Photoshop Cs5 Tutorial: How to create an Out of Bounds Photo Effect

Hey everyone, Justus Good here and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to create an out of bounds photo effect in Photoshop. So first thing you want to do is open up your picture that you think would work well and create a new layer by using shift command N. Now grab your rectangular marquee tool and select the area that you want to be in bounds. So for example I'll grab this here and then right click, stroke and with the color set to, I'm going to use white, you could probably use any color but I think white works best and a width of about 20 pixels. Go ahead and stroke the inside. Now you can command D or right click and deselect and you can see the area that we want to be in bounds and out of bounds. I'm going to grab my move tool and move it to the exact right position. Now head over to edit transform perspective and while holding shift drag one of these corners in. You can make the perspective going in any angle you want but I'm going to keep it in line with the angle of my train. So as you can see it's kind of in the same plane of motion as my train. It'll be different for your photo but and you don't even have to have perspective on it but I think it looks cool with perspective. So again grabbing my move tool and placing it exactly where I want and now I'm going to go to layer, layer mask, reveal all. Then I'm going to go ahead and grab my pen tool here because we're going to delete some of this border. Make sure you're set to paths here, that second button and you're just going to click at each point and cut out a path, a closed path of the part that you want to delete and then right click and fill that path and under the use bar use black because black tells the layer mask to hide whatever is in that portion of the photo. Now we're going to create another new layer by going to layer, new layer or shift command N and we're just going to drag this underneath all our layers and leave it for later. Now click back on your photo layer and go to layer, layer mask, reveal all. Now we're going to grab our pen tool again, make sure it's set to paths like last time. Now you're going to begin tracing the area of the photo that you want to keep so don't forget to start inside your boundary as long as you're within that white area it'll work fine and then slowly start tracing out your object. If you're not too skilled with the pen tool you could use a different form of selection like quick selection but I find that this works best. Now whenever you're going over round objects like that tire I just went over, if you click and drag the pen tool will create a curve. So as you can see I can just click little by little, I'll trace around this whole thing and a little trick I'm using is after you create a curve if you hold alt you can move the anchor so that that curve that you just made doesn't influence the next point. So as you can see I made a curve there and then I hold alt and put the anchor back to where I want it so I don't get too curvy of a line. The pen tool is a really useful tool and there's lots of great tutorials out there so I would suggest learning how to use it and practicing with it. Again holding alt there and putting it back in track and then closing the path. Now with this path we're going to right click and make a selection. Just leave it how it is and select ok and then you're going to select your rectangular marquee tool, right click and select inverse. Now you can fill that, right click fill and use black. So that tells your layer mask to hide everything that we painted black. So now all we need is a simple background which you could do whatever you want with. I'm just going to add a simple gradient here, a little blue and white gradient but the creative possibilities are pretty endless at this point. You could even leave your original photo and just desaturate it or something like that. Hopefully I've given you the basic tools that you need to make an out of bounds photo and at this point you can be as creative and experimental as you want or you can do something similar to what I've done here. So thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. If you missed my previous tutorial check it out by clicking on the right and if you notice on the left we have some viewer results from that tutorial. So they all came out great and I thank everyone who tried it and sent me their results. If you ever have a result from a current tutorial like this out of bounds one feel free to send it to me via YouTube or Twitter or any email and I'll be glad to feature it at the end of my next tutorial. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.