Learn Adobe Photoshop Like a Pro: Advanced Techniques

1. Intro: Hello and welcome. My name is Cat Coquillette. Today, I'll be teaching you how to become a pro with Adobe Photoshop. Consider this your guide to the most important editing tools Photoshop has to offer. You'll learn how to professionally edit and retouched photos, which comes in handy with portraits like enhancing eyes, whitening smiles, smoothing out skins, and plane with spot editing color. You'll also learn how to remove objects from photos. This is another tool I use when I want to clean up otherwise busy compositions or make room for coffee if I'm going to be overlayed type or logos on an image. Then we'll dive into techniques where we're removing backgrounds entirely so we can isolate out individual objects. This is a trick I use all the time when I'm photographing my products for my portfolio or online shop. I'll also show you how I take individual photos and piece them together to digitally create brands new compositions, I'll show you exactly how I turn my hand-drawn signature into a digital file with a background removed. It's easy to place into whatever you need. I'll provide you with a folder of high res photos that you can download and practice with. This means, that you'll be able to follow along for every step of the way with the exact same images and learn by doing, not just by watching. By the end of this class, you'll have a thorough understanding of how to use Photoshop for client work, internal projects, or just for fun. This class, is for those who have some Photoshop experience and you want to take your skill set to the next level. Not only is this class great for all the creatives out there like me, but also for business users of Photoshop. Especially folks who work in creative agencies or anyone on the creative team with a large company. If you don't have Photoshop, no problem, you can download a free trial on Adobe. I provided a direct link in the class description. You can follow me on Instagram and every other social media channel @catcoq to see where I am in the world and what projects I'm working on. Don't forget to follow me on skillshare by clicking the follow button up top. That means, you will be the first to know as soon as I launched a new class or have an announcement to share with my students. Are you ready to dive in and learn how to become a Photoshop pro? Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Welcome to this advanced Photoshop class. This class is broken down into individual video lessons, and each lesson in this class covers one core skill, like retouching the iris of an eye to a much more vibrant color or removing the background from an object so it's transparent. We'll start simple and get more advanced as we go. I recommend watching everything in order because occasionally, we'll be incorporating skills we learned from the previous lessons. I'll be working from images that I either borrowed from friends or downloaded from Unsplash, which is a stock photography website that allows you to download and use images for any project, thanks to their generous community of photographers. Massive thank you to Unsplash for providing these images to use. These freebies are totally optional in this class. Think of them like an extra perk. You're welcome to download these freebie assets to use today or you can follow along and complete your class project using your own personal favorite textures. It's entirely up to you. Either way, you're going to wind up with a gorgeous class project. To access the images, go to catcoq.com/photoshop, enter your email, and you'll immediately get redirected to my Dropbox folder that contains all of the class assets. Just a heads up, this will also give you access to my email newsletters. I'll occasionally send out updates about new classes, artist resources, and brand updates. You can unsubscribe at any time. I'll be using Photoshop CC throughout this class. If you have an earlier version of Photoshop, you'll still be able to follow along, but some preferences might look different on your end. If you don't have Photoshop, remember you can download a free trial at adobe.com. I'm providing a link to the free trial down in the class description. These are editing techniques that I use in moderation when I'm editing my own headshots to send out for media publication or to include in my About page on my website. We'll dive into techniques for removing backgrounds entirely, especially if I want a minimal white background. This gives me maximum flexibility if I wanted to insert the object into new dimensions, like an extreme horizontal for my Facebook business page header, or need an extreme vertical from my Instagram story. I'll also show you how I take individual photos and piece them together using an adorable Corgi puppy and a tropical rainbow setting to practice with. But in the real world, I use these exact same steps to change backdrops on product photos for my business and to create digital mock-ups showing my designs in a realistic application. If at any point during this class you feel lost, I recommend pausing and then watching my previous Photoshop class, which is geared at beginners who are brand new to the software. A few technical specs. I'll be teaching this class using the latest Creative Cloud version. But if you have a previous version, CS6, CS5, CS4, etc, you can still follow along and learn to edit like a pro. Also, this class works for both Mac and PC users. I'll be using my MacBook, but I'm translating all of the key commands into both Apple and Windows language, so it'll be very simple to follow along. A quick intro on who I am and why I'm qualified to teach you this class today. My name is Cat Coquillette, and I'm the founder of CatCoq, an illustration and design brand. Photoshop is a massive part of running my business. I've been using Photoshop software for over 15 years and now it's a tool that feels like an extension of myself. Sometimes I'll even get Adobe key commands stuck in my brain and I'll mentally think Command Z to fix real-life mistakes like spilling my tea. Yeah, I'm definitely a bit of a Photoshop addict. I use Photoshop for a huge variety of purposes in my business. I can easily crop and resize images for my website and blog. I photograph my own products for my portfolio and I can perfect these product shots in Photoshop. I'll remove the background so they're on a perfect white surface with no distractions, I can amp up the contrast and saturation to look more enticing, and I can store that high res file for future edits with all of its layers intact. Then I can resize and flatten into jpegs so I can easily share on social media or attach into an email without worrying about file size restrictions. I resize and save images to be optimized to place into client presentations as well. These PDFs are chock-full of high-quality images, but the file size is small enough to attach in an email. I'll also use Photoshop to add a hand-drawn signature to proposals, contracts, and the artwork I create. On the creative end, I use Photoshop to fine-tune all of my artwork. This is the best software on the market when it comes to easily spot editing color, resizing to new dimensions, creating realistic product mockups or fantastical scenes, and more. The point is, I want all of my output to be professional and reflective of my brand. My work is sold in Target, Urban Outfitters, Home Goods, and more. Plus, I often get my work highlighted by celebrity features like Sarah Michelle Geller, Jessica Simpson, Hillary Duff, and Khloe Kardashian. These partnerships and features have elevated my company to a higher level and I want to make sure I keep it that way. It's a big deal for me to make sure that all of the things I'm putting out there for my brands are quality and experts level work. That's where Photoshop comes in. One of my favorite parts about Photoshop, it's universal. This software is applicable to so many different professions and hobbies. I travel the world 24/7 as a digital nomad and I run my company on the go. I don't have a conventional office. Instead, I work from coffee shops, co-working spaces, airport terminals, and Airbnb around the world. My career is fused into my lifestyle, but one constant is that I can run my business from anywhere as long as I have my laptop on a Wi-Fi connection. You can follow me on Instagram and every other social media channel @catcoq to see where I am in the world and what projects I'm working on. I promise I always keep it interesting. Get those practice photos downloaded @catcoq.com/photoshop and let's dive straight in to our first retouching lesson. 3. Eyes Retouching: For our first lesson in photo retouching, we're going to focus on eyes. I'll show you how you can quickly and easily changed someone's eye color in a realistic way. You can use this same technique to not only drastically changed the eye color, but also to enhance it to a much more vibrant version of the original whew. This especially comes in handy when a photo was shot in low light and the eye color was lost. You can use these techniques to bring that color back to a more accurate representation of reality. Or you can go absolutely wild and explore fantastical views. This is faster and easier than colored contact lenses. Lets go ahead and get started. We've got Photoshop open and for the first file that we're going to be working with, it's called Eye.jpg. You'll find it in the class assets folder. Go ahead and double-click it to open it in Photoshop, or click and drag it into your icon. I'm going to press F to get into this full screen mode so that we have no distractions behind us. If we zoom in a little bit, you'll see this is a really nice high rise lot of clarity photo and what we want to be doing here is changing her eye color from blue to indigo. Let's take a look at our file real quick. It is a flattened JPEG. If you look over here in the layers panel, you'll see there's only one layer and it's called background. We're going to be adding another layer to this and the first step for doing that is by going over here to my toolbar and clicking the Ellipse tool, which is you, if you click and hold that, you'll have all these different shape options. I want to go with a circle, so that's the ellipse and next step, I want to change the color into indigo. I'll go up here to fill and then go over here to my color picker and top that once. Now, with my color picker option open, I'm just going to click anywhere here on this color bar. Find something that feels like a deeper indigo, dragging my cursor over, let's get something really saturated. Perfects. I'll press OK to set that color. Now, I'm going to click and drag to create a circle over her iris and a hold down Shift to make sure that it's a perfect circle. Dragging that out so it feels pretty good and release, cool. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'll press Z to get my zoom tool and click and drag this in words. So I get a really nice close up here and now going back to my move tool, which is V, I'm just going to clicking around and adjust it so it feels like it's right on top of that iris. I need to make it a little bit bigger to fill this sliver over here. I'm going to use the transform tool for that. So Command T brings up transform, and now I can just click and pull it out a little bit more to fully cover that iris and then press Enter to set the transformation. All right, cool. We have that purple circle that's fully covered the iris of our eye, but obviously it's just looks like a purple shape on top of her eyeball. What we want to do is really integrated in. The first step for doing that is going to be removing this section up top where her eyelid is in the way and then a little bit at the bottom. To do that, I'm going to make sure that my ellipse layer is selected and then I'm going to come down here to the bottom of the Layers panel and select the Add Layer Mask option. I prefer using layer masks instead of erasing and I'll show you why. I've got my Layer Mask in place. I want to make sure that the Layer Mask icon is selected over here on the right, not to the image itself. Click on the Layer Mask and pressing Z on my keyboard. