Easy Way to Digitize your Watercolor Paintings in Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Anna. I am a watercolor artist, teacher, and author. You may know me from my numerous skill share classes all around watercolor. I have about seven classes now. This class here is going to be really different because it's a topic that I haven't covered yet and it gets a lot of requests. That is how to digitize your watercolors in Photoshop. When I actually started to pursue watercolors professionally, instead of it just being a hobby on the side I was actually, really happy to have gone to university for graphic design because I noticed and I realized that there was really no use in painting all these amazing watercolors. If I didn't know how to digitize and actually take these paintings into Photoshop and meet my clients needs. I don't actually make art digitally all I do with my watercolors is just fix them up and try to make them basically just like they look in real life and translate that into the digital file. You guys may know that sometimes if you scan a painting, you'll get sort of like yellowish tint or it'll look dirty. Or the famous, a lot of people make mistakes of watercolors because it's so unforgiving in that sense where you can't really cover it up. Good news Photoshop can really help us if you'd like spilled some paint or went a little bit overboard, or just need to correct a little bit of maybe a little mix up you had. What I'm going to show you here is a really simple way. I think it's really easy. All you have to do is know the basics of Photoshop and I take care of the rest for you here. I don't use complicated masks or anything like that. I just take you through a really intuitive process on how I clean up my watercolors in Photoshop. All that you need for this class is a complete watercolor painting. You do actually need a peace that you already finished. If you're still looking at how to create watercolors, go ahead and take a deep dive into all my other classes. I have about seven or eight up at this moment and they keep coming. You need a scanner, you need a computer and you need Photoshop software, and that's it. I'm also going to take you on a little behind the scenes of what a project with a client will look like with me. I actually did choose a greeting card that I'm designing for a large company and showed you a little peek of what the files look like behind the scenes and taking you through my process on how I clean these files up and then how I edit and fix up little mistakes that I might have made. You guys know that watercolors can be really delicate. If you have a little mess up along the way, it's not that easy to clean up unless you do it in post in Photoshop, which is what we're going to do today. I've had this class requested so much. I'm really happy to be able to share it with you guys. I hope you find this process easy and enjoyable. So let's begin. 2. Project Planning : Before we even get started with Photoshop or scanning, I wanted to show you a little bit about what this whole project is and why I chose this. It's actually a greeting card that I'm working on to show you what it looks like in general, what the whole process looks like when you're working for a client. In this case, I am creating a greeting card collection, and it's all based on spring florals. I wanted to show you what it looks like before we actually do the final project. The brief I was given was about these spring florals. They were to be very colorful, originally it was more violet and now each one has a different theme. But so what I do is, I send out these two versions of florals and color boards before. This is so that the client can choose the style that they want me to use. This is the very first thing we do before I even get into the final layout or anything. If you see in this one here, the color boards are pretty similar, but the style of the florals are definitely different. In this case, this one here is more of a structured style that I usually use. It's more of wet and dry waiting for different areas to dry. It's just the style that I think that I'm most known for. But I also gave them the option to do this more loose floral style. These are just really quick sketches. I don't usually paint in this style, but I do know how to do it and I do enjoy it, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to test this out. The client ended up going with this version which is the more loose floral style. After that I send over this here. We need four cards. I send them four different areas here, different styles of florals, and what they can look like. For example here, these are just test sheets, so they don't really mean that much, but there just to give the client an overall feel of what the cards are going to look like. Up here I went overboard with the orange, it will be more yellow. They're just like internal notes for the client and for me to figure out what the project is going to look like. I just do this before. Then once we have this figured out and they improve, we like the direction you're going in, I send different layout tests. The brief calls full floral cards and it has to be two horizontal and two vertical. Two of them are just meant to be full florals and then the other ones are meant to be with the word thank you in lettering. This is going to be a really interesting because I scanned all of this and I'm going to show you how to put it together in Photoshop to not just edit one specific image, which is why I think this project is interesting. This is what it looks like. Then I get feedback from my client and she tells me a little bit what her changes are, her needs, and we come to an agreement, and then I do the final paintings. I already did that. I have already scanned these images which is what I'm going to show you in the next video. 3. Scanning: Now that I just showed you a little bit of what the project looks like before we actually get started for real, I'm going to go ahead and begin with the scanning process. I am using an HP scanner, it's a scanner printer copy machine. I'm going to be totally honest here and say that I'm not in love with this scanner necessarily, and it's not the best scanner I ever used or that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to everyone, but it's what I have now and it works really well for me because of the size. I usually scan paintings that are a bit larger and this works for me, it's an 11 by 17 inch surface, so it works well and it's good enough. We'll just move forward here, and also maybe in the discussion board we can all talk about scanners and what everyone likes to use, I would love to hear your suggestions as well. Okay, so since this project is going to be meant to be printed, it's actually a greeting card and it's final destination is print, it needs to be at least 300DPIs. You can go even higher here, you can go to 600, which is what I would usually do. But in this case it's the lettering, and it's going to be scaled down a little bit so I can keep it at 300 and that'll be fine. Obviously needs to be color and then you just select, this is just a software that comes with the Mac, and it connects to any printer or scanner so then scanning it to this folder here which is my client and then the name of the file and I'm going to keep