Risograph: A Smart Effect In Photoshop

1. Getting Started: Hi guys, I'm Jamie Bartlett. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to make a risograph effect inside of a Photoshop. Risograph is a style of printing that prints one color at a time. You can use half-tones to reproduce photographs on a risograph printer. We're going to simulate that effect in Photoshop to create some really fun art. You can even blow it up to poster size, and print it very affordably. Let's get started. We first need to find the photo we want to apply this effect to. I like to find a lot of my photos at unsplash dot-com. Their photos are really great quality, and really high resolution. I'm going to use this cactus photo right here. I'm just going to download it, copy the image, and then go into Photoshop and say "File", "New". Since I have it copied, it automatically knows what size my photo is and makes my document that size. Click "Okay", and then press Command V or Control V on a PC to paste your image. Now, you need to resize the image to whatever size you want the final artwork to be. I'll go up to Image, Image size, change it to inches. I know that I want my width to be 21 inches. Then since I'm going to print mine, I'm going to change the resolution to 300, and click "Okay". Now, I'm going to convert my image to a Smart Object. Find your image in the Layers palette, right-click and click "Convert to Smart Object". 2. Building the Effect: Now, we can start applying the effect. Go up to Filter, Pixelate, and Color Halftone. I'm going to keep my radius at eight pixels, and then I'm going to change everything else to 45. Click OK and you can see, now everything is converted into dots. Next, I want to make this pure black and pure white. I'm going to do that by adding the Threshold Adjustment Layer. Now, I'm going to color this by adding a Color Fill, and we'll add a Solid Color. Pick whatever color you want, I'm going to pick a bright pink color. Let's try that. Then set the blending mode to Screen. When you look at these dots, you can see that they're all perfectly round. But I don't want it to look so digital so we're going to add a filter to add a little bit of distortion. Click on your Image Layer in your layer palette and go up to Filter, Filter Gallery. I'm going to make sure I only have one filter in my filter stack and here I have two. I need to delete one, and I want to change this from Torn Edges to Glass. I know that I want my numbers to be two and six, and the Texture to be set to Canvas, and the Scaling set to 100. These numbers might need to be adjusted based on your picture's resolution. But what we're going for is just a little bit of distortion on some of these circles, so nothing too extreme but just so it messes up the circles a little bit. That's what it looks like without it and this is what it looks like with it. Click OK. That's the basics of this effect. 3. Making Adjustments: Now here are a few things we can do if your effect needs adjusting. The first thing you can do is adjust the contrast. Let me zoom out and see how my image is looking. Now, because my images such high resolution, it's really hard to tell what the final is going to look like when it's all the way zoomed up, because the circles are so small that once it zoomed out like this, it starts to look like it's solid filled areas, when in reality it's not. But it still gives me a pretty decent idea of how the contrast of this image is. So one way is you can adjust the threshold. So click on your threshold layer, and then double-click, and by bringing this up or down, you can add more darks, or more lights., and then I'm going to zoom into 100 percent by pressing Command 1 on the keyboard, and now I'll adjust it here, so you can see how it's working. It's basically making the dots bigger or smaller. I'm going to reset my adjustment layer, and for a more controlled way of adjusting the contrast, I'm going to add a curves adjustment layer inside my smart object. I'm going to double-click on my image in the layers palette to open the smart object, and now I'm going to add a curves adjustment layer, and then you can bring down the darks more, bring up the lights if you want to add more contrast, or you can also, maybe you want to bring in some of that detail on that window. Do something like that. Now I need to save this to make sure it updates in my original Photoshop document. So I'll save that. So you can see how that added a lot more dark areas. This is before, this is after. So this step is really up to how you want your final image to look like. This image already has a lot of contrast. So I'm just going to leave my curves layer. 4. Adding a Border: Now that I have my image offset, I want to add a white border all the way around the edge. I'm going to find my rectangle tool. I have my stroke color set to white and my width set to one inch. I'm going to select all on my image by pressing command A, then I go to my info pallet. Right here I can see my exact width and height dimensions. So I'm going to click once on my picture, and I'm going to set this rectangle box to be the same width and height as my image. That's 21 inches by 32.223 inches. Click "Okay" and I need to move it, so it lines up with my image. Then I'll press command D to deselect everything, and there we have it. This image is all ready to be printed. 5. Resizing Your Photo: Now say you didn't want to print this, you just wanted to share it online. As you can see, viewing it on the computer at such a high resolution, the dots are so small that everything bleeds together. We need to decrease the resolution so that it looks like it's supposed to when you're viewing it on a computer. Go to image. Image size. Change the resolution to 72 and I'm going to change my width to be 1200 pixels. Click OK. Because this is a smart effect, all the filters update automatically. There it is resized. Now at this resolution, my dots are bigger than I want them to be. I can go back in to my color halftone and double-click. My radius is set to eight. I want to make that smaller. Let's try six. Click OK. It's looking better. I think they could still be a little smaller. Let's try four. It's a good idea to view it at a 100% when you're changing the dot size. I need to zoom in a little. I think the dots are the right size, but I think the distortion is messing it up just a little too much. I'm going to turn that down. Double-click on the filter gallery. I'm going to bring down the scaling of the effect down to 50%. Click OK, and that smoothed it down a little bit. I think that's working. Now I can save this as a JPEG and post it to my class project. 6. Swapping Out Photos: Another great thing about this being a smart effect, is that I can easily swap out my image and it preserves the effect. Let's go find another image. Let's try this flower one. Now, all I need to do is double-click on my image to open my smart object, and then I paste it in here. Now this image is much smaller, so I'm going to crop my document to this image. To easily do this, all I need to do is make a selection of that image. You can hold Command or Control on a PC and then click on the image in your layers palette, it makes a selection around your image. Then go over to your crop tool, make sure it's set to selection, and then press enter and enter again and you cropped it. Now we need to save this and then go back into our original document. As you can see, it's smaller in here, but I want to keep it at 1200 pixels wide, so I need to scale this up. I'll press Command T and then on width here, I'll type in 1200 pixels, and I'll click on this link to keep the proportions and then hit the check mark. Now, if I zoom to 100 percent, you can see that it's all working and you can always make more adjustments to the image from here. I can adjust the contrast, change the color, play with the distortion a little bit, and all of this is non-destructive because this is a smart effect. Once you completed your project, be sure to share it on your class project page. One quick tip, if you do want to print this out, check out the color engineering prints at Staples. You can get up to a three by four footprint for around $12. It looks really great and it's super affordable. I would just recommend that you print a portion of your image at home on your own printer at 100 percent, just so you can see how big the dots are before you spend the money on printing it. That's it, guys. Thanks for taking my class. If you happen to share this on Instagram, feel free to tag me at a pair of pairs. As always, if you have any questions, be sure to ask me on the Ask Me Anything discussion and I'm happy to help out. Thanks again, guys. I'll see you next time.