540 Rendering a person in chrome

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques! This week we're going to take a guy and we're going to render him in chrome, and we're going to do so using the new Select and Mask workspace, as well as the ancient Chrome filter inside Photoshop. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's our final chrome boy just so you can see him on screen. I'm going to start off inside this composition, which contains two images from the Fotolia image library, about which you can find out more at Fotolia.com/Deke.

Now the first thing we need to do is separate this guy from his background, and believe it or not, the best way to do that based on experience with this particular image, is to click and hold on the Quick Selection tool and grab the dreaded Magic Wand tool, which isn't so bad as everyone thinks, and it works out great for this image as you're about to see. And now I'll press the Enter key to select the Tolerance value up here in the Options bar and I'll change it to 20, and that's it. You want to make sure both Anti-alias and Contiguous are turned on, and then just start clicking and shift-clicking your way from the top right corner of the image inward, like so, until you select all of the background on the right hand side, then shift-click up here and shift-click here and down here as well in order to select the entire left hand side.

Then, because we actually don't want to select the background, we want to select the guy, go up to the Select menu and choose the Inverse command or press that shortcut of ctrl shift I or cmd shift I on a Mac. All right, now at this point things diverge a little bit depending on which version of the program you're working in. If you're working in the most recent version of Photoshop CC you want to go up to the Select menu and choose the Select and Mask command. If you're using an older version of the software, this command appears as Refine Edge, which is why it has always, and still has, a keyboard shortcut of ctrl alt R here on a PC, or cmd opt R on a Mac.

Now in older versions of the software, you're going to have this nice little dialog box to work in. Inside the most recent version of Photoshop CC, we have this gigantic, fairly cantankerous workspace, but either way, you'll see these global refinements right here, which you can twirl open if necessary, starting with Smooth and ending with Shift Edge. Now to really see what's going on, I'm going to switch my view to On Layers, and that way we will see this image against it's new layer, and I'll go ahead and zoom in so you can see that we have some fairly rotten edges, which is par for the course with the Magic Wand tool, but we can make things better by first cranking up the Feather value, in this case to six pixels, and what that does is it not only blurs the edges of the selection, but it also gives us some wiggle room, and by that I mean, now I can shift the edge inward or outward with a great deal of control.

I'm going to take this Shift Edge value down to negative 15, and then because we don't really want a blurry edge, I'll crank the Contrast value up to its maximum of 100%, and that's going to give us these goopy edges as you're seeing right here, which are going to work great for the chrome effect. Now just to be safe, in case there's any jagged edges, I'm going to take the Smooth value up to 10 and then, whether you're working inside the Select and Mask workspace, or inside the Refine Edge dialog box, you want to set your Output Settings right here from Selection to Layer Mask, and so that should be available either way, at which point click OK in order to create that layer mask as we're seeing right here.

All right, now I'm going to zoom out just a little bit so we can see the entire image. All right, now at this point I want to apply a couple of filters, and I really want to apply them as editable smart filters, which means I need to convert this layer to a Smart Object. But, I don't want to put the Layer Mask inside the Smart Object, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to double-click in the background and call it space, let's say, so that we have a new layer, and then I'll go ahead and drag that Layer Mask onto the space layer, and I'm just putting it there temporarily so that I don't lose my modifications so far, and now I'll click on the model layer, and I'll press the M key to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool, right-click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object.

And now having done that, I can move the Layer Mask back on to that model layer, so in other words this way the Layer Mask is not trapped inside that Smart Object. All right, now to apply our Smart Filters. And so the first thing you want to do is tap the D key, D as in default colors, so we have black and white as our foreground and background colors, and then go to the Filter menu and choose Filter Gallery, and now it's going depend what you see. Very likely you'll see the Artistic Filters twirled open, and one of them will be selected like so.

What we want is the Sketch Filters right down here, and the one we're looking for is Chrome. And notice that almost all of them make the image black and white, and that's because we set the foreground and background colors to black and white. If the foreground and background colors were anything else, then we'd be employing those colors instead. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and click on Chrome, and then you can modify the Detail, Smoothness values as much as you like. The thing about the Smoothness value is it never really results in complete smoothness, no matter what we end up with some jagged edges.

And so I'm just going to leave these values set to their defaults, which is Detail four and Smoothness seven, after which point I'll click OK to accept that change. All right, now I'm going to zoom in on the image and I want you to see the good stuff, which is that his face gets repeated several times inside of his own face, which is fairly hilarious. So the idea is the chrome is reflecting itself, but we also have these very jagged edges, and the best way to take care of those is to return to the Filter menu and choose Noise, and then Reduce Noise.

And these are the values that I found work great for chrome, so your default values look like this, but the values that I'm suggesting are these: a strength of six, and then everything else set to zero, and as a result we get some very smooth transitions. So just to show you the difference, I'll click and hold, which turns off the preview, and then I'll release to turn that preview back on. After which point, I went ahead and saved my settings by clicking on this icon here, and then you need to actually select your new settings and then click OK, unless you want to override your defaults.

Now, the last thing I want to do is increase the contrast, and I'm going to make that happen by going up to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer, and then choosing the Levels command. And now I'm going to go ahead and call this layer contrast, and then I'm going to turn on this check box, Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask, that way I'll be affecting this layer and this layer only. And now notice that we're missing a ton of highlights here. If you alt or opt drag this white slider triangle, you'll get to preview the clipping on the fly, and I'm ultimately looking for a white point value of 224, right there seems to work out best, after which point I'll just go ahead and hide the Properties panel, and then finally I clicked on that model layer once again and I changed it's blend mode to Luminosity, in order to achieve this final effect.

And now I'll press shift F to switch to the full screen mode, and I'll zoom in as well. And that's how you render a guy in chrome using an overly smooth layer mask, along with the chrome and reduce noise filters here inside Photoshop. All right, if you're a member of Lynda.com then I have a follow up movie, in which we take our chrome guy and we set him against this firey blast of a background, created largely using the Clouds filters. If you're waiting for next week, we're going to take our pretty good looking chrome dude and we're going to turn him into Terminator-quality liquid metal.

Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.