Photoshop Beginner Masterclass: Essential Tools, Editing & AI Features

1. Welcome to the Course: Have you ever opened Photoshop, looked at all the tools and panels, and had no idea where to start? Or perhaps you have used Photoshop, but still find yourself searching for tutorials every time you want to start something new. Either way, welcome to the Adobe Photoshop for beginners Master Class. My name is Hostin cache, and I'm a visual designer and creative professional with over five years of experience working with Photoshop and other digital design tools. We're going to start with the fundamentals, so you do not need any previous Photoshop experience to follow along. You'll learn how Photoshop works and at the same time get comfortable with the tools for retouching images. We will spend time working with layers, which is one of the most important concepts in Photoshop. Then we're going to also learn custom brushes, the text tool, the pen tool, and even some animations. But Photoshop has changed a lot with the introduction of Generative AI, and so we're also going to take a look at that side of the program. You will learn how to use Generative Fill and expand, remove unwanted objects, isolate your subjects, sharpen your images, denoise them, and even use the tools to edit your images. Goal here isn't to memorize every tool, but to understand the core workflow and see the available tools. Once you have that, you can then explore and start creating different pieces using all the tools and workflows that we've learned about. So open Photoshop and let's get started. 2. Getting Started: So before we jump into Photoshop, this is the screen that you're going to be greeted with. This is the home screen, and for the latest versions, you're going to see the same thing. But if you have the older versions of Photoshop, the placement of the panels may be different. So let's start from the top left. This is where you get to make your new file, start a project. And when we click on this, we have a lot of options for different dimensions, difference in depth per inch, color modes, and many other things. So I'm going to come back to this later because I do want to show you what the rest of these things are for, and then we can go ahead and create our first project. Look at the different tools that Photoshop has to offer. This is for new file. This is when we want to open an image, an older project, any other format, we just click on it and it takes us to the regular directory. The home screen when you click it, it's the same page. There is the learn panel where you get to explore Photoshop through their own tutorials, it does a walk through. If you want to learn, let's say, painting with a brush tool, it's 4 minutes. It happens in the app and it gives you a little snippet about what it's about. If I click on, let's say, get to know the app, it brings me to the other screen and I get to start a tutorial. Then you can just click next and exit right over here. I return back to the home screen, just click on Home and then home. So that's a really cool feature they added for the newer versions of Photoshop. There is your files. These are personal to your own accounts. So whatever you've used to sign into Photoshop, these are the files that are within that account. There is shared with you. If anyone has shared file with you, they're going to show up in this panel, Lightroom photos. Light room is another application for photo editing. You can open a Lightroom project and then have it send that image to Photoshop. So let's say you've color coded, fixed Deightness and whatever. Then you want to do some Photoshop work, you click on here and find that photo that you're trying to edit. We also have a deleted tab, anything you delete will be there for you to maybe restore or just see what you've deleted. Right over here are some of the newer stuff, so they always change whenever there's a new update, so yours may not look the same. The top right, we have the Cloud. If you do have your account connected, you have your Adobe Cloud right over here. You can see your storage. I have 2 terabytes. You may be different. And if for some reason it's not syncing, there is usually a button that lets you resume it and configure why it's not doing that. But when you have this checkmark, it's syncing okay. If you sign in to Photoshop through a different device, log into this account, you can still access your file. Have a search bar right here. You can look for a certain project, editorial, anything else. This gift box is anything new about the version you're using. I had this stuff to explore later. We're going to go through each of these ones in the further lessons. But again, if you don't have the latest versions, the stuff you see here may be different. Lastly, that's your account. If you click on it, it takes you to your browser and logs you in on Adobe. So I'm not going to click that because it'll just take me to my personal page. But if you wanted to sign out, edit your profile or anything, just click on this icon. Should be your profile picture. We can also change the view of our recent works. You can filter through your files, change them in different ways. And yeah, that's pretty much the home screen. If you click on this, you get to go back to your project. But we're going to assume that we don't have a project yet and create a file together. So click on New File. This window for new documents should pop up. We have some things up here. These are presets for different dimensions and DPIs. I'm going to start with photo. We have some pretty standard size things like landscape photos, Photoshop size. We can click on this for other things, portraits and different items. We also have templates. This is, again, through Adobe. A lot of them are free, but there are some paid ones that you can explore too. So if I click on any of them, I can download them right here. Actually see a preview first and see if I like it. It's Adobe Stock. This is the artist, the name of that template, and it tells me exactly what that template includes. So we have the effect, sample text, and not included in a download file are these images that we see. So if we wanted to get this effect, the glass reflection, we would need to have our own pictures and simply download this template to implement the effect. These are for pictures, close this, go back here. Next, we have print. One thing that is different between photo print, arts and illustration, apart from third dimensions is the resolution. With Photo, you can see that over here in resolution, the numbers may be different. You're not sure what dimension or resolution you want to put on. I would help to look online and see what's the standard. So if you are designing something that you want to print, it's a good idea to get in contact with your printer to see how big, how many DPIs you need for your file. Throughout this course, I will tell you some standard forms. But again, if you're doing some specialized things, be sure to double check with your printer or do a search to make sure that your size and quality is suitable for whatever purpose you're trying to achieve. So with photo there's like 300 DPIs. You can also do it pixels per centimeter or pixels per inch. The higher this number is, the more high quality your work is. But we can't just put this for every other document because that's going to make it a very heavy file. So for images, for example, if you're importing a photo, there's no need to change the resolution here since the photo already has its own quality and pixels in set. But the only time where you would put a really high resolution is for something like arts and illustration because this is where you are creating those pixels and it's not there already. So photo, when we come to the right, you can change the name of this preset, call it my Canvas or something. We get to save it right here, save the document preset, and then it's going to show up here. Let's just make one. Call this my picture. It's safe and there's my picture. We can change the width and the height, change the unit it's in. You can also decide on your orientation, whether you want it to be a vertical portrait or a horizontal landscape. The button next to it is for artboards. We're going to get more into that in the layers lesson. Artboards are essentially different canvases that you can have for maybe different pages of your presentation, different artworks at the same time, and they're actually really efficient when you're dealing with bigger projects. Next, we have the resolution box. You can type in a number and then decide if you want it to be pixels per inch or per centimeter. The standard is usually 300 or maybe 100. Try not to go overboard with it unless you've been instructed to by your printer or a publisher, and once again, I'll go over into proper numbers in further lessons. Color mode is the way your colors are displayed on your project. Depending on your purpose, you would have to have different color profile so that when you publish it, the colors look accurate on that display. For example, RGB is usually for digital screens, but if you were to print like a physical paper, while choosing RGB, certain colors will look very different. And in a lot of cases, that can ruin your illustrations or photography. So depending on what you're trying to do, you would have to choose your different color maps. We have gray scale, which is just black and white, RGB for digital, CMYK for print. We have lab color. This is more specific to special designs. Will go over some of them that are necessary for you to know as a beginner, but as you enhance your skills with Photoshop, you're going to come across maybe bitmaps, lab colors, and some other stuff. We also have the bit range. By default, it should be an eight bit, but if you're doing a larger illustration that you want to print, you can go for a bit higher. Do not just put it on the highest one because you think it's going to make your work more high quality because that can slow down your program. Worst case, it may just crash your program and you can lose progress for your work. For this lesson, we're just going to go eight bit in RGB. Let's assume we're just doing a digital work. Now, background content is the first thing that you see when you make this project. You can choose a different color. By default, it's white. I can turn into black. If you choose background color, you can choose something from here. You can also do transparent, no background, get yourself a PNG. And then we have custom for you to choose a specific set of colors. So these are the different things. Let's go with white for now. We have some advanced options, which you can talk like that. Color profile, when you open this, this is similar to what we talked about in color mode, but these are presets for certain things that you want to. For example, Adobe RGB is a profile by Adobe. It represents colors differently than compared to, let's say, Apple's RGB. We have Image three and a bunch of other stuff. As a beginner, you don't really need to go too deep into this, but you can see that we have some pretty famous color profiles here like Cannon. We have some LUT over there. We got Fuji film and all these stuff. These are official color profiles by these companies designed to represent your colors on whatever you make in Photoshop in their own unique way. But let's do don't color manage because we're just trying to do something simple lastly, we have pixel aspect ratio. Just an overview. Everything you have on a screen is made up of pixels, and the aspec ratio is the overall size of those collective pixels. So when you click on this, we have square pixels, and we have a bunch of other stuff. Now, what you're choosing here is not the size of your canvas, but rather the shape of the pixel. So one pixel is a very tiny part of your screen. By default, we have everything as square pixels because we're trying to create digital artworks, photography and other stuff. But if you're doing something different, let's say you're doing special type of animation video, you would want to go for the other types, which is different shapes for your pixels. So these are just non square shapes. The first one is your square shape. Just like the color profiles, do not change these unless you were instructed to by a tutorial, by your video editor or anyone else that is guiding you through those complex projects. Now let's stick to square pixels, meaning that each pixel on our screen will be a square. There's also this search button down here for you to look for templates. These are meant to make your workflow a lot more easy. So let's say I want to make a poster. So you can type in the thing that you're trying to make it go, and it's going to open a page on Adobe stock, which is kind of like shutter stock, but for Adobe, and you get to download different poster templates in either Photoshop format, illustrator format, and just tweak it until it's your own. We're not going to go too much into these. You could explore them in your own time. But for now, let's just leave that and look over the stuff up here before creating our project. This was photo, pretty self explanatory. Now for prints, these are the different paper sizes. So we have the classic letter. These are the papers you see in your household print. Have legal tabloid. You can see the inch and their PPIs, pixels per inch. So you can see it's 300, so pretty high quality. You can find A four papers, B three, and so many more. We still have that template feature down here to get you started on the project. So if I click on any of these, you can see that you can just click on them and change the width and height, choose a different unit, and just get started right away. Arts and illustrations are very focused on those pixels because you are, as we said, making them yourself. So you're not importing an image, you're not importing a logo, but drawing things perhaps. And down here, you can see the type of things that constitute as arts and illustration. So we have some text work over here, and these are generally more high quality work. If you look at all presets, we have ten EDP, which is the size of the usual screens. 720 P, we have 1,000 pixels, 2000 and you can just go up from there. If, say you were instructed to do a 5,000 pixels, you just replace that with a five. Next, we have our web. So you can actually create web interfaces on Photoshop. So you can see we have different screens, Macro P 15, IMAC all of that. Say you want to create a mockup like s or you want to make a landing page, send it to your developer. You can do it via Photoshop as well. What people do, if you're familiar with UI design is created here, import it to Figma, organize it a bit there, and then hand that over to their developers. It's a pretty cool feature, as you can see, there's a lot that you can do within Photoshop. Then it's mobile, same thing, but just for the mobile screens, we have tablets here as well, Apple Watches, and instead of looking for what dimensions you need for these type of devices, Photoshop has it all here for you. Lastly, is film and video. Uh, you can actually generate animations in Photoshop and even edit videos to some extent. Obviously, it's nothing like Premiere Pro or after effects where you get to do a lot more complex work. But essentially, it lets you perhaps bring your illustrations to life by making your character blink. It's pretty manual, I would say, compared to some other platforms out there. Does give you the capabilities to do stop motion and that sort of thing. We'll definitely look into how to animate and edit within Photoshop in further lessons, but this is where you would get started. Good for K, get some special ones down here too, eight K, and so on forth. That's our new document panel. Let's go ahead and make a simple square thing. I made this one before I just called the logo, 600 by 600, 300 TPI. Let's go ahead and bring this down to 500 and this to maybe 200. RGB, a bit and everything else is set to default. Now, I'm going to turn on artboards. We'll look at that in a further lesson, but to set up our document, we're going to need to turn this on or else you cannot follow along with what I'm doing. Since this is a square, doesn't really matter which one you choose. It's 500 by 500. But once you have that all set up, let it create and there is our first box. If you're zoomed out like mine, pull down Command zero. Or Control Zero. Command or Control Zero to zoom in. You can also do, let me zoom out again. Right click with the Zoom tool and hit Fit on screen. So whichever way you prefer. All right. So this is your Photoshop interface. This is where you create all sorts of stuff. And in the next following lessons, we're going to start by looking at this long range of tabs, then jump into the tools. Basic functionalities before we learn how to create things like a logo, text, maybe a poster and all those stuff. I'll see you guys in the next lesson where we begin to do that. 3. Colors: Welcome back. In the previous lesson, we learned how to create our very first document. We made a simple square document, and now we are here to work on our canvas. So this white box that you see right in front of you is the canvas that you're going to be putting on all sorts of stuff. But before we get into that, we need to first understand how Photoshop functions, and that starts by looking at all these things on the right side of your screen. Now, yours may not look exactly like this, but these are things that you can bring in from the window tab right over here. So you can see if I wanted to get color. You can see color right here. If I'm pointing to something on the right and you do not see it on your screen, just pause, go to window, find it, and then just click it for it to show up on this right. Now, the cool thing about Photoshop is that you can customize your workplace. Obviously, someone who is a graphic designer will have a different workspace than someone who is an Illustrator. That's why Photoshop allows you to say, take your favorite things, pull them out, maybe remove certain parts, and just keep the things that you're going to be using most often. Example, if I don't use the path window that often, I could right click and then just close it. So it's just going to disappear. But again, if I wanted it back, I can go to Window and then find paths. Click at once, and it's going to show up right over there. All right. So even when I bring in all the different tabs, you can see I have from top to bottom, it's all filled. They are in their own boxes. So notice this line between these four and then there's one underneath these two, and they're all sort of separated. That is because each of these windows are for one specific purpose. First four that you see up there is all related to filling in your shapes, your texts, your lines, mostly in regards to color, but there's also that pattern tab. That's where we're going to begin just starting with color and then I'll make my way down in the next lessons. When you click on this, you're going to be greeted by all of these little groups. And when you toggle them on, when you expand them, you will see different colorful boxes. Now, a lot of these groups are there by default, so RGB, red, green, and blue. These are your classic digital colors. Right underneath, we have CMY Kase, cyan magenta, yellow and black, Ks for black here. And earlier when I said that the colors for RGB, digital colors are different from print colors, you can kind of see what I was referring to. So if you pay close attention, you can see how the magenta or pink here is very different from the one right above it. Same thing with blue, the cyan, the green, the red, and the yellow. If you go on each one, and just click on it. You can see that it's still red in both cases, but it's just the way that they're represented on the screen. So be very careful with how you're choosing your colors to be represented when you're printing or where you're publishing online. Gray scale is just black and white. You start all the way from black to white and anything in between. We have pastels, light colors, darker colors, and all that stuff. You can make your own color palettes by clicking on this group icon. Call it my colors, it okay, and just going to click and drag it outside so it's not in RGB. Before I add a color, I can go down here. You'll notice two boxes. Apple click on the front one and then choose that new favorite red. So I'm just going to grab a random one. You can also put in the hex code. This is unique to a number to a color, I mean. You can find unique hex codes online on Pinterest. There's tons of websites out there for you to grab those specific colors. You can also change their values here. I will come back to this. I just want to make sure we finish swatches and then move on to the other stuff. So you can see that once I hit Okay, I now have my new favorite red or this new color that I want to add into the M colors group. Once I have the selected, the group, I can hit the plus and call it my favorite red. And then just make sure the color is the same. There's this option for you to add it to your current library. Libraries are a way for you to organize any sort of media that you have on Photoshop. So we can have colors. We could have different patterns, different gradient maps, and so on forth. This is in regards to the libraries down here, so I'm going to get into that later. But I if I don't want it to be in my library, I could just not check it. But for the purpose of our course, I'm going to check it, and it's going to show up in my library. Once you're done, hit Okay, and there's my new color. So anytime that I'm trying to draw, looking for my color, just hit on Swatches, find it, and just click once on it. So if I had blue I click once on it, it's going to choose that red. If I want to choose a different color, just click on them once and you can see they're being loaded up onto brush. If you don't want that color anymore, you can delete it. So I'm just going to go down to a different color palette. Say, I want to delete this, hit the trash icon once. Okay, and pretty simple. And as we saw, we can reorder them. So say I want gray scale to be above RGB, I can just click and drag it. If you put it on RGB, it's going to go inside this group, which you could do for a different reason. But for now, I'm just going to have them all lined up like this. If you have tons of swatches out there, you can search for them. So let's go for my favorite red. There it is. And go for only greens and it loads the green in all of my groups. They are labeled green. And that is pretty much our sweags panel. There are some options on the top, right, this little hamburger menu. You can make a new preset, which is what we did with my favorite red color. Make a new group, the same thing as these two. Rename your group, dole the group same thing. Tiny thumbnail. This is how they're displayed. So I could choose large list, and that's what it looks like. You can do tiny thumbnails, change that up to your liking, to go back to the default, which is this. We also have the ability to show the search bar and the results. The resents this is the search bar, and these are the resents. If you don't want them to be visible, just click on them once and they disappear. Have append default swatches, which is changing our list to the way they were initially. So you can see that it brought all of these guys below and just sets them to the default. This is in case if you, for example, deleted half of these and you want to get the original pale group colors back. You can just click that to bring them. We can import swatches. If you downloaded a group or a color palette from the Internet. That works with Photoshop. This is where you would import them. You can export your swatches. You can export these watches for exchange. So you can save it like that on your screen, your computer. We have legacy swatches, which if you click on is going to load in some of the older swatches, paint color swatches, something specialized. This is what they mean by that. We have close and then closed tab group, which is just the same thing as doing that or just removing it completely from the list here. Speaking of that, if you right click on it, we can expand the panel like that, make it bigger if you want, minimize it, and then we can collapse into icons, bring it back to what it was. Change the interface option. This goes into your preferences, but I like to keep it as default. That is your swatches panel, pretty straightforward, really helpful when it comes to anything you do within Photoshop. All right, once we have this, right underneath is your color panel, which you can again load in from your window if you're not seeing it here. Now, color is just color. You can click and drag the edge here to make it bigger. This is where you get to experiment with color, maybe grab something real quick. And whatever I select, you can see down here, my fgrown color changes. Can start painting with whatever I select. So you can see that we have almost white on the left, black on the bottom, and the really pinky scenario on the top, right. So in this color panel, going from left to right is your saturation. So if it's all the way saturated, you're going to get a very deep pink in this case. You can go with red to make it easier. So a very deep red would mean a very saturated red. You go all the way to the left, there is zero saturation, which means there's no color. It's just white. Top to bottom is about the lightness of that color. So if you go all the way to the bottom right, you're just getting pure black. So same thing here. This is when you have no saturation because this side means no saturation. And if you're all the way at the bottom, you have no lightness. So there's no light for there to be any color. But if you go all the way to the top, that's 100% lightness, so there is going to be color as much as you saturate it in. So just try to understand the different sides of this square Going to help you make different color choices for your project. So this is pretty helpful tab to use. This was saturation, lightness and this bar here is your hue, which you can just grab in like that. Now notice how some of the colors give us this error message, it says out of gamut for printing. We did talk about the