Affinity Photo: Beyond the Basics!

1. Class Introduction: Ready to take your affinity skills to the next level, then this is for you. Today, I'm excited to announce my brand new course, affinity photo beyond the basics. This course is for anyone that already knows the basics of affinity photo, but wants to take their skills even further. We'll start by taking a deep dive into selections and masks. Whether you need to apply an adjustment or remove a background, you'll have everything you need to make perfect selections and affinity photo. After that, we'll learn advanced techniques for improving color and light. These techniques are very powerful and they're actually pretty easy after you've had a bit of practice. Just look at this before and after. That's what you'll be able to do. After working on color and light, we'll learn all about photo cleanup. This is a very important skill to learn, so I'll teach you all of my best tips and tricks. By the time you finish this chapter, you'll be able to remove anything from a photo. By this point in the course, you'll have learned so many new skills. The next thing that we'll do is bring everything together to complete three, start to finish projects. Each of these projects has been designed to bring together everything that we've learned so that you can solidify all of your new affinity skills. During these projects, we'll practice a step by step workflow, which you'll be able to use when editing your own photos. By the time you finish these projects, you'll have everything you need to make your own photos look their very best. After mastering color, light, selections, and retouching, you might think that the course would be over, but I have a special treat for you. After we finish mastering those skills, we're going to continue our affinity journey by learning compositing. Compositing is the art of combining multiple photos into a sinkle image. It's my favorite thing to do in affinity photo. We're really going to take a deep dive into it. You'll learn an easy ten step method for creating incredible composites. Then we'll practice those ten steps as we make a series of composites together. Each of these composites is so much fun to make and we'll really help you to take your affinity skills to the next level. After doing all of these projects with me, you'll be totally prepared to make composites all on your own. But before we dive into affinity, I want to mention that this course comes with a few example files that we'll be using throughout the course. I encourage you to download and use them because practicing what you learn is the best way to retain all of these new skills that you'll be learning. You can download those files in the next lesson and then you're ready to begin your journey of becoming an affinity photo master. Let's get started. 2. Download the Class Files: Before you begin this class, I recommend you download the exercise files. These files will be necessary for you to follow along with the Tutorials. To do this, you first need to come to the Project and Resources tab. Then click on the download link. The Exercise files will then be downloaded to your computer and you'll be totally prepared to follow along with the rest of the class. 3. Selections & Masks: The first chapter of this course, we're going to learn all about selections and masks. Selections and masks are the most important tools in affinity photo, but they can be a little tricky. We're going to take our time and dive deep into these tools so that we can really bring out the best in our photos. Let's get started. 4. Masking Update: Before we jump into the course, I need to tell you about a small update to affinity photo. Troughout this course, you'll see a pop up menu whenever I press on the mask button in the layers panel. This pop up has a few different mask options that we'll be using. But now after an update to affinity photo, that pop up is no longer there. Instead, pressing on the mask button will just apply a mask. How do we get the other masking options now? Well, all you need to do is hold down Option on a Mac or Alt on a PC, and then click on the mask button. Then all of the masking options will appear in a pop up just as you'll see me do throughout the course. I think that's it. Now we're ready to dive into selections and masks. 5. Removing Backgrounds: In this video, we'll learn the basic steps to remove a photos background. You can find this photo in the exercise files. For this video, I want to remove the background here and keep our model. To start, I need to first make a selection of our model, which I'll do with the selection brush. I'll select that. Then I'll make sure up in the context toolbar, I have snapped edges and soft edges turned on. I can go ahead and click and drag to begin making my selection to make this go a little bit faster, I'll use the bracket keys on my keyboard to increase the size of my brush. This will just help things go a little faster. If you ever select too much, you can hold down Alt or Option on your keyboard to remove from your selection. Let me just select a little too much there. Hold Alt or Option, and then all you need to do is click and drag to clean that up. Now I have my selection made. I'm just going to apply a mask to remove the photos background. I'll come right down here and apply a mask. I'll press command or control D to D select. Let's take a look at how the selection went. To better see this on this cheered background, I'll go up to layer and then new fill layer. I'll just drag this to the bottom. This will just help us see this better. As you can see, this has a very jagged edge. It's not a very smooth selection and this continues all the way around our models hair. This doesn't look very nice. To fix this, I'm going to go back a few steps. I'll press command or Control Z a few times until we have no mask applied, but our model is selected. Let me show you what I should have done. I'm going to have the selection brush tool still out. Let's act like I just barely made my selection here. Now I'm going to go up to the context toolbar to press on this magical button, which is called refine. Once you click refine, you're automatically applying matt edges to the very edges of your selection. This means this will look quite a bit softer. It has a feathered effect. If I turn matt edges off in this dialog box, you can see we're right back to our problem of jagged edges. Refining your selection is a really great way to just soften up that effect. Now, this is a pretty good start to improving the edges of our selection. But to take this one step further, we can also paint over the edges that we want affinity to take a second look at. This usually happens with hair because hair is very tricky to select. By default, when you press refine and this dialog box pops up, you automatically have this brush tool here. All you need to do is click and drag over the edges of the hair, and this will tell affinity, let's take a second look at those areas. I'm just going to paint over all of the edges. Once I've done that, I'll go ahead and press Apply. Now we have a much better selection made. I'm going to apply a mask that'll just remove the background, and then I'll press command or Control D to D select. Now, let's add that fi layer again so we can better see what the selection looks like. As you can see, this looks a lot nicer. The edges are nicely feathered. We don't have those jagged edges anymore. The hair actually looks pretty well selected. It's not perfect, but I think this actually did a pretty good job. Now, before I finish, I want to show you how you can quickly clean up your mask for any of these problem areas. For example, I think this area looks very smudgy, and you can see if I actually turn off this mask layer, that that gray background is peeking through the hair, and it's included in our selection. We do not want that. I'm going to grab the paint brush. I'm going to paint on this mask in black and white paint to remove and add from this selection As a reminder, when you're painting in white, you're adding to your selection. You can remember this by looking over at the layer thumbnail. You can see that white is lit up where our girl is, and black is covering the background, which means the background is not visible. If I want to remove this part of the hair, I need to make sure that I'm painting in black, which I'll do. But first, I'm going to lower the flow of my paintbrush. That way, I can have a more gradual painting. Then I'll just come right in here and I'll soften this area. Maybe I'll make my brush a bit larger. I find with hair that it looks pretty good to make it slightly invisible in areas where you want to remove. I just removed a little bit of that. The hair looks a little more transparent, but I think that's okay. Then to quickly switch my paint to white, I'll just press x on my keyboard. That's a fun little shortcut. I'm just going to make sure that this sweater is all the way filled in. We do not want that to be invisible. There we go. If I want to, I can make my brush quite a bit smaller and I can just fill in some of these areas again. I think that looks a lot better. Here's what that looks like. We are missing some hair. I could continue to paint a little bit more to bring some hair back. But I think this looks a lot better than where we started where that gray background was really prominent. I'm just going to go around and continue to do this. I think the edges of the sweater look pretty good. I think I'll just focus on fixing up the hair a little bit. You can turn the mask on and off as you go. I can see we need to fill in this area. That's looking pretty good. This area up here looks a little strange. Let's see what that looks like. It looks like we lost some hair there, so I'll make my brush nice and large and I'll just fill in that area. There we go. It looked like it was glowing white. Now we've got that fixed up. All right. I think this looks really nice. Great job. Now you know how to use selections and masks to remove a photos background. In the next videos, we're going to build on these skills as we learn other ways to use selections and masks. 6. Gradient Masks: This video, we'll learn how to add a gradient to a mask. But before we dive into affinity, I want to help you understand what's going on. Let's say that I wanted to remove the sky from this photo. To do that, I would first need to make a selection of the sky. Then I could add a mask to remove the sky, just like how we remove the background in that last video. But what's actually going on? How is the mask hiding the sky? The thing to remember is black masks will hide parts of your photo, while white masks will keep things visible. In this example, what's really going on is that there is a black and white mask being added to the photo. The sky has a black mask covering it, so it's no longer visible, but the trees have a white mask over them, so they don't become hidden. But what would happen if I added a mask that looked like this? It's a smooth gradient that goes from white to black. Well, in that case, the photo would be fully visible over on the white side of the mask. But then gradually fade away as the mask moved towards black. But why would you ever want to do this? Well, you normally wouldn't do this on a photo. However, applying a gradient to an adjustment layers mask is much more useful. Let's come back into affinity to see how this works. In this photo, I want to make the left side darker, the area where she's walking from, and the right side lighter where she's walking toward. It's very poetic. To create this look, first, I'm going to create a dark adjustment layer. I'll come down to our adjustments. Let's do a brightness in contrast, and I'll just darken this. Why not? Let's go ahead and add a little contrast as well. Now with that adjustment layer still selected, I'm going to grab the gradient tool and I'm going to click from this side toward the center. I'm going to hold down Alt or Option on my keyboard, and I'm going to click right here to open up our mask, and you can see this is what the mask is looking like. It's going from white to black. In this white part, that dark brightness and contrast adjustment is visible and then it slowly disappears. Hold Alt or option, and I'll click one more time so we get back to our normal view. Now you can see this. Here's the before and after. Right Let's do this again. This time, I'll make a brighter gradient. I'll go to our adjustments. Let's add a brightness and contrast. This time, I'll just make it brighter and we'll raise the contrast again. This time, I'll go ahead and start it in the center and move it over. That looks opposite to what I wanted. Gradients will always start white revealing your layer, and then it will gradually fade away. I actually want this to go the other way so that the light side is where she's walking toward like that. I'm just going to get out the view hand tool so this gradient disappears. Then I'm going to select both of these layers by holding shift and clicking, and then I'll turn them both off. Here's our before and here's the after. Notice how smooth these transitions are. I think that looks so cool. But there is one annoying thing in affinity. If you click off of the adjustment and then you want to go back and change the gradient. I can get out the gradient tool, but now I actually have to re drag out that gradient again. I can't just adjust the points like this. Once I click off, I can't get it back. That's an annoying thing you have to remember. Once you set your gradient in place, it really is there to stay unless you want to re drag it out. Let's go to the second photo. This is the other exercise file for this video. In this one, I want to make the couple look a lot brighter and the edges of the photo, I want them to be darker. That way, the couple just stands out better. To start, let's add a brightness and contrast adjustment. I'll make this brighter, and I'll add a little contrast. Now I'm going to add a gradient to this adjustment. I'll start where their faces are and then I'll bring it up toward the right corner over here. Right now, this whole area is bright and then it fades to darkness. But I think I want this to be a radial gradient. I'll go ahead and change that right up here. Now I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll click right here so we can see what's going on. You can see it's white in the center, so it's revealing this bright layer. Then it slowly fades away to black so that this layer becomes hidden. I'll hold Alt or Option again and click. Now we can see the before and after. This already looks a lot better. I think they looked so dark before. They were in a lot of shadow. Now I want to do the opposite to darken the edges. I actually want to use a gradient mask that looks exactly opposite of what we have now. Here's a little trick to speed things up. I'm going to duplicate this layer with command or control J. Right now, we have an exact copy. But I want to invert this mask to make all of the black parts of this mask white and all of the white parts black. To do this, I'll press command or control I. Now you can see what that looks like. We have the exact opposite going on. However, this is making the outer areas brighter. I actually want them to be darker. I'm going to click on this icon right here to open our brightness and contrast adjustment. I'll just darken this. All right. Here's that darkness added. And here's the complete before and after. Gradient masks are such a great way to smoothly transition between where an adjustment is applied and where it's not applied. 7. Masking Groups: This video, we'll learn how to use one mask to control multiple layers. In this example, we'll be applying multiple adjustments to this dress. First, we need to make a selection of the dress. I'll grab the selection brush, and then I'll quickly paint a selection onto our dress. It's not too tricky of a selection, but for some reason, these sleeves really don't like being selected. I'll use the bracket keys to get a smaller brush and then I'll just select those. Looks like I got the entire dress selected perfect. Now that that's selected, all I need to do is refine our mask. Remember this automatically creates matt edges to our selection, which is great. I'll just apply that. Then with the selection still up, I'm going to apply an HSL adjustment so we can change the color I'll just change the color of the dress. Let's drag this over, maybe make it a nice purple color. That looks pretty good. I'll D select with command or Control D. Now you can see before and after of that adjustment. Next, I want to brighten the dress. Is there a way that I could use the HSL adjustments mask for the brightness and contrast adjustment? I don't want to keep making the selection over and over again for every adjustment I want to add. Well, there is a super easy way. All you need to do is hold down command or control and then click on the mask. This loads the mask as a selection, and then you can apply whatever adjustment you want to it. I'll go to my adjustments and let's just brighten up this dress. Very nice. I'll D select with command or Control D. And now you can see the before and after. This is a very simple way to use one mask to help you control another adjustment layer. But if you want to get really fancy, you could put your adjustments into a group and then mask the group. I'm just going to start from scratch. I'll just delete both of these layers. Now we can go ahead and start over. I'm going to apply an HSL adjustment. This will be applied to the entire image to start. I'll just make it that purple color again. Then I'll brighten the photo. Then I'm going to place both of these layers in a group. I'll hold shift to select them both, and then command or Control G to group them together. Now I'm going to select the dress again. With the selection brush tool out, I'll just start by making my brush a bit larger. I'll click and drag to make my selection. Oops. You can see it's not snapping to the edges, and that's because I had the group selected, not the dress layer. I'll deselect with command or Control D, and I'll make sure that this layer is selected so that I can click and drag and make a selection of the dress. With the selection made, let's press re fine so that we can make this a really nice, smooth, feathered selection. I'll press a fly. Now we have a beautiful selection made. But what do we do do it? Well, I want to apply a mask to this group, so all of these adjustments are only applied to the dress. With the group selected, I'll go down to our masks, I'll apply a mask. Now this group has been masked, I'll press command or Control D to D select. You can see that all of the adjustments in this group are only being applied to the dress. The hanger is no longer being affected by this recoloring and brightening. Now that we've done that, we can add as many adjustments as we want to this group and they'll only be isolated to the dress. To show you this, I'm just going to select a layer that's inside the group and I'll apply another adjustment on top of that. Let's go with the levels adjustment. I want to make this dress look brighter. I'm going to bring the white level over. There we go. You can see again, this is only affecting the dress. It's that easy. If you want to get really fancy, you can add masks to the adjustments inside of this masked group. I want to make just part of the dress brighter. I'm going to add a brightness and contrast adjustment. I'll brighten it up. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool and I'm going to click and drag from the bottom and then bring it up. This will make the bottom of the dress s brighter, but the rest of the dress will stay its original color. The reason I wanted to do this is because the original dress looked a bit darker toward the bottom, and this just evens out its coloring. But as you can see, this brightness is only affecting the dress, not the background. As one more example of this. Next, I want to paint on some brightness just onto a few areas of the dress. With that layer that's inside of the group selected still, I'm going to apply a levels adjustment. I'll brighten the white level by bringing this slider down. Let's bring it down quite a bit. Then I'm going to invert this layer so that this becomes invisible, and I'll do that with command or control I. You can see now we have a black mask applied to this adjustment. If I want to reveal this adjustment, all I need to do is grab the paint brush and then paint in white paint over the areas that I want to reveal this brightness. I think in this case, I actually want to paint this brightness over the highlights of the dress, just to make it look a little bit more shiny and bright. With a low flow, I think 16% looks good. I'm just going to click and drag to paint and add a little bit of brightness just to the highlights of the dress. Because this is masked onto the dress, I don't need to worry about painting outside the lines. This is doing nothing because my painting will only be clipped into the dresses group. I'll just do a little bit more painting here at the top. You can really see what this effect looks like. With that, I'm done with my painting, so you can see the before and here's our after. With the whole group, I'll just turn this off so you can see what our dress was before and here's the after. Grouped masks are great if you need to apply multiple adjustments to the same place. I really like using this technique. It's really helpful. Now that you know even more about masks. In the next few videos, we're going to take a closer look at a couple of different types of masks. 8. Hue Masks: This video, we'll learn about hue masks. Hue masks allow you to make a mask based on the colors in your photo. In this example photo, we could make an adjustment that will only affect the green trees or the blue sky. First, let's edit up our sky. I'll go to our adjustments and let's apply a brightness and contrast adjustment. I'm going to really increase the brightness to make this very obvious what areas are being affected. I'll just close out of this. Now I'm going to go to our masks and I'll apply a hue range mask. With this dialog box here, we can choose which parts of the photo we want to affect. We can do this by clicking right in the middle here between these two points and dragging this to adjust what parts of the photo are being lit up with this brightness and contrast adjustment. Down here, you can see the trees are lit up and up here, you can see the sky is lit up, which is exactly what I want. With that position right up there, I always like to come down here and just blur this a little bit. What this is doing is it's just adding a little bit of blur to the mask, so there's no harsh cutoff points between your colors. I'm going to raise this to about five pixels. Now you can see before and after. This is only affecting the sky. Actually, it looks like there are some blue tones back here of these trees. If I want to, I can click right here. This will bring up our hue mask again. I can adjust this by bringing it over just a little bit more in this direction so that those trees aren't being affected. They're a green blue. As I drag this out of the green range, they should become less affected. Now you can see that this is mostly only affecting the sky, which is really nice. I'm just going to click right here and now we can adjust the brightness and contrast of the sky to make it actually look good because this is a bit extreme. I'll drag this down and I think I actually want to make this darker so you can see the clouds better. Then I'll just increase the contrast. Now we can see the before and after. Next, let's edit the trees. I'm going to make another brightness and contrast adjustment. Then I'll make it super bright once again. I'll go into our masks and add a hue mask. Then I need to make sure that we're affecting the trees, not the sky. I think right here looks pretty good. I'll make sure that I blur this mask a little bit. Now as I turn this on and off, you can see this is only affecting the trees. I'm just going to click right here so we can adjust this and make this look nice. I think I do want these trees brighter. I'll just tone it down a little bit. Let's go ahead and add a little contrast as well. Here's what that's looking like. I really like how that looks. Now I'll just like both of these layers. You can see the complete before and after. Beautiful. Aren't hu masks so cool? Now that you understand how hum masks work, let's try a trickier example. With this example photo, we have quite a few different colors in this photo, but we can still use hue masks to make all of the colors really pop. To start, let's go ahead and apply another brightness and contrast. I really like using brightness and contrast all the way up because it's just really obvious what colors we're affecting. I'll apply a hue mask. At this time, I think I want this to only affect her dress. Right now, the grass is very bright because we're in the green range. But as I bring this up, You can see her dress starts to glow. But if I take it too far, you can see the shadows in her hair start to glow. I'm just going to bring this back so that her dress is glowing. That looks good. Now only the dress is being affected. I can go ahead and click right here to adjust this a bit better. In this case, I think I actually want the blue dress to look a little deeper and darker. I'm also going to increase the contrast just to make the pattern of the dress pop a little more. Now that we're done with that, I'll turn this off and on, so you can see what this looks like. The dress looks really good, but unfortunately, we're also affecting the grass in a few areas. To fix that, I'm just going to grab my paintbrush. I'm going to paint in black paint over those areas. I'll just increase the flow, so we're fully affecting the area, and then I'll just paint to remove that darkness. A Let's turn this on again. Here's the before and after, and I think that really helped to clean that up. As you can see, now we're only affecting her dress. I just want you to recognize how difficult selecting the dress would have been. We have all of this grass here that's overlapping with the dress. But using the mask, we were able to easily just affect the blue color of the dress without affecting the green grass. This is so cool. Next, let's do the grass. I'll add another brightness in contrast and I'll bring this up. A at of u mask. We can adjust this range to make sure that all of the grass is included. It looks like some of the darkest parts of the grass are a little bit more blue toned. I'm actually going to move this node right here over until those areas start to be included. You can see the before and here's when more of them are included. I think this looks pretty good. With that done, I'm going to remember this time to bring up this slider. I don't think I did that last time. Then we can go ahead and click right here and adjust the brightness and contrast of the grass. I think once again, this would look good with a little more darkness. I think that looks nice. Here's the before and after of that. Like you heard me mention, I do think that I forgot to add a blur to this one. I'll just open that up and I can apply a blur after the fact. That's no problem. So far, we've done the dress. We've also done the grass. Now it's time to work on our model. I'll add yet another brightness and contrast adjustment. Let's bring that up. I'll apply a hue mask. Now, I want this to affect our model skin and hair. Skin is always in the yellow red range, no matter your ethnicity. This is a pretty easy way to just affect those areas, bringing it over like that. To include more of her hair though, I think I'm just going to bring this node over more. Some of her shadows in her hair were a little more blue tooned. I just want to bring this over so that those are included. Maybe I'll bring the whole thing up a little more. I think I need to bring this up because the grass is being affected back here. But I think this looks pretty good. Now we're affecting the model skin. I'm just going to click right here on the brightness and contrast so we can adjust this. I'll darken this, and I'll add a little more contrast. Once again, I forgot to blur the hue mask. I'll just click on that and bring up the blur just to soften that. Now you can see that before and after adding some beautiful contrast to her hair and skin. Now that we've done all that, I think I want to add a little more warmth to the ph. I think this grass just looks a little bit blue. To add warmth, I'm going to use a white balance adjustment. I'll bring this all the way over toward orange to really warm this up. Then I'll apply a hu mask. I want this to affect our grass, which I think it's doing pretty good like this. I'm just going to bring this slider over so we include a little bit more of these shadows over here. And I'll remember this time to bring up the blur. There we go. Now, I'm just going to click on our white balance to adjust this. I think just a little bit of warmth looks pretty good. This is before. It was a little more blue toned and now we have a little more of a yellow green color. Very nice. As a finishing touch, I think I want to make the whole photo brighter. I'll just go into the adjustments and grab a brightness and contrast adjustment. Then I'm just going to make this a little bit brighter overall with a little more contrast. I'm not going to apply a mask. I want this to affect the entire photo. Not every adjustment needs a mask. Here's the before and after of that brightening. Then I'll just select all of these and you can see it complete before and after. Now, before we finish this video, I just have a few last tips to share with you. You probably already noticed this, but affinity will change the color of the hue mask based on what color range that you're working with. At a glance, we can see this one's blue, so it's affecting her dress. As I turn this off and on, you can see that's true. The green ones are both affecting the grass and the red one is affecting her hair and skin. This is a really quick way to easily see what your layers are affecting without you needing to rename every layer. That's pretty nice. And another tip that you did see me do is you can click on the H U mask at anytime to open this up and make adjustments. I needed to do this throughout this video because this is an easy step to forget. That's pretty nice. This is just like adjustments. You can click to open those as well. The last one that I actually didn't show you in this video is that hue masks actually have a color picker that you can use. To show you this, I'm actually going to apply another adjustment. Let's just apply a brightness and contrast adjustment. I'm going to make this totally bright once again. Then I'll apply a hue mask to it. This time, I'll click on the color picker, and I'm just going to click on the blue color of her dress, and you can see that this has automatically jumped from the green up to the blue so that we're only affecting the blue color. Hu masks are a great way to apply adjustments to specific colors in your photo, and it just really helps you to edit faster without needing to make painstaking selections. Now that we know more about hum masks, in the next video, I'm going to teach you how to use a different type of mask called the luminosity mask. 9. Luminosity Masks: In this video, we'll learn how to use luminosity masks. To see how this type of mask works. We'll start off with this practice file, which has five rectangles on it going from black to white. To see luminosity mask in action, I'm first going to add a fill layer on top of this exercise file. I'll go up to layer, new fill layer. With this fill layer on top, I'm just going to change its color. I'll bring the node over here and let's just make it a bright orange color. With this layer selected, I'll come down here and apply a mask to it, and I'm going to select luminosity range mask. Once you've applied this mask, you'll have this dialog box appear. There are two nodes here that control this mask. Since they are both all the way raised to the top, that means that our fill layer is 100% visible. But if I bring them both all the way down, then you'll see that the fill layer becomes totally invisible. But let's reset this, bringing both of the nodes all the way back to the top and take a closer look at what's going on. If I bring the left node all the way down, then the orange is totally removed from the black rectangle, partially removed from the gray rectangles and not at all removed from the white rectangle. But why is that? It's because this left node controls whether a layer is visible on the darkest parts of your photo. On the other hand, the right node will control the brightest parts of your photo. Since we only brought the left node down, the fill layer is 0% visible on the darkest side of our photo and 100% visible on the brightest part of our photo. Of course, this works in reverse too. If I only bring the right side down, then the filler is no longer visible on the brightest parts of the photo, but it's totally visible on the darkest parts of our photo. I know this can be a little bit confusing. Here's a little rhyme you can use to remember what's going on. Whenever you're using aluminosity mask, the light is controlled on the right. If you want your layer to be visible on the brightest parts of your photo, make sure the right node is all the way up. If you don't want your layer to be shown on the lightest parts of your photo, then bring that right node down. Remember, light is controlled on the right. The last thing you need to know about luminosity masks is that this curve line right here controls more than just the darkest and lightest parts of the photo. The middle area of the graph also controls everything in between those two points. If I bring this node over, you can see if you're watching this picture right here, that less and less of the orange layer is visible. I can continue to move it over like that. Now only the very blackest darkest parts of our photo have the orange applied, and I can move it back to apply it to more of the photo. Of course, this works in reverse to. As I lower this node, the orange will no longer be applied to the dares blackest parts of the photo. As I continue to bring it over, you can see it gradually becomes less and less visible on all of these different areas. I know that's a lot to take in, but let's see how this works on a real photo. In this example image, I don't like how dark a lot of the photo is. We're losing a lot of the detail. But if I try to brighten this photo and fix those areas, you can see that while those parts look better, the brightest parts of the photo look way too bright. That's because adjustment layers brighten the darkest and brightest parts of the photo evenly, which makes the bright areas way too bright. To fix this, I'm going to apply illuminosity mask to it. Then I can control which areas are brightened. If I don't want to brighten these brightest parts of the photo and light is controlled on the right, that means that I should drag this right node down. This is looking so much better already. But let's go a little further and bring this light node to the left so that R adjustment doesn't brighten the brightest parts of the photo or the close to be brightest parts of the photo. Just like we did with the hue mask earlier in this chapter. Let's give this mask a little bit of a blur just to smooth out where this mask is affecting. This looks so much better. Here's what this looked like before, and here's that brightening. Notice that the shadows on this rock are still getting brightened, but the brightest parts on the rock are no longer being affected. But I still think this photo is a little too bright with what I did. I'm just going to click right here and I'll just adjust this ale bit. I think that looks pretty good. Much better. While I think this looks really good, I think we're still brightening the trees over here on the top left a little bit too much. If we want to refine this mask even more, all we need to do is grab the paint brush and paint with black paint over the areas where we want to remove the mask. I'm just going to lower my flow. There we go. Then with a little bit of a larger paint brush, I'll just use the bracket keys there. I'm just going to paint over this area, so those trees aren't quite so bright. Now you can see what this looks like before and after. All right. Great work. Now you know how to work with luminosity masks. In the next video, we're going to take this a step further and learn about blend ranges. 