Embraced by words Tutorial

The editors of Zoom.nl, the biggest photography magazine in the Netherlands asked me to write a tutorial in the April edition of one of my photo manipulations. Not everybody speaks Dutch and has this magazine on their bookshelf, so I decided to explain it all again on my website.

The end result of the tutorial is the following picture:

I hope you will enjoy the expaination

Step 1. The Photo

Think before you make the photo how you are exactly going to do the whole thing. In my case it was a man embracing a woman. I took about 30 photo’s before I was satisfied.

The man has to come out of the paper in a natural way. To select the people later on, it is maybe easier to have a disticinct background, in a different color than the poeple so that you can select the subject easier later on. After you opend the photo in Photoshop, use the quick selection to select the couple, copy them in a new layer and rename the layer.

Step 2 People layer

Select the man only and put him in a new layer. If there is a lot of contrast, you can use the quick selection or otherwise quickmask (Q) or layer mask. Do the same thing with the lady.

Put the layer of the lady above the man in the layer panel. Select the layer with the man. Choose image, adjustment, desaturate. Put the opacity to 65%. Make the backgroud layer and the layer with the two people invisible by clicking on the visibility icons (eyes). So at the end of this step you have the man and the lady in two seperate layers with the man in black and white in a lower opacity.

 

Step 3 Paper layer

Make in between the two people’s layer a ‘paper layer’. For this you can serch for an old yellowed piece of paper in Google images. The resolution is not that important. If it is quite low, you can always blur it a bit after you stretched the photo.Another way is to make one by making a layer and render clouds with light brown and a lighter brown as the two colors, than you burn the edges.

Make this layer a bit bigger than the canvas so you do not see any rough edges. After you made the layer, change the layer property of that layer to linear burn for an extra old effect.

Step 4 Text

On the paper we will put the text. The idea behind this photo was a text for Valentine’s day for my wife. Everybody should put his own text of course. Search someting on the internet if your fantasy lets you down. Wikipedia can be great. I liked the use of proverbs and after that I put a kind of personal text, just in case people are going to really read the text ;-).

 

Type or paste the text in notepath. Finish each line with a hard return (enter) and save the thing file as a txt file with ANSI code. This means that each end of the line survives the copy to Photoshop. If you really want to be original, you can of course write your own letter and scan it. Make sure you don’t write too large otherwise the effect is less visible.

 

Step 5 Text layer

Make a new layer in photoshop and copy the text in the layer. Give it a handwriting like fond and a suitable color. Use the move tool (V) to strech the text over the whole canvas.

Rightclick after this on the text layer in the layer and rasterize the layer. Save the file as psd format and open it in Paint Shop Pro. If you do not have Paint Shop Pro, you can try to do the same thing with the liquify tool in Photoshop, however I think it is a bit harder to get the same results. The reason to use PSP is that the mesh wrap tool is not available in Photoshop, at least not in CS3, I do not know ithe this tool is available in newer versions. I believe one can try out PSP for about a month for free after downloading it from the website.

 

Step 6 Text Reschaping

In PaintShop Pro you copy the text twice. Put transparacy of the layer paper to 50%. Select the first text layer and choose the tool Mesh Wrap with about 31 vertical and 25 horizontal lines. Move the lines as if the text of the right arm, head, hip and thy of the man sticks to or is part of the man.

Click OK if you are happy with the work and make sure that there is no overlap with the text layers by removing the non moved text under the layers that have been moved. I like to use a mask layer for that. I gave the left arm the same treatment with the second text layer. Than thand do the same with the head and leggs. Afther that, remove al the text on the original text layer that has been replaced by the body of the man text. However make sure that the edged of the text flow into the original text layer in a natural way.

 

Step 7 Shadow layer

Save the file in PSD format and return with it to photoshop. Select the paper layer and put the layer characteristic on multiply, this way the man becomes a little bit visible. You can ajust the transparency of the man to help with this.

To make the shadows, first make a new layer, the shadow layer. Next click on the layer of the man while pressing ctrl. This selects the man only. Select the brush tool (B), put the opacity to 15% and the seize to 200 and the hardness to 0%. With every click you create a bid of shadow. Make the shadows to the upper and lower arm and the edge of the lower body.

Click on invert and make the shadows next to the head of the man. Click on the layer of the woman with ctrl key pressed and make shadows where she should have them. Continue till you have a convincing result. Use different brush seizes for different shades. Teh sectret is the selection of the area you are going to work with by using crtl + layer selection.

 

Step 8 Finalizing

Finally make the paper a bit lighter. Make a new layer behind the man and make this layer white. This is the new background layer. Select the layer of the paper and put the opacity to 70%, or any other opacity that makes you think is convincing. This makes the yellow/brown of the paper a bit less strong and the paper becomes a bit more white.

That’s it. I hope you found my tutorial interesting. Please leave a reply if you like it.