Speed Photobashing: A Beginner's Guide

so you have a great idea for a design but let's just say for whatever reason you've managed your time horribly there's a review in less than an hour and you have nothing no 3d models or drawings we've all been there what do you do well in digital art there's a practice called photo bashing where you take a collection of photographs and collage or bash them together to create a seamless piece in this video I'll show you how to photo bash your way out of this sticky situation hey this is Steven from RE welcome to speed photo bashing for designers we'll be covering the basics of bashing on a deadline including how to choose your images the most important tools and tips on composing your piece by the end you'll have the essential skills needed to put together your own photo bash this is by no means a comprehensive guide on all the features but rather a quick and dirty cheat sheet to get you off and running let's say I have an idea for a desert house on a cliff and I want to get it down for my review in an hour I'll be taking these photographs and bashing them into this piece through blending compositing and painting here you can see a checklist of the main tools and concepts I'll be covering and you can skip to them at any time using these time stamps let's pull up Photoshop we're going to make a new document and set the pixels per inch to 150 which is best for printing first and most important step is to find the right imagery finding a perfect photo with all the right features can save you from having to construct it out of other images however it's also time-consuming to look for one so you'll have to find a balance between availability and quality want to have an idea of the main elements that will go into your scene in my case that's going to be the house the background mountains and the foreground cliffs the more time you have the more elements you can add we want to use images that have consistent perspectives and lighting conditions since those are the most difficult things to change I usually keep an open mind and experiment with different images until I have something that I like so don't get hung up on choosing mr. right it's also important to keep an eye out for usable parts of an image instead of the entire thing as sometimes great detail can be found in unexpected places for searching there are generally two types of sources head web sites hosting royalty-free collections and search engines if you're not planning to monetize your work or if you're only using a small unrecognizable portion of an image search engines such as Google Images and Pinterest are probably the fastest way to go otherwise royalty-free licenses may be the safer option check out some of these industry preferred sources and yeah the free stuff is pretty nice just um good car now that I have my images I'm going to start dropping them in and roughing out a quick composition I'll use the transform tool to scale these images and layer masks to remove their backgrounds using layer masks is an important concept because it allows us to block out parts of an image non destructively which means we can go back and edit it at any time this allows us to do a bad job at selecting something right now and then improve it later if we have time we'll come back to this point later on there's a bunch of different ways to go about selecting areas for masks here's a cheat sheet for how they can be used as a rule of thumb the magic wand tool is a good place to start it's versatile and can quickly select an area with just a few clicks the quick select tool shown here works well for sharply defined borders the select a mask dialog also shown can be used to refine other selections using its detailed controls the polygon lasso tool is good for geometric objects the magnetic and freeform lasso tools are for complex silhouettes with complex backgrounds you can use the color range tool for areas where the background is separated into many pieces for clearly defined objects you can even try the new AI remove background feature going to start playing around with the composition of the piece by blocking out where the big elements are this part is the most open-ended but it's important to keep a few things in mind to establish flowing lines and continuous structures between these images such as the peaks of this mountain range the background or the bays of this house the angle of the shot should also be consistent in order for the perspectives to match I also want to separate the foreground and background by ordering the layers and grouping them sometimes there are specific elements of an image that we want to use for example this pathway in front of the building but its perspective is off we can use the transform tool to mold the image until it's the correct shape I could look for a new path closer to what I want if I had more time but this is usually faster and yields a good enough result I'm then going to mask out the path I'm doing it roughly using a soft brush because it's faster and I'm not sure if this is going to work yet it's usually a good idea to rough out elements first I can always refine the mask at a later stage this is true for many of the other adjustments we'll be making to the images a non-destructive workflow allows us to iterate quickly on each part of the image without worrying about details I'm dropping in some more images to fill out the scene I want to finalize the placement of most of the elements soon since I'm nearing the 20-minute mark and I want enough time to refine the image later again I'm picking images that have similar camera angles lighting and environments as my scene to make the compositing process easier in this case they're all taken at a horizontal angle on a clear day in a rocky desert as I placed them I'm taking into account the scale cues that textures and atmosphere and my images provide in general I want to use pictures taken up close in foreground parts of my scene and vice versa crisp details such as pebbles and individual plant leaves tell the brain hey this object is pretty close while large terrain patterns obscured by hazy atmospheric fog looks more natural in distant parts of the scene I also want to align the horizon lines of all the elements in my scene which will help them feel more natural correct perspective will allow me to more easily see if scale cues are properly placed before moving on to the next phase it's best to organize your layers into folders for