Fantasy Manipulation | Affinity Photo Compositing Tutorial

in this video we'll create a beautiful fantasy composite if you've ever had your head stuck in the clouds then this one's for you let's get started if you'd like to follow along with me you can find the exercise files in the video description this picture will be our starting point i really like the colors that we have here in the sky and i also really like the stars and these mountains i think this will be the perfect backdrop now what i have in mind for this image is to create a surreal scene where we have a subject here and the subject is sitting on a dock instead of being surrounded by water i want to have the subject surrounded by clouds with the subject being surrounded by clouds it will look like our subject is floating in the sky to make this feel more dreamlike i really want to play up the colors in this image i want to have beautiful blue shadows and i want to have pink highlights you can already see these colors in the background image so i really want to play up those colors and incorporate them throughout the whole image oh and as one more detail i want to add a crescent moon to the sky i'll go ahead and rename this pixel layer plan and then i'll turn that off for now so up here i have our image of the clouds that we're going to use for this image i really like how the clouds look kind of like rolling waves it fits very nicely with the theme of this image so i'm going to bring this image into our main document i'll press command or control c to copy it then command or control v to paste it in i want these clouds to be a bit larger in our image so i'm going to grab the move tool and then increase the size of the clouds now with those clouds placed in the image and at the size that we'd like i'm now going to gradually remove some of the clouds to reveal the night sky to do this i'm going to first add a mask by clicking on the mask icon then with our mask selected i'm going to grab the paintbrush tool so that we can paint on our mask to remove the clouds i'm going to press d to get my colors back to default black and white and i'm also going to fully lower the hardness of my paintbrush that way we have a nice soft edged brush i'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to increase the size of my brush and now i can go ahead and remove the clouds from the night sky i want the clouds to end about there in the middle of the mountains now right now the clouds look a bit too fuzzy because we've removed some of the clouds the reason that i like working with masks is that you can always remove and add the clouds back by switching your colors between black and white if you press x on your keyboard then you can easily switch between the black and white colors so now with my paint color set to white i can paint to add back in some of the clouds and by using a smaller brush you can see that it looks like i have a bit more control over the edges of the clouds they don't look quite as fuzzy and i can really decide which parts of the clouds stay and which parts i get rid of all right i think these edges are looking really nice now that we've easily added in the clouds to the scene let's check in with the lighting and colors of the clouds so first to match our background better i want the shadows within these clouds to be a bit darker and i think making these bright highlights a little bit darker would make this look more natural as well so i'm going to go to my adjustments and i'll add a levels adjustment then i'm going to click and drag this down and to the right of our cloud layer so that this is only affecting our clouds alright so first i want to darken up these shadows i'm going to use the black level slider to do this you can see as i bring this over more and more of the dark shadows become even darker i'm going to bring this over to around 15 and you can see that's about at the point where the white part of our histogram is ended so before the shadows looked really dull because we weren't matching up with the shadow end of our histogram but now that looks a lot more natural next i want to decrease the highlights you can see that they look extremely bright and with this being nighttime i don't think they should be quite so bright so to make the highlights darker i'm going to go to our output white level and this just dulls down highlights so i'm going to bring this down to around 98 percent i don't want to do too much damage to the highlights but i do think doling them down a little bit looks pretty nice so now you can see the before and after of adjusting those clouds next i want to check in with our colors i'm going to add an hsl adjustment and i'll make sure that's also set as a child layer to our clouds i'm just going to increase the saturation i think around 15 looks pretty good for this i really want to play up the colors in this image so i think that looks really nice with that finished i'm going to rename this layer this looks great so far so next i'm going to add in our subject so here's the image that i chose for our subject i like that this dock has nice straight edges so that should be pretty easy to select and the subject here is very dark on a light background so that should be an easy selection as well i'm going to copy this by pressing command or control c and then i'll come back to our main document so i can press command or control v to paste it in i'm going to grab the move tool and i'm just going to center this and now we can go ahead and make a selection of the dock i'm going to use the selection brush tool to do this make sure that you have a snap to edges and soft edges turned on for this then i'll go ahead and zoom in so that i can make our selection so clicking once is pretty easy to select the subject here and now i'm