CMYK RGB thing a little bit, but if you choose a very saturated green like this guy, put this back. What it's going to do is not let you print that exact color if you were to do it. But as I drag it to the left, you can see that there's no problem where I have it over here. My color profile is not exactly made for printing, but basically, if you get a very saturated, very bright color, chances of your printer having that are low, especially if you have a standard thing. But this is something you want to pay attention to. So if you are doing something for printing, you're Workflow in regards to color will be very different. I would have to be very careful about the colors I'm choosing. I have to choose a different color profile, load in certain colors to avoid misprinting later on. But that's basically what this triangle means. Similarly, we have that Hamburger menu. I can change the way my cube looks. This is the hue cue. As we said, this was the hue. I can make it based on brightness. Now we have the hue on here, and then we have brightness on the right side. So when there's light, there's color. When there's no light, there's no color. That's the logic. You can choose your hue like this. Next, we have color wheel. This is something that most of you may be familiar with. But again, it's the same thing. We have hue around this triangle. We have brightness really bright. Really dark, full saturation. If you don't want to use this, you can use the sliders up here. Hue saturation, which is how much color there is and then brightness. Type in a number if you want, you can also use your rakes to go down by one increment and change your colors. Next, we have gray scale slider. This is in regards to how much black you have in that particular color. Every color that you see right here has a little black in it, which may not make sense when you're thinking of traditional paints. But let's say I want this blue. There is 84% of black in there. If I choose, like, a brighter color, it's 6%. If I choose this, it has 95%. Now, in real life, when you try to add black paint, I mean a little bit to your colors, it ruins the entire thing, but that's not the logic that is being used here because these are digital colors. Again, we can change the numbers by our rachis or with a slider. And just remember that on the digital world like Photoshop, K is black, so it's not B, but K. Let's go to another one, RGB sliders, red, green, and blue for digital work. So how much red do we have in our color? The opposite of red is green, so I'm just going to bring these two, like, halfway so you can kind of see. So if I add red to my color, which is currently set to this peach thing, it's going to be peach. If I remove all of the red, I'm going to be left with a greenish color. And if I want to remove the green, I'll be left with blue. Add green all the way. I'm going to get a really bright green. Let's bring this to zero. Now that I have blue, if I remove all the blue, then I'm left with black. If I add all the blue, I'll get a very dark blue. RGB, red, green, and blue, just decides how much of each color you have in your current color. It goes 0-255, and that's the maximum you can have. You can play around with these. As a beginner, you wouldn't really come to this tab. You would either import a color palette, use one of the presets or just manually add in the numbers the hex code to make it a lot more simpler. Have HSB sliders, which is hue saturation and brightness. Kind of looked at that already with a different panel. So hue, what color saturation, how much of that color, brightness, how bright is that color? Pretty simple stuff. CMYK. This is for print. How much cyan is in that color, how much Mcenta is in that color, how much yellow, and how much black. So if you remove all the black, you can see we get a yellow. If I remove all the yellow, we just get white. Now, lab colors are essentially like RGB. We are working with the three channels, but it just converts those channels red, green, and blue to light components. Light or L stands for luminance. You can see that when it's at 100%, we can see the colors. But if I remove that, there will be none left. It just turns to then A represents the red and green. You can also see it somewhat here, and B stands for the blue and yellow. Just like the other specialized sliders, you wouldn't really come to this unless you were instructed to or if you're trying to do something special, but it's good to understand what these letters stand for and why we have this many options. The last thing is web color sliders. This is for the websites. Basically, you can see it in different components. That is because you are formulating your hex code. Now, hex codes they always start with a hashtag, so hence the hashtag They're composed of numbers or letters. Essentially, it's a unique code for each color. So when you go on a website and you see a red button, if you were to find the code for that exact red that you would want displayed on your website, you would take in the hex code of that red button. So again, another specialized thing. If I just grab this color, you can see it starts with 69 091c, and that is a color. When I dab or click on this, you can see down here. We have 69 091c. Same thing. This is the hex code area. If you were to have a hex code from the Internet, you just copy it and paste it there. Then hit okay, and your color is ready to use. Alright, and since we're here in the color picker panel, this is extremely helpful if you're trying to pick colors up another image of a color palette, or you just want to manually type in the values and not use the sliders that we saw. So HSB, saturation brightness. That was, I think, one of the first ones we looked at. You can just put in a number. You can use your arcs as well. So we like 80, you can see that we can move it around. 80 saturation, 60 brightness. That is my color. We can see that automatically the red is set to 112, green is 153 and blue is 31. Let's get rid of some of the blue, increase the green and increase the red. That is our new color. Next, we have lap that we just looked at. We can increase luminance to say 95, get a really bright green and the red and green is set to negative right now. We can make it even less. I get a deeper green Then I can add some of that blue and yellow. You can see it's turning bluish. Just playing around with these CMYK, Cyan Magenta yellow black. You can change stuff like this. Let's remove some of the yellow and you can see I'm getting blue instead. I I add 100% K, I just get black. Now, this new color, you can see it's not exactly fully black is this unique code. If you're applying to use these codes, just remember that white is just FFFF F, and then black is just zero. So it doesn't matter if you're here or here. These two numbers, it's good to know them. So if you're trying to get a pure black and you thought this would be it, this is not pure black. It needs to be all zeros. The same thing for white. If you're slightly off, this does look white, but it's not actually white. Alright. And say you have this really nice color, you want to add it to your swatches, you can do it right here. It goes in that color palette that we made earlier. So let's just do that. Let's call it M blue. Click Okay. We can also put it in our compare it with the color library. So these are specialized library for print mostly or different types of display. The one at the bottom is arc color. So I can compare it with these ones if I want to do some special project. And the last thing is web colors. Basically colors that would display well on a digital screen. And just meet these standards. So you can see it kind of added better grouping segment for us so we can just clearly detect those things and go about finding a perfect color. All other things down here, we have Copy color as HDML. So that's the HDML code if you're doing a website or something, or you want to embed something in WordPress. Copy colors hex code. That's the code we looked at earlier. Then we have RGB spectrum, CMYK spectrum, gray scale. So the way it's displaying these colors on what mode are we on? So you can see that it does change as I switch through. By default, it's more it's on CMYK, but just toggle it here and make it your we have web safe. These are colors that are, as the name says, safe for the websites. So you can see that I will not have the issue of going somewhere in between because it's clearly indicated. Undo that. We can then close and close this entire tab group. We can close this and the tab group itself. That is all the color stuff that we have. We looked at swatches. There's also the same thing for gradients. Gradients are essentially how you go from one color to the next. This will be using the gradient tool, so I'm not going to go over right now until we look at the tool right here. We also have patterns. These are pretty self explanatory. It's just images that you get to fit inside shapes. Again, when I introduce you guys the shape tool, I can go over exactly how these functions. Just like how you have a library for your colors, for your gradients, you also have some for your patterns, and this is where they are located. We also have the channels. This is for when you want to look at a certain channel within your image. So if I were to import something real quick, you can see that RGB ends us with hit Command zero to make it full screen. The reason why you would want to go over channels is when you want to isolate a set of colors within a composition. They're labeled clearly on the top right. The reds, the greens, and the blues, going over them, you can just isolate them. Anything blue and red is currently being displayed right now. Anything green and red it's like that, red and green and blue, they look like that. That's the only purpose of this particular panel. So that's all about just color inside Photoshop. When we move on to the tools, I will show you how to use these colors, but this lesson was meant to understand the logic behind them. Why do we have so many different sliders when we're just dealing with one color? What do the codes stand for, when and where you would want to use a certain color mode. And now that we know the basics, we can now move on to our next lesson where we take a look at the other panels on the right. Oh 4. Move Tool: There are so many tools in Photoshop, and it's really important to understand the basic foundation of what they are used for and how do they operate, basically. This will be a rather long lesson, so I will be breaking them up into pieces and parts, and that way, it would be more digestible. But it's important for you to follow along as I'm doing these exercises so you get a better grip of how these tools work. The toolbar is located on your left. You should see the exact same thing. If for some reason you don't, just make sure you go to Window and turn on tools. So if I undo this, I will not have the toolbar. Just make sure that this is selected. Starting from the top, we have our move tool. This is used to move things around your canvas. I'm going to import the image from last lesson and to import, you can just open your finder, drag and drop it right onto the canvas. You can see that with the move tool, as I go over the image, a blue line occurs around the image. Indicates that this is an element that I get to move around. So just by clicking on it and then dragging it around, I'm moving things. This applies to shapes, text, images, and effects. It's a really helpful tool, and the shortcut to get it is just hitting V on your keyboard. If I'm on something else, I hit V. You can see that it jumps straight to the move tool. When you're on the move tool, there are certain things that you can do. So you can obviously move your element around. You can align them, and you can transform them. So if you're using the text tool, you can't really do those same things. So that's why it's probably the most used tool in Photoshop because you use it between everything. So let's try making this image a little smaller. We can have it selected and then hit Command or Control T on your keyboard. So one more time, Command or Control and then I'm going to get these boxes around my image. You can tell that it's being selected for transforming because of this giant X across our element. And again, anything that I show you right here can be applied to a text layer, a shape layer, a path layer. So just by dragging the corners, I can resize my image. Same thing here. This will maintain the original size of the image, so feel free to move it around. Another thing that you can do is hovering your mouse close to the top of these points. You can see that it changes when I do that. And with that, I get to rotate my image. So clockwise or counter clockwise. You can see on my cursor, it tells me the exact degree. And if I wanted to be on a specific degree, I could just type it in this box right here. So let's say 45 degrees, 90 degrees. Zero degrees. Anything at all, you just do that and you can rotate your image. In terms of position, we do have X and Y coordinates. As a beginner, you wouldn't really use that. Usually, it's more efficient, but if you wanted to, you can just position it exactly by the pixel on your canvas. Okay. And if you clicked away by accident, just click the image again, Commander Control So what else can we do over here? We do have the width and the height currently locked. So when I try to change the size of this, you can see that I can't really squish anything, and that is because we have this locked. So if I click on this once, I can now squeeze my image because the ratio no longer matters. Commander Control Z to undo that and get this locked again. I can also go over the letters, go left or right, to do basically the same thing I'm doing here, but from a different method. You can also use your error keys to move them by smaller increments or just type in any number. Let's say 5%. When I try to resize my image, you can see that it does that by the corners. So every other corner except this guy is moving as I'm trying to move this around. But if I want a different reference point, say, the top one, the right one or anything, you can see these little boxes around this guy. I could just click on one of them. So now this guy is my new reference point. And just like that, we can change the reference point wherever we want it to be. Notice this circular target thing, that's what you're looking for. And if you want it to be at the center, just click the center. And that's where it should be by default. If you don't want the center point, the reference points, just turn off this checkpoint and you don't have to worry about that. And this will just by default, go to the opposite end of where you are moving it. Now, in terms of transforming, we do have some special stuff over here right next to the checkmark and deccel mark. If you click on this, you'll notice that your grid changed immediately. So now we have this situation. You can choose the way you can see these grids. You can add more points, more columns, more rows. The more rows and columns you have, the more precise your transformations can be. This right here is pretty standard. And basically, I could squish and squiggle the insides of this based on the grid. So I can't do anything with the edges here because that was for the previous transform options we had. But now if I just click on this end, I could kind of do this. I get kind of three D, move it around. If you have a gradient thing and you wanted to move like a liquid substance, this is where you would come to do that. When you create a curve, notice how we got these two lines coming from the corner. When you grab this, you can change the edge. The more you take it out, the more intense that curve is going to be so notice this curve. But if you push it in, it's less intense. Pull it in all the way, you're going to get a straight line. And this is a case with all the other ones. So hard to grab it sometimes. Looks like that. If you hold down option on your keyboard and click on it, you can move the corner itself. All right. Let me hit Commander Control Z, get my default grid back. There we go. When I hold down command, notice how I'm getting the option to add another row and column. This is the same thing as up here. Let's say I want another row, I should bring my cursor to the edge. Then I can add a middle row here. So just click Let go and you got yourself another row. If I hold down command in the center and not at the corners, I will get a row and a column, which I could add in for a more precise transformation. So notice how the lines here are more detailed compared to the center. This is because of what we had. So when I move this corner, you can see how not everything is moving. I could just work with this tiny section of my work and get some transformations going. This is the same thing as the command thing. You can just split the warp horizontally, vertically or just do one where there's both or just hold down command. We have some grid options. If I hit default, it just brings me back to what I had. I could make it a three by 34 by four and or five by five. You can also customize this to the way you want it, say, seven columns and three rows. You can do that easily. Command zero. And then this is where you get to decide what kind of warping you're doing to your image. So when you're on custom, you're doing a combination of all of the ones below. But these are things that you would use for something like a shape or a text, not necessarily for an image like this. But since I have it here already, let's go over what each of these do. So when you do arc, it just creates an arc from the bottom, gives us this shape. I could still move the top to have it go the other way and decide how much of a curve I want. Manner control Z. Then we have an arc lower or upper, same thing, but the bottom, as you can see, remains intact. So lower would just be the same thing, but on the other end. And with any of these warps, you still can add the row and the column. So this applies to all of these. Then we have a dapple arc, which lets you get one unified arcing. We have bulging, which makes it rounder in the center. Looks like that. We have a shell lobe. These are just different shapes you can explore the opposite end for upper, turn it into a flag, a wave wave on the inside, a fish shape, and we still have the controls to change this up. We have a rise fish eye effect, which you can just grab the point there. This is something you might use. We have an inflate option, a squeeze option. A twist option. There we go, whichever direction you wanted to go, and then a cylinder option. So you may be wondering, apart from text and other stuff, why else would you want to use the warps? This one in particular for the cylinder warping is really good for mockups. So say you have a soda can and you're trying to warp your design onto that soda soda can. The can itself is shaped like a cylinder. So you would do this and then simply change the width of it and match it to how tall your Soda cans. So it makes things a lot more simpler for those type of purposes. We go back to do wave. And then over here, we have some guide options. The guide options here are talking about the blue line you see on the image. You can change the color if you want how visible they are and how thick they are. Unless you have to, just leave them as the default because you do need to see what changes you're making. This right here just separates just switches the way your warping is happening, just the orientation. If it was warping this way horizontally, we can have it warped vertically. Bending is the same thing as that white box. If I just move this around, you can see bend is changing up here. The height is about the height of your work. Then we have the volume. So that sort of stuff. You can then click this to bring it back to default and undo everything. And once you're done, hit the checkmark. So those are your special warping effects. We do have some general transform options which you can get again with a move tool, then Commander Control team. But this one, you have to right click on the image, and then you get that option. So we have place, which is what we did first when we clicked dragged in our work, placing it, which is have you unselected for transformation. You can do the same thing via Inter on your keyboard. Whichever you prefer. Then we have cancel, cancel the operation. Then we have scale, which decides on how large your images. We have rotate. Let's you rotate it. Skew, basically squishing it or making it bulkier on one end. This is, again, good for mockups. So you have a TV screen that's tilted to the right, you would want to match your design according to that tilt. Then we have perspective. Perspective is more justified than skew. Skew can get a little bit distorted, but I would say perspective is a lot better if you have, like, a well defined rectangular shape. And then distort just lets you do anything you want. So it doesn't really care if it's justified, if the ratio makes sense. You just get to move your artwork in weird ways. Then we have rotate 180 degrees, 90 clockwise, counterclockwise. Warp brings you back to that menu we were looking at earlier. We have the split options, which is the same thing as this or holding down command. Then we have some Tuggle guides, which hides those blue lines that you can configure with this. Then we have flip horizontally. Or flip vertically, and that's about it. I'm going to reset the warp and then just cancel to get back my original image. That's all the transformation. There is another tool in the move tool. Whenever you see this tiny triangle in the corner, that indicates that there's another tool besides the tool you're seeing right now. Notice how the Zoom tool doesn't have that tiny triangle, but a lot of the other ones do. So when you right, click on the Move tool, you can see there's the Artboard tool. The shortcut is also V. But when you hit V, you're going to be directed to the Move tool first. So just right click and grab your artboard. So when we were first setting up our document, remember that we checked a box for artboards, and those are essentially different canvases. So this right here is one canvas that I have, and if I click on it, I could move the entire thing. With my artboard tool. All right. When I click it, I can move it around, and then notice these pluses on the edges of my artboard. That lets me create one on the right. It command Z, one on the top, one at the bottom, and so on forth. It Command zero. When you export your work and say you have seven artboards, that's going to be seven pages of art that you are exporting from Photoshop. But it's important for you to not confuse this with layers. Layers are within one artboard. Artboards are within your project. So it's a bigger concept. Now, with artboards, you can create some presets for yourself. So if you have this special dimension that you'd like to reuse, you could just define it here, then hit the plus sign, and then you can just jump straight into Photoshop and start from that artboard size. But if you want to use a well known size, you can go on here. You can see we have iPhones, we have Apple Watches, and all the other stuff that you might need. And when you click on one of them with the current artboard selected, it changes that to the actual size. IPhone ten is 1125 pixels by 24 36. That's why it's a lot larger. This is predefined by Photoshop. But if you wanted to, you can still change the width or the height of your artboard. The next thing is the background color. By default, it's white. You can do black, transparent or other for the color picker to show. You wanted a different unit, you can just type out pixels and put in maybe centimeters, inches or whichever other units you prefer. I'm going to go back to Logo, which is a regular square, 600 pixels. We do have some other options up here, which is making your artboard two landscape or portrait. But since I have a square, those are being graded out. We can add a new artboard based on these things. If I click on this. I will get this loaded into my mouse and I can just click once and maybe put it right next to my current artboard. We have the orientation, which I could justify them at the center, top edges, distribute the width and all that other stuff. This is for when you have multiple artboards. I only have one at the moment. Then we have some options right here, which by default, all of them are selected. That's the artboard tool. Going back to the move tool, there was one other thing that I wanted to show you guys, and that is when you just have an element on your camas. Have noticed these things, same as the artboards, we have a preset option to make some presets defined for this tool. You wouldn't really use it for the move tool since it's a pretty general thing. But you can turn this on to see the transform controls, which is the same thing that we were looking at earlier. Then you can align it to the center of your document, edges, top, bottom, center it completely means pressing these two, and then there's more options down here. If you had multiple things, let's say I had two things, going to hold down option on my keyboard, click and drag to duplicate my two elements, click and drag both of these elements. I can move them both at the same time. The second one just went under the first one. And then again, we have some default stuff at the corner. We have Auto Select turned on. Make sure this is on. It makes things a lot easier, and then you can go based off a layer or a group. We'll learn about layers and groups in another lesson. But that is basically how you get to use the MV tool and the artboard tool, pretty self explanatory. Throughout the entire course, I will be using these tools interchangeably and it will be used for basically anything between Photoshop. Now let's move on to our next tools and see what else Photoshop has to offer. M. 5. Frame, Crop, Eyedropper Tools: M Now, before we jump into the more complex tools such as the three tools below the move tool, the Marquee, the Lasso, and the Quik Selection tool, we're going to look at some of the smaller tools that only do either one thing or have very minimal features. Now, the Marquee, Lasso and Quik selection are all about selecting something in your