10. Blend Ranges: In this video, we'll learn about blend ranges, which are very similar to luminosity masks. I'm going to start out here with the same lake photo that we were working with in the last video. But I just removed that brightness that we applied to it. Let's start fresh and I'm going to apply another brightness in contrast layer and I'll bring up the brightness to brighten things up. All right. Now with this layer selected, I'm going to apply blend ranges to it, which you can find right up here in our layers by clicking on this little gear icon. Here we have our blend ranges. We can control them with this little graph right here. Blend ranges are basically the exact same thing as lluminos D mask. The light is controlled on the right, just the same. If I don't want this applied to the lightest parts of the photo, then I need to bring the right side down. You can see on our photo, now this isn't affecting the rock quite as much. Just like in the last video, if we wanted to, we could bring this over to the left a little bit to reduce how much this is applied to. I'll bring it over about the same amount as last time. I'll just close out of this and now we can see that before and after. This looks great. But it also looks identical to the previous video. What's the difference? Well, blend ranges and luminosity masks are pretty much the same, so you can use whichever you prefer. But let me show you the biggest differences between the two of them to help you see which one works better for you. I'll just turn off this layer and I'll apply another brightness and contrast layer. I'll bring it up. And then I'll apply aluminosity mask. Bringing that highlight node down again and over to the left. As you can see, these two layers will brighten the photo in the exact same way. But the biggest differences between the two of them is that the luminosity mask has an actual mask applied to your layer. This layer, on the other hand, does not have a mask applied to it. Blend ranges is a hidden setting. Because of this, using luminosity mask makes it a lot easier to see which layers have luminosity mask applied to them. To edit it, it's very easy. Just click on the luminosity mask icon like this. This is different from blend ranges, where you need to select the layer, go to the gear icon, and then adjust the blend ranges from here. But even with this benefit of having a more visible mask, I still prefer blend ranges. Why is that? Well, I think that the less layers you have, the better. One of the most useful things in affinity photo is the layers panel. But I speak from experience that the layers panel is also the most commonplace for something to go wrong. The more layers you have here, the easier it is to make mistake in the layers panel. In my own personal photo editing and throughout this course, we're going to use blend ranges on individual layers instead of luminosity mask. But as you've seen, the luminosity mask really works exactly the same as blend ranges. If you prefer using the luminosity mask, then please do. But for me, I just like the simplicity of these blend ranges. Okay, I know that was a lot of chitty chat, but hopefully that clears things up for you. We'll be using blend ranges a lot more throughout the course. But for now, let's move on to the next lesson and learn about the Pen tool. 11. Pen Tool: Let's learn about the Pen tool. The Pen tool allows you to make precise selections by connecting a series of points together. We're going to start off with this simple image and then work our way up to more difficult pen tool situations. To start, I'm just going to select the pen tool right here. Then up in the context toolbar, I'm going to modify the settings. I want to make sure that we're working in polygon mode, which allows you to lay down points and connect them in straight lines. Another setting I like to turn on is called Rubber Band mode. This gives you a preview of what your line will look like as you set down your next point, which I find very helpful. If you want to close your shape, all you need to do is click on the very first point here and now you have your closed shape. Now, what do you do with this shape? Well, once you've closed your shape, you can easily turn your shape into a selection right up here. Then you can apply a mask to remove the background. Whatever you have selected, we'll stay put. I'll press command or Control D to D select and we can see our beautiful selection here. That was just a quick little demo. Let me just delete this mask. This time as a better example, I'm going to lay down four points going around this picture frame to select it. After I've done that, I'll mask out the background. Starting right here, I'm just going to lay down a point. Luckily with rubber band mod on, we can easily see where our line will lay. Then I'll just connect it back to the first point. I'll press command or control zero to zoom out. Now I'll just turn this into a selection, and then I'll add a mask to it. You can see now our background has been removed, presmand, or Control D. I love how smooth and straight these lines are. This is so useful for selecting geometric shapes like this. But in this photo, I think what I actually want to do is select this inner frame and then replace it with a different picture. Let's delete this mask again. This time, I'm going to make a selection of this inner frame area. As I go, I'm just going to click a little bit more toward the outside. If you select a little bit too much of your frame and then remove it, that actually looks better than if you select too little, and then you have white parts showing through on your selection. If you want to ever move any of these little nodes around, you can hold down command or control, and you can click and drag on the point to adjust where it's positioned. With that done, I'm just going to turn this into a selection. Then I can apply a mask to it. This has done the opposite of what I want it to do. I want it to remove this inner part. Let me just de select with command or control D. Then with this mask layer still selected, I'm going to invert this mask with command or control I and there we go. Now you can see we've cut out the inside of this frame. Now we could easily just go up to file place. We could select any of our images, I'll just select this girl here. We could open them up and place them in the frame. I'll drag it to the bottom so that she's inside of the frame like this, and then we can adjust how she's positioned here. Lovely. All right onto the next photo. In this photo, I'm going to do a very similar thing, removing the inside of the frame and then replacing the picture. However, this frame is a little trickier. Notice we have this object overlapping with our frame. For this part, we're going to want to use a different mode for our pen tool. I'll just select the pen tool. Then I'll show you that previously we were working in polygon mode, laying down just straight lines like this. I'll undo that with Commander Control Z, and this time, we're going to work in Smart mode, which is the second one right here. In Smart mode, affinity photo will be smart about how it decides to place down these points. I'll turn on rubber band modes. You can see this better. As I move and adjust where I'll place the next point, you can see that the line becomes more and more curved. This is a super easy way to get really beautiful curved lines. I'm just going to delete this curve, Let's start in polygon mode with the straightest parts of our image. I'll just start by clicking right here and I'll bring it around. Then when we get to that curved object, we can switch into smart mode. I've made it to the curved area. I'll switch to Smart mode now. I'll just begin clicking to create this curve. Feel free to make as many points as you'd like. We're just trying to create that smooth line. I think that looks pretty good, but I'll hold command or control to adjust my node. Bring this down a little bit. I think this looks pretty good. You can see it's pretty easy just changing the mode in the middle of creating this pen path. I'll just make this into a selection. I'll add a mask to it. I'll de select with command or Control D, and then I'll invert my mask with command or Control I. Just like last time, I'll just place a new image here. I'll choose that girl again. Let's open that up and place it and drag it to the bottom. All right. We've worked our way up. Now it's time to move on to the last photo, which is the trickiest. I want to make a selection of the statue here. This statue is way too similar to the background to use the selection brush tool. But the pen tool can make the selection very precisely. To do this, I'm going to grab the pen tool and put it into smart mode. There aren't really any sharp lines here. Smart mode is our best bet to create all of these smooth curving lines. I'm going to start right on the outside and then I'll bring it in. I'm just going to connect all of these points, creating a nice smooth curve as I make this selection. You're going to need to lay down quite a few points because there's so many curves to this image. The pen tool is very precise, but it can't take a long time. I try not to use it unless I really can't make the selection otherwise. Remember that as you go, you can undo any point that you lay down by pressing command or control Z. You could also hold down command or control to move any of these nodes around as you need to. As you go, remember that it's actually better to cut into the statue a little bit rather than leave some of the background behind. Just keep that in mind as you're in some tricky areas and you're wondering if you should select a little outside or inside. It's better to select more inside of the statue. Now that I just finished, you can see that this curve looks a little strange where I finished my point. I'm just going to undo that with command or Control Z. Instead, I'll lay a point right next to it and then close it. You can see that curve isn't quite as affected. We have our beautiful crazy selection here with so many points. I'm going to turn this into a selection. Then I'll add a mask and I'll deselect with command or Control D. All right, I'm just going to add a background to this now. I'll go to layer and I'll add a new fi layer, and I'll bring that to the bottom. As you can see, the pen tool is perfect for sharp crisp selections. But sometimes it's actually a little too crispy. Look how harsh this line is. Keep this photo open. In the next video, we're going to learn how to soften a mask that looks like this. 12. Softening a Mask: This video we'll learn how to soften the edges of a mask. We're going to practice by softening the mask that we made in the last video of this statue. Like we saw at the end of the last video, the edges of this mask are so sharp. They're too sharp to be realistic. I want to blur the edges here to make them blend in with the background a little better and just make them softer. But the key to remember is that I want to soften the mask, not the actual photo. I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll just click on our mask. This is what we want to blur, the black and white here. I want to blur this, and then our photo will look nice and clear, but just the edges will be blurred. To do this, I'm just going to select the mask. Then I'm going to add a Gaussian blur. I'm just going to place this as a child layer to our mask. Now this will only be affecting our mask. As I increase the radius, you can see, it gets a lot softer on the edges, but the actual statue stays in focus. This is pretty cool. I think this was a bit too much of a blur though. I'm just going to bring this down to about there. Now as I Zoom in, you can see the difference. Here's the before, the very sharp mask, and here's the after. Blurring the edges of the mask is a great way to make pen tool selections look more realistic. A little blur just looks more natural. Now in the next video, we're going to bring together all of the selection tools that we learned about to make our best selection yet. 13. Combining Selection Tools: In this video, we're going to learn how to use multiple selection tools to make the perfect mask. I want to select our model here and remove her from her background. To start, I'm going to use the selection brush tool. I'll just make it a bit larger. Then I'll quickly click and drag to paint a selection. Now, this is actually a pretty tricky selection. The colors of our model, the colors of her dress and her hair are very similar to the background. It's a tricky selection. I'm just going to adjust my brush size as I go, and I'm just going to click and drag to try to add more to our selection. I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll click and drag to remove from our selection too. Just going all the way around. In between her legs, I'll hold or options so that I can remove that little section there. There we go. I'll just continue to do this all throughout this election. As a tip when you're cleaning up the edges of your selection, just click and drag slightly inside the lines and your selection will jump to the edges. If you click and drag right on top of the edge, it's going to jump to the outside. That's just my little tip for you. Stick close to the inside, and you should get a pretty good selection. The selection is really struggling with the hair, but that's okay. I'm just going to end it here and I'll press refine up in the context toolbar. This automatically gives beautiful matt edges to our selection, but I'm quickly just going to click and drag to paint over the edges of her hair. Hopefully to refine this a little bit more, although it's not looking too great. That's okay. I'll just continue clicking and dragging and then I'll press apply. Let's add a mask now, and then D select with command or Control D. Yeah, that's a pretty rough selection, but we're going to do quite a bit of cleaning up. It'll turn out beautiful in the end, wait. I'm going to add a background layer so we can better see our selection. I'll go to layer, new fill layer. I'll drag this to the bottom. Now we can zoom in and take a look at what we have going on here. To start, I want to clean up her hair. I'll grab the paint brush tool and select the mask, and I'm just going to paint in white and black to add and remove from the hair. With a larger brush, I'm just going to paint to fill in a few of these areas, and then I'll go back to remove. We want to make sure that all her hair is included. I don't like seeing all these chunks missing, so I'm just going to paint over these areas to make sure all of the hair is visible. Now that the hair is visible, I'm just going to switch my color to black by pressing x on my keyboard. Using a bit of a smaller brush, I'm just going to come in here and remove some of these splotchy areas that shouldn't be there. Here we go. I'll just continue to do that all the way around the head. Feel free to turn the mask on and off so you can see if you should include more or less of a certain area. I think this area on top of her head should be a little bit more transparent, so I'm just going to paint over it in black and then I'll paint over it in white once again to create that transparent look. I think that's a bit better. I am painting with a low flow here as I go. I forgot to mention that. This should be just a very gradual adding and removing of hair. The hair looks a lot better, a lot smoother. We could keep painting to continue to clean up the selection. There are a few other strange looking areas like down here. But instead, I think I'm actually going to use the pen tool to be a little bit more precise. I'll select the pen tool and then I'll show you how to do this. Down here with her feet, you can see that her shoes look a little bit strange. I'm actually going to turn off the mask. Then I'm going to trace with the pen tool in rubber band mode and in smart mode. I'm just going to trace around the feet. Remember to add as many points as you'd like and aim to stick more toward the inside of your selection. In this case, I'm going to overlap a little bit with the sandals and her feet as I go. I'm going to end my selection about here at the ankle area and I'm just going to bring it over like this. There we go, and then I'll turn it into a selection. Now I'll turn the mask back on and I'll select it. I'm going to grab the paint brush. With this mask still loaded, I'm going to paint in white paint inside of the mask to add back in any missing areas on this mask. I'm actually going to bring up the flow all the way to do this. I'll make my rush a bit larger. I'm just going to paint in white all throughout this. You can see some areas coming back. There we go. Now we have the entire sandal. All of this area is all filled in. Then I'm actually going to invert my selection. I'll do this with command or control, shift I. Now we'll be painting on the outside of our selection, and I want to remove from the outside. I'm going to switch my color to black, and then I'm just going to paint all along the outside. I'm going to be careful at this top area where I don't have a good selection made. Just painting right along there. I'll press command or control D to D select, and now you can see how much better this selection looks. It just looks so splotchy before. To soften this mask, I'm going to add a gaussian blur to it. I'll drag it down like this. Now it's a child layer, and then I'll just increase the radius. It really doesn't need much of a blur, but I think that looks pretty good. You might have noticed when we added that selection that it did remove a little bit right up here. That's no good. I'm going to switch my color to white. I'll select the mask again, and I'm just going to fill in those areas again. I can continue now with this pen tool technique to clean up more of the edges. I'll select my pen tool and in smart mode, I'll start on the outside here and work my way in. There we go. I think this leg looks a little bit messed up too, so I think I'll just keep going all the way up it like this. That looks pretty good. Then I'll click, click, click. There we go. I'm just on the outside of the leg now. I'm going to turn this into a selection. Using the brush tool. I'm going to paint in black to inside of the selection. You see these areas right down here. I don't want that to be included in the selection. With my mask selected, I'm just going to paint in black paint to remove those areas. Up here, I think I'll leave that. I think that looks good. Now I can invert my mask with command or control shift I, so everything out here is selected. I'll just switch my color to white so I can click and drag along here to make sure the entire leg is filled in nicely. And I'll stop when I get close to the top. Now I can de select with command or Control D, and you can see that just looks so much better. I'm going to continue to do this process throughout the rest of the selection, creating a nice selection with the pen tool, turning it into a selection, and then painting on either side of the mask. If there's some areas you see that really just need painting, I think it's totally fine just to paint the area away. But using the pen tool really does make a much cleaner, sharper selection. Just remember to have your mask selected as you do this. You don't want to accidentally paint on the picture. I just finished with the Pen tool, and now I'm going to double check our selection by holding Alt or Option and clicking on the mask icon. Now we can just zoom in here and make sure that we didn't miss any areas of our mask. I can see a little bit of a strange area right here, so I'll just paint in white to fill that in. Up here, I think this actually looks pretty good. And there we have it. We've now cut our model out of her background. To finish this up, I want to show you a little trick to make this mask look even better. I'm going to add a brightness and contrast adjustment. I'm going to brighten it up quite a bit. Then I'm going to invert this adjustment, so I'll press command or control I. Now this adjustment has a black mask applied to it, so we can simply paint in white to apply it to certain areas. In this case, I'm going to apply the brightness just to the edges of our photo. This will help her to blend into her new white background a little bit better. I'm just going to softly paint over it. Maybe I'll lower the flow a little bit to make this even softer. There we go. Just a quick way to help her blend in a little bit better. And make her look like she belongs here. Now, I'll just turn this off. You can see the before, and here's the after of blending her in a little bit better. This only worked because the background is a white color. If we put her on a darker background, I would probably darken the edges just to help her blend in. Now that we've done that, I'm just going to hold down command or control to select our mask and the brightness in contrast. I'll trow them both off so we can see the before and here's the after with our model cut out. Great work. Now you know how to make incredible selections and masks in affinity photo. Now in the next chapter, we're going to learn about Affinity's most powerful tools for improving the color and light in our photos. 14. Color & Lighting: Affinity photo has so many ways to edit color and light. So far in the course, we've really only used basic adjustment layers. But in this chapter, we're going to take a deeper look at Affinity's most powerful adjustments for color and light. Let's get started. 15. Curves for Light: Let's learn how to use the curves adjustment to edit the lighting of your photos. To see how this adjustment works, I've prepared a few screenshots of the curves adjustment. This is exactly what the adjustment looks like in affinity. I just removed everything besides the adjustment so that we could really focus on it. The first thing to know about curves is that this line represents everything in your photo? At the top right, The line is representing the brightest parts of your photo? At the bottom left? This part of the line represents the darkest parts of your photo. As you might expect, the rest of the line represents all of the other tones in your photo ranging from the darkest tones up to the brightest tones. The line represents everything in your photo before you make any changes with the curves adjustment. But of course, the whole point of this adjustment layer is to change the lighting in your photo. How do we do that? Well, as we bring the line closer to the top of the graph, we'll make things brighter. But as we bring the line closer to the bottom of the graph, we'll make things darker. That's how you use the curves adjustment to change the lighting in an image. In this example, we would be making the photo brighter, since we're bringing the mid tones of our photo closer to the bright top part of the graph. But in this example, we would be making the photo darker, since we're bringing the mid tones of our closer to the dark bottom part of the graph. That's about it. That's the general idea of how to use curves. I know that all might sound a little bit confusing, but don't worry. It's actually really easy after you've practiced a little bit. Let's jump back into affinity photo and practice using curves. Starting with this first photo here, I'm just going to go down to the adjustments and then I'll apply a curves adjustment. I'm going to click and drag on this line, starting right from the middle here. As I drag it up, you can see our photo gets brighter, and as I drag it down, you can see our photo gets darker. I'll just reset this line because I want to show you where things really get interesting. We can add multiple points to this line. Let's say that I just want the shadows to be a little bit darker. I could bring this part of the line down. But this is actually making the entire thing darker. You can see that up here. If I wanted to not affect the highlights as much, I could click right up here and bring this back in line with where the line started. Now we're just darkening the mid tones, and you can see this as I turn this layer off and back on. The clouds don't change. Only the darkest parts of the image are getting darker. And we can do this in reverse. If I wanted to make the brightest parts even brighter, I could bring that point up and I could bring this back in line with the rest of our graph. Now only the brightest parts of our image are getting brighter. You can see that here. The midtones aren't really being affected. Only the bright parts are getting brighter. Now, this is pretty cool, but I want to show you the most common curve that people make, and that's making the highlights brighter and the shadows darker. I'm just going to bring this point up a bit over here and this part down a little bit. By making the highlights brighter and the shadows darker, we're effectively adding contrast to our photo. You can see the before and after. This curve is often called an S curve. You can see it makes a very slight s shape. I really love making S curves. I think they really make photos pop. We're probably going to use this quite a bit throughout the course. Let me just reset this because I also want to show you that we can even change this highlight point and this shadow point if we want to. Starting with the highlight point, I could drag this point down. If I wanted my highlights to start at a darker level, you can see this just makes the whole photo darker, but mostly it's making our brightest spots darker. We can do the opposite over here with the shadow point. If I bring this up, the darkest parts of our picture will get lighter. But what if I wanted to do the opposite and make the shadows even darker or the highlights even brighter, these nodes can't go any lower or higher. Well, what we can do is actually use them to affect the slope of the curve. Coming down here to our shadows, I could actually bring this over, which makes the whole slope of this curve steeper, meaning that what used to be a mid tone is now a dark shadow. Right here on the line has now become right here. You can see that now The darkest parts are even darker. I could do this in reverse if I wanted to. I'll just reset this. If I click and drag this one over, you can see we're starting our highlights at a brighter point, meaning that our highlights just got even brighter. I know that was a lot to take in, but let's quickly edit a few photos using curves, and I think everything will make a lot more sense. In the courses Exercise files, we have four more photos for this video. We'll just start right here. For this photo, I think I want to make it a bit brighter. It just looks a little bit dark right now. I'll go to our adjustments, I'll add a curves. Then I'll just click and drag to, brighten this up. Much better. Here's the before and here's the after. That was very quick and easy. Let's go to the next one. I think this photo looks a little bit faded and needs more contrast. I'll go down to our adjustments, apply a curve. This time, I'm going to apply an S curve to add that contrast by making the highlights brighter and the shadows darker. Now you can see this looks a lot better. The dark parts of our photo, like the eyes of the bird or this dark branch, look a lot more dark and contrasted next to the light parts like the light background. Let's do the next one. For this photo, I think I want the shadows to be a little bit darker. They look a little bit gray at the moment. As a little bonus tip, you can actually quickly apply a curves adjustment by using a shortcut, which is command or Control M. I don't know why it's M. That's just something you need to memorize, I guess. I guess you can think about as being a curvy letter. Let's make the shadows darker. I'm going to bring the shadow node over to the right so that all of the darkest parts of our photo are even darker. I think this looks a lot better. One last one. In this photo, I think I need this to be a lot brighter. All press command or control M to apply a curves adjustment. Then let's go ahead and make this brighter. Now the photo looks better, but I think the highlights in the photo, especially on her face, are just looking a little too bright now. To fix this, we could go back into our curves and try to change how this looks. But I don't think that's going to work very well. I think what we need to do is keep the curve nice and bright and use blend ranges. I'll go and click on the Gear icon, and I'm just going to reduce how much this is affecting the highlights. Light is on the right. I'm going to bring this light node down so that this isn't affecting the highlights as much. If I bring this note all the way down, the highlights look a little bit flat. I'm going to raise this just so it's partially affecting the highlights. I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. Now that I'm seeing this, I think I do need to make this just a little bit darker. But I still think this looks a lot better from where we started. Curves gives you so much flexibility when editing the lighting of your photo. But would you believe this adjustment actually has even more to offer? We can edit the colors in our photo too. We'll take a look at that in the next video. F. 16. Curves for Color: In this video, we'll learn how to use curves to change the color of your photos. But before we dive into curves, you need to know a little something about how colors work. You've probably heard of RGB before, which stands for red, green, and blue. These are the three colors that computer monitors combine to form every other color. But what you might not know are the opposites of these three colors, which are cyan, magenta, and yellow. As you can see, cyan is the opposite of red, magenta is the opposite of green and yellow is the opposite of blue. But why is this important? Well, when using the curves adjustment, we can add any of these six colors into our photo. But that's not entirely true. What we're actually doing is adding or removing red, green, and blue. But since red green and blue are the opposites of cyan magenta and yellow. If we remove red green or blue, it will appear as if we've added cyan magenta or yellow. By using curves, we could add red or remove red in order to add cyan. But that's enough t. Let's see this in action. Starting right here, I'll press command or Control M to bring up a curves adjustment. So far, we've been working in the master color channel, which affects the lighting. But if I click here, I can actually go to the red, green or blue color channels to affect the colors in our photo. I'll just go to the red channel, and you can see this line has changed to red, representing the red channel. Using this, I can raise this to add red to our photo, or I can lower it to remove red or add cyan. I'll just reset this. This line works just the same as before, allowing us to independently control the highlights or the shadows. I'm just going to create an S curve here to show you how this works. If I add red to the highlights, I can raise that up to do that, and I can lower this line to remove red and add can. Now we have red highlights. You can see that in his white fur and Cyan shadows. Here's the before and after of that. In this next photo. I want to make the shadows in this photo more blue toned without affecting the colors in the highlights. I don't want her skin or her dress to start to be tinted blue. To do that, I'll press command or control M to bring up our curves. Then I'll go into the blue channel. I want to make the shadows more blue. Go over to the shadow side, I'll increase this to add blue. But I'll bring this line back down here so that we aren't affecting the highlights. Now you can see the before and after. The shadows are a lot cooler toned, but her skin still looks just the same. To make this effect pop even more. I think it'd look nice if the shadows also had a bit of cyan. Cyan is the opposite of red. Let's go back up to the red channel, and I'll go ahead and remove red from the shadows to add, and I'll make this line meet up here in our highlights. Our highlights aren't affected. Now you can see the before and here's the after. Let's go to our last one now. I'll just add a curve. For this one, I think I want this overall photo just to look warmer like it's sunset. To do this, let's start in the red channel. I'm going to add red to the highlights. I'll raise this up and then I'll lower it so the shadows don't become too warm. That's pretty good. Another warm color is yellow. Let's go to the blue channel. I'll remove blue to add yellow. Then I'll raise this line so it meets back up here. Now you can see we've added red and yellow, really warming this up. Let's go into the last color channel now, the green channel. I think I want to remove just a little bit of green from this to make the photo appear a little bit more magenta toned. Now, the green magenta color channel can strongly affect photos and make them look a little strange. I try not to alter it too much. I'm just going to bring it down just a little bit to add that magenta. Now you can see that before and after making this lion look like it's looking at the sunset. Curves can be tricky to learn at first, but it really is an amazing adjustment. You can make your photo brighter or darker, add contrast, change the colors, or all of the above. After you've had a little bit of practice with curves, you'll want to use it on all of your photos. 17. Color Balance: This video, we'll learn about the color balance adjustment. Color balance allows you to easily change the colors in your photos, shadows, midtones, and highlights. We'll be working with the same three photos that we used in the last video so that you can see how this adjustment compares to curves. Starting right here, I'll go to our adjustments and I'll apply a color balance adjustment. Coming right up here to the total range, we can choose if we're working in the shadows, mid tones, or highlights. I'll just go to the shadows. Then down here, we can see these sliders represent all of the colors that we've been working with. We have cyan, magenta, and yellow and we have RGB, red, green, blue. You can very clearly see their opposites here, which makes this a little bit easier than curves. In the shadows, I'm going to give this a very can look. Then I'll go to our highlights, and I'll give this a very red look. This is just the same as what we did with curves in the last video. Now you can see the before and after. That was super easy. Let's go ahead and go to the next one. I'll apply a color balance again. This time, I'll go to the shadows and let's make the shadows look a little bit more blue toned. I'm just going to bring the science slider over and I'll bring the blue slider over. This is just the same as what we did before, and you can see that before and after, the highlights are still unaffected because we were only working in the shadows. That was so easy. Let's go to our last one here. Again, I want to create some nice warmth for our photo. I'll go to color balance. Let's go ahead and start in the highlights. Remember we added yellow and red to our highlights. I'll start with yellow and bring this over. I think this needs quite a bit of yellow, and I'll add some red. I think I'll also raise the magenta just a little bit. Let's go to the mid tones next. I think to affect this photo more, I need to add these same warm colors. I'll just bring the yellow over. I'll bring the red over and a little bit of magenta. Since we're here, we may as well add a little bit of color to our shadows. Since we warmed up the highlights and mid tones, I think it'd look nice if we cool down the shadows. I'll just add a little bit of blue. And a little bit of magenta. Here's the before and after of that. Once again, this was super easy. Affinity has so many ways to edit color and lighting. Curves is such a powerful adjustment, but honestly, color balance might be easier to work with. I usually use curves to adjust lighting and use color balance for colors. Now that we've learned about these two adjustments for affecting colors, I want to show you a more advanced one in the next video. 18. Advanced HSL: In this video, we'll take a deep dive into the HSL adjustment. To start, I'll apply the HL adjustment. Then I just want to start with a really quick review of how this adjustment works. Using these sliders, we can change the hue. You can see every part of our photo is affected, the butterfly, the leaf background, all of the colors. I'll reset the slider by double clicking. There we go. In addition to changing all of the colors, we also have all of these color channels right here. I could go to the green one, and then I could change the hue of only the green parts of the photo. I'll just reset again by double clicking on the node. That was just a really quick review, but now let's dig a little bit deeper. While I'm still in this green channel, I'm going to drag the hue slider all the way over. You can see that this is looking a little bit splotchy. I'll reset this. I'm wondering if it's looking splotchy because our leaves also have some yellow tones. Maybe we should try the yellow channel. Now you see the yellow areas have become splotchy and filled in with color. Wouldn't it be nice if we could combine the yellow and green channels together so that we could change the entire leaf? Well, actually, we can. But we'll need to use this circle right up here. This inner circle represents all of the colors that will be changed as we use these sliders. You can see right now we're positioned somewhere in the green to orange range. However, the only parts of this photo that are 100% being affected are the colors that are in between these two middle nodes. This is 100% affected. This is 100% effective and every color in between. These outer nodes are like a gradient. This point right here actually is 0% affected. It goes 100-0 with these green to yellow colors, and the same goes for this other outer node. It tapers off into 0% once you get to this color. If I want to affect more of the greens, I could move this node over more. Then I could move the mid tone over more so that all of those colors are affected even more. I could also move this middle point over to make sure that all of our yellows are nice and included here. Now you can see the leaves are colored a lot more evenly. There's not as much splotchiness. Now that we have that entire part of the leaf selected, I could double click to reset the hue slider, and then I could alter the color however I want. Maybe I want to cool it down and make it a little more blue toned. I think I'll also desaturate it just a little bit. Maybe let's lighten it up a little bit as well. Now you can see them before and after of just toning down that green color. Let's practice this again. This time working with the butterflies colors. I'm going to go to the blue channel to start and I'll bring the hue over so that you can see what's being affected here. This is very uneven coloring. It's not all changing to the same color and this middle part looks completely unaffected. I'll just double click to reset that. Let's go to the cyan channel and bring this over. You can see a lot more of the butterfly is being recolred, but as it tapers off, these colors are looking a little bit strange. I'm going to make sure that coming over here to our circle. We have more blue included. To do that, I'll drag this node over more. Now we have more blue being affected, and I'll also bring this middle node over more like that. I'll just double click and now we can use this slider to affect the butterflies colors. I think I'll bring this over a little bit more toward blue, just to cool down its colors a little more. I also really want to desaturate this. It just looks so oversaturated right now. Here's the before and after of the butterflies colors. It's not perfect. I think this stock photo was a little bit too overclred, too saturated, but I do think this is an improvement. That was great in all, but I want to show you another way of working with the HSL adjustment. I'm just going to delete this one and I'll apply another HSL adjustment using a shortcut. For HSL, it's command or Control U. Again, you really doesn't make sense for HSL, but I remember command or control because you sounds like. I don't know if that helps, but it helps me. We've used our shortcut to open this up. Now, I want to show you another way to work with this, which is using the picker. To use the picker option, you first need to be in a color channel that you want to affect. You can't be in the main colors to use the color picker. I'll just go to the greens and then I'll use the picker to sample a yellow toned green color in here. I'll just click and you can see that this has moved over to include more of the yellows. I'll just reset this. You can see again. We're in the green channel, it's all over here. I'll use the picker, and if you watch this, it jumps on over to include more of the yellows. Now, I'll just move the hue over and you can see all of the leaf is being affected, which is so nice. I'll just reset this. This time, I'm going to try to sample the butterfly. I'll go to the cyan channel and use the picker, and then I'll click it right in here. You can see that jumped over to include more of the blues, and now I'll adjust the hue. You can see that still doesn't look quite right. Even though the color picker could be useful, it's still important to understand how color ranges work and how the circle works. Because the picker could be a good starting point, but you might still need to adjust some of these points to include more colors and just make this look a little bit better. I'm just going to delete this because I want to quickly show you how the HSL adjustment is a bit similar to the hue mask. I'll press command or Control M to apply a curve, and I'm going to make a very bright curve. Let's just really bump that up. Then I'm going to go down here to our masks and I'll apply a hue mask. I want to brighten up the butterfly. I'm going to move this circle so that all of the points are in the blue range. Then to include more, we can expand our gradient to make sure all of the butterfly is nice and lit up. And we can go ahead and give this a blur. Now we can go back to the curve and we can adjust if we want this brighter or darker, and we're only affecting the butterfly. I just wanted to point that out that this circle is pretty similar and we can adjust these points just the same expanding them to include more colors. Now I want to show you another example of working with the HSL adjustment using this photo here. I press Command or Control U, and now we have the HSL adjustment up. I'm going to use the color picker in the CN section to select the color of these pillows. Let's see if we're affecting all of the pillows, and I think we are. That looks really good. Now, you might notice that the pillows are being affected, but so are a few other things. As I turn this on and off, you might notice the blanket on the left is being recolred, as well as the shadow area over here. Sometimes with the HSL adjustment, you might need to paint a little bit to make this perfect. I'm just going to grab the paint brush tool and I'm going to paint in black on this HSL adjustment to remove it from this blanket and from the shadow area. I'll just turn this on and off to make sure everything has been changed. I'm actually noticing that it is reflecting red on this pillow right here. But I actually think that looks good. It's reflecting because the pillow on top of it was blue before, reflecting blue. Now it's reflecting red. I think that actually looks nice. Now that we've done that and the right things are changing color. I can go back into our HSL adjustment and choose the color that I'd like for this. I think I actually want these pillows to be green. I'm just going to raise the hue until it looks like a nice color. I desaturated a little bit, and maybe let's brighten up the color. All right. After those adjustments, I think this looks really nice. Here's the before and after. Great work. You're now in HSL master, and you can change the individual colors in your photos. 