Compositing in Adobe Photoshop with Aaron Nace from Phlearn - 1 of 2

[Music] you hey guys and welcome to Adobe live my name is Aaron NACE of phlearn comm I'm so excited to be broadcasting with you today you're joining me from my home here in Chicago and I'm so excited to be seeing all of you as well so we've got a really fun day ahead of us we're gonna be hanging out for the next two hours and we're gonna be creating a composite photo together completely from scratch we're actually gonna be creating like a fantasy type landscape image I'm so excited we're gonna have an absolute blast so if you haven't already done so be sure to check in here in the chat window I've just got my chat loaded up right next to me here so I can see everyone and we can interact and have a really good time throughout this broadcast so before we get started in the broadcast let's take a look and see who's in our chat and we're gonna talk about our schedule coming up we've got a she Eunice hey what's up ela Eva hello from Germany hey Locke yeah every day's Jennifer what's up how's it going we've got a reef uh I'm your guru Photoshop guru thank you so much how sweet of you how wonderful Yousef hello Clady what's up long time no see cloudy I hope you're doing well Austin whoa cheers from the Philippines oh I'm so excited to see you guys this is so much fun hey Zeus Ramirez what's up man so good to see you I was watching your and cloudy's live broadcasts the other night you guys did a great job so good to see you wishing all of you guys health and love it's so nice to be able to connect with everyone on line Alberto the punisher is here a law came from canada Tim hey how you doing it's so good to see you Ruben from Belgium awesome to see you guys Lord Harris from Annapolis Maryland wow this is gonna be so exciting guys I'm actually really really pumped about this image today because we are creating a fantasy composite completely from scratch I want to you guys a little preview here of the image itself so you're gonna be able to see this image that we're going to be creating completely from scratch this is actually using Adobe stock as well so if you guys want to create and follow along with this image you'll be able to do so by downloading all of these stock assets so we're gonna have an absolute blast today I'm so so excited now before we get into Photoshop let's go ahead and take a look at our schedule we can see what we've got coming up here earlier this morning you guys saw the be creative on mobile with Terry whitey did a great job our Photoshop daily challenge with Kathleen Martin and I'm gonna be taking a look later today at our dis cords channel so if you guys haven't already done so be sure to join us on discord where you can enter your submissions for the daily creative challenge we're gonna be taking a look at that here in just a minute voodoo Valjean this this morning with some creature creative challenges which is a really cool thing it was like a little Dracula animation not sure if you saw that the illustrator daily creative challenge with Julia was just before this I'm Aaron NACE you're joining me for today's Photoshop compositing session and next we're going to be watching Jesse Showalter for Adobe XD creative daily craft day daily creative challenge and then we've got Paul on how to live stream so super exciting really really great day ahead of us so I'm into it I'm excited I think it's ready to start getting into Photoshop after all that's what we all are here to see so let's go ahead here in Photoshop I'm gonna go ahead and switch my screen voodoo Val Bakula yeah he is the night I love this little chat going on by the way I can see all your chats right here on my screen so we're gonna be hanging out for about two hours today so anything you want to say to me I've got my chat window open he I've got my photoshop window will open here so we're gonna be creating and chatting the whole time during this so it's a really great chance for me to connect with you and any questions that you have for me during this broadcast anything about you know like process during during the composite image feel free to ask I'm more than happy to go over anything and help you guys make sure you get the most out of Photoshop compositing all right super excited all right well let's go ahead here we're gonna jump into Photoshop there we are alright and as you can see here is our image now I've already made this image from start to finish so we're gonna go ahead let's go ahead and save this out and start completely over so I wanted to give you guys a snapshot of what we're actually going to be doing today and there you can see our final image basically oops hit the wrong button and let's go ahead and minimize this so we're gonna just start completely from scratch so we're using Adobe stock images for this tutorial so let's go ahead and I'm gonna just double click on our background here okay we're gonna go into our sample images and I've actually got a few different sample JPEGs here and we've got an Adobe Illustrator everything here is from Adobe stock so let's go ahead and I'm gonna shift-click on all of these images here and we're gonna click on open alright Austan full says it's 3:00 a.m. here and he's committed to staying awake now that is commitment hey Howard Pinsky what's up man I'm so excited to see you here as well alright now here in Photoshop one of the images was an illustrator document so we're just gonna open up as a PDF that'll be just fine here so let's go ahead and hit open it's going to open up all of our sample images and we'll show you what we're gonna be doing with these now sometimes here in Photoshop it can be a little bit overwhelming to see everything so I'm gonna hit ctrl or command - just to zoom out there we go on our images okay so we're zooming out here so we can see everything that we're gonna be pulling together and there we go and then this will go ahead and just close that down so we've got some birds we've got a landscape we've got clouds we've got some rocks we've got different types of rocks and we got a city background so we're gonna be bringing all of these different elements together to create that final image and you might look at these and say I I have no idea how all this comes together because it it doesn't really look like it would all fit into the final image and that's one of the things that I love about Photoshop compositing is that you can cut things out of the background you can change the light you can change the color you can do so many wonderful things with Photoshop that allow you to take images that seemingly have nothing to do with each other and pull them together in order to create a realistic effect okay so the very first thing we're going to be doing is going to our background image here and we're gonna be creating the little ring slash planet that's kind of gonna be the focus of our image and you're gonna be amazed this is actually incredibly easy to do we're gonna start with the elliptical marquee tool believe it or not so let's go ahead and grab the elliptical marquee tool I'm gonna just create an ellipse selection here and we're just gonna hold shift to make sure that it stays a circle and we're gonna make it about this big it there's no real right or wrong here we're creating a fantasy type image and I love that about fantasy images because there is no right or wrong okay so we've made our elliptical selection here now what I'm gonna do is go to my adjustment layers and grab a solid fill adjustment layer you can do that right up here through your menus you can go to meant layer done a new fill layer and over to solid color okay let's just hit OK there and it really doesn't matter what color we choose to start with but I'm gonna go ahead and grab like a bright yellow okay that looks great now what I want to do is delete a lot of this selection I want to I want to delete this so it kind of looks like we just have a little thin halo of maybe like a planet or a Sun or something like that so in order to just make a slight like I basically want to select this shape that I have and then shrink it just a little bit so we're gonna hold ctrl or command right here on the layer mask and click on the layer mask now what that does is basically just makes this shape into a selection so now that it's selection I can right click and I can go to transform selection and I'm just gonna scale this down a tiny bit so let's just I'm gonna hold alt or option and just shrink it down a little bit there we go maybe even a little bit less and then I'm gonna hit the down arrow a couple times there we go let's make it even a little bit larger I just want it to be just super super subtle here now you can change this at any time there we go that looks really cool so basically I made a selection of the circle okay and then I made it a little bit smaller and I'm just bringing it down a little bit so it's gonna be thicker at the top and thinner on the bottom okay so now we want to go ahead and hit enter that's gonna apply our selection and then here on our layer mask I'm gonna hit shift delete and that's gonna bring up our fill dialogue we're gonna fill this with black there we go so here we have the makings of our shape all right Joyce England asked what kind of drawing pad do you have there this is a Wacom Intuos Pro small tablet it's a really nice you have a pressure-sensitive tablet here and I'm gonna be using this later we're actually going to be creating a custom brush in this tutorial out of clouds it's gonna look like fog which is super cool so using a pressure-sensitive tablet like this it's not necessary where you work in Photoshop but if you want to have a little bit more control over your brushstrokes I highly recommend one I kind of like to say it's similar to like painting you know if you were painting if you had a paintbrush you could push harder or softer and create like thicker or thinner lines you can do something very similar with one of these tablets so this is just the Wacom Intuos small I believe they retail for about $200 or so I've had this one for years and years and years and honestly you literally I've used the same one for like six years they keep coming out with new versions and they're also really good but I'm like it's fine it's one of those things that kind of never goes bad so you can just use it and if you got if you were here you could see up close it's like yes I got a dent right over here where I use my tablet so much it's kind of funny okay now I personally love the small size here I love the small size tablet this is the easiest size for me to work from fuzzy says you noticed a car outside yeah I'm working from my house for those of you guys who watched learn before you'll probably notice that I've you know usually record out of a studio right now I'm at a house and I've got a relatively busy street right here so you might hear a couple cars maybe some motorcycles some people listening to music outside but hey that's the fun we're all hanging out on at home right so you guys get to see me in my actual house alrighty so now that we have this circle here it's looking really really good we are gonna go ahead and change the blending mode of this layer so I'm gonna go from normal we're gonna go down to color Dodge now look at what happens when we change this to color dodge it makes such a beautiful light for my images so anytime I want to create like an actual light source in my image color Dodge is the blending mode that I like to choose so