Adobe Certified Professional in Visual Design using Adobe Photoshop - Exam Guide

1. Introduction: Are you ready to become a certified Photoshop expert and take your creative career to the next level? Hi. Hi. My name is Martin Perhiak, Adobe certified instructor with over 20 years of experience teaching Adobe design tools and working as a creative for brands like Disney, BBC, Unilever, and Nickelodeon. I am excited to introduce you to the Adobe Certified Professional in Visual Design using Photoshop exam Guide. I know it's a mouthful, but this course is your complete companion to prepare you for the official Adobe certification exam. The highest industry recognized credential for Photoshop users. You will get in depth video training about all the topics practice exams, exercise files, and detailed downloadable guides to help you review every important topic. And the best part, you can now take the exam from the comfort of your home. No need to travel to an exam center anymore. Why should you consider taking this exam? Well, because becoming an Adobe certified professional proves to employers, clients, and peers that you have real world job ready photoshop skills. It's an incredible way to boost your resume, your confidence, and stand out in a competitive, creative market. It also opens doors to freelance opportunities, career advancements, or even higher salaries. Whether you are just starting out or looking to solidify your expertise, this certification gives you a powerful, recognized credential that will set you apart. Whether you are already comfortable in Photoshop or starting fresh, this course will help you build the skills you need to pass the 50 minute live in the app exam with confidence. Even if you're brand new to Photoshop, you can be exam ready in less than a week by following this course carefully. It's important to mention that the certification exam isn't included and needs to be booked separately. But don't worry, I will walk you through everything you need to know to succeed. If you are serious about becoming a recognized Photoshop pro, this is your first step. I can't wait to guide you on this journey, so it's time to get started. 2. How to prepare for the exam: In this video, I'm going to show you how to best prepare for the exam using this course. First of all, the exam is divided into five main topics. You can see these on my screen. And for each of these topics, I prepared a study guide, which you can download from the resources here on Skillshare. Once you download these PDFs, you will be able to open them on your desktop computer or even on mobile devices. And I recommend using this throughout your entire preparation process to keep track of your progress. You can also search within the document. So if I just type something like scope, I will be able to quickly find all the matches, and I can jump over them. I can also highlight them if I need to. And, of course, you can also select any text from these guides, and you can copy and paste them somewhere else. I wouldn't recommend printing all these guides out because it's a lot of paper. So just one topic. This first one would be 18 pages, but altogether, the five topics, so if it's all the guides, probably would be close to 200 pages. Don't worry. You don't actually have to read through all these guides. That's why we have video lessons for every topic. So I actually cover everything that's written down here in each of these videos. And you will also see the numbering at the beginning of each video title, like 1.1 point A, which means it's from the first main topic working in the design industry. And within that, it would be the first subtopic. And then the A is an additional subtopic inside there. So if we look at the guide, it will make more sense. So that's the main topic. Then 1.1 is the identified purpose, audience and audience needs for preparing images. And then 1.1 point A is that first subcategory within this subtopic for the first main topic. So we can see that's determine whether content is relevant to the purpose, audience, audience needs, user experience, and design for devices. It sounds a mouthful. These are always quite long. But all you have to remember is that the video lessons in the course are all recorded according to this guide, and it goes through everything in the right order. So we will see 1.1 point A, then there will be 1.1 point B. And if we scroll further down, we can find that here in the guide as well. Then if I go further down, we will find the next subtopic, which is 1.2, starting with 1.2 A. So once again, that's the next one we can see here. Besides the study guides that you can find in the resources here on Skillshare, you can also find a link to access all additional resources like exercise files, project files, quizzes, and the final test. Now, once you click on this link, it's going to take you to this platform which we are hosting onsmdsigner.com. The reason why we did this is because it allows us to include quizzes and practice tests that currently is not available on Skillshare. It's important to mention that all the video lessons are hosted on Skillshare. So you only have to come here to access these additional useful resources, but you can complete the class without leaving Skillshare. Once you reach this welcome screen, all you have to do is to create a new account by clicking on the icon here at the bottom, and this is going to set up a new student account on our learning platform. Yes, I'm at designer.com. All we need is your first name, last name, your email address, and a password that you can set up. Alternatively, you can also sign up with any of these options. So LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or Apple. Once you created your student account, you will be able to access all these additional resources, starting with the projects and exercise files. So you can download these from here. Then you can find the quizzes for each of the main topics from the exam. And at the bottom, you will also find the final test, which covers all the topics. But I will come back and talk a bit more in detail about this later in this video. First, I wanted to talk a bit more about the quizzes that we created for each of the topics. What I suggest is to do these quizzes once you completed all the video lessons for a specific topic, and then come over here and start the quiz for that particular topic to test your knowledge and to see how much you understood of all the things that we covered. And it is important to mention that there are a lot more questions for each of these tests than just 20. So each time you are going to take this is going to be different because it's going to randomize the questions from the available pool of questions. And when you are taking these exams, if you are choosing the correct answer, once you confirm, it's going to verify that it's correct. Or if you do the incorrect question, it's going to tell you that it's not correct. Once you finish all the 20 questions, at the end, you will get your results, and we set the passing rate to 70%, which would be the same for the real Photoshop exam. So until you reach the 70%, I would recommend to retake the quiz. But the best thing is that you can actually see a list of your wrong and correct answers. So it just gives you a summary of everything that you covered. To summarize, what I would recommend to do for each main topic is to go through the video lessons. First, use the exercise files to practice everything that we cover in these videos. Then go through or skim through the study guide afterwards just to remind yourself of all the important things that we discussed in that topic. And then when you feel ready, then you can take that quiz at the end of the topic and wet it until you pass the 70% passing rate. In the real exam, besides multiple choice questions, you will also be tested using Adobe Photoshop and performing tasks. And to be able to help you prepare for this particular part of the exam, I created projects. And you can access these projects from this area, which I mentioned already earlier in this video. And once you download the projects dot zip file, which is a compressed file, you will get a lot of Photoshop documents. Each project will have two Photoshop file versions, one that is supposed to be your starting point and one that is showing you the completed version. So what you should do is always open the one that doesn't say completed. So this is where you are supposed to start. So once you completed that, you can come back here and watch my solution or explanation of how best to do this particular project. And there is no right or wrong order to go through this, so you can pick whichever you want to start with. Just make sure you go through all of them. Now, it's important to mention that some of these projects will be slightly more complex and more difficult to solve than others. And it's also important to mention that these are way more complex than what you would actually have in the real Photoshop exam. While in this course, for each project, you have several tasks that you have to complete. In the actual exam, you will have individual tasks. So for each project file, you will have to normally just do one single task. So in case of this particular example that we can see on my screen, there's five tasks that we have to do here. That would be five separate tasks in the real exam, out of all the 17 that is usually included in the exam. Now, once you completed all of these projects and you also watched my solution videos, and you feel like you are ready to try a final test, you can come here at the bottom and choose all topics final test. Instead of 20 questions, here you will get 30 questions, which again is aligned to the real exam, where you will have 30 questions in total, out of which normally there's 13 that are more multiple choice questions like these, and 17 of them would be more task based that you have to do within Photoshop. Although, technically, we can't recreate exactly how the test is running. If you complete all of these projects and then you go through this final test at least once, it should give you a very good idea of how the exam is going to work. And once again, most of the things that I'm asking here in this course is slightly more complex and harder than you will end up having to answer in the real exam. 3. What to expect during the exam: In this video, I would like to show you the tutorials that you will be greeted with when you are taking the exam. So these won't actually be taking up the time allocated for your exam when you're doing it live. So you get 50 minutes to complete 13 questions and 17 tasks. But before even getting to those, you will need to go through a couple of slides, which just simply explains how the exam is going to work. And the reason I included this video is just so you can familiarize yourself with these already even before actually taking the exam. And I will walk you through these quickly. First, you will have a couple of things that they will ask about you. It's more about your background and while you are taking the exam. But then this is the slide that explains it well that you will have this first initial tutorial with a couple of slides. Then the first main segment of the exam starts where you will be asked questions. So this segment will include 13 questions. They are all multiple choice questions. If they want you to have multiple answers selected within a question, that would usually be mentioned. But most of the time you would just need to choose one answer. Then once you are done with that section, you will be moving into another short tutorial, a couple of slides about the next segment, which is going to run directly within Photoshop. So that's the more exciting and interesting part where you actually have to perform tasks, and there will be 17 tasks. And once you are done with those, you will still have the option to go and revisit any of those tasks that you are not sure about. But once you're ready, you can just submit your answers and you will get the score report straightaway. That's a great thing. You don't have to wait around. You will know exactly what your scores are. Now, on this next slide, we can see that you will be able to track how many questions you've answered so far out of all the questions that are coming up, you will be able to keep an eye on your time, the remaining time that's available. And any question can easily be reset. So if you quickly just want to go back to how it was before you made changes to it, you can reset it. This applies to both the questions and the tasks. And probably the most important option here is the mark for review checkbox that you can check at any time whether you already completed the question or task or not. Checking this option is going to add a little flag, and it will make it easier to come back to that particular question or task at a later time. This is how it would look like when you get to the end of a section. Let's say the section about questions, and there's the little flags showing or indicating which questions were marked for review later. And by clicking on the questions here in the summary, you will be able to quickly jump back to them. And once you finish reviewing that question and you make sure that your answer is final, then you can just go back to the summary, which will take you back to this page. And when all of your questions are done, you can just say submit section. That's going to finalize that first stage about the questions, and you will move to the second segment or second part, which is going to be about the tasks. But first, for the tasks as well, it will give you a short tutorial, a couple of slides, and again, explain where you can find the important elements within the user interface. And for this part, the exam will actually open up Photoshop first. And of course, Photoshop has to be installed on your computer for this to work. And the exam will set the interface up in a way that you will see the certification questions on the right side in a dedicated panel So that's what we can see here. And it will always give you the task there, explaining what you need to do. And on the left side, you will have your document where you can work. And the great thing about this part of the exam is that you are completely free to use whatever you want. As long as you complete the task that they ask you, you will get points for it. I mentions that a few features will be blocked during the exam, which is listed here at the bottom, like the help option because they don't want you to learn about the features during the exam. But you don't have to worry about these missing features because they won't be necessary to complete the exam. Now, you are actually also free to move panels around and change the interface. But if you ever want to reset it back to the way it was, just go to the window menu choose workspace and then reset the certification test workspace. I recommend to dock the layers and the properties panels right next to the certification test panel, and to keep these two always visible because these will mainly be needed to complete all of these tasks. So this is my recommended layout. Then similarly to the questions during this task segment, you will also be able to reset the tasks at any time. You will also be able to track how many tasks you already went through and how much of them we still left. You will also be able to mark any of the tasks for review later. You will be able to see your summary as well. And in case you wanted to leave feedback about a particular task, you can also leave feedback here. Now, feedback that you give won't be considered for your final result. It's more of a feedback that they can use to improve the exam if you have the time for that, but I wouldn't worry about that most of the time. It's important to mention that during the tasks, there will be a couple of them where you will also be able to click on Exhibit to see the final result. And that's always useful to check first before you even read the question because sometimes it just makes more sense what you need to create. On the left, you will see your document. On the right, you can check your exhibit. And then once you see the before and after, you will know already what to do. After that, reading the question will make much more sense. Whenever you see something underlined and set in bold and italic, that means simply just by clicking on it, you will be able to copy that text. They just want to make sure that you can quickly put in any text that they ask you to use, for instance, for a layer or a layer group or some other things like saving a file with a particular file name. Now there is an important thing mentioned here on this slide that you should always only do the things that they ask you to do and nothing else. So, for instance, if there is a dialogue box where there's a lot of options and they only ask you to change maybe two or three of those, then all the others should always stay the default value. So don't mess around with anything else. Always only pay attention to what they ask you to do, and you don't have to do anything else. Once you get to the end of the task segment, and you also make sure that you reviewed everything that you marked earlier on, then you can just click on finish that section as well. And with that, you will be done with the exam, and you will be getting your score report, which will tell you whether you passed or not. So the required score is 700, which essentially means 70%, and out of the 1,000 points, you will see your score just below that, and on the bottom right corner, you will see either a pass or a fail. But most likely you will get a pass if you complete the entire course and you go through everything. Personally, I've done many photoshop exams, and I started off with the expert exams, and I had to re certify every year. So I've been doing these exams for over 15 years or maybe more. But this is my most recent score report. I just wanted to share this as well. And you can see, even though I've done so many exams, and obviously, I've been teaching this application for so long, I still sometimes get things wrong and that's perfectly normal. So in this case, I got 979 points out of 1,000. I can actually see that wrong answer was something about publishing digital media, so something to do with exporting a file and. Most likely, it was about using the export files to layers, which I actually talk more about in the projects chapter. But that is all you need to know about how the exam works. So now hopefully you are eager to get started. So move on to the first topic, and I wish you good luck preparing for the exam. I am confident that if you go through everything that we cover in this course, you will nail it and you won't have any trouble passing. 4. 1.1.a Identify the purpose, audience: For every design project, in the beginning, it's very important to clarify a couple of things like the purpose of the design and also the target audience. Now for the purpose of an image or design, first of all, you need to talk to the client and find out more about their business goals and what they want to achieve with that image that you are creating for them. Here is one of our recent design contest briefs, for example, for a charity called Amazon Aid, and they required a series of posters created for the river of Gold curriculum. And this is intended for college students. And here are the topics, the impact of gold mining, rainforest ecology, and so on and so forth. And each of these topics will have a focus, objectives and key activities. So as a designer, the more you know about the intent and purpose of a design, the easier it is going to be for you to understand what elements you should use or how you should frame everything in a composition. And if the brief is not detailed enough, you should always ask additional questions from the client. You can ask questions like, what is the main message that you are trying to convey with this design? Or what action do you want the viewer to take after seeing the design? And also importantly, how is this image going to be used? Is it going to be printed? Is it going to be a small print that people will hold in their hand? Is it going to be a larger print that is going to be on the wall of a classroom? And in case of this brief, we can find that information here in the size. So we know exactly the print size and the color mode, which is intended for print, the resolution that is 300 pixel range. But like always, if there is something not clear in a design brief, you should always consult the client. Now, the target audience of a design or image is just as important as the purpose of the design. And again, that's something that is very clear here in this brief. So we are creating this for high school students aged 15-17. In case of this project, it's very important to know because older kids obviously will be able to understand more complex graphics and designs. So things that we can see here like this infographic would be hard to understand for younger kids younger audience. Maybe for younger kids, something like this would work better, which has a little bit more color and a bit more vibrant and more characters on it. While for a more mature or adult audience, we can have more statistics and information that they will be more interested in seeing. 5. 1.1.b Requirements based on video, print, and web: Another important aspect of the design brief is the deliverables. And that means what are the actual files that you will need to supply to your client at the end of the project? And the type of files or deliverables really depend on the output. So whether the image or design that you're working on is intended for print, web, or video, and the easiest way to compare these and to see the differences is by going to the New Document dialog box in Photoshop. So this is something you can find by going to File New. And then here on the top, you will be able to choose these different categories. So when you choose print, you will see the preferred or suggested settings for it. And most importantly, here, the resolution should be set to 300 PPI or pixel Pyrne by default. Now, the color mode is set to RGB because Photoshop is best to be used in this color mode. Most of the features will be available here. While if you choose CMYK, it will be slightly limited. Some features might not be available. However, this is the file format that is best suited for print, where the four color channels are the four inks that we use for print cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K stands for key color in printing. The best file formats to save into when it comes to print would be PDF, TIF or EPS. And there's one additional thing to remember when it comes to saving for print from Photoshop, and that's how to set up the bleed. It's very rare that they would ask you to do this, but you would have to go to the print options. So the file menu and then choose print. And only here you will be able to find the option for the bleed for which you need to scroll down. And on the printing marks, you will be able to choose corner crop marks and then go into functions as well and choose bleed. And normally we would use 3 millimeters bleed, once we click Okay, this should be all that you need to do to have those crop marks showing up with the right bleed settings when the image is going to be printed out. Now coming back to the new document dialogue box, when it comes to creating images for the web, you would want to use 72 PPI resolutions through a lower resolution and RGB color mode. But besides that, you have to also remember that these files should be saved by using the exports or save for web options from the file menu export dropdown. And the most commonly used three image file formats for the web would be JPAG PNG, and GIF. And we will be discussing these options and all the exporting options in a later topic in this course. For now, is just enough to remember these three options and perhaps one additional file format, which you would be able to find if you go to the file, save a copy option, and then just choose on your computer. And here you will be able to find the web P image format. This is starting to be used more and more on websites, and it's a more modern file format compared to the other three that we mentioned before. And last but not least, from the new document dialogue book, let's just take a look at the film and video category. So here you will see a couple of presets, like the 1080 P or 720 P. These all refer to the size or dimensions of the images that we create. We can see that there are different abbreviation used like HDV, HDTV. This would be considered the full HD format. The 920 pixels by 1080 pixels. But if we click on view all presets, we can also find the four K standards like UHDTV, which would be four times as large as a HD image. So here we can see 3,840 pixels by 2160 pixels. Additionally, it's also important to mention that under the advanced options, you will be able to change the pixel aspect ratio. Most modern video file formats would use square pixels, but some other file formats like NTSC would require a 0.91 ratio between the width and height of a pixel. And we can see these ratios varying here, even having a two to one ratio, which is called the anamorphic format. Just so you can see what this actually means, if I create this document and then click Okay, once I zoom closer in this document, and we start to see the pixel grid, we can actually see that individual pixels are rectangular instead of being squared. So here's a good comparison of the three different outputs that normally we work with in design projects. So whether it's video, print or web, the following considerations you have to keep in mind. First of all, the type of image, whether it's a roster or pixel image or a vector image, which would be resolution independent and can be scaled up and down without losing quality. And that's very useful Fool print because sometimes you need to print in a very large format and you still don't want to lose quality. For color mode, it would be either RGB or CMYK. Resolution would depend on the screen size for video. For print, we would normally want to stick to the 300 dots per inch or DPI resolution. While for web, we normally work with 72 PPI or Pixel per inch resolution. The most commonly used file formats, you can see here for web, print and video, and the key adjustments would be the pixel aspect ratio for video that's unique. For print, it would be whether we want to use or utilize scalable vectors. These file formats like EPS and PDF will support that. And for web, the crucial thing is to think about the compression because we want the images to load faster. So the smaller file size possible is always ideal without obviously compromising on the quality of the images. 6. 1.2.a Key Components of Project Communication: There will be a couple of questions in the exam was about project management, and you have to be familiar with a couple of important terms. So let's just discuss these. First of all, you need to know the three key components of project communication. The first is the project scope, then the due dates, and then the third one is the possible impacts of delays. Already mentioned having a brief for a project. That's essentially what you need for getting the project scope documented and make sure that everyone agrees what are the deliverables that the designer has to produce and what are the expectations from the client? Now, when it comes to this topic, one, I know it will always come up in the exam, and that is the scope creep. So scope creep in graphic design refers to the gradual and often unapproved expansion of a project's goals, deliverables or requirements beyond the original agreement. It usually happens when clients request additional revisions assets or features that weren't part of the initial brief. And it happens more often than not that the client would do these things without adjusting the timeline, the budget, or contract. So obviously, scope creep is something you want to avoid, and that is why documentation and clear communication between all the team members and the client is crucial. It applies to pretty much any type of project management, but it's true also for graphic design. A very typical scenario for scope creep is when an individual, a freelancer working remotely for a client, and they agree on the initial terms, but maybe the brief is a bit vague on some aspects. And then after the designer delivering the work that they were expected to create, the client would request repeated rounds of minor tweaks that will turn into hours or maybe even days or weeks of unpaid work. Unfortunately, this can happen to anyone, even if you're familiar with the term and even if you know how you should manage a project, if you are on your own and if you have a new client that you don't know how to work with or how to manage a project together with, then you can also easily end up suffering from scope creep. The main problem is not just that you will be overworked and you will be frustrated because you will be working on things that were not agreed in the beginning. But it can also strain the relationship between you and your client, mainly because anything that wasn't discussed or agreed on in the beginning will lead to lots of question marks and unclear expectations, and it just makes things confusing. So the way we prevent this to happen is that we always set clear project scope and deliverables in writing. It's highly recommended to always have signed contracts between the parties. And in case the client wants to have a couple of rounds of revisions, that should also be agreed on in the beginning, like limit the amount of revisions that you will allow, and that should be already considered when you set your rate or the price for the project. So if you allow the client two or three rounds of revisions, you should consider how much time that is going to take, and if you get compensated for it, then there won't be any frustration. There's also another term called change order, which again, another signed document that you can have between you and the client whenever they request additional changes that were not agreed on in the beginning or maybe if they change their mind about a crucial part of the project, like the direction they want to change. For these, again, it's good to have documentation you can easily refer back at any time. I Bush comes to shove and the client is not happy with something, these things like the change order will always support and protect you. Now for toDates, there's lots of different tools that you can use like Google Spreadsheets. You can use Notion, Monday, and there's so many other tools out there, especially if you have a team, it's even more important to keep track of everyone's work and what and when they are supposed to deliver. So here's a simple example from our team, the way we manage the publication and advertisement of video tutorials that we publish on YouTube. It has a simple weekly timeline. It also has the tasks broken down and assigned to team members, and there's a clear indication of the status of each of those tasks. For the exam, it's important to also know the term Gang chart, and that is simply just another visual representational method for tracking the tasks and also the deadlines. And you can also be asked a question about what's a critical path analysis or critical path method. This is another visual planning technique which can identify the sequence of dependent tasks that directly impact the project's completion. Both of these methods are useful. Like with the Gen charts, just coming back to them, it's easy to visualize the timelines and how the tasks overlap and again, depend on each other. And there is no right or wrong way to manage the due dates as long as there is some kind of tracking method you are using and you are sharing with everyone involved in the project. Last but not least the third key component of project communication would be the possible impacts of delays. So it's very important to recognize any potential bottlenecks, such as limited resources, like a single graphic designer working on multiple projects and also client availability for approvals. So even if you are the designer and you deliver your work on time, but you obviously need to get feedback on it, and based on that feedback, you have to progress further. If you don't check the client's availability in advance and maybe the client won't be available to look at the work for a week or two, then of course, that is going to delay everything. And you might not feel like it's your fault that the client wasn't available to get feedback. But usually what this leads to is that, again, you will have limited time for the revision that you have to do. And there is another term for this called feedback loop, which means the entire process of you the designer, sending your work for review the client looking at the work, reviewing it, and sending the feedback back to you. And then you, again, the designer looking at that feedback and trying to address it and make the changes. So that would be considered one feedback cycle. And each of these cycles, for instance, could have a separate version name like version one, version two, version three. And it's best to also maybe create separate subfolders within your main project folder where you're storing all the deliverables and files for the project. 7. 1.2.b Basic project management concepts: You also have to be familiar with the five key stages of project management, starting with planning and analysis. Now, we already covered most of the key actions that's required for this stage, like identifying the target audience, finding out the demographics, the preferences and behaviors, also identifying the client's goals, like what is the purpose of the design? What's the main thing that they want to achieve with this design? And the most important documents for this stage would be to get the contract agreement and also the design brief, of course. If you're interested to learn more about the stages of design project, I actually covered this in much more detail in my graphic design theory series. But for the exam, don't worry, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge about this topic. You just have to know the individual stages and what's the order because you might need to put them in the correct order. After planning and analysis, we move on to scheduling. Here, the main objective is to establish a realistic timeline based on the deliverables and the project scope. And we already talked about the different ways we can do the planning, like using a gain chart or timeline. And most importantly, we need to set the due dates or deadlines for all the deliverables. Third stage would be the building part when we begin creating the assets and starting the initial concepts and working our way to fully detailed prototypes or the final designs. And usually the beginning of the building stage would be considered the ideation stage where we come up with concepts, and there's many different techniques that you can use, like mind mapping is a common one where you map out and connect all the important words that you can associate with the brief. And, of course, sketching is something that most designers would utilize, whether it's very simple or more detailed sketches when it comes to web design or user interface design, you would be using wireframes, sketches. And the main purpose of all of these techniques is to save time and to make sure again that you are on the right track so you can check with your client before you invest too much time into producing final artwork that you both agree on what's the best direction moving forward. Here's another nice timeline showing how an idea can start with a simple rough sketch, which then is turned into a more refined sketch with more details than later to include the color palette as well. And only once the composition and visual direction is clear and agreed on, the designers can start working on the final output for which in this case, a three D model was necessary. And from that three D model, once all the lighting and materials are applied, a nice fully rendered image can be created or even a nice animation like this one. After the building stage, we move on to the review and evaluation stage. Here, we first usually would have an internal review to check if we manage to meet the original brief and all the requirements are met. In case a freelancer is working on their own, it's worth asking someone else's opinion before we send the work that we created for the client. So if you have another visual artist or designer that you know, it's always worth to ask for their opinion because they will be looking at things with a fresh eye, and they might notice things that you've overlooked. When you feel confident that everything is ready and you want to show it to the client, you have to make sure that your presentation is going to be top notch. So it's very important to impress the client not just with the work, but also the way you present it, whether that's just a PDF or a PowerPoint. And also, in case you are presenting life, whether it's online or in the same room as the client, it's also important to prepare and rehearse how you are going to talk about the project and what you've created. Once the client is happy and approves the work, then we move on to the last stage, the implementation and publication, where the main objective would be to deliver the final product in the format and medium for which it was designed. 8. 1.3 Copyright, permissions, licensing and how use specific content: During the exam, you will also be asked a few questions about the legal aspects of graphic design work, which mainly focuses on the type of copyright permissions and licensing required to use specific content. Not only, you don't have to be a lawyer to understand these terms. They are fairly simple and straightforward. And there's only a couple of key terms that you need to be familiar with which keeps coming up in the exam. First, let's just clarify what is copyright. It is a legal protection that gives creators ownership over their original work, including designs, illustrations, logos, and layouts. As soon as you create a design, you automatically own the rights to it, and others can't copy, use or modify it without your permission. So why does this matter? Because your work is protected from being stolen or reused without credit or payment? It also means that you as a designer will need permission or a license to use other people's work. So, for instance, if you want to include a photo, use a font or an icon or a template for a project that you're working on, you always have to make sure that you have the rights or the permission to use them. So in a nutshell, if you made it, you own it. If someone else made it, you need permission. Now when it comes to generative AI, right now, there is no clear protection for the copyrighted work that is shared online because for these generative AI models to work, they have to scrape the Internet and devour anything that they can find. So we are talking about billions of images. And most of the big companies like Mid Journey or Open AI, created Chet GPT, will either ignore or try to hide the fact that they included millions of copyrighted work in their training data. The reason why they can get away with this or still continue to do this is because it is very hard to trace back the original copyrighted work because they are not sharing or being transparent about what was used in the training data. Don't worry in the exam. They won't ask you questions about generative AI. It's just something that I am quite passionate about, and it's a gray area really when it comes to how copyright is handled. Let's move on and talk about the next important term public domain. So this refers to creative materials not protected by intellectual property laws, such as copyright, trademark or patent. And in this case, the public owns the work, not an individual author or artist. And compared to copyrighted work, anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission. Derivative work would be considered something that was altered or was based on some other original work. So that means that you've taken an existing piece like a logo, artwork, photo, or layout, and you modified it in some way, like change the colors. You addit some elements, or you combine it with lots of other elements to create something new. But here's the catch. Even if you change something, the original creator still owns the copyright. What that means is that you need permission to legally use or share the new version unless that original work is already in public domain, or you own a license that allows you modifications. So again, to put it simply, changing a design doesn't make it yours. If it's based on someone else's work, it is still protected. Now, fair use, another important term to be familiar with, is a legal rule that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. But only in specific situations like for education, commentary, news reporting or parody. But fair use is not a free pass to any image or design just because you are not making money from it. And courts would usually look at four different things to decide if something is fair use or not. They would look at the purpose, so what it is intended for, the nature, so is the original work factual or creative, the amount or how much of the original work is being used? And most importantly, the effect, whether you work will affect the original creator in any way, but most importantly negatively, like, financial so fair use is limited. It's case by case, and it's also not guaranteed. So the best thing to do to avoid any complications is to get permission or a license to use someone else's work. Now, I mentioned licensing a couple of times. This is another term you should be familiar with. So it is a way you can legally use copyrighted material by paying a fee established by the copyright holder or stock image provider, for instance, you can use the copyrighted material or stock image for a specific time and in a certain way as outlined in the terms of conditions. Might also be asked about creative commons or CC for short, which is a system that lets creators share their work with the public while keeping some rights. So instead of saying all rights reserved, a designer can use a Creative Commons license to say, you can use this, but here's how. So this is a way to make sharing easier, but you still need to follow the rules of each license. Similarly to licensing, you might also need to get signed release forms if you want to use a person's likeness or a landmark in your composition. You will also need a release form if you want to include a brand name in your project, especially if that brand is not owned by the client that you are working for. And there's two types of specific releases that usually they ask about in the exam. One is the model release, which you need if a person is recognizable in your work and the location release, which is required for landmarks or private properties like Disneyland. 9. 1.4.a File formats: It's also important to know the differences between the file formats that we normally would use in a print design project. Now, it might be a bit tricky to categorize the file formats, but essentially they would be falling into three main groups. First is the working or project files that allows you to go back and make changes to a design. So for Photoshop, it would be the PSD or Photoshop document. For Illustrator, it would be AI, and for in design, it would be a DI and D D file format or in design document. Next category are the assets that you would use in a design project. And these would be predominantly image file formats, including both pixel or roster and vector images. But there can be also text files or Excel files in case of a catalog, for example. And last but not least, the final category would be the print ready files. And most of the time, these would be PDFs or EPS files. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time comparing these to each other because you can just use this chart from the Milanotbard for that. So instead, I'm just going to highlight a few important things or tips that you should keep in mind. When it comes to Image five formats, you have to be aware of compression and the loss in quality. So that is especially important when you work with JPEG images. And it is something that you can best understand when you're using the Export as feature in Photoshop. So in this case, we can see a detail from a design on the left and the right side. And at the moment, I am using the same settings, but I'm just going to switch to JPEG for both of these, and I'm going to change the quality. So here on the right size, I'm going to set it to very poor, while on the left side, I'll make sure it is set to the highest quality option, which is great. If I zoom even closer, you will be able to see the artifacts even better. So I'm sure you can spot all of these messy pixels here on the right side. So that is due to the JPEG compression, and this is what we would call a compression artifact. Advantage of using lower quality JPEGs is that their file size will be lower. So while this one here on the left side is around 350 kilobytes, the one on the right with the lowest quality setting is only around 50 kilobytes, so considerably smaller. Most image file formats, including JPEG, also supports embedding color profiles, and this is something that you should always make sure to include for a correctly color managed workflow. And color management is actually our next topic that we will be covering in more detail. Besides JPEG, another very commonly used image file format would be PNG, which has the advantage compared to JPEG that it can also hold transparency detail. So this is something that you can again disable or keep it turned on here on the top right corner. And the bit depth of PNG files by default is 24 bits. But you can always reduce the file size if you choose the eight bit version PNG. Bit depth is a way of measuring the amount of colors that you can use in a five format. So eight bit, for instance, means two on the power of eight, which is 256 colors. Compared to that, the other format, 24 bit would actually mean eight bit for each of the color channels RG and B, and that also applies to JPEG images. But there is also another five format, GIF which can also include animation. But the main limitation of this five format is that it cannot go beyond eight bit depth. So the maximum amount of colors is 256. To better see what that means, instead of using the Export as command, I'm going to choose Export, save for web, where for the GIF file format, we also get the color table. And here, we can actually reduce the amount of colors. And if I go down maybe to four colors, in case of this design, it wouldn't make much difference because it uses already a very limited color palette. But by using less colors in a GIF file, of course, you will have a smaller file size. And file size in general, doesn't make much difference in print projects. It's more important for web and mobile design. In case you are wondering, where can you find the other type of file formats? You will find these under File Save as in most of the design applications. And in the latest version of Photoshop, for instance, it will only show you a very limited list at first, and you can only see the additional Five formats if you choose to save a copy option. Once you do this, you will see a much larger list. And here you can actually find all the formats that you would normally be able to save from the export or save for web features, but accompanied by a lot of additional specialized file formats, which most of the time you won't require in your work. Another common way we can categorize image file formats is whether they are roster or vector based. So JPECPNG and Gift files are all roster based, while the most common vector file formats would be EPS and SVG. Out of these two, EPS is mainly used in print, while SVG is a vector file format that is designed to be used on the web, and it's an abbreviation for scalable vector graphics. Now, there's one other important file format that is worth mentioning. And even though as a graphic designer, you most of the time won't be required to work with this, but it's still good to be aware of, and it is the camera raw format. Now, this is something that most photographers will be familiar with. And the name Row comes from the fact that this is the unprocessed information that the camera records. And this simple comparison shows really well how it can be different or better than a JPEG image. So if you have your camera set to record JPEGs, that means that the camera will automatically compress and process the information and turn it into a flat image. Compared to that, a afile will record and keep all these layers of raw data and will allow you to access all of those layers later on when you are developing the images. And this is why a camera file will always be much larger in size compared to a JPEG, but it's going to give you a lot more freedom when it comes to editing images. The biggest difference you will notice in the tonal range, which is the range between the darkest and lightest details in an image. In case of a raw file, you would have a much wider tonal range, allowing more details to be captured in the brightest areas and also in the darkest areas of the image. In case of a JPEC file, these brightest or darkest details will be completely washed out or burnt out, so they will become completely white or completely black, which means that there won't be any useful color information recorded. So when you are trying to make adjustments, you are going to start introducing a lot more noise into your images compared to developing a raw photograph. And in case you are wondering, the best way to display the tonal range of an image is by using a histogram, which lists the number of pixels in each tonal region from the darkest blacks to the brightest whites, and reading a histogram is actually very easy. When you look at these three examples at the bottom, you can see an under exposed image would have most of the values closer to the left, while an overexposed image would have most of the details in the histogram on the right side. If you see a peak on the far right edge, that means you will have clipping in the brightest details. And the same can happen with the darkest details. Once again, if you see a peak there, that's also not a good thing. And in general, the easiest type of images to work with and that will provide the most information are these neutral exposures where you have most of the details in the mid tones range. And just so you can see and appreciate the difference that you can achieve by developing a raw photo. Here is the original one, and here is the refined and developed version. And you can really see the amount of details we managed to recover in both the darker and brighter areas. Once again, that's before, and this is after. 10. 1.4.a Resolution: Every print designer has to be familiar with image resolution because this is one of the most important limiting factors when it comes to deciding the size and the quality of a print. And essentially what it means is that how much detail an image can hold. When we refer to higher resolution images, it means that there is more detail in them compared to low resolution images. And it's important to differentiate already in the beginning when it comes to digital images, we divide them into two main categories pixel or roster images, and photographs would also fall in this category and vector graphics, which most of the time would be illustration or type. Now, generally, in graphic design projects, you would be using a combination of pixel images and vector graphics. But the weakest link in terms of resolution and print quality will always be Pixel roster or sometimes also referred to as bitmap images. Better understand the difference between pixels and rosters, here is a very close up look of a photograph showing an eye and magnifying a roster image this much will reveal the actual building blocks, the pixels or rosters, which looking this closely, makes it look like it's a mosaic. But zooming way back, we will start to see this as a continuous image without any pixelation. Good thing about pixels, especially when you have a lot of them, is that you can capture really complex visual information, and it also allows a lot of subtlety that you might not be able to recreate with vectors. Now, the biggest advantage of vectors is that they are resolution independent, meaning that they can be any size you want them to be without losing any quality. To demonstrate this to you, here we are in Illustrator with a simple illustration and no matter how much I zoom into it, we will never see pixelation. So these curves that are used as the building blocks in a vector graphic compared to a pixel image are all made up small anchor points. Everything is mathematically described instead of relying on that roster that we've seen earlier or the columns and rows of pixels. If I move one of these anchor points around, all that has to be registered or recorded is the actual new location of this anchor point. That's simply just these two coordinates that we can see here. The computer will very easily be able to connect two anchor points with a linear straight line, but it can also connect anchor points like these two with a curve, and to be able to describe the curve itself, all that is necessary is this handle that I'm dragging around, and it's relative distance from the original anchor point. This method of visualizing vector graphics and shapes in general is what we refer to as Bezier curves. It's named after the mathematician who invented this method. Another important advantage of vector graphics, apart from them being resolution independent, is that their file size is also smaller compared to roster images. But what's clearly a downside with them is that it's very hard to make things look photorealistic, and that is why we're still relying on both pixels and vectors in our work. So as you can see, they both have their strengths and weaknesses and their use in a graphic design project. There's a couple of ways that you can measure resolution, and you may have heard of some of these units like DPI, as we can see it in this example, 300 DPI would be like a standard that we would be considering a high resolution image or a high resolution print. And DPI actually stands for dots per inch, which refers to the number of dots of ink on the printed image. But when it comes to the design phase, so even before we end up creating something that's ready for print, we would normally measure roster of pixel images in PPI or pixel per inch. And what's great about this comparison is how it shows that resolution on its own doesn't really matter. What matters is the amount of pixels in combination with resolution. So when you have a lot of pixel information recorded in your digital image, you will be able to print and keep high resolution image, even in a large format like a zero. We can see the size of this in millimeters here. So this is a fairly large sized poster. Compared to that, when you have less pixels to work with, you can still have a high quality print, but you will only be able to use a much smaller print size. So pixel print, again, just simply means how much of those pixels of the image will be printed on an inch distance. And the higher the resolution, the more compressed those pixels will get on the printed image, which will result in a higher quality print. 