Transcripts
1. Create a Hi Tech Mosaic in Photoshop - introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for the Lunch class, create a hi-tech mosaic with brushes and patterns 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 making a hi-tech mosaic. We're going to borrow the colors for this mosaic from a photograph and we're going to make our own pattern to create the white grid. We're going to make a special brush that we're going to use to slightly distress our mosaic and we're going to add a little starburst and we're going to warp it into an interesting shape. I hope that you're going to enjoy this class. If you see a prompt for a thumbs up, please, if you are enjoying it, give it a thumbs up. This really helps other people see that it is a class that they might also want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so, I read all of your comments. If you're ready, let's get started making a hi-tech mosaic.
2. Hi tech Mosaic Effect - Part 1: We're going to start this project in an unusual place. I'm at a site called unsplash.com and this is a site for free downloadable photos, and the image quality is really quite high here. So I've just typed in the search word tropics, and I've scrolled down and this is the image I want to use because I just want to borrow the colors from it. So I'm going to click on it to open it in a new browser window, and I'm going to click to download. This will give me the full size image to download. I'll right-click and choose Save Image As. I'm just going to save it into a folder on my computer so I know where it is so I can come back and get it shortly. Once it's downloaded, I can go ahead and open it in Photoshop, which is what I'm going to do now. I now have the image open in Photoshop and it's quite a large image. If I go to image, image size, you'll see that's 4,272 pixels by 2,848 pixels. Well, we just want the colors from this image, so I'm going to size it down to a document that is 12 pixels by 12 pixels. These measurements are pretty important that you set it to this value. We're going to set the re-sample method to Bicubic Sharper for reducing images. I'll just click "Okay". Now I have a tiny document, and it's really so small, it's almost impossible to see it on the screen. I'm just going to click on it with the Zoom Tool to enlarge it. This document is 12 pixels by 12 pixels in size, and every one of those pixels has a color associated with it. That's why we made it this size because all we wanted was these blocks of color. I'm going to go now and get the Eraser Tool. I'm going to click on the Eraser Tool, and I'm going to set the mode for it to pencil. Again, that's critical that you use pencil. Drop down your brushes list and what you want is a one pixel square brush. Now, I'm not seeing it in my collection here, so I'm just going to go and add those brushes. I'm going to click here on the brushes fly out, and I'm going to square brushes and I'm going to append them. Here they are at the end and there is a one pixel square brush, which is perfect for me. I have my Eraser Tool selected and I'm in pencil mode. What I need to do now is to erase around the edges of the document. But if we have a look at the layers palette, we'll see that we can't erase to transparency yet. The reason for that is that this image has a background layer and you can't erase to transparency on our background layer. We're going to need to convert it. One simple way to convert it as to double-click on the layer and just press "Okay". That turns it into a regular layer. Now our eraser will work just fine. I'm going to click on the corner pixel here and Shift click all the way across on this corner. I just want to erase the edge pixels. I'm going to click Shift click and then click Shift click. Now I'm down to a smaller number of pixels. If you want to see what you're doing, you can add a layer below this. I'm going to Control click on this new layer icon. White is my foreground color, so I'm going to press Alt, Backspace, Option, Delete, just to fill the back of the image with white. I'm going back to this layer and I'm going to start erasing some of these pixels. I'm going to erase the least interesting of the colored pixels, which are going to be the lighter ones. I'm also going to make this a more interesting shape, by perhaps eating into it a little bit and just leaving some of the nicer colored pixels visible. I'm just going to go and erase some of this into a flowing shape that's what I'm looking for here. Once I've erased the pixels, I don't want, we're ready to re-size this image back up to a usable size. We're going to choose Image and then Image Size. Now we get to make this image a whole lot bigger. I'm going to just multiply this by 100, so it's going to become 1200 pixels by 1200 pixels. But don't press the "Okay" button yet because this is looking like a disaster. Because our image a few minutes ago was this nice pixellated image, but now what's happening is it's all smooth and we've lost all the pixels that we want to keep. The reason for this is this re-sample method. But the moment it's set to Bicubic Sharper, which is one that you would use to reduce an image. But even if you were to choose one of the methods for enlarging an image, you'll see that the problem still occurs it's all blurry. What we need to do is to select Nearest Neighbor. Nearest Neighbor keeps these hard edges. We're going to keep these nice hard edges that we came here to create. I'm just going to click "Okay". Of course now our image is are 100 times bigger, so it looks huge. I'm going to press "Control" or "Command 0" just to re-size it so we can see it on the screen, and we've kept these nice blocks of color. In the next step, we're going to add a pattern over the top of it.
