10-Step GUIDE: Blend Images and Create Composites with Photoshop

hey everybody welcome into this adobe photoshop tutorial brought to you as always by tutvid.com i've got some composite stuff to show you today we got a 10-step process for helping blend images together i know what you're thinking 10 steps why so many steps it's because one-click solutions stink they never work they're not that good uh it's just not that easy if you want your artwork to look great you got to spend some time on it you got to go through a bunch of different steps sometimes you might need three steps sometimes you might need 20 steps but i'm going to show you the 10 steps that generally i pretty much always follow for my composites if you do these things if you think about these things it's usually going to bode pretty well for you with regard to your composites let's jump into photoshop right now and take a look at how to make composites look better and have a whole lot more fun while we're doing them so this is what we're kind of going to try to make here today we might go through a lot of the steps in great detail we might breeze over some other things but generally this is what we're going to try to do so let's talk about these 10 steps step number one is find images or shoot images that are similar that is similar in light lighting style direction of light things like that let's take a look at some examples i'm going to use my friends over here at adobe stock so like i'm just going to show you some examples of things that aren't going to work very well right so you got this it's a very dark moody image heavy shadows right heavy frontside shadows uh super cool photo but like if we try to take him and composite him onto this street where there's this omnidirectional light it's a very soft light uh there's all these colors going on everywhere he's got a very directional light hitting him it's going to be very difficult we're going to open up those shadows so much you're only working with an 8-bit jpeg it's probably not going to end very well what else do we have well we've got this a woman here it's a very harsh light she's got great skin great features so it's going to be very flattering for her but if you were to try to take this very harshly lit scene and put it in a very softly lit again directional light with this backlight that's coming across this ocean scene it's it's you're gonna have to do so much dodging and burning and changing and remodeling of the light it's never really gonna look right likewise here we've got a really strongly backlit image also very shallow depth of field you probably want to avoid shallow depth of field when you're doing composite stuff it's going to make getting a good selection really really difficult if i were to take this and try to composite it into this very dark moody wet scene of philadelphia it's just not going to work well for starters you've got the sunlight lighten up his hair something like this would of course work a lot better in a scene like this you would still need to do a lot and the fact that he's already falling out of focus you would need to make sure that your background is also falling out of focus so a lot of things to think about here so what am i looking for well what i'm looking for is something like this background image and this astronaut they both have directional light that's a little harsh but not too harsh not too soft step number two once you find some images it's all about making your extraction photoshop has some pretty good artificial intelligence tools such as the object selection tool this little select subject option here you see that right up there you can use this in lasso or rectangle mode you would drag a selection out over the thing you're looking to create a selection of and look photoshop's artificial intelligence tools um they're not the best that being said they're awesome because i mean five years ago ten years ago the amount of work they do for you would have been unthinkable they're not going to deliver you finished ready to roll selections but i don't think i mean ultimately that'd be great if they were there but they're not there yet so if you go into them with the expectation that it'll do 70 of the work that i need done you'll probably be satisfied with what they do for you and sure enough we can see uh you know there's still some background between his legs that needs to get wiped out behind the hose around the gloves needs to get cleaned up this far side arm needs to get straightened out things like that but by and large it's a pretty good selection and if i were to say hey let's throw a layer mask on that i could then go in and you can pick your choice at this point you can select the mask go to your properties panel you can jump into select and mask here and if that's your preferred tool you can go in with something like the polygonal lasso tool and start selecting between the fingers slowly but surely and fill that stuff with black in the layer mask to hide that old white background you can just straight up use the brush tool and you take your tablet and just manually you know scratch it all away whatever you're most comfortable with go ahead and do that the point is you want to get a pretty decent selection of your subject you want to make sure you get rid of as much of that kind of fringing and color and light that's coming in from the original scene if we add a solid color a fill layer here and we just do something that's kind of uh muted just drag it beneath our astronaut we can see that this select object has done a pretty good job right we still have stuff to clean up the boot's got to come back over here but it's a layer mask so we can always paint that stuff back in but it's done a lot of the work for us now i'm not going to do all of it here because like i said it's not a tutorial on selections um but hey that's step number two is getting a good selection of the object which you're adding to your image right we're adding the astronaut to the desert we want a good selection of our astronaut all right so this brings us to step number three and the third step is going to be all about direction of light so we have our astronaut here we look at our desert background and here's what i notice right let's just let me uh grab a blue color here that you guys can see i'm just drawing with the line tool uh the the shadows are down over here so we know that the sun is somewhere up there in the sky blasting across our background this way well if we look at our astronaut the light is coming in from over here right it's hitting the front side of him from this direction over here so at first glance these two images of course not very compatible well i'm actually going to get out of this image of the astronaut i'm going to go to the properly extracted one once i've extracted him and i brightened up the little visor and everything correcting this is very simple for an image like this hit command or control t right click and just say hey flip vertical we're going to go ahead and commit that and i can even grab him and drag him over into our background if i wanted to but the point is at this point i don't know why i didn't drag him over but at this point the light is roughly coming from the same direction both for our object we're adding to the image and the background we certainly don't have major conflicts in our light so direction of light is very very important when you are considering your image again you uh if you have something like this scene right here this scene does not have a crazy amount of directional light sure maybe you have these street lights that are little pops of light but they're not doing the majority of the lighting so if we were to bring our astronaut into here we could still make it work we would just need to reduce the level of those highlights on his uh space suit to make him look a little bit more like he's being lit from all sides so that's just something to take into consideration direction of light is step number three and that brings us to the fourth thing that i like to consider and that is the perspective of both your background and the thing you're looking to add to it um and finding the horizon this is going to help with proper positioning helping your objects to look somewhat normal so let's take