How to embed photos and images within letters using Adobe Photoshop

hi everyone this is mike litwin with litwin creative and today i am going to be showing you uh how to put photography and imagery inside of typography inside of letters uh using photoshop and this is not a new effect i'm sure you've probably seen it a hundred times over it's probably most popular um on vintage postcards or things having a vintage postcard effect where you see one photograph inside of each letter and it says greetings from wherever and this is a relatively easy effect uh to do um if anybody is interested in knowing which versions of everything i'm using the uh hardware and software specs i will be in the description below this video um and before we get started i'm going to go ahead and give you a slight little confession this is actually my first instructional video uh so forgive me if it's a little awkward and choppy and informal but that's because i myself am a little awkward and informal so uh that being said let's go ahead and jump right in um like i said the most popular use of this is probably in vintage postcards and so that's the angle that we're going to go ahead and approach this from so we're going to go here into photoshop and we're going to open a new file and we're gonna do kind of a standard postcard size of six inches wide by four inches tall and for the sake of keeping things quick i'm going to keep the resolution nice and low at 72 dpi and we're going to keep it a rgb color of course if you were producing this for an actual print piece you would want to have this much higher at at least 300 dpi and you'd probably want to have this in cmyk color if not at the start you'd probably want to at least flatten everything and convert it to cmyk before you send it to print but for now we're just going to keep it simple 7 utp do dpi rgb color and we'll open that up so there's our artboard and before we even start i like to when i'm doing a project like this have my background be a nice medium gray so that if i have any white effects or any black effects i can see them clearly against the background so i'm going to paint this with my paint tool to a nice medium gray color there and like i said we're going to be showing you i'm going to show you how to put one photograph inside of each letter now i don't know uh where you're watching this from but i am recording this in north carolina and that is an awfully long name for a state and i don't feel like doing that many letters today so uh for the sake of brevity and just so that nobody feels left out we're going to call our state state and i'm going to do that here in black there we go nice and simple you can fill in the name of whatever state that you are in and uh i'm going to be doing this here in impact i know that's a very pedestrian uh typeface to use but it's bold and it's clean and i think it will give you a good opportunity to see the effect that we're about to apply so there we are here we are in state state is a beautiful place to live and since i am coming to you like i said from north carolina all of the photography that you'll be seeing will be things that i have shot here in the most beautiful state that i've ever lived in so let's open up some of those photos now and so getting started let's start with this one this is a photo i shot at a church here in greenville where i live and so what we are going to do is i'm going to go up to select i'm going to select all and then i'm going to go to edit and i'm going to copy now normally i use key commands to go much faster but if you are approaching this from a beginner level i'm going to do the first few with menus so you can see where i'm getting all these from and i'll probably use key commands as we go on with the rest of the photos so now that we've copied this we're going to go back over here to the tab where we have our untitled project we're going to go over here to the layers palette which is where we'll be primarily working on and if you don't know where the layers palette is or you don't have it open you go up here to your window menu and you scroll down and there it is under layers so you go over to your layers palette and we want to have the layer selected that has our text and then what we will do from there is we will hit edit and go to paste and that creates a new layer just above the layer that our text is on now here's what we do is you see where my cursor is in between these two layers you put it right in between the two layers and you hold down the option key now i'm using a mac so for me it's option i'm not sure what it would be on the pc version of this but on the mac if you hold down the option key you see how my cursor changes to a little arrow with a box next to it this creates a clipping path with the layer below it or in an easier way of describing it it nests this image inside of whatever's below it in this case that shape is text and you can see now that our photo is only showing up inside of the letters now this of course is very very big it's covering all of the letters we want to go ahead and shrink this down so having this layer with the photograph layer one selected we are going to go up to edit and we are going to transform and we're going to do a free transform here and i'm going to hold down actually the option key so this goes a little easier you can see by the blue box here where it is showing up and we're just going to put that as close to this as we possibly can to the s now you see some of this is bleeding over into the t but that's no problem we're going to work on that in just a minute so there we are with the first one and just to keep things simple i'm going to go and now close out the one that we were using uh the next one is the t and i think for that one we're