Transcripts
1. Snapshot to Art 3 Photo Effects in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class from snapshot to wall art 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 taking snapshot images and converting them using various photo effects into printable wall art. We're going to do three effects. The first one is going to be an autumn effect where you get a slightly softening of the image but with details still in place. The second effect is a gradient map effect, which will recolor the image in a really interesting way. The final effect is a tritone. We're going to look at creating tritones in Photoshop to color images. 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 just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now, let's get started on turning snapshots into wall art, creating three photo effects in Photoshop.
2. Snapshot to Art - 3 Photo Effects - Part 1: For this first photo effect, I'm using an image that was shot in New York and is downloaded from morguefile. I'll give you the link to download this image in the project description. Now there's nothing special about this image this is just a casual snapshot. But part of what I want to show you in this video, is how you can take a regular snapshot and make it something really quite exceptional. I'm going to start with this image and I'm going to crop it to a one-to-one or square crop. Now, in older versions of Photo shop you would just click on the Crop Tool, hold down the "Shift key" and just click and drag over the area that you want to select. Now that's going to work in newer versions of Photoshop as well, it's just a nice easy way of getting a square crop. If you're working with an older version of Photoshop, that's a good starting point. You can then drag the photo around to get it in the right position. I'm just going to exit out of here for a minute because I want to talk to more recent Photoshop users. There's a ratio option here that you can choose one-to-one square, and that will just select a square ratio crop and of course then you can alter it and I do want to alter it quite a bit. I want a much smaller image. At this point you can also rotate the image if you want to so I'm going to rotate it around a little bit. Not quite square up this building here, and have the tray coming in across the corner. I'll click the check mark. This is the image that I'm going to now work on. The effect that I'm going to create is called the Orton Effect. It was developed in the 1980s by a photographer called Michael Orton. Now he shot with slide film and of course we're not using slide film, we're actually using digital images. We're going to have to create a similar effect but using digital tools. Let me just make this image a little bit bigger so that we can see it as we work. Now in the layers pallet because this is a JPEG image was started off with just a background layer. Now I'm going to create two more of these layers. I'm going to right-click and choose "Duplicate Layer", click "Okay", and I'm going to right-click that one and choose"Duplicate Layer" and click "Okay". Now I have two duplicates and the original background. Generally when I'm working with photos like this, I will want to keep a background version of the image unchanged just in case I need it for another process later on. Right now I'm going to work with these two layers. Part of the Orton Effect is to stack images on top of each other. Now if you stack slides on top of each other they're gone to get darker. What Orton did was he lightened the images, he overexposed them. This one we're going to create an overexposed effect and we do that by clicking on the topmost layer because blend modes work down, so we'd have to click on the topmost layer to have an effect. We're going to click here and choose "Screen." Screen is a lightening blend mode and you can see that that's lightened this image considerably. Now I want to merge this into the layer below, so I have a permanent layer that is lightened. Right now we're only seeing enlightened result because this layer is blended into the one underneath in screen blend mode. I'm going to merge this layer with the one below, right-click and choose "Merge Down." That just merges these two layers together. Now I have a fully opaque, normal blend mode layer that is much lighter than the original image. I want to duplicate this so I'm going to right-click and choose "Duplicate Layer" and click "Okay". Now I have two lighter versions of this image, and because the image is now lighter than it started out with, I want to darken it back to the way it used to be. For this top-most layer, I'm going to select the "Multiply blend mode," and that will darken the image backup. So far we've done a lot of work and really essentially no result, we've just lightened it and then darkened it back again. Well the key feature of the Orton Effect is that some of the areas of the image would be slightly out of focus. We're going to take this top-most layer and we're going to blur it. I'll choose "Filter, Blur, and then Gaussian Blur." Gaussian is a lovely blur and it's probably my go to blur. You can see already the effect that this has had on the image and I've got a really high blur left over from something that I was doing a few days ago. Let's just disable this and then re-enable the Preview. You can say that the effect that you get with this Orton Effect is that you get some really dark areas with a little bit of haloing and fuzziness behind them. Now you can adjust the radius to whatever you like. At low values you get no effect at all. But at higher values you'll start seeing some of the effect coming through and it really is just a personal preference where you want to turn this off. I'm actually quite liking some of the lower numbers here this is about nine. If I wind it up to say 40, slightly different effect but I think I actually might take this back to nine or 10, and I'll just click "Okay". There is a full Orton Effect applied to this image. It has a lot more character and a lot more fill than the original image, and it is almost printable art. This is a thing that you could happily put on your wall, let's say the before and after. This was the image as I downloaded it and cropped it, and this is the final Orton Effect, more interesting color and more interesting and image.