images. So that's why I can get tricky because we have to make sure we're selecting the right thing. Our edges are smooth. Maybe we want to remove something from an image and just do more advanced things. That's why I'm going to skip over these for now and jump into our crop tool, which is fairly simple to use. Now, Crop tool, as the name suggests, is just for cropping. Whether you have an empty file like this, you can simply click and drag to make another artboard on top of your file. Similarly, you can grab that artboard and just crop it into a smaller size. And if you already have an image, and go to my layers, I have two pulled in already. I can use my crop tool to only grab a certain part of that image. So it's a fairly simple thing to use. When you long click on your crop tool, you do see some other stuff. So I have this image right here and it does have a shape that can be cropped out using the perspective tool. Now one thing to notice is that we made this document with the artboard selected, and you can see that my first layer is within an artboard. So when I want to say, just crop out this sign, I will run into some issues. So I end up moving the entire image. And when I go outside of the canvas, I make another artboard. That's where things can get a little bit tricky, but it's not that big of a deal because if we make another project with this checked off, we will not have that same problem. So let's go over here and just copy our layer. Just do Command or Control C, Command or Control. So now I do not have it within an art word. You can see the difference right over here, and now I can crop this as I please. So let's grab a tool. If I were to only isolate San Diego, I could just click and drag. Once I'm happy with it, checkmark, and that is my new photo. But the problem here is that there is some perspective action being done here. So it's not flat straight to the camera. And whatever I do, I'll end up missing parts. I'll end up adding parts that I don't need. So that's where the Perspective Crop tool comes in handy. So when you long click Perspective Crop tool. It starts the same way. So you have the square thing, but now I'm going to bind it to the two corners. Once I let go, you can see that I have a different result. I could simply grab one of these edges and follow along the perspective of my object. You can zoom in, make sure it's all nice and tidy. Believe this is the corner. There we go. I'm holding down the space bar to move my canvas and my mouse to just move it around. You can use your track pad to zoom in and out or just use the Zoom tool, which I'll show you how to do in a second. So once I have my setup, I can hit the checkmark, and there is my image. So I was able to crop it without bringing in all those unnecessary things. So that's what the perspective crop tool is for and crop tool. Simple to use. Now the next tool is called the slice tool. This may sound familiar to you if you use Illustrator in design. And essentially what it does, and as the name suggests is that it slices your image into different parts that you could later export. So if you have done one of those carousel works on Instagram, you can see how when you scroll, when you swipe on that carousel, all the images seem to be intact, but they are different things. So essentially, they use the slice tool to create turn one image into three slices. That if you were to put them together, would result in the original image. So up here, you can set it to normal fixed aspect ratio or the fixed size. I'm going to go ahead and do that Instagram example where we're going to have three identical slices for one image. So aspect ratio one to one. And now let's just hold down shift if you did not put a aspect ratio, but you want to make sure that still is square and then let go when you're done. You can see that it cut my work into two identical squares, one rectangle and one longer rectangle. If I long click, we have Slide Select tool, and I could either divide this into more sections, manually just type in one on one. And this would be my work. I could also move the slices. You can see that I'm making even more. And then when I export this, say, I'm happy with this, export, say for legacy, I have these separate slices that I get to export. This is more of an artistic thing, as I mentioned, but if you ever wondered how they did those type of carousel works, it's via a tool like this. Once we have that, we have the option to create a preset for the different slices. And then we have some things that are like front and to back. This is the hierarchy within these slices. You may not need these at the moment, but that's what they're for. So this brings your current selected slice to the front. This takes it one below the front, one before the last one and the last one. You can also hit promote for it to come one level up until it reaches the front. And then there was a divide, some alignment stuff, and then we have hide auto slices, hides the stuff that it automatically did for you, you can just give each of these a name. Instead of slice five, you could be like loco slice or something, and that's about it. So the slice tool pretty cool, and that is all the tools within this button. Right below it, we have something called frames. This is for when you want to create templates and just need some placeholders. So let's say I was to send this photo to someone else to put their own logo in. To guide them as to where they should put their photos, I could use that frame tool. So just click and drag, and that right there tells them that they should put their photo right over there. We can also do a round one. That creates a circular frame. Now, how does the person on the other end actually put in their own photos? You may have noticed that we're getting different icons at the bottom right of each of these, these are the frames. These are the layers original contents. And the ones to the left, the two things are just indicating that these are frames, but the ones on the right are actually smart objects. Now, smart objects are a great way for you to not only edit your images, but keep track of exactly what you're doing and have the ability to go back to a certain setting and adjust their value. So in this occasion, say we gave that other person this exact photoshop file because it's a smart object, all they have to do is Dabo click on that image, and they'll be brought inside of the image itself. And this is where they can click and drag their new photo or maybe I don't make a change here, whatever they want to do. But just the mere ability of going from our original project to the image itself is only being done because of that smart object. Now, if I were to copy the same image, Commander Control Z, Commander Control Vp and see how this does not have that icon, but double click here, the only thing that comes up is this layer styles panel. I cannot go into the image itself. Smart Objects is something we're going to look at later for mockups. Image editing and so much more, you'll come across it at least once when you're using Photoshop, but try to use it as much as you can when you're making substantial amounts of editing. Okay, so that's the frame tool that you can see, there's not much going on here. The next tool is the eyedropper tool. So this one just selects a certain color for you to use. When you click, there are a bunch of other stuff that I'm going to show you later. But the first one works just by click and dragging. So this is a color that I just picked, my other color. If I'm not sure which color I want, I could just click and hold and drag and see what color I want to sample. Then let go, and it's going to be here, ready for me to use. Up here, we have the sample size. So five by five average looks at relatively smaller range of pixels. It's really concentrated into those tiny colors. But if I increase that amount, it's going to be relatively the same color. It's not as precise. So that's what sample size means. And then point sample is a singular point, singular pixel. Three by three means that it takes three pixels across and three pixels from the top, finds the average, gives you the sample. You can use any of these depending on what you're doing. Then we can tell it to sample what. All of the layers that you have, the layers that had no adjustments, the current layer that you're on or current layer in below. The layers are the things you see here. If you cannot see our layers panel, window layers. Are you asking it to only take a sampling from this photo? The photo above it, all the photos, only one photo, that's where you set that thing. Then show sampling ring is the circular thing that we found before. That's just a visual preference. When we long click, we have color sampler tool. When I click once, you can see that I can see let me make another one here. I can compare some of the colors and maybe try something similar. You can see the RGB values and the CMYK. You can make multiple of these samples. You can see that they're labeled one, two, three. So once you have all these samples, you can make some color choices, maybe choose a different color, see if everything's in the right range. That's the sort of thing you might use it for. But this would be a more advanced tool. I'm just showing you how it would work. Click, we have the ruler tool. So I'm going to go back here for a second just because it's a lot more tidy. The ruler tool, as the name says, lets you measure things. So how tall, how long is this top part of the sign. You can see on the top right, I have some measurements. So the width is 257. The height is 16. I didn't really set a height. You can use it to measure things. So pretty cool. When you let go and click and drag, you're making a new selection, so bear that in mind. You can strain that layer based of that ruler. So if I set the the line at which I want the image to be straightened on, I would make that line. Strain layer, you can see now this line that I made is lying flat. So this is especially good with, like, geometric photos, any buildings, architectures, and many other stuff. Long click, we have the count. It basically lets you count parts of your image. So let's say you have an image full of balloons. You want to see how many balloons you got, you can do one, two, three, four, numbers are quite tiny, but you can change your colors and increase the size up here. So let's make the six and make this red. You can see they got quite large. Let's make the label 12. You can see the size got a lot bigger. I'm going to count, say, the screws. And another reason why you might want to use this is when you're sharing a document and you're trying to communicate with another designer, you can be like, look at 0.12. There's a problem with it. We need to be we need it to be fixed. That's one of the functionalities, you can make different groups. So this one could be for imperfections. Another one could be for suggestions and all that stuff. We know that currently we have 14 counts, then we can make another group based on what we just counted. Then when we're done, clear. So those are some of the lesser intense tools on Photoshop. So in the next lesson, I'm going to start by the selection tools, which we kind of skipped. So those would be these three, and there's a lot that you can do with it, especially with the integration of AI. So it's important that you have the latest version and that you know how you could best use these tools to, in this case, select something. So I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 6. Selection Tools Pt. 1: No matter what you do in Photoshop, you are going to select something. So the selection tools are going to be one of your core tools, and we're going to go over them in this lesson. So there are two resources that you can download from the resource pack. Simply import them into Photoshop so you can follow along and see how these tools work. So let's go back to our first image. We have two signs. We have one that is circle and one that is rectangle. You can also notice the perspective, so they're not looking straight at us, but rather there is an angle. The selection tools are on the right. We have the first one that includes the Marquee tools and these come in different shapes. We have a rectangular one, an elliptical, a single row, and a single column. You can use M on your keyboard to quickly access them. If I just go to a random tool, if I click M, you can see it jumps into the Marquee tool. Now, the rectangular one is very straightforward. I'm just going to go to the second image. Using Command or Control zero, I'm going to fully zoom into my Canvas just by clicking and dragging I can make a selection. You will know that you have a selection once you see the marching ants, you can see the lines are moving. We call these marching ants. But if you select and there's nothing there, it means that you have not selected anything and sometimes you get this error. Make sure that once you let go, there are those marching ants that we talked about. Make a new selection and get rid of the old one, you just need to do another selection. So you can see I'm getting rid of the older ones, and I could just choose something new. To deselect something without having to do a new selection, you can do Command or Control D on your keyboard, and you can see that selection clears. So so far, we know how to make a selection by clicking and dragging. Once we let go, we have a selection. To get rid of it, we can do Command or Control D. There you go. Now, starting with the marquee, I could grab a space that does not really involve perspective. So the sky here, it's flat. I'm not really getting any of the balloons. And in this selection, I can now do things without altering the rest of the image. So you can think of this as drawing a box around an image where you now can only edit what's inside this box. So right here, I have the marching ants. I know I have an active selection. Perhaps I want to use the brush, get a random color. And make some lines here. Now, if I try to go out of this space, for example, like this, you can see it cuts off because I have an active selection in that area only. I cannot touch the rest of the image. The same thing goes for deleting. So if I just grab the eraser tool, let's make it a little bigger. Can't really do much here, but I could delete this part of the image completely. And you can see how the shape here is starting to matter because if I had a circular selection, it would look like a circle. If it was a line, it would have looked like a line. So we can just do Command or Control D. I'm done with my selection, and you can see that the effect is still in place. In terms of layers, we're still in the same background layer, so the selection is being done on that layer completely. To undo this, we can do Command or Control Z. Once it brings back the selection. Twice, it gets rid of the old effect, and you can keep on doing that until you have your original image. If I do another Command or Control Z, it's going to get rid of the selection. That's our first shape, but now you may be wondering what's the point of a selection? What you can do with these is kind of make some adjustments to a large area. For example, we have this sky right now, say, it's too bright for me. Instead of grabbing everything, I could grab a rectangular marquee, make my selection somewhere close to the mountains all the way to the top. And then in this area, I could now make an adjustment. So the adjustment that I'm about to make will only be valid in this box that I just made. So going down here, you're going to click on it. For now, I'm just going to turn it a little darker so we can grab the levels for that. So you can see that right now, we have this mask on our layer, meaning that whatever I do here will only be visible in this top part because the top part here is white, the rest is black. A general rule for what's visible in Photoshop is that they need to be white. And if you don't want something to be visible, it would be black. So if I hide this and I just make a normal levels without making the selection, you can see the whole thing is white. So whatever I do here, is going to affect the entire image. If I just click on Command or Control I on the white box, it's going to get flipped to black, meaning whatever I do now is not visible because the mask is fully black. If you get rid of the mask, it's going to be white by default. Whatever I do is once again visible on my image. We're not really working with an entirely visible or invisible image. We are working with a selection, which is that little square that we made earlier with the Marque tool. So now I could grab my slider and make it as dark as I wanted to. So maybe somewhere like that. When I zoom in, or you can just see it right here, actually, there is a clear cut between what was before and what is now. So I was able to get this done using the selection tool. Now, selections may be harsh like it is right now. It's a very sharp line and it looks very fake. But because I have a mask layer, we are going to learn about masks in the future lessons, but for now, you can follow along. We can easily blur this out to give it a more natural. Click on the mask layer until you see this in the Properties panel. If you're not seeing this, just go to Window, scroll down to properties and make sure it's selected, and you could either use it like this on its own or drag it into your right side panel. Now, here, all we have to do is grab the feather slider and increase it until that sharp line is blurred out. So we still have the effect. This is without it. This is with it, so it's not like we got rid of it completely. But we have now kind of darkened the sky using our Marquee selection. Let's do Commander Control zero to fit it back to our screen. Now, the sky is looking great, but we do have a problem where the balloons were also darkened. So that's where you can switch into a different selection tool. And before I go into that, I will show you the rest of the shapes. It's the same exact thing as the rectangular marquee. It's just that the shape is different. So instead of a rectangle, we have a circle or an oval, however you want to do it. If you want it to be a perfect shape, you just hold down Shift on your keyboard. If you don't want it to be perfect, you just free handed. Same thing. If I let go, I have a selection, if I do another one we get rid of the old one and it's the same thing as the old version. Commander Control D will delete that selection, and we can choose the correct shape based on what we have. For example, if I had the moon here, I would not use the rectangular marquee, but rather the circular one, which is what we're on right now. Another thing about this selection tool, which also applies to shapes is that if you wanted to start from the center, so we're going to pretend that this is a circle. Instead of trying to figure out, you know, the perfect size that will fit my balloon, I could go to the center of the balloon a zoom in, click once, then hold down alter option and shift and pull out. So you can see it starts from the sides now, and the two bottom ends match perfectly with my balloon. If I let go of alter option, it's going to be at one corner, which is the problem we had initially. If I let go of shift, it's not going to be a perfect circle. So alter option for the selection to be made from the center point. If you don't hold down alter option, it's going to start from one corner. Shift is going to give you an even width and height. Now, for the balloons, like I was saying, we would have to move on to a different type of selection tool. Now, for this example, I'm going to skip over to the other set of selection because this is the automated one and probably where you're going to find yourself the most. First one is the Object Selection tool and the shortcuts here are W, so you can bear that in mind. First thing is the object selection tool. Essentially, when you click on it, you're going to get this square on your mouse. Now for this to work, you want to be on the main layer, not the levels that we were on right now, but the main one, I'm just going to unlock it. When I go over the image, you can see that it did take some time to load, but now it has fully detected my object. I could go to the other balloon and now that's pink. I could go onto any of the balloons and even the sky and quickly make my selection. This is only possible because Photoshop detected and analyzed the image before you could even select anything. If you go on this guy right here, click on it once, it's going to re analyze the image, but you don't need to do that unless you have a new image. Now if I want to exclude this from my levels adjustment, I just click on it once, and there we go. I have a perfect selection around this shape which is not a square or a circle using the object selection tool. I could go onto the levels and just hit backspace and you can see that it's now removed from my levels adjustment. Commander Control D is going to reveal our basically the original color and lighting of the balloon. Now, there is a halo effect, and that's because we have the feather applied to every single selection that we do. So what you could do is remove the feather and simply smooth out the edge here with a brush. Now that I remove feather to zero, you can see that we don't have that halo effect. Again, I'm going to go into masking in a different lesson, but for now, you can click on D Levels mask. Go to your brush, right click, adjust the size. Make sure hardness is zero. Then with the color black as your front, your four color, you're going to just go over the edge once, just like that. If this is too obvious, still, you can work with the flow of your brush. So simply go up here, bring it down to 50 or something, get a bigger brush. To help soften the look. Not that big, something like that. Click on this again, again, have it as black, low flow, and just go over the edge. Now it's a lot more smooth because we lowered the flow. This way, I don't need to use a universal feather slider. That's one way to select an object, but we still have a lot more balloons just sitting there in the dark. Just to make this more intense, I'm going to go to levels and make this even darker so we can realize the selection capability once we bring the balloon. We'll fix this later. But going back on the mask, we're going to switch over to a different selection tool. The next thing is the quick selection tool, which as the name says, it allows you to quickly grab something. I'm just going to zoom in on this guy. You can use the Zoom tool, click on that balloon, then use your scroll wheel to go down. With the quick selection with the plus because we want to introduce more selection here, we're just going to go over the balloon and let Photoshop decide and detect the edges. So I just clicked once, but you can see that it understood the edges of the balloon. Again, the fact that the background is very simple is a huge help here. We're going to click on the edges here as well until we have our full balloon. So you can see it's kind of editing its own election. I'm just going to go over the bottom here until we have the full balloon. Now, you made your selection, but sometimes it introduced something irrelevant. You can either switch over to minus to remove from that selection, like this part, or you can click on basically hit Q on your keyboard to refine a selection. So Q is just going to take you to this page. And then using your brush, you can introduce or remove something from the selection. Now, the same idea where white is visible. Black is invisible is going to apply here as well. I go to zoom right in. Using space. I can move my canvas. We're going to zoom in here again. And because I want to remove this edge, I'm going to switch to black. So right now it's white. You can click on this arrow or you can hit X on your keyboard to make the switch. Black now as my four color, I could go in, maybe adjust my brush a little bit, increase the hardness, lower the size. I could paint out this part for my selection. Now when I click on Q on my keyboard, the selection has been modified. If I scroll down, we're going to do another part. Notice how here it's out of place. If I hit Q with the color black, go over this area. Click Q again. The selection is now different. So that's another way where you can modify your selection. Once I have my selection, I could go in again on my Levels mask and click Backspace. Once I go on Devels mask, switch to white, and then hit Backspace, I'm going to exclude this balloon from the effect that we applied. So I can't really zoom in here, but you can see we're getting some extra dots in addition to the bottom area. Then Command or Control D to deselect. So those were two ways of selecting. We have more selection tools, but we learned the core ones so far. We can also use the magic wand, which is basically you point to an object, Photoshop detects it for you, and then you just go about editing. So I just clicked on that once and it selected a large area. If I continue clicking, it's going to add onto this. But sometimes it may think that you're trying to redo the selection so you can hold Shift and you can see a plus shows up next to our mouse. Then I'll make my selections. I'm adding to what was there before and you can use this to make multiple selections. It's a little hard when your object is big and has different colors in it, but this is one of the selection tools. Right now, it selected the ground as well. I could hold down alter option to now remove. So there's a minus remove from this selection. I don't want the grass, but only the balloon. Shift again and we can grab the rest of our balloon as much as we can. It's not really ideal for this object, but you can see that it's still a selection tool. Then we can do Commander control team to deselect. Now, up here, we have a different set of selection tools that I'll continue to show you in the other photo. So we have more geometrical shapes. But before that, let's try to isolate this balloon with the easiest tool for this example. Gonna click on it once. It makes the selection. I'll go on this with the color white hit backspace. So now this balloon is also safe from our levels adjustment. And I could just bring this back to our first look, our first