Learn techniques to enhance your image designs by improving text visibility and expanding the sky into the white space above. This article explores how to adjust the transparency of a box to make text stand out against a complex background, and the use of the clone stamp tool to increase the sky in an image.
Key Insights
- The article introduces how to adjust the transparency of a box to make text stand out against a complex background. This is achieved by selecting the center square and reducing its opacity to between 30-75%, allowing for the right balance between text visibility and background image clarity.
- It also demonstrates the use of the clone stamp tool to increase the sky in an image. To do this, one needs to select the source of pixels and rasterize the object before starting to clone stamp. The size of the clone stamp can be adjusted according to the user's needs.
- The article emphasizes the importance of saving one's work regularly during the process of editing images. After making significant changes such as adjusting transparency and expanding the sky, it is advisable to save the work to prevent loss of progress.
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In this video we're going to be adding sky to the top image, as well as adjusting the transparency. To start out, let's adjust the transparency of this box behind the text.
This is our center square. So with our center square selected, let's first change the color to white. The white will be nice right in front of some of this color.
We can do this in properties, and we'll click the color fill, and then we'll simply select white. Or we can go into our color picker and make sure that six F's are chosen, or drag it to the top left and click OK. Next, let's make adjustments to the transparency of this box.
Some of the reason that we've added this box is to help the text stand out from the background. Without it, if we change the visibility, we'll see that some of the text gets lost and is hard to read in some of the contrast of the background image. A box like this can be helpful for having items and text stand out from a background that's complex.
However, at this point we kind of lose some of the image behind it with such a large box with full transparency. So let's adjust the transparency. With center square selected, we'll simply go to opacity, and we're going to drop it to 30 percent, and let's increase it a little bit more to 60, and maybe 75.
This looks pretty good. It gives us enough contrast that we can read the text. However, we can still see some of the background.
Let's leave it there for now, and we'll hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work, and next let's work on increasing this sky into the white space above. To do this, let's scroll up and zoom in, and for this we're going to use our clone stamp. If we go to the left to our tools bar, we can find the clone stamp about halfway down.
Next, let's make sure that we have our framed image selected. We'll select the image behind it of San Francisco, and now we can begin adding to the sky. As we can see, we have a circle with an arrow through it, meaning that we can't yet clone stamp.
If we click, we'll see that you can't use it because we have not yet identified the source of pixels. We'll click ok, and to select the source, we'll hold ALT and click the area we want to draw pixels from. In this case, I'll choose right around here.
Next, we still have this error sign that's keeping us from being able to clone stamp. Let's click to find out why. If we click, we'll see that this object must be rasterized before proceeding, and the edit contents will no longer be available.
We're going to click ok, essentially meaning that we can pull from the pixels of this, and it's rasterized and optimized for this Photoshop file. We'll click ok, and now we're ready to begin clone stamping. If we start dragging, we'll see that it's not a very large clone stamp, so we're going to want to increase the size of the clone stamp.
We'll go to our options bar, and we'll drag the size up a little bit larger. We can see a preview of our size of it, so we're going to increase it even more. About 400 seems appropriate.
We'll draw our source point again with ALT, click, and then simply begin dragging. Remember with the clone stamp tool that if we draw a source point and start to pull on the edge, drag up, we'll see that hard line is right at the top, because we're drawing from pixels that have not yet been established there. We'll simply click and drag.
I'll choose a source point that's a little bit lower, and we're simply going to add to the sky. Oftentimes with the clone stamp tool, we're going to draw multiple source points to give us the best look, and in this case, we don't have to add too much to the top left hand side since it's covered by the triangle. We'll keep filling this in here, and we can see that we've added all the necessary pieces to the sky.
If we zoom out using CTRL MINUS (-) (-), we'll see that we've added sky to this image. Looking at our entire banner, we now have our image sky, we have the text, and we have a title banner right below. This is starting to look good, so let's use CTRL S to save our work thus far, and in the next video, we'll begin stylizing some of these shapes that we've added.
See you there!