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more so we get nice and close and close that properties window. Before I start erasing this circle, what I want to do is just make sure that the black is my default color and then the white is the dark rounds. This will switched the other way around, just make sure to click those arrows and switch it so that the foreground color is the black. Now, I'm going to select my Brush Tool. I'll get that by pressing B on my keyboard and I'm going to go up here to my toolbar and make it a lot smaller and a little bit softer. Maybe around 18 percent, cool. One trick I like to use here is if you want to see how big your brushes in real time, you can use your open and closed parentheses keys on your keyboard. On the right parenthesis, I'm going to precedent few times and it's going to make my brush a lot bigger and on the left parentheses I'll press it a few times and it makes your brush smaller. I want to make this brush a little bit bigger. So I'll use right parentheses a few times. Now I'm just going to click. It's a nice really soft brush and erase where her eyeball is and I'll do the same thing on the bottom. This is exactly why I like using masks instead of just flat out erasing, because as you can see here, I erased a little bit too much and I can just easily painted that back in. To paint this area back in a little bit, I'm going to switch my foreground and background color so that white is in the foregrounds and then using my brush, I'm going to make it a little bit smaller by pressing the left parentheses key. I'm just going to click and paint that back in a little bit more. Now I'll do the same thing on the bottom. Awesome. Let me zoom out so you can see the full effects. Awesome. Now we have this purple shape that is completely covered her iris and it's nice and hidden behind those eyelids. Now it's time to make it look a little bit more realistic and less like a purple blobby shape. There's a few steps to get there. First things first, I've got this Layer selected, but I'm going to do is just add another layer above it by clicking the Add new layer down here at the bottom rights and holding my Shift key down with the layer one selected and the ellipse layer. I'm going to select both of them and then do Command E on my keyboard that merges the layers together. The reason I did that is because I just want a flattened shape here. I don't really want to have to deal with the Layer Mask and the smart object behind it. So now it's just a flattened layer and I'm going to zoom in again so we can get some nice details. Let me move this to the side so you can see, everything over here is pretty blurred. It's not a very sharp line. I want to do the same thing with this purple color. Command Z to undo what I just did and move that back into place and I'm going to go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur and here I've got that preview box selected so that I can see how blurry I'm making the edge of this shape. I want to match the blurriness of the iris behind it, 4.4, it feels pretty good. I'll press OK and now it's time for the fun part. I'm going to zoom out again. Command 0 fits it to screen and this is the last step. It's adjusting the transparency. Click here where it says normal and that's a normal blending mode. I use two different types of transparency modes for changing eye color. I'll show you the two that I use and what they both look like. The one I used most often is soft light. I'm going to go down here and select soft lights. There you go. Now you can really see those textures coming in through that eyeball. It's nice and soft on the edges. It feels really natural. Let me zoom back out so you can see the full effects. If I click the eyeball next to that layer, you can see what it looks like originally and then with that indigo color over her eyeball. I mentioned that I use to transparency effects. Soft light is my favorite for changing eye colors, but every once in a while, Hue turns out looking really nice as well. This is what Hue looks like on there. Let me zoom in so you can see the effect. I'll turn the eyeball on and off. There it is off and on. You can see on the original, there's a lot of different variation in color within this eyeball. It's primarily blue. You've got some denim navy on the edges and then a little bit of brown over here close to our pupil. But when you use Hue as a transparency effect, it removes all color variations. Everything you see on this eyeball is a variation of that shade of indigo, but it ranges in value, so it gets really dark, almost black and then it gets white. This area that used to be brown has now been transformed into gray. I'll zoom out so you can see the full effects. Then one more time I'm just going to turn soft light on so we can see the full difference. Soft lights, Hue. I'm going to put it back on soft lights and show you one more thing. Since we've done all of the setup of putting this digital contact lens over her eyeball. It's actually really easy at this point to change the color again and I'll show you how to do that. Make sure you're layer is selected and then go to your Hue and Saturation. You can get there by going to image adjustments, Hue and Saturation or you can do the key commands that I always use, which is command Hue both get you to the same place. Now, you can click the scrubber on that Hue spectrum and drag it around to see what different colors look like. Let's see what it looks like on the other side. You can drag it over and it becomes that pink, almost magenta to a crimson red. It's orangey brown and then back to the green. I'm going to put it back at 0. Press OK, and that's our final. That is how you change the eyeball color. To save it, I'm going to go to File, Save As, and change that filename to eyes, recolored. Make sure it is a Photoshop file and press save. Maximized capacity, sounds good and the reason I saved it as a Photoshop file is so that when I reopen it, I'll have both layers here and it'll be easy to make adjustments. If I want to go in later and change your eye to a bright green, I can do that pretty easily because they've already got everything set up with these different layers. But I'm also going to save it as a flattened JPEG. I'm just going to select the format, go to JPEG and press Save. I always save it at 12 quality with maximum and press OK. The reason I also save it as a flattened JPEG is it's a much smaller file size. It's easy to preview really quickly if I'm just going through my files and JPEGS are exactly what I upload to social media, Instagram, Facebook, to my website. They're easy to attach in e-mails. It's just a very versatile file type. We are done with the eyeball. Let's go ahead and move on to our next retouching projects. 4. Teeth Retouching: Welcome to the next lesson in photo retouching. We're going from eyes to teeth. We'll be practicing with this photo of a lovely model with vibrance hair. I'll show you how to brighten her smile by whitening her teeth digitally, and we'll be doing this in just a few simple steps. This is a technique that really comes in handy with low light or warm light photos, where teeth come out more dark and yellow than they actually are. If I'm sharing a business team photo to my blog, I might just do a little tweaking first to make sure all of our smiles are equally vibrance. Let's learn how. In the Class Assets folder, go ahead and open the teeth.jpg. I'm just going to drag it into Photoshop. I pressed F once to get to full screen, so there's nothing distracting in the background. First things first, go over here to your Layers panel and make sure your background layer is selected, and we're going to go ahead and make a copy of that. You can duplicate your layer two ways. First, you can click it and drag it into this Add New Layer box and release. It's made a copy of that layer, or you can simply have your layer selected and hit Control J on your keyboard, which duplicates the layer. This is the one I usually do because I'm obsessed with keyboard shortcuts. The first thing we're going to do with this duplicate layer is open up hue and saturation. You can get there by going to Image, Adjustments, Hue and Saturation, or by hitting Command U on your keyboard. I want the shade of her teeth to match the shade of the whites of their eyes. I want to remove some of that saturation, so click that scrubber and bring it a little bit more to the left. As you can see, the entire image got desaturated but we'll mask that back in later. Go ahead and press OK, and now it's time to add the layer mask. Make sure that Layer 1 is selected. It's our desaturated layer, and then go down here and click Add layer mask. Now what we're going to do is paint back in the rest of that image. Go back here to the set foreground color and make sure that black is that foreground color, and remember, you can get that by toggling these arrows back and forth to switch the foreground and background color. If you happen to have a random color in here, just press D on your keyboard and that will set the default colors. I'm going to make sure that black is in the foregrounds, and I'm going to select my Paint Bucket over here on the left, you can also get there by pressing G on your keyboard. If you have a different tool selected here like Gradient, just go ahead and click and hold on that Paint Bucket and select it down here, it's the middle one. Taking a quick peek up here, my blending mode is normal, Opacity is at 100, perfect, I'm just going to click anywhere in that image. Cool, it looks like we're right back to where we started, but what we're actually going to do now is paint in this teeth area right on the mask to get that desaturated layer behind it to show through. Make sure your mask is selected and this time we're going to switch that toggle so that white is the foreground color. I'm going to press Z on my keyboard, and then click and drag again to get a nice close-up. Now opening my Brush tool, which is B, you can also get here on the toolbar. Opacity is at a 100, blending mode is normal, brush hardness as at about 18, that looks pretty good, now it's the fun part. You can just click and paint that back in over the teeth. I'm just going to click, draw in here. If I get the gums, it's not going to matter because again, we're using this mask. If I over paint any areas, I can go back later and fix it. Now I'm going to switch so that black is my foreground color and make my brush a little bit smaller. You can get there by hitting the left parentheses a couple times. Now I'm just going to paint back in those areas of the gums that I made a little bit too desaturated. This is why I use masks so often. Nothing is permanent, you can always paint things back in and out. If you erase too much, you can always get it back in later. This is going to be a two-step process. We've done the first step, which is removing the saturation here was before and after. Now it's time for the second step, which is to brighten the teeth. Let me zoom in so you can see a little bit. Right now they're looking a little bit gray, so what I want to do is brighten them. To do that, I'm going to click the Layer thumbnail, make sure that the Layer thumbnail is selected, not the mask. With my Layer thumbnail selected, I'm going to go to my levels, which is Command L, and I'm going to take this toggle on the far right and just slide it over to the left a bit. If you watch your teeth, you can see that this is really brightening them. I think that was a little bit too much, so I'm going to bring it back to the right end smudge, and then I'm going to take my middle toggle and move it a little bit to the left as well. Cool, press OK. Now not only do we have the desaturated teeth, we've removed that yellow, but now we also have much brighter teeth as well. Let me fit to screen again and show you the before and the after. It's a much brighter smile. Another trick before we end this lesson is whenever I brighten teeth like this, I also want to brighten the whites of the eyes to match a little bit. It doesn't have to be equal brightness because the eyes have more shadows coming in, but we can brighten them a little bit without too much extra work because we already have done all the legwork here. Select your mask, I'm going to zoom in a little bit more and make sure your mask is selected. Let's go back to our brush tool, which is B, and I'm going to adjust my Opacity from 100 down to about 50. The detail is perfect, and now same thing. With my Brush tool, I'll just click and draw in the whites of those eyes a little bit. The other one, cool. It's not too much of a difference on those eyes, I'll show you the before and the after, but it does help balance out when we brighten her teeth to such an extreme. I'm going to go ahead and save this as Teeth-Retouched. I'm going to put it in my edited folder that I just made, make sure it's saved as a Photoshop file, and now I'm going to save it as a flattened JPEG. Same thing, it's called Teeth-Retouched, and I'm just going to change it to a JPEG, it's in that same folder and press Save. Awesome, that one was pretty simple, let's go onto our next retouching. 