Photoshop BIG 3D Text into a Photo #MSI

okay so in this tutorial we're gonna take some giant letters and add them into an image of a city all in Photoshop [Music] hey guys you're watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills and in this tutorial we're going to create some giant letters make them 3d and then we're going to add them into an image of a city in Photoshop and before we get started this is the last tutorial in the mini series where I'm gonna be using MSI's p65 creates a laptop powerful portable just all-around beast and yay for all the windows users so the p65 sports the ninth gen 9 processor 32 gigabytes of ram a terabyte of superfast SSD storage and tasty RTX 2070 graphics card the 4k screen looks awesome because of course it does and for the creative pros it's also 100% Adobe RGB color accurate if none of that made any sense in a nutshell it's very powerful but if it all made sense and hello my fellow tech nerd so thanks again to Emma Stipe sponsoring this video but anyway let's jump into Photoshop and add some giant letters into a city righty-o so we're now in Photoshop and you can see I have an image of Moscow city that have opened up already if you'd like to download the project files and follow along they are linked in the video description so first of all I'm going to select the type tool over here left click anywhere on the canvas and I'm going to type Moscow you now you may have a different image and you can type the name of your city or your text and I'm gonna go to edit and free transform the hold shift and scale that up something like this and you can also just select this text with the type tool and just make sure that your text is white now you can do this with another color but we're gonna be using white for this tutorial okay fantastic so we have our text now what I like to do is just right click this and duplicate this layer click OK we'll just turn this off down here we're just keeping this version this layer here as a backup just in case anything goes wrong and our text is still editable so I'm gonna call this one here we'll call it Moscow 3d because we're gonna make this text 3d so with that layer selected go to 3d down to new 3d extrusion from selected layer and it will quite often say this would you like to switch to the 3d workspace I'm going to politely decline but thanks anyway Photoshop and you can see we are now in the 3d workspace it looks a little bit different now up here I've got my 3d panel and down here I've got my properties panel now I've docked these specifically as part of my workspace so if you don't see them by default go to window down to 3d there's one properties there's two and you can open these panels drag them around and fit them into your workspace however you like so with our 3d text layer selected what we're going to need to do is now navigate around this so I can move this around like so now there's another way that you can control this as well we have some options down here in the bottom left so this one is orbit we then have pan and then we have dolly now dolly allows us to kind of essentially zoom in or out or imagine this as a camera on a dolly and you can move it closer or further away from your text that is what we're doing effectively panning is well moving around up down left right and rotate now this is going to be the most important one so we're going to try and rotate this in a way that kind of fits with the angle that we would like our text to go and you can also use these controls here to move the text around or rotate it slightly so I'm just gonna tinker with this until I get something I'm happy with actually there we go I'm I'm pretty happy with that that was pretty easy so the reason that have the 3d panel and the properties panel open is because as I select different elements in the 3d panel here I'm going to get relevant properties for them in the properties panel so if I just collapse this down here you can see I have Moscow their 3d text selected and I get a bunch of different options that I can click through for this now this is incredibly complicated and incredibly powerful you can spend a lot of time tinkering around with this but for this tutorial I'm going to focus on the extrusion depth so this is how far our text extrudes you could have something like this if if you really want to I'm gonna keep this nice and small in fact I'm going to enter a value of two pixels and press return so it's really nice and thin and depending on how large your document is the extra GPU power from the r-tx 2070 is gonna make working with this much easier and much smoother okay so I'm just gonna straighten my text up a little bit I think just wiggling it around there just kind of threw it out a little bit there we go so it's just a case of grabbing the right handle and moving it around and then I can of course use the pan to position this where I like so we'll just go for something like this and then if I just expand this down we have all of the different elevations of our 3d text so we have the front we have I believe the back or another side I can't really see but you can see it's marked in black so when I'm clicking on these different materials it tells you alongside what it is so if I spin this round you can see it highlights with black the area that is currently selected I've now messed up my text again so if you wanted to apply a specific material to a particular part of the text you can click through these see it become highlighted in black and then apply all of these different properties that relate to it in fact I can extend this down you can see there's quite a lot of different material properties I'm just gonna focus on the base color now I can of course change this now you can see this the color I'm sampling doesn't quite look like what is on the material that is because we have lighting that is coming into play here and we'll touch on that in a moment I'm just going they're gonna go with a very light gray slightly off-white click okay and the next what I'm gonna do is go up to infinite light now this is a light source that's been created by default I can actually add more light sources down here so I could go new infinite light or I can click the trash can icon to delete this and I can actually rotate around this and again in real time you can see just how light affects