These are the tips, trick and secrets
that I wish I knew them when I was a beginner. If you’re not a beginner I’m pretty
sure there will be some interesting ones that will improve your workflow.
If you’re new here, I’m Oliver and I create architectural representation and visualization
videos, don’t forget to subscribe to not miss out on future content like this one.
Let’s not waste any of your time and dive in right into the list.
Alright so Initially I intended to make a list of 50 tips, tricks and secrets.
And I actually wrote all of those 50 items, but the video was getting to long! If you like
this one, and would like to see a part 2 of this video so that I can continue the list,
please let me know in the comments below.
First up, I’m pretty sure you’ve been using
the alpha channel in the wrong way.
This image usually comes with you render,
if not make sure to active it. Here’s how to correctly use it. Select all with Ctrl + A. Copy
with Ctrl + C. Then go to the channels tab and create a new channel. If you have RGB, Red, Green
and Blue here, which you should by default. The next one will come as alpha. Then simply paste
here the alpha image you just copied. And if you want to select the white, ctrl + click on the
thumbnail and finally work with it as usual.
If you click with ctrl in a mask
thumbnail it will select the mask content. Alt allows you to see what
has been drawn. Alt click again to go back to normal. And shift disable the
mask temporarily, which is very useful.
Now if you click with ctrl in a layer thumbnail,
it will select its content as you’d expect. But Alt and click will zoom into that layer, which can
be pretty handy to find what you’re looking for.
When you’re working with a low quality tree
that isn’t transparent, and you try to remove the white background or any
background to be honest. Sometimes there are those white pixels left in
the image. You can fix that or at least minimize it by going to layer > matting > defringe.
It doesn’t remove the white completely, but it can certainly clean a bit
of the edges if you’re in hurry.
This one is short, but pretty useful.
Hold Ctrl when clicking to create a new layer. That will create one below
the current one instead of above it. This is useful when you have a cutout and want
to create a layer to add shadows for example.
Now let’s say for example you rendered an
image that has a concrete precast wall or even a concrete flooring, but the material
didn’t come looking that great from the render. You can overlay a concrete texture on top, adjust
the perspective using the distort option, and then set the blend mode to multiply. Which will get
rid of the white pixels and only show black ones.
If the gray part of the texture is altering the
concrete look, you can rasterize it and use the levels adjustments to make it more contrasty,
making the gray turn into white so that it doesn’t show when you change to multiply blend mode.
Here I’m just doing a small section, but I often use this technique to give details
to all of the concrete or metal or any material in the image at once. There’s a tip later
in this video that will show you how.
On the same idea, you can
add imperfections to metal not only using the multiply blend mode, but the
screen blend mode to get rid of black pixels. Again, if the texture is
altering the overall look, use the levels adjustments to
turn gray pixels into black.
There’s an amazing feature in the move tool. It’s
called auto select. Leave it unchecked, and then whenever you’re working and want to select a layer
that you haven’t named or there are just too many over your layer’s tab that you don’t know which one
it is. Hold Ctrl with the selection tool, and the auto-select will be enabled and simply
click on the object. This is pretty useful.
Alt plus left click on the
visibility eye to isolate one layer, do what you got to do on that layer and Alt plus
left click again to go back and show all of it.
A pro tip I can give you is to master the
brush tool. It’s probably the most used tool in a post-production. The essential moves are:
with the brush tool selected, alt + right click left or right to increase or decrease the
size, and up and down to make it more hard or soft. Hold alt and you can eye drop a color.
It all about making your workflow faster.
Ok now let’s say you want to change the color of
a material in your image. Instead of manually selecting the object. Make sure to enable the
render elements in your renderer so that you get this type of image alongside with the final
rendered image. This colored image can drastically improve your workflow. Place the material ID below
the render. I usually leave it at the bottom of the layer stack, and make sure they are aligned
in your Photoshop file. Then using the magic want and in the actual material ID layer click on the
color you want to select. Pretty useful, right?
By the way this is the tip I was
talking about back then when we added more details to concrete and metal.
But you can go one step further here. You can select all the same instances of that material
if you uncheck the contiguous box here.
Still talking about selections, here’s a good one.
If you hit Q with something selected on canvas. You go into Quick Mask mode. It makes everything
that is not selected red. And then you can use a brush to continue that selection, painting
where you want the selection to expand. Then when finished, hit Q again
to see the resulted selection.
When placing cutouts in an image, make sure
to use the ruler, Ctrl + R to active it, so that you know more or less how tall each person
has to be. They should all fall with their eyes close to the horizon line.
In Sketchup for example you can see where the horizon line is,
so it’s easy to bring over to Photoshop. If you draw the vanishing points, you can also see
where the horizon line is. Because the vanishing point is always placed on the horizon.
Now using the horizon line will only work if you actually placed your camera
back in 3D around a person’s height, which, most often than not, you should.
Now, obviously there’s variation between taller and shorter people and even
children. But that’s a good start.
When there’s moving cutouts in a scene,
usually they are supposed to be blurred. Go to filter, blur, motion blur and set
the direction that the person is moving. Change the value and hit ok. Make
sure to apply it on a smart object.
Smart objects are layers that cannot be
altered. You can scale back and forth without losing quality. There’s no guides on when
to use them, but as a general rule of thumb, all images inserted will come as a smart object,
don’t rasterize it until you actually need to alter the pixels. To convert to a normal layer,
right click and choose rasterize it. Or to go from a normal layer to smart object, right
click and choose convert to smart object.
When we applied the motion blur to the cutout
that was a smart object, it came as a smart filter. That’s pretty good, so that we can come
back later and modify the motion blur value. This is pretty handy so that you don’t ruin images
and test out many values throughout your process.
Overscroll, this one is something that since I
started using Photoshop I craved for this option. You know when you zoom out and the canvas just
gets centered and fixed there? I don’t like this, it’s so useful to be able to pan around
and make the corner of your canvas stay in the center even though you’re
zoomed out. That way you can still work around the edges without having that
fixed position working against you.
Edit > Preferences > Tools
> and check Overscroll.
Perfect, now we’re talking. This is so
helpful especially when we’re working with big formats. An example on why I like this is
when I need to paint a vignette ting on the sky and I actually work with
my brush outside of the canvas.
Last but definitely not least, let’s say
you have a collage, or even a render, that you need a solid background with gradient
or brush effects. A smart way to do it is to create a solid color under this icon here.
I’m going to place below our base image, and create a simple mask to better
illustrate what I’m talking about.
Then create a new layer on top, add all of
your gradients, brush effects and blend modes.
This is just an example on
how to use this. Be creative, there are endless options on how to enhance a
collage sky, this is usually the way I do it. Usually layers of different
effects make a nicer final result.
Then you finish up with the shortcut Ctrl +
Alt + G to clip this layer to the solid color. Now if you need to change the color, double
click on it, chose a new one, and hit ok.
The last tip is actually more about
the shortcut than the solid color. The Ctrl + Alt + G is so so useful.
Adjustment layers have it with a button, or you can even alt click between the lines of a
layer to clip the layer above to the one beneath it. Well, many possibilities here and you can
even clip multiple layers to the base one.
Now, clipping a layer is something that you use
constantly throughout a post-production process
Alright guys! I hope you enjoyed. This is was fast
paced video with loads of important info, right? Let me know in the comments how many of those
tips you already knew. And we can chat over there. And if you learned something, don’t forget
to give this video a like, it really helps a lot.
And as always thanks for watching, and
I’ll you in the next video. Bye!
