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

696 Enhancing your organic cells in Photoshop

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

696 Enhancing your organic cells in Photoshop

- [Instructor] In this movie, we'll take that random pattern of organic looking cells that we created inside Illustrator and we'll transfer them over to Photoshop, where we can more clearly delineate their edges. Alright, so I'm going to start things off here, inside the layers panel by twirling open the patterns layer so I can see the three rectangles that are piled on top of each other. And, I'm going to target the bottom one right here by clicking on its circular so-called meatball on the far side corner of the layers panel. Now go to the edit menu and choose the copy command, or you can press control C here on the PC or command C on a Mac. Now you want to go over to Photoshop and, depending on how powerful your machine is, you may get something of a delay which is a function of Illustrator trying to transfer the contents of it's clipboard over to Illustrator. But, a moment later you should be able to go up to the file menu and choose the new command. Now, regardless of the appearance of your new document dialogue box, the document should be set to the size of the clipboard, by default. In which case, what I'd like you to do is just switch the unit of measure from pixels or inches or what have you, to points, so that we're seeing how we're going to create a document in my case anyway, that's 1100 points wide by 694 points tall. Then you want to set the resolution value to 72 times 4, which is 288. And that way, your artwork is going to look the same as it does inside Illustrator. And the reason for this is Illustrator likes to think in terms of multiples of 72 pixels per inch where output resolution is concerned. Then, you want to make sure to twirl open your advanced options right here, and set your color profile to sRGB. And that way we're going to see more or less the same colors that we were seeing inside Illustrator. Now having the background set to transparent is just fine, at which point go ahead and click the create button or the okay button, or what have you. Now go up to the edit menu and choose the Paste command, or you can press Control V or Command V on a Mac, and, a moment later, you should see a preview of that first pattern that we created a couple of movies ago. At which point, press the Enter key or the Return key on a Mac, in order to accept that change. Now my case, Photoshop did not ask me if I wanted to paste this artwork as a smart object, it just went ahead and did so automatically, as indicated by this little page icon, in the bottom right corner of this new layers thumbnail. Alright, now, notice currently layer one is transparent, I actually need to fill it with black. Kind of forgot about that step. And so I'll tap the D key, in order to instate my default foreground and background colors, notice the foreground color is black, and so with layer one selected, I'll press Alt Backspace or Option Delete on a Mac, to fill it with black, as indicated by the color of its thumbnail. Alright, now I'm going to convert that layer to a static background by going up to the layer menu choosing new, and then choosing background from layer. And what that allows me to do, is bring out some of the blacks. And I'm going to do that by double clicking on an empty portion of the vector smart object layer in order to bring up the layer style dialogue box then I'll drop down to this first slider which is called this layer, and I'll press the alt key or the option key on a Mac, and drag the right half of that black triangle over to the right. And notice as I do, I drop out the darkest colors in this layer to reveal black in the background. And I'm doing so smoothly, by the way, and that's because I alt or option drag this triangle in two. If I had moved the black triangle all by itself, like so, then I would end up getting a jagged transition, which is obviously not what I want. So I'll go ahead and alt drag the left half all the way over to a value of zero, and then I'll drag the right half, now that the two are separated, over to a value of 70. So notice the value before the slash is zero, the value after the slash is 70, at which point I'll click okay to accept that change. And we already have what is, in my opinion, a better looking effect. Alright, now let's return to Illustrator, and this time I'm going to target the second rectangle in the stack right there, by clicking on its meatball, and I'll press Control C or Command C on a Mac, to copy that layer, now switch over the Photoshop, this time around things should happen more quickly, and that's because this particular layer has less going on. And so to paste it, I'll just press Control V or Command V on a Mac, and this time, Photoshop asks me how I want to paste the layer. I do want to paste it as a smart object, so I'll select that first option, and click okay at which point I'll see a preview of the layer, and to paste it I'm just going to press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac. Now notice that we don't have any interaction, and that's because we need to reapply that lighten blend mode by going to the second option up here in the layers panel, and changing it from normal to lighten, like so, at which point we get this wonderful interaction. Alright, let's go get the third layer by switching back over to Illustrator, targeting that rectangle here inside the layers panel, so we're looking for the topmost of the three, then press Control C, or Command C on a Mac to copy it, then return to Photoshop, and press Control V or Command V on a Mac, to paste it. Now, in my case, I'm getting a little bit of a delay, I guess it's because of the scale values that I assigned to this particular effect but a moment later I see the paste dialogue box, at which point I'll make sure that smart object is selected, and then I'll click okay. And what that does is it just allows you to modify one of these layers in the future, by double clicking on its thumbnail, in which case you will open that layer inside Illustrator. Alright, now press the Enter key, or the Return key on a Mac to paste that new layer, as we're seeing right here, and I'm getting a delay, there's a progress bar, that's good to see, which tells me that the paste is completed, at which point I need to change the blend mode once again from normal to lighten in order to blend all three of the layers. Alright, now I want to sharpen those edges, now I could pile all of these guys into another smart object and then sharpen them all using the unsharp mask filter, but that is going to dramatically increase the size of the image. Notice that it's already huge. Down here in the doc value, in the bottom left corner of the image window, we can see this value after the slash reads 105 megabytes. Now the final version of the image is actually going to weigh in at about 82 megabytes, but you have to consider that the Illustrator file is only 400K, so it's way, way smaller. But I think effects are worth it, as long as we take a prudent approach, that is, and so we are going to once again employ high pass layers, in order to sharpen the image, just as we did last week, and we're going to do that by first merging the contents of all the layers onto a new layer, by pressing Control Shift Alt E, that's going to be Command Shift Option E on a Mac, at which point we end up with a new static layer, so notice this time we're not seeing a little page icon, I'll just go ahead and rename this guy Merged, and then, I'll go up to the filter menu, choose other, and choose high pass, in order to apply the high pass filter, now notice that I've set the radius value to 20 pixels. Now it's not going to look like much, and that's because high pass takes all the non-edges and makes them gray, and leaves color and luminance variations only at those locations where we have edges. In any event, I'll click Okay to accept that change, and then I'll set the blend mode for this layer to the most intense of the contrast modes which is linear light, which is going to produce this effect here. Now notice that we have some very hot reds, and they end up looking like bright highly saturated rings around the various cells. If you want to get rid of those, then go up to the image menu, choose adjustments, and choose Desaturate. And you're going to have to keep an eye on the video here, notice that those reds end up settling down. Alright, now that does add quite a bit of sharpness, so this is the image without the merge layer, and this it how it looks with, but that's still not enough, and so I'm going to up the intensity of the effect, by jumping a duplicate of this layer and you can do that by pressing Control J, or Command J on a Mac, at which point we end up with these clearly delineated edges. And just to give you a sense for the difference, here is that pattern of organic cells that we created inside Illustrator, notice this little area right here, that we have these three intensely red points, but we're not really seeing any edges in between, and so compare that with the sharpened version of the artwork here inside Photoshop, where each and every cell is clearly defined. And that's how you take your random assemblage of highly organic looking cells that you created inside Illustrator and then sharpen the edges using the high pass filter here inside Photoshop.

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