Learn Creative Compositing in Adobe Photoshop

hey there my name's Daniel white some people online know me as danske I'm a designer and instructor within Barto Tut's Plus and in this course we're going to learn all about creatively compositing images in Adobe Photoshop so what is compositing or compositing is the process whereby you combine one image with another or it can be more than one image but essentially it's all about combining multiple images together into a single image and this is incredibly fun because it allows you to imagine like a scene something completely out of this world and then you can bring that to life or in Photoshop and in this course you're going to learn a number of different tricks and tips that is not only going to make your process of compositing images easier but it's also going to make the end result look a lot more effective so in this course we're going to be taking an image of a robot and compositing that with another image of an industrial setting and before we kick off of course if you'd like to download a ton of creative assets that you can use to create your own unique composites and definitely check out and vato elements literally just one subscription gets you access to like over a million assets across a wide variety of categories so if you'd like to follow along with this course and links to download the robot the industrial image and any brushes that we use to move art elements will be provided with the course and the SS that we're using in this course are literally a handful of over like a million assets that are included as part of a subscription okay so with all that said I think it's time to get started okie dokie so we're now in Photoshop I have a new document I've created a canvas it is 1920 by 1080 pixels this is what we're going to be working with but first of all oh we need some images so we're going to jump over to invite or elements remember that the links to download the images that you'll see are provided with the course so we have the industrial setting here so we can sign in download there we go we'll get that one and if I switch over to the other tab you can see we have a robot here now this is listed under the 3d category and the great thing about these to be the assets is you can spin the camera around and download what you want at a specific angle it's incredibly useful if you're looking to like take an image of a row like in this example and match it with your scene so I can click here view 3d render elements does it sting and now I can click and drag and rotate this around so I'm going for something like all looks that looks pretty cool pretty menacing but they're kind of go with something like this now you could download it as a PNG essentially it will have transparency and it will include the shadows but if you want a layered PSD where you can turn the shadows on/off and a few other things then I would definitely recommend checking PSD and then you can download that at this specific angle so I've already gone ahead and downloaded these images let's just switch over here so we've got the industrial image and the robot and if they're packaged inside a zip folder just double-click the zip folder if you're on Mac it will extract the files if you're on PC just drag the files out of the zip folder onto your desktop and once you've got them we're ready to open these in Photoshop so we could right-click and go open with or we could just drag these down here go it on a PC go to file and open and you can do that on a Mac as well so there's multiple ways to get these images in so you can see we have our robot at our desired angle we have this subject flat layer we can turn that off and on and the beauty of this is we also have shadows so I'm going to keep the shadows because they could be pretty useful so I'm going to hold shift and select both of these layers right click go to duplicate layers and I'm going to select the document as my PSD click OK and I can see that they are now in here so next we need the background we have our industrial setting so let's just go to select and all and then go edit and copy because this is a JPEG a flat image that will just copy everything that's selected with the marching ants jump over here we'll click on our background layer go to edit and paste if you do paste this above the subject layer like this by mistake it definitely happens just drag that underneath now I can actually get rid of the background there by pressing delete or backspace on the keyboard we don't need that anymore and I'm gonna call this letter seen and I'm just going to name this robot so I'm just double-clicking on the text to rename we've got shadows as well okay so we've got our robot we've got some shadows we've got the scene now we need to kind of like group everything together because as we create these composites they can get pretty complicated so just naming your layers organizing your folders from the beginning is good practice so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold shift select both of these layers right click and I'm going to select group from layers and we can give this group a name so I'll call this robot and then I've got the scene down here now at the moment the scene is a JPEG so it's not a smart object and then what we want to do is we want to convert most of what we bring into Photoshop into a smart object the reason we do this is because smart objects enable us to add things like effects and filters as smart filters we get a lot more flexibility we can edit