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

709 Building up more flakes and ashes

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

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709 Building up more flakes and ashes

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- [Instructor] In this movie we're gonna take our disintegration effect so far, and we're gonna add some more flakes and ashes in order to come up with something that more closely resembles this final effect. And by the way if you're working from this specific progress file then I need you to do me a favor, go over here to the layers panel and double click on the word displace, that'll bring up the displace dialog box complete with its previously assigned settings, that is to say a horizontal scale of 100, a vertical scale of 20, that's just fine. All you need to do at this point is click okay, and now here's the important step, you wanna go ahead and link to the crystals48.psd file that you've downloaded to your particular system. And that's because these files do not transfer properly from one computer to another. At which point just go ahead and click okay and you will be in business. Alright now we need to generate another displacement map by switching over to this file. And so this is my D map, that is displacement map generator so far. And what I'm gonna do is turn off the crystallized layer that's associated with gray base. And now, again if you're working along with me, drop down to the bottom of the toolbox and click on the background color swatch in order to bring up the color picker dialog box. Make sure that both the hue and saturation values are set to zero and then set the brightness value to 50% for medium gray. And the reason we're doing that is because we need that neutral gray for the next filter which is pointillize. And you assign it by going up to the filter menu, choosing pixelate and then choosing pointillize. And notice that I've gone ahead and set my cell size to 16, I'll go ahead and zoom in inside the dialog box. And notice that we have these kind of black and white blobs along with some shades of gray, and then in between the blobs is neutral gray as defined by the background color. At which point go ahead and click okay in order to create this displacement map. And I want you to remember where displacement maps are concerned, black moves pixels in one direction, white moves them in the other direction, both horizontally and vertically by the way, gray produces no movement whatsoever. Alright now we need to save this guy out as a displacement map, and you do that by going up to the file menu, choosing save as, not save, but save as, and then I'm gonna go ahead and save over this file right here points16 after that cell size value that we entered just a moment ago. You wanna make sure that your format is set to the native Photoshop, that is PSD format. However you want the layers checkbox to be turned off, and that's because this is a very old feature actually, displacement maps we're first introduced in Photoshop 2.0 so way back in the early 90s. And so they have some sort of antiquated restrictions, but you do have to have a flat Photoshop file. At which point click the save button, I'm gonna go ahead and save over my existing file. And then I'll switch over to my file in progress, and I'll make sure that the dude layer is selected as it is. And then I'll go up to the filter menu, choose distort and then choose displace. This time around I'm looking for a horizontal scale value of 200 and a vertical scale value of zero. So this is gonna provide us with some exclusively horizontal displacement. These options are fine as is, at which point I'll click okay. And then I'll locate this guy right here, point16.PSD, and I'll click on the open button in order to apply that displacement map. And we end up with a lot more random distribution of those colorful pixels, which are derived from the image itself, very important. So we're not sitting here painting a bunch of colors by hand. Alright now go over to the layers panel once again. Notice this top displace that's the most recent one, so the first one's at the bottom, the second one's at the top. Notice if I turn it off that I've pretty much completely eradicated the flakes underneath, that's not exactly what I wanted. So I want a little bit of a mixture, so I'm gonna double click on the slider icon over here on the right side of the layers panel in order to bring up the blending options dialog box. And I'll just take the opacity value down to 77% which allows those larger polygonal flakes to show through ever so slightly. At which point I'll click okay to accept that change. Alright now we need yet another displacement map and so I'll go ahead and switch over to this guy, I'll turn off pointillize here inside the layers panel. I'll turn on crystallize, and I'll go ahead and double click on the word crystallize in order to initially bring up this alert message. Which it's just gonna tell you that pointillize can't be shown while you're editing crystallize. Of course it's turned off at the moment so it doesn't matter. So you can just go ahead and click okay. And then I'm gonna take the cell size value down to 24, that's gonna give us some smaller polygons. At which point I'll click okay, and now we need to save that guy out as a displacement map. And so I'll go to the file menu, choose save as once again, make sure my file format is native PSD. I also wanna save over this file crystals24.PSD. And notice by the way if you click the save button and then you click yes to replace that file, in my case I'll see this alert message asking me if I wanna maximize the compatibility. That's a very bad thing to see, in a case of displacement maps because it means you're saving a layered file that has smart objects in it, which is even more dangerous. But for all intents and purposes it's just not gonna work is the deal, so you wanna cancel out and then return to the file menu, choose save as once again, go ahead and select that guy to save over it. Make sure the format is native PSD, turn off the layers checkbox, that's the big thing you need to make sure you do. Then click the save button, go ahead and replace that original file, and then I'll switch over to the file in progress once again. I'll go up to the filter menu, choose distort and then choose displace. And this time I'm looking for horizontal and vertical scale values of 50 each. And again, this is just something that I determined worked quite nicely. At which point I'll click okay, and then I'll select that crystals24 file and I'll click the open button. And notice that we have this kind of back and forth diagonal movement that's going on. So the colors are either getting distorted up and to the left, or down and to the right depending on those luminous levels in a displacement map. So black moves things one direction, white moves them the other. Alright so I'll go ahead and switch back to my file, and I just want you to see what's going on here. If I turn off these top two instances of displace you'll see those big flakes that we saw at the outside of the movie, and then if I turn that guy off and turn the second one on, there are those blobs created using the pointillize filter. I'll go ahead and turn that guy off and turn on the top displace, those are the smaller flakes that are sitting on top. And now just to see how things are building up, I'll go ahead and turn that guy off, turn on the bottom instance of displace, that's the first one. Then turn on the second instance which is building up on the first. And so each one of these displacement maps is building up on the one before it. And then I'll go ahead and turn on this top one so that we can see the smaller flakes. And the brilliant thing about this is that it is creating holes in that guy's face, so we're actually moving the flakes and ashes to different positions inside the larger composition, which will ultimately permit us to create this final effect here. And that's how you build up additional flakes and ashes when creating my specific variation of the marvel disintegration effect here inside Photoshop.

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