TipSquirrel welcomes back Mike Hoffman as he explains the new, and the improved, features of Photoshop’s Layer Management.
Tag Archives: layers
Cube-ism
Have you ever wanted to put a photo into a (virtual) picture frame and just had a heck of a time doing it? No? Am I the only moron on board? I actually spent untold hours trimming around edges of pictures to make them fit into shapes…it makes my head ache just thinking about it!
Ok, in my defense, it was a long time ago, but I obviously wasn’t savvy enough to know about a wonderful little bit of magic in Photoshop called the Paste Into command. Once I discovered it, life became a whole lot easier! Today I’m taking a break from photo restoration to show you a fun little project using the Paste Into command.
First a bit of background. I decided it was time to do something (finally) with Landailyn Research & Restoration’s fan page on Facebook. The old one, aside from my not having actually posted anything on it, looked pretty trite, and just tired. Tired of being neglected! So I got to thinking, trying to come up with a different way to show some of my before / after work.
I don’t know how the idea popped into my, but pop it did: a take on a Rubik’s cube! Nifty! So I enlisted my good friend, Google, and we went looking for a cube to use as a template. At first, of course, I made the whole thing way to complicated, trying to actually use the photo of the cube itself as the base. Waaayyyy too complicated! I finally snapped back to reality and said “Hey, Brain Trust! You’re supposed to be an good at this Photoshop thing! So use your skills, woman!” And so, I did. Let me tell you, making the whole thing from the ground up was so much simpler!
Once I put the finished product on Facebook, I started getting a lot of comments and requests. Seems others might find ways to make use of my little cube, at least I hope so! To that end, I’m going to go over how to put your images on a Landy Cube, and provide you with the .psd file to get you started!
Unzip your file and open in Photoshop. You’ll notice that it’s just made up of two little layers, the cube base and the squares. I actually could have had it all one layer, I just wanted to be difficult. While working, you can have the base on, or not. It’s the squares we’ll be working with. The object of the exercise is to get your photo to fit in the square and actually look like it’s pasted on the cube.
Open the image you’d like to use. Select the area, or the entire image, and copy (Ctrl or Cmd +C or Edit > Copy). Using the Magic Wand tool, select the square you want your image to reside in.
Now, go to Edit > Paste Special > Paste Into.
Your image will appear inside the area you selected and in the layer stack as a shape layer.
Once your image is in the selection, it’s time to transform it by using keyboard short cut Ctrl (or Cmd) + T, or by going to the Edit > Transform menu. Then, either in the Transform menu or by right clicking inside the transform area, select Distort.
We’re doing this because in this particular case all of the shapes are at different angles. Grabbing the corner handles, move them to the edges around the white shape on all four corners.
Repeat for all the squares and that’s pretty much how easy that is! To give the image a little depth and make it look more like it’s pasted on instead of inside the shape, just give it a bit of a Layer Style in the form of an Outer glow. All standard settings except you’ll change the Elements Size to 5 px and the actual glow color from the lovely yellow default to hex value #7F7F7F.
But what if you want one photo to cover an entire side of the cube? Easy! Just select every square you want the image to show up in before you use the Paste Into command!
Okay, it’s a pretty nifty cube, right? So what can you do with it, exactly? Well, the first thing you’ll want, probably, is a place to show off your cube. If you have a blog or Facebook for instance, show your friends, family and customers your cube-ness! Cube your family history! Cube your old photo collection! Old baseball card collection? Cube it!
Just for grins, I cubed five of my favorite artists, my Facebook, Twitter and NAPP fellows. These are really talented people; do yourself a favor and give their portfolios a look!
Show me your cube-ness! I’d love to see what you come up with! Post your cubes on Landailyn Research & Restoration’s wall on Facebook! Happy Cube-ing!
Landy Cube .psd:
http://landailyn.com/TS/Landy_cube.zip
Artist links:
Patrick LaMontagne, Cartoon Ink
Christine Pentecost, Bridger Mountain Photo
Pat Wendt, NAPP Portfolio
Giesla Hoelscher, Inkblots
Sharron Benn, ShazNYC
Thanks to you all for letting me cube you!
Vintage Tints
Vintage is the new thing..wait…vintage and new…oxymoron. Lets say Vintage is all the rage right now. I am seeing it from fashion to photography. It is really easy to achive a cool vintage tine to you images.
Open an image, copy layer…and then burn the outside part of the image so the eye focuses on the subject. I do this at 50% opacity on the new layer so I can lower the opacity even more. You can also dodge parts of your image to stand out more on this layer.
Add a b&w or sepia layer. I used a custom b&w layer with a tint (Hue 35%, Saturation 25%)
Play with the opacity so some color comes through, mine is set at 50%
Create a new layer (I add a layer mask incase I want to “erase” parts) and fill it with any color you heart desires. I tried a purple. Then changed the layer mode to the “soft light” and lowered the opacity to 75%
It was okay….but not the feel I wanted…so I tried a brick red…
I liked… a lot!!!
