GIMP Layers Beginners Tutorial - GIMP 2.10

[Music] hi welcome to this dcp web tutorial in today's tutorial i'm going to be giving you a beginner's guide to using layers in 2.10 okay let's go ahead and open up this folder on my desktop inside this folder i have a subfolder with various images i've downloaded from either the pixels website or pixabay i'll put links to all of these images in the youtube description so you can follow along let's just quickly take a look at the images we've got these people on this jet ski we've got this nice little background image we've got this surfer guy we've got this seagull uh we have this lady chilling out on the beach and then we've got this beach ball so we're going to take all of these images and combine them into a single image and we're going to use layers to achieve that goal okay let's go ahead and open up software uh here we go and we're going to go to file new and you can set the the width and the height of the image however you like but i'm going to be setting it to 1920 by 1080 so it's the same size as my desktop background and i want to set the resolution to 72 dpi here and we're going to fill with transparency transparency here we'll click ok so we basically got a blank canvas right let's go ahead and find those images and we're going to drag in the background first so this is what i consider to be the background so let's drag that into game first and we can see there's a layer that's been created here right so let's just go ahead and click on this bottom layer it's called background at the moment let's just click on this uh where is it this tool here to delete it and we just want to name this background it's worth starting to layer label your layers so you understand what they are when you come back and look at them later before we do anything else let's just make sure we save our work so let's go to my desktop here always save your work and we will call this uh let's just call this layers dash01 okay we want to resize this first image so let's click on the first layer let's go over to the um tool here and we're going to left click and select scale or you can press shift and s and then click on the picture i'm going to hold down the control key and use my mouse wheel to zoom out right so i can see the full size of the image and there's an opacity tool here normally it's set to 100 and you can't really see the canvas in the background so we just want to reduce the opacity so that we can see these checkered boxes so when we grab this handle and start to resize we don't go too far we just want to be on the outside edge right just somewhere around here should be pretty good something like this and we'll go ahead and click scale so now we can see the image has been scaled let's hold down the control key and the mouse will and we zoom back in here and we've got to decide you know do we want to see more sky or do we want to see more sand let's go ahead and click on the move tool and then we can click on the picture itself and then hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys on your keyboard so we can either see more beach here like this or we can see more the sky and less of the beach but i think we want to kind of be uh somewhere in the middle i kind of want the the horizon to be like almost in the middle of the picture here somewhere around here should be pretty good something like this so that's really our first understanding of layers right so what have we done we've moved the image into the into and we've resized that layer remember resizing the layer the image on the layer and then we reposition that image within this layer so one layer is really like our background so think about it when we create layers here in this section here we're going to be stacking images on top of each other this is why we labeled it the background because it's going to be sitting at the very bottom of our layer stack okay so the next thing we want to do is find the next image we want to bring into this picture and i think this bird one is a nice example to cut around quite quickly and we'll use this within um as well right there's a couple of ways to do this um i'm kind of more inclined to go to file open and open it as an independent image right so if we go to file open and go into our images and we just need to know what it was in fact we can click here and we can see a preview of the image over on this side right so we can find out which one was the the bird picture this is the bird picture and i'm going to open it up as a separate image in so you can see there's two tabs now right and the reason why i'm opening it separate tab is i want to work with this image in a separate tab and then move that content into our original image over here like the one that we're working on so in this tab here we want to cut around this picture there's a couple of ways to do that this this image is quite good because it has a lot of contrast between the foreground and the background so what we can do is use um there's a few different tools here but we might use the uh foreground select tool for this this job so what we're going to do is just left click here and we're just going to draw a shape around this seagull picture right try and get close to the picture we don't have to get like really close something like this should be pretty good and we're just going to join these dots all the way around the picture like this just like this and we want to close the close at the end right like here close it and then hit the enter key and that will create a selection so really what we're telling is everything that is dark blue we want to ignore so completely ignore that we're not interested in any of that and now we need to tell him you know what is exactly we want to select from this picture a bit more of an accurate selection so i'm going to click on the um let's just see let's press ctrl z so i'm going to click on this top swatch here and i want to pick a color that really contrasts against this blue color or the white so i'm going to go for like a red a really strong red color something radio and just so you can just click on this handle in here go right to the top and then use your mouse and then go right to the top corner you have a red color and we'll click ok so when we draw on this bird this picture we can see um there's strong contrast between the red and just makes us our selection easier to understand i'm going to press ctrl z and i'm going to move quite close to let's say this wing down here i'm going to hold down the ctrl key and move towards his wing and i just want to reduce the size of this brush so the stroke width here i'm just going to reduce it a little bit i'm just going to draw around the edge here right so this all takes a bit of time now in other videos people might just speed through this but i prefer to show you exactly what's going on and if we ever make any mistakes or there's problems i want you to see those mistakes and see those problems in fact what we could do is zoom out a little bit here right let's just zoom out a little bit we can make our stroke a little bit bigger and we could do this a little bit quicker when you've when you've done like a section like this right let's say you've done this much of the bird this part of the wing let go of your mouse button letting go of your mouse button is your best friend the reason why is if you do something like this and go off of the image but you've let go of the mouse button on the previous step you can just press ctrl z to undo that one element but if you go and draw loads of the content let's say you do all of this and then you go off like this and you didn't let go of the mouse button during that process when you press ctrl z it will undo that whole step so you always let go of the mouse button very every so often so that you can save the steps and in that way if you make a mistake which is uh inevitable unfortunately um you can easily undo it afterwards right so i'll do this part here like this and in essence what we're telling here is you know what is it we want to select from this image give me as much accurate information as possible so we get try and get close to this edge here and we'll get this face in here the bird's head here like this all right all of this body we want and we want to do like all down here and if we put effort into this we should end up with a better selection it's uh when you rush this job here and you just not pay too much attention then um you know the selection won't be as good but it should be pretty good because we're going to zoom this image out anyway so if there's any sort of imperfections we won't really see them that much but if we wanted to use this image quite close up then it would be worth making the best selection possible um to do this job now obviously in photoshop this is a doddle you can do this like in a couple of seconds but in it takes a bit more time the difference is you pay for photoshop and with it's all free so you know what can i say uh let's just do this here let's get this wing in here and we can we're going to kind of tidy this bit up at the end afterwards because it looks a little bit tricky so let's just do this wing here quickly see i'm not going right to the edge but quite close right something like this so i might pause it up a little bit there but it should be okay and then we'll just uh select this here this whole wing let's just make sure you don't want to go outside of the wing yes just make sure you stay inside and let's just do this part here let's just move this a bit quicker let's just do this here sometimes it's worth just quickly selecting the bulk of it and then going around and refining the edges afterwards right so we kind of selected most of it let's um go into this wing here at the bottom let's try and get as close to that edge as possible and remember control z will undo and control y would redo so those are your two best friends for this job and i want to make this um what is this called this uh brush a little bit smaller so i can go in and kind of do