Learn to use Illustrator’s brilliant live trace tool and wrap your head around clipping masks while you’re at it.

For this tutorial I am making a HOPE Rwanda wallpaper. Please take a few moments to check out their website and, if you feel led to do so, support the foundation.

Final Product:

Step 1: Getting Started
Create a new document and make the dimensions whatever you please. I chose the landscape A4 template (29.7cmW x 21cmH).

First off, we’re going to make our background. Select the rectangle tool (Shortcut M) and click anywhere on the art-board. Enter the dimensions of your document, click OK. To align your rectangle to the art-board, bring up the align palette (Window > Align) and make sure the “Align to Artboard” option is selected. Then click on the options “Horizontal Align Center” and “Vertical Align Center” to centre the rectangle.

Fill your rectangle with the grey #232323. This is your background layer (which you can go ahead and name something ingenious like “background” if you are an organised person).

Step 2: Text
Make a new layer (If the window palette isn’t open, find it by going Window > Layers and click the second button from right at the bottom of it) and write the word HOPE in the font “Myriad” (I know, I know, a really basic font, but trust me, it’ll look good at the end) three times on separate lines with the Type Tool (shortcut T). Centre your type using the same method as in Step 1.

Press Ctrl+A to select all of your text, make the size 120pt and set the leading (the space between lines) to 165pt.

Now we need to make our text into an object, and we can do this by selecting the text layer and clicking Object > Expand. You can leave both Fill and Object selected–it’s not relevant here–and press OK.

Alright, now we have our text as an object and can touch up our type. Select the ends of the E’s and make the top and bottom ends all the same length. Next delete the middle of the P’s by using the Direct Selection Tool (shortcut A) and selecting and deleting the inside path points, then finally, delete the all the O letters completely. The beauty of Illustrator is that our text is 100% vector, so we can edit the path points of our words at any stage.

Your text should now look like what I have below, and you are now ready to turn it into a clipping mask.

Step 3: Clipping Masks
Clipping masks are very easy in Illustrator. All you need is the object you want to use as a mask (the text we just made) and the object you want to be clipped.

Here is the image I want to be clipped by our text. An extremely emotive photograph of poverty evidenced in an African child. (I am unsure of the photographer otherwise I would credit them.)

After downloading the picture, click File > Place to insert it into your document. It should be a little bit smaller than our text, and we want it to cover the entire wording so we need to enlarge it accordingly. To do this, select the Free Transform Tool (shortcut E) and drag any corner outwards while holding down Shift to maintain our aspect ratio. Change the layer priority so that it sits underneath the text sublayer.

Now we need to turn all our text letter objects into a compound path for this to work. Don’t worry, it’s easy peasy. Select the entire text object group and click Object > Compound Path > Make (Ctrl+8 or Cmd+8 for Mac).

Next make the clipping mask by selecting both the layer with our placed image on it and the new compound path and click Object > Clipping Mask > Make (Ctrl+7 or Cmd+7 for Mac). Now your text should clip your placed image, and you can now go ahead and move the photo around to show which parts you want to by using the Free Transform Tool (E). I wanted to show the young boy’s eyes so I moved it up and enlarged it a little more.

We’re almost there; all that’s left to do is add the “O” which we will do in step 4.

Step 4: Live Trace
Probably one of the coolest features in Illustrator is the Live Trace Tool. And we’re going to use it to cut out Africa and use it for our “O”.

This is the continental illustration of Africa I used (all images used in this tutorial are available in the downloadable .zip file at the top of the page).

Again we are going to place this image into our document using File > Place, but first create a new layer so that our placed image will go into its own layer.

Now that our image is placed, you should see an option at the top centre of the program window called “Live Trace”. But instead of clicking the button, we are going to click the little drop down arrow right next to it and choose “Comic Art” instead of the default settings. This isn’t a particularly vital step as we are just going to change all the settings anyway, but it does give a slight head start I suppose, and also shows you that there are various presets there by default to choose from. All of these are editable.