11. 1.4.a Image Size: The best way to understand the relationship between the amount of pixels, the resolution and the print size is to use the image size feature within Photoshop. So in this case, we can see that this is the original amount of pixels that we are working with. So around 3,000 pixels width and 4,000 pixels height, which is roughly around 12 million pixels or megapixels. I don't want to confuse you, but in case you want to be specific, a megapixel is actually slightly more than 1 million pixels. It is actually two on the power of 20 pixels, which is 1 million, 48,576 pixels. But to keep things simple, one megapixel you can think of as 1 million pixels. I took this photo with an iPhone, which has 12 megapixels roughly, and that's why we get this image size. Notice how the pixel dimensions automatically paired with the resolution, which is by default, set to 300 PPI or pixel per inch. But what if I change? And to be able to see the print size, all I have to do is to switch the pixels to either inches or one of these other measurement units. But let's just go with inches first. So you can see that it can be printed in the high resolution standard 300 PPI with a size of roughly ten by 13 ". And that, in case you are wondering is between an A four and an A three paper size. So even though it's a 12 megapixel image, it still won't give us a huge size when it comes to printing it with 300 PPI. But what's also very important to understand, and this is actually very rarely discussed is that the quality requirement of a print also depends on the viewing distance. So strictly speaking, 300 PPI or DPI is something that you require when you are producing a print that is going to be held by people like brochures, magazines, books, business cards, so on and so forth. But compared to that, a large banner where people will be just walking by or maybe even seeing it from much further away. When they are displayed on top of a building or by the side of a motorway, the required printing resolution will be much, much lower than 300 PPI. And here is a great comparison where we can see the viewing distance on the left. And the required resolution for it on the right. And you can see that even when a print is displayed 1 meter away from the viewer, it already can drop down to 180 PPI, which is almost half of the original requirement. But as you are getting further away from the viewer, like five meter away, that already results in the requirement going down all the way to 35 PPI, which is around ten times lower than what we started. I don't think you would ever have to design something that will be displayed 200 meters away from people, apart from if you are doing exhibition design, and it's a huge exhibition hall. But in those cases, the resolution could even be all the way down to one PPI. Now, of course, that is a fairly extreme scenario. But don't forget that the minimum required resolution always depends on the viewing distance. And in case you ever need it, there is also a formula to calculate the minimum resolution based on the viewing distance. To make sure that the relationship between print size and resolution makes sense. Coming back to our previous example in Photoshop, when I turn off resampling, meaning that we are not planning to change the size of the image, so we are not introducing new pixels at all. I I now start lowering the resolution, at the same time, as you can see, the print size is increasing. So what this means is that we are just distributing the original pixel information, and it will be printed less densely on the paper. And, for instance, if I go down to 150 PPI resolution, that will give us exactly twice the size of a print compared to when we were about to print this with 300 PPI. Of course, similarly, if we were to go above 300 PPI, which most of the time wouldn't be necessary. But just for the sake of argument, if I go higher and we check, again, the size either in centimeters or inches, of course, it's going to keep dropping because once again, all we are doing is condensing all that original pixel dimensions into a smaller space. Besides PPI and DPI, you may have also heard of SPI and LPI, out of which SPI mainly refers to scanners and how high resolution they can scan images. And it stands for the samples taken in one linear inch, while LPI or lines per inch is used mainly in commercial printing, which describe the distance between the printed lines of dots. To keep things simple, as a graphic designer, you mainly have to worry about PPI or pixel per inch, because that's something that you will be working with in most of the design applications. 12. 1.4.a Aliasing: Now another term which you most likely will come across is aliasing, which is most noticeable on type when the resolution is too low. We will start to see these hard edges on the curved details on type, which is also referred to as stair stepping. And the method of antialiasing is what can help us to improve this by averaging the colors on the edges and smoothing them out. Here is another close up look which shows this stair stepping perfectly. It even looks like a stair in this case, and the result of anti aliasing and how it can smooth it out even at this close up view. When you are working with type in Photoshop, for instance, you will see that antialiasing is automatically applied. But of course, it's something that you can take off. If I select this text here and change the type of anti aliasing from the default sharp to no we can see the result immediately, and even from a distance, this will be noticeable. But if I zoom a little bit closer, we can probably see it even better. So this is without and with anti aliasing, without and with. You probably notice that there is actually no aliasing going on on the horizontal line. And in some cases, it would also not show on the vertical lines. And that is because these details can perfectly align themselves to the pixel grid. So for them, there is no need for anti aliasing. And I can just show you this. If I zoom closer, eventually, we will start to see the pixel grid, and we can tell that this sharp horizontal edge doesn't need any smoothing. It already looks perfect the way it is. Last but not least, I just want to mention that there is a very interesting new area in digital imaging where artificial intelligence is used or utilized to increase the resolution of raster images. And Photoshop has its own neural filter called Super Zoom, which is powered by the Adobe Sensei Artificial Intelligence. And with this, you can increase the size of an image, I think, up to nine times as large as it is originally. At the same time, you can enhance image details, remove JPEG artifacts, introduce noise reduction and shopening and even enhance specifically phase details. And to give you an example, even a four times increase in size would mean this much difference between the original image and the one that went through the neuro filter. And to see the details, I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer. So around 100% view or actual pixel size view would show the original image quality. And if we jump to the resize version with the same Zoom ratio, this is what we will see. This technology essentially is guessing the information that is missing in the original and tries to make up new pixels. Out of all the AI tools used for resizing images, the most effective one, in my opinion, is Let's enhance, for which the link you can find on the board. And here you can see a comparison of the original image on the left, the result of neuro filter, we've seen in Photoshop in the middle, and the result of the Let's enhance AI on the right. You can see how much better the clarity is on that version and how much details were recovered or added to areas like the eyes and the lips. I predict that these type of technologies in a couple of years will make roster images also feel resolution independent like vector graphics. But until then, keep checking the resolution of every image that you're using in your graphic design project. 13. 1.4.b Color spaces: The ultimate goal of color management is to match the colors that you can see on your screen to the colors on the final printed product. In an ideal color management workflow, you would have all the devices that take part in the design and printing process to speak the same language, which will result in predictable and accurate color results. One of the most important components of a color managed workflow is the use of ICC color profile. We can see, everything starts off with the designer having a color profile created for the monitor that they are using. And later on, we will talk about the calibration of the monitor as well because that's also important. But then for the rest of the process, there is always going to be a color profile attached to the designer's files. So no matter where they show up, the original color information should be carried along avoiding any unwanted transitions and shifts in the colors. A color profile is essentially the description of the color space, gameut and behavior of a calibrated device. Printers will have both their offset and digital presses calibrated, and they will be able to supply you the graphic designer with their ICC color profile. ICC actually stands for International color consortium. It was established in 1993, and it's the internationally accepted cross platform architecture and system for color management. The color topic, we already talked about the differences between RGB and CMYK color modes and mentioned that the main difference between the two is how the colors are combined. So while in CMIK that we use for print, we are working in a subtractive color model, which means black is the most intensive color. In case of RGB or on screen, we are using the additive model where white is the most intense color. So with CMYK, when you're combining colors, they are getting darker. It's the opposite with RGB. As you are combining the colors, they are getting brighter. But the main reason why you will see a shift in the colors from RGB to CN YK is not because they describe colors in a different way. It's because they have a different color gameut. So each color space, and in this case, we can see four of them here on the top right, will have their own color gameut which is essentially the subset of colors that can be represented by that color space. As you can see, SRGB, represented with the green triangle has the smallest area covered, which means that it offers the smallest color gamut. Compared to it, the standard CNK color space is slightly larger, and it is this polygon that we can see here with a pink outline. So even though these two colour gamets overlap, there is still quite a lot of difference between them, especially as you are getting into these more vivid and saturated colors. These cannot be translated into CNK correctly. But SRGB color space is actually more designed for b. While Adobe RGB, which is a much wider color gamet is the standard that we would use for print design. You can see it here in the diagram that it is a much larger triangle than SRGB, meaning it covers a lot more colors. And the largest color gamet in this chart is the P photo RGB, which is mainly used in professional photography workflows. You may have noticed that when you're using the color picker in Photoshop, sometimes when you select a color, you get a warning here on the right. Now, this actually means out of gamut for printing. We can see that the color that I selected is described in many different ways, including RGB and C and K, and also LAB, which we will discuss shortly. But in order to see the closest color to this that can actually be printed with the four colors, C and K, we can just click on this little war the color picker immediately jumps to the actual color that was described with the CNK values. So once again, if I click somewhere up here, we can see that these are the values, 430 hundred zero. And if I click on the warning icon, even though the color sample shifted quite a lot, the CNK values didn't change. That is because essentially all of these very vibrant colors cannot be represented with ink, and that, of course, not only applies to the green hues, you would have the same issue with most of the other hues. So for example, if I come up somewhere, let's say, here, again, moving to the top right corner where we have the most intense colors, I can click on the warning, and once again, we will have a huge shift, which shows the nearest possible color that can be achieved in printing. Once again, from here, all the way down there. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula or feature that will save you from dealing with this difference between RGB and CMYK. But by following a color managed workflow, you can be best equipped and work and see the right colors throughout the whole process that eventually will be possible to be printed. 14. 1.4.b LAB color space and synchronizing Color Settings: Already mentioned that ICC profiles are important for this, but we also have to have color calibration and proofing, which I'm going to cover in the next video. But before we do that, just one final thing I wanted to mention, and that is the LAB color mode or lab color mode, which you might have heard of or maybe just wondering how that is different from RGB and CMYK. So the advantage of this color mode is that it's completely device independent, and it is the closest representation of human vision. To better understand how it works, it's best to imagine this color model as a sphere. So it's a three dimensional representation of all the colors that can be described where L stands for luminosity or lightness, which is measured on a scale of zero to 100 which is from black to white. And this can be imagined as the vertical axis or Z axis in this color coordinate system, while the other two axes are A and B on which A ranges from green to red, red being the positive value and green being the negative. And the B axis goes from blue to yellow. Again, blue being the negative and yellow being the positive value. Now jumping back to Photoshop, I have one of my photographs open, and you can see within the channels panel, when we look at RchB color mode, it's going to consist of these three color channels, red, green, and blue. And each of these are eight bit grayscale images with 256 variations of tonal values, referring to the intensity of each of these individual colors. So in case of the blue channel, the reason why we see the flower being completely black because there's no blue component in it at all. Instead, it is made of green and red resulting in this yellow color in the end. And if you concentrate on the grass, you can see that it is brightest on the green channel, while it is much darker on the red and the blue channel. Now, let's see what happens if I switch to LAB color mode. First of all, I just go back to the composite RGB channel and then switching to the LAB color option from image mode. You'll see that there is nothing actually changing on the image. I can just undo this change, go back and forth. And as you can see, even though the channels are changing on the right, nothing is going to be affected in the image itself. But when we look at these channels, we can see that we have the L or lightness channel and then the A and the B channels. You might recall that the B channel was actually the difference between blue and yellow colors, and that is why we are seeing brighter details here for this channel because of all the yellow flowers in the image. The main reason I mentioned the lab color mode because there are a lot of professionals who would work in this instead of using RGB. And even though it is definitely worth exploring it and being aware of its advantages, using RGB color mode instead, as long as you pay attention to color management, you can still work in RGB, especially when it comes to editing images. Now, even though you are using RGB images in Photoshop, Illustrator, and in design, in the end, when you are creating PDFs, most of these applications would automatically convert these colors to CMYK for printing. Before we discuss the rest of the components of a color managed workflow, I just wanted to show you one more important thing that you need to set up in the Adobe applications, and that is something you can find in the color settings option. This is something you can find in the edit menu in most of the Adobe design applications. In this case, we are in Photoshop, and you can see that my settings for color management policies are to preserve embedded color profiles for all of the color models. This is definitely a good policy to use. And one thing that I have different from the default settings is that I use Adobe RGB instead of SRGB for the RGB working space. Notice that there is a little warning here saying that my Creative Cloud applications are not synchronized to each other. So this is actually something you can do from another application, Adobe Bridge, which you can quickly access from most of the Adobe applications. Just go to the file menu and choose Browse in bridge. And then once the application opens up, just go to the edit menu again and choose color settings. And here you will be able to find all the settings used by the other Adobe applications. And notice that there's one here on the top called Custom. Now that is because I did not save my settings from Photoshop. So it just says custom here on the top. But as soon as I click Save, I'm just going to call it Martin. And then save it. I could add some comments on it as well, but click Okay and Okay again. Now scrolling down, I will be able to see the settings. And if I click Apply, it's now going to be synchronized between all the Adobe applications. So for instance, if I come to Illustrator and check the color settings option, I will be able to see exactly the same settings applied thanks to that synchronization that we achieved using bridge. 15. 1.5.a Gestalt principles: I like to think of the Gestalt principles as the grammar of visual communication. Every language around the world relies on grammar which sets the rules, creates consistency, and make sure that everyone can understand each other. It's interesting, but if you think about it, we don't actually learn in school how to understand things when we look at them. Visual perception is almost instinctive. It's something that we learn as we grow up. And even as a newborn, we already start to process our environment by looking at it. Of course, at the beginning of our life, we use our other senses more like touching and tasting things. But as we grow older, we end up relying more and more on our eyes to understand our environment and to be able to interact with it. Apparently, almost 50% of our brain is dedicated purely to process the visual stimuli that we are constantly bombarded with during daytime. And even while we are a our brain projects images, which we understand as dreams. And I like to think of dreams being some kind of exercise for the brain. So even when we are looking at things, it is trying to flex those muscles that we are using when we are again looking at things and trying to understand what we are seeing. So coming back to the guesto principles and why it is important to learn about it, remember, I said that we don't have to learn how to see things. That's completely true. However, as a designer or graphic designer, we need a better understanding how people will perceive the designs that we create, to be able to effectively communicate the message that the project is about. In this video, I'm going to give you a brief background where the Gestal principles are coming from. And we will briefly analyze this Unilever logo on the board just to see how the gesto principles can be applied to any kind of design. So first of all, guest all principles are actually coming from the area of psychology. It started by three psychologists in Austria and Germany in the early 20th century. Most important quote that sums up really well, the whole idea behind guest Autism is by Kurt Kovka who said the whole is other than the sum of its parts. And the word other is very important. So it's not more like Aristotle said, but it is something else or something different. Can see the example of the bicycle. When we have all of its parts laid out and when we have it all put together, even though it's the same exact components with the right configuration or assembly, it will be able to carry us from A to B. It becomes a vehicle. And that is something we definitely can't say about all of its parts separately or just laid out like this, only once they are put together in the right way. And this is a great analogy to think about design as well, where you have typography, images, shapes, colors, contrast, so on and so forth. You can use all of these things, but if you're not putting them together correctly or effectively, then your design won't look good or won't get the attention of viewers. Only when you put everything together in the right balance, the right order or right hierarchy, that's when you will create an effective design. Another important underlying term used in the Gestalt principles called emergence. And essentially what this means is that we tend to look at the entire object before seeing its individual parts. So again, thinking as a graphic designer, that means that if you create a poster, for instance, people will look at the poster in its entirety before they start to look at smaller details like people in the poster or the title or subtitle, and so on so forth. Why is it important? Because for us designers, we have to always create a pleasing composition or overall look of our design. But we also have to make sure that people will be able to find all the relevant information once they spend a bit more time looking at what we created. So looking at the current design of the Unilever logo, we can immediately pick up a couple of the gestal principles that are applied here, like simplicity, which is also referred to as law of pregnans, which we can see in all of these little icons here. They are all simplified almost to abstraction. But if we pay attention, we can still make out and recognize a couple of things here, like there is a little bee here. We also have a bird. There is a pepper. There is a palm tree. There is a symbol, which is for recycling. There's another symbol, the heart, which can be interpreted as love. But in this context, it's more likely to indicate healthy products. So why do you think it was important to apply the rule of simplicity to all of these icons in this logo. Well, if you think about it, if they were too complex and there were too much details on them, it would end up becoming too complex and distracting, and definitely it wouldn't work as a logo. Unilever is a massive company with so many brands inside it, and to be able to communicate that complexity, the designer decided to highlight many aspects of these brands without them becoming too overwhelming or overpowering. And this takes us to the other rule that's applied here, which is called figure ground, which means that we can look at something like this shape here as a unified outline of the letter U. So that is something that we would understand as the ground or background. And all of the little icons inside it are the figures or the foreground elements. The figure ground rule is a little bit more tricky to understand, so you will understand it much more once we look at more examples about it. Since there's so many little icons packed into this shape of the there's also a couple of additional rules applied to make it aesthetically pleasing. One of which, which is quite obvious is similarity. So basically, that means that all of these icons feel similar to each other. So they all use the same color. They all have round edges, so there's no sharp corners in either of them. And if you pay attention to the icons, they all seem to be following the shape of the So that is something that we call common fate. They all feel like going or flowing in the same direction. And another interesting thing that we can see here that it wasn't necessary to create a solid outline for the letter U for it to look like it's closed. So we perceive it as a closed shape, even though it has gaps around it, and that is a perfect example and use of the gestal principle called closure. Symmetry is another rule that we can see here. So if we have this line here in the middle, you can see that not only the letter U is aligned to that, but even the text at the bottom, is symmetrically aligned to the letter above it. This helps to create a pleasing balance in this composition. And if you're looking at the text itself here at the bottom, there's also another rule applied there, which is called continuation or continuity, where, again, our brain can easily connect this and understand it as a single word, even though there are gaps in between the letters. And this works well mainly because this looks like a handwritten text or manuscript. While if this text was set in different typeface, like a Serif or Sunserif then it would already cause issues if we had these big gaps between those letters, especially if these gaps are uneven. And finally, one other rule that we can see being used here is proximity, which in this case, connects the letter mark which we have here on the top and the word mark that we have underneath it. So the closeness of these two elements and the fact that they are stacked on top of each other, we'll have to always see this as a single unit, a logo, even when it's placed on an advert, for instance, together with the logos of other brands. So to summarize the importance of guest principles is that as a designer, you need to be able to emphasize visual relationships, and you can only do this effectively by understanding how your viewers will interpret or perceive the visual information that you are presenting to them. 16. 1.5.a Design elements and principles: The basic elements of design are fundamental visual building blocks used to create any composition. Designers use these elements to construct and communicate ideas visually, just like a writer uses words to build sentences and sentences to build stories. Each element has its own role. Lines guide the eye, shape, creates structure, color, evokes emotion, texture, adds depth, and so on. The principles of design on the other hand, are the rules or guidelines for how to organize and arrange those elements effectively. The elements are what you use, the principles are how to use them. For example, you might use color, which is an element to create contrast, which is a principle or arrange shapes the element to achieve balance, which is another principle. In short, elements are the tools and principles are the blueprint. Luckily, for this exam, you don't have to have an in depth knowledge of design elements and principles. However, if you're interested to find out more about these things, I have an entire training series dedicated to this topic, covering all of these terms in great detail. Just as an example, for balance, we talk about the visual weight of design, and we look at lots of different examples and also the types of balance that you can see in compositions like symmetrical, asymmetrical, radial and mosaic balance. We look at examples of alignment. Can be vertical, horizontal, diagonal or following a custom grid. We also look at lots of examples specifically on how grids can be utilized in visual communication. And for every term and topic, we look at hundreds of amazing examples, and we discuss them in great detail. 17. 1.5.b Typographic hierarchy, readability and legibility: Typography is the art of arranging letters and text in a way that makes it easy to read and visually appealing. Good typography helps guide the reader's eye, sets the tone of the message, and makes the overall design feel more professional and balanced. When looking at a poster or design, we immediately get an impression whether it's been done by a professional or not, and that's mainly to do with the composition, of course, but also the typography. During the exam, you will be asked questions about a couple of key terms when it comes to typography. Like visual hierarchy, which is a type of grouping and arranging the elements within the composition that will help the reader or the viewer to easily understand the message of the design. You can emphasize hierarchy between the typographic elements in many different ways. You can use skill, for instance, to emphasize the title or the most important and highest priority detail, or you can use color to differentiate important details and put them in focus. Readability should always be a priority whenever you place text in a design, even when it comes to hand lettering or more decorative uses of text. Let me demonstrate in this example, a couple of the most important typographic terms that they might ask you about in the exam. So as you can see, we have a title and the body copy under it. On both sides, it's exactly the same format for now. But I'm going to refine the version on the right. First, I'm going to apply kerning to improve the title. Right now, it just feels like there's a little bit too much space between certain characters like the W and O. If I click there in Photoshop and use option or old left arrow, I can reduce the space between those two letters. I can do the same thing between O and R, and probably I can do the same next to O and S, and then L and O as well can go a little bit closer. So that's already looking better. And if I just place this here above the other version of the text, can see it's very subtle these changes, but it does matter. So if we move this a little bit higher, you can feel that this is feeling a little bit more balanced and more professional than the other one. Now, let me just drop that back here. And then for the body copy, what I'm going to do is to first increase the leading or line spacing that I can do by holding down alter option key again. But now I press the down arrow on the keyboard, so I increase the leading. Then I will also increase the tracking, which is the character spacing. So that's alter option key right arrow a couple of times until I feel like it feels more balanced. And now, if we compare the text on the left and the right, we can tell that the one on the right feels much more comfortable to read, that's essentially what readability means. You might be thinking, what does legibility mean? Well, that just simply means whether it is physically easy to read text or not. So for instance, if I reduce the opacity of this text layer, it is starting to be difficult to read it. So the legibility is getting worse. Similarly, if I made the text size smaller to something like that, the text on the left, compared to the one on the right is definitely more legible. Even though the readability is not as good, legibility is probably always your first priority when setting text in a design. You might also be asked about the four main categories of typefaces, and you just have to know that they are Serif, sanserif script, and display. And to better understand each of these categories, here's a couple of slides. Serifs are fonts with decorative strokes at the end of the letters. So we are talking about these little details that would be considered the Serif. This is also a Serif. These details here are also serifs and so on and so forth. These types of fonts are usually associated with tradition, sophistication, or professionalism. But San Serif category derives from the French word sun, which means without. So without serifs, we get these clean, modern, simple looking fonts with no decorative flourishes. They have more clarity. They are more minimal, and usually they come across more contemporary compared to Serif fonts. Then there are the script type faces which try to emulate handwriting. Of these fonts, legibility and readability won't be as good as the other two main categories, mainly because of the fact that these fonts won't connect the characters as well as if someone is actually writing things by hand. So the continuity or flow between the characters is usually interrupted. And it is definitely not recommended to use these for longer amount of texts like body copy, but perhaps they can work well for certain cases where we would like to draw attention to a specific part of text, and we want to make it feel more natural or organic. And last but not least, we have the display type faces, which are highly stylized and the main purpose of them to really be eye catching and draw attention to certain details or to try to inject personality and capture the essence of the topic of a design. 18. 1.5.c Photographic and cinematic composition terms: For the exam, you also have to be familiar with a couple of photographic compositional techniques and terms. So we will be covering these in this lesson. First of all, you need to know what aspect ratio means. Essentially, it means the orientation of the image, whether it's landscape, portrait, or square, and also the proportions or relation between the height and the width of the image. When I look at this image, I can tell that it's a landscape format. But more specifically, I feel like it's close to a 16 by nine aspec ratio, which is widely used on computer screens, TVs, and smartphones. Now, how can we tell the actual aspec ratio? By using the crop tool, we can select the image, and we can type in the ratio up here or even use the drop down menu. So for instance, if I choose 16 by nine, we can actually tell that it is exactly that aspec ratio. We can compare that to these other aspect ratios like two to three or four by six, and we can even swap these two numbers around. So this actually is a narrower aspect ratio than the previous one. And that's why the previous one sometimes we refer to as white screen format. And if we wanted to go even further, we could go to one to one, which would be a square format. Another common one would be four by three, and I'm just going to type these two values in here on the top. This was an older video format and was used by previous generations of TVs and monitors. Now, you might have noticed that whenever you use the crop tool in Photoshop, you also get this grid on it, which is actually the rule of thirds. So it's a guide that can help you to compose your image according to the rule of thirds. Essentially, what that means is that it's best to keep the focal point or the interesting detail of your image, not in the center, but slightly off center and more aligned to the thirds of the image frame. So, for instance, in the original composition, the astronaut is placed according to the rule of thirds and also the mountain on the right side. If I wanted to utilize the rule of thirds even more, maybe I can move the crop in a little bit even more, and perhaps we can move it down just a little bit more like that. So not only the vertical lines are going to be aligned to the interesting details in the image, but also the horizontal third lines will point and lead the viewer's eye towards those interesting details. So we can see this is after the crop and this is before. It's a subtle change, but these things can help to improve the composition overall. In the exam, you might be asked about what's a foreground, midground, and background in a composition. And in case of this image, the foreground would be considered the astronaut and the flowers. So roughly around this space here. Then the midground, I would consider these hills and the valley in the center and everything else, the sky and the mountain would be considered the background. So all of these details here on the top. Another photographic term they might ask about is depth of field. And that's essentially means how much of the image is in focus. So in case of this image, we have a wide depth of field because everything is in focus. Everything in the background and the foreground is all in focus. While in comparison here, we have shallow depth of field because everything in the background is completely blurred out. And also notice in the foreground, these details are out of focus. So only, I would say from roughly around here to there, this part of the image is in focus. And of course, the mushroom is in focus, and some of those leaves nearby, but everything else is out of focus. And in general, using shallow depth of field can really help to draw attention to certain details without any distractions that might be happening in the background. Foreground. Contrast is another important compositional technique, and that's, again, beautifully visible in this composition where we have both color and tonal contrast. So on a very dark background, we have a bright and vivid, warm tone on the mushroom. So it really jumps off from the screen because it utilizes all those different types of contrast. White balance is another term that you might be asked about, and we will be using this example later in the course, but I'm just going to show this quickly. If I choose auto color, it will improve the white balance, which basically means that whatever is supposed to be white in the image is going to be white. So gray color should stay neutral gray. So if I go back, I can see the original colors were more greenish, yellowish. Now they feel more natural and gray. Once again, from a distance before and after. And that's just simply by using the image auto color feature in Photoshop. But if we want it to be more specific, we could use the camera raw filter from the filter menu. And here under color, we would be able to improve the wide balance either automatically by choosing auto or manually by adjusting the temperature and the tint sliders. 19. 2.1.a Set appropriate document settings for printed and onscreen images: First of all, you will have to know how to open Photoshop, although most likely during the exam, the application will already be open for you. But it's good to know that the Creative Cloud icon is what allows you to find all the Adobe applications. And then from here you will be able to choose all the installed applications like Photoshop, and also you can update them if they are not up to date. If I go to the updates, I can see that the beta version of Photoshop, for instance, could be updated at the moment, but that's not the version we will be using for this course. So I will just open the normal Photoshop version, and we will see the splash screen, which changes with each version. So your one might be slightly different depending on which version of Photoshop you are using. But you should see something similar welcome screen, where you will be able to choose from the following options here on the left. Home, learn your files, share with you light room photos and deleted files. Now, if you are on the home tab, there's a couple of ways of starting a new document. You can click on Landscape or social story template files, or you can drag and drop an image here to open it in Photoshop. But most of the time, if you wanted to create a new document, you would just go to the new file option. So it's a big blue button here on the left. You can also find this option under the file menu. So choosing new here will lead to the same result. Or you can also press Commando Control and on the keyboard to get the same menu. The New Document dialog box has a lot of options on it. And if you want to have a full screen view of this, just double click on the top. That way you will be able to see all these presets, which are organized into different categories. So we have recent, we have photo, print, art and Illustration, web, mobile, and film and video. In each of these categories, you will be able to start with a blank document preset, and the information is always displayed here. When you hover over them, you can also see the information displayed under them. But there's also these additional templates that are most of the time free to use. They just need to be downloaded. So if you want to start out with any of these, you can also click on them. For instance, if you want a phone mockup for a social story design that you're working on, once you click on it, on the right side, you will be able to see the name of the template and all the additional information. And it's a quite big file, so it will take a while to download. But if we just want to see a larger preview, we can just click on that and then we can see it right here. We can scroll down and up. And if we like it, we can just click on Download. Instead of using this, I'm just going to go back and choose print as my category. And from here, I'm going to go with A four as the size, which will automatically set not only the width and the height, but also the resolution required for print. Orientation can be changed with these icons. So landscape or portray. You can also have multiple artboards within a Photoshop document, which you can turn on here. But compared to Illustrator, in Photoshop, you will only be able to create additional artboards once you are actually in the document view, not from the new document menu. I'm going to turn this off now, and I just wanted to make sure that you remember the two values that you would normally see here that's important in the exam because these can be questions. So 300 pixels per inch is the required size for print. While for screen, normally this would be 72 pixels per inch. Now, setting up the resolution in Photoshop, of course, is very important because it affects the total amount of pixels in your document. So even though the width and the height of the document stays the same, the amount of pixels will depend on the resolution. So just to demonstrate this to you, I can show the width and the height maybe in inches, and we can set this up to eight by ten, just to keep it simple. With this print size, with the current resolution, Photoshop would give us this amount of pixels. So this is a very low resolution image, only 720 pixels in height for this portrait format. But if I change back to inches and I set the resolution to 300, notice that, again, the width and the height didn't change, but if I switch to pixels, now we have a lot more pixels in this document. So it will be a much higher resolution image. Essentially, resolution means that for every inch, we will have 300 pixels. And because the inches are set to be ten for the height, that means ten times 300, which is 3,000, as we've seen. Color mode can be adjusted here, and that's by default set to RGB. But for print, this again, normally should be set to CMYK, although this is something that can be adjusted later within the document or even when we are exporting the file. But it's important to learn and remember all the available options from here and also to understand what they are used for. So in a nutshell, CMYK is for print. RGB normally is for screen. And then gray scale is for monochromatic images with 256 shades of gray, while bitmap is literally just limited to having white and black pixels in them. When I choose this color mode, you can see that the bit depth reduces down to one bit, and the single bit can have two values, either black or white. While if I go up to grayscale, this changes to eight bit. However, we can also increase the bit depth, which will give us even more variation or tonal range. And that, of course, also applies to RGB. Once again, can go up to 32 bits. Or CM VC images can go up to 16 bit. In the exam, they most likely won't ask you more about bit depth, but it's worth knowing that eight bit basically means two on the power of eight, which is 256 shades for each color channel. In this case, that's for Sion, magenta, yellow and black. And in case of RGB color space, for instance, that means two on the power of eight for each channel. And because we have three channels, it leads to around 16.5 million color variation. Even though this drop down doesn't say it's bit depth or bit depth per channel, that's what it means. So it's worth just remembering that. Last but not least, we also have the background contents that can be set to white, black, background color, transparent or custom. If you choose custom, you will get the color picker and you can pick any color from here. You can set the hue on the right side and the saturation and brightness on the left side. So if I choose any of these colors, we can see that showing up there on the right. But I'm just going to go back and set this to white, which is the default setting. There's an additional section here called Advanced Options, which might be close for you. If you want to see, just open it up, and it holds the color profile and Pixel aspect ratio options. In the exam, most likely they won't ask you about these. Again, worth just having a look at this list that by default, I believe it's going to be set to working RGB, or it can be set to don't color manage the document. And again, the default setting for the Pixel aspec ratio would be square pixels. But for certain video formats, this would already change to one of these other options here. Once you have everything set up, the last thing to do is simply click on Create, and that should open up this new document in Photoshop. I'm just getting a default message here. I'm going to turn that off. And yeah, so this is our new document that we created. We can see that it is RGB color mode, eight bit depth. And the bottom left, which is called the status bar, we can also see the pixel size and the resolution. This, by the way, can be changed to any other options here. I'm just going to keep it on document dimensions, and then the 25% in this document tab means the Zoom ratio. If I want to zoom in all the way, I can press Command one on the keyboard. You can see now it's set to 100%, or if I press Command zero or Control zero, that's going to fit the document to the screen, which in my case, leads to 31% Zoom ratio. There's one last thing worth mentioning, and that is in Photoshop, you can still access the legacy New Window menu. And to be able to get to this, you would have to go to the preferences, which you will find under the Photoshop menu on a Mac or the edit menu on PC. And then once you go to settings, you just have to choose general. You can also remember the shortcut for the settings or preferences, it's Command or Control K. So once we go there, we will be able to find the use legacy New document interface option here. So once that is selected, we can click Okay, and we can try File New to open it. And so this is how it looks. It's much simpler, but essentially has the same settings that we've seen in the newer interface. Instead of seeing all the presets on the left side, we can still choose the document type to be, for instance, film and video, and then the presets that we've seen again before on the left side in thumbnails or icon format. Are still available to choose from, but in this case, it will be listed in this drop down menu. So I can choose maybe one of these, and then obviously all the settings will update according to this. If I click Okay, this new document is created for us, but let's not forget that from the settings, as long as we have this option turned on, we will be using the legacy interface. I'm going to take that off. And if I create a new document now, we are back to the new interface with the previews here on the left side and the settings on the right. 20. 2.1.b Create a new document preset to reuse for specific project needs: Another thing they might ask you about creating new documents in the exam is how to set up a preset, so a document preset. Now, you might remember seeing a name up here whenever you create a new document, and where it says preset details, it has that untitled name. Now, if you just type in a name there, let's just say new document. This is just simply giving a title for this new document. So when you will be saving it, it's going to be the file name by default. And this is also going to show up in the document tab. However, if you want to save a document preset with the settings that you already chose, you will have to click on this icon here on the right. So once you click on that, it's going to let you choose a name for your preset. I'm just going to call it my preset for now. And then once I click on Save Preset, it's going to show up here under the saved category. It's handy that it highlights the document dimensions and the resolution, and it also lets you to delete a preset that you don't need anymore by clicking on the trashcan icon. In case they ask you what can be stored in a document preset, essentially, it's everything that we already discussed. So all the settings here on the right side will be captured in the document preset. 21. 