these feathers here okay i think um it's a little bit confusing this bit let's see let's just see if we can get away with this like this i think it'll be okay and then let's just make it a bit bigger and we'll just fill in this part here i think that will be okay we'll see we shall see let's just do this bit here as well and then we just want to swap that other wing on the opposite side over here and then we're almost done with this selection so i think that should be pretty good i think we're okay i think we're okay uh yeah i think we're gonna be okay so once you've done that selection you can click the select tool here right you can click preview mask okay let's go ahead and click the select tool here select here and it's going to do some computing and it's going to do a selection around this image for us right let's just wait for that to happen it will take a few seconds for it to do that calculation okay so we can see that the selection is now done if you see we've got this trace around the edge and it looks pretty good it's done a pretty good job so what we want to do is go to edit copy and then we'll create a new layer here and it will be transparent layer click ok and then go to edit and paste and then click this green anchor icon and then we can hide this original layer and now we've got a nice cut out of this bird we can click here and then select this layer and then press ctrl c to copy or go to edit copy go back to our original picture let's create a new layer and make it transparent click ok and then press ctrl v to paste and then click the anchor icon and then we're going to zoom right out or we're going to click on the oh we will click on this top layer let's label it first so we know what it is let's just call it bird and then we'll press either shift in s or the skeletal here scale and we'll click on the bird and we're going to scale it and let's just zoom into our canvas hold down the control key and use your mouse wheel to zoom in and you can click on this little box in the corner or sorry in the middle here to move the bird and you can then zoom in and out using this one right the tool here so let's just zoom out and see roughly where you're in a position over here i think kind of around here is pretty good somewhere around here and maybe we can make you can make it really small if you want or you can make it a bit bigger maybe we'll make it about this sort of size and click scale and you can see the bird over here flying at the top right you can hide that layer and show it you can even right click and duplicate it duplicate so now we've got two birds but they're sitting directly on top of each other so what we do is go to the uh tool here and we'll click on flip and we'll click on the bird and it's going to flip it the other way around i believe let's click on the move tool and let's just see this one's now flying sort of in this downwards direction can you see it's all upside down and all all a bit crazy so let's press ctrl z and then press ctrl z and then press ctrl z to undo and then we'll click on the flip tool and we're going to flip it horizontal not vertical and we'll flip it now it's flying the other direction and we can click back on the um let's click back on the scale tool let's click on that little image and let's just shrink it down a little bit and click scale and then we'll click here again and click rotate this time rotate click on that picture we're going to rotate it so it's not exactly the same as that other bird right and then click rotate and just click back on the move tool and we can move this bird over here somewhere and in fact we can probably go to let's see let's have a look let's go to only change its color let's go to color let's go to shoe and saturation and we're going to do a slight tweak to the color so we can change its hue or we can change its saturation right so we're just going to change the color slightly just change the hue just a little amount so there's some differences between the colors of these two these two birds we don't want them to be exactly the same right you can lighten it or darken it a bit as well just change um the color right and you can change the saturation just tweak these settings slightly just so that when we zoom back out they're not looking exactly the same and you can click on the move tool and we can move it over here if you want maybe over here just behind this tree uh or coming from this sort of tree somewhere around here you can just go ahead and duplicate and duplicate this bird and make many many copies and place them all over your scene so really we've got three layers now we've got the background layer we've got this bird in the center and then we've got this bird here so maybe we'll call this bird uh let's call this bird left and this one we should label this layer bird maybe center something like that right it's up to you how you label these layers but try and label them let's go to file save so so far we've got the background we've resized it and we've got two birds in here and we've got a few other images to work with now with this bird here you put a lot of effort into cutting around it right it would make sense that you saved this as a file because if you ever want to come back in and copy that layer and move it to a different project you don't have to go around and cut around this and the one that we've got in here we've resized it and we've done stuff to it so it's better to save this as a original file because it's quite high res and it's you've put effort into it so you may as well save it let's go to file save as and we're going to save it as a file original file and we're going to call this let's just call this bird cut out yeah dash 01 and we'll save it now if we ever want to copy that that bird again we can just open up this file for it and we can copy this and move it into a different project layer but for now we can close it we don't need it right now because we've used it let's go to file save okay so we've added the bird pictures into this artwork so far and let's go back to our images and think about what next image we want to use and i think we're going to take this surfer guy and we're going to add him to the content let's go to file open and we'll open up the surfer dude let's go to images and we'll find him here and we'll click open and we want to cut around this picture as well so let's hold down the control key and then zoom in using our mouse wheel and we can middle mouse click to pan right and we're going to try and get as close as possible to this guy and then we're going to use a different selection tool i think this one will use the let's go to uh let's see let's use the let's use the free select all right so we'll click free select here and we're just going to draw a little dot around the picture so just try and get as close and as accurate as possible like this and just going to draw these little dots and we're just going to trace around the picture and there's different ways to do the selection you could use the foreground select tool again but this is just another example of a different tool that we can use i'm going to try and show you as many different tools as possible and if you want to be more accurate you know i'm not being entirely accurate here um you can zoom in a bit more and get in a bit more close i'm not going to worry about this guy's hair too much so i'm just going to kind of cut around his hair like this something like this and this image is going to be way in the background so it's not going to matter too much if this selection isn't perfect hold down the middle mouse button to pan across and then you can just pan across and we'll just cut around this picture like this and spend as much time as you like on something like this the more time you spend uh the better the selection will be right so we will just do a rough selection for now and normally i'll spend a bit more time uh going around this picture to be fair but for now i think uh basic selection just showing you how to use this particular tool um will help and benefit us to learn a bit more and like i said there's more than one way to do this uh but i just want to show you like various different ways of doing selections rather than just using one particular tool and after we've done this selection we could go in and refine it later um once the selection is done but for now i think we will just do a rough selection like this and we'll use that in our artwork so just keep going around the edge here it takes a bit of time like everything in life it's never that fast and i could speed all of this up right i could do one of them things that you see on these youtube channels and videos where they just speed up this selection but i think that doesn't really teach people much right it's better to show the whole process and then we can have a bit more accuracy and if we make mistakes that we can learn from those mistakes as well sometimes i make mistakes and then i like to show you know how to fix those mistakes i'm just going along the bottom of this surfboard here like this something like this and we'll get to the very end and then we will join our selection here join the selection now that selection has been created if we zoom out we can see the little marching ants around the edge here right you can see them and um we want to go to create a new layer so let's create a new layer first click here and we want it to be transparent click ok we'll select that layer and then we'll go to edit copy and then we'll go to edit and paste and make sure this layer is selected here edit paste here paste and then if we use the anchor icon we can anchor it down and we're going to hide this background and something didn't work there right can you see look we don't see anything here we should see that guy selected so let's press ctrl z and press ctrl z again and just keep pressing it until we see our selection again right so let's find out what's going on here let's try and um let's click on this layer first this bottom layer all right let's go to edit copy