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Stare at the black X in the image below. After about 15 seconds of staring at the photo below, it’ll change to a black and white version. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those scary photos where the monster jumps and screams at you, I promise. What do you see?

You should of seen the photo in color when it turned to black and white. Weird, huh?  Today, we’re going to take a look at creating this Negative Illusion effect in Photoshop! You’ll learn how to create a simple animation to create the .gif you see above.

We’ll start off by opening a photo in Photoshop. File > Open. Navigate to the photo you chose and open it up. 

Double click the background layer to turn it into a “real” layer. Name it what you’d like and click OK.

Next, with the layer selected, hit Ctrl-J or Cmd-J on a Mac to duplicate this layer.

We need to Invert this copied layer. To do that, go to Image > Adjustments > Invert or use the shortcut key Ctrl-I or Cmd-I on a Mac.

Lets go ahead and hide this layer by clicking the little eye() icon to the left of the layer and select your original un-inverted layer.

Next, Click the Create new fill or adjustment layer icon () and choose, “Black and White“. This should create a new Black and White adjustment layer above your original color layer making it black and white.

Now if you click the eye icon next to the inverted layer to reveal it, you’ll see the inverted image and when you click it again, you’ll see a black and white image.

You can add a little dot or X somewhere in the middle so the viewer has something to stare at. For an X, just go to the text tool and type an “X” and position it where you want it. Go to the ellipse tool in the shapes to draw out a circle for a circle.

Now, we’re ready to animate this! First, we need to open the animation window. This can be done by going to Window > Animation. Your animation window might be at the “Timeline” view and look like this.

We need to change this into “Frames” view by clicking the little icon to the bottom right of the animation window.

Your animation window should now look something like this.

With Frame 1 selected, click the Duplicate selected frame button ().

With Frame 2 selected, go ahead and turn off the Inverted layer.

The black and white image should now be showing.

Change the duration of Frame 1 to 15 seconds. You can do that by clicking the little time icon below frame 1 and choose “Other…” enter 15 seconds and Click OK. The duration can be whatever you want, anywhere from 10-20 seconds or even shorter if you’re making a quick change back and forth.

Change the duration of Frame 2 to 5 seconds by following the same method above. 5 seconds should already be listed in the menu. You can click the play button to preview your animation.

Now we need to save this as an animated .GIF file. To do this, Go up to File > Save for Web & Devices.

Here, choose GIF as your save type with 256 colors you can add Diffusion at 100% depending on what looks best. Be sure to change the Looping Options to “Forever“. Click Save and save it to your desired location.

Click the image above to enlarge it if needed.

There you have it! If you happen to create some negative illusions, feel free to share ’em on our Facebook Page! As long as you’re not color blind, this should work.

Have you ever seen these types of Illusions? Do you know of any other cool optical illusions? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The post Photoshop: Negative Illusion appeared first on Robert's Productions | Post Production Tips.

The other day while stepping on the scale, I first thought, wow what did the Holidays do to me!? After my brief moment, I then thought it would be cool to make a Digital Liquid Crystal Display like on the scale or gas pumps in Photoshop. A few days later, here I am writing this tutorial! Let’s begin!

Video Tutorial:

Written Tutorial:

 Open up Photoshop and create a new document. File > New. We can name this, “LCD Display“. I set the size to 800x300px for the width and height. With a White background, Click OK.

In our new document, grab the Rectangle Tool() and draw out a rectangle. Name it, “LCD BG“.

You can CTRL or Command click to select the Background layer and with the Move tool() selected center it Horizontally and Vertically by clicking the appropriate buttons on the toolbar.

Now that we’re all centered, lets add some layer styles to the LCD BG layer. You can double-click the LCD BG layer to open up its layer styles or go to Layer > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay. We need to change the Gradient colors to the following, c0c8ad, and bcbfa1.

Lets also give it a stroke (not the medical term). Size: 6px and Position: Inside.

If you’d like, you can even add an Inner Shadow to this with any settings you prefer.

Alright we’re halfway done! We now need to create the LCD text. But before we do this, we need to download the font. I got my font from Dafont.com. I’ll use the font called DS-Digital which you can get from here. Click the links to learn how to install fonts for Windows and Mac.

Select the Text Tool() and choose the font you’ve just installed. I used a font size of 190 pt and choose White for the color making sure it’s Right-Aligned.

Click a little off the LCD BG layer to place the text so Photoshop doesn’t think we’re trying to type inside that layer. Type 888.8 and position it in the center of the LCD BG layer following the same methods we used to center the LCD BG layer.

Once centered, lets bring the opacity of the new text layer down to anywhere between 10-15%. This is going to serve as the faded numbers you see in the background of LCD displays.

Duplicate the 888.8 text layer by clicking it and dragging it down to the new layer icon or hit Ctrl-J. Bring the opacity for that layer back up to 100%. This will be our main numbers.

Change the font color of the 888.8 copy layer to Black. We can also lock the original 888.8 layer so we don’t accidentally start typing on it. Go ahead and type in whatever number you’d like to display here now.

If the numbers don’t fit perfectly, you’ll need to create a new text layer for the particular number that doesn’t fit and position it to where it’ll fit in. I unlocked and brought the opacity up for the main 888.8 layer just to see how I could better align the number 1.

Looking good! Lastly we can add some noise. Ctrl click the LCD BG thumb to select it.

Create a new layer either by clicking the appropriate button() or by going to Layer > New > Layer.

Go to Edit > Fill and fill it in with White. You can deselect it by hitting Ctrl or Cmd-D or by going to Select > Deselect up in the menu.

Go to Filer > Noise > Add Noise. Amount: 95%, Distribution: Uniform, Monochromatic: Checked. Click OK.

Change the blend mode of this layer to, “Overlay” and bring the opacity down anywhere between 10-15%.

There you have it! A neat looking Digital LCD Display! Use your imagination and see how you can incorporate this in any of your future projects. An idea would be to make your calculator to say things such as your name.

Download LCD Display .PSD! 937.3 KB

Click here to learn how to make this Scale!

Click here for this LED Clock effect! >>

The post Photoshop: Liquid Crystal Display appeared first on Robert's Productions | Post Production Tips.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how you can utilize Layer Comps in Photoshop CS5. Basically, you’ll learn how to create multiple layer comps useful for a quick way to switch between variations in a design.

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