How to Edit & Digitise Watercolour in Adobe Photoshop

1. 1.Intro: This class is all about how to digitize your watercolor artwork in Photoshop. Digitizing is basically turning your artwork into a digital format so that you can use it to display on a website for example or so that you can reproduce it and turn it into prints or use it to create stationaries, invitations, greeting cards, or stickers. In this class, we'll be going through the process of digitizing from start to finish. We'll start by looking at things you may wish to consider when producing your artwork, which can make it easier for you to edit later on. We'll look at how to scan your image in to get the best results and compare this to taking a photo on your camera. Then we'll open Photoshop. I've included a lesson on Photoshop basics for you because I know for me when I started Photoshop, it was a bit mind-boggling. There were so many options, so many tools to use, and it's hard to know where to start. I really hope this will be useful for you. We will then look at how to adjust our image so that we are happy with the color and brightness. Then we will move on to looking at options for moving our background. We'll start this section by looking at the difference between destructive and non-destructive editing, which I think is really important to be aware of. Most of the class will focus on non-destructive edits. So that we can go back at a later date and remove any of the edits that we have made. The tools that we'll cover in this class to select and remove the background are the three eraser tools which is a destructive way of editing. Then I'll give you an instruction to masks, which is a non-destructive way of editing. Then we'll cover a number of selection tools, including the Quick Selection tool, the Magic Wand, the Select Subject option, the Lasso tool, and the Marquis tools. There are so many ways you can extract a background from an image to make the background transparent. With all these options there really is no exact method that you should take every time. It really depends on the complexity of your artwork and your preferred tools. I'll give you an overview of all my favorite tools so that you can draw on each of them depending on your artwork. Then we'll look at how we can refine our selection and then we'll move on to refining our image and facing any blemishes, making any alterations and adjustments. Once we've covered all of the tools that you can use, I'm going to take you through five examples from start to finish and show you how I digitize them. These include a leaf, the rake, the pinecone, the toadstool, and the snowball. They all require different methods, I'll show you how I choose to do them. This class is absolutely pactful of information for you which I hope will be really useful. It's basically the class I wish I had when I was starting out with photoshop and dititizing my work. All of the pieces of artwork that I use as examples in the class are from my previous Skillshare classes so if you take them nice then you should only have them at hand and can follow along the class with me. As with all of my classes, the pace that I go at allows you to work alongside me which I find is the best way to learn. I hope you're feeling really excited about digitizing your artwork. Let's get started. 2. 2.Things to Consider: There are a few things you may wish to consider when you're producing your artwork if you plan to digitize them. Firstly, you should think about what watercolor paper you're using. There are three main types of watercolor paper: Hot Pressed, Cold Pressed, and Rough, and the texture of the paper will show up in your scan. Also you can make adjustments to reduce this to an extent. It is easiest to edit and remove the background of paintings that have the plainest backgrounds. Hot Pressed paper has a smoother surface, so therefore be easiest to remove whilst Rough Paper will have the most texture and will be the hardest to remove. Similarly, it's easy to remove the background when there is the most contrast between the background and the painting. It'll be much easier to remove the background of paintings that have defined edges and stronger colors. Washy pale colors and fine details can be much harder and much more time-consuming to edit, so it's worth thinking about that when you're painting. It's also useful to think about the size of your painting. If I'm going to be producing a painting that I'll be printing for stationary or for a card, I'd like to paint it slightly bigger than the size that it will end up as. By doing this, the quality of your painting when printed should end up looking a lot better. It's not usually recommended to increase the size of your painting after digitizing it as this could affect the quality of it, perhaps making it blurry when printed, unless you have vectorized them. But we'll not be covering that in this class. Once we have our painting, the next thing we need to do is get it into the computer. The next lesson will cover the pros and cons of using a scanner and a camera. 3. 3.Scanner vs Camera: The first step to digitizing your artwork is to get it into the computer, and the two ways that you can do that are by either taking a photo of your artwork or by scanning your image digitally. I wanted to start by talking about both of these options and how you can get the best results. I have used both options in the past for different reasons. Using a camera, particularly a phone camera can be a really quick option or perhaps your only option if you don't have a scanner. I have occasionally used my French tape photos on my artwork, so it's my iCloud and I open Photoshop from there. However, I've only done this when the artwork is really simple and when I'm not using it for anything important or professional. For anything important or professional, I will always scan my working, and here are a few reasons why. When you scan an image, you get an even distribution of light towards the scanner is capturing the image. In comparison, when using a camera, you may have multiple light sources to contend with and some areas of your work may end up brighter than others. You will then have to spend more time on correctness in Photoshop, and it will be harder to replicate those original colors and make it consistent across the image. Secondly, when scanning, your artwork is being scanned on a flat surface, see your scan will be in exact same proportions as your original image. In a photo, you often end up with parts of the image being slightly distorted, perhaps as the camera is not the right angle, or if the paper isn't laying completely fat, which very rarely does with watercolor paper. I think the most important reason of all is the clarity of the image. With a scanner, we have more control over the resolution of the artwork and it will be able to pick up all of the detail on contrast in the original piece. This means that the image will look better and it'll be easier to edit because the image will be clearer and crisper. You may have more professional camera equipment such as the sharp lens and lighting equipment, but I think these reasons will still apply and a scanner will end up being much quicker than setting up all of your camera equipment and lighting for just one photo anyway. But one reason you may choose a camera method over the scanning method is if your artwork is particularly large and too big for the scanner. In this case, it may be the easier and better option for you. The alternative to this for large paintings is to scan in, in sections and then stitched all together in Photoshop. Okay. Let's focus on our scanning options. Firstly, make sure your scanner is cleaned so that scan won't pick up any marks or dust on top of your artwork and then lay your image down flat and parallel to the edges of the scanner bed. I'm using an HP MV scanner, which is part of my printer, is fairly basic machine and wasn't very expensive, but it does a good job for I need. Okay, open up your scan application and the first thing you want to do here is to adjust your settings, and the main thing that we want to make sure is the scan is set to 300 PPI, which is pixels per inch, and you should be able to find this next to the resolution setting. Pixels are basically the building blocks of your image, that tiny squares of color that make up your digital image, and the more pixels you have per inch, the sharper your image will appear. The fewer pixels you have per inch, the more likely you'll be able to see the edge of each pixel and you image won't look as smooth. So 300 PPI is a recognized standard for printing images at a good quality, and I think smaller than that may lead to blurriness and pixelation. Using a larger PPI is not really necessary and will only make the file size much bigger, which can make the processing speed much slower when editing and uploading or downloading. Okay, now scan in your image. You can rotate your image to the correct position, and I usually like to crop my image at this stage, but if you prefer, you can always crop these later in Photoshop. Okay, now I'm going to save this, and you have a number of different options to save your artwork. The best option for saving your scan is tiff, because all of the details will be preserved in comparison to a JPEG where the image is compressed and some data may be lost. The downside of this is that the file size of a tiff is usually pretty large. It can be twice the size of a JPEG or much more depending on the level of compression that the JPEG has made. It depends on how much space you have in your computer and how important the piece of work is. The difference may become noticeable if you make a lot of edits to the image and you plan to print your work, and in this case, for as planning I'm printing this artwork for professional use, I would always save it as a TIFF file. Okay, now we have our artwork saved on the computer, let's say from Photoshop. In the next lesson, we'll be going over some of the basics of Photoshop that will be useful for someone who has little or no experience with the software. 4. 4.Photoshop Basics: In this lesson, I'll be taking you through some of the basics of Photoshop, which will be useful for you in this class. If you're already familiar with Photoshop, then you may wish to skip this lesson. You start by opening Photoshop, and then open one of your images. So just some basics first about the workspace. You have your image displayed in the middle, if you want to zoom in or out, you can just use command plus or minus, or you can just use the touchpad on your laptop if you have one. If you want to return to full screen at any point, you can just click Command zero. Just to note here, I would always recommend zooming in when editing to maximize your level of accuracy. I'm using a Mac for this class, so when I refer to shortcuts I'll usually say, use the command key, but if you're using a PC, then you'll just need to use your control key instead. So let's look at our workspace. On the left here we have a column with all of the tools that we can use to create and edit images. You can display these in one column or two, depending on your preference. Do it by clicking on this double arrow at the top, and if you hover over each of these tools, these little icons, it will tell you what they are with a little description. Some of these icons have a little arrow in the corner, and you can click into these, by holding down your mouse to get more related options. Along the top, we have an options bar which shows you what options you have for the tool that you have currently selected. So you will see that these options change if I change which tool I have selected. We'll go into these tools more later, but one you might find useful to start with, is the crop tool if you need to crop your image at all. Once you've selected the crop tool, this outline will appear on the image with these little markers in each corner, and in the middle of each side, and at the top and bottom, or you can just click and drag on this, to adjust the image to how you want it to be. Now if you want to edit non-destructively, so that you have the option of changing the selection on a later day, and bringing back some other cropped image, then you can untick this delete cropped pixels box at the top, which I've actually already got unticked, but this by default will be ticked. Now you can drag this down and crop your image and click "Return", and if you want to adjust it, just click on the crop icon again. Once you click on one of those edges, the original image will appear and you can make it bigger again. If we had left that box ticked at the top, then those areas would have been deleted and we wouldn't have been able to get them back, so it's quite a useful option to know about. Over the right side are your panels which allow you to manage and monitor all the edits you're making to your images. You can completely customize these panels depending on what you find most useful, but to keep it simple, I'd recommend just using the essentials workspace to start with. You can select this by clicking on this little drop-down up here and selecting essentials. So you should have three columns each with different panels in, and to expand these, you just click on the double arrow at the top. The panels that we're most interested in, in this class are the layers panel and the history panel. The layers panel is in this middle column, and you can see this tab here, is the layers tab, and this shows you all of the layers that you have in your image. At the moment I only have one layer, which is my scan, but as I add more these layers will stack on top of each other. Working in layers allows you to work on individual aspects of your image without affecting other parts of your image. A few things that are useful to know about layers. When you first open your new scan or photo, you will only have one layer, and it will be locked as the background layer. So the first thing I always do is unlock this layer by clicking on the padlock, then double-click on the name and I rename it original. I then duplicate this layer by clicking command