Transcripts
1. Create a Photo Collage for Social Media in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Create a Photo Collage for Social Media in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today, we're making a photo collage in Photoshop. We're going to start by selecting the images and you'll learn how to do that. Then we're going to bring the images into Photoshop. We're going to layer them and then we're going to blend them together using masks. You'll learn some tips and tricks for blending the images colorwise and then we'll finish off our image with an overall texture that we're going to create as a pattern. Now as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs-up. This helps others to identify this as a class that they might want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started making a photo collage for social media in Photoshop.
2. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 1: The first thing you'll do when you start out with your collage is to go and get some images to use. Now the images that I've used in this project are all but one from unsplash.com, which is a site for free stock images. Now, these are images that you can do anything with, so we're free to use these. What I did was, I went and looked for the kind of images that I would use in a collage. When I'm working with a collage, the first thing that I want is a hero image. I want a large image that I'm going to use, and it's generally a person or a thing that is really quite significant in size and color and scope, and that really forms a foundation for the collage. Now, I went looking for images that I could use and that you could use. Through looking for Paris and London, I didn't see anything, I thought a travel collage would be interesting. But as soon as I got to this New York collection and as soon as I saw this photo of the Statue of Liberty, I knew I had my hero shot. So I was going to build my collage with this as my main image. I'll always look for one outstanding image to use for my collages, something big and bold, that's really going to anchor it. From there, you're looking as if you're casting a play. You want some bit players and you want some background, fill in the background of your collage. I went through here and found some images to use that are from New York and that will give a theme to a project. This is one of the ones that I've chosen. I'll go through them all with you in a minute. But as I was going through, this image picked my eye, not because I actually plan to use it in the collage, but because of the grid that was over it, and I thought that the grid was really interesting. What we're going to do is to take that idea of this grid way. You're looking out through something over New York and we're going to use that for the finishing point of a collage. But you can see here in this New York collection here at unsplash.com that there's a wealth of imagery for you to use. I'm going to go through now with you the images from this collection that I downloaded and that we're going to use in the collage. Here, we have the photo that I lie made of potential images that I would use in the collage. I bought this one down because I wanted to keep the inspiration at hand. This ended up being the mesh that we're going to use in the collage, but I also downloaded this one because I thought that might do as well. I like the pigeon and the text here from this particular image, but I actually ended up using a little piece of the graffiti in my collage. This image struck me because of the repetition along the walkway here and because of the Brooklyn Bridge. I actually think that this is a very strong image and this actually forms a foundation of the collage we're going to create. Now, at one stage, when I was looking at these images, I was thinking of using the New York skyline somehow, perhaps in silhouette, but I downloaded a few images of the New York skyline before actually toughing that as an idea. I have a few here that I'm actually not going to use. I also bought this one down of the Statue of Liberty but decided to use obviously this one instead. Here, I was really interested in the flat on building, but as you'll see shortly, it's actually this building that we end up using in the collage. I like this person, I thought that that might have had some potential but ended up not using that. Here, I use the straight signs and here I use this image, this is pretty central to the collage. This image is supporting cast, we are going to see quite a bit of it in the final collage. I liked that and I thought it was a nice strong image to use. Then the two taxi images, we are using these in the collage as well, and this one's going to be central in the front of the image. It's not unusual for me to download a number of images like this, I have 20 downloaded. Three came down for grid inspiration, some of them are not in use in the collage and I think by the time we add up, what we're actually going to use, it's probably about eight of these images. Let's say now what we're going to do in assembling these images into collage.
3. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 2: To follow along with me as I create this collage, you're going to need the images that I'm using. You'll want to go to unsplash.com and search for the keyword New York. All of the seven images that we're using at this initial stage of the collage are here. You'll just run down the images and get them. You want this one. You also want this one from the Bowery. You want this one, we're going to use the one-way sign there. You want this image here. You want the Statue of Liberty. You want this taxi cab here. You want these two taxi cabs, and this image here. Now, you may find that these images are in a different order when you go to download them. The way that they come up on unsplash.com is not always in the same order, but you'll find the eight images here. Once you find the image you want to use, well, let's go and have a look at the Statue of Liberty. You can just click here to download it. It will open in another window, and you can just right click and choose Save image as, and go ahead and save it. You'll want all eight of those images saved to your disk and then opened in Photoshop. I've done just that. I have all eight images opened here in Photoshop. We're going to start out by creating the document for our collage. So I'll choose File and then New. I'm going to call this collage. I don't usually name my documents, but for this one, it's going to be a little bit handy to actually name it. Now, I'm going to choose to make something that is the size of a Twitter header. Early 2016, they changed the size of Twitter headers and it's suggested that you use the document that's 1,500 by 500 pixels tall. I'm going to make it double that because I always make my collages at a larger size, so that we can just scale them down. But I'll do them in the ratio that I want. So 1,500 to 500 is a three to one ratio. I'm going to increase that by making my document 3,000 by 1,000. If we were to reduce that by 50 percent, we'll have a document the size of our Twitter header. But it always pays to make your documents at a larger size, not too large, but a reasonable size, and 3,000 by 1,000 is a pretty good size. I'm going to click "Okay." This gives us an idea now as to the scale of our documents. This can really help you see roughly where you're going to put things as you work. Let's go and have a look at the images we're going to bring across. Well, this image is coming across as it is. I'm going to right-click it and choose Duplicate Layer. This duplicates a copy of this image, and from the document drop-down list, I'm going to go and select my collage, and I'll click "Okay." Now, it's being sent to my collage. Here it is inside my collage image. I'll go back to this image. I don't need it any longer, so I'll just close it. Let's go to the next image. Well, the Statue of Liberty, I want her isolated from her background. I'm going to go and get the Quick Selection tool, and I'm just going to drag over this blue sky, because it's easier to actually select the bit that I don't want, the sky, than it is to select the Statue of Liberty that I do want. Just clicking around here, this is the easiest selection you'll ever make with the Quick Selection tool. It's a very simple selection. Now we're going to add a layer mask. I'm going to click on Add a mask, and we're just going to click once, and that will add a mask here to this layer. Now the mask's gone in the opposite way the way we wanted it, so I'm just going to click on this black and white mask here and press Control or Command I to invert it. Now in my final image, I want the Statue of Liberty by herself. To do that, I'm going to hold control or command as I click the New Layer icon here to add a new layer below the Statue of Liberty. If you add it on top, just move it down, it's very simple. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to merge these two layers together. I'm going to select them, right-click and choose Merge Layers. This is going to do a couple of things. It's going to merge everything into one layer, but it's also going to take this mask and apply it permanently to the image. Let's just see what happens. Here, we now have the Statue of Liberty with the background permanently removed from her. We're never going to see that sky again, which is good news because we don't want it anyway. I'll right-click, Duplicate Layer, go and select my collage, and I'm sending the Statue of Liberty to my collage, and she's over here. She's way bigger than the collage is, but that's fine. Now we don't need her any longer, we can close her down. In this image, I'm going to probably use this building, so I'm going to send the whole image over those. Again, Duplicate Layer, send it to the collage, click "Okay." Let's close it down. Here we're back to the collage, we can see that the image has arrived. Now, yellow cabs in New York, this is going over intact as well. I'm just going to send that to the collage document and close it down. This image, I just want this sign here. So I'm going to go and get the crop tool and I'm going to make sure I have Delete Cropped Pixels selected because I don't want the cropped pixels to be still hanging around. I'm going to select this just in case I want the fire hydrant as well, and now I'm going to send this across. If there's a part of the image that you totally don't want, just get rid of it before you even start sending things across, because you don't want to take excess image with you. This image is going across too. Now, I haven't opened up the graffiti image at this stage, that's someone that has the pigeon and some graffiti in it. We'll just open that up when we need it. This one, however, we do need to do some work on. First of all, I'm going to crop it because I only want the taxi cab and the ground around it. I'm just going to make sure that I have this bit of the image selected and I'll click the check mark. Now I need to make a selection over the taxi cab. It's not going to be the world's easiest selection to make, but let's just have a look around at it so that we know what we're doing. We want this plate here and we want, obviously the lights from the taxi, but a lot of this stuff here belongs to the car behind. Sometimes it helps to have a good look at the edges of the image before you start, just so you can see the bits that you're going to want and those that you don't want. We're going back to the Quick