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Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 1

Lesson 17 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 1

Lesson 17 from: Compositing 101

Aaron Nace

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Lesson Info

17. Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 1

Next Lesson: Using the Pen Tool

Lesson Info

Compositing: Wash-n-Suds Part 1

Well, we've got two sections here to actually get this image edited so what I want to do right now is we're going to go ahead and I'm going to talk about a little bit of mohr organization getting all these things in place and then we're going to go ahead and get into it actually compositing them out so what I want to do right now is choose basically create groups on what's actually going on in our photo group in a photo so I can remember this image I was used to create this is for a man who's so any command g that's just going group that and we're going to choose is to call this extras all right now normally I don't name like every single one of my layers that's something that some people like to blame name while their layers generally I just create groups like this and and I use that method so we're going to make that invisible thiss one is for a different details I'm gonna hit the command and the close bracket that's going to put that in the extras group is well, we're going to make ...

this invisible that's going to go in my extras group as well this one is well and I'm hitting command close bracket each one of these times that's going in my extras group and a cz well is this this way I'm able to say pretty organized from from right from the get go. Okay, these two for files are my heroes. I'm gonna hit man ji and we're going to double click and call this hero. So it's really important to be as organized as you possibly can especially, you know, when you're looking at, you know, something that's when you're looking at something that's going to have a lot of different layers and everything needs to get put in the right place, you want to get confused when you're starting to edit your image is like, oh, yeah, I have that other thing, all right? And they were going to group all those command g and I'm just going to double quick and call this leak that'll help me remember, you can call these things whatever you want. Okay, well, let's, go ahead and start off with our hero shots, so we're goingto click on those and bring those back down to the background, and now we've got our hero shots. So first, before I started, go ahead ing going ahead toe like edit these, which earlier we looked at when you loaded the files into a stack, we could automatically align the source images. We're gonna go ahead and do that now. I'm going to shift here all the way to the top and go all the way down to the bottom we're going to go to edit we're going to go to all out of a line layers and I'm gonna hit on auto what that's going to do is it's just going to take any information you have to remember from yesterday like the camera did like move just a little bit here and there this is going to take all those layers and make sure that they are aligned now if your cameras like moving a foot back or like going up and down and all kinds of crazy directions moving quite a bit it's really not going you're not gonna be able to do much especially you know, like if you take a picture of someone inside and then a tree outside there's no information align those but if it's if it's light changes it should do a very good job at aligning so now I'd like to double check to make sure that it actually did the job that we wanted to do. So if I make these two invisible we should see on lee here we go let's just click on these make sure these air there we should be just a shift in our subject material now everyone see that like every everything is pretty much exactly the same we see just a shift in our subject material so that's the whole thing behind our frame compositing is now now we have all these frames where everyone's probably seem like, you know what home is like? Oh that's how you do it like starting to make sense now it's like yeah, I have a new image that you know, just this little area and each of these they're all everything is the same just a couple things are moving around and really this is where in photoshopped things get really not that hard because we're just going to be using layer masks to kind of bring things together for the actual compositing part of this this is why it's compositing wanna one frame compositing it's not really that difficult, so we're going to spending time to do that, but we're also going to go ahead and stylized this emission really bring out some great things about it. Okay, so let's, look at a couple of options here we've got our we've got our hero let's go ahead and bring him down. There we go. So this is our layer with sean and again, if you wanted to rename all your layers and things like that, you could totally do that, but so how do we actually get the layer of our subject of hannah here with sean? Well, we're going to be using layer mask to do so and I'm guessing most you guys use later masks, you know what? They are things like that folks at home probably used later mask and don't know what they are if you don't it's not a huge deal, we're going to create some layer mouse coming to go ahead and explain them how to use him and things like that. Basically, what lame ass does? It makes things visible or invisible in my opinion, it's. Much better than using the eraser tool, I try to never use the eraser tool later masses just a much better way to do that. It gives you a lot more a lot more control when actually editing something. So what we're gonna do is going to create a layer mask. Now I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. I use them for literally every single thing that I do. Sometimes when people watch me work it's like, what are you even doing? Things just happen on the screen and looks like a lot, you know, like old school coder there, just like a jack cd tray. Open this programme, create this other thing, open the internet like I was never that person, but I watched a couple of people like that, I'm like, how do you know what to do? Keyboard shortcuts are going that's going to be the biggest thing if you guys