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

710 Enhancing and masking your disintegration

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

710 Enhancing and masking your disintegration

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, this week we're gonna take a look at part three and four of what I'm calling the marvel disintegration effect, because it was featured so prominently in that raging summer blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War. Now, if you've seen that movie, great, if not, you might want to skip my movie because it amounts to a kind of spoiler. And so what we're gonna do is take our hero whose face we entirely shattered last week, and we're going to enhance and mask the effect in order to create this horrifying composition. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's the final version of the composition, just to remove as much ambiguity as possible. I am gonna be starting off inside this progress file. If you are also going to be working with this progress file, then just be aware that you will encounter an error message in just a few steps. I'll explain what's going on in just a moment. The only way around this error is to have created your own composition as I explained in last week's movies. The good news is, it's not Instagrammable, you'll just have to skip a step. Alright, so I'll go ahead and zoom in past 100%, so that we can see that we have some very jagged edges around our polygonal flakes. And that's a function of the anti-aliasing generated by the Crystallize Filter, which we used to create a couple of displacement maps. To smooth off these edges, go up to the Filter menu, choose Noise, and then choose Medium. Now, you can reduce the radius value to a minimum of one pixel, at which point, we still have a little roughness. If you go up to three pixels, you end up rounding off the polygons, which is why I split the difference at two pixels, at which point, I'll click OK. Alright now, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom back out. Now the next step is to make the ashes kind of rush toward us so that it looks like we're lifting a frame from a motion picture. And we're going to achieve this effect using radial blur. And so, I'll go ahead and switch over to my image so far. And then I'll go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and choose Radial Blur. And this is an old-school feature that doesn't actually include a meaningful preview. And so what you want to do is take this center point right there. So notice that by default, it's located at the center of the square, and we want to move it up like so into this top-left quadrant so that we're centering the effect right about there between the guy's eyes, if you can just barely make them out. I'm also looking for an amount value of five, and I want the blur method to be set to Zoom as opposed to Spin, which is the default setting, so we're looking for Zoom. And a quality setting of Good is just fine. So make sure that you're matching my center point, especially if you're working with my progress file, because you're not gonna be able to change the setting after you click OK. At which point, we end up with these ashes more or less rushing outward. Alright, at this point, I decided I wanted to back off that last filter, and you could do that by going over here to the Layers panel and double-clicking on this top slider icon. Now again, if you're working in my progress file, you're gonna get this error message right here, which is gonna tell you that Photoshop cannot complete your request because the file was not found. Which is one of those alert messages that frankly doesn't make any sense unless you know exactly what's going on. And so here's the problem. Each one of these dynamic displays filters is linked to a displacement map file on disk. And because Photoshop insists on an absolute path to those files, as opposed to a relative one, there's no way I can make this work out for you. And so, it just can't find the files. Now you would think you can double-click on each one of them and relocate the files, but that's not going to work. You would have to grab your smart filters, throw them in the trash, and basically replay the last couple of movies. Or, you could just not do this step, it's not that big a deal. But I'm gonna do it, if only for the sake of demonstration. I'll go ahead and double-click on that slider icon up there at the top of the stack, and I'll reduce the opacity value here inside the Blending Options dialog box to 77%, and I'll click OK. So, pretty minor modifications in so far as things go. Alright, this is a pretty extreme effect at this point, this guy's entire face and body is falling apart. What we want is to see some of this guy's face so that we can share in his realization that he is indeed turning to ash. And we can achieve that using a filter mask. So, notice over here in the Layers Panel that we have this white thumbnail. That represents the filter mask that's being applied to all of these Smart Filters, and so I'm gonna go ahead and click on that thumbnail to make it active. And then, I'll switch to the Gradient Tool, which you could get by pressing the G key. Go ahead and tap the D key to instate the default foreground and background colors, which are white and black, respectively, when working in a layer mask. And then press the X key to swap them. Next, what you want to do is right-click on this tool icon on the far-left side of the Options bar, and choose Reset tool so that you're working with the default settings. At which point, just go ahead and drag like so across the guy's face while pressing the Shift key in order to constrain the angle of your drag to exactly horizontal. And with any luck, you'll be able to see the guy's left eye, his right eye will be hidden. And now what we want to do is apply some manual brushwork. So go ahead and select the Brush Tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. Then right-click anywhere inside the image window and take the hardness value down to 0%. You can work with any size value you want. For example, I might take it up to 200 pixels for now. And then, you want to go up to the Window menu, and choose the Brush Settings command. That's gonna be the Brush Command in older versions of Photoshop, which is gonna bring up these brush settings right here. The one that we're specifically interested in is this guy, Spacing. Let me go ahead and crank it down to 10%, and that way you will get some nice, smooth brush strokes. Alright now, you want to brush with black in order to brush away the filters, as I'm doing right here. And I might go ahead and increase the size of my brush cursor as well by pressing the right bracket key a few times, and now I'll go ahead and brush down so that I can see the guy's mouth. I want to see his right eye as well so that we can truly experience this guy's horror. Alright now, I'll press the X key to swap my foreground and background colors. So my foreground color is now white, at which point I can go ahead and paint in the effect, as we're seeing right here. And we want his entire body to be disintegrating so that his conversion to ash is nearly complete. Alright now I'll go ahead and paint in a little bit of his chin, and I'm gonna paint in some of the hair on the top of his head as well. And then if you like, you can get a little bit closer to the mouth. If you ever go too far, like so, then just go ahead and press the X key to swap the foreground and background colors, so the foreground color is once again black. Because after all, the Brush Tool always paints in the foreground color. And then I'll reduce the size of my cursor a little bit by pressing the left bracket key, and I'll paint back in the eye and the mouth. And I might take this effect a little bit farther away from his nose. Alright now, press Shift-F in order to switch to the Full Screen Mode, and I'll zoom on in as well. And that's how you enhance and mask your Marvel disintegration effect, complete with this guy powerlessly turning into flakes and ashes here inside Photoshop. Alright now, if you're a member of Lynda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a follow-up movie in which we take our effects so far, in which these flakes here are too rutty, they're too alive and pink and so forth. We want to de-saturate and darken them in order to achieve this dull, dead ash. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll show you how and why to use Photoshop's Note Tool, which is an annotation tool that I have recently found to be a godsend. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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