- [Ben] Hello, my name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX,
and I'm gonna be using Sapphire for Photoshop
to take our blank canvas
and turn it into something much more interesting
with our Builder effects.
(inspiring music)
(air whooshing)
Okay, so I'm in Photoshop with a completely blank canvas,
it's 1920 by 1080 with just a background shape.
And I'm gonna make this a bit more interesting
using Sapphire.
Now, the first thing I always do
is turn the layer that we're working on into a smart object.
So I'm gonna right click, convert to smart object.
This means we have a lot more flexibility
to play around with things at a later date.
So let's come up to filter, Boris FX, Sapphire,
and this will launch the effect Builder.
It always seems a bit intimidating
when we start with a blank canvas,
which is why Sapphire comes with so many presets.
So I'm gonna come up to the top and hit load
to come into our preset browser.
And I'm gonna go straight over to Builder effects,
because these are the more complex effects
that are built up out of more than one single filter.
And we have almost 300 of these now.
So I'm gonna filter these a little bit more
to see what we can do.
So I'm gonna click on my add filter,
and I'm gonna go down to the bottom,
and go to the version filters.
So in 2020.5, we started bringing in version filters
and we can look at the newest presets
just by clicking on 2022.5.
And we have a good number of background presets.
This has been a bit of a focus of the presets
in this particular release.
Now, if we were working
in the video plugin version of Sapphire,
we could see these backgrounds in motion.
But we can't really do that in Photoshop,
because we're working on a still frame.
So how do we come in and change these up?
Well, let's take a look at chrome tentacles,
that's a preset made by John Dickinson,
and I'm just gonna hit load.
And this is gonna load it up into the workspace,
and we can see it's made up
of quite a lot of different filters.
Now, as I said, we don't actually have a way
to change the frame on this,
but there are different ways
within the filter to move it forwards, of course.
And when we're doing something like this,
always start to look at the top effects first,
because generally speaking,
these are the places
where, you know, most of the ground work is being done.
If we look at black background,
that's just a black background,
so that's not very interesting.
So let's move quickly on to texture neurons.
And when we want to move something forward in time,
my rule of thumb is to look for something
that's called phase start.
And if we take a little look down at our parameters here,
we have one that's called phase start right here.
and I can move this forwards and backwards,
and I can get this sort of tentacle arm moving forwards
and backwards as well.
And if we want to change this in other ways,
maybe we can have a look at things like morph X and Y,
just to get a different look on there as well,
and we can definitely see this is a chrome tentacle.
And let's see how this works with something else as well.
So if I load up another preset, come to my filters,
go down to the version filters and go 2022.5,
let's take a look at something else,
maybe we'll take a look
at the '80s glass warp background.
Let's load that one in.
And let's look for the same thing.
So I'm gonna come up quite close to the top
and I have my gradient multi,
which is just creating my colors.
And I have my wave warps one here,
and low and behold,
we have phase start and B phase start here.
And if I change these up,
we're starting to warp around a little bit,
and we come down to the warp bubble.
And instead of our morph,
we have this thing called shift start,
and we can just be playing around with that
until we find the balance that we actually want here.
And I'll hit okay on that,
and that will just load that into Photoshop for me.
So when we're looking
to change how our backgrounds look in Photoshop,
my top tips are start from the top of the node tree,
look for something that's called phase start.
And once you've got that in the right place,
maybe work your way a little bit further down the tree,
finding something that says shift X, Y, or morph X, Y.
And those are usually gonna be the parameters
that are gonna create the biggest changes for you
when you're wanting to move the backgrounds in time.
(upbeat music)
My name is Ben Brownlee for Boris FX.
I hope that's been helpful for you,
and I look forward to seeing you
in another Sapphire Photoshop tutorial
in the very near future.
Thanks for watching.
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or any of the Boris FX products,
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