effects that we apply later on in the course and we can delete them as well if you don't use smart objects then any effects and things you apply they're permanent the only way to get rid of them is to go edit undo undo undo and we don't want to do that so we're gonna work a little bit smarter so we can right click this scene as soon as we've pasted it in and go convert to smart object now what this does is kind of create a snapshot of this image that this size so if I just zoom out you can see it's quite a large image we're going to edit and free transform and because it's a smart object it remembers all the data of this image at its native size so if I scale it down back up back down back up it's not gonna lose any quality whereas if it's a JPEG you scale it down small and you bring it back up again and it's not a smart object guess what we kind of get pixelation so this is a great way to avoid that so I'm just scaling this down with the free transform option and I can double click or press return to set that there we go my seam looks err a pretty good size now I think and we have our robot so now I'm just going to create a new folder from the bottom of the layers panel I'm gonna call this Sene no spell that correctly seen there we go I'm going to drag my seen image into the scene and I'm going to create one more folder now and I'm gonna call this effects this is what we're going to apply some dramatic lighting effects in everything towards the end and we'll pop that up there so that's how I like to structure my composites to have a scene I have the subject or any subjects sometimes I have like an object's layer as well other things that might be there that don't really fit into any category and then I've got the effects right at the top okay so we're nearly done setting this up the only other thing I'm going to do now is select the robot and the shadows and do the same thing again that we did to the background good to edit free transform we'll just zoom out a little bit and I'm gonna hold shift and scale this down and I'm just gonna try and position this roughly where I would like it to be so something like this and you can see those shadows underneath look pretty cool as well good turn those off and on so they help everything just seemed a little bit more believable but there we go so that's the end of the first lesson in the next lesson we're going to take a look at adjusting levels lighting and color balance and yeah so I'll see you in the next lesson okie dokie so we're now in Photoshop I have a new document I've created a canvas it is 1920 by 1080 pixels this is what we're going to be working with but first of all well we need some images so we're going to jump over to invite our elements remember that the links to download the images that you'll see are provided with the course so we have the industrial setting here so we can sign in download there we go we'll get that one and if I switch over to the other tab you can see we have a robot here now this is listed under the 3d category and the great thing about these two easy assets is you can spin the camera around and download what you want at a specific angle it's incredibly useful if you're looking to like take an image of a robot like in this example and match it with your scene so I can click here view 3d render element's does it sting and now I can click and drag and rotate this around so I'm going for something like Oh Alex that looks pretty cool pretty menacing but we kind of go with something like this now you could download it as a PNG essentially it will have transparency and it will include the shadows but if you want a layered PSD where you can turn the shadows on often a few other things then I would definitely recommend checking PSD and then you can download that at this specific angle so I've already gone ahead and downloaded these images let's just switch over here so we've got the industrial image and the robot and if they're packaged inside a zip folder just double-click the zip folder if you're on Mac it will extract the files if you're on PC just drag the files out of the zip folder onto your desktop and once you've got them we're ready to open these in Photoshop so we could right-click and go open with or we could just drag these down here or if you're on a PC go to file and open and you can do that on a Mac as well so there's multiple ways to get these images in so you can see we have our robot at our desired angle we have this subject flat layer we can turn that off and on and the beauty of this is we also have shadows so I'm gonna keep the shadows because they could be pretty useful so I'm going to hold shift and select both of these layers right click go to duplicate layers and I'm going to select the document as my PSD click OK and I can see that they are now in here so next we need the background we have our industrial setting so let's just go to select and all and then go edit and copy because this is a JPEG a flat image it will just copy everything that's selected with the marching ants jump over here we'll click on our background layer go to edit and paste if you do paste this above the subject layer like this by mistake it definitely happens just drag that underneath now I can actually get rid of the background layer by pressing delete or backspace on the keyboard we don't need that anymore and I'm gonna call this layer scene and I'm just going to name this robot so I'm just double-clicking on the text to rename we've got shadows as well okay so we've got our robot we've