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

847 Finishing your “Us” artwork in Photoshop

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

847 Finishing your “Us” artwork in Photoshop

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. All right, now if you're just dropping in on this episode without first watching last week, starting with episode 844, by the way, the next few minutes are going to seem a little insane. (Deke chuckles) But anyway, in honor of Halloween, we drew this in the style of this in an app called Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro equipped with an Apple Pencil. You with me so far? Awesome. And so today, we're going to turn it into this inside the real Photoshop running on a real Macintosh computer. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here I am once again inside Adobe Photoshop Sketch running on an iPad Pro. I'll go ahead and switch out of the full screen mode by tapping on this icon in the top right corner of the screen and how to export this artwork as a native Photoshop PSD file, you tap on this rectangle with an up pointing arrow and then you tap Creative Cloud files as PSD. And a moment later, you'll see that spinning icon in the top right corner of the screen and so a few moments later, you'll see a message that says sent, at which time, you'll know that your file has been uploaded. All right, now I'm gone ahead and switched over to my Macintosh Finder, at which point with any luck, you'll see your Creative Cloud files open on screen. If not, go ahead and bring up the Creative Cloud application, switch to files as we're seeing right here and then click on the open folder button. And that'll go ahead and open up that window, as we can see here. All right now, you want to switch to date modified so that you can see the most recent files and notice this guy right here, which was uploaded today. In my case, it's 6:23 p.m., which was just about a minute ago, and so I'll go ahead and double click on that PSD file in order to open it up inside Photoshop and then I'll press Command + + or Control + + on the PC to zoom in. All right, now let's say that your workshop layers aren't entirely aligned with each other, and so I'm going to press Command + 0, that's Control + 0 on the PC in order to fit my image on screen and then I'll go ahead and select the top red layer right there at the bottom of the layer stack, and I'll switch to my move tool up here at the top of the toolbox, and I'll just go ahead and drag this layer up a little bit like so. And now let's say that I want to align the other layer to it. Then you'd go ahead and Shift + Click on the second red layer right there so that both of the layers are selected and then you can click on this icon up in the options bar, align top edges, and that's going to go ahead and move that right hand pattern upward. All right, now I really don't them to be exactly where they are, so I might drag him down and to the left just a little bit. At which point I'm noticing that there's this kind of blob right here on this layer and it seems to be part of the top right layer right here. I don't want that and just to make sure that's what's going on, I'll Alt or Option + Click on the eye in front of the layer thumbnail so that we're seeing it independently of all of the other layers, and then I'll switch back to my rectangular marquee tool and I'll just go ahead and roughly marquee this area like so and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of it. All right, now just click off in order to deselect the artwork and Alt or Option + Click on the eyeball again to bring back all the layers and now I want you to notice this guy, sketch layer, which is black, as you can see, by the appearance of its thumbnail. It's called sketch layer because I never bothered to rename it inside Adobe Sketch. Now you might think what you can do is just merge it with that background item right there by going up to the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choosing merge down, but it's dimmed. Why in the world is that? Well the reason is, this isn't actually a background as we know it inside Photoshop, it's an independent layer that just happens to be locked. If you want to make it a flat background, then make sure it's selected and then go up to the layer menu, choose new, and choose background from layer. And notice, we're going to see a very slight difference. Notice at this point, we've got a sold lock icon. Well, as soon as I choose this command, we end up with a hollow locked icon. On a PC, you'll also see the word background in italics and that tells you that you actually have a background now. At which point, go ahead and select the sketch layer, click on the fly out menu icon once again in the top right corner of the layers panel and choose merge down. And that goes ahead and merges those two layers together. All right, now I want to add a little darkness around the faces layer, so I'll click on it and I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on this right hand face, the one that belongs to the shadow creature red, and then I'll click on the FX icon at the bottom of the layers panel and I'll choose inner glow. Reason being that I want a uniform effect as opposed to a kind of shadow. So I'll go with inner glow and by default, you're going to see a kind of highlight effect and it'll be even more pronounced if I crank the opacity value up to 100% and then I'm going to tab my way down to the size value and take it up to 100 pixels, which looks interesting, but this is not what I