[Julieanne Kost]
Welcome, everyone. My name is Julieanne Kost. I'm the Digital Imaging
Evangelist at Adobe. Thank you so much
for joining us today. We're going to be talking
about compositing in Photoshop. So I'm going to be
walking through one of my recent composites
in order to explore the tools in Photoshop that
enable me to quickly select subjects, scale, and resize
them non-destructively, as well as then unify
them through color and tone and texture. So one thing you might
notice, my composites are really relatively quite simple. I often think that more
is less and less is more. So the majority of my composites
contain a primary subject, a secondary subject, and
it's set in an environment or a landscape that I create. So everything in my composites
is there for a reason-- to tell a single story. I don't want to include
anything that's extraneous that could be distracting. So in this image,
primary subject is the tree with the bulbs on it. Secondary subject are the
little orange bulbs that form the path in the environment. In this image
right here, we have the front pod as
the primary subject with the pod that
looks like a bird. And then we have the
secondary subject as the pods in
the background set in this environment that has the
water and the stepping stones between the two pods. And here it's even
simpler, right? I just have one primary
subject set in an environment. Now, this might not
be exactly your style, but I'm just telling
you what works for me. And if you're new
to compositing, maybe this way of
thinking can help you, the thinking
that your Canvas and Photoshop is
like your stage, and that's the environment. And you're then going
to add your primary and secondary subjects to it. So this is the image
that we're going to be walking through today. I get a lot of my
inspiration through books, things that I read, as
well as dreams that I have. So this image is called Exhale. And we can see here that here
are the eight primary images that make up this composite. So we're going to
start by setting the stage with this iceberg. Then we're going to go ahead
and add the clouds to it. And then we're going
to add a bottle. That would be the
primary subject. And we're going to fill
that with some breakers as well as some atmosphere. And then we'll go ahead and
add our secondary object and then our secondary subject. And then we're going
to need to unify these using color and tone. And then as a last
step, we'll also add a texture layer
to also make it look a little bit more believable. Well, I don't know if believable
is the right word because I do make these surreal composites. So I just need it to
look realistic enough so that the viewer can temporarily
suspend their disbelief and enter into the image. And just a thought
about this one, if you have something
that is beautiful yet sad, then you can create a
conflict, and that also makes an image more interesting. It also asks the viewer
to ask some questions. So, all right, let's go
ahead and escape out of here. We're going to scoot
over to Photoshop. And because we don't
have much time today, I've already taken the liberty
to create a new blank canvas. And then I placed all
of these multiple layers as Smart Objects. And the reason that
I'm using Smart Objects is because they are
the actual raw file. So if I start with raw
files in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, or
maybe the Bridge to Camera Raw workflow, and I
open them in Photoshop as Smart Objects, that
tells those programs to hand off a copy of that
raw file into Photoshop. So that means if I
need to make changes, like say I change a
blend mode or something, and I need to
lighten or darken it, I'm actually going to
be working and editing the contents of
the Smart Object, which will give me
the best quality. And if I need to transform them,
make them larger or smaller, I can do as many transformations
as I want to the same layer because all the information is
actually held under the hood by Photoshop. OK, so let's just turn
off some of the visibility of some of these layers like
the bottle and those two clouds. So we're going to
start with the iceberg. I've got my Move tool
selected, so I'll just reposition that down to
the bottom of the canvas area there. And I want it to slowly fade. So if you're new
to compositing, I'm going to click on
the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of
the Layers panel. That adds a white mask. And masking is always
the same in Photoshop. When the mask is white, you can
see the contents of the layer. When the mask is black, it's
going to hide the contents. Doesn't matter if
you've got a Type layer, a Smart Object, a pixel-based
layer, a Shape layer, always works the same. So I'm going to tap the G
key to get the Gradient. And I'm just going to right
click and reset that tool. It's going from black to
white, so black will hide, white will show. So I'll start at the top
here and then just slowly drag down into the image. And I get this nice gradient
in the mask, which will slowly translate into showing
and hiding the contents of that layer, all right? So let's go ahead and make
the next layer visible. These are the lower clouds. I'm just going to move
