Adobe Photoshop for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. My name is Elizabeth. I'm a digital artists that specializes in Adobe Photoshop manipulations. In this class we will focus on using masks to blend multiple images into one composite. First, we'll do a quick walk-through of Photoshop's interface. Then we'll move on to learning some of the keyboard shortcuts that will be utilizing in the class. And then we'll jump straight into editing and masking images. This class is for any experience level as we won't be going step-by-step and explaining everything along the way. So let's get started. 2. Class Project: The project in this class is completely up to you. You can follow along step-by-step and use all the assets provided to you in the resources. Or you can find your own images and blend them together to create an original work. Try to think outside the box and explore as much as possible. When I'm finished the project. Head on over to the project section in this course and post your image. Have fun creating. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. 3. What is Masking?: All right, so you might be asking yourself, what is a mask? Basically what a mass does. It allows you to remove information from a layer without permanently deleting it. It's perfect for editing photos because sometimes you don't want to permanently get rid of some of the information in a picture. So let's say that I add a mass to this red circle. So due to add a mask, you select a layer, and this is your mass button. It's a square with a circle in the middle. One way to manipulate a mask is with your brush tool. So click B on your keyboard or hits the brush tool, black is going to take away from your mask. Like this. Okay? And if you hit X on your keyboard or hit this little arrow to bring whites to the foreground. White brings the image back. So black to remove, white, to bring back. Another thing that a mask is good for is blending two images together. So let's move this white circle over a little bit. Let's say right about there. Okay, let's add a mask to the white ones as well. Let's go to our red mask. Let's decrease the opacity. And up that's too much. And let's start removing some of the red. Okay. Let's go to the white and let's remove some of the white. Don't worry, we're going to add some back in because that's what a mask is good for. Adding things back in. Okay, so let's go to the white mask again and let's hit X on the keyboard to bring the white to the foreground and start blending it in together. It's not gonna be perfect. I'm just showing you that you can use a mask to blend things together. Okay, let's go to the red. Take a little bit more out of the red. And it's just a good way to make things blend. Let's say you wanted to fade your mask. A good way to do that was with a gradient. So go to your gradient tool and make sure your mask is selected. And I have my black and white selected so the other way, okay? And if you just dry out a line, you'll see that it fades out your mask. Okay. And depending on how long or short that line is, will be, how faded something is. Go shorter, is getting a little fade. Go longer if you're moving more of the image. Okay, That's another way to use a mask. So masks are just great if you want to keep the information of your layer without permanently deleting it, you never really want to permanent delete anything on an image because you never gonna know if you want to bring something back. So always use mass when you can. 4. Adobe Photoshop Interface: So the first thing that we're going to talk about is the Photoshop interface. Now when you open Photoshop, it's going to ask you to create or open a new file. To do that. I already have it open, so I'm just gonna show you how to do that once you have it open. So go to File and then New. And then you're going to pick the size of the file that you want. So we're just going to do something that photoshop already has reading. We're just going to pick the Default Photoshop Size, which is seven by five, but we're going to flip it. So it's in portrait mode instead of landscape so that the height is longer than the width. Okay, once you have that done, hit Create and you have your new file setup. So let's first look at some of the tools that we're going to use in this class. The main tool that we're going to use in this class is the brush tool, which we're going to use to mask out or bring back certain parts of different images. Some of the other tools that we're going to use a lot is the selection tool. These are great to make quick mass, and we'll use a few of these in the class that you can get a feel for each one of them. Okay, and then we go over to the right side of the program and you can go down here and you'll see layers. This is your layer panel. How layers work? It's basically think about a pizza and you pay on a per pizza you like the crust, the sauce, the cheese and, and toppings. And it's different layers of ingredients. Like when you put the cheese on the sauce, you don't really see a lot of the sauce. You put the ingredients on top of the cheese. You're not going to see all the cheese layers in Photoshop are the same way. You stack them on top of each other and the ones on top cover the ones underneath. So if you want to just have a quick example, we'll make a couple of layers here. Just so you can see it's changed. So if you change the size of these layers, you'll notice that the red is on top and it's covering the gray and the black. The grays in the middle. So it's just covering the black which is underneath it. And the black is covering the entire bottom part. And you can use these eyes on the left side too, show or hide a layer. And then down here is where you're going to make new layers. Or you're going to have different layer adjustments that we can use, which we will walk through when we use them. And we'll get into this more in the coming videos. 