Friday, September 13th, 2013

Photoshop – Hold your own photo collage

Learn how to make a collage effect showing a hand holding a Polaroid photo over the top of your own original photo. The process can be done in practically any version of Photoshop. It uses some simple masks and selections.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.

Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a collage image that shows you holding your own photo. Before we get started let’s have a look and see the effect that we’re looking for.

What I have here is a Polaroid frame and I’ve extracted a portion of the image underneath to place inside the frame. And we have a hand here looking as if the Polaroid image is being held over the top of a scene.

So this is the image that we start with. We’re going to add a hand to it and also a Polaroid frame which we’re then going to fill with our image. We’re going to finish off with just a little bit of shading to help the realism of the situation. So, if you’re ready let’s get started.

To create this effect you’re going to need three images. You’re going to need your main starting image, an image of a hand and an image of a Polaroid frame. Now this image I shot on the street front in front of my house. All I did was hold  my hand up as if I was holding something and then shot it with a macro setting on the camera because that allowed me to focus at that hand.

Now the Polaroid image is from a website. I got it from this Deviantart.com website.

There’s a person there who has a Polaroid image. You’ll just open the Polaroid image up, right click and choose Save Image as. And I’ve got the link for that in the description for this video. So once you’ve got all three images open you’re ready to go.

Now I’m going to start by just dragging and dropping the Polaroid image into my main image. So here’s my main image. I’m just taking the background layer and just dropping it in and then I can move it and resize it.

Now if I’m resizing it I want to do that with the Shift key held so it’s constrained in the correct proportions. I’m just going to place it loosely where it’s going to go. Now with the hand image I don’t want all of the detail because this is straight out of the camera. So I’m just going to crop it fairly tightly so the only bits that I’m going to work on are the actual bits that I need in my image.

So I’m just going to crop it there and then just drag and drop it into position. So once we’ve got the three images all in one we’ve got a lot less stuff hanging around on our desktop. So the first thing I’m going to do is deal with the hand. So I’m going to turn off the other layers, click on the hand layer and I’m going to use the Quick Selection tool.

It really, if it works for your job, it’s the best tool to use because it’s quick. And so I’ve just gone too far there and we’ve selected everything. But let’s just go and deselect the hand. If you select a bit more than you need you can Alt and drag with the Quick Selection tool to deselect an area. So now I have all this outside edge selected and I could either delete that or I could mask it.

And since I’m going to need a mask later on I may as well just mask it for now. So I’m just going to click the Mask icon. Now the mask has gone in the wrong way around but all I need to do is to tap on the mask layer and Ctrl I to invert it.

Now it looks like I’ve got a bit of extra here. So I’m just going to select the black color here and just paint out along this line to make sure that it’s all gone, ok, so I don’t have anything trailing and I’m just going to move my hand back into the very corner of the image where it’s going to go. Now we can go and focus our attention on the Polaroid frame. Again, I’m going to turn everything off, focus on the Polaroid frame layer and again I’m going to use the Quick Select tool just because it is so good.

So I’m just going to select around the edges of this Polaroid because it comes in with quite a bit of edge detail and we don’t want that. All we want is the white Polaroid frame itself. So I’m going to need to get rid of that edge and we’re also going to want to select everything in the middle here so that all that is left is the white frame. Now let’s learn from the last mask that we created.

The last mask we created when we selected the background and just clicked the Mask tool what we got was a mask that gave us the background, the selection and nothing else. So let’s just undo that and this time if we Alt Click on the layer mask we’ll get a layer mask that actually shows us the frame and not the excess.

Now again, we’ve got some trailing little bits around the edge which is a bit annoying. But with black as my paint color I’m going to click at one end of it, Shift Click at the other and there’s a bit of a strip down here too. I’m just going to get rid of those so that I have just the frame itself. And now we can go ahead and we can bring back in our hand and we can have a look at the frame over the top of the image. So you can see how everything is starting to go together.

The next thing to do is to position this frame pretty much where I want it to be.

Now I’m going to want to tilt it. Before I do that I want to grab a selection of the middle of the frame so I can then go and get the image of Sacre Coeur that I need. So I’m going back to my Quick Select tool. I’m going to make sure that the polaroid itself is selected, that layer, not the mask, just the polaroid and I’m going to click inside it with the Quick Select tool so I get a selection of the area that is the inside of the polaroid and turn everything back off again.