then click on the top layer and then go to edit paste and let's try that see if that makes a difference and there we go right we still got a kind of select around inside here the reason why it didn't work last time is because we selected the bottom layer copied and pasted it and that's not a selection we had to make sure we selected um sorry we selected the top layers we'll make sure we select the bottom layer first then copy paste and then paste it into this top layer here let's zoom in and we're going to get rid of this white spacing around here you can see like there's some imperfections in here um we could go in and clean them up i might show you a little bit of that in a moment but let's try and just cut around here so we can use the same tool this lasso tool and we'll just go in here um control yeah let's just go in here assuming a little bit more right and we just go around here and select around this edge here and we'll be done soon hopefully i'm not boring you too much if you you know what you can always set the um set the speed of uh youtube to times two and you can speed through this i will put chapters in the actual youtube description so if you want to just skip to a certain part then you can skip to a certain part if you want to adjust it you can actually grab these handles and adjust it slightly so if you think that something ain't quite right you can just click these little handles and adjust it accordingly right like this like this you can just drag this one in a little bit you can just adjust it and we really want to cut this out right so let's just try control let's just try edit cut for now and then there's our cutout right and now we want to go to select and none because we don't want to select anything out inside of there we want to remove the selection just tidy up this as you can see like this is really that's kind of like the shine off of the i think that's more of the lighting on his arm but we could smooth that out a little bit by using the eraser tool we can increase the size and let's just see it's a bit hard to see but that's like the size of the brush so let's click on this top layer and let's see we can just kind of get rid of that a little bit this white here it looks a little bit iffy you want to reduce the hardness and the spacing and the force right bring them down um just to get rid of that a little bit and that's how you go around the edging here and just kind of tidy up a little bit clean up we'll do a little bit here let's just try and get a little bit of this clean it won't matter to me too much anyway because our image is going to be in the background and these sort of things you won't really see them that much so let's see let's uh zoom out i think i'm happy with that for now with middle mouse click so we can pan across let's save this guy first let's save as and we'll call this one um surfer right supr surfer dash zero once we've got the original file now we can save it and then we'll click on the layer here and we'll press ctrl c to copy and we'll go back to our original image we've got the bird here top left let's create a new layer and click transparency and click ok and we'll press ctrl v to paste now the surface guys here let's anchor the layer down and then we'll call this guy sofa and we obviously want to resize him he's way too big right i want him in the background somewhere so let's go and click on the resize tool or scale let's click on this picture let's just drag it towards the center here and let's see let's hold down the control key and zoom out you can see the picture is very big right so really um probably let's let's click reset and let's close this really let's click the move tool let's explain so the picture is really this size here but the actual copied layer is massive can you see it's like all this yellow thing here is a bit overkill so what we should be able to do is go to the rectangle select tool and make sure we click on the surface and then draw a rectangle around him you know just around him something like this and then we should be able to go to layer let's see crop to selection yeah crop to selection and now our our layer is only the size of this this selection so now when we go to select none and then go to the scale tool here and click on it our handle is a bit more sensible right there's sitting around the image rather than all the way up here somewhere because the the original layer was very tall so that's how we do that let's shrink him down and let's see where we're going to place him maybe like obviously he can't be that big let's see let's have him like you know the closer he's the closer he is he is to the foreground the larger it will be right so let's say if we move him let's say let's have him about that big maybe around here you gotta think about perspective right this is maybe a rock quite close so how big would this guy be compared to this rock he'll be much bigger than that right it'll probably be about this sort of size i reckon something like this seems to be a bit more sensible right and then we'll click scale and we can see does that really look okay i mean to be fair if you know he would never be that far down in the water would he um because obviously this is just the sand here so we need to move him into the background it looks a bit silly having it there so let's take the move tool let's just drag him up to here and he's a bit further back so we need to resize him to make him a bit smaller and then it will look a bit more sensible just sizing down to about here i think something like that and you can play around right it's down to you how you want to do that and we're quite fortunate because when we cut around that picture if we click on the background it kind of gives us a bit of understanding of what's going on here so we can see the surface idea and the cutout was pretty good you know you can't really see those imperfections really but if you zoom zoom right in you'll see it and the way that we cut the board at the bottom it kind of works well with the wave so i think that is kind of done that's kind of job done there i'm quite happy with that in terms of that part of the the image you could click on that picture of the surface guy you could go to color shoe and saturation and then we could kind of lighten him up a little bit he looks a little bit dark there so let's just lighten him up a little bit increase the saturation tiny bit and the hue would normally leave that at default we don't really need to adjust if you just leave that out around zero here something like this and click ok and then let's go to file save remember to save your work um as you go along so so far we have a background we've created we've cut around two birds or one bird and then we flipped the image and then we've got these two birds in the background we've got the surfer guy over here and we've got a few more images to work with okay let's go ahead and click on this tab here this is the surfer guy we can close him let's just make sure it's saved and if we because we saved it as a file we can always come back and take this image and put it into a different picture so always remember to see when you put some effort into something remember to save the file remember to do that let's close this and then let's go back to our images let's just see what we've got left so we use this one we've used the bird put this lady lying down we've got this jet ski people maybe we do the jet ski people yeah let's go to a file open and we will select the images and let's find these jet ski people here they are let's click open and then we'll go to jet ski people and let's just middle mouse click use the use the mouse one in the uh use the control key and the mouse will just zoom in and out and use the middle mouse button to pan we just want to kind of cut around this picture so this one's going to take a fair bit of time um but let's just do this together right so let's go to our free select tool the scissor select tool is absolutely useless i'll be honest with you we can see it and it kind of um just makes junk basically as far as i'm concerned so maybe it does serve a purpose but it definitely doesn't serve a purpose when you want to cut around a picture like this to be honest i've never used it or i've tried to use it a few times and it just doesn't do anything good for me so we could use the foreground selector we could use the free select tool there are other ways as well to select we could use the uh the path tool as well maybe we'll look at that maybe on another picture but for now we use the free selector i think this one is pretty good to use and i'm going to go pretty quick now right i know that this thing is going to be way in the background somewhere so i'm going to go around this pretty fast and not waste too much of your time and uh you know we'll do this pretty quick so we just go around here it doesn't have to be an amazing selection remember we can use the raise tool afterwards to to tidy things up um but we can quickly cut this thing out and obviously if you're doing like print artwork or something a bit more you know not for fun then you want to spend a lot more time doing this stuff uh the effort you put into this will result in the uh the end result it's probably worth zooming in here a bit right this guy don't look too happy does he what's going on me he's all right i'm sure he's having fun let's just get his hair in here and that's it we just keep selecting around this picture and use the middle mouse to pan around right let's hold down that middle mouse button to move the canvas there's a few different ways to do that as well but that's just the easy way to do that hopefully i've done a pretty good job here or a half decent one we'll see when it's cut out at the end so obviously spend as much time as you can doing this it will result in a better cut out and selection but normally when things are in the when you're creating like images like this and stuff when things are really far in the background um your cut-outs don't need to be perfect because