LFL #46 | Compositing tips in Photoshop. Ft. Jesus Ramirez

push and go live right now hey guys good to see y'all there uh let me know if you can hear me give me a thumbs up if you can hear me and also if you can hear me just takes a second for everyone to say hi are you there jesus yeah can you hear me i can hear you um hey can you guys hear okay this here here you're both awesome people can hear us both fantastic all right and i take it you guys can see my desktop so all right well let's go um and just let's kick this puppy off i apologize about that you guys should see me right now um we had a couple of little problems there of course it was my fault but we're good now um and uh so anyway welcome this is gonna be uh after a false start last week uh this is our first time bringing in a guest so there was a couple of little things i had to learn about in obs which is why we had uh you know a couple of false starts there guys but now everything is sorted and ready to go this is how we do things we move along at the speed of a frozen snowball anyway welcome to uh live from lockdown episode number 46. can you believe it we're at episode number 46 and this is where we go live every single thursday at 1 p.m pacific time and we're sponsored by nobody so we can do and say whatever we want you can you can let uh the photoshop training channel sponsor you calling okay this week we're sponsored by the photoshop training channel and um they make pillows and t-shirts exactly that's what they do and yeah and you can see the pillow in the background there you can order that from um from ptc.com actually the photoshop training channel check out his who's who's our guest this week it's gonna be a lot of fun he's got some compositing tips uh all set up for us and um yeah so do us a couple of favors here number one hit that like button it helps us with the algorithm lets people know that we're here and streaming don't forget to subscribe and of course subscribe also to photoshop training channel or the photoshop training channel which is to say zeus's stuff and donald wants a pt t-shirt oh you know what i've been i've been wanting to make these uh ptc shirts especially for when i go to events i can give them out but i have i guess there's no more live events now yeah well let's get um why don't we get you and me on the screen there we go there's jesus you guys should be able to see him now so yeah we've all been talking about shirts we've been meaning to do some live from lockdown t-shirts and right at the rate that i'm doing this these are going to be great vintage shirts by the time they come out uh yeah reminders of the good old days um you guys should see us both now uh okay seeing you at the moment um t-shirts hi from england hey dazzy how's it going uh good to see you russ tracy david there we go everybody's there rod shelley um gary peterson in the house uh cheryl john andrew nichols all the regulars are here good to see you guys we'll do uh good to see your photo maker and what we'll do and hi from scotland bonnie scotland good to see you so we'll do our um uh afterglow in a little bit at the end kia ora that's a good new zealand uh i hope you guys are doing well from the earthquake there paul and the other people from new zealand did you guys feel that earthquake that was a pretty decent one 7.1 i believe off the coast tsunami warnings the whole thing um so i hope you guys are all safe and okay there so what we're going to do now is it looks like everybody's here we're just gonna jump in and i'm gonna head this over to jesus desktop is your desktop ready to go jesus i'm ready to roll man okay so why don't we just kick over i'm just gonna hand it over to jesus right now jesus ramirez from the photoshop training channel give him a nice round of applause awesome thank you so much colin and thank you so much everybody for being here with us this morning afternoon or evening depending on where in the world you're watching from as i said earlier in the chat i'm in a san francisco bay area let us know where you're watching from i see a lot of people from the uk from england and diane and cheryl are both in the uk so yeah thank you so much for joining us uh if you're in the uk it must be about 9 p.m so thank you for spending your evening with us and yeah this stream is going to be all about compositing feel free to ask your questions and colin also feel free to interrupt in any moment so i can answer any questions and there's no excuse me there's no particular order in the compositing tips that i'm going to show you most of these include a larger project that i'm not really going to create the project from scratch just because it would take too much time and i just want to show you like a specific thing on how you would handle something in some cases i may actually go into the psd and show you what the layers include and how they were created again i'm not going to do it from scratch but at least you have a basic understanding of how the files were created and then i'll show you the tip that i'm talking about for that particular step so um oh cool we have uh it's one in the morning in dubai dubai thank you so much for watching graphics ali thank you very much friday morning in new zealand 10 a.m awesome so yeah so this is the first image that i'm going to start with and this is the background and i wanted to place this model into this background and i've already removed the model the background from the model by using the let me kick you turn the desktop sorry my bad no worries and i just want to ask you just a quick question just before we um kick off of the with the session here uh did anybody come in from the newsletter i just want to make sure the newsletter subscribers got in here okay from email yep we're good all right back to you jesus cool and now i got a real now i see where my my screen is that way i know where i could you know like if i cover something with them you know i just got to make sure that i don't cover talk about something that's in the bottom left because i realize now that my yeah don't worry i will move you i'll move you if you all right cool cool so yeah um so right now we're going to look at the layers panel and like i was saying we have this background and i want to composite this model in here and i use the remove background feature that is new in uh photoshop what photoshop is it new and is it like photoshop 2021 i think is when it was first implemented but anyway there it is remove background and we have this image and obviously the edges are going to be perfect i'm going to show you a technique on how to fix hair later but i fix her hair in this image by simply creating a new layer and i'll briefly show you what i did it basically what i did is i just took pieces of her hair like so and then i duplicated them by pressing ctrl j command j on the mac clipped it to layer below by pressing ctrl alt g on windows command option g on the mac and just moving it to the edge there see that's you when you move it to the edge it kind of makes it seem like the hair is still there and obviously you know i distorted it and rotated the the hair so it kind of matched the flow or the actual hair so that's what i did on this layer here to make to to make it fit as you can see there that way we didn't have those halos i also had a brightness uh layer created by a curves adjustment layer just to darken everything up and i also desaturated the image so that it matched the background and i applied a hue and saturation layer by using the selective color adjustment layer and just selecting the reds because that's the color of her skin and just adjusting the sliders to make it match the background now the tip that i'm trying to show you in this example is that when you have an image like this um if this were a real image we would have rim light around our model and in this case we really can't actually i mean we could paint it in if we wanted to you know we can create a new layer right above everything else so let me open up this group enable it clip it to the layer below and i could come in here and spend some time painting with white and actually that's that's a horrible brush to use so i need to use a brush with a hardness of zero and i could just come in here and try to paint it in you know and even something like that it's already making it look more realistic but unfortunately you're gonna make it really difficult on yourself this is passable if this is you know all you have this is better than nothing but i actually think that it's actually better to composite in a highlight from a different image because i think that'll give you better results so for example i have this photo here we have this lady's arm see that see how we have her arm here and i can come in and i can just take the highlight from this arm and use it in my composite so i'm going to copy it and i can bring it back in paste it here ctrl t on windows command t to transform and i can just place it as best as i can over the image that i'm working on this is the reference point you can enable it by clicking on this icon if you're in photoshop i want to say it's a 20 i don't know photo what was it 2018 2019 when they removed it by default so you have to it was like 20 wasn't it yeah it's 2019 2020 something like that you um have to click on this button to enable it before it was on by default now the button show the button slowly so people can see where it is yes right on the top left hand side here in the options bar and what i'm going to do is just move this reference point here and now when i rotate the image it'll rotate from that point see that and i can also scale from that point like so and i'm just trying to match the arm as best as i can it doesn't need to be perfect but it can be close enough then i'll increase the opacity again let me just drag this below here uh which is going to clip it to the layer below so ctrl alt g on windows command option g on the mac if you don't know how to do that and once it's here once it's clipped to the layer below it will use the edges of the arm so i gotta rotate it just a little bit more so to make sure that i don't get any of the orange background and you can see her elbow there that her elbow really wouldn't be here it'll probably be lower so i need to scale it up a little bit more just so that it's in the right area but the point is is that i'm trying to just match the arm as best as possible so that it matches the actual composite so something like this and it requires a little bit of fine tuning but i think that the results are worth it let me just go a bit more like that i don't want to spend too much time fine tuning this image but i think you get the idea so once we get it to about this this spot we can actually start working on the blend and all i'm going to do is desaturate the layer ctrl shift u on windows command shift u on the mac to desaturate a layer then i'm going to change the blending mode to screen it's right up here the screen blending mode keeps bright pixels and it hides black completely so the brighter a pixel is the more it'll show the closer it is to black the less it will show and what i'm going to do now is go into image adjustment levels and i'm just going to darken it so that only the brightest pixels are showing see that see how now the all i have is the highlight and see how that highlight is much more realistic than the one i was painting in by hand so i can put that in here create a layer mask and then i can just start painting away the stuff that you know doesn't work or doesn't belong and of course i can continue re-adjusting this layer to make it fit my composite a little bit better so that highlight there is going to be much more realistic than anything i could ever paint with a um just just by using the brush tool so then all i would need to do at this point is maybe even drag this down below on