And you can see my selection is in place. Now if I just wanted exactly the same size I could go ahead and make a copy but I actually want my Sacre Coeur to be a slightly different size in the frame. So I need to transform this selection. So I’m going to Select and then Transform Selection because that allows me to make the selection bigger so the portion of Sacre Coeur that I’m going to take will be scaled down inside the Polaroid frame.

So I’ve not only scaled it by holding the Shift key as I’ve sized it up but I’ve also positioned the selection exactly where I want it and I’m going to click the Transform or the Commit tool here. Now I want this image but I also what my background so I sort of want my cake and eat it too. So then I’m going to make sure that I have the background selected and I’m going to do Layer > New Layer via Copy.

And what that gives me is not only my original background layer but also a layer that has just this image on it. And so now I want to size it and position it inside this frame. So I’m going to turn everything off except for the Polaroid frame and the image portion. I’m going to make sure that the image itself is selected and click the Move tool. And now I’m going to size it down. I want it just the right size for fitting inside this Polaroid frame.

So it can be a little bit larger than the inside of the frame because it’s in a layer behind the frame but I won’t want it so large that it’s falling over the edges. So we just need to get it in the right position. So having done that I’m going to select the Polaroid frame layer and the picture layer and just tilt it. And now when I turn everything back on we can see how it’s all fitting together. And you can see that it’s probably not in the ideal place still.

So I’m going to with those two layers selected – actually I think I’m going to move the hand. I think it’s the hand that’s the problem more than the image itself so I’m just going to move the hand back down. And now let’s go to the Polaroid and the image and we’ll just move them over a little bit and perhaps even square them up a little bit more.

So I want it where it is going to appear held in my hand. So now let’s go to the image itself and let’s make the image a little bit different so it’s obvious that it’s a Polaroid and not the image behind. I’m going to do this using an adjustment layer with Layer > New Adjustment Layer and I’m just going to choose a black and white adjustment because this allows me to convert the image into black and white.

In fact everything is going to black and white and I’m not worried about that. I’m only focusing on what’s happening inside the Polaroid because we’re going to limit this fix in a minute just to the Polaroid. So I’m going to darken the sky up and lighten up the building a bit. So let’s call that done. And now we’re going to create a clipping group of that which will limit this adjustment layer to only affect the layer below.

And to do that we select the adjustment layer and choose Layer > Create Clipping Mask. Now you can see that this is clipped to the layer below. Now I don’t want it to be black and white. I just want it to be a little less than full color. So I’m just going to drag down the opacity of this layer so that we get the distinct impression that this image inside the polaroid frame is a different image to the one that we’re actually seeing.

Now we just need to sort out the hand issue. And the problem with the hand is that the polaroid frame is behind the hand and we’re not getting that sense that the hand is actually even holding the frame. So we’re going to zoom in. So I’m going to click the Zoom tool with the letter Z and then just zoom into the image and move it around by holding the Spacebar. We already have our mask and the mask will be white where the image is showing and black where it’s not showing. So we want to start painting with black and I want a brush that is fairly hard.

So I’ve got a small, hard brush here and what I want to do is start painting on the mask layer in black to remove the finger where it shouldn’t be. Now it’s a little bit hard to see exactly where it shouldn’t be so I will generally paint out too much of it and then go back and fill it in again. And if I go too far I can just fine-tune that as I go.

And I may want to move even more closely into the image to do this. I certainly will want to size my brush down quite a bit. Now you’re going to do a better and more considered effect than I am because I’m just trying to do this for the sake of the video but you’ll be able to do a better job of this. You obviously – I’ve taken the wrong part of the finger out here.

Let’s just deal with my stupidity here. This is a much better idea. Let’s take the part of the finger that is in front of the Polaroid and then let’s get back the portion of the finger that is behind it. Hum, much better, ok. Now we’ve got some problems here.

Again, this time now I’m getting too much of the background in but I can just deal with that. And then I’m going to get in close here as well. And I would get a bit more of this skin because this is actually the second finger showing behind. We want to ease that off a little bit so we don’t get quite that effect. And part of this is the roadway too. Now having done that let’s just zoom out and see where we’re at.

We’re pretty near done on this. The only thing that concerns me is that there probably would be a bit of shadowing around here. So to put the shadowing in I’m going to add a new layer. I’ll just click the Add New Layer icon, I’m going to select a brush and then I’m going to select a sort of brown paint color. And you can sample this from the image if you want to. Just click on something that’s sort of brown. And then we’re going to paint in where we think that there would typically be a bit of a shadow. And there might be perhaps a bit of shadowing here as well and maybe even across the top of the Polaroid itself.