19. Blend Modes: Learn about blend modes. Blend modes allow you to mix multiple layers together. They're like opacity, but smarter. To see how blend modes work, I'm going to use this simple image here. On the left, we have pure white. On the right, we have pure black, and then we just have a few shades of blue in the middle. I'm going to copy this with Command or Control C, then I'll bring it over to our next exercise file here, and I'll just paste it with command or Control V. As you can see, this layer has been placed on top. If I wanted to blend with a layer beneath it, I could just reduce the opacity like this. These layers are blended together, but only because this is more transparent, there's nothing really smart about it. To really get into the smartness of blend modes, only to apply a blend mode. To do that, just come right up here to where it says normal, and you'll see this big list open up here. First, let's apply darken. The darken blend mode looks at both layers and only keeps the darker pixel from each layer. That's why the black rectangle is fully visible because black is darker than everything else. In contrast to that, that's why the white rectangle is totally invisible because white isn't darker than anything. Then in the middle, you can see that the darker parts of each layer are visible, the cat's black fur is kept visible. But where the cat has white fur, now it's been turned blue. Let's take a look at another blend mode now. That was darken. Let's go to lighten. Lighten is the exact opposite of darken. It looks at both layers and only keeps the brightest pixel from each layer. In this example, you can see the white rectangle is fully visible while the black rectangle has disappeared. Just to look at another blend mode, let's go down here to color. Color will give the bottom layer the color of the top layer. That's why the sides have become black and white because there's no color or hue in those rectangles. But for these middle ones, you can see they've turned blue just like the blue rectangles. This is like a recolor adjustment. All right. What's the point? When would you want to use blend modes? Well, most of the time, you don't actually need to use blend modes. Opacity and masks work perfectly fine for most photos. But there are certain situations where blend modes are useful, a few of which we'll learn about in upcoming videos. But the main goal of this video is just to show you that blend modes exist. Now, even though I will be showing you blend modes more in upcoming videos, I can't resist showing you at least a couple of uses for blend modes in this one. Let's go to this next exercise file. I'm going to copy this with command or Control C. Then I'm going to paste it on this bird image here, I'll do that with command or Control V. Let's take a look at how blend modes will affect how this texture blends into the birds. I'm going to first change this to darken. You can see that this is keeping the darkest pixel. All of the white areas on this bird layer are now invisible. But if we want to keep more detail than that, there's actually another really nice blend mode called multiply. You can see some of the detail has come back from those lighter areas. If you'd like, you can also still reduce the opacity of this layer just to make the white areas more visible. We can use blend modes to add light to a photo as well. Let's come to this last photo. In this one, I want to create a light burst coming from the photo. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. I'll click and drag to make a circle. Then I'm going to add a gradient to it. I'll go to the gradient tool and starting from the center, I'll just click and drag outward. For this outer color stop, I'm going to make it a nice orange color. Then I'm going to turn this into a radial gradient. Now we have this beautiful ball of light. Let's use a blend mode to blend it into the photo. Going to blend modes. I'm going to go to our light and blend modes. I think I'll use screen for this one. This one looks pretty nice to blend this in even better with our photo. I'm just going to apply a blur to it. I'll apply a Gaussian blur. I'll just raise this up. I think I want this even more blurred. I'll just type in this box 300. Very nice. Now I can use the move tool to reposition the circle. Just like that, we now have a beautiful light burst on our photo. Of course, we can reduce the opacity of this. If we want this to be a little less intense. That looks great. As you use affinity photo, you'll learn more and more uses for blend modes. But don't worry about learning what every single blend mode does. Even though I've used affinity photo for years, I still don't actually know use cases for every single one of these. The goal of this video is just to introduce you to blend modes so that we can keep practicing with them throughout the rest of this course. A 20. Global Color Correction: This video we'll learn how to color correct a photo. There's actually a lot of different ways to correct a photo. Depending on your photo, one technique might work better than another. In this video, I'll teach you three different techniques for color correction. That way, you'll have multiple options in your tool belt when it's time for you to work on your own photos. Method number one is the easiest and best place to start. It's simply adding a white balance adjustment layer. I'm going to come to our adjustments and then I'll apply a white balance. Using this adjustment layer. I like to just play around with this slider, I like to make it warmer and then cooler. I'm looking at the photo as I'm clicking and dragging and just seeing what makes more sense for this photo? In this photo, I think it makes more sense to bring it more toward blue, and you can see the difference here. Here's the before and after. This is really just using your eyes and trying to see what looks better. But there are definitely more precise ways to do color correction. Let's move on to method number two for this photo. Tth number two is a really cool little trick that you can use with the curves adjustment. I'll press command or Control M to bring up curves. Then I'm going to go into each color channel to adjust the colors. Let's start in the red channel. The strategy for this is to actually look at this little histogram here that we have in the middle. This whole gray area. I'm going to make each of these points line up to the very edges of the histogram. I just brought the shadows over to meet the darkest point. Then just using my eye, this one's a little trickier. I'm going to try to line up the highlights node, right about there. There we go. Then I'll go into the green channel and I'll just continue this process, bringing it over to meet the edge. Last, we'll do the blue channel. The blue channel hardly needs the highlight moved over, so I'll just do a little bit. Now let's take a look at the before and after. Here's what our photo looked like before, and here's the after. To be honest, I don't know exactly how this one works, but I do know that it's amazing and it really does help for color correction. Let's do another example with this curves technique. I'll go to our next photo and apply a curve, command or Control M. Then I'll go into each color channel and we'll do it again. I'll just drag this over. We don't need to move the highlights over in this one. The highlights are so bright that the histogram is just bumping right up against the edge, which makes this a little easier. I just finished in every color channel. Here's the before and after. This definitely looks better, but it's not quite right. I think our color correction has made the shadows very dark. Maybe we need to adjust the lighting a little bit. I'll go back into my curves and in the master color channel, we'll be able to affect the lighting. I'm going to bump up the brightness just on this very edge, and then I'll bring the highlights area back down. I really don't want to brighten the highlights, just the shadows. Now let's take a look. Here's the before and after. You can see the shadows on her dark coat here look a lot better than before. That's method two. It's a pretty cool trick. I'm going to show you one more method. That's a really cool trick. Method number three is using blend modes. To do this one, first, I'm going to start by grabbing the rectangle tool and just clicking and dragging out a rectangle like this. Then I'm going to find a part of the photo that should be white. In this photo, I think the flowers on her dress are supposed to be a nice white flower. What I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this color picker right over here in our tools. I'm going to change the radius to five by five just so we sample more of the color. Then I'll click right in here to sample that color. The rectangle should have changed to that color. If yours didn't, make sure it's selected and then click here to apply that color. Now we have this light green color that should be white. Using the move tool. What I'm going to do is I'm going to stretch this rectangle, so it covers the entire photo. Then I'm going to use blend modes to change. This is where the magic happens. I'm going to use the divide blend mode, which you can find right down here. You can see the colors of our photo look so much better. Here's the before and after. I honestly never use the divide blend mode except for with this color correction technique. I'm not even really sure how this works, but I do know that this technique is really cool for color correction. Let's do another example with the divide blend mode. Going to this one here, I'm going to make another square. Then I'll use the color picker and five by five. I'm going to click on an area that should be white. I think that her shirt should be a white color. I'll just click to sample that color. Now you can see that that color has been applied to our square. It's a very dark color, isn't it? I'm just going to use the tool to stretch this across the entire document here. Then I'll change the blend mode to divide. As you can see, the white balance looks a lot better now, but I think the whole image just looks way too bright now. To fix this, I'm going to add a curves adjustment with command or Control M. I want to decrease the brightness of this. But I'm going to make sure my adjustment is underneath our color correction square. That way, I'm only affecting the photo, not this square here. With that done, I'm just going to come over to our highlights and I'm going to darken them like this. As you can see, as I darken it more and more, you can actually see these trees and her hair start to reappear before they were missing because the photo was so bright. Go ahead and lower this down until you can see those details again. We still want the photo bright, just not quite that bright. I'll select both of these layers to see the before and after. Now you know three ways to color correct a photo. Depending on your photo, one of these techniques might work better than another. For example, in this last technique, you need to make sure that part of your image has a white color in it, so that can make it a little bit tricky. But I would say just give all of these different techniques a shot and see what looks best for your photo. In the next video, we're going to continue with this color correction by doing some more targeted color correction. 21. Targeted Color Correction: In this video, we'll learn how to color correct a specific area in a photo. Sometimes it's not your whole photo that needs to be color corrected, just a particular part of it. Most often, this actually happens with skin. The human eye is really trained to pick up on even the slightest discoloration in skin. Sometimes cameras don't accurately capture people's skin tones. For example, in this photo, I think her skin is looking a little bit too green. You can see this especially in some of the shadowy areas. It just has a slight green tint to it. But lucky for us, this is a really easy fix. All we need to do is apply an HSL adjustment to the areas that we want to affect. I'm going to press command or Control u to bring up the HSL adjustment. In the master color range. I'm just going to make this hue very extreme so that we can see what we're doing. Because now I'm going to actually paint this adjustment only on the skin. To paint on the adjustment. First, I need to invert this layer with command or Control I. Now we have a black mask. All I need to do is grab my paint brush and paint in white paint on this black mask to reveal the blue HSL adjustment. I'll bring my flow all the way up so that we can see it better. Now I'm just going to click and drag to apply this blue color to the skin. This is just temporary, but it's a very easy way to quickly apply an adjustment just to the areas that you want affected. I'm just going to carefully paint all around only on the skin. If you paint outside the lines, remember you can always press x on your keyboard to switch your colors, and then you can paint in black to remove the blue color. I just finished painting. I think I missed a spot there. There we go. I know this looks a little crazy, but stick with me. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to remove paint from any areas that we don't want it. I'll press x on my keyboard, and I'm just going to paint this over her lips and her eyes to remove the blue tint, we really don't want it affecting here. The eye color looked just fine in the photo. It did not need color correction. If you leave it on the lips and teeth, sometimes it looks pretty strange as well. Now that that's done, I'm just going to click on the HSL adjustment so that we can adjust the colors better. I'll just double click on this node to reset it. Now I'm going to adjust the hue to remove the green tint. You can see as I bring this down, her skin becomes even more green. I'm going to bump it just up a bit, just to bring a little more red into the skin. I think I'll also increase the saturation just a little bit to bring extra warmth to it. All right. Now we can see the before and here's the after. When we first opened this photo, you might not have noticed that her skin had a green tint to it. But now with the before and after, I'm sure it looks a lot more obvious. I think this still looks a little intense, though, so I'm just going to lower the opacity of this layer. You want to be very careful with skin not to overdo it. The more you practice with color correction, the easier it becomes to notice when your colors are just slightly off with a simple HSL adjustment, you can easily color correct any part of your photo. 22. Color & Lighting Project: This video we'll practice the skills that we've been learning by completing a start to finish project. This is the perfect way to review what we've learned and for you to practice using these skills in a real world scenario. Where do we begin? When opening a new photo, the first thing I like to work with is the lighting. Since this photo is looking a little bit too dark, I'm going to start by brightening it up. I'll press command or Control M to bring up the curves, and then I'll raise up our mid tones. You can see what that looks like before and after. This definitely has helped to bring more light into the image, but I think the highlights have just become a little too bright now. We could try to fiddle around with our curves adjustment to fix it, but I think blend ranges would be easier. I'll click on the gear icon, and I'm going to lower the highlights node until I think this looks nice. I don't want to take this too far or the photo will start to look flat. I'm just going to lower this about halfway. All right now you can see the before and after. After I fix the lighting, the next thing I like to edit is the overall colors in my photo. I'm noticing that the colors are a little dull. I want to add some saturation. I'll press command or control you to bring up the HSL adjustment. Then I'm just going to go color channel by color channel to adjust each of these different color channels. Starting in the red channel, let's go ahead and bump up the saturation to see what will be affecting. I can see we're affecting the skin and these flowers. I think I just want to increase the saturation of that. Maybe I want to bump it over a little bit. To bring a little bit more redness to it. Here's the before and after of that. You can see there's just a little bit more red in the skin now. Very nice. Let's go to the yellow channel. If I bump this all the way up, you can see we're affecting quite a bit of the photo here. This is affecting the green grass as well as her dress. I think I will increase the saturation of these areas. Then to make the photo a little bit warmer, I'm just going to bring them up a little bit. You can see this makes them a little more red toned versus making them more blue toned. I think I'll just raise this just a bit, not too far. Let's go into greens. This is affecting more of the grass, that makes sense. I think for this one, I'll go ahead and increase the saturation a little to make those colors pop. Then I do think I still want to make this photo overall warmer. I'm going to raise the hue, just to introduce more warmth and more yellow tones into these green areas. Here's what we got so far. This is looking so good. Let's go into the cyan channel. You can see that they're cyan in a few strange areas. I really don't want to affect those, so I'll leave those alone. Go into the blue channel. I'll raise this now. Again, we have some weird areas lighting up as well as the blue flowers on her dress. Interesting. I didn't even know those were blue. I think just to mix things up, maybe I'll just desaturate those blues. There we go. Next, I'm going to go into the magenta channel. The magenta is affecting the flowers and her lips. Right. I think I will increase the saturation of these areas. Then maybe I can make the flowers a little bit more purply by bringing this over. All right. As I've been adjusting all of these colors, you might be wondering how I know what exactly to do. To be honest, I don't. I'm just going with my gut as I'm adjusting all these colors. I know I wanted this photo to look warmer. For most of these colors, I just erred on the side of making everything a little bit warmer. I think we're off to a really great start adjusting the colors. Here's the before and after. It's starting to look more like a golden sunset, which is really pretty and makes sense because you can see the sun right back here. I want to continue to warm up this photo even more. Let's add another HSL adjustment, command or Control U. Then I'm going to go into the green channel, and I'm just going to use the picker to sample a bit of this grass color. Now that that's been adjusted, I'm just going to adjust the hue to make this area even warmer. Here's the before and after of that. Very nice. To continue to add a little bit of style to our colors. Let's do a color balance adjustment next. I love this adjustment. Let's start with the highlights and let's warm them up a little bit. I'll just bring this slider over to add yellow. Then I think in the shadows, I also want to warm up the shadows a little bit by adding magenta. I'll just bring this one over. Last for the midtones, I think I'll just make them overall more warm. I'll bring the red slider over just a little bit. I'll bring the yellow slider over, and maybe a little bit of magenta. That seems like a good mix. Here is the before and after of color balance. It's subtle, but it really does add some beautiful warmth. After editing the overall lighting and colors. The next thing I like to do is edit the lighting and colors of specific areas. I want to draw more attention to the subject of the photo. I want to do this by adding a little bit more contrast to her face. All press command or control to bring up the curves adjustment. Then I'm going to give this curve a slight S curve. I'll brighten the highlight areas and darken the shadow areas. Now this looks pretty intense on the whole picture, but I'm going to invert this layer with command or Control I. Then using the paint brush tool, I'm just going to paint this just over the areas that I want more contrast added. I'll paint in white paint, and maybe I'll lower the flow a little to make this less harsh with a bigger brush. I'm just going to paint this over her hair and her face. Here's the before and after. I think I might want tone that down just a little bit, so I'll lower the opacity a little. But you can definitely see that the focus is more on her with this contrast added. Another way to add more attention to your subject is darkening everything else. It'll just make your subject glow a little more. To do this, I'll press command or Control M to bring up another curve, and I'll just darken this curve. I'll invert this with command or control. Then I'll paint again with a low flow. I'm just going to paint in white paint on this black mask to darken everything else. We're just darkening the edges. Now that I've done that, I think I want to use blend ranges because I don't think I want the shadows to become overly dark. I'll go into blend ranges and I'm just going to lower the shadows node so that the shadows aren't quite as affected by this. I think I'm just going to bring that all the way down just to soften that look a little bit. Now you can see the before and after of that. She definitely is standing out a lot more. This is looking so good. We're almost done. For our last step, I want to add a sunburst to this photo, just to emphasize the sun a little bit more and accentuate these beautiful sun rays. To do that, I'm going to start by grabbing the ellipse tool and drying out an ellipse. I'll use the gradient tool to add a gradient from the center and going outwards like that. I'll make that other color stop and orange color. I'll turn it into a radial gradient. Now we can start working with this. First, I'm going to change the blend mode to screen so that it blends into the background better. Then I'm going to add a blur, this blends in even better. Bringing the radius all the way up. That looks okay, but I think I want even more of a blur for this one. Let's go 400 this time. Perfect. Now I'm going to use the move to resize and position where this is. With this layer selected. I'm just going to make this larger. I think I want this totally covering this corner and then overlapping with her face just a little bit. I think this looks really good. I'm just going to lower the opacity a little so it's a little less intense. Now we can see the before and after of this circle. Then I can go ahead and select all of our layers with shift, and we can see the full before and after. All right. Great work, everyone. That was a really fun project. This definitely looks a fantastical, a little less realistic, but I do think that this really adds some beautiful warmth to this photo. Now you know how to take all of these different skills and apply them to your photos to really enhance the lighting and the colors. In the next chapter, we're going to shift focus and learn how to clean up your photos. 23. Photo Clean Up: In this chapter, we're going to learn how to clean up our photos by removing unwanted things like power lines or trash cans. Now, if you've already taken my affinity photo for beginner course, then you already know how useful the painting brushes for things like this. You just make a new pixel layer, get out the painting brush. Turn on current layer and below, and then paint. Just like that, you can easily remove unwanted things from a photo. But as great as the painting brushes, it's far from perfect. For trickier situations, you'll want to use the clone brush. We'll learn more about the clone brush in the next video. Then throughout the rest of the chapter, we're going to learn about how to use the clone brush for real world situations. This is going to be a lot of fun, so let's get started. 24. Clone Brush: In this video, we'll learn about the clone brush. We'll start off with the very basics of the clone brush, and then we'll practice using it in some real world situations throughout the rest of the chapter. To set up using the clone brush, it's extremely similar to setting up using the painting brush. We'll start by adding a new pixel layer, so we have something to paint on top of. Then I'll select the clone brush. It's right over here. It looks like a stamp. Go ahead and select that. Then we can go up here's the context toolbar and change it to current layer and below. Now we're ready to use the clone brush. I'm just going to make my brush a little bit larger. Then I'm going to sample an area that I want to clone. To do this, hold down Alt or Option. Your cursor will change into a crosshairs icon like this. Then you can just click right where you want to sample from. You can see this crosshair will be left behind. As I paint, you can see that crosshair actually moves, showing you what you're sampling from. I can continue to do this as I move over here. You can see this frog starts to appear. I can click and drag to paint to reveal that. I can continue this all the way across cloning all of the animals. These animals have been painted on a fully separate pixel layer, and you can see this if I turn off the background. This is completely separate from our original. Now, this is a pretty simple example of using the clone brush, but we could actually be more precise with our cloning if we wanted to. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to hold down Alt or Option to sample the tail of this zebra. Then I can clone this on any other animal to give it a zebra tail. But first, I need to make sure I'm on a new pixel layer. Then I can go ahead and click and drag to paint this tail on. Now, it looks like we've sampled a bit too much. We actually have some zebra stripes on our elephant now. To get rid of those, we can do this super easily. Just come over here and select the eraser tool. Then you can just erase the parts that you don't want. I'll just increase the flow, and then I can come right in here. Remove all of those zebra stripes. Then, since this is a separate layer all on its own, I could also use the move tool to reposition it. We can move it a little higher, a little lower. We can place it wherever we want. I think I'll make this a little bit larger. That was a funny example. I just want to show you one more thing you can do with the clone brush. This time, I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and then with the clone brush selected, I'm just going to sample any of the animals. I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll sample the zebra, and I'll paint it right over here. Then I'll sample the frog, I'll do option, and I'll click, and I'll put him right here. Next, why don't we do the bird? I went a little too close there. They're overlapping now. Maybe I'll undo that and place it a little farther away. Using the clone brush, we can place these animals wherever we want. We can put them on as many separate layers as we want, and then we can move them around. Now you know the basics of the clone brush. I recommend that you continue to practice cloning some of the animals here. Then when you feel comfortable using the clone brush, you can move on to the next lessons where we'll use the clone brush to clean up a series of photos. 25. Cloning Edges: In this video, we'll learn about cloning edges. But what does this mean? Well, when you're cleaning up a photo, you're often going to start with the painting brush since it's super easy to use. But one thing that the painting brush really struggles with is the edges of people and objects. But luckily, we can use the clone brush to clean up these edges. Now, in this photo, I just want to remove this part of the mural. It's sticking straight out from her head and it just looks a little strange. I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and I'm just going to start by using the end painting brush to remove what I can. Go right down here to these tools, I'll click on this little triangle to open them up and I'll select the en painting brush. I'll change it to current layer and below. Now I'm just going to go over this area with the end painting brush to see how it does. I think it did a pretty good job up here, but then it starts to look brown and smudgy in this area. I'm going to grab the eraser tool and with a little bit of a larger brush, I'm just going to erase over those smudgy areas. We still got most of it gone, and that looks pretty good. But I'm just going to use the clone brush to finish this off. I'll add another pixel layer. I'll select the clone brush. Then I'll change it to current layer and below. Now I can hold down Alt or option to sample a good part of the wall. With a little bit of a larger brush, I'm just going to go right in here and I'll remove what I can. I like to sample different areas as I go by holding Alt or option and clicking. Then cleaning up like this. This just makes it so the wall doesn't look quite so repeated. For example, if I take this crack and paint it right here, it will be strange that there's two very similar cracks right next to each other. This looks pretty good, but we still have a little bit of white right here. I'll hold alt or option and I'll sample right over here. Then with a smaller brush, I'll just paint very carefully right along the edge of her hair. All right. I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. You can see this. With both of these layers selected, here's the before and after. I think I can still see a little bit of strangeness on the wall behind her, even though the white paint is gone. I'm going to hold alt or option and I'll sample another part of the wall. Then with a larger brush, I'm just going to smooth out these edges just a little bit, just going to tap on them a little bit, and I think that looks a little better just cleaning up that texture. With that, we've easily used the clone brush and the painting brush to clean up this image. I think this looks a lot better and the edge of her hair is very clean and precise. Now that you know how to clean up tricky edges. In the next video, we're going to learn how to clone clothing to clean it up. 26. Cloning Clothing: In this video, we'll learn how to use the clone brush on clothing. For this photo, I want to remove the logo on this man's shirt. Just like in the last video, we're going to start off with the painting brush and then we'll use the clone brush to clean up our work. I'll just zoom in here. First, I need to add a new pixel layer. I'll select the painting brush. Then I'll change it to current layer and below. Using this brush, I'm just going to paint over this entire area to remove the logo. I think that did a pretty good job. Here's the before and after. But you can see that this crease right here has become interrupted. There's just a strange break in it. There's also a new crease forming right here. The texture just looks a little off. But we can clean this up with the clone brush super easy. Let's add a new pixel layer. Then I'm going to select the clone brush and I'll change it to current layer and below. Now, I'm just going to start on the very top of this crease. I'll hold Alt or Option, and then I'll sample that. Then I'll drag it straight down and I'll begin cloning. Trying to get it close to meeting that point. Then I'm going to sample from down here. I hold alt or option to do that. I'll just bring it up so these points meet. Wow, that looks really nice. By starting from the top skinnier part and the bottom wider part, we were able to match them up pretty well. You can see what this looks like before and after. Now I think I'm going to take care of this extra crease. I'll just sample an area right next to it with t or option. Then I'll just da to paint that away. I think that looks a little better. I think another area, another crease has appeared right here. I'm just going to sample an area right next to it. Then again, I'll just click click a few times to remove that. This is looking pretty good. Here's what we started with and here's where we are. I think this area looks a little strange as well. I'll just sample one of these lighter areas and I'll cover this dark area up a little bit. I think this looks pretty good. Just checking in with our work. I'd say that looks really nice. Here's what we had before, and here's the after with the logo removed. Cloning clothing to remove logos can sometimes be tricky, but with a little bit of time in patience and the clone brush, you can do it. In the next video, we're going to do a little bit trickier of an example as we try to remove power lines. 