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Lesson Info

Use Filters & Plug-in for Rain

Simon's gonna go over some really cool water techniques. Yup, continuing on the rain. The grain. It's moisture. Grain and rain. We have here a picture of a little girl and an umbrella, oh-so-cute. With this, we wanted to add rain to it. On our black and whites we liked, we desaturated with a black and white desaturating overlay and I started with the noise. I'll show em' the whole... So, uh, we made rain. The way we did it was made a new layer and filled it with gray, uh gray. I do it this way, you know why? I used to do all black and then cut it down 50% and that was just the way I started it and then I got caught cause' I put it on CMYK Oh. It was a different color gray and I got in trouble. Alright, so this is a really good production stopping point or continuous conversation. We um, this is the exact technique I just used to make grain for the overlay. He's now gonna use that to make noise. Now, how he was saying he used to do it, is he used to start it with a black lay...

er, not a gray layer. Well, when you convert an RGB file to CMYK, that 50% gray doesn't convert the same, and it bites you in the hiney, generally when a job is on press. Mmhm. And um, yeah. Mmhm. So, be very careful between RGB and CMYK and on these blending modes, you cannot convert a layered file easily with blending modes from RGB to CMYK, but we'll talk more about that in the business of retouching course. So, I have the gray layer, I'm gonna noise the gray layer. Let's make this normal, just so you can see. Zoom in, Filter, Noise, and now we can go, not gentle, but go bonkers. Run that baby-- What number would you suggest, Lisa? I would say 77. Would you go with 77? Let's go with 77 then, shall we? So now, if this baby is on an overlay, it gets really chunky, kind of a cool effect. Yeah, in and of itself, that's a nice technique, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, we use them as a tint stuff in the darkroom. Yeah, try X film. Aw. So, lovely, chunky. I'm gonna take part of this and blow it up, so you have even bigger chunks of rain. I'll transform my selection. I just wanna sing a Burt Bacharach song right now. Go ahead. And I'm gonna command T, transform that up even larger. So, with this noise, I'm gonna add a blur to it. It's a motion blur. On photography, whenever something is moving past and you take a snapshot of it, it's kinda got this trail to it, or if you're movin' the camera and takin' of a moving background. In Photoshop, with this filter, it'll blur it in a direction. So, it'll blur it in the direction of the rain we dig. So, Blur, pull that over to Motion Blur. And from here, you control how much little or a lot and you can also control the direction. This'll go all the way around, 360 degrees. Looks like she's leaning her umbrella into the left. I'm gonna make the rain come from that side. And instead of Overlay, roll it down to Screen. And darken it. Command M to darken and that way, just the highlights will be comin' in. And back it off, so just have a bit of rain. So, now, we have movement, rain comin' down. She's getting drenched. Hm, it's lovely. Thank you, Lisa. Yeah, on our handouts, you're gonna see there is a little note that will list the blending mode groups and they'll talk about what changes when you change your blending mode. So, for example, you've got your normal mode, your darken modes, your lighten modes, and in the lighten modes, you have lighten screen, color dodge, linear dodge, and lighten color. And on the linear dodge, it's a little more the screen. It's a little-- Pardon me, linear dodge, little more intense. So, play around with these, yeah? Yeah, and this one so... Once it's down there, it still look a little more uniform. I'm gonna mask the whole thing out, holdin' down Option, hittin' Mask and take it out. And I'm just gonna paint in where I want it. So, with a brush on white, I'm gonna paint that in 50% and 50%. I'll bring it in some here, some there, some there. Again, I'm gonna stress that his production technique, he is lightly painting on his mask to lightly reveal his rain. The way I do it, is at 100%, reveal my rain and then I reduce the opacity at the layer. Doesn't matter how you do it, it's just different production technique. Another thing with the rain is to get the depth of field to make it a little more realistic. This rain looks like the rain drops will be happening at about her size. What's that? 10, 15, 20 feet away from ya'? I'm gonna grab part of this rain. Command J and float it, make a copy of it, and now, gonna make it bigger. What I'm hoping with that is now we have-- We're lookin' at two layers of rain. We're gonna see rain happenin' right