already we're off to a good start now let's go ahead and zoom in and one tip that I like to give here is if you make a shape like this in Photoshop like we just did with just our marquee tool the edges might be a little bit too hard so it might not look there realistic so let's click on our layer mask we're gonna go to filter blur and over to a Gaussian blur and we're just gonna give it a super subtle Gaussian blur like point eight pixels is enough okay and that's just gonna keep it maybe one pixel that's just gonna keep it from having such a sharp looking edge and that's gonna make it look a little bit more realistic okay now my goal here is to create a light source and anytime that I create a light source in Photoshop I like to do it over several different layers so what we're gonna do is duplicate this layer just hit ctrl or command J okay now here on our layer mask if I hold alt or option I can take a look at my layer mask this layer I'm gonna give a blur okay so I wanted to kind of blur out so we have our light source that's pretty well defined and then we wanted to kind of blur out in either direction so let's go to filter blur and then Gaussian blur this one's just gonna get more of a blur there we go and you can see as I start to blur that out look at that it looks like we have another little bit of dimension to that glow fantastic we're gonna do one more so let's hit ctrl or command J on that again and I'm gonna give this a blur as well so let's just give it a little bit more of a blur and then I'm gonna do even one more alright and this is gonna get a blur - we're gonna go even farther so anytime you're creating a light source or a shadow in Photoshop check this out so if we just have this one layer it doesn't really look that realistic but as I continue to add more and more layers you can see now we are starting to get a little bit of that glow which I love I'm also gonna go in here and change some of these colors right and this just allows me to have different types of basically different types of effects in here there we go so with this color variation it's not just this yellow color we'll have some oranges and some Reds as well all right let's go ahead and duplicate this layer here as well and I'm gonna give this one a nice red color there we go super bright okay so we can see there and then on my layer mask I'm actually just gonna fill my layer mask with black temporarily and then we're just gonna paint with white I'm gonna just grab a regular soft edge brush here okay and painting with white on my layer mask it's just gonna allow me to create a little bit of a glow here there we are and what I want to do here is like hand paint some areas around this there we go around this circle and my goal here is to make it look a little bit less perfect you know I wanted to look like clouds are kind of interrupting this and there we go bring a little bit in there fantastic let's go ahead and change our color just a little bit I love these solid fill color layers it took me a few years to really appreciate them but they're so so wonderful in Photoshop now you can see here my layer mask needs a little bit of work so you just paint white or black on your layer mask okay and then this is gonna get a blur too so we're gonna go to filter blur and then Gaussian blur there we go and we just want to blur it till it starts to look realistic there we go maybe a little bit less okay so let's turn this off and on and you can see there we go off and on it's just giving it a little bit more of an effect which I really like alright let's duplicate this base layer again I'm gonna just fill this with black and then we're gonna zoom right in alright Brian asks could we add an outer glow most definitely and we are going to be using layer effects throughout this tutorial there we go outer clothes are really really cool the only thing the reason I'm not using an outer glow is because I want a little bit more control and I want to I want to create a lot of these layers there we go and you're gonna see as this goes on that we're also going to be creating a cloud brush in fact we're gonna do that just next here and that we're gonna have interacting with this with this fear of light as well all right looking great all right let's just fade that in okay so this is gonna make up basically the first part of our sphere now all of these different layers we're going to shift click all of the layers and hit ctrl or command G to group them together now what we're gonna do is click on our layer mask so a layer mask is gonna allow me to hide all of these layers at the same time and of course we just need to hide this behind these rocks because we want it to look like it's coming from behind the rocks right there we go so we're just hiding all of these at the same time fantastic and I'm gonna bring a little bit of this glow back again I'm not super concerned about trying to make everything perfect with one layer I'm gonna be coming in and out and working with this so as we see more and more as I start to bring more of the image together we're gonna always be able to go back in here and look at this I can turn any of these layers off and on I can change the colors of these if I want I've got a lot of things that I can do to work with this image to make it look more realistic as we go along so everything we're doing today is non-destructive we're gonna be able to go make these changes at any time well we're looking really good the next thing I want to do is I want to start creating some fog and some clouds that's gonna help me actually interact this help this light interact with the scene a little bit more so we're actually gonna be making a custom brush from a picture of clouds right now so let's go ahead and open up our picture from clouds we're gonna hit f4 fullscreen there we go and let's go ahead and make this a little bit larger now first thing I want to do I'm gonna grab a hue / saturation adjustment layer we're gonna go to our blues so let's go ahead and target these blues and I'm gonna bring the lightness all the way down what we really want here is a large contrast but the clouds and the background so my goal I'm gonna basically try to make the clouds took like white in the background totally black like that's my goal and then we're gonna turn that into a custom brush so that looks pretty good next thing we're going to do is create a new layer here and I'm just gonna paint with my brush tool so we're gonna paint black with my brush tool so just hit D for your default colors in Photoshop and we're just gonna paint black right here on top of everything make sure you're at an opacity of 100% and there we go this is looking good this is the only cloud that I need right here at the very top I'm not I'm not super concerned about everything else I just need one cloud okay looking good now I just want to make sure that that is completely black so I'm gonna go to my levels adjustment layer and we're just gonna bring up our black levels a little bit here and that's gonna crank this all the way to black so now I feel very confident that it is gonna be black okay fantastic so we're looking good and my goal here is to turn this cloud into a custom brush and you guys are gonna love this it's really really cool if you've ever wanted to make realistic fog or clouds in Photoshop this is how you do it you just literally grab a cloud like from a photograph and turn it into a brush so the next thing I want to do we're just gonna create a new layer okay I'm gonna go ahead and make a stamp visible and then invert it okay you could also just go to an invert adjustment if you wanted to do this alrighty so now that this is inverted we have a dark cloud on a white background okay so dark cloud on a white background you can do this with any shape you could have a picture of your hand if you want it to if long it was a dark hand on a light background you could make that into a custom brush super easy to do so next thing we want to do is create a rectangular marquee and I just want to make a selection right around the area that we're going to turn into a brush so I brought brought in this entire large large image but the only part of it that I'm actually going to be using is right here this cloud okay so let's go ahead we're gonna go to edit and then down to define brush preset define brush preset and as you can see it's just gonna say sampled brush and it looks like a cloud so I'm just gonna call this cloud and hit okay good deal so let's go ahead and get out of this image we're gonna hit shift F to get out a full screen and I'm just gonna make it a little bit smaller there we go okay fantastic so for those of you guys who are curious on what we just did basically we took a photograph let's make this a little bit bigger you can see we're doing compositing today so I took this photograph of just a regular sky made some adjustments to the sky and I what I wanted to do is basically cut out this cloud and turn that into the shape of a brush okay so that's what we just did and you can see that now my brush shape is actually that cloud like if I actually click a couple times on that image you can see I'm able to paint with that cloud which is a very very cool technique alrighty and thank you for all your questions coming in here in the chad you've got some really great questions and if you guys need at any point in time I'm more than happy to go over things because we're gonna be doing quite a bit all right I'm not sure what a double brush technique or someone said they're seeing a double brush but oh that could be a screen capture Thank You Angela fir for saying that yeah that could just be a glitch with the screen capture yeah I see it now in the broadcast and don't worry if you're not seeing that because that it's a glitch with the broadcast I'm sure because I'm not seeing that as well okay so now what we want to do is get back to our original image and start using this cloud brush alright so MacNeill asks why am i working in all these windows well I have this first window open as my primary edit like this is the image that we're gonna be making and I just wanted to show you you all of the different images that we're going to be pulling together to make our final composite so you can work in whatever workflow makes sense for you okay so now that we have this brush we're gonna go ahead and create a new layer and on a new layer let's go ahead and scale our brush down a little bit and I'm just gonna switch my color to white now as I start painting around with my brush this is what it looks like if I scroll it just looks like basically this cloud is just repeating over and over and over again and that it's not very useful at this point this is not something that I can actually use to create clouds so we're gonna go into our brush settings and in those brush settings we're gonna define things like scattering and shape dynamics and that's what's gonna allow us to create something that looks a lot more realistic so let's go ahead and hit ctrl or command a to select all and then I'm just gonna hit on delete there we go and that's just gonna clear it out okay so we're gonna go to window and down to brush settings there we are and here in our brush settings I'm gonna go ahead and turn on our shape dynamics we're gonna turn size jitter all the way up I'm going to turn my angle jitter all the way up as well okay we're gonna flip the X and the y jitter so now as I start to paint it you can see it's definitely starting to look a little bit more