How to Create a Cinematic Mood and Atmosphere in Photoshop

hello my name is rickard and in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to put together this composite in photoshop this is a composite i put together to highlight some of my light textures and overlays that i sell on nuclei.com now if you want to download the ones that i use for this specific composite i have included a link in the description of this video so go ahead and download those and then let's get started all right let's go to file open and in the assets you're going to see this photo from jez timms from unsplash let's go ahead and open that and the first thing i want to do is just separate out some of the elements in here so that when we're compositing and adding atmosphere we can add it kind of behind and in front of our elements and make the atmosphere more like it's permeating the scene rather than just sitting on top of it so let's go ahead and cut out this chair for that i'm going to use the quick selection tool and just kind of draw around this chair here and that looks pretty good let's go to select and mask and here we can change our various views i'm going to put this on overlay and i'm going to change my color to kind of in fluorescence green and you can also change the opacity here so for example as you're adding or subtracting for your selection you may want it at around 30 or 50 percent and then as you're checking your edges you can increase that so let's go ahead and add the parts that were missed here okay so for something like this where i have some straight lines i can actually just use the lasso tool and right now it's on adding so if i click here and then hold down the option or alt key it's going to turn it into the diagonal tool and i can just go like this and there you can see it's added it and now i'm going to hold down option start drawing let go of option and then hold option again what that's going to do is it's going to allow me to subtract from my selection so like this and there you can see it's now subtracted that and let's just go around here i want to subtract this so i'm going to hold down option let go of option click option again and that's going to allow me to use my poly polygonal lasso there and we'll do the same here but this time i want to add so i'm going to start not holding option and whether you're holding option or letting go of option is going to determine at the beginning whether you're subtracting or adding to your selection so it's kind of a little trick you can also get around it here if you want to add subtract or intersect but i find it easier to just hold down the option key at the beginning or don't hold down the option key at the beginning so there you go that's done a pretty good selection there and then i'm just going to turn on smart radius and add a couple pixels of edge detection hit ok and then i'm going to do command or control j and we'll call this chair next i want to pull this chair right here from the background for this one i'm just going to use the pen tool so let's go ahead and select that and i'm going to start from here just start clicking and drawing and when you click and drag you're going to create an anchor point with handles which determine the curve and if you just click it'll create a point with no handles which is a sharp corner so click and drag we'll make a curved edge and we're just going to do that all around the chair here and generally unless you're making a sharp corner you want to click and drag so that you have those handles to determine the curve of your path i'm going to disregard those i don't really need those now here i want this to be a sharp corner but as you can see there's a handle here so if i hold down option it's going to cut that off and now it's a straight path like so and this is outside of the canvas so doesn't really matter where i click here and then i'm going to close the path like that now i can right mouse click and say make selection when i do this i like to add a little bit of feathering and this is somewhere where you can actually add a just a fraction of a pixel so like even if you do 0.2 that's going to be enough to blur that edge just a tiny bit so let's go back to our background here do command j again and we'll call this side chair whoops all right one other thing i want to do with this chair is you can see this floating leg here it's a little odd so i'm just going to stretch that so that it touches the ground to do that i'm just going to make a rectangular selection like this with my chair selected do command t for transform i'm going to put it on the warp and then just drag the bottom here so that it's touching the ground and then hit the check mark all right last thing is i'm going to want to separate this table top as well so let's select our background again i'm going to zoom in i'm doing that by just holding down command and the spacebar and then dragging left or right you can also go on to your tool here and click to zoom in hold down option to zoom out okay so let's go ahead and go back onto our pen tool and let's go ahead and select out the top of this table i'm going to need that because i'm going to add a lantern to the top of this table and i want to put the lantern behind the table rather than in front of it and there you go that's going to be good enough let's right mouse click again make selection it's remembered my last setting so i can just hit ok and then do command j again and we'll call this tabletop all right the last thing i want to do before i start pulling in other elements is just to get rid of this painting