Misprint: Smart Texturing In Photoshop

1. Course Trailer: Hi guys. I'm Jamie Bartlett, graphic designer and hand letter behind the pairpairs.com. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to add a misregistered print effect to your artwork, completely inside of Photoshop, no outside resources needed. This effect uses ink texture, color blending, imperfect edges and misregistered color passes to give your design a completely custom, awesome-looking misprint in texture. The best part is, you can easily reuse this effect once it's built on any other designs at any other resolution. It's totally non-destructive, and dynamically updates based on whatever you apply it to. For the class project, you'll be designing a retro ad for your favorite app, like this one. This class is for anyone. Even if you're a Photoshop beginner, you'll be able to follow along just fine with my instructions. I'm always here for any questions you might have. I can't wait to see what you guys create. 2. Jump Start Your Project: For the class project, you're going to be designing a retro ad for your favorite app. You can design this in either Photoshop or Illustrator. As you design, make sure to remember to keep your design simple and limit yourself to just a few colors, maybe just two or three. If you do design and illustrator, you'll need to bring each color into Photoshop as its own layer. For my project, I chose Instagram. Here's what I designed. So to get your project started, pick your favorite app and post that to your project page now. 3. Resources: Feel free to customer design your ad, but if you need a little help getting your design going, here are some great resources. Retrovectors has some great illustrations in the style of this project. Don't forget, if you have a subscription to Creative Cloud, there are some great ready to use graphics in their assets library. Then lastly, Fontsquirrel.com is a great resource for some really nice fonts. Be sure to check out their retro category. 4. Getting Started: To get started, we first need to set up our Photoshop document. So we're going to go to File, New. I'm going to make my document a square because my final artwork is a square. You can make yours whatever ratio you want. Just make sure to set the height to at least 2,000 pixels high that way you have plenty of resolution to work with. So if you're going to do a three by two, you would do a height of 2,000 and a width of 3,000 pixels. Since mine is square, I'm going to make both of them 2,000. We'll make sure the resolution is 72 and the color mode is RGB. Once you have that all set, we can click OK. We're going to build a sample design first, then once we build the effect will be able to switch out our class project design. I'm going to start by typing up two text layers. There is one, and two. I'm going to go ahead and make them a little bit bigger and lay them out how I want them. Then I'll change the color. For the "mis" part, I'm going to make that cyan. So I'll type in 100 percent c for cyan and make all the other colors zero. Then I'm going to make "print" magenta. So a 100 percent there and zero everywhere else. Now I want to add a stripe in the background and I'm going to change the width of that to 2,000 pixels wide and the color to yellow. I'm also going to change this x to zero so that it's centered on my document. Also, I'm going to go ahead and change the height to 1,000 pixels tall, just to round it off and then set the y-axis to 500 pixels so it's centered. I'll put that yellow rectangle behind my text and we have one more thing to do before we start building our effect. I want to change the background color to look like a paper color. So you can actually delete the background layer and make a colorful layer. To do that, you're going to go down here, create a new adjustment layer, and go to Solid Color and then you can pick whatever color background you want. This is the exact color that I want. Once you have your color picked, you can click OK and make sure that color fill is behind your rectangle and rename it background. Now that our design is build, I'll save it. I'm going to name mine misprint and click Save. Now the design is done and we can build the effect. 5. Layer Styles & Color: The first step of the effect is adding layer styles to each color. To open up the layer style, I'll double-click on my first layer, and add a color overlay that's set to black. Once that's set, I'll click ''Okay'', and add an inner glow. The blend mode needs be set to normal, and the opacity to 72. The color needs to be white, which mine already is, source set to center, choke set to something around 26, and size around nine. Now we're all done with that, so we can click ''Okay'', and copy the same layer style to the other two layers. So right-click on the effects, and say copy layer style and select the remaining two layers by holding Shift and clicking, then right-click, and say paste layer style. Now we need to convert each one of these into its own smart object. To do that, we need to right-click on each layer and convert to smart object. Then we'll go into each one of the smart objects by double-clicking on the smart object, and change the size of the document to match the size of our source document. So go up to Image, Canvas Size, and change it to whatever your document is. Mine was 2,000 by 2,000 pixels. Click ''OK''. Then we need to make sure to save it here so that it updates in our source