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Preview of Content, Part 2 - Smart Objects and Paths

the way this is gonna is always the same way. We're always going to adjustment layer and picking an adjustment just to make a point. If I had decided for the sake of argument that what I really wanted to adjust was this part of the photograph, If I make a selection first, then when I go to, for example, levels, now it's on Lee adjusting that area and you'll see what happens is the mask is the same kind of thing. It's black is hiding it. White is showing it. So one of the techniques that I talk about a lot asshole idea end up with. So here's an example of ending up with something. I want to make this wall slightly darker, but to make sure I see what I'm doing, I'm gonna make it much darker than I really need initially. And then on the layer mask, I'm going to take my paintbrush and start painting away. I'm painting with white, so I'm basically revealing the effects of the adjustment layer, and I'll just do a little bit to make a point so it looks like I'm painting with a dark color. Wha...

t I'm really doing is painting with white on the layer mass to tell Photoshopped reveal the effects of the adjustment layer in this area. Now let's pretend I did the whole thing once I had, then I would say OK, but now that I've done that, I don't really want it quite that dark. So let me just pull it back a little bit. So now it's still darker, but it looks a little more realistic. So that's the concept of saying I want to end up with in effect. But I want to be subtle, but I still want to make sure that I see what I'm doing. So because of the edible nature of adjustment layers, that means I can go in and say temporarily make it really dark, mask it and then pull it back. So it's a lot more subtle, and that would be, I don't want, say, impossible. But next to impossible. If you used regular adjustments because you, with the regular adjustment directly done to this photo, then you just have to go undo redo. You can't go undo painted back in selectively will be much, much harder. Okay, now the other thing that is touch on really briefly. Here is if you have a photograph that starts with a raw file like this one is, this means when I double click on it, it's going to first go to camera raw, and I have my camera. Ross set up with an option that I highly recommend people use, which is open and Photoshopped as smart objects. What that means is, normally, if I didn't have that turned on, this is the way it would work. I would make some adjustments in here. I would hit open image. It will apply whatever settings I've done in camera raw and basically that's the end of the connection between camera and photo shop. So at this point, I'm a Ziff. I've opened a regular old J. Peg and I continue editing. But if I felt like I wish I hadn't done that, I want to go back to camera raw. In this case, my only real option is to close it and start again. So instead I turn on this option called Open and Photoshopped as smart objects and what that means, And it sounds like it's odd working odd wording cause says open as smart objects plural, but that means from now on, all camera raw files should open as this thing called a smart object. So what it means is now I could make a bad adjustment. Not that you would do that, but just so you can see what's happening. I had open object. It applies the settings. It comes into Photoshop. But now, instead of being a regular background layer, it's called a smart object. This little symbol in the corner tells me this thing is so called smart. Any time you want to look at the contents of the smart object, you double click on it. In this case, the contents is camera. So now I've created a two way street between camera Raw and Photoshopped. So, for example, let's say when I was trying to make a selection, I thought it might be easier if I initially make my photograph look like this. Not that it would, but we'll say it did click OK, and then I, for example, make my selection. And once I've happy with that really complicated selection, I double click and say what? I really want the photograph to go back to these settings, maybe something like that, and when I click OK and updates, but preserves whatever else I've done. So any time we're faced with the task of adjusting something in photo shop, we always have adjustment layers, which are great, but for a lot of things especially, I mean, I shoot mostly for myself in raw, because I like the options wrong gives me so by nature. When I double click on a file, it opens in camera. I move sliders, and when I click OK, it opens in photo shop. I could take this document that's in here in a photo shop and start to do something to it like photo shop style things. But even now I've done that. I can still double click on it to say, I think I'd like it to look more like this, whatever it might be, and it will update but preserve everything else I've done. That would be harder to do using other Photoshopped methods than this. So any time you have the ability to a work with raw files and be making a camera raw, smart object that just means a two way street between Photoshopped and camera. It opens up a whole world of possibilities for anyone that has photo shop CC. If I were to, I'll just fake it here in open a non camera, Robert. So if you have a photo shop, see? See, this is one of the few things that's unique. That we'll talk about it here is that if I wanted to create the same kind of thing, there is now a filter called camera raw filter, which means I connect, actually start in photo shop and apply a filter meaning camera raw normally have to start with the raw file. This allows me to start with any layer and edited in camera, which to me, is one of the best things ever invented because I love those sliders in raw because they're just easier but very powerful. So the fact that I can do this to any layer at all now is really, really nice. So