Beginner to Wow - Affinity Photo Version 2

1. Welcome and Introduction: Hi, my name is Tim. Welcome to Affinity Photo to training. Now before we get going with the actual software, one or two things I need to mention. Firstly, the images. So I'm going to be working with a lot of images. And if you want to use exactly the same images, they are in your resources folder. The second thing is it if you want to use your own images, that's absolutely fine. But if you don't know where to find them. Now, throughout the training, I will be showing you stuff on the video. What I'm going to suggest is that you watch the video first and then try it out yourself. And if you're not sure if something go back and watch the video a second time, maybe a third time, I will try and keep it in nice bite-size portions. Anyway. Let's jump straight in and get started. 2. Tools & Studios: Let's have a look at the interface. Now, on the left-hand side, we've got some tools going on in there. And you'll also notice with the tools, some of them have got little arrows on them. So if you go to tool with little arrow and the top or the bottom right-hand corner. And you click on that tool. If you click and hold, you'll find that it actually opens up some extra tools in here. Once again, I can just go in there, click and hold and see the extra tools. We've also got some more hidden tools and down the bottom. Now I'll show you how you can set up and customize your tools during the course. Let's just go back to one of these tools at the top. Across the top, we've got the persona's. And then there's another number of options that we have along the top here. Once again, we will be using those. And then to the right, we have got sets of panels. Now authentic calls, these studios are different layouts, I suppose, and these can be pulled around. So e.g. I've got a histogram there and I can pull that out. I can go to my navigate and move that out, pull out my layers, and place it over there. You can set up your layout exactly as you want to set it up. There's no right or wrong here. But all of these panels, if e.g. you close one down and I'll do the same over there with my layers. They're all available in the Window menu. So I can go in and find all of those panels. Once again. Now, sometimes when you do this, you make quite a mess of the panels and you haven't all over the show. And affinity calls these studios, These looks studios. So if we go up to the word studio in the Window menu, what I can do is I can just reset my studio and that'll tidy it away. So if I go to the Window menu and studio, you will see there is a right Studio. And let's have a left Studio, which is pretty much a slightly different one. We've got some more options. On the left-hand side. I'm going to just go back and show just the left studio now. So that's all and I'll see in this case, ready, you can go in and put things where you want them to be. I'm going to just reset or show my right Studio. And I will uncheck the left Studio as well. Try that out, move them around. If you make a mess of them, don't worry. You can go to the Window menu down to studio, and you can just reset that particular studio. 3. Pixels & Megapixels: Now, before we get going, I want to just explain about pixels. Photographic images are made up of pixels. And to show you a pixel, I'm going to zoom right in. I'm using the navigator on the right-hand side in the studio here there's a panel called Navigator. And I'm going to zoom right into this image. And if you have a look here, we've got a number of little tiny squares. Each one of those squares is a separate solid color. And those little squares are called pixels. And that's what makes up our entire picture. Let's just zoom out again. So you don't see those pixels when you've zoomed right out. Now, if you've got a camera or a phone or anything which takes a photograph, those cameras are usually measured. The sensors are measured in a megapixel. So you might have a camera that's got a ten megapixel sensor or a 50 megapixel sensor. And what that means is that for each image there are, Let's take the ten, there are 10 million pixels in that image. So a 50 megapixel image will have an image where there are 50 million of those tiny little square pixels in your image. 4. Essentials of a Good Image - Introduction: In this section, we're going to look at all the things that you need to make your images look amazing. From working with the light and dark, to correct in the color, to maybe making the image black and white, converting it to a single tone using split tones for that really cool black and white traditional photographic effect. Let's get started. 5. Crop & Straighten Photos: Let's have a look at crop, an image. I'm going to go to File and down to Open. And I'm going to go into the to fix folder. These are all images that we're going to be looking at shortly that we're going to be able to fix. I'm going to start off with this picture of the Volkswagen. Now, what I'd like to do is to crop off this top section. It's a bit messy. It looks like somebody is actually painted a bit of white in the background there as well. So to do that, we go down to the cropping tool, and that's the fourth tool down on the left-hand side. I click on that and it puts in these little cropping marks around the image. Now I'm on unconstrained in the top here. So this will allow me to crop it to any particular size that I like. So if I grab a corner, I can then crop that down, crop that a little bit out. And in fact, I think I'll try and crop out some of the road at the bottom. Now. That's absolutely fine. I'm happy with that. And you can see that I've got my new pixel sizes in here. It always shows this up as Px or pixels that shows me how many pixels there are. In fact, if you times 3,802 by 2,217, and that will tell you how many megapixels this particular images. But you don't need to really know that one. But what about the other options in here? Well, we've got an original ratio. What that will do is it'll take the original size of the image, the original and just allow to crop it at the same ratio as the original. Once again, going back into there again, we can do a custom ratio. So if I wanted a square, I can just put in one by one in there. And now I've got a square crop that I can use, which is come back to unconstrained for the moment. So I can crop this to any particular size that I like. Now once I've done the crop, I just click on apply. That's it, it's cropped. But let's have a look at rotating. I'm going to go to File and I'm going to go and open up another image in here. Let's take this landscape over here. Now, the horizon looks a little bit wonky if you asked me, to be honest, the original photographer didn't have it wonky. I have walked it if there's such a weird word so that I can show you how to straighten it. Anyway, Let's go over to the cropping tool. And if you move just to the edge of the cropping tool, you'll find that your cursor comes up as this double arrow. And you can then click that again. And you can click and drag around on that image. Now of course, I've got this nice grid over here so I can try and line it up with a grid. And then I might have to crop in a little bit to get rid of these bits that are missing in there. Let's talk a little bit of time. There's a better way. If you want to get out of this, by the way, just click on cancel. So back to the cropping tool. The fast way here is to go across to the top here where it says Straighten. Click the straightened button. And now you can go to your horizon and just click and drag along the horizon. When you let go, it will automatically use that as you horizontal point and straighten up the image. You'll probably then still have to go in and just crop it down to get rid of those extra areas in there. I'll do that really quickly. I'm happy with that, and I can click the Apply button. Now this doesn't just work with horizontal, it also works with vertical. So I'm going to go to File once again, down to Open. And there's a picture of a bridge over here. And you can see it's a little bit on the well wonky side. Straight away, I go to my cropping tool and I'll go to straighten. And I'm going to use the center point of the bridge over here. So I'm going to go from the middle center there up to the top of there. Let go and it's straightened it straight up. All I need to do now is to crop it in to get rid of those extra areas. Just crop that up a little bit like so. And down in there. And once again, click Apply, and it's all sorted out. Try that out on these images. And if you've got any of your own that you want to have gone, by all means do so. 6. Understanding Layers: Now to close down these images, you'll see that they are along the top. And I can then just go and click on one of those little x's to close it down. And if I want to save it, I can save it. If you don't, you can just click. Don't Save in there. Now, I can't see any way to close this one image over here. But of course, if we go to the menu, we've got open there. We've also got close. So I can just close it right down. Once again, either save or don't save depending on what you want to do. Now, let's have a look at layers. I'm going to go and open up an image over here which has got some layers on. So I can explain a little bit about layers to you. I've got an image here which is made up of several layers. Now to see the layers, we're going to go along to the Window menu and go down two layers over there. In fact, you can see that I've actually got a little tick next two layers in there. And my layers are right over here. But I'm going to pull them out. So I'll drag it by the layer's name and just pull this down. So you can see my layers. So in here you can see that the C with the people is in the background there. After that we've got something called shed that is actually the shadow underneath the dog. The dog is a separate layer, if you remember that dog from earlier on. Well, it's been cut out. And then finally we gotta know swimming layer over here. So these layers are all individual images, all put together, stacked one on top of each other. Now, what this means is that I can go and I can move them around and I can switch them on and off. So I'm going to go over to my move tool. That's the second little arrow down there. And now you can see straight away that selected layer shows me a, a bounding box around it. If I click on the dog, well, the shadow or the C, Let me go to the no swimming sign and then I can move that. So I can move it wherever I want in the image. Once again, I can go to the dog and I can move the dog around or look at that. I've left the shadow behind. So I'm going to have to undo that. Now to undo things, you can either go to the Edit menu and choose undo there, or you can use a keyboard shortcut. If you are on a Mac, it is Command Z. If you're on a PC, it's Control and Z to undo. I'm going to go to the shadow. Once again. I can move my shadow around so I can move the shadow there. And it's moved the dog and get the dog sitting over there as well. But I don't like this no swimming sign over here. I think it ruins the whole picture. So I'm going to go up to no swimming. And over on the right-hand side, there's a visibility toggle. And I can just click on that to hide that layer. And once again, we can just click to bring it back. If you really want to get rid of a layer, all you do is you take that layer. And down here there's a little bin. You can just drop it on the bin to remove it. Once again, I'm going to use Control Z or Command Z to undo what I've just done. Now the other thing that we can do while we're in here is we can change the opacity, the transparency of a layer. Now, probably wouldn't want to do this on the no swimming. But if I go to the top here you can see I can make it semi-transparent. Like so. This would actually probably work quite well with the shadows. So if I go to the shadow, I can just adjust the lightness of the shadow to make it more transparent so we have less of a harsh shadow on the ground. Lastly, with these layer basics, we can also change the order that these layers, these layers are in. So if I were to go to the no swimming and move the no swimming sign over there. You will see if I move my dog and I drag the dog above that layer, will now the dog is in front of the leg. It doesn't make sense with this picture at all. So I'm going to drag the dog down below. And I'll move my notes swimming sign back today. While you are moving things around like this, you'll find that if you click on an item, you can select it very quickly to move things around like that. Sometimes though, you don't want to always click on something to select it, to move it. And there's an option here which says auto select. If I switch that auto select to off. Now it doesn't matter how much I click on that, no swimming because the shadow is selected, it will always move that around. So it forces me to go to the layer and then move that layer around. I don't have to click on the object. I can click anywhere in that layer to move it. Open up this little folder, sorry, this little file. And just having a bit of a play with these layers, move them around. You find you can also scale them. If you grab a corner, you can rotate them around as well. Have a good play with that, delete something, and then come back and we'll start on the next section. 7. Saving with Layers: Now with all of our layers, what we want to do is to be able to save this so that we can reuse the document again. So if you go to your file menu, go down to Save As I'm just going to save mine onto my desktop. Over here. I'll call this beach dog. And I'm going to click on save over there. Now, what that's done is it's saved this document with all the layers up. So if I close that down when I want to come back to it, if I go to File and Open, and I'm just going to go to my desktop because that's where I happen to save it. There's my beach dog file and you can see it's a it's a dot, a photo Affinity Photo file in there. Double-click on it, comes back. Here are all my layers still intact and I can continue editing it. If you wish to save out for another package like Photoshop. If you go to file, you can go to Export. And in here we can choose from various other ways of exporting. One of those is a PSD file as a Photoshop file, which is seen as being, well the industry standard for layered files. So you can either save it as an, a, a photo file, which is your affinity file, or if you're going to pass it on to somebody else who might be working in Photoshop. You can save it as a PSD file and then click Export. In there. Once again, I'll click on Save. Now, can I open up a PSD file in affinity? If we go to File and open, you'll see over here, I can choose either the AF photo far the infinities own native file format, or I can use the beach dog dot PSD Photoshop file. If I open that up, once again, the layers are still there. So it's really nice and flexible because you can use it between Photoshop and Affinity Photo. 8. Introducing Adjustment Layers: Now that you've seen how the basic layers work, Let's go and add an adjustment layer. I'm going to go to the File menu. I'm going to choose Open. And I'm going to go and find an image in here. So let's start off with this picture of a car. Now, I want to get my layers panel up. If you can't see it, remember, go to the Window menu and you can choose it in here. There's my layers panel over there. And you can see it comes up with a car being called background. Now, I would like to lighten or darken this image up. So I'm going to go down to the bottom to where it says fx. Next to ethics, there is a little circle. It's kind of a half black, half white circle. And this is called adjustments. I'm going to click on that and you can see now that we've got a whole lot of adjustments that we can do to the image. I'm going to start off with something very simple. I'm going to just go along and I'm going to choose brightness and contrast. And this opens up a little brightness and contrast window over here. And I can choose to brighten up the image or darken it down, like so. I can also adjust the contrast. If I increase the contrast, I'm going to get less detail in the shadows and the highlights, the darker areas and lighter areas. If I reduce the contrast by putting it over to the left, I'm going to get more detail in the darker and the lighter areas, but the image will look a whole lot flatter. So if I'm making any adjustments like this, and maybe I increase the contrast a little bit. Maybe make the image a bit darker. I'll close that window down and you can see my layers. I've now got an adjustment layer which sits on top of my background. Well, why is this important? Well, this is a non-destructive way of working. So the brightness and contrast adjustment that I've got here can, like any other layer, be switched off and switched on. I could also choose to delete it so I can drag it and drop it in the bin like a normal layer. I'm going to use Control Z or Command Z to undo it. And the great thing is if I then want to adjust that adjustment a bit more, if you go to the little icon over here, we'll click on the icon. You can get back to your settings. Those are my settings in there. Let's increase the contrast and maybe darken it down just a little bit more and close it. So using these adjustment layers that you find down here, you've got an adjustment which affects the image. But, and this is the important part. It's not destructive. You can always change it later on. Now, the interesting thing about these adjustments is that they don't just work on single layer images that I know we haven't looked at creating our own layers yet, apart from obviously the adjustment. But if I go to file and I'll open up that beach picture that I had earlier. If I click on the non swimming layer than no swimming, they're there. And then I add my adjustment layer. You can see if I go down to brightness and contrast, I increase the brightness. It affects not just the layer underneath itself, but all the layers underneath. And the interesting thing is if I then drag that layer, new dragged like you do any other layer just below the swimming layer. Now, it's not affecting the swimming layer, but it's affecting these layers here. If I just wanted to affect the background, we can drag that down below the shadow layer. And this is only affecting the background layer. I'll double-click and make some changes so that you can see it's only affecting that layer over there. Try that out with a simple brightness and contrast and pop it onto a normal image. But then also try it on this layered file to get an idea of how it works. 9. What are Levels & How to Use Them: I'm going to close these images down and I'm not going to make any, save any changes. So once again File and close on that one. Then we open up another image to show you. So I'm going to go to File and open and find a different image. Once again, we'll go back to this little Volkswagen. If you've cropped it, That's absolutely fine. I want to add an adjustment layer to this. Now, the adjustment layer that I want to use, I want to check to see and get the correct lightness and darkness on this image. So using that brightness and contrast that we did before, if I go down there, it's very difficult to tell whether I've got the right amount of brightness or darkness in there. If e.g. you are working on a laptop and you're sitting under a tree in the park, you might find this so much brightness around on your screen that you can't actually tell is the image too bright or too dark? Likewise, if you're sitting in bed late at night with the lights virtually turned out and they monitor is turned right down. You can always tell if things are light or dark enough. So although brightness and contrast is great as a quick fix, it's not the best way to check whether your image ready is too dark or too light. I'm going to get rid of that brightness and contrast adjustment layer. And this time I'm going to click on that circle. I'm going to go to something called Levels. Now, I know what you're thinking when I open this up, you look at that and go, oh my goodness Tim, There's a whole lot of graphs in there. Well, yes, there is. And this particular graph is called a histogram. But they are surprisingly easy to work with. If you haven't come across a histogram before, they also appear on digital cameras. So you can actually check your exposure when you look at the back of the camera or through the camera, and the camera itself or the histogram will show you if the image is too light or too dark. But what are they? Well, it just shows the levels. That's why it's called levels, the levels of dark and light in the various areas of the image. Now with this image here, we have got some levels down here where they go all very, very high. And those are the darker areas. There's not that many medium dark tones in the image, but there's a lot of quite light tones in there. Going down to, well, the red goes right up there, but there's not that many in the very lighter areas of the image. So how on earth is this working? Well, if you look at the picture, most of the tones here, the greens of the car and the reds, or the orange in the background, or sort of a lighter. And that's why this is so high over here so that you can see exactly what this is doing. I'm going to change from RGB to gray scale. So everything just goes into black and white. And this probably makes more sense now because you can see over here that the spikes right high in the very dark areas that's almost black over there. So that's probably because there were some blacks maybe over the wheel, the wheel arches there may be at the top of the shadow of the door and maybe write under the car in there. But then there's not that many darker tones in this image. I mean, there are some, maybe the door is darker over there, but there's not that many. But over here in the lighter areas, there's a lot of light tones are not pure whites, but there are lighter going all the way down and there's almost nothing pure white in the image. I know that seems surprising because you would think maybe this area here was pure white, but it's not, it's actually actually a gray. So let's have a look at this on an image which is not perfect. I'm going to just close that down and delete it. Incidentally, if you want an image black and white, that's not the ideal way of doing it. I'll be showing you a better way to make an image black and white shortly. So let me go back again and do this again. I'm going to go and add, I'm sorry, I'm going to go and open up a new image. I'm going to open up this image in here. Now this image to me does look a little bit on the dark side, but I can't always tell maybe my monitor is set to dark. So I'm going to go down and add a levels adjustment layer in there. I'm going to be an RGB. And you can see from, from this that most of the graph is set in the darker areas. That's the left-hand side over there. And there's almost nothing in the lighter area of that image in there. So I can see from my graph that the image is very dark. In fact, you'll see that there's a histogram over here that shows you exactly the same thing that we're looking at in there. So at the moment, I really am looking at this white area in here. I'm ignoring the blues and the reds and the greens. In there. It's mostly this white area that I'm concerned with, which is the lightness and darkness. So, okay, that's great. We understand now that this is mostly or a very dark image, how do you fix it? That's the problem. So what I do is I go to my, in this case, I want to change the levels in here so that I'm getting more lighter areas in there. So I'm going to go to my white slider and I'm going to start to pull it in. You see, as I putting that in, it's pulling the little line across. If I pull that right with that details starts and you see how that image has now changed, enlightened itself up quite a lot. If I pushed that back again, you can see how we just lightening it right up in there. We don't need to do anything with the blacks because there's lots of blacks in the image. But if I did, it makes the image very, very contrasty. Let's click Okay, on that. 10. More Levels & Output Levels: I'm going to go to File Open. I'm going to find this train. Now, looking at this train, I think you can guess what it's going to be already. There were no dark pixels in this image. Now, it does look like there's some lighter pixels in there, but we really need to go in to the levels to find out. And you can see over here that, well, there are no darker pixels in there and in fact there's no lighter pixels either. How do we fix this? Well, I go to my black levels and I pulled that in until I get to the black pixels. And I go to the white area, the white levels, and I pulled that in until we get to the whiter area in there. And look at the difference that makes from that into that. So much more exciting a picture that way. Now what about if we wanted to go the other way? If we had an image which was contrasty and we wanted to put it in the background. What I can do is just open up another image over here. And I'm going to go to this little taxi. Because maybe I want this background image for a PowerPoint presentation or to go into social media and I want to put text on top of it. We'll exactly the same thing. If I go to my levels, rather than using these two sliders here, I can go to my output and I can pull the output up. So what this is doing is it's saying that there's nothing in the image that we darker than this shade of gray over here. Or if I wanted to make the whole thing dark because I was gonna put white text on top of it. I could do the same thing with the output over there. So nothing in this image is lighter than this shade of gray on the subtle gradient over here. If you want something which is just in the middle, you can pull both of them in and get a very well, quite awful picture rarely. But sometimes it's just what you need as a background, maybe something like a background for PowerPoint or backgrounds put text in for social media or a brochure. Try that out, have a go with that last one and try it the train as well. And see if you can get that looking really good. 11. Highlights to Affect the Darker & Lighter Areas: Let's have a look at how we can affect the darker areas, but not the darkest areas and the lighter areas as well. I'm going to go and open up an image. Now I don't know whether you saw that. All I did was double-click on this area here. And that takes you into this open dialogue box. So rather than go to File and open all the time, just double-click on this blank area. I'm going to find once again in the two fixed folder picture of a cat. Now, there's nothing wrong with this image. It's absolutely lovely. But I would like to lighten up the darker parts. I can see some more of the detail. I'm going to go to the little adjustment layer icon. Instead of using levels. This time I'm going to go down. And I'm going to find something called shadow slash highlights. In this shadow slash highlights, there were two sliders, one for the shadows and one for the highlights. And what that means, and what affinity means bite shadows are darker areas. It doesn't necessarily mean anything which as we perceive being in shadow. So what I've got to do is go to the darker areas of the shadows. And I can then Latin them up to taste. And you can see how I can just pull it up to get more detail in those darker areas. Obviously, you can go way over the top with this little slider, but just a little bit of that will give me some nice detail on the cat. And if I switch it on and off, you can see the difference. It's not just affecting the cat, it's also affecting the background. Later on in the course, we'll be looking at how we can be more selective. So we can just select the cat and adjust just the fur. Let's try another image in here. So I'm going to go to File and Open, find a different image. Now, this image has got a neon sign in there and some neon lights which are quite bright. Now I want to do exactly opposite to what I did with a cat. I want to brighten up those whites. So in here, I can go along to the well, past the brightness and contrast to shadow and highlights. You can see if I were to go to the shadow areas, I could darken the shadows down or lighten them up as well. In fact, in this case, darkening them down might look quite good. It sort of gets that neon sign a little bit. It looks a bit brighter. But then I can go to my highlights. I can either darken down my highlights or what I want to do is to lighten them up and you can see how I can pull it up to get them to really jump out of the picture at me. Once again in there, I'll just switch it off and switch it on. And you can see the subtle difference that I've got. 12. Change Contrast with Curves: I've opened up this picture and I'd like to adjust the contrast on it. We're going to use something new now, something called curves. Now, we can get two curves either by going in the winter menu to our layers and clicking on the little circle at the bottom as we've been doing so far. But another way to get into these adjustments, if you haven't got your layers up or you just prefer to do it this way, is to go to the Layer menu. And down here you'll see there's a new adjustment layer option. These are all the things that we've been using so far that are in the layers panel. You'll see this black and white in there, this color balance, this HSL. Well, we haven't gotten to that one yet. But what I'm interested in is curves. When you first open up curves, it, honestly, it looks a bit scary. But we've got a histogram in exactly the same as when we use levels. And you can actually adjust the histogram in here by going to these end points and just putting them in a little bit as well. So I can increase the end part like we do in levels by dragging the ends in like that. And you can see how by doing those, I'm really adjusting the contrast. But we wouldn't be a lot more subtle about it then just putting in those end points like we did with the levels. So the first thing is called a curve, is a straight line there. If I click in the middle, this here is the middle tones of my image. This is the medium grays, if you like, even though there might not be gray, they might be a different color, but the medium tones and I can lighten up there, or I can darken down those middle tones in the image. Once again, nothing special about that. We can do that using our, well, a number of other settings, including something as simple as just adjusting the brightness and contrast. But where this comes into its own, is that if I've put a point over there to stop me from moving that around. I could then go to the darker areas of the shadows. And I could actually just lighten up the shadow areas. I'm going to move the service and you can see what happens with the trees over there. And I can just lighten up the darker areas. You'll notice this lighter area here. Here, nothing's happening at all. Likewise, I can darken down the darker areas. And obviously, I could do the same to the lighter areas. So if I go to the top here, once again, I can lighten up the lighter areas, look at how the detail is just slowly disappearing when I lighten that up. Or I could darken down those lighter areas. Like I'm being a bit extreme here, the way that I'm pulling this around. But most people tend to work with a curved shape in here called an S curve. So you'll see if I make an S like that. So it comes round there and down here. So we get this sort of S curve like that. What I've done is I've lightened up the lighter areas and I've darkened down the dark areas. I haven't done anything to the mid tones. And this increases the contrast on the image. If I just reset that, watch the image, it'll just go back to normal again. So I click in here and I can then just, let's just move that into the right position. And I can just increase the contrast of the image. What about if I wanted to delete? To delete? If I wanted to reduce the contrast, will in that case we go the opposite way. This is a reverse S. So it's an S the opposite way round. So it kind of goes like that and like that. And you can see the difference. Now we've reduced the contrast. We're getting detail in the shadow area here. So I can reduce the contrast in my image. I can increase the contrast in my image. I can just go in here and I can move the middle bit around so I can lighten the middle tones without affecting the highlights or the shadows. And I can darken the middle tones without affecting the highlights or the shadows. Or we can just lighten or darken the darker parts, or lighten and darken the lighter parts. If you get in here and you start pulling these things around and you make a mess and you think, Oh my goodness, what an Arithmetic have I done in here? You can get some really wild results with this. Just click the reset button and that will reset it back to normal. Once again. 