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Lesson Info

Compositing Soccer Image Background Part 1

so we talked about yesterday starting in black and white and huge huge tip there because black and white it eliminates you looking at color so you can just look att whether the composite is actually going to work or not changing color is really easy and photo shop if you need to make something warmer cooler more saturated you're less saturated all that stuff super easy it's not really easy like change the angle the perspective of something in a photo shop it's not always super easy to change like where the lighting direction in something in photo shop but just changing the color is easy so color oftentimes gets in the way I find of you seeing the really essential parts of a composite so when compositing especially like a large composite like this I always start off in black and white and I build my composite up almost to the end usually in black and white and then I go in and just tweak some colors and it takes like ten minutes and then everything comes together really really quickly s...

o to get there I'm just going to create an adjustment layer we're going to go up to our channel mixer and I'm gonna click on monochrome so that's just strips all the chant all the color out of my image all right let's go ahead and I'm gonna hit controller command g two group that with itself and I'm gonna call this cheque group we're gonna be doing things throughout the day that our be bringing other types of what I call check players all right there we go let's just go ahead and shift like all those hit command g double click on there and we're gonna call this sketch all right so we've got a background let's go ahead and start building on from there I'm going commando and we're gonna open we've got a bunch of these stock images normally I'm working if there any computer questions at home I work with a twenty seven inch I'm mac pro I seven like three point two gigahertz processor and it's got thirty two gigabytes of ram I use a pegasus are for external raid arrays as my scratched disk and is my working tribe extremely fast raid ray it's really really amazing and I pretty much keep absolutely nothing on my local machine so I've got a one terabyte hard drive in my local machine on my twenty seven inch imac and it's like nine hundred and fifty bite's free like I literally there's nothing on my computer at all I keep everything on external working drives um and it's because things just they work a lot faster when you're working with the raid array so if I was working at home sorry in my studio with with my setup that I usually use I would just open all these images into a giant stack and start working from there because I can't work on an image with hundreds and hundreds of layers and my computer's just lightning fast the entire time because the entire process like everything that I have on my computer is just set up toe workin photoshopped extremely quickly and I know that's probably not how everyone's got their set up but if you want to work in photoshopped extremely quick quickly that would be my suggestion work on an external drive hope usually a raid array it is a thunderball raid array as well which is really really nice connectivity is past and then uses many gigabytes of ram as possible all right so we're gonna bring this in this is our this's an image of like a baseball diamond and I'm gonna show you guys some really cool things you can do with manipulating perspective and kind of changing the field of view of some of these things so let's go out and just hit shift and I'm gonna click and drag from one image into another one and we're gonna start our composite all right so full screen I mean hit f for full screen we're gonna turn our sketch off and then I'm just gonna basically scale this up a little bit and I know that we're going to lose some resolution if we do scale these things up ideally you don't have to scale up anything in photo shop but I find that the ideal world rarely is the real world so oftentimes I he's yelling things up that's just kind of happens with this sort of thing I'm know that I'm probably gonna wind up adding a little bit of a blur to the background as well as maybe like a like a zoom blur to make it look like there's a lot of action going on with the actual soccer player so in that case I'm really not worried about upscaling because I'm gonna be adding a blur to the background anyway so if I lost any detail it's not really that big of a deal all right so we're gonna hit command tea and I'm just going to kind of scale this up a little bit there we go and rotate this around all right now when I'm doing this I'd like to keep a good idea of about where I want my horizon and your horizons going to dictate your perspective basically the horizon is if if they were like no buildings and the earth was completely flat would be like where where the drop off would be like you just see on forever and in this image it's actually really nice because there's nothing in the way this is pretty much our horizon right here somebody hit command our and this springs up our rulers and then you can click and drag from the top down and this is what creates a guide okay so we've got a guide and it's roughly placing about where the horizon is so a huge thing especially when you're compositing multiple images together if you want your perspective stay somewhat realistic just make sure the horizon is in the same place for every one of those images and your perspective is going to work itself out so for instance if I bring this image in here and I try to make it look right let's just go ahead and add a layer mask to this and I'm gonna just paint black on my leather mask really quick just to make it disappear right here on the bottom there we go if I want to make this trying to look real and have this looked like that was the horizon now it would never work because it's it's way too high up but as soon as I bring this image a little bit further down let's just get rid of this guy as well I'm just going to use a magic one tool really really quick hit w for the magic one tool and uh uh select out the sky when his shift elite and fill this with black all right so having this guy heard sorry the horizon right