307 Creating a black chop on red paper

This movie, frankly, it's a little bit of a throwaway. I'm just going to show you how to take our red chop against the white background, and we're going to transform it into a black chop against a red background. And we're just doing it because I think it looks cool. I've got no more defense than that. But you will probably learn a thing or two along the way. So, I'll go ahead and switch over, to my image so far, and the first thing I'm going to do is add a paper texture in the background, and I'm going to do so just by grabbing this existing paper texture, and I'll make a duplicate of it by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac.

And then, I'll just go ahead and drag that layer down like so. And because I have the Alt or Option key down, I'm seeing a little double arrow icon, which tells me that I'm going to make a duplicate of that layer. So see, already learned something. Now I'll go ahead and rename this layer just so we can tell the difference between these two. I'll call this new layer big paper, because we're going to make it much larger. I also want to be able to see the layer. And the reason we can't see it, the reason it's invisible, is because it's set to the screen blend mode. And when you screen anything against a white background, you get what? So to make things better, I'll go ahead and return the blend mode, to its default which is normal.

And now, I'll go ahead and zoom out just a little bit here, so that we can take in the entire canvas. I want to make my paper texture bigger, and so I'll go up to the Edit menu, and I'll choose the Free Transform command. Or I could press Control T, or Command T on the Mac. You want your interpolation method here, to be set to bi cubic. That's going to work better than bi cubic automatic which is going to soften the heck out of the texture. It's not what you want. So, just standard bi cubic is the way to go. And then, make sure your reference point is set to the center. Over here in the left hand side of the Options bar.

Go ahead and lock the width and height values into agreement with each other by clicking on the chain icon and I'll change the width value to 150%. Which changes the height value to 150% as well. Then I'll press the Enter key a couple of times, the Return key on the Mac, in order to accept that change. Now zoom back in. Now you can see that we've got this white paper texture against the gray texture. We don't want that, so we need to go ahead and clip the top paper into the vector smart object by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and clicking that horizontal line between those two layers, and now we get more or less the result we're looking for, with the exception of course, of the fact that we've got all of this white.

We want the white to drop out. So go ahead and click on the vector smart object layer, and change its blend mode to multiply, which makes white invisible. Now we want to make the chop black instead of red. And we could do that by double-clicking in a vector smart object, and that would open this graphic inside Illustrator. And then I would change the colors there. Or, we can do it directly inside Photoshop, by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and then you want to drop down to the black and white circle at the bottom of the Layers panel.

And go ahead and choose the Levels command. Because you have the Alt or Option key down, you get the New Layer dialog box. And I'll go ahead and call this new layer blacken, and you want to make sure that Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask is turned on, then click OK. And now, go ahead switch from RGB to red, and notice this spike right there? That indicates the darkest color inside the red channel. We want it to be altogether black so go ahead and drag this black point all the way to the other side of this tall line here.

And that's going to be at a black point value of about 150. If you go too far, notice you start getting these kind of cyan edges, around the text and so forth and we don't want that. They're just tiny, you can barely see them here, but we don't want them to be there at all. We'll go ahead and keep that value as low as possible, which is 150. So, 150 for the black in the red channel. That's it. Now, I'll go ahead and hide my properties panel, and I'll back zoom out. Now the final thing we need to do is colorize the big paper texture in the background.

We need to make it red. And we're going to do so, not using hue saturation layer which is a typical colorization technique, but rather we're going to take advantage of a trick that I first demonstrated in Deek's techniques number 238. Which involves a color overlay effect. So go ahead and click in the Fx icon and choose Color Overlay. The default red is exactly what I'm looking for this time around. And I'll show you what it is, just in case you've got your color set differently. I'll go ahead and click in the red swatch there. And notice that the hue value is 0, and both the saturation and brightness values are 100%.

I'll go ahead and click OK. And now, if I wanted a straight colorization, I would change the blend mode to color, like so, but I'm looking for a darkening effect. So, I'll go ahead and change the blend mode to multiply, instead. And that way I'll get a lot of darkness inside of my texture. Now I'll click okay in order to accept that change. Now that's a little bit too dark, so I'm going to brighten things up using yet another levels adjustment layer, so I'll press the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, click on the black and white circle, at the bottom of the layers panel, choose the Levels command because the Alt or Option key is down, I get the New Layer dialog box.

I'll go ahead and call this layer Brighten. I do not want the check box on this time around. Actually, it doesn't matter. You could have it on or off, in this case. But I'll just go ahead and click OK. And then I'm going to take my white point value down to 140. Which is going to brighten things up considerably. And then, to get some of the texture back, I'll go ahead and take the black point value up to 10. And then I'll take this gamma value in the middle down to 0.9, and I'm doing that by clicking inside it and pressing Shift, down arrow. So 10 for the black point. 0.9 for the gamma and 140 for the white point, and that is it.

That is how you take our original red shop against a white background, and turn it into a black shop against a red background, here inside Photoshop.