Hello, I'm Helen Bradley.
Welcome to this video tutorial.
In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can place graffiti on a wall in Photoshop.
Before we get started on this tutorial however I'd like to introduce you to my new book 57
Secrets for Working Smarter in Photoshop.
This is a great book full of secret techniques and tricks in Photoshop that you can use every
day whether you're a graphic designer or a photographer.
The book is available as a printed book at Amazon.com.
It's also available as a download as a Kindle book also at Amazon.com and you can find it
too at iTunes.
And there's a link in the description for this video as to where you can download it
from.
Now let's get back to the tutorial.
This is the effect that we're going to achieve in this video.
The word peace was never on this building.
I just added it as a piece of graffiti.
And I'm going to show you how you can create a graffiti effect so that the text is scaled
correctly and also so that the text sort of blends into the building.
And I'm giving this one the look of being an old piece of graffiti.
So let's just turn that off and see how we would create this effect.
Well the first thing to do is to add some text so I'm going to click on my Text tool.
I'm going to make sure I have white as my color so I'm just going to type these values
in here so we can see the text.
And I'm going to use a font here that I downloaded from the web.
I just went looking for a really good graffiti font that would be sort of chunky and fairly
easy to use.
And the one I'm using is Degrassi, D-e-g-r-a-s-s-i.
So there's the word peace spelled out in Degrassi.
And I think looking back at the one that I had that these two letters could be kerned
better together.
So I'm going to go and grab the Character Spacing tool and I'm going to close up the
space between these two letters.
I'm sort of almost going to overlap the e over the p.
I just don't think that it was wide enough apart.
So let's have a look.
I think that's going to look a little bit more graffiti like.
So now I have my text I need to do something with it.
The first thing I'm going to do is actually change the color.
So I'm going to go looking for a sort of dark, red, crimson look and I'm going to click Ok.
And then I want to add a layer style to it so I'm going to rasterize this type and turn
it into a regular bitmap layer rather than being an editable type layer.
I'm going to click the Layer Styles tool and we're going to add a stroke to it.
And the stroke that I'm going to add is going to be a gradient so I'm going to go and shop
around my gradients to see what sort of gradient I can find.
And I think I'm just going to use this one.
It's sort of a pinky red sort of gradient.
But I want it to be quite large and I do want it to appear at the bottom with the dark area
at the bottom of the text.
So I just need to work here to see where it's going to look its best.
And we could scale it larger or smaller as desired.
So that's going to be my type effect so I'll click Ok.
And we could also if we wanted to for example add a bevel and emboss or a drop shadow or
something.
In fact the bevel and emboss looks pretty good on that.
I might actually go with that while I'm here and just give it the look of a slight beveled
look much as you might expect to see in a good piece of graffiti.
And you can change the gloss contour if you want to do something different with that.
But once we've got our effect we're ready to fill the text and then go ahead and create
it as an object on the wall.
Now to fill the text I'm first of all going to go and get my Magic Wand tool and I'm going
to create this as a single piece of text.
So I'm going to add a new layer and put it below this one, select the two and press Ctrl
or Command E to flatten that.
So that's virtually embedded the style into the layer.
So the text is just all that one layer which means that now I can click on the Magic Wand
tool and click outside the text and that allows me to select everything that is not the text.
Now I might want to add a couple of little bits in here, for example this space here
and perhaps these two spaces.
But I don't want much more than that.
Once I've got those selected I'm going to invert my selection with Select, Inverse and
I'm going to fill it with a color.
So I'm just going to sample a color from probably the graffiti itself or even the wall.
So I could go and get a sort of reddy brown color from the wall and perhaps make that
a bit redder.
And I'm going to add a new layer, place it below the graffiti text and just Alt Backspace
or Option Delete and that's going to fill the text with some color.
And then I can deselect my selection.
And again I'm just going to merge these two layers down with Ctrl or Command E. So that's
my text effect and the next thing I need to do is to put it on the wall.
So I'm going to select it and copy it, Edit, Copy.
So the text is now selected and copied to the Windows clipboard so I'm going to turn
off that layer and deselect the selection so all we're seeing is the wall.
And so I have somewhere to put my text I'm going to add a brand new layer to the image.
So now we're going into the vanishing point filter with Filter and Vanishing Point.
Now I already have a grid here and I want to get rid of it so I'm just going to click
on the grid and press the Backspace key.
That gets rid of the grid.
And this is what you'll see the first time you come in.
So you're going to build up a plane here.
So I'm just going to click at the four corners of my plane to get started.
And this is my grid.
Provided it's blue you can use it.
But this one is not a very good one so I'm going to fix it up before we go ahead.