3. Hi tech Mosaic Effect - Part 2: We already know quite a bit about this image, we know that each of these blocks is 100 pixels by 100 pixels. So I want to add a grid of lines over the top of it. So I'm going to start with a pattern that is 100 by 100 pixels in size, so I'll choose "File", and then "New". I'm going to make a new document 100 by 100 pixels in size and it's just a transparent document, so I'll click "OK". We can zoom in so it's a little bit clearer and easier to see where we're working. Now I'm going to start with a selection, so I'm going to the Rectangular Marquee Tool and I'm going to think about how thick I want my lines to be. I would like the lines through my pattern to be about six pixels wide, so I'm going to need to make a pattern paste which has about three pixels around every side of this pattern. So when it's lined up against itself, we're going to get three pixels here and another three pixels next door, which will give us a six pixel wide pattern. So once we know that we need three pixels here and three pixels here, what we need to do is to add those two threes to make six and then to subtract it from 100, so that is 94. So I need a rectangle or a square that is 94 pixels by 94 pixels. So I'm going to come in here, I have my Rectangle Tool selected, I'm going to choose fixed size, and I'm just typing in here 94 pixels by 94 pixels, and I'm going to click to create that shape. Now, I don't know if it's aligned correctly or not, but I have a method that I can show you to do just that. Let's fill this with black, black is my background color, "Control", "Backspace", "Command", "Delete" on the, marquee to fill this layer with the black and that's the block that is 94 by 94 pixels. I still have my selection in place, so I'm going to use this to align my shape with my selection in place, I'm going to press "Control" or "Command" "A" to select my entire workspace and then I'll choose "Layer", "Align Layer to Selection", I'll choose "Vertical Centers", and then "Layer", "Align Layers", "Horizontal Centers" and that just makes sure that this shape is nicely centered. I'm going to "Control" or "Command" click back on this layer so I have just my black area selected. Now, I know that that selection is right in the middle, I'm just going to press "Delete" to delete it. Now, I'll choose "Select" and then "Inverse". Now I have this three pixel band around the edge of my image selected, white is my foreground color? I'll press "Alt", "Backspace" option delete on the marquee to fill this edge with white, and so this is the pattern that I want to use. I'll press "Control" or "Command" "A" to select it and choose "Edit", and then "Define Pattern". I'm going to call this three pixel border, 100 by 100 pixel pattern and that's just going to tell me what it is, so I click "OK". We don't need this document anymore, let's go back to our image here. Now, we know that this image is 1200 by 1200 pixels in size, so we're now going to add a pattern to it. I'm going to add a new layer at the very top of the document here and I'll choose "Edit" and then "Fill" and from the Contents drop-down list here, I'm going to select "Pattern", and then I'm going to open up this little Custom Pattern dialog and I'm going to the very last of these patterns because that's going to be my three pixel border, 100 by 100 pixel pattern. I'll select it, I'm going to make sure that script is disabled, I don't want that to be enabled and I'm just going to click "OK" and on this new layer now is this grid that we created using a pattern and because of the mathematics that we used, it's gone exactly over each of the shapes, so it's surrounding the shapes.
4. Hi tech Mosaic Effect - Part 3: The next thing we're going to do is to make a brush that we can use to paint, and somewhat distress this image. We're going to start with a new document. I'll choose File and then New. We're going to make a document that is 100 pixels by 100 pixels in size. It's transparent background, and I'll click "OK". This is a very small document, so I'm going to zoom in to see it more clearly. I want my brush to be a circle, so I'm going to select the Elliptical Marquee tool, and I'm going to drag out a circle that is not quite the size of this document, it's a little bit smaller. I'm holding the Shift key as I drag on the ellipse tool to make sure I create a circle. Black is my foreground color, so I'll press Alt Backspace, Option Delete on the Mac, to fill my circle with black. Now, I don't want this brush to paint as fully opaque. But if I drag down on the opacity, this effect is not going to work the effect that I'm looking for. I'm actually going to drag down on the fill. It looks as if fill and opacity are the same thing, but they're very different for this particular effect. The reason for this is that I want to put a stroke around the edge of this shape, and I want the stroke to paint more intensively than the circle itself. If I just down the opacity on this shape and add a stroke to it, the stroke for opacity is going to be reduced as well. However, if I change down the fill and add a stroke to the shape, then the stroke can have a different opacity to the fill itself. It's a fairly subtle difference, but it fairly significant for this particular project. I'm going to click here on the Layer Style icon and I'm going to choose Stroke. We're going to add this kind of strike to our shape. It is a three pixel stroke, so it can be three or four pixels, that's just fine. It needs to be positioned on the outside of the shape. It needs to be blended using the normal blend mode, and we're going to set the opacity of it to around about 95 percent. I don't want it to be fully opaque, but I don't want it to be nearly as transparent as the middle of the brushes. We're setting the color to black, so I'm altering the color picker and setting red, green, and blue values to zero, that's black, and I'll