Photoshop Compositing Essentials Course

1. Photoshop Compositing Course: Compositing and Photoshop is a skill that most photographers would love to learn, but learning the skills that the pros use could take years. This is why we have created the Photoshop compositing essentials video course. This course includes three in-depth sections that show you a complete start to finish guide for creating images in Photoshop. First, we will cover simple techniques for developing a truly unique image, just using stock photos. Next, we will look at more intermediate skills and techniques from creating a unique environment to ways of color correcting your images so they blend perfectly. Lastly, we will cover more advanced techniques with everything from cutting out complex objects, creating weather elements, tone corrections to make it perfectly composited image. This Essentials course contains 12 m depth videos, is 3.5 hours long and includes all of the stock images used in the course. So you can follow along and create your own images if you've ever wanted to create amazing images with the techniques used by compositing professionals. Check out the Photoshop compositing essentials video course by sleek lines. 2. Section 1.1 Simple Compositing Techniques Part 1: Hey everyone and welcome to the Photoshop compositing course. I'm really excited for this one because it's going to be a really fun course to basically make images almost out of nothing. You can do these types of compositing techniques with images that you shot yourself. Or you can do them with a bunch of stock photos in this particular course. Most of these, if not all of them, are going to be stock photos. And the reason I'm choosing just stock photos is because I want to show you that you can basically take a photo from anywhere from anyone that anybody took and still make it usable and still make it relevant in your type of compositing. So throughout this course, we're going to be doing three different types of compositing. I'm going to show you a simple composite first. And it's gonna be kind of a, a conceptual the composite where you can kind of think of something that you want to put in there like a fantasy image and piece them all together and make it look realistic. There's going to be a simple way of doing it. It's going to be a very fairly short video because you'll be able to see all the simple techniques that are going to be used throughout the course. And then we're going to go into an intermediate kind of course. This is where we're going to show you some advanced cutting, maybe cutting out, asserting certain objects, placing certain objects in there that were never supposed to be there, and then adding some lighting effects. And then we're gonna go to Advanced compositing course as well. We're going to go where it's going to basically be an image just straight out of my mind. I'm going to show you how to kind of sketch that on a piece of paper, get the idea in your head and then put those images together, then make your idea final. So before we get started in this course, make sure you download the files yourself. All of the files, all the photos used in this course are going to be available for you to download so you can follow along and use the same techniques that I'm using to develop your image as well. So now that we've talked about what exactly we're gonna do in this course. Let's go and jump into our first simple composite. And this is going to be sort of a fantasy image. I'm basically going to kind of get an idea of what I want to put in an image. Having a base layer, having some elements in there that are, that are special to that particular image. And I'm going to show you what I mean here. So let's jump into the photo and let's get started with our simple compositing at, okay, so here we are in our first image and I'm going to show you the images that we're going to use in this course and kinda give me an idea what we're gonna do here. So we have this kind of book layer with a map here. This is kinda going to be our base image. We're really not going to do too much to this to correct it. But we're basically use this as a base for our composite. And so now we have this photo right here. And what we're gonna do is actually put this on top of this map layer to make it look like it's coming off of the map and give it a little bit of 3D, 3D feel to the image. And the reason why we're doing that is because we're going to make it look like a fun little image with an airplane. You have this old-school airplane here. And we're going to cut this airplane out and make it look like it's flying over the book. So as you can see, it's sort of like a fantasy composite. That's just a fun little idea. And this is going to be a great way to show you the different techniques used to make a fun little image like this. So after we put the plane in there, we also have a couple of cloud layers. This is going to add a little bit of realism to it. Put a little bit, a little cloud cover there. So the plane is flying through the clouds and we're just going to layer these together. So you can see exactly the tools and techniques that we're going to use here. So let's go and get started. I'm gonna go to our base layer. And I'm going to get this mountain range layer here. And I'm going to take this and I'm just gonna click and drag it over to our book layer, and it's going to put it right here. So now what we need to do is actually shrink this down to fit. So I'm going to click Command or Control T on your keyboard. And that'll give you the free transform tool here. And I'm just going to hold Shift. If you hold Shift you get a constrained constraints scaling like this. If you don't hold Shift, you can kinda wonky like that. But I'm gonna hold shift and just scale it down here and just drag it roughly in the area that I want to put it into. So I'm going to put the mountain range roughly around here. I might turn it a little bit. So where this larger areas almost to this corner to roughly roughly around there, I think that looks pretty good. So I'm gonna go and click Enter here. It's a number we need to do. Start blending this end with the underlying layer so it doesn't look as bad as it does now. And so what we're gonna do is get a layer mask. A layer mask is going to allow us to paint some of this away. And we can do that and still take a takeaway is what we need. But if we mess up a layer mask all automatically allows us to go ahead and paint back in. So what I mean by that is I'm gonna go get down here and click this layer mask button that's going to put a little white box next to our image here. And what this is going to allow us to do is get a Photoshop brush. I have a black Photoshop brush right here. The settings for the brush is 1100 right here. That'll work for right now. But the hardness you need to make sure you have that set to 0. I want it to be a very, very feathered brush. And as I paint with black, you can see that it's starting to take away a little bit of that mountain range. And all I'm doing is getting rid of the hard edges here. That's the main thing any to concentrate on is getting rid of these hard edges. And with that feathered hardness, It's basically just kind of feathering it a little bit and making sure that it's not too stark of a change. So this looks pretty good. And what I'm doing here is just kinda membranes is a little bit curved. And I want to get rid of this kind of darker area that's to the left of it. So I'm just doing that. I'm not making it too big. I'm actually going to scale it up a little bit too right around there, maybe turn it a little bit. And this is just preference. This is me working through the image. But obviously if you want a different placement for this, go ahead and do that, that the techniques used are still going to be the same. Okay, so that looks pretty decent. We can always go back and change it if we need to. But now what we need to do is start blending it in as far as the color goes. So one thing I'm gonna do with the color is I'm actually going to go down here to our adjustment layers. And I'm going to choose Color Balance. This will give me a color balance layer here, so I can clip this layer to our mountain range layer. What I mean by that is if I were to make an adjustment at, let's say take the yellows, add more yellows. You see it's adding yellow across the whole entire image. But all I only want it to blend in with the mountain range. So again, to clip this color balance layer, we need to hold the Alt or Option key between these two layers. And when we do that, we get this nice little clipping mask. Click between there. And now it's only adding that yellow back to the mountains. So you can see here basically what it's doing there. It's adding yellow, little bit more yellow to the midtones, so that looks pretty good. I basically just want it to blend in a little bit with this yellow. You see the pages are a little yellow. Just want to add a little bit of hint a yellow there. Again, we'll go back and change it if we need to. But the last thing we're gonna do to try and blend this in together is actually get a curves layer. So we'll go down here to our adjustment layers here. And I'm going to choose Curves. And again, I'm going to clip this curves layer to basically the mountain range. It's so again, hold between the Color Balance and the curves layer. Click there. And now we have this curves layer. So this is going to do is allow us to change the, basically the brightness of the darks and the whites. So for this, I'm going to create a point here and I'm just gonna drag this down. You see it starts to get a little bit more dark. I'm going to click right here and keep it there. That looks pretty good. I'm gonna create another point over here. I'm just trying to lighten it up a little bit. I could have used the brightness and contrast, but this gives me a little bit more control. And that's kinda what I'm going after here. So I'm going to click another point over in this area, and this has started to be the wider areas. And as you can see, the image starts to get a little bit wider, a little bit brighter here. And I'm just playing around trying to get it to blend in a little bit more. I might need to add a little bit more yellow to the image. So let me go down here and add a little bit more yellow play with that. I can go to the shadow area at a little bit more shadow, yellow as well. And this is just a feeling out process of trying to find the perfect balance of the kind of blending and color. So if we zoom in here, we can see that we got this almost off white color and it starts to get a little yellow here. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to match this color with this color to make it a little bit more realistic. There we go again, just playing with this. Let's drag this out. So we got here and that looks a little bit better. There we go. I think I'm gonna keep it right there. Maybe take away a little bit more yellow. There we go. Go back to our shadows. Here. There we go. I think I'm gonna keep it right there. So what I'm gonna do is actually paint it away a little bit more of this area here because I don't really want a lot of this area as kind of on that top mountain range. And this is not going to be two. You don't have to be too perfect on this one. Because basically when the plane goes over here and we have clouds kind of covering it up a little bit. It just adds a little bit of character to the image. I'm going to move this around, get it exactly where I want it. Again, turn it and you can play with the placement isn't as much as you want to. So I'm going to go right there. So what it looks like, it's kinda have a little mountain range. They're kind of going along this book. So that is our mountain range layer. Now let's concentrate on the plane. So if I go over here to our plane here and I'm gonna go, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna worry about this one over here. I don't really care for the smaller one. I kinda want the big plane here. So to cut this out, very, very simply, I'm just going to get the Quick Selection Tool and I'm going to click on the Quick Selection Tool over here and just kinda start drawing over the plane here. And that gives me a really, really nice selection. And I'm just following the lines of the plane. Zoom in here a little bit of a payload propeller blur here, we need to get rid of that. But I'm going to finish selecting as much of the plane as I can. And you can see that it didn't select this antenna here. I'm okay with that. I don't really need that. And just look around and it looks pretty good. So let's go back to the front here and get rid of some of this propeller blur. Again, it's probably not going to matter and show up at all in our image. So there we go, because you need to kind of play around with selecting some of this and not have to be too perfect, especially because this particular portion of the image is not going to be super large in your photo. So now that's selected is go to Select and Mask up here. This is going to allow us to refine our selection a little bit more. See, we've got a little bit more bumps here. And the way we can get rid of that is actually click on these smooth slider, the smooth slaughters going to smooth that out a little bit. She did a really great job. Here is the kinda before. Here's the smooth slider that smoothing it out a little bit, looks really good. And now we can shift the edge in a little bit to kind of get rid of that decontamination of the underlying layer. We can do that as well. And we can also play with the radius here. And that's going to allow us to get a little bit of that contamination as well gone. So that looks pretty good. I'm liking that. So that's pretty decent selection. That'll really look really nice in the photo. So what we're gonna do is go over here and before we output anything, before we get to click the Okay button down here, we're going to change our output. We're going to change that to new layer with layer mask. And that will allow us to drag a new layer over that just has the selection with the layer mask with it. So we'll go ahead and click OK here. And as you can see, this is our layer with the layer mask and everything out as outside of the plane is basically transparent. So now what we're gonna do is click and drag this over to our book layer. And you can see it kinda came in on the wrong layer. So what we're gonna do is drag this up and we'll unclip this because now it's currently clipped. So we're gonna go ahead and hold the Alt or Option key again and unclip it. So now we have our plane on a new, new layer by itself. So now what we need to do is transform this. So I'm gonna go ahead and click Command or Control T. And this will allow us to transform it. So I'm going to turn it up to kind of match parallel with the book here. And I'm gonna shrink this down again using shift, using the Shift key. And that's going to get a constrained. And we're going to position it exactly where we want it here. You can play with the placement again, if you mess with the the the mountain placement, you can also place place this different spots as well. So I'm going to place it right here again, I can always move all of this. But just starting out, this is where I want to put it. So right there, it looks pretty good. I'm liking that. And so that's kind of our placement. Now what we need to do is actually make a shadow. This is kind of something that a lot of people who start out in compositing actually miss is, Is details like shadows. So if I'm looking at this image, we have a darker area over here on the base image. It's pretty, pretty dark here. We have a little bit lighter area and another light source here. So picture a light source roughly in this area, kinda shining down and shining towards the dark area. So that's why there's a shadow here, because there's a light source over here. So what we're gonna do is actually make a shadow of the plane over in this area. So I'm going to scoot this over just a tad bit more. And I'm going to create a duplicate layer of this plane layer. So I'm gonna drag this down to our new layer here. And there we go. We have a duplicate layer. Now we can move this around. And this will be our shadow layer. So I'm gonna put it roughly around here. This is gonna give us a perfectly, perfectly proportion and perfectly detailed shadow for our plane. So I'm gonna double-click on this. And this is kind of an easy way to create a shadow. Now, no one, no one ever really tries to use drop shadow because that's not going to work with this particular example. It's going to take that off. You might want to go to the drop shadow section, but that's not going to be good for this example. I'm going to click The Color Overlay and as you can see, I get a black overlay. This is going to replace everything on our image with a black color. I can always choose a different color if I wanted to. But again, I want my shadow to be black. So I'm gonna go over here and I'm going to position this. You can see we have a small, small problem here that our shadows actually on top of our plane. So we need to drag this under our planes. So now we have a nice shadow. And I'm going to shrink this down a little bit because it doesn't need to be that large. We're going to put it right there. And now what we can do, we've got a couple different options. We can actually blur this out, which I might try. We can take our opacity and just uptake our opacity down. So it looks like it's kind of blending in underneath. It's not a huge shadow, huge, huge dark shadow. That, that works out pretty good. I might actually taken up a little bit. And now let's try blurring it out. I'm a click on our, not our layer mask, but I'm gonna click on our original image, go to filter blur, and then Gaussian Blur. And here's where I can play with the blur of the image. You see it's starting to blur out some of those, some of those edges. And that looks pretty good. And I want to be too blurry. But for this particular image, I might go to around seven. Somewhere around there. There we go. All right, so now we can see it kinda looks kinda cool. And now, now you can kinda see the effect that we're going with. We have the plane here flying over this book and the mountain range. We have our shadow here. So if we just look at the image as a whole, It looks pretty nice. We can actually move the shadow around if we wanted to, to get a different perspective of it, depending on where the light source would be. We can take both of the plane and the shadow and drag this around and move them around like that. So before we put the clouds and let's do a little bit of, little bit of clean up here. So I'm gonna go ahead and choose all three layers that we use for the mountain range. Highlight all three of those. I'm going to click Command or Control G on our keyboard. And that'll group them together. So now if we toggle this off, toggle it on, and you can see that's our mountain range. And I'm going to name this layer mountains. There we go. And now I'm gonna take our plane layer and the highlight, both of those, I'm going to click Command or Control G. I'm going to call this plane. So this is just going to clean up our image a little bit. So this is basically where we started and this is our plane layer. When we toggle that off tall it back on, you can see we have a faint kinda black square. This is probably due to our color overlay and it is, you can see we have the kinda toggle off talking about. We have that faint black square. So we actually need to get rid of that manually with a brush. I'm gonna get my black brush. And wherever I see that black, I'm going to paint away here. There we go. Probably just an effect of the selection, not getting the whole selection. But again, that was easily corrected. Now we just have the shadow. So pay attention to as well. You might see little artifacts like that easily cleaned up by the adjustment layer. Alright, so that is the beginning of the basic and simple compositing that we're doing. You can see that it's pretty fun to do this kinda stuff. And we stub the clouds to go and we still have a little bit of some final adjustments to go with the image. But you can see that's a perfect starting place using just stock photography. So in the next video, we're gonna talk about putting the clouds in, adding a little bit of special effects to really sell it. And then also blending in all the colors together to make them look very realistic. So let's go into section two. 3. Section 1.2 Simple Compositing Techniques Part 2: All right, so now that we've done our basic additions to our image with the plane and the mountain range and a little bit of color correcting just to kinda help it blend in together right now plus the shadow of the plane. Let's move into adding the clouds and adding a little bit of special effects to it, and then blending it all together with overall color adjustments. So the only two images we're going to need now are really just the two cloud layers. So I'm going to decide which cloud layer I want to put under the plane, over the plane and where I want to place them to make it look a little bit more realistic. And then we're going to add some propeller blur to the clouds and make it a little bit more fun. So let's hop into it. Okay, So here we are back at our image and the main thing I want to concentrate on here again is the Cloud. So let me get this first cloud here. I'm going to click right here, and I'm going to drag this cloud layer over to our photoshopped image so far and just drop it in there. So now it looks kind of, kind of where we want to get to place it here and we got to figure that out as well. So first I think I want this cloud to actually be underneath the plane. And how I'm gonna do that Just real quick is to drag it underneath our plane group layer. So now you can see we have the cloud layer right behind here. So we've got a couple of things we need to take care of. First, we need to get rid of all of the black around the Cloud. But we could do this with a selection. But I'm gonna show you a different way of doing this with blending modes. Then we need to kind of scale it down and to get a little bit more proportions. So let's work on the scaling first, I'm going to click Command or Control T on my keyboard. And I'm going to drag this in just like we've been doing. Drag it in and just kinda get it roughly where I want this cloud layer to be. I don't want it to be so big to where it's being, more of the subject and then the actual plane. I just want to add a little bit more atmosphere to the photo. So I'm going to drag it roughly right around here, and I'm going to click Enter. So now we need to get rid of the, the, the black that's surrounding the Cloud. Again, we can go over here, get us selection tool, and try to get it this way and it's not going to work that well. But what we can do is actually easily, we can change our blending mode over here to screen. And when we do that, that's going to take away everything that's black in the image. When I click screen, there we go. So now we just have this nice-looking white fluffy cloud here that's just kinda right behind the plane. And it's just adding a little bit of, a little bit of fun, a little bit of atmosphere again to the, to the images. So I'm going to put it roughly around there. And there we go. So now we're basically going to do almost the same exact thing with our other cloud layer. So if I go over here and get this other scattered cloud layer, drag this over to our image again. And it's going to come in very, very large. But this one, I actually want to be on top of the plane. What I'm doing here just like layering the image. So my drag this above the plane. And now I'm seeing that what I'm basically doing here is little layering. So these clouds are going to be on top of the plane. It's just going to add a little bit more realism to it. So I'm again, I'm going to choose the screen blending mode. So if I go over here and select screen, and now it's going to be on top of the plane. Now what we need to do is scale this down again. So I'm just going to shrink it down Command or Control T. And I'm just running a fun place to place it here. So I'm gonna put it roughly, let's put it roughly around here. So it's actually covering a lot of the plane. Scale this down a little bit more. What I'm really kinda concentrating on because I know going into this, what I want to do is place it above the, above the plane. But also I'm going to take away some of the clouds just to get rid of some of it that's hiding the plane, but also gonna put a little bit of propeller PBL are likely the propeller is that going to the cloud and we got a little bit of swirling going on. So I'm gonna do that as well. So I'm going to keep it roughly around here. Again, you can play with the placement. All you want to see which which spot works for you as far as this goes. But I'm a put my roughly around here and we click in it. So if we were looking at this now it looks pretty cool. It looks pretty neat. So what we need to do is actually get rid of some of the cloud. And the way we're gonna do that again is with a layer mask and then click the Layer Mask button here, go over to my brush, make sure my brush is feathered again. So I'm gonna go over here to the settings and I make sure my hardness is set to 0 again. And I can scale the brush up or down with my left and right bracket keys on my keyboard. And that'll scale it up and down. And so what I'm gonna do here is just selectively go around the image for this cloud layer and just get rid of some of the clouds that I don't want to be in the photo. So just like that at all I'm doing is just taking away some of the spots that are just really hide in the plane. It's okay to hide the plane obviously, but because it's flying in-between two clouds. But I just want to hide some of it a little bit. So it will actually keep that there because I'll do the blur there and get rid of some of this. There we go. Okay, so that is our plane kinda running through those clouds there. Now we can actually change these clouds up a little bit, just move around. We find a different spot. So I keep it right there. All right. So that looks pretty neat. I like the way that looks. So now what I'm going do is add the little spin to where these propellers here. So we would have propellers there and then we spinning and turning those clouds around. This is just going to be a very small touch, but it just adds to a little bit of that realism and shows you the different kind of tools that you could use to really do some special effects in Photoshop. So I'm gonna click on my cloud layer. The adjustment layer, the cloud layer here. And I'm gonna go to Filter Liquify. So this is going to open up that cloud layer in the liquefy box. And this is where we do a lot of advanced retouching. You can move facial features around, you can do all kinds