Photoshop Composite Masterclass: Advanced Lighting Techniques

1. Introduction: What makes a good Photoshop composite? Obviously having a really creative ideas fantastic, but if execution of the ideas lackluster, it's not going to hit just as well. What makes or breaks a Photoshop composite and many times is purely just the lighting in that composite. If the multiple images aren't properly matched them brightness, saturation and color, it will make it look very place and just overall very mediocre. Now this may sound like a harsh reality, but in the professional world, if you're unable to create convincingly blended composites, then you will not have any work. But don't be afraid because today I'll be showing you how to blend your images like a professional in Photoshop, composite masterclass, advanced lighting techniques. My name is Tom Chi and I've been a photographer and graphic designer for almost 12 years now from the United States. And I travel around shooting photos and designing for various clients and companies. But I specialize in fashion, lifestyle and commercial photography and designed. It's honestly the best job because I'm able to be creative every single day. You'll see a few examples of my work going across the screen right now. But if you want to see more, please, you can check out my website at www dot the real-time chi.com or looking up on Instagram at the real-time kind maybe even leave a follow to see what I'm up to. I'm so excited to teach you today because for me, once I learned about how to properly lightened color match a composite, it was a total game changer. I was finally able to create convincing looking Photoshop composites to the point where I've editorial. Even tell how many photos are actually used because they're lit and color match so well. And I want to give you this skill as well. Like I mentioned before, the creative field is very cut throat. If you don't hone your skills and perfect certain techniques, you'll have a hard time lending clients. And I'm not saying this to discourage you. Rather, I want to encourage you to continue to learn, hone your craft and perfect proper lighting techniques like the professionals do, because this can and will literally land you clients from this one skill alone. I once had a sports, a tire company reach out to me to create a simple composite, just a runner composited onto a desert. And the game changer was the fact that I knew how to match the lighting and color properly to the point where it looked like the runner was actually in the desert. Now, I value my time a lot. You know what they say time is money, but above that, I value your time. Why? Because I know how frustrating it can be gone course to course video to video, trying to learn all the techniques and not finding someone who's knowledgeable enough to teach exactly what you need. But my goal today is to make this the only course you'll ever need to know how to do advanced lighting techniques in Photoshop. This course is for anyone who wants to add one of the most relevant and highly sought after Photoshop skills to their toolbelt. Whether you create just for fun as a hobby or you want to make money doing this type of creative work. This course is for you. All right, I think this introduction has gone on long enough. Now, let's dive in and get started because this course is going to be very information dense and informative. So I hope that you decide to enroll in this course. And if you do, I'll be seeing you in the very next video. 2. Where To Find Free Photos: If you're here, that means you've decided to enroll in this course, which is awesome. But before we even get started, we need some images to work with. And if you're unable to actually go outside and take photos for this course, what are you going to do? You need to get some stock images from the internet. But you don't necessarily have money to be spending on paid sock little, so we need some free images. So where are we going to get them from London to show you three of my favorite websites where you can get free stock images. So let's hop into my web browser. And here we are on the very first website that I love to use a lot of time, and that is pixabay.com, a huge amount of content here, over 1.9 million images, videos, and music. So that's a really good thing about Pixabay. They have photos or illustrations of vectors, videos, and music. So any kind of project that you need, you can find free content for that right here. And not only that, you can get really unique type of images from Pixabay, from other websites I'm going to show you and you're not able to search things like UFO, for example, and actually have images of a UFO show up. That's one of the beauties of pixabay, is that you can find really detailed sci-fi or fantasy themed images to use a newer composites. Let's go back to the homepage here and let's go to the next website that I really like to use, and that is pixels.com. Now pixels is a little bit higher quality in my opinion, in the images that they have a curator a little bit better. But again, you can find many things. So you can find images as well as videos. And you can just scroll down and find a huge amount. Looks like they have a theme going on here at the beginning of some reds button scroll down and try and find an image that you would like. Or you can just go ahead and simply search through here. I can go ahead and just search something like elephant. It's gonna bring me all kinds of images of elephants or you can use, for example, this would be very nice to use those a lot they can do with these. So this is one of my really good websites that I use for images. But my favorite all-time favorite web site is on Splash.com. In my personal experience, I've had the best luck with finding the highest quality images from here, from my composite. So 90% of the images that I use are from an splash are all the images that will be used today making. Go ahead and scroll down again, see all that they have to offer. But the beauty of ans flushes, they have some categories up here. If you're really into Russia needs something very specific. I can just go to fashion and I can start looking through all the fashion related images. Or if I wanted something more technology, I can go ahead and just click that category and ready Find something that I could possibly use or of decent composite. Now, why do I like UNSW flesh so much? But I'm going to show you right now, let's say I want this image of the back of this continental car right here. Instead of just clicking download free what she can, they have to drop down and you can select what size of image you want to work with. They give you the option to get the original size of the image, which is fantastic because that means you have the most information possible to work with for your composite and that's what we want. We don't work with very pixelated images. We want as much detail, as much sharpness as possible in our images. So next to having a raw file, having the original size JPEG from ans slash is going to be possibly the best thing you can use for your compositing. So make sure that you download the images that I have provided and the download section for this course, because those are the ones that we'll be using today. In the next video, we're going to hop right into Photoshop and get started with our very first example of some lighting techniques. So let's jump into it. 3. Example 1: Lighting Correction: Alright, we are ready to get started. We're now in Photoshop. I am using the most newest version of Photoshop as of January 2021. So I'm using 2021 version of Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud version. So let's go ahead and let's set up our canvas. Now for this particular one, I want this to go onto my Instagram. So I'm gonna have it be a four by five ratio. So we can keep that in mind. Let's go ahead and let's click Create New. And a four by five ratio can be ten by eight. But I want this to be in a portrait orientation. So it's gonna go eight by 10.5, the resolution be 300 pixels per inch. We're not going to change anything else. Let's just click Create. There we go. We have our canvas loaded up and now I need to place in my images. So I always make sure that I place embedded. I've smart objects to work with. Salt. Let's go ahead and do that. It's very simple. All we're gonna do is go to File, Place Embedded. They going to navigate to all the images that you've downloaded. And from this particular first one, we're going to use the Sunset Street and the bear. So let's go ahead, let's open it up to Sunset. Let's click Place. Photoshop is going to take a second now and just hit Enter. We can resize that later, specially since that the smart object and we're gonna do the same thing. Please File Place Embedded. And we have our bear. Just want to add like a giant bear in the middle of a city. You know, why not? Let's go to a Sunset Street. I'm going to resize this now this course isn't going to be particularly a compositing course. So I'm not gonna go over a lot of the advanced masking techniques, but I do have other courses on that. If you want to learn about advanced compositing techniques, this is going to be focused on purely the lighting and color matching in your images. So let's go ahead and let's get our bear out here. And now let's go ahead and we need to actually cut the bear out of this, ok. Now there are multiple ways you can do it. You can use the pen tool, but you can also just use one of these objects selection tools over here. The object selection towards him do a really good job lately as you see, it's doing a fairly decent edge here. Might want to add a little bit backup here, hold down, shift on your keyboard and it'll add or you can hold down Alter option and it's going to take it away. Second, refine this edge a little bit to the point where I'm gonna be happy with it. Not for the purpose of discourse on new doom. A very basic mask on this. Always go into Select and mass. And then we can see exactly how it's going to look. Let's go ahead and change it to be overlay. Because this way we can see exactly what we're doing. And you see it's not looking too good in some of these areas. So let's go ahead and make sure that you are on your Refine Edge brush tool. And you can go ahead, make the brush smaller with the left bracket here. And you can take your time here and just, just paint on a