Transcripts
1. Crop and frame photos in Photoshop Intro: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Cutout and Frame Photos in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at making photo cutouts and photo frame effects in Photoshop. We'll start by cutting a photo to a shape, a circle, and a heart, and then we'll look at some frame effects that you can use to build on your skills. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help other Skillshare students to find my classes so that they too can learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look at and I respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready, now let's get started creating cutout and framed photo effects in Photoshop.
2. Cutout and Frame Photos - Part 1: The first effect that we're going to create here is we're going to look at a very simple process of cutting a photo to a shape. It could be a circle, it could be a rectangle, it could be a heart. Now, I happen to like squirrels a lot, so we're going to use this little squirrel, and we're going to cut him to a heart shape. The images that I'm using in this class are all going to come from unsplash.com. So you can find plenty of images to work with there. For a heart shape, I'm going to the Custom Shapes Tool. I'm going down here to select the Custom Shapes Tool. I just want to create a heart shape, but I don't like this particular heart. I think it's a little bit unevenly shaped for me. So I'm going to add a different set of shapes to my shape collection. I'm going to click here on the Flyout Menu, and we're going to select the Shapes group of shapes. These come with Photoshop, so you're going to have those in your list. We're going to choose Append because I don't want to lose some of these other shapes that I've already added to Photoshop. I don't have to re-add them, so I'm going to append this set to the very end. Here they are. This shapes collection has this heart in it. I just think it's a nice looking heart, so I'm going to use this one. There's also this one, this is pretty good too. I'm going to use this. I'm going to click on it to select it and then just click away from the dialogue. I'm going to add a new layer to my documents so that the shape goes on a separate layer. I can use shape or I can use pixels. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you'll see that there are three icons here, not a drop-down list, but they have the same things on them. It's path, shape, or pixels, and pixels is the third of the icon. I just want to select Pixels. It does not matter at all what your foreground color is, you're going to make a shape of that color but it doesn't matter what color that is, because we're going to lose that later on. I'm going to drag out my shape. If I want it to be in the original proportions that it was designed in, I'll hold the Shift key as I do so. If I'm not worried about the proportions, if I want a scrunched up heart shape, or a elongated heart shape, then don't use the Shift key as you work. To move the heart shape around as you're drawing it, you can just hold down the Space bar. You'll need two fingers, probably, one on the Shift key, one on the Space bar just to move it around. Once you've got it in position, you can let go the Space bar and continue to draw the shape. The Space bar trick only works while you're still drawing the shape. I'm just going to let go the Left mouse button and then the Shift key. If you find that a little bit difficult to do, I suggest that you practice a little bit because it's really handy to be able to drag shapes and selections around as you're drawing them so you can position them exactly where you want them to be. To crop our squirrel to this heart shape, I'm going to unlock the background layer of this documents. I'm just going to click on the Lock icon. In later versions of Photoshop, that's all you need to do to unlock this layer. In earlier versions, you can just drag and drop the lock onto the trash can. That turns the background layer into a regular layer. Now, we're going to take our heart, and we're going to drag it in the last pallet to just below the squirrel. So squirrel's on top, the heart's on the bottom. Of course, if you can't see your layers palette, you just choose Window and then Layers to display it. The way that we cut the squirrel into a heart shape is we create what's called a clipping mask. I'm going to click on the topmost layer, the squirrel layer, I'm going to choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. The squirrel is automatically clipped to the heart shape. Now, we can't save this as a heart shape image because images when they're saved have to be rectangular. That's just the way that computers work. Images are rectangles, but we can save it with transparency. This checkerboard pattern around the edge of the image is transparency. Say we wanted to put this squirrel on a website and we just wanted the heart shape to appear, and we didn't want anything around it. We wanted the background of the website to appear around the squirrel. Well what we would do at this stage is to crop this image. I'm clicking on the Crop tool, and I'm just going to drag it in. If we want to put it on a website, then we're going to crop in probably as close to this heart shape as we can because we don't want a lot of extra padding around our image. But of course, if you do want a bit of padding, if you don't want the text on the website to come up really close to this image, then you could add a little bit of padding at this stage, so that you are adding a small amount of separation so that text won't be able to get really close to the image because the image is bringing a little bit of padding with it. A little bit of transparent padding. When you're done, click the Check mark. This image has transparency around it and a squirrel cutout in a heart shape. If I wanted to save this with transparency, then I'm going to need to save it as what's called a PNG file. This PNG file format is a flattened format, so it has only a single layer in it but it does support transparency. This image is going to show with transparent pixels around it on the web. If you were to save the image as a JPEG, then this background area is going to be filled in with white. That's just the way that JPEGs work. Save as PNG by choosing File and then Save As. I'm going to choose PNG from this drop-down list, here's the PNG format. I'm just going to call this heart shaped squirrel, and then click Save. Because this saves a PNG file, you get a choice of compression and whether or not it's to be interlaced. Unless you have any particular reason to do so, just accept the defaults and click Okay. If we want to see what this image would look like with say a white background, I'm going to click on the bottom most layer, then I'll hold the Control key on a PC, Command on a Mac, and click on the New Layer icon. Because white is my foreground color here, I will press Alt and Backspace on a PC, option Delete on a Mac, to fill the image with the current foreground color. There you see our little squirrel cut out to a heart shape.
