1950's Style Pin-Up Poster

Quick reference

• 00:04 The first thing that we need to do extract the model from its
• 00:08 background.
• 00:08 You may be happy with a pink background, but for this case,
• 00:12 I'm going to be changing the background to a little bit darker, older style feel.
• 00:16 So how do we extract a model from the background? Well there are a lot of ways
• 00:20 to do so,
• 00:21 but I usually start with a selection method, and one of my favorite selection
• 00:25 methods is the quick selection tool,
• 00:27 which you can find in your tools bar on the left. It's hiding with the magic wand
• 00:31 tool.
• 00:32 I'll go ahead and select the quick selection tool, it works almost like
• 00:35 a brush. Use the left and right square bracket keys on your keyboard to
• 00:38 increase or decrease the size of the brush,
• 00:41 and all you have to do is brush on top at the model, and you're going to notice
• 00:45 that it is starting to make a selection over the area you brush on top of.
• 00:48 And what's nice is that it detects the edges of the area it’s brushing,
• 00:53 so it doesn't select anything that shouldn't be selected.
• 00:56 Now, on occasion, it will select some areas like this pink in the background.
• 00:59 In that case, you can hold on your ALT or Option key and deselect it like that
• 01:04 area for you.
• 01:05 Then go ahead and refine the edge. So I'll continue to go around this model,
• 01:10 and the nice thing is it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. In a
• 01:13 moment, we're going to be using the refine edge tool
• 01:16 in Photoshop, to make the selection as accurate as possible.
• 01:20 Alright, so now that our selection is complete, we want to make sure to refine
• 01:24 the edges,
• 01:25 so we have a nice accurate selection. There are two ways you can get a refined
• 01:29 edge.
• 01:30 If you have a selection method active, you can find it on the top on your Options
• 01:33 bar,
• 01:34 or you can also find it under the Select menu at the top of your workspace
• 01:37 and go down to ‘refine edge’. Now, in this window, we have a few ways to preview how
• 01:42 our selection will look.
• 01:43 Under the View menu right here, we can choose ‘marching ants’ - you can choose on
• 01:47 black, on-white,
• 01:48 or black-on-white. All of these are different preview methods, but, again it is just a
• 01:52 preview: that's not how it's going to look in the end.
• 01:54 The feature we want to focus on is ‘edge detection’. We're going to turn on smart
• 01:59 radius and increase the radius just a little bit.
• 02:01 You'll notice it has gone around and made a much more accurate selection
• 02:05 around the edges, especially where there's hair and fur.
• 02:08 Now, in this case there isn't too much hair, and hopefully not any fur,
• 02:12 so we don't have to crank up to rate too much. But if there are areas that it
• 02:15 missed, you can always use the refine radius tool
• 02:18 and brush in the areas that you want the fine edge to focus on -
• 02:21 especially hair and fur. So I'll do one very simple pass around the outline
• 02:26 of her hair, just in case I missed any stray hairs that should be there.
• 02:30 And there we go: that looks good.
• 02:33 So our selection is looking pretty nice, pretty accurate.
• 02:37 And once it's done, you don't want to press OK. You want to make sure to change the
• 02:40 output
• 02:41 to ‘new layer with layer mask’. It's very important that you save with the layer
• 02:45 mask, because if you look down here,
• 02:47 there's some areas that look a little bit funky, and in that case you can
• 02:50 always grab the layer mask
• 02:52 and, with a black or white brush, you can always make some refinements.
• 02:56 So, with a black brush, making it a little bit smaller,
• 02:58 I can easily brush over this area that looks a little bit strange.
• 03:01 And this area here kind of got rid of some in the leg, so I can use a white brush
• 03:05 and paint that leg back in just like that.
• 03:11 Switch over to black to get rid of this area. Switch back to white
• 03:14 to paint in some the area that it got rid of.
• 03:18 I can go over here and do the exact same thing.
• 03:19 Switch to black and get rid of some of a selection that it missed,
• 03:23 then switch to white and paint in some of that back.
• 03:26 You get the idea. So let me go back to 100%.
• 03:30 And now we have our model extracted from the background,
• 03:33 and it's time to create our new background. So to start, we create a new
• 03:38 layer.