little bit on the edge. And it's going to refine the edge of your selection. And I recommend you do take your time of this school around the edges here. Now be aware when you do the Refine Edge. Go over areas where there's dark area, it's going to add that back in, especially if you're doing the color aware mode. So just be very mindful of that. When it comes to the shadow area here and around his, his literal binocular things are covering here. I'm going to actually do that a little bit differently. But around this for I'm gonna use this refinance brush tool. Let's just hit okay. And now we have a nice little selection is very nice. But I want to add a little bit back. So what are we going to do? Y can use a few different things here. You can use something as simple as the Leso if you would like. And you can again hold down Shift and Alt Option. Refine part of my edge, just using that. So again, take your time of this. Again, the best edge that you would get for this particular image would be done with the pen tool. So if you do want to take the time and use the pen tool, I highly recommend it, but for the purpose of this particular course, I will not be using the pen tool. So there we go. We have a fairly decent selection. And then all you do is just click this mouse button down here. And there we go. Our bear has been mask.val. And we'll see a little bit more artifact being up here at the top. It's very simple to fix. I just get your brush out. It's got a nice smaller brush. Let's do 39 pixels. Kinda do a soft brush. And you wanna make sure you're painting in black. So that's going to paint a wave, this kind of stuff. Let's go ahead and get full opacity on that. And I just want to paint away. Some of that now helps if you have a drawing tablet, I do have a drawing tablet, but if you don't, you can definitely do this whole course using just a trackpad on a laptop. So don't worry about that. So now we have our bare cut out and as you see, he looks very placed in here doesn't mean I'm gonna make him because we want to bear in the middle of the city. There we go. But as you see, the lighting is off helix, obviously very placed. However, I chose an image of a bed that was fairly evenly lit. We see the light is coming from almost a front top direction, which doesn't necessarily match this image. But that's the point of this course. We want to match the two together. So I'll get started with matching the actual lighting in this image. We're going to focus on the color in the very next section of the course. So how are we going to fix this? Well, first of all, we have to look at the brightness level in our image. Now, you can use your own eye level to discern this or you can go ahead and measure the light level of each area here. But let's go ahead and let's just get started. Okay. First thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to do a brightness contrast layer on here. And I'm going to click that down. You want to make sure you're always clipping that down. And first of all, I have to make this a lot darker because he's an, a shadow. It's sunset time, he's not going to be this bright. So let's go ahead. Let's bring the brightness down just to about this level. And we can adjust this at another time. And I'm also going to reduce the contrast and just a little bit. Because as we see this area here is not as contrast the as the bearer itself. So I'm just gonna bring that down to about 21% that we go. Now. I also need to change the saturation a little bit on our bear here. So let's go ahead and let's do a hue saturation. Again. Let's flip that down. And I'm just gonna do a global desaturation. Two, something like that because as you see, this background isn't that saturated. The most saturated part are these traffic lights and our bear is nowhere near that level of brightness or saturation. So we just want them to be fairly these saturated. As we look at this, we see that the shadows may not be the same on the bear as it is here on the buildings of the highlights their different. And I'm not talking about just the color, I'm talking the actual brightness level of the shadows and the highlight. So how are we going to adjust these will very simply actually, Let's zoom in a little bit so we can see a little bit more of what we're working with. Okay, and then let's go ahead and let's add a very nice levels layer, Levels Adjustment Layer. And let's clip that down. And now let's go ahead and mess around with some of these sliders. So first things first, I might want to bring Mr. Jones a little bit closer to the left. There we go. A little bit of that. And then we can go ahead and bring the highlights in as well if we wanted to bring the highlights up. But I'm fairly happy with where the highlights are currently. And I can also bring the highlights closer to our gray or the blacks closer to the gray. So if we drag this area here, you see it's gonna darken those highlights and bring everything that's above this section down to this point, if that makes sense. So everything above 213 brightness level here will be brought down to 213. And same on this other side where the black, everything below the 30 mark will get brought up to that 30 mark. So if you have a black level that is at ten, that's going to bring that up to the level of 30. So that's why you can get this a washed out kind of look. Now for this particular image, I do want to bring that up. Maybe just a few points here, maybe three or four. Let's just do two points up there. Very nice. And then let's go ahead and look at the before and after what we've done. Okay? So before and after of this, as you see, we've really blown out some of the darks and this image is what we want to do. But let's go ahead and let's look at this layer by layer so that you see exactly what we've been doing. So we have our original image here and very saturated, very bright. First thing we did, we lowered the brightness. Very simple, right? Then the next thing that we did, we wanted to be saturated because it's to orange to yellow brown here. We don't want that, so we desaturated it. Ok. And then next we added a Levels Adjustment Layer to bring up the shadows a little bit to match the shuttles going on in the background of our image. We also brought the mid tones over to the left a little bit, which as you saw, also brightened up the image a little bit. Okay, so now that we have that done, we're ready to get started a little bit more lighting techniques here, okay, was still not moving onto the color matching. We're still doing more of the lighting. So that when we look at this image, you want to make sure that you take into account the environment that is going on. So if we talk all the bear off for just a second, we see that the sunset is all the way in the back here. So the light is going to be coming forward at us in this particular image. Now we can look at the shadows on the buildings and see the light is coming from the left by this particular area of our scene here is not being lit by the sun at all, not from the right, at least. So if we look at the background here, that's where the main light is coming from down the tunnel of this three here. Ok. So when we look at the bear, we're going to have a cast shadow that's either going to be just below him or slightly coming forward. And he's going to have a shadow beneath him and the light will be coming around him. Okay, the light is going to hug him. And if that makes sense, okay. So let's go ahead and let's do a little bit of shadow work on the bear. So let's go ahead and create a new layer. Let's click that down. And this is where having a tablet is very useful because we're going to use a soft brush. Just got to get our brush Yale to make it a little bit bigger. Let's go to about maybe 200 pixels for this particular measure, 300. Let's do 300. When I do the shadows like this because I'm gonna do a little shadowed beneath the bear here. I like to sample a shadow color from the actual image itself. I don't just use a pure black. So if I start painting with a pure black, that's again not going to look very good. But if I use a shadow color from one of the darkest parts of the image, it has a little bit of the color cast of the image itself. And then when I start painting, it looks a little bit more natural. Okay, so let me go ahead and find a really nice and dark color that I want to use. And then just going to start painting a little bit down at the point where it's going to be in a shadow. So everything on the lower edge here is going to be an a shadow, okay, for now. But a normal blending mode doesn't look very good, does it? So let's go ahead and find it. Another one that's going to look good. I'm going to use darken for this particular one. And we're going to bring the opacity of that down to about 70%. Struggled before and after. But now a lot more of the front of m is going to be in general. So we're going to do the exact same thing. And this time I'm just going to pull the opacity of the brush itself down to about 42%. And I'm just going to paint a little bit on the whole front side of the barrier that we will be seeing as the viewer. So everything on his face. There we go. So this looks way too dark right now, doesn't it as well? Put that down to darken mode again. And let's run the opacity of this down to about, let's say 20%. So if look at the before and after were darkening him down just a little bit more. Alright. Now mind you will still not doing a color correction, so the colors may not match at this point, which is totally fine. Now when it comes to the actual highlights of this item to do this after the color matching section, because I pull the highlights from the actual scene itself and it actually ends up looking a lot better. So we're going to skip the Highlight Section for now, and I'll be doing that in a color matching section. Now one more thing for the lighting of the image. You want there to be a nice shadow. So how are we exactly going to do a shallow well, there's a few ways in which you can approach adding a shadow tier composite. You want to make sure you're on the layer between the bear and the Sunset Street here. And you can simply take a brush that is soft, full opacity. And again with that same Shadow Color and go ahead and just make a big circle like so. And to control a committee to get the transform box here. And if you hold down Shift, you'll be able to squish