Transcripts
1. Introduction: Photoshop, one of the scariest programs out there, at least that's what a lot of beginning photographers and graphic designers think. And yes, it can be quite a daunting program to wrap your head around, but if you take your time, you can do it. And once you do, you're able to create some absolutely amazing things in Photoshop. So what about Photoshop composites? Where would you even see that? There everywhere, even in places you wouldn't expect to see them in magazines, advertisements, movie posters, album covers, book covers, art galleries, social media, basically, anywhere you look, any industry can think of, I can guarantee they've used Photoshop composites to some capacity. So that's a beginner, her usual feed and get started with all of this. Well, and that's what I'm here for and that's what I'll be teaching you in today's Photoshop composite beginner class learned from approach. My name is Tom Chi and Anthony photographer and graphic designer for almost 12 years now, I'm from the United States and I traveled around shooting photos and designing for various clients and companies specializing in fashion lifestyle and commercial photography. I absolutely love what I do. You'll see a few examples of my work going on the screen now. But if you want to see more, head over to my website at www dot the real Tom Chi.com or looking up on Instagram at the real Tang Chi. I'm absolutely pumped to show you how you can quickly and easily create an eye-catching composite and Photoshop. I'm going to be teaching you tips and tricks that I really wish I knew when I first started out. And these tips and tricks will give you just that edge that you need as you get started in the world of Photoshop composites. Today, I will be walking you through the whole process from where it is coarser images, how to import your photos, basic photoshop interface to the actual compositing, color correction, lightings, special effects, as well as a very basic color grading to give your edit that high-quality look, I will show it all to you. This course is for anyone who wants to get into Photoshop compositing, believe me, it's one of the most fun creative fields to be in what they want to do this just for fun as a hobby or if you want to make money with this creating composites for clients and big companies, we all have to start somewhere and this is the place to start. So with that said, I really hope you decide to enroll in my course today. And if you do, I'll be seeing you in the very next video.
2. Free Image Sources: And we're ready to dive right into our composite, but wait, we need some photos. Don't mean where are we going to get free to use photos that we can use for any type of project. Well, I'm going to show you seven fantastic websites where you can get free to use images for your composites. When I was starting out, I didn't have a lot of money to go buying Paige stock photos, nor did I have access to all the locations that I wanted in my edits? I wasn't able to pay for travel to the Sahara to get a shot of the desert, or to fly to Japan to photograph their beautiful temples and had to rely on these free resources. And I'm gonna show you these seven websites and why each are good in their own way. And then you can decide where you want to get your photos from salt. Let's hop into my web browser and check it out. So first website on our list here is raw pixel.com. Now there are many reasons why raw pixel is good. First of all, raw pixel has a free images, premium images and public domain. I'm going to go over the difference between free and public domain in just a second. But the Guttenberg raw pixel is that you can have access to vectors, to Photoshop files, a PSD mock-ups, for example, we have one right here, a mock-up of a bottle. You can just put your company's logo over here, your design over that. And I saw one earlier for a MacBook or for these onesies phones, you can put your app in there. It's really great for getting these types of business-oriented photos, which is fantastic. But let's go over what the differences between free and public domain. So let's just click free for a second. And you have access to all, all the free images that they have. They've a lot by the way and they update it every single day. But when it comes to a free photo, let's just click this pattern over here and you do have access to patterns on this website, which is fantastic. But if we look over here, if you have a free account and you want free images, you can get ten free images per day from their free collection. So most of the time you're not going to use more than ten images, at least starting out. However, if you do want to use more than ten images, that's something you might want to keep in mind. Might want to get other images from another website. Or you might want to pay to get a membership here, but you can get ten images for free. But what about public domain? Flickr, public domain, these are lot more artistic type of things, more paintings that you might see. So for example, let's just click this image here. And I hear you asking why would I use this in my edit? These have its place too, and these public domain images are unlimited downloads. You can get as many of these public domain images for free. So if you look through these, you can get some really, really cool things just from here, which is fantastic. So lets hop over to our second website here. Next we have heck wizard. I haven't used pick was a too much, but it is a fantastic resource for two reasons. One, it also has access to videos, free videos that you can use stock videos, but it also lets you photos in a very basic way. Lets you put text over your images and do some very basic edits before you download your image. So for example, let's look at this image here. You can edit the image for free. So you're just gonna click Edit. It's gonna load up the editing workspace here. And you can add a few different things to it. So for example, let's say I want to put a little filter to it. I can't do that. And they have some advanced things you can also do so you can really get a very nice image. I can turn them brightness down ever so slightly. We can increase the contrast. These sliders are very sensitive, so you, you're going to want to be careful of that, but you can go ahead and put some text over your image. And again, it just takes a little bit of time. But we can just have something like explore to your, or just explore life something cheeses I might see somewhere changed the color. So it's a very, very basic editing interface, which is pretty cool. We can change the font as well. And then you can go ahead. But that wherever you on and then you can download this. You can save it, you can download it for later, and this is completely free. You even have a video editor for your videos. So the pic wizard has a lot of advantages over other websites that don't let you do this. This lets you do some basic edits before even download your images. So that's fantastic. Let's hop to our next website. Next on the list we have morgue file.com. Now, what makes morgue file.com a little bit different is that their photos aren't maybe as curated or as professional as some of the other sites. Now this could be a bad thing, but in my opinion, it's a very good thing. And I will tell you why you can get some very basic images. For example, you can get just an image of a bowl of soup or just at Deer. Sometimes you want some of these very basic images for your composites. You might want just a plain flour, nothing fancy. Just want a plain flour, a plane orchid. So this website gets you some very basic, lower quality images that are maybe not asked professional, but in some cases more usable and some of the more professional, overly edited images that you may get from some of the more professional looking websites. So that's one really great reason to use more file. Next, we have regret historiography. And again, Gretchen talk is a little bit difficult to say, but again, very different from some of the other images because they have more unique photos. For example, the very first one right up here is one you might not find on a professional stock photo website, but you have some more unique images on this website. So if you want to make your edit some more quirky, more out there, then this is definitely the website you want to get. And this is definitely the website you want to check out to get some of these more unique images. Because where you're going to find something like this, this would be very cool to use N and edit. It was definitely something I would use a 100%. So that's a fantastic way that you can use gratuitous, ah, grumpy. And try saying that ten times fast. But that's a great way you can use this website because some really unique photos. Next we have Pixabay now, next couple are going to be a little bit more professional, high-quality. Pixabay especially focuses on more of the business side of stock images, more marketing oriented. So you're going to find things that are more higher-quality geared towards that. Something you might see in an industry type of stock image. You can also get really cool images from here, as well as illustrations, not just photo, which is fantastic. If you scroll over here, you have images, you have photos, you have vector graphics, if illustration, and you have videos. Not only that, they now even have music, which is a very new addition here, but it's fantastic. You can search some really cool things. I can go ahead and search UFO and they have illustrations that people have made of UFOs. You can get some really cool photo composites. There's one right here that someone has made, and someone right over here, as well as some really unique images with pixels of a, as well as the more professional, higher-end type of images. And I can not do top free photo list without mentioning pencils. Pencils is one of the top websites to get free stock photos and videos that are ultra high-quality and professional. You see we even have videos right here on the front screen. These are really high-quality, perfect to use NR composites. And I have absolutely no complaints about the site. Just make an account and you can download any image that you want. High-quality. It's fantastic. And not only that, when you download, you can choose what size you want to download the image. So if for whatever reason you're working with a smaller canvas, you can download a smaller image, but you can also download the original file size, which is what I always do. I always download the biggest file size I possibly can. So I have the most information to work with. Pixels is definitely up there as one of my favorite websites to get free images from. And lastly, we have an Splash.com, arguably one of the best, if not the best source for free images on the internet out there. I can guarantee anyone who does Photoshop composites has used on splash and there's good reason for it. They have hundreds of thousands of free images that are very well curated into categories. So if I want something specifically focused on technology, for example, I can go through and find some really high-quality images rate from mockups. Great for composites, this would be something cool to use a composite. And they have all kinds of different categories. They have thousands of nude photos at it every single day. And that is honestly in my opinion, one of the highest quality, most professional websites to get free stock images from. And that is exactly why I'm getting my images from for today's edit. So let's quickly go over the images that I'm getting for today's edit. So I have this image of a desert that I got from months flush. All these images will be from ans slash. So I have this image of a desert. I have this image of clouds. I really liked the sky in this image is a very nice, nice colors. And now this image of this woman sitting down, very high-fashion type of looks something you might see on a magazine cover of a magazine. That's what I'm going to try to emulate today. And I have this little dust particle image here. This is a great tip to use on the show you later on how I'm going to use this. This is a really great resource to use in your Photoshop composites to give them that little bit of extra flair. And then I have this image of a moon. Many of my edits have a moon and it's kind of like my signature that I like to include in everything. So I will be including this image of the moon in my edit. So make sure you download these images. Because in the next video we're gonna go over how to import these into Photoshop, as well as a basic overview of the interface. So with that said, let's keep going.
