From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

669 Customizing a QR code in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

669 Customizing a QR code in Photoshop

“

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week I'm going to show you how to create a wicked cool Quick Response Code, or QR Code for short. Now you've seen these things all over the place. For example, if you were to scan this one with your cell phone or what have you, it would take you to the new and improved deke.com. Scan it and see, become a member for free. Now, I considered doing something along these lines three or four years ago, it's just that QR Codes seem so lame, so passe, but they refuse to die. People are using them more these days than they ever were. So I figured, why not gussy things up a bit? This thing right here isn't going to motivate anybody to do anything, where as this thing, that I created in Photoshop, might just do the trick, and it still scans beautifully. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright so the first step is to find a site that's going to generate a QR Code for you. There's all sorts of sites out there, I went with qrstuff.com, just because it gives you a free option. Now I imagine all this stuff is going to change here, but I set my data type to website URL, but you have all sorts of additional options as well. And then I just dialed in deke.com. You can of course go your own way. Now I want you to see how the QR Code previews on the fly, over here on the right side of the screen. So notice if I switch to the static option here, that I get a QR Code that measures 21 pixels tall by 21 pixels wide, and if I switch to dynamic it updates to 25 pixels tall by 25 pixels wide, and if you want to know the difference between the two, you can click on this link right here. And then all you do is click on the download button, and then you download a .PNG file. So it's all very simple. All of that is free, by the way, as things stand now. And then you have all sorts of other fancy options if you decide to subscribe. Alright, I'm going to switch over to Photoshop, where we can see the final version of that QR Code. And by the way, you should be able to hold your phone up to this video and make it work, even though I've obviously made an awful lot of modifications. Here is the QR Code. Again, 25 pixels tall and 25 pixels wide, so it's very dinky. We want it to be much larger, so I'll go up to the image menu and choose the image size command. And then you want to make sure the resample checkbox is turned on. Go ahead and crank the resolution value up to 300, and then make sure width and height are set to percent, that's going to work out best. And go ahead and take either of those values up to 1000 percent like so. Now we don't want to introduce any anti aliasing, so switch to resample method to Nearest Neighbor. Now in my case it's not going to make any difference, because I'm working on an indexed image. That is to say, it contains essentially black and white and nothing else. But if you were working on a full color image, then this interpolation setting would be very important. Because after all, Nearest Neighbor just goes ahead and blows up the pixels, which is what we want. At which point, go ahead and click OK, and now we have a much larger file as you can see right here. Now we want to convert this to a selection outline. By going up to the window menu and choosing the channels command, which will bring up the channels panel, and then you just want to press the control key, or the command key on the Mac, and click on this channel in order to select everything that's white and deselect everything that's black. Now we actually want to select the QR Code, so we want to reverse the selection by going up to the select menu and choosing the inverse command. At which point you can see that all of the black pixels are now selected. Alright now I want you to notice that I've set up this image in advance, and it comes to us from the dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. I'm going to switch back to the layers panel here, and I'm going to click on that dreamstime layer, and press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac, to get rid of it. And so the idea is you just want to go ahead and open some kind of background image. And for the best results, it should be textural as we're seeing here, but you don't want it to be too busy. You don't want to have all kinds of photographic details going on, because that can end up confusing the QR reader that's associated with your phone or other device. Also notice that I've made this image big enough that we have a square area ready and waiting on the inside. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and switch back to that image on hand here, and I'm going to drag the selection outline like so, using, by the way, the rectangular marquee tool, or some other selection tool. So you don't actually want to move the pixels, what we want to do is move the selection outline. Alright, but I don't want to move into this position, so I'll undo that move by pressing CTRL + Z, or command + Z on the Mac, and then I'll drag inside the selection outline and I'll drag onto the tab for this image right here, in order to switch over to it. And then I'll move my cursor back into the image window, and then I'll press and hold the shift key, and I'll drop the selection outline into place. And by virtue of the fact I had the shift key down, that goes ahead and centers the selection outline as we're seeing right here. Alright, now we're going to fill the selection with color by going to the layer menu and choosing New Fill Layer, and then choosing Solid Color. And I'll go ahead and call this guy QR Code, because after