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

716 Riffing on a contour map in Photoshop

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

716 Riffing on a contour map in Photoshop

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. This week, we're going to riff off last week's contour mapping effects inside Photoshop as witnessed here in order to create this inverted double contour map. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, here's that final double line effect, just so you have a chance to see it on screen. We're gonna start off inside that file from last week that combines contour mapping along with the gradient map adjustment layer. Now, I'm not going to need this top level's adjustment. So, I'll just select it and press the backspace key or the delete key on a Mac to get rid of it. Now, I'm going to invert the background image by clicking on it here inside the Layers panel. And then, I'll go up to the Layer menu, choose New Adjustment Layer, and choose Invert in order to force a display of the New Layer dialogue box. I just don't like the fact it's capitalized and it has a one. So I'm just gonna enter invert lowercase and click OK. That does bring up the Properties panel which helpfully tells us that there are no options for Invert. So, I'll just go ahead and close that panel because we don't need it. And then, I'll click on the H lines layer, and I'll change it's blend mode from Spot Light at this point to Multiply. In order to multiply in those black lines and drop out the white lines in between. Alright, and I'm gonna go ahead rename this layer slightly from H lines to H lines red because this particular displacement is based on the red channel. And then, I'm gonna create a copy of this layer and rename it in one operation by pressing ctrl + alt + j or cmd + opt + j on the Mac. Control or command j jumps the layer having pressed the alt or option key forces the display of the New Layer dialogue box. At which point, I'll go ahead and call this H lines blue because I happen to know I'm going to eventually displace these lines using the blue channel. So, I'll go ahead and click OK. I'll turn off that original H lines red layer, and I'll double-click on the Displace item for the H lines blue layer in order to select a different layer mask. Now, at this point, you may see an alert message telling you that you're only gonna see the result of the Displace effect, you're not gonna see Invert. But, that actually doesn't have any application to what we're doing. So, I'll just go ahead and click OK. And, I'm gonna leave the Vertical Scale value set to 77. Notice that Horizontal Scale, which actually doesn't matter in this case because we're working with horizontal lines. But I've gone ahead and set it to zero. Displacement Map is set to Stretch To Fit. Turns out it doesn't matter because this smart object is set to the very same size as the larger composition. But you do want Undefined Areas set to Wrap Around, otherwise, you're gonna have some blankness where the lines are concerned down here at the bottom of the image. Alright, I'll click OK and then, notice that we have a red version of this displacement map. We also have a green and a blue version, so I'll go ahead and select the green version and click Open just so you can see that we get a different effect. So this is red and this is green. We still get contouring, it's just a different kind of contouring. Now, I'll double-click on Displace, click OK once again, click OK again inside the Displace dialogue box. And I'll change this guy to blue, and I know it's blue because it's telling me Gaussian Blur 20. So I blurred every single one of these displacement maps. And I changed the levels to 128 to 255 just so that we're starting with a medium gray. And the 3B tells me it's the it's the blue channel. So 1R is red channel, 2G is green channel, 3B is the blue channel. This is all stuff that we reviewed last week. And then I'll go ahead and click on the Open button, and we get yet a different effect. And notice if we go ahead and combine those blue lines with the original red lines, we get this very interesting effect here. So we're merging two sets of contours along with each other. You can even go more nuts and bring in the green lines as well, but to my mind, that looks a little bit overly busy. Believe it or not that I actually think that about something. Alright, so I'm gonna double-click on Displace once again just so I can take that Vertical Scale value down to 50 and end up looking a little better, then I'll click OK, and I will once again select the blue channel. You do have to keep these files handy by the way if you intend to edit this image in the future. So, in other words, because we're working with the smart object, these displacement maps are actually linked to this larger composition. At which point, I'll click the Open button in order to apply that change, and we come up with this effect here. Alright, now press shif + f in order to switch to the full screen mode. And I'll zoom on in as well, and in just a few minutes, we've been able to transform that effect from last week into this fairly thrilling variation here. And that's how you riff off an existing contour map by adjusting a few blend settings and heaping on another layer of old school displacement here inside Photoshop. Alright now, if you're a member of Lynda.com/LinkedIn learning, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to smooth out any jagged edges associated with your contour lines. And so, if you take a look at this magnify detail right here, and if we were to zoom in as well, you can see that we have some very rough edges along with some colorful anti-aliasing. What we're looking for is this more desirable effect in which the lines are perfectly smooth, and we don't have any of that color artifacting. If you're looking forward to next week, I'm gonna show you how to employ contour mapping for cash. Deke's techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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