3. Interface & Import: We are finally in Photoshop. Now I am running the newest update of Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop 20-20 one. So if you haven't already updated, make sure you update because we'll be using some of the features that are included in this newest update. So make sure you do that and then come right back to the course. But let's go ahead and set up our document. And now let's go ahead and click Create New. And let's think of where we want this image to go. Now, for today's course, I'm going to be creating an image that's going to primarily be used on Instagram. So I'm going to use on a phone in a vertical type of space. So I'm gonna go with a width of about four inches and the height of about five. That's usually the best ratio to use on Instagram. But if you using this for something else makes you know where you're using this for. For example, if this is going to be on a magazine cover mix, you know the dimensions of the magazine cover is an eight by ten page because you're going to want to edit on the size that you're gonna be printing on. If it's going for print, if it wasn't for a website or offer for something like Instagram, I like to add a little bit bigger because if I go for the exact pixel size of a screen is going to be very small side like to edit and a larger space. And then I save it in a higher resolution and it's gonna look a lot nicer. And I'm going to show you how to save and everything later on. But we're going to have our width before inches or height BY five inches resolution. We're gonna keep 300 pixels per inch. We're not going to change anything else was RGB color mode or anything keeping as RGB eight bit white backgrounds. But you can always change this if you want. And we're gonna go ahead and click Create race simple. Now, your interface CM might look different than mine. So let's go ahead. I'm gonna go ahead and reset mine. All you do is click up here, reset essentials. So if you're loading up Photoshop for the very first time, this is probably what it's going to look like. And again, I am working in the Essentials workspace. You have essentials 3D, graphic and web, motion painting, photography. I usually just use essentials and I tweak it to suit my needs. So make sure you're in essential for reset to the original, none of which a few things around. So first of all, I'm going to drag the properties B up here. So if I ever have to adjust the properties, I can just go ahead and do that. It's gonna come in handy later on. I keep the adjustments here and I usually drag the subside more space for my layers. It's nicer to see all the layers. I have as much of it as you can. Now when it comes to the colour appearance, I do know people who like to have their swatches, they have their RGB swatches or their gradients and patterns up here. I usually just have the color wheel and you can change what's shown every QQ brightness cube, you have all different kinds of ways to show color here, I usually just use a color wheel because you can adjust the hue, saturation and the amount of black that is in the image as you see, as we drag this to the left, it adds more blacks will, no matter what point I met on here, is just going to drag that closer to black. So this B is not for brightness because it's not going, starting any white to the image per se. It's adding black or taking it away. So I'll keep that in mind because this is a really great way to get very specific colors for your image. And as you see, this, this warning sign comes up if it's a color that will not print. Well, because this is an RGB space. So this is the color that will not print in CMYK very nicely. So you'll have to adjust that to be one that can be, for example, the scholar. But we're not going to worry about that too much today. So if you also remember on the left here I have some brushes. A really great thing to have is when you're creating Photoshop composites, to have your brushes just accessible. Because by default, if I have my brushes, you can hit B on your keyboard taxes your brushes. If I want to switch between a brush out and need to click this drop-down. Over here, find the brush that I want to use in this whole list. Let's say I want to use this tree brush and then I can paint and then do what I need to. But then I want to go back and change. Its very complicated isn't this? So what I do is I click Window and then I click brushes. What that's gonna do is going to bring up this brushes panel with brush settings and the brushes. And I just click and drag this whole thing over to the left until you see this blue line going across the left side. And that's going to clip it to the left edge of your workspace. Now this is a little bit too wide saw usually drag this n. I usually do like to have a beat to why'd you can have two of the brushes next to each other here. That's generally what I like to do. And you still have plenty of space to work with. So now if I want to paint here and I want to switch to another brush, I can very easily do that. So let's go ahead and quickly undo all what I just did here. And very nice. And yeah, it's very easy to have access to all the brushes that you need going forward. So this is essentially the workspace that I use for all of my composite. It's a very simple, it's very minimal and it's very efficient. And I highly recommend you do this because, for example, having the brushes here is gonna save you so much time. You're not gonna have to go find the brushes that you want. You can have folders, you can favorite brushes, and you can go back to previously used ones right up here. It's a very handy. So now that we know a little bit of the interface, we need to actually import our images. And that's very simple to do, but there's one key thing you want to be mindful of when you import your images. So let's go ahead and do that for our very first image. We're gonna go to file and you're going to go down to place embedded. Now what does place embedded mean? Well, I'm gonna tell you, let's go ahead and have the first image share desert by Jared Evans. And I'm gonna place, and then you can just hit enter. What happens when I place an image? Well, when I place an image, it immediately turns it into a Smart Objects. That's what this little symbol in the bottom right of the thumbnail means. It means that this image is a smart object. And what that means is if I apply a filter to it, it's a non-destructive. And what does that mean? It means I can go back to the original and I can also edit the filters. Let me show you what the difference is. So I'm gonna create a copy of this just for the example here. And I'm going to right-click and I'm going to rasterize a layer. So this is no longer a Smart Object. So now if I wanted to go ahead and let's say I wanna make a filter. I want to blur the filter, give it a nice Gaussian blur. And I want to make a very blurry. For whatever reason. I, that's, I cannot go back. I cannot do one of these edits. And I can get back to the original, but I can't edit the blurb itself. Now on the other hand, let's look at this image here, which is a smart object. I'm gonna go ahead and do the exact same thing, Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. And we're gonna do the exact same radius by 0.6 pixels. We're gonna hit OK this time. And that filter is applied as a smart filter. And I can toggle on and off so I can go back to my original image. And anytime that I want, how cool is that? Not only that, I can double-click on a smart filter. Now here the Gaussian Blur and I can continue to edit the blur that I've made. So if I find it's too much, I can go ahead and reduce it. And not only that, with this over here, it has a smart filter applied. I can paint on that in black. Let me put the opacity. Absolutely. You can see what's going on and I can paint away that filter. So as you see, the foreground is now Sharp again. And as you see, the black that I've painted is on here. So you can really get very refined types. It's using these smart objects. So that's essentially what you really want to do. So I'm gonna go ahead and undo both of these. And I'm gonna go ahead and import all of our images as smart objects. So it's very simple. I'm gonna do the desert image again. Just File Place Embedded. It's a very simple. So what we're gonna do is get all of our images into our workspace. So we don't have to leave our workspace at any point because you don't want to be super in the zone doing it edit and then having to go get another image. Make sure you have everything in your workspace when you begin, it's gonna make things a lot better for you in the future as you go forward. And there we go. We have all Fiverr images in Photoshop. Now, in the next video I'm gonna go over the basic layout. We're going to essentially lay our image layout are composite how we're going to want it to be in our final edit. So let's keep going and let's start doing our basic layout.
