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

723 Creating a faux hedcut in Photoshop

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

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723 Creating a faux hedcut in Photoshop

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now if you've ever read the Wall Street Journal or just looked att the pictures, then you know that it features these things called head cuts. Which are drawings of head shots. And by of example, I've got Quest Love. Now every once in a while we get questions from our members asking how you draw these things. And that's the answer by the way, you draw them. And the artist responsible for this particular head cut is Noli Novak and if you look very carefully at this picture, you'll notice she's not using Photo Shop. See that thing right there, that's not Photo Shop. We however today will be using Photo Shop. And so I'm gonna show you how to take this head shot and turn it into a faux head cut. That is to say it's not a head cut, but it looks awfully darn close. And it doesn't require the use of this. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright here's the final faux head cut effect just so you have a chance to see it on screen. And here's the variation on that effect that we'll be creating in this specific movie. Alright I'm gonna start off inside this photograph which comes to us from the Dreamstime Image Library. About which you can learn more and get some great deals at Dreamstime.com/deke.php. Alright, I'm gonna get rid of that URL layer by pressing the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac. And as you can see in the end, we are gonna create a black and white effect which means that we don't need all this color and so you're gonna save a lot on your file size. If you go up to the image menu, choose mode, and choose gray scale. Now as always, Photo Shop is gonna recommend that you use the black and white adjustment in order to blend your own custom black and white image. In our case however that's not necessary so just go ahead and click discard. Alright now, in order to achieve all these winding contour lines, we need to create a displacement map. So I'll go ahead and switch over to this image and I'll go up to image menu and choose duplicate command. And that way we won't mess up the original and for now I'll just call this dmap because it is gonna be a displacement map, aka dmap. And so I'll go ahead and click okay. Alright, now we need to soften the transitions so that we have some nice fluid lines as we're seeing right here. And the best way to do that is to go up to the filter menu, choose blur and then choose Gaussian blur. And while you can experiment with this value, a radius of 20 pixels works really nicely regardless of the resolution of your image. And so I'll go ahead and accept that change. Now the thing about displacement maps is they bend imagery depending on their luminous levels. So if you're bending something vertically, then black distorts downward and white distorts upward. I want everything to go up and so I'm gonna raise the minimum luminous level to gray by going up to the image menu, choosing adjustments and then choosing levels or you can just press a keyboard shortcut of control L or command L on the Mac. And then just take this first output levels value in the bottom left corner of the dialog box up to 128 which is medium gray, and then click okay. And so now the darkest color is medium gray, the lightest color is white and so forth. Alright now we need to save this image as a flat PSD file. And you do that by going to the file menu and in our case you can just choose the save command or press control S or command S on the Mac. And that's because this file has never been saved. And make sure to change your file format to PSD, that is the native Photo Shop format. And I'm gonna save over this file right here, dmapeyes.PSD. I'll just go ahead and click the save button followed by yes in order to replace that file that I created in advance. Alright now we need to create a couple of very basic line patterns and so go up to the file menu and choose the new command and regardless of the appearance of this dialog box, you want your unit of of measure to be set to pixels and then just change the width and height values, both of them to 20 pixels like so. We want the color mode to be gray scale, not lab. And the resolution value doesn't matter. The background content should be white. At which point I'll click the create button and I have this tiny little image right here. Alright, I don't wanna be zoomed in quite that close, this will be fine, now I'll go ahead and select the rectangular marquee tool. Which you can get by pressing the M key. And draw a marquee until that heads up display reads a width of 20 pixels, so the entire width of this tiny image and a height of 10 pixels, so half of the height of the image. Make sure your foreground color is set to black. If it isn't just go ahead and tap the D key, D for default colors and then press alt backspace here on the PC, that's gonna be option delete on the Mac in order to fill that selection with black. Alright then click off the selection to deselect it. Go up to the edit menu and choose define pattern. And I'm gonna go ahead and name this pattern hlines for horizontal lines even for the fact that the black and white areas are the same size. And then I'll click okay. Alright now we wanna create a vertical line pattern based on this one and so I'll go to the image menu, choose image rotation and then either 90 degrees clockwise or counter clockwise, doesn't matter. I'll just go ahead and choose that first guy right there. And then I'll select two pixels worth. So notice that we've got a width of two pixels and a height of 20, so we're selecting the entire height of the image like so. And I'm gonna fill this with white by pressing control backspace here on the PC or command delete on the Mac. And that way the white region is a little bit thicker than the black and now I'll return to the edit menu. And once again choose define pattern. And I'll go ahead and call this guy vlines and then in parentheses, thin and I'll click okay. Alright, that's all we need this for so you can go ahead and close this little image if you want to. Don't need to save the changes, no reason for that. And so I'll go ahead and return to my image in progress. And then I'll create a new pattern layer by going to the layer menu, choosing new fill layer, followed by pattern. That way I can name the layer as I create it. And so I'll go ahead and call this guy hlines and click okay. And I don't want this guy, this is the last pattern I created, I want the one before which looks like this. So we want hlines even and then I'll click okay. Now this is a little bit difficult to look at especially in the video, so I'm gonna change the blend mode in the top left corner of the layers panel to overlay in order to produce this slightly softer effect. Alright now we need to wrap the lines around the contours of the