11

CREATING BACKGROUNDS FOR VIDEO

While the video world often constrains itself to a 4×3 or 16×9 aspect ratio, the real world does not. When incorporating photos, type, and logos, there is often empty space. Some choose to leave this area empty (or filled with black). I like the color black more than most people—in fact, half my wardrobe is gray, charcoal, or black. But even I’ll admit that it can get pretty boring for video.

To combat this, you can wallpaper the screen. You may choose to fill the screen with blended colors, repeating patterns, or soft textures. In all cases, Photoshop proves to be an excellent tool for creating backgrounds for video. If you choose to animate these backgrounds, they can easily be imported as layered images into After Effects, Combustion, and most nonlinear editing packages these days. In fact, 75% of my After Effects work starts in Photoshop. With this wide-open box of possibilities, let’s begin.

Backgrounds should match the “mood” of the piece. Don’t just tile the client’s logo.

Be sure to go with less saturated red tones. The use of gradual blends helps hold this background together.

(Image courtesy American Diabetes Association.)

Gradients

Video has difficulty dealing with high-contrast ratios. Proper use of gradients exploits video’s greatest weakness. A gradient is a gradual blend between two or more colors. These gradual transitions work very well on video, even after duplication to lower-quality consumer tape stock or being broadcast.

There are three major ways to access gradients:

However, all three use a similar interface: the Gradient Editor.

Proper use of gradients can lift your work off the screen. Gradients are essential to natural color.

Gradient Editor

All gradients are edited using the common Gradient Editor. To access it, click on the thumbnail of the gradient that is loaded in the pop-up window or the Options bar.

Presets (A). You have several presets to choose from. If you want to load additional preset gradients, access them from the submenu (triangle icon). You can choose to replace the existing gradients, or append (add-on) to the loaded gradients. You can also load gradients that live outside the presets folder by clicking the Load button. There are several gradients available online, as well as with this book’s DVD. You can also choose to save your own creations. The best place to store them is inside your Presets Folder (Application Folder> Presets>Gradients). This way they will appear in the submenu for faster loading.

Name (B). For ease of recall, gradients can be named. If you are having a particularly boring day, express yourself here.

Type (C). There are two gradients to choose from: Solid and Noise. Solid gradients involve color and opacity stops, with gradual blends in between. Noise gradients contain randomly distributed colors within a specified range. Each has a different interface and will be discussed separately.

Solid Editor

Smoothness (D). Controls the rate at which colors blend into each other. It can be gradual or steep.

Opacity stops (E). Gradients can contain blends between opacity values as well. To add another stop, click in an empty area on the top of the gradient spectrum. To adjust a stop, click on it, and then modify the opacity field.

Color stops (F). The simplest gradients contain only two colors, but who said clients were simple? Often you may choose to use several colors (or even repeat colors) to achieve a desired effect. Double-click on the color stop to access the Adobe Color Picker.

Stop Editor (G). Selected gradient stops can be adjusted numerically. You can edit the opacity, color, and location (0%–100%, read left to right.)

Midpoint (H). Between stops are midpoints. By default, the midpoint is halfway between two stops. However, it wouldn’t be Photoshop if you couldn’t tweak it.

Noise Editor

Roughness (I). Noise gradients use a roughness setting to determine how many different colors are used to create noise. Use the (comma) and (period) keys to cycle through your gradient presets.

Color Model (J). You can choose between three models: Red-Green-Blue, Hue-Saturation-Brightness, or L*a*b.

Color Range Sliders (K). Adjust the range of colors available to the gradient.

Options (L). You can choose to restrict colors (which has no apparent effect for broadcast-safe colors). You can also introduce random transparency. To create a new gradient, click on the Randomize button. Every time you click, a new gradient will be generated.

New Button (M). To add a gradient to the Presets window, type a name into the name field. Click the New button, and an icon will be added in the Presets window. This new gradient is not yet permanently saved, but stored temporarily in the Preferences file. If this file is deleted or damaged, or if you change presets, the new gradient set will be lost. You must click the Save button and navigate to the desired folder. Be sure to append the file name with .grd to inform Photoshop that it is a gradient set.