4. Basic Layout: Right, so we're ready to do the basic layout of our composite. Now, I am using a drawing tablet, a big tablet that's used a lot in Photoshop editing and Photoshop compositing. However, if you don't have one of those, you can a 100% still do this edit without too much difficulty. So what do you have it or not as fine, but I do have it and I will be using it. So let's go ahead and start laying out our image highlight to turn every layer off except for the very bottom one. And this is going to be the base that I'm going to be working with. So let's go ahead and go down and Tar Desert layer, let's say Control or Command T on our keyboard. And that's going to allow us to transform this. It's gonna make us be able to change the scale of it. Now if you hold down shift while she do this, it's going to skew this in whatever direction you pull it. And you can undo that just by Control or Command Z. And if you hold down Control on any of these nodes, you can shift this in whatever direction you want. So this gives you a good amount of flexibility in how you manipulate your image. But I'm not gonna do any of that in just now. I just want to change the scale so I'm not going to adopt anything. I'm just gonna change the scale of this and make it fit the height of our image here. And I'm going to drag it till I find a nice, nice crop that I like. I like this crop right here. And I'm just going to hit enter. Very nice. Now what I'm gonna do is next, I'm going to bring in our model, whichever model here. And I'm gonna hit controller Command T on the model and just shrink her down just a little bit to about the size I want her to be in this composite. So I'm just gonna place her there for now. Next, let's get our moon in here. Again, controller command t. We're just laying things out for now. And you don't want to be mindful of where the sunlight is coming from. So for example, we see the light on her is going to be coming from the left side. So we do want this to reflect on the Moon as well. We don't want to move to be flipped all the way and have the sun coming from the right because it's not going to make sense, you know? So for this one, I'm going to have the moon be fairly centered. And you can move all of the surround later on. You can have the moon B over here if you'd like. For now, I'll have it be centered and very nice. And I'm going to next have my Skype. For the sky. I'm actually going to just keep that down here and hide it for now. So I'm gonna do something special with the sky layer in just a little bit. And then we have our particle layer, which we're going to use at the very end. So for now, we're just gonna hide that as well. So this is our basic layout of our composite. We're going to have this model will be sitting in the desert with a cool Sun cuz guy going on in the background. So I usually tend to start with the background. That's exactly where I started with. So let's go ahead and turn off everything except for our desert here, and then we have our sky. So we're going to use one of the new features as part of Photoshop 2021. And that is an artificial intelligence powered sky replacement tool. So how do we do this? It's very simple. So we're gonna go up to Edit and we're gonna go to sky replacement. It's gonna take a second for the artificial intelligence to do its thing. By c, This doesn't look too good right now, does it? Now if you don't already have the sky in here, you're going to click the plus button here. You're going to select the sky that we have. Now you've downloaded and we're just going to rename it. And I've already done, so I've duplicates in there, but we're gonna select that one Skype. So I wanted to use that, but it doesn't look very good. This is shot above the clouds. We want to make sure we have this skyline here below these. So how are we going to do this? Well, let's start first of all with our scale. We definitely want to adjust the scale of this. So we're going to adjust the scale until the clouds disappear behind the sand dunes here, okay? And you can move this around as much as you want. We have a few buttons here, so let's go over these real quick. We have a move tool. Okay, this is going to move the sky. Then we have a brush is going to reduce or add to the sky area so I can paint away the dunes if I want. And then here we have our hand tool, which essentially just let you move around your canvas if you're zoomed in, which we have right here, our final zoom tool so far is human. We'll use this hand tool. Use move around our image file. I'm going to be zoomed out for now. And let's take a look. Wanna make sure this edge here is looking nice. Let's look at a shift edge. I'm going to adjust that till you see the blended away very nicely. If we pull that all the way to the right, it's shifting the edge into our original image. We don't wanna go too far with that. But if we go to the negative 100 and it's shifting more of our original image into the sky. You can see that this really doesn't look good at all. So I'm gonna go to about, Let's go to about 30 for a shift edge. Because that's a nice blend along the edge here. As for the fate edge, so this is how much this edge is fading. So the distance in which the fade happens, a smaller fade edge means it's going to be a lot in our analog harsher. So let's look at that. Sort of the narrow, it's fading all the way down here where the image is cutting off. If we have a 100, is bringing in a little bit more of that faith. So I might bring that down just a little bit to 90. And this part is really up to your own eyes, taste your own tastes essentially. So play around with this until you find one that looks really good for you. Next, we have the sky adjustment in this panel is very simple. Notice the temperature and the scale of the sky, and we've already adjusted to scale. You can also flip this guy. So for example, if I had the sun on the right-hand side, I can flip that to the left if I wanted to, very easily. But when it comes to the temperature, I'm going to keep it as it is to looking very nice and cool it down ever so slightly. Just a slight cooling down of the temperature and also the brightness. I'll bring that up just by six, just a little bit. Nothing too crazy. And you can turn off the preview if you ever want to see the before and after, you can see it's quite a significant change and it's a really good way to change the skies and very quick, very easy. Then we have foreground adjustments. The foreground adjustment is, and adjust the foreground so what is left in the image? So in our case it's the sand and sand dunes and in the front. So it applies the previous guy over here in a screen or multiply it. So this is going to change depending on the image that you use. Sometimes multiply will look better. Sometimes screen will look better. For this one, I think screen looks better as a nice little haze in the background, which I like is very nice. And they can adjust the lighting and the colors. So LED lighting adjustment, I can pull out all the way to the right, all the way to the left, you see what it's doing. It's pulling in some of the lighting from the sky onto our foreground. So I want to keep that essentially where it was at around 37. And the color adjustment will attempt to change the color of the foreground to match the sky. So the sky has a lot of this sunset, the pastel pink oranges in it is going to attempt to put that onto my foreground so you can adjust how intense that is or how not intense. So I'm gonna go ahead and keep that around 25. Alex, fairly decent to me. And then you have a few options on how you want to output this. We can now put this into a new layer or duplicate layer. So I'm gonna put this train new layer. So it's not going to put it to this side, is going to put it to another layer above it. It's gonna put into a folder in fact, so let's just hit okay, and look at that. We have the sky replacement group with everything that we've done in here, we have the brightness that we adjusted, the temperature, the sky itself, the lighting on the foreground, and the color and the foreground. And you can toggle all of these on and off to see what has changed. And not only that, you can click for example, the brightness and you can adjust that after the fact. So if I find that six is not enough, I can increase that up to 11 if I wanted to. I'm going to bring that back down to six because I'd like that where that was. But that is also conveniently and just a little folder here and look, within a few seconds, we've been able to change the sky from this to this. That's a huge difference to