a look at how to find the horizon well first and foremost in a scene like this here that we're looking at uh the horizon is uh relatively easy to find because it's it's kind of right there right it's it's a little below where the tops of these hills are right right about there is probably where the horizon is the horizon is kind of at your eye line right where anything below it is you have to look down a little bit anything above it is you have to look up a little bit there's the horizon line but this is kind of an easy image what about the astronaut where's the horizon in that image and how can we match those horizons up if we don't know where the horizon in the astronaut image is well the horizon for our astronaut is probably about i well it's not about eye level it is eye level but we got to find out where is eye level for the astronaut well the camera's kind of pointing directly at his waist so the camera for this photo was probably i don't know 36 inches off the ground or so that right there is probably the horizon so what i could do is i would then drag my astronaut with horizon line into my image i'll just delete the extra astronaut because we don't need him right now the astronaut and the horizon line they're going to be sort of joined at the hip no pun intended based on where the horizon line is but they're going to be sort of joined together because as we size the astronaut we want it to size down to where the horizon is what do i mean by that well let's zoom in just a little bit all right i've got the horizon for the astronaut and the astronaut selected the horizon of the background is on a different layer now that horizon for the background is a bit of a guess i could get a more exact and proper horizon if i took the leading lines off this truck i'll show you how to do that in just a second um but we're just we're kind of winging it here a little bit i'm going to zoom in here and i've got both the horizon for the astronaut and the astronaut selected i'll grab my move tool i'm going to move them just so the horizon kind of lines up just like that cool now i know i want his feet in the image because i want this to be the most challenging kind of composite where you have to have the feet you got to build the shadows and make it look right all that kind of stuff so i'm going to hit command or control t and we're going to transform both the astronaut and the horizon line together now i don't know if you can see it there's this little center anchor point well that anchor point we want that to be on the horizon line doesn't really matter where on the horizon line just on the horizon line and we're going to hold down shift and option that's shift and alt on a windows computer and then we're just going to kind of size him down a little bit and as long as that horizon stays lined up uh no matter where we put him he should look like he belongs there he doesn't look wildly out of place if we get rid of those lines so he can go right there at this point the only thing you're playing with is sizing is he too big is he too small and that's going to change a lot figuring out sizing hat you have to find those perspective lines and draw perspective lines back to the horizon then you can sort of see exactly where in your composite your object should be that would be an entirely separate tutorial because that takes a lot of time already we're spending a little bit of time talking about this horizon thing let me show you how to find your horizon uh in another photo where you don't see the horizon just a great little uh trick to have in your back pocket so we've got this image here it's an outdoor image of this guy let's say we wanted to put our astronaut in here somewhere well where can we put him well check this out here's why this is so important right i'm going to turn the astronaut's horizon line back on let's drag him over into this image and let's say we wanted to put him up here on the landing where the runner is well he looks totally out of place a he's too small but b look at his feet it that does not look right at all so how do we correct this and how do we find where the horizon line is to at least begin making him look like he belongs well this image is relatively easy because we've got all these beautiful long leading lines you really only need two leading lines but we've got a number of them here because all these steps we need to draw these leading lines off out into the distance so we need to expand our image out to the left we're going to do that using the crop tool i'm just going to pull this out to the left kind of like that you make it as big as you want and what we'll do grab our line tool again and again we're just doesn't have to be perfect we're just getting it close enough i'm creating a new layer here because i'm just drawing with pixels here with my line tool and i'm going to begin here with this step i'm going to start here drag along line out that follows that step right you can see that blue line just follows the step great and then let's do this second step here so we're gonna take this line out and boom right there along the step so we've got those two leading lines you could do it with the third one as well doesn't really matter you need to where these two lines intersect that's your vanishing point or that's one of the vanishing points of the image well the vanishing point lives on the horizon so that's where a horizon is so you can then draw another line you could bring up your rulers command or control r just drag a ruler or a guide i'm sorry drag a guide out of the ruler and drop it right there there is our horizon i'm going to hide the rulers again with that command or control r i can get rid of my vanishing point lines i will grab the crop tool again and i'm just going to pull the image back in there we go cool so we know that that's our horizon well now we're starting to see why the astronaut looks so wacky because the horizon is way up there well what happens if we select the horizon in the astronaut and bring him down down here to where the horizons line up all of a sudden hey look at that he could be standing on that step of course he looks way too small but look at his feet they look natural now they look like they could in fact be standing on that step whereas on that top step they looked totally out of place so of course he would be you know like a little child in an astronaut costume if this were the case but that's the importance of finding that horizon line you can really correct a lot of issues where you're pulling your hair out wondering what's going on why doesn't it look right well a lot of times it's because the perspective is not quite right if you find the horizon line and work off the horizon line to help align your objects a little bit better you're gonna really up the production value or the post-production value maybe i should say of your composite images all right i'm gonna close this and get out of this let's get down to business here we're gonna talk about making this thing work here in the desert i think i'm going to make our astronaut a little bit bigger because because i like that and i'm going to bump him up just just a little bit which means i'm going to size him down a little i'm going to make him just off the horizon so he's going to be a little higher than technically he probably should be but this is an art this is not a science i mean it is kind of a science but we're being artistic with it all right so let's talk about the lighting this is step number five correcting the lighting and the contrast if your lighting and contrast aren't right the image is never quite going to look right because it's just again going to look out of place now obviously you're looking at this saying he's super blue he doesn't look right that's the color we're going to worry about the lighting first we'll get to the color later so here's what i like to do sometimes i like to name my layers but i will add a black and white adjustment layer on top of this just gets rid of all the color obviously and allows me to just focus on the brightness values and the difference of brightness values and contrast look at how low contrast this truck is it's a uh a big part of the background scene it should be if it's going to be very contrasty it should be really contrasting