all, that's what it's going to be, and I'll click OK, and that brings up the Color Picker dialogue box. Which, for me, is selecting black by default. Now I want you to notice over here in the layers panel that Photoshop has automatically converted the selection outline to a layer mask. Now at this point you can dial in any color you like, I'm going to change the hue value to 210 degrees, and then I'll crank both the saturation and brightness values up to 100 percent, and I'll click OK. And we end up with this effect here. Now let's say that you want to round off the edges as we're seeing in this final version of the image. In that case, go ahead and click on the layer mask thumbnail here inside the layers panel, and then we've got a two part technique. Go up to the filter menu, choose blur, and choose gaussian blur. And for purposes of this image, I came up with a radius value of 12 pixels, and if you're working along with me, even if you have an entirely different QR Code, this is going to be a great radius value, because it matches the resolution of the image. At which point, I'll click OK. Alright now that kind of rounds off the corners, but obviously we need to firm things up, and you do that by going to the image menu, choosing adjustments, and then choosing the levels command. Or you can press CTRL + L here on the PC, or command + L on the Mac. And then you just want to go ahead and click inside this blackpoint value and press shift + up arrow a bunch of times, until you get a value of 120 luminous levels is going to work out great. And so what that's saying is anything with a luminous level of 120 or darker is going to become black. And so in other words, we're clipping a ton of luminous levels, but that's just fine when you're working with a mask. Alright, now we want to take that white point value and subtract 120 from it, which will give us a value of 135. So in other words, we're taking any luminous level that's 135 or brighter, and making it white. So we have just a very few luminous levels in between. At which point you can click OK to accept that change. And if you zoom in, you're going to see that you have some nicely sculpted edges thanks to the fact that we left a few luminous levels between 120 and 135 survive. Alright now press CTRL + 0, or command 0 on the Mac, to zoom out. And I'm going to change the blend mode in the top left corner of the layers panel, from normal to multiply in order to burn in that effect like so. Now at this point, you want to test your QR code. And you do that just by grabbing your smartphone, turning on its camera, and pointing the phone at the screen. That's all you should have to do. And it's either going to work or it's not going to work. It's going to show you that it wants to open the website inside of a browser, or it's just going to sit there. Now in my case, so far, it's not working. And that's because we just don't have a sufficient amount of contrast, especially where these areas are concerned. Notice this big square in the top left corner, the top right corner, and the bottom left corner. These areas are designed for orientation, and then we've got this other guy right here, which is essentially a kind of alignment icon. And if your phone can't make those out, then it's not going to recognize this thing as a QR code. And so let's say it fails for you as well. Well, there's a variety of different things you could do, such as dropping down to the FX icon and choosing stroke in order to create a big stroke around the layer. And this is what I came up with. I set the color to white as we're seeing right here, and then I set the position to outside, very important, if it's set to inside it's going to look like this, which is not what we want. Also, you're probably going to start off with a smaller size value, something like this. But go ahead and switch position to outside, you want the blend mode to be normal, we want an opacity of 100 percent. And then click in that size value, and press shift + up arrow a bunch of times, until every single one of those gaps is filled in, which happens for me at about 90 pixels, and then I just decided to take it up to 100. At which point I'll go ahead and click okay to accept that change. And now, if you hold your phone camera up to the screen, it should end up working. Now I will say that you may have to be a little patient with it, but again, it should work out fine. Now at this point I decided to add a little bit of extra definition by once again clicking on the FX icon, and this time choosing inner shadow. And these are the settings I came up with. Notice that I've set the color to black, the blend mode is multiply, the opacity is 100 percent, both the distance and size values are 30 pixels, the choke is zero percent, and I went ahead and changed the angle value to 135 degrees, just so the shadow's going down and to the right. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change. And that is at least one way to create a custom QR code that anyone can scan to go to your website or whatever here inside Photoshop. If you're a member of Lynda.com/LinkedInLearning I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to take our custom QR code so far, and we're going to add some more color in these alignment blocks right here, along with this text, and it still scans. Which is very important, because after all, it doesn't matter how pretty a QR code looks if it doesn't work. Now if you're looking forward to next week I'm going to show you how to create this so-called "coffer illusion" with its hidden circles. Do you see them? Look closely, there are 16 of them in all. But don't look too closely right now, because that's going to spoil the surprise. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

Contents