our image. Next, let's go ahead and get our moon in here. The moon is one of the easiest things to cut out from here. You're going to make sure you're on the moon layer. I'm gonna go to the dropdown here. This is where we have different blending modes for our layers. Save anything from darken, multiply, Color, Burn, and as you see, as you scroll over, it changes what this looks like up here. It gives you a little preview of what it's going to do. So we want to go down until we find one that looks good screen and does a fairly good job most of the time. And let's keep going down. In this particular case, usually lighten or screen and does what I wanted to. So I'm probably going to go with strength. Whoops, I click Latin by accident. Let's go with the screen. And you can change the opacity of that as well. Psi will reduce the opacity quite heavily on this. So all the black is gone and it's blended this into the sky a little bit. Let's say controller command t. Because I might want to just reduce the size of this and move this around. Just move it up ever so slightly, right? Nice to just the moon and the distance behind some clouds. Very nice. So let's get on with cutting out our model. But first of all, we do have this other layer of the sky we had here. We can go ahead and just delete that. We're not going to need that. Let's work on our model layer. Let's zoom in a little bit. Now there are many ways that you can cut out a model from a photo. Now this is a very easy model to cut out very harsh edges, which is very nice. You want to make sure you're working with a high resolution image where you have these harsh edges is going to make it very easy to cut it out. So what are we going to do? Well, here are a few ways you can do it. We have objects selection to objects Selection Tool, Quick Selection Tool, or the magic wand tool. All of these essentially do the same thing. But for example, with this tool, I can drag a square around the model and it's already created a vague outline. Now the downside of this FI worked to create this button down here to create a mask out of it. And then I zoom in. You see it didn't do a very clean job as a little bit of a haloing going around, it's not the best. So how are we going to fix this? Let's hit Control or Command Z and our keyboard to undo that. And we can hit Control Command D to Deselect. So how are we going to do the sorrowful some other selection tools, earth quick selection, magic one. But all of these will essentially just create a random type of selection based off of some criteria that you give it because you can give it some tolerances. For example, we have, let's do the magic wand tool. We can set a tolerance for the nano colors and edges that it's going to select from as long as the sample size, but it's not going to give us the best edge. So how are we going to do this? We're continues the pencil. This is one of the tools that are a lot of people are not too comfortable with and that allows people actually scared of using, but it's so easy and so powerful to use. So let's go ahead, let's zoom in. Let's start with her head here. And let's hit P, letter P on our keyboard to get our pencil. And I will be using the mouse. I've been using the mouse as whole time. So you can use your drawing tablet or a mouse for this. And just click and you drag nodes. And as you see, there are two handles on each side. And you want to make sure that you are dragging these nodes out. And you can undo these as much as you want and taking some creative liberties. And I'm cutting out some of her hair here. Because when it comes to hair, I personally tend to try to keep it as clean as possible. And usually in the professional industry, you get rid of as much of the straggling hair as possible. Now what if, for example, I click out here, but I want to bring this known back in here. And it's very simple whether your pencil, you're just going to hold down control, and then that changes your icon. You now have a mouse here. And I can click on this note here and just drag it back to the middle here. But now you see this curve isn't like I wanted to waltz holding down Control or Command. If you're on a Mac, you can drag this handle and adjust that. But what if I don't to adjust both of the handle GC, it's changing both sides of it. Well, that's very simple. We are going to do is hold down Alt or option on your keyboard. And then you can drag this one of these nodes around one of the handle that joy. So you definitely want to take your time with this. Make sure you're getting a nice edge on whatever subject you have. In this case, we have this model because this is definitely going to help you to not have that, that weird halo that happens when you use one of the automatic. Selection tools. And it's just going to look better in your final edit is gonna look a lot crisper. It's gonna look a lot more professional. And we do have a lot of nice straight edges to use. And if you haven't trouble seeing where all the edges are, feel free to zoom in to the point where you see pixels even I usually go to the point where the grid disappears. So that is about this point here. It might vary for what your settings are making off of the stabled or grid completely in your preferences if you want. But I tend to go as soon as possible to make sure I have a nice edge. So let's go ahead and keep going here. And there are some places where you can take creative liberties. For example, here, I'm going to take all of this here. Am I going to cut across here? So in this case I'm going to include it, but you might want to exclude it if you want to. You'll see there's some other piece of cloth or shadow coming from the other side, but I'm not going to include that. Now you do want to be very careful when you're going around skin and LIN. So for example, arms, legs, anything like that. Because if you cut off too much of it, it's going to be very noticeable. It's going to be noticeable if you make someone's arm way too thin or for example, if I were to cut her calves off at this point, it's going to be very noticeable. So you definitely want to pay attention to how you are doing all of these nodes that you're not cutting off too much, am cutting off a few of the pixels. But that is more for the sake of that haloing effect that I was talking about. Very nice. So let's just keep going here. I'm going to show you how you're going to get some of these inner areas in just a second. I'm just doing the outer edge for now. And it is the best when you have a model who's wearing clothes and fashion moves straight edges because you don't have to do really anything of the nodes. You just click and make the points because it's just gonna make a straight edge. And then when you have to make a curve again, you can click and drag. If you wanted to just be points, you could do just points around every edge. But depending on your image and might show up quite jagged. So keep that in mind as well. So you see here I will just clicking instead of making the drag the nodes. So play around, see what works for you. Take your time. Using the pen tool is definitely something that takes patience. But once you learn to master it, you can get any type of selection that you want, even better selections and some of the selection tools that come with Photoshop. And there we go, getting the detail around the hand. When it comes to a point like this. I never drag a point like this because then once I drag out, it creates a little loop there. So always make sure that I end a point like this on just a click. I don't drag a node, a coming out from that, you can drag and you'll be fine. So that's just one little tip that I used to do that I used to make the mistake of not doing mechanism day. Because when it came to those corners, I would still go ahead and drag the nodes. And then I was always confused as to why are these loops just appearing and those frustrating, you know, when you're starting out, you expect things to work for you and then when it doesn't get frustrated and then you tend to stop word, just give up. You just have to stick with it. Take your time. And the more you do this, the faster you're going to get at it, and the better your eye is gonna get at discerning where to place these nodes, how to actually place them. So learning Photoshop compositing is definitely a time-intensive thing. So don't worry if you don't get it on the first day. Now the beauty of the course here is that you can watch this over and over as much as you'd like. So if you don't get it the first time around, watch the videos again. Go through the exact same