Create STUNNING Landscape Photos Using Adobe Photoshop - The ULTIMATE Editing Course Part 1

1. Introduction: Hi all. My name is Meredith. I'm a landscape photographer and outdoor educator based in Denver, Colorado. And in this multi-part course, I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of Adobe Photoshop for landscape photography. Photoshop is truly the best program you can use to edit your photos. And it is significantly more powerful than light removal. With the complexity of Photoshop can be intimidating and confusing, especially to beginners. In the first part of this series, you will learn all of the essential features of Photoshop from how to set up your workspace to how to use layers, selections, layer mask, and so much more. You will also learn step-by-step my entire image editing workflow, starting with opening your first photo into Photoshop from Adobe Bridge in Camera Raw. This course is very beginner friendly. If you are brand new to using Photoshop, you will learn everything you need to know to start editing your images. If you already use other image processing software such as the library to edit your photos. This course will help you advance your skill set by teaching you how to incorporate Photoshop into your editing workflow. So if you are ready to join me in mastering the essentials of Photoshop, then I look forward to seeing you in the very first lesson. 2. Settings part 1: optimal settings for photo editing: Welcome to the class. I'm so happy you're here and I hope you're excited because you're going to learn everything you need to know all of the fundamentals and beyond of how to use Photoshop for landscape photography. In these first few lessons, we're going to go over the very basics, Starting with the preferences that I recommend that you set using Photoshop. Now, these first few lessons are designed for those who are brand new to Photoshop. Or if you just want to start from the very beginning and review and fill in some of the gaps that you have if you already are a Photoshop user. In this first lesson, I'm going to walk you through the basics of Photoshop and more importantly, how to set up your preferences. And this is important so that we're all on the same page. And your Photoshop works exactly like my Photoshop. As we proceed together throughout the course. Whenever you're ready, you can go ahead and open Photoshop on your computer. Whenever you open Photoshop, the first thing you're going to see is this home screen. If you're opening Photoshop for the very first time and have never opened any files before. You won't see any of these recent files down here, but you will see a home screen that looks something like this. An important thing I want to note here is that I'll be using Photoshop 2023, and that's version 24.2. So this is the most recent version of Photoshop as of March 2023. If you have an older version of Photoshop, then this would be a good time to upgrade. And the way you can do that is to go to your Creative Cloud account, which you can find on your computer, either by searching or it may even be listed in the main menu bar up top, if you have a Mac, and this is where you can manage all of your Adobe applications. So Lightroom, Illustrator, premiere Pro, anything you use other than Photoshop, including Photoshop, you can manage in your Creative Cloud account. And you'll see on the left-hand panel updates. And you'll have the option to update any of these applications. These are all up-to-date right now, but you can update them here if you're logged into your Creative Cloud account. Now, if you are watching this tutorial in the future. So if you have a newer version of Photoshop than most of what you'll learn here will likely still apply. Photoshop gets updated and improved over the years. But for the most part, the workspace, the tools, and all of the functions that you can do in Photoshop, typically look and operate just the same. So this course will help you understand the fundamentals which typically don't change very much over time. If you can understand and learn what's going on in this course, you'll most likely be able to learn and understand everything in future Photoshop versions. When you're in the home screen, you'll see a variety of different windows and modules. The main one being the suggestions where Photoshop will suggest tutorials and content to help you learn Photoshop a little bit better. These can be useful, but if you want to hide them because you don't want to see them first thing when you open Photoshop, you can click there to hide. Like I mentioned, if you have an open Photoshop for the first time, you won't see any recent files. But if you have open some images, those most recent photos that you've opened will appear in this recent bio window. If you come over to the panel on the left, you can click on Learn. And here's another area where you can find a lot of useful information to help you brush up on your Photoshop skills and maybe learn something new. These can be very useful, especially when you're starting to learn Photoshop. But most of what you see in this Learn module here, we're going to be covering in this course. If you look back over at the left-hand panel, you'll see a few menu options listed under Files. I don't typically use any of these or access any of my files in this area. You can click on them and access certain files that are saved on your creative cloud. And I'll be discussing this in future tutorials. But these shared with you option I never use. And deleted is where you can see deleted files if you have anything that's been recently deleted. But these right here, I really never used to access my files. I'll be showing you my preferred way of opening files into Photoshop in a future lesson. When you're ready to leave the home screen and enter the Photoshop workspace. You can come up to this Photoshop icon, which is actually a button up here, and click on this, and you'll be taken to the Photoshop workspace. And the workspace is the command center where it will be able to open our images and view our images and edit them with tools and adjustments in virtually an unlimited number of ways. The good news for landscape photographers is that we don't have to understand every single bell and whistle in Photoshop. Photoshop is created for all kinds of different visual artists, from graphic designers to illustrators. And a lot of the tools and features in Photoshop that Other types of creatives need, and other types of artists need. Photographers, and particularly landscape photographers don't necessarily need. In this lesson, we're not going to open an image yet. We're going to focus on setting our preferences. So let's do that right now. If you have a Mac, you can go up to the main menu up here and click on Photoshop. And you will see an option here for preferences. And then click General. If you are using a PC and you don't see preferences listed under Photoshop, then check under Edit. And Preferences might be listed under the Edit menu. And I want to mention here that I'm using a Mac. So if you're using a PC, the menu options as we move through this course might be slightly different than what you see here. They should be the same for the most part, or at least very similar. But if by any chance you can't find what you're looking for. If I navigate somewhere in my menu that isn't the same as yours or you can't find something. What you can do is you can come over to help and say you want to find preferences. Say you can't find preferences on your menu. You can just type it into this search bar here. And you'll see that option appear here. And if you hover over it, you will see directly in the menu where it's located. Alright, so let's head back to preferences. And again, the reason I'm walking you through these preferences is because these are the preferences that I have found personally to be the most practical and useful in my photography. But it will also help you out because as we move through the course, and if for some reason you find that your Photoshop is working a little bit differently than mine? It could be because your preferences are slightly different than mine. Let's briefly go through all of these settings starting at general. I keep all of my general settings at their default state. If you have something different than I have here, then you can pause the video and check all the boxes and select all of the settings. But what you're seeing here are the default settings for this version of Photoshop. One thing I want to mention here that you may or may not want to change is this checkbox right here, this auto show the home screen. If you uncheck this, every time you open Photoshop, you'll be taken immediately to the workspace. You won't see the home screen that we first saw when we first opened Photoshop. But I just leave this checked on. So this is just a personal preference. If you'd like to see that home screen or not. Next, we'll check out interface. This is where you can change the different colors of your workspace. I have mindset to this gray and I find that works just fine for my workspace. If you want to, you can select some of the lighter colors and you can see how it changes. But I prefer this darker gray here, which is the default color in Photoshop. Everything down here, I keep the default state. And the only thing I've changed down here is the UI font size. I believe the default is small, so I've changed it to medium. You do have to close and restart Photoshop for those changes to take effect. But this is just the font size that you'll see in the fonts around your workspace. If you do change the font, I'd recommend checking scale UI font and that will just scale the workspace interface so that the workspace adjust to the different font size. And in options, I only have dynamic color sliders and show menu colors selected. These again are the default states in Photoshop. Let's head back to our left-hand panel and everything from workspace all the way to export. So workspace tools, history and content credentials, file handling, and export. I don't touch any of this. I keep this all at the default state. The only thing that I have slightly changed is under File Handling. If you look all the way at the bottom, the recent file list contains this I set to ten. That's how many of the recent files will appear in the home screen. So if we go back to the home screen and we look at our recent files, that number reflects how many recent files are shown right here. So I just want to show I don't want too many to show up just so it's not so cluttered. And for future reference, when you want to toggle back and forth between home and workspace. This Home button right here is how you do that. So to access your home, you can click Home here. And then the Photoshop icon again to enter your workspace. Let's head back to our preferences. And let's go to Performance. And here let's take a look at memory usage. Now, photoshop will read how much RAM your computer has. So right here is the available RAM. And this will vary depending on the type of computer that you have, your specific computer. You might have more or less RAM than I have here. And that's not something that you'll be able to change unless you get a new computer or hard drive. Hello, This, you'll see what Photoshop has listed as the ideal range. So it's giving you a range of the best amount of RAM that Photoshop needs in order to run smoothly. And you have the option down here where it says let Photoshop use to choose the specific amount of RAM that you want Photoshop to use. And I set this somewhere around the middle of this range so you can slide this up and down. I leave it somewhere around here, which is just about right in the middle of this range here. If your computer has a graphics processor, then make sure that this option is selected. This will also help Photoshop run a little bit more smoothly if it's checked. Let's now check out history and cash. In here I recommend using one of the default settings based on the type of artist you are, the type of work you'll be doing in Photoshop. So presumably you're a photographer if you're taking this course, I recommend selecting this option default photos. When you click this, it will set these states. And these didn't change because I already have them set to what they are now. But say you are doing web and UI design. If you click this, you'll see that the cash changes in the cash tile size changes. If you're working with really, really large images, like high resolution images that you're stitching together. Say unlike a panorama or something like that, you could click on this and you'll notice that these change as well, but we'll keep this set to default photos without going into too much detail about cash levels and cash tile sizes. Most important thing that you need to know about this is that when you increase cash levels, it improves photoshops responsiveness while you're working. But on the downside, it may cause images to take longer to load. And if you're interested, I can provide a link where you can learn more about cache levels and tile size. But let's just keep it simple for now. And these states over here work just fine for the purposes of our landscape photography editing processes. Alright, let's head over to image processing. This is another setting that I never touched. So you can leave this in the default state. Scratch disk. If you have more than one hard drive or a partition hard drive, this is where you can go and select a different hard drives that you'd like to work off of. I only have one hard drive, so I just have this checked on the hard drive that I have. But if you have multiple hard drives, you will see them listed here and the options to check them. If you want to use a different hard drive while you're using Photoshop. For the rest of these preferences here, everything from cursors all the way to product improvement. All of these here, I do not touch, so all of these are left on the default, right out of the box and Photoshop. You don't need to touch any of these either if you don't want to, but you're welcome to look through all of them and make any adjustments. But if you want to keep everything set, how I have it, just keep everything in its default state for now. When you have everything set how you'd like it, you can go ahead and once you're done, click on OK. 3. Settings part 2: optimal color settings: The next settings that we're going to set, our color settings, we'll come up here to Edit and down to Color Settings. This is where you set your working spaces, and this is very important. This is where you're going to select the color space that you want to work in. I'm not gonna go into much detail here about color spaces and how they work, and which one to choose, and when and how to use them. If you're brand new to what color spaces are or if you're unclear about what they are. I will provide links to resources where you can go and learn more about that. But for now, just understand that if you are shooting in the raw file format, which you should be if you are a landscape photographer and you have a camera that's capable of shooting in RAW, then you're going to want to use the color space that retains the most color information possible. And that is pro photo RGB. If you come over here under working spaces, you can select pro photo RGB from this menu of color spaces that opens up and you'll find it right here. This is the largest color space. It's larger than Adobe RGB, 1998, and it's larger than sRGB. If you are working with photos that are in a smaller color space. So say you are opening a photo that's in Adobe RGB 1998. You can select that here. And this will be compatible with files that you open if they're in the Adobe RGB 1998 color space. I do not recommend using the sRGB color space as this is the smallest color space. And the only time I ever use this is when I'm exporting photos that I convert into sRGB that are going to be used on the web. So e.g. if I upload them to my website on my portfolio, I will export them as SRGB. But when I'm in Photoshop editing, I want to retain as much color information as possible. So I will always have this set to pro photo RGB. And again, if this doesn't make sense at this point, don't worry too much about it. Just follow along with me right now. And I recommend setting your color space to pro photo RGB just for now. If we look down here at these other options, don't worry about CMYK and photography. We don't work in this color space. And you don't have to worry right now about the gray and the spot. You only need to worry about the gray space when you're working with grayscale images. And this becomes important if you're using luminosity masks. But if you're not at that point yet, don't worry. We're just going to leave this where it is right now. And later on down the road in future tutorials and lessons and courses. When we go over Luminosity Mass, then we will come back to this. Let's come down here to color management policies. And I have these all set to preserve embedded profiles. What these settings do is when you open a photo into Photoshop and it's not already in the working space that you have set. So if it's not already in the pro photo RGB working space, then Photoshop needs to know what you want to do in terms of what color space you'd like to work with. So e.g. let's say open up a photo that was in Adobe RGB 1998. But I have this set to pro photo RGB working space. By keeping this set to preserve embedded profiles. In Photoshop, we'll keep the working space attached to that photo so the Adobe RGB 1998 color space, then it will just preserve that profile, which is what I want it to do. E.g. if I have one of my photos that I plan on publishing on the web, one of my photos that's in the sRGB color space, then I want to preserve that embedded profile as well. Again, you don't have to worry here about the CMYK or the gray management policies. Now, down here, the only one I have typically checked is missing profiles. And what this does is that if you open a photo that doesn't have a profile, Photoshop will ask you what color profile you want to assign to that photo. Let's say for some reason I opened a photo that should have the pro photo RGB color profile. But for some reason it didn't have any working space assigned to it. When I open the photo Photoshop will ask me what I wanna do with it and I will tell it to assign it the pro photo RGB working space. And later on throughout this course, I'll show you how to assign color spaces to your photos when you open them so that you don't have to worry about this ever becoming an issue in the future. These two options right here, I do not have checked. Again, this is something based on the workflow that I'm gonna be showing you throughout this course is not something that's going to become an issue. So these I leave unchecked. Alright, so once you have all your colors settings set, Let's click. Okay. And now we have all of our preferences in Photoshop set. Those are all of my settings and preferences, color settings, things like that. So hopefully if you're following along with me, your Photoshop will operate just like mine does as we move together through this course. And I hope all of that helps you out, especially when you're first getting started. Now I will mention here that you might want to go back and check your preferences every time you update Photoshop. Sometimes when you go back to your preferences after an update, they might have changed and I have had to change them back to the preferences that I just showed you there. That happens with a Photoshop updates. So this might be something that you have to come back to and refer to every time you update Photoshop. But luckily, we didn't have to change too much. It's pretty simple and pretty basic. And hopefully something that you don't have to do too often. Because typically, once you have your preferences set, you really don't have to worry about it from this point forward, especially as we move through this course. So with that, let's wrap up this lesson and in the next lesson we'll be going over the workspace, which is everything that you're looking at here. So you'll start to become more familiar with the workspace is, and learn all about that. So I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Workspace overview and setup: Now that you have your preferences and settings all set up, let's talk about your Photoshop workspace. Again. The workspace is just everything that you're seeing on the screen here. So it encompasses all of the tools and panels and bars and menus that you see on the screen. We're going to briefly go over everything that you're seeing in your workspace. And throughout the course, we're gonna be going into a lot more adept with all of the tools and functions that you see in your workspace right now. So this is just to give you a general overview of what's going on here. Like your settings. Once you have your workspace all setup, you won't really have to worry about this again, once we go through all of this, you'll really be good to go for the rest of the course. Or anytime you open up Photoshop on your own in the future, you can break your Photoshop workspace down into four main components. And those four main components include the menus, which you see up here. The panels, which are over on this side on the right. So all of these are the panels, the tools which you have over here on the left side of your workspace, which also go with the tool properties which are all up in this bar up here. Then you have the main image window. So this area right here is where your photograph is going to appear once we open up our first photo. So again, we have menus, panels, tools, and tool properties in the main image window. Those are the four main components of your Photoshop workspace. Let's go over the first component I talked about, which is the main menu up here. This main menu bar contains various other menus, like the file edit, image and so on. You'll see as I click on each one of these menus or hover, we will get a drop-down menu with a variety of options. Each of these menus appear contain several options and commands that allow you to perform various actions on your images. And throughout the course, we'll be going through what many of these actions and commands are, what they do and how to apply them to your images will briefly go over here some of the most important menus that we'll be covering in this course and that you'll want to understand as a landscape photographer, starting with file, which has a lot of the same options that you might find in other programs. So things like opening a new file in Photoshop, creating a new file, saving your photos and exporting them in all kinds of important commands that you can use to open, save, and export your photos. If we go up to the Edit menu, this menu contains a lot of commands that allow you to modify your photos. We can copy and paste things in our document, which you're likely familiar with how to copy and paste. We also have commands where we can transform the image as well as auto align and auto blend, which these will become important when you start to learn more advanced editing techniques such as exposure blending and focus stacking and high dynamic range photography and things like that. Not something we're going to cover right now, but good to know where it's located. I also want to point out here that a lot of these options and commands here have keyboard shortcuts listed to the right of them. So if you see symbols and letters and numbers to the right of the command, that is a keyboard shortcut, which means that you can press these series of numbers, letters and symbols. And Photoshop will execute that command without you having to come into the menu and select it. So e.g. if we look at copy, you might be familiar with this as it's similar and other programs. But instead of having to come down this menu and copy something, we could just press Command C on a Mac or Control C if you're using a PC, if you come down to the bottom of the edit menu here, you can actually set your own keyboard shortcuts. So if I click on this, this is where we can go in and set our own keyboard shortcuts. So all of these right here correspond to all of these menus at the top of Photoshop. So e.g. if we open file, which corresponds to file up here, we can look at what the keyboard shortcut is and you can click on that keyboard shortcut. If I wanted to change the keyboard shortcut for new, I could select it and then type something different such as L. But if you come down here, you'll see that this is not a valid shortcut. Photoshop will always tell you why that is. So you might need to experiment finding a series of keyboard shortcuts that work. And the shortcuts, the symbols, the letters and numbers that you choose to use, really comes down to personal preference. You can essentially make them whatever you want as long as Photoshop allows for it. Now, I typically wouldn't change a keyboard shortcut that already exists. If I want to add a keyboard shortcut to open as a smart object, I could simply type in something like command queue. Again, you'll see this keyboard shortcuts already in use. So again, you might have to play around with this. I don't have anything for these keyboard shortcuts, and I prefer to keep it that way. I've actually added very few keyboard shortcuts because the thing is you do have to memorize them in order to use them. And unless you're doing something all the time where you're using keyboard shortcuts over and over and over, I tend to forget them so they really can make your workflow faster if you're using the same command often. But I don't have the best memory, so I usually don't use keyboard shortcuts unless they are very simple and I use them all the time, I'm going to cancel out of this. The other thing I want to point out in the Edit menu here is if you come down to menus, you can also change the visibility and the color of the commands in a menu. So if I go to edit, I can change whether or not I want to see any of the commands that are already listed there, so I