Create Minimalist Digital Collages from Vintage Graphics in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction & Class Overview: Using vintage images and giving them new life as modern minimalist digital collages is a fun and accessible creative process and a great way to develop your visual language, create exciting work for a portolo, and level up your ado photoshop skills along the way. I am gia from creative, and I love working with vintage images and turning them into prints and surface patterns. In this class, I invite you to explore creating times image collages in Adobe Photoshop by combining vintage animal illustrations with linear graphics, typographic elements, geometric shapes, and then giving all your sourced elements a graphical reminiscent of screen prints and so graphs is a reduced color palette. For this class, I will step by step, walk you through the complete process of creating these kind of digital collages, including sourcing the images and combining them in the your collage composition, using other be photoshop filters and adjustments in the smart, non destructive way to create two kinds of graphic treatments, which will give the elements solid color print esthetic, exploring coloring approaches and coloring your collage to create the design vibe, adding more visual interest to the composition by creating a layering effect, and enhancing the look by faintining the colors and texturing your To follow along with this class, you will need a desktop version of Adobe Potashop. And for the best experience, familiarity with its orthol functionality and interface is highly recommended. By the end of the class, you'll be equipped with everything you need to know to start creating your own striking minimalist collages for posters, print and demand product, editorial illustration, graphic design projects. I am super excited to share with you my favorite approach to creating minimalist digital collages using dog graphics, and I cannot wait to see what this class will inspire you to create. So join me in this class, and let's make something awesome. 2. What to Expect & Your Class Project: There are many different ways you can approach creating collages. And in this class, we will concentrate on creating digital collages with a timeless minimal look by combining vintage illustrations of animals with linear charts or graphs, some vintage type, and clean digital geometric shapes. And then given all these elements a graphic treatment, and tie the composition together using a reduced color palette. Combining detailed images of animals with technical drawings, charts, or some sort of linear infographics, allows you to create a strong visual contrast and eject the position between the organic natural forms with something dry and technical, which always makes for repealing visuals and mixing in additional elements, such as type and sol gemer shapes, helps to add more visual interest to your work. In this class, we will be exploring the visual aspect of creating these kind of collages. But if you want, you can carefully consider the meaning behind the elements you use and develop collages with a specific narrative. For example, if you inter editorial illustration. For your class project, follow along with the class and create at least one digital collage and share it along with the original images you have used in the projects and resources tub for this class. I cannot wait to see what images you choose to use and how you combine them in your collages. So without further ado, let's get on with the class. 3. Creative Commons Images & Where to Find Them: First things, first, to create cages, you'll need some images. These days, there are a lot of different websites and galleries where you can find free to use vintage illustrations. And for this class, I recommend exploring various animal illustrations available in the Biodiversity Heritage library on Flicker, sourcing graphs charts or other kinds of linear graphics from the Diagrams plots and Charts album of the British library account, also on Flicker. To help you avoid spending edges, looking for images of animals. In the class resources, you can find a list of direct links to the albums, which I specifically recommend you to check out as they contain great images, quality and fail wise for the kind of collages we'll be creating in this class. Before you start using found images in your collages, you need to check out their copyright status. The great thing about Flicker is that you can easily see it right here for each image. If the copyright status says either public domain or no non copyright restrictions, this means that you're free to use these images, and you don't have to credit their original source. You might also come across some images with a creative commons license or some rights reserved status. And in this case, you need to look into which specific license it is. As long as it is a creative commons license, which is not a noncommercial and not a no derivatives kind, you can use the image for any purpose. And if the license requires attribution, you must include a credit somewhere, for example, in the images caption. You shouldn't find any all rights reserved images in either the biodiversity Heritage Library or British library albums on Flicker. But if you do, needless to say, you cannot use any of these images without permission. All that said, it is always best to look for images in the public domain with the copyright expired. Thankfully, most of the images in the two libraries I recommend fall under this category. But if you want to learn more about how creative commons licenses work and how to use creative commons material in a responsible way, be sure to check out the post on this subject on our work smart blog. So keep these copyright considerations in mind and join me in the next lesson in which I'll share tips for what to pay attention to visually when looking for the source images for your collages. 4. Sourcing Suitable Images for Your Collages: With the corporate status in mind, now you can start looking for images to use in your collages. For this kind of collages, you'll need to source just a couple of different images. First of all, you need one illustration of some animal or some other creature or a skeleton, which can be the main subject of your collage. The image can be monochromatic or in color, but to save time cutting, it is best to look for images with no graphic background around the subject at all or something minimal, which can either be kept or easily removed. Avoid images where there is a light wash of a slightly different color around the subject, as it can be difficult to remove without manual retouching. So best look for high quality and high quantra sprints with a clean background around the subject. For your second image, you need a chart, graph or a diagram or even MP. In any case, this should be a linear based graphic without large field areas or any field areas of different colors. Start by looking for an image of a subject and download all of the images you like to your computer in the highest resolution possible. Then look for a technical graphic, which would work well, shape and structure wise with your collected illustrations. Don't overthink it, but if you can find a technical graphic, which can help to create a narrative when placed together with the illustration, this would be a nice bonus. This would be important if you're creating a poster which needs to communicate something, or if you're creating an editorial illustration for a specific theme. But if you just want to play around, simply pick something interesting based on the graphic qualities. Don't worry if the quality of either images is not great. In this class, we'll be applying a few graphic effects to them, so they will be nice and crisp in the end, as long as the original images are not very small, blurry, or fuzzy. For your collage, you'll also need some vintage type, but don't worry about looking for something separately, as you can often find some descriptions on the illustration or on the charts. So we'll be taking typographic elements from one of the other sourced images. So source a selection of images you want to use in your collage, download them in the highest quality and resolution to your computer, and then join me in the next lesson in which I'll share a few tips for setting up the document for your collage, in Adobe Photoshop. 