down here on the bottom this is going to look a lot more real because the horizon of this image the horizon of my image with the stadium actually matches the horizon of the other one if I were to bring it down there like that doesn't look right anymore right but were to bring it up here that doesn't look right anymore as well so just make sure your horizon for every single one your stock images is about in the same place it's going to help out a lot now I'm going to be warping and transforming this back around quite a bit to actually make it fit into our image so it's not it's not going to be exactly like this but you do want to keep in mind try to keep his many of these things as close as possible and that's going to really help out all right do we have any questions right now or up until this point so were about I was going to keep adding like we started as simple as possible and today's only getting more complex it's not getting easier you'll see a lot of stock images of just sky so how do you determine the horizon or how do you take an image that isn't doesn't have a horizon to it and then place it in somewhere that's going to have our horizon great question okay something that you'll see with a let's just hide that line real quick something you'll see oftentimes with sky images is any time you're taking a picture out and you can actually see the horizon in india image just like this one you'll get the effect of the skies kind of like coming towards you and usually near your horizon you'll see very little activity going on with the sky like in this case it's raining and things like that but you're not really seeing much cloud detail or anything like that actually near this guy that's for a couple of reasons first is because of the atmospherics that are involved basically like you basically just see hayes as you get closer and closer to the horizon because you're looking through more and more layers of atmosphere so there's a lot of hay is going on and the other is compression like all this detail here is right above you but if you were to compress all this like together and stick it really far away you basically just end up with like a grey mass or you know whatever the colored skies so sky near the horizon is pretty much always going to be just like one solid color or it's going to be very very simple it's never going to look like this right near horizon so if you're looking at a stock image and it looks like this for the entire image you know that it was probably not taken out like this it was probably taken looking straight up so if you've got a stock image words you know and we've all seen this guy before it's not like this giant mystery right if it looks like there was an image taken of the sky straight up you should not ever use that when you're when you're looking straight on that should only be used when you're when you're basically be looking straight up which I find is very rare people do that when they're taking stock images so they get a clean version the sky but that's never going to look right and I see it all the time and deposits where you see like a normal image and then you'll see like what should be you know a sky the sky like from here is taken and it's it's put look behind the house and it doesn't look right at all because you don't actually have that perspective of this guy happening in your image so that's one big thing to look for if you are using an image on dh you wanted to make it look like the horizon actually does match up having a horizon your sky is really helpful when I'm dicking stock images of skies personally oftentimes they're never this clean right there's always something in the way there's gonna be a trees or houses or telephone poles or whatever generally I don't worry too much about that stuff because you can clone stamp most of that out really easily the other thing is like in this case I'm gonna have ah building that's going to be going to be in front of that so if there were like you know trees and stuff like that in the distance I could composite something over top of that to make sure b teo take care of that problem go question yes all right the next thing I want to do is I want to stretch this out because I really want this stadium to kind of have like a grand feel to it so clicking on my layer I'm adjusting controller command tea and then we're just going to stretch this out so let's go ahead and zoom out here we go and I'm gonna bring this top up and I'm gonna hold old or option which is going to stretch the top and bottom basically at the same time all right there we go and let's go ahead and bring that right to about there now also keep in mind that this sort of stuff is let's head into there this sort of stuff is not like it's not set in place one hundred percent after I do this it's not like okay now I have to keep this exactly where it is I can move these things at any point in time if I do want to do that okay here's the thing I'm thinking about two is I want this to look like a soccer field and I do want to change the perspective of this a little bit so let's just talk a little bit about perspective all right so if you're looking straight out onto you know a soccer field or whatever you're not going to get this type of perspective with the ground right like that doesn't make any sense because that's that's something you would get when you're actually looking down when you're looking straight out that something the ground line should be relatively flat it's never going to give you this sort of perspective but I just happen to really like this background I think it's a really nice background so what I'm gonna try to do is I'm going to try to warp this background to change the perspective of it I want to change this professor it's perspective from going down on each side so I want this to wind up being flat across the edges and that's going to help it make it look like it's a little bit more straight on something since a ride so what we're gonna do let's just you know what I'm gonna make this a little bit smaller the reason being so I'm gonna do a perspective change real quick and I wantto make sure that applies or you know what instead of making it smaller it's another quick tip you go to image and then down here to reveal all and it's going to