it out in JPEG. You can also do all these different formats here, but JPEG is what's going to work for me, and that's pretty much it, it's really simple. Here, for example, I didn't want it to keep what the original page looks like because watercolor paper can be pretty expensive. When I do lettering I like to save up space, and sometimes I have different projects on one page like this here was for my wedding, so I might have this extra space here so I just used that to write the thank you lettering that I needed to make for the card, and for the record I already scanned paintings that we're going to use. Well, first of all, I'll show you what this looks like. You just click here, you select the area that you need to scan, you click ''Scan'', and that's it you have your scan, it's pretty simple, so yeah, this is what it looks like. I scan the lettering I left that last for you. As you can see, it's not perfect, you can actually see the edge of the paper here, and the page looks a little bit yellowish, and there could be more contrast and it won't always look perfect until you scan it, but that's what this whole class is about. I'm going to teach you how to make it look just like it does on your paper through photo shop. I'm going to just close this here and I'm going to show you what I scanned and what it looks like, raw without any editing yet, and these are the four four florals that I'm going to use for the greeting cards that I'm making today. All right, so this is the first one and as you can see in this case it left it full-page, and then I'm going to correct all that in Photoshop, that's like the teal one, this is more of like a violet one, and you can see that I even have little color tests here and it doesn't really matter when I'm painting one of these types of projects. The paper will usually have notes or little color tests around and that's fine because we fixed that in Photoshop, what else do we have here? Here's these yellow carnations see again here in a little bit of color test, and finally, these pink, pink glow like feather, like little buds and roses. I think I'm going to actually use this one as the example to Photoshop because it has a little bit, a couple of mistakes here that I'm seeing, for example, right here there's a little bit of extra paint and here I think I probably left some extra paint on my hand while I was painting somewhere else. I mean, it's fine to have these little mistakes here all around here, this is obviously going to go away and what we're going to eventually have a really clean image. What I'm going to go through with you guys here step-by-step is, I'm going to use this image here and we're going to combine it with these thank yous here so that my client can have a few options, and I'm going to teach you how to layer that and how to present it in a way where you can have different styles in one Photoshop file. That's pretty much it for scanning, there's not much to it, it's just basically scanning and depending on what you're working on, in this case, it's prints, so it needs to be at 300. If you're doing something just for web, it can be 75 or even a 180, and that's pretty much it, we have all the images we need now. 4. Simple File Clean Up: We are ready to start photo-shopping and I'm opening up my Photoshop here. It is Photoshop CC. That is the creative cloud. It actually updates on its own. If you are a visual artist, and especially if you work with paints and need to take it to the digital realm, Photoshop is fantastic for this. This is really good for helping us clean up our paintings, which is what we're going to start to do. Now, the very first thing we'll do is just like clean it up. We'll just start with the lettering here because it's probably easier. We have this thank you lettering here. I'm going to actually just go ahead and make this full screen here. We have this thank you lettering. Basically what I'm going to do is since I am going to be cutting these different thank you's and I need them to be in different layers. The first thing I'm going to do is deactivate this lock just by clicking on it once. That way I can move around within the layer. Then I'm going to add a second layer here, which is just a blank layer and put it underneath this layer. This layer we're going to name it. It's going to be lettering. I really recommend keeping all of your layers in order and naming everything. Even if you're not a super organized person trying to keep this as organized as possible, it'll really help you out in the end so that you don't have to activate and deactivate layers and see what you're even working on. Try to be pretty structured with this. It really pays off. This here is just a transparent layer right now there's nothing here. We have this very first layer here and the angle here is to actually remove the background. We want to have a transparent background. This is how we're going to work a lot, especially with these files that I'll explain later on why it's so important for them to be transparent, but we are going to be layering different water colors so that we have this final image. It's important to have everything be super clean and not have these patches everywhere. The first thing that we're going to do is actually work with levels. We're going to go here to Image adjustments and levels. Levels are going to help us. Well, it's actually a tool to where you can adjust brightness and contrast. It's just very useful. I always start out here, just because the scanner usually desaturates my paintings a little bit. They always look brighter in real life. As you can see, I'm moving this level here of the contrast. It's just moving slightly up here. It tells you where you need to go as well here in Photoshop and the input levels. If you see it started out like this, it's like super like grain. It needs to be a little bit darker. I'm taking it up here. Then here you have two options. Again, please know that this is not like an extremely technical class for me, Photoshop is almost like any art form you do have to experiment. You do have to play around. This is just the way that I like to do it. I really wanted to say that before even moving forward. But I'm going to show you like what my intuitive process and Photoshop looks like. Here, this background still looks pretty yellowish to me and it needs to be crisp white. You can either move these levels back here, see how it changes. You can do that or you can actually grab this little sample, like this little dropper here, lets click on an area and whatever is in this shade, it will turn pure white like that. But as you can see, it turn super white, which is fantastic. But then it took these contrast levels back, so I just have to move them back over here and get them darker. It's basically just playing around like this until you get a nice contrast that you think looks good and right now this looks pretty good to me. What I'm going to do is just actually just a little bit more. I'm just going to okay this right here. Now what I want to do is have a transparent layer. I'm going to go in here with the magic wand is the tool here. What's really cool with his new Photoshop is that, when you roll over each different tool, it's going to tell you what it is and how to use it. It has these little tiny videos, which this is new and