a little bit more scattered okay and looks like we're getting a little bit more control so the next thing we're gonna do is turn on scattering just a little bit of scatter and this is just gonna kind of put some clouds up and some clouds down I'm gonna pop that on both axes you really want this to be very very random okay a super super random brush because clouds are super random the next thing we're gonna do is turn on transfer and here where it says flow jitter I'm going to set that control to pen pressure now what that allows me to do check this out this is a kind of a big one is earlier someone asked about using a pressure-sensitive tablet if I press lightly now I'm gonna have a low flow which allows me to create this cloud texture if I press hard I'm gonna be creating clouds like this so that's literally with one brushstroke okay so again let's just go ahead and clear that out so with one brushstroke here there we go we're starting off pretty light and I press heavier and there we go so you can see that's one brushstroke it just makes it a lot more realistic when I don't press light and I can kind of come in here and add detail if I want okay now this brush is starting to look pretty good so we're gonna go save this out I'm gonna go to my little menu item here and go to new brush preset all right I'm gonna call this final clouds there we are now the cool thing about creating brushes by the way is you can use these with the eraser tool you can use these with the clone stamp tool you're not limited just the brush tool so just the one thing to keep in mind what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna go ahead and grab a solid color fill layer let's go ahead just grab a random color it doesn't really matter at this point and we're gonna set this to color Dodge okay so having this set to color Dodge you get an idea of how it's interacting with your image and I love these solid color fill layers because you can just change the color at any time and really change your effect so let's double click here alright we're gonna put this back maybe towards an orange and we're gonna get nice and dark there we go something about there we looks pretty good now don't worry about the color because you can change it at any time and here on my layer mask we're gonna start brushing in there we go alright I just want to invert our layer mask so it's all black to start with alright I'll zoom in a couple people said it's hard to see the details okay so we'll go ahead and zoom in and now I'm gonna start painting with my brush tool there we go and you can see what I'm kind of doing is like lighting up the clouds that are right behind this area so if I turn this off and on you can see I can kind of light those clouds up I'm going to just change my color a little bit here a little bit more towards yellow there we go fantastic so I'm gonna I'm basically lighting these clouds and creating some cool lighting effects while I'm going along I'm gonna do the same thing here there we are and alright this is looking really good so basically I'm just making my brush larger and smaller and that's what's allowing me to kind of fade this in and we're gonna be using this brush a little bit more throughout this tutorial as well so turning this off and on you can see I'm basically just adding some light to my clouds and I'm gonna zoom out so I can see how these clouds look you know with the image as a whole I don't want to be too far zoomed in to this because it'll it'll make it difficult for me to see the lighting on the image as a whole oftentimes when I'm doing large-scale images like this I find it's better to be zoomed out a little bit okay fantastic so now we're gonna go ahead and double click I'm gonna take the saturation down a little bit let's just move this around here so I can choose the right color and as you can see check this out I can simply move my color around here and I can change the color of the highlights in these clouds so I can get something that really starts to fit well with this image so there we go there's the before and the after with that okay looking really good now the other thing that I want to do is I want to take this part of the image here this part of the circle and I want to fade that out I'm actually gonna do that with my cloud brush okay so just as an example of what we're gonna do with my cloud brush I'm basically just gonna paint here like this on my layer mask okay and it's gonna start to hide some of this circle but it's gonna hide it in a way there we go it's gonna hide it in a way to where it looks like it's behind clouds so we're just gonna go back to this original layer mask here okay and I'm gonna start hiding this there we go and it's gonna kind of look like it's going behind the clouds alright looking really really good now with this I'm gonna take the same one of these layers from down below we're gonna duplicate that I'm gonna go ahead and put that on the top let's go ahead and fill this layer mask with black and then look at this this cloud brush now is gonna make it look like it's being lit from behind so you kind of lose the light there we go you kind of lose the light of this of this little ring here that's looking cool roll all right you lose a little bit of the definition but you still get the idea of it okay and this isn't something you have to get right in your first pass you can kind of go back and forth with it sit with it and you know basically we're just kind of painting light at this point so there's no there's no right or wrong answer pretty cool I think that's looking really really nice so let's go ahead and turn that back off and on so we're kind of changing from like a solid outline here this is where we would say hey maybe this is in front of the Sun Cloud's to a little bit more of a hazy outline there we go so that hazy outline I'm now filling in those details and making you know doing my best to make that look like it makes sense I'm gonna do the same thing with this one down here we can see this area down here that I added oh yeah someone asked to see the mask alpha yep you can hold alt or option two take a look at your mask at any time by the way so that's what the layer mask looks like for this layer that I just painted in there and again I did that with the cloud brush okay I'm gonna do the same thing here with the cloud brush because it's giving me a lot of this really nice natural variation there we go and this type of variation is what's going to help this effect look more realistic okay we're gonna make another solid color fill layer set this to color dodge as well all right and then this is gonna come in like right here so you can see having a little bit of color variation just makes things look a little bit more interesting and realistic there we go by the way Daniel asks how do you switch brushes like that you can just right click with your mouse or I have a pressure-sensitive tablet and then go ahead and choose your brushes there we go so check this out having a little bit of another color in there just gives it like a little bit more interest and makes it look realistic because very few times in life are things just like one color you know even if like you look at a candle like the flame of a candle you you can see that you know maybe it's bluish towards the bottom of the candle then it turns kind of orange and then it turns white so especially with light things are oftentimes a couple of different colors and whenever I'm compositing or basically painting light I like to there we go I like to try to mimic that as much as I can because I find I get a little bit more realistic results there we go all right and if you do something and you don't like it just erase it away it's the magic of Photoshop you could just paint it black on your layer mask all right that's looking pretty cool now I'm gonna go ahead and grab a curves adjustment layer there we go we're gonna go to our red Channel and bring up a little bit of reds I'm gonna go to my blue Channel and pull down our Blues a little bit let's give us a little bit of green here as well there we go okay we're gonna invert control command I to invert our layer mask and then I'm just gonna paint like how I just want a relatively large glow around this light but we're gonna make it subtle okay so I just kind of try to get the a you know a basic approximation there we go and then dial it in so let's see here in our curves adjustment layer yeah something like that this is a little bit better a little bit too red there we go that's starting to look a little bit better and we're just gonna bring our opacity down on that a little bit so anytime I have an effect where I'm like ah that's a little bit too much my go-to is just to lower the opacity of the effect and oftentimes you'll get a really nice sweet spot where it's gonna look more realistic okay so let's go ahead and group all of those together alright and we're just gonna call this planet / Sun I don't you know the light source back there so pretty cool right here's the before and the after there is one more thing I forgot to do I want to actually make this visible in the there we go in the ocean as well so I'm gonna just duplicate one of these layers there we go actually that looks pretty good sometimes you'll do something by accident and you're like ooh actually that's that's great I'll just leave that all right so let's duplicate that and I totally wasn't planning on doing that but now we want to just paint it visible here in the ocean a little bit okay to get a little bit of light reflection in the ocean there we go so this doesn't really look that great as of now but we're not worried about it because we know we're using non-destructive editing and we can change it at any time so one thing I want to do is I want to make this light right down here I want to make it only visible in the highlights of the ocean like it's reflecting the light from the background so let's go ahead and double click right here there we go well double click there and I'm gonna hold alt or option right here where we see blend if there we go and that's gonna allow me to make this disappear from the darker areas of the ocean check that out making it only appear in the light areas of the ocean and that's what's gonna have a more realistic there we go check that out that's starting to look pretty good right now we're having a little bit more realistic reflection okay the color isn't exactly right so all we have to do is double click right here okay and we just choose our colors so let's make it a little bit warmer a little bit lighter doesn't have to be super strong here you just want a hint of it all right that looks pretty good so let's hit it make this visible and invisible all right maybe a little bit less saturated there okay and then if I need to do anything with my layer mask I can just you know kind of fill this in there all right Eric said I looked so clean did you layer mask my facial hair I'm assuming you're talking about my face I shaved it all off man looking for a change every couple years you gotta change stuff up right we're all artists sometimes my face is the canvas sometimes something else is the canvas here we go so I think this is looking pretty decent as far as like a completely generated light source here we can just turn this off and then back on really really nice so let's go ahead and get out a full screen here we're just gonna make this a little bit smaller and I'm gonna go ahead and close this document here the the clouds