Adobe Photoshop Basics for Beginners

1. Welcome!: My name is Kara Plitnit. I've been a photographer, graphic designer, and professional pixel pusher for over 20 years. I've been photoshopping since the 90s. And I've been teaching for almost just as long with classes on everything from photoshop to design, Illustrator, and more. And after all these years, beginners are still my damn. So if you have ever wanted to get started in photoshop, but you felt overwhelmed or intimidated, I get it. I have been there. I'll introduce you to the workspace, give you the no nonsense low down on keyboard shortcuts and demystify everything from layers to smart objects and file formats to image size and resolution. You'll learn how to work with type, how to take advantage of incredible font features you might not have even known existed. And everything you need to know get started making selections and using layer masks. Along the way, you'll complete some quirky practice projects. Discover a few hidden surprises and have a fair amount of fun. All the practice files are included along with a printable cheat sheet of common photoshop keyboard shortcuts. By the end of this class, in addition to a profound sense of accomplishment, you'll have a solid understanding of photoshop basics and the foundation you need to tackle whatever you plan to take on next. So I'm excited for you and the adventure that you're about to embark on. What are we waiting for? Met me in the next video, and let's dive in. 2. Get to Know Your Way Around: Once you get photoshop launched, you'll see a screen that looks like this. To get started, you can come here and choose open or from the file menu, choose open. Navigate to wherever you saved your course files and open up the folder number one, lay of the land and select all three files and click open. This is the default workspace called essentials. You can find the different workspaces from the window menu by choosing workspace and we can see we're in essentials. There's a number of other preset workspaces and if you prefer to have your panels and everything in a different way, you can also come down here and create a new workspace to save your own later. By default, the images have opened into individual tabs, we can see here along the top of the screen. You can toggle between the images by clicking on the respective tab. The tabs display some information, including the name of the file, the format, the current viewing percentage. This one's even telling us the name of our current layer. It's letting us know what color space we're in and the bit depth of the image. The more images you have open, the more tabs you'll see here along the top of the workspace. If somehow your images don't end up in tabs and you want to put them in tabs, you can do that by going to window arrange, consolidate all to tabs. All right. Let's talk about our panels. The panels can be nested and docked together and in groups. So right now, I have four panels up here that are nested together. They're all in one pocket, and we can switch to whichever panel is active by clicking on the corresponding tab. If we want to remove a panel, say this one, One way to do it is to come over to the menu and select close. If we choose close tab group, that will close this entire pocket that currently has four panels. So I'll just close this one. Now we've got three panels in this little pocket right here. We have another pocket with three more panels here and a third pocket down here with three additional panels. We also have another column over here with a couple more pockets, and we can pop this open by clicking this little double headed arrow right here, and we can see that we have the history panel and the comments panel. These things can all be moved around. For example, I can take the comments panel and click and drag it out here and drop it. Now it's just free floating so I can move it around. Or I could close it from again, the menu here, or I can click the little x right there. Now I have my history panel here and it's got its own big pocket right here. So we can adjust the size of this pocket. Maybe we want to make it narrower. We can collapse it. We can also take this panel and drag it over here and drop it if we want. Now we've got everything in one column. You can move things around really easily. The most important thing to remember, is that when it comes to panels, there's really two important things to know. One is that every panel has its own menu. So it looks the same, whatever panel I click on, this little icon here is the same, but the options will vary depending on which panel is active. That is the panel menu. The other thing to know is that all of the panels can be found from the window menu. If you close something and you want it back, just go to the window menu and you can get it back. One of the keys to working in photoshop is taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts. That's key to everything. To get a sense of how that works, let's click over to this image called Undo. We're going to do a few things to this image and then we'll do those things using the keyboard shortcuts. Let's come up here to the filter menu and we'll choose Distort and twirl. You can play with the settings here and click Okay. Next, let's go back to the filter menu and we'll choose pixelate crystallize. Okay. Choose a setting and click Okay. Finally, let's go to the image menu, choose adjustments, and select equalize. We've done three things to this image now and we can undo those things by pressing command or control. If I do that, I undo the most recent thing. If I do it, again, I undo the second most recent thing. And finally, if I press it a third time, we get all the way back to our original image. So Command or Control Z will undo things in the sequential order, and you can redo them by just using that same keyboard shortcut but adding the shift key. That's just one example of keyboard shortcuts, but that's probably one of the most important ones. Let's talk about tools. Our tools are over here on the left side of the screen. If you thought that this was already a number of tools, guess what? Pretty much all of these have even more nested below them. If you click and hold on any of the tools that have this little white icon in the bottom corner, that means there are more tools in that family. Whichever member of the family was most recently used is the one that you'll see on top. If you want to switch to a different family member, you click and hold and then mouse over and release on the family member that you want. You'll also notice that when you click and hold on any of the pockets with family members, you'll see the flyout includes a letter. That letter is the keyboard shortcut for that family. And as you click and select different tools, you will see the options up here in the control panel will change depending on which tool is selected. If you're not seeing the control panel up here, you can find it, of course, from the Window menu by choosing options. Those are the tool options. Let's get a feel for how this works by clicking over here to the Tiger image tab. And let's grab our brush tool by pressing the letter B for brush. So we can see that now we have this tool active and these are the options for the tool up here in the options bar. Let's choose the following settings. Over here for the size of our brush, we're going to click the little drop down arrow here, and let's set the size to somewhere around 500, and let's drag the hardness slider all the way to zero, and then we can click up here again to dismiss that panel. What we're going to do is sample colors from this rainbow and use them to paint the tiger. To give you an idea of how keyboard shortcuts work, we're going to switch between the tools we use using our keyboard. We've got our brush ready to go. Now to sample this paint color here, we're going to learn two ways to do this. We can switch tools by pressing the letter e, which gives us the eye dropper. And if I position the cursor here somewhere in the red area, and if you have your caps lock on, you might see a different cursor. So make sure your caps lock off is off and then click to sample a color. We see that the color gets sucked up over here, and now to get back to our brush, we press B. Then we can come into this area of the tiger and click and paint, some red. Let's try that again. We'll press for the eye dropper. Come down here and find an orange color, press B to switch back to the brush tool, and paint some orange. Let's do that one more time pressing grab a yellow color, B for the brush and paint some yellow. Okay. Now, that's one way to do it. We can straight up switch tools. But there's a special thing about the brush tool. That is when you hold down the Option or Alt key. It will temporarily switch to the eye dropper. So with the brush tool active, we can hold Alt or option and sample this green color. Let go of Alt or option, and we are back to the brush. So this is called a toggle keyboard shortcut. So let's try that again. We'll hold Alt or option. And I'm going to get this blue color up here. Release Alt or option, and we're back to the brush, and we can paint with that color and then I'll do Alt or Option one more time and sample a purple for the feet here. So that is called a toggle keyboard shortcut. We can press B for brush and y for eye dropper, or with the brush active. We can just hold down Alt or option to toggle to the eye dropper. All right. Finally, the last thing we're going to do in this video is learn how to navigate. Let's switch over to this cafe image here. Let's practice zooming in and out, not by grabbing the Zoom tool. No, no, no, we're going to use the keyboard. We can zoom in by pressing command or control and then just hitting the plus key over and over and over and over and over, see how far you can go. Oh, look at all those pixels, and then we can back out by pressing command or control minus minus minus minus minus. If you just hold minus down, look how far out we can go in that wild. Now, to fit the image on our screen again, the way it was just a minute ago, we can press command or control and the number zero. That will fit it on our screen. Speaking of toggle keyboard shortcuts. Another handy one is to be able to toggle to the Zoom tool. So you may have noticed by pressing command or control plus or minus, we zoom in just to the center of the image. But what if we want to zoom in right up here to the Macha green T sign? Then we're going to hold down command or control and the space bar, and we temporarily get our Zoom tool. And you'll notice when we let go, we're back to whatever tool we were using. Command or control space bar toggles us to the Zoom tool. And if we want to zoom in on this sign right here, I'm just going to click and drag across it. And that'll zoom straight in to that sign. Then while we're here, if we want to move around, you could come over here to the scroll bars and do all of that kind of thing. But only if you want to get seasick, a better way to work is to use another toggle keyboard shortcut, which is the space bar. So if you hold down the space bar, you'll get the hand tool and you can just drag around. And then when you find what you're looking for, you let go of the space bar and you're back to whatever tool you were just using. Again, to fit it all on your screen command or control, and the number zero. Knowing how to navigate your image is so important that I really wanted you to practice. To give you incentive, I've hidden three little reasons why this cafe may not be the best pick. Practice zooming in and out and panning around this image and see if you can find the three little reasons why you might want to go elsewhere. If you find all three, send a screenshot to me at a at arreplicnich.com, and I will have a little photoshop treat for you. That's it for Lay of the Land. Join me in the next video, and we're going to talk about making image adjustments. 3. Basic Image Adjustments: In this video, we'll be using the two files found in the folder called zero two image adjustments. The main thing to know about image adjustments is that there are two ways to do things, the destructive way and the non destructive way. To help you understand the value of the non destructive edit, let's first take a look at a destructive image edit. Here we have a picture of MQ son when he was just a we babe, and this image is over exposed. One of several ways that we can try and correct for that is to adjust the histogram of this image using the levels command. So up here under the image menu, we've got a whole menu option for adjustments, and you can see there are lots of options here. And this course would be super long if we went through all of them. So I'll let you explore on your own. But right now, let's just go ahead and together, we'll choose levels. You can see that the keyboard shortcut is command or Control L. So that brings up this panel here. This is our histogram. It's a graph showing the brightness values of our image. So the dark values are here on the left by this slider. The mid tones are in the middle, and the highlights are over here on the right depicted with this white slider. So we can see that all the information in our image is basically mid tones and higher. We don't have any shadows here. So one thing we can do is to take the slider here and just drag it to the bottom of the information. And you can see that the image shadows got darker and I'll spare you all the details about this, but that's an improvement, right? So that looks good. Let's click Okay. So let's say that we save this image, maybe we come back to it later, and then we're like, You know what? Maybe I want to tweak those levels a little bit more. Well, we can come back up here and choose image adjustments again. Or we can use that keyboard shortcut Command or Control L. And now we see a redistributed histogram based on the correction we made just a minute ago. So nothing's really problematic yet. But just to really push the envelope so you can understand what's happening. Let's get pretty extreme. So I'm going to drag the shadow slider in even more. I'm going to drag the highlights in and we are just destroying this image. So this looks terrible. That's not the point. The point is, let's look at this histogram. See all this data that's here. Watch what happens when we click Okay. And then let's say we're like, Oh, whoops, let's edit that. If we bring up levels again, command or Control L, look what has happened to our histogram. All that mountains of data are now squished and the image is basically flatlined. So no matter what we do here, we cannot get it back. So this is an example of a destructive edit. The first adjustment that we made, was fine. The problem is when we try to adjust an adjustment. So if I cancel this and undo back to here, where our histogram looked like this after we just made the first correction, we're fine. This is a nice nice image and a fine adjustment. So even though it's destructive, the problem isn't that we made this adjustment. The problem is when we try to go back and continue to adjust the adjustment, right? So We don't want to do that. So what do we do if we do need to adjust adjustments. Well, then we want to make sure that we're working non destructively. So let's take a look at this image here. As we saw, we can come to the image adjustments menu, and we've got lots of different adjustments here. But when we do it this way, all of those adjustments are going to be destructive. They're going to bring up a window, and once we click Okay, those adjustments get baked in. If we want to avoid baking them in so we can have the flexibility to adjust them later, then we want to go to a different place. And that is going to be from the bottom of the layers panel. So we should have our layers panel on the screen. If you don't, you can always find it, of course, from the window menu. So find your layers panel. And at the very bottom, there's this little button that looks kind of like a Yinang. That's our adjustment layer button. So when we click on that, we get this whole list of adjustments, and you'll see it's nearly identical to what we had under the image adjustment menu just a minute ago. But when we choose these adjustments here, for example, levels, we don't get a panel that asks us to make an adjustment and click. We get something like this that appears in our properties panel. So let's say that we do a rather extreme adjustment to this image. And I'm going to pull the properties panel out because I don't like it tucked in here. All right. So here I just moved to the properties panel. Let's make some extreme adjustments here. We're going to just beat up this image the same way we did to the other photo. And you'll notice there's no okay button because at no point are we baking this in? I just kind lives here now. So if we're