588 Creating trendy Twirl art in Photoshop

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now today I'm going to show you how to create twirl art, that's t-w-i-r-l art inside Photoshop. And while it may sound a little weird, the results can be absolutely mesmerizing. For example, I was able to come up with this as well as this and this guy right here. Now the technique itself is old as the hills. I was first turned onto it by this guy named Mark Collin while I was working on my MacWorld Photoshop 2.5 Bible back in 1993.

I know, I was like nine. But it's suddenly become trendy again and now that we have smart objects, you have a world of flexibility opened to you. You can change your mind as much as you like. Now specifically in this movie, I'm going to show you how to take this photographic image and turn it into this. But of course, you can start with any photograph that you like. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's that final effect so you can see it and all of its onscreen glory. We're going to be starting in this photograph which comes to us from the dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get special deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php.

Alright, I'll go ahead and select that URL later, and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. And because we want to apply our effects dynamically, I'll double-click in the background and I'll name this new layer Candy, and then I'll right click in the image window with my Rectangular Marquee Tool, and I'll choose Convert to Smart Object. Alright, now the first step is to squish all the colors inward so that you can then twirl them around. And the best way to do that is to go to the Filter menu, choose Blur and choose Radial Blur. And then, you want to select the Zoom option here and crank the amount value up to 100% which is the maximum.

Now ideally you could crank it even farther, but instead what you have to do is apply Radial Blur multiple times. Which brings us to the quality setting right here. Draft produces a noisy effect where Best produces a very smooth one. The thing is, Draft is very fast whereas Best is very very slow. And because you're going to be building these effects on top of each other dynamically, things are going to slow down even worse if you apply multiple applications of Best. So what you want to do is start off with Draft and save Best for the last.

And I'll show you what that looks like. So if you're working along with me, just select Draft for now and click Okay. And then return to the Filter menu and choose that very first command which is going to repeat the last filter which of course is Radial Blur. And that's going to bring up those last applied settings, so just go ahead and click Okay. And I don't want you to see what I was talking about. Notice how very noisy that effect is, but that's okay because I want to apply Radial Blur three times in a row. So I'll return to the Filter menu and choose Radial Blur, and this time I'll switch the quality to Best and I'll click Okay.

And notice this time we're getting a progress bar which shows you how things can slow down, but upside is that we end up smoothing away every bit of that noise. Alright now we won't be needing this filter mask so I'll just go ahead and right click on it here inside the Layers panel, and I'll choose Delete Filter Mask, and then I'll press control zero or command zero to zoom out. Now you want to go to the Filter menu, choose Distort and choose Twirl. And notice that positive angle values are going to twirl the image in a clockwise fashion whereas negative angle values go counter-clockwise.

Now you can really knock yourself out with this filter if you want to. But I'm just going to enter 77 degrees because it's easy and it'll give me a relatively modest effect. And then I'll click Okay. Now I want you to see something here. I'll go ahead and switch back to my final image and I'll turn off this top layer. And notice how much contrast is at work in this effect whereas right now we don't have much contrast at all. Well, the best way to create the contrast, and I don't know who figured this out, but the idea is you go to the Filter menu, choose Pixellate and choose Mezzotint.

And now notice that you have several types to choose from here. I'm going to go with Long Strokes. You can experiment with the others if you like. And then I'll click Okay and that's going to produce an entirely wrong effect. Great thing about working with Smart Filters however is that you can change their order just by dragging them around inside the Layers panel. So for example, I can grab this guy and move it to below the final Radial Blur effect and I'm going to achieve a completely different effect as we're seeing here. But notice because I've stacked it in the middle of a few Radial Blurs that I have this kind of scrapey effect at work.

Most noticeable in the center. Now in the end you might find that to be great. But if it's not what you want, then just go ahead and drag the effect all the way to the bottom of the stack and that way it gets applied before any of the radial blurs, and you end up with some very smooth transitions. Alright, now we want to create another twirl effect in the opposite direction as we're seeing in the final composition. And you do that by first jumping a copy of the active layer by pressing control j or command j on the Mac, and then you just want to double click on Twirl in order to revisit the Twirl dialog box, and then you want to angle things in the opposite direction.