this. So now you have like a nice flat disc that you've made and you can adjust this to be underneath the bear. So this is one way in which you can add a shadow to your composite. This doesn't have any particular shape, but depending on the use and might actually work very well. So let's go ahead and bring that opacity down. So there we go. It's a nice type of shadow, but I want to do it a little bit better. Okay, so let's turn that shadow off. I want an exact Shadow of the bear. How are we going to do this? Well, if you look at the mass care, we already have an exact outline of the bear, so we're going to use that to create the shadow. So he just went on controller command and click on the thumbnail of the mask of the bear. And you see we have these dotted lines around the outline that's exact outlined that we want. So let's go ahead and create another new layer. And we're going to get our pink bucket tool should just say g on your keyboard. And we're going to fill that in with our darkest color that we've been using. Now nothing looks any different here, does it? But if you look here, we've added something, right? So let's do Control Command D to Deselect. And now on the same layer that we're, we've been on, we're gonna do Control Command T again to do a transform. And this time if we drag these handles around, all of a sudden we have a perfect shadow of our bear here, and that's exactly what we want. Now you can hold on Control or Command on these separate little corners here and adjust the note separately. So play around with this and see what is going to work. So I'm just going to flatten this a little bit like so. And to be bringing this in just a little bit more. But now I also want to have a more shadow in this area here. So what I'm going to do is use the lasso tool for this area here. And using the paint bucket tool and simply just going to fill that in with that same color. And it says any kind of line like here, just use your brush and fill that in. And we don't miss the select. And we have a nice shadow of the bear right here on the ground. But that's still not looking very good, is it? I agree. It's not. We need to add a little bit of a blur here and then fade it out. So how are we going to do that? Well, first of all, let's go ahead, go up here. Let's go to filter blur and we're going to go down to Gaussian Blur. Gaussian Blur is my absolute favorite to use for shadows. And you want to be a subtle as possible with this, you don't wanna go too little to the point where it's still a sharp shadow, but you don't want to go to the point where It's blended away completely and looks unrealistic. So you want to find a nice middle ground where there's still a nice little fade. Something on eight pixels is looking at for this particular image and then just hit OK. So now we want to actually blend this into the ground. So we're going to actually use a multiply and blending mode here. You can play around and maybe you something else you can use Color Burn, Linear Burn, darker color, or even darken. But I'm going to use multiply right now. And we're going to lower the opacity down slowly. And there we go. Let's bring that down to about 40%. Looks fairly decent. Let's go a little bit higher. Actual, let's go up to, let's go up to about 70%. And now if you know how shadows work, there's usually a drop off, a little fade that happens with the shadow. So how are we going to deal with that? Well, very simply, I'm going to add a mask onto our shadow layer here. And it's going to be as simple as getting a brush. You can do these multiple ways. And if you hit Enter on your keyboard is gonna make black beans the default color. So remember if you paint in black on a mask, it's gonna paint it away. And that's kind of what we want to do here. Someone bringing opacity down very low to maybe 13%. Active are smaller. And I'm slowly going to start to paint away this outside edge here. So that's going to be darker the closer it is to the center of the bear there. Okay? And you can always paint back, just hit exon your keyboard. You're gonna paint in white and then you can paint back part of the bear. And the beauty of this is I can continue and adjust anything that you want here. I can go ahead back to the original bare layer, changed opacity and is keeping the mosque there. So you can get very nice type of shadows using this method. There we go. So I'm gonna bring this back down to 70%. Unlike to that, that was a good point. There we go. Now, I'm going to actually move on to the color section of this because, yes, sulfur, it's looking fairly decent, but we need to actually add a good color tone to this image because this mer is still a little bit yellow mineral. The spectrum is very purple. If we look at the PSTN sites, very purple, orange, almost a peach color over here in the back. And we need to add that to the bear itself and you can make them bear purple. We need to add a nice little highlight coming around the edge. So in the next video, we're going to actually cover during the color correction portion of the lighting for this particular composite. So let's keep going. 4. Example 1: Color Correction: Okay, so now we're ready to continue and add more of a color correction to the bare in this image because right now the lighting is getting there, but the colors are still not quite there. So let's go ahead and do that. But before we do, you want to make sure that you've been saving along, right with me. So make sure if you haven't already do File, Save As, and save this as a Photoshop file. So just photoshop, save it whatever you want. I've labeled bear in silicon POSIX and just hit save. I'm gonna replace it just because and let's click OK. They're lovely. Toyota. Make sure you save as often as you can. And let us continue with the color correction portion. Now, one of the tricks that I learned many years ago is in order to get the color correct on the bear itself, you wanted to sample a color from the image itself, one that's a base color and middle color. So you're not gonna want to settle any of the shadows and you have the highlights. You want to sample something in the middle. So something along the lines of the purple sky or the purple ground here. So let me show you exactly what that's going to look like. Okay, let's go ahead and make another new layer, but various things, and we're just going to clip that down onto the bear. Ok, now let's go ahead, hit G on our keyboard to get our trusty paint bucket two. And let's start looking at what color sample we want to use. I like this one over here and this section. So I'm gonna pull one of these because it's a nice light purple type of color that's faded just like everything else. And we're going to simply drop that onto the bear narrowly Gill. And obviously we can see the mask and everything, but let's go ahead and fix this. Okay? So I'm gonna go into this drop-down. We're gonna change the Blending Mode of this so you can look through all these, see if something works better for you that likes that you like better. But most of the time, I tend to gravitate towards an overnight soft light or a hard light blending mode. So for this particular image, let's see what's going to look better. I do like how hard light is looking actually sung fuse hard light. And I'm going to bring the opacity of this and down. Let's go to about 43%. So if we look at the before and after one, it's darken up our image a little bit more, which is what we want. And to it's added a little bit of that purple cast to our image. Okay, now before we continue, I do want to get rid of a little bit of this orange that we see in the bear. So at this point on that another hue saturation. And you can see how the thought process goes with all the layers. So we start with the brightness of changing the lighting network, changing the shadows, and then we're adding the colour to it and adjusting the color. So it's a very simple. So in this drop down here, I want to adjust the reds and the yellows, particularly for this image. So it's called true reds and unknown to bring the saturation down to just a little bit. And now I'm going to go to the yellows and bring the saturation of that down. Again just a little bit. There we go. Let's close that and look at the before and after. So again, I've just gone and desaturated it just a little bit more, ok, just to blend the Browns of this in with a little bit with the Browns of the buildings around it. Okay? And now I want to have a nice little edge light to our bear here. Okay, and how are we going to do this? Well, it does multiple ways you can do it, but I like to have a little bit more of a hands-on approach, something where I have a little bit more control over. So I'm going to add another layer right above this. I'm going to clip it down. And I'm going to zoom in here and get my brush when it makes us a nice soft brush. Opacity can be as high as you want. It's totally fine. I'm going to have a b, just around 60% sonata problem. And I'm going to make some brush nice and small. And now I'm going to sample the highlight color of our image. So if we look here, we have a nice highlight on the building. And if we hide the bear, we see behind him the highlight of this guy's going to be this particular color. So I'm going to actually use that. Because we're look, that's going to be what it wraps around. The sooner you can zoom in as much as you want. And using your trusty brush tool, we're going to simply just paint a nice little highlight edge going around the bear. And just think of how the light would wrap around this particular subject, this particular bear. Okay. So it's not going to be too intense. And when we're zoomed in, we see that the mask isn't perfect, but we're just focusing on the lighting for now. We're going to have a little bit of light bleed around here onto the cheek of the bear. And it's going to grab all of these little hairs that are going on the bear. And that's why we use the select mask and that the refinance. So we have these little extra hairs and fibers to work with. So makes this highlight part pop a little bit better. You see it's also getting rid of that little bit of a halo effect that we have. Because no one likes these halos and images. It's kind of, it takes you out of the immersion of having the composite. She never want to have those halos. That we go with a nice little edge light. They're going across the top