• 03:38 I’m going to go ahead and select the background and create a new layer, right at the bottom.
• 03:42 We want to choose a yellowish brown color, somewhere right around here.
• 03:46 Set that as my foreground color, and now that it is the foreground color, I
• 03:50 can use my
• 03:51 ALT Backspace or Option Delete shortcut to fill that layer with my foreground
• 03:55 color.
• 03:56 Once you have a new background set again, you can see the importance of using
• 03:59 a layer mask.
• 04:00 There are some areas that still look a little bit weird, so I can grab my layer
• 04:04 mask one more time
• 04:05 and just make some very minor adjustments. I can always go back
• 04:09 later on in the edit
• 04:10 and make some changes to it if necessary. But I like getting those out of the way at
• 04:14 the beginning.
• 04:15 Alright, we'll leave it at that for now. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, either.
• 04:21 Good, now going back to the background, we'll be adding
• 04:25 a few filters to kind of give it an authentic old style feel.
• 04:27 Now before you go ahead and start adding filters like a wild
• 04:31 person,
• 04:32 you want to make sure to convert this layer for smart objects first.
• 04:36 This will ensure you can go back and edit those filters later on if you
• 04:39 decide you don't like them anymore.
• 04:41 To do that, you can either right click on your layer in the layers panel
• 04:44 and choose ‘convert to smart object’,
• 04:46 or under the filter menu, ‘convert for Smart Filters’ - either way will do the
• 04:50 exact same thing.
• 04:51 Once it has been converted, we can start adding our filters non-destructively.
• 04:55 The first filter we're going to be adding will be a texture. I'll hop into the
• 04:58 filter gallery.
• 04:59 I'm going to go down to texture, I'll choose texturize’ and I’ll set it to canvas with
• 05:04 a scaling of around 50%.
• 05:06 Maybe I'll increase that just a little bit, let's say 80%,
• 05:10 and relief about 2. I want it nice and subtle. When I press OK,
• 05:14 it may look a little bit tiled if you are not zoomed into 100%.
• 05:18 But if you zoom in to 100%, you should be able to see it as a nice
• 05:21 canvas style texture in the background.
• 05:24 And finally, the last filter I'm going to be adding, I'll hop back into my filter
• 05:27 gallery,
• 05:28 head up to brush strokes, and I'm going to choose a spatter texture.
• 05:32 I'm going to keep it at 25 and 15 and press OK.
• 05:35 It kind of gives it a little bit of an older feel,
• 05:38 and some of the adjustments I'm going to be making in the next few minutes will add
• 05:41 that even more.
• 05:43 So, let me zoom out just a little bit so I can see my whole entire document, just
• 05:46 like this.
• 05:47 And we want to add a new layer: we're going to be adding some
• 05:50 burn marks to give even more of an older feel. To do that
• 05:54 on the new layer, I’m going to make sure to set the foreground color to black,
• 05:57 and I'm going to grab a nice large brush. So, I'll right click to bring up my brush
• 06:01 picker.
• 06:02 Make sure the harnesses is at zero and set the size nice and large - let's say
• 06:07 somewhere around 1000,
• 06:08 maybe a little bit lower, right around there: 737 - perfect.
• 06:12 And once your brush has been set, all you have to do is start painting
• 06:17 around the edges where you want the burns to be,
• 06:21 just like that. Now, it looks a little bit ridiculous.
• 06:24 That's because we haven't blended it yet. To do that, in your layers panel on the
• 06:28 right,
• 06:29 we're going to set the blend mode: change it from normal to overlay.
• 06:32 That will blend our black brush with the background layer.
• 06:36 You can always go back and make additional burns if necessary, just to
• 06:39 give it a little bit of an older feel.
• 06:41 Perfect: the background is complete. Now, it's time to move on to the
• 06:47 model,
• 06:48 There's a few things we're going to do. I'll be making three copies of this
• 06:52 model,
• 06:52 one's going to be for a blur, which I'll add a little bit later on,
• 06:55 and the other two are going to help give our model an old style,
• 06:58 colorized feel to her. So to make our duplicates, we’re going to select our model layer.
• 07:03 I'll change the name of this to 'model' and with the Command key on the
• 07:08 Mac, or Control key in Windows held down, press the J key on your keyboard
• 07:12 twice, and that will give us three copies of our model layer.
