Transcripts
1. Welcome!: My name is Spencer, I'm a graphic designer and content creator over on YouTube. You can find me at pixel in bracket goes subscribe for more tutorials. In this Photoshop class, we're going to be learning a lot of different text effects. There are five in here. You could use any one of them as your project or any of the bonus content as your project as well. I would recommend going through each of the text effects kind of learning which one you wanna do your project on because I include so much different content in each lesson there, not just about that text effect. And then I included a bunch of bonus content as well. Can't wait to see you here or over on YouTube. Let's get this class started.
2. Gradient Glow Effect: I've been kind of experimenting with texts lately and learning a little bit more about what I can do with gradients, especially in Photoshop. This little setup right here, something that I created for Pacers gaming. And I'll show you in the top part here, I actually add a bit of a subtle gradient to it. And there's a couple of different ways that you can do that in Photoshop, whether it's with Layer Styles, it's with clipping masks or a little bit of a combination of both. So I'm going to hop into that, show you two or three ways that I've been playing with gradients and text in Photoshop and hopefully learn a thing or two. Okay, so in this image here you'll notice that game one has a, you might call it like a bit of a glow here. So the gradient maybe like a radial gradient from the center out. If I turn it off, you can definitely see the difference between just a solid color of text and then having a bit of a gradient effect. So if I turn everything off, I'm going to show you exactly how I created this. And there's two ways, like I mentioned, that you can do this and I'll just show you both first things. First you gotta hit that T shortcut key for the Type Tool and we're going to type something out here. How about just gradient texts? Just like that. I can use my move tool, Command or Control T hold, Shift hold option. I can scale this up really quickly. And then you can use whatever text options you want to create the look that you want. So we've got two pieces here. I just held Option or Alt to duplicate that out. Scale these up so that you can see them. So we've got gradient text here and then we've got gradient text copy. Now you don't need to create to two of these pieces. You just need to sort of watch and see which way you want to create the gradient. For this first piece up here, this piece of gradient text, what I'm going to use as a layer style. So in this blank space of the layer in my layers panel, if I double-click on it, it's going to pull open my layer styles. For this piece of text. There's tons of things that we can add, but there's one called gradient overlay. And I'm going to go ahead and just click on that. Now it didn't look like it did much, but that's because we have something sort of preset and I'll walk through the different options that you can go through with this. First off, this is sort of your gradient color right here. If you click on that, you'll get the gradient editor. Wow, I can't speak. The gradient editor, editor will pop up. And then from there you have actually a lot of different presets that you can use. So you could click through these and create lots of different gradient text. Looks. For mine, I actually chose the colors that I want it. So what I did was I clicked in here and you'll see on the bottom, we have some different colors and these are the swatches down below. If you just click while the hand shows, you can add different swatches to this and you can adjust where they blend, where one stops and where the other begins. So if you click and drag down, you can remove a swatch for this. If I click on this one and click the color, I went ahead and just eyedropper the color of my text. And actually I'll grab this one down here. And I hit OK. And for this one here, I did the same thing. Grab to that my text color. And I wanted to make it a little bit lighter. So I just drug this, drag this over into some of the lighter area and hit Okay. Hit Okay, and there we go. We have a light to dark gradient. Now, right now, there's no blend mode. So it's not going to blend into your text or create any different sort of multiply effects or anything like that. You can turn dither on if you're noticing banding inside of your gradient, dither is probably going to help get rid of that a little bit. You can adjust the opacity. So this is going to be at the opacity or transparency back to whatever your text color is. I'm going to keep it at a 100 because we're using this as our text color. If you reverse it, notice right now, and I'll mention we have a style of linear, which just means it goes from one side to the other. The angle is 90 degrees, so it's just bottom to top. The lighter colors on the bottom, the darker colors on the top. If I click Reverse, It's just going to flip that lighter color on top, darker color on bottom. We can also scale this, which kind of determines how smooth or how sharp your gradient is if that makes sense. And the last thing here is on the style, we have different options so we could select radial and that's gonna do it's sort of from the center out of my text. And if I reverse that, we sort of have that glow here out to the darkness like I showed you before. And if I adjust my scale, that's going to just, you can see that glow sort of coming in and out right there. And if we go back into here, we can adjust where this lightness begins and ends and how much there is in our texts. Maybe we want more of that swatch and we can even bring this over here. It's going to adjust like where these things clip. So that gives it a little bit of that sort of same effect that I had and the text previously. Now you can utilize this, the gradient overlay to create lots of different gradients in your text. The one issue that I run into here is I can't move this around, so I couldn't move this over to be offset. It just starts in the center and works, it works its way out. So what I do to kind of have a little more customization with that is on this second gradient text down here. Notice that this layer right here, I'm going to create a new layer by clicking that new layer button. And on this layer, I'm actually going to paint the type of gradient I want. This will be a little bit more difficult to get like really cool rainbow gradients and things like that because you're manually doing it, but it also gives you a little bit more control. So in this case, I'm going to hit B for my brush tool. I'm going to grab that same color that I've had this whole time. I'm going to open up my brush, make it a little bit bigger. You can adjust all this up here in this setting and I'm gonna make the hardest Hardness, 0 size is about 1000. Yes, something like that would work. Might be a little big, but I'll show you what happens here. Now. I've got that same color selected, right? I'm going to turn this layer blending mode to Linear Dodge Add. And now when I click over here, it's going to create a super bright, almost like it's like a glow color. And that was just the same color on top of itself, took the text color, made it my brush color. And then just click once over the top of that text and added this linear dodge add blending mode to that layer. Now to keep it locked in on only the text and not affecting anything outside of the text. I'm going to hold Option or Alt and click between these two layers to create a clipping mask. Now, anything that I paint on this layer. Is only going to show up over the top of the texts, which is in this case what I want, but I'll show you a way that we can adjust that later. So this is super bright. And what I can do is pull that brightness back with the opacity. I'm going to hold Shift and press the down arrow and just let this sort of dropped down just like that. And now we've got a lot more of that kind of nice glow gradient effect. The cool thing about this is I can then take this layer here. And if I hit enter on that opacity, so I like about 60 percent of passage just depends. I can use the Move tool shortcut key for that as V, and I can actually move this around. So notice how I brought over to the left side and it moves into the darker color on the right or same thing. I can bring it over to the right side and I can paint more on top of this. So if I go back to my brush with B, I can actually paint maybe a little over here. So notice how the G then took a little bit of that gradient as well. So I can make different gradients, spots, different radial center points with this by painting on this layer, adding a little bit of Linear Dodge or any blending mode that you want, and creating my own custom gradient. Now here's some pros and cons with this. If I go click my move tool, shortcut key is v, and I move this text around. Notice how the gradient doesn't move with it. See how the gradients sort of exists right here, I move my text and it doesn't move with it. That's one of the issues to combat that I can grab both of these layers by holding Shift and clicking. And then I can press Command or Control G or click this folder icon down here. And now I've created gradient text as a folder. And if I turn that on and off, it turns the whole thing on and off. And if I move that folder around, it's going to move all the contents of that folder around. So that's how we can get around that. Whereas this gradient text over here, it's going to move around sort of with its Layer Style attached to it. Now one thing we can go back into this layer style just by double-clicking. And if you don't see your layer styles here, your layer effects. Click this drop-down arrow. We can double-click on gradient overlays going to take us into it. And we can actually maybe change this to that linear dodge add. And that's really blowing it out a little bit, but that's where this size and scale and everything comes in and we can look at exactly how we want to edit that text. This one might not be the best. You might use something like screen or maybe even a multiply color burn just, there are different ways of affecting this gradient. But notice how it kind of changes the look a lot right? Layer styles one way, especially if you're doing a linear gradient, I find that works the best for that, and then you can just adjust your angle. I really have loved lately using this sort of painting over the top, adding a clipping mask effect. Now I'm on a white background here. So if we go over to a darker background where I simply have gradient texts written in here. And this is probably similar to what the thumbnail looks like. If we add that same layer over the top here, hit B for brush. I'm gonna go ahead and make sure I have this color selected. I'm going to just brush a little bit over the top of this. Notice how right now it's not clipped to the text, so it's showing up over the top of my entire document, including the background. If I click on this linear dodge, add, it actually creates kind of a cool glow effect and I can drop this opacity down to whatever, wherever I really want it to be 70 percent right there. That's actually kind of neat. That's another way that you can let that layer affect everything that's below it. If you want to, if you want to sort of show a glow outside of the gradient itself, kind of a neat little thing if you only want it on your text, remember hold Option or Alt, and just create a clipping mask between those two layers. Now, it's only showing where the text is. This felt like a lot more explanation for a simple concept like gradient texts than I thought it was going to be. But if, if this helped you, if some of these techniques helped you, I hope I didn't forget anything. Let me know in the comments down below. Here's a couple of different ways to add a gradient to your texts. I really like this new way of painting over the top of texts on a layer using a clipping mask so that it doesn't affect every single layer unless you really want it to be super glowy. Because I feel like there's so much more customization to it. And then all you have to do is put a folder around those layer contents and you can move it around easily. All right, guys, that's it for this tutorial. I'm Spencer from Pixel on bracket, and I'll see you next time.
