Lessons

Lesson Info

Compositing Fantasy Background Part 2

so that's a little bit about how blend if works and these kind of things could take a little bit of playing around obviously that yellow on the mountains doesn't really do anything so we're just going to quit and delete that but this you saturation oftentimes if you are doing the color balance it's it's a good idea or doing a color match like we are in this case it's a good idea to have these colors on ly be visible where the shadows are or where the highlights are and just as a general rule place any color adjustment like like we have here in the shadows and it's going the most of the time be the correct answer so it's it's again it's going to be based on the image but in this case we want this you saturation probably just to be visible in the shadows so I'm going to double click here on my huse saturation adjustment layer let's bring that over there I'm gonna bring this guy over here and now I'm gonna hold holt or option and bring this from the right to the left there we go and what ...

it's going to do is it's going to kind of allow the highlight color of my mountains to stay just like they were but it's going to allow the shadow color let's just bring in there we go so let me just kind of show you the before and after so command z there's the before and it looks totally fake right it looks looks like it was done in photo shop and the after looks a lot more real but we still have a lot of that color and the reason is because we're keeping some of the color from the original image like we're keeping that you know the variation especially like we still conceive some greens we can see you know a little bit more on the warmer side there's some yellows and things like that here but we do have like the darks the blues tend to start no like shifting into the image especially over there in the shadows so that sort of thing play around with that using like colorized functions there is going to really help out adding those colors and then make sure like restrict those are the highlights or the shadows depending on depending on the image and mostly case is keeping them in the shadows it's going to be the right answer all right so from here what we're gonna do I'm gonna grab a couple different levels adjustment layers so I'm gonna grab this guy we're gonna go up two levels and then option command g is going to clip the skin so most of these layers are going to be clipped now the other thing that I'm looking at it's just kind of like look at our image as a whole I'm most of the time I'm gonna be zoomed out with these images because I want to look at how the light looks as a whole rather than just like you know I find that if you if you're zoomed in you see all the little details but you don't see the images the whole so a levels adjustment layer is basically just a really good way to make things a little bit lighter or a little bit darker and people often have questions about like you know how do I know if this has to be lighter or darker and a lot of time if you just create a levels adjustment layer and put it on there you could just kind of look at it and tell him he's like oh yeah that looks better or that looks worse it should be pretty obvious right we all know what things actually look like in real life just trying to make it look like that I think invites a very technical make it look like it should we go so generally what I will do a gravel levels adjustment layer and make things a little bit lighter and a little bit darker so in this case we're going to go a little bit darker and we can see in some of the areas this does look better right we know that lighter is not the option that's so it's like an iceberg which actually looks really cool to be honest but it doesn't look right we would need a different sky here but that doesn't cool I want to do that in future image so we're gonna we're gonna pump this a little bit darker and as I do we can see the color I still need a little bit more of this blue color so here in levels you can actually you can adjust your lightness and darkness with the rgb channel but you can also adjust your colors if you go down here to the red channel the green channel or the blue channel so if I need a little bit more blue I'm going to go down in my blue channel and then I'm going to push this I can go to the left a little bit and that's going to push a little more blew into my image see if I go farther it's gonna push him or blue and if I go to the right it's going to add a little bit more yellow all right so we're just going to push one point oh by the way is is mid right here so we're just going to push us a little bit to the left not too far just to get a little bit more of the blues all right and then if we need you can see the backgrounds got a little bit of blue and it's got a little bit of green in it as well so if I need to push this and give it a tiny bit of green I could do that as well all right in here with levels and kurt's adjustment layers for the most part you can use them interchangeably I'm going to use a lot of levels throughout the next couple of days just to keep things simple I could use on ly curves and I would be able to do basically the same thing but to keep things simple I'm just going to use level so if anyone's curious I'm like why is he using levels and senate proves it's just keep things simple so we're basically saying that you know speaking the same language over the next couple of days all right let's go ahead and make this just a little bit darker there we go and immediate command I on the layer mask now so next thing we're going to do is kind of zoom in and I want to be able to decide where this is actually going to be visible I don't want this to be visible everywhere