after you zoom out and do all that stuff or zoom yeah zoom out all those imperfections kind of get washed away towards the end so let's just make sure we uh do this selection half decent it will save a lot of tidying up later better the selection the less work afterwards right to tidy all up um so when you do not so great selections you just cause more work later to tidy all up and clean all up it's a bit hard to see what's going on here so zoom out a little bit let's just see let's just move this one in a bit and we're almost done right it's not that long i know it's painful watching sitting there watching me do this but okay you gotta learn somehow and this is uh or pay someone else to do it you know that's the other option i'm pretty sure there's lots of people out there that would happily sit there and do this if you pay them for it but let's learn how to do ourselves and then we gain some knowledge and that's what we want look we're almost there it's a miracle done oh that wasn't fun was it okay so you can see the selection around the edge let's go to create a new layer first in fact what we should do is ready edit copy first copy then create the new layer all right click that layer go to edit paste and then click the anchor icon and then hide this layer and now we can see the selection now we just need to remove all of this water stuff in between here all right if we're going to do a job let's do it right so let's just quickly select everything in here let's just zoom in here a little bit let's grab this uh what have we done here i'm not sure how to undo mistakes like that yeah i'm not quite sure how to go back a step here let's just drag this one let's see what's going on here maybe you know balls up so let's i'm going to press escape and just restart that if someone knows and if you make a mistake on one of these little dots how do you undo it how'd you go back that's the key question like how'd you go back to this step here and get rid of this one i'm sure there's a way of doing it i will google it up and i will come back and tell you at some point uh maybe we'll just do a tour a tutorial just on this particular tour um i think i'll be a bit patient right if you rush too fast you'll make those mistakes so just be a bit patient that's all and you'll get your result so that's there we just press ctrl and x that removes that and then we'll go to select none and then we just need to cut out this part and this part here let's just quickly do that let's drag let's do control let's press escape i don't like this selection let's go to select none let's just do that again to be fair we probably don't even need to cut around this stuff here it's hardly going to be visible when we sort of zoom out but uh let's just press ctrl x cut that out select none and then we just got to do this little bit here just click here and then press ctrl x to cut that and then let's press select none let's hold down the control key and zoom out it's pretty good right it's not amazing selection but it's pretty good for that our job let's go to file save as and what is this jet ski right we're going to save this original file jet ski and then click save and then we're going to let's see we're going to click on this layer press ctrl c to copy or go to edit copy go back to our our our work here and then we'll click new layer and then click transparency here click ok and then press ctrl v to paste and then anchor it down let's just click the move tool and just move it and if we hold down the control key and zoom out this is our content and this is the original image size so we want to then go to the select select around this uh jet ski people something like this go to layer and then crop to selection now our handles will be a lot easier to grab so let's just go to select none and then we'll go to the scale tool let's click here go to scale click here let's scale these people down and let's just scale it for now like this let's just work out where we want to put them i want to put them like in the background here somewhere right maybe just behind these rocks or something i'll just come in from around here um now let's try and think how we're going to do this really what we'll do is grab the move tool and move them like about let's move them let's see right we could be lazy and just put them somewhere where there's not really much going on but let's let's actually make my life difficult and let's click the scale tool scale it in a little bit more so around this sort of size scale and let's move them to about here i want to rotate them a little bit kind of a bit more flat right so let's just click here and go to rotate click on it i'm just going to rotate them around here just slightly so they're more like flat like this obviously that looks rubbish so if we zoom out they just look like they're floating in and what we want to do is really we want to take a bit of this rock cut around here and then place it in front of this this scale right this jet ski people just hide all of these well let's keep this layer active let's hide these layers let's click on this layer here this top one let's label it jet ski jet ski and i'm going to reduce this opacity right down just right down right so we can see just about see them right and what we want to do is go to the background layer and duplicate it let's duplicate the background now so we've got two copies of this background let's hide the bottom one click on this top one and then we'll use our lasso tool we're going to zoom in we can just about see the faint shadow of this jet ski so i'm going to click on this rock and just uh let's just um let's press escape i'm going to click on the lasso tool click on this background copy and then just draw around the edge of this rock here like this i don't need all of it just need some of it let's see it something like this right and then i'm going to press um control c to copy i'm going to go to the jet ski people create a new layer above it and then make that transparent and click ok and then press ctrl v to paste and then anchor it down so really if i hide the background now let's hide this background i've got this piece of rock here right and this background copy i don't really need it anymore so i can just right click on it and delete it and then enable the original background layer all right and then enable all of these and then go to this jets let's call this rock here let's see let's call this label it right let's call it rock and then enable this jet ski people and set the opacity all the way back up now they're behind the rock right and we could take that jet ski people and we can resize them if we want to resize them as long as they kind of stay behind this rock we're good to go so we could click on the resize tool let's click resize scale let's just scale them in a little bit as long as they're sitting behind this rock we're okay so we click here and click scale they'll still be sitting behind that rock because we made a selection and put it in front so remember when we're doing layers if i take this rock and put them behind the jet ski people it's not good to us that rock has to sit above the jet ski people in the lair stack we want it to be in the foreground right um hopefully that makes sense it should and what we will do now let's just save our work first so if we look at these jet ski people they're kind of just floating on the water there's no real splashing or nothing going on here so it looks a little bit unrealistic so what i want to do is just zoom out a little bit and just look at the picture right normally i click on the background because that just gets rid of every selection it's just you can see things a bit clearer now and i want to kind of put a little bit of water and waves and stuff like at the bottom of the bolt so it just doesn't look like it's just sitting there uh it looks a bit rubbish right so what we'll do is just zoom in onto this jet ski people and i'm going to click on the jet ski and i'm going to right click and duplicate it duplicate layer and i'm going to click on the background i'm going to right click and duplicate layer as well right and this background now i'm going to drag it all the way to the bottom and the jet ski copy i'm going to drag that all the way to the bottom here as well and i'm going to hide them hide them like this the reason i'm doing this you don't really need to do this in photoshop but in um when we when we apply effects and do certain things um it's called destructive and a lot of stuff that we do in photoshop is non-destructive so we can undo them quite easily but we want to retain these copies because these are like our original copies think of it that way and we hide them so we don't really need to use them but if we do something we don't like it then we don't lose that piece of work we can still retain it because we've got the background and the jet ski as a copy right so now we can go and take the jet ski people and drag them down so they sit just above the background and i want to merge these layers together because in order to use the clone tool the jet ski people and the background need to be in a single image right now they're sitting in separate layers so we click on the jet ski right click on it right click on the jet ski picture and click merge down merge down here it will take those two layers and place them into one single layer so if i were to zoom right out and let's just zoom right out to here and if i were to hide this background now the jet ski people will get hidden as well can you see no more jet ski people right because they're sitting in the same layer and the reason why we've got these copies is now we've still retained the jet ski people separately right so we can come back and if we make some mistake or we don't like what we're doing we've always retained our original layers so remember to make backup copies of your layers because if you do something to a layer and you don't like it uh that's it it's game over unless you can undo all of the steps and you don't really want to go for that