amounts, and everything looks normal now. So we learned some of these selection tools here. In the next part of the lesson, I'm going to show you the geometrical ones that are more suitable for a situation like this. So I'll show you what that looks like in the next lesson, and we can also explore the select and mask tab. 7. Selection Tools Pt. 2: Alright, welcome back. So we learned about some of the selection tools, but we left the more geometrical applications for this lesson. So the second row has a different set of tools that are called Lassa tools. So it's exactly as the name says. You basically make points. Sometimes it's two points, other times it's multiple, and it's usually used for things with edges. Right here, we have two types of signs. One is a circle and one is a rectangle. The only problem is that we're dealing with perspective here as well. So I can't really use the marquee tools because it's not going to exactly fit the shapes due to the perspective that we talked about. Same thing goes for the rectangular one. It doesn't really work. That's where you can switch over to the lasso tools for selection. You long click on this one, we have a different set of tools. For the first one, for this shape down here, you can switch down to the third option because it allows you to define the corners and easily make your shape. That means corner one. If you click and let go, there's this long strand where you now have to connect it to the second corner. Say this is my second corner, third corner, fourth corner, and I could either close the shape. There's a circle next to my mouse, or I could make even more corners, and you can see how we're going to get a very different type of selection here. But everything else after that is the exact same thing as we saw in the previous lesson. I could make an adjustment just with the selection, and I could deselect with Command or Control D, it's the same idea. It's only how you get to that selection. For our real application, hit C on your keyboard to zoom into the sign. Then go back to the Lasso tool hit L. And we can start defining the corners. So first corner, second corner, third, and fourth, and then we can close the shape. So now I was able to include perspective here just by switching over to a different selection tool. And I could do whatever I wanted to do, maybe change the hue of the sign. I want to go for something more green, maybe work with the saturation and the lightness overall. So just like that, I made this selection. Now there is more Lasso tools other than this one. Now the first option works with the other selection tools. Maybe you made something, but you want to further define it. For example, I made this selection right now. You can see it's in my mask layer. If I hold down Command or Control and click on that layer, going to get that selection back. But because I'm on the selection brush tool, it's now pink. That means that I could now work with different things such as using generated fill to modify what's inside using AI, when I go to the original layer, we could remove what's inside here. I could modify the selection further by either transforming the selection. I could rotate it, I could scale it. Whatever need be. Or I could maybe expand the selection without altering the shape. I could make a mask. I could fill it in and do a bunch of other stuff. So this is a little different from all the other selection tools that we've looked at, because just drawing isn't going to give you a selection, like the other ones do. But I'll show you where we could use this in the circle sign. Going down, we have the Lasso tool. So this is a free hand selection tool. I could draw anything, and as long as I go to the first point, I make a selection. So it could be a little wiggly shape. It could be a long shape, it could be a short one, anything that you want. And if you don't close the shape, it's going to automatically snap it to your starting point. So that's my starting point. That's the end. You can see there is a sharp line. If I let go, it becomes a shape like this. I could do different things really with this type of selection tool. Again, everything else that comes after is the same, modifying the selection, making a mask, and even doing Command or Control D to deselect. The last thing is the magnetic Lassa tool, which is going to basically attract the edges of the selection to the edges that Photoshop detects. So right here, this is an edge a clear cut between the orange background and the sign. So if I attempt to make a selection using this tool, I will make a point, and if I drag on, you can see how it starts making shapes. But if I go closer to the edge, it kind of snaps to the actual edge of the sign. And I'm getting all of these points that I could now modify. This is a little bit more precise than the other ones. And once I'm done, I click on it. So we have this shape right now. It has its own applications. I tend to not use this one that often, but the whole point is that it's magnetic. It will look at the image behind, and it will create all these points for you. If you click, you're going to make some points yourself, but it's a lot less smooth than all the other ones. If you want to get out of it, you can hit the escape key on your keyboard and you're back to your original selection. We have this selection right now. Let's try to select this sign. So what we could do right now is use the Elliptical Marquee tool, and I'll go to the center, as we learned, hold down ulteruption and shift to make a circle. Just like that. Once I let go, we can see that it doesn't exactly fit with the sign because of the perspective problem that we talked about. But if I now switch over to the selection brush tool, it turns pink, and I could now transform the selection by dragging it to the right area. And by right clicking, I could access the other transforming tools. So I'm just going to undo the scaling that we did. We'll switch over to perspective and then grab the edge here, simply move down our shape like that. If we wanted to, we could also work with distorting the shape just so it can fit in. So that's going to be distorted. You can grab the corner and try to fit it to the circle that the sign has. Something like that. Once I'm done, I could hit done, and I have this pink selection. But if I go to any of the other tools, it will look like the marching ants that we looked at. Now, before continuing with anything, I could now switch over to the Select and Mask tab where you can do more precise selections. But you need to have that marching Ant active. So right now, we're seeing it right here. If ID selected for any reason, this will not be available. So selecting the main layer and having an active selection allows you to go to this tab. I'm going to click on it, and you can see how similar it is to when we hit on on our keyboard. The only difference is that you're now working with different sliders rather than the brush tool. On the left, you have some additional tools such as refined edge brush tool. So this is really good for edges that are a little bit out of the ordinary. For example, hair. It could be frizzy, it could be wavy, straight, pointy, or anything. And this really comes in handy because it allows Photoshop to grab those details, analyze them, and give you a better selection. On top of that, we also have refined hair, which is made for hair or anything fuzzy, and you could use it in addition to this tool. Have the Quick Selection tool that we already used. It was one of the main tools on the side, but we also have some of the other tools here. So this is our brush tool, which is the same brush tool we used to make our mask in Photoshop with the black and white. We have the Object Selection tool, which is the one that we used for the balloons. We just brought it in here. We have the Lasso tool for free selection, the move tool to move our canvas, same thing as the space bar, and then the Zoom tool, which is similar to the Z that we did to Zoom in. Now, say you made your selection, we already have one. What can you do on the right side? The first thing is how you're viewing your selection. So right now, whatever that is not included is red. I could change that by going to view, going for onion skin, marching ants on white, black and white. Whatever view helps me best, I personally like the red one because I could clearly see the edges. You can also go for the refinement area, basically show everything. You can show the original if you want to just cut that out for a bit. We didn't do any adjustments here, so I don't need to use these two. High quality preview if you're dealing with really small details, you could turn that on. The opacity bar is how intense this color is. So mine is red, so I could decide on the opacity. And then you can assign what this color means. So masked areas is red right now, but I could have it be the selected area, which is the other way around. Some presets in case you want to save any of these slider numbers for yourself, you save them here. You can also remember the settings so that the next time you open this panel, it has the exact same numbers. Now, edge detection, you can kind of have Photoshop detect a certain amount of radius whenever you're brushing over it with one of the tools. I usually do zero, and if needed, I increase it. So with a smooth shape like this, I don't really need that much precision. Then we have some global refinements. Once you have your selection, do you want to smooth it out? Do you want to blur the edges a bit with feather, create more contrast, or shift the edge to either add to your selection or remove just like that. If you clear the selection, you get rid of what you did and you can also invert it to grab everything else. The output settings is basically whatever you do, where do you output it to? So when we exit this tab, is this going to affect the selection that we made? Is it going to create a new layer, a new document, a new mask? You can select it here. I tend to go for selection so that if needed, I could make more adjustments and then make my own mask. If you have selection, click Okay. We end up with the selection output. Once we have the selection, I could now go in with a different slider and do something else. Maybe go for purple. I was able to select my two signs using the Lasso tools. But of course, we have all the other ones for you guys to explore, as well. So those are these selection tools. When we move forward, you're going to see that they're very important, no matter what you want to do in Photoshop because they lead to masking, selective adjustments, removing subjects, adding subjects, using AI in any way, cloning and many other things. Make sure you're comfortable with them, try these exercises and get a hang of how to use them and which one you would use for certain situations. But one of the applications that you could do once you have a selection is healing, which is what we're going to look at in the next lesson. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. 8. Brush and Layers Pt. 1: This lesson, we're going to go over brushes and layers. This will be a two part lesson because these two work together, and it will really help me tell you how the whole layering works within Photoshop. Now, layers are essentially pieces of paper that you place on top of each other, and the more you add, the more details and the more flexibility you have over the way your image looks. One layer could be dedicated to some filters, other layer could be for some colors, and that's how you build up things in Photoshop. I just made a new document. You can see that on my layers panel, which is right over here, if you're not seeing this, go to Window. And click on layers. We will always start with a layer called background that is locked. Notice this lock and everything else will be great out. It doesn't matter if this is a white box, an image, a cartoon, anything you bring in will start this way. Now, if I unlock this by clicking one on the lock, you can see everything else comes back. Now I have some stuff to work with here, and most importantly, I can start editing this layer. The first thing you can do is change the name of your layer. So instead of layer zero, I can dapple click on the name and call this something else. Once I have that written out, hit Enter and there is my new layer. Now, on this layer, I could start adding things to it. Let's go ahead and get our brush tool, which is right over here. Click once on it, and you will see the circle, which may be a different size, might be this tiny, might be this big, depends on what setting you had before. Then when you right click on the Canvas, this is how I got this panel. Let's actually go over it, size, either type in the pixel number or just change the slider here. One thing you can also do is use your front and back bracket keys to increase it by one increment or decrease it. Hit the right bracket, you can see that I'm making this bigger. Hit the left bracket, it will make it smaller. This is on your keyboard. Let's right click again. Next, we have hardness. Hardness is talking about the edge of that brush. Is it very soft or very hard? Let me just show you visually the difference. I'm going to increase my size until I get a nice color. Let's click away. And right here, I have the color black. We learned about colors already, so you can just tap a click and get a different color, but I will go with a bright one so we can tell the difference. With this in the front, I will make one click on my canvas. Once I let go, I have this red shape. Let's right click and lower the hardness all the way to zero. Now you can see that my brush size changed, but I didn't really go over the size. That is because most of it is this feathering effect. In theory, these two circles are the same size. But this one has a softer edge. What's happening here is that from this part till around here is that softened effect happening. But here, it looks like that. That's the difference. I will now go back to my brush tool right up here, right click again. Now, instead of just hard or soft, you can choose a middle ground that's a little bit softer and this really depends on what you're trying to draw in. If you have a tablet and you would like to paint, this is a tool that you would be using most often. But using the brush tool, you can also make a lot of masking, which we'll get into in this lesson a bit later. These are the general brushes. You do have some libraries on how the edges of your brushes look like. This was soft round, which is this, hard round, that. If you scroll down, we have soft round pressure size, hard round pressure size, this one, it's mostly for the tablet because you can't really determine the pressure with your mouse on your computer. But that's what the pressure is talking about. We also have some artistic stuff like pencil. You can see that looks like a pencil and make it a little bigger. It looks like that. If we scroll down, we got some special effects stuff, some wet media stuff, let's go for one of these. This is a blending brush, actually. I can blend this red into this white, and it looks like I'm painting. Blend these more. If I blend the whole thing, I get this soft pink color. Think of it as a regular paint brush. I'm hitting Commander Control Z to undo. If I scroll down, I got more stuff like woods a little smaller, gives us this woody effect. So if I have a brown with a lighter brown spots, I could use this brush to make, you know, the wooden pattern and Photoshop. We have raindrops, snow and rain, a leaf design, but snow and rain. And a lot more. If you want, you can import your own libraries, by going over here, we can import our brushes. So on the Internet, there's tons of libraries for you to download. Let's say you want a special effect, maybe oil pastels. There's oil pastel brushes on the Internet for you to download, and then you can paint in Photoshop with pastels. You can also export your own brush. Show you how to make a custom brush in a further lesson. But this brush panel is pretty important. You can rename a brush, delete it. Show what you see here, so the tip the name, you can see it showing us a tip here and a stroke. We can change our default brushes, import export, get more brushes, convert legacy to presets and show legacy brushes. So legacy basically is bringing a new set of brushes from the older versions of Photoshop. So you can see that we didn't have this tab before, but now we do. So let me just go to one. Like, for example, flat angle, low person. That's one of the legacy brushes. For more detailed work, essentially, we have watercolors. Can see um it has the texture. If I go on it again, I can darken my coloring just as you would with normal paint. We have some pastels. We were just talking about that. Right, click. Got plenty of more. Some chalk, if you need it. I'm in grass shape. So if you like painting, this is a place to do it. See, I got this nice grass shape. You can change the shape, the size of any brush that you see here. So that's how you do it. Another thing you can change is the direction. So right now all my grass blades are facing up, but I could change the direction here and have them face this way. Perhaps another way. All of those changes can be done rather simply. All right, so that's the brush panel. Now let's go back to layers now that we know how to use the brush. Again, we'll use this in almost every lesson, so it's important for you to be familiar with it. I'm going to go back to hard round, which is what we have here. It's increase the size. Now I want to get rid of this layer and start fresh. Selected. We can go ahead and first of all, make a new layer because you can't have a layer panel with nothing in it. Click on this plus sign to make another layer. Now, grab this and hit Delete. Here we go. I could make more layers. It'll be layer two, three, four, five, as many as we need. If I want to delete more than one layer, grab the first one, hold down Shift, grab the other ones, and then hit backspace or that trash icon in the bottom. You can also let me hit Command C. Grab a few by holding down Command or Control. So let's grab five, three, and one. Right click. We can delete the layers or hit backspace. And now I only have two and four. Now, let's try to do some stuff here. I'm going to hide layer four, turn off this eyeball, and just work on my layer two. Using my brush, I'm going to make a very simple line. Notice how my background is this checkered situation. This just shows that it's a transparent layer, meaning that right now the only thing on my layer is a red line, and it's not like the previous layer where we had a white background. So if I've turned this one on layer four, you can see you can't really tell the difference because there's nothing on that layer. Let's step a click here and get a blue color. And then on this layer, I will make another line. There we go. Now I have two things on top of each other. If I want the blue to go underneath the red, click and drag it right underneath, and there we go. If I want two reds, I could right click duplicate the layer and then maybe bring one below layer four, Command or Control team to transform it. Let's maybe move it up here. Let's grab all our layers, bottom layer, shift, top layer using our move tool, click and drag it to the center. So you can see that everything is starting to connect in terms of the tools. Now, if I want to make a change to my red layer, the one at the bottom, so it will be this one. You can see the blue outline telling you exactly where it is. I can use maybe the erase tool. It's the same thing as a brush tool, but it just removes instead of adds. I will now click and drag to erase parts of my brush. Now, if I'm on this layer, I cannot erase the blue things. I can only remove the red things. Because the blue line is only on layer four. I can only do it like this. If I'm on layer two, you can see I get an error because it's hidden and I cannot delete anything from layer four. You can see this sandwich effect and I could just build on on top of this, maybe 50 layers, ten layers with different things, and that would all be okay. All right. So going back to the layers panel, we can now decide how two things can blend on top of each other. So layer two is currently the top layer. It's on top of everything else. You can see here it's called we have normal opacity fill. So the normal is talking about the blend mode. How is this top layer being blended with the bottom layers? So normal is just your regular thing. But if I click once, you can see, we get this long menu of blending options. So if you go over each one, you can see how things start to change in interesting ways. I will go over what these mean. Let's actually make a new layer, and delete these for now. Use my brush to make 22 circles. One circle. Make another layer. Let's make a different circle and put one on top of the other. All right. I'll use my move tool, click and drag to move both of them towards the center. Let's actually use this one to align it, and I'll just move this guy a little bit like that. All right, so we have these two circles. Let's go to layer six and call it red circle. Call the bottom one. Blue circle. Let's go over each one. Dissolve, you can see how the edges turned a little bit different. Let me zoom in actually. Using my track pad. Pay attention to the edges right now. They look pretty normal, but dissolved pixelates the edges. Now, between all of these, you can see there's these lines in between, and that is because each of these groups to a certain thing. So the top group, which consists of darken, multiply, color burn, linear burn, and darker color, are all about darkening that top layer on top of the bottom layer. So darken, you can see that intersecting layer turns black, and it's the same thing for almost all of them. The second group is the opposite, so it's lightning. So now we can see we're getting a lighter color. The next layer is about building contrast. So right now, you can't really tell with these two shapes. But when we do our healing lessons, these will be pretty evident. Then we have difference. What's the difference between these two colors, the exclusion, subtraction, and divide. And we have hue, saturation, color, and luminosity. These, as long as you know what each group is for, using them in different situations can help you blend layers on top of each other. Next to this is some pretty simple but interesting things like opacity. How much of that entire layer is visible? Right now, it's at 100%. Lowering this will make it go away. Make it transparent. And you can click on this to get a slider or type in your percent manually. Now, Phil is talking about that color. So how deep is that color that layers color, and you can change it just like opacity. Now, opacity is in terms of everything, so the lightness of color, desaturation. But Phil is about how much presence it has within that layer. Now, we have some lock options here. At the beginning of the lesson, you may have noticed this. This will lock your layer, which means that if I grab my move tool, I can still move the blue. But I can't move the red one because it's locked. If I unlock it, I can move it again. The next one is in regards to artboards. When you have your artboards, you can click and drag a layer onto another artboard. But doing this will prevent that from happening. So that's what this is for. Next, we have it to be locked in position, which means that I could still make changes to it, but I cannot move it with my move tool. Hence why it has that icon. Next, we have the brush lock, which means that I could move it, but I cannot make changes to it. You can see it makes a new layer. I can't do it on top of red circle anymore. And then finally, we have transparent pixels. So if I do this, I cannot paint on anything transparent, which is the exterior. If I just clicked on this to get black and white. I'm on red circle. I can paint the inside of that red circle only, not the areas around it. If I deselect that, I can do anything I want. Those are some of the lock features for the layers panel. Pretty cool stuff. Next, we have some things that we can do with more than one layers, which is grouping. Right now, these are two individual layers, meaning that they're in no way connected. They just simply happen to be on top of each other. But what if I want to add an effect to two layers at the same time without having to combine them into one? That's where the group option comes in. So if you click this once on top of a layer, it will create this group. Now I can click and drag a layer to put it inside the group. You can see how it's indented to the right a bit, and now red circle is inside group one. I can put that second circle in there and do something like that, and now I can change the opacity for both or lock both of them. I can remove something by clicking and dragging it out, and now it's no longer indented. Now say I want to combine my two shapes. I don't want them to be separate anymore. That's where I get to merge the two layers. So right click on your top layer and hit Merge Down. And now I have one layer. I can no longer move them separately. I wouldn't suggest you guys doing this unless you are certain because you cannot undo the layers anymore. Say I did this, I went ahead and painted a few more stuff on it, I can no longer break the two apart. Let's hit Command or Control Z. Click. I also have some options to merge everything visible on my screen, even the group got merged. I have the option to hide a layer, rename it, flatten the image, which takes away everything, even a transparent background and takes you back to square one, which was a locked background layer. So pretty simple stuff. We have some other things here as well. To keep this short, we mainly want to remember how to duplicate a layer by clicking this to copy one of the layers, can also hit Command or Control D to duplicate. There we go. You can hold down Alter option on your keyboard. You can see how my cursor turns into two. Click and drag on your layer and let go. We just made a duplicate. I can make multiple ones and do the same thing with the red layer. There we go. Now I can put everything within this group or actually make a new group, so select everything. I make a new group by hitting Command or Control