document. Now you can close this one and do the same thing in your other two layers. Just make sure to keep saving. Next, we need to center all of our artwork in this document. To show you what I mean by that, I'll transform the print layer by pressing ''Command T''. So you can see that the bounding box is showing the 2,000 by 2,000 pixel document, but it's off centered. That's because the word print is centered inside the smart object. But what we want is this smart object to be centered in this document. To do that, I'll just type in 1,000 by 1,000 on the x and y. Your numbers might be different if your document is a different resolution or different aspect ratio. But to send in your artwork, these two numbers should be half of the width, and half of the height. Once you have it centered, you can click the check mark, and I'll do the same thing for the other two layers. This one should already be centered. Yes, it is. Now we need to go back into our smart objects and re-position the text layers back to what we wanted. So double-click on your smart object, and move this around until you think you have it where you want it, save it. It's not that important that this is really precise and exactly where you want it, because we're just using this document to setup the effect. Go back into your misprint, and click on your other smart object, and move this one where you want it. Make sure they're both saved. I just want to move print over a tiny bit more. All right, that looks good. You can go ahead and close your smart objects. It's a good idea to close out of your smart objects when you're not using them. So make sure to do that. As we continue with this process, let's make sure to keep saving so we don't lose anything. Next, we need to group each of our objects individually in their own group. To do this, click on the first layer, and the shortcut for grouping something is Command G for a Mac or Control G on a PC. Do that for each of your layers. Now we're going to recolor our layers by adding a color fill on each of our groups. The print layer, I wanted it to be magenta. So go down here, pick solid color, I want mine to be magenta. So I'm going to change that here, and click ''Okay''. I need to move it just above the group that I want it to effect. Right now, it's going over the entire document and I want it just to go over the word print, so I need to make a clipping mask. To do that, hover between the color fill layer and the group, and hold option. You'll get this little arrow, and then click. Now it's applied only to the word print. Now I need to do the word mis. We add another solid color, and I want to make that cyan. Click ''Okay'', and bring it outside of the group, and then make that a clipping mask as well. We have to do it one more time for the rectangle. I want the rectangle to be yellow. You bring it outside of the group, and create a clipping mask. Now our colors are all set up. 6. Blending: Next, we're going to adjust the blend if settings of each Smart Object. Double-click on the first layer print, and right here you can see this is where we'll find the Blend If setting. If you've never used these sliders before, what it does, is it adjusts the transparency of the layer based on the value of the layer. You can make darker or lighter parts of the layer transparent. To show you what this does really quick, I'll move the window out of the way so you can see my layer. If I drag the white way to the left, you can see that the middle part becomes transparent because we have an inner glow on that, so it's brighter in the middle. That's why the middle becomes transparent, and because we have a colorful layer above it of magenta, it's keeping everything magenta, even though the inner glow is black and white. We don't actually want this arrow moved all the way to the left like this, because that creates a really harsh edge. I'll move it back and we want to split this arrow so that it creates a much softer edge. To do that, you'll hold Option or Alt on a PC and click the arrow and it splits it. So we'll move this one to around 185 and click "OK". It doesn't really do much right now, but once we start adding the effect, it'll start becoming more transparent, then we want to copy this layer style to the other two smart objects. To do that right-click and say, Copy Layer Style, and then right-click on your other layers and say, Paste Layer Style. Next, we need to set each of these three groups to multiply. We can do all this at the same time, if you hold Command or Control on a PC, then change the Blending Mode to multiply. Don't worry about how it's looking right now. We still have a little ways to go. 7. Smart Filters: Now we'll start adding filters to our smart objects. The first one we're going to add is ripple, and we'll just do it on the print layer. Make sure you have that layer selected, and then go up to the top to Filter, Distort, and Ripple. You can see this just roughens up our edges a little bit. I'm going to change mine to 40, and size to small. Click "Okay", and you can zoom in a little bit to see how that's working. You want this to be saddle just to add a little bit of imperfection to your work, so make sure you don't overdo it. Next we're going to add the filter Median. Go back to Filter, Noise, and Median. This is going to smooth everything out a little bit and round out the corners of our text. I'm going to do three pixels. You can see that without it, it's pretty