Getting Started in Photoshop - Episode 2: Layer Masks

hey guys this is Anthony Morganza from Anthony Morgan c-calm this is episode 2 of the video series where I'm teaching Photoshop to those of you that have never used Photoshop now last week we talked about layers and I mentioned how layers are really the foundation of Photoshop and you really have to understand layers in order to use Photoshop effectively well we're going to build on that in this episode we're going to talk about layer masks and whenever possible I'm going to try to tie in real-world situation something you actually might encounter and how you could fix it in Photoshop and with an image like this it's an interior of a room if you expose properly for the room the windows are blown out if you expose properly for the windows then the room is way underexposed and in this case there's four different stops between these two shots well you could really take care of this in Photoshop and it's relatively easy as well and the reason why I wanted to do this type of image because one aspect of professional photography that is growing today is that of a travel photographer and a real estate photographer and either of those types of photographers will run into this issue every day and it's really easy again to take care of now I'm going to assume that most of you are Lightroom users and you would be sending the images over from Lightroom so I am in Lightroom but I am going to show those of you that don't use Lightroom how to load these images as well but we're going to start out with Lightroom I have them processed as I want Lightroom and I'm ready to go and at the end of the video I will talk about how you should probably properly go about taking a shot like this but I'll save that for the end so we just want to select both of them down here in the filmstrip i'm clicked on one because i have a mac i'm holding the command key and i'm clicking on the second one i'm just going to right click on an image go up to edit in and down to open as layers in photoshop now if you add a pc you would click on one and you would hold the control key in and click on the second one and then everything else is the same now it's going to take a while to open as layers always just takes a little while to get opened as layers Photoshop and if you remember last week I talked about layers and it was kind of akin to having actual photographs sitting on your desk one stacked on the other and what happens a lot of times you want to bring parts of the layer that's on the bottom so it shows through to the layer that's on the top now the way they're lined up now we have the properly exposed image for the room on the bottom we have the one that's properly exposed for the windows on top well I'd like the room to show through so you could like if you had images actually on your desk actual prints you could cut out these windows with scissors and just like glue them on the bottom part and then you'd have them you know one properly exposed image well it's a lot easier actually in Photoshop using layer masks now I did mention that if you're not a Lightroom user I'll show you how to load these and it's real easy what you want to do is open Photoshop and go up to file and then down to scripts and then down to load files into stack click there and this dialog box appears you would browse your computer for the files and when you find them they'll show up here and when they're there you'll see this check box attempt to automatically align source images click that check box that will align them at the pixel level so when we mask out this image so that the proper properly exposed windows are with the properly exposed room it will look right it won't look like it's off it will look like it's geometrically one right on top of the other or physically women right on top of the other so I'm going to cancel out of that so now we're ready to do this image now you notice when we send them over from Lightroom off lightroom users we didn't align these at pixel level we have to do that but before I do that I want them in a different configuration I would prefer that the properly exposed room be on top now you actually could do it either way but I think it will be easier if the properly exposed image let me start about that properly exposed room images on top and to move it on top you simply drag it if if what the bottom layer has a padlock on it then you won't be able to drag it but since neither of these have padlocks I was able to drag it and we'll talk about padlocks and background images in future episodes but for the sake of this episode we really don't have to concern ourselves with it we could easily drag the properly exposed image for the room on top of the other one now we have to align these at pixel level because we didn't do that and to do that is very easy go up to edit and then Oh before we do that actually we have to select both of them I only have the top layer selected and we have to suck the bottom layer as well so to do that just like we did in Lightroom I'm going to hold the command key in and click on the one that's not selected again if you have a PC to hold the control key in now we'll go up to edit in and we'll go down to at Auto align layers and when you do that you'll come up with this dialog box and it's asking you for the projection just choose Auto it works great now lens correction vignette above