wouldn't want to hide undo since that's a pretty common command. But if I click that button there and I click Okay, you can see that undo has disappeared previously it was on top of redo, but right now it's disappeared. So I'm gonna come back to menus. I'm going to turn that back on. The other thing you can do is you can change the color of any command listed in your menu. If you click here, you'll see a variety of different colors. And let's say I want to change undo to orange and click. Okay. Then when I open Edit menu, you'll see undo is highlighted in orange. This can be helpful if you use certain commands all the time or if there's an important command that you don't use very often, so you forget where it is that happens to me all the time. You can highlight it so your eye is immediately drawn there when you're looking for it. Again, if you have trouble finding something, you can always go to the help over here and type in what you're looking for. So if I wanted to look for the Undo, I could click right there and you'll see it appear in the menu. Alright, so I'm going to turn that color off. I'm just going to close this up with the settings that I've saved. That's a brief overview of edit. If we go over to image, this is where you'll find a lot of options related to changing your image or your photograph. So this is where we can make things like adjustments, change the image size, crop, even though we'll be working with photos and images in Photoshop, I actually don't use this menu really at all. And I'll show you later in the course the reasons why. But there are a few things here that you'll definitely use, such as the crop command, which we will discuss a little bit later. Heading over to layer. This is where you'll be able to control your layers in Photoshop. Again, we'll be covering layers in great detail throughout this course. So don't worry if you don't know what a layer is yet for now, just know that anytime you need to find a command that's related to editing or adjusting a layer. You can find it in this Layers menu type over here, not something that I worry about and not going to cover in this course. And you likely as a landscape photographer, won't be using select. We will be using and going into great detail with selections. Again, if you're not familiar with selections, don't worry about what they are right now. Just understand that when you need to edit or adjust the selection, you'll find all of the commands to do so. In this menu filter, we will also be using at some point in the course. I do sometimes use filters for landscape photography, and you'll be able to find those in the filter's menu. 3d. We won't be worrying about that view. This is where you'll find tools and commands related to how you see things in Photoshop. So how you view your images. I don't use anything in the View menu too often. One thing I will point out is zoom in and zoom out. I'd recommend memorizing these keyboard shortcuts. Command Plus and command minus or Control Plus or Control minus. If you're on a PC, Command Plus Command Minus on a Mac, these are really useful just to zoom quickly in and out of your images. These are easy to remember and you'll likely be using them often. I use them pretty often. And it's much easier than going down into view and then clicking on, zoom in and zoom out. Alright, plugins, we're not going to worry about this too much right now. Plugins are really just third-party pieces of software that you can download and then install it into Photoshop. And these just improve the functionality of Photoshop. E.g. you can download things that other photographers have created, such as Photoshop actions which can improve your workflow. If you find those tools useful, you can download them from external sources and bring them into Photoshop so that you can start using those tools in your workflow if you want to. Polygons are not included in this standard features of Photoshop, but they can be really useful, especially for things like Luminosity Mass, or say, sharpening and exporting images and things like that. But we're not going to worry about this for now. Moving over to window, this is where you'll find access to all of your panels. So we'll get two panels in just a moment, but All of the panels that have a check next to them have been open. So if we look over here, this is the color panel. The color panel is checked, which means that it's open and that I can see it. If I uncheck this, the color panel will close. Whenever you need to access a panel, which we'll get to in a moment. Just know that you can find all of your panels and their visibility under the Window menu. And finally, help, we discussed help anytime you need to find something in Photoshop, this can be an extremely useful tool. You just type in what you're looking for it right here. Let's now discuss panels which are on the right side of your workspace. Panels are like little menus or modules that contain a set of tools and commands and options that you can use to adjust a number of different things on your images. They give you a huge amount of control over what's going on in your image. There are a ton of different panels. And the good news is that as landscape photographers, we really don't need most of them, like we saw, appear in the window. You can see here that there are a ton of panels and we're gonna go over which ones are the most important ones that you need. As a photographer, we can open and close as many of these panels that we'd like. But one of the easiest ways to get going with panels and to set up your workspace is to start with a preset workspace. And we can find all of those workspaces right up here. If you click this little arrow button, you'll see a variety of different preset workspaces. And right now we're on the essentials workspace. And Photoshop has set these preset workspaces up for different types of artists. I don't find the essentials workspace to be particularly useful. But since we are landscape photographers, we can click on the photography workspace. You'll see other workspaces for painting, graphic, and web. That's not for us. So I'm going to click on photography and you'll see how all the panels over here it start to change. Let's just because photoshop has opened and closed different panels based on what the typical photographer uses. The other really important thing to know here is that you're not limited to one of these preset workspaces. So you can move any of these panels around and you can close and open anyone's that you like. So e.g. I. Don't use the navigator, so I'm just going to right-click on it and just click Close and you'll see that it disappears. Now say I wanted to get the Navigator back. I could just go to Window and down to navigator. And you'll see it appears right back where it used to be. Before I start editing these panels in this workspace, I want to actually save the workspace that I'm creating right now as a new preset workspace. So if anything ever happens, something weird happens in Photoshop and all of my panels arranged hi, want them changes. I can go back and just click that preset workspace. And it will all appear just like I like it. We're gonna go through and I'm going to show you all the panels that I typically use. And we're going to create a new workspace. So the way to do that is to go back to your workspace option button. And we have it on photography now. So that's a great place to start, but I'm going to click new workspace. I'm just going to name this something like photography workspace tutorials since I already have, as you might have seen, my photography workspace already set up and I'll show you how to create that right now. So we'll save that. You'll see if we go back to our workspace menu, that that photography workspace tutorial is listed here. And of course, you can name this whatever you'd like to save it as. Now the essential thing to know is that whenever we change any of these panels are workspace is gonna be saved in that configuration. And every time we open and close Photoshop, our workspace will appear in that exact same configuration as well. I'll show you an example of what that means once we set up our workspace here. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to close the navigator. Histogram is definitely a panel that you'll want to keep open. Histograms are very important and you can check out all the reasons why in my histogram course where we go in great detail about how histograms work and how you can use them. So we're going to keep histogram open down here in libraries. I do not use this, so I'm going to close Libraries. I'm going to right-click on that and click Close adjustments we will be using. We'll be using them quite a lot. And they're very important in editing photos for landscape photography and other types of photography. So adjustments are definitely going to stay here. But I am going to move adjustments. And the way I'm gonna do that is I'm going to click on the tab. I'm going to hold and then I'm going to drag it. You'll see that when you click on a panel, you can drag it around the workspace. You can actually undock it from the panels column and leave it in your workspace to float around, which is something that I don't prefer to do. I do like to keep them duct, but I'm gonna move it to this smaller column right here. You'll see that blue square appear and that's where your panel is going to dark. I'm going to release this panel and you'll see that it dropped right where that blue square was. Now our adjustments is just represented by half circle symbol. If I click on it, you'll see that that adjustments panel opens up. I just prefer this minimalist look. If you don't like that, you can bring it back over to the main column and you can dock it wherever you like. When you're docking a panel, you'll see a blue line which is located where that panel is going to be docked when you release it. So I can dock it right here if I wanted to, and it will create a new column. I can dock it between these two panels or above the histogram panel. I can even dock it in the same window as other panels, e.g. you can see the histogram panel is now outlined in blue. That means when I release the adjustments panel, it's going to dock in the same group with it. So it's going to group them together. In this type of undocking and moving of panels works for all of your panels. So you can undock, float, or redox your panels wherever you'd like. If we come down into layers, layers, you'll definitely want to keep open. I keep layers, channels and paths open at the bottom here. Here we have history. If I click on that, the history panel will open. I do keep history located right here on this smaller columns, so we're going to leave that right there. Actions I leave right here. We'll talk about actions at another point. Here, we have properties and I do not keep this one open, so I'm going to close this group. I also do not use info, so I'm going to close this one as well. Then here we have clone source. I do not use this one either, so I will close that one panel. I will go ahead and add right now that I do use and we'll talk about later, is the color panel. If we go up to window and it come down to color. And we'll see the color panel immediately Docs right here in this smaller column. And I'm actually going to move it underneath the histogram. I do not use swatches, so I will right-click here and close that. For now. This is a good workspace that we have set up for landscape photography. You're welcome to arrange your workspace, however you'd like here. You don't have to do it exactly like I've shown. But hopefully this helps you as we move through the course, you can understand as I show you how to do all of the functions in Photoshop, you'll know what I'm clicking on and where I'm going based on how I have everything set up here. Let's just check up here are preset workspace menu. If we go back to Essentials, you'll see it goes back immediately to the original essentials panel configuration that we were first looking at. But if we go back here, I'm going to click on our photography workspace tutorial. Now the configuration of panels is exactly like we left off. So it didn't jump back to any other workspace. It didn't even jump back to our photography workspace preset the Photoshop preset, already pre-packaged. So now anytime say anything happens and I want to go back to my original workspace that I like. I can just click on this and we're back to the workspace that we have setup. Again, if I close Photoshop and I reopen it back up, the workspace will look exactly like this. That is the basic workspace, overview, configuration, and setup. We talked about two of the four main components of the Photoshop workspace, which was the main menu up here, and the additional menus and our panels. In the next lesson, we're going to open our first photo in photoshop, and we'll discuss all the different ways that you can open a photo in Photoshop. But I'm also going to show you the exact method that I used to open photos in Photoshop and the exact workflow of how to do that. Once we get going, opening our photos, then we'll cover the tools and the tool options up here. The other components of your workspace. That's it for now and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Opening photos part 1: file opening basics: Now that we've set up our preferences and our workspace, it's time to open our first image. There are a lot of different ways to Open Images and Photoshop. There's really no best way to do this. So at the end of the day, it's really up to you how you want to open your photos after you learn all the methods that I'm going to show you here. But because there are so many ways to open files in Photoshop, the file opening process can actually get a little bit confusing and complex. Especially if you're new to Photoshop and you are new to a photo editing workflow. Even though this process can get a little bit complicated, I'm going to break all of this down for you. And over the course of this lesson and the next few lessons on file opening, I'm going to walk you through the exact workflow that I personally use to open files and the one that I teach and recommend to my students. So even though there's no best way to do this, I'm going to show you what has worked best for me personally and hopefully that will help you out, especially when you're first starting to get going with your photo editing workflow. Let's start with the most basic ways of opening photos in Photoshop. If you come up to the main menu under file, you'll see a variety of options for opening photos. The first one is just open. If you click on Open, you'll immediately be taken to a directory on your computer's hard drive where you can navigate to the folder where you're holding the files that you'd like to edit. If we go back to our File menu, we also have the option to browse and bridge. And I'm gonna go into a lot more detail in the next few lessons of what this means and how to browse your photos and bridge. This is actually the preferred method that I like to open my photos. So we will come back to browse and bridge. But for now, just know that browse and bridge is going to be the recommended way that I suggest that you open your photos. We also have open as smart object. And I will also come back to this in a future lesson because this is a little bit more of a complex topic, so we're going to dive into that a little deeper later on in this course. We also have open recent. Open Recent is where you'll see a list of files that you have opened recently and they will appear in this list. These Open Recent files are also located on your home screen. In addition to opening photos in the File menu, we can also go to our home screen. We exit out of our workspace here. We can also see those recent files listed down here. So if I wanted to open one of these files, I could just click on it and it would open up in Photoshop. On the left here. We also have the option to open our photos here. If I click on this, it takes us back to the directory on our computer's hard drive. Same thing as we saw before in the file open. It's just a different way to access that command. As photographers, we won't be using new file. You should never really need to click on New File. We're always going to be opening image files rather than new files. If you go up here, you'll see new. We won't be using that either. That's essentially the same command as new file, so don't worry about that for now. In addition to the options to opening photos directly from Photoshop, we can also navigate from our computer to the location of the photo that we want to open and do it from there. We can do this by using the finder application on a Mac or File Explorer on a PC. If I come down to my applications and open finder, and this will be on a Mac. So if you're using a PC, you'll be using Explorer. But this is where you'll navigate through the directories on your computer, which I'm sure you're familiar with. What you'll wanna do here is navigate to the location where you have the photos stored that you want to open in Photoshop. Now, I have a folder on my desktop that I use for all of my photo organization and the workflow that I use to edit and process my images. I discuss how I organize and get my images ready to edit in my course on Lightroom organization and workflow. So if you haven't checked that out yet, that will be very helpful for you to see, to show you how I create this system, to organize my photos and files. And it will help you understand in more detail what's going on here in terms of how I've organized my files into folders, why I've created my system this way. I'll be talking a little bit more about this in this course as well, because those two courses really tie in together, especially when we're moving from the process of importing our photos from our memory card, from our camera, organizing them, and then opening them up in Photoshop. And this is going to start to make a lot more sense really soon. So hang with me here. We're going to work through this step-by-step. And eventually this is all going to start to click. Again. All of my images to process are in this folder here. Specifically they are in this exported raw files folder. Don't worry about these for now. I go into these two folders in my Lightroom organization course. But for now, we're going to focus on this folder. This contains all of the files that I want to edit in Photoshop. If I click here, you can see a whole list of photos here. In all of these photos that you're seeing here, I have exported into this folder from light room. You can see here that all of my files are in the raw file format. That's shown by the dot nef extension. The dot NEF file format is just the raw file extension that Nikon uses. Depending on the type of camera that you're using, the extension for your raw files might be different. There are a lot of different file extensions for raw files, and they will depend on who makes your camera, e.g. you might see the dots, see R2. If you're shooting with a camera that's made by Canon. You'll also see next to each raw photo file, a XMP file associated with it. These are the files that hold all of the metadata that go with each image and hold all of the color settings and other data that I added to the file in light room. The key takeaway that I want you to have here is, like I mentioned, all of these files are in the raw file format. You might be familiar with other file types such as tiff, JPEG. And we will cover different file types in more depth in future lessons when we discuss saving and exporting images. But I just want to briefly mention here that when you are shooting, when you're out in the field shooting, if your camera is capable of shooting in the raw file format, you should have your cameras set so that you're shooting in that raw format. The reason for this is that raw image files contain unprocessed image data directly from the cameras image sensor. So in other words, raw files save the most amount of light information and data from your image sensor, which is something that you always want to do. You always want to retain as much imageData is possible, especially when you go to edit your images. Raw files give you much greater flexibility and post-processing because they provide more data for editing. And that's because they are uncompressed. Unlike JPEG images which are compressed, jpegs don't give you as much flexibility when you are editing and processing your photos. The only slight downside to using raw image files is that because they capture so much data in light information, it makes them much, much larger than JPEG files. And they require a slightly different approach to opening. If you're used to opening JPEG files, opening raw image files is gonna be a little bit different here. So I just wanted to mention that before we jump into opening these different file types. So if you've been shooting photos in the JPEG format, I highly encourage you to go set your camera so that it's shooting in the raw file format. In most cameras these days allow you to do that. Even newer smartphones and iPhones allow you to shoot in RAW if you know how to go in and change the shooting settings so that you're shooting in raw instead of JPEG, it's typically fairly easy and most cameras to switch from JPEG to raw shooting mode. So check out your camera manual or do a simple Google search. How to shoot on raw, on your specific camera model and that should point you in the right direction. Alright, so now let's actually open one of these raw files. And there's a few different ways to do that here as well. If you're opening a file from Finder or Explorer and you want to open it up into Photoshop, you can right-click on the image file and you'll see an option for open width. And I'm gonna go over and open with Adobe Photoshop. Before I open this up in Photoshop, I want to point out that my computer is showing that this is the default application to open this file. And what that means is that if I were to click Open, or if I was to simply double-click on this image to open it as he typically open a file, it would immediately open in Photoshop. On your computer, the default application to open your raw files may not be set to Photoshop. The way you can change that, at least on a Mac, if you're using a Mac, you can right-click on the image. Then come down this menu to get info. In this window that opens up here on the left. If we come down to Open width, we open that up. You will see an option here to set the default program that you want to open these files up with. And you can see here that adobe Photoshop is already set. If I click on this, I can browse a variety of different applications that I can open that photograph with. If you'd like to set Photoshop to the default application, you can select it, and then it will be set to the default application every time you want to open one of these photos. Now that I've shown you how to set the default application as Photoshop to open up these photos. I'm just going to go back to how we started with with open width and click on Photoshop. This is really the most fail proof way to do this. You'll see here that the photo has an open directly into Photoshop. Instead, it's opened into a different application called Adobe Camera Raw. And let's discuss why it opened in Camera Raw instead of directly into Photoshop. Because we're opening a raw file. All raw files have to be opened in a raw image converter before they can be opened in Photoshop. And Adobe Camera Raw is just another application that integrates with Photoshop. So it's a raw image converter that allows you to process your raw files and convert them into a format that Photoshop can open. If we were to open a JPEG or a tiff file, Camera Raw would not open. Our file would open immediately in Photoshop. But again, because we are opening raw files, we're going to have to first open them in Camera Raw. The reason we can open raw files directly into Photoshop is because they are non editable file type. So unlike jpegs and tips that are editable file types, raw files are non editable until we move them through Camera Raw. You'll see here that Camera Raw gives you a full suite of processing tools that allows you to make adjustments to your raw images such as exposure, contrast, white balance, saturation, sharpening. Really all the tools that if you're used to editing your photos in Lightroom, you will find all of the same tools in Adobe Camera Raw as well. And Camera Raw really works virtually in the same way as light room. So if you're used to editing in Lightroom, then you'll know exactly how to use Camera Raw. In fact, they both use the same image processing engine, which means that the same adjustments can be made in both applications. In addition, like Lightroom, Camera Raw also uses a non-destructive editing workflow. We will discuss what non-destructive, destructive editing means in a future lesson. But in short, what this means is that the original image is not altered. And all the changes that we make to this image here in Adobe Camera Raw are saved as instructions in a metadata file that can be reversed if you ever need to remove them. We always want to prioritize non-destructive editing over destructive editing. Again, we'll get into the details of what that means. Camera Raw is a great way to edit your photos non-destructively. Now, once I click open, this image will open in Photoshop. But if you first want to make some adjustments to this image in Adobe Camera Raw, you can do so using these sliders, again is just like light room here. So I'll just quickly make some minor edits here just to show you how this works. Then you can just click Open. And here we have our image finally opened in Photoshop. I want to show you the difference here. If you were to open a JPEG image, I'm gonna go back down to my finder, open up Finder. And I have a file that I created with just some demo JPEG files. I'm going to open the exact same image, but this one has been converted to the JPEG file format. So I will right-click on this photo to open it. Select Open with Adobe