let's go ahead and close those to control our command W there we are and the next thing I want to do is start pulling in some of my rocks so this is another stock image here let's go ahead and grab my move tool and we're gonna click and drag from one image to another and hit f4 fullscreen okay so next we're going to just go ahead and make this a little smaller controller command T there we go I have my original still open there and we're just gonna make this a little bit smaller and I want to just kind of put this in a place basically my goal here is to make it look like these rocks are kind of coming off of the mountains like the mountains are kind of disintegrating so it's really nice to have a lower opacity when you're doing this and there we go and that looks pretty cool there it's nice to have a lower opacity so you can kind of see how it interacts with your image as a whole okay now also our light source is kind of coming from the right hand side as you can see here so we're gonna hit ctrl or command T I'm gonna right click and we're gonna flip this horizontally there we are looking really really good there and then we're gonna bring our opacity all the way back up to a hundred percent okay now a lot of people are saying use multiply blending mode and normally I would but in this case I actually want to change the light values of these rocks as well so we're gonna cut them out of the background so we're gonna go to select I'm gonna go down to color range we're just gonna select the white okay of the background there we are let's okay and then I'm gonna click on my layer mask and we just hit controller command I to invert our layer mask there we are you just want to make sure you get rid of your edges around any type of images like this there we go sometimes they just show up there we are and then on my layer mask I'm just gonna refine this a little bit so let's just go to select and mask I'm gonna shift the edge in a tiny bit so let's bring up a tiny bit of feathering and contrast there we go I just want to shift the edge because these rocks had a little bit of a white halo around them and that was not looking really good so we just shift the edge in a little bit hit OK that looks pretty good okay so what we're gonna do now is actually right click and go to apply layer mask cuz we don't really need that layer mask anymore and we're gonna be able to use this in several different layers ok so what we want to do next is you know what we're gonna make this a little bit smaller and I'm gonna go ahead and make another one of these so let's hit ctrl or command J we'll just keep that on there for for fun basically okay the next thing I need to do is match these rocks with this environment and I've got a couple great tips for you here the first thing we're gonna do is match our light levels so in order to match those light levels I find it can be really helpful to make a black and white adjustment layer and that just takes the light that takes all the color value away so now all I need to focus on is is it too light or is it too dark so I'm just looking at light levels for now so just so everyone's following along this black and white isn't staying on forever it's literally just here to help me look at my light levels and then I'm gonna take a look at my color levels in just a second okay so now that I have my light levels as fairly obvious I'm gonna grab a levels adjustment layer and clip this to the rocks okay so the levels adjustment layer we're gonna go ahead and click on my clipping mask icon here so now check this out any adjustment that I make with this level adjustment layer zoom in so you guys and see it any adjustment is only going to take place on the rocks okay so what we want to do is take our black point and make this a bit brighter and we want to take our white point and make it a bit darker right I'm trying to match the relative light levels and the relative contrast of my background right so in order to do that I'm working with my input and my output levels there we go okay and we can see right about there that's starting to look a lot more real so if I just turn this off and on you can see there's the before we'll just zoom in here there's the before and there's the after right it looks a lot more like my background now it's in black and white so when I turn black and white off you're gonna see that my color doesn't match okay so my color doesn't match that's not a big deal what I'm gonna do is grab a hue/saturation adjustment layer okay we're gonna clip this as well and I'm gonna click on colorize and now I'm just gonna change my hue till the hue starts to match a little bit better okay and we'll just change our saturation a little bit as well so if your hue and your saturation or matching relatively well and your light levels are matching well check it out so there's the rocks before and there's the rocks after so looks a lot better it starts to look like you know real I also want to put a little bit of a blur in there so we're just gonna go to filter blur and then Gaussian blur and that's just gonna help it match the background a little bit better too there we go looking good and now I can go in here just on a layer mask here and I can start to define what I want to be visible and what I don't want to be visible now these large there we go now I'm just using the same cloud brush actually these large areas here these big rocks I want those to be visible but some of these smaller ones I can kind of make invisible here and in a few minutes we're actually going to make a custom rock brush there we are that's looking pretty good so the rest of it I'm going to take care of with my custom rock brush okay so let's go ahead and group all those I'm just gonna double click and I'm gonna call this rocks one now I'm gonna duplicate the entire rocks one group okay and we're gonna go to my layer mask let's just move this over here okay we're gonna go to my layer mask and I'm just gonna fill that with white big rock David yeah okay so let's just call this rocks two and now I'm gonna decide hey where do I want these other rocks to come in like right about there starting to look pretty cool right so now here on my layer mask I just paint out some of this stuff you know I don't want it to look like just a duplicate of this stuff we had before right there we go so that's starting to look pretty good too all right now the next thing I want to do is I'm gonna create another layer on here just a regular layer we're gonna group it or I'm going to clip this rather and then I'm going to use my clone stamp tool with this same cloud brush so I'm gonna just sample some of this here and start clone stamping it on to my other layer okay so you can see by by clone stamping some of this on to my other layer I'm gonna be able to start to get some of this fog in here things like this alright so getting some of this fog in here and kind of have it you know cover up some of these rocks make it look like you know some of these are kind of coming from before or sorry in front and some of them are gonna be coming from behind I find that this is better than doing like a change of opacity there we go I'm gonna use my eraser tool is gonna have the same brush here to cool so turn this off and on you can see I just started to integrate that a little bit better with everything that we've got going on alright we're going to do one more rocks group let's go ahead and duplicate this again I want something for the right-hand side and check it out we just fill this layer mask with white again okay let's just delete that top layer there and then we're gonna bring our entire rocks group just over here alright I'm gonna hit ctrl or command T we'll right-click and flip hit flip horizontal there we go yeah that's looking pretty good I just want some like really kind of subtle stuff right up here okay that looks good so I'll just invert my layer mask really just the rest of it I'm cool just like right here you know that's that's cool with me [Music] apologies there's a siren outside of my building I live like basically right next door to a hospital which has actually proven to be pretty useful but sometimes it's just means there's sirens outside okay new layer and we're gonna use our clone stamp tool again with that same brush there we are there we go let's go ahead and paint that away super cool Howard Pinsky this edit rocks I love you Howard thank you so much okay so we're looking great here now anytime I do these atmospheric types effects and whatnot I I want a little bit more scattering in here and I want I want to have a little bit more control over that so the next thing we're gonna do is actually create our own custom rock brush and that's gonna allow me to just do like light scattering of particles around it's gonna help it make a look realistic and it's it's gonna go from like dense rocks to you know right now we have like a dense cluster of rocks and then nothing I want it to kind of fade out so it goes dense less dense less less less and then just kind of fades out so we can do that with a custom Photoshop brush so we're just going to go ahead and get out of that document for now looking really good okay we're gonna hit controller command n for new and we're gonna make this 500 by 500 pixels okay so will 500 by 500 pixel super super simple we're literally just gonna grab our lasso tool okay lasso tool and I'm going to hold shift and I'm just gonna make some of these little little rocks here okay this is literally just like making making round shapes and I'm purposely having a bit of like they're not perfectly round right they're supposed to be rocks okay so now what we're gonna do is hit shift delete and we're gonna fill that with black there we go and that's gonna be our scattering aprox so now we want to go ahead and change this well we basically want to make this into a custom brush so we're gonna go to edit and down to define brush preset alright and just call this scattered rocks so literally that's it if you've ever wanted to make like scattered rocks or particles or things like that make a custom brush because with your custom brush settings and all of the things we can do with scattering and shape dynamics it can make really believable cool cool results and creating a custom brush is as simple as having a white document a couple black specks in this case and then just go to edit and define brush define brush preset so now we're gonna go back to this document okay let's go ahead and create a new layer and I'm gonna hit B from my brush tool now we're gonna go ahead and define this brush together so I'm just gonna make it red to start with okay this is just so we can see what we're doing so right now if I just paint with this brush this is what it looks like okay it's just a bunch of little dots but again it doesn't look like scattered rocks it just looks like a bunch of little red dots and it's not gonna work so we go to window and down to brush settings okay we turn on our shape dynamics let's turn that size jitter all the way up we're gonna turn our angle jitter all the way up we're gonna flip the X and the y jitter as well okay next thing we're gonna do is add a little scattering on both accesses there and now check this out okay same brush with a couple different settings look at that we'll go ahead and up our scattering a little bit and increase our spacing a little bit there we go and now as I start painting around look at this look how cool this is right these really look like our