Learning Adobe Photoshop for Beginners

1. Welcome: What's up, everybody? My name is Spencer Martin, and I'm a multimedia designer from Indianapolis, Indiana. I also run a YouTube channel called Pixel and Bracket, which have post hundreds of tutorials do daily creative live streams, a feature artists and mawr all in an effort to help educate and inspire other creatives just like you. Now, this course might be called five Essentials in Adobe Photo Shop CC. However, there's gonna be a lot more than just five things that you learn. We're gonna look at everything from smart objects and why they're so important and flexible . We're gonna look at smart filters, layer styles, adjustment layers and even masking all these air. Very important nondestructive ways of editing Photoshopped files Whether you're painting, doing digital painting, photo editing or even photo compositing. These are all some of the basic best practice things that I use every day in Adobe Filter Shop. I hope you guys enjoy this course. I can't wait to see you There also can't wait to see over at the YouTube channel. Remember, Pixel bracket over on YouTube. Subscribe over there. Follow me here and I'll see in the class 2. Lesson 01: Workspace & Navigation: thanks for joining the class. And welcome to Lesson one. In this first lesson, we're gonna be looking at the workspace and some navigation options here in photo shop. So what I have open It's sort of like the pre document open window. And it generally shows your most recent documents open and has some options here to the left. And remember, I am in cc 2018. So that means that Ah, that's what the windows set up is gonna look like. Yours may differ, but a lot of the same things in these tutorials and videos and lessons will apply no matter of which version you're in. However, just want to make that clear. Which version I'm in. Okay, So what we need to do is actually open up a new document so we can go too far, file down to new document, or we can go to create new and just use this button. The new document window is going to open up and it gives us a list of tons of presets and we have all these different tabs of presets most of the time. Unless I see one that I want to click on right away. What I'm concerned with is the right side over here, and I can set the name of our document here so we could call this lesson one if I wanted to . And then I can set the width and the height and the units that I'm using. So, for instance, right now the with its 1920 but 10 80 that's actually like an HD video size, and it's in pixels. But I could switch that two inches centimeters millimeters points because or anything else that I want, I'll leave it on pixels. We can change the orientation. We can set it up for art boards, which we won't cover in this course but are very nifty low guys. The resolution for a digital output doesn't matter which that's a whole topic on its own. But if you want to, you can just go ahead and set that to 72. If you're doing something for print, I would set it to 300 the color mode I would keep on RGB no matter what you're doing, because you can always convert that later, and as far as the rest of this, you could keep it on a bit in the background white and none of the advanced options matter too much. You know, you get into color profiles and pixel aspect ratios. If this is anything other than square, though, I would definitely select square or else things might look a little skewed. So that's it for the new document window. After we set that all up, all we have to do is hit, create, and that's gonna open up our new document. I'm gonna zoom out just a little bit and will cover all of this work space. So the first thing I want to do is show you the essentials workspace in photo shop. And if I go up to a window down to workspace Aiken set that up. Currently, I have it set to the essentials. However, I'm gonna reset it to make sure it's at the very default settings. So I'm gonna hit that, and it's gonna change our workspace just a little bit now. One thing it is that kind of locked of these icons into a single line over here on the left . And then it opened up a few panels over here like the properties put down here. We have color and swatches and opened up libraries immediately. Libraries were not going to cover. It's a nice way to share objects and assets between your different programs and also with a team with your creative cloud license. However, I'm just gonna close out of that by right clicking and hitting close. So that's gonna pull adjustments into this area. And we have color swatches, adjustments, layers, channels, paths. We also have a properties panel and in the history panel, Let's look in the upper left and we're gonna kind of work our way down to the right. So up here we have our file sort of drop down menu system and obviously underneath file, you're going to find things like Save As and export and different options like new and Open and other things. Under edits, you're gonna find things like Copy and Paste Phil and stroke under here. Different warp options and transform options and all sorts of color profiles, keyboard shortcuts, things like that under image. There's some different modes, so you could switch to a seem like a and convert things. You have adjustments. You also have image size canvas size, which this whole thing is your canvas that would be changing the canvas size. The image size would be actually scaling your image rotation and different things underneath. Layer weaken. Do new layer. A lot of these layer options are available in other places that will interact with underneath type. It's a lot of different type options when you're working with text. Select has different things. Um, I would learn thes shortcuts here. Command a or control A. If you're on a PC in command D or control D, that's select all and de select those air some that I used a lot. You also have different things, like selecting a color range, selecting it. Focus area. Select and mask, etcetera, etcetera underneath filters. Tons of filter options underneath three D, which we won't get into. There's lots of three D options. Ah, view changes, different view setting so like you know, zoom in and zoom out and fit the screen or on here. It also changes some of the way that you view the colors and the proofs pixel aspect ratio . Remember, we're in square, so it doesn't sort of skew any of our view. And then you can show things like, for instance, you can show a grid or different slices. You can show rulers or snap to or show guides, new guys, lock guides, all sorts of things underneath window. We were there just a second ago, but ah, we can obviously do a range, which means if you have multiple documents open, we can arrange them in different ways underneath workspace that sets up our workspace panels down. Here are all of the panels that we could possibly have open, which we will encounter some from time to time. For instance, the character panel and the paragraph panel, even the paragraph styles those would all have to do with our text options. So when we're working with type those types of panels we would want to have open, there are other panels we will work with, and we'll docked him and over here. But in the meantime, there's also help drop down. Uh, in the meantime, though, let's look at what we get with some of these panels. So over here on the left are all the tools that we have. You have moved to a selection tools, lasso, magic wand and different things here that will work with will learn about some of them. In this course, when you have one selected, for instance, the move tool is selected. We also get a bar of options here at the top. And obviously some of these air great