Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. I'm going to show you a quick method to create
stunning, custom text portraits. We'll be using what's called a word cloud to create our text.
There are many word cloud websites and I included nine of them in the video's description below. The
one that I preferred the most is WordArt, so I ll be using that in this video, however, feel
free to use any word cloud generator you want. Open a focused, high resolution photo of a face.
I downloaded this one from Shutterstock. The effect will look best if there are some shadows
on one side. We want the background behind our subject to be black. If it isn't black,
we'll make a selection around our subject, so we can separate it from its background. There
are many ways to do this, however, in most cases, I like to use the Quick Selection Tool. If you're
using CC 2018 or later and are using this tool as well, click the "Select Subject" button. If you're
using an earlier version, just drag the Quick Selection Tool over your subject to select it. To
remove areas of the selection, press and hold Alt or Option as you drag over those areas. If you're
using CC 2015.5 or later, click the "Select and Mask" button. If you re using an earlier version,
click "Refine Edge". Both of these filters will help us to refine the edges of soft or feathery
areas like hair. Open the View Mode. We have seven modes from which to choose. For this example,
I'll use the black and white mode, since it gives us the starkest view of our selection.
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 edges of the hair.
We'll feather it a bit, increase the contrast a little,
and shift the edge in. Next, we'll decontaminate the colors,
which will prevent the background tones from leaching into the edges of our subject.
I'll change the view mode to "On Black", so you can see how the edge of the hair
fills in once we decontaminate the colors. I ll increase the mode's opacity to pure black.
Check "Decontaminate Colors" and increase the amount to 100%.
To place black below our subject, Ctrl or Cmd-click the New Layer icon to make
a new layer below the active layer. 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". We'll convert our visible image into a Smart
Object, so we can modify it non-destructively. To do this, Shift-click the bottom layer to make all
the layers active and click the icon at the upper, right. Click "Convert to Smart Object". Next,
we ll create it as our source of the displacement map, which will bend our word cloud text around
the contours of our subject's head. Click the icon at the upper, right again and this time,
click "Duplicate Layer". When this window pops up, click New and let's name it "Displacement".
Notice it immediately created a new document of the same name.
Displacement maps look best when they're blurred, so go to Filter, Blur and Gaussian Blur.
I'll blur it 4 pixels, but you may want to adjust this amount based on your photo's
size and resolution. Go to File and "Save As". Save it to your Desktop for easy access
as a Photoshop PSD document and click "Save". If you see this message, just click OK.
Now that we saved it, we can close the document.
Next, we ll create a black square shape that we'll use to fill with text. Go to File and New.
Let's make the Width and the Height 1000 pixels per inch and the resolution 150 pixels per inch.
The background is black. Go to File and Save As. Save it to your Desktop. I'll name it "Square",
but you can name it whatever you like. Save it as a JPEG and click Save. When you see this window,
just click OK. Now that we saved it, we can close it. For the purposes of this tutorial, let's use
WordArt.com to create our word cloud. Open your Browser and type in "wordart.com". Once the
website opens, click "Create Now". Since I already saved a couple of word clouds on it before,
it opened this page for me, which listed the word clouds I saved. I'll click "Create".
At this point, find some text you'd like to use. Word clouds look best when there are many words
in your text. You could type it in or find it elsewhere. I'll use some lyrics from a song by
The Beach Boys, so I'll open my Browser to the page I found earlier and drag my cursor over the
lyrics. I'll press Ctrl or Cmd + C to copy it and open back WordArt. Once you copied the text, click
"Import". Click inside the window and press Ctrl or Cmd + "v" to paste your text into it.
I suggest checking the top 3 parameters and then click "Import Words".
It prioritized words based on the number of times it appears in your text.
The more times a specific word appears, the bigger that word will look in your word cloud.
At the lower, left, you can opt to have your words all uppercase,
lowercase, or Capitalized. You can also replace a word with another if you like. Click "Options".
You can choose to allow it to repeat the words, repeat none on them or manually select which
words you want to repeat. You can choose to maximize the words to fill available spaces
or use the size column, as well as using internet links. Click "Shapes". Click "Add Image"
and "Open image from your computer". Find the black square you saved earlier
and click "Open". I'll make its Threshold 100% and the Edges:
0. Notice, our black square was added to Shapes and is active. Open "Fonts".
I'll use "League Gothic", but feel free to choose any font you like. Click "Layout". Click
the "Horizontal and Vertical" box. Click "Define" and drag the word amount slider all the way to the
right. This will ensure the word cloud can accept up to 999 words. Drag its Density all the way to
the right, as well, which fills our word cloud with as much text as possible. Click "Style".
Since our text will be pure white on black, I'll drag the Color Emphasis all the way to the left.
Click the Background color box, pick black, and click "Apply". Drag the background image to 0%.
For the "Word colors", click the "Custom" tab and any of the colors to the right of it.
Click on each color to remove it. Pick white or you can type in six "F"s in the hexadecimal field.
Then, click "Add to Palette" and close the window.
If you want to see another layout using the same parameters, click "Visualize" again.
