Intro To Textures and Blending in Photoshop

hello everyone this is Jerry alt back with another Photoshop tutorial for you what we're gonna do today is talk about how to take a rather mundane photo and turn it into something that looks closer to fine art and I'm not claiming to be an artist I certainly am NOT I do have a lot of experience using Photoshop but even I find new things after plenty of years of doing the normal editing and cropping and whatnot that can enhance my images so what I've pulled up here for you is an image I took in Kenya a couple of years ago you can see that this was shot with a telephoto lens because we've got a nice separation of the giraffe from the background but there's a lot of distraction in this shot this is not unlike a shot you might be able to get at your local zoo if and when we're able to go outdoors again that is but there's some distractions you've got this bush here to the left that the giraffe was probably munching on and it's not the best quality photo I shot this pretty wide open I was trying to shoot a little bit faster but had a wide aperture I mean I can see here in the detail by the giraffes eye that there's actually a fly coming in there there's a bird sitting on its back you may not have noticed that these are little details that don't really have a lot to do with this but as long as you've got a reasonably good photo pretty well in focus then what we're gonna be able to do is pull out even more details here so I'd like to this one because it's pretty simple I've done this technique on much more complex subjects and I would tell you that in the spectrum of retouching your images artistically you could just retouch them change saturation levels adjust your black and whites and cetera and say that's a good photo I'm done with it on the other end you've all seen complex composites elephants carrying a balloon in its trunk with the sky full of rainbows that kind of thing this isn't that far this is just taking a reasonably good photo and trying to add a little oomph to it so let's proceed I've pulled this image into Photoshop and the first thing I want to do with this even though I probably did some basic adjustments might have cropped it a little bit in Lightroom but essentially this is the shot out of camera I'm gonna go up to the filter menu with this layer active and I'm gonna go down to Camera Raw filter now this is a feature that I haven't taken as much advantage of in the past because I tend to go from Lightroom to photoshop and back some of you may be using Adobe's bridge and then going into the Camera Raw filter automatically when you double-click on an image and bridge to open it in Photoshop there is an intermediate step that takes you right here about however you get to the raw filter there's a few things that we can do with this now what I'm gonna do is end up blending out this busy background so that we can focus on the giraffe so what I want to do is bring up the clarity a little bit I just want to snap the details of that giraffe out a little bit because we're gonna blend it I want to pull up the white levels a little bit the skin of a giraffe is not actually white it's a lighter tan color and then the darker more orangey brown so we're gonna bring this up a little bit I'm gonna take the blacks down just a tiny bit trying to make sure like don't have any blown out areas that's a good thing about this photo one of the reasons I picked it you can't control the light when you're in Africa you find the animals where you find them it's not like in a zoo where they may stand in one spot they're moving around you're moving around so you're kind of fortuitous whenever you can get a halfway decent shot so I think that this gives us some good detail to start with we're going to come back here toward the end so I'm gonna click OK that's gonna save these changes back to our lair the next thing I want to do and I always do this when I'm editing so that if I make a mistake I can go back easier I'm gonna create a duplicate layer here and the best way to do this is to hit the command J or ctrl J on your keyboard a couple of other ways to make a duplicate that's the shortcut I think you should remember because it's pretty easy so now I've got a second layer it's not that we're gonna ignore the other one it's just there is a safety valve so we're gonna work on this layer in front of us and we're gonna select out the giraffe but the first thing is to find a background that we want to put in here so what I did is I already selected a texture file and just open it here to save some time but I've got this texture file here now how would you get to that file if you go your file open go down to place embedded go out and search for the file you want to this happens to be a folder that I got from Scott dwellers website he makes some really nice filters or not filters but nice textured background layers that are easy to use so I grab this one it's called brash check I have no idea why and I want to bring it in now this is square but that's okay when you've got the text your layer on top hit the command T to select that image and then adjust it to cover your subject if you just pull on the corners I'm working on a Mac it's going to adjust itself proportionally but it's a texture don't worry about that if it is a little stretched out it just adds to the abstraction that we're trying to achieve but if you hold the shift key down then you can grab edges and just pull them up so you see here we're actually stretching this image a little bit okay then double click or you can click up here on this check mark when you're done to say okay I want to accept that now the one thing I do when I get textures like this that kind of flow from darker or lighter and from highlights to shadow is I want to click this on and off and make sure that I've got that giraffe that I want to highlight someplace where there are highlights in this so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna select this again and I'm just going to stretch down on