of stuff. But we're gonna go on the twirl tool here. You see we have a total Clockwise tool. This will allow you to, just as an example, to show you, if I click here, it starts to twirl these clouds around and kinda get this like almost tornado hurricane effect. But what we wanna do is actually do it selectively to a certain part of the image. Now, you might be wondering how do I see the underlying image? Because all I see is the Cloud and we need to know exactly where the propellers are going to hit. To twirl the cloud around. You go down here to the bottom and it says show backdrop. I'm going click show backdrop there. And now it's going to show all of our images below that, all basically all of our layers that are below the cloud layer. So we can kinda see exactly where we're going to be messing with the Cloud at. So I'm going to scroll in here to kind of zoom in, move my image around here. And we can see that we need a twirl little bit of these areas roughly around here. So here, here, in there. So what I'm gonna do is make sure my Clockwise tool, my twirl Clockwise tool is selected. And I'm gonna do a couple of clicks. Just like that, just doing a couple of clicks. And what you can see it's doing, it's kinda twirling it around. It's not a, it's not a huge change, but again, it's just some kind of fun change that you can do to your image, some twirling these around. And again, this is just to mimic a propeller that is zooming through the clouds. Couple of clicks here and there. There we go. We can even do it here to make it seem like it was coming through the clouds like that as well. Make our brush a little bit larger. We can swirl it around there. And this is also a really fun way to kinda change the shape of your Cloud if you wanted it to. There we go. And all I'm doing is just clicking a couple times. Same thing with over here. We can zoom back. There we go. We kind of make it wrap around that little tail. There we go. All right, we still have a little bit of touch-up to do, but most of all, while we're doing just kinda selling this effect right now and now we can get back into Photoshop and change some of those settings up. So here's our twirl image there. I'm gonna go and click the preview button so you can see often on. So here's the preview off. Here's a preview on. You can just see as little bit of swirl there. Just a fun little thing to add something. Go and click OK here. All right, so there we go. Now it changed. So now if we look real closely, we have that little swirl effect going in to where the propellers are. Again, if we need to change some of this up, maybe we don't like this cloud being over that wing. We can go over here and get our brush again on our adjustment layer. And we can just kind of paint that away. Again. We're making these adjustment layers so we can go back in and change some stuff after the fact. So just like that. All right, so that is our main composites. So what we did is just made a really fun, creative image with a plane flying over a book like it's flying over land. And just kinda creates a really cool effect. So now what we need to do is actually combine all of this and make a color corrections to it. So there's a couple of ways to do this, but for the most part, this image actually goes very well together that the shadows are where they need to be. Again, if you were to look where, let's say our light source was coming from over in this direction. We have the shadow that's on this side of the plane. So that helps really well. Same with the, same with the mountain area here, same with the shadow that we put there. So it all looks really, really good. So what we could do Is actually sell this effect a little bit more with a couple different tools. So I'm gonna go down here to our adjustment layers and I'm going to choose color filter. And what this is going to do is add a warming filter or cooling filter, whichever one you decide. So I change the color or going to a cooling filter. I like to stick with the warmth, but I can take my density down a little bit MIT, Let's get about 10. And what that does is just apply a little bit of a warmth over the whole, entire image. That looks okay. We can also play with the color balance here we can go down to our adjustment layers again, and she's color balance. And we can mess with the different tones just like we did before. We can actually add some creative like split toning looking effects that the midtone and the shadows individually. I like the way that looks, that kinda gives a little bit more red, little bit more blue. That's kind of fun. But one thing we can do to actually retouch the whole image is actually we can open all of these up in Camera Raw. And one way to do that is combining all of these into one layer without getting rid of the layers to do further adjustment. And the way we do that is to click on all of the layers here. So I'm going to click on shift on the background layer and hold Shift and click on the top layer and go over to layer and go down to merge visible. And before I click Merge Visible, I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key on my keyboard and then click Merge Visible. And what this is going to do is give you another layer that has all of these layers combined on it. So as you can see, if I were to take these here and highlight all of these. Deactivate, this is all the same layer. It just combines all of those into one layer. If we did not hold the Alt or Option key, it would basically remove all of these layers and combine them together. We don't wanna do that because we want to keep these here for further adjustments. So with this new layer selected here, I'm going to go to Filter, camera Raw Filter. And here's where we can do a lot of basic adjustments. We can do our exposure adjustments. We can do our contrast to add a little bit more fun to that one, a little bit more contrast there, little bit more clarity and all we're doing, just basically doing a lot of standard retouching to our photo, increase our sharpness a little bit. We can add some vignetting to it. We can do all of these different adjustments, temperature, all of that fun stuff, all of that from here. So just kinda depends on the, the, your editing style, how you want to do that. But I'm going to actually Brian mine up a little bit, take the highlights down so I can get a little more detail on those clouds there. And maybe take the shadows up a little bit. And that's pretty much it. I did a little bit of temperature and tint, but overall that's pretty much it. So I'm going to click Okay. And now here is our final image. So what I'm actually going to do is go ahead and rename this to final. Alright, so just for presentation purposes, this is what we've started with. We have the book image and then we added the mountain range to it. And then we added the plane. Then we put in the clouds. They're added the little twirling effect and then did some final adjustments to make our final composite image. So that is just one real quick fun examples showing you the things that you can do when you're compositing images together. These, again are just stock images that are pulled off various stock sites. And you can feel free to download these for yourself to follow along with this tutorial. But again, this is just a creative way, showing you different tools that you could use to composite these images together and things to think about is like fish for shadows and color adjustments that you need to make. This is just a really easy way to do this and maybe it gets your juices flowing about different kind of creative photos. You can make it as well. 4. Section 2.1 Sketching Your Idea The Walk: Okay, So in this section we're going to go over a little bit more intermediate compositing techniques. We're going to do another image. We're going to create another image from scratch. And it's going to be using a couple different images that we find online against stock images. And the reason I have this little pencil here is because I'm actually going to draw out my idea that I have for a photo. This is really important for, for any kind of creative editing that you might do. Because you might want to create a composite image from scratch, much like we're doing in this course. But you have the idea in your head and you don't want to waste your time getting into Photoshop, dragging in elements that might not work. You want to just get your ideas down on paper and it doesn't have to be on an iPad or anything on that. It can be on a post-it note. It just can be on any kind of sheet of paper and just draw your idea. You don't have to be the most fantastic artist in the world just to get your rough sketch down on paper. So that way you kinda know what's going on. When you, when you hop into Photoshop, start pulling all of your images together. So let's go over to the iPad on, but draw out the idea that I have as a very simple idea. But once I'm looking at it, I might think of other things that I want to add into it. And, and I don't have to waste my time in Photoshop and cutting out a whole bunch of stuff that's not going to work. So let's jump over to the iPad. Okay, So here we go. What we have here is just a blink, blink start here first gonna go ahead and draw in our image. But first, I know that I want my image to actually be a portrait image, a vertical image. So I'm going to get in my box here, and I'm just going to draw out my box here as my boundary image here. So this is what I'm going to stay in. So there we go. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and draw out my idea. So the idea that I have right now is, is kind of like a guy that just like walking down the road, walking out into nowhere. And he's got like a cool mountain range in the back. And so I need to find a person to cut out. I need to find the row that he needs to walk on Neith on the mountain range. I need to find any any different elements of the photo that I want to put in the background maybe. So I got a lot of stuff to find out, but I gotta get my idea down on paper first. So what we have here is just I'm going to go ahead and draw a line right in the middle. And that's gonna be kinda like our horizon line there. And so I mentioned that I wanted them walking on a road. So I'm gonna go ahead and draw my road. It's going to lead off into this, in this horizon line. I'm gonna draw a line like that. And draw another line like that. I don't want to be perfect with this because this really doesn't matter. This is just a sketch to get it on paper. And so this is obviously going to be eroded, so it's going to have little marks on it just like that. And as I mentioned that I wanted to be in kinda walking into a mountain range, just the idea that I have right now it might change, but right now I want them walking into some sort of mountainous area. So I'm just going to draw kind of a rough idea of a mountain right there and just cool accents there. So that's our mountain there. Okay, so let's go ahead and draw our person here. I'm not the best artist in the world. Actually just surprised how well this turned out. So I'm just going to draw my guy here. So this is the head. And it's going to be walking out in this area. So right there. And again, I'm not being perfect with this. Probably couldn't be perfect even if I tried because I'm not the best artist in the world. But again, this is just to get your ideas down on paper. So this are the arms here and legs. Just like that and get a little feet there. Okay, so just by doing that, this gives us a little bit of idea of not only if we need to find a person, but we also need to make sure that the person is proportional to the scene. And that's going to be very important when we find the stock image that we're going to use and putting them in there. He can't be too far up this way because he's going to look out proportion. And he can't be too far back this way because he's going to look at a proportion again. So we need to find the right person to get them up in that scene and make them look too tall or too short. So this is our person here. Let's go and put a tree, this person group of trees over here. Just like that. It's not the best tree in the world, but you get the idea. Again, I'm not the best artist. That's why he's Photoshop. I'm not the best artist in the world. And then we'll go ahead and put some birds here. So let me get a smaller brush. I'll just have some birds flying in the background. Like that. Let's go ahead and put a little bit of color in this just to use a better idea of what we might like and what kinda sky we might want to find. So I'm just going to color this in. It's going to be sort of like a like a sunset sky somewhere around their sun coming into the frame here. I'm speaking of that since going to be kind of a sunset sky, Let's go and put in our image. I'm going to put a sunburst right here. So that's going to represent the sun. And the reason I'm doing that is because not only do I want to have this sunburst add a little bit of visual interests to the photo. But I also want to show you some really good ways of doing shadows. In the first section we covered making a shadow with duplicating the layer of the plane. And we were able to blur it out at some, add some black color to it, and that was as easy as it was here. We might have to do a little bit more work to make it a more realistic shadow and blended in with the ground a little bit more. But I'll show you that as well. So I'm gonna go and get my brush here. And let's go get another brush. Once you start getting in here and I'm drawing out your idea, you might have a little bit better of examples that you might want to put in here a little bit better idea of an element. So this is our shadow. Now the reason I'm drawing it slant is because the sun's over here. So the sun would be right in front of them and you would see the shadow, the legs right there, same with the trees. So this is our shadow. Let's see what else can we put in here? We might want to change a little bit of the colors depending on the image that we pick. But for the most part, I'm actually pretty decent with this idea. So I like this concept. It's going to be kind of challenging to get the right photos. I might even need to make my own elements. So if I need to make my own elements, I'll show you what that means. But for the most part, this looks really, really well. So now that we've got our idea down on paper, Let's keep our idea with us so we can always check back with it. But now let's go find our images, hop into Photoshop and start putting this image together to make it a really cool composite image. 5. Section 2.2 Finding Your Images: All right, so now that we've done our sketch and we got the idea of what we want. Now we need to go find our images. I'm going to show you two of the sites that I've mainly go to to find images. There are a bunch of sites out there. I'm sure you have some stock sides of your own that you visit it sometimes. But these are the two main ones that I go to try to find good quality images. I also have a subscription to a paid stock service. But I don't really ever go towards that just because it's really difficult to find something that's more, more towards what I'm going for. So if I, for example, if I type in walking or something like that, I usually get really, really like professional. And I don't mean professional as far as quality professional examples of like a guy in a business suit and stuff like that. I'm looking for more casual photos. So these two sites that I'm about to show you are the sites that I mainly go to to get all of my stock images to do my composite. So let's look at him. Okay, so here is the first one. This is the one that I probably go to run off hand. Very first site that I go to and it's called Pixabay, PI AXA, be a y.com. And it's a very simple site to use here a couple of featured images that are, I guess our new. But then you can go up here and just like we were looking around for an image and could say guy walking and go here. And here is where I start finding some different examples. So maybe this will be good for our composite that we're doing here. This is also a good one if we wanted it to be a different color and not, not full color, it could be monochrome here. And again, just going down the list here and just seeing some examples. Here's another one. This one could work I guess, but we cutting off the guy's feet so that might not work the best. I like. I like the direction that he's going. And again, just going over here and looking at some different examples. We needed a road as well. So we can just type in road and look for some different roads that we could use. It just kinda depends on how specific you get. So for example, here's a good row that we could use. It, it's a pretty decent, it's still not vertical orientation or portrait orientation. Probably doesn't matter. We can make it work, but that's a good example. And these images are all free to use. They all have a Creative Commons license, licensing tomb. If you click on one of the images, for example, you can see that it's a Creative Commons license and it's free for commercial use, no attribution required there, so that's good. And you can also sign in. You, you do have to sign in and creating an account to download the full res version here, you can download lower res versions, but if you want the full reservoirs and you do have to have an account, It's a free account, so nothing to worry about there. So that is one of the sites that I go to pretty much first before any others. So next is another site that I go to pretty much after that, if I can't find what I want on Pixabay, I usually go to a site called pixels. So it's pixels.com. And here again, Let's almost the same layout as the other one. And this might have some of the same photos as, as Pixabay is as many of the photographers actually contribute to both. But again, we can type in guy walking. And here are some examples here. And you can see we're just looking around trying to find a good example of what might work. And finding these images is a pretty time, time-consuming task. It's not as easy to just type it in guy walking and finding the perfect image runoff handy EDA, play with it a little bit to find the right one. So again, we know we need a sunset as well or a sky, so we can type in sunset sky. And here are some examples that we can pull. Again, we really don't need to concentrate on the foreground elements and most of these, because we already have our foreground element which is going to be the road. So we would mainly just see a nice Skype so we don't want to concentrate on this bottom, bottom third here. We would just need this top portion right here. So that might work. This is a cool looking one as well. So you kinda get the idea of what we're going with. So if you want to look around for images that you can use on your own and not the ones I supplied here. Totally fine. Most of the techniques are going to work almost exactly the same. So in order to save us some time looking for images here, I've already pulled together the images that we're going to use for this particular composites. So I'll go into Photoshop here. So here's our road. We got a nice road here. That's almost exactly what I was looking for with it being and the middle the horizon line, so we don't have to worry about cropping or anything like that. One really great thing about this image is that the sky up here, it has almost no definition. So cutting this out is going to be very easy. And also we have our sky. I think this guy is going to work pretty well. Again, I'm only concentrating on this portion and above. So only this area. So that'll work pretty well. We didn't want to put a little starburst. They're a little sunburst there. It has sort of a small one right here, but we're going to actually create our own and enhance that a little bit. So I think this guy, I'm just going to work really, really well. We also have the model. I've, I did find a guy walking and this one's kinda cool because He's got a backpack on. He's kind of a mid steps. So that will actually add to the effect that we're going with. So we will have to cut him out of the the main image that he's in. But that's not going to be an issue. I'll show you how to do that as well. Here's our mountains that we're going to use. So the mountains here are actually going to go right at the edge of this road. So that'll be fun to put there. And also mentioned that we have birds that we want to add in our image. So I have this whole flock of birds here, and I'm not going to use all of these. I'm actually going to use just a select few. So I'll show you how to put that in the image as well. So those are the images that we're going to use for this particular composite. Again, look for the images that you want to use. Maybe don't want to use this bird image. Go ahead and use the one that you want to use. And you can feel free to look around those sites and see this, and see the images that you want to use. So feel free to download your own, but also these images are supplied for you. So now let's go into the compositing and see what we can do. 6. Section 2.3 Developing Your Scene: All right, so now we have all of our images. I went ahead and open all the images in Photoshop so they're on their own individual tab and Photoshop. I always like to do that, especially when I know these are the images that I want to work with. I always like to do that just so I can go back and look at the images that are coming up. For example, the birds layer that's probably going to be closer to the end, but I still want to have it up just in case. So I have all the images open up in Photoshop. I have my road here. And in this first video, we're going to concentrate on cutting out the sky and replacing the sky and adding the mountains. That's the first thing we're going to concentrate on because those are a little bit of the easier steps that sets the groundwork for how the image will turn out. And then we'll concentrate on the model and all the other little special effects in the next video. So let's go ahead and go into this image and start developing our arsine or overall scene. Okay, so here is our road. We know we're going to use this image. The first thing we need to kind of play around with as far as image goes is this horizon line back here. We see that it's, it's kinda foggy back in this area. So we need to figure out if we want to try to save this little mountain area back here and also these little parts over here. First what I'm thinking is is we don't worry about this because we're going to have another mountain back there anyway when we replace that. So I'm thinking about taking my pen tool and just using my pen tool to get a really nice selection all the way over here. Go across this road area. And I can probably save here and here. So I'll, I'll, uh, we'll probably save this back one here, but I'm not going to worry about this one. So I mentioned we're going to use the pen tool here. So I'm gonna grab my pen tool right here. And if you're not familiar with the pen tool, it's, it can be difficult at first, but a pencil is really used for really almost precise selections. So basically how you use the pen tool, I'm going to give a demonstration here, is I'm going to click right here. And you can see that if I just click again, I get a straight line. That's not what I want. I want to actually follow the angle here. So I'm going to click right here again. And you can see as I drag up my pen tool curve changes. And now I can make this curve match this area. So right here. And then zoom in again. I can go over here and click another one and I can make this match the curve, and so on and so forth. She can see it takes a little bit of time to play with it, but as you get used to clicking and drawing a little curve, it gets really does a really awesome job of getting a really precise selection. It's probably true. I could have just grabbed the Magic Wand Tool and selected the gray areas of this photo. But I really wanted to show the pin tool and how to get a selection from the pen tool. So again, I'm just going around this image. If I was, if I wasn't making this tutorial, I probably would have gone a lot faster. But again, I'm just showing you how you can make this selection. You can zoom in here almost to a pixel view. And so I'm going to go over here. I'm going to click right here and bend it up. You don't want to make too many pins. So if I were to click here, and then here and then here and then here, you don't want to do that. You want to try to spread them out a little bit to try to make them a little bit more. Even the more pins you make, it tends to be a little bit more, a little bit more rough. The selection doesn't, isn't as smooth. So I'm gonna zoom out here so I can make sure I'm getting parts that I want. So I'm gonna go here. I'm going to go relatively low down this road here. Then go back up. And all I'm doing is just following that hard line that the horizon line makes. So again, just going over here and I'm drawing and I'm drawing, making sure I'm actually curve. You can go any which way. But I'm just matching the curve as much as possible. Now this one, I'm going to bend up. They can go down here. I lost a little bit there. I can obviously take this one. I can take this. I get home my Alt key. I can hold my Alt or Option key and I can adjust it like that. See how that works. You grab this little handle here and you can adjust it there. Same thing with this one. I can drag this one down and then keep following the line out. So I mentioned I wanted to save this back one here, so I'll do that. And then I'll follow this up. Create another line here. So you can see that it's not a very fast selection method, but it will turn out to be a very, very nice selection. So again, we lost a little bit there. Hold the Alt or Option key, click on the white handle here, and just drag that down. And there we go. Then we can keep selecting, keep drawing or line over, just like that. And I did mention I want to save that one, but I don't know now looking at it home if I want to save it, but I'll go and do it anyway. We can always go back and erase it. So I'm gonna go back here, draw a nice big line and another nice line there. Alright, so this is basically our selection here. It matches the flow of the line here. But you can see we've got a little couple spots over here. We might need to move those up. So I'll move this up here. Like that. Take this one, move that up. I don't care about getting each individual strand of the grass that's popping up. I just want to get an overall selection. So that looks pretty good. And maybe drag this one down. Here we go. I'll drag this one out to make it not as pointy. There we go. All right, so that's I'm going to keep that there. I might change this one as well. There we go, and then get this handle. Drag it down. Alright? Alright, so now we need to finish