Fun with Photos: Photobashing and Photo Manipulation

1. Fun with Photos: Photobashing: Welcome to Fun with photos. This course teaches an art form, notice photo manipulation, also known as photo bashing. This is the art of taking various photos and mixing them together to make a new image. And today's world, photo bashing is widely accepted as a method of making. Art and illustration is commonly used for all types of entertainment and design. Luckily, you don't have to spend years learning how to draw, to learn photo bashing. But you do have to learn a few tricks. In this course, we'll use Gibbs software to bash our photos together, but you can follow along with your software of choice. The tips taught in these lessons are universal with all common heart software. I will walk you through one full illustration created from scratch with multiple photos. After that, you'll be able to create a photo bashed illustration yourself. Let's get started and have some fun with photos. 2. Introduction: Hi, this is Brendan, and we're going to dive into this lesson here. There's the introduction for my photo manipulation in GIMP course. And what we're gonna do here is go through a slide real quickly with some notes I have in here about what the course is all about. Just a quick introduction. And right here, this is the image that my overall plan with this is to basically recreate this image as I've made it here. I'll walk you through the whole process. Reason I did that is that I wanted to make sure that I had Working image and something recent that I could share with you. And so I just did this 1 first before starting the course. And then what I'm gonna do is remake this from scratch. Or maybe in some cases, I mean, I want to make sure that I demonstrate everything. But in some cases maybe I can reuse some of this because I don't want to have to do each and every single thing. Some of these things are very well. He would takes a lot of work. So laborious. That's where those are going to work either. But this is going to be the image. I just want to give you a quick idea of what we're aiming for here. These are all from photographs. It's a photograph of an animal, different animals horns that are placed onto this animal. And this is a girl who was wearing like a fairy alphabet and posing. And then I took image of wings. They have all of these which I'll show you in the next lesson. And I did a little bit of drawing this stuff back here. What it is, this image is actually called ferry city. So it's supposed to be a city full of fairies. And he can see the castle in the background and, and all that stuff. I'll try and make sure I get this image up there so that you can download it and get a better look at it yourself. So that's what we'll be doing. We'll be covering that image. So first of all, what is photo manipulation? Photo manipulation is like my sample here. It's when you take some photos and you manipulate them, right? So that sounds easy. And the product that you have here would be pretty much a perfect example of what you can do with photo manipulation artistically. However, the sky is the limit. You can really just do all kinds of crazy things. It's popular in recent times to do something called face swap, where you take somebody's face and put it on someone else's body, right? It's really funny sometimes. So you can, you can do funny things with photo manipulation. You can be artistic with it. You can take a picture of anyone and maybe try to make them look like they're made of wood, are made of glass or something like this using different techniques. That would be a little bit more advanced. But basically the concept is that we're taking some photos. Mostly. Since it's called photo manipulation, mostly photos. You can mix images, you know, any sort of images you have. But the idea is to mix different photos together and to make something a new image out of existing images. And that's what I did here in this image I have a background was one image. The girl is one image. The wings for the girl. I made them, she had wings but I wasn't satisfied with them. I made new wings out of images, photos of a bird and then this animal here. We'll go over that in the next lesson in more details. But that's what photo manipulation is. It means to take some photos and manipulate them so that they look different. And the tools used in this case, generally speaking, for photo manipulation, you could actually say that before software, I think a collage is also a type of photo manipulation. So technically you can use scissors and cut out photos or cut out magazines and put it together. But that would be called a collage. I think photo manipulation. Look it up on Wikipedia too. Don't just go by what I've said, but also on Wikipedia, they mentioned some tricks that photographers used to use before software, I think even where they could manipulate the images, that that would be something I'm not familiar with. What I'm doing here is going to be all using software. I'm using GIMP software. You can use Photoshop or chorale draw Or Manga Studio probably, as long as it has the ability to manipulate photos, to be able to cut and paste and crop out sections that you want and read paste them in different positions and to use drawing tools and basically the whole, the common set of tools that you expect to see in any Photoshop like software. As long as you have those tools in your software, you can use that to. Otherwise, I'm not really going to go into too much detail about how to use the software, but it's more about the techniques and why GIMP. The reason I'm using GIMP software, which is an open source software, and it's also free. You can install it on any operating system. And it has all the tools that I need and it does the job. So in other words, I didn't have to pay $90 a month, or maybe it's $9 a month, whatever it is for this Creative Suite and all that they're doing. I don't have to pay that because I don't need it. And so even though $9 might not seem like a lot of money to somebody, it is a lot to some of us and I just don't need the software when I have this one. So I use GIMP. And it's a very good software. Last but not least here, that have in the bottom, maybe I should hide the other parts. It's confusing. Select, cut, compose, adjust, draw. You don't have to memorize that. I just wanted to write that down. Just like this as reminder to me to explain the overall process that we're going to do for the lesson here, I should tell you that we're going to have, I don't know exactly now because this is the first lesson and I haven't. Even though I tried to script everything out perfectly, sometimes, sometimes I need extra lessons, but generally speaking, this is what I'm trying to cover in this lesson. Select means, selecting the images you're going to use. Cut means to cut out the images. Because so if you have, for example, a picture, the girl who became the ferry here, she was in a photo that had a background, but I didn't want that background right. So I had to cut her out. So we're gonna go through some cutting techniques. I will cover that briefly, but not in detail. How I do that with a software and compose means making your composition right? Why did I decide to put the girl where she is and the animal where it is. And there's a lot of things to be considered with lighting and shading. That has to do also with the selection part here when you're selecting your photos, how to get the good voters that are going to work together well, work well together. And then you have to make your composition, which means laying everything out. After that you adjust a lot of things. You can use the tools to change lighting and shading all this so it looks more natural because it's easy for photos or come from obviously taken at different times of day in different locations that might not look appropriate together, but we can do some tricks to make everything fit together a little bit better, so hard to get it perfect, but we can make it a little bit better. And then some drawing not necessary for every photo manipulation attempt or, you know, every, every image that you're creating. But in some cases you might also do a little bit of drawing. Did do quite a bit of drawing in this. And drawing actually makes it easier whether or not you have a steady hand, it's definitely easier. So if you have a tablet, drawing tablets such as a bamboo, that would be highly recommended. I think it just makes life easier, but it's not completely necessary to follow this course. And that's about it for the introduction, I think that covers everything. Just to review again, here we have what is for photo manipulation, the tools we're going to use, I'll be using GIMP, but you don't have to. And then these are all the things that we have to do here. These are all things we want to cover in order to make an image similar to this one. So thank you very much and we'll go ahead and move right on to the next lesson. If you have any question, is make sure to go ahead and to the discussion area of the course and go ahead and ask any questions that you might have. Thanks. See you soon. 3. Licensing and Copyrights: Okay, So this is Brendan, and in this lesson, we're going to cover how to get your images and make sure that they're free images which you're allowed to use. Most of what we're doing here, since it's called photo manipulation. We are in fact using photos for the most part. Now you can't just take someone else's famous photo, add it to your image, and then you start selling your image online or, or put it on your website and tell everybody it's yours. Because that would be like stealing, right? So to make that simple, that's what we'll call licenses and copyrights. We'll just consider that just like a painting of an artist makes a painting, every photo that anyone takes is automatically their photo and not yours. Even though there are so many images online these days, anything that they should all be free. But actually there's an original owner of that image and they will tell you whether or not you're allowed to use it. Lucky for us, there's lots of images that we can use on websites such as Deviant Art. And I recently found this Pexels.com, which is really good. These are great resources, but I gotta show you how to use them and make sure that you're not breaking any rules here. So first we'll go to Pexels.com right here, and they claim to have over 3000 photos. I think they probably even have a lot more, but they haven't updated their texts. And you can just scroll and scroll and scroll here and there's all types of photos. And let me go back up here, the click the Learn More. This pretty much explains everything that you need to know. Photo license and what these license, all of the photos on this website, lucky for us there under the Creative Commons license. Now that license, if you go to the Creative Commons licensing website that