How to get text to interact with ink & plants in Photoshop CC
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
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Hi there, in this tutorial we are going to use all the techniques we've used so far to create this. It's a little bit of Quick Selection, a little bit of Select and Mask, a little Clipping Mask, and we should get the text to interact like this. All right, let's get started.
First up, let's go to 'File', 'Open'. In our 'Exercise Files', there's one called 'Text Interaction 01'. It's in that folder we've been working in, called '05 Selections', open it up. Now this one is a PSD rather than a JPEG. Why? It's because I wanted to use a specific font, and for us all to use the same font. And because all machines are different you're probably not going to have-- this particular font's called Lust. If you want to, you can just obviously click on this Layer and hit 'Delete' and type out your own text but for the moment while you're practicing, let's just work with this font here.
What I did is, you can right click text here and say 'Convert to Shape', it's not appearing there. It just turns this font here into a shape rather than editable text. So that means it loads on your machine, but you can't change it, you're stuck. Anyway, what we want to do is-- let's turn the Type on and off, and I'm just kind of looking at parts, mainly this chunk through the middle here. This would be good to kind of overlap, so I want to select this Mask it, have it on its own layer above the text. So let's do that.
We're using all the skills we've learnt so far. Just putting it to a practical example. I'm going to turn off the Scott's layer, and you click on the ink there. Grab my 'Quick Selection Tool', turns it to brush size. Doesn't really matter. I've got mine at about 50. I'm doing this on and off to see how far I need to go up and down, so I'm going to grab most of that, and I grab most of this. Can you see, I could go through and keep selecting this but I don't need it because the text is not going to-- maybe I will just for good measure. Adding to it doesn't really hurt. You're just trying to work out what you need from this to be above. Perfect.
So I've done a selection from it. If I just add a Layer Mask now it's going to kind of work. It's not what I want, I'm going to do it one extra step first. I'm going to undo that. I'm going to duplicate this layer, so I'm going to right click it, save 'Duplicate', and this is going to be 'Top Ink 01'. So I've got two of them now. Now when I add that to this layer I've got this top bit here, that's just got this ink and the one underneath is this. The one underneath just kind of fills in the background. So now it's just about Layer order.
Like we did earlier on, with the text and the model, it's very similar. So I'm going to turn the text on, drag this above. So this is above that. Now it looks okay as is. I'm going to zoom in. I want to-- there's some bits I can tidy up. Some of these edges here aren't great. So with the Layer Mask selected, remember, you have to click on this. Click on 'Select and Mask', like we did in the previous tutorial. Then, some of these global ones. Definitely these global ones are going to work better in this case. You can work on them individually with the paint brush but because they're all very similar we can just drag these things around.
So Edge Detection, yes, might work. Smoothing, in this case I really like-- I've just kind of picked a random number. I'm going to turn this on and off and I'll get the editor to zoom right in. Can you see, maybe across this area here. So that's the original. That's where the Smoothing turned on, just kind of makes it nice. Shift Edge can be helpful as well. I increased it, actually I want to decrease it. So that's it now, that's it before, that's it now. It's a little nicer, I'm going to click 'OK'. Awesome!
So I've got that layer, the mask is pretty good and I'm going to work on a couple of other parts. There is some bits we're going to do when we start shadowing the background to kind of make it fit in. So you can skip ahead the next minute or two while I do the rest of these. So what else do I want? See this big sticky thing here? I want that to be above the 'S'. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to do the same thing as before. I'm going to turn this top one off just to make things a little easier to look at. I'm going to duplicate the Ink layer. 'Duplicate Layer'. You're going to be called 'Top Ink 02'. Might as well move it to the top.
So with this layer selected, 'Quick Mask 02' I'm going to grab all of that. Turn this on. She'd probably be better underneath for the moment, so I can turn the text on and off. That's probably what I want. So I'm going to turn them all off except for this guy here. I'm going to add you to a Layer Mask. He's going to be above my text. Turn the text on, and there he is, there. Now in my haste I took too much because I didn't want the-- I don't want it above the H. So I'm going to paint out that selection, and this is going to bring in some of our techniques that we learned earlier on.
Remember we were able to paint directly on the mask with black and white to either show or hide things. So on my mask I'm going to grab my black paint brush, there he is there, 'Paint Brush'. Do I want it to be black? I do, I want it to be black. I'm going to make sure my Opacity is at 100%. And I'm just going to paint out. Mine's a bit of a fuzzy brush there, it doesn't really matter in this case. You can see, it kind of starts bringing through the S. I'm going to undo that a couple of times, 'Step Backward'. I'm going to go to my brush size and I'm going to have the hardness up a lot higher so that I can paint this out. There you go, H. There's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.
Now with that Mask selected, I can go to 'Select and Mask'. I'm going to zoom in. Now again, I'm going to crank up the Smoothing. You can see, it just made it nice. I'm happy with that. 'Shift Edge', in a little bit, I'm happy with that as well. What we'll do here though is we'll show-- see this one, says Remember Settings, it just means, every time I load this back in for the subsequent mask that I'm going to do, it's going to remember that kind of Smoothing and that kind of Shift Edge. Handy. Zoom out. Let's go through and do the last bit.