Selection tool and I'm going to select over the taxi and I'm just dragging over the colors that I want. If I go outside the taxi and get some of the images that I don't want, then I can hold the Alt or Option K, and just drag over that to remove it from the selection. I've got a bit here that I don't want, Alt or Option drag to remove it from the selection. I want obviously, the side windows, I want to make sure I've made a reasonable selection of the cab. I'm concentrating more on the middle of the cab at this stage, knowing that I can finesse the edges in a minute. Also, this cab's going to be fairly small in the final illustration, so perfection is not totally required. Let's go now and click to add a mask to this layer. If you are in a version of Photoshop and it doesn't let you add a mask to the background layer, what you'll do is just double-click on the background layer and press "Okay" when you see a dialog, and that will convert it to a regular layer. So you can go ahead and add a layer mask. Now, for this image, I need to do a little bit of work around the edges, so I'm going to zoom in. With a mask, you can paint with black or white to add or remove areas from the mask. Black will remove areas of the image here, white will add them. I need to start with white. I'll go into my brush tool. I'm going to get a hardish brush. This is a good brush to use. I don't want it at full hardness, so I'm just going to move it down to about 75 percent hardness. I'm going to re-size it, I use the square bracket case to re-size it. Painting with white will let me add to this mask. I want to make sure that I've got the edge of this taxi down here. There are a couple of tricks to masking that I'm going to tell you about as we go along. One of them is that you can switch the colors between the foreground and the background color by pressing the letter X. That's really handy because it allows you to continue to work on the image without having to continually go back and forth between the area that you're working on and the colors over here. So X is a keystroke that's really well-worth knowing. The other thing is that if you press and hold the space bar as you work, the current tool turns into a hand tool and that just lets you move the image. You can move the image around again without having to go backwards and forwards between the move tool and the paintbrush tool. Less worried about this side of the taxi because I know I'm probably not going to even be using it. But again, I'm just painting with white at the layer mask selected. This is the thing that's selected. It's got a little border around it, and I'm painting on the image with white, and what's happening is I'm adding to the layer or removing it if I'm painting in black. I'm just switching between black and white by pressing the XK. Here, I've got a bit of cleaning up to do. I know that I want the top of this taxi, but I don't want the car behind it. So I'm going to make sure that I've got the actual taxi sign itself, and then switch colors and I'm just going to clean up the bit of that car behind. When you finish, press Control or Command 0 to go back out. We're going to take this image with its mask with us. I'm going to right-click on the layer, choose duplicate layer, and I'm going to send that to the collage image. Now, I can just close this down. I don't want to save it. But if you did want to save it, you would want to save it as a PSD file so that you would save the mask with it. But I don't need to do that. Here we have our collage image and we've got a number of images in it. This run through them. Here's the Statue of Liberty. Here is the Flatiron building with some other buildings, couple of taxis, that'll paste the road sign, the Bowery station, and the isolated taxi. We're ready now to go ahead and to put these together into the arrangement for our collage and start blending them together.
4. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 3: Before you do too much more work with this image, you want to go and save it. I've gone ahead and called mine NYC collage and it is saved as a PSD file. All the layers are saved in it as individual layers. Don't save it as a JPEG file or a PNG or anything like that or you're going to lose all the work. You just going to be left with whatever is sitting on the screen and it won't be a pretty sight at all, so you want to be saving it as a PSD file. Let's go ahead first of all, and let's start putting our pieces together and the first piece I want to concentrate on is the Statue of Liberty. It is here but it's a huge image and it's way way bigger than our image so we're going to need to re-size it. Click on the Move tool, make sure I have the layer selected, I'm going to press two keys, Control or command T to get my transform handles, Control or command zero to size the image so that I can see where the handles are, because sometimes it's really hard to find your handles. I'm going to hold the Shift key as I drag in because I want her sized in proportion. I'm just going to test her out. Now, there are a couple of reasons why she's going on the left-hand side of the image and I'm just going to explain those to you. Just put her in place and lets zoom in here to see. The problem with the original image of the Statue of Liberty was that she was cut off on this side. So if she's cut off we either have to blend this in, we have to put her up against something that's a solid line, or we have to jam her up against the right-hand side of the image and for me that just seemed a sensible place to put her. The other thing is that she's facing inwards and that's always good in a collage, when you have people or things that are moving facing the direction you want the person to look. If we had a collage and if we put the Statue of Liberty over here, the first place your eyes are going to go is where she's looking which is right off the edge of the page so she absolutely has to be facing into the collage. That's going to give us a bit of a problem with this pace. Because in this image we've got a person facing inwards and if we want to use this image right now, we would have to have this person facing into the collage. Well, the Statue of Liberty is already in that spot so he can't be over the top of her but we could flip him. So let's just look and see what we're going to do here. Control or command T, control or command zero, so we can see the handle. We can see that