5. Keyboard Shortcuts: Okay, the next thing that we're going to talk about is keyboard shortcuts that we are going to be using in this class. I use a few keyboard shortcuts a lot. So it just makes your work process a lot quicker when you know a few of them. So if you want to know exactly what I'm pushing during the course of this class. Look down here at the bottom left, and I'll have key casting on so you can see it. One of the main things that we're going to use is the undo button or the Redo button. So say you do something and so say you do something and you made a mistake. So say you just made a line like that and you made a mistake, hit Command or Control Z, and it'll undo it. So if you want to bring that back, hold down Shift Command and Z, and it will bring it back. So Command or Control Z to undo. So another thing that we're going to use a lot is the transform tool. When you have a layer selected and you hit Command or Control T, it's going to bring up the box to allow you to transform and manipulate that layer. So when you have it selected, you hit Command or Control T. And the box will come up and you can resize it. And if you hold down shift while you're resizing it, can, it won't be as uniform. Okay? Once you have command control the T on a layer and you right-click on that layer, it'll give up. It'll bring up more options and allow you to warp it. Okay, Let's undo all of that and just hit Enter. And once you're done transforming the layer, hit Enter and it'll all the transform box will go away. Other shortcuts that we're going to use, especially when you're using a mask. So when you have your mask selected, which is over here, and we'll talk about this more in the next video. So when you have your mask selected and you want to brush, hit B on your keyboard. And that'll bring up your brush tool. Once you have your brush tool selected, if you want to make your brush larger or smaller, you're going to use the bracket keys on your keyboard. The left bracket will make it bigger. The right bracket will make it smaller. Now, when you use masks, the only two colors you use is black and white. So black will take away part of a mask. If you want to bring part of that mass back, hit X on your keyboard and it'll switch your colors. So white goes into the foreground and you can bring back part of the mask as well. So X to change your colors, BTUs, the brush tool and the brackets to increase and decrease the size of your brushes. This is very helpful is that say you're not going all around your workspace trying to adjust things. 6. Masking Images: Okay, so I've dragged my images into Photoshop. If you're following along with the exact same images, go ahead and do that. They are in the project and resource section of this class. If you're using your own images, just drag them all in and we're going to get started. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to mask every image. We're going to take out all the parts of the image that we don't want or that we think we don't want. And then leave the parts that we want to use because you don't know exactly how our end image is going to look. That's why we're masking. So if we wanted to bring parts of the image back, we can instead of erasing them. So we're going to start masking this first image. It's on top. So make sure you have it selected. An easy way to select something that has one color in it is by using a color range selection. So go to Select Color Range. Now, if we just go outside of this box and you see the eyedropper pops up, click on the color that we're going to remove, decrease or increase the fuzziness. You'll see that selection gets a little bit better. Okay? And then go down to your Layers panel and you'll see this black circle with a white box around it. Click on that and that is your mass 2 button. And you'll see that it mass out. I'm going to hide the rest of these layers real quick. So you can see it better. You'll see that when I masked it, it masked out everything that I wanted to keep and kept that color. But you can invert that by just selecting your mask on this layer and hitting Command or Control I. And now you'll see that we have all these branches left and not the blue that we selected. Okay, that's one way to mass something out. So let's hide this layer. And let's go down to the next layer. And on this layer I think I just want to keep some of the flowers. So let's move down to the next layer that we're going to mask. Hide this top layer. Let's reveal the next layer and select it. So for this layer, and then I'm just going to keep a couple of flowers. If you have the new Photoshop update and you have your object selection tool selected, you'll notice if you hover over something, it turns blue, and if you click on it, photoshop will automatically select that for you. So this is a great way to select stuff quickly, but it's not going to be perfect. We click on this one. And so I selected a few of these petals, but we want to get all of these petals. So let's go back up to here and we will make sure that our ad part of the selection is selected up here. And we're going to click and drag around this petal and that one selected now and then we'll do the same thing with this petal. Click and drag. And now that one selected as well. So we're just going to do a rough selection right now because we're going to come back and fix all this stuff when we put everything in place. So with that selected, go back to your layers panel and we're going to add a mask to this layer as well. So click your mouse button. And now those are masked out. So we're gonna do this for every layer. Use whatever selection tool you're comfortable with. If you want to use a Quick Selection tool, we can use that one next. Click and drag. And again, we're going to clean up all these selections later on. So just do a basic quick selection and mass things out. And easy way to zoom in and zoom out on your keyboard is Command or Control with a minus symbol, or Command or Control with the plus symbol, and allows you to zoom in and zoom out quickly. So you'll notice on this image that there's a lot of similar colors. The white in the petals and the white in the background are going to be a little bit different, a little bit difficult to, to select using AI, because there's a lot of similar colors. So for right now we're just gonna do a basic Lasso tool. And we're just going to do a very rough selection. And then when we put everything in place and we know exactly how much of this image we're going to use. We will mask out more using our paintbrush. So just do a really quick one and then hit your mask button again. Okay, now let's move on to the next one. So at this woman, another great tool to select something really quickly is the just select Subject tool that Photoshop has. Go to Select and then find subject. And then it'll select it for you. And it does a pretty good job. Yes, it misses some parts of it, but again, we will mask those out later on. It your mask and now that one's mast out, go down to your next layer. Do the same thing just to make this a little bit quicker. Mass that out. Let's see if it works for this one as well. And it does. You'll notice