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

729 Tracing vectors with a universal glow

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

729 Tracing vectors with a universal glow

- [Instructor] In this movie I'll show you how to trace your vector base shape outlines here inside Photoshop with what I'm calling a universal glow. And to give you a sense for what I'm talking about notice how sharply defined our vector base shape outlines are, so we've got this T-rex with the scales and teeth and claws, we've got this Evergreen in the bottom right corner with its individually defined needles, and then we have this very intricate bicycle with its spokes, pedals, chains and these wires that are connecting the brakes and the gears. And while all these objects look great, they are obviously vector base shapes especially when compared with this blurry photograph in the background. I'm looking for something more like this, where we have these glows that are integrating the shapes and the photograph, so we have a more consistent composition. And notice if I scroll down and to the right that the color of he glow varies, so it appears blue and white against the moon and purple against the sky. And believe it or not, that's something that we can pull off using a standard inner glow effect. Alright so I'll press the F key to switch out of the full screen mode, and I'll go ahead and switch over to that composition that we've created so far, and then over here in the layers panel I'll click on a trees group to select it. Now I want to restate in order to follow along with me you will need Photoshop CC. In which case, go ahead and click on the Fx icon down at the bottom of the layers panel, and choose the inner glow effect. And I've gone ahead and assigned some values in advance here, but notice that the blend mode is set to screen as by default. I'm going to crank the opacity value up to 100% and I've also got a size of 10, the choke value is 0%, the technique is softer and the source is edge, all of which are default settings. Now I'm going to go ahead and move this guy over just so that we can see the trees. And notice at this point that my color is white, which doesn't match the background at all. So you might think to click on this color swatch in order to bring up the color picker dialog box and then move your cursor out into the moon let's say, and click in order to lift that moon color. Which works great when the trees are set against the moon, but when they're set against the sky, that doesn't work at all. Alright so I'll go ahead and click okay. Now you could get elaborate by switching to a gradient instead, but that's going to take a lot of effort and it's not going to look as good either as a much simpler solution, which is to click on that color swatch once again and then drag that circle to the top left corner of the field here so that you have white. So we want absolute white by the way, which if you were dialing in HSB values would be anything for hue, but I'll just go ahead and dial in zero. A saturation of 0% and a brightness of 100%, at which point I'll click okay. So we have these bright white halos. Next what you want to do is switch to blending options in this left hand list. So in other words, two items down right there, and then notice that the blend mode is set to pass through. So in other words, each layer inside the group is permitted to have its own blend mode. Currently they're all set to normal, so what I'm going to do is set everything to multiply instead. That is to say we're going to multiply the entire group against the background. Notice that doesn't make any difference whatsoever. So you might figure when you apply the multiply mode that you would keep the blacks and drop out the whites, that's normally how it works. The problem in our case is that by default Photoshop assigns this blend mode and then it goes ahead and assigns the inner glow effect. So after the multiplying occurs, then the inner glow effect is screened. What we want to do is apply inner glow first, and you do that by turning on this checkbox blend interior effects as group. And so notice as soon as I turn it on, all those glows go away and instead we have a glow that actually matches the background at every point. So it's blue against the moon and then purple against the sky. And now if you want to modify the inner glow effect, you can go for it. So I could increase the size value like so and I could also increase the choke value in order to move that inner glow effect in. Now that's a little bit too much so I might back off both of these effects like so, but you get the idea. A white glow combined with a multiply mode across the entire group, and that check box turned on will go ahead and make that glow cut into in our case, the trees. Alright I don't want to get that carried away however, so I'll set the choke to zero and I'll set the size to 10 so that we have just a little bit of a glow and then I'll click okay. Alright now I want to do something similar with the T-rex and his bicycle. So I'll click on the T-rex layer and shift click on bike in order to select both of those layers, and then I'll click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and I'll choose new group from layers. And that'll bring up the new group dialog box which allows me to name the group as I create it and I'll call this guy our star because he's the star of this particular composition, and then I'll click okay. Alright now what you want to do is duplicate this inner glow effect onto this layer and you can do that by alt or option dragging, inner glow onto this group like so. And now I'll copy the inner glow effect, notice however that it does appear as a standard white glow and that's because even though we copied the effect, we didn't copy the blend options. And so I need to change the blend mode from pass through to multiply like so, that doesn't produce any effect however and that's because the inner glow effect is being applied after the multiply mode. So I need to double click on that group to bring up the layer style dialog box, and then I merely need to turn on that check box. So the real trick is knowing that this thing exists. It is after all, very easy to use. Alright now I'll click on inner glow to select it and it seems to me that because we have such tiny details like the spokes, I need to reduce the opacity value. So I'll go ahead and click on that value and take it down to 50% like so. And then I will click okay to accept that change. Alright and finally, I'll press control zero or command zero on a Mac to fit the image on screen and I'll turn on this hidden group called title which will add these text layers right here. Including this one layer that I have converted to shapes because after all, you probably don't have that font. And now I'll press shift F to switch to the full screen mode and I will zoom on in as well. And that's how you trace your vector base shape layers with a universal glow that matches all the colors found elsewhere inside your composition here inside Photoshop.

Contents