Non-Scary Intermediate Adobe Photoshop Inc Powerful New AI Features

1. Welcome to this Non-Scary Intermediate Adobe Photoshop Course: Hi. My name's Tim Wilson. I'm a senior trainer at Red Rocket Studio. I would love to help you to create beautiful and professional looking images using Adobe Photoshop. Not only have I trained for some of the world's leading companies like BBC, Nissen, Adobe, Disney, but I've also spent many years as university lecturer. I know how to create a course which you will absolutely love and get the most out of. We'll start right at the beginning, and we'll go through everything step by step. And you'll never be on your own because I'll always be there to answer any questions. Here are some of the real world examples and techniques that we will be covering in this course. Create patterns with textures and exciting compositions, cut out hair for professional results, work on a professional portrait, and make it look even better. Create a logo, add it to a vehicle. Create a night scene and easily create multiple variations from a single design. Adobe Photoshop is such an incredibly powerful package, and the latest versions have got all the power of AI incorporated into it. So I've crafted this course, especially for you using those AI features. You'll learn all the standard Photoshop techniques, but you'll also learn how to use the new AI integrated features. If you're doing this course for professional work, not only will you have tons of images for your portfolio at the end, but you'll also have so many techniques which will really appeal to clients. Of course, if you don't have to use Photoshop professionally, you will have so much fun creating amazing images and graphics and doing retouching and you'll create incredible work that will really amaze family and friends. Start right now. I can't wait to help you to learn Adobe Photoshop. 2. Adjustment Layers - Intro: In this section, we're going to be looking at adjustment layers. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be working through the adjustment layers. We're not going to go through every single adjustment layer, but as long as you have an idea of how they work. But there are some really important ones that we'll look at, like, for example, curves. What are curves? How do we use them? But we'll also look at some more simple ones like patterns and gradients. And we're going to be doing some projects in this section as well. So for example, we're going to take these kids over here and we're going to cut them out. We're going to put them into a different background. We're going to paint a very simple don't panic if you can't paint. It's gonna be ready easy. Simple little strawberry, and we're going to make a pattern out of it and put that in the background on a texture. So so many things to do with adjustment layers. They really are so useful. Anyway, let's make a start on that. 3. Why Use Adjustment Layers & Clipping Groups: I want to bring a picture into this picture frame in my image. So I'm going to go across to this image here, once again, more Adobe stock, and I'm going to drag it across. I'm going to click on it with my move tool drag it up to that picture. Now, you can see it doesn't appear to go. I haven't let go of the mouse button moving back down onto here and release, and it comes across. You can, of course, use copy and paste if you wish, as well. And I want to put this into that frame there. So I'm going to go to edit, transform, and I'm going to use Distort, which will allow me to put this point over here, this one here. Let's take that one and place it there and last point and put it here. Now, I'm going to use Command plus or Control plus to zoom in a bit and move across so I can do this a little bit more accurately. And let's make sure that one's in the right place. First of all, this one's in the correct place. And same with the top two over there. Right. I'll click the little tick over there. So I've got my image in place. Now, that's fine if I'm happy with that image. But what I would like to do is I'd like to make this image entirely black and white. So of course, I can go to the individual layers and use image adjustments and choose black and white in there. And I've only got two layers, and it would be fairly easy for me to do, which is fine, except that maybe in two weeks' time when I come back to this image, I want it in color, and I won't be able to undo it. So instead, we go down to the little adjustment layer icon, the little black and white circle at the bottom. And I'm going to choose black and white there. Now, it jumps to the properties panel over here. So what we get are the properties for the adjustment layer. If I click on a normal layer, you'll see it's the properties for the normal layer. Click on the adjustment layer. It's the adjustments for that properties in there. And I can then go in through my colors, lighten and darken certain areas. And I'm going to leave that right in the middle. Of course, I could also choose to tint the image by clicking on tint and then picking the color that I want to use in here. Now, I want to keep that just as black and white. So the first thing about the adjustment layers is that you have the properties which are there all the time. You don't have to go in and open them again. If I click on this layer, properties disappear, click back onto the adjustment layer, and back they come. And then of course, I can switch them on. I can switch them off, and I can change the opacity on that adjustment layer as well. So maybe I just want a little hint of color coming through almost like an old faded image. But what about if I just wanted this adjustment layer to affect only the picture? I want the picture to look like it's really old, maybe black and white, maybe a bit of a tint on it as well. Well, in that case, what we do is you click on the adjustment layer, go along to the layer menu, and we're going to say create clipping mask. Now, what happens is the adjustment layer gets clipped to the layer below itself, and then these adjustments will only happen on this layer over here. If I want to get out of it again, once again, I click on the adjustment layer. I can go to layer and release clipping mask in there. Now, there's a shortcut for this, which I really like, and this is either the lt or the option key, it's the option if you're on a Mac, the old key if you're on a PC. Just hold that down and move your cursor. Don't click down, move it between the two layers that you want to clip together until you see that little icon. Then you can click and it will just clip it in. Same again to undo it. Hold down the l to the option key. Go over there, between the two, then click to undo it again. Really quick and easy to clip your layers. Now, of course, this means that I've just got this layer affected so I can go to my tint. I'm going to give it a slight oldie worldy kind of tint in there. And then maybe I'm thinking, you know what would be nice if it actually looked lighter. So the whole thing looked much older and faded. Well, I'm going to go and add another adjustment layer. Now, watch what happens. If I am on this layer here and I add a new adjustment layer, I'm just going to use something really simple like levels, and I'm going to push the levels back to darken it down or this way to lighten it up. Can you see it's only affecting this layer here because it's become part of that clipping group. Let me undo that and do it again. Now, if I was on the adjustment layer here, and then I did the same thing, so I go to levels and I push this in a bit here, it affects the whole picture. So if you are on a layer and you add an adjustment layer and there's a clipping group above it, you'll find it goes into that group. If you're at the top of the clipping group, it won't be part of that clipping group. But of course, you can always hold down your alter your option key, go between those two layers, and clip them. And you can have as many of these as you want all clipped together at the same time. So it means now I can click in here. I can adjust the image with the color. I can click on this one, and I can go and adjust the lightness to make it look old and faded in there. Color doesn't really suit the room, I'll go back there and just click on tint and maybe make it a little bit yellower, bit orangier Like so. Add as many of these in as you want. Click in there, go in, add a new one. That's going to affect the whole of the image. I'll just increase the contrast on the entire image. Like so. And once again, hold to option if you want to as part of that clipping group or not. Try that out and have fun with it. It is so useful. It's a better way of doing adjustments. 4. Use Adjustment Layers in a Group: I've made up this little composition with four children on a sky. And the kids I've used are from Adobe stock over here. If you've got a picture of your own children that you want to use, by all means, do that, I've just used a select subject to select them and then drag them straight into that document over there. I then also went about, I'll just undo that. I also went about moving them around. And to do that, what I did was I used Auto Select. So with the move tool, if you switch on Auto Select, when you click on a layer here on the picture, it will select it and you can then just move it around. So I can do my composition very fast with everything just at one click. If I go over to my layers and I just want to use the layer method where I click on a layer and then move it, you can see straightaway that it just automatically jumps back to the layer that I'm on. So if I switch off Auto Select, now if I choose a layer, I can click anywhere to move it around. So don't forget that little auto select. Sometimes you want it switched on, sometimes you want it switched off. Now, what I'd like to do is I would like to bring these all together with a black and white tint color. So if I go down to my adjustment layer and I choose black and white, and I'll just give them a bit of a tint in there. Let's use a sort of a bluish tint on them. You can see it selects everything below it, or it affects everything below it in there. If I move that below that layer, I can just keep going, and it only affects things that are below itself. If I want to change just one of them or affect just one of them, I can use that technique that I showed you earlier, the alter the option key, click between the two. So this is now only affecting that layer in there. Now, what would happen if I wanted this adjustment layer to affect the four children, but not the background sky? Well, what I could do is I can actually take this adjustment layer and make a copy of it by dragging onto the new layer button in there. Put that one above that one, this one above that one, hold down the old key or the option key and do it this way. So that's affecting that. That's affecting that. You can see I've only got four layers to do. It's not the end of the world. It won't take me too long to do it, but there is a faster way. What we can do is we can use a layer group. Let me just undo this once again. So, get rid of that. I want to put all four of these layers into a group, and we've got a group down the bottom here. It's next to the adjustment layer. It's this little folder. If I click on that folder, you can see it makes a group called group one. I'm going to just double click on it and call it kids. And then I can drag the children into that group. Like so, we fold it up. We can hide them all at once, and we've got a really nice group in there with those layers in it. But what about an adjustment layer now? So if I went in here, went down to my adjustment layers and decided on black and white. Look at that. You can see the adjustment layer doesn't just affect what is in the kid's folder, but it also affects the sky in the background. How can we get around this problem? Well, what we have to do is we have to look at the blend mode up the top here. You can see if I go to a normal layer, well, a layer, it just says normal in there. If I go to the background, well, it's grade out, but it should say normal. If I click on this adjustment layer, it just says normal in there. If I click on the folder, it says pass through. Well what does pass through mean? It means that any adjustment layers will pass through the folder and affect things below it. If I change that pass through to normal, now, anything in that folder will only affect what is inside the folder over there. So I can then go and add in more adjustment layers. Let's go over here and we'll just add a very simple brightness and contrast. I'm just going to maybe change them a little bit over there, maybe make them a little bit more contrasty, bit darker over there. So if you want to affect a number of items with an adjustment layer, put it into a group and change the folder from pass through to normal, and that will do it. Do try that out. It is really very useful. 5. Solids & Gradients: What I like to do now is to have a look at more of these options in here in the adjustment layers. I'm going to start with the three at the top. These are really good for backgrounds. So solid color is pretty much exactly that. You choose the color that you want. I'm going to go with that blue, for example. Click Okay. It's in that folder. I'm actually going to move it down underneath the folder, so it becomes the background. By the way, if it's in the folder, it will go gray because it's seeing that adjustment layer. When I move it out, it becomes the background, like so. That actually looks pretty good on that blue. But the great thing about this is I can double click it at any time and then go and change it and see what would look best for my background color over there. I particularly liked that blue that I had a moment ago, so I'm going to go back to that one. Now, what about gradients? The next one down? Well, I'll just get rid of this one, and let's have a look at gradients. So I'm going to click on my background. So when I do my next one of these, it'll come in just above it. I won't have to drag it out of the folder. When it comes to gradients, the first gradient we have is our foreground to transparent. You can see it's this one over here. So white is my foreground, and it's going through to transparent. So that's why we get that fade out. And I can then click on this it'll drop down. In the basics, it will give me my foreground to background color, my foreground to transparent, and then my black to white. Let me change the color over here so that you can see how that works. So once again, I'm going to go with a blue through two the background color. Let's go with more of a sort of a purple color, like so. So once again, I've clicked on my background. I've gone over here to gradient. It's picked up my foreground at the moment, but I'm going to click in there and you can see background to foreground colors or foreground to background colors, foreground to transparent, and then purely black to white over there. There are tons of other colors in here. If I click on the top and go down, you can see we've got blues, purples, pinks, et cetera, clouds, iridescent colors. All you've got to do is to click on the little folder and choose from those sets in there. It really is as simple as that. Now, over here, we've got different styles. So if I go to the styles, I've got the linear style. I've got a radial style, the circular style. There's an angle style, which starts with one color and spins it round to the other color on that side. We've got a reflected style, so it's kind of the gradient reflected on itself, and lastly, a diamond shape in there. We can also adjust the angle of some of the gradients. So obviously this wouldn't work with the circular gradient, but with this linear style, I can just adjust the angle in there. We can change the scale of the gradient as well, so I could make my gradient a lot smaller like that, and you can just move the gradient around if you click in here at the same time. We can reverse the colors on the gradient really quickly, and this is particularly useful if you've used a radial gradient. Let's just change the scale on that. There, I think that's better. As you can see, I can move the center of the radial around, but I can also reverse the colors so we can get something like that. So I'll move it behind the main character in there. Have a bit of a go with that. Try out those gradients, and then we'll go on to the next function. 6. Custom Gradients: I'm going to double click on my gradients again to go back in, and I want to do my own custom gradient. So in the gradient area here, rather than clicking on the little drop down, which we've done before so that you can go to the different gradients in there, I'm going to click on the gradient itself, this little area, and that opens up my gradient editor. Now, I can start with any of those gradients in here. So if I went to the basics, I could start with a black to white gradient if I wanted. But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go here and I'm going to put in my own colors for the gradient. Now, when you look at this little gradient down here, you've got stops at the top and stops at the bottom. And I'm going to be starting off with the stops at the bottom. I will click on this stop here and it says, What color do you want it? Well, I can click on the color there and I can choose the color for that side. Same again, I can go to this side here, I can click on that stop, go to the color and choose a different color for that side. If I want a third color, I just click underneath the gradient. Once again, choose a different color for that part there. Now, I don't like that at all. I think that blue looks awful. I could move it around, so I could say, have the blue on the outside and move this to the inside, like that. And better. Maybe I want to make a harsher edge so I can pull the orange over so we get less blue and a harder edge in here. But if I really don't like it, I'll just move that back to the middle ish. I can go along to that stop, and I can just pull it downwards to remove it, and we're back to the same the two that we had before. You can add as many of these stops as you can get in there, so you can just keep clicking and changing the color on the different stops as you go along, or you can pull them down to remove them. What about these ones over here? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to the top here. And with this one, if I click on that, you'll see that it changes the opacity so I could actually make the middle transparent. Now, if you're going to do this with a color, let's say, for example, that I did want to have this fade out to blue, I would start on this side, change the color of that to the first color that I want to use. And can you see there's a slight bit of yellow that's come through because of the yellow there. It's just bled in a little bit. I would actually click on that color and change that to the same blue as well. So you get a much better effect if you go from one color to the other. And it's pretty much the same over here. If I click between those two, I can move the middle point. I can add more stops in there should I want. Once you've done that, you can then click Okay, or you can actually just add this to your existing set. If I just do new, there it is, it's come into my basic set of gradients, and I can click Okay. Do try that out and have a go with custom gradients, clicking on there, changing the gradient, doing whatever you want. And yeah, have fun with that. 7. Custom Pattern: Let's look at the next option down over here, which is the pattern. Now, we're actually going to make our own pattern from scratch, and then I'll show you how that works. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to file and New Document. I'm going to go over to web, and I'm just going to choose a size in here. I'll use this 1920 by 1080. I want this to be square. So I think I will just use 1080 square or you can use 1,000 square or 2000 square, whatever works for you. Switch the art boards off because they can be just confusing if you've never used them before. Moving down over here, we'll have the white background and we're using RGB color. And when it says color profile, I will just choose SRGB. That's the standard RGB color profile in there. It's a color profile that can be used in most applications, particularly if you're putting this on the web. If you forget to do that, doesn't matter. It's not the end of the world at the moment. Let's click on Create. So I've now got this square shape, and what we're going to be doing is we're going to be painting our pattern. Now, don't worry if you're not an artist or you don't feel you can paint or draw. I'm doing mine using a track pad on a laptop. So mine's going to be iffy, as well. But hopefully, even though the painting itself might not be beautiful, the pattern will work really well. You'll see what I mean. What I'm going to do is in my layers, I'm going to go across and I'm going to add a new blank layer. That's this little button over here, the second one from the right. That puts in a blank layer over there, and I'm going to use my paintbrush. Now, with my paint brush, I'm going to go up to the brushes over here, click on the little drop down, and I could use a hard brush in here. You'll see I could take a hard brush like that and just paint with a hard brush. I want something maybe with a little bit more texture to it. If you want to use the hard brush, that's absolutely fine. So I'm going to close that down and go along and have a look in some of these other brushes and try and find an interesting brush. Now, you might not have the same brushes that I've got, but just have a look and see what you've got in here. I'm going to try this charcoal pencil over here, which gives me a little bit more of an interesting texture. You can see if I zoom in, there's a bit more texture in there. But you can use whatever brush you can find in there. Don't forget you can always change the size in the top if you want something a little bit bigger. Now I'm going to go with something along that line there. And then I want to change the color. So I'm going to paint some strawberries, and I'd suggest you do the same because they are actually really easy to do. I'm going to choose a nice deep red over there for my strawberry. And I'm going to paint a shape. So you can see my brush looks a little bit weird over there. If you don't like it, go and change to a different brush. I kind of quite like that texture that I've got over here. By the way, a strawberry is sort of almost like a heart shape just at a slight angle. And this doesn't have to be perfect. We're going for a painted look in the background. So there's my basic strawberry shape. Now, of course, strawberries have the little bit of greenery at the top. By the way, I'm doing this all on layer one. So I'm going to go and I'm going to change my color to green. I'm going to use a fairly darkish green for this, make my brush a lot smaller. Something like that. I'm going to zoom in, so I'm just using Command or Control plus to zoom in a bit, and I'm going to just paint this little area over here. Doesn't have to be perfect, just a few little sort of almost like a star shape that we have. At the top there. You can spend as long or short on this as you like. It doesn't really matter. And then we need the thing that comes out the top, the little stalk. So I just put a little stalk over there. Easy to do. There's one last thing that you have on a strawberry, and that's these little seeds all over. So we're just going to put in a few of those little seeds. I'm going to go back to my color picker on my foreground color. I want to sample that red again so if I move off of my color picker, I can click on the red, and I'm going to use a lighter shade of that red in there. So I've just lightened this up a little bit. Click Okay. I'm going to make my brush a whole lot smaller now as well. As I said, I'm doing this with a track pad. If you've got a mouse, it's okay. If you've got a drawing tablet, it's even better still. But let me just do a few little sort of shapes like that. If they're too small, just make your brush a little bit bigger. You don't have to fill the whole thing with them. Just a few of these little bits here. Okay, I think that kind of gives the impression of a few of those little seeds. It's another one over there, maybe one over there. Once you've done your strawberry, we want a leaf, as well. But I'm going to stop here so you can get on with your strawberry, do it on a new document, make it square, do a new layer, paint your strawberry in there, and then come back and then we'll do the leaf and then a flower, as well. 8. Custom Pattern Paint Leaf & Flower: I'm going to make a new layer by clicking on that button there. So this is going to be on another layer. And I think I want to make my leaf green. So I'm going to choose a similar green to that, but maybe a little bit lighter over there. Make my brush a little bit larger, otherwise, it's gonna take me ages to fill this in, and it doesn't matter if this goes over that, as well. I'm just going to draw a little leaf shape like that, so something like that. I don't want to color it in. So I'm going to make my brush a lot bigger and just color that in there. Again, if I go outside the border, it doesn't matter at all, we'll just get this leaf roughly if you want to make your brush bigger still, if it seems to be taking too long, that's absolutely fine. Now, with my leaf, I need a little stalk, so I'm going to make my brush smaller for the stalk over there and just draw a little stalk out. Oops like that. I think that looks okay. And then maybe I'll go down here and choose a lighter color to do the not quite sure what that's called. The thing that goes up the middle, the veins, I suppose. We do a few of those. There. Let's do a flower. So I'm going to put this onto a new layer. Once again, we'll just click on the new layer button in there. I'm going to do a little white flower strawberries have little white flowers. I don't know what the center color is. You could look it up if you wanted to be more accurate about it. I'm just going to go in and choose an off white color, so maybe go to yellow and just choose a very pale yellow color there because white might not show up against the white background. And I'll draw a little flower. Once again, zoom in a little bit over there. Doesn't matter if you go over the other one. So let's have a sort of a petal there and a petal here. Another petal going up there, one over here. They're kind of the star shaped. And another one over there. We need something in the middle. I'm going to make mine yellow. Honestly, I don't know if that's the color of a real strawberry, but let's find out. Well, let me do it anyway. So I'm going to have this orange yellow color in the middle. Right, that is all done and I've got my three layers done. Once again, get up to that stage and then we will actually make this into a usable pattern. 