Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to crop images inside of text

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we are going to crop images inside of text, like that. It's super easy to do. We're actually going to push it a little bit further where we take an image and do some kind of glitch effect type stuff where there's a letter, it's inside the text where things offset, it looks kind of cool. All right, let's get in there now, and learn how to make this in Photoshop. 

So first up let's go to 'File', 'Open'. Let's go to '05 Selections' in your 'Exercise Files', and there's one in there called 'Clipping Mask 01', open that up. Thank you, Sydney Rae. I love this texture, but what I want to do is, like you saw at the beginning, I want to kind of mask it inside some text. Pretty super easy to do. So grab the Type Tool, click once in here, and type in-- I'm going to type in my name; luckily my name is nice and short. I am going to do it in all caps. I'm going to select all the text and I'm going to pick 'Slab Serif'. 

So in my search here, I'm just typing in 'slab' to see-- Slab Serif is the fonts that have the big, it's hard to point at them. Over here, see these Serifs, but they're the big slabby Serifs. I have only got two fonts. I'm going to use my Museo Slab, you might not have this font but pick any old font. Make sure it's bold, or extra bold, or black, something nice and big. Now let's scale our font size up. There's a couple of ways, I often just use the Transform Tool. Often always, you can use the fonts over here, but I just hit 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC. Hold 'Shift' and drag it up. Nice big font. Click 'Enter'. 

All that needs to happen is that the image needs to be on top of the text, which is kind of weird. I can't drag this up here so I need to name it by double-clicking the word 'background', give it a name. Concrete. Just make sure it's just above the thing. What you need to do now is have the top thing selected. In my case my image is above my text. Just go up to 'Layer', and go to this one that says 'Create Clipping Mask'. Click on that, and magic happens. Cool, huh? And the thing to note down here is that there's this weird kind of structure. I'll undo it, so you can look at this, 'undo', 'redo'. See this little arrow appears. That just kind of indicates that this guy here, concrete has been clipped to the text underneath. It's a little bit complicated, I guess. 

One of the perks for it though is if I use my Move Tool and I have the concrete layer selected, watch this, I can kind of move the concrete to kind of where I want. I ran out of image there on the left but I can kind of move it around to get kind of-- I like that better. Same with the text, I can click on the Text Layer and move that around. So it depends on which one you want to move around. Just make sure it's highlighted over here. Awesome! I'm going to move it across, I'm going to show you how to add-- because at the moment it's got a transparent background, right? I'm going to show you two things before we get into some more advanced stuff. 

If you want to move both of them at the same time you can click on this top one, hold the 'Shift' key down and click on the one underneath, and now they're both selected. Now they both come around. Next thing I want to do is, I want it on a white background or a background, I don't mind what color it is. So let's click off these layers here, so I got nothing selected. Let's go to this one here that says New Layer it's like a turned up page here. It's at the top there, I want it to be at the bottom because at the moment there's this checkered board. That's fine, it's see-through, which is awesome, but I want to make it a specific color. 

So with this Layer Selector, I'm going to call this my 'Color'. With it selected, let's go to 'Edit', 'Fill'. In here where it says Contents, you can pick black, or white, or 50% gray, or you can just pick on color. Then go through the colors that you want. You'll start to see a theme in my classes. Everything's kind of like Keeley green, I like it. Click 'OK', click 'OK', that's what I want. I might add a Drop Shadow here, Bevel & Emboss. So that's the gist of it. The cool thing about it as well, the text is editable, if my name is no longer Dan I can double click this, I can grab my Type Tool, it's actually the easiest, and click kind of somewhere in here, and my name can be Jan, detecting my mom's name. Look at that, Jan and Dan. So that's going to be this one. 

Let's look at the second exercise now. Go up to 'File', go to 'Open'. Let's open up 'Clipping Mask 02' by Reinhart Julian. I'm not sure who's Julian Reinhardt, not sure. Regardless, the image is epic; I love it. Now this example is basically exactly like the last one but I wanted to show you, I guess some creative uses of that Clipping Mask technique. It's not just kind of like jamming text inside of images. It's kind of a cool effect at the moment where there's this kind of glitch offset image type thing. So just like before, going to grab the Type Tool, we're going to click once, I'm going to type in 'D' because that's my name. We're going to pick a new font, I like Lust. If you're like, "Man, I want some of those fonts he's using," you might not, but if you do, you want to go check out a website called Typekit. We don't have time to go through it just yet but it is part of your Creative Cloud license and that lets you download epic fonts. 

