# I need some help from someone who has Photoshop



## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

Hey guys and gals, I am trying to create an 1803 look out of my latest score, and all I need now is someone who has photoshop to use a diffusion effect to create a 3D crumbled paper texture to create the illusion of realism. It's like using samples but with PDF files, lol. I don't know if it is ethical to ask, but I wanted to try anyways. Attached is the PDF file for anyone willing to try. Thank you so much, and here's what I am going for:

EDIT (8/21) Thank you to everyone who is helping me out! Y'all guys are truly awesome. The effects that I apparently need for this project are the cloud and diffusion filters. For those who would like to try, I am attaching a clean white version PDF file. Plus, this version is updated with different sized note heads, dynamics, and beaming to give the illusion of a more handwritten, uneven note head font. Thank you once again.


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## gsilbers (Aug 18, 2017)

adobe has the adobe cloud and you can rent photoshop for a month. since you have the how to video and should be relative easy to follow it. have you tried?


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## hawpri (Aug 18, 2017)

I'll give it a try.


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## MA-Simon (Aug 18, 2017)

Whaaat. I have worked with photoshop for so long and never even heard of this filter. I feel left out.
Thanks, could be really usefull for texture creation.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

gsilbers said:


> adobe has the adobe cloud and you can rent photoshop for a month. since you have the how to video and should be relative easy to follow it. have you tried?


That's an idea I have not thought of. Thank ya!


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## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

hawpri said:


> I'll give it a try.


Oh, you would be awesome if you did. You know better than me, but I recommend a crumpled paper at least 300 DPI.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

MA-Simon said:


> Whaaat. I have worked with photoshop for so long and never even heard of this filter. I feel left out.
> Thanks, could be really usefull for texture creation.


My pleasure.


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## hawpri (Aug 18, 2017)

There are a lot of ways to tweak this process for fun or to someone's preferences, but I didn't do much to it. How's this looking?


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## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

hawpri said:


> There are a lot of ways to tweak this process for fun or to someone's preferences, but I didn't do much to it. How's this looking?


AHHH! That looks so good! Simply amazing, thank you so much!!! That's exactly what I was going for. In the notation world, would you believe they want "realism" also just like the use of samples, and this is the one thing that I am missing. Did you find it difficult to do, and can you share the crumbled paper that you used? Thank you once again and you are the definition of awesome. Another silly question, I am guessing that it cannot be done with a PDF file, but it needs to be a photo?


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## hawpri (Aug 18, 2017)

Like MA-Simon, I've used Photoshop for a long time, but I'd never used the displacement filter! The filters are really easy. The only potential for it being (or becoming?difficult to do is when it becomes either time consuming, or tough to figure out how to get it just right when attempting to make sure it doesn't look like a quick Photoshop filter job to people who do know what the results of those filters look like. Otherwise, it hardly takes any time.

I'm not sure if I understood your question. What needed to be a PDF or a photo? I can export a PDF from Photoshop, if that's what you mean, but it'll be 11MB. If it really looks good enough as it is, I can e-mail it to you. Just let me know. If you mean it needs to start out as a PDF (as opposed to JPG, or some other format), it doesn't. It also doesn't need to have a background texture to begin with, if that helps- it would be easy to go from a typical PDF or image export of sheet music with a plain white background and get it looking similar to the aged appearance of the example I uploaded.

The crumpled image is a cropped version of this.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 18, 2017)

hawpri said:


> Like MA-Simon, I've used Photoshop for a long time, but I'd never used the displacement filter! The filters are really easy. The only potential for it being (or becoming?difficult to do is when it becomes either time consuming, or tough to figure out how to get it just right when attempting to make sure it doesn't look like a quick Photoshop filter job to people who do know what the results of those filters look like. Otherwise, it hardly takes any time.
> 
> I'm not sure if I understood your question. What needed to be a PDF or a photo? I can export a PDF from Photoshop, if that's what you mean, but it'll be 11MB. If it really looks good enough as it is, I can e-mail it to you. Just let me know. If you mean it needs to start out as a PDF (as opposed to JPG, or some other format), it doesn't. It also doesn't need to have a background texture to begin with, if that helps- it would be easy to go from a typical PDF or image export of sheet music with a plain white background and get it looking similar to the aged appearance of the example I uploaded.
> 
> The crumpled image is a cropped version of this.