5. Skin Retouching: In this skin retouching lesson, I'll show you how to quickly remove blemishes and freckles. Last, how to digitally airbrushed textured skin into a smoother, softer texture. There are a lot of photo filter applications out there to meet this massive demand for smooth skin and photos, but nothing will get to you as natural and effect, as careful and meticulous photoshopping. After all, we all know how easy it is to spot a photo filter. Most of them can be pretty obvious and a little obnoxious. The focus of this lesson is going to be retouching in a very natural and convincing way. No blur outs of every single pore. Instead, we'll be learning how to tastefully retouch skin to look natural and soft. Let's get started. All right, for step one, look for the file called skin.jpg, and let's go ahead and drag that into photoshop. Cool. I'll press F to enter full screen mode, and let's go ahead and zoom in and take a look at our image. The model we have here, she's absolutely beautiful, but the point of this lesson is to teach you how to smooth out skin, remove freckles, blemishes, whatever else, and come up with a really perfect skin tone. I chose this photo because she has these beautiful freckles that we are going to be removing entirely. First things first, let's go to our layer, make sure background is selected and let's make a copy, command J. I always like to make sure that I'm never editing on that original layer. I like to keep that there in place just in case I need it later and it's always nice to go back and see where we started. Make sure that layer one is selected and I'm going to zoom in even further. The first thing that I'm going to show you how to do, is how to remove these freckles and for that, I like to use the clone stamp. You can get there by pressing S on your keyboard or going over here to the toolbar and make sure that clone stamp is selected. How a clone stamp works, is you sample an area of your image like this, and then you can stamp it somewhere else on your image. There's an example. We're not going to be putting near eyeball in the middle of her forehead. Let me just command Z to backup a little bit. Instead, what we'll be using the clone stamp for, is for sampling areas of her skin that are clear and replacing the freckles with a clear skin tones. With my clone stamp selected, I'm going to go to the top and make it a much smaller tool, because again, we're only going to be working with these very small areas. I'm going to zoom in even tighter. Like I mentioned, the clone stamp works by sampling areas of skin and then replacing the areas that we want to replace a with that sampled area. In order to sample the area of skin, I press S to get clone stamp, I'm going to hold down ALT or OPTION on my keyboard and click to sample an area of clear skin. So holding down ALT, I'm just tapping once with my mouse, and now I'll go back up here to this first freckle. Click, drag it around. You can see this plus mark and that shows you exactly the area of skin that it's sampling from. We can go around here and I like doing small samples at once. Instead of just sampling that one area and clearing away all of these freckles. I'm just going to make small incremental samples so that it feels more natural. For this freckle right here, I'm going to hold down Alt and sample an area of skin right above it and then go ahead and erase this area out. Basically what we're doing is a lot of sampling and stamping. Sample and stamp. The reason I like to sample the clear areas of skin that are very close to the freckle, is because that's what's going to feel most natural. If ever you're going to sample an area of skin, say way over here and her cheekbone and try to paint in a freckle over here, it would just look way too light and doesn't really match the skin tone of the surrounding area. That's technique number one for removing freckles or blemishes, it's the clone stamp. Another technique I use is called the healing brush. You'll find that over here on the menu next to the red eye tool, just click, drag it down and select healing brush. You can also get there by pressing J. The healing brush works in a really similar way. You can hold down Alt, sample a piece of your image and go ahead and brush it in and again, you see that crosshatch that shows you where the area is being sampled from. Both of these techniques work pretty well. A way to remember this is, if you're going to be retouching skin, the healing brush is usually better because it's better suited for the textures of that skin. The clone stamp is great when it comes to duplicating or removing objects like I showed you with that eyeball when we first opened it. I'm going to go ahead and stick with the healing brush and sample areas of skin and erase out those freckles. If I want to make my brush a little bit bigger, I'll just hold down the right bracket on my keyboard and continue. All right, now that I have gone ahead and removed her freckles I'll zoom out to show you what it looks like before, after. That was all done using the Healing Brush. If you're interested in moving just a few blemishes or imperfections, the Healing Brush is a great option. All right, now that we have removed the freckles, I'll go ahead and j the second stage of retouching skin. She's already beautiful, but if you want to have a completely airbrushed complexion, that's what the second stage is for. The first thing I'm going to do, is go ahead and make a duplicate of this layer. Command J and again, I like working with a lot of different layers for the sake of contingency. If I mess up on the airbrushing, but I don't want to lose all that other work, I've still got this layer underneath, so I've saved every single stage of the way. We're going to get the airbrushed look and a few simple steps. First with that top layer selected, go to filter, noise, dust and scratches, and if you're not seeing a very reduced blurred out example behind you, just to make sure that, that preview box is checked. I'm going to bring that radius up to about 11. You can see that her skin and everything else in this photo has really been blurred out and you're not seeing a lot of texture come through, which is exactly what we want. If you go too far along the scrubber, like 207, it just gets a little crazy. There is such a thing as going overboard with airbrushing. Let's bring it back to 11 and go ahead and hit OK, and for the second step, I'm going to add one more filter and that is going to be a Gaussian Blur. Go up to your menu bar and click Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. Again, make sure that your preview box is checked so that you can see a live preview and if you bring the scrubber all the way to the left, there's no blur applied whatsoever, and if you bring that scrubber all the way to the right, you will see the most blurred out photo imaginable. I'm going to bring that scrubber back down right at the very beginning, around 2.4 is nice. Go ahead and press OK. Now, you can see that she has very nice airbrushed skin, but the rest of her is also incredibly blurry. What we're going to do is add a layer mask on top of that layer and literally just paint her skin back into place through the layer mask. Make sure that that top layer is selected, and go ahead and throw a mask on there by clicking the Add Layer mask icon at the bottom of the layers palettes. I'm going to make sure that my foreground color is black and I'll press G to get to my paint bucket. You can also get here on the menu by selecting it and getting that middle option Paint Bucket Tool. Let's see opacity is at a 100, perfect. Go ahead and click anywhere in that photo, make sure that your Layer Mask is selected. Awesome. What we've done is through a mask over all of those Gaussian blurs and Dustin scratches filters that we applied just now and now we get to paint it back in. What you're seeing is that layer that we just edited is entirely covered up and you're seeing the layer underneath it. Make sure that your Layer Mask is selected. Let's go ahead and change white to the foreground color. Get your brush by pressing B on your keyboard. I like to bring that opacity down to about, let's do 65 percent. I want to check the hardness, it says 0 percent. I'm going to bump it up to about 14. I'll make my brush bigger by pressing the right bracket on my keyboard. Now, simply start brushing in where her skin is. You can see that, that softness is being applied. I'm making my brush smaller by pressing the left bracket, by the way. The important thing here is to avoid any highly detailed areas like within her lips or her nostrils or her eyeball. If you blur that too much, it's just going to look like a fake photo. What we want to blur out is just the skin and resizing my brush as needed with the right and left brackets. I want to make sure that I'm not hitting that shadow where her pinky touches her cheek because I want to make sure that that line stays nice and sharp. I also want to make her lips a little bit softer, but I don't want it to be too evident. I'm going to drop that opacity down to the 20's, so 20 percent and making sure that I'm not brushing over the crease because again, I want those sharp lines. I'm just going to smooth over her chapped lips here. This is like a digital chopstick. Cool. I'm going to bring that opacity back up to about 50's, 59 percent, and one pro tip, if you're going to be softening skin like this, don't forget to do the same thing with hands otherwise, it's just going to look weird. I'm not going to overdo it on the hands because you still want to see those joints, so that it's recognizable as a hand and not a sausage. let's go ahead and bring my Brush Tool down a little bit and just be really careful to only get strategic areas of her finger. Now I'm going to do a few more touch ups and we are good to go and if I ever Over painted an area, I'll show you an example. Let me blur out that eyeball. The nice thing about the mask is it's entirely reversible. All you need to do is switch that foreground color back to black and you can paint in those areas that you accidentally masked out. That's the really nice thing about layer masks. There's a lot of flexibility there. Let me go ahead and zoom out by Command 0 and I'll show you the before and the after. Let me zoom in so you get a closer look at that, before and after. I wanted to look a little bit more natural. Right now, it's looking a little bit to airbrushed for my taste. I want to make sure that layer is selected and in the Layers palette go to opacity. I'm going to toggle that down to about 50 percent. Perfect. Now you see some of that original skin texture coming through, but it's still nice and smoothed out and you get that same airbrush effect. Before and after, again, it's really nice and subtle. This is where we started, rough skin, you've got a lot of texture coming through plus the freckles and this is where we've netted out, smoother skin, freckles removed, but it doesn't feel overly airbrushed if still feels really natural. Let's go ahead and save and I'm going to save this as Skin-Retouched in my edited folder. Make sure it's saved as a Photoshop file so we can retain all of those layers and now I'll save it as a flattened JPEG with that same file name, Skin-Retouched. Press OK. We're good to go. Let's move on to the last video of the retouching segments. 