277 Painting an eye using a custom brush

Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now some of you may be wondering why I'm wearing this very fuzzy hat, and the reason is you would not believe how cold it is here in Boulder, Colorado. Now, I'm not talking to you, on the Tuesday when this movie comes out. I'm actually talking to you last Friday, just the Friday before the weekend, and we haven't hit our low for the night. That's the crazy thing, but look, check it out. Serious, it is negative two degrees Fahrenheit out. I don't even want to think about how negative it is Celsius.

Just so you know, I gotta wear this thing For protection, don't you know. Anyway, that has nothing to do with today's techniques. Ultimately, I'm going to show you how to use a custom brush to paint an eye. But it's so mjuch more. I'm going to show you how to align two layers in Photoshop, while keeping one layer stationary. You've never seen anyone demonstrate that. I'll show you how to adjust the roundness and angle of a brush. I'll show you how to paint with layer effects. I'll show you how to lock the transparency of a layer so you can paint inside of it, and we will select and scale and rotate a custom brush in order to come up with this eye-catching effect right here.

Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final fish-eye effect, so you can see it on screen. We're going to limit our attention in this movie to the iris, the pupil, and the highlight. So I'll go ahead and switch over to my starter image, which, is just kind of here as a template, so I know where to put things. And I'm going to select the brush tool. Now, I've already got an independent iris layer that I'm going to paint over here. But I need to right click inside the image window to bring up this popup panel. And I'm going to change the size value to 660 pixels, so pretty darn big, and I'm going to change the hardness value to 100%.

Next, I want to lift this little green color that's serving as my placeholder here. So I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, and click on that green to lift it as my foreground color. Now, I need to see the crosshair in the middle of my cursor. And you can get that crosshair by pressing Ctrl+K. That's Cmd+K on the Mac, to bring up the Preferences dialogue box. And then click on Cursors and select Show cross hair in brush tip. Then click OK. And now all you need to do is just nail that.

Or at least that's all I need to do. You need to do it if you're working along with me in this particular sample file. Otherwise, you're just going to have to, you know, sort of approximate things. I'll go ahead and click there, and I create what will be an iris. Now I'm going to right click inside the image window. And I'm going to reduce the size of my cursor for the pupil to 300 pixels. I still want that hardness value to be 100%. And now I'm going to create a new layer by pressing Ctrl+Shift+N, or Cmd+Shift+N on a Mac, and I'll call this layer pupil and I'll press the Enter key, or Return key on a Mac.

And I'll press the D key so my foreground color is black. Now at this point, I don't really even know where to put the pupil, I want it to be exactly centered, but where that is exactly, I don't exactly know. You know what, I'm just going to throw it out in space here. And I'm going to use Photoshop's alignment functions to put it in the right place. So I'll click on pupil, Shift+click on iris, and then switch to the move tool, and then of course you want to use your center alignment options up here in the Options bar. But notice what happens if I click on Align Vertical Centers, Photoshop splits the difference between the two objects, and I don't want that to happen.

I had that target right there telling me exactly where the green iris had to be. So that's messed up everything. What do you do? Well, you press Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on a Mac, of course. You can't lock down the iris. For example, if I click this little lock position icon, and then I Shift+clicked on pupil, then all my alignment options are dimmed, except for auto align layers, which has nothing to do with this project. So what you do instead is unlock the iris by clicking on this icon again, and you loaded selection outline.

So press the Ctrl key or the Cmd key on the Mac, and click on the thumbnail for the iris layer, to load that selection. Then click on pupil. Don't Shift+click on it. We don't want iris to be selected because we don't want it to move. And then notice that my alignment options are still there, and I'll click on align vertical centers. And then I'll click on align horizontal centers in order to put that pupil exactly where it needs to be. So I'll press Ctrl+D, Cmd+D on the mac, in order to deselect the image. And now I want to create the highlight, so I'll press Ctrl+Shift+N, or Cmd+Shift+N on the Mac, to create a new highlight layer.

And then, what I want to do is select my brush tool once again. And I want to create a very specific angled elliptical brush. So I'll go up to the Window menu and choose the Brush command. And I want to see the brush tip shape, not the other option, so I'll just go ahead and click on brush tip shape. And I want the size value this time around to be 160 pixels, and I want the hardness to decline a little bit down to 75%, and then I want an elliptical brush, which of course I could create on the fly, using this little widget there.

But as I say, I have some specific values in mind. I'll change the angle to 45 degrees, then I'll change the roundness to 75%, and I get these settings here. Now I'll hide the Brushes panel. I'll press the X key so that my foreground color, down here at the bottom of the toolbox, is white. And then I'll click right about there to create a highlight. Now let's add some layer effects. First to the pupil, we'll go in and click on it. Click on the FX icon, and choose Outer glow, the second to last item here.

