Transcripts
1. Create Kaleidoscopes with Smart Objects in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello. I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class, create kaleidoscopes with smart objects 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 kaleidoscopes from photos in Photoshop. We're going to start by creating a simple kaleidoscope, so we're going to learn how to cut out a triangular shape and then how to quickly and easily rotate it into a kaleidoscope. We're going to see how we can fill in the corners of our kaleidoscope and also nest kaleidoscopes in and on top of each other. Then we're going to look at creating a far more complex kaleidoscope because we're going to use smart objects to do it. The benefit of using smart objects is going to be that we can edit the kaleidoscope, so we can choose different portions of the image to make the kaleidoscope from, or we can use entirely different images. So you're going to learn a heap about working with smart objects in Photoshop. Now as you're progressing through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying this class, give it a thumbs up. This helps me to get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment as well, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now I've really enjoyed putting this class together and I hope you really going to enjoy it so let's get started. Making kaleidoscopes in Photoshop.
2. Making Kaleidoscopes - Part 1: To create a kaleidoscope, we're going to need a starting image. So I've located one to use. This is on a site called morguefile.com. At Morgue File, you are free to download these images and they don't cost. The proviso is that you need to make some changes to this image. Since we are going to be using it for a kaleidoscope, that's going to be exactly what we're going to be doing. I'll give you the link to download this image. You'll just click ''Download'', and then you'll find it in your downloads folder, and you want to go and open it in Photoshop. Now, I've had it open already, so I'm just going to open it from my recent files list. Now, I'm going to the crop talks. I want to crop the middle of this image. You can see it's got a very heavy vignette around the edge and we want just the brighter pixels here. I'm just going to select a reasonable size crop here and click the check mark. Now, I made this image to be in portrait mode. I just find it a little bit easier to work that way. I'm going to choose Image, and then Image Rotation, and I'll rotate it 90 degrees. Next up, we need to take a rectangular selection from this image. I'm just going to drag out a large rectangle that's going to consume pretty much all of this image. We need to rotate this selection, and to do so, we'll choose Select, and then Transform Selection. That puts handles on the selection itself. You won't actually be destroying the image, you're just going to move this selection. What we want to do is, we want to rotate it 15 degrees. I'm going to this angle here, then type 15, and click the check mark. You can say that the selection is now rotated 15 degrees. We're going back to Select, and then Transform Selection, and now I'm just going to move it. What I wanted to do is, I want this selection, this rectangular selection to cut out an exact triangle out of this underlying image. In this area in here, I just want to say a triangle of image. If I say a shape that has four sides, that's one side too many. We just want three sides in this piece here. Once you've got your rectangular selection positioned correctly so that you can see a triangle in here, click the check mark. Now, we want to take out this piece. We're going to do it by choosing Layer, New, Layer Via Copy. If we go to the last pallet, right now we should see that nothing's happened in here. In the last pallet, you'll see that you have the background image and this triangular piece. It's a triangular piece that we want. Now, I'm going to grab my move tool, just move it into the middle of the image. This is the piece that we're going to use for our kaleidoscope. Next up, we need to duplicate this. I'm going to choose Layer, New, Layer Via Copy. That creates an additional copy of this triangle. I'm going to choose Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal, and that will reflect this triangle horizontally. Still with the move tool selected, I'm going to move it across until it lines up with the other shape. Now, if you don't have the smart guides, those little red lines that light up when you've got things lined up, go and select both layers and click here on one of these three icons here. They, all three of them going to align these two pieces neatly. You may want to just zoom in a bit to make sure that you don't have a gap between these two pieces. I don't have one. I'm not seeing it here as I zoom in. I'm seeing it