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

968 Blending vectors with a pixel-based photograph

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

968 Blending vectors with a pixel-based photograph

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to "Deke's Techniques". Today we'll talk about how you can combine vector-based illustrations with a pixel based photograph. Now, in my experience, when designers hear first word combine, second word vectors, third word pixels. They immediately think you got to do that inside Adobe Illustrator or possibly InDesign. Those work of course, but if all you want is a single page composition then one program does it all, and that one program is Photoshop. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are inside Photoshop, looking at the final version of the artwork, complete with those letters blending into the panels of the van. All right, I'm going to press shift tab to bring back my right side panel and I'll go ahead and switch over to my artwork so far, which includes a photographic image from the Dreamstime image library. I'm going to go ahead and turn that Dreamstime layer off. Now, what we want to do is blend the letters as well as this arrowhead as one big object. And so I want you to see what's going on, the G is separate from the rest of the type. So notice I have this type layer called G and if I were to turn it off, you can see that it's independent. And the reason it's independent is because ironically I wanted it to match the rest of the text. And so I'll go and switch to the type tool, which you can get by pressing the T key. And notice that the font is set to Pacifico which may or may not be installed on your system, that doesn't matter. And the style is light. Whereas if I switched to the layer called O with the flow that the style is set to regular. And so, because the G is so much larger and I want it to match the other layers, I set it to the light style. However, that was a little bit too light and so notice if I expand my layer effects then I have a stroke right here. And so just a very slight stroke, notice that it's just one pixel thick. But that's going to become very important in a moment. In any event, I want to blend all three of these layers including the two type layers and the arrow layer as a single object which means that I first need to group them. So with the G layer selected I'll shift click on the arrow layer, I'll click on the fly-out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and I'll choose new group from layers, is the best way to go. And that way you can name the group as you create it and so I'm going to call mine type with arrow, let's say and then I'll click okay. All right, now what I want to do is blend these objects with the panels of the van in the background. And so I'll double click on an empty portion of this group right here in order to bring up the layer style dialog box and I'll move this guy over a little bit so I can see what's going on. You can also drag inside the image window if you like. And now, because those panel indents are dark I'll go ahead and move this underlying layer slider, the black slider triangle, that is to say, until I achieve a value of 50. Which means that anything with a luminance level of 50 or darker is going to become transparent. We're not actually seeing that here inside the image window, not much anyway, just down the middle of the word, the. And so I'll go ahead and move this guy further over, let's say to 130, just for the sake of demonstration. And so now anywhere where the luminance levels of the van are 130 or darker, bearing in mind that 128 is medium gray. So medium, gray or darker is going to force its way through and anything that's brighter is going to reveal those letters. All right, now I'm getting some very choppy transitions as you can see here in the arrowhead. And so what I'll do is press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and drag the right half of this slider triangle until the value after the slash is 150 and then I'll drag the left half until the value before this slash is 50. So 50 or darker is going to force through those shadows, 150 or brighter is going to allow the letters to show through and anything in between is going to provide some soft natural transitions. All right, now what I want to do is colorize those layers and I'm going to do so by adding a color overlay. So I'll just click on color overlay like so. You want the blend mode to be normal and the opacity to be a hundred percent, at which point just go ahead and click on that color swatch. And this is the color I came up with, but I got to it by the way by moving my cursor outside the color picker and clicking in order to lift a shade of green from the van. And that does match those letters quite well to the point that we can't even see them anymore. But I ended up setting the hue value to 130 degrees, so green, then I took the saturation value down to 33% and I set the brightness value to 80% and then I clicked okay. All right, now I want to take these greenish letters and screen them against the van. And so I'll click on blending options in this left-hand list, and what you want to do is change the blend mode from pass through to screen. And that's going to brighten up those letters. However, in my case it doesn't do a darn thing and the reason it doesn't do a darn thing is because I set