of this foot here. Let's undo that is a little bit too harsh. And we go, I'm gonna grab it a little bit of further there. And there we go. Might grab a little bit on the inside edge here. In fact, let's zoom in and let's get a smaller brush here. I'm gonna grab a little bit here. And if you end up going over too far, it can just use the eraser tool. Obviously make a little bit smaller. And you can go ahead and refine any of the highlights that you've made. In fact, I'm gonna bring the opacity of my eraser down and just lower the opacity of this particular highlight there. So let's imagine, let's take a look at what that's done. Like instantly that's given a big pop to this image. So if we look at the before and after it's added a lot of dimension to this composite. You can really see the light coming from behind. Now this might look a little bit too much. And if it does look too much to you, you can go ahead, lower the opacity to the point where it looks natural to you. So I'm gonna keep mine at around 77%. I like how that looks. And I can still go ahead going with another layer of highlight if you particularly want. Sometimes depending on the image, I'll go in again with the same brush, same color. But this time I'm going to have a way lower opacity to the point of only 8% opacity. I'm just gonna paint a little bit of that is bleeding around, wrapping around art bear here. Let's go ahead and add a little bit, just coming around on a little bit more among the top of his head here. And I had a little bit more of that highlight up there. And more on the shorter here. Lovely. So, so look at the before and after you see we're adding a little bit more depth using this. Now if you find that the color is still not matching up as much as you would like it to. You can go ahead and add another layer above everything, clip it down. And using the same brush, I would sample one of the colors that you want to add to your particular image. And on a nice low opacity to start painting it in, I want to add a little bit of that purple onto the bear here. And I know what you're saying. This doesn't look good, I know doesn't. And I'm going to fix that in just one moment. Okay. A little bit more purple going on here, especially on his face here. Let's go ahead and add a little bit more of that. A little bit more on his foot here. So it doesn't look very good, doesn't mean we're going to go to one of our trusting blending modes. And again, you can play around and see what's going to work best for you. But I particularly like using stuff like soft light. Hard light wasn't my favorite blending modes to use for this particular scenario. And I'm going to look at this. I'm gonna say, let's look at stuff like satellite will probably work best for this. And you can toggle on and off. Here we go. And you don't even necessarily have to add any kind of blending mode. You can just simply pulled opacity down and have a be a subtle hint of that particular colour. So just for example, sake, I'll keep this on a normal blending mode, but feel free to mess around with that. Now one final thing that I want to do here is I want to add a particular color to the shadow of this image. How are we going to do that? We're going to do that with a selective color adjustment layer. It's very simple. So what is this interface here? Essentially, this lets you choose a color and adjust that color. So for example, I want to adjust the blacks in the image. Now you can add cyan, take it away from the image. So again, opposite of cyan is going to be a red, bright red knobs, that of magenta is going to be a green. The opposite of yellow is going to be a blue, and so on. Black is just going to be the level of black. So let's go ahead and undo all of these. And what I want to do here now for the blacks of this image and had more of the purple n. So if you remember, we have Magenta here, so not have magenta and blue. And that's going to give us a nice purplish color. So let's go to our magenta here and add a little bit of magenta to the shuttle. And now again, you can clip it down. So only affects the bear, which when I plus three to the magenta. And for the yellow, we're gonna take away again just minus three. There we go. So for the blacks of this image, we've added this particular color to it so we can toggle that before. And after you see the, how the blacks had almost a green tint to it, we've correct them that. But now we see that blacks are a little bit too much still. So you can just double-click here. And I got on the blacks. We can simply just take away Black from the black if that makes sense, or essentially muting the blacks, I'm just gonna do minus NB minus three on that. No more than minus three if possible, never go the slightest can be a little bit fiddly. If you cannot get the exact number, you just type it in here. And it'll be easier that way. And there we go. So using the selective color, we've added a whole different colour to the blacks of our image. And there you have it. We essentially have this particular image blended together. We've matched the lighting level of this particular image from the bare to the background with match the color. Lets go ahead and look through all the layers that we did. So let's turn everything off. We're gonna go back to the very first layer of the bear. So we placed a barren and looking at it now it doesn't look bad, doesn't look so placed. So let's go ahead and add an a shadow. We worked in the shadow here, which looks very nice. But the first thing that we did, we added a brightness contrast layer. We made a darker because that's what we needed to do. Next thing that we did, we lowered the saturation, we desaturated our image because that yellow was too much of too in your face and didn't match with the background. Now notice I didn't touch any color in the background. Alice, working off of that, I highly recommend that you get your background image finished first and you base your composite off of the background colors. Okay, that's what I personally recommend. Next, we added a Levels Adjustment Layer, which kind of mutated a little bit of the blacks there and adjusted some of the levels of the shadow is for us, as well as the highlights. Next we added some shadows to the bottom of our bare, as well as to the front of the bear. And again, we sampled colors of the shadows from the actual image itself. We didn't just use a pure black because you're never going to have a pure black shadow. Keep that in mind, never, ever. Next, we added a color cast to our bear, which also darken him down a little bit, but added a little bit of that purple into him, which is exactly what we wanted. And we went and lowered the saturation ever so slightly. And then we made some final changes here. We added a little bit of an edge light coming from down the street here. And we also added a little bit of a feathered edge light going around the bear. Next, we added a little bit more of that purple color on top of the bear, but we desaturated that. And then lastly, we added a little bit of that purple, magenta type of color into the blacks of the bear. There we go. And that really color matched up very nicely. Now if this is too much, again for you, you can either double click in here and adjust these sliders here, or you can just lower the opacity of the whole layer itself. So if I want, I can just lower that to maybe about a lower that down to 80%. Think that might look a little bit better. And there you have it. This is the very first example. It's a very simple way to do these adjustments. In the next video, I'm gonna go over more advanced technique. I just wanted to get you warmed up, get you thinking of lighting and color in a composite. So in the next video on the goal, we're a very advanced technique to match the shadows and colors perfectly every single time. So let's keep going. 5. Example 2: Advanced Techniques: Alright, we're ready to get started with our second example. So if you didn't save this first example that we didn't make sure you save it as a Photoshop file. And let's go ahead and open up a new document. So let's go to File New, and I'm going to have the exact same size. I wanted this to go onto my Instagram again. So let's just click Create and we have a blank canvas to work from. So let's go and do File Place Embedded. And this time we're going to use the beach sunset image to enter on that. And also going to do File Place Embedded. We're going to use a two female models. Let's click place. Let's hit Enter, and there we go. So you see these two images are going to be very difficult to color match, and to match the lighting. As you see these models here are fairly evenly lit, but I didn't make sure that they're lit from the left. If you can see the light is coming from the left and it's a very soft. And the image here with our beach, the lighting is coming from the left. So let's go ahead and blend these two images together. So first of all, let's adjust our beach Sunset. Let's make that fit the screen here. And let's go to a nice point that we'd like something like something like this where look nice. And then let's go ahead and get our two female models. Now if you look at this and it'll be very difficult to mask out, right? Because a chair isn't done in a very logical way. So we're going to actually cut this chair out here and make it more three-dimensional and have it be a finished piece as instead of it being cut off on the edge here. So let's go ahead and let's get started for this particular mask. I'm going to use the pen tool because it's going to give me a lot more control. So let's go ahead and let zoom in. I'm going to hit on my keyboard and I'm going to use use my pen tool. And again, take your time of this. The pen tool is one of those tools where you really do have to pay attention and just take your time with it. So if you have any trouble using the pen tool, I have some other courses where I go over advanced techniques using the pen tool. And I highly recommend that you use those. You can always zoom in and adjust these notes after the fact using Control or Command on these nodes. You can adjust these, you can adjust this. You can also hold down Alter option and adjust these anchor, these handles here independently. Ok. So let's go ahead and let's continue around here. And I'm going to cut back once I have my selection made. Yeah. Yes. I So once you have made your selection with