Transcripts
1. Trailer: Hi. I'm Meg Luis. This second installment of my Photoshop series is all about advanced features working with layers and masks. We'll learn the ins and outs of all the amazing things we can do by adding effects and adjustments to layers. Then, we'll learn one of the most incredible features of Photoshop, masks. I'll show you guys some great tips and tricks along the way to make the final project fun and exciting. At the end of the class, you'll be in charge of making an image collage using all of the techniques learned throughout this class.
2. Intro to Layers: This lesson is all about layers. There are so many wonderful things they can do with layers. We'll touch on some of the best ways to make your composition look awesome. We'll take a look at layer, styles and adjustment layers will also work in some other handy things, like locking layers and flattening them.
3. Layer Adjustments: Hey everybody welcome to Photoshop two. We're going to dive a little bit deeper into layers in this lesson and then a few other topics like masks later on. But, for now again like I said, let's go into layers. So, Photoshop has a really great feature called Layer Styles and they really allow you to transform images into some pretty great things. So, I almost exclusively use Photoshop to edit photos over any other program and because of Layer Styles. They're really great. So, I have opened a photograph in Photoshop right now and this is just a photo of my apartment. You'll see more photos of my apartment later on. You'll get very familiar with my apartment. So, let's just start off with this photo here which I have not edited yet. It is an iPhone photo, so the quality isn't that great, but nonetheless we're going to edit it a little bit using Layer Styles. So, the Layer Styles you can find inside of this black and white cookie icon down here. I guess you could just call it a circle as half white half black, whatever, up to you. But, here you'll find our adjustment layers. So, if you click on that black and white cookie, you can see all these adjustment layer styles. Not to be confused with Layer Styles because they are two things. Our adjustment layer styles and then regular old layers styles. So, we are going into adjustment layers for now, we'll cover Layer Styles in a later lesson. Okay. So, adjustment layers here we have, so many things that we can do which is basically mostly photo editing tools. I'm going to show you the most important ones and then I'll let you guys explore the others on your own later. Okay. So, in order to edit a photo, there are a few different ones that I like. I really like hue and saturation because it allows you to bump down the saturation and turn any photo into black and white. You'll notice that above my photo background, this hue saturation layer opened up and this is what's called an adjustment layer. So, it allows you to make adjustments to everything below that layer. So, if I had a bunch of layers under here, it would actually be turning everything under it black and white. So, again, we can adjust this layer like so bring down the saturation we can take down the lightness make it darker. We can make it brighter and you can see here are little indicators of how far we've gone. Then here, we can add a hue. So, if I wanted it to be a little bit blue, I would just bump up the saturation and then bump up the lightness, maybe or turn it down and then I can also press colorize which really really turns the colors. So, if I chose blue colorize, really turns it into actual blue. So, I could also turn it in into purple or magenta or yellow, up to you, what you want to do and then bump up the saturation really turns into color or taking it down could add just a little bit of a yellow tint to it. So, fun to play around with though. Okay. So, that's hue and saturation I'm going to delete that. Let's go on to my next favorite which is levels. So, levels are really great when adjusting the lighting in a photograph. So, you can bump up this little triangle. On the right hand side of the layer levels is brightness. So, if I move it towards the center, it's going to make my photograph really bright. Within interior photography, you actually want it to be bright. So, I'll make that a little brighter and then this one adjusts the mid tones. So, I'm making the mid tones either darker or lighter. I like it to be in the middle, over right there where it was. Then over here, is our shadows. So, it's either going to make everything the shadows dark or it's going to make them lighter. So, that's really using levels as adjustment layer. You could set presets, you can increase the contrast with the increase contrast preset and what not. You can make it darker with that reset or you can make your own custom preset. I just like not using those at all and then I like adjusting things on my own like so. So, if I delete that, you can see my original photo again. Let's move on to the next adjustment layer. Okay. So, let's go to curves. Curves again really helps with the lighting. You can see this is a big curves that we can adjust and change and as I'm adjusting and changing it, different things are happening to my photo. It takes quite a learning curve no pun intended sorry to be able to handle the curves, I usually proceed with caution when dealing with curves, because they can be fickle and confusing. But they are really making my photo looks so much better. Let's turn off the curves to go back to the old way and look how much nicer and brighter it looks with the curve added onto it. So, if I was actually editing this photo, I would have done this and then I would go in and add some contrast with brightness and contrast. So, again, you're familiar with this I'm sure. Brightness literally just makes your photo brighter and then contrast makes it more contrasty. So, it makes the darks darker and the lights a little bit lighter. I think it looks really nice our interior photographs. So, on top of my curves that I already have, I would add a little bit of brightness and contrast which I think is making my image look so nice and make my apartment looks so much better than it already did. So, usually whenever I edit photos of my apartment, people think it looks so bright and so clean all the time but it's really just because I'm adjusting things in Photoshop which is great. Thank you so much Photoshop. It makes my life look better at least. Okay. So, this is the adjustment layers. Let's go through some other ones. We did this solid color, this is a fill layer. So, we can again add our coral color, add whatever color we want on top. I don't want to do that though that's not going to help anything. We can add gradients on top of our layers by adding the gradient, which could look cool if you were going for something like that. So, if I was trying to do this, I could add a little subtle gradient, I can change the color of my gradient down here with these little color pickers. So, if I'm trying to change this