594 Creating an LCD screen effect in Photoshop

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. This week we're going to take that back of the camera screen shot, that we created last week, and we're going to make it look like it was actually captured off of an LCD screen. I don't know if you can make it out here, so let's zoom in a little bit. By the way, am I the only one that thinks a shrimp's eye looks like a deviled egg? Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here I am zoomed in on that synthetic LCD pattern, just so you can make it out in crystal clear detail. Over here, in the actual photograph of an actual LCD screen, on the back of a DSLR, you can see that the LCD pattern is colorful and so at least where this photograph is concerned, where black transitions into white we have a red edge, where white transitions into black we have a blue edge.

The same goes up here, notice that white transitioning into black gives us blue, black into white gives us red. Then we have a variety of other colors that work elsewhere. My guess, however, is that you're not going to want that kind of color artifacting inside of your image which is why we're going to vary the illuminants levels and leave the colors alone. You may recall, from a couple of movies ago, that we enlarged all of our histograms to 300% which is why we're going to create a pattern that measures three pixels wide by three pixels tall.

We're going to start by going up to the file menu and choosing the new command. That would be control, N here on the PC or command, N on the Mac. Depending on which version of Photoshop you're using, your new document dialogue box might look a little different. Here are the important steps. You want to make sure that your color mode is set to RGB, go ahead and change the background contents to white, and then set the width and height values to three pixels, make sure you're working in pixels, a piece, like so. The resolution really doesn't matter.

At which point I'll click the create button or you might click OK, in order to create that new document. Then zoom in as far as you can by pressing control plus, or command plus on the Mac, a bunch of times in a row. Now let's go into a new layer by pressing control, shift, N or command, shift, N on the Mac and I'll call this layer LCD pattern and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now, because our image is so very dinky, just three pixels wide by three pixels tall, go ahead and click and hold on the brush tool and select the pencil tool, which allows us to edit one pixel at a time.

Also click on this down-pointing arrowhead, on the far left side of the options bar, and make sure your size value is set to one pixel. Very important. Now tap the D key in order to instate your default foreground and background colors, so that your foreground color is black and then go ahead and tap the five key to reduce the opacity value, up here in the options bar, to 50% and click and drag down, like so, along the right side of the image and then, in a separate pass, click and drag to the left along the bottom of the image.

Now you want to reduce your opacity value even further by pressing the two key to take it down to 20% and now draw a vertical line down the center of the image and a horizontal line in the middle of the image as well. You'll end up with this very simple effect here. Now let's turn it into a pattern by going up to the edit menu and choosing define pattern. I'll just go ahead and call this guy LCD grayscale, let's say, to differentiate it from any colorful effects I might create in the future and then I'll click OK.

Now I'll switch to that document that I created last week and I'll go up to the layer menu, choose new fill layer, and choose pattern. The advantage of choosing the command is that it brings up the new layer dialogue box, so I can name this layer as I create it, and I am just going to go ahead and call it LCD, nothing more and then I'll click OK. Next, inside the pattern fill layer, I'll go ahead and select the final pattern in the list, the one I just added, and you can leave the scale value set to 100% if you like or, if you want a more pronounced effect, go ahead and increase the scale value to something huge like 400% and then click OK.

Now we want to merge this layer with the various layers behind it using a blend mode. Because we want to use this pattern to both brighten and darken the layers in the background, it's tempting to switch to a contrast mode, such as overlay, which is going to produce this effect here, which is actually pretty darn great. We're seeing a pattern inside the image preview, but we're losing the pattern inside the various histograms. Which is not the way it really works. Notice that we are definitely seeing the pattern, ever so slightly inside the white histogram and more pronounced inside the red and green and blue histograms.

To make that work, I'm going to have to change the blend mode to a darkening mode, such as multiply, which is going to produce this effect right here. If I press control zero, or command zero on the Mac to zoom out, you can see that I've made this image way too dark. This is how it looked before and this is how it looks now. To compensate, I'll add a brightness contrast layer, by going up to the layer menu, choosing new adjustment layer, and choosing brightness contrast. Again, that's going to force the display of the new layer dialogue box.

At which point, I'll just call this layer brighten and click OK. Obviously, make sure the use legacy checkbox is turned off and then press shift enter, or shift return on the Mac to highlight that first value inside the properties panel and then press shift, up arrow in order to increase that value in increments of 10. At a brightness value of 100, everything looks pretty darn good. To show you what I mean, I'll go ahead and hide the properties panel and I'll turn these two layers off. This is the image without the LCD pattern and this is how it looks with the LCD pattern.

Notice that the brightness remains more or less unchanged, but we still manage to see the pattern inside the histograms. To my eye, this is a little bit over the top. The LCD dots wouldn't really appear this big, so I'll just go ahead and double-click on the thumbnail for that LCD pattern layer and I'll take the scale value down to 200% to produce this effect here and then I'll click OK. Finally, notice if I zoom in that I have this soft pattern, which is more or less indicative of the way the pattern really looks, but there's no way such a soft pattern would be able to render such sharp details, so I need to soften things up.

I'm going to do that by turning these new layers off for a moment and then I'll click on the histograms group and I'll press control, shift, alt, E here on the PC or command, shift, option, E on the Mac and what that shortcut does is it merges all the visible layers onto a new layer, called layer one. By the way, that shortcut is the only way to make this work. Now I'll just go ahead and turn those layers back on and the reason I turned them off, by the way, is because otherwise their effects would have been merged into this new layer, whether this layer was in front or in back of the other layers, it doesn't matter at all.

I do want to see the effects of these layers while I apply this next step, which is to go up to the filter menu, choose blur, and choose gaussian blur. Then you can modify this radius value to taste. At a radius of 0.5 pixels, you can see that we are softening the details ever so slightly, so if I turn off the preview checkbox, you can see that formerly things were very sharp indeed, the edges, that is, of this histogram and now if I turn the preview checkbox back on, we've softened things ever so slightly.

I'm going to go ahead and take that radius value up to 1.0 pixel, happens to, I think, look best, where this image is concerned. At which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. Because I applied gaussian blur as a static effect, I want to keep track of what I've done by renaming this layer. I'll go ahead and double-click on its existing name and I'll set the new name to Gblur 1.0px, like so, then I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac to accept that change.

Now I'll press shift, F to switch to the full screen mode and I'll go ahead and zoom out, so that we can take in, more or less, the entire composition. That's how you take your custom screen shot and make it appear as if it's actually being projected from a real LCD screen, here inside Photoshop. Alright, next week we're going to shift away from Photoshop to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Adobe Illustrator, which I have been using since the day it came out.

I was, you know, like two a the time. Deke's techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.