Adobe Photoshop Masterclass: Photo Compositing for Ads & Social Media

1. 1 Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Adelbe Photoshop Master class on creating bold ad compositions with Photo Compositing. My name is Tom and I've been working in graphic design and creative direction for over 15 years. I've had the chance to design for brands such as Pokemon Go, Marvel Snap, Bally Sports, and I've led creative teams to build eye catching visuals for campaigns across different industries. When it comes to advertising, photo composition is one of the most powerful skills that you can have. It's how you take everyday images and transform them into something imaginative, eye catching and professional kind of visuals that make someone stop scrolling on social media or make a product feel larger than life in a campaign. In this class, we're going to focus on that exact process. I'll walk you through how to plan your idea, select and prepare assets, build out a background, place, and blend your product, and then polish everything with color, light, and typography so that it feels like a real ad. We're going to be working on two projects today. The first is a simple sneaker ad that you might see for any major sneaker brand when they launch a new product. And the second is a more complex fantasy beverage ad where we'll take a simple product and transform it into something surreal and larger than life. Perfect. Social media campaign. This class is designed for beginner to intermediate Photoshop users. So even if you're new to compositing, I'll break down everything step by step and show you on screen every single button that I press. And if you're more experienced, you'll still pick up plenty of productivity hacks and creative techniques along the way. By the end of class, you'll not only understand the process of building professional ad compositions from scratch, but you'll also have a couple of polished portfolio ready pieces that you can show off to potential clients or to just add it to your own portfolio. I'm really excited to dive in with you, so let's jump in to the very first lesson. 2. 2 Photoshop UI Overview: Alright, welcome to the class. I'm so happy to have you here. Before we jump into making any projects, I just want to go over the Photoshop UI with you really quickly. We're not going to dive too deep into it, but I will go over a couple of things that we'll need to know for the upcoming projects. Now, when you first open up Photoshop, it might look completely different to mine. Every designer has their own custom way to have the layout, but if you want to follow along and have the same layout as I do, I'm going to show you exactly how I do it. I'm just going to go ahead and reset mine back to the essentials, reset essentials. So if you're opening up Photoshop for the very first time, yours might look something like this. You'll notice my brushes have disappeared off of the left side here, and things look a little bit different here on the right. The first thing that I like to do is I like to take the properties panel over here. You can just click and drag, and I like to pin it just underneath here. You'll see that little blue line. That means it's going to snap in place over there. So just click drag and drop, and now it's over there, and I can open that up. That's just what I need to and hide it away. And whilst we're talking about the modules over here, I also like to enable a couple more. What I like to enable is I like to go to Window, and character. This really helps. Gives us a lot of customization options for our type. We can force a full bold or italic, change our tracking and leading between the letters and lines. Over a lot of customization options here for your type. So I always like to have that ready to go right here in this bar. And when you add that, you also add in this paragraph panel as well. This will let you change how the text is aligned, left, center, or right, and how it's justified. Again, left, center, right, or justify all. So we'll touch upon these character panels a little bit later in the class. Next, we come down over here to our adjustments and libraries. See some of my previous libraries here for some other clients and projects. But what I like to do, I like to have my adjustments shown. And if yours look different than these icons, yours might have the modern view. So this is how the modern view now looks like for the adjustments, but honestly, I feel like it takes up way too much space. You can see here if you go to single adjustments, you kind of have to scroll through and find what you want. That takes up too much space for me. So what I like to do is I like to have the classic view, very small icons here, and I just drag that. So I always like to have my layers panel be the biggest can see how my file is laid out. I can see the hierarchy of the different layers, and I can keep things organized in folders and with proper naming conventions, and I'll make sure to go over all of that as we move forward. Next, you may have noticed on the left, I had my brushes out here. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, when you're doing a composite and you're trying to do the shadows and highlights and trying to get different brushes, it can be a pain to hit be on your keyboard, go into your brushes, hold it down, get the right brush tool if you're not already there. Find your brush down here in this list of all your brushes. And then whenever you find a brush that you like, it ends up closing once you click and start painting. And we don't really want that, do we? So what I like to do is I like to just go to window and enable my brushes window. And you'll see that opens up here onto the right by default. And what we're going to do is we're simply going to click and drag this whole window by clicking up here. We're going to detach it from that side bar, and we're going to bring it up over here to the left until you see this blue line up here. Again, it's going to snap in place, and then you just let. If yours is too narrow, it'll only show one column of brushes, but you can easily drag that out until you have two or even three, if you like. I found two is the sweet spot for me, and then you can easily go from a soft brush. You start painting. You can switch over to a hard brush, do something else, jump down to yet another brush. It's incredibly helpful for efficiency, for fast workflow, and it's going to save you so much time and headache from having to find brush. That is the basic user interface setup for Photoshop for how I'm going to be using it in this class today and how it might also be helpful for you to have it laid out as well. Now, another part of Photoshop we're going to be using a bit today is going to be the generative AI features that are now part of Photoshop. If you don't already see it down here, there is something called a contextual taskbar. If yours happens to be hidden, let me hide it. If it's not there, you can enable it very easily. Just go to Window, Contextual Taskbar, and it's there. This is where you can go to generate your images. Let's say I want something here, we're going to be going into this in a lot more detail later to just show you a quick overview of this, you can click Generate Image, and you'll be met with this dialogue box where you can go through, describe the image that you want, choose any inspiration image, choose if you want it to be art or photo. You can go through all sorts of effects. There's seriously so many here, so many that you can go through and play with. It can give you some really, really cool designs. You can also reference a certain style. You can have a reference image you can bring in by yourself or choose one of the already provided styles here. And same goes here for the composition. You can choose an image that you already have if you want to reference that particular composition or choose something that they have here, more landscape focused, more product photography focused or something else. Once we have that, we just click Generate and Photoshop does its magic. It generates something really cool for us, and we're going to be playing around with this later on. Now, another feature that we're going to be using later in this class is called Harmonize. This is a new feature that's now part of the Contextual taskbar, but it is only available on Photoshop Beta. So I'm going to show you exactly how to get that. So when you have your Creative Cloud desktop app open, this is the home screen here and it is incredibly easy to find the Photoshop Beta. You simply go over here to Apps, you click that and up here you will find Beta. Go ahead and click that. And for me, it says, open for you. It's going to say Install, like you see here that I have for the substance three D viewer. You're just going to go ahead and hit Install. It'll take a couple of minutes to download and install, and then you're going to have another installation or Photoshop that has some really cool Beta features, one of which we're going to be using in the second project of this class. So for now, just install that and we'll be ready to go. And lastly, every single font that we're going to be using today is actually going to be an Adobe font. So what does that mean? You don't have to download any font files or install any I'm going to show you how to enable them on the Adobe Fonts website. When you go to fonts adobe.com, you're going to have access to thousands upon thousands of high quality fonts straight from Adobe's library. They're honestly some of the best fonts that you can get out there, and they're included with your Creative Cloud plan. You can go ahead and enable any one of these, but one of the fonts we're going to be using today is called Fresno, and it's very easy to find and to enable. All you do is go up here to the search bar, start typing the font that you want. And it's already suggested there. It's a font family. Go ahead and click that. And you'll be taken to this page. Now you see this family has two fonts in it. There's Fresno black and Fresno Inline. All you're going to do is for you it's not going to say remove. I'm going to remove it just to show you the example. For you, it's going to say Add family. All you're going to do is click that add, and that's it. It's available in all of your Adobe apps from Photoshop Illustrator, you name it. It's there. You can just go into your type tool, start typing, and it'll be in the list of fonts that you have. It is so simple. You can go to Browse. You can find really cool fonts for any projects. And you can filter by different tags if you want it to be geometric, rough, brush pen, luxury, or anything. You can even get really down into the details and adjust the weight, the width X height, the contrast, italics. There's so many filters here where you can really hone in on the exact font that you want. And like I said, if you look over here, there are over 5,000 font families for you to choose from that are all available to you since you have the Adobe Creative Cloud, and that is going to provide you with limitless creative possibilities. So I'm going to put on screen now the font set. You have to enable for this course. So take a moment, go over here to the Adobe Fonts website, get all of those installed and enabled, and we're going to be ready to move on to the next part of the class. So with your user interface setup, fonts downloaded and the Photoshop Beta downloaded for later in the class. You are now ready to move into the next part of our class. But we're going to talk about what goes into planning a professional ad composition. It's not as easy as you think. 3. 3 Planning out an ad: Before we ever touch Photoshop, we need to talk about planning. And I know, I know. Planning isn't exactly the flashy part of design, but trust me, it's one of the most important steps. When you jump straight into Photoshop without a clear plan, what usually happens is you end up with something that feels messy. You've got too many images, nothing looks cohesive, and halfway through, you're kind of asking yourself where am I even going with this? You kind of lose track. But when you spend even 5 minutes sketching out an idea or building a mood board, everything changes. You already know where your product is going to sit in the frame, what kind of background you're generally looking for, and what type of atmosphere you're trying to create. And that clarity will honestly save you hours of backtracking. Early on in my career, I would get to the final stages of a composition and then scrap the entire thing when I realized I didn't really like it. It wasn't coming together and not what I had envisioned in the first place. So learn from my mistakes and plan it out. Think of it like building a house. If you start laying bricks without blueprints, the walls won't line up and the roof won't fit. But if you've got a blueprint, you can move quickly and confidently because you know exactly what the final structure should look like. Photoshop is no different. The better the plan, the smoother the build. So with that said, let's go ahead and start building out some sketches for our very first project. You can always use something like Google or Pinterest or even Adobe's on Be hands to collect inspiration. But I urge you to make sure that that stays just as an inspiration, as a reference. Don't copy it, okay? Always try to never plagiarize, never steal someone's work. Just use it as an inspirational source, and that's going to be reflected in your own composite. Now, if you don't already have your artboard looking like this, you can just go to File New. And this is a 2000 pixel wide by 2000 pixel high document with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch, and nothing else is changing. It's just a very simple square artboard for us to play around with some thumbnail design. So go ahead and hit Create, and you're going to be met with this screen. I'm going to go ahead and close that because I already have one open. So let's go ahead and make a new layer above this background layer and hit B&R keyboard to go into our brushes. I'm going to go ahead and just go with the very simple, hard round brush. It's at eight pixels. So you can see that is how white it is. I might go ahead and make that even smaller with the left bracket here on the keyboard or right bracket to make it bigger. And I'm going to go ahead and make it a nice blue color so that we can see what we're doing. And if you have a drawing tablet in Sless, that's definitely going to help you in this part of the process, the sketching process. But you can get by with doing some sketches using just a computer mouse. But like I said, it's going to be way easier if you have a drawing tablet. So if you can afford to get one, even just a $100.01 is going to be so helpful for you and open up so many opportunities. So what I like to do is I like to usually break up my artboard into four quadrants, just like so, and that gives me four mini thumbnails to work with. So hitting Z on your keyboard, let's go ahead and zoom into this first one. Now for the first project, our client has given us this following brief. They're launching a new sneaker. How cool is that? And they want you to create an ad for it that simply just showcases the sneaker itself. That's going to be the focal point of it. They're going to have some branding that goes along with it, the name of the sneaker, the name of the brand, the logo is going to be provided for you, and they're giving you quite a bit of free reign as to how you want to present it. Want it to be fairly simple, fairly minimal, and not too elaborate. They don't want too many flashy things and things jumping around on the image. So that is our starting off point. Now, the client has said that they can provide us photos of the shoes from any angle that we want, whether we want that to be a top down view, side view, three quarter, anything we want, they can get it for us. That's going to give us quite a bit of creative freedom as we explore our options. Let's go ahead and let's just start throwing ideas down. When you're at this sketching process, anything goes and don't worry about being messy. These thumbnails, these sketch explorations are just to get your ideas out there and explore different layout options. So one thing we can do is we can have very simple shoe, be kind of the main focus of our image here. And like I said, this is not going to be very pretty. This is just for a layout here. And if you ever want to erase anything, you can just say E on your keyboard, get to the eraser tool and erase that. And if you want to undo something, it is Control or Command Z, and then B to get back to your brush. So we can have something like a shoe here. We can have maybe some branding up here, maybe, like, the main title of the shoe could be down here, whatever they have. Maybe like a little tag line could be under there and maybe some call to action, but maybe not. So if it's something that is this simple, then we might want to go ahead and add in some extra little shapes going behind the shoe. And like I said, this is, like, very very simple line work, playing around with layout. We might want to have some shapes going here. And as you explore the ideas, you might even stop halfway through and be like, I'm not feeling that. And that is fine. You just move on to the next one. I could potentially just have kind of like the tip of the shoe coming up, maybe taking up, like, a good portion of our whole image here in case the client wants to really focus in on a particular part of that shoe, something like that. So this would be the lace is going. So we can just have, like, a very close view of the hip of the shoe, honestly, and then we can have, again, maybe some sort of title or name. I'm just going to go ahead and play around with that. So if I have the name, then I can have a subtext. That could maybe work. And everything is centered here, so you might want to have logo up here, logo, or you might even want to push that off to the side. So this is a potential layout that I could go with. For the background, I would probably keep this just one background, honestly, maybe something like a concrete or a marble. So even that, I would make a note somewhere here, concrete background. Okay, so that's another option here. Now I could also do something that's a little bit crazier. So let's go ahead. I want to, like, split my image, kind of like a cool angle going through it, because this is a sneaker. This is going to be like an athletic, sporty sneaker, so I kind of want to have that edgy kind of look to it. So if we break up the screen in two with some kind of divider, we can play around with that later. And then let's go ahead. Let's add in our shoe. I would maybe want the shoe to follow this diagonal line here. I would maybe even crop that in even more, have the shoe take up a larger part of the image. We could have something like that. And honestly, we can have something like the name of the shoe be right behind it. So that's what a lot of these companies do sometimes is they kind of have the name right behind the shoe itself. I would maybe go a little bit bigger with that. Let's go ahead erase that. I'm not a fan of that. Let's go really big with the name. So if we have name, Something like that. So kind of the shot is over it. Name Logo. We can then have the logo be maybe up here. Because now what we have here, we have a lot of weight in the dead center of the image. So what we can do then is just have the logo off to the side, try to counterbalance that. And this layout as well, also offers a lot of possibility to then change our crop to horizontal or vertical. If we go back to the second thumbnail that we did, this one does lend itself well to a vertical crop. But if we were to do a very long online web banner that is horizontal, this will be a little bit difficult to work with. We would probably have to rotate it. So that's something to keep in mind, as well. Go ahead and try to get a fourth design. I'm kind of happy with this. I like how simple it is. So I kind of like that. For the background, I'll