out. Some of them are not. And there's different things, like auto select. You can toggle on and off. But for now, I just want you to be aware that tools are on the left and other options are up top here. Now, next up is a little tab here, and that's lesson one. That means that is our Photoshopped document that we have open. You can have multiple Photoshopped documents open, and they will just have themselves inside of here accordingly. So that would be one of those view options where you can arrange your workspace tohave different to up vertical or tile all horizontally. You know, depending on how you want to view all of your photo shop documents, or you can view them almost like a browser window for the Internet, right? Just one tab at a time. Now, if we move to the center here, we actually have a ruler bar that shows you in our units that we decided in the very beginning, which would be pixels from 00 down to 1920 by 10 80. And then this whole white space here is our canvas. So whatever things we are creating or painting or manipulating are gonna show up here on this canvas. And this is 1920 by 10 80. That's our canvas size. Nothing. You you won't be able to see anything outside of this canvas. So if you have an element that sort of goes off of the edge of the canvas, you will only see it on top of the canvas here, not beyond here. It will still exist. You just won't be able to see it. Let's move over to the right. We have other tabs over here. For instance, color. You could switch over. We have swatches, which is just color choices, pretty much. And then we also have the history tab, which we can pop out. Anything that's in here sort of looked in. We can pop those out just like so, and we have an adjustments tab with adjustment layers and then the layers panel. So the Layers panel is one of the most important concepts in the photo shop. And essentially all of your items are in here on different layers, and they're going to stack on top of each other. Whatever is on top is the most visible, and then it just cascades down from there. So if what's on top is blocking something underneath it, you won't be able to see the layer underneath it, and so on and so forth. Unless there's something set up that allows you to see through it. We'll get into that deeper in the course. But for now, we're just looking at all of our work space and all of the navigation that we can do here. So one thing that you can dio is you can undock some of these and you can move things around. So, like, for instance, if I wanted color to not be there, but I wanted it to maybe be in this little look and granny here, I can actually drag it and anywhere that is highlighting and blue is where Aiken, Doc, this color tab or color panels. So if I put it right here, noticed how now swatches moves over. It's number one in this panel, and the color palette is now down here. And if I click on that, it pops out to the side and I can carry that over. Or I could put it here as another column. And if I click these arrows here, it's gonna expand out that panel and show me the color panel completely taking over 100% the size of this column. So you know, that's not exactly ideal. But I just want to show you how you can move panels around. So I'm gonna move color back over here with swatches just by making sure that boxes highlighted and letting go. So it's gonna be in here, and I can shift it to the front of swatches by dragging that over. And one thing I do want to do is move properties. I'm gonna move him down here with adjustments and just kind of sit him in there, and I'll click adjustments back over. But if you have a photo shop, CC tells an 18 this is basically the essentials workspace, and that's how we're gonna be working with this. I don't want to confuse you and open up a bunch of different tabs, but I did want to explain the entire workspace for you. So one thing that you can dio I'm just going to show you here really quick. We're gonna use the type tool. You don't have to do anything. Just watch. Here. This is going to be lesson one. And right now it's all in white, so I'm gonna change that to black hit. Okay, I'm gonna scale that up really quick, and obviously, I type that in wrong, so we'll change that to a one. Okay, so this is lesson one. What I want to show you here is just some navigation options so we can zoom in and zoom out . You saw that up in the view tab. Zoom in is command plus zoom out is command minus or control plus control minus four PC windows users. So if I hit command Plus, that means I'm zooming in and I can zoom in As far as these percentages go, I'm not sure what the max is. Maybe in the 3000 range, but ah, what this percentage is actually telling me is I'm currently at 300% so I'm actually viewing it beyond the actual size of my documents. So if I zoom that back out to 100%. This is where the full quality of the image will be. So I'm not making this any larger. I'm actually zooming in on it. So this would be where it is at its full highest quality. Is that 100%? Anything zooming further than that will help me manipulate the layer but isn't going to be any higher quality, which is okay, as long as you know that fact. Someone zoom out here, command or control minus Ah. One other thing we could do if we actually if we zoom back in, is holding the space bar. Notice how my cursor changes to a hand. If I click and drag, it allows me to drag my view around of my canvas. So because I can do that, that's that's one of the most important thing. So between zooming in and out and in holding space for our clicking and dragging that allows you to really move around your image and kind of navigate a little bit and then I'm gonna zoom back out. So those are the most important things that really wanted to teach you In this lesson, you're definitely gonna learn more than just five essentials. But that's okay. I'm sure I'm gonna give you is much information is possible in this course, especially for beginners. I want you to be able to sort of get started, dip your toes into photo shop and at least know how to use the program by the end of this course. 3. Lesson 02: Smart Objects & Filters: in this lesson. We're gonna be talking about smart objects. Now, if you're not using smart objects or if you're annoyed by smart objects just waiting to the end of this lesson because I'm gonna change your minds about that, and you better be using them By the time we finish this First, I'm gonna open up just a simple J peg file. We have three for files that we're gonna be opening up and we'll start with a basic shape. It, like anybody would normally open, you know, an image file into photo shop that brings this little image file into here. We got a picture of a deer eating grass, and what I see most people do is one of two things. First, they've got this image here, and they're like, OK, I'm gonna start adding some adjustments to I want to make it black Nice. They go up to image and they go down to adjustments and they find the black and white in the click on it. Then they get all these things and they mess with them and tweak em. They look at the preview and go, Yeah, cool. Okay, Perfect. And they hit. Okay, and then they go back up to image. And, like, I want a little more contrast in this. Okay, let's find contrast towards that brightness contrast. There it is. Okay, that pulls up. And then they start tweaking the contrast, adding that adding some brightness in their more contrast. You get away with a lot in black and white photos hit. Okay, cool. How about I sharpen this a little bit? So they go to filter and they go down to sharpen and they find maybe unsure Mask. That's a popular one. And they look at the preview, toggle it on and off, and