G, and there is my group. Now I can maybe turn this into one full image by hitting merge group. Now, once again, I'm not able to move things independently and get to do it as one solid unit. We're also able to add adjustment layers. So the reason why these are in here is because each of these will give you a separate layer to work with. So on top of group two, let's add a brightness and contrast. Going to make some changes. You can see how this is a new group. Let's actually choose an adjustment that's more visible. I will go to hue and saturation. So with this made a new layer. Let's tap a click on this icon and just change the hue. Once I have this, this will be a separate layer to work with. So I can hide it. I can lock it, lower the opacity, and the logic is the same as everything else. Just like layers, I can just click and drag this below. Since this adjustment is below my layer, it's not affecting anything. Adjustment layers only work when they are on top of a layer. That's why when we move this around right below, my shapes are as they were before. I I move it up, you can see how the adjustment is being made. Let's delete this. We got some other stuff, these are all things that you will learn in the photography lessons. If you've edited a picture before, most of these words are familiar to you, but if not, don't worry about it. We'll come back to this in a further lesson. Now, in the next lesson, I will show you how to work with layer mask. This was something we saw in the selection lesson as well. When we went over one of these, we saw select and mask. So mask refers to a masking layer, which you can also create down here. So let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson where we learn how to do exactly that. 9. Layers Pt. 2: So I have this photo right here. We're going to get started on learning how to use layers now that we know what layers are. So with this image, we have the subject floating in the air. I plan to use the transformation tools, the selection tools, and the brush tool to add some elements behind the subject while keeping her still in front of that background. So first thing you'll notice is that there's a lot of white space. So let's transform our image so that it fits our canvas. Down Command or Control team until you see the outline like this, hold down Alt or Option, click and drag until it reaches the edges of your cavas. Hit the check mark once you're done, and now we have a full image. What I'm going to do now is use any of the tools to select my subject. So you could go ahead and use the Object Selection tool because this is a pretty easy separation. You can see that since I have this turned on, it immediately finds the subject for me. Even considers these two as two separate objects. Also go ahead and use the Quick Selection tool, the L as Tool, the Magic Wand tool and just isolate that subject. So since this guy has it all figured out for me, I'm going to click once, and then using the option we learned about, add on to my selection. So now I have my subject selected. If I were to right click on this layer via copy, that is what it looks like. But what if I don't want it to be a singular separated layer, but I want to maybe later bring up a little bit of the sky or some parts of her body that were removed by accident. So let's hit Commander Control Z and go back to the marching ants using any of the selection tools. Once you've made your selection, you will notice that there's this layer mask down here and it's the same thing up here. Difference is that when you click this, it will make a mask for you immediately. But if you want to refine your selection and then make that mask, we can hit Select and Mask. So before I go there, what are mask? So masking is basically where you tell Photoshop, you want certain parts of the image visible while hiding the rest of it. The good thing about masking is that you can use your brush tool to reintroduce parts of the image and get rid of the parts of the image in a very precise way. So you can use a one pixel brush to really fine tune those edges and then use that method to kind of have a way to go back and fix your mistakes. If you were to make a selection and just copy that layer, there isn't much room for you to go back and fix your mistakes. So this is where we're going to be brought in when we hit Select and Mask. It's a whole different page, but don't panic. You can always hit Cancel down here or hit okay to just leave this and go back to your original canvas. So let's start with the things on the left. Lot of them should seem familiar to you. We went over them in the previous lesson. But let's take a look. The first one is our Quick Selection tool. And these are just ways for you to fine tune your selection. So that's the reason why we're brought here. So the Quick Selection tool, this tool is native to this panel only this page, and that's the refined edge brush tool. So it essentially works like a brush tool, but the difference is that it really focuses on the edges of that subject. And then, of course, the more finer part. So it could be hair, fur, little bits of dust, whichever part of an image you are finding hard to select on your own. We have the brush tool, the Object Selection tool, the Lasso tool, the hand tool, which is what you use to move your canvas and the Zoom tool. Now, when you're working on Photoshop, there are some shortcuts you need to know, especially with something like this where you really have to zoom in and out multiple times, move your camas around. So just as a reminder, you can use your pad, your mouse track pad to zoom in or out. You can hit Command or Control zero to fit on screen. Hold down the spacebar to move your cavas around. And do all that stuff. So these three things you need to know they'll come in handy. Alright, so let's zoom in on her hair. I'm going to use the Zoom tool for now. Let's say the way the hair was selected was just not up to our standard. We obviously don't want this chunky mess over here. So let's try using the refined brush tool. So we have the plus and minus. Whenever you see plus, just know that it's going to add to a selection. Minus it's going to remove. And in this case, because it's a mask, it's going to restore the original image, meaning that if I were to minus my selection, we remove from the red part. So whatever is red right now is not in our selection. As you recall, we chose the subject in the balloon only. So plus we'll add more of this red area, which is excluded from the selection, and the minus will bring some back. So with the plus, we want more red, basically. Let's go over the edges of her hair. Go, and you can see immediately we have less of that sky blue. I'm going to go in on the other areas and just fine tune my selection. So that's what it looks like, just to show you up before. This is what we have now. This is what we had initially. Now, another thing you can do is have Photoshop do that for you. You can see right up here, we actually have a refined hair option. Click it once, Photoshop will detect a hair and it will fix it for us. So I didn't really have to do the brushing myself. Now, keep in mind, it does say hair, but that does also apply to fur, maybe some fluffy shirt, anything like that. So mainly it's used for hair, but you can also use it for other stuff. So let's say I'm happy with this. Let's go over this area a bit. Using my space for, I'm going to move down and make sure we don't have something like this. For something where we have more manageable shape, so we're not dealing with hair, we can actually go ahead and use the brush tool. So it's right beneath that one. Again, plus minus and then the size. It's just like the brush tool that we learned about. You can hit the forward bracket key to increase the size. And the left bracket key or backward bracket key to make it smaller. That's another helpful shortcut. If you hit hold down Alter option, you can just switch. So notice up here, plus or minus, hold down Alt and just remove these parts of the sky that ended up in our selection. We use the bracket keys, zoom in a little bit more, and you can see how delicate this becomes. So we're working literally pixel by pixel over here. Anything you see that is blue, we're going to get rid of it. Now, from afar, when you zoom out, you may not be able to tell that this was a bad selection and that we got bits of the sky. But when you add other designs, it will become really evident. Okay, let's go down here. I think everything looks fine. Just gonna assume this is the shoe lace and remove it like. Alright, so I have my selection. Before I hit Okay, let's take a look at some of this stuff on the right. These are the properties for your masking operations. So first of all, there's this thing called show edge. So when you press that, it's going to show only the parts that you've edited so far. So as you recall, in the beginning, we worked with the hair. So this is now showing the edges that it refined, which in our case was simply hair. We have show original, so you can see it before and after, just like this. Hold down peak to do that. We have the view which shows you how you want the masking to be seen. So usually it's just this red color, but you can do onion skin, which is basically where it takes that excluded area and lowers the transparency. We have the marching ants, which we're already familiar with on black on white, black on white, and then on layers. So currently, we don't have any other layer. That's why it's transparent. Usually, this is what you should go for because you can tell the difference between what's being selected and what's not a lot more easier. We have high quality preview. This will really help when you're working with larger and more precise selections. It will take a toll on your Ram, so make sure your computer can handle it. But instead of showing you the mini pixels that we had before, it's going to try to show you a higher quality preview when that zoomed in. Next, we have opacity. That's just how visible this red is, this overlay. You can also change it to a different color if you want, but red is a classic, so I'm going to leave it as that, and then you can decide what this red indicates. A selected area or de masked area. The presets here, you can either load a preset, save your settings as a preset itself, and just have them here whenever you need it. You can also hit remember setting. So the next time you open this panel, every setting here is already set to what you had it before. We have the refined mode. When you exclude those parts of the sky to isolate the hair better, are you using color aware or object aware? Now, what's the difference? When it says aware, it's basically talking about what it's using to replace those areas. Color just looks at the color around that selected area. Object looks at the object. You can see when you go over it, best choice hair or fur on complex background. To say if there's a couch behind my subject, I do want Photoshop to be mindful of that and not create some smudged look behind her hair. But since we had a blue sky was pretty much the same blue throughout, I chose color aware because it's just one color. Edge detection. So right now it's at zero pixels because the refinement area is very tiny. So hair in general, you don't want to have a lot of radius for it. But say you were refining a tree, you do want to increase that radius because there's bigger parts that you're trying to set apart. Then if you're not sure what to add on here, just enable smart radius, and it will determine the radius of your brush. Now, here are some global refinements. You can smooth out the edges, feather the edges, create more contrast between them, and then shift the edge. So if I just go over each one, you can see going to the left is going to go inwards. Our selection, going to the right, does the opposite. Contrast, lightens or darkens that edge. Feather softens the edge, and then smooth smooths your selection. So if you use the hard edge brush and you have these jacket lines, you can just smooth it over with this. All right. Let's step or click on each one to set them to zero or their default values, and then move down to our last setting. We do have clear selection and invert. So if you wanted to grab everything else, leave that out or clear the selection entirely, you can do that as well. Alright, so decontaminate colors. So sometimes in images when they're taken and uploaded on the Internet, you will end up with some glitches where they show themselves as, like, purple bits around the corners of your subject, maybe some cyan. And when you sell like decontaminate colors option, it's going to look for those glitches and get rid of them. And then you can decide how intense you want this to be. So at zero, it's going to look like that. At 100, it's going to look a lot better because it's getting rid of those glitches. Is specifically especially important for low quality images. So if you notice some weird colors around your subjects, the edge of your subject selection, just come down here, enable this, then play around with the amount. Lastly, we have the option to choose where we want this new thing, output it to. So we can either make a new layer with a layer mask, just a new layer on its own, a whole new document, a new document with layer mask. Now, the ones with the layer mask still allow you to fine tune your selection in the future and then go back to change your selection. There is a new layer or the new document has this current selection set in stone. You can't really do much with it. Basically, you have to start over. Let's go ahead and choose new layer with layer mask and hit Okay. There's my new layer with the layer mask. That's what it looks like. I'm going to go to a different tool. Let's hit Commander Control zero and move this here. I have my background hidden, but if I bring it back, that's just our original image. Now, when I bring our top layer, which is the mask, I make it visible. You can't really tell the difference. That is because it's positioned right on top of it ground. But if I were to move this with my move tool, you can see I just have another subject. So notice here that the subject is all in white and the background is in black. When it comes to masking, always remember that whatever is white is visible, whatever is black is not. And you can also fine tune this, if you were here, just make sure you're on the mask itself. Use the brush tool that we already learned about, have the color set to black and white. Let's switch to black. Let's hide this for a second. This layer, I could use the color black to exclude parts of my subject and then use white to bring it back. But the problem is that it will bring back the entire image. So do be careful about that. You can also switch between these two by hitting X on your keyboard and just making this a lot simpler for yourself. So what's the point of making a layer mask? For the purpose of this lesson, we're just going to try something really simple. Let's make a new layer right above our background layer one, and then use our brush tool. To make an interesting shape. So let's grab one of these artistic ones, increase the size, get a nice color, and just start drawing. So notice how our subject is not being affected by this brush at all. But if I were to hide this, the original image is because as we learned in layers in the previous lesson, hierarchy is really important. If I bring this below my background, it's gone because this is being placed on top and it covers everything. So let's go back, bring this on, and now I'm able to just put whatever I want behind my subject. And then since it's a separate layer, I get to move it around. I make some pretty cool stuff. What I can also do is use all the filters we learned about previously. Make maybe a hue and saturation effect right above our background, but below our layer mask, table click and maybe change the hue of the sky. Let's make it purple, maybe lower the saturation a bit, and there is my new background. My subject still remains the same, but we got this going on. Another cool thing you can do is, as I've been saying this whole time, going back to adjust the selection. So right now, there is no marching ants for me to immediately go in and adjust my selection. Let's say I'm trying to get rid of this balloon and I just want my subject. What you can do is hold down commander control on your keyboard. You can see my cursor changes, and then click once on the mask, and there are the marching Ads. Now, when I'm here, you can see that there's no selected mask. If I want that option, I have to go to one of these tools. But since this is a perfect circle, what I can also do is use my brush tool. So with this selected with the marching ants visible, hit Q on your keyboard, and you can see that we get that red overlay again. Once we have this, we can hit B on our keyboard to bring our brush. Right click. Let's get a better brush, hard round. And then using that black and white logic we talked about, get rid of that balloon. So let's hit X on our keyboard to get the black color as our foreground, zoom in, and just remove the balloon. Once we're done, we can hit Q on our keyboard again to exit this mode and then make another layer mask. Go to layer zero, duplicate layer zero by holding down alter option, clicking and dragging that layer. And then with the marching ants, we're simply going to hit the layer mask again. So now I only have my subject and not the balloon. Then I could use, let's bring this all the way above, grab the same filter and saturation. And then just change the color of the balloon. Now notice how it's still changing the color of my background. That's where we need to limit something to one layer only. So I'm going to make this neon green, go back to layers, and instead of having this affect everything below it, I'm going to hold down alter uption and then have my cursor in between the two layers. So alter option, click once between them, and you'll see this arrow pointing down. That means that this human saturation to effect is only being applied to background copy, which is the layer the first mask that we made, meaning that my subject is not going to have anything done to it. This one is affecting the sky, but I could do something else here just to show you. Hue and saturation, let's make her pink. Go to layers, again, alter option, click in between, and now this pink can rename it even. It's only affecting my subject and this one just the ball. As we also learned, we can play around with the opacity, change the blend mode, do whatever it is we have to do. Lastly, we do have some special effects. It's called effects. These are things that you can apply to one layer alone. I will go over these in further lessons since each of them are pretty heavy on their own. But essentially, these are just for the selected layers. So it's not like the adjustments where it would be applied to everything below it. It's just for that layer. So to show you an example, I'll just go to Bevo and Boss, say, this is the effect we're going for. It okay. You can only see the effects on that layer. I can hide it and do other stuff to it. But that about covers how we can use our brush tool, the layer masking, and just layers in general. In the next lesson, we're going to go over other tools that can help us work with these layers. So we have the healing tools which are the following, this one, the brush tool, the Clone tool, and then we have our text tool, which is just dealing with text, but in Photoshop, there's a lot of options for you to make it more than just a text. 10. Heal and Adjustment Tools : When you heal in Photoshop, you're essentially getting rid of that original layer and replacing it with a modified version made from the surrounding parts of that selection. That's going to make sense when we actually apply healing to this image, but it's basically an extension of selection because you have to start by selecting an area and then heal that part that you want to remove or modify. So go ahead and import the two images that we have right here from the resource pack, and then you can follow along the exercises so that you can get a better idea of how they work. This is our first image. Now, we have some areas that we're going to remove, and I'm going to zoom in right here. But notice how in order to remove them, I would have to select them first. So we looked at some of the tools in the previous lessons, but for things like pimples or any sort of spots that we want to remove, I tend to go for the Lasso tool because you can generally select a rough area and still get away with a good result. What we're going to do here is zoom right in and make our selection. So I'm going to start with this pimple. Once I let go. We have a couple of options. So some of these are AI integrated. If you're using the latest version of Photoshop 2026, you should be able to see the same thing. But you can also right click to not use any AI. So if you click on Fill, that's going to fill this area. With what's around it, but you can also use Generative Fill, as I said, using the help of AI. So if I click on Fill right now, we can choose where it's going to draw the content from to rebuild this area right here. So we have content aware, which is being aware of what's around. This is where you need to have your setting on. It could be based on a pattern. Have or it could be based on history, which is what was there in that layer before. We're going to go with content aware and we're going to click on Okay. You can see immediately that spot is gone. If I do Commander Control D and Zoom in, there is no harsh line and it looks like the skin was like that from the beginning. I could just repeat the same process with another area. So now we could do something else with Phil. So this other pimple is also now gone. It looks exactly like that. So I'm going to undo the two right now, Commander Control Z, get back our pimples, and we're going to look at the tools that are also designed for this sort of purpose. Let's first duplicate our layer with Commander Control J, and I'm going to hide the original just so that we can go back and see the before and after. So the healing tools are all the way here. If you long click, we have different types same thing as the selection tools. Each one is meant for a specific aspect of healing, the main action, but they're each used for certain scenarios. So the first one is the spot healing brush tool. This is the most straightforward. You have a spot that you want to remove, you select it, and then it will heal it for you. So I'm just going to adjust my brush, which is basically like the brush tool, and I'm going to remove some of that hardness. Just by clicking once, I didn't let go of my mouse yet, there's this black spot. Once I let go, it's going to heal that spot for me. So we can see now that the spot is missing. But notice how because of my selection, there is still a little bit of a red rim around that area, so I could just go back and make my brush bigger from the start. Let's make another duplicate. Use the right bracket key to increase your size, and then make sure you're not selecting or clicking on the eyedropper or the serum applicator. So now it looks like this. If you want to go for a more precise version, you can zoom in, make your brush smaller, and then just paint over that area. So you could do one tab or just click and drag for a little paint either way, it is still going to remove that area for you like this. So that's the spot healing tool. We do have some versions of how it's going to heal this spot. So right now we are on the content aware type, which is the same thing as the Lasso tool example that we did, where we right clicked and then did fill, but you can also create a texture. So let's undo. Now with create texture, I'm going to go over the same area. So you can see how now it focused more on the texture of the skin rather than actually removing the blemish. I'm going to do another version here with the content aware and we can kind of compare the way they performed. So this is content aware, which is going to focus on everything. But if I do texture only, it's only going to focus on the texture and not so much the color or any sort of bumps that the subject has. Let's undo that. Now, this type is going to look at the pixels around the edge of your brush only. So within a proximity, that's where it gets its name from. So right now, this was the size of my brush. It's only looking on the edges. It's not really looking at all the other content that's around that brush. So you can switch between the types and make your adjustment. But, for example, example of where you would use this would be the lip. So you don't want the lip to be reconstructed based off of the texture and the color of the skin because that's a whole different texture and a whole different color combination. So you would go for proximity match. Now, if you do use content to wear, it's not going to mess up the whole thing, but as you can see, it may introduce some blemishes that are basically irrelevant to that area. So this is likely from the skin that was pulled in here to fix that spot. Let's undo that. That's our first healing brush tool, which is for a spot. But we also have something called the remove tool. So maybe we don't want to heal it and we want to completely remove something. When it comes to skin, it's not that different because whether you're reconstructing it or removing that blemish, you're still going to end up with the skin underneath. But this is another option that you could look at. So to remove this blemish, I could hold down alter uption to sample an area for Photoshop, and then I could just replicate that in this new area. For this to work, you would want to grab an area that is similar in lighting and texture so that it will look the most natural. So something like this, I could click once, and as you can see, it is changed completely. Now, if I grab something from a different part of the face, Photoshop is going to try to blend it in with the lighting, but the texture is still not a match. So you want to be careful about where you're sampling. But even if you grab something close, you can see that Photoshop kind of darkens this spot to help blend out that le. Same thing would be applied to an area like this. I