9. Put the Pattern Together: Now, before you make a pattern, what you need to do is you need to make these objects here into something called smart objects. Now, we'll be dealing with smart objects in detail later in this course. But at the moment, if I were to just click on the shape here, I'm going to go to the layer menu down to Smart Object and convert to Smart Object. I'll do the same with this one. Layer Smart Object, convert to Smart Object. Whoops. Miss that one. Convert to Smart Object, and the last one, once again, layer Smart Object, Convert to Smart Object. And now I'm going to zoom out a little bit so you can see the whole thing. I'm going to go to the view menu and the pattern preview. Now, over here, it says, It works best with smart objects. Yes, we know that because we've just done it, so we'll click okay. And look at that. That shows us this pattern how it'll look. But the great thing now is I'm going to use my move tool, make sure auto select is switched on, and then I can move these things around. So I'll move the leaf around there. Maybe the strawberry there, move the flower over. But I actually want two flowers, so I'm going to make a copy of that flower by dragging it onto the new layer button. So I've now got two flowers. And this one here, I'm going to scale down, so I'm going to go to Edit, Transform, and scale. And just scale that one down. You can see all my copies are scaling as well. In fact, the quick thing here is, if I get that leaf, hold down the l to the option key and you can very quickly make a copy of something, you can do Command or Control T for transform and you can then scale them down and you can rotate them around, as well. So I think I want another leaf like that. Next to that one there. And I'm going to move my flour between those two leaves over there. Let's have another little strawberry over here. I'm going to hold down the alter the option key, drag my strawberry, once again, do Control or Command If you can't remember that it's edit, it's actually free transform in there. And this will allow me to rotate it and scale it. Down as well, so we'll have a little one over there. And I can keep going with this. I think I'm going to move my flour over to there. Maybe I'll make another copy of a leaf over there and put that leaf underneath the strawberries. Over there, make another copy of that leaf, rotate it round. You can see we can go on for ages with this. I'll put that underneath those two strawberries. Like so. Now that I'm happy with that, I'm going to just stop at this point. So if you'd like to get here, don't forget, make sure that your objects are smart objects, and then go to view and it's pattern preview in there. 10. Add Pattern to Kids Composition: Now that I've got my pattern, I'm going to go up to edit define pattern. And you can see it sort of cropped into that little square that we've got. I'll call this strawberries or straws or something like that. Straw. Click Okay. Now, that's made the pattern, and it's now in Photoshop's pattern library. I'm going to go back to my document over here, and I will just get rid of that gradient background that we've got. I'm going to put in the pattern. And you can see it's put in this sort of default pattern. If I click in there, if you can't see this by the way, just scroll down to the bottom, and the last one is that pattern that you've just created like so. Now, I want my pattern to actually be on a transparent background, so I want it to look a little bit more interesting than that. So if I go back again over here, I will just hide my background and do the same thing again. I'm going to go to edit define pattern. Straw B, click Okay. Go back into this document. And I'm going to go and add my new pattern. So I've got a pattern. Once again, down there, click on the pattern, and you can see how we've got the transparency in there. I can go to my scaling and I can scale it so it can make it smaller. I can go to my angle, and I can angle it to any sort of angle that I like, and I'll click Okay. Lastly, I think, I want to put a picture in the background, so it's actually on a texture, so I'm going to go to file. I'm going to say Place Embedded. And I'm going to find this fabric picture which I've provided for you. I'm going to pull that out. Over there, let's make it a little bit larger. I think that's about right. We'll click on the tick. And I'm going to go back to my pattern. And over here in the top, I'm going to go to the blend modes. I'm going to choose one of these blend modes to just blend it with a pattern below. So let's have a little bit of a look. Overlays a bit too light. Maybe some of these harsher lights might be interesting, or I will just go into multiply and multiply it with the background. You can see the texture coming through those leaves. As I said before, you don't have to be an amazing painter to create incredible patterns because as long as it looks roughly correct, it works so beautifully. Have a bit of a go with that. And once you've tried one pattern, try creating all sorts of other ones as well and see what you can do. 11. Use Effects On a Group: As you can see, I've been playing with the opacity and the blend modes of both my pattern and the underlying layer so I can see all three of those layers. But what I'd like to do is to do something to get the kids to stand out a little bit. Now, it could be a drop shadow. It could be a stroke around the outside, it could be a glow. We've got four children in there. We don't want to have to go through each one of them in turn to put in the same effect. So you can put an effect directly on the folder. If I double click on this area of the folder here, you can see I can go in and I can put in something on all of them. If I just, for example, clicked on stroke and put a little stroke around all of them, it will affect everything which is inside that folder over there. Or maybe I want an outer glow. So let's go with an outer glow over here, a little bit of a glow around them. That's a bit too much, a small glow over there to try and separate them from the background. And I can always switch that on and off. Yeah, just about works over there. Have a bit of a go with an effect on a folder as well. 12. Brightness & Contrast Plus Legacy: So far with the adjustments, we've looked at solid color, gradients, and patterns. But let's go down and have a look at this next set over here. This is all about lightness and darkness of the image. Now, we'll go to brightness and contrast first because it looks quite basic and it really is. But there is a little button over here that I want to talk about and show you the difference. See, if you use legacy and look at your brightness, you'll see it's brightening up the whole picture, and it also means that anything which is dark over here becomes lighter, as well. If I take this down, it's darkening down the picture, so even those things that are very light become darker. That's no longer white in there. So that's what legacy does. If you switch legacy off when you use brightness, it still keeps those darker areas. And if you use darkness, it still keeps those white areas in there. So be aware of the difference between those two. The contrast will increase the contrast or decrease the contrast on the image. Try it out. 13. Using Levels: I'm going to go to the next adjustment down, which is levels. Now, levels gives you something called a histogram. I'm going to pull it out so it's easier for you to see right in the middle. And what this does is it tells you how many or the amount of light through to dark pixels there are in the image. You can see with this particular image here, there's quite a lot of black areas in here, and that shows in the histogram right here, if we're looking at black through to white on this little gradient. But here, let's look at this graph. So what it shows is there's a lot of black going all the way up. Then it comes down, which means there's not quite so much of this sort of grays in the image, moving over through to almost white. Over there, there's light gray. There's not very much at all. And then it goes up again over here, which is a lighter light, which is probably the white of the sky. By the way, it's ignoring the color at the moment. It's working on all three red, green, and blue channels. That looks like quite a good histogram to me. But let's go and have a look at another image over here. So I brought up a histogram on this image, and you can see that there's a lot of these medium tones over here from sort of dark, almost black through to almost white in here. But there isn't anything in the absolute blacks, and there's nothing in the pure whites over here. Now, that might be absolutely fine. You might look at the picture and go, that's just the way that I wanted it. But most pictures tend to look a bit better if there is something even very small, which is pure black. So to do that, what we can do is we can pull this little stop up to where the detail starts. And can you see how we've now got something in there, which is black? It's made that darker. I suspect that there's some pure blacks in the middle of his eyes, maybe right over there in his mouth, possibly in his hair somewhere. So we go from that to that. And it's exactly the same with the highlights. There are no pure whites in here. I know this looks like it might be pure white, but it's not. If I go to this slider here and pull that over there, now, we're saying that the lightest part of the image will be pure white. And you can see how it's lightened up a lot of things in there. So this histogram now is showing the full range of tones from black through to white. If I just switch it off so you can see it before and after. Now, sometimes you might want that before look. Maybe it's you're looking for that old photographic film color type of look, and that's fine. But if you want to make sure that your image has got a full range of tones, get into your levels and make sure that those little sliders move to where the detail starts. Now, what about this slide over here? Well, I'm going to go back to this image to show you. This little slider will reduce the contrast. By the way, if you pull these in, this is increasing the contrast over there. So this one here will reduce the contrast. And what we can do is we can say, instead of having any blacks, I'm going to pull this over so I can say the darkest part in my image is this gray over here going through to white in there, or could do it the other way, and I could say the lightest part in my image is this gray over here, there's nothing which is lighter. In fact, if you do both of them, you get a very flat looking image like that. Now, why would one want to do this? Well, especially if you're doing, say, for example, a brochure, PowerPoint presentation, something like that, you want to put text on top of the picture. This is a great way of doing it because I can just pull this up and I can get that watermark kind of look to it and put my black text over the top, or I can go the other way, pull that down, and then put white text over the top of that, as well. There is more to the levels than just black and white, because you can actually go in here and you can work on your red, green, and blue channels individually. But for the moment, we're just going to take it as RGB altogether. 14. Using Curves: Let's move down to curbs. Now, with curves, you have a histogram in the background, and you've got this little line that goes from the bottom, which is black through to white at the top. So how does this work? Well, it allows you to lighten and darken the image. So if I were to click in the middle I can lighten up the middle tones over here. You can see they're lightening up more, but it's affecting the darker tones and the lighter tones less because the distance here is greater than that distance there. So by pulling this up, we're affecting the middle tones, but not so much the light or the darker tones. And in fact, because that's there, it doesn't affect the pure blacks, and it doesn't affect the pure whites, either. And exactly the same, I could darken the image down and once again, I'm darkening down the middle tones, but less so the darker areas or the lighter areas in there. But there's more to the curves than just lightning and darkening. What we can do is we can change the contrast of the image. So the way that contrast works is if you make your lighter areas lighter and your darker areas darker, you will be increasing the contrast on an image. And I can do that here by putting a little.in the middle. By the way, if you've put it in the wrong position, you can just drag it around or you can even drag it straight off. I'm going to click in the middle. I'm going to go to the lighter parts. This is the lighter part, remember, and I'm going to click and drag up a little bit. So what I'm doing is I'm increasing the lightness on the lighter part of this document, so it's just affecting the lighter bits. And then down here, I can make the darker parts darker. And you see with this little curve like that, it's very subtle. This is known as an S curve, well, because it's kind of shaped in an S shape there, we can increase the contrast. I'm going to go a bit extreme now so that you can see the effect that we're getting in there. See how the contrast is so much more prevalent. And that's because we are darkening down these darker pixels, but we're lightening up the lighter ones in there. Now, if we can increase the contrast, we can also decrease the contrast. So I'll just get rid of these whoops. So to decrease the contrast, we darken down the lighter parts, so you click over here to darken those down and you lighten up the lighter parts. This is a S shape as well. Over here. Obviously, we've got one S going one way and an S going the other way, but there's still those S shapes. So you can see how the contrast is so much less. Compare it to the increase of contrast, which is the S shape that way. It's a really nice, very, very subtle way of adjusting the contrast on your image. Now, you can also go into your colors as well. So, you know, I can go along to red, green or blue channels, and we haven't got to channels at the moment. But if I lighten and darken the colors here, I could go and do it on the red channel and lighten up the reds or darken down the reds or remove the reds in there. If we were to go in and we went and put in a color balance, I'll just find the color balance here. You can see that, for example, here, green is opposite magenta. So if I went in here and I went to green, by increasing the green, I'm subtracting magenta. By reducing the green, I'm adding magenta. Have a bit of a play with those lightness and darkness and contrast curves. 15. Exposure: Let's have a look at the last one in that set, which is going to be exposure. Now, exposure has three sliders. The exposure slider here affects the lighter parts of the image. You then have the offset. The offset affects the dark and the middle tone parts of the image. And lastly, the Gamma correction. Well, when I drag this, it's like if I went into the curves and I clicked in there and I pulled out those middle tones like that, you can see how we're getting a very similar result from that or the Gamma correction in there as well. 16. Hue, Saturation & Vibrance: Now, you're probably looking at this list of things and going, Oh, my goodness, do we have to go through all of those? No, we don't. I'm just going to pick out the more important ones for you. Some of them might be used very, very occasionally, but let's have a look at the ones that you'll be working with most of the time. Now, one of them is actually going to be this vibrance. What vibrance does is it allowed to increase the saturation, the amount of color in the image. Now, there are two sliders. There's vibrance here, and you can see if I pull it up, we've got sort a subtle effect on the image, and we've got saturation, which is a less subtle effect. The difference between them is that saturation saturates all the colors throughout the image, whereas vibrance just saturates the ones that are less saturated, so you get a much better result using vibrance. Now, let's have a look at another one. We'll go into human saturation. So with human saturation, we have got saturation and we can saturate the image colors. Look how awful that looks in there. We can also lighten and darken all the colors, or we can move all the colors along on the color spectrum. So, for example, here, if I start to drag the hue slider, watch her lips. And as I pull this along, her lips have now become green, her skin turned slightly green. But what about these colors up here? Well, they were blue, and the blue has now become red. So it's just moving all the colors along on the color spectrum. Now, what's really nice, though, is that we can actually target specific colors. So here, if I were to go and click on this red, there, I'm targeting the red, and I'm just affecting mostly the red colors in there. Or I could target just the yellows and predominantly change the yellows in the image. You can see how this yellow here is changing, but the colors on her face aren't because she hasn't got much yellow in her face. Let's go and click on the blues over there and target the blues and adjust predominantly the blues on the image. You could also increase or decrease the saturation on those specific colors. Now, rather than going down to the adjustments at the bottom here, if I want to use a human saturation, I can also do it directly from the image itself. If you don't have any adjustments up and you've clicked on the background, you could just go straight to adjust colors. This is the contextual task bar. If you can't see it, it's in the window menu. It's over there. All I've got to do is say adjust colors, and what it's done is it's put the adjustment on as a new layer. And, of course, that adjustment is the hue and saturation. We've got those colors that we've looked at already, but they also come down here to the contextual task bar. And I can then very easily go in, click on the blues and adjust it here rather than doing it at the top. It's just a quick and easy way of working. Let's change some of those blue colors to a different color in there. Once again, try it out. It's just a short cat. 17. Using Photo Filters: We've looked at color balance earlier on in this course. We've looked at black and white quite a few times. But what about Photoflter? Well, Photo filter just puts on a warmness into your image. Now, to do that, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to select his skin. And I'll go over to my selection tool, the Object Selection tool. And with the Object Selection tool up the top, it says, select people. I'm going to click on there, click on Hi. Now, what I want to do is I don't want to sect all of him. I want to select his, I don't want his eyes or anything. I want to select his nose. And then I'm going to hold down either command on the mac or control on the PC and say, I want his mouth, not his teeth, but his ears, facial skin, maybe his beard, as well, upper body skin and his hands. And then I'm going to click on apply. Now, I've got that selection in there. There's a little extra bit over there that I don't want. You can use any of your selection tools over here. I think I'll just go back to the Lasso tool, go to my subtract option, and just kind of subtract that bit over there. And then I'm going to go along to my selectin mask. If you can't see it the same as mine, just go to the view menu, choose either on black or on white and adjust the opacity of the background and add some feathering to it. This will soften the edge of that selection. Look like okay. Now, I'm going to go down to my adjustment lay because I've got a selection there, it will automatically make a mask for me, so it'll only affect that particular area. So I'm going to go down to Photoflter and all that we get is this very simple little color and a density slider. And you can see if I change the densensy, I can go for no photo filter through to a fairly extreme amount until he becomes orange. So the idea behind this is you can have a color, and you can then just change or warm up people's skin tones with this, and it works on all colors of skin to warm it up slightly. We have a warming filter there. We also, we have quite a few different warming filters. They're just slight different colors. We also have some cooling filters in here, so I could use this to cool down an image. Now at the moment, it doesn't look great because I've only got his skin selected. If I had the whole image, I could cool down the whole image quite well. But let's go back to the warming in there. I quite like what I've got, and you can see if you switch it on and off here, that's normal, and that's with the warming filter on. If you want to do a custom color, you can click on that color in there and you can choose any color that you like. To change the color of the warmness if there's such a word as warmness over there. But we're going to stay with that warming filter in there. Do have a bit of a go with this. This is a really useful one. I use it on most people in Photoshop just to give them a little bit more warmth to their skin. 18. Gradient Maps: I've pulled my layers out so that you can see the ones right at the bottom. I've got this image, and it doesn't look quite right, so I'm going to go down over here and I'm going to go to levels, first of all, and have a look at the levels. And you can see there's no blacks in this image. I'm going to pull it up a little bit until I get to the black details. There we go. We've got some blacks in that image now. If I thought the color was slightly off, once again, I could go in and effect the color. I quite like the color as it stands to be honest. But what I want to do now is I want to go in and I want to have a look at another option down here called the Gradient Map. Now, when you choose gradient map, very often, the first thing that happens is that the image appears to go negative. Now, what it's doing is it's taking a gradient and mapping the gradient onto the tones of your image. Now, I know that sounds a little bit weird, but bear with me. So I'm going to click on this little gradient over here. And at the moment, I've got white on that side and black on that side. If I was to reverse this, so let's just go along into the basics and do that one there, right. I've reversed it now. So this is saying any colors which are black in the gradient will be black on the image where they are black. Any that are white will be white. Now, that sounds pretty obvious, really, but look what happens if I change this black here and I'm going to choose a dark blue. Now you can see anything which is black or dark in the image is this dark blue going through to white. What would happen if I clicked on the white? And I changed that to a different color? Let's go with red. You can see now it maps those colors across onto my image. Now, the interesting thing about this is you can use any colors you like. You can add more colors in the middle. If you wanted to, I'm going to put in a green in there, and we get some horrible, horrible results. But you can also get some really interesting and cool results, too. Don't forget that you can always go in here and look at the other ones. I'm going to go into the purples and try some of these and see how those work. Mm. Interesting, but maybe not ideal. Don't forget you can also reverse those colors. Sometimes it looks better one way than the other. So if you want to add a gradient or a gradient map, shall I say, choose it. Click on the gradient in here, go and change your color. There. If it starts out looking weird, just change it and flip it the other way around. Like that looks negative. But if we undo the reverse, it looks better that way. And you can use custom colors or brand colors in there to get an image to match up with the main brands of your organization. Now, let's have a look at another image over here, which is a grayscale image. And I'm going to go down there to do the same thing, so I'll click on the adjustment layers. But look at that. A lot of these things are missing. Yes, I can get to the gradient map, but they're still missing. And if I choose the gradient map over there and I go and choose a different gradient, well, it just seems to not work at all. So what is the issue here? Let me get rid of that. Well, it's to do with this particular image, which is a grayscale image. Most of the images that you work on are going to be RGB images, but sometimes you're going to come across images which don't have color information. They're called gray scale. I go to the image menu and mode, you'll see that this one is set to gray scale over there. I'm just going to change it to RGB color, which will then allow me to work with color on that image. One of the other things to be careful with is if an image comes up as indexed color, you're going to find that a lot of things don't work on an indexed color image and you have to just convert it to RGB. An indexed color could be something like a gift file that you found on the Internet, which has got specific colors in it. If things don't work, just come and have a look in the modes and change things to RGB color. Now, if I go back to my layers, you can see everything is available there. And I can just go down to my gradient map over here, and then I can apply any of those gradients. Pick some different colors here. Got an orange in there, purple in there, click Okay, and maybe reverse it, like so. Have a bit of a