Create a Hollywood Blockbuster Style Portrait in Photoshop

1. Intro: all right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another class. This is Jason Buff. I will be your teacher on this new project, and that is my ugly mug that you're looking at right there. Um, what I'm gonna do is show you how to take a big show. You how to take a picture like this and go from this kind of mediocre picture means that terrible. It's moderately well lit and turn it into something like this, which I think is fairly cool. Um, here are a couple of different folders. They have different styles. So what we're gonna do in this class is I'm gonna walk you through. If you look through this folder, I'm gonna walk you through all the different things that I do to make this image. So take my hand and walk with me down the road of knowledge. Here we go. 2. Lighting Set Up: Okay. Now, I made this quick diagram to show you how the lighting is put together here. It's very simple to do lights like this and you don't need professional flashes. All you need is really just one big source of light. You can put like a work lamp or something behind a pillow behind a bed sheet or whatever you confined to make a really big light. So that's in this case. I had a beauty dish that I got cut off of Amazon. It didn't cost very much. And I have to professional alien be flashes. But I don't need that. You know, I could I could do this now with very cheap flights. Now, I have two more lights over here in little soft boxes that I also got off of Amazon. That is little cheap ones. You know, just little cheap soft boxes. You can make these really inexpensively at home. Just put a, um a really bright light inside of a trash can, like a black trash can, and put a little white paper over the top. And the key is, when you're doing this, you wanna have thes light's hitting the side of your face and it gives you that cool. Look, um, that I have in the picture. So if you look here, let me, um I'm gonna group these together hips scoop these together and look at me. Um, in this picture over here, I have a flash. Actually, I have a flash behind one of these umbrellas. You can get one of these. All this stuff is very cheap. Now, on Amazon, I think there's about a 1,000,000 different places you can get. But the key is to just soften the light up just a little bit. You don't necessarily want this to be an ultra soft light, but the guy who really taught me this is a guy named Joel Grimes. So if you go online and check out Tutorials by Joel Grimes this is a very specific style for him, and it's the same kind of style. You see a lot for superheroes, and you see this a lot for sports pictures. This light is called a rim light, and it just gives you this nice texture here and brings you out from the background. And you can even put you know, since I'm a little bald up here You know, I don't put a light up at the top, but you can put lights up at the top. And basically, the idea is that your lighting from the back forward and it gives you a really interesting look. And now in the front, I have this beauty dish that's just illuminating. Kind of flatly. That light is slightly above you can see in my eyes. If you zoom in, you can see the reflection there. Don't let me scare you. Right. You're here. Oh, sorry about that. You can see the reflection in my eye, and you can always. If you're looking at photography in general, you can always kind of see the lighting set up in the reflection. Now, you want to make sure another thing. Aside from this cool, little reflection, you always want to make sure that you get a catch light in the eyes like this because that's gonna make you feel the texture of the eyes is gonna make you feel the the the wetness of the eyes, which is something that really can enhance a picture. So that's it for now. Remember, if you want to learn this technique, Joel Grimes is really the master of it, So check him out. He's on YouTube. He's all over the place. I think he's got a creative life course, so I'm gonna leave it at that and we'll move on to the Photoshopped part. 3. Creating Layer Mask: now the first thing I did with this image, you can tell you can see these. Um these little marks here is the actual image that I made this from wasn't completely centered. So what I did was I just took my original picture, and I made it so that it matched up with, um you know, So it's a little more, uh, centred. Okay, so I just took it, and I really, you know, moved it like that, and I re cropped it and everything, so and I knew I was going to replace all this stuff, so I just kind of didn't worry about it. Now, the first thing that you have to do when you're gonna do something like this is create your Alfa Channel because you want to separate this from everything else. Obviously. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how I did that in a very quick way. I'm not going to do as much detail as I did before, but the tool that I use when I first start cutting something out is thebe pin tool. So you grab the pin tool from right over here, and I'm gonna zoom in And you always want to make sure you're working with nice big pictures you want, Always want to use raw rule. Always make sure using raw And what I'm doing is I'm clicking and I'm dragging, clicking and dragging you always You never want it. Just click and stop because you're gonna get a straight line, it's gonna screw up, okay? And I'm hitting this when? If I want to move this, I'm just moving it with my mouse. But if I want to move the middle point, I can move it with my space bar like that. So you just kind of slowly going around and you can always change this. You can always go through and adjust it. And I'm just dragging and I'm moving, you know, holding down the space bar and this is fairly quick and you'll find that the more you do this, the better you get out. So let's go. I don't Like I said, don't worry about all this stuff. We're going to eventually do that in the refined mass thing. If you put if you put a, um, a point in the wrong place and accidentally, you know, let go of your mouse or whatever. You can always just hit control Z and control C has saved me from a lot of heartache. And you also can go to the history panel in the history panel. Will Has your, um, all of your actions saved from, you know, you can You can decide how many, uh, different phases back. You want to go? This is not the best. I'm just gonna do this really quick and you can see I want to get into the refined tool because that's really where we're going to, um, get this guy to shape. Okay, let's just do we can do bigger selections wherever the curve changes. That's where you need to put a a point. OK, so here we go. Here we go. It wasn't great and hit control Z, I didn't like where that point waas vehicle round one right here. And don't be frustrated if the pin tool feels a little weird when you first start working with it. Because, I mean, it took me a really long time to feel comfortable with the pin tool. And the pencil is really something that, um, you know, if you took my photo shop class. It's really more of a vector tool, but it is very powerful. And it's kind of you can't really be a professional designer without understanding vectors . OK, I'm gonna hit control minus minus, minus minus. And I'm just gonna keep I'm gonna select all this stuff down here, and then I'm gonna find my first point and you'll see that there's a little circle there, and now we have a fairly decent cut out of my face. All right? Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click, and I'm going to do make selection. Feather radius zero for now. Okay. So you can see we've got the marching ants now going around my face. And all we have to do is select this layer and hit the layer mask, okay? And whatever iss, whatever's inside those marching ants is gonna be what is white and all this is gonna be black now. So what we need to do is you take that out and you can see now we've got my face selected. Um and so we can really quickly move through here. I'm just gonna go and click. You can see that. Obviously, this is not this. This is what you know. If you if you're working with a bad photo shop person, they would give you this and say, Oh, yeah. Okay, well, this is cut out, you know, But the key to making Photoshopped look really good is to get all the little hairs in there . That's really kind of the the sign that you're working with a photo shop person that knows what they're doing. So let's go in here real quick and I'm gonna right click on refine mask. So let's go there. And this is a really fun too little work with now. It depends what your background is gonna be. It's important to know so you can choose black. You can choose why you can choose theatrical Alfa Channel. I'm going to go. Since my background is primarily going to be black, I'm going to focus on I'm gonna look at this with a black background. Okay, so the main tools, I'm going to use her right here. This is, um, the refined radius tool, which basically is going to, um, is what you're gonna use for going right around the fine edge of your image. But you don't want to go on top of your image where it already is. One of the biggest mistakes I met used to make is let me show you I would get this and I would go around the image like this, which, strangely enough, is actually doing a pretty good job now. Um, but I would get further in here. I would like select more in here, and it would start taking away parts of the image. So what you really want to do And you can you can already see how amazing this is. Look at that. I mean, look at all the little hairs. It looks like I'm over that background, So just go around the very edge and don't necessarily undue control, Z, cause I don't really want to see your hair. I'm sorry, everybody about that. But you can see now I'm getting all those little hairs from my beard. And that's going to really kind of sell the fact that I'm on this background case. I'm just gonna go around here. I'm not going to draw on the image at all. Here we go. See? Look at that Now. This tool was not around for a very long time. And when it finally came out, it just blew my mind. And if you erase if you the other tool down here is the race refinement tool, that means that if you erase something by accident that you wanna have in your image, you can just, um, like I'm gonna click up here. Okay, lets go. Now I use the erase refinement toe when my other tool accidentally erases too much like right here, this kind of erased part of my head. So I'm gonna go in and click the erase refinement tool, appear and see that brings it back. I don't know if I'm totally using this in the right way, but that's the way I use it. That looks terrible. Smart radius. Well, you have to play with it a little bit. Okay? So I don't you get all this white appear and that's not really gonna matter once we start adding in all the the other elements, but it's it's really trying here to do the hair. Okay, so, you know, I want to leave all this and I could make this all perfect and everything for the class, but I want to show you exactly what I do and some of the things that, um, you know, just a much as you will do. I'm just sitting here kind of guessing at what things are going to Dio. And I know a lot of people have actually worked with some amazing Photoshopped people and not even they sometimes really, totally understand absolutely everything that they're doing with photo shop. Now, I don't wanna have your hair here. I'm just gonna Ah, I'm gonna undo that. I hit control Z, um, and let's just leave it like this. I think this is pretty pretty good. Um, you know, and this is gonna hit, OK, And you can make little, um, you know, change is here with the actually, that looks pretty good with the contrast. You know what's going on on that border? Um, you know, if you want to smooth it, if you want to kind of blur it a little bit. And this is all this is all just really changing the Alfa Channel. Okay, so I think this is pretty good. You can change where, um, the actual Alfa Channel is, and that looks terrible. And this is like it says This is the refine mask tool You can really get in and find fine tune where your, um, how your mask is. And the key to the mask, of course, is the edge. All this is white. All this is black. The key is to really refine this edge. And I think that looks pretty good for our purposes. So I am going to click. OK, And there we go. Now, if I put a background here, I'm just gonna put a solid behind my head. We can see how good that mask is. It's pretty good, you know? And you're gonna hide stuff. One of the things that you do a lot of times with, this stuff is just kind of hide stuff, hide mistakes and whatever. Like for example, you can see under here. I have. I haven't cut out that which I could, you know, I could do, but we'll see if I need to do it later. Okay. Another thing that you can do real quick. I know that this has been kind of a long class, but one trick that I absolutely love is if you start getting artifacts here, for example, if you're on a white background and you can see the white background here. You can go in and select this Alfa Channel on this. This this is a little bit advanced, but I just want to make sure I show you this. You can select the Alfa Channel, go on top of that image, get the clone tool the clone stamp and start going through and cloning little areas and painting it out over the top. And this is a tool that I learned from, um, Aaron Nance. You can just go around the edge and let's