but it's not that contrasty contrast that or compare that against our astronaut who has a lot of contrast um also one of the quick things to do is look at the highlight portion of your subject right like up here on the shoulder this is the brightest part of our astronaut getup well the brightest part of like the side of the pickup truck here is nowhere near as bright so we need we know we need to tone those highlights down in terms of brightness so let's do that you can use levels you can use curves you might be able to use brightness contrast but levels or curves are going to be much better i like curves because it's just the most powerful so add a curves adjustment layer beneath your black and white adjustment layer and then hit this little icon down here it's going to clip the curves layer to the layer beneath it so our curves adjustment layer only attacks our astronaut all right up here in the curves adjustment layer we're going to grab the white point and we're going to drag down all right we're going to drag down until the brightness of those highlights is matching a lot more the brightness of that pickup truck and now the shadowy underside of the pickup truck is much less dark than the very darkest parts of our astronaut so let's boost the black point a little bit you want to be careful with boosting the black point too much because you'll really start to wash the object out and that just usually looks frankly bad so we'll we'll boost the black point and then we're going to add a point to our curve and pull down a little bit to darken him uh it's going to introduce a little bit of contrast back into it but i think it really works here maybe i'll darken the light parts of it a little bit more too and i've noticed just as a general rule it depends on the composite ultimately but i've noticed as a general rule if you make your subject what appears to be a little bit too dark just a little bit it's better on a little too dark uh than a little too bright it's just gonna it just seems to work better that way i don't i don't know i'm sure there's some reason behind it i don't really know why i just know that that's what i've noticed so we can get rid of our black and white adjustment layer now so we select that and delete it and here's before we applied our curves here's after so we've worked on the brightness and the contrast using that levels adjustment of course if you need to you can apply multiple levels or curves adjustment layers depending on what you're getting and what you're working with you don't just need to stick with one stack them up if you have to you have the flexibility and availability to do that but we're going to move along here to working on the saturation now to correct saturation we're going to create what is called a saturation mask we do that using the selective color adjustment layer here right there now what we're going to do is take all of our colors and we're going to change the black slider and then we're going to take all of the tones the whites neutrals and blacks and change the black slider as well now i've saved my saturation mask as a preset so i'm just going to select that and i'm going to show you what it's done what it's done for all the colors it's on the same thing it's reduce the black slider to negative 100 see if i go to cyan negative 100 magentas negative 100 but then if i go to the tones white's neutrals and blacks we boost the black slider to plus 100 we have it set to absolute and then i've gone ahead and just saved this as a preset you can do that by hitting the little hamburger menu here and just choosing save selective color preset saves a lot of time especially for something like that saturation mask which just has a lot of sliders you're clicking and dragging all over the place so that's a saturation mask but what are we looking at here the image immediately looks terrible and uh what's going on well obviously this is not the effect this is just giving us information and what it's telling us is all the bright stuff the brighter any of these tones are the more saturated they are and the darker any of these tones are the less saturated they are so sure enough all the white clouds and the white of our astronaut suit they make up the darkest parts of the image and they should because they've got the least color in them um but how can we use this well you have to remember here we are compositing in an object or a person in this case who's wearing a white spacesuit it inherently is not going to be that saturated right however there still are saturation adjustments a lot of this is going to be just sort of steamrolled by color adjustments that we make because this white suit is going to be absorbing a lot of the desert floor beiges and orangey tones but it's still important that we try to make the saturation match a little bit if for nothing else just for this video and the exercise of it so how do we do that well what i like to do generally speaking is use a hue saturation adjustment layer so we add that hue saturation adjustment layer we add this below our selective color adjustment layer add that hue saturation adjustment layer hit this little icon down here to clip it to the layer below by the way the hotkey for that is command command option g that's command alt or control alt g i'm sorry on the pc so we're just clipping this through and then you can if you have a specific color like it's a red box you're placing in your scene maybe you just want to go to the reds and work on the reds i'll just work with master here and say like hey we want to make him more saturated well obviously that's going to look crazy because we can just tell it looks totally out of place way too much saturation so i'll just bring the saturation up a little bit until he looks like he fits a little bit better and what does that mean i don't know you just kind of know it when you see it again it's in art right we're we're cooking here we're not baking uh if i shut off the selective color adjustment layer it doesn't really look like we did much right if i shut it off and turn on that hue saturation layer okay really what needs to happen is a lot of these blues need to be made much more orange but we've established our saturation layer this is particularly useful if you uh if you're compositing in someone who's wearing muted tones if they're too saturated or not saturated enough stuff like that is extremely noticeable and will wreck the continuity of your entire composite image so just bear that in mind the saturation is really important but it really depends on the object of just how important it is so in this case we can always come back later and reduce the opacity or adjust our hue saturation adjustment layer after the fact all right let's select that selective color layer and get rid of it we're on to number seven and that is correcting the colors how do we correct the colors well the correcting of the colors is a bit of a multi-step process it's a little bit of a labor of love it's different with literally every image every subject you place every background you place that subject in because light and color are reflecting and interacting in different ways everywhere right like we have to take into consideration the fact that the sun is coming down from the top right of this image it's going to be bouncing off this desert floor and heading off in a multitude of directions kicking back light and color into the legs of this astronaut and the closer those legs are to the ground slightly the more intense that color will be that that yellowish orange dusty color so how do we begin this process well here's how i like to begin the process i go layer i go new fill layer solid color and you can name it anything you like and we're going to set the hue to zero the saturation is zero and the brightness to fifty percent it's a fifty percent gray and we're going to change the blend mode here to luminosity so luminosity is going to show us the color differences sometimes if you can't see a lot of color difference it is worth your while to add a vibrance adjustment layer beneath that gray color fill and just pump that saturation way up it'll exacer exacerbate it'll exaggerate i should say the difference is in color of course it's going to nuke your image and make it look crazy but it's just