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

875 Posterizing colors, in the style of "Hair"

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

875 Posterizing colors, in the style of "Hair"

- Hey gang this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, some of you may remember the American tribal love rock musical known simply as Hair. It introduced the world to such unforgettable songs as Aquarius, Good Morning Starshine, and the Flesh Failures, better known as Let the Sun Shine In. When it opened on Broadway in 1968, Hair featured a psychedelic poster which I've included by way of this vintage program. Notice the high contrast, the false colors, and the rapid transitions from one color to the next, known as posterization. Photoshop loves posterization so much that it provides a nondestructive posturize adjustment layer, which works pretty nicely by itself, but it works even better with a channel mixer layer, and the old school paint bucket. Here, let me show you why the kids are calling it far out. All right so here we have one possible version of the posterized art. Just so you have a chance to see it on screen. Here's our starter photo, which comes to us from the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. Now I'm going to start things off by tuning off the Dreamstime layer right there. And then I'll click on the black and white icon at the bottom of the layer panels. So you'll need the layers panel on screen. And I'll go ahead and choose Posterize. Now, if you want to name this layer as you create it, then on the Mac you want to press the Option key and click and hold on this black and white circle. On the PC you want to press and hold the Alt key and then right-click on that icon, and then choose Posterize. So that's an Option + Left Click on the Mac, and Alt + Right Click on the PC. At which point, you have the option of naming the layer. I'm just going to go ahead and call mine poster. And then click OK. And now notice that by default I am presented with four levels. Four luminance levels that is, meaning that we have black, white, and a couple of shades of gray. However, if you look at the image on screen, clearly we have more than black and white, and two shades of gray. And that's because we've got four levels on a channel by channel basis. So four luminance levels in the red channel times four luminance levels in the green channel, times four in the blue channel gives us a possible total of 64 luminance levels in the full color composite image. I'm going to take that value higher, all the way up to eight, which means that we have eight times eight times eight luminance levels, which is a total of 512 different possible colors in the full color composite image. Now I don't want 512 different luminance levels. If I did go ahead and keep all these color variations, it would take us forever to assign these false colors right here. What I want to do instead is reduce the number of composite colors to just eight luminance levels. And I can do that by switching back to the image in progress, and then dropping down to this black white icon once again at the bottom of the layers panel. If you're working on the Mac you want to Option + Left Click. On the PC you want Alt + Right Click, and this time around, choose Channel Mixer. And I'm going to call this guy channel, and that's it, and then click OK. And what it allows you to do is mix the various color channels together in order to create a composite image. And it's going to be a grayscale composite if you turn on the Monochrome checkbox. At which point we are now left with just eight luminance levels, because we are looking at a composite grayscale view. Now you can dial in whatever mixture of red, green and blue you like, but what I'm going to do is click on the Preset item right here and choose Black and White with Red Filter. Which is going to crank the red value up to 100%. And it's going to take both the green and blue values down to zero percent. So in other words, we're just seeing the red channel, and nothing more, which is going to work just fine. So we now have eight different luminance levels available to us. White down in this region right here. And if you want to track that by the way, you could just go ahead and switch to the eyedropper, which you can get by pressing the I key. And now notice up here in my Color panel which you'll want to have up on screen as well, and you can get to any panel inside Photoshop by going to the Window menu and choosing its command. But notice that I'm looking at the HSB values. And I can get to those by clicking on the fly-out menu icon in the top right corner of the panel, and choosing HSB sliders. At which point I want you to see if I click in this region right here, the H and S values are going to be zero, because we don't have any saturation. We're just looking at gray values. But the brightness is 100%, which is white. Whereas if I click in the eyelashes, like so, then the brightness value drops down to zero percent because they're black. And then, if you click in this light gray region right there you'll see that the brightness value's 85%. So basically, if you take 100% and divide it by seven, so just follow me here. Zero percent is black, and then you've got seven other luminance levels all the way up to white. So 100 divided by seven is right at 14%. It's a little more, so everyone of these brightness value increments is going to be 14% apart. So if I click right here in this dark region, that's 28%, so 14% times two. And then if I click in this very dark gray region we can see that the brightness value is 14%. All right now we want to go ahead and fill all of these regions of gray with false colors. So, your color scheme is totally up to you. I'll just show you what I came up with. But the first thing we need to do is merge these various layers into a new pixel-based layer, and you do that by pressing mash your fist E. That is Control + Shift + Alt + E here on the PC, or Command + Shift + Option + E on the Mac. And notice that creates a new pixel-based layer. I'm just going to go ahead and