scattered rocks so so cool so now that I like this we're gonna go ahead and make it a brush preset so we have scattered rocks oh one and obviously I just painted with red there to show you guys what this but what we want to do is grab our colors here so look at this I can just start clicking here I can make my brush larger and smaller if I want to super easy just use your open closed brackets just like anything else okay and now I just pop-pop-pop-pop Allah palapa that's the technical term for it and check this out we have all these scattered rocks look at that fantastic we just turn that off and on and we have all those little rocks in there I just give that layer a little bit of blur there we go filter little Gaussian blur beautiful and boom we have all these little scattered rocks up there that are looking great now that brush is well-defined I'm gonna create a new layer and clip that so option command G we just want to go to my final clouds and then I'm gonna just grab some of these lighter colors and basically I want just some color variation with these rocks right like I don't want them all to be there we go I don't want all my rocks to be like just a light color or that same dark color right I want some to be lighter or some to be darker I want some to look like they're farther away and something to look like they're closer there we go okay and we're gonna do the same thing here I'm just gonna put a new layer on that rocks 3 and again some of these I want to be farther away and some of these I want to be closer so I'm just doing that with these clipping masks I'm just basically making some of these lighter and some of them darker and that helps me create that that effect right so now we just group all of those controller command G and just call this rocks it's a pretty cool effect right guys so let's just turn these rocks off and back on boom alright we are looking great I hope you guys are having a good time I know I'm having a great time any time I'm in Photoshop this is my jam so I'm having a great time the next thing we're gonna do look at this we're just moving right along see we don't need this document anymore okay we don't need this document anymore let's go ahead and bring these birds in super easy to do that let's just use our move tool we'll click and drag boom some birds ctrl or command T to transform cuz they're huge right now way too big there we are okay let's hit enter there it's just gonna take a second to do a big transform and then same deal here I just want to go to select and then down to color range we're gonna select this white color okay and we're just gonna pop a layer mask on it I'm gonna invert that layer mask by hitting ctrl or command I and then we just want to fill the edges with black on the layer mask to make sure it doesn't doesn't get visible so a picture of some birds this is actually Adobe Illustrator this is not even a picture of birds this is just some you know render of birds rather but we're gonna make them small and then they're gonna look realistic alright so let's go ahead and shrink these down a little bit there use my move tool alright and figure out hey where do we want these birds coming from alright they're kind of coming from far away so if it's far away if these birds are far away they need to get blur on them and they need to get lighter in color right because they should be in the fog so let's go ahead and add a blur well you know filter blur and then Gaussian blur okay maybe a tiny bit more of a blur great that looks good now I'm gonna create a new layer and clip this we're gonna use this same fog brush and look at this I'm gonna be just paint on my fog brush and some of these are gonna be more foggy some of these are gonna be less foggy and it's what's gonna give us some depth here right alright looking good let's go ahead and choose you a little bit for darker color for some of these up close cool so check that out so there's a before it just looks like we have some dark birds there they're all the same color and there's the after not only did we blur this but we've also pulled some colors in from the background there we go someone just asked how large this file is and that reminds me it's a good time to save alright there we go so I'm gonna go just go ahead and save this out now some people ask what computer I'm using I'm actually using a Mac Pro computer and it's let's see up up up up up I have 64 gigabytes of RAM - 3.5 gigahertz six core Intel xenon a5 processor just to you know just a heads up it's a way overkill for just Photoshop but with phlearn which is the company that we teach Photoshop online we run a server on this computer and I'm also running a live broadcast so I just wanted to make sure I had the best computer possible but you could do this on a laptop for sure so just just a little heads up there okay great so we got our birds in there and we're looking good so let's go ahead and pop out of this image real quick there we go we don't need our birds anymore we're gonna pull these rocks in there so let's just use our move tool I haven't updated my operating system because I didn't want to do it because I'm doing this live broadcast I got everything working and then it was like update your operating system and I'm like no way not in the chance that it could mess up my live broadcast so I'll update after the live broadcast okay so here we go we're gonna cut out some more rocks so let's just hit W for our magic wand tool my birds are flying upside-down really I think just some of them have wings that are going up and some of them have wings that are going down but if they were flying upside down all you have to do is hit ctrl or command T right click and say flip vertical there we go they might be upside down I don't know it's hard to tell there we go let's go ahead and bring in these rocks now you might look at these rocks and say hey those have nothing to do with this image but we're gonna make them look like they do and Jerry asks if these imagers are available to download these are all Adobe stock images yes so they are all available on Adobe stock and I'm happy to provide the file names for this as well okay so let's go ahead and grab a lasso tool and OOP we're just gonna lasso tool this out we're not gonna use that one so we'll just lay your mask that out okay I'm just gonna use my magic wand tool and then fill that with black on my layer mask okay so anything that's just on a white background like that super super easy and you can see I just cut that up very very simply okay now let's go ahead and right click I'm gonna apply this layer mask there we go we're gonna hit controller command T to transform there we go it looks like we had some scraggly pixels over there controller command T to transform and then this is gonna be like my little castle on the top of this rock and I want to make it a little bit taller there we go so you're gonna be my castle on the rock this is like my my house I was talking with my partner Katie and she said it reminded her of the neverending story with the childlike Empress she said oh that's my house up there the childlike Empress house if you guys are neverending story fans I know we are so we have this rock popping on the top of everything okay it doesn't look real at all it doesn't look like it belongs but don't worry we're gonna use the same technique that we use to match these other rocks so let's make it black and first okay let's go ahead and group those and call them birds this is going to be called tower okay so we're gonna go ahead and grab a levels adjustment layer and clip this and then I want to take my light levels and bring them down something like that looks pretty good and then we want to take our shadow levels and bring them up something like that looks pretty good and then I just want to get like a relatively good match here it doesn't have to be perfect but I wanted to be relatively relatively good there we go okay and now check it out I'm gonna use this same clouds brush okay same clouds brush to fade in one set of rocks to another okay I can even use it - there we go - layer mask this other rock and it's gonna make it look like it has a rock texture alright looking pretty good cool now what we're gonna do is right-click I'm going to apply that layer mask and we're gonna give this a little bit of a blur so let's just go to filter blur and then Gaussian blur alright looking pretty good there we're gonna hit okay and that looks fantastic look at this so we have a little bit of a castle on the rocks now it doesn't look that great now I mean in black and white it looks fine but let's go ahead and turn our black and white layer off and take a look at at this image in color Michael listening says you must add a luck dragon next oh I wish I had a luck trying to put in there boom Falkor come on let's do this thing so this is looking pretty good in black and white but again in color doesn't exactly work just yet so I need to make a couple adjustments here alrighty so what we're gonna do is grab a hue/saturation adjustment layer BAM hue saturation adjustment layer we're gonna click on colorize I'm gonna clip this you can just hit option command G to clip that and now we're just gonna color it to match these rocks okay now there's another cool thing that you can do here and this is going to help us out to match some color sorry Kevin asks why do you use mask instead of cutting and deleting surely you'd save your image sighs well I do use masks I kind of use both depending on what I need if I'm gonna if I think I'm gonna need to go back to some of the original information in a lair I'll use a mask so I can get it back if I'm absolutely sure I don't need that information anymore then I'm okay deleting it like for these rocks for instance what I did is I used a mask and then once I was happy with that mask I applied the mask and that's basically the same thing as cutting something out and just deleting the rest of the information cool good question okay so now what we're gonna do we see the image looks pretty good in black and white and I've got a cool tip for you guys when it comes to matching color in Photoshop so what we're gonna do is grab a solid color fill layer you know how I'm a big fan of these we're gonna go all the way to red and I'm gonna change this from normal to saturation okay so changing this from normal to saturation now here's what my image looks like crazy right it doesn't it doesn't look good at all but what I've done is basically I've made I've taken the saturation of the entire image and I've brought it way more saturated so the image is super super saturated at this point now the reason I do this and I do this mostly for compositing the reason that I do this here let me just pop in there we go the reason I do this is so I can see the changes in hue and there are a lot more obvious so making everything really really saturated now look how look how my little castle that I added here it doesn't look at all like it has the same color as the rest of the background where's the before you look at this and you might think oh you know what it's not exactly right but when you add this layer it exaggerated sit and it makes it very obvious that it's not right so what I know now is because it's so orange it's not going to really fit with the blue of the rest of the image so what we're gonna do is I'm going to turn on we're just gonna grab a hue/saturation adjustment layer okay boom hue saturation adjustment layer we're gonna clip this and I'm gonna