could sample a better part of the skin, do a few tabs, and it's completely out of sight. Now, the source can either be the area that you sampled or it could be a pattern that you introduce. Say you're editing a picture where your subject has a lizard skin, that's a specific pattern that needs to be replicated. It's not something blurry like the skin, it would be lines that need to be the exact same. You would import your pattern and then proceed to make that healing process. For the application of this course, the sampled version should be enough. Now, I skipped over remove tool, but this is basically one of the AI tools that Photoshop has introduced. Again, we're going to get into those a little later. But for now, if you're curious how this works, you just choose your brush size. So I'm going to use my right bracket key to make it larger, go over one area, and then using AI, it's going to remove it for you. So as you saw, I didn't have to sample anything. I just clicked on the area that I didn't want and Photoshop removed it for me. You can set your size here, and you can also create a new layer based on what Photoshop creates with AI. So I'm just going to go over this area, and we can see that we have a new skin, but on a different layer. So I could easily delete this if I changed my mind. The next removed tool is the patch tool. So this is when you have a large area that you're trying to remove and not so much one spot. So we're going to just go over a part like this. I'm going to grab a large chunk. And what you do is that you slide over to a part of the skin that you can kind of copy over. Now, the issue with this tool is that if you're not careful about the selection, you will get a glitch sort of thing on the side. But if you avoid that from the beginning, so let me just undo. Let me grab this section and then slide it over, it's going to look a lot more natural. So that's another way of removing and healing. As long as I picked an appropriate area, it worked just fine. Now, another issue with the patch tool is that if you don't have enough space to use as a reference, it's not really going to work out. For example, if I have a blemish over here, where there's, like, a clear line. I can't really replicate that area because the skin, the face is moving at a specific direction. So no matter where I go, it's going to look a little odd. So that's where the patch tool becomes a little limited. But if you have a large area like this, you can easily use. Switch between source and destination. So source means that this is where you're going to start out and what is going to be replaced. But then you could also switch out to the destination and just, like, make this the destination, basically, and put this over that pimple that we had earlier. So to try that out for you guys, we could grab this part, move it on top of the new pimple. And you can see that it blends it in for you in terms of lighting and color. Going to undo that. Now, the content aware move tool is basically where you grab a section and you move it to a whole different destination. For example, if your subject has a lot of freckles that you want to introduce to the other side, you can use this tool. I'm going to demonstrate with this pimple right here. We're going to grab it and simply move it to a different location. Once you click Done, you can see Photoshop tries to blend it in for you. But we essentially have a moved pimple, so it went from here to here. You choose a more suitable destination, it will blend in better. I'm just going to take it again and go for this area where it's also dark. Now the pimple is moved from here to here. Instead of a different brighter area, we're keeping it within its original region. The last tool is the red eye tool. Now, this is as the name says, it's for red eyes, but we don't really have that problem. Essentially, what you do is you click and drag over that area, that red eye, and it's going to fix it for you by changing the color and, of course, any sort of flash that may have appeared during a photograph. Now that's not really applicable here, but it's a pretty straightforward tool that you can try if you have, old photographs or you turned on your flash when you were taking a picture. So those are all the move tools, but we also have some other tools underneath. So you could just steer away from healing and work with what's already in that picture. That's where the rest of the tools come in. The right over here, we have the clone stamp tool and the pattern stamp tool. Now pattern is for patterns, but the clone stamp tool is where you clone an area over a different part of the photo. Already when I go over with my brush, we have this random sample, but I could introduce a new sample by holding down ultra uption, clicking on an area, and simply copying over the skin as it is without any adjustment. The heel tools when you choose a source and then you apply it to a new it may do some modification on its end to help blend in that new selection. But the clone tool is not going to do that. So if I grab a dark spot from this area, put it here, it's going to remain that dark. So you can use this when you don't want Photoshop to do any sort of post editing once you make that selection. Now, you can decide which tool you want to use when you're trying to clear blemishes like this image. It could be the many heel brushes that we had. It could be your selection tools and then healing or it could be the clone stamp tool. The cool thing about the Lasso tool is that you can make a very large selection, and then with the help of AI, you can basically fix that area. That's a large selection. I just did fill, and you can see how the whole area is gone and I didn't go for a tiny spot. This is what I tend to do. You can also combine different selections, basically add to a selection. I just made one right now. By holding Shift, we're going to get a plus on while holding Shift, I'm going to make another selection here and then another one down here. That's three different areas, three different lighting. But still, I could fix it with the fill option. Because it's using AI, it's a lot smarter and it understands what it needs to do in order to help blend in this new adjustment. Commander Control D, it looks really good and very natural. So using this, you can fix pretty much anything, really. You can also use the remove option that we looked at. It's also generative AI. So you are now more aware of how they work and which one uses AI versus what doesn't. So there we go. And then we have this last spot that I'm just going to use remove to get rid of it. And there we go. I'm just going to zoom out now with Commander Control Zero, select them all with shift, Commander control G. This was before, this is after. Those were the heal tools, but we were so far focusing on little spots, little blemishes. Now, in this image, we have three people sitting together. It looks like this person is on its own, on their own, and these two are closer. So I'm going to try to remove this person using a combination of selection tools and the heal tools. So first, make a copy of your original image. And using whichever selection tool you prefer, we're going to select our subject. So you can use the Object Selection tool after it's done analyzing. Click on your subject, and then simply make your adjustments going to zoom in here and add to my selection by being on this second option. Let's grab the pants as well. Grab the arm. There's this little area. The hands, the phone, you know, everything. Just by clicking you can switch over to quick selection if you want, but make sure you're on plus to add to that selection. We have the bags and going to hold down alteruption to remove the rest of the area. To make sure he's fully in, we can hit Q on our keyboard. I could see that I missed a couple of spots. With the white brush, we're just going to paint over these little strokes and get our subject completely in the selection. Hit Q again, and now we have a selection. What you could do is click on Remove, which as I said, uses AI to remove the selection. If you're not okay with that, you can use the content aware film or the clone tool. They just take longer, but they can still work for your purpose. So right now, we removed the subject, but we have his shadow just sitting there so we could use the Lasso tool to clear that area or just use the Lasso tool from the beginning. As you saw, we have a lot of options. I'm actually just going to remove all three people and make this into a landscape shot. So let's try a larger area, click on remove and see how Photoshop performs. So you can see how smooth that was, and it's a new layer, so I could just, you know, go back to the original, make more adjustments, and do other things. So depending on the size of your blemish or thing that you want to remove, you can switch between the heel tools and the lasso tool. So those were the adjustment tools that you can use to remove or modify a spot in Photoshop. Looked at two examples. So by now, you have a better idea on how to use these tools. Again, going forward, we're going to have a lot of exercises where you get to practice with them more. But for now, knowing where to grab them and what their differences are is already a huge step ahead. 11. Text Tool: Now, with the text tool, you can easily access it right over here. That's a letter T. It's very straightforward in terms of how you add a text with the fonts and the sizes. So a lot of you should be familiar with what these are, but I'm still going to go over each one and then we'll move into how we can distort text and do other things with it in the rest of the course. So the text tool is right here. When you long click it, there are four options. So the first one is the horizontal type tool, which means you're going to type horizontally. How you would type it anyway. But we also have the vertical type tool, which is going from top to bottom, vertical type mask tool, which is going to create a layers on the edges of that letter, and then of course, the horizontal type mask tool. First, let's go ahead and unlock our background layer. I just made a very simple document. Start with the most basic one, which is the first one, horizontal type tool. On the top right here, you get to choose your font. There's a lot of options and there are some filters to tell you what they are. These are the different styles of text. They've been grouped in to these tabs based on how they look. You look at a few different types of fonts, you will notice some major differences. Some of them being very bulky and fun, some of them being cursive. We have really thin ones. Those that look like a typewriter and all that sort of stuff to isolate those types of Visuals Photoshop has filters right here for you. We have Serif. These are your sera fonts, Slabserif, Sand serif, script, monospace, handwritten. There's no black letter and then decorative. Depending on what type of font you want, you can go over to these categories or just explore all of them via the classes. Now, where do you get your fonts from? If you go to more fonts, you can import the ones from Photoshop, of course, but you can also download a font and install them on your local computer. If you have an Adobe subscription, there is Adobe fonts. So if you activate it on that website, it will be added to your Adobe account that you've used to log in to Photoshop. You can also download fonts from third party websites. Just make sure that you're installing them properly depending on the system you're using. Once you've installed it, restart Photoshop, and it should show up in the list that you're looking at right now. Go to your font. We can search for a font here. Let's say I want Times New Roman, I get a bunch of different options. I can choose the regular one and then decide on the style that's native to this font. My times font right now has a regular bold italic, but that is not the case for all the other fonts. Let me go with eight heavy. This font is called eight and when we go over here, the style is only one. So this depends on your fonts capabilities. You can also see that on their left, there's this drop down menu. So you can see what type of styles each font has. For example, April Fatface doesn't have any styles, and it's just a regular. But Acumen Pro has all of these styles, and we can see the sample right here. Also add in Imogson Photoshop with these ones. If you're not seeing these, you can try downloading some Emoji fonts from the Internet as we talked about. You can filter through the fonts you got from Adobe phones, your favorite fonts, and then something similar to the one you had selected. I had the letter eight font, and now you can see it's suggesting these two to me so that I may have more options to choose from. Let's clear all and then just choose a font for now. Let's grab this one. Click on your screen and you can immediately start typing. Click the Move tool and you have the option to make it bigger, smaller, flip it, rotate it if you want, and just treat this like a regular layer. Because as you can see on the right, we now have a separate layer that we may do all the things we learned about. Dragging it, putting it in a group, changing the opacity, the fill, the blend mode, and anything else. Let's go back to the text tool, double click. Right here, we have the font size. You can use a drop down menu, type something in or use a slider here. Then we have the alignment. So we want it centered to the left to right, the color of our text, and then we have some of those special things that Photoshop allows you to do with a text. Warping in general is when you get to distort something into a certain angle, certain direction, and right away, everything is grayed out because we don't have a style selected. But let me bring this here with a space bar. Once you choose your style, we have arc, bulge and a bunch of other stuff. These are decorative things that you can use for posters or whatnot. Each of them will give you a set of options down here. The first one is horizontal or vertical. Right now, it's creating this bulge at the bottom, but we can also make it do it vertically. Decide how much of a bend you want, how much distortion horizontally, how much distortion vertically. So you have the same options for all of them, and some of them will create out some stuff like twist because it's horizontal and vertical, we don't really need to choose anything here. You can go to arc and just make some changes to our text. You can type in your values, and I'm going to make this horizontal. Let's make something like that. Once you're done, hit Okay, and now we have a decorative font. I can move this around still. Not much has changed. The fact that this is still a text tool lets me to double click, go back and maybe adjust a few things. If I turn this into a asurized layer, which you can do by right clicking, going to Raserize type, it will become a regular layer, meaning that I can no longer use my text tool to double click and change the way it looked. I can now treat this as a regular layer. Let me lock my background and play around with this one. All right, Commander Control Z. That's a horizontal text tool. You can also go over to the Properties panel and do a few other stuff. The same things are available here. But you will notice we have some other things starting from the space between lines. What I'm going to do right now is set this to zero and write another word. Hit Enter, type in something else. All right. The first one is the space between hello and world. Right now it's set to auto, but I can decide how close or how far I want the second word to be to my first word. This one is the space between each letter. This one's a color. If you go in these three dots, you will also find the height of each of the letters. The width of each of the letters, we're basically distorting our thing and then the baseline shift. The baseline is where your text is sitting on. But if I have this at zero, you can see that the baseline is right over here. If I shift it up or down, it's going to move where the text is sitting on in a different direction. Then we got some languages which won't change the language of your keyboard, but just some of the settings made specifically for that language. For example, if you're using a Middle Eastern language like Arabic or Persian, Photoshop does have to connect the letters, whereas with English, there could be those spaces between them. But of course, you're going to need the Persian or Arabic keyboard to be able to use one of these. If I said this to Arabic right now, you can see it didn't really change this word into an Arabic word. It's just applying the settings that I would need if I were to type in Arabic right now. Next, we have the paragraph settings. This is for when you have a paragraph. How do you do a paragraph within Photoshop? Let's delete this. T on our keyboard to get our text tool, click and drag to make your paragraph. By default, it will give you this dummy text, which is perfect because now we get to see how we can paragraph settings. Just going to choose a lighter font, change the color. When we scroll down, the first thing is alignment, and then we have justification. If you hit the three dots, we're going to get new stuff. Indentation. And then from the left side, same thing from the bottom. Say, this is what we had set all of them to zero. Hitting tab on my keyboard to move to the next thing. Let's enter. All right. Now hyphenate is talking about this one. When a word cannot fit on this line, there's going to be a hyphen, and then the rest of those letters are going to be moved down to the next line. But if you don't want that happening, just turn off the hyphenate option. I hit Command or Control A to select everything. When I undo this, you can see that word was moved to the next line. But if you're okay with this effect, Leave it on. We have some bullets and numbering, so you can make bullet points, just like you would in a Word document, turn it into numbers, letters, Roman numerals and anything else. It's undo that. You can also change the style of your bullet, which we have up there. It's only four things to choose from. Select it again to undo or just not apply that effect to it. Then we have some type options. First one is capitalizing everything. So when I click it once, turns everything into capital letters, this one turns it into lowercase. Next one turns it into small caps. Right now, this is way too giant. I could click on this to make it more refined and better. We have superscript, which will allow you to write a text a top of a word, let's do that. You can see how it turned that into a little text on top of I. So if you have any math equations or physics formulas, you can use this option. We have subscript, which is the exact opposite, so it goes at the end. We have underline, we have overline which draws a line on top of your words, your letters. Looks like that. And the rest of them are currently grade out because they are not suitable with this particular font. But if you were to choose something more basic like aerial, you can see we got this guy and this guy brought out for us. So let me just undo all of these, get my lowercase back. So the other stuff down here is really depending on the font itself. It's talking about how words are blending into each other. Do they connect? So if you have, let's say, a cursive font, you can decide how, say, the letter L and E get to connect. So these are just some stylistic choices that you can explore with. Then we have a special tab for East Asian features and Middle Eastern features. So East Asian, if you're doing thing like Chinese, Korean, there are some specific rules that are only needed for those type of fonts. So you can choose how thick the characters is, which is called sum. We can change the text orientation and line breaking rules, text composition and all that stuff. For Middle Eastern features, you can choose that it's being written from the left to right or right to left. So in this case, it would be right to left. So if this were an Arabic text, it would have to start like this. You can also decide that connection I talked about earlier, so how thick or thin that connection is. That's if you're using these type of languages. And then at the bottom, we have some quick actions converting this to a frame. If you click that once, you can turn into a frame or a shape. The reason why you would do this is if you want to put a pattern or a specific design into the areas where the text is. But normally, you wouldn't do it. So let's undo that action with Commander Control Z. Move on to the other stuff. So in terms of which of these belong to text, we have, of course, the Properties panel, but there's also paragraph styles. So let's say you are editing different types of newspapers or doing magazines, there's a specific style that you have to keep using for each of the pages. So instead of choosing your font again, your size, your style, you can make a paragraph style yourself. So say I want to have one style like this, I will hit the plus sign, and now I have paragraph style one. So changing the font, you can see how I can switch and then I can rename this into, say, magazine, body text. Come over here and put in my options, like I want it to be this font, 12 points. Maybe we can make it smaller. I want them to be red, formatting, open text, composition, and all that stuff. So if you do a lot of text work, these should be both for you. Hit okay once you're done. And with one click, I could just change this to that new textile. Then we can, of course, go back and switch around between these styles. You can delete a text style if you wanted to and rename it as we saw. This will remove the overwrite, so it will take you back to where you began. That was paragraph styles. We also have character styles. So this is for individual characters or letters. If you want a specific type, so let's make one right now. Double click. Say I want it to be an emoji or actually it's something else, something big like that. So I can go to none and then just choose a few of these characters to have this specific style set to it. So it's the exact same thing, but just for characters. We have the paragraph panel, which we went over, the character panel, we also went over that and I believe we do have one more called GLPS. Now, GlipS when you download a font or import it, the designer who did that initially has different options for you to explore different ways that the K is being written in. Right now, by default, let me choose the same font. Just eight. Right. So right now, let me try to find the M, for example. So right now when I go over here, you'll notice these tiny squares at the corners of the letters that are being used here. But there are different ways for me to write my letter M. So we have this option. If I don't like this, I can click on on that. Table clicks. Now I have this special input. Same thing with all the different alphabets. We also have some symbols for you to choose from. And if you're doing any sort of logo type or poster design, I highly recommend coming over here because you never know what kind of options your fonts came with. So we have some cool case. We got some decorative stuff as well. I could replace this D with this shape. Totally fine. We can scale up the glyphs, make them bigger, make them smaller, and the way we are seeing these previews. We can also go over what parts of this glyph we want to see. So everything for this font, only math symbols, there's only a plus and minus, only symbols, and all that other stuff. Now, not every font has this. I believe I mentioned that. Say if I were to go on this MOG one. This will have its own set of glyphs. So it's never one thing. If I go over this one, you can see how it's a lot more different. It's still a pretty cool panel to come to when you try to make your text a little bit interesting. That's about it. That's how we do the horizontal text. Vertical text is the exact same thing, but just vertical. But I'll show you that anyway. You can see our cursor turned the other way and now I can write the same thing, but on the other end. So if you have a specific language that's looking for this version, this style, then this is how you do it. We also have those masking that I told you earlier, which is when you get to create a mask out of those letters. So notice that red overlay that should be pretty familiar to you. Let's decide our font and size and Enter. Now you can see I got the marching ants. Meaning that if I go in my layer panel, right now there's nothing there, but I can add in a pattern. Let's say if I'm here, click it once, and now I got myself this effect. Go to my layers panel and we can find that layer mask. Can dabble click here and choose a different pattern. Let's go for trees. And this is applicable to the vertical version as well. And then you can treat this as a regular layer. Delete that. And right. That concludes our text tool. Pretty simple to use, but there are some hidden cool features that allow you to take your text to the next level, especially for poster and graphic design work. In the next lesson, we're going to go over a very big and important tool which allows you to do a bunch of things, and that is the Pen tool, which is situated right above the text tool. The pen tool, you can not only draw with it to create strokes with it. You can make selections with it. It's used for healing. It's used for layer mask and all those other stuff. So it's a pretty diverse tool, and we'll learn all about it in the next lesson. 