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

889 Creating the Wonder Woman displacement map

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

889 Creating the Wonder Woman displacement map

- [Narrator] All right, now I'm going to show you how I created this displacement map which allowed us to take those colors from the Dreamstime image library and turn them into this kind of shimmering W. All right, so the first step is to create an image that's more or less the same size as this one and to see how big this image is, you can go to the Image Menu and choose the Image Size command. And notice that it measures 2,940 pixels wide by 1,960 pixels tall. All right, so I'll go head and cancel out and then I'll press Ctrl+N or Command+N on the Mac, to bring up the new dialog box, make sure my units are set to pixels and then I'll change the Width value to 2,940. Now the problem with 1,960, I believe was the number, is that it's not divisible by 12, and so notice if I try to do the math there, then I get a rounded value of 163, that's actually not quite right. It's got a few decimals as well. So what I'm going to do instead is take this guy up to 164 and then multiply it times 12, by entering 164*12 like so, and then when I press the Tab key, Photoshop does the math for me and delivers a value of 1,968. So I just need to remember that value I used there, 164, and that's because that's going to allow me to create a bunch of horizontal lines as we're about to see. And I want a resolution of 300 for what's it's worth. Now because we're creating a displacement map, we're generally best off working inside the Grayscale mode because otherwise we run the risk of displacing each and every color channel differently. All right, now just go ahead and click the Create button in order to create this new image and I'm going to give it a solid fill layer of black by going up to the Layer Menu, choosing New Fill layer and then choosing Solid Color. I'll go ahead and call this layer black and click Okay and with any luck, it'll be that way by default, but if not, you can just drag this little circle down to the bottom left corner of the color field and then click Okay. All right, now I want to create a bunch of guidelines that describe 12 rows throughout this image. And you can do that by going to the View Menu and choosing New Guide Layout and then inside this dialog box, go ahead and turn off columns, we don't want any of them, turn on rows, set the number of rows to 12 and then just go ahead and delete the Gutter value. So, don't want any Gutters, just 12 rows as we're seeing in the background. All right, I'm going to zoom out just a little bit here and I'm going to draw a total of 12 white lines. Not using the Line Tool because after all, it just creates rectangles in Photoshop so we might as well use the Rectangle Tool instead. And so I'm going to tap this little switch icon right here in order to switch the foreground and background colors or you can press the X key, then I'll just go ahead and click somewhere inside the image window and I know that my image measures 2,940 wide, so I'll just go ahead and enter that value and I'll set the height to 164. Remember I multiplied 164 times 12 to get the height of this image. And because I really want a bunch of black and white lines, that is white lines that are evenly spaced from each other, I'm going to divide 164 by two. So 164/2 and then press the Tab key and you can see we've got 82 pixels, if your version of Photoshop doesn't do math, you can just enter that value, and then click Okay and we have this big rectangle. All right, I'm going to switch to the black arrow tool, the one that Photoshop calls the Path Selection Tool, but you can get it by pressing A for arrow. And then I'll go ahead and drag this guy until it snaps into alignment right at this location here. So up at the top of the image window. And now I'm going to create a bunch of copies of it. Now I can move this shape just by dragging it but I want more control over the experience because I want to be able to duplicate this rectangle over and over again. So I need to take advantage of a keyboard shortcut, there is no command for this operation and so you just have to press Ctrl+Alt+T, that's going to be Command+Option+T on the Mac, and what that does is it takes you into the Free Transform Mode, hence Ctrl or Command+T, the Alt or Option key allows you to duplicate as we're seeing here. And then I'll drag this guy down so it snaps into alignment with that next horizontal guide and I'll press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac to accept that change. Now all I have to do to take advantage of power duplication inside of Photoshop is press mash your fist T, that is to say Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T here in the PC, or Command+Shift+Option+T on the Mac. And just keep pressing that keyboard shortcut, there is no command once again, over and over, until you create really, a total of, I believe, 13 rectangles is what we have here. And I'll just go ahead and rename this