Now obviously the opacity is going to be reduced enormously. We’re going to take it right down. And we could use multiply if we wanted to just to blend it into the layer below. And then I would just get the Eraser in to just neaten up the edges so that you can take out the effect where you don’t want it to be.

This Eraser has got a reduced opacity which is not helping me here right now, just take out the effect where you don’t want it leaving it in where you do what it. And you fine-tune this. You can also go ahead and soften the edges of the brush so that you sort of peter out this effect so it’s not totally at 100 percent at the very edges. So you can soften the shadow effect a little bit and soften it under here.

But that shadow effect it might be very, very subtle but it will make a big difference in the final image. So let’s just zoom out again and here is our hand held photo. We’ve done this using a Polaroid frame that we downloaded from the web. We’ve copied a portion of the image and adjusted it within the frame so it looks as if it is a Polaroid image and then we’ve placed everything over the top of our underlying photo.

Now apart from a little bit of tidying up for example I can see I’ve still got a slight edge down here that I need to deal with, that’s pretty much the effect that we’re going for. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. I encourage you to subscribe to my video channel so that you’ll be advised when new videos are release.

And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.

 

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:30 amNo Comments links to this post

Monday, September 9th, 2013

Create bracket frames in Photoshop

Learn how to make bracket frames in Photoshop, how to save them as shapes and how to use them over and over again. This process is guaranteed to be fool proof! It is easy, repeatable and doesn’t need a wealth of Photoshop skills. The frames can be used for digi scrapping as well as for displaying photos – pretty much whatever you want to do with them, you can.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.

Welcome to this video tutorial.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make bracket frames very quickly and very easily in Photoshop.

Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming for and I’m going to show you how you can create this sort of bracket frame in Photoshop.

And I’m also going to show you then how you can fill it and add a background so you could get this kind of effect.

I’m going to tuck this one away for now and let’s start with a brand new image.

I’m choosing File, New and my image is going to be 1,200 pixels by 1,200.

I think if you start with an image this size you’re going to find that it’s a workable solution.

So I’ll click Ok.

Now we’re going to use some guides so I’m going to choose View and then New Guide.

And I need a number of guides and they need to be 200 pixels in from the edges.

So I want a horizontal one at 200 pixels.

I want another new guide at 1,300 pixels because that’s 200 in from the other edge.

Now I’m going to choose New Guide and do some verticals exactly the same values, one at 200 pixels and one at 1,000.

So this is going to help us align everything.

I’m now going to choose the Text tool and I’ve got a really large font size or I’m going to select a really large font size about 400 points which is really quite big.

I’m going to click here and I’m going to type a curly bracket and that’s just a curly bracket shape.

Now we can’t see it because it’s white on white so let’s just go and get a color for it right now.

Now this is an extremely unattractive for my purposes here curly bracket so let’s just select it and let’s find a nicer type.

So I’m just going to run through my typefaces until I find a curly bracket that I think is attractive.

I want it to have a fairly short start and something pointy or nice and curvy so that we can actually use it.

And it would be nice if it was sort of balanced.

I think this one might actually make quite a good frame so let’s settle for this one.

Having created it the next thing I’m going to do is this is the text layer, I’m going to right click it and I’m going to convert this to a shape.

So this character is now a shape.

And I’m going to select the Move tool and I’m going to hold the Shift key as I do because I want to constrain this so that it is created at a very large size and so it doesn’t lose its nice curviness.

And so I’m going to just make sure that it lines perfectly with these guides that I’ve created.

And because I’ve got smart guides turned on you can do this by choosing View and then Show and then Smart Guides you’ll see that you’ll see actually little red lines when everything is lined up.

So now that it’s lined up to the guides that I’ve created these two at the top and the bottom, now I’m going to drag it out and align it perfectly to this other guide here as well.

So I’m looking for nice little red lines to appear telling me that it’s lined up in this box here absolutely perfectly.

I’m not totally convinced right now.

Let’s just make sure that it is, okay.

So once it’s in position I’m going to hit the checkmark here.

You can see that it’s extending a bit beyond the edge of the image.

I’m not a slight bit worried about that.

All I need to do is to choose Image and then Reveal All and we can see its edge.

So now that we’ve got one in place the rest of it is really easy.

I’m going to drag this layer down onto the New Layer icon so I now have two.