color, I could go color and then change it to maybe like a nice soft to blue or I could even sample this green color from the photograph with my color picker. The color picker again like whenever you're choosing a color, it just appears on your document on your canvas whenever you move your mouse off of the gradient editor in the color picker. So, I could just pick a color from the inside of my apartment, let's move these windows out of the way a little bit. Let's pick this color from this vase or pick Santas beard color. Really up to you if you actually like the gradient. I'm not sure I'm really into the gradient, so I'm just going to cancel and get out of here. Cancel. Let's go back to our adjustment layers. We can add a pattern. I'll go more into patterns later. We did brightness contrast, we did levels, we did curves, we could change our exposure a little bit. So, again, if we were taking a photo with our camera and it was overexposed, that's absolutely what it would look like or underexpose would make it make it darker. I just want to put that back at zero offset. Makes the shadows a little darker. Again, this is like levels. I usually use levels over exposure, but it's up to you which one you want to use. Let's delete the exposure. Okay. So, vibrance really just bumps up the saturation in the vibrancy of the photo. So, for instance, our space has a lot of pops of color. So, if I pump up the vibrance, it's just going to make the colors just subtly brighter. So, let's just do that just so I can show you and then we'll hide this layer just so you could see what it looked like before. As you can see, very subtle but that's why I like the vibrance adjustment layer because it is so subtle and it's really nice to just add a little bit of that to your layer because it made my green a little greener and this bookshelf a little brighter. It's really nice. Okay. Let's pick a couple more. So, if we go to photo filter for instance, we can add a nice preset filter. So, if you're finding that your photograph is a little cool, you can make it warmer by adding a warming filter or vice versa adding a cooling filter. Then, if that's too much, you can take down the density so that's nice and a little bit subtle. My image actually this is what it looked like originally. I think it looks a little warm. So, I'll add just a little bit of cooling filter on it but not too much. Just five percent. If you don't like the cooling filters, you can just choose a custom color of your own and then bump up the density. Again, we can make it really blue, but I just like a nice subtle five percent, looks really nice. Okay. Lastly, we can do something fun down here we have invert. Okay. Now, watch what happens when I click invert. Everything goes crazy. So, it inverts all the colors to their opposite counterpart. So, the sofa was pretty dark, so it made it really white and so on. The opposite of green is this magenta pink I guess. So, it changed it to that. I've never once learned how to use for invert, I challenge you to find a good application for it. But it's up to you. Again, these are examples to show that there are a lot of things in Photoshop that you can use. But, I have never seen them used well. So, it's up to you whether or not you want to use most of these adjustment layers. But, those are just the ones that I love so much and that I use all the time. So, explore, look around the adjustment layers and see which ones you like.
4. Layer Styles: So, let's talk about the actual layer styles. So not the layer adjustment styles that we just talked about, but rather layer styles. So, we have a background image here that's my photo from before. I can't really do anything to add a layer style to that, but I can copy it, and create an unlocked new layer. So, in order to copy it, remember we just drag it down to the new layer, and let go and we made a copy. So, in order to add a layer style to a layer, you have to double-click on a layer, but again you can't double-click on the title because it'll just changed the title. See? Rather you need to double-click outside of the title somewhere. So, let's double-click and that brings up our layer style, palette, window, box whatever you want to call it. So, this layer style window, and my goodness, look how many things we can do. We have bevel and emboss, stroke, inner shadow, inner glow, satin, whatever that means, gradient overlay, pattern overlay, outer glow, and drop shadow. Within each of these are so many options. Look how many options. My goodness. So, we'll just touch on a few, and see what happens, because it's a lot to handle. So, I'm going to start with my first favorite few, and then I'll let you explore the rest on your own. Just like we did with the Adjustment Layer Styles. So, first of all, let's go with color overlay. So if we want to add an overlay on top of an image, say you want an image that has just a little bit of pink on top for instance, we would do that. So, we would add a color overlay and then we can select our color here. So, I'm going to go to nice bright hot pink, and press okay. So, we can kind of move this over and preview our image here with the color overlay. So, you're kind of wondering, what's the big deal? It's just a solid color nothing's happening. Well, if we change our blending mode here, then we start to see things happen. So, you can kind of just pick a few and look to see what kind of effect they have on your image. I really like multiply, I think it looks really nice, it depending on the color. So, if I chose like a deep dark color maybe like this could sample the screen. Deep dark green and then you can turn down the opacity, which makes the green a little less strong or turn it way up. You can change your color, you can change the different blending modes to see what they do. There are so many different things, so many different effects that the layer styles have, it's crazy, but it's really fun to just kind of go through them and see what they all do. So, that's color overlay, very simple. So, if you wanted to apply it, you just have it checked, if you want to just get rid of it, un-check it. Very easy. So, the next thing that we could do, we kind of went over this a little bit with the layer adjustment style but you can also do this in regular layer styles is the gradient overlay. So, if we click on here on this gradient, we can bring up our gradient editor, and here we have our beginning gradient color, and our end gradient color, and it's just by default going black to white. So, I want to just make my own custom color. So, I'm going to click here, down here, and it brings up this color. So, if I click on the color, it'll bring up my color picker again. So, which color do I want? Let's pick like a golden color. Here's gold. So, now it's just going gold to white. So, okay let's click on white, and then again click the color and let's go to a darker gold. So, then I just want about that color is good, and then we go a little darker or we could go a