How do I make a magic picture on Photoshop CC?

Question

I hope this doesn't violate the "Links to External Sites" rule, but I've played around with this and cannot seem to replicate the results: https://twitter.com/penguins/status/578255717880238080

Can someone explain how to do this, showing the steps?

Answer 1

The effect takes advantage of the fact that the twitter timeline has a white background but a grey background when you hover over a tweet - and a black background when you click through to view an image. This is done by having a transparent image with only the white areas of the image showing - so you will only see anything when the grey or black background fills in the rest of the image.

First get a black & white image.

The first step is to make the image you want to use, black & white. Use the Black & White adjustment and get as much contrast as possible.

Flatten the image. Select All then Copy.

Create a new solid color fill layer and set the color to white.

Hide the original image. Then with the new color layer selected, add a layer mask. ALT + Click on the layer mask icon in the layers panel to directly edit the mask and paste the image in to the layer mask. ALT + Click the layer mask again to finish editing the mask.

For the part of the image that is always visible (in your example and here it is text, but it could be anything).

Create the text layer, then copy the original black & white image above the image and create a clipping mask with the image - either CMD + ALT + G (with the image selected) or ALT + Click between the two layers in the layers panel.

Save the image as a PNG with transparency enabled and you're good to go!

This is the same image with the different backgrounds showing through: