Interior Design with Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction Interior Design: Would you like to create realistic visuals of interiors without any three D modeling and rendering applications? Well, you came to the right place. And Martin, I have over 20 years of experience as a graphic designer, illustrator, and Adobe certified instructor. I have worked with companies like BBC, Disney, Google, IKEA, and I cannot wait to share my best practices with you? This is a streamlined hands on course focusing on a real life design project. I will be walking you through everything step by step, and you will get all the exercise files so you can follow along. In case you prefer not to copy me, you can also follow my workflow using alternative assets provided and create something completely unique that you can showcase in your creative portfolio. I am pretty sure this course will inspire you to create something amazing. This course, we will learn how to use a OB photoshop to create convincing composites of images. We will start with photographs of existing spaces, clean them up by retouching and removing unwanted details. Finally, we will fill them up with furniture, plants, and decorations. We will use features like smart objects to simulate perspective, to apply materials to surfaces. And we will use adjustments and filters to match lighting and colors between multiple images. You can join this course without any prior knowledge in graphic design, illustration, or Adob applications. But to complete the project, you will need access to AOB Creative Cloud and the desktop or laptop computer. But now it's time to start creating, so I will see you in the next lesson. 2. Interior inspiration: This project will be perfect for you if you're interested in interior design, and I'm going to show you the techniques, which will help you to be able to visualize anything that you imagine. This workflow got easier and more exciting since the introduction of generative AI features in photoshop, but I wanted to mention that I've been using photoshop for a long time for this type of work, including changes to our own properties and also properties of our clients because it is always more exciting to see something that looks realistic like a photo compared to a CD drawing like this one. So here is another example of a photo of an interior, which then got turned into something completely different. Once all the visual elements and textures were placed in inside photoshop. So without any further delay, let's start decorating. 3. Preparing the interior: Once you open one of the images in photoshop that I prepared for this project, the first thing you will have to do is to tie the up a bit and make the interior look a little bit more presentable. So all the examples that I prepared are intentionally look a bit run down and derelict or abandoned. And the problem with that is that if you are planing to add anything with the generative fiel feature, it's also going to resemble that esthetic. Anything you will add will also look quite old and dusty and just generally not the aesthetic that we are after. So time to tidy up. First of all, let's create a new layer. I'm going to click on the new layer icon here. And on this blank new layer, I am going to use one of the best retouching tools for this job called the Remove Tool. This one, you can select by pressing J on the keyboard as well. But be careful because it might select a very similar tool called spot healing brush tool. So it's always easier if you right click on this tool here and choose it from the menu. Now, once you have this tool, this is going to work like a brush, and you can increase, decrease the brush size by using the square bracket keys on the keyboard. One is going to increase it, the other one is going to decrease it, or you can also hold down the control and option key on Mac and click and drag left and right to quickly change the size of the brush. If you are on the PC, it's control, old, right click and drag. But this tool, you can work on a separate layer non destructively, meaning that you are not going to affect the original layer, as long as you have the sample all layers option turned on. So make sure that you take this one. And it's recommended to also keep the remove after each stroke option turned on, which allows you to work much faster. So, for instance, if I just paint the line here, as soon as I let go, it will immediately start retouching those details. You can also do with this tool is to draw over an area, just highlight that area, and it automatically going to fill in the details within that selection. I'm going to show you this again here at the bottom. I'm just going to make a selection like this. When I let go, it automatically fills in the center of that area, and it's going to replace everything inside. Now, the results will vary. Sometimes it will be spot on and exactly what you need. Sometimes you need to do it a couple of times, so you need to go over that section. In this case, I'm going to make another selection here and keep updating it until I am happy. So I don't actually want to have more light coming into this area. So I'm going to try to force photoshop from doing that, and that's already looking a little bit better now. So let me just do another selection here. And then I can just draw over this line here at the bottom, and it's already starting to look better. Smaller detail there, some more detail here, and then keep drawing over these bits. Here's another bigger area. I can draw over and let photoshop fill it in. And it's already looking tidier. We can also tidy up around here just to make sure that we will get a much cleaner result. So we can turn off this layer that we created, see before and after, and it's already looking much better. Now I'm just going to go over the details on the walls. And again, I might need to do this a couple of times until I can remove all of these blemishes or dirt from the walls and make it look more presentable and neat. As you can see, I'm doing smaller sections. I'm going through each of these areas one by one. The great thing about this tool is it's not copying any detail directly, so it's really good the way it's mixing up details from the image and combines them together. So it's not going to be as obvious as using a tool like the Clone Stamp tool, which would just copy paste details from one part of the image and just keep repeating those. So it's much faster and more effective working with this tool. And you will notice that the more areas you tidy up in an image, the faster it starts to get to remove any additional details because, of course, it's going to have more areas within the image to reference, and the more tidier areas you have, the more effectively it can work. So I'm just going to tie the up a little bit more here. Probably we'll get rid of this line in the center or just soften that detail there. I want that wall to be more flat, something like that. Now, we have to also tidy up these parts here on the front between the windows. Again, I want to make sure that those look tidy. I'm painting over them, but I want to keep that feature in the center, that vertical column that's in between the windows. I want to make sure that doesn't disappear. And also, I don't want the window sills to be bigger. So you might see me sometimes just going back using Command Z on the keyboard, just doing an undo, if I'm not happy with a detail. That looks quite good. And then we can tie the up this side