Affinity (by Canva) Level 2, The Next Step – Pixel Made Easy

1. Welcome to this Affinity Pixel Level 2 Course: Not only is affinity Pixel amazing for photographers, but hobbyists, graphic designers, artists can all create incredible work using Affinity Pixel Studio. In this course, you'll learn how to turn your ideas into powerful visuals, whether you are subtly changing a picture, changing the colors, manipulating skies, or going for a full multi image montage. Some of the things we're going to be creating and covering in this course. Brochure covers where we put an image into text, pixel stretch effects, full workflow from concept to final image. Professional cutouts and plenty, plenty more. I'll take you through everything step by step in easy bite size videos. Hi. I'm Tim. I live and work on a beautiful barge traveling the canals around London with my wife, Allie and our cat, Fuji. Before becoming a professional designer, I worked as a CSI photographer for Scotland Yard in London. Since then, I've spent over 30 years working with design software and have trained some of the world's top companies like BBC, Disney, the Times Newspaper, and many, many more. This course will help you bring your ideas to life. What are you waiting for? Start right now, and let's get creating together. 2. RGB ICC Profiles - Intro: This is the techy bit of this course. We're going to be looking at RGB and C and YK, which I know we've covered on earlier courses. But we're going to go into it a bit deeper, and we're going to be looking at profiles and how they can really make your life so much better. If you haven't already done it, I suggest you do my affinity Essentials course before starting this one. 3. RGB ICC Profiles: In the fundamental section of this course, we looked at CMYK versus RGB, and I mentioned just got very, very quickly that CMYK is for print. Those are inks on a white paper, and RGB is all about light. So it's things like devices, computers, tablets, digital cameras are also RGB devices. And if you change the color mode from RGB to CMYK, the colors do change because there are certain colors in RGB that won't work using CMYK. And before we take this on a bit further, I want to show this to you on a picture, so I'm going to go to this picture here. I've got this really lovely Ford mustang, and it's just so bright, and the reds are absolutely gorgeous. And it is in RGB. So what would happen to that one? I'm going to go to document. I'm going to go to setup, and I'll just go to document setup at the top there because we can change from RGB to CMYK over here. So let me change this into CMYK eight and I'm going to click Okay over there. Now, I don't know whether you noticed, but if I undo that, so I'm just going to use the keyboard command, Command Z on a Mac or Control Z on a PC to undo. That's the RGB, and that is the CMYK. It's very subtle. It's not as much as things like blues and greens would go. But you will see that the changing between them, it's almost like there's less detail in these really brighter areas. If I just undo that again, there seems to be more detail in there. So just be aware of that. Now, onto the next section, if you think, well, that's fine, Tim. I don't need to bother about that because I'm just going to work on RGB and everything's gonna go on screen. Fantastic. That's brilliant. But there's still something you need to know. You see, if you've got an image like this, an image, whether it's an RGB or a CMYK image, has a profile attached to it. Now, you can think about a profile like a map of the colors telling the computer how to display those colors. So a color profile is a file that helps different devices show colors the same way. It acts like a translator, making sure that the colors from your camera look the same on your screen and as close as possible when they're printed out. Different profiles display colors in different ways, even if they're all RGB. So, for example, this image here is an RGB image. And when we go to document, down to setup, and over here, I'm going to go to the assign ICC profile. You can see this has got quite a common profile that comes from a professional digital camera. It's called a pro photo RGB profile. I think, great. That's fantastic. The colors look amazing. It's RGB. I'm going to save it out. And that might be absolutely amazing, might look fantastic. But if that was then displayed on a device that didn't actually support Pro photo profile, what would happen to the image? For example, somebody with an older browser might not support the Pro photo profile because the browsers support those profiles so they can display the colors as you had them in pixel. Well, let's go down and use something called a standard RGB. This is a very generic type of RGB. It's S RGB in there. If I click on that, now watch what happens to the colors. So somebody who doesn't have that pro photo profile would see your car like that. They're looking at it and going, Well, it's okay, Tim. Doesn't look so great. And you're going, No, look at the reds. They're beautiful. And they going, m not so sure about that. It's because they're not seeing the same colors that you are. And that's because their browser or their device doesn't support that profile. So I'm going to go back over here to the assigned profile, and we can go backwards and forwards over here. It's no problem at all. It's just how those colors are being displayed on our device. I'll click on Pro Photo and assign that profile once again. So how can we get around this problem and make sure that what we're seeing is the same as what everybody else is going to see? Well, what we can do is we can actually convert. So if we go to the document here and set up, I used a sign. A sign just assigns the profile to that particular document. It doesn't change the pixel color at all. It just assigns that profile. You can flick back and forth between them. But if you say convert, and I'm going to convert this from a pro photo profile, through to an SRGB profile. So I'm just going to convert all the colors across, click on Convert in there. There was hardly any difference. It was a subtle difference, but there was hardly any difference between those two. Now, this particular document has got an SRGB profile. So if I go to document set up assigned profile, you can see it's been assigned an SRGB profile, which means that when I save this out on the web, everybody will see this exactly as it is. I say, everybody, almost every single device would support an SRGB profile. So it's one of those things you need to be aware of, especially if you're getting images from a professional photographer or you're a professional photographer yourself and you're shooting with a pro photo profile or any other profile for that matter. Another profile that can cause a few little issues to do with color is if you are using an iPhone, for example, an iPhone or an Apple device often uses a P three profile. So once again, if I go into here again, I will just go over to assign this, and you'll see there's a display P three, which has got a very wide gamut. Means it's a wide range of colors in there. And if you use that P three, once again, you might find a Windows device with an old browser doesn't actually display the P three profile, so it's always a good idea to just make sure that you change it to SRGB. If you're starting a new document from scratch over here, and I'm just going to go in there to SRG sorry, to RGB, the color format. And I've just made sure that my color profile is SRGB in there as well. I've included this picture. It's not from this stock. It's from unsplash stock. I've included the picture so you can have a bit of a play with it, and I've left the Pro Photo profile on. Anyway, if all of this is like, Well, that's a lot of stuff, Tim, don't worry about it. All you have to do is when you get a picture, if you're not sure, go to document setup, convert, make sure it's set to SRGB, and that's it, and you're away. That's all that you need to do. Anyway, I'll stop there so you can have a bit of a look at this image. 4. CMYK Profiles: What about if you've got a CM w k document? So I'm going to go to the document set up here, and you can see my document is set to CMwyK in there. Let's have a look at the profiles. And when you click on Profile, you'll see that there are so many different profiles in here. Now, the best thing to do is if you are doing commercial printing or sending it for commercial printing, talk to your printer and ask them about the best profile for you. It will change depending on where you are in the world. So for example, in Europe, we tend to use these Fogras. There's a Foga 27, Foga 39 in there. There's a Foga 28 down the bottom there. Whereas in the Northern America, people tend to use these swap profiles. But if in doubt, have a word with your printer and ask them what they think you should be using. 5. Perspective & Distortion - Intro: This section is all about distortion and perspective. Now, this could be for correcting something or it could be doing a distortion to get a particular effect. But I'll show you as we go through. 6. The Single Perspective Tool: Let's look at changing the perspective on our images. I'm going to go along to stock, and I've pulled out this mosque picture over here. Now, I've also added it into your pictures so that you can actually get it there rather than going to stock just in case it disappears from stock. But it's from Pixel Bay. Now, I want to go over to the move tool, click and hold on that and use the perspective tool that we've got in here. Now, when you choose the perspective tool, the first thing we need to do is to decide, are we actually doing this directly on the picture? Now I'm going to pull my layers out over here. And let's just do that again. So, am I going to do it directly on the picture? In which case, I need to click on the picture there, and you'll see that when I do that, the perspective is now added to just that particular layer. Or let's close that down over here. If I don't have anything selected and I apply my perspective tool, it puts it above that layer, so it's going to affect anything which is underneath that layer. It's really important because you might or you might not want to affect the layers underneath. Now, I'm going to go along here and I'm going to click on the picture layer. I'm going to go into my perspective tool. This little live perspective window appears. Now, I can show a grid if I want to see a grid to make my life easier. I'm going to switch it off for now. And if I grab a corner, I can then just drag the perspective out. I'm just looking at the columns along here and just making sure that they are sort of sort of straight. And there let's move that across a little bit there. I'll do the same on this side and kind of straighten them up a little bit alike so. I think that's, um, that seems to be okay. And then I'm happy with that. Now, what do I do here? Well, I could choose to merge, and that will just merge it with the image over there. You'll see if I click on there, it just merges it into one, or I'm just going to undo that and go back to the perspective again. I could choose make sure that I'm back on there again. I could choose to just close this down. And that will leave the perspective as an extra part of that layer. You'll see if I close it down, there is my perspective on there. The great thing about doing this is you can always then go in and bin that. If you don't want it. You can click on there again and go back to life perspective in there to continue editing the perspective on the item that you want to change. So that's the way that I would suggest going about it. As I said, if you haven't clicked on the image, it will come in above it, which means it affects everything below itself. Try that one out, just very simply correcting this image, and then we'll see where we can go from there, making a little bit more complex. 7. Affect Multiple Layers: Et's just have a look at how this works with getting the perspective to affect multiple items. You see, at the moment, I've got this perspective attached to that particular layer. So if I drag in another picture, let's just pop another one over here. There we go. And have a look, and I'm going to just make it a bit smaller as well. But have a look what happens here. So if I were to take this perspective and I dragged it onto that one. So now we've got this perspective here, and if I switch it on and off, you can see the perspective is being added to that particular layer. If I drag it above that one and put it by itself, now when we switch that on off, you can see it's affecting both of those layers, not just the one. So be careful where you put these things, and I'm just going to drag that back on top of the little icon there. So it's only going to be attached, you can see to the bottom image over there. Do try that out. Bring in multiple images and see how you can get these to affect different layers together. 8. Perspective Filter: I found this picture of Tower Bridge. You can see it's over here. That's under Pixel Bay. And I've brought it in. And what I want to do is I want to straighten up some of these lines a little bit. I know that it's been photographed at an angle, so there would actually naturally be lines going that way. But I think I'd still like to straighten up a little bit more. Now, we could actually go over to the Perspective tool, but another way to do it is to go along to pixel down to filters and across to distort and then perspective there. Now, why can't I get into perspective? Well, if we look at the layers, it's because I haven't actually clicked on that. You need to select it first, and then you can go along to pixel, filters, distort, and perspective. Now, in here, the biggest difference is that it's actually unlocked the planes for us. Now, I will be showing you that in a video coming up soon. But now what I want to do is I want to look at destination. So first of all, we've got two modes. We've got a source, and we've got a destination. If I switch on my grid over here in destination, I can actually go in here and I can grab a corner and I can adjust this to how I want it to look. The problem is, I don't actually know whether those lines are straight or not. So if I go to source first, now, you'll see with sauce, I can then adjust the grid without the picture. So I'm going to adjust the grid until it lines up with my with the tower. So I'm looking over here to get those lines lining up with the top of the bridge. And I've looked to get this one lining up with the edge of the bridge that's lined up with the edge over there. Now, if I go back to my destination, if I grab this corner and pull it back, it'll just fix it for me. Look at that. It's all lined up properly now. Now, one of the things we can do here as well, is we can actually just show and hide or see it before and after. You see, I've clicked on that little middle button, so I can kind of have a look and see what it looks like beforehand and after. And you can see the difference it makes. I actually looks, even though it's technically not correct. It looks a lot better like that. And I'm just going to click Apply in there. Now, what you have noticed is that it's applied it directly to the image. It hasn't put in an adjustment that you can actually go back and tweak. However, there's another option in there which is still important. So don't discount using this method with pixel, filters, and distort. 9. 2 Plane Perspective: I've opened up this image. I went and search for houses or house, and I found this interior picture. And what I want to do is I want to adjust this wall over here. Now, I'm going to go over to my perspective tool, and if I just show the grid over there, you can see it's quite difficult because I'm basically adjusting the entire picture, and I just want to adjust this little section over here. So instead of just using the one single plane, I want to use two planes. But as you can see, it won't let me do that in here. I'm just going to close this down and I'm going to go to my layers. And I will just remove that perspective from there. Now, what about going to pixel? And of course, if we tried that with a live filter layer, there's distort and there's perspective. This does exactly the same thing as using that little tool over there, but it doesn't let you use more than one plane at a time. So I'm going to go to pixel, filters, and I'm going down to distort and perspective. And because this is done directly on the layer rather than as an adjustment layer, this will allow me to put in a second plane. So I'm going to do two planes. Instead of a single plane, I'm going to do a dual plane, and that gives me two planes. I'm just going to switch off auto clip and switch show grid on. Now, of course, this is going the wrong way. So how do I change this? Well, I mean, first of all, if I move that around, you can see I'm on destination rather than on source. Well, I'm going to pull this in. I'm going to say I want that to go there. I'm going to put that one there. So I'm just looking at this wall over here that I want to track, I think that corner there and that corner there. I'm going to pull this one out, so it's going to go over to there. And this one up here. I'm just trying to make sure that these line up with the windows and the perspective in there. Now, what about this side, this side's a bit of a mess? Let's pull this up over here. I'm just looking at this wall and that one along that wall. Honestly, I'm not going to do much with this wall, so it really doesn't matter too much, but you can do these independently. Now that I've done that, I can go from my source to my destination, and I can say, Okay, with this one, I want to just adjust this and you can see how I can pull in Let's go to get the top of that. Pull in just that particular plane over there. And you can see it's cut down the middle there, so it is messing up the floor. You have to be careful with that. Or I could change this plane over here and maybe move that in up down, let's make it a little bit wider. Over there. I'll click Okay. And if we do it before and after. So that's the after, and that's how it was before over there. So do be careful with that plane. It is easy to mess things up very, very quickly, and remember you might end up with a little bit of a line where you didn't want one, so be very careful. For interiors and exteriors of buildings where you've got two separate planes, this can be really very useful. And we'll use it in our project later on. Try it out. 10. Mesh Warp Tool: I've picked out a picture over here. It's just this little scene with a tiny little hut and some trees. And I would like to move them over a little bit to the left hand side. So to do that, I'm going to use the mesh Warp tool. Now, the Mesh Warp tool says requires a layer, so don't forget to click on the background. Let's try that again. Mesh warp tool. And as you can see, I can just grab a corner and I can warp this image around, so I can grab those handles and I can mess around with a shape like that. Although this is not really what I want to do, the fact is that you can actually do it, grab a point and change with the mesh. Now, I'm going to undo that, so I don't want to continue on. So along the top, we've got a few options, and I'm going to say cancel to get back to the original. Let's try that again. So once again, onto my mesh tool. But this time, I'm going to go along here and I'm going to double click on the edge. And that puts in a line down the middle. So if I were to select just this point, I can move just that point along as well. Let me undo that. If I click and drag, I can select both those points top and bottom, and I can move them both at the same time. You see how I can sort of scale things around now as I want. I'm going to once again undo that, so it commands it or controls it to undo that. But I can also do it the other way so I can go along here and I can just double click to put in a point there and double click to put in a point there. Once again, let's have another point maybe over here. Double click. Now I can actually select all four of those points. So I've clicked and dragged over them, and I can then move everything around that's inside those points. Like that. Let's just double click over here and you can see how it goes around. Once again, I can select those ones, move them around if I need, or just select these two inner points and move them across a little bit as well. You can just go along and you just double click to put in a point on the vertical or the horizontal lines. You can move around the individual points or you can select a whole bunch of them and then move them by dragging one of them around at the same time. Now we do have a destination, and we've got a sauce in there like we had before. So let me just cancel this. Once again, I'm going to go to my mesh tool. I'm going to go to sauce, and I might just double click in there. Double click there. And then I could actually take these two and move them down to there and say, Well, that's the important part there. Let's get those, move them into there. Then I can go along to my source and say destination, and you can see how it pulls those out back to the sort standard look. I find that I prefer to actually do it visually and just go to destination when I'm actually doing this mesh. Whereas, if I'm using the perspective tool, I prefer to do it the other way around. It's entirely up to you as to which way you want to work. But do have a bit of a go with that. We've got a really cool project coming up shortly where we're going to use this tool to make some amazing shapes. Anyway, have a go with that. It's fun. And well, it can be useful sometimes to tweak an image as long as you don't go too mad, like I've tunned the moment. Have a go. O. 11. Deform Tool: Now, let's go to the last tool in the set, which is the deform tool. The way it works is first of all, make sure that you have your layers selected, and then you can go along and you click on the point that you want to deform. But if you just try and move that around, nothing will happen. You need to put in some other points as well, so I want to move that point, but I don't want to move his hand. I don't want to move this one either. So now if I go back to this point here, I can actually deform that point. And these little pins will stop everything else from moving. So I could put a pin on the coffee, pin on the laptop, and on the plant over there, and now it will just move this little area. I could also go in and just pin the desk there and pin it there. Another pin, and we'll only be moving this little bit over here. And then at any time, I can put as many of these pins as I want. I can go to anything I like, and I can just move it around if there's a pin there. Let's go to his hand and just distort that a little bit. It is distorting it, so just be aware of that. Try that out, and then I'll take you on a little bit more with this tool. It'll be a little bit more accurate with it. 12. Deform a Layer: I searched for giraffe in Pixabay, and I found this one. Once again, there's a copy of that in the assets. Now, before I start to manipulate this, I'm going to actually do it on a separate layer, and I'm going to put him onto a totally different background. So to do that, I want to cut him out, and I'm going to use my Object Selection tool. So you go to the Object Selection tool, and as you move over here, it does take a moment to come up. Eventually, it'll start to recognize shapes that are in there. You should have your background selected, by the way. Let's try that again. There we go. So I can then just click on the giraffe and it is selected very quickly. I'm going to copy that and paste it, that is Control C and Control or Command C and Command V, or you can go to the menu and use copy and paste from there. I don't want the background, so I'll delete the background, and I'm going to get rid of this dotted line, the selection line around the outside. And the fast way to do that is Control D or Command D, D for Dselect it's easy to remember. Otherwise, you can go along to the menu. You can go down to selection, and you could choose DSelect. There. Now I want a background over here. So I'm going to add a pixel layer. That's this little one next to the bin. Pop the background in. I'm just going to flood it with color. So there's a little fill tool over here, and there's a flood fill tool. I'm going to use that flood fill tool. Pick a color, and I'll let's just choose I'll use something from the giraffe itself. Or you can make up your own color in there close that. And then I can just click, and it will just flood that pixel layer full of color, and I'll move that underneath the giraffe. So I've got him on a separate layer. Actually, I think, you know, he should be on a blue background. So once again, I'll double click over here to choose a different color and kind of click a sky blue over there and re flood that layer. Make sure you're on the correct layer when you do that. That looks a little bit better. Now, I'm going to go back to my pixel layer. I'm going up to the deform tool. Now, I want to move his neck around. I don't want to move his head too much or his body. So I'm going to click on his head. For some reason this hasn't updated to the correct tool than mine. There we are. That's better. I'll click there. I'm going to click where I want to move. And then these bits here are to just stop the rest of the parts of his body from moving. So now I can go back to this one and I can just adjust his neck over there. I can then go along to the back here and I'm going to click there and just pull this up a little bit over here, and maybe that will pull around as well. I'm probably completely wrecking his skeleton by doing this, but the idea is there. Let's go over his horns and just move them forward a little bit like that. We don't want to move the ears, so we click on the ears, and then I can move the horns around at the same time. I'm happy with that. I'll click Apply to apply those changes. If I just use Command or Control Z to undo that, you can see it's gone from there. To there. Now, you probably don't want to do that too much on animals or people, but I did this to show you that it is possible to do it reasonably well. But always do it with a cut out layer. Otherwise you're going to find your background distorts at the same time. Do you have a go with that one? 13. Project: Flat Photo-Montage Poster - Intro: It's project time. What we're going to do is we're going to create this image here from different images. So we're going to be doing cutouts. We're also going to be using distortion to get the back image as we want it. You'll see how it works as we go along, but let's get started. 14. Use Perspective Tool on Building: Now, I want to open up a picture, so I'm going to double click in this area, and that just takes me to the file and open command. And I'm going to find this building over here. Now, this has been provided for you. What I want to do is I want to straighten up the building, but just before I do that, I need to actually clean up some of my panels. I've got so many panels around here, and honestly, I'm just going to be using the Layers panel. So if I pull that out, because I'm just going to be using that, I'm going to say, Okay, I don't want this histogram. I don't want the color, channels we don't need. Over there, Brushes, no, stock, no, that can go. And I'm just going to keep closing all of these down over there, and I'm going to move my layers back to the side. So that's all that I'm interested in. Now, what I want to do is I want to go to the window menu down to panels, and I'm just going to say, add a preset. And I'll call this minimal. That's just a capital there. And click Okay. So the idea is that if I do decide that I want some other panels and maybe I get this pages panel up and basically just add a few more over there, what happens is when I want to go back to that one, I can go to window down to my panels. There is minimal, and I can choose minimal, and it just resets everything back to that. Now, let's have a go at straightening these buildings because I want them to be a little squares rather than these sort of weird shapes because of perspective. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to be using the perspective tool. Now, I'm not doing it via the pixel and filters as we did before because that's destructive and I might want to change it later on. Now, in here in the modes, I'm going to keep it on destination because that way I can just pull this around, I'm going to zoom out a bit, so I'm going to do this by eye. I'm going to pull that around until I can kind of get my buildings looking like they are square. So erect rather than being at a weird angle. So I'm looking for something which is going to be, I don't know, something like that. Over there, let's pull that about. And I think that works for me. I'm happy with that. So if you'd like to have a bit of a go with that, make your own custom layout of your panels and then straighten those buildings. They don't have to be correct yet, and I'll show you why in a little while, although I suspect you've guessed. Try it out, and then we'll continue on and add to this image. 15. Add Extra Canvas & Remove Sky with Flood Erase: I'd like to expand my canvas over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go along to my crop tool and just pull it up to where I want. So I'm looking for something like that. That's going to be what this post is going to look like. And I'll click on Apply. The next thing I want to do is on this image, so I'll make sure it's selected, I want to remove this background area over here. So I'm just left with the buildings there. So I'm going to go over to something called the flood erase tool. Now, the flood erase tool selects the area and deletes it, and it selected based on this little option up here, which is the tolerance, and the higher the tolerance, the more of those colors it will delete. So let's go and try this out. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over there and I'm going to click. Now, flood fill erase comes up, but it doesn't erase. Why is that? Well, if we go over to the layer, you'll see that the perspective, if I switch it off, shows that it's actually this is the image with that sort of perspective effect applied. Now, if I were to click on there, it would work. But with this switched on over there, I was clicking up here where there actually isn't anything because it's just an effect. If I'd gone and clicked down there, then it would have worked. Unfortunately, though, you can see that it's actually added in some of the windows into its deletion. So I'm going to just take this tolerance down a bit. I'll try Oh, let's try 12. There. And once again, click. There we go. That's left those windows in. Everything looks good. Try that out and don't forget. Sometimes, if you've got an effect like this on the image, that actually doesn't exist. You have to switch it off to see what it really looks like. Try it out. 16. Add a Gradient Background: I want to put a background behind this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along and I can do it in two ways. I can either go down here to these vector shapes and I could put in a little shape over there. And you can see you can change the color at the top in there, which is fine. Nothing wrong with doing it that way or the other way that you can do it is you can add a pixel layer, and then you can just fill the pixel layer as well. Once again, you just choose which way you want to work. I'm going to choose either flood filter, just fill it with a color or the fill tool up here and I'm going to just change that into a linear gradient. Now, my gradient over here, if I just pull it out, is kind of going from one color to the other. Click on the little gradient icon over there, and you can then change the colors. Let's start off with this one over here and we'll just do a color there. Doesn't matter what the colors are because we can always change them later on. Let's have a darker color towards the bottom. And I can always move that around to whatever angle I need, like so. And then I'm going to move that behind all of these. I'm going to drag it down. Now, be careful that you don't drop it onto one of those. So keep going until you see the glow and that'll pop it behind there. Try that out, put in a background of some description. As I said, it doesn't really matter about the colors because we're going to change them later on, anyway. 