done adjusting it, we just kind leave it there and move on to whatever else we want to do. The nice thing is that even if we collapse this panel or do some other work and come back to this, we can always fix this adjustment. If we come back to the properties panel, or in the layers panel, which we'll learn more about later, we see that this thing showed up. This is where the adjustment that we just made lives. So instead of being baked into the pixels, it lives here in its own layer. We can turn it off by clicking the eyeball here. We could throw it away by clicking the trash can, Or we can double click the little thumb nail here, which will pop the properties panel back open. And here is this histogram. And we could just come back and drag these back out. And now our image is right back where it was. Maybe we want to make an adjustment, but not so extreme, then we can kind of, you know, finesse it here a little bit. So, of course, we're not just limited to levels. We can come back down and click that little ing, and let's try playing with hue saturation. Now we get another adjustment layer that shows up here in our layers panel, and it has a little different icon here. This icon represents the settings here in the properties panel. So now, let's try playing with the hue. Maybe we swing it over this way till we have an image with a green sky. Again, we can collapse this if we want. We can go about our business, and if we decide, you know what? Maybe we don't care for that green sky, we just double click that hue saturation adjustment layer icon, this little thumbnail here in the layers panel, and maybe we go for a pink sky instead. So that is a look at two ways of adjusting images. The first method here was destructive. We just went to image adjustments, and we chose an adjustment, and we applied it. In this image, we went to the bottom of the layers panel and added the adjustment as a layer. And we'll learn more about this later, but this gives us the ultimate flexibility for non destructive editing. You may notice that while we're here, if we come to the image menu, we can't choose adjustments in this case because we have an adjustment layer active here. So as we'll see later in the layers panel, You options for everything really depend on which layer is active. If I wanted to make a baked in adjustment, I'd have to click to select the background layer, then I could come up here and choose adjustments, and then I could do it this way. But these would be considered destructive, whereas these adjustment layers here are not. Take some time to experiment and explore all these different types of adjustments, and when you're ready, close these files and join me in the next video where we'll learn about making selections. 4. Making Selections: In this video, we're going to be learning about selections. Using the images found in folder number three, we're going to start with this one of the hot air balloon. Selections allow us to target certain parts of an image. Whether we're targeting it because we want to make an adjustment or because we want to copy and paste something or move something. We need to be able to select it. Photoshop has a lot of amazing tools that automate a lot of this process. So starting with this hot air balloon image, we're going to select one of our wizard like selection tools by pressing W on the keyboard. That selects this tool family right here. The tool we have right now doesn't matter because with any of those selection tools active, we will see the select subject button at the top of our screen. This is going to make use of Adobe's artificial intelligence to analyze our image and select what it thinks is the subject, and we can have Photoshop process that information. On our local device or in the Cloud, which might take a little bit longer, but that's going to give us better results. So the Internet connection you have or don't have at the moment might influence your choice here. I'm going to go ahead and leave the set to Cloud, and then I'll come over and click Select Subject. Photoshop analyzes the image and selects the hot air balloon. So now we can copy it by pressing Command or Control C, and let's switch over to this sky image and paste it by pressing Command or Control V. That's it. Our hot air balloon is now in a new image. If we look at our layers panel here, which I have moved to the top of my little pocket, we can see that photoshop puts the hot air balloon in its own layer, which means if we press V for the move tool, which is the top tool in our tool bar. We can now move this around within the image because it is separate from this layer. Anytime we paste something into an image, photoshop is going to put it in its own layer. Let's move over to this image called citrus. Obviously, if we tried to select subject here, there's a lot of things to choose from. It turns out that there is a tool that we can use to tell photoshop which possibly many subjects or many objects we want to select. That is part of that same W family. It is this tool here, the object selection tool. With this tool active, we can mouse over different objects in the image and Photoshop we'll select them when we click. I'm going to select this grape fruit slice by just mousing over it and clicking, which puts these squiggly lines around it just like we saw in the hot air balloon. These are called marching ants, and this lets us know that our grape fruit slice is selected. I'm going to copy it by pressing Command or Control C. Then let's come up here to the fruit face image and paste it by pressing Command or Control V. Again, we see photoshop paste it into a layer of its own, and let's switch back to our move tool by pressing V for v. And maybe I want to move this up a little bit. And I also want to make a copy of it. So let's hold down Alt or Option and click and drag over to the right to make a copy. Now we have two grapefruit layers in the layers panel, and with our move tool, By default, if we have this auto select option on, we can move them by just clicking on either one of these layers, and you'll notice that as we click, Photoshop selects the corresponding layer and we can move it. So that is auto select layer. It's on by default. But if it starts to become a problem, you can toggle it off anytime by just clicking right here. Let's go back to our citrus image, and we see that the marching ants are still here. So we can de select them at any time by pressing command or control D, or we can come up to the select menu here and choose D select. But in this case, let's leave the selection active because we're going to go back to our object selection tool by pressing W. And here we see these little modifier keys. This tells Photoshop whether we want to make a new selection. We want to add to a selection, subtract from a selection, or intersect a selection. So with this first option active, that means that if we use this tool again, it's going to replace any active selections with a new one. So we can actually just leave the selection here and let's come up to this little guy and click to select him. So we see we've de selected the grapefruit and we've now selected this one, and we can copy that Commander Control C, and let's go back to our fruit face image, Commander Control V to paste. And if we switch to our move tool by pressing V, we can click to grab that little piece and move it down about there. Now, let's take a look at our layers panel. We see we've pasted in three different things, so we've got three different layers. We also have this group folder up here. Let's twirl this open so we can look inside by clicking this little carrot right there. And we see we have a layer here, and then we have this layer called style holder, which is actually just totally empty, but it has some styles or layer effects applied to it. And that means we can copy these settings and apply them to these three layers. To do that, we're going to hold down the Alt or option key. And then we're going to click right on the little effects in the layer right here. And we're going to just drag and drop it onto each of these three layers. So I'm just holding Alt or option, and I'm coming up here dragging and dropping that onto those three layers, which gives them a shadow similar to what this banana has and makes everything look like. It was meant to be here. Finally, let's finish this off by coming up to this group folder. And if we click to put a little eyeball in this empty socket right here, we have a completed magazine cover, which is 100% silly. Next, let's move to this picture of the cat. Images like this are a little more tricky because look at all this fuzzy fur. But it's still a piece of cake. So let's press W for our Wizard like selection tools one more time. And then we'll come up here and start by clicking select subject again. So now we've got this selection around the cat, and we have this little piece that didn't get included quite right. To fix that, let's grab another one of the Wizard like selection tools called the Quick Selection tool. This is basically a paintbrush that paints selections. I'm going to zoom in here so you can see better. But we can see that it's kind of missing part of the foot right here. So with this tool selected, and we've got this plus option enabled here, all we need to do to add this in is basically paint over it. And look at that. It just snaps right in. If the tip of this tool, this brush is too big or small, you can change the size. By coming right up here in the options. I can see right now my brush is nine pixels wide. If I want to change the size to make it bigger or smaller, I can click this little drop down and I can drag the slider right here to adjust the size. Then you just paint over whatever you need to fix. If you make a mistake and maybe you paint too much, all you need to do is toggle to subtraction mode by pressing and holding Alt or option. Now we see the cursor changes from a plus to a minus, and I can come right in here and just fix that right up. All right, so now we have the selection, but we need to finesse it a little bit to get the fur. To do that, we'll come up here and choose Select and mask. This allows us to see a preview of the selection and fenese it. So over here in the right hand side of our screen, next to view, we can choose different ways to view our selection. Making it easier to see. In this case, let's choose on black, and then let's make sure that the opacity for the black that it's going to overlay is 100%. Now we can see that this fur edge needs a little bit of refinement. To do that, I'm going to come back to my brush settings, and I'm going to drop the size back down to something tiny like ten to 15 pixels. And I'm going to make sure I'm selecting this tool here. This is the refinement brush. So we are in a whole new workspace now for refining a selection. And in this workspace, using this tool, all we need to do is tell photoshop to take a second pass at this edge by basically just brushing over it with that tool. Look at that. Look how it selected that hair now. Now, see the fur right here. Let's just brush over the edge with that refine edge tool and look what a better job it does. So there's a number of tools here. They can all be used to refine the selection in different ways. When we're happy with it, we come down here and we can tell Photoshop that we want to output our refined selection to any number of things. In this case, we just want a regular selection. So we'll click Okay. The selection doesn't look any different, but we have refined it. We started by using the select subject button up here. Then we cleaned up the selection to add the foot in over here by switching to the Quick Selection tool. Then we click Select and Mask to enter that other workspace where we refined the furry edge. And now we're ready to copy it by pressing Command or Control C, and let's switch over here to this image called Cater Day and paste by pressing Command or Control V. So there is our cat. And if we look in our layers panel, we have this shadow layer that's not active. We have our cat in its own layer, and we have an empty layer called style holder. So let's click in the empty eye socket to enable the visibility of the shadow layer. We'll switch to our move tool by pressing V. And now let's drag the cat into position on top of his shadow. And finally, let's take this empty style holder, which again, has a little effx icon here and we'll copy that effect to the cat by holding Alt or Option and dragging it like that. Just adds a little shadow And now he looks like he belongs in the scene. Let's try one more just for fun. We're going to click over here on this Tiger image. Let's switch back to our Wizard like selection tools by pressing W. That gives us access to again select subject, and Photoshop selects the Tiger and once again, did a nearly perfect job. But this time, I Zoom in, you can see it kind of missed the ear here. So good thing we know about the Quick Selection tool. With that brush tool selected, and a decent size of 15 pixels. Remember, we can change it from this little drop down right next to our brush preview. All we need to do is brush right over that ear and let go and photoshop selects it. We can practice refining the edge again by choosing select and mask. And in this work space, if we select the edge brush right here. And we want to brush over any of the fur we can, although I don't think we need to. So, now it's adding in stuff that we don't want. So when that happens, we can grab this tool here, the third tool from the top. And you'll notice this cursor has a plus in it. That's going to extend the selection. To do the opposite to remove from the selection, we hold down Alt or Option. And you'll see we get that minus, and now we can just paint away anything that we don't want included. We'll make sure we output to selection and click Okay. Now I'm going to copy this Command or Control C, and let's go to our Woods image and paste Command or Control V. We'll switch to our move tool by pressing V. And dragging him up to the top of this car. Now, let's zoom in and look at this. We can see that he came from a very flat straight surface, and now he's on top of a car, which is curved. So we need to actually curve him around to better fit on this car, and we can do that by bringing up something called free transform. So let's press commander Control T to put a transform box around our subject. We're going to use this a lot a lot. So we've entered free transform. Once we're here, we have this button up here that allows us to warp it. So if we click on that, we get a grid on top of our selected layer. And now we can take these handles and actually pull to curve our tiger. So I'm just kind of wrapping him so that it looks like his tail is going behind the car. And I'm going to pull the middle up a little bit. So he's kind of curving over the shape of the car. You with me? And we'll kind of have this part come out. I'm grabbing these control handles. So each of these corner points has a node, and these corner nodes have these little handles that we can use to kind of bend him around. So I'm just going to pull ever so gently. We don't want to totally make him strange looking, but we'll just get him in here. Like so. Move him around ever so gingerly. And if we were happy with it, we can press Enter on the keyboard or come up here and click this checkmark. Now, we have a tiger laying on top of our slug bug. In our layers panel, we can click to enable this shadow that I put, not the tiger. Up above, we have another style holder layer. So we're going to hold down Alt or Option and drag this little FX icon. And drop it on the tiger. Finally, we've got two adjustment layers here. Let's turn those on by clicking these little eyeballs. Now, these adjustment layers are like rain clouds and their adjustments always rain downward. They are adjusting everything. The tiger, the tiger shadow, this stuff, the background layer. I only want these adjustment layers to rain on the tiger. So to do that, let's start with the Hue saturation one. If we click on the little icon here, double click, that will pop open the properties panel, so we can see the adjustment I made here. And down at the bottom, there's this little I call it the Gonzo cursor. This little button. If we click on that, it's going to clip this adjustment in. So you see that. It's kind of tucked in. So now it's only going to affect the layers below. So we're going to do the same thing for this adjustment layer. So select the color balance layer, click the little gonzo button. It's very subtle. But now, these two adjustment layers and they're related adjustments are only applied to the tiger, which is what I wanted in this case. And finally, let's go down to this Extras layer and click to enable it and look at that. We made a blockbuster of a movie poster. Now, I imagine you might want to save your work here. So let me show you how simple it is. We'll talk about more details of this later. But let's just choose File, Save as navigate to a place that you want to save it, give it a name, and because we want to maintain all these layers and the editability of it, we're going to choose Photoshop for the format and click Save. You're probably going to see a little pop up that asks you if you want to maximize compatibility. Go ahead and enable that option and then tell Photoshop not to pester you with that again. And that'll save you a click every time you save a photoshop file. You can repeat that process with all the other images if you want to save them. If not, that's okay too. Then join me in the next video, and we're going to talk more about layers. 