this is a huge image in comparison to what we're working with, holding the Shift key as I'm just re-sizing this. I'm going to place him roughly where I want him which is over here but he's facing the wrong way. What I want to do is to flip him over. I can click the check mark here and I'll choose "Edit", "Transform", "Flip horizontal" and now he's facing in the opposite way. Everything is good with one exception, the word Bowery is going to read backwards. But there's a couple of problems with putting text in your collages, let's just zoom in here. One of the problems with text in a photo or a collage is as soon as you've got text people want to read it, and so their eye is going to go immediately to this. We would probably be better if we didn't have the word Bowery here at all. If we got rid of it then we wouldn't be drawing attention to something that not only is back to front, but also which is text which is not totally helping our collage. At this point I'm going to the clone stamp tool here. I'm going to click on the clone stamp tool and I'm going to make sure that I'm working on this layer. I'm going to alt click on part of this sign and then I'm just going to start painting over the word Bowery. Now you can re-sample if you like by clicking again on an area of the image and just select it and then paint over it and so now we've got rid of the word Bowery. In fact, what I wanted to do was to put a piece of graffiti in here so we'll have a look at that a bit later but we've got rid of the disconcerting text and we've got a person who also now is looking into the image. Lets have a look at this layer. I'm going to turn the Bowery image off for a minute let's look at this layer. Again, control T, control zero it's huge I'm going to bring it in again holding shift so it's scaled in proportion. Now the bit of this image I'm particularly interested in is this area here, because it's going to look really good behind the Statue of Liberty. So before I make it a lot smaller I'm just going to size it there. I'm going to place the Statue of Liberty over the top, so I've just moved her into position and now I can zoom in and have a look and see if I want to fine tune this at all. I'm going to go to the building layer select the Move tool and just move this around a little bit. I like this blue color in behind her, this blue and yellow. I'm just going to place the building in an interesting position relative to her like this scaffold stairway too. If I'm happy with that that's in place. Let's go and have a look at the signpost here. Well, the signpost I want to be behind the Statue of Liberty, so I'm going to drag it underneath the Statue of Liberty. I have the layer selected I'm just going to move it over and wanted to be around about here without some of its elements but right now that's fine we can clean those up in a minute. Just doing some rough placement now. Let's have a look at this taxi cab here. Let's just make sure I've got the layer selected, I want this taxi cab to be about here because I want these lines to be coming in all directions, I want to make use of this line here and probably need this Bowery image to be maybe a little bit smaller. We can see at this stage you can work things around and just think about where your various elements are going, I think the Bowery image has come in too far. Let's look now at the taxi cab I'm going to put them at the very top because they are going to be over the top of everything. I'm going to control T, control zero and I'm going to start resizing them down again holding the shift key. Now I want them to be roughly in about this position, they're actually going to be tucked in behind the Statue of Liberty and behind this Bowery image shortly. But right now just placing them in front and center is going to be useful, because it's going to allow me to position them and size and pretty much where I want them to be. Then let's go and get the background image which is this long image here. Again, I'm going to control T, control zero just to see what I've got. Well, I want to size it down because I want to take the better pieces of this image. In a minute I want this bridge to be in about this position, so I'm going to place it roughly where I want it to be. I think that's going to be pretty good for this image but because I'm only going to use little bits and pieces of it I want it the very back. So I'm going to pull it behind absolutely everything. Now we've got various layers of image, it's time to start working on blending them together, so that we create this seamless image out of a number of different images. That's what we're going to do next, we're going to work with layer masks and we're going to start blending these series of images together.
5. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 4: Now that we've got our images open in Photoshop and Layer, it's time to get to work with the masking. We're going to have a look and see how we do that. I'm going to start with this image of the Bowery over here. I'm going to turn off the layers above it so I can focus on this layer alone. What I want to do is to provide a place for this car here, to tuck underneath the image. When I'm looking at this, I have two options. One of them is to cut away a piece of this taxi. But in doing so, I'm going to limit myself for moving this image around in that final collage. What would be better in this instance is to cut away the piece of this image here that I don't want to use. Of course we're going to do that with masks. I'm going to select this layer and I'm going to add a mask to it. Now with masks, we can paint with black to erase detail from this layer, paint with white to recover it. We can also paint with shades of gray. Masks are black and white, so you work with monochromatic tools here, black, white, and shades of gray. Well, we want to get rid of this element here. We want to get rid of the train track, so we're going to paint with black. We got to make sure that we click on the "Mask" so that we have that selected. Otherwise you're going to paint in black on the image. If you get it wrong, this is what it's going to look like, and it's not going to be happy. If that happens, just make sure that you go back and click on the "Mask" itself. Now we need a brush here. I'm going to select this round hard brush. I'm going to wind back the hardness a little bit to about 74, that's a good roundness, and I'm going to