as well. I might get rid of this column here. On the left side, I don't think that's necessary. We can tidy up the corner. Of course, I don't want to lose that corner, so I want to make sure it's still going to look like a corner. Let's just see if we can do that. Maybe here on the top. We need to tidy up a bit more. I feel like that's looking quite good. A little bit dirt here at the bottom, and that's looking much neater already. Now, we could go further and refine all the areas, but maybe one last thing I'm going to do is to remove these hanging cables. I can see another one here, and there's one more here on the left side. Notice how I also change the brush size as I'm working. So constantly adjusting it to the areas that I am trying to recreate or improve some more blemishes or dirt that I'm trying to remove. And now we can again see before and after. And it is already looking so much better. I'm thinking I'm also going to remove these radiators below the windows. And for this, I'm actually going to use another tool, the Clonta tool because I want to extend these windows and make them look like they are almost going all the way to the floor. I am going to hold down the old or op shan key and click on this point here in the image. So I'm sampling from that corner point. And I will also make sure that the sample is set to all layers. That way, we can paint with this tool on this additional new layer. Again, working non destructively, not changing anything on the original background layer. And once I sampled, once again, it was old or option key and click on the area you want to sample from. And then since this is a brush as well, you can increase and decrease the brush size, and you should be able to see a preview of what you are sampling. You can then align it to where the radiator is and just start painting over. This way, we can nicely extend the window and come down all the way to the floor. Now, that is a little bit too far, so I am going to use the eraser now. So I can come all the way here and switch to the eraser tool or press E on the keyboard. Just delete back a little bit of that detail. So yeah, something like that. I feel like loose good. And I'm going to repeat the same step here. Once again, I'm using the Clonstm tool sample from this point here, align it, then paint, and painting over the walls as well a bit. And we can always refine this later. F now, I just want to make sure that the radiators are gone. And then switching to the eraser tool, I am again just painting over this bottom section here. So we still want to have a sill for the window visible. Something like that. We can also change the hardness of our brush by using that keyboard shortcut I mentioned earlier. So control option drag. But instead of dragging left and right, if you drag up and down, you can adjust the hardness of your brush. This is another thing you can access from the menus here on the top as well. You can just drag the hardness up and down. Now, if I'm using a zero hardness, is going to make sure that the edge details of my brush is looking better. I can just go back here and draw over the edge a little bit more, just to make it softer, the transition. And I'm going to do the same thing once again using the Clonsem tool, align it to this point, l or Option click, and then paint over that area with the radiator and a bit of the wall, something like that. That is looking good. And use the eraser and just erase back a bit. And that's one of the big advantages of working on a separate layer, you can easily go back and forth between the two. Now most of the detail that we created here will be covered up by the sofa. But I am going to switch back to the remove tool, and I'm going to just refine this area here a bit. So if I paint over that side there, it's going to adjust the lighting there, make it a little bit more coherent to the surrounding details. So it aligns it a little bit more, can do it here on the right as well just a bit and go down. Yes, I feel like that is looking much better now. So once again, before and after, we are pretty much done with the tidy up phase. 4. Adding the floor detail: Now it's time to add some nice details, and I'm going to start with the floor. I would like to make it look like it has a beautiful wooden floor. And for this, we will be using another image that I prepared. You can go to the file menu and choose Open and navigate to the folder called furniture and textures within this project folder. And there you will find a couple of floor patterns. I'm going to work with this particular one, so I will just open this one, which will open as a separate document. And here, go to the select menu and choose A or press commando Control A, And once the selection appears, go to the edit menu and choose define pattern. This will allow us to use this later as a pattern overlay layer style. So I'm just going to click Okay, and then we can close this document, just simply go to file and close it. Now, to be able to use this in our interior, we will have to also create first a rectangle. So from the shape tools, select the rectangle tool and make sure here on the top it's set to shape mode. Then click and drag and draw a fairly large rectangle. If you hold down the space bar while you are drawing, you can reposition the shape and just have more space for it in case you started drawing it in the wrong position. So I'm going to draw something like that. And then I will double click on the layer. Here on the right side in the layers panel just double click near the name of the layer. And then within the layer styles, I want to use a pattern overlay. Whenever you use a layer style, just remember, it's not enough to click on the tick. You have to click on its name to be able to see all the settings for it. So, for instance, if I turn on inner glow, it doesn't give me the settings for it, only once I actually click on the name. So that is a common mistake. Once you have the pattern already selected, you will be able to change the pattern itself. And by default, it should select the most recently used one, but it might have something completely different. Let's just say like this one. If I then want to choose the one that I just created, I will go to that one at the end. Once this is selected, there is a setting for the scale, which you can increase or decrease, and you also have a setting for the angle, so you can decide whether you want it going horizontal or vertical. I actually prefer to keep it vertical because in this image that's going to give us a really nice perspective, and I'm going to probably reduce the scale a little bit to something like that. I think that looks quite good. I'm going to click k now. And then what we need to do as a next step is to turn this layer into a smart object. Now the reason we need to do this is because if we were to just transform this layer, the pattern itself is not going to have perspective on it. So I'm just going to show this to you if I press commando Control T and start dragging one of the corners while holding down the command key. That's the way to create a perspective distortion. As you can see, it's not going to affect the pattern, so the pattern stays the same, completely flat. So to be able to work in a way in three D, we will have to turn this into a smart object. So right click on the layer, the shape layer, and choose convert to smart object. Once you've done that, you will be able to do the transformation in perspective. For this, you will need to use the