Put a face on a coin using Emboss

- [Instructor] In this movie I'm going to use the Emboss filter along with some others to create this mock-up of a head on a coin. Here's where we begin, and the first thing I've done, is just use the Content Aware Fill to mask out the face of George Washington. I'll turn on my new face, and I've already drawn a pen path around this to isolate it from its background. So I'll now come to the Paths panel and activate that path.

Back to my Layers panel, and I'm going to make the path into a vector mask. I'll hold down the command key or control key and click on the Add Mask icon. I'll come to the Edit menu, choose Transform, Flip Horizontal. Next, I want to make it into a smart object. Now if I make into a smart object at this point, that vector mask is going to get included as part of the smart object, which is not a terrible thing, but I'd prefer it not to be, so I'm just going to drag that down onto the layer below, right click, Convert to Smart Object, and then I will drag the vector mask back.

And that just gives me a bit more flexibility for being able to change that vector mask without having to go off to a separate document to edit the smart object. Next, I'm going to scale it - command or control t, to put a transformation rectangle around the layer, and then I'll hold down my shift key and then drag from within to scale that proportionally. I'll press return to commit to that.

The next thing I want to do is make the face black and white. So I'll come to the Image menu, Adjustments, black and white. I'll experiment with these presets, but I'm going to end up using Green Filter. I'm using that one because it removes some of the detail from the face, and I need to simplify things here, but not so much that the High Contrast Red Filter would do, for example. Now, I want to smooth the face out, and I'm going to do that with a Surface Blur, so, from the Filter menu, Blur, Surface Blur, and I'm going to use these values of 10 and 10 for the radius and the threshold, and now it's time for the main event, the Emboss filter, which we'll find in the Stylize group.

I'm going to have the angle at 90 degrees, height of 10 pixels, and an amount of 100 percent. That's making the face too dark, so I'm going to then return to my Adjustments and to Levels, and I'll get my white point and bring that close to the center, and I'll do the same with my black point, but not quite so far with the black point.

To finish this off, I'm going to add some Layer Styles. I'll double-click to the right of the Layer name, and I already created a Style, which is comprised of a Bevel and Emboss an Inner Shadow and an Outer Glow, so I'll come to the Style section, and then click on that style, but we can see that we have the Bevel and Emboss. I'll turn that off so you can see what it's doing. We have the Inner Shadow, and we also have the Outer Glow, and in this case I've made the Outer Glow a darker color and used a darkening blend mode.

So that's how we can create a quick mock-up of a face on a coin, using the Emboss filter in conjunction with some other filters, and in conjunction with some Layer Styles.