3. Glitch Effect: I'm going to create a new document in Photoshop just by using the file drop-down new 1920 by 1080 is what I'll create. That resolution doesn't matter unless you're printing it. And I would do 300, and then I want RGB color mode. Okay, So the first thing I wanna do is create a background. I'm going to grab my rectangle tool and just draw a rectangle, which in the new update of Photoshop, apparently draws from the center out without pressing the buttons. Don't know if that's the same for you, but they have updated that. Now once I have that drawn, I'm just going to double-click on the thumbnail over here to pick a color. I'm going to pick something that's sort of not completely black, but maybe a little bit charcoal in color. And hit Okay, now if double-clicking that doesn't work, maybe check the fill and stroke up here. You'll want your fill to be the color and not the stroke. All right, so we've got the background. Let's create some text out here, form a new text layer by finding the type tool over here, right there it is. And then if I click right here, it's going to type on my rectangle. So I'm gonna make sure I lock this rectangle by selecting that layer, hit in the lock button. Now I'm not going to type on top of it accidentally. So we can just click in here. And Wilders, We got some large texts, but let's type in glitchy. Just like that. I'm going to select it all by pressing Command or Control a centered and, and we're gonna make it a little bit smaller, maybe something like a 100 point or even like 75. There we go, that'll fit the page better. Go back to my direct select, my selection tool or my move tool. Actually I'm used to Illustrator, Command or Control a to select all. And with this Move Tool selected, I can actually center everything up with my alignment options up here. So now we've got glitchy right in the middle of our page. What we need to do first is create a smart object. I'm going to right-click my layer, Convert to Smart Object. Now I can't edit this directly anymore, but if I double-click on my thumbnail, I can open up that smart object. It even looks like a whole different Photoshop file. You can go back and forth between what you're working on and this smart object file. Now the first thing I wanna do here is change the canvas size. I'm going to go to my image drop-down canvas size. I'm going to make this the same size as the canvas that we're using. Hit, okay? The reason I'm setting this up is to make it easily editable later. So now we've got glitchy over here. We could still edit this text, but we're gonna keep it as glitchy for now. Make sure you hit Command or Control S to save. Once you've saved it, you can exit out of it. It'll pop open and ask if you want to save if you didn't. And we're back to here. So I've got this guy and what I want to start doing is creating the different layers of Mike Licinius. So I'm gonna start a folder, and this first folder is just going to include my text in here. And in fact, I might rename this to text if I can type. There we go. And in this first group, I'm going to create a mask. But first I want to create a selection to make that mask out of. So we're gonna grab the selection tool must start from the bottom, and this will be the very bottom portion of wherever I want this first glitchy effect to start, we're going to just overlap our texts by that much. And if I click the Mask button down here, it's going to create a mask based on that selection. Pretty easy. I'm going to duplicate this layer after calling it. Bottom but tomb. And I can duplicate that by holding Alt or Option, clicking and dragging and making sure I see this one solid blue line and then I let go. So now I have a duplicated bottom piece. So we'll call this piece lower, mid, and then we need to adjust the mask of this guy. So unlink the mask to this folder and we can edit the mask without editing the graphic. So if I click on the mask so it's highlighted, command or control T, I can now edit that mask. Now I'm going to leave this top portion there. I'm just going to grab the bottom portion and I'm going to hold shift so it doesn't shrink. And we're just going to grab this bottom portion and bring it up. You can see it reveals my text again. I want to bring it up maybe past where that G, the middle of the G is right in there. Hit Enter to commit that. And now we've got this new portion right there and they line up right in the middle. You can kind of see a faint line here that we can fix later. Alright, so I'm going to link that back together, duplicated again by holding Option or Alt. Bring it up to the top. I kind of missed there. Just gotta make sure we see that blue line and let go. This will be called upper, mid. And same thing I can unlink the mask, click on the mask Command or Control T to transform and then hold shift while I do that. And we can bring it up. And I'm going to bring it up, but think just below the T line of the T. Hit Enter. And we've got this again, I'm going to link it back together, duplicate one last time for the top, that's Alt or Option and clicking and dragging, double-click that top. Okay, and then we just need to reveal the rest unlink and then select that mask Command or Control T to duplicate grab the bottom hold Shift. I'm going to bring it all the way up to the top to enter. And there we go. Now if I want to fix some of these little artifacts, if I zoom in here, Command or Control plus, I seek some gray areas where there is sort of like an overlap or lack thereof. I can create that overlap. It's not going to hurt our glitch effect. So if I just unlink this again, click on the mask and edit this transformation. I can bring this down a little bit and that'll help with getting rid of these lines. I'm going to unlink them all and just adjust each one of them individually here, holding shift while I do it. And just making sure that we don't have any of those little lines in between because he will be able to see those. And I don't really want those in our final design. And the overlap. It's not a big deal since this is going to be like a glitchy effect, not a big deal, okay, big, big deal here though. We got to link these all back together. So make sure you click between the link them all up. Now we can adjust these. So if I have the bottom selected and I hit V for my move tool, I can just use my arrow keys left and right. Or you can hold Shift and use the arrow key and start to sort of glitch this thing out. So I'm going to adjust the bottom a little bit, bringing it over. I might bring the lower mid over upper mid, maybe it'll go away right? Top, maybe we're left like that. So now we see we have this glitchy effect all ready. And you can really just sort of move this to wherever you want them to be. I'm just kind of adjusting them based on what I feel like looks all right. So there we go. We've got that. What I wanna do now is shift click to select all of these folders and then create a folder that includes all those. So just select them all, create a new group. And we've got a new group that has that entire folder. I'm going to call this white because that's the color of this part of the text. And if I hold Alt or Option and duplicate this white folder and now have a copy of it. And I'll call this one red. See where I'm going here. All right, so there's a lot of empty space to the right of this layer. If I double-click that space, it's going to pop open my layer styles. What I actually want to do here is use a color overlay. And this Color Overlay, I called this red. So we're gonna go up here. You know, it's more like a cyan or something. No, until the wrong sounds. Blue. This is whatever this color is like a hot pink. I'm going to hit Okay. Hit Okay. We don't see it because it's underneath. So what we can do is click on this folder again, make sure we have our Move Tool selected. Shortcut key is V, and use those arrow keys again. And if I just start to move this around, you can already see that we're getting some of the color artifacts sort of shown up here, right? Because it's underneath the white layer and we're sort of offsetting it a little bit. All right, so now we can duplicate the red layer and just kinda continue on here. We can make a green if we want really hot, saturated green, and we can do the same thing, use our arrow keys to sort of move this green layer off to the side somewhere, maybe down a little bit and left. And then I can edit this name, make sure it says green. And same thing can duplicate. Remember Alt or Option to do that, click and drag and change that to blue. Double-click the color overlay. And we can go in here and adjust the color of this guide to just like a really saturated blue color. That upper right-hand corner is going to be like the most saturated spot on that color picker. And then we can just use that move tool to adjust this blue again. So there we have it. We've got a low glitchy effect. Now, to add a little bit to this, we can actually use some effects, some filters and Photoshop. So back to my background layer, I'm going to unlock that layer, that rectangle and add some noise to it. So if I have this rectangle selected and go up to Filter, think what I need to do first is actually convert for smart filters. And that's fine. And then I can go back up to Filter, go down to Noise and add a little noise. And noise is kinda reminds me of the fuzziness of like a TV, television screen. And you can add as much as you want and adjust these Gaussian or uniform. I'm going to stick with the Gaussians a little more random. The monochromatic gets rid of the color. I do want the color because you've got the reds, the greens, the blues in there. And you can adjust the amount which we can obviously overdo it or bring it down a little bit. Now the other thing you can do, since this is a smart object, I could leave this at a little over what I want it and hit Okay. And I can come down here to my smart filters and actually double-click the, I don't know what this is. The little lines and stuff down here. It's like the Opacity options are the blending options. And you can drop the opacity of just the noise layer here. So I can drop it to 50 percent if I wanted. So now I just kinda have this texture in the background. Now you can do this if we, we've got the glitch effect. So I'm going to show you two more things. First off, the whole thing is editable. So if I toggle down my first layer here and toggle down maybe the first top portion, I get back to this text. Remember in the beginning we created a smart object. The reason we did that is because I can double-click on this text and still edit it. So if I wanted this to say pixel, pixelate, instead of glitchy, I can re-edit that text. And if I exit out of this, this is going to ask me to save it. I do want to save that smart object. And when it takes us back, It's re-edited the text. And since we use that smart object everywhere, it edits it everywhere, everywhere that it exists, because it's the same smart object. So that's how you can edit it. That's kind of a non-destructive portion of this, which is really cool. And the other piece that you can do here, if high words it and I'm going to create another smart object here. But if I were to put these all into a folder here, we'll call it glitch effect. What I can do it this folder is kinda the same that I did with that rectangle. I can go to Filter Convert for Smart Filters. Okay, now everything's just inside of this one smart filter, but I can apply filters to it. So if I wanted to add a little noise to this whole thing, I can do that here. You see we're adding noise to the little pixelate text here. We can add a little noise to that. And then what we could do also, and I would just recommend playing around with some of the stuff. We're just going above and beyond here, but I could go to Distort. We could do like a zigzag and kinda see what that does. There's no preview button here, but you can kinda preview up here. If you zoom out a little bit, you can see what the zigzags going to do. We'll just stick with Alan and hit. Okay. And it kinda warps my text a little bit. So that's, That's some of what you can do. You can also go back to those red, green, blue layers and affect them individually, change their sizes, change the rotation to create your own glitch effect.
4. Outline Effect: Here's what I did. I'm going to show you first, then we're gonna go through it. Basically I've got type here, right? And I can completely edit this type, so I could change that to fruit or whatever I want. It's still editable type. It's got a stroke around it to make it an outlined font. And in fact, I could change this to whatever I want. So I've got this good headline pro, I could change it to something in anything you can see it actually changing when I scroll over all of these different font choices. So we're gonna keep it on this one. This font is good headline pro, and I'm going to show you guys how to do this in a new document. Here we go, open up a new document. All right. Anytime 1920 by 1080, just kind of a standard little sizes, the thumbnail size. All right, so we're going to add some type to our page. Click on the Type tool shortcut key is T and click on your page. Let's say outline. That's what we're going to use the word. Now this type is white, so I need to select all with Command or Control a, or just double-click in there. And then I'm going to change the color to, let's use something fun like a minty green color like this. Okay, now I'm gonna go back to my move tool. Shortcut key is V, kinda position this somewhere in the center. I can Command or Control a to select all and then align it horizontally and vertically if I wanted to. If I'm that picky. Okay, so we've got some text on our screen here and it's got a green fill to it. See this Layer panel down here. It's got the text layer in there. There's this empty space here. I'm going to double-click on. And that's going to open up my layer styles. Inside my Layer Styles, we have stroke. And if you don't see it, you can go down to the fx button and add a stroke. We're going to click it, so it's checkmarked and actually change. We actually have a stroke on there. Now, I need to click on this so that I can get to those options. We have size positioning, we have a blending mode option, opacity, and then the color as well. I'm going to fill this with the same color as my fill, so the strokes going to be the same color as my fill. As long as color picker popped up, you can select the color or you can kinda hover out here and pick a color. I'm going to pick that right there and hit OK. Now yours might look a little different, That's okay. It's because we have the size adjustment here, so we can adjust the size. We also have positioning adjustment, which means it's going to be on the center of the outline of our font, or it's going to be on the inside or the outside of it. The inside. I kinda rarely use the center you would use if you've got it just right for this font. A lot of times I used the outside because I think it keeps the integrity of it the best. But depending on the size of the stroke, you might end up just on the center. Now you might be thinking, what do we do with the color of the font? Can't really, this is an outlined. Well, we've got the outline there. We need to get rid of the fill the inside. So we're gonna go back up to blending options. And there's this little advanced blending section and fill opacity. I'm just going to take this down to 0. That means that we can see through the fill, there's no, The fills completely transparent, so I'm going to hit okay, on that. Let's bring in a photo. I think I have that same fruit photo, so we'll just bring that in. This one's from unsplash.com. I'll put up a whoever's image. This is in the credits here. All right. So I'm just going to resize this to make sure it is the size of my document. Hit Enter. I simply drug a photo n, So it's landed on top of my layers. If I click and drag this, I'm going to drop it below the outline. So now you can see I just wanted to prove to you, you can see through this font now it's also editable. So I can take this outline text and what's that word in their span knee in. So that's something up their language I don't recognize. We can put that in there, right? We can edit this. And just like any old normal texts, we haven't actually done anything. This is a nondestructive process. Now, what I did to make it more visible over here was a couple of things because we're really, I've shown you how to do it now. But if you want a couple of, maybe a, here's a here's some extra credit, right? So the first thing I did was I thought, alright, there's all this color in the background, this has to be white. I selected it all, went up and changed my color of my text to white. Oh, wait, that didn't do anything. That's because that just changes the fill. Remember, we need to go to stroke so I can actually double-click on the stroke. And if you don't see it, there's a little drop-down panel here that shows your effects, but double-click on that stroke. I can change the color of that. So remember, changing the color of your text isn't going to change anything. You've got to change the color of the stroke and we've got to make that white. Now, I think that the stroke needs to be a little bit thicker for this background so that it stands out a little bit more. So I'm going to go to the size and sort of bring that up. Now I think because it's on the center. It looks okay. It looks all right there. I might also check and see what outside looks like. And I might also check and see what inside looks like. Insides a definite no, outside. I don't really like how that a starts to lose its center. So really for this word, I would stick with the center position if you're going to thicken up the stroke and then I'm going to hit okay on that. Now what else can I do this? Well, I can actually add a drop shadow to the same text. Double-click in that sort of blank area. Let's get back to that layer style and we have a drop shadow option. Once again, fx to drop shadow if you don't see it, check mark that on. It's going to apply whatever our current defaults are. This is sort of where I think I had them in the last document. But if you adjust things like opacity, how dark or how transparent that drop shadow is. You can adjust the size there, the distance that it travels, and different options here that might help your fonts or to stand out a little bit or whatever your word is. And then the last thing would be to adjust the image underneath. So for instance, in my last photo, if we go back to that this word here, because it's so sharp, I thought why don't I add a little Gaussian blur to the background so that there's a little bit less detail in the background. And the other thing I added was a little hue and saturation layer to sort of dark and up. And maybe you could desaturated a little bit if you wanted to. But I kinda like to the color. I just wanted to add a little bit darker to make this pop. So if you want to know how to do that, this hue and saturation layer is in your adjustments panel. So it's just an adjustment layer. If you go up to window down to adjustments, it's going to pull up in this panel and it's this guy here, you click on that, it adds hue and saturation. You go back to properties and you can adjust the properties of your hue and saturation layer. Gaussian blur because we pulled this image and it's a smart object. If not, you'll want to go to Filter Convert for Smart Objects. And then the blur that I like to use most often is Gaussian blur, which is in the Blur option right here, right there, and then attached it as a smart filter, which means we can turn it on and off and do some other fun things with it, or go back and double-click on it and re-edit it, just like we re-edited the effects, the Layer Styles of our front-facing sort of text here. All right guys, that's it. I know I know that I went into detail and I started sort of rambling, but I think I got you through up until that point depending on what you're looking for in this video, that was just a little extra credit time at the end there. I appreciate you guys dot-com. Bye. Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one.