here that we're just gathering data with these uh adjustment layers that we're setting up so how do we attack this image now right all this blue in the astronaut when there should be a lot more orange well we go back to our trusty friend the curves so i'm going to select this hue saturation layer these clipped adjustment layers are affecting the astronaut and getting our initial base color and a composite set here we're going to go ahead and add a curves adjustment layer and we're going to clip it as we've done and at this point you've got your rgb line but if you select rgb you have three color channels red green and blue well when we look at our image the obvious issue is there's too much blue so let's go down to the blue channel if i pull up we introduce a lot more blue but if i pull down we take some of that blue away now the opposite of the color blue is yellow so you can see as we take blue away we are in fact introducing a lot of yellow it's interacting with some of the green and it looks very yellow and green we could go to the green channel and say hey all right take some of that green away and now we're starting to get a pretty orangey looking thing where just the really extreme highlights are still blue in fact if i shut these off you can see the changes that we're making now it's far too extreme but i'm just using this as an example let's turn that stuff back on let's go back to our curves adjustment layer we'll go back to the green channel i'm going to select that point we added just drag it off into the ether and let it go it'll it'll destroy that point we're going to go back to blues here i'm going to drag that point off as well because we're really interested in the brightest parts first so let's just use the white point here and drag and say let's get some of the blues out of the white point right now it looks very green cyanish so let's go back to the red channel red the opposite of the color red is cyan so if there's too much cyan you add red and therefore reduce the cyan so if we grab the white point of the red and we pull that up it's going to make some of that cyan go away look at that hey it's like magic now it looks like there's a little bit too much magenta pinkish looking color and green and magenta are opposites so if we add a little bit of green to those highlights we should help combat some of that and ultimately i think we're going to go back to the blue channel and just pull down on the blues in the the upper part of that image and then let's shut off our stuff and see what we've done so we've made our initial color change and it's done a lot now this is too much because unless the sun is really low in the sky and you're getting like sunlight through the majority of the atmosphere however that works when the sun really intensifies in color toward the end of the day the the color is not going to be that yellow so we know that we've gone a bit too far so we can go back to that blue uh that blue channel in our curves we can say hey look take some of that yellow out of the highlights just kind of chill out there a little bit we can do that we can do it kind of like that there might be a little bit too much red in there as well so we'll push the reds back a little so hey settle down and as we do that then we realize there's too much green in there so we push back on the green a little bit and something like that is a bit better now there's still too much color i think the way to really affix this is with another hue saturation adjustment layer we've entered full fledge into the multi-step process of adjusting colors because here's the thing about this astronaut there's still way too much blue here i want to just get rid of all that blue and then the yellows are a bit too intense so we do want some of that yellowy orangey color to be there but like look at how muted the tannish color looks on the side of the truck compared to the highlights of our astronaut so we want to try to bring that a little bit closer together so let's add a hue saturation adjustment layer clip it to the stack and first thing we're going to do is go over to cyans and reduce the saturation maybe like negative 50 and then go over to blues and reduce the saturation i don't know quite a bit uh in fact i'm going to pull this more into the pinks you can see there's the little slider there so you can control how much of the blues are being attacked as you can see really get all those blues and all that cyan type color and we can see before and after right we just suck all of that blueness out of the side of the astronaut right do we like the total absence of color it's better than the blue but it could be better i suppose and then we'll go up to yellows and we're just going to say hey look just just chill out on the yellows a little bit it'll be a quick and easy way to just kind of tone down the yellows and just make the astronaut's color a bit more reserved now if you've noticed here his uh face shield the visor whatever it is the helmet uh it just has this kind of nasty grungy looking color to it now that's coming from our curves color adjustment layer right we don't like that so we want to mask that out so you can do this any number of ways i'm just going to grab my brush tool and do this kind of quick and dirty i'm going to right click we want a little bit of hardness we're going to paint with our foreground color set to black and i'm not even going to use my tablet i'm just going to go through and paint through and get rid of that yellowish tint okay let's move along here to step number eight as we begin our process it still looks like a lot needs to be done and a lot does still need to be done that's how important these final few steps are going to be and this is a really really important step creating shadows and creating the absorption of light in your model your automobile your object whatever it is that you're compositing in so let's begin here by continuing to adjust the color of him uh here's what i want to do we are going to use him as a mask and we're going to just select a color from the ground around him so i'll grab my eyedropper tool you could do a point sample you could do something like a 31 by 31 average right so you get a really average color you see how it's just giving me white as the color i'm selecting that's because we have the layer mask for the hue saturation layer selected if we select the icon for hue saturation we can now actually select the color hey that's useful let's go ahead and just get one of those tans cool we're going to command or control click on our astronaut right because he's going to be our initial mask and we're going to go layer another solid color fill layer bing and we will say ok and we can see it just fills him with that kind of tan color great we're going to say all right now we're going to set this layer to the blend mode color very very strong the color we're going to reduce the opacity down down maybe like to 30 or 40 something like that and then i'm going to select that layer that layer mask i'm sorry we're going to grab our brush tool here's where it's helpful if you have some kind of tablet or something like that we're going to right click with the brush even if you don't you can still do it i don't know why i said that it just it's convenient i suppose we're gonna go with a pretty big soft edge brush here maybe five or six hundred pixels as soft as we can make it and we are going to paint hit the letter d and then the letter x to restore the defaults for our foreground and background color and then x just swaps foreground background we want to be painting with the color black and we're going to go in here and we're going to paint away we can zoom in a little bit in fact we just want to paint away some of the stuff here that's out on the other side of his body where that sunlight should still be coming through and i want the visor still to be kind of blue reflecting some of that blue from the sky things like that remember the sun uh is it's warm light it's difficult to explain if you don't understand kelvins it's warm light so the color of the light looks a little cooler again google it if you don't quite understand it it's a little bit frankly i don't quite even understand it but i just know that's the way it works um so we're going to just do