commando Control T shortcut or edit free transform feature, and use the commando Control key while dragging the corner points to add the perspective distortion. And as you can see, now, the pattern is reacting to this distortion. This is exactly what we needed. So I can drag these corner points here and align it to the image. I can zoom closer just to double check, and make sure that it is as close as possible to the alignment that we need. I feel like that is looking quite good. And then there is another useful shortcut. If you want to extend any of the size, just hold down the shift key and drag it out. So if you had it too small, you can just drag it out, make sure it fills up the image here at the bottom. And another quite complicated shortcut, but still very useful one is the perspective distortion, which is command optioned shift on MAC or Control old shift on PC. And with that, you can click on one of these corner points and start dragging it out. You will have to actually drag it out quite far to make sure that it aligns to the edge of the wall. The good thing about this shortcut is if you do it, it will automatically do it symmetrically, so both sides will adjust to that perspective. So if I do this again, you can see it's happening on both sides. So something like that, I feel like is looking good. Maybe a little bit more. Just drag it out a bit more. And I feel like that is perfect for us. So I'm going to press Enter to accept the transformation. And then we can have a look at this, and I feel like it is looking really good. The perspective is exactly what we needed. The texture is looking great as well. And if we ever want to go back and make adjustments to the pattern itself, we will have to double click on the layers thumbnail. So this thumbnail here, I have to double click on it, which will open the source of that smart object document. So it's a separate document. Here, I will be able to turn off the pattern if I wanted to or double click on it and go back and adjust the scale. So if I feel like it was a bit too small or too big, I can always come back and adjust it. I'm going to click, and then go to file save. So any changes that you do, you will have to save it. Because, like I said, this is a separate document. And when I go back to the other document, the main one where we are working in, here I can see before and after, and I can decide whether I like the changes or not. By the way, I'm going back and forth with the edit undo and redo commands. So I can see that was before, and this is after actually prefer it to be a little bit bigger, so I'm going to go back to this previous state. I just wanted to point out that you can always go inside the smart object and make those amends if you want to. Now, you can experiment with multiple patterns as well. So, for instance, if I go again inside the smart object, all I have to do is to just create a duplicate layer that's command or Control J. So that's going to have another rectangle inside this document. Double click on the pattern overlay, and there you will be able to choose any of the other saved patterns. So if you import more, like I showed you earlier, you will have more options to choose from here. I'm just going to show this quickly to you. Maybe we have a texture that we like like this one. I click. I save these changes. And then I can just switch to the other document to see this update. It's going to remember the perspective, and it looks great. But this is not the style I want for this document, so I'm going to just simply turn off this new layer, save this document again, close it, and then it should revert back to the other texture. So that is looking good, and I'm going to start naming my layers because it's going to be hard to find out what's happening if we don't do that. So the layer on top is called floor, and this I'm going to call clean up. So we can see the floor before and after. Now, one thing that I notice straightaway that we are missing is this lovely light that is coming from the windows. And that's something I definitely want to keep. So one thing that you can do is to reduce the opacity of this layer, the floor layer, maybe to around 60% or maybe even lower. And then you already start to see the light coming back. Of course, this means that we are also reintroducing the original floor. And as you recall, it was quite a neutral floor, so it doesn't really affect much in the composition, but still it will have a little bit more cracks and details that you might not want to see. So although you can reduce the opacity, maybe down to 80%, just to make it a little bit more blended into the lighting and the general atmosphere of the document. What I recommend to do is to turn off your floor layer just temporarily and make a selection of these windows with the polygono lasso tool. Once you find this tool, all you have to do is to make a selection around the light. Here on the left side, I just go outside of the document. That's the my selection. Then I'm going to press and hold shift key to add to this selection. It's enough to press and hold it at the first click. After that, you can just keep making your selection until you close it. Then again, hold down the Shift key to add the third window light. And come all the way around and close it. Now we have all three of these lights selected. We can go to the background layer and duplicate these onto a new layer by simply pressing commando Control J. So that's going to copy and paste onto a new layer, the lights. Now, if we turn back the layer with the floor texture and put this new layer on top of it, which is the window lights, I'm going to call. This is going to look strange because, of course, it has the original textures on it as well and some details that we don't wish to see. But what you can do is to change the blend mode of this layer to overlay or soft light. I actually find soft light to be the better one. Overlay may is a little bit too intense. But you can decide which one you prefer, and you can experiment with other ones as well. Like screen is actually a quite good one too, maybe with a bit reduced opacity that could work well. However, I am going to stick with soft light with 100% opacity. And what I'm going to do is to add a mask on this layer because I would like to refine the edges a bit. So the layer mask can be added with this icon here at the bottom. Click on this icon, which looks like the Japanese flag, I always call it, and then simply use a soft edge brush, so the normal brush tool. And I'm going to adjust my size as well and the hardness of it like before, and make sure that you have the black color set as your four gram color. So the brush tool, drawing with black with a soft edge brush, and I'm going to draw over the edges now. And you can see that we can refine these edges and just generally have a much better blend in the details. Something like that. This sit here can be a little bit reduced. And then I feel like the rest is looking good. So let's see before and after. Yeah, that is definitely looking much much better. So we added the new floor texture, but we still retain that lovely light that was coming through the windows from the original image. 