6. Hair Retouching: [MUSIC] Let's dive into some hair retouching techniques. I'm going to show some quick steps on how to spot edit color to something drastically different. Spot editing means it will change the color of only part of the photo. In this case, her hair and the rest of the photo remains the same. Our practice photo will be changing the color of this woman's hair. You can apply these exact same color editing skills to more applications.I frequently spot edit color and designs I had created to see what's working best. I'll even spot edit color just to test the market and see what my audience prefers more. This saves me ton of time and money on actually printing out a range of colors on physical products. Instead of that hassle, I can just hop on Photoshop. After all, editing color only takes a couple of minutes. We'll be learning how to spot, edit, color on this lovely model's hair. You'll be able to take these same skills and apply them to so much more. All right. Let's learn how. First things first, I want to look for the file that's called hair.JPG and click it and drag it into Photoshop. I'll press F to go to full screen mode. We have this lovely model with this really beautiful curly hair. Make sure your background layer is selected. Go ahead and make a copy of that by hitting command J on your keyboard, then we'll change the hue and saturation of this overall layer. Make sure that layer 1 is selected. I'm going to key commands that,command U to bring up hue and saturation. Now I can click the scrubber on Q and drag it to a place where her hair looks a little bit more magenta. That looks pretty cool. I'm going to bump up that saturation smudge, around 14 looks great. Go ahead and press okay. As you can see, that changed the hue and saturation of this overall photo. We just want to be changing her hair color. For that we're going to be using layer masks just like we did in the teeth whitening video. Make sure the layer 1, is selected, go ahead and toss a mask by clicking the Add Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. Make sure that your mask is selected. We want to fill in our mask with black. Go over here and make sure that you change your foreground color to black. Then I'll press G as a key command for paint bucket. You can also get there by clicking the icon and selecting the middle paint bucket tool. Go ahead and fill in that layer mask with the black. Similar to what we did in the teeth video, we're going to be filling in her hair with a brush tool. Make sure that your mask is selected. Press B for brush and it's still really tiny. I'm going to use the, right bracket key commands, that had a bunch of times and get a much larger brush perfect. Real quick, let's take a look at our upper menu bar. The hardness is that about 18 percent that's perfect. Mode is normal opacity. Let's bring that back up to a 100. Everything else looks great. The last thing I need to do is switch my foreground color to white because remember, our mask over here is black. So if we fill this in with white than we're showing through this layer that the mask is covering. So I'm just going to click my brush and drag it around in her hair. This is a pretty easy photo to use because the background is white. I'll start with these large brushstrokes. I'll use my left bracket key commands to get a smaller brush. Remember since it's a mask, this first run-through can be a little bit sloppy. That's no problem. We can go through later and refine it, because right now you can see her skin is turning a little bit magenta. Will go through and fix that in the next step.I think I run that mask over all her hair. It's time to zoom in. I'm going to press Z and pull in with my cursor. Now you can see the area that I need to fix where I've accidentally turned her skin magenta. I'm going to switch the foreground color back to black. Use my brush tool. Hit B. I'm going to bring that opacity down to about 73 percent and my left bracket to get a slightly smaller brush. Now I'm going to start erasing some of that magenta and getting her natural skin tone back. One of the reasons I chose this photo is because we have a slightly tricky area here where the hair meets the skin of her shoulder. This gives us an extra challenge. First things first, I'm still going to brush in the skin tone and get rid of some of that magenta in her skin. You can make your brush a little bit smaller by hitting that left bracket key commands, cool. Now I want to make it pretty subtle. I'm going to switch back to white as my foreground color. Come back up to the opacity and bring it to something really minimal, like around 20 percent. I'm just going to get a smaller brush left bracket and I'm going to very gently fill in this area, so it's a very soft difference. You don't see a stark color change between magenta and her skin. I'm going to make this brush even softer. I'm going to bring it down to zero percent hard. I can fill in those areas that we missed and I'll zoom back out a little bit to see how it looks. That is looking convincing. I will go over here and do the same thing for this area. I'm going to bring that opacity down to about 10 percent, so it stays really soft. All I'm doing is outlining some of the tendrils of her hair here. I want to fix the skin here. Let's go back to black as their Foreground Color. Bring the opacity back up to a 100 and just trace along her jaw line to get rid of that magenta and get her natural skin tone back. I'll zoom out by hitting command zero and take one more look. I think we've got just about all of it. I'll toggle the eyeball off. This was the beginning hair color and then putting it back on. This is where we can edit out. The challenging part here is drawing in that layer mask. But once we have that layer mask and place, and we've done so much detail work over here on our shoulder. That's really the hard part at this point. You can select that layer and you can have much more flexibility. Let's open up hue and saturation again command U. If you click that scrubber on hue and bring it to the left, I'm going to bump up the saturation. You can really see what's going on here. you bring that scrubber all the way to the left, you can see all the different shades. There's this navy blue cyan, even a bright green. Bring it back all the way over to the right. You've got some reds, oranges will get to yellow, green. We've done all the hard work with this layer mask over here. Once that layer mask is absolutely perfect, that's the time that you can really start exploring with the color. One thing that this has showed me when I brought it all the way to this start green. I'll go ahead and press okay. I'm going to zoom in by pressing Z and pulling forward.I definitely missed a spot here, so it's easy to fill it. Just make sure that your Layer Mask is selected. Your foreground color is black.You have to brush capacities at a 100 percent. I'll hit the right bracket a few times to make my brush a little bit bigger. You can just fix these mistakes. You can fill in this area again to get her skin tone back. That's the really nice thing about masks is nothing is permanent. It gives you a lot of wiggle room and areas for adjustments.I did the same thing here.Let me fix her neck a little bit. These are areas that I couldn't really see when I was working with the magenta, but I can see it easily when I'm working with something so contrasting like a bright green. I'll zoom back out command zero nice. One more time, I'm going to select my layer thumbnail by clicking it. Going back to hue and saturation command. Now I can find a place on that scrubber that feels like a pretty interesting hair color.I want to see what a hot pink will look like. So let's bring it all the way to the right, to the left. Amp up that saturation and press okay. Let's see the before and the after. One more fun thing I want to show you guys. If you click the layer mask just by selecting it over here, you can also change her lipstick color just by filling in the mask.I'll show you what that looks like, a very bright magenta. I'm going to Command Z to get rid of that,just wanted to show you something fun.That is how you change hair color pretty easily in Photoshop.To save it, I'm going to call this one 'hair retouched' and save it in my editor folder as a Photoshop file, then save it as a flattened JPG with the same filename. Let's move on to our next lesson. 7. Removing Objects: In this lesson, I'm going to show you a really quick and efficient technique to easily remove objects from your photo. Here's the before, and the after. This is going to be pretty simple. We'll only use one Photoshop tool to accomplish this. Removing this plant might seem inconsequential, but there's actually a pretty solid strategy behind this. Like if you wanted to overlay topography or logos to this photo, but you need a clear space to do so. I find myself doing this all the time so I can incorporate sponsor logos into my image, or clean up some space on a web banner for HTML type to be overlaid. Even without this rationale, sometimes removing objects can help unclutter the composition and make it feel more sophisticated and professional, especially if the object in question is too distracting. On a completely personal level, I have absolutely been guilty of using this exact Photoshop techniques to remove tourists from some of my travel photos. No shame, the photos look way better after I've had my way with them in Photoshop. Let's go ahead and get started. In the class assets folder, there's a JPEG called Objects Removal, go ahead and drag that one into Photoshop. Same thing, F gets me full-screen and we have this lovely photo of Charlie Clemens. She's actually one of my friends and a fellow Skillshare teacher. Another fun fact, this photo was taken by Sean Dalton, who was a another friend and another Skillshare teacher. We all stay pretty close. I know both of them because we all live in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in the winters, so we get to hang out together. Anyway, we have this beautiful photo of Charlie Clements, taken by Sean, and what I will do do for this lesson is show you how to remove objects. In this photo, I'm going to be removing this plant from the background, so that it just stays all white and is less distracting. First things first, go ahead and make sure your background layer is selected and make a copy by hitting Command+J, and for object removal like this, it's going to be really simple. We're going to be using one tool for the entire process, and that is the clone stamp. If you remember, we already used the clone stamp on the skin retouching video, and we're going to be using that exact same tool but in a different capacity. You can get to clone stamp by pressing S on your keyboard or going over here to your menu bar and selecting Clone Stamp. I want to take a quick peek at my settings up on the upper menu. Mode is normal, Opacity