5. Multiple Stroke Effect: This is the effect that we're going to be creating. You can see it's got we just have like a type layer with color and then we have a stroke around it this pretty thick, and then we have a secondary stroke that goes around that. And then we have a little drop shadow in there. Maybe we'll add that in for effect. And we have a background layer that goes from a lighter color to a little bit darker of a color. So that's all we're going to be creating, but it creates a pretty neat style and you can actually build on this to make whatever you want. Let's get started by going up to File New or Command N. And we're going to set up a new documents can be 2560 by 1440, resolution 72 RGB color mode. And that's about it. We'll create that. The first thing that I'm going to do is get rid of this background layer and create my own background layer. And I'm going to do that by creating a shape. So over here in our tool panel, there's a shape tool here. I've got it on Polygon tool, but if you click and hold it, take you to the rectangle tool. And from there I just want to create a rectangle that is bigger than my entire canvas. So I'm gonna click and drag to do that. And that's actually going to create its own shape layer and it's going to fill it probably with black for you and maybe why apparently pink for me. It doesn't really matter what color that is because we're going to completely change that. So I'm going to hide that properties panel that popped out. And then I'm going to change this background to double-click on the name and just change it to two background. I'm just going to click on this lock button here to unlock that background. And we're just going to delete that by dragging it down to the trashcan. So now I've got this shape layer that I'm going to use as my background layer. And I'm going to add a style to it by double-clicking in the empty space to the right of the layer name. When I do that, it's going to open up the Layer Styles panel. We're going to add a gradient overlay to this. If you don't see it in your list of layer styles, access it by clicking the fx button down here stands for defects and then grab the Gradient Overlay. So I'm gonna go ahead and just click on that and it's going to set up that gradient overlay mind Hardy has the right colors, but here you're going to start off probably with this black to white. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to keep the blend mode on normal. I'm going to check dither, that's going to help with the banding a little bit opacity, a 100 percent. And then let's get into that gradient and we're going to change this. I'm going to double-click on the bottom. I don't know what this is called. The bottom little thumbnail image here of the color. And once I do that, it opens up the color picker. I think I want like a teal color for this. I'm going to pick something in this range and you'll see that it updates live for you out there. So that looks like a pretty good color. We'll hit Okay. And then oh, actually I'm going to go back into that and I'm going to copy this with Command C, just that hex code down there. And I'm going to double-click on the other color of my gradient. And we're going to add in with Command V, We're just going to paste in that same color. And then that goes in this upper corner, that's where it put it. So I'm just going to drag this and to the left a little bit to create a lighter color so that it's like we have a little bit of light coming in from the top left of our image. I'm going to hit okay on that and then hit Okay on the Gradient Editor. And we have that gradient setup. You could, if it's pointing the wrong way, you can change the angle. So we can adjust this and it will change where our gradient starts and ends. You can also change the style if you wanted a radial gradient, I don't, I'm gonna stick with linear. And then if an easy way to flip it is to hit the reverse button unless you can flip it to the opposite side or you can adjust the angle. You can also adjust the scale. And that's going to change how close together those two colors are. I like to keep quite a bit of scale so that. Pretty good blend from one color to the other. So I'm going to hit okay on that and that is our background layer. Now I'm going to add a folder that includes all of the layer styles that we're going to use to create this effect. So I'm just going to come down here and click on the folder icon in our layers panel. And this folder I'm going to rename to layer styles. And then I'm going to grab the type tool. I'm just going to click anywhere on the canvas. If you have this guy's still selected and you click, it's going to type and create a text box that is that shape size. I don't want that. Make sure you have Layer Styles selected. And then when you click, it's going to type right where you click, we're going to type in the word stroke. Now I'm gonna make this maybe 350 in size. And I've picked a pretty like a pretty bold font and it's got a little bit of italics to it. And I've maybe adjusted some of the options over here, like like our kerning and tracking and things like that. So I've got this font, it doesn't matter once again what the color is. I'll go ahead and change it to just totally white. I'm going to center it up by selecting all up here and select All or Command a. And then I'm gonna do my horizontal and vertical alignments. And that's going to put it about in the center. I'm going to do some de-select or Command D to de-select that. And I'll bump it up a little bit and shift and the up arrow key. So that's about the center, right? That works pretty well. So I've got this stroke and it should be inside of your folder. If it's not, you can click and drag that layer into the folder and it'll let you do that. So if I minimize this, it'll keep all those layers that are inside that folder and it will minimize all those and I can drop them down. I'll go ahead and minimize it for now because I'm really done with that text layer. I'm going to double-click to the right, just like we did the background layer, you can add layer styles to folders as well. And that will affect everything inside of the folder while keeping it all still editable. So that's the whole thing. This is going to be an editable, nondestructive method. To do this, I'm going to drag the layer styles over here so we can see a little bit of R are text. And what we're gonna do is add two strokes, a color overlay, and then a little bit of a drop shadow. So I'm going to click on this first stroke option and it's probably going to have my stroke that I had leftover and that's fine. I'll just talk you through this. So more than likely you're going to be on black. And so what you'll wanna do is click on this color and maybe go pick a different color. This is like a deep purple that I picked. I'm gonna hit Okay. And I can adjust the size of this stroke. And what I want for position is pretty important. I want it to be on the outside. If you haven't on the inside, it's going to cut into the letters. If you have it in the center, it's gonna do the same thing. It's going to create some weird effects on your letter. So I want it to the outside of all my letters. Blending mode, keep it a normal opacity. And you can change this, but I have it at a 100 percent. And that's about right. I'm going to change these pixels, will drag this over a little bit so I can see, I think about 50 might work pretty well as the interior stroke effect. And then what you're gonna do is, I'm going to click on this and then delete it because you're not going to see two more than likely. You're just going to have one. And you can come down here to Effects and add a second stroke. Or you can click on this plus icon to add a second stroke. It's going to be identical to the whatever you just had. Or if you come down here, it'll be a beginner stroke with one pixel and then it'll be black and all that these guys stack on top of each other kind of like layers do. And so this stroke is going to be on top of this one. So in order for this one to show. First off, we need to change its color. I'm going to grab like a really light, light pink and hit OK. And the second thing I need to do, make sure the positions outside, but I need to make this size larger than the size of my other stroke and that will show it from underneath. You'll see it start to build on top of that. And that's exactly what we want. We'll make this 70 pixels. So there's about 20 pixel difference between the top stroke and the bottom stroke. It's a little bit counter-intuitive because you might think, well this strokes on the outside that should be on top, but it's, think of it like layers in here and these guys stack on top of each other. So this guy for him to be on the outside needs to run underneath. The top stroke is in B, a little bit wider on the outside. So you can see in the next thing I want to add as a color overlay. The color overlay is going to affect only my text layer. All that is is I can select a blending mode and then I can select a color. And this color will just affect the text layer. Let's go a little hotter on that pink and maybe a little bit brighter. There we go. I'm going to hit okay there. And that's cool because that's all I want that to affect. And really, yes, you can come back to that text layer and you can't edit the color of your text. However, this helps keep every effect in the same spot. So when I'm editing the stroke colors, I can also edit the text color without exiting out of this Layer Style dialogue panel. So that's how you add that. The last thing I'm going to add is just a little bit of a drop shadow to this. And this drop shadow, I like Multiply for my drop shadows. You can adjust the opacity to be what you want, the angle as well. I generally don't use global light because if you add something else in a different spot, it'll use that same global light settings. Sometimes I want my shadows to be at different angles and stuff. And then you can adjust depending on the size of your document, adjust the distance to spread the size. You can use what I have here like 45, 45, and maybe 145. And for the opacity will do 45, we'll just stick with those 45s. That looks pretty good. I mean, it's it gives it a little bit of a lift off that page. And as far as contour, I tend to tend to go ahead and check mark anti-alias and then I keep the noise down. If you, if you do that too much, it gets really, really grainy. And unless that's the effect you're going for and you don't really need it. But that's pretty much it I'm going to hit Okay. And that applied all these layer styles to the folder, not to the text element itself, but because the text element is inside the folder, minimize this and drop this down. Because the text elements inside the folder, it is completely editable still. So I could write the word effect here and just completely changed that if I wanted to. And here's another cool thing. So I mean, that's pretty much the tutorial, right? That's, we created the effect. Awesome. But here's something, here's a little extra tidbit. If I hide this layer and I'm going to stay inside of this folder, and I'm going to create a new layer. And this layer is just a blank layer. And I'm going to grab my paintbrush tool over here. Where are we? Paint brush tool. Okay, there we are, paintbrush tool and check this out. I can actually paint in that same effect in that awesome. Here's one more thing. So I'm gonna hide this layer. Make sure I'm just clicked on this folder that'll help the new layer I create go inside the folder, but I could come down here and create a shape like this polygon tool and create like a hexagon pentagon wherever this is Pentagon. And it also has that layer style effect. So that's pretty awesome. Anything you add inside of that folder is non-destructive. Editable has that layer style effect. If I drag this polygon outside of the folder, it's going to lose the effect. If I drag it inside the folder, anything inside the folder is going to have that effect. That's an awesome, sweet effect. I've used the word affect way too many times. Thanks for watching. Take care, and I'll see you guys next time.
6. Candy Effect: First thing we need to do is add a rectangle to our page. So I'm going to go over to the rectangle tool, click on it, click and drag so that it covers our entire canvas. And there's a rectangle now we just have like a black color on this. It doesn't actually matter. I'm going to click in this gray area to the right of that layer to add a gradient overlay to this rectangle. And we're going to match the gradient overlay I had on the, on the beginning version. And so I get a bunch of styles here. If I don't see gradient overlay, I can go to the Effects panel drop-down and find gradient overlay. Now I'm going to check mark it and it's probably going to be the color we want already. And I'll just show you guys what this is here. Click on the gradient. We've got color from left to right. And if I double-click on this color, there's my color that I chose. Simply chose it. Lighter blue color. Here's the hex code if you want to enter that in. And then on the right side I also have another color, blue. This one's a little bit darker, same thing. There's the hex code. Hit. Okay, so we've got this light blue to dark blue. And I adjusted the center a little bit. Alright, and so I added a little bit more of this light blue in there. And it kinda, it's almost like a vignette on the corners there with that dark blue. So the hit, Okay, and I got that in there now, opacity, I want that at a 100 percent. Reverse it then your light blue is going to be on the outside. You're dark blue on the inside. So I want the light blue on the inside, dark blue on the outside. Same thing with scale. You can sort of adjust that skill a little bit and I have that up there and the 130, 135 range. And that created a nice subtle gradient, I thought anyway. And so this is a radial gradient, by the way, that's the most important part of they probably have to change that from linear to radial unless you want it left to right or right to left. Hit. Okay, and we have our background set up. So next we're going to, I'm actually just going to lock this background and make sure we don't accidentally change it and just click that little lock icon. Boom, background is locked. Let's add the text. I'm gonna go over to my type tool. It's somewhere around here. The shortcut key for that is of course t. I'm going to type out here, and let's type in x. And we're just going to bring this guy with the Move Tool to the center ish. I can hit Command or Control a to select all. And with the Move Tool selected, I can center it up right here, horizontal, vertical, boom, it's centered. And then I'm going to hit Command or Control D to de-select, good by marching ants. Command or control T, as long as this layer selected will transform that layer. And I can grab a corner and just hold Alt or Option. I'm still getting used to the new scale tool. You don't have to hold Shift anymore, just Alt or option. And we can kind of scale him in there, hit Return or Enter, and it places that text in there. So we have our text, our text. This could be anything you want really doesn't matter at the end of the day. It's just text and it's still editable. We're going to add some layer styles to that text. So let's double-click. Same thing we did with the rectangle in this little gray space. Open up the layer styles. First up, Bevel and Emboss. Now I already have it set up. It's a nice soft sort of a bevel. It's an inner bevel style smooth technique. Depth 84 85 percent kinda depends on the size of your document. My document is 1920 by 