Photoshop. You can see that this image opened directly into Photoshop. We didn't have to use a raw file converter like Camera Raw in order to process and then open this photo that covers some of the simplest ways to open your photos directly into Photoshop. But even though they are the simplest ways to do that, they are not necessarily the ways that I recommend doing so, I'm going to go through the reasons why and show you the exact workflow that I would recommend that you use instead. If you are a light room user, which I hope you are, because it's a really great, powerful program that can help you organize your photos and get them ready, prep for editing. Then in the next lesson, I'm going to walk you through how to open images into Photoshop from light room. After that, we'll tie everything together and integrate Adobe Bridge, which is another great application that can help you streamline your workflow from taking a raw image in Lightroom all the way to opening it up in Photoshop. And with that, I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 6. Opening photos part 2: file organization system: In this lesson, we're going to hop out of Photoshop just for a moment before we discuss how to open photos in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Bridge, I first want to show you how I personally set up my file organization system, which I use to move photos through my Photoshop editing workflow. Now, if you haven't seen my Lightroom photo organization and workflow course, then I highly recommend that you go back and review that course. Because the way organize and manage photos in Lightroom really leads up to what I'm about to show you here. If you've seen that course already, then a lot of this will look familiar to you. I keep all of my raw photos that I shoot in the field on a separate hard drive. So I keep all of the original copies of the photos that come directly off of my camera's memory card on a separate external hard drive, which I then organize and manage using Lightroom. However, once I'm done using Lightroom, which is really just for organization, then I'll move the photos that I want to edit onto my computer's hard drive. And this is really where my Photoshop file management and editing workflow begins. You'll see here that I have finder open and I have a folder on my desktop that I named photo storage and organization. And again, this is just a folder that I keep on my desktop for easy access. When I open this folder, you'll see that I currently have four separate folders within this photo storage and organization folder. If you've seen my Lightroom class, then this exported raw files folder will be familiar to you. And the Lightroom catalogs folder, it will be familiar to you as well. As a review. I save all of my Lightroom catalogs in this folder on my hard drive, which contains all of the information that organizes my photos in Lightroom. And then this exported raw files folder is where I export all of the files out of Lightroom that I want to edit in Photoshop. If I open up this exported raw files folder, you'll see that I have a bunch of different photos in this folder. And again, all of these are raw photos that I've exported out of Lightroom that I want to edit in Photoshop. For each one of these raw files, you'll see the associated side car metadata file, which goes with each one of these photos that just contains all of the metadata. At this point, if you're following along with me, then I'd recommend creating these three files here. If you follow me along the Lightroom course, then you probably already have this file. But if you want to follow along and create the system and workflow that I use to move images through my Photoshop workflow. Then you can create these two additional folders here. So the P S, which stands for Photoshop, currently editing folder, and the ps complete folder. And currently these folders are empty. And this point, you don't have to understand what all of these folders mean. I'm gonna be covering throughout the course what all of these folders mean and what I use them for. So right now you can just pause the video and create these folders without really worrying about what they mean at this point. For now, just understand that these folders will help you organize the photos that you'll be editing and photoshop based on the stage of editing that they're in. So it's an easy way to keep track of your photos throughout the Photoshop editing process. Again, the only folders that you need to create right now are the exported raw files folder, the P S currently editing folder, and the ps complete folder. You can always rename these down the road if you'd like to, especially once you understand what they're used for. And you can also save these folders wherever you'd like on your computer. It doesn't have to be on your desktop. But I do recommend that you keep all of these folders in one single folder. Wherever you'd like to keep a photo storage or organization folder on your computer. You can save these three folders within it. Next we're going to head over to Lightroom and I'm going to show you how to open photos into Photoshop from light room. And I'll also cover the exact method that I use to transfer photos from Lightroom to Photoshop. So I will see you in the next lesson. 7. Opening photos part 3: opening photos from Lightroom: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to open photos into Photoshop directly from light room. And I'm also going to show you my preferred method for doing this. If you're already a Lightroom user, then you might be wondering how to integrate Photoshop into your editing workflow. Now, I don't personally edit photos directly in Lightroom. I use Lightroom to organize and manage my files. And it's a really powerful software that allows you to do that. But for reasons that I've explained in the past and that I'll be discussing in future lessons. Lightroom really isn't an ideal software that I prefer to edit my photos in. If you're new to editing photos than Lightroom is a really great introductory program that will allow you to learn and use all of the editing tools that are available in all of the Adobe products. So e.g. if you go to the develop module, which you may already be familiar with, this is where you'll find all of your developing and processing tools. E.g. exposure, contrast, color settings, sliders, all the things that you can use to edit your raw photos. Even though this is a pretty powerful way to edit your images, I do prefer to edit photos in Adobe Camera Raw. We'll go over why that is here pretty soon. So if I go back to library, all of my raw photos are stored on an external hard drive on this all raw files folder. And all of the photos that you're seeing here in my library are being pulled from this raw files folder. And they've had really minimal adjustments this point, I really have done almost no editing to all of the photos and my Lightroom library here. Down here, you'll see where I organize my photos into smart collections. And again, I cover all of this in my Lightroom organization and workflow course. So if you haven't taken that course and you want to understand how all of this works, then definitely go check that out. But for now, the most important thing you need to understand is that when I'm ready to edit a photo in Photoshop, what I'll do is I'll send it to this in work smart collection. And the easiest way to do that is to select the photo that I want and then press the number five. And now that photo has been sent to my inward collection. What I've done there by pressing the number five on my keyboard is I've rated it with five-stars. And so now, since this smart collection is set to collect all of the photos that are rated with five-stars. Any photo that's rated with five stars will appear in my work collection. I'll go back to my entire library here. I'm just going to go down and pick another photo that I might want to edit. So I'll select this photo and press F5. Then if I go back to work, I'll see that photo located in that smart collection. As a side note here, you might actually notice that these two photos here are actually JPEG files. And the reason for that is that I took those photos accidentally in the JPEG file format rather than the raw file format. That was just a mistake that I personally made out in the field. But all of the photos that I took in the JPEG file format, I still collect them with all of my other raw files because they are all of the original files that I took out in the field. Let me go back to my entire library. So if I come down to my more recent files, I will click on this image and hit F5 on my keyboard. Now we'll see that it's in my work smart collection rate over here. Let's say this is the photo that I want to edit in Photoshop. So at this point I'm ready to step into my Photoshop editing workflow. There's a few ways we can open this photo in Photoshop. The first is to right-click on the photo and come down to edit in. And you'll see edit in Adobe Photoshop. And when I click on edit in Adobe Photoshop, this image will open in Photoshop. However, I am actually not going to open this photo this way. Even though this seems like the most simple way to do this, it is actually done the road, not the best idea. Because if you open this photo this way and it opens in Photoshop, there's a possibility that when you go to edit this photo in photoshop, whenever you save this photo in Photoshop, depending on your computer settings, It's possible that it could affect the original copy in light room. This is something that I want to avoid. I don't want any changes that I make in Photoshop when I'm editing this image to affect the original copy that I'm storing in Lightroom. And this just prevents the original file from getting damaged or destroyed. It ensures that I always have a backup copy. So if I go to edit in, edit in Photoshop, there's a chance that I might lose or damage that backup copy. So in the long run, it's not a way that I want to open my photos and Photoshop. Instead, what I believe is the better way to do this is to export the photo out of Lightroom. The way to do that is to come down to Export and then over to Export. Here you will get a dialog box that will allow you to choose where you want to export that photo to. Now, like I showed you in the previous lesson, I keep all of the photos I want to work on in the exported raw files folder. If I jump back over to Finder, I want to point out again, this is the folder that I want to export all of my files into from Lightroom. And this just creates a duplicate copies. So once they are out of light room, they will never be touched or affected in Lightroom. Again. If I go back into light room, if your export folder isn't set to the folder that you want to export your files to. Then you can just go into Choose and then just locate the folder on your hard drive that you'd like to export your photos to. Again, mine is on my desktop and is located right here. So this is the folder that I want to export my files to. All of the other export settings here, we're going to keep the same. And if you haven't already, if you haven't gone through my Lightroom class, you can actually add an export preset. And the way to do that is to click Add. And then just name this, whatever you'd like. I've already used this name so I'm gonna cancel out, but usually I use something like rot export and you can click Create. If you haven't created this yet, I will cancel out of here. You'll see your export presets right over here. Once we have this all set up, you can either click Export or I am going to show you how to use your export presets. So if I cancel out of this and right-click on the image, you come down to Export. Now, every time you want to export an image, instead of clicking Export, you can come down to your export preset. Both of these presets here are identical, but the important thing to understand is that when I click on one of these, the file is going to be immediately export it to my all raw files folder, which we saw over here. That photo will immediately be sent right here. Let me go ahead and do that right now. Now that file has been exported into this folder, which you can see right over here. You'll see here that I have quite a few files that I've exported out of Lightroom. And that's because I usually export multiple photos at a time out of Lightroom that I want to edit so that I don't have to keep jumping back into light room to export the photos that I want to work on. That's why usually have a lot of photos in my exported raw files folder so that I always feel inspired and I always have something that I want to work on. Now we can open these photos by double-clicking on them. Just like we saw earlier in the course. We can open it directly into camera raw from are all raw files folder. But I actually want to show you how to integrate Adobe Bridge. So rather than just going ahead and opening up this file right now, we're going to layer in one more software tool. We're going to add in Adobe Bridge, which will help us out even further in our editing workflow, we will dive into Bridge in the next lesson, and I will see you there. 8. Opening photos part 4: opening photos from Bridge and Camera RAW: Welcome back to the class you-all. At this point we've covered many different ways that you can open a file into Photoshop. We've also covered how to open files into Photoshop from Lightroom, as well as my preferred method for doing that, which is to export copies of the photos that you want to edit out of Lightroom into their own folder, such as a folder like this that contains all of the raw files that I want to work on and edit in Photoshop. There's one more step to the process of opening your photos that I prefer, which is to incorporate the use of an Adobe application called Adobe Bridge. Even though you can open your files like I showed you directly from the folder where you're storing your raw files. So e.g. you could right-click and then open with Photoshop, or you could simply double-click it. Photoshop is the default application to open your photos. But the reason that I don't like to do it this way is because if we look through this folder, all of the photos are actually quite cluttered and disorganized. It's also hard to view the photos this way, and it's pretty laggy here, so it takes awhile to see the preview on this side, and it's not even really a large enough preview that helps me see the image in more detail. If I want to move through all of these photos, it's really not an ideal way to move through all the photos and work with all the photos that I want to edit here. Instead of using the Finder window to navigate through my photos. And more ideal solution is to use Adobe Bridge. Like I mentioned, bridge is just another Adobe product that you can download from your Adobe Creative Cloud. If you open Creative Cloud wherever you have that stored on your computer, under all apps, you'll be able to see the apps that are installed, but also the apps that are available on your Creative Cloud plan. If you are on a Creative Cloud plan that includes all of the Adobe apps. So Photoshop, lightroom, bridge, and all of the other applications which I recommend that you do use that plan so that you can use all of these tools. Then you will find Adobe Bridge listed somewhere in these applications that you can find and then install. And then it will be downloaded onto your computer for you to use. So there's bridge right there. Let's go ahead and open bridge. The first time you open Adobe Bridge, it should look something like this. Again, this is Adobe Bridge 2023. But if you're using a future version of Adobe Bridge, then it will probably work pretty similar to this. They don't really change too much over the years. So what you learn here will really apply in future versions. Everything you're seeing right here, all of these panels and Windows is your bridge workspace. Let's go ahead and set up our bridge workspace. I'm just going to show you the way that I prefer to open my workspace here. Welcome to change it around however you'd like, but this is the one that I've found works best for me. The first thing I'll do is go up to essentials. If you click on Essentials, you might already be on Essentials. This is the workspace that we have set up here, and we're just going to start with essentials as the default workspace. I do not prefer to use all of these panels here, so I'm going to start turning some of these panels off. You go up to window. You'll see all of the different panels that you can open and close, similar to how we did this in Photoshop. I'm going to turn all of these panels off except for favorites, folders, and content. So I'll turn off collections, I'll turn off export, and you can see them starting to disappear down here. I'll turn off filter. I'll turn off collections. The other way I can do this is by going to the panel and right-clicking, which might be a little bit easier way to do this. Right-click on Publish, close Publish. Let's close our metadata and keywords. The only three panels that I want here, our content, folders and favorites, and you can double-check that here. Now what we'll do is we'll go into our folders panel. You will see the directories on your computer's hard drive. So what I want you to do is to navigate to the folder where you are storing all of your files that you want to edit in Photoshop. I'm going to navigate on my desktop to photo storage and organization. You remember that's where all the photos are located that I want to edit. Now what I wanna do is I want to add all three folders that we created earlier in the course. So the exported raw files folder, the PLS complete and the ps currently editing. I want to add those folders into the favorites over here. If I go back to folders, I can open this up as well. You can either do it from here or from here. Let's start with exported raw files. If I right-click on this, I can go down this menu and select Add to Favorites. I'll do that for PS complete. For PS currently editing. Don't worry about adding Lightroom catalogs to favorites. Let's head over to favorites. And I want these three folders to be here, but I do not want these to be here, so I'm just going to right-click and remove from favorites. Perfect, So now we have the only three folders right now that we're going to be using in our Photoshop editing workflow. If I click on the Export it raw files folder here, you will see all of the photos that I have in my exported raw files folder. And you'll see this is a much better way to view this then when I was looking at these in Finder, again, this is much more cluttered and disorganized. Then over here in Bridge. Now that we have this set, let's set up our Adobe Bridge preferences. And this is not too in-depth here, so we'll briefly go over this and I'll go up to Adobe Bridge and then preferences. One of the most important things here is the cache size. I typically have this set to 50 gb, which is plenty large for what I need and I use quite large file sizes. So you might want to set your cache size to something larger, like 50 gb. You want to make sure that keep 100% previews and cash is checked. We also want to check compact cash on idle. And you will also want to check purge cash older than 30 days because I typically don't keep photos in here for too long, especially after I'm done editing them. So you can check purge cash and it will remove the cash after 30 days. And what the cash really means is that when bridge reads your photo files, it saves a history state of the file so it can easily see it when you're working with your photos. It really just allows you to operate Bridge much more smoothly. For the rest of these settings here, I keep everything the same, so everything is in the default state that Adobe Bridge comes with right out of the box. The only thing that I do change is thumbnails. I change this to 10,000 mb, so do not process files larger than 10,000 mb. 10,000 mb is a really huge amount of data. And this just ensures that bridge will display any file size and your thumbnails no matter how big the images, I use pretty large raw files. And if you have it set to something like 10,000, then you don't have to worry about your thumbnails here. You come down here. You can also turn on metadata to be added to your thumbnails. So things like the date the photo was created will be added to your thumbnail down here. I don't choose to add any of these things. I just like to keep it simple, but you can add this on if you like those preferences. And when you're done with all of this, you can click, Okay. Another thing I like to do to my workspace here is I like to enlarge the thumbnails. If you come down to the bottom, you can use this slider and move it to the right. And this will make your thumbnails are much larger. They usually keep it around something right here, so I get about six photos in the workspace. You also have the options to change the view modes here so you can change it to grid or this list view here. I like to keep it on the thumbnail view. Now that I have the workspace setup just like I like it. Let's go back up to Essentials and click on Essentials here. And I will save this here as a new workspace. If you click on save as new workspace, I'm just going to save it as you can, save it as your name or whatever you'd like to save it as. And then click Okay. And you'll see here that my workspace is saved up at the top. Say, anything happens to your workspace and you wanna get back to the workspace that we've created here. Then you can just click on your workspace and you'll always be taken back to what we've said up here. Again, I just want to recap here that if I go back to finder, these are the exact same photos that you're seeing here in Bridge. Bridge is just a nice way to visualize and also open your photos. It's much more intuitive than using this over here. You can think of bridge, like the name suggests, as a bridge between Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. Now, when you're ready to open your photo, all you have to do is select the photo that you'd like to open. And it's simply double-click on the photo. And like we've seen in previous lessons, because this is a raw file, we're going to see Camera Raw open up before we can open it in Photoshop. This is a time that you can make your initial edits to your photo. And if you come over here to your sliders, like you saw before, you can make edits like exposure, contrast, things like that. And I'm not gonna get into too much detail here about how all of these sliders and all of the editing functions work in Adobe Camera Raw because we are going to cover this extensively throughout this course, as well as in my Photoshop editing courses where we will cover many examples of how to use Ra and what all of these sliders and all of these tools here mean and what they do. For now, I'm just gonna do a simple edit on this photo. I'm going to do things like bring the highlights down so that darkens the sky. Maybe the shadows up, just a touch. So these darker areas light up just a bit. I'll add in just a little bit more contrast here to make the photo pop a little bit more. Maybe adjust the white balance to the right a bit just to warm the photo up just a bit. Then I'll add a little bit of vibrance just to give the color slightly more punch. Really key thing here that I want you to note is that when you are opening up your initial image in Adobe Camera Raw, so right before you open it up in Photoshop here, I recommend not going too heavy on the edits. It's really a good idea to make light adjustments that look good across the entire image. So what we call global adjustments that affect every pixel in the image, because we can always go back and adjust these settings later on. So don't worry too much at this point if you don't feel like everything that you've adjusted in your image isn't perfect. You can always go back and change these settings later on. If you make heavy adjustments here. So if you really make a lot of color adjustments or contrast adjustments, if you want to go back and change those settings later, It's a little bit more difficult to reverse heavy adjustments than it is to go back and add in things like color and contrast. So just something to be aware of as you're opening your first images. I will bring these adjustments back down just a little bit. So they're very subtle and they look pretty good across the entire image. Now there's one last step I want to show you here before we open our photo in Photoshop, and that is our settings down below here, we need to assign a color space to this image. It's important to understand that raw images do not have color spaces assigned to them. If the concept of color space is new to you, we're not going to get in too much detail right now of what color spaces are. I encourage you to go read up in steady what those are. But the most important thing to understand here is that we have to assign a color space to our raw image before we can open it in Photoshop. In order to do that, I'm going to click on this link down here. This is where we can set our color space. In order to do that, you can go up to color space. Click on this box. And I'm going to set this to pro photo RGB, which is the color space that I recommend that you use. We discussed this in the first lesson of this course, but again, this is the color space that will retain the most color information. The most important thing to understand here though, is that you want the color space that you set in Photoshop. So the one that you set when we went through the Photoshop, Color Settings and the initial video of this course. You want that color space in Photoshop to match the color space that you choose here. So if you chose Adobe RGB 1998, then you'll want to select that here if that's what you chose when you set up your Photoshop settings. If you remember, we set pro photo RGB in that first lesson in our Photoshop Color settings. So I'm going to select that here. Again, if this doesn't make too much sense to you, just follow along. Pro photo RGB will work just fine. Then you want to set your depth. Then I recommend you choose the highest bit depth. That will probably be 16 bits per channel for you. So select that. We will not touch either of these, so we won't touch image sizing or output sharpening. This right here is very important. Here we'll check open in Photoshop as Smart Object. We will discuss in future lessons with smart objects are and how they work. And we'll go into much more detail about that. But for now, make sure that smart objects is checked. And that should be it for art Camera Raw preferences. Now we can save these preferences as a preset. If you go up to preset, new workflow, preset, you can name this whatever you'd like, something like pro photo, RGB, smart object. I already have this preset saved, so I'm going to click Cancel, but you would click Okay after you've named this preset. When you open your presets again, you should see your preset listed somewhere here. So there is my preset. And then I will click, Okay. And now down here you'll see the name of your preset listed. And that ensures that we have all of our Adobe Camera Raw preferences set and they're all good to go. Now, if you do update adobe Camera Raw, it's possible that this could revert back to the default preset. All you need to do is click on this and then go find your preset in this menu. So you always want to make sure that that preset is on. Now you'll have the option to open this image as an object. So this is the option that we're going to select when we want to open the image. Just as a side note, if you make your adjustments in Camera Raw and you're not ready to open your photo yet, say you're in the middle of it, but you want to come back to it. If you click Done, then all of this will be saved. In the next time you go back to bridge, all of these settings will be saved. So if I click done, then all of those settings are saved. If I open this image up once again, then you can see here all of these adjustments here. So I don't have to worry about losing those. Now I'm going to open this image as a smart object. So open object. Here we have our image opened exactly the way we want it with all the preferences and settings. It's a smart object. It's in the exact state that we want for our workflow. No matter how I edit what I do to this photo, if I delete it, if I save it, the original copy of this file that's back in Lightroom, never be touched. Also, the fact that this is a smart object layer, and we'll be talking about layers here pretty soon. But it's a smart object rather than just a standard pixel layer. And what that means is that if I double-click on the thumbnail here, then the file will open right back up into Camera Raw with the exact same settings that I can go back and adjust if I wanted to see, if I wanted to add more contrast than I could make that change. And then click. Okay. Now I am right back into Photoshop where I have all of the editing capabilities and tools to work on this image. Adobe Camera Raw alone can provide. As we'll discuss in more depth later, this is really the power of using smart objects, the ability to jump back and forth between Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. It really gives us the best of both worlds. Now that you've learned all the ways to open a photo in Photoshop, we're going to start jumping into how to use the tools and other features of Photoshop that we can use to edit our images. That's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. 