J, and this is the layer that I'll be making the edits on. You can also duplicate this layer by just right clicking, and click "Duplicate Layer". I then go back and lock the first layer and hide it by clicking on this little 'i' here, which makes the layer visible or invisible. Now this original image is now protected, and won't be affected by any changes that we make. The reason why I do this, is so that I still have the original image that I can use or refer back to in the future. It's important to remember that you need to make sure that you have the right layer selected, that you want to work on. So whatever you are doing, just always make sure that your chosen layer is highlighted. Let's just look at this panel a little more. We're not going to worry too much about these options up here at the moment, but let's look at these icons at the bottom. So you have a few icons here, on the very right, you have a bin. If you want to get rid of a layer, you can just click and drag the layer to the bin like so. I'm just going to undo that by clicking control Z, which is a really useful shortcut to know, is the one I use the most. You have more options here including create a new layer, create a new group, create a new fill or adjustment layer, and create a layer mask. I'm going to go ahead and create a new fill layer just to demonstrate how this works. I'm going to click on this icon, and you'll see all of the options you have, and I'm going to click on "Solid Color" at the very top. This allows you to create a layer of solid color, and this will then bring up the color picker tool. On here, you can choose whatever color you want the layer to be, by selecting within the range of this box here. If you want to change the range, just choose a color in this column and select from that. Now white will always be in the top left, and black will always be at the bottom. If you're unsure whether it is true white or true black, you can just check this figure here, which is the HTML code. The HTML code for white is six f's and the code for black is six zeros. For this demonstration, just pick whichever color you like for now, click "Okay" and you will see that it has created a new layer, and it shows you the color you have chosen in this box here. It also automatically created this mask, which is this white box, but we don't need that, so we will delete that in just a minute. Now what we can see in our image is this solid color, and that's because it is the top layer. If we click on the 'I' on this layer, it will hide the layer, and then we'll be able to see the layers underneath, which is our image. So what we're going to do is to rearrange these layers so that the solid color sits beneath our image, and to do this, we just click on the layer and drag it down underneath. We're going to keep this original layer at the very bottom, as we don't want it interfering with anything we're doing. Now I'm just going to right-click on this mask, this white box, and click "Delete Layer Mask". This is not really necessary, but as we don't need it, it just keeps the layers looking a bit tidier. I'm just going to undo that action with control Z, so I can show you another way to delete it, which would be to drag it to that bin icon, and just click on delete in this box that has appeared. So let me show you why we have done all of this. Our aim is to remove the background of this image. So we want to take all of this white watercolor paper away and leave only the painting. Having this layer of color underneath, allows us to change the background of our painting. Usually this will be to white, but it also helps us edit our work and improve our accuracy. I'm just going to hide my colored layer, and make sure that the layer I want to edit is selected. Now I'm going to select my eraser icon and delete some of the image, and you will see this checkerboard which tells you that this is now transparent. Now if I go back to my layers and make my color layer visible, by clicking on that I, you will see the color coming through. Having that color underneath makes it much more clearer where I have made my edits, and which parts of the image are transparent. So having this color layer allows you to work much more accurately, especially when you're working around the edges, which you will see later on in the class. Now if you want to change the color of this solid fill at any point, you can just double click on this box and change the color. The other icon that I mentioned which will be useful to know about is the layer mask, but that deserves its own lesson, so we'll come on to that shortly. Moving on from layers, another panel that is useful to know about is the history panel. As I mentioned earlier, a really useful shortcut to know is control Z, which undoes your last action, but if you want to undo more actions, you can open the history panel here, and this shows all of the actions you have taken so far. Another way to open the history panel, instead of expanding the whole column, is just to click on this icon at the top and it will be displayed in this little pop-up screen, which you can expand downwards just by holding down your mouse and dragging. Now at the top are the first actions you took, and at the bottom is the most recent action. What you can do here is click on any action to go back to that state of the image, and you will see that everything after that action has grayed out. This can be really useful if you want to undo a bulk of actions. By default, the history panel has a limited memory with a set number of changes that it remembers, so will only display the most recent changes you have made depending on what that number is. If you want to increase the number of actions that it remembers or just find out what it is, then you can look at this in the preference settings in the performance tab. So just click on photoshop, and then down to preferences, and then go down to performance, and you can see it's here. Also bear in mind that if you close the image and open it again, the history will be cleared so you will no longer be able to go back and change those edits. So that's just a quick snapshot of panels for you that will be useful in this class. One other thing I want to mention at this stage is pixels, which is what I will be referring to, far a bit throughout the class, so it's useful to understand what they are. So pixels are the tiny squares that make up your image. If you zoom into your image, you'll be able to see them. Each of these squares has its own color, and it is the color of each of these pixels that we're changing when we make any edits to our image. These pixels are how photoshop identifies areas. It doesn't see your leaf or your pumpkin, it just sees a different white, orange, or brown pixels that we have in the image. The more pixels you have in your image, the more detailed and better quality it will be. So I hope that lesson has been really useful to get you familiar with some of the basics of photoshop. If you have any questions, just drop me a message in the discussions area here on Skillshare. In the next lesson, we'll be moving on to how to make adjustments to the colors in our artwork. 5. 5.Colour Adjustments: So now we have our image open. We should have it cropped to the right size, and we hopefully, have some understanding of our workspace. The next thing we want to do is adjust the colors in our image. Generally, when scanning watercolor in, it can tend to look a bit washed out. So we want to give it some of that vibrancy back. We also want to increase the contrast, which will help us when removing this blank watercolor paper in the background. To do this, we're going to use an adjustment tool called levels. Levels uses a histogram to specify the areas of black and white in an image, and can be used to adjust the brightness, contrast, and tones in your image. First, make sure you have the bright layer selected. If you wanted to make these adjustments directly to your layer, you can go up to image, adjustments, and select levels. Or you can use a shortcut, "Command L. " This will open up this box which shows you the histogram chart for the input levels. I'm just going to close this because I want to show you how to do this non-destructively, so that we can go back and adjust this at a later point. In the panels tab, click on the icon at the bottom, which is create fell or adjustment level, and then, select "levels" and you will see here that your new layer has appeared at the top. You can also see that the levels panel has appeared above my layers panel with the same histogram we saw earlier. I'm just going to go and drag this down so I can see all of it. So you have these three triangles me at the bottom of the chart. On the left indicates where the true black is and on the right indicates where true white is, and the arrow in the middle is the mid turns. You can see there is no true black in this image, but there is a lot of white. You can see the painting is looking a little washed out. So we want to make that look more vibrant and bolder. So start with the black color and slide across. What this is doing is adding more black pixels into the image by darkening the darkest pixels. If you move it quite away to the other side, it gets really dark. So we want to make sure we don't go too far. I think about that looks pretty good. Now move over to your white arrow and move this left. Before I edit this, I'm just going to zoom into my image so you can clearly see what adjustments I'll be making. Up here, you can see the texture of the watercolor paper. We want to reduce it as much as possible without compromising the quality of our painting. If you watch the watercolor paper as I do this, you will see that texture starts to disappear, which is what we want. As it will help us to select and remove the background in the next stage. However, be careful here not to compromise your painting because it will start to take away some of the lighter areas as well. Just adjust this until you're happy with how your image looks. You can also move the mid turns around, but, I'm pretty happy with this one here. Now, our image is looking much more vibrant. If you go to your adjustment layer and click on the eye, to make these adjustments invisible. Hiding that layer, you'll be able to compare the two from the original image to the adjustments you've made, and you can see it looks much better, much more vibrant. You have a number of other different options that you can use to adjust your images. If you go back to this icon at the bottom and click on it, all of the options will come up. One example here, if you want to add more color to your image, is hue and saturation. So I'm just going to click on that. If you move these cursors around, you can either add more color or you can take some of that color away by decreasing the saturation. I generally just stick with levels, and I'm pretty happy with how this looks now. So I'm just going to delete this layer. Okay. So now that we've adjusted our image, we're ready to start removing the background. In the next few classes, we are going to move on to looking at the options we have for selecting our artwork, so that we can memorize the background. We'll start by looking at destructive versus non-destructive ways of doing this. 6. 6.Destructive vs Non-Destructive Edits: Let's start by talking about the difference between editing your work destructively and non-destructively. Destructive edits are edits that you make to your image that cannot be removed or changed later on. Another way of describing them are "permanent changes". It is called destructive because you are destroying the original pixels within the image, and whilst we have saved the original in the first layer, and we can go back to that, we will not be able to remove individual edits that we have made. A destructive way of removing the background of an image would be to delete it, and you can do this by using one of the Selection Tools, which we'll be looking at in a couple of videos, and then just hitting "Delete" button, or by using the Eraser Tools. Now, we can undo these actions by clicking "Control+Z", or going back into our history to a certain state, but you cannot undo individual actions within that history, and once you've saved your file and a history has been deleted, the image has been changed permanently and you cannot go back. I like to work non-destructively when removing the background of my artwork, because it always gives me the option to go back and edit something that I've done, even if it's a year from now. If you want to work completely non-destructively, you can use separate layers for all of the edits you make, just like we did with the color adjustments in the last video. To remove the background of your image non-destructively, or any other part of your image, we can use a mask. Simply put, when you apply mask to a layer, it covers the whole layer, and allows you to make certain areas of it visible or non-visible. We'll go into more detail about masks in a couple of lessons. Now, when this is saved as a PST file, which is the Photo-shop Document File, well, you still have access to the layers when you reopen it, you can still go back and edit it later on. In the next two classes, I'll be taking you through both of these options in more detail: using the Erase Tool to permanently remove backgrounds and using masks to hide the background. In the later examples of the class, I'll be using the Latter method to show you how I added five pieces of my artwork as I prefer and recommend this non-destructive method of working. 7. 