explains, as it says here, you can copy the photo, modify, distribute, and perform with it, or you can even use it for personal use. It's free for personal use and even for commercial use. So even if you're going to use one of the images on this website to make an advertisement for a company or something they've officially giving you they've officially given you permission to do whatever you want with these photos. So this is a perfect website if you can find whatever you need here. In addition to that, we have Deviant Art, which as you can see, I already found a fish photo there. What I wanted to show you here on Deviant Art, which is a very popular website. Probably already know about it. If we were to, if we were looking for a fish and we search for fish stock and make sure you use that extra keyword stock as TO CK. Then you'll get a whole bunch of images here using the fish. And as you notice and all the titles underneath here, most of them have well, not all of them, but a lot of them have the word stock in it. And that's because stock is a keyword. That means it's a photo that's kinda just intended to be reused. It's just ordinary stock, regular photo. Lo and behold, right down here in the description of this image, it gives you some rules and something to consider. What he's saying is you're free to use this image, but please follow these two rules. And then he says comment on the stock. Submission or note me with a link to your work, which means down here, you just leave a link of the finished image that you made with this. And another one is give credit by linking back. That means on your finished product. For example, if you were to make a children's book with this, some are in the book. You should give them credit and show the link to this website right here, so that people want to see the original image. Just to give him credit for the original photographer. They can go basically find this link, follow this link and come back and see where the original image came from. That way everybody gets credit for their work. Okay, so there's two websites right there. Very good. You can search for all kinds of stuff here, not Deviant Art. And also you have your Pexels.com and there's many more websites out there. But just make sure that you understand this creative commons 0 license if you're going to use it for commercial use, and we're using it. If you're just trying to make it, make some kind of picture for fun or something. You actually don't have to worry about any of this. But in the event that you're going to go ahead and do some professional work. And then you definitely want to pay attention to all that stuff there. Okay, and so let's just cut this lesson off here because it's getting a little long. And in the next one, and I'll show you real quick about the images that I selected, why I selected when and where I got them. And we'll see you real soon. 4. Select Images and Get Creative: This is Brendan. And now we're going to get into how to select your images and show you the process that I used to come out with the result like this one here. So for all the photos that I have here, which I'll run you through real quickly. I do have to give credit for them and in order to save us time, I put all of it in this file. All of the images except for one came from Deviant Art.com. And I was very careful and make sure that they allow me permission to use these commercially or however I want. So I won't have to worry about the problems in the future. And one of them, this background image came from Pexels.com, which we've already covered in the last lesson. So that's that. And what I did is this background image here I got from Pexels. I like this image because it actually looks like a photo, which means it's not too realistic to begin with, the more realistic a photo is going to be more difficult. Siadh has sort of a high contrast to it. And it's not to say it doesn't look realistic, It's realistic, but it's just so vivid. You just tell by looking at it, it's a photo. So I thought that would be a bit easier to work with. And as you can see the result, it just has that kind of, I guess you might call it photoshopped type of quality. But I like that because the resulting image here is actually pretty much exactly what I was going for. Just sort of a fantasy seen wasn't trying to be perfectly realistic, but just something that'll catch the eye and, and allow you to see the Imagination coming through there. So I chose this image to start with. And then I looked at it and I started get creative. And I said, Well for me, this would be really cool with this realistic type of scene was a fantasy scene and so started flipping through other images. And I saw this animal here. And I saw the girl or she at. Okay, There she is. And that was the girl image taking by DeviantArt called stock or no, that's the wrong one. It was Mickey by MDR1. I can't even pronounce some of these names anyway. It'll be in the credits. And I'm going to see I took the girl, I cut out a lot of parts of her and she ended up fitting perfectly on that rock, which I just thought, well, that's just too perfect not to use the way that she sits right upon that rock right there. So that's a part of the creativity when you're flipping through and a different images seeing which things will fit properly, right? So if I were to go grab a picture of a fish and maybe let's just say clues. Excuse me, close this very quickly. Maybe bring up a small image like this one and we'll make pretend that this little fox like animal is actually a fish. And if he were to be, or even this guy, if he were to be like floating up in the sky, if I wanted to have an animal and looked like it was floating in the sky, would this be an appropriate image? And the answer is probably no because he can tell clearly that his feet are just standing flat on the ground, right. However, he did work out perfectly to be standing down here and that location right there. So that's something that's really important as step number one, when you're choosing your images to make sure that they're going to fit properly. Now as far as resizing them goes, that's also a problem if I were to take this, again, going back to a small image like this. If I were to take this guy here and if I wanted him to be bigger and I had to stretch him, such as making real big like this. Let's see what happens. Actually, it wouldn't be too bad because that image has a lot of detail to it. But look at how when you zoom in, the closer you zoom in, it starts to get blurry, right? So the image was too small that when I stretched it. Luckily in this case, it actually worked out, not, not too bad. I think that was a very highly pixellated picture, which was why. But in some cases, when you do that, you might come to find that it doesn't work so well. If you stretch an image is going to get pixelated, such as when you zoom in very closely, I can see all the pixels. You don't want that to happen. So you wanna make sure that you have a nice big background. If you have a background in your image, that it's a nice big background. And that all of the objects that you're going to put into this scene, or at least big enough that you don't have to stretch them too much or else you're gonna get a lot of blurring and stretching type of look to it. Now another thing to notice about these two characters right here is that one thing is very, very clear in this scene. Let me move him for a second. And this background scene here we can see very clearly that I have, the light is much stronger over here and it's coming. Over in this direction. So that means the sun is over there, right? And the sun is shining its light strongly over this way. And you can even feel that, such as in this area here, you see more shadow on these trees, right? This area is all like the trees look dark because the sun is on the other side and this area is all shaded. As a result, you can also notice these trees over here, they look more bright. You can see all light detail in the light flickering off of all of the, you know, the well, they're not leaves are there because they're evergreen. But whatever he called the leaves of these types of evergreen trees, you can actually see the light reflecting off them. So it's very clear in this image that the light is coming in this direction. Now look at the two images that I selected here. That is actually also the case. It's very clear that, sorry, I have to make a new layer. It's very clear that the light is hitting the girl here and here on our knee. And the other side over here is darker shade. So that's a part of selecting your image, which is actually very important because if it looks like the light, even though you might not think of it, but the human eye is very smart and it notices these things. So if I were to have this girl selected and let's say flip her around. And I use a transformer quickly. If she were flipped around this way, your eye would probably notice that something is really wrong because everything else in the scene here is receiving the light from this right-hand side over here. Why is she suddenly getting it on the wrong side? It just wouldn't make sense to your eye. Someone stand out and be weird. Also with this animal that's called authentic. I didn't even know that before. I found this image. Sort of like a little fox. He also has the light coming on this side. You can see very clearly the light is hitting his back and on his stomach underneath and on this side it's all shaded. So notice where your light sources and where your shade is when you're selecting your images. And it doesn't mean it's going to limit you. You don't have to always find the perfect type of lighting and shading just to match every image. And it might be cases where a piece of art or the work that you're doing is going to be in a very dark scene or maybe the sun is directly above, so you can't tell where the light is. It's just all over the place. You never know. And you can you can work with things. But just like I did with this girl here, if need be, maybe she would just be flipped over and all I would have to do is flip or horizontally and then it would work for a different scene as well. You can do that. But just keep it in mind that you might have to flip the image. You might have to do some lighting work on it so that it looks like it actually fits into this scene. The lighting and shading appropriately that is coming with this, the scene that you're making. That's a really important tip That's going to help everything to look a lot more realistic. So after I found that authentic as it's called animal, I thought I'm making a fantasy scenes, so I have to do something to change them a little bit, not just look like a fox. And as I was looking around, I found these horns from this goat and said, That'll work. And as you can see, obviously made them into this type of animal, which I don't believe exists. It's