little lighter, which I think is a nice subtle gradient. The thing about gradients is if they are too harsh, going too dark to too light or two complete different colors, they look really cheesy and kind of like flashy I guess. If you're into flashy gradients that's absolutely fine. I'm not one to judge, but I personally like really subtle gradients that go from just a little dark to a little light, sort of like this. So, it's gradually getting lighter, and then you'll press okay. So, again just like the color overlay, the gradient overly also has these blending mode. So I can choose darken, multiply, lighten, and see what happens. I like multiply, so I'm going to go with that. You can see it just adds this nice subtle color. Again, also something you can do is change the angle of your gradient. So, we could change, so now it's going dark up here to light down in this corner rather than dark in the bottom and light up top. It's really up to you. You just play, have fun, have a good time, and play with these two because you can get a radial gradient where it's dark in the center and then gets lighter around here, that's pretty fun. Reverse, simply just changes the gradient to be either dark on this side, or light on this side, it will swap it. So, now it's dark on this side and light on this side. So, it just swaps it back and forth, but I don't really like the gradient on here, so I think I'm going to un-check it, and let's just un-check that. So, pattern overlay just the same. You'll have some really nasty ugly default patterns in Photoshop like these bubbles or let's just use the bubbles for now. If you want to go and find your own patterns, I'll upload some pattern resources for you, and you can get going on those, but let's use the bubbles for now. Again, it'll just default tile these bubbles. They look terrible, and then you can apply blending most of those as well. That just looks awful, but if you like it, be my guest, play around with the patterns. Patterns can be really great. The nice thing about Photoshop is that you can add texture to things, and the best way to do that is actually with patterns. So, I highly recommend them. Let's move on to the next layer style. So, I like to add layer styles to shapes. So let's get rid of this image, let's just start with a crisp white background. So, I'm going to go to my black and white cookie, add a solid color, turn that white and we're good. So, I'm going to rename this, white background. Perfect. So, I just want to add a simple shape. Let's add a circle. So, I'm going to select my ellipse tool, draw a circle, perfect circle by holding down shift while I drag. So there's my circle, and now what I'm going to do is apply a layer style to the circle. So, again, I'm going to double-click on a layer outside of the title, brings up the layer styles. So, let's play now with stroke. Did you see just clicking on that what happened? There is now a black stroke around the entire circle, and so a stroke is exactly what you think it is. It's just a nice border that goes around whatever layer you have selected. So, if it was that image, the stroke would be around the outside of that image, but since we have the circle selected, its around the circle. So, we can do the size as a stroke, so we can bump this up. I like having it at maybe 20, just type in 20 pixels and the stroke is now on the outside, but we can change that to the inside. Watch what happens. So, now it's on the inside of the shape or in the center. So, that's halfway outside, halfway inside. I always like doing the outside or the center or the inside. So, let's do the inside. You can change the color there of the stroke. So, if I wanted to do samples just coral and then make it just a couple of shades lighter. I would do this, or a couple shades darker I would do that. So, let's do couple shades darker. That looks really nice. Perfect. Then again, you can change the blending mode of the stroke itself by adding dark and multiply. I usually just go normal. If I want to, you could add an opacity if you wanted to as well, really up to you. The opacity thing is kind of interesting because if I had an image behind it, let's hide this white background, can you see what's happening? You have a faint hint of that stroke around the circle, but yet it's transparent a little bit, so you can see the shape behind it, which I think is kind of fun, and something definitely very unique to Photoshop that I think is really fun to play around with. How you can kind of drag it around and still see what's behind it. So, let's go to some more blending modes here layer styles I mean. So, we just added a stroke and you can add more than one layer style to a layer, you just have to keep checking them. So, I like to do outer glow for instance. So, this one by default goes to screen blending mode, I'm not sure why, I actually like it going to normal. So, let's bump that to normal and then it defaults to yellow. Let's change that to a black. Like so, and now let's bump up the size of it. So, let's bump that up to 30. Let's go even higher, let's go 60. So, you can see what's happening, it's adding this really harsh shadow outside of my layer. So, now what I would do is I would bump down the opacity to make that much more subtle. So, now it's just a subtle shadow that's going on around my circle, which is really nice, and can be applicable in many situations especially when designing graphics or for the web is really helpful. So, let's just press okay, and then we're going to move our circle around and kind of take look and see. I think that looks really nice. So, I could change the color of the circle by double-clicking and making it white, but then our stroke is still kind of that coral color. So, I think that looks a little silly, but you know, up to you. So, I'm gonna go command Z to go back, and then if I do command Z, it goes back again or it could go into the history palette, and go back and find the state where my coral was at and again, in a later class we'll go over the history panel, and we're going back in time more in detail. But for now, this is all you need to know is to do command Z, which goes backwards and forwards. So, those are the layer styles that I wanted to show you. Again, just double-click on a layer, brings up the layer style window, and you can really play with all of these styles. Choose your favorite. I really like drop shadow as well, which is really nice, but in addition to that, inner shadow I use occasionally, but not very often, and the others I just really never use. Just with everything, pick and choose which ones you love, and I'm just showing you the ones that I and most of my colleagues use the most often. Let's move on guys
5. Intro to Masks: Player masks are probably the coolest and one of the most amazing things about Photoshop. I'll cover exactly what layer masks are, how they work and why you want to use them. They're an advanced feature that is actually easy to learn and you'll be glad you did.
