So far, we’ve focused on a very specific topic during each hour. For this hour, however, we take some time to explore a variety of neat things that Photoshop can do, some of which are just for fun and others of which will make you more productive. We look at some cool special effects, explain how to add sticky notes to images, and even show you how to print contact sheets.
You got a taste of some of Photoshop’s special effects in the previous hour, when we applied a few different layer styles to type. Now let’s unleash the true power of Photoshop as you learn how to create these sorts of effects from scratch. Don’t worry, we take it one step at a time.
Note: Your Mileage May Vary
You’ll get very detailed instructions in this hour, with very specific settings for each command or filter. These settings will work with the images shown, but when you create these special effects with your own images, my settings might not always work. Images with different resolutions, sizes, and colors call for different settings. So when you see specifics, feel free to modify them as needed to get even better results with your own artwork.
A glow is a particularly easy special effect to create. If you break it down, it’s basically a drop shadow that isn’t offset at all from the original object, and it’s usually a color other than black. Building your own glow around an object, as opposed to using Photoshop’s Outer Glow layer style, enables you to tweak the glow’s shape so that it fills in any gaps or projects farther outward in key spots.
Create a Custom Glow Around an Object
Let’s create a basic glow around an object. I have an object that’s practically screaming for a glow—it’s the handle from a fabulous Art Deco ashtray I picked up at an antique shop. I’ve already erased the background; now we just need to jazz it up a bit. You can download this from the book’s web page; it’s called brassdog.jpg. After the main book page has loaded, click the Downloads link to get to the files. Or, if you prefer, use an image from your own collection. It’s helpful if the object that will glow is easy to select.
Open an image you want to apply the effect to. Figure 19.1 shows my original photo.
First, you need to select the object that will glow—in this case, the dog. Here, it’s easiest to select the white background with the Magic Wand and then invert the selection (choose Select, Inverse). Don’t forget to make sure that the area inside the curve of the dog’s tail is selected, too, before you invert the selection.
Copy the selected object and press Command-V (Mac) or Ctrl+V (Windows) to paste it onto a new layer. Now you have two layers: one with the complete original image and one that contains just the selected object.
Drag the layer you just created to the New Layer button at the bottom of the Layers panel to duplicate it. Now you have the entire scene as the Background layer and two layers that contain the same cutout object.
Click anywhere in the clear area with the Magic Wand, making sure that the Contiguous box in the Options bar isn’t checked. Choose Select, Invert to select just the dog (or whatever you are using as a glow object). Expand the selection (choose Select, Modify, Expand) by 50 pixels (or whatever’s appropriate for your image). Feather the edges by 20 pixels; this smoothes the selection.
Use the Path menu to make a work path around the selection; then edit the path as needed. Eventually, my dog will be standing on something, so the glow shouldn’t appear beneath his feet. I edited the path so that it’s flush with the bottoms of his paws (see Figure 19.2).
Use the Fill Path command in the Paths panel menu to fill the work path with an appropriate glow color. Then use the Delete Path command to get rid of the path—you don’t need it anymore. Now only the color remains on the layer. Figure 19.3 shows this step.
Make sure that the glow layer is selected and choose Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. This filter will diffuse the glow; I used a setting of around 40 for a very generous glow. (Have I mentioned that subtlety isn’t really my thing?)
Rearrange the layers so that the glow layer is beneath the object layer. Figure 19.4 shows the final product.
Of course, this is Photoshop, so you can accomplish pretty much the same result in several ways. You can skip step 6 and simply fill the feathered selection. Or you can use the Outer Glow layer effect; although it’s not as customizable, you can go back and change the settings later, and it’s certainly quicker and easier to apply.
In this task, you’ve only scratched the surface of glow effects, so I encourage you to try all sorts of settings and colors on your own images. You can experiment with the brightness and size of the glow, and be sure to try other Blur filters, such as Motion Blur or Box Blur, for glows that imply movement or dimension. Have fun!
Photoshop’s Lighting Effects filter offers you a whole range of special effects related to how objects are lit. By illuminating objects with different numbers of lights, in varying types and intensities, you can change the entire feel of an image, drawing the viewer’s attention exactly where you want it.
Enhance an Object with Lighting Effects
The Lighting Effects filter has a huge dialog with a lot of settings. We try out a few of them in this task.