that and that helps a lot in terms of changing the color helping him to begin blend blending in and absorbing just the general ambient color that you would expect a model to be absorbing uh if you were standing here in fact i'm going to get rid of some of this orangey color around his visor and that's pretty cool maybe we could zoom in a little some of the equipment he has maybe reduce the opacity of our brush down to like around 40 50 percent something like that so we're just doing a little bit more uh dabbing away of some of that orange-ness uh all right let's begin working on his feet and making the shadow really work down here at the bottom of the image so how do we do this we need to create a series of shadows that all kind of work together now an image like this thankfully we have one light source and it's going to be the sun up in the sky way up over here but to kind of understand how shadow works um like if we zoom in over here on the truck okay there's a shadow it's kind of soft it's kind of hard how do we know how hard or soft our shadow should be well let me just draw for you a quick example of how this sort of works right let's say here we have two objects let's just create two balls so we've got a big ball here and then we've got a small ball right up here and this ball up here is our light source right and it's shining down on this ball and casting some kind of shadow on the floor well how do we know where our shadow should be well here's how this works let's grab the line tool again and let me draw for you so we draw from the edges of the light down to the ground right the edge of the light across the edge of the object on either side right that's the primary shadow there's technical terms for all this you know the inverse law of proportion or something i forget i forget exactly what everything is called but you have from the edges of the light to the edges of the object right but shadows have soft edges how do i know how soft the edge should be well you draw from the edge of the light to the opposite edge of the object and there you have the width of your the blur on the edge of your shadow so in theory for something like this ball we would have a shadow that's pretty hard right here in this area and then from the edges of this out to the the furthest arrows on the left and right side it would gradually be blurring out to nothing right so you can see that is roughly how that would work and maybe it would appear a little bit better if i just filled it with black right as if that was the shadow for this ball from that tiny little light source so that is what we're kind of working with and the sun probably appears to be roughly that size up in the sky it's just way up out over here somewhere so we want to try to draw some rough lines and you know i don't know let's see how close we can get to what's going on here all right i'm gonna create a new layer here because we're just making lines uh the sun appears to be if we look at where the shadow is cast the sun the edge of this pickup truck object is probably the far side of the cab so if the sun is way out over here it's cutting across the cab and landing over here so that's not quite right because that's like the edge of the shadow our arrowhead should be somewhere more like here so what that means is the sun is probably more like up here right yeah the sun is probably really up over here near like the edge of where our file tab is in photoshop so that's probably about where the sun is all right let me delete those arrows let's assume that that's the position of the sun so what we'd have to do now is draw some of those lines for our astronaut now you're playing with different angles in space because we're no longer dealing with just a light pointing straight down on a ball we have to kind of guess what edge would the sun from up over there in the sky hit on the astronaut well the answer i think is probably the edge of his backpack so the the shadow should probably go to there and then if we assume that the sun's about that size the shadow would also come out here to the back of his hand and be somewhere right around there that would be about the middle uh or the the edge of the harshest part of the shadow certainly by out here the shadow should be falling off a lot all right so if we begin up here again and we draw to what would be the other side of the object not much blur on the front side of the shadow right just between kind of those two lines or that 15 pixels something like that and then if we were to draw from the other side of the sun across we have a much greater amount of blur that would be on the back side of the shadow and of course that makes sense right because if the the shadow is coming down from the sky you're going to have much more blur out in this area of your shadow now my lines are they perfect no i'm sure they're not but this gives us a better idea and we're gonna save this here we're gonna use this as a general rule we're gonna break it um but we at least have an idea of where our shadow should be so let's come back down here below the astronaut i'm going to begin by selecting the astronaut command or control and let's create a layer beneath the astronaut but above the background and we're going to call this shadow one and then we will fill this with well we can probably just go ahead and steal the color of the shadow underneath our pickup truck here so we'll go ahead and take that really dark beige color we're going to fill our shadow shape option backspace or option delete on the mac to be alt backspace on the pc command or control d to deselect and if i move the shadow around we now have this shadow so now begins the process of just cr working to create a shape that looks like the shadow you of course you could get it exactly perfect and every limb should be bent this way and that way you could probably use puppet warp to do that we're not going to do that we're going to go a little bit faster here with this we're going to hit command or control t and we are going to flatten this out a little bit i'm going to right click i'm going to choose skew probably to begin with let's bring this way over here let's let's skew this a little bit this way i'm going to try to line up his feet a little bit um they don't have to be perfect and then i'll probably take distort here and just bring this down more in line with where i think it ought to be on the ground right so we would take this shadow kind of like that and probably to lay it down even a little bit more than that make it a little bit bigger than you think it should be because we can always blur it we can always constrict it and um for the most part as long as there's not a an extremely defining feature the shadow is going to look about right and about right is i'll be happy with about right let me shut off my top layer here with these guides and we can see there's areas of shadow here probably between his legs that would need to be expanded or changed and in fact we could go in and do that right now on the shadow layer we can just grab our eraser tool why are you masking this is actually one area where i use the eraser tool i'm going to right click i'm going to increase the hardness quite a bit and make the brush a bit smaller you can just right click change the size and i'm going to see there's a little bit of shadow sticking out over there i'm going to get rid of that i'm going to back this pointy part of the shadow off over there and then i'll take my polygonal lasso tool and i'm just going to draw a line across make sure i have the polygonal lasso tool and i'm going to draw a line across to the shoe kind of like that i'm just going to fill in these parts of the shadow that probably should be filled in right and then option delete they'll be alt backspace on the pc something like that is probably about where the shadow would be again we haven't masked it we haven't blurted any of that business uh the shadow is way too big right now um but that's fine we're just playing with it and by the way when you look at it and see it's way too big that lets me know my lines for the sun are off right may the sun maybe is up more over here so maybe the shadow should be cut off maybe halfway closer than than it appears to be based on these lines all right so let's take this this