Make Money, Part 1

Sorry, this How-To tutorial is NOT about making counterfeit cash! Instead we’ll learn how to scan a five-dollar bill and add three-dimensionality with Photoshop.

Figure 1: A floating fiver.

Figure 1 at left shows a floating five-dollar bill that a client of mine had used on the cover of a publication. There’s several bills floating across the page just like this one, and I learned some were stock photography and others were shot in the client’s studio. It made me think, because there’s a handful of filters in Photoshop that can do very similar things to flat objects. This How-To will show you a technique that can turn a flat five-dollar bill into a three-dimensional, curled object.

Figure 2: Our original image.

Figure 2 shows where we begin: with a five-dollar bill, front and back. Be sure each side is in its own document. For the downward curl we will only need to work with the front side.

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Step 1: Using Image –> Canvas Size, increase the canvas size by 100% both horizontally and vertically. Quick tip: Check the “Relative” checkbox when doing this to add the extra canvas size to the already-existing canvas size. Unchecking it will change the canvas size into exactly what you specify in the measurement fields.

At this point the five-dollar bill should be centered in a large document window with white space all around.

Step 2: If the fiver is not already on its own layer, make it so. If it’s part of the Background, double-click the Background in the Layers palette to make it a layer.

Step 3: Move the fiver into a corner of the document. This technique basically puts the curl on the bill wherever it is in the whole document; if you move it to the lower-left corner, the curl will show up in the lower-left corner of the bill.

Step 4: Select Filter –> Distort –> Spherize… to open the Spherize filter dialog box. Spherize can accept positive and negative values, but for now we’ll use 100 for Amount and Normal for the mode. Click OK to spherize the bill, effectively adding a curl to it.

Figure 3: The spherized bill (note the unaffected area).

Step 5: Move the bill back to the center of the window and crop as necessary. The spherize effect leaves the corners of the image untouched (see Figure 3), so you will need to erase that part of the bill with whatever selection and erase methods you like. I like to draw an elliptical marquee to match the curl, use Select –> Inverse and then use the Eraser tool to delete what I want.

See Figure 4 below for my final image.

Figure 4: The final bill, with a curl!

With the Spherize filter, you can add any kind of downward curl very easily.

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The bill shown in Figure 1 is actually curling up, and this is harder to do though not impossible. I plan to write this tutorial later in the day, so keep checking D:Photoshop to learn how it’s done!