Typography Portraits                                                                 

These images of Kelly Rowland & Alicia Keys are currently in the process of forming the work from another movement known as "Typography". They have gone through a few steps already (thats why 2 of the images are in grey scale). There are quite a few steps to follow but the end result makes it worth it all. Following the tutorial on the graphics blog, i was able to create images in a similar way to the ones shown below. 

  

 So once i had found the pictures of the artists i wanted to use, i then had to tramsfer them to photoshop where i then had to change them from colour to grey scale. So once i had dragged them into photoshop, I then had to go to 'Select - Colour Range' and then i had to change it to shadows, then by pressing command + C and command V to copy it to a new layer. Clicking back on the original layer (the actual picture), I repeat the same steps but, change it to mid-tones, then copying that again to creat a mid-tones layer. After I did that, i had to go to edit, filter and then change it to 50% grey (for mid-tones layer) making sure that preserve transparency was highlighted and then I pressed ok, doing the same for the shadows layer Edit - Fill - then change it to black and press ok. They will end up like these:

After, the next step was when things began to get interesting. I had to find lyrics of the artists and copy them to word, then opening up a new window on photoshop (setting it to cm, 20, 20 & 300), I then clicked on text and drew a text box to fill the page, copied  and pasted the lyrics to photoshop, setting the font to edwardian and size 30. Then i pasted the lyrics to fill the page.

Then i had to create the text into a brush, so i had to press command + A to select it all and then go to edit and define brush preset to create a brush. Then after creating a new layer, I went to the images and  then painted the lyrics on top with the brush. So now i have a layer with a picture with lyrics, one with shadows and one with mid-tones. Then i had to merge the shadow and mid layers together. So i had to hide the text layer and click on the shadow layer then hold shift and click on the mids layer then pressed command + E to merge them together. Now i had to make a mask layer so by going to the text layer, I then pressed the 3rd icon in the layers box (mask) and created a white box next to the text layer. I had to copy the pixels from the merged shadows and mids to the mask layer. I had to inverse the image so by pressing Command + I, I changed the image to negative. 

I turned on the text layer again but, hid the grey scale layer so all i had was a almost silhouetted image with text around it. No i had to add the colour to it. So by clicking in the top, right corner of the layers box (next to paths) i went to blending options and went down to Gradient overall. Changing it from normal to screen, I then went on to choosing my colour blend, playing with the directions etc then pressed ok. I then got the brush tool and chose a soft brush, reducing the size to 15 and the opacity levels to 42%, I went over the picture so bring out the face more (so like the eyes, nose, mouth and hair) and then I had successfully created my Typography Portraits.