Create Cinematic Scenes in Adobe Photoshop

1. introduction: Hey guys and welcome to this Photoshop compositing course, The Mandalorian. My name is Robyn and I'm gonna be your instructor in this course. In this course, we're gonna be recreating a cinematic sunset scene from Star Wars. And you're going to learn how to create an amazing edit completely from scratch using stock images. To achieve the composite like this, we're gonna be using many tools and techniques in Photoshop. You're going to learn how to create the sky from scratch to create the fakes on and make it look realistic by applying layer style to it. Painting realistic lighting effects on top of that, and applying heat distortion using displacement maps. Then create the seamless guide by using different cloud images and blending them together. You will learn how to realistically blend multiple images together using different techniques. And this can help you become more creative and uncomfortable and solving problems and approaching challenges differently when you're doing heavy exact, It's you need the process of creating this composite. You're also going to learn how to use different methods to remove backgrounds faster and more effectively and make changes a lot more easily. Using a non-destructive workflow. You will learn how to match color and luminosity and create depth using advanced and beginner friendly techniques. Lastly, you're gonna learn how to paint lighting effects and rim light that will make your composites miles better and lot more realistic. This course, for, this course is for anyone that does compositing and photo editing. Familiar with Photoshop tools like layer masks and adjustment layers, and wants to level up his compositing skills. This course comes with all the project files and images that you need to follow along. If you're ready to take your Photoshop compositing and skills to the next level. And I'm looking forward to seeing you inside. 2. Creating The Sky and the Sun: Welcome to lesson one of this compositing course, The Mandalorian. This is what you're gonna be creating in this course. I am very excited to show you how to create the composite like this from scratch. And you're going to be learning a lot of techniques in this course. In this lesson, we're going to be creating the background, and that includes adding the sun and the mountains. I hope you already downloaded the project files. If not, make sure to download them now and follow along with me. Okay, So without any further ado, let's get started on creating the background in this lesson. I'm going to start by creating a new document. And the dimension is going to be 4200 by 2300. And I'm going to click Okay, the first thing I would like to do is create the solid color, which is going to be the primary color of the sky. I'm going to choose any color for now so I can see what I'm doing because we're gonna be creating the sun on top of it. To create the sun, you're just going to take the ellipse tool. Then choose the very bright orange color. I'm going to click Okay, and then just create the circle in the middle. You can hold the Shift key while drawing with the Ellipse Tool to maintain the proportion. And also while you are still holding the mouse, you can use the space bar to move the shape around. The sun is going to be big in this composite. Scale, it up to right about this size. Okay, so we're gonna be adding layer style to this shape to make it glowing. First, I'm going to double-click on the shape and give it a little bit of color. Next, I'll make sure it is centered. So click on Control a to select everything. Then use the horizontal alignment tool just to make sure it is centered. Then I'm just going to push it a little bit to the left. Now we'll reduce the opacity of the shape layer so I can see the background. Then I'll double-click on the solid color to bring the style dialogue box. And I'm going to add the gradient overlay. You can see the gradient is visible behind the shape layer and you can click on the canvas and drag around. I'm just going to drag it to the center and align it with his son. And I'm actually going to reduce the opacity of this shape layer to see the gradient in a little bit better. Then I'll go to the Gradient Overlay Layer Style, and I'll start by increasing the scale. Then I'm going to change the color on the left, too bright orange color. I'm going to make the right one a lot more darker. That's gonna make the effect of the light source in the center. All right, I'm going to click Okay, That's the first layer style. I'll bring back the opacity of the sun layer to a 100%. Then what I'm going to do next is paint more lighting effects behind the sun. We're going to be doing that on a new layer. Then I'll take the brush tool and make sure it is soft. By the way, you can hold Alt or Option and click and drag with the right mouse button left and right to make it bigger or smaller. And you can also drag it up and down and make it softer or harder. I'm going to take a big soft brush and reduce the flow to about 10%. The color is going to be a bright yellowish color. Then change the blending mode to screen. Then I'm just going to paint at the edges to create the lighting effect and make the sun look like it is glowing. Okay, that looks good. I'm just going to need to paint a little bit more at the edges. We can also make the background color darker later to make the effect more prominent. The other thing I want to do is add an outer glow layer style to the sun. Again, double-click on the layer and choose outer glow. This time. I'll change the color to a bright yellow. Increase the opacity and also the size all the way up. You can change the blending mode to screen if you want to. But that's not gonna make the big difference because the background is not that dark. Next, I'll also add an inner glow layer style. This time the color is darker yellow, and I'll increase the size accordingly. This is actually a close representation of how the sun will look like on his sunset. And you'll see how it's going to look like when we finish the composite. You can also look at some reference images if you want to help you with this process. That being said, I'm gonna be doing one last change to the sun. And that is blurring the edges a little bit with the Shape Layer selected and inside the Properties panel, click on this icon to see the mask properties. And from here you're going to increase the federal a little bit to blur the edges. Four pixels is fine for now. And we can always change that in the future. Then I'm going to select these two layers and group them. I'll rename this group to sun. Also group this one and call it background. That includes this lesson. Make sure you are following along with me and your project looks exactly like mine. And in the next lesson we're going to be creating the mountains in the foreground. 3. Creating The Mountains: In this lesson, we're gonna be creating the mountains in the foreground. And we will do that by combining multiple images together to create a seamless mountain scene and match the luminosity and the color along the way. Let's start by importing the images. So go to file open. And you can see that we have the keyboard shortcut Control or to import. So I'll be using the shortcut throughout this tutorial. I'm going to start with this image selected and click on Open. I'll import the second image, which is this one. The last one is going to be this picture of a sunset. We'll start working on this one. We're gonna be using this part of the mountain and extracted from the background. But first we need to remove the girl from the image. And we can easily do that with content aware fill. What you will need to do is take the lasso tool, then make a rough selection around the subject. Like so. Then hold Shift backspace to bring the field dialog box, then choose Content Aware from the drop-down and click OK. And that's going to fill this selection by taking information from the rest of the image. Now selecting the mountain is also very simple. You can take the Quick Selection Tool and simply make a selection around the mountain. It's gonna be easy to select because we have a clear contrast between the sky and the mountains. You can also hit Q to enter the Quick Mask Mode View and double-check your selection. I think that looks very good. And I'm just going to create a layer mask. Only this image like this for now. And we will move on to extracting the other images. So for this one, it's pretty much the same thing. I'm going to take the Quick Selection Tool and make a selection around this bottom area of the mountain. Use Q to check your selection in Quick Mask Mode. And if you find any area that needs to be included to the selection, you can hold Shift and paint with the Quick Selection Tool to add that area. I'm just going to double-check my selection again with Quick Mask Mode. And it looks like we need to exclude this area. And you can do that by holding Alt or option. And this time you will see the plus becomes minus. I'm just going to create the layer mask again to mask the background. And we need to copy this image to our main document. Select the layer, click on Control C to copy it to the clipboard. Then go back to the document and click on Control V to paste it. Close this file and I'm not going to save it. We're not going to be needing this anymore. Then I'll copy the other image. And based inside the document. We will also going to need this one. So Copy and Paste. Now we are ready to blend these images together. As you saw in the original images, the further away the subject is, in this case the mountain, the more hazy it's gonna be darker. So we're gonna make sure that applies to this composite and rearrange the layers to be from the darkest mountain in the foreground and slightly becomes less darker than the background. And we will use adjustment layers if we need to. Before we do that, I'm going to convert each layer to smart object because I want to keep my resolution high when I scale them down. Now I'll turn this layer off. And this one, we're going to start with this mountain. And it's a little bit big, so I'm going to scale it down a little bit. This one is going to be behind it. I'm going to flip it horizontally actually and drag it to the bottom like so. And maybe make it a little bit smaller. I'm just gonna make sure to hide the edges of this mountain by rotating it. The last image is going to be at the very bottom. It needs to be way smaller. So I'll scale it down. I'm just focusing on that out-of-focus part of the mountain in the back. Now I'm going to add an inverted layer mask. And you can do that by holding Alt eruption and clicking on the Layer Mask icon. And now I'm just going to take the brush tool, make sure my foreground color is set to white. And I'm just going to reveal this area. You can use X to toggle between the foreground and the background colors. And now I'll switch to black. I'm going to also reduce the flow. And I'm just going to use the big soft brush to soften that edge and blend it with the background. That looks if for now. And we're going to