Keeping it Simple (sorta) With Just Two Expert Photoshop Techniques!

Hey everyone welcome back to the texture Labs channel so one of my favorite places to scrub through and look at artwork on my phone is not social media it's this just watch movies app this is not a sponsored video or anything I just love looking at the thumbnails and I bet 99 of these made their way through Photoshop in one way or another they're.

All fighting for your attention and the very best ones are like little exercises in efficiency a clear and specific image maybe some single cool thing happening with the typography so I thought I'd make a video where I try to work within that format I want to use one photograph and focus on a single process to create an eye-catching image I want to keep it.

Simple but I'm going to use a process that really asks us to stretch the way we think about color in Photoshop then we'll give the type some nice organic glowing effects with an approach that actually represents kind of a breakthrough in Photoshop for me so I'm excited to share it with you guys let's get into Photoshop and get started.

All right in the first part of this video I'm going to take this black and white image and introduce all kinds of interesting colorful effects without actually putting any color on this or any other layer instead we're going to create some differentiation between the red the green and the blue channels and that's going to sort of magically.

Generate color it'll work like this I'm going to duplicate this layer then double click on it and set this one to be just the red Channel you guys might have seen this before if I transform this layer it's kind of the go-to way to create this offset Channel effect so I'm flipping it horizontally and we get this red and cyan kind of symmetrical 3D look.

It's a cool trick we've separated the red from the green and the blue channels but I do feel like I see this color palette used a lot and it has a very specific association with old-fashioned 3D glasses so let's change it up a little bit I'm going to make one more copy of this layer and on this one I'm going to set it to be the green Channel.

But I'm going to bring the opacity down to 50 opacity so what we've got is blue and half the green Channel down here and red and half the green Channel up here let's check out the channels individually so red is flipped this way blue is flipped the other way and green is half and half we can also visualize it like this we separated the channels.

From each other then split the green up and sprinkled half on each side so we end up with I think a really cool blue and orange palette and let's complicate things a little bit further I'm going to create a new layer and it's just going to be a black and white gradient but then I'm going to double click on the layer and set this one to be 50 opacity.

And this one's going to be just the blue Channel and we get some really awesome color variation going using just black and white layers so where are all these colors coming from well in a black and white image the red the green and the blue values are equal on each pixel but now that we've made each of these channels a little bit different from.

Each other the red the green and the blue values are not equal and that results in colored pixels so for example we've taken this gradient and only apply applied it to the blue Channel meaning we've made some of the blue darker down here which emphasizes the red and green channels and we've Amplified the blue up here creating more blues and magentas.

And yeah it's a little bit tough to visualize how that works but it's at least worth having a sense of the forces at work and now that we're getting maybe a little bit more comfortable pushing the channels around let's get even a little bit more experimental so how about another layer with a gradient in it this is going to be a radial gradient.

But I'm going to set this layer to Overlay kind of an old-fashioned Photoshop trick a radial gradient set to Overlay creates kind of a vignette and draws your eye toward the center of the image but let's also mess with the channels on this one so since we already put a gradient in the blue Channel let's turn off the blue channel for this one.

And leave it in the red and the green maybe bring down the opacity a little bit so what does that mean when we use an overlay blending mode and do we manipulate the channels well it's actually not too crazy it just means that in the red Channel we can see the overlay just like a regular overlay in the green Channel we can see it as well.

But in the blue channel it's totally absent meaning we've boosted the red and the Green in the middle giving us more of these green and orange tones and we've darkened the red and the green out here resulting in more blues and magentas and it's the slight variation between the channels that adds up to give us all this awesome color kind of.

Crazy to see five black and white layers and end up with this image all right in the second part of this video I want to create some nice organic glowing typography but I'm going to do it in a way that I can't believe I only just realized was possible in Photoshop but I haven't seen anyone use this before let me know what you guys think so let's get.

Some type in here and I think there is a movie called South of Heaven but make no mistake this is going to be a movie based on slayer's seminal 1988 album all right I'm going to double click and open the layer style effects so it's always really bothered me that most of these effects have some variation of a gaussian blur like this super fast live.

Efficient blur but every single one of these effects goes either inside the type or outside the type and it always seemed like the capacity is here to have just a blur as a layer style effect which would be really useful for glowing effects and all kinds of things so what's the deal well it turns out it's always just been a matter of checking.

The right box so check this out I'm going to use the drop shadow effect but let's make it more of a glow so I'll switch it over to add mode make it kind of an orangey color and I'll even add a little bit of noise maybe five percent so it's a blurry effect but it just goes outside of the shapes right the original layer still looks the same of course we.

Could bring the fill value on the layer down to zero and that leaves just the drop shadow effect but it's still just outside now there's a hole where the letters were but we've got this little check box layer knocks out drop shadow turn it off and we've suddenly got the whole blurry drop shadow and yes it's a live blur and it's not some cheap.

Looking box blur it's actually a nice organic gaussian blur and it's even much faster to update than the gaussian blur effect so live type with basically a live blur and if you're into creating glowing effects you know the key to a nice glow effect is to have multiple blurs added together and with drop shadow we can do just that we can add.

Another drop shadow basically another glow this one's going to be bigger 50 pixels and by changing the color we can get some really cool color variation happening in the glow one more drop shadow this one's going to be 100 pixels and I'll change the color again maybe go for a bright red glow now another really cool thing about layer style effects is.

That you can mix and match blending modes all on a single layer so these are all set to add mode but I can create another drop shadow and set this one to multiply and we have add and multiply happening at the same time now Photoshop looks at these layers to LFX just like it does regular layers the ones that are on top sit on top just like layers in.

The layer panel and sometimes to make a glow stand out on the background you want to darken the background a little bit so let's maybe bring this multiply drop shadow down to the bottom and I'll switch it over to linear burn that's a little bit more dramatic way to darken the background so pretty cool multiple blending modes on the same layer and we.

End up with a nice organic glow effect happening it's very easy to adjust and you can even still change fonts or adjust the typography all right well since it's the texture Labs Channel I'm just going to sneak in a little bit of texture on top of this whole image yeah I'm kind of breaking my Simplicity rule here but this is kind of a dirty.

Fingerprints lens glass texture that I shot it's a new texture on the texture lab site and it's of course free like everything else however if you appreciate all the free stuff I would certainly appreciate your support a huge thank you to everyone who has supported the texture Labs project on patreon I hope you've enjoyed this video thanks.

For watching and I will see you next time foreign