17. Add Circular Building & Subtract Sky: Now, I'm going to go along to file and place, and I'm going to be placing a picture into this project. Now, the placement policy at the moment, we've got import images as linked files is untaked. So when it places it, it will be placing it as a embedded file. So I'm going to choose place. I'm going to bring in the picture. There we go circular buildings and I'll click and drag to bring it in like so. Now, what I want to do is I want to erase out this area over here. So if I go along to a tool like the flood eraser tool, all I have to do is to click on that bit there. But look, nothing happens. Why not? Well, this layer here is a placed image, so you can see the little icon there. I I hover over it, actually says image. Whereas this one here, the background that we use that tool on is a pixel layer. Let's go to this layer, which is the image layer and convert it into pixels by going to pixel, Rusaize and we can rusterize that layer. Now, they're both got the pixel icon on them. This will work fine if I click over there to remove that background. While I'm here, I also want to spin it around, so I'm just going to go up to the top click on this it looks like a lollipop. Drag it round, but I'm holding down the Shift queue while I'm doing it so I can get the exact 180 degrees. So it moves in increments. If you want to place it underneath your background, by all means, do so, there's no right or wrong here, whatever works for you. However, if I place that underneath, I just want to go down there. I'm looking at these buildings and thinking they're not quite vertical and slightly off. So this is why we did it using this perspective item. So I can always click on perspective and just go in here and tweak it if it's not quite correct. So I'm going to pull that up like so, and this one I'm going to pull out. Over there until I feel that it is correct over there. Have a bit of a go with that. As I said, it doesn't matter about what order you do these in It's entirely up to you. Just drag and drop until you feel happy with your composition. 18. Bring in Tower & Subtract Sky: I'm going to go to File down to place, and I'm going to place another image. So I'm going to bring in this tower image over here, bring in my tower. I think about that size might work really well. And, of course, you know the score. If we go along to pixel rustize, we can just rustize it into a pixel layer, and then I can go across to my arrays, and I'm going to be using my flood erayst to get rid of the background. Now, I got to be really careful here because you see, by getting rid of the background, it's gotten rid of some of those windows. So I could try reducing the tolerance down, and then once again, just doing it in small segments like that. To get rid of it. And then I'm going to move this and I'm going to move it behind the background. Now, I've done it again. I do this so often. I'm going to just undo that. I dropped it in the wrong place. I'm going to drop this down here underneath the circular building, but above my background. So I think that'll work absolutely perfectly. We've got this nice layering effect of the different buildings. Have a go. Bring in that. If you want to bring in any more images, B means do so. But remember, when you start to move things around, look at that. There's a bit of sky that's popped up there, so I might have to go use my flood filled tool and get rid of that, as well. Have a go. 19. Use the Gradient Map: Let's bring all of these together with an overlay color. I'm going to go to Pixel, and I'm going to do a new adjustment layer. And the one Oops. Let's try that again, new adjustment layer, and the one that I'm looking for is called a Gradient Map. Now, what gradient maps do is they map the lightness to the darkness, colors from your image onto these colors here. So for example, if I just got rid of that middle one there and I went to this side and I chose white, went to that side and I chose black. I'll just make me a black to white image. And of course, this is the wrong way around. If I click on reverse, you can see it's just a black and white picture, so it's mapping the dark areas onto black, the light areas onto white. But you can change the colors so I can go here and say, Okay, what about instead of black if we used that interesting blue over there? Then I can go to this side over here and I can say, how about we went with maybe a different sort of blue, maybe more greeny type of blue. In there. You can just flick between these two and decide exactly what you want. I'm going to darken that down a little bit like so. If you want to put colors in the midtones, just click in the midtone over there to add another color. So we'll just double click. Choose the color, and I could put in a yellow if I wanted in my midtones. I really don't want that. I don't like that at all, so I'm just going to say delete to get rid of that one. Have a bit of a go and try out a gradient map that are so, so useful for single colour images or double colored images like this. And you can always go back in again and just adjust it until you're happy with the result. Remember, this is a layer by itself. It's an adjustment layer, so you can switch it on and switch it off if you don't like it. You can also drag it underneath some of the other layers so you can get it to only affect the ones that are below it. If you want it to only affect a single layer, drag it and drop it onto that layer, so it'll only affect that one layer. I want defecting absolutely everything, so I'm going to leave it at the top. Try that out. Have some fun with that. 20. Adjust Buildings With Mesh: Now, you can always add more adjustment layers as well, so I'm going to go to the top here, pixel, new adjustment layer, and very simply, I'm going to use a brightness and contrast because it's just very simple sliders so I can increase the contrast or decrease the contrast. You can do the same thing by just affecting the lightness and darkness in your gradient map as well. Once again, anything that I'm doing in here, I could have achieved the same result in my gradient maps. But I'm going to leave that like so. In fact, if I take this down now, so it's just above the town, those back buildings, I can then just affect those without affecting this front building. Let's go over to this circular building because I want to move a few things around. I'm going to do that by going across and using a mesh warp. So remember, with the mesh warp, we can just double click on the lines to put in more points. Over there, and this is the one I'm interested in. I'm just going to pull it out to move that building in a little bit, like so. I can pull that in and move this one around and just adjust it until I'm happy. Same with this one over here, I'm going to click on there and just pull those buildings in a little bit like that. So once again, have a bit of a go with that. Tweak your image around. There's no right or wrong here. It really is just a matter of playing around with the different tools to see what you can get. Don't forget to click Apply when that's done. 21. Add Text & Export: Need now. Here's some text. So I'm going to go along to the text tool. Over here, I'll use the artistic text. I'll click and drag and put in my tech town. In there, I'm going to select the text and then go up to the top here, change the typeface to something that I like something a bit more techie and rounded. I think that's great. I want to move these two closer together, so over here, I can go in and I can just adjust the distances between the lines. This is known as lead I think that works okay, like so. I do need to change the color. Now, it's blue, so why is that come out as blue? Well, it's because we've got a gradient map above it. If I move that up there, it should go back to black, which it originally was. Anyway, I'm going to select that bit of text there and just change the color in here. I'm going to make mine white. We'll just move that into the right position. Maybe I'll pop it down there. Finally, make sure you save. When we're saving as, we are saving this as an dot A file, so it's going to be openable in affinity. So we'll just call this building montage. And I'll just put that somewhere where I can find it again. And then remember, you can also go to Export and you can export it in any of these formats over here. Quite a useful one, actually, if you're working with Photoshop or somebody who's working with Photoshop is, you can go to PSD over there and you can save it out with all the layers and then continue to work on that within Photoshop. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Tried some other montages with different images, just bringing them together, using the cutouts. Remember, you've got options in here for dragging things onto layers, getting your adjustments to effect just single layers, and also don't forget, you've got pixel layers, but you've also got image layers, and know there's a difference between those. Have fun with that. 22. Project: Pixel Stretch Image - Intro: Another project. I love this one. This is all about pixel stretching. Now, this is an effect that you see occasionally and you might have wondered how it's done, and I want to show you how to do it. But we've got so many other things that we're going to be doing in here. We're going to be using a lot of distortion on the pixel stretching. We're also going to be doing cutouts and coloring, so many things. You can see the result that we've got here. It looks so good. Let's get started. 23. New Document & Make Column: Now, let's start off by opening up the image. You can either do this by going to file and open, or you can just double click on this gray area if you don't have an image open. We're gonna be using this pixel or this jump pixel stretch, bit a mouthful. And I'm going to open that up. Now, what I want to do is I want to separate him from the background. I find this background is very, very busy. It's cool, but it's really busy. And I want to put a pixel stretch behind him, and then we can hide this background. Now, we'll cut him out later on. But the first thing we're going to be doing is to actually be making a pixel stretch to put in here. Now, to do a pixel stretch, what we need to do is we need to make a little layer with a column of pixels. If that sounds weird, don't worry. I'm going to go to the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm just going to click and drag down like that. So I've got lots of detail inside that selected area. Now, I'm going to copy and paste that. Make sure that you're on the layer, otherwise you won't be copying anything. So I'm going to use the shortcut on the keyboard, Command C, Command V, or Control C and Control V on the PC. I'm on a Mac. If I hide that, you'll see that that's what I've done, and I'm then going to deselect that. So pixel selection and deselect to get rid of it. So we've still got the original under there, but we've copied that row of pixels down there. Now I'm going to stop, so you can get to that stage as well. So open the image and copy a bit. Make sure there's lots of detail in the area that you bring in. So, for example, here, don't do the sky side because, well, you won't get too much detail in there. Oh, you could if you wanted. But this bit here will be much more interesting. Have a go with that. Come back and then we'll do a stretch on it. 24. Create the Stretch: Now, I'm going to hide my background so we can just see this over here. Make sure that I'm on the pixel layer. And I'm going to go across over here and I'm going to be using the mesh warp tool. Now, when I do that, what I get are four little dots around the outside or four little squares. I'm going to grab one of them and just pull them out like that. You can see how it's stretching those pixels out. Let's go to this side and do the same. Now, sometimes when you click, because there's a square and a circle together, you might grab the circle, and the circle is the handle. So just make sure that you grab the point, the square and pull that up. And let's pull this out so we get some sort of Oh, grab the wrong one there. Some sort of shape like that. Now that you've got that, we're going to take this one, this top right hand one. We're going to pull it down, and then we're going to take the bottom one and pull it up, so we're kind of folding one over the other. I'm going to pull this one out a little bit like that. So you can see it sort of folded it, and we get this really lovely effect in the middle. Now we can start to work with these little handles, and there's no right or wrong here. I'm going to pull this handle out like that, and you can see how we can then twist it around that way. Let's go to this one here and I'm going to pull that one out, something like that. And this one down here, let's pull that handle across to get these nice sort of lines going in there. And once again, this one here. See what else. You know, we've got another little circular one there. That's the one that I want. I'm going to pull that out. So we get something like that. So I'm looking really for something where it actually looks like it's folded because I want him to be coming through the fold over there. Once you're happy with that, you can then click Apply. And you can see how it's sort of changed a little bit in there. Now, I just want to show you what it'll look like if you use a more flatter color. So very quickly, I'm going to do the same thing, but just over here, I'm going to select that, copy and paste that, go to my copy, deselect it. By the way, my shortcut for deselecting is Control or Command and D. Let's go across to the mesh warp tool and you can see how there we get sort of gradients rather than those that pattern in there. And it's entirely up to you which one you want to do. If you prefer this sort of gradient look, by all means, do it. I'll just take this one here and I'm going to spin that one around on top of that. Anyway, you tried out and come up with some sort of interesting fold on your stretch. 25. Copy the Main Subject: I'm going to go to my background, and I'm just going to hide my stretch at the top. And I want to copy him onto a new layer. So I'm going to go down and I'm going to find my object selection tool. I'm going to move over him, and you can see how it's sort of seen where he is. I'm going to copy that. Now, sometimes this tool is very good. In fact, most of the time it's very good. Occasionally you might find some weird stuff that happens. I want to just check down here bottom shoe it hasn't actually quite got that little area over there. So we can then go along and use one of these free hand tools, click on the Add button, and I can just manually go and add that bit in over there. So if you see something that's wrong, you can add and subtract with that little tool. I'm going to actually go to his head because it's difficult to see this, but we're actually missing some of his hat. So I'm going to manually just paint along there and add that bit in. I've made sure that I'm on the add option, and I'll do this little bit over here as well, that bit of his hat down there and back to the start again. Click that, and that's added that in very quickly. Now, I've got him selected. I'm going to copy him and paste him so he will appear on a new layer over there all by himself, and we can deselect that. Now, before I stop, let's switch that on, and let's move him above that layer so we get something like that in there. And at this stage, you can move him around because we're not really going to use the background. You can see we've got the background still there, but we're going to have a different background, so you can move him to wherever you want him to go. Try that out and copy your main subject and paste, and then move him around to where you think you want him. Now, I'm actually going to put him over here because I want him kind of jumping through that. I'm going to hide his back leg, and then we're going to have some more text down the bottom in there. We'll make it look a lot better than it does at the moment. 26. Select Area & Make a Mask: Let's zoom in a bit. What I'd like to do is I would like to hide his back leg over here. So I'm going to hide his layer and go back to my pixel layer, and I'm going to make a selection on this area. So the easiest way to do this is going to be using the freehand selection tool. But instead of using these two options here, which is the poly or the freehand, I'm going to go to magnet. The magnet will find that edge for me. So if I click once, as I move along, you can see it's just finding that edge, and I'm not having to be too careful about it. I'm gonna keep going in there. If it makes a mistake, don't worry about it. We can tweak that in a moment. I'm going to go round here for now. And there are a few little bits which aren't quite correct. Let's zoom in a bit over here. So, for example, it's selected too much there and not enough there. So I'm going to go across to the straight edge selection tool. And because I've selected too much, I'm going to say subtract. That's the third button along. I'm going to click here. Click there and go all the way around to subtract that bit from my selection. And then this bit here that I want to add in, click on that button, the second button. I'm going to say, I want to get that bit there through to there, maybe get further on. And go all the way back to the start to get that as part of my selection. Oh, there's another bit over here. Having told you how good this tool was, it's kind of let me down, really, because normally I get some nice selections from that on edges like this. So let's go back to this one here. I'm going to go to the third button on there and just remove this part by surrounding that in there. We'll zoom right out, and I'm actually going to add even more just that I make sure I get all of this in here. I like that. Now, I've used this layer to make my selection. But I'm going to actually go to this layer here. Switch him on, and this is the layer. I'm going to add a mask. Now, we're going to the bottom over here. I don't want to just delete that area because I might need to move him or change him later. So I'm going to go down to where we've got the little mask icon. You can see this one here, which is kind of a white square with a black.in the middle. If you click on that, what it does is it makes a mask for you. Now, this mask is actually the wrong way around because I want to show him and hide his leg. So I'm going to just undo that for a second. I had this bit selected. The mask masked out that area and kept this area over here. What I could do is I could go to pixel, pixel selection, and I could invert the mask. I've got the other area now, which is selected. And then when I add the mask, it'll do it that way. I'm then going to deselect this. So all I have to do is to go to pixel pixel selection and deselect. Now the little mask, you'll see is actually separate on here, so I can actually show and hide it. I haven't done any damage to the image at all. We've got him looking like he's jumping through this weird I don't know what it is. Weird brown sandy thing. Anyway, I'm going to stop there so you can try that out, have a bit of a go, do some selection using some of the selection tools, and then add a mask. If it's the wrong way round, go to Pixel selection and just invert your mask in there. 27. Lighten & Darken for 3D Look: Let's zoom in a little bit over here. Now, what I'd like to do is, I'd like to darken down this background behind him a little bit, and I'm going to do that with a paint brush. So I'm going down here and I'm going to choose a tool called the burn brush tool. Now, this is going to be destructive. If you want to use nondestructive methods, it's the adjustment brush up there, but we're not going down that route. At the moment, we're going to be destructive, so I'm going to use the burn brush tool. And then I can just paint. Now, I'm going to make sure that I'm on the pixel layer in here. If you're not sure whether you'll make a mess of this or not, you could actually just copy and paste that layer. So you've got two versions of that layer. You can then hide one and work on the other just in case. Now, I'm just going to paint over there to darken down that background. You can just about see how I'm darkening it down. Behind him a little bit over there, and maybe this bit here is darkened as well. Let's zoom out a bit. Well, I don't like that second bit darker, so I'm going to just undo what I did over there. But you can see how I can just darken down almost like giving it a shadow area in there. And then I can go along to the other tool, which is the Dodge tool. I'm going to make that brush a bit bigger, so we've got a size over there, and I'm just going to pull that size out by clicking and dragging on there. And this will allow me to then lighten up these areas, so I can just lighten this bit over there. Maybe the top, I'll lighten as well as if the light is kind of coming down on that. Once again, there's no right or wrong here. You can just sit and play with these. And because you made a copy, if you don't like it, well, you've still got that copy there to work on. So I'll just get rid of that and do this again. So I'll just make sure I select that. So go in the Dodge tool lightens areas, so I can just paint on these bits here to lighten them. I think I might paint this little bit over here to just lighten that up a little bit, and then I'll go over to the burn tool to darken and just darken down that area underneath them. Not this bit over here, just that bit. It gives it a bit more three D look, and then maybe this area here could be darkened down a little bit, as well. As I said, no right or wrong. We're just lightening and darkening areas up, and it does give it a really nice three D feel. 28. Try a Variation: Now, if you get to this stage, you think, You know what? I really don't like the way that this is turning out. What you can do is you could try another one of these swish type shapes for want of a better word. So I've done another one, so you didn't have to watch me doing it, and I've just done this one over here. So it's the same thing. It's just a larger area, and I did exactly what I did before, twisted it over. And then the problem is that he's not quite right. So what I will have to do is to go into his layer, take my mask, drop my mask into the bin, and then re mask that out again. I'm not going to get you to sit and watch me do that. I will do that in a moment. But if you want to try another one, now's the time, it's always cool to have a few of them to see what you can actually get from it. You get different results depending which parts you selected. I think this time, I selected this area down here from the top right the way through so you can see the green grass and the cement. You've got kind of the sky, some green grass, a bit of cement color in there as well. Anyway, if you want to have a go, absolutely fine. Try different one, and if not, move on to the next video. 29. Saturate & Desaturate: Now, I've redone mine, and I much prefer this way that I've done it this time. I used a larger area, and let's just switch that on. And I took an area from the middle somewhere, so I got some of the green, as well. But it's entirely up to you, you know, just keep going until you find something that you like the look of and I've lightened and darkened mine. If you want to bring the color out, you can go along over here. Instead of using the bone or the dodge tool, go to the sponge tool. Now, I've got a very large brush here. You can see I'm just changing the brush size with this little slider over here. With the sponge tool, you can either saturate the color or desaturate the color. Now, it's not very obvious, I'm afraid, but if you go along here, you'll see there is these three little rings here which say saturate, and there's three rings which are joined together, which say desaturate. Now, this is supposed to represent an RGB color triangle, triplet. Was this is supposed to represent the same thing, but without the color in it. Difficult. Once you know that they're there, it's fine, but when you're looking for them, it's quite hard to figure them out. I'm going to go to saturate, and then I can actually just paint on these and just saturate the colors a little bit. In there. Now I'm on my wrong layer, so nothing's happening. Let's try that again. There we go. And I've just got some color really saturating out on the reds. I'll do the same on this side to just bring out the color. I'm also going to go to the jumper and we'll zoom it a bit to him, make the brush a bit smaller. And we'll just saturate his color a little bit in there as well. I don't want to go too much on his face because otherwise, he'll end up looking very, very strange. Do try that out, saturate and desaturate. And if you do want to try a different one of these shapes, by all means, just take a break from this, have a go again. If you need to go back through the lessons, watch it again, but try with a different shape as well. Remember, these don't have to be upright. If you wish to do a completely different one, if you've got a different picture in there, do one and make it go sideways like that. You can have things going down that way, or you could have something coming out the top like that as well jumping through the top of that twist. And then just pull this out, hold down the Shift key and you can scale these up and down like so. I'm going to undo mine because I'm going back to that look that we had a moment ago. Do try that out. 30. Make Background & Reflection: Let's put it in a background. I'm going to go along and I'm going to add a new layer in there, and I'm going to go and fill it using the fill tool. Now, with a fill tool, I'm going to choose a linear gradient, and this is the gradient over here. But I'm going to change the colors. So in here, I'm just going to pick a different color for the moment. Just that I've got something really wild, we're not going to be using these colors actually, but just so I've got something wild to see. I'm going to pull that below the layers in there. Now, I'd like to change these colors, and the reason I move that down is that I can actually get colors from the image itself. So I'm going to go back there again, click on this color here, and I want to sample colors from the document. So let's go and click on that and we'll use some sort of maybe light color like so. And on the other side, I'll do the same thing again. Click on that, click the sample, and let's try a different color in there. There's no right or wrong with this. I will reverse those colors as well so they go the other way. Just experiment and see what you can do with the gradient colors on your image. If you find that you're not getting to the areas you want, just move the image along and then once again go in there, choose your colors, and this will enable you to pick other areas. As well. That's quite cool, actually. I like those two colors together. Now, once you've put your colors in on the background, what we want to do is just give this a little bit of depth, and to do that, I'm going to put a reflection of this shape on the ground. Now, the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to make a copy of this. I've gone to this shapes layer here. I'm going to copy and paste it. Command C or control C to copy, control V or command V to paste. And here's my copy. Now I'm going to take that copy. I'm going to hold down the Shift key. If you don't hold down the shift key, it will scale all the sides. I'm going to pull it down like so. I'm going to move it underneath that layer, and we're going to just change the opacity on that to lighten it up. Like so. So it just gives us a bit of depth, almost like there's something underneath it that he's jumping through. If you wish, you can copy and paste these things to do all sorts of other designs in the background. So I could take something like that one. Now, I could rotate it round scale that one up, and I could have a second one in there. If I wanted, and I can then go in there to that one. I could change the opacity on that if I wanted to be a lot lighter. There's no stopping, try them out, try them out and see what you get. Try some of these modes as well. Multiply actually works quite well with that. Personally, I think it's a bit too busy. I like it just like that. Have a bit of a go with that, have some fun with doing a background and a bit of a reflection on there as well. 31. Add Text & Export: As you can see, I've added some text into mine. I've put the word jump in over there and I've moved the word behind the man who's jumping. It looks like he's jumping in front of it as well to give the whole document a little bit more mh. That is a separate word, and this is obviously separate down here. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go to File, Export. I'm going to export it out as a JPEG file. And there it is. Have a look. All done and ready to email around. Have fun with it and try some variations. 32. Brushes in Depth - Intro: We're going to be looking at brushes in this section. Now, a lot of this is actually aimed at artists, but for you designers and photographers, there's a lot of stuff in here that you'll be able to use as well. Certainly when it comes to doing adjustments and working on masks, brushes are so, so good. 33. Opacity vs Flow Paint Brush: Now, we're going to delve quite deeply into the brushes, and you've probably used some of the basic settings before, but we really will push this on and have a look at a lot of the little detailed areas. Now, before we start to look at the brushes, and we're going to start off with a paint brush over here. A lot of the settings are similar for the different types of brushes. I'm going to go and show my brushes, so I'm going to go to the window menu down to general, and I'm going to find my brushes in there. I also want to make sure that I'm just on these basic brushes to get started with. If you're not sure, just change from whatever you're in there to a basic brush. They are the best so that you can actually see what you're actually doing with these settings without other settings interfering. I'm just going to choose one of these rounded brushes like that. Now, if you make a mess of your brush, there is a little reset button over there in the top, so you can just click to reset and change everything back to the default brush. Anyway, I'm going to start off with this rounded brush up here. Now, first of all, the size. Now, I'm sure you've used brushes and the size before, so I don't have to mention anything about that. And the other thing I imagine you've been using is over here the softness and hardness of the brush, so you can go from a hard to a soft brush with the slider. But what I do with my brushes is I use a keyboard shortcut. So the square brackets on the right to make the brush bigger, square brackets on the left, to make it smaller, and at the moment that's set to 100%, you can see I've got a hard brush over there. If I do shift and square brackets to the left, it makes the brush softer. Shift and square brackets to the right makes the brush harder in there, so it's just changing those two. I'm going to undo that, so I'm just using Control Z or Command Z to undo. Now, let's move along to the transparency or the opacity of the brush because once again, it's one of these things where you've probably used it before, I'm sure. So with 100% in there, I can just paint over that area. Obviously, if I change that, say to 50%, we can see through it. So what about the next one along here, which is the flow? Just take that back again. If you change the flow on a brush, it also looks like you're changing the transparency or the opacity of that brush. I'm going to just take that up again and once again, we go back to that. What's the difference between flow and opacity? Well, the best thing to do is if I show it to you and I'm going to go over here and I'm going to take my opacity down and I'm going to just draw a little figure of eight over there. Then I'm going to do the same thing with flow. Now with flow, I'm going to have to take that down quite a lot more. And I'm going to draw over there. And can you see as I'm actually going over the brush itself, it's actually building up the paint. So when you paint with flow, it will build it up like that, whereas when you paint with opacity, and it's just take that down. It doesn't build up as much. Well, it doesn't build up at all, to be honest. As you're painting over the same area, it doesn't build up. When you do it a second time when you release the mouse, then it does build up. I am going to stop there so you can try that out and just have a bit of a go with these options in here and the difference between flow and opacity. So remember, opacity, when you're painting, if you haven't lifted up the mouse button will retain the percentage that you've decided on. Flow will keep building it up even if you don't lift up the mouse as you paint over the area. There's one last thing that I want to mention over here, and that is sometimes you'll see, especially if you're painting with flow, the little dots appearing like that on the brush, you can sort of see little round weird areas like that. What I'm going to say is, if you see that, click on more. We're going to come to this later on and change your spacing in there. That'll get rid of it. The spacing is the distances of those dots over there. So we can just change the spacing, close that down, and then I won't have those little dots, but I might have to change the flow even more to try and get some transparency out of it. There we go. Anyway, I've got a very, very green screen, so I'm going to undo all of this while you try that out. O. 34. Spacing & Brush Shape: Let's go up to the Me button over there. So we've got some things in here. I'm not going to go through every single item because there's so many things in here to change for your brushes, and that's a story for another time. Let's have a look, though, as size, which is exactly the same as your size. You can see as I'm changing that, it's changing the top. We've got the hardness in there, which is the same. We've got the spacing which I've mentioned, which allows you to just have the little dots in there. The reason that you use spacing is because the way that the paint brush works is it doesn't smear the paint on. It puts it down in little circles, and those circles overlap. Sometimes when you're using flow, the overlap can cause you to actually see the little dots themselves. If you find that your brush doesn't have a nice smooth edge because you want a really nice smooth edge, just go in here and change your spacing and take your spacing down to something really, really small. You find that, especially if you maybe on an older machine and your brush tends to lag quite a lot, it could be because your spacing is set down to something like 1%, and it's got to put so many of those little dots in. In fact, this 1% means it's putting in one dot there, and then it moves on 1% of the width of the brush and then puts in another dot and another one there. Whereas, if we go up to 100%, close enough. You can see we have a dot there, and then 100% moves on other dot, another.in there. So the default is round about of the 2025 mark over there. If you're not sure, try it out and have a go. Flow, we've looked at. Now, what about shape over here? Well, to show you shape, I'm going to change the spacing, so I can go in here and I can adjust the shape and squish that brush down like that. And then I can use rotation if I want to rotate it round, as well. I'll just close that down and you can see I can get that sort effect from my brush. Let's go back in there again, and I'm just going to adjust the shape that way, maybe change my spacing, get some of the sort of cross hatch type of brush in there. I'll take the size up a little bit. I've then got a brush which is kind of doing that type of thing. Going back here, I'm just going to take my shape back to a circle and my spacing down again. The rotation now doesn't matter because it's a circle. Right. Have a bit of a go with those, and then I'll talk about wet edges and blend modes in a moment. 35. Wet Edges & Window vs Rope Stabiliser: I've just changed my color because I kind of got border with green. I'm going to click on more, and let's have a look at the wet edges in here. Now, with wet edges, I'm going to change my hardness. I'll get a slightly softer brush in there. This is supposed to simulate when you put paint onto a canvas, and the paint tends to gravitate towards the edges on wet painting or the ink tends to gravitate towards the edges. So I'm just going to say set wet edges on, and you can see how we've actually got a more solid edge there and a slightly transparent middle. Now, if I just close that, that's sort of the effect that we're getting with a sort of slightly more transparent middle to the edges. Now, let's go back in there again because you can actually customize this yourself. So if you just click on customize and click the little icon on the right, there are some pre made shapes that you can use for your wet edges, or what's really cool is you can just pull this around and get different wet edges in there so I can get this really wild edge that's going on there. Wafer wanted two of them, maybe I could do something like that over there. I think I'll leave that like that. So that's now my wet edge. When I paint with this, you'll see I get this really interesting edge around the shape itself. So although you can use it to try and simulate ink, you can also use it for some really interesting effects over there. And I usually tend to do this with a hardness towards the middle. If you go too hard, you don't see it. You can see how you can change it with the softness in there. Anyway, it's quite a fun one. So do play with it in a moment. I'm just going to switch it off for now and just go no wet edges. The other thing that we've got are our blend modes. And the blend modes in here are pretty much the same as the blend modes. Well, they are the same as the blend modes that you have at the top, but they're pretty much the same as what you get on the layers over there as well. And we'll be delving into those later on. So don't worry too much about them at the moment. Lastly, although we've covered this in the fundamentals, we have got a stabilizer in here. So just to remind you, I'm going to get rid of that really large, weird pink bit of painting that I've got. If you have a stabilizer on, you've got the one on the left, which is rope mode. So as you're painting, you can see we've got the rope, which is pulling that brush around. Well, by the way, this little button here has got wet edges, so wet edges is still switched on, which is why I'm seeing it over there. Compared to Window mode. Now, window mode is the same with a rope, but it's also based on speed. The faster I go, the more smoothing I'll get. So when I get to a point I want some more details, the rope itself or elastic band I like to think about it as is very small, so I can do a lot of detail and then when I go fast, I can smooth it out. It's entirely up to you as to which one of those you want to use and you can put in the amount in there. Do try out all those little options in there. Don't forget about the stabilizer. I said, I know we've covered it before, and over here, try out the wet edges in there. 36. Force Pressure: Et's have a look at this little button here called force pressure. Now, if you've got a tablet that you're working from like a wackom tablet or Hoon or one of those, you can switch that on, and you'll see that your brush has pressure. But what about if you're working on a mouse? Well, I'm going to go over to my mouse now, so I've got a mouse attached, and I switch on. I'll just do a little line there first. I'll switch on force pressure, and you can see my brush just gets bigger. Well, what's happening because there's no pressure sensitivity on the mouse, it just gives me maximum pressure from the brush itself. Going to undo that. And this time I'm actually going to go back to a track pad. I'm on a mac and my track pad has got some sort of pressure on it. So you might or you might not have the pressure option on your machine. So with that switched off, you can see that is my brush. If I switch it on now, if I don't have much pressure, and I can press to get more pressure over there. Unfortunately, using a track pad is not terribly helpful. Because it's kind of almost either on or off. It's very difficult to get that sort of in between brush in there. The best thing that you can do is to use some sort of tablet. If you're really into painting, I cannot recommend enough using a tablet. It doesn't have to be the most expensive one. Some of the cheaper ones will do absolutely fine. As long as they've got pressure sensitivity, that's all that you need, and you don't need a big one either. I've used very small ones, and they're still absolutely brilliant. In fact, the huge ones are great, but your arm gets really tied by the end of a painting session. Anyway, do try that little one out there if you have a device that accepts pressure. If not, move on to the next video. 37. Protect Alpha: Now, let's have a look at this little alpha one over here. And to do that, I'm going to take my object selection tool and just select my tower. So I've got something on a separate layer. Okay, this select some other bits and pieces, as well. That doesn't matter. I'm going to copy and paste. All I want to do is to show you this on a separate layer like that. I'm going to deselect it over there. So we've got, if I go back to my paint brush, the picture itself plus the transparent area. And this area here is known as the Alpha. So if I paint, I can paint anywhere on that layer. But if I switch this on, now it will protect the alpha and only paint where there are pixels. So it really is very useful. If you're painting something, you just want to get a particular area you don't want to paint onto the transparent areas, switch that one on. I'm just going to click on Reset to reset all my settings back again. Try it out. Just copy and paste something, anything on a layer, and then have a go with the Alpha. 38. Symmetry: I'm going to go along to File and just create a new blank document. And then let's have a look at this last little setting. Now, I'm in vector at the moment. I'm going to click over to the Pixel Studio. Go to my paint brush, and it's this one over here. If I click on it, it's symmetry. Symmetry is great. Fun to play with. I really enjoy playing with it. But between you and me, I've never actually had an opportunity to use it professionally, but maybe there's something sometime that it will happen. Anyway, I'm going to switch on symmetry, and what we have now is a line in the middle. So with my brush, I'm going to change that to a different color. Let's just double click on that, and I'll pick a nice deep. Deep red there. So at the moment, you can see, as I paint on one side, it paints it on the opposite side over there. So once again, going back in here, if I chose mirror, now it paints the same thing on both sides, but in a mirror form. So let me undo that again. So if you've got mirror switched on and you paint something in there, you can see it's doing a mirror version upside down. Whereas if I switch mirror off and do that, it's doing it as if I'd actually spun it around the other way. So that's for mirror on and off. But let's go back over here, and I'm just going to switch mirror off, and I'm going to change the symmetry over there, so I'm going to have eight little shapes. Now, with those shapes, I want to actually put one somewhere, so I'm going to move this around over there, and then I'm going to just draw my little shape up here. I'm just going to click and drag, draw a little heart. And you can see it's going to continue on with that down there, so I can get tons of those. So if I need to move it around, just click on the middle. You can move it wherever you want. And then as you're drawing your shape, it will create multiple versions in a circle. Like so. As I said, it's hours of fun and playing around which you might or might not use professionally. This is really cool if you do that, and you can just create these really interesting intricate shapes. Like so. Anyway, whether you can use it or not professionally, have a lot of fun with it now because it is so cool. 39. Mixer Brush - How it Works: Now, we're going to have a look at the paint mixer brush. So I've gone from my basic brushes over there through to oils. You don't have to use an oil brush, but this whole thing is about painting and smearing paint around, so I thought oils would be appropriate. Now, once again, along the top, we have got the brush size. We've got the flow. We've looked at both of those, and we've got the brush options in here, once again, same as we had before. Now, this is the strength of the brush. So I'm just going to click this clean brush button for the moment. I'll explain about that shortly. And if I click and drag, it sort of smears the colors through the brush or through the painting like so. I'm going to just undo that. Now, depending on how much of that strength you have, will depend on how much it actually smears. Let's go all the way up here. Once again, we've got a long smear over there. The way this paint brush works and it's quite interesting is it picks up at the initial color. I'm just going to clear the brush again. For example, here, if I'm on the yellow light and click, it will start to smear yellow and then it's smearing the pink and then it's smearing her hair color. Now I stop. If I start again, remember, the last smear I did was the hair color there. So if I start again over here, clicked and dragged, it still starts with a hair color, and then it starts picking up the other colors as it goes. Once again, I'm going to end up on this dark green. But then if I started here, it's still remembered that dark green color. So what we can do is just get rid of all of those is every time you start, you can actually go over here and you can just clean the brush. Now if I start from the orange, it'll smear the orange. If I want to do it again, I would clean the brush and then I can start over here once again with the orange, clean the brush, and I can start from the white in there. If I forget to do that, it'll start from the blue. So do have a little bit of a go with that. Remember, you've got the strength in there. Play around with that, but use this little brush over here to clean the brush as we go, and then I'll talk about the other one in a second with the loaded brush. As you're painting, you will see those tiny little marks. Those are ready from the spacing. If I put that spacing closer together, otherwise, you'll see some of those. In there. And once again, if I do that, now we get much more of a smear, but we don't get those funny little marks in there. Do try it out. Have a bit of a go with those. This really is just about smearing paint around, as an artist. Try it out. 40. Preload Colors: Now, what about this little button over here, the loading? Well, this allows me to choose a color, and I'm going to double click on my foreground color, and I'm going to pick something pretty extreme, this green in there so that you can see how it works. If I click that button, it pre loads it with that color, and then it'll start to paint with that color and then start to smear after that. Now what'll happen now? Because I've ended in these sort of colors, it'll continue on with that color over there. So I'm going to just undo that. So preload, we'll pre load it with a color, and I can just keep pre loading that color in if I want to paint with it. I can also, of course, just clear the brush and paint again that way. There are some auto settings in here for auto pre loading and auto cleaning the brush as well that you can experiment with. And lastly, we've got RYB. This is red, yellow, and blue. So these are the models that it's using either RGB for that we use for screen or your red, blue and red, yellow, and blue primary colors for painting. You choose which one you want. Once again, there's a little button to reset things in here. And, of course, we have symmetry. So do have a bit of a go with those and see how you get on with them. 41. Color Replacement Brush - How it Works: For the next tool, I've gone back to my basic brushes, and over here, I'm going to be using the color replacement Brush tool. Now, this is good for photographers, for illustrators, and maybe less so for painters. What it does, is it changes the color on areas based on the brush. Now, in order to describe or show you what this does, I'm going to just go across to vector very quickly and put a little shape over the top, and I'm going to make that shape green. And if I then went to my Opacity here and to the mode on the layers, and I chose, I'm going to find it in here somewhere, color mode. What happens with color mode is it replaces the color of the image underneath. It doesn't affect the lightness or the darkness of that image below. So it means that I can actually just adjust the color to anything I want in there. And you can see how the sky, because the sky is actually quite light is now quite a light purple, whereas the darker areas on the bricks are darker purples in there. So remember that color mode because that's how this little brush is going to work. So I'm going to go back to Pixel Studio, and once again, I'm in the color replacement tool. And then I've got a big brush here, far bigger than I need because I want to change the color of the sky. So if I were to click over here, and I just need to make sure that I've actually selected the layer. So many times I just start working and then realize I've got to go back and select it. If I click over there and paint, you can see it's painting with that pink color. But even though I'm over the roof, it hasn't picked up the roof. It's just painting the sky. Now, I know it doesn't look very good at the moment. Over there. So what it's done is it's just colorized. It's used the color mode to change the color of the sky. I'm going to undo that. If I went over here and clicked on some of the bricks, you can see it's using that color mode to change the color of the bricks. Now, I'm going to undo that. The reason this is not working very well at the moment is to do with something called the tolerance. And that's over here on the right. Now, when you look at your settings, you'll see that we've got the usual settings over here, up to more, and then we have the tolerance on this side. So I'm going to go to the tolerance, and I'm going to increase the tolerance. Now I'm going to go too far with the tolerance, and now when I touch the roof, you can see it's also colorizing up the roof at the same time. I'm going to undo that. I don't know if you've noticed when I did that, the edge of my brush looks a little bit darker than the middle section, and that's because by mistake, I switched wet edges on. I'll do that again so you don't have that horrible little edge in there. So what we need to do here is to find some sort of happy medium. I'm going to try about 13, 14. Click and paint, and there you can see it's selecting the sky, or it's painting the color of the sky, but it's not touching the roof at all. And then I go into my clouds over there. Now, the clouds, I can click again and try and paint them until I get a nice sort of blend between them. If you want at that stage, I could take that setting all the way up and then continue painting in there. I'm going to undo that. We go. So once again, when you're using this tool, you over here to the tolerance and experiment with different tolerances. For this particular image, I found that sort of 14 15 seems to work quite well. And even though you might move over here, you won't be painting any of those colors unless you click and you start painting again. Try it out. If you use this picture, it's a nice one to demonstrate with. So try it out on there. If you want to try it on other pictures, that's absolutely fine. And then I'm going to show you some of the other buttons in here that make a difference. 42. Continuously Sample & Contiguous Paint: I found a picture in stock, which I've opened up, and I've made sure that the image is just a background image, so the little icon is pixels, not the image. Otherwise, you won't be able to work on it as we found out before. What I'd like to do is, I like to change the color of the brakes over here. I'm going to zoom right in to those breaks. And let's have a look at the options along the top for this color replacement tool. Now, we've got two little buttons over here. This one says sample continuously. I'm going to leave that switched off, and then I'm going to move across over here to Contiguous. Now, contiguous really means touching. So if I leave that switched off, I move over here and we'll just zoom in a bit further over there, get a nice big brush over there. You can see if I were to go over here to the break and click, it's selecting areas which are in the middle, but also bits up the top over there. So with one click over there, it's going to paint not just that section, but that section as well. And that's because we've got this contiguous switched off. If I switch it on and do it again, now when I go here, it will only affect the area inside the spokes of the wheel. So using contiguous means that if there's anything that gets in the way, it won't go outside that object. It will only affect pixels which are touching each other. And that can be quite useful for something like this, where you don't want to affect another area. Now, let me undo that. But of course, I do want to affect the other area here, so I'm going to switch that off. So when I do this, it's actually affecting those bits as well. Now, I do need to have actually a larger setting on my tolerance to try and get some of those other oranges or yellows as well. And so I'll try that one. There we go. That's a little bit better. Now, and then I can resample on the darker colors to affect them as well. And there we go. The brakes are now done. But what about the side of the car? And more importantly, what about this little button over here? Well, I'm going to zoom in a little bit over there. So this little button allows you to sample continuously. If it's switched off, when I click, all it does is say, Okay, you've sampled that yellow, and let's use a slightly lower tolerance for this. So when I clicked, you've sampled that yellow, so it's not actually affecting those. Even if I move over them, it doesn't affect them. Whereas, if I switch that on, now, as I'm moving along, as I'm moving the cursor along, it's continually sampling those colors. There we go. You can see it's now pick that up, as well. So it's fast to do something where there are multiple tones that you want to affect. So here, as I'm going over that, I can pick up those tones very quickly. In there. Sometimes you still actually need to go in and change the tolerance to a larger tolerance and have a combination of the two, and that should now work quite well on those colors. So do try that out. I know it's very confusing because they seem to be the same thing. But this one here samples. As you move along, it's just continually sampling the color which is in the middle of the brush. Whereas this one means that this is your contiguous. It will only affect areas which are touching. So pixels that are actually touching in there. And sometimes you might need to use one, sometimes you might need to use the other. Try it out. 43. Pixel Brush vs Regular Brush: Now, the last little brush in here is the pixel tool. And this is great for a pixel artist, so we're just creating those sort of illustrations where you just have one color or the other color or you pick up the pixels. Now, what I mean by that is that if I paint with this pixel brush, you can see I can paint individual pixels on there. Or I can change the size of the brush, and I can paint bigger areas as well. But what this does, it's picking it up as a square. So it's just picking up those pixels, and there is no softening on the edge of the brush. So even if I had a different brush, for example, one of the paint brushes over there, and I made that brush really hard. So I'm going to go to the hardness over there and make that hard. When we zoom right in, I know it's difficult to see with that other brush in the way. But can you see how there's still a little bit of softening along the edge of that brush? Was this one here is, and I know it's difficult to tell, but that's got a hard edge. This one, even though it's hard, has got a slight softening to it. It's got what's called anti aliasing on it. So this brush here, even the hardest brush, will give you those edges, whereas this little one over here? The pixel brush. It's either selected or it's not. It's either painted or it's not. There's no anti aliasing on it. Once again, I'm just going to go back to my paint brush over here and take this right down to one pixel, and that is the paint brush at one pixel. And this over here is the pixel brush at one pixel. And you can see the difference between those two. Anyway, have a little bit of look at it. It might be something you use, it might not. Try it out. 44. Erase Tools: Looking at the erasers that we have here, we have the erased brush tool and that erases, and the options are pretty much like the paint brush. Moving down, we've then got the background erase tool. Now, the background erase tool is very much like the color replacement brush tool. Because what it does is it erases, but it's looking at areas based on whatever you've clicked on in the middle of the brush. So the same sort of thing you'll see we've got the contiguous. We've got the sample continuously all at the top there. So it's the same thing. You click and you start erasing and you move around the edge. You can just keep going. And if I go over the building itself, well, it won't get rid of it. So that's actually quite a cool one. Let's get rid of that and undo that. And then onto the Flood Erase tool over here, which is actually very much like the magic wand. So in the selection tools, you've got a flood select tool, which selects things based on their color. So I can click on that to make a quick selection. And this is exactly the same. If I go to the Flood Erase tool, I can click on this area here and it will see colors which are similar and erase them. Have a bit of a go with those three. Really easy, really simple. They are very destructive, but they're okay for quick jobs. 45. Dodge, Burn & Sponge Tools & Adjustment Brush: Now, we've got some brushes over here, and I just want to talk about the burn Dodge and Sponge before I come to the adjustment brush tool. The burn brush darkens areas down. I'm going to make my brush a bit smaller, and I can then just paint on there to burn or darken those areas down. The Dodge brush lightens areas up. So once again, I can just choose a brush and lighten area up. So. Now, these are destructive tools, and they are well, destroying the image, really. So I'm going to undo them. Like so. The last one, also a destructive tool is the Sponge brush tool. Now, the Sponge brush tool either saturates the color, so it intensifies it, or it knocks it back. And it depends on which of these two little buttons you use. This one over here will intensify the color. So if I go along to this sort of front area here and maybe I'm thinking, you know, this gold with the writing, maybe it needs to come out a little bit. So once again, I can just well, make sure I'm on the saturate, and I can then saturate those colors over there. You can see if I keep going, it's getting really, really bright. Maybe I'll do the orange over there where the sunlight is hitting it and the sunlight's hitting over here. The downside with this is once again, it is destructive. So if I've gone too far, like I have there, well, I'm pretty much stuck. I can only undo it. Now, the other way is we can desaturate. So if I click on this button, and I'm going to do the same, but at the bottom, once again, also destructive I can then just knock out the color. And if I keep going, that will eventually become gray scale or black and white. I'll do the same with those in there. Now, those three are destructive, but certainly with these two here, there's a quick way of using them so they're not destructive. Let me undo what I've done there, so I'm going to be undoing all of those brushes over there to go back to my original Think. There we go. There's the original. Now, to do it in nondestructive way, you use the adjustment brush tool. So with the adjustment brush tool, let's say, for example, that I want to darken down these areas underneath the arches, really to show the shape of this building. So I can then start painting over here, and you see it brings up an exposure box. I'm just going to put that aside for the moment. Et's keep going with those. And then I've got the exposure, so I can actually go and change the exposure to darken or lighten those areas. I'm happy with that. Now, don't click Merge because otherwise it will become part of the image and it'll be destructive. We just click off of it over there. Let's go back to the background again. So once again, the same tool, I'm just going to go to these areas here. You can see it's made me another adjustment over there, and I could use lighten over there to lighten those up. Once again, we'll just lighten these and I think this bit over here could be lightened up just a little bit, as well. Now, that's probably too much, so I can darken it down a bit. As you can see, you can go really over the top both ways. So just a subtle bit of lightning in there. Now the great thing about these is they're non destructive, so I can actually go and switch them off and go back to the original. So there's the original, and there it is with my adjustments. If I don't like them, I can delete them. So I would suggest instead of using the burn and Dodge from this point onwards, you go and you use the adjustment brush tool. The Sponge is still separate, but there are other ways to do it with masks. Have a bit of a go. Try that out and see how you get on. 46. Filter Brush & Destructive Blur & Sharpen: Now, with the next set of tools, we've got the filter brush that I'm going to come to again just now. We've also got a blur, a sharpen, a median, and a smudge. The blur tool does exactly that. If you increase your brush size of it like I'm doing, I can go in here and I can just blur out areas. It is destructive. Likewise, the opposite of that is the sharpened brush. So the sharpened brush is also destructive. And if I just paint a little bit over here, I can make things appear sharper. What it's actually doing is it's just intensifying the contrast on the edges. So it's a little bit like unsharp where you're going to the edges and increasing the contrast between those pixels. It's not an AI smart brush. It doesn't make things up. It just does what it can with the pixels that are there, doesn't understand what it's seeing. Let me undo that. So onto the median brush. Now, the median brush is like the blur brush, but it keeps the edges sharp. Now, this is actually quite good for things that have got a lot of grain in them, so you can remove the grain without making things look too blurry. And I'm just going to go back to that last image that I had over here. And if we zoom right in, you can see down here we've got a lot of grain in the image. I just go on a little bit further, so I'm just going to zoom in a bit more. Now, there's some grain in the background. There's grain here, although technically, this is not grain. It's actually the texture on the pole, but it'll work the same. If I go to the median too, I'm going to make the brush smaller. And let's go up to here. I think 100% will do very nicely with a slightly soft brush. I can then paint on that. And you can see it looks like it's blurring it. But if you compare that to the blur brush, the blur brush just makes things really soft. Was this keeps the shape. I'll do that again. So using the blur on this side, it's blurring everything, using the median brush. It's getting rid of some of the detail, but it's keeping that hard edge over there. So from a distance, it ends up looking a bit better. Lastly, in here, we've got the smudge brush tool, and that does exactly what it says. It smudges things, so you can just like putting your finger in a wet oil painting. Now, I'm going to go back to the tower bridge one because there's some more filters in here called the filter Brush tool. Sorry, some more brushes, called the filter Brush tool. And this allows me to use different filters. So, for example, Gaussian blow. If I want to blow something, using this tool, I can just paint the area that I want to blur it out, and it's non destructive. So it hasn't actually destroyed that layer. If I click in here, you'll see that we've still got the gaussian blur. If I don't like it, I can click on the eye to just remove that, or I can drag this into the bin. Delete it. So it's really cool. With these, you can use the filters to achieve some of the same effects that you get from the blur tool and the sharpened tool. There's so many different options in here when you've got, you know, got a spare afternoon, have a play with them and see what you can get. Really? I'm just going to go and show you one of my favorite ones. This is the half tone. I really like this because it enables me to have this sort of half tone look on an image, which I can just paint in like that so we can get an image to go from full color into half tone. And if I don't like it, just pop it in the bin if you don't want it. Once again, I'm going to make my brush bigger and I can just paint on this side to get a really nice blend from a half tone across. And there's all sorts of options that you can play with in there from full colour half tones like that through to black and whites. Do you have a bit of a go with these. There's all sorts of weird and wonderful things. The unsharp mask, by the way, this is the well, it's similar to what we did with the sharpening brush. Try them out. They're non destructive and you won't destroy your image. 