5. All About Layers: In this video, we're going to be working with the two images found in the number four folder. Starting with this one here called layer sandwich. As you've seen, when we make selections and we copy and paste them into other images, they come in as these things called layers. Here we have an image with a number of layers that are already here. They are not currently visible. Right now, we're just looking at the background layer. To help us get a feel for how all this works, let's click to enable the eyeball next to the plate layer. We could turn layers on and off by clicking this little eyeball socket. If we want to move the plate layer, we need to have the move tool, but we also need to select the plate layer. We'll click to make the plate layer active and now we can move the plate around. The move tool has an option in here to auto select the layer based on where you click. If that feature is enabled, I could then click the background and you'll see it deselected the plate, but it can't actually select the background because it's locked. Okay. But if I click on the plate again, it will select the plate layer. If you like that feature, you can leave it on. Personally, it makes me bonkers because I select things by accident, so I'm going to turn that off. Either way, In order to affect any given layer, you have to have that layer active in the layers panel. Right now, we know that the plate is active because this layer is highlighted here. Let's see what else we have. We have a bottom bread slice, which now is not centered on the plate. Let's use the move tool. Making sure the plate layer is selected, and let's put the plate under the bread. There we go. So we have bottom bread. And the reason that I have this layer sandwich here is to help illustrate the concept of layers as like a sandwich. Just like when you're making a sandwich, you might start with some bread. Maybe then you add some spinach to your sandwich. You put some cheese, maybe a tomato. If you're vegetarian, you might put cucumber for a nice crunch, and then you add the top slice of bread. That is how the layer panel works. Just like when you make a sandwich, sometimes the order of the ingredients might matter. For example, if we take this top slice of bread and we drag it down below the cucumbers, you have to be really careful. If you drop it here, let's do this. Let's drag it below the tomatoes. There we go. I'm looking for this blue line here in the layers panel between the tomato and cheese layer. If I drop it here, Well, now the tomato and the cucumber is on top of it. So that's a pretty messy way to eat a sandwich. Sometimes the order is going to matter here. And if you want this piece of bread on the top of the sandwich, then you need to drag it to the top of the layers panel. And you want to make sure if I drop it here, it's going to go into the folder that contains all the cucumbers. I'll show you. If I drop it in there, and now I twirl open this folder that contains multiple slices of cucumbers. Now, the bread is in this folder. To put it out of the folder and just have it be its own layer up here away from this folder, I'm going to click and drag it not here, but all the way up, so we see the single blue line at the top, and then when we drop it, it lands on top and we can close the cucumber folder. Okay? So we can hide that bread. Maybe you want an open face sandwich. That is super. And then if you decide you want the tomato below the cheese, you can click and drag it below the cheese, and now we see it peeking out from below the cheese, right? So the top of the layers panel is the top of your image. It's as if you are looking down at a sandwich you're about to eat. And whatever is on the top of your layers panel is going to be on the top of your sandwich. Okay. So play around with this and see how you want to make your sandwich. You'll notice a couple of things. I have a folder for the spinach and a folder for the cucumber, and that is because each of these little cucumber slices is actually on a separate layer. If we twirl this folder open, you can see all the different cucumber slices. So I grouped them in a folder just to tidy up the layers panel that would otherwise have many, many, many layers. This is just an organizational thing in this case. Go ahead and play with this, move things around, make the sandwich the way you like it. Then let's take a little peek over here at this image. The other thing that's neat about layers is not only can you turn them on and off. You can move them around, you can group them. You can do all kinds of things, including adjusting the opacity and the blend mode. Here we have an image with two layers. We have the background image, which is this, and we have another image on top basically called skyline, and that's this red one here. But let's say we want to adjust the opacity of this. With the skyline layer active, we can come up here into this opacity setting, and if we click on that little carrot, we get a slider and we could drag the slider somewhere in between so that the skyline image fades away to about 50%. Revealing the image below. That's one thing that we can do. I'm going to drag that back to 100%. Another thing that we can do is change something called the blend mode, and the blend mode controls the way that a layer blends or interacts with the other layers. By default, the blend mode is set to normal. But if we click on normal and we just mouse through these options, we're going to get some really cool results. I think this one is my favorite so far. But there are a number of blend modes here. Some of them will knock your socks off. Others will make you wonder what the heck you would ever use that for. But they're very powerful, and it really just kind of depends on what's going on in your image and what you're trying to do. But the important thing to know is that you've got a lot of options here and they can create some very cool effects. So my personal preference for this image is screen blend mode. And that allows us to view both the skyline image and the background image at the same time. So they blend together using The screen blend properties. Those are the basics of the layers panel. You can move things around and change the stacking order. You can play with the opacity and blend modes. But of course, that is far from everything you can do with layers. In the next video, I'm going to show you how I've been creating all of those fancy little effects that we've been applying to our composites. That's right. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to create your own layer styles. 6. Effects & Layer Styles: In this video, we'll be working with the two files in the number five folder. We're going to start with this one here, Bloom. So far, we've seen how we can move layers around and change their blend mode and opacity, and you have seen some pre made effects that I created that we've enabled at the end of some of our projects. Now I'm going to show you how I created those. In this scene, we have a gradient background. We have a bunch of greenery bits all these leaves and things. We have some text that says bloom, and we have a couple of flowers. Then we have these lines at the top and some text. Before we keep going, let me show you something that's really helpful in the layers panel. You can see that we have these two flowers. There's a dark purple one and a white one, and in the layers panel, they're really hard to see in their little preview here. So to fix that. We're going to go to the layer panel menu, and we're going to choose panel options. And we're going to come down here where it says thumbnail contents, and instead of viewing the entire document in that little tiny thumbnail, we are going to view layer bounds. And let's make the thumbnail a little bigger while we're at it, and now when we click Okay, look how much better that is. I'm also going to rearrange some of my panels here because I want some more room for my layer panel. There we go. So I like to have my layers, channels and paths all over here, and so we have a lot more space. Isn't that nice? All right. So let's talk about how we can add some drop shadows to the scene. And we'll start by targeting the bloom layer. And then we're going to come down to the bottom of the layers panel, and we have this little fx button here. And if we click on that, we can choose what type of effect or layer style we would like to add. And down at the bottom of the list is drop shadow. This will bring up our layer style options. And I'd like to think of this as a buffet. Over here on the left, we have all the different things we can put on our plate. We see that right now we've got drop shadow selected and enabled. So here we're looking at drop shadow settings. There are lots of other different effects and styles to play with. But right now, let's just look at drop shadow. By default, the blend mode for the drop shadow will be set to multiply. We can see the drop shadow showing up here in the image. We can adjust the opacity if we want to make it darker. We can adjust the angle. So we can either type a degree in here if we know it or we can just move this around and you can see the shadow moving. So this is basically if you think of it kind of like a sun dial and this points toward the sun. So if we have the sun up here, then the drop shadow is going to come and fall off the bottom right. These settings control the distance, the spread, which is usually best to keep low and the size. So that affects how hard or soft that shadow is going to be. Those are the main settings. So go ahead and set this to something that you feel good about like so. And when you're happy with it, click Okay. And you'll see it adds a little effect icon to the layer. And down below, it tells us which effects have been applied, and we can see it's a dropshadow. So we can toggle the little drawer here of effects our little effect drawer. We can toggle it open or closed by clicking the little arrow. If we want to make changes, we can just double click right on the effects, and that will pop this back open. Right now, though, we're not looking at the drop shadow settings. So we need to click over here to target drop shadow, and now we can come in here and tweak these settings. So I think I overdid the opacity. I'm going to lower that back down. Maybe something like so. Let me just click Okay, so we can always get back here. Double clicking this means it brings up the layer style dialogue, and then you need to click to access drop shadow. If you twirl open the drawer and you double click on the words drop shadow, then it will open with the drop shadow selected. So that's another option. All right. So now we want to take these Drop shadow settings, and we want to apply them to these two flower layers. So we can hold down the option or alt key as we've done before. And I'm just going to drag on the little effect icon and drop it on the white flower one, and we'll take the same thing holding down Alt or Option and drag and drop on flower two. That's one way to copy the layer style. Now we have all these greenery pieces, and that's a lot of clicking and dragging. Another way that we can copy and paste a layer style is if we right click in this empty area of the layer in the layers panel, right click and choose copy layer style. Then we can click this top greenery piece, greenery six, and then shift click greener e one to select all of them. And then we're going to right click in this area somewhere here and choose paste layer style. And now that same layer style has been applied to all of the greenery. If for some reason, you decide you don't want these effects on here anymore, you can right click on any of those layers, and you would choose clear layer style. So that's a look at drop shadows. If we come over to our neon image, we're going to explore how we can combine effects to give this applause text a neon glow. To get started, we'll make sure the applause layer is selected, and we'll come down to the effects button. And this time, we'll choose Bevel and Emboss. Now, don't panic when you see all these settings. There are a lot of them. But it's just trial and error, right? You just want to move things around until you get the look that you're after. In this case, I'm going to set the style to inner bevel smooth, but I'm going to boost the depth up to about 230. We want the direction to be up. The size to be six or seven is good, soften set to zero. I'm going to leave the shading to the defaults, the default gloss contour, and the default highlight and shadow mode here. So Mostly, aside from adjusting the depth, we're not changing a whole lot here. So here's our buffet plate, if you recall. We've got Bevel and emboss on our plate. Next, we're going to add inner glow. Come down here and actually click right on the words inner glow. This switches our settings so we can work with them, and it adds it onto our plate at the buffet. By default, the blend mode is set to screen. We're going to adjust the opacity up to right around 50%. Down here, we want to change the source from the edge to the center. You can play with the size settings if you want to. I'm going to leave mine where it is. I feel like this looks pretty good. To see the effect that this is having, we can toggle this inner glow layer on and off. It's very subtle, but it's essentially strengthening this highlight down the middle of the text. In fact, I think I'm going to boost the opacity a little bit more. So it really shows up. So starting to look like neon, but we need to add one more important piece, and that, of course, is the outer glow. So we'll click right here on the outer glow words. And now we're going to have some fun with this. Let's boost the opacity to 100%. Let's boost the size all the way as far as it goes, which is 250 pixels. The default blend mode for outer glows is screen. If we want it to have a little bit more punch, let's change the blend mode to linear dodge ad. There we go. And finally, we need to change the color of this glow, right? It needs to be this turquoise color. So if we click right here on this little color swatch that will bring up our color picker. And if we mouse our cursor over the image, it will turn into an eye dropper. And we can just click to suck up this color of the text. So you should see something like this here. If you're having trouble grabbing it, You can also enter these values to get what I've got on screen. So you can come down and type R 020040 for the green value and 255 for the blue. Okay. Then go ahead and click Okay. We can see we've got three effects added, click again. And now in our layers panel, we can see that we've got an effect that's been added to the layer. And down below, if our little drawer is open, we can see we've got three different effects and what each of them is. We can also toggle them on and off individually, so we can see the difference that each one is making. And if we want to edit any of them, we can just double click right on the words to pull the layer style dialogue back open. And now, I think you should give yourself a round of applause for everything you've learned so far. It's a lot. And it's just the beginning. But it sure is fun, isn't it? We're gonna keep this party going in the next video where we'll be learning about brushes. 