396 Fragmenting a photo through ribbed glass

- Hey, gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, today we begin a three-week journey in which we create a Madonna MDNA cover inspired piece of artwork. Now, you can Google that if you like MDNA once again. But our final version is gonna look like this nightclub scene right here. This week, we're gonna start things off by taking this beautiful portrait shot and we're going to fragment it through ribbed glass in order to create this intriguing effect.

Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, just so you have a chance to see everything on screen. Here's the original photo from the Fotolia image library, about what you could learn more and get deals at fotolia.com/deke. Here's the ribbed glass effect that we'll be creating in this movie. Then finally, here's the MDNA cover inspired night club art that we'll be exploring in future movies. Now the first thing that we need to do is create a displacement map that looks like this.

As you can see, I've already created it in advance but I'm gonna show you exactly how it works right now. The first step is to go up to the File menu and choose the New command. Then go to the preset pop-up menu and choose the image that you wanna filter, which, in my case, is that first photograph. It's called downward glance.jpg. Then I'll go ahead and lift its dimensions. Right now, I'm seeing the width and height values in inches. I really wanna see them in pixels. That's very important, you need to know the pixel dimensions. In my case, width and height values are each 2,000 pixels.

Now, most likely you want the color mode to be RGB and you want the background contents to be white. I'm working in the Adobe RGB 1998 color space as well. Now I wanna create a whole number of gradient strips. In other words, I don't want any of these strips to be cut off. That means I need to find a factor of 2,000. The easiest way to do that is to just go ahead and switch over to Google, for example, and then look up factors of 2,000.

That's gonna tell you all the numbers that evenly divide into 2,000. Because 2,000 is such a big round number, I get these results right off the bat here. You can see toward the middle what things are dividing by. In other words, you know probably that 40 times 50 equals 2,000. Well, so does 25 times 80 and 20 times 100 and so forth. So we're working our way out. For example, if I want 25 gradient strips, then they each need to be 80 pixels wide.

Now, really as long as you work with any of these values, you're gonna be okay. I'm gonna go ahead and switch back to my image in progress right here. I'll press Control zero or Command zero on the Mac to zoom out slightly. Notice that I've got my rectangular marquee tool selected which is exactly what I want. Now I'll go ahead and drag down the left side of my image like so. I wanna see in the Heads Up display that the height of this rectangular selection is 2,000 pixels. In other words, I'm selecting all the way from the top to the bottom of the image and the width is 80 pixels which is one of those factors that we were taking a look at just a moment ago.

Now I'll go ahead and zoom in until I'm viewing the image at the 100% view size. Now I'll switch to my gradient tool. Now assuming that you're working along with me, go up to this little gradient icon on the far left side of the Options bar, right-click on it and choose Reset Tool. In that way, you and I will get the same result. You might also wanna tap the D key in order to get the default colors black and white down here at the bottom of the toolbox. Then just go ahead and drag from the left side of this selection all the way over to the right side, like so.

I'm pressing the Shift key as I drag in order to constrain the angle of my gradient to exactly horizontal. Now, I wanna create a bunch of duplicates of the selection. So I'll go ahead and press Control zero or Command zero on the Mac to once again zoom all the way out. Now, this next step, you need to perform using a keyboard shortcut because there is no corresponding command. The shortcutting question is Control Alt T or Command Option T on the Mac. That allows you to duplicate this selection on the fly.

So what I'd like you to do is go up to the Options bar here and turn on this Delta icon, this little triangle right there. That should ensure that both the X and Y values read zero pixels. Then go ahead and select that X value and change it to 80 pixels which is the width of the selection. Press the Enter key a couple of times in a row in order to duplicate that gradient, like so. Now we need to continue to duplicate it and you do that by pressing Control Shift Alt T here on a PC or Command Shift Option T on the Mac.

You wanna do that as many times as needed in order to exactly fill up the width of the image, like so. Then you can click anywhere inside the image. Then you can press Control D or Command D on the Mac in order to deselect your artwork. All right, now, for the best results, go up to the Image menu, choose Mode and then choose Grayscale to abandon the RGB channels so that you have a single gray channel and nothing more. If you get an alert message, just go ahead and click Discard.

Then, finally, make sure that you're working with a flat image. Here, inside the layers panel, you should see this background item and nothing more. In which case, go up to the File menu and choose the Save command. Then go ahead and name the image anything you want. I called mine 80-pixel strips.psd. Then make sure your file format is set to Native Photoshop, that is .PSD, which is very important. Now, in my case, I've already saved the file in advance so I'll go ahead and cancel out. Now, I'll switch over to my original photograph.

Now, I want to apply my displacement map as a Dynamic Smart Filter which means I need to convert this image to a smart object by double-clicking on the background. Then I'll just go ahead and call this new layer model. Click okay and now, I'll switch back to my rectangular marquee tool. I'll right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to smart object. Now you want to apply your displacement map by going up to the Filter menu, choosing Distort and then choosing Displace. That will bring up this Displace dialog box.

Now, by default, both the horizontal and vertical scale values are set to 10. For this effect, you want the vertical scale value set to zero. Then I'm gonna take the horizontal scale value up to 50. Now this is gonna depend largely on the resolution of your photograph. So if your image, for example, measures 4,000 pixels wide, twice as wide as mine does, then you'd wanna crank that horizontal scale value up to 50 times two, which would be a hundred. Make sure that the Displacement Map option is set to Stretch to Fit and that Undefined Areas are set to Repeat Edge Pixels.

Then click okay and find that displacement map that you created just a moment ago. In my case, it's called 80-pixel strips.psd. Again, it has to be a .PSD file and then click Open. You will end up with this effect here. Now this file is gonna get pretty dense over time and I don't need this Filter Mask, here inside the Layers panel, so I'll go ahead and right-click on that white thumbnail and choose Delete Filter Mass to get rid of it. Now go ahead and zoom in to the edges, either the right edge or the left edge of the image and you'll see some very stretched pixels, both over here on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side, as well.

I'll just go ahead and scroll over there so you can see what I'm talking about. To get rid of those, you need to scale the image. What I'm gonna do is press Control zero or Command zero on the Mac to once again zoom out. Then I'll go up to the Edit menu and choose the Free Transform Command. Most likely Photoshop will alert you that it's gonna have to turn off the Displace effect as long as you're scaling the image. But just go ahead and click Okay to move on. Then we wanna scale the image horizontally. You really don't have to change its size vertically but you do need to make it wider.

I'm gonna do that by changing this width value up here in the Options bar to 105%, like so. I'm gonna leave the height value set to 100%. Then I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac a couple of times in order to apply that change. Now, notice if I zoom in here on the left-hand side of the image, that I no longer see those stretched pixels because they're hidden outside of the canvas. All right, now I'll go ahead and press the F key a couple of times here in the PC in order to fill the screen with my image.

I'll zoom in as well. That's how you create and use a displacement map in order to refract an image through sculpted or ribbed glass here inside Photoshop. Now if you're a member of the lynda.com online training library, and seriously, if you're not, you ought to be. You can get a free trial that gives you access to every single movie in the library at lynda.com/deke. Why, then I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to take our effect so far and we're gonna angle the glass and add some additional distortion by applying a displacement map using the Glass Filter.

You can see that this is an extraordinary effect indeed. If you're waiting for next week's movie, I'm gonna show you how to infuse the artwork with some brilliant nightclub colors to achieve this effect right here. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.