Transcripts
1. Shading in Photoshop - An Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on techniques for shading designs in Adobe Photoshop. My name is Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 260 courses here on Skillshare and over 144,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll look at a range of ways to shade objects in Photoshop. Every method gives very different results, and they all use very different tools and techniques. Along the way, you'll learn to configure brushes, use masks and last styles to simplify designs to make recoloring easier and lots more. By the end of this course, you'll be able to shade design elements in various ways and you'll have developed core Photoshop skills that you can use every day in your work. Without further ado, let's get started.
2. Pt 1 Create a simple half and half shading effect: Inside Photoshop, I'm going to create a brand new document and I'm going to be working with a 1000 by 1000 pixel document. I am working in RGB color mode. I do have my Background Contents set to white. That will save me having to fill the background with white every time I'll click Create. Now I'm going to be using shapes. I have the shape tool selected here, this custom shape tool, but I'm setting the stage to pixels. You get a choice of three options here. Pixels just means that you'll be adding a filled shape to your document. Now, the shapes that I'm using here, I've got in a single collection, which is unusual in the new version of Photoshop. I'm going to show you at the very end how I've arranged my shapes to get them to look like this because I don't like the new arrangement. I have a crown shaped selected, which is some way here in my collection. What I chose to do at this stage is something that's very regular, that is symmetrical. If I don't do something different before I draw this shape, it's going to go on the background layer. And I don't want that to be the case. I want the shape to be separate. So I'm going to add a new layer. So that's pretty critical for most of these processes, is that your element is not on the background layer. Let's choose a color to use. I'm going to choose a sort of purple color because when you use pixels with a custom shape, you're going to actually lay down that colored shape as you draw it. So I'm holding the shift key to constrain it to its original proportions. If I want to move it, I'm adding the space bar to move it. Before I let go the left mouse button that's critical. So I now have my crown shape on a separate layer, but it is pixels, it's just filled pixels. The first effect that we're going to use, this first shading technique is to shade half of this shape a different color. And that's why I chose something symmetrical to start off with. I'm going to the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm going to drag a marquee over half of this shape. So I'm just going to try and eyeball it. If I need to move it again, I haven't let go the left mouse button so I can move it around a little bit. Let go the space bar just to fix its position and then let go the left mouse button. So I have half of this shape selected to make this side either lighter or darker. I can use what's called an adjustment layer. So let's go up here to Layer and then we'll choose new adjustment layer. Now the simplest of adjustment layers for this process is quite simply a levels adjustment. So let's go to Levels and we'll just click. Okay. So this is what we get in the levels dialogue. And what we can do is we can drag to the right, this middle slider to make this side of the shape darker. And if we drag to the left, it's just going to be lighter. So you can determine which side you want your lightness and darkness on by just dragging here. Thought I'm going to actually make this side light off. I'm dragging towards the black. That might sound counter-intuitive. But in actual fact, what I'm telling Photoshop is I want more of the pixels in the image to be light rather than dark. So this is dark, this is mid-tones, this is light. This is a sort of chart, if you like, of all the colors in the image right now, we're not saying as sort of proper chart because we're just working with a single color. But this will make it lighter. So I'll, I'll click to close this dialogue. Now, there are some problems built-in to what I just did. Let's have a look and see what they are. Let's go to this background layer and let's fill it with a color. So let's call and get a sort of turquoise, light turquoise color. It's my foreground color. I have the last selected so I can fill a layer with a foreground color by holding down the Alt key on a PC option on a Mac and pressing the backspace key. Of course, you could also do that by just filling with the paint bucket tool. But you can see here that I have an issue. I fill this layer with a solid color, but I'm getting this sort of two tone look in my background. Now if you want that, that's fine. If that's the look that you're going for, then you've solved the problem. But if you wanted a solid background color with just the shape, with this sort of two tone effect. Then we need to do something with this layer here. This is the layer, the levels adjustment layer that is controlling this sort of two tone effect. And right now, the way that adjustment layers work is that they affect every layer below them. And so that's exactly what we're saying. It's affecting the filled crown shape and it's also affecting the background lab. But we can limit its effect to just the layer immediately below it. And we do that by clicking on the Adjustment Layer and we go to Layer and create clipping mask. And in that sense now the levels adjustment only impacts the crown. It's having no effect on the background at all. If you want to undo that, click on this top-most layer that has this clipping mask associated with it, this little bend arrow. And it's inset a little bit telling you there's a clipping mask. We'll go to layer and we'll release the clipping mask. Now the labs being unindicted if you like, and it's affecting all allows below.