this new update. I think it's really helpful, especially if you're just starting and learning Photoshop. Explains a little bit of what each tool does. That's, I think it's really great. Now I'm going to grab this magic wand tool. What it does is that it selects areas that are in a similar color. Right now I'm just going to select all the white area. Actually I'm going to click on command Z to undo that action because I want to deselect this continuous thing here because I want every single shade of white to disappear. That means like even inside each letter and these little pockets here need to go as well. You can also play around with tolerance here. I think right now this is pretty good. When we do the plurals, I'll explain a little bit more about what I mean with the tolerance here. But yes, I mean, this is pretty much it. It just selected all the area that's white. Then I'm going to click on the delete button just like that. That's it. We have a transparent background. What I want to do now is actually click on command D, which is going to deselect that. A cool test here to see if it's actually clean and you're going to see me do this quite a bit. I don't know if anyone else does this, but for me it's a really good tool. I just click on it like a really dark color. It doesn't really matter what it is, like a brown or whatever. I have this little the paint bucket and I have a new layer and I fill that up there. That really helps me to see if there's any little details that I need to remove. Actually here, I'm going to go in with my eraser tool right here. This is a little bit too small, I'm going to go in and get it to be a little bit bigger, so I don't take as long. That should be good. That's not what I wanted to do there, wrong layer. Now we go to your lettering layer, which is where we are actually working. I'm just going to erase all of these little areas that my select tood didn't grab. But my magic one did grab. Just these tiny little specks. I mean, this may not be super important, but I do feel that it's really just satisfying to have it be as clean as possible that way. Sometimes especially with print, once you print it out, you can see little details that you hadn't noticed before and you'll really be thankful that you did all this. For example, here I got really close and there's this little scanner error there. Going back to my eraser and it looks pretty clean. But as you can tell, I mean, you start getting closer and it will start to drive you crazy with all these little tiny specks. Then I'm just going to zoom it out here a little bit. That looks really clean for me now. What I'm going to do is just get rid of this layer here. Now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to have, I need these three-letter things to be in separate layers. I'll explain why once I put it all together. But they are three different versions that my client is going to be able to choose from. I'm going to give her some variety. I'm going to go here to the lasso tool. It's just to make free hand selections. It's super simple. All I'm going to do is basically circle around here. Since it's transparent, doesn't have to be perfect. Now we have a selection around my first thank you. Then I'm going to right-click here. I'm going to click on layer via cut. Layer via cut is going to give me a new layer where only this thank you exists. I'm just going to name the layer, thank you one. I'm going to do the exact same thing with the other two. Now we have our three thank you's here. See if I erase them. There's pretty much nothing left. That old layer that I had here, which was the original lettering layer, I can just go ahead and throw out, you really don't want to have trash layers there, whatever you don't use, just throw it out. Just to have like a nice clean file here. As I was selecting these different thank you's what I noticed is that, there's a couple of imperfections that I want to fix that are bothering me here. I'm going to go ahead and do this, which is what's really good about Photoshop. You can always go back and make it perfect here. Now makes sure to be on the layer that you are working on. In this case, it's going to be thank you three, which is the last one. It's just really simple, but I'm going to grab my eraser tool and there's this little extra blob of oops. I went too far. Just a little extra paint there that shouldn't have been there. See, now I feel like it looks better and I think I see the same thing happening on the u of thank you, number one. I'm going to go in here with my eraser tool and just fix that like that. It's a really similar process to painting. Looking around and seeing what needs to be fixed and how I can make it better and I see again here. Sorry. I see again here. I'm going to zoom in here to this u in my thank you number two layer, and go back to my eraser and just fix that thing that was annoying me a little bit. Now we're all set. What I'm going to do is actually I'm going to save this file and then I'm going to move on to the florals in the next video. 5. Watercolor Floral Clean Up: We're ready to start with our florals. Now, we're going to clean up the florals and I chose this example here to teach you guys. Same as we did with the "thank you," we're going to clean this up. Now, you saw how to do that which was a little bit easier than what this is going to be but it's basically the same steps. I'm going to do the exact same stuff that we did in the beginning. I'm going to unlock that, add a new layer here and what I'm going to do also with this one is actually I am going to crop this. Here we go. I'm just going to leave all the extra space. Doing this is going to really remove all the extra work that I would have had to do with erasing all these. See, I have these all color tests around here and I have this little green thing here and you can actually see the paper border. All of this stuff just goes away, once I crop my image using this tool here, it's the crop tool. Basically it's pretty simple there and I can also with the crop tool, I see that my scanner did something a little bit weird with my rectangle and it was a little bit lopsided. Here with crop you can also correct that so I really need the rectangle to be straight. Now, I just fixed it here by rotating it just slightly and now I have the perfect image here. I'm just going to go ahead and crop that and it will remove all the pain of erasing the stuff that's around it and just give me the area that I actually want to work with. That's it. First step there and just like we did with the thank you. Again, going with the levels and again I'm just going to brighten this up a little bit and make the white, whiter and a little bit more crisp. I'm going to be a little bit careful here because we're using color. I just want to show you what would happen if I went too far. Now, I know that I have a good level here at 9 but if I went overboard like that and took it to 100 in the contrast and the brightness and saturation, it just you're overdoing it there. You don't want this, you want it to look similar to what it really looks like in real life. Here it's just a little bit too light for me and I'm going to take it back to that level 9, which I think is good. I want it to still a pretty soft but just a little bit brighter than it was. See you