Folded Photo Effect in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Folded Photo Effect in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Create a Folded Photo 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 looking at creating a folded photo effect, although you could do this on any image. You're going to learn how to create the appearance of folded paper. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up, and then write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and to determine if they too will enjoy them. 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 all ready now, let's get started creating a folded photo effect in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - Prepare the image: To start with this project, you're going to need an image. Now, I've downloaded this photo from unsplash.com, but you can use any photograph or any image. I'm a little concerned about the proportions of this image, I think it's a little bit too wide, so I'm actually going to start by cropping it. I've just gone to the Crop Tool and I'm just going to drag in on the side here a little bit. Just think that that's a kind of proportion for this image. You'll need to display the Layers pallet, so I'm going to bring mine out so that we can see it clearly. Of course you can always get to it by choosing Window and then Layers. You need to unlock this background layer, which you can do in a number of ways in most recent versions of Photoshop, just click on the lock icon. If you're using an older version of Photoshop, you can take the lock icon and drag it onto the trash. You can also just double-click this layer and just click "Okay". They all have exactly the same effect and the effect is to create a new layer that this image is now on. We're going to add a border to the photograph or to the image, a white border that's going to make it look a little bit more like a printed photograph. So you'll select the "Layer" and then choose "Edit" and then "Stroke". Now we're going to add a stroke to this image, you'll need to possibly experiment with the width of the stroke. I'm going to try 20 pixels to start off with this, and the color is going to need to be white. I've clicked on the color swatche, I'm just going to bring the color right up into this top corner, so I have 255, 255, 255 selected, which is pure white. Now the stroke needs to be on the inside because this image takes up the full canvas so we need to put the stroke on the inside. I'll just click "Okay". By luck, that's a pretty good value for this. Now if it wasn't, I would just press "Control" and command "Z" to undo it, then just go and do it again. "Edit", "Stroke", and you can decrease or increase the stroke now that you know what a 20 pixel stroke looks like. I'm going to leave mine at 20 pixels so I'm going to click "Okay". Next up we need to add some additional canvas around the image, and we can do that using the Crop Tool. So I'm going to click on the "Crop Tool" here and just click on the image. Now, I've got my Crop Tool, I think setup to classic mode, so perhaps its behaving a little bit differently to yours, but the principle is the same. You want to get the crop handles around the image and you want to let go the mouse button because as soon as you do that, the Crop Tool turns into a tool which can actually add canvas. So I'm going to hold "Alt" and "Shift" now and just add some canvas around the image. When I do and click to commit that to change, you can see that we have some additional canvas around the image. So one of the best kept secrets of the crop tool is that you can use it to add canvas. I find it in circumstances like there's a whole lot easier to use than the image Canvas Size option. Now that we've added some canvas, let's go and sample a color from the image that we're going to use to fill the canvas. I'm liking this sort of purple in the flowers here that looks like the foxes actually looking at those flowers. Just holding my eyedropper over this flower and looking over here to see the color that I've sampled. I'm going to add a new layer to the image, so I'm going to click here on the "New Layer" icon, but I'm going to hold "Control" command as I do so, so that the new layer appears below the photo layer. If you put it on top, just grab it and move it underneath. Target this layer, and then because purple here is my foreground color, I'm going to press "Alt" or option "Backspace" to fill the layer below with that color. So now we have our photo on a background, it looks like it's been a sort of printed photo that's got a white border around it. We're ready to get started on the folder paper look. 3. Pt 2 - Add the Shading: Now, the folds that we're going to put in this image, we're going to put two vertical folds and one horizontal fold. To mark all those areas out, we need to add some guides. I'm going to choose "View", and then "Rulers" because I want to say there's rulers across my image. If you just click and drag on the ruler, you can drag a guide to down to the image. Now, I'm going to drop this one middle way across the image. I'm going to drop two in at approximately one-third and two-thirds across the image, it doesn't have to be exact. If you don't get your guides down perfectly the first time, go to the "Move Tool", and if you hover over a guide, you can just move it. Once the guides are down, you can go ahead and select the photo layer and just click on the "New Layer" icon because we're going to put all the shading on a new layer, and that's really critical to this effect, you want a new layer to be working on. Now you want the default colors here. You can get them by pressing the letter "D" or by clicking on this icon, and we've got black now as the foreground color. We need a gradient, I'm going to click on the ''Gradient Tool''. When you open up the gradient panel, the first three gradients will be a Foreground to Background, a Foreground to Transparent, and then Black to White. It's the Foreground to Transparent gradient that we're going to use, so I'm just going to click on that. We're all ready to go here, it's that we don't know which gradients to use. Well, what I did was I took a piece of paper and I folded it up, the way we're looking at folding this image. Folded up crystallined very carefully, opened it up, and then sat it in the light and I made a note of where the light and dark areas were along those folds. These are the darks and lights that we're going to create using our gradient. I'm going to select the ''Rectangular Marquee Tool'', I'm going to drag here to select this top quadrant. Now, if you're not snapping to the guide, you only need to to click on ''View'' here and make sure that you have Snap enabled, and that "Snap To", "Guides" is also selected, because you want to be using these guides to make this accurate selection. You also don't want to have much of a feather, I've got zero feather here. If you have a really large feather then undo this, just press "Control" or "Command", "D" to deselect the selection. Go back and change your feather down to a very small value and make your selection again. To lie down the gradients, we're going to click on the ''Gradient Tool''. I've already selected a Foreground to Transparent gradient. I'm going to click and drag upwards or going to just click on