my everywhere this images right like I I can use my layer mass still this darker area that I'm kind of painting in I can have this be visible on ly in certain areas and this is going to depend again on where I'm actually painting with my paintbrush so just a really simple layer mask just painting white or black on my lamb ask just going zoom in here and make my brush a little bit smaller and kind of dictate where this is actually going to show up all right and for those years watching I am using a pressure sensitive tablet which really helps out make making these selections and painting this stuff a lot easier I'm using a walk um into us pro small for anyone who's curious about the exact a bottle that I'm using everyone's curious everyone makes so we've been we've been talking about in the chat room a question from one of our students out there interested in how erin is using the tablet stylist particularly pressing the buttons on the pen without giggling and messing up so I will be giggling nothing up later by the way how do you do you tend to do all your flow with the with the welcome penn and you have your own adjustments erin that you use great question okay so setting up the walk home tablet I'm let's just go really quickly into that because I know they're going to be a ton of questions and this is an area that I find could be really helpful for people thes tablets air they're super super helpful and I I really suggest not using photoshopped unless you have a tacit they will totally change your life they take anywhere from like a couple weeks to a couple months to really get the hang of but after the fact that they're just it's a tool that's built specifically to do this where I'd like to say this is like painting on a canvas with like a paintbrush and using a mouse is like using a rock on the canvas like it's a mouse is either on or off right so think where is this you have these have like two thousand levels of pressure sensitivity so the harder you press you can control what's going on not only that but it's a pen and it has a lot more natural feel to it I feel more more like actually using a pen so I'll just go over really quickly the preferences that I've set up for this walking tablet and again you guys can have you know similar preferences if if that works for you or set them up however you'd like but hear my system preferences I'm going to go to my tablet okay and here we see we've got the grip pen okay so this is most of our settings were just going to click here on the grip pen I don't really play around with their some buttons along the side of it as well as a touch capability this personally I don't really use that stuff a lot so I'm okay just leaving that stuff basically how it is I turned the touch off and I don't really use these buttons so the grip pen generally I will turn the tip the tip feel up a little harder and this is again it's based on preference but if I click and actually pushed down you can see here like a little a little preview of how hard I'm actually pushing and at this point like I'm pushing pretty hard like this is harder than I would push any regular pen doubleclick distance this is a big one if you are using a tablet in photo shop make sure you have this off it's just a little setting that could be very in a weighing in photoshopping if that's anything other than off here I have two keystrokes set up there are two buttons on a walking tablet this guy is basically think of it is like a left click in a right click on a mouse so this guy I've got set to a right click so if I'm using a brush tool or something like that I'm able to click the ford most button and it's going to act like a right click this back here I have said to a keystroke which is super helpful so keystroke and then just go down to key stroke and you can actually choose one keystroke and here I just had option command z which is the keyboard shortcut and photoshopped toe undo option just command z is undo but then if you hit commands again it'll redo option clans use actually step backwards so if I hit this five times it'll step backwards five times so if you if you're watching me and I mess up and it's like how did he do that he didn't hit on do I'm actually doing it right here on my pen so it's just hit this back button and that's going to be undo so for any u guys who make mistakes which is all of us all you do is have to hit this back button and it'll undo and it makes working in photo shop so quick all right so we're gonna hit okay and then the next thing that I want to cover this mapping here and this is probably just a me thing but what I do is I actually change the area of my tablet two I don't use the full area of my tablet so you guys can see I'm using a walk him into us pro small here it's not big to begin with they have a medium in a large version those things are really great for things like illustrators or like comic book artists things like that who are they need that wide range of motion I find for photography I don't need that wider range of motion in fact I don't even need this entire space I only use about a business card size worth I only use this top little portion there and the reason is I don't know if you guys can see my hand as well as the screen but mice at the very top left of my screen I'm right here and at the very bottom right on my screen I'm right here so when I'm using my tablet really don't use my I don't move my hand it all I keep my hand placed exactly here on the tablet and I could move for up my entire screen just by doing this so that's what I prefer it allows me to move really quickly in photo shop I kind of say it's like a kin teo if you prefer your mouths movement to be really fast like if you enjoy you know a fast acceleration on your mouth