thing, follow along, And then in time, you will learn exactly how to do it. That's how I learn. I watched a lot of courses, a lot of videos from those who I looked up to and I wanted to edit like them. Or I just was curious, How do I Moscow hair for example. Let's take a look us looking good. And yeah, and watching those, doing the videos over and over, there are a lot of tutorials that I ended up doing multiple times. Just to learn some of these techniques that I'm teaching you in right now. So we're almost done masking out our model here. And the final bit of her hair, as you see, I am cutting out quite a bit of the struggling hairs. Very nice and we're almost done with the outside here, the outline. There we go. We have our outline. Look at that, but we're still missing a few areas. We need to get the space between your hands and legs here and then in between her jacket here. So let's go ahead and do that. So just with our P tool here or pencil, we're just gonna go zoom in here using I'll ever so slightly. And we're gonna do the same thing. Now that selection that we have is still there. You can see the vague outlines, the nodes just have disappeared. They still exist. If we go over here to paths, you see the word path that we have. So you can go ahead and go back to any of those any time. Let's go ahead and do this over here. Now luckily, these little spaces here have fairly straight edges, right? Nice. And then we have our final spot here. Non-case here I'm going to actually include the hair. Very nice. Second mask out some of that little bit there later on. Perfect. So now we have our selection. Now, what do we do? It's very simple. All you're gonna do is hit Control or Command Enter. And it's turned all of that into a selection. It's a far better selection than we had before. It's exactly to what we mean. And you're gonna do very simple thing and I click this button down here, and it's going to turn that selection into a mass square, editing non-destructively. So we're not erasing anything here, we're just masking it out. So let's go ahead and click this down here. It's a little white rectangle with a black circle on it. And look at that, everything has gone. Now you might find there are still a little bit of white edges here. And you can clean that up very easily. If you hit B on your keyboard, you can bring up your brush. Now this is way too big and let's make that smaller of the left bracket. And I'm going to go for a soft brush. You can change the size here and I'm gonna make the hardness of this be at around, around 50%. 47 is fine. And now, if you paint in black and it's gonna paint away part of the original image. But if ever wanted to get that back, I painted white. I have everything back here. And that is exactly how I'm going to get rid of some of the detail in-between the hair here. Got a nice small brush. And you just paint away the original background color. Gone. Flagrant. Really go ahead and refine your edges a little bit. Especially down here, like I said, I'm going to come back here. This is where having a drawing tablet helps goes. My drawing tablet has pressure sensitivity, so I can get really fine lines, find edges with this. But if you don't, you can definitely do this without that as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and check on my edges really quick. Make sure this is all looking nice and clean. There's less of these white pixels as possible. Because it's going to look more blended. And there we go. Using the pen tool, we see we don't have much of that white table that we had before, which is fantastic. So there we have our model. She's gone out and now we can move her around, adjust her as much as we'd like. So to hit Control Command T might want to just move her ever so slightly. Like so. Very nice. So now we have our basic layout done. Now what we're going to be ready to do some color correction in the next video, because as we see this quite a lot of discrepancy between the color of our model here, as well as our background here doesn't really match very well, doesn't. So we're gonna do some color correction in the very next video. So let's keep going.
5. Color Correction: Alright, so now that we have our basic lambda1, we do want to get our model here color corrected to match our image. Our image has very low contrast, pastel, pink, purple, and orange, yellow up here. But she's very high contrast D, and she's also in warm tones, but we want to match it a little bit better. So how are we going to do this? Well, first of all, we do want to look at our brightness contrast Adjustment Layer, and I'm going to click that down. So make sure we only just the layer down there. And we want to reduce the contrast of our model here. And I'm going to slightly bringing the contrast up, maybe just about plus four. It's very nice. Now let's go ahead and thrown a hue saturation. And it does help if you're zoomed out for this, cuz you're gonna see how she relates to the whole image. Right? So next we want to definitely D saturate her just a little bit. We're going to add the color and everything back to her later on. Go ahead and do that. Next, we want to maybe increase a lightness this a little bit because if we look at the darks in our image here in the sand as a faded like it's under high contrast. Blacks will want to make sure we reflect that in our model here as well. Okay? So we're going to increase the lioness y plus four. I'm going to keep the hazard as we don't want to change any of that. And now we do want to use a Curves Layer. So curves is one that looks kind of scary to a lot of people. There's a lot of buttons here, a lot of things in the dropdown, lot of presets, and you can do a lot of things with it. So what are we going to do here? Well, first of all, I'd like to create a nice little bit of an S curve in my Curves Layer. And what that means is we bring this down here for our directs, and we bring this up for a highlights. And this creates a little bit more contrast and you can toggle it on and off. You see what we did here. But at the same time I want to crush the blacks. Now what does that mean to crush the blacks? Question that blacks means any black dot we have here. So let's get our Hsu here, for example. Crushing it means we pull this up and it turns into more of a faded gray, dark gray color instead of a Black. So if we zoom out, we see her whole image now is faded because all the blacks have been pulled up to much more of the grey. So if we look on the left here, we're pulling the Black from being this black down here to being more of this gray. So I need anything below this threshold here is going to be pulled up to match that grey color. And that's gonna just the whole image of our model here. So looking at that, that's looking at a little bit better actually, having it at that layer, the faded color is matching a lot better. Not bad. And now for the color, we want to get more of this yellow, purple onto her. So there are many ways you can do this the way I personally do and have done it for many years now is I create a new layer. I clip it down by holding alter option and clicking between the lines here. And then it's a simple matter of hitting on my keyboard to get my paint bucket and alter option. And I sample one of the colors in my background. So I'm gonna go for something that's in between the pink and orange highlight. So something this peach color. And I'm gonna fill in the whole layer. So it's going to color her incompletely. And then I'm gonna go to our blending modes here and give a few different options here you have darkened multiplying the c, it's applying that color to her. But usually the one that works the best is either overlay or soft light. Sunlight does a very good job usually. And obviously we're not going to use it up this high opacity. We're gonna turn that all the way down to 0 and go back from there. And I always teach in all my courses at a little bit, goes a long way. And that is entirely true here. So we see we've just done a little bit of that orange on her. So if we zoom in, we can see just adding a little bit of orange, yellow into every color that's on hurts adding it using the soft light blending mode. Just very, very nice. So that is a basic color correction for our model. Next video, we're gonna go over some shadows and highlights. We're gonna give her some shadows because her light is coming from the left. That's where the sun is coming from. But where a, her chateau, she needs of a shadow underneath Rashid. She's not just floating here. So we're gonna go ahead and do that in the next video. So let's keep going.