9. Photoshop tools overview: Now that we have a photo open in our workspace, Let's briefly go over the tools and the tool options. Like I discussed before, all of your tools are located in the toolbar here. And the options for those tools will be located up here. So each tool, when you click on them, have a individual Tool Options bar that will appear for all of the different tools when you select them. And you'll know if a tool is selected when it is darkened. So if you click on a tool, you'll see the background is dark and that means it's selected. As we go through this lesson and we go through this course. If I ever selected tool that you can't seem to find in your workspace? It might be because it's hiding within a group of tools. For each one of these tools, you'll notice that there's a small little arrow at the right-hand corner. This little arrow or triangle means that there's more tools in addition to the featured tool that you're looking at right here grouped together, the way to access those additional tools is to right-click on the tool. And you'll see a menu of those additional tools pop up. So the one that's shown right here that's featured in the main toolbar is the Move tool. And you'll see that it's the one that's being selected because there's a little square to the left of it here. If I click Artboard tool, then you'll see that this featured icon changes to the Artboard tool. I'm going to right-click and change this back to the Move tool. Another thing to notice, if we right-click on these tools, you'll see a keyboard shortcut to the right of the name of the tool. For the move tool and the art board tool, you'll see the letter V. And that means if you press the letter V on your keyboard, that tool will immediately become activated. And for many of these tools, as we right-click on them, you'll see keyboard shortcuts for each tool, not for all of them, but for many of them. Now, we won't go through every single one of these tools. But what I'm going to briefly cover all of the most important tools in Photoshop, especially the ones that you're most likely to encounter as a landscape photographer. So as we move through these tools, you'll notice that every time we select a tool, you'll be presented with this side window that tells you what the tool is, the keyboard shortcut, and a short description of what that tool does. So if you're ever lost or confused, even after this lesson about what a specific tool does, you can always just select or hover over a tool and you will see that window that gives you a little description about the tool and how to use it, and that can be pretty useful. It can be a little bit overwhelming, especially at first, knowing which tool does what. And this just takes a little time and some practice using these tools. And I promise you, you'll start to pick this up pretty quickly as we go through this lesson. And some of these tools don't really make sense to you. Don't worry, because we're going to dive a lot deeper into what the most important tools do as we proceed through the course. We'll get into using tools when we get to the part of the course where we're actually going to be using those tools to edit our images. And I think that's a much better way to learn this rather than memorizing what they all do upfront. I think once you get your hands on these tools and start using them in examples, they'll start to make a lot more sense. But here we're just gonna do a quick overview of what these tools do. You have a general sense of where they are and what they do? Starting with the first tool that we've already looked at. This is the Move tool. And this tool allows you to move images across your canvas. And it's really most useful in landscape photography when you're doing exposure blending. If you're not familiar with exposure blending, don't worry, it's a more advanced editing technique, but it essentially involves using multiple image of the same composition. Sometimes when we're working with multiple images at a time, we might need to move the image around on the canvas to line them up. So I'm going to turn this Lakoff just to give you a demonstration. With the move tool, you can click and drag your image and move it around your Canvas. We won't be using this tool too much, especially in the beginning part of this Photoshop series. I'm going to move all of this back. And let's move on to the Marquee Tools. So if we right-click on this square right here, we have a variety of options. So for different marquee tools. The first one is the rectangular tool that allows you to select specific areas of your image in a rectangular or square shape. We'll dive a lot deeper into selections and what selections are later in the course. So for now, just understand, these are tools we can use to select parts of the image. Actually, these three tool groups right here are different sets of tools we can use to make selections. In addition to the square Selection tool, we have the elliptical tool. And this will allow you to make circular selections. And these tools, the single row and the single column. These I never really use. I've probably never use these, but these allow you to just select a single row or a single column. If you select the column, a single column of pixels. Again, these next two sets of tools, these are all selection tools. Like I mentioned, we'll really cover selections in a few lessons. So let's not get too deep into these selection tools right now, but just know that all these selection tools are located right here. Moving down, we have the crop tool. And this tool, you might have guessed, definitely an important one that we'll be using. It allows you to crop off sections of your images. So you want to crop out some empty space of your image. Maybe there's too much sky, or we'd like to get rid of some of this foreground. We can crop that in and press enter, and we have a cropped image. Looks compositionally a little bit nicer, but I will undo all of this and the keyboard shortcut to quickly undo the last edit or adjustment that you did in Photoshop is just Command Z on a Mac. Command Z on a Mac, and Control Z on a PC. That'll get me right back to where I originally started right before I created that crop. Moving back to our toolbar, the frame tool, not something that we're gonna be using and covering here. The eyedropper tool can be a very useful tool, especially when you're working with color in your images. So if we select this tool, what it will do is it will sample a, a single pixel on your image. And it will set the pixel that you've selected the color of that pixel as your foreground color. So whenever you're working with brushes and color, this is the color that's going to be selected. If we go back to our image and sample right here, you'll see that this color changes to green. Up here, it'll change to light blue. Whatever we sample will become our foreground color. Next we have the spot healing brush and a few down, we have the clone stamp tool. And these two tools together we use in landscape photography to remove unwanted aspects of our photo. E.g. if I select this Spot Healing Brush, say e.g. there was a piece of trash right here that accidentally entered my composition. I didn't notice it. I could use the spot healing brush to remove that piece of trash depending on where it was and would it look like it may or may not be easy to remove it, but typically things like that are relatively easy to remove. Between these two tools. We have the brush tool, and this tool will allow you to paint onto your image. We have this light blue color selected. We can click and drag our brush across the image to paint across our image. You'll notice up here in our tool options, you'll have the ability to control how your brush looks. E.g. if you want to change the opacity, you want to turn the opacity down. This will be an important control later on when we start to work on more advanced techniques. But if we paint on the mountains here, you'll see that we don't paint 100% onto the mountains. We just painted about 14% opacity. We can turn that up and you can see how that gets a little bit heavier as we paint on. I'm gonna go ahead and undo all of these changes. Next we have the History Brush tool and that's something that I use. We're going to skip over this one. Then we have the eraser tool. Again, not a tool that I use very much, if at all. But what it does is it erases pixels from the layer that you're working off of. And we'll talk about layers pretty soon. But you can see that this will erase the pixels on our Canvas. I'll undo that and let's head over to our paint bucket. This is not a tool that I ever use in landscape photography will move past that one. The blur tool is another tool. I don't use so much, but just so you understand what it does is it blurs your pixels together on your images, which in certain situations can be useful. So if I go up here to the tool options, I'm just going to bring up the strength just to demo this to you. If you click and drag the blur tool across whatever you want to blur, you'll see that whatever you are trying to blur out, we'll start to get blurrier and blurrier. And if I undo that edit, you'll see how it sharpens it back up because I just took away that blur. Next, we have a series of tools that are pretty common for photographers to use. I right-click here. We have the Dodge Tool, the Burn tool, and the sponge tool. Dodging and burning is a very important technique in landscape photography. We'll get into what that is. And the sponge tool will saturate or D saturate the pixels on your image. It's a quick way to saturate and D saturate pixels, which you can control up here by selecting saturate or desaturate. This tool works really just like the Brush tool, but it removes saturation if you have it set to desaturate, and it will saturate those pixels if you have it set to saturate. So I will undo that adjustment. Here we have the Pen tool, not something I use as a landscape photographer. I don't use the type tool as well. If you wanted to add text to your image, you could use this tool. But I'm guessing if you're a landscape photographer, you're not adding text to your photos very often. Then we have the Path Selection Tool. Again, not something that we'll be using here. Then we have the rectangle tool won't be using this tool either. The hand tool we can use to pan around our image. And especially if we zoom into our image here, we can grab and then drag around our image. And this can be a really useful tool when we are moving around our image and doing adjustments to a specific area makes it a little easier to navigate around our image. Next, we have the Zoom tool. Like I mentioned before, I prefer to use the keyboard shortcuts the command plus and command minus. But this tool can be useful as well. What you can do is click and then drag on the part that you want to zoom in and out of. So if I want to zoom in to the top of this here, I can click and then drag forward to zoom in, and then drag backwards to zoom out. Pretty easy. And finally down here, the last thing I want to mention, these are your colors. So here we have the foreground. This is what your brush tool is going to be set to. The white color behind it is the background color. If you ever want to switch with those colors, are you can press the letter X on your keyboard and it will swap out the foreground and the background. If I click on the foreground color, either one of these colors, the color picker will open up. This is a really useful tool that'll tell you everything you would ever want to know about the color of the pixel you have sampled. If I move my mouse over to the image, you'll see that the eyedropper tool opens up so I can sample a color and that color appears right here, the new active color. I'll click, Okay. And that color, it will appear down here in the foreground color. Again, if I wanted to switch back to my light blue color, I could just press X on my keyboard and it will swap back to that original foreground color. That's a very simplified overview of all of the tools that are going to be important throughout this course and the editing processes that we'll be discussing in Photoshop. Really, the best way to learn all of these tools is to play around with them and experiment with them. So this would be a great time to open up a photo and just start messing around with these tools to see what they do. Again, we'll be diving much deeper into how these tools work throughout the course. And another thing I'd suggest, if you have the time, you can always go to the tool overview window that opens up when you hover over each tool. And you'll see this Learn More button. This will take you to a page where you'll be able to learn more about that specific tool and maybe some more techniques that aren't covered in this course. These tutorials can be really useful when you're starting to learn how to use tools. So it definitely recommend that. But hopefully by the end of this course, you'll have a solid understanding of how to use all of the most important tools that landscape photographers need in Photoshop. In the next lesson, we'll be discussing one of the most important parts of Photoshop, which is layer in this panel over here. When we were setting up our workspace, we open this layers panel. Next we're going to dive into what layers are like this layer right here. All the different types of layers that you'll probably use, how they work and things like that. So I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Understanding and using layers: In this lesson, you are going to learn all about layers, which is a core concept in Photoshop that is essential for you to understand as a photographer. When you first open an image, you will see that image appear as a layer over here in the layers panel right here. For this lesson, I've actually opened up two separate layers. So these are two separate images. Just a few moments, we'll discuss why you can only see one of the images and not the second one. But first I want to give you a quick overview of how to manage all of your layers before we jump into what layers are and how to use them. Inside of your Layers panel, you will find all of the controls and tools necessary to manipulate your layers. We won't be using all of these controls and tools in the layers panel. But it's good to know that anything that you need will likely be located at the top or at the bottom here, you can see at the bottom there's an additional set of controls. You can also find tools and controls for your layer is located in the Layers menu back at the top, at your main menu, in the Layers menu. So all of these commands and controls in this menu you can use to manipulate and edit your layers. An important thing to note in Photoshop is that there's often more than one way to do the exact same thing. E.g. we can add a new layer by going to new, but we can also add a new layer by going into the Layers panel. And whenever there's more than one way to do something in Photoshop, there's not necessarily a right or wrong way to do that. It really comes down to personal preference. I'm going to show you multiple different ways to do the same thing, often in Photoshop. And that's just so that you can have an understanding of the different ways that you can achieve the same result, then you can decide for yourself which method is best for you. Alright, let's jump into what layers are and the three main types of layers that you'll typically be using as a photographer. The first type of layer that you need to understand is called a smart object layer. We briefly touched on smart objects a little bit earlier in this course, when I showed you my preferred method for opening images, which was to open them as smart objects or smart object layers. As a quick review to show you that if I open up Adobe Bridge, and if I open up this image in Adobe Camera Raw, if you remember, we set our preferences so that whenever we open this image, it will open as a smart object. And that is indicated on this Open button right here. When you open an image as a smart object layer, you will see an icon on the bottom right-hand corner of the layer thumbnail, right here at the bottom corner. This icon indicates that this layer is a smart object layer, and it's not another type of layers such as a pixel layer or an adjustment layer, which we'll talk about here soon. Like we briefly discussed in the lessons on opening our images as smart objects. The main benefit to using smart object layers is that they allow you to jump back and forth between Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw. So if I click on this smart object layer, my image immediately opens back up in Adobe Camera Raw. And I can make adjustments to this image such as increasing the exposure. This is a little bit too high, but I'm just going to click Okay for now. In my image now reflects the overexposure adjustment that I just made an Adobe Camera Raw. If I wanted to go back and fix that, all I need to do is double-click on that smart object layer. Then I can just bring the exposure back down to where it was. Somewhere around right there. Like I mentioned, I have to smart object layers in my layers panel. The reason you can't see the second layer right here is because the top layer is always the most visible. A key thing to understand about layers is that they are always stacked in order of most to least visible. The layer at the top of your layer stack will always be the most visible layer. In the layers below the top layer will be hidden in the order that they appear. To demonstrate that what I can do is I can turn this layer off. And I can do that by clicking on this layer visibility button, which is just this icon to the left of your layer thumbnail. When I turn the top layer off, you immediately see the layer below. The top layer did not disappear. It's just hidden. So we're seeing directly down to the layer below it. If there is a third layer below this second layer, then we could only see that third layer if we turn to the second layer off. Right now, since all of the layers have been turned off or are hidden from view, we now have no pixels visible. The checkerboard pattern means that there are no pixels visible. If I turn both of these layers back on, I can also swap the order of these layers and you can do that by clicking on the layer you'd like to move and then dragging it through the layer stack. And wherever you see that blue line appear is where that layer is going to drop when you release your mouse click. Now that the layers have been reordered, the layer at the top of the stack is the most visible. If I turn this layer off or hide it. Now we see the second layer in the stack. You can also add additional layers to your layers panel, really as many layers as you'd like. In the way to add a layer is to go down to the bottom of your Layers panel and click the plus button. Now we have a completely empty layer is indicated by the thumbnail, which is a checkerboard pattern. We don't see anything change when we add this new layer because this layer doesn't contain any pixels, it won't affect any of the other layers. If I grab my brush tool and start adding pixels to this layer, so I will change the color here to something brighter, red. Let me just increase the brush size. Something pretty large like that. If I start to paint onto this image with a really large brush here and turn this layer completely red. You will see that I've completely hidden layers below. If I turn this red layer off, now we can see that top image, the one directly below the red layer. I can also change the names of my layers. If I click on the text of the layer, I can type anything that I'd like to name the layer. So I'm just going to name this red layer. If I turn this red layer back on and then drag it to the bottom of the stack. You'll see that now that red layer disappears, even if I hide the top layer, you still don't see that red layer because the second layer in the stack is hiding that red layer. If I turn the second layer off, now I see that red layer. In order to delete a layer, you can click the layer you want to delete, click and drag, and then drag it down to the trash can icon, and that layer will be deleted. You can also delete a layer by right-clicking on a layer and selecting Delete layer. But I'm just going to keep this layer here. I'm also going to bring back that red layer by pressing Command Z. In addition to using the keyboard shortcut Command Z to go back, I could also go back in my history and click the last step that I made in my editing workflow. You'll notice that this red layer doesn't have the smart object icon. Will discuss the difference between this smart object layer and this layer right here, which is a pixel layer. In just a moment, I do want to mention before we go into pixel layers, when you're using smart object layers, you can't use all of the tools when you're editing your smart object layer. E.g. you can't paint and erase on a smart object layer. So if I click this top smart object layer, and you can see that that top layer is selected because the background turns light gray. If I go over to the image and tried to paint using the paintbrush, you'll see this icon that says I can't do that. This will occur on your smart object layer when you're trying to use other tools like an eraser tool or a spot healing tool or the clone stamp tool. You'll run into this issue where you can't use those tools on a smart object layer. You can, however, use those tools on a pixel layer, which is the second type of layer that you'll be working with as a photographer. Pixel layers are very similar to smart object layers, but they don't allow you to jump back and forth between Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. E.g. if I double-click on this layer thumbnail, I'm taken to this layer style dialogue box and I can control the settings of this layer here, not taken immediately to Adobe Camera Raw. And that's really one of the main limiting factors when you're using pixel layers instead of smart object layers. One thing I can do is I can turn smart object layers into pixel layers. And the way to do that is to find the layer that you want to convert. Then right-click on that layer, you'll find in the menu that appears a list of options. You'll want to click on Rasterize Layer. When I click on rasterized layer, that layer is turned from a Smart Object layer into a pixel layer. And you'll see that the icon for smart object layer has disappeared. I'm gonna go ahead and turn this image into a pixel layer. So I'll go up to Rasterize Layer. Now you can see that I have three pixel layers. Now, since we're working with