here. We're gonna see rain happenin' here. You can continue on and just float it all the way back through, but it's just the little stuff like that that makes this piece look a little more realistic. Alright, I have to tell you something, 'cause it just dawned on me right now. Had I been given this assignment, I would have remade that grain layer from scratch or duplicate it and transformed the whole thing. It would never occur to me to just grab a piece of it and enlarge it. A little dab will do ya'. I'm telling you, it's brilliant. Brilliant! And then your files don't get too big. Yeah, and your files don't get too big that way. That's genius. Yup. Then, again, with the mask in it, we'll just bring in parts where we want. Um, can I give 'em a little Hollywood backstory here? Lay it on 'em. Alright. So, what's interesting about this is this is really, especially when you do this often-- This takes five minutes to do. It's nothing. I cannot tell you how many superhero movies we have had to work on, the posters, where folks, designers, are pulling stock images, and they're paying a lot of money for the stock image, and then, it is our job to exactly put the rain exactly in that position. Hours of retouching time and stop time and design time. For what? Just do it this way. It's so easy. It really is. Another thing this motion blur was good for, even the noise. If you were to just take this and leave it on the gray, you had a brushed aluminum look and you can cut that out, so you have your type. Do your noise, do your motion blur. Clip that to your type and now, your type, instead of being just a color, it would have a brushed aluminum kind of effect to it when you change the color. So, that was step three back in-- Right, so basically, this exact function or process, using filters to make rain, you can make a look of brushed aluminum or metal and put it on anything you need. We had done some of the different ways of doing noise. That was just the straight, where you pull down your filter menu to Noise. There's another one up there called Mesatint and Noise. Run it over-- You have a separate file for that. I do have. Well, this one is the mesatint. So, I had run a bunch of different ones in these. Let me turn off the ones I just did. Here's the bigger rains and then they just start walking back, little baby ones. And further back and it just-- I brought it in wherever it was lighter already in the photograph. I just add more brightness there. Why don't you show 'em the mesatint? Go ahead. The mesatint? You wanna just delete that and do a new one? Yeah. Yeah, what the heck. Pretty free with my... Free with your layers. The nice thing about this kind of process, too, is it's so easy. You don't have to be so precious. Oh, must, must keep everything, no! No, no, no. Overlay, fill with gray. Alright. Hey. I wanna stop 'em right here. Do you remember I said I did command New and I made new dot new layer and then I filled it with gray. The way Simon's doing it right now, he's doing it all in one step. So, you don't have to go through all those steps I went through. You can actually do it this way. He's made a brand new layer and inside that layer, he's saying, go ahead and fill it with color overlay gray. Right here. You only get that option once you've changed the mode to Overlay. Mmhm. Two ways to do the same thing. We love Photoshop. Pull down the filter to Noise and set it as stop and have a noise, go down to Pixelate, Mesatint. And then here's a number of different ones. (sighs) Find out you can choose Medium, it gets bigger. This actually have lines in them. Yeah. Yeah, I don't particularly care for the lines on this one. I happen to love the mesatint, but it's very harsh. It's a harsh filter, so it needs a little... Let's try that one. Wrangling. Okay. There we are. And let's blur that in again. Blur, Motion Blur. And there we are, there's a rain again. Delicate. Select small, command J and float it or copy it. There's your bigger one. But this, too, you could also, what I like-- You can move the directions. So, if it's, the rain's smaller back by her, if a gust of wind came up and hit the in between ya', you can change the direction because you have now two sheets of wind. It's um... A little bit delicate, but... We love our command T, don't we? Yes, we do. Right now, it's getting me a little bit of attitude, but... Yeah, well. Brrp, so... You can see it changed the direction of the rain and you just give it a bit more dimension. Yeah, so, you can shift this. So, again, what I think this demonstration illustrates is it's the same thing I did on the water. I just used grain. And now, he's used grain to make rain. And, in Photoshop, I think it's the blessing of Photoshop is there's a bunch of ways