3. Snapshot to Art - 3 Photo Effects - Part 2: For this next photo effect again, I've found another image which really is a casual snapshot of the Chrysler Building in New York. Again, I'm going to start out by cropping it to a square. So I'm going to the crop tool and I'm just going to hold shift as I drag a crop rectangle over it. I'm going to rotate this image too because I want it to run in a angle direction. I think I might pull the image a little bit further into my crop. Now, if you're on older versions of Photoshop and you drag the crop rectangle out by holding the shift key as you drag it, make sure that any time you go to re-adjust the crop tool that you also hold the shift key, otherwise you're going to lose your square ratio. So that's pretty good to me. I'll click ''Okay'' and here is the image that we're going to start with. Whenever I'm rotating, I want to make sure that I rotate fairly hefty amount. So it looks like it was a deliberate thing to do and not an accident. So let's go to the last pallet and let's see what we've got as we build this image up. I'm going to build the effect up in three adjustment layers. The benefit of adjustment layers being that if we don't like it, we can turn them off and if we want to adjust them, we can easily do so. The effect that we're creating is not being baked into the image if you like. So I'm going to start with a black and white adjustment layer, new adjustment layer, black and white and we're going to click ''Okay''. This is the black and white adjustment properties, but for now we're not even going to do anything with them. We're just going to save this black and white adjustment layer for later, we're going to add a curves adjustment layer with layer, new adjustment layer curves and I'll click ''Okay''. This is the curves adjustment dialogue. Again, we're not going to do anything with this right now. We're going on to our third and final adjustment laugh first of all and this is a gradient map. Layer, new adjustment layer, gradient map and I'll click ''Okay.'' Now, this is the default gradient map adjustment and I'm going to click on this cause I want to open up the gradient editor, which is going to let me select an alternative gradient to use. If you don't see a lot of gradients in here, you can add some more by clicking this gear icon to open up the menu and go and select a different set of gradients. Now, I'm not sure which ones I don't have yet, but maybe pastels I don't have yet. So let's just click on pastels. When you see this dialog click ''Append'' because you want to add them to the end, you don't want to replace the existing ones because you want a bigger collection to select from if you like. Now, the one I'm going to use is actually this one and I'm just going to click on it and explain what's happening here. So in our image, we've got light areas and dark areas and we have a gradient here. Whatever is on the left of this gradient is being applied to the dark areas of the image. So here we have darker areas and they're purple. The lighter areas of the image are orange and somewhere in between is a midpoint and if I click on either of the stops underneath the gradient, you'll see this little indicator here. That's the midpoint. That's halfway between purple and orange. Now, we can drag that in either direction. So we could have less purple in the image and more orange, because the transition is much steeper and we can go the other way where we have lots more purple and a little bit of orange, but I like this in the middle, so I'm just going to put it back roughly where it came from. You'll find that there are a lot of great insight you can try out. Some of those that have a lot of lines in them are interesting but probably because this building is so detailed, you're going to lose everything in the vast amount of color detail that you get using these gradients. I've found that for this particular image, a simpler gradient will work best, but feel free to try whatever gradient you like. So I'm going to click ''Okay''. Now, once we've applied the gradient to our image, we also have some creative options available in blending it into the image. So I'm going here to the blend modes. Now, if you're on a Mac before you do that, go and select the Move Tool or the rectangular