How to create an ink splash image around text - Color Range

Hi there, this video is going to take everything we've learnt with Color Range, and put it into a practical exercise. I felt like we needed this video because, learning Color Range in isolation is great, but often you'll run into issues when you're trying to combine it, with a bunch of other things, like Type here. So we'll do this exercise to kind of flesh out any problems that you will run into in the future. Plus it will allow us to practice what we've learnt so far. Are you ready to make a super smoothie ink? Well, it's meant to be banana splash thing. If you are, let's get started. 

So I'm starting with this example from earlier on. You could just jump in and just start with the background color. You might decide, the fruit splash stuff you don't have to actually do, you just want to do the ink with the text. Up to you, but what I want to do is, I want to open up the ink splashes, so go to 'File', 'Open', and in you folder called 02 Selections, there's one called Color Range 6 and 7. So 6 and 7 are just variants of the same kind of ink splash. I'm going to select them. 

We're going to run into some issues and I'll show you how to fix them. And we'll change the colors and get it interacting with the type. So whenever you get ink splashes like this, this is from Adobe Stock and it's on a white background, which kind of sucks, would be nice if it was clear-cut already, but it's not. Let's work with Color Splash 6. 

So we're going to have to use a couple of tools to make this work. Let's start with our good old faithful, 'Select', 'Color Range'. We're going to not use Skin Tones, we use Sample Colors. Click in here, and what we might do is hit the '+' button. Drag across a bit of it. Bit of that as well. You too, you, you. It's got a pretty good selection there. If you're just joining us for this video here, just make sure your selection preview's on grayscale, it gives you good kind of black and white contrast. Let's click 'OK', and let's turn it into a Mask. 

Now our biggest problem is, can you see, there's a white chunk in there. So it's missed that out, so when I turn it into a Mask, and click on this button here. It's cut little holes in here, and you got to decide whether it's worth fixing these up or not. I'm going to, so I'm going to use my, remember our little trick, we hold down the 'Alt' key on a Mac or 'Option' key, no, it's 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC, click on the Mask. Makes it super clear. I'm going to grab my 'Brush Tool', which is the B key. And I'm using my super shortcuts. Wrong, 'X'. 

So I'm using white as my foreground color, and I'm just kind of tidying up the bits that are clearly not holes. They are just things that Color Range left behind. How hard core am I going to do for this? I'm not super worried because it's-- I don't know. I know because I've practiced that already. That, nobody's going to notice any of these small bits. But I guess I'm just showing you, holding 'space bar' to click and drag around. You probably knew that already. We're getting there, Cool. Move it down. Remember, same key, hold down 'Option' on a Mac, 'Alt' on a PC. Click on the 'Mask' to go back. Now let's check this to see if we've got a good mask. 

We're going to dive back into the masking technique we used in the intro version of Photoshop course, it's called Photoshop Essentials. But I want to retouch on it because a lot of people will jump, into this advanced class and just not do Essentials, and miss out some of the super magic that happened in the Essentials course. So what I'm going to do is, with my Mask selected, I'm going to click 'Select & Mask. And what's really cool about this is, you can see up the top here, that's beyond black, and you can have the opacity right up, so you can see a nice contrast with the background. You might say, "Dan, that is a perfectly good mask." And I'd probably, lazy day, I would say, "You are right," and not hint, "Hit 'cancel', and get out of here, and use it." But let's say it's the front cover or something, and it is going on black, which would be tough. 

So if you use Color Range to get here, use the paintbrush to fill in some parts. Let's try and smooth this out. Smooth is a nice one in this option, so watch this, 'Smooth'. Up a bit higher, you can see, just kind of like smoothing out the edges. Making them a little fuzzy but that's okay, this image is a little out of focus as well. And that might be enough, right? So cool little shortcut is the P key, just tap it while you're in here. And it turns the original back on, original. Soft focus version, original. It's a little slow. So just tap the P key on and off to go back to the original, where you are at now. 

Two other things that I might do, is 'Shift Edge' just a little bit. You can see, there's still a bit of ghosting around the outside, so shift the edge in a bit. Hit the 'P' key, have I made it better, worse? It's looking okay. If that doesn't get it, I find Decontaminate Colors works really well, watch this. I'm going to put the Shift Edge back to 0. And just turn on Decontaminate Colors. You can see there, just kind of fixes up all the edges; it's pretty magic. Now you might remember from the Photoshop Essentials, if I use Decontaminate Colors it's going to create a new layer with this mask on it, because it does some pretty serious changing of the image. So let's click 'OK'. 