movements so you don't have to move it a lot if that's what you prefer with a mouse you'll probably prefer something similar with a tablet so here we're just going to click on yep we just try lifting it up and putting it back down again see if it worked it worked uh never do that all right so here here we have our tablet area so I'm gonna click on portion all right let's just get that off and you can actually you can click to define tablet area or you can just adjust it here as well so you can just say like okay I only want this portion of my tablet to actually be active so you can see I'm barely moving my hand right now and I'm covering basically my entire screen so it allows me to work very quickly okay so that in combination with a couple of brush settings here in photo shop which you can get to let's just create a new layer and we're going to go to our brush tool all right just make sure the tablet there we go we're going to go to our brush who'll buy go in the window and then down here to brush using the tablet's goingto open up a ton of different options for you so you'll notice when I paint if I don't press hard I'm painting you know with a small line the harder I press it's going to create a thicker and thicker line that's because here in shape dynamics I have my size set to pen pressure okay now let's say we wanted to go down to something like transfer and I turned my flow jitter onto pen pressure as well so this means if I don't press hard not only is my size going to be small but I'm not going to be very trying uh okay sorry the opposite of transparent so I'm able to now have it not be very trent very opaque so the harder I pressed it's going to become more visible end's larger so you're able to control these using your pen pressure so things that would take like ten keyboard shortcuts I'm now able to do very fluidly just by how hard actually press so for instance in my shape dynamics if I wanted my minimum diameter to not be so small so I'm painting around right the smallest size my brushes like that the largest size of my brush is going to be like that so I you know I don't have these like very fine points like I would over here but I can still control how much it's actually gonna be invisible there we go just by making it either pressing less soft or pressing more soft or I can keep let's just leave everything off that layer I could keep the shape dynamics off so the brush size is going to say the same and this time I'm just not pressing hard here and now I am pressing hard here yeah moving in like a lot of your brush strokes have that kind of click click click click click yeah yes ever hear you do that I don't prefer that okay to be honest I just haven't adjusted the spacing to be closer together closer together spacing you won't you won't get that option that what happened also you can you can kind of see a little preview here if your brushes softer which most of the time I am working with a softer brush you won't see that like the that'll just fate together so like that you can see here that click click click yeah um generally this you don't want teo so if you're seeing that and your brushes hard make sure you bring your spacing down closer or make your brush softer and you won't see that really good question do you mind if I just pop in for a minute a second sir I'm just one of the folks out there know that this is definitely not a beginner's photoshopped class you really need to have some photo shop experience under your belt correct yeah I think this sort of thing is totally accessible to anyone my suggestion because I've learned that you could watch a couple of learn videos and that would help to kind of get you guys up to speed and their free online on youtube but yeah this is this is definitely a class where you might want to have some of that photo shop knowledge already on your you know you've already a little bit more familiar with photo shop that's gonna make this real easy and we have a couple of one or two photo shop classes here too a creative life thank you yeah also creative lives pretty amazing all right so I hope that helps cem cem brush settings and yeah kind of working with the tablet it makes it a lot easier um a quick keyboard shortcut again just on using the brush and using in tablet before I move any farther I'm holding them the control in the option key and clicking and dragging my brush left or right is going to allow me to make my brush larger or smaller on the fly really quickly and if I move up or down it's goingto allow me to make my brush either softer or harder so that would be really really helpful most of the time like when I was first starting I would like I basically on lee used a hard brush or only use this soft brush because it was such a pain too toe to change that all the time but now using the keyboard's broken again its control an option and clicking and dragging left or right or up and down that's goingto really allow you to change things on the fly which helps out a lot and on a p c it's gonna be control and old and then right click and drag after right okay great questions so far all right let's go ahead and do another one of these levels just in layers all right so just kind of editing the background making it look a little bit more like it would actually be affected by this light so again we're going to grab an adjustment later I'm going to go toe levels again option command g is going to clip that and you can use as many clipping layers as you'd like so you can clip them all back down to the mountains we're going to bring this again to the right a little bit this is basically adjusting your mid tone basically baked taking your mid tones and making them lighter or darker if you want to adjust your highlights you can take this guy