How To Match a Subject Into ANY Background In Photoshop! Compositing Tutorial

is your compositing work looking flattened unrealistic if so then check out this Photoshop compositing tutorial where I'm going to show you some amazing techniques to match a subject to any background hi this is a soos Ramirez from the Photoshop training channel this is going to be an information filled tutorial that is going to teach you a lot about compositing we're going to learn some powerful techniques that is gonna help you create more cohesive and realistic composites we're going to start by learning how to match the perspective of two different images so that it feels like the person is standing on that background then we're going to move on to matching the brightness color and saturation of the background and foreground so that again the image feels more cohesive in this case we're also going to learn how to apply a similar depth of field a blurry background to create the illusion that it's an actual photo and we're going to use the Camera Raw filter to bring it all together make sure that you stick to the very end of the tutorial because you don't want to miss any of the compositing tips and tricks if this is your first time at the Photoshop training channel then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification button so that you don't miss any future Photoshop tutorials let's just get right to it these are the images that we're gonna work with I have this image of this young lady standing on this street and I have this background image of a pier on icy waters and if you would like to follow along with these images make sure that you look down below in the description there'll be a link so you can download them and once you have them open they'll be open in two different tabs the first step is to get both images in the same Photoshop document to do that make sure that you have the move tool active and that you click and drag one of the images over on to the other tab the tab will automatically change over if you hold the shift key and release the mouse button Photoshop will place the image that you drag over right in the center of the canvas then you can hit the enter key on windows that's a return key on the Mac to place the image in your new document so now we have both of these images and document as two separate layers the first step is to remove the background from the models image and that's what I'll call the layer I'll call the layer model because this is the layer that will hold my model and the other one is called background so that name is spine and there's a lot of ways of removing the background from an image if you're in an older version of Photoshop you probably will have access to the quick selection tool which allows you to simply click and drag over an image to make a selection so I'm clicking and dragging over her if I make a mistake I can always hold the Alt key on Windows that's the option key on the Mac and click and drag to subtract from the selection I'm going to press ctrl D command D in the Mac to deselect and if you're in the newest version of Photoshop at the moment is Photoshop 20/20 you will have access to a really powerful tool called the object selection tool with this tool you can go under the mode drop-down and select lasso and make sure that you click on this button here in the options of art called new selection and then click and drag a loose selection right over our model and when I release you'll see that Photoshop will analyze the image using artificial intelligence known as the W sensei and it will make a selection out of whatever it thinks the main subject is within that selection so what I'm gonna do now is fine-tune the selection so if you notice it really didn't get everything perfect and that's okay it doesn't need to get it perfect all we need to do is get started with it and we can fine tune as we go so I'm going to press the Z key on the keyboard to switch over into the zoom tool then I can zoom into the image and I can deselect the part in between her legs here and we can do that several ways we can select the quick selection tool hold alt on windows option in the Mac and click and drag to deselect I'm using the spacebar to pan and again you can hold alt on windows option on the Mac and click and drag to deselect at this point you don't need a perfect selection we're going to fine-tune later just make sure that you get the main shapes of the person selected that way you get an accurate station of the selection but you don't have to worry about being perfect that comes at the end I always leave all the fine-tuning to the end because sometimes you can get away with not having a perfect selection depending on what the background is what the foreground is and all the details on both layers so we're not gonna worry about the fine-tuning till the very very end I just want to make sure I have the main shapes selected but anyway this is gonna be good for now and what I'm gonna do is simply double click on a hand tool to fit the image to screen and then I'm going to click on the layer mask icon to create a layer mask based on the selection so everything that was selected will keep she was selected we kept there everything else was hidden in the layer mask this is the layer mask here next to the layer thumbnail you can see that there black hides white reveals let me hold alt on windows option on the Mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail so that you can see it white reveals black conceals I'll once again hold alt on windows and option on the Mac and click on the layer mask thumbnail to reveal the layer and we can continue working so if I select the move tool I can obviously place her anywhere that I want but where should I place her right there where I have her now it doesn't look realistic and sure I could eyeball it and find the spot where I think she looks realistic and I could scale her and try to get it to match but it's always a good idea to use perspective to fit her into a scene if you don't know what I mean by perspective