all the adjustment layers so that it picks up some of the colors from the adjustment so see that before and after see that and i mean the detail is just much much better than just simply painting it in by hand so that's something that i would recommend that you did you could always keep fine-tuning it by going into image adjustment levels and then just you know making it brighter see that's how i'm increasing the highlight there see that so i can adjust it any way that i want just so that i can get a much more realistic rim shadow or rim highlight not a shadow let me undo this because i think if i go on i don't want to undo that i wanted to see you uh show you a final version of this and i thought i i had that ready to roll but i guess i don't so let me open this up and i think i have an image here that will show you what it looks like when it's done and i thought that i did but i guess i don't let me see it's one of these two let me open it up i hope that i that i do have it there we go so that's that's basically doing the same thing that i just did but stealing different parts of the image see how i got her face here that highlight on her face is the same highlight that is found on this side of her face right here you can see her chin here at the bottom that's exactly what i used on let me close this one so it doesn't confuse me anymore is the same highlight that i use down here and these high yeah these highlights look a whole lot more realistic than just simply painting them in by hand so i recommend that you do that you can go steal pieces from we have a question for you uh from photo maker he goes if we do frequency separation on skin should we do it before add any external rim light from another portrait so okay so so the answer to that is um i would put this a highlight that like if you were doing this same technique i would do it after any other adjustments that you've made because you're you're adding stuff on top of it so if you were to add this first and then do frequency separation that could get weird and also to do frequency separation you don't necessarily have to merge the image but i don't see what the advantage of doing frequency separation after this would would get you so i would do it um okay i would do it definitely they're really engaged they're really enjoying this and we have we have another question uh from david holtzstock another one of our regulars and he says what would happen if luminosity blend mode would you use luminosity plane mode in in this particular technique uh which one are you asking about there david i'm guessing that's the question if if that is a question it wouldn't necessarily work um i think screen because think about if you think about it this way the luminosity blend mode would um as i was explaining earlier with screen the darker pixels become less visible and black come becomes completely invisible and then only the brighter pixels in white is what's shown with the luminosity blending mode we would still keep the darker pixels so you would actually see like a shadow or something on here let me yeah he says yes instead of screen yeah yeah so let me see um right here rim light and by the way here's another another trick for you guys i have so many um layers named rim light that i don't know which one it is exactly it's like my document site rim light one rim light two three four real final final final final rim light right um let's see yeah i have so many rim light layers and i'm not exactly sure which is the one that i oh no wonder because i had probably because your thumbnails are really big for presentation when you're working and your thumbnails are smaller it's probably no i was actually doing the right thing earlier so here's the trick guys um so when you have the move tool selected if you right click somewhere on the image like right here you'll see all the layers that are beneath that pixel that i clicked on this is why it's very important to name your layers so if you click on in this case if i click on rim light it'll select this layer which i had the right layer selected but there was a merge layer on top of everything that was hiding it so the question was what if you use luminosity see with luminosity how i still keep the black pixels see that so it's better to use screen because screen only keeps the bright pixels and it hides a dark one so you can create this effect and as you can see here in this case i spend more time fine-tuning the the highlight the um highlight below her arm here her face all this stuff and actually let me show you what this looks like without any of that so you can see the difference let me hide all this and david said that helps it clears it up for him yeah so let me let me make sure i don't hi okay cool so basically that was the original image with obviously the adjustment layer is making it darker but this is what it looks like once you start adding all those elements from that other photo so all these highlights came from this photo so i just took different pieces from this image as you saw me do earlier with her arm so that i could make the image work and you can take something like this like even the side of her arm here and this is like really nice a really nice highlight and you can use it for almost anything you want um so the point is that you need to um think about you know like when you're compositing you know how can you make it more realistic can you paint it sure you can get away with painting it as you saw earlier in this stream how i just painted it and look okay that's better than nothing certainly but it's much better if you can get that detail you see on the skin um than not having and then obviously once you start blending it and you know applying color and all that then everything looks much more realistic cool are there any other questions let me see yeah i don't see any other questions so awesome i'll keep i'll keep going um by the way i see that only 82 people have hit that like button so there's 263 watching that means that like almost 200 people haven't hit that like button so make sure that you hit it if i show something that you enjoy that'll help um that'll help colin here at photoshop cafe and it'll help with the youtube algorithm so make sure you hit that thumbs up button and also make sure that you follow colin at photoshop cafe if you haven't already and follow me photoshop training channel um cool so that's one technique and let me close this and we'll go and work on something else so again there are no particular order so this one yeah i have another question here good question here from jason halliday he goes how do you guys deal with mental block mental block oh man uh that you know what man i'm probably the worst person to ask about that because i feel that i just plowed through stuff you know stuff needs to get done so i don't know i i think i think i'm assuming mental block in the creative sense right like i need to create something either for work for a client or for myself and i have no idea i mean well you and i face it you know like let's say it's tutorial time you know you've got you know you've scheduled a youtube video because you do your what days do you normally drop your videos on youtube um you know what i'm not going to say because i'm not going to i never stick to it okay so you've got a youtube video you know so say yeah because that's you know your creative outlet you know mainly right yeah so so say you're doing that and and you've got no ideas at all like you know because it happens to all of us happens to me like you know i got to do a tutorial what am i going to do what you know what do you do how do you plow through that well see the thing about from about my tutorials yeah yeah apart from going into photoshop cafe and copying your tutorials um the thing about about tutorials is that it we in some ways we're fortunate that we are solving people's problems and i'm fortunate enough in your as well that we have people requesting content so it's not always so difficult sometimes it's difficult in the sense that you know like this tutorial might take 45 minutes you know it requires a lot of preparation other times it's difficult because you can't find um because see i get this a lot like people will say things like well you use the perfect photo and it works and i'm like yeah of course like i'm trying to teach you something i wouldn't use a photo where it doesn't work you know what i mean it's like if you're learning math and your teacher shows you like a very complex math equation you're probably not going to get it but if you learn the principles with a simple math equation you're more likely to do the more complex math later on so i do spend a lot of time finding like the right way or not what i consider to be the most efficient way of teaching something and that could be where my mental block comes in because like i know i could do this like if i wasn't talking and i was just doing it i could do it so much faster in a minute but since i have to talk and explain not only why not only click here click there but why i'm clicking here and why i'm clicking there and not over here then that's where like the mental block could come in i don't know if that makes any sense yeah that's that's good that's a good um you know i think that's that's a good insight for for everybody um you know because sometimes you know we're just doing the work and people see the work and and they don't really understand the process behind it you know like we we do tutorials or maybe someone's a professional designer and it's no different you know like because you know obviously beginning in my career and you too you know we were that's what we did for a living and you know someone throws a job at you and and it's got to be done there's a deadline and you know it's nice to you know create when you're inspired you know it's like yeah you do your best work when you're inspired but if you're a professional i think that's the difference between being a professional and a hobbyist a hobbyist can do you know just as good a work as a professional yeah but they can only do it when they're inspired when a professional is not inspired they might not do their best work but it's still going to be a high level of work and it's still going to be possible as professional so i think you know for people to understand it doesn't matter what you're doing if you're a designer photographer you're creating tutorials it's the same work ethic um is being able to knock something out at that professional level so even when you're not at your best it's still not going to suck right well no no that happens often because you know like whether i'm creating a tutorial or i'm compositing something if i'm uninspired i could still do something that's you know above average but with pressure like i have to do this now client or whatever um is requesting something oh i could do it but it doesn't mean that it's gonna be my best work or that you know it's gonna be like something amazing and i think that the way that you overcome like you get to that level just by practicing a lot practicing practicing practicing practicing it's almost like being an athlete like i was an athlete most my life so like sometimes you just don't feel like performing but since you practice so much you may be able to perform okay in a game maybe not your best game ever but you've had that those years of training behind you they can help you you know rise up from that rut and then hopefully be inspired at a later time that's awesome all right so sorry guys that we turned this into into an interview we're gonna go back to yeah jesus and uh yeah let's get you next time actually i'm gonna paste the link in the chat for um for a youtube video from adobe i actually made the composite that you're looking at now in uh an adobe live session so if you want to see how i created this from scratch