Photo Texture Collage - Blending & Textures in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Photo Texture Collage in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, photo texture collage using blends and textures in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're looking at creating a textured collage in Photoshop. We'll start by making a reflection from half a photo, we'll add a gradient map to the image to enhance its colors and we'll blend that back into the image. Then we'll add a free for download texture and blend that in, and we'll finish the illustration by making some custom sun rays. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, 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 projects. If you're ready now, let's get started on creating a textured photo collage in Photoshop. 2. Photo Texture Collage - Part 1: Before we get started with this photo effect, I want to show you where I got the two images that I'm going to be using from, because you may want to download these images yourself. Now, the first one is coming from a site called unsplash.com, and it's by a photographer called Matt Lay, I'll give you the download link for this and this is the trays that we'll be using. Now, the second one is coming from one of my favorite texture artist, and this is skeletal myths who has a site at Flickr for free downloadable textures. Recently he moved his art over to shadow house creations and this is where we're getting today's texture from, it's here, it's called painted sonata, I'm going to give you that link so you can come and download that as well. Then we're going to start in Photoshop with Matlab's wonderful image here and we're going to open that and get ready to go with our textured collage effect. I now have this image icon in Photoshop and the first thing I'm going to do is put a guide down the middle of the image. I'll choose "View" and then "New Guide." It needs to be a vertical guide and I'm just going to type 50 percent and then click "Okay" and that makes a guide halfway down the image. I'm going to my rectangular Marquee tool, and the side of the image I'm going to use is this side, so I'm going to drag my rectangular marquee over this side of the image using the guide to line it up. I wanted a second copy of this, I'm going to choose Layer, New Layer via Copy. Then we'll go to the last pallet and you'll see that I have a second version of this side of the image on top of the original image. With this last selected, I'll choose edit and then I'm going to choose Transform, and I'll choose Flip Horizontal, that flips this horizontally. All I need to do now is to grab the Move tool and just move it over, so that it butts up against the other half of the image. I'm going to merge these two layers together now by right-clicking this top layer and choose Merged Down, you can also press "Control" or "Command E". We have a single image that is now a reflection of half of the original image. I don't need this guide anymore, so I'm going to choose View and then Clear Guides and that's just got rid of it. Next up we're going to apply what's called a gradient map to this image, I'm going to choose Layer and a New Adjustment layer and Gradient map, it's important that we do this as an adjustment layer because we're going to alter it quite a bit before we're finished with it, click "Okay." Now, this is the default gradient map, so I'm just going to click on it to open it and we're just going see what a gradient map even is. This is a gradient here and it goes from White to Black. What happens when you apply a gradient map to the image is that whatever is on this side of the gradient is applied to the darkest pixels in the image. Whatever is on this side of the gradient is applied to the lightest pixels of the image. The ones in the middle are applied to the mid tones. What we have here is white being applied to the darkest areas of the image, and black being applied to the lightest. Which is giving us essentially what we might think of as being an old black and white film negative effect. But there are other color gradients that we get shipped with Photoshop and you can click on any of these in the dialogue just to say what they do to your image. It can be very exciting when you see these gradient maps applied to your image because there's lots of potential for doing fun things here. Now, the gradient that we want is not in the default set in Photoshop, so you'll need to append it because it's shipped with Photoshop, but it doesn't display here, we're going to click here on this icon and choose Color Harmonies tool. I'm going to choose to append because I don't want to lose these gradients, but I do want to append the new set. The one I want is this one here, and it's Gold, Teal, and Green, I've selected it and you can say that a mix of golden grain, I have been applied to the darker areas of the image in the mid tones, we've got this gold and turquoise color and on the very lightest areas of the image is going this gold saw click "Okay." Now, let's open the last pallet here, and let's have a talk about what we're going to do with this gradient map because right now it doesn't look particularly good. Well, gradient maps respond really well to the blend modes in Photoshop, I'm going to select the "Gradient Map Layer, " and go to