5. Painting the walls, Polygonal Lasso Tool: Now it's time to paint the walls. For this, I'm going to use the polygonal Less tool again, and I'm going to start selecting the wall. I would like to paint. So I'm going up all the way there, and then go around the edge of the document. So this way, I created an nice selection. And this is the first time we will be using the generative fill here in this document. In case you haven't used it before in the other projects, you can find the contextual task bar from the window menu. This is where you can turn it on, and you can decide where you want it to appear by moving it around. I am going to click on Generative fill since we already have this selection, and I'm going to just type in blue all and then it Generate. Now, depending on the image you work with and depending on your selection and the state of the document in terms of how much changes you made to it already, you might get a different result. It's very hard to predict how the generative field works. But most of the time, this should give you a fairly good result, and I can even see some other options coming up here. I actually like this third one probably, although there are some details that I will need to change there as well. Okay, I can work with this first one. The only thing I'm not sure is that it didn't fill in the rest of the details. So this part here should be blue as well and the top detail. My selection was a little bit larger. So I'm going to try to fix that. I'm going to generate a new set. I might get luckier this time, so I'm just going to use the properties panel and click on generate while this layer is selected. And this time, we got a little bit closer to the edges compared to the previous results, but I actually prefer the colors on this layer. So I'm going to stick to using this one. But what I will do is to tidy this up a bit on a separate layer, so I create a new layer, and I'm going to use the removal tool again and just paint over these little blemishes that were created here. Because I want this wall to be completely neutral with no mistakes or no blemishes on it. But I really like what Photoshop did with the lighting. I think it did a really good job matching the interior and the lighting. So I'm going to use the Lasso tool again on the right side. L et's try to make a similar selection on this wall here on the right. Again, I will try to align it as close as I can, and then type in again blue wall. Now, since we already have a blue wall on the left side, most likely the sampling is going to take that into account and it's going to make something more similar to that. You most likely won't get a different shade of blue, although this is a little bit more saturated, but the second one already is looking much closer to what we have on the left side. And then this is looking quite good, too, apart from maybe that small detail there. But what we can do is to hit generate again from the property spanel, which is going to give us additional options to choose from. It's always worth doing this at least once or twice until you get selection of variations. So let's see. Okay, that's quite interesting. Oh, that looks very nice and neat. So, yeah, we have almost like a curtain here, more textured result as well. This is looking quite interesting, too. But I quite like this very neat version. That looks nice, and it really did a good job around the edges as well, so tied that up beautifully. I am very happy with this, so I can actually put these three layers into a group. So the ones that I use for the walls, just so I can find them easily in the future. Select those three by selecting one and command or Control, click on the others, and then use command or Control G, which will create the layer group for you, or you can find this option from the layer menu as well. There you can find the group layers option. So once you have the group, you can call it walls, and we can see it before and after. So that's what we added there. 6. Decorations, details, lamp: Now it's time to add some furniture. I'm going to use the rectangular Marquee tool. It's M on the keyboard. And with this, just make a big selection in the center of the image, something like that. You can hold down the space bar again with this tool while you are drawing your selection in case you want to reposition it within the document before you let go. I'm going to draw it somewhere around here. And then from the contextual Tas bar, I can click on Generative fill and type in white sofa. And this is looking really nice. Let's just see the other results. So we have that one as well. And then we have that one. And the only issue with these results is that the windows are modified. They are much smaller now. And if that's a problem and you want to fix it, I'm going to show you how to do it. But first, let's just decide which sofa we like the most. I actually probably like this one the most. It's quite nice. So that was without the sofa, and this is with it. And definitely the windows got much smaller now. I actually don't mind them being smaller to be honest. But in case you wanted to see the original windows, what you could always do is to select the layer mask for this new generated layer, the white sofa one. So there's the layer mask, that black and white thumbnail, and then you can use the brush tool. So select the brush tool, in this case, probably keep the hardness to 100%. And by drawing with black, you will be able to reveal the origin of windows. So we can draw over these details here and start revealing them. As you can see, I can go over it. And of course, it will take a little bit time to make sure that it's nicely aligned all around. But with a little bit more time, I would be able to get them back exactly the way I wanted it. That's something you can do, and it's a completely non destructive technique because you can always go back and use the white color. So if you switch to white here in the toolbar, with white, you can paint back those details. That were generated with this new layer, so I can just simply paint with white and bring them back. So it's completely non destructive. The main issue with the generative fill in general, is that because it generates not only the object that you want, but also its surroundings within that selection that you created originally, it means that this object, we can't just move around easily. So if I were to move it around, you can see all its surrounding is going to start moving as well. So, yeah, that's just simply something to bear in mind. But that's not a big problem for us. But what we need to still fix is that the window lights are not showing up here around the sofa. So I'm going to switch back to the mask of that layer and use the brush tool with a soft edge this time. And just simply paint over these areas with black. So using black, and just go over that part and this part here and also that part there. So, of course, the light would be obstructed by the object. So we have to also take that into consideration. Maybe hide a little bit more detail there, hide a little bit more detail here. Of the light, something like that. I think that's quite realistic now. So that's obstructing the light, and it is looking quite good. So before the sofa and after the sofa. And now let's create another selection with the rectangular marque tool. I would like to have a plant here on the left side, so I will it somewhere around there and just type in house plant. And that looks quite nice already. But let's see our options. Out of these three, I actually like this one the most. It looks very realistic. It has nice shadows around it. The plant itself is looking nice. So yeah, I'm happy with that. I'm going to keep that there. And then let's put a lamp here on the right side. So I would like to have a