doing that. It almost burns the color so I'm going to leave it up at 9, I thought it was a good level. Now, we have that. Since we are playing with color a little bit here, unlike the thank you ones, I'm going to show you a couple extra tools that you can use. This scanner actually turned out pretty nice but I do have occasions when I really need to play up with the vibrance and the saturation especially with paints where it can really dull the colors down. Here's a really simple tool if you need to get a little bit more vibrance here, see just slightly. You have to be really careful with all these different adjustments here because if you just go overboard, it will look just fake. It won't look like your painting, it'll look over done, over saturated. See, I'm just very, very, very gently adjusting these levels and then I'm going back to image. You can also play around here with color balance which is really good. Some scanners might tend to scan a little bit more yellowish and I've had scanners that do that. If it looks a little too yellow, you can balance the color a little bit here. I'm just playing around here and see if I want it to be a little bit more magenta centered because my accent color here is magenta. Each different illustration that I made has a different accent color and in this case it's magenta. Really all I'm doing here is just playing around and it's really about you have to train your eye, I think to be able to make these slight adjustments but without making it too exaggerated or going overboard. I think that's enough color wise. I really don't want to get too crazy with that. Now, what I'm going do is the same as we did with the thank you, I am going to name my layer and I'm going to say, pink floral border. It's really helpful to just give them super descriptive names, so that way you can always reference back to this. What I'm going to do now, is go again just like we did with the thank you and grab my magic wand. I said I was going to explain a little bit more about tolerance. The really tricky part about photo-shopping florals like this, is that there's a lot of areas with transparencies. For example, take this area here. If your tolerance level is too high, it might eat this up. Let's see what happens if we use tolerance at 100, which will make it cleaner and crisper but it might just take a little bit too much off. See what happens there. All of this area here, I definitely do not want to disappear. All of these watery aspects to watercolor which will make it so magical really need to stay intact. Therefore, even though it might not be as crisp, I need to really play around with these tolerance levels and I'm going to take it maybe to 50 and try that out. Deselecting that and tying it again. See, so still it's not taking up as much of the transparent areas but still is doing that. Again, I'm going to deselect that and go back and try it with 20. I do this every time. I try to take it at the tolerance level where it's going to give me a clean image like a crisp cut out of the background but still keeping these transparent areas that I need here. Right now it's still eating up some of the white areas. Well, it's not white, it's transparent areas that I do want to keep. There is a couple of options that you can do here. I'll do it here with these roses. You can actually go in here and you click on the wand and then select the Quick Selection Tool and you click on this little minus. There we go and I'll just make that a little bit smaller. Here, this is a little tool that helps you substract from the selection, so it means that I do want to keep this selection. I do want to erase everything that is in white because I want to have a transparent layer but I don't want it to remove these little areas in here. Because the selection was recognizing them as white but they're not really white, they're like a very transparent wash here in my water color. This is probably the most tedious part of this where you just have to go around and really take a close look and see where it was going a little bit overboard and where you need to deselect all of these areas. For example here and in here and I'm just going to continue to do this for a little bit here [MUSIC]. So I think I am done deselecting the areas. So what I'm going to do now is actually I'm going to zoom out, Command Minus or just with the zoom out tool. Now, I see that I have a good enough selection where it's preserving all of my painting, all the flowers here, but it's pretty much a good selection of all of the white area that I want to remove. So it's really important for me to have all of these layers be transparent, especially when we start to merge different layers and different elements together, which you'll see in the next couple of videos. You'll see why it's so important to have a nice clean background with transparent layer, so basically right now, I am free to just click on the "Delete Button" on here, my computer, and that's it. I have a beautiful transparent background here, and I'm just going to Command D and that means that I'm going to deselect. Again, the same as I did with my thank you, the file that we did before this one, I am just going to add a dark layer, which is my little hack here that I really like to use, just to make sure everything is really clean. Again, just like we did with a thank you, I am going to go around again and just clean it up. So I'm going grab my Eraser tool here. Now we are on the right layer. So just cleaning up all these little specs and mistakes that I had here and just going around. See, when you get really close, the real issue here is that, since we had to choose a really low tolerance level for it not to eat up a lot of my painting, this is actually the part that's annoying, and you do get a little bit of, when you get really close, you see the edges aren't as crisp as you would like them to be, but unfortunately, I actually do a lot of clean up. Maybe if you zoom it out, it isn't that bad but I get a little bit obsessive and always want to go in and just clean as much as I can. So I'm not going to lie to you, I do spend a lot of time in Photoshop, and I'm not necessarily altering the work. I'm just trying to make it presentable so that my client can see that it's quality work and that they can use my files. It'll be a breeze for them and they won't have to go in and fix everything. So I like to have everything nice and tidy for them. Another thing that you can do here is, actually, sorry, so I'm going to click on this continuous button again. This actually what it does is that it samples only pixels that are together. So this entire white area here I want to remove, but I'm just going to be really careful and be doing it in sections that I see that need it. I'm going to go in here and just erase here. So I'm just going to keep doing this and I will be back with you once I'm done cleaning up. You'll be able to see the whole process a little bit fast-forward. I don't want to bore you guys here with my clicking and erasing forever, but I'll be back with you once I'm done cleaning up all these edges. So if you get too close, you'll get obsessed with all the tiny little pixel that you need to fix, and you really can take it as far as you want. The only reason it really pops up and shows up so much here is