So I'm going to tune both of them on, looking kind of cool. Now I'm going to turn top, these two both off. And what am I going to do next? I'm going to do this kind of, like this bit that blobs out and this little stalk thing. So duplicate the layer, right click, duplicate. 'Top'. I called the other one Link, you noticed, I didn't. 'Top Ink 03'. Now where is it going to go? It's going to be all of this stuff. So 'Quick Selection Tool'. I'm going to drag across that. Not that, so holding down the 'Option' key on my Mac, 'Alt' on a PC to paint that stuff out. There's some weird stuff around there. I'm going to turn you on. I see there, that's going to go across the T that I don't want. So I can either paint it out with the black paint brush later on like I kind of did in the last bit I did.
Remember, over here, or I just removed it from the selection here. So with this layer selected I'm going to turn it into a Layer Mask. I'm going to pop it just above my Scott Shoes. Instantly I can see there's a little bit there that I don't like but that's okay, let's look at painting it out. So on my Layer Mask, black paintbrush, here you are. I'm going to paint that out. I'm just kind of mocking it up there. With it selected I might tidy it up with Select and Mask, and hopefully, because it's remembered my selections it's done the Smoothing and the Shift Edge. I'm going to turn it on, can you see it across there? Turn it off, nice and smooth there. Let's click 'OK'. Turn all through them on, it's kind of a cool way.
I like it when there's this kind of interaction. Looks better from afar. It's the same stuff as we've learned but in a different practical exercise because sometimes cutting people out, and you're like "Oh, I can't understand that." It's quite simple, there's just one person, but when there's like an interaction it's the same principle, but we've had to do it across three layers and we didn't even have to do it across three layers. I just broke it into little sections to make it little easier for us to understand. You could have just selected all of these in one big go but I'm not that clever.
The last thing I want to do is, I want to kind of darken these parts in here. Now the problem with-- we used the technique earlier on, remember when we settled that model in the grass we used the Burn Tool. The Burn Tool is amazing when you're dealing with images, but because I want to darken up the text, watch this, there's a big kind of, like ghost busters, no go. The Burn Tool can only work on what's called Raster or Bitmap images. Don't sweat it, all we need to do is a slightly different technique.
So this is new stuff, what we're going to do is create a new layer. It's this little turned up page here, we're going to call this one 'Shadows'. I'm going to grab my paint brush. I'm going to pick a color, so I'm going to click in here. My foreground color, make sure it's down at black. I'm actually going to maybe pick a slightly warmer, maybe in the pinky space. Where is my pinky space? Just to match, because it's kind of pink in the background there. It's still dark black, but it's got a hint of magenta in there.
Now in terms of my paint brush I'm going to have the hardness down at '0' so it's nice and fluffy. Looks like that. Undo. I'm going to pick a nice big brush size, 300. What I'm looking to do is I want to kind of like-- actually I'm going to undo. I'm going to turn the Opacity down, at 100% it's coming out a bit strong. So I'm going to lower it down a little bit. And what I want to do now, if I click I can kind of build it up, you can see, so this is just a nicer way of building up stuff. So I'm going to go, 'Edit', 'Step Backward' a good few times. I'm using my shortcut so I don't have to keep clicking on there.
So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to-- let's do a really obvious one. Let's do across this H, so I'm going to do it across there. It works pretty good, except it's coloring in the background and everything. I'm going to go on full noise. Can you see, it's actually covering-- I've gone way too far as an example for you but you can see, it's just coloring in the background, which is not amazing but there is a cool little trick, it's combining what we did a little earlier on.
Go to 'Clipping Mask'. So at the moment, the shadow is for it to only cover the things straight underneath. Remember that little arrow that appears when we're using some of the Adjustment Layers? You can do the same thing with layer, with it selected, go to 'Layer'. Go to this one that says 'Create Clipping Mask'. You can see, now this layer is only affecting the Scott Shoes layer and I can paint out here what I like. It's appearing, can you see it on the little thumbnail there, it's appearing up here but it's only affecting the things underneath.
So what I'm going to do is 'Select All'. Then I'm going to go 'Edit', 'Clear'. Gets rid of all that junk I've done, 'Select', 'Deselect'. So with the Shadow Layer selected, it's got a Clipping Mask just above Scott. I'm going to go through here, my Opacity, what is it at, 38? I'm just going to kind of do some broad kind of shadow stuff. I'm just clicking a couple of times. Getting the big stuff done first. You might have to be careful because you don't want to cover this and the S. I'm going to just make it a little smaller here. Clickety-click. Have I missed anything? Probably. You guys are all watching me.
So I'm getting this in, I'm actually going to go double down. Get a smaller brush, I quite like the big broad stuff first and then get in the smaller, I'm getting a smaller brush, and just kind of, I like it quite sharp where it exactly comes out, but then gets more fluffy. Clicking and dragging, clicking, clicking, clicking and dragging. Holding space bar, then clicking and dragging the mouse. You can see it's quite handy when you are doing this type of thing, you want to kind of move around nicely. If you've been avoiding shortcuts so far. I finally get here today. Hold 'space bar', click, hold, and drag. All right, looking kind of cool? What do you think? I'm liking it, I do realize you can't read the word shoes but go for like, abstract cool. It could be like a nice big graphic for the front cover and supported with maybe a logo that kind of helps define the text a lot.
You see, there's quite a bit in covers of magazines, where they have like the name of the magazine along the top but that image kind of interacts with it a little bit, and the brand of the magazine is strong enough that you know that the magazine is GQ or Glamour, or I don't even know enough glamorous magazines but I think you get what I mean. So play along with this tutorial. Give it a go, and in the next video I'm going to set some homework where I'm going to give you examples for you to work on your own. I'll see you there.