3. Cutout and Frame Photos - Part 2: For our second photo frame effect, I'm going to crop this image to a circle, but I'm going to add a little element to the edge of it, a little scalloped edge. Now the method I'm going to show you to do this is going to be appropriate for any version of Photoshop, so you can do this even if you're working with a really old version of Photoshop. I'm going to start by adding a new layer to this image, so I'm just going to click here to add a new layer. I'm going to draw a small circle on it. I'm going to the Elliptical Marquee tool here. I'm just going to drag out a small circle about in this position relative to the dog's head, and I'm going to fill it with black. Black is my background color, I'll press "Control Backspace", "Command Delete" on the Mac to fill that little circle with black. It doesn't matter too much what color you fill it with, but I'm using black for now. Now I'm going to the Move tool. I'm going to click on that. Make sure I have this layer targeted. You'll see that there's a little marker right in the center of this circle. I'm going to click on it, and I'm going to drag it. Took it the wrong way to start off with, but I'm going to drag it across the document and actually dropping it on the dog's eye right now. This is the distance I want between this circle and roughly where I want the center of the image to be. We're going to be able to adjust that easily later on, but that's the distance I'm looking at here. What we're going to do is we're going to swing this shape around and it's going to go all the way round in a big circle. The distance between the circle and this marker, we also need to make sure that we've got plenty of room up the top here for it to swing around and round the bottom. If you're a little bit unsure, just bring it back a little bit. That's where my rotation point is going to be. Now there's an angle option up here and I found that 7.5 works pretty well. In this angle option, I'm typing 7.5 and then I'm going to click the check mark. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate that shape around. Without touching any other keys in the interim, I'm going to hold down on the PC, "Control" "Alt" and "Shift". On the Mac, that would be "Command" "Option" and "Shift". I'm going to type the letter T. Every time I type the letter T, I get one of these circles. I'm just going to keep going until we get all the way around the circle. I've made a circle of circles and you can see here in the last pellet that all of these circles have gone on the same layer. That's nice and handy. I can just click away from that shape and press "Control" or "Command D", to deselect that selection. You can also do that by choosing "Select" and "Deselect". Next up I'm going to draw a circle. I want a new layer. I'm going to click to add a new layer. I'm going back to the Elliptical Marquee tool. Now if I want to draw a circle that it's going to be pretty much the same size as this circle of dots, what I need to do is imagine that this circle is actually inside a square, and what I wanted to do is start my circle about in the top corner of the square. If you can just eyeball that position, if I start dragging out now and hold down the "Shift key", I'm going to drag out a circle which is pretty near exactly the circle I want. Now I'm going to hold the Space bar to just move it a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect at this stage, but I thought you might like to know how to draw a circle with an element of reliability in Photoshop. Of course, I have the "Shift key" held down because I want this to be a perfect circle. Let go of the left mouse button, let go the "Shift key". Now I'm going to fill this one with white. White is my foreground color. I'm on a brand new layer. I'll press "Alt Backspace" on the PC, "Option Delete" on the Mac. We'd like to make sure that these two circles are aligned correctly. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. Now I'm coming over here, I'm selecting layer 2 and I'm going to Shift click on layer 1. So I have both these layers selected. I don't have any alignment tools up here, but I will display them if I click here on the Move tool. Here are my alignment tools. Still have my two layers selected, center them horizontally and vertically relative to each other. The white circle is centered immediately over the top of the black set of little scalloped edges here. Now let's focus on our photo. We have a background layer, we're going to need to unlock it. Again, we're either going to click on it if we're using a recent version of Photoshop, if you're working with an earlier version, grab that lock icon and drag it and drop it on the trash can. We're going to drag the white and the black layer below the image. I'm going to grab both of those and drag them below the image layer. But I want the white layer to be on top because that's going to be our clipping mask. We'll click on the dog layer to select it and choose "Layer", "Create Clipping Mask". Now if you want to know a quick way of creating a clipping mask, you can also hover over this layer here on the intersection between this layer and the one below. If you hold "Control and Alt" on the PC, "Command and Option" on the Mac, you'll get this little bent arrow icon, click once and there is your clipping mask. Now a clipping mask is working, but the dog's head isn't centrally inside the image. Well, we can solve that by going and selecting the two layers that are comprising both the clipping mask and this little outside edge, have both of those selected, and they can be moved independently of the dog image. I'm just going with the move tool to position them right in position exactly where I want my framed dog head to be. If you would like something different in terms of color for the outside edge, let's see how we would do that. Going to target this outside edge layer, and this time I'm going to the eye dropper tool. I'm just going to click on the eye dropper and I'm going to sample a color from this image. I can continue to sample colors until I get something that I like. I could go for a color from the dog. I can go from one of the darker colors from the dog, I can go to his white