maybe they like that. And so they add that to their picture is, Well, well, what do we have? I guess we have a black and white photo. Pretty good contrast. Definitely sharper. And that's it. That's all that's left over. This is called destructive editing, and it means that we have actually changed the image itself. We cannot go back and edit anything. We can't get rid of anything. It is what it is. That's like the scariest thing that I see people do in photo shop. The other thing I see people do is they go. Well, I know how to get I know how to get around that. All you have to do is ah, double click on this background layer, It makes it its own layer. And then I can hold option or all and duplicate that. And now I have my old one here, and I can add all my adjustments to the ah, the one on top without having to worry about losing my old file. Okay, well, that's still destructive editing. You're still being destructive to this image here, Even though you have this old image below it, you still are editing this image in a destructive manner in which you aren't able to edit any of the in between steps anymore. So smart objects to the rescue. I've got this image open. So this is 100% scale, you know, full resolution as high quality as I'm going to get of this image because we just opened it directly into photo shop. What I'm going to Dio is right. Click on it and go convert to smart object. What is a smart object? While a smart object, you might think of it like a nested Photoshopped file. What is nested mean? That means it's like I have a photo shop file within another photo shop file. So imagine this file right now. Right now, it's named one. Dear Vladimir cooed and off. He must be the photographer. So that's my photoshopped file that includes this layer. But if I double click on this noticed this new little smart object icon I'm gonna double click on this deer, and it looks like it just flashed. But actually look at the tabs. It opened up the layer zero copy dot psb. So I actually have another photo shop file embedded into this photoshopped file. Okay, so I'm gonna exit out of that. We're not gonna deal with that yet. I'll show you some more with the nesting later, but for now, what? What is the point of this smart object? What? Why do I even care about it? Especially since whenever I try to do anything, like paint on this, it gives me an air. When I try to erase on this, it gives me an heir. It just seems really unf Lex Herbal. And I don't know, like I can't do anything with that. Just wait because actually you could do so much more with a smart object. So what we've done is we've told Photoshopped. Look, this is the quality of the image. I want you to remember it so forever. Photoshopped will remember the original of this image, and anything we add to it is going to be stacked onto the image and remain edit Herbal, for instance. Let's go back and make that black and white adjustment. Image adjustments, black and white. Okay, Looks the same hit. Okay, everything happened the same. But what happened in our layers panel? We have a toggle dropped down now, and a couple circles out here, which stands for basically it indicates that we have filter effects. And in this case, we added a black and white smart filter. And look, we have all these eyeballs on here so I can turn that black and white filter on and off. I can double click on it to open it up and re edit it and change things hit. Okay, I can actually even double click this out here, which allows me to change blending modes and opacity. Ease of that smart filter individually. Okay. Well, what else? What else did we add to this? Let's go to image adjustments. How about brightness? Contrast? Boom! It adds the same thing. Comte. Wheat contrast. Tweak the brightness hit. OK, take a look. And down here it's stacked another filter in there. And let's say I feel like that contrast is a little too much. I can double click on it and maybe turn it down a little bit or turn it up. Hit. Okay, It all remains creditable. How about filters? Well, what did we add before we had a sharpen on sharp mask and add that on their hit? OK, and there it is. All these smart filters and adjustments stack and I could hide them with the click of the eyeball. Hide all of them. I could hide just some of them. Maybe I don't want it black and white anymore. Maybe I want to see what it's like in color. When I've made these two adjustments, it remains edit herbal, and that is the biggest, biggest biggest thing about smart objects for me is that it's nondestructive editing. Here's something else because this layer is a smart object. Let's say we transform it, so that's command T or control T. And it tells us that smart, smart filters applied to this letter will be turned off temporarily while we transform. So basically, while you make the transformation, they're gonna turn off all the effects. And then once you commit the transformation, all the effects will be turned back on. C hit, okay. And everything gets turned off, but that's fine for now. So if I shift, click and drag this guy, we're gonna make this image smaller. Gonna hit, enter on that and commit it. And then are smart filters come back. So we've got this one image, and I've got to move till selector, And right now I'm just kind of dragging it around. Okay, so he's still a smart objects. Remember? Photo shop does remember how big this photo waas? I'm going to duplicate this layer by holding option or alter clicking and dragging. So we have a duplicate. I'm gonna drag this one over just to the side so we can see them side by side. Now, one of these layers is gonna be the smart object. Let's stay with this one and we'll go ahead and rename it smart object. Okay, that's on the one on the left It's one on the right. We're gonna rast arise It will name it Rast, Arise And I'm gonna right click on that Go to Rast Arise, layer And essentially, what that did was it applied all the effects, which isn't the point of this. The point is to show you how Photoshopped remember smart objects versus rast arised layers . So in this applies to anything in photo shop. If you want to scale it up and down and want Photoshopped to remember and retain 100% quality of that photo that object, that element, that logo, whatever it is, check this out. If I shift, click both of these and I'm gonna transform them both at the same time with Commander Control T. And once again, it just tells me this. I'm going to say, Don't show again for the remainder of this course. Okay, so now I'm transforming both at the same time. I'm gonna make them way smaller just for the point of this. Anytime you scale something, so were way smaller. I'm gonna hit enter to commit that, and I'm a scaling back up. We're scaling back up, and you guys may have noticed this. If you've worked in photo shop ever, that when you scale things in photo shop, whether it be up or down and then back and forth in this way that way and you make a lot of different design decisions as you're working Ah, some of your photos or your logos might start to look a little fuzzier and you're not sure why. What's Because Photoshopped forgets the size of the photo. Check out the photo on the right, see how fuzzy it is. We can't even see it anymore. Let's zoom in on that. That's just like almost unrecognizable. Whereas the one on the left is still 100% quality. That's because that one was pasteurized. It wasn't a smart object. We didn't tell photo shop. Look, remember this image remember its quality? Remember what it looks like forever. No photo shop just sees pixels. And when we scaled everything down, it's scaled those pixels down and stretched and skewed them to be very small. And when we scale it back up, all