meaning from like from starting from zero check it out i was doing this stream with uh claudia from print my soul on and she's in here by the way awesome hi claudia good to see you in the chat and um but yeah so we were we i worked on this uh on this composite on an adobe live stream where she was um my host and yeah so bookmark that for later if you want um but that's how you can see how i created everything you send me that link and uh i i pasted it i pasted it in the chat okay do you guys see it because i don't see it in there it's it should be one of the the last comments because i just pasted it okay do you guys see that and colin i could actually um if you can't see it i can send it to you directly right now um yeah why don't you do that just in case because i mean it might be there but i'm not seeing it in the um youtube series right well maybe it's like i don't know maybe maybe youtube thinks i'm spamming you um i just send it to your uh cs smith email um but anyway so what i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do now is um talk about a little bit about harmonizing an image like a composite so in this case i have this composite here with this uh these background elements and as you can see it's a whole lot of layers that create the you know the background here and i have the superhero which is this woman who is actually working out but i just made her look like that like a superhero by adding like a jacket to her and these bracelets or armlets whatever they call tattoos a whole bunch of stuff right and then the lightning so um basically what i want to show you guys here is that when you have done all this work on top of a composite sometimes just to take it to that next level you have to harmonize the entire thing you have to apply colors or whatever it is to make it feel like a cohesive unit because sometimes even though you you do color matching and everything looks great there's still something missing so i think that it's always a good idea to end your composites by harmonizing your your entire image there's two ways you can do so you can select all the layers that you have and put that into a smart object if you want if your computer can handle it great sometimes when you put a lot of layers especially if they're large layers or you're working with a large file size that has a lot of layers putting it all into a smart object may slow down your machine and that may not be the best thing for you because now you might be working slow so an alternative to that is make a merge copy of all the layers and you can do so with a keyboard shortcut ctrl alt shift e command option shift e on the mac and that takes um that takes all the layers and puts them into one more so you still have all your editable layers but on the top you have a merge layer so ctrl alt shift e command option shift d on the mac or you can just slam your forehead up against the keyboard and i'm sure you'll get all those keys but the point is that this usually i call this layer final because that's like my final you know the way it's going to look and i convert that into a smart object the reason that i'm converting that into a smart object is because if i later on decide to make an adjustment in the layers below i need to adjust the top layer the top smart object with the adjustments that i've applied so to do that all i need to do is just double click on this layer thumbnail or smart object thumbnail it opens up in a new tab and i can replace the content so when i close it any adjustment that i've applied to this final smart object will automatically update so what type of adjustments can i do to harmonize this image usually i like to apply a camera raw filter and just treat the entire thing as a single image so to do so i like to start with the temperature panel in this case i would like to add a little bit of blue just to make it more cinematic see that's how by cooling the image is just looking a little bit better maybe add a little bit more contrast on this image i think that would make it look good maybe darken the shadows a little bit to continue adding more contrast i can also increase the texture just to make the lightning and the other details in the image pop a little bit clarity which is contrast in the midtones i can also increase the vibrance which protects already saturated pixels and skin tones in other words it saturates the pixels that are desaturated without blowing up the skin tones too much um let me see and then i usually like to add a little bit of detail which is uh sharpening so when i sharpen an image what i like to do is start by adjusting the masking slider if you don't see the masking slider just click click on this little triangle and the masking slider when you drag it you really can't tell what's going on but what you need to do is hold alt on windows option on the mac and then click and drag and photoshop will find the edges of the image anything that is in white will not have will be let me rephrase that anything that is in black will not have the sharpening effect and then anything that is in white will have a sharpening effect so i just really want to sharpen the edges i don't really want any sharpening in the sky or anything like that so i can bring the masking slider to about here and then just sharpen those edges also when you're viewing the sharpening make sure that you're at 100 you can see that photoshop is actually telling you here that if you're not looking at the image at 100 the adjustment may be misleading so you can set it to 100 and you can adjust the sharpening so that you can see what that would look like and notice that the notice went away once i set that to 100 you can actually zoom in closer if you want and you can still get a good representation of it but anything lower than 100 would really be misleading so you can always click on this icon to toggle between the unedited version and the edited version but see how much the image is just becoming more cohesive it's just becoming more final by doing these adjustments also you can go into the color mixer and look at the colors that your image has for example in this case i have the lightning and if i want the lightning to pop out more i can select the aquas here and i can just make some adjustments see how i can just make that lighting just pop more see that people loved your alt masking tip piece photo maker um they loved it they said it was worth the price of admission right there definitely thank you so much um but yeah so now i'm just adjusting these sliders to control the lightning see that see how much more the lightning is popping now that i made that adjustment also we have a lot of blues in the image so if i i can come in here and sort of you know shift it to the purples if i want or more into the cyans whatever i think looks good in this case i really don't want to do that but maybe i want to saturate it just a little bit more and maybe bring down the luminance to make it even darker i can go into the oranges which is where her skin tones would be also the reds and increase the saturation on both maybe even a little bit on the yellow as well and i can just keep making those adjustments before and after you can also go into the calibration panel and make some adjustments to your primaries for example i can go into the blue primary and make maybe make like an overall shift in the blues here to get it more into this like blue teal cyan look which i i like better i could also increase that saturation actually maybe not maybe just a tad so before and after and for those of you that watch me on youtube or have been following me for a while you guys know that i like to finish all my composites by adding just a tiny little bit of grain usually never above 10 and the reason that i like to do that is because if you learn anything in the image or maybe you have an image you know like a stock photo that was had already been blurred doesn't have a lot of a lot of green it doesn't feel natural to me it doesn't feel like an actual photo it feels very digital very fake but just by adding just a tiny little little bit of green just just enough so you can see the green it in my opinion it does two things that helps the image look more quote unquote realistic because it looks more like film and also it helps tie in all the different elements that you have you might have some elements that have grain others that have no grain and then elements that have a little bit of grain maybe a lot the point is is that by adding just a little bit of grain to your entire image you help it look more cohesive and also in a situation like this where it's more like a movie poster i like to bring in the reduce the vignette just to darken the edges as you see here right about there and i can press ok and you can see that just by making those simple adjustments i took this flat looking photo or composite and made it a lot more cinematic it pops more it actually feels more like a like something that you would see in the cover of a movie poster or maybe like a video game or something like that and it wasn't that difficult to do all i really did was just adjust a couple sliders and and i got this result so this is something that i like to do with all my composites sometimes it's not that extreme like in this case sometimes there's simply just a bit of sharpening a bit of grain a bit of a vignette maybe if that and and sometimes that's all you require and a more strong has a question for you uh uh van i i think i think it's dutch a dutch name that i can't pronounce i apologize um but he's asking about luts um because we just did a tutorial on like a couple of days yeah you um do you apply luts to these or how about you put a lot on it it depends it depends on what i'm doing like for example i could add a color lookup adjustment table and for this one maybe i would start with like i don't know moonlight or something and then maybe go up and down the see like that one's kind of cool looking you know so like i would just go through these but the problem with luts at least the ones that are built into photoshop is that the only ways that you can change them is by changing the blending mode or changing the opacity which is okay i mean for example let's say this one maybe i'll really like this but i don't like how the lighting is being affected but i like the color i could change the blending mode to color and i have the original lighting with the new color see that or maybe i really like the the lighting but i don't but i like my original color well then i can do that i can change it to luminosity and it does that same thing or not the same thing the the opposite keeps the new um it keeps the new luminosity in the old color um so i don't i don't use some too much but sometimes i know that there's something in here that will you know make it give me give me the look that i want and and sometimes that may be enough i don't know if you taught how to create a color lookup adjustment layer but you can create your own you can add you can stack up adjustment layers and export them as a lookup adjustment layer and then you can just you know save save the ones that you like maybe if you have a specific look you could show us i mean we did that in a previous live from lockdown but we didn't do that in a tutorial if you want to show us how to yeah so yeah let me now i have to think of like something that would look cool let me see okay here i think i have an idea so i think i have a i think i have a photo of this that might work for this i have this lady here in this motorcycle and i think this will work so i'm going to freestyle this so i don't even know if i remember the steps but you know that this is this is why i like doing live stuff because i get to um you know do things on the spot which is a lot more fun i'm sure colin can relate to that it's like sports like sports right so i can