How to burn toast in Photoshop (How to make Ronald Reagan Toast!)
Of all the useful information on the internet, there’s no tutorial on how to make the “burned toast” effect in Photoshop. You know what I mean. Short of rigging a Jesus toaster, there isn’t an easy way to make this effect without some serious knowledge of Photoshop. Till now.
What you’ll need:
- An image of toast. I got mine courtesy of WikiHow. It’s Creative Commons.
- The image or images you want to toast. I’ve used several of The Gipper for my tutorial. A black and white photo with a clean background works best.
- A copy of Photoshop or GIMP. This is essential.
1. Open the image of toast. If it’s a little burned (like mine is), use the dodge tool to lighten it up.
2. Open the image you want to toast. I’m going to make some Reagan Toast.
3. Then, you’ve got to strip out everything that isn’t the person, unless you want it in the photo. In this case, the flag has to go. I don’t want to mess with it this time. Don’t worry about accuracy below the neck. You won’t need it.
4. Also known as THE HARDEST STEP. This is where a black and white photo comes in handy, because most of the work is done for you. After converting the image to Grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale), you need to alter the levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels, or Ctrl+L) so you have almost nothing but black and white, with very little gray.
A little gray is okay, but your image has to be discernible in black and white. Tool around with the levels to find something that works. I spent 30 minutes trying to get the levels right on this particular Reagan image, so here’s one I made earlier:
(I told you it wasn’t gonna be easy).
5. Now comes the fun part. Select everything that isn’t your new picture using the Magic Wand tool.
Note: If your image contains text, make sure to select the inside of Ps, Rs, Os, Qs and other open letters.
Then select the inverse. (Select>Inverse, or Shift+Ctrl+I). Ctrl+Drag your image onto the toast. You may need to resize (Edit>Free Transform, or Ctrl+T).
6. Photoshop will put the image onto its own layer, which is important. If it doesn’t, please make the new image on its own layer.
7. Poke out the eye of the background layer (the toast) and make sure the Reagan layer is selected. Then, Select>Color Range. This is where you select the darkest part you can. You can try to select on the little screen they give you, but it’s easier to select on the actual image. What you select will show up as white, or black if you invert. (Again, I’m switching back and forth between Reagans.) Make sure the toast isn’t visible when you do this.
8. Once it’s all selected, click OK. Untick the eye on your Reagan layer, tick the eye on your toast and make your toast layer blue. This will leave a selection on your toast in the shape of your Reagan.
9. Select your style of burnt toast with the burn tool. For best results, use an exposure of between 65-85%. Any more will be too dark, but lighter creates a nice “light burnt” effect. Back to the Reagan with him holding the GIPPER baseball jersey, it would look something like this:
Nice, eh? Now you can go back and forth to the Reagan and select lighter grays and burn them with a lesser exposure than your blacks, but be careful. It tends to accentuate wrinkles and is a pain in the ass to do.
I recommend going back at least once more and burning the whites in your Reagan to around 20% with one pass-through.
Questions? Comments? Leave them below! Here are my final results. All images are CC-BY-SA.