47. Project: Japan Flow Show Poster - Intro: Another project, and I love this one. Now, this particular project, we're going to go all the way from the client's brief. So we've got a document which we're going to have a look at, which is what the client wants, and then we're going to put the image together based on that brief. And we've got so many things to do, cutouts and effects and brushes and all sorts of things. You can see over here on the side, it's going to look really, really good. 48. The Brief: A we're going to do something slightly different for this project. I'm going to give you a project brief. So this is the sort of thing that could have been given to you by a client. And this project brief, as you can see, says Japan Flow, which is a ballet, and we need to make a poster for the ballet. Now, I've put in things like the overview here, so you can see that it's a contemporary ballet set in the atmospheric back streets of Japan. The story follows an AI dancer a synthetic being discovering movement, emotion, and identity through dance. And then I've given you the mood in here. By the way, this word document will be in your resources area. We've got things like setting the mood, the location, neon lit alleyways, side streets, and hidden corners of urban Japan, atmospheric dreamlight, cinematic, and slightly futuristic. And I'm not going to read everything. I'll just go down here very quickly. We've got the main character, the AI dancer. We've got a black and white photo, which is supplied. I'll also supply you with the background image from Japan Backstreets. However, if you want to use your own, that's absolutely fine. There's some visual direction in here about the colors, the deep blacks, charcoals, neon reds, the inspiration, and how it's blending traditional with futuristic. We've got key themes in here as well, technology versus humanity, flow, transformation, self awareness, and the overall feel elegant, emotional, futuristic, and poetic, a meeting point between classical ballet and cyber Japan storytelling. This, as I said, has been provided for you. Have a read through it, and then we'll get started. 49. Correct Background Image: I've opened up the background picture that I've supplied to you, but if you want to use your own image, that's absolutely fine. No, that's a great image, but it doesn't look quite right. If you have a look at this dark area here and these dark areas there, it's not really black. In fact, there's nothing which is black in this image. So how can you tell? Well, by just looking at it, you might be able to see it. Of course, if your monitor is set really dark or light, you might not see that that's not black. I'm just going to get a paintbrush over here just to show you if I paint on that, you can see the difference between those two. So, to adjust it, we're going to go along, and we're going to do it nondestructively, by going to pixel and adding a new adjustment layer. And the one we're going to choose is levels. Now, levels has got two slides that we're interested in the black level over here, which affects the darker areas or the lighter areas over there so we can lighten bits up. There's also a gamma over here, which is kind of the midpoint so you can lighten or darken the middle tones. Now, what about the levels in here? We have looked at this earlier, but I'm just going to take this a little bit further. At the moment, we're looking at the master, which is all three channels, the red, blue and green channel. I go to the master and click in there, I could just look at the red channel. You can see with the red channel, there's actually quite a lot in the darker areas over there. If we look at the greens, it doesn't really come into play until about this area over here, and then the blues once again is halfway between them. So you could just affect the individual channels, but we're going to affect all three of them over there. If, for example, if I went to red, you can see I can just affect the reds in there. Now, what I want to do is I want to take the black level, and I'm going to drag it up until this little line gets to where the white starts. So we go up to there there we go, and we've now got some blacks in there. We are not being absolutely perfect on this. We're doing it by eye, and we're kind of getting this right by eye, rather than actually sampling those to make sure they're pure black. But for this particular example, that's about enough. I'm happy with that, so I'm going to close that down, and I'm going to take this adjustment layer and I'm going to drop it onto my background, so it's now only going to be affecting that layer over there, the background. I'm going to stop over there, so you can try that out, get your background looking good, whether it's this one or a different one. We want something which is going to be quite dark with some sort of bright Noni colors in there if you're choosing your own. Get to this point, and then we'll continue on. 50. Add an Adjustment Filter: We're going to use this filter brush tool over here. And what I want to do is I want to get a sort of a glitchy, almost cyber feel on the image. And so I've gone over here to the different filters that we've got, and I've gone down to glitch. And as you move over, you can sort of see what it will do for you. Now, if you want to try some of the other ones, by all means, do so. If I went to color half tone, we've looked at this before, maybe you could do a half tone effect on the image. But I'm going to use glitch in there, and then we can choose from the different types of glitches. So I'm going with shred, but let's go with blast over there, and you can see what's happening with that. Now, I'm going to go back to shred. And I'm going to paint just in the middle here because I want to sort of shred the middle or glitch the middle, but I wanted to go out normally from there. Now, this glitch has been applied to the layer below, and you can see where I've painted, there's a little mask up there. If I switch that on and switch it off, we've got something like that. Now, when you use one of these and you go near the edge, you can see how you can actually get some of the transparent areas coming through. Now, if you've done that, and you think, Oh, I really don't like those transparent areas that are there, by switching it on and off, you can affect how it actually affects your image. But what about if you want to keep it like this, but you want to get rid of those bits there? Well, we could get a copy of this, so I'm going to take this background. I'm going to copy and paste it. So copy and paste over there. So I've got two backgrounds now. If I apply the glitch to the top layer, you can see now how if I switch that the underneath copy on and off, it just hides those background bits in there so you don't see the transparency coming through. If you hide the top one, you're back to the normal in there. So this top one, this top layer here has got a levels adjustment. It's also got the glitch adjustment in there. Try that out. It's a little bit weird, I know, but have a bit of a play and get something which looks really interesting on there. 51. Cut Out Dancer: Et's bring in the black and white dancer. I'm going to go to File. I'm going to use Place in there, and I'm going to find him. Click on Open and then click and drag across to get him to the right size. It's going to be something like that. Now, I want to get rid of the background, so we're going to be using some selections for this, and we've done a lot of selections already, but there might be a few extra little tips that we can use. I'm going to go over here to the Object Selection tool and just move over him until the selection finds him. I'm going to click straight on there. Now, that's Mada selection, but it's not probably the best selection in the world. If I zoom right in, I'm using Command and plus to zoom in. And let's just change tools over here, and then remember command and minus or Control plus Control minus to Zoom in Zoom out, et cetera on a PC. You can see the face is not the best at all. What I'm going to do is I'm going to manually go and tweak it. I'm going to go over to my freehand selection tool. Want to add these bits in. Let's zoom in really close like that. I'm going to go to the add option over here. Now, which of these tools should you use? Well, you could use the straight tool. You could use the magnetic tool. I'm going to try the magnetic tool, click and see if it'll find the edge of his chin a great start with that. Let's go back to this one here and remember I'm on the add option. This is all by hand. I'm just going to drag around there. And add in that little bit. Then his lips, once again, back to there. Don't worry, we're not going to go around all of him. We're just doing the important parts over here and there's a bit of his forehead which is missing. A bit of his head over there. And we've got a few big parts over here to do, so the shoulder. I always find that hands, I mean, there's tiny bits on his arm there. I'm not worried about that too much, but hands are often a problem. So I'm going to add in his thumb. There. Now, I need to subtract. Oh, this bit of finger to add in before I subtract. Let's add in that bit. Then I can go to the subtract option, third button along, and I can then just surround the area that I want to subtract, which is this bit over there, that bit over here, let's check the other hand because that's probably a problem as well. Yeah, there we go. We'll subtract that bit in there and we'll add the thumb in over here in the fingers in there as well. I'll zoom out a bit over there. As you can see, I'm not worrying about feet and all the rest of his body. There's going to be an effect on top of this it'll hide a lot of that anyway. Now that I've done that, I'm going to click on refine. And what refine does is it sort of also looks along the edge and tries to help you refine the edge. But if you use refine, sometimes it can mess up perfect selections that you've got. If you switch matt edges off, then it goes back to the absolute perfect edge that you created in there. So just watch that little matt Edges button, it's trying to find these and sort of select them as if they were soft objects. While I'm in here, I could smooth out that selection, so I can go over here to smooth. I'm just taking off those little edges in there. I could feather to soften the edge down, maybe just a little bit of feathering in there. And then we've got something here called ramp, and ramp will either sort of extend your selection. You can see it's extended that way, or by going over to the left, I can sort of tighten up that selection as well. And that'll kind of work with hair, although we'll do the hair slightly separately. If I'm happy with that, I will just click apply at the moment, so I'm back to my selection again. Now, we don't want to do this in a destructive way. So what we'll do is we'll go down here with that layer with the selection on it, down here and we're going to click on the new mask button that's the square with the circle in the middle to make a mask, and then we can deselect that. Now, if there's things that still are a bit of a problem, you can go onto your mask, get your paint brush if you use the white um, foreground color, and I'm just going to go really over the top here, making my brush bigger. I'm using the square brackets to make it bigger. You can see with white, I can just paint areas back. I'm going to undo that or with black. Now, to get to black, the shortcut is X on the keyboard. Press X until flick you between your foreground, your background colors very fast. So X, we'll actually remove that. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in a little bit over here to his hair, use a smaller brush. Maybe a soft brush. I'm making sure it's soft up the top there, and I'm just going to paint out some of these bits of white over here with a soft brush. Like so. If you find there are any other weird bits in there, you could just go in and paint them out as well. We're not terribly worried about those. Get them as correct as you can. But a lot of this sort of area here is going to look a bit different when we finished with it. The other thing that I find is sometimes I go in and do so many details, and I forget that occasionally, this could be, although we're doing it as a poster, if this was something which was for social media, it's only going to be seen at that sort of size. So nobody's going to see whether you've actually even selected the thumb properly or not. If this was a huge, you know, massive poster, then yes, you'd want to be a little bit more detailed on some of those. So, have a bit of a go with that, and as I said, get the selection up and then add a mask, and then on your mask, you can paint bits in and out in there. Don't worry too much about the leg area down here. 52. Adjustment Layers on the Dancer: Let's add some adjustment layers to our dancer. I'm going to go along to Pixel, new adjustment layer, and we're going to start off with the color balance. Now, with color balance, what I want to do is because this is black and white, I want to give it a bit of color, so I'm going to add some red to it and you can see how the red is coming in. So instead of being black and white, it's sort of shades of red. I can add some yellow to that as well. I'm really just looking to get a bit more skin tone to him. We can add a bit of magenta if we want. You can move these around as much or as little as you like. I'm thinking that actually works quite well for my dancer, yeah. That looks good. Once again, switch it on, switch it off to see what you're getting. Remember, this is also affecting the background, so I'm going to drag it and drop it onto my dancer so it'll actually be inside there. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to darken him down at the bottom. Same again, I'm going to go up to pixel, new adjustment layer levels, and I'm going to just push the levels up to darken him down. Now, as before, it's selecting the background, so I'm going to drag it on there, go back into here again, back over to my levels, and just click on the little icon over there. So now I can do it without affecting the background. I'm looking for something like that where we've got this light shining down onto him. Back to my color balance, I think we'll just make him a little bit more red. We can go between these two. I can use this gamma to darken down his skin if I wanted to as well. We're looking for that shape of the arm, the chest, and the face in there. You can do whatever you like, but just add it to just his layer over here. Try it out. 53. Adjustment Glitch on the Dancer: Now the background still doesn't suit the dancer. I'm going to go back to my background over here to this middle one, go into my levels, and this is why we did it as a non destructive layer and darken it down a bit more. You see just that little extra bit of darkness makes him look like he's more part of the scene. But remember, the brief that we had was this was a AI being who is, I suppose, part human part AI. So we want to actually give that effect of digital and I'm going to do that on him. So I'm going back to his layer there. I'm going to go over to the filter brush, and I'm going to once again use glitch. But this time, I'm going to try something else. So I'm going to go in here and try something like a blast or a shred. Let's have a look at the shred. Don't like the shred on there. You can just keep going with whatever you like in there. I'm looking for something that'll sort of hide his legs in the background. So let's go back over here to Blast. There we go. That's quite an interesting one over there. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller, and then I can paint that area in over there. Now, it's come on that layer because I was on that layer there so we can open it up and you can always go in and switch it on and off. So it's only affecting this layer here. But if I don't like it, I can always click on the glitch and then try changing things like the strength. So if it wasn't strong enough, I can adjust it in there. Let's make sure that we can see it first. So back to there again. And I can just adjust that setting. And once again, if you don't like that, try something else when you're in here. Let's try the blast, and I'll increase the size. Over there. Have a bit of a go with that. Once you've tried this out, also don't forget on that particular adjustment layer, you can go to the top to the Opacity and you can adjust the Opacity of that effect so we can kind of bring a little bit of his legs coming through in there. Try it out, and you don't have to use the same one that I've done. See what you can use. I'm going to have a bit of a play here and see if I can find a better one. 54. Add Your Text & Adjust Vibrance: I've done a few things. The first thing is, I went to my glitch and I actually changed it to distort color. And because I think the whole movement is vertical on here rather than left and right, I've changed the vertical strength over here rather than the horizontal strength. You can see we can play with those two like that. And now that I've got that, I also then went in and put in some text. So I'm sure you know how to do text by now. Just go along to your artistic text tool, pop in some text. And remember, with your typefaces, you're looking at something which is sympathetic to the feel of this whole thing. So I've kind of used two different types of text in here. This one here, which I hope will feel more Japanese, and this one, which is a little bit more well, digital, I suppose. They don't have to be over the top. You don't have to choose something which is specifically Japanese or specifically digital as long as they get the feeling in there. Now, a few other bits and pieces. Down the bottom here, this is where the details about the show are going to go. So the client wants to put in some details at the bottom with times and show details and ticket details. They want to put them in in white text. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a rectangle over there, drawing a little rectangle down here in black. Now, that's going to be a little bit harsh. So we're going to change the Opacity of that, so you can still see some of the background coming through over there. But it gives the client an area to put their text in where it'll still be very, very readable, and it won't mess up the design. The other thing that I think is a bit of a mistake here or a problem is that there's this poster, sorry, not poster. What's that? Non sign in the background in the middle of the poster. So I like it there. It gives the Japanese feel, but it's a bit too harsh. So I'm going to go in. I'm going to go down to the background over there, and I'm going to use an adjustment brush, so adjustment brush tool. And up the top here, I'm going to go to exposure. And then with my exposure, I can just paint on there. And then we can change the exposure to lighten up, or in my case, I want to darken it down a little bit like that. I still want to keep the look of it because I think it's good for the whole feel of this. Close that down. And I'm also thinking that the colors do not do justice to the bright neon color backgrounds that the show is going to have. So once again, while I'm still on this particular background layer, over there. I'm going to go to Pixel New Adjustment layer, and I'm going to add something to really make the colors pop, and I'm going to use vibrance in there. Now, there's two vibrant here. Well, there's a vibrance in saturation. If you use vibrant, it makes your colors brighter, but it doesn't affect skin tones as much. It doesn't affect the reds and the pinks and the browns. But you can see that's why it doesn't really do that much on the background. Saturation just really saturates the colors, but it does it on all the colors. So if I push that, you can see how the colors really get very, very bright. Now, I do want something more subtle in my bright background, so I will use vibrance over there. If you've got anything with a human face in it, I would always go with vibrant. It doesn't matter to us because we're actually on the background. He's on a different layer in there. Have a bit of a go, get those going, and then we'll just export this out. 55. Save & Export: I've popped a little bit of text at the bottom here, and I'm now going to save this out. So I'm going to go to File and Save out. Don't forget, D as I say, not as I do. You should be saving as you go along just to make sure that, you know, you don't lose anything if everything crashes. So I'm just going to save this out. I'm just going to call it Japan Flow. And this is going to save it. I'll just put it onto the desktop for now. This is going to save it as a Affinity file. Now, we want to send this to the client, so we're going to go to file down to export. Over there, and we can choose the various ways to export this, talk to the client and ask them how they would like the images. If they have got a design department, they might be working in Photoshop. You could send them the Photoshop file. In which case, they can actually get to the layers themselves, although a lot of things don't translate directly from Affinity into Photoshop. Most of them will probably end up asking for a PDF either for print or just as a PDF for emailing around, whichever one the client wants. I'm going to go with a PDF digital, high quality. So this is something they can email around and print off on the office printer if they wish. On the right hand side over here, because we've got a preset in there, this sorts out all of these little settings for you. Now, I'm going to go over here and just say export and export that out in there. Let's have a quick look. So here is my PDF over there, ready for the client. Try that out, but come back for the next video because there's going to be a bit of a twist here. 56. Add New Dancer & Cut Out: Now, you've sent this to the client. They absolutely love it. They think you've met the brief perfectly. Everything that they asked for, you've done fantastic, except the client says, Unfortunately, our main dancer fell and he's broken his wrist. I'll be out of action for the next six weeks. We've now got a new dancer in Could you update the dancer with our new one. Here's a photograph. Now, the great thing is you don't have to redo everything. What we're going to do is we're gonna go to file, and we're going to place, and I'm going to find my new dancer. Once again, I'll provide her for you. And let's just click and drag her in over there. Now, there's a few issues that we've got. This is a very different type of photo to the one that we had before. But let's see what we can do. So the first thing we need to do is to cut her out. So I'm going to do the same process. I'm going to go along to the Object Selection tool. I'm going to cut her out. And I'm not going to sit and go through all the details because you've done that before. But once you've got your selection, go in, make sure all the bits are selected. Use these other tools here. Let's go over there the free hand tool to add and subtract parts that are missing. As you can see, some of her fingers are missing over there. Don't forget you can go to refine and you can tweak the settings in here. I switch off matt edges unless you want a slightly softer edge on some bits. When you're happy with that, add a mask to that. Now, as I said, mine doesn't look quite perfect yet, but I don't want you'd have to sit through and watch me do all of those details in there. Let me deselect that. So we have got a bit of an issue with her hair. I'm going to go to the mask. Use a paint brush with a soft brush to just brush out some of those bits of hair that are too dark in there. Because it's dark here on a dark background, you can blend it in really easily over there. Have a bit of a go. Get that far, and then I'll take you on to the next step. 57. Change New Dancer to B&W & Add Glitch: I'm going to move her down a little bit, so she's in the same position. Now, having moved her, it's like, What on Earth has gone wrong over there? I'll just undo that. That's because I'm on the mask, not on the layer. Make sure I'm on the layer, and then I can move her down to there. Now, I'm going to just move her down over there so she's just above where that other dancer was or is. And I'm going to take the glitch and drag it from that dancer. If you can't see it by the way, just click on the little arrow. I'm going to take the glitch, and I'm going to put it onto her layer so you can see how she glitches out. We're going to take the levels adjustment, and we're going to put that on her layer. I'm going to take the color balance and put that on her layer. As well. And then this dancer here can be hidden away. Now, it still doesn't look great because, well, her legs are quite light and his were very dark, so it was easy to hide them. And she's also looking very, very red. Remember, he had that sort of nice almost non human black and white with some color on it. So let's do a few things to this. Firstly, I'm going to make her black and white. So I'm going to go to pixel. New adjustment layer, and I'm going to choose black and white in there, and you can decide what you want lighter and darker by using these little sliders. I'm looking at the reds and darkening her down. Don't worry that the background's gone black and white. That doesn't matter at all. Let's close that down. I'm going to take that and drop that on top of her layer, so only she is now affected. So why hasn't she gone black um red because we have got the color balance in there. Well, if I drag the color balance above the black and white in that order, you can see it now applies the red to there. You can always double click the color balance, and if you want a little bit more coloring in there, you can adjust the colors like so. What about this dark area or this light area over here that we need to make dark? Well, once again, I'm going to go in. I'm going to use an adjustment brush, and I'm going to paint over that area to darken it down. And then in the slider, I will just darken that down quite a lot over there. So we have got the glitch somewhere in here. There it is. Over there, let's just pull that up a little bit like so. I don't want the glitch to be colored by black and white. I like those little bits and pieces that are coming on there. And we've now got almost the same thing that we had before. Have a bit of a go, get up to that stage, and then we'll finish this off. 58. Change Adjustment Layer Order: Now, our glitch is only on the dance. It's kind of being affected by the mask. So if we take the glitch and we move it above the dancer, it's going to be affected by the dancer and the background. It still doesn't look quite so good. So what about if we took the glitch and we put it underneath the dancer, but on top of the mask. Now it'll only affect the dancer. You can see if I switch her on and off, but it actually is not affected by the mask. So it is quite important the order that you put these in. I think we're nearly done with her. I'm just going to move her around. I think I'll move her down just a little bit. Over there, once again, you can do a save as, export that out to the client and they should love it. But the important part of the second thing is that sometimes it's really easy if you've built your document correctly with all the things there that are non destructive, it's easy to update anything that you like very, very fast without having to rebuild. Anyway, do try that last bit out and watch the order of your adjustments. 59. Useful AI Tools for Paid Version - Intro: Now, the AI tools in affinity, they're there only if you've paid for Canva Pro. But you can do most things without the AI. I want to take you through the AI tools. So even if you don't have the paid for version, I'd suggest watching this so you can decide whether you think it's something that you might want in the future. Let's get on. 60. Paid vs Free Selections and AI Settings: Before you start working with some of these AI features, it's a good idea to go along to your settings. Now, on the Mc, it's under Affinity and you've got settings there on a PC. I think it's in the file menu. But basically, you're just looking for the settings menu item. And we need to go along to machine learning models. And make sure that you've installed all of these options over here. The segmentation, the depth estimation, that's particularly useful for some of the things we're going to be doing, the colorization in there and the super resolution over there. So just make sure that they are installed. Once again, this is only for the paid version. You can see the little crowns over there. The segmentation is for all of the versions, and once again, you can see there's no crown on that. And it says the object selection tool, it allows you to use that properly. I want to separate the rows from the background. In fact, I want to delete the background completely. So we have got some options that we can use, and I want to show you the differences between using the AI and using the standard options. So if you don't have the ability to use Canva AI because you're not on the paid for Canva version, you can still do a lot of the same things. I'm going to go back to pixels over here. Just make sure my image is selected, and then let's have a look at this little icon at the top. And when I click on it, you'll notice as I hover over it, by the way, it does say Canva AI over there, so it's only available for the full paid up version. Now, first of all, I'm going to just choose Remove Background. Now, I'm going to remove the background in one click. You have to wait a little while while this does its thing, and it does require an Internet connection to work. There we go, and it's got rid of the background, hasn't done a bad job at all. However, it's got rid of the stem, which I really wanted. And there was another little part of a leaf over here that I've liked as well. So this is great if you just need to do very, very quick cutouts of objects. Let me undo that. So you can see I wanted that little leaf there, and I wanted the rest of this leaf and I wanted the stem in there too. So the other way that we could do this is to use the select subject. Once again, this is one of the AI options. You wait you wait around while the AI does its thing. It's done the same thing. But this time it's done as a selection, so you can see it's selected. That bit of the leaf there hasn't selected that one hasn't selected that, but it doesn't really matter because I can now go to my selection tools. Let's go to the freehand selection tool. I can go to the add option at the top there and I can just add that bit in manually. Over there, or I could make a mask. I'll just click on the mask button. That's a square with a.in the middle, deselect it, and I could go to the mask and then use my paint brushes to just paint in or out anything that I wanted from the image there. So no damage done. Let's get rid of that over there. So let's see what happens if you don't have the paid for version. Well, I'm going to go over here to the Object Selection tool and use that. Now, let me just make sure it is selected first. Right, so it's actually shown me that it's done a selection, and look at that. In some ways, this is better because it's got more of the selection that I wanted, plus it's got the stem in there as well. So AI is not always better when it comes to selections. Sometimes it is, but not always. So if you don't have the paid for version, don't feel bad because you can still get to exactly the same area. Anyway, I'm going to stop there, so you can just have a bit of a go between those. If you don't have the paid for version, you could skip out a lot of this area, but do watch out for the projects because you can do those without the paid for version. 