increase the size of it. To do this, I'm going to use the closed square bracket key that just allows me to size the brush. The open square bracket key allows me to shrink it. I'm just going to paint in here. Because I've got a straight line along here, I can use a Photoshop technique to actually paint that line. What I'm going to do is click once here, and then I'm going to move my brush down here. I'm going to hold down the "Shift" key as I click again. That allows me to paint in a straight line. If I need to redo it, I can just go and click "Shift" click. That is bringing in data from the layer below. Well the layer below is not my taxi layer yet. But let's just takeout some of this. You can see that we're seeing through this image, we just don't have the taxi layer in the right place yet. I've got a hole in this image. Let's go and get this taxi image. I want to bring it below the Bowery train station in me. I'm just going to drag it down in the last pallet. You can see here that I've now got it cut off. Now I haven't done the world's greatest job on this mask, but that's fine. I can continue to work on that. But look what's happened to this taxi image. If I select the Move tool, I can move this image up or down, and you can see that we're still keeping this strong railway station line. That's important to me to do. I also want to blend this in quite a bit, so I'm going back to my Bowery station image. I'm going back to selecting the mask. I'm going back to my brush here. I'm just going to test the brush size. I'm going to decrease the hardness a little bit. I want this to be a softer edge brush. Now I'm going to continue to work on this mask. I think I might just go and remove most of the station at this point. At least down to some of the lines that we're seeing through the station and that's bringing in this other image from underneath. Now if I don't want to paint this effect out totally, if I want a more gradual transition, I can come in here and start painting with a gray. I've just selected a gray color, and I'm still painting on the mask. When I paint in this gray color, you can see that we're seeing elements of both of these images, we're seeing some of the railway tracks, and some of the image that is associated with these taxis. That's a handy way of working with these masks. Now as I'm painting with gray on the mask here, I'm starting to pick up some blue color. It is not coming from this tax image because the background and the taxi image is black and white. Let's go and see what's happening. If I turn off the taxi image, you can see that the color is coming from this building. I don't want it to be there. What I'm going to do is go all the way back down, turn everything off until I get to this building layer, and I'm going to mask it off. I'm just going to click on that "Layer", add a layer mask to it. I'm going to paint with black, so I'm just going to press "D" to get my default colors, X to switch these colors around. I want to mask out pretty much everything here on this side of the image. I'm going to get a really big brush. I'm painting on my mask and I'm just going to get rid of this. If I go too far, I can always come back lighter because there is adjust masks. Now let's turn everything back on, and let's see what's happening with the Bowery image. I'm going back to a smaller brush. I'm going to make sure I have the mask for this Bowery image selected. I'm just going to come in here and see if we can pick up the Brooklyn Bridge. Well the Brooklyn Bridge is here, but it's just not in the right spot. Let's go down to this layer that I know has the Brooklyn Bridge on it. It's going to grab the Move tool, and let's move the Brooklyn Bridge into position. That's looking pretty good there. Now let's go back to the Bowery image, and we can continue to work on this masks. I've got the mask selected. I'm going to switch and paint with white. I'm going to bring down the opacity on my brush because that's also another way that you can get a blending effect by decreasing the opacity of the brush. That will allow me to get bits of the bridge into this Bowery image. I'm going to switch this color around, I'm still working with this opacity, just want to get that blended effect. Now on the person themselves. I want them to be fully visible. I'm going back up to 100 percent opacity brush, back up to white. I'm just want to make sure that I really do have his head visible there. Now I'm seeing some transition happening here. There's a straight line happening here, and it's coming from the taxi image. By turning the taxi image on and off, I can see that straight line. What I want to do is to soften this edge and blend in a bit more of the bridge behind. We're going to the taxi image, and we're going to add a layer mask to this. You can see, I'm just looking at what I've got underneath, and just playing around with some ideas. Anytime I need to soften something. I'm making a choice as to which image I'm going to soften it with. Well, this taxi image has a very hard edge on it. You can see this hard edge here. If I turn all these other layers off, you can see it has very hard edge and we want to soften that edge. Let's just go back, turn everything on. On your the taxi image on its mask, I have black selected. I'm going to wind down my opacity a little bit and start painting this in because I want to bring in a little bit more of the bridge underneath. Now, as I do this, one of the things that's attracting me is this set of strong lines. What I'm going to do is decrease my brush size, and I'm going to click, and then "Shift" click so that I'm bringing the underlying image through this building. Anywhere I see lines like this it's a invitation to actually mask in this specific area. I'm just going to bring my mask down here, skip this little thing on top of the taxi, and then click "Shift" click. I'm going to do the same here. I'm going to need to increase my brush because the building is getting a bit bigger at this point, click "Shift" click, and then decrease my brush size here, click "Shift" click. You can see some of the elements from the image way at the bottom here, coming through. It's coming through because this layer here is almost out in this area. We're getting this really interesting blending effect. Now, I'm going to continue to work on some of these elements and I'm going to speed up the video. But before I do that, a couple of things that