1080. That's the size of my canvas. And then of course you have, whether it's up or down, I liked up kinda makes it 3D text. The size and the softness, minus 20, mine is 24 and 4. You guys can kind of play with this, create the look that you want. You can also adjust the angle of the light. I've got mine set at 136 and I actually have that set as a Global Light. So everything that uses the angle is going to have that angle one global light is checked from this altitude, the screen that's shadow, you know, what, how dark Do you want that shadow to show up? I don't even remember what I had that out. Maybe like 40 percent. It's really not a perfect science. It's kinda like how you feel about how it looks on your page. Okay, we don't have to actually leave this Layer Style panel. We're going to add multiple layer styles to our text and we have more to add here. One of them that I can add sort of adds what I think is kinda like a rim light. So like a light around the edge is a stroke around the entire piece. It also softens these corners so that they're not quite as harsh on this text. By the way, this font is macho and can be found in the Typekit as a sink, a bold font, unsinkable is that word. Anyway, let's add a stroke just by clicking on stroke. Remember any of these effects are in the Effects drop-down if you don't see them in this list. So we're adding a stroke on my canvas here I'm adding a three-point stroke and the position I'm adding it is outside, so it's going to add that stroke to the outside of my text. The blend mode normal capacity either to a 100 percent, but I don't just have it as a pure white. You see, if I have it as a pure white, It's almost too harsh in my opinion. So I tried to find what works with this text and I kinda brought that down a little bit into this grayish. And once I had that where it's sort of blended on the shadow side in spots and then kinda highlighted the edges on the shadow side. Maybe that's the highlight side. You know what I'm talking about? I just kinda pulled it back a little bit. Okay. So we had the stroke, I believe what we need to add next is a pattern, a pattern to this. So I'm going to add a Pattern Overlay. And I don't want that one, although there are lots of options you can add here. I believe I want this one here, which is going to add a bit of a grittiness texture. I kinda felt like it looked like snow a little bit. Maybe these letters are made out of snow. It just reminded me of winter more than anything. I can adjust the scale of this. So as you adjust this up, you can make the scale bigger, so you can kind of blow it up or you can make it smaller. Now, the smaller it goes, you might start to see some of the patterning in it. Larger it goes, it's going to get way, way blurry. So I wouldn't recommend going too large with that. It's not a perfect scale. So I'm going to increase it a little bit just so you guys can probably really see it on this tutorial specifically. So minds it a 168 will make it a 100, 75. So it's just a nice number for you guys if you're following along exactly. Now we don't want to add the drop shadow yet. We'll actually add that layer. These are later, not layer. These are all the effects that you actually need to add to the text itself. So I'm going to hit Okay. Now if you wanted to, you could still edit this completely and make it say whatever you want as close to finalizing it as you can. But what we wanna do now is actually just take this text layer and make a smart object out of it. So as long as this layer is selected, I can right-click on it and go up to, we'll find it here. Hang on. Something, Convert to Smart Object. There it is. Convert to Smart Object. Now this is not directly editable. Now, actually have to go inside of that smart object. And what Photoshop just did was it took all of those elements and put them inside of another Photoshop file. And then I've embedded it into here, so it's still editable, but we can sort of work with this in a better way now. And the biggest reason is when we add that pattern overlay, it's going to override any sort of color that we put on top of this and we don't want that to happen. So to get around that, we make it a smart object. I can still edit this text by double-clicking on this Smart Object thumbnail. And it's going to open up as if it's another Photoshop document and it technically is. And so I've got to Photoshop documents open, right? I've got the working Photoshop document at just double-clicked on my smart layer. I have my smart object, so I have this smart object document as well. What I recommend here is we go ahead and before we even do anything, we go up to image on our smart object and we go to Canvas size. We make this the exact same canvas size that your original document is. So 1920 by 1080 is my canvas size. Hit Okay, and now if we zoom out with Command or Control minus, we have a replica sized document. The reason I did this was so I know when I'm making adjustments to texts, like if I wanted to add like a little sub-line down here, that text I can add here and know exactly how it's going to look on my final composition. Generally smart objects just sort of clip it to the size of whatever the object is. I made that a little bit bigger. So from here, I'm pretty sure we're done with the text and we can just Command or Control S to save. Notice this little star, that means it's not saved. So I'm going to Command or Control S that saves that smart object and I can actually just exit out of it if I want to go back to here. So if you made any changes, they will reflect if you save that and then, and then come back to this main document. Okay, So what we wanna do now is add our stripes. Pretty simple way and we're going to do this. Let's add a folder. And we're going to double-click on this folder name and change it to stripes. And then we're just going to add a bunch of rectangles. So click on the Rectangle tool. It doesn't really matter the color. And start making rectangles that scale from the left to the right side of your Canvas. They don't want to be perfect, but you can sort of size then. Now, even though we'll be able to edit that later, you can kinda size them. Now, once I have one rectangle created, I can go back to the Move tool. And just as long as this rectangle is selected, I can hold Option or Alt and bring this guy down and start to create. Bunch of rectangle duplicates right here. You'll see my layer panel to the right keeps adding all those rectangles and they don't have to be perfectly spaced apart. Just create as many as you think you want. And I'm going to create one more here just like that. Now what we wanna do is perfectly spaced them apart. And to do that, I'm going to select all of these rectangles. So click on the top rectangle, hold shift, and click on the bottom rectangle. If they are not in your folder, you can right now click and drag them all into that folder. But minority are what I wanna do here with the Move Tool selected. Actually have some options up here, but I don't have the ones. I want a need to click these little three ellipses. And that's going to drop down more options for my Alignment panel. The one that I want is distributed and specifically distribute vertical centers. Once I click that, notice how all my rectangles aligned to each other and we want to align to selection by the way. So click that and they're all spaced out evenly. Now, that's what I wanted to do there. Now once all these rectangles are created, I'm going to minimize this folder by clicking the little drop-down arrow. And I've got them all in this folder. I can hide them, show them just like that. Right-click on this layer. And we're going to convert that to a smart object as well. So now we've got a smart object, we can double-click into that. We've got all of our rectangles here. What I want to do inside of this smart duck, whoa, we can't talk. What I wanna do in this insight had this Smart Object is add a color overlay. So I'm going to double-click in this space at a layer style. This layer style is going to be a color overlay. Now this color overlay blend mode, normal pasty, a 100 percent is going to be the color of your stripes. So if I click on this here, I can go up to the red somewhere and add that sort of reddish color and hit Okay, hit Okay again, now we have red colored stripes, Command or Control S to save and exit out of this. There we go. We have our red stripes in there. Now to lock them in to the letters only, we need to create a little clipping mask. To do that, I can hold Option or Alt on a PC and it kinda hover between my stripes layer and my texts layer here my two smart objects and this little icon appears if I click, it creates a clipping mask. So now my rectangles are clipped to the text layer and whatever changes I make to the text layer are still editable for these rectangles. Okay, so what I'm gonna do with these guys, these stripes is change the blending opacity to multiply. So brings a lot of that texture in. And once we have that, the last thing I'm gonna do or well, I got a couple more things. I'm going to rotate them so I don't like him being like window blinds here. So I'm gonna do Command T or Control T to grab those and rotate them. And I'm pretty sure I want them to look something like this, maybe like that. Hit Enter. Now we have reached the bounds of our stripes, right? So that's the two edges. It's like we don't have enough stripes, if you like. Let's say you like the spacing and the size of your stripes here, because I almost kind of do. There's two things you can do. I'm going to command or control minus to zoom out a little bit. First thing you can do, the easiest way to solve this is to just wrote or transform this stripe layer again Command or Control T. And we can just grab an edge and we can scale it out. I can hold Option or Alt scale from the center. I can just scale that out to make sure it covers all of my text just like that. And I can hit Return or Enter. And that places it in there. That's one way to do it, but it scales up everything. So if I Command or Control Z and maybe I like the sort of skinnier stripes just like this and I actually kinda do. So I'm going to go back into my little Smart Object, back into my stripes smart object. I need to create more stripes on top and bottom here. So I'm going to go up to Image Canvas Size and create more height space. And I'm going to do 2000. I'm just gonna make sure I have enough space. Hit. Okay, and now I've got more headroom here. I'm going to zoom out command or control minus. And there's plenty of stripes here. So what I'm going to do is drop these down, select all of them. That way I can move them all at once. I'm going to move them down. I'm going to hold shift as well just to keep them in line. Will move them down to here. Just like that. Now I'm going to hold Alt or Option and duplicate this entire set of stripes. I'm going to hold shift as well. While I do this, I'm just going to put them up here like that. And then I don't just want to eyeball that spacing, so I need to select every single stripe now every rectangle, so click on the top rectangle, scroll down, shift, click the bottom one, every rectangle selected, select the Move tool. And remember those three ellipses, we got to distribute them. Make sure you're aligning to selection, distribute vertical centers, and that adjusted them just a little bit there, but now I know they're perfectly spaced. I can Command S to save this or Control S. Remember on a PC X out of that. And now I have way more stripes to utilize here. And these stripes, they're clipped to the x must text. I can still move them around. Seconds position these two exactly where I want them to be by either clicking and dragging or using my left and right arrow keys. Hold shift for bigger steps with those like super nudges. All right, I'm going to add a little bit extra here on these stripes. So I'm gonna zoom in Command or Control Plus, I'm going to add a little bit that makes it look like the stripes are almost a little bit 3D. That's what the Bevel and Emboss again. So double-click out here on this blank space, add a little Bevel and Emboss. What I have added here is way, way, way too much. So we need to bring this back. I'm not sure which numbers are. We're going to bring back soften first. Okay, that doesn't do much, but there we go. The size is big and also probably the depth as well. So I only want a little bit of depth there. Inner bevel and smooth is fine. And then I want to bring back the softness some, and definitely bring back to size. And then once I have it here, I think I want to show a little bit more of the shadow here. So shadow mode opacity, bring that up and maybe a little bit less of the highlight. And then I can sort of play with these a little bit. Might bring back the shadows a little bit more until we get something in here, five pixels, maybe six pixels, 76, something like that. Just to give it a little bit of a lip read on there. And that sort of adds to the effect that the stripes are actually a physical layer on top of my text. Now I think the last thing we want to add here is a little drop shadow on the whole thing. So this whole smart object that includes the text, if I double-click in this area out here, we know we've done this a whole tutorial. We go down to drop shadow and we're going to add that. And you can customize this drop shadow. So the opacity is first, how dark is this, how transparent is it? And then you can adjust the sizing, which is generally the blur. If you want to think about that the distance helps. Or the distance is easy to think about, right? It's the distance away from my object. And then spread is sort of like, you know, it's sort of like how thick it is a little, I don't know how to describe it, but just play with these three settings until you get a drop shadow that you're happy with. So if you need to add a little bit more into it, you can use that spread. If you need to blur it a little more, use the size until you get something that you like. Hit. Okay. And boy, I think There it is. Now. We have the rectangle, we have Christmas, we have stripes. So let's say you want to chat, let's say you want to edit this text, we want to do is double-click on the X-Men apart. And I want to change this and say candy again, right? I can do that. And the reason, you know, the good thing is I know that on this document I'm going to hit the edges. So already I can take this candy and command or control T and then sort of scale it down a little bit, right? Hit Enter. Now I know it's going to fit in my canvas of my other document because we made this the same size. So Command or Control S to save that, We can go back to our working document and there's candy. That probably makes a lot more sense. It does look like candy to me. I don't know. What do you think? Let me think if there's anything else I want to talk to you about so you can move the stripes around just like this. There are clipped to that candy layer or the X-Men text layer. You can create as many lines of text as you want. And you can adjust that background gradient if you want to, you can always double-click on any of these effects to adjust them. If you have it locked, you won't be able to do so. Then I can double-click on that and I can adjust anything I want here. That's pretty much it. So I would love to see your guises, renditions of the effect. And maybe you're, maybe you're using it in a totally different way than what I might think. Maybe it's not even a Christmas effect. You have any questions. I think I covered everything that I'm not entirely sure. If you have any questions, please let me know. I'll see you guys in the next one.