go. 19. Using Invert for a Cool Effect: Let's skip down to some of these ones at the bottom. I want to use Invert. Now, invert just gives you that negative look, which well, it's interesting, but let's use it in a different way. I'm going to undo that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put a black and white adjustment layer over my image, and I'll just move these around till I get the look that I'm after over there. And then I'm going to take a selection tool, I'm going to use a rectangular selection, put it over half the image like that, and then I'm going to go down because this adjustment layer will now make a mask. I'm going to go down to invert, so it'll just give me a negative over half the image like that. Generally looks better if you do something like this using black and white. If I switch that off, you'll get the same thing, but with a color version over there, as I said, works better in black and white. Do try that one out. It's quite an interesting effect. Really easy to do too. 20. The Amazing Adjustment Brush: Let's have a look at other ways that you can put in adjustment layers. There is an adjustment layer brush on the left hand side. If you go down your t bar, you're looking for something which is a paint brush, but it's got a little black and white circle like the circle that you have on the layers panel. Let's click on that. Now, this circle uses a brush, so we have to go to the brush sizes, and at the top, we've got some brush sizes in here, and I can change the brush size to anything I like. Then to the left of that, we've got the type of adjustments. So I'm going to use brightness and contrast. That's the default one. But you can see we can use all of the different adjustments the same as we get with the layers. Now I'm going to just start to paint, and you'll see what happens if I paint well, it seems to be lightening up that area. And I can go to the properties now and I can adjust the brightness of that area using the brightness and contrast as we've done before. So what's actually happened? Well, if I go to the layers panel, you can see it's made an adjustment layer with a mask. Now, we're going to be looking at masks shortly, and I'm going to run through exactly how they work. But for now, all it's done is it's made a mask. So as I'm painting over there, I'm just adding to that mask. Let's try that again. I'm going to go down and get rid of that. So same again, but I think I will use a different option here. Let's use black and white. So using my adjustment brush, I'm going to go up here, choose a brush size. I think I'll get a slightly larger brush over there, and I'm going to paint now. So when I paint over here, what it's doing is it's just painting and making that area black and white. Once again, I can change the settings as we've done before. And I've got that as an adjustment layer. So if I don't like it, I can always bin it. But this is with a plus brush. So when I keep painting, it will keep adding to that selected area. If I go to the minus brush, then when I'm painting, I'm actually painting out from the mask so I can actually get rid of that and go back to normal. And you can work between these two, adding and subtracting the brush that you've got. Let's do one more. I'm going to get rid of that one over there. I'm going to go a bit extreme now. Using the same adjustment brush tool, I'm going to go up here, but I'm going to try different brush. You can experiment with all kinds of brushes in here. I think I'm going to go down, have a look at some of these other brushes over here and use one of them instead. So there's a weird one here called concept brushes. All purpose. I'm going to try that one. I'm going to make the brush really large. So up here, we'll make that very big. And instead of black and white, I'm going to use invert. So, whoa, that's big. Let's take that down a bit. I think I might have gone over the top with that. There we go. I think that's a little bit better. But you'll see now when I paint, what it's doing is it's doing a negative effect on there, so I can kind of have a negative effect over here and the positive effect going around the outside. Or I can click minus and let's just get rid of that bit over there. Maybe this bit of the guitar. As well. You get some really cool effects like this, using your paint brush to paint in different effects on the different adjustments. Try it out, have a go, try out any of these that you wish, and don't forget when you're using them over here, you can always go into the properties and change the properties in there. 21. Using "Apply to Object" With One Click: Now, if we go down once again to the adjustment brush, you'll see we've got some options down here. I am actually just going to change that brush back to a sort of a circle and make it smaller because otherwise, it gets annoying and gets in the way. But you can see this is vibrance, and I can choose from any of these adjustments over here. Once again, let me just pick brightness and contrast, and then it says apply to object. So if I click that button, rather than having to paint the guitar in it will find the guitar and apply it to the guitar. Oh, why hasn't it appeared? Well, all I've got to do is click and it's done. And you can see now that I've got that guitar selected. I can go to my properties and just adjust the guitar. Let me do that once more, so I will get rid of that one. I'm going to go down. I'm on the adjustment brush at the moment. Go down over here, choose the setting that I want. I think I will use Invert this time or black and white. Let's go with black and white. And then say apply to object, and then I've just got to tell it which the object is. So you can see as I'm moving around, it's finding the object, I will click the guitar has now gone black and white, and I can then adjust the settings in here. Now, I know what you're thinking, and that is, how about if we made the background black and white, but the guitar was in color? Well, you can do that easily by going to the mask, we'll be doing this later on. We'll look at the mask later on. But as you've asked the question, what we can do is we can actually invert the mask. And you don't do that from the adjustment layer, you go to image adjustments and just choose invert, and that'll make the mask go the opposite way round. So now the background is black and white, and the guitar is in color. It's a quick and easy way to make something color with a black and white background. Let's try that once more on a different image. Let's see what we can do. I'm going to say apply to object and the object is the person, I'm going to click on her. You can see she's gone black and white. I can adjust those black and white settings, but I go to my layers. Click on the mask on that little mask area there, not on the adjustment, and then go to image adjustments and use invert to get the opposite way round. So I can still go back to my mask, sorry, to my adjustment. Now I've clicked on the adjustment, back to properties, and I can then play with that background to get a slightly more interesting background where she stands out a bit more. Have her go with that. 22. Project: Professional Portrait Retouching - Intro Project: For this project, we're going to be working on a portrait, and we're going to take this portrait here and we're going to make it look even better. I mean, it is a great portrait. But as you can see, this is Fuji the cat, and he likes to come into the videos as well. Anyway, we're going to take this portrait, and we're going to make it so much better. So we're going to bring out the color of her eyes. We're going to increase her freckles so it just really brings them to life a little bit, and so many other things. But we're going to be doing it using adjustment layers with masks on it. Let's get started. Y. 23. Adjust the Whites of the Eyes: Let's do some work on this image, and I want to bring out certain things on her face like her eyes. They are so well, they kind of jump out and grab you ready, but I want to make them even more so. We'll bring in a little bit more color onto her lips, not make them go over the top and maybe adjust her skin ever so slightly. And we're going to do it all with adjustment layers. So I'm going to start off by selecting the area that I want to affect. I would like to affect initially her eyes. So I'm going to go along to my Object Selection tool. I'm going to go to select People. I'll click on her. And then in here, I can choose either her eyes, the whites of her eyes or the irises. Let's start off with the eyes themselves, the whites of the eyes and click on Apply. Now, when it does it, they're not perfect the selections. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, and you can see we've got this sort of What we just get rid of that for a second. You got this little area here, that little area there. We really are looking at the white the eye that we want to well, possibly lighten up. So I'm going to remove those. I'm going to use my standard lasso tool. I'm going to go to subtract at the top, and I'm just going to subtract the area that I don't want. You can see there's a little bit over there on her lower lid as well that I don't want to affect too much. And once again, let's get rid of that. But there, I'm happy with the rest of it. No, almost, there's a little bit over there. Now, what I want to do is I want to go along to my adjustment layers, and I want to lighten this area up just ever so slightly, so not too much at all. So I'm going to go over to brightness and contrast, so fairly simple adjustment and just use my brightness on there. Now, as you can see, I can go really over the top and make it look awful. But I'm doing this so that you can see how harsh that selection really is. I'm going to leave that brightness way up there, and I'm going to click on the mask. And in the mask properties, because you're on the mask rather than on the adjustment layer, on the mask properties, there's an option here to feather, and I can just soften the edge or feather that selection very slightly like that. You can go over the top and really feather it quite a bit if you need. So I just want to feather it slightly in there. Go back to the adjustment layer and then go and put this to where I want it to go. Now, I only want to do a little bit of whitening or lightning on here, not too much at all. The second thing that I'd like to do is I'd like to remove some of the color from the whites of the eyes because very often, rather than actually lightening the whites of the eyes, if you just remove some of the redness or the yellowness in the whites of the eye, it actually looks better than just trying to plain whiten them or lighten them up. So I now need to re select them again. But there's a shortcut. If I go to the mask and hold down on the machets the command on the PC it's control, you can see how my cursors change, and it shows a little dotted square there. If I now click, what it does is it just re selects that as a selection. So now I can go and do my next one. I'm going to go down here and I'm going to go to vibrance and in vibrant, I can desaturate it. So you see, if I go all the way back, how the eyes have actually gone gray, I don't want to do that much, or if I push it this way, we can get all the weird colors coming into the eye. So I just want to reduce the saturation a little bit to get rid of any color from the eye. It reduces these tiny little veins that are in everybody's eye so they don't look quite so prominent. So that's the first part is just selecting the eye. Don't forget you can click on the mask. You can go to the feather and you can at any point adjust the feathering on there. To copy a selection, hold down Command on a Mac, control on a PC. And as you move over that selection, you can just click to get another selection up, and then you can add your new adjustment layer in and it'll have the same mask on there. Have a go with those, get those eyes done, and then we'll look at what we can do with the iris itself. H 24. Adjusting the Iris & Lips With Curves: Let's do something similar to the eyes. So I'm going to go back to my Object Selection tool, select people, find her, go to the Irises, click on apply, and then we're going to change it. Now, it's really as annoying as you're moving across, having these pink things appearing all the time. So I automatically just go to another tool. Let's go down here and I'm going to go to the adjustments, and we're going to go over to the curves because what we want to do is we want to increase the contrast on her eyes. Once again, I'm going to go totally over the top so I can see the mask. Click on the mask, adjust the feathering slightly. So we have a slightly softer edge on there. Go back to the adjustment layer. It's this one over here, get rid of that. And now we can try it out. Remember to increase the contrast, you use an S shape. So if I click in the middle, I can go and do this sort of S shape over here. It's going to darken down some of those tones. It's going to lighten up some of those, as well. And you can adjust this to taste, so I can pull this up so I'm getting more of the lighter areas. Coming in. If we switch that on and off, you can kind of see a before and an after. It's just really beautifully showing up the colors in her eye. At this stage, if you want to do something else, maybe you want to put in a bit of tone into them or even go in and lighten them up totally or adjust the vibrant. You can just go in, hold down command or Control, click over there to get your selection back again and go and add in your next adjustment layer. I'll go to vibrant and I'm going to just push the vibrance up it's not doing that much. Let's try the saturation. Whoa, that really is bringing out so much of the color in there, probably a little bit over the top, to be honest, but it's there, and you can try it if you wish. Now, before you do that, let's go and have a look at her lips. So same thing again. Back to my adjustment layer, selecting people. Got to detect them again. Go in there, and we're going to choose the mouth, apply it. Get out of that tool very quickly. I'm going to go and put an adjustment layer on here, and once again, I'm going to use one of these options in here. I'll use the curves. And you can see as I adjust it, it's really over the top, so click on the mask and change the feathering over there so you get a really nice soft feathering. Then you can go back and you can be a lot more delicate with it. I just want to darken it down just a little bit in there. Now, because she's got sort of lighter and darker areas on her lips, if I were to push the contrast up, it would really make that a little bit over the top. So I'm going to go the other way. I'm actually going to reduce the contrast by doing this reverse S type of shape. I'll still pull that down to darken it down a little bit, but we've reduced the contrast ever so slightly. On ellips. Once again, switch it on NOF and see the difference that you're getting. If it's too much, adjust the settings or go to the opacity up here and reduce the opacity on that particular adjustment layer. You don't always have to do it in the settings itself. Have a go with that. Be subtle about it. 25. Adjust the Skin With Black & White: I now, I'd like to do something with her skin and maybe bring out these freckles a little bit more. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in and I'm going to select her skin. So I'll go to my selection tool, the usual, you know, select people. And I want to get her nose. I'm going to click on that. I'm going to hold down command on the Mc or control on the PC and select her upper body skin and her facial skin in there. So I've got that. We'll apply all of those so we get that selection. Now, there are a few bits which seem a bit strange. That bit there hasn't been selected in the middle. So you can always go in, go to your add option or your subtract option, and just add in the bits that you want or you don't want. So over here, there's her eyelids over there. I really don't want them in my selection, so I'm going to go to subtract and just subtract them really roughly because we're going to be using the um, feathering, anyway, so it's not too much of an issue, and I think that but oh, I've subtracted by mistake. I should be adding it in. Doesn't matter how long you've been working in Photoshop, it's so easy to get that one wrong. Now, I've forgotten her ears, as well, so let's just do her ears over there and this little ear over here. Fairly rough selection. This time, what I'm going to do though, I'm going to go to adjustment, and I'm going to use a black and white adjustment. Now, first of all, you think, why on earth have you done that? Well, with the adjustment, the black and white adjustment, because the skin tones are orange, you'll find that by using red and yellow, you can actually make the um, uh, freckles. I couldn't remember the word for a second. The freckles appear more pronounced by darkening them down. So I can darken down the yellow and maybe lighten the red a little bit and just adjust these two until I've got some more freckles coming out. So what I want to do now is I want to go up to where it says normal on this layer, and I'm going to choose luminosity. So you can see the luminosity there is just the lightness over there. It's darkened down her skin. Let's go over to the mask and feather the edge of that mask so you won't see the edge of that. In there and maybe change the opacity slightly over there. So we're darkening down her skin, but we're also at the same time bringing those freckles up a little bit. And you can always go back in there and make some adjustments in there. If I just adjusted these now, you can see how we can really push those freckles quite a lot. If I switch that on and off, it has darkened down her face a little bit, maybe not quite so much of the yellow over there. But have a bit of a go with that with your adjustment layer, being black and white, but then use luminosity in there. By all means, try some of the other ones. I kind of quite like using hard light over here because it gives us really interesting look over there where the skin goes very, very contrasty, in there. And same again, you can just adjust it to get different looks that you want in there. The first one I used though was luminosity, and you get a very soft look. Hard light will give you a much harsher look to the face. Try it out. 26. Group Your Adjustment Layers: I decided to go for soft light. Over here in the end, you can see it's very subtle now, and I can still adjust my capacity to get more of those freckles coming through. Like so. Now, lastly, to tidy this up a little bit, because we've got so many adjustment layers going on, what I can do is I can click on the bottom one, hold down the Shift key, click the top one, go down over to my folder, which is the group, click on that and put them all into a group, and I'm just going to rename this group with adjustments. The other reason I like putting all my adjustments into one folder is I can just switch them on, switch them off, and see the difference that I've made on my document. Don't forget when you're saving this, if you're saving it as a photoshop file, a PSD file, all those adjustments will be saved, ready for you to use later on. 27. Layer Masks - Intro: Layer masks are such an incredibly important part of Photoshop, and we're going to be working through them. I'm going to show you all sorts of things, including some tips and tricks that you can use with them. And then we're going to some projects after that. But while we're actually working through them, these are some of the images that we will be dealing with. Let's get started. 28. Show & Hide Layer With a Mask & Brush: Let's take this person and put them into this background. And I'm going to do it in the most simple way possible. I'm going to say select subject. So we've got her selected very quickly. I'm going to copy her. That's edit and copy. And I'm going to go over to this image, and I'm going to use edit and paste straight in there. Now, she is much too big for the scene, so I'm going to go and scale her down. This is all destructive at the moment what I'm doing. And yes, well, later on in the course, when we look at things like smart objects, you'll find that we'd make her into a smart object before we went and transformed her. I'll go to scale, scale her down. And I want her sort of standing next to the car over there. So I'm trying to get her to roughly the right size. She's going to stand over there, and we're gonna cut off this leg over here. I'm happy with that. I'll just click Done or click the tick at the top. It's the same thing. Now, first of all, the color, she doesn't look quite right for that scene. So I'm going to go up to filter neural filters. I'm going to use the harmonization filter. I'll just switch it on. And it says, Which lad do you want to harmonize that with Well, I'm going to choose the background. Now, she does look a little bit dark, so I'm going to just go in here. Actually, the strength is right. Maybe it's just the brightness. Maybe she does need to be a little bit brighter. In there, maybe add a bit of red. That looks better over here. So yes, I'm happy with that. I'll click. Okay. I'm outputting this, by the way, into the current layer, not making a new layer. So we just have exactly what we had before, and I can deselect her. I'm using the shortcut Command D or Control D to deselect her. Great. So she's in the scene, but her leg shouldn't be there the car should be showing in front of it. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to make a mask. I'm going to pull my layers out so it's easier for you to see. I'm also going to go to the top over here down to my panel options because you can change the size of your panel. So if they are a bit on the small side over there, just go to the largest thumbnail size in there. I will click Okay. Now, I can see the layers. I'm going to go to the top layer over there. Let's double click and we'll call this woman. So I'm going to click on the women layer and I'm going to add a mask. That's this little button down here. So I'll click on that, and it adds the mask in. Now, the way the masks work is that white shows the layer through Black hides. And you can either click on the layer. You should know this from earlier in the course or click on the mask. You'll see when I go to the properties here, if I click on that, it's the properties for that layer. If I click on this one, it's the properties for the mask. So I've clicked on the mask, and as I said, white shows black hides. So I'm going to go and get a paint brush over here. Just a normal old paintbrush. I don't want anything too flowery over here, a sort of a circular paintbrush. You can go into your general brushes down there, maybe a hard round brush if you like. Change the size that you can see what you're doing, I think that's probably a good start. And I'm going to change my foreground color to black. Now, there's some really nice little shortcuts here. The first one is, if you've got any weird and wonderful colors in there, you'll notice that because you're on a mask, it goes gray. If I click on this, you can see I've got some colors in there when I click on the mask, that's gone gray because I've chosen a I don't know mid purple, I think it was, I can't even remember. So to get those two back to black and white, which is what we want to start off with, you can either click on that little icon there, or you can press D on the keyboard. It's not control or shift or command or anything like that. It's just D for the default colors. And then when we start to work with these two, we'll want to be flicking them around, and you can do that with that little icon there, or you can just use X on the keyboard. Now, if you can't remember these, when you hover over them, you'll notice that there is a little the name of the item comes up and it also right at the end tells you the shortcut. So when I hover over this, you can see D on the end, hover over that once says X on the end. So I'm going to start off by flicking that over. I'm going to start with black. And when I paint on this layer, it looks like I'm actually erasing, but all that's happening is that I'm actually hiding that layer in there. So this hides that layer. If I keep going over there, that layer is hiding what is on this layer. Now, if I don't like it, I can throw it away. Going to drag just the mask and drop it into the bin. Now, this little window appears and it says, What do you want to do with this mask? Do you want to apply it, or do you want to delete it or cancel? Okay, we don't want to cancel. So which one of these should you use? Now, this one's orange and it says apply. That one says delete and sort of semi grade out. So one would think that you should say apply. It's kind of going, you know, pick me, pick me. If you choose apply, what it will actually do is it will cut that mask from your layer. It is very, very destructive. I've just undone that with Command or Control. So the one that we want to use actually is delete because that will delete the mask and your layer will still be there in full. Let me do that again. So I'm going to go and add a mask, click on the mask. I'm going to make sure I've got black, my regular paint brush with a normal brush size. And I can then paint this area out. I'm going to zoom in, so I'm using Command plus or Control plus to zoom right in there. And let's go and paint this leg out over here. Oops. Now, you can see I've gone a little bit too far over there. So if black hides and white shows, if I flick this around, I'm now painting with white, which means I can actually paint that back again. And we can just flick between these two. That's why X is so important to remember because when you do this, it's flicking your foreground, your background color around. So this one will hide Chris X, and that one will show. And it's very fast then to work on a selected area. What I normally do with that is I take the opacity down slightly on that whole layer so I could see the car. I might zoom right in, and I'm using black to just go up to the edge of the car. Over there, maybe that side. Over there a bit. Let's show the whole thing and then take the