feel like you need to be faster in photoshopped keyboard shortcuts are by far the biggest thing you can do to get faster and we have a whole list of keyboard shortcuts on floren dot com if you click on the resource is button right on the top you'll see we have keyboard shortcuts that a couple of downloadable wallpapers for your computer and things like that in some great list. So if you guys are curious about keyboards chuck it that's one great place to find them another great place is the keyboard shortcut, by the way for opening your keyboard shortcuts is photo shop is shift option command k so use keyboard shortcuts for literally everything this's the keyboard truck it for the keyboard shortcut now layer masks we use them a lot, right? I create layer masks all the time and I don't want to go down and click on that layer mass button every time about to create a layer masks so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to actually create a keyboard shortcut right now that's going to put a layer mask on a layer so pretty quick what we're going to do is I'm going to go here is our actual menu you could see right appear at the top we've got, you know like file and info and history and everything like this this is our application menu here sorry file at it image layer we're going to go down to a layer because this is where my layers are so this is the other place where if you guys are curious about what the keyboard shortcuts are in photo shop you can see the right here so you know I never have to go searching for them they're right here in the keyboard shortcuts dialogue so layer we could get a new layers shift option and if you hit shift option command and will create a new layer without a layer dialog box all right what we're going to go down is all the way down here we're going to go see we have our new adjustment layers we're going to go down to where we see layer mask we have hide all reveal all that's going to make a layer mask either white or black and we're going to go down too enable disable maim their mask all right there we go I haven't created this exact keyboard shortcut reveal selection applied enable disable layer mask I believe it's this one um your mask oh it's a reveal I apologize I've been done this in a little bit because I have these keyboard shortcuts settle on michael already set on my computer so reveal all but basically this is going to create a layer mass and it's going to create a white layer mask so the keyboard shortcut I use his shift option command m which makes sense to me for masks. Create a massive shift option plan m now, here in the bottom is going to say option shift command m is already in use and will groove removed from edit menus have accepted that's okay with me. I can't remember the last time I went to edit in down menus, I create layer mask more than I do. Is that so I'm gonna go to accept and go to conflict it's going to remove it from that one, and I'm gonna hit okay? Because I don't ever do that. And that's the great thing about photoshopped let's, you're going head okay, is you can custom tailored to how you actually work. There are certain things that I do all the time gal seen blurs I do all the time high pass filters. I do all the time layer masks. I'm using all the time so I want to set up a keyboard shortcuts for these things that's just gonna make my job a lot quicker. So I want to lay her mask on this. We're going to make parties later invisible and part of it visible so shift option command him. Now I've got a layer mask so pretty quick and easy, and if you, if you wanted to be black hit command, I and now it's black, so without, like, doing anything that saves a lot of time, especially when you like, multiply that over and over and over again throughout an image, I'm not going down here clicking on that, but then, you know, for the layer mask and then going to end it and then mood or a just man invert command, I you know, it's just like, wow, that's a lot quicker. So if you guys are looking to get a little bit faster using photo shop, I would recommend using keyboard shortcuts, memories um, ok, the next thing we're going to do is we have a black layer mask on this layer, so we've created layer I hate command I to make it black, which basically makes it invisible. Everything on the layers invisible basically, all I want to do is paint it back white where our subject is and this is going to allow her to shine through someone used my brush, you'll be for the brush, fool let's go ahead and pop that up there, you can see I'm creating I'm painting with white here and I'm gonna hold control an option and now I can click and drag from the left to the right. And this is going to adjust my brush size which is very cool so control an option from the left to the right is going to make my brush larger or smaller and upper down is going to make my brush harder it's softer so that's another cool keyboard shortcut you know after right click and adjust your size and everything like that right there if you guys are on a pc which I haven't used in p c in a few years but I believe it is ault and control and right click is that correct okay perfect so all I have to do now is basically paint in white right over where our subject is and as I paint in you're going to see this's compositing guys what I'm actually doing right now is compositing and you probably thought like oh man you have to be like so good with your layer mask and cutting people out and it's so hard but it's not because well she was in the exact same place so I just completely replaced my subject and everything that was behind her is the same my lame ass I'm gonna hold alter option looks like this take the sloppiest worst layer mask ever you probably weren't expecting that's like wow aaron sucks accreting but your masks is selections but why would it need to be better than that let's just zoom in and see I mean hit command plus a couple times doesn't need to be better than that no can anyone tell that I did a composite there no it's just that's exactly what it is and everyone's like well, that looks really easy and that's the honest answer is it is really easy this is just there's nothing difficult about it the camera didn't move the lighting didn't move just the subject change so literally in two seconds I was able to create a have a different subject