Adobe Photoshop: Creatively Compositing Photos for Beginners

1. Course Introduction: Welcome to enlarging your pet in Photoshop. In this course, we're going to have a ton of fun creating this effect. The best thing is you don't need any experience. You can use your cell phone camera. We're going to learn Photoshop together for the absolute beginner. My name is Lucas Ridley and I work in the film and visual effects industry as an animator. What we'll be creating is basically a visual effect shot in one frame. So join me in this class where we'll begin with how to take the best photograph for this effect. I'll walk you through the day of the shoot, what to look out for, and how to pose your subjects, and the technical reasons behind the way that we're going to need to take the photographs. Then I'll show you how to pick the right photo that's going to work best and walk you through step by step, inside of Photoshop, how to make this effect with your dog so it looks as believable as possible, and you can share it with your friends on Instagram and Facebook, and make new Christmas cards and everything. It's going to look really cool. So join me in this class and I look forward to seeing you there. Thanks a lot. 2. Course Overview: Hi and welcome to the first lesson of this course, which is just going to be a quick overview of the broad concepts we're going to cover. First, we're going to cover the photography. We're going to take two separate photos, one human and one pet. They're going to be in the same location, under the same lighting conditions. Then, we're going to combine these two photos in Photoshop. If you don't have Photoshop yet, you can get it at Adobe's website and make sure to click the "Free Trial". This course is meant for the total beginner. You don't have to have any experience in photography or Photoshop, and you don't need any fancy cameras. Join me in the next lesson where I will discuss some more technical aspects so you can understand the reasons why we're doing what we're doing in the photography section. Thanks for watching. See in the next lesson. 3. Relative Pixel Size: In this lesson, I want to discuss one of the more technical aspects of this course. I want to talk about relative pixel size, and that's the reason we're going to need to move closer for the pet photo when we do our two photos. Relative pixel size basically means when we have two photos, we want the subjects pixel density to match. Let me talk about what I mean by this. Let's say we have you, the photographer, you're taking a photo of two subjects, subject A and subject B, and these are the representations of the pixels. You're at the same distance from each subject. After we take the photos and say we want to scale up subject B. If we scale up subject B, then the relative pixel size will increase for subject B, and when we put them side-by-side or if we put them together, then the pixel size will be much larger in subject B than in subject A and they won't match, and it'll be visually obvious that this is Photoshop and they don't match. Here's a specific example. If I were to just take my dog in this photo and scale them up because we're at the same distance from the camera, like in that previous example. If I just scale him up and then we zoom in, you can see the pixels are much bigger on the dog than on me. We need to figure out a way to fix this and moving closer to the pet subject when we take the pet photo will solve this problem and I'll show you why. Let's look at this example again. We have subject A and subject B, and if we move closer on subject B, we can see we're going to get a higher density of pixels for the same subject. We're basically going to enlarge the subject with our feet by moving closer to it. Now when we take the two photos and compare them, and if we enlarge the pet photo and we compare the pixels now, we can see that they're the same. The relative pixel size matches between both the subject A and subject B. There's also a possibility that we get maybe too close to the pet. If that happens, the pixel density size is much smaller than the human subject or subject A, then we actually might have to reduce the quality of the pet photo by pixelating a little bit so that we fake the correct relative pixel size between both images so that they match. Now that we understand this is a factor, what distance do we need to be for each subject? Let's take this dog for example. He's about one foot tall, and let's take a typical human subject would have five foot eye line. If we're going to want to match this one foot tall subject to another subject that's about five feet tall. We have a ratio here of one to five. What we need to do is lower the camera one-fifth of its distance. We also need to bring the camera closer to one-fifth of its distance. We need to go vertically, one-fifth down and horizontally one-fifth over. That way, the relative pixel size will be the same between the pet subject and the human subject when we compare them later next to each other. The subjective enlarging your pet sounds pretty easy in Photoshop, just scale it up. But when we look at a topic like this, it's actually a little more complex, and in the photography stage, we need to be aware of that so that we can move the camera closer and get more pixels for that subject so that they will match the amount of pixels that were getting in the human subject so that when they're side-by-side, they'll appear to be taken in the same photo. Thanks for watching the next lesson, we will talk about the day of shooting and what you need to do. 4. Day Of Shooting: In this lesson, we will talk about what you need to consider the day of shooting. The first thing you need to think about is the location. We want to give ourselves as much an advantage as possible. Ideally we don't want to shoot in tall grass, where the grass will occlude the pause of the pet, and we don't want any weird shadows that we're going to have to Photoshop out or either match. The next thing we want to do is look at the equipment. We don't really need a fancy camera for this, but anytime that you're photographing pets, they're not going to stay still for very long, so it's helpful to have a burst mode, which on an iPhone, for example, you can get to simply by holding down the shutter button on the screen and it'll take a series of photos. The other thing that you're going to need is dog treats or treats. Again, anytime that you're trying to photograph dogs, you are going to have to try to keep their attention so that you can actually get the photograph, so having treats or toys or something that they're going to look at, is definitely something you're going to want to bring. Then of course, the last thing is patience, because photographing pets is not particularly easy and it might take some time to get the correct shot. The first thing I do when I get to the location, is start to