Transcripts
1. Vintage Image Cutout Effect in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, vintage image cutout effect in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating a cutout vintage image effect in Photoshop. We'll start out by cutting out the bird. Then we'll make a striped background to use. We'll add a paper surround around the bird and shadows. We'll make some tape and we'll finish off with a vignette. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started on creating a cutout vintage image effect in Photoshop.
2. Vintage Image Cutout Effect - Part 1: For this project, I'm going to use a vintage image of a bird, and I'm going to use one from a site called vintageprintable.com, because they have a lot of copyright free images that you can use. The one I'm going to use is this one here. Now, you might wonder why I'm in Google and not on the site itself, and the reason is, the site is really hard to navigate, so I'm using a Google trick. The Google trick is to type the keyword of what you want to look for, so I want an image of a bird and then the word site and a full colon, and then put the site name, vintageprintable.com. If you do a search for this in Google and then go to Images, you'll find images from that particular site. Now, I liked this image, so I'm going to click on it, and then I'm going to click to visit the page. I'm confirming that it is actually an image from vintageprintable.com, which it is, and here's the image here. I'm going to click here to download this large size version of the image. I'll right-click and choose "Save image as" and I'll save it somewhere on my disk so that I can find it later on. I've actually saved it already to my Downloads folder. Let's just move Chrome out of the way and let's go and create an image for our projects, so I'll choose "File" and then "New". I'm going to make an image that is 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels in size, and it's RGB color, I'll click "Okay." Now, I need to get the image that I just downloaded, so I'll choose "File" and then "Place Embedded." Here it is in my Downloads folder, so I'll select it and click "Place" and Photoshop just places it in position in my document. Now, I'd like my bird to be about this size. I'm pretty happy with that, so I'll click the check mark. Once the bird is embedded in the image, we can go ahead and extract it from its background. For this, I'm going to use the Quick Selection Tool, because it's a pretty good tool for this kind of image. I'm just going to select all over the areas that I want to remove. Now, if the selection tool takes too much as it has here, I can just go back with the same selection tool, but this time using the Alt Key and just remove that area from the selection, so just forcing Photoshop to do a bit of a better job of making the selection. I'll just run quickly around and check to make sure that everything looks pretty okay. I want this little bit in here as well though and I want a little bit in here. Now, instead of cutting away the background, I'm going to make a mask, that means if Photoshop didn't get it perfect, I'm not going to lose a pace of the bird. I'm going to the last pallet and here is my bird, so I'm just going to click to add a layer mask to this layer. Now, it's gone in the wrong way, so I'm going to click on the mask and press Control or Command I to invert the selection. Now, there's a little piece that's been missed here from the illustration, so I'm just going to brush it back in. I'll get the brush tool, I'm going to open up my brushes panel and choose a soft brush here, but I'm going to wind the hardness up to about 75 percent, so it's going to be a little bit harder than it was originally. I'm going to click on the mask, just to make sure the brush is a good size, which is not, so I am going to make it smaller using the open square bracket K. I need to paint with white, so I'm going to reverse these colors. I'm just going to paint on the mask to bring back in the little bit that I was missing here. Now, if at any point you think that you're missing some of the image, you can paint it in on the mask by painting on the mask with white. If you want to remove a piece of the image, then you can paint with black on the mask and that will just remove it, so I'm actually going to remove this bit down here. I'll press Control 0 to go back to viewing the entire image. Now, we're going to create and add a pattern to this image, but let's start by adding a white fill. I'm going to Control, click on this "New Layer" icon to add a layer at the bottom of the last palette. I'm going back to my default colors, black and white, and because white is my background color, I can press Control Backspace, Command Delete on the Mac to fill this law with white. There is a nice, clean background for our bird, but I wanted to add some stripes to it, so I need to make a striped pattern. For this, I'll choose "File" and then "New." I'm going to make a document that is 60 pixels by 60 pixels in size, very small, transparent background, click "Okay". Now, I'm going to zoom in so I can see the image clearly. I'm going to take the rectangular marquee tool here, and I'm just going to drag out a selection that is half the size of this image. Now, if you don't get it perfectly half a size, that doesn't matter, you just need to be roughly half the size of the image. I'm going to the swatches panel, I'm going to choose a swatch color to use. I'm thinking of blue like this, sort of understated blue would be good. It's now my foreground color, so I have to press, Alt Backspace option, Delete on the Mac, to fill half of this image with that color. I have half filled with a color, half transparent. I'll select the whole thing with "Select" and then "All" and I'll choose "Edit", "Define Pattern" and this is my pattern, it's blue and transparent. Don't be faced by the fact that it's just a single line, because that's all we need for our stripes. I'm going to call it stripes, then click "Okay." Now, I no longer need this document, so I'm going to discard it. I'll close it, I don't need to save it. I'm going back to my bird image and I'm going to open the last panel. I'm going to click on the background lab between the bird and the background, blur is where I'm going to be working, and I'll choose "Layer", "New fill layer" and I'll choose "Pattern" and click "Okay." What that does is, it automatically fills this layer with my pattern, and Photoshop is smart enough to realize that the last pattern in the pattern dialogue here is the one I want to use it. It's the one I've just created and it's the one I want to use. Now, I could scale this if I wanted to, so I could perhaps take it down to 75 percent, if I wanted a few more lines. You probably don't want to scale it up a lot, but certainly scaling it down won't have a problem at all, so I'll click "Okay." Now, before I finish with this background effect, I'm going to reduce the opacity on this fill layer just a little bit to make it slightly see-through. I'm going to use an opacity of about 75 percent, but it's not rocket science at all. I'm thinking of replacing this white with a color that's not quite white, so let's go to the foreground swatch here, and let's go to a yellow color. I'm going to pick a color that's a little bit creamer, but not quite white, and. I'm going to Alt Backspace option, Delete to fill that layer with the color. I think this is giving it a little bit more of a vintage look.