3. Pt 2 A more complex half and half effect: So far we've looked at creating this sort of half and half effect with an object that is perfectly symmetrical. Let's look at something that is not symmetrical. Again, I'm creating a 1000 by 100 pixel document exactly the same as the previous one. Let me go to the shapes tool. This time I'm going to choose a leaf shape that is not perfectly symmetrical. This one here. I'm still working in pixels and I will need to add a new layer. Just make sure that these objects are going on to brand new layers, to choose a sort of orange for this leaf shape, again, holding the Shift key so it's constrained to its original proportions, just placing it in the image using the space bar to move it. And now I have my leaf on a separate layer. Now the leaf is almost symmetrical, but does the spit down the bottom that is not symmetrical. So I'm going to use the pen tool for this. I'm going to select here on the pen tool, it's relatively easy to do so let's see how we'll do it. I'm going to make sure that I'm working in a path. So at this stage there's no color going down. All I'm doing is drawing a path I can use for this half and half effect. I'm going to click here. And I'm going to come down here to the point where the cemetery ends. So I'm going to click and drag at this point because I want to start moving around this curve. I think I can do it in one step, so I'm going to click at the bottom here. And again, instead of just clicking, I'm clicking and dragging. At this point, I can finesse this or I could come back later. I'm going to finesse it. So I'm going to hold down the Control key on a PC that would be Command on a Mac. And I'm just going to move this anchor point and its handle into position so I can work on this as I'm drawing it, provided I keep Control K or Command key pushed down. I can also come back here and I could work on this one too. With this one, we don't want the line here to change, so I'm just going to bring this handle all the way in to sit on top of the other one. And then I can drag on this one. You can say, it's not really having a lot of effect on the line down the middle of the leaf. But I do want to make this curve really nice as soon as I'm happy with what I've got, I'm gonna let go the Control key. And now I can continue to draw. I'm actually going to draw all the way around here and come back and just click on the starting point. So I have a path that is following the line that I want to use through this leaf. But at the moment it's a path. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to convert my path to a selection very much the same way as we had a selection with the marquee tool earlier. We can make this a selection. We do that in the paths palette here I've just opened up the paths palette. You can get to that by choosing window and then paths. Once you've got your past selected here, you can click here on load path selection, and that converts the path here into a selection. Now we're just going back to do exactly as we did previously. And we'll go back to the levels adjustment layer, New Adjustment Layer, go to Levels. Click Okay. And again, I can darken or lighten this later half of the leaf by just dragging on this midpoint slider on the Levels adjustment so I can decide which side I want it to be light. I'm going to make this life. We're going to have the same problem as we had previously because this layer is not clipped to the layer underneath, Sophie had a colored background other than white. That would also be changing color. And because my masks not a direct half and half, it's going to look pretty awful. So you can make this adjustment lag clip to just this lat and not affect this layer using this dialogue. So you don't have to go to the Layer menu to do it. If you think about it when you're here, you can actually do it here and you do it with this icon. And that just clips this adjustment layer to the lab below. Let me show you what it's going to happen. You can say that it's jumped in, It's been indented in, it's got this bent arrow, it's a clipped layer. It's only going to affect this layer. If you click this again, you're undoing that. So I'm going to actually leave that in place here. Because with this particular shape, because I've got this band effect happening, I'm certainly not going to want to have it affect any color in the background here. So I've done that. And now we could go and change the color of our background layer. Let's go and choose a sort of dusty blue for this. As before, I could fill this layer by selecting it and press Alt Backspace option Delete on the Mac, or I can click here to select the paint bucket tool and just dump the paint into this layer. So here we have this half and half effect and it is fully adjustable. So if we think that this is not quite the contrast that we want, Let's double-click here and we can adjust the lightness and darkness. So given the result that we're saying with the background, if that's the background that we want to use, we can adjust this to make the half and half effect a little bit more contrasty.