6. Masks: It's finally time for our Masks tutorial. I'm so excited about this. Masks are something that I didn't know about for the longest time and I was using Photoshop for so long and wasn't using masks. Then once I finally learned, it just changed my life and made everything so much easier. So, I'm really honored to be teaching you guys about masks. Okay. So, the wonderful thing about masks in Photoshop is they allow you to not ruin your work. So, anything you apply a mask to, you can undo at any time. So, there are really non-destructive way to work in Photoshop, and that's really great to be non-destructive, right? Okay. So, I'm going to show you how to use them. Let's get started. All right. Let's first start off by copying this background layer again, we're still using the photo of my apartment. I'm so sorry if you're tired of looking at it. Let's copy it. So, we have our copied layer here, and let's do what we call a selection in Photoshop using a path. So, remember those marching ends from the first class, if you were in the first class. I call them marching ends because, why not? It's a dotted line that's moving. Okay? So, let's use this Marquee tool. Let's make a circle, why not? So I'm going to hold down Shift to make a perfect circle. Okay? Now I'm going to let go, and these are what I call the marching ends. We have a line of a path that is selected. So whenever something is selected or whenever something has a marching end, it's called a selection and it is a path. So, a path you can see over here, we have a path's window and that's where we have paths and where we can make paths. Once we move on to the Pen tool, I will show you how to make one with yourself. But for now we already have this pre-made, ready to go path with our elliptical marquee tool that we use. So, it's not shape exactly because it's not using the Shape tool, but it's just a little selection that we have on top. We haven't done anything with it yet. Okay. So, we just have the path created on top of our layer here. So, it's not in it's own layer. It's literally on this layer that we have. So, the mask button you'll see is right down here. I think it looks like a little camera, it's a little rectangle, it has a circle inside of it. It is the layer mask. So, just watch what happens when I click on this. Oh! It looks like nothing happened, right? That's okay. So, what you're seeing is actually the image below. So, what I'm going to do to just show you what's happening is in between these two image layers, I'm going to create just a white fill layer. Remember how to do that? It's you click on the black and white cookie, and you go up to Solid color, select that, and pick white. Oh, okay. So now you can see what we did. So, on this layer up here, we have a circle cut out of what we made. Do you remember a long time ago, I was showing guys in the first class how we cut out a circle from Kevin and Yoko's photo, I just made a little selection, and then copied it and pasted it to a new layer? Well, I'm going to show you how to do that the other way. So, here we go. I'm going to copy this layer here, bring it up above the white fill layer, I hid my background layer with the mask. I'm going to title that masked player, and then this one is unmasked layer. Okay. So the masked layer is hidden, and we have our unmasked layer showing. Okay. So, I'm going to take another circle. I can't guarantee that it will be the exact same as the one before. So, here's my new circle. I have it selected on my image. So here's what I was doing before I knew about masks. I would take it, I would go command C to copy, and command V which pastes the circle in a new layer. Okay. So, what happened was, I would then say, okay let me just completely delete the one underneath. Now, I have this layer with a circle in it. It's still the same. It has a circle with Santa in it just as I want it, but with the mask layer, remember we have the same circle with Santa in it. But the nice thing about the mask, you can see it over here on the right side, the black and white little graphic here. If I go onto the mask, I could just delete, I could drag the mask and throw out the trash can. It says, do you want to apply the mask before removing? I don't want to because I'm deleting it. Look, I have my image back. So, it's completely non-degrading and it's non-destructive. So, I can bring my image back at any time, whereas my old method, I usually deleted the image. So, if I wanted to bring my image back, I couldn't. So, that's the lovely thing about masks. Is that it's completely non-ruining. Okay. So, another wonderful thing about masks that you're going to like is, let's say we want to remove certain things from an image. I'm going to do this kind of a sloppy way for interest of time, but as we move on, I'll show you better methods. So, let's say I want to remove some of this image. So, I will apply the mask first without doing anything. So, let's see. We have masked the layer. I'm going to click on that Mask button down here, ol' camera. Okay. So, there's the mask. You can see how linked to my photo is this little white box. That's our mask. So, I want to make sure that the actual mask itself is selected by clicking on it. Okay. So now, I'm going to bring up my Paintbrush tool. Okay. So, the way masks work is whenever you paint black on the mask, it masks it out. So, it's going to mask out that layer which means that it's basically erasing the layer without actually erasing it, which is really cool. So, it's just going to make anything that pink black on isn't going to show, anything that gets painted white on will show. So, by default, it's all white as you can see. So, now I'm going to paint some black on it. In order to bring up black, I like to do this little color swappy arrow thing down here to bring back black to the foreground. By default, I had white on the foreground and I'm just going to swap them. So, black is on the foreground and I have my Paintbrush tool selected see brush tool. By default, it looks like it's really tiny. So, in order to make my brush size larger, I can do two things. I can go up here into my Brush options where it says 13, that is the size of my brush. So, I can bring it up to larger, even larger. So you can see on my canvas, you can see that my brush is much larger now. It's 271 pixels which is what I moved it to. Okay. The other way to resize your brush is by using the parentheses and clicking them back and forth. So, the left parenthesis is making a smaller, the right parenthesis is making it larger. Okay. So I made it real big now, and so look what happens when I paint black onto my mask. It's actually getting rid of this stuff on the photo that I'm painting. So, obviously, this looks bad and you can find uses for it wherever you want in this use. It doesn't look very good. Well, I'm just giving you an example. So, there are paintbrush. See how it's kind of blurry around the edge. I don't think I really like that. So, I'm going to do command Z to go back in time, and revert it back to the way it looked before. So, I don't want to look blurry around the edges. So, I'll go back into my brush and do hardness. It says 0% which means it's going to be really fuzzy. It's not going to be hard. So, I want to bring that up to 100% to make it hard, and then make sure I'm on my mask layer, and then I'll try it again and look now it's nice it's not fuzzy at