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

724 Tracing outlines around your hedcut

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

724 Tracing outlines around your hedcut

- [Deke] In this movie, we're gonna take our faux hedcut effect so far, complete with its contoured crosshatching lines, and we're gonna make it look even better by tracing around the outlines of the image and converting the composition to black and white. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on the background down here at the bottom of the stack inside the Layers panel. And this background, by the way, represents the original, albeit grayscale, photograph. And now I'll jump a copy to a new layer by pressing Control + Alt + J or Command + Option + J on a Mac, which will force the display of the New Layer dialog box. I'll go ahead and call this guy edge lines and click OK. And then I'll move this layer to the top of the stack just by dragging it upward like so. All right, now I wanna apply a couple of filters as dynamic Smart Filters. Armed with my Rectangular Marquee, which you can see is selected up here near the top of the toolbox, I'll right-click any old place inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. Next you wanna tap the D key, D for default colors, so that the foreground color is black and the background color is white, as you can see down here at the bottom of the toolbox. Then go up to the Filter menu and choose Filter Gallery. Now, there's no telling which filter will be selected by default, but regardless, go ahead and twirl open the Sketch group right here and select Photocopy. And you'll end up with this kind of reticulated effect here. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out just a little bit so that we can take in more of the image at a time. And these are the values I came up with, detail 20, darkness 30, though of course you can experiment to taste, after which point I'll click OK. Now, that gives us some nice outlines, but we're also tracing the skin detail a little more than I'd like. To smooth things over, go up to the Filter menu, choose Blur, and then choose Gaussian Blur. And I'm gonna start with this guy cranked up to 20, let's say, and then I'll click OK. Now, that ends up giving us a very blurry effect, of course. Problem is that Gaussian Blur should be applied before Photocopy. I need to grab Filter Gallery right there and drag it and drop it on top of Gaussian Blur. And if that doesn't work, as it obviously didn't work in my case, then try grabbing Gaussian Blur and dragging it below Filter Gallery, at which point you should see a very different effect. So notice this is before and this is after. Now, I've gone a little bit too far, which is why it's so great that you can modify your Smart Filters after applying them. I'll just double-click on Gaussian Blur. Photoshop is gonna warn me that I'm not gonna be able to see the Filter Gallery effect as I'm modifying my Gaussian Blur settings. Now, I wish that weren't the case, but there's no option at this point but to click OK. And then notice that the Filter Gallery effect disappears, at which point I'll take the radius value down to four pixels, so just a little bit of blur, by comparison anyway. Then I'll click OK. And now you can see that we end up with a very different effect. So this is before and this is after. All right, now I don't wanna junk up my Layers panel with a bunch of empty filter masks, so I'm gonna right-click on this white thumbnail and choose Delete Filter Mask. And then in order to blend the black lines with the image below, I'll click on the blend mode pop-up menu and change it from Normal to Multiply, and we'll end up with this effect here. All right, now I'm gonna zoom in because I want you to notice that in addition to our blackout lines and our white background, we have a bunch of gray transitional pixels, both inside the crosshatching lines and around the big, thick blackout lines. We want everything to be black and white, and we're gonna take care of the crosshatch and outlines in different steps. I'll click on the V lines layer in order to select it, and then I'll go up to the Layer menu, choose New Adjustment Layer, and choose Threshold, which converts every pixel to either black or white. And because I chose the command, I can name the layer as I create it. I'll just call this guy B&W for black and white and then click OK. And now you've got this one slider here. Any luminance levels to the right of the slider are gonna turn white. Any to the left are gonna turn black. So if you want a bunch of black pixels, then you drag this triangle to the right. If you want a bunch of white pixels, drag it to the left. I'm looking for a threshold value of a hundred, so that way anything brighter than a luminance level of 100 will turn white and anything darker will turn black. Now, that's gonna affect all the layers below that adjustment layer, but not this top layer. I want to approach it independently, because notice if I grab that black and white layer and I drag it to the top of the stack, we end up with some very jagged outlines, which is not what I want. So, I'll press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that change, and instead I'm going to approach this guy using a levels adjustment layer which you can create by returning to the Layer menu, choosing New Adjustment Layer, and choosing Levels. And I'm gonna call this guy firm lines this time around. And because I want to affect this layer and this layer only, I'm gonna turn on this check box, Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask, and then I'll click OK. And now watch these lines right here. I'm going to drag this white slider triangle to the left, and as I do, notice that I'm firming up those lines like crazy. And eventually I'm gonna take this guy down to 50. And that way anything with a luminance level on this particular layer of 50 or higher will turn white. That will leave us with a few transitional pixels, but not many, just enough to avoid jagged transitions. And then I'll go ahead and hide that Properties panel. All right, one more thing. Notice that these horizontal lines here, which are at a slight angle, are taking over a lot of the image. I wanna back things off so that we have this effect right here. So notice that I'm opening up the highlights and the midtones. I'll go and switch back to the image in progress here. What we need to do is drop down to this H lines layer and double-click on an empty portion of it to bring up the Layer Style dialog box. And then notice this guy, Underlying Layer. If I grab this white slider triangle and I drag it over to the left, you can see that I'm confining my horizontal lines to just the shadow details over here on the left side of the cheek, for example, and inside this area below the nose. Now, the vertical lines exist on an independent layer, which is why we're not currently affecting them. All right, so I'm gonna take this guy right here to 70, which is measured as a luminance level, incidentally. So at this point anything with a luminance of 70 or brighter on the underlying layer, which is the original grayscale photograph, those colors are forcing through, subject of course to that black and white layer. Now, I don't want these horizontal lines to end this abruptly, so I'm gonna press the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac and drag the right half of this white slider triangle all the way back to the right so that we have a value of 70 before the slash and 255, which is white, afterwards. And that's gonna give us these nice, relatively smooth transitions, at which point I'll click OK. So just so we can see the difference, this is before and this is after that most recent step. All right, that takes care of it, so 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 just so you can see what we've been able to do here. This is the original version of those organic crosshatching lines that we saw at the outset of the movie, and this is the final faux hedcut effect, thanks to our ability to trace the outlines of an image using the Photocopy filter and convert the entire effect to black and white.

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