that it's missing some of the hairs here. A way to fix that is go to Select and Mask. Make sure your feathered brush is selected. And then we're going to just change the view so it's easier to see. Just paint over some of these hairs to get them selected and to get rid of some of the black. And we don't need any of this. So we can go to the brush and the minus, and that'll help remove this part of the selection. Let's make sure we keep her toes. Those are important. Dance without toes. And you'll notice that I'm moving this around and a hand pops up and I move the image to do that, just hold down your space bar and click and hold down, and I'll let you move your image around so it's easier to see it. Let's click Okay. And then we're going to mask this out as well. Okay? And you'll see that there's still a little black parts in there and we're going to fix that again later on. This one is done. Next one, Let's see if the select. Okay, So the data, great job, but we want to have this branch in our selection as well. So go to your lasso tool and then go up here to add to selection. And then we're just going to draw around that branch to add it to our selection. Okay? Everything else looks good right now. So mask that out. Let's go down to the next one. So in this one I want the bird or anything, I just wanted to branch. So let's go to our quick selection tool and just select them branch quickly. So you'll see that it's selected the black part as well. We can remove that with the Lasso Tool. Click on your lasso tool. You can either select the subtract from selection button or when your ad selection is selected, hold down Alt and you'll see that it changes to a minus sign instead of going up here and going back and forth. So just hold down Alt and deselect the parts that you don't want. So when you're making a D selection or a selection of a large area, I recommend that you do it's little by little. So if you make a mistake on one part and you have to undo it, you don't have to undo the whole thing. So we want this part of the branch, so we'll add that part back in. Our right mass this out. Oh, we didn't want that. But we'll clean that up in the next step when we go to the paintbrush. Alright, we have all of our layers mast out. The next thing we're gonna do is we're going to put it all together. 7. Layout and Blending Part 1: So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to figure out the layout of all of our images. So I have unheated them, but we're gonna go ahead and hide all of them except for the dancer. Because that is our main subject. And that's what we're going to be placing all of our other images around. So let's select our dancer. And actually let's drag that all the way to the bottom so that she's the bottom layer. Okay. Let's zoom out a little bit so we can see our whole comp. And now let's just resize her by hitting Command or Control T and just dragging a little bit so that we can have it the size that we want in somewhat centered and a little bit smaller because we're gonna have some things coming around her. That looks good. All right. So what I think I'm gonna do is I'm going to have her arms turning into branches which have flowers on them. I'm going to have some flowers coming through her dress. And then I'm going to play some flowers and the bird around her. And then put a gradient in the background. So to start, let's just start off with some branches and flowers. So let's unhide some of those so that we can see what we're working with the bird. Okay. All right, and then we're going to resize some of them so that we can see them better and move them around so it's easier to know what exactly we're working with. Right? Now for this part, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to follow me. You can move the flowers wherever you want based on HireVue want it's completely up to you. If you want to follow along. That's perfect. Swell. All right, So we have quite a few things to work with and we don't need to use all of them. What I think I'm gonna do is take this part and I'm going to place this into her dress. So let's find that layer, which is right here, Command or Control T. And we're just going to manipulate it until it's in her dress. We're gonna do the fine touches later on. So just put it in place. So we're just doing a rough sketch of what we're gonna do. Oh, I'm missing that branch. Go. I think I'm going to put this branch as her arm coming out here. So let's Command or Control T. We would around size it down and place it where her arm would be. And we're going to mask all this out and blend it in. So don't worry about how it looks right now. I'm going to take this or maybe this and put it in with here. So let's find that layer, which is right here. Command or Control T, does bring it down here. And don't worry about how it looks right now again, we're going to fix all of this. And then I think this is going to be her arm up here. Okay. So let's take that one and that's through. And we will move that into place up here. Just a rough selection and I don't think I'm going to use this one, so we can just get rid of that one. Do you want to use it? Go ahead. But we're just going to delete that layer because I don't think I'm going to use it. That one's in place. So just move these flowers around until you get somewhat of an idea of how you want your image to look. And I'm just going to keep moving things until I get a general idea. I think what I wanted to have happen is have the branches that we have coming out through her arm and then some flowers on that branch. I'm going to make her arm into a branch and have flowers in here as well. And that her dress is going to be faded into flowers. And then we're gonna have some stuff going around her. So I think this isn't going to work up here. I want some more detailed flowers which we have. So we're going to duplicate the layer that I'm talking about. It's this layer that has these beautiful flowers. So let's take this hit Command or Control J, and we're going to duplicate that, but we're also going to on the new layer. Let's name it copy so we know a twenties which we're going to delete this mask. Okay, So we have that layer back. So we're just going to right now just transform it, kind of place it wherever we wanted to have. And then we'll go mask it out in a minute. And we're missing one layer. Hide some of these so we can see stuff. This one we can put maybe down here in her dress as well. Or maybe we can have it coming up through the trees. That might work better. And we can take that