Cut Out Glass in Photoshop with Blending Modes (Better Results!)

if you're having trouble masking glass or other transparent objects make sure to check out this video i will go through the process of masking off this bottle into a new background in this tutorial you will learn about using blending modes and layer masks make sure that you stick around until the very end so that you don't miss any tips and tricks if there's at least one that you enjoy make sure that you click on that like button also i would like to thank msi for sponsoring today's photoshop tutorial i will work with my msi creator 15 laptop which is tested and optimized to run adobe software including photoshop okay let's jump right into the tutorial these are the images that i'm going to work with i have a background image and this bottle this bottle represents an interesting challenge we want to cut out the image but there's also transparency the liquids are transparent and of course the top part of the bottle is not transparent so we need to figure out how to mask this and include the transparency so that we can see the background as well to do so i'm going to take advantage of blending modes and separate the components into individual layers so that we can get the transparency and still keep the bottle so let me show you how to do that to start i'm going to create a new group and this group will contain all my bottle layers so i'll just name this group bottle then i'll select the bottle layer and i'll drag it into the group from here i'm going to create a layer mask to contain the bottle and i'm just going to select the layer and if you're in an older version of photoshop you can use the quick selection tool to mask the image but in newer versions of photoshop you can use the object selection tool or even easier the select subject option from the select menu and that will use artificial intelligence known as adobe sensei to analyze the image and select the main subject notice that i have a selection around my bottle now what you need to do now is click on the group and with the group selected create a mask now notice that we applied the layer mask to the group and not the layer and the reason that we're using a layer mask on a group and not on the individual layer is so that one single layer mask can control all the layers that are going to be inside of the group it's a more efficient way to work next with the bottle layer selected you can press ctrl j on windows command j on the mac to duplicate the layer and do that so that you have three copies i'll double click on the layer name to change the name and i'll call it shadows the second i'll call highlights and the third i will call color next i'm going to disable all the layers and start with the shadows first i'm going to desaturate the layer so i'm going to remove all the color you can do so by pressing ctrl shift u on windows that's command shift d on the mac and as you can see that removes the color i'm going to use this layer to only keep the shadows of this layer and i'm going to use a blending mode if i click on the blending mode drop down you can see all the different blending modes and in this case we're going to use the blending modes in the darken category which remove the highlights and keep the shadows the best blending mode for that in this case will be multiply and as you can see we only keep the shadows next let's work on the highlights layer i'll enable it and with the highlights layer selected you can press ctrl shift view on windows that's command shift u on the mac to desaturate the layer then we're going to remove the shadows and only keep the highlights so again we'll use a blending mode for that i'm going to click on the blending mode drop down and in this case we're going to use the blending modes found in the lighten category which hide shadows but keep the highlights and in this case screen is the best option for that and as you can see now the bottle is transparent we have the shadows and highlights and finally i'm going to go into the color layer and enable that and this time i will not be saturated because i want to keep the color but i don't want the luminosity from the layers below affecting this layer so i'll change the blending mode to color which keeps both the hue and saturation and by doing this we've separated the background from the bottle and it looks fantastic and if you're curious as to how all these blending modes work and what they do then look below in the description there's a link to my tutorial where i talk about each individual blending mode and how it works so make sure that you check that out as well again link below in the description what we need to do now is just fine tune these adjustments so start by going into the shadows layer and you can create a new levels adjustment layer and click on this icon to clip it to the layer below this down pointing arrow is telling us that this adjustment layer will only affect the shadows layer and nothing else again you can enable it by clicking on this icon if i adjust the gamma you can see how i can affect the bottle see that's how the shadows get brighter so they disappear or they get darker and they reappear so it's up to you you can adjust this layer as much as you need to to get the result that you want in this case i'm going to make it a little bit darker by clicking and dragging on this icon just to darken it up a bit then i'll do the same thing for the highlights with the highlights layer selected you can go into the new adjustment layer icon and select levels clip it to the layer below by clicking on this icon and you can click and drag on this slider to darken the layer which will make the darker pixels invisible remember we only want the specular highlights here so darkening the layer is exactly what you want to do once you do that the image looks much darker because we've darkened it with this layer so you may have to come back here and brighten this up just a little bit and readjust it accordingly so that your image looks okay in this case this looks pretty good what i'm going to do now is work on the solid areas of the bottle like the top part here notice that when you zoom in you can still see