think about the distances that we need to take the two separate photos in. First, the pet photo and second the human photo. Right here, I'm walking out 20 feet basically, so that that's going to be the distance to get a full body shot of the human in the image. From that 20 feet, I can do the math about the relative pixel size that we talked about in a previous lesson. I can do the math knowing that one-fifth of this distance is going to be four feet, we're just going to be where I want to take the pet photo. If you're not clear on that, go back and watch the relative pixel size lesson, where I talk about why this ratio is important because we need to get the same pixel size and each of the photos for each of the subjects. Here I'm marking the forefoot mark from where I'm hoping my subject is going to stay. First, let's just say that nothing is going to go to plan, even though I marked out all of these distances. The pet is going to move wherever they're going to move, and you're just going to try to get the photo whenever you can. I would say to take the pet photo first because you want to take the photos of the human and the pet and very similar lighting conditions. It's going to take so long to get the pet photo, that if you took the human photo first, the sun could move quite a bit, and so the lighting conditions wouldn't be as close to what the possible pet photo that you chose that you got in that session. So take the time to get the pet photo first and then you can quickly get the human photo, because that won't be a lot quicker and easier and it will be much sooner to the time that you took the pet photos, so that the lighting conditions will be very similar. The second thing I will say, is to try as best as you can to keep the treat or toy as low as you can in their eye line because if the pen is going to be much larger than human, it'll break the illusion that there are larger if they're also looking up because that's something and pet always does. They always look up because they're smaller than humans most of the time. So we want to keep the tree or the toy low so that when we enlarge them, their eye-line looks like they're looking down or looking at the same height as people. That's definitely something to keep in mind, and it's definitely challenging to get all of these pieces to work together when the pet has no idea what you're trying to do, of course. I would just say, use the burst mode and get as many photos as you can, so that you have as many options later to pick from. The last thing I'll say too, is to consider your background and where the pet will actually be in the photo. In this example, I wanted to make sure that we saw some of the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to place my human subject in a place where the dog placed relative to them, wouldn't obscure the background too much. Just know that in Photoshop later, we're going to totally take the dog out of their backgrounds. Their background doesn't really matter, it's mainly about the human background that we want to be concerned with. Imagine in our head where the enlarged dog will be, because we don't want to take a picture of the Statue of Liberty or something, and then we enlarge the dog to be on the correct side of the person, and they're blocking the background subject that we're wanting to include. Just keep those things in mind and I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 5. Photoshop Introduction: Welcome to the first class inside of Photoshop. Before we get started, I want to show you how I organize my photos. You can see I had two folders, one with a Canon 7-D camera and one with my iPhone photos. Then I made a Favorites folder so that I could group them into that section. I took photos with both cameras just to show that there's not really that big of a difference and you can use whatever camera you have available to you. Let's take a look at some of these photos and see what we're looking for when looking for a favorite. Of course we're not looking for this kind of a photo, which we will probably have a lot of anytime you're trying to take photos of pets. Let's scroll through these and see what we're looking for. As I mentioned in the previous video, you want to try to hold the treat or the toy down low, because we want the eye line to be even with where the human head would be in this photo. This one's a little too high. We want to try to find one where he's looking down a little bit more, so it doesn't break the illusion that he is very big. Because if he was very big, there'd be no reason for him to be looking at the sky all the time. Let's just scroll through here and some of these are good examples of having the eye line being lower. Again, this is a good example of showing how to have the treat or the toy be at an eye line that we can work with in Photoshop so that it creates this illusion that he is big and he can look down on things or at least at eye level with the other humans and it's going to be in the photos. We also want to look at the shadow and make sure that the shadow isn't being blocked by anything because we're going to want to bring that into the photo as well. We're going to eventually cut out all of the dog. We want to make sure that the contact points and where his feet are, are not broken up by grass or something else like this. That's why if we took the photo in tall grass, we'd have a problem because the grass would scale up as he would and we'd have to Photoshop out the grass in front of his feet. If we're not shooting grass or something like that, we can use that to our advantage and not have to worry about those contacts as much. But we want to make sure that we can see the shadow pretty well and the leash isn't blocking his skin or fur, that is. We want to make sure that we are close enough to him. Some of these are a little too far away. But you want to just make sure you get enough photos that you have a lot to pick from. Great. Let's go into the Favorites folder and see which ones I've picked here. I have picked two favorites inside the Favorites folder. There's a couple of different ways that we can bring these in. We can click and drag them in. That's the way that I'm going to show you how to do it. There's one other way that we can open up these files and have them be in the same file in Photoshop. We can go to File, Scripts and go on to Load Files into Stack. If we select the files and shift-select them so we have both of them and and then open the list here and then we can just say "OK" and they will open up into the same tab basically and be on their own layer. That's also a way to open the files together. You can also go to File, Open and just choose the photos, but I'm just going to drag and drop this in here. Now you can see that we have these two tabs open. If you can't see these, you might be in full screen mode. You get to full screen mode by hitting