Gradient Tool

The Gradient tool can be used to manually draw gradients on a layer. To access the Gradient tool, select it from the toolbar, or press . The Paint Bucket shares the same well as the Gradient tool, so if you can’t find the Gradient tool, press to cycle through your tools.

The Gradient tool can use any gradient created from the gradient editor or from the Presets menu. To select a gradient, choose from the available ones in the Options bar. You can also load preset libraries or manually load gradients by accessing the palette’s submenu. To access the gradient editor, double-click a Gradient icon.

You now must choose between five options to build your gradient:

You have a few available options to further modify the gradient. You can specify a blend mode to affect how the gradient is applied to the layer. (For more on the versatile blend modes, see Chapter 3, “Why Layers?”)

Gradient Fill Layer

A Gradient Fill layer creates a new gradient layer in your document (Layer>New Fill Layer>Gradient or from the Create New Adjustment or Fill Layer menu at the bottom of the layer’s palette). Instead of drawing the gradient, you access its controls from the editor and a pop-up window. The gradient can be positioned by dragging in the open document. You can also change the direction and shape of the gradient. When you are satisfied, click OK. While this gradient is not very flexible, it can be included when creating an action. To confine the new gradient to a specific area, make a selection first. This will add a layer mask to the gradient layer. You can edit this mask at any time by highlighting the layer and using any painting tool or filter.

You can click the gradient to display the Gradient Editor. You can also click on the drop-down arrow to access the pop-up gradient palette. You can choose to set additional options, or edit the gradient if desired. All of the previous options and styles are available to modify the gradient. Additionally, you can move the center of the gradient by clicking and dragging inside the Image window.

Double-clicking on the adjustment layer’s icon launches the gradient controls. You can then click and drag within the window to reposition the gradient.

Gradient Map

A frequently underused feature is the Gradient Map (Layer> New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map). The Gradient Map applies a new gradient to the grayscale range of an image. A two-color gradient produces a nice duotone effect. Shadows map to one of the color stops of the gradient fill; highlights map to the other. The midtones map to the gradations in between.

A multicolored gradient or noise gradient can add interesting colors to an image. This is an effective technique for colorizing textures or photos for a background. I recommend using the Gradient Map from the Adjustment Layers menu, because it will provide the necessary flexibility to tweak your look. To modify the Gradient Map, access the Gradient Editor and adjust the previously mentioned options. Remember, Dither adds random noise, which can smooth the appearance of the gradient fill, thus reducing banding. Let’s try it out.

The Gradient Map adjustment layer is fast and flexible. You can also change the adjustment layer’s blending mode to extend the effect’s possibilities.

Working with Photo Sources

Using a photo as a background can be a very effective technique if handled properly. Remember this guiding advice: it’s a background. Sounds simple, right? But be careful that the image you put behind your text or logos does not compete for attention or you will distract your viewers and reduce their comprehension. Here are a few techniques to try.

Defocusing

Gently softening an image works well. This can create a sense of image without dominating the screen. One of the most effective filters for this is the Lens Blur filter first introduced in Photoshop CS (if this is not available to you, then go for Gaussian Blur). Let’s try it out:

Creating a Screened Area

Another technique to make a “cleared” area for text involves using a screen. This is a very traditional print process, but it works well for video as well. Let’s use the same image we had open for our last example.

The advantage to using an adjustment layer is that you can continue to modify the background layers.

Gradient Maps

Gradient Maps aren’t just for amorphous backgrounds; in fact they also work quite well on photographic backgrounds.

Filtering

To further modify photos into backdrops, experiment with filters. While frequently overused, judicious application of the Artistic or Brush Stroke filters can simplify a photo to a pleasant image. Combine filters with fading and blending to achieve a modern look.

Sometimes the photo may serve just as a painter’s palette. By applying several distortions and filters, it is possible to render a photo unrecognizable. All that is left behind are the dominant colors originally contained in the source. This is an excellent way to generate random color fields to use as backgrounds.