13. Correct the image Color with Color Balance: I'm going to go to File and Open. And once again, in the folder, your resources folder, there's a two fixed folder. And I'm going to go and have look for an image. Now, I've got a picture here which shows an owl. And I want to correct the color, but before I do that, I want to check the lightness and darkness. I'm going to go over to the layers. I'm going to go down to my adjustments and I'm going to click on levels. And you can see in the levels here, well, this some detail missing in the darker areas, as well as in the highlights. So I'm going to pull the black up a little bit. I'm going to go to the white switches the white level there and pull that along. I'm just going along to where the details sort of starts. Now, let's close that down and you'll see if I switch this on and off, how much more punchy the image has become. Things like the whites in the shirt on now, proper white rather than a dark gray or I'm sorry, a light gray. And the same with the eyes on the bird, instead of being a dark, dark gray there now, a good, decent black. Now once we've got the adjustments done for the lightness and darkness, we can then go down and we can add a color balance. But before we actually go along and use color balance in here, we need to analyse the picture. It's so much easier to color correct an image when you know what's wrong with it. If you just go straight to color balance. It's like, what do you do with these sliders that we've got here? So let me get rid of that and I'll just click on the little bin to remove it. Well, what I do is I look at the picture and I tried to decide what is wrong with the color. Now, when I look at this picture here to me, it looks very yellowy and very grainy as well. So sort of a greeny yellow color that, that looks like this, too much yellow, green in there. You can just look at an image and go, well, it looks to Orange, it looks to purple. It looks at whatever the color is that you think there is too much of. Now, don't forget, this is very subjective. And although I look at this and go to yellow, green, you might see it being more greenie or more yellowy. There's no right or wrong here. So I've decided that the image looks too yellow, green. So I'm going to go into the adjustments. I'm going to go down and I'm going to find the color balance. It's near the bottom of the adjustments. Then we've got these sliders over here. Now the slide is go from sine to red, magenta to green, and yellow to blue. These colors are opposite each other on the color spectrum. So if I thought that this image looks to green, I would add some magenta. If I thought the image look too yellow, I would add some blue. And you can see without worrying too much about getting all this slide is perfect in here. I can just move these sliders around until I get the color that I like. Now, do you need to move all three sliders? Know absolutely. You move one or two sliders at the most. In fact, this one over here, the third one, doesn't need to be moved because this is about a relationship between these three sliders over here. It's about making this little shape in here. And just to give you an idea, if I put that one there and this one over here, if I moved that one to get that same sort of shape, we've still got the same color correction in there. So it really doesn't matter whereabouts it is. In the, one thing you might find is that if you do do these sliders at the top of the bottom, you might need to preserve the luminosity in there. Otherwise, it can make the image slightly lighter or slightly darker. And I'm happy with that. So there's my image. Let's look at the before and after. So if I switched those two off, There's the before, we've added the correct lightness and darkness. And then we've gone in and we've adjusted the color. I'm going to open up another picture now. Once again, File and Open. And in here I'm going to go and find an image of a family. So we've got this image, something wrong with the color, but we need to fix the lightness and darkness first, assuming that there's something wrong with it. Now, if I move this over, you can actually see over here the histogram. This is the same histogram that you see in your levels. And at a glance I can actually see, oh, actually, that doesn't look like there's any really solid blacks in the, does look like there's whites. So when I go to my levels, once again in here and then my blacks and just increase the blacks a little bit to taste. I don't wanna go too far up there. I'm just going to stop about, about there. Do we need to change the whites? Don't think so. Honesty, it won't make much difference at all. So now that I've got the lightness and darkness sorted out, I'm going to go and to my color correction. But looking at the color here, and I know that this is very, very difficult when you first start out, but you need to figure out what's wrong with the color. Now, if I look at this image, to me, the whole image looks very well. It looks purply. And purple or blue or magenta, that sort of colder area of the color spectrum. And I'm thinking it looks purplish. Once again, you might disagree and you might see a different color in there. And that's not wrong. If I click on the little button down there for my adjustments, I'm going to go down to my color balance. Now where it's purple because we don't have any purple in here. Yellow, green was nice, easy one to do because it's obviously yellow and green. But purple will, purple on the color spectrum is probably between blue and magenta over there. If I thought that something looked to purple, it's probably because it's made up of blue and magenta. So I'm going to go the opposite way. So I'm going to subtract some magenta. They're just do a little bit there and subtract some blue. Look at the difference that this is making already. So as I'm subtracting those two, we're just removing purple. I'm going to go a little bit further. Let's try 50 on there and 50 over here. Now, you don't want to go too far because otherwise you'll find you start to go the other way in that image starts to look a little bit green. But maybe I'll try about 50 ish on that one. And they don't have to be exactly the same. We just have a look and see what what works for us. There may be 57 in the back that looks still looks a little bit too green cell, reduce that a bit. And then we go out, image is all sorted out. Do try that on some images. Firstly, have a look at the color and try and figure out what color you think it really is. The easiest way to actually see it is if there's something in the image which is great, That's really helpful. So e.g. here, this account which is great, but the other way is to look at skin tones. Now, don't get disheartened. If you find that you look at a picture and you go, Oh my goodness, I've got no idea what color it is. It does take some getting used to and you might find that you go through a few pictures before you start getting into this color correction area. 14. Black & White Conversion: I'm going to go into open up another image now. So file open. And once again in the same to fix folder, I'm going to go and pick this image over here. Now, this one is a difficult one when it comes to color. The color is all over the place. But I'm not worried about the color. I would like to make this image black and white. So I'm going to go down to the adjustments and you'll see about a quarter of the way down, we've got something which actually says black and white. Now I'm going to click black and white in here, and my image immediately goes black and white. But we've got all of these sliders in here from red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta. Now what this allows us to do is to actually go along and lighten and darken certain colors in the image. So you can see as I'm lightening these, some of the yellows are being lightened up. If I go to the blues, I can lighten or darken the blues in there. And this allows you to be quite selective about the area. You can see I'm going to take the green and darken the green down a bit. Now, what I'm doing with that is because there's probably a greenish area behind his head. And you can see by doing this and moving the green down, I'm almost Isolating him against the background. If I can go to the yellows and reds and maybe lighten them up a little bit as well. He's been lightened up and he's more obvious against that background. So you can see from before or after, we've got something which actually looks a lot more pleasing. Let's have a look at that again with a different picture. So once again, I'm going to go to File and Open, and I'm going to find another image in here. Now, the picture that I'm going to use is this old taxi. And the taxi, there's a blue sky and there's a yellow taxi, and it's sort of an orangey background. So when I go into black and white, if I go to the yellows and oranges, I can actually darken down the taxi if I want. Or I could make the taxi a bit lighter. And then I can go to the sky, to the blue of the sky. And I can darken down with cyan and blue the sky in there. So the yellow is kind of doing the taxi. The rate is kind of doing the background. You can see it's affecting the indicator as well as some of the, the car is well over there. And this gives me full control over my conversion into black and white. So I'd like to have the car standing out a little bit more from the background and the sky pretty dark. In the top. There are probably a little bit too much over there going all the way over to black. Now, lastly, remember this is an adjustment layer so we can affect different layers with it. So I'm going to go to File Open, and I'm going to open up that layered picture that we had before with the no swimming sign. So in here, if I put in a black and white and I'd like to make this a little bit more interesting. So I'm going to darken down the sky so we can get a bit more detail in the sky. Over there. I'm going to sand, which is sort of a yellow color. Maybe lighten up the sand a bit, but dark and down the nose swimming sign in there. And remember this is on an adjustment layer. So if I drag it below those three layers, only be affecting the background. I seem to have deleted. Let me use Control Z or Command Z to undo that. I'll just drag it down below those two layers. There we go. We've got a black and white background with the two layers in color. To try that out, try to, in some of your layered files, try it on other images as well. Remember your lightening and darkening the colors that are in the image. 15. Recolor to Sepia or Cyanotype: Let's go and get another image. I'm gonna go to File and Open. And I'm going to find this black and white picture. So you know how to make an image from well, color into black and white. But what about adding some color to a black and white image? Now, we're going to use something called colorizing, and it will put a overall tone on the image. So e.g. this image here, I might want to look really old with a yellowish or sepia tone on it or I might want to give it more of a cyanotype look. So as sort of a bluish tone to it, I'm going to do that by once again, going to my adjustments. Let's just pull this up a little bit over here. And I'm going to use something here called re-color. Now, first of all, when you do re-color, it comes up with red. And you'll find, you've then got this hue slider so you can pick whatever color you want on the color spectrum. Now let's say that e.g. with this one, I wanted to be a CPA colors. I'm going to go into the oranges, but then I'm going to reduce the saturation on that down to whatever color I want in there. So I'm just going with a subtle bit of orange in there. I want us to be more of a sign type of color, so a cyanotype. I'll move that across to the science. And once again, you can see I can choose how much saturation I want in that image. Instead, why are we here? You might, you might notice there's a lightness slider. Now this is great. If you want to do something, e.g. a. Background to put text over PowerPoint publication. Or maybe even a something for social media. And you're gonna be putting your own text on top of it. So you can see over here that is the lightness. I can pull the lightness up and I can get a very light image underneath that. I'd actually just make that a little bit more cyan. And I can then put black text on top of that or going the other way, I could change the lightness. So it was quite dark. Maybe reduce some of that blue little bit. And then exactly the same. Put white text on top of that. I'm just going to leave this set to zero, right in the middle. Try that out on some images. Once you've tried some black and white images, go along and try it on a color image. And it works in exactly the same way. You can pick a color image in here. And once again, I can go to re-color and re-color the whole image. I'm going to use the sepia tone. Once again, reduce the saturation down. So we've got that yellow sepia color. And then if you wish, you can go to your opacity and you can reduce the opacity on that adjustment layer. So you actually mixing some of the original color. You can see there's the original through to the CPO layer. I can just mix a few of those together. So in this case, this is going to look like an old color picture which has lost a lot of its color as well. Try those out. 16. Split Tone: I've got the picture of the train have here. Now, what I want to do is to colorize it as we did before. But I want to use a technique which comes from traditional photography, where you can turn the highlights, a different color to the shadows. And this is called split toning. So I'm going to go to my adjustments. I'm going to go down near the bottom of the adjustments to split toning. And in here, I can then choose to turn the highlights one color and the shadows, another color, that's the lighter areas and the darker areas. So let me say e.g. that I wanted to make the highlights quite yellow and I'm going to increase the highlights saturation. You have to go quite a fair way with this one. I'll take it up to the middle. And then the shadows. I want them to be more of a reddish color. So I'm going to go to reds over there. And I can then make my shadows go red in here. So we get this of split from the yellows and the highlights to the reds in the shadows is quite an interesting effect you can do here where you can actually take two colors which are opposite each other on the spectrum. So I'm going to have a yellow for my highlights, but my shadows, I'm going to make it a blue color. So you see now if I put out the highlights over here, it's going to make them yellow. If I pull the shadows, it's going to turn them blue. Let's mix those two together so you will have blue for the shadows and yellow for the highlights. And we get this lovely, lovely effect where you've got blue in the shadows, yellow in the highlights, and the sort of almost looks greenish overall, the tint of the image. You can choose how much you want with these split tones as well. And if you prefer, you can change the balance. So I could actually have more of the highlights or more of the shadow colors coming through with that balance. Let me do this one more time on a different image. So I'm going to go into File and Open. I'm going to take a color picture. Now with a color picture. If I added a split tone, it would mix it with the colors of the image. This is an interesting way to get very old color image look to an image. So in here, if I go down to my split, toning down the bottom, and once again I could make some yellow, so I've got the highlights are coming up quite yellow, but the shadows are going to be bluish. And I'll push them up as well. You can see we've got that really like a color image which has been left out in the sun too long. Of course, if I want to do a proper split toning with black and white on this, the first thing that I would do is to just add black and white and use my settings in here to decide what I'm going to lighten up and dark and down. Now let's have a little look, something like that I think. And then I can add my split tone on top of that. So I'll go down here. Good my split tone. And I'm going to use that same weird split tone than I had before, which was yellow and blue. You can try any sort of combinations you like over there. Then get my yellow and blue split on that. Now, it is still looking a little bit on the very bright side. So I'm going to go back to my black and white. And I can then just adjust my black and white in here as well. So the highlight, the, sorry, the sky is not quite so dark. And maybe those yellows are not quite so harsh on there. No right and wrong. Just try it out. See what you can do with some images. 17. B13 Hue, Saturation & Luminosity: Let's have a look at a setting called HSL. If I go along to the adjustment layers and HSL is the third one down. Hsl stands for hue, saturation and lightness. Now when you first get in here, you'll look at this and think, well, I'm not really sure that that would be useful, but bear with me. You see when we go to the hue, what this does is it shifts the colors along the color spectrum. So as I pull this along, colors will appear to go a bit weird. What's actually happening is that all changing. So e.g. if you look up here at the blue sky, just get that back again. If you look at the blue sky, the blue sky is over here on the color spectrum. So when I pull this along, what was blue has now become pink. If I keep pulling this alone, what was blue has now become orange and you can see it reflected in the sky. Let's take the puppies, e.g. the puppies are red down here, this area over here. So if I pulled it across that way, what was red has now become purple? If I keep going. What was red has now become? Well, silver, cyan color almost exactly the same with green. If you have a look at the green, you'll see the greens would wear green have now changed to more of a dark purple color. Now, yes, you might want that as a specific effect. But the idea here is if we can actually go in and we can isolate certain colors, and I'm going to isolate the puppies. The puppies are red. So in this picture here, I'm going to click on the reds. What happens now with a slider is that we actually have these little dots. It's only this area here that will be predominantly affected. And then the effect falls off over here. All the rest of these colors won't be affected at all. So if I move the slider, you can see I'm on the reds now. If I move the slider along towards the yellows and greens, it's only affecting the color of my puppies, not the blue of the sky or the green of the leaves. What about if I wanted to affect the blue of the sky? Well, one way that you can do it is to actually manually move these little things around. So if I pull that around there, this around to the sky, over there, Let's go to the blues. And once again end up with the purples. So we're affecting predominately this area here, that's the falloff area. And you'll see now it's my sky that will change and a won't be affecting the grass or the puppies. If you want to go back and affect everything, you just clicked back on this little button over here. So I would like to affect the puppies. I'm going to click on the yellows in there. I'm going to move this across. So it's affecting the reds in here. And then I can change the color of the puppies. Now, I've made a tremendous mess over here by affecting some parts and not other parts. If you do that, click the reset button to go to. Just get back to the basics. So I'll choose red in there. I'm gonna pull this down a little bit here. Some effecting predominantly the red colors. I will move that along to the color that I want for my puppies, I'd like them to be blue. Sometimes you might find that the edges need to be affected as well. You might need to pull this out a little bit. If you need to get those edges adjusted, if it's too tight, you won't get that nice change in here, you can change the saturation. So if I thought that those were too bright, I could then just reduce the saturation on, or I can really increase the saturation. Likewise, you can go to your luminosity shift or your lightness. So I can lighten them up or darken them down in there as well. I'm happy with that. And if I don't like it, well, I can switch it on and off in there or deleted. Haven't been to play with that. And I said the colors specifically that you want to change. But don't forget that little button at the top. This is your friend because you can make a total mess very quickly. It's just reset. Try it out. 18. Sharpen Your Image to Make It Pop: I'm going to go and open up a picture from the two fixed folder. It's the one with the person wearing the red top. Now, this picture is great. But when we zoom in, you'll notice it's not ready quite as sharp as one would like it to be. If I go into a bit more, it looks ever so slightly out of focus. Now, what I want to show you is not an adjustment layer, but it's one of the important things that you need to do to your images before you actually publish them. And that is to make sure they look as good as possible. And one of the things to make it look good is to make it look really sharp and crisp. Now the technique I'm about to show you is not necessarily just for images which are slightly out of focus. It can be done on any image to give it a really nice crisp feel. And what we've got are some filters. And I'm going to be using a sharpening filter called the Unsharp Mask. Now before I go into that, Let's zoom right in to see this image over here. And yeah, that's perfect. I'm going to go to filters down to Sharpen and the Unsharp Mask. And in these settings here, we've got three little settings in here. The threshold, I'm going to keep that really nice and low in the five per cent range. This is the amount of sharpening that we will be adding. And this the radius is the distance away from the edge. Now let me explain how this works. E.g. if you look at her teeth down here, what this tool will do is it will find edges. So we've got an edge on her teeth going from light to dark or maybe around her eye in there we've got a dark through to a light area. The two finds those edges and it increases the contrast on those pixels. So the radius is the distance on either side of the light or dark that it affects. Let's have a look. If I take the factor up quite high and then I'm going to increase the radius. Over here. You can see how, because I've gone really over-the-top, It's made that all parts of the tooth go white and the bit on the other side go darker, so it's increased the contrast on that area. Now that looks awful. It really does. But let's go even worse. So we really pushing it up and pushing the radius and you can see how it's affecting those edges. It's making them darker or lighter, increasing the contrast on them. Because if we take the radius down, so we just have a very small radius in there. What this will do is it will ever-so-slightly make this image look sharper. And even with a sharp image, this increases your image and makes it more to use it an interesting expression, it makes it pop. Now we've got some little buttons here that we haven't looked at yet, and these buttons pop up all over. Affinity Photo. And this one here gives you two windows. And you can see the one on the left is the one with the filter applied. The one on the right is the original. So as I'm pulling this up, you can see how those teeth are becoming really nice and sharp, but they're a little bit blurry on that one. Likewise with the eye, although to a lesser extent, you can see this, I look sharper than that one. And if I adjust that radius, we can then see what it's actually doing. I'm going to keep that radius nice and low and increase my factor over there a bit. There's no right or wrong here. Just do it according to taste. When you're happy with that, you click Apply. Now, this is a destructive filter. If I go to the Window menu or go down to my layers, you will see it's destroyed. That layer will not destroyed it. It's improved it to be honest, but it has made changes to those pixels. So be careful of that. And this is one of the last things that you would do before you then save your image out. Try it out on some images. 19. Project: Correct the Luminosity: For our first project, Let's open up an image and we've got a project folder in here. So it's pretty much called Project fixed color and luminance folder. And inside there is the image that we're going to fix. So I'm going to click on open. Now, we've got an image here which doesn't look good. The color looks weird, and it's kind of a bit on the light side as well. So we want to really try and fix that and we're going to do that by adding some adjustments. I'd like to start off though, by fixing the lightness and darkness first, I always find that if I fix that first, the color is much, much easier to do. We're going to do this using our levels. So I'm going to go along to the Layer menu. I'm going to go down to new adjustment layer. And I'm going to choose a levels in there. Now with the levels, I can then start to move my black points in. And I can move my white points in as well. I'm just dragging them in until I get to the detail area here. How far you want to go is entirely up to you. I don't want to lose too much detail though. In the shadow areas. I'm not gonna go too far over. Now. We can also then adjust the mid tones. So with a gamma, I can either darkness down, all lighten it up as well. So I might just darken it down a little bit. I'm looking at their faces. I want a bit more detail in there. Now that I've done with that, I'm also wondering about the contrast. Is it a little bit too contrasty? So we can do another adjustment layer either by clicking here in the layers panel on the little dot and going down to curves. Or we can go to the Layer menu over here and go down to new adjustment layer. And I'm going to go down to my curves in here. Because of the way down. And remember to reduce the contrast, we do a reverse S shape. So I'm going to just pull this one down a little bit and push that one up a little bit. Like so. I don't wanna go too far, but I do want to bring down some of those lighter areas in there, maybe the mid tones down a little bit as well. Remember, you can always switch these off and switch them on in the layers panel so I can see what I've done. You can see how reduced that contrast a bit. If you want to go back to one of the existing ones, Let's pull this layers panel out and pull it down a bit so that you can see, if I double-click on that levels icon. Once again, I can still go in and I can adjust in here as well. So I'm feeling quite happy with the lightness and darkness of that. Have a go with that. Try some levels, try some curves. You don't have to do exactly what I've done in here. This is your chance to experiment this project. So you might prefer to have something which is a lot more contrasty, but you don't have to only use one of these at a time. You can use as many as you like. 20. Project: Correct Color & Add Warmth: Now that we've got the lightness and darkness sorted out on this image. The next thing to do is to look at the color. Now, I'm thinking about the color. Hit it. To me, this image looks very, very green. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start over here in my layers. Make sure I've clicked on the top layer. And then I'm going to go and add an adjustment. And I want to use a color balance as we've done before. Adjustment. Now I've got the color balance up. Remember, I think that this is green. You might think slightly different. But I'm going to go in to the magenta green slider. If it looks too green, I'm going to add magenta. And you can see I can move this across until I feel happy with it. Now. That looks okay. But I want to preserve the luminosity. So when I'm dragging this across, I can get the color right. Now. Looking at this, I'm saying it looks okay, but honestly, I'm just not happy with it. Why is that? Well, what I'm doing here is I'm affecting predominantly the darker areas. And that's because if you look at my settings over here, I'm set to shadows. If I said this to the mid tones and now change the mid tones on here. You can see it does the medium tones rather than the darker tones. So I'm just going to drag that down. I'm really watching the skin tones over here. Then if I thought you know what? The skin tones look okay at the moment. But the shadows don't. I can go to the shadows. And then maybe I can adjust the shadows to get rid of some of the green in the darker areas in there. And you can do that with the shadows or the highlights on your image. Even at this stage, I might be once again looking at this and thinking, maybe the contrast is not right. And I can double-click on the curves and go back into my curves and then just adjust the curves in here to change the contrast on the image. I'll go with a little bit less contrast. Like so. Finally, maybe I want to warm the whole picture up. So rather than just adjusting the color balance, I just wanted to give it a nice warm feeling. And I'll also do that by going down to my adjustments in here. And I can use the same thing. I can use a color balance in there. Or I can go along and I can use a lens filter. Now, the lens filter we didn't look at during the tutorials in this course. But what it does is it puts a color over the top. And I can then choose how much color I want to put in. Now, by default, we've got this little orange filter in here. And you can see how lovely This looks. It just gives a lot more warmth to the image. There's no right or wrong here, although it starts in the middle, you can add as much, as little as you like. If I thought this was a sunset shot, I could push it over a little bit. Technically that image is orange, but it does give it a lovely bit of warmth in there. If you don't like the color, you can go to the color over here and you can change the color. E.g. maybe this image was going to be in winter and you want it to be quite cold. So we can go to the blues in there. And then once again, I can add some blue to the image to get that really cold feel to it. As it happens, I rather like that orange and the warmth from there. So that's what I'm going to do, but maybe just a little bit less than that, just to bring in some warmth on the image. And even then, you can still go back to your color balance. And if you find that the color balance is not right, you can change it in here so I can still go back to my shadows and adjust my shadows. I'm going to my mid tones and do some adjustments on my mid tones. If I thought I'd overdid it. Try that last part out on this little project. And once you've done this project, why not try the same thing on some of your old photographs. If you find any old scanned photographs, have a bit of a go. Always. Try out the lens filter afterwards. And it's just a lovely way to add warmth to an image. 21. Introduction to Brush Tools: Brushes are not just for artists in Affinity, Photo. Photographers can use them as well and we will be doing some really cool stuff with them. Now of course, if you are an artist, I'll be showing you how you can get some various effects with it. But for photographers, we're going to be using them too. Well. Just painting all those details that you need. 22. C1 The Paint brush essentials: What I'm going to do now is to go to File Open. And I've gone into a folder called Brush Tools. And in there I'm just going to open up one of these pictures now. It really doesn't matter too much. Which one you open up because well, we're not going to be doing anything to it. But I'll open up this one here because it's got a very plain background, so you'll be able to see exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to go down to my brushes now that's in the tools about halfway down, you've got a brush tool or a paintbrush tool as it's called. And to get to them if you don't see those other brushes in there, just click and hold on that tool. I'm using the paintbrush tool and I'm going to be looking at these options along the top. Now these options change depending on which tool you're in. If I go to the hand tool, they change. If I go to that little arrow there, change again when I'm on the brushes, it gives me options for the brushes. To left hand side, we have the width of the brush, this is the size of the brush. So I can change the size to any size that I want. I'm gonna go to quite a big brush over there. When I'm painting with this brush, what I'm going to go down to the bottom, and I'm going to use this foreground color. There's a foreground color and the background color. If I click on the foreground color and double-click it, I can then choose the color that I want in here. And then pick the shade. So this is the hue and then the lightness and saturation. I can pick in there. Once I'm done, I'll just click Close. We've got some more options along here. There isn't Opacity option to change the opacity of the brush. There's a float and I'm going to explain the difference in a moment between those two. And then we've got a hardness over here from a hard brush through to a soft brush. Let's have a look at these ones though. Firstly, if I start painting on my image, you can see straight away, I've got a big brush. The opacity is 100 per cent. I'm just getting 100 per cent paint coming through the flows at 100% and the hardness is at 100 per cent. If I change that Hardness down to zero. Now you see when I'm painting, I'm getting a soft brush like that. Now, you're going to have to get used to undoing when you're using this. And that's going to be Control Z on a PC or Command Z on a Mac. And if you forget those, you just go to the Edit menu over there and you've got Undo right at the top. We change it to a different color. So I'm going to go and click. So I double-click on my foreground color. And I can then pick a color from in here. Or if I wanted to take a color from the image, there's a little eyedropper. Over then I can just go to the eyedropper, drag onto my picture and say, I want to use this blue right there. And you just click the blue and that sample, that color. Just click Close. Now when I'm painting, if I've got the hardness set to zero, I get a soft brush. If I change the hardness to 100%, I get a hard brush and of course, everything in between. So a medium hard brush in there and Control Z or Command Z to undo. Let me take my hardness up to 100 per cent. For this last bit. I'm going to go to the opacity. Now with the opacity, if I went down to 50 per cent and I painted on the picture, it's going to give me 50 per cent all over. I'm having left, lifted my mouse up. Now. I'm just painting, even though I'm going over the same area, I get 50 per cent paint down there. Let's undo that. I'm going to take it back to up to 100 per cent. Because then the other thing we've got is flow. Now flower, I'm going to take down fairly low. The difference between flow and opacity with flow when you're painting and you go over the same area second time, it just builds up the paint. It's like having a spray or an airbrush. When you hold the button down, it continues to put paint down. It's take that flowed down even further over there. So you can see as I'm painting over there and I'm keep going over the same area, just building up more and more paint in there. So the opacity, it doesn't matter how many times you go over the same area. If you haven't lifted up the mouse, it's going to be that opacity was flow builds up the paint all the time. 23. More Brush Options & Shortcuts: Now, one of the things that you can do is change some of your settings, not just these ones here, but if you click on the More button, you'll find that you've got so many more options. In here. Once again, is e.g. we've got the size in there. But the one that I'm actually interested in is this one called spacing over here. And this is how the brush puts paint down onto the canvas or the image. Let's have a little look at this. I'm going to go to my width in here and just choose a, a medium-size brush, something like maybe a little bit bigger than that. It's just double that size a bit. That's better. I'm keeping my past you to 100 per cent float 100% hardness at 100 per cent. And then in here, if I were to go to the spacing and took the spacing right down. You'll see what it does. It puts these little brushes, the blobs of brush ready close together. If I move them further apart, you'll see that my brush spacing is further apart. So if I'm happy with this and I'll just close this down. When I'm painting, you can see I'm getting blebs coming around. If I do that again, but change the spacing so it's much closer together. Same again when I'm painting. It's close together, but you can see all the little edges of those blobs. If I don't want any edges in there, I'm going to go to my spacing and I can take the spacing right down if it's 1%. Well, you won't see any little marks along the edge at all. Now this really is only important if you're using a very hard brush. When you're using a softer brush, it's far less important. You don't notice the spacing quite as much. Second thing while we in the brushes here. If I want to change the size I've shown you that you can go to your width over then you can change the size. But we've also got some other shortcuts, the square brackets on the keyboard. If the right square bracket will make your brush bigger, the left square bracket will make it smaller. If you prefer. This. Another shortcut here, which is very, very nice. And it's to do with using your mouse and keyboard at the same time. Now, there are two options for this, so I'm going to tell you the PC and the Mac option separately. 24. Stabilise the Brush for Smooth Lines: Now let's have a look at this little button called the stabilizer. So the way the stabilizer works is it smoothes your line for you. And this is really useful if you are trying to paint along a line rather than having a slight shake from your hand, especially if you're using a mouse. This will smooth out your lines. It's absolutely brilliant if you using a drawing tablet as well. So let's have a look at how this works. I'm going to zoom in. I'm just using, if I'm on a Mac, it's Command and plus to zoom in. If you're on a PC, it's Control and plus to zoom in. And if you want to zoom out, it's Command or Control and minus to zoom out. I, so then I wanted to move around the picture. So I'm going to hold down the spacebar. Spacebar gives me the hand tool. I can just drag around to the area that I want. Now. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller. So I'm going to use one of those shortcuts that we had before to make my brush smaller. Remember you can drag left and right for the size, up and down for the hardness. I'm going to keep mine quite hard and make it small like that. So if I'm trying to paint a line like that, you might find that it's a little bit on the well wonky side. To be honest. By the way, if you are a photographer and you're looking at this thinking, oh, I can pretty much ignore this because it's only for artists. Don't. This is really useful when you're trying to retouch an image. I'm going to do that. Now. If I switch on stabilizer, then I've got two different stabilize options in here. I'm going to go with the one on the left. The one on the left is called rope mode. And as I'm drawing, you can see it's got a little rope in there and the rope is just stabilizing my line for me. So I don't get nice of shakes. And if I shake the mouse a little bit, it's not too bad on there. And you can change the length of that rope. So I could maybe have a much larger or longer rope. So now as I'm shaking the rope, we're not getting quite so much in the way of shakes. You can go right up like that, but this is a little bit ridiculous. It's very hard to control, but you do get some very smooth lines with that. We can do that. Again. I'm just going to put that back to something a lot more sensible. And we've got another one over here, which is the window mode over here. And as we drag, it's flexible. So the faster I go, the longer that rope will become, you can see if I slowed down, it's a short trip. If I speed up, It's a long rope. Compare that to rope mode, which always doesn't matter how fast you go. It's always the same length in there. You choose which of those works best for you. Don't make your rope too long though, because otherwise you find that, well, it doesn't exactly go where you want it to go. But a bit of smoothing, stabilizing is brilliant. 25. Symmetry: But look at this last, it'll setting over here, this is symmetry. So when I switch on symmetry, you'll see we've got a line across the middle of the picture. And as I'm moving this the top one around, it's following me there. So if I were to paint on the top, it will do exactly the same underneath that line. Let's move that out the way. Of course I can move this line around as well. So if I'm starting here, I can then paint like so. We can rotate the line by grabbing it along the line anywhere. And I'm going to just move it down over today. And once again, you can see, I'm painting with symmetry over here. And you can see how it's going the opposite way. So as I'm going up, it's going down. Let's undo that. We've also got a mirror option. So the mirror option is an exact mirror. So if I put this into the middle and I'm just going to rotate it around a little bit. Like so as I'm going down, It's going down as well. You'd have great fun with this. You can do all sorts of weird and wonderful patterns and it is brilliant for artists tried out. 26. Color Blend Mode: Let's switch off the symmetry mode. And I want to go across to the blend modes in here. Now, the blend modes and this quite a lot of them are very similar to the blends that you're going to find will be using later with the layers. So how do they work? Well, you just choose a blend mode and it will blend your brush with the underneath image using the appropriate mode. Now so far we've just been using normal. If I'm painting on something, it is just normal color. E.g. here, I've got this orange and if I paint over her, you'll see it is just normal, solid paint. But if I change this to one of the other blends, I'm going to click on the drop-down and I'll just use Multiply. Now this is going to multiply the paint with the photo underneath. It's almost like using a marker pen on top of the photograph. There are a number of different ones in here. Once again, we've got a lighter version called screen. And we're going to be looking at these in more detail with the layers. But what I'd like to do is just open up another picture and use this to show you how it can actually be quite useful for photography. I'm going to go across to this person here and I want to change the color of her eyes. I'm going to zoom in a bit. So once again, I'm using my same command or Control plus shortcut to zoom in and we'll hand to move around. Of course, you can use the handwrite at the top as well. It's a little bit more. So I wanted to change her color to maybe a dark green or green color. I'm going to go along to my foreground color and double-click and find the green that I want. And I really want something quite well, not too saturated, maybe less saturated down here in the green area. Now it really doesn't matter how light or dark I go. Saturation is what's important. Over here. I'm looking for a nice olive green color. I'm happy with that. I'll just close that down. Now go to my paintbrush. And first of all, let's check the settings along the top of past 100%, 100% hardness. Let's make that a little bit softer. In there. I don't want any stabilization, so I'm going to switch that off in there. And we don't want any symmetry. And if I had this on normal than the main normal mode, if I painted over her eyes. Well, you can see it's just a nonstarter in there. Even if I change the opacity and painted over her eyes, she just looks like she's got some sort of weird green alien cataract on her. But let's take the opacity up to 100 per cent. So the one I want to do is the one called color. Now that's near the bottom, you'll find this another number of other color options in there, this lighter color, this color, dodge, darker color. We just want color in here. The reason we want to use color is we want to replace the color in her. I was just the green, but we don't want to affect the lighter or the darker pixels. Let me make my brush a little bit smaller and paint that in. And you can now see how perfectly that recovers it. Same again, over here, just painted around perfect recolor. Maybe her eyes don't look natural, but at least she looks like she's got green contact lenses. And rather than having a strange alien disease. Let's zoom in again. I'm going to just undo that. And same as before. I'm going to get a color mode. I'm going to use my color in there, but this time I'm going to have a less saturated color. We'll take the saturation down, click on Close, and you can then see how we'll have something slightly more natural looking. I think the problem that I've got here and I'm going to undo that is because if I go to the middle, you don't normally have color right in the middle. So if I just do the outside over here, and once again, just the outside around there, it might look a little bit better. Do try that out. It's a really good technique for just making changes to certain areas, smaller areas where you want to adjust the color very quickly. 27. The Undo Brush Tool: Now I've been painting on her eyes. I've painted the other eye, and I've just finished painting this one. And I'm going to zoom out a little bit. And then I realized that I've made a mistake. I have actually gone in here and I've painted over her skin. So rather than undoing it, because I might have spent a little while doing that work. What I can do is I can go down to my undo brush. The underbrush allows me to just paint back to the original on that area. Now, how else could we use the undo brush? Because it's great for this type of thing, but it's got so many other advantages as well. Well, I'm going to go and open up another picture. So let's go to File and Open. And I'm going to open up this one in here and I'm gonna make it black and white. So I'm going to use the usual thing that we did go into layers, going down to my Adjustment Layer. And I'm going to use black and white in here and maybe just darken down a few of those little areas like so. And before I go, I'm just going to say merge. What that will do is it'll take the adjustment layer and flatten it down onto the layer itself. So if you go to the Window menu and you look at your layers, you'll see it's actually flattened the image down. So now that I've done that, what I'd like to do is I'd like to go in and then paint in the surfboard back in color. So I'll use the undo brush here. And you can now see how I can actually just paint straight onto them. So with color, smaller brush, and we can go and paint those two in its just painting it back to the original image. Now, I'm doing this on a flattened image. It is something that we can do later on when we look at masks will be able to do it in a more non-destructive way. But for the moment, I just want to show you this quick effect that you can get color and black and white images together very, very fast. Try that out. 28. The History Panel with the Undo Brush: Now let's have a look at the history behind each of these images. I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to go down and find my history panel. You might find it's actually over here in the first place. And there was no history in this particular panel at all. But let's say that I've zoomed in over here and I've used my paintbrush, I'm going to double-click to find a color. And I'm going to paint in his board over here with blue. I'm painting on the board that you can see. It's well, making bit of a mess to be honest. We haven't done a very good job on there. And every time I release the mouse and paint again, it just puts in another little paint area when you using undo. And let's say e.g. I've gone over his face there. When you go to the undo option, all it does is goes up your history in there. When you're using the undo brush, it's going back to the original image. So if I'm using the undo brush at the moment, I'll go in like so. And painting those bits back in there. Now as you can see, I've made another mistake again. So I want to use the undo brush, but I want to paint back to the area where I painted blue. So I'll click on the area there were I knew it was blue and I could paint that back in. So with the undo brush, you can either paint back to the original item or you can choose one of these bits of history and paint back to that base of history in their messes with your head. But once you get it, it's great. 29. The Clone Tool to Copy Parts of Your Image: Let's have a look at a different type of brush. Now. I'm going to move down in my tools to find a brush. Well, it's in the bottom third. And if you hover over it, it's called the Clone Brush Tool. The options for this brush are very much like the other brushes that we've looked at with size, opacity, flow, etc. It has got some other options of using layers. So whether you are actually working on the current layer, the current and below, or the layers beneath it, what it is actually sampling. And we'll be looking into more layers later on in the course. So I'm just going to leave that set to the current layer. But of course you understand all these options now and how you can change them. So how does it work? Well, what you do is you hold down the Alt or the Option key and you click an area to say that's the area that I want to copy from. And then you can click and paint that area in. Now that's looking a bit messy. So I'm going to use Command Z or Control Z to undo. By the way, make sure that you've actually clicked on your layer. Because if you don't and you hold down the Alt key when you click and you try and paint it won't work. You must make sure that you've clicked your layer and the layer is active. So let me go and do this again. I would like to copy the heart over here onto that cup. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit and just move it down. I'm going to go right in the middle of the cup. Hold down the Alt key, click ones. Move down over here, and then I can click and start painting and copying that directly in onto this cup. We cannot just go along the edge like that. Now, if I thought that this didn't look quite so good because it's quite a harsh edge. What I could do is just change my brush type, maybe change the hardness so it's much softer in there. Let's try that again. Hold down the Alt key and click and paint. And we get a much softer edge around the, which will look more like real coffee. There. Keep moving about until you get what you want. Remember, if you make a horrible mistake, you can always use your undo brush to Jessica and undo it. Let's zoom out a bit. You can see I've got the same coffee now in both of those. In fact, I could just keep going over there. More, more of the coffee around the edge. So the clone tool does a direct copy. You hold down the Alt key or the Option key, click once. And then when you paint, it paints and exact copy, wherever you are painting. Try it out. 30. Healing Brush: Now, using the Clone tool for certain bits of work is absolutely fine, but sometimes it makes a real mess. Let's say e.g. I want to remove her eyebrow. I Alt click up on her forehead. Move down there and painted. And you can see, well that's not going to fool anybody really wide once you remove her eyebrow heads, who knows? Let me just undo that. So we've got another tool down here. And this tool is called the healing brush tool. The healing brush tool works in the same way that the clone tool does. And I'll do exactly the same thing. I hold down the Alt key and I'll click up here. And I'll move down to the forward. But when I'm clicking and dragging, what it's actually doing is it's blending those two together. So I'm getting a much more natural or normal look. If you can say removing somebody's eyebrow like that is in any way natural or normal. But the fact is that I can actually do it. So the Healing Brush Tool works the same as the clone tool, but it blends the what you're painting in with the existing image and it's a great way of hiding things. E.g. here, if I go down to her cheek, there's a little bit of what I think it's a tear actually. Let's just make the brush a bit smaller. I can then go over here, hold down the Alt key, click ones, move over the tear and just paint it out. And it will just blend that into their same again over here, click and we can just remove that tear very quickly. 