and bring it to the left and that's going to make your lights lighter and this slider is going to make your darks a little bit darker now the slider on the bottom is going to make your darks lighter in the cider on the right is going to make you lights darker so they kind of do the opposite so just remember this guy makes your life lighter this one's going to make your lights darker so depending on your image you're going to need slightly different you're going to need slightly different adjustments if you're let's say these rocks were like you know really really too bright you probably didn't need to take your white point and bring it down a little bit so that's what we're gonna do here for these foreground rocks all right and then I'm gonna take the color here and we're gonna put a little bit of green and a little bit of blue in it all right and I know that stuff looks super advanced but I think everyone's going to see over the course of the next couple of days I'm just I'm going to use one hundred levels adjustment layers and levels are always going to be levels so right now you might be like what is he doing I don't I don't get this but like after an hour you'll be like okay he's going to go you're going to predict he's going be like okay he's going to go toe levels he's gonna grab that slider he's gonna move it down and you'll know it one hundred percent of the time so things like clipping masks things like your adjustment layers things like blend ifs and things like levels I just cover all those but over the next couple days pretty much all I'm going to cover so if you if you get those nails you could pretty much do anything that I'm about to do in photo shop all right let's take command I on the layer mask here and then again we're going to go in with our brush tool all right and we're going toe paint with a soft bed for a relatively hard edged brush here and I'm gonna paint white on my layer mass which is going to make visible over here all right basically my goal here is just to make this there we go it's just make this a little bit more varied like some of this is going to be farther away and some of this is gonna be a little bit closer all right so let's just turn this off or we can see just with like some exposure adjustments and we can totally change look now I can actually double click here on my adjustment layer itself and I can decide if I want this to be even darker or lighter even after I've made my mask on it so this is a really helpful way you don't have to have everything perfect from the very beginning you can change it after the fact and there we go it'll kind of change dynamically with you all right so let's just take a look at that so we started off I'm going to shift click on that later massive turn it off we started off with this which is obviously not at all blending in with the background so we put our layer mask on it we added some color and some levels adjustment layers and we have this you can see it's like it's a huge change that we were able to do and it really didn't take that long to do it all right there's a couple more adjustments I want to make to these mountains kind of make them look even more like they're a little bit farther away so now I'm gonna create a new layer above that and I'm gonna hit option command g and clip that as well and now we're just going to create a color so I'm just going to use my brush tool and if I was painting yellow in painting on these mountains you can see because it's clipped it's only gonna show up where the mountains are but now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this color here which is just a color in my background and I don't know if you guys ever noticed like things that are farther away they tend to like be almost like the same color as the sky like if you ever see a city from a distance it's like it's like got a blue tint to it right farther away things tend to be a little more influenced by like atmosphere so if we want to make these mountains here look like they're a little bit farther away I'm just going to grab a color that's in the sky so using my brush tool all right there we go I'm gonna hold all tor option sample this color and then I'm just going to kind of paint it over top of it there we go over top of my mountains right there we're just saying that peak we want to be farther away all right and then we can lower the opacity of this layer there we go and as I go lower it's going to make it look like it's even farther and farther away all right and let's put a layer mask on there and now I'm going to paint with my lame ask we're going paint black all right just here on the top so we could make like the merry go so it looks like maybe there's some fog or something like that kind of underneath that layer make sure it looks good on the screen too all right we're gonna lower rapacity just a little bit so you can just using these tricks to make the background look like it's actually affecting what's going on here on our mountains all right and we're gonna make another layer I'm gonna grab again with my brush fool all right and we're going to grab this color here from our highlights and then I'm going to kind of paint this on there we go because I want this color to look like it's kind of affecting the highlights now of my rocks right here just you know like if this is the highlight cover color bar sky maybe this would affect the highlight color of our rocks so does anyone in the audience know how to get this toe only affect the highlights yes you have there a brilliant yeah double click right here and we're just gonna move that over to the right move this over to the left and I'm gonna hold alter or option where my underlying layer is and we're going to go just like this and now we can see