this object so I'm just gonna spin this around until I find something I'm kind of happy with and I can also go up to environment and we get more light controls here so I could spin this one around as well now if I go over to the properties panel we get a ton of different options we get shadow options we can adjust the intensity of the light so I could make this even brighter we also have IBL which is image based lighting so I could turn this off and you get a slightly different look but I'm going to keep this on I think and we'll spin this around this can be incredibly complicated by the way and if you'd like to see how it looks just click off of environment and there you go you get a rough idea so I'm just going to tinker with this a little bit more to make sure that my light is coming from the right direction and I'm actually going to go back to my text and change that color I'm gonna go with white actually bring that up and we could go and adjust some of these settings here I could bring up the glow a little bit so you can spend hours playing with all this stuff till you get the right texture and material that you like I'm gonna keep it nice and simple for this tutorial so I'm just going to zoom back out and then try and fix the rotation there we go okay fantastic so like I say you can spend a lot of time tinkering around with this once you've got your 3d text and you're happy we're going to duplicate this layer and then as we did before I'm going to turn off the one below because what we're gonna do is essentially we're going to render and rasterize this 3d layer and once we do that we can't get back to our original so it's always nice to keep an editable version of that 3d text just in case we need to go back to it so I'm just gonna add on the end of this filename we'll call this rasterized rastas head we'll try that again rasterize there we go now we can right-click on this and we can go render 3d layer and you can see Photoshop does its thing now depending on your hardware this will take more or less time so having some solid hardware is going to make this part of the process much easier now this does just take time in general anyway rendering anything especially if you have a large document so what I'm going to do is click escape I'm gonna cancel that because we're doing a tutorial and I don't want this to take hours upon hours but feel free to let yours finish rendering before going on to the next step so it kind of did a half render there so what I'm gonna do is just redo placate this layer just get us back to where we were so there we go fantastic now what I'm going to do is shortcut this by going right click and rasterizing the 3d layer now of course this isn't going to look as good as if you let it take the time to render it you can see we've got a few jagged edges here and but don't worry you can still create something really awesome and we can use things like a subtle blur just kind of blur some of these jagged edges and make the text fit with our image okay so the first thing I'm going to do is grab the lasso tool you can use the polygonal polygonal lasso tool however you say that I'm going to use the standard lasso tool it's much easier for me to pronounce as well and I'm just gonna cut around this now depending on your text you might do this slightly differently and depending on your image as well so once I've selected the word moss I'm gonna go to edit and I can't select cut because I haven't got the layer selected so make sure you have your rasterized layer selected cut will cut it from that layer but copy it to the clipboard and then we can paste it back in on its own separate layer like so now the reason I'm separating these two words is so I can stagger them throughout the city it's just a bit more interesting so I'll go and position this something like this and I could hold shift and then go to edits down to free transform and just scale them up a little bit not too much otherwise we're gonna get pixelation and it's gonna look terrible but we've got a few jagged edges already so a little bit of pixelation well it's not the end of the world so there we go we have our moss and our cow I'm just going to name these layers respectively moss and cow and then I'm going to convert these to smart objects and with these are smart objects there's a few things like adding blur that I mentioned that we'll be doing later in the tutorial but we can do it non-destructively because it's a smart object so we can always edit or delete that effect if we want to and I think actually depending on the perspective you may wish to manually shrink this one down it just feels a little bit big compared to the cow here not the moss and the cow that sounds like a storybook okay so I've got my text position there next what I'm gonna do is add a layer mask from the bottom of the layers panel like so we'll add one to each of the layers and then I'm gonna select black as my foreground color grab the brush tool and I'm gonna grab a soft round pressure opacity brush maybe they're nice and small now I would definitely recommend doing this with a graphics tablet if you do have one however it's not necessary it's just a lot easier so now with black selected brush selected and the mask of the layer selected I can now go and brush the text away make sure you have the right layer and the right mask selected now you can use the left and right square brackets on the keyboard to quickly adjust the size of your brush now this is the part of the process where essentially we're trying to hide our text behind some of the buildings so if you're following along you can copy what I'm doing here or you could position your text in a completely different position and hide it behind different buildings now you can see here I'm doing this very very quickly so please do take a little bit longer with your one in fact this part of the process is so important that if you kind of rush this bit it could actually make or break the end result so I'm just gonna very quickly do this here now what I like to do whether I'm using a mouse or a graphics tablet is as I mentioned take more time but zoom in really close and get that brush smaller I like a little bit of feathering so you get like a natural soft edge nothing too hard but something like this it's just too big it really is too big now you can