be adding clouds and adjustment layers on top of it, so that edge is not going to be visible. I think I'm going to make this mountain a little bit more bigger. I can use my arrow keys to nudge it in place. We're going to go with this composition. And now we need to match the luminosity and the color. Before I do that, I think I want to make the sun also a little bit bigger. Remember the objects that are closer should be darker than the ones in the foreground. I'm going to start with the mountain in the back. And I'm going to add the levels adjustment layer. Then create the clipping mask by holding Alt and clicking between the two layers. That's gonna make sure this adjustment layer will only affect the image below it. And I'm going to need to drag the mid tone slider to the left to make it lighter. Let's add another adjustment layer on top of this layer. Create the clipping masks first, and this layer is going to be darker. Then one last adjustment layer for this image. I'm gonna do the same thing. Okay, so now let's start match the color of these mountains to the background. And I always like to convert my image to black and white to check the luminosity. And I usually use the check layer to do that by greeting is solid color. Then choose 50% gray from the color picker. The hex code for that is 808080. Click Okay, and now you need to change the blending mode to color. This will convert the image to black and white. And using this solid color technique will not affect the luminosity of the image. And now we have eliminated color and we can focus only on the luminosity and fix the contrast because colors can be perceiving. But this way, you make sure the luminosity is right before you move on to fixing color. I think the contrast is looking good. Now, I'm going to turn this layer off. And one more thing before we fix the color. Let me zoom in to show you. There's a little bit of fringing here at the edges from the selection and I want to remove it. The way we can fix this is simple. We need to add the layer mask to this first. So hold Control or Command and click on the layer thumbnail to load it as a selection and then create the layer mask. Now we want to select the area that has the fringing. You can use the Lasso tool for that. Now we need to go to filter other minimum. This filter is going to push the layer mask boundaries inside. And you can see that when I increase the radius, I'm just going to push the mask inside, just buy one or two pixels. You have the preview checkbox to see the before and after. And I think two pixels is fine. And I'm going to click Okay. Now that fringing is no longer there, I'm going to double-check if there is any area that has fringing, but it looks like clean enough for me. Alright, so let's move on to color correction. And I'm going to be adding the color balance adjustment layer on top of levels and create a clipping mask again. Then I'm just going to add the yellow and red to the shadows, mid tones and highlights. I'm gonna be doing that for the mountains at the top as well. One important thing that you need to know is that these color adjustment layers also affect the luminosity. And let me turn on the Check layer to show you what I'm talking about. And this is where we check layer come in handy. If I turn this color balance adjustment layer on and off, you will see how it is affecting the color. In order to avoid that, we can turn its blending mode to color. Now this adjustment layer is only affecting color. And I'm gonna do that for the other adjustment layers as well. Alright, so that's gonna be it for this lesson. We're going to continue working on the sky in the next lesson by adding the clouds. 4. Adding The Clouds Part 1: In this lesson, we're going to continue working on this guy by adding the clouds to create the sunset scene. I'm going to show you different ways to extract clouds from the background. First, I want to organize these adjustment layers by grouping them together. So select the first layer, hold Shift, and select the last one and group them together using Control G. And I'm going to call this layer of mountains. Let's start by importantly images. I'll select the first image, which is this one. Choose it and choose open. As you can see, I chose images with the similar lighting conditions to my compositing goal. And that's very important because the lighting and the color is going to match a lot easier. And it's gonna be easier to blend the images together with the fewer adjustment layers. I'm going to actually copy this image and paste it inside my document because I want to see how it's going to look like with my background active. I also want the clouds to be behind the mountains. The goal here is to remove the background and keep only the clouds. And to me I found that the easiest way to do that is by using blend. If to access blend, you need to double-click on the layer. And right here at the bottom, you have the Blend If options. Because this guy is lighter than the clouds in this image, we can tell Photoshop to hide everything in this brightness level by dragging the right slider to the left. At the moment, the edges are very harsh and we need to do something about that. So what you can also do with Blend If is make the selection software by splitting this slider using alt or option. Now you can make a transition and make the selection smaller. Now we are able to bring back a lot more details at the edges. I'm also mostly focusing on the big cloud at the top because that's what we're gonna be using for the moment to create this guy. Now we can click Okay, when you are happy with the selection. This already looking very good, but I want to flip the image vertically because you're gonna be adding more clouds. And I need that light in the clouds to be at the bottom. I'm just going to drag it here at the bottom. I'm going to rotate it a little bit to hide that edge. On the left. I can use the arrow keys to move it around. Now, what I'm going to do is create an inverted layer mask by holding Alt or Option. And I will use the Brush tool and paint with white to reveal only the area that I'm going to need. I'll make sure the flow is low and I'm going to start revealing the clouds here at the bottom. If there's any area that you want to remove, you can switch to black by hitting eggs. Now you are doing the opposite and hiding the unwanted areas by painting with black. I want to fill the area on the right. I'm just going to duplicate the layer by clicking Control J, alternative the layer by shift clicking on the layer mask. And I'm just gonna move it a little bit to the right. Flip it horizontally to align it with the other clouds. You can also reduce the opacity to see a little bit better. That looks good. I'll bring back the opacity and I'm going to also fill the layer mask with black and do the same thing by painting with a white brush to only reveal the ground on the right-hand side. Okay, So I need to fix the edges because they are a little bit harsh and I can double-click again on the layer and modify the Blend If options. Now even if I did that, I still don't like the edges. What I'm going to do is add a levels adjustment layer on top of it. Then I'll try to increase the contrast to hide that white fringing. I don't want this to be visible everywhere. It's all invert the layer mask and use my brush tool to only reveal this adjustment layer at the edges. We're gonna be adding more clouds. I'm going to duplicate the original cloud layer and I'm going to drag it to the left, alternate off the layer mask at the moment so I can see the image. This time. I'm going to fill the left area. Just the same as I did with the other grounds. Fill the layer mask with black and use my brush again to review it here on the left. Now to avoid these clouds look in the same when we duplicate them, we can change their shape using Liquify. To do that, make sure to select the layer and not the layer mask and then go to Filter Liquify. What I'll do first is I'm going to increase the pressure a little bit. Then down here in the View Options, you want to make sure to check show image. Also, you can check show backdrop so that you are able to see the layers underneath it. I'm going to use the Forward Warp tool to stretch the edges and change the shape of the cloud. Now I'm going to accept the changes. And as you can see, the cloud is looking a little bit different than before. And here's the before and after. I'm going to also create the levels adjustment layer on top of this, create the clipping mask. And I'm going to add a bit more contrast to the edges. All right, so it's still going to need to add more clouds to the sky. So I'll end this lesson here and we can continue adding more clouds in part two of this lesson. 5. Adding The Clouds Part 2: Let's continue adding the clouds to the sky. And in this lesson we're going to explore different techniques to extract the clouds from the background. I have the same image we used before on another document, and this time we will be using a different part of the Cloud. I'm gonna take the lasso tool and I'm going to make your rough selection around this cloud here. And I'll show you what we're gonna do with it in a second. So now what I'm going to do is copy this part of the image using Control or Command C. Then I'm gonna paste it to my document using control V. And I'm going to place it on the left-hand side. We will start by using blend F to remove the background. And I tried this before. And using Blend If is not gonna be enough to fully extract this cloud from the background. And I'll show you another method to further enhance the selection. That's as far as I can go with Blend. If without destroying the details of the cloud, I'm going to click Okay and accept the changes. And as you can, It's still have a lot of the background left. So what I'm going to do first is make a copy of this layer. And I'm going to convert this layer to smart object. The reason I converted it to smart object is by doing so, we turn the blend if changes to transparency. And now I can control click on the thumbnail to load it as a selection. What I'm going to do next is double-click on my first layer and then remove the blend if changes. Now with the selection active, am going to add the layer mask to it. Now if I Alt click on the Layer Mask, you will see how it looks like. We still going to need to work a little bit more on this layer mask. What you can also do is take the brush tool and then change the blending mode to overlay. Make sure the foreground color is black. Then you're going to paint at the edges with the low flow to remove that fringing left from the sky at the edges. The overlay blending mode is only going to remove the areas that it's not a 100% white. I'm going to also add a levels adjustment layer. And then I'm going to increase the contrast to enhance the Cloud is a little bit. If I Alt click on the Layer Mask again, you will see that the clouds are not a 100% white and you still see the transparency. And so what I'm going to do is take the brush tool again. This time I'm going to paint with white to enhance the Cloud. We