in there and now I've got the pick of this guy that I want and I've got the pick of her that I want too isn't it amazing, it's pretty awesome do we have any comments or questions from from the folks at home? Because that's that's exactly this is the only thing you need to know to do frame compositing what I just did and you just do that over and over yet that's literally it was like that's nice net d says adjustment layers and layers mask are your friends and your friends your bf let's go ahead and ask daisy red rocks says do you find that having image stabilization on versus off during the photo shoot causes your layers to meet mohr alignment once been photoshopped that's good question the leads that we used to photograph this image was a twenty four to one oh five I s lynch stabilisation lens during the photo shoot itself we actually did turn off image stabilization because image civilization will actually do it'll actually move elements within your lens to stabilize the image, which will in fact, change the position of some of these layers. So if I do plan on doing composite like this, I will turn image stabilization off. Not only that, but if I plan on doing like a long shutter speed like, you know, a shutter speed open for like thirty seconds to a minute, I usually turn name of civilisation office as well, because it's it's not helping you at that point, you don't need your lens like jittering around things like that, so I turned it off. Good question you're so fluid and working on your composite images, and I think quite a few people missed how you turned on the auto, aline turned on the auto alive. Okay, refreshing, I can most definitely do that now we can do we could do a number of things here in photo shop, I could just restart this image from the very beginning and it would take literally two minutes to get back to where we are right now, I'm not going to do that because I think it would be a waste of most people time, but I'm going to turn on all my layers again, you don't have to have these layers visible. But I'm just going to turn them all on visible just so we can see that they are all here now if you want to auto line your layers which you want to do is click on your other bottom most or top most layer scroll up or down and then shift click so we've got all of our layers are now selected that's the first step select all of your layers now we go to edit down here to auto a line layers and then we want to click on auto right here just hit okay and it'll do the rest for you so really, really easy as long as everything was on a tripod there you're you don't really have to worry about any additional details there that's all right great s f w wonders would it be better to work from the back of the scene to the front when shooting or compositing images that's a great question generally I worked with the quote unquote most important elements first it's it's interesting because we're not cutting things out like traditionally if everything was actually being cut out of their background and place together, which is a different type of compositing you do want to work from the background forward in this case it doesn't really matter because I'm just creating rough layer masts the only time I need to get a little bit better with my layer masks if if if subjects do, in fact interact like if I wanted a different version here of our subject, lee, then I would need to cut out his foot just a little bit better, so but in general, with this cyber compositing, you really don't have to get that specific and that good with your layer masks, I'm just going to hit the sea tool and crop in just a little bit. The reason I'm cropping in here is because the you will get to these frames move just a little bit. You're gonna get a little bit of transparent border on there? No, I don't want to click this the lead crop pixels because I just in case I need that information back at any point in time, I don't think that I will, but I don't like to delete anything my entire workflow, everything that I do is based around, you know, staying very, very organized and structured just you never know and you don't want to have to, like, go back and redo something if you can, not at all avoid it. So that's, what we want to avoid. All right? Well, let's, go ahead and see what we've got going on here, it leads going, we're going to bring her in at the very end, so our composite like it's, we've already done compositing we've composited our subject in here, and everything looks great, so let's, go ahead and bring in some of these extras that we can either decide to use or not use. All right, so this is our extra that we decided maybe for our dress. So here's, what we're what we're going to do, I remember that, you know, this is the layer that I I thought maybe this would look pretty good for her dress. So what we're gonna do is, again, same keyboard shortcut shift option command m, which is going to create a keyboard it's going to create a layer mask, then I'm gonna paint black on this lame ask b for the brush tool than x to paint black, and then I'm gonna paint block right over this dress were doing it slightly different this time I'm painting black over the area that I actually do want to become visible, then I'm in command, I and now what we've got is just the dress is blowing up in this case, so we can see that's pretty quick now, in this case, we had a little bit more movement than just the dress her leg is in a slightly different place, you concede like those things don't align the tree and everything in the background that alliance because that didn't change so we can choose now the you can either choose to like try to cut it out at just the dress or with probably easier is just go ahead and include the legs from this frame as well so unless you do not like the legs at all which they're pretty similar in this case so I don't see why you would not like these legs and like the other legs but if you did what you would want to do is make sure you blend that here right at the dress instead of just go on all the way down the other thing we're going to see is this guy right here and basically this is you know where one layer is goingto blend to the other so you can choose to like painted all the way up to the hand in this case we've got a slightly different hand here so what we're going