Droste Effect with Photoshop and a free online tool - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Droste Effect in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, create a Droste effect 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 going to create a Droste effect in Photoshop. We're going to look at what a Droste effect is, how to prepare our image, and we're also going to use an online application to do this, since the Droste effect filter that was available at one stage for Photoshop is no longer available. But you're going to get some really great results here. As you're working through these videos, you might 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 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, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating a Droste effect. 2. Droste Effect - Part 1: Before we get started creating a Droste effect using photoshop as our starting point, I just want to show you what the Droste effect is. It's called the Droste effect because the Droste Cacao Company in Amsterdam used this as an illustration on one of their Cacao cans. What they've done is they've taken this woman holding a tray with a box of cacao on it, and they've put that image on the front of the box, and then on the front of the box that she is holding is the same image and it's sort of image in image effect, that is the Droste effect. Now, we used to be able to create this in photoshop quite some time ago, and then adobe broke all the processes that allowed us to do it. It's been a constant source of frustration to those of us who really like the Droste effect. So I went shopping for something that would help us do it and I found a really good application, one that I'm extremely happy with, and that gives us realistic results, the kind of results that we would have expected from the old Adobe product. But we're going to need to start in photoshop because we're going to need to pre-prepare our images. So that's what we're going to do now. 3. Droste Effect - Part 2: For your droste effect , you're going to need a starter image. Now, I chose this image for a couple of reasons. One of them is that the goal is off-center on this image and so that's going to help create the droste effect. But also, many years ago I actually use this exact same image to create the drastic effect in what we were using then, which was a Photoshop filter. This is the image I created many years ago. So what I want to do is to see if we can get something pretty similar to this, nowadays in the new application I'm going to use. You'll see here that this image has a border around it. You're going to need some sort of a border if you really want to see the droste effects. So we're going to start by adding a border and then we'll take the image that we have here and go and use it online. I've opened my image inside Photoshop. I'm going to the crop tool, and I'm just going to click on the image so I get the crop handles. I can crop out on this image, so if I hold Shift and Alt, that would be Shift and Option on the Mac, and just drag on the corner handle. I'm going to drag outwards. You'll see that I'm adding the similar sort of amount around all the edges of the image. I'm just going to [inaudible]. Because black is my background color, it became black. So, let's just flip this and make black my foreground color, white, my background color. So I'm going click the check mark because that's done now. Now I'm going back to the crop tool. I'm going to do that again, but this time a very small amount. But before I do, I'm just going to flip my colors. This time I want just a little border, and because black is my background color, it's going in colored black. So that's a very easy way to create your border effects. I've got a black, very narrow border, a white thicker border and then my photo. I have actually compromise my photo because everything's being added to the edge of the photo. I'm going to choose file and then save as-. Now I've got my safe location here on my clipboard, so this going to go and call this framed starter. By making sure that RGB, I'm going click save, and I'm going to send this up as a fairly high resolution image, so I'll click okay. This image is now ready for us to create the droste effect with. 4. Droste Effect - Part 3: Once you've prepared and saved your photo, you can go to the online site. The online site is called PhotoSpiralysis. Here it is. This is the start page, I'm going to give you a link to this in the class project area. If you're using an old version of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera, you can use this option here that uses Microsoft Silverlight. But more recent browsers don't support Silverlight, so if you're using Chrome at all or a lighter version of Internet Explorer, in other words, the new Microsoft Edge, then you'll need to use the HTML5 version. Now there's also a download version. If you click on download here, you can download a version, but I'm really not as happy with the download version as I am with the online one. The download version is not working as nicely. So I suggest that you settle for the online version and that you just click here because the HTML5 is going to work in most of your browsers. Once you have this launch you're going to go to open file and then you're going to navigate to and open the file you just saved. Here is my frame starter, so I'm going to select this image and click open. Here it is open inside the application. Now for tiling, this is the option you're going to want to use. There are other options but they don't give the same results. So I'm suggesting that you click on this one here. Then for layering, you're going to want this first option here. For magnification, four is probably a bit higher, so I'm going to take mine back to about 2.5 to start off with. For spirals, you're going to want one spiral at the very least. So let's type one and tab away. As soon as we hit spiral, you can see now we're getting this frame in frame effect. You can see how important it was to bring this frame with us because it's actually showing exactly what we want to see. Now at this point, you've got everything that you need to create the image that we saw earlier. You can of course, work on these other slide as to see if you get a different result that you're more happy with. But I'm really happy with this one, so I'm just going to click here on creating the final image. Now, I can choose the image size to be the same as the source image or I could scale it up or down. I'm just going to leave mine the same as the source image. I'm going to leave the lab precision options as they're set, but I am going to turn on anti-aliasing. Now I'm going to click to render this. We're going to wait as the application renders out the final image. What we're seeing on the screen here is a small size preview. So what's happening now is, it's actually applying the droste effect to this image and just rendering out the more high quality version of the image and depending on the size of the file that you want to create this may take a little time, so you just want to wait until it's all rendered out. When you're done, you can just go ahead and click the save option. The image will be downloaded to your downloads folder and then you can just click, for example, to open it. This is the resulting image that we created using this PhotoSpiralysis software. If we compare with the original that I created in the Photoshop version, you'll see that the result is pretty good. We're slightly missing this effect where we've got her in the corner of the image but if we had enough image to work with here, we could actually achieve a pretty similar result. So I'm going to take this photo to Photoshop and in the next video, we'll just have a look at finalizing that. 5. Droste Effect - Part 4: I've now opened up the downloaded image, and I'm just going to crop it. I'm going to select the crop tool, and I'm going to crop in, because I would really like her on the edge of this image. I'm going to lop her off a little bit at the knees. I'm going to bring this in to make a sort square resulting image, and I'll just click the check mark. Let's have a look at the Droste effect image that we created in an earlier version of Photoshop using the Droste tools there. You can see that we've been able to achieve a pretty good result with this online tool. It's not exactly the same as we were able to create with the earlier application, but I'm really pleased with the result. I hope that you will be too, and that you'll have fun creating the Droste effect with your own images. I do encourage you, however, to be aware of where your subject is placed in the image. If you place your subject off to the left, then you're going to get your subject appearing very clearly in the image, and that may be a result that you would like to achieve. Your project for this class is going to be to go and get an image of your choice. Prepare it by adding a frame to it, upload it to the photos pharalis website, and create your Droste effect from it. Post the completed image in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, and that you've learned something about the Droste effect, and how you can create it using Photoshop as a starting point. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs-up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they too might 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.