I want to go over with you, because they're important to making collages like this. One of them is this taxi here, you can see it's a lot more orange than these taxis are. It's really drawing our eye, because of that. Well, there are a few things we can do with it and one of them is to use what's called color match. I'm going to select the taxi layer, got it up here. Select it and choose Image, Adjustments, Match Color, that's Image, Adjustments, Match Color. Now in this dialogue, what we get to do is to choose a image or a layer in an image that we want to borrow the color toning from. Of course, what we want for this taxi here, is to borrow these taxis color. What we're going to do is go to the Source option down here and select a Collage. We're saying to Photoshop, the color that we want to match is residing inside this file. Then we need to go and get the layer that it's on. I haven't been very good at naming layers. I think I'm going to have to cancel out of this, and label this taxi layer. I'm going to widen my layers palette here, and I'm going to call this taxis. It would certainly be a good idea to name your layers. You can see that I've already struck trouble here. Let's go back to the taxi, Image. Adjustments, Match Color, go back and select a Collage. Now we can go and select our taxis layer because we know which layer it is. If you have a look when I turn preview on and off, the taxi color is changing because this image here is picking up the colors from this image here. Now you can do some other things. You can adjust luminance. You will want to drag and then let go because sometimes you don't say what's about to happen until you actually do let go. It's fairly subtle some of these changes and with color intensity, you can increase or decrease that to see if you getting better or worse result. But we're looking for a match here, between these taxi colors. You can also use fade because that will fade the effect. If you get too much of a change, then you may want to fade it. Once I've got that, I'm just going to click "OK". That's help this taxi become less apparent unless dragging of our attention into this corner of the image. The other thing that you can do is just drag down the opacity of this layer a little bit. Sometimes just dragging it down to say 95, or even 90 percent will bring some of the image below through this. You won't actually see it, but there'll be a subtle enough change in the image that blends it in just a little bit. I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to work on this side of the image over here, and just get the Statue of Liberty sorted out. I'm going to do that in the next video. I'm going to speed the video up so that you can just watch and see. But be aware that I'm just going to be working with masks on these layers.
6. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 5: Here, I'm bringing the Statue of Liberty and this street sign over the top of the background image. I'm going to start working on the street sign. What I want to do is to get rid of everything except street sign itself. To do this, I'm just using the Quick Select tool to select over the areas of the sign I want to keep, adding it to a mask. Then, I'll just paint away the last bits of the sign that I don't want. Now, if some of the sign is missing behind the Statue of Liberty, I'm just going to bring that back in. Now, I'm going to continue to blend in this taxi layer, just blending in the buildings here with the layers underneath. Just softening the edges and bringing in some of the detail below. I'm going to do that in the sky too. We're finding that in the sky is actually part of that Flatiron building. I'm going to just enhance that effect, bring the Flatiron Building back into parts of this collage. At this point, I'm pretty happy with the collage as it is. I just have a few finishing touches to look at before we go and fix the graffiti over here and also add our overlay. One of the things I'm concerned is that this blue color is really not working in the middle of the collage. I really like the effect of this building coming through here and bending across here, wrapping the entire middle of the image up really nicely. But the blue color is just totally not working here. What I'm going to do is I'm going down to this layer here which is causing the blue color. That's what's responsible for it. Now, I want to keep the color in this building, but I want to remove the blue sky. I'm just going to deselect all the other layers so that we can really focus on this piece of blue sky here. I'm going to select the image layer, not the mask. I'm going to the Quick Selection tool, and I'm just going to drag over this area of the image. Now, here I get two choices. Either I can just kill the color in the blue sky, or I can kill that area in the image entirely. If I kill the area in the image entirely, I'm going to see through to this layer underneath. I actually think that that's probably going to be the best option. But let's say we just wanted to kill a color. I have this area selected, so this is my blue sky that I want to make less blue, if you like. I'm just going to choose image adjustments, and I'm going to hue saturation because that's a nice, easy way of desaturating the sky. When we type the color out of the sky, we just make it gray. But we also may want to colorize it. We could also apply some colorization to it. Again, reducing the saturation, we could add in perhaps some brown into there or something that would complement the rest of the image. That is one of your alternatives is to just come in here and run a hue saturation on just that discrete area within the image and you can get an effect that way. But I'm going to cancel out of this. I just want to get rid of the sky entirely, and I want to see the texture of this image below. I'm going to select on my mask. I have black selected, which is the color that when we fill a mask with this is going to drop this area of the image out. I'm just going to press alt, backspace option delete because we can use that feature to not only fill a layer, but also fill a selection. Control or command D to deselect the selection. Now, there is a little bit of the image here that I do need to do something with. I'm going to go back and this is on this layer here. I'm going to select it, and I'm just going to drag over it with the Quick Select tool. These areas I will just desaturate because