our selection. So we just have this one line here. So now we need to go just, you can go all the way around here on the, on the edge. You want to be precise at all. Where does closing off the selection. So I went all the way around and I'm going back to where we started. And when I click on the little handle where we started, you can see that the cursor has like a little circle next to it. And that means it's going to complete this little pin line here. So I'm going to click on there. And now this is our selection. This is the selection that we have. It's not technically a selection yet though. A lot of people think you can just click the Layer Mask button and it's going to take all of this away. But actually when do a Pin tool selection, you need to actually convert this to a selection. So the way you do that is very simple. You just go to the line, go to the blue line here, and right-click on that line. And you can say Make Selection. And then this will give you a little dialog box to feather the radius. This helps with not having a really hard edge, are really hard cutoff. So roughly around one or two pixels depending on the size of the image. That's what I usually stick to. So I'll go back to two here and I'll click OK. And now it's a selection because you can see we have the little marching ants here. This is exactly what we needed. So if we wanted to get rid of the sky now, since our foreground is selected, it's as easy as just clicking the Layer Mask button. So we'll go down here to the bottom click Layer Mask button. And now we have our background removed and just have our foreground here. And this is exactly what we need to get started. Okay, so now let's go grab our sky. So I'm gonna grab this guy over here, go to this tab. And to get the sky over, It's really simple. I'm just going to drag it, click and drag it over to our road tab here and place it on top. And here's where we can start playing with kinda combining the sky with the foreground. So obviously this guy needs to be in the back ground of the image, so it needs to be on the very bottom layer here. And I mentioned that we only care about this guy here. We don't really care about the mountains in the sky image. It does look kind of cool. We can try to match the colors a little bit, but for the most part, I want to keep just the sky. So I'm going to drag this guy down enough to where it's all I'm saying is just basically the sky. And we can change this again because as we add the mountains, we might want to add the make the sky a little bit taller. So I'm going to go drag it right here just for now. And we can see that the, just because of the colors of the, of the road and the grass and everything that the sky actually blends in pretty well. We don't want to do a whole lot of color changes to it, we will at the very end of the photo, but right now we're looking pretty good. So I'm gonna go and grab my, let me click on my bottom layer here, my sky layer. Now I'm gonna go grab them mountains and we can play with putting those in. But before we do that, we want to cut out the mountains. This is where I'll probably go ahead and grab my magic wand tool. So I'm gonna go over here to a magic one tool right now, have the quick selection tool selected. Click on the Magic Wand Tool and I'm just going to click on some of these blue parts. You can see it kinda change. It connects selected there something, hold the Shift key to keep selecting. And it's going to try to do its best to grab the selection can take the tolerance down a little bit. So I'm selecting more of the like elements. Here we go. And I'm selecting the sky because that's the probably the easiest thing in this image to select as the sky. So here, here. And there might be some little specs that I miss, but we can, we can grab those, I'll take the tolerance down a little bit more. Let's go up with a tolerance. Let's see if we select a bunch of it at once. There we go. All right, so we selected most of the sky. If we need to change anything, we can use our Layer Mask to change that. But for the most part I think we got everything. So let's see how this guy looks to see we had them make any adjustments here. So I'm going to click the Layer Mask button here. And you can see that we did mess up. We actually select the sky, we actually need to select the mountains. So I'm going to undo that. This is a common mistake that a lot of people make. So I'm gonna go to select inverse. And then now click the Layer Mask button. And now we just cut out the mountains here. We can zoom in here and see if we need to change anything. There are some really rough edges. So we have two options here. We can take our brush and go in there and paint away some of the brushing and then try to smooth it out. Or we can Command Z this and just undo. And we can go to Select and Mask and try to help select the mask. Help us out with some of these tools here something go to, from my view, I'm going to go to unblock. And I'm going to change my opacity all the way up to 100. So I get a nice view. And the first thing I would do is smooth out the selection. It's going to take out some of those little hard edges there seemed works pretty good. I'm going to feather it a little bit as well. And I'm also going to shift the edge in a little bit as well. That's going to allow the selection and come into the mountain a little bit. And that will take away a little bit of color contamination that we might see. There we go. I'm liking the way that looks, this will be pretty good for having it in the background. So that looks pretty good. So before, like I do with most of my selections, before I output the selection here and click Okay, I'm going to change my output to, I'm going to change it to new layer with layer mask. And then I'm going to click Okay. All right, so there is our selection. We always have the layer mask if we needed to correct anything, bring anything back that it might have selected that it wasn't supposed to. But for the most part, looks pretty good. Now let's go ahead and drag it over to our road layer. And now we'll go ahead and just drag it down a little bit to where we're not seeing as much when we'll see that much of it probably see a roughly around here, maybe just to the bottom of this little mountain area or we can go down a little lower. So let's go right here. For now, that looks pretty good. And now we can do a couple of little options here. We can do Command or Control T to transform it. We can flip it if we wanted to, if we want the higher parts to be over here, we have a lot of mountain range to play with because it's such a long image. So we can shrink it down if we wanted to. Actually do kinda like a shrinking down. If I'm, if I'm thinking, if I'm a photographer that was out in this area and I wanted everything sort of symmetrical. It would be kinda cool to have the point of this mountain match up with the lines here. So that might be kind of fun. So we'll do it that way or we can flip it again. See which side we like better. So I'm thinking I'm thinking I like this side a little heavier. I think that looks pretty good, so we'll keep it there. And you can see we have a little bit of a faint blue line that's probably due to our selection. So I'm gonna click on the selection, the layer mask here. I'm going to get a black brush. And with my opacity and my flow all the way up to a 100, going to paint that away with a black brush so we can get rid of that. Sometimes that happens when you use Select a mask or selections in general, it might still select something that you're not wanting it to. And that's one way to easily fix that. So like the way that looks. All right, so now what we have, we have our mountain area. One thing I don't I don't like as much as I thought I would. Is this mountain area back here on the original road photo. So I'm actually going to go to my road photo, go to my layer mass kid, a black brush, and I'm gonna get rid of that. May go feather my brush. Make sure my brush is at a hardness of 0. And I'm just going to feather that away. So now it's really just showing the other mountain in the background. We'll do this over here as well. And it's just feathering it in, blending it in as much as possible. See if there's any other spots that we might want to change. Nope. Looks pretty good. Okay. So this is what we have so far, and it looks, looks pretty decent. And what we could do here is try to help a little bit of the colors. We can play with the sky a little bit, but let's go ahead and play with the placement of the sky again. As we mentioned, we have that sunburst here. We also mentioned that we want to have a sunburst of our own that we make, but this will actually help. So I'm going to put it right below here. We might have to scale the sky up a little bit. Someone click Command Control T to scale it. And the reason I'm doing that is because I do kinda want the sunburst that's in the sky or ready to be in this area. But I'm seeing too much of the hills that are in the background here. So on the scale it up. Then I can just bring it now. So right there. So I'm liking the way that looks, that looks pretty good. Let's go in and play with a little bit of the colors to try to help match some of these up. So for the mountains, I'm going to warm the mountains up. And the way I'm gonna do that is again, this is our mountain layer. Click on the mountain layer and I'm going to go to our adjustment layers down here. And I'm going to choose photo filter. This is kind of an easy way to, to lighten things up into, to warm things up. I'm gonna go in and clip, just like we did in the very first example of the composition, composition photos. We're going to clip this to the mountain layer. So I'll hold the Alt or Option key and clip there. So now it's just going to warm, melt the mountains up on their own without warming anything else up. And I'm just warming them up a little bit. I'm not trying to do all the color corrections right now because that's going to be saved towards the end of the photo. But this will just give me an idea of what I want it to look like. So there we go, It looks pretty good. I'm happy with that. All right, so now let's go ahead and create our sunburst. I was going to wait a little bit to do this, but I think I want to go ahead and do it now. In so to create the sunburst, I'm going to make a blank layer so I can get a regular blank layer here. And I'm going to change, I'm going to fill this blank layer to black. I'm gonna fill pure black, 100 percent black. So I'll go to Edit, fill and go to black here and choose. Okay, and now I need to add a Render Lens Flare. That's one of my favorite ways to do a sunburst effect is to do a lens flare. Now the reason I added black is if I do, if I tried to put a lens flare on a blank layer that has nothing on it. It's not going to put anything there. It needs to have something with it. And I chose black because black will allow me to take out the black once I add the lens flare with a blending mode. So I'm gonna go to Filter. Go to render and go to lens flare. Now here's where you have some choices down here of which lens flare type you want to use. Some, sometimes I like to use the 10, 5 or the 50 to 300, but a lot of the times I use the 105 prime, it's kinda like a pure white lens flare here. So your job here basically is this is a preview windows. So roughly the mountains, if you can picture an overlay of the image, are mountains would be roughly in this area. So I'm going to put the lens for the right here. You don't have to be perfect because we can change it. But now you can select the brightness if you want it really bright, not, you're not gonna do it that way, but you can change the brightness. I'm going to take the brightness probably around a 100. And let's go to, Let's go to 105, match the 10 five prime. They're easy way to remember that one. And then we'll click. Okay. All right, so here is our lens flare. Now I told you we can remove the black to have to just show the lens flare. We can remove the black with a blending modes. And we'll go down here to the blending mode section and choose screen. And screen is going to get rid of everything that's black. And there we go. So now you can see we have this lens flare here that we can move around and place anywhere we want to. So I mentioned I wanted the lens flare to be right there and we'll put it right there, the top of the mountain there. I can even click Command Control T to scale it up and make it bigger if I wanted to. And I will I'll put it right there. Okay. So we're looking pretty good. One thing we need to change right off the bat is we need to change the color of the lens flare. We want it to be warmer because it's obviously supposed to be the sun. So again, the way I do this most of the time that works out really, really well is getting a photo filter. So I'm gonna go into photo filter and clip that to the sun layer. And now if I change the brightness of it, you can see it warms it up really, really nice. I'm actually going to keep it at a density of one hundred, one hundred here. I can change it later, but that'll just give me an idea of how the sunflower is going to look. So now I can play again with the placement of it. And that looks pretty good. Let's go ahead and blur it out again because you can see these little sun orbs there. We're going to go ahead and blur those out. So I'm going to go click on my my sunflower layer, go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. I don't want to get too crazy with it. I can actually go up to probably around five. Let's make sure we're paying attention to the sun burst as well. So let's, let's stick to five right there. Okay? So I'm gonna keep everything the way it is right now. I might eventually remove his little son orbs. But this looks pretty well as a starting point. So we have, obviously have a lot more to do. But this is a great starting point for our image. Okay, so you see we had a lot of steps that take just to get to this point. And it's looks, looks pretty good. Now we need to add our model in. We need to add our trees in and our birds and do a lot of overall corrections to our image. But this is a great starting point. And hope you enjoyed learning some of those techniques because some of those are really simple techniques that a lot of people don't know of. Especially using the lens flare, especially using the Pen Tool to cut things out. So that is a just a simple way of getting to this point. Now we're gonna go into removing the model and adding a couple little more adjustments like trees and so on, so forth. So let's hop into that node. 7. Section 2.4 Adding Your Main Subject: All right, so now that we may our environment, we've made our scene that we want to put our model in. Now it's actually time to cut out the model from the image that we have and put them in the scene. If you're not familiar with cutting out complex objects like people or anything like that. This might be a little bit tricky, but there are really great tools in Photoshop to help you cut out models and then refine that selection and get them over in the photo that you want to get him into very, very, very easily. So I'm gonna show you how to cut out the model I'm going to put in the birds that we, we found as well and show you how to take out some of the birds and we only have a select few. And then we're going to work on creating a, creating a tree in Photoshop. We're going to make a tree out of nothing in Photoshop, and we're going to put it in the photo as well. So there's a lot to do. Let's go and get into it. All right, so here is where we left off with. Our image. Still looks exactly the same. Still got the warmth kinda going on here in the sky and we're ready to put the model in. And according to our drawing here, we want the model to be in this area. So I'm gonna go over here, my model image. And my, my purpose here is to cut this guy out as neatly as possible all the way down here to the shoe and get this even flat part. Try not to get some of the the asphalt days walk on the payment that is walk around on here and just try to make it as neat as a selection as possible. So just like cutting out the original image with the horizon line, we can take the pen tool and we can go around the modelling, cut that out. But I'm actually going to use the Quick Selection Tool. So I'm gonna go over here to the Quick Selection Tool. Click on there, and I'm going to zoom in pretty far. And you can see I've got a very small size brush from my Quick Selection Tool. And this using a small brush actually helps you get a little bit better of a selection, especially in places, especially with it being fuzzy like this. This is not exactly the clearest image, but still we can make it work. So I'm just gonna go over the start at the head here. I'm just going to go over the image. As you can see, it's kinda starts intelligently selecting the edges of the hair. And the more I go around, the better sort of gets here. You might miss some spots, but this is really just a trial and error process of cutting out this model. And you can see it kind of went too much into the background here. And the way we can change that is actually holding the Alt or Option key on our keyboard, and that will give us a minus symbol and we can paint over that area and take it away. So if you ever get too much into an area that you didn't want to get into, you can always just click the Alt or Option key and just kinda remove it. But now we're going to paint around the hair here. We don't have to get perfect right now because we can always go back and select a better selection later on. I'm just trying to get most of the model as I can. So this is really just going around following the edges as much as possible. You can increase the brush to try to get better, better areas that are more, more like in color and more, more grouped together. But I find going around with a very small quick selection brush gives you a better result overall. So I'm just following all the way down, making sure I get as much as possible. Getting this area over here, you can see how it kind of popped back any of those little corners. So that's good. I got more of the background here that I wanted. So I can go ahead and go back and get that in just a second. But now I'm gonna go down to the hand and the arm. Here we go. I'll go back and fix this area here again, we're just kinda get a, a overall selection here. This is where it might mess up. I'm gonna go in here and get the hand and the fingers. But it seems like go down here to the pants. Most likely it's going to go ahead and it did. It's gonna go ahead and grab this whole area. So we messed up here. So we need to go back and get that as well. So you can see it's not the most perfect tool to select everything right off hand. But you do get, you wouldn't be able to get this kind of selection with the Magic Wand Tool. You definitely wouldn't be able to get this type of selection just going in and painting yourself because you can't do that as well. So I'm just going in here. It's selecting out as much as possible given the shoe here. And overall, the Quick Selection Tool does, do a really great job of selecting just like it, just like you saw here at grab this area here, but then it pop back in and got got what it needed to. So overall, it does do a pretty decent job of selecting kinda exactly what you need. There are just some spots that you might need to take care of. The only way you can really get a super refined selection. It would take a little bit more time, is the pen tool. But again, I wanted to show you a different way because I've already showed you how to use the pen tool and make the selection that way. But I just wanted to show you the quick selection tool as well. So going in here and grabbing the arm, grabbing the upper arm here. Almost done with our basic selection. All right. And we'll go and get this backpack strap here. There we go. All right, so now we kind of need to go over our image to see what we need to correct. So we'll go over here. Pretty much got what we needed to get here. Hair looks good. This area looks pretty decent. Probably needed correct? A little bit the arm, so he did paint a little bit more in this way. There we go, smooths that out. Again. We could spend more time doing this, you know, get really, really, really in depth and going in really close and making sure we get each individual pixel. But there are tools out there to help you once you get your selection somewhat finalized, hold the Alt or Option key and treaded to go in here and get some of this area. You can see it lets me have that their paint that away. Same with this. It up in here. And all this time holding the Alt or Option key on your keyboard. Go down here, that looks pretty good. We'll get some more of the shoe. Would go. Keep going around again. This is just a feeling out process to make sure you got everything will get this part because it did select all this as well. We'll get that in just a second, but making sure we get all of the hand. Definitely when you're making composites like this, cutting out people are intricate subjects like this are probably the most time-consuming part. And that's why I wanted to make a sketch because I didn't want to find a model that could have worked. And then it turns out it didn't work. And I'm pretty sure this model is going to be perfect for what we need. So I'm gonna go back down here. I'm gonna get this little area in here as well. If you want to get more, more intricate with your selection here, you can always shrink the size of the brush. That will help as well. There we go. And we'll go into in between the legs here and give that as well. I see one big selection grabbed most of that into refine it up here. Need to refine it up here. And down here as well. Try grips some of that. And there we go. All right. I'm going to look around one more time just to make sure we got most of it. But overall, it looks like we got what we need. So just look in the marching ants here, that's kinda what that's known as. And it looks pretty good. There we go. Okay. I'm I'm gonna go ahead and accept that one. That one looks pretty good. So I mentioned we have tools that can help you kind of select and refine it. And oddly enough, it's called Select and Mask up here once you have the Quick Selection Tool selected and when you have a selection tool selected, you're going to see an option up here that says Select and Mask. Now when you click on that, you get a different little box and you get awaits you kinda smooth selection and feathers selection. You've seen this before, most likely. So what I'm gonna do is go in here and zoom in a little bit. You can see we have a little bit of that green colored contamination there. I'm gonna go and smooth out my selection. What that's gonna do is smooth out any kind of the, the wrinkles that are in the selection there. Feather a little bit as well. Take the contrast up and that just kinda helps with more defined edge. And I'm going to take the shift edge in a little bit as well. So that's a good starting point for it. Now what we need to do is do a little bit of edge detection. This is going to like intelligent way of trying to get rid of some of these edges that might have a little bit of that contamination with it. Some increase the radius up. And as you can see, as I increase the radius, a lot of that contamination starts going away, still have a little bit more. We can actually go down here to contaminate colors. We can click on that. And that will take away a little bit of that green. And it looks like we have a decent selection here. I'm going to play around with the Smart Radius though. And just see what we have to take the edge in a little bit just to see as well. All right, For now, I think that looks pretty good. I'm okay with that. So I'm gonna go ahead and make sure my output path is set to new layer with layer mask. This is going to allow us again to paint back any of the spots that we might need to correct. So I'm going to click there and click OK. Alright, so now we have our model cutout and as you can see, we miss the spot. Oddly enough, the selection, selected the Alexa button that's on the back of the backpack here. This is why we have the layer mask. So I'm gonna click on the Layer Mask. I'm going to get my, my brush here and I'm going to make sure my brush is set to white for the foreground color. And when it's white, I can just paint that button back in. No need to go back and reselect it. It was just as easy as just painting it back in. All right, so another thing I want to talk about is with a selection, it might look a little weird in this area. And what I mean by that, it looks like the shirt is connected to the pants or the belt here. That looks a little weird. Again, that's why we have a layer mask. And what we can do is actually take our brush and this time make sure our brush is set to a black color for the foreground. And we can take the brush and just kinda paint away and smooth this out. So now it doesn't look as strange as it did before. So again, the selection did what it was, the best it could for getting these type of selections. But there are there's gonna be some times that you need to go around here. It's kinda double-check with your selection to make sure that you got all that it could. We can even get really detailed and go ahead and end here with his shoe lace and kinda cone out some of the shoe lace here. Pain away. This part here. There we go. And for the most part I like this. Well, let me let me get rid of this area here. I just now saw that one. Again. It just takes some time going around and making sure you got a really nice, really nice selection here. Right there. Not too worried about the hands as much. Alright, there we go. I'm going to call that done with our selection. So now what we need to do is get our model on to our road image. So now we're gonna take our model, click on the Move Tool, click on him and just drag them over and put them on our scene. So now you can see we have this model. We can freely move around. We put in our sketch that we want it to be over here. Maybe we want them to be over here. We can feel free to move around anywhere. We want two, now we need to go over placement for our model. As you can see, he's, he might look a little weird if he's down here, he looks really small. And this is where you kind of need to train your eye about, about a perspective. So down here would not be a good spot and put him because he looks really, really tiny down here. Way down here. Just looks really ridiculous. It looks like he's a giant. So you have to kinda play with the placement here. So if I was going to put them on this road, when I put them closer to here, he looks still a little small. And as you move him up, you see that he starts to look a little bit more proportion. So I'm gonna go right here and let's see about placing him right there. We're just doing