- [Instructor] In this movie,
I'll show you how to create type
that inverts everything behind it using the difference mode
and if you've ever seen this demoed before
in any software, what I'm about to show you
will hopefully blow your mind,
because it not only employs difference,
but we're also going to integrate
the saturation and overlay modes
in order to make sure that the text
is either white or black
with just a few gray values in between.
All right, so I'll go ahead
and switch over to my document so far,
and I will switch to the layers panel right here.
Once again, I'm really running out of room,
so I'm going to double click on the swatches tab
in order to collapse that panel,
and then I'm going to have to drag this horizontal bar up,
and notice that we have a layer called "your"
and then we have one called "push posh,"
and together, they make up the headline for this image.
Now, notice that all the letters
have drop shadows currently, and that's necessary.
Notice if I click on the word "your,"
and all this text by the way has been converted
to outlines, but it could be live text,
notice if I were to switch to the appearance panel
and turn off that drop shadow
and then click off the letters,
we're really losing the contrast right there,
but in my opinion, the drop shadow is a clumsy solution.
I would rather come up with something like this here.
All right, so the first thing I'm going to do
is select my text.
Your text has to be white, absolutely white
for this trick to work,
and then what you want to do is click into word opacity
up here in the control panel, wherever it may be,
then click on normal and choose difference,
and that's all it takes to create text
that inverts everything behind it.
Notice if I move it to a different location,
it's still going to invert everything.
Problem is, it does so very colorfully,
and I personally find that effect
to be extremely distracting
and not all that legible to boot.
So, I'm going to press control Z
or command Z on the Mac,
to put that text back where it goes,
and I'm going to zoom in as well
so that we can watch the magic.
So the next thing you want to do
is switch to the layers panel
and go ahead and target the layer.
So you want to select the entire layer.
One of the great things about any container
inside Illustrator is that you can assign blend modes to it,
but in our case, we're going to assign
attributes to the layer, fill attributes,
and then we're going to assign blend modes to those.
So go ahead and switch over to the appearance panel
and drop down to the add new fill icon and click on it,
and so yes, you can add fills to layers,
and so imagine that we have a kind of infinite fill
that just happens to be clipped by these letter forms.
Now for some reason it comes in as a weak black in my case,
and so I'm going to go ahead and click
on this fill swatch right there
and what you want to do is select any shade of gray,
doesn't matter which one, just grab one,
and then twirl that fill open, if it's not already,
click on the word "opacity"
and change the mode once again to saturation,
and that'll go ahead and leach the colors
out of those letters,
and the reason this is working so brilliantly
is that we've applied this fill on top of the layer,
so think of it this way.
We'll go and switch back to the layers panel.
You've got the word "your"
that's set to the difference mode,
and then you're piling something on top of it,
and it's very important that you do it this way,
that you're working on a container,
because if you just tried to apply gray to the word "your"
and you set it to the saturation mode,
it wouldn't work, because after all, white,
which is the color of the text,
already has no saturation,
so you're not going to get any work done there,
but you can plot more blend modes on top of each other
by essentially nesting that text inside this layer.
All right, now I want to increase the contrast
so that we have fewer of these grays,
and we have more in the way of black and white.
Now, if I were working in Photoshop,
I would apply a levels adjustment layer,
but there is no such thing as levels inside of Illustrator,
but we've got the next best thing here.
We're going to apply a gradient
and set it to the overlay mode.
So drop down to the add new fill icon,
and once again click on it.
It doesn't matter it's on top of the stroke
because we don't need a stroke for this effect.
Then what you want to do is bring up your gradient panel
if it's not already up,
make sure the fill is active instead of the stroke,
and then just click on the gradient slider
in order to add, with any luck,
a default white to black gradient,
and I'm going to double click on this black color stop
and notice it's set to a K value of 100%.
That's going to be a weak black,
which is not what we want,
and so to darken things up, go ahead and switch
from gray scale to RGB,
and you'll end up with a nice, rich black.
The R, G, and B values should all be zero.
All right, now this thing's going the wrong direction,
so I'm going to set it to 90 degrees let's say,
which is the opposite of what I want.
I want the dark stuff to be at the bottom
and the bright stuff at the top,
and so I'm going to click
on the reverse gradient icon
in order to set the gradient in the right direction.
All right, now make sure this fill is twirled open,
click on its opacity setting,
and change the blend mode to overlay,
and you'll see in a second
that overlay's going to provide us with the best results.
Now, I'm going to move this black value up
in order to provide more darkness, notice that,
and I'm going to move the white color stop in
toward the left in order to make the whites brighter.
So just to give you a sense,
this is what we had before, and this is what we have now.
Now, it maybe tempting to try a different contrast mode.
You could go with soft light, by the way,
if you wanted to essentially undo some of your work,
or you could try out hard light.
The thing about hard light is
you're going to see the gradient.
Notice that the gradient is overtaking
the hair in the background, and that's not what we want,
which is why overlay is going to give us the best effect.
Now, if you know anything about Photoshop
and you've ever done any masking in Photoshop,
you may have set the brush, the actual brush tool,
to the overlay mode and brushed inside the mask
in order to darken and brighten the details.
That's exactly what we're doing here,
and that's why it's working out so brilliantly.
All right, but I'm going to back things off a little bit.
I'm going to set the location
for the black color stop to 50%,
that's not backing things off,
that's making it more radical,
and then I'm going to click on the white color stop
and change its location to 60%
in order to produce this effect right here.
All right, let's see it in action.
I'm going to deselect the text for a moment,
and then I'm going to press control zero
or command zero on a Mac to center my zoom.
Now I'll grab that text once again,
I'll press control H or command H on a Mac
in order to hide the edges,
and then notice you can drag this text
anywhere you want it to be,
and it's going to end up giving you that inversion effect.
Now, it's not going to be very legible
over some of the facial features,
but you're getting a sense
for just how flexible this effect is.
All right, I'm going to move it back where it goes
by pressing control Z or command Z on the Mac a few times,
and now because we don't need those drop shadows at all,
I'll go ahead and select the word "posh"
and just to make sure it's selected,
press control H or command H on a Mac
to bring back the edges,
and I'll shift click on the word "push"
and here in the appearance panel,
I'll just go ahead and turn off the drop shadow like so.
And that, folks, is how you create text,
or anything else for that matter,
it could be a path outline,
that inverts everything behind it
using the difference mode
combined with saturation and overlay
here inside Illustrator.