Create vector-style images in Photoshop... without the pen tool!

hey everyone brady from texturelabs.org here in this video we're going to take a look at how to create this vector style treatment in photoshop an aesthetic inspired by the one and only shepherd fairy here he is cutting stencils with a razor blade pretty incredible this technique is not going to require any razor blades or even the pen tool we're going to let the program do a lot of the work for us let's jump into photoshop and get started [Music] all right i'm getting started with a pretty straightforward portrait here this image is about 2300 pixels wide not giant but big enough to have some nice detail i did create a mask already to clip out the background i hope you guys won't mind me skipping that part there is something i want to point out about the mask though there are no feathered edges or soft values in this mask it's just a hard edge black and white mask i really just took the polygonal lasso tool and cut this out like i was cutting something out of a magazine with a pair of scissors as much as that might catch your eye at this point this vector style treatment is all about hard lines and any feathery transparency can just end up kind of clouding up the look all right well i'm going to approach this in a little bit of a non-linear way first i'm going to set up the color then i'm going to work on the quality of the image and then kind of revisit the color to dial it in i'll start with a very simple hue saturation adjustment layer with the saturation turned all the way down next is going to be a solid color layer for the moment i don't care what color it is because the first thing i need to do is set it to the hard mix blending mode yes again with the hard mix blending mode but this blending mode really is more of a tool than it is a blending mode if i double click to open the color backup in this case a solid color set to hard mix is acting like a combination between a threshold adjustment and a posterize adjustment this is going to be an important layer in the process we'll probably end up coming back to this layer to dial it in the only thing i want to note here is that no matter what color i choose for this layer i never get more than four values black white and either one or two mid-tones whether they're red and yellow or blue and magenta actually doesn't make a difference just the fact that i have two three or four values i'm going to set this to kind of a muted orange color here and that gives me four values black white red and yellow doesn't matter whether i landed on red and yellow or blue and magenta because in this next step i'm going to completely remap these color values and i can do it with real accuracy using two adjustment layers the first is going to be a black and white adjustment layer and what this will do is convert any reds to 40 gray any yellows to 60 gray greens to 40 cyan's to 60. let's do one thing and change the blues to 40 and the magentas to 60 you might notice that each of these little pairings of colors red and yellow cyan and blue or blue and magenta they're the same pairings of colors that the hard mix layer underneath was creating and this means that no matter what color the original layers underneath are anything underneath these three layers is always going to come out the other side with the exact values of black which is zero percent white which is 100 then 40 gray and 60 gray if that all seems a bit confusing by the way that's totally fine long story short we've got 0 40 60 and 100 and those values are going to correspond to the next adjustment layer which is going to be a gradient map adjustment layer and if i click on the gradient in the properties tab by default i've got zero percent set to black 100 set to white then i'm going to click to add a new value in here i'm going to set its location to 40 percent and give that a color so that's going to map exactly onto your darker mid-tone i'll create one more value with a location of 60 and this one will correspond to the lighter midtone and because these are exact percentages we really do get a nice accurate replacement of the colors here all right i'm going to leave that here for now and move on to making this image look more like a vector i'm going to select the photo layer down here and i will make it a smart object that's kind of optional but it keeps things a little clearer for the video and there's one filter we're really going to lean on here in the stylized section it's the oil paint filter one of the very few filters in photoshop that actually tries to understand the contours of your image this little lighting checkbox is turned off so the only values that make a difference here are the first two and what i'm looking for at the moment is to get as strong of an effect as i can without turning it up so high that it makes the eyes or any of the other details start to look weird so about the halfway point seems good five and five you can see that starts to simplify the image and look a little bit more illustrated that's something we're going to build on but first there's one adjustment i found that almost always helps create a more illustrated look it's under image adjustments shadows highlights and here i'm going to be pretty generous with the shadows amount this will depend on your image but up here at about 65 i'm getting all kinds of great details in the shadows especially in the hair highlights maybe a little bit less the highlights do bring out some details in the brighter areas so maybe 25 percent i'm going to apply that and