Hey, this is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you how to transform a headshot photo into a powerful portrait made of text.
Before we begin, if you're not already a subscriber to Blue Lightning TV and want to be notified
as soon as I upload new Photoshop tutorials, hit that "Subscribe" button.
Open a headshot photo you'd like to use for this project.
I downloaded this one and the others from Shutterstock.
The first step is to crop it.
Open your Crop Tool.
Click the Width, Height, and Resolution and clear them.
For its width, I'll type in 2000 pixels, but feel free to make it any size you want.
Keeping the height empty will allow us to crop it as we like.
I'll make its resolution 150 pixels per inch.
I suggest making the resolution anywhere from 72 to 300 pixels per inch.
Drag your image to the center and then drag the crop's bounding box to frame your subject to your liking.
At the top, make sure "Delete Cropped Pixels" is checked.
This will ensure that our text will conform to the contours of our subject correctly when
we apply a displacement map to it later.
Click the checkmark to accept it.
To zoom into it, press Ctrl or Cmd and the plus key on your keyboard a few times
or press Ctrl or Cmd + 0 to fill your canvas with it.
Next, we'll separate our subject from its background.
In CC 2020, Adobe added the "Remove Background" button which automatically does what it says.
To use it, unlock the background and open the Properties panel.
If you don't see it, go to Window and Properties.
Click "Remove Background".
Photoshop makes a layer mask of the subject, thereby masking out the background.
It does a good job overall but sometimes it has a problem with soft or feathery areas like hair.
I prefer doing it another way which is to open the Quick Selection Tool
and clicking the "Select Subject" button.
I'll go to Select and either click "Select and Mask" or Shift-click it to open "Refine Edge".
Both of them allow us to refine soft edges such as hair.
I did in-depth tutorials on both filters, so if you want to watch them, I provided their
links in this video's description.
Click "Smart Radius".
This detects smooth and hard edges.
To adjust the size of your brush, make sure the CapsLock key is off and press the right
or left bracket key on your keyboard.
Brush over the soft edges of your subject to refine them.
Check "Decontaminate Colors" which fills in the edges, so the background colors don't leach into our subject.
This is called "color fringing".
I'll drag the amount to 100%.
Output it to a "New Layer with Layer Mask" and click OK.
Ctrl or Cmd-click the layer mask to select its shape.
Go to Select and Save Selection . Then, click OK and deselect it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + D.
We ll use this saved selection later.
We'll create a black layer under the top layer by Ctrl or Cmd-clicking the New Layer icon.
Before we fill it with black, check your foreground and background colors.
If they aren't black and white respectively, press "D" on your keyboard.
Since black is our foreground color, press Alt or Option + Delete.
Make the top layer active and click the Adjustment Layer icon.
Click "Black & White".
Click the New Layer icon to make a new layer.
In this layer, we'll create a soft , black vignette.
Open the "Elliptical Marquee Tool" and go to the center of your document.
Click and hold your mouse or pen as you press Alt or Option + Shift.
Drag out a circle.
If you want to reposition it, add the Spacebar which will allow you to move the selection.
Make it approximately this size.
If you're having difficulty moving the selection, release your mouse or pen and go to Edit and Transform Selection.
Then move the selection to the center and press Enter or Return.
Go to Select, Modify, and Feather.
I ll feather it 150 pixels.
Keep in mind, if the resolution of your document is higher or lower than 150 pixels per inch,
you ll need to adjust the feathering amount relative to its resolution.
Invert the selection by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + Shift + I. Fill the selection with black
and deselect it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + D.
We'll convert our visible image into a Smart Object, so we can modify it non-destructively
and if we want to, replace our subject with another without having to re-do most of the effects.
To do this, Shift-click the black layer to make the other layers above it active and
click the icon at the upper, right.
Click "Convert to Smart Object".
Make a new layer below our black and white subject.
In this layer, we ll add our text.
The text itself can be from a book, a poem, music lyrics, or from any other source.
