Posts Tagged ‘Photoshop’

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Deke’s Techniques: Creating a Warhol-style silkscreen effect

Published by | Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

Warhol became famous in part for his brilliant high-contrast and high-color renderings of famous figures like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and even Mao Zedong. In this week’s Deke’s Techniques video, learn how to add an Andy Warhol-like treatment to your favorite portrait.

Deke shows you how to avoid inferior automated effects by building your own in Adobe Photoshop, complete with canvas texture and midtones. Follow along with Deke in this week’s free video and use the companion text below to help with each step.

1. Start by converting your image to a high-contrast black-and-white version by applying a Black & White adjustment layer. Choose the High Contrast Red Filter from the Black & White presets.

Convert your image to Black and White

2. Increase the contrast of the image by applying a Levels adjustment. Increase the black-and-white points using the histogram.

3. Add texture to the image using a new layer filled with an image like plain-woven fabric or crumpled paper, or use the exercise files provided by Deke.

4. Make the texture appear more organic by choosing Edit > Free Transform and entering Warp mode. Use the handles provided to change the angles of the texture.

Use the Warp mode feature to make the texture look organic

5. Change the blend mode of the texture layer to Overlay.

6. Select the Brush tool to start painting in the color. Choose a variety of different vivid colors to paint the eyelids, lips, hair, and so on. And here’s a pro tip: reduce the Spacing value to make sure the brush strokes are applied smoothly.

Using the Brush tool, start painting in the color.

7. Select the image layer and change the blend mode to Multiply to merge the layer effects.

8. Finally, add a border to your image to make it a bit more authentic.

Create an Andy Warhol effect in Photoshop

To learn about a whole other set of Warhol-style treatments (six, in fact), tune in next week. And as always, members of lynda.com can view the entire Deke’s Techniques collection in our library.

Suggested courses to watch next:

• The entire Deke’s Techniques collection
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate
• Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate

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Deke’s Techniques: How to create an optical illusion

Published by | Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

In this week’s Deke’s Techniques video, Deke McClelland takes an Adobe Photoshop journey into the eye-bending world of op art, creating a ’60s-inspired twist and bulge of checkerboard contortion. You won’t need a sample file or unsuspecting model to follow along with this one—just Photoshop, some black and white pixels, and a love of (and visual tolerance for) optical illusion.

The project starts with a simple square document, created in the Grayscale color mode to keep the high-resolution file manageable. (You won’t need any colors, so no sense making room for them.)

How to create an optical illusion in Photoshop

Next, Deke creates a 2 x 2 checker pattern by using the Rectangular Marquee tool set to a fixed size that’s equal to one-quarter of the total image. Once the upper-left square is filled with black, you can drag a copy to the lower-right corner by pressing the Alt (Option) key while you drag.

Create the pattern in Photoshop

With the basic unit of the pattern complete, you can turn it into a reusable Photoshop pattern by choosing Edit > Define Pattern. In this case, Deke aptly named it Checkers:

Name the pattern for the Photoshop effect

Deke then applies the Checkers pattern to a new blank 4800 x 3000 document. Click the black/white icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to make a new Adjustment Layer and choose Pattern. Then choose your Checkers pattern from the available patterns and set it to 50 percent to fill the document with small squares.

Create the pattern in Photoshop

Saving the pattern layer as a Smart Object allows you to warp it nondestructively with the Transform command. Choose the Warp icon from the options bar and set it to Inflate from the Warp pop-up menu. Then set the Bend to -100. The checkerboard is pinched inward:

Warp the image in Photoshop

The pinching motion of the Inflate transformation has pulled the pattern away from the edges. Deke adds more checkers to the outer edges by opening the Smart Object and doubling its size.

Example of the pinching motion of the Inflate transformation.

Deke then creates the round, prominent part of the illusion by applying the Spherize filter to a circle selection in the middle of the image.

Apply the Spherize command

To achieve the final effect, Deke applies two more doses of the Spherize filter, and the result is a swirling, bulging, some might say hypnotizing bit of Photoshop-created op art.

The final image

For lynda.com members, Deke’s got another exclusive video called Op art experiment 1b: Rounded Windows, in which he turns a flat collection of rectangles into a curving wall of optical mystery.

Deke will be back next week with another mind-bending technique.

Suggested courses to watch next:

• The entire Deke’s Techniques collection
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate
• Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Intermediate

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Converting Photoshop designs to HTML

Published by | Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

For many designers, the process of designing a website ends with a series of mock-ups that represent how the website should look in a browser. While this is a necessary aspect to web design, it is only part of the design process. Translating the web design to HTML and CSS is as much an art form as it is a technical achievement.

It is my belief that web designers should be responsible for getting their design to the browser. Imagine hiring a print designer to sketch out a design, then provide Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files to a printer, and expecting the pressmen to do the layout in InDesign. This print workflow is unthinkable. Just as a print designer is responsible for getting the design to the plate, a web designer should be responsible for getting the design to the browser.

While I’m not suggesting designers need to code every page of an entire website on their own, translating the design into HTML and CSS ensures the integrity of the design. Once the design works in a browser, web developers can use that HTML and CSS as a starting point as they implement their responsibilities to the project.