maybe do some kind of, like, an athletic clothing material. So I'm going to have a note here for myself of, like, a cloth slash fabric background. Something like that. And also, if you want to just move around your screen like this, whilst you have your brush enable, just hold down space on your keyboard. It's going to turn into the move tool, and then you can just click and drag and move around very easily on your project. Now, also a classic design that a lot of shoe companies do is kind of like that signature Nike look, so to speak, where you have kind of a little bit of a divide down here at the bottom usually there would be some information or call to action. So they would probably have call to action. And it never hurts to explore what is usually done, what the norm is within an industry because that is what works. It's the norm in the industry for a reason. So it's always worth exploring it and seeing if you can maybe make a change to it, mix it up in some way to make it more interesting. So usually, like I said, with some Nike shoe ads, you'll have kind of the shoe at an angle. It's usually floating off the ground. So it's usually at a side profile or even a three quarter view, and you'll end up having kind of a shadow below. And they usually have their phrase of do it going right behind everything. Very similar to the third option. So that's usually what they would have. They may have some extra text here to the side. That just adds some visual interest to the whole design. Maybe even some over here. You could see how you want to balance that out. And for this background, it would honestly just be kind of like a gradient color. They usually have a very bright color here in the middle and it radiates outward. So here, the background would be a radio gradient. And also we would have to figure out where we want to put our logo with this. We could potentially have our logo down here and balance it with something else on this side. But if we're not provided that by the client, then we may just have to put it into our image, maybe have that somewhere here. So let's go ahead and zoom out, hit Z on your keyboard. And let's see what we have. So within just a couple of minutes, we've explored a few different options. Now, if I were to have more time, I would probably explore and do anywhere 9-15 different thumbnails to just really play around and see what kind of a layout would work best. So looking at these, I'm honestly most drawn to this one here with the cloth slash fabric background. I like the dynamic diagonal line in that. I also like this one where we have a focus in on one part of the shoe. But I think for now, I'm going to eliminate this one for the sole purpose that this is a new product, a new shoe that is coming out, and our client might want the world to see the whole shoe, the whole design. So I'm going to go ahead with this design. This is what we're going to get started with. Now, in this hypothetical scenario, our client has already provided us a photo of the sneaker, but in case you don't have one or in case you want to find one for your class project later, hint hint, I'm going to show you where you can find some free stock photography that you can use in any of your project. Let's jump into our web browser. Now, depending on your Adobe Creative Cloud plan or credits that you may have, the first place I'm going to recommend is Adobe Stock. You can see right here, you can get ten images or one video with a free trial. So even if you're just exploring Photoshop and using a free trial with Photoshop, you have ten images that you can get for free from Adobe Stock. You just go over here, go over to photos or start searching, and you can find anything that you like. So in our case, we can go here to search, and let's say we want to find a sneaker. Just type that in, hit Enter, and look at all these fantastic images that we have. This is already cut out and ready to go. You don't even have to mask anything out. But there are so many options, so many cool sneakers that you can really get creative with. And depending on your creative cloud plan, these will be available to you. Next place where you can get fantastic royalty free images is pixabay.com. This is one of my favorites. They have almost 6 million images, videos, and music. Anything you can imagine, you can see up here all that they have. They have illustrations, vectors, music, sound effects, even three D models and gifts. They have so many options. So again, here, you can just go ahead and type in sneaker, hit Enter. And again, you have so many photos you can look through. Some are ready to be cut out. Some are already a clip art vector image. We're not going to be working with those. They have some three D rendered sneakers. So again, so many options. And if you find something that you like, it is as simple as just clicking on it. And open up this dialog window. And when you click Download, don't just click Download right off the bat. Click this Drop Down and make sure you download the highest quality that you possibly can. You're going to have way more information in your image to work with. Just select that and download. The third and final place I'm going to recommend you get royalty free images is onsplash.com. As you see here, all their images can be downloaded and used for personal or commercial projects, which is really good if you plan to monetize or do anything of that nature with the images that you download. So again, here, you can go ahead and search. I'm going to search Sneaker and as you see here, you have so many options. You have three D renders, textures, film, people, so many cool things. I'm going to go ahead and hit Enter on Sneaker. And look at that. We have so many options here. And hint hint, this one here is the one that we're going to be using today, and it is the one that is provided in your class resources folder. So to make things fast for the class today, I'm not going to go through and download every single asset with you live on the sites, but I will provide them to you in the class resources that you can download under the resources section of this class. But for any future imagery that you may need, I highly recommend you bookmark these websites you can find anything and everything. Just look, we typed in Sneaker, and there's almost 3.5 thousand photos of just sneaker your project involves something else, let's say it involves a bottle of some sort. You search a bottle, you're ready to go. Let's say your project includes a watch. Look at that. We have 8,000 watches we can scroll through and find something cool that we can use and work with. Now, let's jump back to Photoshop. All right. So before we move forward, make sure that you have indeed downloaded the class resources for this class. We will be using everything in there as we build out our very first project. Last point that I want to make when it comes to planning a professional ad composition is keeping in mind exactly where this is going to live. Many times designers may not realize it, but these ads go everywhere, and they end up needing very unique and very specific dimensions for all the various platforms. Here's an example of just a couple of popular online advertising banner sizes and aspect ratios. In the dark purple here, we have ones which are more popular, and in this pink color, we have those which are less popular. These are just some of the sizes. Your client may come to you with even more. These ones don't even include the ones that go to social media, which tend to be 1080 by 1920 or 1080 by 13 50 to have that four to five or nine to 16 ratio. So just a couple of the sizes here that are very unique. You have leaderboard ads that are 728 pixels by 90 pixels. You have a mobile portrait interstitial ad, which is 320 by 480 pixels. So you have so much variety in the different types of sizes and ratios that you have to design that is definitely something you need to keep in mind when you are in the planning stages. As you see here as we were planning our composite, our second option here that I actually really liked a lot would maybe not necessarily work in a leaderboard ad, which is 728 pixels by 90 pixels. So if you want an idea of what that ratio is, I'm just going to go ahead and draw that really quickly for you. So we have a width of 728. And we're going to have a height of 90. This is the ratio that we're talking about. And if you want your whole ad to fit in that, how are you going to lay it out? Let me just change the color of that so we can see it a little bit better. There we go. So how will I lay out this ad in here? Well, I have the shoe coming in from the side. How far in can I have it? How much detail am I going to lose? These are all things you have to keep in mind as we design, you want something that is going to be fairly modular and fairly easy to adapt to any aspect ratio that you are given. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that for now. We're definitely going to keep that in mind as we design our very first project here to make sure that it's something that can be used in a vertical format, a horizontal format, square format, and everything in between. And the last point I want to make when it comes to planning is to always think like a brand. The product is going to be the hero. In this case, it is our shoe. It has to be the focus of the image. Don't focus too much on the logo. The focus is going to be the product, the hero. Next, the environment is going to give you the emotional hook for the image. So over here, we had a concrete background. That's going to create an emotion of a grungy, rougher vibe that may appeal to people, and it may be part of the branding. But something like what Nike does with their radio gradients gives more of a sense of athleticism and energy, and that might be more of the emotional hook that you're trying to go for. And always with text, you want to make sure that it is clear, but it is secondary to the product. That is why for this third example and even in this fourth example, be afraid to cover up the name of the product. That is a tactic that is often used by some of the biggest brands in the world like Nike, like ADIDAS, because people know the brand, and at this point, their logo and the text in any of their ads are just secondary to their product, to their shoes. So just keep that in mind as you sketch your ideas. So I think for this project, option number three is going to be the one that I go for and the one that we're going to start building out together in the next part of our class. 4. 4 Project 1: Awesome. We are ready to get started with our very first ad. So let's go ahead and get ourselves a new file. Let's just go over to File New. And I want this to still be 2000 by 2000 at 72 pixels per inch. I want this to be a square so that later on I can go ahead and adjust it very easily to make it into a vertical and a horizontal version as we build out our ads for all the different platforms that they may live on. So let's go ahead and click Create, and we're going to get started with our shoe. So you're going to find that in the class resources folder, and it's going to be as simple as going to file. Place Embedded. You're going to navigate over to your class resources folder. And under Project one, you're going to simply place this file called shoe. Go ahead and click Place, and then hit Enter on your keyboard. There you go. We have our shoe in the image, but I don't really want this background. So how are we going to get rid of it? Well, there are definitely a couple of ways, and I'm going to show you just a few of the ways we can do that. You can hit W on your keyboard, and that's going to take you to this quick selection tool. Now, if you click and Hold down, you have other tools such as the Object Selection tool, Magic W these are all suitable selection tools that you can use. For example, if I do the Object Selection tool, it's going to naturally know where the shoe is. I can click that. It's going to get me a pretty good selection of the actual shoe, after which I can just mask it out and I'm done. But if you hit Z on your keyboard to zoom in, you see it may not do necessarily the best job. You see it's missed out something down here. There's some jagged edges. It's not the best selection in the world. So let's go ahead, Control Command Z. Let's undo that and then Control Command D to deselect. Go ahead and play around with some of the other selection tools that we have. We have Quick Selection Tool, which is kind of like a brush that you can click and just drag over all the parts that you want to be selected. And if you want to add to it, you can hold down Shift and you can add to that selection. And if you want to take away, you can hold down Alt or option on your keyboard and paint away from the selection. So with this, this does an okay job. I find this to be somewhat the least reliable. As you see over here, it went outside of the white part of the sneaker. So this one isn't going to be the best. So let's go ahead and Control or Command D on that. And the last one we have here is the Magic One tool, which again, you can just click, and it's going to select based on the color that it is sampling. So I can still hold down Shift and add to it. But now that I've clicked this green, it's selecting all of the similar green in the image. So the magic One Tool is not going to be our best friend here. Let's control or Command D to undo that. What are we going to do? Well, this is where the AI features of Photoshop really come into play because if you see down here in the contextual task bar, it has changed now that we have an image in our artboard. We now have an option to select subject and to remove background. So with one button click, it can do exactly what I want it. So let's click that, and let's see how good of a job Photoshop does. Let's click that. It's going to take a second, and that's it. You see, it's made the mask. And if we zoom in by hitting Z on our keyboard, you see there's no jagged edges here. There's a little bit of feathering over here. We see some of the green from the background is still on the white part of our image, but that is fairly easy to fix. And other than that, it has done a very, very nice selection. I'm very happy with that. I'm just going to go ahead and zoom out. Yeah, that is awesome. I like that. So now that we have our shoes selected let's just go ahead and hit Control or Command G. That's going to put it into a group, and let's just rename that as H. Just like. I always like to keep the very first version of my product on its own layer so I can go back to the very first iteration of it at any point. If I want to start over, I have the starting point. Now, I've had some students ask in the past, why do I always say to mask out your object? Why not just erase it away? I'm going to show you very quickly why that is important. Go ahead and place this shoe in again. Alright, so here we have a fresh placement of our shoe. Now, first thing you'll notice is that this is a smart object. So even if I were to hit E on the keyboard from my eraser tool and I wanted to erase, I'm not able to erase it. So what's the deal here? Well, you cannot do that with a smart object. It says here, the smart object must be rasterized before proceeding. I guess I have to do that. Now, when you have a smart object, you can resize that as much as you want. I can make that big, small, big, small, over and over, and it's always going to retain all the information, all the quality, no problem. With a rasterized image, every time you stretch that and compress it, make it bigger, make it smaller, you start to lose detail every single time. So if I undo the rasterization, so now I'm back to a smart object. If I do Control or Command T, and I make this shot very, very tiny. And I hit Done, and then I want to resize that again. Let me bring that up to the full size again. Look at that. No information was lost. I still have all the details from the image. Now, what if I did do what it tells me and rasterize the image? Well, right, control or command T on this rasterized image. I'm going to make that small, just like before. There we go. And then Control or Command And now I want to make it big again. And oh, no, look at that. I've lost all the detail in my image. Now, I can do Control or Command Z and undo until I get back to the Smart Object, but Photoshop does have its limits. I believe by default, you have about 20 to 25 steps you can go back with your Control or Command Z. Anything beyond that, Photoshop does not say if you want to really go back in time, you're not going to have too much flexibility unless you are working with smart objects. That way, you're always keeping your information. And that is why we use masks because then you can just create a mask for that smart object, and at that point, you can go ahead and paint away whatever you want, if you zoom in and if you paint in black, you can go and do the painstaking process of painting away the background of your image. That's another method you can do, but this is going to take you a very, very long time. The last method that a lot of designers like to use is the Pen tool. So if you hit P on your keyboard, you're going to be met with the Pen tool. And by default, I have mine with a fill and a stroke. I don't want any fill as I start working with this. But for the stroke, let's go ahead and make that. Just white. And by default, it's one pixel. So what does the pen tool do? Well, the pen tool allows you to draw a custom shape around your object by clicking and dragging these nodes around and getting a selection. This can also take a very long time, but it can get you some very nice crisp and clean results. And the benefit of using the pentel is I can go back to any one of these nodes, Control or command, click on it, and adjust any of these as I see fit, either by control or command clicking and dragging these out and changing both sides or by holding Alt option and just dragging one side. You have a lot of customizability with it, but for the purposes of today's class, we're not going to be using the pentol. It's going to take way too long. But it is important to show you because this is one of the staple tools that us designers use. So I really want you to be aware of that, and I want you to play around with it. But because AI has become such an integral part of Adobe and design in general, we will be using that today. Let me go ahead and delete that, get back to our shoe that we selected with our AI selection tool. And we are basically good to go with that. Now that I have my shoe selected and cut out, kind of want to start working on the background. So if we look at our thumbnail exploration, we have our shoe. So that is check right there. Now I want to build out this background with some sort of a cloth or fabric background, and you're going to find one in the class resources. So let's go to File Place Embedded, and we're actually going to go with this poster background. Click and place, and here we have our background. Just going to go ahead and stretch this. Now, if you end up stretching this out and you see that it's elongating it and not keeping the proportions properly, all you need to do is click this link icon over here between the width and the height. You click that and then it's going to scale in proportion. So let's go ahead and click that. I want that to fill up our screen, and let's just hit Enter. And I'm going to hit Z on my keyboard to Zoom out. Because I want to play around with this. I like that this one by default, has a line going through it, so that's going to make our lives a lot easier with some of the design that I want to do. So let's do Control or Command T. And I do kind of like I had in the thumbnail, I want some kind of an angle for this, something like so let's see if we can make this bigger. This is a very high resolution texture, so we can stretch this out quite a bit and maintain all of our detail. That is looking good. So I kind of want to play around with this. Maybe have that like so. Yeah, I like that. I'm going to go ahead and hit Enter. But