on the wall right here it's a little bit distracting so let's go ahead and select our background again and just because i always like to keep my original what i'm going to do is make a copy of this and then make the correction on the copy let's go ahead and select the patch tool which is this tool here i'm going to make a selection just around this and again similar to my polygonal tool if i hold down option or sorry similar to the lasso tool if i hold down option i get a polygonal selector rather than clicking and dragging and trying to do it by freehand so just there and then i'm going to take this and drag it to somewhere around here and you can see it's taken some of that color i can also do command z or undo and try doing content aware and see if that gives me a better result and i like that result better it looks a little more natural so we'll use that okay the next thing we're going to do is start pulling in some of our elements so let's go to file actually before we pull in elements let's go ahead and pull in the lantern so i'm going to go ahead and go to file open and you're going to see this light overlay 45 this is from my practical lights pack and what i want to do here is first cut this out of the background now there is numerous ways that i could do this but i know that for this i know that this background is a pure black so what i can do is go to my magic wand tool and the magic wand tool will select all the pixels that are the same color as the point where you select so there you can see now this has pretty high tolerance at 32 so it's actually selecting pixels that aren't pure black as well so let's put this down to five now i'm going to do command d or control d on a pc to deselect and then click again here you can see it's now just selected the pure black all right then i can invert my selection and now if i hit q on the keyboard that's going to show me a quick mask and that's going to show me what i have selected which is everything that's not red and then the red shows me what i don't have selected and i can use this as a as a reference point it's a little bit easier to see than the dotted lines and i can toggle back and forth between my dotted selection and my quick mask by just hitting q or clicking on this button here in your tool palette now the advantage of quick mask is i can actually use my paint tools to paint in the parts that i want and i can also use all my other tools such as my quick selection so for example i want to quick select oops actually okay so a little bit of clarification here when you're on your quick mask your your selection tools like quick selection or magic wand actually work on the quick mask channel because that's what you have selected so what i will have to do here is go out of quick mask and then use my selection tool and i want to minus this from the selection so i can either hold down option like this or i can change the tool to b minus over here and then i don't have to hold down option now you can see it's not doing a great job so what i made it what i may do instead is simply use my lasso tool but let's go ahead and see which ones we can use the quick mask for just because it is quicker okay so that's probably as good as i'm going to do with the quick mask tool so now i'll hit q again uh go back into my quick mask and i'm going to do the rest just using the lasso tool and filling with black to deselect or white to select and i have those as my default colors if they're not your default colors you can hit d on your keyboard to default them or click on this little icon here all right same trick after i start clicking and dragging to make my selection i can hold down option and it's going to switch that tool to a polygonal lasso and we'll just go in here now when i hit um delete it's going to delete to my background so because i want this out of my selection i'm going to switch these two colors by hitting x and then i can just hit delete oops i don't want that all right so that usually works i don't know why it's not working right now but to get around that i can always hold down command and delete which will fill with my background color or option delete to fill with my foreground color let's do this so again just to fill with my background color which is black i'm using command delete and that's control delete or control backspace on a pc and we're going to go around and do this for all the parts that we don't want selected okay and now the parts where it should be selected we can go on our brush tool and just select a small brush with a 100 hardness and just paint in those areas that should be in the selection now if this red is making it impossible to see your background you can actually adjust that by double clicking on your quick mask in channels and changing the opacity so let's change this to 20 percent that'll allow us to see our original image a little bit better and there you have it that's done a pretty good job now i can hit q again that's going to throw me back into my regular selection mode and with any of my selection tools selected i have the select and mask option i can click on that and here again i can adjust the opacity i'm going to bring it all the way to 100 so i can really see my edges here turn on smart radius bump that up to about 2 pixels and hit ok and then i'm going to do command j to put that on its own layer now i want to adjust the perspective of this because i'm putting it on the top of this table and as you can see this is almost exactly the horizon line of the camera so there wouldn't be this upward perspective here so i'm going to put a