pixel layers, we can actually paint and erase onto these layers. Let's go ahead and do that. So I'm going to bring the size of this brush down That's quite too large. Now, if I go to paint onto this layer, and actually first I'm going to need to select the top layer so we can actually see what happens when we paint onto this image. When I go to paint onto this layer, you can see that now we can paint me go back in the history here. And this time I'm going to select the eraser. When I start to erase onto this pixel layer. You'll notice what happens is that the layer below it starts to appear. What's happening is that I am erasing the pixels on the top layer. And as I erase those pixels, I can see down almost like looking through a window down to the layer below it. If I select the second layer in the stack and I start to erase over the same area. You'll see that the bottom layer starts to appear. Again. It's occurring for the exact same reason. Because we've erased the pixels on the top layer and erase the pixels in the same spot on the second layer. Now we can see again like a window all the way through these two layers to the layer at the very bottom. If I go back here and then switch the order of the layers, I paint onto this area. Once again, you'll see the same thing occurring just in reverse. We've painted the top image now over the mountains, and now we can see down to the darker image below. Again, if I select the second layer and I paint onto the same area, I start to see the red pixels at the bottom of the stack. If I go back and try another experiment where I select the second layer in the stack and start to erase. You won't see anything because the layer on top is not being edited. It's completely intact and so it's hiding all of the changes and edits that we make to the layer below it. If we turn that layer off though, then we see those changes. Everything that I've erased on this layer can now be seen down to the layer below it. Let's undo these changes. A really important concept for you to understand here is the difference between what are called destructive versus non-destructive edit. When I'm editing a layer, e.g. if I grab my brush tool and I start to paint onto this image, when I paint onto this image, I am permanently destroying these pixels. In other words, if I were to save this image right now and then close Photoshop, reopened the image backup. The image would look exactly like this, but the history over here would be gone. I wouldn't be able to go back in the history and fix this. So if I was painting on my image and made a really significant error, say something that looked like this, then it would permanently damaged the image, especially if I saved it, closed Photoshop and reopened it, there would be no way to recover this image without these brushstrokes. This type of edit is called a destructive edit because it creates permanent changes to the original image when you destructively edit an image, any changes you make are applied directly to the pixels of the image. This means that you can't undo the changes later and you might lose important image data in the process. First, I'm going to undo these brushstrokes, and this time I'm going to add a layer to this step. So now I've added a clean layer that has no pixels on it. This time, if I brush onto this image in just the same way, I always have the option to go back and remove these brushstrokes no matter what. The reason for that is, because I can always go back and delete this layer. Even if I save this Photoshop file, close Photoshop and reopen this file back up. This layer will appear in the image stack. If I wanted to, I could either turn it off or two more permanently deleted. I can just drag it into the trash. Now, the original image has not been touched. The original image is still in its original state. And that's how layers allow you to create nondestructive edits, which are the types of edits that are ideal when you're working with your images in Photoshop. When you're creating non-destructive edits, you change your image in a way that does not permanently alter the original image. All of the changes are saved on a separate layer. So you can always go and delete that layer if you ever want to change or remove those edits. Whenever you're working with images in Photoshop, tried to always make edits that are non-destructive. So just to summarize here, when you're working in Photoshop, I always try to make edits that are non-destructive. You can do that by creating your adjustments on separate layers instead of directly onto the image itself. That leads me to the third most important type of layer that you should understand as a landscape photographer. And that is an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is another type of layer in Photoshop that allows you to apply non-destructive color and tonal adjustments to the layers below it. So rather than modifying the pixels on the layer itself, the adjustments made with an adjustment layer are applied as a separate layer on top of the underlying layers. And let me demonstrate what that means. Before I create an adjustment layer, I first want to show you how to create a regular adjustment, which is a type of destructive adjustment, just so that you can understand the difference. So to make a regular adjustment, you go up to image and then down to adjustments. And you'll see all the different types of adjustments. So color and tonal adjustments that you can make to the image. We'll just start with the first one, which is brightness contrast. Here I'm just going to increase the brightness so it's way overexposed. And then click. Okay. Now we've made an adjustment to our image that clearly doesn't look good and say this was a mistake. The problem is, is that if I accidentally made this adjustment, then saved and closed Photoshop and reopen this image. There's nothing that I could do to take down this exposure or this brightness level. In other words, I've created a destructive edit that is permanent. It's changed the original photo. Luckily, I can still undo this change by pressing Command Z. And this time I'm going to create an adjustment, but I'm going to do it using an adjustment layer. There's two main ways that you can create an adjustment layer. The first is to go to your Layers menu and down to new adjustment layer, and then you could press brightness or contrast. The alternate method that I prefer is to go to your panels. You'll find our adjustment panel indicated by the half circle. Wherever that is. If you set your Workspace up just like mine, you should find it right here, but you might find it in a different location in your workspace. Wherever it is, click on your adjustment panel and you'll see all of the different adjustments just represented by icons. These are the exact same adjustments is in the New Adjustment Layer menu. All of these adjustments here are represented by these icons. Over here. I'm going to click on the brightness contrast adjustment layer. And you'll see when I clicked on that brightness contrast adjustment layer that this layer appeared in the layers stack right here. Notice the difference between a pixel or a smart object layer. That's indicated by a thumbnail of the image. In the adjustment layer instead of a thumbnail, you have an icon that represents what type of adjustment has been made. To the right of the icon you have what's called a layer mask. And don't worry about what layer masks are right now, we'll discuss Layer mouse in a future lesson. All of the controls for your adjustment are located in the properties panel. If I wanted to increase the brightness, I can just drag this slider up. We're making really the exact same adjustment that we did before. This time we're using an adjustment layer. We're not using a regular adjustments. So this adjustment is non-destructive. If I save this image file closed Photoshop, and reopen Photoshop, the layer stack would look the same and I could remove this adjustment just by dragging it down to the trash can. And then I get my original image back. And that's really the beauty of using layers. They give you the ability to paint, crop erase, make adjustments and color and tone in ways that do not permanently change your original photo. The last thing I want to mention here about adjustment layers is that you can really add as many of them as you'd like. If I go up to the adjustment panel, I can add additional layers. So I could create a hue saturation layer, or I could create a levels adjustment. You can start to pile up these adjustments here depending on how many adjustments you'd like to make. At this point, we're not going to dive too deep into how these adjustment layers operate, e.g. how to use the levels adjustment and things like that. We'll get to that in a future lesson. But for now, the most important thing for you to understand is that adjustments made with an adjustment layer are applied as a separate layer on top of the underlying layers. So whatever adjustment layers I add to this layer stack, they will be applied to the layer below this layer right here. Before we close this lesson, the last thing I want to discuss is how you can group and organize your layers. The way to do that is to go down to the bottom of your Layers panel and click this folder icon to create a new group. Once you have a new group created, you can drive different layers into that group. If I click and then drag this layer into group one, this layer is now located inside of group one. I can do the same thing with this hue saturation layer. Now both of those adjustment layers are inside of group one. If I wanted to, I could even drag this image layer into this group as well. So now I have three layers in this group. And I can collapse this group by clicking on this arrow icon. And now those three layers are hidden into this group. In grouping can really be helpful when you start to get a lot of layers in your layer stack. And it can get a little bit overwhelming and feel a little bit out of control when you have so many layers to manage it once. You can also rename that group by clicking on the name of the group. I can name this something like Grand Teton adjustments, since that's where this location is. You can even hide and show groups. So if I hide this group here, all of the adjustments, including the image, are going to be hidden. Everything inside of that group is going to be hidden. So that's why we see down to the layer below. So that's a pretty general overview of how layers work. We will be using layers extensively throughout this course. So if this concept seems a little bit fuzzy to you, I recommend going back and rewatching this lesson until it really sinks in. And that will help you out moving forward as we start to dive into more advanced topics. In the next few lessons. 11. Selections part 1: selection techniques overview: In this lesson, we're going to cover the basics of selections in Photoshop. Understanding how to make and to use selections is an essential skill when digitally editing your photos. And it's one that you'll be using often in Photoshop as a landscape photographer. The adjustments that we've been making so far are what are called global adjustments. And global adjustments are adjustments that affect the appearance of the entire image. In other words, they affect every single pixel in the image equally. A lot of times, especially when we're editing landscape photos, we will only want to adjust part of the image. E.g. we might only want to adjust the foreground or maybe just the sky when you use selections in Photoshop, but you will be able to target specific areas of an image that you want to adjust, rather than making adjustments that affect the entire image. When we're making adjustments or edits to a specific part of an image, we're making what are called targeted adjustments or selective adjustments. Now, there are a lot of different ways that we can make selections in Photoshop. We'll be covering many of those in this lesson and throughout the course to understand what I mean by the difference between global and targeted adjustments. Let me show you a simple example to help demonstrate this concept. First, I'm going to make a global adjustment to this image. And I'm gonna do that by going up to Image, down to adjustments. And then I will click brightness contrast to create a brightness contrast adjustment. Here I will use these sliders to adjust the brightness. So I'm going to bring the brightness down here. Now you can see that I've really darkened up the image quite a bit. This obviously makes the image way too dark, but there are parts of this image that would actually look better if they were dark and down. So e.g. this guy actually looks a lot better when it's dark and down a bit. The problem is that when I make this adjustment, it affects the entire image. So it makes some of the areas of the image that I don't want to darken. Say the foreground here. This area all gets way too dark, way darker than I want it to be. And that's really the problem with global adjustments in most circumstances in landscape photography. I am going to remove this adjustment by clicking Command Z. You can also go back into your history if you wanted to go back to the original state of the image. But Command Z is really the fastest way to do that using the keyboard shortcut to go back in your history. So we're back here to the original image. This time I want to make a targeted or selective adjustment. And this time I want to darken down the sky, but I'm going to select the sky. So what I'll do is I'll head over to one of our selection tools. And I'm just going to select the Quick Selection Tool. We will cover what all of these tools do and how they work. But for now, I'm just going to select this for this quick demo. Using this quick selection tool, I'm going to drag the cursor across the sky. You'll now see that there are these black and white moving lines that go around the sky. What this animated line means is that whatever is inside this line is what is selected. You'll most commonly hear this selection that you're seeing, this animated line, you'll hear it called marching ants. So from here on out, if you hear the term marching ants, what it means is that it's the area that's been selected. Now that I've selected the sky, I'm going to go through the same steps to darken down this image. I will go back to image, down to adjustments. Then again to brightness contrast. Again, I'm going to darken down this image just like we did before, somewhere around there. And now we see that only the area that we made this selection, so only the sky has darkened down. This is the only part of the image that has been affected by the adjustment we just made. This is probably a little bit too dark for this guy because it does look a little bit unnatural. But just for demonstration purposes, you can see the difference in what it looked like before the adjusted sky and what it looks like after. Again, noticing how the foreground and the mid ground was not affected at all by that adjustment. Again, this is what you call a targeted adjustment. I'm going to go back and remove this adjustment if I go back into the history and back to quick selection. So now we're back to the original image without the adjustment. Another thing that you can do here is invert the selection so you can reverse what is selected and what is not selected. If you go up to select which this menu right here is where you'll be able to control a lot of the commands related to selecting parts of an image. I come down to inverse and click Inverse. What's happened here is that the sky is no longer selected, but everything else has been selected. So the selection here has been inverted. Now I can do the same thing that we did before. If I go up to Image Adjustments, brightness contrast. Now, when we make an adjustment, say if I brighten this up, the only parts of the image that are being adjusted, R, the foreground and midground. So the river here and the mountains. Again, if I take this down and make it way too dark here, makes it a lot more obvious. If I click Okay, you can see by inverting the selection, I have made an adjustment to the exact opposite part of the image. So everything except for this guy. I will go back and remove that adjustment. A keyboard shortcut to invert, an easier way to invert your selection. So rather than going to select and inverse, you come back to the image and use your keyboard shortcut Command Shift I. If you're using a Mac or it would be Control Shift I. If you're using a PC, you'll see how that quickly inverted the selection back up to the sky. So Command Shift I, if you're using a Mac and Control Shift I, if you're using a PC, when you want to remove a selection, you can go up to the Select menu and click de-select that keyboard shortcut that's easier to use than going up to this menu is simple. It's just Command D if you're using a Mac, and that would be Control D if you're using a PC. I will come back to my image here and using Command D, you'll see that that selection disappears. Now, nothing here in this image is selected. Like I mentioned, there are many ways that you can make selections in Photoshop. We'll start with the simplest ways to do that using the selection tools on your toolbar. We'll first start with the mark key tools that we've briefly gone over. I select the rectangular marquee tool. You'll see that I can create a rectangular or square selection. I will press Command D to remove that selection. We also have, if we right-click the Elliptical Marquee Tool so we can create a circular or oval selection of an object in our image. These marquee tools here, so all four of these tools here you will probably never use. We really won't be using them throughout this course because they're not really practical when you are editing landscape photos, but just good to know they're there if you ever need them. Next, we have our Lasso Tools. Let's first select the Lasso tool. So this is the regular lasso tool. I will press Command D to remove that selection. The Lasso tools allow you to draw selections onto your image. The regular lasso tool that we have here allows you to freehand draw around the part of your image that you want to select. If I connect the ends here, you'll see we have a complete selection, although not a pretty one around the mountains. The polygonal lasso lets you draw selections that have straight edges. So everywhere you click on your image, you will create a new straight edge. That tool will give you edges and angles. Again, this tool is not very practical for IT landscape editing purposes, so we will continue to move along here. Next we have the magnetic lasso tool. And this tool is a little bit more practical. And what it does is, wherever you click, it'll start to detect edges in an image and start to snap it to the edges that it detects. So I'm just running my cursor along this ridge line here, these mountain peaks. And you'll see how the Magnetic Lasso Tool is sticking to the edge of the mountain peaks. In this tool works really well when you have a clearly defined edge, such as what you're looking at here with the skyline of the mountain peaks. So anything that has clearly defined edges, the Magnetic Lasso Tool can be pretty useful for. I will just make a complete selection here. Now we can see that we have a much more refined selection that we've seen in the other tools, selection tools that we've looked at so far. Next we have the smart selection tools. Let's first start with the Quick Selection Tool, which we briefly looked at at the beginning of this lesson. In order to use this tool, you have to do is click and drag over the area that you want to select. The selection will quickly wrap around obvious objects or edges. So photoshop can easily detect where the edges are along this selection here and they're pretty obvious to the eyes as well. Areas that are a little less defined. So if we go down here, if I drag the Quick Selection Tool across this area, you can see it has a little bit harder time determining what I want and what I don't want. But it can tell that there's an edge or a boundary along the river and the shoreline here, but it's not really working that well in this situation. If we look back at our smart selection tools, Let's look at the object selection tool. Once you have the object selection tool, let's take a look at the Tool Options bar for the objects selection tool. You'll see a variety of options and settings up here. The one that's pretty useful when you're using the object selection tool is to check object Finder. When I check object finder, what that does is when I hover over my image, photoshop will start to detect what it thinks are objects and highlight those objects in a light reddish pink color. So right now I have my cursor over the sky. So it's detecting that the sky is the object that I want to select. Essentially the objects selection tool is a way to select objects out of your image. If I move my cursor over the mountains here, you'll see that it's detecting the mountain range as its own object. And over in the foreground, you'll see that all of the green areas of forested areas and shoreline or an object, and it doesn't seem to be detecting the river as its own separate object. It's doing a pretty good job with the sky in the mountains. If I click on an area that's highlighted in pink, what will happen is that that object will be selected. So you'll see the marching ants going around that selection. If object finder isn't working well for you, you can turn that off and I'm going to de-select this. You can set the mode to lasso here. And there's an option for rectangle. I think lasso works a little bit better. You can try them both out, but essentially, you draw around what you want to select. Photoshop will select an object that's within the boundaries of what you have just drawn with your Lasso. Here didn't do the best job of selecting the mountain range. The object finder did a much better job. Let me try that one more time to see if it does a better job if we get a little bit closer to the mountains here. Alright, so we did an okay job. It detected some of the edges and some of what it thinks I think is the object. Clearly there's a big chunk right here that it did not get right. So this is your first example of how selection tools don't always get it right. Oftentimes we have to go in and manually adjust our selections to really refine them and get them exactly how we want them. We will cover how to refine selections. And just a little bit. Another thing I want to point out here is that when you are using selection tools in your toolbar options, you will have multiple options here to add and subtract selections. Let's say that I really liked this selection that was made here, but I want to, on some of the mountains over here, what I can do is come up here to add to selection. If I select this, now when I select these mountains over here, it will be added to this selection. So if I start to draw with my lasso around these mountain peaks. Now we have added to our original selection. And again, it didn't do the best job of selecting those peaks. And we'll talk about how to fix that in just a moment. We can also subtract from our selection. We go back up to our Tool Options bar right next to add is subtract from selection. And if I click on that, now whatever I draw around in the image will be subtracted. So if I want to subtract half of the mountain range here, you can see that all of this area here has been removed from our selection, but we still retain all of the selected area on the left side of the mountains. If I wanted to, I could also use different tools to add and subtract selections. If I go back to add, if I want to add more selection to this area, I can use a different tool rather than the object selection tool. Let's say I wanted to use the Quick Selection Tool. And now if I paint across the sky, if I drag it across the sky, the entire sky is selected in addition to the selection that we had previously of the lower part of the mountains over here. You can mix and match Selection tools in that way. Let's go back over to our smart selection tools. And I will select the Magic Wand Tool and de-select that selection. With the Magic Wand tool, you click on what you want to select. So e.g. if I want to select this guy here, I would click on the sky and Photoshop will detect what it thinks I'm trying to select. I'm not a fan of this tool because you can see here that it didn't select part of the sky. It's really not an accurate way of making selections, so it's not a tool that I recommend that you use, but just so you know that it's there, it's included in these smart selection tools. Alright, let's go back to our image. I'm going to de-select everything selected here. The next thing I want to show you here is how to make selections using options in the Select menu. If we go up to Select, you'll see a variety of ways that we can make selections of our image different than we've seen by using our tools. First, let's talk about the color range selection. If I click on Color Range, this tool allows you to make selections of specific colors in your image. When you open this color range tool, your eyedropper tool will immediately open up. And what you can do is sample parts of the image. So sample the pixel color by clicking on it. And that is the color that you will be selecting for. So e.g. if I want to select for this green in here, if I click here, you will see that my foreground color here turns to dark green. And what I'm doing is I'm telling Photoshop to select all of the pixels in this image that are this dark green. I can also tell Photoshop how many colors I want to include that are similar to this color. And the way I can do that is by going to this fuzziness slider. This planar allows you to adjust the range of colors selected. So the higher I slide this slider, the more colors that are similar to this dark green will be selected. And the further down that I slide it, the more narrow the range of colors that will be selected. So if I were just to put this at one, only pixels