Make AMAZING Photoshop Composites Quickly | Workshop with Aaron Nace pt.1 | Adobe Creative Cloud

[Music] so [Music] [Music] good morning everyone and welcome to another episode of adobe live my name is anna mcnaught and i will be your host today and today i am joined by the one and only the legend aaron nace aka phlearn i'm sure you all have heard of him welcome erin how are you doing today anna thank you so much i'm doing amazing it's just starting to get a little cooler weather here in mexico so i'm enjoying that went on a couple boat rides yesterday so i've got the wind blown face going on i'm super excited you can't beat that oh man i'm sure cooler it's relative it was 32 here last night so oh yeah that sounds actually kind of nice i've been dealing with like 95 fahrenheit for a couple months so i'm super jealous i don't like the cold weather but welcome everyone into the chat hello steve cody susan fairy shawn all of the regulars i hope you're having a great day today and thank you for being here with myself and with erin and for those of you that may not know this story or have seen my instagram story today i actually learned photoshop from aaron and yeah to bring this full circle today to be able to host you is so awesome and so surreal and i remember the first time i met you at adobe max actually the year before we became friends i was so star struck when i ran into you that i forgot my own name i could barely speak and i finally settled down and then a year later you and i got to meet and we we became friends and so now not only have i learned photoshop from you we're real-life friends and now i get to host you so i'm just one happy girl today me too it all comes full circle and it's so fun like our industry and you know creative people artists in general like i find that meeting people in person everyone is just always super cool and open and just like you know even i've got so many people i've like fallen in love with online and i meet a person they're like oh you're normal you're you're cool we can we can hang out it's it's such a really fun community and i'm so excited to be here with you today anna yeah exactly it's so true and i i remember when i met you i was like wow he's super down to earth so chill and so yeah it's it's amazing but i'm really excited to see what you're gonna be working on today and whenever you're ready we can dive right in and feel free to intro that and for everyone in the chat again welcome in and uh if you have any questions for aaron feel free to drop them in the chat and i will feed them over to him perfect yeah please ask questions as we go through today we've got some really great concepts we're gonna be doing conceptual compositing today so we're gonna be creating kind of like a fantasy world it's inspired by the dune movie that just came out like takes place in the desert absolutely beautiful cinematography i highly recommend it um i just wanted to do like a you know kind of like a little bit of fantasy type image and then tomorrow we're going to be doing more practical compositing so that's going to be things you would do with like brands photography type uh you know marketing images things like that for like stock photos and just like more everyday type of depositing but today we're focusing on the conceptual and uh kind of the big focus today is i want to show you guys how you can do really nice color matching and bring composite elements together in a very simple way so we're going to be using levels adjustment layers for most of our coloring work most of our lighting work and i think you're going to be blown away on how powerful levels are and uh basically how you can use a reduced tool set in photoshop but still get amazing results that sounds fantastic i'm very excited because i know i'm going to learn something from you today no matter what you could do i'll always learn something so i'm stoked you ready to get into it yes let's do it let's do it all right so here we are in photoshop so we're starting off with stock photos here this is all going to be stock from adobe stock by the way um i've got my stock photo here and i've got a golden ratio so let's just talk like super briefly let's just make this a little bit bigger about you know kind of like what i'm looking for with this type of image when i'm browsing stock and like kind of where i think these things can go you know so this to me is a relatively intriguing image to start with and when i'm doing conceptual work i want as few clues uh to like modern life as possible like so our background here for instance right is just like a desert you know this desert could exist on any planet it could exist in any space in the world you know this is it's a very kind of like ubiquitous open to interpretation background it's not specific it's not like tokyo or the sydney australia opera house or you know like it's it's very open to the imagination and that allows as an artist that allows me to put kind of like whatever i want into this scene you know i could put something that looked really old in the scene or something that looked like from the future or from x culture or white culture so it's really pretty open our subject in the foreground as you can see uh you can't see her face uh you know her clothing is relatively minimal as well like this could be again from a conceptual piece of artwork it could be from the past it could be from the future so we're looking at very kind of like open and broad um like concepts within the stock photos and those are the images that i choose to start with and then to build forward from there so choosing the right stock photo super important um also i do want to point out that we have the full size stock photos today but when i'm making these composites for the first time i don't buy those stock photos right off the bat what i do is i just use the downloaded previews you know with the big watermark on them uh the reason there is i find you can pretty much tell whether an image is going to work or not in a very small form factor you know like something just like the size of your phone or even smaller like you can look at it for a second and be like oh that's cool or it's not cool you don't necessarily have to get every detail perfect for an image to actually work and oftentimes it's easy to get caught up in the technical side of things whether an image works or not so um for a lot of this process we don't need to work super high res in high detail it's okay to work on small jpeg previews which is like what i did before this all right so i just wanted to kind of get that out there save you guys some money when you're trying to make this type of art too such a good tip so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start off with bringing our golden ratio in so i'm just going to click and drag this directly in there we go fantastic f 4 full screen and let's just go ahead and transform this now uh i got this tip actually from katrina you on a live broadcast uh a couple weeks ago here on adobe live and she brought in the golden ratio and use it for basically like all of her composition work and i just thought it was absolutely brilliant she had it up and she was making you know compositing decisions with the golden ratio up at the whole time let me just lock the transparency i'm just going to make it red real quick there we go and i'm just going to change my visibility down about 20 so with this now i have like a bit of an idea of like where i might want to take this photo so let's just do we'll start with a little bit of a sketch here and this is again like i highly recommend you know just coming in sketching and kind of having fun with the image at first like don't try to create like a perfectly technical composite from the very beginning it i think it always works out a little bit better if you just start off like really kind of simple so we have our leading line basically how the golden ratio kind of works uh just in case you guys are curious is uh you basically have there we go you have this line that kind of spirals up and around there and you know kind of comes off there it's based on math but basically it's it's a way of uh drawing your eye into a photograph and so you want to kind of align structural elements along this path and have them kind of like lead to a focal point that's that's right around here so when i'm thinking of uh structuring something like this i'm like okay cool well maybe i want like a building here like maybe i want something in the background like a big building or something like that that my subject is kind of like looking at you can see she's kind of like looking in the general direction of the golden ratio as well um so that's going to be kind of like a starting point for for this building now maybe we want you know like a a big old sci-fi temple or something which is what we're going to wind up making um you know maybe here in the background we just want some mountains and things like that to give it a little bit more interest obviously we can kind of come in and make some sky happen or something um i want a little bit more interest here so we're going to play around with the idea of like a planet or a moon or something like that behind there as well um we don't have a ton of room right here but this line in the sand that's right here i i kind of want to see if i can shift that a little bit out towards this direction so we're going to play around with that and that's just going to help like i add all of these elements uh kind of like coming across this line so the idea is by having our composition guides up there to start with let's just turn that golden ratio off there we kind of have something to work with as far as our sketch and even at this point like right off the bat i can i can get a sense whether this is gonna work or not um is this gonna be a cool photo i just gotta get the compositing together but um you can tell a lot from this stage already so if you can kind of see it in your eye from here you're in a really good spot if if you kind of did something like this and you don't really like it then it's time to move on and start something else so all right looking really good we have any questions coming in i'm going to go ahead and start bringing some stock photos in no no questions yet but this is a great start and it's going to be really cool cool cool all right so we're just going to go ahead and open these up and again i'm like all adobe stock photos right now this is you know no reason to complicate things um let's just go ahead and bring in our second image so this is uh just some mountains i'm gonna hit v for my move tool we're gonna click and drag from one to another and hit f for full screen okay so let's go ahead and i'll just group this with the sketch uh itself call it a sketch i want to be very organized from the beginning this is because we're going to have a bunch of layers and stuff like that all right so there's my golden ratio [Music] perfect just turn that off for now and then these layers we don't we don't really need those either okay perfect so we have our let's go ahead and group those with themselves just call this mountains fantastic so the next thing i want to do is basically figure out like how do i get these mountains into this scene and how do i make them look realistic right like that's our goal with compositing is like let's make it actually look real if we can so we're going to start by analyzing the light on the on the mountains okay so we've got a hard light source coming from the right hand side and a little bit behind the mountains okay so you can see that just by you know taking a look at our shadows right we have shadows on the left hand side so our highlights are on the right hand side in this case it's just lit by the sun no mystery there so basically we know our light source is coming from the right hand of the photo so let's go ahead and make those mountains off and then take a look at our uh background like what's happening with our background well we have a highlight on the right hand side and a shadow on the left hand side so it lets us know that our sun angle is coming from the right hand side as well so we we need that to match right in this case they do but let's just say i'm just flip this horizontally real quick let's say i brought in this stock photo and it was like this it had highlights on the left and shadows on the right okay what i would want to do is just flip that around so the angle of the light matches as much as you possibly can it's not going