opacity up again, and we've got somebody who sort of vaguely looks like they are behind the car. Obviously, we've got no shadows, reflections, et cetera, but it's a starting point. So do have a bit of a go with this. I've provided these two images for you. Just copy and paste it in. Don't use a mask for her because if you do and you take her over as a masked shape, then you've got to deal with that mask as well. So we're doing it in the destructive way to start off with, scale her down, add the mask by clicking on the little mask button. Incidentally, if you click a second time, you get another mask. This mask here is actually called a vector mask. That's a pixel mask. We will come to this at a later stage in the course. So try that out, come back, and then we'll have a look at more things that we can do with this. 29. Mask From a Selection & Linking Layers: Let's get rid of this mask. I'm going to drag it into the bin over there. I'm going to delete it, so we go back here again. Now, the other way to make a mask is to have a selection. If I just did a little rectangle like that, clicked on her layer, and then added a mask. You'll see it will make a selection out of that mask. I'm going to undo that. So what I can do, rather than having to paint all the way on her leg, I could actually use a selection instead. I'm going to hide her layer. I'm going to go to one of my selection tools, and you can use any selection tool for this. I'm going to use the Object Selection tool. It looks like it'll select the car quite well. I'll click on there to make a selection, and I think that's done a reasonable job for the car. Now I'm going to go to her layer over here. And if I were to make a mask now, you'll see what it does. It makes a mask, but it's the wrong way round. Now, what we could do at this stage is we could actually go to the mask and we could go to image adjustments, and we could invert the black and the white of the mask. So now it's the opposite way around like that. Another way to do this is before you make your selection, you could go to the select menu and you could choose to inverse the selection. So remember, inverse is for selections. Invert is for pixels. So Invert inverses the mask. Everything is selected, except the car. And then I could once again add the mask in and it will do it the correct way. So when you try this out, have a go with either of those methods. I personally prefer to use the adjustments and just go to Invert over there to invert the opposite area, like so. Now that we've got that, she's by the car, and then I realize, Oh, you know what? She should actually be standing closer to the car. If I click on her and move her around, she moves, but the mask moves at the same time because the mask is linked to her layer. If you click the little link over here, I'll make sure I've clicked on her. I can now move her around anywhere. Behind the car, like so. You can see if I do that, she'll appear down there. So it means that I've got a lot of flexibility because I can then move her wherever I want her. By the way, if you click on the mask, you can then move the mask around, but that's quite difficult over there. So let me run through that one more time very quickly for you. We'll delete that. Select the item that you want. In which case, for me, it's the car over here. Oh, no. Because she's on the layer above, it's selected everything except where she is. I forgot to hide her. Honestly, that was a genuine mistake. Let me deselect this. Do it again, select the car. That looks quite good. I'll just come out of that tool because it's annoying with all the pink running around. Go to her layer, switch it on. Now, we want to add a mask. Go to the mask, so you're on the mask, not on the layer, so you're on the mask and then go to image adjustments and invert to invert the mask. Unlock it so you click on the little lock between those two, then click her, and you can then move her around anywhere behind the car. Have a bit of a go with that. 30. Layer Mask Shortcuts: If we go over to the mask and we want to see the mask just by itself without actually seeing everything else, if you hold down on the MAC, it's the option key on the PC, it's the lt key and click on the mask, that will just show you the mask all on its own. And once again, you can alter option click to go back again. If you want to disable the mask temporarily, hold down the Shift key, same on Mac and PC and click on the mask to hide it. If you want to see the mask and the picture all at the same time, hold down Shift and Option or Alt and click. Shift option and click again to get back to normal mode. Lastly, if you need a selection from a mask, hold down Command or Control Command on Mac, Control PC, and click to get your selection back from a mask. Try those shortcuts. 31. Mask on a Group: I'd like to change the person I've got here to this person over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select her. I'm going to copy her and move her across into this image and just scale her down. So we'll get her roughly to the right size. At the same size as the other person in there. That's perfect. Now what I want to do is I want to just basically take that mask and put it on there. Now, I could do that by holding down the command key and clicking and then going to this one and then making a new mask. Or, and this is so much faster, you can just drag your mask from one layer to another one like that. I'll just unlock it, and then I can move her around. Let's just hide that one. And there she is in there. It really is as easy as that to move from one to the other. Now, that's great if I can move one to the other like that. But what about if I had a whole group of people that I want to stand behind the car? Well, I'm going to get rid of that one there. So we'll just delete that and then let's go and find some more people. Let's use him. So I'm going to select him, copy paste, scale him down. And I'm going to put him into a group. I think that's always a bit too big. Well, let's move him down a little bit more. He's like that. So he's going to kind of be standing back there just looking up at the background. We'll make him a little bit smaller. I'm going to have her she's going to be standing near the front of the car, and this lady is going to be standing back there between the two of them. Now, what I can do is I haven't got any masks on. I've just deleted my mask. I can show you this from scratch. I'm going to take those three layers. I'm going to select one, hold down the Shift key, select that one, select that one, and make a folder. So they're all in that group. Let's name that. And now I'm going to just hide all of them, go back to my background and select the car. Select that very quickly. I'm now going to go and show the folder. I'm going to put the mask onto the folder, shall I say, so you can see that all of those people are grouped inside that folder with the mask. It's the wrong way around. There is a shortcut, by the way to flip between your mask, and that is, if you're on a mac, it's command and I, if you're on a PC, it's control and I. That is invert, like so. So it means that I can very quickly now go and move them around, so let's move him just back a little bit there so we can just about see his head. She can move over a little bit. And she can move into the middle between them over there. Of course, the great thing about having the mask on a group is that you can then have individual masks on these layers as well. So, for example, if I went back to her, I needn't cut and paste her. I can just add a mask to her and then move her across into here. Scale her down. And it's a bit too small. Let's make it a little bit larger. And because she's in that folder, the mask is there. If I were to move her out of the folder, you could see doesn't make any difference at all. I'll hold down the Shift key and deactivate her mask. The great thing about this is if I've made a mistake with my selection, I can always go back and tweak it. I 32. Using Generative Expand to Make a Banner: I've got two images here. I've got the woman against this grungy background, and I've got some guitars. And I want to make a banner for a guitar web a guitar website. And what I want to do is I want to have this to be more of a banner shape. So I'm going to go along, and I'm going to crop this to more of a banner size. And the banner I've been told needs to be 16 by nine. That's normal HD size. So I'm going to go over to my cropping tool. And I'm going to make sure I'm on ratio over there. Now, not with heightened resolution because if you do that, you put in 16 by nine in there, it will give you 16 by nine pixels. That's not right. So let's do ratio in here and I'm going to have 16 by nine as my ratio. So you can see it sort of pick that up very quickly because there is a um a default or a preset of 16 by nine in there. What I'm going to do now is to click and drag over there. And I'm going to pull this out because I want a bit more of her body down to her shorts over there. I think that looks about right. But she needs to move across a little bit, or I need to move my cropping across because what I want to do is I want to use these grids on the cropping tool for the most power on my image. You see, these grids here, they're often known as the magic thirds or the golden thirds. Those are the most powerful points on the image. You've got thirds that way, you've got thirds going across. So if I put my subject on a third, it's going to be the most powerful part of the image. If I want to be really powerful, I would move that up so that her eyes over there are exactly on where those two thirds cross. This point, this point, that point, and that point are the most powerful areas. Now that I've done that, you can see that there's a problem because I'm obviously going to be missing out some of that image. So I can either click Generative Expand there or at the top, I can go to generative expand on there. Just click on the tick and then wait for a moment while it generates the background for me. Right, that doesn't look too bad, but if you want to try some other variations, you'll find in your properties now, you have got versions of that. So I can just try some other ones and see if any of them look better. In fact, I think that first one looks about the best. I'm really happy with that. If I thought, you know, in two weeks' time I might want to try one of the other ones, I would leave it like this, but I don't want to. I want to actually just make this as simple as possible for now. So I'm going to go to Layer, and I'm just going to say flatten image, and it'll squash those down like that. Now, I'm going to bring in my other image, so I'm going to go across to this one here. I'm going to use my move tool, and I'm just going to drag up there, down to there and drop it in here. Now, this image is a little bit on the small side, I'm going to scale it up a bit so I will go to my edit transform scale, or I could use free transform and just pull it up a little bit, like so. Right. And I'm happy with that. In fact, I'll take it over a little bit more, like so. Right, have a bit of a go. Get to this stage with those two images, and then we'll use some masks to bring her through, but also to get the guitars to blend into the background. 33. Using Gradients on Masks: I'm going to put a mask on here, so I'm just going to go down to my masks, click on there to add a mask. And then what I want to do is I want to blend these together. Now, let me just show you a little bit with this brush. If I go and get a large brush, over here, and I paint out it paints 100% out because that is on pure black. If I were to choose, say, 50% gray and paint, you will see it will paint out 50% of that image. So the amount or the transparency of the layer is based on the percentage of gray that you use in here. Now, it's important to know about this because sometimes what you might do is when you're trying to erase something, you might think you're on Black, but in fact, you're only over there, which is sort of 90% black. And when you're trying to bring something back or erase it, there might still be a little bit leftover in the background and you think, why won't it go completely. So I'm going to throw that mask away. And I'm going to do it again. Let's add the mask in. Now, this time, rather than using a harsh brush, I'm going to go to the very soft brush, so I'm going to take my hardness down to zero, make my brush really big. So I've gone to, oh, that's nearly 3,000 for the brush. And I'm going to choose black over there. So now when I paint, you'll see what it'll do is it'll paint with a soft edge because the way that mask is working is it's going from black through the various shades of gray to white. Now, even that is still not quite right. I'm going to take my brush up a little bit. Let's try 4,000. I think that's a little bit better, and I can do a sort of a soft blend between those two. The larger the brush, the softer the blend I will get. However, there is another way as well. I'll add in my mask, and this time, I'm going to use the gradient tool on my mask. I'll go to the gradient tool up to the top, we're going to use in the basics a black to white gradient over there, and I'm going to make sure that I'm on the one on the left hand side, which is the linear gradient. And you'll see now if I click and drag, it just does me a nice soft blend between them. If I drag the other way, I'll be doing it that way around. But I'm going to start at the edge of the photo there, sort of slightly in and drag out that way to get a really nice soft blend between those two. The more I go, the more soft that blend will be. If I do something like that, I'm going to get a harsher blend on there. So I'm going to go and just do a slightly softer blend that way. Another thing that you could do, let's just hide that one for the moment is you could bring in an image pop it over the top, scale it up. So it's bigger than the other image there. I could then add a mask to that one, and then I could use once again, a gradient over here, but a radial gradient. That way, if I click over here and go out, I can kind of get this blend from the middle outwards like that, which is kind of quite a cool effect, really. Whichever way you want to try, just have a bit of a play with those two, and then we'll take this one on a little bit further. Personally, I like the look of that one over there, but we'll have a go with the other one in a second. 34. Painting Existing Masks: Let me hide the top one and go back to this one over here. Now, what I'd like to do is, I'd like to bring her back in full. So I'm going to hide that top layer, go over to her, and then I'm going to use one of these select subject options to select my subject, go back onto this layer and onto the mask. I've now actually got that as a selected area. Remember, it's on this layer over here. So all I've got to do now to bring her back because I've got a selection is use my paint brush. I'll just go and find my paint brush over here and then paint in that area. I'm going to make my brush a lot smaller and just harder. Maybe something. Along that line there. Now, do I paint with black or white? Remember, black hides and white shows. This can honestly just mess with your head so much. Black hides and white shows. I want to show her through, so I want to hide some of the guitar on that layer. So I'll be using black over there. And I just paint over here, and she appears. If you get it wrong and you start painting on there and you go, Oh, my goodness, don't worry about it. Commands, control, undo it. Flick over to the other color and paint it out. So what I've got to do now is deselect, and there she is with this nice blend going on what appears to be behind her. I'm going to do it again on the other image. So let's go over to this one over here. So first of all, I'm going to hide that layer, go to her layer, select her, switch this layer back on again, make sure I'm on the mask. And remember, I want to bring her back. So I'm going to be using black. So I'll use my paint brush, black, and I can then paint her back. In full, and we can then deselect that selection. Nothing set in stone. I haven't adjusted the background. That's all we're doing is masking her out. Have a bit of a go with that one. 35. Add & Subtract From Selections On Masks: I've got a few adjustment layers over here, and my adjustment layers have got masks on them. So there is this one over here, which is her hair, I will just show twos. That's a little subsection over there. There is this one over here. Which is her face. And there is this one over here, which is her arms and her legs in there. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to make a selection with the arms, legs and her face as a new adjustment layer. So, as I've said before, if you hold down on the Mack itts command on the PC, its control and click, that makes a selection for you. I've got one selection. I also want this selection here. So if I command and click on that one or control, click on that one, it selects the legs. So how do we get both of them in there? Well, if I command or control, click on this one, then go to this one and hold down the Shift key. You see a little plus appears when I hold down the Shift key, click on there, and it will add that one into the other selection. So with keyboard shortcuts, you can add to your selections. Let's say I want to add the hair in as well, I can once again command or control shift and click on the hair to add the hair into that mix. I realized, Oh, you know, with this selection, I didn't want to have her face selected. Well, I can go to her face, Command or Control and Alt. You can see how the minus appears, and I can then subtract that from the selection. So by using Command or Control and Shift, you can add command or control and Alt to subtract the two of them. It's a really good shortcut because it means that very quickly you can make selections. So here I will just Command click on that and then hold down Shift and Command or Control click on that one. And now I can get in my new adjustment layer. I'm going to do Photoflter and then I'm going to just make her skin look a little bit warmer, like so. Do have a bit of a go with that that's a really useful shortcut. 36. Select & Mask As Well As Cloud Selections: I want to cut her out, and I want to put her onto this background over here, and I want it to be quite a high resolution file. So I want to do a really good cutout. Now, we've got a few problems. We've got her hair around there, which needs to be cut out. We need to make sure that everything like her shoes are properly cut out, as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go along to believe it or not, my Object Selection tool. But in the Object Selection tool, we've got various settings, and one of them over here says, select subject, which is fair enough. If I go to the right of that, I'll click on the drop down. It says, Do you want to do this on the device, which says quicker results or in the Cloud, which is more detailed results. I want to be as good as possible, so I'm going to go to Cloud, and then I'm going to say select subject in here. And you can see it takes a little while while that selects the subject, and it does quite a good job. But we want to make it even better still. So I'm going to click the Select and Mask button. Now, the Select and Mask button, if you can't see it, you can always get to it by going to the select menu and choosing Select and Mask in there. It's exactly the same thing. It opens the image up in this select and mask window. And let's have a look at some of these settings. Now, the first thing is, when you come in here, you'll find that your opacity is usually set to about 50%. And you might find with these preview settings that you're set to something like marching ants, overlay on white, on black. Now, if I left this on white, it's not really going to help me much because she's on white already. So I will put her on black in there, and I'm going to make sure my opacity goes right the way over to 100% so I can see exactly what's happening in here. Look at the little buttons that we've got over here. Now, I'm going to come back to these two at the top. But this one says real time refinement. So if you have that switched on, you can see exactly what you're getting. But it does slow things down. If you're on a slow machine, you might find that things are not quite as quick and you have to wait for the preview to happen. We also want to make sure we're seeing the high quality preview for this. Now moving down a little bit over here, we've got refine mode. Now, if you can't see these, just click on the little arrow on the left hand side, and we can either refine something with color aware or object aware. And I'd suggest when you go to an image, trying both of them and seeing which one gives you the better results. On this, it's not really making any difference at all. So I'm going to move down a little bit to edge detection. And this will show me the edge that is being selected. I'm going to zoom in a bit. I'm using Command plus or Control plus to zoom in, and I'm just going to move up a little bit over here. Let's go over to hand and zoom in a little bit more. So with edge detection, this will show us the edge and increase the edge that is being detected by the software to do the cutout. Now, you can play with this and go, Well, I don't know what difference this is making at all. How's it working for me? The hand started to disappear. Well, with this, I'd suggest switching on show edges. And now when you pull this over, it will show the edge which is actually being detected. In there, you can see if I go up to the hair, we can see that, the hand, I can see that. If I go too far, those are the pixels that are being detected. Now, it's better to actually get that as narrow as possible. So you're just getting a few pixels that are being detected around the edge. Moving further down, and I'm going to switch off that show edges for the moment. Moving down over here, we've got things like smoothing. If you've got rough edges, let's just take that radius down a little bit over there. By the way, there's a smart edge smart radius in there as well. Sometimes switching that on helps with the radius edge. Over here, we've got smoothing. So what smoothing does is it smooths out the edges of your selection. If I push this over to one side, takes a moment, and it's just smoothed out those. This is great for products and things which you've got edges where you just want a really nice smooth feel to it. People and hair not always the case. Feathering softens the edge of your selection. We've looked at feathering in the past, and I can just feather that and make that edge as soft as I want. Contrast does the opposite of feathering. It gives you a very hard edge. Once again, it's great for product photography, objects, that sort of thing when you need that very, very harsh edge in there. Let's just take that back down again. And lastly, my favorite over here, this is shift edges, and this allows you to move the edge out. Well, you can see that looks awful, or in to tighten up your selection in there, that looks so much better. Now, my personal settings in here that I like are maybe in the smoothing, just one to take off any tiny little bumps that there might be. I use feathering, but only a minimal amount, maybe 0.3 of a pixel in there to just get rid of that very, very harsh edge. And then I take my shift edge down to get rid of that edge in there. So before we click Okay and look at the other settings, try it out. Have a look at it. Don't worry about the hair at the moment. I haven't done anything with the hair. So try that out, leave your select and mask window open, and then come back for the next movie, and we'll look at the settings on the left hand side. 37. Refine & Decontaminate Hair: Let's have a look at these settings on the left hand side. Now, the one at the top is the quick selection tool. It's the same as the one that you get in the rest of Photoshop. The next one down is a really useful one. It's called the Refine Edges tool, and it's great for hair because what you can do is you can just paint along the hair, and it will refine the edge of the hair. You can use it on shapes as well, although sometimes it can actually give you weird results if your brush is too big. What I'm going to do though before I do that is I'm going to click the refine hair button at the top. And this will help to refine the hair. I don't know whether you notice, but my hair actually looks better than it did before. If we just switch that off, and we'll just undo that and switch it on again, we've got a slightly better hair than we had before. Now, I'm going to just use this tool and just paint along here. And refine the edge of the hair. It doesn't look like it's done much, but it has helped the hair. After that, we have more of the selection tools, the same things that you get in Photoshop. Once again, there's a brush tool that you can use for painting. There's a selection tool, which is the object selection tool. There are lasso tools which you can use to add and subtract, and then finally a hand and a Zoom tool. Now, let's go over to the other side because when we go to the output settings, I want to use something called decontaminate colors. And what this does is it changes the colors around the edge, particularly of the hair, to the same color as the hair. So for example, if you've got an image where you've got a back light coming directly behind the person, and it's put ever so slight green tinge on the hair. You'll find the decontaminate colors can then just go along and change the hair to the same color as the rest of the hair and not have the green tinge to it, particularly useful if you're cutting out on a very bright color. I will switch it on, and I don't know whether you noticed, but there was a big jump in the hair there. Let's switch that off again. So from there to there, it's really tightening up that selection. You can choose how much you want in here. I'm going to kind of take that back a little bit to maybe a medium amount. And then when we go down here, we then output two. Now, you could output to a selection or a layer mask before, but the moment that you switch on decontaminate colors, it needs to make a copy of the layer because it's actually going to do some destruction on the layer, which I'll show you in a moment. We could then choose to have this as a new layer, a new layer with a layer mask, which is what I'm going to do, a new document or a document with a layer mask. Let's go with a new layer with layer mask. I will click Okay, and look at that. That's a really nice cutout on the hair. I'm going to just switch this mask off so that you can see what's done with that decontaminate colors. I'll hold down the Shift key and click on the mask, and you can see how it sort of painted that brown behind the hair and onto those little bits of hair so you don't get any of the weird colors coming in behind. Now, once you've done that, take your layer and your mask, dragon drop it into the next image, like so. Have a go with that and try out some of those settings. 