say, for example, there's just a little bit of like the white background getting on your jacket. You can select the jacket and just paint a little bit on top. Make sure that your, um, on make sure that current players will okay your selected on that, and you can just color out the edges. And that was an amazing trick that I learned a while ago, and it can help you if you get somebody gives you a picture that is not very well, um, it's not that easy to get a Alfa Channel out of it. Another thing that some people do is they'll get a get a brush that's in the shape of little hairs, and they'll just go on the Alpha Channel and they'll just paint hairs so it looks like it's on top. And it's amazing how much I did. I saved a client once because they had to get a, um, the picture of somebody on an Alfa Channel and they just had all this wild and crazy hair, and there was almost no way to do it. So what I ended up doing was getting a brush that looked very similar to their hair and just painting hair on top of the image. All right, so this is 12 minutes in this class. I'm going to change next to our next topic. 4. ClearingSkin: Okay. Now, the next thing that I'm going to do is just try to fix my face a little bit. So okay, lets go in control plus plus plus. And you can see I've got a lot of little freckles and things you don't want to get rid of. All this stuff. And one of the key things, Um, one of the things you'll see in a lot of pictures that have been over overly retouched is just that there's absolutely no blemishes at all. There's no, you know, people look almost like robots. So I'm gonna click the Band Aid tool just that healing brush tool. There we go and hit plus plus and just some of these little things. You know, maybe, like this little bump here, I'm gonna up with that curly brackets, right and left to make the brush changes we've discussed in the class. And I'm just going to draw on top of the image. Get rid of some of that stuff. Get rid of some of these guys. Select here, paced here, select. Here, look there when I'm selecting with all. So when you see the little arrow tool, that means I'm selecting this area, and then I'm gonna draw on this area, and it's gonna try to match that area. So even if I pick on an area of skin that's got a different color, when I select on it and I draw in the other place, it will try to use when I'm drawing on it, it'll be selecting it like this, the clone tool. But then when I drop it, it'll try to match that area, and it doesn't always do a great job, so you don't want to do it too much. Let's go through here all these little areas. As much as I like to say that I have great skin, when you get in this close, it starts getting kind of icky. And it is a little weird to be doing this to my own face. There we go. So is this all right? That's decent. Okay, so we hit control minus and we've gotten rid of some of those nasty little things. Um, and if you take a good picture, I mean, it's really hard to take a bad picture and make it look good. If I was gonna look at this picture and say, Oh, well, You know what? What? I have changed about it. Not bear in mind. I took this picture of myself. This isn't by any means, A professional picture. You know, the lighting is good, but you can see my arms here. I took this picture. I mean, and at about about 10 pictures, I just took this one because it was the only one in focus. I wasn't looking. I wasn't able to focus on my face. So this is just, you know, I got lucky, but if you look at my eyes, they're even a little bit out of focus. Um, So, anyway, we're gonna go through and start working on the next part of this tutorial. Here we go. 5. Sharpening: one thing that really gives an image, a sense of presence is the eyes. So let's go into the eyes now. And here's what I always do with the eyes. If you look at that, it's just a little bit blurry. So I'm gonna take this whole layer, and I'm just going to drag it down and make a copy of it. And because I'm only gonna be working with this part, I'm gonna go ahead and just add that Alfa Channel. So applause, um, apply layer mask. So we've got this and I want to make sure that my eyes in all these areas uh, you know, my lips, my eyes, my hair, all that is very, um sharp. OK, so I'm going to go up to filter sharpen uncharted mask. Now, uncharted mask is the only sharpening tool that I ever use. There's other ones you can learn about him if you want, but that's what I mean. Literally 20 years I've only used on Chuck Mask. So let's do that in short mask and you'll see all of a sudden it takes the image and starts kind of, you know, trying to make it look like this is sharper and it's there's not a whole lot it can do. Um, it's not gonna be perfect, but you can go. I keep the threshold zero and then you play between the radius and the, um percentage, and so you can go boost up the radius and you'll start seeing what it does. Just, you know, if you just really weird look, so you keep going down, down, down until you really just want to see where you have that detail in the eyes and you can zoom in. No, you don't really need to do this, but you can take this out a little bit. This is not gonna be this layer is not gonna be 100%. So you just want to get it to the point where it looks kind of like this and I click. OK, now, if we zoom back, we can see that the images just wait to, uh, you know, contrast E and doesn't really look that good. But what I'm going to do now is I'm just gonna focus on these eyes. So I'm gonna create an Alfa Channel on this one, and I'm gonna chit control I and there's an easier way to do that. But that's what that's what I dio. And now I'm going to paint on top of this with White. But I'm going to bring down the opacity to about 20 okay? And so when I paint on this, it's not gonna be, like, crazy obvious that it's there's a difference. And, you know, like I said, you're always trying to make sure that you're not give you no tipping your hand and showing people that you're actually using photo shop. You want people to believe that you're just that good of a photographer Now, this is you know, that might be a little too much. You can see that there's a difference Like that doesn't look natural at all. Um, but what we're gonna do in a second is we're going to just bring that down. So here we go. There's the eyes. I'm going to do this for the lips, going to do this for money, beautiful, bushy highbrows. And I'm also going to do this for I'm gonna make the brush a little smaller, and I'm going to do this for my hair, and it just, you know, it just gives you a little extra, You know that There's something going on in this picture that's like, That's kind of that's kind of cool. I wonder how they did that. So you can see that now. All these areas are ultra, ultra