I’m going to make sure that I target this layer and that I have the Move tool selected, I’m going to choose Edit and then Transform Path and I’m just going to flip this horizontally.

And what that does is create a mirror image of my shape.

Now provided I select the shape that I want to move and start moving it, if I hold the Shift key it will be constrained so it can only be moved in a horizontal direction.

So it’s going to line up perfectly to these guides here and all I need to worry about is that it lines up with this guide here that I’ve created.

And again, I’m just going to choose Image, Reveal All so that we can see both sides of this.

Now I’m going to select both these layers and I’m going to drag the selected layers onto the New Layer icon so that I’ve got another set of these braces.

And I’m going to link these.

I’m going to right click and choose Link Layers because I want these two to travel together.

And what I’m going to do with them is simply rotate them through 90 degrees.

So I’m going to make sure that I have them selected and that I have the Move tool selected and I’m just going to rotate these around 90 degrees and so they’re going to move exactly into position.

And I’m going to click the checkmark here to accept that and again, Image, Reveal All so that I can see the image.

Now I’m going to unlink these layers by clicking them and click Unlink Layers.

And the reason why I want to unlink them is that I want to now move each one of these layers independently of the other.

So I’m going to select this one first and I’m just going to use the arrow keys to nudge it in because I want to join up these gaps.

And I’m going to nudge it in and I’m going to count as I go.

Now I nudged that 20 times.

This one’s got a much bigger gap than I normally see so I’m going to have to do that 20 times for each of these.

And I’m going to continue all the way around.

And then I’m going to continue and do it again.

I’m moving the edge ones inwards and the top ones down.

Now you can see that some of these are coming in more quickly than others.

I’m not really worried about that because you’re not going to see it later on if it’s slightly off skew.

I’m just going to bring this one down a bit too.

I just want to join it up so that the edges are pretty even all the way around and some of them are going to join up in different ways.

It’s going to depend on the curly braces that you’re using.

I’m going to press Ctrl semicolon to turn off the guidelines now.

And this basically is my new curly bracket shape.

But of course I want to save it as a shape so that I can reuse it.

So I’m going to click on the topmost layer and then click on the bottommost of these four shape layers.

I’m going to right click and I’m going to choose Merge Shapes because what that does is it merges these into a single shape so they can be sized and moved and dealt with as a single shape.

And now so that I can use it later on as a shape I’m going to choose Edit and then Define Custom Shape.

And I’m going to call this bracket shape and click Ok.

And now of course we’ve created this bracket we can just discard that shape, that image.

We don’t need it any longer.

So I’m going to choose File, New and let’s create a brand new image.

Now we’re going to find this custom shape in our shapes collection so we’ll click here on the Custom Shape tool.

It shares a toolbar position with the Rectangle tool and a number of others.

But it’s the Custom Shape that we want.

And I’m going to go to the very bottom of my list because this very last one is the bracket shape that we just created.

You can see that I’ve created a few others using different fonts.

Now that I’ve got my shape I’m going to hold the Shift key as I draw it out on this image.

And you can see it’s coming in as a new shape layer because I had it designated as a shape.

In earlier versions of Photoshop you won’t have this dropdown list but you’ll be able to select the shape from the toolbar.

So now that I’ve got my shape let’s have a look and see how we would create some of the other effects that were around that original shape.

The first thing I’m going to do is add a background.

And I have already created a very simple pattern so I’m going to choose Edit, Fill and I have a pattern fill that I’m going to fill the background layer with.

And it’s just a little blue strip pattern.

But I don’t want it to be blue so I’m going to choose Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and I’m going to adjust the layer so that it’s a color that works a little bit better with the shape color that I’m using.

So I’m just going to select that and click Ok.

Now I can of course go back to my shape and change the fill color for it.

So I might make it a little less obvious of a pink.

So I’ll select that.

I’m also going to add a stroke to it so I’m going to choose a white stroke or a creamy short of stroke and I’m going to make it a dot stroke.

So we can now see that we’ve got a dot stroke here.

Now I want the middle of this pattern to be a different color again.

And this is the important to see how you can actually create a fill for this shape so that it blocks out the background behind it.

To do that I’m going to take the shape layer and drop it on the New Layer icon so I have a duplicate.

And I’m going to right click and I’m going to rasterize this top layer.

So it’s now a raster layer.

Because it’s a raster layer I can now use the Magic Wand tool and I’ll click just outside the frame so that I select all the area around this shape.

And then I’m going to choose Select Inverse so that I’ve got the entire area of the shape selected.