F. You can toggle through different types of full screen modes. Just in case you can't see those tabs hit F and make sure you're in the right full screen mode. Let's start with the dog image. I'm going to hit Command A to select everything and then Command C to copy it. Then we can go back over to the person's photo and hit Command V to paste it in. Because the images were taken with the same camera, the dimensions are the same, so they should match up as far as how big they are. Now we can close that tab out and just work in this file. Let's start by working on the dog image and we can toggle it on and off over here with the little I Switch, the invisibility switch. Just real quick, let's get rid of this lock layer here. By default, that's what happens when you open up a file in Photoshop. Let's double-click that and just hit "OK" and then we get rid of the lock layer. Before I get started, one thing I'd like to do is to copy the original photos and group them. Let's select both of them and then click and drag them down into the new layer button and let go. Now we have copies of these layers. Let's take the originals here, shift-selecting them and drag them into the Folder icon. We can rename this, something like "Orig" and we can hide that and turn off the visibility for that. We have that if we need to come back to it and we don't have to reopen either of the files if we need to get back to the originals. Let's zoom in here and take a look at the dog. You can zoom in by using the Command plus or Command minus. You can also zoom in with hitting "Z" on the keyboard and get the Zoom tool. You can hit "Alt" and "click" to zoom out. You can hold down the space bar to get the hand tool so you can pan around. Now that we have the image and we know how to move around in Photoshop a little bit. In the next lesson, let's create a selection of the dog so we can remove him from his background. Thanks for watching. 6. Creating The Selection: In this lesson, we will create a selection of the dog so that we can remove him from the background. In Photoshop, there's several different ways that you can make selections. One of the ways is you can hit "W" on your keyboard and pull up the Magic Wand Tool. You can also get to these other options if you click on them, you can get more than one Magic Wand Tool and if you hit "Shift W", you can toggle between them or you can just go over here and select them. We're going to start with the Quick Selection Tool and we're just going to click and drag over the dog. As I do that, you can kind of see I'm painting on the selection. You can continue to click to increase the selection. This selection doesn't have to be perfect and I will show you why here in a little bit because we're not actually going to delete anything. But if we zoom in here, we can actually see the kind of anti-matching going on around the dog, so we can see where the selection is happening. We do want to make sure that we also get the shadow as well because we're going to want to include that in the image so it creates the realism like the dog is actually composited in the other image and casting a shadow as well. So we want to select that too. Later on we'll talk about this tag as well. We can remove it or leave it in, but I'll show you how to remove it later on here in a little bit. So we can include that in the selection. If you want to deselect anything, you can hit "Alt" and click over there, so you can see I got a little too much of the mountains. I can click that and deselect it. You can just use this and go around your pet and select them and get a good kind of starting point for the selection. We can refine it later and I'll show you how to do that. We can also control the size of the brush by hitting the brackets on the keyboard. We can also get to that in the top left up here and change the size and the hardness and the hardness just refers to the kind of fuzziness of the edge around the brush. So there's the ways to affect the brush size. Also just want to say not to worry too much about these kind of like stray hairs that we're seeing at the edge. We're going to do something in a later lesson where we can add these kind of fine flyaway hairs back in. So don't worry too much about that in your selection. Now I'm going to "Command minus Alt" and get a look at it. So now, once we have our selection, there's a couple different ways that we can use it. We can actually invert the selection and then delete the background. If we want to Select, we can actually go to Inverse and invert the selection and delete it. But that's a little destructive and if we make a mistake, there's no way to get that information back without having to bring the original image back in and all that kind of thing. There's another method that I want to show you that allows us to continue to make updates to it. So I'm just going to undo that. The method we're going to use is actually called a Layer Mask and it's down here in the bottom right. It's this little icon with a circle inside of the rectangle and with that selection made, I'll just click that and you can see, because I had inverted the selection that got rid of the dog. But if we just click on the layer mask over here on the right, the black and white image and I hit "Command I", I can actually invert this to be the dog now. This looks kind of similar to what we just had where we deleted the background but now we can actually go in here and change this as we want to. With the Layer Mask selected, I'll hit "B" to get pull up the brush, and you get to the brush over here in the left side as well. I want to make sure the colors I have are black and white and you can get to that by tapping "D" on your keyboard as well and then you can also hit "X" to swap the foreground and background colors. That's why there's two colors over here. They're considered foreground and background. With black selected, we can go in here and with a brush just kind of paint in while we have this layer mask layer selected. You can see that I'm just going in here and painting and removing parts of the image that we don't want and it's not getting deleted. For example, if I make a mistake like this, I can just hit "X" and swap the colors and then just paint this part of the selection back in. So it's really easy to go in and refine the selection we made now and we just want to make sure that we have the Layer Mask selected when we're painting. We don't want to be painting on the actual image and that's probably the biggest thing you might run into is mixing up when you have the image selected or the layer selected. So here you can see I'm actually painting on the image with the Brush Tool, because I'm using the Brush Tool in both instances, but the difference is you can kind of see that little targeted dashed square around the Layer Mask, the black and white image on the right. Here I can go in and adjust the selection