Thank you for answering my questions, and yes I would love for you to email me the file. Thank you once again, you made my night! [email protected].


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## hawpri (Aug 18, 2017)

No problem!


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## re-peat (Aug 19, 2017)

The displacement filter — one of Photoshop’s most amazing secrets — largely stopped interesting users the moment Adobe introduced preset effects (I can’t remember exactly, but that might have been with Photoshop 3 or 4). The displacement filter used to be *the* way to create bevels, 3D-effects and all sorts of subtle or drastic distortions. (Displacing an object or type with a blurred version of itself, for example, gives a great suggestion of 3D or bevelled contours, the depth depending on the amount of blur and the offset between the two layers.)

A bit of a pity, but understandable, that today, hardly anyone knows any more about the power of displacement filter (and several other neglected Photoshop features), because the results it can give you are 100% unique and individual, whereas relying on the stock preset filters (and their limited amount of parameters) inevitable produces a lot of sameness in most people’s Photoshop work: that rather ugly, lazy, instantly recognizable ‘I’ve used Photoshop filters’-look.

- - -

Can I be slightly, cautiously and totally respectfully critical of Hawpri’s mock-up? To my eyes, here’s what I feel is wrong with it:

- The choice of crumbled paper doesn’t look right to me — it looks distinctly ‘deliberately crumbled for effect’, rather than naturally crumbled — and the ‘burnt parchment’ effect is much too exaggerated as well, I find. If realism is the aim, this choice of paper and the effect it is submitted to, is a rather unconvincing start, if I may say so.

- There’s a big inconsistency between the deteriorated, aged state of the paper and the still crisp and pristine quality of the score print. It really ruins the illusion, I believe.

- The colour of the print shouldn’t be pure black either. That’s unrealistic on that type of paper. It should be more of a very dark sepia, but applied unevenly with plenty of irregular hue and saturation shifts (all of them in the dark, reddish-brownish range though)

- The ink of the print should also be washed out a bit in places. Again: in a random, stained, cloudy way. (It’s done very well in the video above.)

- The print should be made a little fatter too, suggesting absorption by the paper: old paper absorbed ink much more than modern paper. Printing stave lines and note beams as thin as they are in this example would be totally impossible, given the suggested age of the document.

Creating a really convincing vintage look is not an easy, straightforward job, and it requires quite a lot of time actually. And I know of no filters (built-in or third party) than can speed up the process significantly without avoiding that glaringly artificial (and to my eyes, ugly) Photoshop-look. It’s a bit like wanting to create a vintage sound for an audio production: merely adding some vinyl-wobble-flutter-crackle effect from some plugin or other, a bit of saturation and some band-pass filtering just doesn’t do it.

_


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## hawpri (Aug 19, 2017)

re-peat said:


> Can I be slightly, cautiously and totally respectfully critical of Hawpri’s mock-up?


Yes! Each of your points were valid, and you expressed all of them very respectfully. After reading your response, I almost feel obligated to create a better version! To be blunt, I wouldn't send a client something like the example above, except as a proof-of-concept before getting started on the actual work.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 19, 2017)

hawpri said:


> Yes! Each of your points were valid, and you expressed all of them very respectfully. After reading your response, I almost feel obligated to create a better version! To be blunt, I wouldn't send a client something like the example above, except as a proof-of-concept before getting started on the actual work.


Go for it! I dare ya.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 20, 2017)

re-peat said:


> The displacement filter — one of Photoshop’s most amazing secrets — largely stopped interesting users the moment Adobe introduced preset effects (I can’t remember exactly, but that might have been with Photoshop 3 or 4). The displacement filter used to be *the* way to create bevels, 3D-effects and all sorts of subtle or drastic distortions. (Displacing an object or type with a blurred version of itself, for example, gives a great suggestion of 3D or bevelled contours, the depth depending on the amount of blur and the offset between the two layers.)
> 
> A bit of a pity, but understandable, that today, hardly anyone knows any more about the power of displacement filter (and several other neglected Photoshop features), because the results it can give you are 100% unique and individual, whereas relying on the stock preset filters (and their limited amount of parameters) inevitable produces a lot of sameness in most people’s Photoshop work: that rather ugly, lazy, instantly recognizable ‘I’ve used Photoshop filters’-look.
> 
> ...