2.2.ab Identify and manipulate elements of interface & Organize and customize the workspace: Most of the things that we have to cover in this topic might sound obvious, especially I've been using Photoshop for a while, but you have to be very familiar with all the terms that are used to refer to certain parts within the interface. So I'm going to walk you through these terms, and we will look at in more detail how to customize the workspace and also how to change the preferences. So first of all, I'm going to show you the menu bar, which you can find up here on the top. So this is what we refer to as menu bar. In these menus, you will find pretty much all the options available in Photoshop. Some of these drop downs will have extensive additional options like on the filters. We can find many of them. The image menu has a lot of adjustments, for instance, and of course, file menu would hold all the options for saving, exporting, importing, and so on and so forth. Now, you don't have to memorize where things are because during the exam, you will be able to use Photoshop, so it's going to let you explore and look for things. However, it's worth remembering roughly where things are. So you won't waste time on looking for a specific option. Right under the menu bar, we find the Options bar. So this is the section that is changing depending on what tool is selected. From the tool bar that we can find here on the left side. So I'm just going to also highlight that. So this is the tool bar, and this actually can be sent to single column or two column layout. And the whole tool bar itself can be dragged and moved to be a floating toolbar, again, both in two column and single column layout. Or it can also be docked here on the right side, even between panels or all the way on the right side as well. So this is called docking. Whenever you have that blue line appearing, it lets you dock it and then again, move it where it was originally on the left side. So depending on the tool that I select, notice how the options bar on the top is changing. So it's going to always give us additional settings and options. And some of the tools have additional dropdowns Wever there's a lot of features, like for the crop tool, we can choose the layout instead of rule of thirds. It can show us a grid, which will start showing once we adjust this. So if I change this to grid, we can see a more finer grid or we can have different compositional settings here. That is why we have the options bar to have easy access to these settings associated with all the tools from the toolbar. And since we are talking about the toolbar, it's also worth mentioning that wherever you see a little arrow next to a tool, that means there's more tools grouped together. So they are tool groups. So, for instance, with the healing brush, we have the additional retouching tools that we can find here. With the selection tools, there's multiple options for different type of marquees and so on and so forth. And also worth mentioning that there is this little icon here at the bottom, which if you click on or click and hold, you can choose the Edit tool bar, and this is where you can actually customize the tool bar. So if there are certain tools that you never use, you can remove them. So for instance, if I just go down here and let's say the frame tool is something that I don't need, I can move it in the extra tools section. So that will reduce the clutter within the toolbar. And I can do the same thing maybe with these tools as well, and you can see it is removing those tools straight away from the toolbar. And of course, we can save this toolbar as a preset. We can even disable all the shortcuts that are associated with the hidden toolbar extras. So anything that we placed in here, we can just simply disable all of those shortcuts by using this feature at the bottom. We can also toggle the visibility of some additional things like the foreground background swatches. Just remove if you don't want to see it, or there is a fairly recent icon, the generate image icon. That's all the way here at the bottom. Again, that's something that we can hide or show again. This could also be useful just to tidy up the interface. And if I just say done, the good thing is that all of these hidden tools can still be found from this section here. So these are the extras, the things that we hid. And we can choose edit toolbar again, go back and even restore the default. So if I do that and say done, then all the icons are back the way they another fairly recent feature is the contextual task bar that you can see up here. This is mainly changing based on what type of layer you have selected or what kind of selection you currently have. So just to show you, if I create a text layer, for instance, I press T on the keyboard and I start typing, you can see the contextual task bar is updating and now showing some options for this particular text layer or type layer. So we can change the font, the size, the alignment, and some additional options. In a way, the contextual task bar is similar to the options bar, but the main difference is that it can appear always directly where your selection is within the document window. By default, this contextual task bar is not pinned. You can see I actually use it as a pinned bar. But if I take that option off, now if I click back to my background layer, the contextual taskbar jumps directly under the selection, which in this case, is the whole window. So I'm just going to zoom out and you can see how that contextual taskbar is following the image. But if I click on the text layer, it will jump up and get closer to the currently selected layer. Once again, if I zoom closer, see how it is changing its position automatically. If you don't like menus to show up on top of your document, you can always choose to pin the contextual task bar and then choose a location for it. So for instance, I can place it up here on the top. And that way, no matter what I select, it will always stay there. But it's still going to update based on what type of layer I am working. Just going to change this text for now and put it down here just so we have a different composition. But it's also important to mention that in case you don't see the contextual task bar, it's something that you can find from the Window menu. You just have to scroll down and you will find it right here. And by the way, you can actually hide the options bar, even the tool bar, and you can also find the entire list of all the available panels. So we have some of these panels currently visible, but there are many other panels available to work with. And the panels are all here on the right side. So these are the panels, and some of the panels currently are showing in iconic format, which means that we can click on them to see what's inside. Once we click on it again, it will be hidden away. There are also panel groups like these ones here on the top. There's actually four panels here. So if I click between them, I can switch to each of these panels, and any of the panels can be dragged out to be moved into a different position. Right now, this is called a floating state for this panel. We can drag it here and drop it into the iconic panels, if I wanted to. So now I can access it like that, or I can create even a new group or column, which is going to allow me again to have it in another iconic state, or I can open it up or extend it, and that way we will see a much bigger view for the gradient panel in this case. So those double arrows are to expand or collapse. The panel groups or columns. And if I drag this panel, I can also put it back here into this group. I just have to make sure the highlight shows up so I can dock it back the way it was. I can even change the order between them if I wanted to like that, simply dragging it left or right. And of course, we can decide how much space we need for each of these panels, so we can drag the division line between them up and down. And if I double click on the name of a panel, it's going to collapse the entire group. We can do the same thing with the properties panel, double click, it will collapse the whole thing. A single click on it again we'll expand it once more. It's worth mentioning that similarly to the toolbar, the panels can also be docked on the left side. These are called docking zones. I can just drag it and put it here and again expand it. So that's the history panel. We can keep here on the left side, for instance, or if I want to revert back to the original settings, so the essentials workspace the way it was, I can just go up here to this drop down. So that's the workspace switcher. You can find the essentials options there. And if I want to reset it, I just have to click on Reset Essentials. So everything goes back to the way it was saved. Now, it's worth remembering that there's a couple of options here that they might ask you to switch to like painting or photography. And once I select this, obviously, it's going to change the panels that are set up by default for these workspaces. And we can also create our own custom workspace all you have to do is to click on New Workspace, give it a name, and you can decide whether you want to capture the keyboard shortcuts, menus, and the toolbar settings as well within the workspace setup. Because by default, the workspace will capture the panel locations, but these additional settings are optional. I'm just going to cancel out of this because I already saved a workspace. I use my name, Martin. If I click on that, you can see it is going to show us a very different layout. And this layout is actually working better on a higher resolution when I set my screen to a higher resolution, right now, it feels like it takes up too much of the screen. But again, I am going to switch back to the essentials option, which is the default for Photoshop. And most likely, that's the one that you will be seeing during the exam. Last but not least, we also have to remember that this is our document window. So this whole section here is the document window, which of course, where most of the important actions will happen. And within the document window, we have the tabs or document tabs here on the top. So right now, you can see I have three documents open, and we already mentioned this part here at the bottom, which is called the status bar. These are all parts of the document area or document window. And switching between the document is just as simple as clicking on these document tabs. Or you can also go to the Window menu and find all the currently open documents here at the bottom of the drop down, and you can easily switch between them from there as well. If you want to see multiple documents at the same time, you can go to the Window menu and choose a range, and then you can choose your preferred layout. For instance, we can choose the three up stacked. And this way, we can see multiple documents at the same time. I can also zoom in and out on them by using Command or Control minus or Command or Control zero to fit to the available screen space. I will do the same on all of these documents. And by the way, zooming in and out in a document window is Command or Control plus, and zooming out would be Command or Control minus. Or, of course, you can also use the Zoom tool either by selecting it from the toolbar or by pressing Z on the keyboard. And the good thing about this tool is that you can just click and drag left and right and zoom exactly into the area of the image that you're interested in. So for instance, here, I can zoom right onto the part where we can see the motorbike or again, on the volcano, we can zoom closer to the gold that is erupting here. I want to pen within a document for that, I would use the space bar, which is the hand tool or shortcut for the hand tool and then click and drag to pen around. And if I want to see the actual pixel size or 100% Zoom ratio, that is, again, Commando control one on the keyboard. So this is where we can really see the amount of detail in an image. And I can do the same thing here with the zebra. That's the actual pixel size or 100% Zoom ratio. These are all high resolution generated images, so there's a lot of detail in them. Finally, it's worth mentioning that you can also choose to have a document window to be floating, so you can drag it out and just keep it floating like this. This can be useful if you have multiple screens and you want to move one of the document windows on your secondary screen. But if you then want to consolidate all the documents back into the tabbed format that we had originally, we can go to the window menu, arrange and then choose consolidate all two tabs. So now we are back to seeing the documents individually, and we can again switch between them using the tabs on the top. 22. 2.2.c Configure application preferences: Luckily, you don't have to remember and memorize all the settings and preferences available in Photoshop. But during the exam, they might ask you to change some of these settings. So it's worth remembering roughly where you can find them. I've already showed this earlier, but I'm going to show it again. If you are on a Mac, you can go to the Photoshop, drop down, choose settings and then general. Or if you are on PC, go to the edit menu and somewhere here at the bottom, you will find the same option. It might be called preferences or settings depending on the version you are using. And once you go into that menu, you will have all of these categories here on the left, starting with general. I highly recommend to go through all of these categories and read all of the settings just so you familiarize yourself with all the available options but I'm going to highlight some of them that can be useful and also some things that they might ask you during the exam. So, for instance, under General, you will be able to choose the reset all warning dialogues and reset all preferences on quit. So these are both quite useful. If you want to find them, they are here in the general category. On the interface, we can choose the color theme of the interface. So we can make it much brighter or go back to the dark mode that I prefer. We can also change the highlight color to be different. I'm just going to keep it the default. And there's actually an option called neutral color mode, which is going to eliminate any color that would appear on the interface like this blue share button. So if I click Okay now, you can see that it is neutralized. So now it's all gray scale. Another important setting is the user interface font size, which is still under the interface category. So this can be changed to large, medium, small, or tiny. But these changes will only take effect the next time you start a Photoshop, so you don't expect to see things changing dynamically. Very important category for settings is the performance, where you can, first of all, allocate how much memory you allow Photoshop to have access to. I have quite a lot of RAM in my computer, and I allow Photoshop to use or have access to 70% of that. Here, you can also decide on how many history states you want to capture. So the changes that you make in Photoshop, in my case, 50 of those will be captured. So if I did more than 50 changes in the document, I will only have access to revert back to the last 50 steps or the most recent 50 steps. But I can increase this up to all the way to 1,000 if I wanted to. I'm just going to keep it maybe at 100. I feel like that's an ideal setting. Another important setting is on the scratch disks, if you have external drives, you can allow Photoshop to have access to those as well. This is mainly important if you don't have enough free space on your main hard drive. Now, in case you can't remember where to find the setting amongst all of these different categories, you can just use the search preferences option here on the top right. And for instance, I'm looking for the cache levels. I can just start typing that in and then choose cache levels, and it jumps straight there and it even highlighted it for me. Let me show this again. Maybe I want to change a setting for glyphs or enable missing glyph protection. Once I click on that, it's quickly highlighting it for me there. Using this search option is also useful just to get familiar with where things are. So you can type in common things like layer, and then you can see a list of all the available options or preferences that will affect how you work with layers. 23. 2.3.ab Navigate a document: This segment, we'll be talking about navigation. And even though this is something that we briefly touched on in previous videos, here we will go into much more detail. And I'm going to mention all the different ways we can navigate a document. So we've already seen Command or Control plus to zoom in. Command or Control minus to Zoom out is one of the many ways to do this. And we can also always see the Zoom ratio here at the bottom, and you can actually type in anything there. So if I type in 15%, it will zoom to that actual ratio. This section at the bottom is referred to as status bar. Within this section is called the Zoom box. We can also change the Zoom from the view menu. So if we go there, we will be able to find the actual pixel size of 100% Zoom ratio, 200%. We also have print size, which should simulate how big this image would be once it's printed. This is not always accurate because it really depends on the resolution of your screen. But just remember that under the view menu, you have lots of these navigational options that you can choose from. And since we are talking about navigation, it's also worth mentioning that under the window menu, you actually have a panel called Navigator, which is going to give you a full screen version of your currently selected document at all times. And here we can zoom in and out very easily with this slider and then use that little red rectangle to reposition. R view within the document. And if this is something that you find useful, instead of relying on the navigator panel, you can also just use a shortcut called the bird's eye view shortcut by pressing and holding the H key on the keyboard, which gives you the hand tool, and then click and holding onto the screen. You also get this temporary navigator view where you can choose which section to focus on. And when you let go the mouse button, it will zoom and snap back to the original Zoom ratio that you were in. So for instance, if I zoom in even closer to 200%, I can go to a different part of this image, and then I press and hold ge, click and hold the mouse, and then I can go to a different part of the image. And then again, you can see it jumps back to 200%. Can also zoom in and out with the mouse scroll. Just remember to hold down the old or option key if you want to use it for that because by default, without holding down the old or option modifier, you will be just scrolling up and down vertically. If you select the Zoom tool, either by pressing Z on the keyboard or selecting it from the toolbar, with this, you can activate the scrubby Zoom feature, which essentially means we can click and drag right and left to zoom in and out. And by the way, this also is available on the Zoom box here on the bottom left. By holding down the Commando Control key, you can also use the scrubby zoom, drag left and right, and similarly get that sliding effect in the Zoom. Now, we already talked about the hand tool. This is something you can again select from the toolbar or press H on the keyboard. And with this, we can pan around within the document. And notice that if I just drag and let go, it still keeps moving. So it's almost like, again, a sliding effect or tossing a paper on a very smooth surface. It's the same effect. This is actually something that you can disable if you don't like it. You will find this under the preferences, tools, flick panning. So if I turn off flick panning, you'll see that it's going to be stopping straightaway, so there is no movement after I let go the mouse. Also a quite interesting setting. I'm just going to turn it back on because I got used to working with this. And since we are talking about preferences in the same tools category, notice that there is actually an option for zooming with the scroll wheel. If you turn this on, you won't even have to hold down the Alt or option key to allow that to happen. But there's also a feature that can be turned off called animated Zoom. So if I use this, when I use Commando Control plus or minus, instead of having an animated zoom, so like a transition between the different zoom ratios, it just quickly snaps to the new Zoom ratio. While, if I go back and turn that back on, we will be able to see the animated zoom. So it's smoother because it transitions from one view to the next. Another useful feature, especially when you are making precise selections is the Rotate view tool, which you can find group together with the hand tool. So you have to right click on that tool and then choose Rotate view tool. Once this is selected, you can click and drag to rotate the whole document window, and we can set it to whatever angle we want. And this little compass that's showing up just shows us the original direction. That's obviously is when the red arrow is pointing to the top like north. But the good thing is whenever you change the rotation, all you have to do to reset it back is to simply press escape on the keyboard. If you are using this tool in combination with the shift key on the keyboard, you will be able to restrict it to rotate with 15 degrees increments. And by the way, whenever this tool is selected in the options bar, you will also be able to see the actual angle that you are using. So you will be able to use this dial as well for rotating it or typing the actual value that you wish to work with. And we also have a button to quickly reset the view if we want to. 24. 2.3.c Use guides and grids: The rulers can help you to see the actual dimensions of your document or to set up something in a specific location inside the document. And you can either turn them on with a shortcut that's Command or Control R or you can go to the View menu and turn on rulers from here or you can also use the properties panel. There is an icon, which you can use to turn it on and off. Now, since we are here in the properties panel, there is also a drop down to switch between the available measurements or units. So by default, mine is set to pixels, but I can change the 2 " and notice how both the horizontal ruler, which is up here on the top so that's the horizontal ruler and the vertical ruler on the left, we both update according to these changes. So if I change again from inches to centimeters, for instance, we can see they both update. Or again, if we go back to pixels, once again, they both update. Also change the measurements by right clicking on them. And if I change it to inches, once again, it updates accordingly. And it's worth mentioning that the origin or the zero point of your document can be updated by dragging this little intersection point here to wherever you want to set it up. So for instance, if I want it to be on the I of the zebra in this document, I can let go. And now we can see that the zero value is aligned both on the horizontal and the vertical ruler to that specific point in the document that we chose. If you want to quickly reset this back to the original point, just double click. Now one of the main functions of the rulers is to set up guides from them. You can drag from the ruler onto the document to create a guide. The horizontal ruler will give you a horizontal guide, and the vertical ruler will give you a vertical guide. However, you can change the angle by holding down Alt or option key while you are dragging a guide. So if you started dragging it from the left side, giving you a vertical guide, you can hold down Alt or option key to turn it into a horizontal guide. These guides can, of course, be moved around unless they are locked. Which is something that you can do from the view menu. So if we go in here on the guides, we can choose o guides. That way we won't be able to select them anymore. We can still create new guides, but they are all going to be locked in place until we decide to change that setting again. So if I turn of the Lo guides option, now, again, I will be able to adjust and move them around easily. By default, most tools will interact with the guides. So for instance, if I use the rectangular marquee selection, I can just start my selection and notice how it's going to snap to the guides. I can go further up, again, I can snap there, I can snap there, and so on and so forth. But if you don't like this behavior, you can change this from the view menu. So there's the Snap option. You can just disable it or you can decide what you want Photoshop to snap to. And if guides is something that you don't want to use for this, you can just take it off, or you can even choose none or all to quickly adjust and change this preference. Under the guides drop down, we have a lot of additional options. Like we can quickly clear selected guides or clear all guides, which will quickly reset the document. By the way, to be able to move a guide, as long as they are not logged, you will have to use the move tool. So that's the first tool in the tool bar. So if you have a different tool selected, you won't be able to interact with the guides. But with the move tool, we can move it around. And when a guide is highlighted, which you can see by this darker blue color, you can also just press backspace on the keyboard to delete it. It's also worth mentioning that from the drop down, you have the guide new guide option. Which allows you to create a guide instead of dragging it out from the rulers to actually type in a value. So we can say we want the vertical guide to be exactly on 2 " distance. And we can even change the color if we wanted to. And once we click Okay, it's generated or created for us. Or if we want the whole layout of guides, we can also access that option from this drop down. New guide layout. Here we have a lot more options. But essentially, this can be useful if you have a more complex layout, especially if you are planning to add a lot of text. You can have these editorial layouts or web page layouts created with multiple columns and gutter or space between the columns. So in this case, we have eight columns with this particular gutter distance between them. But if this is for print, we could also set up a margin and we can control this. Maybe I will set it to 2 " on all the sides and we can even create multiple rows so let's just say we wanted four rows here, that really creates a grid for us. And if there is a guide layout that you want to reuse, you can even save it as a preset, or you can also choose these default presets, like 12 column layout, even 24 column layout. And it's quite useful that within this menu, we even have the option to clear existing guides. So if you already had some guides that you forgot to delete, you can do that at the same time as creating this new layout. So I'm going to click Okay. And it's important to point out that from the properties panel, you can also access some important features for guides like showing and hiding the guides with this icon, locking the guides. Again, it's a toggle. So when it's pressed, that means it's locked. When it looks like this, that means it's unlocked. And then there's also a feature called Smart Guides, which can be disabled or enabled from here. By default, it should be turned on. And what that means is that if we have a shape layer, for instance, I'm just going to create this layer, and I will just change the field color just so we can see it better. If I move this around, notice at certain points within the document, those purple guides will show up. They are the smart guides. So they can help me to align this shape, for instance, to the center of the document. But it works even better if we have multiple layers or objects. So I'm just going to duplicate this one. Holding down older option key, I will create a duplicate and notice that even while I'm doing this duplication, the smart guides are showing me the distance between these objects. And when I move it around, now you can see I can align it to the previous one, both horizontally or vertically. The Smart Guides can be found also under the view menu under Show. That's where you can turn it off. Or remember the shortcut is Command or Control Shift R. It's also worth mentioning that in the settings or preferences, there's a separate section dedicated to guides, grid and slices. It's mainly to do with the visibility of the guides. The colors and style. These are things you can adjust here. And importantly, the grid settings you can find here. You can customize how the grid should work in Photoshop. And by the way, the grid is again something you can turn on from the show options. So there is grid, or you can also find the icon for it here in the properties panel, which we can turn on and off. And this basically is going to again help you to work more precisely on certain documents. 25. 2.4.a Open or import images from various devices: There are many ways to open images or import them into Photoshop. And in the exam, they might ask you a very specific scenario. So I want to make sure that we cover all the available options that you have. First of all, when you have Photoshop open, of course, you can just choose open from here or open any of your recent files. And these recent documents, by the way, down here can be sorted by different options by their name or by their size or even by their type. And if you are looking for a specific file, let's say, the volcano, I can just start typing it in here on the right as well. And you can also change the view how these documents are displayed, whether you want to see them in a list or in that thumbnail grid that we've seen before. If you want to see more of your recent documents, you can also just hide these suggestions here on the top that way the full screen can be utilized. And it's important to mention that the Photoshop Cloud documents would be found under the your files section. So this is slightly different than the home tab where you see all recently opened documents. The files section leads to the Photoshop Cloud documents. Of course, we can also use the file menu and find the open recent option. And here's a list of all these files. And by the way, here, we can also clear the recent file list. If you ever want to start from scratch and have nothing visible here, you can just clear that cache. And above this option, we have, of course, file open. Commando Control O is the shortcut for it. Or we can also browse and bridge or open an image as Smart Object. So let's go through these. First, I'm just going to do the file open, and I can select any image from my computer. Most image file formats are supported in Photoshop. And if I click Open, it will open this single document. But when I go back to the File Open menu, of course, we can select multiple images. In this case, I just held down the Commando Control key, selected two of them, or maybe let's just select three, and then I click Open. Now, they will all be opened as separate documents. So I can switch between them easily here on the Document tab, and I can close them with that little icon next to the document name, or I can go to the file menu and even choose close all or close others, if I want to only keep the currently selected document open. Now if you have a Finder Window or Windows Explorer open, of course, you can also open files from that as long as Photoshop is the dedicated application to open these files. But what you can also do is to drag and drop an image onto Photoshop directly. And that will also open the file. Now, if there is an active document already open, if you do the same dragon drop technique, it's going to do something different. It's going to place the image in on top of the existing document as a smart object. I'm just going to press Enter to accept displacement, and we can see this new layer has that smart object icon. We will talk more about smart objects later. For now, I just wanted to mention that this is the behavior you can expect when you do drag and drop. And again, this could be a question. They will ask you what happens if you drag and drop an image onto an existing document in Photoshop. Now, you know that the default behavior would be a smart object. And if we look at the preferences, this is actually something that you can find under the general category. The always creates smart objects when placing. So that's the feature that we've just seen in action. If we turn this off, then every time you drag and drop an image onto an existing document, it won't become a smart objective, just become a normal layer. Now in the exam, they might also ask you additional ways that you can import images into Photoshop. These are the options that you can find here in the file menu. First of all, you have this category to import images from a particular device or video frames to layers and some additional options. Don't worry, you don't have to remember all of these. One thing that I've seen coming up in exam is whether you can import directly from an iPad or iPhone. That's actually an option that you can find here, and you can use this for certain things like editing a sketch or scan a document or just simply take a photo. And I'm going to use my phone now because I am using a mac, it automatically connected to my phone. I'm just going to take a picture of an apple on my desk, and it should automatically open it up here in Photoshop. So this is a very convenient way of utilizing your smartphone and quickly take a picture of something that you might want to use in a composition. Now, so far, we mainly talked about opening documents, but it is also important to talk a bit about saving documents because whenever you see a little asterisk or star next to the document name and information here in the document tab, that means currently there are unsaved changes to a document. And most of the time, if you see untitled here, that means the document hasn't been saved at all. So you can press Command or Control as to save or go to File Save or Save As. And this is going to give you an option, whether you want to save it as a cloud document or you want to save it on your computer. So a Cloud document is going to be saved in the Cloud, which allows you to access it from any other computer or device. While if you save it on your computer, that will be stored locally. There's lots of advantages of saving something in the cloud, which we might be talking about later in this course. But for now, I'm just going to save it on my computer, and when I do this, I can choose from the following file format. Now, normally, I would recommend saving anything in a Photoshop file format if it has multiple layers or save it as a JPEG or PNG, if it's just a single layer image. I will use the PSD file format and I am going to save it. So now in the document tab, we can see the name has been updated, and you may notice that there is another little icon showing up here since I recorded this image from my phone, it automatically dit something called content credentials. So that CR means that it already uses this feature. And if I go to the Window menu under content credentials beta, which will open up this specific panel, I will be able to see the information for this particular image. So you can see it already edded my social media accounts. It also shows that what app was used to create this and who's the producer or the creator. Content credentials is something that you can apply to anything that you do within Photoshop. And it's currently still in Beta, but it's expected to come out of Beta soon. And one of the many advantages of content credentials is that it's going to help to define whether a project was utilizing generative AI or not. So I can also demonstrate this quickly if I go to the generate an image option here at the bottom of the toolbar. We can just type in Apple on a desk. And I want this to be a photo, and I won't change anything else for now. I'm just going to hit generate. And here we have the new generative layer, which has three different options we can choose from, let's just say we go with this first one. But more importantly, if we open up the content credentials, now we can see the content summary stating that at least one was generated with an AI tool. So multiple pieces of the content out of which at least one was generated. And if we scroll down, we can even see that the AI tools that were used included Adobe Firefly. That's the engine that is used to generate layers or images in Photoshop. Although I haven't seen this question coming up yet in the exam, but I'm pretty sure they will start asking questions about this in the future. So it's good to remember the generate image option, which is here in the toolbar is in a way, similar to opening an image. In this case, of course, it's not an actual file that exists on your hard drive. It's something that the AI or Adobe Firefly is generating for you based on your prompt. And in case you are looking for this feature in the file menu, I feel like it would make more sense to place it here. They actually chose to place it under the edit menu, and there you will find generate image, which will lead to the same dialog box that we've seen before. 26. 2.4.b Place assets in a Photoshop document: We've already seen how we can place images into existing documents by dragging and dropping them into Photoshop. But of course, there's other ways of doing this, as well. If I go back to this previous document, we can just go to the file menu and we can actually choose place embedded or place linked. Now, these are both useful, and in the exam, it's important to know the difference between them and the implications of using either of them. So if I choose place embedded first, for instance, and I choose one of these images that we've seen before, when I choose Place, it's going to be placing it into the existing document as a new smart object layer. I just have to accept the placement by either clicking on Comt here on the top or pressing Enter on the keyboard, and now it's a separate layer which we can easily move around, as we've seen it already before. But the most important thing is that whenever you use the place embedded feature this new layer will be stored within this document. So if this is saved as a Photoshop file or as a T file, which supports layers, it's going to encapsulate the information required for this layer. That results in an increased file size, but it also makes it easier to transfer that file, so the actual Photoshop file to another computer without losing any information of this particular layer. Now, on the other hand, if I go to file and choose Place Linked, that's going to give me a similar option. But this time, when I place the image in and press Enter or commit this. The icon that's showing up here in the layers panel is slightly different. So you can see a little chain icon. And if I right click here and change this to large thumbnails, we can probably see it better. I can also right click on the actual thumbnail icon and choose clip thumbnails to layer bounds. That way, we can see better what's on each of these layers. And by the way, when I hover over each of these layers, they get highlighted in the document window. But you can see that this icon is what I'm talking about the little chain icon, that means a linked image compared to an embedded image. These are both smart objects, which means that we can access the source by double clicking on the thumbnail. So if I double click on the zebra layer thumbnail, it's going to tell me that it's going to open it in a separate document. So that's the source of this smart object, but this is embedded in the main document. While if I double click on this other image, this is going to target the actual physical file that is on my hard drive. Called jump P and G. So just to demonstrate the main difference here, if I close these two documents and I come back here and I go back to Finder, I can rename the file Zebra, maybe add Z there and put maybe a number as well at the end. When I return back to Photoshop, nothing happens. It doesn't affect it because it's not relying on that source file. However, if I do the same with this other image, jump, I'm just going to rename it again. Then I come back to Photoshop. Notice that immediately it's having a problem. There's a question mark on this layer. Something is missing. So if I double click on the thumbnail, it actually asks me to locate the missing file that was originally called jump dot png. If you are using Adobe in design or Illustrator, you most likely are familiar with how linking works. And that's exactly what you have to do in Photoshop as well, whenever you use the linked feature. Now, the main advantage of this is that you can have a source file that is used in multiple Photoshop documents. And if you quickly want to update all the instances at the same time, all you have to do is to just update the source file which is then linked to all the other Photoshop documents. And when you open those other files, you just have to update or refresh the linked smart object layer. So I'm just going to update this file here. And when we go back to this document, now we can see that there is no warning. And there's just one final thing worth mentioning about using linked assets in a Photoshop document. And that is, if you ever want to export not only the main document, but also all the linked assets together and maybe move it to another computer or upload it to a server, what you should do is to go to the file menu first save your document as a Photoshop file locally, and then go to File package. So this is going to allow you to put not only the main document, but also all the linked assets into a single folder, wherever you choose to have them. So I'm just going to call this package, just so you can see what happens. And once I set that as the destination, now, if we look at Finder under the package, we will see not only the main Photoshop file, but also all the linked assets. Like in this case, the jump PNG file. The exam, most of the time they just ask about the main differences between using place linked and place embedded options. So the main considerations between the two, of course, always comes down to file size, portability and flexibility. 27. 2.4.c Use the Adobe Camera Raw interface to import images: You might also be asked about Adobe Camera rule and working with camera rule files in Photoshop. So I'm going to demonstrate how this works. If I go to the file menu and choose Open, you can find this DNG file or Adobe Digital negative file format amongst the exercise files. Once you click on Open, this is going to open this separate editor called Adobe Camera Raw. And if you are familiar with Adobe Lightroom, it's essentially the same settings that you can find here. And in a nutshell, a raw file contains uncompressed data directly from the cameras sensor, allowing greater flexibility for post processing, compared to other compressed file formats like JPEGs or PNGs. In case you are using a smartphone like an iPhone and you want to assure that you capture the most available options when you are taking a picture, you might want to change the settings to use the DNG file format or Adobe Camera row. Now, luckily, you won't have to remember all the settings and options that you can access here in Adobe Camera Row. It would be a whole entire course just explaining how everything works. Most important thing to remember for the exam and things that they might ask is that all the changes that you do here are saved non destructively. And the way it works is that all the changes are saved into a side card file with X and P file extension or in case of a DNG file like this one, is directly embedded into the file itself. And we can actually see that there's already a couple of adjustments that I applied to this image, and it automatically came up and recognized those changes when I opened it. But by toggling this icon here, we can see the original image and the changes that I apply to it. Now I can choose to simply just open this in Photoshop by clicking on this icon here, or if I click on the dropdown, I can open it as a smart object or open it as a copy. If you choose to simply just open it, it will open without linking to the original camera file. So it's going to be a simple background layer. However, if we go back and open that file again, but this time we choose the open object option from this drop down or use the shift key on the keyboard to toggle that option to show up here in the bottom format. This is going to create a new document with a smart object layer, and that is working similarly to when we use the place embedded option. So now I can just double click on the thumbnail of this layer to have access to the camera a editor. So I can easily go back and forth and adjust settings here. Whenever I'm ready, I can click Okay, and the changes will be updated here in the Photoshop document. Working with camera files are mainly important for photographers, but it can be useful for all kinds of other workforce as well, where having access to the original uncompressed image information is crucial. 28. 2.5.a Set the active foreground and background color.mp4: The default foreground and background colors in Photoshop are black and white, black being the foreground color, which we can see here in the toolbar and white being the background color. You can see the watches better if you use the two column toolbar layout. So now we can see if the black and white swatch is a little bit better. And there is a way to switch between these two, so I can change them quickly. So now the foreground color turned white and the background color turned black. But you can also press X on the keyboard to do this quickly. And essentially what this means is that most tools will interact with these two pre selected colors, like the brush tool. If I start painting, it's going to paint with the foreground color. Well if I use the eraser tool that's E on the keyboard to access it, it's going to paint with the background color. That is you are on a locked background layer. Of course, if you have multiple layers, this behavior might be different. Now, of course, you can change these colors. So I'm just going to switch back to my brush tool, which by default works with the foreground color. So if I click on this icon, I can get to the color picker option to change the foreground color. And if I set this to maybe red or purple, once it's assigned, I will see it here in the toolbar, but I can also see it here in the color panel on the right side. And of course, if I now use the brush tool, that's the color that I am painting with. A fast way to sample a color from an image would be to use the eyedropper tool, which you can access always by press and holding the alter option key on the keyboard. And if I sample this image, let's say that yellow color, then now we are painting with that. Can again, sample here on the right side, and I can paint with this pink or magenta color. Now notice that my cursor might look slightly different to yours. It's like a cross hair instead of an actual eyedropper icon. That is a preference that you can change. So press Command or Control K and then go to cursors. And here you will be able to change the other cursors to precise instead of standard. So instead of seeing the eyedropper, I prefer to see this precise cursor, and I'm just going to click Okay to come back to the document. It's worth mentioning that instead of relying on this shortcut, you can also use the eyedropper tool, which you can find here in the toolbar. I'm actually going to switch back to a single column version, so you can also see where you can find it. So once this tool is selected, you will be able to sample just like before. You can even drag across the image, and that way you can even compare the previously selected color on the bottom and the currently pre selected color on the top. But it's also important to mention that by default, the eyedropper is going to sample an individual pixel however, you can also set an average sampling area. So maybe a five by five will sample 25 pixels at a time. So if I click somewhere around here, I will get more of an average color instead of a specific pixels color. So if we zoom closer to this image, of course, we will be able to see those individual pixels, and we will be able to tell that if I use the eye dropper now, sampling one of these colors, they don't really change much when I move between them because it's sampling an average. So if I go closer here, even here, it's not actually sampling the exact color I'm pointing at, it's sampling an average around that pixel. I normally prefer to use an average like three by three, and I like to see this sampling ring. But if it distracts you, you can also turn it off from the options bar. So now you can see we are still adjusting the color or dragging over the image and continuously sampling but without the sampling ring, it is a little bit hard to see what's happening. So that's why I prefer to keep that turned on. It's also important to mention that there is yet another way of changing the color. It's called the heads up display for the colors. And the way you access it is by holding down Command Option Control and click on Mac or old shift right click on PC, and this is basically giving you a quick access to the hues on this wheel. So all the hues, and then the brightness and saturation in the center. So we can very quickly select a color and then start using it. And if we go back to the preferences, once again, it's Command or Control K. This is the actual option, the HUD or hot color picker, which by default is set to hue Val, but it can also be set to a strip, and you can even decide on the size that you want to use with this. So you can adjust it to make it smaller or bigger. Depending on the resolution of your screen, you might want to adjust this. We already discussed that we can change both the foreground and background colors in Photoshop, and we remember the last used colors. Now, in case you already changed both your foreground and background colors, if you quickly want to reset them to the original black and white, you can either use this little icon here in the toolbar or press D on the keyboard, D for default colors. And another useful keyboard shortcut that they might ask about in the exam is, how can you quickly fill in an area with either your foreground or background colors? So I just made a quick marquee selection with the rectangular marquee tool and I'm going to press Option or Old backspace that fills in that selected area with the foreground color. And if I use command or control backspace, that's going to fill in with the background color, the same selection. In case you have no active selection, then these same shortcuts will fill the whole available layer with the selected colors. So old or option backspace fills the entire layer with black or the foreground color in this case, and then Commando Control backspace will fill the entire layer with the background color, which by default is white. And also worth mentioning that the shift backspace keyboard shortcut will give you the field command. And here you will be able to choose from even more options, you can choose a specific color if you want, a pattern, even a history state from previous states of the document, or you can use 50% gray, and you can even adjust the opacity of the selected color. 29. 2.5.b Create, customize, and organize gradients: For this particular topic, you might be asked about gradients and how to work with gradients in Photoshop. For this, you will need to know a couple of things. First of all, you need to know where you can find the gradient tool. The shortcut for it is G. And whenever this tool is selected in the newer versions of Photoshop, it will automatically create a gradient fill layer. So you can see that showing up here in the document. Is essentially a non destructive way of using this tool. So instead of drawing directly on an existing layer, it creates it as an individual layer that can also be edited later on with the gradient annotator. So we can move the start and end points easily around. We can also move the midpoint and adjust the transition between these two colors. And of course, we can change the color stops as well. So if we double click on either of these, we can adjust the color, and it's great that the colors are changing live in the background. So whenever I move my cursor around, can see an immediate and live feedback in the background, which is quite nice. Now we can also add additional color stops by clicking below the annotator and then double click again. We can pick yet another color like so. And now we can move the position of this color stop and again, the midpoint between the two as well, which affects the transition. Can quickly reverse the gradient by clicking on this icon in the contextual task bar. We can also access this option up here in the options bar, and we can easily adjust the type of gradient from the default linear option to these other ones like radio or angle, reflected and diamond. So let me just show you each of these. And if I go to radio, we can also see that, of course, we can adjust the size of this easily and even the shape of it to turn it more into an elliptical gradient like that. Now, since this is on a separate layer, of course, we can always adjust the blend mode and create a blend between this layer and the layer underneath it, which can result in interesting effects like this one. Of course, we can also reduce the intensity of this effect maybe down to 40%, and then we can move this down to be more on the bottom left side, or we can keep it more here on the right side of the image, and we have full creative control and once again, completely non destructive editing capabilities. Now, if you double click on the thumbnail of this gradient layer, you can also access some of the options here. But more importantly, you can go to this drop down and save the current gradient as a preset. We can give it a name as well, call it test. And we can see it showing up here in the swatches, and that means we can easily reuse it in other documents as well. Also worth mentioning that there are lots of nice gradient presets that you can choose from, and we can see now with the blending option enabled, they can actually interact with the image in the background. So again, if we choose different ones, they will give this filtered look on the image in the background. Anytime we want, of course, we can go back and adjust the blend mode and also the opacity to see the full solid view of the gradient that we created. And, of course, you can also access this gradient drop down from both the contextual task bar and also from the options bar, and you can very easily go back to any safe settings that you created. Also worth mentioning that within the properties panel, whenever a gradient is selected, you will have an even better overview of all the available settings where you can even control the opacity of these color stops, or you can interact with your existing color stops, locations, colors, or even add additional color stops if you need one. It's worth mentioning that you can also delete a color stop simply by dragging it downwards or by having it selected clicking on the Bin icon. 30. 2.5.c Create, edit, and organize swatches: Similarly to saving gradient presets, of course, you can also save swatches, which will help you to access the same colors later on, whether in the same document or other documents and stay consistent in using the same colors. For instance, in this case, if I select a color from this image and I would like to save it as a swatch, what I would use normally is to go to the Swatches panel. And if this is something you can't see at the moment, just go to the window menu and choose swatches from there. So once you are here, you can just simply click on the plus icon and you can give this a name. I'm just going to call it swatch one. And I'm going to turn off the ad to my current library option. This would save it into a CC library, which I don't want to do at this point. So I'm just going to click Okay, and we can see this is showing up here. And in case I want to create multiple color swatches and while I want to keep things organized in my swatches panel, I could even create a folder or group, and I can just easily drag this swatch inside that group. Good that we can search amongst the swatches. So if you are not lazy like myself and you actually give useful names to the swatches, you will be able to find them based on their names. So if I type in red, it will find anything that has some red in them or significant amount of red. And from the Swatch panel menu, which is this icon here, we can also access additional options, like we can change the view of the Swatches panel. We can have maybe a small list, which lists them like this. And there's our group that we created with the color swatch that we and if I don't need a color swatch anymore, I can just use the trashcan icon, which is going to delete the whole group in this case. It's worth mentioning that if you are in the color picker menu, you can also add a swatch directly from here. So if I pick a color like this, I can just say add to Swatches, again, give it a name, and again, it's going to show up there in the Swatches panel. 31. 