to be perfect um the the lighting in the background is a little bit more of a hard light than we have in the foreground the foreground is a little bit softer so it's not a perfect match but at least we want to make sure the angle of the sun is as close as possible so that's big big tip number one make sure those match that's gonna help out so let's go ahead and flip that back over all right so let's go flip that horizontally okay now the next thing i want to take a look at here is the horizon of my background image so let's go ahead and i'm gonna just there we go we're gonna group this layer with itself we're just gonna call this subject fantastic so in our subject image let's go ahead and find our horizon and that's just like where where the world ends basically um so we're just gonna say yeah maybe it's right about right about here you know that's that's we're just gonna guess at the horizon line for for our background image and you don't have to get this perfect you just want to get a general idea of about where the horizon is because when you're compositing images together especially on a scale like this you want to match those horizon lines as best as you possibly can it's gonna make it look more realistic let's go ahead and show you this here so i've got this image here and let's go ahead and just figure out about where the horizon line might be like if these mountains weren't here like maybe the horizon line would be right about let me just grab a brighter color here maybe the horizon line would be right about here and i'm just guessing i don't know where the horizon line is but i'm just i'm imagining these mountains aren't here and i want everything to blend in you know maybe even it's a little bit lower okay so let's go ahead and start lowering the opacity and seeing where these kind of blend in so if i just kind of move this around right i'm going to move my background around and kind of compare it to the foreground so if i put the background up like way up here where we have the horizon of my mountains is way up here but the horizon of my stock photos way down here you can see that it doesn't match right like these mountains look like they're in the sky now um even if you did a perfect blend whatever it still wouldn't match now if i take this and put this too low it also doesn't really work the mountains look like they're cut like underground right we have a real perspective issue here but if i take these and like try to match them as best as i possibly can the horizon line from my foreground and the horizon line from my map back the background the mountains you can see already we get a much more realistic image something that you know perspective wise looks like it could exist so that's just a really good place to start now i'm going to go ahead and make these a little bit smaller controller command t i want to just get as much of this as i possibly can here together maybe bring that up just a little bit and again you don't have to make these things perfect but you want to get them as close as possible so let's go ahead and i'm going to just turn off those horizon lines for now and then start to just like move this into place and right about there starts to look pretty good all right so the next thing we want to do is start with our blending let's just delete the horizon lines we don't need them anymore don't need that anymore too okay so we're going to start pretty much immediately with blending these mountains into the background and we're going to be using levels adjustment layers to do this now you don't have to get this stuff perfect right off the bat you can continue to kind of visit revisit it over and over again but we want to have a good understanding of how levels adjustment works because in my opinion it's one of the best ways to composite things together and make them look realistic so let's go ahead and bring our opacity back up to 100 i first want to just pop a layer mask on this right i need a layer mask on here i just i need a carve away space for my subject right she can't she's gotta exist in front of the foreground or in front of the background rather there we go so just masking that out it doesn't have to be perfect by the way especially not at this stage we're still in the early stages of this composite so don't worry about like technical perfection this is much more about concept and seeing how this image is going to work you can always refine selections and layer masks later all right let's just make a large soft edge brush and i'm going to paint black here there we go just kind of painting it away and letting it fade into place there we go we have um excuse me a question from fairy about uh photographing photo assets for compositing and making them match seamlessly through color tones and perspectives do you have any tips on that that you could share while you're working definitely so what you want to do there is kind of just keep these same things in mind like um if you're photographing your subject with a 50 millimeter lens photograph your background with a 50 millimeter lens also right you want to make sure that you're about the same height you want to make sure that your camera is you know like pointing uh in about the same direction basically as many boxes as you can check uh like making the uh source image compatible or similar to the composite image you want to make sure those match as well as possible so for instance like if i'm standing at full height pointing the camera straight forward and i'm focused at you know five meters and i've got a 50 millimeter lens on and i'm shooting at f11 if i'm doing that with my subject when i'm going to photograph my background i want to make sure that all those things are the exact same use the same lens use the same aperture if you can you can even use the same focal length focal distance if you want to point the camera straight forward all of those things you want to be consistent and you want to wait until the time of day uh your lighting in the outdoor environment matches the light source from wherever you're photographing as well so just keep all those things as consistent as possible a good composite in my opinion should involve like as few steps in post-production as possible a good composite should mostly come together based on the source images that you choose or photograph any time that i've tried to do composite that looked really different in terms of source images all the photoshop in the world is not going to get you to the place where you would have been had you just had better assets to work with it's like if you want to make a recipe right like if you're starting with like beautiful fresh ingredients uh you're gonna have a nice delicious salad if you're starting with like old lettuce that's wilting and you know peppers they're all wrinkly and gross and you know no matter what you do no matter how good a chef you are your salad might be a little weird so um let's just start with those elements as consistent and as good as possible if you can so so true such a good analogy [Laughter] yeah so similar similar idea with uh compositing here in photoshop okay so the next thing i want to do kind of just like taking a look at these mountains and in the background where i want to put them so let's just go ahead and uh draw a little bit right here on on the background so we can see so in the natural background for this photo as you can see it gets farther and farther away it gets lighter in color right like my mountains or desert back there is much lighter than here which is lighter than here so it's going to get lighter in color i'm going to see less of it okay and it's going to look more and more like the sky and that's because of atmosphere we're actually seeing through particles in the air and that's what's obscuring our vision from seeing all that stuff there in the background so when we bring in this image look how dark the shadows are here look how uh dark the highlights are here as well compared to what we had before so that's the first thing we need to start with we need to get these two closer together okay and we're gonna use a levels adjustment layer to do that so let's go ahead and grab our adjustment layer we're going to go to levels and then i want to make sure to clip this i want to click on this little icon here this is our flipping mask icon so let's go ahead and click there as you can see the uh levels adjustment layer bumps over the right hand side and i have this little down arrow okay what this means is my levels adjustment layer because i clipped it is only going to be visible where the mountains are visible so super important we want to make sure to only affect one layer at a time okay so we're going to be using levels adjustment layers now the big deal with levels is they come standard just with rgb right so when you adjust all of these little sliders and dials it's just affecting light and dark okay it affects your red green and blue channel all at the same time and it basically is making like gray scale uh changes to your photograph which is not photographically accurate because really no light or color is completely gray scale you're always going to have like a little bit of red or a little bit of green this it's just always going to exist so my big tip here and we're going to continue to show you this over and over and over again is when you're going through your color channels you want to don't don't stick with your rgb in fact i say just ignore rgb pretty much all the time okay if you do this it's going to make a big difference in your work so always start with the red channel the green channel and the blue channel you got to work with all three of those to really get great results now you can see little keyboard shortcuts here i'm on a mac it's going to be option three option four and option five so you can switch between them you can i've got those keyboards mapped to my tablet as well so i can go back and forth between them um hopefully one day we get an expanded view with levels to where we can see red green and blue all at the same time that'd be great but for now we're just going to switch between all right so let's go ahead and just start with the green channel i'm going to do without keyboard shortcuts for now so you can kind of get an idea of what we're doing all right so let's talk about our red channel well the first thing we're going to we want to do okay is i need to make the dark areas of my photo not as dark basically i need to make the darks lighter uh it's that's going to help it match with the background so we're going to start with our red channel i'm just going to take our darks and we're just going to click and drag this the from the left to the right you're going to see that's going to put a lot of reds into my image okay it's also brightening up the dark point now let's go to our green channel i'm going to just grab this and we're going to do the same thing with green and then we're going to go to our blue channel and i'm going to do the same thing with our blue channel and then somewhere right about there we're looking a lot better and i i don't even have i i don't know where these sliders go right now i didn't write any of this stuff down i'm just doing it simply by looking at the image but already you can see like there's our before and there's there's the after now it's a little bit too blue it needs a little bit more yellow and a little bit more red so let's go back to our red channel here i'm just gonna adjust this a little bit there we go until it's you know just kind of fitting in a little bit better um and then our green channel there we go and you can just kind of slide these around and get an idea of what works okay so now let's go ahead and take a look at the highlights of this uh background here right we've done a good job with the shadows but the highlights the you know the sky is a little bit too dark so now we're just going to take this i'm going to push this from the red channel okay this is our highlights areas red channel green channel blue channel we're just going to go you know with each of those um and until it starts to look a little bit more like the background there we go each of these color channels and right there all right so already you can see we're in much better shape than we were before right like there's nothing there's the image and we just popped it in and there's with one level's adjustment layer right so crazy i know it's so nuts you don't have to do much so now i'm going to just adjust my midtones i'm