If you're having trouble making your
composites look realistic, make sure to check out this video, I will go through seven compositing tips
and tricks that I'm sure you'll love and if there is at least one
that you find useful, m ake sure to click on that like button. I would really appreciate it if you did. It really helps out the channel
with a YouTube algorithm. Also, I would like to thank MSI for
sponsoring today's Photoshop tutorial. I will work with my MSI Creator 15
laptop, a powerful computer to tested and optimized to run Adobe
software, including Photoshop. OK, let's jump right into the tutorial Getting the lighting right in the
composite can be a difficult task. In this next tip, I'm going to show you how to add Rim lighting to images
that don't have it In this composite, I have a cool background
with a light source on the top right. And I've done everything I could
to color match this image. I have applied the right brightness saturation and hue, but the image
still doesn't look realistic. And the reason is that I'm not getting the right highlights on her body that
would appear if this was a real photo. So if your image doesn't have a rim light, what you need to do is take
it from somewhere else. In this case, I'll use this photo
of this couple working out. Look at the rim light on her right arm. We can take that in place it
in our composite. To do so, select the Lasso tool and make
a loose selection around her arm. Then press Ctrl C (Windows) or
Command C (macOS) to copy I'll come back into my working composite and I'm going to press Ctrl V (Windows)
Command V (macOS) to paste. And this is the highlight that we're going
to use on her arm I'll press Ctrl T (Windows) or
Command T (macOS) to transform. Make sure that you check this box so
that you can see the pivot point. And make sure that you place
a reference point on her shoulder. And that's going to be
the reference for my composite. I'm also going to reduce the Opacity so I can see the layers below and I'm going
to click-and-drag the holding Shift. To scale from that point, and I'm just trying to get it large enough
so that it covers that entire arm like so it won't be a perfect
match, but that's OK. And what I'm going to do is place this highlight as best as I can
over the original arm. And I can continue scaling if I need to. I think something like this should work, Then, I'm going to increase the Opacity
back to 100% and I'll desaturate the layer by pressing Ctrl Shift U (Windows)
or Command Shift U (macOS) And I'm going to go into Filter >
Liquify. From the Liquify filter. I'm going to collapse all these panels
since I don't need them And the panel that I do want to see
is the View Options panel. From here, make sure that enable to Show Backdrop and where it says Use you can select your
woman layer like so then you can zoom in and just make sure that the arm
matches as best as possible. Again, you don't have to be perfect,
but just get it close enough. The trick here is to use a large brush and push the pixels in as
best as you can like so. Just make sure that it
covers the entire arm. And I think that this will be good. It's not perfect, but it should work. I'm going to press OK Photoshop will make
that distortion, Then, I can change the Blending Mode
to screen and I'll call the layer "Rim light" Next, I'll open up my group and place the layer right above my woman layer like
so it is clipped to the layer below so that the edges are defined
by the actual arm. What I'm going to do now is adjust
the brightness of this rim light layer so that the only thing that is visible is the
highlight and not the rest of the arm. So you can go into Image > Adjustment Levels
and just darken up the image by clicking-and-dragging
on this black point like so. And notice how this is looking
much more realistic now. And I can drag this to the left and you can fine-tune the highlight
accordingly to get a realistic result. You can press OK when you're done
at this point or you need to do is fine-tune the details. For example, you can select the Move tool and move the arm around if need
be so that it matches better. You can also press Ctrl T (Windows)
or Command T (macOS) and you can scale it up and keep moving it so that it
matches as best as possible. Then, you can create a Layer Mask and paint with black on that Layer Mask
and hide the unnecessary areas. And by using this technique you can apply
realistic rim lights to your composites. This is what my result looks like when I have applied the same technique to both arms,
her face and her hair. And this is what it looks like after
I've applied a global color grade. Sometimes, when you create a mask, you might get these white outlines
known as fringing all on your subject. They're really annoying. But with this technique, you should be
able to remove them fairly quickly. I'll double-clicking the Hand Tool to fit the image to screen and I'll select this
soccer player's Layer Mask I can disable it by clicking on it and holding Shift and
to remove the fringing go into Filter > Other > and select Minimum, and that'll take us into this dialog
box that is designed to contract mass. The great thing about the Minimum filter is that you're not stuck
with whole numbers. You can use decimal points when adjusting the radius to give you much more
control when you can track your mask. And also, there's two different algorithms that we can use, Roundness
and S1quareness in this case. We'll go about round this because we're
working with an organic object, a person. So there's no sharp
edges or straight edges. In this case, a radius of 1 pixel should work. And I'll press OK and notice
that the white fringing is now gone. Another great thing about this filter is that you can selectively apply
it to areas of your mask. You can do so by selecting the Lasso tool then freehand the selection