this right now as a way of putting the model in the, in the, in the image, we can always move around later. We can move anywhere we want to. But right here, if I'm just looking at them on the road, most likely this looks about right. We can probably put them down here a little bit more. But probably right there looks, looks pretty proportional to me. One thing we could do though, is actually make them a little bit taller so we can transform him. So Command or Control T, we can make them a little taller while keeping them in that same spot. So roughly about there maybe. I'll shrink him down just a little bit. So it's all about playing with proportions, especially with images that you haven't shot yourself. You really have to play with the proportions of the images. Okay, so now let's talk about shadows. Really need to get this guy a shadow because he looks, it looks fake, it looks completely, completely fake. So, um, what I'm gonna do is make another duplicate layer. This is going to be very, very similar to what we did with the plane where we duplicated the layer and converted it to a color. But we're going to add one little extra step. So I'm gonna double-click on this image, just like we did with the plane. I'm gonna go to Color Overlay, increase my, my opacity and make sure that's at 100 and change my color to black. And I'm going to click Okay, and here's where we have our kind of silhouetted guy here. And what we can do is click Command or Control T to transform. I'm going to right-click and I'm gonna say flip vertical. Well that's gonna do is give me like a duplicate of the image here. So what I have is basically an up sound upside down version of this guy here. So we need to zoom out a little bit. And we want the shadow to be a little bit over in this area can a skewed a little bit. And so how are we going to do that is with the transform still, still selected here, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to say perspective. And with the perspective I get these different, a different way of handling these little, these little corners here. So as you can see, if I click on this middle one, the arrow shows a left and right arrow. So if I click and drag right, it starts to skew. It starts to be a little bit more, little bit less linear. If I were to use a different kind of tool here. So again, I can skew it a little bit. And I'm trying to get somewhat about a perfect angle, whereas the sun was coming down and hitting him. I'm thinking this is pretty good. And we'll put it right here a little bit into the shoe, though we need to move this layer down, but I'm gonna put it a little bit into the shoe and click Okay, so this is our shadow. Let's go ahead and move it below our model. There we go. And now what we're gonna do is blur it out a little bit. But since I know that I don't want to change anything with this layer, I'm gonna go ahead and right-click on this layer and say Convert to Smart Object. And that's just gonna give me a nice flat layer to play with and we can always change it later, but this is our nice shadow layer. So I'm going to go ahead and play with the blending mode. Now I'm gonna go ahead and try it. Let's try the overlay blending mode. You can see that kinda blends in a little bit. It's kind kinda you can see the asphalt underneath that looks kind of fun. Soft light as well. That's too light of a shadow. We wanted to be pretty dark shadow. So this might be something where we just take normal again, take down the opacity like that. And we'll go down and we will also blur this. I'm going to click on that shadow layer, go to Blur, Gaussian Blur. And this is where we can blur it out so it doesn't look too perfect. So for this particular image, I'm probably going to go with around 20. There we go. So now I mentioned that we were all it's gonna do something else that's a little bit, a little bit different as well. I'm going to click a brand new layer and I'm going to get a brush. I'm gonna make sure my brush is black and it's a fairly decent size. So you can see we have this nice brush right there. So this is where we're going to play with a little bit of the brush details to make it perfect for a shadow brush, I'm going to take the Hardness down to 0. And I'm going to make my angle of the brush or my, my, my roundness of the brush and make it a really nice oval seeing say I grab this handle at the top and I can strike it down. Now it's going to be a really, really nice oval, really flat oval. So that's what we have as far as the shadow goes. So now what we can do is change your opacity to a very low opacity, roughly around 25, a little bit lower on the flow. And this is where we start clicking in the try to get a shadow that's above the guy. So right, there is going to be a shadow maybe over here and I'm undoing, doing a couple of clicks every once in a while and just filling out the brush. There we go. So now it looks like there's a shadow on top of that, you know, where his body was coming down on the, on the, on the road there. But then we also have the linear shadow as well. So I like the way that looks. You can see the before and after adds a little bit more realism to it and it looks pretty good. So now let's do a little bit of clean up with our image. We haven't really named anything or anything like that. So let's go and do a little bit clean up so we can move forward with a very organized photo. This is very important obviously. So let's go ahead and see these are the, these are the layers for our model here. So I'm going to highlight all of those click Command Control G to group them together. And I want to call this model. This is probably going to be our sun flare. Yep. Okay, so we're going to highlight about those as well, command or Control G and say sun flare. And probably don't need to mess with most of these product can mess with the mountain here someone do the same thing here, group those together and just say Milton. And I'm going to keep these on their own individual layer doesn't really bother me as much. So now we can toggle off our model, toggle off our Sun, and we're good to go. So you get, you can tell that the image right now does not mess with the colors. It doesn't go together with the colors of the image right now, again, we're going to mess with the color changes. That's a big part of this, but we're going to do that towards the end. Okay, so now let's add our birds into our image and we're going to click on this bird layer. And I'm going to go and get my move tool and drag this over to our image. And I'm going to put this right on top. And so now we can move this image around when you click Command or Control T to transform this. And let's shrink it down. I don't want the birds to be so big and the photo, but roughly around here. And you can place them anywhere you want to when you're following along with this, not a problem, but one thing we need to get rid of is this white background. I showed you how to get rid of a black background, a pure black background. But with for a white, you'd also use a blending mode. You actually use the multiply blending mode. So I'm gonna click on Multiply and as you can see, all of that white and goes away. Now what we can do is get our layer mask, click on our layer mask, click on our brush. Let's go and reset our brush because we didn't mess with it. And we can get our black color for our Layer Mask. Let's go and reset or a Pasadena flow as well. Black color for our layer mask. And what we can do is just go in here and paint away the birds that we don't want. So I'm just getting rid of all these. They don't really care about this big cluster over here. And I'll paint them away. So I know I want to keep most of these. Let's go and get rid of these guys. I don't really prefer them. Let's get rid of this guy here. Will make them a little bit shorter here someone do that one. So I'm gonna keep these, this group right here. So if I were to zoom out, you can see that they're taken up a little bit of room in this area here. I actually want to shrink them down a little bit more because I just wanted to be a little added effect. I don't want them to be a main focus of the photo. So it looks like they're pretty far away in the image. And right now there are pure black. And that's that's something that I don't prefer when I'm looking at something like a silhouette because probably it would be a pure, pure black. In the image if I was taking the photo. But the way I like to do this, just to, just to sell it a little bit, to not make it as perfect is take the opacity of the layer down to pry round. Probably around 8580, somewhere around there, just enough to where you don't see everything through the birds. And now they look a little bit further away, little bit hazy because they're there the opacity down. So if I go back to the opacity, you can't really tell the difference. Lunch when you're looking at it zoomed out. But again, it's just something I like to do and just make them look a little bit further away and a little bit less defined. Okay, so the last thing we're gonna do for this particular section is we're actually going to create a tree. I've looked around for all the images that I can find. Have really nice trees. I don't really prefer any of them. There probably are some out there, but I don't really prefer any of them, so I'm actually going to create my own. So let me click on the new layer here. And if you're running one of the latest versions of Photoshop CC, you can actually go to Filter Render and you can select tree. Now this gives you a kind of a, a CGI tree maker in a way where you can select different kinds of trees, the light direction, the leaf amount, leaf size, all that stuff. You can actually do that from here. So if I wanted to choose a different tree, I can go in here and choose a cypress tree. And when now we have a cypress tree, and I can go back and choose another one. I could use an ash tree. We have an astronaut, so I can play around with a kind of creating my own tree. Now if this was going to be a focal point of the image, I definitely would not use this because if you zoom in really close, it does look fake. But if it's something that's farther away and just going to be like an accent to the photo. I think this works pretty well. So I'm gonna go through here and see what kind of tree we can put in here. I did like, let's see what a palm tree looks like. We can play with the light direction, we can play with the leaf and we'll make it like really crazy. And this is just kinda fun honestly, to ticket in here and play with trees. Now let's do a cypress three. And I don't really like that one. Let's do an ELB. Okay, So I think it must stick with the elm tree. That's going to be kind of fun because it's kind of a nice big, big rounded top going on over here. So now we get to play with the specifics of the tree. So branch height, we can change that it's going to be it get a little taller and pretty much everything that you change in here is going to really transform the trees. So it's not going to look completely the same every time you change one specific slider. So Let's take the leaf amount up a little bit. We'll take that light direction. Now you don't really need to play with the light direction in this specific example because we're gonna, we're gonna play with a little bit, but it does help to have the darker area on this side because again, the sun is going to be in front of the tree. And so we want a little bit darker on the side that's pointing towards the theoretical camera that's over here. So that looks pretty good. We can play with a lot of this. We can play with the arrangement, so it gets a little varied. See how it does that, but I'm gonna keep it right here. So if you want to copy these settings, if you want this exact same tree going copy these settings down here. So we got a 28 elm tree, an 18 for the light direction, a 58 for the leaf amount. Leaf size is 41, branches, height as 132 branches thickness is 180. Leaf type is 10, and the arrangement is 14.4. So that should get you this exact same tree if you want to use this one. All right, so now that we've done all of that, let's go ahead and click. Okay. And it's going to render our tree. And now here's our tree. And as you can see, if I, again, I just told you if I zoom in really close, it does look really, really fake. However, this is going to be a very small part of the photo. So I'm okay with it being a little fake because honestly after the colon corrections, after the, the depth of field effect that we're going to put into it, It's not going to look different whatsoever. So I'm going to shrink it down because again, it's going to be a very small part of our image. And I want the tree to be over here just according to our drawing. So I'm going to move the tree down here. And this is again where I play with the size of the tree. So it's going to be pretty far away from our model. Sum of put the tree right here. Let's see what we got. Click Enter there. It looks pretty good. Other than the color, it looks pretty good as far as the height goes and the size. So what I'm gonna do is actually create a another treatment or duplicate this by holding the Alt or Option key and clicking on the image and dragging, and that gives you an exact duplicate of it. I'm actually going to shrink this down. Let's make another small tree. But to vary it up a little bit so it doesn't look perfect. I'm going to flip it some a flip it horizontally. There we go. And I'm gonna put it right around there. So now we have two trees, the back there in our scene. And it looks pretty fun. So let's go ahead. Most likely I know I'm not going to mess with both the trees individually, so I have these two layers here. I'm gonna go ahead and combine them on the highlight both of them, and click the command E combination. And that's gonna get you combine them on the same layer and give you an easy way to edit them. So now what I need to do is blend them in with the foreground. Because you have this really harsh edge right here. Let me get my layer mask here. Let me get my brush. It's a black brush with a feathered edge. And I'm just going to click a couple of times towards the bottom here. And what that's gonna do is feather that edge and you can see kind of blends in a little bit more and actually makes it look really nice. Looks like the, the the grass here is over the top of it. So that looks pretty good. And again, it will all look a little bit better once we put in our color adjustments and our color corrections. Okay. So this is where we're at right now. Okay, so you can tell that was a lot of different steps to put those little bitty elements into the photo, but overall it's looking great so far. So now what we need to do is concentrate on the color adjustments and getting everything blended together. And then also do a little bit of depth of field effect. I talked about that where you can tell that in the photo if you're looking at the foreground, which is very, very sharp, you're looking at the background of the road. It's a little bit blurry, but then the mountains are completely sharp as well. So we need to correct that depth of field and make the focus a little bit more realistic. So in the next section we're going to hop in and do all that, finish up the photo and have a final output of our very first real compositing photo. 8. Section 2.5 Finishing the Image: Okay, so here we are back at our image. In this section, we're going to finalize everything. We're going to do all of our color corrections to each individual layer as well as a global color correction. Only the effect that I want to add now that I'm looking at it is actually adding a little bit of fog. So I'm going to put some fog in the image kinda, to, to kinda fuzz out that horizon line to give it a little bit more atmosphere. And then I'm going to go ahead and get through all of the other corrections as far as dodging and burning all the Exposure Adjustments, and then finally outputting our original image based on our drawing. So let's go and hop into Photoshop, and we'll finish this all up. Alright, so here we are in Photoshop again. And the only thing I've done since the last section was I just group these birds together in their own layer as well as the trees. So I have the trees here and the birds here. And that all looks pretty good. So what we're gonna do here is actually colored. Concentrate on the colors of the tree. First of all, the tree, I need to make sure that it blends in a little bit with this, with this somewhat the foreground here, but I don't need to make sure it looks perfect. And so we reason I'm mean, that is because that fog is going to go over the trees anyway. So again, you'll have to make every individual layer perfect. I'm just kinda concentrate on the main subjects. The rest of the stuff should blend in together very, very nicely. So we have the tree layer here. I'm going to click on that. And I'm going to go to a color balance layer. So I'm going go down here and choose color melons. Now my clip, this color balance layer to our tree layer because I don't want it to mess with any other parts of the photo except for the tree. So a clip there. And now I'm going to play with the, mainly the reds and the yellows. Some of that increased the yellows here and the reds just like that. And you can see it starts to blend in a little bit more. Doesn't look as bright and saturated. And that's 11 thing to pay attention to because you don't want it to look too saturated because the rest of the image isn't saturated. So not only do we need to match the, the colors of the image, but we need them actually tones as well. So that was on the mid-tones. Let's go to the shadows. Will play with that as well. Kinda give it a little bit more red, little bit more of a blue, sort of helps with that darkness, that, that tone there. Because again, the sun is right here. So obviously you wouldn't be seeing a lot of the green. So that helps a little bit as well. So overall that looks pretty good. That's a quick, quick change. So if you want to match my settings here, we'll go back to the mid tones and the midtones will be a positive 380 and a negative 18. Then we'll go to the shadows and it'll be a positive 11, 0, and positive 26. I didn't touch the highlights at all, mainly because there's not really a lot of highlights in this image to begin with, but I didn't really touch that at all. So that looks pretty good. So I didn't mention that he wouldn't be as saturated. So let's go ahead and take some saturation down. Let's go back to our adjustment layers down here. And we will choose Hue and Saturation clip that he saturation layer 2 there as well. So it only affects the trees. And we'll just take the trees down a little bit and to saturate them, maybe take the brightness down as well. There we go. There we go, It looks pretty good. Maybe take the brightness up a little bit. And there we go. Area looks pretty good. So again, the fog is in cover this area. Again, it's only just to add a little bit atmosphere. We don't want to be so plane here that there's nothing really to look at. So again, trees are just going to be there. Fog asean cover all of that and that'll be good to go. So those are the trees taking care of right now, let's go hop into the model here. And we're kinda gonna do the same thing that we did with the trees. But we're gonna do a little bit of dodging and burning. So let's go and do the dodging and burning first. Now the way I do my dodging and burning is probably different from most. But I found that it gives you the most control and it gives you pretty much a better result, I think. So I'm gonna go and create a blank layer here. And I'm gonna go get a brush. So I'm going to do some burning first, let me get a dark brush. So again, a black brush. I'm going to make sure my brush hardness is set to 0. So it's a very, very feathered brush. And my opacity and my flow need to be set to around 2025. Somewhere around there. Don't have to be perfect on the numbers. And now we can zoom in to our model and start painting. And as you can see, I'm going to paint over and haven't clipped it or anything like that. But it's starting to darken this side. And the reason I'm darkening this side of the model is because this side is furthest away from the sun. So it would be darker on this side of the model here. And again, I'm painting out in this area, but what we're going to take care of that in just a second. So darkening this area, darkening this area down here, just kinda concentrating on this right side of the model. Let's go and clip it to the model layer. And there we go. It just took away a little bit of that, that excessive spill over that we had there. So I'm going to take down the lightness a little bit for the opacity. So that's still a little bit showing through. So that just darkens up that right side. We can change the blending mode if we wanted to being go to soft light doesn't darken it up too much, even if we take the opacity back up to a 100. But we'll probably good, keep it at overlay. Let's try overlay, darkens up pretty good. Then we'll take the opacity down. Let's take it down to about 75. Somewhere around there. All right, looks pretty good. That darkens up that side. Now we need to make a color burn is what I typically call it, someone create a new layer. Clip this layer to the layers below it in the colorbar is basically going to, going to brighten up and give a little bit more warmth to the left side of the model. And the reason we're doing that is because the sun would be hitting the model would be a little bit more warmer there. So I'm gonna get a nice warm colors and then double-click on my color picker. And I'm gonna choose a nice kind of orange color roughly around there. That looks pretty good. So if you want this exact color, or you can type in the hex code here, D, D, a to 15, and that'll give you this exact color. I'm going to click Okay here. I'm going to take my blending mode. I'm going to use soft light from my blending mode. That'll give it a little bit less intensity. And with almost settings the same as we did with the dodging and burning. Now we can paint over this left side and warm this guy up a little bit. We're going to warm up a lot more than we typically would. It's going to look a little bit like a sunburn in a way. But we're going to back down the opacity to change that. So here's our burned before and after you can see there. And now we're going to take down the opacity and just give a little hint of warmth on that left side. So there we go. Looks pretty good. I like the way that looks at turned out very well. We can also do an overlay again that's going to give a little bit more intensity in the warmth. And we can back that down. But I kinda like the soft light with a little bit more opacity. Let's go about 75 on the opacity. There we go. That's going to sell the effect a little bit more. And let's go ahead while we have the, the color burn here, let's go ahead and warm up a little bit of the other areas. So that's our model so far. Let's go ahead and warm up the mountains. So let's go down here to the mountains area. When you click on a new layer down here, clip that new layer to the layers below it. And now this is going to allow us to kind of burn with some color here on this area. And we'll change our blending mode to soft light. And that just kinda warms up the mountains there. And we'll go and back down the opacity because we don't want to be too crazy, but we just add a little bit of color here. And again, while we're here, let's go ahead and do the road as well. So my click the new layer, clip that blank layer to the road. And then we'll do the same thing and warm that up. And as you can see, because we're clipping the things, it doesn't, it doesn't affect any other part of the image except for what we were clipping will warm the road up a little bit as well. We go and we'll change the blending mode to soft light. You can see it just adds a little bit of, little bit of atmosphere to the image. And there we go. So it kind of looks pretty cool. I like the way that I like the way this is turning out, it looks really nice. So this is so far what we've done to the image. Let's go ahead and take care of the sky now. So let's go, Let's put these layers all together in their own group, my group, the road layers together, Command or Control G. And we'll just call this road. There we go. So now our layers are all in their own individual groups. So that makes it a lot more clean as we can easily find stuff. So let's go to our sky here. This is our sky right here. And we're going to create a new layer again. And this is where we're going to use a clipping mask as well, the new no clipping mask. So it's only going affect the sky. I'm actually going to use a gradient tool. So if I click on the Gradient tool, but I'm going to change the color instead of a yellow. I might change the color to a nice little blue. And the reason is because I like the blue that's up here in the sky. I wanna kinda intensify that just a hair. So I'm gonna drag this down if you don't see, if you don't see what you're, if you're, your gradient line looks like this where it's feathered and goes into an opaque transparency here, you probably need to change your gradient type. So it might be, might look like this. It might be on this first section, make sure it's set to color, foreground color to transparent. And that'll give you this nice little blue transparency. And here's where you can change it to overlay for the blending mode to give it a little bit more punch. Or you do soft light. I'm gonna go with overlay. And I'm going to Command or Control T to transform it, bring it down a little bit right there because I like that blue. And then I'll take down the opacity so it's not as punchy. So again, it gives you that little bit of effect there, but not as, not as saturated. And now that we've done that, let's go ahead and warm up. Let's go to warm up the area right where that sunburst is. It's already kinda warm already, but we're going to intensify it just a little bit. And that way we can do that to match the color, is actually sample a color from the sunburst. So the way you do that is you can actually hold the Alt or Option key. And when you do that, you get a color picker. When you have the brush selected, you have a color picker and now you can just click on a color that you like. And we'll click on this color here. It's kinda like a tan color. And that will paint with that exact same color. So we'll get 0, we've got a soft light here, and we'll just paint with that color. Let's try overlay. See what that looks like. Overlay brightens it up a little bit. There we go. And we'll paint over here as well, not make it look as perfectly even. There we go. So love in the way that looks, looks really, really, really nice. Now, let's go and add our fun fog that we're going to add to this image. Let's go and groupies the