sharp. Now I'm gonna take this layer, and I'm going to bring it down to about 50%. So Okay, that looks a little more natural. I think so. Now, when you go back, you can see the eyes are they? Look, you can see all that detail, and it looks like you can see a lot more detail than the resolution, if you understand what I mean. It looks like everything's very high rez in the parts that you wanted to be high rez. Now we're gonna move on to, you know, kind of blurring out my skin a little bit. So that is, you know, the opposite. So that's more has less contrast 6. Blurring skin: Now I'm going to do the opposite. I'm gonna take that same image that I started with, and I'm going to drag it down and make a copy. Put that up here and all I want to do is clear up this skin a little bit. And I could spend hours just working on my face to make it look more and more perfect. But I try to keep things. I try to make it so you don't look Photoshopped. So all I'm gonna do is go to filter, blur Gaussian blur again. I only ever use Gaussian Blur. I know there's other options, and maybe some people use other things. But Gaussian Blur is, you know, 99% of what I dio. Now this is still set to where I had it. You can blur it up to, you know, like crazy, but I just want a teeny little bit of blur. So you look at this skin here, and it just looks a little more smooth. This is not perfect, but Okay, Now that is, um, blurred what I'm gonna do, and again, I can get rid of this layer mask. I'm just going to do delete layer mask, and I'm going to put a new one. Control I And I'm just gonna go back again, and I'm gonna take a brush. 20% is Okay, So I'm gonna make that bigger curly brackets, right? And I'm just going to paint a little. I'm just gonna tap and just see how that goes. Let me zoom in on that. You can see what I'm doing. Okay, so here you can just see it's just blurring it a little bit. You don't want to blurt too much. You don't wanna make anybody aware of the effect. So there we go. Every guy just blurred a little bit. So going through here and I've seen I mean, there are crazy examples of reworking skin I've actually taken For some people that have kind of bad skin, what I'll do sometimes is I'll even graft the skin of a really nice young model and kind of graft their skin onto someone else is not so great skin. I mean, you can It's amazing what you can do. So I'm just gonna do this a little bit more, and then second, we're gonna get rid of all this pink, okay? And that just gives you an idea. I didn't do a whole lot. I mean, come on. You know you don't mess too much with perfection to you. Okay, we go. There we are. That the And Walla we're done. 7. Liquify: one thing you're always gonna have to deal with is what The way that the lens distort your face and the way that you know, sometimes your nose looks a little bigger than it should look. And you can use this for really making somebody look completely different, taking off £20 whatever. But I use the liquefy to a lot. So now that I've got all these little things going on, um, I'm going to select. This is a process that I do over and over again. I'm going to select thes three hit shift and click down, and it will select all those. And I'm gonna hit control G and make a group. I'm going to duplicate that layer, and now I'm going to hit Control E. And now I've just got that image to work with. If I ever need to go back and edit it, I can go back here. But I just I don't want to have so many layers. All right, Um, or you could just create a smart object if you wanted Teoh. It really depends on how delicate you're being with the image. Okay, so what I can do now is go up to the filter and go to liquefy. I'm just gonna play around a little bit with, you know, trying to shrink my nose, try to read, you know, undo what the lens did. So in this case, I'm going to do the pucker too. Um, so I'm gonna make it kind of big, and I'm just gonna tap on it a little bit. I'm not gonna change much, but I'm gonna tap on that. And while it just made my head a little smaller, I'm gonna make it a little smaller. Go into my face, tap it again, tepid again. And you can see it's just kind of making my nose in that area a little smaller, maybe making you look a little bit more like what a longer lens would do because when you are shooting with wide angle lens, it's gonna distort your face. So that is a little more, you know, and you you have to look it and be like, Ok, um, what, is there something that just looks a little off like I mean, look at, you know, I can do this kind of thing to the picture. It's like, Okay. Ah, that's my Shaquille O Neal. Okay, sorry. That's not that's not cool. Um, but there we go. Uh, and I'm just hitting. Um, can I All right? I'm just gonna reset it. Forget it. Ah, reset. If you ever want to reset the thing you're doing Just what? Ah, I forget to cancel. I'm gonna redo that. Okay, so let's go liquefy. And I'm just gonna do that again. I'm just gonna kind of pinched down my nose a little bit, so it looks a little bit less, um, wide angle, Lindsay. And if you know, here's a little tip. If you're ever getting a picture taken on an iPhone, always make sure you're not at the edge because the edges where everything gets distorted. If you want to be in an iPhone picture, get right in the very middle because they're nothing distorts your image worse than an iPhone. And that's why everybody walks away from his Facebook images. Just like completely devastated. Um, now sometimes what if you have somebody's a little bit squinty eyed. You can make their eyes a little bit bigger. My eyes are very small, but in this image, I put the camera a little bit above my head, so I had to look up. And that's a really good tip for filmmakers out there. Put the camera just a little bit above people's heads. So you get your nice chin line. I've got a, you know, a terrible double chin, and this gives me a chin line, you know? And you also get people to open their eyes, so it's always much better to shoot people from a little bit above. Now, this looks a little This looks OK, but, um, yeah, maybe it looks a little off. I don't know. Okay, We'll just stay with that and you can do the before. And after here, you can go. You see what I mean? You can see that distortion. Okay, so that's enough with liquefy now. Really quickly. Another thing you can do with liquefy. You know, like I was saying, when I take a picture right in front of me, I look ah, lot skinnier than I am. Um, but sometimes what I do is you can actually go in and kind of bring your cheeks and a little bit. And I use this a lot with, um, models, too. You can just bring in the cheeks a little bit like that. I mean, that's ridiculous. But, I mean, you can just like it says you can liquefy your image. You can bring down that giant forehead. You know, you could just play with stuff, but you're always gonna run the risk that you're gonna, you know, make somebody look a little bizarre, you know? Okay, that will do. Oops. I cooked. Okay, let me do. There we go. All right, that's it for liquefy. 