INTRODUCTION
in this video I'm going to show you how to take any photo and turn it into an album cover in the style of the artwork of the Smiths in like two minutes so here's an original photo and I'm just working in a new document that is about three thousand by three thousand pixels uh you can choose whatever size you want but if we're pretending this is an album cover that's about 10 by 10 inches and I've just dragged
SMART OBJECT
my original photo on there so you can actually make it a full size photo like some of their albums or like some of their albums are just a smaller size photo inside of a canvas but let me just delete everything that I did previously so either way I'll show you both ways the first thing we're going to do is just make it a duotone or two-tone image so I'm going to right click on my photo layer and just make sure that it's converted to a Smart object and that way we can play around with our edits non-destructively and the first thing
ADJUSTMENTS GRADIENT MAP
I'll do is make it two-tone so I'm going to go to image adjustments gradient map and here you can choose any two colors you want so whatever you want you can play around with it I'm just going to use some sort of pastel style colors seems like they often used pastel style colors but nothing like too vibrant looking something maybe a little bit more mellow and I'll press OK with this combo here maybe I'll make this even a little brighter a quick tip when you're working the Color Picker like normally it's set to Hue H mode and you can see all the colors and go through the slider but if you want to fine tune in on one color a little trick is you can actually switch over
FILL LAYER SOLID COLOR
so s is like saturation I can make it more or less saturated L is like lightness I can make it lighter or darker and so if you find a somewhat of a color you like sometimes you can just play around with it like boost the saturation a little bit increase the lightness a little bit instead of just trying to do it here but they're all the same so I'll press OK and I'll press OK on this gradient and that'll go for that and then I can create a new background layer if I want so there's many ways to do that but I'm just going to go to layer new fill layer solid color and for this color
GRADIENT MAP
I can just draw from the photo that we used or use the same exact color from the gradient map but I'll double click on it and I'll use my Color Picker ink drop a color from the actual photo or use the same exact color from the gradient map so I'll press OK there and another thing I'm going to do to our photo just to give it more of a film grain texture is go to filter noise add noise so here you can add a certain percentage of noise up to your taste and you can choose uniform or gaussian and monochromatic or not out say keep it monochromatic but most importantly a little trick that I'll do is really we should have added the noise first
BLENDING OPTIONS
so what you can do is just take the noise and put it under the gradient map so that the gradient map gets applied after the noise and one thing you can do is even double click on this little slider to add blending options onto the noise so one thing you can lower the opacity of it or you can set it onto a blending mode like overlay or hard light or something like that and uh this way you can sort of multiply those colors together and get a little bit more contrast and grain
SIMPLE TEXT
so you can see that adds a nice little grain to it and you can tweak your original photo however you want you know if you really want you can even maybe add a little bit of a gaussian blur onto your original photo just to make it look a little bit more old still but again if you're going to add the blur I would put it under the noise so that the noise gives it a little bit more of that sharpness back and then finally you can just add simple text whatever you want so I'm just going to use times bold italic font and you can put whatever you want for your parody album art name and uh whatever song title you want and of course I have snap 2 set on
EDIT FREE TRANSFORM
so as I use my move tool Photoshop automatically snaps things to to their centers and whatnot you can adjust that setting under View and you see snap is checked on and if you want you can even add other little touches maybe on a new layer you could add little lines or whatever you want fill those Selections in with the lines or Stripes whatever borders you want or if you were doing it in the full screen style you could just take your original photo press command t or edit free transform also the reason this keeps coming up is it's just telling you smart filters this is a smart layer
DIFFERENT COLORS
so while you're doing any adjustments the preview will get turned off for a second so don't freak out but uh I'm just going to increase the size of this I'm holding option or alt to stretch it symmetrically from the center and once I press enter all the filters get applied again and you have the same thing here so it's really a quite simple effect to recreate album artwork in the style of the Smiths it could probably do it in one or two minutes without all this explaining and you can always go back double click on the gradient map if you want and try out different colors
CONCLUSION
so have fun with this hopefully you learned something even if you don't want to create album artwork like this and it's giving you some ideas if you like this video and you're learning Photoshop I have a playlist with hundreds of more videos for free here on my channel and you can subscribe to my channel here on YouTube to stay tuned for all of the new educational and free videos that I post so my name is thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one