38. Independent Styles: There's a few things I want to do here. I'd like to make her a bit smaller, and I've also noticed there's a little line that goes down this image. So let's deal with that first. I'm going to just zoom out slightly, so command and minus to zoom out, control and minus, as well. By the way, if you want to get your picture to fit into the screen size, use Command and zero to fit it to the screen size. Or Control and zero. Now, I'm going to go along, and I'm going to use the spot healing tool. So this is a bit old school ready. It's destructive. I'm going to make that brush a little bit smaller. I'm using the left square brackets on the keyboard. I'm going to do one click over there, move down to the other side, hold down the Shift key, and do another click, and there we go. It's just got rid of that line really, really quickly. So by shift clicking, you can get your paint brush to paint a straight line between two points. Now, let's go back to this woman over here, the cutout. I'd like to have a drop shadow behind her. So if I go in and I put a drop shadow in, I'm going to double click, and I'm just going to put in a little drop shadow there, and maybe I will, let's see. We'll move that to the top so the drop shadow light is coming from here and going downwards. I can change the size of that, and I'm happy with that. Now, I'm going to resize her because I want you to see something. When we resize, I'm using Command or Control and T, or you can go to the edit menu and choose Transform. I'll zoom out a little bit, and I'm going to scale her down. Now, I've scaled her down. I'll click the Enter button, and I'm going to move her around, so I'll go to move to here. Can you see there's a little line over here from the drop shadow? In fact, if I hide that, it's more obvious. So the drop shadow is also looking at the outside of this and the mask. So how can we get around that little problem? Well, easily we could actually use a paint brush. Black is my foreground color, go to my mask, and I could paint it out like that. That'd be one way of working with it. The other way to work with it, let's go all the way back to the beginning over here before I'd actually scaled her down. Go down to layer style, and in layer style, we're going to choose to create a layer. What this does is it takes the effect and makes it a new layer like that. So now if I switch that on and off, you can see the effect has now become a new layer, which I can then move around independently from my shape. I'm going to select both of those at the same time. I'll click on one, shift, click the other. And just to be sure, I will click the little link over here. So now, even if I select one of them, when I move it around, the other will move at the same time. And I can then scale them down, so I can scale this down to any size I like and you won't see any line around the outside. The great thing about this is that if I unlink them, I can go to the shadow, go to transform, and I can then just adjust that shadow. Maybe so it's looking a little bit like that. So we have an entirely separate shadow that I can work with. Have a bit of a go with that. So once you've put your effect on there, go to layer, layer style, and choose to create layer from that style, and then you can treat it as an independent object. Give it a go. 39. Project: Issues with Cutting Out Hair - Intro: For this project, we're going to take this man, and we're going to cut him out. And we're going to concentrate on the hair and make sure that we do a really good hair cutout. And I've got some tips and tricks to show you with that. And then once we've done that, we'll put him behind the car, and we'll do some shadows to make him look like he really was in that scene. Let's get started with it. 40. Cutouts & Address Hair Issues: Now we're going to be putting the person behind the car or appear to be behind the car. So the first thing to do is to cut him out. And I'm going to use my Select Subject option over here, or if you prefer, you can go up to Object Selection and select him that way. We're going to get a very similar results either way. But I'm just going to select him. And then we want to have a look at the selections, so we're going to go to select and mask. Now, I've put this against a black background there against a white background. Yeah, that works too. Either way, make sure your opacity is right up. You want to be able to see the problem that we have with a hair because we've got a green background, there's going to be a little bit of green coming in there. We also want to check the edges to make sure that nothing is coming through on the edges. Now, I'm going to zoom in so I'm using Command plus to zoom in or Control plus over here. There is a small issue of a little bit of green on his clothing. Now, we're going to have to deal with that separately. But the main problem really is the hair over here. Now, let's have a look and see what we can do with some of these settings. So first of all, moving down over here to our refined mode, let's try the edge detection and see what we get with that. By putting it along, you can see we're getting more of the original hair coming back, which I actually do want. I want some of those little hairs coming in over there. You could try Smart radius and see if it actually does anything for you, but I think the radius going up will give you what you need. Now, if you're not sure of something, whether it's like white hair against a white background or whether it ready is correct, you can go to the view menu and you can see on black and white, that will show you your exact mask. So that's a really useful one to try out if you're not sure about the selection itself. So I'm going to go back to on white over here for the moment. I might have got too much on that refined edges. Let's go back again, have a little bit look on black. I think that should be okay for what we're about to do. And once again, just keep checking the on black as well. Now, because my background is mostly white or a lighter color, that's why I'm checking it on a lighter color. Moving down over here, I'm just going to go to the shift edges and pull the edges in just a little bit, not too much because you can see how we start to lose the hair in there. And if I push it out, we're getting more of the green. So maybe just a tiny amount to get rid of a little bit of the green from the edges in there. Most important of all, is going to be the decontaminate colors. When we switch that on, you can see how a lot of the green has just disappeared. I'll switch that off again and you can see how some of that comes back in again. If you want to use some of these selection tools at the top, by all means, try out the refined edges and paint along the edge to see if you can improve that edge at all. Sometimes you can get some really, very, very good results. With that, sometimes it doesn't do that much at all. Really, there's no right or wrong here. You just use all these tools to try and get the best out of your photograph because every image is going to be different. I'm going to say decontaminate colors, so I've put that on, so that's gotten rid of most of the green around the edge of that image. And then I'm going to make a new layer with a layer mask. That's at the bottom over here, and I'll click Okay. So this has now created a new layer with a layer mask. Let's just hide the layer mask. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and click on it to hide it. And you can see what that decontaminate colors has actually done. It just colored up some of those hairs in the same colors the rest of his hair in there. Once again, I will just hide that so that's before. That's with it. But when you put the mask on, you get a much better result. I'll just turn off the background for now. Now, if there are times when you find that there is a little bit of green coming through or your colours bleeding through onto the image, because a light jacket like this against a green background is. It's going to reflect green. One of the tricks I use is I go along to my paint brush, and I'm going to go from normal down to color. Now, why is it grayed out? Well, it's because I'm still on the mask. I'm going to make sure I'm on the person themselves. I'm going to make my brush. Medium size, small, and I'm going to make it a soft brush as well there. And then we're going to go from normal down to color. Now, before I do it in color, I will just show you what happens if you don't do it in color. I'm going to just select the color of his jacket in there. And if I were to just paint now, you can see we just get that well, flat area. But if you change this to color mode and then paint, what it will do is it'll just paint in the color without affecting the lightness and darkness. Now sometimes when you try this out, you might think, it's gone a little bit too gray. Let's undo that and maybe we can sample a different area here, which is maybe a bit of a more of a yellow color. I also very often take the opacity down, so I'm not doing it all at once, and then I can try that out. That's actually done the trick. There's a little bit of gray here. Oh green here, shall I say, I'll paint that on. Having looked to see if there's any other. Oh, that bit looks particularly green. So I'm going to sample this color here and then just paint out that with color. To get rid of the green from there. If you while you're doing this, find little problem areas like that one over there, go to your mask. You should know this by now, get your paint brush, and we're going to get a small brush and just paint it back in or back out. So I want to be using white this time, and I'm just going to paint that area in, I must make sure that my opacity is set to 100% for that. Let's just paint that bit back in over there. So do check the edge very, very carefully. Now we're happy with that. And in fact, just before we do that, I'm a bit worried that this hair still looks a little bit green. I can use the same trick that I've just shown you by going back to the hair over there. Let's sample a bit of hair colour, which I think doesn't look too green like that there. Large soft brush. Color mode, 50% on here, and I can just paint over those bits, try and get rid of some of that green from there. Be careful. Don't go over his skin because otherwise you're going to find you're going to be turning his skin to a sort of gray hair color. I think that's pretty much done what I wanted. If I just hide the mask for the moment, you can see this is the area that I was painting with that sort of color, colorizing it up to get rid of the green. I'm happy with that, and I'm now going to take him over here, up to this image, and drop him in there, like so. That's a nice cutout against the background. We are going to put him behind the car, but have a bit of a go with doing a really good cutout with the hair particularly paying attention to the color that bleeds through. If you don't get anything else from this example, just get there's ways to get rid of any colorizing that comes in the image into the cutout image. Have a go. 41. Mask Out the Car: I want to scan him down. One of the things that can happen when you are scaling things down when they've got a mask on them, especially if you scale them a lot, is that the mask slightly sometimes it doesn't become detached from the image, but it shows through a little bit of pixels that you might not otherwise have wanted to come through. We saw it last time when we scaled something down and you saw a few little pixels right on the very edge. So there's two ways you can get around. There's the destructive way, which is what I'm about to do here, or in the next session in the videos, we're going to be looking at smart objects which are a better way, nondestructive to do this. I'm going to drag it into the bin and do we choose apply or delete? Well, we choose apply because this is going to be destructive. It's going to cut out the background, and there were left without person against the background, and I can now scale it down quite happily. So I will do that now. I'm going to just go along. I'm using the shortcut, which is either Control T on a PC or Command T on a MAC. That takes you into free transform, and I'm going to scale him down a little bit. So he's about the right size. For the car. Now, the way that I'm looking at this is I was looking at if he was standing in that doorway, how big would he be in the doorway, and he'd be probably about that size. It looks like it's quite a short doorway there. So that's what I'm assuming he's going to be ever so slightly bigger because he's standing slightly forward next to the car over there. That looks okay. I'll click on the tick. Now, you can see there's this nasty little line coming down the background, which is going through his head. Gonna hide this, and I'm going to get rid of that line easily just using the spot healing brush tool. I will zoom in a bit over here, and I'm going to do one click there. I'm going to hold down the Shift key, and I'm going to click over to that bit. I'll then manually paint this bit out. And then I'm going to continue on. Click, hold down the Shift key, and click. I'm just holding down the Shift key all the time so I can just click from one point to another, like that. So click Shift click. If you've got a steady hand, you can do it manually like this as well, just going down. But if it's a long straight line, very often, it's easier to just do it with the shift click method. Okay, we've got a bit of a plant issue there, so I'll just take out the plant completely. And just leave that little stick sticking up in there. If you want to take that out, that's absolutely fine, as well. Now, we need to then create a mask for him, so he looks like he's standing behind the car, so we'll go to the car. Once again, I will hide that. And we want to select the car. Let's use select subject because it'll be the quickest way to do it. It hasn't give us an asso grade selection. Look at this edge over here, which it's just not very good. So what I'm going to do is use a different selection tool to try and add that in. Let's see what we can do if we use this little tool here. We might get a better result. I'll deselect that. We move to the car, it's pretty much the same, really. It's the same sort of selection that we have there. Let's see how this works if we use one of the other tools like the magnetic lasso tool. So I'll start over there with the magnetic lasso tool. You click once and you just hold it or sorry, you just move it. Don't hold down the button. I'm going to move along over here down the window. It's going up onto those plants, but we'll fix that in a little while. I'm not worried about doing the entire car because Reddy, he's just gonna be in that area over there, up to there, and back again. Let's clean this up, so I'll zoom right in, and I'm just going to use this time the um I always mispronounce this log. Oh, you know what I mean? The polytol. I'm going to go to the subtract option, click over here, up the window. And subtract the ill section. You can then just work your way around if there's any other little bits that you want. The other thing that would be nice over here is to see him through the car window. So I'm going to come back to that area over there, and we're going to do it slightly, slightly separately from this piece, but I haven't forgotten about that. I know he'll look a bit weird for now. I'm going to click on his layer over there. I'm going to add a mask. It's the wrong way around. I click on the mask. Now, you can either use Command or Control and I to invert it, or if you look at the properties, there's an invert button in the properties to get it to go the other way around. 42. Save Selection as an Alpha Channel: What I like to do is I like to color him up. I'm going to be using the neural filters to get his color more in keeping with the rest of the image because he looks far too bright in there. Now, there is a problem that I want to show you. You see, if you have a mask on like this, when you use the neural filter, what it'll do is it'll just apply it to the area that it can see. It won't apply it to the hidden area, which might be okay except you might then want to actually move him around and then it'll be a problem. Let me show you what I mean. I go in here, I'm going to go into my neuro filters. I'm going to put on this color one here, switch it on, choose the background. You can see how it changes color there a little bit, and I will click Okay. ARD select that. So what it's done if I hide this is it's only affected that area over there. It's a destructive filter, and it's only affected that bit in there. Now, we can talk more about using smart filters later on, but for now, that is a problem. So we'll just undo that. What about if I hid the mask? Well, if I now go to filter neuro filters, you see, straightaway, it just puts that mask back on again. So, how could we actually do this? One of the ways to do this is to actually just get rid of that selection or that mask. Now, we don't want to get rid of it. It took us a while to actually make a nice selection. So what about if we instead of actually deleting it, we save that selection. So how could I do that? Well, if you hold down Command or Control and click on the mask, it makes a selection for you. And you can save selections as channels. These are known as Alpha channels. If you go along to the select menu, go down to Save Selection. And I'll give this selection a name. I'll call it Car. Click Okay. And I can then deselect that and I can throw this mask away. Obviously, it would have been a lot easier if I'd done all of this before we made the selection. But in real life, that's not always the case. L just apply delete that to get rid of it completely. Now I'm going to go do my filters. I'm going to go to the neuro filters. I'm going to go to this harmonize filter, switch it on, find the background, make sure the color looks okay. I think he needs a little bit more color in him, but more saturation. In there. I think that's okay. And maybe brighten them up just a little bit, too much. I'm happy with that. I'll click Okay. Now, that's affected the whole of that layer. How do we get the other one back? By the way, it's made a new copy of that over there, so that's the original underneath. How do we get our mask back? Well, if you go to select, you can say Load Selection. And in the channel, you just choose the channel that you named Car. Click, okay? There's the selection back, and we can then bring the mask back on top of that. Now, it means that we've got a copy of that layer. I've just hidden it. I can always go to the man, unlink him from the mask, and I can move him anywhere around underneath that I need. 43. Mask in Shades of Grey: Let's bring his body back. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use one of the selection tools over here. I'll just use the magnetic lasso tool, zoom in a bit and make a little selection around the area where I want to see his body. So all the way down over here around If it's a bit of a problem, remember you can either add or subtract from your selection. I'll just add that little bit in over there that I missed. And there's a small bit over here that I've missed. As well. So how do we get that into the mask? Well, if I click on the mask over there, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my paintbrush. There we go. You can see how it's coming through like that. Now, why is it actually coming through at a low percentage? That's because my opacity is set to 35%. If I take it up to 100% and then paint, you will see we'll get the whole of that man's body coming through onto the mask. So you can see how I've actually painted it out over there. Of course, we might want a little bit of the background, so it almost looks like it's reflecting. I know it's not a real reflection because we'll have some of the wall coming through, but it'll give that slight impression. So instead of painting with 100% white, if I painted with, well, let's say, a very, very light gray over there, instead, you can see it's less harsh. Over there. So when we look at it, it looks like there's may be a bit of a reflection. You can play with your percentages over here, take it down, have more gray, try that one out and see what that looks like. That's probably more realistic in there. And we can deselect that. Now, of course, you can see that he's a problem because he's up there. I'm going to move him down, so I'll make sure I'm on his layer, not linked to that layer there, and just move him down a little bit like that. Don't forget if you want to see that mask. Just hold down option or the old key, and you'll actually be able to see exactly what that mask looks like. Once again, alter option, click on the mask to come back again. Now, we still need some shadows in there, but that'll be in the next video. Try that out so long, have a little bit of a go with getting his body to appear through there by using a selection with a paint brush on a mask. 44. Custon Shadows with Masks: About some shadows? Well, he's going to be easy because all I've got to do is to double click on him and go and put in a drop shadow over there. However, look at the issue that we've got. With that drop shadow, because we've got a mask on there, it's actually coming through and applying the drop shadow onto the car, if I just make that a little bit worse over there. Now, that is a bit of an issue. So let's try something else. Very often, it's easier to make a shadow than it is to actually use one of the premade shadows. So how can we make a shadow from that? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a paint brush. I'm going to put in a new layer in here. I'm going to get a largish brush over here. I'll paint with black, and I'm just going to paint an area in with a soft brush. Around him. Shadows don't need to be perfect. That's the great thing about them. You can just sort of paint them pretty roughly like that. If I put that little shadow behind him and then move it around, you can see how it also sort of appears to be a shadow underneath him. So, the first thing is that I can actually take this mask, hold down the alter the option key and drag a copy of that onto the shadow so the shadow is now only appearing behind him. The second thing is that I can go up to the top to the opacity. I can reduce the opacity on that shadow. We just want something which is very subtle behind him. And you can always go in here and just paint out the bits that you don't want. So if I see some of the shadow over there, I could use my as till and largish brush. I can just paint out that bit of the shadow with the eraser on there or use the mask. What about a second shadow? Because that one's okay behind him? Well, a second shadow, I want to have a shadow which actually looks like it's behind the car but in front of him, so on him to darken him down a bit. Once again, I will make a new layer. I'm going to go and get my paint brush, just a normal brush there, and paint a little bit over here. Where there might be a bit of a darkening on him because of the car in the background. So once again, a few issues that we've got. The first one is that I actually just want it to be on him, not on the background. If I hold down the lt or the option key and move between those two layers, remember this is your clipping mask and clip that to his layer. You'd see it's pretty perfect, it's only on him. Now all I have to do is to go to the opacity and change the opacity to get the darkening coming in. If you do a brush like this and you think, Oh, my goodness, I've done it too hard, a little trick is you can go to the filter menu, go down to your blurs, use some Gaussian blur and just blur it out a little bit. I can blur that shadow a little bit more. You can see how I can soften it a bit more if I need. But I'm going to take the opacity down so you can barely see it, but you'll know if it's there or if it isn't. Have a bit of a go with that last, but the shadows are so important, they really do make the image. If I just switch that one off and that one off, you can see, Okay, it looks right, but it's not as good as if we've got that. By the way, one last thing here is if we had that, you can see the difference from there to there, and we've done a pretty good job on that. Have a bit of a go with that and do some of your own custom shadows. 45. Project: Multi Image Advert - Intro: In this composition, we're going to be using masks. We're going to be doing cutouts. We're going to be doing adjustment layers, and we're going to put this whole image together, which could be an advert for a made up perfume company. You'll see how it goes as we go along. Let's get started. 