got some shadows we've got the scene now we need to kind of like group everything together because as we create these composites they can get pretty complicated so just naming your layers organizing your folders from the beginning is good practice so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold shift select both of these layers right click and I'm going to select group from layers and we can give this group a name so I'll call this robot and then I've got the scene down here now at the moment the scene is a JPEG so it's not a smart object and then what we want to do is we want to convert most of what we bring into Photoshop into a smart object the reason we do this is because smart objects enable us to add things like effects and filters as smart filters we get a lot more flexibility we can edit effects that we apply later on in the course and we can delete them as well if you don't use smart objects then any effects and things you apply they're permanent the only way to get rid of them is to go edit undo undo undo and we don't want to do that so we're gonna work a little bit smarter so we can right-click this scene as soon as we've pasted it in and go convert to smart object now what this does is kind of create a snapshot of this image that this size so if I just zoom out you can see it's quite a large image we're going to edit and free transform and because it's a smart object it remembers all the data of this image at its native size so if I scale it down back up back down back up it's not gonna lose any quality whereas if it's a JPEG you scale it down small and you bring it back up again and it's not a smart object guess what we're kind of get pixelation so this is a great way to avoid that so I'm just scaling this down with the free transform option and I can double click or press return to set that there we go my seam looks er a pretty good size now I think and we have our robot so now I'm just gonna create a new folder from the bottom of the layers panel I'm gonna call this seam nope let's spell that correctly seen there we go and I'm gonna drag my scene image into the scene and I'm going to create one more folder now and I'm going to call this effects this is ever going to apply some dramatic lighting effects in everything towards the end and we'll pop that up there so that's how I like to structure my composites I have the scene I have the subject or any subjects sometimes I have like an object's layer as well other things that might be there that don't really fit into any category and then I've got the effects right at the top okay so we're nearly done setting this up the only other thing I'm going to do now is select the robot and the shadows and do the same thing again that we did to the background go to edit free transform we'll just zoom out a little bit and I've got a whole shift and scale this down and I'm just gonna try and position this roughly where I would like it to be so something like this and you can see those shadows underneath look pretty cool as well I could turn those off and on so they help everything just seemed a little bit more believable but there we go so that's the end of the first lesson in the next lesson we're going to take a look at adjusting levels lighting and color balance and yeah so I'll see you in the next lesson hey there welcome back to the course so in this lesson we're going to take a look at levels lighting and color balance so we'll jump back into Photoshop now and we'll carry on with our composite okay so this is where we left off we've actually still got these images open up here so we can just close these down now we don't need those anymore I'm just gonna go to file and save save often just in case something happens it's always good to save and I'm just gonna take my robot on my shadow and maybe move him up a little bit and just scale him up a tiny bit more so he kind of sits in the middle of the scene so something like this there we go okay so that's cool next what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on my robot layer go to the bottom of the layers panel and click the adjustment icon now we've got a lot of different adjustment layers that we can add here these are incredibly important in blending the image of our robot with our scene so first of all I'm going to go to hue and saturation and what this allows me to do is just bring the saturation down a bit now you can see at the moment is affecting the entire image that's no good we want this to only affect the robot so if we click this icon down here what this does is you can see it adds an arrow to the layer below and underlines that layer so this adjustment layer is only affecting the layer below it which is our robot so we can adjust the color of the robot without affecting the background so I could bring this down to like minus 40 minus 39 I can click the I here turn this off and on and you can see it just brings a little bit of that blue from the armor out I could even bring this down touch more will go for minus 51 there we go next what I'm going to do isn't going to add another adjustment layer this one is going to be levels so you can see here I can adjust the shadows the mid-tones and highlights and I can just drag this around again we're affecting the entire image so we just go down to the bottom of this panel and click on the clipping mask icon now we're just adjusting the robot alone so I'm gonna bring this down he's a little bit a little bit bright and vibrant for this scene so I'm just gonna bring the mid-tones here