And because I want to just miss the edge of this shape I’m going to bring this selection in 2 or 3 pixels.

So I’m going to choose Select, Modify, Contract.

I’m just going to bring it in a couple of pixels to make sure that I’m well clear of the border.

And now that I am clear of the border I’m going to select a color here, a sort of orangey yellow color and I’m going to fill my selection with this sort of yellowy orange.

But I don’t want to fill the layer that has the pink on it so I’m going to create a brand new layer and fill that.

So Alt, Backspace, Option, Delete and I’ll press Ctrl D to deselect the selection.

Now I’m going to get rid of the shape copy because I only needed that to create my fill and now I’m going to drag this below the frame and above the background.

And when I do we end up with the final effect that we saw in the original image.

So this was the original image that I created.

And the only real difference between these two is the style of bracket that I used to create the bracket edge.

So I’ve chosen a rather plain one here but in this case I chose a very fancy one.

But the process is identical to create these frames.

And once you get used to it you’ll be able to create these very quickly and very easily.

And this gives you the ability to create your own frames at any time to your own specifications.

I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.

Look out for more tutorials on my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom and a whole lot more.

And please subscribe to my YouTube channel so that you’ll be notified when new videos are released.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:30 amNo Comments links to this post

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013

Photoshop – Craft a custom Black & White Photo

Learn how to craft a custom black and white image in Photoshop using the Black and White adjustment layer and a curves adjustment. The process also includes adding a simple vignette effect.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.

Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can create a custom black and white conversion for your images in Photoshop.

Before we get started with this process let’s have a look and see what it is that we’re aiming at. Here is just a standard conversion to black and white of an image and I just used the desaturated command to get this image. And here is a more crafted version.

Here I’ve been able to make choices about exactly how my black and white image looks. And I like this one a whole lot better and I’m going to show you how you can create this affect yourself. And what we do is use a black and white adjustment layer to do it. So first of all I’m going to take all these layers and just trash them.

And let’s get started with this image which of course was originally a color image. Now one thing I did do to this image is I cropped the beam across the top of the image out of the way because I didn’t think that helped it at all. And now instead of doing a desaturation which you might do by choosing Image > Adjustments > Desaturate, which gives you this sort of flat conversion into black and white, we’re just going to undo that and we’re going to choose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Black and White.

Now this allows us to craft a black and white and what you get is a series of sliders. And you get a sort of standard black and white adjustment. But with these sliders you can determine how individual colors in the image are converted. Now right now I want you to look at this Konica Minolta sign here and it was originally blue.

Now you can see that if I take the blue slider towards the left it becomes very dark. If I take it towards the right we actually lose that sign completely. And this is the way that we craft our black and white image. All we need to do is to bring the sliders to where we want them to be to get the effect that we want on the image.

Now for me I wanted my greens to be a big lighter. So I’m going to take my greens to the lighter side of the slider and I’m testing each slider individually to see which gives me the effect that I’m looking for. And I’m looking for a bit of a moody image here.

So everything is going to be towards the darks for this image. But I might kick the occasional color up to light to that I get a little bit of variety in the image. And I’m just going to craft that until I get what I want and close the dialog.

Now the beauty of using an adjustment layer by choosing Layer > New Adjustment Layer is that this is now editable so I can double click on this adjustment layer at any time and I can redo the adjustment. I can tailor it again to my specific needs.

Having done this I wanted to really give this image a kick so I also added a couple of adjustments to it and these were curves adjustments. I chose Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves and I did this twice because I wanted to use standard curves adjustment. So from the presets the first thing I did was I chose a strong contrast because I really, really wanted a contrast here.

But then I realized that that was over darkening it so I added another adjustment layer and this time I went for a lightening curves adjustment layer. So I just went straight back into Curves and this time chose Lighter because that gave me a lighter but still very strong contrast image. And I finished off with a vignette.

Now with the vignette I added a new layer so Layer > New Layer. And then I chose the Rectangular Marquee tool here on this brand new layer and I just selected inside the image, sort of around I guess about half an inch inside the image. Then with that selection in place I chose Select > Inverse so that now I have this very edge of the image selected.

And you can see that I made a really poor job of this so let’s go back and I missed the top of the image. Let’s try that again, select Inverse. Now it looks pretty even all the way around. I have a sort of brown selected here but it could be black. It could be anything. I’m going to press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac just to fill the selection with that color and then I’m going to deselect the selection with Select > Deselect.