I see that this part down here is still not as I like it. Let's just keep playing around. I'm going to drag this out, make it a little longer. So, take your time, play around with this until you get the exact angle and composition that you want. I'm going to go with something like so. Maybe bring that in And there we go. So once you have that, go ahead and hit Enter. And I'm going to drag that below our shoe, and I'm just going to hide that by toggling this e icon over here. And now I really want to separate this into a top and bottom piece. So let's go ahead and do that. There are several ways you can do this. What I'm going to do is hit Control or Command J on the keyboard to duplicate that. Now you have poster background copy. I'm going to name this one poster top. And I'm going to name this other one poster bottom. There we go. So for the bottom, like the name implies, I kind of want to remove everything that is above it. So one quick and easy way that you can do this is hit L on your keyboard to get your Lasso tool. And I don't want the plain lasso. I want the polygonal Lasso tool and you can simply click and drag. This is going to drag a nice little selection for you. And I do want to keep the shadow that is cast by this little fold in this paper or material, whatever this is. Something like that. And it doesn't have to be perfect, just like that. So we're going to make our selection go up and outside, and there we have it. And now that we have that mask, we're just going to hit Control or Command Shift I. We're going to invert our selection. So now this lower area is selected, and we're going to hit mask. So this is going to keep everything that is within the selection. There we go. The top is hidden. And to mask out the top, it is very simple. We're going to Control or command click on this mask preview over here, and it's going to get us our selection again. We're then going to enable our poster top layer. Make sure we are on the poster top layer, and then Control or Command Shift I again. We're going to invert back and we're going to hit the same mask tool. And you can see already here in the masks that they are different. So if I toggle the poster bottom off, you can see our top is now separated from the bottom. Now, I do want to do a little bit of cleanup work here. I don't like this spill or this stain, whatever this is on the top. So I'm just going to go ahead and make a new layer. S on your keyboard to get to the clone stamp tool. And with Alt or option, you can sample any part of your image. So I'm just going to sample this area here. It's kind of similar. And then I'm just going to simply paint that away. And I believe that is the only stain I don't like. Yeah, everything else is good for me. So let's go ahead and zoom out with Z. And now, with our little edit that we did, getting rid of the stain and the poster top, you can shift click between the two to select them both and then control or command G to group them together. And I'm just going to rename this poster top. Just to keep things organized and labeled. So looking at our shoe, I actually like this green that we have in it. So I do want to sample that just to have for us to work off of. So let me go ahead and sample that. I like that bright neon green that we have going on. So by hitting I on your keyboard, you're going to get to the eyedropper tool, and then by Alt option clicking, you can color sample any color, and it's going to add it to your swatches. So let's go ahead. Let's hide our shoe, and let's hit P on our keyboard to get to our pen tool. I had mentioned that the pentol is great for getting nice selections, but it's also great for drawing custom shapes, and that's exactly what we want here. So with your pen tool selected, you see, because I use the eyedropper tool, I now have that neon green as a fill color, and that is totally fine. So let's go ahead and let's start clicking and dragging our nodes out. And we're just very simply going to start drawing our shape here, making sure to go a little bit into the shadow section. And you can already see hints of that green coming through, and that's exactly what we want. So just take your time, follow the crease of this image. It's a very nice and clear dividing line that we can use to get a very nice and striking background. So now that we have that, we can just simply click around here. There we go. And we have our shape. We have a custom shape here now, and we're going to change the blending mode. So in this drop down, you have so many options you can go through. If you hover over each one of them, you're going to see a preview of what that does. So we have anything from multiply linear burn, light and screen, overlay. You can see how it's affecting our image. But the one that we want today is actually going to be linear burn. Go ahead and do that. And we're going to keep that at 100% opacity. Now I think this bottom part is a little bit too dark. If we toggle our shoe on, you see how bright this is. I want the bottom to also be nice and bright. So let's go ahead and add in a curves adjustment layer. So let's do that. And I'm going to give this a slight little S curve, which means bringing this down just a little bit, and then pulling this side all the way up so we have a nice, almost neon effect going on. Very nice. But now you see this has affected our image here on the left, on the top, as well. So I don't want that. I want to mask out this up here as well. Well, funnily enough, we already have some masks. So I kind of want to pull in this poster bottom mask that we have. So if you Control or command, click on that and then simply hit Control or Command Shift I. That's going to invert your selection. And then if you hit G on your keyboard, you're going to get to your paint bucket tool. And then by simply filling this in with black, that is gone. That is masked out. And our curves adjustment layer is only affecting the layer below. So just do Control Command D to deselect. You can see you can toggle that off and on. It's a lot richer, more bright, more saturated, and that's what we want right now. Next, I want to add in a hue saturation layer, and I kind of want to bring the overall saturation down just a little bit. So I'm going to pull that down to about -12, bring the lightness up to about plus five. So again, you can always toggle that off and on. And you see, I just took the edge off that just a little bit, so it's a little bit too saturated. Now I'm going to add a levels adjustment layer and I'm going to bring this down here to about three this to about 1.2, like so. So what has that done if you talk about that on and off? Again, it's just added in a little slight little fade to the darker parts of our image. So I'm trying to get that rugged, grungy type of look here. And the last thing for the background, I want to add in one of our textures. So let's go over to File, Place Embedded. And in your class resources, you're going to find this scratch texture. So let's go ahead and place that and I do want to rotate this by 90 degrees. So if you hold down shift when you rotate, it's going to snap to the different degrees here, different angles. So I want that at about 90. Going to extend that past our actual artboard and just bring that up a little bit and hit Enter. And then I want to change the blending mode of that down to screen, and I want to bring the opacity of that down all the way to about 30%. I don't want to get rid of all of the texture I do want a little bit of that texture coming through adding just another level of noise, another level of detail. And that is going to be our background for now. So what you're going to do is with the scratch texture layer selected, shift, click all the way down to poster bottom, and that's going to select everything. And you're going to simply do Control or Command G to group that together, and double click on that. We're going to rename that as background. So let's go ahead and re enable the shoe layer. And what I'm going to do on that is I'm going to right click and I'm going to convert to Smart Object. So what that does is that has now applied the masks that we had to this image, and you can see it on the thumbnail here. But now we have this shoe as its own layer. We can click and drag it around. And that's exactly what we want because now we want to start putting our composition together. So if we go back to our thumbnail exploration, I had our shoe kind of at an angle here. So what we want to do is control our command T to get into our transform tool, and I want to start playing around with this and getting it to the size that I want it to be. I do want this to take up quite a significant part of the screen. And looking at it now, I want to match the angle up. With the green here, you have white and green, and you have green and white. I would love to match that up. That would be very cool. So something like this, I think, maybe a little bit bigger. Like, so over here as well. Like I said, the product is the hero of the image, so you always want to make sure that is the big focus that you have. So let's go ahead and hit Enter on that. I like that angle. I like that placement. I think we're good with that. Now we're actually going to jump over to Photoshop Beta. Like I mentioned, Photoshop Beta has a really nifty new feature called harmonize, and I actually want to use that on our shoe to really get it blended into this background. So what I'm going to want you to do now is just save this file close out a Photoshop and open up Photoshop Beta that we installed earlier and open up this same file in Photoshop Beta. Once you have your class project open up in Photoshop Beta, it's going to look something like this. You're going to notice the interface looks a lot different than what we had set up, but don't worry about making it match what we had in the other version of Photoshop. We are here for just one reason, and it's already on screen. It is this button over here that says Harmonize. So what Harmonize does, it merges the objects into a scene by matching color, lighting and shadows. And that's exactly what we want to do here. So let's go ahead and see what Photoshop does. Just go ahead and click Harmonize. And it's going to take a few seconds to generate, and it's going to give you three options. So this is going to be our jumping off point for our color grading, color matching, lighting, shadows. So we want to see what it generates for us. And after a few seconds, we have a couple of options. So you can go through each one. This is our first option, our second, and our third. I kind of like the second one. There's very nice tones in it, very nice moody tones almost. So I'm going to go with the first variation. Now, if you want to make your file size smaller, you can go ahead and click the trash icon for any variation that you do not want to use. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. I don't want these two, and don't worry about what the shadow is like underneath our shoe. We're going to do our own shadow in just a couple of moments, but just focus on the actual colors and tones in the shoe itself. So if we collapse that properties panel down, we can toggle our harmonized layer off and on, and you can see it's done a very nice job. A really integrating that into our background. So now we're going to hit Control or Command S to save our file, and we're going to jump back into the other version of Photoshop. And once we're back in the normal version of Photoshop, I kind of want to do a little something with our new harmonized layer. Now, it is worth noting that if you want to make any changes to this harmonized layer, can. If you open up this dialogue box here, it'll say that the selected generative layer was created in a newer version of Photoshop and is not supported by this version. Now, by the time you take this class, that might have changed with an update. They might have implemented those Beta features into the regular version of Photoshop. But at this current stage, this is how it is. So on our harmonized layer, I'm just going to go and hit Control or Command G. I want that in its own folder, and I'm going to rename that Harmonized. Shoot. Just like. And I want to mask away this shadow. I want to do my own because I kind of want to have a little more control over it. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to control or command click on our original shoe layer. That's going to give us our nice selection here. And then I'm simply going to click this mask button down here, and there we go, our shadow is gone. So I want to have a nice custom shadow underneath this shoe, and there are several ways you can do it. You can always go ahead and just paint it in with a brush. If you B on your keyboard on a new layer, have a big enough brush. You can go ahead, get a nice black and start painting in a shadow, and it can look pretty decent. But I want to have a little bit more control. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to control or command click on this shoe. So I have my selection, and on a new layer, you can click this little square with a plus icon. I'm going to go ahead and hit G on my keyboard to get to the paint bucket, and I'm going to fill that with a color I'm going to sample. So if you hold down Alter option, you're going to go into your eyedropper tool, and I want to sample this darkest color here. It is not exactly pure black, and that is what I want. I want it to be from the image itself. So once I have that sampled, just click. It is now filled in Control or Command D. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this into a smart object. So right click on that, Convert to Smart Object. And we do that because I'm going to apply a blur to this layer. And if I ever want to go back and adjust the radius of that blur, having it be a smart object will allow me to do that. So now that we have that, we can hit Control or Command T. And if we move that down, you see, we now have a little shadow going on. So that is very cool. I want to bring that out to about here just a little bit down so we can see what we're playing with. And I'm going to go up here to filter Blur, Gaussian blur. And I want that to be about a 15 pixel blur. And with the move tool, if you just hit V on your keyboard, you can use your arrow keys to move your layer around. And if you hold down Shift, it'll move it more than by just a pixel at a time. So I hold down shift, and I use the arrow keys to really move that around and get the nice depth that I want. Now, I also want to change the blending mode a little bit, so I'm going to make that be a multiply and at the same time, bring the opacity down ever so slightly. To about 95, I think, will work. Let's go 90. You can talk about that on and off. And like I said, with the move tool V on your keyboard, you can move that around. If I want to bring that in closer to the sneaker, I can. So something like that will work. But if you haven't noticed, there is a slight issue with this shadow because we use the selection of the shoe. I also filled in this area up here by this part of the sneaker here and this part. So we can see some of the shadow peeking through, and I don't really want that. So with this shadow layer selected, I'm going to make a mask on it. And by hitting B on our keyboard to get our brush tool, you can choose any brush at full opacity and make sure it's black, and you're just going to paint it away. That's it. Simple as that, that shadow is now gone. I don't want it there. So we have our first part of our shadow done, keyword first part. I kind of want to have a little bit more of the color going in here because the way that light interacts with a surface, you're going to end up having some of that color bouncing around onto your object. And in the shadow itself, shadows aren't exactly just pure black. So in this case, the shadows must have some of this dark green in it because that's what the object is on. So let's go ahead and make ourselves a new layer by hitting this plus icon down here. And with B on our keyboard selected our brush, I want a soft round brush, the default brush will do. I'm going to bring the size down to about 100 pixels, maybe maybe more. I'm going to increase that to 200. And I'm going to sample a darker green in the image. So holding down alter option, one of the darker greens that I can find, I think that one would work. So just go to the dark parts of the image. I think this one here is going to work for us. And I'm just going to start painting in like so. But you're going to be telling me that this doesn't look very good, and I'm going to be agreeing with you on that. What we're going to do on this, we're going to change the blending mode down to multiply and the opacity down to about 70% as close to that as you can get. So now if we toggle that off and on, you'll see that has now added in some of that green to our shadow itself. And we're going to do that one more time. So let's do a new layer. And with our brush selected, we're going to now go for a lighter green. So I kind of want any one of the greens in our image, the main one that we have and this time, I'm going to bring the opacity down to about 20%. And before I even start painting, I'm going to turn this into a multiply blending mode. And I'm just going to start to paint, and you're going to see a little more richness coming in on the outer edges of that shadow, really softening it up and blending it into our image nicely. And don't worry. We're going to do the shadows on our shoe, as well. This is just the shadow that the shoe itself is casting. So something like that, I might even lower the opacity of this layer down as well, maybe to 70. You can talk about that off and on, and you'll see exactly what the effect of that is. And I'm pretty happy with that shadow. So let's go ahead and group those together. So with our topmost shadow layer selected, shift click down to the lowest one and control or Command G to group that together. And we're going to double click on that and rename that ho shadow. And we have that done. You can talk about that whole thing off and on, and you can see just how much of an impact a good shadow does to the image. Now it's time to actually start working on our shot. So let's start blending it in, doing all the color grading, shadows and highlights that we need to do to make this really work for our composite. So the first thing I'm going to do is just have a curves adjustment layer and I'm going to clip that down to the layer below it. So using this button here, to clip it down. So anything that we adjust is only going to affect the shoe itself. If we don't have that clicked, it's going to affect our whole image, and that is not what we want. So make sure you have that clipped down, and then we're simply just going to adjust our curve to be something like this. Going to bring that lower section down. And I think just these two points are going to do what I wanted to. I kind of want to deepen the shadows a little bit because the cast shadow is so dark. So I kind of want to build up that contrast ever so slightly. Next, I want to add a gradient map, and that is the very last adjustment that we have over here. So click that. Let's clip that down. And if we want to adjust this gradient here, we want to make sure we're clicked on the actual thumbnail of the adjustment layer, not on the mask. So now that we're on the actual thumbnail here, you're going to click this gradient. And for the darkest color, instead of black, I want one of the darkest greens I can find. Like so. And for the lightest color, I want one of the lightest greens that I can find the brightest, maybe over here. Hit Okay on that. Let's close that. And I want this to be on an overlay blending mode. At just about 15 to 20%. You can talk that on and off. You see, it's just adding a little bit of that green tone into our actual shoe. So that's what I want with this one. Just add a little bit of that green to it as we're building up all the layers. Now, I want to really start blending our shoe in, and there are many ways you can do it. Some people like to