5. Collage Document Setup in Adobe Photoshop: Now that you have sourced your images. It is time to bring them into Photoshop and put them together into one document. Let's start by quickly setting up a new document in which we will be creating our new cage. Your cage can be any size and aspect ratio you want. But for the best result, I highly recommend that the shorter side of your canvas is at least 2000 pixels. Larger canvas sizes will allow you to produce more detailed cages. So think about the size and scale of your work. I'm going to be creating my collage in this size, so I will have relatively small details. Regardless of how you intend to use your work. Make sure you set the resolution to 300 DPA, the color mode to RGB and color depth to eight bit. So that you do not have to create e separate background layer later in the process. Set the background contents here to white. In double check that the color profile is set to S RGB, in pixel aspect ratio is set to square pixels. Next, give you a document a name. For example, I'm going to call mine Lizard collage. And with all these settings ready, please go ahead and create our new document. As soon as your new document has been created, save it as a new file. Make sure that the file format is set to Photoshop. Check that the color profile here is sticked, and then hit save. And with a new document created. Next, let's bring our sourced images into it. 6. Bringing Images into Your Collage Document: Now with the new collage document ready, let's bring in the sourced images. Start by opening the images you want to use in your first collage in photoshop. For my collage, I am going to be using this image of a lizard in some of these geometric graphics. I'm going to open them in Photoshop as separate documents. To avoid adding extra information to your collage document. It is a good idea to only roughly select and copy the parts of the sourced images you want to use in your collage. I am going to use the rectangula Markeo to select my lizard. But if you are dealing with some tricky shapes, you can use the last instead with the selection ready, copy its contents, and then go to the new collage document and paste the selection into it. And then repeat the process with the other image you want to use in your collage. Out of all these graphics, I only want to use this one here. I'm going to select it, copy it and then paste it into my cage document. If you also want to use some typographic element in your cage, have a look at what you have in your two source files. I want to use this text here. I'm going to go and fully copy it from the original image. And then paste it onto a separate layer in my Cage document. If your two source images don't have any decent typographic elements, have a look through some other images and copy anything you like to your Cage document. When you're down placing your collage elements into your new document, go ahead and close the original source files. Next, let's talk about developing the composition of your collage. 7. Tips & Ideas for Creating Your Composition: Playing around with the arrangement of the elements when creating any kind of collages is a fun and experimental process. And since when working with the digital collages, you have the added ability to easily scale and, if necessary, even reflect the elements. There is even more room for experimentation and creating just the composition you are after. I will walk you through the process of arranging your collage elements in Adobe Photoshop in the following lesson. But before this, here are a few tips and ideas for how you can go about creating your collage composition. When developing this type of collages, consider the animal to be the centerpiece of the composition. So position and scale it on your canvas first. The other elements in the collage will be used to add more visual interest to the composition, and you can layer and arrange them in different ways, depending on what you want to create. I usually like to use additional elements to make my compositions more dynamic and asymmetric. And if this is something you want to try in your own work, then considere using an odd number of additional elements and combine a linear graphic a scheme or a chart with a typographic element and a solid geometric shape and arrange them around the main subject in a triangle. For example, like in this collage hair. If you want to create a more balanced or symmetrical looking collage, then consider arranging the elements along a single axis instead. For example, like I have done in this collage. You can also explore using less elements in eucage and experiment with the layering and alignment. Or you can try clustering additional elements together so that they are perceived together as one larger element. So decide what sort of composition you want to create. And then join me in the next lesson in which I'll share technical tips and workflow for compose a new collage in Adobe Photoshop. 8. Creating Your Composition in Adobe Photoshop: Now with the sourced elements ready in your collage document, it is time to arrange them in the e desired composition. Usually, when creating digital collises, you can find tune the composition at any stage of the process. But when following this particular collision technique and workflow, it is important to get the composition and especially the scale of the elements right before moving on to developing the graphic look of all of the elements. This is how I would recommend going about this part of the process. Start by switching to the selection tool and make sure that the auto select is not checked here. Then go to the layers panel and select the layer with your collages main subject. Rename it to subject to keep the document ready and to make it easier to see which layer you're working with without having to rely on the layers p nail. Next hide all of the layers above your main subject, so you can clearly see it. And then with your subject layer selected, switch to the fritronsform tool and scale your subject to the desired size in relation to the canvas size. Remember to hold down the option or old key to scale from the center point, if you like, and make sure to constrain proportions while scaling to avoid stretching your source image. Play around with the scale of your main collage element as much as you need to and make sure it works well compositionally in relation to the overall canvas size and has a comfortable amount of room around its edges. When scaling, you can keep your subject centrally aligned to the canavas, or you can straightway start moving it around the canavas to balance the composition. For example, you might want to consider upsetting it to the left or to the right, depending on the animal's shape and posture. Don't worry if you need to increase the scale of your source image because any pixelation created when scaling will be masked by the effects applied later in the process, and it will eventually look like a solid color graphic print. The end result will look good as long as your original image is not