Learn Cool Digital Art in Adobe Photoshop Quickly

1. Introduction: Everyone, My name is Xinye, I'm a digital artist. And in this class we are going to create something spectacular from this photo. So this is the original photo we are going to use and we are going to create this from it. Now this could be, for instance, like a cover for Call of Duty or something. So this is just for fun to create. And we will do all the steps that is needed to achieve this kind of effect to your image. Now you can also use your own photo if you want. But I have this photo in his project. I already got rid of the background. So you don't have to spend time on the move for background for this one. We're just going to do the fun part and that is to create everything inside this image, right? So we will be creating light effects. We will learn how to create depth in image, how to blend this altogether to make this look like a really cool, some sort of cover for game. I want to point out that you don't need any experiencing Photoshop for this, i explain everything really slow. So everyone understands this and it's actually really easy to understand and to make this yourself. Now, if you want to learn to create this, I will see you in the class. 2. Making The Composite: Alright, let's start from the very beginning by going to File and select new to create a new file. Now, for the size, I want to use something like portrait mode. So I'm going to use two times the size of Instagram. This the resolution doesn't matter here. Resolution is only footprint and all the other settings are fine. So let's create a new file. Okay, first of all, let's import our sniper. Just drag it in this file and press enter. So we have it here as a smart object, as you can see. Now lets move it a bit down. And if we want to resize this, press Command on the Mac or Control on Windows and t. And now we can just reach sizes to make this a bit bigger. Because this is like the most important thing in our composite, this guy here with this sniper. So I'll make sure he's big enough. So something like this is fine. Maybe moving a bit here. So we have enough space here to put some other stuff. Right now. Let's make the background black because we want to create a dark scene. So I'm going to press Control I or command IO MEK to invert the color of the background. All right, the next thing to do is to import the image of the fire. So just drag it also here and make it bigger to make it fit this image. Now, I don't want to use these house here. I just want to use the flame Center coming from this house. So I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate is a bit like it's coming from the left side. Let's see, let's move it a bit like that and try to find some less. But for this fire, you can see here, it's really difficult to see, but here's where the image ends and you want to get rid of it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press Command or Control L to bring up the levels. Then select this black picker tool and click on this. And I can see it's gone. So that way we just gave the information at depth. Area needs to be the black one, right? So now we can move this around. And let's also changed blend mode here to screen. Which screen we don't see the plexi anymore. So after that, if we import another image behind it, we will see that image. So let's put some flames, maybe like like this here, and press Control Command J to duplicate it. And to make some more flames here, can eventually even rotate this a bit more if you want. Try to pick some nice parts for the flames. The important thing here is to f also flames coming like in front of him. So we can create some nice reflections. So something like this would be if we'd better. And let's just move it a bit here. And this is five. And now we can always just move those around later on if we want to make a difference. All right, next thing to do is we need to make sure that we get some nice reflections from these flames on this person. 3. Brushing Color Reflections: Create these reflections from these flames on dispersion. And we need to create some sort of REM lights, light reflections. And these slight differences need to be the same color as the light in the background. So in this case it's something orange, yellowish like that. So let's first make sure this person is a bit darker. So what I'm going to do is click on the layer of the sniper and go here and select curves. And with the cors we can make area's lighter or darker. So if we take the higher point here, these are the highlights and bring them down. We can bring down the highlights of this image, but we only want the effect, this layer underneath it. So we need to press this button here so we don't effect the flames, but only this person. And now we can see here we can make it dark. So let's make them a bit darker, not too much. So something like this. Now we need to make sure 0s only dark it. Decide because there we have flames a, we need to make sure these light is gonna come on these parts. So what I'm going to do is click on the mask of these curves, then select the brush and just select a normal brush. General brush from Photoshop. Soft round brush makes sure the hard instance at 0 and the obeys seen flow is at a 100%. Now next thing what I wanna do is to start brushing. So make sure you have black selected as a color. Instead of fighting with Blake, we removing areas from this mask. So let's start with brushing. You can see here these parts here and bit here. Just a little bit extra light on these parts. And it's also the he's hinting here because we get light coming there. Also here on the Sniper. Maybe bit here is finger. Not too much. And bit here. And that's pretty much it. And now we can even change this curve to make it even darker or lighter. But I think this looks fine. Now, next thing to do is to make some nice cohort reflections from this. So what I'm going to do is create a new Layer. Press right mouse and greater clipping mask. And if we create clipping mask, we only work inside the area of this sniper in this case. So let's now select a color here. And let's sample some color from these