(upbeat rock music)
- [Voiceover] Okay so for this video tutorial,
I wanna show you a really simple technique
for how we can realistically add tattoos onto our subjects.
Now to do so make sure it's something called
Displacement Maps within Photoshop, which at first
could maybe sound a little bit tricky but believe me
they're really really simple; so let's get cracking.
Okay so the first thing we need to do is create our
displacement map and that's basically just a black and white
version or be a bit more contrasty of our original picture.
So to do that first of all I'm going to
create a duplicate of our original.
And to do that I'm going to go to the image menu
and just simply use duplicate and ask me for a name,
I'm just going to call that Displacement Map and click okay.
So now in front of us we're actually
working on a duplicate copy of our original picture.
So like I said, we need to turn that into black and white.
And keeping things nice and simple,
I'm gonna go to the image menu at the top of our screen,
choose adjustments and desaturate.
And to make it just a little bit more contrasty again.
I'm going to go to the image menu on top of the screen,
adjustments and I want to just choose something like levels.
And all I'm going to do then is just bring over the shadow
slider and the midtones and I'm just going to
enhance the highlights just a little bit as well.
And click okay, the next thing I'd like to do
is to really make the highlight, shadow, and midtone
areas just pop out a little bit more.
Just helps our form with the displacement map later on
when we're putting the tattoo onto our subject.
So to do that, all I want to do next is create a
blank layer above and I'm gonna fill that with 50% grey.
To do that I go to the edit menu at the top of the screen
and choose fill, and we have this dialogue box here.
And one of the options is 50% grey
now we'll just click okay; over in the layers panel now
we change the blend mode of that grey layer to soft light.
Which then allows me to see a pinch underneath.
Now using dodging and burn tools, I'm gonna bring out
the details in this picture where the highlights
and the shadows and midtones all meet together to create
the contour that you can see in Steve's figure.
So over in our tool bar, we're gonna first of all select
the dodge tool and keeping the settings nice and simple I'm
gonna choose the range set of midtones and exposure of 20%.
And all I want to do then is go over where the highlight
areas are with the dodge tool and paint over them with
the dodge tool to bring them out
and make them that much more pronounced.
So you got this area here in Steve's shoulder
where we got a little separation on your shoulder.
We got the light down the back of his arm, like so.
Because this is where generally I'm gonna put in the tattoo.
So we'll bring that detail out there.
We've also got this area on his obliques here
so if I wanted to for a later stage put a tattoo across here
enhancing these highlight areas would really make the tattoo
follow the shape of Steve's muscles much more realistically.
So I'll just bring the detail in these by
painting over them with the dodge tool, like so.
We've got some more details we need
to bring out are his abdominals.
Little bit there, and obviously I'm doing this
quite quickly just to sort of demonstrate the technique.
So when you're doing this you should do things a lot slower.
But we should paint over those areas there, like so.
This area in his neck is quite important as well,
it's really quite prominent so I wanna make sure that
the tattoo if comes that far up, really follows that
so it can really see the shape
of Steve's neck and the tattoo as well, like so.
And that's probably enough on the highlights.
So the next stage is to bring out the midtones
and shadow areas, so again back over to our
tool bar but this time we're choosing the burn tool.
The settings will keep the same as the dodge tool,
with the range set to midtones and exposure of 20%.
And then all I'm going to do is darken down the areas
where we did in between, where we did the highlights.
So using my right backing key to make the brush
just a little bit bigger, left one makes it smaller.
I'm gonna paint over these areas here with the burn tool
to make these much more prominent,
these areas in between the highlights.
You'll see why this is so important, when we actually do
apply a tattoo because it allows like I said before,
the tattoo to really follow the line of the person that
you're putting on the shape and contour and their physique.
So that's the obliques, they look fine.
We got this area here, these veins when we're photographing
Steve our model first and they're really quite prominent.
So I wanna darken those down so if the tattoo comes
over there, that'll also follow the line and then
look more realistic the way they go over the veins.
Bring the detail down there, bright and darken them up.
We'll darken the tan even, like so.
This area of Steve's shoulder was really quite prominent.
So I'm gonna make sure the tattoo follows that,
so I'm just gonna darken down and add a bit more
of the shadow into there, like that.
And also this top here, this shoulder where it sort of
curves over, let's make sure the tattoo follows that.
And just a little bit more, okay let's go size this
really should suppose to bringing out what is already there.
So that the separation is much more obvious.
Last bit we'll do, maybe we could
curve darken down the centre of his chest.
Okay making the brush a little bit smaller
now using the left bracket key.
And we'll just darken down bit of a line
down the centre of his chest, like so.
So if we zoom out, we can see that obviously
we've gone more than overboard with dodging and burning.
What we need to do now to make
the final effect look realistic, so there we go.
Next I'm going to do, we're going to the last panel.
And using the menu there, we're gonna flatten that image.
Now one we want to do is to make sure that we don't
bring any over the texture from Steve's skin.
That will show through when we
eventually put the tattoo onto him.
So we need sort of smooth that out but what we don't do
is blur it, because if we blur it we're gonna
flatten out the work we've just done.
So we can use the despeckle tool just to
remove some of the texture on Steve's skin.
And we find that in the filter menu,
where it says noise and we've got despeckle.
Now when we first click that you
maybe won't see much of an effect.
So we need to just apply that filter, just a few more times.
So that we're sure we got rid of that texture,
but we've managed to keep the detail
in the highlight, midtone areas
that we just done with the dodging and burning.
So to apply that filter again, all we need to do
is hold down our commander control key and press
the F button on your keyboard, just a few more times.
And I'll probably do it, say three times.