your pen tool, it's a symbol as controller command enter in, I have these dotted lines and then just go ahead and click the mask tool. So make sure that you take your time all of the course right here, Potts video, make sure you get your nice selection. And as you see, this isn't a 100% perfect. We see the hair up here and everything like that. But for the most part, we don't have any haloing just because we use the pen tool that really helps you. And you can see what I did with the bench here. I kind of rounded off this corner here, imagining where that 3D line will be. And I did the same on this side going in like so what I'm going to do here is this edge here is going to be completely dark. Alright, so I'm gonna make sure I do that. But let's go ahead and let's place these models exactly where we want them to be. So just to control the Comanche. And as you see, this looks like it'll be quite difficult to actually color match. And what I'm going to do actually. So I'm gonna keep in mind the size of the feet that are in the sand already. Go ahead and do something like so. Now it looks like a fairly decent placement and fairly decent size. So it looks somewhat natural. Now before I get started, I do want to actually go ahead and fix this edge over here. So let's go ahead and zoom in. And let's make a layer above this. And I do want to essentially bring in, you can just do the Pen tool again if you want and just follow one of these edges down. In fact, I'm gonna fold this corner up from this edge here up to here. And then I'm going to bring that curved around like so close that off. He controlled mine Enter. And we're just going to essentially fill this in with a random color because we don't need this to be any particular colour. So what I'm gonna do is let's just sample a sample the darkest color of this little sea area. And I'm just going to paint this until it's noticeably different from the rest. There we go. So let's just say Control or Command D to Deselect. And there we go. We're gonna change the lighting on that. But just for now, we want to have a little bit of that depth and going on so we know what we are working with. Okay? So when it comes to advanced lighting techniques, we're gonna do things a little bit different from how we did it in the previous example. First things first, I do want to combine these layers here as group them together. And that's a control command E on our keyboard. And I'm going to right-click Angeles Convert to Smart Object. So now we just have one object here that we're working with. But first things first, I'm going to add a black and white adjustment layer that's going to make a whole image black and white. And what is the purpose of this? Well, this is actually going to give us a guideline and naturally show us the difference between the highlights and the shadows of darts that are in this image. We can see that this image of the models is way too overexposure to contrast the as well. So we're going to want to fix that. How exactly are we going to do that? Very simply, we're going to use our trusty Levels Adjustment layer, which is right here. So I'm going to bring that down below. So we can clip this to the model layer. And we're essentially going to be trying to match the shadows of the background up with shadows of the model, or rather the shadows of the model to the shadows of the background. So let's look at these slides over here. We can adjust the mid tones and you can see we're already starting to bring them and down closer to where they need to be. So let's just go ahead and play around with this a little bit. And let's bring these down, open up the mid tones to about that point. Now the highlights are way too high. We want to bring them down just a little bit if possible. We want to match it up to this point here as much as we can. And will the shadows, we can bring the shuttles up as well. And there we go. That's looking a little bit better. So how are we going to know for doing this exactly correctly? Well, let's go ahead and let's get our information panel out here. I'm just going to go to window, I'm going to go down to info and you can be met with this new panel over here. Let me just bring that over here to the side. And let's make it a little bit wider so you can see what we're looking at. Now, once you have your information panel out here, you're gonna see as your role over everything with the eyedropper tool, you see a bunch of different numbers there, right? Well, let's go ahead and simplify this. Let's just click this button here. Let's do Panel Options and it's going to make all of this grayscale, okay? So for the first color read L up here, it's going to be a grayscale. We don't care too much about the second color readout that's just hit OK. So now everywhere where I hold this is gonna give me the lightness level of the area. So this is a 55% black. If you want to look at it that way, we can go over to a highlight and this is almost 2%, this is almost a pure white. So let's go ahead and let's select a color that's not the brightest, bright. Let's go look over here. This is on 4%. And you can hold down shift and it's going to create a point there. So now we have that point marked down with point number one, we have that marked down. Okay? And then let's go ahead and let's look at another point over here on our model here. That's what we want to be as close to that as possible. So it's going to add a point over here. And this is, let's look at this point that will match up as best as possible. So if we look at this, the difference between these two points, let's go ahead and do pen options as make the secondary output also grayscale and that's hit OK. So we see this point here is that 9% and this point here is a, is a 753. So they're fairly close. And if we toggle the black and white layer off, we can see that we're matching the brightness up, not the color, but the brightness of everything. That's exactly what we want to be doing. So let's go ahead and let's turn this off now and information panel and let's go back into our Levels Adjustment Layer. And let's continue fiddling around with this until we're at a point where we are happy, okay? And you can sample the same thing for the shadow is a well, if you would like to go ahead and pull the shuttled up just a little bit more. Right? And everything. And we don't want to pull the highlights up even more. That's not what we want to do. In fact, might even bring it down just a little bit lower. Because this looks like it's blended in a little bit better, something like that. So let's close that and let's look at everything without the black and white layer. That's much to the lighting actually fairly decently for now, this is still looking very flat. Don't worry about that. We're going to fix that in the next step. So let's go ahead and let's get rid of these marks over here. You can just hit V on your keyboard and you get out of the eye dropper tool and it is gone. So let's continue with our lighting. Now that we're happy with the levels here for the brightness and everything, we're going to adjust the saturation now full. How are we going to do that? Very simply, actually, first we're going to add a selective color adjustment layer to everything. And for each color here that you see, we're going to bring the black level all the way down to negative 100 fold, that's the reds. Then go to yellow, ring that all the way down. We're gonna go to Green's, bring that all the way down. And I'm just gonna go through all the colors here. Take science down, take the blues down, take the magentas down. And now for the tone share for the whites neutrals and blacks for group to bring those all the way up to 100%. Okay, so we are on neutral, so bring that up to 100%. And for the last, let's bring that up to 100%. So what is this doing? This is helping us to see the difference in saturation between the background and our main model layers. We see that there is saturation here and the ground and everything. And they're saturation on our models, skin and faces and all of that. So it's going to be as simple as adding a hue saturation layer, clicking that down. Now you can't do a global adjustment layer to match the Saturation up. Now, in this particular case with the models, they are already fairly low saturation. They don't have much color in them. They're very black and white clothing are very pale skin. So it's not going to be too much Saturation adjustment that needs to happen. But there is still a little bit that doesn't need to happen. Like we see the red and their lips is almost more saturated than the red and the background. So all we do for that, which is going to go over to reds and we're going to saturate that ever so slightly. And that delta minus 15. And you can talk with the selective color on and off so that you see what you're doing. And then we can see from the saturation it's a very subtle change. And if you want to, you can zoom in. And we'll just select a color layer, enable an ad on the hue saturation layer. You can take. This scrubby tool here. And it's going to let you click on any section of your image and increase or decrease the saturation of that particular area. So much I'm going to increase the saturation here, solid to match that up a little bit. Something like that. Go ahead and continue here. Little bit more on the lips there. And again toggle that off. Maybe see what slowly matching the lips to our actual image. It's a very subtle change. But that is, I can go ahead and do a nice saturation match in between your image and your subject here, between the background and your subject. So next is probably going to be the most, the most drastic part of this edit. And that is going to be the color matching because up until this point it's still very flat stone not looking particularly good. We want to fix that. So let's go ahead and do that. Now that we need to do the color matching things are about to get interesting, fluctuate it, create a new layer. And we're going to fill this with a 50% grain already has that color selected up here. But you can also do just look solid color fill with 50% gray. And let's go ahead and let's fill that in. And we're gonna change the Blending Mode of this all the way down to Luminosity. They might not be able to see it just yet, but let's go ahead and add another layer of a vibrant Slayer. Let's add that down below that. And we're