when I zoom out, but I know that that's not really there, so I can just ignore it. Next up, I'll right-click on these layers and choose Merge Layers. This has created a single paste, which is going to be the foundation for my kaleidoscope. The next steps are quite simple, but they do have to be done in order. Let's see what they are. Layer, New, Layer Via Copy. Then we're going to choose Edit, Free Transform. Next up, we're going to look at these nine little boxes here in the top left of the screen. We're going to select in the top row, the middle top box. Now, it's critical that you select that before you go on to the next step. Because if you set your angle first and then go and set this, it's just not going to work. Next up, we're going to this angle and we're going to type 30. Then we're going to click the check mark. So that we don't have to do that over and over again, we're going to use some case strikes. The case strikes are Control, Alt, Shift, and T on the PC, Command, Option, Shift, T on the Mac. Hold, Shift, Alt, and Control, Command, Option, Shift on the Mac and then just tap the letter T and do it until you've got all the way around the circle. What Photoshop is doing every time you press Control, Alt, Shift, T, is it's repeating the last commands that you did. The commands that you did were to make a new layer via copy and then transform it using that rotation. It's just a nice simple way of getting Photoshop to do the work so you don't have to do it. Now we've got a whole lot of layers here, so we're going to merge them altogether. I'm going down to the bottom of the layer stack and I'm going to click on the first layer I created. I'll wind up to the top of the last stack, hold the Shift key down and click on this top-most layer so that all of these are selected. I'll right-click and choose Merge Layers. Next up, I want to see what my kaleidoscope looks like because it's way bigger than the current document. There's a command in Photoshop that tells Photoshop to show you everything that is in this document. That command is Image, Reveal All. Now, press "Control, or Command 0" to zoom back out. Now, if you've been successful, you won't see any lines through this kaleidoscope. If it hasn't been quite so successful, and believe me, it happens to me like one in every two or three times I do this, I end up with lines through my kaleidoscope. It's very, very frustrating. But here's the solution if you see fine lines through your kaleidoscope. If you don't see them, don't bother doing this, but if you do see them, here's how to fix it. You're going to take this kaleidoscope layer and you're going to drop it onto the new layer icon. You're going to create a second kaleidoscope. What you're going to do with this bottom one, is you're going to select it. You're going to select the move tool, and you're going to choose Edit, Free Transform. Up here in the degree, the angle box, you're just going to select over that and you're going to type 1, and you're going to press "Enter". What that's going to do is, it's going to rotate this bottom version of the kaleidoscope around one degree. Now, this won't give you any significant difference in the kaleidoscope itself, but it should end up hiding some of those lines through the kaleidoscope. If it doesn't, if you're happy with it, just right-click this top-most layer and choose Merge Down, and that will just merge it into a single kaleidoscope. Here is your very first kaleidoscope in Photoshop and we'll go on in the next video to see what we can do with this particular kaleidoscope, and in a later video, how we can actually create kaleidoscope using smart objects in Photoshop so that they can be edited live.
3. Making Kaleidoscopes - Part 2: Now we've created the first kaleidoscope in Photoshop. Let's see some of the things that we can do with it. We can make a duplicate of this kaleidoscope layer. I'm going to select it and drag it onto the new layer icon. This time we're going to take this top-most layer and we're going to shrink it. We're going to the move tool. We're going to grab the top right-hand corner and hold Alt and Shift as we scale down the kaleidoscope. This lets us shrink this kaleidoscope so it can become the middle of itself if you like. I'm just going to place it in here and click the check mark. Now, it's also possible to rotate this top version, and we would rotate it in uneven number of degrees. If we created this original kaleidoscope using a 30 degree rotation, we could rotate this one just 15 degrees. I'll select this layer and choose edit for a transform. I'm happy with the center rotation, that's exactly what it should be. I'm going to set the angle to 15 degrees and click the check mark. Now you can say that these two elements here and no longer lined up, this one's been rotated 15 degrees to give it a slightly more interesting look. Now if you like the kaleidoscope but you're not really happy with the colors, you can solve that too. We're going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer. Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation. I'll click OK. With a hue saturation adjustment layer, if you adjust the hue, you'll walk the colors of the kaleidoscope around. We could create something completely different in terms of colors from the original colors that we had in that image. I'm liking this pink and purple ones. I'm going to save that. Let's go back to the last pallet and let's have a look at these corners here. If we want to get rid of the corners, we can fill it up with the image itself. I'm going to go back to this kaleidoscope layer. I'm going to turn everything else off for just a minute. I'm going to make a duplicate of this layer. I want to see how big my document is. I'm just going to choose Image and then Image Size. I want to read off here how big this document is. Well, it's 6,801 by 6,800 pixels. Yours is going to be a different size, but it's just important that you know how big it is because we're going to need to know what half of this value is. If I'm working at 6,800, my half value is going to be 3400. You'll just need to do the math on your image. I'm just going to click Cancel, I didn't need to do anything while I was here. Now, if you've done my Photoshop pattern-making class, you'll know that we can make patterns in Photoshop using the offset filter, and we're going to do that here. We're going to take the bottom-most one of these images and we're going to choose Filter, Other, Offset. This is where we add in half the value of the width and height of the document. It's 3,400 and 3,400. That's closed up the spaces in the corner of this image, and it's done it with elements of the exact same image so that we're getting a feel for the fact that those corners actually should have been there all along. I'll click OK. Now we can go back and turn the other elements on. Now, if you look really carefully, you will see where this image here on this layer actually intersects with the image underneath. You can do a few things to eliminate this if you want to. One thing you could do, is to mask this out. I'm going to the topmost of these two layers and I'm adding a layer mask. I'm going to go and get a paintbrush. I'm going to Brush tool, and I'm going to select a soft-ish brush, but I'm going to wind up its hardness to about 50 percent. Now, when you're working with masks, you can paint with black or white. I'm going to paint with black because that's going to hide the image on this layer. I've got black paint here. My brush is way too small, so I'm going to press the closed square bracket just to enlarge it. You can use the open and closed square brackets to enlarge or shrink your brush. I'm going to go through here and just soften the areas where I'm seeing that the kaleidoscope is intersecting with the image underneath. We can soften it that way. You can do as much or as little as you want for this, because it really depends on what you intend to do with your image. If you intend to take a rectangle out of the middle of it, then you don't have to do anything at all. If it looks fine to you, you don't have to do anything at all. The other thing that you can do, is you can blend this layer with the image underneath using a blend mode. Here with the topmost layer selected, I'm going to select Dissolve. I'm going to make sure on the Mac that I'm not using a paint brush tool because this is not going to work on the Mac if you're using a brush tool. On the Mac, you can press Shift plus and Shift minus to go through the blend modes. On the opacity, once you select a blend mode, you can use the down arrow key to go through the blend modes. You can control how these layers interact with each other. You can achieve different results again with these blend modes. Some of the blend modes will be very obvious and others will just blend the two layers seamlessly together, but giving you an entirely new look to your kaleidoscope. You can experiment with these blend modes on the opacity. If you get all the way down to the bottom, blend mode, the one at the bottom is luminosity, then you have to press the up arrow to start going back up again. If you're on a Mac, you can just continue to press Shift plus, and it'll loop around to the beginning again. If you see a blend mode that you like as you go through, you can just leave that selected. I like lighter color, so I'm actually going to use that for my kaleidoscope. There is a way of creating a more complex kaleidoscope from the same basic kaleidoscope by layering it on top of each other, filling in the corners, adding a hue saturation adjustment layer, and then fiddling around with blend modes. Next up, we're going to start looking at smart object kaleidoscope.