layer between these and we're just going to call this background and this layer is going to act simply as reference so i can see what i'm doing i'm going to fill that with my fluorescent green color here all right next i'm going to make a selection just of this part here and i don't want it to select any of this i just wanted to select here and then down this edge so right about there like that i'm going to make a copy of the lantern and with this selection i'm going to do add a mask now i want the mask to hide my selection rather than show it so to do that i'm going to hold down option and then click it now if i turn this off you can see it's hid that part now i want to use this same selection and cut out part of this so what i can do is hold down command and then as i hover over this mask when you hold down command or control on a pc you'll notice that my icon is changing to have a selection and what that means is it's going to use the transparency of this mask to make my selection so when i click on the thumbnail you can see it's made that selection i can then go to select inverse or shift command i and now i have that same selection i can select this top lantern and do command j and then i can go ahead and throw this away you'll see now i have this as two separate layers and what i want to do is i want to modify this layer here so i'm going to go into my move tool which is also v on your keyboard and then do command t for transform now what i can do is hold down the command key that's going to allow me to skew this i'm going to click on this corner anchor point and then just drag down until this line is pretty much straight there so something like that maybe even down a slight bit i also want this here to line up so i'm going to take this anchor point again holding down command and just drag that so it's lined up like so and then hit the check mark and that's done a pretty good job if we put if i do command r to show my ruler i can drag down a guide here and see how that's looking pretty good what i may want to do is also just skew this a bit so that this lines up to the bottom here i'm going to select my main layer do command t again and i want to see my anchor point so i'm going to turn it on here and then drag it to right about here and then hold this down and you'll notice my icon changes when i hold down command and then if i hold down option at the same time i can skew it from the anchor point and i'm just looking at the bottom here kind of adjusting it to be straight with this here like so and then hit return so that's kind of what i want i don't like that this is slanted down now so i can do command transform again just option drag that icon to there and then maybe just drag this point back up and then drag the whole thing down a little bit to get rid of this green line something i'm going to hold down shift to so it's only doing up and down like that so there you go you can see this is the before and this is our slightly modified perspective there i'm going to take both of these layers hold down shift select them both right mouse click and convert to smart object i'm just going to drag this to the side here so i can see both my documents change the name of this to lantern and drag it into my file i'm going to do command t for transform and just make this smaller and sit it on top of the table here i want it right about there i just want to kind of peeking over the table top something like this maybe even smaller like that so there you go most of my elements are now in place what we're going to do next is start building the atmosphere so let's go file place embedded and in here we'll just take the first one which is dust 34 and i'm going to drag this to the top and this i primarily want for these two spots i'm going to change the blend mode on this to screen and just drag this to somewhere over here now our light's going to be coming in here so this is where you're going to see most of that dust now this i want very subtle so we'll just change the opacity to about 20 percent just like that and i want to make sure i can see both these spots here next we're going to go file place embedded and we'll take dust 30 and this one is going to be the smaller dust and again you're going to see the dust as it's coming from the light so we'll put it about there and again put this on screen and i'm going to take the opacity down on this to maybe about 30 percent next do file place embed it again this time we're going to take our big light ray here now let's go ahead and put this on screen so we can see how it's interacting with the background now i want this light to be coming from this window so i'm going to kind of drag the top point to where i want it then take my anchor point place it there now when i hold down option it's going to make it bigger from that anchor point so something like this now you'll see this hard line we're going to get rid of that in a second see if we can't drag so right about there is where i want it we can call this main light and i want this to be both behind and in front of the chair so i'm going to go ahead and drag it behind the chair like this and for this bottom one let's put it on 30 percent i also want it behind the side chair so let's drag the side chair above it like this and actually i want this chair to be underneath the side chair because now what i want to do is first just feather this edge you can't really see it because it's kind of lined up to this leg chair but if you look close you can see that there's an edge there and you don't want that when you add an overlay so we're just going