gallows, put this as the sky. There we go. We'll put sky there. All right, so now let's go and put our fun fog. And here we're going to go in and put it. Let's put at the top right now, it's going to create a blank layer. And this is only one way to make fog in your photos. This is not the, the, the, it's probably not the best way of doing it, but it's the easiest way to add a really great effect to your photos. There's obviously other ways of getting fog. You can take a regular cloud layer that you could go out your door, door right now and take a picture of the sky and convert those clouds into fog. But right now, we're just going to create it all in Photoshop is probably the easiest way to do it. So the way we do that with our blank layer selected, we're going to go to Edit, Fill. We're going to choose black. And before we go into making our cloud layer, we need to make sure our foreground color is set to white. And the reason for that is because it's going to make the clouds and any color that you choose, any color that is your foreground color. So we need to make sure it's completely white. So with that done, we're gonna go to Filter, render and then clouds. And there we go. So this is where our clouds of like it doesn't really technically look like clouds, but we're going to make it look like fog here. So we need to get rid of the black. So the way we do that is just like we've done with every other, every other adjustment that we made is take down the screen as the blend mode. And there we go. Now this is what our clouds look like. So we can move these around individually wherever we want to in the photo. What we need to do right now is shrink these down to make it look like a flat line, fog, flatline flaw, fog layer. So we're gonna go ahead and click men control T. And I'm gonna grab this center handle down here. And I'm going to shrink this down. You can hold the Alt or Option key on the keyboard to do a proportional constraint here. So I can do that just like there. And I'm going to drag this, I'm actually going to drag this out a little bit. We don't have to worry about it being super detailed because I can see it's starting to stretch everything out because fog is not super detailed. So again, that's something that's an easy way of hiding some stuff. So we'll click Enter there. And now what we can do is choose a layer mask. And this is going to get rid of this harsh edge down here. Get a black brush, a regular black brush. Make sure opacity and our flow is up. And we'll go ahead and paint that harsh edge away. Just like that. Now we have this whole fog area. If we want more fog, which I do in this particular case, if we want more fog, we can just hold the Alt or Option key and click on the fog layer. And it'll create a duplicate of that fog layer. So we have more here. We can do another one just like that. And we can even do another one, make it really, really heavy fog back there. We can obviously lower the opacity and make it a little bit better. But for the most part, this is, this is going to work. So there we go. So now I know that I don't want to group. I don't want to change any of these groups together and individually. So I'm going to highlight all of these little layers and click Command or Control E on our keyboard. And that's going to group them altogether. And you can see it brought back the black. They're easy enough to take care of this. Go down to screen for the blending mode. And here we have everything on our fog on one layer. So now we need to figure out the actual placement of the flog, not particularly in the photo, but in our layers because we want it to be kind of in front of the trees here where we're looking, but in front of the model as well. Because right now it's looking like it's heavy fog behind the model. We don't want that, so we need to probably put it right below the tree layer, right there. And as you can see, that's the wrong placement because it's not covering the trees. So let's move it up one more. There we go. So now it's in front of the model, which is good. And now this one is behind the tree, so that covers the trees area a little bit. Now we can take that opacity down and just add a little bit of haze there. We can actually shrink this down a little bit more like that. And we'll go ahead and blur this out to get real and a little bit more of that detail. So Blur, Gaussian Blur. And we'll start the blurred out a little bit. It only got blurred, blurred too much because then it starts to look like a really bad haze. So we'll go, we'll go roughly around 10 and we'll click. Okay. All right, so there we go. We added our fog. The colors are going to change in just a second, but we've added our Fog, we've added our dodging and burning all of your color adjustments. So now it's time to do our global adjustments. So before we do that real quick, I'm just going to put this in its own group layer here, or fog. I'm going to call that fog. And there we go. Now everything is all neat and nice. Now we need to put our color adjustments. All of our color adjustments are going to go on top of our all our layers. We don't have to worry about clipping anything because we want the global color adjustments to be all on every layer. So let me go down here. I'm gonna start with my favorite thing that I always do is a color filter because I'm want to warm this up a little bit. It matches with the atmosphere about it warming up. So I'm going to take the density of the warming filter and you can choose different warming filters as well. It's going to add a little bit different tone. But I like to choose usually goes between 85 and the LBJ. So I'm going to choose LEA for this one. And I'm going to warm this up a little bit. Around 35 for the density. There we go. And let's go ahead and let's do another color balance adjustment as well because of that, that kind of blend some stuff together. Well, it just makes everything blend in a little bit nicely. So let's do a color balance adjustment. Let me go to color balance. And here's her brood can selectively play with the tones. I'm going to mainly concentrate on adding reds and yellows to the image. So for the mid-tones, I'm going to add a little bit of red and a little bit of yellow here. Let's go ahead and do shadows as well. That's going to warm up the shadow area. We can play with the reds, add a little bit more red tone and make it look like it's really hot outside or something like that. We can play with the magenta as well. Let's go to the highlights here. That's really going to help with the warmth. Little bit more yellow in the warmth, a little bit more red. There we go. I like the way that looks. This is kinda style that I typically like my images to be in. But just because I'm changing these doesn't mean that you have to do it as well. Obviously, if you like a different kind of look, you can obviously apply that. That's not going to hurt my feelings at all. But you're just basically changing the image now to suit your specific style. Okay, So two more steps and then we have a perfectly final image. So what do I want? I need to do now is actually make a copy of all of these layers so I can do some main major adjustments like the the, the, the exposure adjustments, saturation, stuff like that. I usually do that in the Camera Raw Filter. So I need 11 final photo of this. So the way I'm gonna do that is just like we did in the plane, the plane section here. I'm going to highlight all of these layers. And I'm gonna go to Layer, go down here to merge visible. But before I click Merge Visible, I'm going to choose alter option, hold down Alt or option on my keyboard. And that's going to give me a final output. So if I were to delete these or hide these, I still have the photo. So here's where are the photo I'm gonna take into the Camera Raw Filter, go to Filter, and then Camera Raw Filter. So here's where I can do some, some, some basic adjustments to the photon, can take the shadows up to shadows down. I can make it look like a really cool looking photo. Contrast. Take the highlights down or take the, taken up. This is kinda just like the touch-up for the image. Take the saturation down, take it up. I can cool the image down globally that way if I wanted to, even though we just did all that. So this is just a way of doing different things to your photo. One thing I want to talk about is sharpening. All these images are kind of sharpen individually. But just because I want to make sure everything is perfectly sharp, I'm going to do a little bit of sharpening not much around 25. And obviously it depends on the, the, the size of your image, but 25 typically works fairly well. And then we'll go over two. Let's check everything else, make sure everything looks good. We want to do any more color adjustments, exposure up a little bit, take the vibrance and play with that. We can actually make it a desaturated image that looks pretty fun. And then we'll just keep it right around there. So I'm gonna click, Okay, alright, so I'm gonna make a duplicate of this layer. And basically what I have now is this is technically going to be my final output. But I have all of these layers deactivated and my Photoshop file just in case I need to go correct anything later on in the image. If I print this image and something looks a little off or whatever, I can go back and change all of this. So always keep your layers. So now let's do our depth of field effect here. So what I'm gonna do here is click on this top layer. And I'm gonna go over to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. And I want to blur out this image just a little bit to where the models is only going to be in focus. And I'll show you how to do that in just second, but I'm a blur out just a little bit. So roughly. Let's go to five and see what we got. Five looks pretty good, so we'll go to blur that out. Well, let's take a look down a little bit more. Let's go to, let's go to 3.5. There we go. So now this image is blurred, but this one is not. So what we need to do here is actually create a layer mask that goes on top of this. But we want this layer mass to be a blank black layer mask going forward. So how we do that is hold the Alt or Option key on your keyboard and click the Layer Mask button down here. And what that's gonna do is allow you to give a black layer mask into paint back in the areas that you want blurred out. And this is kind of creating a simple depth of field effect. So let me get a Photoshop brush with my opacity and flow at a 100 and my hardness set to 0. And we get a white brush and add with a white brush, I paint over the sky and it blurs out the sky a little bit. And this is just creating a depth of field effect for your image. You can go over the model here. I don't want to be super precise. I can blur out this area of the photo. If I really wanted to get super super detailed about the, the, the, the, the detail about where I'm blurring out. I can get really zoomed in here, get close to the model. Go around the head here. Just like that. Make sure I didn't touch the model. So I go back in here with a white brush, make sure I didn't get his head blurred out. There we go. This is just like it kind of a manual way of doing this. But that's the kind of effect it gives, kind of blurs out everything else. So if you were shooting, for example, with f 2.8 lens or something like that. Or an F, F for probably would actually make the effect as well. If you focused in on the person, the rest of this stuff would be kinda out-of-focus. It would be blurry. Same with the foreground here. A little bit of foreground would be blurry as well. So that just sells the effect. If you don't really want that effect, you can just stick with this one and it looks fine as well. But this one just adds a little bit of realism to the photo. So that is technically our final, final photo. So we basically went from a crude drawing, which you see here all the way to this photo. And we were able to make all this come together based on just pulling stock images from any kind of stock side. So there we go. I hope you guys enjoyed that tutorial. I'm doing some really intermediate compositing techniques. It was really fun to make this, especially going from a very crude drawing, gathering up all the images that we needed, and even creating stuff in Photoshop just with using Photoshop tools. So again, from a very, very basic and pretty bad drawing of what he wanted to, something that really looks awesome and you have endless possibilities with this. I only edit this the way that I would typically edit the photos and making composite. You can obviously put your spin on it. If you can. You can make it a black and white photo just with one click, you can make a different saturations, different kinda color tones, all kinds of stuff. You can do, anything you want with this photo. This was basically just showing you the things that think about the techniques that you could use to really create a awesome compositing image. 9. Section 3.1 Sketching Your Idea Sail Away: All right, For this last section, we're going to create one more composite image that's going to be a tiny bit more advanced. We're still gonna do the same thing of getting a model, getting our scene developed, and putting all the effects in there and doing the color corrections. And again, we're going to draw our image before we get in there. But it's going to be a little bit more difficult because we have to play with maybe we have a model and we need to cut some things out away from the model and make art, make our situation work. So I'll show you what I mean by that. But first let's go draw our image and see what type of image we want to create. I know that I want it to be like a more water seen. Maybe one include a boat in there and I wanted to be much like the one before was a little more sunny, little bit more warm. I want this to be a little bit more of a cooler image. Have a little bit more of a cooler, rainy, gloomy mood to it. So let's go on to hop in and let's draw our image and get our ideas out on paper before we ever happened a Photoshop. Okay, So here we are and what I'm gonna do just like I did before, I'm going to draw out my boundary box so I know I'm gonna make this one a landscape orientated image. So let me go over here and just draw my little box here. And there we go. That's everything we're going to include. We're going include in that box. So now what we're gonna do is, as I said, I want to have a, have a boat in the image. So right in the middle, I'm just going to draw a boat. So I'm going to draw a very simple boat. I'm going to make it like that. We'll draw this one in that boat is going to kind of add an angle. It's not going to be like a sailboat or anything. But I'm a drawn this line down here. So these are the slats of the boat. And let's go ahead and fill this in. And this is the inside of the boat, so we need some depth to the image. All right. Just like that. And so I mentioned I want it to be a water scene, so I'm just gonna go in and draw some, some waves here. It's gonna be kinda rough. Rough wave there. And we'll just, just for fun, drawn a little bit, a little bit of waves there. So that is kind of the basic same, but now we need to put it in our background elements. And maybe we need to put in our main subject right now. Our main subject is the boat. And I want there to be a little bit more interests into it. So for a background, I think I'm just going to include like a big mountain area, just like that. Probably not gonna be that size, but at least we'll have something there. And we'll just make this a known area like that. And over here let's do another one, but let's make it a little smaller. So it's a little further away. So this is kind of our mountain area. Can it looks like a mad face there. So that's our that's our mountain area. Since I wanted to be a little bit more gloomy, I don't need to worry about whether in the background that's probably just going to be a bunch of clouds. So I'm not going to worry about that just yet. But in our boat, I actually do want to have a person in there. So I'm just going to draw a simple, simple person, much like I did with the other ones. So here's the head, here's the neck, and here is the body area. And I'm going to have them sitting in the boat. So this is all I really need to draw for that. And then let's see what else can we put in here to make it a little bit more interesting? Let's say with the boat, we want to actually have like a, I'm thinking maybe have this, have this image at night or really, really gloomy situation. So we're gonna put a light on here. And so we're going to have to make a little, little stand. And this is kinda different. I've never seen this before, but we're just gonna have a little stand here. And we'll put like a little lantern or something, sums the candle or something like that. We'll put a little lantern here. That looks like a fish and let's take that away. Let's draw a little bit better. There we go. A little bit lantern, kinda guiding the way. Let's see. We'll put a name of the boat. So we'll put maybe the name of the boat right here. So put a little name section there to remind me. And let's add some rain to it. Maybe, maybe we want to add some rain to the photo. So I'm actually going to take my brush and make it a smaller brush. And we'll just put some rain coming in. So there we go. And again, I'm doing this really fancy on an iPad, but it basically, it just needs to be on a piece of paper. So there's some rain and let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and do, let's do some fog. So let's make it a little bit of fog here. And honestly, I'm doing a lot of this with the specific brushes and everything new and a lot of this because it's just fun to do. This is just a fun part of the process of creating something. So let's get a little bit of fog here. And I'm going to put a little blue area for the fog. Fog right there. Go. And we'll do some gray here. So I know that it needs to be really, really kinda foggy. Just like that. And let's put a little white little color for a light to light the way. There we go. And we'll even put a little bit of light shining on the water there and on the boat. Okay, So this is kind of our basic image. And since it's raining and we have a guy in a, in the boat, why not give them an umbrella? Why not have them be sailing away? Suddenly aware where he wants to go with an umbrella. So I'm going to make a little note any change my brush. There you go. A little umbrella, stick here, a little poll. And just draw an umbrella. Kind of a big umbrella that lake that, when that big, there we go. And we'll just call it it in. We go. So this is our umbrella. We obviously don't have colors in our image besides a little, the little white in the fog area, but that'll do. But that is about it. That is pretty much it. I will do one little thing here before I call this a good image. A good starting point is I will actually, there we go. I'm actually going to put a shadow right here just to help me remember. Because since this machine, this environment basically is going to be not really lead. It's going to be like an overall LET situation because it's probably going to be overcast. The only shadow that we probably will have to deal with. And the only light burn that we have to deal with this from from this lantern right here. So we're going to have a little bit of shadow. So that's just something to think about as well. So I like the way this looks. Obviously things will probably change as we get going in the, in the image. But this is a pretty decent starting point. So that is our image. That's where we're going to start out with. And so now it's time to find the images. I'm going to go ahead and look through all of the images that I can find the images so we don't have to suffer through that of hours and hours of scouring for, for the perfect image for this. But again, I showed you where I get all my, all my images is pixabay.com and pixels.com. That's pretty much where I get all of the mat. So pretty much if you want to hunt down these images just for yourself to see where they came from. Those are the two sides to go to. But again, I include these images that I found. I'm going to include these in the course so you can download them for you as well and follow along. So now that we have all of the images together, we had our little scene together, Let's hop into Photoshop and start creating this really, really awesome image. So I can show you some awesome tools that you could use to develop your images in the future. 10. Section 3.2 Creating the Environment Part 1: All right, so now that we have our sketch completely done and we found the images for this course. I've found actually the images that I'm going to use and you are free to download those completely all of the images and I'm gonna put together. And this particular video, you are free to download them using the link down below in this section. But if you have images that you want to use for your own purpose as well, maybe have some different type of accent piece that you want to put in the image. Maybe you want to put something in the sky that I'm not including. Feel free to do that with this course. This is totally up to you. I'm only going to show you what I'm going to produce, but you are feel free to produce anything that you want to do. So in this particular video, we're only going to concentrate on two specific pieces for this new photo. And that is the boat and the mountain in the background. If you remember in our drawing, we included a mountain in the back left corner, I believe, of the drawing. So we're going to include that in the photo and we're also going to put the boat in the photo and blending in a little bit and show you some different color adjustments you can do and some curves adjustments that you can do to help it blend in a little bit better as well as adding a little bit of a shadow. So let's go and hop into Photoshop and add our mountain and our boat, start our picture off. Alright, so here we are at our photo and this is the base of the photo. This is the type of waves that I want to use for this particular image. I like these waves, number one because they add a mood. The color is nice. And this is kinda what the whole scene is going to be based off of the kind of desaturated greenish cool tones of this water here. But I also like it because of the sky. The sky is kinda bland. There's not a lot going on. It looks foggy already, So anything that we add to the sky is going to really help what selling the effect. All right, So now let's take a look at our boat image. This is the boat that we're going to use. I'm going to cut this boat out using the pen tool which I demonstrated in the last section. But I'm going to cut this boat out and you're just see how great the pen tool is for cutting out specific detailed things. And I'm also going to show you how to feather the edge a little bit. So it kinda blends in a little bit more. And so this is going to be a good boat to use for a subject. One of the reasons I do like this boat number one, it's because it's a smaller boat. And number two is you can actually see the inside of the boat right here. So that's going to really help them. We put our subject in the boat use there'll be able to see a little bit of it so that it's going to kind of sell the effect a little bit that he's actually in the boat. So that's the boat we're going to use for this particular image. And here is the mountain image. We're going to take this mountain here. We don't really need much around, much around the image, but we just need this, this section right here. And we're going to put that in our photo and that's going to be the mountain that is in the back left corner. So let's go and take it over to the image. So I'm going to click the Move tool and drag it over to our water layer. And as you can see, it comes in kind of small. So the first thing we need to do is actually scale it up. And we need to remove a little bit of the excess image that has round here. So what I'm gonna do is click Command or Control T. And I'm going to scale that up to be a bit larger than it is right now. There's really no rhyme or reason how big I want this to be, but we're going to put it in one size right now. And if we need to change it, we can obviously do that later. So I'm going to put it right here. And one quick trick for getting this to, to be able to see the horizon line so we can kind of place it perfectly. It's take the opacity of the layer down. Do that. We still see the mountain area, but we also see the horizon line of the ocean here. So that gives us a little bit more, little bit more precise judgments here of where to put this. So I like it right there. One thing I want to kinda talk about here when it comes to this as I don't like how it's fading out this way. And again, this is a personal preference, but I would rather have the fade out towards the edge of the image. So what I'm gonna do here is actually click Command or Control T again, right-click and say flip horizontal. So that way this part will be kind of fading out towards the outer part of the image. And I'm going to take it down a little bit here. It is still kind of small. So what I'm gonna do is just scale it up a little bit more to right around here. And actually let's go a little bit larger. Because this is a composite and this is kind of a fantasy image that we're creating. We can make it as large as we want to or small as we want to. And it'll look just fine. So we'll put it right there. Click enter. And elastic or opacity backup. So this is our image now. So what we need to do is get rid of all the excess stuff here. So we're going to try to keep a little bit of this fog here, but get rid of all of this area back here. So the way we're gonna do that is very simply with a layer mask. So I'm going to click on Layer Mask button and I'm going to get a brush and I'm gonna make it a very soft brush, hardness down to 0. And it's going to be a black brush because black will paint away the effect. But also need to make sure my opacity and my flow or 100%. But take all of those up to a 100 percent. And now with this brush, I can just paint away parts around the image. So as you can see, as I do this, I'll make the brush a little larger for a more gradual effect. And I can just kinda click away. And you can see that the mountains starts to fade in a little bit more with the scene. And that's because it's going to, it's kind of a foggy seen already. So it kind of fades in a little bit more. We can go up here, do the same thing, kind of faded and gradually up here. And there we go. As you can see, it works out pretty well. It looks like it's still kinda far away, it's kinda foggy, be retained some of that fog here around the image and it looks pretty good. One thing we can actually do to help it blend in a little bit more because right now it actually looks like the mountains a little bit closer to us than I want it to be actually wanted to look at, gets a little bit farther away. So I can take the opacity down and that's going to blend it in a little bit more, make it look a little bit more misty and foggy. Or I can use a blending mode, so I'm gonna take it and go to the overlay blending mode. And as you can see, because it's an overlay blending mode, it actually blends in with the existing sky. So now it looks like it's really farther away. It's really kinda foggy. And if I wanted to, I can get my white brush again and maybe try to paint some of this back. I don't really like that effect, but that's one thing you can do. If you want to kinda keep more fog over here, you can definitely do that. Okay, So this is kind of what we have so far. So I'm going to just toggle off and on so you can see the difference before and after. You can see there's a little spotter here. We kinda miss only go and get black brush and it's kinda make sure I got all of it around here. Maybe fade that in a little bit more. There we go. All right, looks pretty good for right now. So I'm gonna put this in its own group and I'm gonna click Command or Control G on my keyboard. And that'll put it in a group here. And I'm going to title this left mountain. And the reason I'm doing left mountain because we, in our drawing, we had another mountain in this area. So let's say left mountain. And here we go. I'll go off on. That's what we got so far. So even if we wanted to have a cool-looking mountain image and in this kind of dull don't image already. That's just a cool start to begin with. But let's go in and add the boat. So I go up here to the boat image and I said I'm going to use the pen tool to cut this out. So we grab the Pen tool over here on the left. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And I'm basically just going to follow all the curves around the boat. So just like we did in the last section where I used the sky, uses the Pentel to cut around the sky. We're going to basically do the same thing. This is just gonna be a little bit more intense. So I'm going to start at this back corner here, and I'm just going to click right here and start following the line all the way around the boat. So if I click here, drag along. And it does take a little bit of time to get used to the pencil. If you haven't used again, a program like Illustrator, that is, illustrator does have a pen tool as well. It acts very similar. So this is, this is a reason why I'm more familiar with it. But if you're not familiar with the pen tool, I definitely recommend practicing with it. This is a really great way to practice with it because you're just following the path of this boat. It's some parts are complex and some are not. So especially if I get to this point, you can say have to bend it a little bit. I can bend it by going up or down. And I can bend it a little bit and then I can start making my way up here. To do that, I probably need to change this little handle here, so we have this white handle. And again to change the handle to see the direction of the path. And it needs to go hold the Alt or Option key and it gets a little handle converter here it is. Point that up. And now I'm free to go in a kind of a straighter line up towards the top part of this boat here. So again, just following the path, doing a slight curve around. Just like that. Click here. And because we can feather some of these edges, we don't need to be, you know, like, like right here, I kind of missed that little spot. I can go back in here and correct it by holding the Alt or Option key and dragging this in. But I'm going to feather the edge of the selection. When I make it a selection, I'm going to feather the edge a little bit so that it's going to definitely gonna blend in a little bit better. So now I'm going to find the edge of these little ripples here. Right there. Go down. Now I ran into a spot right here where I'm kinda cutting off the rope. So I don't know if I need to clone out the rope to get rid of it, or I may find a use for it. So I'm going to keep the rope in the image. So I'm just going to click right here and go past it. There we go. And just keep going around like that. And if you're more familiar with the pencil, obviously, you, you're going to have an easier time with this. So you can see again, it kinda went in a little bit too far, so I got to correct it with the handle here and drag it in. Drag this one to kind of straighten it out. And there we go. All right, so now we're getting down to the bottom part of the boat. One thing to think about is when you're looking at your image, you don't want the boat to be sitting on top of the water because obviously the, you know, the boat would be sinking in a little bit of the water anyway. So I'm gonna kinda cut it off at this gray line here. I don't really need to be too precise beyond this gray line. So what I'm gonna do is just click here and just kinda loosely follow the same path. And the reason for that is because I'm going to kind of take away a lot of this when I put the boat in the water because I want the boat to be actually sitting in the water and on top of the water. So just like that and see how fast that was just getting to this other side here. And this is where I can start being more precise. Going around. There we go. We have a couple of little ripples here in this bow of the boat. Loosely following those. And going up to here. And now we'll work our way to connecting our path bin this. And we'll click right there. All right, so now our path is connected. Everything looks good. We can go one more time around the, around the path here to make sure we got make sure we got everything. For the most part looks really, really nice. So down here we got loose with that one. And there we go. I'm okay with the selection here. So now mission to click anywhere on this blue line, I'm a right-click on it. And I'm going to say Make Selection. And this is where we get the option to feather. You can feather it one or two pixels. I recommend one or two pixels depending on the size of your image. So I'm gonna do two pixels and I'm going to click Okay. So that's going to feather the selection. And now it's as easy as removing the boat. It's as easy as just clicking the Layer Mask button down here. And we click the Layer Mask button, and there we go. So now we have our layer mask applied to our image. So if we need to paint back anything we can. But this is basically our cutout boat. So now let's take our boat over to the water layer and we'll put it on the water. Alright, so as you can see, we have a couple of different things we need to take care of here. First of all, the boat is way too large, so let's go ahead and shrink down the size of the boat using Command T to transform it. And we'll just shrink it down a little bit. And this is again where you have too much like the other image. We have to play with the perspective and the scaling, because this is a little too small. This is probably getting close to being right? If you wanted to vote really large, this would be a decent sized to put the boat on there, but then the boat is little out of proportion to the waves. So you've got to pay attention to all of that. So we'll shrink it down to roughly around here. And for right now, I'm going to put the boat right directly pretty much in the middle of the photo. So probably around probably around there. And I can kinda move it down, nudge it down pixel by pixel here. So basically what I'm looking for is kind of this crash here. If you want to follow along this crash of the wave here, I'm going to keep that, so I'm gonna put it right here. And then we'll paint in that crash back. So this is kind of what we're looking at right here. This is a decent size boat. Let's actually take it down a little bit more. Right there. There we go. That looks pretty good. So we'll put it right there. And now it's our job here to paint back in those crashes. And I want to make sure make it look like these crashes are on top of the boat instead of behind the boat. So the way we're gonna do that is we're going to take our layer mask, since it's already there, where we take our layer mask and we're going to get a brush, regular Photoshop brush again, just like we used before. A soft brush. And I'm just going to it's going to be, it's going to be a black brush. I'm gonna go ahead and paint back a little bit. As you can see, it's bringing back some of that waves just right there. And this is not our final step here, but it's just bringing in some of those waves here just to see how it looks. All right, there we go. Let's go a little further. Let's go a little farther up here. All I'm doing is drawing a smooth line across. There we go. All right, you can see that, that looks pretty good, but the weird thing is, is the boat is kinda translucent here. So we're going to kind of effect that a little bit. We're going to change that up a little bit. Some of them do it a little bit more like that. All right, so that looks good. Other than the waves looking invisible in a way that looks pretty good. You can see it's actually looks like it's sitting in the water and sediment on top of the water. So now what we're gonna do is make sure our layer mask is selected again. And this time we're going to choose a different brush. So I'm gonna go over here to my brush picker here. And you can see we have general brushes here. Dry brush is wet brushes, bunch of other brushes. I'm actually going to choose the wet brush. And I'm going to click on the wet media brushes. So I'm actually going to choose the paint box brush here. If you want to follow along, you can see why I'm choosing that has this little weird edge to it and kinda changes every once and awhile. So I want a brush with a very varied edge. And the reason why is because I'm going to go over here, kinda zoom into the photo here. And I'm going to paint back in little bits of the water here. I'm just going to click around. And what it's doing is not making it look as transparent, but also not giving me a really smooth edge either. Because that can really kill that, that effect because, you know, you want, you want to be able to see some of that water crashing, but you don't want to be able to see see through the water when it's hitting the boat. So just like that, we might need to shrink it down a little bit when we get closer. I'm just doing a couple of clicks and try to bring some of that back. Just like that. And we'll look around like in the way the waves look here. I can add more ways by going the other direction. A couple clicks every once in a while to paint in that effect. So the translucent brush that we use, the feathered brush that was effect just to get, you can see what kind of effect does there. Just to get the, just to get the general idea of where we want the, the kind of boat to be in. And this brush helps paint back in that effect. And go over here and look. We go. Alright, so you can see it kind of looks like it's crashing a little bit. It's not as smooth, which we don't want it to be smooth. So that's good. And that looks pretty good. So there we go. So this is our boat not there and this is our boat in the water. All right. So I'm pretty happy with that. Obviously, the boat is a little too saturated for the environment that it's in and it's a little off color. So we're going to correct a little bit of the color now. But before we do that, I'm going to add a small shadow to this side of the boat and maybe a little bit on the back. And the reason I'm doing that is just to make it look like it's now if there's any light anywhere in the environment, there would be a little bit of a shadow over here. So this is not going to be a huge effect that it's going to add, but it's going to add a little bit to the senior. So I'm gonna go get a regular brush again, go to my general brushes here, get a soft brush. And I'm going to enlarge it a little bit and get a black brush for obviously a shadow. And we'll take the flow and the opacity down a little bit. So it's not as harsh of a dark spot that's going to go under there because we can keep clicking to paint more backends. So it's more of a gradual effect. And so I'm just gonna go back here and as you can see, I'm painting it below the boat, the below the boat layer so that it's not touching anywhere on the boat. But it still can go behind like that. And still in front, obviously like this. So this just adds a little bit of a color effect that kind of darkens where the boat is around there. I can even dark and other areas of the image if I wanted to. Just like that, it's kind of a dodging and burning effect, basically what we're doing. So I can do that and I can take down the opacity if I don't like how intense it was, but that's pretty much the scene. I can play with the blending mode as well, do soft light that actually looks pretty cool. Overlays pride going to be too much, but let's keep it soft line actually, let's take our soft light all the way up, toggle off and toggle back on. You can see it just adds a little bit of a color shift around the boat. Also helps draw on the user's eye a little bit to where the scene is going to be. So that is the kind of shadow, shadow effect on our boats. And now let's go and do a curves layer. This is going to be one of the final adjustments we do to the boat right now. So let me go down here, draw my adjustment layers here and I'm gonna go to Curves. Curves will allow me to affect basically where the boat, you know, what part of the bone is highlighted if there's dark spots, I can intensify it a little bit. There's lights, light spots like the bow hair though, the front of the boat, It's going to be kind of too bright so I can darken that down. So let's on the lighter point here. You can say I'm darkening the boat down. I'm also affecting the entire scene, which we don't want to do. Again, we'll use a clipping mask to do that. So we'll hover between both and we'll hold the Alt or Option key and will clip the adjustment layer just to that boat layer. So now anything we do, we will just affect the boat. So you can see I can play with the darkness of the bot, the lightness of the boat. How, how contrasts you to how shadow it is. So you can see it's kind of blending in a little bit better now. And I can continue to play with this, give it a little bit more contrast, a little bit less contrast. And I'm just looking at on the graph. So the top part here at the top right is kinda the really bright white points. And this is kind of the really dark black points and this is everything in between. So we're just messing with these points to try to bring back a little bit more of the natural color in this boat to blend them with the scene. So right there we can see the before and after. You can see how it's kind of bright white. And it was a lot of contrast in it and which kind of darken it down a little bit dark in the contrast. Just like that. So it looks a little hazy, which is actually kind of cool because it affects the scene is affected that way. So let's do one more adjustment because I did mention that it was a little bit too saturated. So I can go down here to my adjustment layers again and go to the hue saturation layer. Clip this layer to the curves layer. So now it's only affecting the boat. And I can take the saturation down a little bit and played the lightness fallen at a lightened up. I don't wanna do that as much, but you can play with that a little bit, but definitely a saturation will bring that saturation down. And then we can go back to our curves and do a little bit of final tweaking here. So roughly around there. So now you can see that it's not as bright or saturated or off white as it used to be. Now it kind of blends in a little bit more. So let's put all of these in their own group here again. So I'll highlight all four of those layers, Command or Control G to put them in their own group. And I'm going to label this one boat. And he can see off and on. So it's adding that shadow around there. It's adding the boat, putting it in the water, desaturating it and putting that curves adjustment on there. So again, this is kind of where we started. This is our boat, and then this is our mountain in the background. All right, so that is a good starting point for our image. We did the boat, we did the mountain, we did a little bit of color effects to try to help them blend in together. But now in the next section, because this is just our base, we have a lot more to do. In our next section, we're going to concentrate on the background mountain. If that is even a mountain anymore, because we might change it. Now we're going to add a little bit of splashing going on in the background and, and kinda concentrate more on the sky and a little bit of the fogginess. And then we can add other elements in there after that. So let's go into the next section where we concentrate a little bit more on the environmental side of the image. And then we'll move into the model. Hi. 11. Section 3.3 Creating the Environment Part 2: All right, So in this section we're going to cover developing our environment a little bit more. Now what I'm gonna do is actually put in the right mountain that we talked about and one that we drew on our paper. But I'm also going to play with the sky, maybe add a little bit of preliminary fog. This is not going to be the last special effects and I'll do, but this'll be a little bit. Just show you the environment that we're going to have. The only concern that I have is that I already have a mountain on the left that we put in just in the last video. I don't know if I want to put another mountain on the right, I might want to put something else. So I'm gonna kinda show you the talk to you through that whole process because I don't want to have two mountains because it just looks a little boring. We can add something else to make it a little better. Even though we did that on our drawing, we still have the option to change it. So let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop and we'll start putting all these pieces together to make a little bit better environment. Okay, So here is exactly where we left off. We still just have our boat and our mountain layer. So the first thing we're gonna do is put in the other mountain. And so I've searched around for all the stock photos I can find. And this is the mountain that I thought that would look okay. So I'm gonna take this mountain. I'm just going to scale it down to where it's not as big as this one because we want it to be a little bit a little bit smaller, make it look almost like it's a canal that goes back this way and sweeps around. So we're gonna put this down here a little bit on the right side. And again, we can shrink the opacity here, lower the opacity so we can see exactly where our horizon line is. And I'm gonna make it roughly around there. And since this image kinda the mountain cuts off here, I'm going to go ahead and put that right up against the right edge of the photo. So as far as size goes, that's probably about as big as I want it to be on this right side. So let me go and click Enter here. And I'm going to put my opacity up. Now, we can do almost the same thing we did to this mountain here as far as blending it into see how it's going to look. So let's go ahead and put the, put an overlay on it and overlay blending mode. It gives you that kinda harsh effect. Well, we can do a soft light. Soft light looks a little bit better. And now we're going to do basically the same thing. We did get a layer mask here and get a soft black brush with the Hardness down to 0. And then we're going to start from the bottom and just paint away, lightly paint away this edge here. And we're just going from the bottom, going a couple lines across. Just like that. It just kind of fades away. And then we're gonna do the same thing with here, but I'm going to click around here just like I did on this mountain. Click around here to just gradually changed this up. And I'm going to do same thing on this side. Kinda make that go away. Now, this mountain is far away. I want, this is kind of how, how I want the mountain to look. This one is far away. This one I want to be even further away. And I want to again make it look like it's this ones, the closest one to us. A canal goes back that way and this is kind of the other other land mass that's over there. So it does look a little far away here, but I'm kinda losing a little bit of definition. And honestly I'm looking at it and I don't know if I like it. I can play with the overlay again and make it pop out a little bit more. Take the opacity down to blend it in a little bit back there. And again, it looks okay, but it just is not the type of effect that I'm picturing in my mind. I know I wrote it down on paper of what I want it to be, but I'm looking at it now and honestly it just looks a little boring. So I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep this. So let me go ahead and just deactivate there. But I also found an idea of putting a light house and the back, a small lighthouse. So I have this image here. That is a nice lighthouse. Again, it's going to butt up against the right side of the image. But all I really need is this lighthouse. I don't need anything else over here. And I'm not even sure if I need the people. So have these people here, they're prominent and even be seen because this image is going to be so small. But I might need to get rid of this guy here. But as you can see, it probably was going to add a little bit more interests to the photo. Let's go ahead and shrink this down. Kinda where this other other hill was, this other mountain was going to be. And we'll move it over. And let's lower the opacity again so we can see. So we're gonna put our rocks here, kind of it's going to be almost right on the edge. Let's check the size that's a little bit too large. So let's pop it down here. Again, check with our horizon. And let's go ahead and say that. That works pretty well. So let's keep it there. That's the probably about the size that we need because I mean, it's probably about roughly around half the size of the mountain, so that works out pretty well. So how are we going to blend this in together? Almost exactly the same way we've done everything else. We did this mountain, the mountain before, this one, we're gonna go ahead and use a blending mode. A lot of times these blending modes can help you blend in a lot of things very, very nicely. So let's do an overlay blending mode. And you can see it still keeps that form. It still keeps it that nice, crisp edge of the lighthouse. But we can just go and paint away the rest of this stuff. And it looks like it's already far away. So let's go and do that. Let's go get a Layer Mask, get our black brush, same one that we've been using and just start painting that away. Essentially, it's a really feathered edge. It's going away very, very nicely. Can't really even tell it in the water. And again, this is. This is an object that's so far away perspective to this mountain over here that it looks actually pretty good at blends in very, very, very nicely. The only thing I don't like now that I'm looking at it is this flag. The flag is not blowing it all. Which if the water looks like this, the most likely that flag would be blowing. So I'm just going to go in and remove it always like and put it into another flag if I wanted to. But I'm just gonna go ahead and remove it and just top it off right there. So there we go. So again, that's something to think about as well. Just because you found something that blends in really, really nicely with this, doesn't mean that everything is perfect. I mean, you have the flag there that it wasn't blowing. And that way, if somebody looked at that really, really close and in depth, they would see that there is not a flight blowing back there. So it would be that would it be a dead giveaway on the composite? So I liked the way that looks. Now, again, I don't I don't know if I mind the people there, but I can get rid of them. I can try to see if it'll let me take him away with the blending mode here. If I start doing that, then start to get a little bit of discoloration there. Somebody bring that person back and I'll decide what to do with them later and just see what happens. But most likely we're gonna put some fog back here to add to this fog. And it's going to blow out some of this anyway. So you weren't going to really, really be able to tell. And again, people honestly could be standing out there if they wanted to. And there's nothing wrong with that. So that's a pretty good start right there for the lighthouse. So I like the way that looks. Now that I like the way that looks, we can toggle back the mountain. See which one we prefer. Do we want the mountain there or do we want the lighthouse? I'm gonna say the lighthouse, but if you prefer the mountain, that is totally fine, you can stick with it. So since I know I'm just going to use the lighthouse, I'm not going to keep this layer anymore. I'm gonna go ahead and just delete that layer. And now I can put this one on its own group. So Command or Control G. And I will call this lighthouse. There we go. So there we go. Looks, looks pretty good. So now we're going to have some fog back there and it's going to blend in really nicely with this because they had a lot of fog over here, but not a whole lot over here. So we're going to blend that in very well. Okay, So now let's concentrate on our sky here and a little bit of the foreground, midground right here. So I have this sky image. And again, these are all available for you to download for free so you can check them out and use these exact images. I'm going to drag this over here. And I'm going to do two different things with this sky layer. So I'm going to drag this down here a little bit and scale it. And you can kinda see that it's really light up here and then very, very dark right here. So this is going to go to kinda give me two different, two different task accomplished here. So what I'm going to do is actually stretch this out. And because this is going to be somewhat of a fog image, you don't really need to worry about the distortion because it's going to be so transparent and look like fog that it really won't matter. So again, I'm gonna click Enter here and just have this distortion here and have this image. And again, I'm a play with the blending mode. A blending mode will do a lot of different things. So let's, let's change it to soft light and see what happens. So you can see it really kinda darken up this bottom part of the image. But if we toggle it off, toggle back on, we have a little bit of fog going on back here. I don't know if I necessarily like that as much. But let's try overlay. Overlay gives you a little bit more fog in this area here, but it also messes with this. We can paint that away. But for this purpose we probably have to stick with soft light. And that's