61. Select by Depth: Let's have a look at another way of selecting. So using and I'm just going to select the background first, using the little Canva AI icon, I'm going to go down to select sampled depth. Now, this allows me to select things in the image based on how close they are to me. You'll see that we've got two little sliders over here, we've got this weird looking looking dog. And I've got a near slider there. Now, if I pull this over, look at what's happening here. Everything that's close to me is getting deselected, so we've got the paw, we've got the face and the grass. Further I go, the more of that animal it'll pick up, so I can get to this stage here where I've just got the front of the animal over there. Everything else is selected, everything here is not. So if I keep going, I can keep going until I've got the dog and its back and the lead all selected away from the background. Now, what about going the other way if I pull near back again? Well, doing it this way, does it the other way around. So as I pull over there, it's deselecting the background. And if I keep going, you can see we've gotten rid of the background there, but we've left the owner and the other dogs still selected. I'll keep going a bit more until I can deselect them. And get exactly the same thing that I had before, but this time, the dog is selected in the background isn't. It's very easy to inverse your selection if you've selected it the wrong way around. So this allows you to select things based on how close or far they are from the camera. The other thing that's quite interesting is you can actually use it to select things in the middle distance. So if I take this near slider up, over here. So I've got the dog selected, sorry, the dog deselected over there, and everything else is. And then I take the far slider down to deselect the sky. Now what I've got selected is the owner and those dogs over there and the sort of middle distance grass. It's not something you're going to be using every day. I think this is quite usable to be able to select part of an image. So for example, here, maybe I just want the front of the dog coming at me in there, and this way I can do it very quickly and just get the front without its hind legs in there. But you tried it out, have a bit of a play. As I said, it's not something you use every day, and if you don't have the AI facility, it's not that difficult to actually try and do that as a selection using the standard selection tools. Have a play and have fun. 62. Blur by Depth: And et's have a look at another way of working with depth, and that's going to be this portrait blur. Now, the portrait blur works not just on portraits of people, but on animals or anything that you really want to look at or separate from the background with blur. We've got a radius here, and the radius affects the out of focusness the blurring. And we've got another one here called blur smoothness, and this allows you to smooth out that blurring, as well. Just do this one to taste. Now, we've got the blur focal distance. To show you that, I'm just going to take the radius up and the focal distance down to zero. At the moment, you can see it's just this foreground which is in focus. Everything else is blurred to various degrees. As I pull this focal distance up, I can then get things to start to come into focus. If I pull this up to there, you can now see that we've got the front of the dog in focus and the hind legs are slightly out. If I blow that more you'll see the effect a bit more in there. Now, be very gentle when you use this, it's really easy to go over the top and see things which look really, really strange. So a little bit of radius in there, and I'm going to take my focal distance along until I get the dog in focus and everything else is now out. If I just want to see that, we've got three little buttons. Down here, I'm going to click on this middle button so I can kind of see a before and after by just dragging the slider. Across like that. Click apply when you're happy with it. This is destructive, so be careful. 63. Super Resolve: Let's have a look at another one of these. I'm going to go down to the Super Resolve. Now, what Super Resolve does is allows you to take an image and increase the resolution. So you can see this image, if I zoom right in, there's a lot of pixels in there. There's a lot of grain in the image. If I go along to the document setup, we can see that this image or the spread is 1920 by 12 81. So let's see what we can do with the Super Resolve. If we need to make this into a massive big poster, that's obviously not enough resolution. So I'm going to go to if I just click back on the picture again to make sure it's selected. Up to here, I'm going to go to Super Resolve. And then we once again sit and wait. If you don't have the paid for version, you are watching this and you think, Oh, my goodness, that's really good. You'll actually find that there are some websites, online sites that will do this for you as well. And you can take an image and put it in and increase the resolution that way. With all of this, if you want to experiment with it, you can get a 30 day free trial of Canva Pro, and then you can try out all of these features as well. You don't have to continue after the free trial. Right, so have a look at the difference that this has made. There's a little before and after here, so I can actually drag this across. It does look very artificial, doesn't it, in there. But it has done an amazing job with the image itself and getting some of those details back. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Let's have a look further down here. The hands always give away Oh, it's not not bad. Not bad at all. I just looks very plasticy. Anyway, I'm gonna click Apply. I've gone up to 400% there. I'm gonna click Apply. And let's have a look at the resolution now. So if I go to document, document setup, you can see over here, it's now 7,600 pixels by 5,100 pixels. So it really has increased the resolution quite a lot. If I zoom right and I've got to go in a long way before I can get to those pixels. Do be careful of this on people. It can make them look a little bit plasty. Hasn't done a bad job to the car at all. I think that's worked really well. But I think that she looks a little bit too plasticky. But it's a personal opinion. Anyway, do try it out on this image. This and the rows, of course, are in your resources to experiment with. 64. Colorise B&W Images: Let's have a look at another one of the settings in here. We've got something in here called colorize, and this takes a black and white image and adds color to it as it thinks it should be done. I'm going to click Colorise here. We have a little colorized slide, and you can see it's actually done quite a good job, not perfect, but a good job to get started. I've got a saturation slider here so I can go from the black and white through really quite vivid saturation colors, and I've got a temperature so I can either make it warmer or cooler in there depending on what I want from the image itself. Now, it doesn't look true, but it does look like it has been colorized in that sort of old fashioned hand coloring kind of way. I'm going to click on Apply. Now, I have actually got the original here because I made this image black and white. I'm going to show you the original. That's the original there, and that's what it's done to a black and white version. Not bad at all. In fact, when you look at this one, you think, Oh my goodness, he actually looks quite gray. I do like the colors that they've used on the skin tones, but it's done an awful job of the clothing in there. Anyway, let's have a look at another one. So I'm going to go over to this one here. And this image, once again, I've got the original to show you once I've done, has got a lot of blue in it. There's a lot of sort of blue in the denim. So let's try this out. I'm going to click on here. I'm going to go to Colorise. That's really nice, really, really nice what it's done there. I'm going to pull that up. And you can see the difference between this and if I warm it up or cool it down over then I'm going to warm it up a bit like that. That's actually done worked really well. Let's apply that. And I want to show you against the original. That's the original there, which is actually quite a cold image compared to this one here. You can see there are still some issues, but it has made the skin tones really, really warm in there because of the slider. Was this one, the skin tones tend to be a little bit on the bluish side. Now, have a look at the differences that it's done. You can see he's wearing this denim top and he's got his hand across there. When you look closely on here, he's kind of got this weird color over here, and all of a sudden, his clothes change color. Her clothes go a little bit strange like that. So you can't always rely on this. At all. You're going to have to decide if you think it'd be an interesting thing to try out. It's great on really old photographs, but as I've shown you, it's not always correct. I went to Gemini, and I put that same picture into Gemini and asked it to colorize it. And that's the result that we've got from Gemini. As you can see, Gemini, which is nana banana, has done a much, much better job than you can get in Canva AI. Here's the other image, and as you can see, it's done a really nice job with this with the clothing, getting the clothing correct. Although the colors are not quite as they were in the first place, I could probably go in and ask it to make the shirts on the checkered shirts on the boys red, and it would do that correctly as well. Have a play in nano Banana and see what you can do. 65. Portrait Lighting: Let's have a look at the portrait lighting. Now, the portrait lighting is not just for portraits, as I'll show you in a moment, but it adds lights to your scene. So when you do that, you get something, you look at that and you think, Oh, my goodness, that looks terrible. But the idea is that this little light you can move around in your scene and adjust how the lighting is on your scene. There's quite a few controls for this. So let me just pop it over here and we'll start working through some of these controls. Firstly, there's two types of lights. There's a point light. So think of a point light almost like a bare bulb. And then there's a spotlight, which is a light that you can angle around, so you can see if I just take that around there, I can angle that light around and I can change the cone of that spot as to what it's going to affect. Now, I'm going to go back to point light, and let's start over here with diffuse. Diffuse is like taking a light and putting a piece of tracing paper in front of it, so it softens that light down. So we can just adjust the diffusion on the light. Specula is making things more shiny. So if I increase or decrease the specularity, you can see we're getting sort of more of a shine on her face. If we reduce the specularity, that shine disappears. Now, this is quite useful if you're trying to light a bit of hair like that. With specula, it just lights lightens it up. If you take it to zero. If you take it up to 100%, then you get that sort of nice shine over there. Once again, the same on this hair over here, I can get a really nice shine on that. We probably don't want to do that too much on her face. The ambient light is the overall lighting in the scene. If I reduce that, you'll see it reduces the overall light. So now I can actually just see exactly what that little spot or that little point light is actually doing. Let's take that up. By the way, with these, you can actually adjust the color on the various parts so I can go into the ambient light and we can just change the ambient light to a particular color if that helps you. I'm going to leave mine set to white. Down here, we've got the radius, so you can make it larger or smaller. It affects more or less. We've also got a distance so we can change the distance of that light. And lastly, in here, we've got the strength to increase or decrease the strength of the light. You can add multiple lights in here as well. You just click on Add, and you can add a second light. You can move it around and you can just adjust either of those two lights. It's easier honestly to just click on them to select them that way. Now let's go and have a look at a different image over here. So with this image, once again, I'm going to go into my let me just make sure I've clicked on the background. I'm going to go over here to the portrait lighting, and let's move this over to this side of the car. And once again, I could then choose a bit more specularity because the cars a bit more of a shiny object over there. Ambient light, let's move that down so we can see what that light is doing. Over here, the radius, I can see how much I'm going to be affecting. Look at the underneath the car, how much that's affecting the darker areas under the car. Once again, the distance, we can move that about. There's no right or wrong here. You've just got to do it depending on your image and the strength to go from an extreme through to something a lot more subtle. And now I'm just going to take the ambient lighting. Up and you can see how extreme that is. So I pop that light on the front of the car, and it's way too much. We could just take it down a little bit like so. But, for example, you might want to simulate sunset or something like that. You've got a light up there and you could actually just go into the color. And if we made that red, we could sort of simulate a red light from the side, maybe sunset coming in. Look at that how that's affecting the color, which is hitting the edge of the car. I think that should actually be a bit more orange. Something more like that. But have a bit of a play with this and, you know, see how you get on. I'm just going to show you a quick before and after. So that's with my extra son in there. I'll undo it. You can see it actually, it does do something to that image. It just gives it a little bit more life, having that bit of orange coming through. 66. Project: Soil Poster / Brochure Cover: Project time, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be creating this cover for a brochure. Now, we're going to be using some AI features, but if you don't have AI, you're not paying for the pro version, it doesn't matter because I'll show you other ways that you can do it. And you'll see with the selections, sometimes AI is not the best. But let's jump straight in. 67. Set Up Document: Let's start off by creating a new document. I'm going to go along to file a new and I want to create something with pixels because this is going to go on screen. So rather than using one of these options along the top here, which are sort of in millimeters or centimeters, I'm going to go down to my canvases and I'm going to choose this illustration Canvas, and over there, it's pixels. If you want to work in something else, just change it in the document units. I'm checking that I'm actually in RGB mode and that my color profile is S RGB. Let's click on Create Document and get your document set up. 68. Cut Out and Mask Plant: We're going to bring in our picture, so we're going to go along to file and place. We're going to be using this plant picture, and I'm just going to click and drag it all the way in over there. Let's take it across to there. And now that I've got it covering my background, I'm going to go over to the top, and I'm going to make a copy of it before I go any further. So to copy it, the fastest way is copy and paste, so that's either command or control C to copy it, command or control V to paste a copy in. And now that we've got the copy, I'm going to hide the underneath one. So I'm just working on this top one. We'll come back to the underneath one in a little while. But on this top one, what I want to do is I want to cut out the plant and the soil. So I'm getting rid of the background, basically. And you can do this in one of two ways. You can either go along if you're on the paid for version to that little star button over there. Click on that and you can say select subject. And we select your subject. Now, it might not be perfect, so we're going to have to have a close look at that. So let's go along, and we want to use the refine edges to look at the selection properly. I can't see refine edges along here, but that doesn't matter. It's because I'm not on one of the selection tools. If I go to Pixel Pixel selection, and you'll find refine Edges is down the bottom in there. Now let's have a close look at this. It's done an okay job. You can see it's missed out a bit over there. If I switch off mat edges, once again, it's not bad, although there does seem to be something weird going on over here and over there. So I might have to correct those manually. I think what I'd like to do, though, is to go down here and add a little bit of feathering, not much just a tiny little bit of feathering. And let's have a look at the soil down the bottom. The soil looks right. If we switch on mat edges, the soil looks even better there. And you can remember tighten it up or make it more selected using the ramp option down the bottom. So I think I'm going to leave the mat edges switched on, and I will sort out these bits manually. So I'm going to click on a ply over there. Now, if you haven't got the paid for version, don't worry, I'm coming to you in a moment. Right, so let's have a little bit of a look. In fact, I think it's actually done this correctly. That looks like that is the background through there. But there's something weird going on over here. So let's zoom in a bit. Over there. I'm going to get my Lasso tool, the freehand selection tool and I'm going to go over to freehand. I'm on the add option, and I can then just add in that little bit. Over there if I think it was missing. And then down here, we've also got some bits which are missing. So I'm going to go to the straight edged Lasso tool. Make sure I'm on add, and I'm going to click over here to add in these bits. All the way down to actually, there's quite a lot that's missing on there, all the way up. Up to there and around to add that whole little section in there. And once I've done that, I will then go down to the bottom, and I'm going to add a mask to mask it out. Right, so I can deselect that now. I'm going to hide that. Now, let's say that you're on the free version. It's gonna be pretty much the same. I'm going to copy and paste this s. I've got another copy here. So how would I do that? Well, using my object selection tool, I'll go in, get it to select the object there. Make sure I'm on the ad button, go down to the ground, click on the ground and get to do that. Then it's exactly the same. You can go and check it out using refine edges, see what it looks like in there exactly as we did with the other version. Once again, it's a very similar selection. You can see there's a problem there, and I can then use same tools over there to go and add in the bit that was missing. In there. In fact, this one hasn't knocked out that middle bit there, so I might have to go to the minus, go to my free hand tool and just remove that little bit in a free hand way. Exactly the same, add a mask in there. So both these results are pretty much the same ones done with AI and slightly faster. Have a go. 69. Put the Photo in the Text: Et's get some text going on here. I'm going to go down to my artistic Text tool. I'm going to click and drag the text. And then I'm going to find Well, I'm going to type in the word soil first. But I'm not going to find a typeface that suits this. And I want something big and chunky. So I'm going to go down. In fact, there it is. I'm going to use Aerial black. It's up to you which one you want to use. I kind of like that because it's well, it's big and bold. And I'm then going to move my text into the right position. So what I want to do is I kind of want to have the L over there, and the plant is going to be coming out of that L in there, and it's going to be sitting on the soil. I'm going to move this down underneath that layer. Now, watch out that you don't drag it onto the top layer, drag it between the two, if it's not there already. Hide your top one and show your bottom one so we can see the whole of the picture and then we've got the text above it. Now, drag your text and drop it on top of the little icon over there, and it will automatically mask that text into the picture. It's basically taking your picture and masking it into the text shape. Have it there. Now, you'll see if I switch this on, we get that effect in there, which looks really, so cool. We've got the text, growing out or the plant growing out of the text, shall we say. Have a little bit of a go with that, and then we'll go and do a few other bits and pieces on here and a background as well. But remember, you're putting the text onto the picture there. If you're not sure or you get it wrong, just come back and rewatch this little video again. Try it out. 70. Add a Mask & a Background: I'm going to zoom in to the over there, because what I'm thinking would be really nice is that if it kind of went down there, so it almost looked like the plant was going into the L, and I just want to get rid of this little part, this little green bit over here. Now, how can I do that? Well, because I want to make sure it's transparent, so I don't just want to paint with white. If I go into this bottom image here. What I really want to do is I want to move or remove some of the L from this. I can't do that because this says it's a clipping mask in there. So how else could we do that? Well, one way to do it is if I click on the word soil, I add a normal mask to that. And on my normal mask, I'm going to take a paint brush. I'm going to make sure my brush is black. And you can see how if I paint over there now, it's masking some of that picture over here. So I'm going to undo that. I'm going to make my brush a whole lot smaller. I'm using the keyboard shortcut, which is the left bracket over there. We're gonna go in quite close for this. I think I should also make my brush a whole lot harder because it's quite soft in there. Make my brush smaller still. And I'm just gonna paint out that little bit. There. Now, if you want to do straight lines like I've done there, you click once, move to where you want the line to continue to hold down the Shift key and click again, and that will just give you a straight line over there. Let's go and add a background in here now. And we're going to do that by going to file and place. I've got another image for you, which is going to be the background image. And that's the one over there. Let's click on open, and I'm going to bring that in over there. Now, I'm going to keep going until it covers the whole thing. I'm going to take that and drag it below all my layers in there. Now, why is that gone the weird way that it has? Look carefully here. My soil has got the mask and the soil and that in it as well, because I dropped in the wrong position. Let me drag that out again. I'll just fold that up. I'm going to drag it until I see that glow. Then I can drop it and it's sitting behind everything else. Have a bit of a go with that and then we'll change the color on that background. Okay. 71. Add Text and a Gradient Map: Et's change the color of the background. I'm going to make sure that I click on the bottom picture first, and I'm going to go to Pixel, New Adjustment layer, and I'm going to choose a gradient map. Now, when you first do a gradient map, it comes in with this awful color. So I'm going to get rid of the middle color there. I'm going to go over to the left hand side, and I'm going to choose a green over there. And then I'm going to go to the right hand side, and I'm going to choose a different green. And this one here, I'm going to make a little bit darker, I think. It's a bit bright over there. And I'm going to go back to my bright green and maybe darken that down as well. So we have something like that. I don't actually like the green that I've got there. I'm going to make it a little bit more yellow in there. So we get a really interesting background using the colors from the plant. Now, don't forget if you do want to use the exact colors from the plant, you can always use the eyedropper tool and just sample the colors directly from the plant itself. Now that I've got that, I'm happy with that. I want to bring in some text. So this is where it gets really cool because now it's really easy. I go along. I put my text at the top. I'm going to put in the word organic. I actually, that's size wise. That's pretty good, really. Just take it up to there. And I'm going to take that below that layer over there. So between those two. And that way, we get the look of the text being behind the plant almost like it's cut out, but it's so quick to do if you need anything behind the plant now, it's very fast. Let's go to the view menu and have a look in preview mode without all the little lines. That's working okay. Maybe the text needs to be changed a little bit in my case. It needs to be brightened up a bit. Oops, let me go back to the text, back to the text tool and just select all that text and lighten up a little bit in here. And Maybe I'll have to do something white for that as well. But anyway, I could spend ages just sitting and fiddling with the text color. I always like to go into view and in preview mode. Make sure I'm in preview mode over there. That's not looking bad at all. Anyway, don't forget to save it and export it if you wish. Anyway, have fun with that. Try some different examples of using something going into text so you get a lovely mix of the two of them together. Okay. 72. Project: Wes Anderson Filmmaker Style Image - Intro: We've got another project. Now, this one, we're going to try and recreate a style from a famous director, and the one that I've chosen is Wes Anderson. Now, if you don't know the name, you'll probably have seen his movies. One of his famous ones is the Grand Budapest Hotel. He's got a very, very specific, slightly surreal style, and you either love it or hate it, and personally, I love it. But what we're going to do here is we're going to take some images, and we're going to put them together in that Wes Anderson surreal quite odd colored style. And you can see that this is the result that we've got over here. Now, of course, you don't have to like Wes Anderson. If you want to do another style, that's absolutely fine. Just pick a director, have a look at their work, and try and look and see what makes it unique. So is it very, very contrasty? Is it very bright? Does it have lots of color? Is it minimalistic? And then try and recreate that on your own work. But together, we'll do the Wes Anderson one. 73. Select Subject & Mask: Let's start on this Wes Anderson style image. Now, I've got some images which I'm going to find, and I've given them to you, although you could probably find them in stock because that's where I got them from. So I'm going to go along and find the images. I'm going to start off with the woman with the Volkswagen. So it's this one over here, and it comes from Pixel I'm going to click on open. And then I'm also going to find another picture which we're going to use as the background. So I'm just going to go to open again, and we're going to find this image over here. Now, you can see already this is a very Wes Anderson style. It's very surreal. The colors are really strange. So that'll be perfect for a background. Now, I'm going to cut this image out. That's the first thing that I want to do before I start anything else. So if you don't have the paid for version, you go to Object Selection and you can then start to select this object over there. You could select, say, for example, the Beetle first, then you'd have to go into your add option and then you can add in the woman. You can add in the suitcase, as well. You also have to have a look round because you might find some areas like this that you don't want in your selection. So you'll have to go to the subtract option and you can subtract those bits and pieces that you don't want from there as well. But just be careful because sometimes when you subtract them it subtracts, and I'll zoom out again. I was being sneaky there so you couldn't see the whole thing. You look at that and you go, Where's my selection gone? Let's undo that. Again. So what I tend to do or I would do is, although we've been using the object selection tool, I'd go to the Flood selection tool, choose the subtract option, and then go in there and just subtract those bits manually like that. If you want to do this really properly, you'll have to actually go in and subtract all these little bits over there and even go in the blinds over there as well. Don't forget sometimes you get bits like this, and you'll have to manually go in over there with a free hand tool, either add or subtract them depending on what you want from the final image. However, I'm going to just add that put in very quickly. If you have got the paid for version, we can try doing it with AI. I'm going to deselect that. And once again, I'm going to go into my background. I'll just go back to my move tool, click on the little AI button in there, and I'm going to say select subject in there. So as you can see, you can do these things manually. The AI is sometimes just faster, not always necessarily better, although I think in this case, it will be slightly better to start off with Right, so it's done a reasonably good job over here. I'm looking over here. I can see, Oh, there's a bit there that needs to be subtracted. So these bits I will do manually. So I'm going to go in and I'll start off with the freehand selection tool. So those of you who are doing this manually are looking at this going, M, well, do I actually need to pay for the AI? It's up to you. I'm going to use this to subtract that section over there and just clean it up a little bit. So we'll just go around that bit there and subtract that. I might need to subtract these. Depending on how big this is going to be and how detailed you want from the image, you might have to spend a little bit of time cleaning all these bits up. You can see the windows. It's done one of them, but not both of them. And, in fact, this one's got something weird going on outside. So I will use my freehand selection tool once again. I'm going to go to the ad, and I'm just going to manually Now, I've been doing this for years, so you'd think I'd get this the right way around. Let's go to Add, I'm just going to add this bit in over there. And then for this bit here now remember all of this is selected. So I want to subtract that bit. I will use the flood selection tool on subtract and I can subtract that. And this bit here, I'll also subtract that little bit in there. Then it depends on what you want to do. Do you want to go as far as doing these bits, and in that case, you can do it manually yourself. Also, we've kind of got a bit here, which is sort of semi selected. Now, I don't want that to be selected at all, so I'm going to use my assu tool over here. I want to add that into my selection. You'll see if I do that, I could just add that straight