to do instead is I'm gonna find a blend point I'm basically gonna find a point where this dress and the other dress kind of come together if you need to you can use like, warps and transforms and things like that here generally you don't need to do quite a bit I'm just gonna paint black on here in kind of like an up and down pattern and what this is going to do is it's going to allow one dressed kind of blend directly into the other one there we go and then I'm going to find the point in which they're pretty close which looks to be like right about there this trust is kind of coming in at an angle there and we're just going to bring it back in to make sure it looks like that one there that's zoom in so you guys can see this now if you do if you do want to get a little bit more precise you can use selection tools such as the pen tool to make sure that this in fact does like blend in if you don't want to you can just choose a slightly hard soft brush so hard soft brush a small hard edge brush and just go ahead and paint it off painted out yourself there we go and now we've got one address that's blending into another one so really quickly we can see you know having a completely different we have a dress what do you think? What do you like better and now this is is the whole reason why we do from compositing because we can choose do I like the blowing dress or the flat dress better it's a little bit more in that dynamic with the blowing dress right looks pretty good so it's like okay cool now we have a blowing dress like how easy is that it's so easy it's amazing I'm just using a brush to like hold altero option that's on my lame ass looks like like it's not nice but it doesn't matter it's just do it's doing the job perfectly and that's all that matters in this case you do want to zoom in, you know, just in case you want to zoom in in check areas like the hand you can see there's a little bit of a faint ghosting or a halo wing of her hand so I wantto click on my lame ass paint black on there just paint black right over there especially where her hand is, you know, kind of coming up over here you could see I went a little bit too far right there not really that big of a deal again paint black on the layer mass because I don't want it to be visible over her arm right there and we're good to go so pretty easy and sometimes you're going to get, you know, areas like this that are just a little bit blotchy like it's just a little bit not that smooth and you know, right up there we'll just paint white all the way up to the scene there there we go that looks pretty good and now I'm just going to choose a very soft brush with a really low flow and that's just going to help me blend this out there we go so a nice soft brush is just going to be like it's it's kind of feathering from one into the other that's it guys it's like, okay, cool now we have a dress that's blowing in the wind and a slightly different look on here now, if you are not sure if you did mask out the entire subject, let's see, because I am using a brush to hear I'm not making accurate selections let's say we might have missed a gn area here on the leg there a couple of great ways you can check this one is hold alter or option if you can see you right between the legs and right here that's not really that visible so this area I could hold ultra option and say I didn't, you know I should have maybe mask that in you can also use the slash key, which is right above your return key and that's going to bring up what's the quick mask view so you can actually see what you're masking looks like. So, you know, there I might not have seen the fact that there was like something, you know that I didn't in fact brush her ankle right there let's just see if I notice that yeah, and you can see in the actual image it looks a little bit messed up I might not have seen that so you just want to be sure to turn on these checks to allow yourself to like, you know, correct your own mistakes there we go and we'll just paint that white right over top of there it was just a really nice easy way to kind of see what's going on with your image there we are perfect and we're going to hit this slash key again and we've got a perfect composite guys we've zoomed all the way in we've already done two things we've changed out the main girl so we've changed her from this image to that image and we gave her a new dress and new legs this is pretty awesome and if you guys are taking on commercial clients they're going to love this like they're going to sow love this hear me like can you take the head of this one and body on that one? And you know that stuff is like hard to do but if you set everything up right the way we've done the last two days now you can see it's not hard to do yeah one of the things I'm creative live in the photo shop classes that I've taken one thing they talk about is non destructive nondestructive options options options exactly and do you ever get clients when you hand them your composite go while we love that but she's smiling maybe too much she's smiling too much yeah or whatever, whatever their got their thing is that day, you know, cause clients always never like what you like. I can see that you would have you go oh, great, I've got twenty other heads. Exactly. Yeah, in this case it's before and that's a really good point to bring up now doing a composite for myself or here on creative lives I have the I have the authority to choose the images that I like and we kind of decided those as a as a class together. Sometimes the images that you like or not the images the client likes clients are notorious for picking the worst images out of the photo shoot you like why do you like that one? But before I will start a composite like this, what I always do is I'll send off those source images first what we got in that select file I'll send those off first, and they can make sure the chooser picks so you can either have them narrow town or say like these are the five images of the girl that came out the best choose the one you like the most and all the used that one in the composite, so usually before I'll start this compositing, I will make sure that the client signs off on the individual pieces and then they can see him together now sometimes will still change your mind but if you do work not destructively in this way