on the black outline on his arm. Next go into Filter > Other > Minimum
and again, a radius of 1 pixel should work. Notice how the black line disappears
without affecting the rest of the mask. Remember, if you're enjoying these techniques, make sure
to click on that like button. One of the most often overlooked principles and compositing is
matching the ambient color. Let me show you an amazing technique so
that you can easily match the ambient color of all the objects
in your composites. First, go into the New Adjustment Layer
icon and create a new Color Fill Layer Then, I'll select a 50% grey. You don't have to be exact. As long as close to 50% it should work press OK then change the Blending Mode
from Normal to Luminosity. This will make all the Luminance Values
in the composite the same, and the hue of each item will be more
noticeable. If it's not noticeable, you can go and create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer
and increase the Saturation. I'm going to place these two layers
into a group Hold Shift, click on both then press Ctrl G (Windows)
or Command G (macOS) And this is my ambient color check. And from here, you can see
the ambient color on the image. Notice that our astronauts suit is white, but there's actually some
color hidden in there. When I enable this,
you can see that we have a lot of magenta, in some cases oranges,
yellow, and even green. So what we need to do is make sure that the ambient color of our scene
matches the foreground In this case, notice how most of the background
has a blue tint to it. So we need to match that onto our astronaut so that the
composite looks realistic. So I'll select my astronaut,
then I'll create a Selective Color Adjustment Layer then click on this icon to clip
it to the layer below so that this Adjustment Layer only
affects the astronaut. Then from the colors,
dropdown select Neutrals. And now we need to make sure that the
astronaut's color matches the background. I'll start by adding a little bit of cyan, which will cool the astronaut,
which is exactly what we want. Notice that we have a lot of magenta,
so I'll reduce magenta to add green. Then, I'll reduce yellow to add blue. And notice that this is looking much,
much better now. The foreground is actually
matching the background. I can also adjust the whites. Most of his suit is white, so we need to adjust that so
there's no other hues in there. So I'll reduce the magenta on his suit
and they would turn blue. I can also reduce the yellow
to make it even more blue. Then I can go into the blacks and you'll
see the areas on his glove in his home and change when I add a little bit
of cyan and reduce the yellow like. So notice that this matches
the background much better now. And when I disable the ambient color
check layers, you can see the result. This is before and after. So always make sure that the ambient color matches so that your composites
look more realistic. By the way, if color is important to you,
then make sure to check out the MSI Creator 15 laptop, which
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the best colors possible. These features include a 4k display
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at 100% Also included is the true color technology which ensures color accuracy so that your
work is displayed exactly as you intend. MSI calibrates all Creator15 laptops at
the factory and their Kalmen certified. You'll get excellent color representation
which is necessary for creative work. MSI creator laptops are tested
and optimized to run Adobe software including Photoshop, Premiere Pro,
Illustrator, and many others. It gives you the peace of mind that your
laptop is fully compatible and it will perform efficiently with your
favorite design apps. If you want to find out more about the MSI Creator 15, then check out
the link below in the description. But anyway, let's jump
right back into the tutorial. Have you ever had a composite
that doesn't quite match the background? In most cases, it happens because you did
not take perspective into account when placing elements into your
background image. Let me show you how you can find
perspective in a photo and how you can use perspective to composite
in other elements. In this background image,
you can see that we have receding lines. These parallel converging lines all lead
to a vanishing point on the horizon line. You can then select the Line tool
and click-and-drag on these parallel converging lines and follow
them and see where they meet. I'll start with this line here. Then I'll hold Shift and I'll start drawing a new line and or at least a Shift key
once I've started drawing it that way, I can draw it in the same layer
and follow it all the way through. And you'll notice they
meet right about here. And if I click-and-drag from that point,
you'll see that all the lines on my background recede
into that vanishing point and that vanishing point will
sit on the horizon line. So my horizon line is on this area. I can click-and-drag a guy down and place this guide so that I know
where my horizon line is. If you don't see your ruler, you can press Ctrl R (Windows) or
Command R (macOS) in one way of figuring out where the horizon line is without tracing
parallel converging lines is to look at your image and see if you can figure
out where the ground plane meets the sky. The place where they meet will
be where the horizon line is. Now that I know where the horizon line is, I can enable my Model layer and I'll
disable the Layer Mask by holding Shift and clicking on the Layer Mask thumbnail
and notice that this image also has parallel converging lines so you can
follow the parallel converging lines on this image to find
where the horizon line is. And it's right here,
right next to her hips. So I'll delete the line layers.