since I have this open, actually, let me do go back because I don't like the way this looks make it look not quite so horribly exposed. Okay, here we go. So whenever you go to apply a filter in Photoshop generally and this is another reason why I'm sure the person asked a question about duplicating the background layer in the past. If I wanted to apply a dramatic filter to this layer but still have the often changing my mind, I would have duplicated the background layer like this applied the filter to this one. But again, all that man was if I changed my mind, I could throw this layer away. Still didn't tell me you blurred this module. You did whatever. So instead, now we use this whole concept of smart when you say convert for smart filters, that means this document this layer is now encased in this protective container called a smart object. So that means if I go to do some filter like motion blur for the sake of argument, I'm gonna over blurred to make a point. Now, you see, it actually tells me Well, you did something called motion Blur. How much? Like DoubleClick. And it tells me if I don't like it, I can change it. That simple thing right there used to be so much more difficult is in the past. If I applied a motion blurred, clicked, okay on the layer and saved the document, there was absolutely no way I could no. Later on what filter setting I used. Unless I happen to have not done any motion blur since then, maybe I could have. But here it's right here in the layers panel. So I could even say, you know what? Maybe I went a little overboard. I should just not do that at all, so I can turn off completely or And Or I can edit the settings and or I can lower the opacity, so it's less obvious and this is a mask. So if I decide, I really overall, I'm liking where this is heading. But I don't like the fact that their faces are mass. So let me go in and paint away the part right? Don't want the filter applied in certain places. So that's in a nutshell. Why, anytime you have the option of thinking, should I apply smart filter? Not to me. The answer is absolutely yes. Is there any downside to applying a smart filter? Not that I can think of, because it just because all these benefits, including the fact that if I really wanted to, I could apply this smart filter to a different photograph and then tweak the results on that one as well. So the whole point of doing all these methods where we're trying to be flexible and non destructive is to make our life simpler and that if that includes doing things in a way where I can edit things and try variations, and then we use the same settings. And I mentioned this before, but I think it's worth noting again. A lot of things that I teach are based on having taught lots of session, lots of people. I remember a lot of people ask this or this is a very common problem people run into, and one of the most common things of all that I hear it as I mentioned this before is people say I was doing some stuff in photo shop. I was playing around. I tried some things. I love the way it looked, and I want to look back in later. I have no idea how I did it, So if you can do all those experiments but smart filter adjustment layer, then you have record because it tells you you did a filter with these settings. You did an adjustment with these settings, and then you could look back at three months later and go. Oh, right. That's how I did it. And you can then pull it on another photo and say, Let me apply this same look to that photo and just tweak it slightly. In the past, people would look at something and go. I really don't know. I'm going to guess it was this and they spent another two hours experimenting, trying to find the right combination of settings, and they still won't like the result. Okay, Okay, so here's a couple of other example. I want to show you this one. First of all, this is where I don't want to make this into a big sales pitch for having a tablet. But this is where having a tablet makes a big difference to me, this was just a fun photo I thought was kind of fun. But I wanted to play on a little bit. This is kind of in the realm of what I would call finishing touches. So I still gonna open. This is an object. So even though I'm going to make it look dramatically different in the way it's displayed underlying it, I still have I still will have the opportunity to change the way it looks. So I'm gonna make it look very different from a physic like on screen look. But underlying at the colors, everything else will still be edible. So hard to do that. I'm gonna excuse me very quickly, Make a little brush here. So this is the very quick nutshell of how you make a custom brush and Photoshopped I'm gonna make the world's almost simplest brush on a new document. I've just making a big circle and let's fill it on a new layer. Fill it with black. I also want to make the edges slightly soft. I'm gonna blur the edges. In this case, I don't need to do a smart filter cause I'm just making This isn't right now. I want my brush to look like this. When you define a brush, the way it works is whatever is black is the brush. Whatever's white is see through whatever's gray is my favorite technical term. Kind of I kind of see through kind of not so I just go at it, Define brush. That's it. Like OK, I can close that because it served its purpose, which was to give me this brush to work with. Now I'm gonna add a layer mask to this whips among I love when instructors whose groups it's like having a surgeon goes, Oops and they're like, What? So I click on the add layer mask button at first, when you add a layer mask, it displays and white, which means I'll show the whole layer. Now what I want to end up with in this case is some cool effect where the photograph becomes more visible in some areas than not. That kind of matches with this kind of fun sixties seventies, whatever this era is. So to do that, it's going to seem weird at first to like, kind of walk