How to Create a Powerful Text Portrait from a Photo

I'm going to show you how to create a powerful text portrait. This is an update of a tutorial I did quite awhile ago on an earlier version of Photoshop. This version is more streamlined and efficient. Open a photo you'd like to use for this project. I downloaded this one from Shutterstock. The first step is to remove the background from the subject by making a selection around your subject. There are many ways to do this, but for this example, I'll use the Quick Selection Tool. I'll drag the tool over my subject to make a selection around it. To remove areas outside the selection, I'll press and hold Alt or Option as I drag over those areas. If you're working on version earlier than CC 2015. 5, go to Select and Refine Edge. I did an in-depth tutorial on Refine Edge, so if you'd like to watch it, I provided itslink in my video's description. If you're using version CC 2015. 5, "Select and Mask" replaced Refine Edge. Click the button or go to Select and Select and Mask. I also provided a link to my in-depth tutorial on Select and Mask, so I won't be going over it in detail here. I'll check "Smart Radius" and click "New Layer". Then, I'll click OK. Remove its color by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + Shift + U. We'll create a new layer below the active layer by Ctrl-clicking or Cmd-clicking the New Layer icon. We'll fill the empty layer with black, but first if your foreground and background colorsaren't black and white respectively, press "D" on your keyboard. Since black is your foreground color, press Alt or Option + Delete. Next, we'll crop our document. Open your Crop Tool and click "Width, Height and Resolution". Make the Width and the Height 1000 pixels each and the Resolution: 150 pixels per inch. Drag a corner in or out to size your subject within the Crop bounding box. To slide it up or down, press the Up or Down arrow key on your keyboard. To accept it, click the check-mark at the top or press Enter or Return. To fit it back onto your canvas, press Ctrl or Cmd + 0. Next, we'll prepare our subject to use as a Displacement Map. This will warp out text to wrap it around the contours of our subject's entire face. First, make your top layer active. Click the icon at the upper right corner and click "Duplicate Layer". Open the document list and click, "New". Name it, "Displacement" and click OK. Go to Filter, Blur and Gaussian Blur. Blur it 3 pixels and click OK. Go to File and "Save As". Navigate to your Desktop, save it as a Photoshop PSD file and click, "Save". If you see this message, just click OK. We can close the Displacement PSD file, since we already saved it. Open your Move Tool. We're ready to add text. You can either type it out on a notepad or word pad application or find a poem or lyricsthat you can ultimately copy and paste. Highlight it, and press Ctrl or Cmd + C to copy it. We're going to create a word cloud from our text. There are many free websites that do this, however, the site that I like the best iscalled "Wordle. net". Unfortunately, sometimes Chrome and Firefox have had problems creating word on Wordle, but thegood news is that Explorer does open them, at least for me. I'll open Explorer and type in "wordle. net". Click "Create". Click inside the text box and press Ctrl or Cmd + V to paste your text into it. Then, click "Go". Open "Language". I'll tick, "Leave Words as Spelled" and "Remove common English Words". Open "Font" and choose an easy-to-read font from your list. I'll choose "Steelfish". Open "Layout". I'll use "Straighter Edges" and "Mostly Horizontal". Open "Color". Click "WB", which is white text on a black background. Then, click "Save as PNG". Save it to your Desktop and click "Save". Go to File and "Open". Access your Desktop, locate your Wordle file, click it and click "Open". Open your Channels panel. if you don't see it, go to Window and Channels. Ctrl-click or Cmd-click the thumbnail of the RGB channel to make a selection of your text. Open back your Layers panel and press Ctrl or Cmd + J to cut and copy the text onto its own layer. Drag your text onto your tab of your subject and without releasing your mouse or pen, dragit down onto your subject and release. To move it, just drag it. Name the layer, "Word Cloud". Make a copy of it by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J. Double-click its thumbnail to open the Layer Style window. Click "Drop Shadow". The Blend Mode is Multiply, the Opacity is 75% and the Angle is 30 degrees. 

The Distance is 5 pixels, the Spread is 0 and the Size is 5 pixels. Then, click OK. Since we're going to have many layers of our text, let's save space in the Layers panel,by collapsing the Effects. The effects are still there; they're just hidden. To see them again, just click back on the arrow. Click the eyeball icon next to the original word cloud layer to temporarily hide it. As I mentioned, we're going to create multiple layers of the text that will ultimately coverour subject's entire face. To resize and position the word cloud, open your Transform Tool by pressing Ctrl of Cmd+ T.  Go to a corner and when you see a diagonal. double-arrow, press and hold Alt or Option + Shift as you drag it in approximately this much. Drag it to a corner of the face and press Enter or Return. Make a copy of it and drag the copy to another area. We're going to flip the copy 90%. To do this, go to a corner and when you see a curved, double-arrow, press and hold Shiftas you rotate it clockwise 90 degrees. It'll snap in place because we're holding Shift as we rotate it. Position it over your subject and press Enter or Return. Continue to make copies of your text and feel free to resize and position them over your subject. We're going to create a copy of this entire block of word clouds and then flip it 90 degrees. First, we'll place all the word cloud copies into a folder. To do this, scroll to the bottom copy and Shift-click it. Make sure you're not Shift-clicking the original word cloud. This makes all the copies active. Press Ctrl or Cmd + G to place them into a folder. Make a copy of the folder, open your Transform Tool and rotate the copy 90 degrees. We'll convert our text into a Smart Object, so we can apply a Displacement map to ourentire word cloud. To do this, Shift-click the bottom folder to make it active as well and click the iconat the upper, right corner. Click "Convert to Smart Object". Make a copy of it and hide the lower Smart Object word cloud .  Name the top layer, "Displacement". Go to Filter, Distort and Displace. Make the Horizontal and Vertical Scale 10, "Stretch to Fit" and "Repeat Edge Pixels". Then, click OK. Click the "Displacement" Photoshop file and click "Open". Immediately, our text wrapped itself around the contours of our subject. Collapse the Smart filter and hide the layer. Ctrl-click or Cmd-click the Displacement text layer to make a selection of its shape. Scroll to your subject's face and make it active. Click the Layer mask icon to make a layer mask of the selection next to your subject. Make a composite snapshot of your visible image by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E on Windowsor Cmd + Shift + Option + G on a Mac. Hide the layer below the composite snapshot and drag the composite snapshot to the topof the layers panel. Make the Displacement layer visible again and change the Blend Mode of the compositesnapshot to "Linear Burn". Next, we'll add subtle text behind our subject. Make the lower Smart Object word cloud visible and drag it to the top. Scroll down and Ctrl-click or Cmd-click your subject to make a selection of its shape. Scroll back up and Alt-click or Option-click the Layer Mask icon to make an inverted layermask of the selection next to the top word cloud. Click off the chain-link icon to unlink the layer and the layer mask. Doing this allows us to resize and/or re-position either of these independently from the other. Make the layer active and reduce its opacity to between 15 to 20%. Open your Transform Tool, go to a corner and drag it in. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!