8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/creating-a-vector-composite-effect-from-a-photo 1/14 Creating a Vector Composite Effect from a Photo This tutorial will demonstrate how to take an image, in this case a woman's face, and give the appearance that it is entirely composed of vector shapes. Along the way, we'll use some fairly basic techniques, including clipping masks and displacement maps, to achieve a unique effect! This is the image we'll be creating:
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Transcript
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
To begin, create a new document of pretty much whatever size you'd like. I personally prefer a wider look for this effect, but any sizeshould work. You should however probably stick to a landscape aspect ratio, at least for following this tutorial.
I chose an image size of 720 x 480 pixels, at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch.
Once you've created your new image, fill the background layer with solid black.
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
Next, we have to find an image to work with. I chose a picture of a woman's face that I found on the stock photography websitestock.xchng, however, the owner of the photo requested that I credit the website iofoto.com, so I've just put both here.
You can use an image of almost anything for this effect, but to follow this tutorial, your best bet is to choose an image similar to mine,
i.e. a human face.
Once you have your image, place it into your document as a new layer. Remove everything else in the picture, just leaving the face.
I've also adjusted the brightness and saturation on my image. You can preserve the entire person's head, but I personally think the
effect looks better with the back of the head being cutoff, leaving just the face.
Duplicate the face layer, and make sure it's positioned exactly on top of the original face. Press Shift + Control + U to desaturate thelayer, and then go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. Make sure the setting for Source is selected as Transparency, and use settings of 10,
0 and 0 for Radius, Blade Curvature and Rotation, respectively. We'll see later on why blurring this layer is necessary.
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
blurred the image because displacement mapping in Photoshop is very accurate. If we had tried it on the original image, our vector
shapes would appear choppy because in reality they were mapped to the smallest bumps and textures on the woman's skin. Blurring
the image slightly leaves only the smooth contours of the woman's face, allowing for our vector shapes to maintain their smoothnessbut still conform to the face.
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
Once you have used the displacement mapping on all of your vector shapes, you need to then duplicate your original image layer asmany times as the number of shapes you have. What we need is a copy of the original image for every vector shape we have, with the
copy on top of its shape in the layers palatte. When you're finished arranging everything, you will have alternating image and vector
shape layers, starting at the top with an image layer.
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
At this point we've finished the final effect on the image. I added a Radial Gradient to the background to give the impression thatlight is coming from the left to match the general shading of the image.
8/9/2019 Creating a Vector Composite Effect From a Photo
This technique can be applied to any image using any vector shapes. The key to making it look convincing is matching the vector
objects to the shape, countours, and flow of the object image they're to be wrapped around. It's an odd effect, but I hope you were able
to gain something from this tutorial, and good luck with your own work!
Finally I have added some text, and darkened the neck area so it sits further in the shadows. Additionally I upped the contrast to makethe image a little more eerie.