headache save yourself that headache trust me in anyway right so let's zoom into these jet ski people and uh we want to use the clone tool basically okay so what i want to do is zoom in i've got the background layer selected here i'm going to zoom right in onto this um these people on this bottom you can see there's like this flat line here and we just want to use like the clone tool to just make this look a little bit more realistic so to do that we'll click on the background layer let's go ahead and click on the left click here and click clone and inside the clone tool i'm going to select this brush it's called acrylic 0-5 you can select different brushing experiment right but i'm gonna select this particular brush and then the size i'm gonna set it's around 37. it's going to be pretty small maybe you can see that here it's 37. it's quite a small size and then we've got the aspect ratio angle spacing i'm going to set to 25 0 0 here 100 hardness and then the force is set to 81. these are the settings i'm going to use for this particular tool i'm going to zoom right in and really what i want to do is clone some of this water underneath and use that as like almost like splashing against the bottom of this bolt so i'm going to hold down the control key hold down the control key and i'm going to left click around here somewhere so holding down the control key and left clicking this becomes the selection right and now i can use that as almost like a paint brush so now i can draw like some waves and sort of some imperfections into the bottom of this bolt where it just doesn't look like it's uh just floating in thin air right something a bit more random so if when we zoom out you can kind of looks like a little bit of waves here now you can see underneath the bolt and that just i know it's really picky but it looks a little bit more realistic now rather than it just being um just kind of sitting flat there right on the surface you can even zoom in a little bit more hold down the control key and select something like the water over here maybe over here and then you can kind of draw in the color of the water here a little bit as well just to make it look a little bit more realistic over the front yeah so that's how you use the clone tool i know it's not really a part of this tutorial but if we're going to make something let's make it the best possible right so here's an example of using that clone tool and remember we merged the layers so the idea here was for me to show you merging the layers so when we merge now the the uh the jet ski people are part of that background picture they're they're kind of embedded into that background picture but if we if we wanted to change that or move the the jet ski people we can just enable these two layers right and we can click on the jet ski people click them uh let's see jet ski here and we can just move them anywhere else we want but if we hide those jet ski people and hide the background and enable this one they're burnt into that layer they're permanently there on this background but that the reason why we joined those layers together is that we wanted to take content from the background and then paint it onto the jet ski and you can't do that unfortunately in i don't believe if the layers are separated you can only do that when you merge the layers together okay let's go ahead and click on this tab let's go to file save make sure these jets key people are saved so we can use that that image later we already cut around it put that effort in let's save the work right let's close this and then let's go to file open and we'll go back to our images and then i think we've got um let's see what else we've got in here we've got a volleyball right let's see this volleyball so let's go ahead and click open on that one we've got the volleyball here now this is a spherical shape this is a round circle so it makes sense that we use the ellipse tool here so we click that and then move towards the center of this ball right towards the center point and then hold down the left mouse button hold down the shift key and the control key we can draw out a circle something quite close to the size of the ball right something around here this should be pretty good then we can use the move tool and then just use the arrow keys let's see maybe we can't let's see we can move this selection in fact we in theory we can move the actual background image to improve the selection so we just want to get the the um the image or the selection as round as possible right right around the edge of this ball and then in theory we should have to just go to edit copy copy and then go to new layer and then click transparency here and then click ok and then go to edit paste let's see if that works and then anchor it down and now we've got our beach ball separated here it is let's click on that and then press uh edit copy or ctrl c copy it you know control c let's go back to our image let's go to the top layer here and it will click a new layer and we'll click transparency here click ok and then go to edit and paste and then we should see the beach ball here right and what we want to do is go to select and let's see in fact we need to anchor it down here first anchor it down and then we want to name this let's just call it ball for now and then we'll go to file save and let's go to let's see we want to resize this thing right so let's click the move tool and let's just drag it first and you can see like the ball really again the picture the original image was quite big we just want to draw a selection around this ball to make our life easier let's click on here and select the rectangle select let's select around the ball like this and then we'll go to image so we go to layer crop to selection and then click back on the move tool and then select none we want to remove the selection now we can click on the picture and go to the scale tool click on the board and we can scale it down to something sensible let's say around here should be pretty good and we'll click the move tool and drag that to maybe around i don't know let's have the beach ball around here somewhere let's say let's say it's around kind of uh let's think about this maybe around here i think that should be okay it's kind of covering that rock and i wanted to see that rock there let's have it no let's see okay maybe we'll place it around here around here okay and let's just click on the background and that ball just looks like maybe the ball is flying through the air right that's fine but i kind of wanted the ball to be um in the sand if that makes sense so we can learn what we've just you know if we use our knowledge now that we have that knowledge we can we can kind of um use the same technique that we use for the water but for the sound instead so really what we want to do is duplicate this ball just right click on it and duplicate it and we've got a ball copy and let's drag that down to the bottom this is these are our copies right for later the background we're going to right click and duplicate that again as well because we've got the background with the ski skiers on there we're going to drag that right down to the very bottom and we're going to retain that copy now we can do whatever we want in this copy this new background this one this old one this old version right because we've got copies here let's hide this background let's drag the ball and drag it so that it sits on top of the the background here just above and then we can uh right click and merge it down so now the ball and the jet ski people are all sitting on this background layer that allows us to zoom in here onto this ball object and then we can go back to our clone tool uh here it is clone and i think we will let's see if there's a better brush maybe let's see let's try one of these other ones what is this one this is acrylic too maybe we'll try this one out and we want to really make this brush a little bit smaller it's a little bit too big something around this size and then we can hold down the uh control key and click somewhere like click around here and we're going to use that as kind of the the selection right and we kind of want this ball to be buried in the sand like this let's zoom out now the ball looks like it's sitting in the sand rather than um just floating in cyber space right you can kind of like do a little bit more here just make don't make it two units and make it a little bit rough around the edge and that will kind of give that illusion of the ball sitting in the sun okay let's go click on the move tool let's click back on our ball object let's go to file save as and we didn't save this right so let's call this uh let's just call this ball ball and save this and we can close this layer down and let's just middle mouse click and bring our canvas to the center so we're making some good progress here right not too bad quite happy with the progress so far um what else can we do let's see what else we've got left i believe we've got one more picture let's save this let's go to open and i think we've got one more image to work with i'm not sure if we'll use it let's see what it is this lady right lying on the on the beach so let's just let's just finish off let's click open so what this lady here lying on the beach and again there's a couple of different ways to do this selection here for this particular one i think it will be easier to use the um i don't know let's have a little think about it okay so to do the selection around this image we've already used the lasso tool or the free select tool use the foreground select already we could do a layer mask maybe i'll show you that i've done actually that before in a previous tutorial so i think maybe we'll use the path select tool here so let's click on the path select tool we'll click design here and we're going to zoom in on this hand so hold down the control key use your mouse wheel to zoom in to sort this hand here we're going to left click here once right i'm going to show you a couple of things we're going to left click here and we're