Selections and Masking Continued: Painting Techniques
Lesson 14 from: How to Shoot and Composite Levitating ObjectsBret Malley
Selections and Masking Continued: Painting Techniques
Lesson 14 from: How to Shoot and Composite Levitating ObjectsBret Malley
Lessons
Class Introduction
04:00 2Your Mind is the Camera
08:02 3Set the Scene
06:59 4Get Smart with Your Gear
03:20 5Posing Tips and Challenges
04:51 6Shoot Considerations
04:09 7Shoot Setup
13:02 8Shoot: Working With Animals
09:55Shoot: Creating the Look of Motion
08:54 10Shoot: Levitating Objects
11:04 11Starting the Composite: Organizing Your Images
12:37 12Working With Your Sketch to Assemble the Scene
11:23 13Selections and Masking
30:01 14Selections and Masking Continued: Painting Techniques
08:56 15Shadow Overlays
18:35Lesson Info
Selections and Masking Continued: Painting Techniques
we'll see. We may want this leash to be on top. The angle actually got apparently close there. We could move it around a little bit. Um, I'll show you need trick that you can do with that. But for now, we're just gonna do what we did before. Someone is human on this subject on. Then we're going t o make a quick, quick selection here. It's already smart objects, So shortcut, uh, we'll see. Was it w for the quick selection tool. Always want to say Q and that goes into quick mask mood. And there's nothing there. But that does lead you to a gotcha. So if you ever hit Q, whether on purpose or accident, let's say you're morning to go into quick mask mode. Um, and right now, if you make a selection right, it's not finding that edge. And you're like, I'm on the right layer. If it ever shows it to you, highlighted and red. That's because you're in quick mask mood, and that's a really annoying gotcha that could just get you stuck. Released a minute toe. 10 minutes, right somewhere in there, depe...
nding on how tired you are. And before you throw things. So with this, make sure you're out of quick selection. Uh, there quick mask mode. Someone hit command D hit Q. Also, that's there's a little toggle where you can select it on and off over there. So, uh, so you can see if you have that red, that means you're in quick mask mode, right? Get out of it with hitting Q or the button that we can't see here. Okay, so now if I select, it knows exactly where the edges are, which is what? What I want for a selection. Um, And again, I'll try to stay with the the meat of this subject here and there already just a little bit blurred, Which is good for just showing some emotion and some of the blur that's already there. Typically, I wouldn't want anything to be blurry at all, but this is again sort of a typical in every way that we're doing it here. Um, So Okay, so I'm gonna get the fist, can subtract that selection holding down option. It's thinking, OK, I don't know. I just got that little bit there. Okay, here we go. And it's thinking more. Kale's. Make sure that this leash. I definitely want to get this on there. I'm just going to select all of that. And actually, I'll paint that out afterwards. Let's zoom out and it's freezing. You want to take any questions about selecting were basically the same thing. While it's thinking here. Yeah, you know the Shadow. I really like the shadow on that picture. Yeah, um, we will try to replicate it as much as we can on, and there's there's a couple of ways so that's coming up next. A great segue way once we get the subject here, Okay, it's still live. So that's good. Okay. Yeah, Sometimes it goes. So in general shadow, I do with two different two different layers, one that's just painting to get everything darker. But we'll sure that another is painting with an overlay blend mode, which is really great. Yeah, when you're compositing, how often should you save? Yeah, right. As we're getting on the impending crash here, Right? Um, often eso I'll dio I mean, what's nice is it always saves in the background. So for actual crashes, more often not, it's been pretty good with the you know, some of the latest versions, it will just pop back up, which is really helpful, especially when you're working in. I mean, this one. It is estimating 1.2 right gigabytes is huge, so I'll often do different versions, especially if it, you know, if I want to test something, so I'll say this as one version will do. Command shift s to save. As then, All do large, too. So if I have the hard drive space, I'll make my own various versions of stages of it. But it's it's good to save, but not as important as it used to be, as long as you have save in the background happening. Yes, on the question. Um, I I am doing some composites, like what you do, but I find that my computer is very, very slow. I'm interested in how much ram you have on your laptop. Yeah. Uh, let's see this list. Find up. I'm not sure. Let's see. Yeah, that's, uh, let's see. System. Here we go. It's only eight gigs on this one. Um, you know, the more the better is helpful, but that's that's definitely why we're seeing some of the things that we're seeing here. uh, but, you know, I just as a backup, I made a smaller version. This entire file, if it's in case it starts to get to Laghi for us here because you especially now with cameras that take a bazillion megapixels, things we're gonna add up. So, um, that's just what we have to deal with. Eso save often on, then Also, try toe not have too many smart objects and things like that of that nature. Okay, again, I just went straight to that that mass, just to show you that even afterwards I can come in here, right? If I double click this guy and do select and mask, I get to that same dialog box, which is great. Um, let's see. And it went down here a little bit. One thing about it is the transparency isn't as helpful, right? So it's it works a lot better when you when you actually do the selecting mask beforehand. So Okay, so with this here