7. BONUS: Text Portrait Effect: In this video, we're going to be cutting out in image with text. I'll also show you how to cut out an image with the new and improved select Subject feature in Photoshop. Let's hop into this tutorial about how to cut out a photo with text and maybe make some cool. All right, so you've probably seen something like this before, and this is the final effect that we're gonna be doing. I'm gonna go ahead and group all of this together really quick. If I can hit anything other than right-click. And we're just going to hide all of that to start. So I would create a rectangle. There's the Rectangle tool over here. Just create it larger than your canvas. And then what you can do is just double-click on the thumbnail of the rectangle and you can select your color. I picked 0 e, e, e, which is just a not fully black, but it's kinda that charcoal, pretty dark color. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and bring in my image. So I'm gonna go down to file or go up to File Place Embedded. So as we navigate through, I'll just find my image here and I'm gonna place it into my document. Now it's going to sort of scale it so it's top and bottom here, so it shows the full image. That's okay. We're going to select and cut it out and then we'll scale it up after that. So if I hit Enter, it's going to place that image in there. And this little icon here means it's a Smart Object. Smart Objects are great. It means that we can apply effects that are editable. It's non-destructive. And Photoshop now has remembered the full quality of this image. So as you're working in Photoshop, if you scale things down, scale things up, they can get pixelated. If they're not smart objects, this one is, so we're good to go. Alright, so first thing I'm gonna do here, select subject has gotten so much better. So if I go up to my dropdown select, go down to subject. It's going to look at my layer and try to pick out the subject matter of that layer. Generally, a person that's within your photo doing a great job these days to apply a mask with that selection, I go down here and my Layers panel, and I can just add a mask. Now there might be some little pieces that you might need to go in and edit. I would just double-click on the mask. It's gonna take us into the Select and mask view. Whole set of properties on the right, a couple tools on the left, you might notice some spots that don't work as well for this tutorial specifically, that's okay because they're gonna fall off to black. But if you need to refine or use the Refine Edge brush tool, some areas you can do that. We'll do one little area down here, Command or Control to zoom in. And I see that on the cheek there it probably grabbed a little extra I'm going to hold option or if you're on PC and sorted, just click and drag down this way. Now, I'm fine with that because a lot of this is going to be hidden in our design. So I'm gonna hit OK and we're done editing that mask. You can also paint directly on that mask layer. If you just select the mask, grab your brush tool. Shortcut key is B, and then paint in black or white. Black is going to hide the image. White is going to bring the image back. Okay, so we've got our image in here and we've got it cut out. I'm gonna go ahead and scale it up a little bit, makes sure that layer is selected Command or Control T. And we're going to grab a corner here and probably hold Shift. And I'm going to hold Option or Alt as well to scale it up from the center. And we're gonna make this pretty large, almost like hair to chin on our document. Something like that works right there. Okay. So now we're going to have two versions of this photo in our document. So let's duplicate this layer by holding option and clicking and dragging down, you'll see the double arrows. That means we're duplicating it down. And so now we have 22 versions of this. This one on the bottom. I'm going to put into a group so I can add another mask onto it. So we're gonna go down here. There's a little folder icon. The shortcut key for that is Command or Control G. And when you have multiple items selected, it'll put them all right into a group for you. But when you only have one selected, you might need to click and drag that into the group. So we can minimize the group like this. And what we can do here is add another mask. And this mask, if we use our selection tool in the upper left-hand corner of our screen there. We could just create a selection that's about half of our subjects face here. Once we have that selection created, just click that Mask button again. And now we've got a mask. If we hide the layer that's above, you'll notice that we've got this mass that's over half of the face. The whole thing here is going to be in black and white. So I'm going to build an adjustment layer on top of everything that's going to be black and white were gonna go to adjustments. And if you don't have this panel go up to window, down to adjustments and you'll see it pop out. And there's this little black and white filter right here or adjustment layer. We're gonna create that over the top of everything. So anything underneath that adjustment layer is going to be black and white. So from here, what I'm gonna do is just add my text in. And what I wanna do is click T or press T. That's the Type tool. It's over here in your toolbar. For this one, I'm going to click and drag to create a text box on my document just like that. And it may or may not, depending on what version you're and fill it in with some Lorem Ipsum, that's fine. So here's where you're gonna type whatever you want to type for your photo. I just picked out a quick quote and I'll just copy paste that in here. And you may need to tweak this a little bit like skill this textbox out or in to get your perfect fit. And even after that, I would recommend if something's not looking right, just go ahead and bump it down a line, you know, work with this to get the text looking the way you want it to look. Now I can bring this textbox up till it's right underneath my text right there. And then if I go click on this move tool, I can scale this text up or down by pressing Command or Control T for transform. And then sort of scaling it. Be careful, make sure you hold shift so it locks it into place. And we can scale it up just like that. And then the other thing we can do and hit Enter to commit that text is pressed Command or Control a to select everything. And then we are layers, as long as we have our selection tool over here, are moved tool selected. Our alignment panel pops up up here and I'm gonna click this one to align it to the center. It barely moved it. You probably didn't even see that, but it will align it to the center. And if you think, because text is kinda weird with alignment, if you think it's a little off, you can use your arrow keys to bump that layer up and down. Okay, so what we have here now is another half of our photo right here. And then the words, I'm going to put the photo on top of the text just like that. And then I'm going to hold, this is the most important part. I'm going to hold Option or Alt in-between these two layers and create a clipping mask with my photo and my text. This is what is cutting out essentially the photo into the shape of your text. Now there's a couple of things that we're probably going to need to do here is in regards to like editing this image to make the text more readable, to make the face really fall off into the black. So the first thing I'm gonna wanna do is probably add an Adjustment Layer up top here where this Black and White Adjustment Layer is. And it's going to be a Curves Adjustment Layer. And this one's going to affect everything below it. So I wanna go ahead and bring the darkest parts of the image down a little bit. So the left side of this is all your Blacks and the right side is going to be able to whites. So if you click and pull this up, the highlights are gonna get brighter. Over here. Darkness where the darker sections of your image are gonna get darker. Now, maybe I don't want this curve to be over the top of everything, so I'm going to drag it down. So it's only over the top of the right half of the face this side over here. I'm gonna do the same thing here. You can actually lock in are using clipping masks with adjustment layers as well. I'm gonna clip that to this group layer so it does not affect the Background layer. Up here, though, I am going to add another Curves Adjustment to strictly this image. And we're going to go ahead and clip it holding Option or Alt. So we're clipping it to only that image. And what I wanna do with this one is actually pull up the darkest parts of the image. Notice how in the texts some of this gets very, very dark here. I'm going to pull that up a little bit so we can read it a little bit better. And even the point over here to the far left, the darkest point, we're going to pull that up as well. So what we're doing here is just trying to make this a little bit more legible. And I'm gonna make sure that it doesn't clip up here and pull those down a little bit. So just kind of tweak with that until it's legible. You can add as many points as you want to this and you can pull down sections, the mid tones. Because we're working with black and white. You can do a lot with the image and really retain it. And because it's inside of that text, you don't really see everything that's going on and it does look normal, even if it's blown out or the shadows aren't dark enough. Another thing that we can do here is if we feel like we want to move the face around a little bit. I've got, if I dropped down this bottom group, I've got this image and I've got this image here. And together they make the face and we don't want to move them separately from each other. So I'm going to hold Command or Control and click on both of these two layers so that I can move them together. Now if I use that move to a look, I can just move this around. So what we're gonna do is Command or Control Z to put that back Command or Control T transform. And we can do the same thing, just hold shift and Option or Alt and sort of bring this up and down until you feel like you've got a position to where you want. I kinda want to see the i on the left side of this as well. So I think something like this is pretty good here because we can see the eye, we can tell that the image is crossing over. Now one thing you could do here is you don't necessarily have to have the image that's cutting out into the text have that same mask. So maybe look at removing the mask on that one just by holding shift on this mask, you can hide it for a second or bring it back. So what it's doing is it's not cutting out this image anymore. So what's outside of her face on the image itself is showing through onto the text. You can kind of decide what you like best in regards to how this looks. We could bring that back and what we could do since this is so bright out here and it kind of looks weird when it is mast, is that we can change the text color. That's exactly what this is. Where it crosses over her face is just the text color. So if I press T and have my type layer selected, I can go up here and adjust my text color to be whatever I want. So it could be darker if you want it to be darker, it could be brighter. You can even make it well, since that's underneath the black and white layer, it's not going to be a color. But if you wanted to, you could adjust your layers so that you could bring that color in. So depending on how you want this all TO really look, you can make any sort of these adjustments to your image, to your quote, to the lightness to the darkness using those curves layers, curve layers and different adjustment layers. One thing I might do is maybe pull that back a little bit and let some of the shadows show through a little bit there so that the left side of the image looks a little bit better. But that is pretty much it. This is me from after the tutorial. I forgot to show you one thing. So we're going to pop this open again. And so on the side of the face here that you can see the right side of the face. You see that one right there. One thing I wanted to talk to you about is to get this because I'm sure you're going to be using all sorts of different photos and things to get this side of the face to fall off into the black a little bit more. We need to add a little bit of a, a bit of a gradient on the mask itself. So if I click on this mask and use that paintbrush tool and get like a really large brush with 0 hardness. Make sure it's on black. I'm painting black. You'll notice and I'll click on her face first here that I can create like a bit of a gradient, right? A bit of a fall off. Okay, that was too much. I'm going to undo that a little bit, but if I click way out here, I can really get some more fall-off. So like I can make sure the hair completely falls off. So dependent on how like how well your cut out is, you might want to add a little bit of this, sort of blends into the background a little bit more. So you can do as much or as little as you want. Obviously, if you do too much, you know, that might not look so hot. But if you have a little bit to clean up on this side, especially like up in the hair. And I'm going to undo a little bit more to get that ear to show back up a little bit. We did way too much. Yeah. You can just do that up in the hair a little bit, maybe down here, on the cheek, et cetera. So if you have some things on the side of the face there, you can go back in and add, add, add some masking, some like feathering, we'll call it feathering in there to help fade that face into the background. Thanks for watching guys. Sorry, I forgot that part in the tutorial and I hope the whole thing made sense. See you next time.
8. BONUS: 3D Depth Effect: So I snapped a quick image of my Spotify so you guys can kinda see how you could do this potentially with like a website or some other app design. And basically all we're gonna do is make sure we have that layer selected in our Layers panel go up to 3D, down to New Mesh from layer. And it's this postcard that we're going to click on. It's going to ask you if you want to switch to a 3D workspace because you're about to create a 3D layer. I don't really like to do that, but if you want to switch to 3D workspace and kinda play around with that, you can. I'm just not as familiar with it, but there's a couple of tools that I use really quick with this effect. So I hit No, but I can still access those. So I'm gonna hit 90. And then we're in this space and I can actually zoom in and zoom out like normal Command or Control plus and minus. But we have this sort of 3D layer. Now, that's a postcard, right? That's the postcard effect. Up here on the very top, we have 3D mode and we have some tools that we can utilize. This first one here on the right is like a zoom in and out. So if we click and drag up and down, we can zoom in and out of our image and you can see how it's sort of clipping it to the bounds of what our original canvas size is. So we can zoom in and out. We can also, let's see what this one is. I believe this is slide. We have a pan, we have a role, we have an orbit. So each of these are controlling the camera. So you're kinda like moving around your little postcard effect and looking at it in different ways. I like to use the orbit and that's going to allow me to sort of just rotate this guy around. And you can see right away how by just clicking and dragging up and down, we can get sort of a pretty neat effect. Right off the bat with orbit. You can use each one of these. They're going to be doing a slightly different thing, whether it's rotating, potentially a panning, or sliding back and forth. And once you get it to where you want, you can still use your transform tool select Command or Control T. And we can transform this layer. It'll convert it to a smart object, which is fine because we can kinda dive into that smart object to continue to edit that 3D effect. But it'll convert our layer to a smart object and then allow us to scale up that smart objects. So if you wanted to fill in your space here, just like that, this is like a really cool shot of the Spotify app. And it's a really quick and cool way to sort of rotate whatever it is, a flat object and create more of a 3D look with it. Now if we double-click into this guy, maybe we can get back into our 3D setup. And you notice that we have all the tools again. And in order for you to create a depth of field which is like putting some of the image out of focus. You need to click on this little 3D cube. If you don't see that go up to window down to 3D. And it's going to pop out that menu. And then we're going to look at the current view. Don't click on default camera. I believe that's going to reset your camera settings, so you'd have to go back to. Completely fixing your little 3D effect again. So current view, once I have that selected, I can see over here in the properties panel, which if you don't have that, you can go up to window, down to Properties. I can see that I have some choices with the, I guess the camera lens, if you will. And I have a depth of field choice as well. So we can adjust the distance, which I believe if we select on the Zoom tool up here and hold Option or Alt, we can actually click on a certain point of our image to set that distance. Notice as I'm holding Option or Alt, Clicking the distance over here is changing. So further away, distances further closer up distances closer. We need to add a little bit of depth to this. Once we do that, we can start to see the render began to happen a little bit. You can see on the left-hand side here, very autofocus on the far end here, very out of focus. So remember this is a 3D layer. We're in a 3D space. There is actual distance and depth to this now, just like the real world, right? And if we hold option, remember I'm on the Zoom tool, I can actually click on different points and say not this is what I want in focus over here, this left bar, the rest is going to get out of focus, or the furthest point here that's in focus this. So that's pretty cool, is a pretty cool way to actually set your focal point. And I want it here in the center. I can do that. We can save this and then we can bounce out of that back to this view. And you'll notice a couple things here. First that yeah, we do have sort of a blurrier foreground, blurrier background, and a sharp center. But the blurriness isn't the highest quality. And that's because we haven't rendered that 3D layer. So what we need to do is actually double-click into our scene. So we have to be in that 3D space. We can click on the little 3D cube and go down to Render. And now this is going to start rendering our scene. I haven't really gotten into all of the details on what we're rendering or to what level we are rendering our scene. I'm assuming it's probably on the highest quality version, but it's going to take a little bit to render the depth of field effect. If you don't care about that effect, you can still use this postcard option to rotate, scale, skew whatever your object, and to create that look without the depth of field. And you don't have to really go through this render process, which on my computer it looks like is going to take maybe five minutes. So I'm going to actually use this for the thumbnails. So you guys have already seen that blurred out effect. But it's gonna take a little bit of time to render that perfectly. But you wanna make sure you do that before you export that file or save that JPEG, because you really want that the blurry depth of field to be as high quality as possible.