Once the dialogue box pops up, make sure you click the option “Preview” so you can see the results of your changes before applying the trace.

Your picture will probably look a little jagged and tacky at the moment, but never fear, let’s just change a few settings.

Blur (The amount of blur made to the original image. Using this can dull sharp edges in the original image making the traced version less harsh): 1px with a Resample of 70px
Path Fitting (The lower the number you set in the ‘Path Fitting’ option, the tighter the image will be traced): 5px
Minimum Area (Defines the minimum area in pixels to be traced, which will help to avoid insignificant blemishes being traced): 3,000px
Corner Angle (Sets the sharpness of corner angles. The lower the number, the sharper the corners): 121

De-select the Stroke box (if it isn’t already) and select the Fills box so that you get one vector block. Click OK. Your picture should now look like a nice black and white of Africa, but it needs to be expanded so that you can delete the white background. To do that, select the layer and click the “Expand” button at the top of the screen.

We can now delete the white background by grabbing the Direct Selection Tool (A), clicking the white area and pressing Delete.

Africa is officially not a continent anymore; it’s an easily movable vector on our screen, hooray!

All we have to do now is resize it to fit in the space where the letter “O” used to be, duplicate it twice and position them all in the three “O” spaces. Change the fill of the middle one to a colour that you like to give make the wallpaper really standout. I used the very light highlighter blue-green colour #00FFCE.

After that I simply played around with different images layered over the top of the entire document in Photoshop. (This is also easily do-able in Illustrator). I ended up layering the cracks of a barren desert (the photograph was taken by Poh Wei and can be found in the resources .zip file) over everything and changing the blending mode to Color Dodge.

And that’s it, we’re done!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something from it. If you would like to request a tutorial, you can do so simply by clicking the button below and filling out a quick form.

Make the most of a lifeless photo using Photoshop’s entourage of tools.

Final Product:

Step 1: Preparation
So, first things first, go find a photo that is pretty much technically OK, but just looks plain boring. While you do that I’m going to change CDs.

*Fumbles in CD rack . . . click*

Okay, so here’s the photo I picked.

Pros

1. Good subject
2. Good focus
3. Interesting foreground
4. Movement in the photo adds life to an otherwise boring shot

Cons

1. Boring lighting
2. Even though the background is slightly blurry sitting outside the DOF (depth of field), it’s still boring and cluttering the shot.
3. The main subject bird looks like he has a conjoined twin

Well, there we have it. By identifying the pros and cons of any photo you can quickly work out whether it’s worth saving or not. In this case I definitely think it is. So, let’s get on with it!

Step 2: Identifying the Distractions
Extremely important to a good piece of art is keeping the focus of the piece clear and easily notable. By looking at this photo I can instantly see about a billion distractions. I’ve highlighted them below so you can see what I mean.

It’s important to clone these distractions out first as we will be using adjustment layers later on, along with blending modes which will make any cloning a jolly pain in the neck. So get out your Clone Stamp tool (shortcut S) and clone out the areas circled. Make sure to duplicate your background layer by pressing Ctrl+J (Cmd + J for Mac) first. (It’s always wise to keep a backup, just trust me there.

To get a nice edge around the bird, I’m going to quickly draw a marquee around the edges of the bird so that the clone brush can’t touch the bird. Feather the selection by clicking Select > Feather (Alt+Ctrl+D, or Alt+Cmd+D for Mac) and entering 1px.

Next, add a layer mask to your cloned layer (second button from left at the bottom of the layers palette), grab a black paint brush and start erasing the harsh edges around the bird’s feet and tail feathers. Another benefit of duplicating layers is the ability to layer mask at any stage.

Step 3: Lighting
Right now our photo is suffering from a severe case of mid-afternoon, overcast and tremendously dull lighting. But I’m going to demonstrate a nifty technique to you which is called a “match color”. The best part is, it’s really quite easy.

The idea behind a colour match is that you take the lighting and colouring from one photo and apply it to another. So in this case we’re going to find a shot that has much better and more interesting colours than this one and apply it to our lackluster photo.