paint in the shadows themselves. They will end up adding in a layer like so and just using a brush with a dark color and just start painting in. And that is a completely valid method of doing things. What I like to do, however, I'm going to go ahead and delete this layer that I just did. I like to work with adjustment layers because it gives you a lot more flexibility, and I'm going to show you exactly how. So let's go ahead. Let's add in another curves adjustment layer, clip it down. And for this one, I'm really going to crush that all the way down until everything is completely black. Okay? That's what we're going to do. And with our mask selected here, we're going to hit G andr keyboard to get our paint bucket tool, and we're going to fill that in with black. So now we've masked out that entire adjustment layer. So now it's as simple as erasing away what you want to be darker. So hit B on your keyboard to get to your soft brush. And on a low opacity, I already have mine at 20%. I'm gonna have the flow at 100. I don't need that to be that low. And painting in white, you're going to hit on your keyboard to switch to the white if you don't already have it selected. Now, if I start painting, you're going to see instantly our image is getting darker. So I like to build it up in layers. I might even lower the opacity down to ten or 11, so I can really take my time with this and just essentially paint in what I want to be dark. Now, if I've gone too far and I want to get some of this back, you just hit X on your keyboard, and now you paint in black. So now I'm painting some of that back. Lovely. And it again to go to white and continue with your shadows. So you can tackle that off and on. You can see we've really incorporated that very nicely. I'm just going to soften up some of those a little bit. Maybe a little bit more up here. I'm happy with that. Now that we have these shadows in, I want to add in a little bit of a rim light. Now I want to add in a little bit of an edge light to our sneaker to just give it an extra little bit of dimension. Let's go ahead. Let's make ourselves another new layer here. And we want to clip this down. So by holding alter option and hovering between the layers, you're going to have this icon. Just click, and now this new layer is clipped down to everything else. So whatever we paint is only going to be on the shoe. So now let's go ahead and sample the very brightest, lightest yellowish green that we have. And hitting Z on our keyboard, I'm going to zoom in all the way onto our shoe, hit B&R keyboard, and I want a very small, small brush. And I'm going to put the opacity up to about 20% so I can actually see it. And you're going to slowly start painting a nice little edge light take your time with this. You don't want this to be too sloppy because this will be noticeable if you do this in a sloppy way. So just take your time. With a nice soft brush, you're just doing a nice little edge light just to give that added bit of emphasis here. And we're not doing it for the whole shoe, just for this right side and a very little bit on the left. You can always hit Control or Command Z to undo or hit E on your keyboard for the eraser. So something like that, up here, you're not going to see too much of it because it's already very bright, but feel free to add in just a touch. It's these little details that will end up really selling your photo composites as being part of one actual image. I'm just going to go ahead and keep going down this side of our shoe. This side is already fairly bright, so this edge light isn't going to do too much. But as we get down here, you're going to see it come into play yet again just a little bit. I want that to go just around the shoe as it disappears into the shadow. And again, you can have the eraser equipped with E, and on a low opacity, you can soften up some of these brushes as well, these brush strokes that you do. And you can bounce between brush and eraser with B and E. And then let's zoom out with Z. Let's see what our edge light has done to our image. So if we toggle that off and on, you'll see it's added a nice little edge light here. And if you really want to add in a little bit more emphasis, you can go ahead and make that brush bigger. Like so, lower the opacity even more to about 10%, and then just bring that in a little more. Let that edge light bleed onto the shoe. As it wraps around just think these are three dimensional objects, okay? So light is going to wrap itself around it, and you want to make sure that we show that in our actual composite. So again, hit Z on your keyboard. Let's zoom out. You can toggle that off and on. That is looking pretty nice. So the last little bit that I want to do is to add a little bit more brightness to certain parts of our shoe. So let's go ahead and add in a brightness and contrast layer, clip that down, and I'm just going to drag that all the way up to about 77. And like we did before for the shadows, I'm gonna hit G on the keyboard and fill in this mask layer with black. Hit B on our keyboard to get our brush, and let's make that bit bigger. Something like 160 will do just fine, opacity of about 20%, and now you're going to want to paint in white. And you see, as you do that, that's going to brighten up certain areas. So I just want to highlight some of the highlights of our actual shot. Maybe add a little bit more of a highlight on this edge. Like that, maybe a little bit down here. There we go. And another reason why we do these edits on adjustment layers is you can always go in, double click on the adjustment layer and change these values. I can make this go up and down. And if I want that to come more down, if I want that to be darker instead, I want that to be brighter instead. I can do that very easily. But I'm going to keep that at 77 what I had before. I actually like that amount. So we're going to close that. And you can always adjust the opacity here as well if it's too strong. But I think at 100% opacity, that is pretty good. And you can see very simply how we went from no edits, no blending in. We simply just did a couple of adjustment layers, and we now have a nicely blended in sneaker with our background. And finally, for 5. 5 Project 2: All right, now we are ready to get into our second project. So let's go ahead and open up a new file for ourselves. Let's go up here to File New, and we're just going to have the exact same file size as we had for the very first project. It's going to be 2000 pixels wide by 2000 pixels high and a 72 pixels per inch resolution. No need to change anything else, let's go ahead and click Create. And there we go. We have a blank canvas to get started with. Now for this project, I'm not going to walk you through the thumbnail process, but I will show you the thumbnails that I sketched and came up with for this. Just something to keep in mind, our hypothetical client has come to us with the launch of a new beverage. They want us to showcase this product, this new drink that they're launching, and it's for an outdoors drink. So the general mood and vibe for this is going to have to be adventurous, outdoorsy. We don't want this to be too simple. We really want to explore our possibilities with our compositing to make something that is almost surreal and larger than life. So let's hop over and look at the thumbnails that I came up with. So here are a couple of very quick sketches that I did for some possible layouts. The very first one over here is a very generic drink ad that you may see anywhere, really, with the drink in the middle. I have some smoke billowing out behind it and also some electricity coming off the can just for some added extra elements. But as you see, this one isn't too interesting, so I kept exploring. A lot of the summertime drinks will have the cans almost floating in the middle of nowhere. So I have two cans here just floating with some citrus wedges floating there with them and a light source coming in from the top, right. Again, this is something that you see all over the place, and not too much compositing goes into it. I think we can do a little bit better than. Our third option was exploring more of that beach vibe, having our drink can reflected in the water. I was imagining some kind of an ocean scene with a sunset background and a little bit of a tag line down here. But then going along with the theme of nature, our last option here has a mountain and forest at sunset, and we have our two cans here in the foreground with a tag line. And then I thought it would be cool to add some kind of animal in in the background. This case, I have somewhat of a bear drawn in here. Well, that could be anything, maybe like a moose or a deer, something really rugged and outdoorsy. That could really help tie everything together and sell the idea of this being an adventurous, outdoorsy type of drink. We're the type of person who likes to be in nature. So after this very mini exploration, I've decided to go with option number four. I think we're going to get the most surreal and larger than life ad out of this one, so I'm very excited to start exploring that. We're going to dabble into a little bit of the generative AI features here in Photoshop to get us our background for this. That's right. We're not even going to go to any stock photography websites for the background. So let's hop back to the other file, and let's get started. Okay, so we're going to jump right into this and get the background going. So let's go ahead and click Generate Image. Again, if you don't have the contextual taskbar down here, just enable it by going up here to Window and enabling the contextual taskbar. Let's go ahead and click Generate Image. And I already have a prompt for us, I'm just going to go ahead and paste that in and what I have here is a forest and mountain environment with a focal point on a clearing in the foreground. I need to have some space to actually put the cans of drinks in there. The time of day is sunset with dramatic lighting, and the angle is low to the ground. I want to make sure that I have plenty of the sky in there as well to really give us a nice composition. For the content type, I want this to be a photo and for the effects, let's see if there's something that we can go with here. I think I'm going to go with cinematic. I think that's going to get us a very nice look here. And I think that is all I'm going to use. You can feel free to use something else if you would like. You can definitely choose something else. You can add in a minimalism, maximalism. But I'm just going to go ahead and stick with cinematic. I'm not going to touch style or composition. I just want to see what Photoshop is going to generate for us. So let's go ahead and click Generate and give Photoshop just a moment. Okay, so here we have our three options. Here's the first one. It did a pretty good job, actually. I'm pretty happy with these. The second one and the third one. Oh, I do like this curve in the trees here. That is very nice. Let's see. I like I do like the overall composition of this one. There is kind of leading lines going towards the center here so we can have the cans of the drink somewhere over here and maybe some animal in the background. So I think I'm going to go with this option here, but I also want to get rid of this mound of plants here in the front. I just want all of this to be plain grass. So let's go ahead and fix that. So let's hit Elon R keyboard to get our Lasso tool. And I don't want the polygonal lasso tool, so just click and hold down on this, and let's just go to the regular Lasso tool. And let's just go ahead and draw a selection around this. Very simply. And we're going to hit generative fill, and we want this to remove plant, replace with grass. Just that and hit Enter and let Photoshop do its thing. About 5 seconds later, Photoshop has done exactly what we wanted it to. It's given us three options here. I'm going to go ahead and go with I think this second or third option is going to do what I want it to. I'm going to go with the second option. I like this one. This has removed the plant, so we are looking a lot better. And you can talk about that off and ones, you see, it just got rid of that. It was a little bit of an eyesore, a little bit of a distraction, and we want the focus to be on our product, on the hero part of our image. So there we go. And that is going to be it for the background. So with the top layer selected, hold down Shift and click this first layer that we have generated for the background, and then hit Control or Command G on your keyboard to group that together. And let's go ahead and rename that very simply as background. Just like that. Now, before we go ahead and add anything else to our image, I want to do a little bit of a treatment to our background. I want to adjust the shadows, the highlights a little bit, just to get the background to be in a semi finished state. So first thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and add in a curves adjustment layer. I just want to add in a slight little S curve. Just get ourselves a little bit more of a contrast going on, nothing too crazy. You can talk about that off and on. You see we're adding just a little bit of contrast there. Then I'm going to add in a vibrant adjustment layer, and I want to bring the vibrance of our whole image up quite substantially, actually, maybe to about 35. You can talk about that again, off and on. You can see some of the colors are just a little bit richer. And the reason we're going with vibrant over saturation is because if you oversaturate the colors in an image, the colors will tend to be washed out, whereas if you just increase the vibrance, it tends to make the colors richer as opposed to overly saturated. And that's what we want in this case. Want to add in a little bit of glow coming from our sunset here, add in a little bit of that warmth to our overall image. So let's go ahead and create a new layer here by clicking this plus icon down here and hit B on your keyboard to get into our brush tool. Now, I have a very large brush, about 1,300 pixels large, but you can make that smaller or larger using the left and right bracket on your keyboard. I'm going to keep it at 1,300. I think that's going to be good. And if you hit or option on your keyboard, you're going to get the eyedropper tool, and I want to sample this nice orange color right from our sunset in our image and I'm going to go ahead and click right here once and maybe twice, just like that. I'm going to go ahead and change the blending mode of this all the way down, and you can scroll through to see what each of them does. But what I'm going to settle with here is with screen, and I'm going to bring the opacity of that down all the way to about 30%. So you can talk that off and on. And you see it's added a nice glow to our image. And the last little bit of background effects that I want to do is I want to add in a brightness and contrast adjustment layer, and I want to increase the contrast all the way up to maybe about 25. Let's see how that looks. It's added in a little bit of contrast, which is, I think it's going to really add a bit of that epic WOW factor to this composition. So with that brightness contrast layer selected, shift click down to your curves layer and Control or Command G to group that together, and let's rename that very simply to background Effects. Just like that. Very simple. And you can talk about that off and on. And you see we really added quite a bit of richness and contrast to this image, giving it a little more of that cinematic look. Now it's time to bring in our drinks. Let's go with a File, Place Embedded. And in your class resources, if you go to Project two, you're going to see C. So just click that and let's click Place. Let's go ahead and let's resize that just a little bit. I'm really going to want this to be quite large in our composition. Let's go ahead and do that. I want to remove all of this background. So I'm going to see if the generative AI here can help us out. So let's go and click Remove Background on the contextual task bar, and let's get Photoshop just a second here. That's actually done a fantastic job. I'm very happy with that. So let's go ahead and hit Control or Command T. Kind of want to resize this ever so slightly. And move this around just a little bit. Just to give ourselves some more breathing room for our overall composition. And I think something like that is going to do us just fine. I do want to leave some space. So some kind of animal maybe here in the background, I think would look really cool. So I really want to stick to that, if at all possible. And I think this is going to be it. I think this size is going to do us pretty good. So I like this size and this placement. So let's go ahead and hit Enter on our keyboard. So for now, let's go ahead and hide the cans here. So let's talk all that off. And actually, we want to add in our animal here. So now that we have our placement for our cans, I know what space I'm working with, and I'm going to want to do a special color treatment for the cans in a different way in just a moment. So for now, let's talk all that off, and let's hit L on our keyboard to get to our Lasso I kind of want to have a bear sitting in here, like I had in our thumbnail drawings. I'm going to want the bear to live somewhere around here. So I'm just going to draw in a random shape. I do want him to live somewhat in this area. Like, so I'm just going to talk on the cans just to make sure that doesn't conflict in any way. Yeah, I think that would work. Yeah, I think that would work. So let's go ahead and hit Generative fill, and I have a prompt. I'm going to paste in here. It's very simple. Bear sitting and looking at the camera. Very simple. So let's go ahead and click Generate and give Photoshop. Just a moment. Alright. And we have our options here, and I've zoomed in just to give us a clear look at what we are working with. So here's our first option. Here's our second option. Now, when it comes to animals and humans, Photoshop doesn't do necessarily the best job, but it is getting a lot better. As you can see here with the third option, actually really like this one. This is definitely usable, especially if you hit Z on your keyboard to zoom out. That is definitely going to work a lot better for us. And it's also done a very nice job at blending in the grass with the bear itself. So we don't really need to do any masking of that. All that I would need to do is add in a little bit of a cast shadow because the sunset is very low on the horizon. So this bear would have a nice long cast shadow. So let's go ahead and do that to really blend it into our image. So let's close up this dialogue panel. Let us hit B on our keyboard to get to our brush. And I'm going to make that a whole lot smaller. This case, I'm actually going to paint in our custom shadow. Now, your instinct might tell you to paint on the layer below the bear because you want the shadow to be down here. But let's see what happens if I try to do that. So I just go below that layer, make a new one, and let's go ahead and choose a nice dark color from our image. I'm just going to hold down Alt option on our keyboard and sample one from the trees here. So if I start to paint with any kind of brush, you can see I'm painting in a shadow. But what is this? What's going on? When I use a generative AI, I had a selection. So everything within that selection has been generated by AI and is now on its own layer with the bear. So I can toggle that off, and you'll see that the shadow is below that. So how are we going to remedy that? Well, in this case, you have to be very careful with how you paint. So I'm going to go ahead and delete this layer and make a layer above this bear. So we're going to actually make the shadow above the bear, which is counterintuitive, but that's kind of what you have to do in these scenarios. So let's go ahead and let's just get in a general shape here of where the cast shadow would be going to make sure we cover all of the grass that is right by the bear and bring that off screen here, just