and then I'm just gonna grab the whites and just bring those down a little bit as well not too far unless you're going for like black armor or something really cool like that so there maybe just a little bit here now if I turn this off and on you can see the difference there we've made that a lot darker now when you're creating composites like this it's important to understand where the lighting is coming from because where the light is coming from an image is going to affect your subject within your scene so what we need to do now is we need to add another levels adjustment layer so we can bring back some of the lights but you can see coming in from the windows so we've got our levels one here we could even name this let's call it levels darken I'm going to add another one here so another levels adjustment layer now another way of making this a clipping mask is right-clicking and selecting create clipping mask and what I'm going to do is bring the highlights up on this one and you can adjust the midpoint as well if you want to now this is applied on top of our darken one so we've kind of undone what we've what we started with but if we actually select the mask for this one and press command or ctrl I on the keyboard what it will do is it will completely hide everything on that adjustment there so remember with using masks black hides white reveals so I'm just going to call this levels highlights just so I don't get confused in fact it probably makes more sense to call this shadows instead of darken so if I select the highlights one I'm going to grab my brush tool over here just pick one or photoshop's soft round pressure opacity brushes face boys a mouthful to say that and make sure that white over here is my foreground color and then what I can do is where I brush it will bring back through that levels layer now I don't want to do this all over I'm going to zoom in just undo what I did there make sure the mask is selected zoom in and with a smaller brush just brush around areas so we have a light source up here so this does take a lot of practice the more you understand about lighting the easier this is gonna be so I'm just brushing this along here get a little bit of glow around the edge there maybe the back of the foot in the inside leg tiny bit on the chest there and you can spend a lot longer doing this make it turn that off and on and you can see it's very subtle but compositing is all about lots of subtle things that all add up to a much more effective and result it's all about the big picture so what I can do now I've done those highlights is I can actually double click on the thumbnail for my shadows and I can make that darker but you can see how those highlights become even more accentuated so that's the great thing with adjustment layers as you can do like a lot of backwards and forwards switch between these I could bring the highlights up even more and then what I can do is I can actually turn off all of these adjustment layers by clicking the I in the layers panel you can see we've come quite a long way that's where we started and we've done this so yeah we're doing alright we're doing right so far the only problem is we've actually desaturated to blue in the eyes now in a later lesson I'm actually going to add a glow to these so I'm just going to click on that hue and saturation adjustment layer now I want to use black on this because the layer is already white so you can press X on the keyboard that's a shortcut key to swap your foreground and background color so if you're masking and you're using black and white you can just switch between them and I bring the brush down in size and I'm just gonna brush gently over this now you can see that I'm doing this with a graphics tablet you don't have to do it but it does make it a lot easier because you could control things like pen pressure so I'm just gently brushing over this bringing back some of that color that was lost and I could even do that on the shadows there as well you can see there I darkened a lot of it so I'm just gonna bring that back in because as I said we'll be adding a glow to that in a later video ok so we're nearly done we've just got one more adjustment there that we're going to add so we'll click at the top we want this right at the top and we'll click the adjustment icon go to color balance what we can do here is we can adjust the cyan magenta yellow red green and blue all within the shadows mid-tones and highlights so I could make the shadows in my image more blue I can make the highlights more yellow this is a very very powerful adjustment layer and as I say is another one that just makes combining one image too with a different image especially when they've been shot under different lighting conditions it makes that much much more seamless so I'm going to go with the shadows maybe bring me in a little bit of red again it's adjusting the whole image so I need to add that clipping mask with the mid-tones just a little bit red so kind of this this brick this orange reddish rusted metal but kind of brings some of that onto the subject highlights there we go so this is all I'm making very subtle changes here I don't want to do anything like that I could do you could change the entire color of the robot if you wanted but I am just doing something really subtle so if I turn this off and on you can see subtle but it really does make a difference okay so there we go that wraps up the second lesson in the next lesson we're going to look at adding some distressed texture to our