27. Removing Power Lines: In this video, we'll learn how to remove power lines from a photo. Right off the bat, we can see we have quite a few power lines here. Let's go ahead and start with a pixel layer, and we'll just use the in painting brush to begin. I'll change it to current layer and below. Let's see if we can remove this area just with a large pass like this. Let's see how that does. Since the blue sky background was pretty simple, it actually looks like it did a pretty good job. I'll just paint over that area where it looks a little smudgy. You can see that before and after, I don't think we need to use the clone brush for that. That looks really nice. Next, I'm going to do these ones. I think I'll just try to do the same thing. That did pretty good, but it actually remembered that this line was here and just duplicated that. That's no good. I'm going to use a smaller brush and I'll just paint carefully to remove this one. Nice, and then I'll do the same thing with this one. Those lines were simple enough. They were on such a clean background. It wasn't too tricky. But once you get into this power line crossing th the couple and these buildings back here, this is where things get complicated. I'll start by just removing a small part. Let's see how this does. We'll use a small brush and just paint right through there. Now, that looks pretty smudgy. I'll undo that. We'll just come back with the clone brush to fix that up. Let's try this part. That did pretty good. I think going through the buildings is a bad idea. I'm just going to stick to painting right over the sky like that. We'll just stay right in between the buildings. That did. Let's go back over that. Now we have this big area right here. I'll try to paint over all that I can like that. That did pretty good. Now we have these skinny lines going over all of these different things. Let's see. I think this background is a little simpler down here, so I'll just paint across here, and that did good. I'll do the same with this one. Then we have some trickier areas. For the trickier areas, I think I'm just going to go in with the clone brush. I think I'll leave it at that. Now starting back over here. I'm going to add another pixel layer and on this one, we'll use the clone brush. I'll select that. I'll change it to a current layer and below, and then we can get started cloning this area. I'm just going to decrease my brush size, and then I'll sample the sky. I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll sample up there. Then we'll paint that. And that. Now, we have some antenna back here. I'm going to hold Alt or Option to sample this area down here. Then I'm just going to bring it straight up, and I'll click a few times to fill that in. Then for this area close to her hat, I'll just sample, and then with a very small brush, I'll just finish cleaning this up. That looks really good. Here's the before and after of that. If you didn't like the look of this line right here, you could also just fully remove it. I'll go ahead and do that so you can see. There's no problem removing extra things if you don't like how they look. Continuing on over here, I'm just going to remove this area. I'll hold alt or option to sample the sky and with a very small brush, I'm just going to carefully go right along the edge here. Now, it looks like this color is actually a little different. I'm going to have to sample closer to the area, and then I'll paint just to blend those colors together. That looks pretty good. Ops, I'll press command or Control Z to undo anything I don't like. Remember that you can also erase using the eraser tool if you really don't like how an area looks. Now, as I'm painting here, there are some different hues going on in the sky. I think it would be a good idea to lower the flow of my brush just to blend the areas better a little bit. You'll have to paint over the area multiple times, but that might be better. So the colors can blend nicely. Last for this last black spot right here. I'm just going to sample the green of the building and I'll cover it up like that. I don't know if this is exactly what the building looks like, but at least now we can't see the power line anymore. I'm just going to sample on each side and bring it in like this. That looks pretty good. I'm just going to use a larger brush and I'm just going to dab right here where it looks a little smudgy, and you can see the before and after of that. I might have gone too narrow with this green area. I think I'm just going to come right in here and I'll just make this a little wider. There we go. I'm sampling lots of areas as I go. Just to blend things better. That looks really good. Let's move on to this other building. Again, we'll start with the sky. I'll sample out there and then I'll just bring this in. Then for this yellow area, I'll sample that color with a very small brush, I'll just go right underneath it and click very gently to fill in that area. I'll go up a little bit and sample that color and bring that in. I'll sample a little closer and bring this in. The more areas you can sample from, the better it'll blend. All right. I'll sample this lighter color to fill in this spot right here. I'll just sample from this side and bring it in and then this side and bring it in. This edge is a little bit tricky right here. Then I'll sample the sky. I'm going to sample this bottom edge right here and I'm just going to paint it over. I'll sample it again and paint it over. Just trying to fill this in and make it look a little better. I think that looks pretty good, and we are going to be zoomed back. I think that looks really nice. This area looks a little smudgy, so I'm just going to sample the sky and with a larger brush, ops. Make sure that layer is still selected. With a larger brush, I'm just going to paint over that to smooth that out. I'm just going to continue this process for these other ones. Sampling with alter option and filling in all of these areas. Clonin can definitely take a while. It takes a lot of patients to continually sample and then paint. But I think it's a really satisfying thing to do. It really helps to improve your photos. It's actually not too hard. It's just a little time consuming. I just finished doing my cloning and now you can see that before and after. This looks so much better having the sky nice and clear and open, and now you know how to do a very complicated project, removing something that goes right on top of other objects. That's really hard to do. Now that you know how to do that. In the next few videos, we're going to take a look at making cloned areas. 28. Masking Cloned Areas: In this video, we'll learn how to add a mask to a cloned pixel layer. In this picture, I want to clean up this white space right down here, this white paint that's on the ground. It's in a little bit of a tricky area though because her legs are right in front of it. We'll have quite a few edges that we need to deal with as we're painting this away. To start, I'm just going to add a new pixel layer. Then let's start with the in painting brush to see how this does. I'll put it on current layer and below, and with a larger brush. I can go ahead and get started painting this away. That did, but the pattern seems to be repeating a little bit. You can see this right here over and over and over. The edge over here looks a little strange. I'm just going to undo that with command or Control Z. Instead, I think I'm just going to use the clone brush for this one. I'll get the clone brush out, and then I'll change it to current layer and below. Now I'm just going to begin by holding alt or option in sampling an area over here. Then with a larger brush, I'm just going to begin painting this away. Now, if I keep pressing down and just painting all the way across, you'll see that we'll start to sample the white rectangle again. That's why it's important to sample multiple points as you go before that happens. If I continue, even more, you're going to start to see the white rectangle again, so I'm just going to come over here and sample a little more. I'm not going to worry too much about the edges yet. We'll get to that. Right now, I just want to erase all of these parts so that this part of the sidewalk looks nice and clean. We no longer see any white paint over there and this edge looks pretty good. I'm going to continue this in this section and in this one. I think this looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. This area still looks a little bit too light compared to the sidewalk around it. I think I'll just go through one more time and just add a little bit more of a darker sidewalk to that. I can see repetition right here. I'm just going to go in with a different section of sidewalk and paint over that. I think that's looking pretty good. Now the white paint is gone, but you can see that we've just painted a right over her legs. That's not very good. Now there are a few ways you can fix this. One is just to go in with the eraser tool and erase the edges here. But that's a little bit destructive. If we want to do this in a better way, we can apply a mask to this layer, and then we can paint with black and white paint to add or to bring her legs back into this. I'm going to add a mask. Then I'm going to invert it so that it's not visible. I'll press command or control I to do that. Other way you could do this is to go to mask and then just apply an empty mask. This will automatically apply a black mask. That's a little bit quicker if you want to do it that way. Now with this black mask, I'm going to grab the paint brush tool. Then I'm going to paint in white paint over her legs with a much smaller brush. There we go. Now, since this mask is black, that means that we'll be painting to hide the white sidewalk and we'll be able to easily see where her legs are. I can take a super small brush here and just paint right along the edge of her legs to remove that white part without going over her legs. This takes a little bit of careful painting. Take your time with it. In my opinion, it always looks a little bit better to remove a little bit extra leg than to leave extra white paint. I'm just going to remove a little bit extra. Then I'll go through and remove the rest of the white paint on this side. I'm going to continue this in this section next. Now, the great thing about this being a mask instead of erasing is if I erase too much like that, I can just press x on my keyboard and I can bring her leg back. It's a lot less destructive this way. I really like doing it this way rather than using the eraser tool. I just find that it gives you a lot more control over what you're painting. All right, I think this looks a lot better, and that was a pretty easy way to remove that. Without it being destructive and using the eraser tool. Without looking a lot better, in the next video, we're going to learn how to take our cloned area and move it to a new location. 29. Moving Cloned Areas: Let's learn how to move around our cloned areas. In this photo. What I want to do is I want to cover up this trash can. Now, it's in a pretty tricky spot. We have a patterned brick wall right behind it. I'll need to bring some bricks over to cover this up. Then the rest of this, I'll just sample over this white concrete texture to cover that up and a little bit of cleaning up on this edge here. Let's go ahead and get started with a new pixel layer. I'll select the clone brush. Then I'll change it to current layer and below and we can go ahead and get started. Now, what I want to do is I want to clone this better part of the wall right here. It has a very large section of bricks that we can sample from, and then I want to move it just right on top of here. Now to more easily see what I'm doing, I'm first going to sample with alt or option right over here. Then down here, I'm just going to begin painting my little brick patch. That way, I can easily see where my bricks are. I'm actually looking at the cursor up above where I'm painting to draw this rectangle, so I can make sure that I'm only including bricks in this. Once the outline is done, I can just make my brush larger and then I can fill in the rest here. I think this looks really good. Now I'm going to grab the move tool, and since this is a separate pixel layer, I can easily just move this right where I want it. I'm going to try to line up the grout lines of the brick right here so that they match up nicely. I think I'll actually lower it a little bit. I just want to make sure that this entire wall, this entire seam right here is covered with bricks, and we can just remove the extra that we don't need. I'll just lower this down until the grout lines match up like that. Since we are using the move tool, I could also resize this and make this a little bit larger if I needed to, and I think I do. Now it looks like it lines up down here. And it lines up up here. That's perfect. We don't need all of these bricks. We actually only need bricks where we're covering up the trash can. What I'm going to do is apply an empty mask to this layer. Now we automatically have a black mask. Then I'll just grab the paint brush tool and I'll paint in paint over the trash can. I like preserving as much of the original picture as I can. That's why I like using a mask and just painting what I need rather than keeping that entire rectangle of bricks. This also helps me to smooth out the bricks a little bit better so that they blend together instead of just having a big blocky rectangle, taking up that whole area. All right. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. Now, this area up here looks a little strange to me. I'm wondering if I can erase that part and it looks like that's the trash can right there. I can't really do anything about that. But now that that line's gone, I think this looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. In the process of painting that in, I painted a little too over our model shoulder here. I'm just going to paint in black paint to remove this from our mask. Then on the other side, I'm just going to paint in white paint to make sure this doesn't look too fuzzy. That looks pretty good. Now that we've taken care of the top part of the trash can. All we need to do is sample from this area and bring it over to cover the trash can. I'm actually going to use a new pixel layer though so that we keep this brick layer separate. Then I'll grab the clone brush and we can begin to paint away this. I'll hold alt or option to sample, and then I'll just paint over the area. I'm just going to paint away the bulk of the trash can to start. Then I'll go back and clean up the edges like the very top edge with the brick wall there. Now we're having a bit of a tricky area. You can see that behind the trash can, we have a darker shadowy concrete. I'm just going to use a smaller brush and I'll sample over that area to start to bring it over. I want to fill in this patch of texture right here. I'm not sure what that is, but I'm just going to go over that with this gray color. I'm just sampling and painting as I go, trying to get that all covered up. Now that the trash can is all removed, I'm just going to blend these two areas and I'll do that with a low flow. I'm going to take this lighter color and with a large brush. I'm just going to gently paint it over the area just to smooth that out. Oops, I sampled some brick. Let me do that. Oops. This is why it's a good idea to sample lots of areas or you'll start to sample a little too much. I'm just going right up against our model here and just dabbing that darkness away. I think that looks pretty good. Nice and blended. Next, I'm going to do this top edge of the bricks right here, and I'm going to do that by just sampling the very edge, and then bringing it over like this. I'm going to try to line it up nicely, and then I can begin painting to bring this edge over and I'll paint beneath to get this area, and then I'll bring it up. I'm going to need to do that again, so I'll resample that area again, and then I'll start it again right here. Bringing this over. Sampling right on that line was a really good idea so that we could get that line nice and crisp. But also, I don't know if you can see this, but there's a slight highlight and then shadow right here. There's a little bit of a lip to this. I was able to copy that over as well. It really looks like a seamless transition. I want to create the same seamless transition down here because it looks a little f right now. You can see that that's because that's where our trash cans at. I'm going to copy this area and I'm just going to bring this over. I painted a little bit too much. I'm just going to bring out the eraser and I'll erase that. We didn't add a mask to this layer, so I'm just going to take a little shortcut with the eraser tool. Then I'm going to bring the clone brush out again and I'm going to get rid of this shadow that was underneath our trash can. I'll sample a tile over here and then I'll bring it up. Again, I'll pull out the eraser tool and I'll just press E to do that. I'll just clean up the edge of this bench right here. That looks like a very harsh line. I'll undo that. Let's just bring the hardness of this brush down. Then I'll just paint right over that area. All right, that's looking pretty good. All right. And with that, we've totally removed the trash can over that very tricky area. The Bricks were a pretty tricky area. We're able to blend that in very nicely. Great work on this project. In the next video, we're going to finish off this chapter with a big clean up project. 30. Clean Up Project: In this video, we're going to put our skills to the test, and we're going to remove a person from a photo. Now, for this example, we're going to remove this girl from the photo. I know that's a little sad to do in a wedding picture, but maybe they're not friends anymore or something. I don't know what their story is, but we're going to remove this girl. Now, something tells me that the painting brush isn't going to cut it. This background is pretty complicated. Why don't we jump right into cloning? I'll add a new pixel layer, I'll grab the clone brush, and then I'll change it to current layer and below, and then we can get started with this. I'm going to use a low flow as I go here just so I can blend things together. But maybe we can go a little bit higher than this. There we go. I hold alt or option to sample an area, and then I'll bring it over. Now, we don't want too much repetition with the tree branches. I'm mostly going to stick to sampling the leaves. I think it'll just be a little less obvious if the leaf pattern repeats. I'll just paint this all a way. And I'm going in from both directions. That way they blend together nicely. Now, for this branch right here, this is a tricky, but I'm just going to sample an area right beneath it. With a smaller brush, I'm going to go in and try to rebuild that branch. I'll sample again and do that again. That looks pretty good. I'll just put some leaves right next to it to clean up the edge. Very nice. I'm going to continue this all through the tree area. Now, as I'm painting, I might get my painting a little bit over this girl right here and that's okay. We're going to go back and mask this layer so that we can clean that up if that needs to happen. I just finished with the tree. I think this looks pretty good. Now I want to clean up this edge right here. I'm going to sample starting from right over here, and I'll just try to match this up and paint it across. That didn't match very well, so I'm going to that sampling from right there, trying to match that. That looks better. I'll just paint this across and do. I'll do that one more time just to finish off this area. Trying to match that up. That didn't work. Sometimes it's a little hard to see, but I think that looks a lot better. Painting all the way down through the grass now. I'm going to try to paint horizontally, so you can see the lines here. We have a yellow patch, I'll continue that across, and then down here, it gets darker, so I'll continue that dark section across just to make sure that this looks nice and consistent. I'm going to bring the painting right over this girl's dress, and now you can see our model has been fully removed. I don't really like how this edge looks though. I'm going to come right back in here and I'll try to even this out a little bit better. I think that looks at better. Trial and error a b there. But I think that looks pretty nice. With that girl removed, now we can add an empty mask to this. Then I'm going to paint in white paint to remove this girl again. I'm going to bring my flow all the way up to start, and then I'm going to use a bigger paint brush to fully remove this girl. But I need to make sure I'm painting in white. Now that I finished painting, I'm just going to switch my color to black and I'm going to paint on the very edge of this girl to make sure she hasn't disappeared at all. I think this looks really good, but we're not quite done. Now that we removed that girl, you might notice that we have a bit of a shadow on our girl right over here. This is from where the girl was standing and casting a shadow onto her. To make this look even better, we're going to add a little bit of brightness just to the edge of this girl's dress. I'll do that with a brightness and contrast adjustment layer. I'll brighten this up quite a bit. Then I'll invert this with command or control I. Now using my paintbrush, I'm just going to paint in white with a low flow to gradually add this brightness to that girl's dress. I think I need an even lower flow, so I'll just undo that. Since I brightened it so much, we just need to go very softly with this, gradually adding back in that brightness. With that painting done, now you can see that before and after, that just looks a little bit better. Now that that shadow isn't there. Now, as a final step, we're going to crop this photo in so it doesn't have this awkward blank space. I'll grab the crop tool, and then we can just bring that in so it's even on both sides. Then I'll press apply. Just like that, we've totally cleaned up this photo. I'm sorry that girl needed to be removed like that. That was pretty harsh. But now, if you ever have a situation where you need to remove a person, you can do it. Great work on this project. You now know how to clone away just about anything. Now that we're done with this chapter, in the next one, we're going to learn the most common ways to retouch your photos. O. 31. Retouching Skills: This chapter, we'll learn about the art of retouching. There are so many ways to retouch your images and in this chapter, we'll learn about the most common ways to improve your photos. I know you're going to learn a lot in these lessons, so let's get started. 32. Removing Shadows: In this video, we'll learn how to remove shadows. As you can see, in this picture, our model is fully covered in shadows. Our goal is to brighten her up. To do this, we'll use a curves and an HSL adjustment. Let's go ahead and get started with our curves adjustment. I'll press command or Control M. Then I'm going to brighten this up quite a ways. Then I'm going to invert this adjustment with command or Control I. Then I'm going to use the brush tool to paint on this black mask in white. I want to flow fully up for this. I'll just grab my paintbrush and white paint and then I'll begin. The reason why I decided to raise the brightness so far is because I want to be able to see where I'm painting. I don't want to paint outside of the lines in this case. If we paint outside of the edges of our model, then we'll have a halo of light surrounding our model, and we definitely don't want that. By raising this up so far, it just makes it a lot easier to avoid that. One strategy to make sure that you fully cover your model is to first paint and outline just around the edges, and then you can hold Alt or Option and click on this mask. Then you can simply fill in the rest of it to make sure she's fully covered in this white paint. Our model is fully covered. Now that that's done, I think I want to refine my curves a little bit. I'll just click on this curves adjustment. Then I want to make it so our highlights stay nice and bright. But maybe our shadows aren't affected quite as much. I like the shadows to still look nice and deep and dark. That's a good way to do that. Now that I've done that, this contrast looks a little bit extreme. These highlights are pretty bright. I'm just going to go into blend ranges and I'll lower the light right node over here just so our highlights are affected a little bit less. I think I'll bring it down to about there. Now we can see that before and after. O model is definitely a lot brighter now. But sometimes when you brighten up a photo, the colors can change a bit, and in this case, I think the colors are looking a little bit muted. Let's try to fix this. I want the colors to be improved exactly where I painted on this mask. I'm going to hold down command or control, and I'm just going to click on the mask to load it as a selection. Then I'll press command or control to apply an HSL adjustment, and then I can begin to affect these colors. I definitely know I want to increase the saturation to bring these colors out more. Then we can adjust the hue slider slightly. We can bring it more toward green to bring out some of the redness, or we could increase the redness. I'll double click to reset. I think in this case, there's quite a bit of redness going on. I'm just going to bring it slightly over to the left side just to reduce that. I'll D select with command or Control D. Now you can see the before and after of the HSL adjustment. It's very subtle, but I think this makes the colors look a lot better. I'll just select both of my layers, and now you can see the before and after of bringing our model out of the shadows. Now, you know, you can use curves, blend ranges, and an HSL adjustment to easily brighten up the shadows in your photos. 33. Dodging & Burning: Let's learn how to dodge and burn. Dodging and burning are just fancy words that photographers use for brightening and darkening a photo. When you're burning a photo, that means you're making it darker. Just imagine a burnt piece of food and how that's darker. On the other hand, dodging is making the photo brighter. But the terms aren't really what's important. What is important is being able to control your photos lighting. In this video, we're going to learn four different lighting strategies. We're going to learn how to darken areas that are too bright. We'll also learn how to brighten areas that look too dark. Then we'll learn how to make the highlights and the shadows even brighter and darker in those areas we really want to stand out. To start, I want to darken areas that are too bright. You can see in this photo, the sky is super bright, and it almost looks a little distracting. The star of our show in this photo really is this beautiful waterfall. I want the background to have less contrast so that less attention is drawn to it. To start darkening the sky, I'll press command or Control M. I'm just going to darken this. That looks pretty good. I like how you can see the clouds better. I'll close out of this and then I'll invert this layer with command or Control I. Then I'll use the paint brush and we'll paint in white paint over the sky to reveal this darkness. Again, I have 100% flow. I think that's perfect for this. I'm just going to increase my paint brush and I can begin painting this. As you can see, the sky looks so much better. But as I was painting, I did get some of my painting on these dark mountains here, making them even darker. Lucky for us, we don't need to go back and clean up our painting. Instead, we can use magical blend ranges to fix this. I'll open up blend ranges and in this case, I want to remove this from the dark parts of my photo. I'll go to the shadow node and I'll bring this down. All right, that's perfect. Now you can see that this adjustment is only affecting the bright highlight that we have in the sky and it's no longer affecting the shadowy mountain areas. Now that we've darkened a bright area. Let's brighten up a dark area. In this case, I want to brighten up these mountains just so they look less deep and dark. I'm going to go ahead and add a bright curve, Command or Control M. I'll brighten this up. That looks a lot better. I'll close out of this and I'll invert this with Command or Control. Then with my paint brush, I'll just paint in white over this area. I'll paint it on the beach here, and then I'll bring it up onto the mountain. All right. Now I also accidentally painted a little bit too much on the sky there, but that's okay. I'm going to use blend ranges again. I'll open that up. I'm going to remove this from any of the highlights. I'll bring this down. I think I'll bring it over a little bit more just so we're really only targeting the shadows. Now you can see before and after, we're only brightening the dark area, and you can see both of these before and after. We're really just making these look a little bit more faded and less contrasted to help draw the attention more to the central feature. Speaking of drawing more attention. A great way to draw more attention is to increase contrast. A great way to do that is to brighten the bright areas and darken the dark areas just to make them pop. To start, let's brighten the bright areas by brightening up this waterfall, I'll press command or control. Then I'll make this nice and bright. I already know that I don't want the supply to the shadows. I'll just go right into blend ranges and I'll lower the shadows node. That way they're not being affected. Then I'm just going to invert this adjustment layer with command or Control I, I can paint in white paint to reveal it on only the areas I want it revealed on. Now, in this case, I want to do a bit more of gradual painting. I'm going to lower my flow just so I can slowly build up my paint in those areas. With a little bit of a smaller brush, I'm just going to come right in here and paint on these highlights to brighten them up. I'm also going to paint a little bit on these highlights back here. Just bring that across like that. Now you can see this. Here's the before and after. They're glowing. It's beautiful. Now that we've done that. Let's darken the dark parts of the photo to finish this off. I'll press command or control M, and then I'll darken the curve. Once again, we don't want to darken any of the highlights. I'll just go into blend ranges and I'll bring the highlights no down. Maybe I'll bring it over a little bit, just to make sure we're really targeting the darkest parts. I'll invert this layer with command or control I. Then with a nice low flow like we've been using, I'm just going to paint this on this rock wall over here to darken it up, as well as this area right here with the tree. Maybe I'll also paint it over the stick right here. Now you can see that. Here's the before and after. By adding this foreground contrast. I think this really makes the waterfall stand out better. Now I'm just going to hold shift, so you can see all of these layers. Here's the complete before and after. It looks like it's a whole new photo. That's such a good change. As you can see, doing dodging and burning like this can really help you to draw more attention to the areas where you want it and reduce attention in background elements where you don't want the focus. Great work. You're now a master of lighting. For your convenience, I've added this little cheat sheet to the chapters Exercise files. Using this sheet, you can quickly refer to the steps you need to brighten or darken shadows and highlights in your photos. All you need to do is add a curves adjustment to brighten or darken the photo and then use blend ranges to target the area you want to affect. Out of these four things, the most common thing you'll definitely do is number one, brightening shadows. This is what we did to the trees in this video and the woman in the last video. Because this is the most common thing that you'll do, I added the steps for branding shadows to the very top of the list. By using all of these steps, you have everything you need to totally control the light and your photos. 34. Extending Backgrounds: In this video, we'll learn how to extend a photos background. Let's say I have this photo, but I want it to be a little bit longer. To make it a longer image, I'm going to bring out the crop tool. You could just crop it down to get the dimensions you want. But instead, I'm going to crop outward like this. Sometimes you just need a little bit more space in your photos. With that crop out, I'm going to press apply. Now you can see we have these blank areas here that need to be filled in to make this look more realistic. To do this, I'm going to start by using a super easy method. I'm just going to come over here and grab the Marquee selection tool. Then I'll click and drag to create a selection just up until you're touching the subject and then back off a little. We only want the wall in this selection. Then with this background layer still selected, I'll press command or Control J, which will create a duplicate copy of this layer, but only keep what's in our selection. I'll press command or Control D to deselect. Now I can take this layer, select the move tool, and then I can stretch it out. That looks pretty good. Let's do that over here as well. I'll make sure I have the background layer selected. I'll bring out my Marquee tool, and then I'll make a selection until we're touching our subject, and then I'll back off a little. Again, make sure that your background layer is selected. That way, the selection is selecting directly from here. Then press command or Control J to duplicate the layer. I'll press command or Control D to deselect. Then we can get out our tool and stretch this out. You can see this looks pretty good. I'll select both of these layers. You can see the before and after. Stretching is a pretty good strategy, but it won't look good if you stretch this out too much. Let me just show you this. I'll get out the crop tool and I'll bring this out. Then I'll press apply. If I stretch this one even more. You can see the texture starts to look pretty bad. It's pretty obvious that this has been stretched or warped in some way. This first technique really only works. If you only want to stretch out your sides a little bit. But if you want to extend them even further, we're going to need to use the clone brush to copy the background and stretch it out. I'm just going to start by deleting both of these wall extensions. Then I'll select the crop tool and let's just bring this out in even amount. There we go. I'll press a fly, and now we can fill in these areas. I'll start with a brand new pixel layer so we have something to paint on. Then I'll grab the clone brush tool. I'll change it to current layer end below. Then we can get started copying this over here and copying this area over here to help this blend better, I'm going to be painting with a lower flow. Then we can get started by holding down Alt or Option and clicking to sample, and then we can begin to extend this wall. I think I'll sample this darker area just to make sure this blends nicely. Remember to sample multiple areas as you go. This will just help things to blend a little bit better. I really just keep my finger hovered over alt or option because I press it down so much as I'm doing this process. Now, because I'm using a low flow, the texture can look a little bit muddy in some areas. If that's happening to you, I just suggest you raise the flow and then you can continue to bring the texture over just to clean up those areas. I think that looks really good. Let's do the other side now. I'm going to sample right in this crack right here, and then I'll bring it over so that the crack is met. I want this to match up nice and then I'll continue to bring it over. I'm just going to do that on each of these cracks, trying to line them up. That looks good, and we'll do this one last one. I'll start it over here and bring it over. Not bad. Once you have those main cracks, I think it's okay to just sample wherever and fill in the rest. A just like that, I filled in both sides of the wall using the clone brush. Here's the before and after. The first method that we used is great when you just need a small extension, or you have a simple background. I use this method all the time. But when you need a large extension, or you have a trickier background, the clone brush is your best bet. 35. Blurring Backgrounds: This video, we'll learn how to blur the background of a photo. The exercise file that we'll be using already has a blurry background, but you can actually add a blur to any background. However, to blur backgrounds, you'll need to make a selection of your subject first starting with a photo that already has a little bit of a blur makes the selection process easier, so that's what I'll be using here. Let's start by making a selection of our subject. I'll grab the selection brush tool. Then with a larger brush, I'm just going to click and drag to paint a selection here. Remember you can always hold down t or Option to remove from your selection as needed. All right. Once you have your selection looking good, go ahead and come up here and press on fine. For this one, I'm just going to paint over the edges of his hair. And then all press Apply. Right now, we have our subject selected, but I actually want the background to be selected. I'm going to teach you a quick little trick to reverse your selection. To do this, you can go up to the top, click on Select, and then press invert Pixel selection. Or if you're a fan of shortcuts like I am, you can use the shortcut, which is command or Control, Shift, I. I'm just going to click on this. And now the background is selected, which you can see by these little marching ants going around the outside here. With this outer area selected, now we can apply a blur. I'll go to our filters, and I'll apply a gaussian blur. Then I can increase the radius. Now, keep in mind that when you increase the radius of a whole photo like this, you're going to get some transparent edges going on. I suggest checking on preserve Alpha to fix that. Now I'll just press command or Control D to D select. You can see we have even more of a blur on our background. Here's the before and after. Now, this looks okay, but it could be even better. Let me show you why. We have a little bit of a problem as we zoom in here. You can see that his black shirt is actually bleeding onto the outside, creating this halo of black right here. As you look around the rest of him, you can see this. The colors that he has are bleeding outward. This makes it look a little fuzzy and strange, but there's a better way to do this. This is good for very quick blurs that you want to add. But with this better way, you're going to be able to completely eliminate this halo of bleeding. For this better method, I'm just going to start fully from scratch. I'll delete this gaussian blur. And now, we'll start from square one. The first step to this method is actually duplicating your background layer. I'll press command or control J to do that. We'll need two layers for this because what we're planning on doing is actually removing the subject from the background. We'll need one layer that has just our model on it, and the other layer with the model removed, just to keep these pieces separate. With this upper layer selected, I'm going to select our model. Using the selection brush tool, I'm just going to quickly make my selection again and I'll refine it just as we did before. Now I'm going to add a mask to this layer, which will remove the background from this layer. I'll press command or control D. Now you can see that he's fully on his own on this top layer. However, this wasn't a perfect selection. There's some bleeding going on here. I'm just going to quickly clean that up, I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll quickly paint in black to remove these areas. All right. Now we have these two separate layers. But if I turn off the model layer, you can see that this bottom layer still has the model on it, and I want to remove him from this one. To do that, I'm going to load this mask as a selection. I'll hold command or control, and I'll click on that. Then I want to find a way that we could make the selection slightly larger. I just want to make sure that our model is totally included. I don't want any of his black shirt to be left behind. A super easy way to expand your selection by just a few pixels is by going to the top of the screen to select, and then down to where it says shrink. Or if you want to, you could use the shortcut command or Control B. With this, you can grow your selection, and it will stay the exact same shape, or you can shrink your selection. In this case, I want it to grow, but I don't want it to grow too much. I think I'll just type in 20. You can see now his shirt is fully included. It's just barely hovering around the outside of our subject, which is perfect. I'll press apply. Now we can remove everything inside of our selection to fix the bleed problem. Make sure you have the background layer selected and then go up to the top to where it says, edit, and then paint. This will fill the area with painting to fully remove it, and I'll just press command or Control D to end my selection. Now, I know this area looks a little funny. We have an exact copy of these people right behind him, but don't worry, he'll be covering them up fully. The main point of this is to reduce the bleed of his T shirt, and I think this is going to be perfect for that. Now on this layer, I'm just going to go to our filters, all fly a gaussian blur, and I'll increase this to blur it. Then I can put our model right back on top. You can see this blur just looks so much better. No bleeding, it's nice and crisp, very nice. And you can see the before and after adding that blur. Now, the gaussian blur is pretty good, but I want to show you another option you have, so I'm just going to delete this layer. Instead, I'm going to apply the maximum blur. This blur is really cool. Let me just raise the radius to show you. It turns everything in the background into light spots like this. I'll turn on preserve Alpha and circular so that these squared off lights turn into boca balls. I think this looks really nice. Here's the before and after of that. To make this blur look even nicer, I want to fade in the blur. The closer you are to the camera, the more things should be in focus. The ground right here should be more in focus than the blurry area back here. To create this look, I'm going to use my paintbrush. I'm going to paint in a low flow in black paint, and I'm just going to remove this front area of blur. With my brush nice and large. I'm just going to paint over this area. Just to remove it a little bit. For some reason, this maximum blur filter makes everything super bright. To darken this, I'll press command or control and I'll darken the background. Now that I've darkened it, everything in the background looks very red. I want to fix that. I'll press command or control. I'm just going to move the hue slider so the background becomes less red. I think we'll desaturate it a little bit as well. Now you can see the before and after of that. I think that just looks a lot better. I'm just going to hold down command or control, and I'll select all of the layers we just worked on. Now you can see a complete before, and here's the after. Great work on this. Now you know multiple different techniques you can use to blur the backgrounds in your photos. 