really small or fuzzy. If you are used to converting layers into smart objects before transforming them, which in most cases is a good idea. At this point, make sure you keep your image layers as regular rasta layers. In this workflow, it is important to scale all of the elements first, and we will be converting them into smart object after scaling. This will allow us to give these elements a graphic treatment in a non destructive way and also keep all of the effects at 100% scale to make everything work predictable. Scale you main subject to the desired size, rotated, if required, and then apply the transformations. After scaling, if necessary, further adjust the placement of the subject within the canvas. I will keep mine where it is for now and move all of the elements together a bit later. Next, turn on and select the layer with the next prominent collage element, which should be a linear graphic or a chart. Change the blending two multiply or overlay. So you can see it over the subject. If your graphic has an inverted look with a dark background, now it's a good time to hit command eye or control eye in the windows to invert it, so it has a light background and dark elements like. And then enter the free transform mode and also scale it to the desired site. Again, make sure that the proportions are constrained and play around with the scale and placement of geographic in relation to the subject. Of course, you can also rotate geographic if you want. For example, I'm going to straighten my one here. The position and scale of your linear graphic and animal and how they interact can really help to bring your composition to life. So spend as much time as required by tuning the relationship to start building your composition, keeping in mind any elements which you are yet to add. When happy with the scale, exit the fronsf mode and for a more minute control over the placement of the graphic, use the arrow keys to nig interplace. When ready, rename this layer to graphic, so you can easily find it later. Then if you have a separate layer with a typographic element, turn it back on, rename it to text, and repeat the process. Change the blending mode or opacity to be able to see it over other elements, and then position and scale it to the desired size. I am certain to build my triangle of additional elements. I'll place this text here. Apart from using various sourced elements. You can also add solid geometric shapes to your collage, to create more contrast, and add an extra focal point to your composition. To create geometric shapes, you can use any of the shape tools available here and create any shapes you want. I usually use the ellipse tool and create circles because they help focus attention on specific areas in the collage and create contrast with the linear graphics or elements with some sharp corners. With the desired shape tool selected. Go to the area in the composition where you want to place it and create it roughly in the desired size. If you want to create a perfect shape, do not forget to hold down the shift key while drawing to constrain proportions. After the shape has been drawn, you can further adjust its size and change its fill and straw colors in the properties panel. I will talk about different approaches to color in this kind of collages a bit later. For now, change the fill color to any color you like. I am going to keep it white. Next, make sure that there is no straw color applied to your shape. Then go to the layer panel and reduce this layers opacity to be able to see the subject below. Next, if you want adjust the size of the shape in the property spanel, or simply switch to the selection tool. Enter thetranorm mode, and resize your geometric shape and further adjust its placement this way. And apply changes. So add scale and arrange all of the elements you want to use in your collage. When they're ready, it is a good idea to quickly look over the overall composition and zoom in and out to see how everything works together and fine tune the scale or placement of the individual elements, as well as the placement of the whole collage in relation to the canvas. For example, in this case, I like the general arrangement of the elements in relation to each other, but I want to move all of them together to a slightly different spot within the cannabis to have a bit more room on the left side, to make the composition look more balanced. Seeing how different elements come together in a collage is all part of the fun, but be prepared to spend some time scaling and moving all of the elements around to create an exciting composition. And when you're ready with your collage composition, join me in the next lesson in which you will be setting up our document for creating non destructive graphic treatments. 9. Converting Elements into Smart Objects: When you're happy with your collage composition, the next step is to convert all of the elements into smart object, which will allow you to work non destructively while developing the graphic look. Start by bringing the opacity of all of the layers back to 100%. And change the blending molds back to normal if you have changed it to something else during the previous steps. Make sure that all of your layers are appropriately named like this. Then let's convert each of these layers into smart object. Start by right clicking on the subject layer, and select convert to smart object from the pop up many. And then repeat the process with the graphic layer, and then the text layer. If you added any shape layers, these can stay as they are. With all of these layers converted into smart object, be sure to save your document. Next, we can start working on the visual treatment of the subject layer. 10. Subject Image: Initial Adjustments: With all of the elements scaled, arranged, and converted into smart objects. Now we're ready to start working on creating the graphic treatments. And let's start with the subject layer. So double click on the Smart object layers Funail in the layers panel, and this will open the contents of the Smart object in a separate document. The first thing we need to do here is right click on the image layer in the layers panel, and yet again, converted into a smart object. This might seem counter intuitive, but having a smart object inside of a smart object will allow you to apply any filters and adjustments to this layer non destructively and create a graphic effect using multiple layers, whilst keeping the main color document neat and tidy. With the smart objects ready and selected. The next step is to convert your image to black and white. In order to have more control over the contrast in the black and white image, press command shift option B or control shift O B in windows to apply a black and white adjustment and open up this window where you can adjust how dark different color components will be in the shades of gray, which basically allows you to control the contrast in the black and white image. When working with the scanned images, you will most likely need to lighten the yellows in your image to make the paper lighter. You can play around with the sliders here, or simply hover over the area in the image you want to adjust and then hold down the mouse button and drag it to the left or to the right, to darken or lighten the automatically sampled colors, for example, like this. At this point in to bring a bit more contrast to the image and make sure that different tones stand out against each other and that you don't lose any details. Don't worry if your background is still not completely white or has some unwanted texture in it, or if the blacks are not black just yet. So don't overthink it, and just quickly find tune the look of your image using both the color sliders