Creating the containers
When evaluating your desired layout, one can imagine the structure, or “containers,” that will be needed to replicate the layout in HTML.

Responsive design strategy illustration

Once the HTML structure is in place, CSS is used to assign style and layout to the structure. The combination of HTML and CSS provides the presentation experience of your website. This process is not too far removed from other design methods, and can be mastered by designers in a few months.

Creating your web graphics
The process for cutting up small graphics from your Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks document is referred to as slicing. Many web graphic tools have a slicing tool, or something similar, which allows you to specify a portion of your canvas as a slice.

Slicing a Photoshop document for the web

Once portions of your design are specified inside of slice regions, exporting your main canvas results in individual web-ready graphics being created based on the pixels contained within the slice regions.

Assigning layout and style with CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow us to give dimension, position, and style to HTML elements on our webpage. CSS is unique in that it accounts for the layout of our page, in addition to typographic style. Another great feature of CSS is the ability to assign images to the background of HTML elements. This gives us a unique opportunity to drive imagery in our design with CSS, instead of HTML. Combine this with CSS3 media queries, and we can change our images, as well as layout, based on the user’s screen size. For more on responsive download and design, see the blog post “Responsive download, not just responsive design”.

If you learn best by doing, my Creating a Responsive Web Design course shows you how to take a design mock-up into HTML and CSS. Learn a start-to-finish process for creating a responsive, CSS-based, backward-compatible HTML5 webpage… all in 91 minutes!

Suggested courses to watch next:
• More courses by Chris Converse
• CSS: Core Concepts
• CSS: Page Layouts

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Deke’s Techniques: Simulating a screen print in Photoshop

Published by | Tuesday, August 7th, 2012

In this week’s Deke’s Techniques, Deke shows you how to use Photoshop to create purposeful color spillovers like those you see when colors are slightly mis-registered during screen printing. (For those of you unfamiliar with the old-school physical screen-printing process, you apply each color separately, so sometimes the colors don’t quite line up in each pass.) In this video, Deke will show you how to create this effect to give your image a handcrafted look, while using Photoshop to control the simulated chaos.

Deke begins with the hand-colored image he showed you in last week’s technique. Then, with some simple selections and layer acrobatics, he separates out the colors from the outlines so they can be moved slightly askew.

The nice thing about creating chaos in Photoshop is if you don’t like one part of the simulated flaw, you can avoid it. In this case, for aesthetic reasons, Deke wanted to make sure the sky didn’t move—only the other colored objects and the white clouds—so during the process he demonstrates how he kept the sky in place while the other colors move.

The result is this charming ‘print,’ with all its delightful imperfections courtesy of Photoshop:

Colored line art created in Photoshop with offset screen-printing-style color color registration.

Deke will be back with another technique next week!

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Photoshop CS6: New Features
• Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Fundamentals

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Deke’s Techniques: Hand-coloring artwork in Photoshop

Published by | Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

In this week’s Deke’s Techniques, Deke will show you a range of tips and tricks for coloring a line drawing in Photoshop. Although filling in black outlines on a white background seems like a fairly straightforward task at first glance, there are a lot of ways to inadvertently spill your colors outside their designated areas. Even in a simple drawing like this one, you can see there are lots of nooks and crannies to deal with:

Line drawing created in Photoshop.

The key to keeping everything in place is leveraging the myriad powers of Photoshop layers. In fact, using layers often means you can color way outside the lines and let a layer higher in the stack fix your ‘mistakes.’

The first step is to separate out the black lines from the white background, so that you can paint on the layers in between. The cleanest, most efficient way to do this is to use the image to select itself via the Channels panel. Command-clicking (or Ctrl-clicking in Windows) the RGB channel automatically selects all the white areas, then inverting the selection gives you a selection of clean black lines.

(For more on using Channels to make clean, efficient selections in Photoshop, lynda.com members should also check out Chapter two of Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Fundamentals.)

Once you move the black lines onto their own layer, you can then delete them from the background leaving a clean white backdrop and room to paint new colors on layers in between.

The topmost of these layers is a ‘sky’ layer, filled with blue via the Paintbucket, that ends up being a cover for other roughly colored areas of the image.

To see what I mean, here are the small areas of the image colored in roughly using a combination of the Marquee and Lasso tools, the Fill command, the Paintbrush, the Paintbucket, and the Fill Behind feature with the sky layer turned off:

A Photoshop line drawing colored in with big blocks of color.

And here’s the final image with the blue sky layer restored:

Hand-colored image colored in Photoshop.

As you can see, once the sky layer is restored, since it resides at the top of your Layers panel—on top of your other color fills, but under your black lines—it covers up all the overfilled areas and leaves a cleanly hand-colored image.

For members of lynda.com, Deke also has another technique in the library this week called Creating a custom wave pattern in which he shows you how to fill the sky in this image with a wavy, askew pattern:

Hand-drawn Photoshop image with wavy pattern in the background.

See you back here next week when Deke returns with another twist on this high-tech coloring book project.

