Hello, and welcome to introduction to
photo manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. I'm Abbey Esparza, and I fell in love with
photo manipulation and compositing over ten years ago, usually playing with
themes in the dark and surreal genre. However, today, we'll be putting
together a fantasy-themed composite, ancient ruins, monstrous moons, and all. This course will cover all
aspects of photo compositing, including how to composite both landscapes
and subjects, such as statues of people, packed with everything from lighting and
shading, blending, and of course, a slew of other tiny little special
effects that will help to give your composites at detail and story. So make sure and watch it through till
the very end, so you don't miss a thing. Enough talking,
let's go into our very first video, setting up a Photoshop workspace. This is introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. So before we can get into the nitty
gritty of photo manipulation, I want to walk you through how I
choose my stock images and resources. As well as going through my workspace and
setup as it is quite unique. If you have a fair amount of
Photoshop knowledge already, then you should be just fine
using your own workspace. If you are beginning, you may want
to replicate my workspace even if it's only temporarily to make
a following along a bit easier. However, I have been using this
work set up for almost ten years. So you may just end up
liking it in the end. My workspace is optimized for
photo compositing. And in photo compositing, layers are king. So I have them completely vertical,
giving us as much room as possible and placing them over to the left,
right next to the tools toolbar. See, I figured the Layers panel and our tools here are the two panels I
will be interacting with the most. So I put them right next to each other. Now if you are working with the default
Photoshop workspace, go ahead and right click and close all
the panels over there on the right. We are only going to open up
the panels that we use the most. First go to a window and navigator, and place the navigator over to the right to
where it is a free floating and collapse. As you can see here, we will be
attaching each window to each other to create a row of a shortcuts almost, so
we have everything within mouse's reach. Our row in total will consist of Window,
Properties, Adjustments, Brush Settings,
Color, Swatches, and finally, Character,
Paragraph, and Actions. Though we will not be needing them today, I do like to have them nearby normally,
so I figured I'd throw them in there. If you'd ever like to save this or
any workspace, you can go to Window >
Workspace > New Workspace. And if you ever want the default
workspace again, you can go to Window > Workspace > Essentials, and then
Window > Workspace > Reset Essentials. Now let's cover how to go about
picking your stock images and any other resources you might need. So when searching for
an image to use in a photo manipulation, I like to go with high fashion and
fine art, photos. Images, and those genres tend to already
lend themselves well to world building. They also tend to be very high resolution,
which is very important, as well as having high amounts of detail,
also very important. You do want to be wary of images
that are already highly processed. Things like very retouched skin, artificially increased contrast,
or a heavy color grade. Not to say these images are bad or
won't work, but the more details that are removed
the less you have to work with. So let's take a look at our contenders for
this image. All of the same model from the same shoot, which is always ideal as it
gives you plenty of variations. We have a portrait, two front facing
full body shots, and two back facing. Right away, I know I don't wanna do
a portrait, so as lovely as it is, this isn't the one. Now when comparing these four images,
the big difference is the dress. And I like the white cloth dresses as
they have a more subtle silhouette. So we can rule this one out. And finally, we are down to these three. This one here stands out as it not
only has the most amount of details, the flower and the ribbon, but
it also has the most interesting pose with her facing away and
looking off into the distance. And you can see here, the shadows
are also much nicer in this photo and not as washed out like the other one here. So with our subjects chosen,
we can start thinking of our environment. Choosing your supporting images is
more a matter of finding images that best fit the vision you have in your head. I know I want her in a field, and I know I want there to be a sunflower of
some sort because of the model's red hair. I think it'll tie in quite nicely. You want to look at the color, lightings,
and shadows of your subject and find similar traits in the images you
will be using for her surroundings and environment. Also keep in mind a lot of images
will be chosen using trial and error. I tried out a few different skies
before I landed on the one I chose, a few different landscapes too. And then along the way,
you refine your vision more and more. So however you go about figuring out
what specific subjects you need, and then searching for them. The main points are to make sure
your stock images are nice and big, minimally edited,
and nice and detailed. With that out of the way,
in the next video, we can start things off by creating and
compositing a sky. This is introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. All right, it's time to get started in Introduction
to Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. And there is no better place to start
off than by doing a sky replacement. The starting canvas ratio is
going to be about 16 to 9 with the exact pixel
dimensions being 4815 by 2708. However, you can always size down if you
find this to be a little larger than you might need. So first, let's bring a bit more
interest and detail into the sky. When dealing with a flat gray sky like
this one, my favorite trick is to do a sky replacement and
add in some dynamic clouds. To do this, we will be using a mix of both
of the blend modes and layer adjustments. Let's place the alternate sky
on top of our base image, setting its layer mode to darken. Different image combos will call for
different layer modes. So always feel free to flip through
each mode and see what works best. Now go ahead and
match the two images' horizon lines. The horizon line is where the sky
meets the ground or water in our case. Next, select the new sky layer and go to
Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Setting the brightness to 31,
helping the sky blend much better, and the contrast to 9 to give
the sky a bit more punch. As our image is a smart object, we can go
back and change the settings at any time. So feel free to tinker with these or
any other settings going forward. Finishing up the blending by
selecting the lake layer and again, going to Image > Adjustments
> Brightness/Contrast. Setting the brightness to 49 and
the contrast to -50 will make the hills in the background a bit more hazy looking,
a bit more far off looking. Let's add some deepness to the sky
by adding a dark blue hue to the upper portion of the canvas. Go ahead and create a new layer,
setting its layer mode to Soft Light. Now using a muted, medium blue color, paint towards the upper middle portion of
the sky using a large soft round brush. I like to keep my brush's flow rate nice
and low so I can build things up slowly. You will hear me go on and
on about how great low flow rates are. If you don't know what flow is,
flow allows you to build up paint over and over again with each pass of the brush. The lower the flow rate,
the less paint will be placed at once, giving you much more control,
hence why I'm a big fan. Now deepen the sky even more by creating a
new layer, also setting it to Soft Light, and repeating the same technique,
only this time using a darker navy blue. Let's lower the opacity of this
darker layer to around 65%. I always encourage creating
multiple layers, as this gives you not only more variation in color
and contrast, but more overall control. Most of my composites go well
over the 100 layer mark. So if you feel the need to use five
layers just to make a sky that perfect shade of blue, I say go for it. So with our base done,
let's start adding in our star and moon elements in the next video. See you soon. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this video, we will be covering how
to create a quick Fantasy inspired sky. First, we want to lay down some
stars using a hard round brush, set to five pixels. Next, let's adjust the Photoshop brush's
settings by increasing the spacing to 1,000%. The Size Jitter to 100% and
the Scatter to again 1,000%. Now, create a new layer above all
current layers and paint tiny, white stars above at
the very top of the canvas. Focusing on the darker
portions of the sky. We want them to be reasonably
faint as it is daytime after all. Now let's place an image of
the moon onto our canvas, making sure it's a nice and big. Use the Move and Transform tools
to angle the moon to your liking. I ended up liking this darker,
patchier area of the moon. So I wanted to make sure it showed but
it's all up to you. Once happy with the angle and position,
go ahead and set the Layer Mode to Screen. Bring down the layer
Opacity to around 75%. Next, we want to blend in the moon
into the sky using Layer Masks. Another tool crucial to photo compositing. Adding layer mask to layer by
clicking the Add Layer Mask button found towards the bottom
middle of the Layers panel. The basics of layer masks are simple. If you want to erase something
you paint with black, if you're going to bring back what you
previously erased, you paint with white. We want to erase the bottom
half of the moon. So, with a huge soft round brush,
set the black. Making sure the layer mask is selected, paint black on the bottom half of
the moon, thus masking it out. You might be wondering why I
should use the layer mask, if I could be using the eraser tool. What's the difference? Basically, using layer masks
means you never have to commit to any permanent change. For instance, if days from now, I decided
I erased a bit too much of this moon, all I have to do is select white and
mask back in. Always use non-destructive
editing techniques when you can. This can include Smart Objects,
Layer Masks and Adjustment Layers which we
will cover here in a second. But before we get too ahead of ourselves,
let's add some glow to the moon. Right-click, Duplicate Layer or
hold down Alt and then click and drag to duplicate the moon. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur,
setting the radius to 37 pixels. Use a black brush, masking out all but
the outer edge of the blurry moon, leaving a subtle, glowy border. Now let's add an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is just as it sounds,
an adjustment that is it's own layer. While you can add adjustments
to specific images, as we have done a few times already. Adjustment layers are different, in that they affect all layers
that are located underneath them. You can move and rearrange them
in just as a standard layer. As well as adjusting their opacity,
changing their layer modes, and of course, adding layer masks, probably
one of their most useful features. Let's make a brightness
contrast adjustment layer, placing it above our moon. Double-click to open its properties. Let's set it to 16 Brightness and
27 Contrast. As you can see,
it affects every layer located beneath it. However, we only want the layer to
affect the upper portion of the sky. So, let's add a layer mask, masking out
the bottom two-thirds of the canvas Finish up by grouping together
your moon and stars and then group that group with all the other
sky images into one larger group. The shortcut for
grouping layers is Ctrl+G. Keeping your layers
organized is less than fun. However, your future self will thank you
if you ever need to go back looking for an old layer. And in the video coming up, let's
finally add some land to this landscape. An Introduction to Photo Manipulation
in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. As I said, the one thing our landscape
seems to be missing is some land. So let's drag and drop a full
mountain range onto our canvas and learn the basics of image compositing. One of my favorite tools for extracting
landscapes is the Magnetic Lasso tool, as it retains a nice bit
of texture to the edge. If you zoom in close, you will see all
the bumps and textures that you really, really, really want to try and keep. So let's set up our
Magnetic Lasso tool settings. The width will determine how far
the pass will jump to a new area. Let's set it to three pixels, so the path will never go further than
three pixels away from our mouse. Next, the contrast,
let's just set it to 25% for now. And finally, the frequency is simply how
often a point in the path will be created. We'll go ahead and set that to 30. Feel free to tinker and experiment with these settings as I'm