as I want. I'm going to solo this layer and go in here and refine the edge of the selection. This is where we do want to start to get very particular, but I get too particular about the flower hairs and just make sure we have a clean silhouette of the dog. There's one other type of selection that I wanted to show you. If you go to Select and go down to Color Range, we can actually select based on color. It looks white right now just because the selection preview is chosen as a white mat. So if we go over here and we choose it to be none and we just invert the selection here. We can actually go in with this little Eyedropper Tool, which is just meant as an icon that indicates that we're selecting a color right now. So we go in here and select the blue and if we click right here, we can see that it's already creating a selection for us. If we click again, it will make a new selection based on this new color. So you can see how it got rid of the first selection we made. If we want to add them together, we actually do hold down shift and click. You can set little plus button pop up next to the cursor icon. So that's one way and it's not going to be that useful for my image. It doesn't look like, but this might be useful for yours. I just want to show that method as well. I'm just going to cancel out of that. I want to talk about another one called the Lasso Tool and just hit "L" to bring up the Lasso Tool, you can see in the top left here, and if hit "shift L", I can toggle between them and there's a couple of different versions. There's this kind of polygonal version where we get straight lines and then there is a version that's like a magnetic version where it'll try to find the edges of things. So if we click here and kind of just run the cursor around the dog, it'll try to find the edges. That's also another method of selection. If we did hit "Shift L" again, the one I use the most is just kind of the Normal Lasso Tool. We can actually just go in here and click and drag in, kind of draw a selection in, and if we hold down "Shift", we can just keep adding to that selection. This method might actually prove helpful when you're going in here and trying to get very particular about an area for when you paint on the layer mask with the selected. If I hit "B" and put the brush and I start painting, you can see I'm only going to paint in the area have selected. So this might be useful when you're painting the layer mask. I'm just going to zoom out and deselect that by hitting "Command D" and continue painting out this area. Because again, we don't need the whiskers we're going to add those back in later on. Let's take a look at the shadow area. You can see I did a pretty good job of selecting the shadow. But the edge, if we look down here and zoom in, the edges may be a little harsh. There's another thing we can do. We can go click over here and get to the Blur Tool. It's the kind of little water droplet icon here. With the Blur Tool selected, we can just click and drag over the edges. It'll kind of feather those edges out. So depending on your image, this might prove useful as well. You can see it just kind of softens the edge of the shadow. Again, we're working on the layer mask, so this isn't actually blurring the image, it's just blurring the layer mask. One other thing I wanted to show you about the layer mask was we can actually disable it. Like in this instance, I can't really see if this part on the tongue or it's chin as a part of the image or the background. So if I go to the Layer Mask and hold down "Shift" and I click it, you can see this red X pop-up and it disables the layer mask, so I can kind of see where I'm painting now and I'm actually continuing to paint even with a disabled. You can see that effect. So with it disabled, I can actually just go in and keep working. I know this for sure isn't part of the background and I can go in and use it that way. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will work on taking out this tag from the image and putting hair back in where it needs to be. See you the next lesson. Thanks. 7. Stamp And Content Aware: In this lesson, we're going to remove the tag from the dog. Let's zoom in here with Command Plus, and we can actually take out this tag with the stamp tool. But first let's clean up this edge here with the method we're using in the previous lesson. Whenever I do a big step like removing something, I like to work on a copy of a layer. Let's click and drag this layer down to the new layer button and work on a copy. I'll hide the original so we don't see that behind it. With this layer selected, I'm going to go to Layer Mask and paint away the tag so that we can have a clean start to get rid of the tag part. That is only over where the fur is. Now that we have that done, we can see there's a piece of the tag that is still on top of the dog. There's a couple different ways we can get rid of that, and the first way I'm going to show you is with the stamp tool. If we hit "S" and it's over here on the left side as well, you can see that rubber stamp icon. If with this selected we can actually hold down "Alt" and click over the image somewhere that we want a sample. While I'm clicking over here, and then I drag my stamp brush over here, you can see it's pulling that color and it's actually going to copy that texture underneath it as well. Depending on where we sample from, it will change that. If I click over here, it'll be white, and if I click over here, it'll be black. We want to click somewhere that's close to what we're going to replace it by, and if you noticed just now, it didn't work that great because they had the layer selected. I'm actually painting on the Layer Mask. Again, as I mentioned earlier, that's probably going to be the one thing you run to the most is making sure you're working on the right layer and not the layer mask if you want to be doing something like this. The layer selected, the actual image of the layer. We can go in and start painting out this tag. You can tell that mine is not at a 100 percent because I have a tablet. With my pen I can actually control how hard I'm pushing down, and that affects the opacity of this brush. If you have a mouse, you might not be able to do that, but you don't necessarily need a tablet to do this. It just makes you have like a little more control over what you're doing. I'm just going to paint in this gray area here over the tag, and when I get down to another area, I like to resample, so it's not constantly sampling from the same area, and I can just paint this in and keep resampling. I can resample from the bottom and work up. Because the Layer Mask is on, I don't have to worry about going outside of the bounds so much of the edge that we created with the layer mask. I can go right up to the edge and not worry about that too much. When I'm working from the bottom and I'm sampling from up here, you