3. Vintage Image Cutout Effect - Part 2: The next step we need some textured paper, and I found this for you, which I think is going to work pretty well. I'll give you the link to download it and I'll click "To Download". When you click to download, it just opens in a new browser window, you can right click and save that image and then we'll be ready to open it in Photoshop. Now, I've already done this, so I'm just going to move this dialogue out of the way, and we'll go and open it. I'll choose File and then Place Embedded, going to pick up the image here, click "Place". Now I can just drag it into position. I'll hold the Shift Key as I dragged out in proportion and I'll click the Check Mark. We've slightly expanded this image but not by a lot, so there won't be a problem with it. Now I want to rasterize this, so I'll right click the Layer and choose Rasterize Layer. It needs to be a bit lighter than this. So with this layer selected, I'm going to choose Image Adjustments, and I'm just going to do a Levels Adjustment on it. To make it a little bit lighter, I'm going to drag the middle slide here over to the left and that will lighten it a little bit. So too we'll dragging this slider a little bit. When I'm happy with the result, I'll just click "Okay". I just didn't think it needed to be as dark as it was. Now, I'm going to move this below the bird by just dragging this layer and adding it below the bird. I want to blend the bird into this, so I'm going to the bird layer, and I'm going to click here on the Normal blend mode and I'm going to go down and use Multiply blend mode. That's just going to bring the paper texture to up through the bird. If I zoom in, you'll be able to see it. I'm just going to zoom in here, and let's just go back and set this to Normal blend mode, and you'll see the painting in this leaf is very flat. If I go back to multiply, we get the texture of the paper through it, so we're getting a better result. Now, we're ready to make the cut out, and we're going to make the cut out on the paper layer, so I have the paper layer selected. We're going to use the Pen tool. It's a nice, easy job for the Pen tool in Photoshop, and so we're going to make sure that we select Path up here. You can select Path or Shape. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you might have three icons here. Just make sure that you click on the Path icon. For this, you don't need to be good with the Pen tool at all because you're just going to make it look as if you cut it out with scissors. You're just going to click. Occasionally, you might want to curve by clicking and dragging, but you don't want to do that too much. You really just want to get the look of a cutout image. I'm just clicking my way around this image. When I get back to my starting point, I'm going to hover over the starting point until I see this small icon just next to Pen tool and I'm going to click on it because that completes the path. Now, we have a path, we want to make that into a selection because we want to cut it out of the paper. So we need to go to the Paths palette. You get to that by choosing Window and then Paths. We have what's called a work path here, but what we're looking for is this third icon in, and this is the load path as selection. So this allows us to make a path, but then load it as a regular Photoshop selection. It has the little marching ants around it. Now, I'm going back to my Layers palette, and I want to cut this out using another mask. I'm going to click here on the Add Layer Mask icon, and that adds a layer mask to this layer so we've got this cutout paper effect happening. Now, of course, if this really were cut out paper, it would have a bit of dimension to it. So we next need to add some drop shadows. But what I want to do right now is to tuck a copy of this layer away because I'm going to need it later on. I'm going to grab this layer, and I'm going to drag it on to the New Layer icon. So I've got two texture paper layers with their mask, and I'm going to turn one off. I'm going to focus my attention on this one, the one that's visible, and I'm going to add a drop shadow. I'm going down here to the FX icon, I'm going to click on Drop Shadow. Now, I'm just going to reset this to the default drop shadow so that we can see what we're getting. What we're going to do is to create a drop shadow that's going to suggest that this paper has a bit of dimension, but this drop shadow right now is way too big. The distance is going to need to be only one or two pixels, and so too is the size. It just needs to be the slightest hint that there is some dimension to this paper. We will select Use Global Light, and we will probably increase the opacity just a