4. Making Kaleidoscopes - Part 3: Now as I was playing around with kaleidoscopes getting ready to record this class, I was thinking about a way of creating kaleidoscopes where we could actually edit them after we've created them. So let's have a look now at a different way of creating our kaleidoscope. We're still going to do the rotation, but we're going to start with a slightly different type of image to work with. I've also gone to unsplash.com, which is one of my favorite sites for free images. I've used this particular image before in another Photoshop tutorial, because I really like the colors in it and we're going to borrow these colors for our kaleidoscope today. I just went to unsplash.com and for this image, if you just look up the word fabric, you'll find that there's only half a dozen or so fabric images, so you'll be able to select this one and download it if you want to follow along. Again, just click Download, it's going to open up in a new browser window, and you can right-click and choose Save image as, and you can save it to your hard drive and then open it up in Photoshop. So I'm going to do that now. Here I am back in Photoshop with the image open. First thing I'm going to do is to do the same triangular crop, as I did previously. I'm going to make a selection of this image. I want the in-focus bit of this image for my kaleidoscope, probably something from in here. I'm going to select my crop, I'm going to rotate my image. I'm going to go 90 degrees clockwise on this control command zero just to zoom back out so I can say everything. I'm going to try an even closer crop here. I'm just going to crop it a second time because I'm conscious of the elements that I want in my kaleidoscope. I'm going back to the rectangular marquee, and I'm going to take a nice big piece of my image here. Choose Select, Transform Selection. Again, I'm going to rotate this 15 degrees, click the check mark, and again Select, Transform Selection. I want to move it over so that I have this triangular piece of my image. Right now, I'm going to aim for a good piece of image. Now the benefit of the process that we're going to be using this time is that we can actually change this later on. I'm going to click the check mark. Now this time, because I want this to be editable later on, I don't want to take a triangular piece out of my image. What I want to do is find a way of selecting the triangle that I want to add any time. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to add a new layer to this image, and I'm going to fill this selected area with a color. So I've got a maroon color here as my foreground color. It's fine, doesn't matter what color it is. I'm just going to press all backspace option to lay it on the Mac to create this triangular shape. I can deselect my selection now by choosing Select, Deselect, or press Control or Command D. Now in the last palette, I need to reverse these two layers, but I can't do that right now because I have a background layer. I'm going to double-click on the background layer and click Okay. That converts it to a regular layer so I can drag it above the triangle layer. I want to create this as a clipping mask. So what I want to do is clip this image to this shape. I'm going to do that by clicking on the topmost layer and choose Layer, Create Clipping Mask. Now you can also do it by holding Command and Option on the Mac, Control and Alt on the PC, and just click between these two layers when you see this little icon here. That creates and removes the clipping mask. But whatever way you do it, this is what you should be seeing on the screen right now. Now the key to making sure that our kaleidoscope will be editable later on is to create this object here as a Smart Object. Now, Smart Objects were introduced in Photoshop CS2. So unless you're working with a really old version of Photoshop, you should be fine for creating Smart Objects. What you're going to do is select both of these layers, click on one, shift-click on the other. You will right-click and choose Convert to Smart Object. That creates a single layer from this smart object. When we move the shape out of the way, you'll see that we've got a triangle. It's exactly what we want. Now we need to make a duplicate of this layer, so I'm going to take this layer and drag it onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to flip this, Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal. I'm going to line these two pieces up. Again, if you don't have Smart Guides, select both layers and use one of these icons here, the first three, to align the pieces. What we're going to do next is we're going to create this as a second Smart Object. So we're going to select both of these layers, right-click and choose Convert to Smart Object. So now we've got a Smart Object nested inside another Smart Object. Now that might be a little bit confusing, but trust me, it's all going to be apparent as to what we're doing and why shortly.