7.Eraser Tools: In this lesson, we'll be looking at the Eraser Tools and how we can permanently remove errors of our work. The first thing we always want to do is to make sure that we have the right layer selected, and that is a layer with a thumbnail of our image here. You can find your Eraser Tools about midway down in your tool panel. If you hold this down, you'll see that you have three options. The Eraser Tool, the Background Eraser Tool, and the Magic Eraser Tool. We're going to start with the Eraser Tool at the top. This is basically like a brush that you can use to manually erase areas of your image. You can see that my cursor has turned into this circle and you can make this smaller or larger using your brackets. The open bracket makes it smaller and the close bracket will make it bigger. If I click ones, this will erase that part of the image within the circle. You can also click and drag and that will erase much more. I don't currently have any layers visible underneath this one. You will see that this checkerboard has appeared and that tells me that this area is now completely transparent. If I make that solid color layer visible, you'll see that that color has appeared underneath. If nothing seems to be happening, just make sure that your original layer is hidden. Let's look at the options that we have at the top here. If we start by clicking on this drop down here, you have a few options for your brush. Here's another way that you can change the size of your brush by just sliding this cursor. You can also change the hardness of your brush, which will tell you how hard the edges of the brush will be, it's currently set at 100 percent. If I move this down to 20 and then click "Again", you can see that the edges are much softer. I'm just going to zoom in and show you. You can see that they are much softer than these over here. I'm going to move that back up to 100. Another option up here which is useful to know about is the opacity setting. This is set to 100 percent, which means that we are using a solid brush and it will make the area that we select completely transparent. If we move this down to 50 percent, it will make the area semi-transparent. If we just select over here, you can still see some of the colors underneath. I'm just going to move that back up to 100 percent and that's usually what we want to keep it at. I'm zooming back out. We can use this Eraser Tool to delay large areas of our work or we can zoom in really close, make the brush much smaller and work on some of the edges, which is particularly useful for more delicate areas. I'm just going to press "Command Zero", and that will take me back to a full screen. I'm just going to go back into my history and remove those changes and now let's look at our next tool. The next tool in this group is a Background Eraser Tool, again, just go back to your eraser hold it down and select the middle option here. With this tool, you can erase the pixels that match the sample that you have chosen. Now you see that the cursor still has this circle, but it also has this plus sign in the middle. When you click, it will identify the pixel color underneath that plus sign and anything within that circle that matches it will be deleted. If I click here, you can see it has taken away some of the white pixels, but left some of the dark ones because of that texture in the watercolor paper. Now the pixels that it selects to remove will be dependent upon the tolerance level that you have selected here at the top, it's currently set to 30 percent, which is usually a pretty good figure to start at. If I reduce this tolerance, say to six percent, Photoshop will then be looking for very specific colors. If I do this over the leaf, it'll be more obvious. You can see it only removed those colors that's six percent within the range of the color that's underneath that plus sign, it's not very many of them within that circle. If we increase this tolerance much higher, say to 72, and do that again, it erased much more and it's only really left a few up here, which are the dark ones, which would be most contrast to the one that we selected. I'm just going to go back, the way this background eraser works, I'm going to just adjust this back, I'm going to adjust this back to about 40 and then I'm going to hover over the edge, making sure that plus sign is on the white because it's the white that we want to remove and you can just drag it around the edge of your artwork and it will start to remove these areas and because there's enough contrast in the leaf to the background, it's leaving most of the leaf intact. But you can still see there're quite a few areas that it's left because of that texture. This is a really useful tool if you have a plain background and if your artwork is simple and you want really quick results. I could just zoom out and then just trace this around, making sure my plus sign stays on the white paper and it should leave most of the leaf intact. You can just keep doing that. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well with more complicated backgrounds or detailed artwork. We're not getting a great level of accuracy here. Again, I'm just going to delete all of that and now let's move on to the last eraser tool, which is the Magic Eraser Tool. Again, hold down the eraser and select the one at the bottom, the Magic Eraser Tool. Now you can see instead of the circle, the brush, it has this little eraser icon. Whereas the background eraser tool only erase the pixels within the circle according to the color of the pixel you selected, the magic eraser tool erase the pixels within the whole image. If I click on the background now, everything that is the same color or close to it will be erased. Again, this depends on the tolerance level up here, which is currently set at 20. Again, you can zoom in and check your work. But another way to check is to make that color layer visible and you can see there's quite a lot of areas around here, around the edges and run the very edges of the leaf that it's missed. I'm going to go back in my history and undo that eraser and then I'm going to increase the tolerance to 30 and do this again. You can see is still the same add it to 40, you see it's getting better but you still got a few areas. Instead of increasing it further, what I might do, because you can see it's starting to eat into the painting here. What I would do is move it back down to 30 and then go and clean it up with the eraser. This is one reason why I find it useful to use a mask instead of this erasing method. Because with a mask, we would be able to get some of these areas back that it started to eat into the painting and I'll be showing you that in the next class. Control Z to undo this and the last thing I want to show you in this tool is the contiguous option up here, and this is currently ticked. Now contiguous means connected. When I use this magic eraser, it will only erase the colors within the image that are connected to where I have selected. A good way to show you this is with another image which is of my leaf here. If I click in the middle with this contiguous option selected, it only erase the white areas that are connected to where I have selected. and then what you can do is you just have to go around and manually select any other areas. I'm just going to undo that. If we untick this contiguous box, it will now erase white areas within the whole image, even if they're not connected. I'm just going to click once in the middle and it erased everything. This can be really useful, but you do have less control. You really need to check to see whether it started eating into any areas of your image. For example, you have these lines within the leaves and some of them you may have wanted to have left there. It really depends on the image whether you use this option. Hopefully that have given you a good introduction to the eraser tools. Now, let's move on to looking at how we use masks. 8. 8.Introduction to Masks: In this lesson, we'll be looking at how we use masks. When you apply mask to layer, it covers the whole layer and allows you to make certain areas a bit visible or non-visible. To add a mask to your layer, make sure you have the right layer selected, which again is your image, and then you can click on this icon at the bottom, which is this rectangle with a circle in the middle, which will say "Add Layer Mask" when you hover over it. This white box will appear next to the thumbnail of your image in your layer. You can see this little chain icon in the middle, which shows that these two are now linked. Applying a mask to a layer won't cause any immediate visual differences, you can see my image still looks exactly the same. That is, unless you have an active selection at the time, which I'll show you later on.You can switch between these two thumbnails, and the one you have selected will have these four corners around it. At the moment you want to make sure you have the mask selected, which is the white box. Now, with this mask, you can paint white or black or any level of gray in between. The color that you paint tells Photoshop how opaque to make the pixels in that area. White means 100 percent opacity, which makes the layer completely visible and black means zero percent opacity, which makes the layout transparent and hides it. This box is completely white at the moment, which means that the image is completely opaque, so completely visible. What we want to do is we want to grab our Brush tool, which is this little Brush icon here, so you select that, and at the bottom you'll see these two boxes which show you what your background and foreground colors are currently set to. The top one is what color you'll be painting with if you clicked on the Image now, and so it's set to white, and to switch these two, you can either click on this double arrow here, which will switch them, or you can click X on your keyboard. Make sure that black is your top color as we want to use the brush to hide some areas of this image. Once again, because we've got the brush tool, we can make this circle larger or smaller using our brackets. Now, you can just click and drag, over your image, and because I got that color layer underneath visible, it's showing up red. If I hide that, you'll see the checkerboard and that shows you it's completely transparent. You can also see that in this white box is black mark is now appeared, which shows you which part of your image has been hidden. Now let's switch these colors over again, so white is on the top, and painting with white will be our image visible again. We'll just paint over that area that we made transparent and it comes back. This is a really useful way to remove parts of your artwork with the option of bringing areas back if you make a mistake or change your mind later on. This is just a really simple introduction to masks, and we'll be looking at masks a lot more as we go on in the class. In the next video, I want to start looking at different options that we have for selecting our artworks so we can start to remove the background. 9. 9.Introduction to Selection Tools: In the next few lessons, I'll be giving you an overview of the options we have for selecting our artwork. This is the first step that we need to take in order to distinguish it from our background so that we can remove the background. There are a number of different tools that you can use to select your artwork, and it will really depend on the type and complexity of your work as to which ones would be most useful for you. We'll be covering all of my favorite tools in this section. These are the tools that we'll be focusing on. The first group of selection tools we'll look at are the quickest to use and are really useful if the artwork that you want to select has clear, defined edges which Photoshop can clearly identify. These tools are the Magic Wand tool, the Quick Selection tool, and Select Subject. We will then look at how to use the Lasso tools, and these are useful when we want to manually draw around objects which are not well-defined. These tools include the Lasso tool and the Magnetic Lasso tool. Then, we will look at how we can use Marquee tools when we want to define specific shapes, like the circle in our globe or the curved base of our mushroom. In this section, we'll specifically focus on the Elliptical Marquee tool. One selection tool that we won't be covering in this class is the Pen tool, as that can take a little more time to practice and master. 10. 10.Selections Tools Part 1 - Quick Selection Tools: In this lesson, we'll be focusing on the Magic Wand tool, the Quick Selection tool and the Select Subject tool. So let's start with the Magic Wand tool. You'll find this group of tools near the top of your toolbar, and if you hold this down, you'll see the two options, the Quick Selection Tool, and the Magic Wand tool. So select the Magic Wand tool first. So this tool is useful if you want to select areas with similar colors. So click on the white background of your image, the watercolor paper, and you will see the marching ants appear, which indicate what has been selected. So everything inside of these ants is the current selection. As we have covered with some of the other tools we've used so far, this selection will be determined by the tolerance level that you have set, which is currently at 30. So depending on the selection that it is made, you can adjust this depending on if you wanted to select more, or you want it to select less. Now I'm just going to zoom in and look a bit closer at this, and it's done a pretty good job of selecting all the white, as the leaf is fairly well defined against the background. The reason why I selected the white instead of the leaf, is because it's a much flatter area of color than the leaf is. The leaf has quite a few different colors in there: the reds, yellows, the greens. So let's zoom out again and have a look to see what would have happened if we would have selected the leaf. So to remove the selection, you can just press Control or Command D. Next, I'm just going to click inside the leaf, and you'll see I clicked on an orangey-red area. So it's selected those similar colors that are connected to it because this contiguous box is ticked. So just to remind you as we covered a few lessons ago, this contiguous box means that it will only select colors that are connected to where you clicked. So if I deselect this, and uncheck that box, and click it here again, you see it selected more areas. So up here in the Options bar, you have these options here. So this one is a New Selection. This one which is currently selected is Add To Selection, and this one is Subtract From Selection. You can also see which one