can see it's actually going to get too white. What we can do, is actually just lower the opacity. We can hit a number on the keyboard and that'll correlate to like 50 if we hit Five. Now I'm working at opacity of 50, and you see that up here on the top, and you can control it up there as well. But the shortcuts are nice to use, to work a little more quickly. I can feather this different color in so it's not as stark of a contrast from dark to white. You can just keep working this and get something that you like. I'm going to zoom out to see what we've done. You can see it, it's working pretty well and I'm going to turn on the layer underneath and just drag it on top so we can actually tell what we've done here. Now with that on top, I can turn on and off the visibility and we can see and make a decision. Do we want to keep the tag? Or do we want to get rid of it? That's one method we can use to get rid of a leash or, something that's crossing in front of the dog, something like that. We can use the stamp tool. Let me show you one other method and it's actually the Content Aware fill method. But we need to be careful with this because we actually have a Layer Mask selected. If I go in here and just get rid of this tag, and again, I want to make sure I have the Layer Mask is selected over here on this layer. With that selected now I can paint this out. If I just roughly get this out. Now if I use the lasso tool hit "L "and select this area and you have the selection made, I need to make sure that I'm going to effect the actual image and not the Layer Mask. I need to switch back over to the actual image of this layer. Now I can go to "Edit" fill, "Content-Aware" fill and hit "Okay". You see that it works pretty well. In some instances, we might need to actually merge this layer masks down. It might try to bring in some of the outside image, but in this case it worked pretty well. If you do need to merge down this image, we can just hit "Command Shift E" and it'll merge down the Layer Mask. You can also click the layer mask and go to right-click apply Layer Mask, and that'll merge that down as well. Now we can adjust this area as we need. Stamp tool gives you a little more control, but continent-aware fill is pretty quick. In the next lesson, we'll work on combining these two images together. Thanks for watching. 8. Matching The Images: So now that we have the selection made and the Layer Mask cleaned up, let's turn back on the background layer. We can see that he's not ideally placed so we need to move him a little bit. So we hit "V" on the keyboard, pull up the Move tool, and we want to make sure the layer is selected. You'll notice up here there's an auto select kind of checkbox and when it's checked, it'll automatically just move whatever we click on. We can use that to our advantage if we want. Sometimes it gets a little messy though if you're trying to select certain things and you select the wrong layer. So you can turn that off to make that easier. It'll base your selection off of what layer you have selected here. So let's move this down a little bit and see if we can't get this into a better spot. As we move him into place, we can notice that her eye line is looking at a much bigger dog. It's not actually hitting his eyeliner looking at him. There's a couple different things we could do. We could scale him up if we wanted to, we could also rotate her head down a little bit. We might do a little bit of both. Let's take a look at the relative pixel size real quick. We'll zoom in and see if we have a little latitude to scale them up. If we're comparing visually the pixel size of the dog with the background, It's matching up pretty good, because we got closer to take the dog's photo. So we have a little room to scale him up I think he has maybe a little more density of pixels in his photo. So we can hit "Command T" to pull up the Transform tool. You can see that it is a much larger kind of box here because remember we have the Layer Mask still activated, so it's going to select the entire Layer Mask and all of that. So if we click in the corner here, we can actually scale him up, and if we hold down "Shift" we can scale it evenly. If we don't hold down "Shift" it will distort the image. You can also hold down "Alt" and it'll scale from the center with "Shift" and "Alt " selected together. So we can enlarge him a little bit and move him into place to try to keep him off of the background of the bridge and to get him in the right kind of eye line of where she's looking. The next thing we can do is try to rotate her head down. So I'm going to "Command J" to copy the layer and hit "L", to pull the Lasso tool and just make a selection around her head and with that selected, I can hit "Command T" to pull up the Transform tool again. There's this little pivot point here, I don't know if you can see that, right here in the center. We can actually pull that down to the base of her head where her neck would rotate and then bring our cursor to the corner here and just kind of rotate her head down just to touch so that it looks like she's looking a little more right at the dog. So hit "Command D" to de-select that. You can see the difference here, it looks like she's looking a little closer at the dog. I can pull up a line tool here and you can see the kind of eye line that she has now as opposed to earlier, she's looking maybe a little higher than we wanted to. So that's just an option that you have in case later on the human subject and look with the correct eyeline or something like that. So we can create a new Layer Mask real quick and just kind of paint out with the brush tool around her head and take advantage of the fact that there's this water behind her so that the background isn't too complicated to kind of merge together now with the background original image. The other thing we need to do is to remove the background child here. I took this photo thinking maybe the dog would cover her up, but in this case we need to remove it. So let's make sure that we can hit "Alt", click on the eyeball, and it will solo this layer. So we can zoom in and focus in on this. I'm going to hit "L" to pull up the Lasso tool and just make a selection loosely but as tightly as I can around the subject because we want to try to leave as much of the original background as we can because with Content Aware Fill, it's going to pull in the pixels surrounding it and there's no need to replace the pixels that are at the background that we want to keep. So that's why we want to try to have this selection be as tight as possible. Maybe take out this little section between her legs here, so that it will be able to source the pixels from there as well when it starts to replace her body. So now with this selection kind of cleaned up, we can go to layer fill or we can hit "Shift F5", and we can pull up the Content Aware Fill, but the main thing we want