all removal and geometric distortion a lot of times that messes up the image I found and in my opinion you shouldn't Chuck that and especially if you're a Lightroom user you already took care of geometric distortion and vignettes in lens correction tab in Lightroom right so you don't have to check those so I'm just going to do Auto and what it's going to do it's going to actually look at the pixels and align it to pixel level now I handheld this shot so you can see now we have some blank pixels over here because to align these this image it had to shift the image around a little bit to get it aligned there's nothing I could do about that except I'll crop this out at the end I'm not going to do it right now we'll do it at the end so now we're ready to actually work on this image now I just want to select the top layer to do that I'm just going to hold the command key and again it's control if you have a PC and click on the one I don't want selected so I'm selected on this top layer I want to add a layer mask to it and we're going to go down here in the bottom of this right-hand panel and you'll see right here is the rectangle the circle in it that's add layer mask we'll just click on that now we have a white layer mask you notice nothing happened to the image the white layer mask in this instance really isn't doing anything but we need to take those scissors to this and we need to cut out these windows of this layer so that the windows from the bottom layer come through now to do that when you're working with layer masks in Photoshop all you have to do is paint on the mask and you paint in the opposite color or what the mask is sometimes this is a little confusing until you use Photoshop a little bit but if you have a white mask and nothing has changed then you want to paint in the opposite color of the white and that is black so we're going to get a brush on the left-hand panel is our tool panel and the brush tools right here and you might want to take some notes I'm going to throw a lot of different keyboard shortcuts and things throughout this series and if you want to just quickly pick the brush tool hit the B key on your keyboard B for brush now we have the brush now whenever any tool is selected over here along the top are the tool attributes and you could actually set the settings for how the tool behaves now we need to get a brush that will properly brush out these windows and you might think that a square brush would work great and if you open here and you - and you drag down you can probably find some square brushes but the problem with the square brushes is there's no hardness to select and it has been my experience that if you just used a really sharp edged hard square brush that the it doesn't look right because typically when window is when light is streaming through a window and you try to take a picture of it with the camera it will tend to blur around the edge a little bit so it's not a super sharp edge so you'd prefer having a softer brush and since none of these square brushes have an option to adjust hardness we're going to have to use a round brush and I want to take hardness down a little bit right now it's a super hard brush there's no softness at all I want to add it just a little softness so I'm going to bring it to around 80% of hardness so it's it's mostly hard but not quite so 80% now you could also change the size of the brush with this slider but an easier way is to use the bracket keys on your keyboard so we'll close this down and to use the bracket keys the right bracket key makes it larger and the left bracket key makes it smaller now we could start painting right now we're clicked on this mask but it's a little small I'd like to these windows to be larger I'd like the whole image to be bigger it's easier to look at what I'm painting it on so I'm going to hit command + to zoom in again if you have a PC it's ctrl + I'm just going to hit it a few times till we're zoomed in now I'd like these windows to be up higher so I'm going to hold the shift key in and you'll notice that the cursor turns into a little hand then you could click with the left mouse button and drag the image round if you have a center click wheel on your mouse you also could just spin that and it will move the image up and down so we're ready to paint on the mask make sure this is very important that you're painting on the mask if you're on the actual image layer the layer the image itself that is a no-no you're going to paint on the actual pixels we don't want to do that we're painting on the mask so make sure your clicked on that and because the mask is white we're going to want to paint in black now we're going to we have our brush we look at our color swatches you'll see we're set up perfectly right now we have black as the foreground color that is the color we're actually going to be painting in white is the background color and we're not painting in that color we're painting in black now if for some reason you have colors here that aren't black and white for any reason whatever you just have you know odd colors there and you'd like the default colors there all you have to do is hit D for default on your keyboard and you'll see that they'll change to the black and white now we need black in the foreground you could click this little 90-degree arrow and it will swap them every time you click it but a faster way is the keyboard