all and I can just paint right on there. So, here's where masks get amazing. So, now I want to bring back some of the photo to show in here. I'll switch this back to white and then I can paint and my image will come right on back. Pretty darn cool, huh? At any time, if I wanted to delete the mask, I could do that. I just throw it away like I did before, and then will have my image back. So, this is really nice, again, because it doesn't disrupt my image. I can just get rid of this at any time and bring my image back to the way it was, or I can just make it all white again and paint white all over it, so that the whole image is showing. Pretty darn cool. So, if I wanted a circle in the middle for instance, that was out of the image, I could draw my circle again. Then I could, since it's selected, I have this perfect circle selected. I can bring in my paintbrush by pressing B for boy. That's the shortcut key for bringing up your brush. Then, I can go over here, and select a black as the foreground color, and I can just paint inside, and then it's erasing my image right in the circle. Again, I mentioned this in the last class, but whenever I want this marching ant line to go away, I just do Command D for dog, and it's gone. It's pretty neat, right? So, now I have this layer which I can move around. There's this big, white, obnoxious circle in the middle. Say I don't want that anymore, what would I do? Again, we would do one of two things. We could either drag this down on the trash can and throw it away, or we can go back to our brush. I'm going to press B again for boy, brings up our Brush Tool, and then I can paint. It switches back to white, and get rid of it by just painting over. That is how awesome the mask is. Okay. So, let's practice a method of when we'd want to apply the same mask to multiple things. So, for instance, if I had another image, let's find another image to put on my canvas. I'm going to go find, and then place embedded because I'm going to embed a new image into my Photoshop document. I have another image on my desktop, so I'm going to place this one in there. It's another image of my apartment. Okay. So, let's hide this new image. I'm going to title it New Image. I'm going to hide it, and let's go back to our masked layer. So, okay. So, say I want a random shape that I'm drawing selected and masked out. Remember that tool I showed you before? It is called the Lasso Tool. So, it's the one where I can make that marching ant line of any shape that I draw myself. So, say I want this weird, squiggly shape going around some items in my apartment. Perfect just like that. So, there's my random, very strange, squiggly shape. So, I go over to my mask, make sure my mask is selected, and I'm going to make sure black is selected. Then, I'm going to select my brush. Now, I can paint in here and to get rid of that area as we did in the previous exercise. You're all familiar with this, nothing new. So, my marching ant line is still there, so what do I do now? I press Command D for dog and there. So, I mean, this ugly shape isn't really pleasing to the eye, but it works for purpose of this class. So, now say I have this new image here, and I want to apply that same mask to my new image. It's easy, I just copy it on over. So, what I do here is I go over here to my masked layer, and I go over the mask, and I press Alt or Options, same button on Mac keyboards, and I drag and drop it onto my new image. Look, the mask is now applied to my new image. So, I can look at both of them, and it's there on both. Remember that it's not actually white on the layer. It's actually just nothing on the layer. So, if I hide this color fill, white layer, you can see that this new image is now on top of the background, and you can see through the new image onto the background layer. So, it's not actually white. It was just looking like it was white because of this white color fill. So, if I change this to green, it would be green and so on. The last thing that I love about masks, I will show you now. So, okay. Let me just show this color fill layer and nothing else. Let's create a brand new shape. So, I'm going to create a new layer, name it New Shape. Let's just make a triangle. Let's go triangle. Okay, so I'm doing the Polygon Tool, change the size to three sides up there in my options, hold down Shift to make a perfect triangle, and now we have a triangle. It's black for now. That doesn't really matter, so it's okay. Then, let's show this photo layer, and let's just delete this mask all together. Let's just start fresh and drag this mask down to the trash can. It says, "Do you want to apply the mask layer before removing?" I do not. I don't want that mask to be around. I want it to go away. Okay, so we have our Santa waving, hi Santa, at us above our triangle layer. So, the way I used to do this before masks is, I would want my triangle to cut out of my shape. Now, I would actually just go and make sure that the Santa layer is on top of the triangle. Hover my mouse in between the two layers, and then press Alt or Option until that little square with the arrow shows up, and click in between, which is really great looking because now I have this layer which I can move around. If I have the layer, the photo layer selected, I can move it around on top of the triangle, which is nice because then I can center Santa perfectly to where he's waving at us all inside of his little triangle house, or there's another way to do this with masks. So, if I don't want to do it that way, which I wouldn't recommend because it's just adding two layers rather than one. So, our mask layer is much better. So, here's what I do. I go to the triangle layer, and I select it, and then right on top of the triangle, the left-hand side of the layer itself, you hover your mouse over it and then press Command to where that little dotted line square appears, and click on it now while you're pressing Command. Then, you get the marching ants on top of the triangle, which is great. Perfect. So, I have marching ants. Now, I go and click on my mask, my masked layer is what it's called. It's the Santa layer. I have it selected, and now I click on the mask icon down here to add the mask. So, now look, I have a triangle Santa without the shape, so the shape I can completely delete. I don't need that anymore. I just need this one layer. So, then the thing that's kind of a mummer, at least I thought at first was that, I can't move Santa around anymore and center him, but that's actually not true. I can do that. So, do you see how there is a link icon in between Santa and the mask? If I unselect the link, if I click on it to make it go away, I can now move Santa around. It's perfect. So, now I move him around to wherever I want. Maybe I don't want him in there at all. So, now I can just press the link again, click in between to make the link back, and now it's a whole thing. Again, if I didn't want this triangle anymore, and I want it to go away, I could just delete the mask. Now, I would have my image back. Masks are so great. I'm so glad that I got to teach you masks. I hope you love them. They are so amazing. Let's move on to the next lesson.
7. Intro to Selection: Let's talk a little bit about selection tools. The regular path selection tool that you're using is the whole world different from the direct selection tool. We'll learn when to use them each and why to use them.