like that. And let's go ahead and make this into a multiply blending mode, and we're going to want to bring the opacity of that down just a little bit to about 84 is good. Let's go ahead and make a mask on that layer. And with our brush selected, we want to paint with black. Now, if you don't already have black here, a very quick and easy shortcut you can do is just hit D on your keyboard to get to the default colors and hit X to get black to be on top. So with the black brush now, we can go ahead and make the opacity a little bit lower. I'm going to bring that down to about 20%. We're going to actually paint away some of this shadow just to make it a little more realistic and get some of that shadow off of the bear itself. So let's go ahead and let's just start painting here. You can see we're already pulling some of the shadows off. I'm going to make the brush a bit bigger and soften up these edges of our shadow. Just like that. Very nice. And just like that, we have a nice little cast shadow made by our bear here. Might even do something like that. There we go. It doesn't have to be too crazy, too detailed, a very simple cast shadow. And that's looking pretty good. So for now, let's go ahead and group these two layers together. So we have our shadow of our Bar and the bear. So shift click those together and Control or Command G to group those together. And let's rename that very simply as Bar. And there we go. It took us just a couple of seconds here, and we have a bear in our image, blended in very nicely using AI. We didn't even have to do any custom compositing, which makes our lives easier, especially when we have a high turnover of projects. The new AI features in Photoshop is a total time saver. Not worry. We will be doing some custom light painting for the cans. Now, if you remember from Project one, we actually used a feature from Photoshop Beta, and we're going to actually use that right now, as well. I want to use a new harmonized feature in the Beta version of Photoshop to actually blend in our cans and to give us a nice starting point for our compositing. So what I want you to do now is just save this project and open up the same project in Photoshop Beta. And in Photoshop Beta with the cans layer selected, just go ahead and click Harmonize down here on the contextual taskbar and let's give Photoshop just a moment to think and do its magic. Here we go. We have three options here. It's done a very nice job actually. So let's go through these three. This one is very nice. It's gotten the color and the nice rim light here going on from the sun. And our third option is nice, as well. Let me see. I'm almost leaning towards option one. I think that's going to work the best for us and give us a very nice starting off point. So I'm going to go ahead and keep that as is Option one, and I'm just going to save this and head back into the normal version of Photoshop. And back in the regular version of Photo I want to do is on this harmonized layer, I want to get rid of this shadow that it has generated for us. I kind of want to do my own shadow, and this hasn't done the best job of it. So all I'm going to do is with this harmonized layer selected, control or command G, just to put that into its own group, and I'm going to rename that as harmonized. Here, Enter. And I'm going to make a mask on that layer, and we're actually going to click the thumbnail of our cans that we have from before. So Control or command, click on the thumbnail, and we're going to have a nice clean selection here. And I want this to mask out everything but the cans. So we're going to hit Control or Command Shift I to invert our selection. And then we're going to hit G andr keyboard to get our paint bucket tool. And with black as the main color here, we're going to fill that in. And as you see, our shadows are gone. So let's go ahead Control Command D. And you can toggle that off, and we have our original cans right below that. But for the time being, we can actually turn that layer off for now. We're not going to need it. As you can see, by having that there, there is actually a little bit of a hint of the original cans behind, and we don't want that. We want very nice clean lines. So let's just go ahead and toggle that off. And we have a very nice starting point for our composition here. So before I continue to work on the actual cans themselves, I actually want to get in the cast shadows first because we're going to start working our way up from the bottom of the cans here, and it's going to be nice to have the contact point of the shadow down here that's going to dictate a lot of what we do with the cans themselves. Let's go ahead and let's close up the harmonized layer. And below the cans, we want to make a new layer. So on the background effect, go ahead and click Plus. So we have a new layer below the harmonized layer and the original cans, and now we're going to want to start to add in our shadows. I'm going to show you a very quick and easy way we can do this where we're not actually painting anything. To have more control over it, I'm going to have the shadow for each can separately. You could do something like this, have a selection and fill both of these in and have both cans with one shadow, but I want each can to have its own shadow. So let's go ahead and let's get rid of this what I just did. Now that we have this new layer here, I'm just going to control our command click on the thumbnail of the cans here from the harmonized layer, and that's going to give us a nice selection. And there are 100 ways you can do shadows on any object. I'm just going to show you one very quick and easy way to do it. So with the selection, hit B on your keyboard to get to your brush tool, and I'm going to sample one of the nice dark greens in the image by holding down Alt or option. This one here is going to do. And all I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to paint in for this one can. So you may not see exactly what's going on, but we are actually painting in a silhouette of this one can. Just like, and you can see it on the thumbnail here. It's been updated. And now I want to make another layer. And I want to do the same for this can on the right. So with the brush tool still selected, I'm just going to paint in this can. And for this shadow, it doesn't have to be perfect. So just do a quick little pass over that and you can see that the thumbnail is now updated, and you can hit Control or Command D to deselect. And if you toggle the harmonized layer off, you'll see we now have two cans and their shadows here. It's not exactly perfect. I can go down and paint over that if I want to. But honestly, it's not going to be that big of a deal, and you're going to see why in just a moment. So toggling the harmonize back on, I want to make both of these layers into smart objects. So let's go ahead, right click and convert to Smart Objects for that one, and right click Convert to Smart Object for that one. And we're doing this because we're going to apply a Gaussian blur to both of these. And if we want to go back and make any changes to it, having it be a smart object is going to allow us to do that. So with our first shadow selected down here, let's hit Control or Command T on our keyboard. And if you hold down Control or Command on any of these nodes, you're not just going to scale it up and down. But what you're going to be able to do is you're going to be able to move it around. You're going to be able to skew it around your composition, and that's exactly what we want to do. I want to bring this all the way down here, something like that. You can hold down space on your keyboard to get the move tool and then you can move around. So I kind of want to drag that out to match the angle that the sun is at, so you want to make sure you keep that in mind. I want to bring this up just a little bit. And these sides may flare out ever so slightly, and down here, it might flare inward. So, something like that is going to be good. Lovely. And I'm going to do the same thing for this other can. So with the other shadow selected, Control or command T on the keyboard, and we're going to do the same thing, Control Command click on one of these nodes and drag that down, keeping in mind where the sun is in our image. So in this case, this shadow is not going to go over to this direction, nor is it going to go all the way to the left here. It's going to be very central here, and I'm going to want to bring it just like so. And I might bring this node in ever so slightly because here we just have just a little corner of the can touching the grass. So, that's all we need to touch there. Fantastic. Let's hit Enter on our keyboard, and we can go up here to Filter, Blur, Gaussian blur. And a nice 15 pixel blur is going to look really nice on this. So go ahead and hit Okay. And we're going to do the same thing for this other shadow, so make sure you have that one selected. Filter, blur, Gaussian blur. Or you can go right up here on the filter menu. It's going to have your last use filter right up there, so you can click that if you want just a one click solution there. And again, a 15 pixel or so blur is going to do a really good job on that. Now, these aren't really blended in too well yet, so I want to change the blending mode on those. Let's go down and make it a multiply. And an opacity of about 80% kind of to match the shadow of the bear that we have as well. And over here, I want to change the blending mode of this one as well to multiply and opacity. I might even bring that down to 75 for both of these. There we go. That's close enough 74%. So now we have two very nice shadows for our cans here. And looking at this, I'm actually going to scooch the shadow for the right can up a little bit. So with that can selected, and by hitting V on your keyboard to move things around, you can hit the arrows on your keyboard. Move that up ever so slightly. Lovely. Now, I want to add a little bit of a contact shadow on the grass right below the cans. But if you're thinking about this can actually being here in this field, you're going to have blades of grass going right above here onto the can itself. And whenever we paint that contact shadow, we want to make sure that we're getting those blades of grass as well. So in order to do that, we're going to have to hop back to our can layers here. So select the harmonized layer and the cans, and let's just group those together, control our coman Gi, and let's rename that as cans. Very simple. And let's go ahead and create a mask on that layer. Now, I've included in the class resources a very special brush that I've made myself, and that is a grass blade brush. It is this brush over here, and as you paint with it, let me go ahead and go to a new layer just to show you. As you paint with that, it gives you a very nice, varied grass type effect. And that's exactly what we want as we paint away some of the grass over here. Oh, that's going to be in your class resources. And the way that you install that is in your brushes panel over here, you're going to click this button over here. There are a couple of lines. You just click that, and it's going to be as simple as going down here to import brushes. And in your Project two folder, you're going to have grass brush. You're going to click that and then a load. And once you load it, it's going to be right here in your brushes. So, again, it's this button over here in the top right. You're going to go over to import brushes, navigate to the Project two folder, find the grass brush, make sure it's selected, and click Load. And then you'll be good to go. So hopping back to our cans here, we've made this mask. Let's go ahead and zoom in it Zn ar keyboard and let's zoom in all the way to this can on the left. Let's hit BNR keyboard and go to our custom grass blade brush that I've provided for you. And let's go ahead and make that small. You want the grass blade to match the size of the grass in the image itself. So you're not going to want to make the grass all the way tiny to be this small. And at the same time, you don't want it to be this big. It doesn't match the scale that we have currently going on in the photo. So I like to just match it up against some of the other blades of grass that we have at that level in our photo. So I think something about this size is going to work. And now, if you paint in black, you're going to start painting away and painting in some grass by doing that. And don't worry about the different colors that you see here. We're going to fix that in just a moment when we hop back to the shadow section, and just take your time here. You want some bigger blades, maybe some smaller ones, some messier ones, some straggler ones. So just take your time here, really blend everything in so that it looks nice and natural. And don't be afraid to zoom out, see how that looks. That's looking pretty convincing, actually. I like that. Let's zoom back in with Z on our keyboard. Let's go over here to the can on the right, and we're going to want to do the same thing. But just for this little area here where it's actually touching the grass. So again, be on the keyboard, and this side is almost a little bit smaller. So I'm just going to go ahead and start painting. Again, this side isn't going to need too much, actually. What I'll do a smidge to show that it is actually in the grass and not just floating above it or pasted in there. So let's zoom out, and that is looking a lot better. You see how nicely that blends it in a couple of seconds with a very simple brush, and you have some very nice detail. But now I want to get rid of some of these highlights that are brought in from the grass that's behind the cans, so let's go ahead and do that. Let's go back down here to our shadow layer and make a new layer above that. Very simple and hit B on your keyboard. And we're just going to go back to a nice soft round brush. And with that brush, let's go ahead and sample one of our dark green colors here that we have in our shadow, something like that. And on a low opacity, I like to go to about 20%. Just start painting away. Just a couple of clicks. We'll do exactly what you wanted to do here. And all that detail from the highlights of the grass in the background is gone. You don't see that. You can talk about that off and on, and you see just how cool of an effect that has done. And we can do the same thing over here on the right. There we go, because the grass blades in front of the cans here aren't going to have any highlights from the sun in the background. So that is all that we're painting away here. And that looks a whole lot better. The cans are very much sitting in the composite, and that's looking a lot better. And one more thing that we can do is group all of these shadow layers together. So with this last layer selected, go ahead and shift click down through all of these shadows, Control or Command G to group that together. And let's go ahead and rename that as C shadows. Hit Enter. And let's go ahead really quickly and make a mask on that. And with the Zoom tool, hitting Z on your keyboard, let's go ahead and zoom in here. So why did I make a mask on this layer? Well, let's go ahead and hit B on our keyboard to get to our brush, and let's go back to the grass blade brush that you have downloaded and installed. And let's play around with this a little bit. So let's make that ever so slightly bigger. And all I want to do is paint away a little bit with this grass brush. Just to add in some of that uneven detail because some of these grass blades will be catching some of that light, and they will happen to be in front of the shadow that is being cast. So we kind of want to highlight that a very little bit, if we possibly can on both sides here. And you can change the color to paint that away by hitting X on your keyboard. You have white in the foreground. Something like sew. And I also want to soften up this corner here ever so slightly. So with a soft brush and a very low opacity, about 15%, I'm going to make that brush bigger. And I'm just going to soften that up ever so slightly. Just like sew and same on this shadow on the left, just to soften up the edges a little bit. So let's go ahead and hit Zn r keyboard. Let's zoom out. Let's see how our shadows are looking here. You can talk about that off and on. That's looking a lot better. And you can always paint that back. That's why we use masks. That's why we use non destructive editing so that if we do want to, we can go in with our brush, paint with white, and get some of that shadow back just like so. And that is going to pretty much do it for the shadows of the cans. And now we can really get into blending in our cans to the image. So let's go over here to our cans. Let's open that up. And with our harmonized layer selected, I want to add a brightness and contrast layer, and I want to clip that down. And like I said, I want to be working my way from the bottom up, and that's why we did the shadows down here in the first place. So let's go ahead and put the brightness all the way down. Let's increase the contrast, as well. We really want to darken that, and let's go ahead and collapse that. And on our mask layer, you want to hit G on your keyboard to get to the paint bucket tool. And with black as a foreground color, we want to paint that away entirely. Lovely. Now, let's hit B on our keyboard, get to a nice soft round brush. 15% opacity is going to be good, and we're going to be painting in white. So make sure that white is a foreground color, and you're just going to start gently painting in little shadow down here. And up along the can itself. And you really want to keep in mind for the objects that you're trying to composite together. This one, in this case, it's a cylinder. It's a three dimensional object, and light and shadow is going to wrap around different objects in different ways. So in this case, the light is going to be hitting both of the edges and not necessarily the very front of our cans. The front is going to have more shadow than the side, so we want to make sure we keep that in mind. So let's hop over here to the can on the left and just start painting in a little bit of this shadow down here and up along the middle of the can. Just like so. Nice little bit of detail. And you can talk about that off and on. And you can see with just that little bit of detail, it's already blended that into our image very nicely. Now, right down here at the very bottom of the cans, I want it to be even darker. It's going to be a very dark contact shadow. So let's go ahead and add in a curves adjustment layer. Clip that down. And for this, I really want to bring that all the way down to pure black, essentially. That's what we want here. Get hit G on the keyboard for paint bucket tool, making sure black is a foreground color, and we want to paint that away entirely. That's B on our keyboard, and we've the exact same brushes before with white as a foreground color. We're going to go ahead and paint ever so slightly. The very bottom edge. This one, you really want to go light handed on it. You don't want to bring it up too much. Just a little bit down there. So if we toggle that off and on, you'll see just a little bit of that extra dark shadow right down at the bottom, where it'll be nestled into the grass itself. And this is where if you want to go back to the shadows where we had painted on the extra shadow, this is where you can go in, paint even more if you would like to sell the idea of the grass being darker around that area. Very cool. But hopping back to our cans here, let's collapse the shadows. I'm pretty happy with that curves adjustment layer. It's given a nice little extra bit of depth there where it is touching the grass. Now, I want to start brightening up the edges of our cans here. So let's go ahead and add in a brightness contrast layer, clip that down, and let's pull that brightness up all the way to the right. And it's going to be the same process. Let's hit G on our keyboard with black as a foreground color. Let's go ahead and mask that away. Hit B on your keyboard to get to the brush tool, and painting in white on a low opacity. We're going to start painting in just a little bit of that edge life for both of our ens here. There we go. Just take your time here. This is just a general adjustment, but we're starting to build up the layers a little bit and adding in some of the light that's in our image. So you can talk about that off and on. And you see we've added just that little bit of depth to our cans. Okay? Now I want to add in a curves layer. I want to bring in a little bit of the contrast back to the cans themselves. So let's clip that down. Now I'm going to just have a very subtle S curve dragging this left side down a little bit and the right side up. Nothing crazy, a very small S curve. So you can see if we toggle that, we now have just a little bit of extra contrast. That curves layer has kind of darkened part of our image, so let's go ahead and add in a brightness contrast layer. Clip that down, and I want to bring the brightness of this up to about 20. That's a nice whole number. And if we toggle that off and on, you see, again, that just brought back a little bit of the brightness. Now I want to start painting in some of the light. And it's very nice because we have a sunset in this image. So that means we're going to have a lot of gold warm tones that are going to be going over these cans. So let's go ahead and make a new layer here by clicking the plus icon down and let's clip that down by holding Alt Option and clicking right below that. And let's go ahead with our brush tool selected. I want to sample a nice orange in our image. So let's see what kind of orange we can find. I might actually pull one off of the bear itself here so that it matches. So let's go ahead, find a nice one. I like this one here, and I actually want to change the blending mode of this layer to overlay. And with the blending mode now as overlay, let's start painting, making sure our brush is at a low opacity. And you can see we're bringing in that orange golden tone into our actual cans themselves. Very nice. Just bringing in that warmth. Like, so you can talk with that off and on. And you see just that little detail has added quite a nice effect to our overall composite. Next, I'm going to add in a little bit of an edge light on both of the cans because that's really 6. 