already tell you this first time is not going to work and i'll tell you why in a moment um but basically you can create any adjustment layer that you want you might as well disregard the layer mask because the lut will not save a layer mask so you can just you don't have to delete it but i'm deleting it to show you that it's not going to do anything and the selective color adjustment layer lets you pick different colors in your image or white neutrals from blacks and you can add or subtract a color to it and i know that sounds super weird right we're adding cyan and subtracting cyan adding magenta or subtracting magenta adding yellow or subtracting yellow and adding black or subtracting black the easiest one to understand if you don't know photoshop at all is black if you go if you add black you make the image darker if you subtract black you make the image brighter right so um let me let me show you an example of that if i go if i select the neutrals you know i can make the image darker or brighter right that's really easy to understand but what about things like cyan like what does subtracting cyan look like well if you need to photoshop you might want to just create just for fun a color balance adjustment layer and photoshop does a fantastic way of representing the relationship between colors with this adjustment layer you can see that the opposite of cyan is red the opposite of magenta is green the opposite of yellow is blue so that's the same thing on this adjustment layer is just not represented as clearly so we can add cyan and if we subtract we get red right and we can do the same thing with magenta magenta and on the other side we're going to get green that's right green i'm assuming somebody typed green in the chat and for yellow we have yellow and on the other side we have that's right blue but anyway so that's how this adjustment layer works so i can apply an effect by adding cyan maybe subtracting the yellow a little bit you know maybe making it a little darker like so i can go into the reds and reduce the cyan because i don't want the reds affecting skin tones and maybe increase the magenta and increase the yellow so i could also create a levels adjustment layer where i just increase the gamma like this and i'll also delete that and maybe i'll add a hue and saturation adjustment layer actually you know what never mind i'll add a vibrance adjustment layer and increase the vibrance just to make you know the image pop a little bit more maybe a tad of such of uh saturation like so right so i can actually save this as a lookup table adjustment layer by going into file export if i remember correctly color lookup tables but it's not going to work save photoshop told me you cannot do that because i don't have a background so what does that mean i don't have a background there's an image here right it's right here what do you mean i don't have a background well it's not actually a background layer which is what photoshop wants so what you need to do is select it and go into the layers panel and select new background from layer here here it is and notice now that the name changes to background and it has this little lock here so now when i go into file export um color lookup tables and the window appear right here i'll drag it over so you can see it there it is and i'll just call it like i'll give it a name p.s cafe uh that's what i'll call it photoshop cafe and i can just export you know my lookup table adjustments to find it easy i'll just export it in the desktop there it is desktop so now i could you know delete these adjustment layers because you know we don't need them anymore and it's been a couple weeks or whatever and i want to apply that same look onto this image what you can do is go into color lookup adjustment layers and then load a lut and here it is and there it is it applies exactly the same effect in one adjustment layer so that's how you can save a lookup table at lookup table adjustment layer and reuse it to be frank with you the only reason i would do this is if i wanted to use this same look on a video so maybe in this photo shoot i was shooting the model and then there's also some video footage and i wanted something similar that just matches i will probably maybe try this so that i could just drop a a lookup table on like premiere or after effects or something like that but if i wanted to actually save this i wouldn't i wouldn't do it this way the way that i would do it is i will take my adjustment layers like so put them into a group and i would call them ps cafe uh actually you use capital letters colin look now we'll call it ps cafe look then i will go into my libraries panel and then let me just find the library panel libraries that i don't have a lot of stuff in um let me see uh i think um i don't know i don't know which one doesn't have a lot of stuff this one called test i have no idea what's in here all right great there's not a lot of stuff so i i will take that folder and just drop it in here right in that group and there it is photoshop cafe look and that is beneficial because if i wanted to apply that to any other image it doesn't matter the image i could just drag it in there but it's not going to work i've been saying that a lot it's not gonna work right when you first do it because if i click and drag it in there look what happens it's it's this weird smart object with cloud on it that's not doing anything if you want it to work what you need to do is hold alt on windows option on the mac and drag it into your layers panel and look at this all the layers are there and you can continue adjusting the layer so that it works for your image so let me show you how this will work in another image so if i go back and just type the word man and i think i might have a photo that of like a man that might work i don't know which one would be good i don't know we'll just try this one i have no idea if it's gonna work or not but there's our photo there he is and if i go back into my test folder and look for the ps cafe look and drag it in there and drop it you can see how that is applied to this image and if i think that something is not right i can come in here and still make adjustments to the image so that it works and it looks good with this particular image so you can save a lookup table if you like or you can just save the whole thing as a group drop it into your libraries um panel and that to me is a more efficient way to work because it becomes more editable that's awesome thanks for sharing the uh how to make a lot i think you guys found that very useful awesome and yeah let us know if you have any any questions i know i went a little fast there this is recorded you can always go back and watch it and i'm glad to see that people did click on that like button it's at 175 now so that's great thank you so much 25 more guys to get to 200 we've got 259 there so don't be shy hit that thumbs up button how about this colin how about this so this stream is scheduled to be done in 13 minutes correct something like that yeah all right cool so if we get it to say 225 likes we'll stay an extra what 15 20 minutes and keep showing more photoshop tips and tricks oh you're bribing bribing everyone all right i like bribes yeah all right there we go guys no it's not a bribe it's i'm i'm incentivized incentive incentive there you go incentive so you're being incentivized if you um but what if everyone just signs off all right everybody so you hear that let's see we're gonna get some extra tips out of jesus oh it's a 195 how many do we need 225 50 more or no not 50 lot less than 50. yeah we need what what is that 29 98. oh wait wait i say 198 yeah there we go we need two 20s we need oh 200. all right cool so if i guessed it we'll say 225 and then i'll stay an extra 15 20 minutes how about that all right repayment likes all right cool cool yeah pay me on likes um cool so now we're going to do something that always talks about and this is going to be i don't man i don't want to complain but since this is a live stream i get to be a little more uh lose than an a than a tutorial so uh colin i'm sure you get this a lot when you do a tutorial on masking people usually tell you well why do you don't you do it on a busy background like why do you have to use like a flat surface and my answer is well that's how professionals usually do it of course there's times where you need to work with the images that your art director your boss or your client gives you and it is what it is that's we have to work with but the example that i always give is kind of like a movie director like you've never seen like a tutorial like on after effects you know saying hey why did you use a green screen how come you just didn't shoot it without a green screen it's way easier with a green screen well because yeah it's way easier with a green screen that's how it should be done um so that's why in tutorials you never really see like busy backgrounds and but i do realize that that's a need in some cases so this is what i'm gonna show you now how to what to do when you're dealing with flyaway hair like she has there on a busy background because again i realize that it's a need but it's always not the ideal situation so this is not the ideal situation but i'm going to show you at least one technique that you can use so that you can make this work so we have a background and we just want to place her in there and we can of course use the quick actions and click on remove background and see what that does and it does a fairly good job i mean the new ai is is not terrible see that i mean that was a really difficult background and it did a good job in my opinion so we can work for this we can work with this you can always go back in there and select the layer mask and go into the properties panel and click on selected mask and you could also make adjustments right so by default you're going to go into the onion skinning mode if you have something else selected photoshop or remember but the first time that you go in here you'll see the onion skinning mode and basically when you're 100 you'll see the masked version and as you reduce the transparency you'll see more of the original background in this case i don't really need to see the original background all i need to do is smooth the edges and i like to do this in two steps not one and if you watch my youtube channel you guys know that i always recommend people doing a two-step method for this not one and i'll show you why i think it's easier if i go into the black and white mode to show you why i want to smooth the edges of her body first right but when i do that watch what happens to her hair right it doesn't look good and if i increase the contrast it doesn't look good and the contrast is allows me to have sharper edges where i need them but it completely destroys the hair so what i recommend people to do is just forget about the hair do the person or the other element and worry about the details later and just press ok then you can go back into the selected mask workspace and the sliders are all reset to zero and now i can work on the hair and i can just click on refine hair and photoshop will look at the hair and refine it see that's how i just refined it and just to let you guys know what's going on here is i'll go back into the onion skinning mode and select show edge you see this show edge this is basically where photoshop is looking to create the refinement and notice how it got part of her body it got her face and all of that so you really don't want that so you can just subtract it with the refine edge brush so you can subtract that see that's how i'm subtracting it and basically what this refined hair feature is doing it's basically doing an animated paintbrush stroke with the refine edge tool so notice that i have the brush the refine edge brush tool selected if i enable this plus and paint photoshop