that same color that was in our background is now being added to the highlights of our mountain there we go so it's actually looking like the color that in the sky is casting a little bit of color on our mountains and if it's too much you can either lower your passivity or change your blending mode to something like soft light and that's going to really help out okay so really cool now we can go in here and keep on playing around with this even more but I think it's time to move on a little bit all right so there are mountains next thing I want to do is I want to add some lightning so we're gonna add our lightning let's go ahead and move this this is going to be behind our mountains right so I'm gonna hit command g double click on this and just call this no lightning all right and I'm gonna hold on to the control of the command key and hit the open bracket a couple times and that's just going to move us down our image so early we said you know I want to kind of move in the same depth of our image right so our lightning I wanted to be below our actual mountain group so in this case you can see it's behind our mountains because it's below our mounts and group okay now there's some really cool things you can do here with blending modes up until now we've used masking to get our like our mountains we had the mask away the sky but you could do really cool things of blending modes to get things either visible or invisible in an image as well things like for this layer for instance were going to use the layer blend mode I'm gonna go from normal down screen and with scream does is it makes the darker areas in that image invisible and it only makes the lighter areas visible so darker areas are now completely invisible the lighter areas there are visible it's still not exactly what we want we just turn snapping off there we go it's still not exactly what we want you can see it doesn't look that great but it's getting closer so if I want this to look a little bit better I might need to make my darks a little darker right because the lightning is so light I want the lightning to show up but the darks I don't want to show up but they still they're still showing up a little bit so I need to make my dark little darker does anyone have an idea how to do that yes see you were just doing the same stuff over and over again all right levels and it's too blue so does anyone know how I can take some blue out of this and yellow or red or what if I just want less color in general hugh saturation exactly which we've already used earlier today as well so again with someone's asking this is not exactly a beginner's course and it's not but we're just doing the same stuff over and over again all right so here we go let's go ahead and do that I'm gonna grab a levels just been left layer the levels option command g is going to clip that and now I'm gonna take my black point and I'm gonna make it darker and as I do this my blacks my you know these areas disappear so just the lighter areas are actually showing up now because that's a function of the screen blending mode screen says on lee light areas show up all right now we're going to grab a huge saturation justin layer okay option command g and now I'm just going to take my saturation and we're going to drag this down as well all right and right about there were actually starting to blend in pretty well with our image so you can see I didn't use a layer mascot all all I did was just changed my levels adjustment layer did a huge saturation and changed by blending mode and this lightning is blending in really well now so just a little bit of work I'm gonna hit command t we're going to scale this down a little bit kind of bring my lightning right over there and then I'm gonna put a levels layer mask on here and just layer mask out these corners all right now might be a good time for a question while I lay messed us out that sounds good and this is I think a great time for this is from from me dimi doe who says aaron do you really do you really use stock images normally or do you prefer to take all the pictures yourself and how does it work with rights okay great question I'd to prefer to take all the images myself if at all possible yeah I love to take images myself I find I can get a little more control over them and again I retain all the rights for for the images the rights when you work with stark images is totally going depend on who you get your stocking just from and what you buy you right so you left her expensive writes you khun you know work on I would say anything like below fifty dollar range that stuff like you could use it on a commercial image and it's totally fine you could publish that sort of thing generally above that range if you want like unlimited usage for the rights of say again it's going to totally there are a lot of stock agencies out there it's going to depend on the sock agency but if you want like what usually they call like extended or limited rights where you you have like rights to distribute for instance then you're goingto need to spend a lot more on the stock images but for stuff like this like I like including lightning in the picture but I've never had the opportunity to photograph lightning I would love to but I've never done it and it's like you know thursday night and I've got a project due on friday and like like prey for lightning go outside with my camera so yeah in that case use the stock image but you know if it's in this case you know this is this is my background and it is a really cool part of the image but like I think the cooler part of this image what we're going to wind up finishing up with is what we just shot in the studio today so I still like I feel like I still had a lot of creative input in this image with that