it should be relatively easy to change that back again. So really good question and if you did just need to replace ahead I mean, we just she's got the, you know, top half of her from one frame in the bottom half of her from another frame and all we did is we looked for those we looked for those lines that make things easy to composite and they exist basically in everything the line from her arm here kind of running down in this way like that that's just a natural line that breaks up her dress from top to bottom the same with her dress in this way where it kind of like brought in from the right to the left now, just zooming in here. I could make this dress look a little bit better if I wanted to and we can go over how to do that later. We can see that you do kind of like losing natural highlight there that might have been there to begin with. They just go ahead and I can just paint black on my layer mass right there and bring those back together now at this point where we do kind of have like a little bit of ah disparity between you know, maybe we should have a highlight that runs along the side of the dress, especially right here. Maybe there should be a highlight in that case, we're going to take care of that later just don't let me forget about because we got a lot to do oftentimes all like open and no patter, like keep a physical no pad to like, remember, hey, you should probably do this or another way you can do it is just create a new layer on the top of everything else, and you don't want to get focused on all the little details, usually first in an image, I'll just create a new layer and circle something and I'll just turn that off for now and say, like, oh, yeah, let's, turn this off of the very end. There was something I wanted to do here, let's figure out what it is and go ahead and do it, but that those type of details are you'll you'll see I'll be able to fix this, fix this and you know what? Just one minute, so that separate stuff you can, you can fix this. Well, all right, cool. We're going to continue going and we had a lot of comments yesterday about this light. And I was like, what do you do with that light? I hate its in the frame, and now I'm going to show you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna get rid of it in about two seconds out of rooms, okay, that's what you do well hit shift option command and to create a layer mask, I'm hit command I that's going to invert my later mask and now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna paint white on my leather mask and then I'm just gonna paint over here just like that and all of the questions about what are we gonna do with that light are gone so that quickly the light is totally god and there we go. So now I don't have that in the frame as well, and all we did is we just made sure we took a picture with the light there and with the light out. So if you guys remember this that like there's, no light but it's right behind me. Still, I'm still on the same set. There's no light bulb in this. We didn't try to put a light in it either. We had something down below shooting up, which is bouncing light back out that's pretty cool, right, well, that looks like it actually is you know, a light that's on and it's lighting the scene I didn't try to photoshopped this I'm not going up here with like a curves adjustment layer and like cranking it up because why would I do that? I've got an actual light aiken just shine it in there and here it's going to look quite a bit more believable so now we've got rid of this object too so frame compositing is really cool because you can get rid of things that you need to do in the actual photograph things that maybe had to be there to pull off the photograph but you can also choose like stylistic and you know, artistic choices as well let's see what else we have here this is a frame with miguel here and this is a great example of, like a style choice now usually if you are working with a client they say like, I don't know if I like that you know, the guy in the corner with his looks there I don't know if that distracts from the photograph and you can say like, hey, how about we take a couple friends with it in with it out if you want it there, if you don't want it there, I'll send you both versions you can decide after the fact that clients love that thinking we're like really you can do that like yeah, I took a positive one, the one I got this. So we're going to the same thing I'm to hit shift ops command am and I'm gonna hit command I and now we're just going to use the brush tool and we're going to paint white right over here. Now, the only thing that we're seeing here and there we go let's, just paint that in everything else stayed the same. Very, very easy. The only thing that we're seeing here is a slight change in brightness from the floor, you know, from one image to the other one. Can anyone guess why we have a slight change in brightness here to here? Exactly. Your foot is blocking the light. So what we're going to do is choose a soft brush and just kind of fade that out. They're going to hit the x key and fade is back in, so we want a nice soft brush. And then now we've got a seamless composite of that is what is? Well, well, just zoom in to make sure so the camera's still it's not moving. So this is just so nice. I don't have to take a pin tool and cut out, you know, all the bottom of his foot and things like that. If for some chance you did have a problem with your composite and you didn't need to like actually really really cut those elements out with a pen tool or other type of selection tool we might wind up doing that later today that's totally okay but the other great thing about this type of compositing is because all of these elements are here they were here during the photo shoot there being lit like they should be lit they've got the shadows that should have you're not doing any like photoshopped trickery there's you know there's no like creating a fake shadow there's none of that it's like it's just kind of blends together so with frame compositing you never have to worry about if something looks really or not if it looks like placed in or photoshopped in because it always will look real because it israel we actually did photograph all this stuff and there we could see all right there is our foot in the frame and