because I have this dark background here that it's helping me bring everything to the light. I mean, all this stuff here isn't really as bad as it looks. So once you have a white background, I mean, this is white anyways, and I'm just being extra meticulous here. So for example, if we actually zoom out here and turn this background into a white background, so all F, F is the total light, taking it all the way here, and actually, let's get a new layer here and use a paint bucket. So once you turn it into white, it looks perfect, it looks great, but just having this dark background here to clean it up really, really helps up. It just has this great contrast for all the little dust and stuff, and so I'm going to leave it here. This is way more satisfying. So that was the cleanup. That's how we just cleaned up this file and that's basically just means that we adjusted the color. We did a little bit of level work and we have a transparent background. So if we erase all these, it'll be actually transparent, and we also cleaned up all the little specs. So I'm going to end this video here. Make sure that you clean up your files as much as you can, and you can actually take it pretty far, but this is really good enough for what this project is. In the next video, what I'm going to show you is a little bit of how to fix little details that I couldn't really fix with watercolor at the time and how to make those better. We're going to use some clone stamp tool and a little extra tools that I haven't showed you yet. So I'm going to just end this video here and well, actually this is done for cleanup, and then in the next video, we're actually going to make final adjustments before we put it all together. 6. Correction (Clone Stamp + Eraser): Now that we have a super clean file with a transparent background and there's no smudges around, what we're going to do now is actually edit these florals, and the tool that I'm going to use the most here is called the Clone Stamp tool. It's this one over here, and see what you can see. The little video there is doing, is that paints with the pixels that you are selecting in a different area. This really helps out when you need to, oh my God, there's so much you can do with this, and I really need for you to think outside the box here, not only with what I'm doing necessarily, but how it can help you out in your editing. For example, I use this tool a lot when I need to fill an extra layer of background because, let's say the measurements were off and I need to add a little bit extra area of paint somewhere and these kinds of things. For example, here, I have this little rose bud here, and the way I painted this was actually with some masking, some washi tape around the edges. But in the project, it was requested that a few flowers overlap this rectangle here. You can see I have a few. For example, this little bud here and this leaf here goes over the rectangle area if you can see what I mean there, and also this leaf here. It doesn't look horrible, but it's not perfect, and I do need to fix this before I turn it in. What I'm going to do here is actually get really close, and we're going to start using this Clone Stamp tool, and what it's going to help me do is just basically remove these really harsh lines here that I have. I was able to fix a little bit of this with a little, for example, this area of paint here, which is a little bit more opaque, more concentrated. You really can see this line that I have. But you actually can see it, especially here. It's really bothering me. I'm going to go in here, and what we're going to do is actually take this color, which was actually a little bit more transparent, and we are going to clone stamp that all the way up here so that it looks the same, it doesn't look cut here in the middle, and so you're going to click on ''Alt or Option'' in the area that you want to repeat and you just start going up like that, and I have it at a really soft edge here. The hardness is only at 13 and the size is at that 31 pixels. But, you can also play around with this. Right now, this is good for me. Basically, it's almost like painting, with paint where you're going up and I want it to look pretty natural. I'm just going to continue to take this up here, and I think in this case, what I'm going to do is actually just keep on going up like that, and see, it starts to fade a little bit. Let's say, for example here, if I went a little bit too overboard and went into the, let's say went, I'm going to exaggerate this a little bit. But, let's say I took a little bit too much pink into this screen. You can go into the green area and actually fix that here. I'm doing the exact same thing with the clone stamp, but using green now. See, so now if I zoom out, you won't really be able to tell what happened here and it'll look nice and same brush stroke, and, but I zoomed out and I could still see this triangle, so I'm going to go back with my clone stamp here, and just continue to fix that, and maybe I'm going to need to use a little bit smaller size area to really get in there, and fill it out, and when you get super close like this, it's nerve wracking because everything seems to look super blotchy and weird, and I think it's almost a feeling like it'll never be perfect. But you have to keep in mind that you're working on a really closed section. It's a super tiny petal in a larger painting and all these little details will look fine once we zoom out a little bit. There we go, we're zooming out, and then this looks way better now, and I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing here. Also, for example, another area is on this leaf. See how I have this little lighter green triangle, where you can see the cut here, and I'm also going to go in and fix that. Same thing, using the clone stamp. I'm just going in, and filling all this area in here. It's all of these little details that especially when you're working with a client and you need to deliver a file that meets certain standards, it's really nice to be able to see. Now, you can really see that separation, and I'm going to go ahead and go around because I noticed that that happened here too. If you can see that line that goes across, I want to fix that, and I want to fix that here in this eucalyptus leaves, and there was an other area that I wanted to fix up, here. Also you can tell that, for example here, this blotch of paint isn't supposed to be here. I'm going to go in and close up, and show you how I'm going to fix this. First things first, this little point here should be green. I'm going to go in with my clone. I keep grabbing the eraser, sorry. I'm going to go back with my Clone Stamp tool and click. The area that I want to grab is this green because I want the tip to be green as well. I'm going to click ''Option'' and then select that area, and then just take it up here. I'm not going to worry too much about the shape because I'm going to fix that once I get in with my eraser, which is what I'm going to do now. Now that I have this green tip here, I'm going to go in with my eraser and clean up these edges just like that. There's some relief also when the kind of watercolor that I do, a lot of it is meant to be a file. It will end up being a file because I do a lot of art licensing work or let's say if you sell prints or