don't worry about it I have a tutorial that talks all about that I'll place a link to my perspective tutorial down below in the description but for now I'll give you a brief explanation I'm going to disable the foreground layer the model layer and we're gonna work with the background layer so with this layer active I'm going to select the line tool and make sure that I have shape active and a weight of 10 so that I could see the actual lines that I draw I can maybe change the fill to red so the lines are more obvious when you are combining images together and you want them to look realistic you need to get the perspective right in the easiest way to think about perspective is matching the horizon lines of both your foreground and background in the way that you do that is by looking at your image and sometimes like in this case you don't even need to draw any line so you can just tell where the horizon line is the horizon line is where the ground plane meets the sky we can see the sky is up here and the ground plane is the eyes and this pier so where does that meet the sky well right about here right because this is where the sky starts and if you go up you have sky and if you go down you have ground if you can't really see that in your image just find parallel converging lines like on this pier or dock whatever it is let me know that in the comments below if it's a pier or a dock anyway find the parallel converging lines and follow them all the way to the end and when you get to the other end where they meet that'sa vanishing point and the vanishing point is always in the horizon line so see the horizon line is right here right at that point so where is the horizon line in our model so I'm gonna tap the Delete key just to delete those layers because we don't need them anymore and now we're gonna enable the model layer and I'm going to figure out where the horizon line is for her I'm gonna hold shift and click on the layer mask thumbnail to reveal the original background see that red X on the layer mask thumbnail that just means it's hidden we're not deleting it we're just hiding it for a moment and if I follow parallel converging lines like the lines on the ground here you'll see that her horizon line is more or less right below her ear give or take doesn't have to be perfect but right about there see right below her ear and actually I drew the lines under her so if I drag the model layer and place it under those lines you'll see that the vanishing point and the horizon line are right below her ears and actually if I click and drag from here you'll notice that all the parallel converging lines in the scene end up at that vanishing point see that see how all the lines end up at that point so we know for sure that that's where the horizon line is so if the horizon line is right below her ear that we need to place her ear right on the horizon line of the other image so if I hold shift and click on the layer mask thumbnail then I can select the move tool I can now drag her up and place her right about here so she's in perspective and I can place her anywhere I want left right center as long as that ear isn't that horizon line she should be in perspective but that arises other problems right like we now need to worry about scale so why don't we work on that next I'm going to click on that lock icon to disable the lock then I'm going to right click and convert this layer into a smart object so that I can distort it non-destructively smart objects allow you to apply adjustments distortions filters and transformations non-destructively which means you can always come back and edit them next press ctrl T on Windows command T on the Mac to transform and drag the reference point over onto the horizon line if you don't see the reference point you can click on this checkbox to enable it and then just drag the reference point onto the horizon line anywhere on the horizon line works then if you hold shift and alt on Windows that's shift + option on the Mac and click and drag on the corner handle you'll scale in perspective isn't that awesome see that super cool so what I'm gonna do now is simply scale the layer down so that we could have her in perspective and not seem too small or too big and you can adjust it accordingly and by the way the reason that I'm adjusting the background and not her is because I don't want to scale her up if I scale her up I'm going to stretch pixels and make her look blurry and I don't want that so I rather adjust the background I'm gonna click on the crop tool and then click and drag on these handles to crop the image like so when you're done you can just hit the enter key on Windows and that's a return key in the Mac my image is still looking a little bit off scale so what I'm gonna do is select the background layer and select the move tool then click on the center transformation handle while holding alt on windows option in the Mac and drag to the left to make it just a little wider I think it looks a little bit better that way and this last adjustment is just subjective you could leave it as it was and it was they look good but anyway I'm going to now work on my model we have a really good composite so far but it doesn't look realistic and the reason that this composite doesn't look realistic is because we haven't matched the luminosity or the color of the image and the way to do that is actually very simple it only requires a couple adjustment layers then let me show you how to do that first with any composite that you make I recommend that you create a black and white adjustment layer because that turns the image black and white when you remove the color from a composite you really start seeing the differences in luminosity between the layers and you can see that the composite doesn't work so what you want to do now is click on the model layer and then create a levels adjustment layer which will help us control the levels or the luminosity of the model and match it to the background so that the composite looks realistic by the way you could also use the curves adjustment