36. Defringing: Let's learn how to remove the fringing from your photo selection or mask. Now, if you don't know what fringing is, that's totally okay. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about in just a minute. But first, we need to make our selection. I'll grab the selection brush. Then I'm going to make a selection of the couch, our model, and the floor. Basically everything other than the pink wall that's behind her. Remember to hold alt or option, to remove anything from your selection that you don't like. In this case, it's important to remove the pink wall from between her fingers. Make sure you do that. Next, I'm going to refine my selection, and I'll just paint right around the edges of her hair. Then I'll press apply. With our selection made, I'll just add a mask to it. I'll de select with command or Control D. Then I'm going to add a background to this. I'll go to layer, new fill layer, and I'll just place this underneath. Now you can see what I'm talking about when I say fringing. It's basically the background getting left behind in our selection or the background is simply reflecting onto our selection. You can see that over here with the couch as well. It's reflecting on the shiny couch here, and you can see it over here. It reflects on the very edge and on the inside of the couch. Now, depending on your photo, a different defringing technique may work better than another. I'm going to teach you a few different methods so that you're prepared for any photo. I'm just going to start right up here with this area. To remove this fringing for this first method, I'm simply going to paint away the fringing. I'll select the mask layer and my paint brush tool. Then with full flow, I'm just going to paint right along the edge to remove it. Now, this is very tedious, and it's pretty tricky to paint in a straight line. This requires you to be very careful. There must be a better way to do this. Well, lucky for us, there is I rest command or Control Z to undo. Instead, I'm going to take advantage of the selection that we have over here. I'll hold Command or Control, and I'll click on the mask to load it as a selection. Then I want to make it so that this pink fringing is no longer included in our selection. To do that, I'll need to shrink our selection by a few pixels. I'll go up to select, and then down to grow slash shrink. Because I want to shrink this, I'm going to type in a negative number. I'll go with negative three. Then to just make sure our selection looks nice and smooth, I'm going to check on where it says circular. This just smooths out any rough edges, and then I'll press apply. Now I can begin painting to remove and Whoops, it looks like I'm selecting the inside of this couch. I want to reverse this selection. I'll press command or control Z to undo that. Then to invert our selection, I'll press command or control shift I. Now we should be painting on the outside edge. You can see this looks a lot nicer and we're able to easily remove this fringing. Now I'll just de select with command or Control D, and you can see how much better this looks. No more pink fringing. My next method that I want to show you is desaturating the fringing. This is perfect for areas like this where it's reflected onto your subject and you can't just paint it away. To desaturate this, I'm going to press command or Control I to bring up the HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to fully desaturate this by bringing the saturation down. This is desaturating our entire image. I'm going to invert this with command or control I, and then I can paint it in white paint so that it's only on the areas where I want it. Before I begin painting, I'm also going to make this a child layer to our model. That way, I'm not desaturating outside of here, and later if I decide to change the background color, that'll look pretty strange. I'm just going to desaturate in white paint right on the areas where I want it. I also noticed there's some pink reflecting on her sleeve over here, so I'll just get rid of that. As you can see desaturating is super easy. But I noticed that this couch actually has a bit of a blue tint. This doesn't match perfectly to have it fully desaturated. I'm going to open up my HSL adjustment again. I'll increase the saturation so you can see the color. Then I'm going to bring it more toward blue so that it matches the couch better. Now we have more of a blue color and then I'll lower the saturation. Until this blue color is about as desaturated as the rest of the couch. You can see that looks pretty good. Now it just looks like the couch is reflecting here, and this matches a lot better. You can also see that we have some fringing over here. This is a different color than the couch. I think I want to do this on a separate layer. I'll press command or control you one more time. I'll make it a child layer once again. And then all fully desaturate and then invert this layer with command or control I. Now I can paint over the area to desaturate it. This time, I think I'm going to lower the flow so that I can just layer on this desaturation. Let's see how that looks. I think in this case, this actually matches the floor. Here's the before and after of removing that. All right. Now it's time to move on to Method three, which is using the clone brush. For this method, I'm just going to zoom into her hair, and we're going to fix this tricky area. I'm just going to start by adding a new pixel layer so that I can clone directly on that. Then I'm going to drag it beneath everything else so that this is underneath those two adjustments, and then I can begin cloning. I'll grab the clone brush, I'll change it to current layer end below, and then I can get started. What I'm going to do is I'm going to sample inside of her hair. I'll hold Alt or Option and I'll click. Then I'm just going to paint it right over the edges. You can see that this is fully taking care of that fringing, will still keeping all of the little hair texture that we can see. I think this looks really good. Just so you know, this really only works because this is a child layer. If I brought it outside of the group, you can see that what we're actually doing is we're sampling her hair and bringing it all around the outside. It looks a little funny this way. But as a child layer, you can see that this looks just fine. I definitely suggest using this method if you ever want to remove french from hair. As one last method, we're simply going to change the color of the fringing. On her arm right here, we can see that she has some red reflecting on her skin. We can take care of this with an HSL adjustment, so I'll press command or control you to bring that up. Then let's shift this so we can see what will help. If I bring it over to the right, this is adding even more red to her skin. I need to bring it to the left and actually introduce a little bit of green to counteract that redness. Then I'll invert this layer with command or control I and I can use the paint brush to gradually add that to her arm. With a low flow, I'm just going to paint right on the edge to remove that redness. Now you can see the before, a lot more red, and here's the after. You can do this all over your model using as many layers as you need to to remove the fringing in this way. Using these techniques, you really can remove fringing from any photo. That's everything you need to know about fringing. But just for fun, let's finish this video by changing the wall color. I'm going to close up the models group. Then I'm going to duplicate this group with command or Control J. With this lower group here. I'm just going to delete everything. I'm going to delete the mask and all the adjustment layers, just bringing it all the way back to normal. I'll turn this off so you can see this next step better. Using this duplicate copy, I'm actually going to place the fill layer right in between. Then I'm going to change this fill layers blend mode. I'm going to change it to color. Now, whatever color this fill layer is, it will directly affect the wall and everything in between. In order to change this fill layers color though, you need to have the move tool out. Then you can change the color to anything you want. I'll just change it to a purple color. Then I'll turn the model back on. She's on her own on this layer, and you can see that now she covers up that purple version of her. This is a good way to change the wall color because you can still see the wall texture before with the fill layer just being white underneath everything, you couldn't see any of the wall texture or the shadow down here. This is a good way to adjust that. Now we can change this to any color we want. We can desaturate it, we can make it a lighter color. Since we took care of the fringing, just about any of these colors looks right for this photo. Let's take a look at all of our work. I'm just going to turn all of our fringing layers off so you can see what this would have looked like. Here's the before of our work, and here's the after. You can see this fringing would look pretty bad if we change the wall color, by defringing, this just looks a lot better. Great work on this video. You now know how to defringe like a pro. 37. Advanced Skin Retouching: In this video, we'll learn how to do advanced skin retouching. To get started, I'm going to duplicate this layer with command or control J. Then using this layer, I'm going to end paint on top of it to remove some of the main blemishes that we see here. Because of that, I'm not going to change it to current layer and below. I can just keep it set two current layer. It's pretty simple and easy just to paint directly on top of the layer. Why don't we always duplicate the photo as we're doing painting? Well, we usually use pixel layers for this and pixel layers keep your file size a lot smaller. They also allow you to move your painting or cloning around, like we did with the brick wall a few videos ago, and they allow you to directly erase onto your pixel layer without disturbing your image underneath it. If that's all true, why did we just duplicate this photo? Well, that's because we actually need a photo layer to split into two separate layers for the frequency separation technique I'm about to show you. It really is just in this advanced skin retouching case that I would do this. Looking at our end painting, here's the before and after. This is really nice. I think it did a really good job, and this is good for most photos. But for high resolution close ups that you really want to take a step further, we'll need to use frequency separation to really clean this up. I'm just going to duplicate this layer one more time with Command or Control J. On this layer, we're going to do our frequency separation. To start, I'm going to go to the top to filters, and then I'll select frequency separation. Frequency separation is basically splitting your layer into two different layers, one for the texture, and one for the colors. As I increase the radius in the dialog box, you can see this even better. This side keeps all of the skins fine details and texture. You can really see every little detail here, but it's gray scale. All the colors are separate over here, and you can see the nice colors here without any texture. I'm going to lower the radius just a little bit. I think ten pixels looks pretty good for this one. You can still see all of the little details and this side looks nice and blurry. I don't want to bump it up too much or the blur just gets a little too extreme for what we're about to do. Ten pixels looks pretty good. I'll set it to that and then I'll press apply. Over in our layers, you can see we have a high frequency and low frequency layer. I'm going to turn off these two background layers. We'll come back to those later. But for now, I just want to show you that our high frequency layer looks just like it did with the slider. You can see all of our little texture details, while the low frequency side really is just fuzzy and is showing us all of the colors. Let's take a closer look at how this works. I'm going to have my high frequency and low frequency layer turned on. Then with a high frequency layer selected, I'm going to begin to clean up some of the skin details. I'm going to get out the clone brush for this. I'm going to leave it set to current layer. We're directly affecting the high frequency layer, so there's no need to change the settings here. Using this high frequency layer, I'm just going to sample an area that has good skin texture, and I'm going to clone it on top of any areas that have bumps and blemishes. I'm just going to do this to clean up the forehead a little bit. There's a few bumps that were left behind. This should easily clean it up. Now, what I want you to keep in mind here is that the high frequency layer is a gray scale layer, which means that I'm not affecting the colors here, just the texture. If I sample an area that's a little bit smoother and has less skin pores, and then I bring it over onto this light area, you can see the skin pores details disappear, but this area is still nice and light. In fact, you can see this even better if I just sample her eye for a minute, and then I bring it over here onto this pink area. The pink color stays, but you can see all of the texture of her eye lashes. I'll just undo that. You can see the opposite if I do clonin on the low frequency layer. I'm going to sample this pink area, and then I'm going to bring it on her forehead. You can see that because low frequency is dealing with color. It's taken that pink color, but with a high frequency layer on top, you can still see all of the skin texture. I'll undo that. I'm going to continue to do some cloning with a high frequency layer. I think I want to reduce some of the texture in this highlight. I'm going to do that by taking some of the forehead texture and just bringing it down here. You can see how this is softening that highlight area by not having such intense texture there. I'll also do that with this area. Another area of texture would be fine hairs. We all have peach fuzz. This isn't anything to be ashamed of. But if there's an area where the peach fuzz is really standing out and you don't like it, you can take skin texture from another area and just paint over it to remove it. Now that I've cleaned up the skin's texture, I'm really excited to show you the next step. But before I do that, I just want to show you what a difference cloning on the high frequency layer made. To show you that, I turned back on this layer, and now you can see that before and after. This is especially apparent on the forehead, where she had quite a bit of texture before. Now I've cleaned that up just to smooth that out. Now I'm going to select the low frequency layer and using this layer, we can fix skin discoloration without ruining the texture that's on top of it. To do this, I'm actually going to use our paint brush tool. I'm going to sample colors and apply them to areas directly. I'm going to use a low flow for this. I'll bring it very low. Then to sample colors as I go, I'll hold down Alt or Option and I'll click. This makes it so the colors directly applied to our paint brush. Then I can click and drag to paint this color in. This dark spot over here I want to take care of, so I'll make sure that I paint that color over there. That looks a lot better. Here's the before and after of that. You want to be careful though to stay away from the edges. You can see that I painted a little too much, and now the hair is a little too light. I'm going to press command or control Z until I undo that. You really want to avoid any edges like that. I'll press command or control Z. Now I'm just going to continue to sample nice colors and apply them over areas that I want to fix. I think I'll fix some of these dark circle areas by sampling a brighter color and applying it. There we go. I'll sample this color over here and bring it down. Trying to avoid any edges like the lips or the side of her face. I like the blush color here. I think I'll extend that a little bit. Bringing that rosy color more onto both cheeks. I think this looks pretty good. I just want to show you now here's the before and after of painting on the low frequency layer. We've really even out the colors on her face. Painting on the low frequency layer can take a lot of time and patience to get the colors looking just right. But another way you can do this is actually applying a blur to the low frequency layer. I'll select that. I'll go to our filters, I'll apply a blur, and then I'll increase this. You can see we're applying a blur to this layer. Then I'll invert this layer with command or control I. On this black mask, we can actually paint in white paint to reveal this blurring. This will smooth out the skin colors even more. Be careful to avoid the edges as well with this. You don't want to blur the edges. I'm using a very low flow, so it's hard for me to see if this is making a difference. I'm just going to increase the flow and I'll do this again. Just blurring the colors of the skin. With that, I'm just going to turn this off so you can see the before and after of blurring the skin. This gives it an even softer airbrushed look. By painting directly or using a gaussian blur, either way, we're really softening the colors on the low frequency and I think this looks really nice. Now I'm just going to show you a before and after of all of the frequency separation we've done. Here's the before, and here's the after. Then if I turn on our original photo, you can see that before and after, with all of our painting included. Here's a complete before and after. You definitely won't do frequency separation on every single photo you edit. But for situations like this with very extreme close ups, I think this is a beautiful way to customize your editing and really get all of the fine details looking just right. Great work on this project and great work in this chapter. Now that we've learned so much throughout the course, in the next chapter, we're going to bring everything together and complete three different practice projects together. 38. Practice Projects: So far in this course, we've learned a lot of different affinity tools. But if all you wanted to do was take a regular photo and make it look as best, where do you even start? That's where this chapter comes in? In this chapter, we're going to take three images and we'll edit them from start to finish. These projects will bring together everything that we've learned. We'll review curves, HSL, clonin and more. But more importantly, we'll see how all of our affinity skills can work together on a single image. This is the perfect way for you to solidify everything that we've been learning. That way, you can feel totally prepared to make your own photos look their best. I'm so excited to do these projects with you, so let's get started. 39. Wedding Couple: For our first project, we'll be editing a photo of this lovely couple here. But before we jump into editing, I want to go over my game plan with you. In general, I like to follow six main steps when editing a photo. Clean up, global lighting, global coloring, targeted lighting, targeted coloring, and finishing touches. This means that we'll begin editing by in painting and cloning. Then we'll move on to fixing the photos overall lighting and colors. After that, we'll adjust the lighting and colors of specific areas. Then to finish, we'll take a look at the photo to see if anything else could be improved. These six steps are good guidelines for editing a photo, but they aren't hard and fast rules. Like any guidelines, they're just a good place to start. Up first, let's do step number one, clean up. Does anything in this photo need to be cleaned up with painting or cloning? Well, as I'm looking at it, not really. I don't really see any sticks or leafs out of place. I think this looks really good. Step one is done. Nice work, everyone. Let's move on to step number two, global lighting. Looking at this picture, I feel like it's a little bit too dark. I'm going to add a curves adjustment, command or Control M. Then I'm going to bring the lighting up. So that we don't make the shadows too light. I am going to bring the shadows down a little bit, just to create a little bit of an S curve. I think that looks pretty nice. Here's the before and after of that first global lighting adjustment. Step number three is global coloring. I'm going to press command or control, and I'll bring up the HSL adjustment so that we can boost our colors in every color channel. Starting with the reds, I'll just bring this up. And you can see that we're affecting the skin and his pants and a little bit of the flowers here. I think that for each of these colors, my goal will be to bump up the color saturation, as well as warm the colors up. Let's see how we can do this with this first one. I'll increase the saturation. I already think that looks a lot better. But right now the skin is looking a little bit red. Maybe I'll bring the hue slider over to the left just to introduce a little bit of yellow to make it look more golden. Now you can see the before and after of that. Already off to a great start. Let's do the yellows next. Wow, the yellows are pretty much affecting the grass and her hair. I will bring the saturation up for this. Maybe not too far though. Then to warm up all of these yellows. I think I need to bring it over to the right. Yes. I'll bring it over to the right just a little bit. Then for greens, I'll bring this up. H. It looks like the greens are really just affecting the shadows. I don't really think those areas should be very saturated. I think I'm going to desaturate them. Maybe let's warm them up just a little bit to introduce a little bit more yellow. Next we have CN. I don't really want to change that. Those are just random splotchy areas. I'll double click to reset that. For the blue channel. Interesting, the blue channel is affecting her dress and his shirt. Now, her dress and his shirt really should be white. This is a wedding picture. I think I actually want to desaturate this. Just to make this more close to white rather than blue. And last we have Magenta, and I don't think we need to change anything there, so I'll double click on that. Here's the before and here's the after of doing all of our HSL adjustment. I'll select both of these layers. So we can see the complete before and after of our global lighting and colors. We're off to a really great start. It's time to move on to the next step, which is targeted lighting. The first thing that I want to target here is our subjects. I want to make them look a little bit brighter, so they stand out more. I'll press command or Control M. Using this curve, I'm just going to increase the brightness here. I'm increasing the brightness in the highlights area, and then I'm going to make the shadows meet the line. There's a lot of shadows going on on our subject with his pants, and I just want to make sure that those remain unaffected by this brightening. Because this is targeted lighting, I need to make sure that I paint this only on the areas where I want it. I'll invert this layer with command or control I. Then I'll grab the paint brush. I'll paint in white with a low flow. I think that looks good. I'll just bring this to the areas where I want it. I really want her to stand out in her beautiful white dress. I'll go ahead and paint over her. I'll paint over her flowers as well. I'll paint over him and his shirt I didn't paint on the pants. I just don't think that they need to be brightened up very much. But now you can see the before and after that painting, I think that's about all I want to do with targeted lighting for now. Let's move on to targeted coloring. Now, when I think targeted coloring, my mind first goes to adding a sunburst. I really like the look of that effect, and I think this picture would be perfect for that. You can see there's a rim of light on the back of his head, on the side of her. I think the sun is coming from this direction, and we can add a little bit of light there. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'll click and drag out a circle. I'll grab the gradient tool and I'll drag from the center outward. Let's make this a nice orange color. I'll make it a radial gradient. Then I'll change the bled mode to screen. I'll go to our filters and I'll apply a gaussian blur. Let's just bump this up. I think this needs to be bumped up quite a bit more. I'm going to type in 800 for this. Nice and large blur there. Now I'm going to grab the move tool so I can adjust where the circle is positioned. I want this whole corner to be brightened up, and I'll also overlap it on our subject just a little bit there. This is looking pretty good. Here's the before and after of that light burst. Now that I'm done with that, I think I do want to lower the opacity just a little bit. Before and after. Now that I've done that, I think I want to add a little bit more light to their faces. I'm going to duplicate this circle with command or controlled J. Then I'll move the duplicate copy. I'm just going to rotate it around here and make it a bit smaller, so it's only affecting their faces. Right now we can see that before and after of that. I do think I need to lower the opacity quite a bit on this one. I just want a little bit more sunshine on their faces. Here's the before and after both of those. Here, Let me get out the hand tool so those blue lines go away. Here's the before and after of that. I'm going to deviate a little bit from our steps because at this point, since I've added this targeted coloring with the yellow light right here, I think that this looks a little bit too bright in some places. I'm going to go back to step four and do some more targeted lighting here. To start, I'm going to press command or control, and I want to reduce some of the brightness here. I'm going to bring this down to darken. Then I'll press command or control I to invert this. Using the brush tool, I'm going to paint in white paint. I need to reset that to white and a low flow. I'm just going to paint this on areas that have become too bright now. I think this front area shouldn't be quite so bright, so I'll paint it over that. There we go. Everything is about bringing the focus to them. If one area is way too bright, it'll look pretty strange and it'll take the attention away from them. I'm also going to paint this on his pants. I think they should look a little bit darker. Let me undo that. I think I need a lower flow here. Then I'll just paint this over his pants. Over his shirt. I think that got a little too bright and his face. I also painted over her face. You can see that before and after, just bringing a little more contrast back to our subjects here. This looks great. Darkening those shadows really did look nice. But I think we can make the shadows actually look even better if we added a little bit more color to them. Just to contrast the highlights in the photo. To add color to our shadows, I'm going to use a color balance adjustment. I'll go to the shadows total range. Then I'll add a little bit of color just for fun. Let's see what this looks like if I add Cyan. I don't think that's the right look for this photo since we were trying to warm up everything. Maybe Magenta would look nicer. I do like how that looks. I'll just bring that over a little bit. And you can see that before and after of that. Oh, that looks so pretty. I will say though that sometimes color balance can make your whole photo look overall a bit darker. I'm just going to quickly add a curves adjustment and I'll bring it up to counteract that. Now I'll just select both of those layers. You can see the before and after of adding color to the shadows. I think down here in the grass, this looks a lot better after Getting back into targeting the coloring, I want to work on all of the greenery of this photo next. All of these plants are beautiful, but they are distracting from the subjects of our image. I think we should just darken them and desaturate them just a little bit so the subjects can stand out more. I'll press command or control you to bring up our HSL adjustment. Then I'm going to go to the green channel so I can begin to affect the greens. As I bring the saturation down, nothing's changing. I'm going to use our picker in the green channel, and I'm just going to click right here, so we're affecting the greens. I could see this jumped over and included a lot more yellow. Now I'll bring the saturation down. Perfect. Now we're affecting all of those greens. Lowering it all the way is a very arty look if you want to go in that direction. But I think I'm just going to bring it down. Just a little bit. I also wanted to darken this. And I think I'll bring it up just a little bit to warm up the greens. Now you can see the before and after of just toning down all of the greenery. I'm taking a step back now and I'm looking at everything that we've done so far. I think after everything we've done, the whole photo just looks a little desaturated. I know I did just reduce quite a bit of the saturation. But I think that we're at a good place now where we can add a little more to the entire photo. I'll press command or control you. I'm just going to bring up the of every. Here's the before and after of that. Okay, I realized that didn't do anything because I'm in the green color channel Whoops. I'm going to go to our main color channel. There we go. That makes more sense. I'm just going to raise the saturation like that. Now this is pretty intense. I'm going to use blend ranges to affect this differently. I don't think the shadows look very good when they're over saturated, I'll bring the shadow side down and over. So the highlights in her hair and the highlights of our plants get that little saturation boost. Right now, here's the before and here's the after. This looks really good. Now we can finally move on to step number six, finishing touches. Are there any last small changes that would make this photo look even better. Well, I think I'd like to have this background be a bit more blurred. I think that would be a fun thing to add. I'm going to go to our filters. Then I'm going to apply a maximum blur. If you remember, this blur creates boca ball shapes, and I think that would look really beautiful in the background of this. I'm just going to raise the radius until we can start to see those boca balls. Then I'll change it to circular. I'll also turn on preserve Alpha, so the edges of our photo don't become transparent. Then I'm going to press command or control I to invert this. Now I'm just going to use my paint brush to apply this blur to the background. I want this to only be applied to our vineyard back here. I don't want to paint on these plants that are more in the foreground. I'm going to avoid those as I paint. You can see we're getting a bit of a red rim of light going around here. I don't like how that looks. I'm going to take my brush and I'm going to paint in black paint just to remove that. That looks really nice. Here's the before and after of adding that blur effect. Beautiful. Now, I just want to select all of our layers so we can see a complete before and after. Wow, what a difference. Once you start stacking on all of these adjustments, you can really see how far you can take these photos. Before, this really looks like a picture that you just took on your cell phone, and now we have a beautiful professional looking wedding portrait. You probably noticed as we did this project that the six steps really are just guidelines. Things get more complicated in the real world as you add more and more adjustments on, you want to counteract some of the effects and bring another adjustment on. It gets a little bit complicated jumping back and forth between color and light. But I hope that you'll still find the six steps to be a good starting point when you first open a photo. Of course, we'll continue to practice the six steps more in the next videos so that you can really get the hang of them. Great work, and I'll see you in the next video. 