shortcut X just hit X until black is the foreground color now we're ready to paint now you can see I could just paint right on the window and magically that bottom layer is now showing through wherever I paint now a couple little tricks for this I first of all I don't have my tablet it's in the studio and I met home doing this video so unfortunately I'm using a mouse and I'm not real experienced doing this with the mouse my apologies I'll do the best I can but we're going to do the harder part first I think we'll go up here and do this this arch of the window best I can and then where it starts to get straight I'm going to get a little smaller brush I think things might be a little bit too big I'm going to click once right here and I'm going to go down to the bottom because this is a pretty much a straight line I'm going to go down to the bottom and I'm gonna hold the shift key in and click again you'll see you'll paint a perfectly straight line and we'll go over here I want to pick up paint a perfectly straight line along the bottom I'm going to hold the shift key and again and we painted there now I'm going to go up to here hold the shift key in again and we painted one there alright now it's kind of not far over enough I don't think maybe it's over too far I don't know we'll fix it ok now I could get a bigger brush now and paint the rest so I'm gonna hit the right bracket key and I'm just going to try to go very quickly now I know you know you guys don't want to watch me paint so I'm going to be kind of sloppy obviously you're going to want to do the best job possible especially if you're doing this you're professional real estate photographer and they're paying you to do this you run a really labor over this and do the best job you can now let's just say for the sake of argument you make a mistake you have this big brush and the cat jumps on your lap on your doing this and you went like that well what do you do well no problem all we got to do now is paint white on the mask so we're going to switch these swatches so the white is the foreground and by hitting X and then you just paint that away just like that just any of your mistakes and you could better then apply this this trick like you know like oops I painted in white I made a mistake so hit the X key paint in black right so that's it that's all you got to do to get this looking halfway decent all right now I'm going to quickly do the other ones same way I'm just going to do my best to not embarrass myself and to paint these in there relatively good now I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom we'll hold the shift key in go to there and I think I'll go to there and I'm going to click once there and then go down here and hold the shift key in and paint there then hold the shift key in paint there and then I'm going to get a smaller brush by hitting the left bracket key and come in here and try to get in here a little bit oops made a mistake the stitch is going to be a little tricky so we're going to have to get a smaller brush you hit the wrong key there come in here and try to come in here now you'll see we're we're way soon in I mean so this looks probably like not as good but when you zoom out it's not as noticeable and loop so I made a little mistake there we've hit the X key so I'm painting in white and go back to black so we get this kind of looking decent my heart is telling me to go fast or my mind is telling me to go fast but the professional in my heart is telling me to take my time and do a good job so bear with me I'm going to probably end up somewhere in the middle alright so I did around the statue decently I'm going to hit the right bracket key just so we can get this bigger brush so I could go a little quicker here and mask this in without embarrassing myself too but you get the idea we're painting the mask and it's a lot it's kind of akin to taking scissors and you had that physical stack of prints on your desk and you have scissors and you're cutting holes out of the top layer so this bottom layer comes through so there's that try to do this one oops I slipped a little one hit X so I paint in white hit X again probably have too big of a brush but we'll see what we could do here hold the shift key in hold the shift key in hold the shift key in hold the shift key in again this windows a little funky pretty sloppy here but you'll see once we zoom out actually it won't look as bad all right we'll get the bigger brush now again I'm going I don't want you guys to have to see this but part of me wants to just do all three windows I just want to I don't want to just show you one window and we'll show you all okay so we have this window done very sloppily done but it's done now we want to zoom back out we can hit command minus because I have a map control - if you have a PC and we zoom out a faster way to just have it fit to the screen is hit command 0 or ctrl 0 if you have a PC now we're zoomed out now you can see those mistakes aren't is obvious when we're zoomed out so we did mask in those windows into this in top layer and you know you could say you're done but to me now as I look at them they be just a tiny bit maybe dark and I'd like those to be a little brighter so what we could do is we could add an adjustment layer that just affects the properly exposed windows well where are the properly exposed windows in our stack it's the bottom image