Before we add the text, temporarily hide the subject.
For my text, I'll use lyrics from a song.
Open your source of text.
We'll copy it onto our clipboard by highlighting it
and pressing Ctrl or Cmd + C. Open any word application and press Ctrl or Cmd + v to paste the text onto it.
If your text isn't in paragraph form, we'll need to reformat it so there are no breaks between the lines.
Highlight it and copy it to your clipboard.
Open your Horizontal Type Tool and place your cursor a bit inside a corner.
Drag the tool to just inside the opposite corner.
Then, press Ctrl or Cmd + v to paste in your text.
Continue to paste it in until the whole document is filled with it.
To change the font and other aspects of it, double-click the large "T" in the Layers panel
to highlight all the text.
Click the Character panel icon or go to Window and Character.
I'm using a font called, "American Captain", which I provided a link to, but feel free
to use whatever font you like.
Adjust its size.
We ll adjust the space between the lines of text known as leading by hovering our cursor
over the leading icon.
When it changes into a scrubby slider, click and drag it to the left or right to decrease
or increase the leading.
We can do the same to move our entire block of text down or up by dragging the baseline shift icon.
When we re happy with our text, click the checkmark at the top and close the character panel.
Keep in mind, we can always change any aspect of our text at any time.
Later, we'll distort our text to make it look as if it wrapped itself around the contours of our subject.
To do this, we'll apply a displacement map of our subject to our text.
Since displacement maps give the best results when they're blurred, make your subject visible
and active and go to Filter, Blur, and Gaussian Blur.
I'll blur it 10 pixels based on my document's resolution of 150 pixels per inch.
Go to File and click "Save a Copy".
This will save our document under a new name, but our original document stays open for editing.
Save it to your Desktop for quick access.
Name it, "Displacement" and save it as Photoshop PSD file.
Then, click Save.
If you see this message, just click OK.
Now that we saved the displacement map to our Desktop, we can delete the blur by pressing
Ctrl or Cmd + z on our keyboard to undo the last step which was to add the blur.
Hide the subject and make the text layer active.
Convert it into a Smart Object.
Go to Filter, Distort, and Displace.
I'll displace the horizontal and vertical scales 20 pixels each based on my document's size and resolution.
Tick "Stretch to Fit" and "Repeat Edge Pixels".
Navigate to your Displacement file, click it, and click "Open".
Notice our text got distorted based on the displacement map of our subject.
Make the subject visible.
We'll clip it to our text by making our subject into a clipping mask.
To do this, hover your cursor between it and the text.
When your cursor changes into a clipping mask icon, click it.
Another way to clip it is to go to Layer and "Create Clipping Mask".
Make a new layer below the active layer and fill it with black.
Make your subject active and click the adjustment layer icon.
Click "Levels".
Click the clipping mask icon to clip it to our subject.
Drag the Input Highlights to 180 or you could just type it in.
Make the Input Midtones 1.15.
Make your text layer active and make a copy of it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J.
We'll jump the copy to the top of the Layers panel by pressing Ctrl or Cmd and the right
bracket key on our keyboard.
We need to re-clip Levels and the subject to the original text layer.
Open the Channels panel.
If you don't see it, go to Window and Channels.
Ctrl or Cmd-click the Alpha 1 thumbnail to select its shape.
Open back the Layers panel and Alt or Option-click the Layer Mask icon to make an inverted layer
mask of the selection.
Click the Adjustment Layer icon and click "Invert".
Clip to the text copy.
Click the Adjustment Layer icon again and click "Solid Color".
In the hexadecimal field, type in 8BCFFF and press Enter or Return.
I'll show you how to change the color in a moment.
Clip it to the text copy and make the text copy active.
Reduce its opacity to 35%.
We'll delete the Displacement Map from the text copy by dragging the Smart Filter to the trash.
Double-click the Solid Color adjustment layer to open it and drag the Hue Slider to any color you want.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!