Photoshop for Lunch™ - Upside Down Image Effect - Masks, Selections, Flip Images

1. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Upside Down Image Effects - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this episode of Photoshop for lunch at working upside down. Photoshop for lunch is a series of Photoshop classes, each of which teaches a small number of Photoshop techniques. You'll get an opportunity to practice your new skills in the projects you'll create. Today, we're looking at creating upside down effects for photos in Photoshop. This is an on trend effect. You'll see it around the web quite a bit, and I'm going to show you how to do it. We're going to learn to create a number of upside down effect, including how to create nested selections. As you're working through these projects, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you are enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop, and if you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. So if you're ready now, let's get started turning things upside down in Photoshop. 2. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Upside Down Image Effects - Part 1: All the images that I'm using in this class are from unsplash.com. I'm going to give you a link to that site. It's a really good source for high quality images that you can use. This is one of those images. We're going to start by duplicating the background layer. Just drag and drop it onto the new layer icon. The one I want to turn upside down is going to be this background. I'm also going to make this into a regular layer. In later versions of Photoshop, you can just click on this lock icon and it just unlocks automatically. Now, in older versions of Photoshop, that doesn't work, but you can drag and drop the lock icon onto the trash can. The other thing you can do is just double-click the background layer and then just click okay and it just makes it into a new layer. Regardless of which of those methods you used, you should now have a regular layer. That's important because we can't actually flip this unless it is a regular layer. Now, what we don't want to do is to rotate this because when you rotate an image, you actually end up with a different result to if you mirror image it. What we want to do is to mirror image it or flip it. I'm going to choose edit and then transform, and we want to flip vertical. I'm just going to click that. I've turned this top layer off so what we're seeing is the upside down image. Now we can go and put our right way up image back on top. But we don't want to show all of this image. We just want to show a little sliver of it because that's the trend. I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool here and I'm going to drag out a long, thin rectangle and it's going to go from the top of the image to the bottom. If you don't get it perfectly where you want it to be, you can hold the spacebar as you draw it and then you can move it around. But basically what you want is a thin rectangle over the top of the interesting element in your photograph, and of course here it's the surfer. Now I've got my selection over the surfer. I need to go back and select the topmost layer because this is the one I'm going to add the mask to. I'm just going to click on the mask icon here. What that does is it adds a black and white mask. The white area, this strip down here, is the area that we're seeing from the up the right way image. Let's just turn the background one off. You can see that this is the strip that we've masked out of this top image. The top image is up the right way and so this is the bit that we're seeing that's up the right way. Then the bottom image is upside down and so we're just seeing that as a background where this top image does not intersect with it. From there you may want to go and crop your image or you could add some text as an overlay over it, but that's the first of these upside down effects we're going to create. 3. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Upside Down Image Effects - Part 2: For the second of our effects, we're going to create a circular effect. Again, however you want to do it, you're going to turn the background layer into a regular layer, and you're going to make a second copy of it on top. We're going to turn this layer off while we focus on the background copy, and for this, we want to flip it, so I'm going to choose Edit, Transform, Flip Vertical. Now let's look at this layer, the top layer where everything's up the right way. This time we're going to create a circle cutout, so I'm going to select the Elliptical Marquee tool, and I'm going to hold the Shift Key as I drag out a circle, and this is going to be my mask. Now, I'm going to try and position it horizontally in the document if I don't get it perfectly and if I want to be able to finesse it. I'm going to let go the left mouse button and the Shift key, so I just have my selection here. I'm going to choose, Select, Transform Selection because this allows me to transform the selection but not alter the image in any way. I'm just making sure that my circle here is in the middle of my document. I'll click the check mark. Now, I just want to add my mask as I did in the previous video, so I'm just going to click on the ''Add Mask'' icon. This time we haven't got quite the result that I was hoping we would get because this person's feet are up here and I think that it's not probably quite as good or look as I want. Let's go and see what we can do with this particular layer here, the one that is controlling this image. I'm going to select the Move Tool, and you can see here that there is a link between these two, so the photo and the mask are both connected to each other. If I move things up, the photo and the mask are both moving. That's one possibility here, is I can just rearrange things to where I want them to be. But you can also click this link icon to de-select that link. Now, the mask and the photo are independent of each other. If I click on the mask, I get this little border around it and this set of handles, and I can move the mask around. If I click here on the image, the mask's going to stay fixed, but the image is going to move so I can place the person in a slightly different position within this mask. It's also possible for me with this selection handle to re-size this ellipse. Now it's never very good idea to re-size, rest or shapes, but since we're not going to re-size it a lot, we can probably get away with it here, so I'm just going to re-size my circle, and then click the check mark. Now, I have a larger circle and still right now, this circle and the photograph are independent of each other, so I'm just going to grab my person and move him a little bit differently. Let's grab both of them and perhaps move them down a little bit. I can continue to work on this until I have everything in a position that I want it to be in. I'm going to call that good for my second of these upside down effects. In this case, we're creating a circular mask, and because we're not using the entire image, that gives us a fair bit of flexibility in terms of where we want the circle to go and what part of our photo actually shows up inside the upside down background. Of course, once you've created this, you could add some text if you wanted to, and you may also consider cropping this to a square shape. 