Myerson Photo Blog

Time for another photoshop graffiti tutorial. This time, lets look at how to turn yourself or a loved one into a 60’s socialist revolutionary icon, a la Che Guevara.

Lets dive right in. First off, we’ll need a few photos. I’ll be using this friendly face and wood fence background, both from my iStockphoto portfolio.

To begin, we’ll need to do some preparation work on the photo of the man. Just as with our previous graffiti tutorial, we’re going to want to have our graffiti look like it was stenciled on and spray painted. To do that, we’ll have to adjust the face down to one color. Photoshop provides an easy way to do this. It’s called Threshold.

I opened the image of the man and cropped it down to just the area around the face. Before I applied Threshold, I wanted to remove some of the extraneous background. The threshold function will eliminate a great many details, so it’s OK to do a rough job of isolating the subject. Besides, if we’re going for a stenciled look anyway, edge details are not too significant. Here’s what I had:

The magic “Background Eraser” tool took care of most of the isolation for me. It’s an underused tool, but it’s so useful. After isolating the subject from the background, I added a threshold adjustment layer.

The threshold adjustment turns the image into just black and white pixels. No shades of gray, no nuance, just black and white. The slider lets you determine the threshold (hence the name) at which tones are converted to black or white. Play with the slider to see what I mean.

After settling on a good level of black and white detail, I opened the Channels palette, and copied one of the channels into a new one (as the image is black and white, it doesn’t make any difference whether you choose the R, G, or B channel to duplicate).

I didn’t really like the hard-edged bottom, so I painted a few small edits in this new channel. I then inverted the colors, swapping black and white. The end result was this:

We’re almost done with the stencil preparation. I went back to the layers palette, and added a new layer filled with plain white. I went back to the channels palette and loaded the new channel as a selection. That made it so that I had a selection of the stencil, where all the pixels were white. I dragged that selection into my background (wood fence) image:

Well, as graffiti goes, that’s pretty horrible. Lets make it a little (or a lot) more believable. First off, I went into blending options and straight to the bottom of the dialog box, where it says “Blend If:”. I moved the white point slider for “This Layer” down a notch, from 255 to 254. Since all the pixels on this layer are 255/255/255 white, I only have to hide that one value to make the whole thing go blank.

Then I went into gradient overlay and added a gradient. I like to use gradients, rather than single color overlays. Nothing in real world imagery is truly one color, so nothing in my fakery should be either. The important step, then, is to set the blend mode of this gradient overlay to “Multiply”. As you can see here, that lets the background wood texture show through.

Much better.

At this point, we’ll want to make the paint look a little more stenciled. There are two things I like to do to help create that effect: paint drips and overspray.

Paint drips are just the excess bits of paint that dribble down off the bottom edges of the painted area. These can be painted on directly, or you can use some vector art or custom shapes to do the trick. I tend to paint it on, because it’s quick, and at low resolution it’s more about the impression than about the details. If this were a high res piece, intended for print, I’d probably fire off a few more credits at iStockphoto and get one of the high quality paint drip vectors there.

The other effect I like to add is overspray. This is the spray paint that hits the wall outside the far edge of the stencil. You can see the effect in a real world photo here:

And a close up of what I’m talking about:

Creating this effect in our Photoshop document is actually identical to how it’s created in the real world; we’ll make a stencil (mask) and “accidentally” paint outside it. First the stencil. I used the shape tool to make a rough rectangle around our face. I then rasterized the shape, and roughed it up some using the Liquify filter, the Blur tool, and the Smudge tool. The areas where the edge of the mask are blurry will result in blurry edges to our overspray, similar to the effect of a stencil not placed immediately up against the surface being painted on.

I made a selection of that mask, inverted it and selected a rough brush. Make sure you’re painting on your face layer, as that has the layer effects. When I paint overspray, I try to build up the corners, to help indicate where the edges of the stencil would have been. It’s easy to go overboard with this technique, so experiment to find what works.

Here are the results of the detail roughing. Yeah, I blurred part of the face as well. I think it makes it look a little more stenciled.

One final effect I like to add is a little dimensionality, by having the paint match the contours of the fence beneath it. To do this, I hid all of the layers except the fence, then went over to my channels palette. I picked the channel that had the greatest contrast between the wood surface and the black spaces between slats. For my image, that appeared to be the red channel, though that could be different for you if you used a different base image. I duplicated this channel, then gave that new channel a levels adjustment to leave me with just the black spaces between the slats (a little of the wood texture is fine as well). Invert the channel, and make a selection of it.

With the selection still active, add in a Solid Color adjustment layer, filled with white. The selection automatically becomes the layer mask. Unhide the fence and face layers so you can see what’s happening here. With our new white masked layer selected, use the arrow keys to move the white pixels over to the left. I only had to nudge it a few pixels; depending on the resolution of your image, your mileage may vary. Set this white layer’s blend mode to “Overlay”, and reduce the opacity of the layer to about 20 or 30%. You should see that the painted face now has some highlights where the wood slats round over. Now here’s the cool trick: in the layers palette, make a selection from the face layer’s pixels, invert the selection, and in the layer mask for the overlay layer, make that selection black. That will prevent the overlay from lightening the “unpainted” wood.

That’s it for this tutorial. Add a comment here and let us see how you used these techniques to turn an average Joe into a socialist icon. ¡Viva La Revolución!

Click the image for a larger view of the finished piece.