• 07:16 One, two and three. We're not going to worry about this one too much, as it’s
• 07:20 going to be our blur - we'll get to that little bit later on.
• 07:22 But these two we will focus on right now. I'm going to hide
• 07:26 the top one, just so we can see what we're doing on the bottom layer.
• 07:28 I want to take out some of the saturation in this model, she's a little bit too
• 07:32 vivid right now.
• 07:33 So to do that, I'll be adding an adjustment layer, and again, adjustment
• 07:37 layers
• 07:37 further add to the non-destructive editing we've been doing this whole
• 07:41 time.
• 07:42 So at the bottom of the Layers panel, click on the adjustment layer icon
• 07:45 and add a vibrance adjustment layer. Now, from here, you can either adjust the vibrance or
• 07:49 the saturation.
• 07:50 In this case, both of them will work nicely. If you're looking to increase the
• 07:54 vividness of your photos,
• 07:55 you want to select vibrance, or if you're dealing with skin tones. But in this case
• 07:59 because we're decreasing it, either
• 08:00 your vibrance or saturation will work fine. I'll leave it right around -34.
• 08:06 Looks pretty nice right there. It's not too vivid, but it's also not too desaturated
• 08:10 right there.
• 08:10 Okay, so now that that layer has been dealt with, we’re going to move on to our top
• 08:14 layer.
• 08:14 This is the layer we're going to be adding some filters to, and again, before you start
• 08:18 adding filters, you always want to convert it to a smart object.
• 08:21 Right here, once that's done, hop into the filter
• 08:25 gallery,
• 08:26 head up to Artistic and we are going to be adding a ‘poster edges’ filter.
• 08:30 For this filter, I want to make sure I have a nice outline around her body and a
• 08:34 little better posteization going on.
• 08:36 So the settings that probably will work well will be one for the edge thickness,
• 08:40 one for the edge intensity, and two for the posteization.
• 08:43 Now, the nice thing again about using smart objects is that if you need to
• 08:47 edit later on, you can always hop back into your filter gallery
• 08:50 and make the necessary changes if needed. But right now, I'm going to keep it as is.
• 08:55 Now you may like this look the way it is, and may want to keep it the way it is,
• 08:58 but for this edit I'll blend it a little bit with the previous layer. And
• 09:01 to do that I'll change the blend mode
• 09:03 of this layer from normal to soft light.
• 09:06 That will blend it just a little bit, very subtly, with the layer right below it.
• 09:10 And now, the last filter I will be adding will be noise. I'll go down to filter,
• 09:14 noise and then ‘add noise’. Now mostly, you'll probably have the amount set
• 09:18 pretty low and you probably won't be able to see it:
• 09:21 it's because we have the blend mode set to soft light.
• 09:24 So we'll probably have to crank it up somewhere around 25 for that noise to start coming though.
• 09:27 You want it a little bit subtle,
• 09:30 but also enough so you can see it, so it kind of gives a little bit more of an
• 09:34 older feel to it.
• 09:35 And that looks good right there. If I turn off the visibility of this layer,
• 09:39 you can hopefully see what these two filters have done for this layer.
• 09:42 Good, now the last layer we're going to be working on will be the blur that will
• 09:46 go underneath
• 09:46 and beside her. So, I'll select that back layer right there,
• 09:50 and I'll zoom out just a little bit. Now, before I convert this layer to a smart
• 09:54 object, so I can start adding filters and transformation,
• 09:57 I want to make sure to fill it with black. Black, right now, is my foreground color,
• 10:01 so if I very simply hold on ALT or Option and press Delete or Backspace,
• 10:05 it wil fill it with black. And if I move it out of the way so you can see, and indeed,
• 10:08 it has filled it with black. Now that that's done, I can go ahead and convert
• 10:13 it to a smart object.
• 10:14 Again, right click and convert to smart object.
• 10:18 Now, at this time I can start my transformations and my filters,
• 10:22 so enter the free transform mode with Command or Control T on your keyboard.
• 10:26 I'm going to drag it down just a little bit, right around there.
• 10:29 Then hold down Command Shift, Control Shift on Windows,
• 10:33 and drag it to the side: perfect.
• 10:36 Once I'm happy with the positioning, press Return or Enter on the keyboard.