or cream nose, anything that I like I can select. I got a nice little brown color here. It's my foreground color. This is the shape here that I want to change. What I'm going to do is click here on this icon which says lock transparent pixels. What that does is lock all the transparent pixels so that the only pixels that can be altered, are the ones that are not transparent, in other words, everything that is filled with black. With this lad targeted, I'm going to press "Alt Backspace", "Option Delete" on the Mac because that fills the already filled pixels on this layer with my selected color. If it's not the color you want, just go and sample something else. Try another color and then just continue to press "Alt Backspace", "Option Delete" until you get the color that you want. When you're done, you can come here and unlock the layer. The easiest way probably to unlock it is to re-click on this icon and that just simply unlocks it. Again as we did before, we might want to crop this image. I'm going to click the Crop tool. I'm going to come in relatively close, but not all the way to the edges, just in case I wanted to put this, for example, on a website, and I want to add a little bit of a buffer between the border and the text on the website. Again, I would save this as a PNG file if I wanted to save the transparency, I would save it as a JPEG file, if I wanted to save it with a white background. But there's the second of our photo effects.
4. Cutout and Frame Photos - Part 3: For this next effect, we're going to create a border around a image using a brush. I'm going to the image layer and I'm just going to again convert it into a regular layer. How ever you want to do that. I'm going to add a masque to this image so I'm going to click on the bottom layer and click this Add layer masque icon. Right now you should see no change in the image at all. When we're going to the brush here, so I'm going to click on the Brush and I'm going to open up the brushes palette and I'm going to select a brush to use. Now the brushes that I'm interested in for this effect are dotty brushes things that are a little organic in shape. So I don't want a solid brush, I want something with some interesting texture in it. There are a lot of brushes here in Photoshop if you don't have so many brushes here, open the fly out menu and just go and open some of these brushes. Faux finished, dry media, natural brushes, they're the brushes, thick, heavy brushes, wet media brushes, maybe ones that you could use for this effect, but you just want something a little bit interesting. The size of the brush does not matter at all. It's just really what it looks like. Once you selected a brush to use, open up the brushes palette. Here's the brushes pellet here, if you can't get to it this way, you can always choose window and then brush to get to it. Now, this brush has a whole lot of things already associated with it. I'm going to turn them all off because I'm just interested in the shape. So back home brush tip shape, and what I'm going to do is increase the spacing because we don't want this brush to paint as a solid line, so I want it to have spacing here. I can increase the size at this point if I wanted to. Now we're going to click on ''Shape Dynamics'' because this allows us to change how the brush paints, and we're going to get a more interesting effect as we do this. So I'm going to increase size data. So this is the variation between the size of the brush. It's made smaller and larger as it goes along. Now, I can say that I want my minimum diameter to be quite a bit larger because that will make sure I don't have lots of really small bits. I'm going to wind up Angle Jitter all the way to 100 percent. In other words, I want it to rotate as it gets brushed along the image. I'm also going to increase roundness Jitter because I just want things to happen here that are interesting. I think a 100 percent is too much, let's just go to around halfway along that slide up. It really doesn't matter with a settings what you do just as long as you're getting some interesting effect. Let's click on ''Scattering'', I'm just going to take scattering back to its original settings and just show you what this is all about. So what's scattering does, is allows you to scatter this brush as it paint. So you can have a scattering along one axis or both axes and it behaves a little differently for both. So I'm going to ask for a scatter on both axes, but I want this to paint relatively in a straightish line. So I don't want to have a really big scatter because I don't want it to paint all over the image, I just want an interesting edge effect. If I increase the count, then I'm going to get more brush strokes as I paint this along, so I can build back a bit of density if you like, using count and scatter and Shape Dynamics, rather than just painting in a straight line using the brush tip with a very small spacing. So this is a more interesting line. Then I can vary the count jet or if I want to. Let's just go and say how that paints. Well, I've actually got black paint here, and let's just go on the image and let's just say that's what is going to paint like and that's pretty interesting. Now I'm going back to the layer, and I'm going to click on the ''Layer mask''. I want the layer mask here to have a little border around it. I want black to be my foreground color, I've got my paint brush here, I'm going to increase the brush size because it's a bit small, I am using the close square bracket to do that, but you could use the slide of the size slider in the brush tip shape if you want to. I'm going to click here in the top left corner of the image, I'm going to move all the way across the top right-hand corner outside the edge of the document, I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click once more. What that does, is it gives me a brush stroke, a straight line of my brush from left to right and I'm going to do it here as well. Click shift, click, click, shift click, click, shift, click. I can do this a few more times with a smaller brush or I can change brushes. All we are trying to do is to create a organic edge to this shape so that it's not a hard edge shape any longer. It's