is currently selected. Because you can see on my cursor, there is a little plus sign next to the wand. So now if I select somewhere else, it will make another selection, and add to the current one. So I can keep clicking on areas, but now I just have marching ants everywhere. You can see already it was much easier to click on the white space to get the selection that I wanted. So I'm just going to press Command D to remove this selection. I just want to demonstrate this with a different piece of artwork, as I did before in the Eraser lesson. So let's have a look at this wreath. The Magic Wand tool works the same as your Magic Eraser tool. So again, I'm going to click on this white, and because I've got this contiguous unselected, it means it's selecting all of the white in the image, even if they're not connected. So I'm going to undo that. Click on here. Click in the middle, and it's just selecting the white that is connected to where I clicked. Again, because it's got that plus sign, you can just go around and add in the areas that you want. It makes a pretty good selection at that 30 tolerance. If there are any areas that it has captured that I want to remove, I can just either click on the Subtract, and then you'll see this little minus sign appear. The other way I can do this is, is I can just hold down Shift, and it will turn to the minus sign, and then you can just click on an area that you want to remove, and it will take it away. So I'm going to deselect that and go back to my leaf. Now let's compare this with the Quick Selection tool. So again, go back to that icon, hold it down, and then click on the Quick Selection tool. This uses a similar method, but it's using a brush format, and instead of looking for similar colors, it looks for edges. So you can see now my cursor is a small circle with these four lines. That just means that it's a really small brush. So you can click on your close bracket, and that will make it bigger. So now if I click my mouse, it's going to select an area. The area it selects would depend on how large your brush is, how large that circle is. You can click and drag this, and as you move it around, it will find more edges to select. So I'm just going to drag it all the way around the leaf, and then just let go of your mouse and you'll see the selection with marching ants. As with the Magic Wand tool, you can add or subtract certain areas of this selection. So you can see there are a few areas that it has missed, like the bottom half of this stalk. I'm going to zoom in to these areas, and I'm going to make my brush smaller. Because I've selected the white instead of the leaf, I need to subtract this bit from the selection. So I'm just going to click on this and I'm going to make it even smaller for this tip here. Then you can just go down. See, if I click and drag, it's just making a rough selection. It has captured some of those white areas in there. So it's not perfect, but that's okay because we can tidy this up later. This is just the first step into making our selection. It doesn't have to be perfect at this stage. Now we have our selection. I'm going to press Command 0 and zoom out. It really doesn't matter whether we are selecting the artwork or the background, because we can always invert the selection. So you'll see the marching ants around the edge of the page and around the leaf, which means that the white is selected. So if I wanted to change this so that it's selecting the leaf, I just need to hold down Shift, Command and I, and you'll see that the marching ants around the edge of the canvas have disappeared, and there're just around the leaf now, so it's the leaf that's selected. Now let's just deselect that again using Command D, and look at the final tool in this group. So the final tool I want to look at is Select Subject. You'll find this at the top in the Options bar on either of these tools. The way this works is it selects the most prominent object in the image using Photoshop's intelligence. So I'm just going to click on that box, and you'll see it's loading, and you can see it's done a pretty good job of finding the leaf. As with the Quick Selection tool and the Magic Wand tool, you can then add or subtract any areas into your selection, again using these options at the top. So this option is really useful for well defined pieces of artwork like this. But if I go back to my wreath, and I try using this option now, you see it hasn't done a very good job, and it just looks like it's got a bit confused. So where as this tool is great for obvious objects, it does have trouble when there are more details or the artwork is more complicated. So it's really useful to know about all the range of options that you have in Photoshop. So you can use whatever will work best with your particular artwork. I'm just deselecting that with Command D. The next set of tools we're going to look at are the Lasso tools. 11. 11.Selections Tools Part 2 - Lasoo Tools: The next set of tools we're going to look at are the Lasso Tools. With these tools, you can manually draw around the edges of your artwork. They're particularly useful if you have a pen tablet or a really good mouse, which is easy to control and draw with. They're also useful if you just want to make a rough selection around your object. Particularly if you have multiple pieces of artwork on one page and you just want to extract one of them. You can find the Lasso tools at the top of your toolbar, above the Selection tool. If you hold this down, you'll see there are three options. The ones we're going to be looking at are the Lasso tool and the Magnetic Lasso tool. Start by clicking on your Lasso tool. You'll see you have a little cursor with this Lasso next to it. With this, you just hold down your mouse and then you can start drawing. If I want to make a rough selection around this leaf, I'll just move my cursor all the way around. It's usually best to end by connecting up to your starting point because if you let go, like I'm about to do, then Photoshop will automatically connect your endpoint with your starting point using a straight line like this. Now the marching ends appear and the area inside has been selected. Again, you have the add and subtract options. You can see this little minus sign that's appeared next to my Lasso. If I make another selection around here that is going to subtract it from my selection. I can change this to add two up here or click "Shift" and make another selection and add this area back. Depending on your artwork, you could spend quite a lot of time zooming in and drawing quite delicately round your object. I think it's most useful if you just want to make a rough selection, because otherwise it can take a lot of time. I don't use this tool very often as I find it's quite hard to achieve good accuracy, but it's useful to know how to use it if you need to make a manual selection. Let's do select that with Command D, and we'll move on to the next one. The next Lasso tool we're going to look at is the Magnetic Lasso Tool, which is a really powerful tool for making selections, one that I like a lot more than a standard lasso tool. To select this, you just get back to your lasso, hold it down and you'll find it at the bottom. You'll see again, you've got your cursor with the lasso and a magnet on it. If you hit "Caps Lock", you'll see this changes to a circle, which is really useful and I'll show you why in just a minute. Unlike the Lasso Tool, which is completely manual and relies on your drawing skills and steady hand. The Magnetic Lasso Tool gives you some help. It works by detecting the edges of an object as you're moving around it, and then snaps the selection outline to the edge, clinging to it like a magnet. It works out where these edges are by looking at the contrast in color and brightness between each of the pexels. This circle here is the area which Photoshop is searching for an edging. Using a bracket, you can make this bigger or smaller. If I hover over my leaf and I'm using that plus sign, I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see better. I'm just going to click on the edge of that leaf and release the mouse. If I just move the mouse, so I'm not holding it down, and make sure that circle is over the edge. It's putting down all of these little squares which anchor points along the edge and those keep the line in place. If you want to add an anchor point anytime, you can just click the mouse and it will add one for you. At any point, you can make the circle bigger, which is the area it's searching for that edge or you can make it smaller. If you need to zoom in around whilst you're using this tool, then you can just press Command and plus or minus, because you won't be able to zoom in on the mouse while this is selected. There are a few options I want to show you with this Magnetic Lasso Tool. To get out of this, you can press "Escape" and that deselects it. If you look up at the Options bar, you have contrast here, and that tells you what contrast level Photoshop is looking for when it's looking for the edges. You can set this higher if there is a higher contrast. We're going to keep this quite low at 20. This frequency level here is how often it lays down those anchor points. I like to have mindset at a 100 because I find it gives the best level of accuracy. I'll just show you what it looks like when it's lower. I'm going to move this down to 50 and click on my edge, and I'm going to move it along. You can see, those anchor points are much further apart and you can already see that if I zoom in, it missed out an area of this leaf, which I don't think it would have done if my anchor points were set much higher, I'm going to zoom out again. You can see because I moved my cursor, I've gone back on myself and lay down some anchor point so I don't want. If that happens, go back to where you want it to be and then you can just select the backspace and that will delete as many anchor points as you want. You just need to keep pressing it. If I draw over here, want to go back to where I want to be, and then I'll just remove these anchor points by clicking on the Backspace. If you really mess up like we did before, you just need to press "Escape". If you want your work zoomed in like this all the way around, so if I start like this, I'm going to click there and then start dragging it down here. What you can do to move the image, if you hold down the "Spacebar", you'll see that this little hand appears. Now you can hold down your mouse and move the image. Then, you can just continue making your selection. I'm going to come out with that. Once you've made your selection, I'm just going to draw a bit around here and you come back to your starting point. You will see that this Lasso icon has reappeared with this little circle and that says, you can close the loop. If I click on that, the marching ends will appear and it's now turned into a selection. As with the other tools, you can click on the add or subtract to add or subtract from your selection and exactly the same way as you did with the other tools. I think this is one of the most useful tools and it's one of my favorites for selecting images. If you want to get a really good level of accuracy and have control over what you're selecting. Command D to deselect and Commands 0 to zoom out. Let's move on to looking at the marquee tools. 12. 12.Selection Tools Part 3 - Marquee Tools: Now we're going to be looking at the Marquee Tools. These are particularly useful if we want to define and select particular shapes. We're going to focus on the Elliptical Marquee Tool for this. I've opened up my snow globe. For this, I want to make this globe really crisp. I want to define this edge more. It's a really neat circle. I'm going to select my Elliptical Tool. It's the second one down. It's a circle here. If you just hold it down, you see a few options appear, and you have Rectangular Marquee Tool at the top and underneath you have the elliptical marquee Tool. If you select that, you see your cursor has turned into a dock with those four lines. If you click and drag the cursor, it will start to make a selection of a circle. This is a perfect circle. That's because at the top in this option section under style, I have this fixed ratio selected. The default is normal. If you did this at the same time and you clicked and dragged, you probably got an oval like this. If you want to make a circle, you can either hold down Shift whilst you drag, which will make the circle, or you can just change this option at the top to fixed ratio. Now we want to make a circle that is the same size as this globe. We can just really crispen up those edges. You could start by clicking up here on the left corner and dragging down towards the right. But you'll see the circle moves, and so it's quite difficult to be able to identify when you've reached the right size. I'm going to deselect that. The easiest way to do this is to have your cursor in roughly the center of the globe. Now hold down Alt, click your mouse and drag, and that means the circle is growing from the center. It's still not perfect, but you get much better. I did and I'm going to let go, and I have my selection. It's not perfectly right, so I can use my arrows to move this to the left or up. It's still not quite big enough. If you right-click, you see these options come up. Now go down and click on Transform Selection. That would bring this box up. That means you can change the size of your selection. You can just click on one of these arrows and make it bigger. If you want to keep it in proportion as the perfect circles still, you will need to hold Shift down. I'm holding Shift and I'm just going to drag it out slightly. It's a bit bigger. It's a little bit too big, so I am just going to move it in a tiny bit, and that's much better. I'm going to move over to the right slightly using my arrow keys on my Keyboard. Now I'm pretty happy with that. Then because it's still got this box around it, you need to press Enter to exit this Transform Selection option. You won't be able to do anything until you have done that. Now we've got our globe selected we'll be able to neaten these edges really easily with our Layer Mask. Everything outside of this circle will be deleted. I'll show you how to do that later in the snow globe video. I'll also show you how to add the stand to the selection later on. These methods work the same for the Rectangular Marquee Tool if you ever wanted to create a straight edge of a square or rectangle. Just remember that all of these selections are starting points which we can refine later on. Now we know how to make our initial selections. Let's look at how we can turn them into masks. 13. 13.Turn Your Selection into a Mask: Now we have our initial selection. It's really simple to convert this into a layer mask. Make sure you have the image layer selected, and all we need to do is go to the bottom of our layers panel and select, Create a Layer Mask. This will add your mask box to that layer. You can see it has hidden everything outside of the selection. Now, everything is red because I have my color layer visible underneath. If I hide this, you can see it is transparent. If you had selected the white background instead of the leaf, then your image will now look like this. All you need to do is invert the selection of the mask by making sure that the mask box is selected and then clicking Command I. Then if we make this color layer underneath visible again, you can see that it hasn't made a perfect selection and that there are some areas which need refining. We'll be moving on to that in the next lesson. 14. 14.Refine Your Selection Area: Now that we have our initial selection and we have our layer mask, the background is masked out. In this lesson, we'll look at how we can refine this selection. I select your brush tool. Always make sure that you have the mask selected at this point, because if you have the image thumbnail selected, if I paint now with my brush does make it a bit larger, I'm actually going to be painting black onto my image, which I don't want to do. When you're masking, you always need to make sure that the Mask thumbnail is selected. Just as a reminder, when we paint black, it hides areas of our image, and when we paint white, it makes them visible again. I'm going to make my color line visible and I'm actually going to change that to a color that is more of a contrast like this green, and click Okay. You can see there are a number of white areas that I want to tidy up. I'm going to go back, click on my mask and zoom in using my mouse pad, which make my brush smaller, make sure that this option at the top of your Layers panel is on normal. Make sure your black is selected as well, and then you can start hiding this area. I also want to make sure my brush is set to, I'm going to go for a 90 percent hardness, and just see what that's like and that's pretty good. Now you just want to spend some time neatening up all of these areas. I'm just holding them space bar to get that little hand up, holding down my mouse, and then moving across so I can stay zoomed in. Every so often just zoom out to make sure you're happy with the changes you're making. I want to tidy up this edge, so I'm going to zoom in again and a useful little trick is, if you select your brush, I'm going to click here, and then I'm going to hold down shift. Just move my mouse around, I'm not holding my mouse down at the moment, and then I'm going to click again here, and it will draw a straight line. I'm just going to show you this over my leaf so it's more obvious. I'm just going to click with my mouse once, hold down shift and click again, and it will draw a straight line. Just going to get back into my history panel to remove that. If you do this in small stages, I'm just holding my shift down all the way along and every so often, I'll just click my mouse where my cursor is and I can really neaten up this edge. It's a really useful little trick. Zooming out, and that looks much neater now. You see some of these areas still have this white fringe to them. I don't want to erase too much of my image. In the next lesson, we may look at some ways to fix blemishes, we will still look at how we can use the spot healing tool to fix this. Refining your image is the part of the process which can take a little bit of time just to make sure all of those edges are nice and neat. 15. 15.Introduction to Refining Your Image: Now that we've refined our selection, we can look at options for finding our image if we want to make any adjustments to our artwork. In the next few lessons, we'll be looking at a number of tools that we can do this with. The first one, we're looking at is the spot healing brush tool, which will allow us to quickly remove any blemishes in our artwork. Then we'll move on to the clone stamp tool, which will allow us to duplicate certain areas of our work and that can be really useful for duplicating watercolor textures or certain areas that we didn't manage to quite capture when we're painting. After that, we'll then look at the eyedropper tool and the brush and how to use these to recreate fine details using colors from our artwork. Finally, we'll look at using Adjustment layer masks, which allow us to target specific areas of our artwork and change the colors, the brightness or contrast. First, let's start by looking at the Spot Healing Brush Tool. 16. 16.Refining Your Image Part 1 - Spot Healing Tool: Once we have our selection, we can then focus on neatening up any other areas in our image and fixing up any blemishes. One of the really useful tools to do this with is the healing tool. If you go over to your tools bar and click just above the brush and hold down. You'll see you have the Spot Healing Brush Tool and the Healing Brush Tool. Now I quite like the spot healing brush tool. So click on that and you'll see you have this circle. The way it works is that it uses similar pixels from the surrounding area to fix a blemish. Now, to make any adjustments directly to this image on this layer, you need to make sure that the image somehow is selected. If you have the mouse selected, it won't work. But as we've worked so far in this class, I want to show you how to do this non-destructively, so you can remove these adjustments if you want to at a later time. You just click on this icon at the bottom of your panel, which is create a new layer. Okay, and in your options panel at the top, you just want to click on sample all layers. If I zoom in now, you'll see that I've got these dark patches here on the leaf. They're actually intended to be in the painting, but they're a good example of how this heating tool works. I'm going to use those. I'm just going to hover my circle above this darker patch and just click once, and you'll see that that mark has disappeared and it's blended in with the surrounding areas. I'm going to go down and just do this again with some of these and you'll see it works really well and it can just neaten up any patches. At any point if I decide I want those blemishes back, I can just hide this layer and they come back. This tool works best if you just make simple selection. I click on individual items, on individual areas. If you decide you want to fix all of this, you can click and drag, but you'll see that it becomes more noticeable. You get a more blended liner and it's lost that water colored texture. For that reason, I'm just going to select command Z to undo that. I like to just select these areas individually. One other thing to show you with this tool, which is really useful, is how to neaten up this edges, but it does require going back to your image layer and making sure that image is selected. Need to untick this sample or layers box, and then, if you click on this edge, it would take away that white. The reason why that can only be done within this layer is because when you select this circle is looking for the most prominent colors in that circle, and all you can see in that circle really is red, because everything else is more stamps so that blue doesn't really exist. Photoshop isn't seeing that blue. I'm just going to rename that layer to spot healing, so, I remember what it is, and I'm going to press command 0 to zoom out. 17. 17.Refining Your Image Part 2 - Clone Stamp Tool: So I've just change my image over to this toadstool so that I can show you different ways to work with this. Go to Tools panel and just below your brush tool is your Clone Stamp Tool. If you hold it down, you'll see there are two options, you've got your Clone Stamp Tool and the Pattern Stamp Tool. You want the one at the top, the Clone Stamp Tool. Again, you'll see the circle up here over your cursor. That will show you what size area you're selecting and as always you can adjust this using your brackets. Firstly, when working with this tool, it's always a good idea to work on a separate layer. This will allow you to compare your edits or remove them later on. It will also allow you to transform them which can sometimes be necessary. By transform, I mean you'll be able to resize or skew or rotate the most you need to without affecting the original image. So I'm just going to go down and create a new layer and rename this clone stamp tool. There's currently no data within this layer so you want to go up to the top to the Options bar, and next to Sample, click on this drop down and change this from current layer to current and below. That means it'll be using data from our image layer. So you just need to make sure this image layer is the one that is below your clone stamp tool. Now if you go back up to the top and click on "Window," you can add your Clone Source panel to the dock on the right. So it's appeared here. One of these four options is this Show Overlay, which by default will be ticked and I like to untick this. I'll show you why. The way this tool works is that you select an area that you want to duplicate by holding down Alt. So I'm going to hold down Alt and this target will appear over my cursor, and then you just click your mouse. Now you can see that when I move my mouse, I have this preview of that area that I selected. You can see it's got a bit of a lag and it's quite annoying so that's usually why I just untick this box because I know what area I've selected. It's really just a personal preference, it's up to you. Then I can just click somewhere and that area that I selected will be duplicated. So it's not just that single area that I'm duplicating, it's taking it as a source from the whole image. If I move my mouse around this image, it's going to be duplicating the area around my original selection. I'll show you. If I hold on my mouse here and move it around, it's going to basically be duplicating the whole mushroom using that first click which I made about here as a starting point. For that reason, I'm just going to undo this. If you want to just clone some texture or some dark areas, it's a really good idea to keep your brush fairly small, and every two or three clicks, just go back and select new source. If we want to duplicate one of these white spots in this toadstool, say if I want to make one here, there are a few tips for how we can make this look the most seamless. So I'm going to make my brush slightly bigger. I don't want it too big. I'm going to click "Alt" and click my mouse. Then I'm going to go up to the top from this Options bar and select this drop-down here. This hardness scale here is really useful. If I increase this just as an example to something quite high, say 80, and then I use that source to click, you'll see if you zoom in, you can see that edge around the area. So I'm going to undo that, go back to my brush settings and reduce this down to zero and do it again. We're going to have to move this round a little bit. You can see that has blended in seamlessly. So keeping your brush much softer will give you much better results. So once that's done a really good job of recreating this spot, it basically is an exact replica and it does look quite obvious. What we can do now is, because it's on a separate layer, we can just select this. I'm just going to move this end to get out of the way. We can just hold down Control T and it will select this area. Just note here if you've made a number of edits with your clone tool on this layer, it will select them all. So if you want to transform something it's best to keep it on an individual layer. If I wanted to make another one of these over here, I would do that on another layer. Now I have this selection box around it. I can hover my cursor just on the outside of the box and you see this double-arrow appear and I can hold my mouse down and move this around to rotate it. So I'm going to rotate it slightly down there, and then I'm going to move the box inwards to resize it. Then if you put the cursor in the middle and it becomes black and you can just move it around, so I'm going to move it down there. I'm just going to drag this out a little bit to skew it a little bit more, and then click "Return." If I zoom out now, you can see those two look quite different and it looks much more realistic. So I'm just going to zoom out now. Another useful thing to do with this Clone Stamp Tool is to mirror an area. To do this, you just go to your Panel. I'll just click on this Clone stamp icon up here and I'm going to click on this icon here with the two little boxes and the arrow above it, and make sure that's selected. Now instead of duplicating an area exactly, it's going to mirror it instead. I'm going to go back to my image and so what I want to do is to make this area darker just like this. Before I make any adjustments, I just want to create a new layer, and again, I'm just going to rename it Clone Stamp Tool 2. I'm going to move this so it is above my image and then just make sure that is selected current and below. Now I want to hover over this edge, press 'Alt' and click to select my target source. Then I'm going to click the "Show overlay" so I can see where it's going to be making a mark and I want to line it up roughly with the edge of the mushroom. I'm going to hold that down and I'm just going to color this in and get up to the top, filling this area, along here as well. Now I'm going to click "Command T." I'm just going to move this in slightly so it's more lined up. You can see you've got this line down here so I'm going to skew this a bit, and press "Enter." Now it is mirroring my source. I'm just going to zoom out to see what that looks like. That looks fairly good, but it does look quite symmetrical. The next thing you can do is to create a new adjustment layer. I'm going to go to my Create New Filler Adjustment Layer icon and select a brightness and contrast layer. Now I'm going to hold down Alt and hover between the two layers and then as soon as this square with this little arrow appears, I'm going to click my mouse. That means that any adjustments that you make on this layer will only be affecting this layer underneath. Now I can just adjust the brightness of this and then zoom out. That looks much better. The area at the top might need a little bit of adjustment. But overall, I'm pretty happy with how that turned out. So you can see the two adjustments we've made here and we can hide these. So if I hide this, you'll see that's what it looked like before and that's the change that we made. If we hide this one, which is the spot up here, we can hide this, and that's the addition we made. So this little overview will by no means show you how to master the Clone Stamp Tool but hopefully it's just giving you a bit of an introduction so that you can see the potential it has if you want to make adjustments to your work like this. Now I don't tend to use it too much when digitizing my watercolors as I want them to be as original as possible, but it is a very useful tool to know how to use. So just remember if you're using it to work on separate layers because it can get messy sometimes and you always want the option of removing what you've done. Also just make sure you take your time over this to make sure that the edits you're making look realistic. 