Using Patterned Tiles

Tiling a pattern or texture is a nice way to fill up space. The key is to make sure the texture size is large enough that the seams are not visible. You can find several collections of patterns available, but the key is to look for seamless ones. Thanks to the folks at Auto FX, I was able to include a sampler of seamless textures on the book’s DVD. You can find 3000 textures as well as hundreds of free fonts at their Web site, http://www.autofx.com.

The easiest way to make a tiled background is to use a pattern adjustment layer. The adjustment layer will create a pattern that can be easily resized and pos itioned. Let’s begin.

These utterly useless patterns are built in Photoshop. Don’t let them scare you away. The Artist Surfaces, Rock Patterns, and Texture Fills collection are very useful.

If you change the size of your document, the pattern will automatically expand or contract to fill the work area.

Creating Patterns from Photos

If you have a photo that you’d like to turn into a seamless background, there are two key techniques: Offset (with cloning), and the Pattern Maker filter introduced in Photoshop 7. If you are scanning the photo, scan it at a higher resolution so you have plenty of pixels to work with. Tiled patterns look best when the tiles have fewer repetitions.

Offset and Clone

The “original” method of creating seamless patterns involves the Offset filter. By shifting an image, the seams become clearly visible. You can then employ the Clone Stamp or Healing Brush to smooth out the edges.

Open the file Ch11_Wall.psd to see the results.

After cloning the seams, the tile is ready.

Pattern Maker

The Pattern Maker can be found under the Filter menu in Photoshop 7 or newer. It can be used to generate tiling patterns. These patterns do not often match their initial source; the pixels are “scrambled” to generate a seamless tile. Because the pattern is based on the pixels in a sample, it shares visual characteristics with the original image. This filter works well for small patterns, but not on large objects. The Pattern Maker command is available only for 8-bit images, so you’ll need to down-convert 16-bit or 32-bit sources. Let’s explore this useful filter.

Softening the Background

Getting the right balance between focus and detail will require some experimentation. To produce a natural defocused effect, you can harness the powerful Gaussian Blur or Lens Blur filters. Unfortunately, there are no Blur of Focus adjustment layers (although you can harness Smart Filters in Photoshop CS3).

One way is to flatten the layered background, or make a copy and flatten it. This is inefficient, because it requires backing up and managing multiple files. A better option is targeted flattening, first introduced in Chapter 3 (page 60) as an alpha channel solution. The technique is relatively simple, but it opens up several new design options.

Be sure to hold down the key when choosing Merged Visible. This will preserve your layers.

The softened background will make a better backdrop for foreground elements. Use blurred copies and blending modes for new looks.

This technique has many other implications, especially when blending multiple copies of layers together. Try targeted flatten-ing periodically while building a composition. Apply assorted filters, such as Radial Blur (Zoom) to these intermediary copies, and then adjust blending modes. Several new techniques can be developed.

Some Recipes

You can see the recipe by flipping down the action. Feel free to modify these to create more automatic backgrounds.

To get you started, 12 backgrounds created entirely within Photoshop are included on the DVD. Instead of eating up page space printing long lists, I’ve captured these backgrounds as Photoshop actions.

Remember, there is no exact science to these backgrounds, just some controlled experimentation and a little bit of luck. By employing the Actions palette, you can capture these experiments for later use. For more on Actions, see Chapter 12, “Automation.”

Hands On | 11

A Loop is a Loop is a Loop

Would you like to learn a technique that can save you thousands of dollars? If you produce videos, television, motion graphics, or DVDs you are probably quite familiar with looping backgrounds. These essential elements get used all the time under title graphics, inserted into lower-thirds, or as DVD menus. There are plenty of outlets available for purchasing looping backgrounds (chances are you already own some).

But this gets expensive, and does not give your video a unique look. There are several approaches to looping backgrounds, several companies (including the major players) take a lazy way out and don’t make a full loop, but instead just dissolve to a graphic or different source.

By combining the power of Photoshop and After Effects, you can create custom looping backgrounds. In this tutorial, we’ll create two different looping backgrounds. You can harness these techniques to create very different backgrounds with just a little bit of effort and variation. Let’s explore your options.

You’ll find Exercise 11 on the DVD-ROM.