top one and move it down to her dress. This one and we will move it down here and we'll use it somewhere down here. Okay, let's hide that one. Let's hide that one. And let's hide that one. Now we have two branches that we're going to use for the arms. And I think that this bigger one will be good to becoming out of her arm. So let's move that into place. Make it smaller. We might actually need to make her smaller as well. So let's select her and Command or Control T to bring her down a little bit and we can resize her later on. So let's go back to our branch, command or control T. Let's zoom in a little bit with command or control plus Br, sorry, Command or Control plus sign. And let's just bring this branch down until we have it somewhat in place. Make it a little bit skinnier. And then right-click on this and we're going to warp it. And we're just going to work this bottom part. So it's a little bit thinner K. And we're going to work the top and bring it out a little bit wider. That's good right there. Now hit Enter. Now go to your layers panel with your brand selected and we're going to add a mass to it. Okay, See the mask and make sure that mask is selected. Hit B on your keyboard, or select the brush tool. Make sure you have black in the foreground because we're going to remove part of this branch. And then make sure that your hardness is all the way down. And we're going to lower the opacity a little bit because we're going to start blending the branch into the arm. So let's decrease the size of the brush, and let's zoom in a little bit more. And let's just start removing part of the branch. Okay? Don't worry about the hand-write here. We're going to remove that as well to make this a little bit smaller loops so that we can get in here. And if you remove something that you don't want, just hit X to bring white into the foreground. And you can bring some of that back. Okay, now let's go back to our woman or the dancer and click on her mask. And we're going to remove this hand and blended into this branch. So make sure black is in the foreground. You can hit this little arrow or you can hit X on your keyboard. Blacks in the foreground. And right now let's bring the opacity up to a 100 because we want this hand to be gone. Just paint away the hand completely. Okay. So you can see this branch blends into the arm pretty well, but we can make it a little better. So let's go back to the branch. Hit the Mask. Let's bring the opacity down. Okay, and now let's just paint until it looks like it blends a little bit better. This might take a little practice. And we are going to convert this to black and white. So don't worry that the colors are matching right now. Just play around until you get something that you like. Let's bring it down a little bit more. Let's restart removing and just blend it in. Right? Let's zoom back out. And I don't like this right here actually. So equity to bring that back in on the branch. And let's bring this all the way up to do that. Alright, that looks better. And her arm is a branch. Cool. 8. Layout and Blending Part 2: All right, the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to put the flowers in the dress. So let's unhide those layers that we think we're going to use there. All right, I think that's all. So in this one we're gonna have to do a little work on. We're going to mask out the white parts by hand. So I'm going to show you a little bit and then I'm going to speed up the video so that you're not sitting through this whole thing. So just select your paint brush. Go to black. So we want all of it to be gone, but we don't want to have hard edges. We want it to blend. So we're gonna make our brush size a little bit bigger. And you'll notice that the edge is soft. Instead of having a hard line like that has. We're going to have a soft line is going to blend into the dress better once we start doing that part. So for this part, we're just going to go around and remove those whites. So I'm going to speed the video up so you don't have to sit through it. Okay. Another thing you can do, I just realized I forgot to tell you this. If you want to make a quick selection of the white parts with your lasso tool. So just go around, do a really quick selection of the white areas that you want to remove. Okay, then you can go back to your brush tool and with the black and the program, just paint and you're only going to remove what's in that selection. So a little bit easier than trying to make these perfect brush lines. You can just go in and do a quick selection. Go back to your brush and remove, and then de-select using Command or Control D. You can do that, or you can just use the brush. Now I'm going to speed the video back up again. All right, Now that we have that done, we can start blending it into our address and warping it and shaping it however we want. So let's select it and hit Transform. And hit Command or Control T to transform. And let's zoom out a little bit. We can size it down. Maybe have this going like this. And let's warp it. So right-click on the transformation and then we're going around until you get it, how you want it to look. Let's hide this other guy for a minute. And I don't like this branch right here. So I'm going to remove it. Click on the mask. Picture blacks in the foreground and remove it. If you want to. Transform this again and warp. It looks pretty good. Now let's work on this guy and put him somewhere that we want. Let's click on him and Command or Control T to transform. I'm going to make it. Let me see here. This is just about playing around with the movement in however you want this to look, guys, you don't have to follow along with me exactly. K. And remember, we're going to turn this into a black and white. So don't worry about the colors right now. And I don't like this hard edge right here. If you'll look, you zoom in. There's a really hard edge right here. So let's add a mask to this layer to make sure blacks than the foreground. And make sure your hardness is all the way down and bring your size up a little bit, and let's just fade out that hard edge. Okay? Alright. So what I wanna do is make her dress fade into these flowers. But I think I need some more flowers in here. So let's just add some more loops. Let's flip this vertically, see how that looks. Let's put that right there. That looks good and we're going to feed that hard line out again. So make sure blacks than the foreground. And let's fade that out. Take away some of this other stuff that we don't want. That what's good for right now, and we