this a little bit more and adjust the size here on the screen a little bit more so that I get a little more of that hotspot area right there where the giraffes head is going to be alright so now we're going to turn this off for a moment we're gonna go back to our lair with the giraffe and we need to extract that image and leave all of this garbage behind it out of the picture if you're on a newer version of Photoshop I'd suggest that you try the shortcut see if the program will do a good selection it typically does it gets better with every version but I've gone up here to my quick select tool then once you click on that if you're on something else then you get different stuff at the top when you click on quick select up at the top of your window you'll see a select subject and a select and mask click select subject and then this will do typically a reasonable job of selecting out your subject and I can see that the edges are really well cut out it's miss some of this in the middle because it really wasn't sure whether that was part of it or not so I'm just gonna continue to use my quick select tool and just select out those spots inside so that I have a nice clean selection of everything here now there's a little bit of fur on the edge we could go into the Select and mask and we could take the extra step of trying to bring some of that back but because of the way we're gonna apply this texture it's not really gonna matter so let me make this a little bit smaller so you can see what I'm doing all right with this still selected I'm gonna go back and select my texture which is on top and you can see that the outline of the selection is still showing there make sure you're on the texture layer so click on it once and then we're going to mask this because I want to see the selection I don't want to see the rest of the background a quick way to do this is hold down your option key and click on mask reason for that is if I just clicked on the mask it with mask over the giraffe because that's what I selected and I would just have a spot there it wouldn't be anything showing alright so with this now selected you know it's pretty clean I might have gone back I might have done a little bit of the selected mask and got a little more of the detail here in the hair bring it in a little bit so you can see there's a tiny bit of the background still showing through here but it's fine again we're not gonna be working that precisely on this particular draft all right so with your cursor on the mask not on the image itself I want you to go to your brush selection i've remapped some of my keys but if you hit the B key it'll take you to this whole group of brushes the brush tool pencil tool and a mixer brush we're only going to use the standard brush tool then I want to go up to the brush properties on the top left click on that make sure your hardness is all the way down to zero and that you're using a soft round brush at this point I want to have a much bigger brush because I'm just gonna use the edges of that brush so I'm using my right bracket keys those are the ones to the right of the pion you're typically on your keyboard you have a left bracket in the right bracket left bracket makes it small right bracket makes it big I'm gonna pick a nice big brush and then I'm gonna go here and make sure that I'm using white because again the white is what I eliminated and replaced with the underlying texture so I want to be on white on the mask because I want to reveal some of that texture back in on the giraffe okay so let's see where we are I've got 20 percent let's go maybe 30 percent or so on that and now I'm just going to forgive that little spot in the middle that's because I'm recording and it's showing your spot but what I'm actually doing is using the edge of the brush just this little edge imagine this edge of my image is the giraffe itself I'm just bringing the edges in like this because I want to use the feathered edge it's a very soft brush it fades away here I'll kind of show you what this would be doing I'm gonna go on to the actual background layer for just a second I'm gonna select a black color and I'm just gonna click on it one time well it's not gonna let me do that it's gonna say I have to rasterize this so probably not the best example for you let me let me go back to a different layer just for a second here just want to show you what we're doing let's go to that underlying layer um and turn this off for a second if I had that brush set at black and I click go to a hundred percent just so you can see it and I click there I've got a black spot but you can see how it fades out to almost nothing at the edges if I had this brush completely hard and I clicked I'd get a round ball I don't want then I don't want those kind of hard edges showing up on our subject let me back up two steps here get rid of that go back where we were so the point is I want to go back and make this brush soft again come back to my image and I'm just using the edge at about 30 whoops I'm a hundred percent CI I'm back to show you something so I got to back up a couple of steps there we go I want to change this opacity from a hundred down to a smaller number shortcut here for opacity just hit the number two we'll give you 20 let's do it quickly two gives you 20% you can without clicking in it that's the problem it don't click in it just anywhere you're working on the image let's just push the 4 goes to 40% when I'm doing this again I'm trying to record this and do it at the same time okay in the opacity there we go working on opacity if I hit 3 it goes to 30% 5 it goes to 50% it just saves you moving your mouse back and forth but I want kind of a low flow so I want this to be about 30% and then I want to go and just work over these edges you see how my cursor is actually well off at the subject and I'm just gonna go around I'm clicking you can see with that little dot that I'm not so much running my brush down but I'm just clicking and what I'm trying to do is soften the edges one of the keys to