press X on the keyboard it's a shortcut to swap your foreground and background color around so you can brush in like this you can see going around the edge of the building with a lot of detail and then swap around and then cut back into it so think of it as brushing and erasing masks are very much like that but it's all undistracted so I could hide this mask or I could delete it okay so I'm going to very quickly and crudely just finish this one off I do have a better example that I've prepared earlier that I'll show you in a moment so there we go let's just pretend that that is very professionally cut out just pretend for a moment and what I'm gonna do is add a new layer from the bottom of the layers panel drag this underneath and I'm gonna add another new layer as well so I'm gonna call this first one building shadow and the one above it I'm gonna call it M shadow with building shadow I'm just gonna grab the black the brush tool bring up the size and just pop in a little bit of black this is the shadow on the buildings coming from our letters you can see as I mentioned I'm doing this very quickly and crudely but please take a little bit longer with yours and then I can just bring that down in the opacity so you can see just really subtle it just helps kind of lift it off of the buildings now for the M shadow I'm gonna select this layer we'll go down here grab that brush tool again and as I mentioned much easier with a tablet I'm just gonna create a shadow like this make sure these all go in the same direction it's quite easy with an M it might be a little bit tricky with all the letters and then I'm gonna add a mask to that layer and then brush away some of these now I'm using the edges of a larger brush so you can see as it gets towards the edge here I change to the crosshair as it gets towards the edge it's a lot softer and fainter and then a little bit harder as we get closer to the bottom of the M and I'm just gonna use the arrow keys to nudge that in place now I've done this in literally seconds so as I mentioned please take long with yours cuz it will look much better now you can also change the blending mode from normal to multiply just to kind of blend that onto your image a little bit smoother and you could even drop the opacity a pinch as well so that is the technique the only difference here is that I've done it it's very very quickly for this tutorial however if I go down here to prepared assets here's some that I did earlier so I've got my 3d text here and then if I open up this one in fact I can close my 3d panel down now we are done with this one there we go much more space so I've got my cow and my moss text so I'm gonna whip this up here and you can see what a difference this makes when you spend a little bit longer and do it properly and I'm just gonna use my M shadow layer that I've just created we can just throw that in there and the building shadow let's just check that works yet that looks pretty good okay so we'll close this down for now and just to keep our layers tidy I'm pretty confident that we can go ahead with this tutorial now so I'm going to delete these backup ones here but you can always keep them yourself next what we're going to do is apply some shadowing to the letters so I'm going to click the topmost layer go down to the adjustment layer icon and select solid color you can pick any color you like I'm gonna go with black all the way in the bottom left corner let's click OK and we have black well which isn't very helpful so if I click on the layer mask here attached to that I can press command or control I that has a shortcut key to invert that layer mask so we can hide and show it in a single click I've completely hidden it and then I'm going to use my brush tool and white as the foreground color and what I'm gonna do is you can see I can bring some back in but this is bringing it back everywhere which is no good so what I'm going to do is take the cow and the moss text and right click and select group from layers and I can call this Moscow hey they're back together again and then what I'm going to do is right-click on this adjustment layer and go create clipping mask now you'll see the arrow appears here next to the thumbnail what this means is that anything we do on this black adjustment layer will only apply to our Moscow folder so now if I start brushing in some of that black it only affects layers within that folder which is of course Moz and cow so now I'm just going to go through this and just use the edge of a nice large feather brush to brush in some shadowing this helps just create some depth and try and imagine this as a 3d scene what kinds of shadows with these buildings cast on these letters and as I mentioned it's much easier with a graphics tablet so this is pretty much the technique now what I like to do is do this multiple times so we'll do the same thing again adjustment layer create clipping mask invert the mask and then brush into it so I could do something like this that's probably a little bit extreme and you can really build this up as much as you like now as I mentioned you can spend hours on this in fact please do I encourage you to spend hours on this because it will look much better in the end and we can also go and add a little color tint as well so we'll add another solid color this time it can be a color of your choice so maybe something like this and of course we're going to right click create clipping mask and I'm gonna set the blend mode to color now that's a little bit punchy for me but if I drop this nice and low somewhere around 20 percent you can see we get a nice little subtle bit of color in there now I'm going to add one more black adjustment layer invert that and in fact actually I'm just gonna right-click and delete the master all together now this is just black that ruins everything but if I bring this down to oh I don't know about 20% you can see it's just a really quick way of just darkening my text a little bit so there we go we've got a few adjustment layers to add some shadowing in a little bit of color but I have actually got one that I prepared earlier again I know I'm so organized so I'm just gonna delete this quickly and this is one that I spent a little bit longer on it just looks a little bit better so I'm gonna right-click on all of these adjustment layers and create