sharp. But once the effect is added, it's nice and round, and then click "Okay." Now because we made each of our layers smart objects, we get to add these smart filters. The great thing about these smart filters is that we can always go back, and adjust them, it's non-destructive and doesn't permanently change our artwork. Just to show you, we can always go back and change the settings by clicking on the "Smart Filter", and so I'll double-click on "Median". We can adjust that, change it to eight. You can see how that affected the design, I'll click "Okay", and it updated my artwork. But I'll just undo that because I wanted it to be three pixels. Next, we're going to add Noise. We go back to Filter, Noise, Add Noise. We're going to set it to seven percent Gaussian and monochromatic, and click "Okay." Now that we added the noise, you can see that there's a little bit of transparency in the letters, that's from the Blend If settings we used earlier. Next [inaudible] the Gaussian Blur. Go to Blur, Gaussian Blur, and we want to do just a small amount. We're going to do 0.3, and this is just to soften the texture of the grain a little bit. Click "Okay", then we'll add a Difference Clouds. But first, make sure that your foreground and background colors are set into black and white. Black for the background, and white for the foreground. You can do this by just hitting D on the keyboard, and then X to switch them. Now we'll go up to Filter, Render, Difference Clouds, and move that to the bottom of the effect stack. The reason we want that on the bottom is because all the effects above that is affecting everything below it, so the order is very important. Another cool thing about these smart effects is that we can adjust the blending options of these effects. All we have to do is double-click on these arrows next to the effect. We want to change the blending mode of the Difference Clouds to Screen, and we want to turn the opacity of the effect way down, something to around 15 percent, and then we can hit "Okay." The Difference Clouds just added a little bit of variation to our texture. It super subtle right now, so let me turn the opacity up, so you can see what's happening. We'll turn it back up to around 50 percent. Now if I turn on and off, you can see how it adds more or less texture on certain areas. As you can see, there's more yellow coming through here and less up here, but this is another effect that we want to be settle. I'm going to go back in and change the opacity back down to 15 percent. That was the last effect, so now we can copy it to our other smart objects. To do that, hover over your smart filters, hold down Option on the keyboard or Alt on a PC, and click, and drag them back to your other smart objects. Now you can see that it's also on the word mis, and we just need to add it to the yellow, and there you go. 8. Adjustments & Knockout: Since the yellow is very close to the background color, it's hard to see the texture coming through. We want to adjust that a little bit, and we can do that by adjusting the blend if settings of that smart object. To do that, double-click on the squares of the yellow layer and just slide this around till you get what you want. As you can see, we drag it way over here. A lot comes through. I'm just going to adjust it right about there for now. Hit "Okay". I'll zoom out so we can see what's going on. I think I did that a little too much, so I'm going to go back and readjust that. I like that. If we were actually to print this in the real-world using cyan magenta and yellow ink, we'd be printing that in three separate passes. First the yellow pass, then the cyan, then the magenta. But you can see that the cyan and magenta are no longer cyan and magenta. They turn kind of green and are more red color, because they're printed directly on the yellow and are blending with yellow. This would actually happen in the real world. What we would have done to get around that is punch a hole in the yellow, the same as the letters that go on top of it so that the cyan and magenta words go straight to the paper rather than blending with the yellow. We're going to simulate that here by punching a hole in the yellow, the same color as the background color. We're going to use duplicates of the same smart objects to do it. That way, if we update any of the smart objects, the copies will update too. Let's take the printing group and the color fill and duplicate them. Duplicate those by pressing Command or Control J. Then we'll remove all the effects except for medium and ripple. To do that, just right-click on the effect and click "Delete Smart Filter". Now change the color here to the paper color. You can just sample that. Click "Okay". Now we have to change the blending mode of this back to normal. You can see it's the same shape as the word print. It's just the paper color now. We also need to take off the blend if settings for this layer. Click on these intersecting squares and drag this all the way back to the right. Now drag the group and the color fill layer right below the cyan and magenta and just above the yellow. Now duplicate the word "MIS" this time, just the smart object. Now drag this into the same group that we just moved. Now that both the smart objects are duplicated and are colored the same color as the background, you can see that the words now show up as cyan and magenta the way that they should. You can see that the paper color is punched out through the yellow. Now that we drag this layer into this group, we need to delete all these smart filters so that we can copy the ones from print. Right-click and clear smart filters and then go down here, a hold Option or Alt on a PC. Click on "Smart filters" and drag that up to the word "MIS" and then we need to go back in here to take off the blend if settings. 