DAP - Blog of Debora Parentes | deboraparentes.com » Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorial – Face Transform with Type

Debora Parentes — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:41:05 +0000

In this tutorial, written again by Violet Bag, you are going to learn how to change a normal and basic image of a little kid and transform his face so that it appears to be constructed with text.
There are fifteen easy to follow steps to complete this tutorial and should not take you any longer than 30 minutes to complete.

You can download the source file, including the .PSD file, here:

Face with Type Source Files

And this is the final image you will learn to create:

Step 1

First we start by opening this Picture of the face of the kid below (source files).

Step2

We need to firstly resize the image so that it will work better with the parameters being used in this tutorial.
Go to Image > Image Size and apply the following settings:

Step 3

Now that we have our image resized go to the bottom part of the layers panel and add an Adjustment Layer: Curves.
Click on the icon that is a half black and half white circle, as you can see below.

Step 4

We now need to merge the Picture and the adjustment layer. Convert the background layer into a normal layer and double click on it and hit OK.
Then select the kid layer and the adjustment layer and press CTRL + ALT + E. You will now have your merged layer.

Step 5

Add another layer and fill it with black.

Step 6

Grab the text tool and draw a rectangle that covers the entire image, as you can see below:

Step 7

Start typing any text anything you want (this tut used Georgia, 8pt). What you need to do is select the paragraph mode to justified-center. Use the one that is selected in the picture below.

Step 8

Keep on typing until you cover the whole image with text…

Step 9

Now add a layer mask to this type layer. Hit the icon that is on the bottom of the layers palette, the one that is a rectangle with a circle inside.

Step 10

Now you need to click on the little eye that you see beside the layers to make the first two layers invisible. Once you do that you should see the kid’s
face only, select that layer. Hit CTRL+ A to select the whole image, and then CTRL + C to copy the kid’s face.

Step 11

Now, pay atention here. ALT + Click on the layer mask thumbnail.

Step 12

You will now see that your image has turned to white. Now Hit CTRL + V (or go to Edit > Paste).
And the face of the kid should be pasted on the mask.

Step 13

What we are seeing now is the mask. If you press ALT and click on the mask layer thumbnail it will give you the chance to modify the mask, not
the image. You can do it any time and to go back to your image just click on any other layer.

Step 14

Now we need to put all layers visible:

Step 15

You see, now we’re not seeing the mask anymore. As you can see the text has merged with the original image because of the mask.
Here’s what it looks like:

Step 16

To make it a little brighter let’s duplicate the type layer and lower the opacity to 46%:

Step 17 – Finished

This is the final result.
Hope you’ve enjoyed it and if you have any questions let me know. See ya.

The Author

Paola has been the author of todays tutorial, she is also known as Violet Bag and you can visit here website, Violetbag.com to view some of her awesome works and some more tutorials.

Designing a T-Shirt Mock Up in Photoshop

Debora Parentes — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:13:22 +0000

Use Photoshop to put artwork onto a tee shirt. View video from Layers Magazine

When designing for apparel, presentation of your proofs is very important. A detailed image of a piece simply will not suffice as an adequate proof. You want to hit the design home, and mocking it up on a t-shirt is what’s going to do the job. Apparel designs are much different than regular print jobs because you can potentially design around every nook and cranny of the garment, this is something you won’t be able to illustrate to your client with some large .jpeg. They hired you for your creative knack, and that’s what you’re going to need to bring to the table.

Now here at Go Media, we’re always mocking up something – many of them tees – and after a while we realized that providing a pack of tees geared towards designers for presentation purposes would be very cool. And we did just that… a twenty piece pack of tees that comes separated in five colors with four variations of each. Fronts and backs, clipping masks to isolate your artwork onto the appropriate areas, and even a shadow layer to placed conveniently on top to give it that authentic printed look! We took a lot of time and pride out on these to make sure they came out just right, because bringing the best to our clients is a goal we all share as designers.

In this tutorial, I’ll be using a design that I created for Kick Rocks – an up and coming apparel company.

Author’s note: This process will also cover how I mocked up the “Designing on a Budget” tutorial’s end result (Vomit Whistle) onto a tee – which is the very thing that helped spark the idea to make the pack and this accompanying tutorial (thanks “nobahdi” who asked the initial question of how the shadows were applied to the tee, and everyone else who commented on the tutorial!).