2.6.a Open, browse, and search libraries of included brushes, styles, and patterns: Photoshop includes a lot of assets and libraries that you can access from various panels. You can find all of these in the window menu, and one of the most robust panels out of all of them is the brushes panel, which we will be looking at in more detail later. I'm just going to keep it open up here. So that is brushes, and I'm just going to drag this out so we can see their names as well. And now I'm going to close the history and comments panel so we can see the brushes and brush settings. Then we have the patterns panel, which we will be talking about as well, swatches and gradients we've already seen in a previous topic. But then we also have shapes which we can open up from the window menu. And finally, we also have styles. So let's just open that one up as well. And one additional panel, which we will be talking about is called libraries. This I'm going to place here in this category as well. So all of these panels are used in a similar fashion. You can find some default assets that you can work with, like, for instance, with the patterns, we can find trees, grass, water, and some additional other categories. So, for instance, from the panel menu or this drop down here, we could choose legacy patterns and more. This is going to add additional categories at the bottom. Like this one. There's the 2019 patterns, including dirt, stone, wood, gravel, and rust. And we also have even more legacy patterns that we can still have access to, like color paper category, and so on and so forth. What can we do with these patterns? If I drag and drop any of these onto the document, it's going to create a pattern layer. And if I double click on the pattern layer, I can adjust the scale of the pattern, so I can increase or decrease the tile size. I can also adjust the angle. In this case, that's going to be fairly noticeable. And as long as you have a seamless pattern, you won't really be able to tell where the tile ends. So for instance, again, if we choose another one of these, it will feel seamless, or here is another one and another one. These are all for interior design projects. I created these patterns myself. You can find the recently used patterns up here in this little line or row, and you can of course search patterns based on their names. So if I type in wood, for instance, we can find these or stone. Again, we can find many other ones. And to be honest, most of these panels that I edit here would work in a similar fashion. So while with patterns, we create pattern layer with shapes, we would create shape layers. So if I just drag and drop any of these onto the document, it will create a shape layer, and this is vector based. So it is completely resolution independent. We can double click on the thumbnail to change the color, and we can increase and decrease the size by using the free transform tool that's Command or Control T, and we can drag it up and down. And like I said, it can be changed without losing quality because it's all vector based. Like with patterns, we again have different categories for the shapes which we can find here. And if we go to the drop down, we once again have the option to open the legacy shapes and more, and then now we can scroll down and we will be able to find that additional category there. Styles in Photoshop applied to layer styles. So for instance, if I go to Basic, there is a basic drop shadow style which I can assign, and it will be applied to the currently selected layer, this shape can turn off those effects or turn them back on again. And if I double click on the word effects, it will take us to the layer style dialogue box where we can take a closer look at all the settings that were applied here with that default style that was saved. Brushes is another big category of presets that you can work with in Photoshop. And there's actually two panels, the brushes, which withhold the presets and the brush settings where you can further refine a particular brush and you can adjust a lot of other settings. We will talk a little bit more about this later. Before we go into more detail on brushes, I wanted to mention this last panel called Libraries, which is a very important one. So this is also referred to as CC or Creative Cloud libraries. This is essentially a place where you can store presets and assets that can be utilized not only directly in Photoshop, but also in other creative cloud applications like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe in Design, or even Adobe Premiere and after effects. So for instance, if I go to, yes, I'm a designer, we have a CC library that is shared with all of the members in our company. This has a lot of commonly used assets like the Adobe icons, and it's a very quick and easy way to reuse them in all kinds of projects. So when I drag and drop it into this document, it already shows up and I can adjust its size and decide where it needs to go. Now the main thing that you will have to remember in the exam is that compared to these other panels that we talked about earlier, the library's panel is the only one that has a cross app access. So you can utilize anything that's saved in here, not only in Photoshop, but also in the other Adobe applications. And also, remember that this is the only place where you will be able to invite collaborators to work on the same library as so you can invite them as long as they have creative cloud subscription, they will be able to access the library that you created or even add new assets to it if you allow them. 32. 2.6.b Create, use, edit, and organize brushes, styles, and patterns: Let's focus on brushes. There's a lot of options when it comes to customizing brushes in photoshops, so we won't have to cover all of that because it's not necessary or required for the exam. There's a couple of things that they might ask you to change or work with, but these are usually the most basic things. So first of all, you just have to remember that there are two panels brushes for selecting brushes or for importing brush sets. And that's actually something you can do from the drop down. You can say import brushes or also get more brushes, which will take you to the website, where once you scroll a bit further down, you will be able to find these brush packs, most of which was created by Kyle T Webster, who is an amazing artist, and he created these amazing collections. So you can just download these. They are completely free to use, and then you will have access to them directly within Photoshop. Normally say that these custom brushes are especially useful if you are using Photoshop on the iPad or if you have a pen tablet that you are using on your desktop computer, but they can also be used in Adobe Fresco, another drawing app that you can have on your iPad. But I'm just going to demonstrate that brushes can come in all shapes and sizes. So you can have bird brushes like these. For instance, you can see a couple of different bird brush shapes that I can use. And instead of drawing them like this when you draw a single line with that brush tip, we can go into the brush settings and then start changing things around to make the brush a bit more interesting. So one thing, for instance, is the scattering that will make it already a bit more interesting. So when I start painting now, I'm drawing a whole flock of birds. But what we can also do is to increase the count that will have even more birds added. Of course, that's a little bit too dense at the moment. But we can also vary the shape of each of these birds that we draw. So we can add a size jitter. So that's going to randomize the size of them. Now we can specify a minimum diameter as well. We can also add angle jitter, so that way they will be slightly randomized. They will still feel like they are flying towards the same direction but slightly randomized. I'm just going to reduce the count maybe down to one and the scatter, I'm going to increase both axis. So something like that. Now, let's try drawing again. Yeah, it's starting to look a little bit better. But if we go back to brush tip shape, we can actually increase the spacing here as well. And that way, we will have a little bit more spaced out drawing for the birds. We can also control the transfer, which can mean the opacity of them is going to be randomized. It is quite nice. We can also randomize the color. So we can randomize the foreground and background colors for drawing them. So for instance, if I set red on the foreground color and I change the background color to blue or cyan, we can now see that when I draw, it's going to be a mixture of those two colors. But if that's not enough, we can go back and further increase the randomized effect and have a huge ter applied. That way we will have all kinds of different rainbow colors now on the birds and so on and so forth. Once you have a brush that you set up, which uses a specific brush tip shape, in this case, it's this bird. But you wish to use the same settings with another brush tip shape, all you have to do is to simply lock the settings that you set up. So all of these settings I'm going to lock. And now if I go back to brushes and choose another bird, all I have to do is simply draw with it. And you can see the settings carried over, and I can use it on these other brush tip shapes as well. If you come back to brush settings under the panel menu, we can reset all logged settings, which basically resets everything. And then maybe we can just choose a default round brush and concentrate on the default settings, out of which probably one of the most important one is the size. So I can increase the size of my brush and start drawing. But then we can also adjust the hardness of the brush, which will make it softer around the edges. And we can also adjust the spacing. I'm just going to increase the hardness back. Then we can see how the brush tip shapes are edded next to each other. So it's almost like using a stamp with that shape that we use whenever we work with a brush, and the spacing really is the one that decides how frequently they are stamped next to each other. So when it's set to 1%, they are completely seamless and create this nice smooth line. While when you increase the spacing, it turns into something like a pattern. Now, roundness is something that we can either control with this little icon here on the right, or we can type in the value that we want. And the angle is something again, we can control here, and we can easily create a more caligraphic brush with which we can draw like this. So I just created, let's say, something like a H here. And again, if hand lettering or calligraphy is something you're into, you can find lots of presets for this online, both free and paid. Or you can experiment with all of these settings here and create your own preset that you can then save. Now, of course, once you created something that you want to use in the future, just don't forget to save it as a new brush. Once you click on that, I'm just going to keep the name as is and we can choose these additional options to capture the brush size in the preset and even the color if I wanted to. Then when I click Okay, now it's showing up here. And of course, within the brushes panel, it will also show up. And if you want, you can drag this to the bottom or to the top to easily have access to it. And you can also change the way that these brushes are previewed. So if you go to the panel menu, you can see that we can include the brush tip icon as well. We can also see them without the brush stroke, and we can increase or decrease the size of the previews, so we can have a better look at them when we look at this also from the same panel menu, you can choose to export selected brushes. And in this case, that's the only brush that was selected. I can save it into the exercise files folder, and you'll notice that the file format is ABR Adobe brush. So once I save it, it will make it easy to move this to another computer or share it with someone, and all you have to do with this file is to double click on it or dragon drop it onto Photoshop and it's going to be imported. Because we already have it here, of course, it's not going to make any difference. Again, there's a lot more you can do with photoshop brushes, but luckily for the Adobe certified professional exam, this is all that you need to know. And I feel like we went way more in depth than what normally is required for the exam. Having said that, I highly recommend to play around with the brushes, experiment with a bit more, see all the settings that you can utilize, and also don't forget to try out some of these awesome brush packs that I mentioned earlier. 33. 3.1.a Layers panel to manage visual content: In this topic, we will be talking about layers and why is it important to learn to work with them in Photoshop. So if you want to follow along and practice the things that we will be discussing here, I highly recommend to open up the same file that you can see on my screen called Castle PSD. So this was originally a generated image. I generated this in mid journey, but then I broke it up into separate layers. If you click and drag over the icons of the top three layers, you will be able to reveal the background layer. And then we can see on top of this, we have the hill in the foreground, then the castle in the midground, and then we also have this text layer, which I turned into a smart object because first I rassorized it, and then I created a smart object from it. This just makes it easier for everyone to be able to use it without having access to the original font. And the fact that it's a smart object, it's going to allow us to resize it to make it bigger and smaller without losing resolution. We will be discussing how smart objects work soon in case you are not familiar with it already. Now, there's one thing I wanted to discuss already at the beginning, and there is a fairly new feature which helps you to see a preview of which layer you are currently hovering over. There is a bounding box appearing temporarily over the layer content that you're currently hovering over. Like, right now, I'm over Castle, and I can see the bounding box around the castle can see the hell. I can see the text being highlighted. So this is something that is happening automatically as I'm hovering over the layers. And in case you don't see your layers panel, you can obviously find it in the window menu. So just go there, open it up. And then if you want to change this behavior of layers getting automatically highlighted, is something you will find in the Options bar. Just make sure you have your move tool selected for these options to show up. And then there's two important options here. The show hover bounds from layers layers, meaning the layers panel. So if I turn that off, now when I'm hovering over the layers here in the panel, I'm not getting any preview of them or bounding boxes. But if I hover over the actual layer contents within the document area, I can still see those bounding boxes showing up and also a highlight showing up in the layers panel. So you might find this useful, but I actually find it quite distracting. So I normally also turn this off. So once this is turned off, now we are not getting any feedback. We are just simply moving around both on the document area and also in the layers area, and we won't get any previews anymore. We just simply can select the layers that we want to work with. But then there is one last thing that I normally like to turn off, and that's a feature that's turned on by default for the move tool, that's the auto select option. So just to show you how this works, even though I have the Ravens nest text layer selected, if I click on the Castle, I will start moving that around. If I click carefully on the text, I can move that around. So it automatically switches between layers. Again, this is something that I prefer not to have enabled because accidentally, you can select things and move them around. So it is better to turn off the auto select option, and I'm going to undo these last steps, that's Command Z on the keyboard. And now that we change these settings, maybe one last thing worth mentioning to be able to see the layers the way I see them, in case you haven't watched the previous videos where I discussed this already. You can right click here underneath the layers in the layers panel, and the preferences that I'm using are medium thumbnails and clip thumbnails to layer bounds. That's just simply the way I prefer to see thumbnails, because if we have the other setting, the clip thumbnails to document bounds, some layers might be very hard to notice if they are quite small compared to the whole document area. Like the Ravens nest, I can't even make it out what it is. While if I set it to clip thumbnails to layer bounds, it's a little bit more clear that's the text there. Especially if it was set to black, it would even be easier to see it in the thumbnail. In case you are not familiar with how layers work, this file is going to help you to understand. So we are going to select the text layer first, and by moving it around, you will notice how it goes behind the castle and the hill. So that is because of the stacking order of the layers. So we have the castle and the hill in front or on top of this layer. And that's why when I'm moving this around, it will be hidden behind those details. And I will also turn off the Smart Guides for now. Again, something that we already talked about in the previous lessons. I will find this under the Show Smart Guides options from the view menu, or Command or Control Shift R is the shortcut for it. So that's not necessary now. It's just gets in the way when I'm moving this around. But yeah, so you can see that's basically how this layer appears. It's hidden behind the content sitting on top of it, which in this case, are these two layers, the castle and the hill. Now if I select the castle layer, I can move that around. And again, if I move it down, it would disappear behind the hill. But when I move it up, it will cover up the text because it is on top of that. Of course, we can change the stacking order of layers. So if I drag the text layer and move it all the way to the top, notice how now it will always be visible because it is sitting right at the top of this document stacking order. Similarly, if I select the castle layer and move it down at the moment, it's hidden behind the hill. But if I drag it above the hill layer, I can actually position it in different parts of this hill and see where it would look the best because now it's sitting again above it, so it's closer to us in a way. Can think of layers as sheets stacked up on top of each other or cutouts in a montage that you put together. That's exactly how layers work in Photoshop. Now, apart from the background layer, none of the other layers fill in the document completely. So if I turn off the visibility of the background layer, simply by clicking on the icon next to now you can see if I move the castle around, there is transparency on these layers. So the hill has transparent area above it. The castle has transparency around it, and, of course, the text also has transparency around it. Now, if I turn the background layer back on, that one is completely filled with information. So if I turn off all the other layers, that's how that looks like. I'm going to reset all the layers back by using Command Z or undo a couple of times. And I want to walk you through a couple of important things that they normally ask in the exam. Of the thing is locking layers that you have to be familiar with. This is a useful feature if you want to prevent accidentally moving things around. So, for instance, we can lock the layer's position. If I want to make sure that the castle layer is not moving around, I can just simply lock its position. So this is to prevent it being moved around. So once we click on that, now I won't be able to move it around. I'll get the warning that can't move it because it's being locked. However, this is just a partial lock because I can still paint over this layer if I wanted to. So, for instance, using the brush tool, I can paint over it, paint around it. That is not locked. So it's not completely locked. Just the movement or position of it is locked currently. Again, I'm going to just undo these last two steps. And instead partially locking it, we can also choose to completely lock the layer. So that's going to be a slightly different lock icon. Just once again, let me turn this off. Right now, we see a semi transparent lock, and this one is like a white filled lock. Now I won't even be able to draw directly on this layer. Automatically, a new layer is created when I'm using the brush tool. And similarly to before, if I use the move tool, again, I won't be able to move that layer around. And finally, there's also another commonly asked question in the exam, and that is how to lock only the transparent pixels of a layer. For this, I'm going to turn off all the other layers, just keep the castle turned on, and I'm going to turn on the lock transparency. So that's that icon there. And if I use the brush tool, notice how I won't be able to paint around the castle, so I won't be able to paint here, but I will still be able to paint over it. So this way, I can turn this into like a silhouette if I wanted to. But what's important to remember is that I won't be able to paint over any of the transparent pixels on this layer. So that's lock transparency. And the opposite of this is the brush icon amongst the lock icons. So this is going to the image detail. So I won't be able to paint over it. It automatically creates a separate layer, but I still will be able to move the layer around. So if I use the move tool, I can move it around. It just simply prevented me to paint over the layer. Now, let me turn the layers back on. I will take off the locks from them, and I wanted to show you how to rename a layer because that's also something that you might be asked. Simply double click on the name will allow you to rename it, so I can call this fortress, for instance, and perhaps enter to accept the change on the name. Might also be asked how to turn a background layer to a normal layer. Probably quickest way is to simply just click on this icon here. That's already turned it into a normal layer, which means that now we can move it around if we wanted to, or we could transform it, make it bigger or smaller, or make adjustments to it. But I'm going to undo this and go back to having it set as a background layer and just show you that you can also access this feature from the layer menu, new layer from background. And here you can even give it a name. I can just call it mountains, for instance. Now it's good to know that every image that you open in Photoshop will start as a background layer that's automatically logged, but it doesn't prevent you from drawing over the layer. So it's a partial lock again, which only locks its position. So if I just undo this last step, just wanted to demonstrate this to you, if I use the move tool, will tell me that that layer is locked. But if I use the brush tool, I can still paint over it. And that is going to be considered a destructive change on the layer because these brush strokes are directly painted on that background layer. And that's also a very important term that you have to be familiar with destructive and non destructive editing. In Photoshop, these are key terms, and in the exam as well, it will be used many times. So obviously, we will be covering this in more detail, but that's essentially what you have to remember whenever something is not editable anymore, or later on, you won't be able to make changes too, that is a destructive editing. And the most important thing to avoid destructive changes is usually to work on independent or separate layers. So anything that you want to change in the future should always be on a separate layer. It's important also to know how to create an empty new layer. You can either use this little plus sign here at the bottom of the layer panel that will create that empty new layer always directly above your currently selected layer. I'm going to press backspace to delete this. The other option is to use Command or Control Shift N shortcut. And here you can even assign a name to your new layer. I'm just going to call it new for now, and we can see right there. It's a completely empty layer. And the other technique that you can do is to go to the layer menu, choose new and layer. Once again, we can give it a name. I'll just call it empty. Of course, any layer you create, you will be able to move up and down in the stacking order. And in case of an empty layer, we could start painting over this, for instance, with the brush tool, and then we can see the thumbnail updating as well. And this layer can be moved around, it can be transformed in size. And if we don't need it anymore, we can just press backspace or the trash icon here at the bottom and just say, delete the layer if you want to get rid of it. Now, of course, you can also duplicate layers. So if I want to instances of this text in this composition. We can duplicate a layer again in many different ways. We can use the move tool and hold down Alt or option key and then click and drag. That's probably the quickest and easiest way to do it. And notice how now we have two instances of the same layer. I'm going to delete this copy, just to show you that you can also alt or drag a layer in the layers panel. This is going to create the second instance, but without moving it within the document. So when you use your move tool, you can now move it apart, and you can see them now side by side. Because when you use this technique, they are just placed directly on top of each other. Again, I'm going to delete this instance to show you one other way of doing it. That's by right clicking on the layer and then choose duplicate layer. You can give it a different name. You can even choose to put it into a new document if you want it to but you can also access the same option from the layer menu. So duplicate layer. Once again, we can give it a name and even decide the destination for it. Now, there are many tools in Photoshop that will automatically create new layers for you. One of these is the type tool. If you press T on the keyboard, you will have that tool selected. And then just simply click anywhere on the Canvas or documentaria and then you can start typing. I'm just going to say new layer. And then to accept the changes or stop typing, click on the Commit icon here on the top, or you can press Command or Control Enter, or you can also use the escape key on the keyboard. If you use that for the first time, it might ask you whether you want to cancel typing or you just want to use escape keyboard for committing the changes. We can see that that's automatically a new type layer on top of everything else, and it has a unique thumbnail that's easy to identify. Similarly to this, if we are using shape tools like the rectangle or ellipse or triangle tools, these will automatically create a shape layer, as long as in the options bar, you have the shape option selected. So I'm just going to keep that selected, maybe use a different color. I'm going to just remove the stroke from it. And then when I draw this shape, once I let go, notice how it created that new rectangle shape layer. Another important thing you have to be familiar with is layer styles. This is something you can access, again, in multiple ways. Probably the easiest way to do it is to double click on the layer, not on the name, not on the thumbnail, but somewhere around the right side. So next to where the name is. And this will open up the layer style dialogue box. And here we can assign all kinds of effects or layer styles like dropshadow for instance, and we can see on the image if I start dragging this around, as the drop shadow, we can increase the size of it, which will make it a bit blurred. We can increase the opacity to make it more visible, and maybe we can increase the spread as well. And of course, when I click and drag, it makes it easier to change the distance and the angle. But these are also options that you can control from the layer styles panel. So I can move it up and down. I can adjust the angle and so on and so forth. Now, once I accept the layer style changes, it's going to be visible here in the layers panel, and the effects can be turned off or back on. And if you double click on, let's say, the drop shadow, in this case, we can go back and make changes to the attributes that we used. So these are also completely non destructive. Any layer styles that you apply will be editable later on. Now, it's worth mentioning that with this FX icon at the bottom of the layers panel, you will also have access to that list of layer styles that you can assign to your currently selected layer. 34. 3.1.b Manage and organize layers in a complex project: Next thing we have to talk about is how to group and organize layers. This, of course, is very important and useful, especially for complex photoshop documents, but they always like to ask about this in the exam. So you would have to know how to do this properly. So let's just say, in this case, we need to have these two layers, the Ravens nest and the new layer, so both text layers in a group, and we want to be able to move them together easily. What you need to do is to select both layers from the layer s panel. Now, you can use Commando Control key to add layers to your selection, and these can be nonconsecutive layers as well. So I can skip the heel, for instance, and add fortress and with the same shortcut, I can also remove it. While if, let's say, select the fortress layer, and I want to select all the other layers on top of it, I can just shift click on the layer on the top, so that will select everything in between the two layers. But for now, I wanted to select these two layers. However, if you have lots of layers and you quickly want to find only the text layers, you can also use layer filtering options. Here on the top, you can find these icons. And if you click on the type icon, that will reveal only the text layers. Now notice how we don't see the Ravens nest in this case, because remember I mentioned that was turned into a smart object. So if I want to also see smart objects, I can just turn on this icon as well. And now I revealed both categories or both types of layers. And we only have these two instances. So if I select these two, I can now obviously easily find them. But in case of this document, there's not that many layers. So we can turn off the filtering by clicking on this red icon. That will reveal all the layers once again. And to group these two layers together, all you have to do is to press Command or Control G on the keyboard, and we can see now it turned into a group. I'm just going to undo this last step just so I can show you from the layer panel, you can also find this option right here in the middle, group layer and once it's turned into a group, by using the move tool, they will automatically be moving together at the same time. So if I select another layer, let's just say the fortress, of course, that moves on its own, while if I come back to this group, it will move together. Now here's a very useful feature, and this is again another shortcut. So instead of using Autoselect feature with the move tool, I prefer to use the command or Control key in combination with simply clicking with the move tool, and this will allow you to quickly jump between layers. So if I command, click on the rectangle layer, now I can move that around. If I command, click on the castle or fortress, I can move that around. However, if I command click on the text here on the top, notice how it opened up automatically the group that we created, and it only highlighted the larger text. So if I start moving that around, even though it's in a group with the other layer, I can still move them independently from each other. Now, if you want to avoid this happening, whenever you use this shortcut, the Command or Control click with the move tool, you just want to change this setting here on the options bar to group. So in this case, whenever you hold down the command or control key, you will be able to select an entire group. So notice I'm moving the caso or the rectangle. But now, if I command, click on the text, it's not going to move them independently. I will move the whole group together. Of course, when you have a group, it's worth giving it a name, so we can call this one text and just press Enter. So that just makes it easier to identify what we put in this group. Now, if you want to remove a layer from a group, you can just simply drag it above it or underneath it, and now only this slightly indented layer is what's sitting inside that group. So that indentation is the way Photoshop user interface is hinting that this is inside a group. There is another technique that's similar to grouping layers. It's a way to connect them together, which is called linking. I'm going to remove this group now. We can right click on it and choose ungroup layers or use the keyboard shortcut Commando Control Shift G. That will simply just remove the group, but the layers will still be in the document. So for instance, if I wanted the main text and this shape to move together at the same time, I will be able to link them together. But when would you use this instead of group? Well, in case you want to have them in a completely different place within your stacking order. So for instance, the text might need to be behind everything, so behind the hill and the castle and the shape, this one here on the right, will need to be sitting on top of everything else. But I want to make sure that they are linked and they move together at the same time. So in this case, I would select the rectangle first and then Commando Control click on the other layer in the layers panel. And now that they are both selected, we can either click on this little chain icon here at the bottom of the layers panel. Or we can right click and choose link layers. Once that's chosen, we will see the little ink icons there in the layers panel, and they will only show up whenever one of these layers is selected. So if I click away, the chains are gone. But once I select this one, I can see which layer it is connected so if I now use the move tool, even though I only have the text layer selected, the other layer, the rectangle will also move at the same time. Linking and grouping layers are two ways to organize and connect layers to each other. They are both useful. It just really depends on your layer structure, which one makes more sense to you. Of course, you can take off the linking by clicking on the same icon. Now they become independent again from each other. It is also important to know how to merge layers and flatten an image. These are destructive changes, again, because we are reducing the layer count in our document. So for instance, if I go to the layer menu and I choose flatten image, this is going to flatten all the layers into a single background layer, which means that I won't be able to make changes to these independently anymore. So everything is baked into a single layer. That's obviously a very destructive step. But in some cases, you might need to do this. And in the exam, they also might ask you to do that exact step. You can also find that option when you right click on a layer, so you will be able to find flattened image here, or you can also use the merge visible, which means everything that is currently visible will be merged together. So if I just turn off maybe two layers and I choose merge visible, it's going to merge everything apart from the hidden layers. Let me just undo this last step again. Then what we can also do is to merge individual layers together. So, for instance, the hell and the castle could be merged together by right clicking on the layer on top and then choose merge down. So this is going to merge the currently selected layer with the layer directly underneath it. So now they are baked together into a single layer. Again, I'm going to undo this last. 35. 3.1.c Recognize the different types of layers in the Layers panel: Exam, you might be asked about the different type of layers that you can come across in Photoshop. And we've already seen some of these. So we've seen shape layers like this one here. We've seen text layers. We've seen image layers that just simply has image information in them, background layers that are by default logged and at the bottom of the stacking order. We've also seen a smart object layer, which we will be talking about later. The only other category of layers that we haven't seen so far, which you will be working with on a regular basis, are the adjustment layers. Now, these you can find from the layers panel at the bottom, that little circle icon, and you can choose the options from here. I am just going to choose maybe the black and white option, and notice how this is going to affect only the layers directly underneath it, so not the ones above it. Now, for instance, if I move this rectangle layer at the bottom, it will also automatically be affected by that black and white adjustment. So that layer can be also moved up and down. And as I'm moving it up and down, notice how it's affecting immediately the layers underneath or above. If an adjustment layer is sitting on top of the stacking order, of course, it's going to automatically affect everything underneath it. Adjustment layers are also important aspects of non destructive editing workflow, and apart from the fact that they can be easily turned off or turned back on or moved around within the stacking order, you can also adjust their settings by double clicking on the icon in the layer, and then the settings will show up here in the property s panel. So we can change, for instance, how this black and white conversion affects individual colors in the image. So we have quite a lot of reds in it. We can decide the brightness tonal value that is used for the reds in the image. But in case of another adjustment layer, I'm just going to delete this current one. We will see different options. So once again, I come down here, and this time, I'm going to use maybe hue saturation. Again, that will show up at the top of the layer panel. Which means it's going to affect all the layers underneath it. And now I can control the saturation. In a way, this is similar to the black and white conversion. If I drag it all the way to the left, it desaturates the image completely, turning it into monochromatic image. But I can also go the other way and I can increase the intensity of the colors if I wanted to. So oversaturating them. And of course, we can also adjust the hue of the image and even the lightness, so we can make it darker or brighter. So once again, this is an adjustment layer, which means we can easily turn it on and off. We can also move it up and down in the stacking order. And if we don't need it anymore, we can just press backspace. Now, if a layer has a mask, you might need to press backspace again because the first time you press backspace, it will only remove the layer mask. Again, we will talk more about masks in an upcoming lesson. For now, I'm just going to press backspace again. By the way, when it comes to filtering layer types in a document, remember we can use these options here on the top of the layers panel. Here we also have an option to quickly filter for adjustment layers. This is a good way of remembering the main layer types. So we have image layers, adjustment layers, type layers, shape layers, and smart objects. That's the five icons that you can see there, the different kinds of layers. Of course, there are even more filtering options, not just based on the kind of layers. We can also search for specific layers by their name, and then we can just type it in here. So if I type in here, I can quickly find the one that I'm looking for. Whenever you use filtering, just don't forget to turn it off to reveal all your layers again. One other important thing I need to keep mentioning, whenever you use multiple layers, you have to make sure always to save it as a Photoshop document. So the native PSD file format is the best whenever you work in Photoshop. It will record everything including smart objects, masks, all the different layers, layer groups, and everything that you did to organize your layers. 36. 3.2.a Adjust a layer's opacity, blending mode, and fill opacity: So far, we only talked about turning the visibility of layers on and off, which we can do with these e icons next to them. But of course, we can also adjust their opacity, and that is something you can do with this slider up here in the layers panel. So if I start dragging them to the left, you can see how it's starting to become see through or semi transparent. And I can even drag it all the way down, which is, in a way, similar to hiding it. But I'm going to drag it back to 100%. And instead of always going to the drop down and then start dragging, what I prefer to do is to use this scrubby slider technique of hovering over the word opacity and then start dragging left and right. And if you wait a little bit, you will get a feedback of the changes that you are making. So there's a slight delay sometimes, but you should be able to get the result fairly quickly. I'm going to just set the opacity back to 100% and maybe select the text on the top again. We can try it out how it's going to start disappearing into the background. And it's a great technique to make things a little bit more soft or more subtle. So we can still read that text compared to the other texts. It just faded more into the background. Now, besides using opacity, we can also create interesting mixing between layers by using blend modes. Now, I'm going to use the rectangle layer for this demonstration, and by default, all layers are created in normal blend mode. But if I go to any of these other blend modes here, you can see how the blue color is starting to mix with the colors underneath it. So each of these blend modes will create a different result. And sometimes it's hard to tell which result is going to work well. Like, in this case, Divide created a very cool, almost see through effect, but it works really well in this case. And we can move this layer behind the castle, for instance, and maybe we can make it bigger. I'm going to use Command or Control T. That's for free transform. And with this, we can change the size of this shape. If I hold down the Shift key, I can just drag it sideways so we can create something like a frame behind it, and then if I double click on the drop shadow effect, we can also move this slightly around by dragging it here and maybe make this a little bit bigger the size of the shadow effect and maybe reduce the intensity of it. So you can see that it creates that very interesting result. And this is just one of the many examples that blend molds can be used for. But just for better visibility, I'm going to keep this shape right here. And once again, go back to the blend modes drop down. And as we hover over each of these, we will see immediately the effect these blend modes will create. And don't worry, you don't have to remember all of these blend modes and what they do. The most important thing to notice is that there are groups of blend modes, and they are doing slightly different effects. So this first group from darken to darker color will always create a darker result than the original image. In this case, that blue shape is getting darker and the image underneath it is also getting darker. While the next category will always create a brighter result than the original two layers were. And then the third category is somewhere in between the two. So it's not necessarily going to make things brighter or darker. It usually creates a similar tonal result. So the brightness is not going to be affected as much by these. And then the other two categories at the bottom are more specialist blend modes for very specific tasks. But to be honest, the most important ones and the ones that we use most of the time would be multiply screen and overlay besides the normal blend mode, of course, which means that the currently selected layer is not blended into the layers underneath it. In case this question comes up, whether blending affects any layers above a currently selected layer, you should say no because we've seen this already. Once again, if I set this to multiply, for instance, and I move it around, of course, it will only affect the layers underneath it. But if this layer is moved above these other layers, then again, anything that's underneath it will be affected. Of course, you can use blending and opacity changes at the same time on the same layer. So we can reduce the opacity and also use the blending at the same time. But then there is also one other important feature called fill opacity, or it just simply says fill here in the layer s panel. Now, that is going to be important because again, it's something they frequently ask in exams. For this, I'm going to increase the drop shadows visibility. Maybe even the spread around it, something like that. Maybe we can also add an inner glow just to have another effect. I'm going to increase the intensity of that and the visibility and maybe just set this to a different color like yellow, like that. Let's just make it even bigger and more visible and maybe just set this to normal so we can see that shape better, something like this. So we have two effects, so you have to know here, you don't really have to apply the same effects that I'm using. Using inner glow and drop shadow, which is obviously going to show up here in the layer panel as well. And these can be individually turned off or back on. But what I wanted to show you is if I adjust the opacity of the layer, is going to reduce the opacity of the layer and also the effects that are applied on the layer. However, if you use 100% opacity, but starting to reduce the fill opacity, that's going to only make the fill of the layer, which in this case, is just that fill color, the cyan color become transparent or even go completely away. But all the effects that are applied on the layer will still be visible. So fill opacity set to zero with opacity set to 100% means we are only seeing the layer styles or the effects that were used on this layer. And this is very important. Like I said, they like to ask this in the exam, so you should really remember how to do this. So whenever they ask you to only show layer styles without the layer content being visible, remember that's 100% opacity, 0% fill opacity. 37. 3.2.b Create and edit masks: One of the most important concepts to wrap your head around in Photoshop is how masks work or how to use masking efficiently. So the first and most important thing to understand is that masking is a unique way of controlling the visibility of your layers. So we've already seen the opacity, field opacity, blend modes, or simply just hiding and showing layers. These were all steps that we could use for controlling the visibility. While masks or layer masks can be used in a more specific way of hiding parts of layers. So to understand how this works, if you've never used layers before, I'm going to demonstrate it by maybe hiding parts of this fortress. So I'm going to select the fortress layer, first of all, and then we can go to the bottom of the layers panel and find this rectangle with a circle inside it. That's the mask icon. I like to call it the Japanese flag. So if we click on that, it's going to add this empty layer mask on the currently selected layer. This empty mask is completely white. White shows black heights. That's how layer masks work. So if I use the brush tool, for instance, and I switch to black, having black being the foreground, that is something you can do quickly by passing X on the keyboard or click on this little arrow here until you see black as your foreground color. Now, if you start painting with this, notice what happens, we can, in a way, erase details. So I can just maybe get rid of that tower completely on the left side. But the good thing is, this is not completely gone, so we didn't lose it forever. It is just temporarily hidden away by the layer mask. So if I want to see what happened in the mask itself, I can hold down the alter option key and click on the mask and it will reveal the mask itself. So black hides white shows. So everything else is visible from the original layer contents, apart from that section where I created this black blob, which is hiding those details. Now, I can alter option, click on the mask again and to demonstrate the non destructive aspect of using layer masks, I am going to press X on the keyboard to now draw with white white revealing details. I can paint over it and notice how it can reappear. So it was never completely gone to begin with. It was just hidden away. Let's do this again, maybe on the right side. I press X on the keyboard to hide details. And once again, I'm just going to hide some of these parts. Maybe I want to remove all of this, so I can paint over it, and that way, we have a nice result. Maybe we can also remove all of this. If I use the square brackets on the keyboard, I can make my brush a bit smaller. So I can just paint over these details here, maybe make the brush a little bit even smaller and notice how I accidentally painted over that part of the tower this is when I would just press X on the keyboard and remember drawing with white, you can reveal details. Once again, I press X to go back to black, and with a smaller brush, I can just remove those details there. And if I zoom back out now, we can actually see before and after. So without the mask, how it looked like, with a clever shortcut Shift clicking on the layer mask thumbnail, I can reveal what's there. So this is the layer without the layer mask, and then with the layer mask applied, this is how it looks like. So it's a clever way of non destructively hiding certain parts of the image. And of course, we can be much more precise whenever we zoom closer. If you have a pen tablet, like a acum stylus, you can use the brush more precisely and paint over details even better. But for now, I feel like we created a nice result. So if we wanted to make the castle a little bit less symmetrical, this was a quick and easy way to do it. Last but not least, there's also one other shortcut which can reveal the areas that are currently hidden away while still seeing the image. That's option or old Shift click on the layer mask thumbnail. So this is going to reveal the areas or regions that we painted over with black. So those are the hidden details within this layer. I'm going to use the same shortcut just to hide these details. Of course, if you decide that you don't need a layer mask anymore, you can just right click and choose delete layer mask, or if you want to make it permanent, meaning you want it to be used to actually delete those details from the layer, which would be again considered a destructive editing. But in some cases, you might want to do this. You can just say apply layer mask. So what actually happened is that we use the mask to permanently delete those details. I'm going to undo this because I would like to keep the mask still accessible. Another interesting thing worth remembering is that you can invert the colors of your layer mask, which in turn will invert the visibility of the hidden and visible parts. And the easiest way to do this is by pressing Command or Control I while the layer mask is highlighted. So when I press Command I, it inverts the colors. So whatever was white is now turned black, and vice versa, Black's turned white, and we can actually see this if I ter option, click on the mask. So what this means is that only those parts that we originally were hiding are now visible and everything else is hidden away. Again, this is completely non destructive technique. So you can press Command or Control I again, and you can flip the visibility around as many times as you want. Now, of course, masking is not restricted to be used with the brush tool. You can also use it in combination with selections. So for instance, if we select the hell layer, which once again is that detail at the bottom, let's just say we want to only see this portion of the image. So I'm using the rectangular market tool. I highlighted those parts, and then I go to the contextual taskbar and I can click on the mask icon there, or I can also use the same mask icon from the layers panel and notice how it automatically turn my selection into a layer mask. So kept everything that was inside the selection visible. So that's white in the layer mask, and everything else outside of it turned black, which means they are hidden away. And the beauty of photoshop, of course, is that we combine multiple tools and techniques. So maybe I just started with a rough selection like but then I can use the brush tool, and with white being my foreground color, I can paint around the edges, and I can create a little bit more realistic edge for this hill or cliff, just to make it a bit more organic. I just paint around the edges, like sew on one side, and I can do the same thing on this side, and I can achieve different result instead of it being completely filling the foreground from left to right. Now we have a much steeper side on the left and the right side of this cliff or hill. And if I select both of these layers together, the hill and the fortress and using the move tool, we can move it around just to see how it looks. So once again, this is a great technique to experiment with different compositions and doing that completely non destructively. So we can again shift click on this layer mask to reveal all the details that we had originally and then hide them again just to test whether we prefer it like this or not. The same thing with the castle, we can reveal or hide those details again, and then we have complete creative control over what's visible and what's hidden away. So, in a way, masking is really the ultimate control that you can have when it comes to controlling and refining how layers should interact in your compositions. Last but not least, we should also talk about clipping masks. Even though they are called masks, they behave a little bit differently from layer masks. So for instance, we can have this text right here, come on top of all of these layers. But let's say we only want to see this text inside the silhouette of the castle. So if I wanted to do that, I can actually put it right on top of the castle layer and then hold down the alter option key and click between these two layers. So the text layer and the fortress layer. When I do that, notice now if I move this text layer around, it will only be visible inside the castle layer. So that's what we call a clipping mask. The text is clipped onto the fortress layer underneath it. And I can do the same thing with the other layer. So if I drag this layer above the hill, then I can again alter option click between the two layers, create the clipping, and then I can move it down and notice how it will only be visible inside that heel. Another good way to demonstrate how clipping musk work is to have this shape brought back. I just turned off all the effects and also set the fill opacity up to 100%. I'm just going to put it right above the fortress layer. And I'm going to do the same technique. Alt or Option click between the two layers. We'll create the clipping mask. Or you can also use the shortcut Command Option G or Control Alt G on PC. Well again, create a clipping mask and notice how it's a quick way of turning the console completely blue. So that blue shape layer will only be visible inside the boundaries or silhouette of the layer directly underneath it. And if I wanted to make it completely blue, of course, I could increase the size of this shape, and maybe we could even change the blend mode to something like multiply. And as you can see, the possibilities are endless once you start combining all these things that we learned so far. 38. 