like a fox with giant goat horns, ram horns or something like that. And so that's where that came from. Now for the castle and the background, I didn't actually find an image that was perfect for a giant like sort of fairy castle. This, the name of this is actually called ferry city, that's the name of this image. So it's supposed to be a city where you have fairies and stuff. And I imagined they'd all be up in this giant castle in the background. But I couldn't find a giant castle photo because a giant castles like this one don't actually exist in real life. And I didn't want to steal someone else's artwork. So I got these two little castles here. And I just broke them down into pieces and put them together and build them up like I'm just like Legos are building blocks until I made this big giant castle. And we'll review how I did that coming up real soon. So those are the main tips so far. This, I didn't know I was going to choose this bird. But later on when I realized that the girl who was posing here as the ferry, I realized that those wings, we're just not gonna do it for me. Yeah, I wanted something a lot more amazing, spectacular than that. So I actually just drew the wind wings in with a tablet using a webcam, bamboo. You can also have a into us or whatever. And I just drew him in and then I realized that my hand drawing didn't fit with the rest of the scene so much at all. I had to get something more realistic. So I just went in, grabbed these wings and I cut them out in a pieces and paste them, a, pasted them over and over again. I actually spent a lot of time on that until I got this effect here, which when you zoom out, I think it works just fine. It's, you know, it's doable. I could even do a little bit more work on the coloring with that one actually, down here. Later on, a, well, from the very beginning, I knew this road was going to be a problem because that's a like a cement pavement road. And if we're in some fairy fantasy kind of fiction scene like this, obviously there shouldn't be any cement paved roads, right? So I just found this beach scene or I don't know if it's a sand dune or whatever it is, but something to make it look a bit more natural. And in the Zoom, and now you can see that it's covered up with a more natural type of road. Would have been like that to be a little bit different, but that was that was one challenge I had to face and I just dealt with it like that. I think it looks okay. And I think that's about it. Yeah, we went through all of these images. We covered this as yeah, the animal, the authentic and this and that and the wings. And then you have these guys up here. Because I wanted to at first I actually just had the girl and this guy here. And I just didn't feel like it was done. So suddenly I realized, what if it's, you know, there's a whole bunch of fairies and the background flying around that would make it seem much more fantastic, right? So I actually just hand Judy's in by selecting colors from her with the color selector and then drawing in appropriately as I saw fit. And then there's a lot of blur effects and then the shading and lighting that I added along the way. And I'm going to go in that and the, I'm gonna go into detail with that and the subsequent lessons. But for now, that's all we need to know for this one. Yep. So that's it for this lesson. We'll see you in the next one will start going into detail about how I actually put all their stuff together. Okay, See you soon. 5. Separate the Scene: This is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover some advanced selection techniques, which I'm going to call separate a scene. Because that's basically what it boils down to is taking one image and splitting it into multiple layers. So what happens is when you have a situation like this, if you look at the image and zoom in, the background is blurred intentionally for a mist effect. But if we zoom in, you can see that these trees, they kind of, they are in the foreground there in front of the castle pretty nicely. I mean, keep in mind this image is only meant to be viewed this big, so that's kind of far away. But if we zoom in, you see it kind of fits in rather nicely. That wasn't the case originally, because the Castle, which I have defined right here, is a separate image which I made and installed to that area. So if you look originally, how are we going to make this castle fit in the background and have the trees cover it up. Perfectly like that. It's kind of a complicated thing because you want to make a selection of all this very, very intricate, a detail of all these trees and even like the space between the leaves and stuff like that. How do you make it so I can just put something behind their, right. And so one technique that might be a beginner idea which would work in many situations, would be to lower the opacity of the castle and go in here and just erase out all the stuff that I don't want. Alright, so I'm gonna erase this and use a bigger eraser. Do this quickly. Sorry if this is taking time, but you'll get the general idea is just erase out the stuff that I don't want. So it looks like that tree or I mean, that castle is behind those trees. And technically if you zoom back enough, it actually kinda works, right? But it's not really artistic, it's not fine, It's not detailed. It's leaving a lot of spaces around there. And we don't want that, we want to be able to do is to be able to actually slip the castle right behind the trees there. Now how did I do that? Because this image was originally one image, what I had to do with this background image was to split it in half. So I have the background is gone now, right? That's one layer. And on this other layer, this is, this is the background or that was the foreground. Okay. Let me say that again. Here is the background, and then here is the foreground on a separate layer. I'm on two separate layers. And then I put the castle in between both of those layers. So it'll fit right in and you can even just slide it around and play with it. Do I want it over here? That one over there, and it constantly, consistently stays behind all of that stuff. Okay. So let me undo this a whole bunch of steps to get back to where we were with it. So here's where I originally had a black mask that I made. This is where we start to get into making masks and layer masks. And what I had here, when I looked at the original image, I said, one thing you could do is maybe use a color selector or a magic one. That's beginner stuff, but the colors are different all over here. So if I did that, it would only select, as you can see, it's not selecting everything, it's selecting bits and pieces all over. Even if I use the magic wand and hold down the Shift key and kept clicking again and again. It's just not going to select that whole area perfectly. So what I did is I made another layer and I filled in all of that, all of the parts of everything that I want to cut delay or they want to cut, I fill that all in black. And how did I get that so perfectly? Well, that's the trick. So here's the original image. I'm going to copy and paste it on a new layer. Then I'm going to take all the colors out of it. And depending on which software you're using, this will differ. I'm using GIMP here, so I just go up to colors desaturated and click. Okay. And now I have a black and white version. Now that I have that, I'll go to colors again, go to brightness contrast. I'm just going to put the contrast all the way up and look at that I did half the work for me already. Now that I have that done, I can now I can use the color selection tool or the magic one. And this case I'm going to use a magic wand because I don't want to select that actually. Let me take that back. What I can do is use white. Because there's some parts here. You can see there's just like some dusty stuff back there. I don't want to select all of that. So I'm going to select just like this. That'll be good enough. So I've all that stuff, by the way, big, clear, perfect sky up here. Now I can take the color selection tool and select all of the black. Or actually before I even do that, why not use black? I mean, there's different ways to do this. So excuse me if I'm stumbling around and all this stuff up here, I'll just paint it in using a tablet where it could use the selection box and paint bucket tool. Just fill in all that part that you want to you want it to be black. Select all this stuff here. Just colored in. At any rate you do it, you have to do to get it to the perfect. Now that I have this, I can use a color selection tool or the magic wand. And I'm just going to select all of that. Oops, I see, I've missed a spot down here. Has lack. Right? Okay. And now you see I get a perfect selection. Turn off that layer. I was only the only reason I made this layer. This is what we might call a mask. It's a layer mask that I put over my original layer. So I'm going to turn that one off because I only used it to get that perfect selection. Now I'll go down to my original image here and I can cut out that whole part and paste it back in. And that is basically the trick. So now you can see I have the foreground on one layer and the background on another layer. So now I can go get my castle right here. Slide it down in between those two layers. And there you go. Just as easy as that. So using an extra layer, desaturating it, coloring in the parts that you want to separate. And then go back to the original image and cut out the part that you want to separate is basically three or four steps with a little bit of work in between. And here I can move the castle wherever I want to. And it stays perfectly in the background with the foreground separating itself very nicely. Even in this very complicated area here we have all the leaves and the light shining through. I can put the castle back there and it fits in writing perfectly, just like that. Okay, so that's it for now. See you in the next lesson. 