going to bring the saturation of all the way. Now I know this is going to hurt your eyes, but if we look at this now, but if we look at this now and zoom in, we can see that these models here, they have a slight orangey green casts of them. There's a blue cast to the Sioux over here, and we can get started with correcting this. So how are we going to do this? We're going to use another different method from hue saturation. We're going to use our Curves Adjustment Layer. Let's create a Curves Adjustment Layer. Let's flip it down. They can go ahead and adjust each thing separately and get a particular color. But the easiest way I've found to do this is using this right here, and that is the dragging scrubby type of tool. So for example, for her face here on what needs to be more magenta. So we're gonna go down here non-goal to red because red is magenta and honor face, we're just going to click and you're gonna start to drag up. That's gonna make it more red. If you start and drag it down, it's gonna make it more of a nice cyan type of color. So let's go ahead and add a little bit of a red to that. Now we're gonna go down here to the green layer. And again, same thing on her face. It's going to pull that down a little bit to be more on this magenta type of side of things. And then let's go down to our blue. And then let's bump the blue a little bit so we have a little bit of that purple. Now what does that done? Let's toggle this gray layer and a vibrant Slayer off. And as you see, we've added a little bit of that purple cast to our models. So if we toggle this off and on, we've replaced that. Now want to tackle this model's suit over here. So let's turn both of these back on. Let's go back to our curves adjustment here. And now we see her suit is very blue. It's not matching in with this image here. There's a lot of bright red, even green here in the back. So we want to adjust that. So let's go ahead and go to blue. And I'm going to use the same scrubber tool here. And let's go ahead and let's try and fix this. Okay, so I'm gonna take a little bit of that blue down. And now I'm gonna go into the green layer because I don't particularly want any green in her suits on that. A little bit more of this magenta type of color into that. And let's go ahead and get red. And then let's go ahead and make this more in line with our image here, kind of like a purple ish type of color. Alright, so let's go ahead and let's see what we've done again. So now we've added a little bit of that orange purple color to her suit, r. So that is the very basic way to do the advanced color matching in your particular image. In this case, it's a little bit more difficult because our models are so, so D saturated so much without color MET, we're ready to get started with some of the final stages here. We need to get going with the shadows, with the highlights and some final color correction. So all these other layers that we did, the black and white selective color, the gray and the vibrancy. We're not going to need these, but we can keep them for now just as a little reference for us. So now let's get started with finishing up our composite here because it still looking rather placed. So first of all, let's go down to the layer with our models here and let's zoom in. I want to tackle in this site here because honestly it's not looking that good, is it? So how are we going to deal with this? Very simply, actually, we're going to get our pen tool. I'm going to go here. We're going to actually follow this curve here this time. And then we're going to bring that down here and just continue like so. And all we're going to do is on this layer, we're going to add a new layer above everything. Click that down. And we're just essentially going to do a fill with a color slightly brighter than the brightest part of our original image. Let's go ahead and fill that in, right, nice. And we can do Control or Command Shift I to invert that selection. And I want to go down to our main image here and on a mask actually, let's deselect first. And we're gonna do a little mosque to this. And we're gonna get our selection back like so. Again, Control or Command Shift I. And now if we paint in black, will be able to paint away this excess that we don't necessarily want to have. So let's go ahead and do that. Very nice is the slip. And if we zoom out, we see that's looking a little bit better, will still gonna fix this with some shadows and highlights. So let's get started with that with the shadows and highlights first things first, I want to get a nice cast shadow going of these models here. So I'm gonna go to a layer between the beach and the models, create a new layer there. And like we saw in the previous exercise, there's a few ways in which you can create your shadow. The way in which we are going to create a heres going to actually be using our pencil. So we have a very harsh sunset coming in. It's a very horizontal shadow here. So we're going to come from this corner here. We're gonna go over here. We're going to pick it up by her sandal there and essentially just go off the screen here. And we're gonna bring that around here and it's gonna go like so. Might want to bring this corner down a little bit. Just keep in mind where this edge would line up. And then we can fill that in. That's we control a Command Enter. And now we can go ahead and fill this in. I recommend you sample a color from the actual image itself. So let's sample this darkest red color that we have here. There we go. Let's deselect. And I do want to give us a little bit of a blur. So again, let's go to filter blur. When go to Gaussian Blur. And let's see what's going to work for this particular image. Eight seems a little bit too much, and I want to bring that down to about six pixels. And let's do six pixels. That's hurricane that. Then you can go ahead and listen to the blending mode down to multiply. You can play around and use any other blending mode that you would like. And we're gonna bring the shadows here all the way down to about 42%. That's looking nice. So let's go ahead and zoom out. There goes, we have that shadow done, but now we need to actually add shadow to our models and everything that's in here. So we've got onto everything that we've done so far. Add another new layer, alt option, click to clip it down. And we're going to do similar thing that we did before, where we have more control over what we're doing. We're going to use our brush, the set B on your keyboard. When use a soft brush that's fairly large African American to paint our shadows on. So for this particular item, we're going to have a beard around 50% and start to pink because everything on this side here is going to be in a shadow. So that includes our models, the side of the models that's got a smaller brush. The side of the face will be in the shadow. And go ahead and erase as much as you want. To make this bigger. Can fix some of these little points that we get. Well, we're just gonna go ahead and painting some of these shadow areas because the light is coming from behind and the left. So we wanna make sure we keep that in mind as we do the shadows for our models and everything else. Going and keep darkness. There we go. And again, it's important that you're using a soft brush for this. So it's going to make it look a lot better. He never really want to use a harsh brush for this kind of stuff. Go and around the bottom of the feet, I'll add a little bit more. There we go. And then again, let's go ahead and let's do a multiply blending mode. And we're going to bring no passage of the all the way down. Something similar to what's on the ground floor. On the ground here we have a, we have a 42%, have 30, so we're 45 here. So let's bring that down just a little bit more. 44 is fine. So you see, we're trying to get in a little bit more of that shadow, that dynamic contrast and going here. And you can still keep on painting here. And it'll be that lower opacity. So might do a little bit on her arm here. Like so. Alright, Let's switch gears and let's do a little bit of the highlights. Ok, so another new layer above everything. I tend to switch between highlights and shadows because it kind of gives a more natural look to your image. So now again, we're going to use our brush or going to sample one of the nice orange colors that we have here. And in this case, I'm actually going to start with a very low opacity. So in the previous example, I did the bigger brush second and I did a smaller brush first. In this case, I'm to do the big brush first. Sum to get a nice orange cast going. Everywhere that I am going to have a highlight. Go ahead and add highlighting skew that go in here. And it's gonna go across the top of our venture. Lovely. Well, that's not looking too good right now is. I don't think so, but let's go ahead and fix some of these issues here. We're going to just lower the opacity down to about 6040 or 41% and another layer. And now we're going to do that smaller brush. So now we zoom in Gothenburg, we're going to sample this nicely yellowish highlight here. We're going to have a smaller brush. And if you want to get a straight edge here in this hold down shift, It's going to give you a nice straight edge on your highlights. For put opacity up, you can actually see what you're doing here. Might even go for this bright here, which is essentially a pure white, slightly off from the pure white. But let's go ahead and add a little bit of that into our image over here. So I have a little bit of a yellow in it. And then let's go ahead and let's get started getting that yellow going up our model here. So again, take your time with us. You can go with a smaller brush if you would like. That is entirely up to you and I will fix the hair here in just a second as well. So keep in mind how the light is going to wrap around. It's going to go a little bit on this other side here. Here we go, and I will get a little bit of the highlight on her face as well in just one moment. For now I'm focusing on the outside edge of our models here. Let's see, going up here. And all the colors that you're using here, this yellow, it can be adjusted after the fact. So if you don't like the particular yellow that you've used, you can change that as well. So let's have a little bit of a color. Actually, we're not going to have this good. This is in shadow, so let's keep looking at this. We'll have a little