7. Brushes: Photoshop brushes are so much fun. We've dabbled a little bit, but we're about to take things to a whole new level. As we saw before it, the keyboard shortcut for the Brush Tool is the letter B. We saw that we saw that with the brush tool selected, we could come to the options bar or control panel, and we could change the size of the brush up here by clicking this little drop down. We can also change the hardness. But a better way to change these settings is to use our keyboard. So I'm going to click out of here. We can see right now that the brush I have is 508 pixels in diameter. And I can tell that it's soft because this little preview here is fuzzy. To change that, with the keyboard, we can use the bracket keys. Those are the ones next to the letter P, and the right bracket key is going to make the brush bigger. The left bracket key makes it smaller. So the two bracket keys by themselves, adjust the size. If you want to adjust the hardness, you just add the shift key. Shift left bracket key makes the brush softer. Shift right bracket key makes it harder. So here we can see, I hit Shift right bracket key a few times, and now I have a hard edged brush. What's happening is when you hit Shift left bracket key, you're just moving the slider. And each time that you tap shift left or right bracket key, you're moving this in I forget what it is. It's either 20 or 25% increments. So, you know, once you're all the way over here, that's as soft as it can go. But that's what's happening. So the left and right bracket keys are moving these sliders. All right. So what we're going to do right now is let's make our brush about maybe 100 pixels. We'll see. And we want to make it hard. So I'm going to hold shift and tap the right bracket key a few times till I can see the preview quits changing. And I might want it one notch less hard. So I'll do shift left bracket, and let's see what that is up here. Yeah. It's 25% increments. So then let's zoom in so we can see her face better. So I'm going to hold down command or control space bar, and I'm just going to click and drag across her face. And let's make the brush a little bit smaller. Maybe 40 pixels is good. So tap that left bracket a few more times. Now, before we start painting, we want to make a new blank layer because we don't want to just paint on our image like this. So in the bottom of the layers panel, let's click this little plus icon. This gives us a new blank layer. We're almost ready to start painting. We need to pick a color. Two ways to do that. We can open our swatches panel, can find it from window swatches, and we can just pick a color here. Nice pink, maybe. By clicking on it, that will load it over here into your foreground swatch. Another option is to just click the foreground swatch, and that will open up the color picker. The way I like to work in here is I like to have the radio button here set next to the hue value, and that gives us this giant square and the rainbow stripe. So what I like to do is drag this around till I get the hue that I'm looking for rather. Then you can come into this box and click to select the actual shade of that hue. So this is setting your hue, and this is choosing the saturation and brightness of the hue. And you can see the color that you've selected. Here. It shows what my new color is and down below, it says current, but it basically means your previous color. This is the new one, and this is what we had before we opened up this window. I'm going to go with something about like this. You can also type in numbers down here as we saw earlier. Every color value has a numerical code associated with it. And when we're happy with that, we'll just click. Okay. What we're going to do now is come in here and just paint her lips, and it's going to look ridiculous. And I'm going to need to make this brush much smaller and zoom in closer. So, This is like refrigerator art, right? And I'm doing this just on my track pad. So if you have a mouse, that's probably a better user experience, or if you have a Walkm tablet or other pressure sensitive pen, that is also helpful, but not necessary. All right. So I'm just doing something like this. That looks pretty not great, but it's going to look better in a minute. All right, so we've got that painted on here. Now, what can we do with it? Well, in our layers panel, remember that we can change blend modes, and we can change opacity. So right now we've got this set to normal. So this is just paint literally on top of the photo. But let's change how it blends. So instead of a normal blend mode, let's click and choose something like color, which helps, but it's still a little bit too much. So let's also come up here in the layer panel and reduce the opacity. Now we're talking. If we find that we've painted places that we wish we hadn't, we can just press to grab the eraser tool. And the eraser tool is also a brush tool. So the same things apply. You can adjust the size and shape of the eraser using those same bracket keys. So I'm just going to come in here and clean up Some of my messy painting. If I realize I need more paint, I'll just press B to get back to my brush tool and correct as needed. That looks pretty good. Let's Zoom out and view the whole image by pressing command or control zero. And I maybe want to brighten this color up a little bit more. I'll raise the opacity. All right. Next, let's make a new layer again. This time, let's make the brush bigger and all the way soft. Shift left bracket till we have something like this. This is a 300 pixel soft brush, and I'm just going to dab a little bit of blush on her cheeks, make my brush a little smaller and come over here a bit. Like so. Now we're going to take this opacity and drag it way down. So it's just a little hint. Let's make another new layer. And we'll make our brush hard again, so shift right bracket. I'm going to zoom back in. So I'm going to make my brush smaller again. Make sure it's hard or almost all the way at 100% hardness. And I'm going to pick a yellow color. This is from the pastel folder in the swatches panel. Just click right here. I'm going to come over here and I'm going to paint a curved line right over her eyebrows. Then I'm going to show you how to paint straight segments. So I'm going to make kind of a zigzag shape on the top here. So I want to draw a straight line from here to here. To do that, I'm going to click where I want to start. Then I'll move to where I want to end and I'll shift click. And Photoshop will connect the lines in between. So I'm going to come back down and shift click, and it's just going to keep adding these straight segments. And then I can fill this in. Do the same thing over here. I'll click to start and then shift click to just keep going like that. Maybe I want one more segment here. There we go. And over here too. Perfect. Because this is on its own layer, I can grab my move tool if I want, and I can move this. So I'm going to have some fun painting. I'll switch to a blue color and make sure I still have my brush tool, and I'm going to add just kind of a burst over here. On the sides of her eyes. Same thing over here. Put some purple on the top, each of these points. And going to grab a darker pink, make the brush smaller and put some straight lines in here. This image is so joyful. I just love it. And finally, I want to paint with white. Now, your default colors in photoshop are black and white. So if I press D for default, photoshop is going to give us black as our foreground color, which means that's what's going to come out of our brush. But it also gives us white as a background color, which kind of means it's like the color in waiting. It's on deck, ready for action. So to spring it from the back deck to the front deck, ready for action, you just press X on your keyboard to exchange your colors. Now I'm going to just add a little white stripes inside these. So I'm just clicking and shift clicking to do all of that. Awesome. Okay, so that is some fun with just super simple painting. Now, I'm going to show you how we can take this round, simple brush and make it a lot more dynamic. For one thing, I'm going to increase the size by pressing that right bracket key until I'm about to 150 pixels. And I've got white paint by pressing D for default and x to exchange. We can instantly grab white paint, and now we're going to change some settings of the brush. We've been messing around up here. We click this drop down, we've changed size and hardness. Now we're going to click this folder here. This is a little shortcut button that opens the brush settings panel. And in here, we're going to come down to the brush tip shape settings and down below where it says spacing. We're going to drag this out till we get something like this. Now if we come back into the image and we start painting, we're going to get dots. I'm just going to paint a series of waves that are flowing around her. Clearly, the wind is blowing in this image, and so I just wanted to have some fun with that. Now, there are a lot of things you can play with in this panel, but spacing is one of my favorite things to just add some kinetic energy to our piece. So I encourage you to explore these settings. It's amazing what you can do here. Another way to have some fun with this is to play with brushes that other people have made, especially if that other person is Kyle T Webster. To see what I'm talking about, come up here to your brushes again and click this little preview to open this back up. And you'll notice there's a cogwheel here. If we click on the Cogwheel, there's this option to get more brushes. If we give that a click, it's going to launch a web page on Adobe's website where you've got thousands of free brushes from brush super genius Kyle T Webster. Every so often, he releases new brush packs, and you can download all his other brush packs. From this page. So these are just categories, right? Each of these downloads has loads and loads of brushes. For this, go ahead and download the spatter brushes. So you just click on the little button. It's going to launch download. You'll see that it is called spatter brushes and it's a dot ABR file. So you should be able to just double click on that, and it should automatically install into Photoshop. If it doesn't, for some reason, no big deal. Just make sure you downloaded it, go back to your brush tool, come back up here to this cogwheel, and then just choose import brushes, then click open, and we can see that a folder has been added now called spatter brushes. And if we twirl that folder open and pull this window down, we can see all the brushes. In the spattered collection that we just downloaded. And one of my favorite ones is called Beautiful mess. So to select it, I'm going to double click and that will select it and close the panel. Now I'm going to make the brush a bit bigger. And before we start painting, let's create a new blank layer. And then let's press X. So we've got black as our top color here, and I've got a really large brush, and now I'm just going to paint some spatter on this image. So that's pretty cool. Let's create a new blank layer. And let's go back to our brushes. This time, we're going to scroll down and select the brush called spatter punk. Double click to select it and that will choose the brush and close the panel. Let's make the brush way bigger with that right bracket key till we're like one 1,400 pixels. And let's change our color. In my swatches panel here, I'm going to select this bright bright green color. But you select something you like. Then We could paint with this and we would get amazing spatter. But before we do that, let's enable another magical thing in the brush settings. Remember the shortcut button. This takes us back to our brush settings folder. Here, we're going to click to enable something called color dynamics. We're taking Kyle's brush and we're going to tweak it by clicking to enable color dynamics, and we're going to crank the hue slider here all the way to 100%. We want to have a bright color. Color dynamics enabled, and we're going to take the huge iter and crank it all the way up. Then we can collapse this panel by clicking the little arrow here. Now if we come over in our image and we click and drag, let go, click and dag again, look at that. Every time we let up on our mouse and make a new stroke, we're going to be getting different colors. How fun is that? So here, we've learned how to change the size and hardness of our brush. We learned how to paint or draw straight lines. We made new layers for each piece of our painting here. So the lips, cheek, all these different elements are on their own layers, so we can individually adjust blend modes and opacity if we want to. We learned that whatever brush we start with, we can come up here to the brush settings panel, and we can change all kinds of things. Under brush tip shape, we explored adjusting the spacing, and we explored enabling color dynamics and playing around with this huge er setting. We also learned that you can download a boatload of free brushes by coming up here to the cogwheel and choosing get more brushes. And we saw how you can install them. And once you find Kyle's brushes, he's very prolific. So once you have a bunch of his things in here and it gets hard to find what you're looking for because of the sheer volume, Okay. You can also come up in here and search. So if you remember that spatter brush, that first brush we use was called beautiful mess. So if you simply start typing beautiful up here, it will instantly find it for you. A couple of other things worth knowing about the brush tool is that if you have your caps lock key on, your cursor becomes this cross hair instead of the actual brush tip. So just know that. The other thing is When you're done with these really wild brushes and you just want the basic boring round brush back, come back to your brushes and scroll up all the way to the top under general brushes, and then you've got your basic hard and soft round brushes so that you can get those really wild cursors off your screen. The fun continues in the next video where we're going to learn some basic retouching. 8. Retouching Basics: Next up, we're going to talk about some super simple, super basic, yet, incredibly surprisingly powerful retouching techniques. So we'll be working with the images in folder number seven. Starting with this picture of the paddle board. In some images, you may just need to move things. In this case, I want to pick up our paddleboarder and just move her over to make room for some text. Photoshop makes that very easy with the Content aware move tool. So this is part of the J family. So if you press J on your keyboard, that makes it really easy to find in your toolbar. And then click and hold on whichever family members on top and release on the content aware move tool. Then, all we're going to do is click and drag around the object we want to move. Put our cursor inside the selection and then simply click and drag wherever we want to move it to. Let's say right here. And when we're happy with that position, go ahead and press Enter. Photoshop not only moves the selected subject, but also fills in the area it came from. Incredible. The only thing left for us to do is to get rid of the selection by pressing command or control D or coming up to the select menu and choosing D select. In the layers panel, click to enable the extras, and we can see a finished example of why we might want to move something like this. Let's jump over here to our stucco image where we can dream that remodeling would be as quick and easy in the real world. Let's say we want to fix the stucco here. From the same tool family, this time, let's select the patch tool. Because we're not trying to move the damaged stucco, we want to patch it as if it was drywall. So with the patch tool, we're going to do the same thing. We're just going to make a little selection by clicking and dragging around the area that we want to fix, and I'm just doing this on my track pad. So if you have a mouse, that's going to be even easier. So we drag a selection around the problem area, and then we drag it to a solution. And when we let go, photoshop fills it in. And we can click anywhere with the same tool to deselect it. Sometimes when you're retouching images, it's a good idea to work in steps in little bitty pieces. So maybe once we get that fixed, maybe then we can select this area, patch that. Remove this. So we're defining the problem area, and then we're dragging to a solution. Isn't that incredible? Next up, let's click this image here, and we'll zoom in by pressing command or control plus. Holding down the space bar lets us pan around in our image to position it where we want and check out how easy it is to touch up skin. So this time, back to that same family. This time we're going to choose the remove tool. This is a brush like tools. So just like we learned in the last video, we can adjust the size with the left and right bracket keys. All we have to do to retouch these areas is paint over them. Look how simple that is. Amazing. Got a flyaway we want to get rid of. Paint over it. Gone. Hair across your face? No problem. In fact, let's jump over to this tattooed image. Let's zoom in so we can see what we're doing, and let's duplicate our layer by pressing commander Control J. And this way, we can always back up if we need to. And we can also toggle a comparison before and after, which is pretty cool. Now, check this out. We can use that same tool, the remove tool. To click and remove this tattoo. Just like that. I'm going to just do it in small chunks so we don't overwhelm photoshop. We'll come up here, get it from this direction, a little bit more. And then let's just buldoze across her bracelet. And Photoshop does a pretty excellent job. We can toggle this on and off. To see the difference, and it did stumble a tiny bit on the bracelet. But that is easy to fix. Since we haven't talked about masking yet, I'm going to do it a different way. But after you watch video nine on masking, you'll know a better and more flexible way to do this. But in this case, since we haven't learned about masking yet, I'm just going to grab the eraser brush by pressing for eraser, and I'll make my brush soft by pressing Shift left bracket. And I'm just going to erase on the bangle to restore it. Now if we toggle this on and off, we get excellent results. Once again, we just looked at three retouching tools. That's a look at some of the retouching tools. Obviously, there are more things here. There's also the clone stamp tool down here. But honestly, for most everyday typical straightforward retouching, these are my biggest go tos, content aware move tool, patch tool, and remove tool. The important thing to keep in mind when you're working on retouching images is to duplicate the layer. That way you can toggle your before and after on and off. And the other thing is to keep in mind that you might need to work in small bits and use a combination of tools. Next, we're going to shift gears and talk about working with type in Photoshop. 