them up a little bit and do the same thing. I'll add a mask. The mask is going to be white,
tap G for the Gradient tool. And I'm going from
black to white. I want to hide this little
island in the foreground. So I'll click maybe at
the base of the clouds and then start dragging up. And, of course, the shorter
the gradient you drag, the more abrupt the
transition will be. The longer the gradient,
the nice and subtle the transition will be. All right, we'll do the same
thing for the upper clouds. I'll just make it visible. And then using the Mask
icon, I'll add a layer mask, tap my Gradient tool. Again now, we're going
from black to white, and I want to hide
this area here. But let's say, for
example, that maybe I draw it in the wrong direction. You can always
redraw your gradient. Or you can just use
the Properties panel and scroll down and there's
a little Invert button. Or you can use Command
I on Mac or Control I on Windows in order
to invert the mask. Now, the mask and
the layer are going to move and transform together
because they're linked. So if I select the Move tool
and just reposition this up a little bit further
in the image area, then those will move together. OK, so I like that except the
lower clouds have a little bit too much blue in them. So, like I mentioned,
these are Smart Objects. So if I double click on
the thumbnail for the Smart Object in the
Layers panel, that's going to bring up the
contents of that Smart Object in Camera Raw, because
it's a raw file. So I'm going to just decrease
some of that saturation, get that out of the
clouds, and click OK. And Photoshop will re-render
it from that raw information, so I've lost no
quality whatsoever. But if I double click
on this upper clouds, doesn't open up in Camera
Raw because this original was a JPEG. So I'll go ahead
and just close that, but I do want to
make it lighter. So in order to
lighten it, I could add a Curves adjustment
layer from the bottom of the Layers panel. But when we make an
adjustment with that curve, it's going to darken or
lighten all of the layers underneath it unless I create
what's called a clipping mask. So with the Curve
layer selected, I'll choose Layer, and
then Create Clipping Mask. Or I could just
click on the Clipping Mask icon in the Curves panel
or in the Properties panel. And now, I can go ahead
and make my adjustment. Of course, this is
non-destructive. I can come back and
adjust this at any time. All right, so my stage is set. It's time to add my first
primary element, which is going to be the bottle. So I'll be sure that I target
that layer in the Layers panel. There's a lot of ways to
select things in Photoshop. In the past, I probably
would have used the Pen tool and made a nice vector
path around here. But today, I'm just going
to go to the Select menu, and I'm going to
say, Select Subject, and it's just going to select
it just beautifully for me. Now, selecting glass
is actually hard, especially when you
shoot it against white, because there's the specular
highlight around the rim. So I am going to zoom into
100% and just double check it. And sure enough, there's a
little bit of an issue here. So I'm going to hold
down my Shift key. So I switched the Lasso
tool by tapping the L key, and I'm just going to
add this area right here. And then it actually
didn't include this area over here, which I like so-- what I like that it
didn't include it, so I'm actually going to
subtract this as well. So I'm just holding on
the Option key on the Mac or the Alt key on Windows
to get rid of that. Now, there's another
little area right here that I do want
to select, so I will hold down the Shift key. Great. I think we've got all of that. And then right down
here at the bottom, this is actually
quite a straight line, and I don't want to
have to draw that. So I'm going to start down
here with the Shift key. And because this is already
selected, all I need to do is draw a loose line until
I'm right about here. And then when I
release the cursor, Photoshop will automatically
close that selection and draw the
straight line for me. Excellent. So let's zoom out. And on the Layers
panel, I'm going to click to add a Layer Mask. Photoshop is smart
enough to know, hey, you had a selection made. Go ahead and create the
mask from that selection. Then I'll use the Move tool
and just reposition this down. But I need to kind
of make it look like it's sitting
on that iceberg, and there's actually a
shadow in the original image. So with that mask
still targeted, I'm going to switch
to the paint brush, just get a little bit
smaller of a brush, and tap the 5 key to
set it to maybe 50, you know, maybe 3 for 30%. And I'm going to
want to paint with-- let's look at the
mask right here. Option click on it. I want to show more
of it, so I'm going to paint with white, right? So I'm just going to
paint right over-- oh, well, I've got black
as my foreground color, so I better exchange them,
little smaller brush. And now, I'm just going
to paint with black. I'm sorry, I'm going to
paint with white right here. And it's going to slowly-- sorry, I should probably
have done it with 50%. But see how it's slowly