clipping mask so there we go that's what it looks like when I've spent a little bit longer on it okay so it's coming together nicely we do have a few more layers to go so I'm gonna click on the topmost layer go down to the adjustment icon and add a color lookup now we can add a 3d lut here lot stands for lookup table think of this as a color profile there's lots here please play with them all these are amazing I'm gonna use soft warming for this one oh there we go and that really complements the kind of lilac II color that I chose for the color of the text as well I'm also going to go down here and add another adjustment layer will go with curves a really quick and easy way to introduce a bit of contrast into your image to darken the dark areas and lighten the lights is to click around here pull that down and then push this up you're creating a really subtle wave and we can preview that off and on just adds a little bit of contrast makes it a little bit more dramatic and I'm also going to add a vignette so let's zoom back out now a vignette essentially is where you darken the edges of your image which is a great way to highlight and put focus on the center so I'm gonna go down here to the adjustment icon once again select hue and saturation drag the lightness all the way down I know this looks terrible please bear with me now the mask for this adjustment layer should be selected by default so I'm going to go over here if you don't see the gradient tool left click and hold on the paint bucket tool you can pick the gradient tool and just make sure you have a black to white gradient is one of the defaults so it should be here and make sure you have the second one along selected radial gradient and I can click and drag from the center out to the edge now if yours doesn't look like this if yours looks the other way around so it gets light around the edge and darker in the middle just check this box up here that's reverse and it will flip it the other way around and there we go we have a vignette now this is a little bit strong so I'm just gonna bring this down Oh 40 percents I mean like that turn it off and on there we go just adds a little bit more focus to the center area of the image now one last thing I'm going to do because we created this text from scratch look at it it's just so clean it's too clean far too perfect in fact speaking of perfect text in the original example I was working on the text was very jagged one way of getting around that that I forgot to mention was to select the text which we convert it to a smart object just got to filter down to blur and to select blur or blur more hopefully below will be enough this just adds a very subtle blur that you can see on this text here it's not perfectly sharp it helps smooth out some of those jagged edges and it helps blend it in with the image okay so that's the quick blur tip what I'm gonna do now is add a new layer from the bottom of the layers panel make sure black is selected grab that paint bucket tool fill this layer with black go up to filter down to noise select add noise the amount I'm just gonna crank this up we'll go for somewhere around 100 Gaussian monochromatic click OK I'm gonna name this noise now the blending mode I like to use soft light and then bring me opacity down anywhere between 5 and 10% so I'll go with 10 so you can see a little bit more I'm gonna zoom all the way back into the image so what this does is it introduces a little bit of noise back into the image photographs by nature most of the time especially if they're really bad and grainy most of the time have some degree of noise and because our letters were created in Photoshop they're just a little bit too perfect so I like to introduce this noise layer on top of everything we'll drop it down to nearly 5 percent and then what it does is it just helps that photograph and that text all hang together as if it was part of the same image all by just layering a bit of noise on top turn it off turn it back on and it's easy to select this layer by mistake trust me I've done it many times so I'm just gonna lock this up here and there we go so as I mentioned earlier please spend as much time as you need on yours to refine it get the shadows right and just make it look as awesome as possible but apart from that this is pretty much my process for creating this effect and one more thing I could do on top of this just to make it even more dramatic is I could press command or control a on the keyboard to select everything go to edit copy merged edit and paste so this pastes everything flattened together on a single layer we're gonna right click this and we'll call this dramatic blur I love doing this this is a smart object as well so we can apply blur effects to this and we can then edit them or delete them if you want to go to filter down to blur gallery and select iris blur and it gives you one by default just select it hit delete or backspace no thank you we'll create another one and it creates that new one as a perfect circle now this is where the extra power in your GPU is really going to come in handy rendering all of this in real time so you can see I can adjust this size and just see how that blur renders lovely so I'm gonna focus on the text like so I could even squish it down a little bit like this and just hover over those corners rotate it make it a bit bigger that Blair's a little bit pronounced so I'm gonna bring this down to will go for 10 pixels click okay and sometimes this can just be a really nice finishing touch to a piece of work this is the original and this is with thee traumatic iris blur applied just has a little bit more blur to everything outside of our text again as with the vignette just putting a bit more focus on the thing we want people to pay attention to the awesome text effect that we've just created and there we go so that is how to create some giant 3d letters and then add that to a city image in Photoshop so guys I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you've got any questions or comments you know what to do drop those down below but as always like this video if you enjoyed it take care I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Dansky

Views: 48,668

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Id: kM3fJF3Vti4

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020