And I don't want a glow, I actually want a shading effect, uniformly around the pupil, so click on that pale yellow, color swatch. I'll just go ahead and zero out all the values. So I'll change the hue, saturation, and brightness values to zero and click OK and that gives me black, of course. I'm going to change the blend mode from screen to multiply so that I can see the effect. I'll take the opacity value up to a 100%, and finally, I'm going to increase that size value to 70 pixels, and the size, by the way, is dependent on the resolution of your image.

It happens to work well for this one here. Now, I'll click Okay in order to accept that effect. Then I'll click on the Iris, click on the FX icon and choose Inner-Glow. And I'll click on a swatch. And we're going for another shading effect, by the way, so I'm going to dial in a dark complementary color. That is to say, I'm going to change the hue value to 330 degrees, which is a kind of magenta and then I'm going to take the saturation down to 25%. It already is, and so I'll take the brightness value down to 25% as well.

Click OK. Change the blend mode this time not to multiply which looks okay at 70 pixel size, by the way, might as well set it there so we can see the difference. But, what I really want is a higher impact effect, so I'm going to go with linear burn which produces that which is too much So I'm going to back off the Opacity to 50%. And click OK. This is where things start to get interesting here. With the iris layer selected, I'm going to press the D key to get my default colors, and I'm going to dial in a new foreground color.

Up here in the Color panel, I'm going to change the hue value to 150 degrees. And I'm going to take the saturation value down to 75%. And I'm going to raise the brightness value to 75%. I guess those were two raises actually. Now I'm going to turn off the pupil and highlight layers for just a minute. So I can better see what I'm doing. But if I were to just set in painting. I would paint all over the place. In other words, I wouldn't paint exclusively in the iris, I would paint out of it too. And in case you're wondering what this awesome shading is all about.

That's from the inner glow effect. If I turn it off, flat brush strokes. If I turn it back on, awesome. Layer effects are dynamic, of course. Anyway, I'm going to bring back my History panel because I've done a lot here, and I'm going to click on Inner Glow in order to back up to where I want to be in life. Now I no longer want this angled elliptical brush. So I'll go up to the brush icon on the far left side of the options bar, I'll right click on it and I'll choose Reset tool. And then, I'll right click inside the image window, and I want a special brush.

We have some specialty brushes by default here. But I want to load another one. So I'll click on a little gear icon and I'll choose DP Brushes. And when I get this alert message, I don't want to lose my original brushes here, so I'll click append, to add these guys. Then I'll scroll down the list and I'll select this one that reads 486. If you hover over it, it actually says DP Flower. So go ahead and select that one. And I want to crank the size up to 700 pixels. And then press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac.

I'm going to zoom in here to 100%. And you can see it's quite the reticulated brush. I didn't tell you the end of that one story there. I don't want to paint all over the place like this, outside of the iris. So I'll go ahead and press Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on a Mac to undo that mess. Instead, I want to lock down the transparency. Which you can do by clicking on this little icon in the upper right corner of the Layers panel. And now notice no matter how I paint, it's all inside the iris. Now, that's also a mess.

I don't want that, so I'll press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z to undo that. More of less center the brush inside this shape and click. That's one mass of flecks for the iris, but I want two. So I'm going to first adjust the color. I'm going to take the saturation down the 50% and I'm going to take the brightness up to 85% and then I'll bring up my brushes panel if I can find it, through my big big brush there. There it is. And I will change the angle value to 45 degrees like so, and then I'll press the Enter key in order to accept that change.

I'll hide the brushes panel, I'll go ahead and center this brush on the other one and click, in order to create, this effect here. Press the M key to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool so I can tell what I'm doing. And I'll turn on the pupil, and highlight layers. And that is my pupil, iris, and highlight effect, that will prove to be so terribly effective in my final fish eye. Wasn't that just the most fun you've ever had? Well, if you are a member of the lynda.com online training library, you are in luck, because I have a total of two count them, two follow up movies in which I show you how to paint straight brush strokes, as well as simulate pressure without a pressure sensitive stylus.

Using path outlines in order to transform our eye into this fish eye. I know, it just gets more clever. If you're waiting for next week's free movie, I'll show you how to take this lackluster photograph,compositionally it's great, but we're going to combine a bunch of exposures, using merge to HDR, along with the ability to develop that exposure inside of Camera Raw with Photoshop CC. In order to create this dramatic photograph right here with so much detail. Deke's Techniques, each and every week.

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