image and the best way to do that is to go up to the filter menu, choose distort and then choose displace. Photo Shop is gonna let you know that you can't apply a filter to a pattern layer so you have the option of rasterizing it, bad idea or converting it to a smart object, great idea. So I'll go ahead and click on that button. So I'll change my horizontal scale value to 50 and my vertical scale value to 100. I just happen to know this is gonna work based on trial and error. The default displacement map setting of stretch to fit is just fine, but you wanna set your undefined areas to wrap around and then click okay. Now we need to load that displacement map that we created just a moment ago which is called dmapeyes.PSD and now I'll click the open button. And that's gonna do some very wacky wrapping. Notice that we have what appears to be is a kinda strange clown makeup going on. That's not really the effect I want and I also want to slant the lines a little bit. And the best way to pull that off is to rotate this line pattern inside this composition. But if I were to do that, notice if I go ahead and zoom out a little bit here and then I got up to the edit menu and choose the free transform command or we can press control T or command T on the Mac, Photo Shop is gonna warn you that it has to turn off the displacement map for a moment. Just go ahead and click okay, not a problem. And I came up with the rotate value up here in the options bar of 12 degrees, I just happen to know that works. But notice that we have a problem here if I zoom in you can see that our lines cut off in the top right and bottom left corners of the image. So what I need to do is expand the size of the pattern. And the easiest way to do that is to double click on this thumb nail here inside the layers panel in order to open the smart object inside an independent image window. And now I'll go ahead and zoom out a little bit. So you can see if I go to the image menu and choose the canvas size command, not image size, but canvas size. And notice that I'm working in pixels and that the relative check box is turned off, very important. What you'll wanna do is switch to percent. And then go ahead and change the width and height values to 200 percent like so and then click okay. And by expanding the canvas, you also expand the size of the pattern. Because the pattern layer is always going to fill the entire canvas, at which point just go ahead and close this image window and then click the yes button. That's gonna be the save button the Mac in order to save your changes into the larger composition. And notice that goes ahead and fills in the lines quite nicely. Now I'm gonna zoom out again and return to the edit menu and once again choose free transform so that you can see that we have a very big pattern at this point. It's a little too big so I'm gonna turn on the link between the width and height values right here. And I'm gonna change either one of them to 70%. So that we have just enough image to clear the larger compositions canvas and now I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac a couple of times to accept that change. And if I zoom in, you can see that everything is working out quite nicely. Alright now if you take a look at this previous image right here which represents our final destination where this movie is concerned, notice that we have these lines that are cutting through right here. So we have a little bit of organic cross hatching. And to achieve that effect, I'll go ahead and create another pattern layer by returning to the layer menu, choosing new fill layer and once again choosing pattern. And I'll go ahead and call this guy vlines this time around. Click okay and this time I am looking for that final pattern that I created which is vlines thin. And now click okay and I'll also change its blend mode to overlay. And notice that we're already getting a really great effect. The problem is that it doesn't have any contouring, we just have these straight up and down lines. And so I'll go up to the filter menu and I could choose displace, but if I do that, that's gonna rasterize the layer. So instead I'll drop down to distort and choose displace, just as I did before and that way Photo Shop will alert me that I need to convert this layer to a smart object. After which point I'll change the horizontal scale to 33 and then I'll set the vertical scale to zero because it's not gonna make any difference in this case, then I'll click okay. And I'll once again select dmapeyes and I'll click the open button and we get a little bit of contouring as you can see right here. Especially in the cheeks, but it's occurring all over the model's face. Alright now I wanna create a little additional interaction. And actually I kind of wanna back off the effect in the shadow details and to make that happen, I'll double click on an empty portion of this vlines layer in order to bring up the layer style dialog box. And then I'll drop down to the underlying layer slider right here and I'll drag this black slider triangle right here until I see a value of 70 and then in order to soften the transitions, I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and drag the right half of this black triangle to a value of 150. So we've got 70 before the slash, 150 after and then 255 over here to the right. And that's telling us that we have a fade from the luminous level of 70 to 150. At which point we'll go ahead and click okay. And now just so you can see the difference. It is a little subtle, this is before notice how we have this cross hatching throughout the shadow detail and this is after where some of that cross hatching is disappearing over here on the left side of the cheek, under the nose and so forth. Alright now notice these white filter masks here inside the layers panel. They're not gonna cause us any problems, but we don't need them so I'm just gonna right click on this first one and choose delete filter mask and I'll do the same for the other one as well. And that's just gonna help cut down on the clutter, once again, inside the layers panel. Alright now I'll press shift F in order to switch to the full screen mode and I'll go ahead and zoom on in as well. And just so we can see what we've been able to accomplish inside this movie, this is the original full color version of the photograph and here's the effect as it appears now thanks to our ability to create an organic crosshatching effect using a combination of simple pattern layers along with displacement maps here inside Photo Shop. Alright now things are looking pretty great, but we still need to trace some outlines around the eyes and the mouth and the other facial details which is why if you're a member of Linda.com/linkedinlearning, I have a followup movie in which we do exactly that. If you're looking forward to next week, we're gonna take a black and white head cut and we're gonna render it in full color, sweet. Deke's Techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

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