going to make it a little bit darker so we're going to go to red channel the green channel and then the blue channel i'm just gonna pop in between these and i'm just looking for like a relative match between the foreground and background and then my shadows here are just a little bit too dark uh still so let's go back to our red channel okay we're just gonna pop this and push this to the right a little bit making it lighter then we do the green channel there we go and then we're gonna go to the blue channel all right so what we're doing here is effectively uh working with our light and our color at the same time we're adjusting all the color channels we have effect over our highlights mid-tones and shadows and it can make a huge huge difference in in a composite like this as you can see now i'm looking at go ahead a couple a couple people from the chat are wondering about the difference between using curves and levels and if there's any benefit of using levels over curves that's a really good question um person levels do very similar things they edit information in a very similar way curves are a little bit more complex than levels and you can do some additional things with curves that you can't do with levels but in my opinion levels are very easy to understand and they're very easy to use in in this way so if you really like curves you can definitely do this with curves um i just tend to gravitate towards levels because um i'll just show you for instance like here's what you can do with curves like you could go to your red channel with curves let's just make this a little bit bigger there okay i could like make my shadows a little darker then i could bring this up then i could bring that down i could bring that up and i could bring that down you can do this with curves right like you can have control points on many different places of your curve so technically curves are more powerful than levels um i just find that personally there's very few instances when i'm making this many adjustments across like the uh across the image right because you can see here in the foreground it's making like some of it red and some of it green and some of it red and some of it green um i i think that maybe if i was like uh uh you know much better at this i might use curves to be honest with you because you can get more control but i haven't come across a situation yet where i have felt like levels weren't good enough if that makes sense yeah so that's why i use levels here they're they're just relatively easy to understand in in my opinion and um relatively easy to work with you got you got five sliders per channel and you can just push and pull each of them and you know and and get the effect that you want so yeah i'm a big fan but yeah really good question yeah thank you for clarifying that hope that answers everyone's questions about that that was a really good tip yeah but again if curves are your jam if you're like a you know if you're a huge fan of curves keep keep using curves there's nothing wrong with first really they you know at the back end on like the mathematical level of what's happening it's all the same right like you know it's just it's just taking your your red channel and it's taking your black point for the red channel and and moving your black point that's going to happen in curves it's going to happen levels it happens with a bunch of tools um it on the back end it's the same it's just a change in interface uh depending on what you actually want to do all right cool good good question so let's go back to our uh sketch and see what see what our sketch looks like so now we have this and i feel like yeah we're looking pretty good i want to build them out there i think i want to make this mountains in the back even farther away so how do we make something farther away well we just make the darks a little bit lighter so i'm going to go back to my red channel do that go to my green channel push them a little bit farther and my blue channel and you can see how they just kind of like magically look like they're farther away now we're gonna add some like dust and stuff like that to them um to make them look even you know to give a little bit more depth and and interest but basically just as you make your dark areas a little bit uh a little bit lighter it's going to push areas further and further away all right so the sketch is looking good i want to add some dust and i'm going to do this again i'm gonna just do this with levels all right so the the goal of today is to use levels as much as possible to show you like how powerful they really are all right so let's go ahead and grab our dust now for this you can just use a standard brush if you want you don't have to use any type of fancy brush so let's go to our levels adjustment okay dust is going to make things lighter right so i'm going to take my red channel we're going to go here okay green channel let's just do the same and then blue channel we're gonna do about the same there we go now i'm gonna hit ctrl command i to invert my layer mask and then i'm gonna just paint some dust you can do this with a soft edge brush right here just kind of painting it in and i'm gonna paint and notice how it's above my mountains right so when we think about this we want our mountains to be they're way way far behind and there we go and then this dust is going to be in front of the mountains okay i want to make sure that it's color matched too so let's go to our red because you can mess this up right like you can see right right now this dust doesn't look real um because it's cyan right so i want to make sure to i want to make sure to color match this dust that's the real benefit we're going to be working here with levels is that i can i can just make anything the exact color that i wanted to um sean is asking uh who do you look up to for photoshop skills is there anyone that you go to to learn new things oh that's a really good question i mean youtube is like the best place to go for for everything uh photoshop in my opinion um i would say i i definitely watched a lot of like in the beginning when i was like getting to know the software i watched a ton of tutorials like as much as i could possibly absorb and i think that's the best way to start um after a while after it gets it's like cooking you know if you if you cook a lot and you watch a lot of cooked shows and you make a lot of recipes you kind of get the hang of it and then eventually you're gonna know like oh this tastes good with that let's try this other thing and put them all together and see how it works so um i feel like tutorials are really great place to get to know a technology and to start being more comfortable with something but after you get to the point where you're already comfortable in an ecosystem then i for me i tend to draw more inspiration from other people's artwork rather than like technical stuff because the technical stuff i feel pretty comfortable with already so i'm looking at artwork and that's in a lot of different fields you know photography uh graphic design 3d all types of other stuff that's where i tend to get my inspiration and then i try to translate that into the photoshop field awesome cool good good question all right so let's go ahead and turn our sketch back on and i have this building this is kind of like the most important thing uh that that i want to make here uh so let's go ahead and make a new layer i'm gonna group that with itself controller command g and we're just going to call this uh tower there we go now uh what we're going to do is uh i'm just going to grab my lasso tool we're gonna we're gonna just make this thing mostly with the lasso tool believe it or not so because why not um so i just want to make it about that shape and keep in mind we can change this stuff at any time this is nothing is fixed right we're all good to go so let's just go ahead and zoom in and you know that looks pretty good to me i want to just you know create this i'm going to just make it go straight down kind of straight across you know very simple tower okay so we've got our tower there and i can just start filling this with a color if i want to so i'm going to hit b for the brush tool uh i'm just going to grab this color here in the mouse it's maybe a little bit darker and just kind of paint that in there there we go so that's that's our that's the beginning of our tower right it's very very simple so let's just go ahead and make another one uh controller command j controller command t right click and then we're going to flip that horizontally so we have just a duplicate of it right i want this relatively similar all right cool so it's matching our sketch so even like at this at this stage of the composite like i'm trying to imagine like is this cool like does it does it look good like are we are we gonna continue to see this evolve and be interesting or is it like or is it done is it boring you know that's that's a really important thing to to know at this stage of the game like you know are are we doing it um and i think we're starting to look pretty good we got to use our imagination a little bit but we're starting to look a little bit better now a couple things that need to happen obviously like it doesn't look like it's there right it looks like it's more of a graphic so the first thing i want to do is make it look like it's actually in that space so let's just take these left and right towers i'm gonna hit controller command e to merge those together so i want to go ahead and put them back in space and to do that i need to make the darkest area of these two towers i just need to make that a little bit lighter okay because we can see you know here in my background we're dealing with sand we're dealing with dust and they just need to get a little bit lighter okay so we can do that with our levels adjusted layer so let's go ahead and grab an adjustment layer we're going to do that with levels you guys are going to be so sick slash in love with levels by the end so we're gonna go ahead and grab our red channel just make that a little bit brighter here on the darks do the same thing with the green channel and then do the same thing with the blue channel and just go a little bit further i don't you know i don't know these numbers i'm just you know kind of doing this by eye there we go it needs to get even lighter go something like that red channel all right a little bit more so you can see just some fine tune adjustments but as long as we get our our colors right it should start to look like it's actually back in that environment right and we don't have to make this perfect we can do all kinds of changes but you can see already you know this just looks like a floating triangles and now it's starting to look like it's back there in space a little bit right so we're just kind of working with like the overall idea and and the depth here with this composition so for now we're just going to make that invisible because i want to do more compositing we got to bring in a lot of texture and things like that right it's not it's not going to work at this at this stage it's just it doesn't have any textures and it's too flat it's not going to look like a photograph so the first thing that we're going to do let's just go ahead and take a look at the edge of our mountains back here okay you can see it's all jagged right there's so much detail here on the edge of these mountains uh and as opposed to this triangle which is just perfectly flat and straight okay so what i want to do is try to bring in some of this detail that we have in these mountains back here i'm going to bring that in to the um to the triangle and i can just do that with a layer mask and a lasso tool so let's just grab a layer mask i'm going to hit l for the lasso tool just use a regular lasso tool and we're just going to go in and i'm going to just kind of do this and like very intentionally make it all like crickety and jaggedy and and crazy right like this is i'm trying to make like natural elements and again i'm taking inspiration from the elements that already exist in this scene and trying to match them as best as i possibly can so you know when we're building this environment when we're building this world we're building an art concept you know we want all of the language to be uh relatively similar right like okay we're in the desert we've got all these rock outcroppings how would they how would they build this giant tower right well they probably use some of the rock that's around there to do it