layer H lines because that's what we have and then I'll just go ahead and partially marquis all of my rectangles with my black arrow tool. And I want to move them half their width up by going up to the Edit Menu, and this time I'll just choose Free Transform Path, or you had that shortcut of Ctrl+T here on the PC or Command+T on the Mac. All right, I'm going to go up here to the Options bar and turn on the Triangle which represents Delta, meaning that we're going to apply a relative movement and then I'll go ahead and select the Y value, enter negative, because I want to move the lines upward, 82 because that's how thick each one of these rectangles is, divided by 2, and then if I press the Tab key, you can see I'm going to move everything 41 pixels upward, at which point I'll press the Enter key, or the Return key on the Mac, a couple of times to apply that change. All right, now I want to make these lines zigzag using a filter and I want to do so non-destructively, so I'll Shift, click on the black layer right there in order to add it to the selection and then I'll press the M key to switch back to my Rectangular Marquis Tool and I'll right-click anywhere inside the image, anywhere inside the canvas that is, and I'll choose Convert to Smart Object. Now at this point, we no longer need those guidelines, so I'll go up to the View Menu and choose Clear Guides, they still exist by the way, inside the Smart Object, just don't need to see them outside the object. And now, I'm going to wave these guys by going up to the Filter Menu, choosing Distort, and then choosing Wave. Now normally you get some crazy effect like this, what we want is big, huge spikes and I want regular spikes as well. And so the first thing I'm going to do is set Type to Triangle, so that we're getting triangular spikes, and we want them to be much taller so I'm going to go ahead and take this first Amplitude slider right here and drag it all the way over to the right so that we're increasing both the min and max values. And then I'll go ahead and do the same for the Wave Length, we after all, need more room between our spikes, so I'll grab that first slider and drag it all the way over to the right as well. So that we're ending up with the biggest spikes possible with the most room between them. Now the reason we're seeing a bunch of tiny little lines is because we have too many generators and so I'm going to take the Generators value down to just one, and notice now, if I click on Randomize, it doesn't do anything because I'm not giving the filter any room to work. There's not room for random results. Now, I do want to go ahead and create some additional spikes down below here so I'll set Undefined Areas to Wrap Around and then I'll click Okay. Now, I've got a pretty obvious problem here and that problem is that one of the lines, one of these guys right here, that goes up at this location and then comes into this region, so it's really just one of the rectangles, is too thick. And the reason for that is that Photoshop went ahead and thoughtfully increased the size of my canvas when it created the Smart Object. And so what I'm going to do is double-click on this Smart Object thumbnail, in order to show you what I'm talking about, notice that we shouldn't be seeing this top half of this first rectangle or the bottom half of the last one. And so if I go up to the Image Menu and choose the Canvas Size command, you can see that the height has increased. It should be whatever that value was, 164 times 12, which is 1,968, that's what we're looking for, and the Anchor should be set to the center, and by the way, notice that the relative check box is turned off, at which point, if I click Okay, Photoshop's going to bring up this old inaccurate message that tells me that some clipping will occur. That would be true if I had a flat background, which I don't. So I'll just go ahead and click Proceed and we get the results we're looking for. And so I'll just go up to the File Menu and choose Save in order to update that Smart Object. And now, if I switch back to the image in progress, you can see that all of my lines are exactly the same thickness. Now I don't want my lines to be this sharply defined because if they are we'll get some jagged results, which is why I'm going to blur things a little bit by going up to the Filter Menu, choosing Blur, and choosing Motion Blur. And I've gone ahead and set the Angle value to 90 degrees, I've got a distance of 100 pixels, at which point I'll click Okay. And notice that we've got a problem along the top of the image as well as along the bottom and that's because my Smart Object is the same size as my canvas and as a result, Motion Blur is running out of room. What we need to do is make the Smart Object larger by double-clicking on its thumbnail, it's still open right here, so that's a nice thing. Now, if I were to go up to the Image Menu and choose Reveal All, then I would reveal all of the white rectangles, which is the same problem we had in the first place so that's going to ensure one of our rectangles is thicker