marquee tool, something that's not a brush tool. Then go and select this dropdown list. These are the blend modes that we are going to look at. This series here, that doc in the image, a series here that have a lightening effect and a series here that have a contrast effect. They are applied differently depending on the darks and lights in the image. There's some funky blend modes here and another group at the bottom. So what I'm going to do is select the first one other than normal. So I'm going to click on ''Dissolve'' some starting to move down the list. On a Mac, I would then press ''Shift'' and ''Plus.'' That Shift and Plus to go down the list one step at a time. On the page say, I can use the down arrow. I'll just go through these blend modes and look for something that I really like. So this is darker color, lighter and screen, these of a lightening blend modes, color dodge, I'm now in the contrast blend mode with over light and soft light and hard light. Then I'm going down to the funky ones with difference in exclusion, subtract and divide. Finally, hue, saturation, color and luminosity. So I'm actually going back to color because that's the blend mode that I have chosen to use, but as you can see as we came down that list, there are heaps of blend modes that look really fantastic with this particular image. So now I've settled on my blend mode, lets go back to these other two adjustment layers that we added but didn't do anything with. I'm going to double-click on the curves adjustment. That opens up the curves dialogue. Now with the curves dialogue, the current setting is nothing at all, no change has been applied to the image. Over here of the darks in the image and over here are the lights in the image. If I drag up on the curve, I lighten everything. If I drag down I darken everything and if I drag in different places, then I can have a completely opposite effect on various areas of the image. So here I'm dragging up on the lighter areas which are lightening the lightest areas of the image, but I can drag down here on the darker areas of the image and darken them. So lightening the lights and darkening the darks. If I make a mistake, I'm just going to drag these little markers off the curves chart, go back to my straight line. So for this particular image, I do want it lighter in the light areas of the image. I want to try and get rid of this orange in the sky and just end up with a creamy color, but doing that has also lightened all the dark areas of the image. So I'm just going to drag down a bit on the darks to try and retrieve those a little bit. Now, let's go and have a look at the black and white adjustment that we applied which was the first one that we applied. Again, I'll double-click on the left. I'm now with the black and white adjustment. What we can do is we can make certain areas of the image based on their original color, either light or dark. Now, there's precious little of this colors in the image, but there is quite a bit of yellow. So let's see what happens when we drag the yellow slider to the left. While the yellows and the image are forced to be darker and the color of the gradient map posts on darker pixels is purple. So the building, the Chrysler Building is turning purple. If we take this slide in the other direction, we are going to lighten the yellow areas in the image and what is being applied to the lighter pixels is an orange color. Now, if you find that the yellows slider has some effect on the image, chances are that the adjacent sliders may well as well. So you could also try the red slider and the gray slider to see if there's any red or green in the image, well, there's no green, but there is a little bit of red. So you can just play around with the slider to try and fine tune the effect that you're getting. You want to go back to the curves adjustment layer, you can do so by double-clicking on this indicator here to reopen this panel, then you can go ahead and make additional changes to the image. I just want to try and get describes the building back into a little bit of color. So there's our second photo effect. Again, we've taken a photo that was little more than a snapshot, cropped it and applied some layer adjustments to it to create something a lot more visually interesting.