click "OK". My fill type is set to color. Now that we've got our stroke looking like this, I'm going to click "OK". This is my brush shape, I just think it's probably a little bit too opaque, so I'm just going to reduce the fill on it a little bit, and we're also going to reduce the opacity. This is going to have two separate effects on the brush. The opacity setting is going to affect both the outside edge, the stroke and the fill. The fill opacity is only going to affect the fill in this document. If you want to check and see how it might paint, I'm going to hold Control or Command as I click on this New Layer icon to add a layer below the image, and I'll press Control Backspace, Command Delete on the Mac, just to fill the layer with whites. We can see how this brush looks. Well, again, I still think it's probably a little bit on the dark side, so I'm going to lighten up the fill and I'm going to reduce the opacity as well. I think that's a better setting. We're going to turn off the background layer, I'm going to select the brush by choosing Select, All, and then I'm going to make it into a brush by choosing Edit, Define Brush Preset. I'm going to call this bokeh brush, B-O-K-E-H. It's a photographic technique, and this brush is like the bokeh dots you get in an out-of-focus background in an image. I'll click "OK". Let's go back to the image that we're working on. I'm going to add a new layer just above this color layer and underneath the patent, so that we can paint on it. But for now I'm going to turn off the color layer and also the patent layer, and just select this empty layer because I want to see how our brush is going to paint. I'm going to click on the Paintbrush tool, and I'm going to select my brush, and it will always be the last brush in the brushes panel. Let's see how it paints. Well, it doesn't paint very well at all. We need to make some adjustments to the brush settings. I'll choose Window, and then Brush. I'm going to select Brush Tip Shape and I'm going to increase the spacing on this brush so that the brush strokes are separated from each other. It's going to look like that. Next, let's go to shape dynamics. We're going to increase the size jitter, that will make the brush paint in small sizes and large. I think I might even increase the jitter a bit more. I'm not going to touch minimum diameter because I'm pretty happy with that angle jitter, we don't need to adjust because this is a circular shape, so rotating it is not going to have any effect on it at all. Let's look at scattering. With scattering, we can adjust the scattering values so that when we paint in a downwards line, the brush strokes go either side of the line. We can adjust that on both axes if we wish. That's how it's going to paint. I can increase the count as well, but probably only to two. Let's try the count. Well, we're getting this overlapping effect. If we wanted to adjust that a little bit, we might want to spread out our spacing a little bit too. That's not looking too bad. The other thing that we can do with brushes is we can paint two brushes at once. I'm going to click here on Dual Brush, and this allows me to add a second brush over the top of this one. For this, I'm going for one of the brushes that is shipped with Photoshop. It's in the default brush set, and it's this one here. It's called a sampled tip brush and it has the number 60 underneath it. I'm just going to increase its size, and you can see that it's obliterating in part the shapes brush underneath. I'm also going to adjust its spacing so I can see how it's working here. Let's just test it. Now our brush has gone from painting pure circles to having a slightly distressed look. A little bit more interesting. I'm going to use that as well. The other thing I'm going to use is color dynamics. With color dynamics, we can get the brush to paint in color. I'm going to click here on the foreground color, and I'm going to select a foreground color that is a dark orange. A little bit more intense and orange than is in the original image here, and I'll click "OK". I'm going to select a background color. For this, I'm going to select a bright yellow. I'll click here on the yellows, and let's choose a bright yellow. Let's see how the brush paints now. Well, if I paint with it now, you'll see that it's painting in color, but it's only painting in this red color. What I need to do is to adjust this jitter, the foreground/background jitter. Now the colors will vary between the foreground color and the background color. You can also adjust saturation. Well, it's already set to adjust saturation. That would vary the saturation of the brush. You can do that if you want or you could just leave the saturation set to it's normal. You can also adjust brightness. But I'm pretty happy with the way it's painting right now, so I'm just undoing all those brush strokes, double-checking my brush, pretty happy with that. Let's go now and do our painting. For this, I'm going to turn all the layers back on because I want to see how this brush is painting. I'm just going to start painting through the image here. I'm not worried about these bits painting outside, because I'm actually going to blend this in a minute. I'm thinking that the brushes aren't painting quite large enough, so I might add a few strokes that are a little bit larger. If you see something you don't like just press Control or Command Z to undo that stroke. I'm just going to put some strokes around here. Then I'm going to blend this layer in with the layer below. I'm going to do that by selecting on this Normal blend mode and go down to dissolve. Now, on the Mac, you won't want to be using any of these brush tools when you do this. You probably want to select something like the Move tool or the Ellipse or Rectangular Marquee tool. On the Mac, then you can press Shift Plus and Shift Minus to go through the blend modes. On the PC, you can just press the