Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to this video Tutorial today we’re looking at creating a frosted glass effect in Photoshop before I start the video. I have a special coupon for you that you can use to access additional. Photoshop training at skill share in the description below youll. Find a coupon for Skillshare. My sign up offer is always at least as good as the current Skillshare offer and typically, mine is even better. When you sign up for Skillshare, you get access to thousands of classes there, including over 200 of mine, please feel free to share those coupons with family and friends. Now let’s swing over to Photoshop where I have an image open and it’s just a regular photo. We’re going to create this frosted glass effects. I’m going to start by converting this background layer of the photo into a smart object and this is crucial. I’ll right-click the layer and choose convert to smart object. Now I’m going to make a duplicate of this smart object layer and I can do that by just dragging it onto the new icon now with the smart object layer. I’m going to do a few things, and the first thing I’m going to do is to blur it. So with it selected, I’ll choose filter and then blur, and I’m going to use a Gaussian blur, and this is a really large blur and typically you would use quite small blurs, but in this case, because we want this frosted glass effect. We want to take it up to where we are sort of losing the quality of the image, and you can determine just how far you want to go. I want to go quite away so this is going to give me the effect. I like I’ll click, OK? The nice thing about these effects is that because they’re applied to a smart object. If they’re too much or too little, we can just double click on them and then make adjustments to the effect now the next thing. I’m going to do is to apply a frosted glass effect. I’m going to reselect the layer and this time. I’ll choose filter and then filter gallery now. The frosted glass filter effect is here in the distort option, so you’ll want to go down and locate the distort options and the middle one. Here is the glass effect now. I’m going to size this image, so it fits on screen so we can see the entire image here and just see how the effect is going to work Now before I do this. I’m actually going to back off this. Gaussian Blur cause. I want you to see it a little bit more clearly, and it might be a little bit easier to see with less of a blur. So let’s go and do that lets. Go back to the filter gallery and here you’ll say that. I’ve got glass selected, and then I can choose the distortion amount. Now you can go from no distortion at all to quite significant distortion, so I’m minding my nup all the way to 20 so I’m getting this texture in the image. Now you can also adjust the smoothness from no smoothness to a very high value of smoothness, but you can see that it’s really changing the effect and somewhere between these two values will be your sweet spot now. I know what I’m looking for. I’m looking for something a little bit more like this, A little bit of a fine grain effect, but you may be looking for something more intense in which case just adjust your settings now for the texture, you get different options, so there’s block so you can see this sort of glass blocks effect. If you like you can get canvas and while canvas might sound like a weird thing to use for glass, it actually works really well, and so that’s a really nice effect if you want to try that. I’m using frosted because that gives me the effect that I’m looking for, and there’s also a thing called tiny lens, which just sort of like miniature blocks. But again you can choose whichever of these you want. Now, when you choose your texture, you can then adjust the scaling, so you can make it very fine or very coarse, and I want mine to be quite scaled high, so I’m going to choose 200 Which is the maximum scale. If you choose invert, you’ll just find that the light comes from a different direction, and so the design changes just a little bit for me. It’s not making a huge amount of difference for some other effects. It might so now that. I’ve finished with this. I’m just going to click, OK? I’m going back to my Gaussian blur, so I’m going to double Click on it and I’m going to increase it back up again because I want it back where it was originally and again. The nice thing about these filters is that because we’re using a smart object. They’re totally editable. Now what we want? This frosted glass effect to do is to be in a sort of block across the middle of the document. So the next thing we’ll do is to create a rectangle. It’s going to be filled with black, so I got fill here and no stroke. I’m just going to click and drag to apply it to the image. Now if I add the option key, the alt or option key as I draw it out, then I’m drawing from the top left corner, which is a little bit more convenient now. I’m looking at this particular image and its width is 387 too. So I’m going to make sure that this is as wide as the image is not overly concerned about the height. I just want it to be the right width, you know? I want to align this, so I’ll select it and then press ctrl or command a and I’m going to Center it up in the middle of the image so that will just align the center of the object to the image. I’ll press ctrl or command D to deselect the selection. Now what I’m going to do Next is to use this as a clipping mask, so it doesn’t matter what color