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

697 Making dead cells spring to life

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

697 Making dead cells spring to life

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now last week I showed you how to create this organic community of happy cells. This week we're going to kill half the cells and make the other ones spring to life. Now, you might wonder why we'd do such a thing. Well, I didn't know that'd be your reaction. I came up with this and I thought it'd be cool to share with you. But also, it's a great example of how you can take vector-based smart objects in Photoshop and then modify them inside Illustrator. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here is a final version of the artwork. Just so you have a moment to see it onscreen. In part because I think it looks so much better onscreen. I'm going to go ahead and switch to that version of the image we created last week and I want you to notice that I've gone ahead and renamed all the layers so we've got this medium cells layer, bright cells and dark cells. If I were to turn off medium and bright cells like so, so that we're just seeing the dark cells along with those merged high pass layers you can see that those two layers, the merged high pass layers are making a big difference where the detail of the artwork is concerned. So, notice if I turn them off, that we have quite a few cells, but we get even more cells and a lot more depth once we start turning those merged layers back on. That's because they were based on the composite image that included the medium and bright cells layers. Now, if I wanted to increase the detail that much more, I could go ahead and select this merged layer up here at the top of the stack and jump a copy of it just by pressing Ctrl+J or Cmd+J on the Mac and you can see that carves in the edges that much more. Alright, so as you can see here the combination of these four layers working together is what's responsible for the dark cells down here at the bottom of the final composition. And so what I'm going to do is to turn the bright and medium cells layers back on and then I'll click on one and Shift+click on the other, so that they're both selected, and then I'll go up here to the Fly Out menu icon in the top right corner of the Layers panel, click on it and choose New Group from layers. And I'll just go ahead and call this group "Bright," and then click OK. Alright, now we want to add a layer mask by dropping down to the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and clicking on it. And then, you want to select the Gradient Tool, which you can get by pressing the "G" key. Now you also want to go ahead and tap the "D" key to instate the default foreground and background colors, which are white and black respectively, when you're working with a layer mask. Then, go up here to the Gradient icon on the far left side of the Options Bar, right click on it and choose Reset Tool and that way you'll reset the Blend Mode to normal and the Style to Linear. Alright, now I want the image to be half dark and half bright as we're seeing here. So, I want to draw my gradient right here across the middle of the image. To find the middle of the image, I'll go up to the View menu and choose New Guide and then you want to go ahead and select the Horizontal Orientation option there and change the position to 50% and click OK, at which point you'll create a guideline right through the center of the image. Now, I'll be creating my gradient from white to black, so I'm going to start about a pica above my guideline and I'm going to drag down while pressing the Shift key to constrain the angle of my gradient to exactly vertical and then I'll release at which point I end up revealing those dark cells down here at the bottom of the image. Alright, I no longer need the guide, so we'll go to the View Menu and choose Clear Guides to get rid of it. And now, we're going to make a couple of modifications to our bright layers. And so I'll go ahead and twirl open the Brights group right there and I'll double-click on the thumbnail for bright cells in order to open it up here inside Illustrator. Alright, now we're looking at that rectangle that's filled with a repeating tile pattern. I want to make the pattern that much brighter and I'm going to do so by bringing up the Swatches panel, which you can do by going to the Window menu and choosing the Swatches command. Don't choose the command if it has a check mark in front of it, however, because that will hide the panel. Alright, so here inside the Swatches panel you just want to go ahead and double-click on the bright cells swatch in order to open that pattern in the pattern editing mode. Then, go ahead and select this middle row, which you'll see inside of the tile boundary right here. Notice, because I'm selecting it with the black arrow tool, I'm selecting the entire row because these circles are grouped together. And so I'll go ahead and ungroup them by going up to the Object menu and choosing the Ungroup command or you have that keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+Shift+G here on the PC or Cmd+Shift+G on the Mac. Then I'll click off the shapes to deselect them and I'll click this guy inside the tile boundary right here. That's very important. And then I'm going to fill it with this very first gradient, bright red, in order to produce this effect here. And notice now that every other cell appears bright. At which point I will go ahead and save my changes, either by clicking the Done button in the top left region of the screen or you can just press the Escape key and that's going to update that pattern as we're seeing here. Then, you want to go ahead and close the document. Click the Yes button here on the PC. That's going to be the Save button on the Mac, in order to save your changes not here inside Illustrator, but rather inside Photoshop. And notice a moment later we will see a progress bar and the composition will update to reflect my changes. And so this is before and this is after. Alright, we want to do the same thing to the medium cells, so I'll go ahead and double-click on the thumbnail for the medium cells layer here inside the Layers panel. To once again open that document inside Illustrator. Then here on the Swatches panel, I'll double-click on this swatch, medium cells. So notice, we're only seeing those swatches that are used inside this particular document. So I'll go ahead and double-click on medium cells in order to open the pattern in the editing mode and then I'll go ahead and select this middle row once again inside the tile boundary. It's grouped, so I'll go up to the Object Menu and choose the Ungroup command and then I'll click off the group in order to deselect it and I'll select this circle right here, which as you can see is entirely inside the tile boundary. And then, I'll change its fill, which is active here in the Swatches panel to the medium red gradient, which is going to produce this effect here. Notice, once again we're seeing alternating fills inside this row, as well as the row two above and two down below. Alright, so having updated the pattern, we'll go ahead and press the Escape key in order to save my changes to that pattern swatch and then I'll close this document and click the Yes button here on the PC or the Save button on the Mac in order to save my changes. Once again, not to a file on disk, but rather to hand off my changes to the parent program, which in this case is Photoshop. And just so you can see the difference, this is before and this is after. And that's it. I'll go ahead and press Shift+F in order to switch directly to the full screen mode and I'll zoom in as well, just so you can see how far we've come. This is the version of the image we saw at the outset of this movie, and this is the image as it appears now with these dead cells springing to life using a combination of Photoshop working together with Illustrator. Alright now, aren't you kind of sorry you doubted me? Next week I'll show you how to create letters with free-form accordion style extrusions using object blends in Illustrator. And by the way, if you have a moment, please visit us at Deke.com where everything is beautiful and memberships, like butterflies, are free. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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