6. Cut and Erase: Hello, this is Brendan. And in this lesson, we're going to go over cutting out the characters and props, how to cut. And these different techniques we can use to put all of our characters into the scene. Now, in this scene is very clear cut and dry. Let me show you the finished product here. It's pretty clear cut and dry. We have a an overall image seen. There's some, I guess I'd call this a prop architecture, the castle in the background and the foreground, we have a couple of characters and I, Julian some extra characters. And that's it. You might be doing something more artistic, such as, you know, taking your friends image and making them look like a demon or, or a beautiful, I don't know, magical character. Just whatever your imagination comes up with, right? So it's not always going to be very clear cut and dry like it is with this situation. So I just want to explain that when I say characters and props, this can all depend on whatever it is you're doing. And you're going to have to find different techniques for different situations. You might even have a surreal kind of situation where you have one type of background blending into another type of background. And you can use all the different tools and tips I'm going to teach you in this lesson for that as well. First off, how to cut and many ways to go about this. Let's bring out some of our characters which we have prepared in advance, I believe find the girl She's in here. Yeah. Sorry. I didn't have that paired already. There she is. Yeah. Okay. So here is one of the characters. So I had to fit perfectly in place to say on that rock. And obviously she was like a great fit for that situation. Is that little rock that little bolder just happened to be there. Now, I can't see when I put her over there, you know, exactly where she fits, but there's one thing I know for sure is that I am not going to use all of this stuff here. Now look at what happens when I start erasing on her. This isn't this particular software. This is just going to be a quick tip for those of you who are using the GIMP. That happens some times that a layer which you import it will have some background color to it. So even though you're erasing, it's not going to give you a proper transparent erase. It just gives you the background color that you erase off of it. There is a tip somewhere up here. I'm sure to change that. But I don't know where it is at the moment because I have achieved trick for that. Whenever you get that situation that you can't erase and see the layer behind it. Just copy and paste it real quick and turn it into a new layer. The new layer will be able to solve that problem. So let me just hide this layer now on this new layer which I just pasted. Now, you see I can erase everything and it just makes the the underneath layers show up better. Okay. So since I have that there, I'm going to get rid of this one and make sure to name my layers. So this is like the most fundamental, easiest trick is to just go ahead and erase everything you have here and be sure that you zoom in. You can, if you don't have a tablet, doing this with a mouse would be a little troublesome. But you could also do something such as take out the lasso tool and just go point-by-point around her. You can start off being very rough like this. Just go around and get a vague idea. I know in advance I'm not using these wings this time, so I'm gonna cut them out. There's the second time I've done this. Now after you have selected her, you can go to selection and invert the selection. Again, that'll work in any software and just delete that, right? But it'll just be different depending on which software you're using. Now, I don't think or I guess I should say, pretty much know for a fact there is no magic wand. I want to say there actually is a magic wand, right? That's this tool up here in the toolbox, but the magic wand isn't as magic as we'd like it to be. It doesn't just magically select a human. Or at least not yet. You know, with modern tools that they have out there, it's kinda funny. I guess they should have something because they can detect where a person's eyes are, that they can have software that detects where persons faces and do face recognition. You'd wonder why can't they just find the whole body for us and select that magically. But even if they were to do that, then what's next, then they'd have to make a new software to figure out where the whole dog's body is and et cetera, et cetera, goes on and on. For infinity, There's all different types of situations. So the best thing to do is basically to know how to use all of these tools and the software. Because even if we had a tool that solved that problem, then there's going to be another problem after that. So you can't solve all the problems. So this is just one very basic way of going about this right here. I can use just to go ahead and erase out the stuff that I don't want in this image. Nothing too complicated that Anna, I might even leave a little bit rough. Now if you're making a piece of art, you might as well take the time and go ahead in there. If you want this to be like, would you call a timeless piece of art or something like that? You can go ahead and there and zoom in and get all the details and stuff like that. I'm not going to worry too much about that right now. One thing you can do is make sure you have a nice soft edge on your eraser. So when you're erasing it a kind of blurs off instead of making a sharp edge right? That way. It'll fit into the scene a little bit better. Hopefully it'll blend in to the scene. So I have her cut out pretty much I wonder, put an a in this place here and see how it fits. It's not perfect. Or is it I guess it's okay. I think I made a little bit smaller or bigger. Yeah. She needs to be smaller anyway. So for this situation, use your Resize tool. Again, no advanced magic going on here. Make it a little bit smaller and put her in a place. And that works. Just like that. I think that's almost about the same. You can see I made some changes with our hair and stuff in the later one. That's not important. I can even just leave that how it is for now. So that's one basic tip, another one. 7. Cut with Layer Mask: Okay, Sorry for the abrupt start and stop. With these couple lessons, it was one big video run. I had to split it up into two parts, so won't be too long and boring for you and you can come back to reference it. So in this one we're going to do another technique for cutting out characters with the layer mask. And let's go ahead and get started on that. Now, another trick we can do that. This one you might like this better. And this just, I'm just showing you different techniques. You can do this. What if I were to erase here? Sorry, let me go back to the ferry. If I were to erase the ferry here accidentally. What if this wasn't a fairy? What it was something, not just a girl, but some big complicated thing. And so I erase there. And then I raced over here and I'm working, working then suddenly I realize, Oh wait, I accidentally erased something over here many, many steps ago and I go back, back, back, back, but it's back like 50 steps. And I don't want to have to backtrack that much, right? So there's another technique which you might prefer an S called a layer mask. Let's see what happens when we use a layer mask. If you make a mistake when you're using a layer mask, it's not as much of a problem. So I'm going to go and I assume this is one thing I'm not a 100 percent sure about in Photoshop or the other softwares. But if GIMP has it, I mean, they must have it because those are technically more advanced softwares that are expensive and all that well you want to do is add a layer mask with white full opacity. And I don't know why it says White is should say black because what happens when you add that layer mask to this image? What happens when I color on this with black is it actually erases it. Okay. It does exactly the same thing as if you're erasing it. But what I'm doing is I'm using a brush and I'm coloring with black. So why does it do that? Well, it's a color mask and what it's doing is it's adding an extra layer. You can even see it over here. There is the original image layer, as you see here in this part. On the, on the, the, what is this called the layer selection area here, it added a second layer, which is a mask. And what the mass does is it applies a certain type of trick to the original layer. So the trick that we apply this time is anything that I paint black, make it disappear, just make it go transparent. And that's what it does. And so the great thing about this is if I make a mistake, I can flip back to white paint over here. I'll go back into the white color and actually bring it right back. Right. And what if I wanted to bring all this back? I can bring the whole thing back. So if you have a very complicated a little object or image that you need to do a lot of detail work on and you're afraid you're gonna make mistakes and definitely use this layer mask. And so you can get rid of, I can even just go like this real sloppy and say, get rid of all that stuff like that. I'm not worried of lips. I erased his ears. I don't care because I'm just going to flip back to the white now and we can bring that stuff right back. So you don't have to worry about mistakes as much. And you can flip back and forth with colors and say, Here, I'm gonna do a little. Elijah went too far. Let me just flip back, brought it back, take it away, bring it back just like that. So the color mask use black and white to erase and bring back everything on the layer. So the layer mask is a great way to do some detailed erasing. So now I can move them around. Whoops. There's a good tip to one you're painting on the layer mask. The layer. It actually has two layers on it now and you have to select the right one. This is if you're using the camp, I'm not sure that it's the same. Look what happens. It actually, you can see that that layer, it's moving around. But I don't want to select that. I want to move the whole him. So I'll go back to the original layer and try and pull that one, and that'll work. So now I can move that one around. And once I move him out here, yeah, I can see. Now watch if I start drawing on this layer, it actually draws the black. I have to go back to that mask layer and then I can do this erasing. Yeah. There's a lot of little things to pick up with this software. I'm assuming it's equally as complicated in Photoshop and have that there. And there's, so that's two different techniques. And I'll make sure I covered everything. We're cutting things out. We did layer mass, selecting and blending. Now blending happens. Where have I hope I brought that out? Yeah, I want this guy. Because what happened is in the original image we have here. And hide that for a minute. This guy is way too white. It's not a good sky and it doesn't really have much going on, right? So I wanted to use this cloud sky. And that's why I ended up using over here or did I oh, actually this might be the wrong image. Let me use this one anyway. What I'll do is, first of all, remember what I said about light. You can notice on this one that the light is definitely coming from that side and the darkness is, shade is on the other side. This definitely is one of those case where this layer needs to be flipped. So I'm gonna go to whereas layer to about no Transform Flip. Okay? Something like that would be a little bit better. But I need this one back behind. Yeah, not only the castle, but also that one. So in this situation, I don't want to have to do that whole trick where I separated everything again. And at least I have the foreground behind it. One thing I can do is put it up here. And then again with a layer mask. Let me go in here and add another layer mass. Yeah. So I get a little bit nervous sometimes I'm trying to get this