4. Snapshot to Art - 3 Photo Effects - Part 3: For this final photo effect, I've selected another snapshot style image from Morguefile. Again, I'm going to the crop tool and I'm going to select a square crop. I'm holding down the "Shift key" as I drag over the image. I'm also going to rotate this around just making sure that I'm holding the "Shift key anytime I reshape the crop rectangle to make sure that it is kept a square crops. I'm just going to position it roughly where I want it to be and I'll click the check mark. Let's zoom in a little bit to this image. Now the effects that we're doing with this image are going to be applied little differently to the previous images because I want to bake these into the image. They're not going in as adjustment layers. The 1st thing I need to do is to lighten this image a little bit. It's pretty dark in these areas. I'm going to choose Image and then Adjustments and I'm going to curves because we've used curves all along and it's probably a good thing for us to continue to use curves. Here are the darks, here are the lights. I want to lighten up the darker areas of the image, just lighten up this building. But I don't want to blow out the sky too much, so I'm just going to drag down on the top end of the curve. Not actually darkening these, I'm just putting them back to where they came from in the 1st place. Something like about this is a good start. I'll just click "Okay". If we look in the last pallet, you'll see that there are no adjustments here, everything so far has been baked onto this image. The next step is to make this black and white because the effect that we're going to use relies on a grayscale image. We want to create our own grayscale image, not have Photoshop do it for us. I'm going to choose Image and then Adjustments and I'm going to black and white. This is the same black and white adjustment as we've been using previously, but this time it'll be baked onto the image. What I'm looking for is an interesting black and white. I'm just going to adjust these colors to see what I can get. I want to build in a little bit of contrast if I can. I'm looking for some darks and some light, particularly in this building area here. I want the sky to be pretty light, so that's going to involve the blues and the cyans. For me right now, that's going to be sufficient. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but you could spend a little more time crafting a really good black and white. I'll click "Okay". Before we go on to the next step and accept this black and white image, I just need a bit more contrast. I'm going back to Curves and I'm going to apply another curves adjustment. We're going to Image, Adjustments, Curves, and I'm going to drag down on the bottom here and up on the top to try and get a little bit more contrast in the middle. Where this curve is the steepest, that's where you're going to get contrast. I'm trying to build in some contrast in this area of the image which contains most of the image data. A bit of a steeper curve here will really help me. Let's see the before and the after and you can see that it's got a lot more contrast in it. Let's click "Okay". Now the effect that we're going to apply to this image is called a tritone. The process of creating it in Photoshop using the tritone tools is to convert it to a grayscale image which is why we came to make our own grayscale image because we didn't want the default one that Photoshop would have given us. We wanted to craft our own if you like. We're going to choose Image and then Mode. Now right now we are in 8-bit RGB color mode, that standard photography color mode. Well, we're going to grayscale. We're going to Image, Mode, Grayscale, and we're going to discard the color information. We need to. That's what you have to do to create a grayscale image. I'll click "Discard". There should be no change in the image at this point because all we did was convert this to a grayscale image because the next option is to select Image, Mode, Duotone. You can't get to duotone if you're not using a grayscale image. It's just grayed out. Let's click Duotone. I'm just going to click on Monotone because that is the default in the duotone dialog is a monotone. A monotone is one color, so it's black and white. A duotone would be two colors, black and for example, yellow and white. A tritone would be three colors. White being no printed color at all essentially. It's not really a color but you might want to think of it as a color. I'm going to custom dialog because there is a really nice blue that I like and I want to use as a starting point for this effect. Here it is. Here it's blue072 bl 1. I'm just going to click on it. Now if you don't have that blue, you can just go and pick a blue from the picker. I'm just going to the color picker and you can just go and pick a really nice rich royal blue would be fine and click "Okay". Now each of these colors comes with a curve. This curve is slightly adjusted. The default curve actually looks like this. We'll take this middle slider out and it's a curve that goes from the bottom left to the top right. But this one was actually adjusted slightly. This curve dialog here is a little different to the curve dialog that we've been working with in this course in Photoshop because the colors are a different way round. You can see that white's on this side and black's on this side. What we're seeing here is that this blue color is being applied to the darker pixels in the image