out of the frame so let's zoom in and I'm gonna make sure that this looks there we go we're just going to zoom in we can see a little bit of a brighter area here we can choose to do two things I can choose to make a better selection right here around miguel's arm or what we can do is I just used my brush tool and choose a large soft brush and just paint that away. So now we got a big, fuzzy area over there instead of like a hard edge. But can you guys sell know looks pretty good? So it's pretty easy. Everyone go and this is just total list, total style choice at this point. So, like, you know, we can decide. Do we like this in or out? Personally, I'm a fan of it in I think it helps to, like, bring the image together a little bit more, and there seems to be a little bit too much like negative space or blank space here, so I like it in but let's say a reclaimed it was like, yeah, let's, get rid of the foot. We could do that, too. Now, the other thing is, if we wanted to move the foot over to the left, like if we were actually wanted to move it over, we can do that pretty easily with the move to we can't do that if we don't cut it out better, though that's the interesting thing, if we want this in its actual place, when you know when it is in there. Then we can just use a layer mask into a very rough job if I did want to actually move this over to the left, we would want to cut it out a little bit better and we can use a pen tool to do that and we can go over. How do you do that later? We have questions about about what we're doing. What do you guys think? Do you liketo do you like the feet? I mean, no, miguel is probably part pretty partial, spitter amazing. Where did you get those feet? Was it a normal man or a superman who had those feet because they're just awesome? What do you guys think? Does it kind of helped with composition or do you think it's distracting? I think it helps because also like if you take out the feet and you see like the the stand it's holding the studio lights that's royal I don't mean that way you don't clone stamp it out like that there we go and you had that question yesterday. What do you going to do about the stand it's holding the studio lights up? I think we solved that totally by accident by having feet there that was not on purpose it's a happy accident, but if we did decide we wanted those out too you could clone stamp out as well not only that's um, interesting feedback online, we've got people who like but like it both ways, berta made an interesting comment I didn't like the feet until he took them out that's a recently see it and they like it better that's a really great way to look at things as well and again I keep talking about with clients here and these clients they don't have to be you know they don't have to be paying you money this could be your friend this could be you this could be like you took a couple pictures with your friends and then you can see things with him without but sometimes it takes that sometimes it takes like having a something in the frame and then taking it out and being able to see that difference to be like, you know what? It is better to have them in there and being able to make that decision after photo shoot is very, very powerful because you can just, you know, I've missed a small area there, so I'm just gonna, you know, stumble around my words while I let's get back in we'll j shamsul says I preferred out and if it's for an ad let's say that would be perfect area tohave a logo on a bit of copy, so it really depends on what you're using for, yeah, totally that's a really good point. It would be a good area for a logo or a bit of coffee. I think you know, one reason that I like them there is because they take up space that without them there, it's just a little bit of negative space. That wouldn't be something like there. But if we wanted to do something like what I'm about to do right now because I'm just a wild and crazy guy, if we wanted to do something like this is not probably how I would actually do this, I would photograph the bark separately, but I'm gonna use it. Clone stamp tool and clone stamp this right over here. There we go. And then I'm gonna hit command tea to just bring it something like that. We're gonna hit the am the marquis tool, and we're going to select this washington's out now. There we go. Perfect looking pretty good ships, optic. Command em again to command. I, omar later, mass command d two d select that in command. I again, we've got our washington selected out. I'm gonna hit shift command. This is why I thought the keyboard shortcuts on there might be a little tense because it's like what's happening and we're going to click on those and then we're going to fill that with blacks well so we have our our washington's logo now and it's completely it's on a new layer if you hit command tea and make these things a lot larger you're going to lose quite a bit equality that's I'm just doing this for an example because I think that was a pretty good point that they made but yeah now it's an ad for the washingtons we could we could do all kinds of fun things you know what I kind of do want to do a fun thing you guys want to be on here for the ride we're going right click on here I'm gonna apply this layer mask which is going to this is what my layer mask looks like now I'm going right click and imply apply the layer mass to the actual layer itself and the reason I want to do this because we're going to do another transformation I think is this too big maybe make it a little bit smaller it's fine all right but I would do is write click and apply the layer mouse cinematic man j which is going to duplicate that layer now what I want to do is I'm going to lock the transparency of this layer which is not going to allow me to paint in transparent the transparent pixels, transparent pixels or anything that you don't have information on so in this particular layer it is everything except for this guy where you click on the lock transparency icon right there you can see we've got a lock on and hit shift elite and I'm going now fill this with black we're going to hit okay I'm gonna unlock the transparency on that so it's just a really cool way to fill whatever you have on a layer with black no one had command tea and I'm going to warp that right about there it enter command