layer but for beginners levels it's a little easier to understand if you're more advanced and prefer curves go ahead and use that with the levels adjustment layer I'm going to click on this icon here in the properties panel to clip it to the layer below clipping a layer simply means that the levels adjustment layer will only control the layer directly below it in this case the model layer and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to adjust the luminosity to match it to the background but before I do that let me quickly explain how the levels adjustment layer works so at this point you see that we have a dark handle on this side we have a white handle and the same thing is true for the two at the bottom so these five controls adjust the luminosity of the layer but how do they control it well if I drag this point to the right this black point to the right watch what happens the image of course gets darker so what Photoshop is doing is making this image darker but how well look at the gradient below this gradient tells us that the dark pixels are on the left and the bright pixels on the right if you notice right dropped this slider so right about here right on this shade of gray so what we're telling Photoshop is that anything that is this shade of gray or darker will be black right and why is it black well because we're telling Photoshop that the darkest point is pure black but I can change that I can click and drag this point to the right and now the darkest point is no longer black is this dark shade of gray which is the same gray that you see here so that's the way this tool works the point on top tells Photoshop what pixels are the darkest color and the point at the bottom determines what the darkest color is and the same thing is true with the points on the right if I drag the white point to the left it brightens up the image notice that we have white all over her skin that's because the brightest points are white we're telling Photoshop that anything that is this shade of gray or brighter will be completely white but if I drag this point to the left now the brightest point will be this shade of gray it will no longer be white so again the bottom points control how bright the brightest pixel is how dark the darkest pixel is and the points on top control which of the pixels are the darkest and which are the brightest so if you want it just a black silhouette click on the black point and drag it all the way to the right because then everything will be completely black or alternatively you can grab the white point and drag it to the left and that will make the brightest point black and the darkest point black so it makes everything black in the image and the center point on top controls the contrast I hope that that made sense to you but now that you know how that tool works I'm just gonna use it to adjust the image here and I'm gonna double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen so that we can see it better and what I'm gonna do next is make sure that this black and white image looks realistic pretend like we're just making a black and white composite if it looks really black and white it'll look real with color so just adjust the start point and try to match the foreground to the background I'm also going to maybe make a few more pixels brighter and I don't necessarily want them completely white so I'm gonna drag this white point to the left so that the brightest point is just off white I'm also going to click on the center point and drag it to the right to add more contrast the center point adds or decreases contrast in an image but anyway I'm just gonna drag it to the right and add a little bit more contrast and what I'm really looking at is that the darkest pixels in the background match the darkest pixels in the foreground so if I click on this eye icon you'll see the before and the after much much better I'm going to now disable that black and white adjustment layer so you can see the result unfortunately when you adjust the levels adjustment layer you also adjust the color of the image hue and saturation and I don't want that to avoid that from happening I'm going to click on the drop down and select luminosity so that now this layer only adjusts as the luminosity and not the hue or saturation and I'll give this layer a new name I'll call it luminosity so that we know what it controls before and after everything's looking much much better now next we need to control the color that's in the image it's somewhat difficult to tell but the background image has a slight blue tint and we're gonna try to match that on to the foreground so that everything looks more realistic to do so we're going to use the curves adjustment layer and once again I'm going to click on this icon to clip it to the layer below then make sure that the focus the white outline on the layer thumbnail is selected and hold alt on windows option on the Mac and click on the auto button to bring up the auto color correction options and we're going to use the find art in light colors algorithm to match the colors of the foreground and background by default this algorithm makes the darkest colors of your image black and the brightest colors of your image white which allows you to color correct the image but we're going to use this technology to color match let me show you how first look for the shadows in the background double click on the shadows swatch to bring up the color picker and select the shadows in the background notice how these shadows are not black they have color to them somewhere between blue and green so that is the color that the shadows on the foreground need to be so I'm gonna press ok to select that color now we need to look for the brightest part of the background not including any specular highlights rating like that in this case I think it would be a good idea to select the eyes because it's very bright but it's not necessarily a specular highlight or something that is blown out and notice that the ice also has a little bit of blue in there so I'll press ok and notice