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

711 Turning your flakes into dull, dead ash

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

711 Turning your flakes into dull, dead ash

- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to take our vibrantly colored flakes and we're going to turn them into dull, dead ash. And we'll be doing so with the help of a classic hue saturation adjustment layer. So I'll go ahead and switch over to my image in progress and then I'll go up to the layer menu, choose new adjustment layer, followed by hue saturation, which is gonna let me name the layer as I create it and I'll just go ahead and call this guy ash and click okay. And then I'll go over here to the properties panel and select this guy right here which is known as the targeted adjustment tool and it allows you to modify one range of hues independently of another. We're interested in modifying the flesh tones and so I can either drag inside those flesh tones to the right to make them more saturated or to the left to make them less so and in the end, I took the saturation value, which you can see over there in the properties value down to negative 20. If you want to modify the hue, which I do, I want the hues to be less red and more brown, then you press and hold the control key, or the command key on the Mac, while dragging. And so notice if I drag very far over to the right, I'll make this guy green, if I control or command drag very far over to the left, I'll make him a kind of purplish blue. I want him to be just a little bit orange and so I'm looking for a hue value, once again you can see that hue value changing on the fly over there in the properties panel, I want to take it up ever so slightly to plus 10 so that we end up making our pink flesh tones a little more orange. And then finally, I'm gonna click in this lightness value and I'm going to press shift + down arrow a bunch of times to take it down to negative 70, at which point this guys looks very ashen indeed. I don't really want to affect his entire face, so after hiding the properties panel, I'm going to go ahead and load that filter mask that I assigned in the previous movie by pressing the control key, or the command key on the Mac, and clicking on that filter mask thumbnail here inside the layers panel. And then, with the ash layer still selected, I'll drop down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the panel and I'll just click on it. And that'll copy the filter mask to a new layer mask and this assumes, by the way, that you hue saturation layer didn't come with a layer mask automatically, in which case, if it did, then just go ahead and right click on that layer mask, choose delete layer mask, and then control or command click on the filter mask again and then, with that ash layer still selected, drop down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel, and click on it. And you'll end up with this effect here. Alright, now, finally I wanted to create the effect of this guy's world spinning around him as he's falling to his ultimate demise. And I'm going to achieve that effect using motion blur. So I'll drop down here to the background item at the bottom of the layers panel and double click on it in order to covert it to an independent layer. And I'll just call it blur and click okay. Now as always, I want to apply motion blur as a dynamic smart filter. And so I'll go ahead and confirm that my rectangular marquee is active up here at the top of the tool box. And then I'll right click any old place inside the image window and choose convert to smart object. Next, what you want to do is go up to the filter menu, choose blur followed by motion blur. And I'm going to ahead and leave the angle value set to zero degrees so that the motion of the blur is entirely horizontal. And I took the distance value up to 50 pixels, at which point I'll click okay to accept that effect. Now this time around, we're not using the filter mask and so if you want to tidy things up, just right click on that white thumbnail and choose delete filter mask to get rid of it. And finally, I'll go ahead and 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 turn your happy, colorful flakes into dull, dead ash when perfecting your marvel disintegration effect here inside Photoshop.

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