Creating a Recessed Wall

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Create a recessed wall in Photoshop. to be used in style boards, design boards, mood boards and beyond
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Lesson 12 Creating a recessed wall and a protruding wall In Photoshop. Welcome back to another exciting lesson here in Photoshop my name is Brian Lee and today we’re gonna be going over how to create recessed walls using the living room design kit.

Intro

To start off, I want you guys to know that in order to do the recessed walls we must have already established a look and style of the walls. Make sure you get textures in there, make sure you get whatever kind of lighting you want in there. You may even want to place doors or windows and just make sure that you get all the basics of the design kit completed for your project and then dive into making some recessed walls.

Getting set up

So let’s just say that this is the look that I want, what I like to do is go into the walls layer here. I have my right wall selected and before I do anything ill just hit F to change the view inside of photoshop where I can move things around.   All right, so first things first let’s turn everything else off except for that the rich wall layer. I’ll turn off my global lights the other walls floor and ceiling plus any other extras that are on top of my wall. I just want to have this wall turned on and I’m going hold space bar, to move the image over so that the wall is centered in my viewpoint.

Right wall recession

Creating the recessed wall layer

So I think I will make the recessed wall right in the middle of this right wall layer. Hit “M” for the marquee tool just be approximate. I could do a double selection if I had to two walls that I wanted to recess. It all depends on the situation.   So once I have my selection made with the marquee tool, I’ll just hit command J and that’s gonna give us a new layer based on the selection. If I hold command and click I just need to go to my right wall and hit this little Mask tool down at the bottom of the layers panel.   Note: make sure your selection is inverted prior to hitting the mask tool. Command shift I and then when you hit the mask tool you will be left with a hole in the middle. this is the basis for building our recessed wall.The cool thing about this mask is that if I disable it, it will be right back to where it was. The non-destructive way of working in photoshop.

Working with the recessed wall.

Now that I have this wall on its own layer I’m gonna put the layer behind the original wall in the layers panel. Then hit “V” to bring up the move tool and drag it to the right.   You can immediately see that we have made a recession on our wall. Depending on the situation, it’s up to you on how deep you want to make that wall.

Filling the missing area with a side panel

We have a problem there’s a big hole in the wall to the next step is just to fill that hole so just gonna make a separate piece by selecting the layer here the recessed wall area and hit M for the marquee tool.   I’ll drag down and select the section in the corner of the wall. And hit command J. Then it’s just a matter of willing this new piece into place with the transform tools.

Defining the side panels

We want the trim of the recessed wall to be going horizontally. One of our issues now is that the recessed wall is a little high, so we need to scale the recessed wall down to line it up with the height of the original wall.

Finessing the wall 

Remove the excess parts: Once the recessed wall is lined up I will just hold M to pull up the marquee tool and remove any access parts of the wall by selecting and deleting the unwanted pieces.   Now, I will turn everything back on it the document, the floor, lights and you may see we have a bit of a problem with this black line left behind between the remaining original walls. so that’s because of this mask. So I just need to extend the mask a little bit higher so it covers all of the original walls. I’ll unlink the mask from the layer and scale it vertically by a few pixels.

Right wall protruded 

To create the opposite effect and actually have the wall come into the room, we will use the already existing pieces fro the previous example.   Note: by the way, this is also a great way to make a bit of a hallway or doorway. by turning the recess wall off your left with a gap between the walls. If he just turns the layer off you get a nice room there.   Back to the protruded wall, with the recessed piece selected I’ll hold shift and use the move tool, drag it out into the room. Keep in mind we do want it to stay the same size as the original wall.

Adjusting the side panel

Now that we pulled the wall into the room the problem is that we have a hole on the side, so we need to take that little sliver of a side panel from the previous example and bring it forward. We will also need to transform it to be the same height and size as the front of our new protruded wall.   Note: Pay attention to layer order here. you want both the protrusion and the side panel layers to be in front of the nearest wall. So now you want to scale the front of the protruded wall using the perspective tool making sure that it follows the correct perspective of the room.

Back wall recession

Preparing the workspace

So to get started with the back wall I want to go to my back to the wall layer and I want to turn off everything else but the back wall including my lights and shadows, the floor, the ceiling. I’ll keep the side walls to help me see the center of the current wall.

Creating the back wall recession layer.

So first, let’s take the back wall and make a selection of approximately the size of the wall i want to recess. I’ll hot common J to create a new layer from my selection.

Creating a hole in the back wall.

Then I want to select that layer by holding command and clicking on its thumbnail. I need to invert the selection command, shift, i.   With the selection inverted I’m going to hit this button down the bottom of the layers panel the mask tool.   It’s possible you messed up the centering of the wall and want to move it laterally across the wall. To do this, just turn off the link between the layer and the mask hit V to bring up the move tool.   Select the mask and now you can slide it laterally across the wall. Remember you will also need to adjust your recessed wall layer. When you’re finished turn the link button back on.   I can now hit Command-T and scale the recessed wall piece down.   Note: that the visual depth of the wall is equivalent to the scale.   Note 2: If your using the Living Room Design Kit you may need to adjust the floor and the ceiling smart object layers and extend them deeper into the room.

Side panels of the recessed wall

To make the side panels we just need to select a piece of the already created wall and hot CMND J to put the new selection on its own layer. We can then play with its perspective to fit nicely between the original wall and the new recessed wall. do the same to the opposite side panel.   Lastly, Using the curves layer you can darken this wall down to make it appear more obviously recessed.

Back wall protrusion

Using the pieces and parts from the original wall, remove the left and right trim walls we just created. Scale the recess wall up to be a little larger than the original wall. This will make it look like it is coming forward.   Lastly, You can add a little darkness behind the protruded wall on the original to make it appear like a shadow. I would recommend using the curves adjustment layer. (See tutorial above for example)