through. The whole thing is that first, I'm gonna fill the layer mask with black. Now, when you do that, it hides the entire layer, which seems like an odd choice. Why would I hide the entire document? Well, I want to gradually show the photograph. Okay. The way gonna do that is take my pink brush. I go and find that brush I just created, which is the last one right here. And it looks like this now If I just painted the paint brush with white, it will say, Well, ever you paint with white. I reveal that part of the photograph, and if I painted like this, you'd see Okay, that's it's OK, but it's not terribly interesting. So what I want to do is take advantage of some of these crazy brush days. I call them crazy because there's so many of them. It's just unbelievable. So here's my basic brush right now. You see, it's showing me a preview at the bottom. I rely on this a lot to see what I'm gonna get, cause join me is just one big thick brush stroke. So if I increase the spacing, it turns into separate circles and I decide how much do I want them spaced out? I'm gonna make the relatively close. Then I go to this one called Shape Dynamics, and it says, You see all these things that say jitter. That's apparently adobe engineering for change over time. Which means the longer you do this, the more it will change or the harder you press, the more it will change. So right now you'll see it's a previewing. There's quite a difference between the biggest circling, the smallest one. I can change that to say, I just want a little bit or I want a lot. What's the minimum that I want? If this was not a circle, I could also say angle. So that, for example, of was like Maple Leafs, each one the maple leaf would change slightly. And in the class I used maple leaves. Example on with one brush. Make it look like a whole bunch of different colored leaves because of all the settings you can use in here and then, in this case, I'll just scattering. Which means you could do multiple brushes, the kind of spread out or not. This also changed, so that to me, only because I've done this a few times this preview is giving me a good idea. That's kind of what I was picturing. And because of the way I want this to work, I'm gonna lower the opacity of my brush a little bit, so it'll be semi see through it first. But each brush will kind of pile on top of itself, So when you painted a low opacity, it means that semi see through. If you paint over the same place. It gets more and more available or concede. So as I start painting, see, this is the effect that I'm getting, and all I'm doing here is I'm varying the intensity of my pressure. I want to make sure I can still see her face. So I'm pressing harder around where I want to see detail and then later in other places. Normally, if I'm doing this kind of experimentation fairly early on, I'm gonna add a new layer, drag it down to the bottom of my stack of layers and fill it with white. Because eventually, I'm probably gonna print this on a white piece of paper. So I want to see what I'm getting. And sometimes that identifies. Okay, that looks a little odd right there to make sure you're painting on the court here, though the only thing and I warn people this in The lesson on this is that when you do these scattered type brushes, it can be a little frustrating. Because you can say I want a brushstroke, right? Fair and pinks over here because scatter is saying I don't care where you're pressing. I'm gonna move it around. So Sometimes you want one, like right on her elbow. It's like Come on. Their radio took like, five tries. But so this is what I the result I've got the layer mask looks like that. You see, it's got different shades of gray and black. But even though overall I'm pretty happy, just want to see a bit more of her boot in here. So just get that. That's a little more like I had mind even at this and our where I think I'm almost done. Ultimately, this is still a camera raw file, so I can still double click on it and say, I want to see what this would look like if and I edit some other setting like Go back and change it, make it more vibrant or something else. And apparently right now, Photoshopped decided it would not do that for reasons unknown, because it should based on the way set up. But any who? Normally I'd be able to double click, go back to camera and say, Let's make it more vibrant and it just update. Okay, that's an example I'm creating, in effect, that's very different than the original, But yet I haven't done any damage. The original photo is completely untouched. So if I decided you know what? Forget the whole thing. Throw away the layer mask. I'm right back where I was before in previous worlds of photo shop, people would have taken erasers and gonna race, race, race, race, race to get to this end result. And then if someone said, Oh, I love that, but just change this one thing you were like because he couldn't just change this one thing because it was gone. A race or delete means it's not there anymore. And everything is up for experimentation. For example, here I could say, Well, just out of curiosity, what happens if I add a drop shadow toe all these little circles in here and I can decide where I want it in the settings and everything else. So here's a little side note. I mentioned this in the part of the sessions on layer styles. A lot of people when they click on the drop shadow, it's almost like this rule that drop shadows must be down into the right and must be black because it's a shadow. But my theory is well, OK, but what if I said I want the shadow to be read and I wanted to be up into the left because you can even this and I'm not in any way suggesting I would leave it that way because I But just to make a point now I click OK, and I look at later kind of go No. So I can either turned off or go back and re edit because just another setting. So let's pretend from what this project was finished for now, the next thing I do is save is