along with that as far as like creativity goes being that I didn't just choose one stark image as is I chose a couple different and I'm combining these together I feel like personally that that satisfies my creative need a little bit more than if I just had chosen an image and then then I put that together so sister personal thing but yeah the answer is yes I prefer to choose I prefer to shoot my own images but sometimes you just kind of don't get the opportunity to okay lay public with one more while you're doing that daniel staff would like to know jimmy tips on keeping file size down ok good question one of the things you could do is get rid of any extra files that you have so like for instance I brought in a different version of these of these mountains and I don't really plan on using this I just brought it in is like kind of a way to show you I could have used that instead of this one it would have been basically the same exact iq technique so get rid of those if you if you have them I don't suggest like merging all your layers together that seems to be uh well you don't want to do anything that's going to destroy your options later down the road like using this psd I can go in here and I could change the lighting on the mountains you know a year from now and I wouldn't have to start from scratch um I did hear this one trick and I'm I'm probably it's a really weird trick okay I don't know we're just gonna maybe you contest to see if this works apparently if you created a layer on top of everything and fill that layer with white just like this on a psd and then you go to save your psd apparently that will dramatically lower your file size and it doesn't make any sense um but that's what someone told me one time so we're going to try it all right white test it was money yeah let's just try it right now I don't know um I think it's the way like photoshopped renders a preview all right so let's delete that and I'll say it's currently being safe so let's just see so if this works then yes I do know a way all right um non white test ah very creative with my naming here alright let's wait till that saves and then see how this looks all right we're going to find her all right so we've got our nonwhite test is four hundred and thirty eight megabytes and our white test is three hundred fifty nine megabytes so yes I do have a way I think you just earned here chow I have actually never done that before but yeah I do look right I invented it in school all right so yes do that another quick tip is if you guys are working in sixteen bit obviously converting down to eight bit is going to dramatically lower your file size as well but generally you don't want to do that there's a reason you're working in sixteen bit so if it's the very end of your edit and you just to save some file size at the end then you can kind of convert down to eight bit and that'll help up help out with the file size okay let's go ahead and open group one there we go and I'm gonna pick these birds because I've adding birds by the way adding birds to any photo is the easiest thing to do ever so if you're like I think this image would be better with birds it's incredibly easy to do because most of the time birds are photographed on like a light sky just like this so we're just going to use a blending mode we're gonna use the exact opposite blending move that we did for the lightning so the lightning was light it was bright lightning on a dark sky birds are going to be usually dark on a light sky so instead of going down to screen we're going to use screens opposite which is here on multiply all right so multiply is going to get rid of the light areas in your background and now just like we did with the lightning I just need to make sure that this background doesn't show up and I want I'm going to need to adjust my saturation as well so again we're going to grab a levels adjustment layer and a huge saturation adjustment later so let's go ahead and do that down here over two levels option command g to clip that and I'm gonna take my white point this time and we're gonna make it a little bit whiter and now my whites are not showing up all right now it's time to take my hugh saturation option command you to clip that we're gonna take our saturation down all right very cool now we're just going to take our original layer hit command tea and kind of transform it down and then put our put her birds to work wherever would that they're going to be this is there's too big they're like pterodactyls in the background why not actually that'd be fun alright zoom in here and there we go cool now I'm just gonna put a layer mask on here and we're going to grab it layer mask and and paint black here right here where the ground is so this doesn't show up all right and there we have birds in our image and then easy yes okay oh good that's why the silence I was fearful that it's like do okay so yeah fine birds and stock images of birds are really easy to find or you know don't pay for those go outside and point your camera in the sky and take pictures of birds you can put him in any image and make a sky a little bit more interesting and it really does not you know we just we just kind of showed it really doesn't take too long all right so we're going to shift click those layers and hit command she double click on that and call this birds yeah just got a lot of like these small elements that aren't necessarily like easy toe pick out but just that that's what makes it so realize that those little tiny like elements that are you fail and yeah I find that you know that sort of thing just had a little bit of character to these things especially when we're trying tio we're tryingto kind of makes scale here a little bit right like these these rocks are not