8. Adjusting colors: now that we've got it like this. I mean, this is kind of the fun part. So what I'll typically do is I'm gonna cheat a little bit, and I'm gonna grab something from my other folder. Um, I'm just gonna throw something in the background here. And as I had said, I always already kind of worked out that this would be something I could put in the background. Of course, this looks totally fake. It doesn't look like it mixes or whatever, but what I'm going to start doing on top of this is I'm going to start adding a bunch of adjustment layers. Okay, so I guess the 1st 1 I'm going to do is I look very pink here. So and, you know, I think the other stuff is taking a long time. I'm gonna run through the rest of the stuff a little faster. So the first thing I'll usually do is go to, um, Hue and saturation and go to, um, just the reds and maybe take down the Reds a little bit. So I don't look so, um, pork like that. If that's the right word, um or you can change where the Reds are. Okay, well, you know, whatever. Um, my favorite tool for you know, adjusting is the curbs. So the curves tool is right here. And, as you know, from my Photoshopped course, if you're at the level that you need to be for this course everything, you know, forget about thes group groups up here. Everything that's on top of what you're doing is going to have the same adjustment. So everything is going to have the contrast changed or everything is going tohave the, um the color is added on top of it, or everything is going to be affected by this curve. I don't have anything really on here yet, but I know that everything that I have is gonna be under here. So what I usually do is I'll go Teoh my curves and I'll go to the blue layer, and I'll usually bring that down here so you can see it's affecting the background layer as well as my layer. Okay, so let's go and blue gonna bring that up. And this is something I do with almost every picture. So you can keep bringing that up, and you can see where that you know goes, bring that guy up a little bit and then take the middle here and drag that down. And that's going to give you this really cool. Look, just by playing with the Blue Channel, okay? You can also go to the Red Channel and bring that up a little bit. But I'm not going to do that for this picture. Maybe just a little bit up and little bit down here a little bit now. Well, over here. And you just you're trying to take it out of reality. You're trying to get it further from what looks like an actual picture. So there we go. Now I'm gonna add another adjustment layer, which is going to be the color balance. And I just find these air, these air just kind of the things I go to so shadows I'm going to drag over in the blue and yellow. I'm gonna drag that over to the blue here to now, I'm gonna go to I'm not gonna mess with the mid tones, but the highlights. I'm gonna drag that over to the yellow so you can see that's going here. And that's just you can already see with just those adjustments. You can see how much more cinematic how much more kind of professional this looks and that this is the equivalent of just kind of color grading. Okay, and I'll stop with that for right now because I think you've seen the huge improvement that makes to the image. 9. Overlaying elements: if you're gonna be doing a lot of graphic design, I highly recommend that you join up with a stock image library so you don't run into problems with your stock images. I've done graphic design for a very long time, and I know a lot of stories about people who have done designs with probably the most, um, strict. One is Getty images. Getty images will find you if you choose one of their images. I mean, I've had friends who just totally, um, you know, got messed up because they did a project and they used the Getty image that, for whatever reason, was not registered or whatever. So I use ah, service called Dollar Photo Club. And what basically happens is I pay, I think, $10 a month and I get every single picture that they have for $10. And if I don't use that $10 it goes towards the next month. So I've got probably like, 100 images. Now I can download for free, and they cost so little and they're really nice high resolution images. And so when that's kind of the first place that I go and find images this uh, is a lens flare just to the search for lens flare with the dirty linens. And I got this and you can see it's a very, very nice, high resolution image. You could probably find this for free somewhere, but I just try to work with images that I owned the rights to. Now, as you can see, I can just I just took that image. I dragged on it and brought it over into my image. And you can see, even though my image is fairly large, this image is a lot larger, so I'm just going to shrink that down and put it over here. Now, this is kind of the J. J. Abrams, uh, style. You know, where you've got, like, the dramatic lens flare. And and, you know, this is the kind of stuff that he uses for, like Star Trek and stuff like that. Now, of course, I'm just sitting in this on top of my image. You're not gonna be able to see anything, so I need to go up to my blending layer, uh, my blending thing here. Ah, and I'm going to try a couple of different things. The 1st 1 is going to be screened. So let's just do screen. And as you can see, it overlays it. But it's a little too bright and I get that brightness. So what I can do is really bring down the darks in this image. So I'm gonna hit control. L um and I usually just use if I want to do something quick. I just usually do levels that may be a bad habit, but I I use the levels adjustment, and I'll bring that down so that this area on the image goes down to black and you're not going to see it anymore. So you can just see kind of how that goes. And already we're starting to get kind of an interesting image. Now, this looks a little too cheesy to me. Um, but you could do something like this. This definitely looks more along the lines of like something you'd see for a movie poster. Whatever. Uhm, I'm going to get rid of that blue because I wanna make sure everything matches. So I'm gonna hit control, shift you and it's gonna de saturate that image. And I also want to make sure that this is underneath all my adjustment layers. See? So it's actually being affected by these adjustment layers. And one thing I can do with these adjustment layers if you start I mean, I know, I know people that have, you know, 2030 adjustment layers. You can