need to hide this background area here so you know what to do, switch to black and mask it out. What you're going to do is paint with a black at the edges to remove the background and with white to enhance the Cloud. Continue going back and forth between black and white until we have the Cloud extracted. You want to make sure to paint with a low flow so we have more control. This cloud is green now we're going to keep on adding the clouds. And this time I'm going to take the lasso tool and copy this part of the Cloud. By the way, you can use Shift to add to the selection and Alt to exclude from the selection. Now click on Control C to copy it. Then go back to the document and paste it. Okay, We're going to do the same thing for this one. I'm going to double-click on the layer. And then with the Blend If options, I'm going to try to hide the background and remove as much as I can from it. I'm going to stop right here and I'm going to click okay. Now again, we're going to make a copy of this layer first, then convert it to a Smart Object. Then add the layer mask to my original layer. We're going to be doing the same thing, this cloud as well. You will use the overlay brush technique to hide the background. For the sake of keeping this part of the tutorial short, you will see me speeding up some of the redundant tasks after I explain it to you, of course. Most of these better parts are me just doing the same thing over and over again. Even if I speed it up, you'll be able to see exactly what I'm doing. I finished cleaning. This cloud. And just like what I did with the first one, I use the overlay brush to clean out the edges. And I also added the levels adjustment layer on top of it to enhance the contrast a little bit. What I'm going to be doing now is add more clouds and I will import this one next. I'm going to copy and paste it to my document. And I'll use blend if, again, to hide the background. And I need this one to be at the very bottom. I'm actually going to flip it horizontally and try to find the best part of these clouds to add them to my composition. I like this part of the clouds. I'm going to accept the changes. And then I'm going to invert my layer mask by holding Alt or Option and clicking on the Layer Mask icon. Then with my brush tool, I'll change the color to white to reveal this part of the cloud by painting with a low flow. I like the composition so far. We're not going to worry about the color not matching for the moment. We will match the color when we finish putting everything together. I'm just going to import the next image. And it's going to be these clouds. To extract these clouds, I'm going to use the different method this time. First I'm going to take the lasso tool and select the left part of the Cloud. Then I'll copy it and paste it into my document again. Now I'll take the quick selection tool this time. I'm just going to make your rough selection around the clouds. Then create the layer mask. And this time we're going to use select and mask for this image to refine the edges. Now you're going to use the Refine Edge tool to paint around the edges door store some of the details of the cloud. The refine edge tool is actually pretty good for masking all kinds of complicated edges. And not just where. I'm going to make sure my output is set to layer mask. Then I'm going to click Okay. This is how the layer mask looks like. And I'm going to drag this one to the job to fill up this area of the sky. I don't like the shape of the cloud at the moment. So we can use the liquify filter again to warp the clouds and change its shape a little bit. First, I want to convert this layer to smart object, and then we need to go to Filter Liquify. I'll take the Forward Warp tool. I'm going to choose the big brush size and I'm just going to work the edges like we did before to change the shape of the clouds a little bit. I'm going to go back to the cloud image. And this time I'm going to take the lasso tool and copy this right part of the Cloud. Again, I'm going to use the same techniques to this cloud from this guy. I'm going to speed up this part also. What I did next is I was experimenting with the clouds by flipping them vertically and horizontally until I find what I'm looking for. I also ended up copying this cloud from the bottom and placed it at the top. Use the liquefy tool to change its shape. All right, so that's going to be it for this part of the course, which is adding the clouds to this guy and also this lesson. And in the next lesson, we're going to start matching the color of the clouds with this guy. 6. Color Correcting The Clouds: In this lesson, we're gonna move on to color correct in the clouds to match them with this guy. And also we'll be adding some lighting effects to enhance the sunlight. As you can see the color and luminosity or off, we will be adding some adjustment layers to bring them all to the same color and luminosity tone. I'm going to start by adding a color balance adjustment layer to this cloud layer, then create the clipping mask. What I'm going to do, it simply add more red and yellow to the shadows, mid tones and highlights to match it with the color of the sky. The next one is this cloud, and it's a little bit dark. So I'm going to click on the Levels Adjustment Layer. And I'm going to decrease the contrast a little bit. Then I'll also add a color balance adjustment layer for this one. Again, I'm going to add more red and yellow accordingly. For this cloud in the background, I'm not going to add the color balance because I want to also change the luminosity. Instead, I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer and create the clipping mask. What I'm going to do is check colorize and then increase the saturation. And the hue slider. I'm going to change the color to orange. And also with the lightness and saturation sliders, I'll try to match the color and the luminosity with the rest of the crowds. In this case, I want this cloud to be less visible. I can increase the lightness to reduce the luminosity a little bit. All right, The next one is this cloud at the top. And as you can see, there's a little bit of fringing out the edges. And to fix that, we can select the layer, then change the blending mode to Multiply. I can see that I missed part of the Cloud with the layer mask. So I'm going to take the brush tool and paint with white to restore that part. Okay, So at the moment the Cloud is a little bit dark and that's not a problem. We have complete control with adjustment layers. What we can do is add the Levels Adjustment Layer. And then I can reduce the contrast a little bit by dragging the mid tone slider to the left, and also make the darks a little bit less darker. That's pretty much what we need to match the color of the clouds with this guy. But what I would like to do next is enhanced the light on the clouds by adding some rim light at the edges. If you take a look at some reference images of clouds on his sunset, you will see that they will have some glowing light at the edges because of the backlight from the sun. In order to do that, what I'm going to do is select this cloud and then I'm going to make a copy of it by holding Alt or Option and clicking and dragging to make a copy underneath it. Then I'm going to move it a little bit to the top. And you can use the arrow keys to do that. Now I can change the Blending Mode to Color Burn. And as you can see with the color burn blending mode, the Cloud was during to a bright golden color. Now we need to soften the edges a little bit, and we can do that by adding a little bit of blur. First, I'm going to convert this layer to Smart Object and then go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. I'm just going to increase the radius until those details fade away. As you can see, that makes the cloud and the sun look a lot more realistic. Now going to be doing this, the rest of the clouds. And also this is going to be only visible near the center where the sun is going to be using layer masks whenever I need to hide the effect from the areas that it doesn't need to be visible. And you can also experiment with other blending modes. I used the color dodge blending mode for some of the clouds. For the clouds at the edges, I use the layer mask to reveal the light underneath it with the smaller brush size to paint a thin rim light. The edges. And that's what it's going to make the clouds look realistic. Take your time on this step to paint the lighting effects. And I hope you are following along using the source images. And we will resume in the next step. Alright, so I just finished painting the lighting effects or the clouds. And hopefully you've been following along in your projects looks similar to this. The color and the lighting on the clouds are now matching together. And now we need to paint more light in the front that comes from the sun. I'm going to start by enhancing the light on the edges of the sun. Remember that we added in Inner Glow Layer Style for that, I'm going to find that layer style. I'm going to increase the opacity of the outer glow a little bit. Next, I'm going to also modify the layer style of the background layer. And I'm just going to darken the edges a little bit. Emphasize the light in the center. The good thing about non-destructive workflow by working with layer style and in Smart Object is that we can go back at any time and make changes instead of re-creating the effect. Alright, so that's all I wanted to change for the Layer Style. Now we're going to be painting some lighting effects. The center, I'm going to create a new solid color layer inside the background group and underneath the sun, I'm going to pick a bright orange color. We need to invert the layer mask first using control i. Then you're going to take the big soft brush, change the foreground to white and also reduce the flow. And slowly start painting some soft light to create the halo behind the sun. You're gonna need to be careful not to paint too much. Because if you do, the sun will start to blend with the sky and we don't want that. But if that happens to you, you always have the ability to reduce the opacity, change the color, or make the background darker. That's the light we have been painting so far. I'm gonna be adding more in the front. I'm going to duplicate this layer and drag it to the top and also change the blending mode to screen. Then I'm going to reset the mask by filling it with black. This time I'm going to paint some lighting effects, mainly on the top of the mountains and the clouds to create that glow in light of the sunset. Feel free to change the color if you need to. And I'm gonna make the color a little bit darker. Be it for the lighting effects. And as you can see, it also enhances the light on the sun. Okay, I'm gonna end this lesson here and we also just finish it creating the background. We're gonna move on to the next part of this course, which is adding the characters in the foreground. 