a PSD because when I look in my folder later, I'd see the name of this file dot any F which my original raw file and then the same file name dot psd, which I know is this version with all the editing I've been doing. So now I have two levels I could go back to go right back the original raw file if I need to. But in this case, I can also edit all this because of the way I set up this document. So when we talk over the next couple of lessons about the whole best practices, good work habits, this even This is an example where I've made my life simpler by thinking ahead that I want to get to this result of this weird background thing with bubbles or whatever it is. But I want to make sure I don't paint myself into a corner where later on I'm like, I wish I could. Well, I can change everything. I could make this black and white. I could delete this completely. Could apply if I mean nothing I've done at this point has painted me into a corner where at any point have to go. Oh, well, The only thing that about this that's fairly, would be hard to edit would be if the file size was too small. Because that's one thing that's harder to change is if I decide later on. And I want to make us a poster then and have a bit of a problem because I made it smaller. To begin with, you can always go from big to small. You don't want to go from small to big. Everything else about this, though, I could apply smart filters to this toe, get some other a fact I could add adjustment layers, every single aspect of it is can be edited because I've structured that way. So that's a recurring theme that you'll see over and over again. And what I trying to show is that everything can be edited in some to some fashion if you build it that way. Okay, so here's an example of something that someone asked me once. Then they said, I wish you could wrap text around objects in photo shop like you can in design. And my response was a Why would you want to? But be you kind of can is just not called text rap. And he was like because he went looking for, you know, where is the thing called text rap? And there isn't one. But if you think like photo shop and say OK, so Photoshopped has an option called type in an regular type, I can make a block of text, and when I do, that text will wrap around to the next line. So right now I have giant text against let me just make it a little more reasonable. So as I add tax, you see it wraps around to the next line like that. So that's a standard text block in photo shop is just a rectangle. Well, photo shop also lets you say, if I used these things called paths, for example, if I take the Ellipse tool and tell it, all I want is this thing called a path. You draw path, and now it's just this shape, which doesn't mean anything yet, because you have to do something toe a path. But all I do is I take my type tool and I click inside of it. And now, if we add some fake text, you see, while it's hard to see, because the Texas still too big that make it really small and you'll be able to see that as I do this now it's taking the shape off that that path. So if I go and hide the path agency, all it is is just text inside a shape. So I'm showing you this to lead up to the fact that ultimately I can still make it look like text is wrapping around. So the way that I do that, this is I show this because it's part of my same philosophy thing. I want to end up with text that looks like it's wrapping around the shape. So the approach I would take you that well, I need to make the equivalent of a text block. I'll start off with a rectangle, but then I'll use my quick selection tool with optional all which allows me to remove from. And I'll take away the kind of outline of this runner and all this extra stuff over here. So I end up with a selection that looks like this now. If I tried to put type in, their first ball wouldn't work. But secondly, I don't want to go right up against him. So one of the ways weaken change selections and photo shop is a command called modify contract, and I just this point is a bit of guests working to say I'm gonna contracted by, say, 15 pixels, and now you can see it's still the same shape, but it's kind of contracted in, so I'm almost there. But again, you can't put type inside a selection have to put in a path. So somehow I have to tell Photoshopped. Turn this selection into one of those paths, and thankfully it's quite easy. You just come over to the past panel and shoes make work path, and that means turn this election into a path. It has a number called tolerance, which means how accurately do you want to it to follow your selection? The lowest number you can get to is 0.5. So here's a little side tip every so often, like a dialogue. Imagine you've never seen this dialog box before, and for some of you, you're probably not a matching it because you haven't. But it's just saying some number. I think it defaults toe one point. Oh, how do you know what number? What rain? There's no slider. It just it's asking you to put in a number. So as a general tip and photos off, have you ever faced with the dialogue box and you have no clue whatsoever? What's the highest? What's the lowest guess? And put some ridiculous number like 10,000 and when you click okay, it's gonna tell you No, that's too high. Here's the range. So this is the only way in. Well, not the probably is the only way and Photoshopped to be able to quickly tell, so it's asking me to go between 0.5 and 10. So now that I know that still doesn't help me know what the numbers do. At least I know the range. I happen to know that the lowest number 0.5 is very accurate. In this case, one is probably accurate enough. So now I have this path. Now, finally, and go back to my type tool, click inside and put some text in there. Just get a bunch of it. This is a great, fairly new feature involved. Shop is the ability to just make fake text like that on a scale that So there we go. Now it looks like type is wrapping around. This