4. Pt 3 Simple shadow and highlight shading: For this next example, we're going to add highlights on one side of the shape and shadows on the other. So again, on going back to creating a document that is filled with white, I'm going to add a new layer because I want my pixels, my shape to be on a separate layer. I'm going back to the custom shapes tool here, and let's go and choose a simple heart shape. This one here, it's a filled heart. This would be how hot? That is. Just the outline, not the fill, but I want the filled heart. I'll select a pink color to use. So let's just go and get a pink color. And I'll hold the Shift key as I draw my heart again, adding the space bar to move it into position. So this is going to be the base color for my heart. I'm going to add a lighter highlight around here and a DACA highlight around here. So I'm going to grab this lab, I'm going to drag it onto the New Layer icon. So I have a second one, I'm going to do that again, so I have a third. Let's go and make this layer here the darker color, I'm going to select a darker color to use. So let's just go to this base color and choose something a little bit darker. I want to fill this shape with this darker color. Now if I use the paint bucket tool or the Alt Option Backspace tool right now, I'm going to fill the whole laughs. I let me just show you what's going to happen, not exactly satisfactory. Instead, I'm going to make a selection of this hot and I can do that by control or command clicking once on the thumbnail here and you can see the marching ants around the shape. Now I can fill it with the Alt Backspace option Delete, or I can go to the Paint Bucket tool and just click inside to add my color to it. Now I've got my selection. And these hearts here on these other layers are in exactly the same position. So let me just click on this one. Let's click it to select it. And to this, Let's add the lighter color. But first of all, I want to sample my pink using the eye dropper so I know what my starting color was so that I can go and choose a lighter version of it. So I'll click here on the color. Let's go and choose a lighter version for my highlight. I want to fill this. So again, Alt Backspace option Delete or disguise the paint bucket tool and dump the paint in. I made to deselect my selection so that select and deselect, or I could press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. So now let's turn on all three layers. This top-most layer is the base heart shape. The second law is the lightness and the bottom shape is the darker shadow. So I'm going to turn on my base shape and my shadow layer. I'll click on the shadow last so it is selected. I'll target here the move tool. Just click on it to select it. And I'm just going to start moving this shape using the arrows on the keyboard. I'm going to press Shift and the right arrow key that moves it about 10 pixels at a time and just find it in an easier way of grabbing hold of this to make sure that it's going in the right place. Now I'm moving it downwards as well because I want it to line up with the bottom here. I'll just click away to make sure that I've got in the right place. If I haven't gotten the right place, just going to re-select the layer and just use the arrow keys to adjust it again, but I did get it right the first time. So this is my shadow. Let's go here and grab the highlight layer. Again, I'm going to do the exact same thing with the Move Tool selected, the last selected. I'm going to press Shift and up arrow and left arrow because I want to start moving this out of the way. Now, one thing I'm saying right now is that this light layer, this highlight layer is no way near light enough. So I'm going to click away from it. I'm going to click on this ladder to target and I'm going to Control click on the thumbnail, so I'd have it selected. I've got the last selected over here in the last panel. And because I control clicked on the layer thumbnail Command click on the Mac. I've got these marching ants around this lighter area. Now I need to make a better job of choosing my light color. Choose a better life at color. And I'll go back to the paint bucket tool and just drop it in. I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. If I'm happy with that, great. If I'm not, I can go back and try a different color again. Just think it's not quite live enough. So that's a very simple shading effect done with three copies of a shape. One of them, the darker one for the shading I've moved across and down, the lighter one for the highlight, I've moved up and across. And then this one here is the base shape. So you can say that it's the shape that is notionally having the shading added to it. The background lay here at the moment is filled with white, but we could fill it with any color. Let's go and get a sort of turquoise color to fill it with. And you can say the shading here, nothing that we've done with moving these three laze around his had any impact on the background layer. So we don't have to protect the background layer in this case in any way.