the very first of my blend modes, which is dissolve on a Mac before you select the first blend mode, make sure that you're not using a Brush tool, select either the "Rectangular Marquee" tool or the "Move" tool, and then when you select the very first of these blend modes, you can continue to navigate the Blend Mode list, but pressing "Shift Plus," when you get the very last one, the max going to roll around back to the beginning again. When we get to the end on the PC by pressing the "Down Arrow" key on the PC we are going to stop, we'll have to come back up by pressing the "Up Arrow" key. This is dark and blend mode, Multiply, Color Burn, this is actually the one we're going to use, but we're going down to the bottom just to see what we get as we go. Linear Burn, these are all a darkening blend modes, darker color and now we're into the Lightning Blend modes with lighten screen Color Dodge, Linear Dodge, Lighter Color, now, the contrast the Blend Modes, Overlay, Soft Blight, Hard Light, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, and now, the funky blend mode with difference and exclusion, Subtract, Divide, and then hue, Saturation, Color, and Luminosity and that's the end. I'm going back up and I'm going to select "Color Burn." Now, one of the reasons why I selected Color Burn was I really like what it did to the skies, so I would say what it does, it adds this blue color into the sky. But I'm not too happy with what it does to the tree or to the ground here, what I'm going to do in the next video is I'm going to work on this mask. I'm going to remove the effect from some parts of the image less than them in other parts, and just leave them at full strength in other parts. 3. Photo texture collage - Part 2: To adjust how the gradient map with its color burn blamed mode interacts with the image below, we're going to paint on the mask here. I'm going to click on the mask and I'm going to make sure that I have black and white paint, select this. I'm going to press the letter D and then I want to paint with black so I'm going to press the letter X or just click this icon just to flip these colors around. Now, I want a brush and I want it to be quite large and quite soft. I'm going to come in here and select a brush that looks like this, a nice soft round brush. I want its hardness to be zero so it's got nice soft edges. I'm just going to measure it out on the image here. I think it needs to be just a little bit small, so I'm going to press the open square bracket K just to shrink it. The square bracket case can be used to increase and decrease a brush size. I find that very handy to just to be able to click with the square bracket case to adjust the brush, rather than having to go back up here and select the size because you really have no idea how big 1,000 pixel size brush is. I'm going to start by removing this gradient map effect in this area of the image I'm so making sure I have the mask selected, just going to paint over here with black. That's bringing back in the underlying image. I'm going to adjust the paint brush size as I work so that I mask out all of this area. Now I'm going to select mid gray. I'm going to select something around this area of gray. I'm going to paint in the middle of the image here to remove some of the gradient effect here. Now, I'm going to decrease my brush opacity as well so I'm not removing everything unless I want to, and I can remove it more heavily by just painting over the areas I've already painted over. I'm just going to work around here until I get an effect I like. Basically just using the gradient mask to affect the sky. Once I've finished with this, I'm ready to go and get my texture. I've already downloaded the texture and I'm going to open it now in Photoshop. With the texture image open in Photoshop, I want to copy it across to my other image. I'm going to right-click this layer and choose duplicate layer. I'm going to take it to the photo I'm working with and click "Okay". Let's go back to our original image now. You can say that the texture is quite a bit smaller than the image that I'm working with but since it's a texture and we're going to blend it in, that's probably not too big of an issue. Going to stretch it so that it covers the entire image and then click the check mark. Now I want to blend this texture in with the underlying image. Again, I'm going to make sure I'm not using a brush tool on the mark. Select the first of these blend modes, use shift plus on the mark, use the down arrow key on the PC and just run through these blend modes looking for something that is interesting. The contrasted blend modes are where I want to be and I'm actually going to select this one. This is hard light, but let's keep going through the blend modes and just see what else there is. Now we're down to luminosity. But I think for this image and for what we're working with right now, something in this set of contrasted blend modes is going to be the best option. Here we have overlay, soft light, hard light, which is what I'm going to use, vivid light, which is pretty extraordinary as well, linear light and pin light. Just as I go back up to hard light, one of the things that I'm seeing through this image here are some light sources in here. That's prompting me to think in terms of doing something with some light