Here’s my match colour shot:

To do this, make sure both photos are open in Photoshop then click back to the photo you are working on. Merge your cloned layer to your background layer by selecting them both and pressing Ctrl+E (Cmd+E for Mac), and then click Image > Adjustments > Match Color.

Select the image you are using to match colours from the “Source” drop down box. If you are using my example pictures and have ticked the “preview” box then the photo will already be looking much cooler, but we’re going to go a lot further and make it even better. Change your settings to the following:

Luminance (A type of exposure level for the final merged image): 200
Color Intensity (The intensity of the colours from the matched image): 173
Fade (How much of the original colour scheme you wish to retain): 0

Click OK. Now we are well on our way to eliminating the boring lighting in this photo.

Step 3: Exposure and Shadows
Our lighting looks much better now, but it’s still pretty flat and grossly over saturated. In fact, let’s fix the gaudy saturation first.

A quick and awesome (non-destructive) way to lower the saturation of the overall image is to create a new adjustment layer by clicking the circular shortcut button at the bottom of the layers palette (3 from the left) called “Create new fill or adjustment layer”. Choose “Hue/Saturation” from the pop up list.

Lower the Master saturation to -85.
Lower the Reds channel to -30
Lower the Yellows to -12
Completely remove the Blue channel (-100)
Completely remove the Magenta channel (-100)
Click OK.

Your image should look pretty desaturated now, but don’t worry, it gets better!

Next we’re going to bump the exposure by creating a Curves adjustment layer. Again, click the little adjustment layer button at the bottom of the layers palette and choose “Curves”.

Make a new node at the input “150″ and raise the output to 189. Click OK. Rearrange the Curves layer to be below the Hue/Saturation layer.

Make one more adjustment layer like we did above, but this time choose “Levels” and clip the blacks back to 114. Click OK. Move the Levels layer to the top layer and change the opacity to 70%

Step 4: Blending Modes and Burning
This is where we put the finishing touches on our image. It’s almost there but still looks lifeless. Not to fear, time to call on blending modes.

Duplicate the background layer by clicking it and pressing Ctrl+J (Cmd+J on the Mac). Set the blending mode of the new layer to Hard Light. Double click the layer to get into layer styles and add a Color Overlay. Leave the colour at the default fluorescent red and set the blending mode to Hue. Click OK.

Now all that is left to do is the burning. Grab the Burn tool (hidden under the Dodge tool, shortcut O) along with a nice and big brush size, select Shadows from the “Range” area and remove the final distraction: the car in the near background. You will need to change the Range to Highlights to get rid of the glares from the sun on the car’s exterior.

Finished!

There we go, that wasn’t so hard, was it? As you can see, boring photos can sometimes have a whole stack of potential hiding behind their dull exteriors. It just takes a little patience and some know-how to turn them into something special.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned something from it. If you would like to request a tutorial, you can do so simply by clicking the button below and filling out a quick form.

How to find the dead centre of a document in Photoshop using guides.

Step 1: Create a new document
First things first, you’re going to need a blank document to work with. File > New, then pick any dimensions your heart so desires — it’s not important what you choose; I chose a landscape A4 (29.7 x 21cm for the American readers) document.

Step 2: Find the middle
Now that you have a blank document, click View (in the File menu) > New Guide. A dialogue box should appear where you can choose between horizontal and vertical guides and where they will be positioned, with the default measurement being in pixels. I’m sure most of you know about guides, but what some people don’t know is that you can choose your guides in percentages.

Keeping the default vertical guide selected, type in 50% into the “Position” box. Click OK.

Voilà, a guide showing you the exact position of the centre of your document. I told you this was going to be straight-forward.

More tips:

• For more awesomeness, turn on “Snap to Guides” by clicking “View > Snap To > Guides. This tells Photoshop to snap everything you drag around to the guides. Very useful for lining up layers I can assure you.
• You can experiment with different guide positions by entering percentages such as 33.33% and 66.66% for a document you want split into thirds (trifold brochures are a good example of somewhere this could be applied).