5. Making Kaleidoscopes - Part 4: Now we've got a smart object inside our Smart Object, we're ready to proceed to create our kaleidoscope. I'm just going to move my Smart Object down and let's just draw Image, Reveal All so we can see everything here. Now, we need to create this kaleidoscope a little bit differently to the way we did the previous one. Let's see how we're going to do that. First of all, I'm going to rotate this shape 15 degrees. I'm going to take the shape and choose Edit, Free Transform. I am going to transform it around its top center point here of the nine point, we're going to transform it around the middle on the top row, and we're going to rotate it 15 degrees and click the "Check mark". What that does is it aligns this to a nice vertical line that's going to give us a little bit more flexibility as we work. Now that we've got this first shape, we're going to take this layer and we're going to drag it onto the New Layer icon. Don't do this using new layer of our copy. It's not going to work because of the smart object here. I would dragging it onto the New layer icon. Now we're going to rotate this and we're going to choose Edit, Free Transform. Now we're going to rotate again around this middle top point. I'm going to click on the middle top point here. Don't go any further until you get it right. You'll see that it already says 15 degrees. Well, what we're going to do is, we're going to continually add 30 degrees to this. We're going to type 45 and click the "Check mark". Now we're going to take this layer, drop it onto the New Layer icon, do the same thing. Edit, Free Transform. We're going to select the top middle of these icons says nine little boxes up here. We're going to add 30 to 45, which is going to give us 75. We're going to click the "Check mark". You'll see here that we've created a quarter of our kaleidoscope., Let's go and choose Image, Reveal All. We had to do this one manually. It's just the way that the smart objects work. But because we're building up something that's going to be able to be edited later on. It really is worth the work to create it. Now that we've created a quarter of this, it's going to be easy to create the rest. We're going to click on the topmost layer Shift click on the bottom layer here, and we're going to drag and drop all three of them onto the New Layer icon. That's going to create a second quarter. Now with a three still selected, we are going to create the rest of the kaleidoscope. First of all, we're going to choose Edit, Transform, and we're going to flip this horizontally. This is this side of the kaleidoscope. I'm just going to drag them over here and line them up. I'm going to make sure that there's no spaces and there is a space right now, so I'm just going to move it in. It's battered, nice and neatly up here. If I need to, I'm going to check and make sure that there is no space here. I think I've gone a bit too far I'm just going back to the Move tool, just going to move it out a little bit. I'm back in until I get it nicely lined up. Control or Command 0, just to move back out. Now I'm going to take these three paces, and I'm going to drag and drop them onto the New Layer icon again. That's creating another quarter of my kaleidoscope. I'm going to choose Edit, I'm going to choose Transform. This time I want to flip them vertically. This is this pace. I'm just going to move it into position. I'm using the smart guides to line it up. You don't have smart guys just Zoom in there and make sure everything's nicely aligned. I'm going to wildly three pieces is still selected, drag and drop them onto the New Layer icon. Then we're going to Edit, Transform, and we're going to flip this horizontally to make the last pace of our kaleidoscope. I'm just move that into position. Then we're going to press Control or Command 0 to Zoom back out, and will choose Image, Reveal All to see our kaleidoscope. Everything is looking pretty good in this kaleidoscope. If you need to, you can Zoom in a little bit and just make sure that your lines are right. If they're not aligned, just go back in and select the groups of paces, and just move them into position so you can manipulate them as groups of three the same way as you created them in the first place. I think I've just about got mine looking right now and I'll.\ Zoom back out. Now we've created basic kaleidoscope shape. We're going to gather all of these spaces up together, and we're going to make them a Smart Object too. Click on the top one, Shift, click on the bottom one, right-click and choose convert to Smart Object, and you'll end up with one smart object. In the next video we're going to see how editable this really is.