select thes hit control G and just do adjustments and clean things up. Okay, So really, we're just using adjustment layer my image, this image in the background and I've still you can still see the images that I had. I've still got all these images back here. Okay, so we're getting kind of close now. This is a little too too much so and this, you know, I probably brought it down a little too much. So let's take that again. I'm going to control Z Control Z and no, You know what? I'm just gonna leave it the way waas So do that again. I hit control. L bring that up control shift. You I've just done this a 1,000,000 times, so I know. Bring it underneath my adjustment layers, so it all matches. Okay, there we go. Now we've got all these nice little elements The's air. Nice little fractal elements here That look like the lens wasn't clean. So I can take this guy. I'm gonna bring it down a little bit. And you can, um I'm just gonna make sure it's not covering my face too much, so I'm gonna add a little bit of a black layer mask on top of my face. Here we go. Okay. Now, another thing that I wanna have on top here is, um, the just the sparkles and things, you know, Just like a little bit of magic. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the brush tool, and, um, I'm gonna make it white. And I'm just going to do I'm gonna kind of scatter a lot of little blurry circles around. Okay, so I'm going to go into the, um, the brush panel pallet that's over here, and okay, So here is the shape that I'm working with. I'm going to do shape dynamics, sighs, Geter, scattering texture. No, I don't need that. I don't really use the only ones I ever used to these two. Okay, so let's see what that gives me. Okay. That's a little too big. I'm gonna make it a little smaller sighs and make sure this is on its own level. A little too small. Okay, there we go. That's kind of Okay, So I'm just gonna draw that through here, and it just gives you a little bit of magic or whatever, and I'm going Teoh, bring that down. Probably make it a little smaller. I don't know. It's just one of those little things that people add that I think adds a little extra move to their images. And so, yeah, you just I mean, you can see that now. It's a question of just playing with your image and just playing around and seeing what works and what doesn't work. And that kind of doesn't work. Okay, let's make that really big and just make it look like Bring that down. Not sure if that's really helping out the image at all. Let's see. And it looks like this. This guy's just a little too gonna move this over just a little. Okay? Okay. More or less what? You can see what I'm doing here, you know, and you can do this is all just your whatever your personal taste is. But now we've started to have these elements another really cool. I'm gonna bring in another image real quick. I have this image that I use all the time. I've used this this same image for years, so I'm going to click on that and bring it over and see if that helps me out. I just like to. And as you can see, I dragged it in its under my adjustment layers. So it automatically has that yellow blue tone to it. I'm going to drag it into the corners here, and let's see, I'm gonna do try overlay, see if that adds. No, not really a soft light. Usually some flights. Kind of like the, um, bashful little brother of overlay. And on crea create an Alfa Channel on top. Here, make sure that's black. OK, my computer's running a little slow, so we put that up to 100 and this again is something that people use all all the time making movie posters and things like that. Um, okay, there's gonna paint in the corners here. My jacket. There you go. Okay. Try to keep my face relatively uncovered by the my computer. You know, this is a really fast computer to I don't know what's having problems. It was tremendous because it's a big fire. Just cover cover coloring in some of the edges here, making my jacket look a little tougher. And bring that down to about 50. Okay? And now I'm going to go on top of this. And, you know, one of the things that I actually did in the original was I added thes white, um, added white on the sides here so it would look like there was more, like, kind of light coming from the sides. And I didn't really like that, but let me show you kind of what I did after that. On top of that, I just put the white layers there, and then I went on top of that, and with pure black, I just went all around my image and, you know, you can even just fill it up. I don't know what's going on here, but you can. I think I'm just cause I'm recording. It's starting to fill up my hard drive. Okay, so now I'm gonna hit white in the middle here, and I'm gonna change the blending mode to multiply. And it allows me to just see, you know, to make it like the focus once again, kind of goes to my face here, and I think I'm losing a little bit of the contrast on my face. I might change the, you know, put that on top here. You can see this is a little bit different from the image that I have. Um, but you're always gonna run into that. You know, it's very hard to do exactly the same. And this also, we're getting to something that kind of looks cool. You know, this we can take some of this other stuff down, bring this down, and it becomes a question of really tweaking things like, you got this layer, you get this other layer Not really liking that as much now. So it's moved that over here. Okay. And now, um, I'm gonna add one more adjustment layer up here, which is going to be as we saw the Grady int and the Grady. It is a great tool. Um, a great adjustment layer. I'm gonna change my colors back to those green kind of the greenish blue dark, greenish blue. Or you can kind of put it like that. Okay. And then I'm gonna change this one to kind of that yellow kind of, ah, skin ish yellow. Well, we'll just like that. And you can see when you when it comes up here, you can click on these guys and see what the opacity is. So I can bring that capacity up to 100 and now I'm gonna to make it so that these two are, you know, one side on the other side. So going across. And now I'm going to play with my adjustments overlay overlays, usually the 1st 1 I try because overlays probably my favorite one, so we can put it like that and you can see that the image instantly gets more interesting because you've got this change in color and it makes your I kind of wonder over the image. So I'm gonna bring that down and you can kind of see it just adds it's it's these little details that make you make people look at your image and go like, Wow, how did they do that? Okay, so there we are with that. That's kind of, um I think we're pretty close. And now the one thing that I added to it just to give it A little bit of, um, interest