robot okay so you're back for more so in this lesson we're gonna look at taking our robot adding some distressed texture there's some awesome brushes from avato elements so we'll jump into that now and get started okey-dokey so this is where we left off of course we're gonna start by going to file and save and what we're going to do is add some distressed texture to our robot you can see he is very very clean pristine you might say and our background will is a little bit rusted and disheveled so we need to kind of match our robot with our scene and just rust him up a bit with a bit of texture now there's lots of different ways you can apply texture what I'm going to do is with a brush so if we click on our robot layer we can click on the new layer icon from the bottom of the layers panel and it creates a new layer now because we created this in between some existing adjustment layers and our robot there it automatically just applies that as a clipping mask and I'm going to double click there and call this texture so what I can do is I can pick a color for this texture I'm going to stick with black and use the brush tool now if you've never installed any brushes in Photoshop before you can click on this drop down here to get the brush panel up and then go up to the COG go down to import brushes and then just navigate to a dot ABR file so the brushes I'm going to use in this course what I'll do is I'll include those in the course notes but yet any ABR file you just double click that or go and import it like this and it will bring it into your brushes panel so you can see in inviter elements I've got quite a few here we're not going to be using all of them in this course but we've got a few of my favorites so distressed texture brushes brushes we have plenty to choose from I'm just going to click on one and you can see if I just click it adds a bunch of texture in fact I'll just make a new layer really quickly so you can see this brush in all its glory so I can brush him text you're like so and then I could pick maybe a different one and it adds a slightly different texture and you can resize these brushes like you can with anything all this one's quite nice okay so we'll go with that so let's go back to our texture layer I'm gonna bring the brush size down you can see it looks something like this and I'm just gonna click in a few places and just add some texture you can see literally how easy that was you can spend ages doing this you could you could what we could we could really mess up our robot here but he's not he's not that damaged she's not that worn down so I'm gonna undo that a little bit so there we go we've got some texture we can turn that off and back on now we could leave that as like completely black but to blend this even more with our with our robots our subject what we can do is change the blending mode from normal to something else now overlaying soft light are pretty good so if I go to soft light and just zoom in you can see here we've gone from just solid black to then blending that with our robot and we can even bring the opacity down up here from the top of the layers panel if we wanted to make it a bit more subtle so I could go for like for 80% so it depends entirely on what you're going for okay so that wraps up that lesson a quick look at brushes and how you can use some of them to add texture some grittiness to an object in your scene and yeah so I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson hello welcome back to the course in this lesson we're gonna take a look at adding some shadows and some glow effects to our robot in our composite so let's jump back into it right here so this door we left off we have our robots and our scene now we're going to accentuate the eyes with some glow effects and work on the shadows around the hands and the feet so first of all let's do the shadows so we'll click on our shadows layer remember these are existing shadows that we brought in we could actually duplicate that layer by pressing command or control J and it makes those a bit more pronounced so that's a pretty quick win over here though we don't really have a shadow so let's add a new layer from the bottom of the layers panel and I'm going to use one of photoshop's soft round pressure opacity brushes now you can adjust the hardest depending on how hard you like the edge of your shadow to be you could go for a hundred percent which would look quite terrible so if I just bring this brush down in size memory you can adjust the size of your brush using the left and right square brackets on the keyboard that is a bit too hard so I'm gonna just go for a hardness of about thirty percent and you can see it softens the edge considerably so what I'm gonna do is actually change from a round brush I just bring this down over here I can just squash this down and that's just the size of that and it gives me a much more shadow kind of esque brush so all of these shadows here are kind of coming in from the right to the left and now with my brush I can actually and this does take a little practice I can just brush in some shadows of my own and you can spend a lot more time doing this and then you can use the eraser tool as well if you want to just finesse those shadows so that's a really really quick way you can add some shadows and I'll just call this layer custom shadows just so I didn't get mixed up I could even add a little bit more something really soft just around here something like that and then I could bring the opacity down if I wanted to to