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

888 Creating a Wonder Woman 1984 poster effect

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

888 Creating a Wonder Woman 1984 poster effect

- Hey gang this is Dick McClellan, welcome to Dick's techniques. Today I come to you from the Drake Passage. The notoriously treacherous waterway between the northernmost point of Antarctica and the southernmost point of South America. Only a superhero would attempt this. Which brings me to this week's technique, "Wonder Woman 1984." The media blitz for which includes a series of posters with characters set against what they can only guess are colorful, gleaming ribbed glass Ws. Now I look at this and I think chrome, displace, glass, wave, all contained in the filter menu, for the shop's very own Drake Passage of digital treachery. Now, I could be wrong. This could all go wrong, but here, let me show you exactly how I think it works. All right, here's the final composition, just so you have a chance to see it on screen. And we're going to start things off by creating this zigzag background which I imagine represents the letter W. And we're going to be starting with these two images from the DreamsTime image library, about what you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime dot com slash deke. I'll go ahead and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of that URL. And then I'll turn off the top layer, so we can focus our attention on these colors. And that's what you want, an image that contains this white color and luminance variation is possible. All right, so I'll go ahead and click on that color layer to select it. And I want this effect to be as dynamic as possible. So armed with my Rectangular Marquee tool, which is selected up here at the top of the toolbox, I'll go ahead and right click inside the image window and choose Convert to Smart Object. And that way I can apply a handful of filters as editable smart filters. Stunning by tapping the D key incidentally, to en stay true default foreground and background colors, black and white respectively. And then go to the filter menu and choose Filter Gallery, in order to open this big window right here. Now we'll come back to glass in just a moment. But we're going to start things off by twirling open this guy's sketch, and then you want to click on chrome. And that's going to replace all the colors, with variations on the foreground and background colors, so black to white. All right, now we'll take the detail value up to five, and then I'll tap to the smoothness value and take it all the way up to 10. All right, now click OK, in order to accept that change. Now, I don't really want the image to turn black and white, I just want to give it some more contrast. So I'll double click on that little slider icon on the right side of the layers panel in order to bring up the blend options dialog box, and I'll change the mode to the first of the contrast modes overlay. Which is going to bring back that color. And then I'll go ahead and click OK. All right, now we don't need this filter mask, so I'm going to go ahead and right click on it and choose delete filter mask to get rid of it, and that'll give us more room to work inside the layers panel. Which is presently pretty empty, but it will be quite full before we're done. All right, now I want to add those six eggs. and I'm going to do that using a displacement map that I've created in advance. Now I'll be showing you how to create this displacement map in a future movie, but for now, just go ahead and return to the image you're working on. Go to the filter menu, choose distort and then choose displace. And notice that I've dialed in a few values in advance, I've set the horizontal scale value to zero. So whenever you're working with a displacement map, white is going to move the image details in one direction, and black is going to move them in the opposite direction. Now I want that to happen on a vertical basis so that we're getting that vertical zigzag for the letter W, but I don't want to modify the horizontal elements inside the image. So I've got a horizontal scale of zero and a vertical scale of 100. These options don't really matter, because my displacement map is much bigger than my images, but I've got to set the tile and then I'm telling Photoshop to repeat edge pixels. If you have access to this checkbox, embed file data in Smart Object, definitely go ahead and turn it on. And that way you can edit the image with a lot more flexibility down the road. All right, I'll go ahead and click OK to bring up this dialog box, and I'll go ahead and select that guy height x two dot PSD. I called it that because I scaled it 200% vertically, at which point I'll go ahead and click the open button in order to create the zigzags you see before you know. Alright, now we need to apply just one more filter by returning to the filter menu and choosing Filter Gallery. And at this point, you want to twirl open the distort folder this time around and select glass, that middle guy right there. And notice by default, the texture is set to frosted. That is not what we want. So go ahead and click on this flier menu icon and choose load texture and then find that same displacement map height x two and go ahead and click Open in order to apply it like so. And as long as you leave the scale value set to a hundred percent, you're going to have a dead match. All right now notice that we're seeing these kind of tremors inside each one of the spikes. I want to spread those out a little bit. So I'm going to click inside this distortion value and press the up arrow key and notice as I increase that distortion value, we get more stripes inside each one of those zigzags. And at 10, I think things look pretty great. Then I'm going to go ahead and crank the smoothness value up to its maximum of 15. At which point I'll click OK in order to accept that effect. Now the real wonder woman poster just features two zigzags for the letter W, it doesn't feature this stuff out here on the left or right hand sides. And if you want to match that, then go ahead and press Control A, or Command A on the Mac in order to select the entire image and then press Control Alt J, or Command option J on the Mac in order to jump the selection to a new layer, and I'm going to call it with 148%. Because I happen to know that's what we're looking for, at which point I'll click OK. All right now with that layer selected, I'll go to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, or you can press Control T on the PC or Command T on the Mac. And now notice that my width and height values is up here in the options bar are not linked together. So if they're linked for you, go ahead and turn the chain icon off, and then change the width value to 148% in order to scale the image. So we're just seeing two zigzags like so. And press the Enter key or the return key on the Mac two times in a row in order to accept that change. Now I want to center the W inside the canvas. And so I'll go up to the View menu and choose new guide, and then I'll make sure to select the vertical option and set that position value to 50%. At which point, I'll click OK, And we now have an absolute center guide. All right I want to move this guy over a little bit, and I'm going to do so from the keyboard by zooming in, and then I'll press Control Shift left arrow, just a few times right there. I've got the control key down here on the PC, that would be Command on the Mac, in order to invoke the move tool on the fly. And in pressing the shift key in order to move in 10 pixel increments. And then if I want to move the image just a little bit further over, I'll press Control without the shift key, that's going to be command without the shift key on the Mac, along with the left arrow. All right now just press Control zero or Command zero on the Mac, to center my zoom. Oh, and by the way, if you want to see the contribution of any one of these filters, then you can turn these guys on and off, and you can even change their order if you like. But you'll need to first turn off the static layer above the color layer like so, and now notice if I turn off the chrome filter, which is the first filter in the stack, that we have a little bit less contrast especially where the luminance levels are concerned. And then if I want to turn that filter back on, I press Control Z or Command Z on the Mac. And you can do the same thing with the top filter, the glass filter if you like, which makes a very big contribution as you can see, and then turn it back on, I'd go ahead and once again, press Control Z, or Command Z on the Mac. All right, but I want to scale that guy so that we're seeing that crazy colorful, reflective W created using a displacement map, along with the chrome and glass filters here inside Photoshop. Okay, so you saw me apply a displacement map, both using the displaced command and the glass filter. But even in a perfect storm, displacement maps do not just wash up on deck, you have to reel them in. Which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have an in depth feature link follow up movie in which I show you how to create this big spiky displacement map complete with its evenly spaced rows. Dick's techniques, each and every week. See these corners, I do not cut them.

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