it could do is say OK, Well, all I see is a couple pixels, so I'm gonna stretch that out and just kind of guess, and that's what happened to this rast arised image over here. So if you guys were ever scaling anything in photo shop and noticed that like a logo gets fuzzy, that's what's happening. You need to make sure that that logo is some kind of a smart object first, and then start scaling it, or the image or the element or whatever it ISS. So the other thing, too. We do have these smart filters applied to the smart object. If I double click into here, I still have that original photo inside of there. So it's still there, always gonna be there waiting for us. And Photoshopped remembers that, Which is great. All right, let's go on to the second little mini lesson inside of this one. It's gonna be about nesting, and this one is cool. So what I have here is I do have free goods of the week stream on my YouTube channel. Every Monday morning, we just talk about some free downloads from a from a site called Creative Market. I've set up the thumbnail template to be as easy as possible for me to quickly create every morning every Monday morning when I when I do these. Ah, live streams. So what I have is just a title card. You can see that here and inside of that folder. If I drop that down, just a couple text layers and then the rectangle. Pretty simple stuff for the title card. I also have this photos thing element Smart object in the background. I can hide that. Toggle that on and off. So just two elements here. But this thing is far more complex than what it appears. And you can see actually that I have some filters applied to it. I have a smart filter like a ghazi and Blur applied to inside of this smart object the double click. It takes me into its little Photoshopped file. Remember, that was nested inside of this one. So we have this guy called photos would double clicked him, and it opened up into this other Photoshopped tab. I have all these other different layers in here doing different things. In fact, there's even some masks here which we'll talk about that later in this course. But what I have going on is a bunch of photos that have been rotated and placed into position, and then they have a little mask. Teoh, keep them within a certain bounds. As you can see, I've obviously tiled this together and tilted. Everything will look at these. These air, all smart objects also. That's right. We can have smart objects inside of smart objects and just continue on and on and on building these templates. And I'm gonna show you how easy it is to build a temple in change. If I double click on the I, it opens up to be just a normal plane photo. And look where three layers in here. This is, like, inception or something. Well, this I looks pretty good. I'm actually gonna embed that dear photo into here and see what happens. So I'm gonna go to file down to place embedded. Um, I grab that little deer image in place. That in here. Okay, cool. That's perfect. It fits right in there. I'm gonna go ahead and delete the I layer, and I'm just gonna exit out of this level. This third level of smart objects just going to say, Hey, don't you want to save that? Okay, I'll save it. Let's see what happens. It replaces that smart object image, because inside of this one, we had that deer saved. Well, if the exit out of this is gonna ask me to say that again, okay, I'll save it. It replaces the photos with this one. So back out on this layer, it's completely replaced it. And I didn't have to do any of the transformations, any of the rotations or anything to position this in there. That's the power of nesting smart objects. That's pretty cool. I could just double click in here, double click into this next one and replace it as easily as placing embedded or even just dragging in an image, saving it in there hidden. Enter on that. I'll delete out the lower layer. I can hit command S or control s to save really quick and updated that one can save that one really quick x out of it. And we have updated two of these to be dear now, so that easy. You can build these different templates and you can save yourself time with smart objects by setting up transformations on the smart objects and also applying filters. For instance, I would like to apply another filter onto this may be something to darken up the background a little bit so I could go to image adjustments, brightness and contrast. And I could turn down the brightness someone that background image just to sort of make the title card stand out a little bit more. And that's always here. And I can always go back in and adjust that just like we showed you before. Pretty cool stuff. All right. Last type of smart object. There's a little bit of difference in this Final one, and we're gonna cheat a little bit. I know this is a photo shop course, but we're gonna open up illustrator a little bit because if we copy paste an item from Illustrator, for instance Photoshopped layers for beginners. Look at this over here it says vector smart object. And it's got a little cloud on it, too. If I double click on this guy, it's gonna open up. Illustrator is actually gonna open up that smart object, and I got to kind of find it a little bit, but it's right over here. So we're in Illustrator now with this vector file, for instance, a logo file in my case, some text I couldn't even delete this out. Hit command or control s to save this could exit out of this guy and switch back over to my Photoshopped document and check it out. It updates automatically and removes that photo shop from there. So they're even different types of smart objects you can have. That's vector. Smart object is easiest Copy pasting from Illustrator. You can also, just in the same way that we placed embedded or even place linked. But we can place embedded other Photoshopped files other illustrator files into this photo shop file to create smart objects and create nested layers inside of our Photoshopped files . Now, I know this got kind of crazy as faras what we can do with smart objects. But I wanted to show you the power of them and I really think that smart objects they don't hinder your design. In fact, they give you so much more flexibility in what you're doing and how you can set up your photo shop files, structure your layers and give yourself a nondestructive environment to work on all your projects. 4. Lesson 03: Layer Styles: in this lesson, I'm gonna give you an overview of layer styles. What are layer styles? Well, they're pretty cool in a similar way that in the last last lesson that we talked about smart filters on smart objects, layer styles, air kind of similar eso let me start by creating a rectangle. We're gonna make it the size of my canvas here. So it covers my entire canvas. And what I'm gonna do from here is actually go click on the move to a command A or control aided to select all. And I'm gonna make sure position this right in the center. Them a hit commander controlled d to de select all I've got a rectangle shape down here in the layer. What I can do is double click in this blank space here to open up the layer styles panel. What are layer styles? Well, we've got a lot of them over here. Bevel and emboss stroke in her shadow, inner glow, satin color overlay, ingredient overlay, pattern overlay, outer glow and drop shadow. And then we also have this little FX button down here which we can ADM or of the above options. Or we can also delete some of these if we wanted to. So what I'm going to do with this background instead of having it be this yellow color, I'm just gonna add ingredient overlay to it. This grating overlay then has a bunch of options blend mode, opacity and then the Grady int itself. We can