3.3.a Nondestructive editing: Smart Objects, Smart Filters, and adjustment layers: We already covered most of the important aspects of working non destructively in Photoshop, apart from one key element or key component, which is the smart object. So we actually have already a smart object in this document that I created and prepared for this example. But I want to demonstrate how they actually work and how they are created. I still have these two layers, the hill and the castle in this composition, but I deleted all the other layers, and I actually also disabled or hid the layer masks that we used in the previous lessons just to keep things easier. I didn't delete them in case we want to use them again, so they won't cause any trouble. We can keep them like that. In case you want to do this, it's the shift key, the one that you can use to hide or disable temporarily layer masks. And what I wanted to demonstrate here to you is that whenever you want to resize a layer without loss of quality, that's when you should use a smart object. So what happens if I select these two layers, for instance, and I make them smaller. So I'm just going to make them much smaller like this. And maybe I decide that this should be somewhere here in the background. But then I changed my mind and I decide, actually, it was better bigger. So I'm going to use Command or Control T for free transform. And by the way, this is something you can find in the edit menu. So free transform is right there. I'm just going to make this one bigger again and notice how everything got really pixelated. So we lost a lot of the original details. If I press Enter, Photoshop will try its best to estimate what those details were, but it's not going to be as great as it was before. So if I zoom closer, it's going to be very blurred and just really low resolution compared to how it looked before. So we can see the detail level in the mountains in the background, and we can also compare this to how this looked before. If I just undo a couple of steps. So that was before, and this is after. So this is definitely something you want to avoid happening whenever you resize image layers. So the best thing to do is to turn both of these layers into smart objects. And ideally, you want to do this before you started changing the size of an image layer. So the highest available resolution is the one that should be recorded. So at this point, this is the highest available resolution for me. I'm going to right click on the Hill layer first and choose Convert to Smart Object. And then I will do the same thing with the fortress layer, Convert to Smart Object, as well. Now we have two independent smart object layers that I can still move around. But the good thing about this is that now if I make changes in their size, let's just say I want to make this castle look smaller, but maybe I want to keep the hill the same size. I can easily do that. And if I change my mind, I can press Commando Control T again on the fortress layer, and I can even see here on the Options bar. The percentage of the size compared to the original size whenever the smart object was created. So if I just type in 100 and I make sure that the chain icon is turned on, meaning that both the width and the height is increased back to 100% at the same time, I can just press Enter, and now I know exactly that this is recovered to its original size. And if I zoom closer, we can see that we didn't lose any of the original details. So using smart objects is a way to prevent loss of quality when it comes to transforming, especially scaling layers up and down. But you would be surprised even rotating layers with the free transform tool can also result in loss of quality, especially when it's repeated multiple times. So in case of any type of transformations to image layers, you should always consider saving them first as a smart object and only after that, apply the transformations. One important thing to remember is that whenever you create a smart object, you might increase the file size of your document slightly because each of these smart object layers can be considered embedded documents within your main Photoshop document. And to demonstrate this to you, what we have to do is to double click on the thumbnail of the smart object layer, and that is going to open a separate document. In this case, it's called fortress dot psB. PSB is slightly different from PSD. While PSD stands for Photoshop document. PSB is the Photoshop big file format. It is used whenever a file gets bigger than 2 gigabytes in file size, but it's also used for smart object files that are all embedded inside the main Photoshop document. And you can have as many smart objects as you want within Photoshop file, and you can even have nested smart objects, meaning you can have smart objects inside smart objects. Luckily in the exam, they won't ask you complicated questions about smart objects. Most of the time, it's just simply to create a smart object, how you do that, or maybe they might ask you to merge two layers into a smart object, which I'm going to just show you quickly. So I'm going to close that source document, and I'm going to select these two layers, the hill and the fortress layers together, and I can right click and choose Convert to Smart Object. Again, even though they are already smart objects, they can be converted into a single smart object. Which is similar again to grouping layers. Now they are combined into a single layer. However, remember, if we double click on the thumbnail, we will be able to access the source, and within the source, I can still move these layers around. So I can maybe move the fortress on top of the heel layer and I can maybe move it down here. And probably it will still look realistic somewhere there. And then if I want to update these changes, because it's a separate document, what we have to do is to go to the file menu and choose Save. That's going to update this document. And when I close this, we will see it also updating here in the main document. Now, the good thing is that even though we've done the changes inside the Smart Object, we can still go back to the previous state by just simply pressing undo here within the main document. And, of course, we can go all the way back to having them separate smart objects as well with another undo step. One additional thing to remember about Smart Object layers is that you can also apply filters on them non destructively because any filter that you use on a smart object layer will automatically become a smart filter. So for instance, if I go to the filter menu and choose Distort, maybe wave, which is great for creating reflections of images, for instance, we can just click Okay. And we can see how that looks. But most importantly, this is completely non destructive, so we can easily turn it off or turn it back on similarly to layer styles or effects. And we can also double click on the wave filter, and we can adjust the settings if we wanted to. And in case we decide we don't need the smart filter, we can also just right click and choose Delete smart filter. Like I said, it's completely non destructive. Compared to this, if I apply a filter on the background layer, which is not a smart object, it's going to become a destructive change, which we won't be able to make changes to later on. So, for instance, if I go to blur and choose Gas and blur, and maybe increase the radius. We can blur out the background to create this shallow depth of field effect. I click okay. And it looks great. We have more focus on the foreground details. But unfortunately, this was done completely destructively. So if I ever change my mind and I want to have a little bit more focus on the background, I can't really do that anymore unless I undo this last step. But what's important to remember is that even though Photoshop has a history, you might recall seeing this history panel in an earlier video, which can record all the steps that you do while having a file open, this history or the ability to go and undo steps that you didn't want to do, especially destructive steps. This won't be available once you save and close a file. And this is why it's so important to work non destructively, to have that flexibility to be able to go back anytime, make all the changes to all the aspects of the composition that you created. So to fix what I've done here, I would go back before applying that effect. So at this point, and if I wanted to use that blur on the background, I would right click on the background layer and then choose Convert to Smart Object. Maybe we can rename it to mountains and then go back to the filter menu and choose Gaussian Blur. If you use the one on the top, that's just going to simply repeat the same settings that were applied last time. But because it's now a smart object, it's going to record this as a smart filter. So that allows me to turn it on and off, and I can also double click on it to amend the amount. Maybe if it was a bit too much, I can reduce it and get the result that I wanted. Just to make this composition a little bit more interesting, I'm going to move this text behind the castle and I'm going to use the free transform tool to make it bigger, something like that. I feel like that is still legible, maybe move it a little bit higher, something like that. Maybe we can make it a little bit smaller. Yeah, something like that. Now, you can see that I was changing the size of this layer. Now, again, thanks to this layer being a smart object, it was recorded with a much higher resolution layer. So I could easily go up and down in size. However, it is important to mention that text and shape layers are all vector based by default in Photoshop, so they can be scaled up and down without losing quality on them, so you don't have to turn text layers into smart objects. And now let's just summarize the key components of working non destructively in Photoshop. So we already seen smart objects. That's mainly what we talked about in this lesson. But we've also seen before adjustment layers which are also very important layer masks. Again, we've seen before, and just in general, using the layers for every independent component of your composition. So whenever they ask you in the exam about non destructive editing, these are the things you have to keep in mind. Layers, in general, smart objects, adjustment layers, and masking, which includes layer masks and clipping masks. 39. 3.3.b Destructive editing: painting, adjustments, erasing, and rasterizing: Although we talked a great deal about non destructive editing, in the exam, they might also ask you about the opposite of how can you do destructive editing or what would be considered destructive editing methods. So I'm going to just quickly go through these even though they might sound obvious and self explanatory. I wanted to show you again. So one of the most destructive changes you can do is to merge all your layers together, which is also called flattening your document. So if I right click on the layers panel anywhere, I can just choose flatten image and that basically bakes or merges all the layers together. You won't have access to anything anymore. The main advantage of this is that you will reduce the file size drastically because now you have only a single layer compared to all the additional layers that we had there. But I'm just going to undo this. So this is definitely a destructive change. Another thing would be to rasterize a layer. So something that's already set up as a smart object. Can be rasterized. So I'm just going to do this on this text layer. I will right click on it and choose rasterize layer. And again, what that means if I reduce this in size and then make it large again, see how pixelated it will get because it will only have the remaining pixel details available, and it will have to try to emulate the original details, but it lost the original quality. So whenever you rasterize a layer, whether it's a smart object or a vector layer or a text layer, they will all become resolution independent. And then one other major destructive change would be to directly affect pixels of an image layer. This is, again, something that can happen if I work on a normal layer, not on a smart object, because in case of a smart object, if I wanted to use my brush tool, Photoshop will automatically create an additional layer for me. But if I rasterize this smart object, then this turns back into a normal image layer. Now I can start painting over it and notice how these changes are happening directly on the layer. So if I ever need to reveal what was there before, it will be very tricky. Luckily, I still have the history state where I can just undo this last step, and I can also undo the rasterization to go back to my nice and safe smart object that I had there before. And maybe I will rasterize the hill layer as well just temporarily, just to show you one other thing. You can also apply adjustments directly on image layers instead of using them as adjustment layers. So having this layer selected, I can go to the image menu and find adjustments here, and maybe I can just use hue saturation. And I am going to adjust the colors, maybe the saturation, do something crazy with this foreground detail. Maybe we make it darker, something like that. Once I click Okay, all these changes are now baked into that layer on the top, and that is because it was a regular layer, so just a normal layer, not a smart object. And the adjustments were applied not as an adjustment layer, but directly on the layer itself. So this is again, something I won't be able to go back and make changes to. And if I save this file, close it. The next time I open it, I completely lost the original details of that particular layer. So this is again something you want to avoid doing. Either you want to keep your layer as a smart object, and then even if you use an adjustment from the image menu, which normally would be considered destructive, because it's a smart object, the changes that I'm going to do now will be saved as a smart filter. So the hue saturation adjustment became a smart filter. I can easily turn it on and off or go back and make amends to it, and if I don't want to use it anymore, I can just clear the smart filter from this layer or the other option to use the adjustment non destructively would be to add it as an adjustment layer. Once again, hue saturation, and then I can again make some changes here. And if I only want this to be applied onto the heel layer, I can use a clipping mask option click between the adjustment and the layer underneath it, and then it is only going to be affecting that foreground detail here. So I can turn it on and off and we can see the changes, and I can always keep going back and adjusting the values and achieve something similar to what we had there originally, but now it's completely non destructive. And I'm just going to show you one last thing. Maybe I'm going to turn the fortress layer into a normal layer by rasterizing it. And instead of masking, if I use the eraser tool, I can do something similar to what we've done before removing parts of the castle. And, of course, this is also considered destructive changes because it's not just hiding those details, but it's actually deleting them. So again, if I don't have the history states to fall back on, those details that I removed would just completely be lost. Luckily, I can just undo these changes, go back to this being a smart object, and the smart or non destructive way of doing the same thing would be to add the layer mask first on that layer, and then use the brush tool and paint with black being the foregram color. So black hides, so I can achieve the same result. But now it's non destructive, meaning I can just shift click on the mask to reveal this again, if I wanted to, or I can use the brush tool with white being my foregram color, and I can just reveal parts of it again if I wanted to. And it's still not showing everything, but I just revealed a bit more that I felt like is useful for the composition. So before you take the exam, make sure you really get familiar with all of these non destructive editing methods, smart objects and smart filters, adjustment layers, and masking. I will have more multi layered compositions and files available from the exercise files folder for you, just to experiment and play around with all of these features, just to get the grips of using them and also combining them in your workflow. 40. 4.1.a 1 Crop Tool Group: This topic, we will be covering all the important and essential tools that we use for editing roster or pixel images. So first of all, let's talk about the crop tool. This is something that they like to ask in the exam, and for sure, you should be familiar in using it. So if you write on the crop tool, you will see that it's part of a group of tools. The most common one out of these is the crop tool that you would work with. But it's also good to be familiar with the other ones. We will talk about those briefly. When you first start using the crop tool, it's going to have a selection of the entire canvas. However, you will be able to make changes to this quickly, either by click and dragging over the image on the desired new selection for your crop, or you can also drag these corner points in so to have a tighter crop on an image. One of the most important settings you have to pay attention to is in the options bar called delete cropped pixels. If this is turned on, that means whatever is outside of the crop zone will be deleted. So you will lose that. This would be considered a destructive editing, which we talked about in the previous topic. So if I press Enter, we can see here in the layer spanel that the thumbnail is not showing the original details. And also, if I press C on the keyboard and click on the image again. That's for the crop tool shortcut, it won't allow us to reveal the original details. So they are completely gone now. However, if I undo this crop, the original crop that I had and I go back to the initial state of the image. When I use the crop tool again and I turn off delete crop pixels, now if I make a crop, let's just make a very drastic crop, like a portray format for a phone, for instance, you can just accept this crop. But notice how the thumbnail is still showing the entire original image. And if I use the crop tool again, I can easily extend it again or focus on another part of this image and save out multiple versions of it if it's needed. Another important thing to mention, and this is again, something that in the exam can come up often that you can actually set your crop to specific ratios or APAC ratios. So for instance, we can find square here, and we can, of course, still change the size of this and move it around. But this is going to constrain the crop to one to one or square size. We can also find these other standard apec ratios like four to five or eight to ten. Then we have five to seven, two to three, 16 to nine. And in case you want to change the orientation. So instead of using 16 to nine in this landscape format, you can also just click on these arrows here in the Options bar, and that will set it to a portrait mode. So the same aspect ratio just in portrait mode now. Now, of course, you can also rotate your crop, so just drag around the corners, and then you can create angle like this, for instance. And if I accept that by pressing Enter on the keyboard, now we can see the result of this crop. I'm going to go back to the original crop, however, and I'm going to reset my crop as well by clicking on clear here on the top, and also click on Reset on this icon here. I wanted to show you that you can also use the crop tool to expand the image using the generative expand feature. I'm going to just increase the height of this image to maybe something like that, and then I can click on Generative Expand, and I can even describe what I want to have in that empty part, what I want Photoshop to fill it in with. But most of the time, I prefer not to specify anything because Photoshop is very good at guessing what it should be. I'm just going to press Enter and then this relies on Adobe Firefly, the generative AI engine within Photoshop, and it's going to cost generative credits, which you have at the moment around, I think, 1,000 each month, as long as you have a creative cloud subscription, and it takes a while, especially if you have a high resolution image. And once you see the result, in the properties panel, you can switch between three options. And I actually like this third option, which is the least busiest one. I feel like that is a good way to keep the interest on the center of the image. Yeah, probably that one is the best. And if we want to see the original image and how much we edit to it, we can just turn on and off this new generative expand layer. I feel like Photoshop did a really good job on this expansion. Now, there's one additional thing they might ask about the crop tool, and that's how you can use it for straightening an image. So you can see that there is an icon here. With this, I can just drag over the landscape. Like so, and then it's going to straighten the image based on that. I can press Enter, and we can see now the landscape feels more straight, although this is an imaginary scene, so I actually prefer the original slightly angled view. And there's one additional thing worth mentioning that from the Options bar when you use the crop tool, you can also change between these different overlays, so you can have a grid, or you can have the golden ratio. You can also have the golden spiral, and you can even rotate these by pressing the shift or keyboard shortcut or clicking on cycle orientation. And this is going to turn the currently selected overlay around within the image. So for us, I think it makes more sense to have this aligned to the astronaut. Something like that would be a good use of the golden spiral compositional method. So let's just see how this crop looks like. Yeah, that is actually quite similar to the original crop before we extended it on the top. The only thing you have to know about the other tools grouped together with the crop tool is that the slice tools are mainly used for web design where you can create segments of an image, and it allows you to export individual zones or areas of your composition as separate files. While the other tool called Perspective Crop Tool is a special version of the crop where you can specify an area which is in perspective. So you want select that area and you would like to crop that out and remove the perspective distortion. So normally we would use it for things like this where you highlighted the section you need, and then once you press Enter, it's going to straighten that detail and make it completely straight, so with no distortions on it. So once again, this was before, and this is after. 41. 4.1.a 2 Brush Tool Group: Another important category of tools that we use for editing raster images would be the brush tool group, starting with the brush tool. The shortcut is B. And we already seen this tool being used before, and I mentioned that we can use X on the keyboard to switch between foreground and background colors. We also looked at the brush settings and the brush presets. So I'm not going to spend too much time on this. If you haven't seen it, it's covered in the second major topic, the project setup and interface. So brush tool, we've already talked about, but most importantly, what we need to always mention is that this is a destructive tool if you're using it directly on an image layer. So, for instance, in this case, we use it on the background. Notice how the brush is going to appear on the thumbnail as well. So I'm painting directly on the image. If you want to use it non destructively, you should always create an empty new layer, and then you can paint on. During the exam, most likely, if they ask you to do something with the brush tool, they will tell you exactly what settings they want you to use. And the easiest place to change these or access these would be through the Options bar drop down right here. So if they tell you, let's just say, you need to use a 50 pixel brush with 100% hardness, that's where you can set it up. And if they need you to use a specific color, you would just click here on the foreground swatch, and they will probably tell you the code for this color, the hex code, which you can type in here at the bottom, or they might tell you just to use red color, and you can just double check the HSB or RGB values, whether it's going to match what they are asking you to use. And then once you click Okay, this brush is ready to be used. So I can start painting. There's also a couple of additional settings like blend mode for the brush, opacity, flow and smoothing. These are all here in the options bar. If they ask you to change them, you will know where to find them. Now, they might test you whether you know what's the main difference between the brush and the pencil tool. And the easiest way to explain is that the pencil tool is also a drawing tool, but it has no anti aliasing applied to it, so the edges will be more pixelated. So there's no smoothing on the edges. And I can demonstrate this easily. I'm just going to create a new layer, maybe set it to white. And then first, I'm going to use the brush tool. So I will use a 200 pixel size, and I'm just going to make a blob here. Then I'm going to change to the pencil tool, and I will use the same size just for the comparison, 100% hardness, and then we will create another circle next to this. So you will see that the one on the left was the brush tool, which has this nice smooth edge, and I'm zoomed really close here just to be able to see the pixelation. But we can see that there are some gray pixels here that's called anti aliasing. And it's a method that is used to make curved lines more smooth. And it's a common practice that we see in Photoshop also used for text layers and so on. But on the pencil tool, we can see that it doesn't have anti aliasing. So the edges are more jagged or it's also called stair stepping. This problem that we can see here. And of course, if I zoom further out, it will be harder to see it. But even from a distance, we can tell that the one on the left is smoother and feels rounder. The next tool in the brush tool category is called color replacement tool. Here, you can select any color from your foreground color picker and paint over the image to change the colors. Now, this is also a destructive tool because it can only be used directly on a raster image layer. So I would very rarely use this. Instead, I would rely on adjustment layers. By the way, if you have a generative expand layer in this document and you try to use this tool on top of that, it will ask you to first rasterize that layer, which is another destructive change that I would try to avoid most of the time. But I just show you if I click Okay. Now it's not a generative layer anymore. It doesn't have that little spark or magic icon on it. So now I can draw over it. But again, this is a tool that I would highly recommend to avoid. And the last tool in this category is called mixer brush. Now this actually can be used non destructively, and it can be useful sometimes. If you turn on sample all layers in the options bar, that's when you can create a new layer and start painting there. Now, if I zoom a little bit closer, I can maybe show this on the clouds, maybe on some parts where it's a little bit too detailed. Again, this image was generated. So there's some strange details here. This looks more like a mountain somewhere in the sky, just floating. First, I will normally say clean brush here in the settings. And then I also want to make sure that this option is turned off. So you can just toggle that icon there. That means that the mixer brush is not going to blend a color into the image. It's just simply going to sample the colors in the image and blend those together. So you can paint over the image, and especially on soft details like the sky and clouds. This can be a very nice way to quickly blend details together and to create nicer result. So I'm painting over this a couple of times until it created like a perfect blend in the image like that. And if you feel like it's still not looking perfect, what you can do is also go to the brush settings and maybe reduce the spacing on this a bit and then paint over these details, and it gives you an even smoother result. You can just drag details up and down a bit until you are happy with the result. So the mixer brush can be used for a lot of different things. It can be used to create more painterly results, but it can also be used for smoothing some details out, a bit similar to what the blur or smudge tool would but generally, the mixer brush is quite versatile, so you can do quite a lot of different things with it, and there's lots of settings for it here on the top. Luckily, if they ever ask you to do something with this tool, they will be very specific in the exam explain how you need to set it up. Just remember to use the options bar and make sure to turn on sample all layers if they ask you to use it non destructively. 42. 4.1.a 3 Clone Stamp Tool and History Brush: Another important tool in Photoshop that's considered a roster editing tool would be the clone stamp tool, and the shortcut for it is S, and this works like a brush again. So you have a brush size that you can change. I normally use the square brackets on the keyboard or hold down Control option and click and drag left and right on a Mac computer or use Control Alt and I believe, right click and drag on a PC to get the same result. So with this, you can decrease the brush size by dragging left and right, and dragging up and down will change the hardness. Most of the time with the Clone Stamp tool, it is recommended to use a completely soft brush, so hardness set to 0%. And I'm just going to demonstrate how to work with this. The first thing you need to check is the sampling. This should be set to all layers if you have multiple layers in a document. And if you want to use the clone stamp tool non destructively, again, you know the drill, you have to have a new layer created for it. Since I already have an empty layer that I just use for that tiny little improvement there with the mixer brush, I'm going to use the same layer. For the Clone SM tool, and I am going to hold down the alter option key and click on maybe the astronaut's head or maybe the legs might be a good reference point. And then when I move my brush to the right side, notice how I can draw another astronaut. Maybe I can just draw another one here. So essentially, it's a copy paste tool or copy paste brush, we can even call it because it's going to paint over the image and copy whatever we referenced. So in this case, we were sampling from the leg. But if I keep painting, it's just going to remember all the other details that are there in the original reference point. And that is thanks to the option called aligned. So if aligned is turned off, I'm just going to go back a couple of steps just so you can see what happens. Now, if I sample with alter option, click in this case, let's say, the helmet and I start drawing. Each time I start drawing with this, it's going to start from the same point, but it won't continue it. So if I wanted to continue this, it will just repeat the same section again and again. So it's not aligned. It's more like creating a pattern of the same detail, right? So I'm just going to undo these changes. And maybe one last thing I wanted to mention about the Clone Stamp tool is that if you go to the Window menu, this tool actually has its own panel called clone source, and this can be used for more advanced settings. Like, for instance, you can even make the sampled area smaller. So when you are using the clone stamp, it will actually create a smaller version of the sampled area. If we want an astronaut further in the background, for instance, what we could do is to reduce the size. So here, if I change the percentage to 25%, that would be a quarter of the original size. And we can already see how much smaller the astronaut got. I'm just going to sample again and also make my brush smaller, something like that. Looks good. We could even flip the sample details. So if I click on this icon, we can have an astronaut looking the other direction. So maybe he can look in the opposite direction, and I'm just going to paint him here. Maybe let's just sample again from the legs. I think it's easier to align it like that. So we have one astronaut looking towards the left. The other one is looking towards the right. And if we wanted to reset these settings, we can just click on this icon here. So now we should be able to draw the astronaut in the original size again. And I'm not going to undo these changes because I want to also show you another tool that, in some cases can be useful, especially if you work destructively instead of using individual layers for all the changes. So this is called History Brush Tool. Once you select this, you have to also make sure that you use the history panel. And in the History panel, you will have to choose which state of these changes you want to revert back to. I'm just going to have it set to the original version when the document was opened. So that's the sampling point, but this can be moved to any of these other available history states. But if I keep it up there, that means it's going to revert back to the original details. However, in that state, there was only a single layer, so it won't allow me to use it. So it doesn't match that history state. So we actually have to go down a bit and probably go here before the Clone Stamp tool was used. So I selected that option there, or maybe it can even go back to the mixer brush state. And now it should allow us to use this tool. And this is also a brush. So you can increase the size, and even the hardness. And if I start painting over here, notice how it will go back to how the image was before I made those changes. So I can easily remove all of these mistakes that I made. Instead of undoing, I brush them back. So it reveals that specific state that we chose from the history panel. Once again, this tool is something that you very rarely will have to rely on as long as you work non destructively, and you do everything on separate layers, and you utilize all the techniques that we already discussed in the previous topic. 43. 4.1.a 4 Eraser, Gradient and Paint Bucket Tools: Another set of tools that I very rarely use is the eraser tool group. There's three types of erasers. Again, these are all destructive tools. That's why I would very rarely rely on them, but I'm just going to show you how they work on the original layer here at the bottom. So if I just use the eraser tool, it's going to delete. Like a brush, but it deletes, then you can use the background eraser tool to remove background details. So this is going to try to find and identify edges. So when I paint around the astronaut, for example, it tries to find the edges, and it does a fairly good job. Mostly, although it starts deleting some parts from it as well. Again, it's a destructive chain, so I would never use this tool to be honest. And then we also have the magic eraser tool, which works a bit similar to the magic one that we will be discussing once we get to the selection tools that can take out certain areas based on their colors. So probably a good section for this would be the mountain, maybe. So yeah, it just removes big chunks of the mountain. So it relies on similar colors being next to each other. And yeah, it found those quite well. But once again, I wouldn't rely on this tool because it literally just deletes details instead of making a selection, for instance, and masking it out, which would be the more professional, non destructive way of doing things. So whenever they ask you about the eraser tools, you have to remember they permanently delete pixels from raster layers. And last but not least, we also have the gradient and paint bucket tools, which would also be considered roster editing tools. The gradient tool we've already seen in a previous topic, this actually creates an individual layer, so it is a non destructive tool or considered non destructive. So that is something that we already covered. I'm not going to go into detail. However, in the options bar, you will find the classic gradient option. And this actually is going to create a gradient directly on your currently selected layer. So this way, it actually becomes destructive. So that's something that you want to double check here on the top. It's a fairly recent feature. So in all the versions of Photoshop, you wouldn't have the option to switch between these two. But having it set to gradient, it will always automatically create an separate layer for your gradient. If we switch to the paint bucket tool, I can also show you how that works. This is probably better to be used on a separate layer. So it can either be used within a selection. So, for instance, if I make a selection here, I can use the paint bucket tool. Shortcut is G, by the way, to fill this selection in with my foreground color, or I can also choose to fill it in with a pattern, and the pattern can be selected from here. We talked about patterns again in a previous topic. Going to pick one of these patterns and click inside my selection. If there is no selection, the paint bucket will fill in the entire canvas. Once again, I very rarely use this tool because there is a handy shortcut to quickly fill in areas. Without having the tool selected. And again, this is something I mentioned earlier. You make a selection. If you press Alter option backspace, that fills in with your foreground color, and if you press Command or Control backspace, you can fill your selection in with the background color. And shift backspace would get you to fill dialog box where you have even more options. So in a way, if you know these shortcuts, most of the time you won't have to rely on the paint bucket tool. 44. 4.1.a 5 Shape and Selection Tools: Even though Photoshop is mainly known for its roster or pixel editing capabilities, there are also vector based tools. And in this topic, we will need to cover these because in the exam, they might ask you about them. First of all, you have to know where to find them and what's considered vector based tools. So the Pen tool category will have all of these tools here, mainly for drawing, and I'm going to walk you through the differences between them. But that's one of the categories, and the other major category is this one with the shapes. So these will create vector shapes. And additionally, you also have these selection tools, Path and direct selection tools, which is for making changes or edits of your existing vector parts. Now, the type tool, category or group is also vector based, but this is something that we will discuss in a separate topic. So we will come back to this soon. For now, let's just focus on the drawing tools and probably easiest to start with the shapes. So I'm going to use the rectangle tool first. And here in the options bar, you will have three modes, shape, path, and pixels. So if you use it in shape mode, that's the easiest one to understand, and this is something actually we've seen before in other topics. So this is going to create a vector shape layer. And this is completely non destructive, so it's not affecting the image underneath it. We can move this around with the move tool. Or if we use the path selection tool, we can also easily adjust its size, so we can extend it. We can rotate it around. We can even make the corners round with these corner widgets. So we can increase the roundness on the corners, and of course, we can change the fill color. We can add a stroke color if we wanted to, and we can increase the stroke size by dragging this to the right or left. That's again, the scrubby change on the word itself stroke, but you can also do the same thing by clicking here and dragging this up and down. That is a vector shape. And remember, we also had the direct selection tool. With that one, you can select individual anchor points and start moving them around. But you will get a warning that if you do this, you won't be able to use the live shape features like the roundness that we edited earlier. But if I say yes, now I can move these points around freely and I can make amends to it. The biggest difference between a vector shape and a roster layer is that vector shapes are resolution independent. So we can easily resize these up and down without losing resolution on them because instead of pixels, these shapes rely on these anchor points. And that will apply to all of the vector editing tools, so we will be working with anchor points instead of pixels. Having said that, if you want to, you can actually draw pixels with the shape tools. So instead of setting it to shape, you can set them to pixel and in this case, if I draw something, it will actually be drawn directly onto your currently selected roster image layer, and that by now you probably know would be considered a destructive change. So I would recommend not to do this. However, it's good to know that is possible. And perhaps in the exam, they might ask you to do something like this. So now you know where to find this feature. Let's look at the third option path. Again, this is a mode or drawing mode for the shapes. With this, you can draw a path without having any fill or stroke around it. And this can be used for many different things, but mainly, it is usually used for turning this into a selection. So I can right click on this and say, I want this to be turned into a selection. I can also decide whether I want feathering or entire a sing on this. But once I click Okay, you can see it turned into a selection. Might be wondering why is this different from using the rectangular Marque tool? Well, in a way, it's exactly the same thing. However, there are obviously different types of shape. So for instance, there's the polygon tool or triangle tool. So these obviously wouldn't be available from the marque tools. So if I wanted to make a triangular selection, I could use the triangle tool, draw the shape that I need maybe around this mushroom. Maybe something like this. I wanted to create a selection there, and then I could just right click Choose Make Selection, click Okay, and now we have that selection ready. Or perhaps I wanted to create a stroke around this area. So I can just undo this, go back to the path that we created earlier, and maybe we can even add a bit of roundness on it like that. And then I right click and say stroke path with the brush tool. And then if I click Okay, it's going to create that stroke based on my currently selected brush tool settings. So that was the thickness of my brush, and that was the color. Again, I've done this in a destructive way because I edit it on the currently selected layer. But if I go back one step and create an empty new layer, of course, I can also do it there. And maybe if I just reduce my brush size a bit, then go back to the settings that we've seen here before with the shape tools and choose stroke path. Can just say, Okay. And now you can see that the triangle was created on this empty new layer, so it became non destructive. Now one thing you have to remember about pots is that although they are not visible in the layers panel, they actually will be stored in your Photoshop document, and you can find them under the pots panel. So if I switch over here, we can see that there is a work path here. Now, if I want to make sure that this one get deleted after I make some additional changes to the document, I can double click on this and just call it triangle. And now for sure, it's going to be saved. So I can come back to my layers panel. And even if I delete this stroke that we created here, I will always be able to go back to the paths and find that triangle. If you don't need a path anymore, you can either click on the trash icon in the paths panel or you can press Backspace while it's selected. Now one question that might come up in the exam is to create a star, for instance, or you have to create an octagon or pentagon. So both stars and polygons can be accessed from the polygon tool. Once you select that, before you start drawing, you probably want to choose the mode. In this case, I'm going to use the shape mode. And then here on the options bar, we can decide how many corners we want. So let's just say an octagon would have eight corners, and then I can click and drag and there we have our octagon shape. If I wanted to create a star with, let's just say five corners, that would be in the additional settings here, and I can change the star ratio to maybe 50%. Now if I start drawing, you will see it creates a perfect star. It's worth holding down the Shift key if you want to keep the shape perfectly proportioned. Thing like that. Otherwise, you create these distorted shapes. But yeah, so that's how it looks when it's set to 50%. And then there's also an additional setting for creating a smooth star index. So if I draw another one, that's how it's going to look like. And by the way, these options you can also find here in the contextual ts baar. So you can click on the number of sides, which you can amend, and the lowest amount would be three. And by the way, you can see that a currently selected shape layer we'll update based on the changes that I'm doing here. So you don't have to draw a new shape if you made a mistake. You can also just select any of these shapes. Maybe I go back to the polygon, and then I can amend the amount of sides or corners and then maybe go down to a hexagon, which would be six. And then I can turn this into a star easily by just amending this option, the star ratio. And there's also an option to amend the corner radius. So this is going to make the corners rounded. It's important to mention that we also have the custom shape tool, which would work with the preset shapes that we can find here from the Options bar. So we have a couple of them available here, but there's also more options we can find in these additional categories. And the same techniques apply to these. If you want to make sure they don't get distorted, just hold down the Shift key, and then we will be able to change their color at the stroke on them, and resize them up and down without losing resolution because once again, they are vector based. Worth mentioning that whenever you have multiple shape layers created and you select all of them, I just held down the shift key, clicked on top and the bottom layers. If you use Commando Control E, that's to merge these layers, it's actually going to keep them vector based. You can see that little icon here in the thumbnail refers to the fact that this is a vector shape layer. So they are still vector based, but now they are merged into a single layer. This can be useful if you want to change quickly the color of all of these shapes. So we can just double click on the thumbnail of this layer, and then we can change it to a different color, for instance. But by using the selection tools, like the past selection tool, I can still move these shapes around easily. And if I use the direct selection tool, the white arrow, I can just select individual points like this point here on the star. Again, I'm going to get this warning that is going to affect how I use this shape in the future. I'm just going to say, don't show this again. And then, yeah, you can see I can move these points around easily individually as well. Now, it's worth mentioning that once you have multiple shapes on the same layer, they can also interact with each other. That's called Path operations. So for instance, if I wanted this small star to be taken out of that bigger star under it, we can change the path operation for it from combined shapes to subtract front shape. And once we do that, we can see it turns into like a cookie cutter that we can use on any of these other shapes. However, notice that this shape doesn't seem to be affected by the star, and that is because of the stacking order. So even though it's a single shape layer, there is still a stacking order between these parts. And unfortunately, that's not something that we can see anywhere. We just have to remember that once we have a shape selected, it probably will have to be moved to the front by clicking here and say, bring shape to front. So this is for the stacking order of the shapes within this vector shape layer. And now that it's set to be in the front, wherever I move it, I just move it maybe on the tiger. It works as well. Here, it works as well. Now it works everywhere because this path is set to be in the front. Similarly to most of the settings that you have for vector shapes, this is also non destructive. So you can always come back and reset it to combine shapes, which is going to set it the way it was. However, there is one exception which could be considered slightly destructive. And that is if I combine two shapes together, let's just say I put this star here on top of the tiger. Maybe something like that. Now, you can see if I zoom closer, these are still two separate shapes. So I can still select the tiger and move it around. I can also select the star and move it around. But if I select both of these parts together and I come to the path operations and choose merge shape components, then it's going to turn it into an individual path. So now I won't be able to move them apart separately. And even though it's still a vector shape, you can see why this can be considered slightly destructive because we don't have access to the original two shapes anymore. Never come across a question about this particular path operation, but it's still worth remembering what's the difference between this one and the other ones that would be considered non destructive and keeping the individual parts separate without merging them. One additional thing worth mentioning is that you can also use a shortcut to access these path operations when you're drawing multiple shapes. So for instance, if I wanted to use the ellipse to cut out from another shape, I could just hold down the old key and notice how my cursor is changing from a plus to minus. So holding down Alt or option key, I can draw this new shape, and it's going to automatically subtract from the other shapes. Remember, if you made this by a mistake, you can always come back here and set it back to combine shapes, which will have it filled instead of subtracting from the other shapes. But it is also worth mentioning that if you ever want to draw a shape from its center point outwards, which could be useful when you want to position it in a specific spot, you want to use the same shortcut that I just showed you but after you start drawing the shape. So if I start drawing a shape here and let's just say I wanted to align it to this circle here in the background, I start drawing from its center point but then while I'm dragging this shape around, I can hold down the alter option key and notice how it now starts drawing from the center point of that circle. And if I add the shift key as well, I can also keep it perfectly symmetrical or essentially create a perfect circle, which I can align. Another useful shortcut when you are drawing shapes is the space bar. If you press and hold the space bar, you can reposition a shape while you are still drawing it. So don't let go the mouse. Just hold the space bar, reposition the shape, and you can continue drawing it again once it's set in the right place where you wanted it. 45. 4.1.a 6 Pen Tool Group: Now it's time to move on to talk about the pent tool group, starting with the pentol itself. This will again have two modes, shape and path, just like with the shape tools. However, the pentol can't be used in pixels mode. That could also be a question that is just simply something that is not available. Even though it's there, it's just grade out. It means that you can't use it in that mode. Let's just use it in shape mode for now, and the Pen tool can be a slightly tricky tool to get used to because of its behavior when it comes to creating curves. So if you just click and create new anchor points, it's fairly straightforward. It creates these straight lines. However, if you want to create a curve line, you can click and drag, and then it's going to create a curve. But then the next segment, even if I just click normal also still be curved because Photoshop by default would prefer to create these smooth transitions between the curve segments. And that is thanks to these symmetrical handles that are created each time you click and drag with the Pentool. For the exam, it's important to remember these terms. So anchor points and handles. This is a handle that I can move around and adjust the curve itself. But these are all anchor points that we created. The main difference is that when you have curve segments, it would be considered a smooth anchor point. While these would be corner anchor points when they are in between straight path segments. Now, if you ever want to convert a smooth point into a corner point or vice versa, for that, there is a dedicated tool called Convert Point tool. Once you select this, with this, I can click on the smooth point simply and turn it into a straight point or click and drag again to turn it back into a smooth point. So we can do the same again, and one more time here again. And then we can also turn this into a smooth point. And once again, if I just click on these, I can turn them back into corner points. There is also a shortcut to access this particular behavior with the Pen tool. So when the Pen tool is selected, you can just hold down the Old or option key, and you can do the same thing. Click on Smooth Point or click and drag to turn it back into a smooth point. Now, there's also the Ed anchor point tool and the delete ancho point tool. This can also be accessed directly from the pen tool. You don't actually need those tools to be selected. So simply just hover over a point, and automatically, you can see that the pen tool changes to the minus pen, which removes that anchor point. Or if I go over the edge of this shape, I can just add a new anchor point. And if I want, I can also click and drag to automatically create a smooth point there. Don't forget that you can also move these anchor points around easily at any time with the white arrow or direct selection tool. So if I just click on that point, for instance, I can move it up, or if you have the pento selected, you can also use the Command or Control key to temporarily change the position of your existing anchor points. I like to say that the pentol gives you the most control over what you are drawing. However, there's two alternative vector drawing tools here, one called free form pentol and the curvature pentol. So let me just show you how this work. I'm going to delete this shape and switch first to the free form Pentool. With this one, you can essentially draw freely as the name states. And when you let go, it's going to assign the anchor points automatically. So instead of you drawing the anchor points individually, it will follow the path that you created and try to assign the anchor points based on what you drew. I feel like the name freeform Pentool is very fitting, easy to remember the main difference between the two. And then there is this other version called curvature Pentool, which has a slightly different behavior. It still requires you to draw the anchor points individually. However, this by default will create smooth points. So if I just simply click, click, click, notice that everything is automatically turned into smooth curve segments. So no matter what I do, it's always going to try to create the smoothest result possible. Even though it works similarly to the pen tool in that aspect that you have to manually create each anchor point, the result or how the created shape will look like is going to be the opposite. So instead of having those sharp corners, this is going to have smooth points all around. And that is why it's called curvature Pentool. However, as long as you have the same tool selected, there's also additional advantages to using this tool. You can easily move these points around on the path without creating any sharp transitions between the points. So not only drawing the anchor points is going to allow you to make them very nice and smooth, but even repositioning the points will affect not only the currently selected anchor, but also the surrounding parts. You can see how they are changing or distorting slightly because of the way I'm moving these points around. It's a really cool alternative to the pen tool when it's important to create smooth or more organic shapes. And it's worth mentioning that if you double click on any of these anchor points with the curvature pen tool, it's going to turn it into a corner point. So you can still create corner points, but it's an additional step that you have to do. So you just have to double click on the anchor points. And by the way, double clicking on any of these corner points will turn them back into smooth points once more. Now, whichever alternative of the pen tool you want to use, they all can be used for selections, but I would normally use the pentol and the curvature tool for this. So if I switch to path mode, this is actually going to help us to draw around shapes. For instance, here, we can draw around the castle. So I'm just going to follow the edges and draw around it. Maybe I just wanted to make a very accurate selection of this castle or the tower. So I'm just going to draw around these points. And I'm just going to simplify it a bit here like that. And I come down. Also, I'm going to keep it straight here and maybe also come down all the way here for now, and I'm just going to close these shapes. So you can see I made this path around that particular tower. But then if I wanted to turn this into a selection and maybe use this detail somewhere else in the composition, I would just have to right click and say make selection. And then click Okay, and then use the shortcut Command or Control J, which is the feature from the layer menu, layer via copy. So it creates a duplicate based on that selection. If I use the move tool, we can see how this turned out. So you can see that the pen tool can be actually very useful for creating these precise selections with small details. And although we will be covering most of the smart and automated selection techniques in Photoshop, the Pen tool is still something that I often rely on when it comes to creating these precise and detailed selections. Yes, it can be more time consuming, but it is still a tool I like to rely on for professional results. 