Technical Slop

Layer Mask Zoom

Playing with a tweakable Layer Mask in a D-Map is a lot of fun. Not only that, but it opens the door for more advanced techniques. Advanced techniques? Yes, advanced, but they are for another day. Right now it's all about building a foundation for those advanced techniques while having some fun. Keeping it a little simple for now.

Here we go.

This is the base D-Map that we will start with. I call it a Zoom Cube. Notice that with positive values it expands the picture of Biker Chic.

It's a good start, so let's get busy modifying it for our purposes.

Across the top are the various parts involved. Red channel is a linear gradient with white on the left and black on the right. Green channel is a linear gradient with white across the top and black along the bottom. Blue channel is 50% grey.

Next up is a basic circular gradient going white to black. Blending Mode is set to Exclusion. Also, Blend Clipped Layers as Group is turned on.

Then comes the two Curves Adjustment Layers. The bottom one is the tweak one for messing with. The top one is the Layer Mask fixer Ad-Layer. In Mask Fix, make sure it has Input: 0 and Output: 128 just like I showed on the previous page.

The way this works is that the target image is expanded in the center, but the expansion is reduced to zero when you reach the outside. With the D-Map as it is, the reduction of expansion is done linearly. Umm...

Sorry, but no examples of taking it for a spin just this time. You'll have to try it on your own.

Well, that was fun. Now let's tweak the D-Map. Double-click Tweak to pull up the Curves dialoge box and mess around. Save it as a PSD and give it a whirl. Here are example curves #1, #2, and #3.

Once you get Curves you want to try, save the D-Map again, go to your photo, and Displace again. Do it a bunch of times. You are actually using the Curves dialogue to bevel the Squish Factor. Hard to explain. Play with it and you might get it.

Okay, you get maxium expansion where the curve is white. You get no expansion where the curve is black. Everything inbetween is inbetween. Look at Curve #3. In the upper-right we have maximum expansion. Then the expansion slowly gets reduced. When you meet that little upward curve in the lower-left, expansion goes up a bit, then shoots down to zero.

Follow that? Jeez, I hope so.

Here we have a humour picture of Tom Hanks that I picked up somewhere. This is an arbitrary picture. Really. Tom is just a lucky guy.

Here we have Tom Displaced using Curve #1. Pretty funky, eh?

Yes, this is how ShapeShifter distorts with a circular selection, but we don't need to make a circular selection. Small matter of convenience.

All that is left is to dress it up.

Here it is all dressed up and ready to go.

An HSB> Colourize Adjustment Layer to turn it a bit blue.A circular selection to clean out the corners. I even Leveled it a bit (with an Adjustment Layer of course).

I also did a cut & paste on the D-Map's Layer Mask. I tossed it into an Alpha channel in Tom's doc, and used that for Lighting Effect, which I tweaked with Levels. I ran Lighting Effects on a Layer filled with Grey and set the Blending Mode to Hard Light. Works for me.

Here we have Tom Displaced using Curve #3. This is the same pic as above, but it's cropped slightly differently. I'm naughty like that.

All that is left to do is to dress it up.

Same deal.

There are two HSB Adjustment Layers -- one to de-saturate the outer ring, and the other to colourize the center. There is also a Levels Adjustment Layer to tighten it up a bit. I also tossed in a black circle between the center and outer ring. Some of the lighting is off (same C&P/Lighting Effects as above), but I'm not in the mood to fiddle with it.

There is something really cool about this discussion. KPT 5 has a filter called ShapeShifter. Pretty spiffy plug-in. The above technique is *exactly* how ShapeShifter works with a circular selection. Well, how ShapeShifter handles distortion when you tell it to use a reflection map. Manually adding other things, like lighting effects, is up to you, but isn't terribly hard. If you would like to learn more about duplicating ShapeShifter with irregular shapes and what-not, I recommend reading Reflections Maps.

Ready for more? I hope so, because tweaking an invert on the Rotate Cube is coming up next.