we go. So the transparency so I can see what was there very quickly for for this one. In general, when you have a subject, I will do it again in two different ways. once they'll do it for the edge of them in general. Then I'll go back and do it for the hair. Kind of like what we did with Bucks North. So for the first round, this first round that I would be doing, I'm going to shift the edge to the left. I might add a little feather and shift the edge. Eso if I zoomed in close. Uh, you know, no edges is perfectly one pixel, you know, binary sort of selection. But I selections often are. So you want to make sure that it, you know, if it starts looking to cook together, that typically might be one of the reasons. So make sure have some kind of feather. Whether it's half a pixel to a full pixel depends on how blurry your image is. But you typically want to match it to whatever the content is. So in this case, I found, you know, 10.8 toe, one pixel somewhere in there is just fine depends again, held blurry. It is, um, and you can type this in manually here, but we're just going to stick with that since that's hard to move there. And then finally shift edge. So if I shift the edge to the right, we might notice some sort of halo that's happening around the subject. So always make sure the shift edge to the left on, and I find that between 35 45% works really well for the edge of a skin. So I'll say that again, uh, feather between 1 1/2 pixel to one pixel, maybe a little bit more, and shift the edge between 35 45% sometimes less. It depends on the selection what you did for it. But in general they found that as a good go to start part for shifting edge and again that will bite into that subject and make him seem less again cut out a little bit of feather bite into it. Whether they have a dark halo or light halo and so evil, they are good there that it will. It will change on that. So you just want it gone. No halo. Okay, so with that, then you could do if you do the radius for edge detection. It's also gonna feather whether that whatever that is. So you want to make sure that you're not doing hair as part of this because it will also try to fuzz it. No one wants a bad hair day. Okay, so they do, OK, and I'm gonna do it again. So that was just for the edge of the subject. Them to go back in and you selected mask. And let's zoom in a little bit for the subjects. Hair. Um, okay. I can see some other parts that it missed here. We might just see if we can paint that in. Can I? Just a little bit more there. That made it worse. All painted out afterwards. Okay, so let's just try painting around the edge of that subject like that. Say the subject. You're sitting right here. Thank you for things. Work on this. Um, so there's not not a whole lot of difference here again. This this might be one that I would go in afterwards and literally just paint. Um, it's not smooth. Smooth is really great If you have something that isn't just organic in nature, if you have hard edges of things or things or mechanical with smooth edges, smoothing can really clean up your selection, sometimes with the selection and anti alias. It will not quite work. Right? Get these jackets, stair step. So playing with smooth can help. Ah, lot for that, For this one is gonna be just fine. So I'm gonna hit, Okay? All right, Because there's not a lot of hairs that were whispering out there. I'm gonna make this mask.
Class Materials
Free Bonus Materials
Ratings and Reviews
Molly B
I agree a bit with Eric Burke's review (which was a thumbs down), however, I feel like this is neither a thumbs up or thumbs down recommendation, more like a 3 to 3.5 star rating. :) That said, I agree that there was so much talking and not doing in the initial portion of the class sections. I feel like when there is a class offered for Compositing, much of the science people want to know is in the editing tips and tricks AND some of the shooting tips and tricks. Photography of the subjects is important to understand, but examples of live shooting should be kept fairly minimal. Aaron Nace still nails the science behind planning and shooting for composites and also rocks in the editing (in my opinion). Brooke Shaden is also a good example on the editing details. I feel like Bret had something different to bring to the table from the class preview with puppet warp and some of the cutting / masking tips... I agree that all the editing portions of this were super rushed and just touched on a lot of last comments of "oh isn't this neat" and no in-depth instruction on how that feature is used. I just felt like he really ran out of time. At the end he talked about re-shooting the dog, perhaps he could have gone in to puppet warp to change the lower legs and tail a bit as an effort to make it look more like his sketch? Bret seems likable, but does continuously talk about side stories and extra noise that seems could be more focused on the topic at hand. :) I still picked up some tips, but this would be more ideal bought on a sale rather than full price. :) I have a lot of photoshop knowledge and own some other composite classes on CL, so I don't feel too lacking, but this would not be for a very beginner of compositing. I wouldn't mind seeing Bret back with a more refined class structure focusing on the magic of puppet warp and other tricks to get the most out of compositing.
s
Had a good time with this course! Bret is a great instructor, you can really tell he enjoys his work and has a lot of fun engaging the audience. I've done some compositing in the past but with a much older version of PS. This course really helped me take advantage of the new features in PS CC and also helped streamline my workflow. It's a course that both experienced and beginner compositors alike can learn from. A big thanks to Bret Malley and CreativeLive for making this course!