that immediately the image picks up the colors that we selected and it applies them to the shadows and highlights oppress okay Photoshop will then ask us if we want to make these colors the new defaults we do not be scholars are just for this image they'll be different for another image so I'm going to click on the no button and if I click on this curves adjustment layer I icon you'll see the before and the after now notice that the luminosity change and we don't want the luminosity to change so we're gonna change the blending mode to color color keeps the hue and saturation in disregards the luminosity so that's what we want we want color so before and after and if the effect is too strong you can always bring down the opacity and adjust it accordingly I think in this case the effect was a little strong I don't like the shadows here so I'm gonna reduce it down to about 70% before and after it's still a subtle effect but I think it does a lot to bring this composite together next I'll rename the layer just so that I know what it controls I'll call it color in some composites you may need to adjust the saturation of your image if you need to do so click on the new adjustment layer icon select hue and saturation clip it to the layer below by clicking on this icon and then adjust the saturation of the image in this case I don't really think we need to adjust the saturation too much maybe I need to decrease it just a tiny bit there's not that much saturation in the background image so maybe just a little less saturation before and after just a subtle adjustment so now we've matched the perspective of the image with the horizon line and we've also matched the luminosity and color of the image let me show you one other thing that I think you should look into when you're making these kinds of composites I'm gonna hold shift again and click on the layer mask thumbnail for the model to bring back the original image notice how blurry the background is the shallow depth-of-field on this a layer I want to match that on my composite so to do that I'm going to bring back the layer mask I'm going to click on the layer below remember I made a smart object so I can work on it non-destructively one of the easiest ways of blurring the background is by going into filter blur gallery tilt shift by the way I have a tutorial that talks all about blurring backgrounds I'll place a link to it down below in the description and there you'll find all the details and everything you want to know about blurring a background in this video I'm just going to give you a general explanation so with this filter you can see two solid lines in anything in between the solid line and the dashed line will be a gradual transition between InFocus and out-of-focus so between sharp and blurry so I'm going to click and drag this point down and just put the focus part way down here and I'm gonna click and drag on the solid line and we're gonna have a gradual transition from sharp too blurry pixels I think the background is a little too blurry so let me decrease that a little bit like so and I'll press ok so now I have a blurry background before and after what I'm gonna do now is select this layer 0 which is the background layer the name change when I converted it into a smart object next I'm going to place all these layers into a smart object so that I can manipulate them as a single layer so select the background hold shift and click on the hue and saturation adjustment layer to select all the layers then right click and select convert to smart object so I'm gonna go into filter Camera Raw filter and we're gonna pretend this is just a regular photo and I can adjust the shadows bring up the shadows so I can get more detail and maybe I want to enhance the effect and make it seem a little colder so I'll decrease the temperature maybe add a little bit of texture make it pop a little vibrance applies a smart saturation it protects skin tones and it also protects already saturated pixels then I'm going to go into the detail and add a little bit of sharpening and here's the trick for you if you hold alt on those option on the Mac and click on the masking slider you can see where Photoshop is applying the sharpening anything in white reveals right we're talking about a mask anything in black conceals so white reveals in black conceals if I drag this slider to the right while holding the Alt key on windows option on the Mac you'll see the image become darker so that means that the areas that are black will no longer have the sharpening effect applied to them so you can adjust it accordingly so that the effect is only applied on the areas that you intended to next go into the HSL tab from here you can control the hue saturation and luminance of individual colors by using these sliders for example I'm currently in the luminance tab and if I drag the oranges slider I will control the darkness of her sweater and I'll just make it a little bit brighter then I'll drag the blue slider to the left to make those darker add more saturation to the oranges maybe a little more to the blue so that they have a nice contrast with the orange top and I don't need to adjust the hue but if you need to adjust the hue you can do that here watch what happens when I adjust the blue slider see how the colors of the sky and the water change I don't want to do that but I just wanted to give you that option in case you wanted to apply it in your image next click on the FX icon and this is really important if you apply a blur I'm gonna zoom in notice that we blurred the background if we blur the background we're gonna lose all the grain or the film grain that was found in the image this makes it look more digital and makes it look fake so I think it's a good idea to bring in just a little bit of grain back into the image like so I'll fit the image to screen so that we can see it better and I think this is looking pretty good I'll press ok and you can see the result before and after and now that I know that my image is working I can't start fine-tuning for example I can