9. Working with Type: When it comes to fonts, you can use whatever you want. For the purposes of this lesson, I'm going to be using some Adobe font fonts because they are free and accessible for anyone with a creative cloud subscription. So if that's you and you want to follow along, we'll need to activate a few fonts before we get started. So if you open your browser to fonts.adobe.com, log in with your AdobiID and then come over here to search for NASA ization as a NASA space agency. Here's the result. We can click to select it, and all we need to do to be able to use it in photoshop is click Add Font. That's it. This message is letting us know that the font is now available in Adobets. We'll click. The next font we're going to use is called Ling Flowers. I'm going to scroll up here and just typeingFlowers. Here we go. We can see that this typeface has three fonts. If we click on it, we'll see that it has a caps Font, a script font and a ding Bat font. So we're going to use all three. So up here at the top, we'll just click Add family. Again, it's letting us know. It's now ready in the various Adobe apps. And let's come back up here again. And the last one we're going to search for is called Owners text. Okay. This one has 12 different versions, but the only one that we're going to use is just called Owners text Black. So you can see, I've already got mine added. So if you want to add the whole family, you can otherwise just add Owners text Black. Once you get those fonts activated, can switch back to Photoshop. We're going to start with this image here from the number eight folder. First thing we're going to do is press T for the type tool. And if we come up here into the control panel, we can choose a font. So I'm going to type NASA and there pops up, NASA ization regular, so we'll click to select it. And now we're going to create the type. So there are two ways to add text to your document in photoshop. You can click and drag, which creates a box for the text. This is nice if you have lots of text, that's like a paragraph, basically. I'm going to delete this. And the other way is to just click. And that creates a single type line. Now, when you do it this way, you won't get word text, word wrapping. So if I just keep typing, it's just going to go on forever. There's no wrap unless I actually hit return to make a line break. So if you're going to need multiple lines and you don't want to have manual breaks, then you'd want to click to Drawbox. So I'm going to just hit escape to cancel add and press delete to get rid of it. So to do that one more time, with the type tool, I'm just going to click to insert my cursor. And now I can and Photoshop will insert some dummy text, and I'm just going to type right over it with the word ah in all as. Now you'll notice the cursor is still blinking. So if I press return, I'm going to get a line break. So I'll hit Delete to undo that. So to set the type, meaning kind of put it down and get our cursor out of here, we have two options. You can come up in the control panel and click the checkmark, or you can hold down the command or control key while you press Enter, and that will set the types. So now you see that the blinking cursor is gone and the text is no longer active, basically. So how can we scale this up? Like everything in Photoshop, there's more than one way to do it. If we want to insert our cursor in here to highlight or select the text, we can come over here and click and drag to select it. But you got to be careful. I'm going to press the escape key and show you why. Right now, I have this cursor that looks like an open book, or it's like a cursor with wings like a little butterfly. If I click with this cursor and drag, oops, I've actually created a new text box. When that happens by mistake, which it will, just press the escape key and then hit delete, and that will cancel it and delete it. What you want to do is really watch that cursor. If I get in close to the text, you see that the wings go away? Now, if I click and drag, I'm not creating a new type layer, I'm just highlighting existing type. Now I can come up here and we can scale the size by choosing from the preset by typing in a number, or by coming over here, and if you hover on top of the T, you get this little double headed arrow, then you can what's called scrub. I'm going to click and drag until I get something pretty big, like that. Again, to set the type now, we need to Command or control enter or click this checkmark. That looks pretty good. Let me grab the move tool here and move this in position. I think I actually want it to be bigger, and don't worry about what color yours is right now. But another way to scale this bigger is to press command or Control T to bring up free transform. And then we just drag from a corner. If we hold Alt or option while we drag, we will scale it from the center outwards. So I'm going to grab something till it's about this big. And again, just like with the type tool, we need to commit this transformation. But in this case, we can press enter because we're not in text mode, we're in transform mode. So you can press enter or again, click this checkmark. All right. Let's talk about changing the color. With this type layer active and the text tool selected. We can change the color not here, which is what you might think, but up here in the control panel. So this little swatch right here when you've got the type tool active, this swatch is the text color. In this case, the color is not going to matter much. You'll see why in a minute. But just for kicks and giggles, let's click on this. And if we want white text, for example, we can click and drag this little dot all the way to the top left corner of whatever Whatever hue you have here, the top left corner will always be pure white. The code for pure white is either six Fs down here in the hex code or values of 2505 for each of the red green and blue channels. Then go ahead and click Okay, and we see that we've got white text. If we look in our layers panel, we can see that we've got a layer for this text. So anytime that you click with the type tool or click and drag, photoshop creates a layer for that text. Let's say that we wanted to take this image here and place it inside these letters. To do that, let's first enable this so we can see it. So we see that we have this picture of the milky way. And if we want to put it in these letters, what we need to do is called clipping. We need to clip it. It's almost like a shrink wrap or like a vehicle wrap. So we're going to take this image and basically shrink wrap it or clip it to the type layer below. So to do this, the two layers have to be directly on top of each other in the layers panel. And whatever it is that you want to wrap around needs to be on top, and the object you want to wrap it around needs to be below it. And then, all we have to do is hold down the alt or option key. And hover our cursor in this line between the two layers. So when we see this little gonzo cursor, now all we have to do is click and just like that, this image gets applied to the layer below. If you want to apply that, you just hold Option or Alt and click again in that same spot. What's cool is we can also use the move tool now to move this around, so you can position it for whatever you think looks best. Let's switch back to the type tool by pressing T. Let's make sure we have white selected up here, the nasalization font, and let's add one more line of text by positioning our cursor up here above, we should see the butterfly wings, and when we cli we're going to get another layer and it's huge, and we're going to type in all caps, see a sense. Now, because this is so huge, we can scale it down by pressing commander control A to highlight the text. Since we are in the active layer, then it just becomes like in any word editor, right? You just select the text, and then you can come up here and scale this down till something like this. So mines at 92 points. Now, to commit this text layer, I'll come back up here and hit commit. I'm going to grab the move tool and drag it into position about there. If you have this contextual task bar on your screen and it's in your way and annoying, you can grab this little bar here and move it away. You can also click the three dot menu and either hide the bar or pin the bar. In the layers panel, we can click to enable the starburst layer. These are some tiny starburst that I added to the image, but they may not align with wherever we've positioned the text. If we need to move them, click to select the starburst layer, use the move tool. There they are to position them appropriately, and then finally enable the details folder down here, and wow that looks good. I'm in awe and I hope you are too. All right. Let's take a look at another image here, burst if you didn't activate the owner's text, Font? Any similar font will work just fine. Now we're going to add some effects to this. So type layers, just like any other layer, we can add effects to it. So in the layers panel, with the type layer active, we're going to come down to the effects panel, and we're going to choose stroke. Stroke is a fancy word for outline. In this case, we're going to drag the size up. We can see we're getting an outline around the text. Right now, this is set to inside. So we're creating some outlines inside. So we can choose a size here. If we go too big, it's going to swallow up the actual letters. I'm going to keep it around here. And we can change the color by clicking on this swatch. So when the color picker pops up, I'm going to mouse my cursor over the image, which gives us the eye dropper, and I'm going to click to select this orange color right from this type right here, and I'll click. So we have one stroke applied, but guess what? Some of these effects can be applied more than one instance. So you'll notice that the stroke effect has a little plus here. If we click, we've added a second stroke. Now, this one, we don't see because right now it's identical and on top of itself. I'm going to click this bottom instance of the stroke. Let's change the color by clicking on that swatch. This time, let's sample this blue color here and we'll click. And let's change the position to outside. And now let's grow it like so. When we're happy with it, we'll click Okay. And now to really set this off, let's warp it. We've seen the transform command a few times. We can apply it to text as well by pressing command or control T. Once we have this active transform box around the text, if we come up here in the control panel, we're going to see this little guy. This is the Warp text option. When we click on that, we'll see some settings change up here and one of them will say Warp we can apply whatever type of warp that we want. In this case, we're going to choose bulge. Here we can set the bend. By default, it set to 50%, which is actually perfect. But just so you know, you can click on the word bend and you can scrub it to dial it down or burst it even more. Choose whatever you think looks good when you're happy with it, press the checkmark or press enter on your keyboard. Now, if you change your mind after the fact, of course, we know we can double click the words here to edit the stroke, or if we want to edit the warp, we can just pray as Command or Control T again, and again, press the little warp button, and we can see that it remembered all of our settings. So maybe we want to dial it back down a little bit or try a different style of warp. And when we're happy with it, we'll just click the checkmark. Finally, let's take a look at this third image here. So this is the looking flowers script font, and it looks pretty, right? But we can make it look even more fancy by taking advantage of open type features. To see what I'm talking about. Let's make sure we've got the type tool active. And up in the control panel, we have another little shortcut button. Just like with the brush tool, when we had the little button up here that opened brush settings. This is going to open up our character at paragraph panels. Here in the character panel, we have all these little buttons down here. I'm just going to focus on these ones. These are toggle switches for some of the features in open type fonts. So this first feature here enables any standard ligatures that a particular font may have. So ligatures are combinations of letters. So here we see a special character for a double T. Here we see a special character for a, a lowercase t, followed by a lowercase h. So if we toggle that off again, we're back to just regular two lowercase Ts and a lowercase t followed by a lowercase H. So some fonts, the designers have built in special ligatures for certain combinations of letters. And they give you a better result. So this is a much nicer, cleaner, easier to read double T than this. So those are standard ligatures. Let's see your everyday letter combinations, double Ts and T H and stuff. This button here enables discretionary ligatures. These are next level extra fancy ligatures. If we enable that, we see that this typeface and its designer put in a special combination for a lowercase i followed by a lowercase d. I just love that. Look at that. The ascender from the D swoops over and dots the. Isn't that just neat? Continuing down this path, we have this option here. This enables something called stylistic alternates. And if we click on that, we find out that we get extra fancy versions of some of these letters. So for example, we get an even fancier version of this liigature. Now, it has a swirl on it. The capital R gets this swirl, the capital N and the P, they all get extra fancy. To make this work, you need a font that has these kinds of characters. And then you need to know how to enable these settings. So this is one way to enable some of these fancy open type features. Another way to access these characters requires a preference tweaking in photoshop. If you're on a PC, you're going to choose the edit menu, and down here somewhere you'll see settings. On a MAC, it's on here under the photoshop menu settings. We're going to go to the type preferences. And here where it says, enable type layer glyph alternates. We're going to click to turn that on. Now when we click Okay, and we come in here and we choose, for example, this capital B. We're going to get this flyout menu with lots of different capital Bs that we can choose from. If we decide we want this one, we can just click to make the switch. So we can go through and see what the different options are for all these different characters to make sure that we're getting the ones we like the best. So that's two ways to access some of these features. One is the toggle switches in the character panel. The other once you enable the photoshop preference to do so. Is to select right from this menu here. One thing that I want to change is this liigature of this Double T is crashing into the R. And if I turn off the discretionary ligatures here, I'm going to lose this ligature, which I love. So what can we do? Well, thankfully, there's a third way to access all of this stuff, and that is Photoshops glyphs panel. So to get to it, I'm going to come to the window menu and choose glyphs. And I'm going to pull it down so I can actually see stuff. And this is just a running list of everything in this font. So up here at the top, it tells us which font we're in. Because this type was selected and highlighted, it automatically chose this type. We want