reverse the Grady in to make it darker on the centre. I'm gonna keep it just like it is. And if we look at the ingredient, it's actually light on one side and then dark on the other. And it's a radial Grady int. If we look at the style here, we could try linear and see what that does. Look, seconds light on one side, dark on the other. You know all these different options here that we can kind of tweak and figure out. You know, the scale, how that affects it, etcetera, etcetera. So I can hit OK on that. And I've set up a little like a vignette id Grady int as a background layer. We can go ahead and double click this. We'll call this the background, and we can get rid of this background just by unlocking it and hitting the delete key and then notice how the effects down here actually applied to it. Just kind of like thes smart filters were applied the smart objects. So this effect that could double click and go back in and edit it so they remain edit herbal. Even though this isn't a smart object itself, the layer styles do remain creditable and our nondestructive editing. So what else gonna do? Well, how about if I add some text out here, I'm gonna get ground. My tight tool, the short cut key is T. And I'm gonna not click just anywhere on here, because if I click right here on top of that shape, it's actually gonna apply text layer to sort of the shape of that rectangle. So instead of that, I'm gonna back out of that guy, and we're going to add a text layer just outside of this here, and we can start typing in text layer, and then we can move this text layer down, and then I'm gonna hit command tear control T to transform this guy. Grab the edge there, bring it down, holding option, or Ault and shift down into the center. Okay. We'll hit enter, then command air control A to select all. I'm gonna center it up really quick and then command D or control D. And now we have this text letter written out here and the colors. Kind of weird. Can't really see it very well, but I'm not going to change it up here. In fact, why don't we change it down here? So I'm gonna double click in this blank space once again and we have all these options. So what if I were to say, do color overlay? Ah, interesting. I can actually add different color effects to this text layer. Cool. How about drop shadow? Hey, I think it added a little bit. Drop shot. I can change the opacity on that. Bring it up. I can change the size of my drop shadow spread and different things with the distance of it . And we can just adjust this to be exactly what we want it to be. I can also do inner glow. You can notice there's a little glow on the edge. Now we can add texture, bevel and emboss all of these different layer styles. We can add strokes. Weaken had a stroke on the outside of it. Then we can add multiple strokes, so you know, it's very quickly. We created almost a different type of textured element here. With this text layer, it's got a drop shadow. It's got a little bit of a glow stroke on the outside. It's got a color overlay and look all these air stacked in here, and we can start turning these off to see what other kind of effects we get with certain ones of them turned off and turned on. And this is one of the great things with the nondestructive editing and layer styles that you can stack all these on top of each other and create really cool edit doble text layers . That's pretty cool, actually. The fact that this is edit herbal, then you can re type in these styles, and you could save these styles or save, you know, copy all of these two different sets of text. So, for instance, if we were to add some more text out here, we'll call this another text layer to How's that? We can move this guy down so we can see him will scale him down once again. Cause apparently, are Ah, default was way too large. So that's that original text layer will look. I can actually see these effects here. Hold options, are all on them, dragged them to this text later, let go. And it duplicates all the layer styles to that new text layer. That's pretty awesome. So layer styles can be copied and duplicated that could be hidden. They could be edit herbal. They could be added to something not added to another. There's all sorts of options with ease, and they stack on top of all of those smart filters and smart adjustments that we learned in the last lesson. So very cool layer styles or something you need to be aware of. 100%. I recommend you dig through here, find out what all these things do kind of just tweak and pull on different elements here, test different percentages and just see what you can create with all these different layer styles. 5. Lesson 04: Adjustment Layers: this lesson is all about adjustment layers, which are some of my favorite and most to used photo editing techniques. So we learned about adjustments as faras adjustment filters like image adjustments and then all of these, we can actually create layers that affect the layers underneath it called adjustment Layers . You noticed this adjustment panel here and we could actually go to window and then adjustments. If that doesn't show up for you underneath this adjustments panel, you see it says, add an adjustment. And there's all these brightness, contrast levels, curves, exposure, vibrance. We have black and white. We have posterized threshold, all these different types of adjustments that we can add a hue and saturation. Okay, let's say we add black and white. Oh, it changed our image to black and white, and it has all those same adjustment layers adjustment layer properties in the Properties panel. When I have this adjustment layer selected and this adjustment layer is exactly that, it's its own layer that I could turn off and on. Well, let's add another one like the brightness and contrast and weaken tweak the contrast and turn that up just like we did in one of the earlier lessons. So why would I want to add the's adjustment layers when I can just have this Be a smart object and add adjustments to it? Well, what if you wanted to add the same adjustments to multiple layers without having to add them to every layer or copy them to every layer? For instance, if I just bring in this little squirrel here, a little squirrel, I'm a skill him out just a bit. So it covers the entire canvas there. Well, Mr Squirrel is on top of the deer right now, so if I hide the squirrel, I can see the dear underneath there. How about I just scale this squirrel down, actually, so we can see both of these images right here in here. Okay, well, the squirrel is above everything else, so he's not getting affected by anything. But what happens when I dropped him down below all of these, he gets the same adjustments as the deer because anything below these adjustment layers are getting affected by them. If I drag him on top of black and white, he will get the brightness and contrast, but not the black and white on top of that, he won't get any of these. It's a very cool way. Teoh add adjustments to multiple layers at the same time. Also, though, let's say that I need this squirrel to be on top of this, dear. But I want the deer to be in full color, and I want the squirrel that have this brightness and contrast in black and white what we could make what we we call a clipping mask. And if I hold option or Ault on this black and white look at how my cursor changes in between the two layers between the squirrel there and between the black and white adjustment layer. If I click on that, it's gonna add this little arrow drop down, which basically means okay, this black and white layer is attached to this squirrel layer via clipping mask. And so this black and white will only affect this squirrel there. And if I do the same thing