bit of a highlight here on the left side of that. Get our eraser here. Full opacity comes out to be smaller. And we're going to fix this side of the leg here. Like so. I'm a little bit of lending to the bench behind them. Toggling between the eraser and the actual brush. Okay, so now we see we have a little bit of that edge like going on. Let's reduce the opacity of that ever so slightly. Now on a new layer actually want to tackle the shadows and highlights what highlights actually on their faces. So how are we going to exactly do this? Well, you can do a very similar thing. Let's get a nice color here and just start going on her face, but it's hard to see exactly where you're going here. So I'd like to just mascot offer myself a little bit of a lasso shunt, make sure you get a nice of a selection of possible. So I'm just gonna go like this. The right side of the head here doesn't count as much as the left side here. So with our brush now when we paint, it's going to be just in that edge there. And add a little bit of highlight there. And if we deselect, you see we've added that nice highlight to her face. Now on that, a little bit of that to her nose as well. I'm gonna get a little bit of that last soil here. And then we have our brush. I'm gonna go a little bit. It's like that step touch of that highlight, the Select. And that might be a little bit too much. So you just get your eraser low capacity. And then you can paint away the highlight. How cool was that? So before, after we're just adding a little bit of depth to their faces. You'll see it's making it look a lot more natural. So let's go ahead and add the same thing to this other model over here. So I'm gonna do a very similar thing when we got our lasso tool. We pay very close attention to this left edge here. You can always use the pen tool if you want to get a really precise edge. But let's go ahead and just do this for now. And with our brush with a nice little highlight going across her head here. Further her face. If we deselect and have a nice edge there, we went a little bit too far here. At the top for me, just erase some of that. Some of the changes soften that up a little bit, like salt. And I'm gonna do the similar thing again on her nose. Now you can't just paint freestyle. I can get the brush in my hand. And you start painting with a lower capacity. But I found it's better to have a little bit of a guide going here. With this Leso. Gives you a little bit of something to work off of. What's nice like that. And we're going to fix these edges again with our Eraser tool on low capacity. And you always want to make sure that you keep things as flattering us, possibly you don't want to make things unflattering. So I'm actually going to redo this highlight on the nose and I'm actually going to do the method I mentioned before. I'm gonna do, I'm very low opacity brush that is very soft. And I'm just going to do a few passes down the nose here. And over here. Eraser. So again, there's many ways that you can do the whole shadowing highlight thing. I'm doing just a little bit of that highlight on her nose. There we go. That's a lot nicer than the first one that we did. So for you, zoom out a little bit and just look at the model spaces before and after. So we've added a little bit more depth to their faces just by doing that. Now when it comes to their hair, let's go ahead and fix some of these issues. So we do already have a mask on the layer with the models. You can just come in with a brush. I'm actually going to go at about 63% opacity and just gently paint away the issues with the hair. There we go. It's blending it in a little bit better. Let's go to our other model to she also had a little bit of that going on here. So we just want to make sure we get rid of this haloing effect. Because the haloing effect that really ruins a composite many times. So I want to make sure you limit as much of that as possible. And there we go for that particular part. So let's go ahead and do some final touches here. Peck. So on it a little bit more with shadow. So let's go and add another layer above everything. Get our brush out. Got our brush out, and it's got and make that nice. And big. Thousand might be a little bit too big. Round 3400 will be fine. I'll passively 63 is okay. And I'm going to sample again the darkest part here. And I want to add a little bit more dark coming in from the bottom of our image. So for now I'm only focusing on the bench area here. So I don't get too much about the shadows on the feet here. And in fact they can be fully dark. And now we're gonna go and do multiply lending mode and bring that opacity all the way down. Let's do, let's do 73%. But honestly, we're going to add a mosque. And I'm just going to mask out some of this at D. We do not want Mike on the clothing and little bit on the bench there. A little bit on the side of the foot there because it might catch a little bit of that light coming through and go. Now might actually want to add a little bit of a shadow, this model going down behind here. Let's go ahead and do that. So I'm actually going to go on a layer above everything. And this particular one doesn't matter exactly where you put it. Well, that's going to use our lasso tool. And I'm gonna go ahead, go along this edge of the enhancer. And I'm not sure we're going to fix this part here. Like so. Kept on nice edge gone and lovely. And all I'm going to do is I'm going to get a nice dark color here. And I'm going to paint in a little bit of a shadow being cast by this model. When it comes to compositing shadows is going to make our break everything and makes everything look so much better. City Select, and thus lower the opacity on that. Quite a bit. Let's go down 30% before an African adds a little bit of extra depth to your image. Now this one, I'd probably do a final color graze. I'm gonna do a really quick one with the guys. And I'm just going to essentially just do a nice color lookup that's going to be applied to everything. And only choose one of my favorite foggy night is one of my favorite component, is one my favorite Lutz to use over here. And all I'm going to do is I'm gonna bring your passage of the, all the way down. Like so. And then this is where you do your final little adjustments on the bring the brightness up. Like so. Omega final hue saturation, just desaturate everything ever so slightly. There we go. That's a little bit more of an advanced technique that you can use to color match everything in your images. In the next video, I'm gonna give you a quick bonus lesson on how to get a nice and neon lighting effect in your composites. It's incredibly, incredibly easy. So let's go do that. 6. Bonus: Neon Lighting: All right, so now I want to show you a really quick bonus literal lighting trick that you can do to create a really cool neon lighting effect in your image. Let's go and let's open up another new file here. Let's go file new. Again, same settings as before, and we're gonna go File Place Embedded. Listen, we're going to use neon city as our first image. And actually gonna do File Place Embedded. And I'm going to use male model in field. So this is going to be a very quick one. Okay, so let's go ahead and let's resize our neon city and make that nice size. Because also you want to add a nice model into this particular image. How are you going to do that? Very simply, actually, let's go ahead and let's go to a male model right here. And we want to essentially cut him out of this. Now he has a very nice clear edges. So our objects selection tool might actually do a fairly decent job. And it looks like it actually has a little bit of work needs to be done down here. Is fixed this edge here. And use our lasso to add that back in six coat. Everything else looks fairly good. Let's go ahead and fix this part here by his hoodie. And everything else looks fairly recent. Let's go up here actually. Let's fix this area around his hairline here because we want to make sure we get this nice hoodie in everything. So if it's finding no pixels, which are actually are pixels, just use your Lasso Tool. On holding down shift. You're able to actually add into your selection here. So there we go. Let's get this selection van, and let's fix this one over here. And like social, that looks fairly decent, looks like we have a fairly good selection. And now all I'm going to do is to our Mask button. And there we go. One model is now cut out, but it's not exactly perfect as it. So let's go ahead and actually fix that salt. I might actually want to make him a little bit larger here. You control command T And let's just resizing to about this point. All right, there we go. So first of all, I want to completely saturate this particular model. So let's go ahead and let's make him Black and White Adjustment Layer on just him. Okay. And next, we're just going to keep everything as it is. But we're going to do is going to do, we're going to do a brightness contrast layer on him, dark and him down. Maybe bringing the contrast up because this is fairly high contrast. And it might get a little bit of a Levels adjustment just to bring the whites back from where we put them. Okay, so for now, this is what we're going to be working with. But I wanted to add a little bit more of this neon color to our model here. So what are we going to do? Very simple. So let's create a new layer. Clip it down. This time we're going to use just as Gradient tool here, and we're going to use this first blending mode here was second blending mode. That goes from your foreground color too transparent. So we're going to pick our nice neon pink magenta color here. And we're going to simply drag right-to-left. Let's go all the way across like so, like that. And let's go ahead and choose a nice blending mode here. So you're not going to necessarily want to do one of the overlay or any of these might want to do something more along the lines of Color Burn or Linear Burn would look nice. The Fill Color Burn here. We can lower the opacity of the field like. Now, let's go and do another one. This time we're going to get some of this blue neon going from the left, going across like so. And we're gonna do essentially the same thing. We're going to bring that, they're bringing opacity of that down. Like so. And now you can go ahead and do all your shadows, highlights, all of that stuff. Just go ahead and make a layer bug. Let's bring