not personally married to any of them. I don't pay too much attention to my
Magnetic Lasso tool settings as later we'll be refining this edge anyway. Next, making sure the mountainscape
layer is selected. Click at the very edge of the landscape,
right where the land meets the sky. Now drag your mouse over
the edge of the landscape. This does not have to be perfect, we are just getting a kind
of rough selection for now. Once you hit the end of the canvas,
just swing the path around and connect to the very first point. Bam, you have a selection,
as unpretty as it might be. Add a layer mask to the mountains. The mask will automatically take
the shape of the selection. And hit Ctrl+I to invert
the layer mask if needed. We can then go ahead and clean up any
large chunks of sky we may have missed with a sizable black, round brush. Now for the real black magic,
also known as the Refine Edge tool. Double-click the lands layer mask,
bringing up the Properties panel. And then click Select and Mask. First thing's first is
that you want to make sure the Refine Edge Brush Tool is selected,
found here on the left. Second, you'll want to check smart radius. Bringing the radius to around 3 pixels. That number may change image to image, but I find 3 to 6 pixels works
well most of the time. You would also use the bracket
keys to adjust your brush size. Now paint along the edges
of your masked area. If you find you have brought back too
much of the masked-out background, you can hold down Alt to change
the brush from add to subtract. Continue to add and subtract until you have something
you are decently happy with. Because now it's on to
the global refinements. I'll start by setting the shift edge
to -55, which will bring in the edge, getting rid of some of these
left over white areas. Next, a feather of 0.5 pixels and
a contrast of 15%, which will help our edges
look less chappy and sharp. This looks good for now, so let's hit OK. Next, it's the third and
final round of refining. Because at the end of the day,
no AI can truly beat out the human eye. As you can see here, we have a few areas that the refine
tool went a little too hard on. Let's take a semi round brush,
set to white, and mask the areas back in. Let's take a close look at all the edges,
making sure they get some touching up. If you see an area that was supposed to be
masked but wasn't, you can go ahead and change the brush's color to black,
masking it out yourself. Let's finish blending of the landscape
by clipping two new layers into the mountains. You can clip a layer into
another by holding Alt and clicking on the line
separating the two layers. A clip layer is restricted to
the boundaries set by the layer it is clipped into. For instance, this area of the land isn't quite
blending well with its new background. We can see that first
the area is too light. And secondly, the area is too green
compared to this bluish area here. So let's fix the color, first by setting
one of our clipped layers to color. Painting a darker muted blue
color with a soft round brush and then bringing the layer's
opacity down to 45%. Next, we can fix the lighting issue
by changing the second clipped layer to soft light. Painting black on the lighter
areas of the landscape, adjusting the opacity as needed. You will always want to make sure color,
lighting, and contrast all match, and everything blends seamlessly. So it's always a good idea
to spot treat like this. And the more time you
spend on any single area, the better it will end
up being in the end. But for now, this will do just fine. Finally, let's wrap this landscape up
by filling in the empty bottom gap and adding a bit more depth at the same time. I'm going to duplicate the landscape
image and delete its layer mask. Next I'm going to enlarge
it substantially. Go ahead and zoom out and
give a big tug on both sides of the image. Next, horizontally squish the image using
the transform anchors, holding Shift so you keep it the original
height of the image, we are only affecting the width here. Now we're going to click on the transform
anchors here and then enter work mode. And we're going to push and drag the grass into what I can
only describe as a wooshing shape. Finally, mask the top three
fourths of the canvas, leaving only enlarged grass covering
the empty area from earlier. This is not an exact science. I will enlarge, shrink, push, and
pull and mask this area over and over until I like how it looks. I think techniques like this
are important to not only share but show, most things aren't done in
a step one, two, three format. It's done through trial, error, and
maybe a few extra cups of coffee and a tad bit of frustration now and then. At the end of it, all we want is some swooshy enlarged
grass at the front of our canvas. And with that,
we can group all of our current layers and name that group Landscape. Now onto a personal favorite of mine,
extracting and compositing people. See you in the next video, an Introduction
to Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. I am very excited about this next part
as we will be learning how to cut out an image in a Photoshop. We have two total subjects to extract. The first of which will be our model
here that I have opened in her own document for now. My go-to tool for extracting people for
years now has been the Pen Tool. And while there is a bit of
a learning curve to the Pen Tool, no pun intended if you know
what the Pen Tool curves are. Anyway, the basics can be
covered reasonably quickly, so we will just stick to those for today. Also keep in mind that the Pen Tool
is best used for smoother surfaces. Anything with hair, fus or
fur will be saved for later. So in this case we're going to be
skipping the flowers and the hair. Just keep that in mind. So go ahead and select the Pen tool. Now, we want to look towards
the upper left-hand corner and make sure it says path. We're going to start a path by clicking
on the edge of our model here. Now, click towards another area. Pull down on the curve
anchor to create a curve and then hold Alt to drag this here
into the new anchor point. Let's do that again. Click drag, hold Alt and bring up. We're going to do this over and over until
we get back to the starting anchor point. Again, ignoring the hair and
flowers for now. It may seem long and tedious,
but once you get the hang of it, you will barely have to
think while you're doing it. While creating your path,
you want to try and make it fewer points as that will give you