open bracket and use my wiki hit the number five on there and we've got a shadow now we can go ahead and make the shadow a little bit more realistic we want to buy clicking on it and I really like keyboard children's especially for things like gals and blurs so I'm going to take a quick break and we're going to go to our filter we're going to go to right down here where it says blur and gals gambler which I use all the time shift option man g is now a keyboard shortcut for galaxy and blurred so if I want to give that a blur shift option command g we got a galaxy and blur on there there we go we can kind of blur that out there we go I've created a duplicate of this so this is going to be in their shift option command you it's going to get a much less and blur on it I'm going kind of fast right now, but I wanted to do something cool. Shift option command m is going to create a layer mask on there and I'm gonna paint this black. So I've got two layers of a shadow going on right there. The washington, as I think, could come down a little bit more. So it looks like it's actually, uh, seated, there we go. And we've got a shadow on our washington's. Well, the only thing is, are washington's it's a little bit too bright, so if we wanted to, we could make that a little bit darker for the image command. L will bring up your levels and I could bring my output levels down a little bit lower. That's gonna look like it's actually hanging out in the scene. Now, if you did want a natural like, pop up sign of washington in the scene, I would recommend printing one out and literally putting it in that place. And that would, in my opinion, be the best way to do it. Way points out that your shadow is pointing the wrong way based on the light in the same marty you're just a student, and I love it that that's a really good point, the shadow is pointing the wrong way, it's it's pointing the wrong way and it's pointing the right way and I just want to make that point really quick because we do have a lot of light sources it's pointing the wrong way to be it's pointing the wrong way to be that hard because I remember when we had miguel's food in there we had a shadow there so there should be a shadow that's blocking our feel light so these lights these guys here should definitely be quite a bit different they should be let me just hit command e we'll give this a calcium blur there we go. I will make this a little bit less visible so there we have where it's blocking our feel like now we could just do the same thing locked the transparency shift lead fill that with black hit command t warp this over well down the controller, the command key there we go and we'll move this under and then use our vikki and so now we have a shadow that's going off in the in the correct direction as well. So totally right I was mostly just doing that to play around, but now that everyone seems that we should actually do it for riel, why not let's get it to be, uh, the correct shadow and we'll lower the opacity there perfect, so there's or washington logo and it's a little bit too visible so let's hit the wiki and then the number three or the number two on her keyboard then we can kind of move this around to like see where it's actually looking like it it fits there cool good suggestion marty you called me out on it and I appreciate it because if you didn't do it a client would have ever gotten with washington I don't know if I really want to leave that in or not but it's fun alright let's double click on there and wash and suds shift option and cole's bracket twice will bring that all the way the very, very top of everything that we see here cool I think we've just got a couple of minutes more we're going to be coming back to this composite but let's go ahead and take a quick break talk about some questions and things like that and I'd love to hear some feedback fantastic so just a question about what you just did, barry says do you ever live label your layers like dress bottom blown or holding bleach, etcetera instead of just leaving the founding that's a really good question? I don't know the reason is it might sound ridiculous maybe not after seeing these files, but a lot of the time when I'm working in photo shop I have one hundred or two hundred layers no a lot of layers that's not common I worked with a lot of layers I love them, I used them or is like a history than anything else if I'm about to do something new, usually I'll create a new layer that way I can always go back and turn these things on or off that's the way that I love to work in photo shop so I don't I don't tend to name my layers what I tend to do is I tend to name the groups so I know you know I can still really easily find something here's my hero if I want to change the girl out again, I just turned that right back off so it's still pretty easy to find anything that I needed to find when you get to where you're working with one hundred to two hundred layers. If you named every single one of those layers, it would take thirty minutes longer to edit your whole photo and that's just normally not something that I want to do now if I am delivering it to a client and there there are not like that many layers I will usually go back and edit the layers or at least make smaller groups and named those groups well, cool all right explore discover share over in utah is asking, how do you decide when to mask out a part to show the image beneath or mask an item from above and then old red I says, how do you know which layer toe work on to create the mask as well? How do you know which layer to work on to create the mask? Well, it's it's a really good question what we're doing right now with this type of compositing is notice I'm not like cutting into everything out from its background incredibly well so we're just kind of like building this up from from the ground up and each of these images for the most part things they're not really overlapping anything else now if we did decide for instance, this washington it's it's on the very top it is overlapping some things and I can move it around so as I move this around it could be, you know, over here it could be over here I get moving up here, we would probably wantto take the shadow off of it or something like that I could make it a logo here on the wall thiss makes sense to be above everything