something like that, you can always go in and if you made a mistake in your original watercolor, you can always go in and do these little hacks, fix it, and see here. It all depends on how much you want to get into it, but I'm going to grab my clone stamp again. For example, here I feel like this got a little bit too much into this space, and then here's another area that I messed up on, and I'm going to go in with my eraser and fix that as well. Here, all of this area needs to go. I'm just going to erase all that and go in. Right now, I'm using the eraser, and then after this, I'm going to go and select the clone stamp again and actually fix this little edge here. Again, Option or Alt, clicking on the color that I want it to be, and just going around that edge there. There was some green, and see, right now, it looks a little bit rough because I'm using a smaller area here. But then if you go in and adjust the size of your clone stamp to have it a little, it's like fluffier, because the edges are softer when it's larger. You can go in here and see now I have this area here, and I'm just cleaning that up. When you zoom out, it all looks good. But I did have that area that I needed to fix, and I feel like there's still a little bit. I must have made some mess here, and so I'm going to just keep doing this for a while. I'm going to clean it up, and I'll be back with you once I've been at it for a while here, cleaning all this stuff up. We're pretty much done with his step. All I really did was use a couple of tools and that was the Eraser tool and the Clone Stamp tool. As you can see, you can no longer see these little areas that were bothering me. It really looks like these leaves and florals are overlapping in the transparent rectangle we have here in the center. This was just the thing that I happen to need to fix in that moment, but really this tool is super useful for any mistake that you have or let's say you need a certain area that you didn't fill up enough or maybe their dimensions weren't right or whatever it might be, the Clone Stamp tool is awesome for that. Yeah, now our florals are all prepared. I'm going to end the video here because in the next video, we're actually going to go into how to set up your files. 7. A Side by Side Look: Just for reference, I want to show you what our files look like side-by-side. Here on the right we have the original scans and to the left we have the final file just for us to take a look back and see everything that we've done here. The original scan is here, you can see the background is dark and has this yellow tint. I have all my color tests here. Finally, we just edit it and adjust it into the file size needed to be and that's it. Basically, what we have here is a messy scan and it ends up being a beautiful greeting card. What I'm going to show you now is just for fun, a little look in to the entire collection here. Then what we just saw is the pink floral, so they're all meant to be in the same color scheme, but each one has an accent color. This one is yellow. I think I really like this one's yellow carnations and then this one is some turquoise and teal, and the final one is this little violet florals. This one also has one of the thank yous that we use, but it's cut up in a different shape. These are just images on a screen right now, but they will end up being a really beautiful boxed collection of cards, and that's it. I wanted to show you what a little project like this looks like and how to achieve these different files in Photoshop. I really hope you enjoyed this. Just to finish off the class, the next video is going to have a look into a more complex file just for you to see as reference like how far you can take it with these simple Photoshop tips. Of course, there's so much more you can do, but I think that's a good starting point. So thank you so much for watching. 8. Master File: We're almost done here. We are in our final step. What we're going to do now is actually create a new file. It has to be in the measurements that my client needs to tab this greeting card in. Sorry, my computer is a little bit slow while opening new documents. We need a print document here. If you just click on "Print" it's really good because it already puts the resolution in 300. Then it has different styles here, Orientation. What I need to do now is create a file that's going to be five inches in width and four in height. That is the proportion that this is supposed to be in. The title is going to be PinkFlorals. In this case, usually when you would create a file for a print, you're going to have the Color Mode be in CMYK. But I actually leave it in RGB, which is the screen color. That is just the way that I work with clients. They then fix that and do their thing. But usually the correct thing to do would be CMYK color, which is for print. Unless you're actually working for web, which you always want to do RGB. That's just a little technical thing here. Now I have my file. I need it to be 5 times 4 inches. The background is going to be white. I do want a white background. So I'm just going to click on "Create" and we're going to have a new file, which is actually going to be the area that we need to work in. These are rulers here. You see they're in inches. I have them in inches. What I'm going to do is cut here in the middle because I want to have some guide. So see if it's four inches here. I'm going to cut it here in the middle, at two. Now I just have a nice guide here. What I'm going to do is actually drag the files that I just created with you guys, and we're going to put them in this final Canvas. I have a separate file here and this is the Canvas that I want to drag it into. So I'm just going to select this layer from this file here and just drag it into here. The size that I was working on was actually larger than the ultimate greeting card size. That's great because that means that now I just have to scale it down a little bit. As long as you're scaling down, it'll be perfect. When you start scaling up is when it gets a little bit messy. My client has asked me they want the proportions to be a little bit smaller. They don't want it to be in the entire page. Size here. So I'm going to keep it at this size here. If they ever need to make it bigger or smaller, we can always adjust that. But that'll happen later on once I talk to them. But already see how having it in the right space and with a nice clean eiry white border it already even looks a little bit more professional. What's really cool here is that I can actually have some exact measurements that can help me with this rectangle and get it really right. I'm going to do a little trick here. Just to have this rectangle be in the exact spot that I want it to be, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to grab this. This is just a rectangle tool right here. It's a Shape tool. I'm just going to select here. These are just little hacks that I make on my own and then I just tend to figure these out. I have this rectangle here in a separate layer. What I'm going to do is actually, I'm going to click "Command T", which is Transform. I'm just making sure that my rectangle, which is imaginary because I painted it with watercolors, is in the right spot. Right here I see that the center of this rectangle that I drew, that I even added