Lessons

Lesson Info

Adding Background Image to Composite

So, we're gonna create a curve, and I kinda live in this little half area here, little half circle, we're gonna click on that. I'm gonna go to curves. So what I'm doing is I'm creating contrast, so I'm going to increase the brights until we get pretty much white, and then I'm gonna increase the darks until we get pretty dark. So what I'm looking at is her hair especially, and these branches. So this might be a little bit much there, bring that back a bit. So everyone knows extracting hair sucks. If we photograph dark hair on a light background, then this is actually one of the nicest ways to do an extraction on hair because we're creating a curve, and then we're gonna do a channel mask, so that's fun. Actually, one of the attendees here had a great question, so if you're photographing in the studio, and we'll go through this tomorrow, but if you're photographing in the studio and you want the shadows on the ground, what about the hair? Well, you can totally hold up a little green scree...

n if you've got one of those five-in-one reflectors, and you have the green screen behind their head and just do a select by color range and nix that out. You can totally do that if you want to and if you have access to that, but if you don't, there's other ways that we can do extractions that are relatively quick. So we are going to go-- So here we've got Layers, Path, Adjustments, Channels. So if you don't have Channels on your window, you go up to the top bar here where it says File, Edit, Image, Layer, blah, blah, blah Window, scroll down and see the Channels and click it. So then your channels are going to show up in there. So right now if I click red, it's not too bad, Green. Blue. So in this case, blue has given me the most contrast and information for what I'm looking to extract. I'm going to hold Ctrl, which gives me this little square right here and I'm going to go click. So that's kind of cool. So what I'm going to to from here, Layers. Awesome. I'm going pull in my mountain range shot that I photographed that should be in here. Yes it is, there we go. Just as promised. This is a mountain range that I want to put into the background. I'm going to bump up the clarity just a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit because we've bumped up the clarity a little bit in the image that we're working on and maybe a little bit of the contrast. And that should be pretty good. So control A or command A which is select all. Control or command C, Copy. Control shift V, paste. Standard, nothing has changed, everyone does that. And we're going to just click on because we still have the selection, we should have the selection. Oh, we lost the selection, rats. Every now and then I slip that up. Channels, we're just going to repeat this. Channels, go down to the blue channel, hold the control or command click so you have the little dancing ants everywhere. Layers, turn on our mountain layer and then click on the mask. Now I'm going to turn off my curves and so we're starting to see a little bit of what's going on here. That this actually kind of works. And it's gonna get better. So if I want to make this mask better, I'm going to hold alt and click on this mask. So this is what this looks like. So there's a sweet tip I picked up on some random YouTube channel, I don't know. If I could remember the photographer or digital artist that put this tip out online, I would send them so much love mail, like this is amazing and the greatest thing ever. I can't remember who it is. So if they're watching, whoever you are, thank you. 'Cause this is incredible and totally made masking so much easier. So we are working on our mask right now which is black and white. We go right here to our doge and burn tool which is on the left hand side of the tool. So, here go dodge. Let's just hit the dodge tool. We're gonna make sure it's set to midtones, exposure, whatever. And we can dodge this out. Actually, let's try shadows and see what happens. No, I don't want to do it on shadows, midtones is better. Am I on dodge tool, yeah. So, what we can do here, is we can actually start to blend out some of these areas. Let's try highlights just for kicks and grins. Every time single time-- There we go highlights, this is what I wanted. Every single time I work on an image, I'll sit there and be like, "Oh right, what was that thing "that I was doing that made everything easier?" This, using the dodge tool on the highlight, so when you're working with stuff that's super contrasty, is pretty awesome for cutting things out. 