in, and whoops, I've gone a bit too far there. Just undo that. I'm just using a straight edge to go round it to add that bit in. And then you can spend more time in here getting all of these absolutely spot on, if you wish. Now, once you've done that, what we can do because we don't want this to be destructive. So we're going to go in and we're just going to add a mask in there to make sure that well, we can make any changes that we want. So at this stage, if I deselected this and I thought, you know what? I really would like to actually get rid of that back window. I could take a paint brush over there. So I'll make sure that I'm on black as my foreground color and then I can just erase out with a brush. Obviously, I'd have to be really careful and going quite small. Make sure that you're on the mask over there. Have a go, get that far and cut her out with an interesting selection. And then we'll take her over into the background over here, but we're going to do some bits to the background first. Have a go, try it out, get that far. 74. Create a Panoramic with Generative AI or Copy & Paste: Let's open up this beach image over here. What I want to do is I want to extend the beach out quite a lot. I'm going to just zoom out a bit over here. And I'm going to go in not up to these automatic AIs, but I'm going to go to the Canva AI, and I'm going to use this little tool here. You see, if you're in Pixel, you don't get that little tool quite the same. If you say crop, if you go to the Canva AI, it's a slightly different cropping tool. It's called the Generative Expand tool. So do watch that Pixel, that's crop. This is Generative Expand. And I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to just expand this out a bit like that because I want this to be very cinematic Wes Anderson style. We want this nice panoramic view over there. And all I'm going to do now is to click Expand. That's done quite an interesting job. We've got the tree over here, and we can bring in the car on this side. And if you look at your layers now when we go back to Pixel, you'll see that this is actually a separate layer over there. So, for those of you who are not on the paid for version, how could you do this? Well, one of the ways that we could do it is to just take a selection of this. So if I took that selection there, and what I'm going to do is to make sure I'm on that layer. You won't have that top layer. Copy and paste that in. So I've got another version of that, and then we can just move this version over a little bit over to there. Now, it's not quite in the right place, so I'm going to just have to make sure that I move it so those two appear to join in there. And then we need to blend them, as well. So the easiest way to do this at the moment is with some sort of mask. So if I put a mask onto that layer, I'm going to make sure I've deselected this, by the way, so we'll deselect that. I'm on the mask, and I'm going to choose my paint brush, and if I paint on there, you can see how I can kind of mask that area out. I'm going to zoom in a bit, and I'm going to actually use a soft brush. So I'm going to take my brush all the way down, so it's really soft and then make it bigger. The more overlap you have, the better mix you'll have between these two now, it's still a little bit on the light side. You can definitely see the difference between those two. But what about if we darkened it down or change it a little bit? I'm actually going to do it manually. I'm going to go across to my burn brush tool. Use a small brush over here. Make sure I'm on the image, not the mask. I'm just going to darken that down a little bit to try and get those two to blend in together. And the Cs actually worked quite well now. What about this section here? Well, once again, a bigger brush and then maybe just one or two clicks over there on this layer to try and darken that down. This one here could probably lightened up a little bit because that bit there is lighter, or I could go to the background, and I could click once or twice on the background to get it to work. You might need to adjust this a little bit more. This area here looks a little bit bluer than that bit does. You don't you don't automatically realize how different this side of the image is to that side of the image. So you just need to play with these and either dodge or burn until they match up together. Now, as I said, I'm going to be using the AI version, so I'm just going to undo all of that. And show my AI version in there because that's got a really nice big palm tree. Do have a go with one of those methods, depending on how you want to do it. You either go across to Canva AI and use the little Generative expand tool, or if you're in pixel, you would use this tool here, you'd pull this out. You click Okay, apply it, and then you would take some of this image and copy it onto that side and blend the two of them together. Have a go, get a nice panoramic looking image either way. 75. Add Sunset Lighting: Let's get this image onto the other one. I'm going to click on the image itself to a copy, Control C, Command C, whichever you prefer onto this image, Control or Command V to paste it straight in. And I'm going to move the image across over here and I'm going to scale it down because it's a bit on the large side. I want something maybe just like that in there. Now that I've got that, I've got a few bits and pieces that need doing in here. We need some shadows underneath it. I also want to affect the lighting over here. I want a bit of sunlight. Like I showed you with that studio lighting, I'm going to put a little bit of orange on the side there to simulate the light that's coming through here. You can see the light is coming across this way, so we might need to darken down this part of the car. I'm going to do this in a few ways. I'm going to use the AI, but I'm also going to use some Dodge and burn. For those of you who are in the free version, don't worry about it. We can do both. Let's start off by doing the lighting and sorting out the lighting. On this image up here, I've clicked on the image. I'm going to go up to my AI. I'm going to choose portrait lighting, and I'm going to move the light over to this side up here. Now, I want this light to be orange, so I'm going to go over here and I'm going to click on the color. Let's just take that back to orange. And get some sort of orange light going in there. I'm going to increase the strength so we can have a look and see how that looks. Over there. You play with these and see what you can get from them. Change the distance there. There we go. We'll get it just to go to the edge, like so, and I'll click on Apply. Now, if you want to see it before and after, use your either Command or Control Z to undo it. Command Shift Z or Control Shift Z to redo it. You can see the difference that I've got from there to there. Now, what about if you don't have the AI version? Well, one way you can achieve exactly the same result is if I undo this, I could use a paint brush, and I know it seems a bit weird to be able to paint a color straight on there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along and paint on this layer. Yes, there are ways to do this non destructively, but for the moment, we'll just use this method. I'm going to choose my orange that I want to use. I want to paint with orange. But there just a nice bright orange up there. And I want to make sure that I'm not painting on sort of the outside of this layer. Now, you can see that if I'm on there and I've got a mask, it doesn't matter where I paint, it'll only paint on the layer itself. But the second thing I want to do is when I'm painting, I don't want to fill it with color like that. I'm going to go from normal and I'm going to go down to color mode. So there's color mode there. You can see now when I paint, it's actually just painting it or colorizing it with orange. I'll zoom in a bit over here and I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller and I could then start to paint little bits of orange. Smaller still on the edges over there and just pick up a little bit of orange. I'm going over the top so that you can see exactly what it is that I'm doing, painting those colors in. You'll obviously want to be a lot more subtle. Let's undo that. The other option that I use in here is another one and it's often called add over there, Add or color burn. When you do that, it adds it in and it makes it very, very bright. Like that. So if you're going to use that, go over to your options at the top here and just take down the amount of color that you're using. So once again, if I do that, it'll just lighten up and warm up those edges a little bit as if there's some sunshine. Hitting that, especially on this darker air it's working very, very well. Whichever of those methods you want to use, have a bit of a go with those. I just need to go and get mine again. I'm using the AI version over there once again to just go through it. It's portrait lighting. Put in your light where you want it to be. I'm going to have to zoom out a bit over here, move my light to the side, change the color to orange. Over there or even red, depends on you entirely. And then have a look at your strength, change the strength, change the radius, change all of these options until you get exactly what you want from that. I'm going to change this specularity over here, let's have a look. Yeah, that works really well. And click on apply to get some light coming in from the side. Have a go with either of those methods. 76. HSL Adjustment Layer: I'm not entirely convinced that these two colors work together. This one looks very sort of bluish and surreal. This is more normal. So on this layer, I'm going to go along to Pixel. I'm going to go down to my adjustment layers, and I'm going to add an adjustment to effect this. I'm going to use HSL. Now, HSL allows you to move the slider along the color wheel. So as you can see, as I'm pulling this over, what was maybe pink has now become purple, what was blue has become red. So it's just changing these around. Now, I'm going to close that down because I only wanted to affect the car. I know that's not right yet, but I only want to affect the car, so I'm going to drag this onto the car onto the text where it's this background. Now it's part of this layer here and it's not affecting the background. Now, let me go back to that again. I'm going to click on the HSL shift adjustment, and I can now tweak it until it looks okay. So that's normal, and I can push it over one way or the other. I'm just going to push it over to the right slightly to get the colors to move along the color spectrum. So we're sort of getting something which is more sympathetic to the background. I'll go a little bit further. And I'm going to stop there. Now, let's have a look with and without it. So if I poke it in the eye here, that was before, that's after. You can see the colors are more sympathetic. Try it out. 77. Adjustment Brush: You'll notice the background shadows are pretty harsh, and the car is not that harsh. It's quite soft delighting. So I'm going to do something else here as well. I'm going to go along, and I'm going to use my adjustment brush. I'll just get a slightly larger brush in there and just paint on this side of the car, and I can then adjust it in here. And I'll also paint maybe a little bit down here where her legs are in the suitcases, and up to now, of course, I only want that to affect this layer, so I'm going to drag it and I'm going to drop it on the text that says background. So now this is only going to affect that side of the car, and we're looking for something a little bit more like that. So I can then go and tweak these settings. That's far too much, but just a little bit like that to darken down ever so slightly. If you want, you could also play with things like contrast. So we could go along to the pixel, new adjustment layer, and let's go and have a look at the contrast. I will just use brightness and contrast and increase the contrast a bit. You can see what happens if I do increase it. Over there. It's not making this darker. It's just making the blacks blacker in there, and I could darken it down using the brightness over there. I'm just looking for something maybe a little bit more like this. And at any time, when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, well, you know, I can always go back to my HSL. If that's not right, tweak that again and keep adding colors. This is very blue, so maybe I'd even go in here. You can see I just can't help myself. I got to keep going over here and add some blue to this. And I'd probably do that with a color balance to be fair. And we could just add some blue to the scene. Maybe just a little bit of blue in there to cool that down a little bit. Anyway, you can add as many of these in as you want. And remember, you can drop them into that layer so they only effect that layer there with the car on it. Have a go. 78. Change Your Viewpoint with a Mesh: As you can see, I've just put in a brightness and contrast layer over the top of everything to try and get them all to have that Wes Anderson interesting look. I'm just going to fold this one up as well. Now, the problem that I've got here is that the car, the viewpoint of the car is a lot lower down than the background. It looks like when this has been photographed, we were at a lower point when this has been photographed, we were at a higher point. We need to get those to be the same. So I'm going to go to my background. Now, in order to do this, I need to put these two layers together. So I'm going to click on the top one. I'm going to go to Pixel. Merge and merge down. And now both of those are on the same layer. I'm not too worried about these ones here. I'm only going to be working on the background. So with the background, I'm going to go over to my mesh warp tool. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to double click to put a mesh point across the horizon. And then I'm going to select those two points, and I'm going to pull them down. So what I'm actually doing is I'm meshing this and pulling the horizon down until it looks correct. That looks more normal over there. I'm going to okay that, so I'll just click Apply. Let's have a look at before over there. You can see how the card doesn't look quite right, whereas after it actually looks more like it was in that scene because we've changed our viewpoint. Try it out. 79. Paint in Your Shadows: Let's add some shadows in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do them manually. So on my background, I'm going to add a pixel layer, and I'm actually going to paint them in. And we're going to use a number of different layers to build up the shadows slowly. Now, let me start off with a paint brush. I'm going to go over here and just increase the brush to 100%. And I want a nice soft brush. This. So I'm going to start off quite large over here. I want black as my foreground color. Now, I could just click on that one there to bring it to the front, or you can just press X on the keyboard. And I'm going to paint. So here we just paint roughly underneath the car. This is the first layer just to kind of get us into the idea that there's something that is sitting above the ground. So this is going to be just a little bit dark in here. And if you notice that the trees actually go all the way across like that, we might actually just decide to darken this area a bit more, as well. We can put in a harder shadow later if we wish. Now, I know what you're thinking. You look at that thinking, Tim, there is no way that that looks anything like a shadow, and you're right, doesn't. But what we'll do is we're going to take the Opacity right down. All we do is we're looking at darkening the bit underneath the car a little bit. And because this is black, it's also removing some of the color in there. Shadows have less vibrancy than other areas. Now, we're going to build that up, so I'm going to go and add another pixel layer over here, and let's make that a little bit smaller in there. This might be a little bit more accurate inside here. So in the car over there, that bit there, this bit over here. And if you've gone too far, doesn't really matter. We can always get the erased tool, a normal eraser, make the brush a lot smaller on my eraser and just get rid of the areas that I don't want. So I think that bit over there, maybe a harder edge in there. Just work backwards and forwards over here until you get what you're after a little bit more. Maybe under there. And then once again, we will just reduce the Opacity on that. If you look and you think, well, actually, all the way over there, there shouldn't be a shadow right out there, get your razor and reduce it until it seems correct. Now, although we've got this dark area under the car, the car still looks like it's floating. So what we need to do is we need to have a really dark area underneath the tires. And I'm going to do that with a paint brush, much smaller brush over here, and we'll zoom in a bit. Because what we want is a dark area under here. Now, I need to do this on another layer, and Nelly forgot. So we need a darker area over here and maybe a little bit behind that tie. They're not too much out the side here. And the same over here, darker area there, a bit less over there. You can see that the car itself is actually quite light. The blacks are not black on the car. Now, we could fix that either by adjusting our shadows or we could go to the car layer itself and then put something in the car layer. I'm just going to click on brightness and contrast. I'm going to go up to pixel, down to New Adjustment layer and I'm going to go to my levels and just push the black level up. You can see until those wheels become darker. Let's have a look at those there. Now, that one looks a bit strange. That one doesn't look quite right. Use your arrased tool and just get them until they look. Oh, I'm on the wrong layer. That's that's not good. Let's try that again. Just make sure that I'm actually on the correct correct layer. So I will do that once more. Apologies. I'm going to go to pixel, New adjustment layer. I'm going to use levels, push the blacks up a little bit on that layer to get those dark areas out. So it kind of matches the background as well. And then I'm going to go back to my shadows and just play with them until they look right. So erase on that a little bit, maybe on that side a little bit as well. Now, this one here, because it's very small, doesn't have to be reduced too much because if you have that darkness underneath it, you can see how it just plants it on the ground. But there. We probably also want something similar underneath the suitcase, something really dark down there over there. Don't go too far down here because once again, it'll look like it's actually floating in there, just really close to the wheel. You can keep going with these and do another one really, really close to the wheel until you feel confident with it. If you want something a little bit harsher like that, do these ones first, and then you can go in on another layer and do a harder shadow as well. But even with the harder shadow, there'll still be these sort of softer shadows underneath. I have noticed, though, that this back shadow is kind of going up at a weird angle. It should be further across. So I'll just have a look at that. This is the one here. Use my raised tool, maybe a slightly bigger brush and just raise that back a bit so it'll go more of an angle. Like that. Right. Anyway, have a go, get to that stage, and then we'll look at doing a hard shadow with a little bit of color in it as well, because, as you can see, these are not gray these shadows here. We want to match that. 80. Long Hard Shadow: Let's have a look at a long shadow over here. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and get, believe it or not, a selection tool. So I'm going to be using my freehand selection tool, and over here, I can choose either the straight edge if it was a building or something like that, or in this case, the rounded freehand. Remember, there's nothing right or wrong here. All we're doing is we're getting the appearance of some sort of shadow. So I'm going to go and I'm going to just draw out what I think the shadow might look like. Over there. Let's just go back to there. Now we're going to add another pixel layer and I'm going to fill that area. So I'm going to use the flood fill tool. And what I want to do is I want to choose a different color. I've double clicked on my foreground color, and I'm going to sample this brown color that we've got over here. Um, I think that's it, Let's just tweak that a bit and say close. And now I can just go and flood fill that area over there. I know that looks very, very strange to start off with. Let's deselect that. But of course, I could then go in and change the Opacity. So we're just looking to reduce the Opacity on that so we get some sort of feel like those ones have got in there. And by adjusting this, I say, Well, that doesn't look too good. Use your erase tool, erase out the bits that you don't think look so good anymore. So I can just pull it out a little bit like this. You don't want people to look at this and go, Wow, what a fantastic shadow. You want them to just look and go, Yeah, really looks like it was there. I'm going to reduce the Opacity slightly of that a bit more so you can barely see it. But it gives the impression that's there. 81. Recolor Tree & Remove Line: We've got two things to do here. One is to sort out the tree, which looks very blue, and the other is this little line around the car. So let's sort out the tree. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use a selection tool to roughly select the tree. I'm going to go into pixel, new adjustment layer, and I'm going to use color balance. And I'm going to push the reds right up, so it's kind of warming up the edge of that tree. You could add a bit of yellow if you wished. And we'll deselect that. Now. Now, chances are, there's a little bit of an edge there that you might see later on. So I'm going to make sure I click on the mask, get my paint brush. Now, when I'm painting, I'm going to check that my selection up here, my mode is set to normal, not add or color or anything like that. Otherwise, it won't work. Make my brush a bit bigger and just paint out that area over there. With a soft brush, so I get a soft edge on that. You can see there's a much softer edge there now. So why have we got this square around the car? Well, what probably happened is that as we change the scaling on the car, it kind of got slightly affected from the mask. So basically, the problem is the mask. If I show and hide the mask, you'll see that's where the edge of the picture actually is. So if I click on the mask, I'm going to use my paint brush. Black and do exactly the same thing, but with a slightly smaller brush, and I can just paint out that line there down there. Don't think there's one over there. There. That's it. Save your file and export it. And you can always come back if you want to tweak any of these settings because nothing is set in stone. We can always go back and change anything we like in here. And I'm going to just change the exposure because I think it's too dark. Like so. Have a go and try to Wes Anderson your own image as well. Okay. 82. Channels - Intro: In this section, which is not very long, we're going to be looking at channels. Now, you might never have used channels before, and I want to show you what they are, how they work, and how they can actually help you with your selections. 83. What Are Channels & 8 Bit: Let's have a look at how images are made up. Now, I've got an image over here, but this could be any image at all. It could be on a laptop. It could be on a tablet, it could be on smartphone or a digital camera. You see, images are made up of red, green, and blue, which you know, we've gone through that already, ones that are displayed on devices. But each of those red, green, and blue by themselves are called a channel. So this image is made up of three channels, as opposed to a CMYK image which is made up of four channels sine magenta, yellow and black. So we'll talk about the three channels in here. In fact, there's another channel which you don't see and you can have multiples of them called Alpha channels. For now, we're just going to talk about RGB channels. I'm going to go to the window menu. I'm going down to my Pixel and across to channels. And you can see we've got three channels here, one for each color. So those three channels together make up all the millions of colors that you see on your screen. So if I were to hide, for example, the blue and the green channel, over there, we're just seeing the red channel here. Now, these channels, although they show up there as full color, they are just gray scale. They are just light through to dark pixels. You can see because it's the red channel, this red gradient I've got is showing up as pure white because it's just showing 100% of red through there. If I were to hide it and go to the green channel, the green gradient is showing up at 100% in there. And likewise, if I go to the blue, the blue channel is showing up at 100% white at the top there. Sorry, I've got these the wrong way around, but you can see the idea blue, red and green. So all the colors that we see are made up of those three. Now, each of these channels has got a number of shades of gray to make up this image. Now, there's a standard image that you work on a normal image, something you download from the web or get from a picture library usually is made up of 256 shades of gray for each channel. And we know that because this image here is called an eight bit image. You can see it says RGBA, red, green, blue, and Alpha, and there's a slash and an eight over there. So eight bit means that there are 256 shades of lightness in here. So why do we see all these millions of colors if there's only 256 shades? Well, it's because we take the red, green, and blue and multiply them together. So 256 times 256 times 256 is a little bit over 16 million colors that we're seeing on this particular image. There is a downside to something like this, and that is, if you've created a gradient in a certain color like blue, a very vivid blue, it's not using green or red to display those colors, so you're actually only going to see 256 shades of blue in there. And this is why sometimes with gradients, particularly single color gradients, if they are in the red, green or blue spectrum, you tend to get what's called banding like little lines across it. So if you're using a lot of gradients, it's worth thinking about going up to the next level of color called 16 bit. I'll show you that in a moment. Let me stop at this stage here. If you want to open up any image and just have a look at the RGB channels in there, and then we'll move it on a little bit more. I know this is brain exploding stuff, so we'll take it nice and slowly. 84. What Are 16 Bit Channels: When professional photographers shoot, they don't always shoot in eight bits. A lot of digital cameras will work in higher bit depths, some of them ten, some of them 14. And that means that there are more shades of gray in each channel that they are able to record. I've got an image over here of this woman, this portrait, and if you have a look, this is RGB a 16. So this is a 16 bit image. Now, that means that there are so many more colors in each channel. In fact, each of those channels has got about 65,000 shades of gray in each of them. So you can time 65,000 by 65,000 by 65,000 and get a very big number. And that's how many shades of colors you could potentially have. And that means that if you are using something with a lot of very subtle gradients and you want to keep them, then using an eight bit image, sorry, a 16 bit image will be the better option. Now, if you've got a 16 bit image like this, how do you know, apart from going to the channels? Well, the other way that we can tell is if you go to document setup over here, and you'll see at the bottom, this says the color format is 16 bit RGB over there. Let's just go back into here very quickly and have a look at the individual channels. So there's this one over there, that's the blue channel, the green channel, and the red channel. You can see they're showing up with the colors on them. It's still the same thing. It's just shades of that color over there. 85. HDR 32: Let's have a look at something called 32 bit HDR. Now, what I'm going to do is show you three pictures that I photographed. I just did them from my phone. We've got this picture here, which has got a medium exposure, but you can see a lot of the detail out there is, well, it's too bright. And the detail down here is just too dark. So I did another exposure here as well, where I got all the detail I could from this dark, ready black area down here, and I did another photo where I got as much detail from the highlights as possible. I hand held these. They are not on a tripod or anything like that. So let's put them together as a 32 bit HDR image. By the way, each of these is eight bit. If I go along to document setup document setup here, you'll see that it is an RGB eight. So I've got three images which are eight bit. I'm going to close those down over there. I only open them to show you. Now, what we do to bring in a 32 bit image or make a 32 bit image is you go to file. You go to New Image process, and over here, we do HDR Merge. Now, I'm going to click on Merge over there, and there's going to ask me, can you show me the images? So I'll just add them in. Now, I've put these three images into your folder so that you can play with them as well over there, and I will click on Open. Now, it shows me the images in there. But if I go down here, we've got a few more options. I do want to make sure I automatically remove any ghost. I, when you've got two images which are one on top of the other and you've moved slightly, you might get a ghost of one of the images, so I'm going to get rid of that. Noise reduction? Well, I'm going to leave it on the default because we don't need that. And over here, we've got tone Map HDR image. Now, I'm going to click on Okay. And then what happens is it puts those images together. It overlaps them. It makes sure they're all aligned, and it takes us into the tone mapping area. Now, that looks horrible, but what it's done is it's mixed those three images together, so we should be able to get to the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights, and have detail in all of them. You can see we've got presets down here, so I could click on a preset if I want to see that. This dramatic one, that doesn't look too bad at all, and that's showing the detail from outside as well as the detail from inside. But remember, these are just presets. If we go to the other side over here, we've got some tone map options. So I can go along to the tone compression, and I can pull this down so you can see how it's compressing more, and we're getting less detail from those highlights. I can go to local contrast and we can increase that contrast or decrease the contrast, as well. There's so many options in here that you can then start to play with from things like the Black point to get more blacks in there or less blacks and the brightness of the image as well. Saturation well, we can increase the saturation on there. So you can just go through here and mix those three images together until you get an image that you're happy with. I got to be honest, I'm not overly happy with this. At the moment it was an awful picture to start off with. In case you're wondering, that is a multi fuel stove which you use on a boat, and this is where Fuji Our cat plays. So that's what that weird thing is over there, and this reflection of a guitar in the window. So in here, we've got more options right the way down to curves. You can change your curves. But remember what you're doing now is you're actually working with three images in one, which makes a 32 bit HDR HDR stands for high dynamic range image, so we can get detail from the highlights and detail from the shadows. Now, when I'm finished with that, I can click on Apply, and here is my image. But let's just make sure that we've clicked on it. If we want to go back and change it again, you can click back on Tone Map. Little button up the top here, and we're back again into tone mapping. And we can go and make any more adjustments over there. It's getting worse and worse. The further I go into it. Anyway, do have a bit of a go with that. Try it out, and, you know, try it on your own stuff, take your phone and do some different exposures of the same scene. You know, you might want something where you've actually got an image and it's at night, but you can actually see into the window of a shop which has got the bright lights on, and you want to get detail from the outside street as well as from the bright areas. And you can do this and make up HDR, 32 bit image and use tone mapping on it. Now, if we want to save this out, let's just have a quick look at what it is at the moment, because if we go to setup, you'll see that it's actually a 32 bit HDR image. If we go to file and we're going to export this when we're exporting this out, and I'm just going to choose the defaults over there, I'll use a JPG option. Click on Export. Let's put this on the desktop so I can find it again to show you. I'll close that down. So if I open that up again, this is the exported file, and there it is over there. What you'll see is when I go to Document Setup and document setup there, it's now an eight bit image once again. Do try it out. It's quite fun, and you can get some interesting results with it. 86. E5 Alpha Channels: What are Alpha channels? Well, Alpha channels have got a few uses, but basically they are grayscale channels, which just hold information. Now, one of the uses for Alpha channels is certain bits of software, particularly in video editing don't allow you to use transparency. So you couldn't save it out as a PSD file, for example, with transparency or PNG, but they do recognize Alpha channels for transparency. So that's one use for Alpha channels. Another use, and this is the one I'm going to demonstrate now is that you can use Alpha channels to help you with your selections. And what's weird, though, is that masks are kind of an Alpha channel, as well. Anyway, let's just have a look. So I've got this woman up here again, and I'm going to zoom in to her face. I'm going to her lips. An I want to do a little selection on her lips. Now, if you just watch this every so often, first of all, if I click off of it, you only see that sort of RGB composite there. When you click on the layer itself, you'll see the full channels. So if you just wonder why maybe you don't have all of them in yours, make sure you've clicked on it. I'm going to go along to the free hand Lasso tool, and I'm just going to select her lips. Now, I'm not doing a great job because this is not a tutorial about doing great selection, so I'm just going to go around her lips like that, and I might just refine them very quickly going in here and putting in a bit of feathering. That's all that I'm going to do. I'll click on Apply. So I now need to go out, let's say, and I want to save that selection to use later. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to the Pixel menu. I'm going to Pixel selection, and I'm going to go and I'm going to say save as a spare channel. If you save it to a file, it saves it as a totally independent separate file. I'm going to say save as a spare channel. There is my spare channel there. I'm going to right click it, click Rename, and I'll call this Lips. Oh, libs. Let's try that again. I'm going to click Okay. And then I can forget about this selection, deselect that. And if I wanted to, I could save this document as a dot Af file, and that would save that little selection or that channel Alpha channel with the document. So then what about getting it back? Well, to get it back, you just go along there. Once again, right click on the channel and just say load to pixel selection, and it will bring it back as a selection for you. Let's take this on a bit further. I'm going to deselect this. I'm going to do another one. So over here, I'm going to just go round her teeth. Like that. And then I'm going to save that as a selection. Now, it says Pixel selection there. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about this pixel selection, not the lips. So we get a Pixel selection, right click it, and we're going to once again create this bare channel over there. So there's our other channel. I'm going to right click that, rename it and call it teeth. So I've now got, if I deselect this, two channels there, one for lips and one for teeth. If I right click on teeth now, I can then load that to the pixel selection, and there's my teeth back again. But of course, we can take this one step further because I want to adjust her lips but not her teeth, so I can go into the lips channel. I can load that to the Pixel selection. Then I can go to the teeth, right, click that and I can say subtract that from the Pixel selection. You can see in here, we can add to the Pixel selection, we can subtract from the Pixel selection, and we can intersect with the Pixel selection. I'm going to choose subtract from Pixel selection, so it'll subtract that bit there, so it's only her lips that are now selected. If I went over here to Pixel down to new adjustment layer, and I used Let's use an exposure on here, and I just darken it down. You can see it's not affecting her teeth in there. Let me deselect that over there. So do have a bit of a go with it. As I said, one of the uses is about saving your selections, which can then be saved with a document, and you can add and you can subtract those Alpha channels as selections together onto your image. Try it out. Okay. 87. Masks as Alphas: Now, sometimes you'll see some other Alpha channels appearing. So what I've done is I've made a selection of her nail. I haven't made any sort of Alpha channel in here at all. I'm going to go to Pixel New Adjustment layer, and I'm going to use this exposure. I'm just going to darken down her nail a bit like that. And then we'll just deselect that. So what have we got here? Well, we've got something called the exposure adjustment Alpha. And it's this selection or this mask over here. It's coming up as an Alpha channel. If I click back on the background, you'll see that that exposure adjustment Alpha disappears. So it's only there when you actually click on the adjustment layer. I'll do this one more time over here, so I'm going to do a quick selection. Around there. Once again, I'm going to go to the pixel. New adjustment layer, I'll use curves. I'm just going to darken down that nail, give it a bit more contrast over there and deselect it. So you can see if I click on this curves, we've got a curves adjustment Alpha. If I click on the exposure, we've got an exposure adjustment Alpha. If I click on the curves adjustment Alpha over there, that's actually the mask. I can paint on that. So I'm painting directly onto the mask, which is actually painting directly onto the Alpha. Let's just get some white over there. Paint that bit back and we can then paint in these nails over here as well. And all of that is happening on the curves adjustment alpha, which is a mask. Anyway, once again, try adding an adjustment layer in there and checking out the Alpha that you get from that. 88. The Development Area - Intro: Now, there's an area inside Pixel called development. And as you see, sometimes we'll open up a picture and it'll go straight into development. Sometimes it goes straight into Pixel. But development is all about working with raw files. Now, if you've got no idea what raw files are, don't worry, I'm going to be explaining exactly what they are as we go through it. So let's get started. 89. What is a RAW File: Let's go and open up an image. I'm going to double click over here and I'm going to go and open up a file. I'm going to take this file in there and click Open. I'm in the Pixel studio at the moment. I click Open and look what happens. It automatically jumps to something else called Develop. We've got different tools in here. We've got different panels on the right hand side. Why did it do that? Because it doesn't do that with all images that you open? Well, it's because the particular image that I opened is what's known as a raw file. Now, let me just explain a little bit about raw files and where you come across them. Raw files are files that come directly from a digital camera. So if you photograph with a digital camera, you very often have the choice of saving out what you've saved or what you've photographed, shall I say, in two formats. You can either save it as a raw file. And depending on the type of camera, it could have a different extension. There are things like DNGs, Nikon have got a different extension, Can have got a different extension. But they are all files which contain all the raw information from the scene. If you save out as a JPG file, then what's happened is the camera has processed the information and very often has knocked out some of the highlights or the shadows depending on the initial exposure that you've chosen. Whereas a raw file will very often keep all of that information. So, a raw file over here, if you have a look along the top, it tells you a bit of information about this file. In this case, this says RGBA 32. If you open up a JPG or you save a JPG from a camera, very often, it will be an eight bit file. So there's more information in this image. It doesn't mean that the camera shot that at 32. It's just opened it at 32. Usually a lot of digital cameras, professional ones will be able to save out the information as ten, 12, 14, 16 bits. So quite a lot of extra information that you can use. Once you've done this and you've made some changes, I'll show you how to change things in a moment. What do you do? Well, if this is a raw file, the great thing is that when you go to output, you can either output it as a pixel layer, in which case, it will just change it to a straight flat file, normal file. Or you can actually have it as a raw layer. And there's two options here, either to embed the image or to link it. I'll just choosembed for the moment, and then I click on Develop. So now what we have over here is a different type of layer that we haven't looked at yet, and it's got a little camera on the left hand side there. So if I'm making some changes in here, and then I think, Oh, I wish I had done that in raw, you can just double click on the icon. And it'll open it up again in raw and you can make more changes in here. I'll just show you, I'm going to go and change the exposure and I'm going to go over the top completely. I'm going to say develop over there. Then maybe I've gone in here and I've gone to my adjustments and I thought, let's make this. Let's use HSL on it and make some horrible changes. But then I think I wish I could go back to my raw file. I can just double click on the Raw file there. And go back and adjust my exposure in there as well. That's as a Raw file. You can't do that if you choose a pixel layer afterwards. I just click on Develop. So this image here has got the Raw file embedded in it and you can always go and change it. Have a quick look at that and then we'll go into more details in the develop area. I've added the raw file in with your other files so that you can open it if you don't have any of your own raw files to try out. 90. Basic Settings & Presets: Let's open up an image. I'm going to open up this one that I've provided for you. It's called Norfolk August and it's a DNG file. DNG file is a raw file format. It actually stands for digital negative. It doesn't come from one specific camera, but it's it's kind of in the raw files. It's like the JPG of the raw files. Lots of people use it. Now, over here on the right hand side, right at the top, I've got a histogram. Now, we've looked at histograms before, but they're quite useful in the raw fm and keep an eye on it, and you can actually see how your exposure changes when you make some changes in here. We're going to go down to this area now, and we've got five little tabs. There's the basic tab. There's lens correction tabs, details, tones, and masks. Don't worry. We're not going to go through every single detail of all of them. I just want to show you the important things. So starting over here with the basics. The first thing at the top is a preset. So if I make some changes here and I get this image looking really good and I'm very happy with it. But of course, I might have four or five other shots also with the same exposure that I want to correct, I could save that as a preset. I can add a preset and I can just apply that preset to the other images. Now, what is slightly strange, and this caught me out the first time that I used Affinity like this was that this preset is just for the basics. If you go to lens, you've then got presets for the lens. If you go to details, you got presets for the details. So if you make a preset over here for the basics and then change the lens and details and tones, you'll find that by applying that preset, it doesn't necessarily update those on your next image. So just be aware of that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go over here to my exposure, and I'm just going to adjust the exposure to lighten it up. So as I'm adjusting it, yes, we can see more details in here, but you can also see that the histogram is moving across to the right hand side. So we've got more detail in the middle area over here. So I'm just going to not do anything too harsh to it, roughly lighten it up so we can see the dinosaur. Now, there's two more slides in here. One is for the black points so we can darken down the blacks over there, and one is for the brightness. So once again, we can lighten up the lighter areas without affecting the darker areas as much. And once again, when you try this out, have a look and see what the histogram is doing. Then moving down, we've got the contrast, so we can adjust the contrast either way. Clarity, which makes the image almost appear sharper. It's really nice. It's not sharpening, but it makes it appear sharper over there. Saturation to increase the intensity of the colors and vibrance. Vibrance is like a delicate saturation, but it doesn't mess with skin tones as much as saturation does. So it's really a very nice one. I prefer vibrance. It's a lot more delicate, unless of course you want to go completely over the top with that one. Moving down, we've got the white balance over here, and we can just switch on the white balance and then adjust the warmth of that image. I'm going to warm it up a little bit. Over here, let's go down. Again, shadow and highlights. Now, I'm going to switch that on because I can then go to the highlights and I can darken down the highlights or lighten up the highlights. And you can see by darkening down the highlights, I'm getting more details in the window in this cathedral. So I can pull that down to just get a bit more detail in there. If I wanted more detail in the shadow areas, I can increase or intensify those sorry, increase those shadows, not intensify them. I can lighten up those shadow areas in there. And then down the bottom over here, we've got the profile. And remember, we've talked about profiles before, and we can output them as anything you like, really. But be careful because some of them will give you colors that are not available on other people's machines. So if in doubt, stick with SRGB, it's a nice safe one. So that's the basic tab over there. Try it out, have a bit of a play with it. Don't forget, before you click Develop, make sure that you are on the raw layer. So we're going to take that in as embedded file over to here. If we need to make some changes, we can just go and double click and we're back into the develop area and go and make some changes over here. Lastly, I want to save this as a preset in case I've got some other images that need these exact same settings. But just before I do that, I'm going to go along to one of these other little tabs. It doesn't matter which one, I just want to show you another tab in here. I'll go to the curves and I'm just going to go wild with that curve over there. Let's go back to the basic settings over here. If I add a preset now, I'll just call this tester. You can call it anything you like really over there. Let's say that I then went back to my tones, and I switch that tone off over here, back to my basics, made some silly changes to this. And I want to go in over here, back to tester again, you can see it resets it, but what it doesn't do is it doesn't add in the tones over there. It's only doing the basics. So just remember, you can use this for other images, but it's also quite a nice way to save your settings while you're going along if you want to experiment, you've gone in here, you thought, Wow, that's fantastic. I like that. Save it as a preset, and then you can go wild with some of the other settings, try something completely different. I mean, that's just horrible. But then you can always go back again. That's the default. Go back to Testra again in there. I've called Min tester. You can call it anything you like. It doesn't really matter. Try this out, see how you get on. 91. Lens Distortion & Chromatic Aberration: I I'm going to go back into my raw file. So just double click on there. And we're going to go over to the lens option over here. Now, some cameras will automatically be selected in here and you can actually see the lens profile automatically. Mine hasn't picked it up automatically. You can see this little warning symbol there. But it doesn't matter. If you don't see yours, you can just click in there and go and find it. Now, I'm on a Sony, so I've got a Sony 27 to sorry, 24 to 70 in there that I want to use. So I'm going to switch it on. And when I do, you can see that the image slightly adjusts itself, so it gets rid of any distortions that the lens might have put in. Now, we can actually manually distort as well so we can pull these in and out from the middle. This sort of pincushion effect can be a bit of a problem sometimes, especially if you're shooting something which has got to be absolutely upright. We've got horizontal vertical and rotation, so you can have a bit of a play with those and see what they're actually doing to adjust them. And then further down, we've got something called Chromatic Aberration. Chromatic Aberration is when the image usually towards the edge of the image splits into the colors that you can see. So you might find that you're seeing a fringe of red or magenta or something like that, and this allows you to correct those little problems. It usually happens at the very edges of a lens. The more you pay for a lens, the less of that you usually get. 92. Detail Settings for Noise: Now, defringe removes the purple fringe that you can sometimes get around an object. Remove lens vignette. This removes the darkening that can sometimes occur at the edge of the image and then post crop vignette. So that's once you've cropped it, if there's a vignette on there, you can work with that. Otherwise, this one works on the whole image. That one works on a cropped area. So let's move on to the details. Now, in the details, we've got a radius and an amount over here. We're going to come back to that one. And I'm going to go down to the noise reduction first, and then we'll have a look at what those two are actually doing. What I'm going to do is in the noise reduction so that you can see this, I'm going to zoom into my image and you can see there's quite a lot of noise in there or grain as it's known. Now, grain can look really good on an image. It gives it that photographic film type of look. But if you don't want it, you can remove it in here. So I can go to luminance. Luminance is the lightness and darkness grain. And if I pull this up, you can see I can just remove it from the image. And if I go too far, it's going to look horrible, really, really horrible. But if I take it up just a little bit, I can get rid of some of that grain in there. And then we've got some luminous details in here and you can change this to see exactly what you want from your image. Obviously, this is different on every single image, so I can't say set it at this or do that. You've just got to try it out on an image by image basis. Now, sometimes you might find that you actually have color noise or color grain in there, and you can adjust that or remove that with this little one, as well. If I pull that right back, you can see there's some color noise going through in there, and we can just remove that very quickly. Now, the reason I've done this before that one is because you can't really see this working properly with the grain. I'll just zoom out a bit. What this top one does, it's called detail refinement, and it just gives your image a little bit more detail along the edges. I'll just take the radius up a bit over here and take the amount up. Look at the top of the spines over here. If I switch that on and off, you can see it's almost sharpening it up over there and giving us detail on the edge. And down the very bottom, lastly, we have got the noise addition, so I can click on that. And if I want to add in more of my own grain, well, I can do that over there. You've got color grain, if you wish to add that in as well. So one removes, one adds. Anyway, so have a little bit of go at those detail settings. Try it out. 93. Curves, B&W & Split Tone: I've moved across to the tones tab, and first one we've got over here is curves that we've looked at earlier in the course. And if I just switch it on, I can then click on that curve and lighten or darken. I can increase the contrast, so to increase the contrast, you do an S shaped curve. To reduce the contrast, you do the opposite of an S, so it's a reverse S in there. If you want to get rid of this, just click on little reset button at the top. After that, we've got black and white, so I'll switch that on, and once again, we can adjust the lights and darks of the blackness and the whiteness of the image. By using these, I can darken down the reds. I can lighten up the yellows or whichever one of these I want to use. Now let's go down. I'll leave that on black and white for the moment to something called split toning. Split toning is a traditional photographic technique where you take a print and you put it into one lot of chemistry that can affect or tone the highlights and another bit of chemistry that can tone the shadows. So in here, if I switch that on, you'll see we've got the highlight hue. And we've got the shadows hue. So in here, I'm going to pull this over to, say, yellows, for example, and then I'll use my highlights and just increase that to make the yellows slightly. Toned. You can see over there, the very light areas are being toned yellow or orange, shall I say, in there. Then I can go in here to this one and I can say, Well, I think the shadows should be maybe blue. I can then tone the shadows with the blue. Let's go a bit extreme on these so you can see with that split toning, I've now got the highlight areas in yellow and the darker areas in blue. I can choose what balance I want between the yellows and the blues at the bottom. You can use this to recreate all sorts of effects from traditional sepia tone through to some really wild and wonderful split tones that you want to create yourself. Don't forget, if you make a mess, just click on that little reset button to start again. Have some fun with that one over there. And if you do it on a black and white, it looks really good. But if you try it on color, and let's just do this one over here, you can get the same sort of weird effect with a combination of the color and the split toning in there. Anyway, try it out. 94. White Balance Tool: I'm going to come back to masks in a little while because we're going to be using some of these tools with masks. But let's have a look at some of the other tools that we have in here. Now, there's a hand tool to move around your image. There's also the Zoom tool to zoom in and out. Fairly straightforward. I prefer the shortcuts that we've discussed before. Then moving down over here, this is quite an interesting one. It's called the white balance tool. What that does, it sets your white balance in here. So what we need to do is we need to actually click on something which we think is a neutral color. So zooming in over here, if I go into these areas here, I'm trying to look for something which is neutral, I don't really know what is neutral in here. Let's have a look at this piece of paper that she's holding in there. If I were to click on that piece of paper, once again, it's it's not giving me anything very neutral. There's something in the background there. Let's try that one. Mm. Ah, there's something right at the top over here, and there we are. I'm going to click on that and see if that does the trick. That's better. That's definitely better. An image like this is very difficult because there's so many different lights coming in there, some sort of very red or orange lights in here. We've got different color lights there. There's light that's coming through the window. So there's a mix of colors. So the whole color balance is very, very subjective. So I might use this to kind of click and get myself right in the right sort of area, but I would still do this manually, as well. So I'm just going to pull that out, and you can see I can probably get it closer manually. So that's the little white balance tool up the top there. Try it out, but you might need to tweak it yourself. 95. Develop a JPG with Red Eye & Blemish: I've got a picture here, and this woman has got red eyes. Red eye is what happens when a flash goes off and the light bounces against the retina, so you're actually seeing the red from the retina inside the eye. And I want to remove it. Now, there is a red eye tool in Affinity. This is not a raw file, by the way. So I can go in here and I can use the red eye removal tool in Affinity. What about if I wanted to do it in raw? Could I actually do that? Could I take this in as a raw file? And yes, you can. So if you click on the image over here, you'll see this develop. If you click on that, you can take any image. So I've taken this image, which was a JPG image in as a raw file, and then we've got the same tools over here. So we've got the red eye removal tool, so I can just go in with my red eye removal tool and click and drag little square over that part of the eye and another one over that one, as well. Let's have a quick look over there. Yes, I think I've got that in the right position over there. So why would I want to do it in here? Well, if I click on Develop when we come back here again, it's still a pixel layer. So there's no reason why you'd need to take that in and use the red eye tool, for example, or the other one, the blemish removal tool that we'll come to in a moment inside the raw file. You can do it in here and you get exactly the same result. However, while you're actually doing it, there's a bit more flexibility. So you can use any of the tools inside Raw by just clicking on the layer, making sure you're on your MOV tool, click Develop, and you can go in and use any of these options in here. But as you can see, this image is still an eight bit image. It's not a higher bit depth image. Now, let's have a look at some of the other ones as well, some of the other tools in here. I'm just going to cancel that. I don't want to. Whoops. Let's try that again. I want to just cancel this and I'm going to go back to the other image that I had with the Dino. I'm going to double click on that and let's have a look at some more settings in here. So moving along or moving down, shall I say, we've then got the tool for removing blemishes. I'll zoom in a bit over here. This is not particularly a blemish, but I want to get rid of that light because I might find it distracting. So with this tool, I can actually just click on there, and you'll notice that if I move this around, there are two little circles. This circle here is the copy circle, and it's copying it over onto that blemish in there. If I did it the other way around, if I did that and that, then it would try and copy from there to there. So those two little circles, I can just move them like so. Over here, let's go over to this, and we can then just have a slightly bigger wider brush. When we do that, you can see I've got a huge brush for that one. There are two circles. One copies, and one paints it elsewhere. Try it out, it works the same as in normal affinity. It's not just for the develop area. Have a bit of a go with those to the red eye and the blemish tool. 96. Create a Masked Area: I'm going over to my mask tab, and you can see there's a mask. There's a master in there. And now I'm going to go across to my brush. This one here is called the mask Paint Tool, and I'm going to click on it. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint an area in. Now, we've got some options for the brush over here, and I can also adjust the size of the brush using the left and the right square brackets on the keyboard. So with the brush, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint this area over here with my brush. Let's just paint that bit in over there, I want to effect that bit, and I'm going to make my brush smaller. I want to effect that bit over there as well. And you can see I've now got something here that says Brush mask. Now, if I make a mistake, I can then go to the brush erased tool or the mask erased tool, and I can just erase out those bits that I don't want over here. So if I didn't want to affect the dinosaur's bones, I might just go in and erase those probably a bit more carefully than I'm doing at the moment. I don't want to affect that wall either, so I'm just going to go down there like that. And she doesn't need to be affected. So how do I do this? Well, I just go over to my settings now, and I can adjust this so you can see I can lighten it up or darken that area down. So I want to darken it down to keep all the attention on this area in here. Maybe I'll reduce the saturation in that area as well. Now, the great thing about this is that if I'm done with that, I can click on Develop when I get here, I might be doing some other things, looking at this and thinking, you know what? That's very dark and depressing in there. So I can just double click, go back into my develop area. Then I'm going to go to my masks. I can click on the brush mask, go over here and affect those areas like that. Let's try being lighter still. So you can do the masks, and they stay with the image when you actually develop it as long as you are using this raw layer output. Let's do another mask. I'm going to go to my masks. There is a new mask button down the bottom there. I'm going to click on that, so I'll click on that one. I'm going to go over, and I think I'm going to darken down this window, so I'll just paint the window in I'm doing this very, very fast. When you tried it out. You might want to do a little bit more detailed. Now that I've done that, I can go back to my basic settings, and I can just adjust the exposure to darken that down and bring in a few more details in there. And let's take the saturation up on that as well. And yeah, I think I think I quite like that. Maybe even some white balon to sort of make it a bit more orange. In there. So you add as many of these masks as you want, and you can always come back again, click on the mask and adjust them. When you're actually on a mask, you'll find this Opacity so you can reduce what you've done with little Opacity slider in there as well. Have a bit of a play with those masks, and don't forget there's also the mask erased tool if you've gone too far, that you can use at any time and just paint out what you've done on that mask. Try it out. 97. Gradient Mask & Show / Hide Masks: I if you're working with your masks, you might want to see what's going on. And what you can do is you can actually click on Show masks at the top here. So when you click on the mask, you can see it a lot clearer. So if I do that to the brush mask, go along to basic, I know which one I'm changing in there. Unfortunately, I can't actually see exactly what's going on with that. Let me go back to the masks. Again, this one here you can see is that one. And if I make changes to my settings, well, you can't really do much in there, so I'm going to switch that off and then I can go and change my settings. There. So just flick that on and off to see what you're working on. Now, let's have a look at one more mask which is this one over here. This is a gradient mask. So we'll show the masks again. I've gone to my gradient mask because I want to darken down the top. So I'm going to just click and drag to make a bit of a gradient. Let's pull that one up a little bit like that. And then I can go back to my settings over here and just maybe change the exposure to darken down the top. Just a little bit to balance the whole image out. Anyway, really easy one, just click and drag to do a mask in a gradient. It really is great for darkening down things like skies. 