showing that saddle that's in the original image? All right, and
that's what I wanted, so that it looks like it's
sitting more on the iceberg, and it's creating
or casting a shadow. All right, so Command
0 to zoom out. We need to start
filling this, but I also want to see through the
bottle because it's glass. So let's change the blend mode. So in the Layers
panel, I'm going to change the blend
mode to Multiply, so now, I can see through it. And now, we'll add
these breakers. So I'm going to target the layer
as well as make it visible. And we'll zoom in just
a little bit here. And I'm going to switch. I'm not going to
use Select Subject. I'm going to come over and
use the Object Selection tool, and I'll change the
mode just to Rectangle. And I'll just click and drag
over all of those breakers. And Photoshop is going
to kind of shrink-wrap it down to select them. And the breakers that
I'm interested in are kind of these two
breakers and these over here. And if we zoom into 100%, we
can see it didn't quite get the selection correct there. So again, I'll switch
to the Lasso tool. And then I'm just going to hold
down the Option key because I want to delete that area,
that extra area there, so Option key on Mac. That would be the
Alt key on Windows. And I like the selection there. That's good, good, good. All right, I don't really care
about that area over there, so let's go ahead
and just add our mask by clicking on the Mask icon at
the bottom of the Layers panel. Use the Move tool,
reposition that, and line that up at the
bottom right about there. OK, so do you see that
little edge there? I don't really want that. So what I need to do is
I need to choke the mask. I need to bring the mask in. So with the mask targeted
on the Layers panel, I can go to the Select menu,
and choose Select and Mask. And we're going to concentrate
on these global refinements here. So right now, I have a
hard-edge mask, right? There aren't a lot of various
levels of gray in there. It's pretty much
just black and white. So this means when I shift the
edge to choke the mask if I move it to the left
or spread the mask if I move it to the right,
it can't move very much. But if I increase
the feather amount, now I can move this more widely. So let's go back to
the view on Layers. And I'll add a little
bit more of a feather. And now, we can see that I
can shift that edge more, but it gets soft, right? So then you can use the
Contrast slider to build up the contrast along that edge
that you've just created, and that is much better. All right, so I'm
going to click OK there in order to apply that. But I need to get rid of
it outside of the bottle. So let's Command click
on the bottle layer. And what that's going
to do is it's going to load it up as a selection. But I actually need
to select the inverse, so Command Shift I will
select your inverse, so now, everything outside
of the bottle is selected. And black is my
background color, so I'll use the shortcut
Command Delete in order to fill with that
background color. And then we can
zoom back in again. And I'll deselect
because, of course, we had that blur where I
painted in that drop shadow. So now, I just need to
grab my paint brush, tap the X key so that
I'm painting with black. And let's bring it all
the way up to 100%. And I'm on the mask
for the breaker layer, and we're just going to
get rid of all this, right? So I'm going to come along the
bottom, over here to the side, click and drag in order
to bring that down. And then I can switch to maybe
50% by tapping the 5 key, so that at the bottom
here it looks like it's really inside of the glass. OK, excellent. I'm going to switch
the Blend mode. But when I do, 'cause I want
to switch it to Multiply, now, all of a sudden,
I can see through to the edge of the iceberg,
which I don't want. So how would I avoid that? I can make a duplicate. I'll use command J
on Mac or Control J on Windows to duplicate it. And then I'll just set the
Blend mode back to normal. And then I'll hide
everything by just filling that mask with black. And then with my
paint brush, as long as it's set to white,
maybe 50%, I can start painting in this area. And not only do I hide the-- well, I'm actually revealing
the contents of the layer, so it's hiding that
line across there. It's also brightening
up these breakers in some points, which
I think is going to make it more interesting. All right, we need
to add our clouds. So on the Layers
panel, I'm going to make them both visible-- the clouds and the storm. And we're going to just drag
those down below the bottle. So now, the breaker
and the bottles are sitting on top of them. And I'll hide the clouds, but
we want to work with the storm. So I'm just going to
duplicate the bottle mask by just holding on
the Option key on Mac, Alt key on Windows,
drag it down there. That's great, but
it's so dark, right? I like the storm,
but it's super dark. So let's invert it. Well, because it
is a Smart Object, I can go to the
Image menu and use my adjustments such as
the Invert adjustment, and it will add it
as a Smart Filter. And now, I get this
lovely blue color instead, and it's much brighter. If I want to reposition the mask
