Create a Pop-Out Photo Effect

YOU’LL NEED THIS

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP, Subscribe to various packages

at www.adobe.com. WHAT IF YOUR IMAGES COULD RISE UP from their flat prints into three-dimensional solidity? Well, they can’t. Sorry. Not without some sort of holographic photo frame that will launch at a ridiculous price, and prove to be as popular as 3D TV.

What you can do, however, is create the illusion of a pop-up image. Doing this involves a couple of layers and a mask in Photoshop, but to make it more interesting, we’re going to use a vector mask. Vectors are lines and shapes made of math, rather than pixels, and are usually more at home in Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer. Photoshop has a couple of vector tools, including the Pen and polygonal shape tools. They’re not used often in photo-retouching, being more for the graphic design crowd, whipping up logos and the like, but have some specific uses that can come in handy.

You’re going to need a photo with a strong subject for this project, and it would be helpful if the background isn’t too busy, so this is the perfect opportunity to hone your large-aperture background destruction skills. – but draw rectangles, but it draws them as vector shapes. For our purposes, we want a rectangular path on the layer we’re working on, rather than a free-floating shape, so choose “Path” from the “Options” menu at the top of the interface, rather than “Shape.” 3 IN THE FRAME Draw a rectangle on the bottom half of your image, using the guides you placed earlier to help you. This rectangle will become the frame your cut-out image pops out of, so make sure the top is in the right place— the shoulders if you just want a head popping out, or lower if you want more of the body exposed. Open the “Paths” palette, and you’ll see your new path in there as “Work Path”—double-click it to rename it. To make your path into the frame, we need to warp it a bit to apply a pseudo-3D effect. With your path selected, choose “Edit > Transform Path > Perspective,” and drag the top-left corner of your rectangle to the right. The right-hand corner moves in by the same amount automatically [ Image A]. When it’s 3D enough for you, click “OK,” and dismiss the warning about converting your shape to a path—a path is what we want. 4 DIFFERENT STROKES Next, we need to “Stroke” it—that is, paint some color along the path’s otherwise invisible vectors. Select your path in the Paths palette, and choose the Paintbrush tool from the toolbar. Choose a brush that’s