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lucienp8924865
Inspiring
May 12, 2017
Answered

How to Make an Editable TEXT Portrait from a Photo

  • May 12, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1735 views

I am working on a BlueLightning tutorial; the image on the left--as shown in tutorial.  My image on the right contains marching ants.The next step is to click on the Layer Mask, but it inverts the text (last image). I can't figure out what I am doing wrong?  Thanks for looking, Lucie.

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Correct answer Nancy OShea

I'm not 100% sure what tutorial you're using, or what the exact outcome you want, but here's what I tried. There are lots of ways to do this:

Make a selection of for the highlights (I did a silhouette, according to one tutorial I saw.), then save the selection as a mask. The selected area should be white, If not, press ctrl/cmd-i to invert it. Then I used the threshold to create a b&w image to make my black selection. I inversed this, as what was to be black needed to be white. Went to channels, ctrl-clicked on the thumbnail, and saved it as a channel.

Then I loaded this shadow selection (ctrl-click on the channel thumb), went back to the layers panel and created a layer mask for the chadows:

Then I went back to the channels panel and made a selection of the highlights. Frankly, at this point, if your highlight text layer is below your shadow text layer, that's all you need to do. You can do as you mentioned alt clicking on the shadow channel to subtract that selection, but you really don't need to. I then added the highlight mask to the highlight text layer:


This looks like the tutorial. 

Photoshop CS6 Tutorial: How to Make an Editable TEXT Portrait from a Photo. - YouTube

Nancy

1 reply

Chuck Uebele
Community Expert
Chuck UebeleCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2017

It looks like you're making the same selection for both the highlights and the shadows. either use ctrl/cmd-shift-i to invert the selection or ctrl/cmd-i to invert the mask (make sure the mask is selected).

L
lucienp8924865Author
Inspiring
May 12, 2017

The instructions are: 

Open your Channels panel and Ctrl-click or Cmd-click on the Shadows thumbnail to make it into a selection.

Open back up to you Layers panel and click on the Layer mask button to make a layer mask next to the active layer, which is the Shadows text.

Make the Highlights text layer, visible and active.

Go back to your Channels panel and Ctrl-click or Cmd-click on the Highlights thumbnail to make it into a selection and then go to the Shadows thumbnail and press Ctrl+ Alt on a PC or Cmd + Opt on a Mac to subtract the shape from the Highlights shape leaving just the highlights of the portrait.

Open back up your Layers panel and click on the layer mask button to make a layer mask next to the highlights text.

Here is image of my Channels Panel:

And here is what it should resemble:

Chuck Uebele
Community Expert
Chuck UebeleCommunity Expert
Community Expert
May 12, 2017

I'm not 100% sure what tutorial you're using, or what the exact outcome you want, but here's what I tried. There are lots of ways to do this:

Make a selection of for the highlights (I did a silhouette, according to one tutorial I saw.), then save the selection as a mask. The selected area should be white, If not, press ctrl/cmd-i to invert it. Then I used the threshold to create a b&w image to make my black selection. I inversed this, as what was to be black needed to be white. Went to channels, ctrl-clicked on the thumbnail, and saved it as a channel.

Then I loaded this shadow selection (ctrl-click on the channel thumb), went back to the layers panel and created a layer mask for the chadows:

Then I went back to the channels panel and made a selection of the highlights. Frankly, at this point, if your highlight text layer is below your shadow text layer, that's all you need to do. You can do as you mentioned alt clicking on the shadow channel to subtract that selection, but you really don't need to. I then added the highlight mask to the highlight text layer:

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