6 Resizing for different ratios: Okay, so now we're going to get into a little bit more of the technical side of things when it comes to creating ads. And when you create ads, you really need to be mindful of all the different formats and sizings and ratios that you're going to have to deal with. That includes assets that are horizontal, vertical, and any other shape in between that you can imagine. So we want to make sure that we can adapt our design to fit those needs. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the square projects that we have for both Project one and Project two and create both a horizontal and a vertical version for each one of those that will be very adaptable and very usable for any other ratio that we have. And we will get to that when we get to the exporting section of the class, which will be in the next part. So for now, make sure you open up Class Project one, and let's go ahead and get started. Now, we want to make sure that we do not save over this original class Project one file. This is going to be our original square format that we have. So the first variation we're going to do is going to be the horizontal version of this ad. So what you're going to do is just going to go to File, Save as save this as Project one horizontal. And as you see, I have now saved mine as Class Project one, horizontal, and now we get to the actual fun part of it. The first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to turn off the logo. The logo is something that we are manually going to be resizing and replacing for each image that we need to export, and that's just going to give us a good amount of flexibility, which we're going to want, and you're going to see why later on. So for now, let's just go down here to our text plus logo and for the checkmark, just turn that off for now, and that's going to be just fine. And now let's hit Z on our keyboard and let's zoom out quite a bit. So, whenever you're resizing for a horizontal or vertical format, you really want to think, Where do you want the focal point to be? Do you want to extend it left and right to keep your subject in the middle? You want to extend it just to the right or just to the left. What is the overall layout that you want to stick with? And for the case of this, I'm actually going to drag all the way out to the right and maybe a little bit to the left, but I think I'm going to focus on dragging it out to the right. So all you're going to do is hit C on your keyboard to get to the crop tool, and we're going to click on one of these sides here. We're going to go with the right side, and you're just going to click and drag. And your screen is going to look very funny for a little bit as you stretch this out. And I want this stretched all the way over here. Like, so width of about 11,000 pixels. I think will do us just fine. And let's go ahead and hit the checkmark. And that's looking a little bit scary right now. We have to fill in this whole area, and it might take a little bit of time, but I'm going to show you very quick and easy way to do that. And before we do that, for this horizontal cut here, I kind of want to make the font and the shoe a little bit smaller. So let's go ahead. Let's select our shoe. Let's select our text. Let's hit Control or Command T, and just click Okay. And we can now resize this. I want to bring this down just a little bit. To be like, so go ahead and hit Enter on our keyboard. And now we want to expand everything. So the easiest way to do this is to turn every layer off and work from the bottom layer up. Otherwise, you're going to have a very hard time figuring out what is not looking good on what layer. So just toggle everything off. We're going to go all the way down to our poster bottom layer, toggle that off, as well. We have our background here, and that's where we're going to start. So with the very bottom layer, hit Control or Command T, strag that all the way across by holding down Shift, and let's hit Enter, and that layer is done. Next, let's toggle the poster bottom on. And now we really want this to fill up this whole area. So that's going to take us a little bit of time. So let's go ahead with our poster bottom layer selected. We want to paint away whatever we can on our mask. Let's hit B on our keyboard to get to our brush tool. And in white, let's start to paint away and see what exactly we have to work with. So up here, we're going to have an edge. Let's zoom in with Z. And this can be somewhat rough. We want to paint in a black here just to get that edge going. There we go. So we've made sure that this bottom poster section goes all the way to the edge. That's exactly what we want. And next what we're going to do is we're just going to duplicate this with Control or Command J. And with V, our move tool, we're just going to click drag that over here, and we want to paint back now the other side of this. And with B selected on our keyboard, painting in white, we're going to paint back everything that has been masked out, including this section here. So let's just carefully paint that back in. Like so, lovely. Let's click and drag that a little bit over here. I want there to be somewhat of an overlap. Just like so. And all we're going to do is, again, with our brush tool, we're going to get a nice soft brush, bring the opacity down, and we're just going to soften up those edges, blend these two together so that it looks somewhat seamless, and that'll do. And now we're going to repeat this whole process quite a few times. So we're going to do two of these layers at a time. So poster bottom and polster bottom copy, make sure you have both of those selected, and let's do Control or Command J. So those have been duplicated. And now let's do Control or Command T, and let's just bring them over here. To the right, make sure it overlaps a little bit. Let's enter, and you can go ahead and group those together with Control Command G and just make a mask on that layer, and it's going to be the same process to make our brush smaller or larger, but smaller would work better, and we're just going to blend out those edges, might even zoom in so I can see a little bit better what I'm doing and work with a little bit of a smaller brush. Let's paint back a little bit of what I've painted away. So just take your time here, paint over these edges. And we're going to fix some of the seams here in a little bit. It's not going to be too difficult. Just like so, let's zoom out with Z. Let's go ahead and duplicate this group that we have. Control or Command J, and then control or Command then we can move that over. And we already have the blending kind of done, so we're not going to do much with that. Let's hit Enter. Let's keep moving to the right. Control or Command J. To duplicate that, control or Command Let's move that over. Let's hit Enter. Let's do Control or command J one more time. Control Command T to move. A, we're almost there. We almost made it to the end. And in fact, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to hit C on our keyboard and just bring that in so I don't have to do another group of these. That'll be totally fine for us. Fantastic. So let's go ahead and make a new layer above that. And now you can see this looks very much like it has been copied and pasted a couple of times, so we really want to fix that. So let's zoom in, and let's hit S on our keyboard to get to our clone stamp tool. And we're going to want to make that be a nice big brush. And I always like to have my clone stamp tools on about a 50% opacity. That's going to help the blending very nicely. And let's hold down Alter option to sample part of our image, and you're just going to start to click and try to stamp away some of these edges here. And it's just a process of going back and forth once you blend those edges out. You get a nice seamless look to your composite here. So this may take a couple of minutes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to keep doing this process, and I'm going to encourage you to do the same thing. Just old option click and keep going over the places with this 50% opacity clone stamp tool and keep doing this until it looks less like it's been copied and pasted so many times. And I'm going to meet you back here once I have done that. And a couple of minutes later, I have something that looks a little bit better and something that I think I can work with. So moving forward, let's go to the next layer, our poster top. And here we have to extend this by just a little bit. And I think we can get away with it by just working with the mask. So on the mask layer, hit B on your keyboard, and we're going to paint with a hard brush with 100% opacity, and this should take us all the way to the edge here, which is going to be perfect. Fantastic. Go ahead and zoom out. There we go. And let's toggle this next layer on. That was just getting rid of that one little drip over there. Fantastic. So that section is all done. Next, we have our green shape here. So make sure we have that layer selected and hit P on your keyboard for the Pen tool and Control or Command click into the shape, and it's going to bring you up all of these nodes. And I simply just want to drag a couple of these nodes out here. I want to drag this one up here. This can be a little bit rough of a selection that's totally fine. Let's bring that over there just to fill out this whole right section of our image, and that is that. Fantastic. Let's go ahead and zoom back out with Z, and that is going to look fantastic for the shape layer. Let's go ahead and turn back on the curves layer. Again, we have to adjust our mask here. So let's zoom in. And with our brush tool, just like before, we're going to paint in black. Over on our mask just to make sure that we're getting what we want. Let's zoom back out. Next, we have our hue saturation layer. We can turn that back on. We can turn our levels layer back on, and we can turn our scratch texture back on. Now, for our scratch texture, we want to stretch this across the whole image. So let's do Control Command T, and just hold down Shift. We're going to stretch this. It's totally fine. It's a scratch texture, so it's not going to look bad if you stretch it out, especially in this particular context. So that's our background done completely. We can toggle back our text and logo. So that's going to be okay where it is. We can toggle back our shoe. We've placed that there because we want it there, and we will be copying and pasting in our logo separately. Now, let's go ahead and go into our color grading and effects. We can toggle that whole folder back on. The color grading is already applied to the whole thing, as is the faded effect. All we need to do is stretch out this noise layer. So with the noise layer selected, just hit Control or Command T. Just hold down Shift and drag it across the whole image, hit Enter, and there you go. We have a horizontal version for this. Perfect to put any kind of call to action or logo in here, and you're going to see how we're going to play around with this later on in the next part. Let's go ahead and save that, control our Command S. And let's go ahead and open up the original version of Project. Okay, so we have the original version here, again, and this time, I'm going to save another version of this as Class Project one Vertical. So now we need to do the vertical version of this ad. So simply just go up to File, Save As and save it wherever you would like as class Project one, Vertical, as you see I have done. So let's go ahead and zoom out a little bit. One is going to be vertical. And again, the same thought process applies. When I make it vertical, do I still want this main focal point of my image to be in the center? Do I want it to be top weighted, bottom weighted? So that is something to think about. So let's go ahead and hit C on our keyboard to get to our crop tool. And we're going to start by dragging out the bottom just a little bit or quite a lot of bit, actually, to about down here. And we're also going to drag it up ever so slightly. To be something like that. I'm not going to adjust the width whatsoever. But that is going to look good, I think, for a vertical crop of this. So let's go ahead and hit the check mark there. And it's going to be the exact same process. You turn everything off, go down to the very bottom layer and start there. So with the very bottom layer selected, control or command T, stretch that out to fill the whole screen, hit Enter, and let's move to polster bottom. On the mask layer for poster bottom, let's go ahead and hit B on our keyboard for our brush, and with it being white, let's just paint and get back as much of the original that we can just like that. And let's go ahead and duplicate this layer with Control or Command J. And with our move tool selected, V on the keyboard, let's just click and track that down like so. And then let's zoom in and let's soften up that. Let's blend that together with our brush, V on the keyboard, soft brush. Let's put down the opacity to about 40%. And on the mask of that, let's paint in black. And again, take your time to just get rid of that harsh edge. And we're going to do a little bit of the clone stamp tool as well in just a moment. So let's zoom back out with Z, and let's duplicate this layer again, Control Command J. And with a move tool V, let's click and drag that down. And let's do that one more time. Control or Command J. And with V selected, we're just going to bring that down. Just like so now, let's go ahead and use our clone stamp tool. Let's make a new layer above this, and let's zoom in. We're going to do the exact same process. You're going to hit S on your keyboard and you're going to sample using Alt or Option somewhere on screen and just start to click and blend all the layers together. Until it looks nice and seamless, and you're happy with moving on to the next stage. So I advise you to take your time here. You don't have to go at the same speed as me. Take your time, really go back and forth, zoom out, zoom in, make sure it's all blended together very nicely so that it looks as seamless as possible. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect. Don't think that it does, but just get the general idea across and have it blended together. So I'm going to take a moment here to just finish up, and I suggest you do, too. And there we go after another minute or so. I think I'm happy with that. So let's keep moving on. Let's go up here to our polster top. And we're going to do the same thing on the mask layer. I want to zoom in. And with my brush, I'm going to go for the hard brush, full 100% opacity and painting in white. I want to paint back and see how much we have up here. Fantastic. We don't have to stretch or clone stamp or anything. Awesome. Let's go ahead and turn on the next layer. That's just getting rid of that little drip over there. Then let's turn on the next layer, which is going to be this shape here, and it's going to be very similar as before. So on the shape layer, hit P on your keyboard to get to the pen tool and control or command click within the shape to get all the nodes to show up, and we're just going to click and drag down these two nodes here. Like, so just to fill out all of the bottom of this part of our image. And let's hit V on our keyboard. Click outside of that, and then we will be done. Let's hit Z. Let's zoom out. Fantastic. Let's go ahead, turn on our curves layer. And let's adjust our mask here. So zooming in, let's hit B on our keyboard. And we're going to paint in black, so make sure you have that as your foreground color. And then let's just paint that away. That is done. Let's toggle back to hue saturation. Let's toggle back to levels. Let's toggle back to scratch texture, and the scratch texture we're going to have to stretch to fit this whole thing. So control or command T. Then just shift, click, drag all the way down, hit Enter. That is done. Let's toggle our text and logo. And, like before, we're going to turn our checkmark logo off. We're going to paste that in manually. Let's turn on our shoe, and let's turn on our color grading and effects. The only thing we have to change that again is our noise. So control or command T. Shift click. Let's drag that all the way up and down, and let's hit Enter. And that looks awesome. So go ahead and save this by hitting Control or Command S. And now let's open up our original file for Class Project two. So here we have our second project, and this one is going to be a whole lot easier to get our horizontal and vertical versions of because we're going to use AI to help us out, and it's going to do such a good job. So we are going to go ahead and save a copy of this as our original file, and we're going to save one as Class Project two horizontal. We're going to start out with the horizontal crop. Let's go to File, Save As, and I have saved as Class Project two horizontal. So the process for this one is going to be very similar to that of the first project. So let's go ahead and hit C on our keyboard to get to our crop tool. And I want to drag this out a little bit on the left and quite a lot on the right, all the way to about I'm going to say about 8,000 pixels or so, like so. But before we hit Enter, I'm actually going to see what the generative expand feature is going to do for us. So right down here in your contextual task bar, you'll see generative ex go ahead and click that, and let's see what Photoshop is going to do for us. No need to fill in any prompt. Just click Generate. And after a couple of seconds, we end up with this. I ended up cropping in a little bit on the right because I felt like it was getting a little bit too wide. So I just cropped that into about that 6,000 pickle point. Well, let's go ahead and look at the generative expand. Let's see the options that it gave us. Our first option was this, which is okay, but I didn't exactly like how much shadow was in it. Our second option was fairly good. And this was our third option. I didn't like this artifact here on the left, so I decided to go with this one in the middle, our second option. And I think this is going to do us just fine for what we need today. So let's go ahead and hit Control or Command S, and we have our horizontal version done. Let's go ahead and close this out and open up the original version of our class project two. So now we have the original version of our class project. Again, it's going to be the same process file save as, as class project to dash vertical. Okay? So file, save as, and I have it saved now as class project to dash vertical. And we're going to go ahead and hide the text and logo layer. We don't want that to influence anything that degenerative AI is going to do, so let's toggle that off and let us zoom out. Now for this vertical composition, I would like if this would stay dead center. So I'm going to make sure I keep that in mind. Let's go ahead and hit C on our keyboard, and let's drag this up to about this point and this down to about here. Something like that. That looks pretty centered to me. And again, I'm just going to hit generative Expand. Not going to give it any prompt, let's go ahead, click Generate and give it just a moment. And after a few seconds, here are our options. I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in so we can see a little bit clearer. So this is our option one, option two. I like Option two a lot better. And option three. So I think I'm going to go with Option two, and I'm going to just add one little tweak to this. I'm going to go ahead and make a U layer above this, hit G on my keyboard and hold down till I get the gradient tool. And I'm going to sample one of the darkest colors down here, like so, and making sure I have this gradient option selected under basis. I'm just going to click and drag right up from the bottom, help splend that section in a little bit better, and that is all I'm going to do. So now we have our vertical version of this done, as well. Let's go ahead and hit Control or Command so now within a couple of minutes, we have a square version, a horizontal and a vertical version for each of our ads that we can then place into various templates and use in various formats. In the next lesson, I'm going to be providing you with a template that has several different sizes of exports that we need to provide to our client. And that's why we made these different versions, the square, the horizontal and vertical. It was all made so that we can have an easier life when we are working with these templates. After we get everything into our templates, we're going to export and have everything packaged and ready to go for our clients. So let's keep moving forward and wrap things up. 7. 