31. Heal on new Layer: I'd like to clean up this image is a little bit, I'd also like to make him a little bit younger, which would be nice to be able to do in real life. But let's start off with getting rid of some of the marks. I'm going to go over here to the blemish removal tool and zoom in a bit, I can just click on some of these little marks in here to get rid of them. Now, sometimes when you click, you think, why is this not working once? Because you're not on your layer. Make sure you've clicked on your layer. And then the tool will do its thing. So I can click over there. Let's get rid of that one. Maybe a few clicks on there to get rid of that little mark in there. Now, I'd like to reduce the line on his forehead as well as the lines and resides. Now we don't want to get rid of them completely because what? We don't want to give him baby's skin. But we do want to reduce how harsh they look. And we're going to do that not on the image, but we're actually going to use a second layer and do it on a second layer. So I'm going to make a new layer by clicking the New Layer button. And this adds a new pixel layer. So what I've got now is a blank layer sitting on top of my old layer or my existing layer. I'm going to go over and I'm going to use the Healing Brush tool that you use. This tool, what we have to do is we have to make sure that we are not just on currently. Because if you're on current layer, it won't work. Because what it'll do is it'll look at the LED is on to try and find what to copy, and there's nothing on that layer. This is a totally blank layer. So you need to use the current layer and below option. So now I can go along here, hold down my Alt key, click on the area I want to copy from. Move over to there and I can copy that across and just remove that mark on his forehead. Now, let me do it again. So I'm going to do these bits as well. These won't look quite so good yet. So I'm going to hold down the Alt key, click up here to sample some texture and then paint this area in. Over there. I did warn you that it wouldn't look that great, but don't worry, we'll improve it. Same again over here, I'm going to Alt click once again, go down here and just start painting out these bits in there. So now as you can see, he has got baby's skin under his eyes that just does not look realistic. But if you look at your layers and I hide the background layer, this is actually been painted on the top layer. First, it's non-destructive. So I can actually switch it on and switch it off. But it means because it's on a layer, I can go to the opacity and I can reduce the opacity so I can see some of the original coming through. So that's without it. That's what, 100 per cent. And I can just decide how much of that I want. I think I want something like that where we can still see that he's got a few lines and resides, but it looks improved to a compare before and after. Over there. Try that out. When you do this on a image, try doing it on a new layer. Make sure you've got current layer and below switched on. Otherwise it won't work. Then you can reduce your opacity on that particular layer. Have a go. 32. Blemish Removal Tool: I want to get this picture back to how it started. And I'm going to use the history panel for that. If I pull my history panel, remember if you can't find it, you can find it in the Window menu under History. And one way I can get back very quickly is using this little position slider. I can just drag that back until I go back to my original image. So I'm going to close that down. And this time I want to get rid of the little bit of makeup that's on her either. So I'm going to use a little tool called a blemish removal tool. I can just take a small brush if we zoom in over here, what I can do is just very quickly click on those areas that I want to remove. This mark over here, I can just go and click on that to remove it. And it's basically just painting in something which is very similar in tone and texture. To try that out, It's a nice, quick and easy way of just removing a few little marks. And it's this one over here. It's the blemish removal tool. 33. Dodge Burn & Sponge to Adjust Lighting on Image: I'd like to show you some of my favorite tools now. And they are down on the left-hand side. If you go along, well, it's just above the clone tool. And click you find, you get the dodge, the burn and the sponge tool. Now, strange words are no Dodge and Burn, but they come from traditional photography, where when you dodge something, it meant that you could lighten areas up of a print or you burnt to darken areas down. Now, I remember it by saying, well, if you burn the toast, it will go darker. So that's how I remember the difference between lightening and darkening with these tools. But let me start on the dodge tool. I'm going to have a look along the top over here because all the options are very similar to what we've looked at so far, except when we get to the tonal range. Now the tonal range allows you to affect predominantly mid tones, shadows, or highlights. I'm going to stay in the mid tones for this. And I'm going to make my brush a bit bigger. I'm going for a fairly large brush and the hardness I'm keeping set to zeros, so I get a very soft big brush. And you see now when I click on this part of the image, it lightens it up slightly. So as I'm clicking, it's just a lightening it up. Now, do make sure that if you go to the Window menu and you'll layers that you are on the correct layer to start off with. I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller and try and lighten this area up. And I'm going to lighten up this subtle strawberry as well. Now, if you find when you're doing this that it's not doing as much as you'd expect. Go along to your opacity and increase the opacity over here. So this is how much the brush actually does. You see as I'm clicking, lightening goes up a little bit more. And I can even go to some of these leaves and just lighten them up a little bit. So we get a bit more green in the background. I'll lighten up that bit as well. Now. I've got those two. Well, I think pretty good, but I will zoom in a bit over here and take a smaller brush to maybe lighten up a few of these little leaves in there and you can see here, I don't know, I'm just clicking around with the brush. Now I'm going to go to the opposite, which is the dark and all the Burn tool. And it's exactly the same. Again, I'm going to be using the mid tones. I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger. And I'm going to once again, maybe darken areas that I don't want to be so obvious. So just over here underneath that strawberry, I wanted to be a little bit darker there. So I'm looking to try and model the store, the strawberry if you like. And same with this one, just darkening it down a little bit on them. Now, I'm going to make my brush bigger because I want to also darken down the word. And you can see as I'm clicking, it's just darkening down slightly. So we get a bit more of a wooden texture coming through in the, maybe this bit of paper is also a little bit too light. So I can darken that down a bit. And I'm really looking to lead the eye into my bowl of strawberries over there. Maybe this is just actually to lighten. I could just darken that area down and darken down some of the leaves. I know I did lighten them, but I'm looking at the whole thing. Now. I want to see this as it looked originally. So I'm going to go to the Window menu. I'm going to go to my history. And then I can use the slider and just say what it looked like before. How does it look like? Now? You can see the difference over there. Of course you might prefer the original, but I kind of like what I've done in the working, go back to any stage of that. Okay, so we've got our lighten and darken tool in there. What does the sponge? The sponge does two things. It either D saturates the color or it saturates the color. And you can see along the top we've got to saturate button or a D saturate. Let's start with a D saturate button. With D saturate, I can go along to the leaves in the background and just paint on them to D saturate their colors so they're not quite so strong in the green Department. And of course, maybe the strawberries, I want to really saturate so I could choose saturate and I can click on them and really bring out the color of those stories, even the wooden here, maybe I could bring out a little bit more of the tone of the word using saturation. Of course, this is not so important. So maybe I'll go to D saturate and just remove some of the color from the wood over there. Let's have a look at the before and after over there. So that was before. And that was after. Try it out. Three tools. Dodge to lighten, burn to darken, sponge, to saturate, or D saturate. 34. Remove Coffee Stains: Before I get going on the next project, I want to clean up my desktop. So I'm going to go to the Window menu studio. And I'm just going to say reset studio, which resets it back to the default setting. It's a really nice feature to just quickly get your panels back into the appropriate studios. So we're going to go and take an old photo and just bring it back to life. I'm going to go in and open up the image that I want to work on. And I'm doing that by just double-clicking on the desktop here, which takes me to open. Or you can go to File and Open. And in the CP project retouch old photo. Highest bit of a mouthful folder. There is an image here that we're going to go and open. And you can see it's an old image. And there are some stains on the image as well. So we'll get rid of the stains. Then we'll go to the image and will affect or sought out the lightness and darkness, the luminance of the image. And after that, we'll look at how we can actually put in some colors so we can get the effect that those old hand tinted images used to have. Now, this effect, although we're doing it on an old picture, you can still use a similar effect on modern pictures to get that lovely old look to the image. Let's start off by fixing this area down here. This is sort of a coffee stain on the print. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to go down in the tools and I'm going to use the inpainting brush. Now this brush is brilliant because when you paint with it, it just fills the area in with appropriate content. See what I mean when I go in here, we had a look at this briefly during the course. But I'm going to make the brush a little bit bigger. I'm using the square brackets on the keyboard. Of course, you can always go up to the brush width in there. Make it a little bit bigger. And I'm just going to paint over that area and you can see how it's filled it with something similar. Same again over the over here, I can just paint that area, that paint that bit. And I'm doing it in small bits at a time. I'll make it a little bit smaller for the trouser area over there. And same with this bit. We're painting that. And lastly, this section down here. Now I'm going to go across to the top and do something very similar on the top. So slightly bigger brush. And I'm gonna go over here first of all and paint on that. And then I'll just keep going. You'll notice there's a little bit of staining, a bit of yellow going on there. Don't worry about that. We'll fix that shortly. Over here. Another one there, another one here. And let's go in to the clothing. So with a smaller brush, I'll go over this section. And I can probably do this bit as well. Maybe even along the coat that seems to have worked and that one's worked. Now this one here, you see if I go over this, what I might end up doing is actually losing part of his arm. So I'm going to do it into smallest stages who will take this bit here? First of all, and then maybe this bit over there that day, this bit here, we've got a little bit of orange in there. So now that I've done all those bits, although there's some staining going on. I'm quite happy with the fact that I can't see the edge of that. Now to get rid of the staining, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and get my layers up. And we're going to add an adjustment layer with black and white. Now you can either do that down here or don't forget, you can always go to the Layer menu, down to adjustment layers and you can choose it in here, it's the same thing. So I'm going to go down and choose black and white. And what we're going to do is find it there it is over there. And you can see straight away, it actually hides those areas. Now, if I switch that on and off, you can see them coming and going in there. But that area is still it's still obvious. I can still see that there's something in there. So I want to darken it down a little bit. You could at this stage, go back there and use that little tool and see if you can actually tweak some of that to get rid of the edges. But because it needs to be darkened down, I'm going to go and use the Burn tool. While that's a big brush, Let's make that a bit smaller. And in the burn tool, I'm going to go to the opacity and just reduce the opacity so it's not too heavy. And maybe just burn that in once or twice to just darken it down a little bit. Same over there. Just a fraction. I think that looks alright. So do have a bit of a go with that. So go in, use the tools over here that I've mentioned, the impainting tool. And also if you want to use the burning tool to darken areas down and put a black and white adjustment layer over the top so that you can hide all the stains. Come back and we'll move on to making it look a little bit better. 35. Levels & the Burn Tool: Now, you know what I'm going to do with this next one. I'm going to use some levels. I'm gonna go in here, choose my levels and push my levels up. So I get to start with the details starts and the same with a white. Bring that to other details starts over there. Now, that's it for the levels. But looking at this image, there is still some lighter areas here and a lighter area at the bottom. This book looks great. It looks really, really good. So what we will be doing later on in this course is we'll be using adjustment layers masks to sort these problems out. But for now, we're going to go to the background. And we're going to go and we're going to use a burn tool. I'm going to make this brush really big, very big. And I'm also checking that my hardness is set to zero in there. So it's going to be a very soft brush and I can then just run it along the bottom like that to darken things down. I'll try the second time. I might need to darken little bit more. That's looking great. Now what about along the top here? Oh, I didn't mean to click on there. Maybe make my brush a little bit smaller and I can run it along the top on those trees to just darken them down and try and match the darkness of the image. You didn't need to be really careful that you don't go too far, end up making the sky go black. But that doesn't look too bad at all. Now what has happened is there's some strange little bits which have appeared over there. And I'm going to get rid of them by using my inpainting tool and a slightly bigger brush and just painting over them. It looks like it was actually on the original print. We just get rid of those bits, like so. So do have a bit of a go with that. Use a levels adjustment and then use your Burn tool to darken down the top and the bottom. 36. Painting in the Color on a New Layer: Now we're going to paint on the image. And I'm not going to do all of them. I'm just going to do a few faces and then some clothing as well. And I'll leave you to do the rest because honestly otherwise, you'll be watching me for hours. But let's have a look at how I can change the color on here. So first of all, if I got my paintbrush and on the paintbrush, I decided to choose a color. And I'm just going to pick, say, a pink over here. I know that's not true. Skin turn Let's go. Something vaguely vaguely skin Tony. There, even that it's maybe a bit too orange. But I'm just guessing at the moment are close that down. If I went to the background and painted on it using color mode, you can see it's not colorizing it up because it's on this layer over here. And if I switch off the top two layers, then you can see the colors come through. So we can't paint directly onto the image. So there are a few ways around this. I'm just going to undo what I did with that painting. The first way is that you can actually go to these adjustments. And if you click Merge there, I'll do the same on this adjustment here. What it does is it merges those adjustments onto the background layer, which is fine. And I can do that. And now if I paint, you can see I can paint with color onto the problem with this is if a painted with that color and I think it's just too dark. Well, I'm pretty stuck really, especially if I've done ten other people and then I realized that I need to go back and change her. So what I'm going to suggest is that we just undo those. So we have our layers up there and we put a new blank layer on top. So I'll do that by clicking on this little button down here. This will put a new pixel layer above everything else. Once again, I can go in and I can paint the colors on the people. You can see. Hang on a second. That doesn't look right. Well, remember when we painted before, we painted in color mode. And even if you paint in color mode on a blank layer, it's still going to be solid color. But if you look in your layers, you'll find that at the top it says normal. And these are all of the blends exactly the same as you have in the paintbrush. So if I do it on the layer instead, I can go down to color near the bottom, and I can then change the color on this layer. Now the great thing about this is that if I then want to hide it, I can hide it. I can also reduce the opacity so I can get more of a subtle color coming through like that. And if I've gone too far, I could use my eraser tool on there. Wow, that's a big brush that's knock that down a bit. And I can actually erase some of those if I've gone too far. So I'm going to get rid of that. And I'm going to click on the New button to make a new one. And I'm going to double-click on the name. And I'm going to call this skin tone so that I know what layer has got, got what, and it will use different layers for the different parts of the image. 37. Sample Skin Tones from an Image: I'm going to go and find an image to use the skin tone. So I'm going to go to File and Open. And I've gone to the two fixed folder and I'm going to use this person over here. I want to sample her skin tone. So to sample it, I'm gonna go across to my colors down here and double-click. And then I'm going to use the sampling tool. Drag that across and find the color that I want. So I'm looking for a sort of a darkish orangey pink color there. And I'll just click on that little button that gives me that color. And I can close it. So there is my color there. Let me go back to this document now to find that same color. If I just double-click it, remembered it in there, I can click it again. And I've now got that skin tone to use. Let's zoom in to an area here and I'll just do some of the faces now. As I said, I'm not going to do every single face. I'm just going to do a few to get you started on this. But I'm going to start off by painting on here. So I'll need to make sure that I'm on the correct layer, that I've got my paintbrush over there, maybe slightly smaller brush there. And when I start painting, it does cover the whole area that makes life very difficult to see what you're doing. So I'm going to suggest that even before you start painting, go into your Layers panel and change from normal all the way down to color. And this way now, when you start to paint, you will just be guessing color on that layer. Now, of course it's too dark, so change your opacity until you get the sort of faded color effect that you're after. Now of course, you don't need to just use one color for people's faces. Obviously, everybody's skin tone is different, and it also differs depending on the area that you're in. So you might find that some people have got more pinkish cheeks. So once you've gone through here and you've done some basic colors over everybody's face. And let's just do that. You'll notice that I'm not being that accurate. I'm going over their clothes a bit. I'm not too worried about that. I can fix that later on there. So once I've got that, I might think change to a slightly different tone for the rest of the skin. I'd better do these before I lose that color as well. So we'll do him, father, grandmother, and the kids. So very quick. Over the top, like that. Now, of course I can go in here now and then change the hue slightly. So maybe I can go more over towards the reds a little bit, or the oranges will close that down. And then I can go to the cheeks with slightly smaller brush and maybe just put a little bit of red onto those cheeks. You can barely see the difference in there. So I might go back and make it even more red in there. Let's close that down and just about see a little bit of pink coming through on those cheeks. You have to watch this because it's very easy to overdo the color I like I've done on there, maybe just a little bit in there to warm them up. Now, if you've gone over areas like this, as I said, it really doesn't matter, although it would matter with his hair because he's now got pink hair in there and you should have white hair. So I could use the erase tool with a small brush. Just maybe go over the base of his hair that I want to get rid of. His mustache could be taken back again as well. So have left out one of the kids there, but that doesn't matter. Have a bit of a go with that. Put in slightly different colors on the skin tones. Once you've you've tried it out, go round them and maybe remove areas that you don't want to be effected. And then we'll put in some clouds. 38. Add New Layers for all Parts of the Image: So I've gone in and done the rest of my skin tones in here with some slightly different, slightly varying colors as well. Just sort of skin tone pinks that I think might be accurate. I've done some of these have smaller children, especially the blonde ones with lighter skin tones than some of the other people. But it's up to you to do how you want. Now, the trick here is to do everything on a separate layer. So I want to do the hair. I'm going to once again do a new layer. Double-click, give it a name. And on that layer I'm going to change the normal to color. And I will also reduce the opacity. Write down. If you don't reduce the opacity, you're going to have really over-the-top looking colors and I'm keeping minded about 30%. You can see if I went to my skin tones and increased her back again to where it should be. Well, up to 100 per cent. You'll notice that they look, well, they look awful. So I'm going to take that back to about 30 per cent. Also. I'm going to go to my hair layer and it's exactly the same. I need to choose a color. You can either do this by picking your own colors in here, or you can go along and choose colors from the another picture where you want to get a brown or whatever color you want for the hair. I'm just going to click Close over them and then zoom right in. And it starts over here. And of course I'll have different color hair for the different people. So we'll start with this chap, get my paintbrush and a little bit of color on that hair there. But you can see because of the color, it's very much similar to gray. It's not showing up very well at all. So I might need to actually get a bit more color in there. Let's close that and see how that works a bit better. We can use different colors in here too, because e.g. this little kid here might have reddish hair. So I might go along and once again choose a totally different color for her hair. And so we can go with more of a what looks pink actually, but we can adjust that. And if you make a mistake like I've done there, feel free to just go over it again and keep going over until you get the color you want. Don't forget. You can also go back to the base layer and use your Burn tool to just darken areas down. So if I thought what she should have darker hair than that, I could actually just darken it down a little bit like so her head just doesn't look natural like that. I need to get a different color for that. But some of them will need their head darken down. I suspect he could do with actually slightly darker hair over there and the same with this chap back there. We'll darken those down a little bit. And that child over there as well. So for this one, they are virtually blonde. So I'm going to go with a sort of a yellow, but very, very pale. Yellow, just enough to have a little bit of color in there. I'm still on the Burn tool, so I need to watch out. Always watch your layers. You can see I'm on the Burn tool still. I'm going to go back to my normal paintbrush, back to my hair layer. And once again, I can then paint that color in. And if it's not right, if it's not dark enough, go back in. Try a slightly different shade. There we go. Got a little blonde coming through over there. So try that out on the hair. Once you've done the hair, do another layer. So go in, add a new layer. This layer, of course, could be called clouds or you could just do suits or something like that. So I'm going to say Close. And exactly the same. Change it from Normal down to Color Mode and adjust the opacity. You will find that the opacity doesn't always remain the same on every layer. So over here, if I just type in, sometimes these are really difficult to get hold of that little sliders. But if I went down to the hair layer, I might find the hair would actually look better. It was further up. You can see how the yellows come in there. And his hair looks well. It looks strange to me, to be honest. She just looks way over the top. Like it's been like it's been dyed. So that wouldn't be normal. I can go to my erase tool and just erase her out, her hair out, and then try again with a slightly different color. So I'm on the clouds layer now, exactly the same. Pick a color. So let's go with one of these little dresses in here. I'll choose the color that I want. And I'm gonna go with something. It's greenish. Don't go too bright with the colors. Remember this is an old photograph. They wouldn't have had super bright colors. And using my paintbrush tool, I can then start to color up the clothes. Each time you get to a new area, start a new layer. And that way you can always come back and adjusted individually. It's all yours. Have a bit of a go with that. Once you've done the people, if you want to try doing the background, don't do the whole background all the same color. Use different shades because the trees in the background at the top might look different to these bushes, might be a different color to, that, might be a different color to the grass. Use different shades of green to get your background all done. Most importantly, just have fun with it. And once you've done this, you could try it on a modern photo as well. Put a black and white adjustment layer on top of the photo and then go in and recolor it to do a hand colored look. 39. Introduction to Selections: One of the things that you need to do when you're working with images. Whether it's just for a standard image or whether it's a multi image composition is learn how to use selections so that you can select certain areas to just affect those particular areas. At, in this section, we're going to be looking at all of those features. So I'm going to show you how you can use the selection tools from absolute scratch right away through to creating really interesting selections where you can go in and you can select things like hair. Very, very difficult to do normally. But I'll show you some really nice, easy techniques for that. 40. What are Selections & How to Use Them: I'm going to go into the resources folder and find the selection folder. Let's open that up and I'm just going to pick an image for the moment. Now, we'll just take this one over here. So we were looking at selections in this area. And the first thing I want to do is just show you the selection tools. Now on the left-hand side, we've got various selection tools. There is this one over here, which is a selection brush. Underneath that we've got the magic wand. And then below that we have got a lasso tool. But the lasso tool has also got the rectangular elliptical marquee, as well as column and row mark keys as well. Let's start off with this rectangular marquee. And I'm going to click and drag, right. So now what does a selection actually do it over a will to make one. But what does it do? Well, what it does is it makes sure that whenever you're doing something, you are only working in this little dotted line over here. These are often called marching ants are the dotted line. So e.g. if I went back to my paintbrush, I'll just use the same sort of paintbrush that we did yesterday. And I painted. You can see it'll only paint in that area. Incentive that's painting with gray because we're in color mode. If I went back to normal mode, remember color mode from earlier, went back to normal mode, it will just paint within that area over there. So the first thing about a selection is it allows you to just work very specifically in one area. I'm going to undo that using Control Z or Command Z dependent with your Mac or PC. So I can click and I can make a selection like so. And then if I want to move my selection around, I can just click inside it to move it about. You'll notice that there are four little buttons up the top here in the options. If I click Add, then when I click, I can actually add to my selection. Like so. That doesn't even have to touch. I can just add bits out here. If I want to subtract from a selection while I go to the subtract option. And this will allow me to subtract areas from my selection. And the last option here is intersect. If I were to click over there, you can see how it's just showing the intersecting area between those selections. Once again, anything that I do will not only affect this area over here. Now what about if I went to my adjustments and put an adjustment? So I'll go in there and do well brightness and contrast and increase the brightness. Once again, you can see it's only affecting this area here. In fact, what it's done, it's created a mask, but we'll be looking at masks later on. I'm going to undo that once again using my shortcut over there. And then I want to de-select all this. I don't have to go through undoing everything. So in the Select menu, at the top here, we have got a de-select option. Let's have a look at some of these other shapes very quickly. So you've got an ellipse over there. And you can actually mix and match. So I could go to my rectangle, say Add, and I could add in a rectangle with the lips as well. These ones over here, the columns and rows, when you use them. And I'll just do a new selection for them. They just select one little row of pixels or column of pixels. And then down here we've got the free hand selection tool. And free hand selection tool has got three options in here. One is for freehand. So I'll just deselect that instantly. The shortcut for de-selecting, it's a nice, easy one to remember. It's Control D on the PC or Command D on the Mac. So over here I can do a little selection like so. And I can still use my Add option to add to it. Or I could use my Subtract option to subtract from it. Just subtract that a little bit. Around there. We also have a straight line option over here. And this allows me to click and just do straight lines for my selection. When you go back to the beginning, it makes it into a section where it would if I wasn't on subtract. Let's go to a new selection over here. We've got straight lines. Anyway, take a few minutes, just have a bit of a play with those. Don't worry too much about doing anything to practical or exciting with them yet. Just start to get a feel for how they work, where you can add, you can subtract, you can intersect, you can do new ones and new will allow you to move that selection around. And then within the free hand to check out these two options over here, just freehand or straight lines. Remember freehand, you just click and drag. For a straight line. You just click point, point, point, point, point or click, click, click, click, and go back to the beginning in their control D to de-select or Command D to deselect on Mac, try them out. 41. Freehand Selection with the Magnet: I've opened up another picture from that same selections folder. And let's have a look now at the Freehand tool. But the third option along here, which is the little magnetic option. What this allows me to do is to find edges very, very easily. Now, I'd like to change the yellow color on the dog shirt. So I'm going to zoom in. I'm using either Control plus or Command plus to zoom in on the keyboard. And then the hand tool I can use to just move along. All I really want to do is to make this nice and big. I'm going to, as I said, use the Lasso tool with a magnetic option. And over here, I'm on New. So all you do is you click once, I'll just go to the edge of his shirt. One click. And now you don't need to actually hold down the mouse button. All you do is you move and you can see I'm not being very accurate. It's just finding that edge for me. Even though I move backwards and forwards, it's doing a reasonably good job now. It is not perfect at all. And we can have to clean this up a little bit shortly, but it gives us a good starting point when I go around here, down to the bottom there. And now I'm going to make a deliberate mistake over here. I'm gonna go, whoops, I didn't mean to do that. So how can I