to do the exact same thing. Mmhm. And so, he used a um... Grain, Noise, and then he used Mesatint to do the same thing. It doesn't matter, really. It's whatever your preference is and I think folks get bogged down. There's a lot of, "Oh, there is a way to do it." No, darlings, there's tons of way. And in fact, this graphic, if you guys see, we're gonna show you some noise options. So, on the noise options, you have the blur gallery actually has some noise. I'm not even gonna touch that right now. You have the standard noise filter, which is what I used and what you used on the first part of your demo. And then, we have the texture grain, which now, texture grain is under Artistic. Texture grain is under Artistic. So, you've got this. This comes in the handout that you all have. And then there's Mesatint. No right, no wrong, whatever you prefer. And they all do a little something different, too. You can control the size of 'em. That's ah-- Yeah, the other thing is, once you have this noise on a layer, you can make it bigger and smaller, too. So, if you want bigger and smaller grain. There's one of them does a roughing. It makes it a rough kind of noise. Yeah, and that's under the blur gallery, I believe. Excuse me, in the, yeah, the blur gallery noise. So, we're not gonna run through all of them 'cause it'll take too long, but we want you to take a look here and see what you can do and it's fun. There a lot of good stuff. So, we had taken the rain and we made a motion blur and it's pick out how much and in what direction it ends. The new blur gallery, they have what they call a blur on paths. If you had a straight path, it'll do like the old blur, but then with the path, the Bezier path, you can make it, give it an angle and you can give it a bend. That's what I did on this one right here. I think this is a really powerful tool. Yep. Yeah. So, what happens here, instead of it being straight, I told err... Worked with Photoshop and then, it's now gonna make the blur along this blue line. And as you move in, your blur is going to move. It's great, it's really powerful. So, then, you have bigger, smaller, warmer blur, and then you can change the direction zone and just make it madness back there. I do like that. Yeah, that's pretty fantastic. Now, the old school way of doing that would be just a typical warp. Command T, Warp. And just pull it down. But, when you do that, your rain drops actually get fatter in one area than the other and this is more effective. So, that was our straight rainy girl. We have a number of things in here. The first one, lens flare. Who did that? But notice, it's a different kind of lens flare. If you pull it down a little bit, you'll notice. I'm the lens flare gal. Let's have a look. Yeah. It's just a little gradient. So, you know what, do you wanna show 'em just doing a gradient rather than going to the render, or do you want me to show? Well, let's have a look. So, gradient. It's so easy. It's crazy easy. And you go for G for gradient. 'Cause gradients are great. And then you do a circular? Yes, I do, radial, yup. Okay, and then, we're just gonna go gray, too. White, no, white. Just white, white to white. White to white. Just white. So, hit that, choose white. Now, we got white to white. It's where, actually, white to transparent. So, if you click up here, you can show 'em that. Alright. Alright, so, this is something that I think is pretty funny while you demo this because often times, we'll have our directors and creative directors spend all this time getting lens flares and then blur 'em. And all they would have to do is take the gradient tool with white and click and drag and they've got a littl-- Li, wala! That's it, but no. And sometimes, they'll do stock. They'll get stock flares, which cost $250 a piece. And all they had to do was take the tool. Render it up with the filter. Yeah. Boom. So. Either way, filter or draw it. All easy. Here's our fun little mixtures, without the-- I love mixtures. So, this one's on a screening. Let's have a look at this in normal. Yeah, one of-- This section, in particular, we're really playing with blending modes. Blending modes are your friends. Look at that. Mmhm. Is that the Roosevelt one? And you added a blur and you had it on as smart object. You put a smart Gaussian blur on it. 'Cause I'm smart. Yes, you are. Mass it out and you had it on screen. This one happens-- This lightens it. to be called Emotion Franklin, mmm. So, you get the yellowing and you get the lightening. Then, you put a hue saturation on here that cooled it down some. Ah, did totally desaturate. Desaturate it. Probably unnecessary 'cause of the gradient map, but hey. And then, you threw a gradient map. Oh, lovely. Yeah, let's talk about the gradient map. Yeah.