is now going to be our base let's hit command or control j to duplicate it we're going to take this original one and we're just going to uh blur it so we're going to go filter blur gaussian blur and uh you can kind of just fuss with it a little bit 20 actually might work pretty well what is 15 remember it's a pretty sunny day so there's not a lot of blur that we've got going on out in our image um so maybe even something like 10 would work better okay and then we will take this and we're going to try setting these to a number of different things maybe we'll go with soft light to begin with probably soft light to begin with and then we'll take our second shadow here which is much more hard edged and we can look at what does multiply look like uh maybe soft light for this as well how does that look looks pretty good we can handle the color we'll fix the saturation level in just a second that's kind of cool and then you would reduce the opacity begin working to change things a little bit uh we still need to do a bit of work with the shadow around his boots that's totally fine pretty easy to do we'll do that in just a second cool i kind of like that let's duplicate this top shadow layer command or control j and we're going to go ahead and say hey we're going to set you to the blend mode of saturation and we're going to blur you a bit just to kind of cover this whole area where the shadow is and we can reduce the opacity until the color looks natural so by setting it to the blend mode saturation it just forces the color to match the saturation of the color in that layer i.e that brownish color that we used so we don't get that really extreme orangey color alright nice we're going to select all three shadow layers by selecting the top one hold down shift select the bottom one hit command or control g to group them together we can call this shadow or whatever we want to call it and we can begin now the process of just masking away the bit of the shadow that really is too much so let's apply a layer mask to this entire group so they'll hit the layer mask icon there grab your brush tool make the brush really big so again we're going to go up in size and then just click a couple times to begin masking away the bit of the shadow that probably shouldn't really be there right something like so and then of course you can paint some of it back in if need be all right now the shadow is not intense enough okay that's great good to know i mean it's not great but we've got the information now so what i'm going to do is grab the middle shadow that's the one set to the softer light blend mode hit command or control j to duplicate it all right pretty cool let's go with the really blurry one again command or control j to duplicate that okay not bad we need to boost up the saturation control of our saturation layer here to make sure that that's looking right looks okay there's a little bit of red fringing around the edges because we blurred that but the front edge of the shadow here is a little bit too straight for my taste so i'm going to go to either the salt one of these soft light layers and i'm just going to try blurring it a little bit so filter blur gaussian blur and yeah 10 pixels actually might be a bit much let's go like six something like that all right that's cool all right and now we just need to control this whole thing a little bit more and by the way i'll show you another thing we can do here with the shadow um let's uh go back into our our mask here and let's just paint away the shadow a little bit more there's just too much too much of the shadow something like so let me size it down a little bit i really don't mind the shadow coming toward the front i think that kind of looks a little bit better up here in the front uh but it can't be it can't be stronger out here than it is close to our astronaut that is definitely not going to look right so something like that um now obviously where his boots meet the ground is still kind of messy and it's still just too red so here's what we're going to do we're going to just go ahead and sort of blast the whole layer group we're going to apply a hue saturation adjustment layer and we can hit the clip and just clip the hue saturation adjustment layer to the entire layer group and we'll say hey look just calm down on that saturation there just or we could specifically target the reds and say hey just take some of those reds settle them down maybe make them a little bit more orange so they they just match with the dirt a little bit more something like so like that and then we can even go in and we can say hey let's increase the power of that shadow a little bit something like that now another little trick to just immediately help blend this in is to take away the very hard edge of something like his boots so we could go to that astronaut layer add a layer mask you want to be careful doing this because you don't want to destroy the integrity of your image either we're going to right click here and we're going to just make the size of quite a bit smaller and we're going to increase the hardness a little bit but we still want it to be kind of soft we're going to set our foreground color to black and i'm going to make the brush a little smaller and then we would just come through here and just it doesn't even have to be perfect just kind of having a rough roughed up edge that's what you would kind of expect to see something like that can really help blend those feet right into the image in a way that's much more natural so there we've created the shadow for his feet is it perfect no do i want to spend more time on it yeah but i always want to spend more time on it we spent a lot of time on it let's talk about creating and working with the shadows and absorbed light on the body of the astronaut as well i like to do this using a it's really a dodge and burn method create two curves adjustment layers set the top one to the blend mode screen select the layer mask hit command or control i that just fills that layer mask with black select the bottom curves layer and set it to the blend mode multiply this of course will be our shadows we will select the layer mask hit command or control i as well on that and we can zoom in here and begin painting in some shadows so i will grab my brush tool again and make it a little bit bigger again just right click and make it a little bit bigger adjust the hardness we don't want it to be very hard at all and we're going to reduce the opacity of this down to like 10 15 percent something like that we're painting with white here and we know that down here as he gets closer to the inside of where the shadow is cast on this leg for instance it should be darker right it should be darker in there on the inside of that boot it should be darker things like that now part of the issue of what we just did i'm going to refill the entire layer with a black to hide all of that is we're dot or we're burning out here on the image right see how we're making the ground look dark we don't want that we only want these shadows to be cast on the astronaut well it's pretty easy fix here just command or control click on the astronaut load him as a selection and then come back to that curves layer and now paint your shadows in and they will be perfectly constrained to just in this case the boots i'm going to zoom out just a touch here and then just go over everything that you think ought to be a little bit different maybe darker on the side of his body you can begin kind of playing use a really really big brush reduce the opacity even more and just fade off that highlight a little bit don't go crazy with it because you still want it to look realistic right the bottoms of his hands maybe right they're going to be a little bit darker than that outer palm or not the outer palm the palm is the inner part of the hand right the the back of the hand is going to be lit by the sun this side of the hose would be a little bit darker so just things like that try to pay attention to stuff like that the inner side of that hose and the front side of the hose the back side of the hand is going to be darker than the front side the underside of the hand should have some shadow all sorts of things like that right the bottom of that strap maybe the bottom of our camera actually really