little bit to just darken the edges. Let's see this without the drop shadow and with it. You can see that the slightest drop shadow, even a one pixel drop shadow is giving this paper a little bit of dimension. Now if you are using earlier versions of Photoshop, you can't add multiple drop shadows to an image. But if you're using a later version, say in particular, you can add a second drop shadow, and I suggest that you may want to do this. If you can only add one, just click "Okay" and we'll go on with the project shortly. But if you can add multiples, click the Plus icon here to add a second one. For this one we want to deselect Use Global light, and we want to swing this round a little bit so that we're getting a little bit of a drop shadow effect up here, which is also giving this side of the paper a little bit of dimension. But for this, we're going to reduce the opacity down very, very small. Because we don't really want a drop shadow, but we just want to get the hint of there being some paper here. I'm going to turn this one off, the bottom one that we created earlier. You may be able to see just the hint of some dimension in this paper on this side of it. It's not on the other side because the drop shadow's being removed. But I think that this will help you just reinforce that effect of having a sheet of paper on top of another sheet of paper. But in both cases, a very small drop shadow, and in the one that is on the leading edge or on the light edge of the paper had very, very small opacity, so it's almost not there. I'll click "Okay". Now we saved a duplicate of this image down here, and I'm going to turn this back on now, and I'm going to add a drop shadow to it because what I want to do is bend this shaded paper in a minute. I want a very big drop shadow to suggest that the paper is bent. I'm going to the spare copy if you like, of the layer that I kept back, and I'm going to add a drop shadow to it. I'll click the FX icon and click Drop Shadow. Now with this drop shadow, I want to use the Global Light for it because I want it to be thrown in this direction. I want the multiply opacity to be much higher here. I'm just going to start with distance spread and size to say what I get. Well, size is going to soften it for me. So I want it to be a little bit soft but not really, really soft. I thinking that's a really good value there. With distance, because I want the end of this piece of paper to look like it's bent, I will need quite a reasonable value for distance. I want this to be a distinct drop shadow here, and then I can just adjust the spread. I'm just focusing on this area here, I'm going to ignore everything else that's happening on this shape. Just want to get a good indication that this particular piece of paper might be bent. Once I'm happy with that, I'll click "Okay". Now the drop shadow that I've just added has been added to the whole shaded paper, but I just want it down here. What I need to do is I need to extract this drop shadow onto a layer by itself. I'm going to click on this drop shadow, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to choose Create Layer, and I'll click "Okay". What that does is it creates a drop shadow here on a layer all by itself. So you can see that it's been extracted onto its own layer. I no longer need this layer so I can just hide it or I could discard it. But with this layer, I've got a lot of drop shadow, I just really want this a little bit. Well, I'm going to mask that out. I'm going to add a layer mask to this layer, and I'm going to paint the drop shadow out. I'll click on the Brush tool. I made a nice big softish brush. I'm going to click on this brush, I'm going to set its hardness to about 50 percent. Not totally soft, but not very hard either. I'm going to increase the brush size by pressing the close square bracket k. Now, white on a mask will reveal, so we're seeing everything on this layer where we have the mask in white. If I'm to paint with black, then I'm going to start hiding bits of this shadow. So I have black paint here, and I'm just going to run round the edge of this cutout to remove the shadow that I don't want. I'm going to reduce the size of the brush as I'm working around this area here. Now this is the piece that I want to have bent. So I want the drop shadow around the edge of this, I don't want it around where it's actually going to be stuck to the page with tape, and then I'm going to remove the rest of the drop shadow. This mask is just letting me mask out the drop shadow that I created. I'm getting the effect of this particular end of the paper being bent upwards, and I'll put a piece of tape over there in a minute to reinforce the fact that it could well be bent.