was I added a little line over the eye, so that was really easy. All I did was I took a white solid and dragged it across my eyes like this. And it just doesn't make any sense for those of you that, you know, wonder if you saw that. And you go What? What is that all about? You know, I just did it cause I thought it kind of added something to it. So I put that on and I did overlay. And then I brought the overlay down to about 20. And there you go. So this is kind of the same thing I did. Now I'm not going to do the other thing that I did for my image. Oh, and down here, by the way, You know what I'm gonna do real quick is, um let me select all this, group it together, and I'm going to copy it and then hit control E. And as you can see over here, this layer contains all these other things. I like to just kind of get, you know, I'll hit the crop and I'll make sure that it says delete cropped pixels inner. And now you know, my image is Krupp. Now, my images just this. It doesn't have all that stuff that was going outside. You don't want to do that if you want to keep working on an image, but just to keep it small. I do that now. Another thing that I did that I thought was kind of interesting. Um, on the image that I have, you'll notice that I did a couple of things. Uh oh. Okay. Like I tell you what, let me stop this, and I'm going to go to another tutorial. 10. Unsharp masking: okay, in my haste, I almost forgot to show you guys. One thing are actually two more things that I want to show you how to do here. Um, now, this is a I'm actually happy with the way this is. But if you want to go in and make it a little kind of more the style that we're going for, I'm gonna copy this image and I'm going to go up to, and this is going to make it more sharp and give it more of a contrast. I'm gonna go. And as you can see, it doesn't quite have that Nike esque, I guess. Look, that kind of pro sports or whatever. Um, dramatic film looks. I'm gonna go to other high pass, and that is going to give you this kind of image. It's going to, you know, I don't really know how to describe what it does, but it gives you like a grayscale image and gives you all these details on top. It's kind of like sharpening, but it gives you a slightly different look than what? Sharpening those. So I'm just gonna have put a little bit of this, You know, I'm not gonna go all the way over here and go crazy with it. You just want to do a little bit so you can see all the details I'm gonna hit. Okay? And now I'm going to do hard light on top of my image. And now you can see that there is a month you've got a much more of a contrast e image than what you had before. All the little lights and darks and everything are really, you know, jumping out at you here. Now, you don't necessarily want this for everything. So I'm going to do an Alfa Channel on a layer mask on top here. I'm gonna hit black. Make sure I'm not using that same brushes before, and I'm going to zoom in and I'm gonna make that brush smaller and percent R curly brackets , right? For whatever reason, my computer is screwing up, so bear with me. And the thing that I think is cool about this is I know people who do poster designs. I do poster designs for movies sometimes, and they used this exact process. I mean, you've learned something now that you can really grow and develop. Um, So what I'm doing now is I'm just taking off parts of that thing that I just created, um, that layer, because you don't wanna have your skin so ultra sharp, and you can always bring this layer down. Let's bring it down, See, bring it back up. And this is another thing that I learned from Joel Grimes. It's really nice little tool, and it makes your image look a little more dramatic. 11. Dodgeburn: you guys have probably heard of dodging and burning. So let me just run through that real quick dodging and burning is, you know, like I said before, it's a way of enhancing the lights and darks oven image, and you'll kind of see what it is as I start working on it. Um, I'm gonna create first of all, a layer that is 100% gray. Now, the way that I do this, people, there's a better way to do this. Um, but I'm just going to select this layer, you know, I'm a dinosaur, so I stood this stuff he always selected. All right, click Phil and ah, 150% gray. There we go. So we've got our gray layer there, And why is that not look great, because you've got all these adjustment layers and everything sitting on top of it. Um, and it really doesn't matter, OK, Because we're going to click overlay, And when you click overlay everything that's great disappears. So this layer is gonna completely disappear. And now we're going to start painting on this layer. Okay, so we're going to start painting with white and with black. But when we have the white selected, Um, we're going to go up here and when a click color dodge and I'm gonna bring this down to 20 because it it really, um it works fast. It's like it it stands out if you do anything more than about 20 actually, I'm even gonna bring it down to 10. OK, so wherever you see the reflections in this picture, you're gonna want to kind of paint on top of those. So I'm just gonna paint here where I see this reflection here. And don't worry, you can always And I'm gonna extend this up a little bit. I'm gonna paint on here, bring this up a little bit of the reflection under my eyes and you can see that's just bringing out the image just a little bit A little bit right here, my nose. Just making me look a little more shiny, you know, it's ah, it's almost a little too shining. Okay, now I'm gonna do the opposite. I'm gonna do a little bit here on my lip. There we go. Just makes things stand out, And the black is the black is gonna do the opposite, so I'm gonna do black. And then Leonard, you, um uh, color burn. So I'm gonna just, like, take this and, you know, you can run into problems if you do this too heavily and add a little bit more shadow here with my nose. And this is obviously a little over the top. I'm just giving a little more shape to my face. And this is starting to look a little ridiculous. I can take in the cheeks a little, make this a little darker if I want. That doesn't really look that good. Um okay, so I'm gonna go to the eraser tool, and I'm gonna bring that also down, Teoh. And, um, I'm just going to kind of take some of this stuff out, and I'm since I'm doing this all on one layer. If I mess with one and mess with the other one, if I mess with the, um, burn that, I'm gonna mess with the the Dodgers low and bring that down a little bit, like a little smaller. It's just I look like I've got, you know, smudges on my nose. So let's bring that down. You wanted to be dramatic, but not that dramatic. And I'm gonna I'm just gonna go in and do some more, um, color dodging on my eyes. Just bring him up a little bit. It's just a fast way to make your eyes stand out a little bit. Okay? And since I look like I'm wearing makeup in this, I'm gonna hit 50 and bring it down a little. But you can even blur that if you want, but you can see that's just a general idea of dodging and blurring. And there's the before and there's the after. 