seems to make pretty good sense so you know yeah um so this is i want this to have a little bit of that like rock feeling to it right yeah this is so smart to do it the lasso tool this so often when i'm trying to paint a rough edge i have a rough brush that i use and i don't know why i didn't even think to just use my lasso and draw down the side yeah right it's like oh cool so there we go that's that's lasso tool for you that just that just did it and you can see already it works pretty well and we'll just do it at a few different scales you know i'm not a zoomed in right now so we have like a a bit of a larger scale lasso tool and you can just come in here and add detail as much as you want right there's no um yeah there's no right or wrong here you can change this at any time too and when i'm making stuff like this i will generally try to do you know part of it uh you know to go take a break go do something else for a little while then come back and take a look at it again and see how we're looking so already you can see it's much more natural right let's take a look at this thing on the side versus this one i just need to do my lasso at a couple different um scales right so we're zoomed out here this is going to give me my big variations and then we're going to zoom in a little bit more and that'll get small variations all right nice cool do we have any questions this will just take like a minute uh let's see uh sean was asking if he pulled down the rgb channel first and fine-tune the colors would that be quicker yeah you can definitely yes you can definitely do that and that is how i've done things historically i've just switched to not using the rgb at all more out of like i just want to get really good at learning where everything is you know on on a little bit of a more granular scale but yeah that that would be a really great way to uh to at least to get like started and to like know where things are um i think especially when you bring in the keyboard shortcuts for the levels which is like option one or three four five on the mac um then you can actually start to work really really quickly with with the different color channels and just this morning i've mapped them onto my wacom tablet so i can do it really as fast yeah so it's a it's a very new workflow for me i i've literally just started doing it this week and i've been using photoshop for uh as long as i can remember um so you know if i i wouldn't be surprised if i make you know changes to that workflow as time goes on like we all agree yeah have you been making much art for just for fun lately or kind of focusing on other things yeah yeah i've been doing a lot of art for fun i've been doing a lot of 3d stuff as well having a lot of fun in i use blender is completely free and there are a lot of really great tutorials online for it and um i've just have a ton of fun with that so yeah i'm kind of going through a little bit of an art renaissance period for myself how about you anna yeah i've been trying to get back into things i i tend to end up taking a break over the summer uh to focus on like travel photography and and just being in in the travel world in general and then uh i always find that fall and winter i end up being my most creative self and kind of getting back in the zone oh why do you think that is i don't know i think uh i think a lot of it has to do with just maybe getting cooler and like wanting to be inside and at my computer and in the summer i'm like i want to be out hiking and exploring and yes yeah and so my husband and i run a travel business together doing like brand travel photography and um i think i may have told you a little bit about it like in our camper van and whatnot so we're always on the go and that makes it a little hard to actually sit at the computer and do photoshop work and actually focus you know yes 100 yeah yeah i feel you there yeah when i'm traveling i don't tend to think about much else except for like being in the moment yeah it's so important and especially when you're in such a beautiful place you want to be able to just spend time there and not be like oh i gotta do some artwork or sit at my computer a 100 yes take time and enjoy the you know stop and smell the roses as it were yes exactly exactly all right so we're almost done with this lasso tool cut out i know so literally the longest i've ever spent it's gonna last like tool in a tutorial before but all right so we've got like a really jagged logan edge now starting to look a little bit more realistic so the next thing i want to do is start bringing in some texture into this uh shape because it just doesn't it doesn't look realistic at all right so um we've got some other stock photos here let's just go ahead and bring bring this in and i'm just going to click and drag this right in here so i wanted to find something that's you know was relatively similar to um to to the background to the texture of this all right let's just go ahead and make this larger so if we're taking a look let's just make that invisible real quick if we're taking a look at um there we go at the lighting of this photo right we want our light source to be coming from the right hand side so we want you know this should have like a pretty good amount of highlight in it right here okay and then this area should pretty much just be in shadow um so i want to make sure i can replicate that as best as i possibly can with the texture that we have here um you know kind of coming from from this area so i'm just kind of like looking around like okay cool where can i where can i put some things and where are they gonna have the texture that that i actually want so we're just kind of bringing some things down and and again for this um face of things you know i highly recommend just like popping around and trying a bunch of stock photos and see what works you know not everything is going to be uh perfect but you know with any luck you're going to find some things that that really look good there we go so i'm just going to put in this around here i don't know exactly where it's going to go as of yet but right there looks pretty good for now keep in mind i can color match this and light match this later i'm just looking for like texture and and shape that's really that's really important turn this on at any time okay cool so let's go ahead and make a layer mask on this i'm just gonna mask this out from the from the left hand side we don't need it there and i'm gonna duplicate this one and then clip that again all right and then for this guy we're just gonna lasso tool this real quick to just get a quick cut out all right so literally just grabbing the texture go go go and then we have another one let's just move this up here so i can just get like a little bit more that texture moving on that side it didn't quite cover everything that i wanted yeah it's looking so good already though it just like went perfectly into place it's crazy right like this is yeah this stuff is um you know we we tend to i don't know i i tend to make things a little bit over complicated sometimes but really if you can get your color and your light looking really good um you can kind of get away with a lot of this uh like really easy compositing tricks yeah let's put this in here oh cool so i'm gonna go ahead and just apply this layer mask real quick to my background so remember i just started with these triangles and now i'm just popping texture over top of them i'm just clipping them over top right so now what i can start to do if i want to is i can start to make this like uh actually make sense with my texture too right like um i'll just make this a little bit bigger right there because there was already like a rock that kind of did that right like this i can go ahead and cut that out oops [Music] i keep getting the wrong button all right let's just delete that out and then like this i can kind of make that go there we'll just fill that with that so i can start to actually like this you know it's kind of like a really cool element there start to bring this in and it's just going to make it look more realistic it's gonna make it look more like um like the shape that we've chosen actually kind of makes sense with um there we go second cool cool so you can see it's it's starting to like literally take shape right yeah and all these like shadows on the very right hand side i want to get rid of those if i can because those are um you know we we want the highlights to be coming from from the left hand side um so the best the best we can do or from the right hand side so the best we can kind of mimic that uh the more it's gonna look realistic all right but that i'm i'm pretty happy with that for now we don't have to go much uh more in depth from that so what i wanna do i wanna make the top a little bit lighter so i'm just gonna use a clone stamp tool okay just grab a real simple a hard brush here it doesn't have to be fancy all right as for the clone stamp tool we'll just sample that and then paint that right up there there we go so i can do that with any of these shadows if i need to like this is um that shadow right there i just want to cover that up too because that really should not be in such shadow given its location cool fantastic so i'm just really good thanks so much yeah it's going to come together it's going to look uh well you know fingers crossed anyway yeah you never know with compositing right i know sometimes you get to the end and you're like oh god what did i do trash what did i do i thought i knew how to do this i know never mind yep you question your whole life's existence a hundred percent even after it's like i've already like this image i already made this you know and i'm still like whoa is this going to work is this we're in a live broadcast are they going to kick me out it's funny how your confidence changes as soon as you're live streaming it's like wait i don't remember what i'm doing or if this worked or anything 100 yes thankfully i've got you to cheer me on and everyone in the chat yeah everyone's loving it and learning so much people are like he's going to turn me into a professional over here so oh yeah yes we are that's what we're going for um how are we doing on time i'm not even keeping track of it uh we're good on time you still have uh about an hour oh that's perfect that's yeah that's all we need all right oh cool cool yeah this is what i'm doing now is one of the harder things so you know as long as this works uh we're good yeah all right so um that looks great let's just mask that out right over here all right cool so we have basically uh well let's just move that a little bit because it just basically looks like the same exact thing there so kind of what we just talked about before where we had uh you know some shadow uh like shadow on the left hand side highlight on the right hand side that's just what i'm trying to recreate now with with texture and as you can see i'm just literally taking texture from another mountain and just putting it where i want it to go there we go let's just clone some stuff in here to kind of bring these two back together again so real simple also keep in mind that this is going to be like way muted in the background right so this is it's not something that needs to be um like pixel perfect necessarily okay cool so that is our uh let's go ahead and delete that level adjustment there we just made that in there for for fun okay so this is basically like the foundation like of our tower and we can see our sketch yeah we're looking pretty good it's it's not perfect we can change all this thing at any time so the first thing that we're going to do let's just go ahead and take these layers just make them invisible so you can kind of see what we did so again i just like literally have this shape that we made and i'm just popping texture over top of it and you can move this texture at any time okay so now what i want to do is as you guys can see let's just make a new layer here to kind of show you this um the shadows here on this side are a lot darker than the shadows on the right hand side you can see a lot of like blue in the shadows on the right hand side and you can see it here too it's just much much darker um and that is giving the appearance of this on the left being closer to the camera and this on the right being farther from the camera right so we need to fix that first i just need to get these two to match i want the shadow levels here on the left to match the shadow levels here on the right that's our first step and