nice lamp somewhere around here. Again, we generated fill, I'm just going to type in standing lamp. Maybe let's make it a copper standing lamp, just to make it more stylish. And that first one looks more like a street light, so I'm not going to use that. The other ones are not looking that good. Maybe if I just type in a modern standing lamp and generate three new variations, let's see how they turn out. Okay, so this one is already looking much better. I feel like the first one is the best in terms of perspective as well. I feel like that fits the aesthetic the most. From this point on, it's really up to your imagination and creativity, what you would like to see. But one additional acute detail that maybe we can do together is to add a cat on the sofa. So I'm just going to do generative fill, cat sleeping. And animals and people in general can be a bit tricky. So the results vary a lot. Sometimes it's spot on what you want, but you might need to do a couple of generations. Like in this case, this cat looks a little bit strange in terms of proportions. That one looks much better, and that's cute as well. So yeah, I quite like this cat. I'm going to keep that one and maybe add the pillow here on the left side. I'm just going to type in here blue pillow cushion. Let's see that one. And maybe the second one this time is the best. Yeah, I quite like that one. It just nicely matching the colors of the walls. 7. Place embedded, furniture: Of course, you can't always rely on generative fill in case you want to have a specific furniture placed into your interior. So to practice this, I would like you to go to the file menu and choose place embedded. And then navigate to the folder where you had the patterns. You will find a couple of furniture images here, like this white armchair. Once you place that in, is going to come in as a smart object. So we can resize this maybe to around that size, and then press enter to accept the placement. So this obviously is already isolated from its original background, which makes it a little bit easier to work with. However, we still have to get rid of the wide background. And the easiest way to do that is by going to the select menu and choose subject, which should automatically recognize the chair itself, and then click on the mask icon in the layer spanel. That way we can mask this image out. And you might want to flip it around. So if we want to put it here on the right side, I think it already looks good. But maybe if I want to place it here on the left side, I can go to the edit menu and choose transform flip horizontal. That way, we have it flipped around. And one of the first things that you will have to do whenever you bring in another photo into your composition is to try to align the perspective and then the lighting. So in this case, the perspective is fairly simple. Use the free transform tool, commando Control T. And then look at the legs of the chair and zoom a little bit closer. If I align it to the floor, these two legs should align. And also, those two legs should align to the lines on the floor. That will help us to get the perspective right. Hold down the commando control key and start dragging the corner points until it's a closer match. You can also use the side points a little bit keep dragging until it's aligning better. The front two legs are better now. Now it's the legs in the back that's a little bit still distorted. So I'm trying to align those as well at the same time. Can be sometimes a little bit more tricky to do that. Feel like that is looking already better. So let's see before and after. It's a subtle change, but it's still better. I feel like I can place it somewhere here. And now in terms of lighting, what we can do is to bring back the original shadows of this object by duplicating this layer, that's commando Control J. And then set the blend mode to multiply. Then delete the layer mask. So right click on the layer mask, choose deleted. This way, we get back the original shadows. So multiply blend mode on its own without the original layer would look like this. It would just cost anything that's darker on the current layer onto the environment. But because we have two of these layers, we have one set to normal blend mode. Which we must out. And this other one, the two together works really well. And I actually prefer the colors or the lighting on the chair itself once we have the multiply layer turned on. So this way, it looks much better. You can see without the chair, and with the chair, I feel like it is looking really good. In some cases, the multiply effect might make the actual object itself too dark, and in those cases, just use the layer mask, so add a new layer mask and using the brush tool, just paint with black over the areas, which you want to keep still in its original lightness or details. So in this case, we could use this just to add a little bit more light here around where the light is coming from the windows like that. So without the mask and with the mask, that is actually helping, again, to align the lighting or synchronize lighting in the composition. 8. Adjustment layer, ceiling: Last but not least, I wanted to also brighten up a bit the ceiling because that's exactly how it looked in the original image. We only tied it up a bit, but I feel like it could be a bit brighter. It looks slightly off it just doesn't match again, the aesthetic that I am after. So for this, I'm going to add an adjustment layer on top of all my layers. We can find the adjustment layers here in the layers panel. For this, I'm going to use the curves where I can just simply click and drag the curve and make it brighter like this. I can adjust it, move it around and look at the image. Well I like the most. I think that brightness on the ceiling is going to work for me. Of course, it makes everything too bright now. But because we have this on a separate layer and this layer has a mask, we can decide exactly where we want these effects to show. So I'm going to select that curves layers mask and use the gradient tool. With the gradient, we'll just make sure that you have this first swatch selected, the black to white, and the linear option, and then click and drag from the windows up to around here. The good thing is that you can always adjust these two points, so you can decide where you want the effect to apply in the composition. Feel like something like that works well. So before and after, it really is just affecting the top of the image. And fills it up with light. So the rest of the image is not getting brighter. That was already bright enough in my opinion. And yeah, I feel like that is looking much better. 9. Final checks, thoughts: Now we can see the original image once again. If I hold down the Alt Option key, I can click on the icon, hide all my new layers. This was before, and this is after. Of course, we can also put all of these layers into a group, select the layer at the bottom, te clean up, and then shift click on the top to select all of them, and then commando Control G, to put them into a group, and then we can just call it changes. Now we can just easily turn all of them off, and then back on again. I'm quite happy with the result we got, but of course, it's up to your creativity now to come up with an interior that you like. Feel free to add more objects, experiment with different styles and aesthetics. And of course, also, besides experimenting with all the original settings that I created, try this out on your own images. So take a picture of any interior that you wish to amend to and visualize how those would look like, and then fire a photoshop and get started. 