to make sure is we're on the image and we want to make sure the image is selected here in the layer. I had the Mask selected, and we don't want that. We want to make sure that we are on the image. So double-check that, and then you can go to layer and fill or you can just hit "Shift F5", and with Content Aware Fill, we can enter that and we kind of get a good starting point. Clearly this isn't good enough. So let's hit the "S" button on the keyboard and we get the Stamp tool, and then we can pick a selection over here that is maybe behind the dog. We don't want to select somewhere right next to the selection we're going to replace. So I'm going to go a little further away, and then now after we all click that, we have a good piece of the ocean that we can paint back in here and replace the areas that aren't as good. My opacity, it looks like it was down a little bit, so I can increase that to a 100 and just start over here, or you can get 0,0 as well, and then we'll go to a 100 for the opacity and paint this in. I'm just going to clean up these other couple of spots, I'm just clicking along the way to pick a new source, and then hover my brush over it to make sure it's what I want and just paint it in here. So I'll do that with her shadow as well, and I'll click somewhere on the beach and then just kind of paint this and keep on clicking. You want to make sure that there's no repeating patterns, you can see this little stick right here. So I'm going to reduce the brush size with the Bracket tool and I'll click on the beach and just cover up these little sticks that repeated and here's another one right here. So I'm going to zoom out with "Command Minus". The other thing we need to do is clean up this shadow. If we take a look at it, we can see that it's overlapping her legs and her shadow as well. One thing to keep in mind is when we have a situation like this, two things blocking the same light, doesn't make the shadow darker and the shadows don't compound on each other. So we need to remove where they overlap because a shadow is a shadow no matter if there's one, or two, or three things blocking the light, the shadow is going to be the same kind of darkness. So let's go in here with the brush tool, with the Layer Mask selected hit "B" to pull up the brush tool and just start painting out the area over her legs like we've done before and just get rid of this. We can also, of course, get rid of it where it overlaps her shadow. We want to leave this part of his face sticking out too, because that's his little muzzle and it will indicate that they are in fact operating in the same space. We want to leave that in here. But we can also see that the value of the shadow is not the same as the value of her shadow. We can fix that here in a minute plus just clean up this shadow in layer mask and then I'll see you in a second. If we go up here to this little tab that says adjustments, we have all these different types of adjustments we can apply. I'm going to choose the curves adjustment. You can see we get a new layer up here on top of everything and if I start moving this around, and I click on that line and create a new little pivot point there in the middle, you can see it's affecting every layer beneath it. There's one thing we can do to constrain this adjustment to just the layer below it, which is going to be this shadow layer of the dog. If we go over here to the layers, and I'll hold down alt, you can see my cursor changes a little bit and with this little arrow and box down. If I click here with that cursor holding down alt, it'll change to only affect the layer below it. Now we can dial in this shadow to be the correct value and match the value of the dog's shadow with a value of her shadow. I think something in here looks pretty good. We can turn that on and off and see how it affects it, so it lines up pretty well. Of course, the other thing to keep in mind is it's also affecting the dog. We're going to adjust that later a little bit too if we want, but we can just take a look at the self shadows that's happening on the dog here if we zoom under the ear. Look at this value here and compare that to kind of a self shadow on her, in her arm pits or something like that. We want to just make sure that all of these are lining up and matching. Because what could also happen is the fact that like these are two different photos. When we're taking two different pictures and if your camera is on the auto exposure then we might have a picture like this. Then we're trying to bring a picture that's more exposed because the auto exposure meter differently for the dog photo than on her photo. We can use these adjustments to bring these back into the same realm of exposure in the case that the auto exposure of your camera had two different meterings or something. That's one way to adjust these to get them to match up a little bit more. The other thing to keep in mind is if his shadow of his muzzle is blocking her or they're intersecting, then it also means that his shadow should be hitting her waist somewhere. If you want to get super realistic about, we can do that. But I don't think that it attracts. If we just wanted to move on from here that could work. But just to show you how to do this and to keep in mind the realism of the interaction of light and shadow. We can just create another curves adjustment. We can solo her layer and you can see here that we actually had the layer below it here, we just need to merge that down. If we shift select both of these layers and then command E, we can actually merge those down together so we don't have to worry about that head rotation we did earlier getting messed up or those being separate anymore. Now that this is together, we can hit W and bring up the wand tool and just make a selection of her body where we want to paint in the shadow that he is casting on her. I'll just pick another curves adjustment. You can see with that selection made, it already made a layer mask for me. You can see that over here in the right of that curves adjustment. If I click here to start moving this around, you can see it's only affecting the area below this layer of the selection that we had just made. We can use that to our advantage as well. We want the shadow to match the other shadows here, so we want to keep that in mind. If we turn this on and make sure we have the layer mask selected, we can hit B and pull up the brush, and we can paint out the areas where we don't want the shadow. I'm going to increase the brush size with the brackets and just paint out where I think his head shadow should be hitting her body. If we look at their shadows where they interact, it looks like it's around her waist somewhere, so we can go up here, and also notice that if I start painting here, because we no longer have that selection made, it's just going to paint out away from her body. Just keep that in mind. We