40. Ocean Rock: In this video, we'll be editing a photo of the ocean. Now, normally, I like to start with step number one clean up. But for this photo, the lighting and colors are so bad that I think it'll actually be tricky to see our cleanup work. Instead of starting with cleanup, let's do global lighting and colors, and then we can come back to do our cleanup. Let's start with Step number two, global lighting. All press command or Control M. The first thing I want to do is just brighten up this photo. I don't want to brighten it up to the point where the shadows look dull. I'm also going to bring down the shadows to create a S curve. This already looks a lot better. Here's the before and after. Very nice. Next step three, global colors, I'll press command or Control U, and we can go color channel by color channel to affect these colors. Starting with the reds. I can see we're affecting the rock and the sand. I think I'm just going to increase the saturation of these areas. Then I think I'm going to bring the red out of them just a little bit by bringing the slider over to the left. For all of these colors, I'm just trying to boost the color, so it's easier to see them. I think that looks pretty good. Next for yellow. It's not really affecting anything, so I'm just going to leave that one alone, for green. Again, I just won't do anything with that. Now for Cyan, you can see this is affecting the ocean and the sky. I think I'm going to bring up the saturation of this. Then I want to add a little bit more green to this. I'll bring it over. I think I'll need to raise it up to do that. You can see that right now the ocean just looks a little bit too purply. As I bring this up, we'll get a little bit more of that green color. Next for blue. This is affecting quite a bit of our sky and ocean as well. I think I'll just increase the saturation. Then we can play around with the hue a little bit. I don't really like how it looks play around with that, so I'll just leave that one alone. Last, we have magenta. I don't think I want to change anything there, so I'll leave that one alone. Now you can see before and after of that HSL adjustment. I think the ocean's colors look a lot better. Now I'm just going to show you a before and after of both of these adjustments. Here was our picture before and here it is now. With both of those layers done, I think it's finally time to circle back to step number one and do some cleanup. Now, it's important that you always put your clean up layers underneath any adjustments. I'll just select the background and place my pixel layer on top of that. If I were to place this on top of these layers, then I would be sampling from all of these, and I wouldn't be able to come back and make adjustments to them. It's a good idea just to keep this underneath everything. Now I'm going to begin in painting to get rid of some of the things in this image. I'll change it to current layer envelow, and then I'll get started in painting. Now for this photo, I think I just want to clear out everything other than the rock and the ocean because I really want the focus to be on how beautiful this rock is. I'm just going to paint over just about everything, all of the people, everything on the beach, just to clear it all out. I just finished with my in painting and now you can see the before and after just cleaning up all of those areas. Now, I do think I want to go in with the clone brush next, just to fix up some of these areas that I painted on. I'm going to add another new pixel layer and on this one, I'll grab the clone brush, and I'll change it to current layer and below. The main glaring issue I see is right here where that car door was open. You could see that this tinted the colors to be more of a blue cyan, while the rest of the beach was this pretty red yellow toned sand. I need to sample some of this color of sand and bring it on over just to make this look better. With that new pixel layer selected, I'll hold Alt or Option to sample some of the better colored sand. Then with a nice large brush, I'm just going to bring it over. Wow, that already looks so much better. Here's the before and after of that. I'll sample right on this edge here and I'll bring it over, trying to match that up there. I'll do that one more time, starting farther back and bringing it over. That looks so much better for that car door. Now it's time to look and see if there's any obvious repetition points here. That's the problem with cloning. Sometimes you'll get exact repeats of areas. For example, we have two little bumps in the waves right here, and then they repeat again right here. I'm just going to take some different wave and remove that bump. I'll do it over here as well. We want all of these areas just to look a little bit different. I see this rock right here repeats as well. I'll just remove that. Go ahead and check in with your work and make sure that any areas of repetition are removed. With that done, I'm just going to go through and make sure that any other areas where I remove people are still nice and clear looking. We don't want any splotchiness or anything left behind from that. With that, I think I'm done cloning. You can see the complete before and after. Great work. Now we're done with steps one through three. Now it's time to go in with some targeted lighting, and I really want all of the focus to be on this beautiful rock. I'm going to use light to bring more attention to it. First, I think I want to darken the water. I'm going to select the very top layer and then I'll just press command or control. I'm going to make this darker. Then I'll invert it with command or control I and I'll use the paintbrush tool to paint and white paint over the water. I'll just increase the flow all the way for this. Then I can begin painting. I think this will just add some nice contrast. The water will contrast more with the sky, and I'll frame out the rock nicely. Here's the before and after of darkening the water. Next, I want to brighten the sand, just to contrast with that water better. Again, I'll do command or Control M, and this time, I'll do a brighter curve. I'll invert it with command or control, and then I'll just paint it over the sand. Here's the before and after of that. Right now, I think the highlights have gotten a bit too bright, the sand is almost glowing. I'm going to go into blend ranges and I'll bring the highlight side down and maybe over a little. That way, we're mostly just brightening up the dark shadows of the sand. I think that looks pretty nice. Next, I think I want to brighten the sky so that the rock stands out even more. The rock is nice and dark and if the sky is brighter, I just think that'll look better. I'm actually going to make a selection of the sky. I'm going to select our photo layer. Then with the selection brush, I'll just make this a bit larger. I'll make a selection of the sky. I'll hold Alt or option just to remove that part and any other parts. It looks like we have some people in a canoe back here. I guess I could have removed that, but I think I'll just leave that. I think this actually did a pretty good job. I'm just going through now and removing anything that doesn't belong. I have the whole sky selected now. I'm going to add a curve to this, I'll press Command or Control M. I'll bring this to the top of our layers. There we go. Then I'm just going to brighten this up. I'll D select with command or Control Z. You can already see how much better this looks. The rock looks a lot more striking already. Let's focus in on the rock now and give it a bit more contrast. I want to make a selection of the rock just to make this easier. So I'll select our photo layer again and with the selection brush. I'm just going to quickly paint a selection over the rock. It's up to you if you want to include the reflection in the water or not. I think either way looks just fine. Then I'll remove this little circle cut out from the rock by holding to option. Our rock is now selected so we can go ahead and apply a curve to this with command or control. I'm just going to raise this to the top of our layers just to keep things organized. Then I'm going to make an S curve to add contrast to this rock. The highlights will be brighter and the shadows will be darker. I'll de select with command or control D. Now you can see the before and after. Now, I actually don't really like how dark the shadows got on the bottom. I'm going to grab my paint brush and I'm going to remove this with black paint, I'll lower my flow, so I'm painting very lightly. I'm just going to remove a little bit of the shadow here. I think that looks better. We've now finished with all of our targeted lighting. I'm going to select all of these layers so that you can see a complete before and after. This looks so striking. I think it's beautiful. We're almost done, we're just going to do step five next, which is targeted coloring. There's not a ton I want to do here with the colors because I think this photo already looks really nice. But I do think I want to give the water a little bit more of a boost by bringing it more towards Cyan, just so it doesn't look so cold and gloomy. I'm going to press command or Control M. Just to practice, let's use the color channels to add more cyan to the water. The opposite of Cyan is red. We need to go into the red channel and take away red. You can see how this warms up the water with that cyan. Very nice. I'm going to invert this with command or Control I so that I can paint it just on the water. In white paint, I'll quickly do that. I am painting with a low flow, so I do need to go over this a couple of times. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. I don't really like how the white is now tinted to can. I'm going to go into blend ranges and I'll bring the highlight slider down just so that those areas stay bright and white. But I think this color looks a lot better before and after. The other area that I want the colors to pop a little bit more is on the rock. Rather than making a new selection, I'm just going to load this rock as a selection by holding command or control and clicking on it. Then I'm going to add in HSL adjustment. I'm going to go into the global color channel. Then I'm just going to increase the saturation to bring out the colors. I think I want to bring the hue slider over more toward yellow and green. I'll press command or control D to D select. Now you can see how those colors just stand out a bit more. I actually think this looks a little too bright, so I'm going to go into the opacity and I'll just lower that. It's time for step number six, finishing touches. I think the rock looks really nice. It has a lot of contrast and good colors. But I think the water just looks a little bit flat. There are ripples in it, but I think I want these ripples to stand out even more. I'm going to sharpen the water. I'll go into our filters and I'm going to apply a clarity filter. This adds extra contrast just to the areas where you paint this on. First, I'm going to increase this clarity slider up quite a bit. You can see what's happening here. Here's the before and after. You see how the ripples stand out a lot more. I'm going to invert this clarity with command or Control I. Then I'll paint in white paint just over the water. Again, I'm painting with a low flow, so I'm going to go over this a few times. And here's the before and after of that. I do think I still want to lower the opacity, just so this isn't so intense, but I like how that looks before, after. I just have a couple of last touches I want to do. One is to take this wave right here, this dark wave in the water, and I just want to extend it across, just to make this look more like it's an area that's good for surfing. To do that, I need to go back down to our clean up layers. I'll select the top clean up layer, and I'll put a new pixel layer right on top of that. To bring this wave more across. I'm going to use the clone brush set to current layer and below. Then I'm going to hold down Alt or Option to sample an area with a larger brush. I'm just going to bring this wave over. I'll sample again and do it again. Then I'm just going to clean up any areas of repetition, with a smaller brush. I'll just go in here and clean that up. I know this is a little funny and waves don't really work like that. But I do think this is pretty striking, just adding that wave in. Here's the very last trick I want to do. I actually want to bring some of the people back into the picture. I liked it when there were people in the picture. It really showed the scale of the rock and how huge it is. Just to give more perspective to how big the rock is, let's bring them back. I'm going to go to our in painting layer where we removed all of those people. With that layer selected, I'm going to lower its opacity. Now we can see what the picture looked like before, and I'm just going to use the eraser tool and I'm going to erase on the painting layer, where I want the people to come back. Now, the people I want to bring back are the people in the water. I'm just going to erase over this guy right here. And over this little boy right here, and over this reflection that I had right here. Then I'll go into the clone brush layer and I'll do the same. I think I cloned over some of these areas, just bringing it all the way back. Last, I'll go onto this pixel layer and I'll just make sure that that's fully cleaned up. This one I have to be a little more careful because I added the wave back right here. With a nice small brush, I'm just going to add his back in. And you can see now this looks a little strange right here. So I'm going to grab the clone brush and with a smaller brush, I'm just going to bring the dark wave in again. Painting right up against the ar. All right, I'll go in from the other side and continue to do that. I'm just going to go back to the painting layer and I'll increase the opacity again. Now you can see those people are added back into our picture. I'm going to select all of the layers that I have here, and I'll turn them all off so you can see the complete before and after. What a beautiful difference this has made. It really feels like a totally different picture. Great work on this project. Now that we're done with that, we're going to do one more project in the next video to really solidify these six steps. 41. Sidewalk Model: This video, we'll clean up and enhance this portrait photo. Now, normally, the first step to any photo is the cleanup process. But just like with the previous video, the lighting and colors in this photo are so bad, but I think it would be difficult to see or clean up, especially in this dark puddle down here. Instead, let's start with global lighting and colors and then we'll circle back to clean up after that. Starting off with Step number two, let's do some global lighting. Like I said, I feel like this image is a little bit too dark, so I'll press command or control M, and I'm just going to brighten this up. Now, I don't want to lose the shadow, so I'm going to bring this to meet the line. You can see that this looks a lot brighter and nicer, but the highlights are a little bit too bright. I'm going to go to blend ranges and I'll bring the highlights node down just to reduce that. The photo is still brighter. Now it's just not over brightened. Here's the before and after. Let's move on to step number three, global colors. I'll press command or Control U to get out the HSL adjustment. Then we can go color channel by color channel to adjust this. Let's start with the red channel. This is affecting her skin. I want to increase the saturation. So we can see that color better. Then I think I'm going to shift the hue over to the left just to reduce the redness a little bit. Moving on to yellow. I'll bring this up and you can see that this is affecting the greenery in this photo. Now, I don't want this to become more saturated, so I'll leave the saturation slider alone, and I think I'll shift the hue over so it becomes more red toned. I'll just bring that up. Like that. Go into green. This isn't really affecting anything. I'll double click to reset that. Let's move on to Cyan. We're affecting the sky. I do like adding cyan to the sky, so I'm just going to increase the saturation here. Then to make this even more. I'm going to increase the hue slider over to the right side. Let's go into the blues next. As I increase this, you can see this affects all of the puddle, a lot of the sky, and her genes. I think I am going to keep this a little more saturated. Then let's see what this looks like. If I bring it over to the left, this adds more purple hues, and I I bring it over to the right, we're adding more green hues. I think I'm just going to leave that alone because I like how that looks as is. Let's go into Magenta. And this isn't really affecting anything, so I'll double click to reset that. Let's take a look. Here is the before and here's the after before, after. I just want to add one more adjustment to finish off editing the global colors. This time, let's add a color balance adjustment. I love adjusting each total range separately. Let's start with the shadows. I'm going to add a little bit more s to the shadows. Let's see if Magenta looks nice too. I don't think I want to add magenta. Adding blue looks a little bit too intense, so I'll just leave that one alone. Let's go into the Mintones next. Again, I think I want to add more cyan. I like how this is making the sky look. I think I'll add a little bit of magenta here and a little bit of yellow to warm this up. Last, we can go into the highlights. Maybe we can warm these up. Actually don't like how that slider looks. Maybe magenta will look better. No. I think I'll leave the highlights alone. Now we can see the before and here's the after. Also like all of the layers that we've done so far, and you can see the before and the after of all of those global adjustments. Now that the photos lighting and colors look pretty good. It's time to circle back to step number one and do some clean up. I'm going to click on our background layer, and I'll add a pixel layer on top of that. You always want to make sure that your cleanup layers are underneath any adjustment layers. Using this layer, I'm just going to start off by doing some in painting. I'll select the brush, change it to current layer in below, and then we can get started removing some of these areas. Now, the main things I want to remove in this photo are the power lines in the sky and in the puddle. Just make sure you take care of those. Anything else, feel free to try to remove it. Anything that you think would make the photo look better. It doesn't really matter. Make sure you take care of those power lines. Down in the puddle, this is a very tricky area. It looks very splotchy. Just be careful, you might need to paint over the area a few times, maybe use a little bit of a smaller brush. But if your area is still looking splotchy, don't worry. We'll come back and clean this up more with the clone brush. Now that I've done in painting, I'm going to go back and do some cloning, just to improve a few of these other areas. I'm going to add a new pixel layer to start. Then I'll select the clone brush, and I'll change it to current layer envelo I'm just going to start down here in this puddle. Like I said, this is a pretty tricky area, so I'm just going to go in here with a large brush and a low flow. Then I'm going to try to blend some of these colors together to make them look better. I just finished cloning. Here's the before and after of that. I still think this puddle looks a little splotchy though. I'm going to add a blur and I'm just going to blur that area a little bit. We'll go to our filters and apply Gaussian blur. I'll increase the radius, and since nothing's changing. I need to make sure that this layer is standing on its own on top of all of our clean up layers. I'll check on preserve Alpha. I think that blurr looks good. I'll invert it with command or control I. Then I can use the paint brush. I'll paint with a low flow in white paint. I'm just going to paint this over the area to smooth out the colors. Be careful as you're doing this to avoid painting over your model. You don't want her to become blurrier, just the splotchy areas. After all that painting, here is the before and here is the after. I think this has done a nice job of reducing that smudgins. Now I'll just select all of these layers. You can see the before and here's the after of our cleanup. Feel free to do any other cleanup that you want. This is just what felt good to me in the moment, but maybe you want to remove a little bit more of the debris over here, or you could try removing this car back here. Whatever feels good to you. Now that we're done with steps one through three, it's time to move on to step number four, targeted lighting. To start off with this step, I want to darken areas of the photo to bring the focus more onto our model. I'm going to select the top layer and then I'll add a curves adjustment on top of that. Then I'm going to darken this. Now, I want to darken areas without affecting the highlights too much. I'm going to go into blend ranges and I'll bring the highlight side down. That way, any of these areas we're darkening, we're really just deepening the midtones and shadows. I'm going to invert this with command or control I. Then I'm going to paint in white paint over the areas I want darker. In this case, I'm going to darken the fence behind her, the sidewalk behind her, and I'll darken the entire puddle, which should help if we have any leftover smudginess that we want to cover up. Now you can see the before and after, just bringing the focus up toward our model. I think the lighting looks pretty good so far. I'm just going to move on to step number five and do a little bit of targeted coloring. To start, I want to make another sunburst. I just really like that effect. For this sunburst, I'm going to make it come from this direction. It looks like she has lighting on the side of her face and the front of her body, and then the back is more dark. I think this will look pretty nice. I'm going to grab the ellipse tool and I'll just begin to make our sunburst. I'll add the gradient. I'll set it to orange. I'll make it radial. I'll change the blood mode to screen. And I'll add a Gaussian blur. Let's bring this up. I think I actually want to type in a much larger number. Let's go with 600 this time. With that done, I'm just going to grab the move tool and then I can reposition this circle. I want this whole corner to be covered and a little bit of her as well. I think I'll lower the opacity. I'll just bring this down. That looks pretty good. Now you can see the before and the after just adding a little bit more light to that side. Now, if there really was a sunburst on that side, I think that that whole area should be brighter. I think I want to add another curves adjustment just to brighten that area. I'll press command or control M. Then I'm going to make this brighter darkening the shadows a little bit. I'm overdoing it quite a bit because I'm going to paint this on with a low flow. I'm going to invert this with command or control I. Then I'm going to paint in white paint. There we go and a low flow. I'm going to paint this on the whole front area in front of our model. I'll also paint the entire sky with this brightness. Then with a smaller brush, I'm just going to paint the front of our model. Anything that would be facing the sun like the front of her arm, the front of her leg, and her face. I'm just going to bring a little more light to those areas. Now you can see the before and here's the after. Now this brightening looks a little too intense, so I'm just going to reduce the opacity, and I think that looks better. Now that we've added the sunburst and the lighting to the front of the model. I want to add a little bit more contrast back into this by darkening the back of the model. I'll add another curve, and I'll bring this down to darken it. I'll invert it with command or control. Then I'll paint it just on our model on the back areas where the sun wouldn't be hitting her. I think this is adding some beautiful contrast. Here's the before and the after. You can select both of these layers to see the complete before and after. We're really just painting with lighting, and I think this looks really nice. We're finally on the sixth and final step, finishing touches. Let's take a look at this photo and see if there's anything else we want to improve. I think the lighting and everything looks really good from far away. But maybe we should 00 in and take a look at her face. There are a few things that I could see that we could take care of here. One is I see a little bit of minor acne right here. If you wanted to take the time to paint that away, you totally could. But with how zoomed out will be, I don't really think that the normal viewer would be able to notice that. I think I'll leave it alone for mine. Instead, something that I want to improve is the coloring on her face. I think it'd look nice if we just smoothed out some of the harsh areas of contrast on her face. For example, we can see that she has a highlight on her cheek, but on the other side, it becomes very harsh and dark where the shadow is. I think it'd look nicer if that was a little bit smoother. I'm going to go down to our background layer. I'll duplicate it with command or Control J. Using this duplicate copy, I'm going to apply some frequency separation. I'll go up to the top to filters, frequency separation. And I'll increase the radius so we can see a little bit more texture on this side. That looks good. I'll press apply. Now we have a high frequency and low frequency layer. Now, to make things easy on ourselves, I'm just going to select the low frequency layer and I'm going to apply a gaussian blur to it. I'll increase this. You can see our colors are getting blurred, while the texture stays nice and intact. With that blurring done, I'm just going to invert it with command or control I. Then I can paint with a low flow and white paint to smooth out these areas. I'll paint right here on her cheek and try to avoid the edges. We don't want to blur those. I think that looks a lot nicer. Here's the before and here's the after before, after. Now, before I finish, I can see that her eyes are a little bit fuzzy and out of focus, I want to add a little bit more sharpness to them so they stand out better. I'm going to select the high frequency layer. Then I'm going to add a high pass filter to it. I'll drag it out, so it's on top of that. Then I'll raise the radius until you can just start to see the details on her face. Remember, we're just trying to see the area that you want to affect. In this case, I want to see her eyes. Then I'll change the blend mode to soft light. I'll close out of this and I'll invert this layer with command or control eye. I'm just going to paint this with 100% flow over her eyes and eyebrows. Here's how that looks. Here's the before and here's the after. It's pretty subtle, so I'm going to duplicate the highpass filter twice with command or control J. Then even from a distance, you can see that this has really improved, the contrast in her eyes. Here's the before and the after. It's time. Let's take a look at all of our layers. I'll turn them all off so we can see the before and here's thereafter. Now, it would be a great time to adjust anything that you don't like. I think I went a little bit too far with our blurring of her face, this layer right here. I'm going to reduce the opacity of that one. I also think I might have applied too much brightness to our model. I'll reduce the opacity of that layer as well. Let's do that one more time. Here is the complete before and after. Great work on this project. I know that was a lot of layers and a lot of work, but we really made a great difference with this photo. Now that we're done with these three practice projects, I'm sure you could open any photo and know just what to do to fix it up and make it look better with its lighting, colors, and cleaning it up. Now that we're done with that. In the next chapter, we're going to dive in to doing some compositing. 42. Compositing Skills: For the final two chapters of the course, we're going to do my favorite thing to do in affinity photo. Compositing, Compositing is the art of taking two different images and combining them into a single image. I think compositing is so much fun, but it can be a little tricky. We'll need to bring together all of our affinity skills to make our composites look their best. Luckily, for us, there's an easy ten step method that we can use to create our composites. By following the ten steps, you'll be well on your way to making beautiful composites. The first step to compositing is to find the right photos for your project. Next, we'll need to apply a mask to one of the photos to remove its original background. Then comes the easiest step, resizing and positioning the masked photo to fit inside the other photo. After that, we'll work on matching the overall lighting of the two images, and then we'll work on matching the overall colors as well. Next, we'll add a shadow to our composite, and then we'll create a contact point. Now, you've probably never heard of a contact point before, but don't worry, it's really easy. After that, we'll add shadows and highlights to sculpt the lighting in our composite. Then we'll match the clarity of our two images, which just means that they should have the same amount of sharpness or blurriness. Finally, the tenth step is to continue editing, which means that we'll make the overall photo look better after we've matched the two images in our composite. I know this seems like a lot of steps, but each step is actually really easy to do. The whole process will go much faster than you might think. If you ever want to refer to the ten steps, I've added this list to the Chapters exercise files. Feel free to open this list whenever you need a reminder of the ten steps. I'm so excited to start compositing with you. This is going to be so much fun. Let's get started. 43. Step 1 - Find the Photos: In this video, we'll learn about the very first step to compositing, finding the right photos. You can take your own photos for a composite or you could find free photos online. I have three websites that I like to use for this. They all have pictures that are 100% free to download, so I love using this as a resource. They're all really easy to use too. All you need to do is search for a topic. Then you have all of these photos to choose from, and you can just come right here and download it by clicking this button. That's Pexels. The next one I like to use is called Unsplash. This works just the same. Search for your image, hover over it and download it. Last, we have Pixabay, which works slightly differently. Just type in what you want. Then you'll need to click on the image first, and then you can click here to download it for free. You can choose which size you'd like, and then you can press download. What should you look for when you're looking for a composite image? Well, there are a few different things. First, we have camera angle. Is the camera beneath your subject, looking up at it? Is it hovering above your subject, or is it more of a straight on? Here we can see we're looking up at this cat in the tree. We're looking down at this tiger in the water, and here we have an image looking very straight onto our model. Another thing to consider is the camera positioning. A close up portrait probably won't mix very well with a big vast landscape. Another thing to consider is the lighting in your photo. Do we have very harsh shadows with sharp contrast between the shadowy area and the highlight area? Or is it more of a soft look where all of the lighting is evenly lit across our subject? When you're looking at pictures like this, you can always make soft light become hard by painting hard shadows on it. But it's a little trickier to make something with harsh shadows become soft. That's just something to keep in mind. The last thing to consider is how easy is this photo to mask. In this photo, we have so much hair flying through the air along with a very busy background with the trees. This would be a nightmare to select. But a photo more like this with a plain background is a lot easier to compose. There's no shame in choosing a picture like this that's easier to cut out. Okay. Now going into affinity. I found this forest image on Pixabay. I think the lighting in this photo will make a really fun composite. Once I picked my background, I searched for some photos that might work with this forest using the guidelines we talked about a minute ago. I found a few potential ones. I'll just go to file, and then down to place. Then I'm going to select all of these pictures that I found, I'll hold command or control to grab this last one. Then I'll just open these up. I'm going to place all of these into our image because I just want to compare them and see which one works best for this forest image. With all of these loaded into the image, I'm just going to one by one, roughly cut them out to see how they would look on this background. I'll just grab the selection brush. Then I'm going to quickly paint out a selection. It does not have to be perfect. We just want to get a general idea of how this would look. I'm just going to mask this. Then I'll deselect with command or control. I'm going to continue to do this for the other ones. With the bunny layer selected, I'll just paint my selection and then add a mask, and I'll de select with command or Control V. I'll repeat these for the last two. With these rough selections made, now we can see one by one if these pictures would fit into our background. I'll turn off all the other layers, and let's just start with this pumpkin right here. If I place this pumpkin right here and shrink it down a little bit. I actually think this would look pretty nice. The angle looks good, the lighting looks good, it's even coming from the right direction. The lighting is coming from over here, casting shadows on this side. That looks p n. Let's see our next one. This statue looks pretty good. Let me just shrink it down. But one problem I'm seeing is the angle is a little bit off. In this forest photo, we're looking pretty straight on and maybe slightly downward. But with this angel image, it looks like we're looking straight on and slightly up at the angel. You can see the bottom of the angel's feet. It looks like this angel is falling backward just because of this angle. I don't think that would work very well. Next we have this bunny. Let me just shrink this down. I think this angle looks really nice. We're looking a little bit down at this bunny as well as the forest. Those match up. Last, we have our cat. I think this one looks pretty good as well. It looks like we have three pretty good options here. Even though these other options look pretty good, I think the bunny was my favorite. I think we'll go with this one as we learn about the ten steps throughout the rest of this chapter. Using the guidelines that I taught you about lighting and camera angle, you can use these to find potential photos that match up nicely. But sometimes it's actually just better to see what they look like directly in affinity photo by applying a quick mask to them. I know that helps me a lot, just to narrow down which one looks best. In the next video, we're going to make a more accurate selection of our bunny. M. 44. Step 2 - Mask the Subject: In this video, we'll learn about the second step to compositing, masking our subject. In the last video, we made a super quick selection of the bunny. But now I just want to make a better, more refined selection. I'm still going to use the selection brush, and I'll just click and drag to paint my selection over the bunny. Luckily, this is on a white background, so this should be pretty simple. Once everything is selected, I'm just going to refine our selection. I'll press apply. Then I'm going to apply a mask. I D select with Command or Control D. Just like that, we've masked our subject. This was a very quick video. The next one, we're going to bring this bunny into our document and adjust how it's sized. 45. Step 3 - Resize & Position: This video, we'll learn about step number three to compositing, resizing and positioning. I want to copy this bunny and paste it into our background. I'm going to select its layer and then I'll press command or control C to copy it. I'll press command or control V to paste it in. Then using the move tool, I can resize this bunny. I need to make it quite a bit smaller. I'm trying to scale it so it looks nice. For reference, we have some leafs and some sticks here. We can try to position this and make it a little bit smaller so it looks more realistic. I think I also want to rotate the bunny. Hovering over this handle right here, I'm just going to click and drag to tilt it a little bit to the left. I think that just lines up with the surface a little bit better. And maybe I'll make it a little bit smaller. Now that I've brought this bunny into the image and I like where it's placed. I'm going to do a little bit of cleanup on the mask. I'll select the mask. Then I'm going to zoom in here. Now, you might notice that there's a white line running around the outside border of our mask. This is a very annoying glitch that affinity photo has, but it's very easy to fix. I'm just going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll click on the mask. Then I'm going to grab my paintbrush, and I'm going to paint in black paint right along the edge. This will remove any of that white line that's there. That white line is just what's left behind from masking. For some reason, it just likes to keep a little bit of the border, a little bit of the picture is still visible. By painting in black paint right along the edge, we're just smoothing that out so that's no longer there. And now you can see that's gone. That's a quick fix to that little bug. Now it would also be a good time to fix any glaring issues on your mask. Now that we can see our subject in the background like this. For example, if a chunk is missing, now would be a great time to fill that in. I think this looks good though. I don't see any glaring issues, but we might come back and work on the mask a little bit later if we notice something's wrong. With that, we are done with this video that was super easy. In the next one, we're going to start making the bunny look like it belongs more in this background by adjusting the lighting. 