the shadow from the actual image itself. Get our brush, nice big brushed on her soft. I'm just going to paint the sin. Might be a little bit more shuttle down in the middle here. 6% dark in the central area. And we're gonna bring the capacitive that down as well. And I might want to bring the highlights up again. So let's go ahead and do another Levels layer. And let's go ahead and bring the highlights of our model of this like so. But let us too much flux right on the mass. We're going to actually fill that incompletely were black. And we're going to paint the highlights that we want to exist in here. So when we paint in white, were actually painting back these highlights. If I go for 100%, you'll see that I'm painting that back in, but I don't necessarily want to go for a 100%. Let's go to about 60%. It's got a little bit of that. Like so. And again, you can paint us away. You can reduce the opacity. Mounted a little bit more onto his glasses. So how are we going to do that similarly to the way we did the faces in the models before. So let's cut this down. Let's get our lasso tool here. And it's gonna do a nice little selection around just the glasses here. Alright, let's get our brush. So let's go ahead and try and sample one of these nice pink colors here. And you can always bring the brightness up over here. Mike. So make are much smaller. Now when we paint will be painting magenta type of color onto the glasses here. So management one can do a little bit. Brighter type of pink sheet can also go ahead and erase this as well as much as you'd like. And now this is clip down, so it's only going to be applied to actual modern layer here. Now, I'm actually going to sample this purple color on him because that's more of what is on him. We're going to do that. Let's deselect. Now that's not looking very good, is it? Let's go ahead and change the Blending Mode here. And I want to do something more along the lines of, Let's actually zoom in so we see what we're doing. Let's go ahead and do something more along the lines of let's just keep up normal. And let's bring the opacity of that dominance then. Like so. So there we go. We have a nice type of neon looking at it here, made to this particular image. And if I wanted to, I can keep on going and do even more. So if I want to go add another layer above here. And if I wanted to paint with this magenta type of color that we had going on. I can I can go ahead and and immediately add that to the same linear burner Culver and that we had before. So when I paint, it's going to do that color burn. You can also do a nice linear burn. Linear Dodge. Who can do nice Linear Dodge on him? Let's do Color Dodge, Mamie. And let's do a nice color Dodge. In fact, I'm gonna do a nice low capacity of about 30%. So it'll get a little bit more of that color on his face. And I'm, I have that all the way down to like maybe 2%. So add a little bit of that color. 2s whole outfit and everything that we have going on here is again, the shadows aren't gonna be Kerr black. So we have this a matched up fairly nicely. And there we go. Let's look at the, before we went from this placed image. We turn it black and white, made it a lot darker. We just did the levels a little bit to bring the highlights out more. And then we added the magenta type of color from these neon lights on the right. And then we added a nice cyan light, blue neon light coming from the left here with an added a little bit of shadow tour image, giving us, giving you a little bit more depth. And then we adjusted the levels again to bring the highlights back out. After which we added a little bit of a highlight two is glasses, which isn't that noticeable, but that's totally fine. And then we add a little bit more of a Color Dodge to his face. And there we go. And you can still go ahead and blend these images together even more if you'd like. But this is essentially a really cool way in which you can create a nice neon looking at it. Now in the next video, I'm gonna show you exactly how you can and should save your images quickly and easily. 7. Let's Save: All right, so I've gone and added a few other little adjustments to the previous example. I added a nice color lookup and final brightness contrast. And without that it looked like this. Sited a color lookup with foggy nights and then a nice brightness contrast. But now that you have your finished piece, you actually want to save it. So if you haven't seen that up until now, make sure you're saving as a Photoshop file. It's very simple File Save As and you see that as photoshop sangha service as a neon lighting. Save that as a Photoshop file, done once it okay. And now I will say you're going to save this. Now, I mentioned I want to put these onto my Instagram. Now, your default might be to save it as a jpeg. So let's go ahead and let's do that. Let's do File Save As. And we're going to go and save this as a JPEG just right here. Keep us at neon lighting. And the call this JPEG. Let's just hit Save. And we see that this is going to be 3.8 megabytes. And when it comes to Instagram, I personally prefer to save it as a PNG. Why? Because Kanji's tend to be two to three times as large as jpegs. Let's go File Save As. And I'm going to say the same thing as a PNG to write down here the enlightened, and I'm gonna call this PNG. Let's hit Save. And that's gonna give me a lot more detail Lama information for the images on Instagram. Because whenever you post it to social media and all the different absolutely end up compressing your image. So if you have a bigger image to start with, it's gonna end up looking better. Now what it's going to save this for your website while having a 3.8 megabytes JPEG is too big for your website. It's going to take forever to load, especially if you have a 100 pictures on your portfolio on your website. So we're gonna save this for web. So let's go to File. We're gonna go to export and safer Web Legacy. Now immediately just by saving it for web, it's down to 849 kilobytes. We see that down here. So if we zoom this out, we didn't lose any of the quality whatsoever. But let's go ahead and let's make this down to just 285% size. Hit enter on that. We're down to 600 kilobytes. I'd like to be between 500 kilobytes to a thousand kilobytes or one megabyte. But the closer to 500 kilobytes and the faster it's going to load. And you can see the Whitman heightened here in pixels. So this is definitely going to fill in a full screen image very nicely. So I'm gonna actually put this down to 80. That's 531. That looks perfect. Let's hit Save. And let's go to where we have. Our images are over here. And let's go ahead and say this is neon lighting and JPEG for web from 90, which on this is so safe. And of every gulf. Now another file, some right, you can save it as I'm only going to mention, it is a tiff format TIF F. Now the benefit of tip is if you want to go and print your final piece. So if I were to go and print this and bearing the city composite that I made earlier or any of the ones that I made today. I'm probably going to want to save that as a TIF file and send it off to a printing company. Why? Because Tip ball keeps all the layers and it keeps a tremendous amount of information to files are as big if not bigger than the Photoshop files I've had projects before where the tip files are larger in fact then the Photoshop files themselves. So that's what you want to send to print shops you definitely don't need be putting 2-300 and Megabytes size images onto your website. Now in the next video, I'm going to go over your assignment for this course. So it's time for you to get involved. Let's go. 8. Your Assignment: Now is my favorite part of the whole course is a part where actually you get involved. I want you to go ahead and create your own composite just two images, get her background and get a subject or model, anything like that. And combine the two focuses very specifically on the lighting matching the lighting matching the saturation, matching the color, and then adding a little bit of other details like the highlights and shadows like this. This is exactly what I want you to do. Just these two images. You can get them from the free websites that I showed you at the beginning of the course. Or you can go ahead and take our own photos. That is totally fine as well. Just keep in mind the direction of the light and the direction of the colors that are in the images. Once you've made your composite, drop it down to the student submitted projects section of the course. In the next video, I'm going to go over some final thoughts for this course. 9. Final Thoughts: Well done. You've completed this portion of my Photoshop composite masterclass, advanced lighting techniques, I'll quite a lot of information to cover what I am glad that we did. And now you have the skills you need to go and match the lighting saturation, and colors in your composites with eat, no longer we are composites look placed or faith, rather there'll be incredibly well blended. You finish this course of three of your own composite as also one you'll be making for the assignment, you're free to include all the pieces made during this course in your portfolio. I would like to mention that I'm selling Lightroom presets right now for a special introductory price over on my website. So head over to www dot the real Tom Chi.com forward slash presets to get your presets today, these are perfect to use and Lightroom to apply preset color grades to your photos and edit presets that I've already made and tested over many years of practice and use. And you know the best part, both precept packs are cheaper than a cup of coffee. I really want to give you the means to get great results in your edits and photos. I really hope that you've learned a lot about lighting techniques in Photoshop that you can apply to all of your composites. If you've enjoyed this course, I encourage you to leave a review and rating has that helps me out and feel free to check out my teacher page to see other Lightroom and Photoshop courses that I've made, ranging from beginner courses all the way to mastery level courses. Also, if you have any suggestions or requests for courses that you'd like to see me cover, need it in the comments for the course and I will try my best to cover any topic that you suggest. It's been a pleasure teaching you today and I hope to see you again any future course. Take an easy.