'Cause what we're doing is we're not screwing with any of the shadows from that horrible mess of branches that's right there. So, it's pretty rad. And this is why I like to shoot my backgrounds overexposed. Or at least brighter. It makes cutting out way easier. So yeah, whoever you are on the internet, if you happen to be watching, thank you so much for that video. If I could give you proper credit, I totally would (laughs). So, now we zoom in here. I'm gonna do the opposite. I am going to burn her face. We could actually probably just use a plain brush here. So I just switched over to my regular brush, 'cause I'm not worried about the edge there, but some of the areas around her hair and everything else will be a lot easier if I just used the burn tool. Like, her shirt for example, right. Just burn through that and this dress. And it'll get us like 90 percent of the way there relatively quickly. Yeah, I'd love to be able to give proper credit to the person who found this one out. It's like, "That's amazing." So, when working with a mask like this, we actually can see all the little malfunctions. And it's not to say that we're not gonna have to go in and do a little bit of fine tune cleanup, 'cause we totally might have to, but this'll sure get us close. Tomorrow's masking will probably not go this fast, so we'll be doing boat loads of questions while I draw out hair strands. Don't think we'll be so lucky. Do you have any questions? Let me take a peak. Um, I'm not sure 100 percent what this in reference to, but can you explain why that background works and others don't. Um, the mountains? Yeah. Mostly because it was shot and I'll go into it in more detail in a few minutes, but mostly because it was shot far away with the same aperture, similar focal range. So on and so forth. I'll go into that in a few minutes here, I just gotta clean up this mask first. Cool. So, yeah. I swear it will be in more detail in a moment. So I'll start moving things around, but I want to get the mask nice and clean first. And I'm just using the space bar and clicking as I move around the screen. Aha, see, when you zoom in nice and close, you can totally see what you've missed. I am not gonna bother scanning around through the entire image. When I'm doing this by myself, I will just make a grid pattern of the entire image and start cleaning the shiny stuff up. Okay, nevermind, I'm a total liar, I can't not do it. Go faster. I could probably just select fill all too, but, I find if I spend the time in this and I get to know every single edge and corner really well, I am a lot more aware of what's going on in the shot itself and maybe things that I want to change going forward. So. Get that nice and close. Fix that. And so we can see here that her hair extraction's actually not too bad. It's looking pretty good. Okay, not right. Whoops. Brush. Yeah, this is why most people don't like doing compositing, 'cause it's f'ing boring. Kind of sucks (laughs). So I'm adjusting the hardness and softness of the brush. We have little bit mixed up here so I might try grabbing the burn tool and bringing some of that back. There we go. Alrighty, we have a mask. Rats, missed a spot. That happens a lot (laughs). So, alt click, and we see now we have our background. It's not looking too bad. And in relatively short time, so I can see here down at the bottom here, I've made a mistake. Alright, so I can go into here. I can probably hit the dodge tool. Bring some of that back. Or I can go in and just micro do it by hand too which is generally what I prefer to do. 'Cause see here we have this little tiny halo, if I print this up really big at like 60 by 90, that halo's gonna show up. So, I will neurotically usually go in around here and just like clean up those edges. You can see that I've done it. I probably am not gonna do it today. I don't feel like dealing with you either, so I'm gonna cut you out. Yeah, all these little halos that you see around the trees and everything, or the little piece of grass, I will just go in bit by bit and get rid of all of it. But, that's just because that's a choice I make. It's the images that I like to make, so that I can see all that stuff's gonna disappear. So, all in all, relatively quickly, we're looking pretty good. I'm gonna see here, I'm gonna move this background piece around a little bit. So, see where there's this chain link between the mask and the mountain range, I'm gonna turn that off. So, if I leave that on and I hit the move tool, which in my case is the V. It's gonna move the mask too. Alright, I don't want to move the mask. If I unlink it, I can move the background independent or I can move the mask independent. So, that's something that's kind of-- So, I might look at this and just kind of shove this around a little bit. 