6. Shadows & Highlights: Alright, so now that we've done some color correction, we need to start adding in some shadows and highlights. Right now a model is just kind of floating here. She looks at very placed here. So it doesn't look like she's part of this scene. So there are a few ways that we can create shadows here. So first of all, let's just go ahead and select all the layers we did in the previous video and hit control command G. And this group it together and we're going to call this model. So now everything is in that layer. So a few different ways to create shadows is, I'm going to show you the first one. Let's go ahead and goanna layer on top of our desert, but the lower model. So you can have a soft brush that is fairly large to sample some of the darkest color in our image, something like that. And bring that down just a little bit. And I create a nice circle like that. Very simple. And I do Control or Command T. And then if I hold down shift and it's going to skew that to be very narrow. And then at this point you just changing the size of this and then changing the location of this to match where it is in the image. And they can lower the opacity. So this is one way in which you can start adding some shadows into your image. What there's one way which is far better and far easier in my opinion. So let's delete that layer. Let's open up our model layer. Now if you hold down Control or Command and hover over our mask that we've created. That's gonna get you the selection that we had before. Now you're going to want to close up that layer and we're going to create a new layer just like we did before. And make sure we're on that new layer with our selection. Next, we're going to get G on our keyboard to get our paint bucket tool. And we're gonna go ahead and get our dark color here. I might darken that down just a little bit. And these aside is so solid to D saturate that. And r cannot just a little bit. You don't go full black is no image actually has fully black shadows, no cast shadows ever fully black. So keep that in mind. There's always some color to it and in this case, it's a brown color. So we're going to click there and we see nothing has really changed for them. If we look on the thumbnail and it looks like we filled in this outline, was that color and that's exactly what we've done. So let's hit Control or Command D to Deselect. And then let's hit Control or Command T to get into our transform tool. Now what we're going to do is hold down control or command. And now we can drag this node and we have a very nice shuttle that's exactly what her shadow is. Just going to pull this gets a little bit off the screen here. And then I'm gonna use the corners here to adjust to match up with where she's sitting as well as where her Mahila for issue is, something like that. Man, now you look at this and you say, this is a little bit too harsh of an edge, and I would agree with the 100%. So we're gonna go into Filter, we're gonna actually do a Gaussian Blur on this. But before we do that, let's make this quickly into a Smart Object. I'm gonna do Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. And we're going to have a nice little blurred to this. Let's go about 3.5 pixels. Not too bad. And we're going to lower the opacity to match the other shadow. That's an image, that's what I'm looking to emulate. And you see it's not matching up to perfectly signal coming with your brush. We can go into layer above this. And we can just go ahead and paint in just a little bit of that. And again, you can lower the opacity of this layer is one. So we just got rid of a little bit of the edge there. Very nice. So that's a little bit of a cast shadow on her. But now I also want to increase the shadows that are on her son, her right side here. I want to add some shadows. So I'm gonna go on a new layer above the model. And I'm going to clip it down. I'm gonna hold on Alt or option. Click between the layers. It's going to clip it down and make sure you're zoomed in nicely to see your home model. And with a nice soft brush, I usually lower the opacity for this part, so I don't want to go too crazy, too fast, usually do it around 20%. And with that same shadow Michael, a little bit darker. We're gonna pull in some of that particular even darker than that. We're going to add some shadows here and we can always erase for E for the erase tool and then go ahead and erase what you don't want. So I'm gonna add some of this dark brown shadow to our model here. Because where she's sitting is going to be entirely in shadow. If you think about the physics of it, which is something that we're not really told to do when we're editing our photos. But it is important to think of the physics behind what you're editing. Because if it looks too fake, people are going to notice it. So let's zoom out a little bit. So this is the before and after. So adding some of that contrast back when we will reduce the opacity of this to about 40%. So it's a little bit more believable. And now I do want to have a little bit of an orangey glow on her as well. So let's do another new layer. And I click that down. And now we're gonna do an opposite thing. Okay? I'm going to sample the highlight color we have in our clouds, which as we see is a very peachy type of color. And I'm gonna bring just a little bit brighter. And I'm gonna just paint with that same brush low-pass, and just give a little bit of an edge light going across to the left side of her. And there's already fairly large highlight on her left side. I'm just going to be very subtle with this. So if we toggle that before now front and that, you see we just added a little bit of an edge glow and just let itself can add a lot of detail to your image. So I had to lower the opacity on that. About 60% was always a little bit goes a long way. So I always go a little bit too far and then I dial it back. It's very nice. And now we have our model part of our image here, number l. So you can always come in here and see how well it's meeting up with the shadow. So sometimes it is a back-and-forth kind of thing. It's going to go ahead. Brush Tool, kinda wanna paint and a little bit more by her heal. Very nice. And I might actually go ahead and combine our two shadows so you can toggle it on. And I'm going to do is I'm gonna add a gradient to ours shadows. How are we going to do that? Very simple. So we have this group here. Let's just rename it shadow. You can double-click on the name. So the Rename option comes up or you can right-click and rename in here as well. Very nice. So let's go ahead and create a new layer above this. The option to click it down. And what our brush, I'm actually going to paint with black this time because now we are going to be painting on our shadow hackles up. So again, low opacity. And we're going to be darkening part of our shadow here. Now, this isn't a soft as I would like it to be. So let's go ahead and click our brushstroke down here. Hardness of 0. That's what we want. There I go and I can bring up capacity of that down about 35%. And the foreign after. That's a little bit of extra depth to our image. A little bit more realism. Okay, so that's looking good now and had a little bit of a gradient shadow across the bottom here. So let's go ahead and do that really quickly. And this is gonna go above every layer we've done so far. I'm going to zoom out. Now we're going to hit this tool over here, the gradient tool, it compresses g, but by default might G goes to the paint bucket tool. So it goes between those two. And the blending mode I'm going to use here, or the gradient I am going to use is the second option here. The second option, the foreground color, which is a color over here and goes to transparent, and that's what we want. So any color that I sample, you see the gradient is changing. So if I want this purple issue, blue-gray, that can be that any color. It's going to change on the top-left as you see. So what I want to do sound to get some of this shadow that I have here. And I'm gonna pull a nice gradient coming up from the bottom and might be too much. Just a nice little gradient. I'm going to reduce the capacity of that about 77. And look at that just for some shadows. We've done quite a significant change here. So let's toggle everything that we had before. So let's toggle this off and our shadows. So we went from this to this. That's quite a significant change. It's really blending HER n a lot more. So in the next video, I'm gonna go over some special effects and then add a few little birds in the sky. I want to add a little bit of a lens flare, and I also want to do a little bit of blur on the background. And so I don't want the background to take away too much attention to right now. And back is fairly in-focus. And I want to not be so and focus on the folks to be more on our model in the front. So we're gonna go ahead and do a little bit with that as well in the next videos, let's go on and let's do a little bit of special effects.
