Create a Wordle Word Cloud and add in a Photo Portrait with Photoshop CC

In this tutorial I show how to make a Wordle word cloud and how to combine that image with a photo of Abraham Lincoln to create an interesting Wordle art design. If you like Wordles or Tagxedo word art, you should be able to find an image to enhance just about any wordle. Ideas might include songs, movies, celebrities, poems,animals,speeches etc. Find an image related to your Wordle and fire up Photoshop and give this tutorial a try. This tutorial was made for white on black word-clouds and black and white portraits. In the near future I will be making another tutorial covering colored word clouds and colored portraits.

This video was made for instructional and educational purposes. In it I teach people how to use Adobe Photoshop to make interesting designs. No copyrighted materials were used in this video.

Image Attributions:

Abraham Lincoln O-55, 1861-crop, Public Domain
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...

LEONARDO, Public Domain
http://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...

T Roosevelt, Public Domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T_R...

**Transcript Excerpt**

We'll start out by creating Wordle image on the Wordle website. The text used is from the Gettysburg address.

Next we'll cut out the letters, distort them, and color them.
Then we'll take an image of Lincoln and crop it, adjust it, and make it a sepia style.

Finally we'll place Lincoln in the image, Then make opacity adjustments, and apply adjustments with the Camera Raw Filter.

To begin the project we need a word cloud.
Browse to wordle.net
Click Create
Paste in some text. I used the Gettysburg Address.
Add a few words describing the image. Such as "Gettysburg Address" and "Lincoln"
Put a tilde between the word Gettysburg and the Word Address. That will force the two words to appear one after another.
Duplicate Gettysburg Address and Lincoln a few times so they will appear three times. This will make them appear larger in the wordle.
Before continuing inspect the text and insert any tildes that you may want. In this case I put a tilde betweeen four and score and also seven and years.
I also repeated four~score and seven~years so they would appear larger.

Press Go. A random word cloud will appear.
Next choose Color. Choose White on Black or WB
In the options menu choose font. I choose Berylium as it looks quite historic.
Then choose Layout. Choose Straigter edges and then choose Mostly Horizontal

At this point keep pressing re-layout with current settings in the Layout menu until you find a word cloud that is fairly rectangular with not too much black space at the sides.
When done, Click the save as PNG button.
Save the file as word.png

Open the Wordle picture in Photoshop.
choose Image - Size
Change image resolution to 300 pixels per inch.
Double-Click the Background layer. Name it letters. Save the image as a psd file

To select the letters, Choose Select color range. Select shadows. Move the Fuzziness slider to 0. and the range slider to 18. For your picture play with the fuzziness and range sliders till the letters are clear.
Check the Invert box. Click OK to load the selection.

Duplicate the selection. Name the new layer letters.

Press D to Select Black as your forground color.
Choose the bottom layer. Fill it with black. Name it bg.

At this point we'll distort the letters a little to help fill up the image.
Select the letters layer. Chose Edit - Transform - Distort
Drag the letters up near the top of the image
then drag the letters down near the bottom.

Place embed the portrait image.
Name it Lincoln.
Rasterize it.

Next we will crop Lincoln out of the image and add a sepia style.
First turn off the eyes of the letters layer and the bg layer.
To make it easier to see whats happening. Make a new layer below the Lincoln image. Fill it with 50% grey

Make the Lincoln layer active.
I used the quick selection tool with Sample all layers turned off to select Lincoln.
Here is the resulting basic selection.

Then select Refine edge. Make the view On-Black
Choose smart radius of 8 pixels.
Choose the drawing brush and trace around the edges.

Set smooth to 2 pixels
There is some backlight on some of the edges. To remove, Set Feather to 3.3 pixels
and Shift Edge to -18%
"Change Output to" to layer mask. The settings for your image may differ

The cutout looks pretty good, but you can tweak it using the mask.
Press D to make black your foreground color.
Select Lincolns mask. Use a soft round brush about size 50. touch up as needed. Here I removed some fuzz outside his left arm.
Press the X key to change the foreground color to white. Use this to add back any missing color areas.

Once your happy with it. Delete the 50% grey layer it is no longer needed.
Duplicate the Lincoln layer. This improves the quality of the image.
Then merge the original and the duplicate.
Rename it Lincoln again and add a layer mask to it......