now is looking at that edge see that show edge see that so that that's all this this button is doing it's just painting it um by automatically for you so you can actually just you know cancel out of it if you want and then go back in there and i still have the same show edge enabled but let me go into the onion skinning view show edge and notice that there's nothing there right because there's no edge there but if i go into edge detection i can increase the radius and see that photoshop is now making those refinement adjustments just on these edges but usually i don't like to do that just to show you what this is this is a radius of 52 pixels around the edges of your image and photoshop is using the algorithm to detect the edge and also remove the background from the foreground you can also use smart radius and photoshop will try to not make it a 52 width stroke around the image it tries to guess you know how big or small the edge should be not being larger than 52 pixels however but anyway i don't like to do any of that because i think it's better if you just do by hand so what i like to do is i like to just select the refine edge and just start painting like so and i can select where photoshop is going to make those edge refinements see that and when i click on show edge you see that it's exactly what i painted on and you know in some cases refine edge the automatic ai feature may do a good job in other cases it doesn't so it's totally up to the image that you're working on and i don't really want it to look at her face because we're definitely gonna keep her face so something like this but anyway once that happens photoshop is doing that refinement and the composite looks okay and i'll press okay and this is looking good but it's not looking great there's a lot of you know hair strands missing and what i like to do in this case is paint them in you can paint paint them in in one of two ways you can literally take your wacom tablet or whatever graphics tablet you have and just start painting hair strands and that could look okay and that could take a while what i like to do is um just take hair from somewhere else and then use that to make a brush let me show you what i mean i know i have a photo of a lady here that we can use to create a brush let me just scroll down until i find it and we will create the brush and i hope i can find her quickly oh there she is her right hair so you can take a photo like this and you can just crop it like so something like this so that we just have that hair and i can go into the channels panel we just need to make it black and white right so the hair needs to be black and the background needs to be white i can take the blue channel and click and drag it into the new channel icon to duplicate it you never want to work on the actual channel because you will destroy the image in this case it's not important if we destroy the image but still we wanna we wanna um not destroy the image so now to make the background white in the foreground black there's so many things you could do you can go into image apply image that means that photoshop will take um one of the channels or one of the layers and then apply a blending mode to it and then put it on top multiply makes things darker and screen makes things brighter so i think i'll go with screen just so that i can get the white the the background as close to white as possible so see that before and after actually you know what i changed my mind i'm going to go with multiply yeah i'll go with multiply and then i can do use something like image adjustment levels to brighten the background like so and i can just keep adjusting it accordingly the point is is that i'm trying to get as much of the hair strands as possible while keeping the background black i'm sorry white i can select the dodge tool the dodge tool i'm going to set the range to highlight so that it only affects the brightest pixels and i'm going to keep a i'm going to keep a low exposure so that i could just paint in these areas and i just want to keep the background as white as possible there we go i think i think this will work then i can just [Music] create i'm going to have to invert it now so i'm going to just press ctrl i command i to invert because i want the actually you know what now that i inverted it i need to make some of these areas darker just so that the hair strands come through better something like this anyway then i'll hold ctrl and windows command on the mac click on the blue channel copy go into rgb go back into the layers panel and then just make a black solid fill like that and it's really not that important that these other pixels here are transparent i'm mainly concerned about the hair strands if you made something that is not completely black you can always go back into image adjustment levels and just brighten the pixels now brightening brightening will make them darker now because we're dealing with a layer mask now so basically the opposite of we were doing what we were doing a moment ago but you can see how i'm really starting to get that hair and that's going to look really really good so what i'm going to do now is go into edit let me try that again go into edit define brush preset the reason that that didn't work earlier is because i had the layer mask selected the focus the white outline was in the layer mask i needed that on the actual layer i can go into the fine brush preset and i can call this uh hair brush there it is press ok now when i go into this image watch what happens when i create a new layer and i just click and paint see that that's the hair so i can select a color that is similar to her hair like so reduce the brush size by tapping on the left bracket key on the keyboard and that's how you know you've been using photoshop for a long time because the new cool people use the other keyboard shortcut with the on screen overlay but us all older people use the bracket keys but anyway talking about keyboard shortcuts there's a new keyboard shortcut which is the right and left arrow keys to rotate the hair but when you click that's what you get and basically what you can do at this point is uh yeah i'll ask you a quick question um and this will be an opportunity for you um to go relieve your bladder not you but some people in a in the chat they're braiding their legs they said um so they don't want to miss a thing so you're too engaging um but we had a great question there only only on a live stream can we say this um let me go back here we have a great question and then wait and then i want you to continue that um and then that just gives cause the poor guys bursting um okay so photo maker was asking the question to make that hair sample darker or lighter you know to make a brush can we use the brush on overlay and paint on the background or here with black yeah you can you can definitely do that that's one of the techniques that um that you could do um i mean oh man did i close that file um i think i already made it to to perfect for that to to work but let me see if i could get it so basically the question is can you so the answer to the question is yes that's the simple answer to the question so you can select the like a soft brush like that and you can um you know select something like this and change the brushes blending mode to like overlay and then when you well actually that's actually way too strong i would need to reduce the opacity but you can reduce you know and just paint and then kind of get in between the the um you know darker areas like so you see that how i'm just selecting the the hair strands are at the bottom i could have done that as well i didn't think it was necessary but you can definitely do that you can also switch it to white and it kind of does the same thing the other way around how it just um makes those hair strands come out even more so in this case actually making the hair strands pop a little more is is actually doing a good job but the answer to that question is yes you can change the overl the blending mode to overlay on the brush not the layer in this case you can't do it because it's a channel and then paint with black or white to enhance either black and white on the image that's awesome people are loving it by the way um people are having a great time so please can continue awesome yeah so let me go back to that brush that i just had here i think it's this one and i'll just select the color that is oh one thing i was going to mention is um if you open up the brushes panel you can flip the x axis and then when you paint now the hair is looking the other way but now i need to change my mode to normal and increase the opacity to 100 and when i paint there it is i actually want the hair to be a little blonder so i'll select a different strand like so that's looking really good so i can just now use the bracket keys to kind of like size up her hair and then rotate it like so using the arrow keys on the keyboard if you're in an older version of photoshop using the left and right arrow keys in the keyboard will not work you will have to come into the brush settings and rotate this icon here so to rotate the brush but basically what you want to do now is just click once like so and place this behind her and what that allows you to do is create these hair strands see that see how i'm creating these hair strands and i'm going to go quickly here using different layers but i think that it'll be obvious what i'm doing i'll rotate it a little bit more and then just try to get more more hair on here see that's how i'm getting her hair and basically what i want you to do at this point now is just make sure that the hair is the right darkness i think it's not dark enough for the composite so i can go into image adjustment levels and maybe darken it up a little bit so that it it looks more like the hair that's actually there see that or maybe even brightening it up but you get the idea see that's how i'm getting these hair strands now so that looks a lot more realistic than me just painting over the the actual image i can go back into the layer mask here and just with a regular brush i could paint with black and just hide all these areas that are just really blurry and just let that bro that custom brush that i created just do the magic see that just keep painting and obviously i need to do a little more work on top here i wasn't very very good on the top here but you know i think that you get the idea and that's the thing about about you know the techniques that colin shows or me or anybody else is that a lot of times you may know the techniques but the real magic happens when you start fine-tuning things and you start really spending the hours in there but you can i think you get the idea of you know how how this could work and actually i'm not liking that one so much so i can just hide the ones that i don't like and just keep the ones that i like and there it is see that see how that hair is there and it just looks much much better and also keep using different um hair colors don't use the same one if you use the same one then it looks more unrealistic but you know you can select something that's darker and then paint with that and see what that looks like put it below everything else and then you know just just see see what works for your image and just move it around accordingly and you'll get really really good hair strands so that's that's one of the tricks that i would use to um let me just duplicate this this one is another fabulous tip and uh uh sorry uh russ from england uh from london says brilliant tip thanks jesus thank you so much everybody so they're loving these uh these tips and we have two more likes to get to 220. so come on guys if you have not hit that like button 225 225. 