show everything that you've got in your image so yool we have to re crop after you do this but going to the reveal all now you can see that's what's going on on that layer this is what's going on in our background layer and you can kind of decide what you want from there all right let's go ahead and mass this out and we go paint all this black all right and for this I'm going to use one new tools and photoshopped pretty sight about eye level one photo shop comes up with new tools that are actually helpful and that I will actually use it it's a it's a very rare occurrence now let's click over here and I'm gonna goto edit and then down here too perspective warp and this is actually brand new wood photoshopped cc two thousand fourteen so we're gonna go to edit and done a perspective or and I love with all these new tools they actually show you exactly how to use the tools when you actually choose them as well so it's really nice basically you click and drag to define your planes and then you start warping so let's go ahead and start this out I'm gonna click right here in the middle just kind of clicking and dragging out in this way there we go I want to kind of define just like it said define your planes for your perspective so this is like one perspective it's kind of going in in that way and then there we go that will join up with that guy bring that down there and bring that down there okay so now we've got like two planes of perspective this is kind of how perspective works and I want to change the perspective off this field to make it look like it's a little bit more straight so we're gonna take from our our defining our planes to to the warp tools I'm just basically just click there and now I can click on any of these corners that I want and it's going to completely warp in perspective what I've got for my field so I'm just going to bring some of these corners up here there you go and it's just gonna warp that up they're going to bring this corner up there there we go so now I've got more of like a straight on type of stadium field this is amazing all right and if I wanted to like unlevel these out as well aiken bring you know this a little bit higher up towards the edges as well let's just go ahead and see about making that in there who bring this guy in a swell all right usually this is used for buildings where you can actually define uh you can define like construction planes or perspectives and then you khun kind of straighten things out a little bit because you will get you know some perspective or but we basically taken what was the baseball diamond with you know this feud down here in the bottom taking this a little bit and we've even doubt we basically changed you know that the bottom where it was had a little bit of perspective you know like game to it and we've straightened that out so it looks a lot more like we're looking straight on the stadium instead of looking down on the city so we literally just change your perspective of this image which is I think it's amazing listen the checkbox that's going to apply that transformation and uh we're going to go in just a second all right there we go so let's go ahead and zoom in cic command plus a couple times and some of these details like this stuff up here I'm not too worried about that because I'm gonna wind up cutting all that out anyway we're putting our own we're putting our own stadium lights and we're putting our own grass and everything like that in into this image so we're just gonna paint all this black on our later mask we're just going to make all this invisible there we go that's kind of looks like we just got like a field it's pretty cool played baseball in a field of corn or ever all right there we go um so this is going to totally depend on what you can do with your stock images and what you have with their stock images you know if I had my ideal image of of the background here on dit was in the proper perspective I would have wouldn't have had to do this but then I wouldn't have gotten to show you guys that really cool tools so I'm okay with it all right let's go ahead and define this with our marquee selection tool these other parts of layers and on my leather mask when hit shift lead and fill those with black all right now we're just gonna grab our crop tool and I'm gonna crop right back into our sky there we go original image looking pretty good and I'm again making sure did not check this delete crop pixels button we're gonna hit this check mark and uh and we're going to go so I can still stretch and move this background the stadium around as I need to and even after I get my you know soccer player in this image later on in the day I can still stretch and move all these things around but this is just going to help me too here we go let's just stretch that up a little bit this is just going to help me to get a pretty close perspective to what I actually want all right cool and I'm just gonna go ahead and say this real quick be a good time for questions if anyone has one while I save the city job all right let's pull one from the internet shall way awesome so here's a question aaron this is from paul erin if you use many different stock images of natural elements in the same composite how important is it to match the lighting direction intensity of every single plant piece of grass can you use images with different lighting and fix it in a photo shop okay really good question is faras lighting intensity goes that's something you've been totally changing photoshopped you could make something brighter or darker really quickly and really easy in photo shop if you want to changes in the direction of light in photo shop it's almost impossible if you know something is lit from left and you want to make it look like a flip from the right besides just flipping the image around it's almost impossible to change the light direction on something because you would literally have to repaint the highlights and shadows completely on that object s o get the lighting as close as possible again if you guys are kind of starting out in the composite world use images that are based on soft lighting so cloudy skies like we're doing today and relatively soft lighting that makes it much much easier because lighting is not really directional it's not