In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we’ll use Select and Mask to make a perfect cut to get splashing milk from its photo to our text and then transform that milk splash to blend and flow around a letter and then colorize the milk splash and complete the color splash effect using a couple text and Adjustment Layers. Check out the tutorial and see exactly what I do. I hope you enjoy it! Leave a like and drop a comment on this video as well!
Adding Text with a Bevel and Emboss
I used the typeface “Novecento Bold” which is a free font (available over at FontSquirrel) and choose a size of 300pt and typed out the word “COLORSPLASH” in all caps. I then applied a gradient overlay of a medium gray at the bottom sliding up to solid white at the top of my letters. I also applied a Bevel and Emboss with these settings: Chisel Hard, Depth: 100%, Size: 3px, 55° angle, 50°altitude, Highlight: Normal, White, 40% Opacity, and Shadow: Normal, Black, 80% Opacity.
Extracting the Milk Splashes from Stock Photo
I grabbed a stock photo from Adobe Stock of multiple splashes of milk over a black background. I went Select>Color Range and selected the black areas and increase Fuzziness to around 145 and then hit OK. Go Layer>Layer Mask>Hide Selection to create a mask that makes all the black go away. You may need to select the mask and open the Properties panel and choose “Select and Mask” and add a little smoothing and contract the edge a bit to get rid of any dark gray matting that may be on the edges of the milk.
Colorizing the Milk Splash
Colorizing something like bright white milk can be tricky because we want to maintain the pure and bright highlights that are on the milk splash. I used a Color Balance Adjustment layer and checked OFF the “Preserve Luminance” option and also added a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer and ticked on Colorize and slid the Brightness slider down a bit and pumped the Saturation until we start seeing color. If you check out the video, you’ll see how I use the Blend If sliders and tweak the coloring until I get a much better result. Check out the video at the top of this post to see all the detail and methods I use to create this effect.
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