Now we’re going to take our tee from the pack (Blue Front Wrinkled.tiff file) and open it up in Photoshop.

Now focus on your layer panel. This is the structure we came up with for these files.

Since the design that we’ll be using is intended for a white shirt, we’ll need to change the shirt layer that’s currently blue, to white. Before hand, I make the background layer a dull grey so we can distinguish the white shirt completely from the background. I then use the following settings using the Hue/Saturation tool to achieve the desired look.

Automatically you’ll notice that the shadow layers look way too dark. So we’re going to bump the opacity down to 50%.

Now we import our art. Open the file in Photoshop (and make sure it’s a hi-res export) and place it in the Your Art layer. Dragging it will work, copy and pasting, etcetera, etcetera.

Now we’re going to use the mask layer to make our printable area the only visible spot on the design. Grab the actual mask from the “Mask” layer (not the whole layer), and drag and drop it right onto the “Your Art” layer. You should now have no excess left around your shirt, and all wrinkles, the collar, and overlaps are preserved as if the shirt were truly printed. The best part is that you can still edit and move around your design. Make it bigger – move it off the edge – whatever – it will stay within the bounds of the shirt because of the mask. Check out the following image to get a better idea of what I mean here.

Now your mockup is done. If you feel you need more shadow now that the design has been placed in… then bump up the opacity of the shadow layer and you’re good to go.

Author’s note: I like to get snazzy so I’ll place some crazy texture on the background and fidget with it to make look all dark and complimenting to the garment. These additional presentation doo-dads often get the client very excited and way more interested in your work, versus a dull and boring round of proofs. And nobody wants to be stuck re-illustrating 3 to 5 times because of a half-assed proof’s inability to wow the client.

We’ve also got a quick video of how to set up the layers on vimeo.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and got to learn a little about the functionality of our new Apparel Template pack. Taking a progressive approach to the mock-up phase of apparel design is something that should be taken very seriously. As always, we provide (and use) the necessary tools to do so. Thanks for reading everybody, take care.

Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland, Ohio. We specialize in Brand Development, Website Design, and Illustration. We deliver effective designs with legendary customer service, giving our clients an unparalleled experience.
Hire us for your next creative project. learn more | contact us

This post was written by:

Dave – who has written 8 posts on GoMediaZine.

Dave is Go Media’s hell raising wild child. Illustration and petrified whale bone are the two things this guy lives for… next to barbacoa tacos and fried plantains. When he’s not gently tapping and stroking the surface of his wacom with his stylus… he’s relaxing to some contemporary jazz. More than likely illustrating some vomiting skulls in fitted caps, half-naked zombie women with dookie rope chains, or demon toddlers chugging tequila on their big wheels.

How to present your portfolio in a Creative (NOT BORING!) way

Debora Parentes — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:36:38 +0000

Post by Debora Parentes

Having your portfolio showing flat versions of your best work can many times become very boring to the person viewing it. Especially if you are looking to impress a new client or employer.

A great (and easy) solution is to take photographs of your work. You don’t need to have a professional camera. You can use any camera (even the iPhone camera does a good job!) and modify your image in Photoshop for that professional look.

If by any chance, your project did not get printed, or was an online version only, I would recommend for your to print it on your home printer and then take a picture of it. It does sound like a lot of work, but trust me, you will be impressed with the final results.

Don’t want to photograph or print your files? Another great solution is to mock-up your designs in Photoshop. How? Using blank templates. Graphicriver offers a great variety of templates for a very affordable price. You can also find free templates all of the web.

You can also find many PSD templates on this blog free for download. Many of these templates I used on my personal portfolio.

How to Photograph your Artwork

Mock-Up Files Templates

DAP Blog Mock-Up Templates

DAP T -Shirts Mockup Templates

More T-Shirts PSD Mockup PSD

PSD Mock Up usiness Cards

Free iMac PSD Mockup by~nrmb

PSD Corporate Identity MockUp

Corporate Idendity Mock includes CD

iPhone Mockup

iPhone GUI PSD Mock up