I actually do want them in the collage. I just don't want their color. I am going to use that Image, Adjustments, Hue/Saturation and just drag down the saturation. We get this gray color coming through instead, click "Okay". Now, let's just stick all of that back together again. We do have a slight gap in here. You can see that the image of this runner is not quite meeting this area correctly. When I put the Statue of Liberty over, she's not quite covering this up. What I can do is a number of things. But probably the easiest thing is just to clone in the missing piece. I'm going to this layer here that has the runner on it. I'm going to the Clone Stamp tool. I'm just going to alt or option-click on an area of the image here, and I'm just going to paint it in behind because all we really want is the color. I'm just going to fill this across into this area of the image. I can see by placing the Statue of Liberty in place, I can see where the Statue of Liberty and this image, the background image here intersect, and so I can see what part of the image I need to build up. Having done that, let's put the other pieces back again. Now we have this most seamless transition. I am still a little bit worried about this particular area here. I think it's a little bit light. There is a tool that we can use to darken it and it's called the Burn Tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Dodge Tool and the Sponge Tool. I'm just going to get the Burn Tool. Going to make sure that I'm working on mid-tones because I think that's probably where the detail is, and an exposure, probably around about twenty-five percent will be a good starting point. Make sure that you have the correct layer selected when you use this tool, then you can just burn it. Burning is going to darken it. That's going to blend it in a little bit more with the layer underneath. Sometimes that just helps minimize the effect. The Statue of Liberty perhaps could be lightened a little bit. If you wanted to do that, you would just select her layer. Let's choose Image, Adjustments, and let's choose Curves. Now, curves is a slightly complex adjustment, but what I'm going to show you is going to fix her. This is the light area of the image. This is the dark area of the image. Right now, there's no adjustment being made at all. We want to lighten the lighter areas. I'm just going to bring the curve up at this point in the lighter areas of her garments. Then, if we want to darken her a little bit in the darker areas to add a bit more contrast, we can drag down on the curve. You just want to visually get something that you like. Really think that she could be quite a bit lighter given that she's a beautiful color. Now, if you do something like this and wiggle your curve around, you can always just drag the little pointer off the curve if it's not working for you and start again. Let's just see what we've got there. Well, she's a lot lighter and brighter here, so I think that's a reasonable fix for her. Now that we've done all this, we're ready to go and do the finishing touches, which is going to be to apply this graffiti here and then go and find a grid for overlaying over the entire image.
7. Photo Collage for Social Media - Part 6: We're now ready to get the graffiti onto that image and to make our pattern that goes over the top. I've opened the image from unsplash.com that I've got a piece of graffiti here for. I'm just going to use the Lasso Tool here to make a general selection around just this area here, just a nice little slice of the image. I'll choose "Edit", "Copy". I'm going back into my collage image. I'm going to go back into this Bowery image layer over here. I'm going to zoom in a bit. Now, I'm going to do edit paste. That's going to paste this element onto a layer by itself. Of course, it's way too big, so I'm just going to grab the Move tool, size it using the Shift key, and just get it so it's ready to place in position up here. Now, I want to blend it in so I'm going to apply a blend mode to this last. I'm going to click on the ''Blend Modes, click on "Dissolve", and then just press the ''Down Arrow'' key to run through the blend modes. Now, on the Mac, you'll want to be using a tool that is not a brush tool. Use the move tool or the rectangle marquee tool. Then once you've selected one of the blend modes, you can run down the list by pressing Shift plus and Shift minus. I'm just looking for something that's going to blend this in. Soft light is really good. Just try and find something that works for you. I like soft light, so we're going back to soft light. Then I can just drag down the opacity of it a little bit just to blend it in a little bit. Now, you may want to make touches like that throughout your collage. It's always interesting to have little elements buried in it. I think we're going to bring up the opacity of that a little bit more. But that's a way that you can borrow paces from another image and just add a little bit of extra dimension to the image. Now, let's go and have a look at this grid. Now, this is from Morgue file and I'm going to give you the download link for it. What we want to do is we want to extract these bars so that we can make a patent from them. The first thing we're going to need to do is to straighten this because it's not straight. I'm going down to the ruler tool. I'm going to stop clicking here at the very top of this element. I'm going to drag a line across here, right across the exact same place in this next door element and let go. Now, in lighter of versions of Photoshop, you've got this option that striped and last, so you're just going to click that and you're off and running. In earlier versions of Photoshop, you don't have that. You're going to have to choose Image Rotation, Arbitrary. What comes up when you select arbitray is the angle of this line. Provided you've drawn your line with the ruler, this is the angle of it and this is the rotation you need to apply to it to straighten it. All you have to do is click "Okay" and it's done. Next up, we want to turn the background layer into a regular layer. I'm just going to double-click on it and press "Okay." We need some of these metal elements here. I'm going to the Quick Selection Tool. I'm just going to drag over these metal elements. You don't need all of them. But you will need some of them. You'll want a couple of complete sections of grid here. I'm just going to show you in a second just