done quickly. Now I can use, again, I want to paint black to a race. For example, some of these areas here and reveal the mountains. But I want it to slowly, gradually fade off in the mountains. So what I can do for that situation is use the gradient tool and make sure it's in linear mode and make sure that here I have it from fade from foreground to transparent. So that means it's going to fade from black to transparent and linear mode. And what I'll do is just hold it from the part where I wanted to start fading and hold down the Shift and Control key. And there you see it'll just gradually a fade off like that and make it a little bit higher. Yeah. Let me zoom in so you can see it. Just grab it here, pulled up and there you go. So it starts to reveal the mountains gradually like that. Okay. And then something else I can do is lower the opacity on it just a bit. So there I have a different cloudy type of scene, but I'm not convinced this is the same image that I had before. I think I might have used a different class or maybe you like that better. Yeah, That's why I have to do is move it up a bit. Is that similar? Yeah, that was it. So now if I move it, I had it. Hi. This which actually looks better as more natural. Yeah, that's about it. And I think I must have played with the contrast on it or something because obviously it's a little too dark, but I think for now, I do believe that's good enough. I just lower the opacity a bit. Yeah, that's about it. Okay. So now if we go back to just look at the overall image, we've done our castle and we have our fox character here called authentic and the ferry. We've got everything cut out and that was our goal for this lesson is to use Layer Mask, select and blending techniques too. Get everything cut out and put into place. I didn't go over the castle. But I hope you did see, I do believe I covered this in an earlier lesson. It couldn't be more simple. All I did was take this image here and this image here. And you can see, I cut out this castle area. This whole, Where am I there? This whole Castle area here on this one. And you can see specifically this part right here matches up with that area over there. I just cut that out and stack it on top of itself. And it's really simple as soon as funny. And these ones, I did the same thing. So excuse me. If you look at the castle on the bottom here. Bottom part of the castle was actually from there, right? So you can see this castle was used on the bottom, and eventually that just got put behind the scenes there so you don't even see it. So as almost like a waste of work, but I think some of the top parts of the castle still come out. It does something, it does something. And that all eventually turns into this. So for this part of the lesson, and I'm glad that this was not too complicated, very simple, just how to move things around and get rid of the backgrounds and fit him into place. And next to it we're going to do is see how did we take it from this and get it into this where all the colors are working together better and you can feel the depth and space in the scene and stuff like that. So, but for now, yeah, that's just cutting out your characters and moving everything in a place. Hope you learned a lot and we'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Fixing Colors and Values: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover fixing the colors and the values in the image. As what happened is we copied and pasted basically a bunch of different images from a bunch of different places. And what that does is it brings a lot of, in this situation, we're kinda lucky, it's not that bad, but it tends to bring a lot of that is say, value problems. And what I mean by value problems is the colors in one image might be a lot more sharper, brighter, more vivid than they are in another image. And also in cases like this where I built this castle, let me actually name that layer. We'll click in that castle image. The original images of the castle were actually kinda close up. It's not that far off. But in this situation, the castle supposed to be kinda way off there in the background behind the trees and all that. And this is really, really big epic fantasy style of castle, almost like Disney type of thing. And it's just, it might stand out a bit too much. So some of this, I guess he kinda gotta have an eye for it. It doesn't all come out to everybody. It doesn't stand out to everybody, this type of thing. But once I go through it with you real quickly, I think you'll see it's not too hard to figure out and I'm going to show you a trick real quick here to see whether or not you have the correct values. Okay, so the first trick I want to do, I'm going to select the highest layer. As you can see, there's all these layers up here which I have hidden. They're just kind of out of the way because I'm trying to do the work are basically redoing the whole image which I've already done. We already have the finished product here, like a cooking show where they finish it first and then they show you how to do it. But let's go to the top most visible layer that I have over here. And I right-click on it and have a really, really special tool over here called New from visible, from visible. Click New from visible. And it seems like nothing happens. So let's see what happened with new from visit. Actually what it did. I can demonstrate by using the Move tool here. What it did is it made a whole new layer with everything that's visible. And you can NY how to say you cannot separate that. It's all one layer now. So I still have my other layers, right? I can hide that fox character. I can hide the girl and the foreground. These are all on separate layers, but the new one, the new from visible, it merged all of those layers for me. So I have all of those together and I have the old previous one. Now I have to go back step, a few steps that actually it might be easier for me to just delete that and redo it and make sure it's in the right position. So why would I wanna do that? Knew from visible? Because what happens is with this new layer that I make, I can apply some tricks to it. Saturation. And let's do that right here. Image layer. And now we're going to color these saturate. And now I have a black and white version of it, but look, I can hide it and all of my previous work is still there untouched. All right, so now I have this black and white version. And why do I want a black and white version? Well, this is my values. If you don't know what values are, take my previous courses which I mentioned. And that'll help you out a lot. But briefly, the values are going to be the difference between different colors of the saturation of the colors. The best example here, Let's look at the mountains. The mountains, but even when I zoom up on them, the shading on the mountains, it's only a little bit gray and the light hitting the mountains is just a little bit white. But look, when we zoom up to these foreground objects, look at how dark that is right there. You see really dark shadows and look at the light reflecting off that leaf there. It's almost pure white. So you get really sharp whites and really dark shadows in the foreground, but often in the background far, far away. It's totally different. That's just how the human eye works. That's just how things work. I don't go into detail on that. In this lesson. What I wanna do is make sure that all of the objects that I've copied and pasted in this image have the correct values. So one way to do that is to make it black and white. And things just stand out a little bit better this way. And it gives you sort of a different view on things. Another thing you might wanna do, because you've been playing with your image, doing all kinds of copying, pasting and stuff. You might want to go ahead and flip it. And now when I flip it around, I can get a new view on things. Because if you're staring at an image for an hour or two hours doing all this work, you just get used to some mistakes and some flaws. So you flip it around and gives me a new perspective on things. Helps you to see things he might not have seen previously. And we put it back to where it was. For now, everything's okay. And of course I've already, this is my second time doing this image. And I had a lot of stuff prepared already. I know on this first one, it took me quite a few hours to make sure everything was perfect. Okay. So anyway, that is, that's what values are about. What am I going to do to change the values? One thing, using a good old-fashioned color tools here, brightness and contrast. And to play with this, do I like it with more contrast or less contrast? You can make it real strong like this. So it will start to go a little bit, Disney or a comic bookie. I'm not sure if you like that, make it real sharp like that. But if you do it to this layer, make sure you do it to all the other ones. I don't really like that. I do think I want to make this a little bit brighter. If we look at the finished version I have here, it's a, it's a lot more soft and tone. It doesn't have this really sharp, vivid colors here. I think the contrast is a bit too high. So on that layer, which is the right one, the foreground, I might decide to lighten things up a bit with brightness contrast and brightness up just a little bit. Yeah, that works better. Now you can see the other two characters I have here. They're standing out a little bit more because that was faded out. So I want to go back to them and go to the very first. And colors also lightened her up just a little bit so she fits in and just try and make it. So this is obviously way too white, is the best way to do it. That's way too dark. Just find some place where I just start to feel comfortable with it and don't look at don't even look at the scale lighter sliding it. Look at her. And let your leg your eyes tell you where do you think she belongs? For me, it's right there. So you see, I did have to move it up 27 points. Now go over to the authentic creature. Same thing, brightness contrast. Grant. Now I'm Brianna. I'm on the wrong layer. I have to make sure remember we have that layer mask on there. Make sure you select the layer on the left, that's the original. Their contrast is good when I make those kind of mistakes. Learn something dark, light, dark sky and bring it back. Same thing that came up to about 19. So these are all I think they're all relatively similar to begin with. Actually. That's okay. I'm happy with the API enough because we can go in and make more shading to which I am definitely going to do. That's that there. Another thing is the castle in the background. The castle stands out way too much because it was intended should be in the foreground. This is where we start to get into drawing. I'm going to go into my brush. I'm going to select the sky color because notice the mountain, what color does it go? It's going blue is usually whatever