I’m going to blend it in using a multiply blend mode because the multiply blend mode darkens everything. And you can see the darkening effect around the edge of the image when I turn it on and off. Of course it’s not only way too much but it’s also a really hard edge. So with this layer selected I’m going to choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

Gaussian Blur is my sort of go to blur because what it allows you to do is to really heavily blur the edges. Now I’m down at the very bottom of the image so that we can see the edge that we’ve got. This is it with a zero radius blur but as soon as I start increasing the blur you can see that it softens out nicely. So I’m just going to make it nice and soft and then bring down the opacity of it until I get what I want. So this is the original image and this is our new crafted black and white version.

And I think that for me is a lot more interesting than this particular version that I got by just choosing to desaturate the image. If you like this sort of dark, grungy sort of version or if you want to be able to craft your black and white images with a bit more control than just a one-step click select option then this is the tool you need to do it. Use the black and white adjustment layer and craft your own images.

I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out on this YouTube channel for more of my video tutorials.

And subscribe so that you’ll be advised when new tutorials are launched and also visit my website at projectwoman.com where you’ll find more tips, trick and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Lightroom, Illustrator and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:30 amNo Comments links to this post

Sunday, September 1st, 2013

Create ornate circles with shapes and color in Photoshop

See how to turn simple shapes in Photoshop into ornate circles. The process is simple and you can source the elements to use from the web as free shapes – I tell you where to get them from.

Transcript:

Hello, I’m Helen Bradley.

Welcome to this video tutorial.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how you can make circular ornaments in Photoshop.

Before we get started with this tutorial let’s have a look and see what we’re aiming for.

This is one of the floral ornament shapes that I’ve created and I’m going to show you how you can create this quickly and easily in Photoshop.

And I’m using Photoshop CS6 for this technique.

If you’re using an earlier version you may need to adapt parts of the tutorial but you can still do it.

So let’s just close this down and let’s create a new document, File, New.

And it doesn’t really matter too much.

I’ve just got a 600 x 600 RGB document with a white background.

You can create pretty much anything.

Now before we actually start making our shapes we’re going to need to find some things to make them with and what I’ve done is I’ve located some places on the web that you can get these from.

So I’m going to this particular site here which is all-free-download.com.

It’s all-free-download.com.

And if you go searching for vector floral clipart you’ll be able to find this file here.

And this is the one that I’ve used so you just click it and then go ahead and download it.

And once you’ve downloaded it you can open it.

And I’ve got it open here now in Windows Explorer and I’ve actually gone ahead and extracted all the files.

And in this particular file there’s a floral clipart AI which is an Illustrator file and there’s also a CSH file.

And the CSH file is a Photoshop one so you can use that.

And what I did was I put the shapes in Photoshop’s shapes collection.

So I’m going to show you how you can do that now.

I’m just going to size the Photoshop screen down so that I can see the Photoshop screen as well as my Windows Explorer screen here.

And I’m going to grab the tools and I want the Shapes tool because I want the Shapes panel here.

So I’m going to open this up here and click this icon here which opens up the Shapes fly out menu.

And I’m going to choose Load Shapes because when I do that Photoshop takes me to the custom shapes location.

So this is where it expects the custom shapes to be.

So what I’m going to do is show here my Windows Explorer folder and I’m just going to drag and drop floral clipart into here.

In fact I’ve already done it.

You can see it’s here so I’m not going to drag it in a second time.

But you would drag the floral clipart CSH or the shapes file which is a Photoshop file into this custom shapes folder.

And when you do the custom shapes are now available inside Photoshop.

So you can close everything down.

I’ll just close this for now.

Okay, let’s go back to our document untitled2.

I’m going to make this screen, Photoshop screen, the full screen size.

So now we’re ready to go to our shapes.

I’m going to click here.

This is the Shapes collection.

Usually you’ll see the Rectangle tool but we’re actually going for the Custom Shape tool.

And because my image is 600 x 600 in size I’m going to put a couple of guides in here.

So I’m going to choose View, New Guide and I’m going to put a vertical one at 300 pixels, that’s 300 px, and click Ok.

And I’m going to go ahead and put a horizontal one in, click Horizontal, type 300 px and click Ok.

So now I have my center point marked and that’s just going to make things a whole lot easier in a minute.

So I’m going to create a new layer by just clicking the Create New layer icon here at the foot of the Layers palette because I want to work on an empty layer.