fill. It has we’re going to put the rectangle layer below the top most of their smart object, so it’s going to be sandwiched between the two of them, and we want to make this a clipping mask. You can do that a number of ways. One of them is to select the topmost layer and just choose layer and then create clipping mask the other way that you can do it. Let me just undo that is to hover between the two layers this layer here that is a smart object and the rectangle, so you’re going to hover in this area. Hold down, Ctrl and alt on the PC. That’s command option on the Mac and just click here and that makes the same clipping mask. Now, if you think that your rectangle isn’t big enough, you can reselect the rectangle layer and with the move tool, you can just adjust its height, and I’m going to do just that. I’m also looking at this frosted glass effect, which I really like, but I think I would like it to be lighter. So let me show you something that’s specific to working with smart objects, and that’s kind of cool, so I’m going to go back and select my smart object layer and I’m going to make an adjust with image adjustments. I’m going to use curves. Now note that I’m not using an adjustment layer. I’m putting this adjustment on this image, but since you can’t change the pixels in a smart object, it’s being added underneath here, so it’s been added as a smart filter, so our adjustment is now a smart filter, so I’m just lightening this up so still got the sort of look of the original photograph in behind everything, but it’s much lighter, and I’m really liking that effect a whole lot better, but any of these options is editable, so you can double Click on curves to re-access. The curves adjustment make changes to it. If you double, click on the filter gallery, you’ll go back to the filter gallery where you could change or edit the glass effect, and if we want to change the blur, then we’ll double click on the Gaussian blur and we’ll be able to increase or decrease the amount of the blur. Now, if that’s what you came here to do, you’re done, but I want to show you something else that you can do in terms of making a knock out through the glass and what I’ll do to do that is to make a text knock out, so I’ll click on the type tool and I have a brand new font that I just installed and it’s AK. We know it’s the demonstration version of the font. I really like it, so I’m going to just increase the font size. Let’s just take it up to it 200 to start off with. Otherwise, It’s going to be too small and I’m just going to type the words frosted glass, one of the things. I really like about this font is. It has a really nice letter. Oh, it’s a really fun letter. Oh, so! I’m just going to enlarge it, so it fits pretty much across the middle of the document. Now, because I want to knock this font out as a whole in my frosted glass effect, The first thing I need to do is to convert this to a path, so I’ll go to the type options and I’ll select create work path. We’ll go over to the path’s palette so that we can see things as we’re working now also want to see the layer’s palette, too, So I’m going to select this frosted glass effect. I’ll choose type and then I’ll choose convert to share and that converts the text to a It. Just makes it a little bit easier to work with now. I’m going to a selection tool and needs to be one of these vector selection tools, so the direct selection tool is a really good choice. I’ve got my text shape selected, so I’m going to choose edit and then copy and that just copies this shape to the clipboard. Now I’m going to turn off that layer. I’m going down to my rectangle layer and I’ll go over here to the path’s palette, and you can see that this rectangle layer is now selected. Well, what I want to do is to paste into it. The type selection that I have, so I’ll choose edit and then paste, so we now have the frosted glass effect and the type that are all on the same layer, So I’ve just pasted it in on top a selection and you’ll see up here on the toolbar. I also have access now to my vector selection tools. I’m going to click this icon here and what I want to do is to subtract the front shape. The front shape is the type that I just pasted in and now you can see when I say subtracted. We’re punching a hole through the frosted glass effect and so to finish this off what I’m going to do is set this in concrete if you like, I’m going back to that same set of options and I’m going to choose merge shape components, so this now becomes the look of this layer. The layer is a vector layer. It is the rectangle with these areas cut out of it, so let’s go back to sing the entire image, and I’m just going to deselect my vector tool, so I can’t see them any longer. And so this is the effect that we’re getting this rectangle can be moved, so you can move it up or down in the document and it’s just applying a live effect as we do it. The portion of the image that’s in the frosted glass effect is changing, so the glass is always going to look like it’s placed immediately over the top of the underlying image. Let me just straighten that up and put it in the right position. So there is a fun, frosted glass effect. You can create with or without some type applied to it in Photoshop. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and that notification Bell. So you’ll be alerted when new videos are released until next time. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me here on my Youtube channel.