Abstract Twisted Light Fibers Effect Photoshop Tutorial

[Music] everybody I'm Nathaniel Dodds from top vidcom today we're going to kick it old-school this Photoshop tutorial this is one of the very very very first effects I ever learned how to create here in Photoshop way back in the mid-90s when I first opened photoshop photoshop 4.0 and boy does it feel like forever ago I think I was only like seven or eight years old but if you're wondering what this effect is here it is so there you go that's the effect that we're going to create if you do enjoy this tutorial make sure you subscribe to the channel by using that little red button down there and if you really enjoy this tutorial well there you go a link just appeared right up there somewhere that's my Photoshop course you can pick up a copy that Photoshop course it helps us do what we do here at touch vidcom and this entire channel is funded by viewers just like you so thank you with that out of the way let's jump in and check out this video so here we are in Photoshop we've got this image this is a free stock photo from unsplash.com I'll have a link to it down in the bio or description of this video and one of the first things that I like to do when I bring a stock photo for an effect like this into Photoshop is go image image size and just make sure the width and height of the image are manageable that your computer can handle pushing filters on an image like this if it's 7000 pixels wide it's going to be a bit more difficult than if the image is you know 3,000 or 1000 or whatever number of pixels wide so I've got 3000 by 2,000 pixels here that's just perfect for me and I'm going to right click on the background layer and choose to convert this to a smart object we're converting it to a smart object because we're going to go filter and we're going to go pixelate and choose mezzotint and as we apply these filters because this is a smart object over here it's going to apply these an editable smart filter so you're going to see exactly what that means in a moment with mezzotint this is a completely randomized type of filter and I like to go with coarse dots for this particular effect medium lines long lines and medium strokes and long strokes also tends to work well it's just a little bit of a different effect I prefer the coarse dots look so I'm going to choose okay and it really fouls up our image now this effect that we're creating one of the cool things about it is you can really apply it to any photo you want or you can just open a blank Photoshop document go like filter render clouds and begin with that sort of base of black and white and create this exact effect as well but I find a really really really colorful photos just lend themselves to really really cool effects and they always it's always going to look different every single time you do this it's going to look a little different so that's part of the beauty of this all right if I hit this little tiny white arrow boom I can see there's my mezzotint filter applied it is in fact a smart filter but the work has only just begun we're going to go filter blur and we're going to choose radial blur here and I like to go with a 100-mile max it out blur method needs to be zoom and the quality I'm going to go with good if you notice that the blur still looks too grainy and noisy just bump it up to best but best you know it's going to take a little bit longer to render so you can see here with our first blur it looks really coarse now that that is more a matter of those very coarse mezzotint dots being blurred then this filter being super low-quality I'm going to hit command or ctrl F and what that's going to do is apply the radial blur again see that commander control F so I'm going to just go commander control F it's going to bring up the radial blur dialog box 100 on the amount blur method of zoom and a quality of good of course and we're going to apply that one more time commander control F and I'm going to hit OK alright so now that we have this sort of speeding zooming image that it's borderline hypnotic we want to begin applying the filter distort twirl effect now this is where things kind of get cool so I like to go with really you can do an angle you know if you go 50 degrees you go 200 degrees I'm going to roll with something right down the middle at 100 degrees in terms of the angle and I'm going to hit OK now what I want to do here with this twirl and this is part of the value of these smart filters is we can come over here and double click on this double line and we can tell this twirl filter hey you know what we want your mode to be set to lighten and you're going to see it's going to immediately start giving us some sort of interlocking intertwining lines and I should mention that generally speaking with this type of effect I like to use the light and blend mode you could go something like multiply you could go with screen screen is going to kind of blow things out even brighter you could go something like overlay these are all just different styles of effect overlaying soft light they tend to be really heavy I think doing something like lighten is kind of like the most modern and clean looking effect for this effect that admittedly is is kind of straight out of the 90s but still kind of cool to be able to do nonetheless we're going to go ahead and it okay and we need to apply a second twirl filter so I'm going to use a hot key command or ctrl F that was the last used filter was twirl command or ctrl F to apply a new twirl and this one we're going to go with an angle of negative 100 degrees and hit OK and you're going to see it's going to really kind of