and the color pa widget. And when you're ready, hit a key to apply the black and white adjustment. Next, let's further boost the images contrast and eliminate any extra stuff around the outside of the image. In order to do so, press command L or Control L in windows to apply the levels adjustment and open this window. The first thing we need to do here is to work on the background color and flatten it out. So start by working with the white indicator here and drag it to the left. If you hold down the option or old key, you will see which areas of the image are being affected. Adjusting the whites, will make your image look pretty bright. So you need to bring the blacks back in, by adjusting the black indicator, and dragging it to the right. You might also need to play around with the mid tones indicator as well to find tune the contrast in your image. The position of all these indicators will depend on the image you are working with. So simply move them around until the image starts to look cleaner and more contrast. But try not to push things too far and avoid losing any details in your image. Don't worry if there are still some small areas of unwanted texture or artifacts, because this you will be able to remove later after creating the graphic look. So get the tunnel contrast to your lichen and make the background look more even, and he K to apply these adjustments. With the contrast adjusted, the next step is to make your image sharper. With this layer selected, go to the filter menu, sharpen and select unsharp mask. In the unsharp mask dialogue, set threshold to around two or three, radius to around two to three as well, and then play around with the amount value. These settings will depend on the size and quality of the original image and the level of detail in it. Play around with the settings in combination with each other to get your image looking sharper, but not overly sharp and. When ready with the unsharp mask settings, hit a K to apply this filter. Because all these adjustments have been applied to a smart object, you will see them in the layers panel underneath your smart object layer, and you can revisit them and find tune how things look at any time if necessary. Apply these initial adjustments to your image. Next, let's give it a graphic treatment, which will make it look like a grainy sgraph kind of print. 11. Creating a Risograph Effect: With your image converted to black and white and sharpened, now it is time to transform it from being a irregular looking scan of a print into an exciting solid calgraphic with a hint of a so graph. Look. Still in the same smart object content document, press command shift and control shift and in windows to open the new layer dialog. Rename your new layer to graphic texture. Then set the mode to overlay, and check the fill with the overlay neutral color, tick box, here, and click OK. Once this layer has been created, make sure it is above your image layer, and then convert it into a smart object. Next, with this layer selected, go to the filter menu. Pixelate, and select pointalze. Set the cell size to 3-5 depending on your image size. I'm going to set it to free and click K. Pointalize filter creates a pattern out of shapes in different colors. Next, we need to desaturate it. Press come under you or control you in windows to open the human saturation adjustment. Turn down the saturation and apply changes. At the moment, pointilize filter will add just a bit of texture to the image and to create the graphic effect we are looking for. You need to change the blending mode of this layer from overlay to hard mix. And your image, including any blurry or fizzy areas, will start looking sharp and made out of opaque pixels. If you find the effect a little too harsh, now you can go and play around with the fiel value of this player. Somewhere 70-100% usually works well and allows to bring back a little bit of tonal variation from the original image. In this case, I like how it looks at 80%. After adding this effect, you will most likely want to adjust the contrast in this texture to make the image look better in terms of the tonal range. In order to do so with the texture layer selected, press command L or Control L in windows to add a new levels adjustment to this layer, and adjust the input levels until you get the image looking just right. Bring the white and black points to where there is something on the histogram, and then play around with the midpoint indicator to further adjust the contrast. When happy with outlooks, it a K to apply the changes. After adding and adjusting the levels for the texture layer, you might also want to revisit the levels adjustment for the subject layer below to fine tune the look or carry on building the effect and come back to the levels a bit later. Some images will look great. I just these effects applied to them. But if you start losing details, you can also add a bit more texture to your image. In order to do so, select the graphic texture layer and go to the filter menu noise and select add noise. Here set the amount value to 25%. Select Gaz in and check monochromatic here and apply this effect. It will help bring out extra details and add more texture to your image. If it starts looking to a, you can go to the filter menu once again, and the other select minimum. Set the radius to between not 0.2 and not 0.3 pixels. Make sure it is set to preserve roundness and apply changes. With these two extra filters, your image will look slightly different, and the effects will work differently depending on your image. Because this image is quite graphic to begin with. These filters don't really make much difference. But if you're working with something that has solid colors and more tonal variation, they will help to create a better texture and bring out more details. After building this texture effect, if necessary, go and further play around with the levels both here and in the subject layer to finalize the look. And if these adjustments still don't help with bringing out the details in all of the tunnel areas in your image, you can manually lighten or dark and select areas in your image, and I'll show you how to do it. And destructively in the next lesson. 12. Bringing Back Details Using Dodging & Burning: If after adding the graphic texture and getting the most out of the levels adjustments, you still need to bring out more details in some areas of your image which are too dark or too light. You can use the dodge and burn tools and work on the select areas of your image to make them lighter or darker. To use these tools non destructively. Start by creating another new layer by pressing command shift and control shift in windows. Rename your new layer to dodging and burning. Set the layers blending mode to overlay. Take the fill with overlay neutral color checkbox, and click. Make sure that this layer is above your subject layer, but below the layer with the texture. Then select your new layer, and let's get on with the dodging and burning. If you need to lighten certain areas in your image, select the dodge tool. Because we're using the neutral gray layer. Make sure the range is set to mid tones, and the exposure is set to about 25%, which is its default setting. Then select a soft round brush, and start painting over the areas in your image, which you want to lighten. You can increase the effect by layering the brush strokes, and in order to do so, you need to release the mouse button, and then brush over the same area again. For example, you can see how it is lightened in these areas and helps to reveal more texture. If you need to darken some areas, switch to the burn tool. Keep the same settings here. Then the same as before, paint over any areas which you want to