You can see here, it's this original that I was working on, and because I used Decontaminate Colors, it says, well let's just put it on its own layer. Because what you'll find is, if I right click and disable this mask, you can see, it's done some really crazy stuff to the edges, to make it a really crisp clear selection. It's awesome. We can go back to the original, but that's why you end up with a second layer. So I'm going to grab my 'Move Tool', click, hold, and drag, and go to my weird little, banana, blueberry smoothie thing. 

I'm going to add some text before I get into too much coloring for this. So I'm just going to turn all of these off. Now, cool little trick is, watch this, if these are all on, you want to turn all of them off except for the background, just click the first one, hold, hold, hold mouse, drag it down. Turn them all back on by clicking, holding, and dragging across them. Just a nice little quick way of turning just some of them on and off. So I'm going to add some Type. So you can skip along this bit, I'm just adding Type. Stick around when we go and change the colors of these paint switches. Actually what I'll do is I'll get the editor to just fast forward this bit. It's not very exciting. 

We're back, I put in some fonts, if you're looking for these fonts, they are, this one's Museo Sans Condensed. You can download that from Typekit, free, but you're really after this one here, right? This one here is called Machine Script, actually Remachine Script, you can see it there. Now I've included version of this font in your exercise files. Where is it? It's here, under Font. Now what you'll see is, it says, for personal use. So if you want to use this commercially reach out to the owner of this, Google 'remachine script'. You can use something like My Fonts to go and pay for it if you want to use it commercially. So this is the free version to use, but you can only use this personally. I love it though, such a cool font. 

Now I stopped here, I added a Drop Shadow, picked a color. I wanted a Drop in here because I wanted to show you just another trick. Well both of these have the same Drop Shadow. It's applied the Drop Shadow, it's super. I can right click anywhere in this kind of gray area. You can say, 'Copy Layer Style', click on 'Smoothies', right click it and say 'Paste Layer Style'. It's a simple but helpful little trick. 

So now I want to go and recolor this thing. It looks like blood. It still looks like blood. So I want to make it kind of banana colored. So with the layer selected here, I'm going to go to my Adjustments Layer, I'm going to play around with Hue & Saturation. The trouble with doing this here, if I change the Hue, it's going to change the background as well. So what I can do is, see this little icon here? It's a little-- it's got a really long name, but basically it says only affect the layer just underneath. So this Hue & Saturation layer is only affecting my Color Splash now. 

So you can see, when I adjust it, and you do those background colors on, the green and the blue looks a lot nicer, but anyway, Hue and Saturation, I'm going to pick a color, and what you'll find is, like yellows, some of the colors are perfect, right? They just work really nice. Let's have a look at yellow. Where is yellow? I can't find yellow, where are you? There you are. Not too green. See the problem with this is that the yellow ends up being kind of brownish, or in this case a little bit green. So what you can say is, 'Colorize', crank up the Saturation, and then find a color. Close to it, but because of these dark colors it's just not going to work. 

So what we're going to do is go back to 'Adjustments', and play around with the levels. I want to effect just the layer underneath again, so just the Color Splash. And what we're going to probably have to do, is just play around with these grays in the middle here. So there's just not so much of that dark kind of muddy yellow. Depending on what color you need it to be you might have to adjust around with the darks and the lights to get to kind of where you want it to be, but I'm happy enough with that. 

Now I'm going to select on this layer here, and I want to shrink it down. So before I shrink it down, I want to convert it into a Smart Object so that it doesn't-- so gets protected, right? Just gets wrapped up and I don't lose resolution. So I'm going to right click it, tell it to be a Smart Object. I'll use my 'Command' T for Transform. I'm going to get it to an appropriate size, and now it's just messing around a little bit of like, what I-- don't want to do. Undo, 'Command T. Shrinking down, holding 'Shift'. Hold down 'Alt', or 'Option' if you're on a Mac. 

