Transcripts
1. Color Trail Background - Introduction: Have you ever wanted to create these awesome
background effects in Photoshop and put your own image on top of them using
colors from the image? Or how about we
take an image like this and we get these incredible
see through backgrounds. Or you could just take
a standard picture. This is, Ali, my
wife, and my cat. And the backgrounds
very distracting. So I've just put it into an awesome background like
that for an Instagram post. Hi. My name's Tim Wilson, and I'm going to take
you through how to do this incredible
background step by step in easy bite size portions. Let's open up Photoshop
and get started.
2. Cut Out Your Subject: Let's go and open up the
picture that we want to use. And I'm going to open up
this image from Adobe Stock. I've provided the picture
for you if you want to try it yourself
using this one. And I want to select the women. Now, the easiest way
for me to do that is to either click on Select
Subject down there, or go along to this little
Object Selection tool. Photoshops got some
really cool AI tools now. And the great thing
about this is it says, select people at the top, and it's just
recognized that person. Now, you'll find if you've
got a whole group of people, you'll have a number
of people appearing along here and you can choose which one you want to select. I'm going to click
on her because she's the one I want to select, and you can see it
says entire person. That's what I want
to select there. Or if you just wanted to
select part of the person, you can actually
go along and just select these bits in here. Anyway, I'm going
to click on Apply, and that makes my selection. Now, if you have used things like layer
masks in the past, you can go in and you can just
apply layer mask to this. If you haven't used layer masks, then you can use copy and paste. I can go up to edit and copy, or you can use the
shortcuts if you know them, edit and paste. And in my layers panel, I'll just pull out
my layers over here. If you can't find your layers, it's the window menu halfway
down to find your layers, and I'm going to pull
that down so you can see my layers in there. I've
got this background. I don't need the
background anymore, so I'm going to bin it and
that leaves my cutout in here. I want to do one more thing before I stop for
you to try this out. I'm going to go along,
and I want to make this a square image. So, the easiest way to do that, and there are a number of ways, but the easiest way is to go to this little cropping
tool over here. Go to your ratio at the top and choose
one to one in there. And that will allow you to just click and drag a rectangle. When you first do this, it
just makes the rectangle. It won't allow you
to make it bigger than the size of your document. But once you've released it, you can then go and grab the
corners and pull it out. By the way, I'm going
to use command and minus if I'm on a Mac
or Control and minus, if I'm on a PC to
zoom out a bit, and I'm just going
to make this bigger. Like so. I think that's the size I want
the whole document to be. And then I'm going to click
on the tick, and there we go. We've got her nice and
small in the middle of this square document.
Try it out.
3. Make the Color Trail With a Single Column: What we're going to do
now is we're going to create that colored trail. And we're going to use
a little tool over here called the single
column Marquee tool. And all it does is when you move over your
image and you click, it selects one row of pixels. So I'm just going to
click down and move it, so it's roughly down the
middle of my picture. And then we're going to do
that copy and paste again, so edit and copy
and edit and paste. Now, I know you can't see it, but what it's done is
it's copied all of those pixels over there
into a single row. If I were to zoom right in, and let's go in a
little bit further. Over here, and I
hide the background. You can see we've got
all those colored pixels just like that
in one single row. So on this layer, I've clicked on this layer here. I'm going to go to edit,
transform, and scale. And you can see how it gives me this little line with
some other bits in there. If you click and you
scale out like this, just by dragging it out, what'll happen is it'll scale both the width and the height. We don't want that.
I'm just going to undo that over there. So the trick here is to go to one of these
middle little dots, hold down the Shift key, and then drag it out. Over there, drag
this one over here. I'm making this, as you can see, a lot bigger than my page. Let's keep going out with that over there. I'm
happy with that. And all I'm going to do now
is to click on the tick, and you can see it's brought
in the colors in there. So I've got my
colors, and lastly, before we start to
manipulate them, I'm going to go over
to the layer menu. And I'm going to go
down to Smart Objects, and we're going to convert
this to a smart object. I'll explain why we
do this later on, but it really will make
your life a lot easier. So it's just lay a smart object, convert to Smart Object, and it'll convert
the lay that you're on into a smart object. Still looks exactly the same, but it's now a smart object. Have a bit of a
go with that one.