5. Pt 4 A more complex shadow and highlight shading: For this next example, I've already created my document and my brand new layer. I'm going to the custom shapes tool. And this time I've chosen a speech bubble shape. Not because I want the speech bubble per se, but I wanna make a cloud out of it. And it's showing me sort of half of a cloud or starting point for our cloud. I'm going to click here and I'm going to choose path this time because I want to draw out the path so I can edit it before I work with it, I'm holding the Shift key down as I'm dragging out my path here. So this is the cloud shape. I'm going to the paths panel because I need to work on this and just in case I make a mistake and lose it, I'm going to actually save this work path. Work paths are not saved and you can lose them really easily. So I'm going to click on this little fly out here, and I'm going to choose safe path, just going to call it path one. And now this can't be lost. I can just click on it at anytime I can get it back. So that's a nice way of working with paths. Now, I want the curly bit here. I don't want the rest of this. So I'm going here to the white arrow tool, the direct selection tool. And I'm going to drag carefully over the bits that I don't want, making sure that I don't select any part of the Cloud that I do want. I'm just going to press the Delete key. And I'm told that this will turn a live shape into a regular path. That's just fine. Let's just click yes. And now I have a path that is my cloud shape. So I can actually save this. So if I select this and go over here to Edit and down here to define custom shape, I can make my own cloud shape. I'll just type cloud and click. Okay. So now I can get to this like I could get to any other Photoshop shape. I'm actually going to delete this. I'm going back to my layers panel. I've got my layer selected. I'm going to choose custom shape. I'm going to go and find my new shape, which is going to be at the very bottom here. I'll click on it to select it. I'm going to make sure that I have pixel selected here because I do want to keep drawing with pixels. I'm going to use this blue shape, the sort of turquoise blue as my cloud. I'll hold Shift and I'm going to draw out my cloud shape. Now we're going to do the exact same process as we did previously with three of these cloud shapes that we're going to run into some difficulties. I'm going to show you how to solve them. I'm going to make two copies of this shape. One of them is going to be darker, one of them's going to be lighter, and one at the top is going to be my base shapes. I'll just turn that off for now. This one's going to be my lighter, so I have it selected. I'll Control click or Command click on its thumbnail to select it. Let's go and get our lighter color. Last time I didn't get it lightness. So let's see if we can get a lighter this time. I'm just using my Alt Backspace key stroke, but you could use the paint bucket tool. I've got my selection in place. I'm just going to de-select this layer. Let's go and select this layer. Make sure it's selected because we want to drop the paint into this layer. Let me just sample the base color using the eyedropper tool so I know what color I'm trying to get a darker version of. This is looking pretty good. And I'll fill this. I'm going to press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. So I have my shadow, my highlight, and my base shape. Let's go and get the shadow. I'm going to move it across and down. So I've got the Move Tool selected up here. And I'm going to do this with the arrow keys shift right arrow, and then just start moving it down. Adding the Shift key just moves at a bigger amount if you like. So I'm pretty happy with that. Let's go and get the highlight layer. And we'll do exactly the same thing, shift and arrow. And I'm going in the opposite direction this time. I'm going to fill the background with a color because it's probably going to make it easier to see what the problems are going to be here. So let me go and get a sort of pinky purple here and fill the bottom layer with it. So this is where I'm saying that there are issues. You can see here that the shadow and the highlight or running into each other in various places. So I want to make a decision about which of these are shadows and which of these are highlights. And I'm going to remove the object that I don't want. So here, I don't want the shadow. So I'm going to the eraser tool and going to make sure that for my eraser, I have selected here a really hard brush. So let's just go and say what we've got in general. Brushes. A hard round pressure sized brushes, pretty good for me. Doesn't need to be enormous and I can certainly control the size in just a minute. So I've got my brush, I'm looking at it on the screen, it's a good size. I'm targeting the lab and I want to remove the content from, I want this shadow gone. So I'm just going to paint it out. I'm going to come around here and decide here, I want the highlight gone. So I want to use this shadow, but not the highlights. So let's go to the highlight layer and let's just remove that. And we're going to work around my shape, locating the areas where the highlight and the