18. 18.Refining Your Image Part 3 - Eye Dropper Tool & Brush: In this video, I want to show you how you can add additional details to your work, using the eyedropper tool and brush and then also compare this with the clone stamp tool. For this part, I've opened up my wraith. We'll be adding to this small area here just to connect to this branch up to the rest of the leaf. Just have a look at our layers. We've got the original color fill, our image with our mask. The spot healing where we edited out those pencil lines earlier and are Levels Adjustment Layer. Firstly, we're going to create a new layer. We're going to rename this eyedropper brush. With that layer selected, we want to go to our toolbar and select the eyedropper tool. You'll see at the top under this sample, we want to make sure that the selection is current and below, which means that it will be looking for data within the current layer and the layer below and we just need to check that the layer below is our image, which it is. This eyedropper tool allows you to select a specific color from your artwork so that you can use it to paint with. If I zoom in slightly, if I select for hold my eyedropper tool over this branch and click that has selected the brown color and you'll see that is down here in my foreground box and it's also up here in my column box. At the top in the Options bar, you see that you have this drop down next to sample size and this shows you how Photoshop is selecting the color. You can choose point sample, which will mean is that acting the color within the specific pixel you have clipped on or you can use a large area to take an average. I'm going to keep mine at five-by-five because this is a small area. We don't want to start taking any colors from any other area around the branch. I'm just going to do this again and you can see it's just changed ever so slightly. Now that we have our color selected, we can change our tool to our brush tool. Then we can zoom in a bit closer and we can start. I'm going to make this brush a little bit smaller and we can start just adding this brown in, to connect it to that leaf. If we go too far it we can just select our eraser tool and then just delete some of that area. Just going to need to move up a little bit. You don't need to worry about deleting any of your artwork. You can see I'm clicking on that leaf and it's not doing anything because it's only erasing details within this layer, which is just this section here. Now, I can zoom out and that looks pretty good when you zoom out. When you zoom in, you can see that this is a solid colors. You wouldn't need to be careful when working with this and it really does work best with very fine details or very small areas. Otherwise, it can become noticeable. Another way you can do this for larger areas or for when you need to make sure you keep that water color texture when you don't want a solid color is to use your clone stamp tool. I'm going to hide this layer. That has taken away that color fill and I'm going to create a new layer and this time I'm going to rename this clone stamp tool. I'm going to move this layer down, so it sits above my image layer and making sure that layer is selected. I'm going to go to my clone stamp tool. I want to make sure that this sample is current and below again. Again, it's looking for data within the current layer and the layer below which is my image layer. I'm going to make my brush smaller and then to select this area, I'm going to hold down Alt and click. Now, I'm going to just move this up. I'm make it smaller again and click again and make it even smaller coming to this area. That looks pretty good and you can zoom out and it looks pretty realistic. You can hide that and see it looks like before. I think that's a really good job. Now, we have quite a few layers here. We have quite a few adjustment layers and refining layers with all of these edits. [inaudible] help with thing we can do to tie to this one up is to group them. If we go to the top and click on the top layer, hold down Shift and then use our mouse to scroll down to this color filled layer, it will select them all. Then we can go to the folder icon at the bottom, which is create a new group. If we click that, it will put them all into one group and you can group these at different levels. But I find it useful to group all of the adjustments together. What I can do now is just, you can just click on this arrow to expand it. I'm going to go down and just change this color to white. Then click on the arrow again to make this group smaller. Command zero to zoom out, and now what we can do is we can compare all the edits we have made all along to our original. If we make our original visible and then hide this group which includes all of our adjustments. This is what the image looked at the very beginning when we scanned in. You can see it's fairly washed out and it has the watercolor in the background. If we select this again, that's what it looks like now. It's much more vibrant. You can see the background has been removed, so we've just got this white. This is really useful way to compare the two just to check that you haven't missed out any areas. Now, let's move on to looking at how we can make adjustments to our artwork by using adjustment layer masks to target specific areas. 19. 19.Refining Your Image Part 4 - Adjustment Layers Masks: Another way that you can edit your artwork is by using the adjustment layers. We've already looked at how this action works briefly when we adjusted our whole image using the levels tool. But with these adjustment layers, you can also use the masks to specifically tag areas that you want to adjust the color or brightness of. So for example, with this toadstool, I may want to add some more shadow down the left-hand side to make it stand out more. So go to your layers panel and click on the icon at the bottom to create a new adjustment layer and here you have all of your options and you can adjust the brightness or contrast, the saturation of colors, and the exposure. So let's start by selecting the brightness layer. This new layer has appeared and you have your adjustment here with the mask linked to it. So select your adjustment and you'll see this has appeared in the panel above. What you can do here is you can, depending on what you want to do, you can increase or decrease the brightness or the contrast. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to decrease the brightness to about 30 because I want to add some shadows to my image. So what that has done is that currently that's affected the whole image. So if you click on the mask and then click command I, that's going to invert the mask. Instead of all of the adjustment being visible, all of that adjustment is now hidden. Now we can select our brush with our white and then paint over the areas that we want to make that adjustment visible. If I want to add some shadows along here, what I want to do is just make sure my brush is nice and soft so it will blend in nicely. Then I'm just going to run along this edge and you can see it's just darkening that area. I'm going to do the same, zoom in slightly, and again do the same along here. You can see it's just adding that shadow, making it darker. I'm going to zoom in to make this smaller and add some more shadow underneath here and I'm going to add some down this right side as well. Okay, so zooming out and then if you click on this eye, you can see the difference that has made, I'm pretty happy with that and then you can see where you have made the adjustments on this mask thumbnail. You can do this with all the adjustment options. So if we select another one then select hue and saturation. Again, if I select on my adjustment thumb now, then you can change any of these options. What I want to do here is I want to increase the saturation of just the toadstool. I'm happy with the colors of the stroke but I just want to make this more vibrant. So I'm going to increase this so it's slightly brighter not too much, maybe about 12 and then again, I'm going to select my mask and click command I to invert it and then I'm going to make sure I've got my brush and my white and then I'm just going to paint over my cap. You may not see much happening but you can see that I have painted over that so that area is visible now. So if I click on this eye, that's what it was like before, slightly darker, and now it's much more vibrant. If I take both of these layers away, that's what it was like before I made these two adjustments and add them back in and that's what it's like now and I'm pretty happy with that. So that's a really easy way to edit specific areas of your image without affecting other parts of it. 20. 20.Saving Your Artwork: In this lesson, we'll be looking at how to save our image. When saving, I always like to make sure that my color layer is hidden, so that if I'm going to import this into another file or use onto another document, it's completely transparent. All we need to do to save your file is go to File and Save As. I always like to save my file as a psd file, which is the photoshop document. That will be the default option. As long as this Layers option here is tipped, it will allow you to go back into the file at any point and make any amendments to any of your layers. If you want to use your file for something else other than editing and photoshop, like printing or for any digital use, you'll need to save in a different format. But I always like to keep the original psd file so that I always have the option of making those amendments at a later date. If you click on the drop-down under format, you'll see you have lots of different formats to choose from to Save As, and as we discussed earlier at the beginning of the class, the two options that are use aren't JPEG and TIFF. If you want to save your image and use it for social media or another digital use I usually save a copy as a JPEG. This does compress it, but it makes it easier to use digitally.A TIFF file will be larger and maybe to big to process digitally on your social media or on your website. If you want to print it, I'd save it as a TIFF because it'll keep all of that data and it will produce a better quality when printing. You just select your format and then click "Save". Now that I've taken you through an overview of all of our options, from scanning or artwork into photoshop basics to all the selection tools that we can use and the refining tools that we can use to edit our selections and our images, and how to save our images. In the next few lessons, I want to take you through a number of example pieces of artwork so I can show you how I digitize them from start to finish. I'll be showing you five different examples. These will all require different tools and different refinements. I'll be using all the tools that I've shown you so far. The first example piece of artwork that we'll be looking at is the leaf. 21. 