Deconstructing A Photoshop Illustration

My illustration for the How-To on conditional actions uses a variety of Photoshop techniques.

My favorite tutorials are often the ones that deconstruct real-world graphics; Scott Kelby and Photoshop User magazine comes to mind as an example, with their re-creation of cool graphics floating around our heavily-branded environments. So after a few requests I decided to break down the techniques used in my illustration for the How-To tutorial about conditional actions; you can see the completed graphic in Figure 1, or check out the Designorati homepage.

Figure 1: The final illustration.

It’s a simple composition with three main components. We’ll look at each of them in turn.

THE JPEG ICONS

Figure 2: The layer of JPEG icons.

Thanks to Mac OS X and the ability to enlarge our file icons with clarity, it’s easy to increase icon size by selecting View –> Show View Options… in the Finder and using the slider. After that take a screenshot (Cmd-Shift-3), bring it into Photoshop and crop it down. If your folder or desktop is white (and most are) then there won’t be a need to remove the background.

I scaled the image down to the desired size and used a rotation of -25 degrees and horizontal skew of 30 degrees to achieve the right perspective. Duplicates were created by duplicating the layer several times and placing them in proper position. At this point you can either flatten the layers together or do what I did, which was to select all the layers (CS2 makes this easy, just hold Shift and click the layers in the Layers palette), then press Cmd-G or select New Group… in the Layers palette’s flyout menu to combine the layers in a group. Note that “group” is the same as “layer set” from earlier version of Photoshop. To achieve the fadeaway add a mask to the group (Layer –> Layer Mask –> Reveal All, or click the Layer Mask button at the bottom of the Layers palette) and use a soft round brush to mask the icons.

THE DROPLET ICON AND THE SHADOW

Figure 3: The droplet icon and the shadow.

The ImageReady droplet icon was captured in the same way the JPEG icons were above, and because it has a hard edge it was easy to select the white pixels around it with the Magic Wand Tool and delete them. The shadow, which is cast by a light source directly above, is impossible to pull off with the conventional drop shadow filter but a cinch if you use a brush:

1. Create a layer below the layer with the droplet icon. Pressing Command while clicking the New Layer button in the Layers palette is a good shortcut to do this.
2. Open the Brushes palette and select a standard soft, round brush (a brush around 90 pixels wide is ideal for this illustration)
3. Click “Brush Tip Shape” in the categories to the left of the palette and in the Roundness field enter 25% or drag the handles on the crosshairs display until the brush becomes an oval (see Figure 4)
4. Set opacity to 50% in the Options bar
5. Click once to add a slight shadow
6. Decrease the brush size (right bracket key) to about 30 pixels
7. Click once in the epicenter to add a smaller, stronger shadow

Figure 4: The Brushes palette, showing the Brush Tip Shape options.

THE CONDITIONALS

Figure 5: The conditionals.

The conditionals are those drop-down menu items sticking out of the droplet icon, cut and pasted from screenshots of ImageReady’s Conditional dialog box. To achieve the illusion of bending and curling I rotated the conditionals and used the Spherize filter (Filter –> Distort –> Spherize…) at various strengths to warp each conditional. Quick tip: CS2’s Warp command (in Edit –> Transform) can also achieve similar effects; however, it doesn’t do a good job of creating three-dimensionality like the Spherize filter and its cousin, the Pinch filter.

Once the conditionals are positioned where you want them, Shift-click the layers and create another layer group to house them. As with the JPEG icons, create a layer mask and this time use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to hide the conditionals below the top edge of the droplet icon. It’s as easy as selecting the area from the top edge down and filling it with black.

For even more three-dimensionality I added a slight shadow where the conditionals meet the droplet icon:

1. Create a new layer in the conditionals’ layer group, at the top of the layer stack
2. Command-click the first conditonals’ layer to select it
3. Shift-Command-click the rest of the conditionals’ layers to add their selections to the first one
4. Use a soft round brush to add black to the conditionals

You can see in Figure 5 above exactly where I added black. You can do this with the droplet icon visible, which works better because you can see just how far the shadow needs to reach.

CONCLUSION

All the techniques shown here use fundamental Photoshop tools that have been around for years. I used scaling and skewing transformations, the Magic Wand Tool, brushes and the Brushes palette, and the Spherize filter. But when used at the right time and combined in the right way it can create a powerful illustration that communicates well. On your next assignment think about the “old” Photoshop techniques, because even in this era of filters, effects and plug-ins a lot can be achieved with the oldest of tools.