46. Step 4 - Match Global Lighting: This video, we'll learn about step number four, matching the global lighting. In this step, we're going to try to match the overall lighting of our bunny with the forest behind it. To start, I'm going to add a curve, command or control M. Then this is only affecting our bunny. I'm going to make this a child layer to our bunny. Now we have six main options we can try to get this bunny to blend in with its background. We can make the midtones brighter or darker. We could make the shadows brighter or darker, or we could make the highlights brighter or darker. In this photo, we can see that the forest has very dark shadows. I'm going to bring our shadows over, so they're darker. The forest also has very bright highlights, which you can see on these rocks here. I'm also going to bring the highlights over just to brighten them up even more. Now you can see the before and after adding a lot more contrast to our bunny. If you're ever in doubt with which thing you should try with the curves adjustment, I suggest just trying each of the six different things, adjusting the midtones, shadows, and highlights to see what blends in better. Keep in mind that compositing really is an art, not a science. You don't need to be perfect with your lighting. Just try your best and I'm sure it'll turn out just fine. 47. Step 5 - Match Global Color: In this video, we'll learn about Step number five, matching the global coloring As we've seen throughout this course, there are many ways to affect the color and affinity photo. But in this video, I'll show you three layers that I like to use when matching color for composites. The first layer I like to use is actually stealing the colors from our background photo. Now, this technique might look a little bit strange, but I promise it's going to look really cool in the end, so stick with me. For this first layer, you're going to grab the background layer and duplicate it with command or Control J. Using this layer, I'm going to add a gaussian blur to it. I'm going to increase this quite a bit until all of the colors start to blur together. I think I'll add even more of a blur here. I'll make this 200. Perfect. Make sure you turn on preserve Alpha as well. Then you're going to take this blurry layer, and you're going to make it a child layer to the bunny. Now that those colors have been applied just to the subject. All you need to do is have that layer selected and then change the layers blend mode. I'm going to change it to color. Now it's taken all of those blurry colors and applied them directly to the bunny. Now, all we need to do is lower the opacity until this looks right. You can see we've already made a big difference here with the colors. Here's the before, and here's the after. That was a pretty fun trick, but I still have two more layers that I like to use to really get these colors looking right. The first one is a color balance adjustment. The overall coloring in this forest is very yellow and green toned. I want to affect all of the shadows, mid tones and highlights to lean more in that direction. I'm going to start with the highlights, and then I'll add more yellow and more green. Go into the midtones, I'll do the same thing, adding more yellow, and more green. Last with the shadows, I'm just going to do this a little bit gentler. I don't want our shadows to look too colorful, so I'll just add a little bit of yellow and ale bit of green. Now we can see the before and here's the after before, after. The last layer I'd like to add is the HSL adjustment. I'll just apply that with command or control U. Now, right now, I'm just going to stick to our main color channel because I feel like this bunny looks a little bit too saturated. I'm going to decrease the saturation here. Then we can play around with the hue slider to see what looks good. I think I want to continue to add more green. I'm just going to bring this down just a little bit toward green. Now you can see what this looks like. Here's all of the color adjustments we did in this video. Here's the before, and here's the after. Using these three layers for adjusting the colors is pretty simple, and you can do this for any composite to really quickly get these colors to match up better. We can see what this looks like with all of our work so far, including that curves adjustment, here's the complete before and after. We've now matched up the global lighting and the global colors. I think this looks so good. 48. Step 6 - Add the Shadow: This video, we'll learn about step number six, adding a shadow. Before we can add our shadow to the ground in front of the bunny. We first need to determine which direction and how harsh the shadows are in the background photo. We can see that we have a burst of light coming around the rim of this rock here, which means that the light is coming from this direction. The shadow should fall behind the rock like this. We should do the same thing to our bunny over here. This should be more lit up, and then the shadow should fall right in front of the bunny right here. Now that we know where to place it, we can add a new pixel layer. Then we can paint in black paint with our paint brush to add the shadow. I'm just going to lower the flow so I can apply the paint gradually. Then I'm just going to make my brush a little bit larger and I'll begin to place the shadow. Now, I just made a mistake. This has been placed as a child layer to our rabbit. We actually want to make sure that this layer is placed underneath the rabbit, but not as a child layer. Now it should be being applied under the rabbit, but on top of our background. As I paint, you can see that's true. Shadows naturally fade out the farther you get from the subject. Make sure you lightly paint just a little bit of paint around the outside edge of the shadow. I'm just going to lower the opacity of this layer. Just to reduce this and so you can still see the grass underneath it. Here's the before and after. The bunny already looks like it's blending in a lot better here. In the next video, we're going to continue to make the shadow look even better by adding a contact point. 49. Step 7 - Create the Contact Point: Let's learn about step number seven, creating the contact point. In this step, we're going to make it look like the bunny is actually standing on the grass and not just floating above it. This can be done in two steps, painting on our mask and adding a contact shadow. First, let's work on our mask. With the mask selected, I'm actually going to paint in black paint to remove part of the bunny. By masking off the bottom of our subject, it will look like the subject is pressing down into the ground. For softer grounds like this forest, you'll want to mask a bit more, but mask less if your subject is standing on a hard surface. At this point, we could also clean up the mask a little bit. In this case, I think I want to remove more of the white fringing. I'll just carefully go around my subject to remove a little bit of that. Now that we've cleaned up the bottom of this mask, we're going to make a contact shadow next. Remember how I mentioned that shadows will fade the farther from the subject you get. Well, the opposite is also true. Shadows get darker as you move closer to the subject. For this step, we're going to create a pitch black shadow going right along the edge right underneath the bunny, where it's making contact with the ground. First, I'm going to close up this group, and I'm going to select this pixel layer once again. I'll make another pixel layer on top of that. So I can see what I'm doing better, I'm just going to lower the opacity of this pixel layer. Now that our shadow is a little less in focus here. I'm just going to grab this new pixel layer, and I'm going to paint in black paint with 100% flow to create a pitch black shadow just along the edge of our bunny. You just want to paint this where your subject is making contact with the ground. Don't continue this all around, just the contact with the ground. Now that I've painted that on, I'm just going to raise the opacity of this other pixel layer here. You can see that again. Here's the before and after of that contact point. This looks a lot better. It makes the bunny look a lot more grounded. But I think that this shadow looks a little bit too light and there's a pretty harsh transition. I'm just going to create one more pixel layer and using a low flow once again. I'm just going to paint to blend these areas together better. With that, I think our shadow looks really good. Here's the before and the after of creating our shadow, and here's the before and after of creating that contact shadow. The contact shadow is such a small little detail, but I think it makes a huge difference. 50. Step 8 - Add the Shadows & Highlights: This video, we'll learn about step number eight, adding shadows and highlights. We've already matched the overall lighting of the bunny with the forest. But taking some time to enhance the lighting in specific areas can really make your composites look more realistic. The goal is to make the lighting on our bunny, look like it's interacting with the lighting in the forest. In this particular composite, we need to make the front of the bunny darker and the back of the bunny brighter since the sun is coming from that side. First, let's start by making the front of our bunny darker. I'm going to press command or Control M to get out of curves adjustment, and they'll make it a child layer to our bunny. Then I'll make this curve dark. I'll invert it with command or control I. Then I'm going to paint in white paint on this curves adjustment to reveal the darkness. I'll make my brush larger. Then I'll just paint right over the front of the bunny. Any areas that should be blocked from the sunlight. I'll also paint a little bit of darkness underneath the bunny here and on this part of its leg right here. This part of the leg would be hitting sunlight, blocking this area from getting any sun. That needs to be darker. I'd like the front of its face to be darker, but we'll deal with that later. For now, this looks a lot nicer, darkening the front of the bunny. Let's move on to the other side. I'm going to press command or control and make this lighter. Then I'll invert it with command or control, and I'll paint this right behind the bunny. Right on its back, and I'll also paint on this part of its ear right here. I think I made that a little bit too bright. I'm going to switch my color to black and I'm just going to paint it off of this bottom part here. Before and after. Now you can see both of these curves. Here's the before and here's the after. This already looks really good, but we can do even better. First, I want to teach you about rim lighting. Rim lighting is what we can see over here with this rock. The light is hitting this side of the rock and it's wrapping around the outside edge of the rock, creating this rim of light. I want to mimic that on our bunny here. I'm going to make another curve. I'll make it very bright. Then I'll invert it with command or control I. I'm just going to paint this in white paint right along the edge of our bunny. Now, luckily, this has been placed as a child layer, which means we don't need to worry about getting this paint on the outside. As I'm painting, I'm just staying right on the very edge and I'm adding in this brightness. I think I'll actually bring up my flow for this. Adding this rim of light right here. I'm going to stop it about there. And stop it about here. Just on the back of the bunny, and then I'll paint just a little bit of rim lighting right here. This looks very harsh, though. I'll undo that. Now I'm going to lower my flow to make this more subtle on this part of the bunny. We have our rim lighting done. Here's the before and after. The last thing I want to do with this lighting is I want to darken the front of the bunny right here even more. It just looks too bright for the shadow area. In this case, we already added this very dark curve, but it just wasn't enough. Sometimes we just need to paint in black right on our layer to really darken something. I'll add another pixel layer. On this one, I'm going to paint with a low flow in black paint, just to darken right here. We can also do this right on the edge of the bunny to remove any extra fringing that shouldn't be there. You can see that before and after of that. With that, now you can see the before and after of everything we did in this video before and after. The bunny fits so much better into this background now. I think this looks great. If you want to reduce the harshness of any of this, you totally can. But in this forrest image, the lighting really is quite harsh. I think I'm going to keep it just like this. Now we're officially done with our lighting for our bunny. I think this looks great. In the next couple of videos, we're just going to finish up this composite with some little detail work. 51. Step 9 - Match Clarity: This video, we'll learn about Step number nine, matching the photos clarity. I'm just going to zoom in here and take note of how sharp this photo is. In the background, we have some sharpness, but we also have some fuzziness here. On the bunny, we have a lot more sharpness here on the front of the bunny where it's in focus, and then it fades out and becomes blurrier on the back of the bunny. This is because when this picture was taken, it had a very shallow depth of field, meaning that it very quickly transitioned from being in focus on front of the bunny to out of focus as it got further away from the bunny's face. But I don't really like how this looks for this composite. I want to balance this out a little bit better by making the front of the bunny more and the back of the bunny more in focus. Let's start by making the front of the bunny blurrier. I'll start by adding a Gaussian blur. I'm going to make sure this is placed as a child layer to our subject. Then I'm just going to raise the radius to begin to blur the front of the bunny. I think that looks pretty good. Then I'm just going to invert this layer with command or control I and I'll paint in white just over the front of the bunny, where I want this to be a little less in focus. I think that looks pretty good. It's subtle, but I think this just matches the sharpness better. But now to make this match even more, I just want to raise the sharpness of the back of the bunny. I'll do that with the clarity filter. Again, make sure this is placed as a child layer. Then I'm just going to increase the strength here and I'll bring that all the way up. Then I'll invert this layer with command or control I, I can paint in white paint on the back of the bunny to bring it more in focus. I'm going to select both of these layers so that you can see the before and the after. Before and after. I think this looks a lot more balanced. I know this might be a little bit difficult to see after this video has been compressed and uploaded online. But trust me, adding a little bit more sharpness and blurring to balance out your image really does make it look a lot more convincing. 52. Step 10 - Continue Editing: This video we'll learn the final step to making a great composite, continued editing. Now that the bunny and the forest are blending together so well. We can edit the entire photo as a whole, and any changes we make will affect the bunny and the forest. Because the bunny and the forest are already blended together, they will stay blended as we add more adjustments because the adjustments will affect them equally. Let's start off by affecting the overall lighting of this photo. I'll press command or control M, and I'll make sure this layer is placed on top of everything. Now, for me, the shadows in this photo are very dark and I'd like to reduce that a little bit. I'm just going to bring the shadow node up. But then I'll bring the mid tones down because I don't want them to become too light. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Lightening up that. I think you can see the details on the bunny a little bit better now. Then I want to affect the overall colors in this. I'm going to press command or control. There are some red tones back here and in these leaves that I think are interesting, but maybe we want a different look. I think it'd look nice. If we made this more monochromatic, I'm going to go into the red channel. I'm just going to reduce the saturation. Then I'm just going to bring the hue slider over to the left to add more yellows and greens to these areas. Now you can see the before and after of reducing the redness. Not only does this make the photo look more monochrome, but it also helps the bunny to blend into its surroundings even more. Now I'm just going to select both of these adjustments, so you can see the before and after. Now I'm just going to select all of the layers that we just worked on. I'm holding command or control to quickly select them all. Now you can see the before and the after. Great work on this composite. You now know all ten steps that you need to create any composite image. We're going to continue to practice these ten steps as we complete three compositing projects together in the next chapter. After doing all of these course projects with me, you'll be totally prepared to make composites all on your own. 53. Compositing Projects: You've made it to the final chapter of the course. Congratulations. For this chapter, we're going to continue on our compositing journey as we complete three compositing projects together. During these three projects, we'll practice the ten compositing steps that we learned about in the last chapter. As they say, practice makes perfect. Once you've practiced the ten steps a few more times with me, you'll be totally prepared to use this workflow to make composites all on your own. This might be the last chapter of the course, but I think it's also going to be your favorite. Let's get started. 54. Wedding Composite - Find the Photos: Let's do our first step to compositing, finding the photos. For this composite, we're going to place the bride into a brand new photo. Since this is a practice project, I've already found the photos that we'll be using by going to Pexels and unsplash. You don't need to worry about finding these pictures. They're in the exercise files. But why did I pick these two photos? Well, there's a few reasons. If you look at the camera angle, both cameras are high up looking down. That's how we see the top of her head. That's why it looks like this hill is relatively flat. Next, the camera physician. Both photos were taken from a moderate distance from the subjects, so we can see quite a bit of them. Also, I chose this because of the lighting. Both photos have lighting coming from the side, producing soft but noticeable shadows. And last, I think this will be pretty easy to mask. Her hair might give us a few problems, but the rest of the image should be easy to mask away her background. And speaking of masking. In the next video, we'll mask the woman from her background. 55. Wedding Composite - Mask the Subject: Let's do this second step to compositing, masking the subject. To begin, we first need to make a selection of our subject. I'll grab the selection brush. Then I can click and drag to create my selection. Now, for this bottom part of the dress, all you really need to do is click once and the entire dress is selected perfectly. But the top area of our selection is a little trickier. I suggest just painting over both of the arms fully, we'll remove these green areas after. Then you can come up here and begin to add hair in. Now the hair is really tricky in this image, unfortunately. Just click and drag until all of it's included, and then you can hold Alt or Option to remove as needed. Now, for these arm areas, this is a little tricky because they have such sharp corners here. What I like to do is, I like to hold Alt Option and click and drag to remove too much. Make sure that whole corner is included in what you remove. I'm just going to select our arm again, that's still there. But holding Alt option, click and drag to remove all of that. Then lift up on alt option and click and drag to add again. This gives you a nice sharp corner there, which you wouldn't have been able to really get otherwise. You would need to use a very small brush in order to get that perfect. But with over selecting, I just think this makes it a little bit easier. I just finished making my selection. I'm going to press refine Then I'm going to paint just on the edges of her hair. I'll include these two little wispy bits, and then I'll go all the way around like that. Then I'll press apply. Now I'm just going to apply a mask to this, and I'll de select with command or control D. You can see our mask looks bad up here by her hair, but the rest of it looks pretty good. We could clean up our mask right now, but I actually like to wait until our subject is in her new background. That way, I can just see how much I need to remove. We'll take care of that, cleaning up her mask and placing her in her new background in the next video. 56. Wedding Composite - Resize & Position: In this video, we'll resize and position our model. To start, I'm just going to select the whole layer right here, and then I'll press command or control C to copy it. Then going to the background, I'll press command or Control V to paste her in. I'll grab the move tool so I can resize this layer. Looking at the surroundings, I think she needs to be a little bit smaller and I'd like her placed right about there. Now, something you might notice is that the lighting is actually going in opposite directions. The sun is coming from this direction in the background, casting shadows on the backs of these plants. While in this photo, the light is clearly coming from the other side because you can see this highlight on her arm here and shadows on her other arm. We'll need to flip one of these pictures. I think I'm just going to flip the background. I'll unlock the layer. Then with the moved to selected, I'll right click. I'll go to transform flip horizontal That looks much better. Now you can see the light is coming from the right in both of these pictures. I think I'm going to select her layer and just make her a little bit larger. I'll place her just like that. Now that she's placed where we'd like her, it's time to clean up the mask. To start, I'm going to hold down Alt or Option and I'll click on the mask. Then we're going to do that trick to get rid of anything remaining on the edges. I'll grab the paint brush and I'll paint in black paint with full flow right on these edges here. I'll hold Alt or option and I'll click again. With that mask still selected, I'm going to go right in here and I'll just remove these areas that are sticking out from her head. I have full flow to start and I'm just removing the biggest areas. Now I'm just going to reduce the flow so I can gradually paint away right on the hairline. Now, it looks like I removed a little too much, so I'll press x to switch to white, and then I'll paint those areas back in. Then I'll switch to black and I'll do the opposite. Just coming in here and removing all of the background areas. This looks pretty good, and as you zoom out, you can see this looks just fine. You can't see any of those weird flyaways anymore. To continue cleaning up our mask, we could go down here to where the areas of her dress are transparent. But we'll actually go back and take a look at these later when we're adding shadows. Because as you can see, this is grass showing through the original photo and we have grass here. I think we can add a little bit of shadow here just to make this blend better. But we'll do that later on. In the next video, we're going to work on the global lighting to make our model match the background. H. 57. Wedding Composite - Match Global Lighting: In this video, we'll work on matching the global lighting. To start, I'm going to press Command or Control M to add a curves adjustment. Then I'm going to click and drag this, so it becomes a child layer to our model. Now I can adjust the lighting to see what looks best for this picture. If I bring the mid tones up, you can see this makes her stand out even more. It really doesn't help. By lowering it, this actually looks pretty good. Let's take a look at the shadows next. If I lighten her shadows, that looks a little odd. You can see her shadows right here. They're just a little too light. It doesn't really make sense. If I darken those shadows, she doesn't seem to match better either. I'll leave the shadows alone for the highlights, we can darken them or brighten them. I think darkening them actually looks pretty good, so I'll do that. All right. And now you can see, let me just go in here. Now you can see the before and after. I think that's already a big improvement. In the next video, we're going to match the global colors. 58. Wedding Composite - Match Global Color: This video, let's match the global colors. I'm going to use the same three layers that we used on the Bunny project. We can go ahead and start by selecting the background, I'll duplicate it with command or Control J. Then I'm going to apply a blur to this background. Let's go with the Gaussian blur. I'll raise this all the way up and I'll make sure to check on preserve Alpha. I think I'll just blur this a little bit more. Let's go with 300. With those colors nice and blurry, I'm just going to select this layer and I'll make it a child layer. Now that it's applied only to our model, I'm going to change the blend mode to color. You can see this looks pretty intense on our model. I'm going to reduce the opacity of this quite a bit. Now you can see the before and the after. This is just reducing some of the redness in our model skin to help her blend in better. Let's do the next layer. I'll press command or control you to bring up the HSL adjustment. Right now, she looks a little too desaturated compared to the background. In the global colors, I'm just going to raise the saturation. Then using the hue shift slider. I think I want to still reduce more of the redness in her skin. I'm going to move the hue over to the left. Just introduce a little bit more green. Now you can see the before and after of that before, after. We only have one last layer to do. I'll go to the adjustments and I'll apply the color balance adjustment. Let's begin in the shadows, and I'll just play with these sliders to see what looks good. I think I do want to add a bit of red this seems to look nice. We might have gone a bit too far on these other layers adding green to her skin. I'll just raise the reds a bit. I think I'll add ale bit of green and a little bit of yellow. Let's go into the mid tones. Again, I think ale bit of red actually looks quite nice. Maybe I'll add a little bit of magenta to the midtones and a little bit of yellow. I for the highlights. Let's see. That slider did not look good either way. I'll leave the cyan red slider alone. I'll add a little bit of magenta. That one doesn't look good either. I'll double click to reset that. Here's the before and after of the color balance. Just bringing more color back. Now I'll select all of these color layers and you can see the before and after. Let's see that one more time closer before, after. Her tones definitely match the grass a lot better. I'll just select all of the layers that we've done so far, so you can see the complete before and after of all of these global adjustments. All right now that we're done with the global adjustments, we're ready to move on to adding the shadow in the next video. 59. Wedding Composite - Add the Shadow: Let's add the shadow in this video. I want to add a shadow on the ground next to our subject. This means that this can't be a child layer, I'll select the background layer, and I'll add a new pixel layer on top of that. Then I'll grab the paint brush tool and I'll paint in black paint with a low flow, and a larger brush. Because the lighting is coming in from the right side, I need to paint a shadow that goes in this area right here. I'll start just painting gradually right underneath her dress. I think casting the shadow like this looks pretty consistent with the rest of the photo. I'm just going to lower the flow even more and I'll paint on the very edge to soften this even more, and I'll darken it as it gets closer to her. This looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that. It looks like the shadow should have been there the whole time. Now that we've added this simple shadow. In the next video, we'll take this further by adding the contact point. 60. Wedding Composite - Create the Contact Point: Let's create the contact point. To start, we're actually going to paint right on the mask to just remove a little bit of the mask right along the bottom, just to help it blend in better. With the mask selected, I'll paint in black paint with a very low flow right along the edge, just to blend this in more. Now that we're finished removing some of the very edge area. I can see this part of her dress is transparent. Now in the original photo, it had green grass. This actually blends pretty well, but this grass just looks a little bit too light for this new background. I'm going to again paint with a very low flow, and I'm just going to lightly go over that area to help darken it. Just make sure you don't paint away too. This so still have this sheer panel of fabric over the grass, making it appear a little bit lighter. I think that looks pretty nice. Now that I'm done with that, I'm just going to close up this group, and then I'll select the old shadow layer, and I'll place a new pixel layer on top of that. Using this layer, I'm going to paint in black paint to create our contact shadow. I'm just going to paint with 10% flow. With the Bunny project, we used 100% flow, but the shadows are a lot softer in this picture. So we need to make this very subtle. Remember this contact shadow should only go where your subject is making contact with the ground. Don't continue it too far up the sides of the dress. Just where she's making contact. All I just finished with the contact shadow. Here's the before and the after before, after. I think this looks really nice and grounds it a lot better, but I'm just going to add one more pixel layer and using a larger brush and a lower flow. I'm just going to paint right in between the contact shadow and the regular shadow to blend these areas in better. I think these shadows look really nice. Here's the before and the after. As one last finishing touch, I want to add a little bit more of a shadow to the woman right here. The grass should be blocking the light from coming right here. I'm going to add a pixel layer right in here. I'll select the color balance adjustment and place a pixel layer right on top of that. Then using a super low flow, I'm just going to paint right over the dress where the light should be blocked. You can see that before and after. It's subtle, but I think it makes a good difference. Now I'm just going to select all of the layers that we did in this video. So you can see the complete before and after. Now that the shadow on the ground looks really good, we're going to continue to add more shadows and highlighting to our subject in the next video. 61. Wedding Composite - Add the Shadows & Highlights: Let's add some shadows and highlights to our model. The lighting already looks really good, but I think we can accentuate it even more. I'm going to open up our models group, and I'll just select this pixel layer right here. Then I'll add a curves adjustment on top of that with command or Control M. To start, let's add more highlight to our model. I'll brighten this. Then I'll invert it with command or Control I. Then I'll grab the paintbrush tool and we can paint in white paint with a low flow. Maybe I'll raise this just a little bit though. With around 10% flow, and I'm going to add highlight on the side of her body that should be lit more. I think it would look nice if the right side of her body just had a little bit more shine to it. I'll just paint that in right there. Now you can see that before and after of that. Let's do the opposite next. I'll press command or Control M once again. But this time we'll make it darker. I'll press command or Control I to invert this. Then I can paint in white paint on the left side of her body to darken it. And you can see the before and after of that. I'll just select both of these layers. You can see the before and after I think that lighting looks really nice. Now I have one last optional step that you can do. After all of the adjustments that we've added to our model. It's starting to look like her dress is a peach color when maybe it's more meant to be a white color. I have nothing against colorful wedding dresses, but this is just optional. If you want to reduce this, go ahead and press command or control. Then in the main color channel, we can just reduce the saturation. I'll lower it completely. I'll press command or control I to invert this. Then I'm just going to paint in low flow over the dress, just to reduce some of that coloring. Now you can see this looks a little bit more like a white dress. Here's the before and after. Now, I'll just select all of the layers we did in this video. So you can see the before and the after. Beautiful. Great work. We're almost done. In the next video. We're going to match the clarity from our subject and background. 62. Wedding Composite - Match Clarity: This video will match the clarity. In order to see the clarity, I'm just going to zoom in here. You can see that the background image is a little bit more fuzzy than our model here. You can see all the details on the models dress very well. I think we should blur the model just a little bit to help her blend in better. With the models layer selected, I'm going to add a Gaussian blur. With this placed as a child layer, now I'll just increase the radius. You can see this already looks like too much of a blur. We're losing all of the detail. We need to keep this very low. I think 0.2 looks pretty good for this. Now you can see that before and here's the after. That was very subtle, but now that our clarity is matching, we can move on to the next video where we'll finish off this project. 63. Wedding Composite - Continue Editing: Let's do the final compositing step, continued editing. Now that the model and the background match perfectly. We can place any adjustment that we want on top of them, and they'll affect both of them equally. We can add as much style, we can change up the colors however we want. Here's what I'm going to do for this one. I'll select the top layer, and then I'll press command or Control M to add a curves adjustment. I want to make this image brighter. I'm just going to click and drag on this node to raise it just a little. Next, I want to start adjusting some of the colors. I'll press command or control you. I'm going to go color channel by color channel to adjust each of these. We did a lot of adding green and yellow to our model to make her match the grass better. But now, I think I want to bring out more red tones to warm up her skin again, this will also warm up the grass at the same time. Let's start in this red channel. You can see this is affecting the path and her skin. I'm going to increase the saturation right here, and then we can adjust the hue, moving it more toward green or more toward red. I think I'll leave this one alone for now, and I'm just going to move on to the yellows. If I increase this, you can see this is affecting most of the picture. I'm going to raise the saturation. Then I'm going to make this one more red. I'll move the hue slider upward. You can see this adds warmth to the entire picture, not just our model. Go into the greens. Let's raise this. Nothing's changing, so I'll double click to reset that. Let's go into CN and we're affecting the sky. Here's where I want to have a little bit of fun. I want the sky to be less saturated, but more green toned. To start, I'm just going to lower the saturation. Then I'm going to bring the hue slider over to introduce more green. I think I'll also brighten up the sky a little bit just to reduce the contrast. A going into the blue channel, I want to do the same thing. I'll desaturate, and then I'll move the hue slider up to add even more green to this. Maybe I'll lighten it a little bit more. And for magenta. This isn't affecting anything, so I'll double click to reset that. Now you can see the before and after. These colors are a lot more stylized. But I think by fading out the sky like this, it's helping to bring the focus more to our subject, which I think looks really nice. Let's just add one more adjustment. I'm going to apply the color balance adjustment so that we can affect the shadows, mid tones and highlights separately. I'll start in the shadows. Let's see how it looks cooling down the shadows. I think that looks pretty nice. Maybe I'll cool them down even more with a little bit of blue. Now that we've cooled down the shadows, let's go into the mid tones and see what we can do here. I think cooling down the midtones also looks nice, so I'll do that. Maybe I'll add a little bit of magenta. And going into the highlights. There's a lot of highlight in this picture with the clouds and her dress. I'm not sure I want to affect the highlights, so I'll close out of that. Now we can see the total difference here is the before and after of all of those final adjustments. Now I'm just going to select all of the layers except for our mask. Let me see, I'll hold down command or control. I'll click on all of these. And I'll just get out the hand tool. And now you can see the final before and after. Well, that was quite the project. I love how this turned out. Great work. Now that we finish this beautiful wedding composite, in the next video, we'll move on to a whole new project. 64. City Composite - Find the Photos: Let's find the photos for our next project. For this next composite, we're going to place this woman into the middle of a city. Since this is a practice project, I've already found the photos that we'll be using on Unsplash. But why did I pick these two photos? Let's take a look. First, I like the camera angle in both of these. You can see in the woman's photo, we're looking slightly up towards the sky. In the city photo, it's pretty similar. We're looking up at these buildings. I also like the camera position. Both of these photos are taken from a similar distance. We can see the hills in the background of her photo, and we can see all of the buildings in the city. It seems to match up. I also like the lighting. They're very similar. In her photo, the sunrise is shining on her face, and In the city photo, we can see that the light is coming from behind the buildings. It's pretty similar. Both photos have noticeable shadows. It doesn't seem too extreme, but I do think we're going to need to make her shadows look a little bit harsher to match the city. Last, we have easy to mask. She might actually take a little bit of work to mask, but it shouldn't be too crazy. It's always nice when people wear hats, so we don't need to worry about their hair so much. Those are the two photos that we'll be working with. Let's move on to the next video and we'll mask the woman from her background. 65. City Composite - Mask the Subject: Let's mask the subject in this video. Now, I'm going to be honest with you here. While preparing for this video, I tried using the selection brush to make a selection of our model, and it really wasn't working very well. What do we do when the selection brush isn't working? Well, in that situation, we can turn to our good friend, the Pen tool. I'm going to select the Pen tool and then I'll change its settings so that we're in smart mode with a rubber band mode turned on. Also make sure you have snapping turned off for this step. Then we can go ahead and get started tracing her. As I'm tracing her, I'm going to lean toward cutting more of her off to remove any fringing that we can see as we're tracing. It's always a good idea to cut more inward rather than leave some of the background behind. I'm just going to click click click all the way around the outside of her. When I get to her hair, I'm honestly just going to cut through the flyaway hairs. It won't really make a huge difference for this composite. It's totally fine to leave those out. That took a little while to do, but it wasn't too difficult. Now that that's done, I'm just going to turn this into a selection. Then I'm going to go down here and add a mask. I'll de select with command or control D. Now we can see our smooth, beautiful selection. Now, before we finish, I do have a few more areas that I'd like to remove from the mask. We can do that by simply tracing the areas with the pen tool. I'll start down here right where her bag is. I'm just going to trace this whole area Once I have that traced, I'll turn it into a selection. Then with the mask selected, I'll grab the paint brush, and I'll paint in black paint with full flow to remove what's inside of my selection. I'll D select with command or control D. Then I'll do this again. I'll grab the pen tool, and I'll just trace over a few more of these areas I'd like to remove. You can see this green and red fringing is pretty bad right here in the nook of her arm. I'm going to make sure I definitely cut out those areas, so you can't see them anymore. Last, this area is a little bit tricky. It would be hard to trace it with the pen tool. Instead, I'm going to use a low flow on my paint brush and I'm just going to paint this little area right on the mask in black paint. If you paint too much, you can press x on your keyboard to switch to white. You can bring some of that back. All right. With that, we're done cutting out our subject from her background. Great work. In the next video, we're going to copy her and we'll paste her into her new background. 