that line and drag upwards just a little bit, you don't want a very big gradient. An actual fact, I've probably add on the side of caution there, so I'm going to bring mine in just a little bit more. This is about as much gradient as you want. This one's dark and this one needs to be light. Now I need to reverse these colors, which I can do by clicking this icon here or pressing the letter "X". X is going to be handy because we're going to be using this a lot. Again, I'm going to click and drag here, I am holding the shift key to make sure that I drag out a perfectly horizontal gradient. I wanted it to be about the same size as the one before. I'm just going to continue across the image, making a selection based on the guides that I have here, looking at my diagram, and then putting in my dark and like gradients. This one's dark, and I have two light ones. Holding "Shift H" time to make sure that the gradients go in perfectly horizontal, just undoing them if they're not right. Now, I'm going to continue across the image and plot always gradients in, and then we're going to come back and do the next step. When you've finished adding all your gradients you can press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. In the next video, we'll go ahead and blend the effect in a little bit and crop it to the outside edges of the photo. 4. Pt 3 - Finishing Touches: To blend these shaded areas into the image, let's get rid of our guides first of all. So I'm going to choose "View" and then Clear Guides" and that gets rid of the guidelines. We also need to clip these shadows to the underlying image because the shadows are only going to affect up to the edge of the white paper. Right now their way into the purple area. They should be way into the purple area, but we need to clip them. So we can do that by creating what's called a clipping mask. What we're going to do is clip this layer to this layer. We select this layer and choose "Layer" and then "Create Clipping Mask". Now you can also do that if you're interested by selecting this layer and hovering your mouse pointer between these two layers while holding Control and Alt, that would be Command and Option on the Mac. You get this little sort of bent arrow icon. If you click once, then you're creating that clipping mask. That's just a shortcut way of doing it. Now the shading that we've got while it's effective is way over the top so we're going to take the opacity down. Now there are what are called scrubby sliders in Photoshop. So instead of opening up this panel and dragging on this slider here, you can actually drag on the word Opacity and I'm going to take it all the way to zero because these effects where you're adding something to an image are easier to see and to judge, I find, if you work from zero opacity and then start increasing it. So I'm hovering over the word Opacity when I get this little hand icon, I'm going to start moving to the right. That's going to build these shadings back in. You can make a judgment about how much of this shading you want and how much you don't want. I could take mine up to somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. That seems to be the kind of value that gives you the correct shaded effect, but without being too much over the top. Once you're happy with the amount of shading that you've applied, you can merge these two layers together so you can right-click this top-most layer and choose "Merge Down". That merges the shading into the image underneath so it's all fixed in place. Now that allows us to do the next technique, which is to slightly bend this image. We're going to do that using the liquify filter. So with this image layer selected, we'll choose "Filter" and then "Liquify". In the liquify filter we're going to use this to push the photo. I'm going to start with the zoom tool. I'm just going to zoom out a bit because I want to see things clearly as I'm working. I'm going to use this Forward Warp Tool. I want a nice, big brush. In fact, this brush is pretty good in size. You can adjust your brush size using your open and closed square bracket case. What I want to do is just grab this and just push it. I want to make sure that I'm getting a pretty smooth line here. You'll find that a bigger brush works a whole lot better than a smaller brush. So you can push this, you can do a couple of pushes just to make sure that you get this nice bend in the image. Because if this image had been folded, it would be showing a little bit of a bend along these lines. You can bend it in at the edges if you want as well just a little bit. When you're happy with the result, click ''Okay.'' Now, I've probably been a little bit enthusiastic about my bends, but you can see the result is that it reinforces the fact that this was a sheet of paper and it has been bent. Next up we're going to add a drop shadow. I'm going to click on this layer and click the "fx" icon and choose "Drop Shadow". This is the drop shadow that I've got right now. At the moment the opacity is really low, so I'm going to crank up the opacity, so it's a lot higher. Distance I have set to really high, but I'm just going to push it back. Now one of the things you can do with the drop shadow is you can actually drag it around yourself by just clicking on the image so you can move it into position wherever you want it to be. But you can also adjust that using these sliders. Now, the size value is really a fluffiness value. It's a sort of fair value. You can see that the increasing the size actually makes a shadow a whole lot softer. I'm going to bring it in so it's a little bit harsher. Spread is really a bit more about size. So I always thought that these two adjustments were wrongly named, but just be aware of that, that one of them might be better than the other for doing whatever it is that you're trying to do with the image. So I want a shadow that appears pretty much all around this image, but which is a little bit heavier perhaps on these two sides. I'm just going to bring the opacity down a little bit and click "Okay". To finish up, we can rotate the image because the drop shadows going to come with it so we can just rotate it a little bit just to give it, again, a slightly more organic look. The suggestion that this really is a photo that has been folded and then placed on a surface. So there is our folded photo effect. Your project for this class is to create your own folded photo effect. Go and find an image to use a photo or another image to use. Add the border to the image, create your guides, and then add your shadows. You're going to clip the shadows to the image and you're going to make these shadows a little bit more transparent so that you can see the image through them. Then you're going to use the liquify tool to bend the edges, add a drop shadow, and finally, rotate the image just to create an interesting look. Post an image of your completed photo in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and you've learned lots about working in Photoshop and in particular, creating a folded photo effect. If you did enjoy this class and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and then write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they too 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, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.