over here, is a little bit to the left. So I'm just going to nudge it slightly to the right like that, just, so I can see that my shape is perfect. Then I'm going to nudge the rectangle shape a little bit higher here so that it's in the center. I'm going to grab my floral layer and bring it up to that level. Now it's perfectly aligned. You can see it here. Actually if you put this into a little transparency, you can see how it aligns pretty perfectly there. I hope this makes sense. It's just these little hacks that I make up. I did go to university for a graphic designer, I did learn Photoshop, but they don't necessarily teach me this specific hack. But it's just when you know how to use all these different tools, you can start to think creatively of how to fix little problems that you need to resolve. Now my painted imaginary rectangle is actually centered. It's actually in the middle. I zoom out. It gives me a lot of inner peace and balance to know that this rectangle is perfectly aligned and where it needs to be. Now for the interesting part, I'm going to put this file here to the side. I have these three layers here. I'm going to drive all these layers into our final file. Again, they're going to be larger, which is totally fine. I'm just going to click on "Command T", which is Transform. You can also find that tool if you go to tools here and click "Transform", but the commands are very, very useful. I'm just going to scale this down to where it needs to look like. I think that's pretty good. Again, as I said before, it's really important to keep your layers organized. What I'm going to do here is actually select. You click on "Shift" and then select all these three thank yous. Then I'm going to click on this little "Create a new group", this icon here. I'm going to name it lettering. So that way all of my different thank yous are in this one folder. It's just a really good way to keep it organized. If I were to make this folder invisible, you won't be able to see any lettering at all. Just a little extra organizing of your layers there. Now I'm going to zoom in here so that I can see better. I am going to one by one make each lettering arrange it where it needs to be. You see the really cool thing about having your guide is that it'll push you almost like magnetically to where it needs to be. So there's the first thank-you. Then I'm going to make the first thank-you invisible. I'm going to go on to the next one. Again, same thing. Having these guides here makes it magnetic. I'm going to make that invisible and going to the next one. Final thank you. This is actually the final file that my client is going to get from me. I'm going to explain a few things. First of all, the lettering, because I could have painted the original painting just with a square and already the thank-you in it and just scan it, fix that up and deliver that. But the way this client needs this is for the lettering to be separate for a couple of reasons. Number 1 is that they need to have a choice. I was requested that it has different lettering styles so that they can choose which one is best. Then the client can then choose what they think works best for the specific card that they want to use. The other reason is that a lot of the work that I do with this client, they do a lot of embellishing with their cards. For example, it's very probable that the thank you, it has to be in a separate layer because they need to isolate this layer, do the extra work that needs to be done in the production or post-production area where they need to add. For example, glitter, or foil, or just different kinds of embellishments to the certain areas. This is a very simple example of that, but there's really complex stuff that each little flower has a different foil, or glitter, or diamond, or whatever it has in there. I can show you a really complicated example once we've finished with this one here. But that's basically it. This is how I will deliver it in a Photoshop file. I will probably just leave one of these and then in the e-mail I can explain. There's different layers here and you guys can select whichever one you want. One last thing that I wanted to show you about having this transparent background is that they can also decide that maybe they want to have the background instead of being like this crisp white, it can be like a cream color. They can go in here with a Paint Bucket tool and just have a layer underneath. Then they can choose, maybe they want it to be a little bit creamy or like that. This class here is very simple, very basic photoshop stuff. Maybe if you guys like this class, I can go into deeper stuff later with the textures and stuff. Another thing you can do here is have the layer be on top of all the other layers here in this little creamy layer. Then the way that you blend it, right now it's at normal, see there's all these different options. If you click on "Multiply", this just means that it's giving it a tint over the entire painting. If you see the difference with Multiply as having it being blended over the painting, now instead of having it be underneath everything like this, it's going to be over everything else. It does give it that little tiny extra hue or tint of cream and it makes it all blended together better. I'm not going to have this optional. I'm going to leave it white because that's the way that we're working with this specific client. But that's just one of the examples why it's really useful to have everything be transparent and clean, and then you can really play around with it. If you go crazy, you can even have a big brush stroke in the back with different colors. I've done a lot of florals with a galaxy background where you can play around and have just really layered up in Photoshop. That's it. This is pretty much what we did here. I wanted to be pretty simple with my first Photoshop class here. If you guys like this kind of stuff, I can make more complicated stuff. But I think this is really good to start out. In the next video, what I'm going to do is just show you a little bit of a comparison of what our files looked like in the beginning and what they look like now. 9. Extra Examples and Final Thoughts: To finish off this class, I want to give you a little bit of extra insight into what a larger project can look like using your watercolors and complementing it with Photoshop. So I chose this project here, it's another greeting card that I did. I'm showing you what it looks like in its final version first, this way we can deconstruct the project later on when I show you in Photoshop so that you can see what kind of work was done here. So as you can see these specific client, the way they print is in layers and there's a lot of embellishment. There's actually some rhinestones and feathers, like real feathers in here. The lettering is embellished with gold foil. This is the interior of the card. But all of this was originally painted in watercolor. You can see that there's also some really fine gold details in here. Again, here is the interior. I wanted to show you this picture too, because we can see the envelope liner here, which was also painted in watercolors. But it's a little bit different than what we do here, what we did with the past exercises. So I'm going to actually show you. This is what the card looks