like 90 percent just so it's not total blackness but there we go that's a pretty quick job and it looks pretty effective so next we're going to go and add a glow to the eyes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go above all of my other layers because I don't want those color balance and levels and all that affecting what I'm about to do so I'm putting this right at the top so I'll create a new adjustment layer and we'll go with solid color you can do this with a brush but I'm doing this with color because well I'll show you why in a moment so I'm gonna go with blue I can't actually hide this and just sample the same color blue here let me bring this up just so it's a bit more punchy and then remember click on the layer mask and go command or control eye and it will hide that completely and then I can use white and well I'm going to make sure my brush is perfectly round again so just click on another brush and go back to your soft round pressure opacity brush I've got my hardness is zero now and I'm just going to click make the brush ever so slightly bigger than what you're trying to add the glow to I'm just gonna click click click click bit smaller over here click click click click and then what I can actually do as well is I could change the blending mode to something else you get that live preview here and if I go for a hard light for example and just maybe bring your pasty down just a tiny bit you can see there we very quickly and easily added a glow to our robots eyes and there we go so some shadow effects and some glow effects that was it for this lesson and I'll see you in the next one ok so we're back for another lesson in this lesson we're going to work on our scene a little bit more we've done a lot of work on the robot but we're going to build out our scene with a few more effects for that just to bring the two elements of our composite together so we'll jump back into it now and get started okie-dokie so this is where we left off we've got our robot we've done quite a lot of work actually and now we're going to do some work on our scene so let's collapse our robot folder expand the scene folder now first of all I'm going to add a hue and saturation adjustment layer we'll just bring this down a little bit like so you can just see we're just desaturating a little bit of color from the scene some of that orange and come up over here this sort of teal turquoise vibrancy we're just removing some of that next what I'm going to do is add another adjustment layer the levels we need to darken are see just to my try and make it a bit more moody so it matches some of the shadows and the darker areas on the robot so I'm going to bring this down and bring the whites down we don't have to make it too dark but you can fine-tune these and you can adjust them at any time so there we go we've darkened our scene now we're also going to add another adjustment there we've not done this one yet this is called color lookup essentially this enables you to apply a LUT to your image LUT stands for lookup table think of it like a color profile so we can click on this lots to do here I would play around with all of these you can literally you can turn night in today with some of these they're fantastic but we're gonna go with futuristic bleak I do like this one so there we go is pretty bleak a bit too bleak so I'm going to just drop a capacity down make it slightly less bleak will go with I'll go in about 60% something like that but then what I can do is I can actually go back to my robot go back to that color balance adjustment layer and just maybe adjust this a bit more so it's not so red so I'm just kind of trying to balance all of these different judgement layers so there's much more harmony between my subject and scene but I'm putting the subject in [Music] today we go we've added a few adjustment layers to our seam it could actually click on these all of them selected right click and go create clipping mask but because they're at the bottom and there's nothing below our scene it doesn't really matter but what we're gonna do now is because we have a smart object for our scene we can apply a blur effect so if we didn't have this as a smart object that we did at the beginning applying this blur effect would be permanent but because it's a smart object we can actually go up to filter down to blur gallery and select a variety of different blurs so we would tilt shift these are quite demanding on the computer as well so I would recommend disabling preview unless you've got like a beast of a computer because every time you make a change it will update a changing it and can take a little while so I'm going to bring this down now what this allows me to do is click like a starting point and then have a blur graduate across a certain distance so I could have part of this image in focus and as it goes towards the distance I could then blur it out so it's really useful for adding some blur effects and depth of field to a composite so I'm going to move this circle down here this starting point I want all of this to be in focus because this is a round on my subject is now you can add multiple points by clicking anywhere else and have multiple blurs that kind of go into the distance but it can get incredibly complicated you can't spend a lot longer with this if you want to kind of have a certain type of blur effect I'm going to do something pretty simple and I'll channel I'll tell on preview so you can see what's happening it might just take a minute to load so you can see