to add a mask to it go in our gradient tool make sure our gradient is foreground to transparent which is this one right here and then make sure it's on linear make sure your foreground is black and then just start at the edge and drag toward your overlay that's going to get rid of that hard line there like so and then i'm going to take this drag it into here to make a copy and put it above the chair so that we have some atmosphere both in front and behind the chair now in case i move these what i'm going to do is hold select this one hold down command select these two i have them both selected now and click on this little link so now if i move either one of these oops okay so you'll notice that it's auto selecting this my dust layer even though i want to be moving my main light if that happens make sure this auto select up here is turned off so let's turn that off now when i select this no matter where i click it's going to select those layers now with these two linked together when i move one it's going to move both that way i can make sure that if i ever do move this light it's moving both layers the one in front of the chair and the one behind the chair all right next let's go to file place embedded again this time i'm going to grab the flare 19 now this is from my flare pack and you'll notice that it is quite sharp and i don't want that because um just the rest of this image just doesn't have that same sharpness so let's go ahead and go to filter blur gaussian blur and i'm going to select a point here and you can see here the lines and i'm just going to blur this until i no longer see those lines there that's good and i don't need this to be a smart object so i'm going to right mouse click and go to rasterize layer and that's going to get rid of the smart object and also embed that blur into the layer let's go ahead and put this on screen and i want to line this up to where the light is here so right about there and then if i do command t i'm going to drag my anchor point to the center of the flare hold down option and just change the size of this about fifty percent i'm going to add a gradient and do the same thing to make sure i get rid of this hard line there so i'm just going to gradient in toward the light there like that all right next we're going to go file place embedded again and this time i'm going to use this last layer here which is from one of my light texture packs and again i don't need this to be a smart object so i'm going to rasterize the layer we're going to call this lantern light i'm going to put this on screen and then do command t for transform i'm going to rotate it make it smaller and put it behind here i just want to make sure it's behind the top of the table because i know that's where my mask is and then i'm going to put it behind our lantern layer like this so there you can see it's just the light from that lantern now it should be more yellow so what i can do is do command b which brings up color balance you can also get that here adjustments color balance and i'm going to take the mid mid-tones and make them yellower and redder and then my shadows a little more red and then my highlights yellow and red and that's going to color the whole thing as you can see and i think we can also blur that so let's go ahead and do a gaussian blur and we also don't need it quite that big so i'm going to do transform again make it smaller and then let's go ahead and add a mask to that and just blur kind of gradient in the light toward our lantern like this and for this one i also want it a bit in front and a bit and back so i'm going to take this one and put it on 40 make a copy of it put it above the lantern and put this one on maybe thirty percent actually even less let's just leave it at ten percent that's just going to give us a little bit of light coming from the front of the lantern like that all right next i'm going to go above the side chair here and go to file place embedded and place my butterflies those are a png file that they're already in place so everything's where i want it to be all right next i want to do a few lighting tricks so the main one i want to do is on this chair so if the light is coming in strong from over here what i want to do is where the light is hitting the chair i want it to kind of glow so what i'm going to do is take my chair make a copy of this layer and i can call this chair glow i'm going to do command m to bring up my curves and just bring down my blacks so that nothing so that really all that's left is the highlights of the chair and remember bring those highlights up quite a bit so something like that hit okay and then i'm gonna put this on screen and then go to filter blur gaussian blur and as you as i adjust my radius here you can see it's creating this nice glow effect and i want it to be where you don't see the edge of the glow but you still get that sense of glow from the light hitting it so something like that i'm going to add a mask to this i don't want it so strong here so i'll just go back onto my gradient and just kind of cut it out there and there all right next i want to make this light a little bit stronger and a little bit more contrasty so i'm going to take this main light here do command m and do a similar curve here i'm going to bring up the bottom and then bring down the bob sorry bring down the bottom and bring up the top i can even do this a little bit of an s curve here something like this that's going to bring up the contrast so something like that let's bring up the opacity see maybe 40 i think is a little nicer and i don't want this um so obscured