else, right? So that's a really good question let's just turn this off and we'll click on this extras and were clicked back miguel on it makes sense that he's above everything else too because he's actually closer to the camera however, if I decided I wanted to maybe like move him to the left or the right what I would need to do then is make my make my mask just a little bit better. The next question we had was let's say, we had one particular object that we wanted to make, how do we decide whether we just mass that little area out or the opposite? And that depends on the real estate that that object takes up. So for instance, this image right here, where we have our light right there, that's a very small amount of the image, right? So it makes sense to me that we wouldn't try to, like, paint black over everything and then paint white just over that that seems like it would take a long time, so what I would do instead is create the layer mask on this paint black, right over top of the lamp, there we go, and then just hit command. I we've taken care of just a really small part of the image very quickly, and I didn't have to like, you know, literally just painted right there. I wasn't painting black everywhere else, so it depends on how much real estate something is going to be taking up it's fantastic, thank you. Fifty shades of grain on amy well, lansky and others are kind of wondering about the difference between flow and a pass ity why do you prefer to use less flow than less capacity and what would be the difference? And just in general, what is the difference between opacity and flow? That's a really great question for a long time, I didn't understand, so I didn't really use flow it all I thought flow was, you know, like something that they just stuck in there for, like, you know, like, why is this even here? I'm going to show you guys the difference right now, and I think you'll be able to see the reason why I used flow exclusively. I keep my opacity at one hundred percent always all the time, one hundred percent capacity and here's, why let's? Just go ahead and create a new layer shift option command and and shift command close bracket will bring this all the way to the top. I'm going to use my white paint brush and we're going to choose our opacity at fifty percent so you can just hit the number five if your on your brush will hit the number five in europe, acid is at fifty percent let's. Just choose a soft edge brush here. Now, let's say I was masking an area out now if you just want something to be on or off. Then you can use opacity and it's a really great way to do it, but normally you don't normally you want some types ingredients you can see it here in the layer mess that we've used, where, you know, in this area I wanted just a little bit of gray areas, so it kind of blended that area in just a little bit especially, you know, here with, you know, on our different layer masks sometimes remember that a great example here is actually this area here where we wanted this to be, you know, hard mass, but in this area we wanted to kind of like, blend that area the wall back this is the layer mask for miguel here, if ever remembers that was but it was a little bit lighter here, okay, so we're using opacity basically, if I paint around, I'm painting at fifty percent capacity, and if I go over this over and over and over again, you can see I'm just painting on not doing anything special if I keep on going over and over again, well, I can't lay down anymore. I can lay down fifty percent capacity, I can't lay down less and I can't lay down more and until I lift my brush up and then paint back again, it's going to add another level opacity, but again on ly where you see it if I if I go over that area again it's going to back to go back to fifty percent capacity in my opinion you know let's say I wanted to do this I'd have to like click click click click click click click over and over and over again to get her to actually be gone now let's just go ahead and hit command a and hit delete teo clear that layer I'm going to change my capacity back two hundred percent and my flow down to something pretty low hit shift one to make my flow ten percent so this way if I wanted her to be completely visible or invisible let's pretend I'm on a lay a mask I can start painting on her and you can see I'm very I'm laying down like almost no color here but I haven't lifted my brush up and I'm laying down mohr and mohr and mohr and more color so I'm able to completely master out really easily and then I could just make my brush a little bit larger and I can soften it out over here maybe jeff's have a little bit of that layer over here and bring it in a little bit more it's a much to me it's a much more natural wayto work because it's you know with a natural pandora pencil like you go over it again and again and you lied you lay down maurin and that's, what flow does if you cover it over again and again and again it's going to lay down wearing so you, khun, start off with something that's, you know, very soft and kind of like build it up to me, it's a much easier way to mask things out as well, because you don't really ever go too far. You start off with a little bit and once it's good enough, you just move on to somewhere else. Once it's good enough, you move on to somewhere else or you lift your brush up. So everything that I do when photo shop is based around efficiency when you're working with one hundred, two hundred layers often you don't want to waste a lot of your life away. So if I could do something really quick, maybe I brush a little bit smaller, maybe through this well headed mass. These in I want this about fifty percent mast in. I could do this all without lifting my brush. Ever just very nice.

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Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great moment i Won't miss. 2 of my favourites learning web sites in one !!! Thanks Aaron for all you bring to me including lessons of English...(don't understand every joke but...when you smile , i do too... ) Best regards from Brittany (France)

Mohamed Rasoon
 

i'm amateur photographer.i had a hope move on as professional, this is great lesson and CreativeLive motivate my self step by step to fulfills my hopes.

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