4. Vintage Image Cutout Effect - Part 3: For the type that's typing the bird down, we're going to need a new layer. I'm going up to the very top of the document. I'm going to add a new layer and we're going to need a type color. I'm going to select the foreground color here, and I'm going to select a slightly orangey yellow color for my type. Thinking something like that for now, I'll click "Okay". Now I appear to have a paintbrush and I appear to have painted here so I'm just going to undo that. I want a rectangle tool and I'm going to drag out a narrow rectangle here. I'm going to fill it with my foreground color with Alt Backspace Option Delete. I'm going to zoom in because I need to cut some bits out of it to make it look a little bit more like tape. I'll select "Deselect" to de-select the type itself, and I'm going to cut out some edges on it. I'm going to choose here the Polygonal Lasso Tool, and I'm just going to click down one end of this piece of tape to make it look as if it is being cut out of a tape machine. I'm going to go back to the starting point. I have a selection here, I'm going to press "Delete" and that will just cut the edges of the tape. I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now I'm going to do the same at this end. I'll make my selection, press "Delete", press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now I have a pace of tape. Now I could lighten this pace of tape a couple of ways. I could drag on the opacity or I can drag on the fill because I want to add a little bit of a drop shadow later on, it's better for me to decrease the fill than it is to decrease the opacity. I'm going to adjust down the fill. I'll press Control or Command zero to zoom back out. Now I'm going to grab this tape. I'm going to move it into position. Well, one place I want tape is down here. I know that I want it there. I'm going back to this lat and I can Alt, drag another pace of tape away. I can shrink this in one direction so it looks like a shorter piece of tape, and I'll rotate this as well. I can use that to make a second piece of tape. At this point, I've probably exhausted this tape look I need to go and make another pace. So I'm going to go up and add a new layer. I'm going to repeat the same thing as I did before. Make a piece of tape, fill it with my foreground color with Alt Backspace option Delete. I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to start cutting out the edges here. I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection first of all. Having made this first cut, I'm going to deselect the selection and come down here and make another one. Press Delete Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Command zero to go back out to full view. Now I'm going to put another couple of pieces of tape down. I need to adjust the fill on this layer. I'm just going to test and see what I did last time. Well, I did 54 percent last time. That's a good value to put in here. The color's going to match even though these are on different layers. Now I'm going to duplicate this layer by dragging it onto the New Layer icon. I'm going to Control click on this layer so I have the portion selected. I'm going to start to move it into position and put one final pace of tape in my illustrations, just going to rotate this around a little bit and click the check mark. Now this one, I can also shrink if I want to, just to make it look like a smaller piece of tape. Now we're ready to go back and to add a small drop shadow to each of these tape pieces. To do that, it would be really useful for me if I could merge these four layers into one. But I'm going to have a slight problem here. Just watch this fill opacity. Every one of these layers has a 54 percent fill opacity. I'm just going to select them and I'm going to merge them by right-clicking and choose Merge Layers. You can see here that now this layer has a opacity of 100 percent, but it's partially transparent. Now that's going to bite me when I come to put the drop shadows on. I'm just going to undo that. I'm going to suggest that you go back to each of these layers and you make the fill opacity 100 percent for each of them before you merge them. Then when we've got the merged one, we're going to make its fill opacity 54 percent. Then we're going to be able to get the shadow effect we want. I've got each of these at 100 percent. I'm now going to right-click and choose Merge Layers, and having done that, I'm going to take this fill opacity back down to the 54 percent that we actually wanted in the first place. Now I can add my drop shadow. I'll click here on the "Fx" icon, click "Drop Shadow". You can see that drop shadow is appearing around the edges of the shape not underneath it, which would have been the case if we'd left those layers the way they were. With the drop shadow, we're just going to bring this down to a really, really small size, one pixel zero on the spread. We want to reduce the opacity way way because this is after all tape. We just wanted to have the very slightest impression that there is a little bit of dimension here. Once I've got the values that I want, I'll just click "Okay". To finish off this illustration, we're going to give it a vignette. I'm going to add a new layer to the very top of the image, and I'm going to select around just inside the top of the image. I'm just going to click and drag a rectangle here. Now, I want to select everything I don't have selected right now. I'm going to choose, Select Inverse that just inverts the selection. I'm going to fill this area around the edge of the image with a brown color. I'm going to the eyedropper tool and there's a brown color in here on the wing of the bird, which would be nice to sample. I'll double-click on it and I'm just going to make it a little bit lighter. About that would be good. It's my foreground color. I'll press Alt Backspace option Delete on the Mac to fill that area with my brown color, and I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. To make this a vignette, I need to blur it. I'm going to select this top-most layer and I'm going to blur it using filter blur and then Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is a really awesome blur and I want to give this quite a big blur. I've got it say here to something like about 36 to 40 pixels. You just want to real darkening around the edge of the image, click "Okay". To blend it in to the layers underneath, I'm going to set the blend mode for this layer to multiply. Having done that, I can go back now and just adjust down the opacity to sort. I want a sort yellow coloring around the edge. I don't want it to be too heavy, but I do want it to have a vignette effect. Here's our final illustration, we've taken a vintage image of a bird and we've removed the paper from around it. We've substituted that with our own vintage paper and we've created this cutout effect. We've made a tape, we've bent at pieces of the paper, we've made a background and a vignette. This is all being done in Photoshop. Your project for this class is to do just go and find a vintage image of a bird. You can choose the one that I've used, or you can use one of your choice, or you might choose some other animal, but you'll find plenty at vintage printable.com to use. Then create your own cut out effect with your own background. A vignette effect around the edge and add some tape and the drop shadows. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned some techniques for working in Photoshop, for making cutouts and tapes and vignettes. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of graphic design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