12. Final touches: All right. Now, with the final wrap up, we've got pretty much the whole image here. I'm gonna take this group and do Cliff. I didn't dupe. If I I'm going to provide it, and I'm going to hit control E and turn this into just one layer. We're gonna We've got this little piece down here that I'm gonna take care of in a second, so don't worry about that. Um but here's a little trick that I did that makes this image look a lot more symmetrical. I took Let's double this image, and I'm going to cut it in half where my face is. Okay, right here. Actually, I'm gonna do the other side like this, and I'm gonna hit control, see and control the Control De and Control V. So here ago. Here is this 1/2 of me. And if you want to get a really weird picture, this is something they did for the movie. The orphan. Um you can hit control t right, click and do flip horizontal. And you get this. Hey, can put your face together like this. It is a little bizarre. I know, But here's what I did to make this image look, even mawr kind of symmetrical. What I did was I gonna take these two images, and when you want to combine images, you just do control E. And I'm going to let me see. I'm going to basically just use this side of my jacket. Now, I probably should have done this when I was due before I did. My, um I think I did this before I did the, um the the fate of color and everything. So this this looks like yellow to yellow again. So technically, I screwed up a little bit, but, you know, this is just kind of a little extra thing. I'm going to create an Alfa Channel on top of this, and now I'm going to paint out my head. And so here we go, because my face looks a little bizarre. I'm going to make sure this is normal. Make sure this is regular. And so here we go. Now, as you can see, my jacket is not quite the right color, but, um, you know, you could put another solid color on top of me. Not sorry. You could put another Grady. And on top of that, And you know, really, the point here is just to see kind of how it all comes together. I think you can agree. So let's call this guy blue. Do that again. Make sure that's a 100. What the heck? Uh, make sure this is it. 100. Here we go. That's pretty Okay. Overlay itself late. Okay, whatever. Hard light? No. Okay, well, there you go. And I just want to wrap this up. Now, You see, my shirt is all nice, and, uh, it looks the same on both sides. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe do. It's all just a taste thing, you know? And I'm also going to to make it look more like the image that I had here. I'm going to make, you know, start making this more actually going to take this off, that I'm going to start drawing black around the image. And if I get too far, what I can do is I can bring, you know, and then I can I concede. Make sure that's multiply, and then I'm gonna put a white layer on here. So whatever I do, white is just gonna disappear because it's a, um Here we go. Okay. And I can bring this. Ah, you know, take this guy the sharpening thing. The sharpening layer here. I couldn't duplicate that and just bring that up on top of this layer again. So it's got a little more say, it just adds a little more hope there. I don't really want that down here. More plaque here and then I you know, I can add the that little white line that I have That was just a little fun taste. You could add a lot of little elements on top here. 30 overlay. Here we go. Like that a little smaller. Just gives it a little something. The other thing that I had thought about doing was just creating a grid on here, you know? So it would have been creating little lines. See, just creating a bunch of lines on top. And I thought that would look cool. And you can select all those lines and go up to a line and make sure they're all the same distance from each other and keep going down here. You know, I'm just doing this the fast and dirty way. Um, control e, Bring these down gonna delete that last one. So it's not a double. I know this might be going a little fast. I'm just showing you this because that this was just another idea that I had for putting this on top transform. And I thought this would have been kind of a cool thing to Dio. And then you can, you know, I'm doing control, Lee. I'm bringing those together and then you can do just, like, overlay or, um, you know, whatever. And then, you know, put that make it bring in and out for channel. So not everything is there. Not everything is in the same place. Or you could just make it kind of in the background here, and you can also make it blurb glow in places. So let's say I've got the, um and I'm moving fast here. But let's say I'm gonna double down on this. I'm gonna try to make it glow in just certain areas. So I'm just doubling this and doubling it so it gets, um, bigger and bigger and bigger, So e And then I'm going to blur it. Filter, Gaussian blur again. Gaussian blur. Here we go, and I'm going to duplicate this control. J J J Control E Control J Oops, Control J J J. And that's just control. J is making new ones, and control is combining them all filter Gaussian blur, cause okay. And then we can go in and just put an alpha channel on that. So have it so that some parts of it are blurred. And then bring that down. That doesn't really look all that great. But you can see just all these little things you can play around and do and add. Anyway, so that's just another idea. Alright, guys. Well, that's about the end of this class. And I hope that you guys got a lot out of this. I think you can see how amazing photo shop is once again, I mean, how easy it is to create something like this. And you can take thes tools and start using them for different things. You know, you can you something like this is a movie poster, or you can use it for, um, you know, really anything. And you can also sell this to clients. I mean, if you can show somebody that you could do something like this, you could be like, Hey, you know, let me come to your house and they might look at your equipment if you don't have pro equipment, But you can just say, Look, this is how I make these images. Um, you know, you put up your bed curtains or whatever. You put up your work like lights. You take the really nice pictures and you can start making pictures like this, you know, tomorrow. So thanks for taking this class. And I look forward to everybody taking my next class. Thanks a lot.