21.Example 1 - Leaf: The first piece of artwork that were going to be digitizing from start to finish is this leaf. So now we've seen quite a bit of it throughout the class so far, but I wanted to take you through the whole process in one go. So this is my original scan here, and you'll see that I have my background layer in my layers panel. So the first thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to unlock this layer. Double-click on the "Name" and rename it, Original. I'm then going to press "Command" and "J" to duplicate the layer. I'm going to go back to my original layer, lock it, and hide it. That will keep that layer protected, so I can always go back to it in the future. Next, I'm going to create my solid fill layer, so I'm going to go to this adjustments icon at the bottom. So this icon here, and then go to the top, and click on "Solid Color". I'm going to make this a blue color, because that will have the most contrast, and click on "Okay". I don't need this mask here, so I'm just going to right-click and click "Delete Layer Mask". I'm just going to drag it down underneath my image layer. Next, I'm going to just select My Image Layer and then go back to the Create Adjustment Layer, and create my Levels Adjustment Layer, and you'll see this has appeared in the panel above, so I'm just going to drag that down, so I can see all of it. Now, I'm just going to move my cursors along until I'm happy with the colors in my image. So I'm making it slightly darker now, and then I'm just going to adjust the white, to try and remove some of that water color background, but not too much, so it doesn't start eating into my painting. So that look pretty good. I'm just going to click on this eye within my Levels Adjustment layer just to hide it, so I can see what it looked like before, and you can see it is much better, much more vibrant now. Now, I need to go back to my image layer and the next thing I want to do is select "My Leaf". The selection tool I'm going to use for that is select subjects. So I just need to go to the tools bar and click on one of my selection tools, and then it will appear in the Options bar at the top. So I'm going to click on that, and it's loading, and you'll see these marching ants have appeared around the leaf. So I'm just going to use my cursor to zoom in, because I want to check how good a job is done here, and it looks pretty good. So it missed out a couple of areas here, so I'm just going to make sure I have my quick selection tool selected. Now, my circle has this minus sign. I'm going to make it smaller, and that's taken that area away. So I'm going to zoom in and do this with these areas as well. This will save your work in the next stage, when I'm going to be refining these edges with the brush. So I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to press "Command Zero" to go back to my full screen. Now, I'm going to click on this "Create Layer Mask" icon at the bottom, the add layer mask. So now because I've got that blue color layer selected, you can see my blue background. So if I remove that, you'll see that it is transparent, but we want to keep that on, because then we can see the contrast between the edges, and see the areas that we want to refine. So next, we just want to make sure that we have this thumbnail, this Mask thumbnail selected. You see it has the four corners around it, which is what we want. Your colors will automatically changed to black and white for painting with this mask. So now we can go over to our brush tool. Make sure the black is selected, because we want to start hiding these areas that we don't want in. I'm just going to start from the bottom and work my way around neatening out any areas. So I'm going to use the open bracket to reduce my brush size down, so I can get into these smaller areas. This is the part that you want to spend the most time on. Just making sure that you refine your selection as much as possible. Make it as neat as possible. So I don't want to neaten up any areas that don't need it. I still want it to have that watercolor effect and that means that some of the areas will be slightly rough. I don't want it to and am looking like it has just been painted digitally. So I delete this adds a bit more. I can just click once, hold down Shift, and then click again, and that will draw a straight line. Again, don't want to take too much of this away. So now, I'm just going to zoom out to check how this is looking. It's pretty good, I think I'm almost there, just want to tidy up this area. Just keep zooming in and out and making my brush smaller. I don't want to take away this white area here, I'm actually going to fix that a bit later. Take away this area here. I'm happy with that selection. I'm just going to change my color to white just to see what it looks like. That looks pretty good. So now, I just want to check the image to see whether I need to refine any areas of the actual image, fix any blemishes, or any fringes around the edges. So I'm going to go back to my color layer and so for example, down the bottom. Along this red line, you can see it's got these little white fringe areas which I want to get rid of. So to do that, I'm going to click on "My Image Thumbnail" and select "My Spot Healing Brush Tool". I want to make sure that this sample all layers is unticked, because otherwise it will start to bring in your solid color layer. When you remove the background, you will see that part of that blue will be in the image which we definitely don't want. So I'm going to zoom in and just hover over this edge. Make sure that my Content Aware is selected here. Then click on that and you see that the white is disappearing. So I'm just checking the hardness of my brush and that's nice and soft, so it'll be blending in, so that makes better. I'm not going to do it too much, and just fix this white area over here. Now, I'm just going to have a look at the stoke. I like when there's texture in there, so i don't want to neaten it up too much. I'm just going to go back to my mask here and my brush, make sure my black is selected, and just take away some of this area. Now, Command Zero and I'm just going to get back to my colorful layer, go back to my white, and check. So I'm happy with that now. So the final thing I want to do, is just to remove this color layer, so the background is transparent before saving. That will mean if I import it into a new document, then I'll just have my leaf, which is what I want. So now, let's move on to our second example, which is the wreath. 22. 22.Example 2 - Wreath: The next piece of artwork that we will be digitizing is this way, we'll need a slightly different method for this one. I'll start with the same process as always, and that will be to remove the padlock from my background layer, double-click and we name it original and then ctrl-J to duplicate it, go back to the original add the padlock to lock it and make it invisible. Then I will add that solid fill layer in and I'm going to make this one red because it will have a nice contrast to the green, delete that mask and move it below my image. Next I want to add my adjustment layer, I'm going to just adjust this until I'm happy with my colors. Some of these greens are quite pale, so I have to be careful with moving the white arrow over, now I'm going to go back to my image layer, for this I'm going to use my magic wand tool, I'm going to click on my magic wand. I'm going to de-select contiguous because I wanted to select all the white areas in the image and I'm going to select in the middle. Now I'm going to add my Layer Mask using this icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Because I've selected the white, it has masked out my weight, what I want to do is I want to press "Command-I", and that will invert it. You can see it's already made a really good selection, I won't have much work to do on this, I'm just going to make sure my mask is selected in this layer and click on my brush tool, make sure I've got my black because of my top layer, I'm going to zoom in because I can already see some areas which need editing here. I'm just going to increase the size of my brush and I can see that that brush is quite soft, just going to undo that and increase the hardness of this brush, going up to 100. I'm just going to zoom in, take-away these little specs, I'm just going to have a look around now and see if there are any other areas that I want to adjust, I'm pretty happy with that. I'm going to press "Command-0" to zoom back out, then I'm just going to change this background layer to white so I can properly see how it looks. I'm going to go back and select my mask and just zoom in because I think it might have taken out some of these branched areas. I'm just going to make sure my white is selected reduce my brush size and I'm going to run it over this branch and you can say it's bringing back some of this branch. I'm pretty happy with that, I think it's done a really good job. But you can see this pencil line here under this leaf which I want to remove, for that, I'm going to use my spot healing brush tool, I'm going to create a new layer, select my spot healing brush tool, make sure sample layers is tip to the top. Then I'm just going to click on this line, you can see there's a few more areas here where you see that pencil line, I'm just going to take that away. I don't like to make too many edits to my watercolor work because I think it can start to look too digital after awhile, I'm going to "Command 0" and zoom out and I'm really happy with the job that that's done. I'm going to save this and we can move on to our next one. 23. 23.Example 3 - Pinecone: The next image we're going to digitize is this pinecone. This is slightly different to the ones we've done so far, because you have all of these edges which are really pale. So we'll need to define some of these manually. So it will require a different process. So as usual, I'm going to unlock this layer, rename it original [inaudible] to duplicate to go back to the original, lock it, make it invisible at the solid color, which I am going to make green. Remove that mask and move that color underneath my image. Then I'm going to select my image again and then create my levels adjustment layer. Going to make it slightly darker. Not too dark. Just more white. I'm also going to add another layer to this. Another adjustment layer. I'm going to go to my hue and saturation layer because I want to reduce some of the saturation in this. So I'm just going to reduce it to 20. Then I'm going to go back to my Image Layer. Go to my lasso, select magnetic lasso tool. I want to make sure my frequency is quite high. So I'm going to select that at 100. I'm going to make sure I press "Caps Lock" so that I can see the area that Photoshop is searching for an edge. So I'm going to start by zooming in. I want to start in the bottom left corner. Remember if you want to move the screen around, you can just hold the space bar and this little hand will appear and you'll be able to click your mouse and move it around. So I'm going to make this brush smaller. Click on where it would start and start dragging around this edge. Remember at any point, typically around some of these pale edges, you can click to lay down an angle point. Otherwise, you don't have to hold your mouse down. You can just use your mouse to move this circle around. You can see this is making my edges really accurate. So now and he told my space-bar down and move this up. This is going to save a lot of time in the next stage when we want to refine the image well. So it's cut out a little bit of the paler area here. So I'm just going to go back and then click "Backspace" so it deletes all of those angle points. Then when I move up, I'm going to lay some angle points down in this pale area. There it's captured at this time. I'm just going to move round. Holding on space-bar and I'm just moving my screen down and then continuing. This is such a clever tool. Again, that's loss on the area. So I'm just going to click back space to move those angle points and then just make sure I click again, estimate there again. So I'm just moving and clicking to get past this area so it doesn't lose that selection. We can always go back and refine some of these areas afterwards. If I can capture most of it now then that will be good. Again space-bar and move it down. I'm nearly at the top. So I'm nearly halfway round. You can work much quicker than this. I want this to be really accurate. So it really depends on how much ticklish this you are, how accurate you want it to be. But you could zoom out and then you could just drag this round and it will still do a pretty good job. But I just want to make sure it captures all of these pale areas in especially around the tips, where there is not much contrast between the painting and the background. Say like here, there's not much contrast in this area. It's still doing a really good job of detecting these edges. So I'm just going to hold down space and move this up again. I'm just going to get back up to that bit and backspace to lay those angle points and then click on this pale area so it can get past that. Well, I just made a mistake there. I'm going into the [inaudible]. So I'm backspacing. Let's go back here. It's going to move a little bit faster now and then just slide down on these pale areas. Making sure to click "Okay". So I'm going to get back there because I missed out a little chunk. I'm just going to move gradually, clicking just to get past this pale area and then can maybe again. In the areas with more contrast, you can move much quicker. I just like to slow down the paler areas and make sure it's capturing everything I wanted to. So I come here. It's okay. There's a few bits I just missed here, so I'm just going to go back and click on this corner. I'm going to move it again. Backspace. Let's backspace a few times because I messed up there and backup here because it's going inside the [inaudible] again. So I'm just backspace until I get back there and then this has gone back in again. I'm going to make this brush a bit smaller and that would be easier to detect the edges when it's smaller. This area is not well-defined at all. So we might have to fix some of this at the end. You can see it's not going to have a particularly smooth edge there. On the final bit. Now when you reach the beginning, you'll see that the icon changes to this lasso with a little circle and I can just click and now it's changed it into the marching ends. So we've got our selection. So now I'm going to click on this mask. So you can see that's done a pretty good job. So now you can just make sure this mask is selected and then you can go to your brush tool. Then I'm just going to select my black and zoom in. Now I just need to make sure I take-off caps lock so that I can see my brush. I'm just going to zoom in further, check on some of these edges because I just want to neaten these up. Make that brush smaller. I'm just going to smooth some of these edges. I'm pretty happy with the job it's done there. So I don't think there is much more I need to do. I'm just going to change the color with the background to see how it looks on the white. That looks pretty good to me. I like all of the texture within this pinecone, so I don't think there's any real areas I want to fix in this. So I think I'm just going to leave that one as it is. So there's the pine cone. So now I'm just going to save that and we can move on to our next one. 24. 