a smoother looking extraction as supposed to making a million tiny
little points here. However, use as many
as you think you need. The longer use the Pen Tool, the better you will become at
just kind of feeling it out. Also keep in mind what you're extracting. For instance, I take extra care
when doing things like arms or legs, making sure to get
every little curve and fold. However, if I'm doing cloth, I make my
own edge, deciding what lumps, bumps and other details I do or don't want to keep. Once you have connected your points and
you have completed your path, you can right click, make selection. Now, go ahead and
add a layer mask to your model. Double click on the mask and set the feather to 0.5 pixels just
to give the edges a bit of softness. Finally, this is optional but I like to duplicate the model layer at
this point, just so I have a backup. Because now, we are going to right click apply layer
mask, making the change permanent. But with that,
we can move on to how to extract hair. An introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this video, we'll learn how
to extract a subject's hair. Extracting hair is probably both my
favorite and least favorite thing to do. Luckily, however, our model today has very
little hair to extract and the process won't be all that much different than when
we extracted our hilly green landscape. Let's start by creating a quick
selection and mask of our subject's hair using the magnetic lasso tool,
just as we did earlier with our greenery. Let's go ahead and
ignore the flowers here. Now let's double-click the mask and hit Select N Mask opening
up at the Refine Edge. Make sure the Smart Radius is checked,
the Refine Edge brush is active, and the radius is set to three pixels. Now drag your brush across
the edges of the hair. If you find you have
a hard time seeing it, you can go change the view in
the upper right-hand corner here. Once happy, go ahead and click OK. Finally, let's deal with these
flowers using the Pen tool. Feel free to clip out any petals or leaves
that you think are a bit wonky-looking. And once you're done, you can right-click Fill path and then right-click Delete path. And, with this, another favorite trick
of mine is to use the Smudge tool set to around 25 strength and
nudge in the mask just slightly. This will not only give you a much
more organic looking edge, but it will help fix any white
edges that are peeking through that you might have missed
while creating your path. Usually edges like this tend to
hide behind the Pen Tool path, so they are very, very, very easy to miss and
sometimes can be incredibly frustrating. [LAUGH] Go ahead and drag and
drop our subject on to their new landscape using the move and
transform tools to size them down. Now as much as I love the Pen Tool, it's
not always the right choice for the job. Coming up, let's look at what tools
work best where and put the object selection tool to work in Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this lesson, I want to quickly cover
why sometimes I use the Pen Tool and other times I use a version of the Lasso
tool or some other selection tools. We will also be taking a look
at the object Selection tool, one my favorite features
of Adobe Photoshop. Luckily, it's pretty simple. If I'm extracting something smooth
with larger curves or flat edges, like the sign here,
I will likely use the Pen Tool. The Pen Tool gives me more control and
accuracy and, most importantly, a sharp, clean edge that I can then blur or
roughen up later on if needed, as needed. I will also use the Pen Tool
if the subject or object is located in a busy background. Photoshop's AI tends to have a harder
time deciding what should and shouldn't be selected. In cases like that, I tell Photoshop
to sit down, I'll do it myself. That being said, Photoshop's AI does
an excellent job when dealing with high contrast images, such as solid objects on
a flat white or flat black background. On something like this green flower here,
I use the color Selection Tool, saving me a whole lot of time for
having to get into all these nooks and crannies with the Pen Tool. Though sometimes I still might end
up busting out the Pen Tool if I'm feeling incredibly picky and
a particular. I'll use the Selection Tools when it's
a simple shape, like a perfect circle here with these metal marbles,
I can use the circular Marquee Tool. And as we've already seen,
items such as grass and hair are best extracted by
creating a quicker selection and then going into Refine Edge to,
well, refine that edge. So back to our image. I have dragged and drop this photo
of a line of stones onto the canvas. When placing them, I lower the opacity to
help get a rough idea of what size and angle I wanted them to be at. Now to extract them. We want to make sure we keep as much
of this texture here as possible. Meaning, the Pen Tool is a no go. You could use the magnetic Lasso Tool,
however in 2020, Photoshop decided to up
its auto select game by pumping the object Selection Tool
with some significant power. Let's select the object Selection Tool and create a rectangle around
the larger first stone here. To select the further stones there
in the back, hold down Shift. You'll see this plus sign and
create more rectangles around them. Once done, go ahead and add a Layer Mask. As you can see,
the selection is almost perfect, but there's still a halo of white around the
edges of the stone, just very slightly. So a quick way to deal with
this is to hold Ctrl and then click on the Layer Mask,
creating a selection. Going to Select > Modify > Contract, and
then setting it to one pixel, click OK. Now select Inverse. And finally,
Edit > Fill > Black, boom, gone. It's that easy. Next up in Introduction to Photo
Manipulation we'll be deep diving into blending modes. And you might know what I'm going to say. Yes, it's one of my favorite
features of Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation and Adobe Photoshop. In this lesson we will be covering how
to blend in Photoshop using blending and layer modes. Right now, our subjects are just kind of
sitting there very copy pasted feeling. There are countless ways to help merge
things into their new environment, blending everything together. But I want to show you my favorite and
quickest ways, all relying on blending modes. This works particularly well
with any kind of grassy, lush landscapes like we have here. Let's start by duplicating the landscape
group and then right-click and Merge That Copy. Now let's clip the landscape