go back along my line? Will all you do is use Delete or Backspace on the keyboard. Just keep clicking it and it will get rid of those little dots until you back to where you want to go. There are times also when you want to go in a certain direction. And the software thinks that you want to go in another direction. And with that, you can actually click to put your own points down. So I can go click, click, click to get my points in there. So you can click to put in points, or you can use backspace or delete to go back along the line. Now I'm going to go back along the line and let it follow the line all the way along. Right, the way back to the beginning and click on the beginning to make my selection. Now as you've seen, it's not perfect. We've got a little bit that's missing over there. So I would probably just go to my free hand tool, zoom in a bit, and then just add this button with freehand option in there so I can just really quickly just add that in. Now, I've also made another deliberate mistake here. When I've been adding the sin over there. Watch what happens. It just gets rid of my last selection. I will Control or Command Z that make sure that you're on the appropriate mode. So if I go to the add mode, now I can add this one in as well instantly. It is actually quite easy to see if you are in the wrong mode. Because if you're in the New Mode and you move over your selection, you get this little cross through the middle. When you're on Add, you'll actually see the little plus there. So I know that I can just add in over there. Likewise with subtraction, subtract and intersect. Once again, you just see the cross as you go over it. This one is not nearly as important. Add and subtract. We use all the time. 42. Color Selected Area on a New Layer with Primary or Secondary Color: Now that I've got my selection, what I'd like to do is to fill that area in with a color. Now, instead of actually working directly on the dog, which is very, very destructive, I'm going to go over to the layers and I'm going to pull out this Layer panel. And what we're going to do is we're going to make a new blank layer on top of that. So I click on the new layer button that's next to the bin at the bottom. That makes a new layer in there, which I'm going to click on. Then I'm going to fill that with color. So I can either go onto my paintbrush and actually painted in, or I can go to the Edit menu and choose to fill with. Now we've got two options, the primary color or the secondary color. The primary color is this one down here, which is the white one that I've got. The secondary color is the blue color. So I want to fill it with that blue. So to choose the blue, by the way, what I did was I double-clicked and I use this little icon to go and pick the blue that I wanted. Or of course you can do it with the hue options in there. By the way, if you have picked a color, Let's say e.g. I've used this to just drag that a little. Going down there. I've picked that color there. You have to click on the tiny little dot next to the eyedropper tool to get it to get that color for you. So I want, I want a blue though. So I'm going to use the eyedropper, drag it onto my background. For the dog. Click the little icon to choose the blue and close that. And that's what gets me my secondary color. If you're on the foreground color over here, it's exactly the same. Double-click it. You can pick the color that you want from there. And once again, just click it and Suppose that down. Let's have a look at filling this area. Now on the new layer, I'm going to go to Edit and filled primary color and you can see it fills it with that color over there. Let me undo that. If I go to edit and fill with secondary color, you can use the other color. Now, obviously, this is a problem because it's just a flat color. Remember with our paintbrush, we could paint in color mode to just have color rather than actually just a flat color like that. We can do exactly the same thing in the layers panel. If I go to my Layers panel, you'll see you've got normal, which is a blend mode at the top. And one of those options is color, which is near the bottom. And I can then just use my shortcut Control or Command D to de-select it. Now the great thing is because this is on a layer. If I've got a mistake in here, I can use my eraser. There's my eraser brush, and just erase from this layer really quickly. Because I'm on that layer. I could also get my paintbrush and just paint. So I'm going to paint with the with my secondary color in there. These, if you come from the Photoshop background and these are the same as your foreground and background colors. I'm just going to paint in a little bit over there, just a bit of blue. I'm going to undo that and do it maybe slightly, slightly less. So just a little bit of blue from the edge of the brush. Like that. Right? So I'm going to zoom out now. There's my dog. It's all done and it's on a layer. And this is non-destructive now because if I switch that layer on and off, I've still got my original dog in there. Do try that out. 43. Flood Select Tool or Magic Wand Tolerance: Let's go back to the other picture that I had over here. So I've just clicked on the little bar along the top to go back to that one. I would like to select her top and do something with her top. I'm going to use the Magic Wand this time instead. Now, the way the magic wand works can be very confusing because sometimes you'll just, can you go what, and that's it done. Well, it seems to have selected some of the background. And if I click on parts, it just seems to select all over the show. So I'm going to de-select that control command D. And let's have a look at how this is going to work. So first of all, we've got the same options as we have with the other selection tools. The add, subtract, and Intersect option. And the layer that we're working on is the current layer. Now we don't have any other layers in this, but that's important to note that you can either work on the current layer, on all of your layers. Then we have a tolerance. Now, before we get to the tolerance, let me show you how this works. First of all, if I were to click on her shirt, it just selects the shirt because the way it works is it's selecting pixels which are similar in color and are touching. Now that's quite important, the hand or touching because it's only selected these ones here. It hasn't selected those ones there. So I could then go along to my Add option and then adding this bit over here. Now, how does this tolerance then work? Well, if we go over to the dog and I'm on the background of the dog. Once again, I'm going to be using my magic wand. And I'm going to click over here, but I'm going to take the tolerance right down. The tolerance you can think of as sensitivity. So if I clicked with age, you'll see when I clicked on the background, it selects pixels which are similar in color over here. But it hasn't selected the same blues in there. So let's just deselect that. So the one way to work, you can use the tolerance, you can click and then you can go to Add option and you can say, let's add in that. But then this bit here and this bit here. Sometimes it takes quite a lot of clicking to get it just right. You can see there's lots of little bits over there. The other way that you can work is to actually increase your tolerance. So let's go with a much higher tolerance. And I'll just take 250 per cent. And if you click with that, the tolerance is so high, not only has it selected, the background is also selected most of the dog, to be honest, it's only left a little bit on his shirt, his eyes, mouth, and we're sitting the shadow. So you really need some sort of happy medium. And the starting point that affinity gives you is 20%. 20%, if I click over here, hasn't done a bad job. It's missed out a few little bits around here, but that's fine. I can go to the plus and I can just add them in there. Now of course, if you go too far and you've added in too much, There's a few things you can do. One is you can use the subtract option and click on the area to subtract it. It's just subtract that a little bit over there. But as you can see, it's sort of going backwards and forwards and then subtracting other bits as well. I prefer to just take the tolerance down a bit and work with a slightly lower tolerance. So this time I'll select using my Add option. I'm going to select that butt and then just add in these bits manually around here until I've got everything that I want selected. So now that I've got my selection up over there, if I wanted to, I could actually go to the Select menu and I could choose to invert the pixel selection, which selects the opposite areas. So now my dog is actually selected. Try that out, have a bit of a go with different images. Trial the tolerance. See what happens when you go to various parts and click on various parts, adjust the tolerance, but use the Add option to add in the bits that you want. 44. What are Contiguous & Anti-alias: Now in the magic wand, Let's have a look at these options. At the top, this contiguous and this anti-alias, not words. When it comes across that often. I'm going to, first of all, use my magic wand with a lowish tolerance. And I'll just keep this down quite nice and low, maybe 18. And click on her top and you can see it very nicely selects pixels over here. And it's selected these pixels because there are similar and they are touching. It hasn't selected the other ones over here which are not touching. So what would happen if I switch contiguous off? When I selected in there? It selects pixels which are similar, but they don't have to be touching. And you can see it's selected a whole lot of different pixels in here. So that's the first thing. Contiguous means that when you select something it has to be touching. I find that the most useful because if I did want to select her top, I would have contiguous switched on. I'd select one side and then go to the Add option and add in the second side over there. Let's de-select that. Now, the next thing I want to do is have a look at anti-aliasing. And to do anti-aliasing, I'm actually going to go back to the ellipse. I'm going to do two ellipses I'm going to make, Let's try that again. I'm going to make an ellipse over here with anti-aliasing switched off. And I'm then going to click on the Add button. And I'm going to add another one over here with the lips switched on. By the way, you can see I'm drawing from the center because that actually says from center in there. If when you drawing you want to make sure that you have a perfect circle, just hold down the shift key will do the exactly the same with a square. Now, I'm going to fill those with a color so you can see what the anti-aliasing is. So I'm going to go to edit and fill. And I'm going to just choose that white, which I've got in there. Click Apply, and de-select. Let's go in and have a close look at this so we can see the difference between these two. So this line here on the left, this was created with anti-aliasing switched off. And you can see things were either selected or they were not selected. Was with anti-aliasing. You have this slight softness to the edge where certain things are semi selected and gives you a much smoother line. Then having the anti-aliasing switched off, if I just zoom out a little bit like that, you can see that the one on the right-hand side is a much softer line than the harsh line on the left. So anti-aliasing doesn't matter which selection tool you're using, gives you that slight softness and gives you a much more pleasing line. Try it out. 45. Selection Brush & Copy to New Document: Let's have a look at this brush selection tool. Now, I really liked the brush selection tool, but it's important to understand the sensitivity of the brush. Now, first of all, we've got a brush width up the top there. But you can also change it like any other brush by using the left and right square brackets on the keyboard. So with this tool, if I start to paint, it just goes along and you'll see it'll actually snap two areas had snapping to the edge of her hair. And that's because the snap two ages is switched on. And I keep going over here and I could keep painting. You can see this might take a little while to paint around the document. Let me de-select that. What about if I use a larger brush? Now? By making the brush larger, it doesn't just mean that the area that I'm painting is a bigger area, but it actually makes the brush less sensitive. So it takes in more areas very quickly. You can see I just painted very quickly over there and it's gone all the way round. To select the whole background. Show you that again with a slightly smaller brush, medium-sized brush. If I do this, it's snapping very quickly to the edge over there. So the bigger the brush, the well, it will select more areas very quickly for you. The smaller the brush. It'll take a lot more work on your part to go around the edge and neither way is right or wrong, you just decide what you want to do. For this particular image. I'm going to go with a medium, medium, large brush, maybe about this size here. And I can just paint this in very quickly and keep painting down there. Now let's go over to the dog and select the dog. So I'm on the background layer over there. I've selected it using that same tool. I can just go around the outside really quickly to select the outside area. Of course, I could have done that with a magic wand as well. Now I've gone too far. You can see I've got part of the dog's mouth in there. So I'm going to zoom in a bit. And let's just move this across. Then I can go to the subtract option or the Add option, depending on whether I want to add to the selection or subtract from it. I want to subtract from the selection using a much smaller brush. Now, I'll go around the edge. There we go. We've just selected the dog very quickly. In fact, the dog is not selected, the background is selected. So if I want to select the dog, I would have to go to the Select menu and choose to invert the selection. So we'll invert that selection there. Let's just hide that top layer for now. And you can see my dog is nicely selected. What I'd like to do is to put the dog onto a different image. So I want to do a new image, Let's say e.g. you're creating something for social media and Instagram post. So I might go to file and new. And in here I'm going to be doing a new document. Now you've got all sorts of different preset sizes in here. And then all I'm going to do is click on Create. This will create me a blank document. Then I can go onto my dog. And what I'm going to be doing is to be selecting the dog. Over here. You can see I've just gone to my move tool and I could actually select and copy it into this document. But I'm going to make sure that I've selected the dog. Copied. Now, you can use the shortcut if you know your shortcut Control C or Command C. Or you can go to the Edit menu and say copy in there. And then you go across to the new document. And you can go to Edit and Paste. And that will just paste in your new image. So where has my image gone? In here? Well, if I click over here, you can see it's actually down here. It's really big. So sometimes when you paste it and you think, where's it gone? Well, it doesn't really matter. You can always zoom out. And as long as you've clicked on that or selected the layer, it will show you where it is. I'm happy with the dog being there. So that's my first layer in here. Do try that out. Have a go. We using particularly this brush and watching your options over there, making sure that snap to edges is switched on. You can then select items you can use select, and you can invert selections as well to get the opposite selection. Then if you want to copy it, Go to your Move tool, make sure it is selected so you can see all the dots around the outside. And then it's Edit and Copy. And then go along to your document that you want to paste into. You can make a new document or you can use an existing document. And you can go to Edit and Paste to paste it straight in. Over there. It does look a bit weird with that dog just sitting on her shoulder. Try it out. 46. Using Matte Edges in Refine: Now sometimes when you go to the selection tool and you go and click, the tool doesn't always work. So do make sure that you have the layer selected if I click on that layer. Now when I click, the tool work perfectly. So let's have a look at refining the edges of this selection because at the moment we're selecting them and to be fair, they pretty rough selections. I'm going to select this part of her top. And then I'm going to go to the Add option and I'm going to add in this part over here. Then what we can do is we can go along to a little button called Refine. Now, if you are on one of the other tools, you won't see the refine that you have to be on a selection tool, any selection tool to be honest, click on refine and it opens up the Refine selection dialog box. Now, straight away, the fact that you are in here means that it is actually trying to refine the edge of the selection for you. Because we have met edges switched on. The software's looking then trying to get that age is slightly refined. Now we do have some more options in here that we can look at. But the first option really is to just come in here with messages switched on. And that will help your edge tremendously. I'm just going to click on Apply. And that has made my selection a whole lot better. So if I was to go in and maybe fill that with, let's just pick a color in here. And I'll just choose a pink color from that while sample something from the, from the background. And I'll apply that. I've got quite a reasonable edge in there. Unfortunately, because it's not on a separate layer, it's destructive and we've just got this solid area of color. But do try that are just going to refine edges, just clicking on refined edges and making sure that that little button is switched on. So when you've got a selection over there, roughen edges, you wouldn't matter edges to be switched on. I'm going to cancel that because we don't want to do that one yet. Then out. And then we'll take this a bit further and we'll see what we can do with doing a nice cut out with her and her hair. 47. Getting Good Hair Cutouts with the Refine Brush: I'm going to undo all of this using my shortcut and de-select. So I want to select her. I can use the magic one to try and select the background. Or I'm going to choose my favorite, which is this little button or this little tool shall I say? Which is the Brush Selection Tool, slightly bigger brush. And then I can just paint in the areas that I want, making sure that the snap two edges is switched on. I'm gonna go slightly larger, brush the brush than that still. That's perfect. Like I just worked my way round over the top and paint it in. Now, I'd like to select the opposite area. So I'm going to go to Select and invert pixel selection. Now there's a little bit of hair that's missing in there. I'm not too worried about that, but I think I should add it in. So I'll go to the Add option and just go and click on the edge there, maybe the edge of that as well. Unfortunately though this is a bit of a rough selection. I'm going to show it to you by actually copying this and pasting it into this document here where I had the dog. So I'm just going to paste it straight in. Now it is down the bottom here. So let's make it a bit smaller. You can see already the hair as it's popping through looks really bad. There's no way that I could get away with that at all. So let me just delete that layer. Now that I'm in my, in my document, I want to refine the edge, so I'll just go back to my selection tool. I'm going to click on Refine Edge. And it shows me a mat or a mask around the selected area. So what I can do is I can now start to paint in this area here and let the software trying to figure out what it should do about the hair. I'm going to make my brush a little bit bigger because we are, when we go into refine edges in a brush, then I'm going to start painting over here. And I'm just painting along this edge over here that I wanted to refine. Now when I get to the top there, I'll just stop. And you can see the software is trying to figure it out and it's gone. Oh, yes, Actually you need a few more of those hairs in there. Let's go down there. Same over here. Once again, I can just go around this edge up to there. Stop, wait. And around the top bit over here as well. And it's just refund and you keep going over the areas if they're not actually correct. This bit here hasn't actually really picked up those middle bits. And I could go along the edge of her clothing if I wanted to as well, maybe the edge of that of her neck there. Now you'll see that there is a border width in here. And this is where the software is actually looking to do its thing. The larger the border, the while, the longer the software will take to try and figure it out. But you might also find you get some fairly strange effects from that with a reasonable size border. This is perfect for really doing these hairs over here may just making sure that all come in as they should. Once I'm happy with that, I could click Okay or apply bracket also smooth it out. You don't do too much smoothing in here because of the hair, but maybe a tiny, tiny bit of smoothing helps to get rid of some of the rough edges in there. Let's click Apply. And I'm going to do the same thing that I did before. Just go back to my selection tool, my move tool, copy. What I've done. I've used Control C or Command C, whichever you prefer. Go back to this image and it's paste it straight in. I'm going to zoom out here and just make this a whole lot more sensible size-wise. And let's zoom in to have a look and see how that looks. Looked at head makes so much difference. Now, we've got proper hair coming through rather than the rough outline that we had before. 48. Using Foreground and Background to Refine the Selection: Let's have a look at selecting the dog now. So once again, I will go along and choose one of my selection tools to select the dog. I'll use the magic one this time. With a tolerance set about 20 per cent. You can see it's done quite a good selection of the background. I can then add in this bit of background as well, but I should be on my ad option to add it in. I've got most of my selection done. I want to select the dog though not the background. So I'm going to go to the Select menu and choose to invert the pixel selection. And now while I'm in a selection tool, I'm going to click on Refine. That's not a bad selection at all. But it could do with a little bit more work. Let's have a look first of all, at the border width. And you can see I can change the border width over here. I don't want it to be too harsh, but we'll just go with a nice thin border like that instantly. Let's say e.g. your dog was actually on a red background to start off with, it'd be quite difficult to see what you're doing on this background here. So there are different ways of actually seeing this. You could actually see it on black. On white or black and white just so you just purely see it as black and white. This is a great area here because I can now see immediately they've got some sort of problem by the dogs. I think its tail or back leg or on transparent over there. It's his back leg. I'm going to stay with the overlay for now. So now that I've got that, I can go in and sort out this issue down here. Let's zoom into it a little bit. Over there. We have got some different options for our brushes. Now we've been on Matt all the time looking at the edges. But if we go to the foreground paint, I can say that this area here, I want to include it. So this is the foreground, if you like. If I clicked on background overlay and I can say that this area here is the background, so I don't want it in there, so we can just go around that bid and paint on that. And once again, it tries to figure out where it should go. I can keep going with that so I can go back to the foregrounds. I actually know this little bit here is foreground. And that bit's foreground. And this bit is foreground over here as well. So you think of a foreground as the subject that you want to keep. And background is the area that you want to get rid of. I'm just going to go back to the face of the dog because I'm really not happy with the selection around here. So I'll go back to Matt, use a small brush and just go over that edge and see if it will just redo it and make that edge of the dog look a lot better. Now of course, I can use a much smaller brush in there as well for more details. Just get it to redo that. But I don't think we doing this bit as well might might look really good. I'm not sure what that lipid is part of the dog. I think it is. Now that I've got that selected and done, we'll just click apply. And as before, I can then take my dog and copy it and paste it into the document. There it is down the bottom. And we've got a much, much better selection this time than we did before. You can see straight away even by just looking at the difference between the ears. This one here has got the refinements on. That was just a really rough selection that we did first look at the difference in there. 49. Place the Images & Cut Out with a Mask: Onto our social media pineapple. Let's go along and clean up the desktop first. I'm going to go to the Window menu down to studio. And I'm just going to say reset studio to get all of my panels back to the original place on the right-hand side. We will be using the layers panel quite a lot and we might pull that out later, but it's all neat now for this particular project, we're going to go to File and New. And in the web options, right at the top, we've got a different web presets. Over here. You can see there's different social media presets in there. We've also got devices. So the one that I want to use though, is the social media square. So I've clicked on that and that puts my sizes in here, which is 1080 by 1080. Now, I'm going to make sure that my image placement prefers embedded. We can change that on a document by document basis later on, but that's how I'm going to do it for now. And in my color, I'm set to RGB slash eight. Let's go along to create. Now, I've got my document here. I want to bring in a background. So I'm going to go to File. I'm going down to place. And in the folder with your images in this folder called Project pineapple social media. There you can see, I do try and put the final document in there as well so you can actually open mine up later on if you want to have a look and see exactly how I did mine, but it'll be pretty much the same as yours. I'm going to open up this fruit basket background, this really orange wild background there. Click on Open and then just drag it in over my document. I'm going to make it just slightly bigger than the document just said. I'll make sure that it goes right away to the very edge in there. If we go into the Layers panel, and it's hard to be putting this out. Again. You can see what we have here is just the fruit bark basket in there. There's no underlying layer, if you like, it's just a fruit basket. So the next thing we need to do is to bring in a piece of fruit. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to go to File. I'm going to go down to place, and I'm going to bring in the pineapple in here. And of course I'm going to pull it out and I'm gonna make this quite large, I think. So. Maybe roughly a little bit smaller than that because I want to have my person sitting on the pineapples. So maybe down to down to there somewhere around that size. You don't have to get it absolutely right. Just roughly how you'd like it to be. So I'm sort of thinking something along that line. And now we need to cut it out. So we're going to be using the selection tools that we've looked at. During the last section. I'm going to go along to my favorite selection tool, which is this brush selection tool. And depending on the size of your brush, remember, you can change your brush size with the square brackets on the keyboard. The size of the brush will affect how sensitive this tool is. I'm going to click and drag in there. And if I think, oh, that's not sensitive enough, I can use Control D or Command D to de-select it, make the brush a bit bigger, and then try it again. So that's looking a whole lot better. In there. Let's go and get all of these little bits and pieces all selected. Now, if you zoom in, you might find that there are some bits which have been missed out. So I might have a much smaller brush and then go in and select that little piece. I've gone too far. I'm going to just undo that with Control Z to once again, make my brush even smaller. So it's less, less, less effective on those areas, but better for smaller areas. Over there. Clicking that bit, It's clicking this pit here. And any other bits that I can see like that. But now that's a bit of a problem. So I'm going to use the subtract option and just paint that back in. And this a little bit back in as well. Sometimes when you have an issue like this, it's a occasionally easier to actually either do it later on once you've got the refined edges. Or in this case, just go over and use your free hand tool. So I'll zoom into that area there. I'm going to go to Add, I'm just going to add in this little bit over here that I missed out. Would just add that in, like so. And then I can subtract any bits that I didn't want in here. So I like to get my selection sorted right at the beginning. It makes it easier in the long run and it makes my selections better. There's another bit that I've missed out, but I think I might be able to do that using my selection brush with a small brush over there. There we go that we've painted that in there. I think that's okay. You can have a look round jaws and see if you're missing anything or you need to add in any bits and pieces. Like so. I have just noticed one what I'm going to honestly keep noticing these areas. That's the problem. That the more you will you do with this, the more accurate you want to be. Sometimes you don't need that accuracy. Although for this one, I would like it. So now that I've got my selection, the last thing I'll do is click on refined edges, are Look at that. I can see straight away that this bit hasn't been selected, so I can cancel that. Go back to my brush, maybe a slightly bigger brush this time. And just paint that in as well. And that's one of the great things about refined edges. When you look at it, you can see straight away if there are any issues. Now, once I've checked that I don't have any issues. The mat edges make sure that there's a little bit of refining going on to that selection. Anyway, if I switch it off, this would be my normal document or my normal file without any refinements, switch on messages, and then the software actually helps me with those edges as well. You can smooth things out if you want it on a smooth, too much in there and you can feather to soften the edge as well once can you see I've put in tiny, tiny amounts in there. Remember, you can always go down here and you can actually add to your selection. So over on the left-hand side where I've actually seen that I've missed out a bit. I can use a very small brush here. So I'm going to go with a really small brush. And then we need to decide whether we're going to add or subtract. So if I call it foreground, and I go in here, you can see the foreground is actually subtracting from the selection. If I choose background, academic painted in and say this is actually part of my image. And once again, I can go to foreground then and subtract that a little bit there. I could do the same with all of these. So just use the background, paint, those bits in there. And the final pieces, that one there and that little section. And this last bit over here. But once again back to the foreground, say this is not part of my pineapple. When I'm happy with that, I will click on Apply. So at the moment, my pineapple is not selected, just my background is selected. Now, what I can do then is if I do on my pineapple selected, I can go up to the menu over here and choose, Select and invert pineapple selection. So you'd see what I did there. I said invert pineapple selection. I meant invert pixel selection. I've got pineapples and the brain at the moment. So now my pineapple is selected. And what we're gonna do is we're just going to click on the little mask. You will be looking at masks in detail later on in this course. But for now, I'm just going to click that little mask and choose mask over there. And you can see how to just masked out by my pineapple without me having to delete anything at all. We can get rid of that selection using Command and D, and we've got a really nice selection on that background. So have a go with this. Make a new document, choose whatever social media size you want. If you want to put in your own custom size, that's absolutely fine. And bringing a background, if you're going to be doing the same one that I'm doing, then you bringing that pineapple orange background. And then once again, place the other image on top of that of your fruit. In this case, the pineapple. Use your selection tool to make a selection as good as possible. I always select the background here because it's easier to select the background. And then you can use your select and invert pixel selection to select the opposite area. And then you click once you've got your selection right, and you've refined it, you click on that little button down there, the mask layer button. And you can just add a mask and it will delete something else. Now, some of you might find that when you do this, you forget to inverse your selection and you end up with something which looks like that. So if you've done that, you can click on the Mask and use either control or command I, that's actually invert and that will invert that mask for you. You don't have to get rid of it and start again. You just invert the mask. Anyway, try that out, get up to this stage, and then we'll bring in our person to sit on top of the pineapple. 50. Fixing Masking Issues: Now that we've got our pineapple there and it's cutout. I want to show you a problem that you might come across. Because we've got the mask over here and we've got the pineapple. And if you happen to be on the mask and you try and move your pineapple, what happens is actually the mask moves instead. Now, if you click on the pineapple, now you can move your pineapple with the mask. But you can see that the problem we have is, as I move it around, there's a tiny little white area which has appeared on the site. And in fact, without moving it, I can see there's a little bit of white down there. Now we can get rid of that by going to the mask itself. If I click on the mask, we actually paint on masks because if you want to hide something on a mask, you use a paintbrush. We'll be looking at this in detail in masking. But if I go to my paintbrush and use black as my paintbrush color, I can then just paint on those little areas like so. I'm, by the way, I'm just using the square brackets on the right to make my brush bigger. Let me move this down. So let's say, oops, wrong one. Make sure I'm on my pineapple first. Let's move that down. Then I decided that I want my Panopto be right over there. Well, what I can do is go back to the mask. So I click on the mask. Then I can use my paintbrush with black. And I can paint that out. By the way, be careful you don't go over your pineapple because you'll end up painting that out as well. Control Z or Command Z is your friend. So do check that out just in case now, if for any reason you're having problems with the mask, and as I said, we'll be looking at masks later in this course. But let's say that you weren't able to create the mask. For some reason. Don't get disheartened. I'll just go down and show you a slightly different way that we can do this. So if you've made your selection on the background, you can actually just go straight into an Erase tool. There's an erase brush there. Get yourself a large brush and you can paint out the background as well. So this is another way of doing it. This is a very destructive way of doing it, but there's no reason why you can't do it that way as well. But I wanted to show you what this of course, just to introduce you to using masks, whichever way works for you, I will just de-select that and get rid of that line. Now, if you've already gotten a mask, it's working perfectly. You don't have to do this last step in here. 51. Place Person, Cutout & Refine: Let's bring in our next layer. I'm going to go along to file and place. And I'm going to bring in this man who's sitting on a some sort of wall. And I'd like to get him to be a roughly about the right size at the moment. But of course, if he's not the right size, you can always go in and scale. Once you've dropped the image in, they will place the image in there. Now I'm looking to get him probably about that size there. I'm thinking he's gonna be sitting on the pineapple there. So I think that's probably a really good size. Now we're gonna do the same thing that we did with pineapple. And we're going to go and use a selection tool. But this time instead of selecting the background, inverting the selection, I'm going to select him. So I'll use my favorite tool, the selection brush tool. I'm going to zoom right in and start selecting him there. So I'll just go around here. I'm sort of starting from the top and working down. When I go out the edge like I've just done over there, I'm not worried about that. I can fix that shortly. Let me go up to his hat and I'm going to zoom in again and make my brush smaller. So the left square bracket over there and select his hat. Make sure I've got his ear, that little bit of hair in there and around the top of the hat. Like so. I think that's just about it, that the ear is just about in. Let me move down now and continue on doing the hands over here, making sure that I get the fingers in there. And on this side, once again, getting those fingers right in there. And I can move down and do his shoes and feet and legs. So let's move down to here to there. Along the shoe. I'm still, I'm using a smallish brush here so I can be a bit more delicate with my selection. Let's just get that heel in there. And this last shoe over here. That's not a bad selection at all, apart from the bits that I've added in that I shouldn't have had in there. So I'm going to go to my Subtract option. And starting down here, I'll subtract that. I'm going to subtract this bit right up to there. And this little bit up to his sleeve, and the last bit up to the edge of his arm. Now I think that looks okay. I've just noticed I've got a bit in the middle that hasn't been selected, so I'm going to select that again with the brush. Also buys neck, something doesn't look right. So I'm going to add that person over there. Now, we want to obviously refine this. I'm going to click on the Refine edges and make sure I've got Matt age is switched on. If you find that his hair needs to be sorted out, you can use your refined brush and just paint around it and make sure that you get it all looking good. If you need to add in any bits like this, we can go to the foreground and we can just add them in and tell the software that that's actually the foreground. Over there. We've got some, another bit over here which didn't seem to be selected, but that's obviously foreground as well. Those the zips and they're just checking it out really quickly to see if I can see any obvious mistakes. And if you wish, and you want to tighten up your selection, you can get a ramp and you can take that over slightly to the left. And that'll tighten up your selection a little bit as well. If you go too far, you're going to find that you really tighten up the selection. That looks horrible in there. If you go to the right, it extends your selection out. So maybe just a little bit over to the left to tighten that selection up ever so slightly. Don't forget, you can always look at your selections by going to the preview and choosing black and white. And this thing shows any issues. Now, I can see straight away there's some really bad things happening here. I never saw that on the red mask. So if I click on background, I can then go and actually painting these areas over here and tell the software that they actually shouldn't be selected in there. And a likewise over here I can see a few bits that really should be the foreground. So I can paint those in very carefully with this tool. Now sometimes you might find that the reason this is happening is because you've gone too far over with the ramping. And if you don't ramp it, you might not have the same issue that I've got over here. Background. Let's just take that In term. That's the background. And this is the background in there as well. Once again, I can just keep going all the way around my document, adding and removing bits and pieces as I need. Now, if I'm if I feel happy with that and I looking at that from a distance, it looks okay, it's not going to be super huge. Search should be fine. We'll just say Apply. And then we're gonna do the same thing that we did before by just making a mask. So we just go down here to the little mask icon. Click on that choose mask, and it makes a mask of your image. Now, I'm going to deselect the selection. I want to move him around now, so I'll use my move tool to move him around. I need to make sure that I'm actually on his layer, not on the mask. That's so important. You click on the layer or the mask. We want to be on the layer. And now I can move them around into the right position. If you have any problems like that, click on the mask. Go along to your paint brush and paint with black that will paint that area out on the mask. Go back to them, to the layer again and use your move tool and move him to where you want him to be. Have a go, get your person in there, and then add a mask into that. 52. Add Some Shadows for Realism: Now I'd like to put a bit of a shadow underneath him. So it actually looks like he's sitting on the pineapple. And I'm going to do that by adding a new layer. So in my layers panel over here, I'll click on one of the layers. I'm going to go and add a new blank layer that's next to the little bin at the bottom of the Layers panel. You click it and it adds a new pixel layer. I'm going to go and get my paintbrush. Just choose black, very, very soft brush. So in my options along the top, the hardness is set to zero. And I'm just going to paint in with some black underneath him. Now, once again, I know what you're thinking here. You're thinking that looks really awful. But I'm going to move that below his layers. I'm going to take this layer and drag it onto the layer, but underneath the layer. So first of all, excuse me. You can see it's now underneath his, him, but in front of the pineapple. But then we're going to reduce the opacity and pull the opacity down. So it's just darkening the area rather than it being a big black splotch over there. So it's just darkening it down like so. Let me do another one. I'm going to add another layer in here. Now that's automatically because I was on the last day, it's coming just above it. Make sure I'm on that layer. Use my paintbrush. I'll just paint in some darker areas down here. Maybe underneath his body and his hands are probably going to be resting on the pineapple and maybe just a little bit by the feet as well. So same again, I can reduce the opacity on that layer. I don't want to take it too far down, up. Shadows are quite dark, surprisingly, underneath when you're sitting on something. So maybe I'll go something like that. And I can always go back to any of these and actually paint on them if I want to add in a little bit more or change my brush size and just add a bit to the shadows. In there. You're not looking to make amazing shadows. People shouldn't look at your image and go, Wow, there's a spectacular shadows. In fact, they shouldn't even notice the shadows. They should just look at the image. Go, wow, he really looks like he's on that pineapple. Shouldn't see all the details. You might find that you want to add a little bit of darkening down just behind his body as well. So it looks like there's a bit of a shadow on some of those leaves, but that's entirely up to you. Have a go with adding some shadows to the document. 53. Colorize the Hat & Graphics Tablet Tips: Has the person has got orange pants on and they've got a well, brownish or dark gray top. I'd like to match the hat to the background. So what I'm going to do is to zoom right in. And I'm going to go along to the layer of the young man. I'm going to paint his head a similar green to the background color. So to choose the color, I'm obviously going to be working with the paintbrush and I'm making sure that I'm on the layer, by the way, not on the mask. So I'm on the layer. And I want to paint straight on that. I'm going to go over here and I'm going to get a color. Now, I can choose the color by using this little color picker, dragging it onto the document and I'm going to pick a green in there. And then you click the little dot next to the eye dropper, and that gives you the green. Now, normally that would work absolutely perfectly. But you can see the problem that we've got here is it doesn't matter what color I choose. My color always remains white. Now, the reason for this, and we'll go into this quite a lot in the layers section of this course. But it's because this is actually a different type of layer to the other ones that we've got where we could paint on these other layers. They were pixel layers, was this particular layer is an image layer, so you can't paint directly onto it. So how do we actually do anything to that layer? Well, one of the ways we can work is we can actually go and convert this layer into a normal pixel layer. And we do that in the Layer menu using, if we go right way down to the bottom, the word rasterize, rasterize converted from that image layer into pixel layer. I just choose Rasterize. And you can see it's done. It, it's also gotten rid of my mask because actually cut out that image in there. Totally. So that's fine. For now. This could be a problem if we were thinking later on in terms of making things non-destructive. But for now, it'll be fine. I want to get a slightly smaller brush and I'm going to go and pick my color again. So I'll go to the colors, Double-click on that, use that green that I picked before or I can go and choose another green in here. I'll just close that down and then going to colorize his hat. So on the paintbrush, I'm going up to color mode. Remember we didn't normally on normal mode, we're on color mode now. And I can then just paint his hat with a similar green to try and match the pineapple behind him. Let's paint this in over here. If you make a mistake, just use Control or Command Z to undo. What we're talking about painting or doing some painting here. I'm going to suggest that if you're gonna be spending quite a lot of time using the software that you actually invest in a graphics tablet of some description for your computer. Probably the most common one is a company called whack them, but there are various companies out there who do them. The only thing I'd say with them is that when you do start to use your graphics tablet, if you've never used one before, you're going to find for the first maybe two days of using it, you pretty much want to throw it out the window. It's really annoying. On the third day you'll get to grips with it. And by the fourth day, you will wonder how you ever cooked without it. So if you're going to do a lot of this type of work, invest in a graphics tablet. Even the small ones will still be really useful. You don't have to have a big a3 or a4 size to work really well with a graphics tablet. Anyway, I've colored his hat up over there. So have a go with re-coloring his head. You want to colorize his pants or trousers up here. That's absolutely fine as well. 54. Add an Effect from the FX Options: Now to separate the pineapple from the background, I'd like to put a shadow in there as well. But instead of using one of these customers shadows that we did, I'm going to go along to the layer. I'm going to click the little fx button at the bottom. This effects, when you go into it, allows you to use a number of different effects on your layer. And the one that I want is going to be an outer shadow. So I'm going to click on that. And we just make sure it's ticked so we can apply it. And now I can go into my settings over here. So I'm going to increase some of these settings until you see the shadow behind it. Let's just offset it a little bit over there. And as you pull them up, you'll start to see the shadow appearing. So I've got quite an intense shadow now that looks awful. It really does look bad. But if I increase the radius OB, I can soften the edge of that shadow down and I can offset it as well so I can move it over to the side if I need. Now, quite honestly, that's a little bit too much. I want it to be a bit subtle in there. I'm going to take down the opacity on here. All I'm really looking for is a very subtle shadow just underneath. If I switch that on and off, you can see how to just lifting the pineapple away from the background. Don't go too far with this. Keep it really nice and subtle in there. So once again, people shouldn't admire your shadows. They should admire your work. While we're in here and on the same layer. If you want to then start adjusting lightness and darkness on the layer, by all means, go over to some of your tools we've looked at before, the Dodge and Burn tool, I could use the Burn tool and maybe just darken down some of the leaves on this side and maybe some of the leaves on that side if I thought it would help a look better. Maybe some of these at the bottom. Draw the eye in to the chap sitting on the pineapple. Have a go with those two bit of a shadow using the effects in there. You can always double-click on the FX word in the layer and open up the effects again, if you need to make any adjustments to it. 55. Add Some Artistic Text & Use Rotate & Flipping: I'd like to add some text in the background. Now, I'm going to go along and find my type tool on my Text tool. Now, if I look down here, I can't see any T's. But you'll notice that there's a little double arrow at the bottom of my screen and I can go down and there's more tools in there. So I'm going to go along to the Artistic Text tool. That's the one that I want to use rather than the frame text tool. The Artistic Text tool is usually used for bigger bits of texts. The frame text tool is used for when you have a lot of texts. So when you put your text in, the text actually re, flows into the frame was with this one, I can just change the size really quickly. I'm going to click on that and I'm going to put a little a over there. So I'm just clicking and dragging to get the size roughly to where I want it to be. Then I'm going to pop in my text. So I'm typing in pineapple, type in anything like really. I'm tapping mind all in caps. Now we can always move it around here. Let's just move my page about a bit so I can move it around and I can scale it as well. So you can second scale it around like that. Now, I want to select it again. So I'm going to double-click to select the word pineapple and going to the top, I want to change my typeface, my font to something else. I'm looking for something which is going to be fairly well, quite, quite large because I wanted to go in the background. And I've used Arial Black. But honestly you can use any typeface that you like that you think would look really good with it. But one of these sort of slab typefaces are big and bold typefaces usually look quite good. I could try something like Marvel if I want to, oh sorry Marvin. If I wanted more of a, a fun type of typeface. In fact, I'll go back to my one that I had before, which was Ariel. And I'm using Arial black. Now I'm going to take this down a little bit, so I'm going to scale it down. Change the color. What color do I want for my, for my text? I'm going to go up to the color at the top here. And I can then actually sample colors from an image using the color sampler. Here is we can go into the greens and see if we can find a green for that. I can go along and find something different. Maybe it's an orange, a lighter orange. Over there. Click on the little button to add it in. Remember we can change this later. It's not set in stone. So if I'm happy with that, I want to make it a bit bigger and I'm going to rotate it as well. So I'm going to go to the rotate option. That's the little handle just takes out of the side and rotate it. While I'm rotating it, you can see it spins all over the place. If you hold down the Shift key, you'll find it will actually rotate in small increments. It's much easier to get it to the angle that you want by using the Shift key. I'm going to pop that down the side there. And I'm going to pull it out to roughly about halfway. And in fact, I want my text to go right just over the edge of the document. It's not so much a readable text is more of an effect which says pineapple in there. Now that I've got that in the right position, I'm actually going to move it below the pineapple. It's in the background. And I want another one on this side as well. So to make a copy of a layer, you can right-click on the layer and choose to duplicate it. So now I've got two of them, ones on top of the other one. I'll move this over. You can see it's the same thing once again. But I want to flip it because I wanted to be the other way around so one reads upwards and downwards. So I'm going to go to the Arrange menu. And in here I can choose to flip things horizontally. Now obviously that reads the wrong way. I can go to arrange and I can flip things vertically as well. So now they both read the right way and I'm just going to pull this in a little bit. So there's a bit of overlap at the bottom. As I said, I'm not doing this to get readable text. I just want to get the feel of the word pineapple in the background. You can use your move tool at anytime to move them around. If they're not in the right position. You can still go back to any of these items that you've got in here and move them about. You can even go to your background. I switch it on, switch it off. And you might find that you can have more interesting background or change your background, bringing another picture. If you want. 56. Save & Export for Web: Now let's save this out. So I'm going to go to file and choose save. And this is going to save it as a Affinity Photo file or an affinity document. So I'm just going to call it Pineapple. And I'll save it somewhere. And that saves this with all of the layers intact. Now if I want to save it out for the web, I'm going to be exporting itself. Just go to File, choose Export. And in here, I'm going to go to my preset options at the top and choose JPEG. In the settings. Over here. I can then choose the quality that I want. A higher-quality will give you a larger file, but the image will look so much better. Then I'm going to go down and export over here. And once get it asked me where to export it to, I will just put it onto my desktop. You can place it wherever you want on your machine. And that's done. That's the end. You've got it all done. And you can then go and paste it or put it into your social media account. Have fun with it. Try second one of these, with your own images. Use a different piece of fruit. Find a different person or an animal, get the combination of the two of them. Add shadows to give a feel of realism. Add some texts in the background as a texture. Most importantly, have fun. 57. Introduction to Layers: In this section, we're going to be looking at layers. If you haven't come across layers, don't worry, I'm gonna be showing you exactly what they are and how to work with them. Now I know so far earlier in this course, we have looked at some sort of layers. But in this section I want to show you a whole lot more and what you can do with them. 58. The important Fundamentals of Layers: Let's go and open up another image for these layers. I'm going to go to File and Open, and I'm going into the resources folder, but I want to go into the Layers folder here. I've got a few images that I want to work on. So let's start off with this one over here. That one, This one over here of the city. So I'm going to open that up. And then I'd like to bring in the chapter these arms folded onto that as well. Now, the way that I'm going to do that is gonna be different every time I bring in something new. So for now, I'm going to do it by going to File and Open and opening it separately over there. And then we can do a cutout and take it across. The other way to do it is to actually place it directly into the image, and I'll be showing you that next. So for this image over here, I want to cut him out and I want to put him in that image there. So I'm going to use some of my selection tools now the one I'd like to use is the selection brush. I'm just going to paint very quickly over him and over his head. That, that's not a bad selection for a very, very fast selection. But I'm going to go to refine and in here, check the width of the border, make it reasonably small. I want to have a close look at this. So instead of overlay, I'm going to choose black and white. And let's zoom into his face and see if there's any problem areas. Now, there does seem to be a little bit of a problem over here on the side of his face. You can't see that when you're in the overlay area very well at all. So by going into black and white, I can see it pretty clearly. So what I'm going to do down here is I'm going to go to the foreground, brush and zoom in again and just tell the software that actually this is all part of the foreground. This is part of the subject. I can just paint it in. Like so. Once again, you can see it sort of as I let go, it tries to sort it out for me. So that's not too bad. I think. Let's have a look at his hat. Once again, I need to say there's a few bits here. I want to make sure our foreground in there. You can try using a little bit of smoothing over there. If you feel that it will work, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And likewise, feathering, feathering is a softening of the edge. So if I put in a little bit of feathering and I'm just going to do a small amount. Over here. It can get rid of some of these little strange shapes that you get, especially from a JPEG image. So once I'm happy with that, and I finished doing all of these little bits. Once again, a little bit of foreground. Over there. I'm going to click apply. And there is my chap is all selected. Now I want to move him across into the other image. So what I'm going to do is copy and paste. I'll go back to my move tool, make sure it's selected Control Command C to copy. I'm just going to use Control or Command V to paste him straight in. Now, we need to find our layers. So if you can't see your layers up, I'm going to go to the Window menu and find my layers over here. And I'm just going to pull it out and pull it down so it's easy for you to see what I'm doing. You don't have to do that if you'd prefer to have them in there. And I can now use my move tool to move him into the right position. He's gonna be standing in the middle over here. Now, the first thing that you notice is that I've brought him in, he comes in and he's layer is called background and the background is called background. So I want to just double-click on the name and I'll call this man. I'm going to double-click on the background and call this city. So we can just name our layers to get things to make far more sense that way. The next time I'd like to do is to make the city a little bit well, it looks a bit flat at the moment. There's no blacks in there. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to put an adjustment layer in here. I'm going to go down and I'm going to use a levels. I'm just going to push the levels up a little bit like that. But now what you'll notice is it's affecting both the city and the chap in there. So I want to move it below the man layer. Now, Be very careful, I'll just undo that when I'm dragging down. You can see at the moment we get a little blue line which appears underneath the levels layer. Well, that doesn't do anything. If I keep moving, it actually highlights the man layer. I don't want to do that either. I want to keep going until I see the blue line between the man and the city. So I'm going to double-click on there now and then I can affect my changes. And it's making the whites maybe a little bit more white. So we've got a bit more contrast on that. Now have a look at the layers over here. Over on the left-hand side, it tells you what type of layer you, this is a pixel layer, so you can see lots of little pixels there. This is an adjustment layer. So we have the adjustment icon over there. And don't forget, you can go to the visibility. You can switch it on and off. Any of the layers, switching them on and off. You can lock a layer up here. And although we're not going to be going into it on this course, you can click on the little cog there. And this takes you into blend options. How you can blend the one layer with the one below it. We've also got the main blends over here where we talked about with the brushes where we used color mode. And you've then got an opacity. You can adjust the opacity of any particular layer, including adjustment players. Tried it out, cut the, cut the man out, bring him in. Have a go with an adjustment layer, add an adjustment layer and move it around, drag-and-drop it. Incidentally, if you drop it into a layer, you see it appears to disappear. It hasn't. You might have to click on that little arrow and drag it out of that layer. Again. I'll be telling you exactly what that does later on. When you drag it, make sure you see the line between the two before you drop it. Try that out. 59. Placing & Selecting: I'd like to bring in another image. Now, I'm going to go to file and place. Rather than using copying and pasting. I'm going to go to Place. And in the layers folder, I'm going to find the image of the motorcycle. So I want to find that one over there. Let's open that up. And you can see my cursor has now changed. This is going to allow me to click and drag the picture in. It'll come in as a new layer. So I'm going to start over there and click and drag and get my motorcycle about the right size that I want. I want it to be about that. Now you might find that your motorcycle comes in above your man layer. You can just drag it and drop it below that layer. Once again, being very careful you don't drop it into the layer, but just below that layer over them. Now, I'm going to hide the man and I want to cut out the motorcycle in here. So we're going to be using some selection tools. The one that I'm going to choose for this is going to be my favorite, which is the brush tool. And I'm going to go around and select this very quickly. So if I zoom in, I can start off with a reasonable size brush. And I'm using my square brackets to select the brush size. So reasonable size brush and I'm going to go round the most cycle quite quickly. Now, bear in mind that a lot of this motorcycle is going to be hidden behind the man. So I don't have to worry about getting the details too accurate for the whole of the bike. But let me just get that little bit there. Get the seat in maybe that little section of tank there. Now you can see it. Sometimes when I'm doing this, it's going too far. I'll just keep going by getting all these little bits and pieces in. Even if I have gone too far over there. And it's two. This last one, I'm just changing the brush size as I'm going selecting the bits that I want. Right? So now that I've got all those, I can then use the subtract option to say, I don't want this bit, I don't want those little bits over there. I can subtract the areas that I really don't want quite quickly. And for more details, I would then make my brush a lot smaller. So small brush in there to subtract those details. And of course, if I've gone too far, I can then use the Add option at the top. Just add in the bits that I wanted. Now, I'll do a few more of these little bits here with subtract that. And of course, there's this huge chunk here that I want to subtract, subtract that. And then sometimes when you do this, it goes too far. I often undo it, make my brush smaller, and then try it with a smaller brush. The same again around those bits can be removed. Or I can go to the Add option and just add them in. Sometimes you're going backwards and forwards to get it. Absolutely perfect. Once again, I've got this little area here that I'm going to subtract. If I can. This bit needs to be subtracted that, but needs to be subtracted. This needs to be added in. Because when you try this out, you're going to see this so many details. The more you do it, the more details you keep seeing all the time. That I won't get too far. I think I'll just subtract this bit over here between the wheels. And lastly, down here, we want the stand in. So I'm just going to add in my stand and use the subtract to subtract the bits that I don't want shall be those bits there. And these bits here. I've removed those bits between the bank because they will show up quite a lot. So there's one there, one there. And this one, I think we will do. 60. Place Image & Group Adjustments: Now I want to make the image look as good as possible. So obviously I'm going to go to my selection tools and use refine edges. Now, all I want to do is keep Matt edges on so it will actually go around the edge and make them look a little bit better. But I'm going to get a smooth and increase the smoothing just a little bit to smooth out those edges. If you find in your selection that the edges are actually too wide for the object, maybe you're getting a little bit of a background in, or maybe you want a bit more of the background. You can use ramp in here. So I can reduce, which will tighten up my selection or increase my selection. In there. You can see as I'm doing this look at the wheels, how the selection is going right way around the outside of the wheels. Especially if I zoom into that, it'll make more sense. You can see how it's pulling it right out there. Whereas if I pull this in the other way, it will tighten up that selection. I don't want to tighten up too much because otherwise I'll lose some details. But just a little bit might help. I have noticed a bit of the tires missing there. So I can go to foreground, use my brush and just paint that back in again. So it understands that that actually needs to be part of the image. Let's click Apply. Now, have a look at the layers and you'll notice that I've got well, pixel layers here. The city is a pixel layer. The man is a pixel layer. This layer here has got a different icon on it. This particular icon comes in when you bring in your image using place, because it doesn't place it as a standard pixel there. It places it as brings him to the original color space and resolution from that image. Now, that's absolutely brilliant, except if I want to work on this, I'm not going to be able to work very easily. So what I'm going to do is converted into one of these type of pixel layers. Incidentally, if you were to use the eraser tool over here and just erase on the layer. You'll notice it'll automatically converted into a pixel layer. If you do any sort of brushwork on the layer, it will convert it. But if you want to convert it in manually, you go up to the Layer menu, go all the way down to the bottom and choose Rasterize. And that'll just rasterize it or converted into a standard pixel layer. Now, I would like to get rid of the outside area over here. So I'm going to go up to the Select menu, and I'm going to choose two, invert the pixel selection. So now everything is selected except the motorcycle. By pressing Backspace or Delete on the keyboard, you can just delete all those extra pixels around the outside in one go very, very quickly. Now I can deselect this. You will find though, that if you start to move it around, there could be some extra areas that are coming in. And you might want to use your eraser tool to just erase those out. There's no erase brush over there and I can just erase them if they are getting in the way they they're not in mine, so I could actually leave them exactly where they are, but if I wanted to move it around, I could do that. So I've got the bike pretty much where I want it to be and it's underneath my man over there. Let's go back to the bike, just move it in a little bit down there. Now, the problem that I have with a byte is the color. It looks so different from the background. The background is very orange and the bike is bluish and goodness has what his calories, it's he'd looks a little bit orangey green. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do an adjustment layer on the bike. And I only wanted to affect the bike. So go into my bike layer. I'm going to go and add an adjustment layer in here. I'm going to start off with levels to just do the levels. But you can see by doing the levels, I'm going over the top here. It's affecting the bike and the city. So the way around this is we drag the layer and we drop it into or onto the one that we only want to affect. So you can see it goes blue completely rather than just at the top or the bottom. Blue completely drop it there. And now there's a little arrow that appears. If I click on that, you can see that my levels is actually grouped inside this layer. I can now double-click it and go and do my adjustments in here. Better. I think contrast looks, looks a lot more like the background. Actually looks. Let me do that again. So if I add another adjustment layer here, maybe this one is going to be a color balance. So I'll just go to color balance and I'm going to make it quite red and yellow to try and match the background color. You don't have to get it right the first time. Once again, I just drag it inside that group and it's only affecting the motorcycle. Now, I can double-click and then get my colors just right on the bike. So I'm just trying to match that that background. I'll do the same with the man at the top. So I want to adjust his color. So I'm going to go into the adjustments. I'm going to go down to color balance. And I want to make him a bit more orangey yellow to match the background. Of course, that's affecting everything below it. So I'm going to drag it onto his layer and drop it. So it's not only affecting his layer, you'll see if I switch it on and off, It's only affecting him. Of course, if I want to affect everything, that's no problem. I can just go to my adjustments, go down, find what I want. I'm going to use vibrance and maybe just reduce the vibrance so the image is less saturated in color. And of course that affects everything below itself. Over there. One more layer. I'm going to add a new blank layer over here, and I've just clicked on that new layer button down the bottom. And this is a totally blank layer. It hasn't got anything in it. I'm going to paint on that layer. So I'm going to use my paintbrush. I'm going to choose black as the color I want to paint with. And I want a slightly bigger but softer brush. What I'm actually doing is painting in a shadow underneath the motorcycle. Now that looks really bad. So let's make this a little bit smaller. And I'm just going to paint a bit of a shadow in there now I know what you're thinking you're looking at figure there is no way that that looks anything like a shadow underneath that motorcycle. But if I were to drag this layer underneath the bike and then change the opacity on the layer. So it's a lot more subtle. You can just see how you're getting that darkening area under the bike. Let me do another one so I'll add another one in. Just over there. Maybe smaller brush and just use a really dark but underneath the wheels. There. There we go. The bike look like looks like it's actually standing behind him. So do have a go with a few of those bits and pieces, particularly in looking at the layers and dragging adjustment layers onto the individual pixel layer. So it becomes grouped or part of that layer. You can always drag them out if you want to. But you just drag and drop them on top of the layer to become part of them. If you want to try and making new layers, blank layers, and then painting on them, you can then adjust the opacity on those layers individually as well. And don't forget, you can always go to any of the layers. You can put an adjustment at the top to effect absolutely everything. So over here, I could maybe just take the vibrance down a little bit in their, in looking at my image. To be honest, I think I need to actually go into the adjustments on the man's layer and just do another one in here just with some levels because I don't think he's quite dark enough. Then there we go. That looks better. But once again, I'll drag it into his layer over there. Have a bit of a go with that. 61. Add Artistic Text & Save: I'd like to darken down parts of the man. So I'm going to go to the man's layer. Instead of using adjustment layer at the moment, I'm going to go across and use some of the tools that we looked at earlier in this course. And that was the lightening and darkening tools. We've got the Dodge and Burn tool over here. I'm going to use the burn tool. I'm going to get a slightly bigger brush and on-demand, I'm just going to go to the side of his face and just darken down that side a little bit more so the lighting on him matches the field that I've gone for with this motif. Finding that this hand here is very distracting. It's very bright. So I'm going to darken that down a little bit as well. So it's not so over the top. Rather getting the eye, the ally to actually look at his face rather than that. Similar, these Watch can be dark, just darken down a little bit and the side of his clothes as well. And of course, because that's directly on that layer, it's destructive. I'll do the same with the motorcycle. To the motorcycle, Maybe I could darken down a few of the bits over here in keeping with the rest of the look of this whole image. Let's now add a different type of layer. And I'm going to go right to the bottom of my tools. Click on this little double arrow and go and find the Artistic Text Tool. Now the Artistic Text tool allows me to put in text and I can then just scale it up and down. You've got two types of tools. We go into these in the level two courses in a lot more detail. But for now, I'm going to use the Artistic Text tool. And over here I just want to pop in the text now it doesn't matter where I put the text in, because all I'm going to do is click and drag. And then type my text writing over here. So I'm just going to put in back to the city. Now, my text is there, it's actually behind the man. So I'm going to move it above. And let's move our layers over here. I'm going to select all the text now to do that, I've just clicked a few times. I keep clicking until it's all selected. And then I've got text options over here. I'm going to make my text a whole lot smaller. You can see we can just choose from sizes in there, or I can type in directly in here. I'm going to try 72 as the size of my text. Oh, you can see that's so small, but it doesn't matter. I find it easier to grab a corner and just scale it up like that. When it comes to the color of the text, you can click on the color and you can choose your own color in here. Or you can use the little eyedropper. And I'm going to drag the eyedropper down onto the yellow line on the road and choose that yellow. So as before, we click on the little icon to choose that color, There's my yellow text. I want to change the typeface or font on this text. So in the top left-hand corner, I can go in. And if we move the layers out the way, these are all the different type faces that I've got on my machine. So you might have different ones. To me. I'm just going to go and find something which really suits the scene, something that's big and bold and maybe not the sort of thing that you'd use on a document for legal document, but just something that's a little bit over the top there. We've got this ready wild text in there. Using my move tool. I can move that around again. And you'll notice that it comes in as a layer. It actually names the layer with the texts that I've put in over there. And I've got the little a on the side to show that it is a text layer. Let's save this. I'm gonna go to File. I'm going to go down to Save as. And I'm just putting mine on the desktop. I'm going to call this one in a city. And when I save it normally like that, it's saving it as an AF photo file type. Remember if you want to save it out and take it to Photoshop, you could go to File and you could go to Export. And in here you could export it as a PSD file for Photoshop or if you wanted to take this out to the web. But we've also got some other options. So e.g. I've got the JPEG option and I could say that out for website. Or if I was actually going into taking this into a Microsoft application like a PowerPoint, I would use PNG in there. 62. Introduction to Masks: A lot of what we've done so far has been very destructive to your images. And you will find, if you try to go back again, it's very difficult. In this section we're going to be looking at masking. So you'll no longer be deleting parts of your layers. You're just going to hide them with a mask. Mask are so powerful. And I want to take you through the whole process, right from scratch to create an incredible masks. 63. How Masks Work With Black & White: I'm going to open up a picture. So I've gone to File and Open. And this time I'm going to go into masking, masking folder. I want to pick one or two images. I'll just start off with this picture of a dog. And let me bring in another picture as well. So I'm going to go to File and Place. I'm going to place these flowers on top of the dog. Now, as you can see in our layers, we have got a standard pixel layer there. And then this layer here, which is a special layer, it's an image layer. So once again, it retains all its original properties. But I'm going to go to the Layer menu, go down, and I'm just going to rasterize that layer. So now just becomes a normal layer. Now, if I want to see the dog through here in the middle side, flowers around it. What I could do is I could go along to the eraser. I could choose a really big eraser in here now just make the brush any large and I can erase on that layer over there. Now, why won't it let me erase? Well, I need to click on the layer first and then I can just erase out those bits. Now, that's absolutely fine. No problem with doing that. But the problem is that this is destructive. Yes, at the moment, I can go to my history and I can go back through my history to the original image. But if I'd save this out, and I'm just going to go to File and Save As I'll call it dog flower. And we'll just pop this somewhere. I'll put into my masking folder. And if I then closed it down, and I then opens it up again. So there's my dog flower. You can see my history has gone and is no way that I can get back to the original document over there. This is a very destructive way of working using the eraser tool. So how else could we do it? Well, I'm going to bin that and I'm going to go back to File and down to place, bringing the same flowers again. And we'll put them over the top of the dog. I'm going to do the same as I did before. I'm going to go to Layer and down to rasterize. You don't have to do this step now, but we will just for the moment. Now, instead of actually erasing from this layer, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide parts of the layer. Not do that. If I go down over here to the bottom, you'll see I've got some little icons. We'd been looking at the Adjustment Layer icon quite a lot. But I'm going to click on this layer and I'm going to add to the left of that a mask. So if I click on Mask layer there, it says, what type of mask do you want? Do you want a mask to an empty mask to under Compound Mask? And there's all sorts of other range masks in there. We're just going to be using a standard mask. The mask pops in next to the layer. Now you can choose to either click on the layer or on the mask. You work on the layer or you work on the mask. Now the way that it works is that the layer will show and hide based on what's in the mask. So if I go along and I get a paintbrush and I'm getting a paintbrush, not the erase tool. This is a paintbrush. I've got black as my painting color in there. And I'm going to increase the size of the brush. I'm just going to start painting in here now it looks exactly like I've actually used that eraser to erase out the parts of it. But the thing is, it's on the mask, it's not on the layer. So black on the mask hides the layer. So if I've gone too far and I thought, You know what, I want to actually get fruit of some of this at the top, bring back the flowers. Will, in that case, I can go to the other color here to white. And now when I paint, I'll actually be painting back there. Now this means that I can actually save this document exactly as it is and always come back to it at all. I won't have lost any information. So you make sure you've clicked on the mask. You go along to your paintbrush. And with your paintbrush, if you paint that you see I'm painting with white, so nothing will happen. I'm going to click on the black to bring that one to the front. I'm painting with black and will then allow me to paint in that way. If I've painted too much, I go over to white and I can then paint it back using white in there. Well, what would happen if I painted with gray? Well, let me show you. Double-click over there, go into 50% gray and painted with gray. You can see gray or 50% gray will show through 50% of the image. The darker the color is. It's good to darkish gray. The more we will be hiding that layer. I'll go with a much lighter color this time, so a light gray. And once again, you can just about see the dog coming through there. So if you don't want the mask, what can you do? Well, you can take your mask and you can actually Binet, so I can just drop it in the bin over there. It removes the mask completely and I can go and do another one. So one more time very quickly, I want to add a mask. Click on the Mask icon down there. Choose mask. It adds the masking and you use black to hide on that layer and white to show through the layer. And if you don't want it to take the mask, drop it in the bin at the bottom. Try that again. Into there. Have a go with that. 64. Masking an Adjustment Layer With a Brush: Now let's have a look at a mask on an adjustment layer on this picture. By the way, this is from the same folder with masking. I'm going to go down and I'm going to go and add an adjustment layer to this. And I'm going to do something fairly extreme. I'm going to add a black and white adjustment. And I think I might just adjust this a little bit so we get a bit more of her skin tone coming through. Using the reds and the yellows. On here, we'll adjust the skin tones rather nicely. I'm happy with that. Now what I want to do is I want to actually remove some of that adjustment layers to hide some of that adjustment there. I'll do that with a mask. Now with an adjustment layer, you don't have to add a mask. All you do is you get your paintbrush. I'm going to be using black. And I'm going to zoom right in to her eye. And because I'm on the paintbrush and I'm on the adjustment layer, I'll get a slightly smaller brush when I start to paint. It's painting a mask. You can see it's automatically now putting a mask over there. And on this one here I'm going to paint on that either. So what I'm really doing here is not painting color in there. I'm just hiding. If I switch that adjustment layer off, you can see that's her real Eichler in there. So I'm just hiding part of the adjustment layer so I can see it coming through just to know i now of course, if we've gone too far like that, I can then go over to white and I can then paint out that area. So we can just go with something like that. I think there's a little bit of skin tone in there. I'll just remove that with the same tool once again. So this way we can have a combination of an adjustment layer, which we can show and hide using a mask. So when you do this, just use your paintbrush. Don't worry about making a mask. Just paint straight on the adjustment layer and hide using black paint. And then you can show again using white paint. 65. Masks from Selections: I'm going to open up a background image. And then I want to bring in a portrait. I've got somebody who's standing in front of that background. This time, I'm going to do it as we've done before going to File Place. I'm using the embedded placement policy. Go to File, find the image that I want. And I think it's going to be, well, Let's move this out the way. This one over here. I'm going to place that image in there, bring her in quite large, and move her up a little bit like that. Now that I've got the image in, I want to mask out the background rather than erasing it. So we're going to do this using a selection. Now, as before, we can use any of the selection tools. I'm going to go with the brush selection. So I'm going to choose a reasonable size brush and I've got a bit on the small side. So just making it a little bit larger and then just paint in this area over here. Now that's way too big. You can see it's jumped onto her face as well. I'll undo that and I'll make my brush smaller, even though it's quite a small brush because of the way that the brush works, the bigger it is, the mod picks up, the quicker it picks up. Over here. I've also now picked up her t-shirt as well. So I'll go to the subtract option. Once can make my brush a bit smaller, so it's less sensitive. And just get those little bits out. And these little bits out as well. Now before I go any further, I'm going to go to refine. It shows me the mask. I will just have a look at the border width them, you can change the border width, make it a little bit bigger because I want to get some of those hairs in there as well. And then I'll use my brush inside the refine the selection area, make it a bit larger, and then just go around to hand try and get some of these hairs in. I think that's got pretty much most of them. I might need to zoom in a little bit and have a look at some of this because I'm going to go to foreground and just paint that bitten, say this bit here is the foreground. Now, I've painted in. And in fact, what it says is it's the background. I'm going to undo that. Use the background because it's the other way round. And now when I paint that in, there we go. We've just painted that little section. So if you get it wrong, like I've just done, just go and painted. We might need to smooth this out and just a tiny bit as well. Now, once I'm happy with that, firstly, let me show you down here the output. Because you can output is a selection. You can also output to a mosque a new layer, or a new layer with a mask. But I'm going to keep it on selection for now, but just bear that in mind for later. Click on Apply. And the issue is that I've actually got the background selected, not her. So if I go along to the Select menu, I could then choose to invert the pixel selection. So I've selected the opposite areas and now she is selected rather than the background. And we can go to the layers. And I now add a mask, so I've got a selection of first, then I add my mask, and I'll click on Mask in there. And you can see it automatically takes the selection into account. I can de-select what I've got in there, and I've now got a mask from that selection. Now the great thing about this is that then I can go to the mask and if I have lost anything in there, I could always go back and just paint it back in. So directly on the mask. If I paint with white, I could make sure I'm on the mask first of all, and on my paintbrush. And I'm going to just paint with white over there. I can just paint things back in again. Or I can go over to black and I can just paint them out to hide them. So we haven't lost anything. And of course, at this stage, if I then decided to close down the document and open it up in two months time. All of this will still be here. And I can then go in and sort out the edges as well. And I haven't lost anything at all. So if you want to create a mask, you can do that from a selection. Have a go with this one here. Try her on the background, make the selection as good as you can first. And then when you actually bring it in, you can either choose to select our use a selection or you can bring it in as a selection and then make a mask. So from within the Refine area, you could choose to have it as a mask already. You wouldn't have to go through the extra step that I've done. Try it out. 66. More Mask Options: I want to find a background picture. And I'm instead of actually going to something that I've already downloaded, I'm going to go along to the stock studio. And if I pull this out, you'll see we've got this stock panel and it says Pixabay, and it says pixels. These are two libraries with royalty-free images. Now, all I have to do, and by the way, I suggest that you actually read the notice in here about what you can and what you can't use them for and all the details. What I'm going to go and find an image. So I'm going to find street art. I'll just press Enter. And sometimes it will pop up the first time