Does it all from the centers, but let's say I want something like that. I want it to kind of interact with the background. Especially with Type, it's probably just easiest to grab-- here's my super layer, right? Just want it kind of poking out in front of the R instead of messing around with selections and masking, and stuff, I'm just going to cut the R out. Move this back, you see what I'm going to do here, right? I'm going to duplicate this layer. Duplicating a layer, I can right click it and duplicate it. Extra little trick, is hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or 'Alt' key on a PC, and just kind of select and move it. Kind of makes a duplicate as you're moving it. 

I'm going to grab the 'Type Tool', select it all, maybe Left Align, capital R. Back to my 'Move Tool'. It's going to drag it behind my ink. We're not going to get too fancy with masking this out, when it's easy just to separate that text on to its own layer, to get this kind of interaction. Now to try and tie in all these different techniques, we've used out of Color Range, we can open up our file that we worked on earlier. It's this one here where we messed around with the skin, remember? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of these, I'm going to right click any one of them and convert it into a Smart Object, just so they're all kind of smushed together. I can dive into it, remember, by double clicking it to get inside, but really, just so that it's just one unit. I'm going to drag it to our little exercise here, here he is.

 
Because it's a Smart Object I can shrink it down, without kind of destroying or losing the selection. And again I want to kind of lean on one of the masking techniques we learned in the earlier Essentials course. For the people that did that one, this is just practice. I promise there won't be too much of this through the course, but for the people just jumping into Advanced, it's a trick probably you might not know. First up, with the 'Move Tool', I'm going to hold 'Command Shift' and square bracket to bring it to the top of my layers. If you're on a PC, it's 'Ctrl Shift'. So square brackets, they are next to your P key. So hold them both down, and the left one sends it to the back, the right one sends it to the top. 

It's one I use quite often, just say, all the way to the top, please. I'm going to grab my 'Ellipse Tool', and I'm going to draw an ellipse around it. What I find is people tend to use the Elliptical Marquee Tool to do round selections, but it's not what I want, it's not better, there is a better way, and this is the way. So I've got my image at the top, I've got my ellipse just underneath, and if I hold down the 'Option' key, so with this top layer selected, the long way we learned in the Essentials course, is we went to 'Layer', and we went to this 'Create Clipping Mask'. It's going to show you-- that works, totally, but I'm going to show you the pro way. 

All you do is hold down the 'Alt' key on a PC, 'Option' on a Mac, and just hover your mouse in between these layers, you're looking for that icon. Not that, not that, this. Just click on it, and it does the exact same thing as going to Layer, Create Layer Mask. It's just a real quick way of doing it. And the cool thing about doing this as a mask is that these are totally separate. I can move my ellipse around, or I can move my image around. I can select both of them by clicking the top one, holding 'Shift' in the second one, and just transform them both. And I'm going to get something like that. 
A bit lower down here, I'll turn on my banana. Send them to the top using my shortcut. Scale him down. Now before I scale them down I'm going to convert them into a Smart Object. You can leave now. Now I'm just kind of trying to turn it into something half decent, in terms of the design. Which is going to be hard. There's that, blueberries. Where are you, blueberries? Here you are. You need to come to the top as well. Might have to duplicate that, remember our trick of holding down the 'Option' key on a Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC to get two of them. Transform them or rotate them so we've got a few extras. I might put that under the word Smoothies. Ah, creative genius. 

Duplicate that 'Super', bring it to the top. This one's going to be 'Banana flavored'. It's going to be white text, thank you. Make it smaller, 'Command T'. I very often don't use font sizes, I'll use, just scaling it to get the right font size. Depends really if we're working with digital, or going to kind of print, we'll have to be a little bit more specific with font sizes probably. This is more of a splash social media graphic. Cool. 

And last thing is, this here, it is way down to the bottom, but with all the extra graphics. So I'm going to select this bottom one, hold 'Shift' and click this top one, and you grab the whole lot. Because they're all in the Layer Masks, and all on their own layers. Nothing smooshed together because we're pros. I can lift it up. 

How impressed with this am I? It looks kind of cool. Let's just say I did a practice example of this, and it looks better than that one. So I'm happy. Don't think I like the color of the pink, that my friends is a personal choice. Let's finish this here before I waff along forever. The goal of this video really was to show you how you end up using kind of combinations of tricks. Color Range is awesome, but only when you start using it with other things, other techniques, other tips, other shortcuts. That's when you go from a beginner to an advanced user. 

So that's us, we'll leave it there, let's get into the next video where we'll set a project for you to do. I'll see you there.