rays in this image, so that's what I'm going to do next. I'm going to build in a couple of hand created light rays. I'm going to create a new layer here by clicking on the new layer icon. Probably the easiest tool to create these light rays is going to be the Pen tool. But since we're just clicking with it, it shouldn't be too difficult to use. I click the Pen tool. I'm going to make sure I'm in Path mode, which is one of the three options here so it's path that I want to use. I'm going to start in the top corner of the image and I'm just going to come down to where I want the light ray to finish, which is about here. I'm just going to drag across and go back up here. Now, while I'm here, I think I'll draw the second one so I'm just going to click outside the top edge of the image. I'm going to drag out a second light ray here. Now I'm going to come back in and just click over the finishing point. I have a path that I'm now going to fill with some color and the color is going to be white, so white selected here. I need to go to the paths palette, which is this one here. You can also get to it by choosing window and then paths. What I need to do with this work path selected is to click here. This is the fill path with foreground color option. I have for the foreground color set to white. I know I'm on a brand new layer in the documents so I'm just going to click once to fill this path with white. Now I don't need the path any longer, so I'm just going to drag and drop it onto the trash can and I'm going back to my layers palette. Here is my path filled with white, which doesn't look very much like a light beam yet. But one of the things I want to do with this is to soften its edges because it's really quite a sharp edge light effect. With this layer selected, I'm going to blur it so I'll choose Filter, Blur and then Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is a go to blur. It's just a really nice blur for things like this and we want to blur it quite a bit. We want to soften the edges of this shape. I've got this set to about 36 pixels. Just pick something that gives you a nice soft effect and click Okay. Now we need to blend these into the underlying image and so we'll again, go down the blend modes looking for something that's going to blend these light rays in, but will also give us the light ray effect. It's going to need to be in something like one of these lightened areas or in these contrasted blend modes. You can see that we've really hit paint dirt here, overlay blend mode, just rocks, this effect is perfect. We're getting a little bit of light through the trees. The way that overlay blend mode works, is that it applies this effect differently to light and dark areas of the image. It's picking it up more in the lighter areas of the image and less than the darker areas, which is giving us the feeling that maybe this light source is behind the tree and we haven't had to do any selection work to get it there. I'm just going to test the rest of these contrasted blend modes. But as you can see, it really was overlay that was the one that we wanted. I'm just going to go back and pick up overlay. Soft light would also be a possibility, but I really like the shininess of this overlay blend mode. But I also think that these light rays are a little bit too intense so I'm just going to drag down its opacity a little bit to blend it in a little bit. If I think that it's affecting some of the image where it shouldn't be such as this grass here, then I can just add a layer mask to this layer. I'll go back to painting in black so I'll press D or click here on this icon to get the default colors, go back to my paintbrush. I've got a very low opacity here. It's about 57 or 59 percent and I've got a nice soft brush. I'm just going to size it down and just pick this up here and just try and remove it from the areas where I don't want it touching the foreground. I want the light rays more concentrated in the background and I can even remove it from the tree if I want to hear. There's our finished piece of art. This is the image that we started with. Well, it's part of the image that we started with. We did reflect it to create this starting point. We then added our gradient map and then blended it out in the places that we didn't want it to be. We added this amazing texture to the image, which gave us a lot of light, and we blended it in with the Hard Light blend mode. We finished off with a couple of light rays just to add some visual interests to the left-hand side of the image. Your project for this class will be to take an image of your choice and of course, you're very free to use the same image that I've used. You may want to because of the amount of detail in this effect. You'll reflect the image to produce this mirror image starting point, then add a gradient map to it and blend it in and out of the image as you wish. Find a texture and add a texture to the image and blend that in. Then if you see something in the image that you'd like to enhance, you could add some light rays. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned lots about working with textures and gradient maps and blend modes in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. 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. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.