This popular Photoshop effect is trending again

So, I've seen the pixel stretch effect floating around the internet again, and it's a really fun and easy effect to create, and I'm going to show you how to do this in Photoshop right now. So, here you can see I've got my English countryside, and we have our lovely red phone box in the middle. Now, for this effect, you want to pick an element in the image that you want to stretch. So, in this case, it's obviously going to be the giant red phone box. So, let's go and grab the single column marquee tool. And what we're going to do is just try and find the edge of the post box and make a selection. So, if I click and drag with this, you can see it just does a one-pixel selection. So, we're going to go over to this part here, and then we're going to press command or control C, command or control V. And if we hide this background layer, you can see we have a slight sliver of a pixel. That doesn't even make sense. We have a pixel-width line, and what we need to do now, this does run top to bottom. So, we've got to trim off everything we don't need. So, let's go in here, command or control I to invert the layer. This makes it a little bit easier to see. So, I think maybe about here. We're going to go up to the top. Whoop. There we go. Press delete or backspace. Be gone. And we're going to go down here, and we're going to do this from the bottom. So, I reckon here. All the way down. Delete. There we go. We can invert that again, and we should now have our one-pixel-wide line that is the height of the post box. Nope, that's a phone box, Dan. Now, we can press command or control T for free transform, and we can, as you might have guessed, stretch this. So, we're going to pull this out. And you can, of course, pull this in any direction. We'll start with it being completely horizontal, and I'll duplicate this layer and turn this one off. This is going to be the backup in case I screw it up. It's a good idea to keep one of those, and then we'll just call this one pixel. Right, let's give it a go. Fingers crossed. So, what we're going to do with this is press command or control T again to go into free transform, right click, and then choose warp. Now, this is where it can get especially crazy, but also very creative. Now, I'm you could I mean, like you could bend it any which way you like, but there's a really cool effect that I want to try here, and that is where you kind of bend it back over itself, and it creates this almost like page turn effect. So, we'll push this as far as we can go. Maybe we bend that up there, and then do this. Um you've got to try and get the right handle here, so it can be a bit fiddly. So, we could pull this one. Is it this one? And then maybe pull this down. Yeah, something like this, but then I also want to get this part up here. So, I'm going to have to pull that one. Ah, there we go. That's the handle I wanted. You see what I mean? It's very fiddly. Um depending on the type of warp you want to create. There we go. There we go. That's what I'm going for. Let's pull this one down a bit. Nice. So, you can of course play around with this loads, but that is what I've got so far. Now, this looks fine on its own. You can see it's quite literally just stretched the edge of the post box, and we've bent it and warped it in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways. But, uh yeah, feel free to play around with this. What we can do to make this more realistic, not really realistic, [laughter] but to sell this effect even more is add some shadows and highlights. So, I'm going to add an exposure adjustment layer, hold alt or option and click between these layers, and it will clip it to the pixel layer. So, when I adjust this now and make it darker, you can see it's only going to affect the pixel layer and not the entire image. So, now we've darkened it, we're going to invert that. There we go. Now, press B for the brush tool, have white as your fill color, foreground color. Sorry, my brain was in Illustrator for a second there. And then grab this brush here, the soft round pressure opacity and flow brush. My goodness, that is a mouthful, but this brush is amazing. It's the best brush in the entire world. Literally, I use it for everything. Hardness at 0% and this is the key step. You want to drop your flow down. Don't do this with your flow at 100%. I did this for years and it's just No, no, no, no, no. We're going to drop this down to 10 or 11. Let's do 11 and be cheeky. So, we're going to zoom in now. Imagine this is like a big blanket or a ribbon and this is actually happening in this lovely English countryside. There would be shadows on there and there would be highlights on there where the light would be catching. So, we're going to try and think about this in a realistic setting and I'm very carefully with my 10% flow value, just going to brush in those shadows here. So, this is kind of turning over. So, we're going to have some shadows there. Maybe this bit we'll just brush in again over and over a bit more and then this side here maybe we'd have some coming up the middle there and we'd leave the edges maybe a little bit brighter. So, if I just zoom out and show you what I've done. This is before, just completely flat. This is the after. Now, I might have gone a bit too much there. So, what we can do is go into our exposure adjustment layer and we can easily just dial it back or dial it up even more. So, find something that's subtle but realistic. And what we're going to do now is do the highlights. So, you could do the same thing again with the exposure adjustment layer. However, I am going to use solid color just because I mean there's so many different things you could do here, but I'll show you why in a minute. So, again we're going to add a clipping mask, alter option, click between the layers. Obviously, let's invert this. We don't want white everywhere and I'm just going to subtly brush in a few highlights here. This is where the light's kind of catching most. And maybe up here along the edge. Very nice. Ooh, maybe over here as well, right along the edge. And we go. Your cheeky red ribbon. Right, so obviously that looks awful, but what we can do now is we can adjust the blending modes. So we could go to something like overlay. And if I hide and show the layer, you can see it is a subtle difference, but now that we've got it in place and we've set the blending mode, we can go back in and we can kind of be a bit more creative with this. So let's just That's too much, damn. But let's go in and just brush a little bit more. We'll make this bit a bit brighter here. So once you've set up your adjustment layers for shadows and highlights, that's when you can really kind of get in and fine-tune it. And if I just show you a before and after, completely flat versus with shadows and highlights, you can see the difference. It just looks so much better and it kind of gives you a bit more of a sense of depth as well. And if it is a little bit too punchy, just select both layers, press five on the keyboard, and immediately that is 50% opacity and the effect effectively becomes half the strength of the opacity. So there we go. That is the pixel stretch effect. Honestly, it's a ton of fun and if you do have a go at this, tag me on the old social medias @foreverdanski. I'd love to see your take on this, but otherwise, I will catch you in the next one.