can hit command click on the layer, and it will create the selection of this layer mask that we have. That's one thing you can use to remake this selection and then add to it with a lasso tool. If we hit L and then we hold down shift, we can just add to the selection, if we want to add back in and isolate where we're painting, we can do that as well. But just keep that in mind as something if you need to make adjustments. We can continue to paint here and one thing to keep mind is we don't want to have a straight line across her leg like this. We want to paint with the curvature of her leg to imply the shape and roundness of her leg. That's something also to keep in mind the 3D quality of whatever you're painting shadows on. It should follow that as well. I'm just going to continue to paint this out where I think will indicate the right shadow for the dog and zoom out and check that. I think that's looking like it's in a pretty good spot. I might adjust the curves just a little bit to leave a little detail on the shadow on her. Just bring that up just a touch. I think that's looking a little better. Zoom and compare that, where the shadows hitting her and the darkness of that shadow. Now that we have that corrected, I think it adds a little bit of more realism that he would be casting a shadow on her. There's just one other little two percent touch that will just add to the realism of this photo. In the next lesson, we'll add some whiskers and hair back into the silhouette of the dog. Thanks for watching. 9. Adding Whiskers And Hair: Welcome to the class on Adding Whiskers and Hair back into the dogs silhouette. But before we get started in that, I just want to adjust this curves layer that we made for the shadow in the last lesson. Because I think it's affecting his body just a little too much. Make sure we have the layer mask selected and hit "B" to pull up the brush. I'm just going to use the brackets to increase the brush size. I'll hit "X" to swap over to the black color, may travel layer mask selected and hit "5" to get 250 percent opacity. Then just paint over just the dog's body and not the shadow because we liked at where the shadow was at. This is just to remove some of that curves adjustment from the dog's body. I think turning this on and off, you can see it's still affecting his body a little bit, but it is much less, and I think that looks a lot better. Now, let's get into adding the whiskers and the hairs. If we come in here and we look at the silhouette, it looks really clean and there's no stray hairs breaking the silhouette very much. That's something that we can add back in. If we go over here to the left side and we look at these tools and we click on the "Blur Tool" down here, there's the "Smudge Tool" in this little menu set. If we click that, we want to make sure that we have sample all layers off and finger painting off. We can choose the dog layer here. If we start painting on it, you can see it doesn't really do much. That's because we had the layer mask still applied. If we turn off the layer mask and we start dragging, now we can see that the smudge tool is smudging the pixels outside of the silhouette of the dog. The brush size we have is maybe a little too much. First, we'll need to merge down and apply this layer mask so that we can actually use the smudge tool. Before I do that, I like to copy this out. I'm going to shift select the layers and copy these out just so that we have a duplicate to get back to and drop these in the original folder. Now, with these two selected, shift selecting them, I can hit "Command E" and merge the layers down. Now, when we use a smudge tool, it works and you don't have to worry about the layer mask being on or off or affecting that. Let me zoom in here and get a little better look. We want to have the brush size be pretty small because we don't want this to be super obvious. We want it to be a very subtle effect. Some of the biggest places that we're going to notice this is on the whiskers and eyebrows, and in this photo it's anywhere where dark is meeting light and there's all contrast. If we crank up the strength to 100 percent, you can see that's way too much. I think it was 50 something and we can drop it down to like 75 something like that. We can increase the strength, it'll effect and smudge a little more than it was before. Actually going to click and drag in here and make sure that we have different links and sizes and thicknesses. If I click and drag in the same area, I can make it be a little bit thicker. We just want to make sure we're adding variation it's not all looking the same. If you zoom out here, you can definitely see it on the eyebrow. I think it adds quite a bit. We just want to go around the silhouette of the dog and break up his silhouette with the stray hairs. Great, now that we're done adding in the whiskers that we can see that it does add quite a bit a detail into the silhouette. Especially if we want to crop in and make a different photo and zoom in here. It's going to add quite a bit to the photo. In the next lesson, let's continue to further refine and add just a little better adjustment here to further silhouette that this dog is in this photo. It's a little more believable. Thanks for watching. I'll see in the next lesson. 10. Finishing Touches: In this lesson, we're going to add a light wrap, which is essentially a phenomenon that happens naturally in photographs. To get started, we're going to control click the dog layer to create a selection of the dog. Let's zoom in here and we don't actually need the shadow because the light isn't going to bleed into the shadow that's already in contact with the ground. We can just hit L to get the Lasso tool and just drag around and roughly take out the shadow. We can further refine this effects later and remove it from areas as well. But this is just a good start that we know for sure we don't want the shadows so we can just go ahead and deselect that. Because our selection is so close to the edge, we want to expand it a little bit because we want to bring in the background image on top of this dog. Let's go to select and we're going to modify, expand, and we can just increase the size of this by say, one pixel. It just made it slightly larger all the way around by one pixel. Let's select the background and hit Command J to duplicate the layer of the selection we have. We basically make the dog disappear, which isn't exactly what we want, but it's a start. Let's command click this layer to create a selection again and go to "Select", "Modify", "Contract". Because we want to take some of this out. We just want a rim around the dog. Let's go like five pixels. It's contracted the selection down, I'm going to just delete that. What we're left with is actually just like this little rim of the background image around the dog. If we turn this on and off, we can see that it's encroaching on