with this brightness contrast, it drops down and effects only the squirrel as well. So now these two adjustment layers are affecting only this squirrel layer, and the deer layer is left untouched. And then what you can do is select all these. Hold, shift and click and select a mall and create a folder. If you wanted to, and I could call this one squirrel. I don't know if I've spelled that right. Hopefully and you can start to structure your photo shop document in that way where you can toggle is down. Have all of these effects on the squirrel toggle that up So he's hidden, and I can keep it a little bit more organized as I move through and create MAWR and Mawr adjustments. So there's tons of different adjustment layers. Some of my favorite ones, I would say, would be curves and one of my favorite adjustments with the curves. And I'll tryto kind of scale these panels out so we can see this. The curbs is basically black on the left side, white on the right and how much we see of either of them. So if I pull this black up so that it's saying that the darkest black becomes more of a gray, so I pulled all the way up, the darkest black becomes white. So what I like to do sometimes they call it crushing the blacks. It's to take the darkest black and not make it quite so. Blacks quite so dark. So we'll lift it up a little bit, make a little bit grayer, and then I can add more points to this with the curves and just kind of create the photo effect that I'm looking for. Maybe that more muted, pulled back Dark's type of grayish tone. You know that sort of vintage e effect, if you will, and then you could pull this left and right to brighten it up or darken it up, just depending on what you want and what the effect is that you're going for. So the curves is a good adjustment layer. We can look at some of the other ones. Brightness and contrast. It's pretty self explanatory levels is another one where I can adjust the input and output points of the black and the white in the mid tones just by changing these tabs here. If we look Atmore, we have exposure, which isn't easy. Just quick fix for brightening up and toning down your images. Let's see, what else do we have? Vibrance is sort of like hyun saturation and hue, and saturation is way to adjust the hue, obviously, with the saturation and then the lightness and the darkness of our photo. And if you really dig in here, you can actually go into just the reds and it just all the red or the greens. And one thing I want to know, though I don't like to make a photo black and white by adding Hewitt in saturation adjustment layer and turning the saturation all the way down, I like to make a photo black and white like we have been, which would be to add the black and white adjustment layer that one just makes sure that it's truly black and white. Sometimes with the human saturation, it turns into more of a bluish, um, or you might get more of a reddish like a warm or cool black and white, black and white versus like an actual black and white layer. I just like the effect the black and white adjustment layer gives more than the hue and saturation, and there's other ones you guys can play around with these, and just I would recommend just clicking and finding out what it does. You know, photo filter. We can give it almost like a c p a tone, and we could turn up the density on that. And so, with the black and white layer and the photo filter with the warming filter, we've created a C Peotone image. I've still got the squirrel will hide him. So we now have, like a c p a tone, um, dear image with all these adjustment layers and let's let's take a look at what all we've added. So I've been clicking through these. We actually have quite a few added on top of our dear layer, and we can go through and hide these or not show some of them if we don't want to see them . You know this is the photo filter Ah, without the black and white layer. So just a little bit different coloring on that the photo filter with the black and white layer. Now it turns it into a C Peotone. We can get rid of the photo photo filter, and now it's black and white again, and you can see the power of these adjustment layers and how you can non destructively. Once again, this is like is like the key topic here. During this course non destructively edit your photos, your designs and the different elements within your Photoshopped projects 6. Lesson 05: Masking: masking is one of the absolute fundamentals photo shop, and I hope that you forget the eraser tool forever after this. So why is masking last? While masking is the last lesson that I'm teaching Because masking can apply to every single other piece that we have looked at in this course so far. For instance, I have the deer set up again and let's add an adjustment layer that's black and white. So we're gonna go to adjustments. We're gonna add the black and white adjustment layer. Everything's turned black and white. Well, what does this big white box here on the right of this layer, that white box is the mask, the layer mask. Now, the way that layer masks work is it allows us to see through the layer or hide the layer and anything that's in white. The layer is showing anything that's black. The layer is hidden. What does that mean? That means we can actually paint on this layer to go over and select my brush tool. And down here we have black and we have white Now, technically, we can also paint in grays, but I'm gonna stick with black and white as it basically on or off of different sections that we paint on this layer mask so black and white here and we could toggle those with this little arrow. But if you do any sort of masking, you're gonna learn to love the X key because the X key will toggle back and forth between those two colors moving the black to the foreground or the white to the foreground. OK, so what can we do with masking? Well, I need to adjust my brush size. I'm gonna move the hardness to 80% sort of an arbitrary number. You can just dependent on what you're doing moved to wherever you want. Take a look at this brush size on a scale that up a little bit more because what we're going to do is what if I want everything in black and white except for the deer, all I need to do is draw on this layer and basically say OK, this black and white layer needs to exist everywhere except for where the deer is. So let's paint on top of the deer. I'm gonna zoom in. So we have a little bit closer view of this dear and watch what happens when I paint in black on this layer mask, it begins to reveal what's underneath. So, essentially, where I'm painting in black, you'll notice that it actually pops up over here as a little preview where I'm painting in black. The black and white adjustment layer is not affecting the layer underneath it, so I can continue to paint this deer out until we have him completely showing. And we'll just do this really quick and notice how I actually went over a little bit and you can see some of the background. Well, that's where I just hit the X key. Switch to my white color and I can just color back over that paint back over that and remove that toe. Show the layer again over here, and we can switch to black again. And we could finish out this year left and right bracket to make my paintbrush larger and smaller. And we can just work through the rest of this dear here and finish painting him, painting his legs and with black will speed up this section of the video so that you can see the final result. Okay, while this isn't the most perfect mask I've ever created. If we zoom out, everything else now is in black and white except for the deer. Because we painted that deer in on top of him on this layer mask in black, which means