flames. Something orange, maybe bit more orange. Something in the same range as these flames. Press OK. And now we can just select a normal brush again like this. And start brushing these areas here. So let's first do it like this. Red, these areas here, maybe bit here, just to make sure where he's flames are. So not here because we don't have flames on top. So we don't rest at area here. Just a bit here, maybe here. And let's also do the slippery here. Just a bit of these. And next thing to do is to see if this looks good. We're going to change the blend mode here from normal to all fillet. And now we can see, we eventually don't really see it. So we need to be a bit more here. So let's brush it even deeper inside is person like dead. Maybe also here on this hand. To get some nice orange reflections from these flames. Can also do this gun here if you want. A little bit more here. So also do sum here. And now you can see this starts to look really good with this background. It blends look better than without these colors. Let's deal with here. And you can even do with year she wanted done though too much. Try to pick some spots that are getting light. And if you don't, if it doesn't look good, just brush it away with with the eraser like there. So the best way is to just brush a lot and after-death use the eraser to get rid of some parts to make it better. Maybe not here. So I think this is, this looks fine. Maybe less here. For something like this. 4. Brushing Highlights: Alright, let's do a bit more brushing here so we get some highlights here. So for this, I want to create a new layer first, press right Moussa and create clipping mask. Now if you go to Edit, Select fill, we can select 50% gray here. Press OK. And we flag this layer with 50% gray. And if we change the blend mode to overlay, we only see what we are doing inside this layer with the brush. So for this, I want to select a brush now. And this time I'm going to pick something orange, yellow again, but almost too wide. So it's like, really like now, something like this in this range. And if we brush now, you can see we get these nice highlights coming out. So for this, we can make the edge a bit lighter with this. So just brush these edges a bit lighter. So get some nice colors. Highlights popping out. Don't do it too much, just a little bit on some places to create some highlights here and there. Maybe year on this hand. Like that. I bit here and maybe bit here from this fire in the background. Just a bit of dispersion to make this whole look better. And be in between here. Something like this may be here on this Beck. And that's pretty much it. And now we have a little bit more depth with these highlights. We will add some more depth later on. But let's just for instance, to this question here. I think this is fine. Maybe don't need to even do this part. Just a couple of these areas that gets pilots. All right, let's move on to the next stage. 5. Adding & Blending Background: Now we can start with adding the background here. I have this photo of this building that you can just open this up in Photoshop. And if you go to select subject, it will automatically make this selection of this building. This is fine. The only thing I would like to change here is to make sure the selection goes a bit more inside this building so we don't get like these white borders here. So for this, I'm going to go to select, modify, and select contract. And that contract we can select the pixels, amount of pixels that it goes inside this selection. So let's do maybe tree. This is fine. You can see here it goes inside this. And let's make a mask. Now you can see we have still like these areas here that are wide. So if you really want to go into details, you can press right mouse and tried to get rid of these width, this brush. So this is relieve something if you want to make like everything perfect. And without floss, you can do that. But I'm not gonna do that now. I just going to leave it like this. Press ok. So now we have this selection. And what I want to do now is to press right mouse and convert this to a smart object. So that way we have a smart object and we can just drag it in file. Now you're gonna make sure to put this behind all those layers because this will be in the background. So let's just first find a nice path for this. We can even make it bigger or smaller if you want. Maybe make bigger to fill this whole area of something like this. Right? So this is fine. Now, this building looks way too light for this time of the day. It looks like ninth year, so well, to make sure the building is at night. So it's time to make this building darker BY doing this, by adding some curves to this, like we always do. And don't forget to press this. So we only affected layer underneath it. And let's just drop all these highlights. Now this building needs a bit more contrast. It looks greyish To me. I wanted more black. So for this, I could just take the middle point here. And you get like this. And you can see here it looks a lot better. Now, I still want to see sunlight from this building. So for this, I'm going to create a new curves preservice again. And let's bring up these highlights. And also take the mid tones. Move it a bit like data. So play around with the settings to create some nice contrast. Here ends I have some highlights to make it look realistic like that. 6. Creating Lights: Let's make the background a bit more exciting than this. So first I want to do is I want to create some light, more light in the background, like a horizon. So let's just first select something, something like this fire yellowish, and create a new layer underneath the building. Now if we just make a dot like this, make sure you have here, especially at a 100 flow at a 100. And the hardness is 0, just a normal soft round brush. And let's make a dot like that. Now lets move this dot now down here. And we can even make this bigger if you want. And now you can see we get a lot more light now in the background, which makes it a lot better to look at. If it looks a bit, it looks a bit yellowish now. And so to change this color, I'm just gonna press control