fine-tune the crop maybe I can bring this down a little bit just to keep her more centered I can also double-click on the smart object which will open it up in a new tab and I can make adjustments for example I can adjust the mask but you original mask from the model so I can click on this mask and I can zoom in and really get into those details now next select the brush tool and go into the options bar and click on this down pointing arrow and I can increase the hardness to 100% and I can paint with white to reveal pixels see that zero I'm painting these areas in so obviously you would spend your time making those adjustments and if you wanted to remove pixels or hide pixels I should say you can click on this icon to swap the foreground and background color or simply press the X key to swap those and when black is your foreground color you can paint to hide pixels and obviously this is where you really want to spend your time fine-tuning your image another thing that I recommend that you do is to click on the layer mask then on select mask by the way I'm in the on white view and the opacity is set to 100% that way you completely ignore the background and you can adjust the edge of the mask you can smooth it add some contrast shift it in whatever you like and you can press ok when you're done next I'm going to click on the brush tool and paint with black over her head here just to remove those areas now one thing that I should tell you about this area will be really difficult to mask so there's two things you can do number one is you can try to move her so that the background sort of matches that area here and then make adjustments so that it's not noticeable that we're looking at another image and what you can do is create a layer above the model layer and simply select the brush tool and paint with the blue that you see here and by the way what I'm doing now is holding the Alt key on windows option on the Mac as I have the brush tool selected and that brings up the eyedropper and I can select the color as soon as I release the key the tool comes back and I can paint with that color so I'm just gonna paint with that color there and I'm gonna change the blending mode to color next I want the hair to come through but not the red areas if you notice the hair is pretty dark so I'm going to double click to the side of the layer in use the blend if to bring out the darkness so I'm gonna click here assess underlying layer and click and drag this to the right see how I'm starting to bring out the hair then I'll hold alt on windows option in the Mac and click on this point to split it in half and create a smooth transition like so and then I'll press ok so this is before and after if I double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen you can see what I did there looks much more realistic because that area is very difficult to mask and we wouldn't be able to get a realistic result another thing that you can do is create a new layer on top of everything else and then paint in the hair I have a tutorial right show you how to create brushes that allow you to easily paint in here I'm not gonna go through the steps in this video but if you want to learn how to create those brushes then look down below in the description I'm gonna place a link to that video so that you can learn how to do that so I'm gonna go into the libraries panel where I save my brush and I have it here hair brush when I click on it and it automatically enables it I'll then select the eyedropper tool and just select some of the color of her real hair with the brush tool active I'm just going to bring down the size of my brush to something more manageable maybe around 432 pixels in this case and I'll paint see that see how I just painted those strands of hair then I can press ctrl T command T on the Mac to transform right click and flip horizontal and I can just place them in these areas where I would want the hair and I can either place them here above the actual model layer and obviously I have to mask those right I have to hold alt on windows option on the Mac and click on the layer mask icon to hide the contents of that layer and with white using a regular circular soft brush I could paint in that hair back in and obviously you would have to spend some time getting them to match or another option is to delete the layer mask bring back the hair here and for example on on this side of her hair on the other side I'll flip it once again so that you could see so ctrl T command T or transform right click horizontal and I'll just place it right about here and I'll place the strength of hair below her so that her hair covers it and we just see these strands of hair barely popping out and I can adjust the luminosity of the strands of hair by going into image adjustment levels and then using the levels adjustments to either darken or brighten the hair accordingly so it's totally up to you how you use these strands of hair but you will have to paint them in and these difficult to select areas but for now I think that this is a good explanation of how to make the composite work when you do all this fine-tuning close this tab save it everything that you did will be automatically updated onto the smart object I'll double click on the hand tool to fit the image to screen and just look for any details that you may have missed if you missed anything just go back into the smart object and keep adjusting it and see you're happy with your results let me know down in the comments below which of these techniques was your favorite and what you learn from this tutorial also if this is your first time at the Photoshop training channel then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification button so that you don't miss any new Photoshop tutorials thank you so much for watching I'll talk to you again in the next Photoshop tutorial

Channel: Photoshop Training Channel

Views: 1,370,245

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Id: xQyceKmZTR8

Length: 30min 15sec (1815 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020