click on colorize okay so check this out all I have to do is change my hue there we go I just changed my hue until these start to match a little bit better look at that and right about there my hue starts to look a lot better right it starts to look like it makes sense so keep in mind that this is in a very exaggerated version of my image so if I turn off my exaggerated version of my image it should look better okay but it still doesn't look perfect okay but here's the deal in black and white it looks pretty good I think it could be a little bit lighter in the darks there we go okay so in black and white it looks good so that tells me that my light levels are actually okay right because it looks good in black and white now when I super exaggerated the hue it looks over the saturation rather it looks okay as well but it still doesn't look perfect and so that basically means I have only one element left so when you think about compositing the biggest thing we want to match we want to match our color right and color is made up of light levels so like is it light or is it dark we want to match our hue hue is like red green and blue and we want to match a saturation and saturation is how much of that color is present okay so we've already taken a look at this there we go and it looks good in my light levels so that's good okay my hue looks good as well so the only thing left is my saturation so what I know now is my saturation is off basically I only have one option I need to make it more saturated or less saturated and looking at this it's pretty obvious that I need to make it less saturated awesome so let's just take my saturation and start to drag this down a little bit and there we go we can see it starts to match much much better with the rest of the image I think it's looking really really good now we do have some of this from the planet in the Sun that's actually changing the hue there so I want to bring in some of these colors in there as well okay but we can see how look at this this is the rock as we just brought it in straight out of you know is basically cut it out added that and it's already looking a lot better so now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take one of these layers that we used for the light okay we're gonna duplicate this alright let's go ahead and bring it up there and I'm gonna make it only visible where the tower is visible there we are and now we're just gonna paint on it again with this same brush okay and this is gonna help me just bring some of the color there we go it's gonna help me bring some of the color of that light back on to the tower subtly I just want to do it subtly that's awesome now here are some other cool tips you can do you can create a new layer and use your clone stamp tool so I'm going to use my clone stamp tool to start clone stamping in some of the original rock over top of the castle there we go and that's going to help with the transit transition there as well and you just want to make sure for this that you choose your sample to be current and below so I'm sampling the sampling this layer and also the rock layer underneath it and you can see that helps that transition look look a little bit more natural as well okay so there we go and then one more thing we're going to do is I'm just gonna grab my brush tool okay we're gonna change my blending mode from normal to color and I'm gonna start painting with a color blend mode on there as well so if you have ever any trouble at all getting the right color onto something you composite you can simply grab the colors of the layer underneath it and then start painting it in alright so check this out here's our tower we're just gonna go ahead and turn all of this off so this is just the tower let me to refine the layer mask a little bit more because we have like a hard line down here you really don't want that sort of thing it just makes it a little bit more obvious okay beautiful so we start off with our light levels then we worked on our color levels added a little bit of color brought in some of the the ground and then we just finalized the color there alright I think this is looking pretty cool so let's go ahead and save this out and we're back on to our stock images so we've used this stock image and we're good to go so now we're back with our last stock image and this is a stock image of a city and this is how we're going to make our images look a little bit more like it's a inhabited basically this tower in the background there I wanted to make it look like you know you could live there so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take these lights here okay we're gonna take some of the lights in this stock image and then I'm gonna actually apply them over top of these image sorry over top of this tower great so let's go ahead and use our move tool we're gonna click and drag from one image to another alright let's just make sure we're using a new layer here at the top there we go click and drag from one image to another and here we have our lights alright so we can go ahead and close that one out and hit f4 full screen looking really good now the next thing we want to do is I want to take this and also clip it to my tower so really I just want this to be visible just where my tower is and now we can see I can move this layer anywhere I want and we're just gonna have these lights visible in the tower okay now let's go ahead and unclip this for now and just lower our opacity so I can figure out about where these lights are and which ones I want visible all right so let's hit ctrl or command T to transform and we're just gonna make this a little bit smaller there we go someone asked if you can clone from a different document yeah you actually can clone from a different document I personally have never used that feature that much I find it easier just copy and paste but but yes you can go into your clone source dialog and clone from any document you can even flip things vertically and horizontally if you want to do that too okay cool looking good so now we have some lights over top of our tower let's go ahead and clip those option command G again we're gonna bring up our opacity this looks pretty good now what I want to do let's go ahead and make them a little bit smaller actually alright our lights there we go so let's just bring this right here and great I don't want a lot of the lights on the bottom so much I mostly just want them on the top so what we're gonna do is change this blend mode from normal to screen okay so anytime you want let's say you want the dark part of your image invisible and the light part visible you can use a screen blend mode and that does exactly this so if I change this back to normal you can see it's literally just the city lights this is some skyscrapers over top some rocks here if I change this from normal to screen then just the light parts are showing through okay if you were to change this to multiply just the dark parts would show through okay so we want to go back to screen but we see a little bit of an issue here because this is set to screen all of the light parts are showing through including some of the images here in the background like the parts of the tower that are relatively light so what we're gonna do is hit ctrl or command L for levels and levels will allow us to make our darks a little bit darker okay now we can see as I make my darks darker they're just disappearing okay and that's exactly what I want my darks being darker makes them invisible because I'm on a screen blend mode all right so that looks pretty good let's sit okay we're gonna add a layer mask to this and we're gonna paint with black on our layer mask okay just basically where we don't want these I want these lights to be alright so nothing really here on the bottom I'm just gonna switch to just a normal soft edge brush all right there we go yeah exactly this is where the attack of the clones were made I'm a huge Star Wars fan so bring it I think that was one of the main driving forces behind my creativity growing up was was watching the Star Wars films and all the behind the scenes and seeing how they did everything it's still one of my favorite things to do all right so I'm just removing some of these some of these things from the outer edges that you know might not make sense if there's a rectangular window all the way the edge now keep in mind I'm also like super super zoomed in so when we zoom out to like a normal level it's gonna look a lot more like realistic basically not that it doesn't right now but it's a it's a little bit it's a little bit funky and we need to blur this just a little bit okay so we're gonna click on our layer we'll go to filter blur and then Gaussian blur and just give it a little bit of a blur all so cool so let's go ahead and zoom out looking pretty good I think some of these lights down here on the bottom I still want to make those invisible so we'll just go ahead and mask that out all right Nick says I haven't made any smart objects it's making you nervous I know I mean I do use smart objects quite a bit actually in Photoshop I love smart objects for you know for instance like applying a blur if you make a smart object first then you can change that blur at any time honestly kind of the biggest reason I'm not using smart or sub smart objects right now is because a tiny Gaussian blur is really the only filter that I'm that I'm using throughout this tutorial and I'm using the same exact Gaussian blur on all of the elements so they all match and if I was using a lot of different types of or like different levels of blur on things then I would most definitely be using Smart Objects but I love Smart Objects and I think that you know it's a great habit to be in to use them whenever possible definitely all right cool I think that's looking pretty good so we get to kind of pick and choose what we want level here there we go that one's a little bit too bright too all right and so from a from a view like this where we can see the image as a whole you can see there we go you can see you get the idea that it's like a city or a complex or something like that there in the background but you can you can still see the overall you can still see the overall landscape of it and I played around with this image originally I was like oh maybe I'll put a boat in the foreground and put like a person on the boat and I I did a lot of different things but in the end it just felt a little bit more I don't know it just felt a little bit more unique to have like a landscape style composite I really haven't done anything like this you know very much at all to be honest but it's a lot of fun to create like a fantasy composite that doesn't involve people because a lot of my work have you know just about all my images have people in them and it's a lot of fun but I wanted to give myself an image like a challenge to do something creative that didn't involve people as well so yeah I think we're looking really really good fantastic so let's go ahead and turn our tower off and on looking good now we're gonna make another layer over top of that and I want some of these clouds to look like they're going over top of the tower so what do we do in this case well we grab our cloud brush see how useful this cloud brush is become there we go I'm just gonna grab some of these clouds and start painting them over top of my tower there we go and down in here as well so this is just again it's a regular brush okay I'm actually gonna unclip this because it I