then that's just going to put them in the same plane uh in terms of like our three-dimensional like the z-axis closer and farther from the counter all right so we're going to use a surprise price levels adjustment layer to do that all right so i've got my keyboard shortcuts here mapped to red green and blue my three color channels um so you can do this again really easily uh just by selecting your different color channels up here at the top or you can map your keyboard shortcuts or you can just use whatever's included in photoshop all right i'll just do this for the broadcast because i feel like it's easier all right so we're getting closer right let's go back to our green channel go back to that red channel all right so not perfect i think when you just adjust the greens a little bit but as you can see already looking quite better yeah that's looking pretty good there so now at least like visually i feel like they're they're a little bit closer it could be a little bit darker this moon make it a tiny bit darker there we go so they both look more like they're on the same plane does that make sense anna am i explaining that okay yeah that's perfect okay cool cool cool um so we're in a good spot there looking better the two of them look more cohesive now i need to put both of them back in space so we're going to use the leveled adjustment layer to do that as well so let's grab another levels you can see on the on this one i just masked it so it was only visible with the one on the left but now i want it to be visible everywhere so we'll go back to our red channel just pop that okay go to our green channel or blue channel and again i have no idea where these uh little sliders are gonna go we're just doing it live and see and see where they go there we go but it's gotta be pretty light in color right like we're not we're not dealing with dark areas here um there we go and i'm trying to decide like how light or how dark i might i might want these things to be as well because if it's too light it's not gonna really work for my composition um so i can change like the light values of of the background too like those mountains back there i'm already seeing like the mountains i might want to squish them down so i'm going to hit controller command t shift and just like squish them down a little bit you know and that's just going to make them not compete visually so much yeah that feels better it's like i love when things happen like that you're like ah you know just like a deep breath of like i like how that feels exactly exactly all right and i'm just making them a little bit lighter right so it's like now they're really back in the background and you guys saw how easy that was and i can still turn this layer off and on at any time right that was just the stock photo and there's you know my uh with them a little bit lighter it kind of pushes them back into space a little bit okay so that's the cool thing about working non-destructively in this way is like we can change the stuff at any time there's really no right or wrong um at all so let's go ahead and just do this with my red green and blue again all right and then i want to adjust my highlights as well because there's not enough red in the highlights so we're just going to kind of take some of this highlights from the red green and blue channel as well there we go looking good and my shadows are still a little bit too dark so we're just gonna make those a little bit brighter again this for this to look at all realistic it's gotta like blend into the background like it's it's really going to look like it's back there far far far away all right perfect do we have any questions coming in from the chat let's see um i've been kind of feeding them to you as they come in let me see if i missed anything people are enjoying the uh squishing of the mountains and uh seeing the magic of levels um yeah so douglas asked about the upper sliders versus uh the lower sliders what what did the upper sliders do if those are for the highlights and shadows uh good question so the upper sliders will control your white and black levels i'll just go ahead and show you this um we have input and output levels the upper sliders this will control your black points so basically anything to the left of this point will become black on the right hand side you have your white point so anything to the right of that point will become white and then in the middle you just have like your mid tones all right by the way if your composite works you should be able to do any of these things like i should be able to push it here and it should still look real right i should be able to do like this and it'll all work together i should be able to do this and it'll all work real too so that's another like really good test like try going in here and squishing all this stuff down and like say hey does this actually look real and like right now i can see for instance my mountains see this like really hard line right there well i need to mask that out right it doesn't it that doesn't look real i didn't even see that before but now we do and we need to go ahead and mask that out from the background so that's you know just a really good way to start testing your images to see if they actually work together so that's basically how uh levels adjustment works um you have your input levels at the top which control like your white and black point and then on the bottom your dark point will control how dark your darks are and this will control how light the lights are there we go awesome and yeah that's such a good question i'm gonna go ahead and just darken my sky like a little bit and uh we're gonna grab a level adjustment layer i'm gonna put this um yeah we'll see where we're gonna put this i don't exactly know yet um could be in front of the mountains could be behind the mountains but i overall i'm looking at the composition and i just want this um i want this to be just a little bit darker it's it's looking better but it's going so far in the background i want it to be a little bit darker um for my composition so let's just go ahead and grab a like uh there we go nice and simple levels adjustment let's see about that yeah it's gonna go in front of the mountains and then i'm just gonna color color balance that with the rest of the photo right there we go so it needs to have a little bit more red so you can see kind of how it's uh it's coming together right and these sliders are you know let's just kind of come in here and grab the sliders and see you know stuart asks does aaron ever test a composition balance with black and white like artists do definitely yeah a lot of the time i actually do work in black and white um and that really helps to get an idea like overall of of where the colors are or where the light levels are in in a photograph so yeah we can in fact when i built this composite for the first time i did it in black and white i highly recommend doing that um yeah that's a really good tip i haven't done that in so long i kind of forgot about doing that yes it's uh yeah it really helps out just to like see the light levels and i i do feel like it really helps with just an overall composite as as well there we go um and then sally asks at what point will you double check with the golden ratio oh yeah so that's on here i can just turn that off and on at any time to kind of like balance things um also we want to keep in mind that we can totally just move this stuff whenever we want you know so um it's we're not we're not set it doesn't have to be exactly where it is um you know like i can move that tower i can move uh i can move any of these elements at any time i'm just gonna make my background like a little bit brighter here or a little bit darker um and this is just going to help me like add in some of the elements that i want so go i'm going to have to recolor some things but that's not a huge deal as we'll see here just a little bit all right so i'm kind of making my background as a whole just a little like the light levels i'm making a tiny bit darker there we go so now you can see these mountains uh don't really fit in anymore because i changed that i changed the coloring so we can see it's not going to be a big deal to to fix that again so let's just go ahead and reset that okay you can see the mountains still look like they fit uh once more just make sure my mask is looking good so really not a big deal to go in and change this at any time so let's go ahead and just switch to our red channel pop that green channel and blue channel just want to start pushing that way back in the background there we go you can start to see that's looking much much better and then i want to do the same thing with my highlights so let's just pop the red channel cool cool cool all right and i'm gonna just bring let's see about bringing down the overall highlights just a little bit cool so you can see we've kind of moved the foreground and the reason i did that is because i want to um there we go i want to uh give myself a little bit more visual space for this tower see how light this tower was before oh yeah in order to look like it was actually fitting in there and it was just getting so light where i felt like compositionally i was worried about it just getting totally lost right like i still want it's it's kind of like the main point of this photo that tower um so i didn't want it to be so uh like light in color i need a little bit more contrast so you can see it's like really not a big deal to kind of come in and just recolor everything uh douglas asked if it's possible to use the levels panel for color grading oh yeah that's a yep that's um 100 possible i would highly recommend it for sure cool yeah i feel like this uh level of darkness and brightness is looking much better now i think so too yeah yeah i was getting a little bit um we were kind of losing the tower you know yeah it's starting to disappear into the dust into the dust which you know can be what you want um [Laughter] but compositionally we kind of needed it to be visible yeah all right so you can see we're pretty much doing all of our color adjustment and light work with uh levels here just going through the different color channels and and working on them i know it's not like the most amazing like and here's this tool and here's that tool and you know sometimes it could be fun to show like 20 different tools and tomorrow's session we're going to be doing a lot more of like that type of work um but i think it's it's super important to um you know to kind of see how powerful these things can be and to see like yeah you can create like really cool composites um using like very simple simple simple tools you know you don't have to do the super complex you don't you don't have to create 12 adjustment layers to color match or whatever absolutely i think it also shows people like really good practice with it too and and continuing to go back to that same tool then you become an expert with it exactly exactly all right cool we're looking pretty good they're not a perfect match uh but pretty good and this is the second time around that we've kind of done this so you can see it doesn't take that long to do and it's really just like pushing these sliders you know from left and right and see like okay what what works here what doesn't work all right and i want those mountains to be a little bit farther away so we're just going to push them a little bit farther still all right we do have some other elements so we're going to go ahead and start bringing those in and kind of see how everything works together so let's go in here and i always when i'm doing this kind of work by the way i will always like get this to a point where i think it looks decent and then um take a break and come back and look at it again and see how it looks on the second coat so i want to bring this like little planet in here too just thought it was kind of a nice detail there we go let's full screen this out um the planet is going to be behind the mountains there we go oh actually i didn't do a perfect job cutting them out so maybe it's gonna be in front of the mountains for now all right and we'll just double click call that planet there we go and i'm just going to change this from a normal to a screen blend mode and just kind of make it really really subtle there in background all right that's looking good and then the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to bring in my um there we go my original psd this was my um there we go fantastic so this was my