9. BONUS: Torn Paper Effect: The first half of this tutorial, I'm gonna show you how to cut out your own paper assets. So just in case you've actually scanned in your own piece, just like I did here, or you've taken a photo of that or maybe you've downloaded something or purchase something that has a background and you need to cut out that piece of paper. We're going to make a quick selection first with a pretty large size brush. Photoshop can see the edge fairly well, especially if you scan or take this photo on a darker background like I did here. So when we zoom in, we can see that it's captured a lot of the edge, but it hasn't got the fibers along the edge. We're gonna go ahead and create that mask. And then on the mask in the layers panel, we're going to double-click it. It's gonna take us into the Select and Mask. And I'm going to zoom into the edge here. And in the view mode and the upper right, I'm going to switch it to black and white so we can really see the contrast between the edge. We're going to select the Refine Edge brush tool, which is one that you've probably used or seen before when cutting out hair. And a photo, potentially seen it in a hair cut out tutorial. So we're going to use this brush and a fairly small brush size to paint along the edge and just let Photoshop do the work. You can see that it's picking up all those fine details along the edge. Very well. That's, that's the point of this brush is to sort of pick up all those fine details and dependent on the scan and how it properly focused. Some some areas might be a little bit blurrier than others, but you can see just how well it's picking up all that detail along the edge. And I don't want your brush size too big. If it's too large, it's going to pick up too many pixels way outside of the paper edge. And it's going to really throw off drop shadows and just give you unwanted pixel data that isn't a part of your actual image. Once you've made your way around the edge of this image and hit OK, it's going to apply that mask to your layer. And we can see over here, I've already cut out the entire paper assets so that we can use it really quick here. And it's got that fine detail all along the edge. And I put just a quick little background layer so we can see that here. And if you add in potentially a drop shadow to this layer, your piece of paper is going to look a lot like that original image that we had. So if I turn off the mask here, you can see this is our original scan. And over here I've just added a small drop shadow to it. And these two look very similar to each other. But in this one, it's completely cut out and usable. Now a quick way for you to sort of save this down as a PNG or you can save it down as a PSD Photoshop file if you want to, to hold Command or Control and click on the Layer Mask. And then what we're gonna do is go up to Image crop, that's going to crop to the edges of our piece of paper. And I'm going to hit Command or Control D to de-select. I'm going to turn off the drop shadow and also turn off the background layer. So now we just have that piece of paper and I can save this out by going up to File, save As, and quickly save it out as like paper texture PNG. So that would be how to cut out your own paper texture to use in your work. So if we move on to actually creating something like you saw in the thumb, now, we've got two photos here stacked on top of each other. And I simply want to mask out the top photo and show a little bit of the paper edge as well. And maybe add a bit of a drop shadow to create that cool sort of torn paper effect that you saw in the thumbnail. First, I want to bring in the piece of paper. So we're gonna go to File Place Embedded, find our paper texture PNG and just place it in our document. I'm going to hit Enter to just place it right in there. And we've got this piece of paper. So I'm gonna zoom out just a touch, use Command or Control T and scale this up. I don't have to hold shift these days. I'll just get this torn paper. Write about in the center of my page right in there and hit Return or Enter that's going to place it right there and commit the actual transformation. And you see it's on top of this photo. So like we did before to make that selection with the mask, I'm going to hit Command or Control and hold it and just click on the thumbnail of my paper texture. And that's gonna give me a selection of that texture. I'm gonna go down to the first photo, the one that's on top that actually want to make it look like it's cut out. And I'm going to create a mask on top of that. So now if I turn off this paper texture and it looks like we have this sort of torn edge effect to the top photo. Now what I wanna do is make a little bit of that paper kinda come over or come underneath the edge of this torn edge that we have in the photo just to help kind of make that look a little bit more like it's torn paper. And so if I move the paper texture underneath and just move it outside of the edge a little bit. That's going to create sort of torn edge. And you could use any edge, you can rotate the piece of paper or use sort of any edge, scale it up, scale it down. We can even warp it a little bit. So if we command T or Control T and then right-click on that transformation and go to Warp. We can do a little bit of warping along this edge to make it look different than what the mask looks like. And we can really sort of create that torn paper look however we want. The last thing I would do to this paper texture is add a little bit of a drop shadow to it. And this drop shadow is obviously too much. So we're going to scale that back. The distance shouldn't be that much. Maybe up the size, up the spread a little bit, and then up the opacity sum. We want to keep it on multiply though. So that multiplies with the background. We're going to hit okay there. And that gives us that little torn paper look. We can customize this however we want. We can move this paper around, we can rotate it like I said, and create different sorts of Torn Edges and then use the warp to sort of transform what that edge looks like if you want to, if you don't like maybe some of the background color coming through, you might see it in some places along your paper texture. You can go to adjustments and just make sure that that piece of paper is totally black and white. We can clip it to only the paper texture layer by holding Option or Alt. And that's going to make this black and white and take out any color that was in it previously. And there's just a little bit here, it's not as noticeable, but you might have some of that dependent on how well the quick selection and select and mask did for your texture. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, learned a couple of things about the torn paper effect. I actually use this a lot this year for Pacers gaming, and I do the exact same thing here. It's really easy to create your own textures if you want to. Just scan them in and very quickly select them and use them in your designs. Appreciate you guys watching. I'm Spencer from pixel in bracket, and I'll see you next time.
10. BONUS: Image Color Overlay: Lately I've been using a lot of color overlays in my design work for Pacers gaming. I'll put some examples up on the screen right over here. And most of these have the kinda duotone look to them, but you don't have to do that. You could let the colors bleed through. I just liked that imagery better for what I was working on. Nevertheless, pretty simple stuff using blending modes in Photoshop. I'm Spencer from pixel and bracket. Let's open up Photoshop and get started. So I have just a new Canvas open here. It's 1920 by 1080 because that helps me make thumbnails, but it doesn't really matter. You can have whatever size open you need. I'm going to pull in a photo going up to File, down to place embedded. You can also just drag and drop a photo. And I think I have a couple of downloaded here. We're going to use this one right there. I believe that's going to be the thumbnail image as well. So we're just going to create what's in the thumbnail for the most part. All right, so I brought this guy n you can scale him up and down when you're bringing them in. But no matter what, he's going to be a smart object, just hit Enter to place him in there. He's a smart objects so we can scale them up and down with no worries about quality loss or anything like that. We've got this photo. I'm going to add a quick color overlay, and I'm just going to show you really quick what I would do first. I'm going to make a new rectangle. Here. You can just go ahead and edit the fill right now if you want to, or you can just make a rectangle. And boy, that's, that's kinda screwed me up. Now, Photoshop makes those rectangles from the center out so you can do that or you can hold Option or Alt and just create it from the corner over here. And I just want to make sure it covers my Canvas. Once I got that rectangle made, it creates a layer down here. See in the lower right, I've got my layers, but double-click on the color part of the layer, the little thumbnail, it brings up my color picker and I can change this rectangle to anything I want. Because I've been using a lot of yellows. I'm going to show you the yellow first. I'm going to pick a nice saturated, bright yellow. For this first demonstration. We'll pick some darker later and I'll show you how I handled that. But the brighter colors tend to work more because for the most part, what we're doing is replacing the whites of the image with this color. So what you can do now is play with the blending modes. And if you see in my layers panel over here, I have this normal dropped down. These are my blending modes. And luckily in Photoshop, the latest version, it actually previews each of these blending modes as I scroll down through them, which is really nice. Now you notice some of these effects already give you that duotone ish look or even monotone look. But what I'm going to pick is multiply. What I wanna do is actually make this image black and white. So I'm going to go up to adjustments. If you don't see this panel, you can go to window down to adjustments. It's going to pop it open. And there's this little black and white option here. I'm going to create a new black and white adjustment layer. Now if you have a lot of layers in your document and you want to link this to just this photo because it'll make everything black and white underneath the photo. I'm gonna do that by holding Option or Alt and clicking right between them to create a clipping mask. Okay, so we've got this look, what, we've already got this sort of, I don't know if this is kinda do a tone, right? It's black and then yellow. But I want to make it pop a little bit more. So one of the little adjustments that I put it in there, if we go back to that panel, is actually curves. I'll bring open the curves. Curves used to really scare me. It's pretty easy basically it's saying, Hey, anything that's black, make it black. Anything that's white, make it white in your image. And then from there you can sort of adjust. So if I take a point down here and my darker grays, right? If you look at this little, it's like a little graph. And I pulled this up, that means make my darker grays brighter. Does that makes sense? If I pull this down up here that says make my widest whites, darker, highlights are getting darker. That's how this guy works. So a lot of times what I do is I definitely up the contrast of my image. I will pull up the darker parts of my image more because I really want that photo to pop. And now I can see that we've got a lot more contrasts there. We're seeing a lot more of my color come through. And if you wanted to move this rectangle, you could to see the difference. And then if you wanted to turn off and on the black and white layer, you can do that. If you really want to. You can actually put this all in a folder. We could duplicate this image down below or double-click on it accidentally and exit out of that. Duplicate it by holding Option or Alt down below outside the group. So collapse that group, it's still inside the group. We gotta make sure it's outside the group. So I'm going to drag it down here, right there. Now that pop to the left, it's not indented anymore, it's outside the group. So this group on top of this photo, right? This group, if I add a little mask to it and I grab my little gradient tool, this is how I actually did the, the thumbnail and I'm going to select this gradient right there. So basically what I did was I created a little gradient on the mask. So I just painted that little gradient tool onto the mask. And this is the thumbnail image. I just wanted to show you that in case you were wondering exactly how to do what was in the thumbnail. So what I've done is I've created a mask here, where on the white side of the mask we can see the effect on the left side of the mask. We see through the layer. And fact, if I turn off this background layer and turn off the picture underneath, you're going to actually see transparency through that. So right now we only see the right half of this photo. And if I turn on the bottom of the photo, the bottom photo, you'll see the left half of the photo, right? Does that make sense? If I turn off this effect up here, you actually see the whole just regular photo. All right, so that's how to handle that. Let's go ahead and turn off this here. And what we have now is essentially just the effect on top of the photo. In fact, I'm just gonna get rid of that and I'm going to get rid of the background layer. So this is all we have right here. What if you want this guy to be darker? Well, we can double-click on this and let's say I want it to be like a dark navy blue. Start to bring this down here. Where did my photo go? Well, what you're doing when you have multiply as the blending mode is you're basically saying. Anywhere that there's white, replace it with this color. If I go down through my Blending Options, we're going to see a lot of different things happening throughout my image. Now, one of the things I like is using Overlay or Soft Light. Even some of these others like screen or lighten, will basically apply that darker color to the shadows. And that kinda makes sense, right? You, if you apply a light color to the shadows, you're kinda going to invert the image a little bit. And the way multiply it goes, I'm actually applying a dark color to the whites of my image was going to really dark in my image. Now, that being said, I actually utilize this quite a bit to create backgrounds because now I can type text on top of it and it's going to be relatively visible. But if you want to maybe have this color, most of your image, but still be able to see the image. What I do is I actually duplicate this rectangle. So I'm going to hold Option or Alt and duplicate it. Then with one of these, I don't know which one, maybe the top one. What I like to do is go into these modes again and maybe select something like screen. And so now I've got screen and I've got Multiply. And with the end, I actually think I keep them multiply on top. Yeah, that's what I do. So without the screen, It's a little darker with the screen, there's not much difference, but now I can take that multiply and I like to just hold Shift while I have the opacity selected and use the down arrow keys to start to bring back that multiply a little bit. And you notice we're already starting to see our photo more. And it's got a little bit of that color to it. And you can adjust the colors of both of these rectangles to get the exact color that you want. But even in the 90s, even just dumping it down through the nineties helps you see the photo a lot more. So if I were to go to 85 percent, I can actually see the photo a lot better if I wanted to utilize this in a way where it's a little bit brighter than how dark that was. It's not just the background. I actually want it to be visible in my design. Now the other thing too is I would, I would go back to those curves. You might want to readjust how these curves affect your photo because that will adjust the brightness of it and how much you can see and how much of the photo falls off into the black or the white highlights. I think that's pretty much it for this tutorial. If you guys have any questions, definitely let me know for sure. I just basically walked you through two different ways that I do color overlays in my design work and I do this all the time like every single day. Even add texture on top of these and everything like that. So if you're interested in any of that or me going any further with the color overlays. This is sort of just the quickest method that I had applying a rectangle using a blending mode and have in that color pop through, usually with the black and white layer down there instead of having the color because I think the color sort of Muddy's it up. If you're thrown a big rectangle across here, it's you're, you're probably want and the color of that rectangle, not necessarily all the colors in your image. If you guys have any questions, let me know, subscribe for more tips and tutorials, and I'll see you guys next time.
11. BONUS: Gradient Map Duotone Effect: Picture open here. That's all I have. That's my only layer. All I need to do is add an adjustment layer. Now you can find it in your adjustments panel to the lower right hand. It's called Gradient Map, as you see there. Or you can go down here to this little half circle filled-in guy and go up to Gradient Map. Either way it's called Gradient Map. Now it's going to create a new adjustment layer called Gradient Map. And it's going to affect everything below that adjustment layer. Clip it to just the singular layer below it, you can hold Option or Alt and click between the two layers to create a clipping mask. So now the gradient map will only apply to the image below it are the layer below it. If you wanted to apply to everything else you can, if you want, you don't have to do the clipping mask. Anyway. All righty, It's created a different mapping of colors in my image. So if I click on this gradient in the properties panel, it's going to pull up the gradient editor. And what we're doing is we're essentially replacing colors in the image. So down here in the lower left, this is going to be your darker tones, even though it's sort of flipped it to white, It's going to be the darker tones, trust me on that. So we can double-click on the swatch. You can also click on the color there as long as that swatch is selected. Now, this one, I'm going to make something like a darker blue tone like that. Hit Okay. And now on the other side, I'm going to click on the black swatch, go down to my Color and change this to something like a really hot yellow. So something closer to the light range of the colors in my image and hit. Okay, and just like that, we have our new gradient map duotone effect. It's that easy. Now you can also add other colors in here. If you click just below this, you can add more swatches, change these colors. So if I wanted to add something red and here and maybe pull it back a little bit so the yellow passes through kind of like a mid-tone red and hits that darker blue. You can do that. So you can adjust these effects in any way that you want. It's actually pretty cool. And then these little diamonds sliders, you can move the clipping points of where those colors start and stop. So if we get rid of this orange again and we go back to these diamonds in the middle. There's just the one. So it's kinda like little tug of war here. Do you want more yellow in the image? Do you want more of the dark blues and the image to pull back some of those colors, either or is kinda helps the contrast. Now if I hit okay here, I can actually add other adjustment layers above this as well, so you're not done. You can always add more brightness and contrast if you want to adjust your image in any way that you want.