copy into our rocks, adding a layer mask to the layer, and
then setting its layer mode to Lighten. Using a soft round brush, we are going to
mask out the top portion of the rocks, leaving the bottom of
the stones covered in grass. This already looks so much better,
but we are not done yet. Duplicate and clip the grass layer into
the rocks below its original grass layer. Setting the new layer to multiply. This will help darken the areas behind the
grass, making it less shear and floaty. Lighten and
multiply are an absolute dream team. And while they won't always work in
every scenario, when they do work, they work beautifully. So I encourage you to experiment
with these two layers much more. Now all that is left is some fine tuning. We can start by changing our brush color
to white going back to the screen layer and adding in a bit more grass. Once happy, you can flip to the multiply
layer and add and subtract as needed. Try and zoom in real close and make sure the edges don't
look too terribly feathery. If you need it, you can change your
brush size to one or two pixels and mask in individual little blades of grass. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be
perfect, this is where time and patience will really pay off in the end. And once you are happy with the stones,
you're going to repeat the same process on the model the exact same process,
same layer modes and all. Don't fiddle with things too much,
however, as coming up we will be diving into
a lighting and shading effects. And we can always come back and refine the grass at absolutely
anytime as shading and shapes change. This is Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. See you in the next video. Welcome back to Introduction to photo
manipulation and Adobe Photoshop. In this lesson we will be
covering the shading and the lighting using adjustment layers,
layer mask and layer modes. This is when having a drawing
tablet comes in a bit handy. It doesn't need to be big,
fancy, or name brand. Any drawing tablet will
be better than none. However, if you don't have one,
that doesn't mean you can't paint, so do not worry. I'll be giving some non-tablet tips and
tricks as we go. So first, let's start by
lighting our subject's hair. I'm going to create and
clip a new layer into the model here, setting the layer to Overlay and
placing it above our grass layers. Now with a tiny two pixel brush, I'm going
to paint white on the outermost hairs, as well as the highlights of the hair. When painting hair at this stage, you want to keep your flow rate low,
sometimes as low as 1%. But typically, anywhere from
10% to 40% is the sweet spot. All the outermost hairs and flyaway
should end up being basically pure white. Go ahead and keep your brush nice and soft
most of the time, and you can go ahead and increase the size to add
any larger blooms of light, always keeping the environment in mind. For instance, she is more lit
on her right side than her left. So let's focus the lighting
a bit more here. Once we are happy with the first layer of
light, we are going to repeat that step. Only this time on a new
layer set to normal. We're going to paint a solid
it then white hair strands using her natural hair as a kind of guide. The reason a drawing tablet helps so much in these two steps is
because of its ability to apply pressure sensitivity which is what is
giving us these tapered edges here. There are a couple of ways to get
these without a tablet however, my favorite being using the smudge tool. Here, we have painted a line
using just a mouse, so it's blunt with harsh edges,
not too terribly hair like. Let's select the smudge tool and
crank it up to around 55%. Now, let's smudge out both
ends of the brush stroke. The only downside of this method
being that it won't be as quick compared to just being able to swish
and flick with a pen on a tablet, but it will absolutely get the job done. Now on to our first Curves Adjustment,
clipping it into our model. Curves layer works by placing points
along the diagonal line here and then pulling either up or down. Pulling down will darken while
pulling up will lighten. For this curve, we want to just
slightly lighten our subject. So let's place a point right about
here and drag up just a tiny bit. Now, let's fill the layer mask with black
by selecting it and hitting control I. Which is inverting the white to black. Now, let's use a soft round
brush to mask back in the light just around
the edges of the subject. Being careful not to let
the light go too inwards but still keeping a smooth gradient. Next, to the shading. For shading, I like to use a mix of
brightness contrast, and a curve adjustment layers along with a layer set
to multiply for more advanced shading. For this piece,
let's stick with a brightness contrast and curves layered for now. Create and clip a brightness
contrast layer to the subject. We are setting it to a negative 32
brightness and a negative 17 contrast. We're going to use this layer
to darken the back of our model giving her more dynamic lighting. Click on the layer mask and
hit Control I to invert it. Using a soft, round brush,
let's mask in the adjustment layer, focusing on the middle of the subjects
back here and also the head and the legs. Finally, we can finish up at the woman for
now by creating and clipping a new soft light
layer inside her and using a black soft round brush to
deepen her shadows even further. Remember, keep that flow rate and nice and
low, so you can build up those shadows. You guessed it, slowly, around 5 to 10%
should do and if the shadow ends up being too deep or dark, you know, go ahead and
bring the layer capacity down a notch. Now on to the stones. While the stones will require
what seems like a million layers, we will be using the same general
techniques and tools we did for our model. So let's create an clip a brightness
contrast layer and to the stones bringing the brightness down to a negative 100 and
the contrast down to negative 150. Now, zoom in nice and close on the rocks
and using a semi hard round brush, mask the face of the stone and
only the face here. We want the shading to be located
only on the sides of the boulders. You can also use the shadow to
shape your rocks a small amount, keeping in mind what areas the sun
would and wouldn't be hitting. So when we are all done with our shading,
we can now do some color correction. In my mind, I wanted these rocks
to be much more stylized, and a colder grey color. We are going to achieve that look
with just three adjustment layers. First a black to white