sketch that i did for for today's class so you can see every time you do this it's going to come out like a little bit different so we have our sketch here on the left um i think i just i like a little bit more detail in the rock on the one on the left than on the one on the right um and i like some of the the color matching that i've got back there as well so we can make those changes at any time but now i'm like okay cool i want a little bit more detail in that rock so let's hit f for full screen that's one of the benefits of you know kind of coming in and doing this um a couple different times like i i always recommend getting your work to where like you like it and you think it you know has a lot a lot of potential and then just take a break and then come back and look at it again yeah that's such a good tip i feel like you always see things that need to be changed after getting some fresh eyes on it a hundred percent yeah and i always send it to friends you know in the early days of me making like art and stuff like that i was very like shy about it i didn't want to show anyone so i was like it's done you know right but now i i really enjoy sending my work to friends because they're you know they always offer really good insights yeah so i highly highly suggest you know just kind of showing your work around and seeing what other people think all right let's go ahead and bring in that golden ratio we can still move this tower you can see i can move this tower at any time none of my work that i've done on it is lost okay there we go i feel like that's gonna fit in just a little bit better there bring in my planet there as well looking good so for anyone who had questions about like when do you bring the golden ratio back in like how do you know where to put it um because we're working like this in a non-destructive way we can just do this stuff at any point in time all right let's go ahead and get rid of that all right i'm going to bring some more dust in front of the tower so let's go ahead and group that together all right and i actually have a brush that i made that is it's like a custom photoshop brush that is actually made for dust and like clouds and things like that and i just made it like with a photograph of a cloud and kind of like repeated it around so it looks like it has some natural texture and there's actually a free photoshop youtube tutorial on how to make this so if you guys want to just go to the learn youtube channel and type in like dust brush or cloud brush it'll be there cool there you go so that's kind of like what we're working with with the texture of this so let's go ahead and just in this dust i'm just going to grab some of this color here and we're just going to kind of paint this here in the foreground and that's going to help it again just kind of push it back into the background a little bit more this is in front of my tower we still have some color matching and things like that to do on the tower because it's not it's not perfect but it's just going to help kind of like push it back a little bit all right and then we just want to carol wants to know if you have saved your work today oh i have not carol thank you so much i know that's always always me whenever i'm working i'll be like five hours deep and it will be like untitled i'm like oh my god i still save this classic air i know like luckily photoshop doesn't really crash that much anymore on my computer but in the early days it was like a real thing yep you know try to use like a liquify with too many like too big of a file it's like boom there goes there goes photoshop i know and you always pray that it will open up and say recovered like please please please please please please i'll i'll pray to the save gods next time i promise i'll save my work you know yeah a hundred percent it's uh yeah thank you so much carol helping us out thank you carol all right so i went ahead and made those mountains a little bit uh brighter as well to push them back in the background so as we can see i i'm not using a ton of like adjustment layers to do my coloring work i'm just kind of constantly evolving it a little bit and again i at this stage this would still be like the sketch stage i i would still do all this with uh like stock um like low res previews like this is the sketch that i did uh in preparation for today's class um and i'll just go to image and image size and you can see we're at 667 pixels by 10 by a thousand like i just used the sample images from adobe um you know you don't have to go super complex with it there we go if something if you can get something to look good really small you can get it to look good big too but if it doesn't look good small it's really not going to look good big in my opinion like it has to work at multiple levels there we go i'm just going to reset this because i'm like not 100 happy with where it's going right now so we'll just go ahead and try it again just grab that level adjustment layer and try it again there we go all right cool and then if we have time at the end of this i have a really fun exercise planned as well great all right how are we doing on time man uh we are good on time you have um about 40 minutes oh cool awesome let's see um i had a question for you where did it go so yemi asks yummy says i follow you on uh phlearn tutorials and i want to ask if 30 day tutorial can help with these functions oh 30 days of photoshop um yeah we definitely do cover levels in in that class so yeah it definitely helped with that yeah thanks for the follow what's up yeah looks like i saw a number of people say that they were coming over from uh your youtube subscribers and youtube channel and uh people looking for your holiday sales on phlearn and i know you usually do like a big black friday sale right yeah we're gonna do a big black friday sale this year wow that was actually how i got in on um phlearn's yearly subscription and was i was doing that for a while from a black friday sale that was a number of years ago but i loved it it was so awesome heck yeah thanks so much for joining in you know being part of the crew is awesome of course i remember the mermaid tutorial that you did where like the big wave was crashing around oh yeah that was so fun and then um the one with like uh i forget what it was called but it was like um oh i think a little boy like laying on a table and he had the blue light coming out of his mouth with like the witches around oh them god that photo shoot was so much fun yeah i always love seeing kind of the behind the scenes that you do and like showing how everything comes together so cool awesome awesome thanks so much this is really cool thank you of course uh someone wants to know how you got the magnifier on the screen oh that's a third-party app called uh pro mouse it's uh you can get it on in the app store cool yeah it's available for uh to write that down too yeah i don't know if they have it for windows but they probably have something similar um cool so yeah now i'm just kind of like working with the texture and seeing like okay cool where do i want to you know make some changes again this texture shouldn't just kind of like move in and out and it can be very um very fluid you know there's no there's no right or wrong to this no and then i just want it to be nothing but dark area on the side so i'm just gonna put this go and i'm just kind of painting in with like a rough brush right now uh between the shadows and the highlights cool let's go ahead and put that right down there all right cool cool i think we're looking pretty good uh looking awesome there we go a little bit more color balance and we're good to go all right we have some dust in our foreground i'm just gonna set that landing mode of the dust to lighten so we don't want the dust to darken anything there we go all right and then the next thing i thought would be kind of fun so i'm gonna look back here at my uh golden ratio you know i think we're looking pretty good we're relatively interesting maybe i can make this a little bit bigger so the cool thing too is like now this tower and the planet i can hit control or command t and i can just scale these up a little bit too you know we're we're just doing everything is like built in a non-destructive manner here so it's not at all a big deal to kind of move them around like you know that's really the workflow that i i want out of photoshop like i want to be able to change my mind and and move things around at any time it just helps a lot in overall like versatility and like where you know like here we just kind of move that tower made it a lot taller and um you know we can kind of make these changes at any time all right because at the end of the day like we we want to create like a beautiful image right like it's i'm trying to make something that's simple but also like like looks relatively realistic and it is beautiful you know and um at no point in the creation process do i want to feel like i'm i'm stuck with whatever i've done like if i'm like oh that tower is not in the right place or whatever like feel free to move it at any time you know there's no no reason you gotta you gotta stick with that decision yeah i feel like i always tend to move things very close to the end of a composite too i will be working with something the whole time have it all color graded and be like wait that's not quite right and then completely change the size exactly exactly um and it's because when things get like for me anyway when composition starts to come together um like without any of this stuff on there right like when when i was just dealing with let's just show you here where it started you know when it just looked like this it's kind of hard to tell like okay how is this really going to fit into my scene but when it starts to look a little bit more real and we've got the detail coming in and everything starts to come together it's like okay cool now i have a sense for like what this is actually gonna look like and you can start to adjust it from there right all right cool we're looking good so the next thing i want to do let's go back to our golden ratio i wanted that moon to be a little bit bigger uh so it would kind of like come close to the edge of my golden spiral and kind of uh draw your eye in there um but one thing we don't have right now like the sky is just kind of like boring right now right like there's there's nothing in the sky i just want some interesting stuff going on back here so i found this picture um i brought in like a bunch of different skies and i was like no that's not interesting enough i want something kind of weird um so i found this picture of a uh of like a lighthouse with waves splashing over it i was like cool i wanna i want that to be the sky of of this image because i haven't seen really anything like that so let's go ahead and bring it in um and again we're just gonna use like levels adjustment layers to to match this in and to see how it looks so first thing we want to do let's just pop it uh we're going to pop it here below the mountain so that's going to go right about there and then i just want you know i want to see how how good i can make this look with just levels adjustment layers to to start with because that's pretty cool right to make that is the sky i'm like oh i've never seen that before so let's try it yeah alrighty so uh let's just group that with the sky we'll just call this waves there we go and pop a levels adjustment later on go right now if you're having trouble seeing like if your bright areas need to be lighter or darker that's always a good time to throw a black and white adjustment layer on it with this black and white layer on here now i can see that like the the sky itself like this area is just a little bit too dark so i i want to make that a little bit lighter so i need to make my darks a little bit lighter and then maybe my light area and maybe make those a little bit darker so i'm got that on there just to kind of see what i'm doing but that's basically telling me that hey my darks have to become even lighter for this to work so let's go ahead and just bring all those in until we get to about the point where we want this again keep in mind with these levels we're adjusting our light levels but we're also just in color at the same time all right oh and that's looks like like a pretty good match to the the sky color around there yeah much better all right so let's just put a layer mask on there and see about passing this away a little bit too green and i do want them