the size of mountains like they're not actually that large and they're not that far away really but we're trying to make it believable that that they are that far away so that's why we're using these levels just released kind of had that depth and adding these birds and you can see some of these birds and they're actually I think still probably too big but we're gonna leave him that big so I like the idea of giant birds in the back you know you can kind of see him in front of the mountains or whatever so it kind of makes it look like those those things they're far away because in your mind you're like okay birds is there a certain size if they're this far away they must be small so it kind of helps to push that visually further back s o using these little tricks I think really does help out with that sort of thing and yeah the end of the day it's just another creative element that you khun you can add to your photos so I'm I'm all for you know adding these little things in there it makes things a little more fun like oh yeah I put birds in there or not all right do we have any other questions I'm gonna just adjust the levels on the couple of these guys as we talk we're solid up here all right yes he told us that you had set one of the presets on your pen tablet teo undo my mind was totally blown do you have any other like really simple little preference is that you have that are really helpful okay I do and those air usually keyboard shortcuts and I know you know if he has a kind of earlier on and photoshopped you probably I don't have all the keyboard shortcuts memorized but they're a couple of ways that are really gonna help you out a couple of different tools here okay let's say if I go to image you can see right beside just about every command in photo shop you're going to see a keyboard shortcut so image size is going to be shift command I this's a really good way to start learning your keyboard shortcuts now there's some things that are built into photoshopped that don't have keyboard shortcuts for instance like a galaxy and blur I use god's name blurred all the time like every single image I'm adding a blur teo either you know some sort of special effect or whatever it is and there's no keyboard shortcut for accounting blurred but you can create your own really easily so to do so just goto edit and then down here to keyboard shortcuts all right so edit and then down here to keyboard shortcuts and what you're gonna do is you're getting basically get the same structure here as your file menu right up here so file edited image layer it's basically the same thing here so anything you can access in a dialog box you can create a keyboard shortcut and if there's if there's something you want to be a keyboard target like let's say that there's a keyboard circuit that doesn't make sense to you like in your own head you want you'd like it to be your own command you can change any keyboard shortcut and photo shop too so I'm gonna go to filter and we're just going to scroll down here too blur and then here in gaza and blur I created this earlier today but we could just I'll just show you how to do this so if we do that and then hit accept so this is how photoshopped will look standard there's no galaxy and blur keyboard shortcuts so I have to goto filter blur gazi blur and if I'm doing that ten times during an image it's gonna take a lot of time so I'm gonna go to blur jazzy blur and right click right here and I'm just gonna hold down the keyboard shift option command g because g for gals ian right that's just something that makes sense to me and usually holding shift and option and command is usually not a taken command in photo shop so holding the three of those down really not that difficult and then hit g and then that's going to be okay just make sure that works all right here we go so like if I created a new layer here and a word of paint around with my brush you alright and then shift option command g that brings up our gazi blur I can choose my radius and hit okay I can hit the letter v and then the number three which changed my capacity to thirty percent and I could make it look like fog in the background I didn't even plan on doing that but it looks cool all right really good question cool do we have any others yeah so from up here um this is kind of a big picture question are you in the mood for a big picture question I love it so in your opinion were the most common mistakes people make in compositing great question okay um perspective I see a lot of the time I see this in commercial ads all the time I've got a land rover ad comes to mind where they photographed a bridge and there's a land rover on the bridge and like the you know the surfaces like this and the land rover is clearly like it's at the wrong angle like it it looks like it's like that right and so they completely missed the perspective on that today we're not dealing really it all with perspective because we're just we're putting her in front of everything so I would say if you if you're not at the point where you're comfortable with early stage compositing don't attempt the perspective stuff because that is a little bit more advanced if you are interested in you know the perspective matching with compositing I do have some really great techniques to that but it involves math I can have to calculate perspective so it's a little bit more event so that's a big one that I see people getting wrong and can I jump in on the photo shop have perspective tools photoshopped does have perspective tools it really does that hopes up some of the time okay so let's say we wanted to build a perspective plane in photo shop that's going to help us like if we needed to paste saying he didn't make a sign looked like he was on this table two