darken to bring back some details or to increase the contrast in the image. When using either of these tools, use the square bracket keys to quickly change the size of the brush in relation to the size of the area you want to paint over. I am going to burn these lighter areas in my image here to have a bit more texture and details. When you're done, you can check what difference the dodging and burning has made to your image by switching this layer off and on again in the layers panel. The difference here is subtle, but it helps to bring out some of the tricky areas in the image. So use all of these techniques to give your image the desired graphic treatment, and if necessary, spend a bit more time working with the levels after dodging and burning to finalize the look. Next, let's quickly clean up this image, using a mask. T. 13. Cleaning Your Subject Image: After finalizing the graphic treatment of your subject image, now it is time to remove any unwanted elements and marks and make your image ready to be used in the collage. First of all, let's quickly add a solid white background below all these layers. Click on the create new fill or adjustment layer button and select solid color. Set the color to pure white, and click Okay. And then drag it below the layer with your image in the layers panel. This step is really important because having the white background and no transparency around your image is essential for the graphic effect to work correctly. With the white background layer ready. Select the subject layer, and click on the ad new layer mask button here. Then select the mask fam nail in the layers panel and remove any element you don't want by covering them up with the black color within the mask. To make things quicker, I like using the lasso tool to draw a rough selection around my subject, making sure that most of the things I want to remove are on the other side of the selection. Then I simply close the selection, invert it and fill the selected area of the mask with the black foreground color. So tool is great for getting rid of some larger areas, but to fin tune the edges of the subject or remove some small bits here and there, I would recommend using the pencil tool and a hard round brush, which will allow you to maintain hard edges around the elements. To remove any areas from your mask. Double check that the pencils opacity is set to 100%, and the foreground color is set to black. If you've been using the lasso tool before, do not forget to select your selection, to be able to work with the entire canvas. And then start painting over any areas which you want to remove. As with the dodge and burn tools, you can use the square bracket keys to quickly change your brush size. If you are removing a large element, on need to work in a tight area. I tend to switch between the lasso and the pencil tools as I work around my image, using the pencil tool to remove any small details, and using the lasso tool for selecting larger areas or complex shapes. So spend a bit of time removing any element you don't want to have in your collage and any obvious dust or marks from the background. When you're done with your mask, the contents of your document should look like a clean, solid white background with a graphic subject image. Now with this image ready, save this document, then close it and go back to the main collage document. Here, the smart object has been updated. And now it is also a good idea to quickly save this document as well. And with the subject image rey, next, let's get started with the coloring. 14. Colouring & Using Reduced Colour Palettes: Before you start working with all other collage elements, it is a good idea to apply the base coloring to your subject and the background. Since this class is about creating minimalist collages in reduced color pallets, you will need just three different colors. And to keep it simple, to create an overall coloring of the subject and the background. We'll be using a gradient map and then adding an accent color to the additional graphic elements separately. So let's quickly hide all other layers apart from these two. And then click on the create new fill or adjustment layer button and select gradient map. Make sure your new gradient map adjustment layer is above the subject and background layers and below all layers with other elements, which you want to have a different accent color. With the gradient map layer selected. In the gradient map properties, click on the gradient here, and then in the gradient editor, select any gradient which you want to use to color your image. Gradient maps work by replacing colors from the original image based on the brightness in gray scale with the equivalent colors from the set gradient, in this way, create Doton coloring effect. In a two stop gradient. The left stop replaces black in your image. The right one replaces white, and all the colors in the gradient between them, replace the shades in between. You can assign your own colors to the color stops here. We check out and select a gradient from the available presets. I have shared a few gradient presets, which you can try using in your collage in the class resources. So don't hesitate to download them and import them using this button here. If you want to learn more about creating effective coloring using gradient maps, be sure to check out my class, mastering duotones in Adobe Photoshop, and don't hesitate to read my guide using gradient maps, color images on our work smart blog. Choosing the colors collage is one of the most important steps in the process of creating these kind of collages. And even though we're creating a minimal graphic look using a limited cape, there is still a few approaches to coloring. You can explore, which will allow you to create collages in slightly different styles. My favorite approach to this kind of collages is to combine a colorful dooton image with white graphic elements. This approach is pretty foolproof and depending on the colors used in the gradient map. It allows you to easily create collages with a different be. If you're after something quite clean, minimal, and modern, but vibrant, at the same time, I would highly recommend trying this first. If you're after a more minimal and timeless look, you can also combine white elements use a gray scale or really muted duotones. This approach will allow you to easily create elegant low contrast collages. If you're after creating a minimal, but more sophisticated look, again, use met to low contrast gray scale or subdued monochromatic duotone, and use a combination of additional elements, some in white color, and some in a soft color, for example, golden beige. In this case, you'll be using four colors overall instead of free. If you're after something bolder, instead of using white additional elements, make them black or dark gray, and pair them with a light and bright, met to hyp contrast duotone image. And if you want to create something more expressive, you can try using a gray scale or highly disagurated monochromatic duotone and combine it with the additional elements in some rich bright or even primary color. So decide on the coloring approach you want to take and pick the colors or a premade gradient preset, which works for you. I am going to use this gradient preset here with the intention of combining these colors with additional white elements. When you're ready with your gradient map, click OK to apply the changes. And now with the base coloring done, let's move on to adding other graphic elements to our collage. 