Now I used Kuler a little bit earlier to get my color scheme and I have a video on using Kuler in Photoshop that you may want to look at on this YouTube channel.

But basically what I did was I went to Window Extensions, Kuler and I launched Kuler.

Well, that’s just hidden it, hasn’t it.

So here’s Kuler and I went looking for flowers and I searched for flowers and I located a flower color scheme that I really like.

So I just clicked here and choose Add to Swatches Panel.

And here are the flower colors added to my Swatches panel so I thought we’d choose a different color flower this time.

So I can just tuck Kuler away because I don’t need it anymore.

I do need my Layers panel.

I do need my tools and I will like my swatches to be open.

So with the custom shape selected I’m going to go and first show you how you would add these shapes in because I’ve already done that.

But you’ll click the fly out menu and you should see your shapes in here.

They should be listed.

If they’re not then you can click Load Shapes and go and load the floral clipart shapes and click Load and then they’ll be loaded into your panel.

So they’ll be here.

Now I’ve got two sets of them but that doesn’t matter too much.

Now the first thing I’m going to do is choose one of these shapes to work with and the ones that I worked with were the fairly small ones, things like this or this that had sort of nice floral elements.

But they were fairly simple.

So I think we’re going to start with something a little bit more complex this time.

So let’s select this one.

I’m just going to click it.

And on the toolbar here I want to be working in shapes so I want this to be shape not path or pixels.

In earlier versions of Photoshop you will need to select an icon here.

It won’t be on a dropdown menu and you won’t have these features here for fill and stroke.

But you’ll be able to select the fill color and I don’t want a stroke on this at all.

But I do want a fill color and I’m going to select one of my floral colors that I used or grabbed from Kuler.

So now I’m going to make a blue shape with no stroke and I’m just going to draw it out here.

And I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original proportions.

I’m just going to let go.

So you can see now I have this shape on a new layer and it’s just a blue shape.

I’m going to drag it into position.

Now I think in actual fact that I would like the bigger end on the outside so I’m going to drop it down here because that means that this bigger end is going to be on the outside of the circle as I work.

And now I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T because this gives me my Transform tools.

And what I want to do first of all is find this little marker that’s in the very, very center of the image.

And I’m going to drag it around and I’m going to pop it just right over the middle the image.

And then I’m going to set this option here this angle option to how many degrees I want to transform this image in.

And there is 360 degrees in a circle so we need something that will divide into 360 equally.

So for example if we want 10 shapes around it we could do 36 degrees.

Numbers like 30, 60, 45, 10 are good values.

I’m going to choose 30.

So I’m going to type in 30 here and you can see that the shape has started to rotate.

And I’m going to click the checkbox.

So it’s started its rotation and to complete the rotation all the way around the circle I’m going to hold Ctrl and Shift and Alt all at the same time.

So I’m going to press Ctrl, Shift, Alt on the Mac, that would be Command, Shift, Option and then the letter T for Transform.

And every time I press the letter T because I have Ctrl, Shift and Alt held down you can see that it’s adding another shape.

So all I have to do is to press the letter T enough times that my shapes creates an entire circle.

And here is my shape here.

Now you can leave it as a shape layer if you want to.

You can resize it if you want to by holding Shift and Alt as you drag in or out on the handles.

I’m going to drag mine out a little bit.

I think this is going to be the larger of the shapes and I’m going to click the checkmark to confirm it.

Now so that my computer doesn’t get stressed out with having such a large shape I’m going to rasterize this.

So I’m going to right click and just rasterize the layer.

But you could leave yours as shapes if you wanted to.

Now I’m just going to click Create a New Layer.

And we’re just going to repeat this over and over again.

So I’m going to choose my Shape tool, my Custom Shape tool.

I’m going to choose a different shape this time.

So I’m looking for something interesting that will complement the shape that I have here.

And last time I used this shape as my final shape so I think I’m going to do that again.

So we’ll wait for a minute before we use that.

But let’s go and get this one that’s sort of like a leaf shape.

I’ll click on it.

And now on a new layer I’m going to turn this layer off for a minute so that I can see what I’m doing here.

I’ve got no stroke.

I’m going to change my fill this time to a green color and I’m going to just drag out my leaf shape.

I’m going to hold the Shift key so it’s constrained to its original size and dimensions and I’m going to position it pretty much over the center of the image.

And I’m doing that by holding the Spacebar down as I drag it into position.

And now I’ve got my green shape.

I’m going to select the Move tool so I can now rotate it and press Ctrl or Command T.