and there's no blue color at all being applied to the lighter pixels. If we adjusted this up, then we would have blue color being applied to the lighter pixels. But we don't want any blue there at all. I'm going to settle for no blue here and blue being applied to the darker areas only. I'll click "Okay". Now that is a duotone. But if I select tritone, I can add another color. I'm going to click in here and I'm going to go and get another color. The color I'm going to use is going to be the opposite of blue on the color wheel. Blue is opposite, is yellow orange. I'm going to choose a yellow orange here. If I open the curve with the explanation I used last time about what the curve is doing, you can probably see what's happening here is that this orange is being applied in exactly the same places as the blue was applied right in the shadow areas of the image. We're not getting any nice contrasty blue orange effect, we're just getting a middle brown if you like. I want the yellow to be on the lighter areas of the image. I'm going to drag up on this curve and start putting some yellow in the lighter areas. I don't want it in the dark areas because I want blue there, so I'm going to drag down here. Somewhere around here is my ideal. Now the sky is way too yellow for me. It's like really nasty color there. Let's just bring this down until we get a creamy sky but not too much yellow in the sky. But we may want some yellow in the mid-tones. If I just drag up here, I'm going to get some yellow in these areas of the image. Then maybe remove it totally from the darkest areas of the image, but make sure that there's a little bit of yellow in these areas just to craft something that looks visually interesting. Now I'm really still unhappy with the sky. I think there's still way too much color in it. I'm going to bring it right down there. Here I would just spend a little time crafting effectively something not unlike a gradient map. Only this time we're choosing our two colors and we're actually bending it to fit the way we want it to. Just a different way of achieving a similar result. I'll click "Okay". Now there's a trick to this process and that is that all of these things have to have a name. It doesn't matter what the name is, they just have to have a name. I'm just going to type yellow in here. Once I've typed yellow in here, I can click "Okay", otherwise I'd get an error saying I just have to name it. You just go ahead and name it. I'll click "Okay". Now we're in duotone mode. Well, actually we've got to tritone. But up here you can see it says tritone 8. We can't get access to a lot of the tools in Photoshop because we're not working in RGB color. To go back to RGB color, we'll choose Image, Mode, and then RGB color. No change to the image except that now we're working in RGB color, so we can do things that we can do in RGB color mode. The last thing I want to do with this image is to add some noise to it. Noise can be really attractive. In an image like this, noise will really, really help it look good. I'm going to choose Filter and then Noise and Add Noise. When you choose to add noise, it's added to the currently selected layer. I've got all my image data on the one layer, so it's being applied to this layer. Let's just kick up the amount of noise so you can see what it looks like. Now this is what's called Gaussian noise and this is what's called uniform noise. There is a difference between them and you just want to select which you like better. Gaussian has more range, so there a lot more lighter and darker noise pixels. Uniform, it tends to be clumped around the mid-tones. I'm thinking for this image perhaps uniform noise will be best. Now this is color noise, so it's actually got color in it. If you want it to be monochromatic, just click Monochromatic and then it will be monochromatic noise. Then you'll just set the amount of noise. Now you don't want very much. I wounded up to a really high value just so you could see. But I'm going to take this one up maybe to about eight percent and click "Okay". Let's zoom in to have a look at the noise and you can see that there's this grain in the image. Going to open up the History panel just so that we can wind back and see what this looks like. The History panel shows me the history of the work that I've done with this image. I'm going back a step, so that's no noise and you can see a smooth color here and then into add noise. Just a nice little film grain look to the image and I think it really enhances an image like this. There's another possibility for working with images in Photoshop to turn something that really was a basic snapshot into something that could be printable wall art. Your project for this class is to reproduce one or all of the photo techniques shown in this video. Duotone effect, the gradient map effect or the tritone effect. I've given you links in the class project to the three images I used and you can use those for your project or you can choose other images of your choice. I guess the important thing here is to choose something that looks like a snapshot and actually make it into something that looks like wall art. Choose a good starting image to use. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned lots about working on photos 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 may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to 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.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