7. Special Effects: All right, we're ready to start adding some special effects to our image. So as for everything we've done on our model, we're essentially done with her for now at least. So we can go ahead and create another group of all the shadows and highlights that are on our model. Group that together model. And I can't stress enough how important organization is when it comes to Photoshop and positive because you can get really lost in all your layers, especially if you aren't labeling them. So you see we have shadow, but then we have layer six. Imagine if we have layer 100. I've had projects which have over 200 layers in it. And if I didn't label everything and group them properly, I'd be completely lost trying to find where everything is, make sure that you stay organized. So I'm gonna group the shadows together as well. So now if I want to adjust the shadows, I can, I have the model follows the gradient, sleek and adjust all of these separately and have your organization. But at the end we have some special effects. So first things first what I mentioned was I wanted to do some background blur on our background here. And that should be very simple, especially since our desert as a Smart Object. So we're going to do is going to make sure Warner doesn't layer. I'm gonna go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. And we just want a little bit of a blur in the background. And about two pixel blur. And it's gonna be more than sufficient. And what we're going to do is we're going to hit Jenner keyboard. And if that doesn't default to the paint bucket tool, just find your paint bucket tool for me, it's down here and fill in that hole filter with black. So now everything has gone. Nothing is blurred. Or we're going to do now is with our brush. And we get a nice big brush that is a very soft. We're gonna paint with white. And I'm gonna do a capacitive about 30%. And we're going to start painting in the blur on the background. So I'm gonna have it be more blurred all the way at the edge here. Less blurred coming to the front here. If we toggle this before and after, you can see that there is more focused on her face. And that's exactly what I wanted. Very nice. And again, if this is looking like it's too much of a blur, you can double-click the Gaussian blur here, take it down. And you can really get very fine tuned with your Blur here. So I'm gonna keep this at 1.6 pixels. Very nice. So now we have that blurred on. Very, very nice. And next, I'm going to add some nice little birds to our image. So only include the brushes for this for you to download and it's very simple to install them. All you do is click the drop down here. And then you're gonna click Import brushes, select the brushes in the download folder. Now since I already have them installed, I don't have to, but they're going to find this a bird's brushes to have a whole bunch of brushes. Then I'm gonna go to the layer that's on the very top. And if I want to paint in a bird, I'm not going to think to in black if I were to paint it with black. And again, full opacity. If I were to paint it black, it's gonna look very fake. It's not gonna look real. We want to take into account the atmosphere, not as in this image. So again, very small pressure. And we're going to sample a color that is in the sky already. So I wanted to have this blue up here, maybe even a darker blue. Add a little bit of black to it. So now we have some birds in the back. I'm going to talk about just a little bit more. There we go. So now we have a nice color for the birds. So I'm gonna go ahead and be very intentional with how I do this. Are in here, convert there. Now you do want to avoid making faces with the bird. So for example, I don't want to have these two here and then one there. And then a few birds like this, making some kind of a face. It's distracting. Generally having just one or two, maximum three. But if you do F3, don't have them in a triangle. You want to have two grouped off. And then you have one often the back. And then that looks most of the time a lot better. So enough tuna back here. Very nice. Having a moon number that's a little bit of my signature that I haven't nearly every single one of my edits absolutely loved doing that. So that's a nice little weight and add a little bit of extra life to your images. Now if you remember, we didn't have this image of particles. What are we going to do with this? So let's go ahead and look at what blending modes we have. Cuz you can get some really cool effects. Just looks something like this. So if we start going through these, we see some of them start looking good woman gets onto the lightened and screen area is adding some cool detail to our image. And having this little bit of a grunge effector image of these light flares, light bubbles, whatever you want to call this as a dust, and actually adds a lot to your image. So let's go ahead. Let's have this on color dodge Maybe let's look. I'm going to go with screen for this. Let's just do Control or Command T. And I'm going to stretch this to fit our image. Now, this doesn't look good right now, does that? It looks quite horrible if I do say so myself. So we're gonna lower though pest study on this to about 33%. And I'm going to create a layer mask on this. And again, hitting on your keyboard to get the paint bucket tool. And if you don't already have a black as the main collagen hit D is gonna get the default color of black and white. Enemies hit X and it looks black on top. So I'm gonna paint away everything we just did. And we're gonna get our brush out. Nice soft brush. Make it bigger again and I'll pass it to this. There's going to be very low and we just 10%. And we're gonna paint in white. And again, you can change the size of your brush using the left and right brackets on your keyboard. Now I'm gonna go ahead and paint in soluble. Surely. Some of the detail we see it's coming in here. And I'm gonna do this in sort of a vignette fashion. You can see on the layer mask here how am painting it in. And if it seems like you're not seeing what's happening, just toggle the layer on and off as changing the color a little bit and adding some of the effect. And we can zoom in and see a very nice, I always like adding textured and my images at unifies it in my opinion. And I really like it. Call it there for the particles. And finally, I want to add some lens flares. Let's go ahead and make another new layer on top of everything. And we're gonna go to our lens flare brushes. So make sure you install those as well. And we're going to look through and see what's going to work the best for this particular image. My favorite is just the default first one that comes with this. My default, the brushes are absolutely massively. You will want to reduce the size of these. So let me find a nice color. And again, I'll pass any, make sure you put that back up to where it was. I'm going to have the sun coming in about where this cloud is in the middle. Just a nice little lens flare coming off the side. That's nice like that. And then you can, you can layer these up. So I usually put each lens flare on its own layer. And you can experiment to see what looks good. Let me just show you so you can see what each one does. So I highly recommend you go through these, play around with them because you see what each one of those, and I want to add one of these in here. Lower low pass any there. And I can group these together, rename this lens flare. Very nice if the particle layer already labeled, but then when you do want to label our third layer. And there we go, we've done some very nice special effects to this. I'm really happy with how that's looking. Next video is going to be, my favorite part is going to be a very basic color grading that we're gonna do to this image. And it's going to absolutely finish it. It's going to make it look fantastic. It's the best part of the whole Photoshop composite and prop process where actually makes the image finished and makes it look unique and done. So let's keep going. Let's just some very basic color grading.
8. Basic Color Grading: We're finally ready to do my favorite part and that has some basic color grating. Now I do have a course that I've made and you can feel free to check it out on my teacher pages is a form course on color grading, mock color theory. What it's all about, what I'm going to show you a very basic way to colour grade your photos to give it that really high-quality professional look. So first thing that I like to do is after I finished my composite, I put everything into one layer. So I'm just gonna call this Edit. This is the final edit. And anything I do now is just the colour grade not I'm applying to it. So first things first I do want to do is I don't want to do another quick Curves Layer. And to make sure I clip it down below it's, it doesn't really matter at this point, but you always still clip it down. And I want to crush more of the blacks because it is still a little bit too high contrast for my liking. It's gonna pull this up all the way to about here. Very nice. I'm going to close out and I'm gonna show you two different ways in which you can calibrate your photos. One gives you a little bit more control, but another one is more easy. So let's do the very first method here. Okay? So the first method is using the selective color adjustment layers. So let's click that. And this lets you selectively adjust each color. So if we click this drop down, we have our reds, yellows, greens, science moves magentas, whites, neutrals, and blacks. And based on all of those colors, you can adjust the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black level in each of those colors. And that's exactly what we're going to do. So we're going to start with the blacks. I generally don't touch any of the colors. Sometimes I do if there's some color cast, but usually at this point in the edit, I don't really have that. So I usually just adjust the blacks to whites and the neutrals. So let's start with the blacks. I want to increase the science a little bit. Let's pull this over to about, let's go to about 19% magenta. I will also pull that over to the right. Let's go to about that point. And I want to take the yellow level down maybe to about this point. So if we toggle the before and after, before, after. So we see what we're doing here. We're cooling down some of the shadows in our image. And that's our goal here for this particular colour grade. Next, let's go over into whites. Now I will like to remind you that there are presets setup, this is a customer doom. I can also have a default one and you can download different presets on everything. But for now, I'm just gonna do the custom one. Now when it comes to the whites, it's gonna just a whites and our image. And we're gonna do a very similar thing. Cyan wanted to bring that up just a little bit. Little bit goes a long way. You never want to drag the slider is all the way to the left or all the way to the right. It's not going to look good and you're not going to have a good time. And then I just have a little bit of the magenta there S for the yellow again, I want to take that away with plenty of yellow in our image. So I wanted to make sure we have that. And as for the black level in the whites were going to bring that up to about 33. So we can still talk about it before and after. You see slowly, we're adjusting some of the colors that are in this image, where the colors that are in the different values of tones in our image. So next, let's go over to our neutrals, which by definition is everything between whites and blacks. So I'm gonna bring the sign down just a touch here. Magenta. I'll give a little bit, we'll go plus five on that. As to the yellow will do this minus two on that and lack will go minus seven there. And that's all we're gonna do for the selective color. If we toggle that on an off, we see just the change that we've made here. Not too bad. And then there's one more thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to make another adjustment layer. And I'm going to use RP Bucket Tool. And I'm going to fill it with a nice dark blue, something like this. And what I'm going to do is I'm gonna set this to a Multiply blend mode or some other mode might work, but I'm gonna go multiply. I'm gonna bring no past study all the way down. And this just gives a nice blue cast, dark blue cast our whole image. So this is one way that you can calibrate your image, but I'm gonna show you an even easier way that I actually use more often when I'm doing color grading in Photoshop. And that is using the color lookup, which is super handy. So I'm gonna go ahead and hide these two layers that I just did. I'm going to keep the curves adjustment because I like that. But let's go ahead and use our color lookup. Now this is a little bit scary maybe for some of you because we have a lot of different buttons here. But it's very simple. We're not going to adjust anything on unless we're only gonna look at this first drop down where it says a load 3D. And you can think of, let's sort of like presets in Lightroom is going to adjust all the colors and everything in your image. So if we click the two-step look, we can go down with our arrow keys and go through all of these. And it's gonna go through a few different types of colors that can be applied to this image. We're going to use this one called foggy night. It comes default with Photoshopping Donald, other ones from the Internet. We're gonna go with this one. And we're going to heavily reduce the opacity of this. We're going to go all the way down to about, about 30%. We don't want this to be too crazy. But that is the colouring that I'm going to personally go with for this image. I'm really happy with how that turned out. And if we look before and after are colour grade, we have before. Let me make sure that I don't turn on all the layers which I just did by accident. This is the before. I'm going to drag this down here and we go, this is a before. After. That is quite a significant change, just a little bit of a colour grade. It brings everything together, makes the image pop, makes it look fantastic. I'm really happy with this edit. Fantastic. And there we have our final edit in the next video I'm gonna go over how to save this edit because I'm sure you're gonna want to show off. Probably want to post it to your Instagram, to your Facebook, anywhere onto your website, even into your portfolio. So I'm gonna show you how you can save this in a quick and easy way. So let's keep going.