225. all right keeps going up it's like bitcoin uh but it doesn't always go up but hopefully the likes don't drop like bitcoin does um all right guys so oh 222. look at that oh there we go all right overachievers there we go all right 223 two more guys two more um and then we get an extra 15 minutes 2 28 okay i think i think we can say oh 2 28 we're past there all right we're past it all right so now man now i have to stay here longer with you colin you could be worse things you know yeah but anyway you can as you can see you know you can start moving these hair strands around and just making it you know match the composite as best as you can and that's much easier much more realistic than trying to to select something that's so difficult to select like her hair up against that original background as you can see she's blonde and there's all kinds of stuff going on in the background so yeah that's that's one of the things that i would recommend all right that's great okay so we're past 230 likes so we're ready for another tip all right let's go um okay well i'm done guys so no just kidding so um this is an uh a tip about making um an image match into a composite like a lot of times when you put something in you know it looks fine but you really can't tell what's going on so one of the tricks that i like using is making a solid color fill layer setting it to it doesn't have to be 50 you can just be off you know i'm at 53 here and that's fine as long as the saturation is no zero it doesn't matter press ok and change the blending mode to luminosity and what that's going to do is that this is going to like essentially crush all the luminosity down to the luminosity of this adjustment layer and you can actually see the hues of the image and if i increase the human saturation you can see all the colors that are found in the image but see that see how one of the reasons that this is not looking as as good is because there's a difference between the the uh foreground and background and to make it even more obvious because actually i don't think this is i'm going to make a like a fake adjustment here like let's pretend that this is what the original image looked like just to make it even more obvious so if i go into selective color and select neutrals and just bump up the you know blue and all these different colors i think that'll make it more obvious and i'll merge these two so that we know we're you know like let's say our original image is that right and you're placing this object in here when you do that color check layer that i just showed you you'll see how there's all these different blues in the image that are not found in the foreground element so that's why when you composite sometimes things don't look right because there's these little subtle colors in the background that might not be easy to see and if they're not in the foreground then it clearly looks like the foreground element is not part of that background so by creating a solid color fill layer setting it to something like 50 or you know in this case 53 that's fine as long as saturation set to zero and then creating a hue and saturation adjustment layer and bumping it up to 100 percent you can create this check layer that shows you really what kind of colors you have in the background and what i'm really looking at is not so much at the green of the trees or any of that i'm looking at the street all these things that have gray this should be quote unquote neutral gray to try to see what color cast that image has and notice that his suit it should be technically white but there's actually quite a bit of yellow in there the street should be gray but there's actually a bit of blue in there so what you can do is either adjust the background or foreground totally up to you in this case i'll adjust the foreground element i'll select the selected color adjustment layer and clip it to the layer below with the neutral selected i can start adding a little bit of cyan just to try to bring in some blue reduce the yellow to bring in a little bit of blue and notice now that just by making that simple adjustment the foreground element is kind of looking a lot like the background or the the environment that it's in and when i disable this that just looks a little more much more better than that and i know it's a subtle adjustment you can barely even see it see that before and after but these are those little subtle details that make your composite look more realistic and less fake because now you're taking into account the ambient color the color of this in the background also if i really wanted to match this and make it look more accurate to the scene the model here is way way brighter and has less contrast than the background the background has more contrast and it's darker if you can't see that one of the ways that you can visualize that is by creating a black and white adjustment layer so you can remove the color and just notice how much more he pops and it's okay if the the main figure in your scene pops that's actually a good thing but in this case i think he's popping too much and the contrast is not right so let me work on the contrast so i'll select the layer and then create a levels adjustment layer i use the level adjustment layer often it's super easy to use so i recommend that you use it so what i want to do here is i want to click and drag this over to the right the dark pixels because i want to make the darker pixels on this foreground match the darker pixels on the background also notice that the background really doesn't have anything that's pure white everything here is super super white so i can click and drag this one to the left just to darken the whites a little bit and i can just make adjustments until i get something that looks like it belongs in this particular scene so that it matches and then when i disable the black and white adjustment layer you should have something that matches better before and after see that so this is without the adjustments this is by taking into account luminosity or brightness i should say might be too too much actually so let me reduce it down a bit and then this is by applying that color effect maybe just for the purposes of stylizing the image i can increase the yellow decrease the yellow more and increase the cyan just a little more so just because um things look okay in the check layer doesn't mean that you can't change them afterwards to look better in the actual in the actual scene so you see that just by making these simple adjustments we were able to make this model fit this scene much much better nice that's very yes very good people loving that um i think photo maker said here over sampling a color from the background and adding a color fill layer and reducing the opacity this makes much more sense tracy said this is great i struggle with this um says the black and white adjustment layer is so useful for this just as a czech layer yeah people are loving it so also something you guys can have to keep in mind not all saturation these saturations the same right so let me show you what i mean by that so let me go in here and you know you know i get lost now that they adobe change all these you know that we get all these presets and i i you can tell i've been messing with them because i have them like duplicated like three times and i can't even figure out where anything is now but anyway here here we go you made both so you know what i do though is uh if you go go back in there i got a tip for you i got a tip for you go back to your um gradients your just show all the gradients you know what i do is at the very top see though just i grab the old ones like grab the you know the foreground background whatever ones and i drag them above the groups so the basic ones are always at the top you know yeah but look at what i did here for some reason i don't know what i was doing and i just kept duplicating them sync presets i i wiped out all the presets on all my machines from sync yeah so be careful guys if you use that back them up before you do it because you can get some unpredictable results anyway definite please so so we are talking about that not all saturation is the same right so let me just duplicate this in case now i don't want to we have to redo it but um so you know how do you desaturate a layer well one way is by going into hue and saturation and desaturate and that's the result you get right and then another way is by going into vibrance and reducing the saturation same same name right saturation slider and look look at what happens completely different result do you guys know why that is colin do you know why that is and let me just do one more like i can even do a black and white adjustment and we're going to get a different result so just because you're desaturating or removing the color in in photoshop you're not going to get the same result no but almost every method gives you a different result and the reason is the math behind all these different things and if you notice the human saturation adjustment layer uses the hsl l very important lightness color mode that's not the same as the hsb color mode see that so these are two different color modes hsb and hsl a lot of people use the word brightness and lightness or luminosity interchangeably i've probably done it a bunch of times but they're technically not the same thing so that's why when you desaturate a layer you get different results depending on the method that you use the hsl method is probably like the most scientific or robotic way of looking at it and what i mean by that is when you um look at an image basically what this is doing is it's taking the the brightness level and the saturation down and giving you a resulting gray base on the math basing on what the brightness value was of this particular color so when i enable this you can see that when i how can i do this i can here we go when i click and drag on here you'll see that the hue is the only thing that changes but the saturation and brightness does not so when you desaturate with the human saturation adjustment layer basically you're just removing the saturation entirely and the heel doesn't matter and then you're just left with the brightness right and that's why you get a solid flat color because in the eyes of math it's the same number it makes perfect sense but with a vibrance adjustment layer you don't get the same thing you get these darker areas and these brighter areas and different shades why is that well it uses a different color mode this one uses the hsb color mode and this one is designed to be more like the human eye to us humans certain colors may look darker than others even though the numerical value might be the same so in this case to everybody blue will look darker than yellow and i don't know if that's for everybody i got to be sure because it might be different for colorblind people so i'm not sure if that's true or not but it's definitely true if you have normal vision that blue will look darker than yellow it just it's the way that we perceive color so this is why this adjustment layer uses color in this different mode so whenever you're desaturing desaturating layers keep in mind these differences because that will affect the result and that may affect how you edit your your image or the look that you're going for so i most of the times will use the black and white adjustment layer because this is similar to the vibrance adjustment layer but notice that by default it already made some adjustments so you know um it's not a hundred percent the same but it's close enough and it's easier to make than making a vibrance adjustment layer so that's why i use that particular one instead of the hue and saturation adjustment layer that was great thanks thanks for sharing that um well we're we're at 215 so i think we're at a pretty good spot here where let me do one more one more one more okay all right go ahead let us know in the chat if you want one more because we did get to 240 so that was way past the the goal of 225 so let