24.Example 4 - Toadstool: The next piece of artwork I'm going to digitize is this toadstool here on the left. The first thing I'm going to do is select my crop tool and crop my image. I don't need to worry about completely getting rid of the other mushrooms, because my mask could do that for me later on. You can see that when I made that crop, this changed from a background layer to a normal layer and then move that padlock. I'm just going to rename original. Click "Mandate" to copy it, go back to that original, protect it with the padlock and make it invisible. The next thing I want to do is to add my solid color layer. I'm going to add a green underneath this because it will have a nice contrast. I'm going to delete that mask and move it below my image. Now I'm going to create my Levels Adjustment Layer and adjust my colors by moving these curses. I'm going to go back to the layer with my image on it and zoom in. To do this, I'm going to work with a couple of different tools here. I'm going to start with the Quick Selection Too and I'm going to start by selecting this cap, making sure I've got all these white areas within it. Then I'm going to zoom in because you see it's missed out these white areas, because they're not very well-defined. I'm going to reduce the size of my brush and make sure it's got that plus symbol in the middle, which means add two selection, which it has. Then just click on these areas. That has done a pretty good job of selecting the cap of my towed store. Now what I want to do is go and select my last Sue tool and I want to add this area into my selection and then I can refine it. To do that, I'm going to hold down Shift and then just roughly draw around the edge of the mushroom. Then go back to the beginning. You will see if I zoom in, that it is just added to the selection. The marching ants along the bottom here disappeared. Now I can go to the bottom of my Layers panel and add my Layer Mask. Now we just need to refine this selection at the bottom. I'm going to start with the very bottom. You can see there's pretty much no contrast here whatsoever. We're going to have to manually select this area. To do this bottom curve, I'm going to use my Elliptical Marquee tool. You want to make sure that this style is selected as normal because we don't want to circle, we want an oval here. Now just hold down your cursor and click and drag towards the right and create an oval shape. Let go of your mouse and your selection will appear. Now you want to right-click and select Transform selection. You can now move this around to where you want to be, either by clicking and dragging or using the arrows on your keyboard. I think about that looks right. When you're happy, just press "Enter." Now grab your brush. Make sure your mosque is selected. What we want to do is hide this layer underneath so we get that nice, neat edge. Make sure you're black is selected. If I paint now, whilst this area is selected, it's only going to affect the area within that selection. If I show you, and that's not what we want to do. I'm just going to press "Command-Z" to undo this. What we want to do is invert the selection. To do that we press "Shift" "Command" and "I," and you'll see these marching ants have appeared on the outside of the page. That shows you that everything now is selected apart from this oval shape. If I run my brush along the underneath of this oval, is going to hide everything underneath that selection and makes us really nice, neat curve. Now you can just press "Command D" to undo that selection. Now we just have to fix the rest of these areas. To do that, I'm going to grab my magnetic Classic tool. Make sure my frequency set is set fairly high and that's 100. I'm happy with that. I'm going to start over here and then go up to the top. I'm going to zoom in. I'm just going to press "Command Plus" to zoom in. If you want to see your circle area that is looking for the edges within, you need to make sure that you change to caps lock at the beginning. I'm just going to press escape to go out of this and start again, so now that circle has appeared and that's the size of the error, is searching for the edge. I'm just going to click down and go up to this edge and then work my way down. We're actually going to make this brush bigger by selecting my end bracket. I'm going to zoom on using Command Minus. Let me zoom back in bit closer and then hold down space to move the image. I'm just going to quickly drag this down and then I'm going to come up and close it there and click and it's going to make that selection. Now, I'm just going to grab my brush. I'm just going to press "Caps Lock" again to show the size of my brush. Then just paint over this selection and Command D to deselect. You'll see that it missed lower area there and watching. I'm just going to tidy that up. Now we can do the same on the other side. I'm going to go back to my Magnetic Lasso Tool. Press "Caps Lock" to show the circle. The area is searching the edge for and click outside, go up to the top and then start working where cross. Now this side, you may need to work. I'm going to work a little bit slower because the edges are much less defined. I want to make sure is making the right selections. I'm just going to press the "Space Bar," hold my mouse down, and moves the image up and then carry on. It's making a fairly good selection. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm just going to go back up and join it up here and then click to select it. You mount, grab my Brush Tool, press "Caps Lock" to share my brush and then hide that area, Command D to de-select. Then I can just zoom in and tidy up any of these areas I need to. You can see actually this edge is quite, it's a little bit rough. I'm just going to tidy up with my brush tool. "Commands 0" to zoom out. I'm really happy now with the selection that it's made. Now I'm just going to have a look at it and see whether I wanted to make an edit to the image. Notice a couple of blemishes, here and here. I'm going to select my image thumbnail, click on my "Spot healing tool" going to zoom in. Make sure my brush hardness is quite low and just select on that and it will fix. There's another one here. Just select that. I can go in and fix some of these, but I quite like that texture so I'm going to leave that. I'm happy with how the toadstool is looking now. I always just like to change my color background to white just to make sure it looks okay against that background, because that's usually what it will be on and it does. Now we can move on to our final example, which is our snowed ripe. 25. 25.Example 5 - Snowglobe: In this final example class, we're going to be digitizing this snow globe. As usual, we're going to start by renaming our layer, making a duplicate, going back to the original, locking it, and hiding it. Then, I'm going to make my solid color layer, delete the layer mask and move that underneath my image. Next I'm going to create my levels adjustment layer. I'm just going to edit this. Now just clicking on my original layer. First thing I'm going to do for my selection, is to select my globe. I'm going to go to my elliptical marquee to do this. I want to make sure that style is fixed ratio, so it makes a circle. I'm going to hover in the center, click Alt, and then hold my mouse down and drag outwards to make this circle. Now, using my arrow keys on my keyboard to move this around. It's a little bit too big. I'm going to right-click and select transform selection. Holding Alt down to keep the proportions, I'm going to click on my mouse and then make it slightly smaller. That's too small, so I'm going to make it bigger again. Using my arrows, I'm just going to move this down on the left, until you're happy with that.Once you're happy, just click Enter. Now I'm going to grab my lasso tool, select within the elliptical selection, the circular selection as a globe. Hold down Shift, so it adds to selection. Then I'm just going to roughly draw around this stand, and then meet at the beginning. You can see that it's added it to this selection. N ow I'm going to click on this icon at the bottom of my layers panel and add that mask. Okay. You can see this still has a little bit of white on the edge, but we can neaten that up later. Now, I'm going to grab my magnetic lasso tool to cut out this area. I'm going to start in the masked area, zoom in a little bit more. Make sure my frequency is at high levels, it's at 100. I'm going to press Caps lock first. It changes to the circle and make that slightly bigger and that will show you what area, it is searching for an edge. I'm going to click once and then move up to the globe and then without holding down my mouse, I'm just going to trace this edge. I make that slightly bigger, let me just leave this alone and any point, you can see it's just dipped in there. I'm going to get back over here, and then press Backspace. That's aligned to area. I still want to capture it. I'm going to press command plus to zoom in. You can see it's not making a very neat edge here. I'm clicking with my mouse. Let's just zoom out. Now, I'm just going to press my Space bar down so that hand appears, pull down my mouse, and then move my image across, and then carry on. Again, I've got another little dip here, so I'm just going to make sure, I press my mouse to add an anchor point. Then just run across. Again, once I get to the edge, press Space bar, hold my mouse down, and move my screen across. Again, space bar, hold down my mouse, and move the screen and then I'm going to go along the globe. Then I'm going to command minus to zoom out. I'm just going to loop this round so I can go back to the beginning. Once that lasso has paired with the circle, I know I'm at the beginning, and I can click once, and it's turned into the marching ants. That's my selection. Now, I can select my brush tool, press Caps lock again so I get my circle back, and then I can just make sure I've got my black selected to hide this area, and then paint over all of this. Then command D to deselect. I'm just going to zoom in slightly to make sure it's got all those areas. I'm going to make my brush smaller and just tidy up some of these edges. Now, I'm just going to zoom in, make my brush smaller. Command Z here, I want to increase the hardness of my brush again. Remember to make a neat line. You can click once with your mouse and then move it, hold Shift down click again, and that's much neater. I'm just going to make my mouse small so that I can dip into this little corner. Tidy it up. I'm just going to go round with my brush tool and neaten up any of these areas, removing the white. I'm clicking, holding down Shift, to neaten up these areas. So command 0 to zoom out. I'm pretty happy with that selection, I'm just going to zoom in and tidy this bottom area up again. Let's just have a look at what that looks like against a white background, which is what it will be on. I still want to neaten up this area here. I'm going to go back to my green, and then now I'm just going to choose my spot healing brush tool. Make sure my image thermal is selected. I'm just going to zoom in. I'm just clicking if this edge is going to fill in that gap. You can see this slight pencil line here and a dark area here. I just want to fix that and all the way down here as well. That looks much better. There's a couple of errors over here I need to fix. I want a little bit more contrast right around these edges. I'm just going to add another levels layer. I'm going to make my background white so I can see what's going on. I'm going to select on my levels thumbnail, I'm going to make this slightly darker. Then, I'm going to click on my mask, and command I to invert it. It's hiding all of that. Now what I want to do is grab my brush, make sure my hardness is set really low. I'm going to set it to zero. Make sure my white is selected, because I want to make some areas visible now. And I'm going to make my brush a bit larger. I'm just going to run this brush, round the edge now. Because it's soft, it's blending in quite nicely. See it's adding a nice bit of shadow to the edge. I'm just going to add a little bit to the sides of the stand too. I think that might be a bit too dark, so I'm going to undo that, to about that. Then what I'm going to do now is change the opacity of my brush, so I'm going to make that 50 percent. It's not making it as dark,I'm just going to get around these edges and make this brush a bit smaller. Let's just compare that with the original. I think that stand is a little bit too dark. I'm just going to take some of that away and compare again. I think that's much better. I'm happy with that globe, so that's our final example complete. 26. 26.Your Project & Final Thoughts: Your project for this class is to digitize a piece of your artwork using any of the tools that we have been through in these lessons. As you would've seen now, there are so many tools and options for digitizing and editing your work with Photoshop. I really hope you found this class has helped you to identify which tools will work best for you and your art. Along with your project, which I would love to say so please do post it in the product gallery. I would also love to know what you thought of the class and if there is anything particular that you found useful. I tried to really pack it full with a lot of information, which I know I would have found incredibly useful at the beginning of my digitizing journey. I hope it will serve as a really useful reference class for you to come back to whenever you need to. Also don't forget if you have any questions, then you can just drop me a message in the discussions board or you can contact me directly on Instagram at Sharon Stevens design. If you do digitize any of your artwork and do post it on Instagram, you can tag me in your work and I'd love to reach you in my stories on there. You can also use the hashtag Learn with Sharon. Finally, just a really big thank you for taking my class and supporting me as a teacher on Skillshare. If you have any ideas or any requests for future classes, I'd love to hear them. Do just getting contact with me and I look forward to seeing you in my next class.