just going to click and drag to select the rest of the dock if you select a little too much like i just did over here you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard and then click and drag to remove those areas alright with that selection made i'm going to press on the mask icon which will remove the background then i'll press command or control d to deselect i'm going to grab the move tool and then we can go ahead and move this subject in place so with the dock layer selected i'm going to increase its size and i think i'll bring it to about there i want our subject to be sticking out into the middle of the document but i don't want the subject to stick out too far i think this is a nice balance still having some clouds and mountain overhead so with that done our next step is to adjust the light and colors of our subject layer so let's start with the lighting i'll go to my adjustments and add another levels adjustment and this time i'll click and drag it down and to the right of our dock layer so for this part of the image our subject looks very dark you can see that our subject is definitely the darkest part of the image so i'd like to lighten up the darks and to do that i'll come down to our output black level and you can see as i drag this over it's just making the darks look less intense i'll bring this to around 11 i think i also want to brighten the highlights we have very bright highlights on the clouds and the highlights here aren't quite so bright so i'll go to our white level slider and i'm just going to bring this over and i think around 93 looks pretty good for that so now you can see the before and after of just making this less dark and now let's look at our colors so there are definitely some weird colors in the dock you can kind of see right here we have some bluish green and we even have a bit of orange going on over here so even though the dock looks very gray and unsaturated you can still see that we have a few strange colors in here that's not quite right for this image i'm going to really dig into our colors now by adding a curves adjustment using the curves we can go to the individual color channels to address the different colors that are here so i'm going to start with the red channel and i'll grab the picker then i can click and drag directly on our doc image to add or take away some of the red i'm going to drag upward to increase the reds you can see that as i increase the reds it looks better with the reddish pink color here that we have in our clouds next i'm going to go to the green channel now we had some greens here in the dock but there aren't really any other green colors in the image so i'm going to decrease the screen so i don't want to take this too far but i do think that looks a lot better with the magenta color that we have in the clouds and last let's go to the blue channel and i'm just going to drag upward slightly what a great difference this has made it definitely looks like it blends into the image better here's the before and the after of adjusting those colors the last thing i want to do is increase the saturation of the dock so i'm going to add an hsl adjustment and then i'm just going to increase our saturation i think around 14 looks pretty good now i'm just going to rename this layer and then we can go ahead and close up these groups so i think that the dock is blending in quite nicely here however you may have noticed that we have a sunset going on in our background right here if we're having a sunset over here then that means the light is coming from back here because of that we should have a shadow being cast behind our subject so let's go ahead and add one in to start let's make a selection of our subject i'll make sure that i have the doc layer selected then i'll go ahead and grab the selection brush tool and then i'll just click to make that selection i can see i've selected a bit too much here so i'll hold down alt or option to remove that alright with that selection made now we can paint in this area to create our shadow however i don't want to paint directly on this layer so i'll go ahead and add a new pixel layer so with that new pixel layer selected i'm going to grab my paintbrush tool so that i can paint in a shadow now i don't want to paint in black i think that will look too harsh so i'm going to grab my color picker and i'm going to select this dark blue color that's right here on our subject then i'll click on the sampled color to apply it to my paintbrush and now i'll go ahead and paint this in now that we've painted that in i'm going to go ahead and deselect by pressing command or control d then i'm going to grab the move tool the first thing i want to do to this shadow is flip it upside down so i'm going to right click then go to transform vertical then i can go ahead and drag this downward so that the edges of our shadow match up to the edges of our subject and i'm going to go ahead and have them overlap a little bit next i want to fix the perspective right now the shadow is just going straight down i want to make it look more like it's sitting on top of the dock so we need to have the edges match so i'm going to grab the perspective tool and i'm just going to drag out these handles i want this line to be parallel to the dock and i'll do the same on the other side then i'll press apply okay so now that our shadow is in place let's blend it in better first i'm going to change our blend mode up here from normal to multiply now you can see the lines of the dock showing through i'm also going to lower the opacity i'm going to bring this to around i think around 55 looks pretty good we can clearly see a shadow here but now it's not quite so intense next i'm going to soften the edges of the shadow to make them look a little more fuzzy to