you do it, it'll pop up and say, are you happy with all of the fine print and use click on yes. Now I want to use one of these bits for street art. I'm going to just take this one over here and drop it into affinity. And what it does is it just opens up that straight into infinity in there. You can search for anything you like, whether it's Pixabay or the pixels in here. So let's e.g. say surf. Search for that good all sorts of images in here that I can use. Let's get rid of those. So now I'm going to bring another image in here. I've got a portrait that I want to put in front of this background. So I'm going to go to file and place. And I'm going to choose this chap here. He's got a very plain background. So I'm going to open and I'm going to click and drag to bring him in. I think that will do quite nicely. Now I want to get rid of the background. So this is exactly as we've done before. I'm going to use one of my selection tools. And in my case I'm going to be using the brush and just paint this background area in there. Unfortunately, picked up his shirt. So I'll use the subtract option, maybe a slightly smaller brush so it's less sensitive. And get rid of those bits there. Remember, you can always bring them back later because we're going to be using a mask. But this is the easiest way to do it. And same again every day to just add that little bit in like so. Now remember I've selected the background. So I really want to select him rather than the background. So I'm going to go to Select, and I can choose Invert pixel selection. And then I'm going to go up to my refine. And exactly as I did before. Just use the brush, nice large brush over here to refine his hair. Just go into those habits over there. Remember the bigger the brush, the more the software has got to figure this out in a long it'll take when you release the mouse button to do something. What a few hairs in there, Let's get rid of those as well. And possibly there might be something down here. Right. Okay. So I feel I'm happy with that. What I'm going to do now is to go down to the bottom. Instead of selection, I'm going to set output as a mask. So I don't have to make the mask. Once I've done it, I just click apply and automatically make a mask for me on that. Now you'll notice that this is still an image rather than a pixel layer in the mask are quite happy on that. So I've got him in there thinking that his eyes are a little bit too dark. So I want to lighten them up. Now we could go over here and we could use something like the do the dodge or the Burn tool to lighten or darken areas. But I want to make this non-destructive. So I'm actually going to go in here and I'm going to use an adjustment layer. Now the layer that I'm going to use is going to be curves. So in curves, I'm going to settle so of spine over here and I can pull it up. And what that'll do is we'll adjust the lightness of the image. Now, although I'm adjusting everything, I'm kind of looking more towards his eyes and I always go over the top when I start this. So we'll go over the top like that. Then what I want to do is I want to put a mask on this layer. So I'm going to use my paintbrush. And you can now see that I can paint out the areas that I don't want to affect. Incidentally, if you're thinking this is kind of a long way round, you are absolutely right. And I'll be showing you a shorter way later on. I could paint out all of all of that in there, so I don't want any of that. And then I can go over to white. And maybe with a slightly smaller brush, I could go in and just paint around the eye area. It was too dark. And he looks like he's Sunglasses on when he's been in the sun. Once again, I'll just change it to black and maybe paint out that little bit there and this little bit over here as well. Now of course this is too bright, but that doesn't matter. I can always double-click, go into my curves once again and just adjusted to suit so I can just get it to the right amount. That's normal. Suddenly they look very dark his eyes. And this is just going to lock them up a little bit in there. But of course I also want to go in and brighten up the pupils. So let's zoom into his pupils are over here. This time I'm actually going to do it with the selection tool. And I'm going to use a free hand selection tool just in the freehand mode at the top. And I'm going to put in a little area around here. And another one. So I'm on the Add option at the top there. Another one down here. I'm going to go to refine. You can see that's quite a harsh edge. So I'm going to add some feathering that'll sort of soften that edge a little bit as well. Now, I'm happy with that. I will click apply. And just as a selection. And then I'm going to go and do a new adjustment layer here. So I've got my selection there first, I'm going to go to my adjustment layer and I'll use something exactly as it did before curves. But these curves remember, only affecting the eye. They're not affecting anything else. So I can just adjust the eye like so. Remember, if you want to increase the contrast, you use an S curve over here. So we can maybe increase the contrast on his eye. A little bit. Like so. And I'll switch it on and switch that off. There we go. It's just brought in a bit more detail to his eye. Now while that selections there, maybe I want to try changing the color. So I'll go and do another one. So once again down here. And I will use the option for HSL, that's hue saturation and luminance. And then in the colors, I can just pull the colors over and you can see how I can adjust the color on his eye. Now, that's a little bit extreme, going both ways. Let's just adjusted towards the green side. Close that down and I can then de-select. Remember, those are on masks. So at any time, if I realize, oh dear, I've made a bit of a mistake there, there's a bright area there. I can go to the curves adjustment layer, use my paintbrush, get a smaller brush and paint out the area that I didn't want to select there as well. I think we've got a little bit in there. Let's zoom right out. I'm using a shortcut which is either control zero or Command Zero to see the whole image. August to fit the whole image into the screen. If I switch these off, you can see the before and the after. Over there. Try that out, use a selection and then add an adjustment layer, or work on your adjustment layer with the paintbrush. 67. Multiple Masks on a Layer With a Group: I'm going to open up this picture of a car. So the one I'm looking for is gonna be this little Volkswagen in here. I'm going to open that up. Now I want to put somebody into the car, so I'm going to go to file and place and go and find the person that I want. And I think they are that one there. So I'm going to place him. I don't want him to be too large. I suppose. His head's probably gonna be about that size in there. Now, I do need to cut them out. So using one of my selection tools and I will use my usual, I'm going to go in here and just select the areas that I want. As we've done so many times before, Let's zoom in a bit so I can be a bit more accurate over here. Make sure I get his ear. Maybe a slightly bigger brush to pick up some of the hair around their bits. Then I think I've gone a little bit too far with that. But you get the idea. Then of course, we go over to our refined edges. And I can then start to refine the edges here. So I'm going to look at the border width over here. So it's not too big. And I can just run around the edge, maybe a slightly smaller brush over there. In fact, I think I did a better job before I touch that. So I can of course go to my foreground of my background. I can just say this is actually foreground or this is background, depending on what I want. So I want that back there. And then carry on once again back to my mat. And I can then tweak that a little edge over there. It's going to do that but by his ear and that little section in there. So I think that's pretty much got it. Remember, it's not set in stone once you have actually gone in here and made a mask. Even if they're a bits missing, you can always fix them. So there he is, He's all nicely cut out. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to put him inside the car. Firstly, he's facing the wrong direction. So we're going to go to the Arrange menu. And over here, I can flip layers horizontally or vertically, and I'll just flip him. So he's now looking forwards inside the car. I'm going to hide him for a moment. So we'll click on Hide. And I then want to actually do another mask. So I want to make a mask of the windows of the car. So he will then be looking out through those windows or appear to be looking through those windows. Not to do that. I'm going to use a selection. So I'm going to go to the background. Here. I'm going to make a selection. Any tool that you prefer. I'm using the usual one to select that area in there, these bits over here. And of course, I will need to zoom right in because there's some areas that I don't want to affect it. So if I go to my Subtract and I can just subtract these bits here. Obviously won't be seen through those vices, but he will see through that. Just subtract some of these bits in here. The more time you can take it in here, the better ready to just make sure that the selection does look really good. And we'll go up here. He's not going to appear on that side of the car, so I'm not too worried about getting them. Absolutely perfect. He's never going to be over there. But he might be by the windscreen and sorry, by the windscreen wipers. So we'll just get rid of these over here and I'm going to add in those bits there, the little bits that are underneath. If this is a problem later, I can always fix it manually. Of course, this area here, he'll be behind that. So I might need to subtract this from my selection. And with a tiny, tiny brush, I might be able to just go up here and subtract that as well. Let's do this little section over there. I think I've virtually Got it. Got it right. If he was going to go on to the side window, once again, I'd have to spend a bit more time on the side by taking out some of these areas over here. Maybe the bit of metal down by the glass that might need to be removed. And I might need to add in this bit of glass down here. These ones really should not be selected. So I might have to subtract them as well. But to be fair, I don't think he's going to actually come out to that area. One last bit. Here this bit needs to be added in, so I'll add that little section in over there. Okay, now I've got my selection and I've gone to refine. And on the edge I'm just going to smooth out the edge a little bit further. It ever so slightly, just slightly soft in there. And do we need the mat edges or not? Well, you see if I switched them at edges off, I get a much better selection for this. If I switched them on, it's trying to blend those things together. So I will switch them off because I want a harsh edge, but I want to use my feathering and smoothing on there. I'm going to click on apply. Now I've already got a mask on the man's layer. So how else could I do this? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the man and I'm going to add a folder or a group. I click on the Group. And now what I want to do is I want to have the man inside the group. So when you drag things around, you can drag them into an object. And you can see now if I show and hide, the man is inside the group. If I'm on the group rather than on the man. If I was on the man there among the man layer, if among the group, I can then go and add a mask to the group. And we'll just switch on the man and you'll see now you will appear to be inside. Well, he will, once I've added the mask in there, sorry, I didn't click on the mask properly. So he now looks like he's actually inside that area. I'm going to de-select. So I'm just going to use my shortcut Control D or Command D to de-select. Now I can click on the man. I can move them around. So let's get the move tool over here and he can be moved anywhere around because of that mask. Now he's probably gonna be about there. He might need to be a bit smaller. I think if he was sitting back there, he probably be around that point over there in the car. So a bit smaller. Right? So so if you add a mask to a group, it will affect anything which is inside the group. I could add a passenger in here as well. I won't do that because that's going a little bit over the top. But I could add a passenger in as long as they were in the group, they would also be masked out. This group, this group mask as well. Let's add in one or two more things. So I'm going to go to the man's layer and I'm going to add another adjustment layer to darken him down because he's a bit on the light side for the car. So I would choose my curves. And I'm going to darken him down a little bit over here. I'm going to use a reverse S-curve. So it will not only darkening, but also maybe reduce the contrast on him as well. So remember, if you use an S, it increases the contrast and reverse S This Way reduces the contrast. And over here you can see once again, if I switched on, switched off, how it reduces the contrast. And because it's in the group, we are only affecting what we have in that group. So that can be switched on and switched off there. Let me add another one and I can add as many of these are like. So I'm going to add one more over here. And that's going to be vibrance. And in the vibrance I'm going to reduce the vibrance. And looking at him, he's still looks too bright when I go back out, out here. So I can go back to my curves, double-click on the curves, and maybe darken this down just a little bit. So. So if you need to add a second mask to a layer, you can do that by adding it to a group quite easily and anything that's in the group will then get masked. And you could add several passengers in there. As long as they were in the group, they would all be masked by the groups. Mask. Try that one out. 68. Create a New Poster Size Page: It's the final big project time. So I'm going to clean up my studios by going to Window studio and reset my studio. And we're going to make an A4 or a three. It's entirely up to you which size you would prefer. Document, which is going to be a poster. We're going to be doing a jazz club Poster to announce new acts. So I'm going to go to File and New, and we're going to create the document from scratch. Now I've gone over to the print option up the top here we were in web before for social media, I've gone to print, and in here I can choose from a 3A4. Now you might find that your page is actually in landscape format rather than portrait format. And you can just change it with those two little buttons at the top. So I'm going to go with a four to make an A4 poster. And I'm going to go to portrait in here. I'm going to just check my size, my page width and height is absolutely fine. The resolution is 300 DPI or dots per inch, also known as pixels per inch. I'm going to go across to color. In the color. Depending on where I want to actually print this out. I can choose either RGB, if it's maybe going to be opposed to which is going to actually be just sent out and PDF to round or center people. If it's going to go for commercial printing, I might then choose to use CMYK in there. So I'm going to, for this one, continue on with RGB mode. If you're working for a commercial printer doing stuff that's going to go for commercial printing, then I'd suggest going to CMYK. Let me click on Create. So here is my document in here. Now you might find that yours actually has a little margin in it. And in the View menu, you've got to show margins option. Now if that pops up, you might find it useful, you might not, but you can show and hide it by going to show margins. In there. Set up your page, show you margins if you wish, come back and we'll start adding some content to this. 69. Place Images & Blend With Masks: What we're going to be doing is bringing in some pictures. So I'm going to go to File, I'm going down to place, and I'm going to be placing some images. Now there's a folder called Project jazz poster, and we've got all the images over them. I'm going to start with the chapter, the saxophone. I'm going to pull this down so I'm gonna click and drag and get him to cover my entire page. Now I'm going across to the layers panel. I'm pulling the layers panel out so that we can start to see what we're doing in here. Let's move this down a little bit. I'm using a shortcut to get to the hand tool really quickly. And that is just the spacebar. If you hold down the spacebar, technically the hand tool and you can move your page around. Let go the spacebar to go back to whatever tool you were in before. Obviously, it doesn't work when you're in the text tool because you'll just be putting in spaces. Like to lock this picture down so I can't move it around, bowed, do anything by mistake. So by clicking over here I can click the little padlock at the top metal lock layer down. So if I try and move it, it won't allow me to. My first picture. I want to bring in a second picture and blend it with the first one. So once again, I'm going to go to File and Place. We're placing embedded all the time. I'm going to use this picture of a record player vinyl in there. I'm going to bring that in. So pop that in there. This is going to go along the bottom here. And I want to blend the two together. So I'm going to go onto the layer, add a mask. And with the mask, I'm going to go up to my paintbrush. Choose a large soft brush. I'm going with a very large soft brush, which I've got black. And I'm just going to paint this out to blend that right in there. You can use some of the other options in here as well. From normal, you can try mixing those layers together with different options over here. So I'll just make sure I clicked on the left first and then I can blend it with other options in there. Some of them might look quite interesting. It really depends on the image itself. I think I'll stick with lightened. Now. Let's bring in a third image now as well. By the way, I'm just going to move this image across slightly over there. And you can now see I've got a problem. So I'm going back to my mask. I'll use my paintbrush and just paint that area out. So I just want this, the feel of the vinyl record in the corner. Now, the vinyl record or the tone arm for the record is in color. We want this posted to be predominately black and white, maybe with just the logo of the club in color. But we'll fix that later. I'm going to go to file and place and place a second image in here. Let's move my layers out the way I'm going to use this microphone. Once again, it's a color image there, but we will make it black and white soon enough. So I'm going to bring that in. I'm going to cut it out. So using one of my selection tools. And as always, I'm going to go with the brush selection tool, zoom in a bit, and paint the area that I want to select. So I'm going to have to go all the way along here and all the way along there to make sure I get all those little details in. I think I've got them all apart from that one. And then down here, we'll get these details there. And down to the Chrome there. Now that I've done that, I'm going to go and add a mask. I'll click on the Mask button there, choose mask, and that'll mask it out. Now, I've forgotten something really important and that was to refine. So Control or Command Z to undo. Go to refine in here, make sure that you have your mat edges selected. I'm gonna put a little bit of smoothing on there to smooth out any of those edges. Remember, you can always see problems in here. So I'm going to just go across to my foreground and say that this is a foreground object over there and paint that little bit back in again over there. Let's click Apply. And I can then once again and my mask. Let's de-select that. And that's Control D or Command D to de-select really quickly. Now, that's okay. It probably needs moving around a little bit. So I'm just going to go and move it. They can see what happens when by default your unmask, when you move it, it moves the mask. So undo it, make sure you're on your layer. And you can then move it into the right position. And I'm going to rotate that around a little bit as well. Once again, you can see the issue that we have over here with some of the other image coming through. You can always go back to your mask and hide it again. Let me bring in one more image and blend it. And then you can try these three images. So I'm going to go to File Place. I'm going to find the woman's singer and place her in here. So I'm really actually looking to try and get her head roughly the same size as the saxophone player. And I'll just zoom out a little bit so I can do that. Now, a little trick that I do here is to sometimes if I'm trying to match things up, just go into my opacity and reduce the opacity on one layer so I can see them both at the same time. And we can then change the size of that until they are roughly the same size. And I can take my pasty write-up. Now, of course, I want to get rid of some of these details so I can see the, the other layers below it. So I will add a mask. Use my paintbrush and a very big brush to just brush in some of these bits. Really, I'm just blending the images together. And if you go to find you think, oh my goodness, I really should get a bit more of her and just go over to white. And you can then start to paint things back a little bit as well. So combination of black and white to paint or hide bits and try that out. Get to that stage. If you don't like the pictures that I've chosen, find some more. You can either find them in your stuck over here, just search for jazz or singers or something like that. Or you can go to another website that I use where these images come from, which is royalty-free. It's like Pixabay. It's called Unsplash. So you can choose images from there. You don't have to register, you can just download them directly. Try that out. 70. Adjustment Layers to Affect Single Layers: Let's make all of these layers black and white. So I'm going to go to the top layer, click on the top layer, and go to my adjustments. And I'm going to choose black and white in the Adjustments layer, and that makes everything go black and white. I can still affect some of the color areas using these sliders here. So e.g. if I go to read, I could make the singer a little bit brighter or darker because she's in color and her skin tone tends to be a bit red and yellows. I can use those two to adjust the lightness on her. I can try some of these other colors as well if I had different colors in there, because that's the topmost layer, it affects every single layer underneath. Of course, you can see the issue. We've got the saxophone player who is very contrasty. And then we've got the singer on the right with the lighting is quite soft. So I would like to actually increase the contrast just on the singer. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the single layer. So I'm going to make sure I click on a single layer. I'm going to go and add another adjustment for contrast. Now we could either use levels, if you prefer to use levels, that's absolutely fine. Or you can go to Curves. I'm going to go to curves in here. And remember in our curves to make things more contrasty, we use an S shape to make things less contrasty. We use a reverse S. I'm going to click in the middle, and I'm going to make the whites whiter over there to make them more contrasty. And go to the bottom and click over there and make the darks dark. And you can see how she's getting more contrasty in there and go to the middle tones and then either lighten or darken things based on the middle tones. Now that I've got that and close this, of course, this layer or the adjustment layer is affecting not just her, but it's actually affecting him and making him even more contrasty. I only want the curves adjustment to affect her layer. So I'm going to drag her lead down. I'm sorry, I'm going to drag the curves down onto her layer over there and just drop it. And now what will happen if I just click on the little arrow by her layer is that this adjustment, the curves will only affect her layer. If I double-click now and I can make these changes, you can see it's only affecting her layer. I'm really I'm just looking to get something where the the adjustment makes her a little bit more contrasty. Not too much, but just to sort of match the field that we've got with him instantly while we're in here, you might want to rename some of your layers as well. And you can do that by just double-clicking on the layer and renaming it. The names come in from the name on the saved file. So yours might look a bit different to mine. 71. Add Logo & Text: Let's bring in another image. So I'm going to go to File and Place. I'm going to find this logo and bring that in as well. So the, the clubs logo is going to go between the two of them. In there. Once again, I will just reduce the opacity slightly so that I can see exactly where it's going to be and place it accordingly. So it's going to sit between the two of them like that. Now, I want to get rid of some of the extra area around here. By the way, if yours comes in and it's gone black and white, It's because you might find that it's actually below some of the other layers and that makes it go black and white. If you put it above the black and white adjustment layer, it'll go back to being in color. I'm going to add a mask to that layer. I'm going to use my paintbrush and just paint out some of the areas in there that I don't want over there. Just like so and maybe get rid of that line up the top. I'd like the, I like the little light above the social jazz live logo. Now I've got that in. I'm going to go and put in an area where I can actually put in the details of the new act. So we're going to use something we haven't looked at in the course yet. And that is a shape. I'm going down to my shapes over here, and it's just below the pen. We go into the rectangle tool and I can then change the fill color for that rectangle. Now, I'll be changing this as we go. So minds on white and I'm going to put in a little square over there. Now I could of course, just leave things like that and say, Okay, this is all set up. The club will print it out and they will handwrite what new acts that are coming in the bottom there. Or if I wanted to put in the texts myself, I can do that. So I'm going to be four. I put the text in, just reduce the opacity of this white shape. And the reason I'm doing that is that we can see some of the details coming through behind it looks quite, quite nice like that where we can actually see the details, but the black text will still show up. So I'm going to go along and I'm going to go and get my Type Tool. Remember that's right down here, autistic text. But then I'm going to click and drag to put my text in here. So I'm going to just type in some texts. New acts. And I'll do return. And this will be for 12th of January. I'm going to select the bottom bit of text and change the size to something a little bit smaller. And I'm going to center align it as well. We've got some align options along the top for the text. And then I can move my bit of text into the right position over there. Now sometimes when you bring in your text, you might find that something weird has happened and the text is actually gone into the layer below itself and become part of that layer in there. And if that happens, it's very difficult to move your text around. So if that's part of the layer or it's disappeared, you can just drag it out so you can ungroup it from the layer below. But what about if I thought that white area just not doing it for me, it looks too big and chunky. I'm actually going to go to that white shape, change the color to black. And let's just adjust the opacity slightly so we can see a bit more of the picture coming through. And then I'm going to go to my text and select my text. Just select all of it and change the text color, maybe to white. We've got the reverse of that. No. I'm happy with the way this is, this is going to be printed off on a local office printer or something like that. So I'm going to save it out. First of all, File and Save As. And we're saving this as an affinity file. So I'll call this jazz poster. And we'll just put this, I'm going to put this onto my desktop over there. So that is my editable version with all the layers intact. Just before I do my final export, I want to check it out without this line around the outside. So I'm going to go to view and switch off show margins in then just make sure that everything is okay on that. Remember at anytime you can just go to any of the layers and move them around if they're not quite in the right position in there. So I'm happy with that now, I'll just do another quick save and I'm going to go to File, choose Export. And because I'm just going to be emailing this across to the club and they're going to be printing out on the local printer. I will just save it out as a JPEG file in here. In the next course or level two of Affinity Photo, we will look more into saving things out footprint using CMYK. For now we're just gonna go with jpeg local printing and click on Export. Once again, I'm just going to save that out onto my desktop. 72. Well Done & Thank You: Well, we've got to the end of this course now. Well done. I'm sure you're doing amazing things with your images. But don't worry, there is a level two cores. And during that course, I'm going to take you on to all the things that we haven't covered yet. The advanced features looking at the different persona's, the liquefy persona, as well as the HD persona as well. Don't forget you're not on your own. Post any questions that you've got. Post your pictures. We love seeing what you've done. And most importantly, just enjoy the software. See you in the next one.