how much you will need. As I drag or if I take more than I need, then I can just remove it by holding down the Alt key as I drag on this tool. But let's just go and see how much we've got. Going to click here on the "Add Layer Mask" icon. This is what we've got here. Ultimately, for our patent, we're going to need something that looks like this. We've got pretty much all that we need. We need to just clean up the middle bit. We're just looking for sort X shape here if you like. I'm just going to deselect that. Going back to this mosque lab because now that I've got this, I can paint with black and white paint to either remove the content on this lab or add to it. Going to make sure that I'm working with a fully opaque brush. It wants to be fairly hard, so I'm thinking probably about 75 percent hardness. Now, you can do the brush trick here and just click "Shift-click". Click and then Shift-click will get you along these lines pretty fast. Just to name things up. Once you've made a pretty good selection here, add a new layer below this one by control or command. Clicking on the New Layer icon, select both layers, right-click and choose Merge Layers. That will give you a single layer with justice element on it. Now we're going to make a selection and you're going to start here in the middle top of this little X mark here. Then you're going to drag across to the middle top of this X mark here. Then you're going to drag down so that the selection goes to the middle top of the two X marks down here. Middle top of this X shape, middle top of this X shape, middle top of this X shape. Now choose edit, define pattern. You'll find that you have like a cross mark here as a pattern, and so click okay. At this point, you can test it. Just choose File New and make a large document. I'm making mine 3,000 by 3,000 pixels in size. I just want to test this pattern's working well. Edit, fill select pattern from the list here. Makes sure that you select the last patent here because that's the pattern you just created. Make sure script is turned off and click "Okay". You just want to say that the patent is repeating. It looks as if it is a mesh. Just going to add a lab below this, fill it with black, and you can say that the mesh is pretty good here. I'm pretty happy with that. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be reasonably good. If yours doesn't look like this, then just go back to this layer and just work out the bits that are not working for you. Perhaps, you even remake your selection and you'll be ready to go. But I'm happy with this. Let's go to our collage. We're going to the very top layer of the collage. I'm going to add a new layer here. Now, I don't want to use the Edit Fill because that will not allow me to re-size the pattern. I have to add the patent in a different way. I'm going to choose "Layer", "New Fill Layer", "Pattern". Click "Okay". The pattern we just created will be the pattern that's here. You can see it's way too big. I'm going to scale it down. I'm going to start at about 20 percent and see how that looks. Well, I still think it's a little bit big. Let's go for 18 percent and I'll click "Okay". I'm going to press "Control or Command zero", so I can see the whole of the image here. Now, the grid that we've got is really light and it's also really obvious. I'm going to start by finding a blend mode for it. I'm just going to run through my blend mode list. Darken's pretty good, multiplies' pretty good. Color burn is pretty good. Exclusion is pretty good. Subtract is not bad. Going back to the darker ones up the top here, I'm going to have a look again at this darken group. It's going to darken, multiply, color burn, and linear burn. Well, I'm going to choose color burn. I think that's going to work pretty well for me. I'm going to drag down the opacity then because I want it to look less opaque in the image. I just want to see the hint of this grid over the image, but not really, really dark. Now, because this is just a layer like any other layer, we can also use this already created mask to remove the effect of this grid in places we don't want to see it. Let's go back and get our brush. Let's go and see what it's doing. Well, fairly soft. Maybe about a 50 percent hardness. Going to increase that size a bit. Using the square bracket case, make sure I'm painting on this layer. I'm painting with black, so that's going to be removing it. I'm just going to heat this image in the places where I want to minimize the effect of this grid. I'm going to heat it with this brush. If I dial down the opacity, I can lighten the effect, but not totally remove it. I can control this grid a little bit on the underlying image. I get to decide where the grid is going to show and where it's not going to show. Here's our final collage. It's been made from a number of images in Photoshop. We've bought the images in, we've borrowed the bits and pieces from each image that we want. We've blended the images together using masks and we've thrown a pattern over the image to finish off. There are lots of techniques and tools in this project and you're all going to get a collage that looks just like mine. In fact, I have trouble repeating this collage over and over again because every time I do it, I get different things appearing. I've done it before and this is one of the other ones that I've done. But you can say here that it's a lot bluer to a different look to this collage. Every time you do it, you're going to get a different result. This was really exciting when I saw this building here. I haven't seen that in the collages before, but I really liked the effect. Your project is going to create a collage yourself. Now, you're most welcome to go and get those images from unsplash.com and to follow along and make this collage pretty much the same way as I've done it with your own twist on it because you will have a twist on it. Or you can go and select images of your choice. You'll just want to limit your images to say, eight or 10 images so that you don't overburden yourself. Just experiment with some of the tools and techniques that we've used in this particular collage to get a collage that you're happy with. I hope you've enjoyed this course and I hope that you've learned lots about making collages in Photoshop. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to see this is a class that they also may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