there we have focus here and then it just gradually blurs out towards the distance so something like this now I could add another point at the top so I have the scaffolding up here a bit more in focus and as I say you can add multiple points so you can really try and control that depth of field a bit more we could add another one and I could rotate it to the side and then maybe add another one over here my computer's handling this very well and then just bring that in like so so you can see I've added multiple blur points you can spend a lot longer doing this I'm going to try and do this really quickly just to kind of show you the technique so there we go just bring those out to the edge so as we move further away from the subject we're getting more blurry now if you want to delete one just select it and press Delete or backspace okay that'll do for now you can of course crank up the blur if you want something incredibly dramatic that's that highlights there how quick a job I've done but if I bring this down to like seven pixels it's very very subtle so if I turn preview off and back on you can see it just has subtle bit of blur and then I can go maybe fine-tune this a bit more I could even get rid of this top one so something like this click OK and you can see it's listed as an effect under here as well and what I can actually do is double click this and go back and make changes or I can just drag this effect to the trash down here let go and it will delete it all together so we get that flexibility with smart objects now what I'm also going to do is just go filter blur Gaussian blur and just add a little bit of blur to the entire scene just because you know I don't want everything to be too crisp and sharps or something really subtle like even maybe just one pixel it depends on your document size you can just see switching from before we had the blur to after the blur it just puts a bit more focus on the subject and makes the whole thing look a bit more dramatic and it's the kind of effect you would actually get if this was a photo you would get some degree of depth of field okay so let's just collapse this down now so we have our robot we've done quite a lot of work as you can see we've done a bit of work on our scene we have nothing in our effects folder and that's what we're gonna do in the next and final video we're gonna add some effects to really finish off our scene and just make the whole thing a bit more dramatic so there we go I'll see you in the next lesson hello welcome back to the final lesson so we're going to add the finishing touches some scene effects to our composite in Photoshop so without further ado let's just grab this pen and let's jump back into it okie dokie so we're just gonna save the document now we have our robot lots of stuff I've seen lots of stuff we can go back and fine-tune that which we might do in a moment but we have an empty effects folder so let's add some effects so first of all I'm going to click new layer just drag this into the effects folder we'll expand that down and I'm going to call these spotlights so again with the brush tool selected we'll go to the brush panel and we're going to use some more of inviter elements brushes so we have fog Photoshop stamp brushes now I love these you can naturally apply fog to a scene in one second it's black let's just press X on the keyboard or just pick white or whatever color fog you'd like from the color picker boom there we go fog literally that easy end of lesson just joking so adjust the size now you're gonna make sure that your brush covers your scene but you can add fog literally this quickly there's lots of different ones here so I'm just kind of trying a few different ones seeing how they work and then just undoing if it's not quite right I might go for this one I could spend I could spend hours playing with these brushes so you can see I can really kind of choose the position this one's kind of coming more from the lower half of the scene and I've just realized I've named this spot lights so we're actually doing fog so there we go we'll do the fog first we'll do the spot lights in a moment so if I go to normal and I can adjust the blending mode I think I'm probably going to keep keep this as is but just drop the opacity a little bit like so so we're just adding a little bit of fog a bit of mysterious mist to the scene so we can turn this off and back on you can see that so that's incredibly dramatic input because this effects folders right at the top it's going to affect our subject like a robot and our scene everything below it so we've got some fog now we're going to create another new layer this is the actual spotlight layer so we'll call this spotlights I probably don't we spotlights this time so we've got some more brushes there we go fog spotlights lots of different ones here I'm just click I'll bring it down you can see the shape so you could try out loads of different brushes I'm just going to keep this really simple and use number one now what I'm going to do is just bring this down left click and then I can go to edit and free transform and just pull this into position I can stretch this out of shape this is really subtle so I'm just adding some light coming over from the right hand side and again with as with anything I could change the blending mode we could go for hard light for example and I could bring this just down a little bit so it's not so overpowering in fact I'm going to call this spot light one because I'm actually going to add another one