got a flaky edge and just using click shift click as a quick way of getting a result. Let's see what we've got. I'm going to add a layer below this image by holding the Control key or command on the Mac or I click on this New Layer icon. I've got white here as my background color, let's sample it with white, so I'm going to press Control backspace command to delete on the Mac and that's the effect with a white background. Now if it's not right yet, you can go back to your mask and you can continue to brush on this image. So we can add a few extra brush strokes if we don't have the level of organic edge that we want. If you want to change brushes at this stage, you could try a different brush so there are lots of things that you can do at this point. Now, I'm just going to wind up my brush a bit and just come down this edge a little bit better. We can also test it with black, let's click on this background layer that we've created, and black is our foreground color, alt, backspace, option delete and you can say the effect with black and I like the effect with white. I'm going to go back and just control, backspace, command, delete to fill this layer with white. We now have an image that has some transparency built into it. Now, there's a question for you at this point is what you're going to save it as? If you want the edges to be transparent, you'll turn off this background layer and just save this. Saving this as a ping image file would give you these edges transparent. If you were to put this on a website that had a orange background, then you'd be seeing orange through these transparent areas. If it had a patent background, you'd be seeing patents through this transparent areas. If you just want it with a white edge, or a colored edge, or some sort, put a layer behind it and then you can go ahead and save it as a Jpeg. If you spend a bit of time creating effects like this, one of the things you may want to do is reuse them easily. I'm going to show you now exactly how you would create this so it can be re-used. We don't have to re-create it, we just have to change things around just a little bit.
5. Cutout and Frame Photos - Part 4: To make this a re-usable effect, what we want to do is to convert this image into a smart object. Now, I want to take this mask away just for now. So I'm just going to drag it and drop it onto this bottom layer so I've effectively removed it from the image. It's only a temporary thing, but I want to get to this image and I don't want it to be masked in any way. I just want it to be an intact image. I'm going to right-click on this. I'm going to choose '"Convert to Smart Object" and you'll see this little indicator in the bottom corner of the image, that's a smart object. Now, I'm going to put my mask back in. Effectively this image has not changed. The structure of it has changed a little bit, but the result that we're seeing on the screen is exactly what we had before. I would go ahead and save this as a Photoshop PSD file, because this will allow me in future to reopen this file. If I want to use this frame edge, all I need to do is to right-click on this layer and choose "Replace Contents". Then I can go and choose a different image. I have an image of a dog here. I'm just going to click on it and click "Place". What Photoshop does is it replaces the food image with this dog image. Now the dog image is much bigger than the food image. That's causing us a few problems because half his face is off the edge of the image. What we're going to do is we're going to click on this lock icon to unlock it. What we want to do is to make some changes to this image, but we don't want to change the size or the shape of the mask. I'm going to click on the dog so I have him selected. Control 0, and then Control T. What this brings up is the transform handles and Control 0 makes sure that I can see exactly where the edges of the dog image are. You can see how much bigger he is than the image we were working with earlier. That's just fine. What I'm going to do now is to start dragging in on the corner. I'm holding Shift and Alt as I do so, so I can bring the image in from all sides. I don't have to bring it in very far. If I want it, for example, to look like this, I can just bring it in over there. I don't have to bring it all the way and I can effectively just crop this image as I'm making my adjustments but I will want the image to at least cover the area that was covered by the mask. I don't want to say bring it in here because I'm going to have a big area here that's just going to look pretty awful. But I do want it to be still that size. I've just lost the proportions of this image, but I'm just going to try and guess at about where it needs to be. You probably won't want to do that because it might spoil your images a little bit. But I'm just trying to show you what we're working on here. I've now got the dog placed where I want him to be, I'm going to click on the check mark. He's now placed in position. I'll just come in here into the Layers palette and click again where that lock icon was, because that is now locking the dog image and the mask. I'll press Control or Command 0 just to scale my image up so I can say what I've got. We've now got a re-usable effect. This is exactly the same edge frame effect that we were using on the previous image. Because we've got a smart object we can right-click at anytime, choose Replace Contents, and add another image into our frame effect. Your project for this class is going to be to create one or more of these effects for a photo of your choice. Feel free to go and use images from unsplash.com, it's a really good site for images to use. I encourage you if you're looking to create templates, for example, to sell frames that you've created, to investigate the possibility of doing this with smart objects because this really is the way to give somebody an element that they can then reuse for their own artwork. Post your finished images in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned a bit about cropping an image to a shape and creating a frame effect in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help others to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