the silhouette of the dog. We're going to use this to blur it out and then add it back on top of the dog. We can actually use blend modes to help us with this. We can choose something like a screen, which might be a little too bright. We can change that up to the lightened mode, and we can turn this on and off and see the effect it's having. Let's just solo this to see what we're actually doing. We can see that the edge of this is pretty hard, it's not very blurry. We can actually blow this out by going to "Filter", "Blur", "Gaussian Blur". We can just crank this up a little bit to smooth out this edge. It's not such a hard defined edge. We'll hit "Okay" and then turn back on these other layers, and turn this on and off and see its effect. We can see it's just like bleeding in the background. It makes the dog sit in this image a little bit better. It's these final two percent things that really sell this effect. There's places where we don't want this to happen. You can see down here on his belly and around his legs and stuff, that's not ideal. We can actually just use a layer mask as we've done before and get a brush and just paint those areas out, because that rim light bleeding effect on there doesn't really make a ton of sense, because it's in shadow. We can just paint that out with the layer mask. Especially in the dark areas, it's maybe a little too much. We can lower the opacity of our brush we wanted to, or if you have a tablet pen, you can just lightly brush over it. I'm going to go down to something like 30 percent and go over this area and just make it a little less contrasty. We can see this helps sell the effect that there's this bloom of light around the dog that helps them sit in the image a little bit better. We only want this to affect the dog. We don't want it to affect the background as well. Because we blurted out, it's actually crossing over between the silhouette of the dog in the background. Let's control click the dog layer, and then we can invert the selection with Command Shift I and then use the layer mask to paint out this effect over the background. We're not painting this out over the dog, we're pitting it out behind them because we don't want to double up the background image on itself in a blurry way. We want to just remove that from the background, so that this is only just bleeding onto the dog's silhouette just a little bit. Now with this effect complete, we can zoom in here and turn it on and off and see this subtle effect that we've created here that just sells it a little bit more. Great. Now that we have that done, the next thing I like to do before I save out on image always is just to double-check the horizon line. Because we're taking these photos probably not on a tripod, so there's really no guarantee that the horizon is straight. We can hit "C" on our keyboard to bring up the crop tool, and it's over here on the toolbar as well. There's like little box looking thing. If we click and drag here, we can crop the image, but if we hold it just outside of the image here, we get these two arrows, and that's going to allow us to rotate the image. As soon as we start rotating it, we see we get these guidelines. I'm looking at the horizon where the water meets the land and the background. We want to get that straight across. Let's click up here in the corner and just use those guides to help us get the horizon totally straight. This will automatically crop it as well, so we don't get any white around the edges. As we rotate it, you can notice it's also cropping it. We can hit "Command R" and pull up rulers. If we click in the ruler up there and drag down, we actually can get a ruler and that's not on unfortunately. Let's go to "View", "Show", "Guides". Now we can see the guides and we can bring down multiple ones if we want, and we can accept this crop by hitting the checkbox here. With those guides, we can just bring them back up to get rid of them. But we can see that they helped us make sure the horizon was straight. Now we can go to the "History" up here in the top right and pull this down and just compare the crop that we just did. We can get all the history. There's a limit, but basically, the last little bit we can compare this crop. We straightened out the horizon quite a bit. I'm just going to hit "C" one more time to help the crop tool again, I just get rid of some of this negative space in the bottom left and in the top right. I can hit "Enter" to save this. One last thing I want to mention is about pixelating the dog. In the case that we got way too close to the dog, and the relative pixel size was much smaller on him. Basically, if he looked like he was in much higher resolution than the person, you can go select the dog and go up to filter pixelate and mosaic. Now you can see we've pixelated him quite a bit, but we can actually decrease that cell size until we get something that matches the resolution of the background that he's in. This is just one way to further try to match the effect that we just did. We can see here maybe I don't know if that's big enough on your screen. We can just slightly pixelate him a little bit, and it can maybe help sell the fact that, the relative pixel size was the same as the background image. I think for us, luckily, we don't have to do that because you can see the background here is in pretty good resolution and here, we already scaled them up earlier in the course. We're probably at the maximum amount that we can mess with this. Ideally, we actually have a little more detail I think. But in case your dog photo went the other way, and you needed to down raise him to match the background, you can do that with the mosaic filter. Now we have our final image. Now let's save the photo to something useful that we can actually post to Facebook or Instagram or something like that. Let's go to "File", "Save As", and hopefully at this point you've already saved this file as a Photoshop files. You can open it back up and retain all the layers and everything. But what we want to do is save it as a JPEG. We can scroll down to JPEG, which is just here at the board of the screen. When we hit "Save", we'll get some options here. I'll just say, I've already saved it. I'm just going to say Version 2 for me, and save is just off frame there, click that and we get these compression options, and you can see the preview isn't actually the preview here. You're not going to see that update. The preview is just the size, how big the file size is going to be there. You can save it, probably something high and hit "Okay". Now we have our JPEG saved out, that we can use an upload wherever we want. Thanks for watching this course. I hope you learned some cool tips and tricks in Photoshop and got more comfortable with it. Please share your work in the course with me and I love to see what you guys make. Thanks, and I hope to see you in some of my other courses. Bye.