us know if you guys won one last one it just takes a second for it to go through because yeah delay here but i'm sure they do i still wonder if there's a way of identifying what would be color equivalents of grayscale images so we can use the correct colors to recolor the grayscale one any ideas if i understood that question correctly is like can you determine the color that something was was by based on the grayscale if that was that was the way i read that how did you read that colin if there's a way of identifying what would be color equivalents in a grayscale image so we can use the correct colors to recolor because i think i kind of like what you showed because uh you know because we were looking at i guess it's the perceptual versus the uh is that what they call it for the colors um perceptual versus relative or whatever it is i forget the correct names um i mean there is you know like you can sample and just look at the uh the brightness value when you sample it is one way um so i think that's probably what he was asking i'm gonna imagine all right cool so we have one more and thank you all for the 241 likes okay so david david just cleared that up sorry sorry to be he says so he can recolor f uh yeah well there's no real way because you don't know if if the photo was manipulated in any way as far as i know colin i don't know if you have any any different answer than that um you know colorizing a photo is a whole thing maybe david maybe we'll look at that um in a future lfl will address coloring a photo how's that sound right right because that's that's a discussion all in itself cool um and also i'm pretty uh shout outs to matt klaskowski i'm sure that's the only dislike we got on this stream thank you matt for the dislike i'm just talking about matt leskowski's in the husky no no he's not but i'm sure he came in just to dislike this video of course he did yes he did yep and by the way matt's a good friend of ours that's why we're messing with him so big shout outs to matt i'm sure he's the only one that dislikes my videos well maybe he's under here under a different name oh yeah he's known for having fake accounts that's right and disliking everybody's videos um so one more um so here's a composite um and one of the biggest issues that i see with a lot of people is how do they how they remove fringing or edge halos when you max mask something so see that see how this is a shotgun original the original background was white but then we have like this halo around there there's actually a tool that i don't see a lot of people using that i think works great if you have a layer mask selected there's actually a filter that's designed specifically for masks so if you go into filter other we have the maximum and minimum filters they work the same way one increases a max the other one decreases it so if i go into minimum you can see that this slider will decrease the will contract the mask and the algorithm is actually really really good you can decide to preserve roundness or squaredness i prefer roundness for two reasons number one is where when working with organic objects like a person it keeps the roundness better i guess that's why they call the name but also notice that roundness also gives you decimal points so you can um adjust in you don't you're not stuck with just whole numbers so what you can do is just maybe increase this slider accordingly just to you know reduce it so that the um the fringing goes away and obviously you will have to experiment with that and see what works best for the image that you have also another advantage of using this technique and i'll undo this the other advantage is that sometimes you may have a great great selection but maybe only one part requires that so just like with any other filter you can make a selection and then go into filter other minimum and just work on that area without destroying the rest of the mask see that so i think this is a really really powerful way of just removing fringing from images uh the question often comes up is isn't that the same thing as either going into select modify and contract when you have a selection active so the answer is no it's not the same thing for two reasons number one is contract only the select contract option only works with a selection not a layer mask and also number two is you only can work in whole numbers so you can use decimal point so those are the two reasons why they're different and the other question is well what about the shift edge on the select and mask workspace that's sort of the same thing but notice that even at negative 100 see negative 100 here look at how i didn't really remove the fringing see that see how it's still there and the edges are really jagged and i would have to start smoothing the selection and maybe adding a bit of contrast and doing so much work and i still don't get something that that removes that fringing entirely and it doesn't look as good so completely different algorithm it works great i highly recommend that you use it either on a whole photo or just a little piece that requires that mask contraction and also just to show you guys this filter also can expand the mask so you can go to filter other maximum and now i can just create it's essentially creating a stroke but it's it's really part of the mask see that and look at how good the algorithm is see how it keeps the edges really really nice it keeps those little bumps so it creates that effect you see there so highly recommend that you use this filter when you're trying to remove halos or outlines from your photos so people loved that tip like yes excellent tip again great tip best tip today um and then rob barry of course is not satisfied he wants one more and then there's people asking we've had several people asking how do you blend images in collages how to blend image i mean that's a whole nother stream but um i guess the best thing that i can tell you about blending images and and collages is well how about this we'll do one more calendar i don't have to go but we'll do one more this is this is about blending images right so i'm going to disregard the collages part because the collage in my at least how i understand that word it's almost like when you're a kid and you're cutting photos and collaging them you know like when you're in high school and putting pictures of your friends or whatever it really doesn't doesn't matter how you collage them as long as it looks good to you but when you're blending images from this different sources to create a composite like make it seem like the person is there then it matters a lot and one of the things that matters the most is perspective we couldn't spend all day talking about perspective but the one thing you have to keep in mind is there's a surface and it's a person or object standing in that surface if you want to make it seem realistic then you have to keep perspective in mind so you have to look at the image and figure out a couple things i in my head it's really easy to think about it these days is where does the ground plane meet the sky because and no matter what image you're looking at if you have a ground plane usually the floor or the street or whatever it is there's usually a person standing in in there and on there and then there's converging parallel lines and they always end up at the horizon line which is at a vanishing point which is at the horizon line and the horizon is always where the ground plane meets the sky just it is what it is and if you study uh perspective drawing that's what it is and if you are like a 3d artist then you understand that as well in a photo you have to find um all the leading lines so you see how these lines right here on the side of the street and the railing lead to like right about her hip so that's where where the vanishing point is that's where the horizon line is um if you um another way to think about it is like the horizon line is always at eye level right but what does that mean on a photo where well where was the camera in relationship to height and tilt when the photo was shot so in this case i can imagine a photographer maybe stan maybe like kneeling like they're on their knees maybe or on one knee and they're just taking a photo looking up a little bit so then you could you could make the argument that the her horizon line is like right here on her hips and it can't be much higher or much lower than that and if we look at this image we follow all the parallel converging lines you'll end up like right about here and if you imagine this image without any buildings or or anything else you you probably can assume that the horizon line or where the ground planes meets the sky will be right about here you don't have to be perfect you can be close enough right about here so then if i wanted to composite her in in here and let her be in perspective then i wanted to place her summer around this range you don't have to be perfect but the closer you are the better it'll look so right about here she would look good so i can click on the remove background button to remove the background and you know she looks like she's she's there obviously i have to work a little bit with the shadows and color matching and all that other stuff that i did earlier but the most important thing is perspective because if i place her like right up here she doesn't look like she belongs the perspective doesn't match if i put her down here it doesn't work either only when i place her more or less in perspective is when the image starts looking uh starts looking better so i hope that um i hope that what happens when there's no um visible horizon well you have to imagine it right so like for example let me i think i may have an image here that might help me illustrate it um give me one second okay so like right here right we don't this is the same image of that woman in that superhero thing we don't have a horizon line right let's just assume that she's jumping in the air so it doesn't matter but let's just assume that she was standing on the ground so she's not she's not floating or anything she's like under tipito um where do you think the photographer was when the photo was shot was he what was he kneeling standing where was the camera tilting just by looking at it i think um that the photographer was you know his eye levels maybe like right about here will be my guess somewhere around there and there's a couple context clues right so if you're looking at um i'm trying to see if i have something here like on i don't know my phone for example right if i'm if i'm right at eye level i cannot see the bottom or the top part of the phone if the phone is below my eye level that means the horizon line is here and i can see the top of the phone if the phone is above my eye level then i can see the bottom of the phone so i'm actually using like imagining her thigh like as a a cube like a like a you know like a rectangle cube type of thing so i can't see the bottom of her legs so then that does that means that you know the hor i mean i can barely see the bottom but i can definitely see the top you know what i mean so i'm imagining that i'm imagining that if if her waist uh if she was invisible and i can see the waist of her pants i would still be able to see the top part of the pants so then that means the horizon line is on top of that you know so i'm just imagining like what can i see she's leaning forward a little bit which is why i can see her shoulders so maybe i don't think the horizon line is this high up i think it's right about here so i'm just have thinking about all these context clues in my image to try to figure out where the horizon line is is in an image that doesn't have any parallel leading lines but i can definitely tell you one thing we can rule that the horizon line is not up here so you know like this is probably like my my no man's land like right up here there's