Start with an original image. Perhaps you have an image that’s too flat, or maybe it just needs to be more three-dimensional to look more realistic. Figure 19.5, showing a stuffed toy, is such an image. (If you want to follow along, download the image
monkey.jpgfrom the Sams website.)The first decision to make is whether I want to light the entire scene or just the monkey. Lighting a single object is more dramatic; lighting the whole canvas is more natural. In this case, I’ll put a spotlight on the monkey.
Choose Filter, Render, Lighting Effects to open the Lighting Effects dialog (see Figure 19.6). From the Style pop-up menu near the top, choose Spotlight. You’ll see a preview of your image on the left with the new spotlight effect.
Photoshop ships quite a few default settings, but you can view these as starting points for playing around with the various sliders and values. Don’t be intimidated by the number of choices here; start by changing one setting all the way up and all the way down, to see what it does. Then move on to the next one.
To change the direction and/or shape of the spotlight, click and drag the handles around the oval in the preview area. You can move it around as much as you want, and you can move the center point to reposition the light. Move the light in your preview area so that the image looks something like what you see in Figure 19.7.
Now the unlit parts of the image are a bit too dark. You need to bring up the overall lighting some, so drag the Ambience slider rightward a notch, and change the color of the spotlights to something more interesting than pale yellow.
That looks pretty good, but what if you tried something completely different? Figure 19.8 shows the Triple Spotlights preset. You can make each light a different color by clicking it in preview area and then clicking its color swatch box over on the right and choosing something new in the Color Picker.
If you find yourself bringing various images together in Photoshop to create new scenes, you can’t just throw the images together and come out with a realistic result. As you’ve seen, adding effects such as shadows is essential to create a realistic-looking environment. Creating reflections is another way you can do that.
Add Realistic Reflections to a Surface
Let’s run through an example so that you can add reflections to your repertoire of special effects.
We need to start with an object that we want to put in front of a background. I happen to have just such an object, and a simple background is easy to make. First, use the Gradient tool to lay down a very simple oblong gradient from dark to light; mine goes from blue to white. Then add some noise from the Noise filter so that it has a little texture (I used a setting of 8%). We want this to look like a photographer’s backdrop, so choose Transform, Perspective to drag the bottom out wide. Figure 19.9 shows this stage.
The sides of the backdrop should be vertical at the top, so select the upper area of the backdrop and apply perspective again to straighten the sides. For a final touch, select the gradient area and apply the filter of your choice to give it a realistic surface. I used the Plastic Wrap filter to make the surface look like rippled plastic (see Figure 19.10).
Now it’s time to set an object in front of this background. (You can download the image I’m using from the book’s website. It’s called
cone.jpg.) I think you’ll agree that the effect isn’t particularly realistic (see Figure 19.11). It looks as if the cone and background came from two different sources—which they did, of course, but we’re trying to fool the viewer here.To start creating a reflection of the cone on the background, first duplicate the cone layer. In the Layers panel, move this new layer below the original cone layer, because the reflection should appear underneath the original object.
With the reflection layer active, choose Edit, Transform, Flip Vertical to flip the reflected cone upside down.
Now use the Move tool to slide the cone’s reflection down into position. You might find that you need to use the Distort or Skew Transform commands to move a reflection into its proper position and shape. The adjacent edges of the two cones should meet precisely, with no backdrop visible between them (see Figure 19.12). The second cone looks like a reflection, right? Well, yes, sort of. It looks like a reflection in a perfectly reflective surface such as a mirror, which this backdrop obviously isn’t.
To make the reflection truly realistic, some of the backdrop has to show through, just as it does with drop shadows. You can make this happen by adjusting the Opacity slider for the reflection layer until the reflection blends in better with the surface. That makes it a lot more realistic, and if you’re satisfied with the reflection as it is now, you’re done. I think the reflection still looks too perfect, though.
I think my problem is that the reflection is head-on to the viewer; using the Skew command can fix that problem in short order. I also blurred the reflection a bit. Check it out in Figure 19.13.
Okay, now our composite image is looking pretty good. The cone image is now interacting with the backdrop image, creating a fairly realistic effect. There’s just one more thing bugging me: the vertical portion of the backdrop behind the cone. Shouldn’t the cone cast just a bit of a shadow behind itself? Well, we can certainly make that happen. Apply the Drop Shadow layer style to the original cone layer to add this shadow, being sure to adjust the light angle so that the shadow falls on the vertical backdrop, not on the reflection (see Figure 19.14).