Creative Differences
Last week we looked at some practical and very utilitarian ways to take advantage of Difference blend modes in Adobe Photoshop. Today, we’re going to take a 180 degree turn and look at some ways of using the Difference blend mode in some creative and artistic techniques. So let’s get in to the artistic frame of mind and take the creative plunge.
Difference mode can be a very interesting way of working with multiple images in a collage. Since Difference mode, you may recall, magnifies and highlights the differences between images, this technique work especially well with images that have nicely saturated colors and good contrast. We’ll start with this image as our base:
Now, we’ll open our second image, and drag it directly onto the first, so we have both layers in a stack, like so:
Now, simply change the blend mode to Difference, and look what happens:
Now, if you’re on Windows, when you have the blend mode highlighted in the layers panel, you can press the up or down arrows to cycle through the blend modes – this is really useful in cases like this as you experiment to see what looks cool. Mac users can do this by pressing Cmd-plus and Cmd-minus to move through the blend modes. Either way, experiment and see what happens. Most often, I find Difference blend mode to be one of the more interesting results.
Now let’s look at another technique. I saw something like this in Photoshop User magazine many years ago, and it is a really cool technique for making futuristic abstract backgrounds and textures. Lets start with a new document, white canvas, at the default Photoshop size.
Now, let’s select a nice saturated green color as our foreground color. Then, choose the gradient tool, and from the gradient picker, choose foreground to transparent and select linear as the style.
Now, look in the toolbar just to the right, and what do you see? Yes, yet another of the hidden spots within Photoshop where blend modes are available. Let’s set the gradient tool’s blend mode to Difference, and draw a random gradient (again, make sure you have foreground to transparent set in te gradient picker:
Nothing special, right? Now let’s drag out another gradient, and watch the colors interact with the difference mode:
Cool! Now drag out some more in succession, like so:
And a few more in random directions:
Now, let’s switch to a saturated blue and drag a few more times:
Now, a saturated red and continue:
Now, some yellow… and for variety, lets switch to the radial gradient:
A few more times:
You get the idea – you can keep playing with this all day, creating new wild gradient blends with Difference mode. Here I’ve added some type and set the type layer blend mode to Difference as well:
Experiment, get creative and have fun!
Image alignment and analysis with Difference Blending
Way back when we started our journey through the dark and forbidding lands of Photoshop Blend Modes, I showed this chart, grouping the blend modes into some distinct categories:
If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are a couple in the middle that don’t fit into the other categories, and today we’ll take a look at one of them: the Difference blending mode. As the name implies, this mode is useful for finding the “difference” between two layers, but it also has some creative uses as well. In this tip, we will focus on the more utilitarian purpose, and see how Difference mode can help us to align and analyze images.
First, a bit of an overview of what difference mode does. It compares the colors of the current layer to those below, and subtracts the two to arrive at a resulting color. This has three special secret effects:
- Blending with pure white as the color will completely invert the image. This provides the same result as using the Image > Adjustments > Invert command.
- Blending with pure black as the color has no effect at all. Recall that black pixels have a tonal value of 0, so subtracting 0 makes no change.
- Blending two identical colors together will result in pure black. Since the values are the same, when subtracted, the result is 0, which is the value of black.
We can see this in action below. We’ll start with this image:
Now, let’s add a new layer, with a simple black to white gradient. Change the layer’s blend mode to “Difference” and you can see that the white part of the gradient has inverted the image, while the black part has left the image unaffected:
This demonstrates special effects 1 and 2 from above. Now let’s look at special effect #3.
First, we delete the gradient layer. Then, duplicate the background layer and set the duplicate to “Difference” blend mode:
Notice that, although you can clearly see the images are the same in the layers panel, the net result of subtracting the two (Difference mode) is that the entire image turns black. The main point to realize is that this happens because EVERY pixel is the SAME.
What if we take the move tool, and nudge the top layer to the right a few pixels? You can do this my selecting the Move tool (V) and using the arrow keys to nudge one pixel at a time. Notice that even with a move of one pixel, there is a noticeable change. Take a look:
You might start to see where I’m going with this: you can use this feature to line up layers, one on top of another, by nudging them into position. Modern versions of Photoshop (with Photomerge) have some pretty sophisticated stitching capability, so this isn’t always as useful as it once was. But it can still get you out of a bind, and it works on any document regardless of how many layers you have.
For example, I worked on a project recently in which I was scanning in an entire front page of a newspaper – a 30-year-old newspaper, brown and aged, with creases, dust, you name it. Now, my scanner isn’t the size of a full newspaper, so I had to do it in segments. And, with the sad condition of the paper itself, Photoshop’s Photomerge feature wasn’t cooperating – so, I had to stitch by hand.