Since we don't need them, I'll hold Shift and click
on the Layer Mask to bring it back. I'll select the Move Tool and I'll move the model group directly over my composite
so that both horizontal lines match making that composite look
and feel more realistic. And you don't have to be precise. You can move the model
up or down just a bit. As long as you're within that range,
your composite should work. One of the most difficult things to do in Photoshop is mask hair
from busy backgrounds. Let me show you a wonderful technique that will help you in these situations so
that your composites look more realistic. First of all,
I'm going to select my Foreground layer and I'm going to click
on the Remove Background button. This will use Adobe Sensei machine
learning technology to analyze your photo and make a selection of the main
subject and apply a Layer Mask to it. Photoshop does a great job. The mask is not perfect,
but not bad for one click. And the secret that we professionals have is that if something is too difficult
to select, we just disregard it. And we painted back in digitally. This is what we're going to do next. The first step is to mask out hair
that we don't want to include. So select the Brush Tool then paint
with black on hairs that are too difficult to select and then paint them back
individually to make them more realistic. There's two ways of doing that.
Let me show you both. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to paint single hair strands using
the Brush Tool from the brush settings. I'll set the brush size to 1 pixel,
the spacing to 1%. And if you have a Wacom tablet,
enable the shape dynamics and. Set the Size Jitter
Control to Pen Pressure. I'm currently using a Wacom tablet,
and what I'll do is I'll hold Alt (Windows) or Option (macOS)
to temporarily activate the Eyedropper tool and I can select a color found on her
hair and I can now paint in that hair digitally like so so that you can see what I'm doing. I'll zoom in by tapping in the Z key and you can see how I'm just
painting in these strands of hair. And as you paint, keep sampling from the original hair color
so that you can have hair strands of different colors and also follow
the hairs strands that are already there and noticeable just to keep
everything looking more realistic. And obviously you can keep following this technique all around her
hair to get a better result. The second technique is to use
a brush made out of actual hair. Start by creating a new
layer underneath your model. Then I'll double-clicking the Hand Tool to fit the image,
the screen and I'll select the brush that I already have saved
in my Libraries panel. I'll search for it.