blending any subject into a background is to eliminate that real sharp edge that makes it look like it was cut and paste all right so you see we've kind of overdone it here we've really kind of blended this giraffe in so you don't see a lot of the details so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna make the brush smaller remember the bracket keys is bigger and smaller I'm gonna hit the X key that's gonna switch my colors from the white to the black X we'll just switch it back and forth black is going to reveal parts of that I'm sorry hide parts of that mask that I was just painting in and now I'm gonna come back inside cuz I really only want that edges to be affected so now I'm getting some of that detail back I'm still the 30% flow you could be a 25 or 30 whatever your taste is there's no right or wrong way to do this it's just a question what you want I will tell you that I think it's important to get the eyes back as much as possible and it's a little more difficult on an animal like this typically if i zoom in on this because the eyes are offset to the side you see how you know I'm picking up some of this background getting rid of that I don't want that so I'm gonna make my brush smaller I change my color back to white and I'm gonna paint back in what I was losing here so you don't worry about the lashes it's the eyes I want to be sharp that'll get us pretty good and then do same thing over here and just dab at it all right so now I'm gonna go back to black come in on just the eyeballs and just kind of bring those I can increase that I just hit the number 5 took my opacity to 50% just click in on the eyes with an animal if I can get their eyes right and then I want to make sure I got their nose especially if you shoot something like a deer or an elk or a bull and they've got you know that kind of leather and looking nose you want some detail back in that we do want to preserve some of the detail here in the face I'm going to do that and then I'm just gonna do the inside of the ears leave the little fringing at the side but bring back a little bit of that detail on the inside kind of makes it a little more realistic you know if you want to go whole hog and keep dabbing with the white on this eventually what's gonna happen is you're gonna get back to just the background you're gonna erase it in effect the entire animal that you're trying to get so I'm gonna make this even smaller like white I'm coming right around that I want to avoid anything that looks like it was patched together then we're gonna run around it you can see here that on the hair there's a little bit of that white or the light that was coming through it in the original photo I'm just gonna touch those spots very lightly and that's gonna blend them so you almost are losing the hair into the background nothing wrong with that now I mentioned the little bird here so let's see if the X key and come back to black let's bring a little bit of that bird back into the picture just fix the tiny bit of white so you have to take your time doing this you know once you've practiced it a few times I mean I'm able to kick out some of these images in 10 or 15 minutes this is not ours but as you notice I haven't done anything artistic at this point but what we've managed to do is give a nice soft edge a nice transition from the animal into the background all right I'm gonna pull out so we can take a look at that that's not really bad at all if you don't like that color if you want to adjust the color you can add a an adjustment layer go down to the bottom click the what looks like a Halfmoon go to the hue and saturation adjustment layer but this is important I got a bunch of layers down here I want to click this bottom left button in that box so that it clips that layer to the one underneath it and because of the masking what it's really going to do is just affect your background and not affect the zebra so as you see the zebra this is totally weird but it shows you the point you can see where the little bit of blue is bleeding into the edges of the neck and around the head and that's because we've just blended that background into the foreground so if you slide the hue and saturation you know you can go to extremes but you know I was trying to get something natural I don't want it to be actly what the ammo was because I wanted to stand out a little bit more so that's not bad somewhere in there I can decrease this in saturation or bring it up really crazy depends on your mood I'm gonna leave it a little bit above half because I want that background to pop a tiny gun then you can change the brightness of the background and again typically wherever it starts is gonna work unless you've got really dark spots in it okay so we're gonna accept that and say that that's pretty good now what I want to do is take all of my visible layers and I had one at the bottom which was the finished one I did before I might turn that off just so I don't have to mess with it there's a shortcut and I don't remember all the keys on the PC offhand but it's command option shift and the letter e on the Mac so it's probably control option shift on a PC and what that does is it takes all of those underlying layers you just had and consolidates them and creates a basically a stamp now I have a single I can turn everything else off and I've still got that image what I've basically done is created a flattened image on top of the layers but I didn't get rid of the layers now you can certainly keep flattening as you go but you know if you get down to the last touch of this and go oh I want to fix around the eye and you flattened everything you're not gonna be able to do that so at this point I'm gonna take that layer that we just created and there's a command here now which I can't get to because I've already flattened it that does the same thing you can find it in the in the menu but that shortcut will do it for you just have to hold your fingers in the right position command option shift e on the Mac again but what we're going to do