7. Adding The Tie Fighters: Now that we have finished creating the background, we'll start adding the foreground elements and the characters. In this video, we're gonna be adding the TIE fighters. And then we're gonna match their color and luminosity with the background. I'll start by importing the image and we're gonna be using this one. It's the front-facing 3D render of a TIE Fighter, and it doesn't look that realistic, but it's going to be barely visible and out-of-focus. And you will see how we are going to match it with the background. We're going to need to remove the background first. The easiest way for this image is to use the magic wand tool. And you just need to click on the background once and it will be selected. You can also click on Q to enter the Quick Mask mode and double-check your selection. And then we can just create the layer mask to hide the background. You can see that there's a little bit of freezing at the edge. And that happens in Photoshop sometimes when you add the layer mask to get rid of it, you can take the Rectangular Marquee Tool and make a selection around the whole image. Then to exclude the TIE Fighter, you're going to hold Alt or option and make a selection around it. Now we have only the edges excited and we just need to fill this area with black. All right, so now that we have removed the background, let's start by matching the luminosity first. Since this TIE Fighter is backlit and there's a strong sunlight behind it, it should be much more darker. So I'm going to add the levels adjustment layer on top of it. Then we need to create the clipping mask to this adjustment layer, so it's only affecting the layer beneath it. Then what you need to do is make the whites much more darker by dragging the slider to the left. Now we need to match the color and I'm gonna add a hue saturation adjustment layer. Usually I use color balance, but this image doesn't have any color information. So we're going to use a hue saturation and check the colorized checkbox. I'm going to just increase the saturation and change the hue to orange. I can also increase the lightness and thus going to add the haze effect to give the illusion that it's back in the distance. We're gonna make it smaller later. Now I'm going to click on Control or Command T and make this TIE Fighter smaller. I'm going to also make two more copies of it. I'm going to select the layer and all the adjustment layers above it. And then click and drag using Alt or Option to copy it. This one is going to be smaller. I'm going to make one more copy and make this one even smaller as well to make it look like it is far away. It looks like I missed the part of the fringing. I'm going to select it and remove the fringing by film this area with black. Now I'm going to select all of these layers and group them together. Then I'm going to call this group type II errors. You're going to need to make the TIE fighters in the back less darker because they are further away. So I'm going to modify the adjustment layers accordingly and increase the brightness. I'm trying to increase the brightness on this one. And at the same time not to blend into the clouds in the background. I'm going to increase the brightness on this one also. And it's going to be even lighter. I'm going to add one last step in this lesson and that is adding e curves adjustment layer at the very top. I'm going to add some contrast by increasing the highlights and darkening the shadows. As you can see, this adjustment layer added a lot of red to the image. And that's because it's also affecting color and not just the luminosity. To make sure this adjustment layer only affects the luminosity, you can change the blending mode to Luminosity. Now we don't have to worry about this adjustment layer affecting color. And I'm actually going to make the darks a little bit more darker. That's going to be it for this lesson. And the next lesson we're gonna start adding the characters in the foreground. 8. Adding The Mandalorian Part 1: In this lesson, we're gonna be adding the Mandalorian in the foreground. So let's import the first image that we are going to be working on today, which is the Mandalorian. We're going to remove the background using the pen tool, which is the most accurate tool to cut out the background for this image. I'll show you how to use the pen tool if you're not familiar with it. Unfortunately, we don't have an image that shows the full body of The Mandalorian. We're gonna be using another image of a high-quality action figure to blend the two images together with layer masks. This is the perfect opportunity for me to show you how to blend multiple images together seamlessly. So let's start by removal the background. And I'm going to take the pen tool and I'm going to zoom in to see the edges a little bit better. To make a selection of anything using the pen tool, you're going to click and hold to add the point. You have this handle that you can control and move the path. Then you can add the next one. You can see that I have a preview of what the path is going to be. This feature is called rubber band, and you can enable it by clicking on the Pen Tool Settings here and checking the rubber band checkbox. To add another point, you just going to click and drag again. You can see I'm still holding the mouse. And this way I'm still able to move the path whenever I want to align it with the edge of my subject. When you reach an area like this one where there's a curve, you can hold Alt or Option to bend the handle. And you will be able to change the direction of the path. If for some reason you lost the connection of the path, maybe you accidentally clicked away using another tool. You can always switch back to the pen tool and click on the last point. You created two reconnected with a path. Just like I showed you, you're going to go all over the edge of your subject to make a selection around it. Another thing you should know is while you are creating the point and you are still holding the mouse, you can hold space along with it. And you'll be able to move the bath and align it with the edges of your subject. Alright, so now that you know how to use the pen tool, I'm going to save some time here because I already extracted the image from the background. I have it in another document. And I will also be providing this for you to download as the transparent PNG. I'm going to select this layer, click on Control C to copy it. I'm going to paste it in my document. We no longer need this path, so I'm going to select it and then delete it. Now we're going to need the bottom part of our subject. Let's import the second image. I also removed the background of this image, and I'm going to also copy it and paste it in my document. This image is a little bit smaller, so I'm going to scale it up and match the two images together. And it's okay to scale it a little bit as long as we scale up to much till it gets pixelated. I'm trying to align the edges together and you can use the arrow keys to nudge it and perfectly align them together. There are some areas that are not perfectly aligned, and I'm going to show you how we can fix that in a little bit. I'm going to accept the changes for now. We're going to be blending the two images together using a layer mask. And I'm going to keep this mask intact. So instead I'm going to group the layer. And then I'm going to add an inverted layer mask to the group to hide this image altogether. Then I'm gonna take the brush tool and paint with white to review only the bottom part of this image. I think they are not aligned quite yet, so I'm gonna click on Control T again and rotate it a little bit. We need to align the edges of the clothes together and we're gonna be using Liquify to do that. First, I'm going to right-click on the layer and convert it to smart object. Then I'm going to go to Filter Liquify. You're going to take the Forward Warp tool and use it to work the edges and align them with each other. Make sure to also keep the pressure low. And another important thing to do is to check show backdrop. This will allow you to see the layers underneath it and makes your workflow easier. And you can also control the opacity from here. Before we start warping though, I'm going to take the freeze mask tool. And this tool is going to allow you to paint on the areas that you want to predict from warping. And I'm going to paint on top of the shield to keep it intact. Then I'm going to switch back to the Forward Warp tool and start warping the image. Photoshop won't allow you to use the Forward Warp tool when the opacity is at 100. So I'm going to reduce it a little bit. I'm going to take the freeze mask tool again and paint around the other side of the shield. You can also hold Alt to remove from the area you paint it. That should do it. And I'm going to align this area as well with the background image. Now we can click Okay to accept the changes. And as you can see, the edges are now aligned because we convert the image to Smart Object before. We have the liquify filter as a smart filter and we can double-click on it and make any changes we want. I'm going to zoom in and also align this area of the stitching together. Let's blend the two images together. And now I'm going to add a layer mask to the top layer. Then take my brush tool again. And I'm going to also paint with the low flow. I'm going to reduce the opacity even more. And painting with a low flow and opacity is going to allow you to slowly blend the two images together without having some hard edges. I'm actually going to remove this area altogether. So I'm going to take the pen tool and make a selection around this area of the shield. Once you have your path, Great. If you're going to right click and choose Make selection. You can also click on Control H to hide the selection. And then just take the brush tool and mask this area by painting with black. Now I'm going to keep on masking the edges with a brush draw and blending the two images together. That should do it for the layer mask. As you can see, we still need to match the luminosity and also remove that bottom part of the shield of the image in the back. What I'm going to do is select that layer and I'm going to create the new layer above it. Then I'm going to take the clone stamp tool and we're gonna be using it to remove this area. To ensure that we only paint on top of the image, we can load the layer mask load as a selection by holding Alt or Option and clicking on the mask thumbnail, then you can click on Control H to hide the selection. Now you can take the clone stamp tool and make sure the edges are soft. And also in the tool setting, make sure it is set to current and below. So to sample an area, you're going to hold Alt or Option to sample from the original image. You can see the preview the clone stamp tool gives us and we can use it to align the area we just sampled with the original. Then start painting to fill that area. And it will keep on sampling from the same area. If you see a repetition in the texture, you can sample from it another area, align the textures together and paint and paint on top of it to fix it. Another thing you should not be doing is cloning big areas. You should clone small areas and continuously sample from different areas so you don't get repeating texture. Now it's important to sample from similar areas to get this to work. For example, to remove this part if a shield you need to sample from the dark area underneath it and then paint on top of it to remove it. Now I'm going to keep on sampling and painting until I get all of this area removed. Okay, We pretty much have the two images blended together. Now we only have to match the luminosity. I'm going to use a levels adjustment layer for that. And I'm going to move it on top of the group and then create the clipping mask because I want to affect both layers. Then I'm just going to darken the whites until I get about the same luminosity of the original image. All we have to do now is invert the layer mask. And we can use the Brush tool to reveal this adjustment layer only on the top area of the legs. All right, now we have the two images blended together. We still need to fix a few things and match the luminosity. And that's what we're gonna be doing in part two of this lesson. 