independently from the bottle, I just unlink them,
select the Move tool, and now, I can reposition this. So let's scoot it
right to there. Then I want the clouds layer
to only appear in the area where the storm is. So we can go to the
Layer menu and create a clipping mask, just like
we did with the Curves adjustment layer. So now, those clouds are
only appearing in the bottle, and I, of course,
can reposition them. And I can also add
a mask to them, because I don't really
want them showing up at the bottom of that bottle. And I'll just make sure that I'm
painting with 100% with black, and I'll just paint
that out at the bottom. So now, we're seeing the
storm from the bottom layer, and we're seeing the
clouds from the top layer. The nice thing about
the clipping mask is that if I need to make a
change to the mask itself, I'll click on it in
the Layers panel. And then I can paint with
black to paint that portion out of the mask, because
we don't really want to see the clouds
up in that top area where there was
that bottle stopper. OK, so moving on quickly, we
need to add the face image. So let's go ahead
and target that. This is our secondary element. I'll zoom into 100%,
and I'll return back to the Object Selection tool. This time, I'm just going
to use the Lasso because I'm going to get a little bit-- I'm giving it a
little bit of help because, otherwise,
it's going to try to select this area down here. Oh, and I did it
anyway, so that's OK. I'll just use the Marquee tool. I'm going to hold
down the Option key, and I'm just going to
select out this area. Because I'm going to
create my own reflection, because this
reflection won't really work because it's all rippley. All right, so on
the Layers panel, let's go ahead and add our mask
by clicking on the Mask icon. We'll zoom back out, and
then we'll transform this. First thing I want to do is
just right click in there, and I will flip
this horizontally. And then let's also
make it a little bit smaller because we're putting
it back in the background there. And then I'll tap Return Enter
to apply that transformation. Let's zoom in to 100%
and just make sure-- ah, see that little halo,
that black line around there? I don't want that. So with the mask targeted,
we're going to do the same thing we did a moment ago. I'm going to go to Select,
and then Select and Mask. And I'm just going to use that
Shift Edge, pull that over, and now, we don't
have that halo. Terrific. Now, to make a
duplicate of it, I'm going to want to make
the duplicate darker. So I can't just use command
J in the Layers panel, because then if I change
one, the other instance of that Smart Objects
is going to change. So instead, I'll go to
Layer, Smart Objects, and then I'm going to create
a new Smart Object via Copy. Then I can transform
this, and we'll go ahead and flip this vertically. Now, it's down
here, so let's just drag that up so they match. And now, when I
double click to edit the contents of
this Smart Object, it's going to bring it
up in its own window. We can decrease
the exposure of it. When I click OK, only this
copy of the Smart Object was changed. Now, if you ever want to
mask more than one layer at the same time
with the same mask, we can go ahead and
select them both and put them in a
group using Command G. And this will be our
Face group, and we'll just add a mask to that group. So we can see there's the
two layers inside of it. I tap G to get my Gradient tool. It's going from black to white. Black will hide, and
white will reveal. So I'm just going to
click and drag up. And now, we get that nice
kind of fading reflection. OK, I am almost out of time. Let's keep moving along. So two things to unify this,
because, like I mentioned, that sky, the top sky here in
the stage, that was just a JPEG file. And so there's a lot more noise
in that than some of the newer images that I photographed. So with this texture layer,
I'll just go ahead and make it visible and also target it. And then I'm just going to add
a Blend mode, so in this case, either Overlay or Soft Light. I actually prefer
Soft Light, but I think Overlay is going to
show up better in the video, so I'll go ahead
and use Overlay. So now, I've got a nice
texture throughout the image so you're not going to notice
that there's a lot more noise in the sky than
there was, say, in the face or in the bottle. The other thing we can do is we
can always unify through color. And one of the easiest
ways to do this is by adding a Gradient
map, not a Gradient overlay, not a Gradient fill
layer, but a Gradient map. And before I add it, I'm
just going to tap the D key. That'll set my foreground color
to black and the background color to white. And that way, when I go into
Gradient map, what I basically get is all the
colors in my image remapped to grayscale
from black on the left to white on the right. But I can click in
the Gradient and then I have the Gradient editor. So if I just wanted to add,
say, little bit of blue in my shadows, I can
go ahead and click, let's say, at location 20 here. And then I'll click
on the color swatch. And now, we can add a color,
like any hue and any saturation and any brightness. I'll go ahead and add a blue,
