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Other Artistic Effects

I want to talk about some other type effects that are kind of a different idea and a ways that we can kind of break rules of Photoshopped, that I'm always the people telling people, Don't ever do this. But if you do it the right way, it's It's a useful situation and one of them is You have a photograph. It's it's kind of interesting, but you want to do something, Teoh make it even more interesting and you don't have just the one that you can work on. It could be, you know, something like this. Normally, I tell people you never want to increase the size of, like, scale something up in photo shop because you know you're going to just lose quality if you do that, but depends on the situation, how you do it. So I'm going to just use my quick selection tool here, try and get a relatively decent selection. I missed a few little bits here and there, but for our purposes will be okay. I do want to get a bit more of her hair, so we'll just do a quick little refine edge thing and see if we can't...

get her hair looking a little better here. All right. And I'm going to make a layer mask. Look. Okay, so now I have her basically extracted with a layer mask. Duplicate that and then take this one free transform. And I'm going to zoom way out and scale her much bigger like that. I need to change the order of them. And smaller one probably could be over here a little more. I think I still want white in the background. So I have a new layer below and filled with white. And then this one, we're going to lower the opacity way down. Normally, if I scale something up that if we look closely at you'd say, Oh, it's kind of pixelated doesn't look as good. Well, yeah, if you keep it 100% opacity. But if I deliberately make her really a much bigger verse like that, I think I want to move for up just to bits. You can see her smile there, something like that. And if you still look at it and say it looks really soft in terms of the focus because I am chri, that's just Then why not use that to your advantage. Why not take this convert to a smart object and then do something like Gaussian? Blur Ah lot and then double click on this Say, let's lower the opacity to get that kind of really nice soft focus effect in the background. You can imagine this could be used in lots of different ways if you have a really nice photograph like this, but it just by itself was coming, and she's sitting on a white background. It's kind of feel like it needs a little something else, then taking the same photo or layer and making it much larger, recognizing that you're gonna lose quality, so you have do something to accommodate. For that on the simplest way is to lower the opacity dramatically and or add some filter. So you're saying if it's already looking kind of faded, you know, like our little soft. And why not make it play with that and make it even softer Now? A little bit later on, we'll talk about kind of a template idea, and I'll use my fair words say, theoretically, we could do something like this with making it almost like a template. So once I've got that two photo effect. I just replace the photo and both of them updates so that I don't to do this again every time with every single photo, I'm doing a bunch of senior portrait or something. So this was just to kind of introduce the concept of this one one photo used twice. Then we'll later on talk about how we can build on that and do it in a way that's even more interesting because we're going to do it almost like a prepaid, pre prepared template that we can use for other purposes. So part of my reason for showing this is I know that often to make a point. I say things in a very dramatic Don't ever do that. And don't ever do this Well, yeah, most of the time. That's true. I would still say about Don't ever flatten. That's probably never gonna be changing. But for things like you shouldn't enlarge something cause of lose quality. Yes, So if you know that, can you still do that? Yes, as long as you deal with the problem accordingly. So doesn't just look like Oh, that's kind of a big, blurry photograph. Now doesn't look very good. Just build on that and take it a step further. That's one little effect. I want to show you another one. I wanted to show you here was this idea. This is completely outside. Everything we thought about so far. Well, it's sort of is because we're still going to do it in a similar kind of way. But if you're just want to go completely artistic now and try something different, I don't. You remember this? I can't pick the year. But I want to say was about four years ago, perhaps in the Grammys they had these posters of all these well known artists. But their face was made up of text. So all you saw was like text. But from further away, you could say, Oh, that Stevie Wonder because you look closer. You could see all the words to his song. It was really cool. And I like that. I went That's pretty interesting. I wonder how it could do that same kind of thing. So this was the idea that I came up with, and it's just this is toe plan to see that we don't always have to think about. It's a portrait kind of a weird one, frankly, but how can I do something with this to just make it more interesting? So for this to work for me personally, it worked best with a straight on portrait where there's some contrast, like in this case, dark hair and a beard and dark eyebrows. If it was, everything