to make sure we're viewing the entire font versus different categories of glyphs. And if we scroll down here, I'm looking for the basic ligature of the double Ts. So that's going to be down in here. And you can see, there are three different versions of this ligature that we can apply. And I want the standard one here because this is the one that's there now and it's crashing into the E and the r. This one would be great if it was at the end of the word because this will create another spacing issue. So I just want this one. So from the glyphs panel, I can just double click to insert it, and I ended up with an extra T, so I'll just put my cursor in here and delete it. And can press Enter to set this type. For now, let's close this panel and close this. If we target this Extras layer and enable it. We're going to see all this fun extra stuff I've added to this. I wanted to show you a fun way to explore ding bats. With the type tool active and the Extras folder selected, use the Type tool and click somewhere in just an empty space right here. Just click to insert a cursor. You're going to see the Lorm psm type. Let's go back to our Glyphs panel by choosing window glyphs. And instead of the looking flowers script font, let's look at the deco version. So same font, same type face, different font. And here we have all these fun little ding bats. And if you want to make them bigger, you can drag the slider here to enlarge the preview. But the one that I'm looking for is this one right here. It's a little corner element. So to insert it, I'm going to double click, and any highlighted text will be replaced with this character, and I'll commit it. Now, what I'm going to do is press commander Control T to bring up free transform, and I'm going to scale it and drag it down here until it lines up just right. So I'm using my arrow keys on my keyboard to nudge it around. And when I'm happy with the position and the size, I will press Enter. Next, I'll switch to the move tool by pressing V. And I'm going to duplicate this by holding down the Alt or option key, and we get this double headed arrow. If I click to start dragging, I can drag it over here to make a copy. And now to flip it around, let's press command or Control T to bring up free transform. And within free transform, I'm going to right click and choose flip horizontal. And it flips the whole thing over, and now I can nudge it into position, and then I'll press return. See what we're doing. See where we're going with this. So now we have two additional type layers. So it's a little glyph, but it's codd as a U. So technically, it's like if you type the letter U with the deco font, you're going to get this character. So that's why the layers panel says. So we have a U layer and we have a U copy layer. And we're going to select them both in the layers panel. So with one selected, you can Shift click to select the other, and with that move tool still active, we're going to hold Alt or Option again and this time, we're going to drag up because we've got both layers selected, both layers will get copied. Now we'll press Commander Control T again to bring up free transform. If we right click inside the free transform box, this time we can choose flip vertical. And then we can nudge it into place using the arrow keys on our keyboard. And when we're happy with it, we press Enter. I hope you enjoyed this little peek into the world of type and type design and typography. It's so fun. I encourage you to play, explore, and you will never look at fonts the same way again. Of course, there are more exciting discoveries waiting to be had here in photoshop. And in the next video, I'm going to introduce you to another one of them called Masking. 10. Masking: In this video, we'll be working with the two images found in the nine folder folder nine. We're going to learn about masking. Masking is huge in photoshop, and it can get as complicated as you want it to get, or it can just be simple. So we're going to keep it simple in this example, and what you learn here, you'll be able to apply to any project going forward. So here we have a couple pictures of my son when he was I don't know, maybe eight months or so. He's eight now. It's been a long time since I got to squeeze these baby cheeks. In these photos, he is modeling a little scarf and hat that I made. In one picture, the scarf is setting nicely. Everything looks good. His expression is pretty stoic and in the other picture, he is smiling, but the scarf is falling off his shoulder. What we're going to do is combine the two together. We're going to take the smile from this image and we're going to blend it in with this So we'll start with the smile image, and we're going to use this Elliptical Marquee tool. So if you don't have that one active here, you're going to click and hold and then release on Elliptical Marquee. And I'm just going to click and drag to draw a selection around his face. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle. And then we'll copy Commander Control C, and come back over here to the scarf image and Commander Control V to paste. We see that Photoshop puts the little smile in its own separate layer. And so that we can properly align things. Let's temporarily reduce the opacity of this layer. To about 50%, grab the move tool and move this into position like so. Now, normally, we might try and line up the eyes. But in this case, I'm going to move his chin so that his chin lines up down here. Then we'll go ahead and adjust the opacity to 100%. And that looks pretty good. But obviously, if we look closely, we can see this hard edge around here, we can see the cutoff down here. And what we want to do is blend this in seamlessly. So you might be thinking, well, let's just grab the eraser tool and start erasing this edge. And that's one way to do it. But with the eraser tool, you don't have the flexibility for fixing mistakes. So instead of erasing, we mask because masks can be undone. So how do we do that? With this layer selected, we're going to come down to the bottom of the layers panel. And this little button that looks kind of like a camera, that's our mask button, so we're going to click to create a mask. And photoshop adds this thumbnail to our layer, and nothing changes because our mask is blank, as we can see here. In photoshop, layer masks work much like masks that you might wear at a costume party. Just like a mask might hide your face, in photoshop, the mask can hide parts of the layer. Nothing is being hidden right now because this mask is blank. So, how do we make this mask not blank? We paint on it using the brush tool, and we paint on it with black paint. So right now, I've got white as my active color, and black is on deck. So I'm going to switch them by pressing x on my keyboard, or if you're too busy drinking coffee with your other hand, you can just click the little switcheroo right here. So now I have black on top. And we've got the brush tool. So just like before, we can change the size of the brush with the left or right bracket keys. And we can change the hardness by adding shift to that. So shift left bracket key is going to make the brush soft. So I'm going to make my brush about 175 pixels and soft and I'm painting with black. And rather than trying to paint on the little thumbnail here, you actually just paint on the image. So look at this. I'm just going to paint over this, and I'm able to restore the original image below. So I'm going to come down here and blend. You see why I lined up the chins to make this part easier. We'll come around here and just go all the way around his little hat. And that's it. We can look at the mask here, and we see that we've painted on it with black, I can see I missed a spot. There we go. And this black is hiding those corresponding parts of this layer. If we want to see the mask by itself, we can alt or option click on the mask thumbnail here, and we can see this is where we've painted. So these areas that are painted with black are blocking this layer from being seen. Sometimes it's easy to forget which color blocks and which color shows the contents of a layer. So I like to think of it like the lights in your bedroom. If the lights are off, it's black, and you can't see. So the black is hiding things, and the white is like letting the light shine and you can see those parts of the layer. So to get back to our regular image, we just alt or option click again on the mask. So let's say that we make a mistake and we paint away too much. Whoops. And there's his not smiling expression. And now this just looks super weird. So what do we do? We've accidentally masked too much. Well, we just unmask it by pressing x to get white paint, and we can turn the lights back on on this part of the layer. So here's this layer by itself. And now we can see if I paint with black, we're hiding things like whoops. And if I need to restore it or unhide it, I'll press X to get white paint and paint it. Back. That's literally all there is to it. So we're painting with black or white on a layer mask so that we can hide or show parts of a layer. In that sense, it is kind of like using the eraser tool, but it's much more forgiving because when you make a mistake, you just switch to the other paint color and paint it back. And to check our work, we can toggle this layer on and off. And we see that we were able to combine that cute, happy smile with a good looking scarf. And now you know how masks work. Join me in the next video to learn about smart objects. 11. Smart Objects: In this video, we are going to be working with the images in folder number ten. Starting with this cat image. And we're going to start out by selecting the cat. So I'm going to press W to grab my wand tools over here, my Wizard tools, which is one of the ways we can access this select subject button, and I'll give that a click. Photoshop will automatically select the cat. And we're going to copy it. Commander Control C. And let's come over here to this scene image to paste Command or Control V. Now, the cat comes in rather large, which is a good thing. In photoshop, it's always much better to have things be big and you scale them down. That's better than taking something and enlarging it, which involves creating imaginary pixels. So we want to avoid that. Now, we need to scale this down to fit this cat in the chair. To do that, we're going to press command or control T, which brings up free transform. And before we do anything, let's take a look up here. Photoshop is telling us that the cat is currently at 100% scale. So this is 100% of the cat's full size. Now, let's scale this down so that it fits in the chair. So maybe something around 33%. C position it like so. So now we see we're at around 33%, and if we press Enter, we confirm the transformation, and everything's great, and there's no problem yet. Until we decide, we want a bigger cat. And then we're like, Whoops. Let's actually scale it up just a bit. So then if we press commander Control T, we see Oh I thought it was at just 33% of its size. But as soon as we scaled it down and we committed that transformation, Photoshop threw away all those extra pixels. So this is 100% of the cat's size now, which is fine, except if we want to enlarge it, now we're going above 100%, and that's not a good thing. So how do we avoid that? With smart objects. So let's undo this, so we're back to our giant cat. And before we transform it, let's come over here in the layers panel, and if we right click, we can choose convert to smart object. So nothing really happens here, except we now see a little icon here. And I like to think of this icon as a suitcase. And in the suitcase, photoshop is going to store all of the cats pixel data. What does that mean? Let's take a look. Let's press Commander Control T one more time. To bring up free transform. And again, we see we're at 100%. And again, let's scale it down to 33% or so and commit it, and I'll switch to my move tool and move him in place here. All right. So now he's in the chair. And so far, it's no different than before. But we have the little suitcase here with all the pixel data, which means. Now if we decide we want to enlarge the cat and we press command or control T, Now, he's not at 100%. Now he's at the same 32 33% that he was because photoshop stored and remembers all the pixels that this cat came into this image with. And those are now sort of kept in this little suitcase along with the layer. And that means if we want to scale it back up again, we can do so not by inflating it and making up fake pixels, but by just using the pixels that it came with. So that is one advantage of smart objects is they pack all that pixel data in and make it easy for you to draw on it. If you need to later, right? Editing and photoshop is really about maintaining flexibility because you never know what you're going to end up wanting to do later. There's a lot of experimentation and doing things in photoshop. So anytime that you can leave yourself that cushion and wiggle room to come back to, then it's generally a good thing. So I'm going to go ahead and cancel that enlargement because he's here. He fits in the chair, and we see that photoshops remembering all of that data. So that is a good thing. Now, let's walk through that again. Let's come to this frame image. And we're going to select the frame, but believe it or not as clean and simple as this image is, select subject doesn't work very well in it. Instead, we're going to use the magic wand tool. It's part of the W family here. The magic bond works by selecting pixels of a similar color. So for example, if I click on the black frame in this image, it selects most of the frame, but it misses some spots. Depending on where you click, you may have different spots than I do. So let's deselect that by pressing Commander Control D. And it turns out that in the control panel up here, we can actually control how picky photoshop is about the color that it's selecting. So if we want to expand our selection, we need to increase the tolerance. So let's set that to something like 75. And now if we come in here and click on this frame, we're going to get a nice selection of the whole frame. And now we can copy that Commander Control C and bring it into our frame image and paste Commander Control V. And before we scale it down, let's make it a smart object by right clicking in the layers panel and choosing convert to smart object. Now we can scale it by pressing Commander Control T for free transform. And we'll just drag this down. Something about like so. And when we're happy with it, we'll press Enter. And just like the cat, photoshop packed all that pixel data here in the frame in case we need it later. So not everything that you put into an image needs to be a smart object. It's a trade off. Because now when we save this image, we're going to have basically an extra large image because it's got all this pixel data in it. You have to balance your flexibility needs with your file size storage limitations. But in this case, it's not a huge difference, so we're going to roll with it. Next, we're going to add an image to this frame. But before we do that, we need to select where we want it to go. And for the best results, we're going to use the rectangular marquee tool. So that is the family second from the top, and we want the rectangular marquee tool. And I'm going to make a selection up here in the top left corner just a little beyond the cutout of the frame. A like this, I'm going to click and I'm going to drag like that. Now let's go get something to put in there. So we're going to go to this rainbow rooftop image, we'll select all by pressing Commander Control A to put marching ants around the whole thing, we'll copy it Commander Control C, and come back over to our scene, and instead of pasting, we're going to choose edit, paste special paste into. And that is going to paste in the whole image while turning our selection into a mask. If we hide all this other stuff. Our whole image is here, but the lights are only on in this section, which is a good thing. Except that the image is too big to fit in this selection. So we're going to transform it. And we want to make sure whenever you have a mask on a layer, you can select the mask or you can select the thumbnail. And in this case, because we want to transform the image itself, we need to make sure that the image thumbnail is selected. Then we're going to press commander Control T, and we can scale this down. It looks like it disappeared, but it was moved outside of the visible area. So I'm going to just scale it to about something like that and then press enter. And we don't need to have those things turned off. So we'll turn them back on. And because we want this to be below the frame, I'm going to drag it in the layers panel below the frame and then drop it. So now the frame is on top. That looks pretty good. Let's