not too purple but maybe there. But the key here is that I don't
want the brightness at like 69. I want to bring the
brightness down to 20, because that'll be the same
level of gray as in that gradient. And then I can go in
and say, you know what? 85 is just way too saturated,
so we can back that off a bit. But this way, if I
have some shadows that are cooler and some
shadows that are warmer, this blue tint is going to
kind of make them more unified and look like they all
belong in the same location. All right, so let's actually
bring the saturation down to about 20. I want it-- no, that might
not show up on the video. Let's do 30. OK, we can see that. I'll click OK and OK again. We can also just change
the opacity of the Gradient map layer if we wanted to. Or in this case, I'm going to
tap V to select my paint brush and tap 0 to make sure
I'm painting at 100%. And then I can just paint with
black in this mask in the areas where I don't want it
to tint those shades. So I might go ahead,
because, I mean, that was a really nice kind
of teal color in there, and I might just bring
back a little bit of the color in the face. OK, so I know that I'm
almost out of time, but that is the composite
that I wanted to create. I just want to show
you one more thing, because I know we didn't
really replace the sky. We just kind of
combined two skies. But you guys, you got to check
out the new Sky Replacement. So I'm going to go
to Lightroom here. So these images all have
their skies replaced. So that is a new replaced sky. That's a new replaced sky. So is that one, so much better
than the original skies. Because sometimes
you're at a location, and the foreground
element is amazing, and the sky just isn't, right? So all of these
have been replaced. So let's go to this
last one right here. And I'm just going to use
Command E to edit the original. This must be a
Photoshop document. Oh, that's OK. It's only one layer. So then let's go
to the Edit menu here and go to Sky Replacement. And you've got these different
skies that you can choose from, so there's a bunch of
preset skies in there, but you can also load your own. So I've just loaded
four skies here, but we could take a
look at some of them and see what they look like. So that doesn't look right
because the size of the sky is too weird. Maybe we'd want something
maybe a little bit more subtle like th-- no,
that doesn't work either. This one works
actually quite well. There are other ones. Like, if we wanted
to come in here, we could add a rainbow
behind the sky. I think that looks quite lovely. If we just go up to Blue Skies
and we had just a plain blue sky, you'll be able to
see what a great mask it's actually making. So let's return to
the one that I loaded. And this is just my sky. You can load your sky by
just clicking the gear icon and then going and
getting a new sky. And you can create
groups and put your skies in groups and everything. But one of the coolest things
you can do is you can go ahead and you can scale the sky as
big or as small as you want. And you can reposition it. And as you do that,
Photoshop is actually going to change the lighting
adjustment in the sky adjustments up here,
and make it blend and add some of that color
into the foreground element. So that's a little bit too
big because I want the moon in there, so let's go to 120%. And then I'm also
going to flip it. Because the way I
see it, you can see, there's the-- see, it
knows where the horizon is, so it's matching the
horizon in the image with the horizon in the photo
that I'm replacing the sky in. And I just want to
scoot that over. Actually, let's scoot it over. Oh, let's scoot it
over to the moon. It's right there in
the center, all right? And, of course, I can
change any of these options. If I want it to look a little
bit more yellow, I can do that. Or I can make it more blue. I can add brightness. So I can either
brighten up the sky, or I can darken it down, maybe
make it a little bit more moody. And you could also
say, you know what? I want the Lighting
mode in the foreground. Don't multiply it but screen it. Keep it lighter. In this case, I think the
artificial intelligence here, multiply was a better choice. But you could also change the
Lighting adjustment you can change the Color adjustment. So that's what's happening to
the foreground elements there. And then we can output
this to new layers. So when we click OK,
completely non-destructive. Because I've made the changes
to all of those layers, are to all of the
adjustments, it actually creates like a brightness which
is an adjustment layer, a sky temperature which will help
me with the warm to cool, the yellow to blue, and then
the foreground lightings. And, of course, I
can come in here and I can make changes to the
masks and everything as well. So if you do have
to replace the sky, that is just a really cool
new feature that I hope you'll definitely check out. So with that, you
guys, I'm out of time. I'm very sorry. But I hope you
learned something. I you had a little bit of
fun, maybe a little bit of inspiration in there. I am hoping that you'll check
out all those new tools. And enjoy the rest of MAX. So thanks again for joining me. Take care.