15. Linear Graphic: Visual Treatment: With the gradient map applied over the subject and the background layers. Let's move on to adjusting the next collage element. Turn on the graphic layer in the layers panel. Make sure it is already converted into A smart object, and its blending mode is set to normal and its opacity to 100%. The visual treatment will be applying to this graphic won't be too complex, so we're going to do it all in the main document. And we will be using a different technique, which works well with any linear graphics or scant type. But if you want, you can also try applying the same treatment to the other elements as we have applied to the subject image. With the graphic smart object layer selected in the layers panel. First, let's convert it to pe black and white, even if it already looks somewhat monochromatic. So press command shift option B or control shift d B in windows to open the black and white adjustment, and same as earlier, play around with the sliders to lighten the background, and slightly increase the contrast in the graphic. And when ready, click OK to apply the adjustment. Next, let's further adjust the contrast in the graphic. Apply the levels adjustment to your smart object, and start by dragging the black indicator to the right to make the darker areas appear black. Then drag the white indicator to the left to flatten out the background and make it white. Don't worry if you still see some dust or small marks around, as you'll be able to remove them in a moment. Make sure that you don't lose any details in the actual graphic whilst adjusting the black and white points and play around with the midtone indicator to get everything looking just right, for example, like K. And when ready, click a K to apply the levels adjustment. After this is done, next, let's sharpen this graphic. Go to the filter menu, sharpen and select unsharp mask. The setting the need to use here will depend on the quality of your graphic. But I would recommend that you keep threshold set to about three, radius to 2-3, and then experiment with the amount value, and tag the radius filer to create a reasonably sharp looking graphic. When ready apply changes, and if you still have some blurry edges in your graphic, again, go to the filter menu, noise and select add noise. Set the amount value to 25. Select Gazan. Check one achromatic gear and hit a K. In this case, we want this noise to affect only the dark elements in the graphic and not to be visible over the white background. So double click on the blended Options icon for the air noise adjustment in the layers panel, and set its blending mode to hard mix. With the blending options still open, zooming and have a closer look at the edges of the shapes. If things look typeltd for your lain, go ahead and reduce the opacity of the noise filter. For example, in this case, 50% works okay. So just the effect of the noise texture and hit a K to apply changes. After adding all these effects and adjustments, the next step is to mask any marks or elements you don't want to feature in your collar. Select the graphic layer, and go and add a LM mask to it. Then select the lay mask fum nail. Double check that the foreground color is set to black and cover up any elements you don't want, by using either the pencil tool to draw over the elements, or by using the lasso tool to draw selections and fill them in with the black color, just like we have done earlier. After you have cleaned up geographic. Next, let's make the white background here transparent. So double click on this layer in the layers panel to open the layer styles window, and in the main blending option section, go to the blend I settings and make sure that it is set to gray here. And then go to the white indicator for the current layer and holding down the option or old key, drag the left side of it to the left to split it into. This will allow you to create a smoother transition between the white color into transparency, and the white color should visibly disappear from your image. It's just the position of this indicator to remove as much of the lighter colors from your graphic as you want. And then go to the right side of the white indicator here and shift it just a tiny bit to the left so that it says something 250-254 here instead of 255. This will ensure that you won't have any faint white color anywhere in your image, even if it is not visible to the naked eye. Your blend of slider should look something like this by the end of it. When ready, a K to apply changes. Next, it is time to color this graphic. In order to be able to color it with any solid color. First of all, you need to put this layer into a group with the group created, rename it to graphic elements so that it is easily identifiable. For now, just keep your graphic layer in this group, and later we'll add other elements to it, which we want to be colored the same way. To color the content of this group, go to the AD fiel or adjustment layer button and select solid color. Select the deside color, which works for the lo you want to create. For example, I am going to use pure white, and then click OK. Drag your new solid color layer just above the graphic elements group like this, and then hold down the option or old key and click between this layer and the group when you see this arrow appear. This will clip the solid color layer to the group and it will fill all the visible contents of the group below, and you can easily adjust this color at any time. But I'm going to keep it set to white. So this is how you can make your sort graphic. Appear as a slightly distressed solid color print. As mentioned earlier, you can also experiment with applying the same effect we've used with the subject image. But in most cases, this simpler technique will suffice to style any linear graphics or typographic elements. And in the next lesson, I'm going to share with you how you can quickly apply the same graphic treatment to other elements without recreating all of the effects from scratch. 16. Typographic Elements: Visual Treatment: After you have built a combination of filters for style neo graphic, you can now easily apply the same effect to any other smart object, which requires a similar treatment. For example, to apply these filters to the smart object containing neo typographic elements. Turn this layer back on, and then simply hold down the option or old key and drag the smart filters from the graphic layer to your text smart object layer like this. After copying these filters across to your text or any other graphic element, they will most likely require a bit of agestin to get the look just right. So start by opening the levels adjustment here and play around with the sliders to flatten out the background and increase the contrast in the graphic. In this case, something like this works fine. When ready to K to apply changes, and after adjusting the levels, you'll be able to clearly see all of the little elements and can now go ahead and mask out anything you don't want to keep. Again, create a layer mask selected and remove any unwanted elements the same way as we have done earlier. For example, I am going to quickly remove these marks and blemishes around the text. With the mask credit, check how everything looks, and if necessary, go and adjust the ad noise filter here. Consider going to the actual filter settings and play around with the amount value here. At this point, you can simply change the settings and wish the effect in real time. When you're happy with the amount of noise, apply changes. And apart from changing the amount. Be sure to go to the noise filters blending options and further adjust its opacity. I'm going to set it to about 60% to make this text a little crisper. So get your text or a second graphic element looking clean and sharp, and then go to the previous graphic layer, right click on it and select copy layer style. And then go to your text layer, right