going to left click here one more time so that we've clicked three times basically we can press ctrl z listen very carefully here ctrl and z will undo so we can press ctrl z once control z or z if you're in america ctrl z to undo and then we can press ctrl y once and twice to redo whatever you do do not press any other key on your keyboard except for control hold down the control key and z and hold down the control key and white if you press z on its own for example and imagine you've drawn these dots all around this whole image and you get very close to the end and you press z by accident zed will take you to the zoom tool and you're going to lose your selection trust me i've done it before it's painful yeah so make sure you click on the select all control z and control y and these are the only keys that you need to do you can also go to um undo right ctrl z and control y here you can use these tools as well so let's go ahead and click here and i'm going to zoom in a little bit and we're just going to click and we're using this particular tool for a reason we've got kind of a rounded edge around this hat we can click on these little dots and adjust them as we go along but the closer or the more accurate you see um [Music] when i clicked on this middle one and if i click down here it starts a new selection or a new path we don't want that so when you click on another element let's say we click on this one and we adjust it what you want to do is click on the very last one and then go and click here and it will keep the the selection moving this way right um or the the the path the path we call as a path right so let's keep clicking on this here and we'll keep going around the edge of this arm and we'll get down towards the bottom and we'll see why this tool is useful around here so let's zoom in on this elbow and the elbow has a rounded edge so i'm going to take this line i'm going to draw an imaginary line going down down down down down to this position here i'm going to left click hold down the left mouse button and i'm going to drag down drag downwards in this what direction here right and then i'm going to left click around here to make the new line and i'm just going to keep clicking around here now this bottom part i'm not too worried about i'm just going to do a rough selection around here just a little bit you know you have to be a bit sensible but just do a rough selection because i'm going to cover most of this when we move the picture across with sand i'm gonna cover it with sand uh to make it um look a bit more realistic so all of this is gonna get covered with sand we'll use the clone tool to do that when we move this image into this artwork up here right we use the uh clone tool to do that afterwards so we don't have to be super accurate around here it's just across the top here is where we have to be more accurate around these sort of edges here so let's zoom in on this elbow let's click here and let's click around here and then we can draw a line in our minds up to around here left click and then draw out that rounded edge here like this right and then we can just uh continue to click around here and then we can draw a line from here to around here left click and drag out like this and then we can continue to click here here this is all pretty straight right it's not much roundness to it to here then we get to this hat i'm not really going to cut around all of this stuff here it's going to take too long and you're going to make it bored so i'm just going to do a rough sort of cut around it just around this part here and i'm not going to be too super accurate i'm just going to cut all of that away i don't want any of that so let's click on this hat here just click around here around here and we start to get this curved edge right so i'm going to take a line from here and draw a dot around here and then hold down the left mouse button and drag upwards to draw around a rounded edge i'm going to take this dot and drag it through here then i'm going to take this line and draw another imaginary line going through around here left click and then drag upwards to draw a rounded edge then take this dot and drag it to around here uh let's move it down slightly to around here and then take imaginary line imagine drawing a line so kind of drawing around it to around here this position then left click and then drag and draw around that rounded edge and then take this dot here and drag it to around here we can even take this circle click it and drag it up a little bit as well just to improve that and then we can click here and i think that's going to be okay we could draw a bit of a rounded edge here left click and just draw a slightly rounded edge and then we can left click here this last dot left click here and then we can left click at the top you can see you kind of got this curve shape let's take this handle and drag it over to here let's click on this one let's see let's try and hit the let's undo this this is wrong right so let's press ctrl z ctrl z hold down the ctrl key ctrl z here uh and let's do ctrl z till we get to this position we've got this dot here uh let's click on it and just move it slightly and we're just going to click here click here as well because i want to create a straight edge here like here like this and then we're going to create another straight edge here and we'll click on this hill and then we can click around here and draw around the hill right like here and we take this dot and drag it down to around here and then we can click here and click around here and you can be as accurate as you want with this right let's say we want to draw like around here so let's click around here we can draw out like the roundness of this hill here and then we can take this dot and drag it over to like here and then just continue to do our selection i'm going to speed this up a little bit because i know you're getting bored and but this is quite an important skill to learning game right to make selections with um with uh this path selector but it takes time that's the thing it all takes time time effort and energy will result in a better selection that's the bottom line um obviously in photoshop you can do stuff like this much much quicker but photoshop costs money gameplay is going to be out probably fairly soon and i've been playing around with a beta version of that uh the next version of this software called version three and that is getting very good actually they've actually done quite a lot of nice things in there so that's for a different day and a different tutorial uh for now we're just going to keep left clicking and try and use small dots right like not wide space dots the smaller these dots or the spacing between them the more accurate your selection will look and be and if you make a mistake just drag in here after you drag one of these dots remember to click on the very last one to continue your selection if you don't do that you'll have a few problems so just remember to do that and yeah this was supposed to be a layers tutorial i end up showing you all of these selections so there you go but if we're going to do something you must do it right at least you'll learn this skill as well which is always a good thing selections in are a bit tricky compared to photoshop but remember if you press ctrl z hold down that control key please yeah um pressing z on its own imagine if you went and pressed z right now all of these dots will get lost literally all of them you know if you press z on its own or any other key so just be careful yeah that you don't do that make sure you always press that ctrl key first if you want to undo one of these dots sometimes you don't need to undo them like if you click here you don't need to press ctrl z just click on the dot and just drag it to where it should be yeah so really control z you don't really need to use that unless you're going to undo quite a lot of the dots going backwards but if you make a mistake you click here just take that dot and drag it to where it should be so really control z you don't really need to do it so see when i click here i clicked on this dot and then i clicked here it's going to start a new selection i don't want that so i'm going to press ctrl z very carefully click on the last dot this one and then continue the selection or the the the path so let's just try and speed this up fortunately when i speed it up i make more mistakes so let's just do this at the right pace and hopefully you're following me pause the video fast forward it if you're getting bored you know i'm not forcing you to watch all of this so uh if you're getting bored feel free to fast forward uh and i'll put chapters anyway inside the youtube description so that if you want to skip to a certain part of this tutorial then you can do that as well all right so we're getting down to his hat again the other side of it let's zoom out a little bit this would be easier so let's take a line from here draw all the way down to about here left click hold down the left mouse button drag out that rounded edge and then take this dot and drag it closer to the original dot over here that's what this is how i do it maybe i'm doing it wrong but this is how i do it then take that dot draw a line in your mind down to around here and then left click and drag out that rounded edge and then take this dot and drag it all the way up close to this one go around here and then let's see be careful uh let's take that dot draw a line down to around here draw at that rounded edge something like this take this dot drag it to over here and guess what click on this dot click on it the very first one you started with and then click selection from path and we've got a problem here look it's going to learn some madness up here somewhere so let's see something right let's press ctrl z to undo let's zoom in here let's see what's going on with these dots let's do selection to half and let's see what it's doing here can you see there's a gap here right here that's causing the problem this gap between this dot and this