4. Warp the Shape: We're now going to adjust the shape of this to
get a nice twist in it. So what I'm going to
do is I'm going to go along to the edit menu. I'm going to go to transform, and I'm going to say warp. And the warp puts this
little grid over the top. Now, the great thing about
this grid is I can then grab these corners and I
can just pull them around. You can see how I can
pull that one over that. This is the trick to doing this. I can pull this
one up like that. So we can just move
them around and get some really interesting
shapes going on. So to get the effect
that I was doing there, I was just pulling one
over the top of the other one over there. We have some little handles so you can play
with the handles. You can pull the
handles around to get different effects on there. Now, once you've got
something that you like, we can just click on the
tick there to okay it. And then I can move my person
on top of that layer there. Of course, once you've done that, and I do
this all the time. I look at it and
think, You know what? That wasn't quite right. I want to manipulate it a bit more. This is why we've done it as a smart object because if I
click on that layer again, I can go back to edit, transform, and use warp again. And you can see it's picked
up where we left off. So I can then just
continue manipulating this around and seeing what I can do with these shapes in here. It really is just a matter of playing until you get
the shape that you like. Now, I'm thinking that, I kind of quite happy with that. I think I'll just pull
that up a little bit, like so and click
on the tick again. But at any time,
you can go back and manipulate the shape.
Have a go with that.
5. Well Done & Thank You!: Let's put an interesting
background in this. I'm going to go and choose some colors that I want
to use for my background. So I will go over to the left hand side to the foreground, the
background color. I'm going to click on the foreground and then I'm going to sample a color
from my document. So I'm going to sample this, which is basically her
skin tone over there. And then I'm going to
click on the background, the back one over there. And the moment that this
color picker opens, it allows you to sample colors, and I'll sample more of
a pinky color in there. So I've got those two colors, sort of a lighter pink
and more orangy pink. Then what I'm going
to do is I'm going to go down in my layers to the very bottom to this
little black and white circle. This is the adjustment
layer icon. Click on that, and I'm
going to use a gradient. I'll click gradients in there. Now, you can see the
gradient that we have goes from the pink, the foreground color
into transparent. If you click on the little drop down in the gradient window, you'll find that in the basics, if you click on that drop down so you can
see in the basics, the first gradient there will be from your foreground
to your background color. Now, maybe I don't like
the linear gradient. I want to use a radial gradient. You can reverse it, so you
can go from one color to the other or the other way
around. You can scale it. If it's too big or too small, you can scale those colors out. So I think I'm happy with that. I'll click Okay. All
I have to do now is to drag this underneath
that layer over there. So really easy,
really simple to do. You can actually adjust your
gradient still because I'm thinking that I
really could do with a darker pink at the top. I like the pink
that's behind her. So if I double click
on the gradient and then click the gradient
itself, not the drop down, but the gradient itself, you can see I can choose
either to work on the pink or the orange pink. I'm going to click
on the orange pink. Here's the color
there. You'll see if I choose that one, it's
the lighter color. Click on that color
there, click that, and then I can go in and maybe sample a different
color from there. I like that. I'll go back to this pink over
here and adjust that. I'll click on there. Maybe
I'll try a lighter pink still. You can just work your way around or you can sample colors directly in here and
see what you get. That's actually looking
quite good now. I'm happy with that. And I'll
click Okay and Okay again. I would save this by
doing a file and save as. So I've got the large
file with all the layers. Then if I want to export
this for social media, I'll say export as I'll put in the width
and height that I want to export it to now because this is going to
go for Instagram, let's say, Instagram is
1080 by 1080 pixels. I can just type in 1080 in there and you can see it sorts out my height
for me, as well. I'm doing this as a
JPEG, high quality, and export that and just save it wherever I
want that to go. So I'll just save this out. On my desktop, and that's done. Once you've done that, if you want to do
anything else to it, by all means, have a go. If you'd like to learn
more of Photoshop or see more of these type
of effect videos, don't forget to click
on my name right at the bottom and
go to my profile and have a look at all
the courses I do in Photoshop, Affinity, and Canva. And also click the
Follow button. That way, you'll be notified of any new courses
that I put out. Have so much fun with that. It's a brilliant,
brilliant technique.
Tim Wilson, Adobe Certified Instructor and Expert