6. Making Kaleidoscopes - Part 5: Now we've gone ahead and created our kaleidoscope using Smart Objects. At this stage, there is no difference between this particular kaleidoscope and the one we did in the first videos, except that this one was a whole lot more complex to create in the first place. But we did all the Smart Object work so that we could edit this kaleidoscope live. Let's see, how are we going to do that. I'm going to go to the last panel here, and I'm going to locate this little Smart Object thumbnail, and I'm going to double-click on it. What it does is it opens up and shows us the contents of the top Smart Object. What this is the file, we can see up the top here it says Layer 0 and it'll say copy something. Mine's copy 12 PSB, because of the files I've been working with. But you'll have a separate file and it'll be a PSB file. That is a set of layers that are contained in this topmost Smart Object. I'm going to open that up, and I'm going down to the very bottom one of these, and I'm going to double-click on it's Smart Object icon. That opens up the original paces that we were working with. I'm going to the bottom-most layer here, and I'm going to double-click on that icon. Every time I'm doing this, I'm going further into the history of working with this document, and always varying paces that we use to create our kaleidoscope are all still there. So here's our original triangle shape, and here's our original image. Well, I'm going to click on the original image, I'm going to select the move tool, and I'm going to move the image within this triangle. I'm going to find a different portion of the image to be my kaleidoscope. I just need to make sure that I don't move it so much that I see this maroon color, that's handy that we used a dark color for the triangle because it's going to let us see if we've gone too far and added some of the background into kaleidoscope. Once I've done that, what I'm going to do is click this close icon. I'm going to be asked if I want to save this document and I do. What I want to do is save the changes that I've made to the Smart Objects. So I'll click "Yes". Now when we go back up one layer, we're going to say that this is now a different slice of the image. This object is very different and I'm going to close it. Again, I'll be prompted to save it, and so I'm going to say yes, so I'll click "Yes". Now Photoshop is doing some thinking because it had to adjust this document now which is a series of layers, all of which relate to that initial Smart Object. I'm going to close this document too, and I'm going to click "Yes". Now we're back to the final PSD file that I saved and it has this Smart Object in it. You can say that working with Smart Objects, although it took us longer to set up the document in the first place, we've been able to create a different kaleidoscope by just going into these nested Smart Objects and making changes to the original document. Now, there's something else that we can do. Because this is one set of Smart Objects, let's see what happens when we make a duplicate of this layer, but we break the Smart Object link on this one. To do this, we need to use a special command so I'm going to select this layer here, I'm going to choose Layer, I'm going down to Smart Objects, and I want to do New Smart Object via Copy. We've got two at the moment, identical Smart Objects. Let's go to this top object and let's drill down to find the original Smart Object. Double-click on this one, double-click on the bottom-most layer here, double-click on the bottom-most layer here, and we're back to our original object. I'm going to the fabric, and I'm going to move it around again to find yet another different portion of the image. Having done that, I'm going to close this and I'll click "Yes", close this Click "Yes", Close this, and click "Yes" to save it. But now when we look in the last pallet here, you can see that we have two totally different kaleidoscopes. Because we use this option Layer, Smart Objects, New Smart Object via Copy, we copied the Smart Object layer, but we broke the link to the original Smart Object, which allows us to then manipulate this as a second Smart Object. If we just wanted one that was always going to be an identical copy of this one, we would just drag it onto the New Layer icon. But the Layer Smart Object, New Smart Object via Copy makes a duplicate of this Smart Object but breaks the original link so we're getting a second Smart Object. Now we can do the things with this kaleidoscope that we did with the earlier one. We can go to the move tool, hold Shift and Alt and just size this up. We still got a similar color scheme, but this time we've got two completely different kaleidoscopes and we can make as many of these as we like. It's very simple. Let's take this one. Will go to Layer, Smart Objects, New Smart Object via Copy. This is an identical Smart Object. Double-click, double-click, double-click, and now we're back to our original image. Now we can just move this into a different position. But you know what else we could do? We could use the totally different image. Let's go and find an image to use. Now, I went to unsplash.com and I found another image that has colors like this. So let's go and have a look at that. This is the photo that I found and interestingly, it's by the exact same photographer who shot the photograph of the fabric that way using. I'm going to download that, and I'm going to open it in Photoshop, and we're going to look and see how we could replace the image that we're using for this