gradient map which is also my preferred way to
grayscale most things. Second, a brightness contrast layer
with a brightness of negative 26 and a contrast of negative 49. And thirdly, a curve layer, bringing up the shadows, recreating
a curve similar to what you see here. Now we can add in some
more detailed lighting. Focus on bringing in a bit more
texture and dimension on to our rocks, as right now they're feeling a bit flat. Let's start by creating and clipping
a new curve layer into the stones, bringing up just the highlights and
inverting the mask with Ctrl+I. Now, using a brush with varying hardnesses
and sizes, we want to start carving out some shapes in the rocks, adding in areas
where the sun might be hitting extra hard. Don't be afraid to let your highlights
bleed into the shadows just a little bit as there would be some
ambient lighting bouncing around. We can now create and
clip two new layers into the stones. Setting one to Soft Light and
the other to Overlay. Just like we did with the hair, we want to paint varying layers
of light bringing out detail. Also keeping in mind the lighting
of the environment so we can replicate it on our stones. Don't be afraid to create
more than just two layers. When lighting and shading subjects,
I can easily use five, 10, 15 layers and not even bat an eye. Using multiple layers will help
you build up a light slowly and give the lighting more dimension. So again, right now we're just
using a whole lot of Overlay and Soft Light layers and adding light to
any areas that just might need it. And once we are happy with our lighting, we can add some quick shadows to
the grass surrounding all the subjects. As I mentioned earlier,
one of the better layer modes to use for shading is multiply. Let's create a new layer
above the subjects and all of their clip layers,
setting that layer to a multiply. Now, we want to color grab from
the shadows of the area we are going to be painting on. In this case, it's the grass. To quickly color grab, you can hold
all while the brush tool is active. We're going to use a screen to create some
quick shadows right under the stones and a stretching to the left of our subject. You want to keep the brush flow low and
the hardness soft this time around. Though when painting shadows like with
our boulders, don't be afraid of harder edges as shadows tend to have a shape and
structure a majority of the time. Right now,
we just want to lay down some quick and dirty shadows as we will be adding in
some last blades of grass later on. And we might end up adjusting
our shadows afterwards anyway. Finally, I can introduce you to my
favorite tool, Photoshop hence offer. And at the very least is one
of the most underrated tools. Blend If, you can do so
many cool things with Blend If. And I highly recommend playing
with it in your spare time. However for now, we are just going to help our shadows
feel less like giant blobs of dark green. Double click on your shadow layers icon,
opening up at the Layer Style panel. Look towards the bottom and
you will see Blend If. I always have such a hard time explaining
Blend If, so instead, I will just show it. I usually choose
the underlying layer option. Here, you can hold Alt and
click on the toggles to separate them. Pulling the right toggles to the left
will remove the layer from the highlights of the layers underneath. The closer the two toggles are to each
other, the starker the effect will be. Which is not a bad thing, sometimes you might end up wanting that,
it all just depends. The shadows work precisely the same, only you will want to use
the toggles on the left. For now, we just want to slide
the toggles here to about the middle, giving our grass a nice bit of highlight,
no painting needed. And there you have it, some quick lighting
tricks that you can apply to most, if not all, photo manipulations. And next up, we are moving on to
the smaller details and almost finishing touches next time and introduction to
photo manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this lesson we'll be looking at how
to paint smaller details using Photoshop brushes, as opposed to
trying to find stock images. See, I want to add some ribbons
coming off of these rocks here, as well as some grassy seeds and
debris floating in through the air. Both these details will give a sense
of motion and breeze to our image. And while we could find
pictures of ribbons and maybe dust, neither would be fun to
extract or blend onto our image. Not to mention we would be
restricted to whatever flow and shape the ribbons would already have,
taking away our choice and maybe vision. So we are better off just painting them. So first, let's start with the seeds
by creating a new layer above all other current layers,
keeping it set to Normal. Let's grab the Brush tool and
set it to 5 pixels and 100% hardness. Now go over to the Brush Settings panel. Let's start adjusting our settings
to create our Photoshop brush. It'll be a bit similar to our
stars brush we did earlier. First, let's set up our spacing to 1000%. Next, let's set up our size, angle,
and roundness jitter all to max. Let's set scatter to max,
count to 2, and count jitter to 75%. We can finish up by checking color
dynamics, keeping the settings as default. This will give us a slight variation
in the color of our debris. To save a Photoshop brush or any custom settings you might
add to a pre-made brush, hit this button towards the bottom of the
layer panel, name your brush, and hit OK. Now we are just going to paint
a few quick lines of seeds going through the middle of the canvas
using this pale light green color. I know this seems like such a small
little minute detail, but small details like these are what gives an image a bit
more style and just kind of interest. Once done, we can provide the seeds with
a bit more depth by adding a bevel and emboss a layer style with
the settings seen here. This will help them stand out just
a bit more amongst their environment so they don't get lost too much. Though, again, we want this to be
a very subtle effect as opposed to it looking like a bunch of sharp blades
of metal are flying through the air. Or that might be an interesting story or
plot line to add, now that I think of it, maybe next time. Next onto our ribbons. As I know, painting even
the smallest of things can be intimidating to a non-digital painter,
aka me. So I won't be using my pen tablet for
this. All we will need is our mouse,
a hard round brush, and the Eraser tool. Start by creating a fun
