Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. I'm going to show you how to create a simple,
but powerful, album portrait from a photo. Open a photo you'd like to use for this project.
I downloaded this one from Dreamstime.com. Go to Select and Color Range. Click "Highlights".
Drag the Fuzziness and the Range all the way to the right and click OK. This created a
selection of the white and lighter areas of your image. Invert the selection by pressing
Ctrl + or Cmd + Shift + I. We'll cut the selection from our image and copy it to its own layer.
Press Ctrl or Cmd + J. We want to make a new layer below the active layer. To do
this, Ctrl-click or Cmd-click the New Layer icon. We'll fill the empty layer with white,
but first, if your foreground and background colors aren't black and white respectively,
press "D" on your keyboard. Since white is our background color, press Ctrl or Cmd +
Delete. For this example, I want to hide the hair on the left side. If you want to mask
out areas on your subject, click the top layer to make it active and click the Layer Mask
icon to make a layer mask next to your cut-out subject. Open your Brush Tool and Brush Picker. We'll take
care of the size in a moment. The Hardness is 0% and the Opacity and Flow are both 100%.
Then, press Enter or Return. To make your brush bigger or smaller, press the right or
left Bracket key on your keyboard. Brush over the areas you want to mask out. To zoom into
areas, open your Zoom Tool by pressing "z" on your keyboard and then drag it over the
area you want to zoom into. Press "B" to open back your Brush Tool, adjust its size and
continue to brush over areas. To reposition your image, press and hold the Space bar and
drag it. Then, open back your Brush Tool and continue to brush over areas.
To fit your image back onto your canvas, press Ctrl or Cmd + 0.
Click the top layer to make it active
and click this icon to lock the transparent pixels.
Doing this allows us to fill the cut-out with colors without filling the transparent pixels.
Open your Gradient Tool
and make sure the Linear Gradient icon is active.
Click the Gradient bar to open the Gradient Editor.
Click "Noise" for the Gradient Type.
The gradient contains randomly-distributed colors.
The "Roughness" controls how gradual the transitions are between color bands in the gradient.
I'll keep mine at the defualt amount of 50%.
By dragging the sliders in the Red, Green and Blue components,
it'll adjust the colors within those components.
If you don't like the existing gradient...no problem.
Just click "Randomize" to show various gradients until you find one you like.
Then, click OK.