particles the sky color is, That's what other things start to turn. So I made a layer just over the castle, or I can go like this and just paint right over it. I'm not going to be that sloppy. Kinda go like this. I'm going to bring the opacity of that layer down a lot. And we'll just go in there. And I have to be perfect with it. You can always erase it around the edges apart that's hidden behind here. I can get sloppy, just fill it in real quick. There we go. And now notice that huge difference that is made. Here's a castle and we zoom in. It looks like it's just popping out is kind of awkward standing amount of nowhere. And here, when I add that layer of fog, which is a little bit of blue missed on it, kind of pushes it way back into the background a little bit more. And you can zoom in and clean it up just to show you. So it stands out better here is that layer of blue. And we can clean it up a little bit. Here. It's not super noticeable anyway. And we bring it down and you can play with this until it gets to, again, just go up and down without looking at it and kinda bring it to the point where you feel like it's at the right color. And I definitely, I'm not going to spend time on the lesson during less than this, but if you're making a piece of art, then definitely go in there. Take the time to clean up all the little edges and stuff like that. So it looks like it belongs in that distance. Get it in the right distance. So that's it with basically with colors. It's a trick you can use. Making the new visible layer just to double-check your value switching around looking at the light and stuff. And then obviously shade is going to be another thing. I'm going to put that in the next lesson. We don't have any shade under these characters. That's obviously not right. Let's fix that in the next lesson. That's it for this one. I hope you learned a lot season. 9. Adjust Shading: Hello, This is Brandon, and in this lesson we're going to cover the shading techniques to adjust shading, to make sure that others shadows and shade of all the things that you've added to the image are as they should be. So I have here the authentic creature and the ferry, and they're both missing things which I might not do. For example, I've already showed you everything, all the techniques about cutting and pasting. So I don't really need to show you how to add these horns. I did a little drawing to help them and you can see wasn't too difficult. I just use a small brush and add some hair to make it blend in. Not sure if I'll cover that, the wings I will cover because that's complicated. But yes, some of the things that are self-explanatory or I've already done techniques that should enable you to know how to do that, so I won't cover them. But one thing that's very, very important and you just need to make sure that you never forget it is to have shading. Now, I just added some characters here, right? Let's start off with the girl. And want to add a layer under the two characters. And I'll just call it shadow. What happens if you take a character from another scene and add them into this scene? Well, there's shadow was in the other scene that we cut out cut them out of. But we had to cut her out perfectly in order to make our fit this scene, right? But we still need a shadow. So the light is coming, as we've said many times, is coming from over here, right? That way the sun is over there on the right and then down. So she, she should be casting a shadow down over this way, but it's not very strong. I think the light is actually coming on a sharp angle like that because you don't see a lot of shadow in this area coming off the trees. So she should have some shade around here. And this guy should have some shade just round here. And it's not going to go very far off and it's not going to stay very far behind. They're just coming at that 45 degree angle this way. So it's head if you have that angle or maybe I should come up to about here. And think about what you have on this guy. He has two ears coming up this way. Shadow is like a mirror, is kind of it's not facing you the mirrors at a strange angle because everything's coming this way. So if his ear is here, then there should be another era comes there this year here is kinda going that way because everything's coming down here. So you should have something kind of like that. Is body's little bit bigger. You don't want to make it so skinny here that it just touches his paws because his whole body, it's going to cast a shadow. So there should be kind of a circle there. But with prospective and all that, and all the way up to the tail here. Now obviously this is a black or very dark black shadow and it doesn't match everything else that we have here. But as you know, we've been watching this far. Don't worry, because I have a trick for that. Are we gonna do? And you can probably guess already, is go ahead and turn the opacity down on that layer. And there we go. Now the reason I did it like that, let me make a new layer and show you. Alternatively something else you could do is turn down the opacity on the brush. And I think this will happen in other softwares too. What happens is if I turn the opacity on the brush each time I make a new stroke and it gets darker and darker. Here's the first stroke is like that. The second one comes over that intersecting point. It just makes it darker and darker. You don't want that to happen. You want the whole shadow to have one solid color. Now that's not always true. But in this case it's true because it's sunlight that's there. And as usual, we'll go back to that layer, the shadow layer, and just play with it a bit and see what looks best. This is not good, that's too dark. This is invisible. Let's see where it starts to look good. If I slowly, I do like it to be strong enough that it's noticeable. But sometimes just making a subtle change is really all you needed. And for this situation, That's really all we need. I think on this image I might have also did a little shading on the castle back there. I'm not sure, but the way I'm looking at it now it seems okay. So we compare the two. I know there's a blur effect coming up which I haven't covered yet. But for now that's that. And we've got our shadows in there. Just remember if we had more characters, then you add more shadow and you make it as dark as it needs to be. I need to be a little bit darker here. Another technique, since this doesn't look so natural, foci on here, make it a race around here. Bring up some, some little sharks, sharp spikes there as if the grass coming through the shadow. And the shadow might also be hitting the blades of grass over here. So it won't just look like some black lump is falling on the ground behind her, right. Also on the ridges here. And like make it bumpy, come up and down and around because that's what shadows do. They tend to like wrap around things and stuff. Now with that, let's bring the opacity down. And it might look a little bit more natural. Again, just play with it to get it where you want it. And that's it. Just remember to add some shadow is, that's the whole point of this lesson. Hope you learned a lot. See you in the next lesson. 10. Drawing Techniques: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson we're going to cover some drawing techniques. Actually, it's just one drawing technique, which is, or it's a couple. I'll show you a couple. But it's for one object which is the wing, as we have it here. I'm going to show you how to draw one wing, or at least how I did this wing that you see on the left. And that is what we're going to do. So I already started this because I needed to get I realized that this is going to take awhile. So I had to prepare some of the advanced, but I'm going to take it back all the way to the very beginning. I just need this layer in the hidden in the background. So what I did with this is first you draw on the wings. Now the situation that we're dealing with here, withdrawing techniques, and I'll talk about that while I'm drawing because there's a lot to do here, is let's imagine that I had nothing on this layer basically, and I had to start from scratch. And I suddenly realized that I didn't like the wing that she had on her before or maybe she didn't have a laying on her. And I just wanted to make a new one and improved one. So in order to do that, the first thing to do, which I'm not sure if it's the best thing that for me what I do is just go ahead and draw it first because I have a tablet. We can do that in cases where you don't have a tablet. Well, firstly, I definitely recommend having one. If you're doing this type of work, it's good. But in cases where you don't have one, you can use some tools, such as the path tool. And use the path tool to do drawing techniques is very good. I need a darker or different color to separate the inside of the lung here. So I have the inner ring, outer ring. This isn't really intended to be a drawing exercise, is just to show you how I do this. So I'm not going to cover all of the drawing techniques, but you have to first draw in whatever it is that you're trying to do. And what will happen is if you're trying to do this, if your intention originally was just to go ahead and draw in whatever you think is missing. You're going to realize that there'd be a lot of work to that, right? Because there's gives me there's just too much detail and reality to try to draw out by hand. And it's one thing to be very realistic drawing, but to make it lifelike or even to have it fit in with all the values and the colors of a photo. That's a completely different thing. That's a type of art that just takes so much time. And the reason that we're doing photo manipulation to begin with, I think was to save that time, wasn't it? And we're hoping to do something that anyone can do without too much work, not to turn everybody in the world into a, an artist. So in cases like this, you can just draw in very crudely like that, something that will look like the object that you want. And then he stepped back and you say, well obviously that's not very realistic, right? So in order to make it more realistic, we're going to take an object from a photo that has the details that we need and we'd normally call this a texture, right? So basically what we're doing is we're adding a texture to a drawing that you did. And you don't have to be Picasso to do this. Or whether we say Picasso Rembrandt or whatever. I know some people laugh when I say that because they don't know that Picasso is actually a very talented artists. They think he draws a random weird things, is actually very, very talented. And he could draw just about anything. That was a side note. What we're gonna do is use your favorite selection tool, which we've covered already extensively and cut out the part that you need for your object. I'll bring that down to my wing layer here and then to hide. Okay, so now back to my