9. How to save your image: Well done, you finished your composite and now we're ready to actually save it because like I said before, you want to show off, you want to show everyone just how good of a job you did. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna show you four different ways that you can save your photos. Now if you haven't already, make sure you've saved it as a Photoshop file. If you haven't, make sure you do File, Save As find a place to save it. I have mine. Save those composite Work in Progress. Photoshop, PSD file. You're going to hit Save. I'll hit yes to replace it in on a problem. And you just said OK on the dialogue, and that is saved as your Photoshop file. You can always come back to this. It's going to have all your layers and that is perfect. What if you want to put this onto your website or onto the internet? Will by default, you'll probably think to save it as a jpeg. And most everything on the internet is a JPEG. So let's go ahead and do that. Pool File, Save As and N, it's dropped down. We're gonna select JPEG. And I'm gonna rename all of these to be whatever they are. So Composite JPEG. And let's just hit Save. Again, maximum, you're going to save it those and maximum file size 620 kilobytes. That's not that bad. And that's just hit OK and lovely. But when it comes to your website, you essentially want to have your photos to be a very small file size, preferably under 500 kilobytes so that it loads nice and fast. We saw this one was a little bit too big. I've had jpegs, which are about 20 megabytes, and that's way too large for once. I'm going to take forever to load your photos, especially if you have hundreds. So how do we remedy this? Well, it's very similar to go File Export and safe for when you're going to have this dialog box come up. You can zoom out, you can see the quality of the image does not go down. Some saving as a preset of JPEG high with JPEG compression, it's going to be a high-quality quality. I'm going to go a 100%. And there we go. And we see the file size is 578 kilobytes here. We're going to reduce the percent here and make it and 80% in size. Now to 390 kilobytes, it's a lot smaller file size, but the quality is not sacrifice for a website, this is going to look fantastic. So then all you do is hit Save. And then I'm going to call this mixture, I find why I want to save this, and I'm going to call this composite JPEG web and just going to hit save. And now that's safe for web. It's a far smaller file size and essentially what you want. But what about for Instagram? Personally, I like to save all my photos that I upload to Instagram as a PNG file, I found that that is the highest quality, keeps all the sharpness, keeps all the colors in the best possible way. So let's go ahead and save this as a PNG file. Save as and are dropped down. We're going to select P and G. And again, just rename this PNG. So you know what you're looking at. I'm going to keep it large file size. Instagram will do its own compression, but that is going to save that as a PNG. And that's good for use on Instagram or any social media that will do the compression for you. And lastly, what if you want to print this one? If you have a composite, you want to print it out as a large photo or large poster that you want to put onto your wall. So you want to send it off to a print company, but they're not going to be happy with a 500 kilobyte JPEG, not at all. Most print companies are going to ask you for a tiff file, TIFFs. And we can save one as a TIF file. So let's go ahead and do that. File. Save as it's all the way at the bottom, tiff. And hit save. Not going to change anything in this pop up here. And it's gonna include layers. So with TIF and includes every layer, because when they print they might need to adjust something, might need to change the color profile, which is totally fine. And we're going to hit OK. Now tif files are absolutely massive. Let me tell you how big this file sizes. So this file is in 98 megabytes. It's bigger than the actual Photoshop file. The Photoshop file for this as about 96 megabytes the way I have it. And that pitfall is bigger than that. So you're not going to want to put a TIF file onto your website because it's gonna take forever to load hundreds of images that are a 100 megabytes each. So definitely something to keep in mind. But there you have a couple of ways you can save your photos for different applications. In the next video, I'm going to go over your assignment for this course is going to be a fun one.
10. Your Assignment: And so you've completed this course, but now you have an assignment. That's right. I want you to go ahead and create your own edit using all the techniques taught in this course. A very simple edit. I want you to use at least three images that you find, either that you take by yourself or that you get from one of those free image websites that I showed earlier in the course and create your own composite. Follow each video in the course, and apply those steps to your images. Create a composite, drop it down to the students submitted photos. I really want to see what you can do. Have fun, be creative, and share what you have. I really want to see what you can do with the skills and techniques that you've learned in this course. In the last video, I'm going to go over some final thoughts.
11. Final Thoughts: Guess what? You've made it through my course, Photoshop, composite beginner class, learn from a Pro. That's absolutely fantastic. And not only that, you've ended up with your own composite that you've created. I really hope that you've learned a lot today skills and techniques that you can transferring to future creations that you make. Also, I hope that you do the assignment for this course. You can refer to the previous video, but I just wanted to reiterate that I really want to see what you can do with these techniques. I did try my best to pare down compositing to its simplest elements. And I believe that you can create something truly awesome. And would like to mention that I am selling Lightroom presets right now for special introductory price over my website. So head over to www dot the real-time kind.com, four slash presets to get your presets today. And these are perfect to use on Lightroom to apply preset color grades to your images that I've already made and tested over many years of practice and use. You can transfer your final edited image over to Lightroom and do your color grading process over there using one of my presets. And you know, the best part, both preset packs that ISIL are cheaper than a cup of coffee. That's right. I really want to give you the means to get great results in your edits and photos. If you've enjoyed this course, I encourage you to leave a review and rating as that helps me out and feel free to check out my teacher page, to check out other Lightroom and Photoshop courses that I've made, ranging from beginner courses all the way to mastery level courses. It's been a pleasure teaching you today and having you in my course and I really hope to see you again in a future class. Take it easy.
Tom Kai, Photographer and Graphic Designer