down arrow. Now, I need to pick up my blend mode first, so let's go to darken, and now I'm just going to run down my blend mode list. You can see that things like color burn have eliminated the over spray. These brushes are being limited only to the area that this painting is in. I'm going to keep going down the list and see if I can see something. Now if you see something and there is some over spray, those brush strokes are not being removed, that's fine I can show you in a minute just how to get rid of that. But what you're looking for is an interesting effect in this blend. I really like this divide effect and I think I'm probably going to use it. I like divide because I like this inverted color effect, but let's look and see what you would do if you chose one of the options where there was this over spray, where the paint was going outside the area of this shape. Well, you're going to go down here and select this layer, and you're going to the Magic Wand tool. You just want to click out here somewhere in this transparent area on this layer. Turn the tolerance down really low to about 10, and you want Contiguous to be checked and Anti-alias to not be checked. Ten for your tolerance, no Anti-alias, yes to Contiguous, and just click here on this layer. What you're doing is you're making a selection around the area that you don't want the paint strokes to be in. Now go up to the paint layer. This is the paint layer here, and we're going to add a mask. We do that by clicking here on this Mask icon. It says add a layer mask, so you're just going to click once on the Layer Mask. What the layer mask has done is it's done completely the opposite to what we wanted. It's removed the paint strokes from inside the shapes and just left the ones that we didn't want. Well, just click on the mask here, make sure you click it to select it and press Control or Command I. That just inverts the mask. This mask on this layer is now removing the paint strokes anywhere where these colored squares are not. Now I'm going back to my divide blend mode because that's what I want to use. But if you were using a blend mode which left the paint strokes on the outside, that's how you're going to solve the problem.
5. Hi tech Mosaic Effect - Part 4: We're going to add a few little starburst shapes here. I'm going to click on this paint layer and add a new layer above it. I'm going to press "D" to get back to my default colors and I'm going to flip them around because I want to be painting in white. I'm going to select my brushes tool, I'm going to open up my brushes panel. Now, the brush I want to use is not in the default set in Photoshop, so I'm going to open the fly-out panel, I'm going to select "Assorted Brushes" because it's in this collection. I'm going to append this. The brush I want it is this 50 pixels small starburst, so I'm going to select it and just click away. I've got a brand new layer. I'm going to size it up a little bit by using the close square bracket key on the keyboard. I have white paint, and now I'm just going to click in a few spots where I want to add a little bit of extra light. I'm picking the lighter areas of the image to do this. If I want some extra light, I'm just going to double-click on the brush, so I'm not going to move it between brushstrokes, but I think that was a bit too intense. Now, that I've done that and I'm looking at this shape, I'm thinking that this color area would look better if it was a little bit more intense. This is easily solved. I'm going to grab this pattern layer, and I'm going to drag it onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to take the topmost version of this, and I'm going to set its blend mode to multiply. Now, multiply is a darkening blend mode, so it's going to darken up this pattern. If it darkens it up too much for you, then just decrease the opacity a little bit. So you'll get a little bit of the darkening, but not a 100 percent of it. The next step we need to do is to flatten this image, so I'm going to hide the background layer so that I'm not going to flatten the white. I'm going to choose "Layer", "Merge Visible". That just merges all these pieces into a single layer, and now I can bring back my white background. Having this element on a layer by itself is now going to allow me to warp it to get it an interesting shape. To do that, I'm going to select this layer, just click on it and choose "Edit", "Transform", "Warp". What this does is to display a grid over the image, and it's a sort of tic-tac-toe grid. Each of these lines in the grid can be dragged on, so I can drag on these lines to just bring the image in. I can use the handles, but I can also just drag on it, and so I can reshape this image. I can push things together and I can pull them apart. I get a more visually interesting results. When I'm happy with the result, I'm just going to click the check mark here. There's our final piece of art. We've created this from a color scheme that we borrowed from a photo. We've made the pattern overlay, we've made brushes, and we've gone ahead and warped through the final shape. Your project for this class is going to be to do just this. Go and find an image, you can use the one I used, or you can use an image of your choice. I suggest that you settle for your 12 pixel by 12 pixel image because it's just going to make the mathematics so much easier. When you enlarge it, just make it 1,200 by 1,200 pixel image. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with in your project. If you see a prompt to give this class a thumbs up, please if you enjoyed the class, give it a thumbs up. That really helps the video become more visible for other people, and they can see that it's a class that they may want to take. If you feel like leaving a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at every single one of your projects. My name is 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.