That’s all for now. Make sure to click the big shiny button below if you would like to request a tutorial.

If you would like to request a tutorial, please email me what you would like to see in upcoming posts.

//stephen

Photoshop Tutorials: Paths Part I

Step 1: Preparation
Open photoshop and start a new document. I made mine 500px x 500px at 72dpi (dpi is a print term and irrelevant for this exercise. But that is another tutorial altogether). Next make sure the paths palette is visible by clicking Window > Paths (it may be a nested menu on the layer palette.)

Step 2: Selecting A Path Tool
You can make paths either by drawing them with the pen tool, or by using preset shapes (e.g. rounded rectangle tool.) In our first exercise we will use a rounded rectangle path to make a vector mask border. So first select the rounded rectangle tool (it may be hidden under another tool) and make sure paths is selected as in the picture below. I have imported one of my own pictures to my new document for demonstrating the border on.

Step 3: Creating A Work Path
Now that you have your rounded rectangle tool selected and it is set to make paths, set the radius of the corners to 39px (because we are so precise here) and draw a path right to the edge of the picture. Now when you look in your paths palette you should see a new work path which shows up on your picture when selected like a pencil thin gray square with rounded edges.

Step 3: Creating A Vector Mask
Now comes the fun part. First click the path selection tool (the black filled in arrow adjacent to the rounded rectangle tool, remember it might be under another tool.) Then click anywhere inside your path to select it. Now, making sure your photo layer is selected, right click the path and select Create vector mask from the drop down list.

That is all you need to do and you should end up with a nicely curved border for your photo. If you want a thin black line to emphasise the border you can stroke your path by right clicking it in the paths palette and selecting stroke path, and make sure simulate pressure is not selected. Use the brush tool from the drop down list but first click the brush tool in the normal tools menu and make sure its set to 1px and 100% hardness.

And that is that for vector masks for now. Let’s move on to drawing paths by hand.

Step 1: Preparation
Start a fresh document to make things easy. Go for 500px x 500px again just because we can. Now we can start drawing some cool paths.

Step 2: Drawing A Path
You can free-form draw a path or draw it point to point. I prefer point to point as you don’t end up with anchor points all over the place which are a pain to delete as there is usually a whole lot of them. So go ahead and select your pen tool. Now let’s draw a wavy line from top right to bottom left and then back to the start like in the picture.

Notice when you draw a point of a path you have the ability to stretch out those two lines at either side of the point, those are called handles and are very helpful later on.

At first drawing a path will seem awkward but you will quickly get the hang of it. To end a path when you get back to your start point, wait till you see the little circle appear when you hover next to the start point and then click. This will end your path into a complete circuit.

Note that it doesn’t have to be a complete circuit but can be just a straight line.

Path points can be undone at any time by standard undo of Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) then Ctrl+Alt+Z (Cmd+Alt+Z on Mac) to undo multiple steps because Adobe likes to make life so easy – not. I couldn’t get the little circle representing the end of a path in the screen-shot so you’ll have to pretend it’s there at the top red selected area.

Step 3: Using the Path
Now you can do many things with this path. The main advantage of using paths of course is that you can resize them at any time by using free transform Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on the Mac) to however big or small you prefer without losing a scrap of quality because it is a vector.

But right now I will show you two of the most helpful things you can do with your path. First you can make it into a selection which is great for cutting people out of photos as you can easily edit your path (with the add anchor point tool which is underneath the pen tool in the tools menu.) Or you can stroke/fill your path by right clicking it in the paths palette.

You will be presented with a number of options when you right click the path which are all pretty straightforward. If you click Make Selection you can also feather the selection to however much px you like (well, up to 250px anyway.)

Have fun with these options and feel free to ask if you have any questions. A fun thing to play around with is Simulate pressure when you stroke a path as you can first make up a brush pattern in the brush tool area then stroke your path with that brush.

There are many more things you can do with paths, but now that you know the basics, working from here should be a lot more straightforward.

If you would like to request a tutorial, please click the big shiny button below.