66. City Composite - Resize & Position: In this simple video, we're going to resize and position our subject. To start, I'll make sure that we have her background layer selected, and then I'll press command or Control C to copy it. I'll go into her new background and I'll press command or Control V to paste her in. Now, I'm just going to use the move tool. I'm actually going to make sure that I have snapping turned on because I'm going to snap her so that she fits just perfectly into this image. Once you see that red line on bottom, that looks really good. She's lined up on top as well. Then I'm going to center her just like that. Now, because she's lining up perfectly with the top and bottom edge, we actually don't need to go and clean up her mask from that white line. But if you did shrink her down, then you could start to see that white line appearing. You need to go on her mask and just paint in black to remove that. But because of the way I'm choosing to position her, whoops, with her perfectly lined up and centered, we won't need to worry about that. That was nice and simple. In the next video, we'll start to match her lighting. 67. City Composite - Match Global Lighting: This video we'll match the global lighting. I'd like for her lighting to match the background better. I'll press command or Control M to bring up the curves adjustment, and then I'll make this a child layer. Now this will only affect her. Then I'm just going to go through all of the six things we can do with the curves adjustment to see what looks right for this. We can brighten it. That's not right. Let me just darken that. Then for the shadows, Lightening it certainly looks wrong. I think I'll actually darken the shadows in this case. Just a little bit. Then for the highlights, we can brighten them or darken them. I think I'll also darken these. This photo behind her has a much more of a moody look. I think this looks a lot better. Here's the before and after of adjusting the lighting. I didn't realize how faded and gray she looked. Now she looks a lot deeper and it matches better. All right, great work. In the next video, we'll work on matching the colors. 68. City Composite - Match Global Color: This video, we'll work on matching the global colors. We're going to use those three layers that we like to use for matching colors. Let's start by duplicating the background layer with command or Control J. Then I'll add a blur to this layer. I'll increase this and make sure preserve Alpha is turned on. Then I'll increase it even more. Let's go with 200. Now that those colors are nice and blurry, I'm just going to place this as a child layer to our model. Then I'll change the blend mode of this layer to color. Wow, that looks really intense. I definitely need to lower the opacity. I don't want this affecting her skin quite so much. I think I'll bring it down quite a bit. Now you can see the before and after. You can mostly see the difference in her red shirt before, after. That was a good start. Let's do the HSL adjustment next. I'll press command or control you. I think her colors need to be a lot less saturated. The background is full of a lot of grays and blues. Let's start with the global colors, and I'll just bring the saturation down. Then I'm going to change the hue slider. Moving it up would make her more red, so I need to move at the opposite direction. Bringing it to the left, just introducing a little bit more of blue to it. I think that looks good. Here's the before and after very subtle adjustments so far. Let's go out with a bang and do the color balance adjustment next. Starting in the shadows. I know I definitely want to add more cyan to her. Let's start there. Adding a little bit of cyan. I think I'll add a little bit of green as well and blue. Let's go on to the midtones. Again, I'll add some cyan. I was thinking about adding green, but I don't want her skin to become too green. I'm actually going to add magenta instead. And then I'll add even more blue. A going into the highlights. I'm going to add even more cyan. I'll add some more green and more blue. This looks a lot more extreme than our other adjustments. Here's the before and after. Now we can see all of these color adjustments, here's the before and after Wow. Let's look at all of our global adjustments from where we started. She definitely looks like she fits into the scene a lot better before, after. What a great start. Now, normally the next steps that we do would be to add a shadow to the ground and then add a contact point. But because of the way this composite is positioned, we actually don't need either of those since we can't see the ground beneath her. But we will need to add some nice rim lighting and shadows directly onto our subject. Let's move on to step number eight, adding the shadows and highlights. 69. City Composite - Add the Shadows & Highlights: Let's add some shadows and highlights. Now, my goal for this video is to darken the back of her more. Since the sun is shining in front of her, there wouldn't really be light back here. I also want to enhance any rim lighting that we have here. Let's go ahead and start there. I'm going to add a curves adjustment, and I'll make this nice and bright. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I'm going to use the paint brush. I'll paint in white paint with a low flow. Let's bring it all the way down, I think 5%. Then with a larger brush, I'm just going to paint this on the left side of her. I'll paint some light right here and here. I'll also paint a little bit of light on top of her arm right here and right in here. Now you can see the before and after of that. I'm going to add one more curves adjustment, Command or Control M. I'll make this nice and bright as well, and I'll invert it with command or Control I. I'm going to use this layer to paint on our rim lighting. I'll raise the flow, and I'll use a bit of a smaller brush. Then I'm just going to paint on the very edge to add even more light. I'm trying to do this a little bit more soft, but I still want to add that lighting there. I might have added too much there. I'm going to switch my color to black by hitting x on the keyboard, and then I'll just remove a little bit of that. Nice. Continuing on, painting in white paint, all the way down here. I think I'm also going to add a little bit of light right in here. Then a little bit on her arm and in the nook of her arm right here. In addition, we can also enhance some of the fabric on her shirt that has highlights. I'm only going to do this in areas where it should be bright. Right here, the sunlight is hitting her arm. I'm just going to add a little bit of light right in there. Then over here on this part of the shirt, I'm just going to enhance a few of these ripples. That looks pretty good. Now you can see here's the before and after of adding the rim lighting before and after. Here's the before and after of all of that lighting. That looks really good. But now we need to balance it by adding more darkness. I'll press command or Control M and I'll add a dark curve this time. I'll invert it with command or control I. Then I'm going to paint with a very low flow. Just to add this to the back of her. I'm basically going to paint this everywhere other than where I just painted that light area. And now you can see the before and after of that. Now, even after all of that darkness, there's still a few areas that look a little too bright. I'm going to add a new pixel layer, and I'm just going to paint directly on this layer and black paint to reduce the light in those areas. In this bright spot on her shirt, I'm just going to add a little bit of black paint. Then on the back of her pants here, oops, I went a little too far. I'm just going to add a little bit more black. We want both sides of her pants too, and I think that looks better and a little over her hair. Here's the before and after adding a little bit more darkness. Now you can see all of those lighting layers. Here's the before and the after. Wow. Painting with light makes such a big difference. I think this looks a lot better. All right, great work. We're almost done. In the next video, we're just going to match the clarity between these two pictures. 70. City Composite - Match Clarity: This video will match the clarity Now, normally with this step, I would zoom in and make sure that the clarity between our subject and background is exactly the same. But in this picture, she's standing at quite a distance from the city. Instead, I'm going to use this step to add a bit of a blur to the city. I'm going to close up her group and I'm going to select our background layer. Then I'm going to add a Gaussian blur. I'll just zoom in here so I can see this better. I think I'll raise the blur like that, and I'll make sure preserve Alpha is checked on. Now, to make this look more realistic, I'm actually going to apply a gradient that way the blur can fade from here to here. This area should be a little bit more in focused, and then it should gradually get more blurry as we go up here. I'm going to start my gradient right up here at this building, and I'm just going to drag it all the way down to the very bottom. Now you can see that we go from a blurry building and then it gradually becomes more in focus. I think that looks really nice. Then one last thing that I want to fix is actually the mask of our subject. If you zoom in here, you can just see how harsh this line is. I want to blur the mask to blend this a little bit better. With the mask selected, I'm going to apply a Gaussian blur. I'll make sure this is a child layer to the mask. Then I'm going to raise the radius. If I raise it too much, there starts to become a halo. I actually want to be very subtle with this, blurring it just enough to soften that edge. I think that looks nice. Here is the before and after. Now that we're done with that blurring, in the next video, we're going to finish this project by doing some continued editing. 71. City Composite - Continue Editing: This video we'll continue editing. Now that these images match each other so well, we can put as many adjustment layers as we want on top of everything. I'm going to start by adjusting the lighting. I'll press command or Control M. Now, something that stands out to me in this picture is just how dark the shadows are. I'm actually going to raise the shadows to lighten them up, and I'll just do this a little bit. Then I'm going to darken the mid tones, just to balance that out. You can see this just makes the picture a little less extreme. Here's the before and the after. Just a subtle difference. Next, I think I actually want to make the photo warmer. It's just so cool right now. Go into the adjustments, I'm going to apply a white balance, and I'm going to bring this slider over to add warmth. Then I'm going to add a little bit of green. A. Like that. You can see this gives a much different feeling before it was a cool dark city. Now we have that little bit of warmth coming from the sun. I think this looks nice and I'm going to take all of the rest of the adjustments in this direction. To continue to take it in this direction. Our next step is going to be adding a sunburst. I'm going to do this by adding a burst of light to this corner over here where the light is hitting her hat. I'll grab the ellipse tool. I'll click and drag out a circle and then using the gradient tool. I'll drag from the center outward. Let's make this orange. I'll turn it into a radial gradient. I'll set it to screen, and I'll add a blur. I'll just type in this box. Let's go with 400. Then I'll just grab the move tool so I can adjust how this is positioned. I want this to cover this whole corner and a little bit of her hat. That's very extreme right now, so I'm just going to lower the opacity. Now you can see the before and after. I want to brighten this effect even more. I'm going to add another curves adjustment with command or Control M. Then I'm just going to brighten this. I'll invert this with command or Control I. Then I'm just going to paint with the paint brush tool in white paint. I'll need to reset this color here. Then with a large paint brush, maybe not that. I'm just going to paint in this area. To brighten it up. Here's the before and after. Now to contrast this a bit, I think I want to darken the right side of the picture. To do this, I'm actually going to use a pixel layer. I'm going to paint in black paint over this area. I'm going to paint all along the bottom here and all up here. I've painted a little bit too much there, I'll describe the eraser and with a low flow. I'm just going to erase that a little bit. Bringing the brush out, I'll paint over that again, keeping it a little bit more ****. You can see that I painted over our model. I actually don't like that. I'm going to lower this so it's beneath our models layer. I'm just darkening the background. Now that I've darkened that area, I like how it looks down here, but I'm noticing this blue part of the sky a lot more. I want to reduce this. I'm going to click on our top layer again and I'm going to press command or Control you to get out the HSL adjustment. I think I'm just going to make the whole image less saturated. Then so I can target this area. I'm going to go into the scans, and I'm going to reduce this saturation even more. I think I'll brighten it just a little bit. Then I'm going to shift the hue slider. I think I'll bring it up, just to add a little bit more warmth to it. Now you can see that before and after that area looks a lot less intense to me. Now that I've added all of those different adjustments, I'm noticing this part of her shirt, it looks very dark and I'm wondering if I can go back and fix that. I'm going to open up her layers, and I'm going to see if this black pixel layer is what did it. I think it is contributing to that a little bit. I'm going to grab the eraser tool and I'm just going to reduce that darkness right there. It just looks way too dark. I'll grab the paint brush because I painted away a little bit too much. This area should still be dark. Then we have this adjustment, which darkened even more. I'm going to paint in black just over that area to reduce that even more. There we go. I think that looks better. Looking at our picture now, I think it looks really good. I just want to add one more detail and that's actually adding some noise. I think this style of picture would look really nice if we just added a layer of noise over the top of everything. I'll go to the filters, and then I'll click on add noise. I'm just going to add a little bit of noise. You can see what this effect is doing. I don't want to add too much. I think somewhere around there looks pretty good. Here's the before and after a adding noise. Okay. Our picture looks so good. Now, I'm just going to select all of our layers so that we can see the before and after. Here it is, the complete before and after I think this project turned out really nice. She looks so good and definitely fits into the scene a lot better. Great work. Now that we're done with that, we'll do one last composite starting in the next video. 72. Street Composite - Find the Photos: Let's find the photos for our next composite. For this last composite project, we're going to place this man into a brand new photo. Since this is a practice project, I've already found the photos we'll be using by going to Pixabay and Unsplash. But let's take a closer look at why picked these two photos. First, I really like the camera angle. Both of the cameras are about at eye level. I also like the camera position. Both photos are taken from a moderate distance. They're not too close or too far away. Now, arguably the most important thing that really fits with these two pictures is the lighting. The man is being lit from behind in his original photo. When we place him in the new photo, he'll also be lit from behind. This will help us to make our composite look extra convincing. Last, I think he looks very easy to mask. He's wearing a hat. We don't have any flyaway hairs. Very nice. Now that we've found these photos, we can move on to step number two and mask the man from his original background. 73. Street Composite - Mask the Subject: This video will mask the subject. This man is going to be pretty easy to select. Let's grab the selection bruh, and I'm just going to use a larger brush so that I can click and drag to create my selection. Now, like I said in the last video, he doesn't have any hair we need to worry about. This selection should actually be pretty simple. I'm just going to zoom in here and make sure I got everything. I'm going to use a small brush just to remove this part right here. Our selection looks good, so I'm just going to apply a mask to it. Then I'll de select with command or Control D. I didn't do any refining this time because there aren't really any soft edges that need refining areas of hair or fur like with the bunny project. This was a super simple selection just with the selection bruh. All right. Great work. Now we're ready to move on to the next video where we'll this ma into his new image. H 74. Street Composite - Resize & Position: In this video, will resize and position our subject. I'm just going to select his layer, and then I'm going to press command or Control C to copy it. I'll go to our background and I'll press command or Control V to paste it in. Now I can just use the move tool to resize him. I'm going to turn off snapping just so I can move him around a little easier. I like the placement there. I'll admit it's a little bit tricky to know how large he should be in comparison to his surroundings. But I think this looks pretty good. Now that we're done placing him, we can fix the white line bug by holding Alt or Option and then clicking on his mask. Now I'm just going to use a paint brush, and I'll paint with full flow and black paint right on the border here. With that cleaned up, I'll just hold down Alt or Option and I'll click on the mask again. Now that we have this man in this background. You might notice that we have a little bit of light fringing. There seems to be a little bit of a light halo going around him. But that's actually going to work in our favor in this photo because the light is coming from behind him. It's already creating a natural rim lighting, which looks really good. But if you were to place this man in a background where the lighting wasn't coming from the back, maybe it was coming from the side. I would probably want to clean up the fringing on the side that the light isn't hitting him. That's just something to keep in mind. But for this composite, this is going to work perfect. In the next video, we're going to work on matching his lighting to the background. 75. Street Composite - Match Global Lighting: Let's match the global lighting. I'm going to start by adding a curves adjustment with command or Control M. Then I'll place this as a child layer to our subject. Now I'm just going to play with this curves adjustment to see what looks good for our subject. Now, I already think he looks pretty bright for this nighttime photo. I'm going to bring the mid tones down. In addition, I think the shadows on his black shirt look a little bit too dark when you compare it to the shadows in this picture. I'm going to lighten this shadow point by just bringing it up like this. I also think his highlights look a bit bright on his face, for example. I'm just going to lower the highlights, just to dull those down a little bit. Now we can see that before and after of doing that global lighting. Nice and simple. With that done, let's do the colors in the next video. 76. Street Composite - Match Global Color: Let's match the global colors. We're going to do our three color layers. I'll start by selecting the background and I'll duplicate it with command or control J. Then I'll apply a blur to this layer. I'll bring it up and turn on, preserve Alpha. Let's just type in a number. We'll go with 500 this time. I really want these colors to be blurred. That'll be nice. Then I'm going to take this layer and I'll make it a child layer to our model. Then I'll change the blend mode to color. You can see we have the colors reflecting on him. We have the warmth of the street on his lower half, and then the coolness of the night sky on the upper half, which is pretty interesting. I'm just going to lower the opacity down, so this affects him less. Then we can move on to the other color layers. But first, I just want to show you the before and after. I like that this has warmed up his clothes down here before they were pretty cool toned. It's also muted down his skin tone a little bit. I think this just looks a little bit more even for colors for this. That's pretty good. Next, let's do the HSL adjustment, I'll press command or control. Then I think I want to lower his saturation even more. Just to prepare this for the other colors that we'll add with color balance. I don't think I want to mess with the hue, so I'll just double click to reset that. But just lowering this saturation is going to be a good start and now we can add our color balance and really start to apply colors that we think look good for this. Let's start in the shadows. Just looking at the surrounding areas. You can see that the shadows in this photo are a little bit warmer. All this warm lighting is making them a little bit more red toned. I'm just going to increase the red slider, and I think that's all I want to do. I really don't want to cool down the shadows in this picture. Let's move on to the mid tones. Again, I think I do want to raise the redness, so I'll put that up. And I think I actually want to add a little bit of green as well. I definitely want to add yellow. We're really not trying to cool him down. We're just trying to warm him up for this picture. Last, for the highlights, I'm going to add a little bit of red, a little bit of magenta, and some yellow. Now you can see the before and after of the color balance. Before we really dole down his colors and now we're just bringing them back so that his clothing and his skin is all evenly colored. I think this looks really good before, after. Now you can see the before of all of our color enhancements and here's the after. Last, I'll just show you all of our global adjustments. Here's the before and after of those. Now that he's fitting so nicely into this background, we're ready to add the shadow in the next video. 77. Street Composite - Add the Shadow: Let's add a shadow in this video. Now, just looking around at the shadows that are already on the ground. You can see that they look pretty soft in this image because there's so much light coming from different parts of the image. As we're painting a shadow underneath our subject, we need to keep that in mind just to use a light hand for this shadow. Now I'm going to close up his group and select the background. Then I'm going to add a new pixelayer on top of that so that the shadow appears underneath him. Then using the paint brush, I'm just going to paint in black paint with a low flow to add this shadow. Now with a larger brush. I'm going to begin painting his shadow. Now, the light is coming from behind him, but I think I still want to paint the shadow at an angle. I can see a lot more light from this side. I think I'm going to paint the shadow, so it reflects diagonally down like this. I'm just going to start right by his feet, and then I'll bring it out. I'm going to darken it a little bit more toward his feet, and then it'll fade out as we get farther away. I think I might have painted a little bit too much right there though. I'm going to grab the eraser tool and with a very low flow. I'm just going to paint with a large brush to remove a little bit of that. I think that looks better. I'm just going to grab the brush tool again, and using a larger brush, I'm just going to go over this one more time. Now you can see that before and after of that shadow. I kept it very soft. I think at this point, I do want to go back in with the eraser and just erase a more of it to keep it even softer. But I think that looks pretty good. I'm just going to go in here also and erase a little bit of the shadow behind him. It really should only be appearing right underneath him and in front of him. With our shadow in place, we're ready to move on to the next video, where we're going to create the contact point. 78. Street Composite - Create the Contact Point: This video will create the contact point. To start off with the contact point, I'm just going to zoom into his shoes. Then I'm going to select his mask because now's the time to clean up the mask down here and create a little bit more softness on the edge here. I'm just going to grab the brush tool, and I'll just paint with a low flow. Maybe I'll bring it up a little bit though to around 15%. Then with a nice small brush, I'm just going to begin to clean this mask up ale bit. I know it was a little bit strange down here. I'm just going to clean up any weird areas and also soften the edge. Now, keep in mind that he has a hard pair of shoes on on a hard surface. We shouldn't erase too much with the bunny project. The bunny was on grass. It made sense to paint away more of the bunny. But here, I'm just going to lightly paint some away. I think that looks pretty good. Now with that prepared, we can create our contact shadow. I'm going to select this pixel layer and I'll add another one on top of that. Then I'm going to paint in black paint right along the edge to create our contact shadow. I think I'll just lower the flow a little bit. Then I can begin painting. Remember that this shadow is only for where his shoes are contacting the ground. Don't paint it all the way up his shoe on the right shoe, just on the part where it's touching the ground. I think the shoe looks a little bit strange right here. I'm going to go on the mask and I'm just going to paint away a little bit more of the mask. I think this light line right here is just coming from his shoe. But I don't want it to be there, so let me just get rid of that. Now that contact shadow looks pretty good. Here's the before and after. Now, I'm just going to add another pixel layer so that we can blend the contact shadow in with the existing shadow. This transition shadow should be pretty soft. I'm just going to use a little bit larger of a brush and I'm going to paint right along the edge. Maybe I'll undo that. I'll lower the flow even more. I'll paint right along the edge of this contact shadow to blend it in. Using a larger brush, I'm also just going to enhance the shadow that's underneath him, darkening that a little bit more, and then fading it out. Here's the before and after of that blending. Now you can see the before and after of all of the contact shadow work that we just added. Very nice. I think this looks really nice and really helps to ground our subject. He no longer looks like he's just floating there. I think that that's the hardest part when placing your subject because it really did look like he was floating. But with this added shadow, now we can see that it looks like he belongs in that area. I think his size looks good. That's all really nice. Now we have him placed, his shadows done, and now we can move on to the next video where we'll refine the shadows and highlights that are on our subject. 79. Street Composite - Add the Shadows & Highlights: Let's refine the shadows and highlights that are on our subject. We already know that the light is coming from behind him. We need to refine the shadows and highlights a little bit more to darken him more in the front and then add some rim lighting around him. I think this will really help to enhance this effect. I'm going to start by selecting one of his child layers. Then I'm just going to add a curves adjustment. We'll use this first one to darken him. I'll go ahead and darken this one. I'll invert this layer with command or control I. Then I'm going to paint in white paint with a low flow to reveal this just over the front of our subject. I think I'll save his head for last. I'm just going to start darkening the front of him. Remember this is a child layer, so there's no need to worry about painting between his legs. That's not a problem there. I'm trying to avoid the very edges where we're going to be brightening in a second. But I think that looks pretty good. Now I'm just going to add a little bit of darkness to his face, and then I'm going to concentrate a little bit more darkness under the rim of his hat. Then I'm going to add a little bit of darkness to the front of his hat as well. Now you can see that before and after of that. I think that looks pretty good. Now I'm going to add some more lightness to his outer edges, I'll press command or Control M, and we'll make this one brighter. I'll invert this with command or control I. Then I'll paint in white paint once again, and I'm just going to paint this on the edges. I'm not doing rim lighting yet. This is just a general brightening of the edges. I'm mostly going to do this for the top of him where the light is mainly hitting. But I think I will add a little bit to the rest of his edges, just a little bit. That looks pretty good. Here's the before and after of that delicate lighting. Now we can go in with a harsh lighting by adding some rim lighting, Alps command or Control M. I'll brighten this. Then I'll invert it with command or control I. Since this is rim lighting, I'm just going to up my flow a little bit. Then I'll use a smaller brush, and I'm just going to enhance this rim lighting. Now there already is existing rim lighting, which makes this super easy. Just paint in those same areas, enhancing them a little bit more. Is this on his mask? That looks a little strange. I'm just going to quickly select his mask and I'm going to paint that in to connect that line. That looks a little bit strange. I totally missed that. I'll switch my color to black just to erase the extra there. That's better. Back to the rim lighting. I just finished the rim lighting. Here's the before and after. Now that we're done with all of that lighting. I want to show you an advanced trick. You can see over here on the left side that his highlights are looking pretty white and on the other side, they look a little bit more warm toned. I don't really like the look of these white highlights, so I want to enhance the yellowness of them. Let's do that. I'm going to apply a white balance adjustment. I'm going to increase the warmth. And I'll add a little bit of magenta as well. Now our subject looks very warm, but I only wanted this to affect the highlights. I'm going to use a blend ranges. I'll click on this gear icon. Then I'm going to bring down the shadow node, and then I'll bring it over, so it's only affecting the highlights. Here's the before and after, you can really see this on the newspaper before, after. I think this is a little harsh, so I'm just going to lower the opacity. But you can see how this just softened the harsh whiteness of the highlight. I just have one last finishing touch and that's actually down here on his shoes. I think this highlight just looks a little bit too intense and I want to tone down the colors in it. I'm going to press command or control you. I'm going to desaturate this. Then I'll invert it with command or control I. I'm just going to paint in white paint over the shoe to reduce that. I think I painted with too harsh of a flow. I'm just going to lower that. Then I'll do that one more time. Just trying to reduce the yellowness a little bit. Here's the before and here's the after. Let's see before and after of all of the layers we did. Here's the before, and here's the after. Great work on this video. I think all of those shadows and highlights really helped. In the next video, we're going to match the clarity between our subject and the background. 80. Street Composite - Match Clarity: Let's match the clarity in this video. To see the clarity that we need to fix. I'm just going to zoom in right here. You can see that our background has a lot more noise than our subject does. I want to add a little bit more noise to our subject just to make these two areas blend in. I'm going to select one of the top layers here. Then I'm just going to apply the add noise filter. Make sure that's a layer standing all on its own. That looks good. Then we can go ahead and bring up the noise. I think this level of noise looks pretty good. It has a similar noise to the background. Now, typically, noise is mostly present in the shadows, which explains why the dark area of this background has so much noise. But on our subject, I don't want our highlights to be too affected by this noise. I'm actually going to use blend ranges to remove this noise from the highlights. I think I'll bring it over a little bit as well. You can see the noise is still present, but now it's more subtle in these highlight areas. Then as you move on to a more shadowy area, you can see we have quite a bit more noise. Here's the before and after of that. I'm just going to lower the opacity a little bit. Just to reduce this a little bit more. But you can still see the before and after and how this helps him to blend in with his background better. That was a very subtle step. Now, I think we're done with being subtle. Our model looks really good with this background. In the next video, we're going to complete this composite project by affecting the photo as a whole. 81. Street Composite - Continue Editing: Let's continue editing in this video. It's time to affect the entire photo. To start, I'm going to apply a curve on top of everything. Make sure this is no longer a child layer. I think I want this overall picture to look a little bit more moody. I'm just going to darken it. Just a little darker. Next, I want to make the sky a lot less noticeable. Right now, it just looks so saturated. I'm going to press command or Control U. Then I'm going to desaturate this all the way. I actually want this layer to be placed underneath our subject. That way, I'm not affecting him at all with this. I really only want to affect the sky. I'm going to invert this with command or control I. Then I'm just going to paint in white paint with a low flow to desaturate the sky. That looks pretty good. Here's the before, and here's the after. Next, I want to enhance the lighting in this photo by grating light bursts. To start, I'm just going to grab the ellipse tool. I'll add a circle. Again, this is placed behind him. We don't want any of this light to be on his front. This should only be behind him. Then I'm going to grab the gradient tool. I'll just start from the center and go outward, and I'll make this an orange color. I'll change it to a radial gradient. I'll set it to screen, and then I'll add a blur to it. L et's go with 500. Then I'm just going to select the circle and I'll lower its opacity. There we go. Then I'm going to grab the move tool and I'll reposition this. I'm going to enhance the lighting over here. I'll just do that. Then I'm going to duplicate this oval twice. I'll press command or control J to do that. Then I'm just going to move this oval over to this side. Then I'll move this oval over to the center. You can see we have quite a bit of light coming from these. I think I'll just select them all and I'll lower their opacity even more. Now you can see that before and after of enhancing that light. This looks really nice. Let's contrast this lighting by darkening the ground a little more. I'll select one of the light bursts and I'm just going to add a pixel layer on top of that. Then I'm going to paint in black paint, and I'll just paint over the ground. Just add a little bit more darkness. Again, this should be behind our subject since we only want to affect the ground. Now you can see the before and after. Again, I want to lean more into the moody vibe of this. I wanted to look like he's a detective walking the streets. To create that effect a little bit more, I'm going to desaturate this photo even more. I'm going to go back to the top of our layers and all press command or control you. Then I'm just going to desaturate I think I'll also shift the hue slider just to warm it up slightly. I'm moving it up to the right. Now you can see this. Here's the before and after. This is really helping to reduce the yellow tones back here, creating a more flat photo. Last, I think this would look nice with a little bit of a vignette. I'm going to press command or Control M. I'll darken this. Then I'm going to go into blend ranges and I'm just going to make sure that our highlights aren't affected by this fintte. I think I'll move it over a little bit as well. Then I'm going to invert this. Then I'm going to paint with a low flow and white paint, just to add this fgette to the edges. We're trying to draw the eye into our subject. Here's the before and after of that vignette. At this point, after all of those adjustments, our shadows look really dark. I'm going to apply a curves adjustment, and I'm just going to raise up the shadows to lighten them. I'm also going to darken the mid tones just a little. You can see the before and after. With that, I just want to show you all of the global edits that we just did. Here is the before and after of those. A much different feeling now. Now I want to show you the before and after of everything that we've done. Here we have it. Here is the before and after. Great work on this project. This was the very last compositing project. After having all of this practice, you now know how to take the ten steps and you should be able to apply them to your own photos. I hope you have some fun getting out there and making your own composites. 82. Class Conclusion: Great job. You made it to the end of the course. You are now in Affinity Photo Master. I hope you enjoy taking all of your new skills into the real world as you edit your own photos. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next Affinity Revolution Tutorial.