8. Selection Tools: I want to give you guys a quick little lesson on the direct selection tool because I think it's such an important tool in Photoshop. Okay. So, by default, you'll see that your path selection tool over here is the one that is selected. If you click and hold on it, you'll notice that the direct selection tool is underneath, and this is the one I really want to talk about. So, I'm going to hold down Z and zoom in a little bit on my canvas and let's go back over to the direct selection tool and just take a look at what it does. So, it allows you to pick out points on a shape or a path and actually move those points only. That probably means nothing to you right now. So, I'm going to show you exactly how we can apply that to something real in Photoshop. Okay. So, let's draw a shape first. I saw my coral color selected, and let's draw a rectangle, any size and shape will do. Okay. So, there's my black rectangle. Let's make it- should we make it coral? Okay. So, I'm going to just select that coral color that I have saved from before. Okay. So, let's click outside of that triangle on the background, and then let's select our direct selection tool that we talked about earlier. Okay. So, without clicking anywhere yet. Remember where the past points on the rectangle might be, and that's the hard part. So, on a rectangle, they're specifically on each of the four corners. If you're on a shape that you've created, it's always going to be on a corner. If you need to look to see where the path points are, go onto the layer of the shape and do the command T, and you can see these corner points are where all the paths are. Okay. So, press enter or double-click to get rid of this, and let's go back to our background because we need to be not clicking on a layer yet. Make sure you have your direct selection tool selected, and again, the direct selection tool you'll always know because it is the white arrow, not the black arrow. Okay. Then you find the corners of the shape and then you select them. So, I will make sure that I have- you can see the path points that are not selected are clear circles. The ones I have selected are filled in with black. So, if I hold down Shift I can select more than one point. Right now I have all four selected. If I click them again, they will deselect. So, you can see I'm clicking, unclicking, selecting and unselecting. I just want one point selected for now so I can show you what this tool does. Okay. So, I just have this point selected. So, now what I can do is I can click and drag, and move this point around on my own which is really helpful. Photoshop is giving me a little warning that just says, this operation will turn a live shape into a regular path, continue. That is okay. It's just telling us that we're moving paths around and that we're editing our shape. That's okay. In fact, you can just say, "Don't show this again" because it's really not a necessary warning. We still have our direct selection tool and you see that there's a little path point here. So, we can actually move this point in and look, I just made it a really interesting arrow. I can move this around too. When I have a point selected, so say I want to select this point, it's filled in. I can also use my arrow keys to move the point around. I can press and hold them down and it'll just move on its own as well, which is helpful. Okay. So, that looks like a nice place. Then again, if I select more than one point. So, I'll select at this point and this point. I can click and I can move those two points together. Then we can get interesting shapes that way. It's pretty nice. So, that's what the direct selection tool does. Again, I'll do it with another shape just so that you can see. Feel free to exit out of this tutorial if you get it by now. So, I will create a, let's do a circle. Okay. So, I have a circle here and my path points are on each four sides of the circle. So, you can see one, two, three, and four. So, I'm going to change the color here. Let's just choose blue color, let's get more blue. This is teal. That'll do. Okay. So, let's say I am not happy with just these four path points and I want to add more. How would I do that? So, to do that, I would go to the pen tool which we'll dive more into later, but I want to do add anchor point, okay. So, the anchor points as you can see all the ones I have here one, two, three, four. These are the ones we talked about. If I go to add anchor point, I can click on the circle and add as many as I want. It's pretty nice. Then I can click A, which goes to my direct selection tool. The shortcut for the direct selection tool is A. Click that. Now, I can select some of these points, and again, like before, I can drag them out, drag them in, and I can make interesting shapes that way which is pretty cool. I really like doing this with circles, it's pretty fun. Makes me feel powerful. All right. That's the direct selection tool. Let's move on.
9. Intro to Transform: You can do a lot with the Transform picture and Photoshop. Manipulating shapes into layers has never been more fun. We'll go over how to transform objects and enhance your work through resizing various elements.
10. Transform: Up next, I'd like to talk about transforming things in Photoshop. Throughout the series, we've really done a few transforming things, but I really want to reiterate what we've done and teaching in some new things along the way. All right. So, let's start off with a shape again, and this will obviously work with any sort of photo or shape or layer that you have, but I would like to start with a shape. So, I'm just going to make just random rectangle here. Black is fine. That will do. Okay. So, as I've told you about transforming so far is that whenever you have this shape selected, go and command T, which brings up that transforming box. Here, you can click and drag on any of these points to change the shape and size of your rectangle. Okay. But that's about the extent of what we talked about. I want to dive a little bit deeper now. So, once you have this box open, if you want to warp it a little bit, you can hold down command and then go right over any of these points, and you can push and pull and move different points like so. So, again I'm holding down command while I do this, and it really makes interesting perspective-ish things happen, which is pretty neat. So you could change it into like that if you wanted to and then press enter or you could double-click in there to go back to your shape. Okay. So, let's do something else. So, let's make a new rectangle. That's perfect. That will do. Okay. So, let's go Edit, Transform, and now let's do things this way. So, again we could do something called Perspective, which is really nice, and we can do preset. So, see how my mouse is moving but it's only moving certain ways, that's because Photoshop's being smart about it and only let us doing certain perspective things. So, you can see what's happening here is pretty neat. They're retaining certain things for us so that our perspective is staying intact, and that's pretty cool. Again, I'll do more perspective for you because this is very interesting. So, we'll go edit, transform, perspective, and now it's almost like going off into horizon or the horizon line. So, we could do things like that, or it's going off in the distance that way, and it's really quite nice, isn't it? It's easy. Photoshop is making it easy for us to do perspective work. I don't do much perspective with my job, but I can see that a lot of illustrators definitely do this. Okay. So lastly, I want to show you how we can flip things and rotate them. For this, I'm going to need an image. So, I'm going to go to File, Place Embedded to embed an image in here. I have an image on the desktop of my friend Brooke. Okay. So, I'm going to press Enter or double-click. All right. So we have Brooke here. Say we wanted to flip her and make her part on the other side, for instance. So, she's just reverse. So, her hand pointing up is going to be over here and her part will be on the other side. So, we'll go Edit, Transform, and then Flip horizontal, and that flips Brooke right across which is quite nice, right? Okay. So, if we wanted to rotate the entire image, we could do that as well but to transform thing. So, Transform, Rotate 90 degrees clockwise or 90 degrees counterclockwise or 180 degrees. So, if I wanted to turn her 180 degrees, I could. Let's just rotate at 90 degrees. That just rotates her, which is quite nice. The other way to rotate would be to, let's zoom out a little bit, is to do a command T again to bring up that transformed bounding box, and then I would go to the corner where I see that little round arrow around any of the corners, and I can now click and drag and rotate Brooke this way. Okay. Or if I want to make sure that it doesn't end up almost perfect but not quite, I can hold down Shift while I rotate and it snaps to all of the main degree point. So, this is a perfect 90 degrees, and that way it's always going to look perfect in nice rather than being some sort of weird, angular integer. Okay. So, I'm going to put her back to how she was. Just like that, press Enter, and there. Now Brooke is back to the way she was, and everything's good. So, that is transforming. I transform everything in it, something that I probably use more often than anything else. It's definitely something that will become second nature to you as you use Photoshop more.