• 10:40 Then you can move it into place if needed. I can move it right there, just so
• 10:43 her hand lines up. Right about there, perfect.
• 10:45 So now for the filters. I'm going to go up to filter,
• 10:50 blur and then ‘gaussian blur’. I'll add it very subtly,
• 10:54 somewhere around five, maybe six, pixel blur. Press OK.
• 10:58 Now, to finish the blur off, we need to fade it out and decrease the opacity.
• 11:02 So to fade it out, we can add a layer mask at the bottom of
• 11:06 the layers panel.
• 11:07 And then, grabbing the gradient tool right over here in the Tools bar, you want to
• 11:11 make sure the gradient is set to ‘black
• 11:13 to transparent’ and then very simply brush down,
• 11:17 just to fade it out just a little bit. Then finally,
• 11:20 decrease the opacity to blend in with the background.
• 11:26 There we go, it's looking pretty nice.
• 11:29 The next element we're going to be adding will be the text. Now the text
• 11:32 really is completely up to you as to what it looks like.
• 11:34 I'm going to be using script-based text using ‘Snell Roundhand’
• 11:38 and make it nice and large. Set it to a dark blue, desaturated color.
• 11:43 I'll go ahead and type out my words of choice.
• 11:49 It's a little bit too small, so I'll transform it up just a little bit,
• 11:53 or quite a bit. Press Return or Enter to accept the changes.
• 11:57 Now, I do want to blend it in with the background just a touch.
• 12:00 So I'll zoom in here, so I can see it at 100%: nice and crisp.
• 12:03 I can enter my layer styles, and down at the bottom, I can use Blend If to blend it
• 12:07 with the background very subtly.
• 12:09 Hold down ALT or Option, ALT on Windows, Option on the Mac,
• 12:13 and drag the left side of this handle to the left, just a little bit. You can
• 12:16 start to see
• 12:18 that it is very subtly blending with the background. Obviously if I go very far,
• 12:21 it is going to blend a lot,
• 12:22 but I want it very, very subtle, somewhere right around there: and press OK to accept.
• 12:27 Perfect, we're almost finished. There are two more things we're
• 12:31 going to be doing, which are completely optional: one of which
• 12:34 is to add some sort of grunge map on top. It looks like there's a face right here,
• 12:38 see the little face?
• 12:39 Anyway, adding a grunge map can further add to
• 12:42 the old feel to your design. So, I'll go ahead and drag this into the design,
• 12:46 right here.
• 12:46 Once it’s in the document, I'm going to hop back into my layer styles dialogue box
• 12:50 and again, down at the bottom in the Blend If section, we're going to make a few
• 12:53 blending changes.
• 12:54 This time, we're going to be effecting this layer, not the underlying layer.
• 12:58 I’m going to drag the left side of the highlights slider to the left,
• 13:01 and you can start to see some of the brighter areas of this branch map start
• 13:04 to fade away,
• 13:06 just like that. And then, finally, you can change the blend mode either to
• 13:09 overlay or soft light, whatever you feel works best, and you can decrease the
• 13:14 opacity
• 13:14 if needed, just to give a little bit more of a grungy feel to this design.
• 13:20 Press OK. Finally, the last thing I love to add to most of my designs - sometimes
• 13:24 it works, sometimes it doesn't -
• 13:26 is a curves adjustment layer. It really starts to sharpen up your image,
• 13:30 just a little bit. I'm going to pull this up a little bit,
• 13:33 pull the shadows down a touch, highlights up a touch,
• 13:37 maybe a little bit, and leave it right around here.
• 13:40 And there we have it. We have our pin-up edit complete, and because we work non-destructively,
• 13:45 all of this is completely editable. So if you want to go back and change the
• 13:49 vibrancy, maybe decrease the saturation of the model just a touch,
• 13:52 you can easily do that. If you want to change the texture background, you can very easily
• 13:55 do that. You can change the blending of the text.
• 13:58 Everything is completely editable, and you're left with a pretty nice looking,
• 14:01 old-style pinup. And again, you may not be looking to create exactly this,
• 14:06 but hopefully you can take the techniques you learned in this tutorial and
• 14:09 apply them to your own projects,
• 14:11 and create exactly what you desire.

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