than the others. So what I need to do is add an additional area of black up here at the top by going up to the Image Menu and choosing Canvas Size once again. And I'm going to click in the Height value and enter +82, is I believe the value, half of 164, and then I'll press the Tab key, in order to have Photoshop do the math and figure out that the value we're looking for is 2,132 pixels, at which point, I'll select the bottom Anchor point right there and I'll click Okay in order to add that black space above the canvas. And if you can't really see it, then you could just right-click inside the pasteboard, that very dark gray area, and choose Medium Gray instead, and now you can see we have a black line at the top. At which point, this time I'm just going to go ahead and close the image, and I'll click Yes in order to save it, that would be the Save button on the Mac, and when I say Save, we're just really updating the Smart Object. All right, now, thanks to that Motion Blur filter, we just have a bunch of shades of gray. I need more contrast, so I'll go up to the Layer Menu, choose New Adjustment Layer and then choose Levels. And I'll go ahead and call this guy contrast and click Okay. And now notice our little histogram right here, we're missing a bunch of shadows and highlights, and so what I decided to do was take this first value up to 60 and then I'll Tab over to that last value and set it to 200, like so. And that way we restore our blacks and whites. All right, now I'll just go ahead and hide the properties panel. All right, now at this point, you definitely want to save your file by going up to the File Menu and choosing either Save or Save As. The file hasn't been saved yet so either one should work. I want to save to my computer and then I've gone ahead and called this guy Spiky lines right here, .psd and so if I click the Save button, I can just go ahead and replace it like so and I'll turn off Maximize Compatibility 'cause it's not going to do me any good, just going to increase the file size. Now, thing is, I cannot use this as a displacement map and that's because it contains layers. So now what I have to do is go to the Image Menu and choose the Duplicate command, at least this is the safest way to work, and call it Height x2, because I'll ultimately scale it to 200%. I also want to flatten this file so I'll turn on this check box Duplicate Merged Layers Only and click Okay and now we have a flat background. All right, now I'm going to scale the image to 200% vertically and the reason for that is I want some very spiky Ws indeed. And so, go ahead and switch back to the file so far and then I go up to the Image Menu and choose the Image Size command. You want the Resample check box to be turned on and you're Interpolation Method should be set to Bicubic Smooth Gradient, that's going to give you the smoothest results, but you want to unlock your width and height values, otherwise you're going to scale the image proportionally. Notice that I've set the unit to Percent and so I'll go ahead and set, not the width value, I'll Tab beyond that, the height value is what I'm looking for, set it to 200% and click Okay. And we end up with this stretched image right here. All right, now you want to save it, and because the file's never been saved before, you can just choose the Save command. I want to save to my computer and then I would go ahead and save over this file right, Height x2.psd. It's very important, even though we don't have any layers, that you save to the native PSD format. I've already done that in advanced however so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. And now if I were to switch back to that colors file right there, and I'm just going to go ahead and click on the color layer and I'll apply my displacement map as a purely static effect by going to the Filter Menu, choosing Distort and then choosing Displace. I'm looking for a Horizontal Scale of zero, a Vertical Scale of 100 and I'll go ahead and tile the displacement map in case it's not big enough, even though it's way bigger than it needs to be. And now I'll click Okay and then I'll find that file, Height x2.psd and I'll click open and that goes ahead and applies the displacement map as we're seeing here. All right, so it's a long process but that is how you create a displacement map that you can use with the Displace command or you can also use it by bringing up the Filter Gallery, twirling open the Distort Folder, selecting Glass and then clicking on that fly-out menu icon and choosing Load Texture, then go ahead and find that file, Height x2.psd and click the Open button and you're going to apply a Glass Distortion within the confines of that same displacement map. And I'm going to set the Distortion value to 10 and crank up the Smoothness value to 15, at which point I would click Okay in order to apply that filter. And so what we have is a professional quality displacement map that allows us to create this shimmering ribbed-glass effect in the shape of a capital W.

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