12. Pen Tool: Now, let's take a look at the pen tool. It's situated right below our Dutch and burn tool, and it looks like a pen. So when you along, click on it, there are tons of other options. But we're going to start right at the basic, the general pen tool which allows you to do basically all the other stuff below it. So grab that. G yourself a canvas. I just unlocked my background layer, and let's take a look at the stuff up here. First are the presets that we get for all the other tools. But right next to it, we have the option of either shape or path. Now, let's start with shape. That's the easiest method to use the pentol for. Right next to shape is the fill color that you can grab and the stroke color. Then it's the thickness of your stroke, which you can use a slider and then what your stroke looks like. So is it a dashed line, dotted line, and then the alignment, caps and corners. To show you these better, I'm going to just start drawing a shape. So grab your penol and make some dots. So first dot, you need a second dot, so it connects. Let's do a regular triangle. And as soon as you have an area between your strokes, that is when the field color will show up. To close your shape, we go back to our first dot. Let's zoom in right here, use our space bar, and let me show you what those three options were for. A line is talking about the alignment of your stroke based on that path that you just drew. The blue line here, which is what we're making with our Pentool, is the path. It only turns to a shape because we're having a closed area for there to be a fill color for. So do we want this width the stroke to be aligned at the center of the path on the right side or on the inside of our shape or on the outside? Next is the caps, which is the cap of the path right now is sharp. We can turn it into round or a square shape. I will have to show you this with a different one, but right now we're dealing with a corner. So corner, we have a sharp turn right now. We can turn it into a round one or something cut like this. Take a look at our caps. I'm just going to do one, two. That's all we're doing. Let's zoom in, and now we get to use this option to decide where the cap ends. Right now, it ends right at our point. Second one is a rounded one, and lastly, it's a square one, but it extends from that point that we made. We do have more options, but these are in regards to our stroke only. These are the same things as the one we chose here. But if you chose a dash line, which I'm just going to turn on right now, turns your stroke into dashes. Now we get to decide how many dashes we want in this path. Right now it's four. Use your rakes, let's do six maybe. I'm getting larger things. But the gap here is what making it different. You can make this into three. And just add different spacings and different length for each of them. This is how you get to change it up. You could turn this into your own preset or just use one of the presets that were made for you. Once we're done, we can hit Okay, and then let's take a look at some of the other options. I'm just going to lock our background layers so I don't move anything other than my shapes. Next, it's talking about the width and the height. That's talking about the path only. In terms of the shape, you could use it, but it's going to give you a distorted result. If you're not comfortable using these, you can also hit Command or Control T to resize that shape just like you would with any other layer. Lastly, we have the option to combine the shape, subtract the shape, intersect, and exclude. This is the same logic that we looked at in the selection lesson. Instead of adding to our selection, we can combine two shapes. Let's make another one. You can see how it's on the same layer, but now I have this combined shape. Have alignment, so aligned to Canvas or selection. You can distribute it, and then we have the hierarchy of that shape. So it below one above one, and you get to situated like that. All right. So going back to our shape, let me hit Commander Control Z. You can see the blue line going around our shape. So let me actually change this into something else so we can see that color better. Now, what if you wanted to remove a point? Say you made your shape but you made an extra side by accident. Let's draw a random shape. Let's do this, for example. But I realized that I wanted a square, and this thing is just not up to my standard. When I hover over any point, notice how there's a minus next to my pent. That minus indicates that when I select it, it's going to delete that shape. If you go on that same selected path, there's going to be a plus. That indicates that you can add a point. Just like that. Now, why would you add a point? When you add a point, you can see that there's two circles right next to that point. So let me do that again. The square is our point. We get two circles. Now, we get to move this point simply by holding down Command or Control on our keyboard, clicking once on that point and then just dragging it. So I can adjust my shape as I go forward. Now, why is it rounded when I didn't even create a round? I just did one, two, three, four. That is where those rounded handles come in handy. Essentially, the more these handles are stretched out, the curvier your path is going to be. Holding down Commander control again, click on the handle and just experiment with it. You can see how that's changing the curve. And as I mentioned, the longer the curve, the more of a rounded effect you're going to have. Whereas this one is pretty short, it's barely rounded. And if we didn't want this curve, we wanted a sharp turn. All we have to do is hold down alter option and then click on that main point. And now those handles are gone, meaning that we're just getting a sharp edge like this. Similarly, we can do that alter option thing on one of the handles. What if I want one side to be curved? The other side to have no curve. That's where I get to hold down option. You can see my cursor changes, click and drag on that edge only. So when I push this all the way into my path, there is no curve, and that's precisely what you see. So even though they are supposed to be moving together, you can only move one of the handles via leroption. All right. So this was our shape. But what if you want to turn this into a selection? You can do that by right clicking and then making the selection. That familiar marching ant shows up and what I get to do is adding a shape or a color restricted to the inside. Let's go ahead and click the adjustments right here. Go to pattern, and just add this forest pattern. You can see that shape is exactly the layer mask and that is how you can use the pen tool for more than just drawing. Now, going back up here, Remember that there is a shape tool within Photoshop and there is the path option. So when you're making shapes, it's generally an extension of the shape tool right here. If you long click, you can see all sorts of shapes. We have the classics, and then we have a custom shape tool where if you press on it, you're going to get a large library of all sorts of shapes. So let's say a tree, we can just put that in right there, and it will follow the same fill and stroke that you have selected here. So if I lower the width of my stroke, we can actually see that green. But sometimes the shape tool doesn't have the shape you want, so you'd end up using the Pen tool to create that shape. But everything above here for the shape tool is the exact same as the Pen tool except, of course, we have that library. Now let's go over the path option for the pen tool, and that way, I can show you exactly what you can do with it. Let's switch from shape to path. And immediately it gets rid of the colors, the width, and the stroke. Instead, we can make something like this. Let's say this is my path. I'm going to close it, and as you can see, nothing happens. That's because we need to choose what we want to do with this. So you can click Selection. This will show up, and basically, it's asking you if you want to feather the edges of this selection, which if you do, it will make the selection a lot more natural. Let's say two pixels. Click Okay, and there's my selection. So if I had an image, I could make a new layer based off of this or I could do what I did before, which was to add a pattern. Notice because of that feather radius, the edges are not as sharp. Going back to that path, let me make something else. You can also use it to mask something. Let me just bring in another pattern. Let's just go over here and I'll get this tree. Let's delete the layers right click. We just have the pattern fill. Now with the pen tool, I can start making my selection. If you hold down Shift, you can make straight lines, and now I have a perfect square. When I hit mask, it will create a mask on top of that layer. Now I have my forest fitted into a square. And this is with zero feathering, so you can see the edges of this selection is a lot more sharp than the previous one. Alright, let's go back here, do a few more things. If I changed my mind about making this into a path, I could just switch and change it into a shape. And now I have shape one. So if you go on the shape tool, I can change the fill from a pattern into a solid color like we've been doing so far. We also have a gradient option, which is when you go from one color to the other. So black to white, red to white. You can change the angle, change the type of gradients or radio from the center, angle, reflected or diamond. All the other things we have a large library for you to choose from. You can also switch the colors by hitting this button. We have solid color gradients and patterns, which is what we've been using so far. You can also just click this and put in your own code for that unique color that you want. Alright, so that was the original Pen tool, but there are some other stuff in the drop down menu that we can also explore. So I'll just make a new layer. Let's long click on this and take a look. So that was the Pen tool. Next, we have the free form Pen tool, which basically allows you to make really free selection. So I'm not dealing with points here, but I could just go around and make something like this. The same options up here. I could right click, make this a selection, choose the radius for feathering, maybe fill it with a certain color. So if I choose color, they'll ask me what color, and now it's filled with red. Now, with the free form, you can't really make points. You can see I'm clicking everywhere, nothing's happening. But once I make my weird shape, close it up. I will see the points made for me. This is less precise, but if you do want something curvy like this, you still have the option to either delete one of the points or use the handles that we saw before, hold down command or control, and maybe intensify or sharpen one of the curves. It's the same thing. It's just the way that you're introduced to them is not the same. We can also the other Pen tool add to our selection. Let me just continue this. I'll go to the edge here and connect it to my first thing. Once you've filled in your shape, you've closed the shape, you can go ahead and make a new shape. So right here, we have combined shapes, subtract, and the same things we've had so far. Let's try the intersection. I'll draw something else, close it. And now I have this effect. I could make a selection of it, and it's pretty much the same thing. So I'm just going to hit delete. Notice here that even though I deleted the previous selection, I can't really grab this one to delete it. I'm selecting it, hitting backspace, as you can see, nothing happens. That's because I'm dealing with a path here, as I mentioned. The way Photoshop works is that it saves your paths in a different window called Paths, which if you're not seeing it here, just go to Window and click on Paths. When you go on there, you can see there's something called Work path and it looks exactly like what we have here. If I wanted to delete this, I would have to come here, hit Delete, and there we go. If I make a new path, it will show up right there. I could make another new path like this and then proceed to fill it in or just do it vice versa. You can hit that button to turn it into a selection with the marching ants or turn it back into a path. Also, if you use the Lasso tool, you can turn it into a path just like that. These work interchangeably. Let's delete, both of them, and take a look at the other pen tools. Next, we have content aware tracing tool. Now, this is for when you have something already on your screen. For this, I just imported an image into Photoshop. This is in the resource folder, so just import it in. Using the content aware Pen tool, it's going to detect an object for you and automatically create a path around it. We have a human subject and we have this balloon. When I have my mouse over an area like the sky, you can see nothing's going on with my cursor. Once I go towards the balloon, especially the edge of it, you can see something does show up. When I click on that area, it creates a path around my balloon. The same thing can work with the human subject, but since that is more isolated, it was easier to find. Notice how I did make a mistake around this area. We already learned how to deal with that. Let's grab command or control and just simply work with the point here. Click on until that's the only dark blue one, and you're able to move this to the side. Then work with the handle. There we go. We can add to that selection so I could try getting the mountain here or that tree. You can see I still have that blue line around my balloon. I could remove from that selection. Let's hit around the balloon and I'm getting rid of the points. We have make selection. So it's saying no pixels are selected because I don't have a closed shape, but it essentially works like the other pen tool. Let me just grab this and then click here to complete my shape. And I think we should be good to go. Let's see if we're missing an edge. So now I can make a selection. I can go to paths and just call this balloon. So whenever I'm in need of a selection for my balloon, I just need to make a really precise selection once, save it over here, and then I can just come back to it and click on it. Let's go ahead and delete that. And now the blue lines are gone. We have some other stuff here. This is the same for every pen tool alignments, the hierarchy, the different settings we went over. And then tracing, we have normal, simplified or detailed. This is depending on what kind of shape you're dealing with. By default, it's normal. But if you're dealing with a really detailed work like a building, you might want to switch onto this. This will use more computer powers to make sure your computer can handle it. And then here you're determining how much detail you want Photoshop to put into this selection. By default, it's set to this. Again, you can determine how much you wanted for your object. Next pen tool is the curve issuer pen tool. So this is just for curves. I'm going to go back to our original document, and unlike the first pen tool where we made points and we got sharp edges. This allows you to make points, but it's going to be rounded edges. So unless you're making it sharp, you're going to be getting curves all the time. So if you hold down alter uption and then click on one of these points, you can see how it's turning what is not fully curved into curve and then vice versa. I could uncurve everything by holding down alter uption, bring it back by holding down alter Rupi again. And the other ones make a point and then just click and drag it. You see I'm not getting any handles here because it's curved by default. I only need to make it sharper and undo that. Same settings up here, not much has changed. Going to delete this, and then we get to move to our other tools. We have Add Anchor Point tool, which adds the anchor point to that path that you have. I'm just going to go back just draw something real quick. When we add points until now, we've been using the command or control to do it, but you can also just use this tool to add points because they're anchor points, they come with those handles. It doesn't matter if you're using the curve tool to make your curve or the regular pen tool, you can add the anchors just like this. Then of course, you can move them around, play with the handles, and do whatever else. We have the opposite, which is delete anchor point tool. So it deletes these points that we just made. Next, we have Convert Point tool, which is the shortcut alter option that we've been using. But if it's a curve, it gets shifted to a sharp edge. If it's sharp, it gets shifted to a curve. Now, before I end this lesson, I do want you guys to practice going around a subject. So let's go back to this image right now. What I want you guys to do is use the selection tools that we've learned so far to grab the human subject and these two walls. Let's go over that together. You may choose to use one of the auto features. Let's hit Cloud, select subject. There it is. Now using the tool, I can make an estimate of what I want these lines to look like. Let's actually go for the ones at the bottom to make it a little easier, grab your pen tool, and before I hit anything, I'm going to go to paths and create a new one. Let's hit this first, and now we got one. Let's call this human. Let's make a new layer. And on path one, I'm going to use my pen tool to make a line from there to the edge, close it off, and then from there to the edge, and then make sure to connect it. To make it precise, we're going to hold down commander control and match it up with the correct perspective. Be sure to click again so that the blue line only applies to the point you're trying to change and then do the same thing down here. Once I have this, I can make a selection, and let's do some adjustments. I'm going to go over here and let's say I want to change the ground color into something else, maybe something like that, a little reddish, close that off, go to our paths. Grab the human layer, quick selection, go to layers, and we're simply going to remove the adjustment from this human saturation. Currently, you can see it's coloring his pants too. Now that I have the marching answer on my human subject, all I need to do is make sure that white is the foreground color. Let's hit X to switch it on this layer, let's hit deep backspace and then Command or Control deep. Now my human subject is no longer pink. To soften the edges a bit, I'm going to double click on the layer mask and simply feather the edge. Not a lot because it gets rid of everything, but we're just going to feather it by around a few pixels. If it's too intense, we can lower it by a little bit. And now the floor is pink. So before or after, really simple thing to do. So we use the selection tools and the pen tool and use some masking to change the ground color. In the next lesson, we're going to learn about the action panel, which basically takes all of these things we've learned so far and allows you to create a preset for each of them. So that's a really cool feature to learn, and I'll see you guys in the next lesson where we do that. 13. Action Panel: The action panel in Photoshop allows you to frequently use edits into one button. So if you frequently turn your images to black and white or change the hue of your greens, the action panel can make your workflow a lot faster as you can record your workflow once and just use that button over and over again. So let's go ahead and take a look at that panel. If you go to Window, it's going to be the first one there called actions. So if you have the latest version of Photoshop, you will see a lot of these predetermined actions. But let's just go over on the basic ones. I'm going to close all of them, and we can see we have Wig, we have frame channel, wood frame, and all that stuff. These are things that if I were to hit Play, using this button, feather is not available. Now, these are things that if I were to just choose one and hit play, I'm going to grab this one, which is supposed to turn our image into sepia toning. If I hit the triangle next to it, I can see exactly what happens. So we make a snapshot, we merge to layers, we desaturate, and then we make the following adjustments. Those are the steps that this action will take. Let's select it, then hit the Play button down here. You can see in one click my image, turn into something else following those steps. And if I go here, it just made layer one and the hue and saturation. So when you first import, as you know, we only have our background layer. This came up because of the actions panel. Alright, let's go back to our actions panel, gets lost there and see what else we can do. So you can delete an action, make a new set, which is what you can use to store these actions. So right now they're in default. Let's go ahead and make a new set. Let's call it colors. I okay? Now, within colors, there's nothing in there. So let's go ahead and make a new action. Before that, I'm just going to delete the adjustments that I made, delete the layer mask, and then delete that. So back to the beginning. Let's go to the actions panel, and what I'm going to do is create an action for turning an image into black and white. Very simple. Hit the plus mark right here. Let's call it, make it black and white. Set. We want it to be in colors, but you can set it into whatever sets you have. Function key, when you hit a keyboard shortcut, which would be from the following, this action will happen. I'm going to select not for now. And then a color for you to organize them better. Now we're going to record. Now, whatever you do from the time this turns red until you stop it is going to be saved as your make it black and white action. So let's go ahead and duplicate this Command or Control J, and let's do something really simple. So just black and white filter. Let's clip it down, play around with these slides a bit, just so our action is interesting. Let's say that is my adjustment. Go to actions, and then hit Stop. So what do we have here? We have layer via copy, which is what we did. Make adjustment layer, create clipping mask current layer, set current adjustment layer. That's exactly what we did. If I were to delete what I just made, all of that, start from fresh, go to the actions panel, and simply play this action, I will turn it into black and white. You can do this for more complex workflows, such as turning the hues of every color within your image into a specific color palette, maybe adding some vintage filters, creating things from scratch. This will make things a lot faster for you. In the next lesson, we're going to look at another way to make our workflows faster within Photoshop. 14. Custom Brush and Pattern: Now, let's learn how to make our own custom brushes from either a drawing or an image. I'm going to start with an image right here. This is available in your resource pack. We use this before in an on lesson. So import this into Photoshop and let's go ahead and select the subject using the methods we've learned so far. I'm going to make this quick, grab one of my selection tools, have Photoshop selected for me, and then go to Select and Mask just to fine tune the hair. So it refined hair, Photoshop detects it for us. Everything looks good. As you recall, we did have some imperfections here that I'm going to remove via the brush tool. Once we're done with our selections, let's hit okay. And it's going to make us a new layer with this selection. Let's delete the background, right click on the mask to apply that layer mask. We have a transparent piece out of our subject. Next, we're going to grab the adjustments down here exposure and turn this image into just a black solid shape, and this will give us our brush. So make sure there are no details available or visible inside your object or subject. And if you have to, if it's kind of gray, and you can see the outline for whatever reason, you can just duplicate the exposure layer with Commander Control J just to intensify the effect. We're done, we're going to go and just merge everything together, so grab the first one, hold down shift, grab the last one, right click, and then merge the layers. So that's all we have right now. Let's go to edit, then define brush preset. Call this flying weighty with balloon. It okay. And now I have my brush, so I can click. I have my red color loaded in with 55% flow. Let's increase that. Click once and I got myself the subject. Now, with something like this, where you have one singular subject in your brush, if you click and drag this, it's going to look weird. So what you can do is increase the spacing of your brush. Go right over to this box containing the brush, and it's going to bring the brush settings for this particular brush. So down here, we can see that when we stretch it, we're going to get this effect, which is what we just saw. But we want it to be in a way when we click and drag, we're just getting like, multiple flying people. So this is just size, the orientation, but this is where we need to be being at. So the spacing between each of the strokes. If you increase the spacing, you can see slowly we're getting different people. And now, if I draw, getting them just like that. The more I increase, the more space between each of the two. So use this as you'd like to make this work. This is especially helpful with singular objects. So even if you have this leaf, you want it to be differentiable and not just one giant blob. You have some stuff on the edge right here, so if I can find my new brush, there it is. Let's make a new layer. I'm going to just do one for reference. Let's increase the spacing again. We have some angle options. If you ever wanted to change the angle, we have flip Y, flip X, the roundness of that shape, so you can squeeze it for whatever reason. Now, on the left, we have some interesting things. So you can go into the way shape of your brush is. So when you're talking about shape of your brush, you're talking about the tip of that brush. So hence why when we change the jitter, we can do, like, different sizes at the same time, just the minimum diameter. Can do an angle jitter, so make it more randomized. Again, if you have a leaf brush, this is perfect. Roundness jitter, so making it more random, minimum roundness. You can flip the X or Y jitter and the way the brush is being projected. I'm going to uncheck this. Then we have scattering, which is scattering the brush strokes. You can do it on both axis. So it just travels into space. We have count one, then count jitter. So we have 16 right now, eight. The next thing is the texture. We don't really have a texture here, but if we did, we could adjust that the brightness of the texture, the contrast. You could technically make a brush that is not just an outline like this. So this is where the texture comes in handy. We have dual brush, so you can combine two brush strokes. That was the person, and I selected this, I believe, wooden brush, and this is what we're getting. You can choose