commands you to bring up the heat transform. And here I can change the color of this light. So if I want to make it like more wide like this, I can just increase this. You can also just move the slides aren't If you want more red or something like this. This is just what you like most. I like to have it a bit lighter, a bit more to the wide. Let's leave like dead bit orange. Read something like this would be fine. Press OK. And now we have like this cool lighting in the background. And we can also just press Ctrl J to duplicate it and maybe move it to death side also to create some nice highlights here in the background. Maybe even one more. You can also put it behind this building. But I think I like it dark on that side. So let's just leave it like this and this is fine. Now we can also give this building some highlights. So for this, I want to go through this building on this layer above it and create a new layer. And just make this data again. But let's make it smaller like this. And the only thing I have to do here is change the blend mode overlay and put it in these windows. So you can see here that gets these highlight now. And now we can just press Ctrl J to duplicate it. If you want more of these highlights. Let's put them both in a folder by holding down Shift select in both, and click on this folder. So we have now this folder with this highlight. And if I press Ctrl J, I can duplicate this and move it to another floor, maybe not a floor. Maybe stretch it out like that if you want through. Let's move it up. Let's also the year. So stuff like this to get nice highlights in some different areas. Maybe even here if you want to. So this, you can play around with this to get some light in this design. I don't wanna highlight everything. I just want a couple of these places because if you're gonna highlight everything, you'd taken all the attention away from this person. I think this is the most important thing in this composite. So I'm just gonna do a couple of these, maybe one or two, like the two floors. That's it, right? So this is really easy to achieve. Light like that. 7. Particles: And now we have the desired idea pretty much done. So the next step is to improve things. And this is actually the fun part of the whole process. Now you can just add stuff like flying particles around or maybe other stuff like light effects in his background. But let's start with doing some particles. I have this photo here, and the easiest way to create particles is to just use photos. You can find like fire particles, own stock websites. I have this photo here. So the only thing I have to do is to put us in this design and change the blend mode to screen. And you can see how cool this already looks. And we get a lot more of details and I think it looks a lot more professional than without all these stuff. But it's probably it's too much now. It's also a bit blue. So what I'm going to do here is to create a curse layer on top of this, press this, and bring these metals down so it's blend this image better so we don't get too much of that blue. But blue is also pretty cool. So if you want to make it a bit more colorful, you can use that blue. And later on when you finalize things like doing color balance, you can get rid of that blue if it's too much. But I like to have more controlled my design. So I'm gonna get rid of this blue for now and just do it like this. Now, these particles are maybe a bit too much now. They are like a lot of particles now. So what I'm going to do is create a mask and select the black brush and get rid of some of these particles to. So it doesn't really take all the space in this design. So let's just get rid of a couple of these. I can see here this blue. It's going, you can see here when we brush, it doesn't look so right? So the best way to fix this is to press Command L, select the black picker and select that. So we get rid of all that blue now. And this is what I like. I like it to have it more like this. And maybe you want to leave some particles like 50%. So you can just drop here the opacity of the brush and just get rid of them a bit. Not much. So they don't take to mileage like attention in this design. Because you don't want to ruin the design with these particles. You would just want to improve your design. That makes sense, right? I think there are also bit to read to me. So what I'm going to do is create the hue saturation on top of them and get rid of the scholar a bit, maybe bit more orange like that. Think this looks better, right? So that's pretty easy to achieve that. 8. Adding Blur: The next thing you could do to make this better, or is this a sniper here, let's press right mouse and restaurants this layer and select the blur tool. And with the blur tool, we can blur out the edges a bit. And that way this image blends better with the background, so you don't see this hard line on the edge. So just go around the edge like they're just a little bit to make this better. They saw, these are all little things to make it better. So if you want to make everything like perfect, These are all the things you should do to get the best result at the end, right? So just do it like this, this, and this, and it's fine. Now, next thing to do is this building here. I will, what I will do here is to, I would blur this out because I want they have all these folks on this guy here. So you need to reauthorize this layer of this building and give it the lens blur. And that's pretty much it. I don't change the settings here. I usually just leave them like this. I only checked this radius here to see how much blur that May 1 be, something like this. Press OK. And that's fine. I can see here we just blurt out these backgrounds. Now the only problem here is we get this white border. You can see here that doesn't look right. So what I would do is press Command or Control and click on the layer to make the selection. Then go to Select Modify, contract. And let's say maybe five pixels, because here it goes inside and make a mask and those white things are gone. Baby needed even more. But you get the basic idea, right? So now you can see here it looks a lot more