want it to paint down here a little bit too this is just a regular brush there we go and I'm just holding alt or option there we go and this is allowing me fantastic this is allowing me to just grab the colors of my background and paint that in there okay now that my blending mode here I'm gonna change this from normal to lighten it should just be clouds and I don't want him to like darken that little tower at all all right this is so so cool I'm really loving all these comments coming in you guys have got some great ideas someone says some x-wings faded into the background some rocks hitting the water really really cool ideas I'm absolutely loving it alright well we've got just a couple more minutes till our portfolio review so we're gonna go ahead and do a we're gonna add a couple little spires to the top of this thing so let's go ahead and create a new layer here now with our spires again I'm gonna go with the same type of the same type of architecture here so there we go you know kind of like not trying to make them a hundred percent perfect so this is just with a lasso tool there we go so basically I'm just making a selection to start with and then I'm going to a clone stamp this so we're just going to clone stamp from outside into the selection we'll hit ctrl or command H to hide there we go and literally just clone stamp in from one area this tower into another one there we are and we can change these to I think they look pretty good well we'll see okay and then we want to do the same thing over here so we'll just add a little Tower I want like a spire on the top of these if anyone's curious like what are you doing there we go all right cool and then that's just gonna get the exact same Gaussian blur that everything else gets so it should look pretty pretty seamless there okay cool yeah that one's a little bit too thick so we're just gonna pop a layer mask on that all right there we go and I'm still using that same cloud brush believe it or not I get brushes like this and I'm like I'm gonna use it from everything all right it's still a little bit too why let's go ahead and zoom in we can make adjustments on this we get plenty of time all right cool so let's go ahead and save this out the next thing we want to do is make some spires to go on the top of these and we basically want to do this in the same principle that we did for the for the for the light there but we're gonna save that until after we do our current challenges so we're gonna take a look at our current challenges now I'm super excited to see them so if those of you guys who have not who haven't had the chance to do so be sure you go on to discord and you can take a look at our current challenges also we're gonna take a look at there we go our daily creative challenge here there we go let's just pop this up sorry there we go pop this up here in this window okay so we can see here's our daily creative challenge here on B hands net so if you guys haven't done so you can go to behance on net slash challenge slash Photoshop I'm sure we're gonna link it up here in the chats and here you can sign up for the Adobe creative challenge so you've got all of your information right here and you're gonna see that these challenges are getting unlocked very shortly so we've got a on April 14th we've got a creative challenge oh that's right we are doing portfolio I think we're going through the Behance sorry we're doing the current challenges in discord today I'm pretty sure help me out here on the on the live chat help me out here on the live chat I'm pretty sure we're going through the discord current challenges for the for the Photoshop play at home alright so I'm gonna go ahead and go through those and we're gonna hear what we have here as well there we go let's go ahead and clear these perfect so if you haven't already done so be sure to join us here on discord where we're taking a look at the current challenges and these were posted oh I got a message on slack from Voodoo Val oh we are doing portfolio reviews today Oh wonderful okay Thank You Val for sending me these images alright thank you everyone you were right turns out you guys know what's up shouldn't surprise me of course you guys know what we're doing here okay we are doing portfolio reviews let me just make me a little bit smaller here in the corner okay there we go alright portfolio reviews fantastic Thank You Val for linking me up today I apologize everyone about the daily creative challenge turns out I'm thinking about tomorrow in my head but we've got a portfolio review right here so I've got two portfolios that Val was nice enough to send over thank you so much foodie though and we're taking a look at Austin full mohamad mastery as well by the way these are both on be hands so if you haven't already done so I mean a lot of you guys are watching this live broadcast right here on be hanscom's slash live if you haven't already done so go ahead and upload your work to behance it's like the best platform in my opinion for not only showcasing your own work but for discovering other creatives work as well and I know that I've had a lot of job opportunities come my way through behance over the years with people looking for in my case I do you know professional compositing photography retouching that sort of thing so you know browsing through portfolios I've had a lot of I've had a lot of people contact me through Behance so if you haven't uploaded your portfolio on be hands be sure to do so alright well we're looking really Rick right here so Austin fool looks like we have a lot of composite work a lot of sports work some graphic design work and some logo some logo stuff as well all in all really really cool so let's take a cup let's take a look at some of these you know up close here so here we have a composite what I like about this image is you're matching your graphic style from one image to a different so like this image here obviously we have a portrait here we have another portrait and then here we have like a full body image but I'm not distracted by everything which is a good thing like this portrait in the background blends in really well here and then we have selective coloring here in the foreground which definitely draws my eye right to this area here in the foreground so really really nice composite work here I can see this is I guess rich Hamilton is the there we go is the text here in the foreground I'm having just a tiny bit of trouble reading this it I like it I think it's really really cool and says r.i.p rich Hamilton so I really like it I'm just having a tiny bit of trouble reading it right here but that could be just me let's go through a couple your up other images super cool again you're using selective coloring I really like you're matching this yellow like the yellowish orange here with the blue in the background the contrast just gives it a little bit more pop and makes it you know not so monochromatic but I like what you're doing here with you know basically we just have the Selective coloring going on so you know your athlete is basically in black and white and then the the jersey here is in color and then we have a little bit of a pop this orange here and then you've got a lot of really great textures on here like this you know texture here in the background we've got like dot patterns and things like that it's making these images a lot more interesting than if they were just on a you know all white background and it looks like here you've also designed a custom logo for this person with the K in the L being hand signs I'm not sure if you design that or not if if that was you know already done let's scroll down and see oh here we have some more examples here playing for the Toronto Raptors I'm I'm not the most knowledgeable when it comes to basketball so pardon me I'm not sure who some of these people are but it just speaks to my own basketball ignorance but what I really like is the fact that we've got this hand logo here and then you've got the hand print as a texture on this image as well that's so cool anytime you can match like textures with you know graphics and logos and then I get the impression that this would be a hand print of of this of this person even though it might not be exactly that person's hand print that's the impression that I get and I really dig that it's a it's a super cool effect all right let's kind of take a look a lot of this kind of same general principles here we have with looks like a artists here as well yeah all in all I think this looks really really good I guess my only like slight critique here would be that we have like a low polygon version of the subject I think she is really strong especially with her red hair but then the microphone just kind of looks like a cutout image with a Gaussian blur on it but she doesn't have a Gaussian blur on her so it's a little bit like if you if you were going for a depth of field thing then that's super cool but I would almost like to see it in the same resolution with the same type of treatment and then the cut out of her hat again this is probably done on purpose on purpose to look like low poly but I I don't know I would probably prefer just like a smooth round cut out of a hat but again that it's it's an effect thing so obviously everyone is you know everyone has a different opinion and everyone has their own style and that's what makes us great as artists so keep in mind that anything that I say is just my opinion it's you know like you guys are probably looking at my composite I'm doing today and you're probably like oh I would totally do that little different and that's wonderful that's what makes us all unique artists so I'm super happy and honored to be able to look through your portfolio here Austin and and and be able to give my thoughts on it so I very much appreciate that and really cool logo I actually get the feeling from your logo like I feel like I know what type of work you're you're working with as well it has like a very like a like a movement to it and the fact that you do a lot of sports work makes a lot of sense and I feel like this logo actually fits very well with with the with the work that you're doing here as well all right oh and Austin you're here in the chat oh so good - so good to talk to you how wonderful thank you so much for joining us here in the chat as well okay wonderful so our next image here is Muhammad I'm not sure if Muhammad is here in the chat as well but I'm super honored to be able to look at your images here is well Muhammad let's go ahead and start up here this is the for the stay at home challenge for our current circumstances super cool we've got a lot of different effects going on here and ok cool so I see this as like your you know basically like a public service message here maybe your brain wants you to go out but you have to keep your legs in your home so yeah I definitely get you there I'm feeling the same thing you are very very quiet I really like your use of textures and this this light here in the you know in in the foreground looks like a lens flare it really gives the image a very cool effect let's take a look we have some more super cool again a lot of use of texture here and textures can be relatively difficult to pull off but I feel like you're doing it very well here and here we have like a build up effect which I appreciate as a as a creator I really like to see how other people are doing their work from start to finish and I would say that you know if you can post any type of build ups like