46. What We're Doing & Cut Out Model: To create this picture, we're going to start off with this roses picture in here. We're then we're going to cut out the portrait of the model and put her in, and we're also going to be then adding the flowers onto her head. Now, when we start, we'll find that the roses themselves look too sharp. So what we're going to do with the roses is we're going to put on some blurring using the blur gallery. If I just switch that off, you can see how they become sharp, switch it on, and they blur slightly. When it comes to the model, we've got a few things to do, as well. First of all, we will be looking at obviously cutting her out. Then we're going to be doing a little bit of blurring to get her to sort of blur out slightly so that the attention is on her face, her eyes, particularly. We'll also bring out the eyes by using some adjustment layers. You can see I've got these three adjustment layers in here, which are going to really bring her eyes out and get them to pop. We'll also be adding some color. You can see how we're just coloring up her hair to blend it into the background, and moving on to the top section, we'll be adding in the flowers in there, once again, looking at a bit of blurring because they've been too sharp by themselves, we'll be putting in a bit of a custom shadow underneath them so they look like they're in the right area, as well as various other lightning darkening and color changing on those flowers to get them to blend in with everything else. Finally the text, which is going to have a drop shadow behind it. See if I switch off the drop shadow. There it is. But the drop shadow is using the color from the image at the same time. Now, let's get started. I'm going to close this one down and we'll start off by getting the image of the flowers. This is going to be our base image. And we then want to bring in the portrait onto that. Now, the portrait cut out is going to be very similar to the one that we did in the previous project. We're going to go along, select the subject over there. We're going to be looking at this using and I'm going to go to select Select and Mask. And I want to check it against a background, which is maybe not white. So I'll go into the view and have a look at that on black, and you can see, it's not a bad cutout at all. Let's see if we can do anything with the edge detection. If I pull that over a little bit like that, it looks okay ish. I'll try the smart radius. We're going to go over to the refine edged brush tool. Make my brush a little bit bigger and just refine the edges around the hair, just a little bit. Like so. I'll move down over here. I'm going to go to the feathering. I'm going to put in a tiny bit of feathering. You can see I'm going for 0.3 or 0.4 to just take a harsh edge off of her body and move down to my shift edges. Now we can try the shift edges pushing it in and seeing what we're getting. Obviously, we don't want to push it out, but I think just taking that down to say minus ten -15 will help a little bit. Remember, you can always go along and check this purely using black and white to see how the hair is going to look. Let's go back to this on white, and I think that will work okay. Finally, we want to also decontaminate the colors to get any color coming from the background coming in and affecting the hair. Now, this is actually not going to be that much of a problem because the background is fairly neutral behind her. I'll click Okay, and I've then got my selection. There's the original selection in there. I'm actually quite happy with that. I think the hair looks right on there. Have a bit of a go with that, get your selection done. Once you've selected your item, drag it across into the flower scene over there, and also check it out. You can see the face over here on mine doesn't look that great. If I zoom in a little bit overhead, look that rough edge. So for that, I'm actually going to go to the mask. Use a paint brush directly on the mask. I want pure black and white over here because I'm going to be showing and hiding things. And I'm going to take my brush down. I'm using the left hand square bracket to make it smaller. And I'm going to just paint that bit back that's missing manually like that. If you zoom in a bit, you can be a little bit more accurate. With that, I'll go right in there. And if I've gone too far on that edge, like I've done there, I'll flick over to black and then once again just very carefully. I am, by the way, using a slightly soft brush over here so that edge is not too harsh. Just go back and pull that in a little bit like so. Right, I think that looks a lot better now on her cheek. Have a bit of a go with that and get your image looking really good. 47. Adjust Eyes & Colorize Hair: I'll zoom out a little bit over there. I want to make her slightly smaller in this scene. So I'm going to use my command or control T to scale her down. Let's just make her a little bit smaller like that there needs to be room for the flower hat on her head. I think that that'll be pretty much what I'd like. Now, I want to bring her eyes out. So I'm going to go along to the selection tool. I'm going to select people. She should appear in there. Click on her, and I can choose the whites of her eyes. Now, the whites of her eyes look absolutely fine at the moment, but I do want to do the irises. So I'm going to click on Iris, apply that, and then I'm going to bring the color out, and I'm going to lighten them a bit. So I'll zoom in so I can see what I'm doing. I've got those two selections there. I'm going to go down to my adjustment layer and I'm going to start off with brightness and contrast very, very simply. By the way, this pink just keeps coming and going. Just change to a different tool, as I've said before. Let's just go back to that brightness and contrast, and I can then start to brighten them up to get a bit more lightness in there. I think that's working right. Let's try a bit more contrast. That works quite well. Now I want the same selection back again. So very quickly, hold down Command or Control, click on the mask, and then you can do a second adjustment in here. If you want to do them in a folder, as we've looked at before, that's absolutely fine. By all means, go for it. I'm going to use vibrants and just push the vibrants up to see if I can get a bit more color out of them. Let's try with saturation. Probably gonna be too much on the saturation side. So I'll just do the vibrance over there. And let's look at before and after. So that's before, and that's after we've just brought out some color. The second thing that I want to do while I'm here is to blend her hair color into the background. I'm going to do this manually by just painting on a new layer. Whoops. Just clicked on the wrong one there. I'll undo that. If I choose a new layer over here, I'm going to get a paint brush. I'm going to sample the color. The fastest way to sample color, by the way, when you're on the paint brush is to hold down the lt or the option key, and you can just click on the color that you want. I've got a pink. I'm going to make a large brush over there and just paint over here now. I know it looks awful at the moment, but do bear with me. We don't want too much on that side just a little bit. Over there. And then I'm going to go from normal and have a look at color mode in there. Now, on the brush, it doesn't do anything at all. But if I use that same technique over here on the layer and I went to my layer and color, then you'll see how we'll get that colorized effect on there. Now, I just want this on the very edge. So I think what I'll probably do is just erase some of that. This is just a layer that I'm working on very quickly, so I can just be as destructive as I like with that. Might remove some of this. Oops. Let's have a soft brush for this. Erase some of that from around her ear area over there. There's may be a bit too much over there, and I want that to be fairly subtle, as well, a little bit of pink coming through. And you can just work backwards and forwards with that just adding more or subtracting more. There's no right or wrong with this. Now, I only want that to affect her hair, even though it's pink, you can't really see it on the background, but I will put it just above her layer. Hold down the alter the option key, click between the two layers. So now if I hide the background, you can see it's only affecting her. Otherwise, if I do that, that's what I've actually painted on. So I only wanted to affect that layer over there. 48. Add in the Cut Out Flowers: Let's go and find the flowers and bring them through. Once again, we need to select them. I'll say select subject. It's selected the flowers plus all of this stuff below itself. So I'm going to zoom in a bit over there, and I'll use the little magnetic lasso tool. I want to be on the subtract option, and I'm going to start over there and just run this around these flowers at the bottom. Over there. Once again, you can be as accurate or not as you like with this. I'm trying to be reasonably accurate to get those little flowers in there or petals, shall I say? And I'm going to just go around here and subtract those. Now, the rest of it is really easy to subtract because I can just go to a Lasso tool. Either click on subtract or hold down the alter option key. It's exactly the same thing. Surround those and remove them. Now, just in case I made a bit of a mistake on there, I'm going to go and add a mask to this, and that looks okay. But at this stage, if I thought, you know what? I should have used my Select and Mask tool. It's not too late. You can do it on a mask. Go over to the properties, click on Select and Mask in the properties for the mask. And once again in here, I can try some of these options. I think I'll go along to the shift edges and just tighten up those edges a little bit in there. Have a look and see if decontaminate colors does anything for you. Doesn't seem to be making much difference for me, so I'll leave it like that. I'll add a little bit of feathering just a small amount to that selection. Let's click Okay. I'm ready to take it over, so I will use the move tool and just dragon drop it into this image. It looks pretty reasonable. I'm going to go to command or control and T for transform. And I'm going to transform it around, so I'll just drag it around like that. Might have to be a little bit bigger or she needs to be a little bit smaller either way. So we have this garland of flowers on her head. Something like that. I'm happy with that, and I'll click on the tick in there. So, have a go. Cut out your flowers in there. If you shift click on that, you should see the whole of that image still there. Try it out. 49. Adjust the Flower Color With Neural Filters: I can see a few little areas in here that I'd like to get rid of. I'm going to zoom in a bit over to there. Of course, remember, you just click on the mask, use your paint brush and just paint out the areas that you don't want. You can still at this stage. I'll just paint those out very quickly. You can still at this stage, always go along to your selected mask again. It's not set in stone that using it on the other image, you can always work once you've moved it across to the new image because the mask is still there. So a few little bits, get rid of those. Over there. Oh, there's a dark area over there. I think that should go, as well. You can take a little bit more time than I'm doing on mine and just check the edges really carefully. So. Now, the other issue that we have here is the color difference. This is a very different color to the pink in the background. And what I can do is I can click on not on the mask, but on the image itself now. And I'm going to go to filter, and I'm going to use my favorite the neural filters. And I'm going to go to the harmonization option, switch it on, and in the layer, I'm going to choose the background, the pink in the background there. I'll pick up that pink and adjust the colors over here accordingly. Now, if you're not happy with what it gives you, by all means, change the settings in here a little bit, I am going to brighten it up just a little bit over there and it looks a little bit orange, so I might remove some of the orange over here by adding a little bit of blue. Not too much. Just a small amount. I'm just doing it in small fractions so that I can see what I'm getting. Once again, I will click Okay on that, and then we can deselect that, and those changes have been made directly on the layer. I'm going to stop there so you can try that out as well, and just have a good close look at the edge of your selection in there in case there's any funny bits, mine still needs a little bit of work that I'll do while you try that out. 50. Flower Shadows: Let's put a bit of a shadow underneath her flowers. So I'm going to use my paint brush. I'm going to do this on a new layer. I've got my new layer button over there, and I'm going to paint it in. So I need a soft brush, maybe a bit larger. Mm, bigger than that. Let's try something along this line. And I'm going to just paint over here. Now, color wise, I want to choose a fairly dark pink. So I'm going to hold down the alter the option key and just sample maybe some really dark pink in there, and let's just go under over there, that's the bit that's going to have the shadow underneath it. Now, I need to move that layer below that one and then reduce the opacity. Another good thing to do here while we're at it is change from normal to multiply. I can move that around. It doesn't look great yet. So if I move that around, you'll see that we have still got the shadow in there. I might move it out and reduce the opacity a little bit more and then do a second one. So this one here you can see is giving us sort of a slightly darker area on her. Let's do another one. And this time, I'll just put the new layer directly underneath that layer. Once again, get my paint brush. Maybe a slightly smaller brush this time, and I'm going to go in over there just sort of around those flowers. And I'm really trying to do the bits which would get more of the dark area like these sections over here, and that bit under there, not so much with these flowers, but just a little bit. So same again, let's reduce the opacity. On that. So we're kind of getting a secondary shadow coming in. You can see if I get rid of them both. We've got that darkening area coming in. And you can just adjust these to get whatever look you want from them. I'm going to do one more. So one more shadow over here, I will just make a new layer. I'm going to zoom in for this one. And using my paint brush, let's go with darkish red, once again, slightly smaller brush. And I'm going to paint in these areas over here that would be obviously more dark than the others. So just those little bits there. Those are the areas that would probably get a little bit darker. And once again, we will just adjust the opacity, but leave that one quite, quite dark. You can sit and play with these as long as you like. Once you start getting into shadows, you start to then look at them and go, Oh, actually, if I just add a little bit there and a little bit more there and a little bit more there, Remember, people are not going to look at your image and go, Wow, what amazing shadows. They will look at it and go, Yep, I can see that that really was the case, and it doesn't look like a cutout. Hopefully they shouldn't even look at that. They'll just go, Oh, I see that they photographed that with a garland of flowers on her head. But let's have a look at it before and after over there. Try that out and make some shadows. 51. The Blur Gallery For Iris & Tiltshift Blurs: I'd like to put some blurring on the flowers in the background to give this a bit of depth and take away some of the harsh detail in those background flowers. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to filter. But before I put the filter on, I'm going to say convert for smart filters. This will enable me to apply a filter which is constantly adjustable. Now that I've done that, you can see my layer has got a smart object icon on the corner. I'm going to go to filter. I'm going to go down to the blur gallery, and these are all different types of blurs that we can use. I'm going to try the iris blur. Now, the iris blow is interesting because it's in a circle. So you can move the middle of the circle wherever you want, and you can see it. This is now sharp, and it blows out from there. Can change the amount of blur. I'm going to go over the top so you can see how that's working. So I can move that wherever I want. And I can obviously also pull this out these little bits in here a bit, as well. So the blur sort of happens between those two dots. So this bit here, if I move that out, this bit here will always be sharp and the blur goes out between those two. I can make the outside as large as I like. All the inside and make that a bit smaller. So when I pop this over here, the really in focus area will be behind her head and then it blows out from that. But I'll take the amount down, so it's not quite so harsh, but we get a really interesting effect. The great thing about these smart filters, when I click OK, if I then think, Oh, my goodness, I made such a horrible mess of that, if I go down to my layers, you can see it comes in as like a masked object. And I can switch that off and I can switch it on again, as well. If I really want to change it, I can double click where it says blur layer and go in here and make my adjustments. So I think I'm going to go with something like that, so a little bit of blur going out from the middle to the outer flowers which are pretty blurred. Click Okay. Now let me do that on another one. I'm going to go up to the top over here. And I want these flowers over here to be nicely in focus, but go slightly out of focus behind that. So once again, I'm going to go to filter, convert for smart filters. Watch what happens to my mask. Now, you see it'll just seem to disappear. It still is there, but you get to it inside the smart object. More of that later in the course. Now, I've done that. I'm going to go to filter. Down to my filter gallery. Sorry, my blur gallery. And I'm gonna do the same thing again with an iris blur. Let's move that up to the middle. We'll pull this in a little bit like that. All that out. I'm gonna rotate it. Do you see if I move to the top, I can rotate that around. So I want to have most of these flowers being in focus, but some of the ones getting to the edge are gonna be out a little bit. So I'm looking for something along that line there. And once again, if I just adjust that, you can see how extreme that can be. I don't want anything nearly as extreme, just a little bit of blurring on the edge ones. Again, I will then click. Okay. Now, if you do have a mask on like I've got over there and the mask is hidden inside your smart object, you can still add another mask to the smart object if you thought, you know what? I'm going to go and get a paintbrush, make this bigger, and maybe just blend out some of those edge areas over there, so it sort of blends into the background flowers. And that's done on my mask on my smart object. Now let's go down to her face. So once again, I'm going to click on her. I'm going to go to filter, Convert for Smart Filters. We'll click Okay. And then I'm going to go to filter. Once again, I'm going down to the blur gallery. This time, I'm going to use a tilt shift. The tilt shift allows me to put a sharp area across the middle and then blur above and below. But the great thing about this is I can rotate it. So I can rotate it to an angle like that. Let's pull these ones out over here. Man that I think pull that out over there. I think I want her eye to be really sharp in there and the focus to kind of fall off on either side. Not much. If you go extreme, you'll see looks a bit weird. So just a little bit of fall off with the sharpness over there. Remember, make sure that her eye, that's the most important part of the image, is in focus. And you can just adjust these as you need them. Do try that one out. Click Okay, and it's done. 52. Adjust Color Balance Non-Destructively and Find Glyphs: Now let's go back to the portrait and adjust the color slightly because I'm thinking that now that I've got all the other flowers on very, very pinky magenta color, her skin looks well, it doesn't look the same magenta as the background. So I'm going to click on her layer. Remember, this is a smart object. And I'm going to go to image adjustments. Now, you're probably thinking, Tim, stop. That's destructive. And normally you'd be absolutely right. But if I go down here to my color balance, and what I want to do is I want to make her face a little bit more mageni like the background, so I'll add some magenta in there. I'm obviously adding too much. Click Okay. Now, normally, that would be a destructive way of doing it, and I'd have to undo it. But what you can see, because this is a smart object is that over here, we've got the Blur Gallery. We've also got the color balance. I can switch that on and off. In here, if I want, I can also go in there and double click it and go back to my setting. So this is like an adjustment layer, but it's actually on the layer itself. It's not a separate layer. So I can go and make any adjustments that I like over there, click Okay. And now let's switch off that color adjustment, and you can see a subtle difference on her if I switch it on again like that. So when you add a normal adjustment to a layer, which is a smart object, it doesn't do anything destructive. It just adds it in underneath as a fully editable adjustment. Let's put some text in here. I'm going to go and get my text tool and just click over here and pop in some text. And I've just made up a little name for this bit of for this product. I'm going to make that bigger. Over there, and let's move that along. Now, look what happened. My text is seeming to disappear. And that's because I put it in when I was on that layer, and it thinks it's part of that layer clipping mask. So I'm going to just move it above those so it's no longer part of that clipping mask. I think I'll put it right at the very top, to be honest. Select the text, and I'm going to adjust the text color. I think I'm just looking for something which is white or maybe this very pale color. No, it's got to be white. The characters themselves, the CHAD O, are all fine. The R needs to be brought closer to the O because there's a bit of a gap in there. That looks a bit funny. So I'm going to click between those two. And I'm going to go along to my text settings. Now, you can either get that in the properties or if you go along here, there's some text options. You can click on that to get your character settings. I'm going to adjust this option here. This is known as coning, and caning adjusts the distances between individual characters. And you can see I can see if I can make it look a little bit better. Hmm. It does need a bit of a gap there, but maybe what I had was too big. Like so. The other thing that I want is I want on the E to have either two little dots or a little line, something, something like that. I'm going to find the character I want by going along to the type menu. I'm going to go down. I'm going to find the Glyphs panel. So if I go to panels, you'll see we've got glyphs in there, and this will show me all of my different characters in the typeface that I'm in. So I'm looking for something here which has got, there we go. E with two little dots. To try that, you just double click it and it pops it in. Or maybe I'd want one with a little line like that. Either way, if you need a special character, you can just go straight up to type panels and the Glyphs panel. Select the one that you want to change, and you can then just add that in. Have a bit of a go, and then we'll do the final video on this of putting in dropshadow and exporting it out for social media. 53. Resizing Issues & Saving for Socials: I'd like to put a little drop shadow underneath the text. I'll just move the text into the right position. It's going to go down here, but to make it easier to read, I want a slight darkening behind it, so I'm going to double click on the layer and I'm going to go down to drop shadow. But I want to take the distance down to zero, so it sits behind it. Let's take the opacity up so you can see what I'm doing. The size, I'm going to increase the size over there to get a bit more softness. And instead of black, I'm going to sample some of this pink over here. So although initially it start out as quite a harsh shadow, it's more just a bit of pink. You can see if I do that. Like so. If I just switch that on and off, you can see how it's almost bringing out the text so it looks a little bit better in there. Now I've got my text all good to go. I want to crop this down for social media, so I make sure that I have saved it. And if you haven't saved it yet, you should be saving as you go along. You know that from before. Now I want to crop it down, so I'm going to go to my cropping tool. And over here, I can then choose the width, height and resolution. I want to crop this down for a square. So I'm going to go 1080 PX pixels by 1080. Once again, px in there. You don't need anything at all in your resolution. And I can then just click and drag that across to the area that I want. So I'm looking for something like that. I'm happy with that. I'll click on the tick at the top. Let's zoom in a little bit. To that, that's looking quite good. But I want you to see this. When I crop down, look what's happened to that blurring over here. You can see the blurring has appeared to increase on the background. Now, that does happen when you start to adjust the sizes. It keeps the same blurring, but changes the size of the document. So we'll deal with that at a later stage. But for now, I'm just going to double click on the Blur Gallery and just go into my blurring and reduce just a little bit in there. We'll click Okay. You'll probably find that it's the same on her face, so I might have to go to the Blur Gallery on her face and adjust that That's okay. This bit over here on her flowers, once again, blow gallery, and we can reduce this. Of course, we could have just flattened down the whole image before we cropped it, but we've got other things to do with this, as well. We'll find over here on the text that the drop shadow is a little bit too harsh in there or too large. So let's just take the size down slightly on that. I think that's pretty much it. I'll just move that text into the position that I wanted to go in. All we need to do now is to go to File, Export, exports and we'll be exporting this as a JPEG in there, keeping the quality quite high, and I will click on Export, and it's done. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that tutorial. Have a go with some different images as well using those custom shadows, as well as things like smart objects. Have fun with it. 54. Smart Objects - Intro: This section is all about smart objects, and we're going to use a project all the way through so you can learn and work on the project at the same time. And what we're going to do is we're going to start off by creating this floral style logo, and we're going to be using an image. I'm also going to go into Illustrator and show you how you can vectorize a photograph. Now, if you don't have Illustrator, don't worry about it. You can just ignore that bit, and then we can carry on and I'll have the image that you can use. After that, we're going to put it onto a van, and then we're going to just make sure it looks that way. And then we've got a project to pull the whole lot together afterwards. But so many things to do in this section, let's start right away. 55. Scaleable Smart Objects: Let's have a look at smart objects and what they really are there for. And we're going to start off by opening this picture and then bringing in a logo. So I want to take this animal lovers logo. Now, this logo is not a vector logo. This is pixels. You can see if I zoom in, you can see the individual pixels in there. And I'm going to take it across, so I'm going to move it with a move til dragon drop it into that image over there. Now, what I'd like to do is I would like to get rid of the white background in there. So very quickly, I'm going to go and select the subject, and that's selected the logo, but it hasn't done a great job in there. So let's deselect that. What about if we used the magic wand tool, and I selected all the white. Once again, it's done a really good job of selecting the white. It hasn't got the bit between the O and the A. So lastly, we're going to go up to the top and switch contiguous off. And now when I select, it's selected all the white in there. I'm going to add a mask, and I'm going to invert my mask over there. So I've now got the logo by itself. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like to scale this logo down. So I'm going to go to edit and transform and scale. And I'll scale it down. Over it. Now look what's happened. Certainly at the top. We've got a bit of an issue because some of that white has come through, still, but that's alright. I'll just make it a little bit smaller. It's going to go and be sitting right in the corner. Over then I'll click on the tick. And then if I was ready to send that to the client, I might go in here, close this down. All good, send it off to the client. Close this document down. So I've saved it. Then the client says, Can you make the logo bigger? And you go, Yeah, okay, let's make it bigger. Once again, I'll go to the logo. I'm going to go to edit and transform, and I'm going to go to scale, and I'm going to scale it up. Now, look what's happened. When I click on the Tick, can you see how it doesn't look so good? The edges are a little bit funny. I'm going to bring in the other one to show you the difference. So let's go and find this one here. And you can see straightaway that this one has lost something in the process. And you'll find the smaller you make something, the worse it's going to look. If I scale it up to the same size, Look at that. It's awful. So this is the problem if you're scaling pixels up and down. Vector is not a problem at all, but with pixels, when you scale something down and you rescale it up, it's going to lose quality. The smaller you scale it, the worse it's going to be. So let's get rid of that one and start this again. So what I'm going to do is exactly the same thing again. I'm going to select the logo, using the magic wand, contiguous off, click on there to get all the white, make a mask, invert the mask. And before I start to scale this now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it into a smart object. So I'm going to go to Layer. I'm going down to Smart Objects, and I'm going to say Convert to Smart Object. Now, this still looks exactly the same. The logo itself over here, you'll see it's lost the mask that it had on. That mask is actually inside that I should be showing you that very, very shortly. Now, let's scale this. So I'm going to go to transform. I'm going to scale it down. I'm going to make it super, super small over there, and pop that next to him like that. Once again, we can save that. We can close down the other one over there. Client says, Can you make the logo bigger, and all we have to do is to scale it to the original size, and you can see the quality is still there. We haven't lost any quality at all. So the first thing about smart objects is they enable you to scale things down and then up again, especially with logos. If you've got something you think you might need to change over time, make them into a smart object first. Try that out. Bring in this logo. The images are there, and get rid of the white from the background, if you wish, make it into a smart object, scale it, or don't do it as a smart object and see what happens. 56. Edit the Smart Object: Now, we want a few of these logos around on this page. So I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key, depending on where your MACOPC and make a copy of that layer. And I'm going to scale this one down over there. So we're going to make that one smaller, so we want that up there, and maybe we want a third one. So once again, I'm going to hold down the Alt or the option key, make a copy, and scale this one down even smaller still, and that's going to go down by the dog. And at that stage, once again, we also go, Okay, that's great. Let's send this to the client and see what they think. And when they come back, they come back and say, That's great, but we don't want this text on here. Can you get rid of the animal lovers text? Now, we've put it onto three separate layers in there. The thing about smart objects is that all three of these smart objects have got one parent. So they are just instances of one file. So what happens? Now, have a look here along the top, I don't have anything else open. This is the only document that I've got open. I'm going to double click on one of these, and it doesn't matter which one. And you see it takes me into that. That says layer two dot PSD PSB. So I'm just going to do that again. Let's go to layer two copy two, or if you'd call it Fred, it would be Fred. Double click it, and it takes me once again into Layer two. So it's going into the original document. Now, this is not the one that we first opened up and saved. This is a layer. It's actually gone into that layer there. And there is our mask. So it means that I can go and get my paint brush over here. Let's use a hard brush. So I'm just using shift in the right bracket to make my brush really hard onto the mask, and I can just paint that out over here. So once I've got that painted out, if I go back to this document, you can see it still looks the same. But what I need to do now is to save this so I go to file and save, not save as just save, and it resaves this back into the document there. If I close this down, you'll see that it's updated all of those little logos. Let's try something else. Double click on one of these. Go in here. I'm going to put an adjustment layer on top of that so we can have multiple layers inside our smart object. So in this one, I'm going to go along, and I'm going to use, oh, I think, human saturation. I'm just going to mess with the colors over here, so we'll have this sort of purples. Remember, on our layers, we have now got two layers in there. Once again, I'm going to go to file, save, close it down, and it updates it on my document. So a smart object is an instance of a file which is saved separately, but in the same Photoshop file, if that makes any difference or if that makes sense. And you can always double click on that object to go into it and make any adjustments that you like. I can switch that off. Once again, close this down, make sure I save it, and it will update in here. Try that out. Make copies by using the alter the option key and then double click one of them, go in, do some changes, save, come back to your document, and you'll see how it's updated. 57. Project: Logo and Van - Intro: This section is all about smart objects within smart objects, within smart objects, within smart objects. We're going to be nesting these smart objects. And we're going to take this image, and we're going to make it into a night shot. So we'll be using things like lens flares and putting lens flares into the image. And we've got so many bits to do with this. Let's start right away. 58. Make New Document and Add Roses and Smart Object Vector: I'm going to do a new file for the logo, and I'm going to go along to Web, and I'm going to choose 2000 by 2000 pixels. In here. I'm going to switch off artboards because we haven't done that yet. Resolution doesn't matter because we're working purely in pixels. RGB color, which is great. And down here to the color profile, I'm going to choose SRGB. SRGB or standard RGB is a profile that will work on most browsers and devices. If you choose one of the other ones in there, you can't be sure that it will look the same or your colors will look the same on different devices because the device might not support that profile, but most things seem to support SRGB. Let's go over here with square pixels because we're not doing anything for broadcast, and I'll click on Create. And then what I want to do is I want to open up the Roses picture. So I've got one from Adobe Stock over here, maybe this is something been given to you by a client. You can see this image here, it's not a painted picture, although it looks like that when you first look at it. When you're going in close, because these are all flat colors like that, it looks like it's actually an image or a photograph which has been vectorized in Illustrator. Anyway, maybe that's what the client's given you. Let us go and select that. I'm just using a rectangular marquee to select it, and I'm going to move it across into my background, like so. Now, I know this is a Photoshop course, but if you wanted to try one of those roses yourself and you had a copy of Illustrator, if you've got the full Creative Cloud suite, you will have Illustrator on there. What you can do is you can go along in Illustrator to File, click on New and then in this new document window that comes up, what you do is just go across to web and web Large. This will make us a large image, totally blank. I'm going to click on Create. And then we need to place the photo that you've got. Now, I've got a Rose photograph from Adobe stock, but you can do this with any image you like. Go to File Choose Place. Find the image that you want to use, place it in there and click and drag to get it to the size that you want. Now is the easy part. Go to the object menu, go all the way down. And what we're looking for is something called image trace. Once you find image trace, go across to make. Now, this is just saying that it might be a bit slow because the image quality is quite good. I'll click Okay. If a window showing the properties of the image trace doesn't automatically open, then you can go to the window menu and we can go down. We can find the image trace panel. That's this one over here. Now, this also, once again, looks complicated, but it's really not that bad. What I'd suggest is, and this is really easy to do, you've got some presets along the top, things like pure black and white images, low color, high color. You could try one of these either low color or high color. And if I click on high color, for example, what it will do is it will trace my image as a vector into color. And you can see it almost looks photographic like. If I zoom in, though, when we get really close, you can see those little vector shapes in there. If you want something a bit more impressionist, you could reduce the colors in here. You can see if I take that down from Max all the way down over there, it will reduce the number of colors in there and give us this more posterized or impressionist look to the artwork. Once again, just play with it, see what you get. Once you've finished with that, you could actually take this across as a vector file. We just got a file Save as I'm going to save this onto my computer and I'm going to put it onto my desktop so I can find it again. Let's call this Rose, and I'm going to choose the format which is going to be Adobe Illustrator AI. I'll click on Save. When this pops up, just click Okay. Now, back in Photoshop over here, I've just gone back to a blank document. To bring it in, you can go to File, and we want to place an embedded file in there. Let me go and find that image. There it is over there, the AI file. I can click on Place. There's only one image to bring in, so I'll click Okay, and there it is. We click on the tick and it's done, and it is a smart object in there. Now, why would I want to bring this in as an Illustrator file? Well, firstly, an Illustrator file is totally scalable. I can scale this up. I can scale it down without any loss of quality. Also, if it comes in as a smart object, what I can do is I can edit it in Illustrator. Have a look at this. The moment you can see here's Illustrator here, nothing is open. Let's go back to Photoshop. If I double click on this Smart Object. What it does is it opens it up in Illustrator. Here it is in Illustrator. So the smart object for an Illustrator file doesn't open up as a separate layer. It opens it up in Illustrator. Now, it means that I can click over here and make some changes. Let's go and see what it would look like purely as black and white. And if I close this down now and save it, when we go back to Photoshop, you'll see it's updated in Photoshop. And they'll look at that and I think, You know what? I really don't like that. I can double click it, go back into Illustrator. I'll go back to limited color, maybe. Let's try that. Mm, maybe a few more colors. There we go. That's better. Once again, close this down. We'll save it back into Photoshop. And there we go. It's updated. So you're working in Illustrator and updating things back into Photoshop. It's really clever and it's great use of smart objects. If you do want to learn a lot more about Illustrator, I've got a full Illustrator course on both the iPad as well as the desktop that you could have a look at. Anyway, let's get back to Photoshop. 59. Select & Mask to Cut Out Rose: I'd like to select this rose over here and make a copy of it. So I can put that onto a separate layer. This is going to go on top of the R and the other one is going to be underneath it. Now, to select it, I've chosen my magic wand tool, and by default, the tolerance for the magic wand is 32. And then we've got the contiguous over here. Now, if I try to select the background with contiguous switched on, you can see it selects white pixels which are all similar and are touching. So it hasn't selected these ones here or those ones over there. And there's a little bit of white down there, but it hasn't selected as well. I'll deselect that. If I switch contiguous off and then do it again, it selects pixels which are similar, not necessarily pure white, but similar and are not touching. So over here, it's selected some pure white in there. These areas here, which are gray, because the tolerance is highsh, they've selected as well. So I'm going to deselect that, and I'm going to take my tolerance right down. So I'm just going to put in something like four in the tolerance. Click again with contiguous switched off, and you can see how it's selected the white plus all the little bits in here, it's still selected maybe a few little bits on there. Now, that's selected the background rather than the image itself. So I'm going to go to the select menu and I'm going to inverse that selection. So now we've got the roses selected. But to have a proper look at it, I'm going to go into Select and Mask. I'm going to go to my opacity and make sure that's up to 100% in there. And that looks okay. If I try it on white once again, it sort of looks okay. It's difficult to tell. So with something like this, what I do is I do black and white, and then I can see straightaway that there's some little black dots over there, which need to be removed. And I'm not sure about that. Is that a that one should be there. So it's just those little black dots over there that need to be removed. So what I can do is I can go and use one of these tools over here to just maybe paint it out. I'll use this brush tool over here, and I can paint those out. With a plus. If you go too far, try the minus, and that'll do the other way around. So let's just go back to that one. While I'm in here, I'm also going to go on black and just look at this edge. You can see how it's quite a nasty edge. There's a lot of little lines in there. So for this, I might choose a bit of smoothing to kind of smooth out some of those bits, a tiny bit of feathering, not too much, but just a little bit over there. And then I will go to my shift edges, and I'll tighten up that edge, look at the difference that makes by tightening that edge. In there. And we've got a much better selection now of those roses. So I'll click on the mask button over there, and we can see then that we've got that cut out like so. 60. Isolate Front Rose with Filling on Mask: Remember, this is just a mask, so we haven't deleted anything. I'm going to make a copy of this layer by dragging it down onto my new layer button down there, and let's hide this background one. So we're just working on this copy. And I want to get rid of this rose over here and that little rose that's coming out over there or the bud that's coming out there. Now we can do this in so many different ways. But for me, I'm going to do it by using a selection, and I'm just going to use a magnetic lasutl zoom in over here. I'm going to run around the edge of this rose here. So I'm not too worried about that. I'm just looking at the bits that I'm going to be cutting off, going into there around this area here. Now, this bit doesn't matter. Just go round that bit there, there. And I'm going to zoom out a little bit over here and just go all the way around this bit back to the beginning. So really, all I've done is selected the bits that I don't want. Go to my mask, and then you can either paint it in or this is quicker, you can just use edit and fill and just fill that area, not with content away, but with black. I'm just going to click Okay, so it'll just fill that bit with black. I can deselect that, and there is my rose in there. If there are any areas that look a little bit funny, like, honestly, this bit here doesn't look quite right, I might use a selection tool once again to just select that. And then go to Edit and fill and just fill that once again with black to get rid of it, and we'll deselect that. If you've got any little bits like that, use a paint brush, very small paintbrush. And just paint it out if it's being a bit of a problem. There's no right or wrong here. You just sort of painting out bits that you don't want or adding them in if you do. I'm happy with that. I'll stop there. Have a bit of a go, get a secondary layer on there that's cut out, so you should have one underneath that's got everything and one on top, which is just this front rows in here. Have a go. 61. Add the Text & Add to the Mask: Let's bring in our text. I'm going to go to my text tool. I'm going to click, pop in the R, and I'm going to select it and make it a lot bigger. Now, we can just click and drag on there to pull it up to make it the right size. So I'm going to keep going like that. Now, I want to find a typeface that's sympathetic to my business that I'm doing this for, and I've chosen something fairly curly, should we say, but quite thick, as well. You'll see if I do that and move it in, I've got that little R over there. Going to scale this up a little bit more. This time, rather than actually going into the type to scale it, I'm going to use command or control T and just resize it in here. This is absolutely fine. It's not destroying the R, it's not resizing it disproportionately, so I can just pull that out, like so. I'm also going to just double click that and pick a different color for it. Now I want something from the roses itself. So if I move over here and click, I can then pick colors directly from the leaves. That's all looking good. Let's move that R underneath those two and switch on the bottom one, and you can see the effect that we get with one being behind and one being in front. Obviously, if you move this top one, you will see the copy directly underneath that. If you wish, you could even go as far as to, and I'm going to command or control, click on the text to bring that back as a selection. Go to this mask here, and I'm just going to paint the bits in that maybe I don't want. So using my brush, I'm going to make my brush a whole lot bigger. And just paint this bit out over there, so we kind of get the roses just coming through the middle of that R. Deselect that. Like so. 62. Add a Custom Shadow & Clip to Text Layer: To separate the rose from the R in the background, and I'm going to do that with a shadow. Now, if I were to go over here and put on a drop shadow, well, you can see it looks like a total mess at the moment. First of all, because it's picking up some of the edge of that mask, it's also masking these things here. It's putting on a shadow. Sorry, it's putting a shadow onto those things. We're putting a little bit of a shadow onto the R over there, which just doesn't make much sense. So it's a lot easier. Sometimes, instead of using one of these shadows, let's just undo that to just do a manual shadow by painting it in. I'll get a new layer underneath the roses. I'm going to go and get my paint brush, make a large brush. Over here. And I'm going to make sure that that brush is really soft. I'm using shift and left bracket to have a softer edge to that. Doesn't have to be perfect. We just want to get a bit of depth to this. And then I need to choose a color over here. So I'm actually going to choose a very dark green for my shadow. And I'll just paint. So as I'm painting here, you can see how it's just darkening up those areas behind the flower, maybe a little bit over there, maybe a bit down the bottom. And if I switch that on and off, you can see the difference. Now, of course, it's also going onto my background. So if I take this layer here just above the text, hold down the Alt or the option key, and click between the two of them, now I've clipped that to that layer in there. I also changed the opacity ever to slightly lighten it up a little bit. I'm happy with that, and I can carry on painting if I want now. So a little bit more over there, maybe a little bit darker out there. It's entirely up to you what you want to do with this. I'd also suggest going from normal to multiply mode. Try it out. 63. Add Logo to Van: Now that I've got all my layers ready to go, I'm going to make this into a smart object so I can keep reusing it as many times as I like. I'm going to take the background and get rid of the background because I don't want a white background in my scene. And I'm going to select the bottom layer, go to the top one, and hold down the Shift key and click on the top one. So it's selected all of the layers in there. And then I'm going to go to layer smart objects and say Convert to Smart Object in there. And it squashes all those layers down. But remember, you can always double click on that smart object to go in and do any editing that you like. So if I decide to change the color of the R or move a rose or something like that, even add a background, I can do it really quickly. Now that I've done that, I'm going to save this out so I'll go to file, save as, and I'm putting this on my computer rather than on the Cloud. I'll just put it onto my desktop where I can find it again and I'm going to call this Rose Logo. And I'm saving this a PSD file, Photoshop file over there. Now, I want to go and open up an image and bring this into the image. So I've got an image over here, which is the truck. There it is there. And I want to put the logo, not that one. But that one onto the truck. I'm just going to drag it across. So I'll drag the smart object onto there. This is going to go onto the side and onto the back. So I'm going to make a copy of that for the back. Let's go to this one over here and I can then go and using my edit, I'm going to go down to transform, and I'm going to use distort I'm just going to distort it onto the side of the truck, like so. Place that one there. That goes there. And that one goes down on the side there. And so it looks a little bit better, and we can see some of the lines that truck coming through. I'm going to change the blend mode to multiply so we get those bits coming through. Same on the back one. I'm going to once again go to edit, transform and distort. I'm on the wrong layer. Let's just press escape, get out of that. Make sure I'm on the correct layer first. Edit, Transform, distort. Get this into the right sort of shape that I want. So I'm just watching these lines over here, get them to run parallel to those. Same with this at the bottom. That can be moved across like that. Click on the tick and then over here, I'm going to go into normal and chose multiply. So the little handle comes through as well. So here's my start point. I'm just going to close that down. So I've just got this image in here. Now, because those are smart objects and they're copies of the same smart object, if I then look at this and think, You know what that R is just too dark, I can double click one of them, go into the Smart Object. I'm going to click on that T and change the color, and maybe I'll try this as a red. Let's do a bright red. Now, all I'm going to do is go to file and save, move across to my truck, and have a look there. That's not bad at all. Let's go back to this image here. Once again, I will just change the color of that to something else. Let's try more pinky type of color. I think that's less extreme. Once again, file and save, go on to this. Have a look. Yep, I really like what I've got there. So I can then close that one down. Try that out and put your logo onto an object. This truck is a nice one to pop it onto. 64. Add Bottom Text: What I like to do is to change this logo quite a lot. So I'm actually going to get rid of these two over here. And I'm going to go back to my original. So if you've saved your original, this is the one that you want. And there's a few things I want to do. First of all, I want to bring some more of these leaves in front of the R, and I also want to change the color of that. I want to put some text right at the very bottom. So I'm going to double click on it to go into the Smart Object. And let's start off by just bringing a few of these leaves back. So what I'll do is I'll just hide those other layers over there. I'm going to go down to this bottom layer and I'm going to select some of the leaves. Now, I'm going to try some different tools. I'm going to try the let's find it, the object selection tool and just move over that and maybe just choose that little section over there. By the way, I'm on the Lasso tool, which is why I can just surround objects. Let's just surround that one over there to bring those two back. Now, I've done one, and the other one's disappeared. That's because I wasn't on the Add button. If this gets in the way, by the way, you can move it with a little handle on the side, and I'm going to add that one in as well. And then I'm going to go back to this top one over there, switch that on. Let's just show everything else. And I can then on my mask, paint those back. So the easiest way would be to get a paint brush rather than using fill for now, flick over to white and paint those back in like so, and that one over there. Let's deselect that. That's looking better. They don't really need shadows, although you could do one if you wanted. I'm also looking at this one down here, which is going across onto the, or underneath the little part of the text. So I think I want to bring that one in as well. So once again, I'm going to go and select it. So I'll just hide those for now. I'm going to select it using that same tool again. So we're going to take that one. In fact, I might take a few bits more that bit there and that one over there. Let's go back to this top one. And I can paint those in too. Same again. We're painting on the mask with white to bring those back. That is looking better. Now, I also want to change the color of the tea, and I want to choose maybe a lighter green, sort of that type of color, so it's not too harsh. The other one looked a little bit too dark for my liking. I'm going to go to my shadows now and change the opacity so we just have slightly less of the shadow in there. Now I want to add some text at the bottom. I'm going to go along to the image menu down to Canvas size. I'm going to click at the top here, so my new space comes in underneath, and I'm going to change the height. Let's say, 2,400 over there, click Okay, and I've now got some extra space at the bottom. Now, that might be a bit of a pain when I'm actually trying to change these on the truck. It's probably a little bit too much. So if I go to image, Canvas size, I can reduce that. Let's try 2,200 over here. Once again, make sure you're on the top, so it's being reduced from the bottom in there. Click Okay. And it does say, you know, you're cutting something off. What do you want to do? I want to proceed. I know that I'm cutting that off. That's absolutely perfect. Let's get some text in here. So onto my Type tool there. I'll just click. And now the problem is I've clicked and straightaway selected this little T over here. This can be really annoying if you're trying to put in text and you've got a big character like that, and every time you click, it just selects a different character. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to move right out the side there, click up there, put in my text over here. I'm going to scale that down, so I'll just select it and scale that right down to something a little bit more sensible. Over there. So I'm going to pull this down. I can't see it because it's come in with this clipping group here. If I pull it right to the top, there it is over there. It still needs to be scaled a little bit more. And I think something along that line in there. Anyway, I'm going to fix my text. Maybe I'll have the word roses in red and maybe change the font on this. I'm done with that. I can then close this down and save. There it is there, and I'm going to drag and drop it into my van and pop it back on. You can see I've now got the text on there. Once again, you've seen me do the transform over here, so I won't get you to watch that again. Now that you've got your logo, it's really easy to do a few variations on it. Maybe some web banners like this, as well. Bit of text, really cool looking logo, and maybe a picture to go, as well. Have a go with some different web related items for that. Have fun. 65. Artboards: I'm going to make a new file, so I'm going to go up to new file over here. I'm going to go to web, and I'm going to make something which is for social media a square. So I'll just choose this web large in there. And in case I need to scale it down, I'm actually going to make it 1920 square. So 1920 over there. So maybe it's a bit bigger than the usual 1080 there? Or if you want to just double 1080, that works too. But importantly, here, I'm going to leave the artboards switched on. I'm going down. I'm doing this for the web. I'm going to be using RGB color. And in the color profile, I want to find one that works on most as many devices as possible, and that's going to be SRGB. I'm going to click on Create. So what we've got now is this little area here which says Artboard one, and there is Layer one in there. And if I close that down, open it up, you can see that it almost looks like a folder. Now, I'm going to bring in the picture that I want to use in here. So I'm going to go to File, and I'm going to use Place Embedded. Now, I've got this JPEG you have some flowers, and I'm going to click on Place, bring them in. I think I'll just scale them around, like, so maybe make them a little bit larger. Over there, they're going to go on the edge over there. Look what happens. It brought it in. It was a JPEG file, and it automatically made it into a smart object for me. Kind of quite like that. I want to bring in the logo that we created earlier. So once again, I'm going to go to file. I'm going to use Place Embedded, and I'll go and find that file. It was this one over here, the Rose logo. Place that in. I'm going to just scale it down a bit. And that's going to go, well, pretty much in the corner over there. And let's get some text onto this. Before I do that, I'm thinking this is going to go on social media. If you imagine it's going to be that size on a phone. You can't read this bit of text down the bottom. I'm going to go to the smart object here and double click it. And in here, I'm just going to put on because I don't know how many levels down that is, and I don't want to delete it permanently. So I'm going to put on a mask and just mask that out with a paint brush, some black, and just paint that little bit out. Over here, let's make that brush a bit harder. Paint that little section out, like so. We can close that down, save that. Now, that's absolutely fine because if I then need to come back and get that text back again for another one that I'm going to be doing just now, I will be able to actually unmask it. So I think I'd like some text in the top here, so I'm going to get my text tool over here and just pop in a little bit of text. So I have new delivery times in there, and I'm going to make that a little bit bigger. You can see all these things that I'm doing are coming out into that artboard over there. So I think let's put this on a few on a few different lines. Like so. I think that's it. Just getting rid of the spaces, so it lines up quite nicely, and then I can scale that up to size. I'm scaling and holding down the Alt or the option key at the same time, so it scales from the middle outwards. If you don't hold down the lt and the option key, it scales from the opposite corner. But this is quite a nice way of doing it. We've got our new delivery times in there, and I'm just going to change that text color to something else like a dark pink. Like so. Very, very simple. So what's happening with these art boards? Well, I'd like to create a variation on this. So this is the post that'll go out on Monday, and then on Tuesday, I want another one with slightly different text or a different picture, or maybe the pictures just moved. So what I can do is if I click on the word artboard, you can see over here that we've got these little pluses around the outside. Now, if I click this plus here on the right hand side, it will make me another artboard over there. So you can see now I've got two artboards, artboard one artboard two. And if I want to, I can then do something new on that. So I could go in, for example, and place a different picture in that one. Let's go and place a different image on there. I'll use the van. Over there. And once again, I want the new delivery times in there. Now, before I put that in, have a look at what I've got. I have got Artboard two, which has got the delivery van on it. I've got Artboard one, which has got all of these items over here. So, this means that I can create multiple different variations on a theme all within the same Photoshop file. If I save this, it saves it as one PSD, one Photoshop file. But there's more to it than that. I want to take this bit of text. I'm going to hold down the alter the option key to make a copy. Whoops. I want this piece of text. I'm going to hold down the alter option key to make a copy of it. Now, this bit of text is actually in that artboard there. If I drag it across, I can drop it in this artboard, and you can see it pops it into artboard two over there, and I can then scale down to a different size. Let me do that again. I'm going to go to these flowers over here. Hold down the alter the option key until you get that double arrow, drag it to make a copy, and then move it straight across over here onto that one, and then I'm going to rotate that and scale it around. I think I'll just pop that down. It doesn't really work down there. Maybe we should move the truck or the van up a little bit. Like so. So you can have lots of artboards all within the one document, and you're using the same things time and time again. But let's say, for example, that you thought, Well, I kind of like this style that I've got over here, maybe I can make another copy of this artboard. Well, if we go to the artboard itself, that's artboard one. I've clicked on it, and I can make another artboard on the left hand side. But this time, I'll hold down, once again, it's the Alt or the option key and click the new artboard button, and it makes a copy of that. So I've now got a second artboard over here. And on this one, maybe I'll just change the text to say new delivery dates. And we can keep going with these. If you fold them up, it makes life a little bit easier because you then have a look and which 1:00 A.M. I working on? I'm working on artboard number one. So I'm going to go to artboard number one and open that one up, as well. If I'm working on artboard number two, I'll go to artboard number two, open that up and I can then see the layers in that specific artboard. So do have a bit of a go, make a new file for yourself. Bring in some pictures, some layers onto that file that's got artboards in it. And once you've done that, either make a new artboard by just clicking to make a new blank artboard, or let's go back to this one over here or by holding down the alter the option key and clicking to make a copy of that artboard. You can see we can have so many of these around here, different artboards all with variations of the same thing. And when we save this, if I go to file and save as, I can save all of those just as a single Photoshop file. It means your whole set of different images are all within one file. 66. Smart Filters & Masks: What we're going to do here is we're going to make this into a night scene. So the idea behind this is the flowers are delivered overnight. Now, what I'd like to do before I start is to put the logo onto the side of the van. So I'm going to go and find it. Let's go and open up my logo. And that's going to go across into there. I'm going to scale it down, and I can do that quite happily without losing any resolution if I pull it up again, remember? And that's going to go over there. And I think we also need to adjust it slightly. Let's zoom in a bit. Over there, I'm going to go to edit, transform, and distort, and just make sure that it is actually in line with the lines of the van. I think something like that is probably just about right. Because the van is at an angle, we might actually also just squish it down this way because of the perspective. I'm happy with that, and I'm also going to obviously put on multiplies that we can see some of the van details coming through. Now, the next thing that I want to do on here is to make the van look like it's actually moving at speed. And we're going to do that by using one of the blurring filters. Under blur, there's a filter called motion blur. There's also another one called radial blur. These two are both about speed. Now, I want to actually blur both of these at the same time, not just this top one here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select both of them. I'm going to go to layer I'm going down to Smart Object and convert to Smart Object. So now I've got one item with two things inside it that I can then apply my blur to. Filter, blur, and let's first of all, have a look at motion blur. Motion blur allows you to put on motion on an item, and you can change the angle to any angle that you want. So we can sort of do something like that to get speed. It just looks out of focus to me, so I'm going to cancel that. Prefer to actually go in and use a different blur, which is radio blow. Now, radio blur comes in two parts. You can either spin something around. That's great if you're doing wheels or anything round it or Zoom. And I'm going to use the Zoom effect over here, and you can move the point of the filter. So if I put it right over there on that side, everything would zoom into there. Going to move it so I think it's sort of roughly where the front of the truck is. You can choose how much you want to zoom it, and I will do quite a lot to make it obvious. I'm going to knock it back in a little while. Click Okay, and it will apply it. You can see it's just above the top. But now because I did this on a smart filter, this is fully scalable this blur. If I double click it, I can go in there and say, well, actually, it should come down a little bit and maybe a bit to the front, but maybe less blur over there. Let's click Okay and see what that does there. Hmm. Maybe a bit further down. Once again, double click, pull this down. Over there. Click Okay. Now, that's sort of the blur that I want, but as I said, it is too much. We can't really see enough with the truck. So I can either go here and just reduce this down, which I will do, or I can go along to this little item over here, where you've got the radial blur or any filter that you put on to the right of that, you've got a filter, which if you click on that, double click that, shall I say, it will allow you to go into the blending options for that filter. You can use any of these blends, you know, if you want sort of a lighting or a screen or something like that. See there how the trucks kind of got a bit of movement on, but the darker parts have come through. Or if I used multiply, we can get some of the darker parts coming through in the lighter bits. You get the idea. You can play with those, or you could just go straight to opacity and reduce the opacity so you see some of the original truck coming through. Once again, I'll click Okay. The second thing and this is why I love using filters on smart objects is that we've got, and if you haven't noticed it already, you will never unsee it. A mask, the mask is for the filter. So if I get a paint brush over here, let's have a big soft brush there. I can just paint in the areas that I want to keep soft. Now, why is it doing that? Well, it's thinking that I'm trying to paint on that layer over there. Let's make sure that you click on the mask. I'll get black as my foreground color, and then I can just paint in here. Straight onto my mask. A little bit at the end of the van there. And you can see how that is hiding the radial blur from the scene. If I double clicked on the radial blur and just increased it quite a lot, click to okay, you'll see the effect a little bit more. I'm going to undo that last bit that I did. So I've got a very sort of subtle movement on this particular scene. Have a go with that. So take your van, put the logo onto the van, so the logo that you're taking across, by the way, is the one that's actually in as a smart object. Pop into the scene, then take both the van and the logo, select them both and make them into a smart object. And then on that smart object, you can then apply the radial blur and experiment with that and then also experiment with the mask that's on the radio blow. There's quite a few things in there to try out, have a bit of a play, and then we'll make this darker still and put some lights on the van. Have fun. 67. Nested Smart Objects: I'd like to put some more filters on here. So if I go to filter, I'm going to go to render and I'm going to use a lens flare for some light. So as you can see, you can put a light onto something. Click Okay. But it vanishes. What's happened? Well, you see, when I've added this in, it's added it as a lens flare filter on the smart filter group. So it's actually using that mask to mask out the lens flare, so you're not really going to see it. I'm going to pop that into the bin. So, one way around this problem is to select this smart object, go to Layer, Smart Object, convert to smart object. So we're making smart objects into smart objects. And this is known as nesting Smart Objects. I'll click on Convert to Smart Object. Now what I'm going to be doing is going to filter, once again, render lens flare, and I can put that lens flare exactly where I want it. I want to go on that light on the front there. You just move around that little cross hair in there. You can change the brightness to anything that you want. I'm just going to keep it fairly low, maybe about 90 in there. You can also choose from different types of lens flare. Click Okay. And if it's not in the right place, just double click it and move it again to where it should be. Ah, that's better. Now, I want a second one for the other light, so I'm going to go along to filter. Once again, I'm going to go down to render and lens flare. Don't use lens flare from the top because that's just going to the same settings. Go down to render lens flare, and we'll pull that one across to that side. So once again, I can click Okay. I've got two lens flares on the van now. That second one looks like it's a bit too harsh, so I'll double click it and reduce the brightness on that second one. I think I'm doing the right one. Yes, yeah, that's correct. You can just switch it on, switch it off, and move it around until you get it into the right position, like so. Once again, I can go back to the first one, and I can move that one around as well. Have a go with that. So take your I'll double click it. Take your existing layer or your existing smart object, make it into another smart object. So then you've got a smart object within a smart object. In fact, we've got smart objects within smart objects, within smart objects on this. And then we'll add some darkness to the scene. 68. Add Darkness In Nested Object: To put an adjustment layer on my image to darken down the whole scene. Now, you see, if I'm on this one, this was the one with the lens flare on there. And I then went and put an adjustment layer on there, and I'm going to do levels, and maybe I'll darken down with that one. I don't want any pure whites on the van. I want to look much darker, so maybe I darkened down with that as well. No, that looks okay for nighttime, but look what it's done to my lens flare. Those lens flares should be absolutely brilliantly pure white. So it's darkened down everything, including those filters there. So I'm going to bin that. Instead, let's do it on the next level down. So I'm going to double click on this to open it up. So I've opened up the smart object where we had the radial blur. This is where I'm going to put my levels. I'm going to darken it down by pulling that little slide that way. I don't want any of those pure whites, so I might darken them down as well. While I'm here, I want some of the light on the road where the lights are hitting the road to be lighter. So I might click on the mask on my adjustment layer, get my paint brush, and you can actually just paint in those areas as well. Now, I'm going to be using a slightly bigger brush over there to sort of get a softer area on that. Now, that doesn't look quite right yet, because what I've done is I've painted in something which looks a bit too harsh. A little trick that you can use on a mask. If you click on the mask, you can just go into your properties and feather the mask to try and soften that down a bit. And if I keep going, there we go, we've got some sort of feathering going on there. I could always add more adjustment layers if I wanted to. I could go in here and I could do a new adjustment layer. And this adjustment layer is going to be brightness and contrast because I want a bright patch where the light is hitting everything. So I'll lighten everything up. Now, of course, that's done the whole of that layer there. So how about if I inverted Command and I or click Invert there, it inverts that layer, I can click on the layer. Get white as my foreground color. Hopefully you're used to these by now, maybe slightly smaller brush, and then I'll click once or twice over here to get the real light area where the lights are hitting the ground in front of the van. Remember, you can always flick over to black. If you've gone too far, I have over there, and I can go to this one and once again, use white this time to remove that one. Now that I've done all of those things inside, remember, I'm actually inside the smart object, if this doesn't screw with your brain, nothing will, to be honest. I'll just close that down and we'll save that. Let's go back to here. You can see my lens flares are pure white now. So that's absolutely perfect. If this doesn't look realistic, it's no problem. I can double click. I can go back to it, and I can just adjust it in here. So I'll go along to the brightness and contrast. And let's see if we brighten it up a bit more. Hm. Or get my paint brush and paint bits in or paint bits out from that. Let's go and do another little bit over there. Whoa. That looks a bit much. It's because I'm painting on the wrong layer. Let's go back to the mask. I'll just paint with a bit more white on there. But don't forget if you're on a mask, go to your properties, and you can always use the feather to soften the edge of that. Have a bit of a go with that and get those lights going on darken down the scene. Remember, the one I'm in at the moment is this one over here where we have got the lens flare. Inside that one, we've got this one with the radio blur, and that's where I've done the lightning and darkening. So when you're closing that one down, you're going back into this one over here. Try it out, and finally, we'll get rid of those lens flares at the top, which look a bit funny, and we'll put in some text. M 69. Add Text & More Lens Flares: What I'd like to do now is to darken down the sky and reduce these little lens flare circles. So I'm going to put an adjustment layer on here. I will just use something simple like brightness and contrast. Darken that down. Over there, I think that's that's pretty much what I wanted. Now, of course, it's affecting absolutely everything in my scene. I mean, it looks quite good. Actually, it does look quite like a night shot over there. But we want this to be bright because it's an important part of the business. So back to my layers, I'm going to go back to my adjustment layer up here to the mask, and I'll try using a gradient. Now, I'm most um interested in this area over here. So I'm going to use a radial gradient, and I'm going to just click and drag out with that radial gradient like so. You can see as I can move this around wherever I wanted to go, I can pull this out. We can go to the top, and we can squish it around. So I'm really going for this section over here at the front of the van, like that. And that is hiding the adjustment from the layer below. I think I'm happy with that. So if I go back to my adjustment layer settings and adjust it, it's kind of doing everything except the front of the truck there or the van in there. You can still manually go in, obviously, and lighten up areas should you wish. Lastly, let's just put on a piece of text over here. Overnight delivery, we will change the size of that and move that into the right position over there. If you then want to take this a bit further and you want to put lights on your text as well, I know this is getting a little bit over the top now, and if you've been struggling with this, just stop there. But you might want to take this set of layers and then go to layer, once again, go down to Smart Object and convert to smart object again. So we've got smart objects within smart objects, within smart objects, and then your brain just explodes. I'm going to go to filter down to render lens flare, and let's just put on a lens flare in the middle of the O. Like that. Have lots of fun with it. If you get confused by this whole sequence, go back and try it again, watch the videos again, or just try something simple. Just do the start few videos to get the basic two lens flares on the truck and maybe darken it down. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. There's a lot of stuff in quite a simple image. Try it out. 70. Well Done & Thank You!: Congratulations. You've reached the end of this part of the course. I'm sure you're creating amazing stuff in Photoshop. Do look out for the next section. It's coming very, very soon. And don't forget to have a look at our other courses in Adobe and affinity and Canva, as well.