Hi.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you how to transform a photo of someone or something into a spray paint,
stenciled portrait.
I provided this image of a weathered concrete wall that you can paste your stenciled portrait
onto.
Its link is in my video's description or project files.
Before we begin, if you want to know as soon as I upload new Photoshop tutorials, smash
that "Subscribe" button and please remember to click that "Like" button to let You Tube
know you like my stuff.
Open a photo of someone or something that you'd like to use for this project.
I downloaded this one from Shutterstock.
The first step is to separate our subject from its background.
Let's use the Quick Selection Tool to do this.
I find that a radius of 10 pixels generally works well in most cases.
Drag your tool over your subject to select it.
For this image, I'll be just selecting my subject's head.
To remove areas of the selection, press and hold Alt or Option as you drag over those
areas.
It's not necessary to refine its edges, since we'll be making it look like a stencil, which
has hard edges.
To check your selection, press "Q" on your keyboard to see it as a quick mask.
Press "Q" again to revert it back into a selection.
Once you're happy with it, press Ctrl or Cmd + J to cut and copy the inside of the selection
onto its own layer.
We'll convert it onto a Smart Object, so we can modify it nondestructively.
To do this, click the icon at the upper right and click "Convert to Smart Object".
Go to Filter and Filter Gallery.
To reduce your subject's size in the Preview window, press Alt or Option and the minus
key on your keyboard.
Open the "Sketch" folder and click "Stamp".
By sliding the "Light/Dark balance" and the "Smoothness", we can refine the amount of
detail we want in our stencil.
If you want to reveal more detail in the black parts of your stencil, make a copy of it by
pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J. Double-click "Filter Gallery" of the copy to open the filter and
fit your stencil onto the Preview window.
Adjust the setting amounts to bring out more detail in the black parts.
For now, don't be concerned that the other parts are losing detail.
We'll restore them back in a minute.
We'll hide the copy with an inverted layer mask.
To do this, Alt or Option-click the Layer Mask icon.
By brushing white over the layer mask, we'll restore back those details in the black parts
of our stencil.
Open your Pencil Tool and invert your colors by pressing "x" on your keyboard, so white
is your foreground color.
Open the Pencil Picker.
We'll adjust its size it a moment.
Its Hardness and Opacity are both 100%.
To make your pencil bigger or smaller, press the right or left bracket on your keyboard.
Draw over the areas you want to restore.
Double-click an empty area of the lower stencil's layer to open its Layer Style window.
Click "Stroke".
The color is black, the size is 15 pixels, and the Position is inside.
The Blend Mode is Normal, and the Opacity is 100%.
Hide the photo and make the top layer active.
Click the New Layer icon to make a new layer.
In this layer, we'll create a composite snapshot of our visible image by pressing Ctrl + Alt
+ Shift + E on Windows or Cmd + Option + Shift + E on a Mac.
Ctrl or Cmd-click the New Layer icon to make a new layer under it.
We'll fill the empty layer with white.
Since our background color is white, press Ctrl or Cmd + Delete.
Make the composite snapshot active.
We'll fill the transparent area surrounding our subject with white.
To do this, open the Fill window by pressing Shift plus the F5 key at the top of your keyboard.
Pick white for the contents and "Behind" for the blending mode.
Click the Layer Mask icon to make a layer mask next to the active layer.
Go to Filter, Render and Clouds.
Go back to Filter.
Click Blur and Gaussian Blur.
Blur it 20 pixels.
Open Levels by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + L. For the Input Shadow level, type in 80 and for
the Input Highlight level, type in 180.
Shift-click the layer mask to hide it and make the layer next to it active.
Go to Filter, Blur, and Lens Blur.
The Lens Blur filter gives us the ability to customize the blur more than any other
blur filter.
By sliding the Iris Radius to 100, we can see that our entire image is blurred out,
however, if we make the Depth Map Source from "None" to Layer Mask", it uses our cloud filter
layer mask as the source.
Where there's white in the layer mask, our image is blurry and conversely, where there's
black in the layer mask, our image is sharp.
Keep the rest of the settings at there default amounts.
We'll fade the Lens Blur effect by going to Edit and "Fade Lens Blur".
It's important to note that the only time we can do this is right after we use the Lens
Blur filter.
We won't be able to fade it later.
Fade it to 80%.
To give it a spray paint look, change its Blend Mode to "Dissolve".
We're not going to see the effect yet, but we will.
Press Ctrl or Cmd + A to select our entire image and Ctrl or Cmd + C to copy it.
We'll paste it onto the layer mask, which will replace the clouds, but before do, Shift-click
the layer mask to make it visible and then, press Ctrl or Cmd + V to paste our portrait
into it.
Invert the layer mask by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + I. Make the portrait active.
We can now see that it s starting to look stippled.
When we fill it with black, the effect becomes stronger.
Shift-click the white layer to make it active as well and press Ctrl or Cmd + E to merge
them together.
If we press Ctrl or Cmd + 1 to zoom into our image to its full size, we can see that the
stippling is too sharp to represent spray paint.
To resolve this, we'll blur it a little.
Go to Filter, Blur, and Gaussian Blur.
Blur it point 5 pixels.
To fit it back onto your visible canvas, press Ctrl or Cmd + 0.
If you want to place it onto the concrete wall I provided or another background of your
choosing, press "v" to open your Move Tool and drag the portrait onto the tab of the
background.
Without releasing your mouse or pen, drag it down and release.
Change its Blend Mode to Multiply.
To resize and reposition it, open your Transform Tool by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + T.
At the top, make sure the chain-link icon is active.
This links the Transform's width and height, so no matter what percentage we make it, the
portrait will retain its aspect ratio.
Hover your cursor over the "w" or "h".
Our cursor becomes a "scrubby slider".
Drag it to the left or right to decrease or increase our portrait's size.
To reposition your portrait over the background, just drag it.
Continue to tweak it until you like its size and position.
If you want to angle it, go to a corner, and rotate it.
To accept it, press Enter or Return.
Lastly, I'll show you how we can blend it into the background.
Double-click an empty area of your portrait's layer to open its Layer Style window.
We'll use the "Blend If" filter to blend in our portrait.
Basically, Blend If uses the luminosity of layers to blend them together.
"This Layer" represents the active layer, which in this case, is our portrait, while
the "Underlaying Layer" represents the layers under the portrait.
In this case, it's the concrete wall.
When we drag the black slider of "This Layer" to the right, the black tones of the portrait
disappear.
Conversely, dragging the white slider to the left makes the lighter tones disappear.
When we drag the sliders of the "Underlying Layer", it pushes the lightest tones or darkest
tones of the concrete wall through the portrait depending on which end we're dragging.
To make the transitions smoother, Alt or Option-click the middle of the triangular slider to split
it in two.
Drag either the left or right half across.
Play with these sliders until you like the balance between your portrait and the background.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
Thanks for watching!