9. Adding The Mandalorian Part 2: In this lesson, we're going to continue working on the Mandalorian character. And we're gonna be adding the cape, fixed some areas using the clone stamp tool and also fix the luminosity by removing some of the highlights in the front. I'm going to start by selecting all the layers of the character and group them. And I'm going to call this group The Mandalorian. That done. I also want to reduce the size a little bit. By doing so. As you can see, we have a little problem. The area where we apply the liquify filter before has changed because of the scaling. Let me show you how we can fix this. If that happens to you. First, I need to undo the last step. Then you need to go to the layer where you apply the liquify filter and convert that layer to smart object. Once you do that, you can scale the group again and that problem won't happen again. What I would like to do first is go back to the image of the action figure. And this time I'm going to take the lasso tool and copy this part of the cape from this image to add it to our character. Now, with the layer selected, click on Control J to copy it on a new layer. And again, we're going to copy and paste it in our document. I'm going to put this in the right side and I'm going to need to flip it horizontally. And also I'm going to scale it a little bit and match it with the image. This layer needs to be below the Mandalorian group. Before we put the cape in place, we need to remove the background first. And the best tool to select complicated edges like this is the magic wand tool. So you're going to click on the background to select it. And if you want to add more to the selection, you need to hold Shift and select more areas until you get everything selected. Of course, you can click on see two anti-de Quick Mask Mode. And it looks like we also need to add these areas. So I'm going to keep on adding these areas using shift. We pretty much have everything selected. Now, I'm going to add an inverted layer mask using alt or option because we have the background selected and we need to select the opposite of that. Now, I'm going to take the brush tool to remove any unwanted area on the edges. You can also use other selection tools along with the Magic Wand tool to refine the selection. And I'm going to use the pen tool to make a better selection of this area of the gate. In the mask properties here, I'm going to increase the feather a little bit, just the smoothing those hard edges at the bottom and match the sharpness with the subject. Now, I'm going to use the move tool to place the cape underneath the subject and align them together. This position will work, but I need to remove the hand from the image. And we can also use the clone stamp tool to do that. I'm going to create a new layer on top of it. And I'm going to take the clone stamp tool again. Just like I showed you before. You need to sample from similar areas and align the edges to remove the unwanted area. If you have some areas left from the background like I do here, you can take the brush tool and paint with black with the small price size to remove any fringing that is left in the game. The last thing I want to fix, this missing area on the right side of the cape. And for that I'm going to take the pen tool and just draw a small area of further the end of the game should look like. Then you can right-click and choose Make selection. And now on a new layer, you can take the clone stamp tool and just sample an area from the bottom edge of the cape and fill that gap. We also sample the background alongside with it. To remove it, we can also use the magic wand tool to select that area and fill the layer mask with black. I will also group these layers and I'm going to call the group cape. Now that the group is added, I'm going to go back to the action figure image. And the next thing I want to import is this bottom part of the blaster. And I also have it masked out. So I'm just going to copy and paste it in my document. I'm going to paste it underneath my subject. First, we need to flip it horizontally. And actually I'm going to drag it at the top here and use this part of the blaster to match the ankle. Also, I'm going to scale it a little bit and move it to the right side and match it with a subject. Let's fix the missing part of the plaster. And we can also use the clone stamp tool for this. What do you need to do first is create a new layer at the top. Then take the pen tool and just draw a shape of how this part is going to look like. Like so. Now I'm going to close the path and convert it to a selection. And we can take the clone stamp tool, use a small brush size. And we can also hide the selection to see a little bit better. Use the clone stamp tool to sample from the edge and paint inside to create that shape. All right, Let's continue on. And I want to fix some of the highlights problems here, like the one you see on the shield. And we shouldn't have highlights on these because the subject is backlit. So what I'm going to do is create the levels adjustment layer. And I'm going to move this layer on top of the group and create a clipping mask. And I'm simply going to make the highlights a lot more darker. As always, we need to invert the layer mask first. We're going to use the brush tool. And I'll make sure the opacity and the flow Arlo. I'm just going to pick on any area that doesn't suppose to have strong highlights like this left part of the shield. We also need to fix this area as well. But first, I want to remove this harsh shadow line so we can blend the adjustment layer a little bit better. On a new layer if you are going to take the clone stamp tool. And this time reduced the flow a little bit. As you can see using a low flow, I'm able to soften the edge of the shadow and the blended to the image. Then we can darken the rest of the area where the adjustment layer like we did before. Now I'm going to turn the levels adjustment layer back on and I'm going to use my brush tool again to darken this area. I'm also going to use this small brush size to darken this area and only leave a small highlight at the edge. This is before and after the adjustment layer. And we were able to fix those highlights with just an adjustment layer. I'm going to also reduce the luminosity on this area too, by painting on the same adjustment layer. The last thing I want to fix is the blaster behind him. And for this, I'm going to select that layer and add a levels adjustment layer on top of it. Also, I'm going to darken this layer and match it with the rest of the image by darkening the highlights. I'll make sure to create the equipment mask for this adjustment layer so it doesn't affect any other layer below it. Alright, so that's all for the Mandalorian character. Of course, we need to fix the color, but we need to add Baby Yoda next. And that's what we're gonna be doing in the next lesson. 10. Adding Baby Yoda Part 1: Let's continue adding the second character, which is Baby Yoda. And we will be merging multiple images for this character as well. These are the two images, and let's start by importing this image first and remove the background. Make sure your image is Smart Object. Before we scale the image. For this one, we're only going to use the body and replace the head with another image. I'm going to use my pen tool to quickly select it and I'm gonna get back to you when I'm done. Okay, now I'm going to right-click and choose Make selection. I want to feather the edges a little bit in four pixels is okay. Now I'm going to add the layer mask. And I'm going to move my subject a little bit to the bottom. And if you watch the series is very small, so I'm gonna make sure to scale my image to about the size. Let's import the next image, which is this one. Again, I'm going to use my Pen Tool to only select the head of this image. And I'm going to quickly get back to you when I finished doing that. If you've noticed that I selected a little bit more because it's gonna be easier to blend this part with the rest of the body. I'm going to right-click and make selection again and add the layer mask. So I did not pay attention on the hair because we're going to be painting that using a custom brush. And I'm gonna show you how to do that in a little bit. But you can still restore a little bit of that hair. And if you click on the Select and Mask button to enter the Select and Mask panel, you can take the Refine Edge tool and start painting at the edges. And Photoshop is going to try to restore some of that hair back. I tried this before but I didn't like the results. I'm going to do it anyway and we're gonna be enhanced in that by painting more hair on top of that. Just go over the edges and try to restore as much as you can from the hair. I'm going to show you how we're going to create a custom hair brush to paint hair on top of this. As you can see, the edges are not that great, especially on the left side. But we're going to fix that in a little bit. Make sure the output is set to layer mask on the right-hand side. And click Okay. You can also Alt click on the layer mask to see the edges a little bit better. And as you can see, we need to clean the edges a little bit more before we paint some hair on top of this, I'm going to take my brush tool. I'm just going to review some of the lost edges with the white brush. Now I'm going to change my brush to overlay. I'll go back to the Layer Mask view. Just going to paint with black here to remove some of that freezing at the edge and make sure the edges are clean. Okay, so as you can see, I fixed the edge of the left ear on purpose with the pen tool. I can use my clone stamp tool to fix that layer. I'm going to Control click on the Layer Mask to load that into a selection. Then I'm going to take the clone stamp tool, click on Control H to hide my selection. Then I'm going to create a new layer. And just sample from the inside to fix the edge. Okay, so let's start fixing the hair. And now I'm going to show you how to create the custom hair brush. We're going to do that on a new layer. I'll click on Control N to create a new