that black and white mask doesn't show. So if I hold shift and click on that mask, it'll hide the mask, which basically means it will just be completely visible, this black and white layer. And so it shows us what we are affecting. And if I hold shift and click on this again, it will re show that layer mask, which means anywhere in black we see through this black and white layer adjustment. Okay, So what if I wanted to also blur everything except for the deer? Well, if we go to this dear layer here, the image layer, we still haven't as a smart object, we can add a filter and this filter, we can add a blur filter, maybe a Gaussian blur. And with this blur, let's really crank it up to something that is very visibly blurred. But not too much us. But there we go. Something around 10 pixels. We'll work well hit Okay, so everything is very much blurred. The entire document is blurred and added a smart filter down here Noticed. This smart filter also has a mask. So I could paint on that smart filter as well To make sure the deer doesn't have that ghazi and blur effect applied to it. Switch over to my brush tool shortcut. Keys be. I could do that same painting with this guy here to show the deer and make sure that he is not blurred out like the rest of the image. I'll just do this really quickly for you so you can get the idea of how we can make these adjustments and apply masks to them to hide and show different parts of our layers and make sure the effects are only applied to certain parts of our layers. Very, very powerful tool in masking. Now, one other thing Weaken Dio. If we bring our squirrel back into this image and I'm gonna get rid of this black and white layer will get rid of the smart filter here. Let's bring our squirrel in. We can use masking to composite photos together. So how about we scale this scroll down holding, shifting option or Ault. And maybe he's gonna be about that size. Well, I enter and then we're gonna place him here right here on the ground. So let's zoom in here. All right? So I have to images. Now I'm gonna go and delete this black and white layer, and we'll hide this. So you see, I have this one little image of the squirrel and I have an image of the dear, and the squirrel is on top of the deer. In fact, you can see the boundaries of it very easily. What if I want to add this squirrel into this image? While masking is one of my favorite ways to cut around photos and what I need to dio to add a mask is just click on the mask button down here, added a mask. Now same rules apply. I can simply paint on this mass Toby for the brush tool. And I have white and black and need to switch to black with the X key to just flip flop those. And now I can start painting over this and removing parts of this image, but they are still there. So if I switch back, toe white. I can actually show that again in case I make a mistake. So what I couldn't do with this is actually, just paint this out super quick for you, and we'll just kind of go around this squirrel a little bit. What kind of keep some of the grass in there? He could use some of the grass. I might get rid of his whiskers some, and it goes close to him as I can. With this size of a brush, we'll zoom in. We can scale our brush down with the left bracket key and just go around the squirrel very roughly. Just to get rid of most of the green around him, we hold shift. That brush is gonna go in straight lines pretty easy. Teoh. Go around objects just by holding shift and clicking ahead on them. We'll go around this tale a little bit and I can cut into it. That's OK. It's not gonna hurt it. Too much tales, pretty fuzzy. But for what we're doing here, just kind of demonstrating the fact that you can, in fact to this and this is my preferred method, really? To cut out photos is to use masking because of how a non destructive it is. I would never use the eraser told to do this and be just how easy and quick it is. If I make a mistake, let's say accidentally go through his arm right there. I can one. Yes, I can just undo it. But to I could also hit the X key and kind of re draw back in here because I'm repainting and white and that means I'm showing this layer again. And if I switch back to black with the X key, then I can hide this layer again and you can see over in the layers panel as I'm creating this. It's actually creating and painting on that layer mask in black, all the areas that I want to hide of this image. So what I want to keep in the white of this image is just the image of the squirrel. So just this cut out portion of the squirrel, So zoom out on that. Now I'll make my with the right bracket my brush a little bit bigger. And what kind of cut up into this grass A little bit, we'll leave some of the grass. We should be able to just tweak it a little bit more Here, move this squirrel down. He's sitting in there. And how about we darken him up a little bit with an adjustment layer? Remember where we used those before? You know, Just do a quick brightness and contrast with a darkened him up. Notice how everything is darkening. Well, remember, we just hold option or Ault. Click between those two layers, and now it's just applying to the squirrel there and drop that darkness down a little bit. Pump up the contrast. Some we can change to maybe a curves and this a little bit just to kind of tweak. Remember, we got ahold option between those two layers. Pull this down. Some were just kind of tweaking, setting up our little squirrel guy to sort of fit into this image a little bit better. And now that I've tweaked some of those, I can go back to the mask, maybe tweak how this grass or it comes up into that squirrel layer, and then we can go back and maybe make an adjustment with the hue and saturation and darken it a little bit. Just so that that grass sort of fits together. And now I have a squirrel who's been masked out and had a few adjustments applied doing a few adjustment layers. And those air strictly applied to just a squirrel layer because we made a clipping mask holding option in between each of these, he isn't how in here, with the deer just hanging out. So that's how you can composite photos together with masking. Masking is super powerful. You can put it on smart filters. You can put it on adjustment layers. You can put it on the layers themselves and watch. If I hide and show this layer now you can see that he's got his full. It's remember, it's nondestructive editing, so we retain the full image is still there, but it's just hidden now instead of erased out. Your fellow designers who go into your photo shop files will very much appreciate all these nondestructive editing techniques that you've learned throughout this course, and then the next lesson we're gonna pull everything together and create a project in which you guys could share with the class 7. Project: Text & Image Composite: for the class project, you'll notice that there's an attachment to the class that contains several different landscape images, all of which I hand picked from unspool ash dot com. It's a great place for, um, copyright free imagery. If you're looking for stock photography or images or any type of photos to use in your work , you don't have to credit the authors. But I went ahead and credited them in the description of the class and also in the file names themselves. The main goal of this project is going to be to create adjustments on the image itself and also mask in a large piece of text. So, for instance, I have pulled up the desert photo here, and first thing I'm gonna dio since I've just strictly opened this J pig in photo shop, I'm going to right click on this guy and create a layer from background or convert to smart object. Just it skip a