the blend mode to normal where color overlay is concerned. That's what I want, because I want to fill those white letters with green. If I was to change this blend mode to screen then I would be screening the white, which gets me white. You can't get any brighter after all. So I'll go ahead and switch this guy back to normal. What we need to do is switch back to blending options and turn on this first of these five check boxes right here, blend interior effects as group and that's going to brighten up those letters like so. At which point I'll go ahead and click okay to accept that change. All right, next it struck me that the tip of this arrowhead should be a little darker in order to match the darkening shades of the front of the van. And go ahead and drop to the add layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers panel and click on it to create a new layer mask and then I'll switch to the brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. I want you to tap the D key to instate the default colors so that the foreground color is white, where mask is concerned and then press the X key to swap them till the foreground color is black. Now, right click anywhere inside the image window and take the size value up to 500 pixels, take the hardness value down to 0% and then all you need to do is click on that headlight right there. So just go ahead and center the headlight inside that round brush and click. And that goes ahead and darkens up the tip of the arrowhead ever so slightly and gives us a more natural effect. All right, the only thing that's left is this G, notice if I zoom in and I'll also go ahead and switch back to the rectangular marquee tool, which I can get by pressing the M key. I'll go ahead and twirl this group open and I'll grab the G and I'll move it up to outside of the group just for a moment here. So we can see that it has this big tail at the bottom, which is showing up. By the way, I'll go ahead and undo that change by pressing control Z or command Z on the Mac. You can see that fragments of that tail are indeed visible. And so I'm going to mask that tail away by dragging along this shadowy ridge above the tire, along the bottom edge of that fender. And so notice that the top of my marquee is not quite even with the bottom of the fender, it's a couple of three pixels up. And now with the G layer selected press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click on the add layer mask icon. And because you alt or option clicked you're going to mask that selection away. Now, I want you to look very closely at this effect right here. What I want to do is soften it and you can make that happen, assuming that the layer mask is selected by bringing up the properties panel, which you can also get by going to the window menu and choosing properties and then I'm going to click in the feather value and press shift up arrow a couple of times in order to set the feather to 2.0 pixels. But notice here inside the image window that really nothing much happened, actually something did but let me show you the difference. This is a feather value of zero, so notice that the edge scoots upward and then when I take the feather value up and up I'm scooting that edge downward, that's not the effect I want at all. And so notice that the feather value is currently 4.8 pixels. What you want to do is double-click on an empty portion of the type layer. So notice this is the type thumbnail right here, this is the empty area to the left of that thumbnail and if you double click like so, to bring up the layer style dialog box, what you want to do, I want you to watch what's happening out here in the image window. Turn on this check box layer mask hides effects and now we're hiding the effect, the stroke that is, instead of stroking around the mask and as a result we get a nicely feathered edge. And so now click, okay, I'll click on the layer mask thumbnail once again so that we can see the feather value here inside the properties panel and I'll take that value down to two pixels like so. Therefore it still looks like the tail is going too far down then go ahead and hide the properties panel. Notice this link icon right here between the text layer and it's layer mask, go ahead and turn it off so you are not seeing the chain icon. Make sure the layer mask is selected here inside the layers panel then switch to the move tool up here at the top of the toolbox, which you can get by pressing the V key and press the up arrow key once or twice in order to nudge that mask upward. At which point you will achieve a more natural effect. And now, I just go ahead and press shift F in order to switch to the full screen mode and press control zero or command zero on the Mac in order to center my zoom. And those are a few different ways to blend vector-based type and shape layers with a pixel based photograph here inside Photoshop. If you are a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a followup movie, in which I show you how to bend, not blend, but bend a straight line segment while keeping its arrowhead on the flat and steady. Looking forward to next week, that's when we'll switch to another of my favorite pieces of software, Adobe Illustrator, in which I show you how to align graphic objects to point type. What am I talking about? "Deke's Techniques" each and every week, keep watching.

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