10. Workflow perspective pattern: Love doing interior design mockups or visuals in photoshop. Today I'm going to show you one of the coolest techniques, which is easy to learn, but it's actually a quite advanced and complex method. This is for creating repeated patterns like here, the floor, having these floorboards showing. You can see it's actually not the original one. I replaced the original one, but to create something like that, and something that you can easily adjust later on, That's what I'm going to show you. We are going to use a smart object with a vector shape in perspective, and on top of all of this, a pattern and a gradient overlay layer style. So let's see how it works. It's actually much easier than it sounds. 11. Pen Tool, edges, floor : When I start working on a visual, it usually looks like this. That's the photo I took of the space. Then first of all, I started cleaning it up. I got rid of a couple of things that I won't need, and then I start adding all these details. You can see I keep everything very structured and I even have additional options that I can turn on and off and see what works best. It really helps to decide how to do the interior design of the space. The floor is what we are going to concentrate on. I'm going to just turn off all the details and as the floor, and I'm going to turn off this layer just so you can see how I do it from scratch. The first thing I would normally do is to use the pent tool and set to path mode, or you can also use it in shape mode, whichever you prefer. I actually prefer it in path mode, and it's important that you need to make sure it's set to combine shapes. So as long as you have that on, you can start drawing. I always start drawing from outside, and then just roughly for now, I'm going to identify the edges that I need to keep to. So under the skirting, we go around and follow the line that we need to fill in. You can see I'm not really bothered about being too precise. Because what we can do is once it's closed up, the whole shape, we can always tweak this. For example, if I go zoom a little bit closer, you can see this line needs to go further out. I'm using the direct selection tool and simply dragging that point out. Then I just quickly check like this can go in. When you select something, you can even use the arrow keys on the keyboard to push it in to maybe somewhere around there. As this one can come up to maybe here and so on and so forth. I would be able to refine this further, but I think it's fine, maybe just this last point here, I'm just going to drag out a bit that way. All right. This defines the plane on which we need to create the pattern for the floorboards. What I'm going to do next is to turn this path into a vector shape. The way you do that is by going to the little yin yang sign at the bottom and choose the solid color adjustment layer. So once that's created, we can click, I'm just going to set it to gray for now. It doesn't really matter what color it is. Click k, and you can see that is already there. The next step is going to be to create another vector shape. But for this one, I'm just going to use the simple rectangle tool. Again, this one, I use as shape, and I'm going to keep everything the weight is and click and drag to define the area on which I'm going to apply the floorboards. Let's say something like this. Usually, I just cover the whole canvas with it. And then once that's created, we can find a texture that we can use for the floorboards. Now, I already have two prepared here, I have a brighter one and I have a darker one. Let's start with the dark one. I'm going to use command or Control A to select all, and then I choose edit and define pattern. That is going to create a seamless repeatable pattern. Of course, it's important The image that you use needs to be already prepared in that way. That's a whole separate technique, which I'm going to show you in a separate video. Now let's just say we found this actually, I found this online. You can also search for it. The same thing if you just search for wood texture or floor wood texture, you will find something similar to this. I'm just going to call it dark oak. It actually could be walnuts, so I'm not going to call it oak, so I'm just going to call it dark wood floor, and then. Now that's safe. I can even close this image. I don't need it anymore, because now what I can do is to go back here. Double click on the layer, the rectangle layer, and then from the pattern overlay, I can find the most recently saved pattern and with the scale option, I can start increasing or decreasing the scale of it. That's a really handy feature which you can use to adjust the size. Once I click, we will be able to start working with this. Now you can see when I Zoom closer. It looks much more detailed, just from a little bit further away, it doesn't look as detailed. But now what we can do is to turn this into a smart object. The pattern overlay is going to be inside the smart object. And there is a reason for that. Actually, I'm going to create a duplicate just so I can show it to you. So in this case, for example, if I use this layer, and I wanted to use maybe a distort option on it, holding that commando control, you see that it's not going to add perspective on the pattern. So the pattern is going to just stay flat two dimensional. So instead of that, I am going to turn this into a smart object. So right click. Convert to smart object. And then I can use the free transform tool and holding down the shortcut. Command option shift or control or shift. You can create perspective distortion, and then I can just simply without the shortcuts, drag it down. Again, drag it further back in. I can start applying the perspective distortion. Most of the time, I would just hold down commando control and start dragging the corners into place. So here again, I will drag that out, drag this out as well and align that corner into that corner up there. I'm just going to make sure that this aligns here. The cool thing is that you can always drag this further out, if there's more space you need to cover, and it's going to still work quite well with the perspective. So if you want to see this in context, you can also reduce the opacity, and you can make sure it aligns well with all these lines. So when I use the free transform again, I can just drag it up a bit and I'm paying attention to the lines of the floorboards and the lines of the skirting in this case. So I can just make sure that this aligns a little bit better. So you can see how those perspective lines are following the skirting here and also here. I think that looks quite good. So now if I set the opacity back, then it will work quite well, but let's not forget that we created that vector shape, which we will be using as a mask. Now that I have these two objects or layers on top of each other, all I have to do is to use the alt option key in between the two and click to create a clipping mask. That way, the shape we created at the bottom becomes the mask, and this smart object is clipped onto it. 12. Different floor surfaces: That's how quick and easy it was to set this up in perspective. The cool thing is that if I feel like this floorboard actually in terms of scale is too big, maybe the actual elements of these floorboards needs to be smaller or bigger, all I have to do is to double click on the Smart