9. Misregistration: Now we want to offset the cyan and magenta layers from the white background so it looks like it was misprinted. We need to make sure to move the actual smart objects, not the group. Just to organize this a little bit, I'm going to rename this group to knockout. We want to make sure to leave this layer where it is, so I'm just going to go ahead and lock it, and close it. Then I'll go up to the cyan and magenta layers and offset those, but we want to make sure not to move the group, we want to move the actual smart object. I'll use the arrow keys to nudge it over a little bit just so it's slightly off, and then do the same thing for the magenta smart object but in a different direction. Because, remember, if we were doing this for real, you print the two colors separately. At this point, you can even add a little rotation, so it's not perfectly straight. The easiest way to do this is just to transform it by pressing Command T or Control T on a PC and going up to this angle right here and doing something very small, because even on one degree angle it's probably going to be too much. Let's try 0.25. I think that's even a little too much, let's do 0.15. I think that's good. Click the checkmark. Yeah, I like that, and I'm just going to leave the cyan straight. If you decide you don't like that or you want it more later on, you can always go back in to the transform of that, and the number is still here, so you can always adjust that. This is why it's important to adjust the smart object and not the group, because if you did it to the group, the numbers wouldn't be preserved. If you notice around the cyan and magenta layers, the texture stops around the edges and it's darker, but that doesn't happen on the yellow layer around the knockout. We need to cheat that a little bit, and we're going to do that with an outer glow. Go back down and unlock the knockout layer and double-click on it, and we're going to add an outer glow. We need to change the blend mode to normal, bring the opacity up to 100, and change the color here to the yellow background. But we can't make it the actual 100 percent yellow because the yellow is being multiplied onto the background color. Just to show you, if we change it to 100 percent yellow, you can see that it's much brighter than the blended yellow. What we need to do is instead just sample the yellow. When you sample the color, you want to try to find the darkest part of the yellow. Click Okay. Then we need to change the spread to 50 percent and the size to 15 pixels. Now you can see that there's a solid edge around the knockout group as well, just like there is around the cyan and magenta. That's the entire effect. Now we can swap out this sample artwork with our class project's artwork. 10. Swapping Out Art: Now just to show you how this is working, I'm going to edit one of the words and show you how the art updates automatically, with both the color and the neck out. I'm just going to change this here to TEST, click "Save", go back to our original Photoshop file and you can see that both the cyan and the white knockout layer are updated. Because they're both based on the same smart object. If I zoom in here, you can see that all of our little details are still preserved and dynamically updated. That's what's so great about smart text string. You can reuse this effect as many times as you want. Now, let's put our artwork in this. Here's what I designed for my class project. This design is a little more complicated than the design we use to build the effect, because this design has multiple knockouts. In our original misprint design, we had one knockout on the yellow. For my class project, it needs the paper to be coming through on the blue and on the black. To make things a little easier, I actually knock them out of the design. I'll show you, if I turn off the background layer, you can see that there are holes in both the black and the blue. If I turn off the black layer, you can see that there are holes in the blue layer where the black would be. Also my artwork is the same size as the document that we built the effect on, so easily translate over into that document. I'll select my black layer, select all by pressing "Command" or "Control A", and copy, and go into my main document, and go into one of the top colors smart objects, and then paste it in here. Now I can drag the effects from our text onto my artwork and delete the word print. I'll save this and I make sure I close it, and you can see our artwork is updated. No, it's not the right color but we'll get to that later. Now I'll go back into my artwork, and copy over the blue as well. We'll paste this under this Smart object. We need to add the effects over on this layer 2, and delete the word TEST. Save it, and close it. Now, our artwork is in this document. My design is only two colors, so I can turn off the yellow group. I also need to turn off the knockout group, because I don't need that for this design. Now I'm left with these two colors, but for my design, the magenta needs be changed to black. But I'm not going to do 