just going to add a touch of fog in this little midground here. So let's go ahead and look at the image full screen here you can see it looks pretty nice, kinda gives you a little bit of action going on this way. You can even scale it this way, drag it out, try to find that perfect pattern there and that looks good. So now what we're gonna do is actually drag over the image again, the same image. We're gonna go back here and drag it over again and see that, that kinda covered the whole sky. And see that kinda covered the whole image this time we're just going to use it on the sky. So we're kinda making this image work to two different ways for us. So you don't necessarily have to find an image for each specific part. You can actually make one image do double work. So for this one we're going to try to change to a different, Let's try screen. That's going to get rid of a lot of stuff. That's a really foggy image. I don't know if that's what we want to keep that. So let's go down to overlay again, overlays going to add a little bit more in that sky. And it does a really good job of darkening some of this up and darkening that stuff back there to make it look like it's part of the fog. Or we could actually go back to normal. And we can just start taking the opacity down a little bit of a normal layer. And that's going to bring in a little bit of that sky there. So let's go ahead and paint away. Let's use a layer mask to paint away some of this and see what we got here. Some that increase my brush pretty large because of a lot of area to paint away. And I'll paint away the part that's covering the mountain a little bit there. And I'm not dragging and drawing out like this. I'm not doing that. I'm clicking in certain spots. Let me get a lump little bit larger here. So again, this just adds a little bit of texture to that sky there. And that looks pretty good. I'm, I'm liking the way that looks. So this is kind of how our environment is coming out. So a couple of things we could do, we could actually add for the lighthouse, we can actually add a little bit of a light back here that's kinda trying to shine through the haze. We can do that in a little special effects. We can do a lot of different things, but this was just to kind of develop our environments. So we still have to put the model in there. We still have to put any, any special effects like rain, more fogged and maybe cover up this area because this is really foggy, but this is probably going to be foggy as well. So we've got to put fog in this area. We have that little light that we put it what to put on there and we have a little umbrella that the guy's holding. So again, we've got a lot to do, but that shows you how you can quickly develop your environment in your image and quickly add some interesting effects on top of the mountain that we already added originally, but we saw that we didn't like the other mountain, even though we drew one in our photo. Once we actually got it in there, didn't it didn't look, it wasn't exciting enough for me at least, so I replaced it with something else. So you have the boat here, you have a little bit more visual interest in the background. And it all is going to work very, very well. So now we're gonna go into putting the model in and putting a little bit of accessories that the model is going to have. And then adding a little bit more special effects to try to further this image along and see what kind of image we're developing now. 12. Section 3.4 Adding the Main Subject: All right, So now we're gonna go over probably one of the harder parts of this composite and that's going to be putting the model in the boat. Now the reason it's gonna be kinda hard as because we had to find an image that was that would allow a person to be sitting in the boat. And I think I found the right one. But then we also need to put the little the little adjustments there. We need to put the, the, the, the umbrella that we drew in our image. We need to put that over the person because eventually we're going to add rain. So it'd be kinda cool to have the rain hitting, but he's under the umbrella safe, nice and nice and dry. So we're going to add the umbrella to the person. And we'll probably finish up a lot of the boat as well. So we do have that light that we want to add to the boat. So I'm thinking about going ahead and adding that light and seeing the kind of effect that we can get to it. I don't know exactly how I'm going to add that light, but we're gonna go through it together and see what we can do. So again, download these images, follow along with us. And let's go ahead and jump into Photoshop and start adding our model to our boat. Okay, so here's basically where we left off. We still got the bow, we still at the fog that we added here, you can see we toggle that off, toggle back on. That is all of our fog there that we're going to add just right now. Probably going to add a little more because we want this to be a super moody image. But again, we're going to concentrate just on the model. So this is the model photo that I found. And the reason I like this one was number one because of the, the, the natural colors in the image. And it kinda matches the color tone that we're going for. But it also shows a guy that's kinda, kinda sitting. So picture him sitting on a boat and maybe he's sitting on a bench and the boat or something like that. So I think this is going to work out very well. Another thing that I really like is because we do want to add that umbrella in his hands. His hands are sort of free. They're open. So maybe we can put the umbrella coming out of this hand and popping out and covering them up. So the way we're going to cover this guy up with the umbrella and get them in the boat and everything is first we need to cut them out. So that's going to be the harder part. What am I actually going to do is show you a different technique for cutting out and this, and this is more the manual way of doing it. I probably would do this a totally different way. But I'm going to show you that even if you don't want to use any tool in Photoshop, you could actually just use a layer mask and paint it away. As easy as that sounds. Kinda take your model out. So how I'm going to do this exactly is to take a elasto tool just to regular Lasso Tool. And I'm going to go around the model just like this. And it's very loose as you can tell. We're going to move around the model. Once I get down here, I can be a little bit more loose with it because most of this part down here under, under his hands is not going to be seen. So again, just going around the model and there we go. So now what we can do is just do a regular old copy and paste. We can click Command or Control C to copy. And we can go over to our main image that we're creating and say command or control V to paste. And there is, he's very, very large though, so we need to scale him down. So we're going to click Command Control T to transform and scale him back. So this is again, we're not, that trick comes into play where you're taking your passage down. Because we wanted just kinda play with him and make sure that he's proportional to the boat. And also make sure he's in the right spot of the boat. So probably I want to make sure his hands or our scene. So it might be around here or here. We've got to figure out what we're going to place them. I'm going to put him shrink them down roughly to around here. Let's see how that works. And his hands probably won't be seen as well. But we can move them down a little bit on the boat and maybe shrink them down a little bit more. And we'll click Enter to accept that, we'll take our opacity up. And just to see where we're at as far as where he's going to be placed. We can go ahead and choose the layer mask here. And we'll get a regular black brush again. Most of the time when we're using a layer mask, we're just using a standard feathered black and white brush. And so with my black brush with the hardness set to 0 again, I'm just gonna go ahead and paint down this area and get this away so I can see what he's going to look like sitting in this boat. Shrink my brush down a little bit so I can get in here. And I'm not being too perfect with this because this is only just for a visual for me to see how well he's going to place in this boat. So let's say he's going to sit right there. It actually looks pretty decent as far as the size goes, the size of him. If he want to scale him up, we got a two options. Basically we can just click Command or Control T here and just scale them up this way. But you can see that we stepped to add more back to him. But there actually is another way of doing this. You can see that if we go over here to our IR layer, we have the guy layer here. We have a chain link that's in-between this adjustment layer. What this chain link means is that these just these adjustments are locked. So if we unlock these adjustments, we can actually click on our model, not our adjustment layer, but our model. And now we can scale them up. And you can see that that adjustment layer effect is still there. So again, we can scale them up just a tiny bit more. Not a whole lot. But probably around there. And we'll click Enter and see what we got. So that looks pretty good. Again, we can always change it, but for right now that actually it looks pretty good. So let me go and click between those two layers again to add that chain back so everything is locked into place. And now we'll go in here and basically we just do exactly what we did down here. We're gonna take our black brush and just go around our model with a feathered brush and paint it away. Now again, I wouldn't do this all the time, especially not in cases like this where I need to be a pretty precise, but there are some things in this image that I can probably get rid of. So for example, is this hair that's flinging all over the place. We can probably go and get rid of that because it's really not adding much to the image. And with this feathered brush, it actually feathers in fairly nicely. So just like that. And once we get past the, the head of the model, it's going to be a little bit easier because we have nice, clean lines that we can follow. There we go. And with the head, especially this top part where the hair is the umbrella is actually going to cover a little bit probably around where his hair line starts right there. It's actually going to cover that. So this part right here does, it doesn't really, it doesn't really mean much. But we still want to be as neat as we possibly can. So we'll go ahead and get this other piece of hair back here that's kinda flying away. We don't have to worry about that one. There we go. And if I'm doing this, usually what I try to do if I if I if I'm not taking my time, if I'm trying to hurry through it, what I'll do is I'll go around the edge like this and not worry about these excess sections over here. Because then I'll go and write a, you know, basically right after I paint away all the edges, I'll go back and take those away. So my, my first concern here is just going around the edges. And you can see that I'm actually zoomed in pretty, pretty good amount. Kinda see that pixel view here. I could have done this on the image before I drag it over. But I kinda like the, uh, kinda like being able to see the guy in the boat here almost real time as I'm, as I'm drawing them away. So just doing this can these little spots here. And even if I'm doing this, this way are the direct selection tool. It's still, it's still looking at that kind of time consuming thing because doing this as you got to be pretty precise in order to sell this effect. But even if I had to do the direct selection tool, I still would have had to take away a lot of different things and correct some things. I could use the Pen tool before, but I just wanted to show you a different way of doing this. So getting rid of all this excess over here, I can enlarge my brush and get rid of that. So just doing that one side, you can see how well it turned out, just painting it out manually. There are some spots are really like a probably get rid of it because it's kinda it's kinda uneven. But again, make the brush a little bigger and had a feather that in there. I always try to use a feathered brush as much as possible because that allows me to have a little bit more flexibility. Even if I'm going kind of fast like I am right now. You can see I'm just painting this away. And it's not looking too terrible because it's a feathered brush. So we'll go over here and follow this color down. Just like that. Looks pretty good. Start to take shape here. Shoulder, kind of round that off a little bit. And there we go. All right, so now let's fix this area right here. So we'll get a white brush because we want to paint back more of him. And we'll just run this white brush along this edge. See we're messing up there. It also helps if you have like a PIN pad, like a bamboo pen pad that you can draw with because it's better. Get a better result when doing that, a lot of compositing artists actually use the patents that have a mouse, a traditional mouse, because it gives you a little bit more control, a bit more freedom to move naturally. But I like to stick with a mouse because that's what I'm used to. So there we go. Okay, so this is our model sitting in our boat. Pretty simple. So this is before, this is after. And you can see just because of the natural color tones of the original image, he actually looks like he kinda belongs there in a way. So that's, that actually works out pretty well. All right, so we got our model in there. Let's go and add the umbrella in there as well, just to kinda get that out of the way and will almost be done with the model. So I have this umbrella here and thankfully it's on a transparent background, so we don't have to cut this out. But I do want to change the color. I don't want it to be black. That just seems a little too boring to me. So to do that, I'm gonna go and click the umbrella and move it over. And I'm going to put it in the image. And I'm going to, obviously that's way too large, so I need to go ahead and scale this down. And again, I'm looking for it to be a little bit more proportional. And as you can see, it's cutting off the guy's forehead there. And that's okay because that's what we want to actually happen. We want we want him to look like he's under the umbrella and not behind it like he does now. So I'm gonna kinda play with the angle a little bit here. You can turn it around. Play with the angle of what we're doing is trying to align up his hand with his handle. We can even lose some of the handle because we don't really need that, but we don't want to take away too much of his eyes and we also don't want the umbrella to be pretty massive. So I can play with the angle here and the handle length. So let's go roughly to where his eyes We're pregnant. It covers eyes up a little bit with this back portion, but we're going to bring that back in. So I think I like the size of the umbrella. There. There we go. Alright, so let's go ahead and play with this one. We can change the size a little bit later if we need to. But for the most part, I like kinda like the way that looks. So we'll we'll now work on getting the guy in the umbrella or under the umbrella rather than behind them. Okay, so how are we need to do that basically is again with another layer mask. Basically if you've learned layer mask, if you can conquer layer mask, you're gonna be able to do a lot in Photoshop. So they really can't control everything in a way. So we're going to click the Layer Mask down here. And what we need to actually do is paint away the umbrella. So we're going to paint away the back of the umbrella. But as soon as we start getting into this darker, darker black part area, that's where we're going to stop painting away. If he kinda see what I mean here. If I'm starting to paint into his face here. And I don't want if I'm losing the umbrella here, I can paint it back. But as soon as I get up here, that then starts to look bad because now it's he's in front of the whole umbrella. So we need to make him look like he's inside the umbrella and just stop at this front edge right there. And now we can continue to paint along that edge. Just like that. We'll get him under the umbrella and then we'll paint back the the rest of it that kinda got away from us here. So there we go. And this kinda shows you that we can actually move the umbrella down a little bit towards covering more of his forehead. So we'll pick back in more of the umbrella switching to a white color. And we'll bring this back here just like that kind of follow around his head. There we go. And bring this back as well. There you go. Now that he looks like he's in the umbrella now we all need to do just kinda move the umbrella down and see the room that we have. So we're gonna go right around here. And I'm actually click Command or Control T again to kind of just slightly nudge it left and put it right there. All right, so that looks pretty good. The size of the embryo looks pretty good. So now we need to go back to our layer mask. And we need to make sure that we have the clean-up area back here. We're kinda moved around. So we lost a little bit of the shoulder. So we're bringing that back. All about details when it comes to the little elements like this, creating a, creating a scene. Just like we've been doing it. The waves and the, and the, and the mountains and stuff, that's pretty easy. But when it comes to details like this, this is the part where you have to kind of spend your time getting in here and really, really thinking about it. What paint away this edge to make it more of a straight edge here. And there we go. All right, so now he's under the umbrella. It looks looks pretty nice. Looks cold. But it looks pretty good. So now let's go and take the, the handle here. We'll paint away that. And basically we're just going to go from this point here. We'll go take this away. But we'll give him this little sliver of the handle here. Paint it away from his hand. There we go. So now it kinda looks like he's holding the umbrella. Let's go and paint that back way as well. So it looks like it's kinda whole number I'll hand it's, it's kinda it's a small touch, but you still want to make sure that he's he's looking like he's holding it. So that is our umbrella. That's the guy and that's our umbrella here. So now let's go and change the color of the umbrella. There's really a couple of ways that you could do this. And there's no right or wrong way, but there's one way that I'll do it that's fairly easy. And that is using a hue saturation adjustment layer. So let me go down here to our adjustment layers. I'm going to click on hue saturation. And I'm going to, first of all, I'm going to go in and clip that to our umbrella. So on the click, clip it there. And now I'm going to click colorize. It seems like it click colorize. I can start messing with the color of the umbrella. So I'd actually do like the red. I think the red looks really nice. The only issue is we have red showing up in the poll here and we want that to be black still. So we're going to paint that away using a layer mask as well, but we can play with the colors. I think I'm actually really liking the red. I don't want it to be too saturated. But in this scene, really gloomy, gloomy, moody, mountainous water ranges and everything. This actually looks really nice. It adds that little splash of color. So I'm going to take the color down a little bit, just a desaturated touch, but I'm gonna keep thinking, wanna keep that red color. Let's brighten it back up. There we go. Okay, I really like the red color really shows off well, so let's go ahead and paint back. It comes with an adjustment layer. So let's go to pane back that poll to make it look black again. So with a black brush, I'm just gonna go in here and make sure that that is going to be black. So this is my require you to zoom in a little bit like that. We can actually go all the way down. There we go. Because this is not touching anything. We can actually just paint it away. Don't have to be super precise. We only time we need to be precise is up in this area. So there we go. Now we have our red umbrella and actually it looks pretty cool. I actually like the way that looks. So there's a couple of small things we need to do because it just isn't a matter of adding the umbrella. We actually need to add shadows as well. Shadows are key in this. So we have our umbrella here, a red umbrella. We need to put our shadow below the umbrella. So I'm gonna go and create a layer right here. And this shadow is gonna kinda go on the guy's forehead and maybe a little bit on this, this area. So let me get a black brush. I'm going to click the D key on my keyboard. That's, that's going to take you to the default colors on your brush. So I have a black brush year. It's feathered and that's the, that's kinda how I want it to be. So it's going to look like that. And what I'm taking my opacity, I'm going to bring that down to around 25, same with the flow to around 2025. And here's where I'm gonna go in here and just kinda start painting away. And adding a little bit of color are a little bit of darkness really to the guy's forehead to make it look like he's under the umbrella that's going to sell it a little bit. You can see just that little effect. This kind of looks too crisp. He's got a little bit of darkness going on there. So that actually really helps take the opacity down a little bit. We can do the shadows on the shoulders. And maybe a little bit down here just, just to add some little different touches. Now what it's doing is it's actually affecting the water and everything around it. So let's go ahead and clip it to our model. And there we go. Now it's only going to affect our model. So that's kinda cool, kinda gives that little fade shade effect right there, right above the eyes. So that looks pretty cool. So I really like the way that looks. Let's go ahead and add a shadow back here while we're at it. I'm going to add it to the boat kinda behind him. So he looks like he's still sitting in the boat there. So let's go find our boat. And we're going to create another layer here. And I'm gonna make a new layer, brand new layer. And I'm going to paint on the boat back here. And you can see it's affecting a lot around it, but that's okay because we're going to take care of that. There we go. We can do a blending mode to kind of blend it in a little bit more, make it darker. And then we can clip it. And now it's only going to affect that boat area. Now it is affecting this front part here. I don't know if I like the way that looks. I'll take the opacity down and we'll take our adjustment layer here. We're going to create another adjustment layer. Get a standard black brush with a capacity of 100 and a flow of 100, shrink it down. And we'll just remove that effect to that boat area. Just like that. Pregnant a little bit too much. So we'll zoom in here. Just like that and area. Alright, so now he's got a little shadow there. We've got a couple shadows on his face. Looks pretty good. So that looks pretty decent for right now. But what I will do is actually kinda take care of him a little bit because he's still even though it looks like he belongs in the scene, he still is a little bit too, too saturated for the scene. And he also is kind of has too much contrast because if this were a regular image that you were taking a photo of, he would not have that much contrast, I would assume and is in his jacket there. So I'm gonna go ahead and find our model here. So this is our model right here, and I'm going to create a curves layer. So let me click on that adjustment layer with the shadows. I'm, I click on top of that one. Good, our adjustment layers here and go to Curves. And my clip that to there. And here's where I can play with the curves of the model. You can see I can take away the contrast, add more contrast. And this is where I'm going to take a little bit of that contrast out of them and have them fade out a little bit. And I'm just playing with, playing with the white and black values here. Like go zoom out a little bit, it looks a little bit better. It actually makes the shadow a little bit too harsh. So we'll go ahead and take the shadow down a little bit after we get done doing this. But for the most part, I think that pretty much took care of it. It's not a huge effect. So a toggle it off, toggle it back on, and you can see that he's a little bit less saturated, a little bit less contrast these. So if you want to follow this line, it's kinda hard to tell, but basically create a point kind of almost halfway, kinda drag it up a little bit, take a little bit of the blues out to take a little bit of the blacks out. And then take this other line at the kinda of a white point here and just kind of drag it, drag it down a little bit of drag it up roughly around here. So it's almost a straight line Here's taken out a little bit of that contrast. So I mentioned the shadows a little bit too harsh. So let's go over here. And I'll just take the opacity of that shadow down a little bit. So there we go. So this is what we got so far and I think it actually looks pretty well. Okay, so the last thing I'm going to do is actually apply the lantern, the little, the little light that we want on the front of the boat. And I've looked at everything that I can I can think of when it comes to adding that light there. And I don't really like the drawing that I made. Like a little poll sticking out here. I don't like that. But what I am going to do is actually utilize this rope. It's on the front of the boat. If it wasn't for this rope, I would probably just like cut this out. And for one for the light actually I will just cut this out and clone it out, out, out of the image. But since it's already there, I'm actually going to use it as a part of our scene. So I have this particular lantern here that's kind of a CGI land or not, can show it to you here. Full image. It's actually a CGI lantern. It's not really that high reds, but it will do a really great job as a very small detail in the photo. So I'm going to shrink it down a pretty good amount. Go over to our image and take the opacity down. Because what I'm looking for is a place to add this handle and have it knotted and hang off of the boat. So I'm going to shrink it down a pretty good ways. And I'm going to utilize this last knot in the rope here. So now I need to check the size of the lantern and obviously needs to be a little bit bigger than that. So I'll put it right there. And let's see how that looks. We'll have it kinda hanging off to the left or tilting to the left because you don't want it to be super straight on like that, that looks fake, but because the waters are so rough, It's probably swinging all over the place, so this will be a good spot for it. So we'll put it right there and check the size. Looks good. We'll go and click Enter. And we'll take the opacity all the way up. So what we need to do is actually get rid of the white area. And one way to do that is actually just using a blending mode. We can actually use one blending mode to get rid of the white in the image. It also take away a little bit of the image by itself, but we can actually come back and fix that. So I'm going to take the land and image and I'm going to choose a blending mode of multiply. And you can see that takes away the white in the image. Now you might be saying, well, it looks a little, little see-through, a little weird. We're going to take care of that in just a second, but I'm going to show you how to do that as well. But There's also a little faint white box that's kind of going around the image but toggled off, toggle it back on. You can see it this little white box area. I'm just going to apply a adjustment layer or layer mask. Let me get my black brush, black feather brush, paint that away. Just like that. So now that white box, faint white boxes gone. Don't wanna get too close because I actually just kinda take away a little bit of that lantern. It's going to go around the image just like that. And while I'm here, I'm going to go ahead and paint away a part of this handles. I'm zoomed in really far and I'm going to take away a part of this handle that because of this handle would actually be going through that rope. So just like that, I'm going to keep it there. I'm going to keep the rest of the rope. It's not really hurting anything. So that is our lantern added to our boat. But now that I'm looking at it once it's in the group and I have kinda my eyes of kinda rested on something else and it's not just looking at this, I think this size is a little off. So let's take the size and scale it up a little bit too roughly around there. And we'll put this back over there, kinda size it back. That looks a lot, lot better. So now let's go back to our rope and pain in a little bit more of our rope because we actually enlarged it. And we'll go over here, paint that in, paint that in. There we go. All right, so this is what we have right now with our boat light there. We need actually lighted up and put some shadows around it. But now we're just gonna kinda concentrate on some other things in the next video where we talk about adding special effects. All right, so as you can see, we did a lot of different steps to make that one part of the image very special. We added the umbrella, we had the model. We got everything in there, the lantern, it looks good. So now we need to add all of the cool special effects like the rain, the lights. I think I'm going to add a light to the lighthouse as well. Just add a little bit of special effects to it. And then also do a lot of the color contrast adjustments as we did with the previous photo that we made. And get all of that duns, we can create a final image. So let's roll into the last video to get our final image ready. 