middle pace kaleidoscope. Here I am back in Photoshop and I've just opened up this image. I want to crop a pace out of it that we can use for our kaleidoscope. I'm just looking at these bottles, and I think I want to rotate this as well, Image Rotation, and I'll just rotate this 90 degrees clockwise. Now, I want to take this layer here and I want to put it in layer 0 PSB because that's this layer over here, which is the original pace of my kaleidoscope. I'm just going to right-click on this background layer, I'm going to choose Duplicate Layer, and in here I'm going to send it to layer 0 PSB and click "Okay". Now let's go to layer 0 PSB, and we can see our image here. Well, all we need to do is to get rid of this clipping layer and clip this one instead. I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the trash can. I'm going to click up here, I'm going to just re-size this image a little bit because I want it to be just a little bit bigger so that's going to cover up this triangle nicely. Now I'm going to re-clip it, select the topmost layer, Layer, Create Clipping Mask and now it's clipped to this triangular shape. I'm going to move the image into position so I find a nice pace of these bottles to use. When I'm done with that, I'm going to close this and save it. This is the original bottle image that has just reappeared. I'm just going to cause that. I don't want to save it because I don't want to save those changes. We're back now into the second step of the collage, so we're going to close this one and we are going to save it. Now we're going to get a kaleidoscope with this new set of images, and we're going to close it because it's another PSB file, and we are going to save it. Then it's going to land here in our original collage so we can go to it and for example, re-size it. It's got similar colors to the original pace that we used. I might want to turn this off and use this, or I might want to use the pace in the middle. But we've got so much flexibility by creating these kaleidoscopes as Smart Objects. A little bit more difficult to set them up this way, but the potential for creating really interesting designs is far greater. Now, just as we did with the first kaleidoscope that we created, we can fill in the corners. Let's go to this Smart Object. I'm going to drag and drop it onto the New Layer icon so I have an exact copy that is linked back to the same image. These two use the exact same image. I'm going to check how big my image is. I'm going to choose Image, Image Size, and right now I'm running at 5076 pixels. I'm going to write that down, and I'm going to calculate half of that value. Half of that's going to be 2,538. I'm just going to cancel out of here. I'm going to select the bottom-most layer because that's the one I want to break up. I'll choose Filter, Other Offset. I'm going to type in here the value that is half of the width of the image 2,538. I'm going to do 2,538 here as well and click "Okay". Now we've filled the corners of this kaleidoscope with a broken up pace of the original image. Again, this is a Smart Object and the offset filter has been applied as a Smart filter to it. There's a lot of potential here for creating all kaleidoscopes in Photoshop. Your project for this class is going to be to make a kaleidoscope and how complex a kaleidoscope you make is entirely up to you. You can make one of the simpler ones and nest them in on top of each other, or you can go and more complex and experiment using Smart Objects in Photoshop to create your kaleidoscopes. When you've finished your kaleidoscope project, post it for us to all enjoy. I really hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about creating kaleidoscopes in Photoshop and also about working with Smart Object. If you enjoyed this course, and when you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people, people just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at 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.
7. Kaleidoscope extra content: I'm doing this video as an addition to the kaleidoscope class, because I've had questions from a few people that relates to filling in the background with some of these kaleidoscopes. Now, the one I'm particularly going to address, although it relates to practically anybody who wants to fill in these backgrounds, is somebody who wanted to crop this to a circle, and then fill in the corners, and they didn't want the kaleidoscope to go full width of the background on this layer. They wanted the background pieces to fill in the area. I'm going to show you, [inaudible] work around for this. I'm going to start by cropping this to a circle. I'm going to select the circle of the Ellipse tool here. I'm going to hold down the shift key, as I drag out a circle. I'm going to place that pretty much in position where I want to crop this image. To move it, I'm just holding the space bar as I work. I'm thinking that this is pretty near the right size, so I'm going to let go of the left mouse button. If I want to just adjust a little bit, I'll choose "Select" and then "Transform Selection". This lets me transform the selection, but not actually make it at this stage. I just want to make sure it's pretty evenly placed over this particular kaleidoscope, so I click the "Check Mark." I have this layer here selected. I'm going to choose "Select", "Inverse" to select what is not already selected and just press "Delete." Now, I have a circle, and what I'm going to do is crop this, all the way to the very edges of the shapes. I'm going to choose, "Select", "Deselect", so