just black and white. So I don't to worry about any little bits of black left, and I often, once I've done that, I might decide to make it a little skinnier than it was. And I've got the start of this effect of this kind of cool border. So at this point, just be a matter of now. rinse and repeat. Okay, so that's the first part. Let's try. I want to get a vertical one. Maybe over here somewhere. That looks kind of nursing, but I might adjust the threshold. Just a bit more like this may be the a bit more black. Copy emerged back here. Paste, double click. Get out of the white. Okay, we transform. Make it skinnier position. So I won't do all four edges because again, not just you just didn't watch me do the whole thing. But the real point of this is that I'm opened up all kinds of possibilities because I've taken a photograph that was going to be a throw away and just buy on this this threshold adjustment layer, I'm turning into different parts of black and white, and the busier it is, the better. The fact that a lot of this is solid water is why we're getting so much white. So if I had another photograph from the mentioned before about taking one of those bushes that just have all kinds of crazy branches, that's perfect, because that means you're never going to have just blank periods, areas like this. So this particular photo parts of it lend itself pretty well. But other parts, not as much. I'm gonna stick toe these areas up here. In each case, copy emerged paste, and then do this. Now, since I need to do four of them, here's a trick that may help you. This blend if slider take note of the fact that it's in this dialog box that says layer style because layer styles can be copied and pasted. And most of when they think of copy paste a layer style, they think of like drop shadow. But because technically this is considered part of the layer style, I could take this one right here, right click and choose copy layer style. So now when I do this next copy emerged. Come here and paste I just have to right click and choose Pace layer style and the whites already gone. So have each time going open that blended slider and drag it now again I could free transform and make it the size I want drag it down, etcetera. And as you would probably guess, I might say, by now we once we have our four layers, those layers are just could be. You say I love it the way it looks. Or you could take all those four layers, put him into group, make a smart object Playa filter. So there's never that point where, like and only like that, I guess I'm stuck. Even this threshold border thing. This could just be the start of saying I kind of like that, but I think I might like it better if it was a mask instead of a border on top of the photo. So every time once you get to the point of having these elements on layers, then you can start looking at a different say what if I use as a clipping mask or a layer mask versus just a border on top? But getting to this point was a matter of taking any old photograph that's got lots of stuff happening at a threshold adjustment layer. Make a selection and copy merged