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

673 Shading the panels in a Coffer illusion

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

673 Shading the panels in a Coffer illusion

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week we're going to take that so called coffer illusion that we created in Photoshop last week, complete with its hidden circles, and notice we're zoomed in this time around, so we can only see four circles in all, and we're add some depth and some shading so that our panels actually appear to be recessed as in the case of real architectural coffers, and by that I don't mean (coughing). I mean C-O-F-F-E-R-S. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's the more or less flat looking version of the coffer illusion and here's the shaded version that we'll be creating over the course of this movie, just so you have a chance to compare the effects on screen. All right, I'll switch over to this build file, so called because I'm using it to build the effect, and notice that I have my grid turned off, and that's going to allow me to better see what I'm doing. If you need to turn off your grid then go up to the view menu, choose show, and then choose the grid command to turn it off. So in other words, you don't want to see a check mark for now. All right, now I'll go ahead and escape out, and I'm going to change the labeling of these two circle layers just so that I know exactly what's going on with each, and so I'll call the one at the bottom here L circle for left circle and I'll call the one above it R circle because it's the right circle. Now we want to create copies of both by shift clicking on L circle so that they're both selected and then you can jump copies of the two layers just by pressing control J or command J on the Mac. Now we want to move them to the top of the stack. You can do that just by dragging and dropping them but you may run the risk of dropping the layers into the edges group, which is not what we want. So I'll go ahead and press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change, and so instead go to the layer menu, choose a range, and then choose this first command, bring to front, or you've got the keyboard shortcut that works across Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, which is control shift right bracket. That's command shift right bracket on the Mac, and that'll go ahead and pop those guys to the top of the stack. Now we want to fill the right hand circle with white. So go ahead and select it by clicking on it and then tap the D key to install the default foreground and background colors which are black in the case of the foreground color and white in the case of the background, and then we want to fill this circle with white, which is a background color, while respecting its transparency, and you do that by pressing control shift backspace here in the PC. That's command shift delete on the Mac, and we now have a white circle set against a white background, which is why we only see half of it on screen. All right, now I'm going to click on the left circle layer in order to select it, and armed with my rectangular marquee tool I'm going to select the top portion of my image. Now for this to work, I need to bring back the grid, and so I'll go up to the view menu, choose show, and then choose the grid command to turn it on. Remember that you have a keyboard shortcut of control quote mark here on the PC. That's command quote on the Mac, and then I'll go ahead and drag from let's say the top left corner of the image down to this location right here, so that I'm covering up that top portion of the pink rectangle, but I'm not covering up any of the blue stuff here in the middle, and I'm also not going too far over to the right. Now, we want to subtract away the white circle, and you do that by pressing the control and alt keys here on the PC. That's command and option, and notice with those keys down when I hover my cursor over the thumbnail for the R circle layer right here I see a pointing finger with a little marquee with a minus sign in it and that shows me that when I click I'm going to subtract that circle from the selection. So again, you press the control and alt keys here on the PC. That's command and option on the Mac, and click on the thumbnail for the R circle layer. And now with the L circle layer still selected we want to fill the selection with black. Black is our foreground color, and so you want to press alt backspace here in the PC, or option delete on the Mac. All right, now we want to brighten the bottom rectangles by dragging from right about here, which is going to select the bottom edge of that pink rectangle right there all the way down so that we're connecting with the white circle, but we're not going too far out from the black circle, and now you want to subtract the black circle from the shape, and you do that by once again pressing the control and alt keys. That's command and option on the Mac, and clicking on the thumbnail for the L circle layer and that's going to subtract this portion of the black circle like so. And now you want to click on the R circle layer to select it and we want to fill the selection with white, which is the background color, and you do that by pressing control backspace or command delete on a Mac, and now you can press control D or command D on the Mac in order to deselect the image. All right, once again it's going to be easier to see what's going on if we hide the grid and I'll do that by pressing that keyboard shortcut of control quote mark here in the PC. That's command quote on the Mac. All right, now I'll select the L circle layer and I'll press the five key to reduce its opacity, up here in the top right corner of the layers panel, to 50%, and that leaves things looking pretty drab. I want to bring out some of the bright colors and I'm going to do that by double clicking on an empty portion of this layer, to bring up the layer style dialogue box and I'll go ahead and scoot this guy over a little bit and then notice the underlying layer slider down here at the bottom of the dialogue box. You want to reveal the brightest colors by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac and dragging the left half of this white slider triangle over to a value of 128. Notice this value before the slash right there, and because I pressed the alt key or the option key on the Mac I divided this triangle in half, so that we have a soft transition between the luminance levels of 128, which is medium gray, and 255, which is white, at which point I'll click okay to accept that change, and so here's how things looked before and here's how they look now. So it's a slight difference, but a meaningful one as well, I think. Now I don't want to darken up any