um here let's go ahead and do a proper cut out here so our mountains let's just go ahead and make everything else invisible real quick um the mountains i was just doing a really quick cut out with these to begin with but let's do a proper cut out here it's really easy i'm just gonna go with my magic wand tool all right let's go [Music] perfect and then that's gonna be black on my layer mask put that in there and then the waves can just go right behind my mountains because i want them to look like sky right so they're [Music] it kind of looks like a big explosion or something yeah yeah i was just like drawn to this image and i'm just like i don't know can we can we do it yeah can we make it look cool can we make it look like you know somewhat realistic all right so we just need to color match this a little bit better because it doesn't look good and that's the cool thing about this composite process too is like you know i can have some of the i don't have to have everything visible when i'm color matching like i should be able to get this done just as it is right like with a little bit of the image of this one let's take this all right this needs to get a little bit lighter [Music] [Music] whoa nice we have any questions from the chat nothing right now a couple people are leaving so they're just saying goodbye gonna re-watch or watch the replay and that's a great time for a reminder for everyone uh if you missed any of this or want to come back and watch it again you can always watch the replay of this as well as all of the other adobe live streams and daily creative challenges this is a resource for you whenever you need it and don't forget that we'll be back here tomorrow again with aaron at the same time for day two day two we're doing just practical compositing so we've got a bunch of really great examples chosen for tomorrow um stuff that we're going to be running into in like everyday design life as as artists and designers yeah that would be really good looks like you got a bit of a uh line there oh i totally do yeah thank you so much from one compositor to another one all about those i know i always end up finding them after i've published something i'm like are you kidding me or like i'll print something this is so bad like luckily never client work but i'll print something big scale and then be looking at it really close up and i'm like oh my god there's a little tiny line [Laughter] i know i've done that so many times when it's just like you think i would know better by now i know i know i've got to the point now where i'll go in and check my layer mask if i'm doing any sort of client work but you think i would do that for my own stuff at this point you know i got to be smarter than that and yet i don't i feel you one one trick that i do is i'll just grab like a levels adjustment layer and like crank it like left and right yeah i'll show you guys that just a second i'm just cleaning this mask up here yeah that's smart i know we i remember we used to do that like in high school or college just to see if something was edited like see someone's picture be like oh put that in photoshop and put a levels on it oh look she photoshopped that it's like such a good tool to see where someone kind of messed up it really is yeah like uh here we'll we'll just grab one here so you can grab levels and just kind of crank mess with your white point most with your black point and then you can kind of you can see like edges and seams and things like that so this is also an interesting tool because like right now we can see like this uh the mounted thing that i made like this doesn't really look like it belongs here right it just doesn't look perfect and if you do your composite like correctly if you do it well it should look seamless like no matter what kind of weird crazy adjustments you throw at it right like you know it should look good here it should look good there um so it can be helpful to actually like do some of this stuff and then continue to make your adjustments and then you can see like oh cool like i actually need to you know i need to bring in some more reds right there for it to look a little bit more realistic you know um so yeah it can be a really good learning resource to kind of just crank these layers and see like you know how everything kind of comes together after after the fact yeah so so helpful june says i am a member of phlearn and i love these tutorials on compositing oh amazing well i thank you so much and i'm super excited about compositing and i'm planning on doing a lot more we've actually got a really great compositing tutorial coming out uh very soon on flooring too so all right so she's still kind of doing some color matching i know it's not like the most exciting stuff in the world but i feel like it is if you can do this then it's gonna make your compositing life like so much uh better like i feel like you're gonna you know you're gonna be able to just kind of create whatever you want and blend them together and that's just so much fun so so important all right cool looking good so another thing that we can do like if you're at the point where you're like okay level adjustment layer cool cool cool but like i need something a little bit more um you can always grab colors from your image as well so like for instance i'm going to just create a new layer and let's just say i want to grab this color let's just there we go i'm going to grab this color in the mountain so i'm going to grab this color right there okay and then i'm just going to paint this over top of here and i'm going to change blend mode from normal i'm going to just go down to color so it's just going to color it that color the same as the mountains behind it like if you are having trouble getting it with levels um just grab it and then paint it over and then what can be really nice is i can just make this visible in the highlights or the shadows i could just double click here and here my layer style let's just bring these things together i can hold alt or option and then make this not visible in my shadows so it only is now visible in the highlights so basically i'm just coloring the highlights there we go you can see there's the before and after there's a before and after subtle but i'm coloring them to fit in a little bit more and then you can do the same thing with the shadows right like if i want this to be that color i just change it from normal to a color blend mode there we go but then i want this to only be visible in the shadows so i can double click here oh let's just double click and then hold alt or option and then take this away from the highlights of the image so it's only visible there in the shadows awesome yeah so that should kind of help like blend everything back together again a little bit better if you need to do it if you can't get it right with the levels which is like you know working with levels and things like that can be a little bit tricky so it's totally totally uh understandable if you can't get it absolutely perfect how you want it to all right we've got our uh levels in there and cool let's go ahead and delete those so i'm back to my golden ratio for now i think we're looking pretty good uh we've got our sketch there um i think we're actually like pretty close to like where i want to be with this image as a whole one thing that we did talk about with our uh with our foreground here is uh possibly bringing this line in the sand just a little bit more to the right so let's go ahead and see if we can do that i'm going to just hit m for the marquee tool make a selection around the bottom of this and we're just going to go to our uh liquify filter and i'm just going to start by pushing this off to the right a little bit just using my forward warp tool and we want to make a really really large brush that's kind of going to be the key to this there we go so you can see i'm not going to try to move it like too too far because if you if you go too far with the liquify tool things just look all stretched and warped and you know generally not that not that great um but i want to see the other thing you can do is here in your view options you can have a show backdrop turned on and then you can choose whatever layers you want and in this case i can go down to my golden ratio layer all right and i'm going to say put that in front in my opacity all right oh it's not it's not it's not doing what i want yeah sometimes that gives me an issue too i don't know why i don't know why hmm i feel like i can never get that to work really yeah it is kind of tough yeah it's like sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and it's such a useful tool to be able to see that and but yeah that's that's already looking better oh maybe it was okay let's try golden brown because it was in the folder yeah i think so i'll just give that a difference all right so we'll try this again there we go let's make their filter liquify all right show backdrop there we go now our golden ratio is actually showing up let's hit escape on accident there we go and again i'm not going to try to pull this in the sand like so so far go let's just show you sometimes the show backdrop can be a little bit annoying too i'm not going to go all the way but i i want to just bring it a little bit more go just make sure it looks realistic i just want to bring it a little bit more so we're actually like getting some of the cues of that golden ratio all right let's hit okay there let's see how that looks all right so kind of like the footsteps are going up and around in that direction so um let's just show you guys before and after so there's the before you can see uh you know it's kind of just going up in that way and then after you can see we're trying to follow around that that golden ratio so we've really done like all this with the gold ratio kind of like at the at the forefront now now that we've done all this and our composite like you know usually when i get to this stage i will just take some time go do something else come back and look at it again and do some more color work we're in a live broadcast right now so that's not an option but i've i think the colors are okay here i just want to do a little bit more stuff to make them a little bit more interesting so let's just create a new layer i'm going to group that with itself all right we're just going to call this color there we go and i'm going to grab like some of this sand color here in the foreground i'm just going to make a really large brush okay and start painting over this let's maybe go a little bit lighter here there we go and i'm just going to put this like as a soft light layer so i want to just bring some of this color here in the foreground into the background there just a little bit all right maybe this dust i want to make it a little bit less visible um i want to like bring in some interesting color right here in the highlights of these little like uh waves the little splashes um so i'm gonna go to like a color balance adjustment layer let's grab our highlights i'm just going to pull those towards red and towards yellow a little bit and because i'm on top of all the layers right now there we go any um any adjustments that i make are going to be visible for everything so it can be a really good way to make a composite kind of look a little bit more realistic at the end um because all of the colors are now going to be interacting with each other so i always like will color grade something at the very end and it'll help everything kind of come together in just a little bit more of an interesting and more realistic way usually cool uh sam is asking could you show minimum dot in image i'm not sure what that means uh i'm not really sure yeah let us know sam what you're thinking um okay let's go ahead and grab another level judgment how are we doing on time because i got one more exercise i want to cover yeah uh we have about a little less than 30 minutes oh cool all right so i'm just kind of doing all my colors as a whole now and it's going to kind of bring everything back together all right cool we're looking good i still want a little bit more like contrast um for that tower there we go so the mountains behind it they're going to get a little bit lighter so again everything is being informed by like our original photograph right like i want everything to look like it kind of fits in to the original image so that's kind of why we bring all these elements in color and light match them to to that image anna do you have any suggestions anything