want at all. I want it to be dark, and so I'll click on the color swatch right here and I'll zero out the HSB values. So that we have a hue of zero degrees and saturation and brightness of 0% each, at which point, I'll click okay and that gives us black. The problem is, we can't see black when the blend mode is set to screen, so I'll go ahead and change it to normal and we end up with this effect here. At which point, I'll click okay. All right, now I want to add some shading to the jumpsuit right here, and so I'm going to take the outer glow. You don't want to drag it yet. You want to start by pressing the option key here on the Mac. That's the alt key on the PC and then dragging it and dropping it like so. And notice, because I have the alt or option key down, I'm seeing a double arrow cursor, which tells me that I'm going to duplicate the effect as we're seeing inside the image window. Now that's a little bit too much, so I'll double click on the words inner glow associated with jumpsuit layer and I will change the size value to 50 pixels and I'll click okay. All right, now if I zoom in some more, you can see that we've got some bad edges and if that bugs you, then all you need to do is switch to the eraser tool, then right click any old place inside the image window. Make sure that the hardness value's cranked up to 100%, and I'm going to take the size value up to, let's say, 30 pixels might work, and then I'll just go ahead and erase along this edge like so and that's going to give you a much improved effect. If you're a little more careful than I am, I ended up erasing a little bit too far, but I'm not going to worry about it. I'll just go ahead and erase some more. Now notice down here that we've got some very bad problems, which kind of surprises me, because I thought I was doing a really good job and there, I went in, did you see that? I went in too far, so tell you what, here's another way of working. I'm going to undo that last change and I'm going to click and Shift + Click along this edge, and by virtue of the fact that I continue to Shift + Click here, I am painting, or if you prefer, erasing in straight segments, all right? So I'll click there, Shift + Click here and so forth, and if you just make sure that each Shift + Click point is close to the click point, then you'll be fine. So for example, I'm going to click here, Shift + Click here, Shift + Click again, so now I can just continue to Shift + Click once I set up the initial click point. And that goes ahead and once again, erases in straight lines, so just little tiny straight lines as you go. And then I've got some issues around the face, as well. I'm not going to worry about that. You could, if you like, of course. You could spend the entire rest of your life on this project, if you like, but what I'm going to do is press Command + 0. That's Control + 0 on a PC in order to center my zoom and I'm going to turn on a couple of layers that are hidden inside this composition. There's the signature right there down in the bottom right corner, and there's the us layer, Us being the name of the movie upon which this composition is based. Now I'll go ahead and click on the us layer to select it because let's say I want to take that type right there and I want to make the letters thicker. In that case, I could apply the minimum filter here inside Photoshop, but for the best effect, I want to apply that filter to an editable smart object, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the rectangular marquee tool, then right click any old place inside the image window and choose convert to smart object and that will display a little page icon in the bottom right corner of that thumbnail. Then you want to go up to the filter menu, choose other, and choose this guy right here, minimum, which is actually going to make the letters thicker, especially if you crank up that radius value like so, so I took it up to two pixels and then you want to change preserve to roundness in order to get nice, round edges as we're seeing here and then I'll click okay. And now if you want to see the difference, I'll turn off the smart filters, so this is how the letters looked before and this is how they look after. And the reason this works this way is that minimum is actually collapsing the size of the transparency mask and so it's moving those edges outward. So it's a little bit technical, but it works great. All right, now notice that I have a problem with the head right here. I'll go ahead and zoom in just a little bit more so you can see that I've got a kind of divot. If you get that, then go ahead and switch to the faces layer once again, inside the layers panel and then rather than painting with a brush, click and hold on the blur tool icon, which is the little drop and switch to the smudge tool. And then assuming the default settings, just press the right bracket key a few times in order to increase the size of your brush and then just paint upward like so, and that'll go ahead and smudge that portion of the face up in order to fill in that gap. All right now, I'm going to go ahead and fill the screen with the image by pressing Shift + F and I'll press Command + 0 or Control + 0 on the PC in order to center my zoom. And that is how you clean up the scariest drawing ever made in the style of Spanish surrealist, Joan Miró, here inside Photoshop. All right, so that takes care of that one, and may I be the first one to wish you a very frightening Halloween. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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