dot here so somehow we need to fix that let's press ctrl z let's click on this dot and maybe we can click on this one here as well let's try and figure out how do we join them um maybe let's just uh in fact let's let's click on this list let's left click out let's press ctrl z let's press ctrl z let's click on this one maybe we just need to click on this one no i'm going to try and join these together somehow um maybe edit control move alt i want to join these two dots maybe i just overlapped them in no join let's try that let's press ctrl z let's click on this one and drag it to here i don't know i don't think that's going to do what i want it to do should be a way to join them so you probably won't have this problem but let's try and fix it because otherwise this ain't going to work so let's see how we fix this interesting let's try this edit tool in fact okay that will join it there right so if we click on the edit tool and if we click on this dot and then click on this one and then let's see let's go back to design now they join together yeah so you have to select the edit tool click on the one that we want to select and then click on the other one and that should join them together just be careful when you're doing these dots i must have made a mistake there somewhere clicking a bit too fast let's move back down to here let's click on this dot click on it and then let's click um on this handle here right click on this last handle and then click here and now let's um do selection to path now it's done correctly now the selection is right so now we have to be very careful let's go to edit copy let's go to a new layer create new layer transparency click ok and then go to edit and paste and then click the anchor icon to anchor it down and let's just hide this bottom layer and we can see the selection here looks good so now we can click on the top one and this selection is done once we click out of it it's finished right i don't think there's a way to save a selection not that i know of um or a path maybe there's a way to save the path right you can see the path in here so export path interesting so let's just export it and let's go into images and let's just call it lady dash path that's zero one we can probably save the path and if we ever want to have that path come back again then maybe there's a way that we can just import it back in i'm not really playing around with paths too much in in um in so i'm gonna learn more about that and then share that knowledge with you but we've got a transparent background for this particular picture that's what we wanted let's just go to the move tool and when we click on this move tool in fact let's go to file save as and we're just going to save this i tried a few experiments before so i'm just going to save this as lady3 i'm going to keep my uh experimental files one and two but i'm going to call this one lady3 this is the one we're doing right now i'm just testing some stuff and when we click on the move tool this selection is going to get removed right it's path tool now it's been removed and now we just want to cut out this um this here we just want to cut around these little bits here so we can use the lasso tool or the free select tool and we can just click in here and we're just going to click around here this one doesn't need to be like super accurate let's just click here here and join at the end and then press control x control and x or edit cut here control x that removes that go to uh select none and then move to the other side and then do the same on this side here and then press control x or edit cut edit cut here and do select uh none and then hold the ctrl key so you can zoom right out and we want to make a copy this let's click on that layer press ctrl c to copy we'll go to edit copy and press ctrl s to save it let's save our work let's go back to this original artwork here and we're going to click on the rock layer here and create a new layer it's going to be transparent here so click this button down here to create a new layer make sure it's transparency click ok and then press ctrl and v uh or edit paste control v right and that is the picture of this this lady and we can click on this floating layer and then use the anchor to anchor it down let's just type in lady here and um we want to resize this right so let's go ahead and click on the skeletal click on that picture and we can just grab this handle and just scale it down so probably around this sort of size should be okay and we'll click the skeletal so now we can scale it down i think we'll just draw a new selection around it so let's click the selection tool and we'll draw a box around this picture let's say around this water size right nice square box something like this and then we'll go to um layer crop to selection so if we resize later again we're just resizing it a little bit easier for us that's making our life a little easier let's do select none we can click on the scale tool and then we can scale it down and that's just a little bit easier to scale and we can click on the middle box to this little middle box here to drag drag it in position i'm going to kind of drag it around here scale it down a bit more maybe to about here i think it's going to be good somewhere around here and we'll click scalp so that's where she's going to be laying down on the beach but it kind of looks like she's just floating on the sand which doesn't look very good so we're going to take this lady picture layer right click and duplicate it i'm going to drag that copy down to here underneath and we're going to hide the ball and hide the lady letters hide these ones these copies these are backups right and we're going to take the background layer we're going to right click and duplicate that and drag that down as well this is going to be one of our backups so we can take the lady and then drag her above the background and we're going to merge it like we did before so if i hide the background uh let's see what am i doing let's hide this background hide this background layer you can see um the ball will get removed from the picture as well because it's merged and sold with a jet ski these jet ski people and the ball because we we um use the clone tool to add some water and some sand here it's merged to this background layer so when we hide it the ball and the um uh what is it the jet ski will get removed but the guy and all these other things will stay there inside the image because there's separate layers above right there's separate layers so we want to take the picture of the lady and merge her to this background so we can clone the sand and then draw some sand underneath her so we will click on the layer of the lady right click and merge down so now it's behaving as one less she is a part of that background picture now we can zoom in to this hold down the middle mouse button to pan across hold down the control key to zoom in and out we'll click on the clone tool and i'm going to click on the brushes i'm going to click this brush here click acrylic free and i'm going to set the size quite small i don't know if you can see this size here maybe you can see it it's pretty small and we're going to you can see there's a lot more light on this side and it's much more darker on this side so we have to be a bit smart in terms of what we're cloning so i'm going to clone from around here just underneath but it's a bit of a light patch so let's say around here so i'm going to hold down the control key and click here then let go of the control key let's zoom right in here let's zoom in a bit closer and then we can start to use um this sand to draw as if there was like a bit of sand um she's kind of buried a little bit in the sun so it just doesn't look like a flat cut layer at the bottom here just you can be a bit rough and ready with this it doesn't have to be perfect but if we zoom out a little bit now it looks like the sand is kind of like actually sitting in the sand right that's kind of the objective of this and you see i'm cloning directly below not very close but around here so when i left click you can see the clone below what we're cloning so like around here and we just want it to be a bit a little bit random around here right you want to be like too perfect because uh sandy's not perfect is it it's going to be a bit rough already so let's see now it looks like she's sitting in the sand or laying in the sand a little bit and you know it looks a bit more realistic i don't know what you think but i think it's better than just having it floating and same with the balloon and the ball here and this jet ski so let's go ahead and click file save we can go back to the picture of this lady let's press ctrl s to save it and then close it and let's click on this very bottom background layer and we can kind of zoom in a little bit here and we can see um what we've done so far right so i think we've made good progress remember we started with a plain background and we started to master these layers and these images on top so we'd cut around the birds we've got the birds there we've got the jet ski guy i've got this surfer dude we've got this uh beach ball we've got the picture of the lady and now we can go and take anything else that we want we could have a plane in the background if we wanted you know how to do this now i've shown you three different ways to cut around pictures and how to bring them into here and how to create new layers so our layers are like um they're like tracing paper right think of it that way so we can stack these layers however we want and that would determine how um you know how these these images um composed together you could say is the best way to explain it so let's try a few more small things and then i think we're finished with this tutorial okay so i want to duplicate this background layer so i'm going to right click on it and duplicate it one more time i'm going to take copy free and drag it right down to the bottom and then hide it i'm going to click on this background layer i'm going to go to filter i'm