let's keep that at a 100. The brush size and hardness look great. Let's go ahead and zoom into that pesky plant that we want to have removed. I tap to "Z" on my keyboard, I'll click and draw in a little bit. Perfect. "S"gets me back to clone stamp. It's going to be that same process that we used for removing freckles in the skin retouching video. I'll use the left bracket a couple times to make that brush a little bit smaller. Now I'll hold down Option and click to sample the white area. Now I can just simply click and draw over those leaves. You'll see that if I go too far, it starts repeating the plant again from the top, which is why I need to be constantly resampling. I'm going to resample again by holding down Option, sampling this area, and now clicking and dragging it back over. I'll do another resample here, so Option click and drawing in. More resampling, and one more time. As you can see, the majority of that plant was pretty easy to remove on that white background, but I am going to zoom in here to really make sure that this couch line stays nice and crisp. Still using my clone stamp, I'm going to sample from the far left, and go ahead and click and drag. I will do the same thing over here, sample from the far right. I think my brush are a tiny bit smaller, and click and drag. Command+O gets me back to full screen. Perfect. That was pretty simple. We can see what it looked like before and after. It was a pretty simple process made even easier because this photo was very white and clean, but you can use these same techniques across a wide variety of photos. I'm going to save this in my edited folder, Object Removal, Edit, save it as a Photoshop file, and I'll also save it as a flattened JPEG with that same filename. Let's move on with our next photo manipulation. 8. Removing Backgrounds: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to remove an object from the background. My example here is this absolutely adorable corgi puppy. I'll show you how to isolate him from that orange background so that he is on his very own transparent layer. Removing backgrounds is probably one of the most googled Photoshop tutorials. Like all things Photoshop, there are an infinite number of ways to accomplish this using Photoshop tools, but I'm going to show you my favorite and fastest technique. There's a reason that the demand is so high for removing backgrounds. I almost always end up doing this with product photos that I've taken, especially when they're on a white background. When I remove the background from a product, it gives me so much more flexibility on how I decide to use that photo. I can easily change the background color without affecting the product itself or I can swap in an entirely new background like I did here with my passport photo. This makes the photo itself more dynamic and interesting. Plus, it allows you to use the same photo for a multitude of purposes without having to re-shoot it every single time. There's a lot on my plates and I'm always up for anything that saves me time. Let's learn how to remove those backgrounds. To get started, look for the Corgi JPEG in your Class Assets folder and go ahead and drag that into Photoshop, pressing F to get to full-screen mode, and we have this lovely little corgi puppy. What I want to do is remove this orange background from the puppy and because it's all about the same color and the same texture, I can do this using the magic wand tool. You can get there by pressing W on your keyboard or by going over here on your toolbar and making sure that magic wand is selected. Let's take a look up here at our upper menu bar. The two things I want to look at are tolerance. The first thing I'm going to do is drop that tolerance down to about 20 and turn contiguous on. Now with that magic wand tool selected, if you click anywhere in this orange area, it'll go ahead and select most of that orange around the puppy. Because that tolerance is only at 20, it's not going to get some of those darker areas or lighter areas. It's going to stick in a range that's close to that sample point where I originally clicked and because contiguous is turned on, that means that it only selects points that are touching each other. If there was a big orange circle in the middle of this puppy, even if it matched this exact same hue from my sample point, it would not be selected because contiguous is on, so it's only selecting the areas that are touching each other. Let's go ahead and zoom in. I'm making sure that my wand tool is still on by pressing W, I'm going to hold down Shift on my keyboard and select some of these areas that weren't previous selected on my first click. There's one and that took care of a lot of this area. I'll click over here to grab that area and now the whole bottom. Let's get these details area between its paws. Right now I'm just clicking those areas where the pixels weren't selected. Now to grab the rest of the pixels like this watermark over here, I'm going to select my marquee tool, which is M. You can also get there over here on the toolbar and make sure that it's the first one selected, the Rectangular Marquee. Now same thing, I'm going to hold down Shift and just click and grab some of these other areas that weren't fully selected. I want to make sure that I'm getting all the way to the edge of that photo. Let's see if there's any more. Nope, I think we got them all. Now I'm going to press Z, zoom in a little bit, press M to get my marquee back, and just click and select some of those straggler pixels. Don't forget to be holding down Shift as you do that so that it grabs the entire selection. Right now I'm just going through and grabbing those straggler pixels so that all of that orange area is fully selected. Great. I think we got just about all of them. There are some areas like down here with the fur where it's going to be a lot trickier to grab that orange just because of the nature of the transparency and the texture of that hair. One quick cheat for this that I'm going to show you is with all of that orange selected, go to Select, Modify, Expand. I'm going to expand the selection by three pixels. Go ahead and press OK. As you can see, that selection just got a little bit tighter in. I'll show you the before and the after. The reason I used that little trick is to make sure that we are cutting in a little bit more, so that none of that background is showing through on our selection. I will zoom out, Command 0. It looks like we've been able to select all of that orange. Now I'm going to invert that selection by going to Select, Inverse, and now only the puppy is selected. Before we had all of the orange selected and now it's just the puppy. One more thing I'm going to do before I throw a mask on there is go to Select, Modify, Feather. I'm going to feather this by two pixels and go ahead, and with that background layer selected, click to throw a mask on there. Perfect. We have that puppy that's been cut out of that orange background. The orange background is still there. We just have that mask on top of it and let me zoom in real quick. You can see that these edges are finely blurred and they're blurred because I did that little trick with the feather option. The reason I did that is because it feels more natural to have this slight blur on the edges than to have a really sharp, crisp line. That's a dead giveaway that something's been cut out from the background behind it. If you feather that selection by about two pixels depending on the quality of that photo, it'll just look more natural and whatever background you place it on top of will feel like it belongs there. It'll feel more integrated. I will zoom out, Command 0. This checkered background is what indicates that it's a transparency in Photoshop. Now if you select your image thumbnail, you can literally take this puppy and move it around on screen. It is completely removed from that background. If you select the mask and right-click it, you can disable that mask and see that orange background coming through. Let me Command Z to get rid of that or you can even delete it entirely and undo what you've just done. I'm going to Command Z again because I want to keep that mask into place. Now that I have that mask in place and that background removed, I'm just going to do a few quick touch-up areas, especially down here by the puppy's paws. Make sure that your mask is selected, not the image thumbnail, the mask itself. For this, I'm going to use my lasso tool. You can get to lasso by pressing L on your keyboard or by clicking over here on the toolbar and making sure that that first lasso is selected. It's just the original lasso tool. Now what I'll do is click and manually trace around to select that orange area by the puppy's paws. If I hold down Shift, I can grab another selection over here by its belly and grab all of that orange and the last little piece right here. Perfect. Now I'm going to go back to Select, Modify, Feather. Keep it consistent at those two pixels. Press OK. Again, making sure that layer mask is selected, let's go to our brush tool, which is B on the keyboard. Up here at my menu, I want to bringing that opacity up to a 100 percent. Down at my color picker, I want to make sure that, that foreground color is black. Now with my brush tool selected, I can simply click and draw in on those selected areas and mask out some of that orange. To deselect, I'll hit Command D on my keyboard or go up to Select, Deselect from the upper menu. I'll zoom out, Command 0. Now you've seen three ways that we can select pixels to remove that object from the background. First, we used the magic wand tool, and then we used the marquee tool to grab some extra chunks, and last but not least, we used our lasso tool for some of the fine tuning. We have that mask in place so that we can easily paint in and out on that mask and not lose any of the data on our background color. Let's go ahead and save it as a Photoshop file. I'm going to call it Corgi-isolated and I'll save it in my edited folder. Go ahead and press Save. I'm also going to save this not as a flattened JPEG, but as a PNG. The reason I'm selecting PNG here is because that means that, that transparent background will be retained. If we save it as a JPEG, all that transparent area will just be saved as a flattened white background. So I want to make sure that it stays transparent, thus the PNG. Go ahead and press Save. Now that we've isolated our object, which is the super cute corgi puppy, let's go ahead and learn how to integrate it into a brand new scene. 