dimensional sign I could use the perspective tools in photoshopped to place a sign onto this table and it would look really but if I have a three dimensional object that is not rotated around in three dimensional space correctly then there's really nothing you can do in photo shopped for that like let's say way took a picture of a land rover right and instead of the wheels looking like it was on the floor like it was you know actually like rolled towards the camera like the camera was in the wrong plane during the photo shoot you can't physically roll a land rover in photo shop right like you photoshopped has three d now so if it was actually a three d object yes but a photograph you can't you can't move things like this you khun you know rotate him like this you can move up or down you can scale in larger smaller but you can't you can't do this so this is what I see a lot of time being wrong things like be tilted too much toward the camera or too far away from the camera three other big thing is shadows and shadows they're really really tough to get right my big advice when shooting shadows is try to capture those shadows so if you're photographing someone and you need them to look like they're standing on a street and you need that shattered to be there photograph the mona seamless backdrop try to get the mat lighting to match using that kind of some of the ideas we talked about earlier and then photograph get their shadow on the seamless as well and then you can use things like these blending modes let's say you had a white seamless backdrop and you photographed and they had a black shadow on that seems backdrop you could use that multiply blending mode it would make the white seamless backdrop disappear and just their shadow would remain and you can use that on your composite so use those little tricks if if you need a shadow to be visible and it needs to look like it's actually on the ground use those things and actually try to photograph those shadows because just creating then photo shop is really difficult to do okay thank you yeah you're welcome yeah very cool all right let's go ahead and open this guy up again and so this we're going to use a little bit later when it comes to adding our subject in this layer we're not going to use so in the sake of lowering our file size I'm just going to hit the delete key on that and then we've got a moon which I'm not actually planning on doing anything with this moon but if I did want to I'm gonna show you guys how to do it and I probably most of you guys could guess how it could get this moon in here right screen adjustment layer makes the blacks disappear and just the whites appear I could adjust my levels to make that blend a little bit better and my hugh saturation to make the color work a little bit better so let's try that so changes from normal down to screen again that makes the blacks disappear right that scrabble levels just one layer option command gesine equip that I'm gonna make my blacks a little bit darker okay looking good except work too saturated so now we're going to grab our hugh saturation option command g I clicked on the wrong one but I can use the saturation here and lower the saturation down there as well so now if I wanted to add this that's just shift click all those and hit command cheated group I could definitely make it look like this is another good point by the way if you are trying to make these effects look riel and you have these like lighter areas try not to add them to the like the darkest area of your photo try to add them to areas that are already on the lighter side of your image like over here that's going to look a lot more real you can see I did the same thing with lightning I added the lightning to where there was already a light area in the composite if I were to try to stick it up there you can see that doesn't look real right because light lightning produces light so that clouds around the lightning should have that light in them as well so putting up here is not a great idea but as soon as I stick it right down there in the middle of the area that already has light it's most of my work is already done for me so just kind of keeping in mind these little tricks and most of it I find is just thinking about like ok lightning produces light the clothes need to be light around it to like you know kind of thinking about how how light works in reality saves you a lot of work in your compositing time because you're not trying to force something that was never going to work to begin with so if I wanted this you know this moon this moon to exist here in my image I would just click on this and I could you know add a little bit of a moon why not just put a moon end lightning all the cliches and one headed lightning when you had a moon birds was leasing all right there we go lightning and a moon right next to each other yeah there we have it guys all right now we're just gonna click on there and working and call this moon all right very cool so this is pretty much everything that we needed to do to create a background and you get sincere like whether you're interested in this type of like fantasy things or you know if you're a little bit more on the editorial portrait wherever you are in this creating the backgrounds it really doesn't it could be fun and it doesn't take that much hard work to get here again we used a simple combination we use some layer masks we use level adjustment layers we used a couple of different blending boats and we used to use saturation we were able to get totally different stock images to blend together much better and I did this relatively quickly imagine if you went home and spent like an hour trying to get this toe look right you'd be able to make it look a lot better than this