is still edible type, so if I decided to change it, I could. But that path was a simple way for me to say. I need to make it look like it's wrapped around because do you think about it? If you use any other software that you're familiar like in design, it wraps around an object cause it's separate object. But in Photoshopped, this football player is not separate. He's part of the background, so I can't just somehow indicate wrap around that because there is no that. It's just the entire photo. So This is how I get to that end result of making it look like the text is wrapping around by going through several steps. And then I go through this same session on the same function in one of the classes where we talk about how we can do type in some different ways. This is and let me preface by saying, I'm gonna go through this fairly quickly because it's quite well, somewhat complex without having explain the whole thing. But it's trying to show you when people say, Why are you such a big fan of smart objects? Here is why. So we're going to imagine for a moment that I am faced with the task of creating graphics. They're going to be used on a calendar. So for each month I need three letter like, you know, no OC desk in all the three letter shorter names off of months. But I want some effect, so I'll just do it like this. So here's one of my little pet peeves about Photoshopped. I mean, it's good. Sometimes it remembers things, but currently, right now, it's remembering that I previously had a type size of two points so I've got the world s smallest calendar type of the moment, so we need to make it a little bigger and is another bonus tip. Putting white type on a white background does not work very well, So I need to make it so I can see it. Okay, so let's just do and we'll use that one since I have it and I'll make it pretty darn big. Now here's an example what I was talking about when I kind of mentioned the fact that once you know about this thing called turning, here's an example for reasons known only to the person that made this font. When you apparently type capital C fall by a capital T, they touch each other, which is really odd. I don't like that. So I clicked between the two of them and do optional right arrow and says, I would prefer that not to happen. Thank you very much So that's turning in a nutshell. So now I just have my type player. But before I do anything else, I want to give myself options, so I'm going to convert it to a smart object that's gonna protect the type and let me do a bunch of other things to it. Any time you have one smart object, you can then make a copy of that smart object simply by duplicating it. So now I have two copies of the same smart object as you'll see later on. If I edit one, the other one changes. So now I'm gonna make this blurry, cause I want this to be like a shadow. So I'm gonna do a bit of a blur on here, and I'm gonna free transform and say But I really want this to be like a good old fashioned cast shadow something like this, maybe. Okay. And then finally, I want just not toe have type, but I want to have a photograph inside my type. So I do that using something called a clipping mask, and this allows me to have a photograph insight type with this nice little shadow. Now I say this is a PSD. Now, when it comes to do the next month rather than starting over again, I've kind of set this up, and this is what I refer to say that technically, Photoshopped doesn't have an option called template, but this effectively is because now I could just do two things. Say I want a photograph I'm gonna use for November or say December, So I just dragged that in their first. So now I've got October with winter in it, which is kind of weird, but all I do is double click on either one of these two because it's the same smart object Twice. I double click on either one. It gives me the content, and now I just say, Well, this should be December. I close and save it and both of them update So it's updated the text and the drop shadow, and I got my photo. So I just keep doing that. Put in the next photo type in the next month. And if we think of this in the context of compared to the alternative, if instead, everyone I was starting from scratch going well, Let me make a type player. Let me think what size it was. How was that shadow? Now I just have to double click, change it to different letters, you know, whatever it is, close and save it and then find a new photograph that goes in there and replace that one so the amount of time it's taking and do it is dramatically less because the thought process was, How can I set this up to make my life simpler? And we could take this to any extent I could put a stroke around the outside of this letter. I could make the shadow fade out more quickly or make it semi see through. All of those factors are basically just part of my layer structure. But by building this structure, that's very nondestructive slash edit herbal slash reusable. It means I in effect, even organise thought nowhere in Photoshopped do I say save as template. I just used the word template because a lot people relate to that. You say this is like a template because every time I open this document, I just have to do two things. Edit the type put in a new photograph next, and each case I go save. As so this is my PSD file. When I'm finished with April, I go save as April next save as and that would be my ongoing for each month. Bring in, edit the type, bring a new photograph, save as next and for a project like this. It's I can't even imagine the time you could save by doing it this way, as opposed to building each one and trying remember how to do that and how would I do that is built into this kind of structure. So that's why we consider. At least I suggest we should consider this kind of approach because ultimate is going to save you time be more productive. But then also, from a creative standpoint, it has the built in ability to experiment.