shadow are running into each other. I'm going to make a decision as to whether I want the highlight or the shadow at this point, and then remove the opposite. Here I want the shadow, but I don't want this highlights. So target the highlight layer and just paint over it. And here, I don't want the shadows, so I'm going to target the shadow layer. I'm just going to paint that out. And just make sure that any place where the highlight and shadow are on top of each other, I'm making a decision about which of the two that I want. As you're working on this, you might find it easier to name your layers, which you can do by just double-clicking on the land name itself. So let's double-click there. I'm going to type shadow. And here I can double-click on this and type highlight. And I've just named this layer Cloud. So if it's easier for you to find the layers in the layer stack here by clicking on the name, then go ahead and name your layers. Now, I want to go back to seeing my entire document. So I'm going to press the Control key command on a Mac and tap the number 0 that just re-size as the image so we can see at all. Now if we're not happy again with our highlights, I'm just going to Control click on the highlight thumb now and we can go and sample the existing highlight color. And I'm going to go a bit lighter. And again, fill it with the paint bucket tool or Alt Backspace option Delete, they select your selection. So in this more complex example, we had highlights and shadows that ran into each other. And all we did was make a decision about whether we wanted the highlights or the shadows in each of these instances.
6. Pt 5 Shading with Brushes: So this next example we're going to use brushes to add as shading and highlights. I'm just back to the exact same size document as I was working on, going to choose a sort of blue color to use. And I have got my shape selected. I'm using pixels and I found this little submarine shape, which I believe is probably part of the 2019 shape collection. I'll hold the Shift key as I drag out this shape. We're going to talk a little bit more about shapes in a video at the end of this class. I have put this on the same labs, the background. So let me just undo that and, and put it in the right place. That's really critical. Okay, now will help me if I save these colors as I work. So I'm going to the Swatches panel, and I'm just going to click the plus symbol here to add my colors. So this is going to be my base blue. I'm going to add another lab because my highlighting is going to go on a brand new layer. So let me just name that layer. Now for the highlighting I wanted, unlike a color of this blue. So let's go and pick our life at color. I want to be able to get back to this later on, which is why I'm saving my swatches. So this is going to be my highlight. We need to set up a brush to use. I'm going to the brushes tool here. I'm going to click on A1, and I'm going to click on this drop-down arrow here to get access to the brushes. Now the brushes that are included with Photoshop days, days, much more limited than what we used to. And so we're going to add the legacy brushes. So come across here to this gear icon and go down here to the bottom and click on Legacy Brushes and okay, and that adds the legacy brushes to Photoshop. Now we want one of these default brushes. Now, I don't like the way that these brushes a shine these days. If you don't like that and you want to back to just its original version. What you'll do is click on the flyout menu here. Turn off brush name and brushstroke so that you'd just getting the tips. I find it easier to work that way. Inside the default group inside Legacy Brushes is this one that's just a dry media brush. So it's got a number 66 underneath it that tells you how big the base brush size is and it's a dry brush tip here. So I'm just going to click on it to select it. And then I'm going to the brush settings panel so that I can adjust the way this brush looks. So I'm going to increase the spacing. But something's telling me there's something really interesting happening with this brush here because whatever I do to it in terms of size, Gita and size and scattering. Still painting along this line. Now when you see a brush that doesn't change behavior, when you sort of add scattering and stuff like that to it. Have a look for the Dual Brush option because this was actually a brush that's controlled by another brush. So another brushes actually controlling the behavior of this brush1. If we turn that off, then we get what's really happening in our brush. And this is what it looks like and it's nothing that we want right now. So this is going to increase my spacing and little bit I'm going to go back to Shape Dynamics, adjust the size, Gita and all the work here is really happening in the scattering area. So I'm going to adjust the scattering are going to do both axis scatter. Think no, I think I'm only going to do scatter on one axis here. I'm going to leave the count back to one, but I am going to increase the spacing a little bit and possibly adjust the angle and roundness so that this brush breaks up a little bit and becomes a little bit more interesting. And maybe just a little bit