11. Intro to Cropping: Cropping is such an important feature in Photoshop. I'll show you guys how to use the crop tool and resize your canvas. If you've ever created canvas in Photoshop and then your mind about the size, the cropping feature is perfect for you.
12. Cropping: Let's now dive a little bit deeper into cropping. All right. So I had this image here of Brooke and you can see that there's a lot of white space on either side of her, and I'd like to crop it to where it's just a photo of Brooke. Okay. So, in order to do that, I need to do grab the crop tool. I can do that by pressing C for crop, that's the shortcut key or you can see the Crop tool over here in our toolbar. So, there's a few different ways that I can do this. It brings up this cropping box here. I can just drag the cropping box to fit around Brooke and it does a really nice job of snapping to the photo, and then I would just press Return or Enter, or double-click inside the cropping box and that would crop it that way. Seems easy enough, but there are a few other ways that we can do this that I'd like to show you. Second way to do this is I have my cropping tool selected, I could literally just click and drag and trace over the area i want cropped. So say you don't want it to snap to the photo, rather I'd like to just crop up from here or crop it a little tighter, I can do that. So I can press Enter and then we have it cropped that way. The last way to do it is by these ratios. So, I could do a ratio of one to one, which would make it square. So once I press Enter, that creates a square ratio which you can see our canvas was already a square. So, if I want to do a ratio of one to two, here's our ratio one to two. If I want to do a ratio of two to one, you get this ratio instead. Then I can move this around by clicking and dragging which is really helpful. I can even go off of my photo in crop her to where it looks like this. Press Enter, double-click and there's our new canvas. So, it's really interesting the things you can do. There are also are preset ratios like square. These are just popular ratios for what they probably think that Photoshop users are using most often. There was also a really nice straightened feature in which we can straighten her photograph to match up to that line. So, did you see what happened? Again, I'm clicking on Straighten, now I'm drawing a straight line. So, for instance, a lot of times with photos, you'll notice that you have lines in your photograph. I specifically have lines in this wood beam, so I would trace across the wood beam like so and then it would straighten to that wood beam. I don't necessarily want it like that because it doesn't really look straight to me visually because Brooke seems pretty straight going up and down. But that is something that you will need in the future and will come quite in handy when you're editing photos. Those are really all the things you need to know about cropping. As you can see, there are some additional settings here that I don't normally use. Also, here is how it looks when your crop is overlaid on top so you can see this diamond because I set it on diamond. I don't ever need those things but you may, so have a poke around and see what's up with the rest of the crop features.
13. Image Collage Project: I'm going to walk through with you how to make your final project. We're going to mix images with shapes and do a really fun image clash. There's a lot of creativity and freedom here so I'm really excited to see what you guys do. But here's what I wanted to show you how to do so that you can give it a whirl yourself. All right. So I have this photo here that I took from a recent trip to Stockholm, and I think it's kind of nice because there's a lot of angles in this photo and a lot of triangles and a lot of contrast too. So, what I did for the example, and you could see this image on the info page for the class, but I'm going to do a different new one for you right here. So I started out with quite a few triangle shapes. So in order to make a triangle I need to grab our polygon tool, and make sure it's on sides of three, and I'll just start making triangle shapes. So, again, I'm holding down Shift to make a perfect triangle, and as you'll see, it's facing the wrong way from what I wanted, I actually want it to be flipped around. So there are two things I could do here. I could do Command-T to bring up the transform bounding box and then go to where I see that curved arrow on the outside, hold down Shift while I'm rotating, and I could do it that way or I could undo Command Z and go edit, transform flip horizontal. Oops, I'm sorry I went flip vertical. It's amazing how often I forget the difference between horizontal and vertical, and then I can do it like that. So up to you how you want to do it but I usually do it the former way not the latter way but whatever to each his own right. Okay, so now I need to copy this triangle into a pyramid-type shape. So I have triangle one here. I'm just going to title this triangle. Now I'm going to move it over and then I'm going to start copying it. So in order to copy it, I need to make sure that the triangle layer is selected then I'll hold down Alt or Option, same key on the Mac keyboards, click and drag. So, if I'm clicking and dragging I can move this willynilly all over the place but I want to make sure that they're straight. So I'm going to hold down Shift while I'm dragging and it keeps it right straight so see how my mouse is moving all over the place and then triangle is staying within that line that's perfect. Exactly what I want. So, I'm going to line it up real nice so there's my second triangle I'm going to do it one more time. Here we go. Three triangles. So now I need to make the next row. I just need two triangles for the next pyramid row so I'm going to grab the most recent two I'm gonna hold down Shift and select them both and now I can literally just hold down Option and drag them both down and move them to where they match up nicely right there. Do you see what I just did there? Okay so I just need one more to fill up this last spot. So, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to select one triangle, hold down Alter option, click and drag and then move it down. Perfect. Okay, so I have all these triangles. Now I need to resize them to fill up more of this photograph. I'm going to hold down Shift and then click the very bottom ones so that they're all selected and now I can move them all around and now to make the volume bigger what do I do? I click Command T to bring up that transform box again and I can still move this around. So now I want to retain the proportions so I'll hold down Shift while I resize. We'll make this about this size. How's that? Click Enter to submit and now I can move this around to where the center is. I like to go the visual center rather than the real center with weird shapes like this so that looks like the visual center to me. Okay I'm going to number these triangles in an order that makes sense to me. I would say one, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, so I got to find the first one. This is triangle one. I'm going to rename them just so I can remember because it's really going to be necessary. This is triangle