objects thumbnail. And within there, double click on the pattern overlay layer style, and just adjust the scale. Let's say we need to make it smaller. I can just reduce the scale, click Okay, save this. It's important. When you are within a smart object, you have to go file save, and then when you switch back, you see a date updated. The other cool thing is when you are making amends within a smart object, you can stay in the main composition and just use undo do, quickly see the difference between the larger and the smaller floorboards. I'm just going to keep it on the larger one I think it works quite well. But not only that, you can also have multiple textures used in the same composition, and you can experiment with whether darker wood or brighter wood will work better in this space. The way I would do that is similar to before. I just find a texture that works as a repeated pattern. Turn it into a pattern. So I'm going to do the same thing and I'm going to call it light wood floor. And now it's saved, I can close this one. And we need to go back into the Smart object. So again, double click on the Smart objects thumbnail, and then within this. I can either create a separate layer or add another pattern overlay. In this case, I think I'm just going to create a duplicate, so command or Control J, and then double click on this one, change the pattern to this bright one. Click Okay. And now you can see I can just simply click to show the bright one or show the dark one underneath, and I can even call this one light, dark. Because they are vector shapes, I could even change the color here just so it's easier for me to find which one I'm working with, that can be the dark brown, and this can be the brighter one. Maybe something like that. I can very quickly see which one I'm working with. If I save the smart object, don't forget you have to update the smart object, then we will immediately see the updated version here. Now you can see this pattern wasn't really seamless. Here we can see a clear edge. That's why it's very important to first create a seamless pattern and that is the one that you would then use in a pattern overlay. But even like this, it's not that bad, we can still get the idea of how this would look like. So once again, I can use undo redo and compare which version I prefer, or if I need to show this to a client, I can show very quickly present it within photoshop the changes. There's one last thing I would do, and normally that would be the gradient overlay. So to make this look more natural, and I think it's going to look better on the darker version, we would need to represent somehow light. Light is obviously coming or flooding in from the garden and from the top. This part would be much brighter than here further inside the room. What I would do is to do this outside on the smart object with a gradient overlay. The way you do that is double click, get to the layer styles, choose gradient overlay. And what I normally like to work with is the radio option, and normally I would reverse the default gradient. That way, the bright details are inside and the darker details are on the outside. Now you can see it's already set to multiply, but I just set it back to normal so you can see it better. This is actually how it works when you use these settings, and you can increase the scale for it. Now, imagine this is like reflector light. So I want the light to be around there on the top. Now, if I then go into the bland modes and choose overlay, that creates this effect, as you can see it, and of course, the light doesn't need to be as harsh as this, so we can reduce the opacity to something around there. Now, even if I just turn this on and off, you can already see how the whole thing looks like. But if you want, you can also start amending the colors. So instead of black, you can change the color in the gradient to maybe something dark brown, and that's going to create a nicer effect in my opinion, and even the white can be amended to something that's coming from the outside, maybe a bright blue color, something like that, which would represent the sky. In this case, I'm just going to keep that white. And if I click Okay, I can increase the overlay effect. You can see how that starts to look more and more realistic. Again, before gradient overlay and after I apply it. The best thing is that again, everything is non destructive, which means if I go inside the smart object, I can still turn on the other texture, the light wood, and I can see that together with the gradient overlay here, it's obviously too harsh, so we can just reduce the intensity of it. To something like that, or maybe we can even change the bland mode to multiply, I think, in this case, that would work better, something like that. But because everything is already in place, it's much easier to amend it. That's all I wanted to show you in this video, and I'm just going to turn back on all of these other elements. If I put this underneath here, we can turn back all the other details, and that's our final result with the other texture that we created in this video. 13. Smart object techniques : This time, I'm going to show you a technique with smart objects on this example. So we have a hallway this time, and I already went ahead and prepared a couple of things here. First of all, I have a layer group with the clean up, so I can just remove a couple of things that I don't want to see in this visual. Then I have some decorative elements. I also have a layer group here on the top call textures, where I have a couple of things prepared that we will be using for this tutorial. So my aim is to create a visual for the stairs, and this is roughly what we are going to build in this tutorial. So let me walk you through step by step, but most importantly, the key is that we will create a chain of smart objects, and you will learn why this is such a useful feature in photoshop. 14. Stairs top, chain object: So first of all, let's just turn on the textures, and I'm going to start with the top of the steps in the sir, and for that, I'm going to use this dark wood. So I'm just simply going to copy this out from the textures here on the top, and I can turn off the rest. I am going to rotate this around. Holding down shifte I can make sure it's 90 degrees exactly and then I will turn this into a smart object. This is the key. Before you do any other distortion or rotation, the purest form of the shape is when you should save it as a smart object, and ideally, the highest resolution possible. Definitely before you start making it smaller, scaling it down. What I'm going to do is right click and choose convert to smart object in the layer spanel. Now that it is a smart object that means we can resize it without losing any details of the original quality. But more importantly, we will also have the ability to have them all connected. So all the steps in the stairs will be all connected. You'll see how it works. So let me just move this down here and I'm going to create the first step here. First of all, let's use free transform, commando Control T, and then to create perspective distortion, I'm going to use commando Control key and drag these control points around. So this is skewing or perspective distortion, depending which handle you grab, and there you go. The first step is already in place. Now, make it look more realistic. We will also create the nosing. The nosing is the bit that wraps around the stab. I'm going to copy this old click and drag or Option