loop with nice long ends, making sure your brush is
at 100% opacity and flow. If you find your lines aren't smooth, you can bring your brush's smoothness
up to 100%, or a little lower. Either way,
this should help you out of bit. The size of your brush is up to you. I want thinner ribbons, so I'm using
around a 8 pixel size brush, which will get smaller and smaller as we work on our
smaller and smaller rocks in the future. With our loop painted, we're going to
switch to a hard round eraser brush and start shaping the ribbon. The first things to go are the ends here. Again, you can bring in the smoothing up
on your Eraser brush if you need to steady your strokes. Now we are going to give the effective
that our ribbon is twisting by erasing the inner parts of the loop. Make multiple smaller passes using Ctrl+Z
to undo if you don't think it looks quite right. You can do this over and over again
into the perfect little thin edge here. Then you can finish up by adding a bit
of twist to the tail ends as well, using the same exact technique. Now let's give our ribbon
a few similarities to the ribbon the woman is
wearing in her hair. Bring down the fill to 71 and
then add an inner glow layer style with the settings you see here,
giving the ribbon a slight border effect. Finish the ribbon up by adding some
shadows with a layer set to multiply, at around 15% opacity or so. We want these to be very, very faint. Clipping the layer into the ribbon and
painting with a dark blue. You'll want to paint ribbons for
all the stones, as I mentioned, making sure they vary in shapes and sizes. Not all of them need to have loops,
some of them can be straight, just imagine how ribbons might
whip around in the wind. I also recommend you paint each strand
of ribbon on to their own layer, this will make it way easier to adjust
them later on if you ever need to. As the process is similar for
painting each ribbon, I like to do each step one by one. Meaning I'll paint all of the loops and
lines, then go in and copy paste of the layer
style to all of the layers. Next, all of the erasing. And finally the shadows, doing it in
a bit of a assembly line process. This ends up making the whole
process much faster in my opinion. And once you are done,
you can group all of your ribbons up and add some final shadows using
a clipped layer if you wish, because now we are moving on to
painting with adjustment layers. Next time on Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this video, we'll be looking at
how to paint with layer adjustments. By adding some symbols to our stones, just to give the image a bit
more fantasy-esque interest. Let's start by creating two adjustment
layers below our ribbons group. First, a black to white gradient map. And secondly, a brightness contrast layer
set to 150 brightness and -50 contrast. Now, let's group these two
in a group named Paint, giving it a layer mask filled with black. Now, with any sort of grungy brush, these charcoal Photoshop brushes from
Envato Elements will work wonderfully. Mask in various rooms and symbols. I'm just trying different shapes and swirls until I'm like yeah,
that looks pretty cool. However, if you want, you can research
real runes from various cultures or even books and movies. Now that our runes are painted, we can help them blend a bit better
using our old friend Blend If. For the gradient layer, we want to adjust
the highlight toggles to where they're around 198 and 232,
as seen by these numbers here. While for the brightness contrast layer, we want to adjust the shadow
toggles to be 0 and 170. This will remove all of
the brightness caused by the paint from the darker areas of the stone. You can finish up by going in with
a black, grungy brush to roughen up the edges of the paint,
using small little quick strokes. This is optional, but I totally think it's worth the effort and
only takes a few minutes. That's it for our painted rocks. A very simple and quick effect that can actually be
applied to multiple other things. Tattoos, face paint, graffiti art. It's a very versatile technique here,
love it. So next time in Introduction
to Photo Manipulation, we are moving on to how to add
some extra depth to our image. Always a very fun step. Welcome back to introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this video, we'll be learning to add
depth by adding detail to both the back and foreground of our image. Let's start by by dropping this lens
flare directly below our subjects group, shrinking it down and
setting it to screen. Now we want to add a layer
mask to the lens flare and feather out the edges
using a soft round brush. Set the black, making sure there
are no visible harsh edges. Now, let's make this lens
flare more defined by going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast,
setting the brightness to a -77, and the contrast to 100. Ironically giving us a almost
brighter looking light source despite bringing down the brightness. Now we are going to not only add some
grass poking up from the foreground, but also adding some more detailed blades of
grass surrounding our stones and model. We'll be using this simple
grass from Envato Elements. The coolest thing about the stock image
is that it's a 3D asset, meaning not only will it come background-free, but we can
also change the angles of the grass. So we can get multiple tufts
of grass from just one asset. Go ahead and
click the View 360 Render button. Once loaded, you can drag and
angle the grass any which way you want. Once you've found an angle you like, you can download it as either a PNG or
a layered PSD. As we will need to remove the shadow here,
let's download it as a PSD. Here is an angle I downloaded earlier. As you can see, the PSD comes with tons
of helpful layers including the shadow layer that we can easily
remove by just deleting it. We can actually go ahead and
delete all but the subject layer, then dragging that subject
layer onto our main canvas. Try and download at least five
different angles of grass, so we have some variation. Now that we have all of our grass layers
on our canvas, we can do some a quick color correcting using Image >
Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, checking Colorize, and then setting
hue to 84 and saturation to +46. Next, Image > Adjustments
> Brightness/Contrast. Setting brightness to 57. However, while placing our grass,
we want to change these as needed. Changing them so
they match their surrounded areas. But for now,
let's keep them nice and bright so we can see them a bit