We can adjust any of the settings. For example, to see the words in all uppercase,
click "Words" again and click "Upper". To see it, click "Visualize". I think my word cloud will look
better if the largest words were a bit smaller, so I'll click "Options" and next to "Size", I'll
click "Use size column" instead of "Maximize". Once again, to see it, I'll click "Visualize".
Once you're happy with your word cloud, click "Download". The "Standard" sizes are free, while
the HD versions cost money. For our purpose, the Standard size is fine, so click "Standard JPEG".
It'll download it to your computer's default location, which in most cases is the "Download"
folder. If you're not sure where it downloaded ot, click this arrow and click "Show in Folder".
Minimize your Browser. Click the New Layer icon to make a new layer and fill it with black. Go
to File and "Place Embedded". This import files as Smart Objects. Find and click your word cloud
and click "Place". Next, we'll resize it. At the top, make sure the chain-link icon is active,
which links the width and height of our text block. Drag the scrubby slider over the "W" or
the "H" to the left or right to reduce or enlarge our word cloud. I suggest making it approximately
this size. Then, press Enter or Return. Change the Blend Mode to Lighten. You'll see why in a moment.
Drag it over to one side. Make a copy of it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J. Open your Transform Tool
by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + T and go to a corner. Press and hold the Shift key as you rotate your
text clockwise until it snaps to 90 degrees. Then, press Enter or Return. Changing the Blend Mode to
Lighten allows us to see the text under it. Press and hold the Shift key as you drag it to the right
until they're flush with each other. Make sure there s no gap between the two. Make a copy of it
and drag it down and over. Make the original word cloud active and make another copy of it.
Drag it into position, so its flush with the other text leaving no gaps. We'll convert our visible
image into a Smart Object by making the top layer active and Shift-clicking the bottom word cloud
layer to make all of them active and then clicking "Convert to Smart Object". We'll make a separate
document of the Smart Object by opening the fly-out list again and clicking "Duplicate Layer".
Open the "Document" list and click "New". Let's name it "word clouds".
Open your Rectangular Marquee Tool and place your cursor on the corner of the text, itself,
making sure you don't include the black border. Drag the tool to the opposite corner of your text
and again, make sure you don't include the black border. Go to Image and Crop. Deselect it by
pressing Ctrl or Cmd + D. We'll make our word cloud montage into a pattern by going to Edit
and "Define Pattern". When you see this window, just click OK. Now that we saved the pattern,
we can close it. When this window pops up, click "No", since we don't want to overwrite
our Photoshop document with this image of our pattern. Now that we saved our text as a pattern,
we can delete the layer that we used to create it by pressing the "Delete" key. Double-click
the black layer to open its Layer Style window. Click "Pattern Overlay". Our word cloud pattern
should immediately appear. If doesn't, open your list of patterns, scroll to the bottom, and click
it. The Blend Mode is Normal, the Opacity is 100%, the Angle is 0 degrees and I'll keep the
Scale at 100% for now. If you want to adjust its size, just drag the slider to the left or right.
Convert this into a Smart Object, as well and drag the face layer to the top.
Change its Blend Mode to "Multiply". We'll adjust its brightness levels by clicking
the Adjustment Layer icon and clicking "Levels". Drag the Input Highlights,
Shadows and Midtones until your portrait's brightness and contrast are to your liking.
Next, we'll displace our text to conform to the contours of our subject.
Make the word cloud layer active and go to Filter, Distort, and "Displace".
I'll displace the horizontal and vertical scales 20 each,
however, you may want to adjust these amounts depending on your document's size and resolution.
Tick "Stretch to Fit" and "Repeat Edge Pixels". In case you're wondering, "Wrap Around" fills
voids with content from the opposite edge of our image, while "Repeat Edge Pixels" extends the
pixels along our image s edge in the direction we specify. Find the Displacement PSD file you saved
at the beginning and click "Open". Next, I'll show you how to make the bottom end look cut-out.
Make a new layer below our text by Ctrl-clicking or Cmd-clicking the New Layer icon.
We'll fill it with black. You may have noticed that our colors inverted when we added the Levels
adjustment layer. Press Ctrl or Cmd + Delete to fill our empty layer with the background color.
Make the text layer active and press "z" to open your Zoom Tool. Drag it over a part of the bottom
of your image. To reposition it on your screen, press and hold the Space Bar as you drag it.
Open your Polygonal Lasso Tool
and draw paths around the words you want to keep. The words below your path will be masked out.
Connect the path with the first point you made. You know you completed the path when you see
this small circle at the lower, right of the polygonal lasso tool. Then, zoom back out. We'll
make an inverted layer mask of the selection by Ctrl-clicking or Cmd-clicking the Layer mask icon.
Lastly, I'll show you how to add an additional displacement
map to our portrait. Make a copy of your word cloud and reduce its opacity to 50%.
We're going to rotate this copy, but before we do, click the chain-link icon to unlink with the
layer with the layer mask. Doing this allows us to resize and reposition either of them
independently of the other. With the text active, open your Transform Tool. If you see this message,
it's just letting us know that the displacement filter will be temporarily turned off while we use
the Transform Tool. Just click OK. Go to a corner and press and hold Shift as you rotate until it
snaps to 90 degrees. We'll enlarge it to cover our entire subject by going to any of the corners
and pressing and holding Alt or Option as you drag it out. Then, press Enter or Return.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!