Lessons

Lesson Info

Groovy 3 Exercise

Okay now let's put all this into practice by making a groovy three. And so what we need to do is load in that 123 dot psD file if you haven't already. Maybe you have the messed up file, don't worry you can always go into the history palette here and just click on the very top thing to reset that as we learned earlier. So your screen should look something like this. So what we wanna do is we want to turn our three into a groovy three and we're gonna play like we're free schoolers doing this, it's gonna be a lot of fun. So the first thing we want to do is we want to hide all the layers that aren't the layer called layer three. So we're gonna click the eyeball next to one and two. And then we need to select layer three. So I'm gonna click on layer three. So now that's the layer we are working on now, we want to use some of the selection techniques we learned earlier to get rid of all the red. And so what we're going to do is we're gonna go over here and we're gonna click on the magic wand...

tool. So I've clicked on that and then click anywhere in the red to select it. So all the red is selected, we see are marching ants there, we want to get rid of that stuff so hit the delete key and poof it's gone, we've deleted the red. And so now we just have a three. So now let's de select that by hitting command or control D. That gets rid of our marching ants. And we just have a three on a transparent background. Now what we want to do is we want to lock in the opacity of this three. We want to protect the transparent areas. So go over here to the lock in our layers palette. And the very first thing is we have this little guy right here, lock transparent pixels, click on that. You should see a little lock over here saying that that is locked. What that does remember is it allows us to paint in the areas that have something in it that's the three but it ignores the transparent areas. It protects those areas. So what we're going to do now is we are going to paint with reckless abandon to make a really groovy three. So what we should do is go over to the left hand side of your screen and about a quarter of the way down where you can see a brush. So you want to select that brush tool or you can just hit B. That will select the brush tool. Then we need to select a brush that's about I'm going to go up here to the options bar We want to make sure that size is about 30. So it can be 25-28-32 just around 30. So I'm at 33 pixels and click that little triangle to hide that. So we should have a brush around pixels and also make sure the opacity is at 100% and the flow is at 100%. So all those options should be good. Now I'm gonna show you something new. We want to choose the color for our paintbrush. So let me introduce you to something called foreground and background colors. So on the left hand side of the screen, at the very bottom of our tools palette here we see a black in a white square. These two square boxes, those are our default colors. And so you can see that there's a little tiny black and white square box and there's a little tiny little arrow if we click that it changes the black and white. So we have the foreground color which right now is white and the background color which is black. If I click those little arrows it switches them. So now the foreground color is black and the background color is white. Now in the future you might be doing this quite a lot specifically when we get to layer masks and so you might want to switch those back and forth and select black and white. You can do that with two shortcut keys that will use a lot. So to get our default colors just hit d on your keyboard just click d on your keyboard and that will reset to black and white to swat to switch the foreground and background colors Hit X. So hit that you can see that your foreground and background colors are moving back and forth. Okay so get it where we have black in the foreground and white in the background and we want to choose a color that's not black or white. So all we have to do is double click on the foreground color, that little square box on the top. So I'm gonna double click that. And this color picker shows up and it says color picker foreground color, it tells us we're picking a new foreground color. So to choose a color in this menu here, this little bar right here allows us to change the hue so we can go through the color spectrum and say, hey I want something that's red or violet or blue or green or whatever. So we're gonna go into the blues here and then on the left hand side we can choose how saturated or luminous that is. And so we're gonna just take this to the top right corner or something like that to get a really saturated blue and we're going to say, okay now notice down here are new foreground and background colors are blue and white. So our paintbrush is now blue. So now what I want you to do is return to your preschool days and just start painting and scribbling just paint right over this three and go crazy. Okay so you should have some squiggles like that, it doesn't matter Just squiggle away and do that. Now we're gonna go change to a different color. So again go back double click on our foreground color. Let's get some red. Yeah why not? So we're gonna, okay now we're gonna paint again squiggly squiggly squiggly. Great let's get a new color. Let's get something maybe orange or yellow or something like that. It doesn't matter. And now let's maybe change the brush size 2 67. That's pretty good. Ah And just scribble away this should look like Eddie Van Halen's guitar when you're done with it. So just scribble away let's add some green. Why not? So there we go. I'm gonna change my brush size again to a smaller brush. Okay so now I've got all that kind of stuff. That's really cool. Okay so you should have a scribble E. Three that looks something like this. Now let's return to our default colors. How do we do that remember? It's the D. Key. So I'm gonna hit D. And now you should see on the lower left hand side, black is the foreground color and white is the background color. It's the default foreground and background colors. D for default colors. So what we want to do now that we have black for our brush color is to get a really big soft brush. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to the brush sizes and then I'm gonna make this brush size, oh maybe Up to about 188 to about 200 pixels. Let's do something like that. That's pretty good. And then the hardness should be zero. So the hardness it tells the edge of what you're painting. If it should be a crisp edge or sort of fade out and so zero it should fade out, it should be very very soft. That's what we want. So we have a soft round brush so we can click that to collapse that then. And just paint around the edge of your three just a little bit so we get just a touch of that black coming to the edge. We wanted to fade out so just go ahead and trace the outside of your three like I'm doing here That's gonna give your three a little bit of depth. I mean this is art 101. Not even that, it's preschool art but it's fun. We're learning how to do some stuff in Photoshop. Okay so now that you have your three sort of outlined with a dark color. We want to now add some touches of white to make it three dimensional. So to do that, remember our foreground and background color by default are black and white. So to switch them we hit X. So we're going to hit X. And now notice our foreground color is now white which means our brush is also White. So now what we want to do is to take our brush, we're going to make the size o something about 60 pixels, something like that. So it's not super large. And then what we're also going to do is we're gonna take the flow Down to about seven or 8%, something really, really minimal. So what that means is that when we paint it's just gonna very lightly touch our scene and so it's not gonna paint a bunch of paint just a little bit on there. So once we have that flow down to I'm gonna raise it to about 8%. I'm just gonna paint where I think there should be a highlight. I think that brush is a little too small. I'm gonna get it up to maybe 100 pixels. There we go. And that's going to paint a little bit of a highlight. There we go. Now it's looking a little bit better around the three. So that's going to give your three little bit of a three dimensional look. Again, I know this is not great art but we're just having fun. Okay so we've made a three dimensional three here, it looks a little bit groovy, that's exactly what we wanted. It's pretty cool. But now we need to do one more thing, we don't want a groovy three that looks like that. We want a groovy three that's tilted and slanted and looks really fun. And so now we need to learn about free transform. And so what we can do is you can go up to edit and then we can zip over I'm sorry to image and that's not it either. Oh no what do I do? This is a fantastic thing about Photoshop if you find yourself looking for something and you don't know where it is, remember what we said before, you can go to the help menu and I know I'm looking for the transform tool so I know I'm going to type in free free transform there it is and it tells me exactly where that is, it is in the edit menu so I can just go down there free transform. So that's the benefit of that help menu in practice. Now what I can also do is instead of doing that I can hit the keyboard shortcut which is command or control T. And I get the free transform tool, you're gonna use the free transform tool all the time. So if there is a keyboard shortcut that you learn command T or control T. Is one that you should write down right now and you're gonna use this control constantly, let's see what it does. So free transform allows you to transform an object freely. So I can go to the corner of this little box here, this is called a bounding box and I can move it down and it will resize my item proportionally, I can move it out so it makes it large, I can do the same thing with the boxes in the middle or on the side. If you go to a corner, you'll see that the cursor turns into a little uh to double narrowed um icon. And so that allows you to move your three to the left or to the right, so we're gonna move that to the left, you can move this in the center. If you hit the shift key and then move one of these boxes, you can see it allows you to move it freely without being in proportion so it can warp and twist this. And so the free transform tool is something you'll use a lot to change the size and shape of things. The thing that's around this three is called a bounding box and you'll see it over and over in Photoshop once you have this set up to the place that you want it and you want to accept the changes, you can accept those changes in one of two ways. So at the very top of the, the menu here there's the options bar and you can see there's a check box, you can click that that will accept the changes or you can just hit the return or enter key. And so I'm going to click this checkbox bunk and now we have our Groovy three, Okay, there is more to learn and so in the next section we're gonna show you how to take this up to another level