I’m going to drag this little indicator into the very middle of the intersection where those two gridlines are.

So I’m going to rotate around that location and I’m going to select the amount of rotation.

And I’m going to use 30 degrees again so I’ll type 30 and then I’m going to press the checkmark here to accept that transformation.

Now I’ll press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to repeat that transformation and copy that shape.

And I’m going to do that until I get all the way around the circle.

So this is my second shape and if I click to show my first shape I can see the two shapes as they’re interacting.

I think I want to change the size of my top shape so I’m going to select that layer and with Shift and Alt held down I’m going to size it so that it appears as a much smaller shape here.

And I many also want to rotate it for example because I initially set 30 degrees as my rotation.

If I rotate this through 15 degrees it’s going to be slightly offset.

And I think that will be a good choice here.

So now let’s go ahead and make a third shape, again creating a brand new layer, selecting the Custom Shape tool and this time I’m going to go for this sort of filler shape.

I think this one here is going to be a good choice although this leaf could be used as well.

I’m going to select it and select a different color to use.

This time I think I’m going to choose this very light green color.

I’m on a new layer.

I’m going to drag out my shape.

I’m going to hold the Spacebar to move it into position and perhaps even hold the Shift key so that it’s constrained to its original proportions the way it was drawn originally.

And then I’m going to let go the Mouse button and then let go the Shift key so that it is now drawn on this new layer.

Now this is really quite a big element so I’m not going to need to have too many of them.

I’m just going to use the Move tool to line it up very neatly here.

I’m going to press Ctrl or Command T to get into free transform mode.

I’m going to move its little indicator all the way down to the middle here so that it is going to rotate around the circle and this time I only want a small number.

So if I rotate it through 90 degrees I’m going to get four of these shapes on the screen.

And that will be plenty.

I’m going to press the checkmark here to confirm this transformation and then let’s go back and press Ctrl, Alt, Shift T to make the additional shapes.

I’m going to press that three times so that we get this finished shape.

Now I’m thinking this particular shape might look better with a border on it so I’m going back to the Shape tools and this time I’m going to select a stroke.

And I’m going to add a lighter green stroke around it.

I’m going to make it a single line stroke and I’m just going to make sure that the size of the stroke is correct or sufficient for my needs.

I’m thinking probably about a 2 point stroke will be nice.

And I’m going to again make this into a rasterized layer by right clicking and choose Rasterize Layer.

And so there’s my additional shape.

I’m now going to drag on my greenery layer and move it on top of the original layer and I can also resize this layer if I want to make it smaller or larger or even moving it behind everything else.

Now one of the things that you can do then is to make the background layer a different color such as black.

I’ve selected the background layer and I’m pressing Alt Backspace to fill it with black.

I can also add effects to these layers.

Let’s go to this greenery layer and let’s add an outer glow.

So I’m choosing the Add Layer Style icon here and I’m going to add an outer glow.

At the moment it’s a white glow.

So I’m just going to increase its spread a little bit.

You can see it’s some dimension and a little bit of a glowing effect here.

And then let’s go and get a green color from the underlying image and use that as our glow.

Now we may not want it to be quite as feathered and we may just want it to a more harsh sort of glow which is quite possible and just click Ok.

And then we can do the same for this shape here and we could add a glow to it, again, Outer Glow.

Again, I’m going to sample a color.

I’m actually going to sample this blue color and then use something in that sort of same color range perhaps a bluey green for my outer glow.

I’m going to increase the spread and also soften it up a little bit so it really looks like a glow.

Perhaps we could use a different blend mode such as lighten or we could play with overlay or color dodge.

Some of these will work and some of them may not.

But you can certainly experiment with how these interact with not only the black layer but also the green sort of colored layer below.

And I’ll click Ok and then I’m going to press Ctrl and the semicolon to turn off the gridlines.

Now this shape is very different from the shape we saw earlier.

It’s created in exactly the same way but you can see the color scheme and the actual elements that I used to create these shapes are quite different.

But I’ve got two very interesting shapes that I could now use as backgrounds or elements in a collage or for some other purpose.

It’s very easy to create these rotated shapes and lots of fun.

I’m Helen Bradley.

Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.

Look out for more tutorials on this YouTube channel and follow me at projectwoman.com where my blogs include tips and tricks on Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.

Helen Bradley

Helen Bradley

Labels: , , , , , ,

Categories:photoshop

posted by Helen Bradley @ 8:30 amNo Comments links to this post

Page 2 of 212