6. Addendum - Editing with Smart Objects: This is an additional video for the high-tech mosaic effect in Photoshop, and it's in response to a question that someone asked. What they wanted to do was to not flatten the image so that they could warp it, but yet come back later on, and make changes to it. Well, you can do that, and I'm going to show you how in this video. At the point at which you are about to flatten the image, you should stop, select the layers in the image. I'm selecting all the layers except the white background layer. I don't want to select that. I'm going to choose layer, and then smart objects, convert to smart object. Now if your version of Photoshop does not support smart objects, you can't do this, but lighter versions of Photoshop do. I'm going to convert all these layers to a smart object, and now I can warp that. I'm going to choose edit, transform, warp, and I'm just going to apply really simple warp at this stage because I just want to show you what the potential is for altering this mosaic after you've warped it. I'm just going to click the check mark here. Now say that we liked this wall, perfect, but we wanted to darken these colors even a bit more. Well, we could do side by double-clicking on this little icon here in the bottom of this layer. The little icon here tells you that this layer is a smart object. If I double-click on that, I'll open the original smart object, and now I can make changes to it. Let's go to this layer, and let's duplicate it yet again. We're seeing some changes in our image. Now the trick with smart objects is to know how to get out of them and back to your image. Up here in the file name area, you can see that this is layer 2.psb. It's a special psb file, which is what is used when you create smart objects. Having made my change to this image, all I'm going to do is go up here and close this smart object file. When I'm prompted to save it, I'm going to say yes. When I do, I come back into Photoshop, and the changes that I've made to that smart object are now reflected in the image, but the warp hasn't changed. This is a way of having your cake and eating it too. You can not only warp your mosaic, but you also get the opportunity to change the mosaic itself if you need to, just by double-clicking the smart object thumbnail. It gets you back into the smart object, you can make your changes. Well, let's turn the effect off here, and let's just click the close button, yes to saving it. Back in Photoshop, the edits that we made have been applied to the image. I hope that helps you if you want to know how to work with this object without flattening it before you warp it.
7. Addendum - Making the pattern in Photoshop CS5 : This is an additional video for anybody who's using an earlier version of Photoshop and who's having a little bit of trouble making the pattern to go over the mosaic. We're going to start by creating a new document and it's going to be 100 pixels by 100 pixels in size. It needs to be transparent and it needs to be RGB color. I'll click "Okay". It's a very small document here, so I'm just going to zoom in so we can see it a little bit more clearly. The next thing is we have to make a 94 pixel by 94 pixel selection here. So I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool. From the Style drop-down list here, I'm going to choose Fixed Size. Then for the width and the height, I will type "94 px" and that will make sure that you're creating a selection that is 94 pixels by 94 pixels. The width is 94 px and the height is 94 px. Click once in the document, and that will add a rectangle that is that size. Now, when you're clicking, you want to do it up in the top corner here, so you make sure that it actually fits inside the document. I'm just going to undo that, and you can see that my cursor is up here and I'm just going to click. We need to now make sure that this is in the center of the document. I've black as my foreground color. I'm going to press "Alt-Backspace", "Option-Delete" on the Mac, to fill the square with black color. Now, the selection is still in place and that's really important. You'll press "Control" or "Command-A" to select everything. If I go to the Move tool now, you'll see that these icons appear on the toolbar, and you'll take this one which reads Align Vertical Centers. Then you'll click this one which reads Align Horizontal Centers. That just makes sure that your square here is plum in the middle of your document. Now, you can deselect everything by pressing " Control" or "Command-D." Here in the last panel, you'll want to Control-click on this layer thumbnail because you need to put a selection around this black area. Because we don't actually need the black, we only filled it with black so that we could make sure we had something to align. I'm going to press "Backspace" on the PC, and it would be "Delete" on the Mac. We just need to delete that fill. Now we're going to select everything that is not currently selected. We'll choose "Select", "Inverse". What's selected now is the area around the very edge of the image, the area that we want to make our pattern. White is our background color here. So I'll press "Control-Backspace", "Command-Delete" on the Mac, to fill this area around the very edge with white. Now I can deselect everything. I can press "Control" or "Command-D," or you can choose "Select", "Deselect." Now, you'll choose "Select" and then "All" because you need to make a pattern from this pace. "Edit", "Define Pattern", and you can call this whatever you like. I'm going to call it 94 by 94 px border pattern and click "Okay." Now you can just discard this document because you don't need it any longer, and you can go back and complete the rest of your mosaic.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