So I'm holding down my control key, pressing F once,
again, and again and that's should be enough now.
To remove that roughness of Steve's skin.
Four stages to save this displacement map for use later on.
So go to the form menu and we'll choose save as.
Now obviously we called it the duplicate displacement map.
You can see the top here where it says save as.
It's called it, displacement map but I wanna
save this as a Photoshop document.
So I'm gonna click on Photoshops,
so make sure it says "psd" at the end there.
And I'll just put this on the desktop for use later on.
And click save and then we will close it.
So we've now made a displacement map,
the next stage is actually putting
the tattoo onto Steve's shoulder and bicep area.
So the next stage is actually adding in our tattoo.
And I'm gonna bring in a tattoo drawing that I've got.
And I'm gonna bring it in as a smart object.
So to do that I go to the file menu choosing place,
I'm gonna locate the tattoo I want
and I'm gonna go for tattoo number four.
And clicking place, so brings it in as a smart object.
Obviously it's way too big at the moment,
but we can resize that, but one of the things is what
you notice is it's a black tattoo on a white background.
Now luckily using blend modes we can get rid
of that white straight away in one click.
And all we need to do is change the blend mode
of this tattoo layer to multiply
and straight away you'll see the white goes.
So now we've got more of an idea of where it's being placed,
so it can position it exactly how I want it.
Incidentally, if you want to know more about the multiply
blend mode and the screen blend mode and what they can do,
I've actually got a video recorded on my Youtube page.
So head on over to the Youtube page
and the actual tutorial video is called "Using Blend Modes."
And that explains about what you
can do with multiply and screen.
Anyway, heading back over to this tutorial here.
Let's now resize the tattoo, so I'm gonna go to edit
and free transform, and I'm actually use the track handles
to reduce the size of the tattoo to around about there.
And when we click out so on, move our cursor
outside of these bounding box.
It allows us to rotate as well, so I'm gonna bring it across
to there, drag it over onto his bicep and shoulder area.
Just position it now where I want it to be.
And I reckon around about there is just right,
so I'll click enter to commit that.
Now obviously zoom in here, we can see that
the tattoo is in the right area.
We got these arrows here which
extend over and off Steve's body.
We can deal with those in the end.
Now this is where our displacement map comes in,
we're now going to apply the displacement to allow
the tattoo to follow the shape and contour of Steve's body.
And we do that by going to the filter menu
at the top of the screen, choosing distort
and then the second option down is displace.
Now when you do that you'll get this dialogue box come up
here with a horizontal scale and a vertical scale.
Now I like to start off with these numbers quite low,
so we'll start off with say, five in each of those.
And all I have to do is controlling how much distortion
we want in that tattoo when it's
following the displacement map.
And you'll see what I mean in a short while.
But we'll click okay, and when we do that it brings up a box
here asking us to basically load in our displacement map.
And I know that was on our desktop and there it is
so click okay on the displacement map
and you'll see once Photoshop starts doing its thing.
It's actually started to manipulate
the tattoo now so follows the contours of Steve.
Now if I go before and after, we can see that it is actually
following the shape of Steve's muscles quite well.
If you zoom in here we can see this area here on the
shoulder's cut, see how that tattoo
sort of arches over onto there.
That was quite nicely, in fact you know what
I think we might need it just a little bit more distorted.
And this is the advance of actually
bringing in the tattoo as a smart object.
So what I need to do now is double-click on the filter
and brings back up the dialogue box
and I'm wanna change those to eight.
Just to add a little bit more of a distortion, click okay.
Again it's gonna ask me for my displacement map,
so I'll click on the displacement map
which is on our desktop and click open.
Photoshop does its thing and now we can see
just a little bit more distortion applied.
If you go before and after, and I really like that.
Because we can see the effects even more, obviously
I'm not gonna to leave the tattoo looking that dark.
I think if we lower the opacity of that layer or opacity,
down to right about 60% and zoom out.
We can see that it's a bit more realistic,
you're getting some of the texture of
Steve's skin coming through as well.
So I quite like that, now we can get rid of these areas
here that have extended over onto the background
by just adding a white layer mask to the tattoo layer.
Pressing B on our keyboard to get the brush
and just making sure that we're painting in black and we
can tell that by our full ground colour here being in black.
And all we need to do is paint over the areas
that extend off Steve onto the background, like so.
And just taking care, not to paint off too much.
So just reduce the size of our brush is the left bracket key
and just come in nice and close and just paint it away.
So that it looks like it's naturally going over
the curve of his body out of sight there.
So we can get rid of all this,
a little bit more on this area here.
Carefully painting that away, like so.
So there we go, zooming out we can now see
we've realistically added the tattoo
onto Steve's bicep and shoulder.
I really like the way that it folds
over onto this little cut in his shoulder just here.
And also on this little area here
where there's a bit of an fold.
Can you see how the tattoo sort of like,
dives in there and comes back out slightly distorted?
Really worked, really well but it's just
one of those things that's just trial and error
when you checking and put the numbers in.
Obviously first, we tried five
but eight nailed it, it was just spot on.
So there you have it, now obviously anybody who have
tattoos will sort of testify that they are a bit addictive.
So as you can see, I've got a few more
obviously paintings down here when we did the obliques.
That's how obliques tie in and that little bit on the chest.
But if we zoom in on that chest, you'll see what I mean now
about this area here where you see how the chest sort of
disappears here and the tattoo
folds in then comes back out in the side?
Really really realistic, love it.
Okay so there you have it, that's how to realistically
add tattoos onto a subject's skin.
So that they follow the contour of the body.
I'll leave you to it and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)