9. Create A Scene: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to piece together individual photos to create an integrated scene. Then we'll add some effects like lighting, color balance, and special effects. We're going to be using our Corgi photo and putting this little guy into a pretty outrageous scene. That's just so that we can have some fun while learning some absolutely crucial skills when it comes to collaging separate photos together into one overarching composition. I use these exact same steps to change backdrops on product photos for my business and to create digital mock-ups showing my designs in a realistic application. Let's go ahead and get started. First things first, I'm going to open up the file called scene.jpg and pull it into Photoshop. Then I'm going to go into my edited folder and look for that Corgi that we isolated from the backgrounds and open that up as well. I will separate my tabs, grab that entire layer by clicking on the "Type" that says "Layer 0", and drag it into that scene file, we can go ahead and close the Corgi now and I'll press "F" to go to Full Screen. Awesome. Making sure that my dog layer is selected, I'm going to use the transform tool, which is Command T and click and drag this dog so it's a pretty cool place. I like balancing it between those palm leaves on either side and then still letting this rainbow show through. Press "Enter" to set the transformation. This is looking pretty majestic already. Next up, I want to throw a pair of sunglasses on top of that Corgi. Let's go back to our class assets and open up that file called sunglasses.jpg. Now I just want to select the sunglasses out and drag them onto our new scene layer. Using my Marquee tool, which I can get by pressing "M", or by going up here on the toolbar and making sure I'm choosing the rectangular Marquee. I'm just going to click and drag, make sure I'm getting the full object here with the sunglasses and pressing "F" a couple times so that it goes back to the small box. Now I will click and drag them onto the file. We can go ahead and close our sunglasses.jpg. I'll press "F" to go back to Full Screen. These will be all the elements we're working with. Now I want to place the sunglasses over the dog's eyes and so that I can see what I'm doing. I'm just going to go ahead and make sure that sunglasses layer is selected. Change the opacity down to about fifty and now click and drag it right over the dogs eyes. I don't even need to resize it. It is a perfect match. Now that I have that positioning figured out, I'm going to change that opacity back up to 100 and now comes some fine tuning. Before when we were removing the background away from objects, we were working with objects that were on a flat background with a really simple color, but as you can see here, these sunglasses are on this textured concrete background. So that trick we used with the magic wand tool isn't really going to work in this case. There's too many colors back here, too many textures to get a really clean selection. Instead, I've got a different workarounds. It's not as fast as magic wand tool, but it's definitely more precise. For that, you want to go over here to your Paths tab. It's in that same window is Layers. It's just the far-right tab called Paths. Go ahead and click that and we're going to start a new path. Click this icon on the bottom, that says "Create a New Path" and here it is, Path 1. The way that we're going to cut around these sunglasses is using the Pen tool. The Pen tool is great because you have the most control of any other selection tool. I'll show you what I mean. Press "P" to get to Pen, you can also find it over here on the toolbar. We wanted the first option, that Pen tool and I'm going to look for a nice starting point. It's a great place to start with a Pen tool is in a sharp edge. I'm going to click to start my Path, and what I'll do is I'll click to search these anchor points. You'll notice that as you set them down, you can pull those anchors to control what your next path will look like. I'm just going to be really careful here and I'm just going to start outlining. You can see that as I click, I'm holding my cursor down so that I can adjust these anchor points to make them absolutely perfect. I want these sunglasses to feel really simplified, so it's okay that I'm cutting off some areas. If you ever click an area that was mistake, you can just command Z to go back to your previous anchor point and then continue outlining. One can trick as well as you click and drag and you create those anchor points if you ever don't want to have an anchor point for the next step, all you need to do is hold down "Alt" and you can bring that forward anchor point right back to the starting point and that way it just gives you a little bit more control. I have connected the points and this entire path has now connected itself. The next step is to select your Path and go down here to the bottom of the layers palettes, and click this icon that says," Load path as a selection." Literally what that's done is put a selection around those sunglasses without really precise shape that we drew in with the Pen tool. Now with that selection already made, let's go back to our Layers tab, and again, making sure that that sunglasses layer is selected. I'm going to go up to Select, Modify, Feather and I'm going to feather this by one pixel. Remember what that does is it gives us a little bit of blurriness on the edges, so it's not a very stark sharp cutouts. It'll just feel a little bit more natural, especially when we put these sunglasses on the dog's face. Our layer 2 is selected, we have feathered our edges and we have our selection around the sunglasses in place. Let's go ahead and throw a mask on that layer. With that layer selected click "Add Layer Mask." I'll zoom out. Now we have a pair of sunglasses on our Corgi dog with a tropical rainbow setting in the background. A very nice, ridiculous Photoshop piece. Before we move on with our next step, I just want to make sure that these glasses are centered over the dog's face. You can just click and drag them over until it feels perfectly centered. Do you want to have a little bit more control and not have those glasses jumped from pixel to pixel? You can hold down the control key on your keyboard and it won't jump to any points or pixels. It'll be a much smoother drag back and forth. That looks awesome. This dog is super cool. When your collaging scenes like this together in Photoshop, all of these photos were obviously taken at different times of day with different lighting, with different camera settings. There's a few tricks that we can do to key them together so it feels a little bit more integrated. The first way I like to do that is by keying the colors together. Go up here to your top menu and click "Layer," "New Adjustment Layer," "Color Balance." Go ahead and press "OK." Now we can toggle the scrubbers on this color balance option and what it's going to do is change the colors for all of the layers underneath us. We can go to an extreme blue back here to full yellow. You can even mess with our magentas and greens. The reason I like keying colors together like this over all of the layers is because it helps it tie in and feel more integrated. Let's see what happens when we bring it to an extreme yellow and an extremes cayenne. What that's done is it's affected all of the layers that are underneath this color balance layer. If you only want this color balance to affect only the immediate layer underneath. Just go ahead and click this icon and that will lock your color adjustments to the layer that's directly underneath. Now if we're moving around on our toggles and playing with colors, it's only affecting the sunglasses layer, so just store that information away for later. It's a nifty little trick, but for this, I want it to be sampling all of the layers, so I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that box. Let's bring everything back to zero and find a good place. One thing I want to do is select my shadows and amp up that red, so it feels a little bit more vintage in deeper. Then in my mid tones, I'm going to amp up that yellow a little bit so it feels more retro. You can go ahead and close the Properties panel by clicking the "Color." Now let me toggle that layer on and off so you can see what it looked like before and now after. Just by changing the color balance like this, we'd hoped this entire composition feel a little bit more integrated and like it fits together more. The other cool part is we did this all in individual layers, so it's possible to turn some layers off and turn them back on so we have maximum editing capabilities. Since its composition is already pretty wild, let's go ahead and throw one more thing on there just to bring it to the max of outrageousness. What I'll do is select all of my layers together. I'm doing that by clicking that top "Layer," holding down "Shift," and then clicking all the way down to my background layer so that they're all selected. Now I'm going to make a copy of all of these layers by hitting "command J" and with all of these layers still selected, I'm going to merge them altogether. Command E, and essentially what I've done is taken all of our editable layers and added one flattened layer on top so that I can throw a lens flare filter on top of this layer. Go to Filter, Render. Lens flare. We have this preview box that popped up, and what you can do is you can select different lens types and literally click them and move them around on that composition to see what they'll look like and see what the 35 millimeter looks like. Nice. The 105, that one's pretty extreme, but then you can control the brightness up here on the scrubber all the way to the left and all the way to the right. I'm going to bring it to about 70. It lets you at movie prime, looks like. I like the classic 50- 300 millimeter zoom. I'm just going to adjust that brightness to make it a little bit less extreme. Grab it on the preview box and have it look like it's shining right off of those sunglasses. And go ahead and press "OK." Perfect. By adding that lens flare on top of this photo, it's already kind of an outrageous composition that really helps tie it in together when we have this lighting effect that applies to all layers from top to bottom. Let me zoom out and show you what it looks like before and now after. Obviously with Photoshop, there is an unlimited amount of scenes that you can create by collaging and piecing things together. This lesson just covered a few of the key staples that you'll need in terms of isolating objects and piecing them together to create this fantastical scene in a larger composition. Let's go ahead and save this, I'm calling it scene retouched in my edited folder. Make sure you're saving it as a Photoshop file. Now I'm going to do the same thing and save it as a flattened JPEG with the same filename. Let's move on to our next lesson. 10. Digitizing a Signature: In this lesson, I'll teach you how to take your hand-drawn signature on paper, digitize it, and then optimize it in Photoshop by removing the background. It's pretty simple and there are a ton of real-world applications for this. For example, I use my hand-drawn signature to digitally sign contracts, tax forms, letters to clients and friends, and I even place it onto my artwork files. When I used to work at a design agency, I had a digital version of our founders signature, so I could place her signature into proposals that we sent to the clients and give them a more personal touch. This lesson is pretty simple and straightforward, so let's learn how. If you don't have a high res art scanner, no big deal. I've actually digitized my signature just by taking a picture of it with my phone. For this example, I signed my name on unlined blank white paper with just a basic black marker. Then I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture. A couple of tips here to make the quality as nice as possible. If you're using an iPhone, don't forget to tap your signature on the screen to set the focal points. This ensures that it will be as sharp as humanly possible. I'm also photographing my signature in bright natural lights and unconscious to make sure there's no shadows on that page as well as I snap a photo. Pretty simple and now I can open up that file in Photoshop and begin editing it. For this lesson, you can either follow along with your own signature if you were able to write it on a piece of paper and take a picture with your phone. But if not, no worries, I've got a practice signature here in the class assets that we'll be working from as well. Either follow along with your own signature or go ahead and open up the signature JPEG from class assets. Cool, pressing F to maximize the screen, so our goal here is going to be to isolate the signature from that paper background so that it has a transparent background. You can see the picture I took is okay. It's not fantastic, there's a little bit of shadow over here. The paper has this reddish hue over to the left and this bluish hue over to the right. But that's really not going to matter too much because all we're interested in is this black ink with our signature on it. The important thing is that there's a lot of contrast here between