Finally, back to the filters. Choosing Filter, Render, Lens Flare lets you put just a little extra light reflection at the bottom of the cone so that there’s an obvious reason for the shadow. Figure 19.15 wraps it all up in one.
Well, I’m satisfied; the final image looks like all of a piece instead of like a cone floating alongside with some random, unrelated pixels. That’s what special effects such as reflections can accomplish for you.
If you’re in love with sticky notes (and really, how can you not be?), you’re going to love Photoshop’s Note tool; it’s even better than real sticky notes because the notes can never fall off. Switch to the Note tool (it’s behind the Eyedropper in the toolbox), and then click the picture anywhere you want to add a note. You can even insert notes outside borders of the picture. Each note is indicated with a sticky-note icon; clicking the icon with any tool displays that note’s text in the Notes panel (choose Window, Notes if you don’t see it).
Notes are a great feature if you pass pictures back and forth with other members of a workgroup. I also use notes when I first download a bunch of photos from my camera and want to make notes about what to work on when I have time. Figure 19.16 shows a photo that needs a lot of work, with its accompanying notes on what its specific problems are. These will be visible to anyone who views the image in Photoshop.
If a note obscures something you want to see in the image, you can drag the note’s icon to another location. To get rid of a note, either drag its icon completely out of the image window or click it and then click the trash button on the Notes panel.
These days, people are more likely to shoot with digital cameras and print with their own photo printers than take film to the camera shop to get it developed. But one of the services camera shops provide is still quite useful, even when you’re working with digital images: producing contact sheets. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Photoshop can create these for you.
In a traditional darkroom, the first thing you usually do with a roll of film is make a contact sheet so that you can see what you’ve shot before you spend the time to make larger prints. And this practice still comes in handy with digital photography. For one thing, you don’t have to sit in front of your computer to review the photos in a contact sheet, and you can pass the sheet around a room instead of having everyone gather in front of a single monitor.
The first step is to drop the images for the contact sheet into their own folder; if you want, you can even create subfolders inside the main folder. Then choose File, Browse in Bridge to open Bridge.
First, click the Output button at the top of the Bridge window to switch to Output mode. In the left pane, click Folders and choose the folder from which you want to make your contact sheet (see Figure 19.17). Now, in the right pane, click PDF in the Output pane; then choose a template from the pop-up menu. For this purpose, your choices are 4×5 Contact Sheet and 5×8 Contact Sheet. Click the disclosure triangle labeled Document to see the paper size settings. Choose a paper size that your printer can handle. The Low Quality setting is usually good enough to see what’s going on in thumbnail images, and using a lower resolution produces a faster-printing document.
Next, view the Layout settings just below the Document area. If you want to change the number of photos displayed on each page of the contact sheet, enter the number of rows and columns you want on each page. Finally, check the boxes labeled Use Auto-Spacing and Rotate for Best Fit to allow Bridge to make the best use of the available space on each page. When you click Refresh Preview at the top of the Output pane, Bridge goes to work all on its own to create a new contact sheet document. When Photoshop has finished its part of the job, you can scroll down to the very bottom of the Output pane and click Save to create a PDF file of this contact sheet, which you can then print just like any other PDF file. Figure 19.18 shows a typical contact sheet, with the pictures arranged neatly in alphabetical order.
Learning to get more out of Photoshop isn’t really about specific instructions and narrowly defined settings—it’s about experimenting with all the features the program has to offer and taking advantage of your new discoveries. As you use Photoshop’s features (especially its filters) more and more, you’ll develop an endless stream of fun effects and useful techniques. This hour is just a small taste of what’s possible.
Take some time to study reflections. Look at yourself in the door of your microwave. (You might have to polish it first!) Go outside and examine the reflection of trees in water—even in a puddle or a pothole in the street. If you can locate a book of M. C. Escher’s drawings and etchings, look in particular for Three Worlds, Puddle, and Rippled Surface—three well-known nature prints featuring water and reflections. You can also find small images of all three of these works on the National Gallery of Art’s website (nga.gov). Imagine what Escher could have done with a copy of Photoshop! If you feel inspired, try creating an Escher-style image showing reflections.