do that i'm going to go to our filters then i'm going to add a box blur filter i'm going to increase the radius and you can see that this really softens up our edges so depending on how harsh your lighting is you can have less of a blur or more of a blur i'm going to bring our shadow here to 11 pixels all right we're almost done with the shadow to finish this i want our shadow to gradually fade out so that the shadow looks darker as it's closer to our subject and then it's less intense back here to do that i'm going to select our pixel layer and then add a mask to it then with the mask selected i'm going to grab our gradient tool then i'll click and drag and you can see that where the color stop is white we still have the shadow fully visible and as it gradually fades darker and darker toward black it starts to disappear on our mask all right i think the shadow is looking really good so i'll go ahead and rename this layer now before we fully finish with the dock i want to make it look like these clouds are overlapping with the dock so i'm going to go to our docs mask then i'll select my paintbrush tool and i can paint in black on this mask to remove parts of the dock which will reveal the clouds just make sure that you have your default colors so i'll press d to get black back and now with a nice low flow paintbrush i can gradually add these clouds over the dock very nice that looks very mystical we've now finished adding in our subject and the shadow so with these main features out of the way let's have some fun by adding in some extra details we'll start by adding a moon to the sky here's our image of the moon i'll go ahead and copy this by pressing command or control c then i'll go back to our document and press command or control v to paste it in i'm going to click and drag this to the top of our layers then i'll grab the move tool so that i can shrink down this image now i'm going to make a selection of the moon this should be pretty easy since our moon is a nice pure white color up against a dark background to do this i'm going to use the flood select tool this tool lets you select an area that has the same color make sure you have contiguous checked on and then you can click on the moon if you don't have contiguous checked on it will select all of the white in the whole image but if contiguous is checked on it will only select the white that's touching with the moon selected i'll go ahead and add a mask then i'll press command or control d to deselect with that nice and selected i'm going to select the moon layer and the move tool so that we can move this moon in place all right i think that looks pretty nice because the moon looks so good as it is i don't think we need to adjust the colors or the lighting so that was very simple i'm going to rename this layer so the next thing that i want to do is add some noise to the whole image to give it the same texture if we zoom in here you can see that the clouds have quite a bit of noise but as you zoom around the rest of the image you don't see that same level of noise so to even this out i'm going to add noise and paint it on the areas that need it to do that i'll go to our filters and then select add noise i'm going to click and drag this to the top of our layers then i'm going to increase the intensity quite a bit with the intensity so high we'll easily be able to see where we're painting as we add this in so i'm going to press command or control i this will invert this mask so that the noise is being applied to nothing so now i can take my paint brush tool and with full flow and painting in white paint i can go ahead and add this noise to strategic areas now obviously this is way too much noise so i'm going to double click on the add noise filter and i'm just going to bring down this intensity i think somewhere around 10 is nice you can see we have some noise added here it's not quite as intense as the clouds but it does help to even out the noise across the image so now that we've added our noise the last steps that i want to do is i want to adjust the light and colors of this whole image let's start with the light i'm going to come to our adjustments and then add a levels adjustment then i'm going to add a little bit of extra contrast to the overall image so i'm just going to bring the black level over a little bit and i'm going to bring the white level over a little bit if i turn this off you can see what a difference this has made here's the before and the after adding that contrast just makes the sky and our subject pop a little bit more and the final thing i want to do is add some color grading in the beginning with our plan i wanted to make sure that we had nice blue shadows and pink highlights so let's emphasize that with a gradient map adjustment this adjustment lets you add specific colors to your shadows and highlights i'm going to delete this mid-tone node and now we can adjust the colors and the shadows and the highlights so i'll start by clicking on the red shadows node then i'll click where it says color and i'm going to make this a nice deep blue color then i'll come to our highlights node and i'm going to change this color to a nice light pink color obviously this looks a bit too intense so i'm going to change the blend mode so up here i'll go ahead and change this to overlay then i'm going to bring down the opacity of this layer so now you can see the before and after of that gradient map adjustment and with that we're done after all that work this finished product looks so good thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next affinity revolution tutorial

Channel: Affinity Revolution

Views: 15,920

Keywords: affinity photo, tutorial, composite, manipulation

Id: 6jfgHqLqBWU

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021