right here right at the bottom that's our properly exposed windows so I want to make those brighter so I'm going to click on that and I'm going to get an adjustment layer now remember I'm in the photography workspace you click right here and I'm in the photography workspace so if your Photoshop doesn't look at like mine you may want to change your workspace to photography I'm just going to get an edge an exposure adjustment layer and when I click there you'll see right above that lower layer that had the properly exposed windows I now have an exposure adjustment layer and the way the exposure adjustment layer works or any adjustment layer works it will affect every image below it or every layer below it and in this case we only have one layer below it and if I take this exposure slider and I move it you'll see it's going to just affect that one layer so I just want to make them a little brighter I think that might look a little more natural so brown dode run to stop I added a light to that and I think that looks a little more natural now we could look at the mask if you just want to see what the mask looks like hold the alt or option key and it's alt if you have PC option if you have a Mac and just click right on the mask mask and you can see there's our paint on you can see I missed some spots well you could like fix that by make sure you you're on the in this case black I want to paint black right on the mask and I could just fix those spots I missed real easily doesn't matter that you can't see necessarily the actual image I get 60 spots I missed like this real quickly and now to get back to the actual image hold the ultra option key and again and click on the mask again and now we're back to the actual image now when we align the pixels remember we have some dead pixels over here some blank pixels I need to crop that out the crop tool is on the tool panel and it's right here and you can hit the C key on your keyboard to quickly use the keyboard shortcut to go to the crop to now we have our tool attributes along the top and I'd like to keep the original ratio it was originally a 2 to 3 ratio shot and I'd like to keep that now I think it's going to be a little easier to crop this if i zoom out a little more so I'm going to hit command - just to zoom out and I'm just going to grab this corner here since the dead pixels are on the left and at the bottom so I'm going to grab this corner and just pull it in just a little bit like that and you can see that when you use the crop tool in Photoshop it will snap to the part just beyond the blank pixels so that it helps you crop it when you're done with the crop tool you click this checkbox right there and then you crop it so there is our properly exposed image now for those of you that are in Lightroom you want to go back to Lightroom just go up here to Photoshop quit Photoshop and it's going to ask you do you want to save this image and obviously you do so you're going to click Save and it will save the image you can see the progress bars down here in the lower left-hand corner and it's saving this image exactly like this with these layers so you actually could come back in and re-edit this later if you want so once it's saved and will take a little while and the whenever you have the more layers you have the more masks you have and things like that the bigger the file is going to be so be aware of that the files tend to get very large so let's drag these around we have this image here which is more or less properly exposed for the windows it was one five hundredth of a second f8 ISO 6400 then this one which was properly exposed for the room it had the same f-stop same ISO but it's one thirtieth of a second that's four stops difference and then I used Photoshop and masks to mask in the windows so they look more properly exposed and you can see it's relatively easy I did it while talking and not really with my strongest tool possible my tablet I used a mouse and I still did an adequate job and you guys could probably do much better on your first try now I mentioned that I would talk about how you would go about shooting this shot if you're a real estate travel photographer you preferably would like to use a tripod I actually was in the specific Eshoo ting something else and I was walking to the office and the office is like behind the altar on the side of the building and I had to go off the side I went up the stairway and I was going down this hallway and I happen to look to my right and there was this trainee little prayer room and I thought that it's really unique it's all rounded you know and I so I was in a hurry so I and I didn't have a tripod so I handheld the shot and actually took a bracketed set of nine images one stop apart so I actually sat there and just held in my shutter so it took nine images right in a row and held it as still as I could and I still lost some pixels you saw on the left it's really hard to handhold a shot and have it perfectly aligned it's probably impossible so I you preferably use a tripod now for you could take just a bracketed set of images that would be the easiest and fastest way but probably the better way and the way to really nail it is you'd like to take two different exposures one for the room and one for the window and to go about doing that you'd like to have your camera and spot metering mode I'm going to assume you don't have a light meter