this this looks like an animated gif which I'll show you how to do that by the way at the end of today's broadcast we're gonna have a little bit of time so if anyone's curious on how to create one of these wonderful build ups and put that on your B hands portfolio I'll actually show you how to do that today I wasn't really planning on it but we have a little bit of time so we'll be able to show you how to do that cool all right here we have a looks like a whale of course we've got some birds composited in just like our photo today super cool I think you did a really nice job matching the coloring and the light with the foreground and your logo integrates very well here with with this beautiful photograph it looks like we have a video I'll watch the video later and another super super cool image this actually reminds me of like a pure illustration I'm not sure if this is composite with photos and illustrations but I really like what you've done here I haven't really seen much like this where it looks like kind of the whole world is warping around and we have these different cactuses and some some birds here it looks like we have a couple different different references and then some Forrest Gump on the bottom which I'm a big fan of Forrest Gump so really really cool and then it looks like we have some strict digital painting here as well and these look fantastic nice job on these digital paintings I would say you know I'm not a digital painter but I love some of the texture work that you put in your other composites like these you know these images up here have so much texture to them it'd be cool to see some of your digital paintings with a little bit of texture on them as well it's just to see what type of an effect those give alright and then here we have again a really really beautiful composite where it looks like a split split earth again I would say you know if I were to give any sort of subtle critique it might be that you know we have a pretty blurred foreground here which definitely works I might be compelled to extend this blur a little bit more like if you had a shallow depth of field with your photography things close to the camera and things really far away would be out of focus depending on where your focal point is I mean if your focal point is at infinity then that would be in focus obviously but because we do have this area so out-of-focus it might be nice to have a little bit of a more gradual depth of field change in this image but that's a super subtle thing and I know that personally I really struggle with adding elements to the foreground and doing blurs to them it's very difficult to get that blur ratio right and make those things look realistic so I tend to use the less of a blur the more of the blur and usually that's worked out for me but a fantastic job a super cool concept and really really wonderful images so thank you so much for submitting your images everyone to be to be on today's live broadcast I really had a great time viewing all of these portfolios and yeah again if you haven't already done so be sure to upload your images to behance as well so we can check them out and maybe they'll be featured in featured in a future live broadcast all right well thank you so much let's go ahead and get back into Photoshop here there we go and here in Photoshop we've just got a couple things to do but I think our image is looking great we're gonna add a spire and then I want to show you guys how to do a build up an animated gif as well so let's go ahead and grab our spire I'm just gonna grab another solid color fill layer there we go let's set this from normal down to color Dodge okay great controller command I on the layer mask for the color dodge and then we're just gonna go in here and basically just grab our polygonal lasso tool all right I'm gonna hold shift to make sure it goes straight up and down and then I'm gonna bring it in a tiny bit there we go and then I'm gonna fill that with white so we're just using there we go shift delete to fill that with white because this is just selections on a layer mask right all right there we go cool so what we want to do here is hit ctrl or command J to duplicate this and then we just want to give this a blur so let's go ahead and zoom out and give it a Gaussian blur so it looks like we have some light kind of emanating from from these little spires there okay we're gonna do another one and this time we're gonna change the color a little bit more Orange II because you know I'm a big fan of having a few different colors in there okay and then we're gonna go ahead the same brush we had here we're gonna use the cloud brush to just add a little bit of there we go a little bit more and I'm even gonna do like a little bit atmospherics around here to make it look like there are some clouds over here that are kind of being lit alright cool I think this is looking pretty good so let's just go back to the spire here I'm going to just take it down a little bit more all right and let's see how that looks coming out there I think this this spire here I just want to make it a little bit taller so we'll just go back to our polygonal lasso tool there we go that way we just have a little bit more separation between the three of them so we have like a little bit of a hierarchy there why not we'll make it taller we're doing fantasy images today the tallest spiral in the world there we go cool and then there we go just fade that out a little bit right there Wow super super cool and there we have our tower so we can just turn that up look at that we just turned the whole thing off and back on what a wonderful wonderful fun composite that we were able to do today in under two hours guys I've had a fantastic job a fantastic job I do have a fantastic job I get to play around in Photoshop for my whole life it's really wonderful but if I had a fantastic time with you hanging out today so our composite is looking great we are done just like we talked in the portfolio review I want to show you guys how to create up a build up effect because this is something super cool that you can use on Instagram you're you know portfolio on Behance just a cool way to add a little bit more interest to your work and show people the build up effect so let's go ahead and get into it it's actually very very easy to do what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go back down all the way to the base layer okay so all the way to the base layer what we're gonna do is create a new layer I'm gonna go to image and then down to apply image there we go apply image layer is gonna be set to merge okay and we're gonna go back to our blending mode is that that's gonna be set to normal and you can also hit shift option command II okay all right we're gonna do this nice and quick so basically we're gonna bring that in there we go let's go ahead and bring every step that you want to make basically all you have to do is make layers visible and invisible create a new layer and then make a stamp visible which you can do by hitting image and then down to apply image so like these rocks for instance I want to show that these rocks weren't exactly that they didn't exactly fit when we started so I'm gonna make that a step as well right because that's like pretty cool so let's create a new layer and then merge that together okay and then I'm going to turn all these clipping masks back on boop boop boop there we go let's just go back to rocks one turn that on there - all right bring this all the way up at the top new layer and a stamp visible okay great our birds we're just gonna put those right in there and then our tower I'm gonna just bring this in just like that again because I want to show the different steps that we got to to bring our tower together all right so we're gonna use the matching step so you can see I'm basically just creating stamp visible layers on top of everything Oh and there we go so now check this out I have these stamp visible layers on top of everything I'm gonna shift-click all of these layers we're gonna right click and I'm gonna go to duplicate layers dot dot dot I'm gonna just put this in a new document and then I'm gonna change the size of the document we'll just make this pixels I'll make this 1200 pixels just because the original was kind of large and I didn't really necessarily want to make an animation from that so now we have each of these layers here ready to go we're gonna go to window and then down to timeline okay so here's our timeline we're just gonna create it asks you if you want to do a video animation or a frame animation I'm gonna go to frame animation I'm gonna select all my layers and then we're gonna go to there we go create frame animation and then we're gonna go make frame from layers okay make Fame from layers and then I'm gonna set this at like a point two second delay and then check this out I just hit play and it builds it for me basically each one of those layers now it becomes a frame in my animation I can have as many or as little as I want and I'm gonna change my delay in between them there we go check that out looking good and then you just go to file export save for web and then I'm just gonna say set this to be an animated gif looping forever and then I'm gonna hit preview and then check this out it's actually going to show me a preview here in my web browser so would actually open the gif here in chrome you can see your file size okay in this case it's almost one megabyte so you can see it's a very large image all your settings but I'm actually viewing the animated gif right here in Chrome and that's an incredible tool because it allows me to see if everything's actually worked out the way it has or the way I want it to and it does look really good so I'm gonna go back into Photoshop let's go ahead and save this out there we go we'll go to day one all right put a jiff or a gif the ever ensuing battle of gif or Jif alright just name it fantasy composite progress and there we go that's literally all there is to it so once you're done making your composite image take an extra 30 seconds make an animated gif or an animated gif out of it and that's just another thing that you can use to promote yourself and promote your work to help everyone find you and to help basically move your career forward yeah really fun thing plus they're just really fun and I like to be with them well everyone thank you so much for joining me today I hope you enjoyed learning how to create this Photoshop composite image completely from scratch I want to say a big thank you to Adobe thank you to voodoo Val thank you to everyone in the chat who's joined us thank you to all of our moderators it's been a really really fun time and again we're gonna be broadcasting live for the rest of the day let's take a look at our schedule here so up next we've got our our Adobe XD daily Creed with Jesse and then after that we've got how to livestream with Paul alrighty well thank you everyone from the bottom of my heart I wish you love and happiness and health during these times from my home to yours thank you so much I'll see you later bye everyone you

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 70,683

Keywords: Photography workflows, mobile photography, lightroom, lightroom presets, create, photo retouching, photo editing, photoshop, compositing, pro tips, how to enhance photography, adobe, adobe live, adobelive, Phlearn, Aaron Nace

Id: wGaQNvH7jb4

Length: 120min 0sec (7200 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020