at this exact color will be selected. Now, let me pull this back up to about the middle here. And you'll see this black and white thumbnail that represents our image in color over here. What this is showing is everything that is in white is what's going to be selected and everything in black will not be selected. You can see here as I slide the fuzziness up, that more and more of the green is going to be included in this image. And that's because we have many different shades of green. We clearly don't have any green in the sky and really no green in the river here. And that's why all of that is blacked out. The gray parts of the image represent what is partially selected. If you want to lower the color range that you're selecting, just like the fuzziness down and you'll get fewer colors and colors that are very close to the range of the exact color that you sampled. But if you want to increase that color range, just pull this fuzziness slider up. Let's say I selected this guy here and you'll see a very different thumbnail. Now, our foreground color is set to blue. And Photoshop is going to select all of the blue color in the sky, as well as in the river. I can also add additional colors to add to the range. If you go to this eyedropper tool here. Now the next color that I select will be added to the overall selection. If I start to add in some green, you will see now that most of the image is selected, because now we've selected both light blue and dark green. But I just want to stick to blue. So I'm gonna go to the eyedropper with the minus symbol. I'm just going to select green so that I can remove some of that green from the image. And you can see I start to remove a lot of the green from my selection. So once I have the colors I want to select for, I can click, Okay. Now all of the parts of the image that had that light blue color has been selected. Sometimes when you make a selection like this, that is very detailed, it can look a little bit overwhelming with all of the marching ants that you see here. One way you can make it a little bit easier to look at is to hide those marching ants. And the easiest way to do that is to use the keyboard shortcut Command H, that would be Control H on a PC. Now, even though the marching ants are hidden, the selection is still there. The way we can check that is by going to image and adding an adjustment here. So let's add a brightness contrast adjustment. I will just darken things down. We'll see what happens. We can see here that our adjustment is being applied to the selection. I will go ahead and cancel out of this. And if I press Command H or Control H, you'll see that the marching ants re-appear. And it does look like we included some of the green into our color selection. I'm going to deselect the selection. Let's go back to art selective menu. Next Dr Color Range. We have focus area, and this is not a selection tool that I really ever use. This tool can be used to select different areas depending on how in-focus they are. So e.g. if the foreground here was really out-of-focus, but the mountains here, we're extremely sharp and in focus as they are here. Then I could tell Photoshop how to select what's in focus or what's not in focus. But I really don't find this tool useful. And even for more advanced techniques like focus stacking and things like that, there are better techniques that you can use if you're interested in blending different exposures with different areas of focus. Again, this is not a tool that I use and is one that I don't think will be useful for you either. The subject select tool is also another tool that I don't use. This tool can be more practical if you shoot images that include people. So photoshop will detect subjects such as people, and then select those subjects in the image. This next one is select sky can be useful especially for landscape photography. If I click on it, select sky, what will happen is Photoshop will detect what it thinks the region in this photograph includes the sky. Here you can see that it's done a pretty good job of doing that is detected some of the snow on the top of this peak here to be part of the sky. So that is clearly inaccurate, but oftentimes it works pretty well. That's just an example of how you can use different tools to really achieve the same effect. If you remember earlier in the lesson, we use the quick selection tool to select the sky. And we really achieved the same thing by using the sky detection from the Select menu. That's a pretty basic overview of how to make simple selections in Photoshop. As we've seen in this lesson, photoshop typically does a pretty good job of making the selection that you want, but it doesn't always get it quite right. So lot of times we have to go in after the initial selection and manually refine the selection to get it perfect. And that's what we'll be covering in the next lesson. E.g. we just selected this guy here, but it didn't detect it quite perfectly. It included some of the snow on the peaks here in our selection. So in the next lesson we'll cover how to refine our selections, how to make them a little more accurate so that we have perfect selections to use in our editing process. That's it for this lesson. I will see you in the next one. 12. Selections part 2: refining selections with Quick Mask Mode: In the previous lesson, we covered the basics of how to make selections and how to use them to create simple targeted adjustments to your images. We saw that for the most part, Photoshop does a pretty good job in determining this selection you want to create, especially when you're using smart selection tools. But most of the time it doesn't make a perfect selection. Oftentimes after we create a selection using tools in Photoshop, we have to go in and refine that selection to make it perfect. Let's go back and create a selection of this guy. And I'm just going to use the Quick Selection Tool like you've seen before. And just drag this across the sky here. Here I have a selection of the sky, but like we've seen before, these selection isn't perfect. From this perspective, it looks pretty good. But if I start to zoom in and I will start to zoom in on the mountain peaks here. If you remember, the easiest way to zoom in, in my opinion, is to use the keyboard shortcut Command plus, that's on a Mac. If you're using a PC, that will be Control plus or Command plus to zoom in. As a review, you can also use your zoom tool. So if you click where you want to zoom in, you can zoom forward and you can scroll back to zoom out. In addition, you can use the scrolling feature on your mouse to zoom in and out. Just a quick review of zooming because we will be using that a lot throughout this course. I'm going to zoom in to the mountain peaks up here and use my painting tool just to orient myself where I want to look. If I zoom into this peak here, this is Grand Teton. You can see that Photoshop did a pretty decent job. Selecting the sky actually did a great job, except for this little area right in here. Because the snow at the top of this peak right here is such a similar color to the sky. Photoshop had a little bit of trouble detecting the difference in this edge between the snow and the sky. So it just went ahead and included the snow on this mountain peak in the sky selection. But I do not want this part of the mountain included in the sky because it's not part of the sky. Let's talk about how we can refine this selection to fix this problem right here. One of the simplest ways to fix this is to use what's called Quick Mask Mode. You can enter Quick Mask Mode by going down to this bar here and selecting this icon that is a square with a dashed circle inside. If I click on that, what you're seeing here now is all of the areas of the image that are de-selected, that are not selected, are covered in this semi-opaque read. The parts of the image that are selected are in their normal color, so they appear as they naturally would in the image. So again, everything in red is not selected. Everything that looks normal is selected. In order to fix this selection here and remove this from the sky selection, what we're gonna do is go over to our toolbar and select the brush tool. You can also use the keyboard shortcut B. So I will select the brush, and I'm also going to increase the size of my brush, which you can do up here in the tool options. If you come up to this area right here, the little circle with the number underneath, you can increase and decrease the size of your brush. And I'm just going to put this at something like 30 pixels for now. An even easier way to adjust the size of your brush, which is my preferred method for changing my brush size, is to use the keyboard shortcut Control Option. While holding Control Option, click and drag to the right to increase the brush size. And drag to the left to decrease the brush size. So I will increase this brush size a little bit more to about 30 pixels or so. The other thing I want to point out here is when you enter Quick Mask Mode, your brush colors will change to black and white. The foreground here, as you can see, is black and the background is white. And that's important because you're going to use the brush tool to select and deselect parts of the image based on whether we're using black or white as the foreground. When we're using the black brush, whatever we paint onto our image will be de-selected if your brush isn't set to black right now, the easiest way to do that is to press the letter X on your keyboard. And that will switch the foreground and background colors. So I just switch back to white. I'll press X again because I want black in the foreground. And then now I have black selected. Wherever I paint onto this image using the black brush will be de-selected. If I come up here to the area that I want to de-select, I can brush onto this area. Now I have de-selected that little patch of snow that was included in the sky. If I were to go a little bit too heavy on that and start to accidentally remove some of the sky. What I can do is switch my brush color back to white and then use the white brush to select the areas. So I'm going to drop the brush size down a little bit here. If I paint on here using the white brush, I will increase the selection. Everything I'm painting in white will become selected. So if I accidentally go a little bit too much onto the mountain, again, remember we're just trying to select the sky. I can go back, press X, switch it to the black brush, and then correct that error that I just made there. You can see that this still isn't perfect, but it's much better than what Photoshop did. We were able to correct that error right there. And for the most part, this guy selection looks pretty good. Let's zoom out here and move over to this area over here, where we've got some really irregular shapes. We see that the branches are included in the sky selection. Obviously, this is not part of the sky and want to remove that. I will zoom in a bit here and zoom in a little more. And I will take my brush size down. Using the black brush here. If I start to paint onto these branches, you can see that this would not only be a time-consuming way to de-select the branches, but it's also a pretty inaccurate way to do this. In this circumstance. Quick Mask Mode is really not the ideal tool or solution to remove these branches from the selection. And later on in this course, we will be discussing more advanced selection techniques. So if you encounter a situation like this with a very difficult shape to remove from your selection, there are better methods than Quick Mask Mode to do this. So we won't worry about this for now. We will come back to this concept at a later time throughout this course. I'm going to zoom out here and go back over to our mountain peak. Back to where we remove this little patch of snow here. Now that we've refined the selection, I'm going to exit Quick Mask mode by clicking on this icon again. And now we see that the area of snow that used to be selected in the sky is no longer in our selection. So that's what we wanted. You can see all we have a much better selection, but we still do have some problems around the edges here. It doesn't look perfect around this ridge line here. Another great tool that we can use to fix this is the Select and Mask tool. You will find this back in the select menu. And down here in Select and Mask, click on that. The first thing I'm going to do here is go over to View and select these options here. I just wanted to change this to red. We can see the area that selected and de-select it a little bit better. What you're seeing here really works just the same way that you saw in the Quick Mask mode. Everything highlighted in this semi-opaque red is de-selected, and everything in the normal color is selected. The first tool I'm going to use here is the quick selection tool. If I click on this, this tool is going to work in virtually the same way you saw in Quick Mask Mode. The only difference is that instead of using a black and white brush, you're going to use these plus and minus options here. So instead of using a white brush to add to your selection, you will click the Plus button here to add to your selection when you're brushing on, this works just like the brush. And when you want to remove a selection, you will click the Minus button and that will remove the selection, e.g. if I want to add part of the selection here, I can just paint onto the image. And now I've added part of this mountain peak back to the sky. Obviously, that's not what I want. So I will go to the subtract from selection option. Now, if I paint on here, I will subtract this selection from this guy. You can see that it's doing a pretty good job of removing the mountain from the sky selection when you have a clearly defined edge like this, a better tool in my opinion to use is the Refine Edge Brush tool. If I select this, this tool also works as a brush. And what you can do is paint along the edge that you're trying to select. If I paint along that edge there, when I release my mouse, you'll see that this selection between the sky and the ridge line of the mountains is a little bit more refined. I come up here, you can see this selection here is not great, so I'm just going to paint down along this ridge line here. When I release that selection is much better. I'm going to zoom out here and find some other parts of this ridge line where this guy selection wasn't really accurate. And I noticed right here that this tree was included in the sky. So I'm going to zoom in on this tree here. I'm going to paint on the top of this tree using the Refine selection tool. Now you can see that Photoshop has done a pretty good job of removing the top of this tree from the sky. This is a very irregular object, difficult pattern to paint by hand to de-select, like we saw in Quick Mask Mode. But when you're using this Refine Edge tool in the Select and Mask module, it's a much more precise way and a much easier way to refine a difficult object to de-select. Again, we'll be covering more advanced techniques for refining difficult selections, such as ones like this. Now, when I'm done using Select and Mask, if I click Okay. Now you can see that the selection outlined by the marching ants does not include the top of this tree. So we successfully removed the top of this tree from the sky. It still might not be exactly perfect. But for now, this is a pretty simple way to remove the top of that tree from the sky selection. At this point, we've covered the basic ways that you can refine your selections in Photoshop. And now what I'd recommend is that you open a photo in Photoshop, start experimenting and practicing using all of the different selection methods that you've learned so far. E.g. you can practice making selections using all of the selection tools in the tool bar. I'd also experiment using the options in the toolbar, options that are associated with each one of these selection tools. And then practice using the tools in the Select menu so you can make selections with Color Range. Select the sky. Again, focus area in subject or really not a big deal if you skip over. But try the select and mask and some of the Modify options. The best way to really start to understand how selections work, how to make accurate selections is just by practicing and experimenting. The more you practice, the better you'll get and the more precise your selections will be. You'll start to understand what type of tool you need to create a specific type of selection. And again, that just takes practice. When I first started out. All of this seems so overwhelming. And I promise that when you go through these one at a time, keep coming back to this lesson, keep going through this material. It will really start to sink in understanding selections and how to select parts of an image that you want to make targeted adjustments to is really one of the most essential skills in editing your photos as a landscape photographer. So important that you understand this now because the concept of selections really lays the foundation for a lot of the techniques that we'll be using throughout this course. And it will really take your landscape photography to the next level, especially as you start to learn more advanced editing techniques. Like I mentioned later on in this course, we will dive even deeper into making and refining selections and how to use them to make targeted adjustments to your images. In the next lesson, you are going to learn what is perhaps one of the most powerful features of Photoshop, which is how to make layer masks. So we will jump into masks next, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson. 13. Layer masks part 1: layer mask basics: So far in this course, you find the general concepts behind how to make and use layers and selections. In addition to layers and selections, one of the most powerful tools that you can use in Photoshop are called layer masks. And that's what we'll be discussing in this lesson. Layer mask become even more powerful when you combine them with the use of layers and selections. And masks are essential tools that you'll be using often as a landscape photographer to edit your photographs. First, I want to cover the four main benefits to using layer masks. The first benefit to using mass is that they allow you to hide or show any portion of any layer that you're working on. It will also allow you to make targeted adjustments to specific parts of your image beyond what you can do by just using selections alone, as we saw in the last few lessons. In addition, the third benefit to using masks is that they allow you to merge and blend different layers together. And mass are really useful when you're using more advanced editing techniques, such as exposure blending or focus stacking, where you are blending and merging different exposures into a single photograph and mass make these types of techniques possible. And finally, this may be one of the most important benefits to using layer masks is that they are non-destructive. Which means that you can always go back and adjust or refine a mask without permanently altering the original image. Alright, so now that you understand why masks are important, Let's dive into how to actually use them. Here we have the image of the Tetons that we've been working on previously throughout this course. And here in our layers panel, you'll see that I have a single pixel layer of this image, and I also have a pure red layer underneath. If I turn this layer off, you'll see that I have a 100% red layer. Every pixel in this layer is red alternative pixel layer back on. What I'm actually going to do here to make it a little bit easier to see is I'm going to enlarge these thumbnails. And the way to do that is to hover over your Layers panel and right-click, you'll see some options to change the size of your thumbnails. So I will click large thumbnails, and now our thumbnails are much larger. And now with this pixel layer selected, I'm going to add our first layer mask. The way to add a layer mask is to come down the layers panel and click this square with the gray circle in it. You will now see that there's a white box next to the original pixel layer. This white box that you're looking at right here is the Layer Mask. And because it's directly to the right of the image thumbnail, this layer mask is being applied to this image. You'll see that you have the option to select either the image, the pixel layer, or the layer mask. If you click on the thumbnail, you'll see that there's a white border that goes around whichever thumbnail is selected. Here are the pixel layer is selected, or in other words, the image is selected and here the layer mask is selected. And this is important to understand because you will be making edits to the pixel layer and the layer mask separately. Let me demonstrate what that means. So if I click on the image and I grab my brush tool here, if I start to paint onto this image, you'll see that the image changes in the thumbnail, but the layer mask does not change. So I will remove that with command Z. And this time, if I click on the layer mask, first, you'll notice that the foreground and background colors immediately changed to black and white. As you'll learn in just a little bit, you can only paint onto a mask in black, white, or shades of gray. So you can only paint on the gray scale. Now here with my brush selected, I can come over to the image and start to paint like I did before. And you'll see the brush strokes that I just created appear on the layer mask, but you won't see anything occur on the image thumbnail. One thing to note here is as we're moving through the course, if you ever need to reset your foreground and background colors back to black and white. So back to their default colors. You can simply press D on the keyboard. You can see there that the colors switched back to white as the foreground, which is the default state, and black is the background. You can also click this little button right here, and that will reset your foreground and background colors as well. If I want to remove this layer mask right here, the easiest way to do that is to right-click on the layer mask and select Delete Layer Mask. And in a moment here we'll talk about why those brushstrokes turned red instead of black or white. Let's talk about what a layer mask is actually doing to this image. With, you're working with layer masks. Like I mentioned, you'll be using white, black, and shades of gray on that mask. Fundamental concept to understand about masks is that any part of the mask that is white will show the pixels of the image that the mask is being applied to. In contrast, any part of the mask that is black will hide the pixels of the image that the mask is being applied to. In other words, a white mask as you're seeing here, we'll make this layer visible. And a black mask, as I'll show you in a moment, we'll make this layer invisible. Very common phrase that you'll hear when learning about mass is white reveals and black conceals. If you can memorize white reveals, black conceals. This will help you as we're working through mass to understand what's going on when we make black mouse or a part of our mask black and what's going on with the white parts of our mask. So here we're looking at a white mask, which means that we can see all of the pixels in the image that this mask is being applied to. Let's create a black mask and see what happens. I'm going to create a black mask here by simply inverting this white mask. And the easiest way to do that is to use the keyboard shortcut Command I, and that would be Control eye if you're using a PC command I on a Mac. And now that layer mask has turned black, like we just talked about. Black conceals the pixels in the image that it's being applied to. A completely black mask will completely hide all of the pixels in this image. Let me invert this mask again by pressing Command I. So we have a white mask again. And now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go back and choose my brush here. And I'm going to paint onto this image with a black brush. And you'll see here my foreground color is white. If you remember, the easiest way to switch that back is depressed X on your keyboard. And I'm going to make this brush a little bit larger here. I'll increase the size of the brush just like that. I have a pretty large black brush here. I'm going to start painting on it to this image. You'll see everywhere that I paint, the image is turning red. If you remember from the lesson where you learned all about layers, the visibility of our layers works from the top-down. We see the top layer first, and then anything that is erased or hidden from the top layer, we will see down to the layer below it. Essentially a way to think about this is that I've painted a window hiding all of the pixels on this layer so that I can see down to the red layer that is below the image. What you can see here is that wherever I have painted black onto my layer mask, I have hidden the pixels in this image. The best way to think about this is that these pixels are now invisible. They're not gone, they're just hidden from what we can see. If I were to change this brush back to a white brush by pressing X on my keyboard. If I paint right here, you will see the pixels of our image of the mountains revealed back into view. Again, anywhere I start to paint in white, the pixels on the image will become a parent, will be able to see them. If I press Command or Control I and invert this mask, you'll see that the opposite has happened. Now the only areas that we can see are in white on the layer mask over here. And everything else, including this line in the middle, has been hidden. So we're seeing directly through a window into the red layer below our image layer. A useful thing to know here is that if you want to see what your mask looks like superimposed over your actual image. You can view your mask by pressing option if you're using a Mac or Alt, if you're using a PC holding Option or Alt, click on your mask, and now you will see the mask exactly as it exists layered over your image. If I press Option or Alt again and click on the Layer Mask, you'll see that it reverts back to the image that we were looking at. You can also disable a layer mask and you can do that by pressing and holding Shift on your keyboard and then clicking your Layer Mask. If I press and hold Shift, click the Layer Mask, you'll see that it disappears and now you have an X over that layer mask. And then to reactivate it, just press Shift and click your Layer Mask again. Let's invert this layer mask back to the original one that we created. So I will press Command I or Control I. Now I want to demonstrate what would happen if we painted on this layer mask with a brush that was a shade of gray. Do that, I will head over to my colors and I'm going to select somewhere around here. So this is actually about 50% gray. Now we have a brush that's at 50% gray. What I'm gonna do here is I'm just going to paint like you saw before. Now we can see that the red layer below is not 100% visible. Here. It's 50% visible because we were painting at 50% gray. In other words, we have about 50% opacity to the layer below. If I press Option or Alt and click on the Layer Mask. Now we have a gray stroke. And that is just partially showing the layer below. We're in contrast, the black area completely hid the layer below. And the white 100% showed the layer below. Now we're just showing the layer at 50%. Let's try using a lighter shade of gray here. How will move this up to a gray that has a luminosity of 80, which we can see right here in our luminosity value. This shade of gray is 80% as bright as pure white. I will click, Okay, let me take the size of this brush down here. It's getting a little bit cluttered. Alright? So I will paint down here. What you can see is the transparency is even more subtle. So we're seeing less than we saw over here of the red layer underneath. If we use a darker shade of gray, we go to our color picker. I will bring this down to about a gray that has a luminosity of 30, so it's 30% as bright as pure white. This is a much darker shade of gray. Then if I paint onto this image, you can see that we can see almost completely through to the layer below. We retain a little bit of detail of our image. But because this is such a heavy or a dark shade of gray, we see almost completely down to the layer below. Again, if we were to invert this layer mask using Command or Control I, this area that used to be light gray is now very dark gray. So we're seeing almost completely down into the layer below, but there is just late detail in the image that we were looking at. In this area that was dark gray, is now a shade of light gray on our layer mask. So we're only seeing about 20% of the red layer below it. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the lesson, the beauty of using layer masks is that even though we're creating all of these edits, the original image in this layer is not being touched. If I ever want to fix anything on a layer mask, I can either delete it and start again, or I can just change the layer mask. E.g. say I wanted to remove all of these edits. I could change my brush back to white. I will increase my brush size here. Now, if I paint white onto this layer mask, then all of those edits disappear. So this image is essentially untouched. It's a non-destructive form of editing because I can do anything I want to this layer mask and nothing is going to happen to the original image. 14. Layer masks part 2: using layer masks with adjustment layers: I'm gonna go ahead and remove this layer mask. Now what I wanna do is show you what happens when I add an adjustment layer. So if I go to my adjustment layers panel, which is right here, the half circle, I'm going to create a hue saturation adjustment, which is represented by this icon, can always see which adjustment you're about to create because the name of the adjustment when you hover over the icon will appear right here. Right here is the icon where we can create a hue saturation adjustment layer. If I click on that, you'll see our adjustment layer appears right here. So this adjustment layer is being applied to the layer below the image of our mountains and the river here. An important thing to note here is that every time you create an adjustment layer, that adjustment will come with a white layer mask. In this layer mask is being applied to the adjustment. And with this layer mask does, is it allows us to control where our adjustment is going to appear in our image. In other words, it allows us to create more targeted adjustments using the adjustment layer. Let me show you an example of what that means. If I go up to the Adjustment Layer Properties and if I start to saturate this image, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to overly saturate this image just for demonstration purposes. Obviously, that doesn't look great, but it'll help you understand what's going on here. So we have eight heavily adjusted image using this hue saturation adjustment layer, this white layer mask, because it's white, it's allowing all of the adjustment to show through. In other words, the saturation adjustment that we just made is completely visible. If I invert this layer mask by pressing Command or Control I. Now that adjustment is invisible. The adjustment is still there. As you can see, the saturation is still really high. We have just hidden all of that adjustment. If I want to reveal parts of that adjustment on that image, what I can do is I can choose a white brush and I'm going to take the size of this brush down quite a bit here. So ensure that you have a white brush here as you paint onto your black mask. Remember, white won't reveal all of the adjustments similar to how we saw the mask on the pixel layer here. Wherever you paint white on this layer mask will reveal the adjustment. So if I start to paint in white along the mountains here, you can see that overly saturated adjustment we made is starting to show through. So we're making that adjustment completely visible. We've got some Technicolor mountains there. Cool. If I were to invert this layer mask. So Command or Control I. Now we see the entire image is overly saturated, but the mountains for the most part, wasn't a perfect selection, but the mounts for the most part are back to their original color. We can turn this entire Adjustment layer and mask off by clicking the layer visibility button, this little icon right here. So I can turn that off. That's the original state without the adjustment. If I turn that on, we can see the adjustment with the layer mask applied to that adjustment. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add an additional adjustment layer. So I'll go up to my adjustment panel, and this time I will select brightness contrast. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to darken down this image by dragging the slider down to the left. I'm going to overly dark in this image just so that you can see a little bit better what's going on with this layer mask. You can see that I darken down the entire image. But what I can do is say I want to bring these mountains back to their original state, is I can select the layer mask and using a black brush. So right now it's set to white. I'm just going to press X on the keyboard and go back to the black brush. Now, if I paint back onto these mountains, and this is not perfect here we will learn how to make these adjustments more precise. You can see I'm bringing back these mountains to their original brightness level. So they are getting lighter as they were in the original photo. Now I can turn this layer on and off again to see the changes that have gone on. This mask is covering the brightness adjustment just for the mountains are located. The rest of the image was darkened down and we can see everywhere in white is where that adjustment is being revealed. But hopefully this is giving you a general idea of how we can stack adjustment layers and then modify what parts of those adjustment layers are revealed by editing or painting onto the mask. Here, we can really control in great detail which parts of the adjustment are shown and which parts are hidden. What I could do at this point is group these two layers together since they are adjusting the same part of the image. So everything except the mountains has been adjusted here. I can go down to Group. And then I can click each of these adjustment layers and drag them into this group. I can name this group something like area around mountains. Adjustments. Alright, so if I were to turn this group off, now, all of the adjustments disappear because we're hiding both of these adjustment layers grouped together. If I turn them back on, we see both of the adjustments back in view. 15. Layer masks part 3: painting hard and soft edged masks: So far up to this point, we've been looking at Layer Mask that have been edited with a hard-edged brush. E.g. if I click on one of these layer mass and I press Option or Alt and click on the Layer Mask. You can see that what we've painted here is a brush that's using a very hard edge. Let's say we wanted to use a softer brush here. What we could do is go up to where we edit the size of our brush and bring the hardness of the brush down. So if I bring that all the way down to zero now, and I will bring the size of that brush up. Now, when we paint on this mask, you can see how those brushstrokes are much softer. They blend from black to white much more softly, you'll see shades of gray in-between the transition zone there. We will be using the brush tool a lot to paint onto our masks. And I encourage you to learn some of the easier ways to adjust the hardness and softness of your brushes, as well as the size of your brushes. Rather than using the Toolbar Options up here. An easier way to change the size and hardness of your brush, starting with the size of your brush. That keyboard shortcut that you can use to increase or decrease the size of your brush is to use the square brackets on your keyboard. If I use the right square bracket, the brush will get larger. And if I use the left square bracket, the brush size will get smaller. So that's a pretty simple way to change your brush size. If you want to change the hardness of your brush, first heel press Shift on your keyboard, and then you can use the square brackets. So using the square bracket to the right will increase the hardness of your brush. If I brush on here, you'll see that is a hard brush. And if I press Shift and use the left bracket, then the brush will get much softer than if I draw on here. It's a much softer, fuzzier brush. I've showed you. My preferred way to change the size of the brush is to press Control option if you're using a Mac and then click and drag to the right, you'll see the brush get larger. And if I continued to hold Control and Option again on a Mac, you drag this to the left, the brush will get smaller. Changing the hardness of the brush is pretty similar. You continue to hold Control and Option. This time you drag up, drag down, drag up to decrease the hardness of the brush, and drag down to increase the hardness of the brush. Again, Control Option drag, right to increase the size. Drag left to decrease the size. Drag up to decrease hardness, drag down to decrease the hardness of the brush. If you're using a PC, it's Alt plus right mouse click Plus drag left, right, up or down to change your brush. 16. Layer masks part 4: blending images using layer masks: You might be wondering at this point, what does all of this mean? This seems irrelevant right now. But let's jump over to a different image. One of the main benefits to using layer masks is that it allows you to blend and merge different photos together. Here, as you'll see in the layers panel, I have two different images. These are two different exposures of the exact same composition. The top one is a much darker exposure, and the bottom image is a lighter exposure. If I turn this top layer off, you can see that exposure below it is much lighter. Now, I want to take different components from both of these images. The parts that I like and I want to combine them. And the way we can do that is by using layer masks. If I turn this top layer back on in this image here, I really like the exposure in the sky as well as the Sun, but the foreground is way too dark. So I want to bring in the lighter foreground from the image below it. What I'm first going to do is I'm going to add a layer mask to this darker image. We will come down here to the Add Layer Mask button. And now we have a white layer mask and that is revealing all of the pixels in this image here. In order to hide the darker pixels and reveal the lighter image below. What we're going to need to do is paint onto our layer mask with a black brush. I will grab a brush that's already selected and I'm just going to set this to black. Remember if it's not black already, you can just click this button as well. And I will press X to switch that back. Now we have a black brush. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to paint in black over the parts of the image that I want to hide. So I'm trying to hide the darker foreground parts of the image. You can see here the image below is starting to show through almost like a window down to the pixels underneath the darker image. I will come down into the corners here and then make my brush a little bit smaller just to get these buttes up here. You can see it's difficult to get this perfectly brushed in and we'll discuss how to fix that. In the next lesson. We're just going to do a rough brush here just to lighten up the foreground. There we go, and just do a simple edit just to show you how this works. I haven't blended this perfectly, but it gives you the general idea of what's going on. We look at our layer mask over here. We can see that the white is revealing the sky. So everything in white here on our mask is being shown in this image, the darker image. So our sky here is being revealed. The foreground, everywhere we've painted in black is being hidden. We can see down to the layer below it. And this is allowing us to see a lot more detail in the foreground and the shadows. It makes it much more interesting image. Then if I turn this layer mask off by holding down Shift and clicking on the layer mask. If we hide that layer mask, this foreground really is not interesting. It's way too dark, but now we have turned that layer mask back on the really nice detail and color in the foreground from our second exposure. At the same time, we are maintaining the color and the exposure in the sky. We look at the layer at the bottom here. This guy is way too bright. We can see in our histogram that all of these pixels are likely blown out, especially the sky. So a lot of times when you have a situation where the dynamic range or the contrast, the difference between the darkest parts of your image and the lightest parts of your image are really, really wide. Then you're going to need to use two exposures to capture all of the detail in your scene. Let's turn our top layer back on. So now we have a blended image. Let's say that we decide that this foreground that we've blended in is a little bit too bright. In that case, we can use a gray brush to brush back in the areas that we find have been overexposed. So let's do that here. Let's go and choose a gray brush. I'm just going to take this to something about 50% gray. Now I'm going to brush onto our image. Larger brush here. You can see it darkens up, but it's not as dark as the original image. So as we paint about 50% gray here, we're seeing through to the layer below about 50% of the way. That means that our foreground is going to be brighter. If I turn this layer mask off, you can see the original image, or at least the darker exposure was much darker. If I turn this on, it is much brighter, but it's not quite as bright. And say if I had chosen black brush, so let's choose a black brush here and see what the differences. So I will just paint on the left side here. And the black areas are going to be much, much brighter. In this way. We can really precisely managed which parts of the layers we want to blend in and which parts we want to leave out. And we can control the percentage or the amount that the two images are blended together. Maybe there's certain areas that I do want brighter, e.g. this area that's getting hit by light kinda looks a little bit nicer when it's lightened up. And this is a technique we'll learn a little bit later. A type of dodging and burning you can do if I choose my white brush, so I will press X on the keyboard and reduce the size of that brush there. I start to paint in the foreground here. That's quite a bit too dark. But now you can see how I'm darkening up certain areas that might be more in the shadows and look better to my eye to be a little bit darker. That is a little bit too dark here. So I'm going to change this to a darker gray brush. So it's somewhere about there. I paint over here. It is still darker, but it's not too dark there. So again, just controlling very precisely by painting onto our layer mask here. The different shades of gray control, how much of the layer below we see. The key takeaway here is that white makes the layer visible and black hides the layer and all of the shades of gray partially hide the layer depending on how dark the shade of gray is. Again, white reveals, black conceals. Commit that to memory and it will really help you out, especially because we will be using masks extensively throughout this course, and you will likely be using them a lot whenever you are editing a landscape photo. In the next lesson, we're going to dive deeper into mass and how to use them in combination with selections. Like we saw as I was painting onto this mask. It's very difficult to get these adjustments perfect, especially when you're dealing with irregular objects. Painting by hand can be a little bit tricky and time consuming and even in certain circumstances, nearly impossible. So there are methods that we can work around that when we combine selections. We will cover that in the next lesson. And I will see you there. 17. Masks and selections part 1: converting masks into selections: In this lesson, you are going to learn how to combine mass, which you just learned in the previous lesson with selections, which you also have learned throughout this course. As you saw in the last lesson, one of the ways we can edit mass is by using the brush tool and directly painting onto our image using a black, white, or a gray brush. Sometimes, however, it can be nearly impossible to brush onto your image in a way that's extremely precise. E.g. we saw in the image of our mountains here. Certain areas like the trees on the skyline would be very difficult to paint by hand and outline if we were going to mask or select them by hand. The good news though is that there are other ways to make mass rather than hand painting them. In addition to painting mass, e.g. if I create a new mask and select a black brush, so I will press X on my keyboard to select a black brush. And if I take down my brush size here, if I paint onto my mask here with a black brush, you can see that it would be nearly impossible to get all of the little detail in the trees and in the branches here to get a perfect mask. And even if I make my brush really, really small, this, as you can see, really impossible if I were to mask out the sky from this tree here. Instead what I can do is I can create a selection to create a mask. Let me show you what that means. First here I'm going to delete this layer mask, so I'll right-click and delete. A simple way to demonstrate this is first we're going to select our elliptical tool. I'm just going to make a simple elliptical selection of the mountain area. What I can do here is I can turn this selection into a mask. Once I have this area selected. Now if I come down and create a new layer mask, you can see that this mass that we just made reflects the selection that we just created. So if I click on this, you can see that we have a black and white mask for everything that was inside the oval is shown, so it's revealed and white. And everything outside of that oval is hidden. We go back to our image, like we saw before. Everything in black is hiding the pixels. We're seeing down wherever there is black we're seeing through all the way down to the layer below. Everything in white is still shown. So we don't see the red pixels inside of the oval or the layer mask is white. Me delete this layer mask here. We can also do the same thing using adjustment layers. I will recreate that selection with our Elliptical selection tool, just going to wrap a selection around the mountains. And now I'm going to create a new adjustment layer by clicking on our adjustment layer panel. Here I'll create a brightness contrast adjustment layer. Now we have a mask that reflects our selection that's being applied to the adjustment. If we start to change the brightness here, e.g. you can see that we can only see the adjustment in the white area of the layer mask. As I slide this left to right, only the area inside of the oval. We can see the adjustment. If I were to inverse this by pressing Command or Control, I will see the exact opposite. The adjustment is hidden inside of the oval, but everywhere outside of the oval is going to be adjusted. The key thing to understand here is that anytime you have a selection and then create a new layer mask, that selection will become a mask. We can also turn mass into selections, so we can also go the reverse direction. And to show you how that works, I'm going to delete this layer. And I'm going to make the same selection or similar selection just with the elliptical tool. And now I'm going to create a mask just like we saw before. So now we have a layer mask that represents that selection. If I wanted to get that selection back, I could turn this mask back into a selection. The way to do that is to go to your layer mask, thumbnail and click Command or Control, and then click onto that mask. And now you can see that that area has been re-select it. Let me show you another example of this. So I will deselect the selection, so Command or Control D. Now I'm going to paint onto this layer mask here with a white brush, like we saw before. Using the white brush will reveal the pixels in the image, will select my brush right here. I will increase the size of this brush. I'm just going to paint onto this image here and just a weird shape. If I wanted to, I could turn this layer mask into a selection that only selected the white areas. So all of what we're seeing here in this brushstroke I made and also inside of the oval. I press Command or Control, and then click on the thumbnail. Now, all of this, as you can see by the marching ants, is going to be selected. So again, anytime you have a mask, you can turn that mask into a selection. And just to summarize here what you've seen so far, the simplest way to explain this is that selections can become mass, and mass can become selections. Let's look at some practical examples of when you might want to use this. I'm going to delete this layer mask here. I'm going to deselect the selection here with command or control. D mean is bring the brush size down. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to select the sky. And as we've seen, there's many ways that you can select the sky. But for now I'm going to choose the object selection tool. First. I'm gonna check at the toolbar here to make sure that the object finder is checked. Now, wherever I hover over my image, photoshop will automatically detect a subject or a region of the image that it thinks I might want to select. So if I hover over this guy here, does a pretty good job of determining where the skyline is. I'm going to click on this area that's highlighted in red. And now the sky has been selected, minus a few issues here. It looks like some of the snow on the tops of the peaks have been included in the sky. For now. I'm just going to turn object finder off, so it's not too distracting. Now that we have this guy selected, let's create a selection mask. Using this selection, all we need to do is go down to our Add Layer Mask button. Now you can see that we have a layer mask in which all of the area that was selected. So all of this guy is going to be white in the mask. And all of the area that was not selected in our selection is going to be black. We'll make this larger so that you can see that. We can also see here that Photoshop included some of the white areas at the top of the peak into our sky selection. If I wanted to remove that, all I need to do is select a black brush. And we'll set this to black. Then I can just paint along the skyline here just to remove parts of the area that were included in the sky. I don't want those to be included in my mask. All I want is the sky selection. That's gonna be pretty good for now. So now I'm gonna go back to our image. So Option or Alt. Now you can see here that everything that wasn't included in the selection, we can see directly down to the layer below. All of the pixels that are covered by the black part of the mask are hidden from us. So we're just left with this guy. If we wanted to get our selection of the sky back, then we can press Command or Control and then click on the thumbnail, like we saw before. Now that we have this selection back, I'm actually going to delete this layer mask. Even though the mask is gone, we still retain our selection. This time, I'm going to make an adjustment layer rather than just a layer mask on top of this pixel layer. I'm gonna go up to our adjustment layer panel. Here, I'm going to create a brightness contrast adjustment layer. Now the mass that we see is going to be applied to that adjustment layer. So the mask, which is based on the selection that we had, is going to reveal and conceal parts of our adjustment layer. Let me show you how that works. Since only the area of this guy is going to be revealed by the adjustment layer. When I adjust the brightness, if I bring it up or if I bring it down. Notice how only the sky is changing. Even though the entire layer is being adjusted. We can't see all of that adjustment because the layer mask is covering up most of the image, basically from the ridge line of the mountains down. If I disable this layer mask by pressing Shift and then clicking on the layer mask, see the entire image is darkened. But this layer mask is us control over the regions of the image where the adjustment is shown. Let's take a look at how we can do this of our two exposures of Monument Valley. We saw before when we were painting in this mass that it was a little bit tricky to perfectly paint around the boots here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this layer mask. And let's start over here. First, I'm going to select the sky like we just did in the last image. This time, instead of using the object selection tool, let's try a different technique that you've already seen before. Let's do select and then sky and let Photoshop determined where the sky is in this image. It's done a pretty good job of outlining the sky here, especially because this is a pretty well-defined edge along the horizon. Now that we have this guy selected, let's create a layer mask. So first I will click on our Layer Mask button. What's happened here is that we are maintaining the color in the sky, the color from our darker exposure and everything else, including the foreground and the beauty here are lighter. That's because we're seeing down into the layer below the darker exposure. I turn this off. You can see we are left with the entire dark exposure. If I turn this on, we are seeing down into the image below, which is the lighter exposure. While there still isn't a perfect exposure blend, it's a much more accurate and precise mask that allows us to blend the two images together. If we take a look at this mask over here, we really retained a lot of the detail in the buttes here much more than we probably could have painted on ourselves. And definitely a lot faster. 