Here’s a view of a couple of layers I was trying to align:
You might be tempted to lower the opacity, but that’s really hard to see. Let’s change the upper layer to Difference mode (temporarily):
Notice how in the overlapping area, you can see both layers, and you can see that they are not aligned. Grab that move tool, and get a rough alignment by dragging the top layer:
Notice how the closer you get to alignment, the more areas turn black? No, it’s time to switch to the arrow tool and start nudging one pixel at a time:
You’ll know you have the best possible alignment when a one-pixel nudge in any direction results in more color appearing. You’ve reached the center of alignment (don’t forget that some images might require rotation or resizing to get the alignment perfect). Once your image is in alignment, simply change the blend mode back to “Normal.”
One last tip for today: you can use this not only for alignment, but for analysis. Recall our image from a few weeks ago when we looked at softening with Overlay:
What if we wanted to do a quick check to see where we made our modifications and retouches on this image? We simply duplicate the original, bring it to the top of the stack, and set the blend mode to “Difference:”
Now the differences are visible, but at this resolution, and without a good monitor, it is really hard to see! Can we do something about it? Of course!
Let’s add a new layer to the top. Fill it with white, then set the blend mode of the new layer to “Color Dodge.” BOOM! The lighter areas are amplified and it is easy to see where we made our retouches from the original image:
I hope you found today’s tip useful! Stick around for next week, when we will explore some of the more artistic ways of using Difference blending mode.
Make An Easy Snow Effect
As it’s almost Christmas I’m going to show you how to make a quick and easy snow text effect using the ellipse tool.
Step 1
Make a new Photoshop document – I’m using 1024×768 but please feel free to use what ever you want. Set the back ground to black.
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Step 2
Choose the Text Tool and set the font to Arial Black size around 100 and type “Snow”, I then highlighted the “now” bit and lowered the size to 72. For the colour I used a light grey #dddddd.
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Step 3
Choose the rectangle tool and draw out a rectangle the slightly covers the bottom of the text. Set the colour to White #ffffff.
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Step 4
Choose the ellipse tool and while holding shift draw out a lot of circles at the bottom of the text like in the picture.
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Step 5
Do the same at the top of the text
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Step 6
First set your foreground colour to # 0076a3 then make a new Gradient Layer – Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient above the background layer. Set the gradient type to foreground to transparent, angle 90 degrees. As in the picture
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This should give us this
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Hope everyone has a great Christmas
Top Tip Tuesday – Make a Peeling Sticker With Selection Tools
Using Photoshop to Change the Mood of a Photo
We can do a lot of powerful things with Photoshop – in this tutorial we will change the mood and feel of a photo so it appears to be early morning rather than the middle of the day.
Step 1
Download this photo from Sxc.hu and bring it into Photoshop. Now the cow and field is pretty bright so we want to reduce the brightness and saturation a bit. Above the Cow Layer add a new Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue / Saturation. Reduce the Saturation to – 24 and the Lightness to -16.
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Step 2
The Photo is still a little bright so we add an additional Hue / Saturation Adjustment Layer above the last one. This time click the Colourize button in the bottom right, next change Hue to 198, Saturation to 25, and leave Lightness at 0. Click okay and change the Blending Mode in the Layer Palette to Multiple, set the opacity to 48%.
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Step 3
Next we are going to change the sky a bit – grab the Magic Wand Tool and set tolerance to 32 and un-check Contiguous. Click on the blue sky so it is all selected but the clouds are not.
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Step 4
With the Selection still in place we add a Linear Gradient – Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient >
Then click the gradient at the top of the window – it may look different to the one here.
Next Click the Colour to Transparent gradient type; we need to change the foreground colour by clicking the Lower Left hand arrow followed by the colour picker, which is just below the arrow. (As in the picture below) and change the colour to #F3C8C8
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This will make a gradient only in the bits we selected earlier; automatically masking out the bits we don’t want
Step 5
Drag the Gradient Layer below the two Hue / Saturation adjustment Layers, the sky and the clouds will look a little bit to rough and don’t blend that well
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So we want to blur the Gradients mask, we do this by Selecting the mask and going to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and setting the amount to around 10 pixels.
This should give us an effect like this
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Step 6
Make a new Layer Called Mist and reset to the default Colours by Pressing D on the Keyboard. Next Grab the Rectangle Marquee Tool and draw out a small square. Then Fill this with Clouds. Filter > Render > Clouds.
And pull the anchors to fill the bottom part of the window.
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Step 7
Drag the Layer below the Hue / Saturation Layer and set the blending mode to screen. Next we want to add a Layer Mask to this Layer – Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All >. Select the Gradient tool from the tool box, set the gradient type to black and white and drag a gradient out from the top of the grass to the clouds.
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Step 8
Make a new Layer at the top of the stack called Stars, choose a 1 pixel hard edge brush and set the foreground colour to white. No spot some stars over the sky.
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This is what we have in the end.
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