convert this now to a smart object by right clicking and choosing convert to smart object. So that's going to package up the image with the mask. And you'll notice we made it a smart object after we scaled it down. That's fine. Because in this case, we are making this into a smart object not to necessarily maintain the giant pixel data. But to maintain the mask and just make it easier to replace this image. So this is another great way to use smart objects if you're working with template or a mock up because it makes it easy to edit. So, for example, let's say that we want to replace this image now. How can we crack open the suitcase, so we have access to the image and the mask to be able to replace it? Well, we just double click on the thumbnail to crack it open. And what just happened? Here's our image. We double clicked on the thumbnail on the smart object, and that cracked open our suitcase and actually put it in a separate image, basically, almost like another separate file. And here we can see the entire image, even what's beyond the bounds of What's visible, and we have the mask associated with it. So let's say we want to paste in a different image now, like this lion. So I'm going to go to the lion image. I'm going to select all Commander Control A. I'm going to copy it Commander Control C. And let's go back not to the scene here, but to the cracked open suitcase smart object that we've got going on in this image. So you'll notice that because this was called Layer three, the cracked open smart object, the suitcase is called layer three PSB. And now we're going to paste in the lion and we'll bring up free transform Commander Control T, just like before, and we'll scale this down. And get it so it fits nicely. Look at that. So incredible. Magnificent, right? All right. So this is in here now. I'm going to press Enter or return to confirm that transformation. And now we still see the original down here. We've got this on top. All we need to do to get it in here. Is hit Save. Not save as. We don't need to give it a name. We don't need to choose where to save it because the reality is it's going to get saved inside this document. So we're taking this whole suitcase. We're going to pack it up, and we're going to put it in this document. So all we need to do is choose file save or press Command or Control S. That's it, and then we can close it by pressing Command or Control W. And just like that, boom. It's in this image. You'll see this a lot if you purchase templates. If you are working with mock ups, you're going to see people using smart objects because it's a really easy way to paste in content and have it update in the main image. So let's try this again. Let's crack open this suitcase one more time. Double click, crack it open. Let's say we decide we want the cat on the rooftop after all. We can Hide the lion, hit Commander Control S, Commander Control W, and here we are. And then if we're like, You know what? I really wanted the lion after all, we can double click, turn on the lion, save it, close it, and it updates. So that is a look at two different uses for smart objects. One, to maintain the pixel data for scaling flexibility, and the other makes it really easy to replace content in things like templates or mock ups. Now, to really finish the scene, I would want to add a drop shadow to the frame, and inner shadow to the image within it. And a shadow on the cat as well. So if you want to experiment with that, I encourage you to play and explore. And when you're ready, meet me in the next video where I'm going to help you make sense of image size and resolution once and for all. It's easier than you think. 12. Understanding Image Size: Let's talk about image size and resolution. First thing is, how do we know what we're even dealing with? One way to get an idea is to look down here in the bottom left corner of our screen and Photoshop has this little info bar. By default, this displays document size. So we can see that it's 17 megs. We know that's a pretty big image. It's not like some web graphic, for example, but we don't have a lot of specifics. Thankfully, we can change the display by clicking this little carrot and instead of looking at document size, we can change it to document dimensions. Now it shows us exactly how many pixels we have for the width and the height, and we see the resolution. So don't panic. We'll talk about this in a minute. But you may be thinking, that's nice for pixels, but what if I want to see inches? We can change the unit a number of ways. The easiest is probably to just turn on our rulers by pressing command or control R. If we right click on the ruler, we can choose our desired unit. I'm going to choose inches and now this display changes to inches. It shows us that this image is 41 " by 27 " and some change and that it has a current resolution of 72 pixels per inch. Now, if we wanted to print this image, we're going to want somewhere 150-300 pixels per inch. So before you panic and think, Oh, my gosh, that's low resolution, it's only 72 pixels per inch. That is true. That's how images spill out into Photoshop. Like, from your camera, if you just take a photo and you haven't manipulated it, you just open it in photoshop. Everything's going to be 72 pixels per inch, which is fine because we have a lot of inches here, 41 by 27. So now we have some better information about what we're actually dealing with. But how do we actually resize this? If we're sending this to a lab, we don't have to worry about it. We just send them the image and we choose the size when we place the order, and their software will manipulate the image to the size that you want and it will print it. But let's pretend you're going to print this on your home printer. If we just hit file print right now, we're going to get warnings, because this is currently 41 pixels long, that's huge. My printer doesn't print that big. I'm guessing yours doesn't either. Instead, we can change the size by coming up to image image size. Here, let's make sure before we do anything, let's check resample. This is the safe way to use this. By unchecking resample, We are taking existing pixels, which we can see here, total number of pixels for the width and the height, and we're simply redistributing them. So let's change this to inches, and we can see this is the current setup of the image. Let's say we want to print this on our home printer, and we're going to print this as let's say 12 " wide. The height would be essentially 8 ", and the resolution would be 250, which is perfect. This would make a great eight by 12 print. So how did that get from 72 pixels per inch to 249? Well, we basically scooped up all those pixels, and instead of spreading them out over 41 ", we scooped them all in and spread them out over 12 ". So we've got more pixels in every inch. Right? The number of pixels stayed the same, but we spread them over a smaller area. So I like to think of pixels like peanut butter. And if you've got only one spoonful of peanut butter, and you spread it out over a giant surface, like let's say a tortilla, the peanut butter is going to be spread really thin. But if we spread it out over a smaller area, like let's say a cracker, the peanut butter is going to be much thicker. You're going to get more peanut butter in each bite. That's how resolution works. So by making the physical dimensions, smaller, the amount of pixels in each inch went up. So we still have the same number of pixels. They're just spread out differently. So if we click Okay, nothing happens other than this updates. So now if we hit print and we have the right size paper like eight by 12 paper in the printer, then we shouldn't get errors because printers can print eight by 12. So that's how image size works. And resolution, right? They're connected. But let's bring that back. So again, age, image size, and let's say that you want to take this image and you want to put it on the web. Like, let's say you want to use this in an e mail or something. You would never want to put a almost 3,000 pixel wide image into your e mail. Like, that's way too big or on the web or whatever, right? So this re sample option, allows us to get rid of pixels or to make them up. But again, we want to avoid that. So anytime that you enable re sample, generally speaking, you want to be doing it intentionally to downsize your pixels. Before we turn that on, anything we type here, even if we type a width of one, we're going to have a wildly high resolution. And if we make our width, like 2000 20,000 ", now we've got one pixel per inch. So now you could you could play checkers on your image. The pixels would be so big. And that's with resample turned off, right? So the dimensions up here are not changing. The number of pixels is not changing. They're just being redistributed. Let's take this back to 12 inch width. And now if we enable re sample, now we see that the link between the resolution and the width and height has been broken. That means we can now get rid of pixels. Maybe we want to change this to pixels. Now instead of total number of pixels measuring 2,990, let's say we do want to put this in an e mail. Maybe we're going to use 800 for the number of pixels. So now we see that up here at the top, our total dimensions have changed because we enabled re sample, we're now throwing away some of our pixels. And that sounds bad. But there are times when you want to do that, especially when you're putting anything on the web, right? So sample is not all bad. It's a good thing, but you just want to make sure you use it carefully, not by accident, which is what tends to happen. So now we see that our image is going to go from 2000 almost 3,000 pixels down to a width of 800. And we can see that our image was 17 megs in size, and now it's going to be one meg. And when we click Okay, we're going to see that the image gets much smaller on our screen because it has less pixels. That's a look at image size and resolution and how they are connected. I'm going to do this, so we're back to our large eight by 12 image. If we want to change the shape of this image from a rectangle to a square, we need to cut it, and we do that with the crop tool. So I'm going to press C on my keyboard for crop tool. And up here in the control panel, we have a number of presets here. They're divided into sections. So here at the top, we have ratio or with height and resolution. In this middle section, we have ratios. So we see numbers here, but these are not actual sizes, and I'll explain that in a minute. And down below, we have some actual presets for different sizes. For now, let's come up here to one to one square. And if we select that, we see a preview of our crop. We can see in the area within the square, this is what would be left of our image. If we cropped it, we'd be cutting away these edges. But we can also drag around the image within the square, so we can choose which part of the image gets cut and which doesn't. Maybe we want to crop it this way. So we can drag to the crop that we want, and then we can press return. So you'll notice we cropped it to a square, so we have a ratio of one to one for the width and the height. We didn't tell photoshop what size to make the square. So because our image was 12 by eight, and we cropped it to a square that was as tall as our image. So if this sides 12 ", this side is eight, and when we crop, we end up with an eight inch square. So when you choose a ratio, just keep in mind, you're not choosing a size, you're just choosing a ratio. Let me undo that. Let's say we want to crop this to an actual size. So instead of ratio, we'd want to pick with height and resolution and set a with and height of let's say 4 ". We're going to leave the resolution blank to just see what we end up with. The idea being that we don't want to give ourselves less resolution than we would naturally have, and we don't want to generate imaginary pixels either. So let's just leave it blank and Photoshop will take care of it for us. Let's go ahead and click Commit. And we have our crop. And now we can see that we have not only cropped this from a rectangle into a square, but we've also resized it by designating not just a ratio but actual width and height dimensions. So now we have a four by four image and the resolution ends up being over 300. So we've got more than enough. Once you get above 300, it's kind of just extra. So this is great. So now we could print this, we could send this to a lab, we could do whatever. It's going to be great. Now, where people get into trouble with the crop tool. If we undo this, let's go back to our settings, and let's leave this blank one more time. But instead of doing a maximized crop like this, let's come in and crop just to this little balloon here. Let's say we want to make this 4 ". So we're leaving resolution blank, and now if we press enter, we see that to make this four by four, we're going to end up with only 81 pixels per inch. That is not going to look good. If I undo that, the reason that I tell people to leave this blank in most cases is because if you don't, and you type a number in here like 300, and then you do what I call death by cropping, which is ops. Which is again, to draw your crop really tight like this coming in. Because I told it, photoshops like a genie. Because I told it that I wanted 300 pixels per inch. When I crop, I'm going to get it. Now I've got a four by four with 300 pixels per inch, but they are made up pixels. That's possible. Yes, you can do it. It may not look terrible, but it's just not the way we do things. So I like to tell people to leave this blank so that you don't force photoshop to make up pixels unknowingly. If you leave this blank, you can do your crop, whatever you want, and then you will see, do you have enough pixels to really pull it off or not? And then you can decide if you want to go ahead with it or try something else. So that's a look at image size and resolution and cropping in photoshop. There's definitely more to know here, but those are the basics. Now that we know how all that works in the next video, we're going to talk about file formats and how to save your work. 13. File Formats: Let's talk through how to save your work and how to save a couple of the most common file formats. Most of the time, you're going to be starting your projects with a JPEG like this. As you work in photoshop, you're probably going to add layers to your document. Maybe something like this. And let's say we crop this. To a nice square about like so. We started with a JPEG, but now we've got all these layers happening here. And if we think we might ever want to come back and make some changes to this, then we need to save these layers, and JPEGs don't save layers. So to save this as a photoshop document, we're going to choose File, Save as. I'll just go to my desktop here and I'm going to call it wildflowers, word art. Okay. And Photoshop is automatically suggesting the photoshop format for us because of all the layers. So that's a good thing. We'll go ahead and click Save. This becomes our main file, our working file, our source file, where we've got all of our pieces saved forever with the document. But now, if we want to let's say print this. We don't want to send someone our layered Photoshop file. We want to send them a print ready file like a JPEG. But you'll notice if you come up here and choose File, Save as. We don't have the option to choose JPEG here. So what we need to do is click Save a copy. Now we can choose JPEG. And we can change the name to let's say Wildflowers Word Art and we'll call it print. We'll choose JPEG. I'm going to put it on my desktop and hit Save. If you see a message about maximizing compatibility with your photoshop document, That's a good thing. You want to enable that, and to avoid seeing that message, every time you save a PSD, check the box to not show it again. Once we hit save, we're going to be confronted with JPEG options. JPEG file formats include some compression, and you can tell photoshop how much compression you want to have. Lower amounts of compression give you a higher quality file. So in this case, the range goes 0-12 for quality. So because this is intended for print, I'm going to leave the quality set to the highest of 12 and click Okay. So what's confusing a little bit is we've made the JPEG and saved it, but we are still here looking at our PSD file. So the JPEG is nice and safe on our hard drive. It's not open right now. The PSD file is, and the PSD file still has layers. So let's say now that we want to make another version of this, maybe to use in a marketing e mail or on a blog or some other type of social post. We don't want to send a PSD file online, and we also don't want to post our big full sized image with all these pixels. If we used that in an e mail, for example, it would be huge. So let's come up to image. Image size, and let's