What I want to do is line it up over a line through the building so that we can use it
to place the text in position.
So I think this looks pretty good.
So once I've got my grid I can press Ctrl V which is the Paste key to paste in the text
that I had on the Windows clipboard.
And when I move it over the grid you can see that it changes rotation so that it actually
is smaller at the back, larger at the front as it would be had it been painted on that
building and then photographed.
Now I don't want to have to deal with this light today so I'm just going to make the
graffiti small enough that it will position itself up here and I don't have to worry about
putting the light in front of the graffiti.
So once I've got the graffiti in place and scaled within this area I'm just going to
click Ok.
So that's put the graffiti on the wall but not in a particularly convincing way but we're
halfway there.
Now this is the image I was using as a texture file here so I'm just going to drag and drop
it into my main image and then I can close it down.
So I'm going to scale it so it looks pretty much the size of the paint job or the graffiti
and just pop it into place.
Now I want to copy it so I'm going to select this layer and choose Edit, Copy so that I
have this texture on the Windows clipboard.
I want to add it as a mask to this layer so I'm going to grab the text layer and add a
mask to it.
Now to get into a mask you can just Alt or Option click on the mask and that just puts
you over the top of the mask.
And what I want to do here is get rid of this and just do Ctrl or Command V to paste this
shape in.
And I want to make sure that it's going to be positioned over where the text is.
And I'm going to click back on the text.
And you can see what this has done is it's started to place the text on the wall because
it's actually made it a bit more grungy if you like.
And if it's not grungy enough what we can do is we can add some contrast to this.
So I'm going back into this layer here and I don't want that selection but I do what
this mask.
And now I can do Image and Adjustments and I can do a curves adjustment.
And this allows me to darken the mask.
Everywhere where the mask is dark we're going to see through to the bricks underneath.
So let's see how that looks.
Again, we're trying to get this image to look as if it's been painted on the wall and we're
seeing the wall through it.
We could also use a blending mode so I'm going to just run down the blending modes to see
what will give me the best result.
Usually darker is a good effect.
One of these darker or multiple blend modes will work pretty well.
I also think that there's a bit too much pink in this image so I may change down the pink
by just getting rid of it.
I'm going to do Image, Adjustments and I'll go Hue/Saturation.
And because I'm only on this text layer that's all I'm worried about I'm going to go to the
red channel and I'm going to drop the saturation in the red channel a bit and probably also
in the magentas.
And that will give me less saturation in that channel which again will tend to make this
image look, this graffiti look, a lot more aged and a lot more as if it has been put
on this wall and it's been there some time.
So I'll just fiddle around with the lightness and the saturation here.
And I can even adjust the hue if I want to for these reds and click Ok.
So there's the beginnings of the graffiti on the wall.
The other thing that I would do here is to blur this text slightly.
If we zoom into it you're going to see that there are a lot of really hard edges in here
and no graffiti artist is ever going to get edges that are that hard.
So with that layer selected I'm going to choose Filter and then Blur and then Gaussian Blur.
And obviously 143 pixels is way too much.
We need something more like about 1 to 1-1/2 pixels, maybe even 2.
What we're looking at doing here is just getting a softening of those edges so it looks less
laser sharp and again a bit more like it could have been created with a can of spray paint
rather than Photoshop.
So I'm going to find a sweet spot for that blur and just click Ok.
And we'll zoom out to see how that looks.
And probably as a final touch I would go get the Eraser tool.
And the Eraser tool, there are a lot of interesting brushes that you can select in the Photoshop
collection and you can make your own.
One of them that I would use here is something like this or like this one which has got quite
a bit of capacity to erase things.
I'm going to go into this very close up, make sure I still have the Eraser selected.
And I'm just going to work around the edges and perhaps try and soften some of these harder
edges.
And again making this look like it was actually on the wall and spray painted on the wall
so I'm getting a sort of dithering effect at the edge, also a bit more of the bricks
underneath showing through, so again we're getting the feeling that this might have been
painted.
But essentially the vanishing point filter is giving you the tool that you need to place
the text on the image and do it in a way that was really true to how that image proportion
is.
And then using various tools in Photoshop you can actually apply the image and really
make it look as if it has been painted on the wall.
So there's our before and there's our after.
And the one I showed you earlier was this one here.
It's just a different effect.
It's different colors.
But again a valid attempt at putting graffiti on the wall without the risk of being pulled
up by the police for doing so.
I'm Helen Bradley.
Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
Look out for more tutorials like this on this YouTube channel.
Consider subscribing to my channel and you'll be alerted when new videos are released.
And visit my website at projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and tutorials on Photoshop,
Lightroom, Illustrator, Photoshop Elements and a whole lot more.