will fix the rest later. So let's go back to this one. And what I think I'm going to do is mask out part of her arm and make it just flowers. So I think I want her skin part, her forearm to be gone. So let's go to the dancers mask, brush selected black in the foreground. And let's just remove it. And remember that we're going to add it. We can always add stuff back in if we mess up. So we're just going to remove I would say up to her wrist and then we could add it back in. If we want to. Let's go back to this layer right here, which is right here. So Command or Control T, Let's move it around, size it down. I think I'm going to have it look like it's coming out of her sleeve. And I might not need all of it. Have it down a little bit more. I think that's good and let's warp it. So right-click and then work. Let's zoom in. And we're going to curve this a little bit. Have it going into her wrist, but out of our arm. Don't worry about this part. We're going to get rid of it in a second. All right, hit Enter. And now let's go to that mask and make sure blacks in the foreground. And we're going to mask out this part right here. And also this part right here that's supposed to be coming out of her sleeve. So just paint until it's all gone. And then let's concentrate on her sleeve part. Let's actually draw a selection lasso tool and draw right where her sleeve is. And then circle around. Come on this side of her sleeve. And then get your paint brush tool, make sure blacks in the foreground and just take out that part of the branch and that Command or Control D to deselect. And let's zoom out. Her arm is very skinny. So what we're gonna do is we're going to add another branch in there to make it look thicker. And we have that other branch that we have right here. So let's Command or Control T to size that down, rotate it, cited down some more. Let's bring it in here. See what we can make with it. Sided down a little bit more. And I think that looks good. So let's transform some of this. It's this guy right there. That one looks fine. And then we're going to go back to this one and transform that a little bit so it matches those branches better. Okay, and let's Command or Control T, right-click. And you guessed it we're going to warp again and just line those branches up a little bit because we are going to get rid of them. Okay, Now, we are going to go to the mask on this layer. Make sure your paint brush selected. Let's bring the opacity down. And we're going to zoom in and make sure blacks in the foreground. And these branches out. The, this one out. And remember this is going to be in black and white so that the color doesn't matter. Right now. K 0, that make sure nothing else is there to take this out. This makes sure everything looks good. All right. So you can see how this isn't lined up and we can't really warp it to make it look lined up. The way we want to. So what we're gonna do is we're going to go to that layer and we're going to select that one part. Okay, Now we're going to hit Command or Control T. And we're going to work this one part instead of the whole thing. So just move it around until it lines up. Good. Okay, and then Command or Control D to de-select. Let's zoom out and see how that looks. Looks a little bit better. But we're going to mask out parts of this branch as well. So let's go to the branch. Add a mass to it. Make sure blacks in the foreground. Make sure your brushes selected, hit the brush or B on your keyboard. And we're going to do a 100 percent right now. We're gonna do it we did before. We're going to just draw a selection around this leaf so that we can get rid of all the branch that's supposed to be under her sleeve is increase our brush and just take that away. This doesn't make sense anymore because it's coming out the side of her arm. So we're actually going to get rid of that as well. Oops, sorry. Let's decrease the size of the brush. Let's get rid of this branch and we're going to get rid of those flowers as well. Ok, select that. And let's just mask this out. Make sure all of your branches masked out. Oops. Alright, let's make this looks good, but it's a little too thin. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to merge those because I'd actually like the way that looks. So we're going to apply this mask. Okay? Then we're gonna go to this flower layer, which is right here. And we're gonna apply that mask. Okay, and then we're going to select that layer command and select the branch layer, right-click and merge layers. Now you'll see that this is on its own layer. So hit Enter, undo that, and let's name this arm flowers or something, so it's easier to find k. And then we're gonna go in and we are going to make it a little bit thicker. Hold down shift. So you don't have a uniform transform and then move it around and set it to an area that you like. Alright, that looks good for right now. All right. Now, you guys can go in and add more flowers if you want. But we're going to move on to this top part. Okay, So I'm going to speed along here so you guys don't have to watch the same thing over and over again. So you guys have the basic idea what to do when placing your flowers. I'm going to speed this part up the basic placement and masking of the layers. So feel free to watch it or we can, you can just jump on to the next video where we're going to blend in the dress. So the other layers. 9. Final Blending & Black and White: Alright, now that we have everything in place, somewhat, the next thing that we're gonna do is we're going to blend this section of flowers into her address. And then we're going to add some depth to it, and then some shadows. And we're also going to make everything black and white. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to zoom in on our address. Bring that up a little too far. Okay. So we wanna get rid of all of this, but not her feet. And maybe part of this dress as well. So we need to select the dancer, select the mask brush tool selected or hit B on your keyboard. Make sure blacks in front. For the first part, Let's just do a 100 percent opacity so that we get rid of a good portion of the address and then we'll blend it back in. Minkowski rid of part of this. You can't really see this. Let's make sure we're not removing her feet because dancers need feet. K. Get rid of all that. And actually I want to keep that. See, this is why masks are good. I removed that and then I like the way it looks so we can bring it back in because we didn't delete it. We just put a mask over it. So maybe I'll just fade that out. So we'll go to maybe 40 percent on our opacity. Bring the brush up a little bit and we'll just fade part of the mask out, the key part of that vector S. Okay, let's hide some of these layers so we can see what we've taken out. Okay, so let's take out some stuff without the fires being there right now. And we're going to add some depth by adding another layer of flowers and then putting a shadow on that. All right, let's settle or dress flyers back in. And let's actually, I like the way this looks. So I'm going to blend all of these dress layers together. So let's apply the layer mask. And you don't have to do is if you don't want to, you can keep playing with yours. But I'm happy with the way that mine looks. So then we're going to select each flower layer that we have on the dress by holding down Command and clicking on those layers. And then you can either Command E, which will join the layers together, or you can right-click and hit Merge layers. Now we have the dress flowers, and I'm going to rename this to dress flowers. So it's easier to flowers, not flower. So it's easier to find K. Now that we have that, I'm going to add another mask to this. And we're going to blend this down into the address. Let me see something real quick. I actually like the way it looks when it's below. So we might change this up a little bit. Let's go to this mask. And we are going to play around with this a little bit. Let's take up the feet now actually go here and we'll bring these flowers back in. We're going to pass to backup. And these fires back in. And let's increase our brush. Decrease the opacity quite a bit. Make sure that your brushes soft and make it bigger. And we are going to blend these flowers into this dress. Okay? You can do as little, as much as you want. And you can see that I'm getting transparency here. So we're going to hit X on our keyboard or a switch to make white come upfront. And we're going to blend that back in. And just make it look like it's one seamless piece. And keep going back and forth between taking away and adding. And just blend things together how you want. If you start to see transparency, make sure you add it back in, like right here. So we're going to add the dress back into here and then go to our flower. Okay, don't worry too much about the transparency because we are going to add another way or flowers that's gonna go behind it to give it some shadows. So why don't we do that right now? Let's go down to our dress flowers. Hit Command or Control J. And that's going to give you a duplicate of these flowers. Okay? Now, we're going to bring this below the bottom. Okay? And if you select that and you transform it, sorry, Command or Control T to transform, you'll see that we have this going on. So let's make it a little bit smaller than our original. Let's move it around a little bit and hit enter. Okay, that's going to be a good portion of shadows. And also wondering this part of the dress back a little bit too much blended or if they're funded some more. Alright, so the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to add an adjustment layer to each layer. The reason we're gonna do to each layer is because the lighting and the color in each layer is different. So if you do it to each layer, you can manipulate it the way you want. So if we just added a black and white adjustment layer to the whole thing, Let's go to the top, select that one. And now we'll add an adjustment layer just to show you what I'm talking about. So this is your adjustment layer and you can manipulate it by moving the sliders. So say I wanted to add some darkness down here. But I don't want to add darkness up here. So if I'm moving it, it's going to affect everything. So if we add a clipping mask layer, we can affect each one individually. So we're going to do that. We're going to take this and we're going to bring it down. We'll start at the bottom. So this is our copy here. So we're going to have this adjustment layer selected and right-click on it and create clipping mask. There's also this little button here that can do it as well. So let's go back to that one and we're gonna do it again. Black and white adjustment layer. Make sure it's selected. Clipping mask. And we can actually copy and paste this as well. Make sure you just fill layer selected command C, go above, hit Command V, goes above the next layer. Just make sure you're clipping it to that bottom layer. And keep doing that until each layer has a black and white clipping mask. To select a layer, Command B, clip it, select Command B, clip it. This might seem tedious, but it's the best way to get individual results on each layer. Two more. All right, and you'll see that everything on our composition is it black and white now? So now we're going to play around with the settings for everything. So make sure you're desperate layer selected and this is where you're going to adjust everything. Right here. You can adjust the different colors. So you can always click Auto, but that's not the way to do it. So if you hide this adjustment layer on your top, you're going to notice that there's a couple, there's some yellows and oranges in here. So let's bring that back and let's play with those, make those a little bit brighter. You bring the red standardly that the oranges are going to be affected. So let's make that a little bit brighter as well. And just play around until things are where you want them. Do this with each adjustment layer. Same thing with this one. Let's make these brighter. All right. This is affecting the flowers. These little flowers don't need a lot of adjusting because they look pretty good already. We're going to go in and add some shadows and some highlights to the little flowers and the dresses. So I wouldn't worry about these little flowers if you have them. So we're just going to skip all the flowers, right? And we're going to move down to the bird. The bird is well, does it really need a lot of adjustments? We can make them a tiny bit brighter if we can, but I don't think that we can do that with levels. So you're just going to go through and adjust these however you want to. And this one's for the arm. Actually want this to be a little bit darker. All right, let's move on to the top. It says, this is a little bit brighter. Give it some depth. There we go. What's next? The hair, which would be this one right here. It's gonna give that some shadows right away. Okay. Let's go down to the hair copy. I mean, the hair. Give that one some shadows as well. Just do some quick adjustments to each one. I believe this. Let's zoom out so we can see this branch a little bit better. I don't want it super dark. And I also don't want it very light. So right about there. And the dancer now, she actually looks very good the way she is. We don't have to adjust much as her because she was already in black and white. So let's go to the flowers on the dress now. And let's move this around. I believe this is the top, the top one. Let's actually do the bottom months first. Hide the top ones. And let's make the bottom one's pretty dark because they're going to be a shadow. So too dark, That's good. Okay, let's reveal the top ones and let's make them a little bit darker as well, but not as dark. Let's zoom out and see how that works. Okay. Also, don't forget to save your work every once in a while because things have a tendency to crash. 