part of the background and that obviously doesn't look very good to fix that we need to go to the shadows layer and hold control on windows command on the mac and click on the new layer icon to create a layer directly below it so below the shadows layer and i'm going to call this layer solid because this is the area that's going to give me the solid areas of the image in other words the areas that are not transparent with the brush tool selected you can make white your foreground color my background color is currently white so i can click on this icon to swap it to the foreground color or you can tap the x key on the keyboard to do the same then when you have white as your foreground color you can use the bracket keys on your keyboard to increase your brush size i'm tapping on the right bracket key to make a larger brush and then i'm just going to paint with white on that area and notice that that just brings back the original pixels and i don't have to worry about staying within the lines because we have applied this layer mask to the group so no matter what i'm always going to stay within the lines which is exactly why i wanted the layer mask in the group and not on an individual layer if we had it on an individual layer we will need to duplicate the mask on each layer and if we change the mask we have to change them on all layers and that will take too long so having the layer in the group saves you time and it's a more efficient workflow also you can zoom into the bottle and work on areas like this they should be solid but are not so again with my brush tool i'm going to resize my brush by tapping on the left bracket key and i'm just going to paint in also i want my brush to be a little bit softer i have hard edges so i'll hold shift and tap on the left bracket key to soften my brush a little bit you can also come in this drop down and increase or reduce the hardness so i'm reducing the hardness to get softer edges and i can continue painting on these areas i'm going a bit quickly here but feel free to take your times in your projects so that you get better results there's no need for you to watch me fine tune all these smaller details but anyway once you have something that looks like this you can double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen again you can spend time fine tuning all the smaller details everything is looking fantastic at the moment the shadows the highlights and the color and by the way if color's important to you then make sure to check out the msi creator 15 laptop which features msi's exclusive true pixel display it is a combination of several features specifically designed for creative pros to get the best colors possible these features include a 4k display up to 220 ppi for great on-screen detail that can reproduce adobe rgb at 100 also included is a true color technology which ensures color accuracy so that your work is displayed exactly as you intended msi calibrates all creator 15 laptops at the factory and they are kalman certified you'll get great color representation which is necessary for creative work msi creator 15 laptops are tested and optimized to run adobe software including photoshop premiere pro illustrator and many others it gives you the peace of mind that your laptop is fully compatible and it will perform efficiently with your favorite design apps if you want to find out more about the msi creator 15 laptop then check out the amazon link below in the description at the time of this recording amazon was selling it for five hundred dollars off but anyway let's jump right into the tutorial what i'm going to do now is work on the light that will be hitting the background so let's analyze the image for a second if you notice the bottle here we have a shadow on the right and on the left hand side we have a highlight also if i change the blending mode of this layer from color to normal and then disable the layer mask by holding shift and clicking on it you can see that the shadow is on the bottom right in other words the light is coming from the left so what we need to do now is bring back everything the way we had it so i'll enable the layer mask and change the blending back to color and we need to create a shadow on the right hand side because the light is coming from the left also since this is a bottle the light would go through the bottle and we would see a little bit of the highlight here on the actual surface you can actually see a highlight here on the bottle so we will need to recreate that on the surface as well so let's start by creating that light i'm going to collapse this group click on the background and create a new group and this will just be the light and shadows and i'll create a new layer inside of that group and this one will be the highlight and what i'll do is select the brush tool when you have the brush tool active you can hold alt on windows option on the mac to temporarily enable the eyedropper tool and when you click you will set that color as your foreground color then i'll increase my brush size and i'm just going to paint like so this is going to be the light that's hitting the surface now we want to make sure that we don't affect the inside of the bottle so to do that we're going to need the inversion of this layer mask and you can invert and duplicate a layer mask really quickly in photoshop simply by holding alt on windows option on the mac shift and clicking and dragging that layer mask onto another layer or group and when i release photoshop will duplicate the layer and invert it all in one go notice now that the inside of the bottle is not affected by the brush strokes when i paint so what you can do now is select the highlight layer and simply switch the blending mode into color dodge color dodge is a really interesting blending mode it's one of the eight blending modes that allows you to adjust opacity and fill and get different results and with fill you typically get better results so you can reduce the fill and notice that the intensity of the light changes as well see that looks really really good i think for now this is good we can fine tune it later once we add the shadow to add the shadow i'm going to hold control on windows