over here on the left one that's a little bit more subtle and you can spend as much time as you like you could even use a different brush and just brush in some light to it like a soft feather brush you don't have to use spotlights but let's just bring that down a little bit more so I'll go with 39% and I'll call this spot light too so if I turn everything off you can see we've gone from a very dark very moody hitch to having a bit of fog could tone that down a bit actually that's incredibly for me but bringing a spotlight will bring in another light source so you could spend much more time fine-tuning this if you wanted to but there we go you can see how quick and easy it is just use brushes whether it's fog spotlights particles whatever it is you can use those brushes to really kind of like add something to your scene ok so we're nearly at the end now I'm gonna add one more layer now I like to add a new layer we'll call this noise so using 3d objects is awesome using images is awesome but sometimes they're just a bit too clean a bit too perfect if you zoom in loads you see here we've got plate this robot is like perfectly cut out so actually I'm just going to select the robot go to filter down to blur and just select either blur or blur more as DARS is it just very slightly blurs that you can see we have this listed as a smart filter just so everything isn't so perfect against the background now let's get back up to the new noise layer what I can do just select black as your foreground color go to filter down to noise and add noise and it can't do anything because I haven't actually filled this layer with a color yet so if I just fill this with will go with black filter noise add noise and you can adjust the amount you can see here it adds this which looks terrible I like to go with gorgeou and monochromatic so it just kind of removes that color and what you can do is actually if you change the blending mode on this to something like overlay or soft light you can see it looks like that but if we bring the opacity all the way down to something between like I find 4 5 and 10% is kind of the sweet spot and I'll just zoom in so you can see it kind of adds a little bit of that grain that you would get like from a camera like the noise you get from a camera photo to the scene so maybe 5 percent let's go with that really subtle so if I turn this off and back on you can just see it like it adds that level of noise a little bit of grain to your entire image so your subject even if it's a clean 3d image gets the noise treatment the background it's just so really subtle detail even at 5 percent there's something that I like to do to all of my images just in case anyone ever bloomed in so what we could do is we could actually select the noise layer and just lock that we don't really want to ever move that and we can zoom all the way back out turn our effects off and back on so you can see they have quite a considerable effect on the overall image and this is the part really where we can go back and fine-tune everything because now I've actually got this effects folder I'll leave that on I could go back here double click on my shadows for the robot making darker make them a bit lighter we've got the highlights over here so I can extend - it knows more I could even go and add another shadows adjustment layer so I'll go and add another levels layer will darken this like loads and then what I'm going to do is remember select the layer mask command or ctrl I to hide everything and then if I go and grab one of those default round pressure opacity brushes with white as we brushed in the highlights I'm now going to brush in some shadows and these shadows are going to be much more accentuated and as I say you can spend a lot longer I'm just doing this like super quick so you can see what I'm doing let's brush a little bit round here little bit of that there so there we go if I just hide all of those layers but the initial one we make it darker add some more shadows we add some highlights make it go back we could fine tune that add more highlights I can play around with this for absolutely hours but essentially if I just click all of these off we have our scene that we've done a little bit of work too we've got a robot that we've done a lot of work to and then we have our effects folder on the top that really finishes off our entire scene and there we go that wraps up the course for creative compositing in Adobe Photoshop so I really hope you enjoyed this we've gone from robot to industrial image to dramatic lighting effects we've composited all that together into our final design and if you like to follow along and download any of the assets the brushes the things we've used throughout this course then there will be links provided in the course notes but anyway that's it for me I hope you enjoyed it take care and I'll see you soon you

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 71,256

Keywords: Adobe Photoshop, Compositing, creative compositing in photoshop, photoshop compositing, Dansky, advanced photoshop compositing tutorial, photoshop compositing essential tools & techniques, photoshop compositing tips, photoshop composite, step by step photoshop compositing, compositing in photoshop cc, composting in photoshop, photoshop tutorial, photoshop, photo manipulation, compositing, composite image, composite, adobe photoshop, Envato Tuts+, Envato tuts+, phlearn compositing

Id: bOC2LwKN_MA

Length: 45min 3sec (2703 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019