10. Adding Background: All right, the next thing we're gonna do is we are going to take our dancer and the flowers that are attached to her and make her into one object. I have her exactly where I want her to be. So we're going to combine all those later layers. So it's easier to make a background and the shadow and add some highlights to Earth. So we are going to go through and select all of the layers that are attached to the dancer. So the tops, none of the flowers, none of the individual flowers that are on the side because we want to move those around. Not the bird. So the arm flowers, the tops, the hair. All of this is attached to the dancer. So we're going to either Command or Control E, or you can right-click and merge layers. Okay? Now if you look, our dancer is all one piece. Awesome. So let's make her a little bigger since we know what her size is going to be. Okay. And let's move our flowers around again, just so that they make more sense. K, so I can go here. This one. Let's put it right there. This little guy. You can stay down here, but let's make it a little bit smaller. There we go. Just go through and set up your composition to exactly how you want it to look. I got a little guy, Let's put them right there. This one. Let's actually go on the mask and bring everything back. Oops. I felt bring back part of the flower that we want to, they want to own a bit though. So let's get rid of this. This. And that looks good for right now. Let's zoom back out. 11. Highlights, Shadows, and Corrections: Alright, now that we have everything cleaned up in our layers panel, what we're gonna do, the last thing we're gonna do is add some highlights to the bird and the flowers and the branches. And also we're going to put a shadow down here. So let's start with that. Okay, since the light is coming from here, the top right, we're going to add highlights going on the right side of all the images. Okay? So to do this, we're going to just put in a solid layer. So go to your adjustment layers in your layer panel, scroll down so you can see it's solid layer. Okay? For right now, let's just pick a white because I don't know exactly what color we're gonna do yet. Click on the mask for the layer and hit Command or Control I to invert it. Okay, Now the next thing we wanna do is duplicate this Command J and then move it down so that each layer has its own adjustment layer. Okay, So the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to clip the adjustment layers to layer below it. And you'll see why in a minute. So right-click, create clipping mask and do it for the next one as well, create clipping mask. So when you create a clipping mask on here, it's only going to allow you to brush on whatever object you have a clip to. So say we wanted to bring back some of that color onto this layer. Just go like this and you'll see that it's only painting on that layer and not on the background or the other layers. Okay, so let's undo all of that. And let's go to our mass on our adjustment layer. We're going to have white in the foreground. We're going to have, Make sure your heart is, is all the way down. And let's bring the size of the brush down a little bit. And we're just going to barely paint this back in on the edges of the flowers. So let's zoom in. So light's going to becoming from here. So just paint on the right side and the tops where light would be hitting it. It was coming from this angle. Okay. And you're not going to paint the whole thing, you just going to paint the edges. And on some of it you're not gonna be able to really see. Don't worry though, because we're going to adjust it to a different color. Let's change this color so it's a little bit easier to see. Okay, So it's red, but we're gonna change it back to a different color. I just want you to be able to see what you're painting it. So make your brush hardness to 0. Keep the opacity at a 100 because we can always change the opacity down here and the blending mode. So big the hardness at 0 make your brush size a little bit bigger. And what you're gonna do is you're just going to have white in the foreground and you're going to paint all the way on it. But just outside. And you'll see that you're getting these edges of color, which is exactly what you want. Okay? Remember where your light's coming from. Coming from this way. So let's put a little bit on this sort of here in a little bit right there. And we're going to do It's here as well. Just go around the edges to where the light would be hitting. Just go around the edges. This is a very small touch, but it makes a big difference on certain parts of your image. Let's make the brush a little bit bigger. If you do too much, just hit X and remove. That's why we have masks. And you notice that this has still some stuff on from the image. So let's go to the mass of the dancer. Make black in the foreground. And let's remove this portion that we didn't remove before. I go back here and keep adding in our highlights. And you're just going to go around. Every edge has a little bit of highlight on it. I'm going to speed this part up a little bit so that you don't have to watch all of the painting. Once you have all those added that you want, I'm just going to do this much for right now. Just to show you how to do it. But once you have those on the dancer done, do the same thing for the flowers and the bird. Just go in and add some highlights, very subtle highlights to where the light would be showing. And I'm just going to do a few of them really quickly. And then we're going to change the color so that you can see how it looks to have highlights and without the highlights. And if you don't have a great master key on this one, go to add a mask on the