4. Photoshop for Lunch™ - Upside Down Image Effects - Part 3: For this next upside down effect, we're going to create a hollow rectangle. We're going back to the basics here. We're just going to turn our background layer into a regular layer and duplicate this layer. We're also going to flip this bottom layer upside down with Edit, Transform, Flip Vertical. Now let's go back to the topmost layer with it visible and let's focus on this. What I want to do is to create a selection that is actually a hollow rectangle. I'm going to start by making my two selections, and then I'm going to subtract them from each other. Now I've already experimented a little bit with this image. I have a fair idea how big a selection I want the inside piece to be. So I've already set this up to a fixed size and it's 1100 by 700 pixels. It's important to use exact dimensions here, because what we want to do is we want to make sure. That our next rectangle is going to be 200 pixels bigger than that, or 300. But so it has nice edges all around it. So I'm going to start here by just clicking on this selection. I'm going to put it in the middle of the document. I'm going to choose, Select and then Transform Selection. It's the right size, but right now I just want to make sure it's dead in the middle of the document. Because when I create the next selection, I want it to be in exactly the same position, and just larger than this. Later on, we can position the whole piece in the right place. I'm just going to click the check mark here. This is my little piece, so I'm going to choose Select, and then Save Selection. I'm going to call this Small and click "Okay". What that does just in case you're curious, is it saves this as a channel. If I go into the Channels palette, you'll see here that there's a channel called Small, and it's just saved inside the document. So if were we to save this document as a PST file. Inside it will be a selection called Small that we can call back anytime in the future. Now let's go and make it big. I'm going to change this thinking to 1400 by 1000. I'm adding an extra 300 pixels to either side of this. I've just set my values and I'm just going to click here now. I think that's going to be pretty good, but again, I want it to be in the middle of the image. So again, I'm going to choose Select, and then Transform Selection. I'm using my smart guides to make sure that this is perfectly aligned. Click the "Check mark." Now I'm going to save it with Select, Save Selection, and this is going to be called Big. Again, we would have a channel with a selection that looks like this called Big. Now I can de-select this selection. I'm going to go back and load Big, so I can just load it as the selection. Then I'm going to choose Select, Load Selection. I'm going to choose Small, but this time I want Small to be cut out of Big. So I'm going to choose Subtract from Selection and click "Okay". Now I get a selection that only comprises the area that is around Small, but inside Big. While I'm here, I'm just going to save this, Select, Save Selection. I'm going to call this Hollow, and click "Okay". Let's just have a quick look in the Channels palette. Well, here's Hollow, it's a hollow rectangle. Now I can close the Channels palette, because we've just had a look at that. Let's go back to the topmost layer. Now I want to position this selection before I go ahead and make my mask. It's just like any regular selection, we can choose Select, Transform Selection. Which will allow us now, to move it into position. This time I'm not worried about centering it, I want to make sure that it's in an area where I've got something of interest here. This is the area I'm looking at, so click the check mark. To make my mask, I'm just going to click on the Add Layer Mask icon. Now, something happened here and everything went the wrong way around. But that's fine because anytime you have a mask, if something goes in the wrong way around. You can just click on the mask and press Control or Command I. Because that invert's the image, so what was black becomes white and what was white becomes black. Now in this case, we've got a situation slightly different to the one we were working with before. This cut-out here is actually showing us the image underneath here. If we want to move it around, we can go ahead and move the cut-out here. So we can come to this mask and just move it around. That's fine, but if we want to change the image, we have to come down to the bottom here. Because this is the image that is inside the mask. Just want to be sure as to what's happening here. I'm just going to position this in an interesting place. I can go back and lock this mask if I wish to. There's another one of these upside down effects created in Photoshop. But this time you've also learned how to make a big selection and make a little selection. Then subtract them from each other to get a selection that is a ring. You could create that using a circle, for example, just make a big circle, make a little circle. Save both of those selections, and then go ahead and do that subtraction. You just want to be careful that you first load the bigger of the two selections. Then go and load the smaller of the two with the Subtract from Selection option selected, and you'll be fine. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of these upside down photo effects in Photoshop. To post your finished image in the class project area. As you're working through these videos, you might have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. If you're enjoying this class, please give it a thumbs up. Recommendations like this help me get my classes in front of more people who just like you, want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, so I look at and respond to all of your class projects. I'm Helen Bradley, thank you for joining me for this episode of Photoshop for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode of Photoshop for Lunch soon.