It's called Hair. Here it is. And now when I paint,
you'll see that I have this hair strand now for the sake of time, I'm not going
to go over how this brush was made. But I recently published a video on masking tips where I show it,
how I created it step by step. So I'll place a link to that Photoshop tutorial the low end of description so
that you can check it out In that video, I also share a link to the Brush Tool that you can download it
and use it in your projects. But anyway, this is the brush
that I'm going to use. I'm going to undo that and reduce my brush size by tapping in the left bracket key
on the keyboard and you can see a preview of it there so that the
hair matches my model. I will need to make some adjustments. So I'll click on the brush settings button
from the Options bar under Brush tip I'm going to flip it on the x-axis so
that the hair is facing the other way. Now, I'm going to use the left arrow key
and the keyboard to rotate the brush. I could also rotate it from the Options
bar under the Angle Option. And if you're in an older version of Photoshop, you can only rotate
it from the Brush settings. But anyway, I'm going to rotate and resize the brush to make it match
as best as possible. And I'll click once to add
the hair strand before and after. And as you can see,
that makes this mask look a lot more realistic since we're painting in hair strands
instead of masking them, which a lot of times is more difficult
and it doesn't look as good. In this next clip, I'm going to show you what I do to finalize my composites
and make them look more cohesive. First, I do one of two things: I either put all my layers
into a Smart Object, but in a composite like this that has
a lot of layers and a lot of Smart Object already, I will copy all the layers
into one flat layer. There's an easy way to do that. You can press Ctrl Alt Shift E (Windows)
or Command Option Shift E (macOS) and we create this layer that is just a flattened version
of all the other layers. And I usually call this layer final
and I convert it into a Smart Object. And the reason that I'm converting this
to a Smart Object is because I'm going to apply some color effects and I
want to be able to edit them. Also, if I decide to change something,
my composite, I can copy all the layers and paste them inside of the
Smart Object to update it. So I'm still working with a Smart Object
even though this is my final step next go to Filter > Camera Raw filter
and we can treat our composite as a single photo and we can adjust the color,
tonality, and other things in our photo. For example, I can add
a little bit of contrast. Darken up the shadows a little bit,
maybe even cool the image a bit more. Add a little bit of texture, maybe even clarity,
which is contrast on edge pixels add vibrance, which is a smart
way of adding saturation. It protects skin tones
and already saturated pixels. And if you've been following me
for a while, then you probably know that I always like to end my composites
by adding a little bit of Grain If you zoom into the image,
you'll see that it's quite blurry in some areas and it doesn't feel
like an actual photo. So to make it feel more like a photo, I like to add just a tiny little bit
of Grain just to bring that film element back usually anywhere between 5
and 10, depending on a composite Then, I'll right-click and fit the image
to view and I'll add a vignette. And you can see my before and after, I think that it's very important to add
a Camera Raw adjustment at the end of all your composites to make all
the elements come together as one. By the way, if you find Camera Raw sluggish it's probably because
you don't have a powerful GPU. The GPU is an essential component
when running Photoshop. If you look at the Adobe website,
you can see a list of Photoshop features that require a GPU for acceleration,
which includes Camera Raw. In other words, these features can
be very slow without a powerful GPU. Also, some features will
not work without a GPU. The laptop that I'm currently using
contains the powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX super with 8GB
gigabytes of video memory. Best of all,
Nvidia has creative app partnerships with Adobe Black Magic,
Autodesk and more to bring GPU accelerated improvements to your favorite creative
software, including Photoshop. So make sure that you check
out the MSI Creator 15. The link is below in the description. After you spend hours on a composite,
it can be difficult to spot mistakes to see your composite in a new
light, try out this next trick. It's a lot like flipping a paper upside
down when you're trying to spot mistakes in Photoshop all you need to do is go
into View and select Flip Horizontal. And that flips the image horizontally,
of course, and it shows your composite in a new way and hopefully
you can spot mistakes. Now, it's very important to note
that we're not transforming pixels. This is just the preview. So if you were to save and close this file and open it up again,
you would see the original composite and not the flip version because
we're not transforming pixels. We're just changing
the way we look at them. The old way of doing this was to go into image, image rotation,
and flip the canvas horizontally. And this Command actually
transforms pixels. So Photoshop will have to calculate
the transformation and that could take some time on larger files
in slower computers. But now all you need to do is go into View and select flip horizontal
and it happens automatically. So let me know in the comments, which were your favorite compositing tips
and if you saw one that will help you in your workflow,
remember to hit that like button and subscribe if you're new
to the Photoshop Training Channel. Again, I would like to thank MSI for
sponsoring today's Photoshop tutorial. If you haven't already,
make sure to check out MSI Creator 15 laptop,
which is designed for creators, but it is also a well-rounded system
for everyday users and gamers. Spec-wise, it's equipped with a
2.3 GHz Intel i7 eight-core processor, 32 GB ram
and the powerful Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super with 8GB of video memory
and of course, a 4k display, that can reproduce Adobe RGB
at 100%. The link to this laptop is
below in the description again. My name is Jesus Ramirez. Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to talking to you
again in the next Photoshop tutorial.