46. 4.2.a Type tools to add typography to a design: This topic, we will be talking about the type tool and all the different things that they might ask you in the exam about working with type. So the type tool is here in the toolbar. You just press T on the keyboard to select it. And there are a couple of other options here which we will come back to. But first, let's just focus on this one. Now, the most important thing to remember in Photoshop, if you just click with the Type tool, that's going to create a single line or point type layer, and I'm just going to accept this as it is for now because I want to show you that if I go to the type menu, it will tell me the alternative option which is called paragraph text. So we can actually convert this already to a paragraph text. However, I want to show you that you can create that by default with the type tool if you click and drag. So this area is going to be the bounding box for your text. And the main advantage of this is that we can, of course, increase or decrease that size, and the text will automatically reflow in that area. Now, let me change the text size down to maybe 100 points just to keep it a bit smaller, and I'm going to reduce the size of the paragraph text. And there is one more thing worth mentioning that might come up in the exam. If you have a work with paragraph text, if you see a little plus sign on the bottom right corner, that means that there is overset text, meaning there's too much text that just doesn't fit in this bounding box. So as soon as I make the bounding box bigger or make the text size smaller, it's going to disappear. So that means that there is no overset text anymore. I'm going to finish editing this text by pressing Command or Control Enter. And then if I use my type tool to click on this initial type layer, the point text object, you'll notice that it doesn't have a bounding box around it. It's just text in a single line. However, if I want, of course, I can press Enter to divide this into multiple lines, but there won't be any automatic arrangement of the text or alignment to the bounding box like we've seen it before. So you can probably tell that point text could be useful for a couple of words like a title, while paragraph text layers are better for longer amount of copy. So in this case, for instance, if this was a promotion for a book, I can call this the forbidden forest. That could be the title. And I already have some copy that I prepared in chat GPT, which could be the synopsis for this story. I am just going to reduce the text size. Notice how I can use this scrubby change here on the type icon, and I can make the text fit better the paragraph or the bounding box of this text layer. And then I can move this around a bit, align them to each other. And then we can already see the advantage of using the point text for the smaller amount of words, while with this paragraph text, we have the option to go back and maybe increase the width of our copy. That's the measure in typographic terms, so the length of the line and perhaps we can also increase the leading, which would be the space between the lines. Now, that is something that you will find here in the properties panel. So if I just make a little bit more space, we will find this right here next to the size of the text. So this is leading by default, it's set to auto. But if I start increasing that, we can space out the lines a bit more and maybe even increase the bounding box a bit. Now, having more leading or more space between the lines usually makes the text easier to read, so it improves readability. Alignment of the text can also easily be changed here in the properties panel. Just make sure you select both of the paragraphs. So we can have left, center or right align text. We can also have justification with the last lines aligned to the left, center or right, and we can also have fully justified text if we wanted to. Just going to do last line align to left. I think that makes the most sense. And we can again just adjust this a little bit and align maybe the text to the width of the title text. Because the text currently is in two separate layers, it's also worth putting these two in a group. So I just selected them both and press Command or Control J. So now it's in a group, it's easier to move it around and find the best location for it. We can, of course, change the font at any time, so we can come back, double click on a word to select it, triple click on a line to select it. Or if you have more lines, you can click four times to select a paragraph. And click five times to select the entire copy within that textbox. Instead of clicking five times, of course, you can also just press Commando Control A to select all the text. But coming back to the title, I'm just going to change the font to something like this. I think that works quite well with this title, and I'm just going to make this slightly bigger. But instead of changing the font size, what you can also do is to use free transform on text layers. So Commando Control T just simply drag it out until it matches the size that you need. The good thing about working with text layers is that because they are completely vector based, you can easily change the size up and down and you won't lose quality. So we can see that is 217 points roughly the font size now, although we could have done this by selecting all these texts and then increasing the point size up and down, I just find it sometimes easier to use the free transform mode, especially when it comes to these point text layers that we normally use for titles or subtitles. Remember, we also have the vertical type tool, which essentially works similarly to the horizontal type tool. It simply just starts writing text vertically. So if I click anywhere here on the left side, maybe we can just type in part one. And then let's just see also how these type mask tools work. I'm going to use the horizontal type mask tool, and let's just click somewhere here on the image. I'm going to increase the text size to much bigger, and maybe we can just put one character here. Like F. And when I accept this, it's going to turn it into a selection. Now, if I want to move this selection, I can just use any of the selection tools like the Marquee tool, and I can move that F anywhere here. And why is this useful? Well, if I create a new layer, an empty layer. I can just use the brush tool, maybe have a soft edge brush, and I reduce the opacity of the brush down to maybe 9%, and then I can just sample a color from this image by holding down the option key and then start painting over this. Notice how it's going to create this nice, faded effect on that text. So I used only the silhouette of the character that I needed, but I actually painted inside it instead of relying on writing the text, as we've seen here on the left side. To be honest, I wouldn't recommend using these tools, but for the exam, you have to know about it because they might ask you to do something with them. But I'm just going to show you a better alternative to achieve the same result. So instead of using the type mask, I'm going to use the horizontal type tool, do F and I'm just going to make this bigger with the free transform tool. Let's just say I need a big A there, and I want to make it showing up in the background somewhere. So instead of showing it fully like right now, I'm going to reduce the fill opacity to 0% and then double click on the layer to get to the layer style. And turn off the blend clip layers as group. This is a special option that can be useful sometimes. If I click Okay, I can create a new layer, an empty layer, and then alter option click between these two layers to create a clipping mask. And then using the brush tool like I've done before, I can just paint on that new layer to start revealing the shape or the font underneath it. And the advantage of doing it this way is that I can easily come back to that text layer underneath and I can change this character to anything I need. So if I change my mind, I can R or G, or I don't know, X there if I wanted to. And of course, we could also change the font. So it's fully editable. I can do whatever I want there in the background. And yeah, this is a much better and more non destructive way of doing the same thing. I just have to make sure we cover all the tools that they might ask about in the exam, but I can't resist myself showing you the better and more non destructive ways of doing things. 47. 4.2.b Character and paragraph settings: Although we already covered a couple of essential text formatting options, in the exam, there might be more questions about this, and I want to make sure that we cover everything that might come up. So one of the other things besides letting that they might ask you to change could be tracking, and tracking is the spacing between characters. So character spacing is also called. This is what you can find here. So we can just click and drag to the right or to the left and then the spacing between the characters will increase or decrease. The same feature if you use it individually between characters would be considered cerning. And Curning can be something that can improve the look of text, especially for fully capitalized texts like this. In case of this font, I don't really feel like the need for it. I think it's very nicely aligned. Just going to show you if I hold down alter option key and press right or left arrows, I can individually the distance between the characters. And in this case, here in the properties panel, we actually see these values changing here on the left. So this is kerning and this is tracking. You are using the properties panel, you will notice that there's also these dot dot dot icons, which would lead to even more options that you can find here. But these next two options are rarely used, and I wouldn't recommend using them. They are for stretching the text. So for instance, we can select the word D and I can increase the vertical stretch on and this is definitely not something I would recommend to you. So just wanted to show you that you can do that. You can, of course, also do a horizontal stretch. But yeah, like I said, I would normally keep this set to 100%. And then the next option would be called baseline shift. With this one, you can lift up or down the selected text from its original baseline. That line there would be considered the baseline. So I'm just going to set this back to zero as well. And then moving down to the other text layer that we have here with the paragraph here I'm going to select both of the paragraphs and again, use that.dot.in the paragraph section within the properties panel. And I want to show you the additional options that we have here. So we can have the entire text indented with this first option. It creates a margin on the left side, full indent. I'm going to set that back to zero. We can also do first line indent, only the first lines are indented. Can also be useful, and we can also control the space between the paragraphs. So as you can see right now, there is actually an empty line between the paragraphs. That's normally not something I would advise to have. Instead, I would select these paragraphs and I would just add more space between the paragraphs. So I can control exactly how much space I want there to. So worth mentioning hyphenation is something you can find here. If you turn it off, the text won't be hyphenated. If you turn it on, the text might be hyphenated depending on the alignment of the text. But if you wish to avoid seeing hyphens, just simply turn this off. But just so we can see how hyphenation works, I am going to just adjust the text frame a little bit, and then eventually we will start to see hyphens like here. This text is now hyphenated or that word, and there's also another word here. So just to save time for yourself during the exam, you just have to remember where to find these options. So kerning, tracking, text size, and scaling of the text and baseline shift. This is all in the character formatting options, while alignment of the text, indentation, space between paragraphs, hyphenation will all be under the paragraph formatting options. And there's one last thing I need to mention because I've seen this coming up in the exam a few times. So where can you turn on ligatures for text? This is something that you can find in the type options, and there's actually two types of ligatures, standard ligatures and also discretionary ligatures. So these are the two icons that you can find here. These are both open type features, and they won't be available or even noticeable for most of the fonts or typefaces. However, for certain typefaces, it's going to make a big difference. So if we go in here, there is actually a font I know called Alegreya. We select this one, it actually looks much better for this copy already. But when I have this text selected and I turn off the ligatures, there is going to be a very subtle change that you probably won't even notice from this distance, but I'm going to zoom a little bit closer. So let's just zoom closer to this part here and I'm going to select all the text again. So see when I turn this on, the T and the H will be joined together into a single glyph. Lip is called a character or special character in this type set, and that's something that normally would be two separate characters like H and T. But if I allow these ligatures to be used, then it's going to use that special version. And ligatures, in general, are used to improve legibility and readability of text. So it's definitely something that I would utilize if I have them available. And we can also turn on these discretionary ligatures. This is going to add connection between certain pairs of characters like S and T, C, and H, and we can see this actually being used quite a lot throughout this text. So that is without these extra set of ligatures, and this is after. So once again before and after. And if we zoom out a little bit even more, we can see how the text looks like having turned on. Once again, you don't actually have to be worried about learning all the typographic formatting options. As long as you familiarize yourself with the property s panel and know where to look for certain set of options, you will be fine and you will be able to answer the questions in the exam. Most of them are fairly straightforward and easy to solve. 48. 4.2.c Rasterise text: Another common question in the exam could be how to rosterize text. Again, this is a destructive method, and I wouldn't normally use this. However, we need to know how to do it for the exam. So for instance, this part one text, let's say we need to turn this into a roster image layer. Way we do that is by having that layer selected, right click on the layer and then choose roast rice type. It's as simple as that. And now it is an image layer. And the main reason why we would normally do this is not to have issues with missing fonts. So if we know that we won't have to edit this text anymore, but maybe someone else needs to work with this photoshop file who won't have access to that particular font that we used, instead of having the missing font error, this way, they definitely won't have any issues because it's just a normal image layer. Besides this scenario, why would we ever want the text to be turned into pixels or roster details? Well, maybe you would want to use tools like the smudge tool with which you can smudge details out a bit to create this hazy effect, which could be interesting in some cases. Or perhaps you want this text to be a little bit more faded, but instead of controlling the entire opacity of the layer, just want parts of it to disappear. So maybe using the eraser tool with a soft edge and maybe set the opacity of the eraser down a bit, we can just remove bits of the text a bit, again, making a slightly ghostly effect on certain parts of it. Once again, all of these changes are destructive, so you don't have control over really what you're doing. Or once you've done it, if you don't like it, you will have to recreate the whole thing from scratch. And like always, I like to show you the proper way of doing things like this, even though in the exam, they will ask you sometimes to rasterize text. What I would normally do, and I'm just going to undo a couple of steps here until we get back to the text being still editable. So what I normally like to do to keep this text editable, but still allow us to do some changes to it to start with maybe we want to create that ghosted effect. Instead of using the eraser tool, I will just add a layer mask on this layer, and then I will use the brush tool with the color set to black and maybe the opacity to something like 20%, and then I can paint around the edges a couple of times, and you can see I can create that effect easily. And if I made some parts to faded, I can just switch back to drawing with white, and I can paint over parts of the text again. So that's completely non destructive. I can turn the mask on and off by shift clicking on it. And then if I wanted to create that more fluid or liquid result that we had where the text was a bit smudged, I could right click on this tax layer and choose Convert to Smart Object. And then we can go to the filter menu and choose liquefy. Once liquefy is enabled, it's a filter, we will be able to zoom closer on the text, and then just use this forward warp option, the first tool, maybe make the brush a little bit bigger, and then we can create the effect that we've seen before. Something like that, and then we can click Okay. And the good thing about using it as a smart object is that the liquify filter will become a smart filter, which can be turned off or turned back on. And if I double click on the liquefy, I can go back and make changes to it. I can recover it if I need to. And if I double click on the Smart Objects thumbnail, I can also go back and find the layer mask in there, so everything is fully editable. If I want to keep things even simpler, I could even just delete that sk inside the smart object, and I am going to apply it directly here on the Smart Object, and that way, it's even easier to control it. So everything is fully editable and completely non destructive. 49. 4.3.a Selections using a variety of tools: Knowing how to make selections effectively is one of the key concepts in Photoshop, and it's really an essential skill to work effectively. Now in this topic, we will be covering most of the selection tools that you will be asked about in the exam. But this is a big topic, and there's so many advanced ways of making selections. So we will really just go through the most important ones. Now, first of all, there is a shortcut to select everything in your document that's Command or Control A, to remove a selection, that's called D select. I would be Commando Control D. We can also find these options in the select menu, select A and D select. There's also re select, selecting what was selected before and we can also invert a selection. So for instance, if we make a selection of this part in the image, I'm just using the rectangular Marquee tool, which is here in the toolbar. We can also invert this selection by using inverse. So that would be Commando Control, Shift I. So right now it is selecting the elephant. But if I invert the selection, now it will select everything but the elephant. And there's actually a very useful shortcut to be able to preview what is selected and what is not selected. And that's called Quick Mask. If you press Q on the keyboard, you will be able to see your active selection in full color and the parts that are not selected in this red overlay. So if I go back, once again, that's the selection. Now I can tell that everything selected but that initial selection that we created. I'm going to switch to another selection tool called the LessoTol. I'm just going to make a quick selection around the head of this elephant, and I'm just going to press Q again, just so you can see how it works. Once again, it's a different view of a selection, and this special view can be used for a couple of different reasons. But for now, I am just pressing Q again to go back to the normal marching ends view. It's important to mention already in the beginning that most selections can easily be moved around simply just by clicking on them and dragging them around. That is if you are using one of the selection tools because, for instance, if you use the move tool with an active selection, that is actually going to cut that section out and move it within the same layer somewhere else. I'm just going to undo this last step. Now, another thing we can do with a selection is to transform it. So if I go to the select menu and choose transform selection, this actually is going to only transform the selection without affecting the image. So if we made our selection too big, for instance, we can transform it. If I hold down the Shift key, I can even change the proportions or aspect ratio of this selection, so I can stretch it out. I can rotate it around and so on and so forth. And once I press Enter, it will go back to seeing the selection once more. Now, no matter which selection tool you are using, if you want to hide certain parts of a layer and only show the current selection, then instead of doing anything else, you should always rely on masks. So remember, the layer mask option is here in the contextual task bar or at the bottom of the layers panel. That's the right or non destructive way of working with selections. I'm just going to undo this last step and remove my selection. And since we already talked about some of these selection tools, let's take a closer look at them. So first, we have the market tools, the rectangular marquee tool with which we can draw rectangles. Or if we hold down the Shift key, we can draw squares. While with the elliptical marquee tool, we can draw ellipses or holding down the Shift key. We can draw perfect circles. And by the way, while you are drawing a marquee selection, holding down the space bar, you can reposition it anywhere, and you can, of course, also draw from the center point of an object, holding down the old or option key. So I can start drawing from the center point out that can also be useful sometimes. Besides these two marquee tools, we also have the single row and single column marquees, which literally just select a single row or single column of pixels. Once again, these two tools in the 20 plus years of me using Photoshop, I don't think I ever needed. And moving on to the other category where we saw the lesser tool, we also have additional tools. Again, most of these I very rarely use. The lasso tool can be useful in some cases, and it has a couple of options here on the top, like anti aliasing is by default turned on. It can also have a feather, so softer edge whenever you make a selection. So for instance, if I type in 50 pixels for the feather and I draw a selection around this elephant. When I press Q on the keyboard, we can see that this is a softer selection, so not a hard edge selection. Going to press Q again and go back and reset the feathering on the Lasso tool to zero. And I want to show you the polygonal lasso tool is similar to drawing with the pen tool, but this already will create a selection. So when we let go, we can create a selection, so it creates these straight lines. When we just press Enter, we will get our selection. And last but not least, we have the magnetic so tool. This is supposed to be able to find the edges of objects, and we have a brush. We can make the brush size bigger, and then we can just start drawing around the edges of objects. And it's trying its best to find the outline on the details that I'm drawing over. But of course, it's never going to be as effective as some of the other selection methods like the select subject, which is here in the contextual task bar. So if I click on that, will actually do a really good job identifying the elephants in this case. So, of course, this is something that relies on generative AI, and Photoshop improved a lot in that area in recent years. So many of these old school selection tools like the magnetic lasso tool is almost completely irrelevant now. But for the exam, they might still ask you about it, where you can find it, and roughly why would you use it. The selection Brush tool is a fairly new addition. And essentially this is like the brush, but instead of painting, it is used to create selections. And it's by default, giving you a different preview of the section. So it creates this overlay. If I press Q on the keyboard, we can see that that segment is the one that's currently selected wherever I paint it over. And everything outside of it is currently not selected. So that's how this tool works. You can, of course, make the brush smaller or bigger. If you hold down the old key, you can also take away from your selection, and it's in a way, similar to using a mask when we are painting over the mask, and it could be useful to create a selection even before you turn it into a mask. But to be honest, there's not much else to be discussed about this tool, so I'm just going to press Command or Control D. Remove that selection. And instead, I'm going to move on to this next category of selections. These I would call the Smart selection tools, which will identify things in the image. For instance, the magic One, which is probably one of the oldest smart selection tools available in Photoshop, would be able to select similar colors next to each other or even throughout the image. So if I click on the sky, for instance, we can see it will find all similar colors in the vicinity. That is because of the default behavior of this tool is set to contiguous pixels only. However, if I turn that off, I will be able to click maybe on one of these yellow flowers, and it will find all the similar looking yellow flowers throughout the whole image, even on the bottom here. I'm going to turn this back on again, set it to contiguous, and I'm going to change the tolerance from the default 32. So once again, this is, for instance, the sky selection with 32 as the tolerance. But if I increase the tolerance, maybe to 80, and I click on the sky again. Notice how it now select a broader range of colors, and it even went into selecting parts here on the elephant's head where the flowers are, which are similar in colors to the sky. I like to keep this on the D 432 tolerance, and most of the time, I like this tool to be able to sample all layers, not just the current layer. In this case, that doesn't really make much difference because we have only one layer so far. But that's essentially in a nutshell, how to use the magic one tool. And then the quick selection tool is slightly similar to how the selection brush tool works. Again, this has a brush size that we can control with the square brackets. But the way this works is actually a bit different because here you can start drawing over an object and let Photoshop try to find the edges. So you start drawing normally around the center of an and it will try to snap onto the edges. So expand the selection and snap onto the edges. So that's basically what I achieved here. We can continue drawing here on the right side as well, and you will see how it tries to find the edges of that selection as well. It's doing a fairly decent job, but sometimes if it goes a little bit too far, we can just hold down the alter option key and then subtract from the selection. We can do the same thing here as well, subtract from the selection, and now it's looking much better. Is a very useful tool, and I still rely on it sometimes, especially if you turn on the enhanced edge, you will get quite good results in most cases, at least to get started with a selection that you can refine later. But there is also another tool which is even more improved or more smarter called Object Selection Tool. When you use this, you can just hover over objects in the image, and it will recognize them. It will even recognize that there's two separate elephants here. So we can see that one and that one or the background, or maybe here at the bottom, it can't really recognize anything. But perhaps if we go to this other image, here it will recognize the astronaut, the backpack, it will recognize the sky. And again, that's all it could recognize. But in this image, for instance, it will recognize the mushroom really well. And for most of these selection tools, you will find lots of additional options up here in the options bar. I'm not going to go through these in detail because most of the time the questions in the exam will be quite basic. Now, coming back to the elephants image, there's one last thing that you will actually find in the edit menu, which is considered a selection called sky replacement. And once I use this, we will be able to choose a new sky for our image. So I'm just going to use maybe this nice sunset image. Or we can find spectacular images here, maybe go a bit further down. Like that one would work quite nicely with this image. And we can see before by turning of preview and after is doing a really good job maintaining the original subjects, the elephants, and even those mountains in the background, and trying to make everything quite nice and realistic. So it blends the original details with this new sky really well. Of course, we can go back and find other images here, maybe this one this looks really nice, as well. And we can even control the color temperature. So if we wanted the sky to be a bit more bluish or we wanted it a bit more yellowish, we can do that. And once again, we can see before and after. And the good thing about this feature is that it can output the results onto new layer. So if I click Okay, it's going to create a completely non destructive change. So it's a sky replacement group that can be turned off or turned back on and notice how it's using adjustment layers and layer masks. So it's set up in a very professional way. 50. 4.3.b Modifying and refining selections: Now, although we talked about these quick selection or smart selection techniques that we've seen in this previous group, the smartest selection has to be the AI powered select subject or remove background options. These are both options that you will always see. Whenever you have an image layer selected and you have your contextual task bar open. So I'm just going to click on select subject for now, and it should find the two elephants really well in this composition. We can see in quick mask mode, the selection. It's not perfect. We can see around the edges it kept some of the original sky in there, but it is very close to having everything selected that we need for both elephants in this case. And if I click on the mask icon in here, it's going to turn that into a mask. And if I alter option, click on the mask icon, we can see how the edge of this selection looks like. So it's not bad but not perfect, still better than all the other selection techniques that we've seen so far. And by the way, if we go back a couple of steps, if we know that we want to turn our selection into a mosque, we can also just go straight to remove background. So it's going to save us one step, not only select a subject, but we'll also turn it into a mask. And as the result, it's essentially the same thing, but skipping one step now, although this feature is already extremely useful as it is, I have to mention that in the current Photoshop Beta, they improved it a lot. So it got so much better, and it is expected to become part of the main build. So by the time you are watching this course, it might actually be already using that new version of subject select. But right now, I'm just going to switch over to Photoshop Beta, and I'm going to show you that if I use subject select or remove background, it's going to give an even better result. And we will be able to see side by side comparison, especially if I add a new solid color layer from the adjustments and maybe just set it to white. So if I put this on the elephants and we zoom closer, we will be able to see the details around the edges will almost completely eliminate the original sky colors. So if I go back to the other version and I do the same thing, put this solid color white background underneath. Now if we zoom closer, we can see there's actually quite a lot of the original sky details here still. So that's the Bita version, and that is the current main build. Of Photoshop. So there is a significant improvement, as you can see. And if I went further down around the trunks as well, there's lots of little leaf details that are selected perfectly. And again, if you compare this to the current version, it did a fairly good job, but still kept some of the sky details there or here. And again, around the head, it has even more of those remnants. Compared to that, the beta version is doing just an excellent job at eliminating all of those details. So if you like the way subject select works now, it's just going to get better and better in future versions. Now as we go along, I'm going to switch back to the original main built version of Photoshop. And I want to show you another important thing that you can do to improve selections. So in case you are left with some imperfections in a selection, whether it's already in a mask or just still in a selection, you can use the refine option. Now, if you double click on a mask, you will be able to get to this select and mask workspace. And within this, you will have several refinement options. But first of all, you would want to change your view usually to on layers or on white could also be useful. But since we already set up a white background, the on layers is going to work well. And I'm just going to increase the edge detection and notice how it's going to start to eliminate some of those blue details there. We can also turn on smart radius, which can help to improve the results even further. Like this is actually doing a really good job with a higher radius. For this selection, it looks quite good. We can increase the contrast perhaps because it's getting a little bit too soft. And now, if I want to see the original selection, I just press P on the keyboard and then press P again to see the updated selection. So even though I'm not using the beta version, with a bit of refinement using these features, I actually got a much better selection result. And if I click Okay, I can accept this change, and now my mask is updated accordingly. Just so you can see this feature, I am going to delete this layer mask to go back to the original image. And if I go to Select Subject again, I can also go to this little brush icon here in the contextual taskbar and choose Select and Msk which will take us to the same editor. Or if you have one of the selection tools highlighted like Market tool, for instance, you can also choose Select and Msk up here. So they will both take you into the same editor where you have the refinement options on the right. Now, there's a lot of additional options here, we won't be covering these because in the exam, they won't really ask about any of them. 51. 4.3.c Save and load selections as channels: Finally, you should also know about how to save and load selections. Now, even though again, this is something that you can replace by using layer masks because in a way, layer mask are save selections, there is another way of saving selections in Photoshop, and that is by using the channels panel. So if I just use the Object Selection tool in this case, and maybe select the elephant on the left. So I just clicked on that to create a selection. Instead of saving this as a mask, I can just go to the select menu and choose Save Selection. We get a dialogue box where you can rename it. I'm just going to call it elephant one and click Okay. Then I'm going to click on the elephant here on the right side and then go to the select menu again and choose Save Selection. And I will call that one elephant two. So notice that here in the Channel panel, now we have two selections. And even if I remove my current selection, so I press Command or Control D to deselect it, I will be able to go back to these selections at any time. So in the channels panel, normally you would want to stay on the RGB channel, which is the composite color channel. But if you command or control click on the thumbnails of these safe selections, you can reload them at any time. You can even combine selections by pressing Command or Control Shift on a thumbnail. So you can see how I managed to add both elephants to selections from those two individual selections that we saved. Besides the channel spanel, you can also go to the select menu and choose load selection, and there you will be able to use this channel dropdown to select either elephant one or two, and then we can say it's going to be a new selection. So there's elephant two. And if I go back again and perhaps I want to add elephant one to this existing selection, I can choose elephant one and say add to selection. Then I can click Okay. And now, once again, we have both of them selected. Now, you might be wondering why would you ever need this option when you can just use layer masks? Well, in some cases, you might want to use a selection on multiple layers or you want to reuse that selection for multiple layers. So instead of having just a single layer mask that is tied to a layer or layer group, this way, you have easy access to recall those particular selections that you will need throughout your workflow. 52. 4.4.a 1 Modifying the canvas or image: Before we can talk about the transformational features of Photoshop that can affect single layers or individual objects, we have to look at the global transformations that we can do. And the two most significant features we have to talk about are the canvas size and image size options, both available from the image menu. Now, let's start with image size. Once you select this, you will be able to change the pixel dimensions of your document. I can just click on this image and see a detail like this one here. And within the image size dialogue box, we will see an actual pixel size view of that, which will really help us to determine the amount of detail in this image and the resolution of it. So we can see it's a very high resolution image, close to 6,000 pixels in width and 3,200 pixels in height. Two main ways of using the image size dialog box, you can either use it to resample the image, which can be used to increase its size or make it smaller. So as long as resampling is turned on, that's going to be the result of this feature. However, if you turn this off, there's an additional way of using it, and that is to define the desired resolution for the image. So if I change the resolution here, to a higher amount, let's say, 300 pixel per inch, which would be required for print, we will be able to see the actual print size. So with a good quality print, this image can print to around 50 by roughly 28 centimeters in size. The same thing we can see in inches as well, so close to 20 by 11 ". When you use the image size dialogue box without having the resampling turn on, it's not going to affect any of the pixels of your image. So if I click Okay, it's not going to make any visible changes. It just simply defines the output resolution of this image. So it's important when it comes to printing it out. However, if we go back to the image size dialogue box, and now we turn on resampling, then we will be able to choose the type of resampling interpolation or method. And I normally would keep this on automatic because Photoshop is good at choosing the best or the most suitable option from here. Some of them are better for enlargement, some of them are better for reduction, and I'm just going to change the size. In this case, maybe we can go back to pixel count to 2000. So this is going to make the image significantly smaller. And if I click Okay, we will get a much smaller image. So that was before and after. It's a little bit hard to preview this because the size keeps changing. But maybe if we zoom out, and then we move the image here. So this was before, and that is after. So there is a better way of seeing the change in size that we achieved here. But most of the time we would use the image size dialogue box to increase the size of an image. So if I go back here and maybe choose inches, let's just say we need to print this out in 25 " width. That will require 7,500 pixels width. So that's obviously much more than what we had here. So we can click Okay. And again, that was before, and that is after. Now, Photoshop is really good. At increasing the pixel count without changing the details in an image. Of course, there is a limit to this. And usually, if you make an image twice as big as what it was, you will start to see some pixelation and loss in quality. But generally, Photoshop is quite good at guessing that additional amount of details required for a higher sized image. Now, by the way, in case you are wondering, this is also a generated image, which I did in mid journey, and I used magnific which is another amazing tool for upscaling. Now the other important option that we mentioned is the canvas size feature. With this, we can increase the active area of this document or decrease it as well. But first, let's just try to increase it. So let's just say maybe we needed 2.5 " extra space around the edges in this document, so we could just increase the width up to 30 and the height up to 19. And I want the canvas to be extended with white, which is my background color, and I want it to be extended from the center, and then I can just click on Okay. Now, if we jump back to the image size dialogue box, we can actually see that the amount of pixels also increased with the canvas size extension. However, in this case, the original image was not transformed, so it wasn't scaled up. It just simply added these white pixels around the edges. So the overall pixel count still increase. However, the image itself was not resize. There's actually an even better way of expanding an image with canvas size, and that is when you use the relative feature. So I'm just going to undo this last step, go back to Canvas size. And if we turn on relative, it can be even easier to specify exactly how much space we want around the edges. Let's just say we put 3 " now both for the width and the height, and then we can just click Okay, and then it just simply extends the canvas with the required amount. That would be 1.5 inch on the right and left, and also 1.5 on the top and the bottom. Besides expanding the canvas, we can also use the same feature to subtract from the canvas, and we can again use the relative option if we wanted to, and maybe we can type in minus two and minus one, for instance, and notice how the arrows change pointing towards the center now. So it's indicating that it's going to crop into the image. And if I click Okay, it will also warn us that this is going to lead to clipping or cropping. And if I say proceed, then we will see the result. So that was before, and that is after. And it's a destructive technique, so you will lose all those details that were cropped or clipped using this feature. So if you ever need to crop an image, I would recommend to use the crop tool instead and making sure that the delete cropped pixels is turned off. We already discussed this in a previous topic that if you are using the crop tool with this feature disabled, it's going to be considered a non destructive editing method. And while we are looking at the crop tool, I also wanted to mention that similarly to the canvas size feature, you can actually use the crop tool also to expand an image. So if I wanted to have more space in the canvas, I could just do this with the crop tool extend it, and then I can decide what I want to do, whether I want to keep these new empty areas transparent, or I want them to be filled by using the generative expand feature, which will rely on generative AI or Adobe firefly to come up with details to fill in those areas. For now, I'm just going to choose transparency and then accept this change. It's also worth mentioning if you have any areas that are transparent, are the edges in a document, and you want to quickly remove them, you can use the image trim option and keep it with the default settings and just click Okay. It's going to eliminate all of those empty areas. Similarly, if you cropped an image and you want to quickly reveal all the hidden details. Remember, again, I was using the crop tool without deleting those details. I will be able to go to the image menu and choose reveal all. So this will quickly reset and show all those hidden details in one step. There's maybe one last thing worth mentioning for canvas size, and that's the fact that you can change the anchor point. So instead of having it set to the center, we can set it maybe here on the left side. So if I say, I want to add 5 " to the width, if the anchor point is set on the left, the new addition or this empty part of the canvas will be added on the right side. So all 5 " of width was added on the right side because we changed the anchor point. 53. 4.4.a 2 Artboards Feature: It is also important to mention that Photoshop has a feature called artboards, which allows you to have multiple canvases in the same Photoshop document. When would this be useful? Well, for instance, here's an example from our graphic design boot camp course, where we created these web banners, and instead of having three separate Photoshop files, we can have them all in the same file, but still having the ability to quickly export them in their designated aspect ratios. So this is the landscape format, the square format, and the portrait format. Thing about using artboards in Photoshop is that you can easily move objects from one artboard to the next. So for instance, if I'm missing the shoe from this artboard, I can just select the one from this one, and holding that Alt or option key, I can just drag it over to this artboard and then find the best placement for it. Once it's there, it moves it in the right place within the layer structure. I can just move it down a bit to have the text more visible. I haven't actually showed you how to create artboards. So you can find this tool called Artboard Tool connected or combined with the MV tool. And once that one is selected, you can either click and drag to create a new artboard, or you can also create the artboard with this icon here, or whenever an artboard is selected, you can also just click on the plus sign to duplicate it in any direction. And whenever an artboard is selected, you can also change its orientation with this icon up here. Click on that to switch between portray and tscapeFmat. So that's how you can change that. You can just press backspace on the keyboard to delete unnecessary artboards. Also, you may have noticed that each of these artboards have a name on them here on the top left. That's actually something that you can easily change here in the layers panel. So you can just double click on portray in this case, and we can rename it. I'm just going to type in new. So you can see how that's updated already. Like I mentioned, the biggest benefit of having multiple artboards in a document is that you can easily export them individually. And you can do this easiest if you go to the file menu and choose Export Export As, where it will automatically show you your three artboards and you can decide which ones you want to export. And, of course, also you can adjust the settings used for them. So if you all need them to be in JPEG with a specific quality, you can quickly update all three of them, and it's essentially going to give you a Batch Export option. 54. 4.4.b Rotate, flip, and modify layers and objects: Now we will discuss all the additional transformation options that can be applied to either layers or groups of layers or even to the entire document, starting with some options that we haven't seen yet from the image menu, like the image rotation. This is something that will apply to the entire document. So for instance, we can rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, or we can go back and rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise. And also, there is this additional options of flipping the canvas horizontally or vertically. This can be very useful for checking your composition with a fresh eye. So normally we get used to seeing our composition a certain way and flipping it horizontally is a great way of testing if everything is working fine. I'm going to just undo this last step and keep it as it was originally. And now that we discuss these global changes, let's concentrate on things that we can do with individual layers or groups of layers. For this segment, I'm going to use the astronaut PSD file, not the image. So if you open up this file, you will notice that I already separated the astronaut on a separate layer. So I use the generative field layer to just hide where the astronaut was standing. And then I have the astronaut saved as a separate layer, which first I mass out, and then I turned into a smart object. Just to make it easier to scale it and move it around. Now, undoubtedly, the free transform feature is the most useful and versatile way of making transformations and distortions to layers. And this is actually something you can find from the edit menu, and we've already seen it before used for other examples. The shortcut is Commando Control T. But if this is a feature that you use often you can even turn on the show transform controls for the move tool, and then by default, no matter what you select, you will always see this transformation box, and that will allow you to immediately access the free transform feature. Most of the time, I prefer not to have this turned on. I like to have as less distraction as possible on my document. Instead, I just rely on the keyboard shortcut, Commando Control T or you can also use the contextual task bar because there is an icon there, which quickly leads you to the free transform feature. Now notice that the contextual taskbar quickly gives us the option to rotate the selected layer 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise. We can also flip it horizontally and vertically. It's very handy and quick access to these common options. But of course, we can then manually increase or decrease the size of our selection, and we can also rotate it easily. If we hold down the Shift key, we can constrain the rotation to 15 degrees increments. And it's worth mentioning that if you drag an object onto its opposite side, it's going to automatically flip it around. So the same thing here, if I start dragging it to the left side, it will automatically flip it if I go beyond its original boundaries. Notice how the options bar will tell us whether the current selection is bigger than the original size. So it's 129%, so roughly 30% extra compared to the original size. And because I'm using a Smart Object, even if I accept this transformation, next time when I go back to the free transform mode, Photoshop will still remember what was the original size. So I can easily reset this back to 100% if I wanted to. Now, this will only work once again if you didn't forget to turn the layer into a smart object in the first place. In case you don't know how to do that, simply right click on a layer and then choose Convert to Smart Object. I highly recommend to always turn your layer or layer group into a smart object before doing any transformations to make all these changes non destructive. Now, if you go to the edit menu, there's actually a whole group of transform options like scale, rotate, skewed, distort and perspective. These would be focusing on these particular changes. So for instance, if I choose skew, if I start moving one of these points, it's going to create that skewed effect. You can see, or if I press escape and go back to transform and say, I want to distort the image. Now again, it's going to behave slightly differently. Now, even though these options are available from the menu, I still prefer to use the free transform tool and just hold down the command or control key instead. This way, I can access the distort option. Or if I hold down Command or Control and Shift together, I can use the skew option. And also, if I use all three modifiers together, so command option shift or control all shift, then I could also do perspective distortions on my selection in all angles, of course. Another thing that they might ask you in the exam is how to access the warp option. Now, this is also something you can find in the options bar whenever you have the free transform active. So up here, we can enter the warp mode. And with this, we can bend the image, so we can create these cool results by dragging points around and restructuring our character. So this was before and this is after. This can look realistic or it can look a bit wonky depending on how you use it. And if you need even more control over how to distort certain parts of the object, you can use either the Puppet Warp, which is a very useful option, especially in combination with a smart object. Here, you can place down pinpoints on your character in this case, and maybe the arm as well, can have a pinpoint, and I can move these points around. And it almost feels like we are changing the posture of the astronaut. Maybe I want the astronaut to look up to the sky, and this is going to help me to achieve that. So this was before, and this is after. That's amazing, isn't it? Why it's called Puppet work because it's almost like as if you are a puppeteer. Also, don't forget about the liquify filter, which again, will turn into a smart filter, so it will be completely non destructive as long as you have a smart object. And with this, you will be able to apply, again, very refined changes to your object. So for instance, if we wanted to change slightly the shape of the helmet, maybe we can go down here in the settings and just say, I don't want to see a backdrop just simply the object itself. We will be able to move things around. So maybe we want to make it slightly elongated, something like that. Or maybe we wanted to keep it straight here instead of being more like a sphere. I want to create a more unique helmet, and perhaps this side here can come up a bit. So this is almost like sculpting, in a way. If you are careful enough, you can achieve really great results. And I can see before and after. Yeah, it looks good. If I click Okay, now that's also applied. Notice how both of the changes that we've done recently can be turned off from the smart filters or turned back on again. So we can see before and after, but we can also see just before the liquefy and then before the puppet verb. So we can individually turn these on and off and also go back and make amends to them by double clicking on them. 55. 