is go back in as a final step or next to final depending on what you want to do and I go back to the Camera Raw filter now what I'm gonna do depending on what I want to do with this image is I can increase the clarity a lot more it's going to have the effect of you know adding to the textures that are behind it it's also as you can see making that giraffe pop a little more on the background I can bring a little bit of texture from here into it if I if I pull it all the way to the left it gets kind of watercolor II and soft but I want to see the fur on the animal so I might increase that a little bit and then here's the secret you don't know where this is unless you've worked with the Camera Raw filter and you've probably like me skipped it forever and ever and if you come up at the top of these sliders under profile see if you click on each say Oh color monochrome oh whatever there's a little box here to the right and see it right here if you click on that here's where the magic comes from you've got profiles that Adobe builds for you based on your image there's an artistic a black and white a modern and then a vintage look and within each of these you've got selections so what it's done is it goes in here let me make this smaller so you can see the whole thing there we go you know if we go to the first one it's promoting some of the magentas here's promoting some of the orange channel let me get something that's pretty cool I kind of like that go down the bottom that's more yellows and you've lost some of the Reds that are in there and the same thing here you just get different looks I like this one I think that looks pretty good but we're not done we've got other choices go down to the modern sometimes I find things in here and the same kind of thing a little more sepia tone maybe there's one that's fairly similar to the one I just picked that's a more matted look anyway play with it take a look at them see what you like I don't like that one I think I'm gonna go back and you know I'm still selected on their artistic five you do have and I've used this for zebra for elephants and like you have a monochrome panel as well there's some interesting things done with the monochrome you know if all you do in Lightroom is click the black and white button you lose out on a whole lot of the nuance that you can get from shifting your gray points but you know I hate to waste a nice colorful animal with black and white so I'm not going to use that I'm gonna go here with the artistic number 5 I kind of like that up at the top I'm going to close this group and then what I can do is come over to the individual colors in the saturation you know maybe you don't want it to be that bright you can pull down the orange channel and see what I'm doing here making it more muted that's basically what those artistic profiles were doing is just adjusting some of these so I might bring the reds down a little bit maybe the yellows down a little bit more I kind of like the blaze orange behind them it adds something for me to the image and then these blues and purples there are no blues in this channel so you know you can take a back and forth it's not going to do anything but you can see that we're in a yellow and an orange palette here so we can play with the red orange and yellow sliders to kind of you know just customize this and get it where you want it so for our purposes and for this demonstration that's fine and then I'll click OK and there we go I've got an image that we can use it pops it's got all the photographic detail but it also still looks a little bit like you've painted it so imagine taking a portrait of somebody's dog and being able to do this to it and really make it look special so it wasn't just shot in the yard on the grass it wasn't shot in your studio on a gray background you can really help yourself out by adding to these layers so that's what I've got for you today I might crop that down a little bit but I can crop it when I go back so if I close this it's gonna take me back to Lightroom and then I can crop that down a little bit I can make an 8 by 10 format I could do square or if you want you can just do it right here and grab your crop tool and play with it to your heart's content get the image you want double-click on it and there we go and now I've got an image ready to go save that out send it to your printer if you have any questions feel free to add them at the bottom of this video and I'll get notified no answering back as best I can if you enjoy this content please consider subscribing to my channel that way you'll be notified of future tutorials I'm gonna throw a couple of things at you real quick and then let you go the photo I did myself I told you this particular texture came from Scott Detweiler de twe il er Scott's got his own YouTube channel and he does a lot of more in-depth he's an artist unlike me some more in-depth stuff you might wanna check out his channel and this technique I got from watching a tutorial from Matt Klaus Loski if you've ever used on one or if you were in Adobe Lightroom user for a number of years Matt used to work for Scott Kelly's organization then he went to on one software he's got his own website in his own channel that's Matt que ma t TK dot-com you might want to check him out this particular tutorial that led me into this path of discovery was one that he was offering and probably still is at the time I'm making this video for 50% off for a period of time just because you know photographers aren't really busy because nobody can go any place certainly check it out he's got a free intro tutorial I love his style of teaching he's very laid-back and easy he also creates a lot of lutes for light room for lighting scenarios and has a lot of light room as well as Photoshop tutorials so with that I'm going to say goodbye thank you very much for watching

Channel: ALT Imagery Photo Studio

Views: 1,478

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Id: iCKGoHAsVJw

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020