layer. And the document is going to be 500 by 500. And it could create will take the brush tool. We're going to make sure the opacity and the flow are a 100%. And I'm going to also choose the hard brush in pressure enabled. If you are using a graphic tablet, you can click on the Brush Settings here. Click on the Shape Dynamics and make sure to enable pen pressure room here. You'll be able to tell by looking at the Edge in this preview panel. Make sure to turn it on. And I'm going to create a new layer. And I'm going to take the very small brush size. Just going to make a stroke to create the hair. If you are using a mouse, it's gonna be hard to make the good stroke. You can get you a little bit better results by increasingly smoothing from here. This will help you make a smooth strokes. Then you're just going to be a stroke that looks like a hair. I'm actually going to increase the size a little bit. And I'm gonna make the stroke that is about the same size of this document. I'm going to stop here and I like this one. Now we can convert this one as the brush presets. In order to convert it, make sure your background is white and the actual stroke is in black before you convert any brush preset. Once you do that, go to Edit, Define Brush Preset. Then you'll see the preview of your brush year. Then you can rename your brush. I'm going to name this one to hair brush and click. Okay. This is how it looks like for the moment. If I try to paint with it, it looks like this. It's not exactly how we want it at the moment. And now I'm gonna show you how we can modify the brush settings to get this brush to look like here. I'm going to close this file and we're not going to need this anymore. Now let's create a new layer and let's start modifying this brush. The first thing you can check is scattering. And this slider will allow you to scatter the individual strokes left and right or up and down. The count 0 is going to allow you to increase the amount of strokes. I like the count to be all the way down so I can have more control. You can also control scattering using pen pressure. And it's going to increase the scattering when you press harder on the pen. The next thing I'm going to check is color dynamics. And this will sample the foreground and the background colors. And that's going to help us to get a realistic result. I'm going to also check transfer. And from here you can control the opacity and the flow Jitter. Basically this will paint these strokes in different opacity and flow levels. And it's going to add depth and make it a little bit more realistic. Alright, I'm gonna also check build-up. And the last one is shaped dynamics. The shape dynamics. It's going to paint these strokes in different sizes. And you will see that in the preview here down below, when I increase or decrease, besides, for me, I'm going to choose something in the middle to about 50%. For the minimum diameter, I'm going to keep this one lobe. You can also increase the angle jitter and that will rotate them left and right. And they are going to look a little bit randomized. This is how the brush looks like at the moment. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to change the control of the Angle Jitter to direction. When I do that. What will happen now is when I paint with my brush, it's going to follow the direction of my movement. And this is going to be very helpful when we start painting the hair. That's all these settings we need. I'm going to stop this lesson here. And I'm gonna show you in part two of this lesson, how are we going to blend the two images together? 11. Adding Baby Yoda Part 2: First, I'm going to take advantage of color dynamics. I'm going to first sample a light color here from the hair. Then for the background color, I'm going to sample a little bit darker color from the image. This way the individual hair are gonna be slightly different in colors. And it's going to use the colors of the foreground and the background. All right, so now let's choose a relatively small brush size. And you can just start painting some hair here on top to fill this area. If you don't like the area like what I'm getting here, you can click here on the brush tip shape. And you can change the angle from here. As you can see, just by using the same colors and want to find the brush settings, we can get the very realistic results with this brush. Now I'm going to quickly finish painting the hair all over the head and ears. Alright, so I spend some time to paint some hair on top of his head and ears. And as you can see, there is the ugly fringing that doesn't look great. And I want to remove that with the normal soft brush. But before I do that, we need we need to save this hair brush as the brush presets so we don't lose the settings. I'm going to show you how you can save this brush as a preset so that you can use this in the future. To do this, you're going to click on the top right menu in the brush panel and choose New Brush Preset. From here, you can rename your brush. You can choose to capture brush size or color, or not gonna choose those. We only need the tool settings for this one. I'm going to rename this brush to hair brush tool and click. Okay. Once you do that, you'll find the New Brush Preset at the bottom of the brush panel. And you can use this in the future with the current settings you saved. I'm going to take a normal soft brush. I'll switch my foreground color to black. And I'm gonna select the layer mask. Then with the low-flow brush, I'm going to start removing that fringing on the edges. Alright, so this looks much better now. Now I'm gonna quickly continue painting the hair on the right-hand side. Okay, so that should do it for the hair. And now what we're gonna do is blend these two images together. What I'm going to do is select all of these layers using shifts. And then I'm going to group this layer and call it Baby Yoda. Now using the move tool, we can drag the whole group and align it with the original image. I'm just going to use the Free Transform tools to perfectly resize and align the edges. And then we can use the Layer Mask to blend the edges a little bit better. You can also reduce the opacity so you can see the edges. It looks like it is perfectly aligned. So I'm going to accept the changes. So what I'm going to do is select the layer mask of the top image. And then I'm gonna take a soft brush with my foreground color to black. Make sure to use the low flow. Then you can just start slowly blending the edges with each other. Now, don't worry if they look not blending well, that's because of the contrast. We're gonna be using adjustment layers for that to blend the contrast. Okay, that looks good. All we need to do now is select the layer of the body. And then I'm going to create the levels adjustment layer on top of that and create the clipping mask. All we need to do now is make the mid tones and the highlights a little bit darker until we get the same contrast with the top image. That's before and after. That's it for all the components of the front characters. What we need to do now is blend the luminosity and the color. And that's what we're gonna be doing in the next lesson. 12. Color Correcting The Subject: Now that we've blended the images together and everything is in place, we can start matching their color and luminosity with the background. I'm going to show you how you can use check layers to match color. Let me show you how you can do that. We're going to create our Check layer on the very top. I'm going to create the new solid color like we did before. But this time you're going to drag the color picker all the way to the top right corner so that you get the saturation and the brightness values to 100%. And that's very important. Then you're going to drag the hue slider all the way to the top or the bottom so that the hue value is at 0. Then you can click Okay. Now we're going to change the blending mode to luminosity. Once you do this, you're gonna get the color map of your image. This will help us see where the color is focused and we can match the subject with the background using this technique. As you can see, our subject has a little bit of blue and the background has a lot of orange. And all you have to do now is add your favorite adjustment layer. So I'm going to start with demand Laurene, and I'm going to add the color balance adjustment layer on top and create clipping mask. Now I'm going to start adding some red and yellow until I get the same color or a little bit of close to our background. As you can see, the color is now a little bit better. If I turn off the check layer, you can see now the subject looks much better and it's matching a little bit better with the background. Let's turn the Check layer back on again. And let's do this again for the Baby Yoda group. I'm going to create the color bands, just new layer. And I'm going to create a clipping mask. Then again, I'm going to add a little bit of red. I'm going to add some yellow as well. And this one does not need that much yellow and red. I'm going to keep the value low for this one. This is before and after. This technique will help you a lot, especially if you are just getting started with compositing. And I personally rarely use this technique because I did this for so many years. And I don't need to use check layers all the time. I use it only when it's a little bit hard to match the color. And I want to see a color map of my whole image. You can use this technique as the base for your color matching. And then you can turn it off and adjust the colors accordingly to your liking. It should also mention that you can also add a hue saturation adjustment layer on top of the check layer and increase the saturation to enhance the color map so we can match the color easily. Also, don't forget that these adjustment layers will affect luminosity. In this case, my subject become a little bit lighter. You're going to have to adjust them. Or you can change the Blending Modes accordingly. I'm going to select this color balance adjustment layer, and I'm gonna change the blending mode to color to make sure that it's only affecting color. Then the levels adjustment layer and change its blending mode to luminosity. The layer order is also important. So if I move my levels adjustment layer on top of this color balance adjustment layer, you will see how it is affecting the color. I'm going to change the blending modes for these adjustment layers as well. I'm going to move the, the levels adjustment layer on top. This is before and after the adjustment layers. And we might have to modify these in the future because we are going to be painting more lighting effects and rim light on top of this. And they will brighten the image. I'm going to do next is I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer on top of demand, the Lorine group. I'm going to create a clipping mask. I'm just going to shift the hue a little bit. And these saturate the image a little bit. This is before and after. And it's just the minor change. That's gonna be it for matching the color. In this lesson, we will move on on painting some lighting effects and finishing off the background in the upcoming lessons. 