each of the main layers or elements of your scene and then color coding them this will save time and prevent confusion later now that we have the full scene in place it's time to start compositing this is the meat of the process where everything starts to come together for color-matching will be using adjustment layers these are non-destructive layers that sit on top of another layer to tweak its appearance they affect everything below them but can also be applied to a single layer or group they're crucial for bringing all varying exposures brightnesses and colors of our images into sync and because they are non-destructive the same principles of ruffit then refine can be applied these layers can also have their own masks that we can use to apply effects on only parts of the image the main adjustments we'll be using our levels hue saturation and color balance together they form what I call the stack that I applied to most of my layers to match them to each other color balance is the most useful for precisely matching the RGB color values between layers while hue saturation is useful for matching the intensity or hue of a layers color they can also be used to darken or brighten an image uniformly and finally levels is a versatile adjustment that can be used to change the lighting conditions of a layer to match a brighter or darker scene it can also be used to simulate shadowed areas or atmospheric haze the point of these adjustments is to make the image look seamlessly uniformed but not necessarily pretty yet this is similar to the process of film editing where a neutral frame is used until the final color grade for blending the layer masks will be doing a heavy lifting its job is to make it difficult to tell where one image ends and another begins seamless blending of different textures requires different techniques uniform textures that have low detail definition such as skies skin or concrete blend well with a smooth fades between them which can be achieved using a soft round brush organic formations such as rocks and vegetation with high detailed frequency and definition can be blended with a medium hard brush with a jagged border to prevent ghosting and transition high-contrast objects such as trees against sky and hard borders between nature and architecture require precise masking and hard edges this can be achieved by painting over a detailed selection on a layer mask for this tree I'll be using color range to get all the sky pixels out from between the leaves it's important to experiment with new ways of blending to figure out what will work best for novel situations the transform tool can be useful for editing or adding to architecture in a scene by copying portions of the image and transforming it we are able to construct this new section of the roof and pillar to merge the two images we can also create completely new geometry by importing flat material textures and transforming them in the same way we can fix any missing portions of a surface using the clone stamp tool the clone stamp is extremely powerful for both removing imperfections from the surface and taking an existing pattern and extending it to fill a hole or gap compositionally speaking this image is a bit busy right now and I want to reduce the amount of information in some parts of the frame to draw attention to the focal point the house we can do this using atmosphere to increase the separation between foreground and background using the levels adjustment we can take out the lows and highs and the brightness of the image to simulate the effect of fog dispersing light to make a more evenly lit image we've spent around 20 minutes on compositing and now we need to wrap up the details on this image with a fine-tuned pass we'll need to keep an eye out for overly hard transitions uneven lighting or color tone between layers and objects that draw unwanted attention away from the focus in this image I notice four main areas for potential improvement harsh straight line separating the house courtyard from the rocks outside the lack of orange tint on the foreground rocks and paths unnaturally straight transition between the cliff edge and the surface as well as the large and distracting dark plants in the middle now that we've fixed these issues we can move on to the final color grid remember thanks to non-destructive editing we can go back if we have time to refine anything we want in this phase we'll finish out our image by bringing out as color and pop well first bring back some of the blue lost in the sky by using another stack of adjustment layers we'll only paint out parts that we want these effects to take place then once we're happy with the base file we're going to make a copy and flatten all the layers this will allow us to use the Camera Raw filter to do a final color grade pass a camera RAW tool is a pretty nifty self-contained editor that has intuitive controls similar to Lightroom and is tailored towards image post-production although the same effects can be done directly in Photoshop the workflow here using sliders is much faster and simpler for overall image Corrections we can now take a step back and assess how the entire image feels we've sacrificed some color oomph to get all the images to blend well earlier but now we can edit back in across the whole piece well brighten up everything a bit and give it some more contrast to highlight the intensity of the Sun I'll also add a graduated filter which gradually fades in the adjustment over a gradient I want to saturate the sky a bit more and I'll use the gradient to fade the hazy effect away as we look higher into the sky now I think I'm happy with the peace so we can save it out and there you have it we've completed the final image in less than an hour if you ever need to edit the individual layers again simply make your edits within the original group make a second copy flatten then drag the smart filter over to the new image this has been a short guide on speed photo bashing for designers I hope you found this helpful if you would like to learn more advanced tips about photo bashing or any other rendering techniques check out our youtube channel or visit us at Ahri school and sign up for one of our courses thanks and happy bashing

Channel: Advanced Rendering Institute

Views: 11,087

Keywords: photo bash, photo-bash, collage, architecture, design, collaging, colage, compositing, photo-compositing

Id: eqjRFmOGjhg

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020