then what i'm going to do is create a duplicate of this layer i'll leave the bottom one alone and the top one i'm just going to go nuts with the oil paint filter i'll apply that filter again this time with it turned all the way up to 10 then i can use the shortcut command control f or command alt f to reapply the latest filter another oil paint then apply another oil paint and as i keep adding that the details are just becoming more and more general shapes you start to get diminishing returns after a while but i've got about seven copies of oil paint going on here and it is starting to look more vectory but i've totally lost the details in the eyes and around the face what i can do is use the layer mask here and with the brush tool set to kind of a soft brush i could just mask out a few little areas where i want that detail from the layer underneath to show through all right so with the image looking not so photographic anymore it's a lot easier to dial in the color i'm going to reopen this gradient map adjustment layer and what i've got here is a folder full of presets which i will link to for you guys and these are pretty simple gradient maps but each of them has four colors which are located at 0 40 60 and 100 to line up with the setup so i will pick something out here and hit ok then this is really cool i'm going to double click to reopen the solid color layer the hard mix layer it's a lot easier now to get a sense of how this works if i take all the saturation out of this color it's going to give me an image with just two colors the black and white colors then the more saturation i introduce the more of those mid tones i'll get if i keep the hue solid red it's going to limit the color to a single mid-tone color but if i adjust the hue here i can start to introduce that additional color and really what you can do here is just experiment with these values and kind of push it around and find something that looks good all right well this is starting to come together i do want to take a moment to say that this tutorial is brought to you by the generosity of the texturelabs.org patreon supporters they are your fellow artists and designers and they keep all this stuff free if you're finding value in the texture labs project and are in a position to be able to help support it i truly appreciate it all right let's get back into this thing and take it to the finish line i'm going to start by dropping a few more elements in here i'm going to drag this vector star into the background i'll include a link to this and i'll kind of scale that into place using transform now if i change the color of this using hue saturation or this could be levels or anything to bring up the brightness you'll see that there are just a few key moments where it kind of triggers the next color in this four color palette anything under these layers up here is going to be limited to just one of those four colors i'm going to add one more thing here this half tone pattern and really no matter what i do here if i bring the opacity back on this and it's kind of blending with that star shape everything still remains within that four color spectrum let's give this a little bit of a poster look with a white border around the whole thing i'll do that by creating a new solid and i'll make it white then i'm gonna click on the mask command or control a to select all then i'm gonna use select modify contract and maybe i'll try 100 pixels use command or control i to invert that part of the mask and deselect then i can use transform on the mask too if i want to refine the size of that a little bit and i can always drop more photographic elements into this composition so if i drag this flower in here now for the portrait there was a lot of custom tailoring with a detail layer and a more stylized layer people's faces do require a little bit of extra work but with something like this flower if i just hit it with the oil paint filter sometimes that's enough to kind of get it into that vector look i might even repeat the oil paint filter one more time and i can even add a layer underneath this and just with the paint brush i'm going to bring the flow setting down to make this a little bit more subtle with the paint brush i can get a little bit of a shadow in here and it'll stay in that four color space finally if i want to introduce a few more colors in here i can command or control click to select the shape of this flower then select the mask on the gradient map adjustment layer and use command or control i to invert that part of the mask to black then i'm going to duplicate this gradient map and on this one i'm going to invert the entire mask so this adjustment layer will only affect this flower and i can experiment with a completely different preset on this layer or what i find works well is to use the same gradient preset but just change the color of one or even both of those mid-tones that kind of keeps the blacks and the whites in the same place but introduces just one or two new colors then to wrap the whole thing up i might add a little bit of paper texture on top and i will set that to screen mode and that pretty much wraps it up i hope you guys will enjoy experimenting with this technique please do me the quick favor of hitting the like button on your way out always more of the stuff on the way so be sure to subscribe thank you for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: Texturelabs

Views: 364,087

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Id: CGdGqcAQdMU

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021