layer and remove what you need to remove so that it's cleaner. I didn't do a very good job on this one. Okay. Let's go back to the adjustment layer and white and keep adding in our highlights. Some doubt here on the bird. All right, now you have the highlights done. We're going to add shadows down here on these flowers, since the dancers going to have a casting a shadow on them. So we're not going to do how it's on those. So once you have that done, let's go back into our layer panel and let's change the color. Let's change it to white. Or maybe like a yellowish. See. You can see the highlights have changed to yellow. White doesn't do much because of the black and white, but let's just do a hint of yellow on it. And then we're going to decrease the opacity. Okay? So this is width and without, go up here, with and without me to take some away here because it's just too much. Let's go there and take that away. And some of this away. This is one mass are great because you can adjust and readjust as much as you want. I don't like that much yellow. So it's a very subtle but it gives it a little bit of a pop. Okay, Let's do the other ones. Well, actually, let's check out this color. So when you want to copy a color, just look at the code here. Hit Command C. Cancel this. Double-click on this color. Make sure that's highlighted command V, value of the exact same color as before. It. Ok, and let's take a look at these. So let's bring the opacity down on this one as well. Let's zoom out. All right, That looks good. The next thing we're gonna do is we're going to add some shadows down here to this, to these flowers. So to do that, so a good way to do that is with the exposure layer. So go to your adjustment layer icon. Go to exposure, click. Okay. Let's bring it down here. So it's clipped to the flowers and the bird layer. Now, click on your exposure and we're going to go and bring the exposure down. You'll notice that they get black. Okay, that's fine for now because we're going to invert it and then paint shadows back in. So once you have it to a good level, I'm gonna say this is a good part. Let's click the mask on the Adjustment Layer and Command or Control I to invert it. And you'll see they're back to normal. Go to your paintbrush, put white in the foreground with the mask selected. Let's zoom in on the bottom. And we're going to paint back in some of those shadows. So right up top here. And don't worry if it's too dark. We can add I'm sorry. Don't worry if it's too dark, we can decrease the exposure on them. Just add some shadows to it. Okay. All right. Once you have it the way you want to look, Let's go to the opacity and just decrease it a little bit. All right, and now this is before, this is after. Let's zoom out. That's before and after. It looks a little bit better, right? The last thing we're gonna do is we're going to add a shadow for the dancer and the flowers and the bird. Okay, So what we're going to do is. We're going to take all of these layers, since we have that the way we want them and select them and then convert to smart object. Okay? And then we are going to Command or Control J to duplicate it, bring it below. And now we're going to Command or Control T to transform it. Hold down Shift. So you don't have a uniform transformation. Because if you don't hold down Shift everything's going to transform uniformly. And we don't want that right now. So we'll down Shift, transform. Remember the shadows coming from here. And don't worry, we're going to blur this around. Just put it wherever you want. Ok, hit OK, and we will adjust it. Okay, now that you have it adjusted and transformed however you want it. We're going to go to the shadow layer. We're going to go to Image Adjustments and exposure. And we're going to bring that exposure all the way down. Good. We don't really want the detail. We just want it to look like a shadow. Once that's done, I'm going to go to our opacity and bring it down. That looks good. Okay? And I'm going to work this a little bit. It okay? And let's just work this a little bit. So it looks like a crazy shadow. That's good. This isn't going to be perfect, but this showing you how to do it. Okay, now I want to add a little bit of a blur to the shadow. So we're gonna go to make sure your layer selected. Go to Filter, go to blur. And let's add a Gaussian blur. Now the radius is going to let you determine how much blur. And this will let you move around to see parts of that layer. So let's increase the blur a lot so you can see what it looks like. Have the preview on. That's too much. So I think that looks good. Okay, good. The last thing I wanna do is add a levels adjustment layer to our dancer and the flowers. Just so just a couple of things. So go to your adjustment layers in the layer icon, scroll down to levels, and we're going to clip that to our dancer. Now. Just play around with the levels to increase the highlights and the shadows until you get your image the way you want it. I think that looks better. All right, now, the last thing we can do is we can add a color Raw Filter. You don't have to do this. I like to add a little bit of color to all of my images with the color off filter just gives a little extra pop. So to do that, let's select all of our layers. Hold down shift, and select them all. Let's convert them all to a smart object. Go to Filter, camera Raw Filter. Now, this is where you can play with color grading. So I like to add a little bit of color to images. And this is something that you just have to play around with to get the final image that you want. Because you can go crazy with this ad greens and yellows and do whatever you want. I just want to add a little bit of blue and a little bit of pink. And EBIT. Go back up to basic and you can play with the exposure at some temperature to it or warmth. That actually looks nice too. A little bit of that. Play with the shadows as well in here. Okay. So just play around and color grading to get the final image that you want. And that's the end of the class, guys. Thank you so much for taking the course. 12. Thank You: All right, We've reached the end of the course. Congratulations on finishing the class. Thank you for taking time to view the class. Don't forget to post your projects in the project section. And if you have time, I would love to ask that you go and review the course. I always appreciate any feedback. If you have any questions, post them in the discussion section, and I will respond to them as quickly as I can. Thank you again for taking the class. Everybody take care.