And for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to go with exactly the opposite value as before, so instead of 77 degrees, I'll dial in negative 77, and then click Okay. Alright, now you want to experiment with the Blend mode. And so I'll go ahead and click on Normal here, and a great place to start just to get your bearings is Difference which is going to create this kind of psychedelic inversion mode. Now for money, that's a little bit obvious, although you may find luck with it. The other modes that tend to be very useful are Darken, let me show you what that looks like.

I'll go ahead and choose that mode, and I will zoom in here. And you may wonder why in the world I would choose Darken instead of something like Multiply. Well, what I want you to notice is how the striations of color go over each other and under each other. So notice this kind of blue line first goes under this reddish one and then goes over its next door neighbor. If you were to switch from Darken to Multiply, you're going to get a much more uniform effect, but it's most likely going to be less interesting where this particular technique is concerned.

The other one that works nicely is Lighten which is also going to give you that over under effect as we're seeing right here as opposed to Screen which is going to produce a more uniform effect. And then if you want to combine the effects of Darken and Lighten, then you want one of the least used Blend modes in all of Photoshop, Pin Light. And that is going to produce this effect here. So notice that we're seeing these waves of color just pop in and out of view which works out quite nicely. Another one you can experiment with is Luminosity which is going to keep the luminensce of the top layer and mix it with the color of the layer below where you can get the opposite effect by going with color.

But I ended up landing on Lighten for what it's worth, and of course it's up to you which of the many Blend modes you decide to use. Now you want to either modify your Smart filters or turn them on and off in order to customize the effect. And in the end I went ahead and turned off both these bottom Radial Blurs associated with the top candy layer. And you can do that by dragging over those eyeballs, but if you're going to turn off any of the Radial Blurs, make sure that you leave the top one on because the top one is where we applied the Best quality setting which provides us with those smooth results.

So just so we can see the difference here, I'll go ahead and zoom in a little bit. This is the effect before I turned off those Radial Blurs, and this is the effect afterwards. And notice we get a little bit more contrast in the end. I also just through trial and error decided to turn off one of the bottom two Radial Blurs associated with the bottom candy layer, and that ended up giving me a bit more contrast down here in this stark regions as well. Though again this is before and this is after.

So it's a pretty subtle modification, but I liked it. And then finally you can mess around with the Mezzotints. And so I'll go ahead and double click on this guy right there, at which point you may see this warning telling you that when you're editing smart filters, you're not going to be able to preview the other ones. Well that doesn't even apply to this filter because it doesn't have an external preview. So just go ahead and click okay and then try out a different type setting. In my case I'll go with Medium Lines, can't really see how it's going to work until you click okay, but because we're working with smart filters you can change your mind as much as you want.

And so this is before and this is after. Now if we're to take a look at the final effect here, you can see that it shifts a little bit. So this is the effect I had before and this is the effect that I'm seeing now. And what that tells you is that one of these filters is random. Well, twirl employees a very specific angle, Radial Blur tops out at 100%, and so it must be Mezzotint. And as it turns out, it is, which means if you don't quite like an effect, you can double click on either the Mezzotints, then just accept that warning, and then you may be able to just click okay and see a different effect.

Or just go ahead and switch to a different setting and then you can even switch back if you like, and next click okay and you should see the effect after a few moments there, shift on screen. And just to show you the difference here so you know I'm not lying, this is before we reapplied the Mezzotint effect and this is after. Alright and then finally, what if you don't like that black hole in the center there? Well then, just go ahead and select the bottom layer, and then go to the Filter menu, choose Render and choose Lens Flare.

And make sure your hot spot is right there at the center of the image, set the brightness and lens type to whatever you want, and then click okay and you'll get this effect here. But Lens Flare does leave a little bit of residue as we're seeing here in the center of the image, so I'm just going to press control z, command z on the Mac, to undo that effect, and I'll press shift f to switch to the full screen mode. And that friends is how you create old school but newly trendy twirl art using filters that have been around forever here inside Photoshop.

Alright, now if you're a member of Lynda.com, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to take what we've made so far and turn it into a work of symmetrical twirl art. And while that may sound trivial, you have to remember that we're working with smart objects which take just as they give. So of course there's a trick to it. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you how to take a person's face and turn it into a twirl art face. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.