'Cause this far, this up too high like that, I don't really like. So, I kind of want to bring this down a little bit, just because then, see this line, that's gonna kind of flow with the direction of her hips. So, one thing that I forgot to do, that I sometimes, like to do, is I like to do a bit of liquefy work. And not a lot, in this case, I might fill out her hair a tiny little bit or something like that. I didn't do it before I did the mask, so that means that I'm gonna do it later on in the image. And with the way that everything is positioned right now, even if I add in a different sky, it'll be fine. Because I can create two layers, I can do the liquefy work and then mask back in the areas that were modified and I'll show you guys how I would do that. So, in any case, I'm just moving this down a little bit here. I have a little bit of problem here with that mountain range because it's coming out of the frame. So, I can use my marquee tool. I can highlight this and I can just see-- I'm not gonna see if I can stretch the trees. I'm gonna hold, highlight that, control T or command T and just grab this top bit and see if I can stretch it and keep it looking realistic. Which in this case, I can. It looks fine to me, so, if we want to make sure if you're stretching things, you don't want to stretch it too far 'cause you can get massive pixel damage, right. And it's gonna look extremely strange. But, pulling that up just a little bit, it's nice and out of the frame again, we have this nice line and it's actually going nicely with her hips and we're following this nice little compositional guideline here, which I'm kind of digging. I don't know, everybody here is like falling asleep, you're just like, "Yeah, well, you know, "it's not too bad, it's okay, whatever." (laughing) So, that's how I like to do a lot of this stuff here. And it's the fastest way. That's why I'm saying, when you're photographing this stuff you're gonna photograph it for retouching. So, in this case, I photograph this for retouching. I photographed her a little bit... I photographed the image a little bit overexposed. Although the clouds came in and brought it back to almost a perfect exposure. But I try to photograph the sky so it's a little overexposed so that we have this really nice, you know, easy way to cut out hair. So some people are like, "What if I want to shoot a blonde in light background?" I'm like, "Well go ahead, it's just gonna be harder." That's all there is to it, you know. If you're gonna photograph a blonde, you know, hold up a dark card behind her head or something like that. Far enough away that you're not gonna cast a shadow on her, but someway that you're gonna be able to differentiate the hair if you want it to be moving around. Or you can spend a bunch of time going in at four or 500 percent with a brush going strand by strand by strand. Whatever you want to do, it doesn't matter, compositing has so many different ways to do whatever it is that you want. There's some digital artists who swear by the eraser tool. The eraser tool makes me want to take up smoking. (laughing) It's not the way I choose to create 'cause I like to change my mind. But, if that's what works for you, that's awesome. Right, so don't let somebody sit there and tell you what's right and what's wrong. So, from here, the next thing that I'm gonna want to do is I'm gonna pull in a few different cloud ranges. I'm just gonna see what's up with this. So, the reason why I chose this background... Actually before I do that, I just remembered another thing. The reason why I chose this background is that I had photographed it from a similar angle, right. Similar camera lens, well same camera lens. And it's actually shot a very similar white balance. So, it is a little bit different here, you can see that she's a little bit more tungsten, there's a little bit more magenta in here. Right, you can see slight differences and the more you train your eye, the more you'll be able to see it. I remember the first time somebody was telling me, "Oh your model has more daylight than your background." I was like, "What?" How do you-- What, how do you even see that? But, now of course, I see it. The same thing with beauty retouchers, I sent an image off for critique to a beauty retoucher and I was like, "Hey, how do you think it's going?" And she was like, "Oh it's really good, "but there's some slight bluish around the skin." And I was like, "Where? (laughing) "How do you see that?" But it's the same thing, it's like, once you train your eye, then you start to see it then you look at all your old work and cry a little bit and you're like, "Okay, the mistakes of the past "will not be the mistakes of the future." But, whatever. So, yeah. Yes, absolutely, what's up? Can I ask a question before you move on? What is your, like, when you get in to work on really in close to get out any halo, what is your flow and opacity and hardness of your brush? 'Cause when you get in there-- Yeah, so we can do some of that right now 'cause we're actually, if I give you guys the psd, I'm probably gonna wanna go in and fix it all. So, if we zoom in really close, we'll do one less from that, so we can see here where it was fixed and where it was not fixed. Brush. So, right now, I've got opacity 100 percent, flow 41 percent. But that will change a lot going back and forth. Actually I should ask the first question, who here, I'm sure... There is a difference between flow and opacity and somebody here has been in the audience who's been to one of my workshops before, she can't answer this question, 'cause she knows the answer. (laughing) And if she forgot, bad.