nothing there and it's probably not down here either right so in a composite i know that the horizon line that i placed her in needs to be somewhere in here and that will make the composite sort of realistic ideally i could really figure it out and see where it is also here's another tip um think about when you're shoot think about a photo with your phone or with a camera right i'll use the phone since i have that here if you're shooting straight on right straight straight forward the horizon line would be right about the center of the image but if you tilt your camera down now the horizon line will be above the center of the image if you tilt your camera up the horizon line will be below the center of the image so these are all the little context clues that you need to look at when you're looking at a photo to determine where the horizon line is i hope that answers the question i know it's a little long-winded but i felt that i needed to to mention all those things yeah that's great um that's very useful you know these things are you know sometimes you realize it but you know sometimes you need someone to explain it to you for you to actually you're like oh yeah yeah okay that makes sense you know i've seen that but until someone explains it to you don't necessarily understand right what what you're what you're looking at or you're just having yeah um you know like people like okay yeah that makes sense you know because i'm looking at you know i'm walking and i'm seeing the tops of things and bottoms of things and then it all kind of comes together and i think that helps and you know definitely you know people are thinking loving these tips you know people are just and by the way i think that matt heard us calling him out because i don't see that one dislike anymore oh he took it away okay now i'm coming now i'm convinced it was matt kloskowski uh must have been if not it was uh glenn dewis so oh yeah yeah yeah glendois or matt are always this like in her videos guys that's not how you say his name you know it's glen jewish you know this is the british the british jewish dues is how the british president but his but i think like his real pronunciation from like i don't know where the name origin is i think he said it was dewey or something like that no no no no because i said it once i said uh glenn dewis and he actually said um i was the first one in america to say his name right all right all right do you guys know glenn by the way you guys know what we're talking about these are friends of ours um yeah check out glendois also glendo is on his book his photoshop book is i mean i know you have like 30 something books colin but no i need 20. come on man only 20. there you go uh but glenn uh dewis is just uh i just saw that he posted on his on his facebook page that he's got a uh a photoshop book coming out um oh yeah that's right from rocky with rocky nook because what was it photoshop no it's a masking photoshop masking or something uh let me see if i can find it so we can share it asking uh let me see i should probably just go on his facebook because i know that okay so kathy kathy says i said his name right because she knows him okay all right so i feel like i've accomplished something uh fellow brit as you said colin all right well well well people don't know colin where you're where you were born though i think i think that's why you know how to say it well actually they do i think oh they know they where was colin born let us know in the chat if you know where he was born okay that's good yeah let's find out let's find out okay so here we go so this is um i'm gonna paste the link in the chat and i guess i'll show it now while people are typing that up but this is a glenn dewis's new book it'll be uh out the 17th of august of this year and it's a photoshop layers and selections book and he always does some fantastic stuff so check out glenn and his book and i'll paste the link in the chat oh chris and tracy got it right they said oh scotland so scotland wow you got some real fans there auckland then new zealand that's right wow under under a bush under a bush in scotland yes yes new zealand all right you guys got it right yeah yeah so so you're you're you're a kiwi via scotland how is that saying uh you're a kiwi way of scotland or something like that i don't know the same i don't know sayings guys i don't know what i'm trying to say sounds good um beyond the wall yeah from the frozen north yeah yeah yeah but then i moved to the sunny south which trust me parts of new zealand were very chilly too um nice so anyway that was that was good all right yeah so we went an extra 30 minutes thank you for the 250 likes look at that 250 likes and zero dislike uh thanks again matt for don't worry don't worry we'll get the dislikes on the replay yeah scottish kiwi there we go jason you're right so thank you i want to thank you jesus for um joining us uh two weeks in a row last week you guys couldn't hear him because i had to figure out the audio turn out i had to install an audio driver but you don't care about that uh but you know hey thanks for giving up um your afternoon and um you know you're probably starving for lunch now i'd buy you lunch well i'll buy your lunch next time hey man you could always over me something i can uber use some lunch you know well i'll send an uber from here and oh yeah yeah yeah from your house you'll make me a sandwich to get the guy to pick it up and then yeah the world's most expensive sandwich but it it it's only like a short six and a half hour drive to your house colin yeah yeah you know i could put it in a tesla and just kind of send it there and autopilot yeah there you go might not make it but yeah actually the battery it would it would probably die halfway there doordash so there we go there we go doordash that's right all right everybody thank you so much thank you so much for joining us it was awesome being here and uh yeah i hope to see you guys again soon and keep enjoying the um live from lockdown i guess this is week 46 colin this is week 46 yep my god that's amazing excellent man good job so that and the crazy thing is you know we had a few weeks off for uh max and christmas uh you know different times like that holidays so um guys we've been on lockdown we've been doing this for a year um that's right so i wanna i wanna thank you guys you know especially you know a lot of you who have been here every single week you've never missed a week which is just absolutely incredible a lot of you have missed a couple but most of you are here every time uh thanks guys for you know for doing that and you know the reason we're doing this is you know because we're not selling anything we're not yeah we're not doing this for that we're doing this because we're doing this for likes okay well we do want likes we beg for likes but yeah we were begging for likes but this this is about community and it's about all of us coming together and um you know and just you know sometimes you know one of the things that unites us all is art and we have a passion for art and photoshop and it's great that we can come here and call them put us side by side man oh yeah yeah yeah hang on a sec i'm really good at there we go now we're talking oh by the way i went to headphones um my airpods died um oh no in the middle of it so um yeah i switched to headphones but anyway so yeah no but this is why we do this and you know craig is asking are you going to be around after a lockdown definitely not colin's going to go party hard as soon as the i mean i think colin wants to move to texas now that they opened up completely oh no oh no um so yeah i don't know maybe um yes i did say that um we've actually had that question a few times after lockdown what's gonna happen to life from lockdown is it gonna end or what's going to happen um we're still going to continue to do something you know obviously it's not going to be called live from lockdown once we're not locked down um it'll be live from not locked down or unlocked it'll be unlocked you can just call it that photoshop photoshop cafe unlocked there you go yeah there you go so um yeah we're gonna do something um i i have pledged that i don't know what it's gonna be um you know it might not be weekly it might be we'll figure all that when we get to it because right now you know the advantages you know people like jesus and i we're home um because this you know bounces around i guess the uk every now and then but um you know whereas in normal times you know we're traveling a lot you know you and i i can take my glasses off i don't have to read um we uh you know we do conferences and stuff together all the time so you know obviously we're not about to do it every week because you know i'm going to be traveling and doing things but we're definitely going to do something you know what's your i haven't seen you in over a year and i used to see you more often than friends that live literally 10 minutes away from me uh same here same here yeah we used to see each other on the road all the time yeah once every couple of months at least at least like sometimes we see each other every week oh i like that i like that comment it says life after lockdown live jerome yeah i'm sorry if i mispronounced your name but that was that's that's a good oh i like that you know why because i wouldn't have to change the logo that much that makes you have a better you know yeah i could keep that oh oh yeah life the little e and the oh i could keep that key did you guys notice the key in the logo um i don't know if you did but yeah yeah you know i never actually says animated in the intro you know i didn't run the intro this week no worries man no internet yeah yeah no intro needed so um so anyway guys uh thanks for coming i think we're gonna let you resume your normal lives um everything will be restored to normal um until next week we're gonna see you for another wonderful episode of live from lockdown now by the way uh jesus tell everyone where they can find you uh photoshop training channel is a youtube channel um subscribe and tick tock instagram jr from ptc um i do one minute tutorials on tick tock you're doing them as well colin so if you if you guys want to see some short form photoshop tutorials tick tock uh colin you're at photoshop cafe i'm guessing and i'm at jrfromptc that's that's right and you can find him at jrptc on uh twitter and other youtube uh not other youtubers other social medias so jesus is very active on instagram uh actually are you actually yeah a little bit no i'm i'm mostly tick tock tick tick tock and um and i'm not doing any dances by the way just just saying thank god for that that's why you have subscribers how many subscribers you have now on um on your he's a big tick tucker i don't know but it's somewhere around half a million like 400 and something thousand all right jason halliday is one of them awesome all right all right guys thanks so we're gonna wait a minute here um don't forget subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet um to where you are here just hit the subscribe button also go to the photoshop training channel i've dropped the link in there maybe i'll drop it in here again um go there and there's a link and subscribe to jesus for some great uh photoshop tutorials as well and we'll see you guys see you next week later everybody thank you bye

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 7,459

Keywords: photoshop, tutorial, photoshop tutorial, learn photoshop, how to, photography, colin smith, photoshopcafe, colin smith tutorial, photoshopcafe tutorial, adobe photoshop, panorama, pano, live stream, live, have a panoramam in photoshop, small planet, tiny planet, fix photo, make photo better, photoshop tips, photoshop hacks, photoshop tricks, tips

Id: -ykJuejqjDI

Length: 94min 26sec (5666 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021