click and select paste layer style. This will transfer the blend I settings across and will remove the white background from your text. Due to the nature of these kind of images, it should work as it is. But if necessary, you can always open the layer options for this layer and fine tune the blend I settings as required. After you have coped across the blend of settings, simply drag your text layer to the graphic elements group, and it will automatically get the same color applied to it. After applying a solid color to your text smart object, you might start seeing more visible noise or funny edges of the shapes due to the effect of the applied filters. If that's the case, be sure to go and further adjust the d noise and the unsharp mask settings to get the typographic elements looking just right. Now, if you have any other graphic elements in your document, repeat the same process. And if you have created any geometric shapes directly in photoshop, if you want them to be colored the same way as all other graphic elements, go and simply drag the shape layer into the folder with the other graphic elements. Alternatively, if you want to color it separately, keep it outside this group and change the color of your shape through the properties panel. I'll put my circle into this group because I'm going for a simple free color approach. So give all your graphic elements this kind of visual treatment. Color them, and when you're ready, don't forget to say your document. And with all of your color elements ready, the next step is to mask all these elements around the subject and start creating a layering effect. 17. Masking Graphic Elements: After you have applied and finalized the lo of all of the graphic effects and colored all of the elements in collage. Now it is time to work on adding depth to it by making the subject graphic appear in front of some of the graphic elements and behind some other ones. And you can achieve this with mask. Start by going to the layers panel and hide all of the layers except for the subject and background layers. Then select the subject layer and go to the select menu and select color range. In the color range panel, make sure it is set to sampled colors here, and using the hydropaol, click on the white background area in your cool. Set Fazen 200. Double check that all of the settings look like this, and click. Now, with this selection ready and active, select and reveal the graphic elements group in the layers panel. Then add a new layer mask to this group, and you should see a mask pan nail added here. Now turn on the visibility of all of your layers, and you should see the graphic elements which overlap the dark areas in the image masked. Basically making it appear as if the subject image was printed on top. Using the color range in the subject layer allows you to quickly mask all of the dark elements in the image, which is great for creating clean edges between the graphic elements and the subject. And it is super useful if your image has some tricky areas, for example, bits of hair, fur, or some other uneven and detailed textures around the outline of your subject. But to create e proper layer in effect and make the subject EPA solid. Next, we need to further work on masking the areas within the subjects shape. Select the mask applied to the group in the layers panel. Then select the pencil tool and hard round brush to ensure that you won't add any soft and fuzzy edges to your mask. Then make sure that the foreground color is set to black, Zoom into the area which you want to work with. Change the size of the brush head using the square bracket keys, depending on the size of the area you need to cover and start painting inside the shapes to create a silhuette of your subject within the mask. Work carefully within the edges of the shape and to speed up the process. Remember that you can also shift click to draw straight lines. This can save you a lot of time when working around large and more even shapes. Having worked around the areas close to the edge of my subject, now I need to mask out the larger area in the middle. For this, I'm going to switch to the last, draw a selection, and then simply fill it with the black foreground color. So use the combination of the pencil and lasso tools to mask out any other overlapping areas and hide everything which you wish to be hidden behind the subject. Depending on the complexity of the shapes, this part of the process might take some time. But the results are worth it, and I usually find this masking process quite therapeutic as well. Whilst working on your mask. You can also consider bringing back some elements to make them appear on top of the subject. For example, hiding this text behind the foot would make it fussy and unreadable. So instead, I'm going to switch my foreground color to white and paint over the text here like this. So get your mask ready. Next, I'll show you how you can quickly add more visual interest to your collage with the layered print effect. 18. Creating a Layering Effect: Simply masking your graphic elements around the image and keeping some of the parts hidden, works well, and you can totally keep your collage as it is. But you can also create a more complex look by making the masked areas look as if they are printed in some other color on top of the subject graphic to create a fun layering effect. If you want to do this, select the graphic elements group and the solid color layer above, and hit command J or control in windows to duplicate them. Then go to the duplicated group. Then remove any elements. You don't want to appear above your subject. For example, I only want my graphic layer, so I will delete the other two layers here. Next, select the mask applied to the stop group and invert it. You will see the entire graphic elements yet again. And all you need to do now is go and change the solid fill color to any other color you want. To keep it minimal, I would recommend simply sampling the darker color from your colored subject image like this. Then if you want, you can experiment with making it slightly lighter or darker, which will allow you to add a bit of variation to your work. But without using any blending modes. I am going to keep my color the same as in the image here. So select your color and then apply changes. Now your collage is almost finished, and all you would to do is finalize the colors and add some texture. And in the next lesson, I'll share a few tips for fine tuning the colors. 19. Making Colour Adjustments: After you have finished Muscular color elements and creating a layering effect, you might want to tune the colors. At this point, you can revisit your gradient map and change the colors in your gradient. For example, I am going to slightly adjust the darker color in my gradient and apply changes. If you're using the same color as used in your gradient map to create a layer in effect, after making any even very minor changes to your gradient map. Make sure to go back to the color fill layer here and resemble the new color from the image to keep the color in minimal and consistent. For example, I'll resample this darker color here and apply changes. Apart from adjusting the gradient map and the feel colors here, you can also click on the Add new fill or adjustment layer button, and add a new human saturation adjustment layer. T. Make sure this layer is above all other layers, and then go and tweak the hue of the entire image. Using the hue slider in the properties panel. If you're working with some overly bright colors, you can also use a saturation slider to slightly reduce the saturation and give you work a more subdued or subtle look. In this case, I'm going to adjust both hue and saturation ever so slightly to make the colors look a bit softer. I love using this little trick to make subtle changes to the colors I use in my collages, and you can see the difference it makes. So make any adjustments to your colors in the gradient map and color fillers, and further f tune the colors using the hue and saturation adjustments. And then let's move on to adding some texture to make our collages look less digital. 