professional because it has the idea like a real photo we take faraway would focus on this. The stuff in the background will be blurred out. So this looks a lot better to me. 9. Flashy Light Effects: Okay, if you want to create light effects coming from, for instance, these highlighted areas in the background here, maybe year, it's really easy to do if you just create a layer on top of everything, select a normal breast, bring the obesity in flow all the way up to a 100 and bring the hardness at 0. Now, if we select here a color, something like like this, and then really almost white, let's first just make a dot here like that. And change this blend mode to screen. And you can resize this and you have some go lie effects coming through. And usually I tried to put it in between these areas. Maybe here width, and then just press Ctrl J to duplicate it, maybe one year. And if it looks too wide, you don't want to have it too wide. You can press control. You risk all allies and bring the lightness a bit down. And tried to find a colored it fits this background. So for this I would maybe little bit lighter, blue color like dead. And that's it. Now let's just duplicate this on and move it there. And you can see how easy it is to create like these nice highlights here coming from the background. So those are little things to make this better. Sometimes you don't even need to do this. Sometimes it moves the image. So maybe I wouldn't even do is for this one, but I'm just going to show you how it is done and how easy it is. So just like that and it's fine for me. Maybe this one is too much. 10. Camera Raw Filter: Alright, now we can do some final adjustments to the. So for this first thing to do is to go all the way up on top of all the layers and create a new layer and press Control or Command called shift E. So we duplicated this layer. Now, if you press read mouse and converts to a smart object, then go to Filter Camera O n here we can do some final adjustments. If your camera looks a bit different, you might have older version, but the setting should be all the same. Until you can finalize the image by setting the right colors and do some final adjustment. So maybe let's make it a bit more like dead and play around with the settings until you have the perfect image. So usually I use these sliders just go from left to right. Maybe a bit less cool truest. Where else it gets to document background. You can eventually increase highlights here if you want some really popping out. But I like to keep it realistic so I'm not gonna do that. Let's also move the shadows, maybe a bit darker shadows. Let's do some whites here. Let's do a bit more whites and blacks like that. And if we drop the texture here, you can see this image gets really soft like a, like a game. And maybe at some clarity so it doesn't lose the details. So this is really cool to achieve something really cool at the nth. Now let's also move this one, maybe a bit more DAs. And the vibrance. Usually I tried to use less colorful images for night shot, so this is at night. So you might want to interrupt this a bit to the left at much. Alright, let's move on to curves. You said don't touch that one and sharpening, I always give it a bit more sharpening. And column mix. Hi K Here we can change the colors a bit so you can play with these settings, maybe move it a bit to that side and find some nice color tons for this whole image. Let's see maybe these are nothing. And then some situation here. I think I like it like this. I am not going to touch these. And some less things to do is you can give it a bit of a vignette, just a little bit and do some calibration here to set the colors like you want to. So just play around with the settings and see how this changes the image to make it better, right? I like, I think I like it like this. I'm going to press OK. And you can see the difference. This was before this after the colors got really cool enough. 11. Final Adjustments: Now next thing to do is to give it the curves on top of everything to make these lights really pop out here. And you can jump this one a bit to the right to make it a bit darker, right? So next thing to do is to also do some color balance. And t, you can make the college even better. So give it a bit of a blue sea and to get that cinematic look, if you want to or more read, if you want to, have it more one-to-ones, which like dude, like this. So this is fine. Now you can also add some color lookup here. Some LET maybe Trieste triple work to get some colors, pop them out, and just dropped their best year. So it doesn't affect this too much. Right? And if you want to make this look really like a, like a game or something, you can just import the logo here. Change the blend mode to screen. And you can tell if you want, you graded the color of the cover. There's one little thing that you can also do to make this even look cooler. And debt is to select this layer here from everything, our final layer, and go to Filter, Blur Gallery and select field blurred. And with this, we can blur some areas out. So of course, the middle center shouldn't be blurred out. So we can change the settings here to 0. And if you hold down Alt, we can copy these settings. So let's put some points here on the areas that we do not want to effect, right? So these areas we don't want the effect. But here we can add some blood. That is to make this look a little bit like, more like a game. And you can see here this is really cool to just give it the final touch to it. I'd be a bit also here. These little blur effects to make this look cool, maybe also here. And this will make the image look like better quality on these areas, right? So maybe not here, but it's a movement there. Just a couple of these areas blurred out to get their effect, maybe also behind them. She want. So you can just play around with these and don't do it too much just to with like a little bit on some areas to create some nice depth. Right? So that's pretty much it. So thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this class and learn something new. And don't forget the radius class if you liked it. And I hope this y1 and z1.