13. Section 3.5 Special Effects and Final Edits: All right, So now it is time to finally wrap up this image and get are really awesome, fantastic composite image put together. So we're going to add all the special effects. We're going to add the rain. We're going to add the lights. We're going to add a little bit more fog and then do some overall color contrast adjustments to get everything wrapped up together. So without further ado, let's go and get in Photoshop and finalizes the image. All right, so now we're going to pick up exactly where we left off. And the first thing I want to do before I do anything that I talked about as far as the special effects is I want to clean up our little a document a little bit. So we have we have the fog here. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and label this fog. So my group these together. So I'm gonna do Command or Control G to group these together. And we call this fog. Here we have our model and see what goes with our model, that we have our curves adjustment. We also have our shadow, you can see there. So with our model, I'm going to go ahead and group these together as well, these three layers, Command or Control G. And we'll call this model. And then now we have the little lantern. And then some now we have the umbrella here. And we're gonna go ahead and put those together, command or Control G. And we're going to call this umbrella. There we go. Alright, so now our documents cleaned up. So now we can go all the way back to basically where we started. And now we are right here. So let's go and add our light first. I'm gonna go ahead and add the light to the lanterns. He can kinda see the thought process of this. So this lantern image is actually on the boat. So I'm going to expand the boat here and this is our lantern. So the way we're gonna do this as much like we're gonna do the same effect when we add the light to the lighthouse. So I'm gonna go get right here and I'm gonna create a brand new layer. And I'm going to fill this layer with black. So it's going to be pure blacks and go to Edit, Fill. And then black. So roughly where the, where the, the, the little lantern is roughly around this area. So what I'm gonna do is go to Filter render and then go to lens flare. And you might notice this is almost the same thing we did in the last image that we created, making a sunflower effect. We're doing almost the same exact thing. But we are creating a, a kind of a light that's coming off of the lantern. So again, I'm using 105 prime, that's usually the one that I use. And I'm doing a brightness of a round 30. So I'm gonna click OK here. And I put it roughly in that area of where the, where the lantern is. We can always change that obviously, but let's take our blending mode and we'll change our blending mode to screen. So I'm gonna go here and click screen. And you can see we're a little bit off. So now we're just gonna move it up to or lantern. And now it looks like there's a light coming from the lantern. We form, will it be a little bit larger? We can actually scale this up, do a transform, and scale it up a little bit, and move it right around there. So the brightness actually looks pretty decent. And that looks pretty good. So let me click Enter there, go back to full screen here. And it looks actually really, really nice. So let's go to warm up the light. It's a little bit warm already, but let's go and warm it up a little bit. And then same thing we're gonna do with their other image that we did. We're going to create a photo filter layer. So again, to go to our adjustment layers here, go to photo filter. Before we make any adjustments, go ahead and clip this. And now we can increase the, the, the kind of brightness of it, the warmth of the light. So for this one, I'm actually going to probably stick around 70. See how that looks. Maybe a little too warm. And we'll go, so we'll go down to about 55 or 60. Let's go to 60. Alex are pretty good. So as you can tell just as a small caveat to what I'm doing here. As you can tell, what I'll do is I'll make an adjustment here. I'll zoom in really close and make the adjustment. And you'll see me sometimes zoom out like this. And the reason I'm doing this, because sometimes you might see that this looks pretty good. This, this effect looks pretty nice, but once you zoom out, you start to see different things. And so what I wanna do is just make sure that everything looks good from really close all the way to viewing it far away. So that's one reason why I go back and forth with these particular images. Let's zoom in a little bit more. And what we're gonna do is actually just make a small, small highlight in the water a little bit warmth highlight like the light is hitting off of the boat in the water. So what we need to do is actually create another blank layer. And we're going to get a brush. We're gonna make our brush fairly large to roughly around here. So the size is around 175. Make sure our brush is feathered and we're going to sample a color. So I'm going to hold the Alt or Option key and I'm going to sample maybe a color right here. This, It's kinda like a pale pink color. So I'm actually going to double-click on that and get a, get a little bit more warmth. Kinda wanted to get the area of that color. So let's go right around there. So if you want to use this exact value, you can type in this code E Eight be 0 for two, and type it in the hex value and you get that exact same colors and then click Okay here. I'm gonna change my blending mode of this layer to overlay. And the reason I like to do that is just because it blends in a lot better than using a normal. Or sometimes you can use soft light for the most part. I start off with overlay and see what it gives me and then I'll change it from there. So I'm going to just start clicking here and you can see it kinda adds that little warmth effect to the water. It's a little too much obviously. So I'm going to actually undo that. And I would take my flow and opacity down very low like I've been doing most of the time here. Go around 20, and then going around 2025, I find those values are usually good for dodging and burning and shadows, stuff like that. So now I'm going to click and you can see that it's really gradual. The effect that I'm getting some to highlight the water here. Maybe take my brush up a little bit as well. And I'll just click around the boat. So I'm actually going to put a little bit of a highlight on the boat as well. Especially right near that Lantern they're seeing here me click on a little bit and get some get a lot of clicks in there. And that's just because I want to put that highlight on the boat. So overlay works pretty good. Let's go to soft light. So what happens if I kinda tones it down a little bit? Actually prefer that one better, looks good from far away as well. But we will take the opacity down just a hair. So it's not overpowering the image. So there we go. Looks pretty good. I like the way that looks. So now we've got our lantern is pretty much done. Our lighting effect to our lantern is pretty much done. So we'll go ahead and collapse the boat group there. Now let's go in and add a small light where the light houses. So I'm going to go into our lighthouse layer here. I'm gonna create a new layer. And again, I'm doing almost the exact same thing that I did for the lantern. My go to fill and I'm gonna go to black. And so the light, the lighthouse is roughly in this area, so I gotta make sure I changed that in our preview. So go to Filter Render, Lens Flare. I'm a Moore lens flare over here a little bit. And actually want to be a little bit less intense than the other ones. So I'm gonna go brown too. Let's go down and 15 for the brightness and click. Okay, So there's our little tiny light, looks like it's shining right at the camera. And it will change our blending mode to screen. There we go. And now we can just move it over here, right on top of that little lighthouse area. Right up at the top there. And there you go. Now we have a couple options. We can actually choose to warm up the light because it might be a little bit warmer than the environment here, or we can leave it as is, I'm probably going to leave it as is for right now. I might scale it up just a little bit. I think I made it too small. So I'll scale it up a little bit and then move it over. There we go. And there we go. So that looks pretty good. What it does is just add a little bit of interest on this, on this right side, we have this big interests piece back here, but adds a little bit of interests back there. So just to see what it looks like, Let's go ahead and warm it up just to see we probably won't use it. But again, I'm gonna use the same thing, photo filter here, clip that, and then we'll warm up that light so you can see it. Just because it's faded back there, it's not really adding too much, but actually do like it actually. Now that I'm looking at, I do like it. So then again, just play with different things. This is really great. I wasn't going to use the photo filter, but now I'm going to use it. I think I really like the effect that it gives. So awesome, I love the way that turned out. Okay, so now let's add in our fog so much like we did with the other image. We had a sky layer that had a bunch of clouds. I was actually able to find a fog image that's in a transparent background. So that's going to help us a little bit with this. So I'm going to drag this over. We have this fog layer here. You can see it's on a transparent background, really helps a lot. So I'm going to scale this up. I wanted to be fairly large because I want the fog to be right in front of the guy. We have a lot of fog back here, so we don't need to worry about that, but I want the fog to look like it's kinda floating on top of the water. So there's a couple of ways we can do that. We scaled up a pretty good amount. But now we need to change the perspective because we want the perspective to be that the fog is kind of going back in the image. So when you right-click on your transform here you have this option of perspective. And this will allow you to choose one of the handles on either side and drag it in or out. And when you drag it in, it's going to give you like a perspective warp effect. So they can drag this one out and look kinda looks like it's going on a different plane, like a 3D plane. So you can see that's kinda, kinda looks like now it's like floating on water. So that's kinda the effect that we were going for. It looks really, really cool. So I'm gonna click Enter there. And it's a little bit too intense obviously. So what we're gonna do is to help this out, we're going to first of all put it on its own layer at the very, very top, because we want it to cover almost everything. So we're going to blur this out just a hair. So we're gonna go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. And that is a little too much. So we'll go down to roughly around nine. Let's friend 9. There we go. And now what we're gonna do is just take away some of the opacity of there. See now is just kind of blending in with a little bit of the fog back there. Bringing it back down. Let's just go and go to 50. Run off the bat and see what we got. So yeah, now it looks like it's kinda rolling on the water. We can actually scale it up a little bit as well. There we go. And we can actually take away cuz it's kinda covering the model as well and everything, which is probably what it would do to begin with. But we can actually do a layer mask on there and get a black brush and kind of pain away. Some of the, some of the fog that's covering the model. Just so he's kinda, you know, sharp and clear. And we're doing that with a very feathered brush opacity and flow down to fairly low amounts. So there we go. So that was a quick way to add fog. If you can find images that have transparent backgrounds, you're going to save yourself a lot of, a lot of trouble to kinda cut stuff out. Most of the time you can do it with the blending mode, but obviously it does help if it's already on a transparent background. So that looks pretty good. I'm really digging the way that looks. All right, so now it's time to add our rain to the image. Now there's many, many different ways of adding rain. There's a lot of overlays you can get. Sleek lens actually sells a lot of rain overlays at a really, really nice. But I can, you can actually create your own. It might not look as great as some professional overlays, but you can actually create your own rain directly in Photoshop. So I'm not sure how to do that. So I'm gonna go to make a brand new layer here. And I'm going to fill it with black just like I did with the lens flares and go to Edit, Fill and then filled with black. Now I'm going to go to Filter Noise and then click Add Noise. And here you can choose some of the mounts here makes sure that you see the amount. For this particular image. I found the best amount would probably be around 330 one. So I'm kinda in-between there. And make sure you choose a Gaussian for the distribution and monochrome for the color there. Because if you don't have monochrome, it's going to be kind of a colored rain and we don't want that obviously. So monochrome is there's going to be a lot of black and white noise. So I'm going to click OK here. And here is where we can kinda blur this out a little bit. So I'm going to do a different kind of blur than I've been using. I'm going to go to filter blur. And then Motion Blur. And you can see motion blur. We can actually make it look like streaking rain, which is actually exactly what we need. So you can play with the angle. You can make it go sideways if you wanted to. You can make it go straight up and down. But we're gonna do a little bit of an angle. Let's do an angle around 5051, negative around there. And then we're gonna do a distance. The more distance you add, the more rain to get, the longer the streaks basically. But I want it to be fairly short reign. So let's go still playing with it here. Let's go around 35. And we'll take our angle back down a little bit more. That was a little bit too slanted. So there we go. So now let's click OK. And the way we're going to get rid of the black obviously is again with another blending mode. So we're going to click up in the Blending Mode section and choose screen for our blending mode. And when you do that, you can see we zoom in here, we get to see a little bit of that streaking rain and that looks pretty good, but that's a very heavy rain because you can sell its streaking a very good amount. So what we're gonna do is actually intensify or details of either rain, whichever one you want to do. So I'm gonna click a new adjustment layer here and I'm gonna go to the levels adjustment layer. Now this is a levels adjustment layer will allow you to increase the blacks and the whites in your images. So I'm gonna go ahead and clip this. And when I do that, my histogram here, my little histogram image changes. So this little slider over here, it is represented the black part of the image. Even though the black is not there visibly is still is there because of the blending mode. So if you zoom in here a little bit and you take the black point up, you can see that the rain starts to kinda go away a little bit. So now it's a little bit lesser of a rain. If you take the wide up the white part kind of brings back more of the, the, how much more rain is visible. So you can see just by doing those two things, we have a little bit better rain here are to toggle this off. You can see we kinda have like a really hazy image, but now we're just kinda bringing out the individual raindrops in the image. And you can continue to play with it and see which ones you like. One thing I like to do, just to give me a little bit more freedom is choose a good, good style rain here if you want it more intensified, I can show you how to do that in just a second, but she's a good style rain. And then we'll go and group these together and put them on one image altogether. So the way we're gonna do that is highlight both of them. Command E on your keyboard, and that's going to bring back the black, but it actually puts it all on one layer. So now we just change the blending mode back to screen and we're kind of back where we started. Now we can actually just duplicate this layer. And you can see we have nice raindrops here. So if we wanted to put these in their own group, we're just going to do a Command or Control G, rename this rain. So now you can see the before and after here. This is without the rain. This is with the rain. We can take the opacity down and this just gives you a little bit more control over. How are your image looks with the rain and everything in it. So this is just a way of giving you more control. All right, so now we are almost done with this image. Now it's time to do some of our basic color corrections. So the first thing I'm gonna do is actually go to our photo filter here. And I've been choosing warm filter most of the time we've been playing with photo filters, but actually going to choose a cooler filter. And I'm going to play with the different types of cooler filters here we have different, different kinds of have a little bit more magenta in there. I'm actually going to choose the cooling filter, 80. You can see it cools down the image a little bit, but I'm just going to take the opacity down. And that's going to apply an overall, overall coolness to the image, overall field to the image. So I'm gonna take it down to about 30. So obviously right now it looks like a cold image and that's kind of what I'm going for here. And then we're gonna play with our color balance, mainly like we did in the other image. So I'm gonna go to our color balance here. And I'm just gonna see what kind of blends everything in a little bit more. So obviously we don't want more reds in the image that doesn't look good at all. But we may want more cyan and the image we may more, a little more blue. We could add a little bit more yellow if we wanted to, to make it look like a different kind of color effect. But obviously we just need to play around with it and see what we like. And it's all going to blend in together pretty much because we've already done individual color corrections to most of the image. So for the most part, it's obviously going to blend them together. So maybe for the highlights, this part up here, we want it to be a little bit more yellow, a little bit more blue. Kinda just depends on your style, but I actually do not mind a little bit of red back there that actually looks pretty nice. So there were yellow. Let's just keep those two for right now. The next thing I'm going to do is actually darken up the sky a little bit. So the way I'm gonna do that is choose a new layer, new blank layer. I'm gonna go to my Gradient Tool here and I'm gonna make sure my gradient right now it's kind of like in that orange color that we sampled, I'm going to choose a black. So the way I can do that easily as clicking the D key on my keyboard. And now it's set to black to transparent. So what I'm gonna do is just drag a very fairly shallow gradient tool down from the top there and you see it kinda darkens at top. Now we can change the blending mode to overlay, and that's going to bring out a little bit more of the detail in the image. We can try solve, fly it again. But I actually don't mind just doing the normal that IT managers dissolve, but I don't mind using the normal and just darkening it up that way. Sometimes it's okay to just use a normal blending mode and just use the opacity and darks, dark and some of that up. Now one thing I do want to do just like we did with the previous image that we created. I'm going to put these in their own group here. And I'm going to call this color correction. There we go. And now I'm going to create a new image, just like we did before. A new image that has all of these layers combined into one layer. So I'm gonna highlight all of these, go to Layer and go to Merge Visible. But before I do that again, hold the Alt or Option key. And now we have our image on one layer so we can deactivate all of these if we want to. And now we can go make some different final adjustments in the camera raw filter. So I'll go to Filter and then go to Camera Raw Filter. So here's where we make some saturation adjustments. You can definitely do this in Photoshop. But I do prefer to do it in the camera raw filter because it's usually you're more familiar with that, especially if you've used Lightroom so much. But this is a good filter to use so you can play with the highlights. The shadows bring down the highlights a little bit. Maybe you take the contrast up and really, really mess with the photo. This is where you can actually put your specific spin on the photo. So maybe you want a little bit more clarity to make a little bit more crunchy, you can do that as well. One thing I do want to do this particular image is actually add a vignette. So I'm going to add a small vignette. So as you can see, it's just going to draw that view reside right into the model here. And you can still see a little bit of the lighthouse, still see a little bit this, but you mainly just seeing the viewer's eye going right into the model. And again, just making some different adjustments here. Do this exposure adjustment as well. There we go. And looks pretty good. I'm gonna go in and click Enter. And now we can do, we can choose to do two different things. This image doesn't actually warrant having to do the bokeh, the blurred out effect if we if we don't want to, but we actually have an option because this, this actually looks pretty decent on its own. But if we wanted to do the blurred out effect, but just like we did in the previous image, we can do that. So let's go and create a duplicate of that layer. Go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and will blur out a little bit. Let's go to round. Let's go to around six. All right, so it's blurred out a lot. And we'll go in and create a layer mask here. You get a large black brush. And for this image is going to be fairly easy because we can make a couple of different strokes right across the image. So I'm going to hold the Shift key to make it perfectly level stroke. And there we go and takes away the blurriness in that image. And now you can see that we have that kind of cool bokeh effect. So you can see the before and after with that effect. This is off and this is on. You can see it definitely handles the water pretty good. We can add more to it to kinda make a really nice shallow depth of field. Just like that. There we go. So now it's really shallow, depth to feel, but it just depends on your style. So don't don't do exactly what I'm doing if you don't think that it looks good. But that's just one way of doing it. So I'm going to keep it just like this. And that is our pretty much final image. All right guys, so I hope you enjoyed that tutorial. It was really fun to make these images, especially this one, because there's so much going on in the photo. And we can do way more with this. We can do weigh less with this and make it more minimalist. But we did a lot of different things. And I hope I showed you some different ways of thinking about your photo. Not just how to do one particular thing in Photoshop, but also different things to think about. Scaling perspective, depth. This is all stuff that goes into compositing successful images in Photoshop. So now it's time for you to go ahead and take out your notebook, sketched down some different ideas, find the awesome images that work with that, or go take your own images that there's no problem with that. But this is kinda harder, harder way of doing it because you kinda gather a bunch of images from everywhere. But hopeless showed you different ways of doing it. So now somebody to go out and make your own images, make your own composing images, and really play with your creativity. Because that is all what this is all about is just pure creativity.