like. Obviously this is the last image, this is what it looks like altogether, the lighter image, all the florals, there's different layers here. The way that this card was, the brief instructed me to leave a lot of space in between, so each layer is different. I'll show you what I mean when we look at the Photoshop file. Yes, here's what the greeting card looks like on the website and these are just some pictures that I took with my photographer. So here's again, what it looks like, similar to what I showed you with the brief with the flowers that we Photoshopped together. This was the very first thing I made. I just did really quick sort of painting sketches and send those in so that they had an overall idea of color and composition and layout. So we figured that out when we chose this green vertical layout. Now that I have the layout, what I needed to do was create all these different elements and actually gather all of these together in Photoshop. Actual composition was made in Photoshop, so everything is hand painted, but the composition is set up in Photoshop. So just like we did with our own Photoshopping in the project that I taught you. This is very similar in the way that everything was painted and then it obviously originally had a white background, but that was all cleaned up. If you notice every single element here is in a separate layer. If I start to make these layers invisible, you'll see what I mean here. Again, notice how I had already organized all of these layers by name. It's hard when you have similar ones. So it's like twig 1, twig 2, twig three. But it's still really helpful to see all these little leaves. Each one is an individual layer. If I were to have a background here, that is not transparent and is a darker color, it's really important that it's super clean here, just like that. So that is why we do all the work when cleaning around the edges and and just getting it really crisp and clean because eventually I was going to have a darker layer which ended up being this. So it's a large green background painted with watercolors and then layered on top of that are all the different elements that I showed you here. But they are laid out in this position here. This folder that you see here is the leaf. If I expand that, you'll see all the different elements that are in here. So the reason that this specific project is painted this way was because the client really needed it to be in this Photoshop layered, here we go. So it's just easier if I show you a picture again. So see how each floral has these different layers and they're cut out and there's feathers going in between everything. So it was really important for my client to have everything just set up this way. The background is another watercolor wash. Then here we have the lettering 'thinking of you' and which was important to be in a separate, if you notice here it's white because white was just a neutral color, but it ended up actually being gold. So they needed that separate layer in order to do that foil. That's basically it. I just wanted to show you what a more complex project would look like. I have a million files like this. I do a lot of client work with my watercolors and I just thought it would be interesting for you to see what it looks like. Like in the pre-production phase and I do have one other file. I have one more here that I think you will be interested in. So this other project I thought you might be interested in, it's a sugar skill. It's a Halloween Day of the Dead card that I did. Just the same way that I showed you with all the other projects, there's usually a little color swatch here, and then there's two really quick sketches with watercolors. In this case it was sort of like, Are we going to make it cooler or warmer? What is the whole thing going to look like as an overall? Then once we have that figured out, then we can actually go ahead and paint. I painted a lot of different skulls here that never saw the light. I believe this is the one. Yes, that's the one that ended up being fine. See there's all these different versions. Sometimes when you see some artwork out there, you don't know all the different processes that happened behind behind the actual project. Yeah, that was another idea. I also wanted to show you here how I have it all arranged here, how it works. I did actually just paint a regular watercolor painting here. Later on I was to separate in Photoshop. It was going to be a little bit easier to separate it here because it's a lot of contrast. In this specific painting, there's a lot of black and white. This is what it ended up looking like with watercolors. So if you remember this tool here, the magic wand, if I selected the black background, it was going to be really easy to just have a quick separation of the black and white. So this card is one of my absolute favorites. It's super embellish as well. As you can see, it was necessary for the black to be in a separate layer because if you can tell here, although the entire background, everything that was black has this black glitter to it and they have these really fun cards. Here you can take a look. So there's two different pieces of art here. One is the lighter image, which is if you open up the envelope, there's separate art that related to the final artwork and then the actual artwork that is the cover of the card, which is the sugar skull here. You can tell that there's also a bunch of different layers and in all kinds of stuff going on here. So what I'm going to do is show you. So this is the liner image. This is the image that you see inside the envelope. This one is a little bit easier than the other stuff because I don't have to separate it. So there doesn't have to be that much Photoshop work except for just a little bit of color correction and the layers that I taught you at the very beginning. This is just a simple flat image. But in the case of the Halloween, here, in the case with the sugar skull, we did have to do a little bit of separation within the file. So for example, the black is isolated here and we needed to see different options for size. So I have a smaller floral and a larger floral. You can see right here. So if you're actually working with client work and stuff, it's really good to have these Photoshop skills so that you can give them the options that they need and just the workflow will be way better. Just to show you what it would look like, the flowers can be either larger like that. I'm just using the transform tool or keep them back at the smaller size. So I'm actually going to undo that free transform. That's pretty much it. I just really thought it would be fun to show you a couple of extra projects. Please remember that all of these Photoshop tools are pretty easy to use. You just need to practice and also use your personal creative intuition and play around a lot. These are just the kind of tips that I use. My work is very simple in Photoshop. It's not complicated at all. It's just about practicing. If you ever need to see more complicated Photoshop work, let me know. This is pretty much the basic stuff that I usually do with my Photoshopping, but there's definitely a whole world out there. I hope that you learned something here and I'm happy to share the process behind the final art as always. Thanks again and see you next time.