12. BONUS: Removing Logo Backgrounds: We're going to look at how to remove a white background from logos. And just depending on the logo, the techniques going to be different. We'll look at a simple version with the pixel in bracket logo with just a really quick selection. And we're going to mask that. And then we'll look at maybe a lower-quality logo that has more text in it, more colors in it. And we'll look at how to select out the white, get rid of it, and also kind of refined the mask a little bit. So there's a little bit of a masking tutorial in this, but overall, I'm just going to teach you some techniques that I would use. Move some white backgrounds. So every step of this is sort of my own best practice at doing this. And what I would do is if you have these like jpegs sitting somewhere of these logos that you need to remove the white background from because you don't have access to the original. You need to go to File and down to Place Embedded. That's how we're going to bring in the logo into Photoshop. So I've already got my document open. I've created a new one. It's 1920 by 1080, so just large enough, make sure it's larger than your logo. And we're gonna go to place embedded and we're going to find that logo. So I'm going to start with the pixel and bracket logo, which is the easier of the two. You see, all I have is a black and white logo. So I'm going to hit Enter to place that in there. And you'll notice. And I've had some people comment that when they've brought this in C, I can just hide the background or it can unlock it and just delete the background layer by hitting the delete button, dragging it down to the trashcan, whatever you wanna do. We'll just delete out that white background layer. So anywhere there's checkered is transparency. What I've had people do this because a lot of people will use the eraser tool. And I believe that's over here somewhere, you up right there. And then they'll get this little X and they'll try to click and it'll say it must be rasterized, et cetera, et cetera. Well, no, I don't want you to do that. I want you to cancel. We're not going to erase anything you guys need to learn how to mask and masking is easy. All right? What you need to do for this one is pretty simple. C, I'm going to use the magic wand, which is everybody's favorite tool. It almost never works, but in this case, it's actually going to work pretty well. If I click on the white area Photoshop and the Magic Wand tool is going to be like, Okay, I'll look for all the white stuff and it found everything, but it doesn't look inside of objects. So I need to hold Shift. And notice that plus icon pops up and it's going to add, if I click, it's going to add the interior of that shape as well. So now I have everything selected outside of my logo. And over here I have my layer. And as long as that layer is also selected, I can go down here to the create a mask button, add a layer mask. And when I click that, it takes that selection and it adds a mask based on it. Now what did we do? Well, it looks like our selection was reversed. So in order to invert this mask, make sure you have it selected, and then go up to Image, down to Adjustments and Invert. And that's shortcut key is Command I or Control I on a PC. And look at that just like that, we have our logo isolated on a transparent background. And what else can I do with this? Well, let's say you wanted to if you did have a one-color logo, but you wanted to change the color to the corporate colors of the brand standards. I can actually double-click in the blank space of this layer. And that's going to open up the layer styles. And I can go down to Color Overlay, which is basically, basically going to take anything that exists on that layer outside of the mask and it's going to apply this color to it. Notice how it's white now I can. So that's a really quick way to do that a lot just to go from black to white or it could go to read or any other color that I wanted. I could hit Okay. Hit Okay. And now I have that applied. Everything I've taught you here is non-destructive because everything still exists. So if I hide the color overlay and then I hold Shift to hide the mask, see the x, we still have the original layer here. And because it's a smart object, it's going to retain its full quality. So if I scale this down and scale it back and hit Enter and scale it back up. It retains that quality without losing it because a normal rasterized layer is going to be stretched and skewed by photoshop every time you resize it, and every time it does that, it loses a little bit of that quality or a lot if you scale it down a lot and then try to stretch it back out. So all of these little techniques are kinda like best-practices. So let's look at a little bit harder of a logo, right? So I'm going to start actually, why don't we just say well, we'll just open up a new document. New Document, and then we'll do 1920 by 1080. I'm just going to select a custom preset, RGB, 300 DPI, whatever it doesn't matter, create, okay, the background layer is white. We have that here. Okay, that's fine. Let's go File place Embedded and we're going to bring in that other logo. It's just other little print logo. I just found some random free logo. It's not that high-quality. I'm going to bring it in, hit Enter. And you'll notice how it's pretty fuzzy. If you look at that, It's a pretty poor login is probably a logo that a lot of people will encounter that, that type of quality. And so you'll, you'll notice that the background on this actually isn't even perfect white. It's actually an off-white color. And then if we go ahead and hide and delete that background layer, which is going to hit the delete key. Goodbye. We have leftover just this logo and let's say this is the only access I have, this logo and I gotta make it work, right? A lot of times that's just the way it is. All right. So I'm going to remove the white on this and with the the, what's it called Magic Wand tool. If I click out here, now I'm going to click inside of each one of these letters. Okay, you know, starting to click inside of those. And then I, Oh my gosh, I'm going to click inside these tiny letters like, what's it even going to see? And inside of there, this is going to end up being a pretty crummy, a rendition of the same technique we use. So let's forget about the magic wand tool for something as complicated as this. Instead, Let's go to Select and then color range. And that's going to open up this little color range document and it's going to have whatever color was sampled last, let's go down to this selection preview and first click None. That's not going to change our image at all so that we actually can figure out what we want to select here color wise, okay, so right now, I'm going to bring this fuzziness down. I'm not sure what the default is. It might be, maybe it starts at 0, it might start right in the middle. I have a little eyedropper, and there's some eyedropper options down here underneath these, these, these options here. And then there's also invert that's generally not selected. So we'll unselect that we're just going to. To bring this back to the default, I want this first eye dropper and I'm going to just select the color that I want to select. All right, so just eyedropper into the white area. Okay. Now under selection preview, I can go down to something like black mat. And what that does, or I can actually go to Quick Mask, looks like this. Okay, so what happened is remember how we inverted that mask in the first version. What we actually want to click the invert button on this version two. So I'm going to click Invert. So I'm making a selection that is the inverse of the color. Don't worry about all those complicated technical words. It's going to work out just fine. But what this does is allows me to go to a black mat just to see what my selection or what my logos going to look like on black based on this selection. And from here I can adjust the fuzziness, which basically says, Okay, I see what you clicked on. How many colors around that or in a certain range do you want me to look for? And the more you turn up, the fuzziness, the more like colors it's going to try to find. But the higher your turn up, the fuzziness, the more you're going to get into the different pieces of the logo. Notice how this blue shape here changes as I drag that down and back. And notice how the outline of the white and we start to eat into the colors a little bit. So you want to pick one that's in a sort of a medium range that doesn't start to deteriorate the logo too much, but also picks up a decent amount of the white around the logo and I'm going to hit Okay. I'm at 130. That's just sort of just depends on the logo that you have. And once I hit Okay, it creates that selection, and it's actually selecting everything outside of the logo so that when we click on the Mask button, remember we have this layer down here and I'm going to click on the mask. We've just created a selection just like the magic wand tool and a little bit of a different way. I'm going to add that mask. And it masks everything out outside of the logo based on the color selection that we made. Cool. However, let's say I add a background underneath this because right now, oh, it looks great, but it's hard to tell. So I'm going to add a shape layer and we're just going to cover the entire artboard. And from here, I'm going to drag it below my other layer. And I'm just going to double-click on that rectangle. And I'm going to give it a little bit of a darker color, right? So I could darker gray or, you know, I got a better idea of what if I wanted to put this thing. Maybe it's going on something like a darker tan color, maybe not even black and white. It's got a little bit of color to it. I want to see how that looks on top of that color. I'm going to hit Okay, well actually most of this looks pretty decent. But if you zoom in here, notice how this yellow shape actually has a bit of a halo around it. Let's get in there and tweak that. What I'm gonna do is select the mask of this layer. And this is where the masking tutorial sort of starts a little bit. You see the way that a mask works is anymore that's black. You can see through that layer anywhere that's white, you see the layer. Does that make sense? Because if I hide this mask holding Shift, I see everything. But you'll notice on this mask that there's a lot that's painted in and black. And let's see if we can't make this thumbnail a little bit bigger. Large thumbnail. So you see, we can actually almost read, and if I zoom in here on this, we can actually see anywhere that's black outside of our little logo is what is getting hidden out of this layer here. And anything that's white is what's getting shown. So that's the way that masking works. Well, we can actually paint on that mask layer. So let's zoom into this little halo and yellow piece. And I'm going to click on this masked layer over here. And I'm going to grab a brush with the shortcut key B. Over here. We've got a brush and I can adjust its size and we can adjust its hardness. I selected just the general brush. And now what happens is I have a black and a white here, and I can toggle those with this little toggle key, these double arrows here, that is also the X key. And if you do masking, you know the X key because the X key, you just keep going back and forth. It's like a little bit of a dance between drawing and black, drawing and white drawn in black, undo, undo. You know, you go back and forth between all these keys. So x is to switch back and forth between those. And here's the difference. If I draw in black on this mask, important that I have the mask selected. If I draw in black, it's going to basically delete out or hide the pieces of that layer. If I undo that with command Z, and that's another one that you're going to hover on a lot. And then I switch with x. Notice how my white is now in the front. If I draw, it's showing that layer. So it's really showing a bunch of that white on that layer. And I can undo. So what we're gonna do is go back to the black to where we can hide this, right? Just hide along that edge a little bit. One little trick to draw straight lines with the brush. If I click once, hold shift and click again, photoshop will draw a straight line between those two clicks. So when you have geometric shapes like this and even when you have circular shapes, you can make little straight lines to do this. Like if you're going around the outline of a person, what you can do is click where you want it to start and then come down here and click where you want that to finish and hold shift. And it's going to draw a line along that, or it's going to draw a brushstroke along that. And because our brush stroke is black and because we're on the masking layer, we're going to start to eat into that edge a little bit and I can do it again and again. And now I'm going to go up here and actually reduce the size to five points and reduce the hardness maybe to 80 percent. So we're going to get a little bit closer to this. So notice how my brush size is smaller. I can hold Shift and we're going to eat away at that white that's along that edge. And I'm going to click and do the same thing for this top edge. And I think I changed the shape a little bit on that. So you want to be careful my click again. And that was just a quick undo. And I'm going to click again hold Shift and go through. Click again hold Shift and go through. And you guys can sort of tweak this to your liking and you can go through different shapes and just get rid of some of this haloing. Remember we're drawing in black, I'm just holding Shift and we're clicking along the edge of this. And for every time you click and hold Shift, it's going to keep drawing in straight lines. So I just have shift held and it's just going to keep drawing and straight lines. So around some of these square-like shapes. It's pretty easy to hold Shift and just keep drawing in these straight lines and keep removing some of that edge. So that's how you can sort of tweak and refine your mask a little bit. Now one other way to tweak and refine the mask, other than manually doing it like that, if I double-click on my mask layer, it opens up a little Properties panel for that mask. And it's got a bunch of properties here. And I can actually change my view mode so I can view it in black and white on white, on black or whatnot. And what I can do from here is actually adjust these different toggles so the adjust the radius of my mask, adjust the smoothing of it, adjust the feather. I can do the contrast of it, which kinda makes it a little bit too sharp for me. I can also shift the edge. So if we zoom in here, we can shift the edge back of some of these letters and it's starting to eat into that white that's around that shape. But you'll notice that it's really starting to eat into some of these shapes too. So you gotta be careful with some of these. I would make small tweaks. I think the most reliable adjustments will be made manually. So just to finish off some of your logos, if they have some white pieces still on them. Use some of these manual painting adjustments. This is masking. This is how I would do it if I needed to sort of tweak and get the single look right on different colors. Whether that's this tan color or it's like a lighter color, a yellow, maybe it's a red or pink sheet of paper. Notice how our logos holding up pretty well on all of these different colors of backgrounds. So if you needed to put this logo anywhere like that, you can. Now one other cool thing is because I've masked this out. Remember how he changed the color of our logo before? Well, it's an easy way to take a colored logo like this with different colors in it. And actually double-click here and we're going to open up the layer styles again. And we're going to go down to Color Overlay and check this out. I've made it a one-color logo. So if I wanted to change this to a white logo or changed this to a black logo because we have selected everything out and we've done this masking, we can do that. So it takes that selection and creates a color overlay based on what it sees there, which is what's left of this logo that's showing very easy way to just kinda deal with and manipulate some of these logos. Now there's one thing, one last thing I want to show you, and that's that I see a little haloing out here. Check this out. You see how he's still have we still have a little bit of this color. I don't know if you guys can see that very well and you definitely can't see it on that. Let's go ahead and find out where it looks the best. Maybe it's maybe it's on stark white. So on that stark white, Can you guys see that there's a little bit of a halo there? Well, we need to remove some of that and now it's really easy to do that. If we just zoom out and we go and we select this on this mask layer. We're going to take the lasso tool and I'm just going to go draw around the logo. So I'm literally just kind of drawing with my mouse around this logo. And I created a selection with the lasso tool around that logo. What I wanna do is because I like this close to the logo, everything is good. But as you reach the edges, look at that halo that's starting to form. You know, that, that color select sort of missed with that fuzziness selection. What I can do now is invert this selection. So I'm going to do Shift Command. Hi. So now everything outside of this logo is selected. Everything in this space is selected. So if I'm on my mask, what do I do? I just need to fill that in with black and it's going to disappear. So I'm going to do a fill and that's Shift F5. So if I do Shift F5, that opens up the fill and I can select a lot of different things to fill the contents width. I'm just going to select black. That's all I need to fill it with. Blending mode. Just leave it at normal everything. Just leave at normal capacity, 100% hit. Okay? And look at what that did to our mask down here. It actually filled in that entire area. And if I zoom in here and undo, see how we even had edges here and that haloing, you can't even tell, but there is that haloing here. And when I redo that, it actually filled in everything outside of our logo with black. So that's pretty darn cool. And that allowed us to have get rid of any of that haloing. So now we have like a really solid logo on transparency to use in whatever way that you need to use it, whether it's black, white, the original color version, anything like that should work. So using all these tools that I taught you, I know this was super long. This was way longer than I expected it to be. Using all of these a way that you can remove white backgrounds from logos, also though, from anything, I mean, any picture, Let's say you have a product. I've done this countless times on my product image pictures that I want to put as an isolated picture and I need to remove all the white from it. Just use these tools. And these aren't all the tools. There's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So there's lots of tools I taught you some of them. There's lots more techniques and different ways that you can remove stuff. It just every single instance is different. So here's some techniques. I hope you guys learned a ton. I hope this tutorial was helpful. Check out the channel and I'll see you next time.