two. You can see what I like to do to find shapes is I like to hide and show them to make sure I know which one is which. This one is triangle three and I'm reordering them in order. Here's triangle four, triangle five and lastly we have triangles six. So they're in order now. Next step of the process. I'm going to be copying this background layer. I'm going to do that right now. Okay, it's copied and then I will be applying it over all of these triangles and moving it around in an abstract manner. So, you'll understand what I mean as I go along. So triangle one is up first so I'm going to put it on top of triangle one layer and then we talked about this before, this is my alternate to masks and this is normally what I like to do first before I add masks. So, I put the background layer on top of triangle one and I hover my mouse in between while pressing Alt and Option until that little icon shows up. When the icon is there, I click. So I've been noticing from some students that for some reason this doesn't work for them and if this doesn't work for you it's absolutely okay here's the backup option. When the background is on top of the triangle just right-click on this little background layer and create clipping mask and that does the exact same thing. So you're probably like where's my triangle I have been? You'll notice that it's just on top of the triangle so if you move this photo library you can move it around and this is how we're going to create our abstract shape. So I like this here may be like this. That looks good okay, and then we're going to do that with each and every triangle. So, I like to just copy this one by making sure it's selected and holding down Alt Option and dragging it to right above triangle two and letting go which just copy this and I can move this around. Again, I'm going to right-click and create clipping mask and then move it around on top of that triangle. Do you see what I'm doing? Hope so. Okay so that's good and then again I'm going to hold down Alt Option, click and drag above triangle three and then right-click on the photo layer, create clipping mask and then move it around. I just like finding interesting combinations of shapes and textures to mix it up and make it break from what the actual photo was like. That looks good. Okay, keep trucking on. Copy this by pressing Alter Option moving in on top of triangle four, letting go, right-clicking, create clipping mask and then move it along scenes and how about this woman a little bit or her little legs down there. So since this man here is the visual focal point of this photo I like to keep him where he is but just a little off so it looks a little confusing. Again I'm going to hold down Alt Option, move this above triangle five, right-click create clipping mask. Now I'm going to just keep him on there but make him just a little bit off so like this. This is what I like to do something similar to that. Again, up to you what you do. This is just my preference. Okay, again hold down Alt Option, copy it over triangle six, this is our last triangle, right-click, create clipping mask and then figure out what looks best for this photo, up to you. Again you should just use your own photo for this, don't try to use mine. Your photos probably look much better than mine do. So now we have this interesting abstract collage and what I like to do now is it's looking a little confusing, this new triangle shape and what is the old photo. So I like to add a little overlay on top of the photo and do you remember how to do that is with those layer styles. So, I'm going to take the background and I'm going to copy it again. So, now we have a copy on top of the background, stay with me, and then we double-click on this new copy layer and we bring up our layer styles again. So, we go over to color overlay and look at that. We have red overlay on top of our image now but I'm just going to make that black. So I'll slide that down to black and then I'll bump down the opacity to where, it's just dark enough to where it's creating enough of a divide between the original layer and this new triangle abstract shape that I made. I like even number so let's go to 30 and then press okay. All right so what I like to do now is just clean up my layers a little bit so I'll make layer masks for each of these images rather than having these triangles here because that will cut the amount of layers we need in half and it will make this a lot less confusing. In order to do that I'll start with triangle one and I will put my mouse over this shape here in the Layers palette, on the layers window and press command which gives that marching ants line around the triangle. Okay, so then I select the image that is clipped to the triangle and I simply just click the mask and now I can delete the triangle. Easy. So now I just have one and I can rename that whatever I want, triangle one again. It's up to you what you name your layers. Okay, so I'll do that with triangle two again. Hover my mouse over the actual triangle shape in the Layers window, press command and then click. It's selected so now I go to the image, it's clipped too and a press the mask. Now I can delete the triangle and name this triangle two. Again for triangle three, hover my mouse over the triangle in the Layers window, hold down command, click now the triangle is selected so I take the image layer that is clipped too and press mask and then delete the triangle. Okay, I'm going to do that to all of these triangles and I'll be right back. So I have done that to all my triangles so as you can see I have far less layers than I did before which is really nice to look at and a lot easier to find what I'm looking for. Lastly, I have this background copy so I'll just title that the official background and look at that everything is clean and de-cluttered. If I wanted to I could select all these by clicking the bottom one, holding down Shift and clicking the top one and then right-clicking and selecting a color for these if I wanted to just keep them organized so that at a glance I know which ones are triangles but it's really not necessary. So this is the end of my final project. I encourage you to use your own photography colors images or graphics for this and go crazy I'm really excited to see what you do. I can't wait. I will be peaking and often I your projects and please pop in and look at other students projects and give them feedback on their projects. Let them know when you like them. Let them know if you see something wrong or see something you could help them improve on. Also if you have questions throughout this process or throughout this class, please go to the class discussion Q&A feed and ask your questions and I'll try to monitor a little bit. But please if you know the answer to a classmate's question just go ahead and answer it for me, because I am not really supposed to go in there and answer questions but I do like to keep an eye on it and help you guys out whenever I can. Again I can't wait to see what you do with your final projects. I am so excited and I hope that you enjoy this class and I hope that you continue to take the rest of the Photoshop series class. Thanks everybody.
14. More Creative Classes on Skillshare:
Meg Lewis, Designer, comedian, performer