So say I want just a big D. Hit 'Return'. What we're going to do is the same thing as before. Remember, has to go above, so I'm going to name it first. 'Shoes', it's going to be above. Then with that top layer selected, let's go to 'Layer' 'Create Clipping Mask', and it's mocked in there. What I also want to do is duplicate this layer, so I want two of them. So that could be it, right? We've done from the last exercise, we did. But what I want to do is push it a little bit further, like you saw in the intro. 

So I want to duplicate the layer, this is going to be my 'Shoes 2'. Good, well-named. Can you see in the structure here, trying to be a Clipping Mask as well, but watch this, if I just drag it underneath it kind of loses that Clipping Mask. Now not to freak you out, if you are freaked out, just stop it where we-- stop now, but if you're ready for a little bit more action, what's happening is, that's exactly--

These two here are what we've done so far. I've made a duplicate down here, and dragged it down to the bottom here. The thing is, because it's not got any Mask it's actually just filling in all these gaps around here, but watch this, it's actually a separate—moving it around, I guess, helps us. Be on the Move Tool, click anywhere but the D and just drag it around, and get a sense for it. What I want to do is kind of offset it. Just because that's the kind of glitch, kind of cool effect. I'm trying to get this D to stand out a little bit more, and I just want a, I guess move it over a little bit, and what I might do is, with this particular layer I'm going to darken it down a little bit to kind of emphasize these laces within the D. 

So with this layer selected, let's look at adjustments. There's a few different ways. Probably the easiest way is to go 'Hue/Saturation'. So make sure you have 'Shoes 2' at the bottom selected, Hue/Saturation' and just drag the lightness up, I said, never use this but in this particular case, actually quite a handy thing to do. That's what we're trying to do, just kind of like-- you could go through and drag the saturation down. Can you see, I've made it gray in the background here, or drag it right up, probably too high. You could mess with this, there's no kind of right or wrong here. It's, I guess, we're just trying to do some creative glitchy type stuff. 

Next thing I want to do is just crop this whole thing down because I've got this extra stuff down the bottom, so I'm just going to go there. Probably crop it a little bit at the top as well to get my D in the center. It's a little bit in the center. When you're ready, hit 'Enter', and that's us, that's our kind of cool glitch effect Clipping Mask. 

Now we've done it for text here, you can do it for anything. So if you know how to download shapes, vector shapes, or any sort of shape, I love heart, an emoji, some sort of Twitter icon, if you download those, and bring them in, to copy and paste them into this file here, into Photoshop, you can use those to do the exact same thing. So image on top of it, and make it a Clipping Mask. 

All right, it is homework time. So what I'd like you to do, is I want to see two versions. I want to see text on an image, just like this, and then, this kind of glitch effect version of the text. I just want you to use your own, obviously initials, or you can make another one for my mom or my brother, or my dad, we all have three letters. There's Ben, there's Wal. We all go by three initials, so you can make one for any of my family. You can pick your own initials, it can be the whole word, up to you, but I just want you to pick your own image. 

You'll have to pick your own font because you probably won't have mine, but pick your own image for this option, and I want to see this one, but I also want you to do this glitch effect thing as well. So go off, find your image, do your giant letter and just kind of offset them, and follow this tutorial again. Like always, share them on social media or share them in the projects on this page. Instagram, I am bringyourownlaptop, 

Just so you know, when you are looking for images there's kind of two nice places. Unsplash is really nice because you get to use them commercially without having to pay for them. Or back link them, or anything like that. Some beautiful images in here. Easy to get kind of inspired out of here. You can use Google Images, that's fine, say I want to use shoes, just make sure when you are doing this, under 'Tools' go to 'Usage Rights', just make sure you check this one, 'Labeled for non-commercial reuse' because you're not going to be selling this thing, you're just using it for practice. If you want to use it for your portfolio, you need to use this, 'Labeled for reuse'. Cuts down the images but it means that you're not going to run into legal troubles. Or just jump back to Unsplash, these guys are awesome. The photographers here are super generous with their images, I love it. All right friends, that is it for this video. We'll see you in the next one.