project 1

Graphic Photo Overlay Tutorial

To show how I pulled in the photographic elements in my last project, I'll take you though step by step. First, your background is pretty important, make sure whatever you are laying your imagery over works well design wise. This isn't really a design tutorial though, so I'll leave that up to you. Something else to keep in mind is that I'm doing this tutorial from a windows based PC, so the hot keys will be a little different if you are working on a Mac. But if you are confused, you can always find the commands by going to the file menus at the top. You can enlarge the image to get a clearer view of what I'm showing by clicking the thumbnail.




When choosing a photo, try to make sure it has high contrast. You can always add the contrast in, but it makes your job a lot easier if it's already there. We are going to be making the image very graphic with hard edges. That way we can cut away the white space and leave us with the black space which we can color with. Here I chose a photo of an abandoned warehouse. It'll work, it has well lit areas and lots of shadows.





So now that we have our photo, we need to remove the colors to make it easier to work with. Don't worry, we'll be putting the color back, but for now we need to get rid of it. It's a good idea to be working with a copy of the photo incase you accidentally save over it, that way if you wanted to use the original colors, you'll have them in the original.
Now, to take out the color. We can do this quickly with a short cut. Hitting "Ctrl+Shift+U" will use the "Desaturate" command which can also be found on the file menu under "Image>Adjustments>Desaturate", but it's much faster to just use the hot keys. That'll take all color out of the photo.




Next we need to make this thing real graphic, practially straight black and white. There are tons of ways to do this in Photoshop, there's never just one way, but I'll show you the way I do it. I open up the "Levels" menu and play with it there. I feel the "Levels" menu allows for more control, so I use it. To get to the "Levels" you can use the hot keys "Ctrl+L" or from the file menu "Image>Adjustments>Levels" This will pull up the "Levels" menu for you.





Now the three notches I've circled in red are the ones we are going to be playing with. The closer together you bring them the more graphic the image will become. This is great for us, as that's exactly what we are going for. What it does is takes the whole range of black and white and compresses them together, so that way there are fewer value shifts, making it more graphic. The dark notch on the left controls darks, the light notch on the right controls the lights and the grey notch in the middle controls midtones. Watch the image behind the menu and play with the settings until you have what you want.





Alright, I'm pretty happy with what I've got there, so I hit okay. That will set the levels however you have them set and leave you with your image looking real graphic. It's alright if you still have a little bit of grey in there, just keep in mind that the parts that are grey are going to be more transparent than the parts that are solid black when we get done with them.






Alright, now here's where things start moving. We first need to make sure that our graphic photo is on it's own layer. Now the Layers palette should already be up by default, but if it isn't, we can call it up simply by hitting "F7" or by the file menu with "Window>Layers". Now we need to make sure that the graphic photo is seperate from the default "Background" layer. You can tell if it's the default background layer by how it looks in the layers palette. It's the layer with "Background" written on it done in italics. That layer, because it's the default background layer, isn't very flexible for what we want, so be sure your photo is on a seperate layer. If it is on the background layer, you can duplicate it, and erase everything on the default background layer, just make sure that it is on it's own layer, like shown in the image.





Now it gets a little tricky, so stay with me. We are going to switch over to the channels tab on the layers palette. This will allow us to select parts of the image via hue and value. Just click on the channels tab to move over to the channels palette.








Now we are going to “Load channel as selection”. It sounds a lot more complicated that it is, all we do is click that little dotted circle at the bottom. I circled it in red for you incase you have a tough time finding it.








After you have your selection, click on the layers tab and make sure the layer with your graphic photo is selected.









Then just hit the delete key. The black may turn a little bit lighter, which is normal. If you turn off the background layer you can see that the white is now deleted. Hit “Ctrl+D” to deselect and now you’re left with your hard black area.








Next we will lock the transparency. Find the “Lock Transparency” button. I have it circled in red if you can’t find it.









Now with it locked, we can paint over it how ever we like, and with it on it's own layer, we are free to lay it over top any other image or color and still have the freedom to work with it incase we change our mind.








Experiment with painting the overlay and with the differently kinds of layer types, such as "Vivid light", "Overlay", "Screen" and "Multiply. There are all kinds of outcomes you can get to the limits of your creativity!