Subtitles of the Movie

Now that we're all Photoshop experts, I want to show you how I created an image like this. You can see over here on my Layers palette that what I have is a few layers. Well I'm going to start off with my apple, because basically this is a composite of two images - the apple and the buildings. And if I go to my Paths palette, notice that someone (namely myself) has kindly already created a path. And this can be a little bit time-consuming, so I'm not going to show you how to do that, since you already know how. And I'll hold the Command key down, and when I do that notice that my pointing hand has a marquee icon around it, indicating that when I click, it'll load this path as a selection around my apple. So its Command clicking on the thumbnail or Control clicking on the thumbnail if you are a PC or Windows user. There is my selection, Edit menu>Copy, and now the apple is on the clipboard. So I can go to my building picture here and I'm just going to paste. Well it's pretty good, but I want my apple to be behind this building on the left and in front of this building. Because the image I had in mind was something that made it look a little more realistic, if you can believe a gigantic apple was ever on this building to start with. So I'm using the Layer Mover tool to re-position where I want this apple, and I'll use this arrow key just to move my apple around in one degree [pixel] increments. Well I can see that my apple is in fact in front of this building, So I need to do a little bit of Photoshop slight of hand and copy the building and paste it back down on top of the apple on a new layer. So I'm going to hide the apple, and I'm going to select the building layer, make that targeted, and I'm going to use the pen tool. Since all I really need to do is create a sharp edge selection of this area right here - the corner of the building. So I'm going to add a point here, add a point at the corner, and this corner and finally this corner down here. And the rest of it doesn't really matter because I know it's going to be obscured where it will be in front of the apple. Well here is my selection. I can see that I made a mistake right here on this corner. So, I'm going to go to my Direct Selection tool and click on the corner and drag that anchor point up. So now I'll go to my Paths palette and Command click on this path to activate it as a selection. [The] selection is active on my building layers, so I'll copy and paste. And of course when I paste, if I have a selection active it will paste directly back into that selection on a new layer. So here is my new piece of the building directly in register with the building underneath it. Now I'm simply going to move this layer above the apple. It's beginning to take shape. And one thing I noticed though is that there were some white pixels that I got from the building behind it. So I'm going to edit that with a layer mask. So I'll click the layer mask icon here, which will add a layer mask to my floating building portion. And I'll use a sharp edged brush such as the Pencil tool, and begin to paint out the white pixels. Sometimes you might want to zoom in to do this. Finally to make this a little bit more realistic, my apple really needs to have a shadow on it, because a shadow will be cast by this building. So I'm going to put a shadow on its own layer. So I'll click my apple layer, make that the active selected layer, and click the new layer icon. And creating a new layer will always create a new empty layer above your currently selected layer. So now I have a new empty layer onto which I can paint some dark marks; I'll use the airbrush to create a shadow effect. So I'm going to paint. I'll dial it down to 50%. And I'll make sure that my stylus pressure is activated, because I am using a pressure sensitive stylus. Just to begin to make some marks. Well I can see that I've actually affected areas that aren't on the apple. So what I want to do is use my apple to create a clipping group, and I'm going to hold my Option key down and move my cursor to the space in between these two layers. And when I click, that will use the apple to chop away visually areas on the layers above it adding it to a clipping group. That's Option click on the line in between a layer or Alt click if you're on a PC. And I'll turn that off; I'll Option click to de-activate that clipping group and you can see it shows my entire shadow here. And I really want that shadow to be just on the apple to create a more realistic effect. So I'll Option click the line diving these two layers. Finally, I think I'm going to add a sharper edged shadow also. So I'm going to create a new layer, go back to my Pen tool and create a kind of a curved path here. And I really don't care about the left side of my path, because I know that it's going to be hidden by my building. Command click to activate it as a selection, and use my airbrush to paint in some detail on this. And my airbrush, of course the airbrush effect is contained to wherever there is a selection. So I can't paint outside of it, only inside the active selection. I'm going to hide my selection just to see how it looks so far: it looks OK. It could stand it to be a little bit softer, so I'll de-select and I'll run a Blur filter over this selection. So I'm going to Filter menu>Blur, and I'll choose Gaussian Blur, but just one pixel. So that's a nice effect: it's sharp but not too sharp. I'll undo that so you can see how it looked before. It's a little bit too sharp. We'll redo the blur, and I'm going to add this also to my clipping group. So I'll hold the Option key down and click in between these layers. So here is the final effect. You can see that I have my building, piece of the building on the very top layer, and which in this building across was derived from the base or source image. Behind it I have two shadows - layer four and layer three. And these two shadows are added to a clipping group, and the apple is the base of the clipping group. So it's chopping away the edges of my two shadow layers. And the apple is here and finally the apple sits on top of the entire thing. I think to finish this, I might actually add a little bit of a highlight at the bottom here, because light would be reflecting off of the roof. And I also might turn down the opacity of my sharp edged shadow just a bit. So that's how you can put together some of the tools and techniques to create a illustration.