of these horizontal lines and so I'll grab that horizontals group right there and drag it all the way to the top of the stack and that will brighten it up. All right, now I'll click on this R circle layer right there, and I'll reduce its opacity to 33% just by tapping the three key twice in a row and so notice now you can see that the opacity value is 33%. This is once again a kind of dead effect. I want to bring back some of the dark colors this time around and I'll do that by double clicking on an empty portion of this layer to bring back the layer style dialogue box and this time instead of alt or option dragging the left half of the white triangle I'm going to press the alt key or the option key on a Mac and drag the right half of the black triangle once again over to a value of 128 this time after the slash, and because I had the alt or option key down I divided the triangle in two as we're seeing right here, at which point I'll click okay and what that does, by the way, is it creates a soft transition between black and medium gray, and to see what that looks like I'll press control Z or command Z on the Mac to undo that change. Notice how very flat it was looking before and notice how nice and rich it is looking now. All right, now I want to add a little bit of bevel and emboss to these horizontal rectangles up here at the top of the stack. And so I'm going to go ahead and twirl open the horizontals group right here and I'll click on the top rectangle, which happens to be named rectangle 22, and then I'll click on the FX icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll choose bevel and emboss. The ampersand is missing here on the PC, but you can see it on the Mac, and here's the settings we're looking for. Style, inner bevel, technique, smooth, most of these are defaults by the way, depth 100%, direction up. I changed the size to five pixels just to match my inner shadow effects. My angle is 135 degrees. My altitude is 30 degrees. Really doesn't matter, and down here notice that the highlight mode is set to white, and the opacity is 100%. The shadow mode is black and it is also set to 100%, at which point we end up with this effect right here. All right, now we need to duplicate this bevel and emboss onto three of the other layers, and so I'm going to press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and drag the words bevel and emboss onto rectangle 21 and then I'll alt or option drag it onto rectangle 20, and I'll alt or option drag it onto rectangle 19. Don't need to change rectangle 18 because it's just black. All right, now I want to collapse all of these layer effects and you can do that by alt clicking or option clicking on this up pointing arrow head right there next to the FX icon over on the far right side of the layers panel, and I will also twirl close the group. Now, notice these dark edges over here on the right hand side and these bright edges on the left hand side. If I were to convert this image to a pattern the way it is then we would have seams in between the bright edges and the dark ones. I don't want that. So with the entire horizontals group selected, once again, here inside the layers panel you want to go up to the edit menu and choose the free transform command or you can just press control T here in the PC, or command T on the Mac, and then just go ahead and drag the left edge all the way over to the left side of the canvas, and drag the right edge all the way over to the right side of the canvas, and then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now we need to express all of this wonderful stuff as a pattern and you can do that by bringing back the grid, which you do by pressing control quote mark. That's command quote mark on the Mac, and incidentally, probably should have mentioned this earlier, but notice that I'm looking at an eight by eight pixel grid. If your grid looks different, then press control K, or command K on the Mac, to bring up the preferences dialogue box, then click on guides, grid, and slices over here in the left hand list. Make sure grid line is set to every eight pixels. You want the lowest number of subdivisions possible which is one and I went ahead and set the color of my grid to yellow. All right, so I'm going to cancel out because I've done all of that in advance, and now once again armed with the rectangular marquee tool, you want to drag from this position right here. Notice we're seeing this black column and I'm at the bottom of it, and I'm going to drag up and to the right, not to include the black column on the other side, but to include just the orange column, and the reason I'm avoiding this black column here is because that would repeat the column, which is not what I want, because I'd end up stretching my hidden circle and turning it into a kind of hidden ellipse. All right, so with this portion of the image selected you want to go up to the edit menu and choose define pattern and I'm just going to call this guy shaded shapes and then I'll click okay. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch over to that version of the pattern that we created last week. Notice that I have an editable pattern layer here inside the layers panel. To update it, I'll just go ahead and double click on its thumbnail and that'll bring up the pattern fill dialogue box. Then I'll click on the thumbnail for the pattern. I'll scroll all the way to the bottom of the list here and I'll select my new pattern, shaded shapes, and that will go ahead and update the pattern like so and then I will click okay. All right, now just to see what we've done I'll switch directly to the full screen mode by pressing shift F and then I'll press control zero or command zero on a Mac to center my zoom, and for the sake of comparison, here is the flat version of that coffer illusion, complete with eight hidden circles at this particular zoom level, and this is the final shaded version of the art work, and if I've done things properly the circles are no more obvious than they were before. But we do have the effect of shaded concentric rectangles that look almost like colorful drawers here inside Photoshop. All right, so coffer illusions, they're all the rage. Now, next week we're going to stick with the topic of optical illusions, although we are moving into Illustrator, where I'm going to show you how to create a classic cafe wall illusion, and believe it or not, every single one of these lines is exactly horizontal and absolutely parallel to the line above and below it, and that goes for this piece of art as well. So even though the lines aren't horizontal they are absolutely parallel on the right hand and left hand side of the art work. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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