you you think we can improve on here i think it's looking really good i'm i'm very curious to know what your exercise is i'm like super excited for that it's going to be like a painting exercise oh okay cool uh i guess maybe i mean i really like the slightly cooler tone that you had in your original mm-hmm i did too yeah so here's the original one yeah yeah spicy really crisp yes slightly cooler and definitely a little bit more um yeah i like the the color range in the original one too me too yeah yeah so let's see about putting that back on top of everything let's go to our levels adjustment i'm going to just grab our uh like blue channel and cool it up a little bit let's invert that yeah i think this will be good it'll just add a little bit more of a visual interest sometimes when everything's like the same color it can just be like a little bit boring for lack of a better word there we go yeah just bringing a little bit of that cool color in i think that's yeah definitely looking cool it is one of those things it's so funny as a artist and as a compositor like i made this original sketch like a couple of days ago and like remaking it today i'm like there's no way i could get it exactly the same that i had it a couple days ago you know i know isn't it funny how that happens and and you're like wait i don't even know how to get back to this and i often will redo my work and a lot of times like really upgrade it and give it kind of some new techniques i've learned and stuff but there'll be some sort of like color thing that i used in the first one that i cannot seem to match in the second one and it's like so frustrating it is so frustrating it's like what it's like i should be better at this now like i already literally did this image and i have more experience now but um yeah it just goes to show like it it really like every piece is like such an original like experience and even just making it you know absolutely yeah it's very interesting and how everything kind of like builds on each other too so if you just do one of your levels like a slight tiny amount more or less then it changes the color of everything else further down the road exactly exactly as we've seen today in in the broadcast with republicans and some things exactly but it's so fun to like know these fundamentals and then you can kind of change and adjust things as as you go along cool i think that's looking a little bit better we it still looks like it fits in space um but it looks more um we see a little bit more contrast yeah yeah that looks really good go and then i wanna the tower itself just looks like this wall on the right looks like too perfect kind of so i just want to adjust that and again back to my levels adjustment layer for my lasso tool to do it so while aaron is working on that send over any last-minute questions that you have for him uh sam if you want to clarify what you meant by minimum dot in image we can help you out with that and just a reminder for everyone that will be back at 9 30 a.m pacific time tomorrow for part two and then if you stick around after uh aaron and i you can check out the illustrator daily creative challenge replays with claddy immediately followed by packaging design so be sure to check that out if you're interested in watching some replays today and tomorrow we'll also do the artist spotlight and you can submit yourself or a friend for that for next time we're on uh we have someone for tomorrow already chosen but that will be um really a good opportunity for you to present your work so how's that looking erin do you get that edge all cleaned up i think so yeah i'm i'm pretty happy with it perfect let's make the plan a little bit smaller and we're good to go like i'm i'm pretty happy with with this image as a whole again like i i would definitely come back and like rework on the colors and everything like this um but i think as a whole like yeah i'm pretty happy with it maybe make the tower like a little bit smaller and move it around it's so fun to move things around even at this stage when like things actually look good like you know like they look like they they should yeah there you go just still kind of work on composition yeah i love it at this stage i might have to create something like this i'm just really digging the vibes and i think maybe after watching dune this weekend i'll be super inspired yes it's visually absolutely beautiful i haven't really seen him really like it that's super inspiring okay fantastic well sweet do you have any more suggestions or anything from the chat um let's see uh douglas says thanks a lot erin was that a gradient layer the black and white you used to balance the sky and the ground oh it was a levels adjustment layer and i i used a gradient to um to for the coloring yeah good good question cool so yeah we have um about eight minutes left time is flying by i don't know if you want to um show your exercise or if you feel like you have a little bit more work to do on this let's show the exercise so this next exercise i just wanted to bring it up as a little bit of a drawing exercise and i'm just using adobe stock so let's go ahead and open this up um there we go draw an example so i wanted to create like basically we just have this like little platform here and my goal is like i want to create something that looks like an actual sphere or a ball glowing here and to do this like let's just pop this into black and white i i want to just i think doing stuff like this is just a really good exercise in general um like if you can make something like this look good in black and white you can definitely make it look good in in color so the first thing we're going to do i'm just going to create a new layer and hit b for the brush tool we're just going to just paint it right i'm going to this is my my base my base color right there and i can go ahead and deselect that and uh we're looking good so let's go ahead and lock the transparency of the spike and paint so the next thing i want to do is basically i want to start like painting in highlights and shadows to make this look real and that's really what we did throughout this entire exercise was paint highlights and shadows for trying to make it look real so i want to paint in some highlights here so i'm going to grab some of the highlight down here and i'm doing this in black and white just to kind of like focus first only on the lighting uh of the image and then i can come in and work on the color afterwards there we go so just kind of bringing this in like painting this edge work and i highly recommend doing this sort of exercise um on your own when you guys have the time as well because it'll just kind of challenge you a little bit and it'll it'll help you understand like three dimensionality and volume and shape and things like that just giving this a little bit of a blur move it down a little bit all right there we go we bring in some highlights you know around the top as well because like a sphere or cube will have you know some edge highlights that we need to paint in there as well there we go so i'm doing this in black and white to start with and then we're going to pop it in color in in just a little bit but the idea here is the same like if you can get this to look good in black and white then you can get it to look good in color but if if you can't get it to look good in black and white it's very difficult to get it to look good in color just give it a little blur so you can see i'm just kind of like putting these highlights around uh to kind of catch the light there we go from you know from this little orb here there we go and we're at a little bit of a time constraint so i'm not going to be able to do this absolutely perfect um but that would be the goal would be like hey make this cube or whatever you have like try to make it look real in in this space do it first in black and white and then worry about color and if you can get it to look you know somewhat real um and like three-dimensional then there's a good chance uh you can make this sort of thing work uh on any type of composite so let's just get this you know like decent it's not perfect admittedly right now um but let's get it decent with some shadows and some highlights in in there all right i know we're on a little bit time crunch here too paint some highlights good already so just doing this in black and white just to kind of see like okay cool like trying to pick up some highlights from around there pick up some shadows from around there there we go so something something like that looking looking okay i remember having to do this with uh pastel and pencil and parker and art school when we were first exactly exactly like a million little squares 100 and this could be so helpful even at this stage um with photoshop too you know so now i've got that looking okay i just turned it looks okay in black and white i just turned off my black and white so now we're looking at any color but i can just make a new layer above that and then change this to color and now i can start bringing in some of these colors so i'm not affecting my light value here now i'm just affecting my color and i'm just grabbing some of the colors that already exist in this scene and starting to paint them in so you know more saturated colors like right towards the edge a little bit grab these kind of colors and blend them together like a you know big bit of blue big bit of red here just kind of grabbing all these things and and putting them together to try to create something that looks like you know looks somewhat realistic that's the goal right it's like if you can make this look like completely realistic um you can do just about any type of compositing work so i think like anna you said you know in art school they show you how to do this and you know make a good point of like how important it is and i think you know here with compositing and stuff like that it's still so so valuable to be able to do this sort of thing in these exercises um they'll just help go a long way in terms of like making realistic composites like if you can make a sphere here look realistic um i i think that you'll have no problem making just about anything that look realistic yeah this is so cool to watch it's like very relaxing too it's definitely looking realistic yeah so all i did like everything that we did before here like this was all black and white right just trying to make it look good as possible there and then i just threw one color layer on top of it and you know that's that's basically all we're working with so just a good idea that like you know light values actually are extremely important and that really will dictate like the majority of like whether a composite works or whether like a photograph works um and then you know like color can always come at the end it's like a really good finishing step so um yeah i just kind of wanted to like you know show everyone a fun little exercise like this that you can do and obviously keep working on it but um you know that's basically just that little ball there we just made you know completely from nothing so it's a very similar idea to what we did here on on this other document right we just made some triangles um i threw some texture on them and then color balanced everything to make it kind of look like it's in place but like the concepts are basically the same between the two of them um yeah just get your light levels first and then you can worry about color afterwards amazing that was such a great lesson thank you so much for sharing that and thank you for your amazing tips today an awesome photoshop composite thank you for everyone for joining us today in the chat it's been a pleasure and we will be back here tomorrow at 9 30 a.m pacific time join myself and erin again where we'll be working on some realistic compositing so we will see you tomorrow have a good night everyone or good day wherever you are bye bye everyone [Music] [Music] so because

Channel: Adobe Creative Cloud

Views: 13,067

Keywords: Adobe CC, Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Masterclass, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Adobe creative suite, How to make Photoshop composites, Photoshop tutorial, aaron nace adobe, adobe photoshop workshop, edit, how to, learn, photo manipulation, photoshop composites, photoshop masterclass, photoshop tutorial, photoshop. Aaron Nace, teach, tips, tips and tricks, tutorials

Id: QPkIumYWwVI

Length: 117min 10sec (7030 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 03 2021