13. BONUS: Adding a Watermark: What's up everyone today we're gonna be looking at how to add a watermark to any one of your images really quickly in Photoshop. So I'm going to show you how to add your logo as a watermark and also how to add some text if you want to, in Photoshop is pretty quick and pretty easy. Now one thing you want to make sure you have before you get started is a one-color version of your logo or word mark. That could be black, that could be white. It doesn't matter, but we want it to be one color and we want it to have a transparent background. I'm going to assume you have a logo and we're gonna just open up a photo in Photoshop like this and go up to file, down to place embedded. And we're going to find that logo. So for instance, it could be a PNG of the logo. We're gonna place it into our document just like that. Now you notice this one is black, but that's okay because in this blank area of our layer on the right, if we double-click it, it's going to open up our Layer Styles. And one really quick way that I switched the colors is to add a color overlay and then you can select any color that you want. So if you wanted it to be darker, you could select darker or lighter, hit OK twice and you're back out. Now you have a white version of your logo with this color overlay effect attached. Now we can drag this logo around anywhere. We could put it in a corner, hit Command or Control T and hold Shift while you grab one of these corners to scale it down, we can just hit enter and accept that change right there. And then we could go up to opacity and maybe turn it down to something like 25%. Or if you wanted maybe like 50% just depends on how opaque or transparent you want that logo to be. Now, that's a pretty quick way. If you're putting the logo on your social media post or you just want something like a little logo bug in the corner of your image. Just grab that one color version. If it's a lighter portion of the image, maybe flip it to black, or if you want it to be any sort of color, you can just grab that logo if it's got a transparent background and just set the opacity. So I'm like 50%, 25 percent, something like that and put it up in the corner or down in the corner wherever you want. Now another thing that you can do is instead of a logo, if you just have some text you want to add to this. And of course, we're getting an error, but pressed the T shortcut key. That's the type tool over here. And we can click anywhere on our Canvas and we can type in something. I'm just going to type watermark in here and go back to my move tool. It's a little bit small. All I have to do is press that Command Z or Control T on my keyboard to scale this sucker up, make sure you hold shift once again. And once it's all the way scaled up, I'm going to hit enter or return. The next thing I want to do is go back to that T or type tool and make sure that this text is centered. That's gonna make it a little bit easier when you're working with it. Press Command or Control a to select your entire art board, make sure you're on the Move tool. And then you can align this piece of text to the very center. But clicking these horizontal and vertical alignment center buttons up here, press command or control D to de-select everything. And now we've got this piece of text in the middle of our document. Now what you can do with that command or control t to transform it is you can actually rotate it. And if you hold shift, it's going to lock it into 15 degree increments. So for instance, this is like a 30 degree or like a 45-degree angle or whatever it is, you know what I'm talking about? We can hit enter and then we can do the exact same thing. We can drop the opacity of this type layer down. So we just add that watermark right over the top of it and you can just make it 5%. So it's super subtle, 10%, something around there. And you've got this watermark over the top of your image. Now if you want, I'm going to just Command or Control Z to return to this version. If you want, you can hold Option or Alt on PC and you can click and drag to create multiples of these. You've seen this probably on some watermarked images before. I'm gonna hold shift and select all three of my layers over here, I'm going to press the little folder icon that's Command or Control G, just a group that together. And then I can do the same thing with that layer selected. It's Command or Control T two to rotate and transform this. And you can rotate that. We can hold Shift, hold Option or Alt and do something like this as well. If you wanted to do like a multiple, multiple sort of like watermark effect on your image. I think that pretty much covers it. It's really easy to add this, oh, actually, you know, to save this out, you're just going to want to go up to file down to Save As. And then you're going to just save it as a jpeg or whatever your image file type is that you want and then hit save. So that's how you would save that out. And then if you're uploading that to your site, if you're putting that on social media, I know if you're adding a watermark, you're putting your image somewhere where the public can see it, but you don't want them to steal it, right? So wherever you are putting it, that's what you would do essentially. So really quick, really easy way you can save out. Let's look at that too. Like if you wanted to save this watermark and just keep putting it on other ones, you could actually just hide the photo here. So if we hide the photo, you can't really see it here. But if I bring this opacity up, you can see that we've got this watermark and we've got all these transparent squares, right? That means if we save this file, it's going to be transparent in the background outside of where the text is. So if I do File Save as what we can do here is just save it as a PNG. And we'll go find that folder that we have the logo. And I'm just going to call this watermark. Watermark PNG. Save that it OK. And then what we can do is instead of typing this text, and if we open up another photo here, we can actually do the same thing we did with the logo. Go up to File Place Embedded and we can find that watermark PNG. It's a PNG so they can have that transparency and hip place and it's going to place it in here. Now, we do need to go ahead and what I would do is save it as full 100% opacity. So like don't make it transparent. And then just do that in Photoshop if you want to. So you can drop that down to 10% just in case you want a little bit more or less transparency that gives you the option to edit that when you bring the PNG end. So you don't have to necessarily type in that text or duplicate your logo around every single time. Once you've done it, once, as long as you're bringing the watermark into other photos that are of similar size, you can go ahead and just place that watermark on the top of it and then tweak the transparency if you want to. The other part of this is that obviously photos are different sizes. So what you would do with that PNG is exactly what you saw us Do. You would hit that Command or Control T. And that's the transform tool. And then you can rotate that around, scale that up and down, and really do with it what you want on top of your image. You can also play around with some of the Blending Options, but I think just dropping the opacity works well enough in this case. And then yes, it could also be a color logo as long as you have transparency, you obviously don't want to see just sun-like white box that's half transparent with a logo inside of it. Like a JPEG would be. You really want to have some kind of transparency there on top of your photo. So if that makes any sense anyway, real quick tutorial on how to add watermarks in Photoshop if you have any questions or there's other use cases that you want to learn. Hit me up in the comments down below, and maybe I'll make another video on them. Once again, I'm Spencer from pixel N bracket, and I'll see you guys next time.
14. BONUS: Outline Thumbnail Effect: You've seen it all over YouTube. If that outline photo effect where you cut someone outward object out of the thumbnail, maybe a blow it up a little bit. You put a little white outline. There's big old gradient in the background, something like that. I'm going to show you how to do that in Photoshop if you're looking to create some trendy YouTube thumbnails. So let's open up Photoshop and get started. I'm going to hit Create New and for YouTube thumbnails, what I always do is 1920, not 19 thousand 1920 by 1080. That's kind of your standard HD resolution, RGB color mode. That might be an advanced options just depends on no, actually it's probably not. Anyway. Moving on. All right. So we've got this 1920 by 1080 document. I need to bring in my photo that I'm going to use. So I just literally screen grabbed a thumbnail from a video. I'm going to go down to File Place Embedded. This is my screenshot. I'm going to hit Place and it's going to place it in here. So I've got some, some different things from the video itself inside of here that I don't want. So I'm just going to scale this up by holding Alt or Option until I don't have those pieces in my video anymore. So I can click that and drag that down. So this is what we're going to be looking at here and I'm going to be basically cutting myself out of this. This is a little video that we shot for Pacers gaming just recently and not released yet, but soon to be. All right, so I'm going to grab the pen tool and that is shortcut key P. It's down here in your toolbar. I'm going to make sure that up here in the modes it's set to path. And then I'm just going to trace around whatever I want to cut out. So it helps to zoom in a little bit here, that's Command or Control plus and minus. And I'm going to start at the edge of my document and I'm just going to create these straight lines by clicking out here with my pen tool and just tracing around my object. Now you can click and drag to create rounded lines here if you want, you can be as detailed or as not detailed as you want with this. Now, just a quick note here and I'm going around the wrong part, but a quick note here. It really doesn't if it's a thumbnail, it doesn't matter that much. You can go pretty quickly, just make sure you're following the contours of your person or object fairly well, and it's going to turn out, all right, so as we just kind of click around this, we're just trying to stay on the outside or slightly inside of our object around the face is when it probably matters, potentially the most. But as we just click around the outline, We're essentially we're just going to create this sort of cut out of our person. And I might speed this part up just to get through it. But all I'm doing is clicking with my pen tool and you can, I mean, just like I said before, I'm being a little bit lazy. But you can click and round the edges if you want. We're going to cut right through this seat belt and would go all the way to the edge here. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and see what we have left. I might want to cut in a little bit here where you can see underneath my arm. And then we're just going to click all the way outside and complete that shape or that path by clicking on our first. So we've got me cut out. And what we need to do is open up our paths. Dialog window. You can go down to window paths to pop that up. And we have this working path. If we click this selection icon here, it's going to create a selection out of that path. Now it's possible that it creates the selection reversed from what you want. That's okay, I'll show you how to fix that here in a second. So what we wanna do here is go ahead and make sure our layer selected that we want to chop this out of and go down to the Create Mask button. As long as that selection is selected, it's going to create a mask based on that selection. Now one thing we didn't do that I'm gonna do right now is hold Alt or Option, click and drag to duplicate this layer. And on this bottom layer, I'm going to right-click on that mask and just delete it. So now we actually have a mask and the background, which we can then create some more separation in, in our, in our thumbnail here. Alright, so we've got this mask setup. And what I want to show you here is if you hit Command or Control I, it's going to flip or invert that mask. So if I hide the bottom layer, you see I either have a complete cut out or I have the person cut out. That might be how your mask comes in. So I wanted to show you how to invert that, but we just want the person cut out. Okay, so enough talk. What we wanna do now is double-click in this empty space of our layer. That's going to open up our layer styles. And we just want to add a stroke to this guy. And I'm going to bump up the size, changed the color to white. And then what I would do is make sure the position is outside. But if Center or even inside works better for you, use those, just, just play around with that to see exactly how it affects your image. I'm going to keep it outside. Maybe scale this down a little bit to something, maybe like 15. And so we can hit Okay on that. Now, we want to create a little bit more separation. Remember I added this second layer down here and that's going to be the background layer. I can add in other adjustment layers here. Like for instance, we could just do hue and saturation and do like a colorized so that now the background is some sort of color like a hot pink color. And we can add whatever saturation and brightness we want to it. If we make it a little bit darker, my silhouette might show up a little bit better. The other thing we can do, I'm still underneath here, the original image, but as long as we scale meet up, it's going to cover up my original underneath so I can take this top layer Command or Control T to transform. I'm going to zoom out a little so I can kinda scale it down a little bit more. If you hold shift these days, it's going to skew it. So no more holding shift, just hold Option or Alt unless you're in an older version. And you can sort of scale up this picture and you can move it around just make sure you're covering up your original for the most part. And we could do something like that. And you've got your outlined picture effect right here, add some text and you've got yourself a trendy YouTube thumbnail. I don't know if I explained that perfectly well, but I hope that I did. The other thing you can do, you can create any color outline that you want, and you can add in those Layer Styles. There's other effects in there. There's glows, there's inner shadows, There's also drop shadow. You can add a drop shadow to it if you really want to. There's all sorts of effects you can stack on top of there to really make that part of your image stand out. Hope this was quick and easy for you. This is exactly the method that I use to create thumbnails for Pacers gaming. You notice I cut it out really quickly. If you're an orthodox Pin Tool user, Sure you can use the handles and rounded off, but quite frankly, when it's a thumbnail and it's only going to be this big. It's not that big of a deal. Just get it done. Speed is sometimes more important. All right, you guys, I'm Spencer from pixel and bracket, and I will see you all in the next one.
Spencer Martin, Graphic Designer & Content Creator