double-click on its existing name, and rename it eight shades, because that's what we have is eight different shades of gray. All right now, I'll go ahead and click and hold on the gradient tool right here. And then I'll choose the paint bucket tool from the fly-out menu. And what you want to be able to do is replace the colors in total. So, in other words you want to take all the blacks for example and replace them with a different color. And so I'll go ahead and dial in the color I came up with, which has a hue value of 50 degrees, so just on the orange side of yellow. And then I'm going to Tab down to the saturation value, take it up to 100% and take the brightness value up to 100%. And this is the color I want to use to replace the blacks. Which I can get to by, notice my cursor right there. The arrow, the tip of the arrow is the hotspot, so don't pay any attention to that drop of paint coming out of the bucket. That is not a hotspot, that's just part of the cursor. You want to pay attention to the tip of the arrow, so the top left corner of the cursor. At which point click in order to fill the blacks with yellow. Couple of problems here. First of all, we've got a lot of goobers around the yellow edge right here. Which is a function of this anti-alias checkbox. And then, we're not getting all of the blacks. Notice that some of the blacks are unfilled right here. And so I'd have to click on them in order to fill them as well. And that would take me forever, but that's a function of the Contiguous checkbox being turned on. So I'm going to press Control + Z or Command + Z on the Mac as many times as it takes in order to undo that fill. And I'm going to go up here to the options bar and I'll select the tolerance value, which wants to be zero. So you just want to fill the black pixels and nothing more. In other words we don't want some kind of tolerance range, which is measured in luminance levels by the way. And then you want to turn off the anti-alias checkbox so you don't get the goobers. And then you want to turn off the Contiguous checkbox so you fill all of the blacks in one click by clicking like so. And now all of the blacks throughout the image are affected. Now, if you happen to like working this way, and this is a great way of working with a tool that I don't use very often albeit, but still. You can go ahead and create your own preset by clicking this down pointing arrowhead over here on the left side of the options bar. And then clicking on the little plus sign, and I'll just go ahead and call this guy poster tool because it's useful for filling in posterized artwork. At which point I'll click OK, and now I have my own preset. And that way if I ever right-click on this tool icon up here in the options bar and choose Reset Tool, which will reinstate a tolerance value of 32 and turn those two checkboxes on. I can switch back to my saved settings by selecting my poster tool right here. And notice that sets tolerance to zero, and turns the checkboxes off. All right now I'm going to dial in a different color. Up here in the color panel, I'm going to change the hue value to 150 degrees, which is a kind of green. And I'll leave the saturation value set to 100%, and I'll take the brightness value down to 10%. And then I'll zoom in so I can find the next darkest shade right here, which happens to be this guy. It looks fairly black by comparison to the yellow, but it's actually our next darkest shade of gray. And notice that goes ahead and fills those grays with that very dark shade of green. It's a little hard to tell, so let's try a different color here. I'll go ahead and set the hue value to 120 degrees this time and I'll Tab down to the brightness value and set it to 30%. And then I'll go ahead and click in the next darkest shade of gray in order to fill it with this vivid dark green right here. And now I'll go ahead and crank the hue value back up to 150 degrees. It's a little bit tedious at this point, but we just have a few more colors to go. So, I'll go ahead and set the brightness value to 60%, and I'll click right here in order to fill, notice all of those shades of gray, whether they're adjacent to each other or not. And now I'll set the saturation value to 80%. So I'm taking it down a little bit. I'll take the brightness value up to 80% as well. And then I'll click in the next darkest shade of gray right there. All right now I want to switch to a shade of red. So I'll set the hue value to 20 degrees, which is actually pretty orange, but still. And I'll set the saturation value to 50%. And I'll set the brightness value to 100%. And then I'll click in this shade of gray in order to make it that shade of orange. I promised however I was going to go with red, so I'll go ahead and take the hue value down to five degrees this time. I'll set the saturation value to 70%. And I'll take the brightness value down slightly to 90%. And I'll go ahead and zoom out all the way by pressing Control + Zero or Command + Zero on the Mac. And I'll click on this remaining shade of gray, the one that's not quite white. So you want to click here in order to fill those pixels with that shade of red right there. And then finally I'll crank the saturation value up to 100%, and I'll take the brightness value down to 50%. And then I'll click in one of the white pixels in order to fill it with that dark shade of red, like so. And finally I'll go ahead and finish off the artwork by turning on this type group, which contains a modified version of the word Light with an infinity sign for the dot above the I. And that is how you take a continuous tone photographic image, and turn it into a piece of artificially colored poster art, here inside Photoshop. This week I have a followup move in which I show you how to recolor your artwork the same you colored it in the first place using the paint bucket tool. If you're looking forward to next week, I'll revisit the same topic but this time altogether nondestructively with the help of a gradient map adjustment layer. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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