was like very light colored skin and blond hair probably wouldn't work as well, because you need to have some contrast for this to work. So first of all, go to select color range and tell it now it's already there. Select the shadows. So it's going to take all the dark areas, and I hit Commander Control J. And I have a layer that looks like that. Hi. Then I go back here and I go to select color range and change it to mid tones. Click OK and press Commander Control J and I have a layer that looks weird now. What I want to do, though, is that's actually copied the pixels of of his face. I want whatever is on this layer to be 50% gray, so if I use a keyboard shortcut, all just so show you where it is, Phil, change it to 50% gray, but I want to make sure it happens to buy. Already overnight would need to check that it preserved transparency is on. If I didn't have that turn on, the whole layer would be great by putting preserved transparency will say take on Lee the areas that are on there, the pixels and make them gray. And if I show those two layers this one, I wanted to do a similar thing but tell make sure it's all completely black. So end up with this combination of these two layers. At this point, if I I was trying to be, I suppose some part of my brain is saying I should convert that to a smart object, but because they're just too pixel layers that I'm not going to use independently, I would actually just merge them together in this case because I just want one layer that looks like that. Then we're going to select all this and copy it when I can hide that for a second. Now I need a bunch of text, take my type tool. And if this was Stevie Wonder than I would find the lyrics to his songs and fill it in, but it's not so we're just gonna go type and then paste Laura Ipsum to get some type in here. This tends to work best if it's really small type, and then we can just copy and paste this enoughto Philip the whole thing. And so that's we're getting to that point now. We add a layer mask, and if you remember any time you want to paste on a layer mask, you have to be viewing the layer mask. So right now, if I just hit pay, so just paste. Infect another copy of this layer so I often don't click on here and I choose Paste. Yes, I didn't copy that properly, so let's try that again. Go back here. It's like doll. Copy this one optional click based on we Go de Select. Now, if I leave it like that, the result will be not very interesting. Wanting to do is take this mask and inverted, and I've got this whole thing is way to be home islands. Let me step back step. You'll see if I can recover. This said it had to start again, probably not but we'll see. Okay, maybe this whole work now used to be this case really small. So give me a second to copy this. And then if we down the bottom here, put it layer filled with white. So everyone squint your eyes a whole lot and step back about four feet from the monitor. You can start to see if they're a little better now. In some cases, you may just It doesn't seem to be cooperating, so I may need toe help it out by putting. So I didn't realize when I started this whole thing, the resolution was much higher. So my percentages of putting type and someone were a little off. But you get the idea that now this is something where we're just saying, you know, I'm trying to do something that's just artistic, not anything else. This is still live type. So if it made sense for you at some point to say, I want a couple of these words to be much bigger for some reason, which would look really weird in this case because now there's, like, a big hole in his head. But you get the idea you can change it to anything you want. I think part of the problem is it's maybe it my Texas a little too light. So let's go back here a bit. Hey, that's not gonna work. All right, One more try. That's a little better. Still got weird gap in his head happening there. Scenario. Okay. Bye. See if I could make it a little more intent. This way. Darkened. You get the idea? Obviously, my I started off with a file. It was a little bit too big, but I just wanted toe end this segment off to say it doesn't always have to be about enhancing your photograph or, you know, taking something and just adding some color toning or addicts of idiotic and say I want to go down completely different path. This mask, now that I have it there could be used for other things, not just text. I could, uh, let's do one more quick e. Let's do this. Um, I think I still have this pattern. Yeah, not the bubbles pattern. Thank you very much. Why? It always defaults. So that's kind of weird. Someone here. I have my little stripey pattern. Let's make little tiny stripes. This looks any better. Steal that mask. That's a little more. That's kind of what I was picturing but with text. But you get the idea that now I could take this and we'll make a smart object and do transformation and distort and all sorts of possibilities. So this could still be ultimately said, Well, I still want this to be part oven overall photographic effect, so I might change blend mode so it's applying to the photograph and doing something different. Who knows? This was just to sort of plan to see that it's not. All of this day is not supposed to be. Just make every color look or every photo look beautiful. In a color standpoint, what else can we do artistically in Photoshopped that still gives us ability to experiment, try different things.