13. Finishing The Background: Now that we've finished matching the color of our subject with the background, the next thing is to add some highlights and paint some rim light to our subject. But before I do that, I want to finish the background first. And we're going to be painting even more highlights and add some blur to the background so I can bring focus to the subject. I'm gonna start by going to the sun group and I'm going to disable auto glow. The reason I did this space because I'm going to be painting some highlights and I don't want the sun to blend with this car. You don't have to do the same thing as I do. You can mix and match different techniques and see what works best for your image. What I'm going to do next is I'm gonna select the sun layer. I'm gonna go to the mask properties. And I'm going to increase the feather a little bit more. About seven pixels is going to be okay. We're going to be doing next is add some heat distortion to the Son and to the TIE fighters in the background. In order to achieve this, we're going to use the displacement filter in Photoshop. Let's start by converting the layer to Smart Object. Because we are going to be able to use smart filters when we convert it to smart object. In order to apply the displace filter, we need something called the displacement map. I have my displacement map in another document. I created this displacement map by just adding some horizontal paths. I just made multiple copies in different sides. Then I created these ten visible at the top, and I duplicated them and made them different sizes. We can randomize the shapes a little bit. Just like how layer masks work, the displacement filter is going to be applied on the white areas. We need. It'd be a little bit more randomized, so we don't get the same shapes in the displacement. I'm going to select the first layer, and I'm going to create another stamp visible at the top by clicking Control Alt Shift E. I'm going to convert this layer to smart object. I'm going to go to filter, filter gallery. You need to go to the sketch folder and then click on Chrome. This is going to apply IE Chrome filter. And this way we are able to randomize the shapes even more. You can play around with the details and the smoothness to get the result that you want. And then you're going to click Okay. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to go to filter blur and I'm going to apply a Gaussian blur just to smooth the edges a little bit. Next, I'm going to scale my layer to make the lines a little bit bigger. Now we can save the file and it saved in the Projects folder as a PSD file. Now we can go back to the document. You need to select your layer and then go to Filter Distort, Displace. We're gonna start with ten value in horizontal and vertical scale. You're going to choose stretch two it and repeat edge pixels and then click. Okay. Now Photoshop is going to ask you which displacement map to choose. You're going to choose that displacement map PSD file. Then click on Open. As you can see, the displacement now is applied at the edges of the sun. And it looks exactly of how the sun is going to look like on a sunset. Because we use the smart object. Now we have the smart filters mask. And we can paint on this mask with the brush tool to hide this effect on certain areas. And I want this effect to be only visible at the bottom area. I'm going to take my brush tool. Make sure my foreground color is black. I'm going to paint here to hide it from this area. We can also double-click on the displacement map, and we can change the value if you want more distortion, we can choose 15 this time. Click Okay. We need to choose the displacement map file again. Now as you can see, the effect is a little bit stronger. I'm going to undo that because I liked the effect subtle. I want to also blur the edges of the sun a little bit more. So I'm going to double-click on the smart object. From here. I'm going to increase the feather a little bit more. Now I'm going to close and save the file. And we are ready to do the next step. If you don't like the effect in the first time, you can go back here and change the file from here. You can flip it horizontally to get a different effect. You can scale it even more. Then save your file and reapply the displacement map again. We can double-click on the displacement filter again. I'm going to click Okay. And we're going to choose the file again. Actually going to increase my vertical scale a little bit. I'm gonna try 20. Yeah, 20 pixel is a little bit better. Let's move on. And now we're going to need to blur this guy. First. You're going to need to turn the Mandalorian Annie Baby Yoda groups off. Then we can create a stamp visible of the background. First I'm gonna go to the TIE Fighters group. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller. Now I'm going to select this Curves Adjustment Layer and click on Control Alt Shift E degree the stamp visible. Now we have an image of the background and we can turn the Mandalorian and the baby older groups are. And again, I'm going to right-click on the layer and I'm going to convert it to Smart Object. Now you're going to need to go to Filter, Blur Gallery and choose field blur. If you don't see the blur handle, you can click on Control H to show or hide it. This blur filter is going to allow you to add multiple points and control the amount of blur on each point. We have this point in the center and we can click on it and drag it wherever we want. So we're going to start with this TIE Fighter and we're gonna choose in small amount of blur for this one, because this one is in the foreground and should be less blurry. Now we're going to add another point here. This one should be a little bit more blurry because it's further away in the background. You get the idea. We're going to add another one here. And this one's going to be a lot blurry than the ones in the foreground. Something like that should do it. Now I'm going to add another one here. Then I'm going to add another one here. And this mountain is going to be a little bit less blurry than the mountains in the background. I'm going to add one last one here. And the value of this one is going to be two to three. Now we can click Okay to apply the blur. With that done, I'm going to also apply heat distortion to this TIE Fighter in the background. If we go to Filter, Distort and apply the displace filter again. You can see that the displacement is very strong on this TIE Fighter. And what we need to do is to make the lines in the displacement a lot smaller. I'm going to undo this. And then I'm gonna go back to my document. I'm going to scale this layer to make the lines in the displacement a lot more smaller. Let's save the file and try to apply the displacement again. Let's try a little bit smaller value than before. I'm going to choose seven and click Okay. It looks like 70 is still strong. I'm going to double-click again. This time I'm going to choose four. In order to make this only visible in this Thai fighter, we're going to click on Control J to duplicate the layer. I'm going to disable this, the displacement map on this layer. Then we're going to add an inverted layer mask for this layer to hide everything. And then we're going to paint with the brush tool only in this area to make it visible. The last thing we can do now is paint some lighting effects to the background. I'm going to create the solid color. I'm going to click Okay for now. And then I'm going to invert my layer mask. This time I'm going to choose the darker color than before. I'm going to choose a reddish color from here, from the clouds. I'm going to click Okay. I'll disable my layer mask for a moment to see the color. And I'm gonna change my blending mode to color dodge this time. You have an idea of how the color is going to be. You can reduce the opacity to see before and after. That's the color we're going to use to paint the lighting effects. I'm going to take my brush tool now. Make sure my opacity and flow or low, I'm going to choose about 20% opacity and 10% flow. Now we can start painting some lighting effects here at the clouds and at the mountains at the bottom. In fact, I'll choose 10% opacity and flow. Let's do this again. When I paint a little bit here on top of the mountains. I'm also going to add a little bit of flight here on top of the thigh fire. This color will give us a little bit better highlights. That's before and after. You can always reduce the opacity to reduce the intensity of the effect. Alright, so that's all we need to do. We have finished the background now. In the next lesson we're gonna be adding some lighting effects and paint some rim light to the subject, and then we can finish the composite. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Painting Rim Light: Finally, at the last steps of finishing off our composite. In this video, we're going to be painting the rim light to our subjects. And I'm going to show you different ways on how to paint rim light. In this video, we're gonna be using adjustment layers to do that. You can use your favorite adjustment layer. I personally like to use hue saturation. We're going to start with the Mandalorian. I'm going to add a hue saturation adjustment layer on top of everything. I'll create the clipping mask. What I usually do is I check colorize. I increase my lightness and saturation all the way up. And then I can match the hue with the color of the environment. In this case, I'm going to use the bright orange hue and match it with the background. That looks okay. What I'm going to do now is invert the layer mask by clicking on control. And the easiest way to paint rim light if you're not experienced with using the brush tool, is that you can use blend if so, here's how to do that. I'm going to turn off the layer mask for the moment. You can double-click on the hue saturation adjustment layer to get to the Layer Style dialog box. From here, we want to hide this adjustment layer on the shadows and make it only visible in the highlights. You can drag this underlying layers slider to the right to hide this adjustment layer from the shadows. And then you can use Alt to make a smoother transition. Here's before and after. You can also change the blending mode of this layer. And I can change the Blending Mode to Color Dodge or Linear Dodge. Then you can simply take the brush tool, choose the white brush, and just paint at the edges. I usually work with the low flow, so I'm going to reduce my flow to 40%. Then I can continue painting on the edges to paint the base of our rim light. If you want to change how the highlight would look, you can always double-click on the adjustment layer and change the blend. If sliders from here. I'm going to quickly finish beating on the edges to add some highlights. This is the highlight I've been painting so far with the hue saturation using Blend. If now I'm gonna do the same thing for the Baby Yoda character. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this adjustment layer using Alt on top of the baby or the group and create another clipping mask. Now I'm going to fill the layer mask with black. Now I'm gonna start painting at the edges here as well. And it looks like we need to change the hue saturation value a little bit. For this one, I'm going to double-click on the hue saturation. I'm going to make the highlights less visible on this one. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add another hue saturation adjustment layer. I'll create the clipping mask. And I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to check colorize. I'll increase my lightness, unsaturation. This time I'm going to choose the little bit saturated color than the first one. That looks good. I'm going to invert my layer mask. We're gonna be using this adjustment layer to paint some thin rim light at the edges. So we're not going to use blend if for this one. And before we start painting the rim light, usually when I paint the room light, I switched between a soft and hard brush a lot. So what I'm going to do to speed up this process, I'm going to open up the brushes panel. And we're gonna be switching between these two brushes. We can use keyboard shortcuts to speed up this process illnesses, rather than increasing and decreasing the hardness. So you can use the less than and greater than keys, the switch between brushes. The less than we'll go back and the greater than we'll go forward. This is the soft brush. When I press the greater than, it's going to switch to the hard brush. And this will make our workflow a lot faster. Let's first start with the soft brush. I'm going to choose the very small brush size. From here, you can reduce the previous size. We can make the pen or smaller to get some room to work with. What you're going to do now is take a small brush size and start painting some thin rim light at the edges to paint the room lights. Don't be afraid if you paint too much because you can always switch back to black brush and remove any areas that you don't like. Keep in mind that you don't need to paint this everywhere. You only need to be this when it makes sense. So for instance, most of the light is coming from the left. So we're going to be painting the rim light mostly on the left. It's always a good idea to zoom back and see what you've been doing so far. We're going to continue adding some rim light at the edges here as well. On an area like this, we can the hard brush. What you're going to do is click once here, then hold shift, and click at the edge, and that will add the straight line of highlight. This way it'll be easier to paint straight lines. Now I can switch to black and remove this area. We can do that also here as well. I'm going to click once here, hold shift and click at the end. Then we can switch back to a soft brush or big brush and make the edges a little bit softer. Now I'm going to keep painting the rim light at the edges with the soft brush. When you reach an area like this, it's gonna be hard to paint the rim light within angle like this. What I like to do is use the Rotate tool and you can hold on to rotate the image to get an easier angles to paint wet paint highlights on an area like this. You're going to start with the soft brush and then paint some highlights like this. Then you're gonna switch to a hard brush, switch to black. And then you're going to mask the edges to make them a little bit harder. Then you can switch back to a software brush, make the brush a little bit bigger. You're going to make the highlights fade away a little bit like so. It's going to be easier for you to start with this area and then you can continue painting on this area and paint the highlights. Once you do that, you're going to take a big soft brush. Then mask the edges to make them a little bit 3D. Now I'm going to continue doing the same thing on the edges here as well. Okay, So this is all the highlights we've been painting on the Mandalorian so far, as you can see, it makes a drastic difference that the character, hopefully by following me now, you will learn how you can do this. Now I'm going to continue painting the highlights on the Baby Yoda character. And I'm basically going to do the same thing for this one. What I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this hue saturation adjustment layer to the baby or the character. Create the clipping mask. I'll fill my layer mask with black. Now I'm going to start painting highlights on this one as well. That's gonna be it for this lesson. And the last lesson we're gonna be doing the last color correction for the image. Bring the focus to the center and add some sharpening. 15. Last Finishing Adjustments: Welcome to the last lesson of the course. And in this video, we're gonna be doing the last adjustments and finish the composite. I would like to start by turning the blending mode of this layer to normal. Because if I zoom in, you will see how it is changing the color here to white. And I don't really like that. I'm going to turn the blending mode back to normal. Now this looks a little bit better. You can also enhance the rim light a little bit more by duplicating the adjustment layer. Then create another clipping mask. Then you can make this layer visible anywhere you want. For me, I don't like this to be visible everywhere. I only want it to be visible in this area of the arm and the top of the helmet. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take my lasso tool and then I'm going to make a selection around the helmet. Then if you want to add to selection, you can hold Shift and then add to the selection. Now we can invert this selection by clicking on Control Shift I. And then we're going to select the layer mask and fill that area with black. This way. It will be only visible in these two areas. What I want to do now is I want to add more light coming from behind him because we have a massive light source behind him. We should have some light leaks, especially on these areas. In order to achieve this, we can use the same technique of the solid color we used before. I'm going to create the solid color on top of everything. We're going to click Okay, for now, I'm going to create the clipping mask. Then we can choose a bright orange color from the background. Now going to change the blending mode to Linear Dodge. Then we can modify the color to your liking. We're going to go with this color and we can change this later if we need to. Now we can invert this layer mask. Then we can take the brush tool. We can choose the very low flow and opacity. I'm gonna go with 20% flow and opacity. Then I'm going to start painting here with the small brush size. You can see how that adds some really nice golden highlights at the edges. And it also enhances the rim light that we painted before. We can paint the light also in this area. On the right-hand side as well. Alright, that looks really nice. If you don't like the color, you can always double-click on the solid color and make the color more or less saturated. So I'm gonna make it a little bit less saturated towards the white. That looks good. Now I can take a little bit bigger brush and I'm going to add some wider light areas. Then what we can do is duplicate this layer, create another clipping mask. I'm going to fill my layer mask with black. Zoom out. And then I'm gonna take a bigger brush. And I'm going to paint the wider area of light at the edges. Like so. As you can see, this really takes the image to the next level. This is before and after. As I said before, these adjustment layers will make the image a little bit lighter. So what we can do is at the bottom we can click on the Levels Adjustment Layer. Make the image a little bit darker. That looks really good. Now I'm going to do the same thing for the Baby Yoda character. We can Alt click and copy the same adjustment layer to the Baby Yoda group. Then I'm going to create the clipping mask and fill the layer mask with back. Again, I'm going to take my brush tool and start revealing some light at the edges like so. You can see how this adds some really nice dreamy like highlights at the edges. I'm going to make this a little bit towards the orange. I like that. Now what I'm going to do for the last steps is I want to add some vignetting at the edges. On the very top of everything. I'm going to make a selection with the Elliptical Marquee Tool, the center. Like so. And now I want to blur the edges a little bit. So click on Q to enter the Quick Mask mode. And then we can go to Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Then you're going to add the very generous amount of radius to make the edges very soft. So above 100 pixels is going to be good. You're going to click Okay. And now we can go back to the normal mode by clicking on Q again. And then we want this to affect the edges. So we need to invert the selection by clicking on Control Shift I. Now we can add the curves adjustment layer or levels. I'm going to choose GRS. And I'm gonna make the image a little bit darker. This is before and after. This also is affecting the color. So I'm gonna change my blending mode to luminosity. All right, so the last thing I want to do is add some sharpening. I'm going to turn off this adjustment layer for the moment. I'm gonna click on the layer underneath it. And I'm going to create a stamp visible by clicking on Control Alt Shift E. Now I'm going to change the blending mode of this layer, linear light. I'm going to zoom in a little bit more. Then what you're gonna do is go to Filter Other than high-pass. This is the sharpening filter and what basically do is add contrast to the highlights and shadows. If you add too much radius, you'll start to see some halos around the edges. Depending on your image size. For me, I found that one pixel is the sweet spot for this image without having some halos at the edges. Now we can click Okay. As you can see, this will enhance the image contrast and bring the focus and enhance the highlights as well. Then we can turn back the curves adjustment layer on. That's basically the composite is now done. Usually what I do at the end is I add some color adjustment layers, or sometimes I use a camera raw filter. But because we focus on matching the color and the beginning of the tutorial, I don't think that we need to add more adjustment layers to enhance the color. You can try that for yourself. You can try adding a camera raw filter. And you can do this by adding another stamp visible at the top so we can turn off the Curves Adjustment Layer and the sharpening layers. And we can add another stamp visible by clicking on Control Alt Shift E. First you're going to convert the layer to Smart Object so you can get smart filters. Now we can turn back these layers on and you can go to Filter, camera Raw Filter. From here you can try playing around with these sliders. You can change the temperature, you can change the tint, the exposure, the contrast, and so on. But for me I like the way it is. I'm gonna click on cancel. So I really hope that you guys enjoyed this tutorial as much as I did. Make sure to submit your work in the community. And I'm looking forward to see your work.