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Photoshop CS6: New Features
• Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Fundamentals

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Deke’s Techniques: Adding a stroke (or fill) to a photographic image in Illustrator

Published by | Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

This week’s free Deke’s Techniques shows you how to add a border to a photographic image that has been prepped in Photoshop and placed inside Illustrator—a feat that, at times, can seem impossible if you don’t know the right steps. To make up for not teaching you how to fly (this will make sense once you’ve watched the video or if you’re a regular fan of Deke’s absurdity), Deke also demonstrates in this week’s free tutorial how to add a fill to the same image, which is great if you want to give your image a nice purple tint, as we see in the dinosaur example below.

Adding a fill color to an image in Illustrator using the Effect menu.

Adding a fill color to an image using the Effect > Convert to Shape > Rectangle command.

Adding a fill and a border may sound like simple tasks, but in this case both are reliant on one unintuitive maneuver—using the Effect menu to convert your photograph into a rectangle shape Illustrator can see (Effect > Convert to Shape > Rectangle). Apparently, until you perform this unintuitive move, Illustrator does not understand that the placed object (in this case, the photo) exists. Not convinced? Try using the Attributes panel to create a stroke or a fill and see for yourself—nothing happens no matter how fat, bright, and presumably visible you make the stroke or fill. You have to use the Effect menu to “explain” to Illustrator that there is a rectangle in order to apply a suitable stroke or fill. At the heart of it, it’s all about knowing how to talk to Illustrator in its own language.

For members of lynda.com, Deke also has an exclusive video this week called Two ways to crop in Illustrator that demonstrates how to crop an image placed in Illustrator, which, in the vein of this week’s theme, is another unintuitive feat.

See you back next week when Deke will return with another reality-tweaking technique.

 

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• All Illustrator courses on lynda.com
• All Design courses on lynda.com
• All courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Illustrator CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Illustrator Insider Training: Rethinking the Essentials

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Deke’s Techniques: Changing proportions selectively with Liquify in Photoshop

Published by | Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

This week’s free Deke’s Techniques episode demonstrates a (fairly ridiculous) method for shrinking a model’s head while leaving his body in standard proportion. Although, at first glance, this seems like another wacky manifestation of Deke’s fertile imagination (or homage to David Byrne’s Stop Making Sense big white suit), there are legitimate reasons (and skills) involved in learning how to transform one part of an image while matching the remaining parts.

Ultimately, Deke shows you how to take the normally proportioned model on the left, shrink his head, and realign his shoulders to match. Using a combination of layer mechanics, the Free Transform command, and of course the tricky, but oh-so-useful Liquify command, the effect is seamless:

The fact is, reducing one part of an image while making the remaining part match up is an exercise in careful use of the Liquify command. In this tutorial, Deke will show you how to work within the Liquify dialog box so that you can accurately see how the edges are going to match up between the layers. In order to keep the suit’s pinstripes aligned, you need to know how to employ the power that resides within the Liquify dialog box. It’s not a quick process, but the result is both whimsical and demonstrative of real Photoshop skill.

If you’re feeling contrary, and you’re a member of lynda.com, Deke also has a member-exclusive new movie this week for increasing the size of a model’s head.

Deke will be back with another free technique next week.

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Photoshop CS6: New Features
• Photoshop for Photographers: Portrait Retouching

 

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Deke’s Techniques: Inverting facial features in Photoshop

Published by | Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

When I first watched this week’s free Deke’s Techniques video, I was mesmerized by the way Deke inverted a portrait but left the eyes and mouth in the right-side up position. ‘Mesmerized’ might be a euphemism, because, really, I was sort of spellbound by the fact that I couldn’t immediately imagine why anyone would want to perpetrate this bizarre effect. Check it out for yourself in the free video tutorial below, then read on.

Arguably, at first, the inverted portrait on the right looks almost normal, even though we know in our human hearts (and eyes, and optical information processing centers) that something is wrong:

Photoshop effect: Inverting facial features in Photoshop.

But when you flip the entire composition, you realize just how wrong the altered face (now on the left, in case it’s not disturbingly obvious) actually is:

Photoshop effect: Inverting facial features in Photoshop image 2.

The truth is, that this is a great demonstration of how our eyes and expectations force us into reconciling a confusingly hard to pin down, altered portrait. More importantly, in the process of flipping the model while restoring the eyes and mouth to their original orientation, you can learn a great deal about creating impeccable Photoshop compositions, including how to tackle duplicated transformations, careful masking, and selective healing. You can also, should you choose, learn to create a flipped portrait that is truly unsettling.

In the end we have a portrait that’s more disturbing than it initially seems, and a technique that’s more grounded in solid Photoshop practices than one might initially suspect—ultimately, it’s a party trick that teaches solid Photoshop machinations.

Deke will be back next week with a more standard portrait retouching technique that will reorient your mind (and skin) back into place.

 

Interested in more?
• The entire Deke’s Techniques weekly series on lynda.com
• Courses by Deke McClelland on lynda.com
• All Photoshop courses on lynda.com

Suggested courses to watch next:
• Photoshop CS6 One-on-One: Fundamentals
• Photoshop Masking & Compositing: Fundamentals
• Photoshop CS6 Essential Training

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