I just got a response from the author of the video explaining to me how he got the cloud, blurry effect, and here was his response:

"A cloud can be created with the cloud filter in Photoshop. Then you copy the cloud to the alpha channel of the image and have an transparency map with a cloud style. Save it for example as a .tif file and then import in Finale."

Thank you for bringing that to my attention, because it was definitely a step that I missed.


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## Lawson. (Aug 21, 2017)

I tried giving it a shot:







(more distortion but as a result parts of it are cropped out)





The main issue I had was that the original file was already on textured paper, so I couldn't distort or wash out or thicken/blur the notes very well without making the actual paper look weird. If you post a version on white paper, I could get it looking a bit better.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 21, 2017)

Thank you to everyone who is helping me out! Y'all guys are truly awesome. The effects that I apparently need for this project are the cloud and diffusion filters. For those who would like to try, I am attaching a clean white version PDF file. Plus, this version is updated with different sized note heads, dynamics, and beaming to give the illusion of a more handwritten, uneven note head font. Thank you once again.


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## Rodney Money (Aug 21, 2017)

Lawson. said:


> I tried giving it a shot:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Ah, nice! Thank you for this, my friend. I don't have Muk's eye, but I think it is looking great, especially the 2nd one at measures 14 and 15 where the crescendo and forte look like they are about to jump off the page. Thak you once again, and this time I have provided you a white clean version but with "random notes."


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## Rodney Money (Aug 21, 2017)

@Lawson. Measure 11 is epic also! Did you try the cloud filter yet also for blending the text and notation randomly?


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## hawpri (Aug 21, 2017)

Rodney Money said:


> Go for it! I dare ya.


Haha, that would be fun, but I haven't had so much time recently, and it looks like Lawson beat me to it. Still, it seems like a fun distraction to take a little time to practice this look in case I ever need it someday.


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## Lawson. (Aug 22, 2017)

I may have over-done it a bit. :D I sadly wasn't able to figure out how to get the cloud filter to only blend with the text, and my clipping masks and stuff didn't work super well on it.


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## re-peat (Aug 22, 2017)

*Here*'s my attempt.

_


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## re-peat (Aug 22, 2017)

Lawson. said:


> I sadly wasn't able to figure out how to get the cloud filter to only blend with the text


Lawson,

If you place your 'cloud layer' just above the text layer (in the Layers palette) and then make the text layer a *clipping mask* (by simply pressing Alt+Ctrl+G, while having the cloud layer selected), the cloud layer will only be visible where the text layer is visible.

A far more interesting solution though, is to work with the blending options between layers. If you double-click a layer, the pane that appears has two sliders at the bottom (in the *Blend if*-area of the pane), the settings of which determine how the layer will blend with the layer below.
The *top fader* sets two tresholds: the left one is the treshold (of image density) below which the layer won't be visible, the right one sets the treshold above which the layer won't be visible.In others words: move the left slider to the right and the dark parts of the layer will increasingly become transparent, and if you move the right slider to the left, the light areas of the layer will increasingly dissappear. (You can set this for each colour channel individually, or for the grayscale values of all channels combined).

The *bottom fader* does a similar thing but will affect how much of the underlying layer is 'let through' (i.o.w. become visible). Move the left slider to the right and you'll see an increasing appearance of all the dark areas of the underlying layer, move the right slider to the left and the same will happen with all the light areas of the underlying layer.

More interesting still: you can decouple both triangles which make up a single treshold marker — decouple by pressing Alt while moving one of the triangles — and, doing so, define ranges of image density which are allowed to be visible or forced to disappear.

It's a bit complicated to explain in words, but if you spend a bit of time with those faders, you'll quickly understand how they work and what can be accomplished with them. If still confused after experimenting however, here's a *video tutorial* that goes a little deeper into Photoshop's 'Blend if' feature.

_


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## Guy Bacos (Aug 22, 2017)

First time I've seen this vintage reproduction of sheet music, and done so easily. Pretty cool.


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## Alatar (Aug 22, 2017)

re-peat said:


> *Here*'s my attempt.
> 
> _



Now, this look really good!


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## Rodney Money (Aug 23, 2017)

re-peat said:


> *Here*'s my attempt.
> 
> _


Talk the talk and walk the walk. Absolutely wonderful. After lessons tonight, hopefully I can share some details that I found amazing and then ask some questions concerning them.


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