our signature and the paper, that's going to make it a lot easier for us to isolate it from the background. The first tool I'm going to use is the magic wand. You can get there by pressing "W", or by going over here to the toolbar and making sure that your magic wand is selected. Let's check the upper menu. Contiguous is turned on, that's perfect, tolerance is at about 20, all looks good up there. Go ahead and click in the black area of your signature. Cool. I got almost all of the P, not quite the full extent, but what you can do is with your wands tool selected, hold "Shift", and click those other areas that weren't yet selected, they're a little bit lighter gray. Then grabbing all those little stragglers. Perfect. There's one more. I got all the areas within that P. Now it's time to get the rest. Now with my wands tool selected, I'm going to hold it down Shift and click somewhere in this R. Awesome. I'll grab the ICE as well, the dots and the underline. I'm just holding down Shift as I click through, I could adjust the tolerance and bring it up to about 30 or 40, but I want to be really careful that I'm not selecting any of this paper background back here. I'm going to keep it at 20 even though it means I have to do a little bit more clicking. Now holding down shift, I'm just going to grab all those stragglers that weren't selected in my original click. Perfect. I think I've gone ahead and got them all, I'm going to Command 0 to pull back out. Cool. The important thing here is that only our signature is selected, there's no more selected parts can be floating off in the distance here. That's why it was so important to keep contiguous checked on. Now I'm going to do a major zoom in. Tapping Z and then pulling in, I just want to see how close to the edges we are. It's actually pretty nice. Now I'm going to go to Filter, Modify, Feather. Just feather it by one. Remember, the reason I feather the selection is so that that outer edge is a little bit blurred to feel more natural. It's not going to be this really harsh, stark line. Command 0 to zoom back out. Now that I have my selection and place, thanks to the magic wands tool, I want to make sure that background layer is selected and I'm going to click and throw a layer mask on there. Excellence. Let's zoom in and see how we did. This all looks pretty good. We've only selected those black areas of the signature. Everything was intentional and I zoom back out again. I'm going to do a couple more things to refine this before you save it as a signature PNG. First, I want to make sure that my layer is selected, not the Layer Mask, but the layer itself with the artwork. Go ahead and click that layer thumbnail and now go to image, adjustments, hue and saturation. I'm going to bring that saturation all the way down and press "Okay". It doesn't look like too much really changed on here. But what it's done is entirely desaturate this signature, so it's only gray tones. Remember in that photo the paper had some reddish tones over here, blueish tones over here and I just want this signature to be monotone and all grayed out. Now you can see that our signature has a lot of white space around it on this artboard. I want to go ahead and crop in tighter. My trick for doing that is go ahead and select your Layer Mask and then holding down Command, click that layer mask one more time. What that has done is it's selected that entire layer mask, so all of our signature is basically selected right now, but not the paper behind it. Now I'm going to tap C on my keyboard for crop and automatically because we had that selection in place, the bounding box for the crop is going to go ahead and tighten in on that selection, so that's perfect. Go ahead and press "Enter" to set the crop, and one more time. Beautiful. We have our signature in place. It's been isolated from the backgrounds. Before we end this lesson, I want to show you one more fun thing you can do with that signature. Go ahead and make sure that your layer is selected and then make a copy command J. Now if you select your layer thumbnail, remember not the mask but the layer thumbnail, you can go into your hue and saturation, so command U and go ahead and tap "Colorize". Bring up the lightness a little bit because right now it's all black. Let's also bump up that saturation and now you can toggle the scrubber on the hue spectrum and explore a lot of different colors to recolor your signature digitally. I like the cyan blue. Go ahead and press "Okay". Awesome. That's just a little trick you can use if you want to explore color digitally in a really quick way. Let's go ahead and save this as a PSD. I'm going to call this signature isolated. Throw it into my edited folder, make sure it's a Photoshop file and press "Save". Now I'm going to save this as a PNG. Remember PNG saved with that transparent background in place, which is important in this case. Same filename, signature isolated. Go ahead and select PNG and press "Save". Excellence. Let's go ahead and move on to our next lesson. 11. Edit Product Photo: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to edit a product photo. Product photography is another huge demand with Photoshop tutorial. The difference between a mediocre photo and a flawless professional photo can make or break your online sales. Personally I carefully edit every product photo I take before I share it on social media or post it my online shop. I've seen first hand how sloppy product photos can generate almost no traction, whereas professional quality product shots can generate massive revenue for businesses. The practice photo we'll be using today is actually just a water bottle that I bought while I was living in Bali and I still have it with me. I decided to use it as today's example products. I snapped a picture of it on a white piece of paper outside in bright natural lights. Because I shot it outside under fantastic lighting, the photo already looks pretty good, but I'm going to show you how to make it look even better with some fine tuning edits, so it looks even more professional. After we polish up this photo, I'm going to show you how to add some color dots. This is a handy trick in case you have a range of colors within one product category. Instead of photographing every one separately, you can simply adjust the color on one product photo to create an entire range from the same photograph. Let's get started. Go ahead and open up your Class Assets folder, and we're looking for the file called Product.jpg. I'm going to pull that into Photoshop, press F to get to full screen mode, and here is our lovely product to practice with. This is straight from my camera raw without any retouching. We're going to be starting from absolute scratch here. Before you start any edits, the first thing I'm always going to do is to make a copy of that background layer. With that background layer selected, I'll hit Command J, and the reason I do that is just for contingency. If I mess something up down the road and I want to go back to that original layer, I still have it down here at the bottom It's not lost. The first thing I want to do retouching wise is going to be brightening up this white background without losing the shadow back here. To do that, I'm going to make sure that my layer one is selected, and then I'm going to open up my levels, Command L. You can do a lot of really cool things with levels, but the one I want to focus on right now is setting that white point. Over here we've got three eyedroppers and I want to select the far right one which is setting that white points. Go ahead and click it. I'm going to look for the area of this photo that is the most white, but I want it to brighten to absolute white. Once I find that area, I'm going to click and essentially what that's done is I've just determined the whitest area of that photo, and the entire rest of the photo will key into that based off of where I clicked. As an example, I'll show you what not to do, so that white sampler selected, this is what happens if I click a really dark area. That entire photo gets way too blown out. Command Z to go back to get the white sampler selected and go back to an actually white area. Another reason I prefer sampling the whites like this with the eyedropper instead of just manually moving those levels up and down is because it's going to give me much better color accuracy. In my original photo, that line yellow color of the water bottle is a little bit too dark and isn't really that color accurate when it comes to the real product. But when I sample the white point like this, it's giving me a much more color accurate read of that product. This is especially useful if the color you're working with has skewed to a slightly bluish or even slightly yellow tone. By sampling the white out of a tone like that, you'll get a much more color accurate results. Let's go ahead and press "Okay." Another thing I want to do is to even out to this water bottle. You can see it's at a slight diagonal, so I just want to straighten it out. To do that, I'm going to be using my rulers. At the top and side of the screen it hidden here by in that Toolbar. We have these measurements, and if you click anywhere within that ruler and drag down, you can put a ruler in place. You can move them around if you want or clear them altogether by going to View, Clear Guides. What I want to use these guides for is to give me a starting place for how to rotate this water bottle, so it's straight up and down on that y-axis. Go over here to the left, and from anywhere within this ruler, just click and drag out a guide. I'll put one here, and let's do one more on the other side. Cool. These guides are essentially invisible. They're just here for me to see in Photoshop but if I were to save this file as a JPEG or a PNG, you're not going to see these guys. They're just for my visual reference here in this working file. Time to straighten this baby out. With my Layer 1 selected, I'm going to open up Transform, so Command T. If you move that cursor to that outer edge around here, you'll be able to click, hold and rotate that image. It doesn't need too much tweakin and go ahead and press "Enter" to set the transformation. Now I'm done with those guides, and alternative to clearing them entirely is to hide to them. You can hide them by hitting Command semicolon, perfect. You can get them back with the exact same key commands, Command semicolon, but I want them hidden, excellent. By rotating this water bottle, I've also rotated that entire layer, so we're seeing the layer behind it up here on these corners. There's two solutions for getting rid of this. One, you could crop it in, press C to get to your crop, and you can just click and drag it in and get rid of that background layer. But if you don't want to cut off any of those borders, I'll show you another way. Command Z to get back to where I was, and now with my Layer 1 selected, I'm going to clone stamp these areas back in. Let me zoom in by pressing Z and pulling and S gets me to clone stamp everything up here looks good. The main thing is I want to make sure that opacity is at 100 percent, I'm going to bump up my brush, perfect. I hold down Alt or Option to click to sample where you're stamp comes from, and then just go ahead and click and drag. You can see that I accidentally pulled in that top of the water bottle right here. That's why you're going to be really careful with resampling. I'm going to get rid of that by just making my brush tiny or a bit smaller, sampling from up above and clone stamping and blackouts. Go ahead and do that to all four corners. This product photograph is looking pretty good. Lets go ahead and just Zoom in and make sure that there's no discrepancies or smudges or blemishes anything on this water bottle. Press in Z and pulling forward, this is the time where it's really beneficial to have a clean screen. I'm just going to take a look at this water