100 percent black. Actually know that mine is 1B, 1B, 1B. It's just a real dark shade of gray. That helps to let more of the texture show through. Click "Okay". Then my blue color, I need to know what blue I want that to be. I'll go and sample that, and I can copy that and paste that into this color. Now we can change the offset of the two different colors, because right now it's a little too extreme. Also, I'm going to rename these to keep it organized. This is my black layer, and this is my blue. Now to readjust these, remember we don't want to move the group, we want to move the smart object. I'm going to switch to this Move tool and adjust the blue, have that a little off, and then go up here and adjust the black. I want the blue to actually be lined up on the edge. To center it, I'm going to transform and change this to 1,000 and 1,000, and click the "Check Mark", and then I like the black where it is. That's all you have to do to swap out the artwork and preserve the effect. 11. Speckled Texture Overlay: Now as a little bonus, I want to add some speckled texture to the background and will also generate this using smart filters and effects. Just to keep things organized, I'm going to collapse all of the groups. Now that I have all my artwork in here, I'm going to save this as a copy so that we don't lose anything from the template that we built. So File, Save As, and I'm just going to name this misprint instagram and click Save. Now since I don't need the knockout or the yellow layer for my art work, I'm going to go ahead and delete those. But you might need those depending on how you built your artwork. To start this speckled layer, we need to make a new blank layer. You can do this by clicking the New Layer icon down here. We need to fill this with black. If black is set to your background color down here, the easiest way to do this is hold Command or Control on a PC and then press Delete, and now convert that layer to a smart object by right-clicking, and Convert to Smart Object. Now, group that layer. I want this speckle to be the same color as a black ink. I'm going to duplicate this color fill, and remember that's Command or Control J, and bring that above the group, and then set a clipping mask by holding Option or Alt on a PC and clicking there. Now I'm going to group the color fill with the group that it's attached to, and rename this black speckles. Now go to the smart object and add noise. Go up to Filter, Noise, Add Noise, and we'll change it to 15 percent uniform and monochromatic and click Okay. Now we want to add some filters from our filter gallery. But first we want to make sure that our foreground and background color are set to black and white. If yours aren't, remember, the easiest way to do this is just to press DM in the keyboard. We want the foreground to be black, and the background to be white. Now go up to Filter, Filter Gallery. The first one we want to do is torn edges. So go to Torn Edges, and because we've already done this, the numbers are set the way that I want them, but make sure to change edge to 2, 4, and 11. To add another effect on top of this, we need to go down here and click New effect layer. Change this to Stamp, and change in numbers to 1 and 9 and press Okay. Now we need to adjust the Blend if settings of the smart object. So double-click on the Smart Object, and this time we're going to do the opposite of what we did for our artwork. We're going to split the black by holding Option or Alt on a PC and drag it all the way out to somewhere around 200 or so. As you can see what that did, it got rid of all the black in that layer, just leaving the speckles, but they're showing up as black because we have the color fill clipping mask on top of it. You can see here, see they're are white, but we want them to be black. To get another color of randomly generated speckles, I'm going to duplicate my black speckles and then I'll change this here to say white speckles, change the color to my paper color by sampling my document, and then I'll delete the filter gallery by right-clicking and clicking on Delete Smart Filters and then I need to re-add those same filters. Go back up to Filter, Filter Gallery, and they should all still be there. I'll click Okay and there you go. Let's say I wanted a little less of the black texture. I'll go to my black speckles, double-click on Filter Gallery, go to Torn Edges. Using the up and down arrows on my keyboard, I'll go ahead and adjust these slightly. Lets see what changing it to two looks like. Yeah, that got rid of some more. I like that better. There's your background texture. Remember, all the textures we generated, you can always go back in and readjust them. If you wanted a little less texture on the black banner here, all we need to do is go into our black group and go to the Blend if settings, so double-click on the Smart Object and we can adjust this. If you drag it to the left more, more texture shows through. If you drag it to the right more, less texture shows through. That's all there is to it guys. 12. Thanks!: That's it guys, thanks for taking my class. Once your project is complete, be sure to post it to your project page, and if you decide to share it on Instagram, be sure to tag me at Apairofpears. I love seeing your work. As always, if you run into any problems or have any questions, usually ask me on the Ask Me Anything discussion. Thanks again guys for taking my class. I'll see you next time.