enable re sample, and let's scale this down to just 800 pixels and click Okay. So it's going to get very tiny on our screen. Of course, if we press command or control and the number zero, it will fit the screen again. But now, this image has just 800 pixels. So let's save a version of this. Again, we can choose file, but we already know if we choose Save as, it's not going to give us the option for JPEG. Instead, we'll choose save a copy. And we'll choose JPEG. And this time, we'll add a suffix of 800 on the end. That way, we can tell at a glance which files for print and which files for the web. Then we'll click Save, and again, we'll get JPEG options. This time, because we are planning to post this on the web, we are more concerned with the file size, and maybe we want to compress this a little bit. So I'll drag the quality down to eight and the file size will shrink to under 200 K. Now we can click Okay. Again, we've made two JPEGs now, but the file that is open on our screen is still the PSD. So that's what happens when you do file and you save as a copy, you're creating that file and saving it on your hard drive. But then it's not open in photoshop. You're just kind of saving it and putting it away. So we're still looking at our photoshop file here. So now, if I go to close this, it's going to warn me that I haven't saved my changes. Of course, the changes that I've made include downsizing it to make that 800 pixel JPEG. I've already saved my PSD. I don't want to save the fact that I downsized it to 800 pixels. So I'm going to say, don't save because I know I already saved it. So I don't want to save the changes. And now let's open those files and take a look. So here's our PSD. Here's our print JPEG and here's our 800 pixel JPEG. We'll open them all up. Here's the PSD with all of its layers, and we can see its full size here, currently 55 ". Okay. 72 pixels per inch. So nice, big and healthy file with layers. Here is our print version, same size, 55 ", 72 pixels per inch. But because it's a JPEG, it doesn't have any layers. And here is our 800 pixel image that we can see because our display is set 2 ". It's showing us 11 ". But if I turn on rulers, Commander control, and we right click and change this to pixels. Now we can see down here that it is 800 by 800 pixels. That's how things work in photoshop. You usually have your JPEG source files, your PSD composite. And then, depending what you intend to do with that image, you might save a print version, you might save a web version. You might save a square version, a vertical version, et cetera. So you want to make sure you're organizing all of this stuff in a way that's going to be manageable because when it comes to files and file formats, there is no one size fits all. That's a look at a couple of file formats and how you save your work. In the next video, we're going to put everything all together with a little help from AI, to create a composite. 14. Compositing and AI Basics: Welcome to the last video where we are going to put this all together to practice what we've learned and learn about some of photoshops built in AI features. So we're going to be using these two images from Folder number 13, starting with this giraffe. To access the select subject button. You know me. I like to press W for my Wizard like tools, and then we'll click Select Subject. To make sure that we are doing a good job selecting this fur, we're going to come up here and choose Select and mask that pops up our select and mask workspace, where if you recall, we can change our view. So we are looking at the on Black view, and I've got the opacity up to 100%, and this makes it easy to see the background bits that got left behind in the giraffes fur. So we can refine that with our refinement brush right here. The second one from the top. And I'll make my brush a little bit bigger using that right bracket key. And then I'm just going to paint along this edge and look at that. Photoshop just cleans it all up. And when I let go, it'll kind of bake it in, and we can go around here and clean up any other bits. That looks good. We want to make sure that we are outputting this to a selection, and we'll click Okay. Now we're going to copy Command or Control C, and come over here and paste in this cloud image by pressing Command or Control. V. Our giraffe is nice and big. Before we scale him down, let's pack up all those pixels into a smart object by right clicking in the layers panel here and choosing convert to smart object. So now we can scale it non destructively by pressing Command or Control T. If you can't see the corners of the bounding box on the giraffe, a neat little trick is to press command or control and the number is zero, and that will scoot you back so you can see it all. And then we can just drag this down. I'm going to put them in here about like so. And when we're happy with that, we'll press enter or click the checkmark to commit it. He's cute. Look at them in there. All right. So that's it as far as actual source images for this composite. Next, we're going to play around and let photoshop make up the other parts of the scene using generative fill. To get started, we need to define the area that we want to fill with something. Let's come over here to the Lasso family. They're the third from the top. And if we click and hold, we have a number of family members here. We just want the regular lasso. This tool works by letting us just free hand draw a shape. I'm going to just draw a blob here. Something like this. So you just start by clicking and dragging to draw around, and then when you get back to where you started, you let go and Photoshop will close your shape and you have a blob like this. This is where we're finally going to use this little floating toolbar that might have been in your face the whole time. This is called the contextual task bar. And if you don't see it on your screen, like everything, you can find it from the window menu. Clear down towards the bottom, contextual task bar. Here, We can now enable generative fill by clicking this button right here. Photoshop is going to let us know that there are user guidelines that you need to follow. If you want to read them, you can click here to do that. We will agree, and now we can type in a prompt here. So I'm going to type steam punk flying machine. And the joy of this is, who knows what we're going to get, right? This is all being generated on the fly. So my results will be different than yours. My results will also be different from what I did previously when I was exploring this. So who knows? But when we're ready, we'll go ahead and click Generate, and then Photoshop will work its magic. You'll notice that a couple of things have happened. We've got a new layer here for our generative layer. Photoshop automatically created that, and it popped open our properties panel. And now we're looking at three potential steam punk flying machines. So we can cycle through them a couple of ways. We can come to the properties panel and we can click to see the different things that it has created or we can also tab through them using the buttons in the contextual taskbar. If we're not in love with any of these, we can click generate again. That's going to generate three additional options using that same prompt. And if we extend this window, we see that it kept the first three that it generated, and it made an additional three options. Maybe we want to try typing steam punk flying Zephyr and hit generate. I had really good luck with this one time, and the next time I tried it, it didn't work so well, so I don't know what we're going to get here. These are fun though, right? Look at that. All right. What we need to know at this point is that when you type in a prompt and you generate it, photoshop is going to give you three options. You can generate more, you'll get another three options. You can even change the prompt and hit generate. You'll get another three options. What's really cool is they're all here and they're going to stay here unless you delete them. As long as you save this document as a PSD, These versions are all going to live right here in this layer. So even if you close the properties panel, anytime that this layer is selected, if you open the properties panel, you're going to find those different variations waiting for you. And if you forget what you used for a prompt, if you click on any of the variations, it actually saves it with the prompt. So if you forget or you want to iterate on it, that information is saved as well, is pretty cool. So let's just pick. I like this one. I'm going to go with this one here. So that's it. There's nothing to do. We can leave all of these in here. If there are some we know we don't want, like, I know I don't want this one. I can hit the little trash can to delete it. Don't care for that one or that one or that one. They're fun, though, right? Okay. So anyway, I'm just going to delete some of those because keep in mind, they will get saved with your document, and, you know, if you go wild here and you've got 300 variations, that will definitely increase your file size. So just something to think about. But I'm going to keep these three. So it's important to note, too, that Photoshop has filled this entire selection that we drew with the object. In other words, it's not on a transparent background. So if we grab the move tool and we're like, I just want to move this over here. It's going to come along with the generated background. So if that is where you want to put it, then your best bet is to make a new selection here and regenerate something in that location. Okay, so that is a steam punk flying machine. How about if we give our giraffe some aviator goggles? Let's go to the Elliptical Marquee tool, and let's choose the add to selection option. And I'm going to come down here and just click and I'm going to hold shift so I get a circle. I'm going to drag one circle there. And because we've got this ad modifier turned on, I can put another circle over here. So I've got two circles. They're slightly overlapping so that when I let go, we get this goggle shape. What's cool is if you want to move the selection, you can use your arrow keys to nudge that around. I feel like I didn't have it in a good spot. I'm just going to nudge it over to there. Now I'm going to click generative pili. At this time, I'm going to type aviator goggles. Oh. Hmm. Well, those are definitely more wild than the ones I got before. Let's try this again by typing in vintage steam punk, aviator goggles. Let's see what that does for us. Oh, these are fun. Okay. I'm going to go with those. And lastly, let's go back to our Lasso tool here. And if this contextual task bar is in your way, which for me, it moves around based on where you're working and what you're doing, which I really don't like. I'm going to move it over here and I'm going to pin it by going to the three dot menu and choosing pin bar position so that it's just here and it doesn't get on top of my work. Because now I'm going to draw a area for a scarf to be blowing in the wind. I'm going to use this free hand lasso just lasso tool. I'm going to click and drag to draw basically where I want the scarf to go. And I want to have it flying in the wind, so I'm going to give it a shape like that. So while we mostly prompt with the words that we type here, the selections that we draw also do quite a bit to hint photoshop towards what we are after. Now I'll type gender to fill again, and I'm going to type scarf flying in the wind. And I'm letting this render in real time, you get a sense of how long this really takes. Oh. That's awesome. We got three different versions. Oh, of course, that yellow is my favorite. I'm definitely going with the yellow one. And that's all there is to it. You can see that the AI stuff, the generative fill is super easy to use, and a lot of fun. So now let's see what we can do to tie all these pieces together and really give this image a nice finish. So one thing I want to do is tone down the color a little bit. So remember, in our towards the beginning of this course, we made some image adjustments over here. But this was destructive. So definitely want to make these non destructive edits. So in the bottom of the layers panel, I'm going to go to the little Yin Yang and let's choose hue saturation. And this puts an adjustment layer at the top of our image, so it's going to affect everything below it. Adjustment layers operate kind of like rain clouds and their adjustments in downwards. So if there was a piece of this image that we didn't want to adjust, we could just drag it up above the adjustment layer and it won't be affected. For example, if I take the saturation and drag it all the way to the left, and now I drag the scarf layer above the adjustment layer, the scarf won't be affected. So back to the saturation adjustment layer. With this active, we see the controls in the properties panel, and I don't want to desaturate it all the way. I just want to low it out a little bit. So I'm going to drag it to -23. The good news is we can always come back and change this if we want to. That looks good. Next, let's give it a bit of a vintage tint by adding a solid fill color. So let's come back to the little Yang and this time, let's choose solid color. And we get a solid color here and our color picker opens up. And remember that it's kind of a two part process, right? The first thing we want to do is select the hue here. I'm going to drag this down to the orange section and pick a sepia kind of color and then click Okay. And now let's change the blend mode. Remember that we can also adjust the opacity. So you're not stuck. Like if you like this look, I kind of like the hard light blend mode, but it's still, you know, too intense. So once I choose the blend mode that I want, then I can come over here to opacity and let's dial that down. The last thing we might want to do is add some noise to our image. Now, it's funny because early in digital imaging, we were all about reducing noise because it was everywhere. And now our digital images and generated things like this are so squeaky, clean that they look fake because they don't match the rest of the image. Let's add a little bit of noise to this image by creating a new blank layer and coming to the filter menu, and we're going to choose noise add noise. Okay. Just kidding. I forgot that we need to fill this first with something. Let's go to edit fill, and let's fill it from the contents here. Let's choose something magical called 50% gray. Now, before we add the filter, let's make this a smart object. That way, we get a smart filter, and we can edit it and adjust the noise value later. I'm going to right click and choose Convert to Smart object. Now we'll choose Filter. Noise, add noise. We want to add monochromatic noise and a pretty low amount, which is kind of hard to tell how this is looking. I'm going to drop that down to 4%. And we'll click Okay. And now for the magic, we need to change this blend mode from normal to something magical that works with this 50% gray, which is overlay. In overlay blend mode, 50% gray disappears. Just straight up becomes invisible. But because we have speckles of noise that are darker and lighter than 50% gray, the noise will stay. But the 50% gray will disappear. And now if we zoom in on our generated image like this little flying contraption, we can see some noise in it. And if we hide that layer, you probably can't tell on your screen, but I can see it on mine. So if you're following along, you should be able to see it on your screen. But in the video, you probably won't see it. And what's nice is because this was a smart object before we applied the filter, that means our filter is a smart filter. Which means? If we want more noise or less noise, we can just double click down here where it says, add noise, and we get our settings back, and we can add to it or subtract from it. So I might boost it a bit. Like maybe I'm going to go wild and say eight. The nice thing is, we don't have to choose. We can come back and edit it anytime. And so that we know what's what later. Let's double click Layer two, right on the words right here where it says Layer two, and let's type noise and press Enter. And of course, we want to save this beautiful masterpiece we've created by choosing file. Save A, and we'll call it genius composition. And be sure to choose Photoshop for the format and save. You did it. Bravo 15. Next Steps: I'm so glad you joined me for this course. We covered a lot, didn't we? I hope you come away from it all feeling great about everything that you've learned and confident that your photoshop journey is off to an awesome start. So keep in touch and let me know how it's going for you. You can find me on social as K Plicnith or online at Kara plcnith.com. Thanks again for joining me and until next time. Happy photoshopping.