of spacing here. Okay, let's see how this is going to paint. So I'm just going to close this down. That's looking like a pretty interesting brush to use for highlights. So I've got my highlight layer selected here. I can adjust my brush size either through the brush panel here, just adjust the size. Or I can use the open and closed square brackets. So the open and closed square brackets will make it bigger and smaller. I find that an easier way to operate. The next thing I need to do is to decide where my highlights and my shadows are going. So I'm going to highlight top and left and shadow bottom and right. So let's just stop painting this on. Going to change the size of my brush because it is too big. Now if I want to paint in a straight line, I can click and then hold the Shift key down and click again. Now, because my brush is very uneven, It's not going to look like a straight line, but it is going to point along those edges. And then I want to come here and go down to here. Going to close this brush up a little bit. I think the spacing is too far apart. Click, Shift-click, but it can also just brush it on. Making sure that I go on the top and on the left for my highlights. Now one thing I'm not the slide spit concerned about now is the IVUS brio. I've got paint going absolutely everywhere that I don't want it and that's just fine. Soil. I want. This side to have a little bit of highlight as well. So again, highlighting on the top and on the left. Now once you're pretty happy with the initial highlighting, we need to get rid of the over spray. Now you can do that in a number of ways. But the simplest method to use is the one that we used for the levels adjustment. And that's just using a clipping mask because what we want to do is to clip the paint work. So it only affects this layer and where there is content on this layer. So I'm going to click on this layer here and go to Layer create clipping mask. And that just clips the paint work. So it only appears where the actual submarine is. Now this point, you can continue to add paint to your image, but you may also want to remove some of the paint. And what I suggest you do is to use an eraser. So you click here on the eraser and I'm going to re-select the same 66 brush to use with the eraser and again, set it up. So I'm going to remove the Dual Brush option here and then just work with what we've got left. The spacing looks okay, I think it's the scattering that's too much. Now the spacing doesn't look okay at all. And with the shape dynamics, I'm just adding some GTO saw. It becomes a more interesting brush. But of course this is not a brush. So back on the paint layer, I'm going to just adjust the size of my eraser and just bring it in to remove some of the highlights. So a combination of adding paint and removing it will be really handy for adding highlights to your object. And then with the shading, we're going to do exactly the same thing. Just add a brand new layer. We're going to sample the color. I'm going to sample the base color here. I'm going to click on this and find a darker color to use. I'm going to add it to my swatches. I can click my layer either after I've done my painting or in the middle or before. And I think it's easier to do it before. So I'm actually going to click on this layer now and choose layer and then create clipping mask. So now all the paint I'm putting on this layer is going to be clipped to the underlying shape. And let me just call this shading. So back with my brush and with my paint color, I've got my shading layer selected. Let's just start painting this on. I'm going to adjust my brush size as I'm going. And for this I'm going to the right-hand side and to the underneath. Now as I'm painting, I'm saying a few places where I could have improved my highlighting. So I'm going back to my highlight layer. Let's go back to the swatches panel. Pick up the highlight color, which is why we saved it, because it would be difficult to get it back. Otherwise, make sure I'm painting on the highlight layer and just go and add in the highlights that I've saying that I'm perhaps missing. So then we can go back to the shading laugh, find an eraser again. And we can use the eraser on this shading layer if we think the effect is too much, you may get a slightly different result if you alter the order of these layers to put the highlight on top and the shading underneath. You can just experiment with that. You can also adjust the opacity of these labs. So I'll just dial down the opacity so that the highlighting that you've got is now a little bit more subtle. And so towards the shading, adjusting the opacity will allow you to get a similar effect, but a little bit less intense. I'm using scrubby sliders here. These are Photoshop slide is wherever you see a word, There's a really good chance that when you hold your mouse over it, you'll get a hand with a set of arrows. And what you do is you just drag on the word. And that is a scrubby slider that changes the opacity value without you having to click here and adjusted this way. Find scrubby sliders really handy to use. So look out for those as you're working inside Photoshop.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