deselect that selection. I'm making sure that my snap is turned on, because I need this crop to snap in to the edges of my new kaleidoscope shape. Then I'll click the "Check Mark." This is the setup. Before I go to the next step, I want to make this a fixed size. I'm going to choose "Image", "Image Size", and I want to be a nice round number. At the moment it's 6339, I'm going to make it 6300. Just so it's an even number, I'll click "Okay." I'm going to remember that value. I'm going to right-click here, and I'm going to choose "Duplicate Layer". I want to duplicate this to a brand new document. I'll click "New" and click "Okay." Now we have a brand new document here that has a kaleidoscope in it. Here's the original kaleidoscope over here. You're not seeing any different because the two documents are identical at this stage. Now, at this point I'm going to run my offset filters because I want to break this image up, so I'm going to choose "Filter", "Other", "Offset". The value of the width of this document was 6300, so I'm going to have that. It's going to be 3150 and 3150 here. I'm going to click "Okay." Now we've broken the image up into its component pieces. Next up, I want to take each of these pieces onto a new layer. I'm going to firstly put in some guides. I'm going to choose" View", "New Guide". I'm going to put one in at 50 percent vertical. I'm going to put one in at 50 percent horizontal. It's going to make it a whole lot easier to break this image into its component pieces. I'm going to the Rectangular Marquee Tool. I'm going to select over this corner of the document, and just line up my selection very carefully to my guides. Now, "Layer", "New", "Layer Via Cut". I'm going to turn that off. Now I'm going to do it to this piece over here. I'm going to come in from this top corner, and just line up everything very, very carefully to these guides. "Layer", "New", "Layer Via Cut". But first of all, I want to make sure I'm on the right layer, which I wasn't. So let's go and do that again. "Layer", "New", "Layer Via Cut". I'm going to turn that one off. Going to make sure I select this bottom most layer. I'm going to come in from this side with my Rectangular Marquee Tool, just making sure that I get that line up the middle of the document, the vertical line, the horizontal doesn't matter so much because I've got nothing in this area anyway to run into. So "Layer", "New", "Layer Via Cut". Now, each of these pieces on it's own separate layer, I don't need my guides anymore, so I'm going to clear my guides. But I'm going to go and get the Move Tool. I'm going to move all of these shapes into the bottom corner of my document. Because what I'm going to do next, is to shrink the document a little bit, I don't want to lose this. They're in the corner. Next up, I want to make a selection that is smaller than my starting image. My starting image was 6300 pixels in size. I want to reduce that by about 10 percent. That's going to take me to around 5700. I'm going to do this using the Rectangular Marquee Tool. I'm going to select a fixed size, and I'm going to type in here, 5700 pixels by 5700 pixels, and hit "Tab." Now I'm going to drag out a selection that is 5700 by 5700 pixels in size and over, and including the bottom edge of this document because that's got all the action pieces in it, if you like. Now I've got that selection. I'm just going to crop to it with "Image", "Crop". Now, this image is considerably smaller than it was by 10 percent. Let's go and put little pieces of the image back into position. I'm going to turn off all these pieces, and just concentrate on this one, which is going up in the top corner, and just making sure that it's going to snap there. If it isn't snapping visibly, I'm going to use the alignment options to do that. Now that I've done that, let's go and get this one, I'm going to control or command [inaudible] day to deselect anything that's currently selected. Going to push this into the top corner up here. We'll go and get this one. This one's going into this bottom corner, make sure it snaps. Then this final one is going into this corner. It shouldn't have to move because it was already in position. Now we've got a seamless background for our kaleidoscope. It's very even around the edges. So when we put our circular kaleidoscope in the middle, everything is going to fit really nicely. We've got this nice edge happening here, so everything is looking really, really good. Let's go back to our kaleidoscope image, and let's take this layer with us. I'm just going to right-click "Choose Duplicate Layer," put it in untitled document, which is the one we just created, click "Okay." Let's go to this image, and now I'm just going to shrink it down. I'm going to make sure it's centered on top of everything. Now we've got our kaleidoscope over a seamless background. If you want to see the effect I'm just going to re-color this top one a little bit using a hue saturation adjustment layer, just so that you can say that. We've got the seamless background edges behind it, created using part of the original kaleidoscope, so that our original kaleidoscope is well inside the bounds, and there is a border to it. If you wanted to be able to achieve that result, that's the approach that I would be taking to this task. If that's been a problem for you, I hope that this video has helped you see how you might be able to manipulate the kaleidoscope pieces to get something that is a little bit more like what you want.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
