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

731 Creating a porthole to a far-away galaxy

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

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731 Creating a porthole to a far-away galaxy

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- Hey gang this is Deke McClelland welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, I don't know, you read the title to the movie right? There's nothing else to say about it. We're gonna take this thing that we made last week and we're gonna turn it into a portal to a far away galaxy. What else can I say about this? Nothing, I can't, there's nothing else to say. Here, lemme show you exactly how it works. Alright here's the final version of the art work as it appears in Photoshop's full screen mode to bring back the interface, I'll press the F key and then I'll go ahead and switch over to those original rings that I brought in from Adobe Illustrator. Now you may recall that each and every time you apply content aware fill you get different results. Which is why I've gone ahead and created a total of four variations over here inside the layers panel. I'll go ahead and turn them on so you can see. That's variation one and that is actually one of the variations that I created last week. Here's variation two, so we end up with a differently structured wrinkle. Here's variation three which has a little more in the way of ripped edges in the top right corner and here is variation four. And so you can work with any one of the variations you like. I'm gonna go with variation four however. So I'll go ahead and select the first three variations and press the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac to get rid of them. I'll also go ahead and turn off that on white layer. Now at this point we need to drop away the white pixels and there's a couple of ways to do that; one, is to click on an empty portion of this layer to bring up the layer style dialogue box. And then you wanna go ahead and take this white triangle that's associated with this layer slider right there and you wanna drag it over to the left. And the second you do, all of the white pixels will drop away. Problem is, that leaves us with some very jagged transitions. Now we can sort of get rid of those by pressing the alt key or the option key on the Mac and dragging the left half of this white triangle farther to the left like so. So notice now we have softer edges. But we're also making the layer translucent. So notice how we're seeing right through those rings to the stars. And you'll also notice if you zoom in which you can do by control or command clicking that we have some bright halos. So rather than relying on these blending sliders, I'll go ahead and cancel out and create a full fledged mask. And I'm going to do that by going up to the window menu and choosing the channels command in order to bring up the channels panel. And then notice our channels here, we've got the red channel which is very bright, we've got the green channel which is a little darker and the blue channel which is darker still. And that's because these rings at their brightest happen to be orange which is a mix of red and green. What we're looking for is a channel that has the most contrast between the foreground and the background and that's gonna be blue. So go ahead and grab the blue channel and drag and drop it unto the little page icon at the bottom of the channels panel in order to make a copy of it. Now you wanna increase the contrast and the best way to use that is to use the levels command. Which you can get by going to the image menu, choosing adjustments and choosing levels or you have that keyboard shortcut of control L or command L on the Mac. And notice all this stuff right here that represents the dark pixels that make up the rings. And so what you wanna do is take this black slider triangle and move it to the right of all that junk in the histogram. And I ultimately came up with a black point value of 100 like so. You can go ahead and leave these two values unmodified. Now we actually wanna mask in the rings and mask away the background. Which means we need to invert the mask and you can do that by just reversing these two output levels values. And so I'll change the first one to 255 and I'll tab over to the second one and change it to zero and then I'll go ahead and click okay. Now when you're creating alpha channels, I always recommend that you rename them in order to indicate how you got here. So I'm gonna go ahead double click in the current name and change it to B for the blue channel comma and then I'll enter those levels values which were 100 for the black point slash slash cause we didn't do anything to the gamma value, 255 for the white point and then I'll enter another comma and write the word invert and then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac. Alright, now I'll switch back to the full color composite and I'll load this guy as a selection by pressing the control key or the command key on the Mac and clicking on it. And notice that goes ahead and selects the rings independently of the background. Now you wanna switch back to the layers panel and turn the selection into a layers mask by dropping down to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and clicking on it. At this point we still have those jagged transitions and we have the haloing as well. The difference is now we can soften those edges, using a combination of gaussian blur and levels. And you do that by making sure that your layer mask is selected here inside the layers panel then go up to the filter menu, choose blur followed by gaussian blur. And you may be able to get away with the radius value as one pixel but I'm gonna take it up to two pixels like so. Notice that does soften the edges but we also get a more pronounced halo, that's okay I'll just go ahead and click okay and the I'll address that halo by once again returning to the image menu, choosing adjustments and then choosing levels. And we've gotta work with the static command by the way because we're working with a mask. Alright, now notice if I crank up that black point value by dragging the black slider triangle over to the right that I end up moving the edge inward and getting rid of that haloing. We still have a soft edge however, which is why I need to drag the white slider handle to the left. And I ultimately came up with a black point value of 160, you don't wanna change the gamma value and a white point value of 200 at which point I'll click okay. And you can see that gives us a smooth, sharply defined edge. Alright now press control 0 or command 0 on the Mac to zoom out. And at this point I decided I needed to brighten up the rings and I'm gonna do so using a brightness contrast adjustment layer. And so I'll go up to the layer menu, choose new adjustment layer and then choose brightness contrast. That way I can name the layer as I create it. And I'll just go ahead and call this guy boost. I also wanna make sure that I'm not affecting the entire image, just the active layer. And you can do that by turning on this check box, use previous layer to create clipping mask. At which point clip okay and then I'll click in the brightness value here in the properties panel and I'll press shift up arrow until I'm satisfied with the result which occurs at 50. At which point I'll go ahead and hide the properties panel to accept that change. And that's how you take you 3D rings that you squished and twisted using content aware fill into a kind of cosmic portal here inside Photoshop. Now if you're a member of Linda.com/linkedinlearning I have two, count them, two follow up movies in which I show you how to take that thing we just made and for one thing, we're gonna make it look way better and then we're gonna turn it into a galaxy of rushing stars. (wooshing sound) If you're looking forward to next week as well you should, I'm gonna introduce you, in case you haven't seen it already to what I regard as the best new feature in Illustrator CC in years and that is puppet warp. Which is going to allow us to take this fish and bend it. And my goodness who doesn't wanna bend a fish? I don't know what that means either. Deke's Techniques each and every week, it doesn't mean that, keep watching.

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