4.5.a Basic auto-correction tools: We will be looking at three automated adjustment options, which you can find under the image menu. So autoton autocontrast, and auto color. These can all be applied directly on an image layer or raster layer. So you won't be able to find these as adjustment layers, unfortunately. However, if you ever use this, I would recommend to duplicate your layer first, just so you do everything in a way non destructively, so you still have the original layer to fall back on. So if you press Command or Control J, that's going to create the duplicate. And I'm just going to call this one auto adjusted. And then we can first try with auto color. Now this is probably the most significant change in this case, because it's going to try to eliminate all unnatural colors. So it tries to make a balanced color result, and it does a really good job recovering all the different colors here in the flowers. So if you look at this very strong filtered look that we had it's hard to differentiate the colors, but Photoshop could still tell what the original colors were intended to be there, and also it recovered all the colors from these more greener parts in the image, and the snow will look more neutralized, as well. So really, it just remove that strong filtered look. It's not completely gone, but it's definitely more realistic. And then if we go to image, again, we can also do autocontrast, which in this case, is just going to increase the contrast a little bit more. Yeah, that definitely got a little bit better, but the image itself already had a good amount of contrast to begin with. And then if we go to auto tone, that's just going to improve the tonal values in the image. So once again, before and after. Again, it was a little bit washed out before. Now it got even better. And if I turn off this layer, that was before the original version, and this is after. So certainly the original one was more painterly and more surrealistic. While this new one looks slightly more realistic. But we can test this out on some other images as well. Here, once again, I'm going to start by creating a duplicate layer, and I'm just going to call it auto. And then let's start with the auto color. I like to start with that most of the time. Once again, you can see how this mysterious magical color palette that we had originally here is now neutralized, then we get a bit more realistic version. And then we can go to auto contrast and then auto tone. So once again, this was before, and this is after using the three auto adjustments. And then last but not least, here's one more image. Let's just create once again a duplicate layer, and then let's try first auto color. It's going to neutralize that green haze or greenish, yellowish haze that we had. Then by using auto contrast, we have a bit better contrast edit, and autoton is also going to improve the overall look in the image. So you can zoom a bit closer and see before and after. Once again, the original green, hazy look could be a stylistic choice that you are after or a while this one, after all the auto settings, looks a bit more natural or realistic. For all of the examples that you see here, I used AI, so they are generated images with a couple of adjustments and editing, but they are not real photographs. But it's interesting to see how the AI images can be made more realistic as well with a couple of automatic adjustments in Photoshop. 56. 4.5.b Tools to repair and reconstruct images: In this segment, we will be talking about the retouching tools. So this is the category, and you can see we have quite a lot of tools here. And perhaps additionally, we also consider the clone stamp tool, a retouching tool, so we will also briefly mention that. We actually already seen how that works in a previous lesson. I can just show this quickly here again. If I sample from somewhere in the image, like, let's just say sample from the head by using the alter option key, I've done the sampling, and then I can just paint over the image to paste in those details. So it's a copy paste brush. It's the easiest way to explain how it works. Compared to this, we have these other features like the healing brush tool, for instance, which works in a very similar way to the clone stem tool. However, this one will not only copy paste, but also blend details together. I always recommend to use these tools on a separate layer. Notice how I already created that empty new layer called retouch. And always make sure the sampling is set to all layers. So I can sample from the background layer, but I will be able to paint on this new empty layer. And I'm just going to make my edges softer, so I can paint over here and notice how the result is automatically blended. So if I paint over in this section, again, it's going to blend the colors together and not just simply copy and paste the results. This tool can be very useful when you are trying to remove blemishes from skin or smaller details like that. So in this case, for instance, we want to remove maybe this jewelry detail here, both on the left and the right side. It looks a little bit strange, especially this one on the left side. So if I sample from the skin, right there, and then I start painting over these details, see how nicely it starts blending things together. So it's definitely a more effective way of removing these details than just simply using the clone stem tool because if I relied on that, just going to switch quickly to that tool, make my brush smaller and sample on the skin here. Although it feels like the skin tones should be similar, it will really stand out because that part there at the bottom is darker in tonal values. So the healing brush can blend the colors and tonal values to the underlying image while still maintaining the details of the sampled image. Now, there is also another fairly recent addition to the retouching tools called remove tool. And this is relying on generative AI or may rely on generative AI. It's actually a mode that you can change. So if you don't want it to use generative credit, you can turn this off or you can set it to auto. And if you want to insist on using generative AI, then you can just set it to be on at all times. This tool also have the sample all layers option, which I recommend to keep on and also use it on a separate layer. And I also like to use the remove after each stroke option. So that will allow us to just simply draw a single line over this detail here. And when I let go, it will automatically remove that. This is definitely the most effective tool for removing blemishes. It might be a little bit heavy handed sometimes. Like here, it created a little bit strange result. But if you paint over it a couple of times, it probably will improve. We can do the same thing here on the right side. Just going to paint over all of that. And, yeah, it did a brilliant job. So we can see before and after looks great. And we could continue to paint over details and maybe use it on this head piece as well. Maybe it's a little bit over the top, this detail here, so I'm just going to paint over that to see how it looks without it, maybe just draw over this part here a little bit more. But in some cases, like here, we can see that the shadow doesn't want to go away. So even though we remove that jewelry, the shadow is still there. And notice also that if you keep painting with the same tool, it actually starts to cause this pixelation problem. So it's not something that you want to see in your images. So what I recommend normally to do is to switch over to the healing brush tool. And maybe sample a nice clean skin detail and just paint over the part that just doesn't want to work, maybe something like that. And it's already starting to look a little bit better, not perfect, but slightly better than before. So we can see before and after. With a little bit of more work and refinement, I think it could look quite realistic. So one of the best advice is not to rely on a single tool, try to combine them together and see what works best. Now when it comes to removing details, of course, there's also the generative fill option. So if there is a bigger detail, let's just say this flower here, we could try to use the remove tool. It's a fairly big detail. So I'm just going to paint over the whole thing, and let's see what happens. It might take a little bit longer. So usually bigger details take longer. And yeah, as I expected, it's not great. And also, it doesn't really give us any options. It just gives us a final result. Instead of this, we could just use, for instance, the lasso tool and paint around the flower that we wish to remove. Like, so I'm just going to paint around it, and then use generative fill, and we can just say, I want to see hair instead of that flower. So now if I hit generate this again, relies on Adobe firefly, so it will use generative credits to create the result that we get here, but it's worth testing it out because for bigger details, I normally find this to be the most effective way of removing unwanted details. And then we can see the three options that we get. There is a funny one here with a little cat. I don't know where that came from, but probably this one is the best out of all of them. Let's just see the flower is not bad either because there's a couple of flowers there. So if I zoom out a bit, doesn't look that bad, but because we wanted to see hair, I feel like that's probably still the best option. However, now that we did the generative fill layer, we could create one more layer here and then just use the remove tool again on top of this. So if I use the remove tool, maybe just paint over that little part there, and let's see what happens. Yeah, that's a little bit better. And probably, if we zoom out, that looks quite realistic now. So that was before and that is after. Now, generative fill can be used for quite a lot of things, and in some cases, it could work well for refining details that you already retouch. So for instance, this area here that we worked on, if you feel like it's still not perfect, you could just make a selection of it. Generative feel. And without typing in anything, just press generate. And most of the time, it's going to give you a good result. Like here as well, that was before. This is after might look a little bit budged, so slightly strange skin details, but it's still better than before. Before it was obvious that it was retouched. While here, the shape of the nose and how the eyebrows look is much more realistic. So yeah, if we look at this from a distance, definitely looks better. I still looks retouched and a bit fake, but I feel like it improved it. And then we have another version here as well. We can see that's also a little bit more subtle in the changes. But yeah, I still like this one the most. So that was before, and this is after. Now we also have the spot healing brush tool, which can be used for even smaller blemishes, like tiny little details that we wish to remove. They should also be set to sample all layers to be able to use it on a separate layer. And the best way of using it is to have it set to content aware. And then if we zoom a little bit closer here, and then maybe we can paint over this part here, which looks a little bit pixelated, and it does quite a good job. So that was before. This is after. We can also maybe try to remove a bigger detail like this one. And let's see what happens. Yeah, I mean, it's not perfect. It's not as good as generative fill. But maybe after a couple of times painting over an area, it will understand what we wish to remove and it will improve it. But to be honest, since we have the remove tool and generative fill, I very rarely would rely on this tool because it still most of the time leaves a bit like blood result that is quite easy to spot. So like I mentioned, most of these retouch tools are not that relevant anymore since we have these new generative AI features like the remove tool and generative field. Luckily, in the exam, they won't go into very complex questions or ask you to do complex retouching workflows. So it's enough to just roughly know what's the difference between these tools that we covered. And I won't even talk about the patch tool and the content aware move tool and the red eye tool because I've never seen any questions asked about these. It's just worth maybe reading about them and maybe testing them out. But honestly those are really not relevant for the exam. 57. 4.5.c Adjusting the appearance of objects, selections, or layers: When it comes to improving or adjusting the appearance of images, we categorize these adjustments into two large categories. The first one being tonal adjustments, and the second one is to do with color adjustments. Now, first, let's talk about tonal adjustments. No matter which feature you want to work with, it's always recommended to have the histogram panel open because that's going to help you to evaluate the tonal makeup of your image, going to make this slightly bigger by going to the panel menu and choosing expanded view and then here I will switch to RGB. It just makes it a little bit easier to understand what's happening. And I will also refresh this. So when we look at this AI generated image of a wise man, we can see that it is a very under exposed image. So it's very dark. But that is an artistic choice in this case. It was intentionally prompted to be this low lit scene. However, in the histogram, we can see that the highlight section is almost completely empty. So there are no details in the image that would fall in this section. The midtones are also very flat, so hardly any information there, and mainly the information is here in the shadows section. That's the three main regions we normally talk about shadows, midtones, highlights. Now, if we use an adjustment like levels, which you can get to bypassing command or Control L, we see the histogram there as well. And one quick method of fixing an underexposed image is to drag the highlight or white point all the way to the bottom of this little hill. So where the tonal values start, roughly, it would be around there, and that basically will brighten up the image. So we can see before and after, if I press the preview, turn it off, that was before, and this is after. So with a single adjustment, we increased the brightness of the image, but also added more contrast by reducing the tonal width and eliminating that big empty section here on the right side. So once again, that was before. And this is after. This is a very effective technique. However, remember, we also had the Auto Contrast option, which is going to give us a slightly similar result, especially maybe if you use it together with auto tone. Maybe it's not as drastic as what I've done, but it's going in a similar direction. Now, besides levels adjustment, we could also use the curves adjustment, which would be Command or Control M on the keyboard. With this, we could increase the brightness, the overall brightness of the image by dragging this curve up then if we didn't want to make the brightest details already brighter, we could just maybe drag this down a bit here, so the highlights don't have to get too bright, and perhaps we could move the black point a little bit higher, something like that. Perhaps the darker details can be increased a little bit even more just like that. Now if we are concerned that we are losing contrast, we could also drag this white point in maybe around here and then just readjust this slightly and also bring that down to somewhere there. Now we can check before and after. That's also a way of correcting this underexposed image. But it's also worth mentioning that if an image doesn't have enough information in certain areas like the darkest or brightest areas, normally, we'll refer to those as clipped highlights or clipped shadows. And I can easily demonstrate this by dragging this white point even further to the right and then creating these clipped highlights here. So if I just drag this up, and then click Okay, you will see that some of these details here are turning completely white. So that's something that you want to avoid. So this was before and this is after. It's definitely got brighter, but we also clip some of the highlights in the process. It's important to mention that both levels and curves can be found in the image adjustments area. So they are both here. They are the most common adjustments we would use for fixing tonal issues with images. However, it's always best to use them non destructively from the adjustments section. So here we can find levels and curves, and each of these will then be applied as adjustment layers, which will allow you to make changes to them later. There's even an auto option in evos, which sometimes can help you to get a really good result, so we can see before and after. So this is already doing a good job, but I can just drag this a little bit further to the left, and maybe the midpoint, we can drag a little bit to the right, somewhere around there. So once again, that was before, and this is after. Besides curves and levels, there is also the brightness and contrast adjustment and also exposure. It's just worth mentioning that you can find these here as well. However, these are less useful as the other two that I already mentioned before, but these are also adjustments for fixing tonal problems with your images. Now moving on to the second category, we have the color adjustments like hue saturation. Once again, I prefer to use these as adjustment layers. This is something that we already seen before in a couple of examples but I'm just going to repeat quickly what we can achieve with this. We can adjust the hues of the images in the image. And if we want to just quickly reset a value, just double click on the slider. We'll go back to zero. We can increase the intensity of the colors by increasing saturation, and we can also increase the lightness or reducing it will make the image darker. Another useful adjustment is called color balance, which is closest to doing color grading, if you're familiar with video editing. So here we have the different tonal range, shadows, midtones and highlights. And for instance, if we start with the shadows, we can make the shadows look cooler by adding more blues in them, and then we can make the highlights warmer, which is going to create an interesting result. Yeah. So that was before and after. So a more cinematic look we can achieve with this. Maybe we can make the shadows even cooler like that and slightly purple. Yeah. And then we can go back to mid tones, and the mid tones can maybe a little bit warmer as well. And we can check the changes. So that was before, and this is after. Once again, we are clipping quite a lot of details. We can see it in the histogram as well. It's getting more fragmented, meaning that we are losing some details. Because we are doing everything on a separate adjustment layer. It's not a destructive chain, so we can always go back and refine our settings. Once again, don't worry about learning all the adjustments available in Photoshop. Mainly, what you have to remember is that there's these two categories or most important categories. The first one to improve the tonal values, so that's the brightness, contrast levels, curves, and exposure. And then the one from vibrance to color lookup is for color adjustments or changes to the colors in your images. 58. 4.5.d Photographic changes to images using tools and adjustments: There are also a couple of tools in Photoshop that can be used for affecting tonal values and even colors or details in an image. And these you will find here in the tool bar. There's one group that holds the Dodge burn and sponge tools, and then there's the other category, blur, sharpen, and smudge. And also a fairly recent tool called Adjustment Brush Tool. So we will talk about all of these in this lesson. First, I'm going to start with this group, the Dodge, burn and sponge. Dodge and burn are used to brighten or darken details in a specific area of the image, and they are all brush based tools, so you can paint with them. And one of the biggest problems and reasons why I don't use them often is that they are destructive. So you have to apply them directly on the image. So I'm going to start by creating a duplicate layer and I'm going to call this one edited. And I'm just going to zoom a little bit closer here on this phase. And by using the Dutch tool, by default, it's set to mid tones. I will be able to brighten up details. So if I want really more focus on this phase, I want it to really stand out in this composition. I can just add a little bit more brightness there. But if I want to also have even more contrast, I can also switch to the burn tool, which again, is a brush based tool, so I can make the brush bigger. It will again, by default, affect the mid tones, but I can just paint under the chin a bit, maybe a bit under the hair, something like that, and perhaps also a little bit more here under the hair. So with these few changes, if zoom out. We can see before and after, we really exaggerated the lights on the face, maybe feel more three dimensional, but also really help to increase the focus on that phase. And if we feel like it's a bit too much because it's on a separate layer, we can just reduce the opacity that way we reduce the intensity of the changes that we made. So that's a non destructive way of using dodge and burn. And of course, you can do a lot with them. You can reduce the intensity if you reduce the exposure, so you can build up the effect a little bit in a more subtle steps. And also, of course, you can switch the range to affect more the shadows or the highlights for both of these tools. The third tool here called sponge tool is going to affect the colors instead of the tonal values, and it can either saturate or desaturate the image. So if I use it in the default desaturate, I will be able to just paint over this section here a couple of times, a few brushstrokes, maybe a bit more around here on the top. Desaturating these details, it will completely eliminate all colors, and it's hard to see it like this. But if I turn it on and off, you will be able to tell a little bit more the changes that we made there. And perhaps there's a little bit more colors further down. So I can also apply this so desaturate and then we will be eliminating more colors there as well. So that brownish warmer tone can be eliminated. Or if I switch to saturate and I paint over details, I'm just going to undo these last couple of steps. So we go back to how the image was before I use these settings, and I paint over these areas here. You will see how those brown tones are really starting to pop. So that was before, and this is after. Once again, even on the face, I feel like or on the hair, or maybe these other characters in the background, we can bring out the colors a bit more and we can see before and after. Now the other set of tools are more for adjusting the details. So it's not about tonal values or colors. It's simply the details. So we can make things look more sharp. I'm going to use the sharpen tool, and I'm going to zoom closer and paint over this section here. I'm going to make sure sample all layers is turned on. So that way, I will be able to sample from the layer below and still see the result on the top, maybe paint over the eyes a bit, the nose. Just paint over it a couple of times. And then if we see before and after, we can see how the sharpening looks like. But it's important to mention that if you want to sharpen the overall image, not just certain parts of it, it's probably better to use the filters. So on the filter menu sharpen, you will find things like smart sharpen or unsharp mask. These are both extremely useful features. So maybe selecting one of these, increasing the amount even higher, you will be able to see the difference that this can make. So that was before, and this is after. Before and after. Let me just go even higher, maybe increase the radius a little bit as well. That obviously starts to get overcooked, but we can see the result a little bit even better. And if we click Okay, we can zoom out. And I feel like even from a distance, we will be able to tell the sharpening effect on the overall image. So once again, here, we can see before and after. So certainly, the details that are in focus got much sharper. But coming back to this group of tools, we have the opposite of sharpen, the blur tool, which works exactly the same way. You just have to make sure sample all layers turn on. And for instance, if you want to exaggerate the shallow depth of field in images, you can just paint over details that are already out of focus and just maybe blur them out a little bit even more. Or you can use this third tool called Smudge tool, if there are certain details that maybe you want to blend together. So with this, you will be able to just stretch out some details and blend them together or make more smoother transitions between things. Really, this is a tool I very rarely use, but I just want to demonstrate to you that we can smooth out surfaces, for instance, in this case, like that, maybe also smooth out this part here. And in a way, it can be considered the retouching tool because we can create these very smooth surfaces. So that was before, and this is after, but it's not really the most effective tool for achieving that result. I would probably rely more on the retouching tools when it comes to refining details like that. It's also important to talk about the new adjustment brush tool because I expect there will be some questions asked about this in the exam. This essentially can apply all of the adjustments that we've seen before used as layers. And this tool will automatically create the adjustment layers based on our selection. But not only that, it will also automatically create a mask. So, for instance, if I use the hue saturation adjustment and I start painting over the gold in this image, can see that it applied already a plus 30 saturation value, and it created the adjustment layer with that mask. And I can just continue painting over the gold if I wanted to really emphasize that in this image. So this was before and after. So I could very quickly locally apply the adjustment wherever I wanted to. And because it's an adjustment layer, I can increase that value or decrease it if I wanted to. And, of course, I can do further adjustments. Since we are looking at the hue saturation adjustment layer, there is also an option here called on Image Editing, that little hand icon. If I select that, I can click and drag over any color in the image to target that. So in this case, I can just click here, and immediately, we get a filtering in the adjustment layer. So now all the changes that we are doing will be only applied to that certain range of colors around the yellows. And that's the range there. We can always adjust that further, make it even smaller if we want it to or wider. And what this means is that we still have our global adjustments we've done in the master channel. So we can see that it's still there. But now we switched over to the yellows. And here, for instance, if I started changing the hue, I can adjust all the colors where I painted over. Maybe I can make this blue, for instance. And if I continue to use the adjustment brush, of course, I can quickly paint over any other details, even the explosion up here on the top or these colors here, and I can very quickly fill in all these details if I wanted to. At this point, I also just want to quickly switch over to the beta version of Photoshop because their hue saturation adjustment has been slightly changed. So the interface is a little bit different. And you can see here it's faster and easier to switch over to, let's just say, affecting the yellows. I can very quickly adjust the hue, so I could make these maybe pink in this case, because I didn't use the adjustment brush, in this case, there is no mask, so it affects the entire image, and it did a really good job at identifying all those details without affecting any of the other details in the image. You can expect the hue saturation adjustment layer to update soon to this interface. But for now in the current build, you just have to use this drop down that we've seen earlier. 59. 4.6.a Using filters to modify images: We already talked about filters in previous sections, and we also talked about smart filters, which can be applied whenever you turn a layer into a smart object, and it's the feature that keeps filters non destructive. But in this segment, we will go a little bit deeper and also cover a couple of filters that we haven't used so far. And these are filters that most of the time they would ask about in the exam. So I am going to first turn this layer into a smart object and maybe increase my thumbnail size just so we can see it better. And the filter that I would like to show you and which is actually my favorite filter, it is the most robust and versatile filter in Photoshop, the camera raw filter. Once we apply this on the smart object, it's going to be a smart filter, which will be completely non destructive. And first of all, here we have the auto option, which we have to very quickly improve the tono values in this image. So this was before. I'm just pressing P on the keyboard, and this is after definitely a lot better. But besides the tonal values, we could also go into the color options, and we could improve the white balance by going to auto. So we can see once again before and after, or we can just turn off the color changes with this eye icon that was before. This is after. And then there's a lot of additional options we can do here. Like by going into detail, we can increase the sharpening or sharpness of this image, and by zooming closer, we can see once again the effect of sharpening that's before. And of the can see this on the beard and maybe on the texture of the clothes. And after applying all of these changes, I can just click Okay, and then we will see the smart filter under the layer. You can turn it off, turn it back on, or double click on it here to go back to the settings. And there's also an interesting option for smart filters, which you can find under this little icon here. You just have to double click on it. This actually gives you a way of fading out a smart filter. So reducing its intensity, you can reduce the opacity or visibility of the smart filter. I've seen this maybe once coming up in the exam, so it's just important to remember that the blending options for smart filters can be used for both reducing their intensity or even to apply them together with a blend mode. That's very rarely something that I would use, but that's also something that you can find here. I'm just going to go back, set it to normal, and then click Okay. Of course, you can stack multiple filters onto the same smart object layer. So we could find additional filters here if we wanted to and then apply them. Another filter that they often ask about in the exam would be the filter gallery. I'm going to just add this on the same layer. I will press Command, the Control Zero to zoom out. And we can see this stained glass effect. But of course, we can change this to all of these other options here. Maybe mosaics, tiles. We can zoom closer and see how that looks like. Or we can go into artistic and maybe use the cutout filter on this, which creates this more graphic look and of course, here on the right side, we have the options to increase the number of levels, for instance, or increase the edge simplicity, making it even more abstract. And because we use this filter also on a smart object, anything that we do here will be completely non destructive, so we can just click Okay, and at any time, we can just turn off the filter gallery if we want to see the original results. 60. 4.6.bc Layer Styles: We also already talked about layer styles in previous topics. So I'm just going to go through quickly the things that they might ask about in the exam. So first of all, in this file, I already put the mushroom on a separate layer, which allows me to apply layer styles or layer effects on it. I will double click on the layer. Within the layer style panel, I can choose something like outer glow, and I'm just going to increase the opacity and probably the size and also maybe the spread. Yes, something like that will work quite nicely. And I will change the color to something like this blue that we have in the image, or it could also be this purple or magenta or pink color, and then I can click Okay. Now, as you can see, this effect is going to show up here in the layers panel. We can easily turn off, turn it back on. If I double click on it, I can go back and refine it further if I wanted to. But there is one additional important feature they might ask about in the exam, and that is, how can you rasterize layer style? Now, the way you do this is by right clicking on it and then choosing the create layer option. It's not obvious what this is going to do. Essentially, it will turn that editable style into a new roster layer. So it won't be editable anymore, but it's still non destructive because I can control its opacity. I can also just turn it off if I don't need it. But the biggest advantage of doing this is that now we will be able to hide parts of it that we don't need. Like here at the bottom, I don't want to see that glue. So I'm going to add a layer mask, and then using my brush tool, I will set the opacity to 100% and increase the size. I can just paint over the bottom section like that. So the glow will only appear on the top, so we can see without it and with it. Now, if you want to change the color of this, you can either select the thumbnail and use Commando Control U to then use the hue and adjust the color quickly. Or you can also apply another layer style on this layer. We can double click here and maybe use the color overlay. And if this effect fills in the transparent parts, you just have to go back to the blending options and make sure that the blend interior effects as group is enabled. So now we can go back to color overlay. And instead of using gray, maybe we can use a different color. Like we can change it to blue or teal. Something like that actually works better in my opinion. So let's just click Okay. And again, this is completely non destructive. We can go back and forth and apply the changes. Sometimes in the exam, they might ask you that you need to copy a layer style from one layer to another. That's very simple. All you have to do is to hold down the old or option key and drag the effect and move it onto the other layer. Or if you don't hold down the shortcut, you can just move the effect. So you take it off from one layer and place it on the other and finally, you also need to know how to save a style that you created. So in this case, for instance, this color overlay effect that we created. If we want to reuse it, all we have to do is within the layer style panel, we just have to click on New style. So once we click on that, we can give it a name for this one, I'm just going to keep it as is, but I don't want this to be added to my creative cloud libraries. So I take that option off. The rest of the options can be on, and then once I click Okay again, now if I want to reuse this, all I have to do is to double click on the layer and then go to styles here, and I will be able to find that style right there. Which will immediately assign the same color overlay that we used earlier. And if you want to manage the styles that you created, just go to the window menu and choose styles. So within this panel, you will be able to find some default styles like these natural ones or fabric, and obviously there's our save one as well. Again, the Styles panel is something that we talked about in an earlier topic. 61. 5.1 Prepare images for export to web, print, and video: Most of the things that might come up for this topic in the exam, we actually already covered in previous topics. However, we will go through everything once again, and I might also show a couple of additional things that we haven't seen before. So first of all, whenever you have to prepare a file for output, photoshop document, you have to make sure that it's set to the correct color mode, which you can do from the image menu. So you can find the mode here. Right now, I have this set to RGB. But if the intent is to have this printed, I would change this to CMYK. In the exam, they might also ask you that the image needs to be set to gray scale color mode for some reason. That's also, of course, something that you can find up here. It's also worth mentioning that the bit depth can also be changed from the same drop down. So eight bit, 16 bits or 32 bits, but channel options you can find here as well. Again, in the exam, they might ask you to change these. Now next, we have to check if the image size and resolution is correct. So we again, do that from the image menu, but this time we go to image size. And then here, most importantly, we will have to make sure that the resolution is set correctly. So in the exam, if they ask you that you need to have your document prepared for print, they might not tell you that it needs to be set to 300 pixels per inch resolution. That's something that you have to know. So this is something you have to check. And for instance, if it's set to 72, then what you want to do is to turn off the resampling and change the resolution to 300. This won't affect the pixel count in the image, so it's not going to change the dimensions. It's just simply sets it up ready for a high resolution and good quality print. Now we can check that the percentage didn't change, so it's still the same size. It's just changing the resolution. So resampling whenever it's turned off, the resolution change won't affect the pixel size or dimensions of the image. Now, they might actually specify in the exam in a question that they actually want you to resample the image, and in that case, they will probably tell you which resampling method they want, which you can find from this drop down. So I'm just going to turn this off now and click Okay. And then next thing that we have to look at is the file info, which you can find from the file menu. So when you go down here, you will be able to get to the metadata of this file. Most of the time in the exam, they would ask about things that you will find in the basic category. So if you click on Basic, here you will find the author, the description of this project, the keywords, perhaps. But most of the time they would ask to set the copyright status, to copyright it, and then perhaps just put some copyright notice text in here. If this ever comes up in the exam, once you've done these changes, just click Okay, and it's going to update the file and you can move on to the next question. Now that we've done all these steps, the final important step would be to export the document. And again, they might ask you a couple of different things. First of all, you have to know that saving the file as a photoshop document is probably the first step that you want to do, especially if you have multiple layers. But then if you need to export the file for print, you would want to go to File Save As, and then you can choose the Photoshop PDF. That's probably the best option. And then if I click Save, it's going to just give us a warning that the new dialogue box might override some of the settings, but we can just click Okay. And if they ever ask you to do this, most likely, they would tell you to use a preset, which you can choose from here. Usually they would ask you to do one of these PDF X presets. So maybe X one A or X four. And once you select this, this should update all the settings that you will find here in the additional menus. And then all you have to do is just to save a PDF. By the way, here at the bottom, in the status bar, we can always see whether we have the resolution set to 300 PPI or not as long as the document dimensions is selected. Now, of course, we also have to know how to export our work for the b. This is something we can do from the file menu, export and either use the safe for web or export as options. Safe for web is still something that they sometimes ask in the exam. So it's worth knowing how this dialog box works. Most important thing is that you can find the presets here on the right, and the additional options will be below. So they would normally tell you exactly what they want. So you might need to save out a specific percentage in terms of the image size. So if they say 75%, just type it in here. They might tell you the quality that they want, again, that you can choose from here, and then depending on the preset, you will get all the options prepared for you here. However, they might ask you to do a custom setup here. So maybe they want a low JP quality with some other settings. Again, it's usually very simple. As long as you know where to look for the settings, you should be fine. Then just don't forget to click on Save here at the bottom, because if you just press done, it will just remember the settings, but it won't actually export the file. Now the other way to save this document for web was the Export as option, and this is a better and easier dialog box to use normally. It also has the different formats here, PNG, JPEG, and GIF and you can actually export multiple versions, and perhaps sometimes they might ask you to do this. So for instance, right now, it is saving this image as a JPEG but perhaps I want it to be saved as an additional version, which is only half the size as the original. I can just say add this to the export options. So it's going to now save a full size JPEG and another JPEG, which is half the size of the original. Also, it's important to mention that if they ask you to include the metadata information, the one that we said earlier about the copyright, that's actually something you have to also make sure is turned on here. And once you are ready, you can just hit Export and choose the destination on the computer. Last but not least, in some cases, if there is a video layer in a document, you have to also know how to export a video file. That's again from the file export drop down, and you will find here all the way at the bottom the render video option. Once you go into this, it's going to give you all the necessary options. And again, they will specify in the exam what you need to choose. You just simply have to find it. Now, because I don't have a video layer, it only gives me the option to save this as a Photoshop image sequence. But if there is a video layer, you would be able to choose Adobe Media Encoder. Most of the time they would ask you to save the video as an MP four file format. 62. 5.2 Export or save digital images to various file formats: You might also be asked during the exam about differences between the available file formats that you can choose in Photoshop. So let's talk a little bit more about this. I wanted to also mention that if you go to the file menu and they tell you to save into a different file format and you can't find it in either the Save as or under the export options. Most likely you will be able to access it if you choose Save a copy. So just to demonstrate this to you, if I choose Save as, I currently have a PDF open here, I will be able to only choose these couple of options here. Let's just say they all you to save into an EPS file format. So if you can't find that here, then we can go back and choose File, Save a copy. Then now we should be able to find the Photoshop EPS or all these other file formats here. So this is where we can see the full list of supported file formats. And don't worry, you don't have to know about all of these. You just have to know the most important ones that we already talked about. The way, you can also save into a Photoshop rule format. So if you select that, it will just simply be dot RAW. But you might recall us talking about the DNG file format as well. That is the Adobe Digital negative camera Rule file format, which is the most commonly supported one. That's actually not something you can choose to export to or save a file to. That's usually a file format that you can set up your camera to save images to or your smartphone. They might ask you in the exam to save to a file format that is best for sharing images on the web. For that you probably want to use JPAGO if it's for the web, but it also needs to include transparency, then you want to use PNG instead. Again, these options are best to be saved from the file menu by choosing export exports. However, it's also worth mentioning there is a quick Exports PNG option here, which will just immediately save the file onto the desktop or other location on the computer that you choose. It's also important to remember that if they ask you to export each individual layer from your document to individual files, this is actually something you can do from the layers menu drop down, so you can go here and then just choose. But the option won't be visible unless you actually select the layers you want to export. So in this case, I can select all three layers, go back to the drop down and notice how we immediately have more options available. Including the quick export as PNG, like we've seen before, or the export as. I'm just going to choose this because here I will be able to specify exactly the format and settings that I want to use for these individual exports. So the astronaut layer I can maybe set to PNG to include the transparency details. The generative field layer maybe I want to save as GIF, for instance. Now, GIF is usually the file format that we want to use for anything that is animated, frame animation usually. But the only problem is that the export as Dialog Box actually doesn't allow us to do that. So even though we can choose this format, we won't be able to include multiple frames. That's something that you can only access from the legacy save for web option. I'm going to show you that in a second. Going to switch to background and maybe change the size here to 50%. And yeah, let's just say this is what we needed to set up. So on the left, we have a good overview of each of the layers and how they are going to be saved or exported. So this one is PNG, GIF and JPAG and there's the estimated file sizes on the right, and obviously, also the pixel dimensions in the middle. Now, I'm just going to click Cancel and go into the file menu and choose Save for web legacy because I mentioned that this is the only way you can export animated gifs. So if we go up here and just say GIF 128 did this is normally the option I would go for to maintain the best quality. But right now the animation section is grade out, and that is because we haven't set up any frames. I'm going to show you this quickly using the timeline panel. So we go to the window menu and choose timeline. And then instead of creating a video timeline, I'm going to create a frame animation. Click on that button. So we have a single frame right now, but if I click on Plus, I can add another frame and maybe just move the astronaut down a bit, and then maybe let's just create one more frame where we move the astronaut a little bit even further, something like that. So now if I play this back, just moves very quickly. But we can select all these three frames and change their duration to maybe 0.5 seconds. So if I play it now, that we see the astronaut moving slowly, and here at the bottom, we can also change how many times we want this to loop. So we can set it to forever or just once, play it back once or maybe three times. But once we have the setup, now we can go back to the same setting we've seen before. So save for web legacy. And then from here, if we choose one of the gift options, maybe this one on the top, notice how the animation is now available, and we can still preview this if we wanted to. So I'm just going to zoom out, fit in view, and then let's play it back. Of course, the gift image quality is much lower than JPEGs or PNGs, because we only have 128 colors available. But it's worth mentioning that that's not the maximum. That's just simply the highest preset option here. But we can actually increase that to 256. It's worth mentioning, though, that by increasing the color amount, the file size will also increase. So right now, it's 5.8 megabytes. But if I change this to 256 colors, it will be a smoother image, but the file size will also go up. However, when it comes to saving animated gifts, which is intended usually for a website, we would keep the image size much lower. So maybe 600 pixels width instead of the original 5,000 pixels. And that is going to drastically reduce the file size. So now it's only 155 K. So we can zoom closer. Let's just see that's the actual pixel size, and we can play it back. Yeah, I mean, it looks already much better. So this could work as an animated web banner, for instance. That's what we needed to do here. We could even save this as a new preset, by the way. That's something you can do from this drop down, save settings. Not going to do that, and I'm also just going to close the timeline panel. We won't need that anymore. Before we move on, it's important to also talk about a term that they will often ask in the exam, and that is to do with compression. The image compression is for reducing the file size of your output and it can be either lossy or lossless. Now, we've already seen many file formats here, and the most important thing to remember is that JPAG is a lossy compression. By PNGs, DNGs, EPS, and a few other file formats all offer compression, but compression that is lossless, so it won't affect the quality of the image. So just as an example, if I go to File Export S and we choose the JPEG option, we will see that there is a quality slider. And even if we set this to seven, it's still going to result in loss of quality. That is why it's called a lossy compression. While, if we go to the PNG option, we don't actually see a slider. Here only these two options, whether we want transparency or a smaller file with reduced bit depth. But in case you are wondering about the compression, that's actually something that you can see if you choose to save a copy option, and there you choose the PNG file format. So once I click Save, it's actually going to ask me about the file size. So do I prefer a large file size, which is going to be faster to save or I want a medium file size or smallest file size? This is when compression is going to be used, but once again, this is loss less compression, so it's not going to affect the image quality. 63. 