command on the mac and click on the bottle layer mask to load it as a selection with the selection active i can create a new layer and fill with a dark color i'm going to hold alt down windows option on the mac and just select this dark brown that i see here and actually maybe i'll even make it a little bit darker than that maybe that brown there and i'm just going to fill that color that i just selected is my foreground color so i can press alt and backspace on windows that's option delete on the mac to fill with the foreground color then i can press ctrl d command d to deselect and i'm going to show you a technique to create shadows that you probably haven't seen before what i'm going to do now is go into filter blur gallery and select path blur make sure the path follows the light so the light is coming from my left and it's going to the right and this is what this arrow here represents then you can increase the speed and you can see the shadow getting larger but notice that the shadow's going in either direction i don't want that i just want it to go in one direction so i'm going to uncheck the centered blur box and notice now the shadow is just going to the right which is exactly what i want and you can adjust the endpoint speed if you like i'm just going to increase it i want there to be a little bit of space between the bottle and the shadow here because in reality this part of the shadow wouldn't be so close to the surface since it's raised a little bit so i think that moving the endpoint to the right a little bit helps create that illusion so this is pretty good in this case and i'll just press ok to commit the changes so that my shadow blends a little bit better with the surface what i'll do now is change the blending mode from normal to multiply and i think this looks pretty good you can always reduce the opacity if you think the effect is too strong and also i want more of that highlight to come through so what i'll do is i'll create a layer mask and just paint with black to reveal the highlight there like so and i'm going to increase the feather just to blur that a little bit so that the mask is not so sharp and maybe even reduce the density down a bit and i can go back and adjust my highlight and maybe increase the fill just to make it brighter and this is looking pretty good what i'll do now is maybe apply a little bit of a blur to my highlight i think it's looking a bit too sharp so i can go into filter blur gaussian blur and i can blur it a bit more like so and i'll press ok and then decrease the fill to about 52 percent next you need to work with the background so click on it to select it and then select the rectangular marquee tool and make a rectangular selection that covers a little bit more than the bottle something like this should work and just press ctrl j on windows command j on the mac to duplicate the contents of that selection into a new layer and you can see that here also drag and drop that inside of the bottle group when you simply drag and drop a layer into a group it'll go to the top of the group but if you hold shift as you click and drag when you drop a layer into the group it'll place it at the very bottom of the layer stack see that way here at the bottom so make sure that the layer is at the bottom and then select it and press ctrl t command t to transform right click and select warp and simply drag these handles to distort the layer so that you create the illusion that you're looking through glass see that see how it's not lining up perfectly and it's looking sort of rounded that's what you want to do and of course you can manipulate the layer any way that you want in this case this looks pretty good so i'll click on the check mark to commit the changes and actually might be a little low so i'll select the move tool and click and drag it up just a little bit something like that just so that it seems like we're looking through a bottle at this point all you need to do is adjust the small details to get a more realistic result the one thing that i will recommend for you to do is to tap on the z key to select the zoom tool click to zoom in and just fix any imperfections that you have on your layer mask so go to your bottle group select the layer mask then select the brush tool and you can use white to reveal pixels it should be showing or black to hide pixels so in this case we need to show the pixels that are being cut off here so i'll tap on the left bracket key on the keyboard to reduce my brush size and i can also go on this drop down and increase the hardness or you can use the keyboard shortcut if you like that's shift and the bracket keys on the keyboard and just click and drag to add to the selection and here's the trick for you you can click once hold shift and click again and photoshop will draw a straight line between those two points and you can do that to bring back and reveal the pixels that were missed by the artificial intelligence and obviously spend time fine-tuning your mask until you get the results that you want i'm going to pause the video and show you what my image looks like after i spend some time fine tuning it but rest assured that everything i've done is simply what you've seen in this video just spent a little more time fine tuning it to make it better and again if you haven't already make sure to check out the msi creator 15 laptop which is designed for creators but it is also a well-rounded system for everyday users and gamers spec wise it's equipped with a 2.3 gigahertz intel 7 8 core processor 32 gigabytes of ram and the powerful nvidia geforce rtx 2080 super with 8 gigabytes of video memory and of course a 4k display that can reproduce adobe rgb at 100 the link for this laptop is below in the description and if you want to learn more about compositing and putting images together then make sure that you check out this video it's my seven compositing tips to make your composites more realistic click on it now and i'll see you next time

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 86,045

Rating: 4.9597607 out of 5

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Id: X7XN2q3Hpmw

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021