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

670 Adding more color to your QR code

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

670 Adding more color to your QR code

- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to take our cutting edge QR code and, yes I'm joking about that. But even though this is pretty retro stuff these things are still in wide use. And we are going to add an extra color. And we're specifically coloring the alignment patterns in a top left, top right, and bottom left corners as well as this little alignment pattern right there. And we're going to add a little bit of text that is not going to hurt the readability of this code. All right so I'll switch over to our image so far and what we want to do is jump a copy of our blue QR code layer, and I'm going to do that by pressing control alt J. Or command option J on the MAC. And because I have the alt or option key down, that forces the display of the new layer dialog box at which point I'll call this new layer alignment let's say. And then I'll click OK. All right now you want to go ahead and turn off the new layer and then select the old one. The QR code right there. And armed with your rectangular marquee tool which you can get by pressing the M key, you want to marquee this area right there so just generally marquee it. And shift marquee this guy. And shift marquee the one in the bottom left corner as well and then shift marquee this item right here. And now just to get a sense of what we should do here. Press the alt key or the option key on the MAC. And click on the layer mask thumbnail here inside the layers panel to view the layer mask independently of the rest of the image. And then tap the D key in order to instate the default colors which means a foreground color of white and a background color of black when you're working inside a mask. Now we want to get rid of these white areas right here and fill em with black. Black is a background color as you can see down here at the bottom of the toolbox. And you can fill a selection with a background color by pressing control backspace here in the PC. That's going to be command delete on the MAC. All right now just go ahead and turn that new layer back on. And you want to get rid of the layer effects by dragging this effects item right here. And dropping it in the trash can. So just go ahead and get rid of the effects associated with the alignment layer and then alt or option click on its layer mask to view it independently of the rest of the image. And then I'll press control minus or command minus on the MAC to zoom out slightly just so that everything's as obvious as possible. And I'll go up to the select menu and choose the inverse command. And that selects everything outside the orientation and alignment patterns. And then you want to once again fill the selection with black by pressing control backspace here on the PC or command delete on the MAC. And then you can press control D or command D on the MAC in order to deselect the image. And then just go ahead and click on the blue thumbnail for the solid color layer in order to switch away from the layer mask. All right I'm going to change the blend mode back to normal so that we can actually see this layer. And then you just need to double-click on this blue thumbnail in order to bring up the color picker dialog box and dial in any old color you like. So if I was to change the hue value to zero then the color of this layer would become red. I'm actually looking for orange so I'm going to change the hue value to 35 degrees. And I'm going to leave both the saturation and brightness values set to 100% at which point I'll click OK. Now might be tempting to assign one or two layer effects to this layer such as a simple drop shadow for example. But in my experience that messes things up. Once you start playing with the orientation and alignment patterns, that makes the QR code a lot less legible. And so it seems to me that it's better to have a legible QR code than a bunch of illegible eye candy. All right but we can add a few things in the negative spaces right here. And notice if I turn on this text group here inside the layers panel. And that goes ahead and adds a little bit of text in a form of deke and com right here with the alignment pattern acting as the dot. And in my testing even with these items, the QR code works out just fine. And so what I suggest you do is go ahead and test your code to make sure it works on your phone and a couple of other phones as well, because once again if a QR code doesn't function then all of this work is for naught. And that is how you take your custom QR code and give it a little bit of extra color here inside Photoshop.

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