should have a little bit of an orangey light being cast up from the ground um but you can see there we just added some shadow to him and if i take it off there it is before and if i put it back on there it is after and of course because it's a curves adjustment layer you can just adjust the adjust the opacity until it looks just perfect and then we would do the same thing with the the uh dodging layer here i'm not going to spend a ton of time on it but i would just make the brush really small and say like hey we want to really just kick up that highlight and kick up this highlight i would again load him as a selection but again i'm not going to fuss with all of this too too much because we got to get on to bigger and better things here and wrap this tutorial up here all right let's do one more thing with the foot shadow and then one more thing with that actual absorption of color the edge lighting or the edge color of our object which are two really really important things the first thing i like to do is create like a big soft shadow at the base i just tend to notice it it just helps um so i'm gonna do this actually above the astronaut i think i'm gonna grab a uh the elliptical marquee tool we're gonna create a new layer up here we're gonna call this uh shadow big or soft or whatever i don't know hold down shift and just draw a big circle or a big ellipse and we're going to fill it with let's fill it with that dark brownish color right so we'll select that option delete alt backspace alt backspace on the pc command or control d to deselect now we're going to go filter blur gaussian blur and we're going to blur this a bit maybe like let's go 75 pixels it's going to depend on the size of your image you might want to go more you might want to go less i'm going to go 100 pixels here that's cool now i made this because now we're going to free transform this circle and it's going to allow this blurred shape to kind of lay flat or at least give the appearance of laying flat command or control t let's just smush this down a little bit we're going to stretch it out a touch i'm going to bring this over here and put it around around the base of the feet maybe we'll expand it out a little bit again we're just looking to add what would be general shadowy ness and this should help our shadow at the base of the boots as well we're going to set this to the blend mode multiply and we're going to reduce the opacity down quite a bit i mean it'll be down in the 20s or something like that somewhere right around there and if it if it doesn't look right you can always paint away little bits of it i think i'm going to leave that all right let's get rid of what's this layer here oh those are our sun lines let's just grab these top three layers and get rid of them we don't need them anymore what we're going to do now is paint in some of the edge lighting now the edge lighting you can do a number of different ways you can use a hue saturation layer and apply color that way that can then be changed what i tend to like to do is just use color fill layers so i would sample again sample off the color of the background make sure you have not the layer mask selected and grab that you know whatever color and then just go and say yeah give me a solid color layer cool hit okay fill the mask with black and then we would go in and paint in color wherever it needs to be now i'm going to shift click this mask and we're going to try setting this to like what is soft light soft light probably is going to work best for us i'll shift click the mask again grab my brush tool and we're going to slowly paint in here and this is where you really want your opacity to be pretty low i'll probably set it to like 15. we're going to paint with our foreground color set to white and you're just going to begin softly dabbing in what would be kind of this orangey color right now again i made that same mistake where i did not select my astronaut first so let's command or control click our astronaut so we're just painting the edge light on him and the the thing is you don't want to go and wholesale paint around all the edges you have to remember this light is going to be reflecting up from the ground so any type of surface that would be absorbing a little bit of light from the ground should probably have just a touch of orange added to it right like the bottom of our little camera box thing here and this kind of thing if you go around and you do several passes of this type of edge color this makes a massive difference in terms of all of the sudden taking your object and just saying oh yeah now it looks like it belongs in fact i'm going to just i'm going to bump a big dab of this orangey color into here just because i think it looks i don't know i just think it looks right so something like that and you can go around with multiple colors you could go with blue and add a little a little bit of blue over spill onto the top part of the helmet and the visor as if it was coming down from the sky things like that are always kind of a fun little touch but yeah that's gonna be our step eight considering the shadows and the absorbed light and then step nine is kind of a little bit more of the same it's just going and tweaking that stuff so like if i were to if i were dropping the astronaut into this photo right we had this belgium photo earlier i would want to pay specific note to these sort of spotlights if you will in the background and what i would be doing is saying like hey there should definitely be more like orange in this one specific area because an orange light is bumping into him uh one other thing we could do here is pay a little bit more attention to the shadows and the darkness at the bottom of the pant legs so maybe we'll just do that here let's load the astronaut up let's go ahead and create another curves adjustment layer let's just set this to multiply right out of the gate maybe we would even take the white point and just knock it down just to kill off some of that contrast maybe boost a little bit of the shadows just to kill off that contrast we're going to select that uh the mask associated with the adjustment layer to boost that opacity back to 100 we're going to paint with black we're just going to get rid of all the stuff up here above the waist we know we don't want that to be darker and then the stuff below the waist we're going to reduce the opacity of this brush tool back down to like i don't know 20-ish percent and just kind of mask it until it looks right what is right i don't know but i'm just going to kind of play with it until it looks about right and then maybe just reduce the opacity reduce the opacity reduce the opacity there a little bit more kind of something like that so we're just darkening up the base a little bit more and focusing on the shadow side as well just to help build out the shadow you could also paint like a little bit of shadow in around the feet uh things like that can all be really really helpful for this final step uh in terms of the shadow and things like that um and that's what you want to do it's just creating those edge lights where they're needed creating the stuff that's going to help sell him in the scene right like maybe what we should do is create an edge light along here that would really uh indicate the sun beating down on this side of his body we're not going to do it because this tutorial is long enough but this is where you would consider things like that maybe there's too much blue in the visor maybe the visor needs to be a little brighter maybe add a little sparkle to the camera lens nothing crazy but just like a little highlight of some sort all those type of things can be done here at this point so all these edge lighting and color adjustments these final ones at least it's a bit of a labor of love you just got to take your time and go over it and do it i've taken a bit of time to show it here in the video um i'm really not liking the way the front of those boots are looking i think i want to reduce the opacity of that multiply layer even more something like that is cool and maybe what we'll do it's a little bit of a cheat and it's definitely not something you want to do all that with all of your images but we'll just try it here um well you know what this will be step 10 here let's move on to step 