going to go to the light and shadow and i'm going to click on the lens flare here lens flare so let's click on lens flow and then we'll click on this little arrow icon here and i'm going to click where to start with us the sun is over here and i'm going to add this lens flare can you see this lens flare coming across the picture so you can actually click on the drop down and you can click different presets as default it's going to show kind of down here somewhere i believe um but you can click on them and you can see there's different styles of these lens flare you can pick one that you like i think um probably let's see let's see what this one looks like maybe this one here click on this tool and you can just kind of we should be able to click on it and you can move and click and change where that lens flare is positioned right i want it to be over where the sun is like here and i'm going to go ahead and click okay you can do split view and that kind of splits it in between and you can just about see a lens flare coming out here if i do split view you can see this half is with the lens flare this half isn't when i undo it you can kind of see the rainbox what color is coming from here that's how you can go about adding a quick lens flare and we're applying that to the background layer here okay so the next thing i want to do is click on this lady copy the copy of this lady i'm going to right click on it and duplicate it duplicate and i'm going to take this layer and drag it above the background and i'm going to call this lady i'm going to rename the lady shadow i'm going to enable that layer and i'm going to hide the background for the moment and i'm going to take the eraser tool i'm going to use the acrylic brush here the same one that we used before the same size i'm going to raise most of this picture i'm going to get rid of most of it just get rid of all of this don't want any of this i'm going to keep some of it towards the bottom of the picture so as i get closer to the bottom i kind of want to keep some of this some of this image here right like around not that much maybe just undo that one minute assuming here so we can do a bit a bit more accurately this stuff we can get rid of so i'm just using the eraser tool here and we're just going to get rid of most of this all right up to somewhere like around here i'm going to keep maybe a bit less than that let's see here so this part down here i want to keep everything else i want to get rid of let's speed that up by clicking on here clicking on the roundy brush tool increase its size and then we can just erase much much quicker now right we're going to keep [Music] this stuff down here this bottom piece here use that to create a shadow just like this we just want to keep or retain like a piece like this something like this should be okay let's zoom out let's just middle mouse click here and just zoom in here just click the move tool uh let's turn back on our background now and this layer sits right on top can you see like this and what we'll do is click on this layer um and what we will do is uh let's in fact let's hide the background layer for a moment we'll click on that layer let's go to color let's go to levels and we're going to take this handle this handle on the left hand side we're going to drag it all the way across to make it black like this and then click ok and then we will turn back on our background now let's just save this and we want to create a shadow out of this so we'll click on the shadow layer the ladies shadow let's go to tall it's going to actually filter blur gaussian blur we're going to take the gaussian blur and we're going to increase it to something like this to around 11 or yeah something around 11 right we're going to blow it out to something like this and let's see if we can yeah we'll leave the opacity all the way up like this and we'll click ok and we'll click on that click on the move tool and then just use your arrow keys let's see let's click on this shadow and move tall you should be able to move it here just want to move it underneath a little bit like this like this normally yeah you can use the arrow keys as well right you want to move it too far so you want to move it so it just sits underneath like this it kind of looks like there's a shadow because the sunlight is coming from here expect to see a shadow underneath just make it look a bit more realistic you can do the same with the ball as well and a few other objects and stuff you can you know you can have experiment have a little bit of fun doing that okay let's go ahead and save our work let's go to file save let's go to file export as and we're going to export this as a jpeg file so we select in here let's go to jpeg and let's call this layer i think it's called layer one right so let's call this uh let's give it a sensible name let's call this yeah layers one is fine let's export this and we save it as 90 jpeg compression so we've got layers one and what we'll do is go to file save as and we're going to save it as a file and layers 2 i'm going to click on the background go to filter and go to lights and shadows and click bloom i'm going to turn on the preview and we can have this like bloom effect and it kind of just i don't know it just for me it just kind of adds something to the picture but it's down to you whether you want to use this or not you can turn down the strength and just bring up the bloom a little bit it kind of just brightens up the whole image and everything looks just a little bit better you can turn it off and turn it on you can kind of see you get a bit more lighting on the on the you know where the lights are everything just looks a bit more popped out a bit more but you do lose some dow in the clouds as well you must remember that everything just looks a bit more brighter for me when you turn on the blooms i kind of like that uh you can do a split view so you can see like this side is what it looks like before and this is what it looks like now it kind of looks a bit more polished and it just looks a bit more brighter for me so i'm going to go ahead and click ok and we saved it as version two so that we can now go to file save and we've retained that version one version so we don't have a problem right we can always retain or we could just duplicate that layer before applying that effect um that's another way to do it okay so let's export as and we'll export this as version 2 in here and we just save this and export it let's export that and then click export so we've got kind of two versions here let's close down this file and let's minimize this if we open up our folder here i'll just open this up and let's go back a directory and we'll have two different files so we've got the original one which is this composition and then we've got one with the bloom turned on right you can see kind of different it looks a little bit washed out here as soon as we turn on the bloom it looks like a lot brighter it looks very sunny in this picture you can even tell the difference on the person like it just makes things pop a little bit more right so i prefer this one i think it looks a bit more um better but this is your down to your own perception right so think about it we started off with a background with nothing which is the background we've managed to put the lady in here we put the ball put the pictures of the the birds we've got this water ski guy we've got this surfer dude you could take any content now and use your imagination and combine lots of different images using layers this is the important part using layers you can have a little crab here or something you can have loads of different things in here right entirely your choice now you've got a lot of freedom you could take like a mountain and put it in the background if you wanted to you can do almost anything this is this is the power of learning layers and how to create selections and remove backgrounds from other pictures and then bring them together you can even show you how to do little drop shadows here like stuff like this how to add um you know a little bit of wave i don't think we did anything with the surface because the cut was quite clean but we added a little bit of wave here uh to these jet skis they didn't like it was just sitting there and we placed it behind the rock remember we created another rock we cut a bit of the rock out and placed it in front of the jet ski so it's sitting in front of the jet ski and you've got the ball and then the sand that we did here as well and then we took the birds and we flipped them over so they don't look like they're too like cut and paste drops okay let's go ahead and close this let's go ahead and close this i know this was one epic long tutorial and it was just meant to be about layers but sometimes to explain things in we need to actually go and create something and that's the only way that we're going to learn so hopefully you learned a lot from this tutorial if you liked it you enjoyed it please give it a thumbs up write in the comments just tell me that you know if you want me to make other types of tutorials and give give me some suggestions in the comments and i'll go ahead and try and create something for you to teach you and to help you to understand how to use this software that's the end of this tutorial don't forget to subscribe and look forward to seeing you on the next dcp web tutorial [Music] you

Channel: DCP Web Designers

Views: 1,712

Rating: 4.7966104 out of 5

Keywords: GIMP Layers Beginners Tutorial, gimp tutorial for beginners layers, gimp tutorial layers, gimp layers tutorial, gimp 2.10 layers, gimp 2.10 layers tutorial, gimp 2 layers tutorial, gimp layers help, gimp layers beginners tutorial, gimp beginners layers tutorial, gimp layers for beginners, gimp 2 layers for beginners, gimp 2.10 layers for beginners, gimp beginners tutorial, gimp 2.10 tutorial for beginners, gimp tutorial for beginners 2020, gimp tutorial for beginners 2021

Id: zv86BBRmB8o

Length: 87min 16sec (5236 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021