step. I'm gonna go ahead and click that. So now I have this layer as a smart object, which means I can apply adjustments to it and remain non destructive. Of course, I think I'm gonna create a very very high contrast black and white photo and then add some text to it in the background. To do that, I'm gonna go to image adjustments and we're gonna do that black and white adjustment and want to have that selected. I'm going to just keep it as default and hit, OK, Next I'm going to add a levels adjustment layer instead of filter. So we've got the black and white as a smart filter. I'm gonna go ahead and hide that. Let's add an adjustment layer here, and then we're going to adjust it in the Properties panel and turn up the blacks a lot. I want this to be a lot higher contrast, and I'm an adjustment mid tones until I get a level that I like. And while I do like the sort of stark contrast down the sand, I don't like what it's doing to this guy. I'm starting to notice some flaws in the image with these dots that are probably on the lends itself. So what I'm gonna do with this levels layer is actually add a mask. We're gonna kind of at a Grady int mask down into the sand itself. So over here in the toolbar is the Grady int tool. If I select that, I get a bunch of options up here. I want to go from white, two black, and I want that to be a linear, radiant. And then there's also opacity and reverse, and we may adjust some of these, but I'm gonna leave them as they are, and I'm gonna make sure that I'm selected on the mask of my levels layer. If I click and hold also while holding shift to keep it directly vertical, I can basically draw from white to black, which on my mask layer, is gonna be from shown to hidden. If I do that, it's actually the reverse of what I want, isn't it? So I'm going toe undo that with Command Z, and we're going to start from the bottom up. And so wherever I start here is where the mask is going to start. And then wherever I finish is where it's going to finish with that radiant. So if I let go right there, it actually gets rid of a bit of that levels adjustment to the sky. You'll notice down here we have a Grady in on our layer mask canal. And that's sort of hidden some of those flaws in the lens and allowed our sand down here to be super high. Contrast. Still. So now I'm just gonna add a text layer to this with the type tool. That shortcut key is t go out here and just click. We're gonna add the word desert in all caps. That is very, very small right now. Someone to select all command air control A. We're gonna turn up the font size too much, larger size. Let's see what? 1 80 Don't we need to go up even higher? 300. Where's that set us? Oh, goodness. We're gonna go up even higher. Maybe there's something like 7 50 All right, 7 50 Looks perfect. I'm gonna go back to my move tool, and we're gonna move this desert to right about here, so it's gonna be like it's sitting on the horizon. I need to add a mask to this desert text layer. Something clicked. The add mask button. We've added a mask to it. And then what I need to do is I wanted to sort of sit behind the horizon there. And so I'm going to grab my brush tool right here. Check out What I have is faras a brush size of my turn that up some even more than that, That looks pretty decent. A little bit higher will be all right. And the hardness will go ahead and keep at 80. I may even do about 85% on that. Someone zoom in here and the first thing I'm gonna dio is remember, black is what hides are layer and white shows that some drawing on the layer mask for the desert layer. I'm gonna go switched to black with the X key and just going to draw so that I can see all of the horizon again. I'm just kind of revealing all of the horizon, and then I'm gonna make tweaks after that. So just move over here and reveal all the horizon. Ok, now I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more, remember, Commander Control Plus And now we're gonna make our very specific refinements to this. I'm gonna turn my brush size down with the left bracket. Left bracket brush size gets smaller, right bracket brush size gets larger. Go down about this size and we're going to switch to the white as our foreground color. Remember, that's the X key toe foot, those back and forth. And now I can paint again to reveal the D layer along the horizon. If I hold shift, it'll create straight lines form, which will probably work pretty well in this case. And I'm just painting in and following the horizon line all the way across. And with this type of an image, there's actually a lot of leeway. You can almost create your own horizon as you're moving across the letter here, which is pretty good and noticed I went a little bit too much over the rising there. So switch back to my black and just draw over this again to kind of remove some of that. We want the effect of this sort of sitting on that horizon and not over the top of it. So I'm just gonna hovering between the black and white paint, and we are hiding and showing, depending on how much of the horizon we cover, switching back to black there just to remove some of that going back toe white and moving through here. So what? I want you guys to Dio is choose one of these sort of landscape photos that I've put into the pack into the download files for you. And I wanted to do something like this with it to mask in like a large word behind one of the horizon lines may be behind some mountains or the forest lines and just just work on sort of your masking techniques. And also, I want you to edit the photo a little bit, just like I did. I made it black and why? And I turned up the contrast by a lot. So you don't have to do that. You can. You can keep it in color, but throw in some of those edits, maybe mask in some of those edits, or if there's a person in the photo, you can leave them in color. Looks like we just finished there, So I'm gonna zoom out now and we're going to take a look at this. I've got Desert written behind the horizon line and we've got a very high contrast photo, and I'm actually going to change the color of that desert font Teoh something maybe a little less harsh of a white. So we'll bring that down, maybe bring it down into the graze a little bit more something like that to fit the photo a little bit better. And there we have it. We've just massed in a giant word in the background there. It's kind of sitting inside of the photo. That's how you would do something like that. And the masking allows you to sort of show and hide that, and it's still creditable. I can type in this here, just type in a different word, and what happens is we might have to re edit. Depending on where some of our letters hit. We might need to re sort of draw on that mask. However, it is an edible file here, which is nice. We could go back to desert with Ian Dukie, and that is the project. I just want you guys to practice masking a little bit, practice adding some adjustment layers and maybe even some smart filters to your photo, and then post that for the class. Would love to see your different designs. Would love to see what you guys do is maybe some of you are going to push the boundaries of this project a little bit. We could always go back and turn off the black and white. We go back to color even, and I could tone down. This level's a little bit. I could even tone down the a pastie of it overall to 50% and it's back to that sort of, um, muted color tonal. But I could even turn that off, and it's a little bit harder to see desert there, but you can see how this is all still edible. This is all nondestructive editing. That's what I want you guys to really practice with this project, and I can't wait to see what you come up with.