click and drag, and then I'm going to make it much smaller than the other detail or much more squashed in, and I'm going to drag it out, something like that. Now, when we Zoom closer, we can refine this even more. I think that looks quite good. The only thing is, I would say this one can be slightly darker, so I'm going to also use an adjustment on this. Because it's a smart object, adjustments are added as smart filters, which is brilliant. Again, just saving space and making it easier, and also most importantly non destructive to apply them. So anything that you do non destructively means that you have the flexibility to make changes to it later. So what I'm going to use in this case is curves, command or Control M, and with that, I'm just going to make it darker, something like that. If I drag this curve up, it gets brighter, and that's also quite nice, but in this case, I think it makes more sense to turn it darker because the light source is more from above. So the top would be brighter, as you can see, light is mainly coming from the top. So I think that looks quite realistic. This is what I meant, it's non destructive adjustment because it's a smart filter, I can just turn it off, turning it back on. If I don't want to see this, I can even hide it, so it just takes less space in the layer spanel. Now that I have these two elements ready, I can start duplicating them. I select both of them together using the move tool old or option key, I can make the duplicate. First of all, I'm going to adjust the size, probably needs to go up somewhere there, and then let me see somewhere around here, and then somewhere there in the corner. That seems like a good fit, and then I can adjust the nosing as well. Command held down while resizing, I can drag it into place. You can see how quickly and easily we can generate multiple versions of the same element. Now, I'm going to do one more and I'm not going to go through all the steps because it just keeps repeating the same technique. I'm just going to do one more. There you go. Holding down command when using the move to, you can also control on PC. You can also switch between layers. Just simply command or control click. I can select the one that I want to work with. Another big advantage of working with smart objects is that it preserves the distortions as well. You have the control points exactly at the corners. Unlike normal layers where you would have just a bounding box around it. You wouldn't be able to handle the perspective as well as this. So it's definitely Smart objects is one of the key features in photoshop that if you haven't been using already, I highly recommend learn to work with them because it makes work much easier. Let me see maybe a little bit. This one can come out further down, and also here come down a bit further. Then this one, we just drag in, I'm just choosing the same shortcuts as before. That looks quite good. Now, we can already put all of this into a group command or Control G once you have the layer selected. Can turn it on and off easily to see before and after. That looks quite good, I think. The best thing about this is that because all of these elements were starting from the same smart object, they are essentially instances of the same element. If I update the source, all of these will update at once. Let me show you how this works. If I double click, On one of the smart object thumbnails. It opens up the source. If I come back to the composition and I grab one of these layers, in this case, this bright wood and put it in here, so put it inside the same smart object and just simply align it with the free transform tool. I will be able to have another detail on top of it, and I can call this light and that one dark. Now if I save the smart object, go to file save, and go back to our composition, which is this one here, see it immediately updated and not only that, but even the nosing bit that we used smart filter on will also have already that slightly different shade. Everything is fully non destructive and flexible. I can always go back again to the smart object source, turn off the light. Save it and go back. Now it's brown again or dark again. And just like in the previous sorial, I showed you, if I use undo redo, even without going inside the source of the smart object, I can see the differences before and after. So that's a very quick and easy way to see, which one works better. 15. Adding details to the front of the stairs: Now, let's just take this one step further, and I'm going to do also the front part of the stairs. I'm going to call this one top. I'm going to use this texture, so I just created a duplicate. It's a very nice decorative tile that can be used. Might be a little bit over the top, but I think it can work. Before we do anything, don't forget to turn this into a smart object as well. I'm going to right click, convert the smart object, and then we can move it underneath the rest of the design here, and I'm going to start using the free transform as before. Command T or control T and then holding down command or control. I'm doing the perspective distortion, setting it up to something like that. Then duplicate align free transform, align done, duplicate, align free transform, also align and done. There you go. That looks quite nice. Again, I'm going to put this into a group and I'm going to call them front. Now we can turn it off, turn it back on, or turn both of them off, turn both of them back on. Just like before, if I wanted to change all of these tiles to something else in the future, like this other pattern, I'm just going to show you quickly. Here it is. I can copy this layer, commando Control C, Go into the Smart object source by double clicking on the thumbnail and Cano Control V to paste it in. The ability to copy layers between documents was recently added in Photoshop CC 2019, and I love it. I use it all the time. Now we have two versions. We have the original tiles at the bottom and this new one on top. Don't forget what you have to do is save the smart object, and then when you go back, you will already see it updating there. Once again, do redo, I can compare which one I prefer. So I'm not going to continue adding all the additional steps, but I can show you how it would look like. If I turn these off, I can turn back the stairs that I created, and all of these are built the same way. If I just change one thing, all of the steps will update straightaway, even though they are all in different perspective and maybe even using filters on them, because the source is the same, that creates this chain of smart objects, which basically connects them all together. One last bonus step, what if you want to have one of them independent from the others, like let's say here on this step, I would like to have something different. What you need to do is to right click and choose new smart object via copy. That means it separates it from the chain or the other instances, it becomes unique. I'm going to just mark this with a color. I normally do this right click and set the label on that layer to red, that makes it easier to find which one is the independent version. But if I now go inside this Smart object and maybe use another pattern here like. Say this one. Once I save it and go back, you see it won't affect the other steps. That's the smart object via copy feature. It's a way to detach one instance from the rest of the smart objects in your chain. 16. Conclusion: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.