bottle. I really like that texture coming in here. Here's one, perfect. I was worried that there wasn't going to be anything wrong with it. I'm glad there is so that I can show you how to erase that out. Take a look at this smudge up here. I want to go ahead and get rid of that, and I can also do that with my clone stamp. Press S to get to your clone stamp. We're going to make it much smaller by hitting that left bracket key command. I'll sample from a point right next to that smudge. Holding down Option, I'll click bring it over and just do a really light brushing back and forth. Perfect. That was a great way to get rid of that small imperfection. Go head and Command zero to get back to full screen, and let's go ahead and take a look at the before and the after. It's much better. Having that professional white background helps a lot. We've cleaned up that imperfection and we've straightened our product so that it lies perfectly on a vertical axis. Just for fun, let's consider a scenario where you're selling these water bottles and there's actually two color options, this acid yellow and then a bright blue. If you want to skip the effort of photographing that blue bottle, you can just change the color of this yellow to give yourself two options. I'll show you how to do that. First for the sake of layer organization I'm going to double click my layer and change the name to yellow. Then I'll make a copy of that layer, making sure it's selected and hitting Command J, and this is going to be my blue bottle. I showed you how to spot edit color earlier using that Magic Command tool like this, and then going to hue and saturation and dragging that scrubber around. We already know how to do that. I'm going to show you a different technique. Go ahead and go to Layer, New Adjustments Layer, Hue and Saturation, press "Enter." I don't just want to take this scrubber and move it all over on the spectrum because the top of that water bottle is changing as well and I wanted to stay the same, it's that where color. Instead, if I just want to select certain colors, I can go over here and click "Master" and change that in this case two yellows because it's the yellow that I'm wanting to change. Click "Yellows" and now when you click that scrubber and move it up and down on the spectrum, only the yellows of that image are going to be sampled and changed. I wanted a bright blue, wrong way, let go to the right. I like this one. Let's see what happens if I bump up the saturation there. That's fake, I want to put that back to zero. Even though we only sampled the yellows, turns out there was actually some yellow within this wood color, so it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to. But to the nice thing about working with an adjustment layer is that there's automatically a mask thrown on there. If you ever change any of the color you don't want to and you've used an adjustment layer like we just did, we can just paint that back in with our mask. Go ahead and click your Mask. I'm going to change my default color to black. Get my brush tool they hitting B making sure the opacity is at 100 percent, or that brushes are tiny, so right bracket a bunch of times to get that back out to a big level. Now simply brush it back in. I'm going to hit the Carat to collapse that properties window, it's distracting. Now Zoom out by hitting command zero. Perfect. That's a very convincing blue water bottle. It looks like that could have been the original. Again, for the sake of file organization, I'm going to select that adjustment layer, hold down shift, grab my blue layer, and then Command G to group them together. I'll double-click the group name, change it to blue, and that just helps our files stay organized. Let's hit the Eyeball and see what the yellow looks like and now the blue, perfect. You can repeat those steps an infinite number of times and have as many color options as you want to for this water bottle. If there's ever a case where you want to remove that white background and work with a transparent PNG instead, you now have the skills to do that because of our lesson earlier on isolating an object. Let's go ahead and save this as a PSD. I'm going to call it Product Edits. In my Edited folder, make sure it's a Photoshop file and press "Save" and now I'm going to save it as a JPEG. Same filename, except I'm going to add blue, save it as a JPEG, press "Enter" and now hitting the Eyeball to hide that blue layer, I'm going to save the yellow version. Product edit blue I'm just going to double-click that blue, change it to yellow. Make sure it's a JPEG and press Save. Cool. You guys are basically pros at Photoshop now. Let's go ahead and move on to the next video. 12. Saving And Exporting: Now that we've finished all of our retouching and photo editing lessons, let's take a minute to learn about the optimal ways you can save your files based on what you're going to be using them for. I'll also show you how to save different dimensions and orientations, so you can have all your bases covered with just one photo. Let's jump right in. There are a lot of different file types out there, but for images, I usually just use three: JPEGs, PNGs, and PSDs. So I'll just walk you through what each of those look like. Let's start with the PSD, which is a Photoshop file. When you save as a Photoshop file, all of these layers are going to stay intact. So you can close the file, reopen it later, and everything will stay here exactly as it is. This is the most versatile file type and no matter what you are editing, I always recommend saving a PSD version of that just so that you have all those layers intact, and if you need to go back later and change anything, you can. The next file type is a JPEG. The biggest difference here is if you take a look over here at the Layers panel, everything is flattened into one layer. You've lost all of those editing capabilities that you had with the PSD file. When I've completely finished editing a file and I want to attach it in an e-mail or upload it to social media, I'll go ahead and save a JPEG of that. JPEGs are compatible with just about anything you could ever want to upload this photo to, it's pretty universal and last but not least, we have our PNG files. PNGs also just save as one layer but the big difference between these and JPEGs, is with PNG, you can have a transparent background. JPEGs will flatten everything including the transparency. But if you want to retain that background that's been removed, go ahead and save it as a PNG. This is especially great if you're saving a logo and you want to be overlaying it on an image and to have that image show through. So PNGs will get you that transparent background, JPEGs will flatten that background. So if it was transparent before, it's now white. Now that we've gone over the three primary file types, I'm going to show you how to create files in a variety of dimensions. So let's go to New, and for the first dimension, I want it to be an extreme horizontal. So let's do 820 by 312 at 150 PPI, RGB color perfect, and the reason I chose these dimensions, is because these are the dimensions of a Facebook business header. So go ahead and click "Create", excellent, and I'm going to go ahead and drag my blue water bottle into this file. First, I`ll rotate it 90 degrees, holding down shift to get those perfect angles, and now I'm going to expand it forward. Pro tip, if you hold down option, it will expand from a central point, which will just save you time from moving it around later. Double-click to set, perfect. I'm going to zoom in a bit. All right, let's go ahead and save. I'm going to click "Product Edit Blue" to set my file, except I'll add a little bit more to the ends, a spoke header. Go ahead and save it as a JPEG and press "Enter". We could have changed the file size in that original working file but my preference is always to start new files when I want to have drastically different dimensions, and the primary reason that I do this is to keep myself from accidentally resizing my primary Photoshop file and saving before I realize what I did. Let's go ahead and do one more. For this I want to do in extreme vertical. So let's go ahead and do Instagram story dimensions, so 1080 by 1920. I'm going to keep it at 1500 PPI RGB, and go ahead and press "Create". For my Instagram story, I want to use that scene of our tropical corgi. So go ahead and click drag in, and same thing as before, I'm going to hold down Option so that everything resizes from that central points, and now just drag it over a little bit, perfect. Double-click to set the transformation and let's go ahead and save this as, I'm going to click "Scene Re-touched", and change it to Instagram story. Make sure it's a JPEG and go ahead and press "Save". Cool, that was pretty simple. The main thing I want to drive home here is that when you're resizing to some different dimensions, it's best to start a brand new document rather than crop in from that existing working file. What that does is protect you from accidentally saving that working file in new dimensions and losing a lot of data. Now that we've got the gist of Photoshoping, let's go ahead and move on to our final video lesson. 13. Final Tips: We've made it to the end. For your class project, I'd love to see what you created in the class today. You can share what you've created using the photos I provided, or if you went off script and made your own masterpiece, I would love to see that as well. Please post your work in the project gallery so we can take a peek. In addition to posting in the class project section, I'd love it if you also share it on social media and tag me, @catcoq, and Skillshare. If you'd like to learn even more Photoshop skills, I recommend checking out some of my previous Photoshop classes. In designing top-selling product mockups, I show you how to turn your designs and photos into digital mockups. This means seeing what your patterns look like printed on wallpaper or what your illustration looks like on a throw pillow. As a bonus for enrolling in my class, I'll even give you 10 free mockup files worth $155, so you can follow along for every step, just like you did today. These are some of the most professional, high-quality mockups available on the market today. You'll get them completely free when you sign up for my class. If you'd like to learn how to easily create professional-quality surface design patterns in Photoshop, I absolutely recommend checking out my class modern patterns from sketch to screen. In that class, I show you how to turn your hand-drawn art into a pattern. It's actually pretty simple. By the end, you'll know all the techniques to create gorgeous on-trend patterns out of your artwork. In my modern calligraphy class, you get a two for one. First, I show you calligraphy and brush lettering techniques, and then we'll pull them into Photoshop. I'll show you how to digitize your hand-drawn lettering and edit it to absolute perfection. You know, I love giving out freebies to my students, so when you enroll in that class, I provide eight IRAs metallic texture files and show you how to turn your designs into metallic masterpieces. Last but not least, if you want to learn how to bring your hand-painted or hand-drawn arts into Photoshop and edit it digitally, check out my class, digitize your art to sell online, prep your paintings for print on demand. In that one, I teach you how to fine-tune your hand-drawn designs to both retouch them and explore more variation with color patterns and more. If you're an analog artist like me, this class is absolutely worth checking out. All right, everyone, thank you for taking the time to learn with me today. I hope you've picked up some new skills to become a Photoshop guru. You can follow me on Instagram and everything else under catcoq. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the Follow button up top. Thank you again. I will see you next time.