wing which I just cut out there. I cut out the part that I needed. Here's my wing back and we're going to have to do a little bit of work now. And I have to spin it, resize it, shape it to get it to where it needs to be. That part's not too hard to understand. In this case. I think on the original one here it seems that I did enlarge the wing a little bit. I'll try that with the scale tool. Make it a little bit bigger. So we get some nice big feathers there and try and move it into place. Now, I want to lower the opacity, but first there's some details here and a workout so that it looks realistic. Ila have it nice and clean. Just erase all those parts that you don't need. This little bit of background erasing here. And since this is detailed, you could use the layer mask technique if you wanted to. And we're going to cover a couple of things here. This is just getting this into shape is one part of the problem and other part of it is to be able to have the correct color. Because maybe I found the perfect wing texture, but I don't really like the color of it. Well, you shouldn't have to worry about that. That's the whole point of the software here is that. We can manipulate things. That's why it's called photo manipulation. Okay, so I've to these wings now, I've copied and pasted this one. And we're going to move them into place, shape them in size, and it's where I need it. And with little bit of experience, I think I happen to know that should be enough for now. And just erase some of the parts on the second one that might not fit. So I'm gonna make a backup of this wing. Just put to the side for a minute. Doing that and copy paste. And now go back to these. And I can merge them together. So they're one big layer. Now. Try the opacity down a little and we'll just go to work. It might end up changing your original drawing a little bit, but you don't want to stray too far from the path. If that happens, you'll lose sight of your original goal. And you do have happy accidents as a column. Originally the swing, I wanted it to be a brown length and it ended up being this color. The reason I did that is because I really liked all of the colors that came out of this. There's all these purples and blues and, and different hues of red and stuff hidden in there. Which ended up being, well, it just looks good. I liked it. So I decided to keep it like that. And you can do that. You can make decisions like that along the way. And that turned out not to bet. Now keep in mind, I'm doing this for demonstration purposes and on the original length where I was really in my art mode and taking my time. You just want things to look good. You should not rush. Of course, you should take your time and get everything looking really good. So there you can see this is with just two or three copy and paste. I pretty much got something in there that'll work with this one. I did a lot more work. It might even be a little muddy, but the job got done right? So for the technique which I used here, remember this layer, I'm going to make it a little bit transparent so that it blends in is only being used as a texture. It's not going to be the full image. It's being used as a texture and I want it to blend in with the drawing that I did underneath it. So what I do for that is I lower the opacity a little bit, but see when I lower the opacity, you can see where the other drawing is not matching up with the texture that I just added. So I'm going to, since I can't control everything in the original texture because I don't want to just chop off the leafs, excuse me, not leaves, feathers and all and just chop them off. So I'm going to lower the opacity and then come back in here with that original color that I used and draw in. Basically filling in the blanks of where they're not matching up. So you can see here the wing is that these feathers are coming out here, but it doesn't match with the Juang underneath it. So I'm going to fill in all that space there. I'm doing this on that on the original drawing layer. Just make sure that they match up as best you can and where they can't. And we find that if you can't make it line up perfectly in some cases, Excuse me, then, well, just erase it. Now. Go back to here, turn the opacity up a bit and you can see it works out pretty well like that. So I'm just going to go ahead and merge these two, just like everything else we did in I can play with this. Don't even look at it. Look at the image, see how when it's at full capacity, it doesn't work out so well. It looks kinda awkward. That's why I wanted to do the drawing and mix it and blend it with her. So without looking at this slider, I'm just going to look at the screen and get it to where I feel comfortable with, where I think it looks realistic enough or just where I feel happy with it. And then we'll merge these two layers. Merge it down. So there's the feathers flying wing and obviously there's some detail work to do on here. I'll just erase over here. You can see right here some of the original green from the background, that was the grass in the background from the original bird image. And that's in there, right? So I'll select a color nearby that and just fill it out. Fill that in like this. Because that green clearly just doesn't belong there. Over here. Fill that in. Or I can erase cases like this. Basically just a lot of detail work. And the more detail work you do, the better it is. I guess one of the main goals for this type of work is not to waste too much time. You want to work smarter, not harder. The faster that you can get things done, the more time you have to focus on the beauty and creativity and. And other things like that. So it's always better if you can get things done faster. And that's about that. So that was basically one technique that I use to do these wings over here. These are obviously better because I spent more time on it. I was more careful with it. But in addition to that, there was a lot more work. And this is why I prepared another layer and advance this one here. Because that would take a lot of time I'm going to do. And luckily it fits a mess just in a place here. That's not too bad. And erase out some of these spots here. And again, if that works out well enough, go play with my capacity on that. Get it to where I think it belongs. And make sure I have the right layer here. And we'll just merge it down. There. We have one full wing, but it's not complete. We only got it in a position where I can add another layer, do a little bit of shading and lighting on it. And all I do is lower the opacity on this until it feels like it looks unnatural. And you can do this step-by-step, add multiple layers, various things you can do. I'm not doing anything perfect here. Just do a little bit of shading here so you can get a feeling of how easy it is. I'm noticing these areas and the leaves here that cover over the other leaf. So there should probably be of a keep calling them leaves. The feathers. Okay. Just remember every time I said the word leaf, I meant feather. Under these feathers here. Right? Wings, feathers, trees, leaves, Note to Self. Go back to grade school. Okay. And I think that looks pretty good, right? You've got a little bit of shading in there. And we can also flip over to the white real quick and add that. But technically, you see merged down. I'm not really happy with the color of this, the arm of the wing here that needs some arcs. So just merge that down. Should probably add another layer and do it carefully. But although I do for that is change it to a more realistic color, something that fits in there. Fill it in. As such. Of course, when we're doing drawing in a situation like this, it would be a little bit dangerous to just draw directly over that wing layer. So it's much safer if you add another layer, draw on there first and then go back and merge them. And just do a little bit like this. I'll keep this very brief because this is less than this complicated thing to do. I just want to prove to you that can be done with relatively relatively painlessly within minutes, not hours. But to be perfectly honest, I actually did I believe the first time on their spend hours on it. Just so you know, it's not intended to be I'm not saying this is easy. There we go. See that. That was just an extra minute of work. And it kind of blends and it looks pretty good. Now for this one here, obviously I did a lot more work on it. There's more color. Spent more time. Just making sure I had the perfect capacity and working on the details and stuff like that. And I also added some color to it just by using go in here, find some random colors and add a layer with a very, very low opacity and you can go in there. That's just a drawing technique, right? And that just gives us some color like that, right? You do another random colors. So always colors like reflecting off of different things. So you can do something like that. And another technique. And we're there. So just wanted to go over very quickly, is going to get back to that original wing here. If I didn't like the color of this wing. And let's say I did all the same work that I did over there because already merged those feathers and there's links. So I don't want to have to do that again. But let's imagine I put that into place and cut and pasted all the pieces I needed. And I just wanted to change the color. So what I can do is go in to the saturated mode here and make it black and white. They might not notice, but if I zoom in here, I've just taken all the color out of it by going into colors and desaturate. After that, go into colorize. And let's say I wanted to make the wing the original brown color that I'll just drawing over there that's sort of like tan color. So I'll move this over in to the orange brownish area of hue. You have all the colors in the hue here. There's red, purple though every color you could want. If you want Brian, then you go for the orange yellowish color and just make it a bit darker. And now obviously that's still looks kind of it's too bright, a little bit too comic, easier. Disney like so turned down a saturation until you get to a more realistic view. And there you go, have a nice brownish tarnish kind of hue, but it's all going to be one flat color if you do it like this, right? There's like flat green or aqua, there's flat blue. So after you do that, you might want to go over it with some other colors a little bit, but just to get you started, That's another technique is to use the first D saturate, make it black and white, and then colorize it and it can change the colors. But in this case, I really like the colors that came out of that original image, suggests ended up using that. And that's all for this lesson. Hope you liked it. And we'll see you in the next one. 11. Adding Effects and Finishing Up: Hello, this is Brendan, and in this lesson, we're going to cover some different effects. I guess you could call them