10. this can be uh wrapped up in step 10 and that's just our final light and color and grain and sharpness adjustments uh kind of the global adjustments if you will uh maybe you don't want to make any global adjustments you want your image to be as it is and you're looking at it and saying hey maybe my astronaut's a little bit too dark all right you go back to our brightness adjustment just reduce that layer opacity a little bit right there we go we've brightened them up maybe that does look better maybe it does maybe we want to reduce some of the saturation in there right hey how does that look not too bad not too bad at all uh you can begin making those kind of changes but one of the other changes i want to try making or explore here is using a gradient fill layer so let's go new fill layer gradient and this is going to be on top of everything we can go with whatever i mean we could go with a color of the foreground big old gradient editor here we could go i'm gonna i think i'm gonna go for foreground to transparent for sure and you could change your foreground color if you want to be black whatever mine happens to be a tan we can make a tan color work uh so i'm gonna hit okay uh and then we're gonna hit ok and i'm going to set the blend mode of this gradient to multiply well maybe overlay soft light now we're going to go multiply here let's double click on our gradient uh adjustment layer again and i grabbed the move tool by the way so now i can actually drag the gradient and i'm just going to drag it down until it's not really affecting the sky so we're just kind of darkening up the foreground it's a little bit too much it it's blending a little bit but it's working in those shadows it's enriching the shadows too much so i want to flatten this how do i do that well we're going to use the blend if feature so i'm going to double click out here on the gradient fill layer and i'm going to use my blend if sliders here underlying layer if so if it's attacking the darks i want to just fade away from the darks so i'm going to alt click that handle split the handle and just drag it this way just until you see how the the shadowy parts of the image start to look a little bit less contrasty right there we go something like that is good and then we can just reduce the opacity down down around 50 60 and there's before and after we're just kind of adding that general effect all right so that's not too bad for all of your final adjustments here's what i found to be most helpful for me in my composites adjustment layers are your friend use the brush tool when you're working with the mask and just take the brush tool and set it to 10 opacity then whether you're adding or removing an effect you can do it very gradually and subtly and really blend everything together and it's like if i wanted to come down here and work on the shadow at his feet which admittedly does need work i can do that and i can spend time on it and tweak and adjust and say ah that's got to be a little darker or brighter or whatever it needs to be the one final thing that you may want to explore is clarity and sharpness and just kind of some underlying color grading type stuff so we can do things like hey give me a levels adjustment layer here let's kill off some contrast just in the scene overall maybe we'll try a color lookup table let's go with what is teal orange how does that look that's interesting right starts to look more like a movie set how does crisp warm look is that interesting kind of interesting as well maybe i would take both of these layers then you can select them both by shift-clicking to reduce the opacity of them start to blend them back to our original image a little bit you could merge all layers to a new layer command shift option e that's ctrl shift alt and the letter e on the pc and we could just call this layer grade or something like that i like to right click and convert it to a smart object you might not quite be able to see that so we'll go layer smart object convert to smart object that's going to allow us to go filter camera raw filter and then here in camera raw we can do all sorts of cool things i'm going to zoom to 100 just so we can really see what we're working on first and foremost i'm going to go to effects i'm going to add grain because grain just has this cohesiveness that it lends to your image it starts to pull everything together it doesn't need to be so much that it's noticeable but it does make quite a bit of a difference that's cool i'll go to basic and i'm going to just throw in a little bit of clarity to add some mid-tone punch maybe a bit of texture that's kind of cool maybe i'll warm the entire image up just a couple ticks something like so uh maybe we'll go down to detail and just throw a little sharpening on there i'm not gonna make it perfect here i don't want it to be too crazy but just a little bit of sharpening to just uh give a little bit of the edges of our details a little pop and then down here under calibration we can do some interesting stuff i'll set it back to fit so we can really see the whole image we can change the colors in our shadows probably influence the image with a little more magenta then we can look to see what the reds are affecting oh that's interesting what if we make the ground a little bit more yellow or what if we make it a little bit more red kind of interesting reduce the opacity a little bit that kind of looks cool what is the green doing the green is also affecting the ground what happens if we start swinging the green this way or that we probably want to make it a little more pink if we're doing that and then what is the blue doing oh the blue is kind of doing a lot of nice things but what if we just reduce the blue a little bit and what if we swing the blue yeah maybe just a little back toward the pinks something like so and then we can hit okay and you can see you're just kind of applying a final sharpening and grading effect to your composite image so let's just take a look at what we've done we began with our background we added our astronaut we changed a bunch of lighting and color with the astronaut we added a shadow right it's the shadow not perfect but it's something then we added additional shadowing and shading onto our astronaut we tweaked the color and the light of the astronaut a little bit more we darkened up the foreground of the image and just sort of helped pull it together a little bit then we began adding this overall grade to our image i still think the visor is probably a little bit too blue but we got to stop somewhere and that's where i'm going to have to stop this tutorial 10 steps on creating better composites in photoshop i hope you've enjoyed it you can take these steps you can apply them to literally any composite you are creating um this tutorial went way longer than i wanted it to um but i hope you've been able to stick it out till the end and you enjoyed checking out some of these features and go and create some composites of your own i've linked these adobe stock photos in the description of this video so you can grab these exact photos and follow along if you want um or you can use your own photos uh do whatever you like if you enjoy youtube if you enjoy these videos you want more photoshop tutorials you can subscribe to my channel that's cool if you do instagram you can see instagram stuff and behind the scenes type stuff on my instagram i just had to create a new one because my old one got hacked so we're trying to rebuild it that is what it is you can check out and find the link for that in the description to this video as well so for creating composites and a 10-step process from finding images that worked a direction of light and cutting out images and color and light and saturation and shadows and absorbed light and all the different things that we covered in this video and went over maybe we went over them too much i don't know ladies and gentlemen that's it get it got it good nathaniel dodson tutvid.com i'll catch you in the next [Music]

Channel: tutvid

Views: 933,127

Keywords: Photoshop Tutorial, Photo manipulation, Compositing with Photoshop, Blend Images, Create composite images, How to blend images, How to create a composite, tutvid

Id: g3qe4rDw1XU

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022