going to use this picture of the body on the lighthouse that i have again we're going to go up here to select all edit copy and then we're going to go back here and now what we're going to do is we want to go ahead and have layer 1 selected which is the photo we just had and we're going to go to edit paste and we put down the next photo now here's the trick because this photo is already nested with the typography layer if we put this right over top and we put our cursor in between these two layers and hold down option it doesn't nest to this it nests to state because both of these are now nested within the typography and we're going to do the same thing we did with this photo with this lighthouse photo as well we're going to go up to edit we're going to go to free transform and we are going to shrink this down a little bit so it fits inside of the t just like that and of course you see because this is a horizontal photo now we're covering a lot of extra layers and this is probably a good time to go ahead and show you how we're going to go ahead and block that out if you've never used masks before on layers we're going to go over some layer masking right now and so let's make this layer disappear that i just put down we're going to go over here to this little eyeball icon we're going to click on it to make it not visible and we're going to go back to our very first layer our first photo that we put on with this selected we're going to go down here to the bottom of our layers palette and there is a little icon that has a square with a circle inside of it it says add layer mask we're going to click on that and you see it's got this mask right here the trick with the layer mask is that when you have it selected not this part but actually the mask itself selected anything that is painted white will be visible anything that's painted black will be completely blocked out and anything that is various shades of gray will be various levels of opacity you'll be able to see through it somewhat we're going to just go ahead and use a straight black to mask some things out so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to have all of this selected i'm going to select the entire canvas and i'm going to make it all black now you see there's nothing there and now here on my mask i'm going to take my paintbrush and i'm going to get something a little smaller than this gigantic paint brush that i already had there we go and with white as my foreground color i'm going to be here on the mask and every place where the s is well looks like i had my old pat make sure your opacity is up to 100 that's much better look it's nice and clear and now we have that letter only inside the s and no place else we're going to go ahead and do the same thing with this photo i'm going to select that layer go down here to add layer mask i'm going to make the entire thing black by selecting it all have black as my background color and i'm going to hit delete and then i deselect and with that mask selected i go in here with a white paint brush and now i've done another one okay so now you've seen how we've done two of those five letters and now i'm going to move along a little bit faster because i don't want to bore you with a super long video we're going to close that out and now for the a well i'm right here let's go ahead and use this photo of the beach this is actually where i grew up on the outer banks so lovely place we're gonna paste that inside of here we're gonna go in between these two we're gonna hold down the option key we're going to nest that we are going to use the transform tool to bring this down in size and then we're going to create a layer mask down here at the bottom and we're going to select it all we're going to make it all black and then we're going to use our white paint brush to paint it in now once again we're going to close that photo out so we don't accidentally reuse something uh let's go here to this nice sunset shot that i have we're going to copy it and paste it here just as we've done right over top of these we're going to use our option key again nest that inside we are going to transform it bring it down to the size at least as close as we can of the t let's center that sunset in there and make it look really nice and we're going to add a layer mask down here at the bottom make the whole thing black again use our white paint brush to put that in there and now we will use our last shot of these uh trees here we will copy it and paste it here option key between the two layers nest that transform the size down to something that will closely fit inside the e and she's bleeding over here again of course because it's a horizontal photo we will go down here make another layer mask make it all black and then paint that in and there you go each one of these now has a different photo inside of it um now of course i'm not particularly happy with this as if it were going to be a postcard um either as more things i would do to actually give it the uh legitimate uh authentic postcard effect but i think i'm going to save that for another video this is just to give you an idea of of how to achieve the effect of putting a photo inside of each letter so after this i think i'll go ahead and do a separate video that show you what to do beyond this but i hope that this was informative for you and uh if you have any questions you can feel free to email me and i will put my email in the description as well so have fun go forward and put the name of your own state in there and thanks for watching

Channel: LitwinCreative

Views: 596

Keywords: Photos, photography, letters, typography, Photoshop, tips, tricks, type, tutorial, tutorials, instructional, Adobe

Id: enc0b5drDtA

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021