18. Masks and selections part 2: creating a vignette: I want to show you one more practical example here of how you can combine mass and layers. Let's actually delete this layer mask here. I'm going to turn this layer off because I'm not going to be using it for this demonstration. I'm going to select the layer below. We're gonna make a selection to this lighter exposure. Here I'm going to select the elliptical tool. And I'm just going to draw onto this image a giant oval shape. When I'm trying to achieve here is a soft vignette that darkens up the corners of this image. I'm going to want a softer selection in order to create a softer mask. To do that, I'm gonna go to Select, and we have seen this before, the ways to modify your selection. You come down this menu. I'm going to select feather. Here. I'm going to create a really high feather levels are something like 400 pixels. And this is really going to soften the selection. You'll see what I mean here in just a moment. Now that I have a soft oval selection around my image, I'm going to create an adjustment layer. To do that, we'll go back to our adjustment panel. And I'm going to add a brightness contrast adjustment layer. We look down here, you can see that we've created an adjustment layer indicated by the icon for a brightness contrast adjustment layer with a layer mask that's been applied. We don't see any changes yet because we haven't adjusted that adjustment layer. But if I were to increase or decrease the brightness here, you can see how the areas in the white part of this adjustment layer are the only parts that are getting adjusted. What I want though, is I want the regions around the oval to be adjusted. I'm going to invert this layer mask by pressing Command or Control I. And now everything in the center of our image, everything shown in black is going to be hidden, or at least the adjustment layer is going to be hidden. And everything in white, the margins, the edges and corners are going to be affected by this adjustment. To continue to adjust this adjustment layer, we'll click back on that icon so we get our properties for that adjustment layer. And I'm going to darken down this image. So all of the areas that I'm darkening down here are only being applied to the white parts of this mask. I've darken this down a lot just to demonstrate what's going on here. If I close this up, you can see now that I've created a vignette around the image, it's a pretty strong vignette, but it's another way that we can combine layer mask with selections to create targeted adjustments and very specific parts of our image. The last thing I want to show you here is how you can adjust the opacity of your layer mask or adjustment layer. Let's say that after creating this vignette, you decided that it's a little bit too heavy, it's a little bit too dark. A little bit too much for this image. What you can do is you can change the opacity of this layer. To do that, you go up to opacity right here. And you can either select this box and you'll be shown a slider that you can drag up and down to reduce the opacity. So as I drag this down, the opacity of that adjustment will start to go down and that adjustment will disappear at zero. And all the way back towards the top, that vignette will get stronger, that adjustment gets stronger. So let's say we want to take it down to about 63% there. A little bit nicer and a little bit more natural. You can also go up to opacity where you see these double arrows and just drag this from left to right. You can dial in the opacity that way as well. There we have a pretty decent vignette that we created by using selections combined with layer masks. At this point, you might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed with everything that you've learned so far. All of these techniques in Photoshop can start to feel a little bit complex and a little bit overwhelming, especially when we start to layer on all of the different concepts and start to combine them. At this point, what I'd recommend is just play around making selections and turning those selections into Layer Mask. You can also play around going in the reverse direction. So turning Layer Mask back into selections. Like the other techniques you've learned, the more you practice this, the more it will start to sink in. And it will start to become second nature to you, but you do have to experiment and practice these techniques. Then I recommend that you do that before moving on to the next few lessons because we're going to start to layer in more advanced techniques. Having a foundation in selections, in layers and adjustment layers, as well as layer mass is really going to help you moving forward throughout this course. In the next lesson, we're going to continue our discussion about Layer Mask and learn some more advanced techniques and concepts that you can begin to apply to editing your images. We will leave it here for now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 19. Saving selections as channels: In the previous lesson, you learned how you can turn selections into Layer Mask and use layer masks to create selections. Now in this lesson, you're gonna learn more tools and techniques for using selections with layer masks, including how to save layer mask that you can then go back and recreate selections from. And how you can combine different layer mask to select different parts of your image. The first thing I want to show you here is how to create a layer mask that you can then save for later use. So if you want to go back and use a layer mask again, you don't have to go back and recreate the entire thing. This technique can be really useful and save you a lot of time so that you don't have to keep repeating the process of making the same selection over and over of the same area of a photo that you want to adjust. Let me show you what I mean by that. I'm gonna go ahead and re-select the sky like we've seen in the past. For this selection, I'm going to use the quick select tool. So as you've seen, there's many ways that we can make selections. We've selected the sky in multiple different ways so far, but I'm gonna go back to using the Quick Selection Tool. I'm just going to drag this quick selection tool across the sky here to make this selection. Now it looks like we have a pretty decent selection of the sky. And if we wanted to refine the selection, we could go to Select and Mask like you've seen in previous lessons. Then I could zoom in and really refine this mask, especially along the skyline here. We have gone through these steps in a previous lesson. So this is just a review here. What I'm gonna do is using the Refine Edge brush is I'm just going to paint onto areas here that may have been not perfectly selected when I created that sky selection. That looks a little bit better. Typically, I take the time to go through this entire ridge line and fix all the problems that I see along the selection here. But it's done a pretty good job. And rather than going through and making the selection perfect, I'm just going to assume that it's perfect in its state right now after making all the refinements necessary. And then I'll just click Okay, once I feel like that selection is ready, I will just zoom out of the photo here. Now what we'll do is add an adjustment layer to this photo. So I'm going to add a brightness contrast adjustment here with that layer because we have this guy selected, we have a layer mask that reflects the selection of the sky. Everything in white is going to show in the adjustment and everything in black is going to hide the adjustment. Just to demonstrate that once again, you can see how those adjustments only change the sky. For now. I'm just going to set this back to zero. Let's say I want to make future adjustments to this guy, but I don't want to go back and make another perfect selection of the sky. Say I took a lot of time to really refine that selection. And now that I have created the selection, I want to reuse it in the future. What I can do in that case is I can recreate that selection. So I'll go back down to my Layer Mask here and pressing command again, if you're using a Mac Command or Control on a PC, I can hold that and click on this thumbnail. Now I have my sky selected. Now what I wanna do is I want to save this selection. In that case, I can go up to the Select menu and then down to Save Selection. And I'm just going to save this selection sky and click. Okay. Now I've saved a selection of the sky. But you might be wondering where you go and find that selection. The way you do that is you head over to the Channels panel. That is where you'll find the sky selection that you created. You click on it. You can see the mask in black and white. It whenever you save a selection, you will always see that selection listed in the Channels panel. Let's look at an example of how I could use this selection that I've saved in the channels will turn the RGB channels back on and turn this guy channel off. If I go back to my layers panel, I'm just going to entirely remove this adjustment layer, drag that to the trash. I'm also going to remove the selection here of the sky. So I'm just going to press Command or Control D. Now I have nothing selected. All I'm left with is the original pixel layer of this image. So say we want to get that sky selection back. What we can do is head over to the Channels panel. If I press Command or Control while hovering over this guy channel and click, you'll see that that selection reappears over the image. Now that I have it selected, I can go back to my adjustment panel. I can create a different adjustments. So instead of doing the brightness contrast, Let's say I make a hue saturation adjustment and I'll head back over to layers. Now I can make saturation adjustments to the exact same area that we were using, the brightness contrast layer on. If I go up to this saturation slider, you'll see that as I increase saturation, I'm really overly saturating the sky here. Or I could completely desaturate this guy. Now, anytime I want to make an adjustment to the sky and I need to get that selection back. All I need to do is head over to the Channels panel, hover over sky and Command or Control and click. And I will always get that exact same selection back. Let's say I wanted to select everything other than the sky. So everything else in the photo except for this guy, including the mountains and the foreground and the mid ground here. In that case, I would invert the selection, so I could press Command or Control I, and that will invert the selection. As you see here, everything outside of the sky has now been selected. And just as a review, if you forget the keyboard shortcuts to invert the selection, you can just find the command up in select and then press inverse. Now what I can do is I can save the selection of the land. So to do that, I will go to Select, Save Selection. And I will save this as land. And click, Okay. And here over in our Channels Panel, you'll see that land selection appear anytime now, I want to create a selection of everything to the exclusion of the sky. I could just hover over land. And I will remove this selection here with Command D. I can hover over land and press Command or Control and click. And now I have that land selection back. There's an alternate way that you can reactivate this selection. So instead of using the Channels Panel, I do find the Channels panel the easiest way to create selections. But you can also go to, and I'm just going to Command D, remove that selection. You can go to Select and then down to Load Selection. And now in the channels, you open that up, you will see the sky and the land. So if I select sky and click Okay, now the sky is selected. Next what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to select the mountains in this image. So I'm going to, using my Quick Selection Tool, I'm going to de-select the sky. I'm just going to drag this across the mountain range here and create just a basic selection of these mountains. Since I didn't get the entire range at once, I'm going to make sure that add to selection is enabled. Then I'm going to just add some of these other areas onto my selection. And I think that's pretty good for now. It's obviously not perfect. I could go in into the select and select and mask module. And it kinda touched this up a bit. Maybe where the trees are. As you can see, this would be more of a time-consuming refinement. This is a more difficult selection to create and we'll be discussing ways to address more complicated selections such as you're looking at right here. But I'm just gonna go in here and make some minor refinements to this selection. Something like that. Again, I could go along here and continue to refine this selection so that only the mountains are included. But this would take quite some time using this technique and it would be very difficult to get really accurate. So for now we're just going to assume we have a perfect selection of the mountains. And I'm going to click Okay. Now that I have the mountain selected, I'm going to save this selection. So we'll go back up to the Select menu and down to Save Selection. And I'll save this as mountains. Over here in our Channels Panel, we now have sky, land and mountains. Three Save selections that are saved as channels, but that we can use to create both selections and layer mask. I'm going to zoom out of our photo here. Let's say now we want to create a selection not necessarily of a distinct regions such as the sky or the mountains. We want to select a specific color in this image, like you've seen in previous lessons, we can do that by creating a color selection. I'm going to de-select the mountains and go up to the Select menu, then down to color range. What I wanna do here is I want to select for it some of these lighter, yellowish grasses in the image. I kinda want to bring out some of the yellow tones in the brighter grasses. You remember, wherever we click on this image, the color will be sampled and then that particular color will be included in the selection. I'm going to come down here and click on some of these lighter grasses. You can see from our color wheel over here that we've selected a yellow color. It looks more of a yellowish green, but it's definitely a yellow hue on the color wheel. You can see in the image preview here that all the areas in white are the areas where this particular yellow color, as well as colors similar to this color are going to be selected. And if you remember, the fuzziness will control how many colors similar to that yellow color will be included. I'm just going to leave this somewhere around right here. So I have a yellow included, as well as some of the other colors related to that yellow. So some of the yellowish greens, It's not including the blue sky, a lot of the pinks and blues in the mountains or the river here. It's also not including some of the darker greens down in here. I will click Okay. Now all of those colored pixels have been selected in this image. I'm going to press Command H. So Command H or Control H on a PC to hide all of the marching ants. The selection is still there, but we're just hiding it for now. Now that we have that color selected, Let's create a adjustment layer just to see what happens when we make an adjustment to that yellow color. I'll just make a brightness contrast adjustment layer and head back over to our layers. Let's see what happens when I increase the brightness. That actually looks pretty nice. Just a little touch of brightness into those yellow areas. It makes the photo pop a little bit more. So I'm gonna keep this adjustment for now. I also want to save that selection. And even though it's gone right now, what I can do is go back to my Layer Mask and press Command or Control and click on that layer mask thumbnail. Now I have that selection back. And I'm going to save this selection. I'm going to save this as yellow colors and press Okay. Now back over in our channels, we have a channel that will allow us to select and create mass just for the yellow colors. I'm going to remove this selection, so Command D. And if I click on this mask, now we can see all of the areas that were adjusted. So everything in white is what was adjusted. Everything in black was not adjusted. And everything on this mass that is in gray is partially adjusted. 20. Adding and subtracting channels: In the final technique I want to show you in this lesson is how you can add and subtract two selections from the mask that we've created. You can actually combine the mass that we've created here. We can combine them or subtract them. And I'll show you why this is a useful technique how to combine and subtract selections using our layer mask. First, we can add two masses together. I'm going to create a selection of the sky by pressing Command or Control and clicking on the sky. So now I have a selection of the sky. If I want to add the mountains. In addition to this sky selection, I can press Command or Control and then shift. And you'll see when I press command shift, the plus sign appears on that selection box. So when I hover over mountains now that sky is selected, Command Shift, click on Mountains. Now the selection has included the mountains area of this image. So I've combined the sky selection in the mountains selection. This is useful because now I can create a selection that only includes the area outside of the mountains and the sky. I can create a selection which includes the foreground and the mid ground. And to do that, I will just create the inverse of the selection. So Command or Control shift. And I. Now we have the inverse of that selection. So everything outside of the sky and the mountains has been selected here. And I'm going to save that as a selection. So select, save selection. I will name this foreground, midground. Now if I wanted to edit only the foreground and the midground, I could always come back to this foreground, midground channel and create a selection and a selection mask. The other thing you can do here is you can subtract channels for. So I'm going to deselect the selection here. Let's say we wanted to make this foreground midground selection, but we wanted to do it by subtracting rather than adding channels together. What I could do is hover over the land channel and pressing Command or Control, create the land selection first. Now I have all of the land here, including the mountain selected. What if I wanted to subtract the mountains from my selection? So I only had the mid ground and the foreground. To subtract the mountains. From this selection, I would hover over the mountains channel and then pressing Command or Control, and then Option or Alt if you're using a PC, option for a Mac and Alt for a PC, now you'll see the minus sign inside the selection box there. So when I click on mountains, the mountains selection was removed from this selection. So now we're just left with the foreground and the mid ground in this selection is essentially identical to this foreground and midground channel that we have over here. In the last example here, I want to show you how you can remove parts of your selection from the yellow color channel that we've created here. First, I'm going to de-select our selection. If I click on this channel, you can see that there's yellow in the foreground, the mid ground, but there's also a little bit of yellow color on the peaks here. Let's say when I'm making my adjustment that I want to adjust the yellow in the image, but I only want to adjust it in the foreground and the mid ground. I don't want to adjust that color in the mountains because I already liked the way the color in the mountains look. In order to do that, I'm going to need to subtract the mountain selection from this yellow color selection. So I'm going to turn all of our channels back on and turn that yellow colors channel off for now. And I am going to create a selection from this yellow colors channels. So pressing Command or Control, clicking on the yellow colors channel. Now I have that entire selection back, even though we can't see it. Part of the mountains up here is partially selected. So there is a little bit of yellow in the mountains, although it's not very visible to the eye right here, but it is included in that channel. If I were to make an adjustment, as we saw earlier, to this yellow colors mass than the yellow in these mountains would be slightly touched. In order to avoid that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to subtract the mountains channel from the yellow colors channel that we have selected right here. I'm going to hover over mountains and then pressing Command, Option or Control Alt. I'm going to click on mountains. And now the mountain selection has been removed. And it's hard to see that here. So I'm going to create a adjustment layer, just like we did before. I'm going to create a brightness contrast adjustment layer. And back over to art panels here. Now if I click on this layer mask to see what it looks like. So Option or Alt and click on the Layer Mask. You can see that we don't have any part of the mountains included in this layer mask. In contrast, let's look at the original layer mask for the yellow selection that we created. So if I click on this, this was the original layer mask before we removed the mountains. So this is where part of the yellow was going to be adjusted. But now that I've created that subtraction, whenever I work on this adjustment, none of that adjustment is going to affect the yellow colors in the mountain peaks. If I go back to our image and remove this layer for now, that was the original brightness contrast. This one that we're creating here, when I increase the brightness. All of this adjustment is only affecting the foreground and the mid ground. It's not affecting the mountain peaks up here. And although it's a very subtle change, it can really make a big difference when you start to add many, many layers and adjustments on top of your original image. And these types of techniques that allow you to make more precise adjustments will really enhance the quality of your images, especially as you practice them over time. It truly takes a lot of time and practice to comprehend the concepts of layers in the layer mask and selections. But as you improve your skills in utilizing these tools, you will be able to significantly enhance the quality and the accuracy of your adjustments. And these tools will really give you endless opportunities, especially creative possibilities that allow you to enhance your photos. What I'd like you to do now is practice saving selections. Hopefully at this point you've started to pick up some of the tools and techniques for creating selections. So now you can start saving some of those selections. And I encourage you to head over to the Channels Panel and practice adding and subtracting those selections. In addition, as you create channels, practice turning your channels back into selections. And once you've refined your selections and your channels, practice creating adjustment layers that will allow you to selectively adjust parts of your image. In future lessons, we'll begin to go more in depth of how to use these adjustment layers and all of the tools and techniques you can use with adjustment layers to enhance your photos. 21. Conclusion and next steps: That concludes the first part of this course on mastering the fundamentals of Photoshop for landscape photography. I hope you've gotten a lot out of this course so far and that you joined me in the next part of this series, which we will learn more advanced landscape photography editing techniques. Everything you've learned so far really lays the groundwork and foundation for everything that you'll learn in the next few parts of this series. While you're learning all of this course material, I definitely recommend that you go check out my website where I have a ton of free online resources to help you become a better landscape photographer. I also have several other landscape photography courses on Skillshare, but I really think will help you out as well. For now. I want to thank you so much for being here and I look forward to seeing you in my next class soon. Take care.