special effects to make the overall scene look a little bit better. And these are basically like finishing techniques. So at this point you see I've brought us along very far in making, remaking this whole image from scratch. And I don't want to have to continue if you can imagine how painful it is to redraw something that in this one it is actually like a piece of art, right? And to have to redraw this entire thing from scratch for demonstration purposes. But I did go through a lot of the effort to make sure that we had a good finished piece for you to look at, right? So at this point we're very, very close to that. And I'm just gonna go ahead and move back to this, the actual original file here, the original piece of work so that I can basically close out this one. We've covered everything here, including some techniques for lighting shading, splitting the scene, adding your characters, lighting shading and even some drawing techniques with texture. There's a summary. Ok, so close that one and move on here. So let's move in to this is the original file here and I just closed out one. I just hit one layer which had one of the techniques which I want to show you and it's right here. It's called blur. This is one of the effects that you might have noticed, makes it look. Zoom in a bit here, makes things look a bit more magical and mystical. And what that is, It's basically just a blur effect that I added and I used a layer mass to clean it up for the parts where I don't want it. So let me demonstrate that for you very quickly. Well, there's a couple of different ways to do this. I think. Yeah, I'm gonna do it this way. This, this won't be too hard. I'm going to go New from visible, which we've done many times now. And you know, it just makes a copy of the whole layer and merges them into one layer or excuse me, it makes a copy of the whole image with all of its visible layers and makes a new layer above it. Now with that new visible layer, I can go ahead and go into a filter here and use the blur effect. I'm going to use a Gaussian blur as they call it GA USS IN. Don't know what that means or where it came from, but I use it all the time. It's a Guassian blur. And I'm sure you can look up in Wikipedia if you want to know the history of that. I just want to know what it does and what it does here is it makes a blur. As you can see when I zoom in now, when I use the Guassian blur, it just blurs everything. Now this for me, is a useful effect if you're trying to make things look like they're far away. And your focus is on the foreground objects because that's what happens. In reality. I cannot look at the background and the foreground all at the same time. The things that I'm not looking at are usually kind of blurred out in my vision. So this kind of effect helps you to see where the focus of the images and did that wrong. Okay, I'm gonna do it again with a stronger blur. The higher you make this number right here, I'm gonna go up to 20, ish 21. And then we get more blurred. How you make the number the more blurred it is. So now that I have that blurred, obviously, we don't want everything blurred, right? So how do we take out those parts? And we'll use the same technique we used before in that is to use a layer mask. Because remember, we just made a new layer out of this and we saved all of the things that are beneath it. So by hide this layer, you see it goes back to the original there. So the original image and all of the layers are underneath this one blurred layer. Therefore, all I need to do is go add a layer mask as we've done many times before. And make sure that I'm set up in black and white here. And we'll go to the black color and start erasing out. Make sure we're on the right part here. Something isn't working up. The opacity of my brush was low. Okay. Now we'll zoom in here and you see her face is all blurred until I draw in that black part there and we'll have to switch into white sometimes to bring back the blur as we already know. Okay, so that's what we're gonna do for that. This is one effect that I have used a lot. And people, how should I say, the kids all love it? People rave about it. So now you can see she isn't perfect vision because she is still the original character from the original drawing underneath. But everything else has a blur on it. So using that kind of idea, what we're actually going to do is just bringing the whole foreground into focus here. And you can get creative with this. There's a lot of different ways to go about it. This is going to be my way of doing it right here. What I decided to do, as I was saying in the other one, was to bring out a lot of This, this area here, I did keep the woody call them the fairies, the flying fairies in the background there. I did keep them blurred out. But I brought in some of these foreground trees. And the sky, which should be closer to us, that part of the sky brought in. And let me see. I've got this part here. Looks a little weird. Yeah, bring that in. And so just like that, you can already see it's a little bit more natural. Just so the back area there looks like it's far off in the distance. Now if it seems a little bit too blurred as it does now, there's our age-old trick which we use over and over of just lowering the transparency. So you're kind of blending in the blurred image with the non blurred original part. And that ISI, it helps a lot with a castle and everything. And you get it just at the right opacity, then you get that kind of effect. So anyway, I'm not even going to keep that image. I'm going to hide that because I did a lot more work on the original Blur layer here. So I want to use that one. That's just how I like it. And we'll get rid of this one for now. Another effect, you can see I have many layers here on the top foreground area. You can play with the color, such as I did with this one. And I gave it a sort of a sepia effects. So you might think that, you know, it's kinda like an ancient photo or something like that. And in order to do that, the same effect that we've done a couple of times before, but I just wanted you to realize that, you know, for educational purposes, we'll do the same thing. New from visible. And we've done this many times. You'll know where I'm going with it. We're going to desaturate it. And then guess what's next? We'll go to colorize. And in case you haven't seen this before, what happens in a colorized area is you can choose a hue. It has all of the same colors that are in this color wheel here, where you have from top to bottom, it's the sort of a red, purple, blue, light blue to green, yellow. It has all those colors in here and the same row. I don't know why they don't show him, but that's what the hue is and you can choose a color such as well, choose any color. I was going for that sepia kinda look last time. Maybe they're in some alien planet and for some reason everything is just green, has a green tint to it. Or maybe there's like some kind of fog. If you're doing a science fiction type of look and it's all green, right? And then you can just lower the opacity a bit and have it blend in with the original colors just like that. So it will have a little bit of a hue to it. And that, aside from being a cool color effect, it also helps to balance out all of those weird colors that you have coming from. What is just a lot of different photos and drawing and all these things that you did. You've mixed it all together. And what happens in the end is you just have these weird values and stronger and lighter colors, different saturations and stuff all mixed together. But if you do this kind of technique, it helps to balance it out a little bit. In this case, I'm not going to use that, but it is a technique which you can use. So again, I'm going to go ahead and erase that one for now. And we'll look at some of the other techniques. Another one, again, I'll make a new from visible. And in the filters, this is where you have to do some exploration and have a field day. But this is specifically what I've found for this type of work, this type of photo manipulation. You might want to go check out this cartoon effect. What happens in cartoon effect is it attempts to make it look like a cartoon by drawing lines around everything. So you can see what happened there. If we zoom in, see how it added a lot of black all around the edges of everything. And that's just kind of a cool effect. Effect, which again will help to balance out a lot of the oddity and the colors and stuff. But I don't really like, I don't want to make everything I do cartoony, right? But in certain cases it might be helpful if you try that effect. And again, lower the opacity just a little bit. And you'll notice that overall, it helps a little bit. It makes it a bit more artsy, a bit more cartoony. But I'd rather have that and have a nice finished product over having a lot of weird photoshopped, copied image kind of look, right? I don't want to have that kind of look. I want it to look like everything works together. Everything is harmonious and, and stuff like that within the one image. And if you lower the opacity low enough, it's almost unnoticeable, just balances things out of it. So those are a couple of techniques which in the end can help you to make a nice finished product. And let me get back to where I was. I actually did use this one which is a little bit of the what do you call it? Not the sepia effect, but the cartoon effect. I can't remember exactly which ones I used for to go look at the finished one which I uploaded. Okay, and last but not least, I think this might actually be the last lesson. I might do a little more summary lesson. But in case this is the last lesson. I just wanted to say, don't be afraid to add a signature layer as I did here. Add one more layer and you go in with the pen at a little signature and a date there. That's always a nice thing to have. You can use that if you're using a tablet or if you're not using a tablet, you can go in and just use the text tool and put your name and who it's by. And that's how you know that it's really done and to let people know who made it. And so you can feel proud of your work. And if there's any more lessons, then there'll be after this. But I do feel as though I've covered everything at this point. This is all I had in my outline for this course was bringing up to this point. And if you have any questions, of course, please do ask me. I am available and I will add lessons as needed. But for now I did cover everything that I intended to cover. And I know confidently that I gave you all the techniques that you need to make an image just like this or any other image you might want to make. Or if you feel like you need more techniques, just let me know and we'll cover. The whole concept here is to understand photo manipulation. And that's what we did in this lesson. Hope you enjoyed it and have fun making your images. Have a good day.