7 Exporting your ad: Alright, so in the class resources folder, you should find a file called template for resizing, and this is what we're going to use to lay out our ads and get them ready to export for our client. Now, when it comes to ad design, you're going to have dozens of sizes that the client is going to come to you with. Some are incredibly obscure, and I've tried to include a few of them over here. For example, you have a leaderboard ad that is 728 pixels wide by 90 pixels high. You have a Billboard ad, which is 970 by 250. And you can look through. I did just a couple of them just for your reference here. And I also included some social media sizings, as well, such as 1080 by 1080, 1080 by 1920. So and so forth, you can use across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, you name it. You can use it. So let's go ahead and let's get started. So now, when you have this template for resizing file open, go ahead and save this and add to the end of it sho. We're going to use this first template just for the shoo ad that we created. So just file, save as, and save it as template for resizing Shoe. Very simple. Go ahead and get started. I'm going to start with our social ads here because that's going to be probably the easiest, let's go ahead and hit ZnR keyboard and let's zoom in. Let's hit VNR keyboard and click one so that we are in this particular artboard. So all we're going to do is we're going to place a linked file back to the Photoshop files that we had for each of the sizes. By placing it as linked, as opposed to placing it as embedded, it's going to keep our file sizes smaller, and anything that we change or alter on the original Photoshop files will be updated all across these templates because they are linked to those files. So let's just go to File Place Linked and wherever you have your project saved, let's go ahead and click on Class Project one and Place, and there we go just like that. Easy, done. Let's move on to the next 11080 by 1920. This is going to be our vertical crop. So it's going to be the same process file, Place Linked, and this time class Project one Vertical. This is exactly why we did that. Now we can drag that to fit the full width and bring that down to be around there, slightly top weighted, how I want it. Awesome. Let's move on. We have 1080 by 13 50. This is a four to five ratio. And since this is also vertical, I can just go over here to the 1080 by 1921, click Control or Command C, head back over here to the 1080 by 13 50. Make sure you click between these two, and then just hit Control or Command V to place that in. And now we can adjust the exact spacing of this. I kind of want to center that a little more on that. Done. Let's go ahead into our 1920 by 80, click into that artboard, File, Place Linked, and let's place in our class Project one horizontal, like so. And we're going to click and drag this out to fill the full height. And we're going to bring this like so. Might even make that larger. Et's just keep resizing that. Something like that. And as you see, there is a little gap here on the left, which I can fix it very easily. All I'm going to do is on that layer, make a new one above that. Let's go ahead and zoom in. And very simply with our clone stamp tool, let's just hit S on the keyboard and make that a little bit smaller. And we can go with full opacity for this first pass, and I'm just going to pull in from other areas of our image. Just to get that blended in. Everything is pretty uniform and equally lit, so it's not going to be that difficult to have it look seamless and blended, and that looks pretty good as it is. Fantastic, let's go ahead and zoom out. And I'm going to do the same thing I did for the vertical ones, make sure I have this horizontal one selected, Control or Command C, and let's go down to our 12 80 by 720, and let's hit Control or Command V to place that in. And let's resize that. We really want to bring the size of this one down something like that. Going to have that be a little bit bigger. I don't want this to be actually slightly to the right of our image. Just add an extra bit of visual interest. Let's hit Enter, and we're going to do a very similar process here. Try to clone stamp what we need. So let's go ahead and make a new layer above that, hit S on our keyboard, and it's going to be the same process. We're going to clone stamp, used option to sample any part of the image, and you're just going to get started with painting away what you want to paint away. Take your time with this. But because we have a very simple and plain paper texture going on here in the background, this is going to be very simple and very quick to do. As you see within a couple of minutes here, I'm ready doing it. Very simple. And you just want to make sure that you avoid repeating too many noticeable tells, like the same mark over and over. Might pull in a little bit of this paper up here as well. Like so and a little bit of this darker section, maybe down here. That'll be fantastic. And, look, done. So we pretty much have all of our social media sizes ready and done, and now we're going to move on to some of our specific ad sizes. Let's go ahead. Let's go down here, and we're going to be starting this whole same process again. So let's start moving from left to right. Let's go into our portrait ad. Click in there. Let's go File Lace linked, and this is going to be our Vertical one. So class Project one Vertical, hit place, and this is why we made it so long because some of these unique ones that we use for ads will be very skinny and very long. So we really need to make sure that we account for that. It's going to scooch that over ever so slightly, like so. And let's just copy and paste that into all of the other vertical layouts that we have. I hit and control or command C to copy, and then control or command V to paste that in and it's just a rinse and repeat process. This is why we made them a size that we can just repurpose and reuse all over the place. So I want this one to be like that ever so slightly toque weighted. Might even make this a little bit wider. There we go. And our last vertical one, control or command T to resize that. Let's go ahead hit Enter. Lovely. Some of these very tiny and very skinny ones are the most difficult to work with, but that is completely fine. Let's go over here to our mobile landscape interstitial ad. Make sure we click in there, File Place Linked, and let's go ahead and do our class Project one horizontal. Let's hit Place, and let's resize that. Let's make that even bigger. Drag that over. And there we go, have it nice and centered. And you can move that around with V on your keyboard. I think something like this will do just fine. And let's hit Control or Command C on that. Let's paste that into our Billboard ad. This is why we made it so long and so skinny, so we can work with crops like this. Let's bring that over and we can still resize that just a little more. You always want to use as much of it as you can so that your product is as big as possible. So something like this, let's enter and down here as well in our leaderboard ad, Control or Command V. Let's go ahead and resize that. And this is probably the most awkward size that I've ever had to work with. But you make it work, so let's drag that over. So we see a little bit more of it. Might even bring it like so. Hit Enter. And for this one, I'm going to do a little bit of a cheat code, since this is such a small image, you're not going to see a lot of detail for this particular one. An easy solution you can do is just make a new layer above this one, and with your brush tool selected, hit B on your keyboard. Let's make that small. Let's sample the color of our paper here by holding down Alt or option. And let's make sure we're on a soft round brush, and I'm just going to paint in the same color. There's such little detail at this scale that you can get away with just painting it in. So no need to do any kind of clone stamp tool, and that's going to do exactly what we want it to. And looking at that, I might even bring this in further to this point. So our sneakers at about the one third mark. So back on our layer where we were painting, we can hit B again. Let's just fill that in. Just like so Lovely. I like that a lot. So now we have all of our sizes in and we have two more little steps in. We need to add in our logo that we have here in our square crop, but we need that across everything. So let's open up our original Project one, and in Project one, let's go over to our text and logo layer. Go to our checkmark, and let's hit Control or Command C, and we're going to be pasting this all over our other template. So back in our template, let's start and go through each one of these. Our first one here, 1080 by 1920. Let's hit Control or Command V, and let's hit Control Command T to transform. And let's move that up. I want that somewhere around here. Just like that, let's move over to our next one, 1080 by 13 50. Click on that Control or Command B. And let's hit Control Command T again to transform. Want to bring that up here, maybe resize that by using Control Command and that's that one done. Let's go over to 1920 by 1080, hit Control Command V, and then Control Command T to transform. And I want this to live here in the top left corner, and I'm going to make that a little bit bigger. Like so, let's move down to 12 80 by 720, hit Control Command V, and then Control Command And again, I want this to live here in the top left. But I want to make sure that this is actually above our proper layer here. So let's make sure we drag that checkmark layer above where we had clone stamped and again, Control Command and just get that into place. Like so. And I might scooch that up just a little bit more by using V on the keyboard. And that's that. So let's go down here to our actual ads for our portrait ad, let's take Control or Command V to paste that in and then Control or Command T to transform and move it. And let's bring the logo up here. Let's resize that to be a little bit smaller. And then using V, let's just scooch that on up just a little bit. Let's move on to this one here, our mobile landscape Institial. Let's hit Control Command V, and then Control Command Let's make that smaller. And let's get that up here into the top left. And I'm going to zoom in just a little bit with Z so that we can see what we're doing. Hit V on your keyboard to move that around. Great. Let's move to our Billboard ad, control our Command V, and then Control Command Again, I want this to live here on the left, so I'm going to resize that, make that smaller. Easy. And let's go down here. Let's do our vertical interstitial Control Command V, and then Control Command Spring that up to the top. Let's make that nice and small. Done our half page ad, Control Command V, Control Command strag that up, make that nice and small. There we go. And then we have our wide skyscraper ad, Control Command V, Control Command This one's going to be very small, but let's bring that up here to the top to enter. And then last but not least our leaderboard ad. Let's hit Control or Command V, and then Control or Command and let's bring that size down a little bit, and this is going to live just here on the left of our image. Let's hit Enter. That is looking good. Now, a lot of these ads are going to be on a website, and they're going to have a call to action, a button that says something like B now. So let's go ahead and do that for just a couple of these, okay? So let's start with our Billboard ad. Make sure you click there. Let's go ahead and hit on our keyboard so we get into our shape tool. And instead of the triangle, let's click and hold down so we get our rectangle tool, just like that. And let's go ahead and click and drag ourselves a nice little rectangle, something like that. And for the fill, I have it sampled to the color that we have in the background. So make sure that you're using that. And then all you want to do is let's click and drag these little nodes here to round out those corners. And let's close up that dialogue box. We don't need that here. And then let's see where we want this to live. I think somewhere like here will look pretty good. And then let's go ahead and give this a nice drop shadow. So let's double click on that layer here, and that's going to give us our layer style panel over here. Let's do a drop shadow. And we have a drop shadow with a very simple black opacity of 43% angle at about 56 degrees, distance of ten pixels, size of 13 pixels. Just a nice, subtle little drop shadow. Let's go ahead and hit Okay. Now, let's go ahead and hit T on our keyboard to get to our type tool. Let's just click anywhere on here so we can start typing. And I'm simply just going to type by now. Using this nice dark green color. If you want the exact hex code for it, it's 5a802 B, or you can sample any of the dark greens on this image. This is just the one that I think would look very nice. Let's hit the checkmark on that. Let's hit Control or Command T. Let's go ahead and drag that into our button here, make that a little bit smaller. And then just make sure it is nice and centered, and then hit Enter. And I think that could go a little bit over to the right and down. That looks pretty good. And now all I'm going to do is for this text, the B now and the rectangle, I'm going to Control or Command click both of them, or you can do Shift Click between the two. I'll select them both, and then hit Control or Command G to group them together. And I'm just going to rename that as button. Just like that. Let's hit Control or Command C on that. And I'm just going to paste that into our Portra ad, our half page ad, and our leaderboard ad. So let's start moving from left to right. Let's go to our Portra ad, Control or Command V. And we can resize that very easily with Control Command Let's make that smaller, and let's have it live somewhere around here, about two thirds down the page. That'll look good. Now let's go to our half page ad. Same thing. Control or Command V. Let's resize that with Control Command and let's bring that down to live about here, just like that and last but not least our leaderboard ad. Let's hit Control or Command V. And for this one, we definitely want to resize that as well with Control Command T. And this can live all the way over here, making sure it's centered vertically in the whole composition there. And in a couple of minutes, we have about 12 different exports that we have from one design. So this is going to make your client very happy having multiple options readily available to them fast and easy. Go ahead and hit Control or Command S to save this. So we're going to do the same thing for our second project, and that one is going to go a lot faster. So let's open up the original template and Class Project two. So here we have the original template again. So let's go ahead and save that. This time, adding dash Cs to the end of it. So file, save as, and now it is template for resizing dash Cs. And I have Class Project two here open because I'm going to be taking both the logo and the text from this for our social media post versions of this. Go back to our template, and let's start placing everything in. It's going to be the exact same process. So our first 11080 by 1080 file place linked, and you're going to go with Class Project two. And there you have it. Now let's go to 1080 by 1920, File, Place Linked Class Project two Vertical. Let's hit place on that and just simply drag that out, like so. And I might bring this down just to see a little bit more of the sky, something like that. And we'll add in the text and logo in just a moment. Let's go ahead and copy this with Control Command C. Let's go over to 1080 by 13 50 and Control Command V. Let's hit Control or Command T to resize this and let's bring this up, have it be a little bit more centered like that. Lovely. Let's go over to 1920 by 80. Let's go over to File, Place Linked, and Class Project two horizontal. Set place, and let's resize that. So I do want this to still be somewhat centered, let me see if I can resize that to the point where it can be. Something like so. And again, control command C on that. Let's go down to 12 80 by 720 and Control Command and Control Command T to resize that. So let's make that smaller, pull that over. And we're going to have to resize this just a smidge because I still want the cans to be centered Something like so let's go ahead and hit Enter on that. And let's focus on the social media posts for just a moment here. So let's go back to our class Project two file, and let's copy our text plus logo folder. So making sure that's selected, Control or Command C. And let's go back to our template here. Let's go to 1080 by 1920, and let's zoom in with the Z. Like so. Let's hit Control or Command V. There we go. Let's hit Control or Command T to resize that. And I'm just keeping my eye on the text here. There we go, something like that. And then let's bring that down to about here, giving nice little bit of breathing room both above and below the text. And let's go in there. Let's find our logo. Let's take Control Command T. Let's bring that into our composite. And