better while placing. Let's also copy the same layer adjustments
onto all four other pieces of grass. Next, we can begin placing our
grass at the base of the stones and model, placing them wherever
they seem to fit best. Remember to duplicate the grass to use
multiple versions of the same stock image. However, make sure and try and
flip or edit the grass in some way so it doesn't end up looking repetitive. Add as much grass as you'd like. Finish up placing your grass by adding
extra large tufts of grass into the foreground, making sure to place
them above all other grass layers. You can even group all of the foreground
grass into a group of their own so they are easy to find later on, as they
will get some special blurring treatment. With everything placed, we need to blend
the grass into the new environment. Focusing on matching the surrounding
depth and sharpness, or lack thereof, as seen here. For these blades of grass out, here we can
do a simple Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. We are only blurring
them about 0.3 to 0.4%. While we are doing this,
we can also add a mask and mask out any hard edges that
the grass tufts may have. So just go in, mask a little, and
also experiment between the 0.3 and 0.4% blurring, trying to match the general
sharpness of the surrounding grass. And for the front blades of grass,
we're going to blur them using Filter > Blur Gallery > Field Blur,
which is my favorite blurring tool, as it results in a much more
natural depth of field like blur. We don't want to go too crazy, however,
around seven pixels should do just fine. Once you make any final little
adjustments to the grass and their shadows, you can group them all up. We are almost to the end now as we
move on to color correction, and the next video of introduction to
photo manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Welcome back to introduction to photo
manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. In this lesson we'll be
learning how adding some simple airy lighting over the whole canvas
can bring an image together. This is usually one of the last steps I
almost always finish off an image with as it really does help
tie everything together. We're going to start with
a new layer set to screen, creating the layer above
all current layers. Now using a huge brush set to a very
low flow as little as one to 10% we're going to paint colors all over the canvas. This is all about freely
painting in light and color. So there is no exact method here. However, I do have some tips to share. Don't know what colors to paint? A safe bet is to color pick colors
from the already existing image. For instance, you can paint some blue onto
the sky and more green onto the grass and yellow right where the sun is located. However, you can also experiment with
similar colors like red instead of yellow for the sun, and then bringing
in some yellow onto the grass. Whatever colors you do end up choosing,
make sure to build them up slowly, making sure everything is a smooth
transition from one color to the next. Finally it's time to wrap everything
up with some final color correction. This is how I finish up a good
portion of my images as it creates one cohesive color scheme as well as
helping with evening out the tones and contrast of the overall image. This color grade will consist of
eight adjustment layers in total. However, all but
one are actually color look up layers, which I did not set out
to specifically do but color look up is one of the lesser known
tools that I'm always happy to cover. So we are in the end game now. Let's get started by creating a color
look up adjustment layer above all previous layers. Here you will see the settings,
one being 3DLUT. If you click on the drop down, you will see all of the presets
that Photoshop has to offer. I highly encourage you to flip through
them and kind of get a feel for what all of them look like. But for our first layer in this image,
we're going to go with three strip, bringing down its opacity to 50%. Next yet another color local player set
to crisp warm with an opacity of 18%, just to warm things up a tiny bit. Third, a film stack layer set to 15%
opacity to up the contrast slightly. Fourth, a foggy night adjustment layer,
a personal favorite, set to an opacity of 50% and
a blend F of zero and 255. Again, the numbers shown here on the highlight side as we only want
this layer to affect the shadows. Fifth, a Kodak five zero two five,
Fuji three five one zero, set to 26 opacity further
adjusting the contrast of it. Six, a Kodak five zero two five two three
eight three with an opacity of 30%. Seventh, a tension green layer
with a 100% opacity, but with the top half of
the canvas masked out. We only want this to affect
the greener areas of the grass taking up the bottom
portion of the canvas. And finally,
a colorful layer set to lighten and filled with a deep nice forest green. This will create a very subtle effect,
within the darker shadows of the image. And, there you have it. Once you're done you can
group them together and then pat yourself on the back, not just
for having all of your layers neat and tidy, as I am sure you do,
but because we have finished. But there is still a bit
more in the next video, we will do a quick review of everything
we have learned here today and see what potential this
image truly does have. See you soon. Hello everyone. I hope this course has helped you
get your creative juices flowing and has inspired you to creates some
photo composites of your own. My favorite thing about this image is
how secretly versatile it really is. And it's a great starting point and
has the ability for you to add even more story and
details to it. You could add mystery or horror elements,
or go completely opposite and turn it into a full-blown
sci-fi composite, all using the same exact
techniques we learned here today. Compositing with the Pen tool and
refine edge. Lighting by mixing and matching
blending modes and adjustment layers. Using blend if to melt layers on
top of each other beautifully. And using various adjustment layers at the
end of the piece to color grade an image, bringing it all together
into one focused vision. But most important, having fun and
expressing the images and art you have in you head,
because that's what art is actually about. I sincerely hope you had
as much fun as I did. I'm Abbey Esparza with Envato Tuts+, and this was Introduction to
Photo Manipulation in Adobe Photoshop. Hope to see you all very soon.