this butterfly right there so i can go onto my mask go onto my gradient and just kind of cut out the top like that and i think that looks really nice all right next i'm going to add a little more color to this chair and then we'll start color grading the whole scene so let's go on to the chair i'm going to convert this to a smart object that way when i add my curve to it under adjustments curves or command m i can always go back and change it because it's a curve on the smart object so here i just want to go to my red channel and bring it up that's going to add that nice burgundy color there and as you can see it's a smart filter i can turn that on or off i can also double click on the curve to adjust it all right next thing is some color grading first thing i want to do is give it kind of a painterly look so to do that i'm going to go to the very top and add a curve and in my curve i want to go to the blue channel bring up the bottom and bring down the top so that the middle stays in the same place and what that's going to do is it's going to make all my whites tinted yellow and all my blacks tinted blue and i kind of like that look tinting your yellows gives your images more of a painted look just because the canvas is not pure white so when you look at a painting all the whites in the painting are usually more of a off-white so this helps to give it that kind of painted look so something like that and then lastly i'm going to use a gradient map to give this even more strong of a color grade so let's go here to our adjustment layers go up to gradients map i'm going to click on this and i'm going to change my black color here to a cyani blue like this and i'm going to change my white color here to a yellow kind of a warm goldish color actually and i'm trying to keep both of these kind of within the range of neutral in terms of luminosity and you'll see why in a second so i'm going to hit ok and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to change the blending mode of this to soft light you can see here that that's giving the whole image a really nice color grade now the beauty of using a gradient map is that with the gradient map i can control both the color of the shadows here make them more saturated more bluish more purple more green i can do all that here so if i wanted to give this a nice horror look i might go more green in my shadows and more red in my highlights so something like this or if i want to give it a more classic look i can go to kind of a blue in here and a more golden color in here and also by dragging it more toward the light or more toward the dark i'm also controlling the luminosity of the image so just be careful with that play with it see what kind of effects you get i kind of really liked the horror look we were getting so i might do a cross between that and our more classic painted look so maybe something around there more warmish orange color for our highlights and then kind of a blue green color for our shadows and the shadows uh here the luminosity is quite important because i can really blow out my shadows by making my back my dark color too light so you want to keep it more toward neutral and the further right you go the more color it's going to put in the more you go to our neutral the less it's going to affect the image and a pure neutral will do nothing so because it's on soft light nice and i think something like that looks good and you can also adjust the balance of your split toning here by taking this and dragging it like this if you want more of that orange color or dragging it to the right if you want more of this color i think somewhere in the middle is actually pretty nice and there you have it the last thing i might do just to kind of reinforce the painted look is give the whole thing a bit of a sharpen there's many ways i could do that my favorite is just adding a layer at the very top we can call it sharpen and i'm going to do shift option command e which is going to merge everything into one layer here go up to filter other high pass put this on about 2.5 pixels hit okay and then change this to linear light now you can see that's before that's after it's giving the whole image kind of a crispy look so something like that and maybe i don't want it so strong in here the beauty of having doing it with this is it's all one layer which i can add a mask to put on my black gradient and get rid of the sharpness here in the shadows so that i'm just getting that sharpness here in those highlights that's before and that's after so there you have it that completes this tutorial if you enjoyed it please subscribe to my channel turn on notifications leave a like leave a comment i do read them all and share this video and if you do want the full set of my light textures flares practical lights and so forth you can find those on nuclei.com and i have included a link to the various packs that i used in this tutorial all right here are some other tutorials that you can check out and i'll see you next time

Channel: Nucly • Photoshop and Creative Design Training

Views: 20,963

Keywords: photoshop, photoshop tricks, Photoshop, Photography, Tutorial, Nucly, Rikard Rodin, Create mood in photoshop, create atmosphere in photoshop, cinematic, compositing, composite, photo composite, mood, dust, overlays, light, tutorial, Dust in Photoshop, Adding Dust Particles in Photoshop, How to add Dust in Photoshop, atmosphere in photoshop, adobe photoshop, free tutorial, color grading, chair, editing, haze

Id: vPvQN4XnKso

Length: 35min 59sec (2159 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021