I actually want this to be a little bit more centered. Let's make it a little bit bigger. Let's drag that over to be somewhere around here. Again, if you want the exact center, you can drag in a ruler off the side here, but I know the center of 1080 will be about 5:40, so it is already pretty much there. It needs to go four pixels to the right. So I'm just going to hit V on the keyboard and then hit the right arrow about four times, and that'll be four pixels. So we can now bring that ruler off the screen, and we're good to go. So now let's go ahead and take that exact text plus logo folder, Control or Command C to copy that. Let's head over to our 1080 by 13 50. Let's go ahead hit Control or Command V. So let's go and make sure we find our logo. So let's press V on the keyboard, hold down Shift, and just press the down arrow as we bring our logo into this particular crop. Like so. And then let's go ahead and bring the text stuff, making sure you have taste the adventure text and those two lines selected. Let's hit Control or Command T, and let's hold down shift as we just drag that up and then just hit the checkmark. And there we go. That is good to go. Let's go over here to our 1920 by 1080 cut. Click there, and let's hit Control Command V. We're going to paste that in. And for this particular one, we're not going to need those two lines on either side of the text, so let's go ahead and hide those. Let's just go to Taste the Adventure text, hit Control or Command and we're just going to click and drag that up like so, and let's hit Enter. And for our logo, I'm actually going to select our logo, hit Control or Command and click and drag that all the way up and over here to the top right. Let's hit Enter. And now let's head down to 12 80 by 720, and let's hit Control or Command V. And it's going to be a case of the same thing. We do not really want those two lines. So let's click the drop down here. Let's hide both of those, and let's go to Taste the Adventure text. Control or Command and we're just going to click and drag that up. Maybe resize that, bring the size down ever so slightly. Hit Enter and have our logo selected, hit Control or Command and we're going to click and drag that. Again, to live over here in the top right of our image. Might need to resize that a bit. Let's go ahead and hit Enter. And let's zoom out, and those are pretty much good to go. Now, let's head down to these ads here in the bottom left, and let's do the same thing. Let's get started with the Portra ad here, File Place Linked Class Project two Vertical. Let's place that in and just stretch this out ever so slightly. Let's bring that over. And hit Enter. And let's just hit Control or Command C on that, and let's fill that in for all of these vertical ones. Hit Control Command V, and then Control Command T to transform. Let's make that a little bit smaller and then click and drag that down. Like so. Go to the half page ad, Control Command V, then Control Command T to resize, bring that down and drag that down to about here to enter, and then our wide skyscraper hit Control Command V, then Control Command T to transform. And let's bring that all the way down and all the way up. And let's bring that in like so. And let's go ahead and finish up with our horizontal one. Let's go to our mobile landscape interstitial, file place linked class project to horizontal place and let's just click and drag that to fill up the whole thing. And I'm going to have that be left weighted like so. Let's hit Control Command C on that. Let's go to our Billboard ad, Control or Command V, and then Control Command T to transform. That is actually almost already in the perfect spot, so I'm just going to move that over ever so slightly. Let's go ahead and hit Enter on that. And same thing with the leaderboard add. Let's hit Control or Command V. And let's hit Control or Command T to transform. And let's make that little bit smaller and bring the size down. And you'll notice this one is actually not wide enough, so we're going to actually fix that in just a moment. So we can actually cut off a little bit of the bottom of the can. So we're going to do that. Like, so let's go ahead and zoom in with Z on the keyboard. Let's make a new layer above this one. Let's hit B on our keyboard to get to our brush tool, and let's sample the darkest color that we have on this side. And I'm just going to start painting. It's one of the easiest and quickest hacks to make the brush nice and big, and you're essentially painting in a nice gradient. That's not going to be very noticeable, especially once we have a call to action or a button over here. Go ahead and zoom out, and now it is time to add in our logo and then finish things off with a button. So let's go back over to our class project two file. And here, let's just go ahead and take our logo folder. So click that and then Control Command C, and let's head back to our template. Here in our template, let's go to our portra ad, and we're going to add that into all of these. So let's it Control Command and then Control or Command T to transform. Let's make that little bit smaller and bring that up. To be somewhere around here, and you can still move that around with V if necessary. I can live somewhere there. Let's go to mobile landscape here, Control Command V, Control Command T. And I want this one to live in the top right for this one. Like that, let's go to our Billboard ad. Let's hit Control Command V, and then Control Command T to transform. Want that to be nice and small. And again, in the top right, it can live there. Let's go to our mobile vertical interstitial, hit Control Command V, then transform Control Command Let's have this live right here in the top center. Move that around with the V and your arrow keys if necessary to get the exact position. Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit because these ones are getting very small. So on our half page ad, hit Control Command V, then hit Control Command T, and then let's resize that yet again. Bring that up here. Maybe a little bit smaller. And then reposition that with the V on the keyboard. Let's move over to a white skyscraper, hit Control or Command V, and then Control Command T to transform. I'm going to bring that all the way up here. Have that live right there. And last but most certainly not least, I'm going to add it right here for our leaderboard ad, Control Command V. Let's hit Control Command T to transform. And I'm going to bring that all the way over here to the right. And as you see, what we painted in, that gradient is covering it. So let's just click and drag that above that gradient, and that is looking good. So last thing that I want to do is actually want to bring in the buttons that we had from the very first template into this one. So let's open up the first template that we had for the shoe. So here we have our first ad. So let's go ahead and grab our button, hit Control or Commands. I'm taking this from the Billboard ad. Let's go back to our template for the C. Back here in this template, let's go to our Billboard ad. Let's hit Control or Command Shift V, place that in the exact same space. I want to change the color of the font. That's not going to match this particular composite, but I will keep the same font. I just want to change the color. Let's go ahead and click on that By now font. Let's click this button here. And let's go ahead and sample the darkest color that we have. Let's go ahead and hit Okay. So we're still using that same Amboy font. It's a Adobe font. So if you don't already have it, make sure it is enabled. Let's go ahead and copy this by hitting Control R Command C. So let's go over to our portrait ad now. Let's hit Control R Command V, let's hit Control Command T to transform. Let's make that like so, bring that down here, have it be nice and centered. Like that. Now let's go over to the half page ad, Control Command V. T Control Command T to transform. And we're going to bring that down to about here. You can move that over with V on the keyboard and your arrow keys. And last but not least in the leaderboard ad, let's hit Control or Command V. And let's go ahead and resize that with Control Command Want that to be about that big. And I want it to live about here. And don't forget to drag that above the gradient that we had painted in, like so. Let's go ahead and zoom out. And now we have our second project ready to go with 12 different versions yet again for our client. So go ahead quickly and hit Control or Command S to save that. So the very last thing that we have to do is export all of our files. Several ways that you can do this and several things that you should keep in mind. So let me quickly go over some of these. So when you export, you can go to File, Export, and you can do a Quick Export S PNG, and that is not going to give you any kind of dialogue box, any kind of options to play around with. So I tend to stay away from that, especially if you have multiple files like this. You may have a certain naming convention you want to use a file structure that you want to save this too. So Quick Export as PNG is not always going to work, especially not for this particular case, but it can be handy if you just have one image and you do want to have it Quick Export as a PNG. Now, you also have Save for Web. This is a legacy format of saving that is specifically made for saving images that will be used on the web. So this is going to drastically decrease the size of the files, and it's going to do its best to not lose the quality. So if you know from your client that all these images are going to be used on the web, then go ahead and save for web legacy. But because we have some of these going to social media don't know exactly where all of these are going to go. The safe bet is to just go ahead and click Export As. Let's go ahead and click that. When you do that, you're going to be met with this dialog box and you see all of the different artboards that we have. All of them are checked and ready to be exported. So we're going to export each one of these as separate files in one click. So that's going to be pretty awesome. Let's quickly go over this dialog box for the export and get everything ready to go. So first things first, you can change the size of all of these. So let's say you have one of these, which is 1080 by 1080, but your client says that they want this to be twice that big. They want this to be 21 60 by 21 60. You can simply go ahead and click this dropdown and make it two times bigger. So this is going to just scale up your image when it saves it. So that's a very quick and easy way to adjust the scale if you want to do it for every single image. Now, moving over here, you have a couple of options. You have the format, and if you click the dropdown, you have PNG, you have JPEG, and you have this particular case, we're going to avoid GIF altogether. That's mostly for animated GIF graphics. So we're going to be focused here on the PNG and the JPEG. Now, if you select PNG, you have the option to maintain transparency and turn it into a smaller file. If you're working with a 16 bit file and you want to decrease it down to an eight bit, you have the option to do that with the PNG because in this case, I'm not really too concerned about any transparency being saved. I'm just going to go ahead and choose JPEG as my option. And for the quality, I always like to go with six or seven. Seven is obviously going to make the file sizes slightly larger. You can see here, these aren't that big of file sizes as they are. They're 326 kilobytes, 1,000 kilobytes, 61 kilobytes. These are very small files. So I'm going to go ahead and have this be seven to have the highest quality. So good thing to keep in mind, higher quality, higher file size, lower quality, lower file size. So you really want to balance and see what your client needs, what your client wants, and go from. Next, you have the image size section where, again, if you want to change the size of this image, I can go ahead and change the size of this to be 2000 pixels wide, and it's by default going to scale up this other one, as well. It's going to scale up the height to match that. But I don't want to do that. So I want this to stay at 1080. And as you saw, that updated the scale by percentage as well. So if you have a specific percentage in mind, let's say you want to make everything 300% larger. You can go ahead and do that. Just click 300% and instantly it's going to do that for you. You'll be ready to go. But I'm going to keep my scale at 100%. And for now, do not worry about the resample options. Let's just keep that at bicubic automatic. This is a lot more technical and it's not going to really play into this beginner to intermediate level class, so just keep that as bicubic automatic for now. And next, we have the canvas size. And here, this is different than the image size. When you just the image size, this adjusts the whole image. When you adjust the canvas size, this is going to adjust the canvas that the image is on, not the image itself. So if I go ahead and make the width be 2000 pixels wide, you're going to see it has now added that amount on either side, but our image is still 1080 by 1080. So if for any reason you want some type of a border for your image, you can do that, but this is not necessarily the best way to go ahead and add a border to your image, but this is a way in which you can do that. I'm not going to do anything with the canvas size today, so I'm just going to go ahead and hit reset on that to get that back to the original. And by default, it's going to match the image size that you have and that you are working with. Next, moving on to the metadata section. You're working with some copyrighted material from a client and they tell you specifically that they want to maintain the copyright and any other info within the actual image itself, you can go ahead and click the checkmark. Many times with Photoshop, it's going to have your personal copyright and contact info saved into the metadata of the image. So in many cases, the client does not want that. They may not necessarily want your name attached to the file itself. So for now, let's just go ahead and keep that selected as none. And the last section here we have is color space. By default, it's going to have these checked convert to SRGB and embed color profile. Keep those both checked for now. We are working in the RGB color space anyway, so it's a good idea to just keep that as is. And then let's just go ahead and click Export. When you Export, you're going to be met with this File Explorer dialog box, and this is where you are going to save your project. So I always like to stay organized. So I'm going to make a new folder here, and this is going to be called Project one Sho. Just go ahead and enter on that. And whilst I'm at it, I'm going to go ahead and click New Folder, and I'm going to name this Project two hands. So let's open up Project one shoe, and this is where I want to save all of these as an export for my client. So let's go ahead and click Select Folder. And that's it. It is safe. Let's go to our File Explorer and see what we've done. So here in our class files, we have our Project one shoe folder. You can click that, and everything is saved with the file name from the template file that we were working with. So you see the 1080 by 1081 is called 1080 by 1080. The Billboard ad is titled Billboard Ad. So you can change up your naming conventions however you would like. Many times the client will have a certain naming convention that they want. So just always make sure that you follow what the client wants you to do. Now, let's go ahead and do the same thing for our second project. This is going to go a lot faster. So let's go to File export as I'm going to drag the quality of the JPEG up to seven let's go ahead and hit Export, Let's go to our Project two CNS folder and click Select Folder. That's it. That is how quick and easy it is. Let's just double check that everything did Export. Here we are in our Project two Cans folder, and everything is ready to go. We have our leaderboard ad, half page ad with the sizes, all ready to go for our client, ready for delivery. All you would need to do is do right click on here and compress to a Zip file, and that is ready to send off to your client. You can do the same thing for Project two. You can do right click, Compress two zip file, and that is ready to go to your client. You can see these file sizes are not Project one and Project two, each one are about 3 megabytes in size, very high quality still, but nicely optimized for the web and for any other platform that your client chooses to use these on. And just like that, you have 12 exports done for these two projects, ready to go and deliver to your client. In the next part, I'm going to wrap up this class, give a little recap of what we've done today, and give you your assignment for this class because I really want to see what you can do. So let's move to the next part and wrap things up. 8. 8 Assignment + Final Thoughts: We've made it to the end of class. So let's take a moment to recap everything that we've covered. We started by planning our compositions, figuring out the story we wanted to tell, sketching out a layout, and choosing the right assets to bring that idea to life. Then we dove into compositing, cutting out products cleanly, building our backgrounds, and blending everything together so that it feels like one seamless image. There we focused on polish, adjusting light and color to unify a scene, and then bringing in branding elements such as typography and logos to really make it feel like a real ad. And finally, we wrapped it up with exporting, making sure your files are ready to share online, sent to a client or added into your design portfolio. Now, let's take a look at the two projects we created side by side, the simple Sneaker ad with its sporty and grungy energy and the fantasy beverage ad, which shows off how far you can push imagination while still keeping it professional and polished. About what you've accomplished here. If you can create these types of composites, you now have the ability to create professional level advertising visuals in Photoshop. That's something you can confidently present to a client, an employer or include in your portfolio to show that not only do you just know Photoshop tools, you can design entire campaigns and tell stories with your designs. Here's the thing. Don't stop with sneakers and drinks. The real fun is experimenting with products that inspire you. For your class project, I want you to pick one of your favorite products and build your own ad composite around it. Head over to one of the stock photo sites I mentioned earlier in the class and search for that product. It can really be anything. A perfume bottle, a phone, a car, or something completely different. The key is this. Make it seamless. When I squint my eyes, the whole composition should feel like a single unified photograph. Not a collection of cutouts. That's the mark of a strong composite. Once you finish, make sure you upload your ad design to the project gallery. Not only will I be checking them out, but your classmates will, too. And that's where a lot of inspiration happens. Seeing how different people approach the same process is always eye opening. And you'll be surprised at the creative direction others take. Thank you again for taking this class with me. I know Photoshop can feel overwhelming with all its tools and features, but I hope you're walking away, feeling confident, inspired, and excited to keep creating, whether you're building a portfolio piece, trying to attract clients or just experimenting for fun. Photo coompositing is a skill that will open new doors if you've enjoyed this class, check out my teacher page to see the other classes that I've made. They range from beginner level all the way to advanced, so you are sure to find something great. With that, thank you again. Congratulations on completing the class. I can't wait to see the incredible ads you create. I'll see you in the Project Gallery.