really clear what direction the lighting is coming from it's just kind of like generally nice soft lighting overtop of everything and that makes it much easier to do your composite so you can start off in that world and then when you're comfortable doing that you can start bringing in okay I want a hard directional right like coming from the right and then yeah you'll need every single one here images all along the way is gonna have to match the exact same lighting and from fashion tv writing on your suggestion would you suggest we view a stock image in black and white before eventually selecting or purchasing it if yes what should we be looking out for and avoiding okay quick question I'm usually still looking at my stock images in color the things that I'm looking for when I'm choosing my stock are things like perspective and things like like our big three we remember we've been talking about these last three days is our lighting our perspective and our composition so for instance I was able to change perspective a little bit in with this image I prefer to not do that but if we need to change perspective a little bit like we did we can do that obviously like for instance if you want to take a picture and make it look like a castle is often the distance and you've got your stock image and yes I want that in all of my images but a castle off in the distance is going to look like you basically photographed from straight on right if you had a stock image and stock images of person standing right in front of the castle and there looking up at the castle castles like doing like this right which is basically what you get if you were looking right up at the castle and then you try to put that off in the distance it's not gonna work because the perspective is too different because off in the distance a castle doesn't look like this right a castle you all the lines would be a little bit more straight so if you wanted to try to fix that in photo shop you could but it'd be a much better idea to try to get the perspective of a castle that actually I was far away in the distance um and then as faras looking at these images and black and white on stock website it's not a bad idea I've never I've never done it before but using the techniques that we showed you guys I believe it was in day one's class where I showed you how to actually download a cop andi I'll show you how to do it again really quickly so looking in you know our stock images here this is again on foa tolia and we're going to bring some of these in later in the day like let's say I wanted to bring this this image of a goal in there we go we were just quick on this download comp images there we go this load up and um all right I'm just gonna write click on here and I'm going to go to copy image all right and then here in photo shop I would just create a new layer and hit command ve to pay set in all right and then we can see arc the concert always going too small and they're going to be watermark but you khun scale them up you can put them in place and you can decide like ok does this actually work is this going to be the right perspective for a goal that I need to put in my image and if it does work you know you can still mass this and things like that like obviously when it comes time to actually use the image go ahead and purchased the stock don't try to get away with using the calm because you can see that I mean the quality is really not that good because you just scaled it up so much and it'll have a watermark and it's illegal so three good reasons did not do that there's that too but it'll still give you a relatively good idea like even if you're zoomed out like this I can you know try to say flip this horizontal and you know stretch it out a little bit quick there and use a magic one tool to try toe cut this out from the background and you know I'll still get a pretty good idea of whether or not I'll even be able to use this goal in my image like is this going to work and if it will yeah it was like no that's not gonna work because it's probably not going to work it doesn't at all look like it should right dad saves me some money I don't have to purchase that stock image I'm going to keep looking at other sock images and find the right one all right great questions by the way thank you you're welcome seems like yeah thought of more myself all right so here with our background now and again all this stuff is totally changeable I can move this up or down as I need to and and we're good to go all right let's go ahead and say that this is going to just do it really quick version cutting these cutting these bleachers out here on the top so you can use a ton of different tools right now I'm just going to use the political lasso tool I'm gonna click here and all right we're gonna do this I'm gonna show you guys how to use the pen tool later in in another segment and that's going to really help get us selected out a little bit better but for now the believing a lasso tool most people already know how to use this one basically just click wherever you want to make your selections just like we're doing here click and click there we go and I'm gonna hit option delete to fill with my foreground color which is used to end that connection because I'm always like you have a point and missing it enter this is actually really cool tip that not many people know about when using a political lasso tool if you hold down the altar or the option key and start painting you get a regular lasso tool and then you let go and you're back to the political lesson tool and you get a head injury that's cool but this is even cooler if you were in the regular lasso tool you can start off years last this election then hold alter option and it turns into the police all lasso tool and then you can let go and you'll keep on painting right back with your regular also tool so you don't actually have to they actually couldn't get rid of one of these tools so you could just tell you a whole walter option but just a really cool quick wake and sometimes you'll have to do it was like and it's like this over here and then okay straight line straight line straight line and then now I want to start something else so really quick way you khun you could get a couple of those tools good question