20. Texturing Your Collage: Now that you have finished creating collage, you can explore adding some texture to it to make it look more tactile. You can add any kind of texture to your work, and using some paper texture usually works great. I'll be using this old paper texture and you can download this texture from the class resources. Open this image or any other high resolution paper texture in Photoshop, and then simply drag it into collage document and close the original file. Then rename your texture layer to paper texture and convert it into a smart object in order to apply any adjustments to it non destructively. Use the free transform tool to position and scale the texture layer anyway you want over your canvas, and apply changes. And then go and select any desired blending mode. Multiply is usually a safe bet. But I'm going to use difference because it allows to texture both lighter and darker areas in more advanced way. When you first apply the difference blending mold, your work will look hideous and inverted. You need to turn down the feel of this layer to around 10% or even less to make it look more normal. To make this texture work properly with a difference mold and make it look more pronounced, let's also de saturate it by adding a black and white adjustment to this smart object. In the black and white adjustment window, make any required adjustments to make your texture look more contrasty in black and white or simply go to the preset and select high contrast red filter, which will help increase contrast in any paper texture. Apply the black and white adjustment, and then add a new levels adjustment to the texture and play around with the sliders for the input levels. Drag the black indicator to where the information starts on the histogram, and drag the white indicator roughly to where it ends. The texture will become more visible. Further play around with the position of these indicators and shift the midtone indicator to adjust the contrast in the texture. Texture in your work this way will also have an effect on the colors and brightness of your image. So adjust the levels until we get the right balance between seeing the texture across different total areas in your colors, and your colors still looking good. And when ready, apply changes. After adding these adjustments, if necessary, go and further tweak the fill value of this layer. I am going to further reduce it to 7% to make it a bit more subtle. Because blending texture with your work usually makes it darker or lighter overall. After texture your work, you can further fine tune the look by going to the add new fiel or adjustment layer button and adding a new brightness and contrast adjustment layer. Make sure it is above all other layers in your document, and then increase or decrease the brightness in the property s panel to compensate for the effect of the added texture. So experiment with texturing your collage using paper textures. And if you want to learn how to quickly texture your work in Adobe Photoshop without using any additional materials, be sure to check out my class texturing in Adobe Photoshop, five easy techniques, using filters. And now with your collage ready, it is time to save and export it for sharing online. 21. Finalising & Saving Your Collage: When you're done create nuclease, it is time to save it for both archival purposes and for publication. But before you get on with saving your final work, have a quick look at the placement of your collage elements in relation to the cannabis and tack it if required. Quite often, after coloring and applying all of the graphic effects, the composition will look a bit different in comparison to how it looked as untreated source images. For example, in my case, I need to select all these layers and groups apart from the texture, the human saturation adjustment layer, and the brights contrast layer, and move them all together to a slightly different spot on the cannabis to balance the composition. If you need to do the same, make sure that you move all of the elements together. Otherwise, you will need to revisit all of the masks. Having finalized your composition. First of all, be sure to save your cools file with all of the layers as a PSD document. Even if you don't think you will be revisiting it, believe me, better safe than sorry. With the PSD document saved. Next, it is a good idea to save a separate full size copy as a flattened image file. So set the format to JPEG here, embed the color profile and hit safe. Then open this new JPEG image in Photoshop. Then save a few extra copies optimized for sharing online. Open the image size dialogue. Change the size to the optimal size required for the platform you want to share your work on. For example, 1080 pixels wide for sharing on Instagram, or about 1,200 pixels wide for sharing as a skill share project. Set the resampling method to bi linear and apply changes. Then simply receive this JPA document under a different name. In my document names, I usually include either the platform name and format or the actual size in pixels, so I can easily find exactly what I need. So save any number of JPEG documents optimized for sharing on different platforms. Next, let's wrap up this class. 22. Conclusion: This is how you can create minimalist digital collages in Adobe Photoshop, by combining vintage animal illustrations with linear graphics, typographic elements, and geometric shapes. I hope that you have enjoyed this class. Learned a few unique tricks and techniques for working resourced images, and we'll have a lot of fun exploring online libraries of indage illustrations and creating your collages. I cannot wait to see what images you discover, how you use them in your collages, and what approach to coloring you choose to follow. So be sure to share your finished collages and sourced images you have used in the projects and resources tub for this class. And if you're going to share your work on Instagram, please tag us at attitude creative in your posts so that we can easily discover them and share your work with our followers. If you have found this class helpful, please leave a review in the review sub for this class. And if you have any sort of questions, be sure to leave a comment in the discussion sub for this class, and I'll happily answer and provide feedback. And be sure to follow us here on Skillshare, to be the first to know about our new classes and update. If you want to learn a few super easy techniques for text new work, don't hesitate to check out my class text in Adobe Photoshop, five easy techniques using filters. And if you want to learn some more advanced techniques for creating different graphic effects in Adobe Photoshop, be sure to check out our Adobe Photoshop effects classes, which you can find on our profile. If you fancy creating your own mockups to showcase your collages. Be sure to check out my class, create unique framed art mockups with Adobe file and Adobe Photoshop. If you want to learn more about Diatoms and create different Clog. Be sure to explore my class mating otos in Adobe Photoshop. If you're now a fan of working with vintage graphics, in case you haven't already watched them, do not hesitate to check out our popular sourcing mix series of classes. Thank you for watching this class. And I hope to see you in our other classes. B B. We will.