5.3 Export to Creative Cloud Library: Last but not least in this topic, you might also be asked to save an asset like this astronaut image into a Creative Cloud library, which will make it easy to use in other food shop project or even in other Adobe applications. Now, if you need to do this, just go to the Window menu and choose libraries. So that's the panel that we need. I'm just going to extend it so we can see it better. And the first thing that you will need to do is to create a new library. They most likely will tell you what it should be called. I will just call this exam and create. And then all I need to do now is to drag the layer in here, and we can see it already showing up here. And just to test this out, if I create a new document that's Command or Control N on the keyboard, let's just create this. I can just drag and drop this in here and easily reuse. Anything that you place into a CC library will be stored in the Cloud, so you can easily access it from any other computers as long as you are using the same Creative Cloud account. And by the way, if we click on the Creative Cloud application, these are all things you can find under the files, your libraries. And since I have a lot of libraries, I can just type in Exam. So that the library that we created earlier, and then we can just jump into it and then even organize the assets that are here or share this entire library with another collaborator. So if we click on this, we can put in the emails associated with Adobe IDs here, and we can also decide whether we want to allow them to ed the assets in this library and also add additional assets if required, or we just allow them to view the library. Which still means that they will be able to place these assets into their projects if they want to. They just won't be able to make changes to the library itself. There might be one last question about saving assets into a CC library. They might ask you, how do you know whether something's already been saved? You can see this from this little Cloud icon when you click on it, within the Creative Cloud desktop application, it should tell you that the libraries are sync or up to date. Right now, it says upto date. And within Photoshop, at the bottom of the library's panel, you also see that little Cloud icon. And if you have a over it, it should say all upto date. 64. Projects - Nike: This test project, first we have to flip the layer around. Now, you can do this in a couple of different ways. Probably easiest is go to the edit menu and then choose Transform, flip horizontal, which is going to keep it in the same place, just flips it around. Or alternatively, you can use the Commando Control T shortcut for free transform. And then up here in the options bar, just put a minus in front of the Walu which stands for width and this also is going to reflect it or flip it horizontally, and just don't forget to press Enter to accept the transformation. You might need to press Enter again because the first Enter is just going to confirm the change in the text, and then once you press Enter again, it confirms the transformation itself. Now, the easiest way to turn the background black and white would be to first select the subject of the image, which you should be able to choose from the contextual task bar. If you don't see this, just go to the window menu and choose the option from there. So once I click on Select Subject, it's going to make a selection of the trainer, and then we want to change the background color. So right now the shoe is selected and not the background. So the best thing to do is to invert the selection. Just click on this icon here or press Command or Control Shift I, and then go to the adjustments area and then choose black and white. This way, the change will be non destructive, and that was specified in the tasks. So we can turn this off or turn it back on. Now, we have to change the color of the Nike logo. The easiest way to select this would be by using the Quick Selection tool. So this is a brush. You can decrease the brush size with the square bracket keys on the keyboard. And let's just try to stay in the center of this selection and let Photoshop find the edges. I'm just reducing the brush size as I go along. And if you end up having selections of parts that you didn't want to include in the selection, just hold down the Alter option key, paint over it, and it should reduce back the selection. It's definitely worth zooming in closer just so you can see better the details that you're working with. And I feel like that looks good. We can always press Q on the keyboard to check how it looks as a quick mask, then press Q again to go back to normal view. And now that we have this selected, we need to change the color to red non destructively. For this, I would use another adjustment layer. I would use the hue saturation. And the selection that we created is added as a layer mask automatically, which keeps everything non destructive, and then we can start moving the slider around. Now, we can see that red is probably around here. If it's not strong enough, maybe you can add a little bit of saturation on it as well. That will make it pop even more. Yeah, something like that looks good, let's see before and after, yeah, I'm happy with that result. And now we just have to add a text layer. I press T on the keyboard. That's the type tool, and I'm just going to click maybe up here, and I will type in just do it with an exclamation mark. And notice that I'm already using the impact font. So that was already selected. From the context of Dos Bar, you can search for it, or you can also just type in Impact here on the top, and you should be able to get to. Size should be set to 200 points. So either use the Options bar or the contextual task bar for this. Then we just have to make sure it's set to white. I can see it's already set to white, but if I click on this watch, I would be able to choose the white color. Now, all the letters need to be capitalized. Again, that's something that's already turned on for me. Easiest to find this option in the properties panel on the type options. So that's the icon, make sure you turn that on. And then the tracking is something that you can find here. So you can change this to 25. So this is how it would look with zero tracking. The characters will get closer to each other, and this is with 25. And then the rotation is actually something you can only change if you first commit the changes that you've done so far. So accept these changes. And while the text layer is still highlighted, you can go into the transform options in the properties panel, and we can type in -35 for the angle. And that's how we needed this to be set up. I think we can take off everything that we have here in the tasks, and now we just have to place it under the shoe. So, and we are done. So if we want to have a quick look at the layer s panel, we needed two adjustment layers, and we needed a type layer to complete this project. 65. Projects - Statues: This project, we will be using the Cam u filter, and it's important that we have to use it non destructively. So the first step should be to turn this layer into a smart object. So right click and then choose Convert to Smart Object. Once you see the little icon there, you know that it's going to be safe to use any filters because they will all become smart filters. And we can go to filter camera raw filter. Now, once the camera raw editor opens up, you won't be able to see the instructions on the right side. So what you can do is to just reduce the size of the editor like this. So you can still keep an eye on the tasks. And if you want, you can also zoom closer to the image. I probably set this to 50%. Yeah, something like that or maybe a bit further out, like 33%. That's going to allow me to see better what's happening. First up, we need to change the white balance to auto. This is actually something you can find in the color options. So here's white balance. Instead of a shot, we change it to auto. This is going to do a subtle adjustment on the temperature and the tin sliders. And you can easily see before and after by press and holding the icon. When you let go, it goes back to the updated version. Then we can close the color area and let's go into detail. That's where sharpening is. So this one needs to be set to 100. Once again, we can use the little icon, turn it off, turn it on. We can't really see it from this distance, but if we go closer, maybe to 100% and holding down the space bar, we just reposition the image. We can now see before. And after. So obviously, close up, we will see a big difference there. Again, let me just go back to 33% Zoom ratio. And then we need to also go into the effects area where we need to increase the texture to 100. So that's just simply dragging it all the way up. And we can see without this and with so it really adds a lot of contrast and detail, especially to the imperfections or details in these marble statues. And then we just have to change the clarity to 25. That again, just makes them pop even more. So this is without clarity and texture and with clarity and texture. Now we can click Okay to accept these changes, and we can just turn off the filter to see before and after all of these changes. And now the last step is to export this image as a JP with a quality set to four and the width set to 1,000 pixels. So for this, I would recommend to use the export as option from the file menu export. And once the dialog box opens up, you just have to remember that it needs to be JPEG, quality set to four, and the width will have to be 1,000 pixels. But it's also important to mention that because we have two artboards in this document, one for the instructions and one for the test project, you actually have to make sure that first you select the test project. So you can even turn off the instructions because we don't need to save that. So having the test project selected, let's do this again, quality set to four and then width set to 1,000 pixels like that so the Canvas size should update to 1,000 by 561, and then we can see that the file size will be around 100 kilobytes. So all you have to do after this is to click Export and then choose where you want to save the file. 66. Projects - Poster: This project, you will have two layers on top of each other. So we have the bus stop image, and on top of it, we have this poster image. The first task, again, is to use the Adobe Camera Raw filter non destructively on the poster layer. And notice that although the bus stop is already set as a smart object, the poster layer is not a smart object yet, so we have to make sure that this first is converted to a smart object by right clicking on the layer. And then once we have that, we can go up to the filter menu and choose Cameo filter. Once this comes up, we can make it slightly smaller like that, and perhaps we can zoom a little bit further in, maybe to 50%, hold down the space bar on the keyboard to reposition the image if needed. And first, we need to go to the light section. We need to change the exposure to 0.5. Then we need to reduce the highlights by -30 and the shadows to 100. That's the maximum amount. So we can see before and after. This is improving the overall details in the image, so we can see a lot more detail compared to before. Then we can switch to the color section. And here we want to change the temperature to -15. So cooling down the image a bit and then the tint to be 25, which reduces that green haze that we had on the image, and this is before and after. So a little bit more realistic colors. And that's all we needed to do here, so we can just click Okay. And thanks to the fact that this was set up as a smart object, it can easily be turned off and back on all the changes that we've done in the camera raw filter. And last but not least, we have to distort this poster layer until it fits perfectly into that frame in the background. So if we are using free transform now, we know that it's going to be non destructive automatically on this smart object. So we can press Command or Control T and first, I'm just going to reduce the size a bit, get it closer to where it needs to go. I prefer to make it usually smaller than the area that I need to cover. That way, I can easily distort the corners in place, and we can even zoom a little bit closer just so we can see what we are doing. So the shortcut you will need to use here is the command or Control key and drag the corner points in place. So this is the same thing that you can access from the distort option in the edit menu. I'm just going to do it quickly here first, and then press Enter to accept the changes. But the same thing you can access from the edit menu, transform and choose Distort. When you do this, you don't even have to hold down the shortcuts. You can just simply click and drag the corners and put them in their place. So now if we zoom back, that's the result exactly how it looks here in the instructions. 67. Projects - Matriarch: The first thing we have to do on this image is to change the background. So we have to select the matriarch layer and then choose remove background. This is similar to using select subject, but it automatically will turn that selection into a mask. So essentially, keeping the subject in the image visible and everything else is going to be hidden. And in case you don't have your contextual task bar, you can find it from the Window menu, and that's the probably easiest way to access this option. But once you've done this, the next option you will find here is to generate a background. And that's perfect. That's exactly what we need to add a lush jungle. That's exactly how it's described in the task, so I'm going to use that as my prompt. And the Adobe Firefly generative AI engine is going to calculate what is needed for us here. We will get three options to choose from in the properties panel. So let me just move a bit to the left. So that's one, two, and three. Um, I actually like this one the most. Of course, because it's generative AI, it will always look slightly different. The one I have here is slightly better. So if you don't like the results you get, you can hit generate again and keep generating until you are happy with the results. But we can move on to the next task, which is to retouch the facial decorations from under the woman's eyes non destructively. So I zoom closer. So we are talking about this detail here and that one. So I am going to click on the woman's layer, and I will create a new layer above it. And I am just going to call this one retouch. This is necessary to be able to use the retouching tools non destructively. And then the best tool I would recommend to use for this would be the remove tool, and the mode I would normally keep in auto. So it might use generative AI for the retouching or may not depending on the areas that you paint over. But what you definitely want to make sure is turned on, that's the sample all layers that's again, necessary to work non destructively. And this is a brush so you can use the square brackets on the keyboard to increase, decrease the size. And if you want to remove both of these details at the same time, you probably want to remove this option. So to remove after each stroke, I'm going to disable. And this way, I can just paint over this side and also the other side, like so, and then either press Enter or click on the tick here on the top, and it's going to start generating those details. Most likely, it's going to require generative AI, and again, most likely, it's going to give you a nice result. If it's not perfect, you can just paint over any smaller areas that you don't like. I'm just going to run this again. It's a small area. For this, we could even use the spot healing brush tool. But yeah, I think this is great. The remove tool works really, really well. There is no visible edges at all, so it's perfect. Now, let's look at the tasks. The next step would be to place the tattoo layer on the chin. And we need to flip it vertically, resize it to fit between the bottom of the chin and lips without distorting it. So first of all, the tattoo layer is currently not visible, so we have to make it visible. Then I'm going to use the free transform tool and I'm going to drag the corner points. Now, this is a vector smart object, so we can easily resize it and we don't have to worry about losing quality. So if we make it too small, then we can make it bigger again, easily. But once we have it set roughly to the right size, Remember to flip it vertically. For that, there is this convenient icon here in the contextual taskbar, so I'm just going to click on that, and then I press Enter to accept these changes. And now let's just take a quick look at the last couple of steps. We have to change the blend mode to soft light for the tattoo layer. That's easy. From this drop down, I'm just going to choose soft light. And if we zoom closer, this is how it looked in normal mode. This is how it looks in soft light. So it looks a bit more like a tattoo. Now we just need to make it a little bit blurred because it's too sharp. So we will use a 0.5 pixel Gaussian blur, non destructively, because this is already a smart object, it automatically will become a smart filter when we apply it. So let's go to blur from the filter menu and then choose Gaussian blur. And the amount was 0.5. So just a very subtle one. That's before, and this is after once again. This is before, and this is after. Looks more natural now. Let's click Okay. And if you're not happy with the placement, you can keep moving it around still. You can resize it if you want. But I am happy with how this looks, and we completed another project. 68. Projects - Castle: The first task here is to scale the fortress down and place it somewhere here in the middle of the image to make it look like it's in the background, but we have to do this non destructively. So first, we need to convert this layer to a smart object. Let's just right click on it, choose Convert to Smart Object. Now I'm going to use Commando Control T for free transform and let's resize it down. I think it will be roughly around here. Maybe it can be slightly bigger, something like that. So just for your reference, if you do maybe 40% width and height, that's roughly the size that I am using here, and I am going to press Enter to accept this transformation then Zoom closer. And next, we will have to hide some of the details from the left side of the fortress because it doesn't feel like it's following the angle of the mountain. Now, to do this non destructively, I would use a mask. So I will click on the mask icon in the layers panel, and then I will be using the brush tool set to black the fogan color is black, and the hardness is set to 100%. I'm using roughly around 40 pixel size on my brush, and I'm just going to paint over this part here. I feel like all of this can go, maybe something like that. If you feel like you deleted a bit too much, you can always press X on the keyboard and reveal a bit more of the original details. Like that. I just again, remove it with black, a bit more here on this side, maybe a bit more on the bottom. And then I think the rest looks good. Maybe just a little bit more here on the right side I'm going to remove like that. Again, just trying to follow the angle of the mountain. Yeah. I feel like that's looking quite realistic now. Now, we need to apply a Gaussian blur filter. But before we do that, it's useful to select the image thumbnail to make sure that the blur is not applied to the mask. So we can go to the filter menu and then go to Gauss and blur. And then we have to choose a value that will match the sharpness of the image in the background. I am just going to reduce it maybe down to one pile. Yeah, I think that's good. And by the way, if you really pay attention to this image, some parts have more sharp details like the mountain here, also that mountain there, while this central part here looks more lower resolution or more blurred out. And that is because a lot of pieces were put together using generative AI. Using generative fill in particular in Photoshop can cause this type of problem. So you will have different resolutions or different detail levels but in the same composition. And that's why it's very important to always zoom closer and take a good look at everything. But I don't really have to worry about the rest. All I needed to do is to match roughly the environment in which the castle is. And last but not least, we also have to brighten up the fortress to again match the background. And for this, you can use the image adjustments curves or levels. And this is going to end up being a smart filter. So we don't have to use them as an adjustment layer, but I will show you both ways. So we can just drag the curves up a little bit, and that already looks better closer to how the background looks like. So if I just turn this last adjustment off and back on, yeah, that looks already much better. But the other option would be, instead of applying it as a smart filter to add the curves as an adjustment layer from this dropdown, I'm just going to choose curves, and then I'm going to drag it up a bit. The center, but notice how it affects the entire image, and that is because we haven't set up a clipping mask on it yet. I'm just going to hold down the alter option key and click between this adjustment layer and the fortress layer. So that way, now the effect of the curves adjustment is restricted to the layer directly underneath it. So this is before and this is after. So either way is good. Of course, you don't have to do it twice. So either use a clipped curves adjustment layer or curves as a smart filter, which you could set up from the image adjustments menu. For many of these projects, you can achieve the same result in multiple ways. And that applies also to the exam. So whenever they ask you a question, most of the times there's multiple ways to get to the end result. And in exam, they will accept either of those options as long as they give you the same result. 69. Projects - Astronaut: This project, we will have to correct the colors, the tone, and the contrast automatically. And to do this non destructively, the best thing to do is to duplicate the layer. If you press Command or Control J, that's a quick way to do it. And we can just rename this layer to be color corrected. Just so we remember, and then we can go to the image menu, choose auto color first, then autoton and then autocontrast. To be honest, you can do these three steps in any order you wish. But if you want to see the difference before and after, you can just turn on and off this new duplicate layer. And next, we will have to copy the astronaut onto a separate layer and we have to move it to the right side. So I'm going to use the select subject option, and then I'm going to press Command or Control J. Which is the same shortcut that we used to duplicate the original layer. But when you have a selection, it will copy that selected detail onto a new layer. So in this case, it's not going to copy the entire layer. We can use the move tool and just drag the astronaut on the right side for now. I'm going to name this layer astronaut. Before I forget. Now, we have to hide the original astronaut here on the left side with generative fill layer. So I'm just going to turn off the new astronaut layer temporarily just to make sure that I don't confuse Photoshop and I have the color corrected layer selected. And then with my rectangular marquee tool, which is M on the keyboard, I can make a selection around that part of the image, and then we can just click on generative fill from the contextual task bar. And I'm not going to write anything here. Normally, if you don't write anything, Photoshop will just try to imagine what could be in that area if the main thing that is currently there would be removed. So it's simply remove technique. And most of the time, Photoshop will do a good job on this selection or to replace this selection. And we will get three options to choose from in the property panel. So once we see that three options, I also recommend to zoom closer just to really be able to tell the difference between the results. And this first one looks already quite nice. So let's just take a look before and after. Yeah, it looks really nice. But let's take a look at the other ones as well. That looks good, too, and this looks very nice, too. Actually, probably I like this third one the most. The mountains look best in that one. Although this is quite nice, too, I like the contrast here. Each of these could work. But I feel like this one suits the composition the most. So I'm going to stick to this one, and now we can turn back the astronaut layer, and we will need to flip it horizontally. So let's go to the edit menu, choose Transform, flip horizontal, and then we will have to adjust the pose non destructively, having the hand pointing more towards the center of the image. So for this first, I will convert this layer to a smart object that will allow to use the puppet work non destructively. But before we use that, I'm just going to move the character in place. Yeah, somewhere around there, I feel like it looks good. Now we can go to the edit menu and then choose Pop at warp. Then we click here, click here, and by the way, you can turn off the mesh if you don't want to see that. In some cases, that makes it harder to see what we are doing. So I think that is enough pins to have the hand pointing in the direction we need it, and maybe we can position the body as well slightly differently just to make this look more natural. Yeah, something like that. I feel like it looks good. Okay, so let's take a look before and after. You can also turn off the Puppet Warp, turn it back on. And in case you want to change it, you can just double click on Puppet Warp and then get back to the pins and you can move them around if you're not happy with the result. I feel like this looks quite nice, and that is all we needed to do in this project. 70. Projects - Banners: In this project, you will have three artboards that you have to work with landscape, square and portrait format for the same banner. And the first task is to change the big sale copy to the same color as the trainer's text. Now, to find the big sale copy, the easiest thing for you to do instead of opening these artboards and trying to look for them is to go to the filtering options in the layer panel and choose name, and then you can just type in Big. So this is going to quickly find all of these layers to make sure that you can open these files without any warnings or missing font errors. I already rasterize these text layers and turn them into smart objects. So the easiest way to change their color instead of using the type tool would be to double click on them and then use the color overlay layer style. Now, this already has that yellow color, but to make sure it's the correct one, I can click on it and then click on the text in the background. And then I can click Okay and Okay again. So this is the portrait version here on the right. We can see without the color overlay and with the color overlay. And then we can just hold down the older option key and drag that color overlay layer style onto the other instances. Quickly. So filtering for the layers is especially useful when you work with artboards or lots of layers and lots of layer groups, especially when you have multiple levels of nested layer groups because it will be much harder to find them. I always use the filtering for this type of thing. And then we can also use the filtering to find quickly all the trainers, which I actually called converse. So if I just type in converse, we will find them easily. And their color will have to change to purple. Again, because these are all smart objects, I know that if I use an adjustment, it will automatically become a smart filter. So I can just press Command or Control U, which is the hue saturation adjustment. And I'm just going to type in -90. I think that's going to be close to what color I wanted. That's that purple color. It looks quite nice. So this was before, that's after, and we can click Okay. And then just like the way we duplicated the layer style, we can also just hold down old or option key and drag Hue saturation onto these other layers. You just zoom down again, Hue saturation onto that layer, and now it's applied on all three instances. Now we just have to export all three of these artboards, which is best done from the file export export as command because we have a fourth artboard. Or the instructions, I'm going to first disable that. And then I'm going to select the landscape artboard and then Shift click on portrait to make sure that all three are highlighted. Now we can assign the settings that we were asked to use. So JPEG is the format. We have to make sure that the colors are converted to SRGB, which is the best option when you want to use images on the web. And then we have to make sure that the output file size for each of these will be not more than 100 kilobytes. We can see the current size is there. So the way we can reduce the file size without affecting the pixel dimensions is by reducing the quality. So we can go down one by one. I went down to five from six. This largest image, the landscape is still above 100 kilobytes. But if I go down to four, now it is much closer. Let's just go down all the way to three. Now it's perfect. So with three, it's going to work perfectly. However, in the scale all option, you have to make sure the scale is set to one. So times one, you don't want to increase the scale on them. And then once you choose Export, it should be able to export all of these on the desktop. It will place them into a separate folder called images, but that's all we have to do for this project. 71. Projects - Elephants: This project, you will see a slightly different setup. Instead of having two artboards, we have the tasks written down within the same canvas area as the main project that we're working on. The reason I had to set it up this way is because we will be using features like the expand Canvas, and that wouldn't work well if we have artboards, or it would be a little bit complicated to use. So as the first step, we'll have to expand the canvas by 500 pixels to the top and 500 pixels to the bottom. So if I go to the image menu and choose Canvas size, if I type in 1,000 pixels for the height and have the relative option turned on and the anchor set in the middle, it's going to expand it by 1,000 pixel altogether, but it's going to divide it between the top and the bottom equally. So we can click Okay, and we can see that happening. Now we will have to fill in these empty areas on the top and the bottom. And for this, I'm going to use the rectangular market tool. So let me just make a selection up here. I always like to overlap my selection a bit onto the image, and I will do the same at the bottom. But before I make my selection, I will hold down the Shift key to add to my existing selection, and we only have to go up to the guide in the composition, like so, and then we can just click Generative Fill. And I would normally turn off anything else that's in the composition. Like, in this case, I would just turn off the instructions while I'm using this. And I'm not going to say anything. I will let Photoshop fill in the details automatically. Again, this is using the Adobe Firefly generative AI engine. And as long as you are using an up to date version of what shop, this should work really well. So that's the first option we got in the Properties panel. This is the second one. This is the third one. I feel like the first one is perfect. I like this little grass section here in the foreground. Okay, so we will go with this. I will just bring back my instructions, and then we have to replace the sky with clouds and the rainbow. So for this, I am going to go to the edit menu and choose sky replacement. This is going to bring up this dialogue box here on the right, and the option that you can use for this is under the special category, and I feel like it's all the way at the bottom of that category. So there it is. Now, if you want to keep your composition symmetrical, you can just move this rainbow in the middle. Like that. So as long as you are still in this dialogue box, you can easily reposition the replaced details, so the new sky. Feel like that looks quite nice. And then we can just click Okay, the sky replacement will be added as a new layer group. And next, we will have to place in that small heart shape that we can see here in the final result. So it's a useful thing to zoom into this final result if you ever in doubt what is the required step. So that is a custom vector shape that you can find from the custom shape tool. Once you select that, from this drop down, you should be able to find the heart. And then we need to make sure that this is set up as 100 pixel size. So instead of click and dragging, you can just click once on the screen, and then you can set up the width and the height to 100 pixels. And then we can just say preserve the proportions as well. And because it's not a perfect square, the height is actually going to be smaller than 100 pixels. Now, the width is exactly 100 pixels. That's what we needed. So we can just click Okay, and I forgot to change the color to white, but we can do that from the contextual task bar. I'll just set it to white, and we need to make sure that this is placed on top of everything else. So once it's placed on the top, it's not going to be affected by the sky replacement group and to set its position you can use the property spanel transform area. So here we have the X value, which should be 1750 pixels. The Y value wasn't specified, so we can just keep it roughly around there in between the two elephants, and that should be fine. And the last step that was required here is to add vibrance and saturation changes non destructively. This can be achieved best by using the adjustment layer called vibrance. Once we add that, we can type in the exact values that we need. So the vibrant should be increased by 50 and the saturation should be increased by ten. So once we do that, we can check before and after. So it just makes the colors even more intense and vibrant. And because it's sitting on top of all the layers, it's going to affect everything, including the sky replacement and the generative field layer that we created for the top and the bottom. And also, of course, the original details, the elephants in the middle. 72. Projects - Runes: For this project, first, we have to make a selection of the people and the boulder. So it is best to turn off the text layer temporarily. And having the image layer selected, we can use the select subject option from the contextual task bar. Once we click on that, it should make a good selection of the people. And to add the boulder to the selection, you can just come to the Quick Selection tool and you can use the square brackets on the keyboard to increase the brush size and then just brush over it. This should automatically add to the selection. And maybe you just have to press a couple of times to make that selection. And this looks good to me. Yeah. Let's just press Q on the keyboard for Quick Mask just to double check. Yeah, I like it. Can press Q again. And now we have to save this selection first. That's a useful feature if you want to reuse this selection a couple of times throughout your project. So go to Select Menu, choose Save Selection, and we can just call it subject or maybe Druid and run stone. Let's just click Okay. And this, by the way, will be added in the Channels panel right there. And in case I wanted to reload this selection in the future, I could either hold down Command or Control key and click on this thumbnail or I could just go back to the select menu and choose Load selection, and then we can just find the Druid and Runestone selection and we can click Okay. We will need to go back to the layers panel, turn back the text layer, and also select it, and then let's apply this selection as a mask. So if we click on the layer mask icon in the Layers panel, it's going to only show the text within that selection received. However, we want to achieve the opposite of this. So we will invert the colors of the mask by pressing Commando Control I on the keyboard. Now we have to con the text to make sure that we can see all the letters I will use the type tool, so press T on the keyboard and then click in the text just right after the N character, and then hold down the alter option key and press right arrow until you can see the E properly. You don't want to move it too far like this. I think it's nice when it overlaps it a bit. Something like that. So it's still legible, but I like the interaction between the boulder and the text like this. So I will press Commando Control Enter to accept these changes. And then let's add the outer glow effect on this layer. We just double click on the layer and then choose outer glow. And then the settings that we needed to use here is 65% opacity, 50% size, 0% spread. And for the color, we have to use this hex code that is written in the instructions. And we can click OK again. And then finally, we have to change the blend mode of this text layer to screen, and that's going to create a really nice glowing result. I especially like how the glow looks around the heads of these characters here and also around the stone. So if we turn off the glow, without it, and that's with the glow together. So it creates a really nice interaction between the text and the image. 73. Projects - Volcano: First step for this project is to add a vertical guide at the specific point in the canvas, and this can be achieved by going to the view menu and then from guides, choose new guide that make sure that vertical is selected and then you type in the required 2000 pixels position. So once we click Okay, this is going to be placed 2000 pixels from the left edge of the Canvas. And if I press Commando Control R, which is going to show the rulers, I can see exactly that's what we got as long as this is set to pixels. If you right click on the rulers, you can change the units there. Now the next step is that we have to distort the image non destructively and make sure that it's squeezed into the left side of the canvas and align it to the guide that we created. So we know that for any non destructive transformation, we need to first convert the layer into a smart object, and then we can use Commando Control T for free transform. And then if we just start dragging the edge, is going to try to keep the proportions the same. But if you hold down the Shift key, you can access the distort option. It should snap to the guide. Once you are ready, just press Enter, and distorting image is normally you would want to stay away from unless there is nothing in an image that would give it away that's being distorted. Like here, you wouldn't really be able to tell that this image was distorted. So originally, it looked like this. Now simply the volcano just looks more steep. But that's basically all we can see on it. Next, we have to add a solid color layer. This is something that we can do from the adjustments drop down. Let's choose that solid color option, and we need to use a yellow color. I'm just going to set it to this. Or we can actually use the hex code that was specified in the instructions. So it's F 22 D. And then we can just click Okay. So this layer should be placed underneath the volcano, and then now we have to change the colors of the volcano. So all the lava that currently looks like gold will need to turn green. If we go to the image menu and choose adjustments, hue saturation, and here we switch to yellows and then start adjusting the hue. It's going to give us the result that we needed. Maybe you can just increase the tolerance and have more of the original yellows included in this adjustment like that. So if I click Okay, this is going to become a smart filter because the layer was a smart object. Or alternatively, if you prefer to use adjustment layers, you can also access this from the adjustments drop down. We just choose hue saturation, and then we choose yellows. Again, we can adjust the hue until this turns green. But notice how the color fill layer is also turning green, and that is because the hue saturation right now is affecting everything that's underneath it, and we just have to make sure that is avoided by using a clipping mask between the two. So I'm just going to adjust this a little bit like that and then hold down do option key and click between the adjustment layer and the image directly underneath it. So this way, that yellow color fill at the bottom is now not affected anymore. So this is before the adjustment layer, and this is after. We will need the timeline panel, which we can find from the window menu for the next step, and we have to create a frame animation. So let's click on that. We have to change the duration to 1 second. That would be 1.0, the loop to be set to forever. So I'm going to keep it on that. And then I'm going to create a new frame. And in the second frame, all we have to do is to just move the volcano image to the right side. If you hold down the Shift key, you can make sure that it's not moving up and down, and it should snap to the right edge of the canvas. Now, if you press space on the keyboard, since we have the timeline panel open, it's going to start playing this animation. And our task is to export this as an animated gift. However, to be able to do that, first, we have to also use the slice tool, which you will find group together with the crop to and we just have to make a slice on this area here. So click and drag over this hardboard. And if you zoom closer, you can check if you aligned it correctly or not. But this seems to be fine. And the next, we will have to go to the file menu and choose Export, save for web legacy. Is required because this is the only place we can export animated GIF. So we just zoom out a little bit here. We have to turn off transparency. And here, you should choose the gift 128 did preset, then change the image size percentage to 25. And then once you click Save, you will have to make sure that you choose all user slices instead of all slices or selected slices. So the only user slice that we have here is the one that we created. All the other slices around it were automatically created by Photoshop but once you save this file, it's going to save that specific area that we highlighted, and it's going to include those two frames that we created using the timeline panel. 74. Projects - Mushroom: The first thing we have to do in this project is to set up the butterfly layer for non destructive editing. So this would be right click and then convert to Smart Object. Then we need to flip this horizontally, which we can do from the edit menu, transform, flip horizontal, and then we can change the blend mode to screen, and then we need to move it closer to the mushroom. Again, we look at the reference image that's close enough. Now, next, we need to duplicate this, which we can do with the move tool, hold down old or option key and click and drag. And we are asked to reduce this down to 50% of its original size, which we can do with Command or Control T and then type in 50% for the wvalu and if you remove the minus in there, it will automatically flip it around as well because it was initially already flipped. But you can also use this horizontal flip icon in the contextual task bar if you need to. It's good as long as you have the two butterflies facing the opposite directions, and we can just say done, and then we can start moving it down here. We have to change the color of this butterfly, which I'm going to do with the hue saturation adjustment that's command or Control U. And because it's already a smart object, this will become a smart filter. So let's just change it to something like that. I feel like that's close to what we have in the reference image. And now we have to move on and work on the second mushroom that we have to create. For this first, we have to select the background layer and then choose Select Subject from the contextual task bar. Once we click on that, it should make a good selection of the mushroom. And then to separate this and to put it on a new layer, we can just press Command or Control J as to duplicate a layer, and we can just rename this to mushroom. That's our new layer, and we can use the move tool to move it here on the right side for now. We will have to do non destructive transformations on this layer. So first of all, I will convert this to a smart object, and then I press Commando Control T to access the free transform tool, and we were asked to reduce the size of this to 40%. As long as you have the little chain content on, it's going to keep the proportions the same. And then we also have to flip this horizontally. Like that. And then let's just accept this transformation and place it somewhere around here on the right side. Then we have to straighten this mushroom just to make it look slightly different to the original shape. And this can be achieved easily with the Puppet Warp feature, which luckily will also be non destructive because we are working on a smart object. By default, this tool would show you a mesh on the selected object. But if you turn that off, it will always be easier to see what you're doing. Going to click here at the bottom, then maybe here one more time, then maybe here, and then there and there and perhaps maybe at the top as well. So now we can start moving things around. Let's just move this top part up a bit. And these as well. A little bit higher. I want to make sure it doesn't look too distorted. So I might need to use a couple of extra points like that. And this one here, by the way, if you hold down the alt or option key, you can also drag these pins around or adjust the rotation on them that can be useful sometimes. And if you hold down the alt or option key, you can also remove a pin. If it wasn't placed correctly, you can maybe create a new pin and then move it around until you are happy. Like here, maybe we can just drag this up a bit. This one can be rotated slightly. And this is looking already much better, so much straighter and definitely different from the original shape. So if I see before and after, we made quite a big change on this mushroom. And now we just have to blur this out because we want to make it look like it's in the background. That's why it's smaller. So in order to achieve that shallow depth of field effect, we will go to the filter menu, and from the blur gallery, we will choose field blur, and the amount should be set to 15 pixels. So that's how it looks. That looks good. However, it can be made even better if we turn on the high quality option. And then we can click Okay. So we can see without the changes and with the changes, or we can just turn off the blur gallery and turn it back on and we can zoom out a bit, and we can check if we achieved a similar result to what we have in the reference image. And I feel like we did a good job again. 75. Projects - Parkour: There might be a task in the exam where they will be testing whether you are familiar with the content aware scale feature. And this is actually a feature that I haven't even discussed in the main topics because it's a bit outdated. It's not something that I would recommend for anyone to use, mainly because it's not utilizing the modern AI that is built into Photoshop. It relies on the older Adobe Sensei AI, which is very outdated. And I'm not sure whether they are planning to improve this or update this, but it's clear that it is not working as well as it should be. So in the exam, whenever you see a similar composition where you need to stretch an image to fill in the empty area, most likely, it is about the content aware scale. So you will be seeing something similar to this. And I think everyone who is familiar with Photoshop's latest features would immediately think about just making a selection here and then using generative fill because they will be asking you to fill that area with some detail. But actually, in the current exam, they would want you to use the content aware scale. Now, if I select the layer that I prepared here and I go to the edit menu, the option will be grade out, and that's also intentional. I wanted to make sure that you're familiar with this, so it can't be used non destructively. That's also one of the reasons that I don't like to recommend this feature at all. So it has to be used destructively. So you will have to either duplicate this layer and then rasterize it if you want to keep a backup smart object version of it. But I'm just going to click Rasterize Layer, and now the option will become available. So once I choose I will be able to start stretching this image. But there's also another important thing to notice. When I stretch this image, it actually also stretches it sideways. So Photoshop tries to use this content aware scale feature proportionally by default. If you hold down the Shift key, you can override this and you can restrict it to literally just distort the image vertically. And that's what is asked in this question. And most of the time in the exam, they will also ask you to do it this way. So just remember to hold down the Shift key while you are dragging this up. What you will notice is when I do this, eventually, the person in the image will start to get distorted. And it's specified in the task that we have to avoid that. Now, there is an option here in the options bar to protect skin tones. So this automatically supposed to detect skin tones, and it will make sure that they are not being distorted. So if I turn that on, it will protect the skin tones, but because the legs are covered, so there's a trouser that this guy is wearing that is still getting distorted. So it's clear that the legs are stretched vertically. Now, this luckily is not something that you have to do usually in the exam, but I wanted to just show you how you can improve even further than this. But most of the time for the exam, it would be just enough to have the skin tones option turned on, and then that would be enough. But for now, I'm just going to press Cancel. And first, I will use the layer and the move tool to have the select subject option show up in the contextual task bar. And once I choose that, it should make a really good selection of the person, and then I'm going to save this selection. So I go to select Save Selection. I'm going to call this one guy. Now that it's saved, I can remove my selection. Command or Control D, go back to as it was. I'm just double checking the layer is rasterize steel, so I can now go to edit content a Vare scale. I will hold down the Shift key, drag this one up until it fills in the canvas, and then the skin tones option can be still turned on, but now we can also add the selection that we created earlier. I can just choose to protect the guy in the image, and now we can see that that worked really well. There's only a little bit on the head that is being distorted, and if we zoom closer, you can probably see that better. So that could have been avoided if I first expanded my selection by ten pixels before saving it. But I'm not going to go back now. I'm happy with this result. I'm just going to click On Done. And then now that we have the image stretched out without affecting too much of the person, so we can see before and after. I just stretched the sky. It did stretch the building a bit as well. And once again, this is the reason I don't recommend anyone using this feature. It's just really outdated compared to generative field and generative expand. But there's another task here that we have to export this layer with the following settings. Now, this is also a tricky question, and I've seen this coming up in the exam. So they mentioned that you need to include a prefix when exporting. Now, prefix can only be included when you use this feature from the file menu export, called layers to files. So if I click on this one, notice it has file name prefix. So you can put whatever you want here, but at the end, it will have the layer's name as well. So in this case, this layer is called Parkor. We can just put final here, like it's specified in the tasks, and then we have to make sure it's set to JPEG, and then we have to also make sure it includes the ICC profile. And we want the quality to be set to six. So now that we have all of this setup, we should be able to run this. This is like an action because it can batch process multiple layers. But notice that there is also an important option called visible layers only. And in the task, it says we have to export only the Parke layer. Because there's also additional layers in the other artboard, those should be first turned off before you run this. But I'm just going to show you if that option is not turned on, what happens. So I want to export this on my desktop, maybe export it in here. So let me run this. If I go to that folder, I can actually see that there are four images exported. So each layer was exported, like I explained. So if I come back and turn off the instructions layer group, now, really the parco layer is the only visible layer currently in this document. Now if I go to file export layers to files, I can make sure that besides all the other settings, I will also turn on the visible layers only. And then let me just call this final and then run it. Now we can see it's just that one single image. However, because we are using artboards, it still has a big empty space on the right side. So this is, again, a bit outdated feature and something that I would normally recommend to use, but they might still ask you to use this in the exam. So instead of using this, whenever I want to export layers, I would just use the layers panel drop down and choose exports. Will then allow me to select the layers that I want to export, and it will work perfectly even if you have multiple artboards, and you can do a lot of settings here, like we've seen this already throughout this course. But the main difference here is that instead of a prefix that you can add to the fine name, you can only add a suffix. So that's something that's going to go after the layer name. So it could be something like final, and in that case, it would be parorFinal dot JPAC. But the main advantage of using exportez is that we can even export multiple versions of the same files. So we can not only batch export all the layers, but also have multiple versions of them saved in different sizes. So we could create double the original size, half the original size or the actual size all at the same time. But I'm just going to cancel out of this and show what happens if I have the instructions artboard turned on. So I just come back here and go again to Export As. Notice how, even though it was turned back on, it's still not showing up here, and that is because this is in a separate artboard. If I come to this and even though it's still logged, I can just go to exports, and now it's going to show it. So the separate Rboards won't show up here unless you have them all selected. So we can just go back here, Command or Control click to select multiple arboards and then if I go back to Exports, now I will be able to see them both in this dialogue box. To summarize for this particular project, I wanted to make sure that we cover these two, in a way, outdated features of Photoshop. But it was important to cover this because they might still ask you questions about this. And hopefully now it will make sense and you will know what to do. 76. Conclusion: Congratulations on completing this course. You've put in the time, the effort, and the practice, and you are now one big step closer to earning your official Adobe certification. Remember, during the exam, you will have 50 minutes to answer 13 questions and complete 17 tasks. So keep practicing with the exercise files and test exams included in this course. When you feel ready, book your exam, stay calm, trust your skills, and show what you can do. If you are looking to build even more creative superpowers, don't forget we also have exam preparation courses for Adobe Illustrator and in design. These certifications can make your resume even stronger and open even more doors in the design industry. If you manage to pass the Photoshop and either the Illustrator or in design exam, you will automatically get an additional Adobe certified professional in visual design specialty credential and badge. Even more reasons to do more than one Adobe exam. Once you pass your exam, and I'm sure you will, we would love to celebrate your success with you. So tag us on your social media posts. We are always excited to see our students achieve amazing things. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Stay creative, stay curious, and I will see you in the next course.