98. Crop in RAW: The last of the tools in here allows you to crop the image down. So I've gone to the crop tool, and maybe I want to get rid of just a little bit at the top and a little bit at the bottom, like so. I think we'll take that in tighten the whole image up like so. And by mistake, I'm going to crop off too much of the stained glass window. So if I develop this now, you can see that it's crop the image right down. But of course, if I double click it, you know, what's coming here, don't you? I can then just go back again over there to the crop tool and bring it back. Like so. We'll click on Develop, and there we've got our uncropped from the top image. The other crops are still there. Do try that out. It's non destructive cropping. 99. Liquify - Intro: This little section is all about the liquify tool. Now, the liquify tool is the tool that gave image manipulation a bad name initially before AI came along, but it has actually got some really, really good uses, and I want to show you them. 100. Liquify Tools: Now let's have a look at another option, and that's right next to develop. It's called Liquify. I'm going to click on Liquify over here. And what we have are some tools on this side and some options on the right. Now, what we can do is, first of all, go down to the brushes and we can adjust the brush size in here. You can see we've got a slider for the brush, or you can use the shortcut, which is your square brackets left and right to change the size. So once you've got your size, your hardness, your Opacity setup, you can then start to have a look at some of these little tools here. No, very quickly going through them, you've got things like the liquify, which is the push, which allows you to sort of move things along like so. You've also got this one, and you can see it's kind of got a straight edge over there. It's a totally different type of push. I prefer that one. I find it far more useful. I'm going to just undo those two. This is a twel so you click and hold, and it will just twirl things around. This is the pinch. Which makes things bigger, and this is the punch, which makes things smaller. You just click and hold to change the size of items. With those items there, you can just click and do whatever you want by pulling things around. But what about if you don't want to affect the entire picture? Well, I'm going to just go back again and come in with the fresh version of this picture. So I've just canceled the last one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click on Liquify, and I'd like to actually change the hair but not affect this woman's face. So down here, there's a little frosty snowflake. I'm going to click on that, and that says freeze. So what it does is it masks out the area over here so I won't affect this area. I don't want to affect that bit there, and I probably don't want to affect her arm and this bit of hair either. Now that I've done that, when I go back to these tools up here, I can then start pulling things around and moving things, and you can see it won't affect what is red. I'm going to undo that a bit. So I'm just going to pull her hair out a little bit here because I think it's a bit unbalanced. There's so much hair on that side, and maybe pull this in just a little bit over there. Now, if I'm happy with that, I click on Apply and you can see the difference. If I just undo this, that's before, and that is after. So it's quite subtle. Let me do that again. So I'm going to once again go to my move tool, make sure I've clicked on the layer, click Liquify. I would like to adjust her nose a bit, so I'm going to go to my freeze tool and I'm going to that's not on the freeze tool. I'm going to go to my freeze tool, and I'm gonna freeze this bit around here, so I don't touch it by mistake. I'm also going to freeze her mouth. Over there? Oh, now I've gone too far onto her nose, so I can use the unfreeze tool, maybe a smaller brush to just unfreeze this area. Now, when I go in here and I adjust her nose, let's just move it up a little bit. You can see it's not affecting her mouth or her eyes. Okay, I've gone kind of over the top there, but with a subtle bit of movement on there, we're not affecting those other areas. And once again, click Apply when you're done. There's lots of little tweaks and settings that you can try in there. Have a bit of a play with them, but that's basically how that tool works. Try it out. 101. Reconstruct Mesh Slider: Well, if I go along and I do some changes to this, so I'm going to do the same sort of thing that I did with a hair, but maybe a bit more extreme. I'm going to use my freezing tool and I'm going to freeze this area here so I can't affect anything by mistake. There, maybe going into the head just a little bit over there. And then I'm going to go along and get this move tool over here and I'm going to pull some of this hair out. I'm going to use a bigger brush over there to just pull it out a bit more and maybe push this bit in a little bit as well. Now, I'm happy with that. I want to clear this mask so you can either use this thaw tool or you can just say clear mask down there. Now, I've kind of overdone this. So if we go up to this little reconstruct mesh, I can pull that over to the left and just undo what I've done, so you can see it goes between what I've done and the original. And I can say, Well, I've went too far, so let's just take that back a bit until I'm happy. So do have a little bit of a look at that. The reconstruct mesh, whatever you do, over here, let's just pull her face down a bit. You can then choose to just reconstruct that. You can see it's doing the hair at the same time, so it's the whole image. Like so. And try it out. 102. Project: Spy Master Poster - Intro: It's project time once again, and this is another movie poster. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a very minimalist spy type of poster. You can see I brought it up on the side here, and we're going to be bringing the pictures. We're going to change the color. We're going to do well, we're going to cut out the person in the foreground. We're going to put in shadows. We're going to put in reflections, so many things to make it. And, of course, once you've done this, you can try it on your own. It doesn't have to necessarily be for a movie. It could be for an invitation, it could be for a brochure, whatever you wanted. But I'll show you the technique. Anyway, let's get started. I can't wait. This is a great one to get going. En 103. Create Your A3 Document: So the art director has just given you a scrap of paper and said, Could you create this movie poster for us? It doesn't look much, but it's got enough information for us to work from. The art directors also given us the photographs of the people that we need. And the idea behind this is that it's a very sort of spy, very black and white. It's quite light because it's not it's got to be reasonably high tech. We're going to have a white background over there, and we're going to be bringing in all these pieces, cutting them down. We're going to take the person in the middle. We're going to make her look less smiley, so we're going to make her a bit more serious. And we're going to take the background pictures, make them black and white. One of them is going to be red. We're also going to introduce things like shadows and reflections underneath the chair that she's sitting on. Now, if that sounds a lot, don't worry, I'm going to take you through everything step by step. So let's make a start. This movie poster needs to be A three, so we're going to go along and we're going to create a new document. So I'm going to go to File New. I'm going to do an A three size document, which is this one here. And I'm going across to the side here. Now, this document is primarily for emailing around and people can print it out themselves. So we will choose RGB eight for this. If this is going for mass production, we'd be looking at CMYK. But this is the kind of thing that people will use their home printers to print up. Now, I think that looks right. We've got a color profile on there, which is RGB. The sizes are all fine. And I'm going to click on Create Document. Now, what about a bleed around the edge? I hear you cry? Well, because this is for home printing, there are very few home printers that can print edge to edge. Some photographic printers can, but generally, it's not like commercial printing where we actually have a gillotin cutting out the edges, so we really don't need to have a bleed. If we did, we could actually change it and add it in later on. But for now, we've just got an A three document like so. Anyway, if you'd like to get your A three document up very quickly, come back and we'll start bringing in the assets. Mm. 104. Place Image & Cut Out: One of the things we forgot to do was to check the resolution. We've got the size, but we actually need this document to be 300 PPI. Now, PPI stands for pixels per inch. But a lot of people also refer to it as DPI or dots per inch. So if you see DPI or PPI, you can pretty much say they're the same thing. You will find sometimes though for inkjet printers, they use PPI, which is individual little tiny dots of ink. But for our purposes, we're actually using this as pixels. A dot equals a pixel. So anyway, let's go to the document. We'll go down to our setup, document setup, and over here, you can see we are at 300 DPI in there. Now, let's go and bring in a picture. So I'm going to go to place an image. I'm going to go to file and place. Now, let's just check our placement policy. Over here, my placement policy, I want to make sure that we're actually bringing things in as embedded files rather than importing them as linked files. I want to make sure they are part of the document, so that's absolutely fine. I'm going to click on Place, and I'm going to go along and find the image. Now, the one that I want is the woman sitting on a chair? No, not that one. She's sitting on a chair by herself, so let's go and find her. There she is over there, and we'll open her up. And I'm going to bring her in reasonably large. She doesn't have to be huge, but she's probably gonna be about that size over there. Now we need to cut her out. So how can we do that? Well, we can either go along here to our Object Selection tool. We move down. We just wait while it figures it out, and I can click to select her. Now, I also want to bring in the stool that she's sitting on. So I'm going to move down to that and making sure that I'm on the Add option. That's the second button there. I'm going to click on the stool to add that in as well. That's done a pretty good job. Now, just in case there's an issue that I need to change later on. I'm not going to cut her out. I'm actually going to go down here in my layers, and I'm going to add a mask, which then masks her out. And I can then deselect her that's either Control D or Command D to deselect, and she's cut out like that. And the great thing about this is because it's actually on a mask, at any time, I can throw the mask away and get back to the original or I can actually click on the mask and paint bits in and out as I need them. It could be, for example, that I didn't like these little black feet on here, and I just wanted to look white. So once again, I could just paint them out on the mask. Have a go with that so far. 105. Liquify: She's our spy master, and she looks far too happy for a spy master, so I'm going to zoom right in. Over there. And you can see she's got this sort of subtle smile over there. I want her to be a little bit more serious. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use liquify to adjust her face slightly to get more of a serious look from her. I'm going to go up to the little move tool. I'm going to click on Liquify. Now, you need to be careful because before I do that, am I on the mask or am I on the layer? I need to make sure I'm on the layer, not on the mask. So do watch that. I'll click on liquify now, and there are certain things we don't want to affect. We're going to freeze them. I'm going to make my brush a lot smaller. I'm going to go to the freeze tool and I'm going to paint this area over here. Now, let's try that again, freeze tool and I'm going to paint this area over there. I don't want to affect her chin, so I'm going to paint all of that. I'm going to paint the hair over there. Definitely don't want to affect the hair. Then just making sure that it's just the area that I'm interested in that I will be affecting. So maybe something like that. Now, let's zoom in a little bit over there. I'm going to start with her mouth. So I'm going to go along to this move tool over here, and I want to just push her mouth close just a little bit like that, and then go to the corners and pull the corners down. Now, I'm going to start from right over here and just pull them out slightly over there. So she has an open mouth, but it's not quite so let's pull that up a little bit. Not quite so happy. And there it's more of a sort of a serious look. It's very subtle what I'm doing, but it's enough to take that sort of happiness away. Other thing that we can do is when people smile, their eyes tend to crinkle up. So I'm going to just pull her eyes down. Once again, smallish brush. I'm just going to go below the eye over there to this sort of bit underneath the eye and just pull it down a bit over there. Not too much because you'll end up actually distorting the iris itself, but just a little bit like that. If you want, you can go to the eyebrows. You can pull them down a little bit. So we have more of a frown almost coming in over there. And have a look at this. If I go to reconstruct, actually, let's just clear the mask, first of all, Reconstruct we've got before and after. Look at the eyes as I'm moving them. I've been very, very subtle with them. So we've got happy, serious. And if you keep going over here, it'll get even worse. But we don't want that. That looks a bit funny. So I'm happy with where I am at the moment. She's looking serious enough for the image. And I'm going to click on Apply in there. So when you try this out, make sure that you freeze the area around the outside over there. So you're only affecting part of that image. And then when you come out of it, if you want to have a look at what it looks like before and after, just use either Control Z or Command Z to undo, and then you can use either Command Shift and Z or Control Shift and Z to redo so you can sort of see the differences over there. Try it out. Don't forget to mask things in your liquify tool. 106. Shadows & Reflection: She seems to be floating in the air. So I'm going to do two things. I'm going to put a subtle shadow underneath her. But I also want it to be on this pure white background with maybe a reflection in front of her. Let's start with a reflection because it's a really easy one to do. I'm going to go to her layer and I'm going to copy and paste, so it's either Command C or Control C to copy and command or Control V to paste. So I've then got two of those, one on top of the other. Let's go to the bottom one. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to squish her down to make a reflection. So I'll go back to my move tool. Now, before I start squishing, if I just squish her like that, you can see it just makes her smaller. So I'm going to hold down the shift key. And then when I squash her, she'll squash that way. I'll keep going until she's all the way over. Let's get the bottom of the chair to line up, holding down the shift key again. Get the reflection in there. Now, it's quite a harsh reflection that's almost a mirror like, so I'm going to go to my Opacity and just reduce the Opacity down so we get a sort of a subtle reflection, almost as if the background is white plastic. So we've got a bit of a reflection in there. The next thing that we need to do is to start putting some shadow in. Now, we've done this in the course already. So I'm going to go and I'm going to make a manual shadow. So down over here, making a new layer, and I'm going to just paint it in. So get you working with a paint brush again. Choose the brush size. I've got black as my foreground color, and I'm going to paint a bit of a blob underneath there, like that. Now, I know that looks awful, but let's take the Opacity down over there. We'll move it behind everything, so it's not messing with her feet. And then we'll go to the move tool, and once again, I'm going to hold down the shift key, and I'm going to squish this down to something which looks more like that. I might even pull it in from the edge a little bit like that, so we've got more of a shadow underneath her. And we'll take the Opacity down again, as well. Like that. So it's just enough to give the impression that there is something underneath. Now, the other thing that we can do as well, is we could go in here and we could put very subtle shadows underneath the chair legs. So I'm going to move down here. I'm going to add another layer. Once again, pull it down below those two. Use my paint brush, slightly smaller brush than that over there. And I'm just going to click one over there, once again, over there and reduce the Opacity on that to get a bit darkening going on or the one at the back as well, maybe. And then once more, we'll add another one of these layers. I'm adding pixel layers all the time over there. I probably zoom in a bit further. Once again, smaller brush, potentially even harder and just paint just underneath those little feet where the really dark area would naturally be. You don't need to change the Opacity on the small one too much because they would be very, very dark. Anyway. You can keep building this up. You know, you could go along to this one here, which is the big shadow over there and say, Well, let's take that down a bit more. And what about if we had another shadow in there? So you can see how you can just easily, easily get very carried away with this. I'll have a bigger brush once again. Click over there, click over there, maybe scale those down, holding down the shift key, pulling them down and change the Opacity of those. You don't want people to look at your poster and go, Wow, what amazing shadows and reflections. They just shouldn't even be aware of them. It just helps to sell the whole illusion. Have a bit of a go, try it out, bit of a shadow, bit of a highlight. 107. Gradient Background: Let's pop in a really subtle background. I'm going to add a new layer, and I'm going to move it underneath everything. Once again, when you're moving these things around, make sure that if you drag it below everything, you see that little graduated orange color. I'm going to go to my fill tool. I'm going to fill, and the type is going to be a linear gradient, and I'm just going to click and drag like this. Now, although that looks okay, I really want to have the foreground being white as well. So I'm going to click on the gradient editing area. And I'm going to say, Okay, in the middle here, maybe I want another little color. So by the way, I just double clicked on that line. This foreground here, I want that to be white, so I'm going to go white there. So you can see we've got a very, very subtle gradient that goes from white to gray in the distance. And let's just try changing that, bring that gray down a bit. Messes with your eyes in the engine. You can't see that gray, but it is very subtle. If I just change that to a darker gray, you can sort of see what I'm going for, something like that, but very, very subtle over there. Right, that's it. There was a really easy section, just a bit of a gradient in there to help once again with the depth of the image. 108. Setup Row & Column Guides: Now, before we bring in the pictures, let's set up a bit of a grid system so that we can see exactly what we're doing. I'm going to go along to the view menu, and I'm going to go down to guides. And what I want to do is I want two guides, one down the middle and one across the middle that way, so vertical and horizontal or rowan columns. Over here, in the columns, I'm going to just choose two columns, and you can see now I've got that nice little white line running down the middle. And I'm going to do the same with my rows, and I'm going to choose two rows in there. Now, if you want to make that gap bigger, you can just change the gutter between them to any size you like. But I kind of like that sort of size over there, and I'll just close that up. So that's great because now I can just design on that. And because I actually want to design without her in the way, I'm just going to go and close or switch off all of these layers over here until I can see that bit over there. So if you'd like to get that far, you can see two rows and two columns, and then we'll take it further. 109. Create 4 Squares & Snapping: Now, we're going to use these guides to put our shapes in for our pictures. So I'm going to go all the way down to these vector shapes. Even though we're in the pixel persona, these are still vector shapes in here. And I'm going to draw in one of those shapes. So I'm going to hold down the Shift key while I'm drawing to get a perfect square. And I think I'd like to change the color of that, so I'm going to just give it a totally different color so I can see what I'm doing. Over there. And I'm going to get rid of the stroke around the outside because we just don't need that, so we'll choose none in there. And that gives me my first little shape over here. Let's zoom right in. And I'll just pop that over there. Now, let's make a copy of that. So I've got my rectangle over here. I'm going to copy and paste it, and the copy is then going to be moved across to here. If you wish, you can use your alignment tools to get these absolutely spot on. And obviously, there's a lot of other bits and pieces where we can get things to snap to each other and to guides and all sorts. But we're doing this manually now. Paste again. Let's bring that one down to there and one more paste. We've got this one over here. So they're all lined up perfectly. Now, we are going to take all of those. I'm going to select one, hold down the Shift key, and select them all and move them below my people or my person. Now, just be very careful where you drop it. Make sure that it's a perfect line like that when you're dropping it. It doesn't matter about the shadows because they're down here anyway. And with them all selected, I'm just going to pull them up a little bit into the position where I want them. We can move them later on. It's not a problem. So let's just show our person and all the other layers in there. So that's pretty much what we're after. Now, let's just go back there again. So I'm going to go up to view down to my guide. That's not my guides. Let's try that again. I'm going to go to View Guides. And as you can see in here, you can do as many columns or rows as you like. They're just really useful. I'm going to take mine back to one, so they'll kind of disappear off of the page. If you want to snap things, go along to the little magnet at the top. Click on that. Everything is grayed out, but all you've got to do is say enable snapping at the top, and you can see how you've got so many things that you can snap to object snapping and page snapping. There's just so many things in there. 110. Add Photos into Squares: Let's start to bring in the pictures now. So I'm going to have four different pictures in those squares. So I'm going to start off with the first one. I'm going to go to File and Place, find the first of my images. There's the first one over there. She looks particularly spy like, and I'm going to bring her in over there. Now, I'm really only interested in her face, so I'll place her over there. And then I'm going to take her and I'm going to drag her down. Now, I need to find out which square is which. The first one that I started is actually that one there. So I'm going to drag her and I'm going to drop her on top of that, and that'll push her into that square over there. Let's do this again. So I'm going to go to file place. I'm going to find my next one, which I think is that one there. Click on open, bring her in. And move her along to the right position because it's difficult to see what you're doing if you place it on the wrong one. So I'm going to pop her over there. Let's drag her down, drop her into that. Two more, very, very quickly. File place. Find the next one. She's going to go. Now, what's happened here? I've clicked and dragged, and you can see it's actually placed inside that one over there. This is something you need to be aware of where you've actually clicked. So I need to make sure I've actually clicked on that rectangle over there, or that one for that matter, or none of them. And then I can bring that in again. So I'm going to go to File Place. Find her. I could bring her in. I think that's about the right size. Move it to where I think she should go and once again, drop her into I think it's that one there into the square at the back. One last one. This won't take very long at all. Place, find the image. Bring her in. She's going to be quite big, I think, because we need her face to be large. Move her over and drag and drop her onto the square like that. This is very, very busy at the moment, but when we make them all black and white, it'll look a lot better. Anyway, do try that out, have a bit of a go with that and bring the pictures in there. 111. Make Images Black & White & Add Into Squares: She's looking out of the frame, and I really want her to be looking into the frame. So I'm going to make sure I go in and select her. There she is inside that little box inside the rectangle. I'm going to go to Layer. I'm going down to a range, and I'm going to say flip horizontal, which will flip her the other way. So she's now looking into the scene, which is a lot more pleasing. I'd like to now start to make these black and white. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my pixel menu, new adjustment layer, and I'm going to find the black and white adjustment. There it is over there, and we can then adjust the reds until we get the color that we're interested in. This is adjusting everything below itself, including the shadows and the reflections. So just be aware of that. If you only want to affect one of the layer or you want to do it four times, you just drag it into the layer and it'll only affect that layer in there. But I'm going to cheat and I'm going to do it for all of them at once. Have a go. 112. Make Image Red Using Multiply Mode: A this is our trait, and we don't want her to be black and white. We want it to be red. So I'm going to take her layer and I'm going to drag her all the way above the black and white, but underneath the other two. So we'll drop over there. So she's now in color. But we want her to be red. So there are different ways that you can do it using different adjustment layers. But I'm going to do a totally different method. I'm going to take a little shape. I'm going to put the shape on top of her, and I'm going to make this shape red. So I'm going to change that to the red that I want. Like so. I think that's kind of quite like that red. And then I'm going to take this and I'm going to drag it into her layer. So I'm going onto there into the layer. So now we have the red inside that shape. So we've got the shape. We've got this red shape, and we've got the portrait of the person. I'm going to click on the red shape in there, not on the main one, but inside there. And I'm going to change the mode, and we've got all these different color modes so I can choose which of these I like. I mean, that one's quite extreme. Um, let's have a look and see which ones work really well. I think probably multiply is going to be the best one because it darkens her down as well. So try that out just using a shape which you've then added into another layer, and then just adjust the mode to get well, whether it's multiply, whether it's darken, whether it's color, any of these ones until you get the thing that you're looking for in there. 113. Add Text & Tracking: As you can see, I've added some text in, so there's a bit of text here, artistic text, bit more there, another one over there. I'd like to change a little bit of this text, particularly the flixo film at the bottom. Maybe that's the company. I'm going to highlight the O in the middle, and I'm just going to increase the size to something like that gives it sort of slightly more of a branding type of look. I also want to change the word treachery because it's a bit boring at the moment. I want something which looks far more cinematic. So I will make it a little bit smaller. I'm going to centra line it if I wish. And you can see, as I move across, you get all these little sort of lines which come and go, showing you exactly where you are on the page. Now, what I want to do is I want to actually go to the window menu down to text and the character. In the character, I want to find the position and transform. So I'll click on that. And this option here, this is called tracking. So if I've selected my text, I can change the tracking to move the characters further apart. And we're looking for something like that, which gives a very sort of cinematic type of feel to that bit of text. In fact, I'm going to take it a little bit further and we'll just go on a little bit. You'll see I'm just dragging on the little icon over there to move it across over there. One last thing, and she is disappearing into the background. So we need to think about how we can actually bring her out so that she's slightly forward of the pictures. We'll do that in the next video. 114. Add Effect & Export as PNG: Now, to separate her from the background, I'm actually going to use an effect. I'm going to go onto her layer over there. I'm going down to the ex at the bottom, and I'm going to choose an outer glow. So I'll switch the outer glow on and then I've got the color which is white. You'll see if I pull this out, we get quite a lot of quite a lot of horrible glow around the outside. We can change the intensity as well. But what I'm looking to do is to get something which is kind of very much more subtle. So we'll take that in a little bit like that, maybe increase the radius a bit more, but take the Opacity down. Once again, we don't want to go wow what an amazing glow, but we do want to separate her from the background just ever so slightly so we can see the edge of her suit and her hair. You might need to fiddle about with that and maybe come in and have a look and see if you need to tweak it at all. As you can see, I can barely see that as you can't see. So let me go back in. I'll just double click on that and let's have another look here. Just take that up just a little bit. There's no right or wrong here. You've just got tweak it until you feel happy with what you've got. Okay, I like that. So I'm just going to click on close over there. It's just enough to separate her from the background a little bit. Now, we want to check this out and see what it looks like without all the lines around. So again, to go to the view menu and go into preview mode so we can see our whole project. If you like what you've got, don't forget to save it, and of course, you can export it as a JPG or a PNG file, whichever you prefer. If you want to make any changes, have a bit of a go. Change the pictures, change the colors. You could have different colors on all four of those squares, if you wished. It's entirely up to you. This is all about technique, not about the actual subject matter itself. Anyway, have fun with that and try some variations on this theme. 115. Well Done & Thank You: Congratulations. You've reached the end of this course. I'm sure you're creating amazing work. Now, don't forget to leave us a review. It really helps us to help to build more courses for you. I also do courses in Adobe, as well as Canva and Procreate. Don't forget to follow me and have a look at my profile. I'll see you in the next one. A