change the way things are looking here right it's going to drag and twist those lines I'm going to double click on my double line let's try setting this to the blend mode of lighten as well and just see what it looks like because this actually doesn't too bad but what if we change it to lighten we can see well look at that it's actually giving us more lines and making it look like even more is intertwining and twisting and and pulling through this I'm going to hit okay I'm going to leave that act lighten so now that we've done that really all we need to do is just increase the contrast try to bring out some of the difference of these lines a little bit more and part of the way we can try doing that is number one change the mezzo tint right so we can double-click on this it's going to say look everything is going to become all messed up which is fine we're not going to see it anyway I'll go with like medium strokes maybe let's try that hit okay let's see what this looks like and you can see just by changing that we get a very different and yes some contrast has been added so maybe that would have been a better a choice to go with from the get-go we'll leave that but we're going to add even more contrast and we're going to do that by adding a levels adjustment layer so we're going to click on the levels adjustment layer icon there and we're going to drag the blacks top and I made that plus 15 there and we'll drag the whites top back maybe a little bit kind of like that so you can see there's before there's after we're just giving it a pop of contrast now we're going to begin editing and tweaking the color so we're going to do that using a color balance adjustment layer I'm going to click to add that we begin with the mid-tones here and what I'm going to do with mid-tones is go about plus 20 in the red department it's all just you know rough numbers I'm going to push some agenda into it so I'm going to push the background negative 17 and I also want to push a little blue into it so right about plus 10 next I'm going to go to the highlights and with the highlights I'm going to push more red in to the highlights then I'll come over here will push a little bit of a gent into the highlights not not a huge crazy amount and I think will also push some blue into the highlights you could try yellow in the highlights and I think I prefer the blue and the highlights so I'm going to go go right around plus 10 plus 12 with some blue in the highlights I'm going to come over here to shadows and with the shadows I'm going to push cyan into the shadows so something like that looks good then we'll push some magenta into the shadows kind of sort of like that and then we definitely want to put blue in the shadows so you can see just just right there we've kind of completely changed the color of this we've made it look much more intense we've made it really pop and if you really want to take it a step further what we can do is sharpen this so we can actually add smart sharpening directly to this whole twisted effect and it will just add it to our stack of filters here so we can go filter sharpen we can choose smart sharpen and I'll just drag over my loop so I can kind of see the middle of my document and if we really want to make this pop we can push the amounts up a lot we could also push the radius up a lot you just want to be careful when you really start pushing the radius and amount up you really get this very halo II very fake looking effect so I'm going to go with a radius about 1.5 pixels and probably an amount of about a hundred and fifty percent and then we can reduce a little bit of noise there's not gonna be a crazy amount of noise in there but I think that's about what I'm going to roll with 150 1.5 about 20 percent reduction of noise don't worry about the shadows highlights and we're going to roll with that so I'm going to hit OK and it's going to sharpen that up and you can see their smart sharpen has been added to the list of filters just like that and guys it's a pretty simple effect but it's a pretty cool effect and it's something you could now take this and use it as a texture you could take it and apply it to a photo use it as a background for something all kinds of different things but most of all it's a really cool like old-school Photoshop effect that we can we used to never be able to create it with one layer and Smart Objects Smart Filters it allows us to create this entire effect with one single layer and then of course the adjustment layers to add some contrast and color just kind of mess around with it and customize but that's really it for this one so for creating this crazy looking effect in Photoshop using but one single layer and the power of smart objects and smart filters and everything else that went into this tutorial guys that's it get got it good neva no Dodson shut vidcom I'll catch you in the next room and before you go make sure you subscribe to my channel for more great tutorials every day also by my course that helps us do what we do and this channel is supported by viewers just like you you can also just click the thumbnail and watch another video from this channel see you next time guys

Channel: tutvid

Views: 284,408

Keywords: abstract effect photoshop, twisted fibers photoshop, fibers photoshop, twisted effect photoshop, random pattern photoshop, abstract art photoshop, abstract photoshop, smart filters photoshop, smart object photoshop, photoshop twirl effect, spin photo photoshop, spinning effect photoshop, spinning photo, how to, photoshop tutorial, photoshop tutorials, FEAT

Id: UAWIh9YUAxo

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017