you'd have your camera and spot metering mode and you want to meter on something in the room that is medium gray the better option is just bring an 18% gray card with you hold the gray card out in the middle of the room and meter on that and get a meter reading now you're going to keep the ISO the same between the two shots and the f-stop the same between the two shots so all you really have to be concerned with yourself or concerned about is the shutter speed so take a note of whatever that shutter speed is then point your spot leader of your camera to the window or windows and take a medium leader reading of that and that's going to give you another shutter speed the f-stop and the ISO are going to be the same then what you want to do is set your camera up on the tribe frame the scene focus properly put your camera in manual mode dial in that ISO and f-stop that's staying the same and put in one of the two shutter speeds take the shot then put in the second shutter speed and take the shot now you just took two shots one is properly exposed for the room one is properly exposed for the windows you can take those two shots into Lightroom do what you need to do in Lightroom lens correction stuff like that bring them over to photoshop and then do what you need to do what I showed you to do for the windows now another thing you might want to keep in mind especially for you real estate photographers is you've got to try to make sure you take the shot without any distortion in this in the image you hit this room has a rounded like ceiling so it's not applicable here maybe but most rooms have square corners and you want your verticals vertical your horizontal sorta horizontal in your corner square and I use two 14 to 24 millimeter lens for this image and I was at 14 millimeters and you can see right here 14 millimeters introduces a lot of distortion in the shot and this room is you can see a 14 millimeters it looks small so you can imagine this room is very very small well you would prefer to use a lens it's not going to introduce any geometric distortion into the image and typically a 50 millimeter lens is perfect it works great on full-frame cameras and on a crop sensor camera you won't have any geometric distortion usually with a nifty 50 and they're not expensive the problem though is when you really have a tiny tiny room that the 50 millimeter might not be in a wide enough angle of view to cover the room well a dirty little secret of real estate photographers is they take panoramas with their 50 millimeter lens so if they were in this situation with this tiny room the 50 millimeter lens I guarantee but obviously the angle of view would be such that you'd be missing all this stuff on the left and right it really was that small of a room so what they do is they take a panorama they'll set there they'll do those meter readings that they need to do then they set their camera up on the tripod focus where they need to focus the take a shot let's say at the left side of the room with the shutter speed set for the room exposure then they take a second shot with the shutter speed set for the window exposure then they will Tan their camera to the right and overlap the image by 1/3 to 1/4 and take a second series of shots for the right side of the room again one exposed for the room and a second one exposed for the windows now they have four images and basically two panoramas they're going to create and then they will take those two panoramas and process them in Lightroom and then line them up in Photoshop and do the same thing I did and they did that because they don't want any geometric distortion introduced into the scene now that 14 millimeter lens you pray it's hard to see but I mean there's tons of distortion here that you know look at this this should be flat and it's leaned in and this is leaned in so we really need you know if you're a GM you know if you're a real estate photographer if you're even a Travel Photographer you'd really like everything to be nice and square so keep that in mind and that's how you would go about taking shots like this so I hope that helps and I added that at the end because I don't know how many people are interested in knowing that and again you could do you could do a bracket like I did I was in a hurry and I didn't have a tripod anyway and I just stood in the doorway I actually leaned against the door opening to steady the shot as as much as I could and fired off 9 shots and then you saw what we did here so it's really up to you the obvious question you might say is well HDR work in might work but it usually doesn't look nice so I strongly recommend that you don't do this really if you're real estate photographer whatever don't do an HDR shot it just won't look right usually you'd prefer to use this method I hope this helped you I hope this taught you something you didn't know I know working in Photoshop could be a little tricky because it's a lot different than Lightroom and next week we'll do something else that hopefully will build on this and help you become much more proficient in Photoshop thank you everyone that watches my videos I truly do appreciate it I'll talk to you guys soon

Channel: Anthony Morganti

Views: 50,270

Keywords: photography, photographer, post processing, adobe, lightroom, photoshop, layer masks, layers

Id: 5oqxuyKSArM

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2017