something else. Let's undo it here. So we have the person here. I could select one of these and notice how it combined the two. We can change the size, the spacing of that fusion, the scatter, and the count. Color dynamics doesn't really apply since we have a solid color brush. Next is transfer. How does the flow transfer in So flow is, as we said, how much ink is coming out of your brush. We have the same thing for opacity. So this would be good for, like, clouds. Have brush post, which is how the tip of your brush is situated. So noise, which is, like, little things you can add to your brush. We don't really have much texture going on here. Next, we have wet edges, so it kind of gets that watercolor effect. You can build up on it. Build up. That's another thing you can do. So going on top of it. We have smoothing, making sure your selections are smooth, your painting, should I say? And then protect texture. I don't really have texture, but it will maintain that texture with every brush stroke. And then once you're done, you just close off and can start using your custom brush. Now, you can do the same thing if you didn't have an image. So let's say I wanted to grab something like this, one of these brushes that are currently there, and I draw something cool. I could turn this into a brush. So simply go to Edit, to find brush presets, then hit okay. There we go. It doesn't always have to be an image. You can draw something yourself. If you have a signature, this is how you would do it, if you want to create a pattern like this. Speaking of patterns, actually, once I have something interesting like this, I can actually define my own pattern for the pattern panel. Same place, edit, we can define a pattern. Let's call this silly lines. I okay? Now, silly lines will be visible in the patterns panel. If you're not seeing that, go to Window patterns. And if I were to delete this, let's make a new layer so we can delete this, go to patterns, click this one, it gets loaded in. I can now use this on my design, on my photos and have fun with it. But that's pretty much how you can make your custom brushes and custom patterns in Photoshop. In the next lesson, we're going to go over the last thing that concerns how Photoshop works, and that is the animation feature. Of people don't know this about Photoshop, but you can do frame by frame animation here. It's great because you have all these tools that allow you to draw cool things. Why not animate it in the same place? So I'll see you guys in the next lesson where we do that. 15. Animation: So let's go ahead and use Photoshop's animation panel to create some smiley faces on the piece and just see how we can deal with motion within Photoshop. So go ahead and import this image from the resource pack. And what we have right now is simply our background layers we've had so far. I'm going to do is unlock this and simply bring our timeline right below. So go to Window, scroll down to timeline, and this is where all the animation will happen. G to put this up there. You can also go to Window Workspace and just work with this in the motion workspace. But I personally prefer the essential with the addition of the timeline because of the layers panel. So you can see that right now we have two things. They're marked down here, zero, second, 0 seconds, one, two, but we said we want to create some video motion. So let's go in the top right corner here and convert to video timeline. So now, let me just extend this a bit. This is going to look like a regular video editing software. We're going to have our layers and then make changes as we go. So you can use this thing down here to increase the thumbnail, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. And basically, you're going to be stacking layers on top and as the video plays, it will go over each of those images. In one image, you can have a smiley face. In another image, you can have a sad face, and that's generally how your motion is going to go. This is more of a frame by frame animation. Layer zero, let's call this our main, and then you can see that it changed the same layer here into main. I'm going to duplicate this a couple of times. Command or Control J. Stew, three times. And then what I'm going to do is go on my first main copy, use our brush, adjust the size, get maybe a white color, zoom in with the track pad, and just draw some smiley faces, maybe on this one. And let's hide the other two so we can see what we're doing. So there's some eyeballs. Alright, so this is what my first look is. If I bring back the other two, it's going to hide my first thing because we learned with layers that it's all about the hierarchy. So whatever's at the top is the visible layer right now. So let's hide the second copy and sorry, the third copy. On the second copy, I'm going to lower its opacity so we can see the smiley faces. And because they're positioned in the same exact location, the original image, I can just change and be focused on these smiley faces. So on main copy two, I could maybe draw the eyes again and just maybe have this P stick its tongue out. Second one, I could have him kind of be grumpy. And this one, I could have the same eyes. But have it like snore. Then we're repeating it with the same with the third layer. So let's hide the main copy. Based on copy number two, we can decide our next thing. So this one, I'm just going to keep it as it is, eyes eyes, and then just the tongue. This one I could make it maybe move its math a little bit. As if he turned away, you can use the erase tool to delete something as well. Then the third one, same thing, sleeping. But I'll move the Zs in a different way. So draw Zs in between the previous ones. Okay. So we have three things. Let's bring back their opacity all to 100%. But when I bring them all back, we're only seeing the last edits. That's because these are starting at the same time. To make this like an actual animation, I need to offset the last two layers. So this guy can stay as it is. So when I go over, you can see it's nothing, then the faces show up. G to actually move this. I'll have to draw something here first, actually. Let's hide the top two. Bring the cursor here, lower the opacity and draw something on the first layer. Just because I want them to be alive from the beginning. So maybe have it look to the side and then like a different smiling face. This guy is gonna look this way before they begin their motions. And the third p is just sleeping. Okay, let's bring back the opacity. And now just like the first two, we're just gonna offset these like that. Now when I go over it with my thing, you can see that they're changing. Let's bring them back first. Can see they're moving around, they're alive. And when I hit space, it happens really quickly and that's because we're dealing with one frame at a time. 0.101 020, three, four. If I want them to run longer, I simply have to extend them. Let's say the first scene is five frames. Second scene is also five frames, and I'm just offsetting it like that. You can use this to minimize your view. So let's go on ten frames and then cut it right there, hit the scissor, and just delete with backspace the extra bit. This here, get your timeline slider on 15, cut again, and then just delete this with backspace, bring this here, and then have it continue for the rest of the thing. Now let's hit the space bar and we can see how it's pretty cool. I'm going to extend this because I just remembered we erased a part of the eye. What you could do is also open these guys and change the position, opacity and style. Position just means that you can change where the image is. So if I move it to the side, you can see how in the beginning it's up there, then it comes down here. That's just a simple animation. You can do the same thing with opacity, so it's fully visible at the start, then transparent at the end. Then we have the style, which is what we've been doing so far with the brush adjustment. Click on here, you can add more media, make a group, make a video group from these clips, and just delete this track. Can also go back frame by frame, go forward, hit play, stop the thing, go from the start, move to the end. If there's audio, you can have the audio going. There's actually an audio track down here so you can put a sound effect file right below and then match your animation to that. Once you're done, you can render the video, so it's play smoothly and then decide where you want to save this at. Another thing that you can do is start an animation without an image like this. So let's go ahead and make a new document. I have this layer zero here. It's not an image, and what I want to do is animate my own thing right here using the onion skin feature and just make a silly frame by frame animation. So what I have right now is layer zero. This could act as your reference layer. So say I want to draw a path for my falling ball to follow. Going to draw something like this, and then this would be my ground. Now, to bring in the actual ball, I need to go over here new video group. And now within this video group selected here as well, I'm going to make a layer. Now, this is a video layer and not your typical layer. I'm going to zoom out a bit and extend this to one or two frames, maybe three frames. So align it with three F and just duplicate this. Commander Control J until you're happy. So I'm going to go to six, hit the scissors, delete that, and maybe one more at nine, then delete the rest. So I have three scenes for my animation. Have the playhead at the beginning, layer one. Let's actually call these something. So background scene one, scene two, and scene three. And call the group falling ball. Alright, so scene one, let's grab our pencil, choose her color and draw our ball. Now, if I go to the next frame, you can see how the ball isn't there. And that's because we said we're dealing with frames. So to enable onion skins, just go over here and choose enable onion skin. Now what is an onion skin? When you go past a frame, the next frame, you can see how my ball fades out at the end. The beginning, it's all dark. At the end of that scene, it's this color. That is because onion skins allows you to see a reference of your previously drawn figure so that the next time you draw a ball, you can make sure that it follows the same width and height and the same direction. If I don't have onion skins enabled, I wouldn't know what the ball looked like. So in my scene, too, if I assume it's here and I draw it like that, you can see how it's a lot different from my first ball. But if I have onion skin enabled, go over here, I have a reference to follow. So I'm going to zoom in here and draw my ball relatively the same and in the same direction. Then that's our third ball. So I'm going to go on scene three and draw my ball again, making sure that it looks decent. When I go from the beginning, you can see, I have a falling ball. And all I have to do is just duplicate the scene numerous times until my ball effect is complete. When I'm done with my reference, I could just, um, either hide it or delete it and maybe replace it with my own background, say this red color is my new background, and just continue making my animations. And that's pretty much how you use the animation panel in Photoshop. It really depends on how you use the tools over here to make video layers. It's the same logic as regular photo layers, only that you have a timeline and you're dealing with seconds or frames, and your playhead needs to be able to show that sequence perfectly. You can add an audio track and then render and save it for your next project. Use this in Photoshop a lot for looping their text effects. Maybe if they make a cool composition, they have, like, the stars sparkling in the back. Generally, you want to use it for shorter and more simpler animations. The heavier works is going to need a really good and fast computer because this is obviously a lot more complicated than a regular two D static image. Now that we know how to use all of the basic features within Photoshop, we can now move on to different use cases. We're going to start with photography and then make our way to graphic design, some mockups and many other things. I'll see you guys in the next chapter of this course. 16. Generative Fill : M Photoshop recently introduced some of the AI tools that work with Adobe Firefly. There is a long list, but essentially they help you edit images faster by introducing artificial intelligence. We're going to go over each one and we're going to apply them to this very picture. So go ahead and download this, import this into Photoshop, and we can get started with the first tool which is Generative Fill. Right now, I only have one layer, which is my photograph, nothing else. Already you can see that at the bottom, I'm getting this new tool. If you're using an older version of Photoshop, you may not see this so make sure you are on the 2026 version so that you could follow along. You can immediately ask Photoshop to edit the entire image by giving it a prompt. So when I click on this, I'm going to be informed about my credits. Just like any other AI tool, you have a certain number of credits, depending on the plan that you have. I'm just going to click Okay now. And basically, we get this bar at the bottom. I'm just going to drag it up and we can describe the thing that we want to change. So this is less about me selecting an area but more about giving an instruction to Adobe. So I could say, turn the water more cyan. And then that's my instruction. The water is a little bit purply for some reason, so I'll ask for this, and then we can choose our model. Currently, we have Adobe Firefly Image five, but there's also some partners that you can select. I'm just going to go with Adobe right now just so that it's fully an Adobe experience. Once we have this, we have some additional options here, but that depends on your model selection. So for example, the first one is only for Gemini. The next one is also for Gemini. This one doesn't really need a reference image, and then we can see our credit usage. I have about 4,000 credits remaining, and if I need more, I could just buy some extra. With the three dots, you can learn more about their process and how credits are being used. But once you're done, you can click on Generate and it's going to look at the entire image and apply what you asked for. Now, bear in mind that AI is always going to be a little bit off, and it only comes down to the image and the prompt that you have that it may give a really good quality. Almost every time you will need a little bit of refinement after it is finished. If you look at your layers, we have this new one with the AI symbol. Anytime you see this symbol, it just means that it's going to use AI. But yeah, basically it's done, and we have a mask layer as well. This is before, this is after. It's definitely more can, but this just goes to what I was saying earlier that you do need to make some adjustments after it's finished to make it blended or just be more realistic. For example, with this layer, I could change the blend mode to get a better look, maybe multiply is good. And then maybe we could lower the opacity a bit until 70 and we can then mask it to only be applied to the water. But that's the first thing. We can now add stuff to our canvas using generative fill. So I'm going to hide this for now, and we're just going to build on this image with the remaining of the lessons so that we can have a full composition by the end. Using the Lasso tool, I could grab an area and once I let go, I could go for Generative film. Now, in here, I could describe what I want Firefly to put in place. Again, you can choose your model if you want a different thing. I will go with nano banana for this just so that I get a more realistic result. Firefly tends to give a little bit of a cartoonish look. For this, I'm going to switch over. Now, because I switched over, we do have some reference image choices and, of course, the bar that we can say what we want. I'm going to try writing just asking for a Seagull without a reference image. But if we saw that it's struggling, we can just grab a image from online and put it here for Gemini to refer to. Seagull flying in the sky. Let's click on Generate. I'm using 3.1 want to follow along. Again, we have a new AI layer. I'll just put let this be. But one thing to bear in mind is that these new AI layers are going to build upon what's visible on the canvas. We hit the earlier layer, but if I bring it back, you can see how the Segel is not fully blending in. That's going to affect the look. But there is my Segel. I have one option. But if I wanted to, I could have Gemini redo this with some comments. But when I zoom in, it definitely looks like a Seagull. So perhaps we could make it a little smaller and put it somewhere else. So since I'm going to mask the water anyway, I'm going to hide it for now, and we're simply going to do Commander control T on our Seagull and make it smaller. Once I have the size, I could maybe re select the subject, the Seagull, and do another generation. So that's going to be a different thing. You can also adjust the size of your new AI subjects by choosing a smaller selection. So if I do something like this and then put seagull flying in the sky, that's going to give me something small because it has to now fit inside that selected area. So I have my Seagull. I could do something else. Let's do a tiny boat. Something like that. Make sure you're on the base layer Generative fill, and we're going to try a different model. Let's try flux for this, and I'll do red sailor boat. In the water. There is the boat. It's very tiny. But say I want it to look exactly like a certain boat, I could now upload my reference image and have Lux redo this generation. So there is a reference image for you guys to download, so download that and then attach it right here. So now I have a reference image. There it is. I'm just going to hit generate on the same layer so that I get a new boat that looks like my boat, the reference there's my second boat. It doesn't exactly look like the reference image. So I'm going to redo this using the base image now. Let's do a different selection, one that is tall enough for the sailor boat. All right. We can do generate a fill, flux, and I'll upload it here. Okay, so we have a boat. It's really tiny, making this look huge, but that's okay for now. I'm just going to delete our first boat and zoom in to see the new boat. So it is very tiny, but we got to clean out the sky later on. So we got these two elements now. Let's actually blend them in before moving onto our next AI tool. So starting with the water, I'm going to hide the rest, drag it down here. We're going to hit basically delete this layer mask for now, and then using the selection tool, whichever you want, you can grab the water. So I'm going to try to grab the water using the base image. There we go, click once. We have our water. There's some extra bits. I'm not sure what that is. Let's zoom in. That's just part of the lighthouse. I'm just going to help Photoshop a bit and remove those areas. But other than that, we have the perfect selection, and now hidden cue, we will go on this top layer, and we're going to make a mask. And now our water is more blue like we asked, and we could try different blending modes, opacities to make it look nicer. So that's our first component. Second component is this sailor boat. So it is nice, but it's just not blending in at all. What we could do is go over to any selection tool and grab Select Subject. I usually go for Cloud. Click on it once, and it should separate the boat. I'm just going to invert the selection and leave only the sky so that we could use a color range to clean up the rest. This part is fine. It's just the top wires, I guess, that are being not included. So we have some cleaning up to do with the boat. Let's move on to our SGL and then we'll come back for that guy. So the Seagull is very straightforward. Again, select your subject, however you like. So I just cleaned up the SGL the same way you select it, and then you deleted, the, you know, background. And now I'm going to do the same thing with our boat. But essentially, we're done with generative fill. We added two elements. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to expand using AI and Photoshop. 17. Expand: So this is where we left off in the previous lesson. We added the boat and we added a singular seagull, as well as turning our water blue with the help of the prompt edit. So now we're going to expand this image simply by going over to our crop tool and then expanding it however you like. So you could either keep this horizontal image and expand it sideways or turn it into a vertical one and expand it upwards. What I'm going to do is first move my boat somewhere in sight. So let's grab the boat and put them somewhere here. Get the bird so I could, like, cut it easily. Then I could go in with the crop tool and get something that is vertical. So let's crop our image like that. First, I'll crop it like this. But then we're going to go on the same tool and just expand it further. So say I want more of the ocean and I want more of the sky. I will set my dimensions. If I want, I could go down here, choose a different ratio. But all you do is click on Generative Expand, and then it's going to do that for you. Now, you could describe how it is going to be expanded. For example, introduce some trees when you're expanding or introduce the moon, something like that. But if you click on nothing, it's going to basically type nothing. It's going to rely on what's already in the image and simply complement that. So it's not going to add or change much. There we go, this is before, this is after. There's my new image. I'm going to unto basically go back to the original ratio, but I'm now going to expand it this way so we can actually use the prompt box to introduce some trees and maybe some more boats. So more trees. Birds and boats. Very simple. Hit generate, and let's see what comes out. There's my new landscape. Let's zoom in and see what we're dealing with. We definitely have more boats, these trees at the bottom, and we have some birds on the side. So we were able to not only expand the image but use generative fill at the same time to add new elements. That's our second tool. It's really handy when you want to get more from your images. But you can really use this to expand patterns, designs, get more room for mockups and pretty much anything that's going to need more space. 18. Remove with AI: So this is where we left off in the previous lesson. We added the boat and we added a singular seagull, as well as turning our water blue with the help of the prompt edit. So now we're going to expand this image simply by going over to our crop tool and then expanding it however you like. So you could either keep this horizontal image and expand it sideways or turn it into a vertical one and expand it upwards. What I'm going to do is first move my boat somewhere in sight. So let's grab the boat and put them somewhere here. Get the bird so I could, like, cut it easily. Then I could go in with the crop tool and get something that is vertical. So let's crop our image like that. First, I'll crop it like this. But then we're going to go on the same tool and just expand it further. So say I want more of the ocean and I want more of the sky. I will set my dimensions. If I want, I could go down here, choose a different ratio. But all you do is click on Generative Expand, and then it's going to do that for you. Now, you could describe how it is going to be expanded. For example, introduce some trees when you're expanding or introduce the moon, something like that. But if you click on nothing, it's going to basically type nothing. It's going to rely on what's already in the image and simply complement that. So it's not going to add or change much. There we go, this is before, this is after. There's my new image. I'm going to unto basically go back to the original ratio, but I'm now going to expand it this way so we can actually use the prompt box to introduce some trees and maybe some more boats. So more trees. Birds and boats. Very simple. Hit generate, and let's see what comes out. There's my new landscape. Let's zoom in and see what we're dealing with. We definitely have more boats, these trees at the bottom, and we have some birds on the side. So we were able to not only expand the image but use generative fill at the same time to add new elements. That's our second tool. It's really handy when you want to get more from your images. But you can really use this to expand patterns, designs, get more room for mockups and pretty much anything that's going to need more space. 19. Harmonize Images: So we learned how to expand our images, but now we're going to see how we can remove elements with AI. This is where we left off. When you want to remove something, you can use Photoshop's traditional tools, but recently they've introduced Adobe Firefly and made a bunch of tools with them. So I'm just going to merge everything here, so we have one flat layer to get started with. Just grab the whole thing with shift, right click, and we're going to merge layers. So we have one layer. Now I'm going to make a duplicate just so we have access to the original and zooming in, I can find something that I want to remove from the image. I'm going to remove our original boat just because it looks a little out of place. I think the sailor boat looks much better. What I'm going to do is grab any of my selection tools, grab a large area, and simply click on Rmove. So that's going to use AI for that, and it's fairly consistent in maintaining the colors and the textures that are around that selection. So you can see it looks like there were no boats from the start, and also I get a new layer. So if I changed my mind, I could just get rid of the layer and not have to go back to the original image. So it's fairly easy to remove elements inside Photoshop. Also going to remove a larger chunk now. So this is a bunch of trees, and I could do the same thing. We could even use a different selection tool like the marquee, choose a large selection and remove once again. I actually did this on the main layer, but the good thing is that we're going to get a new removed layer anyway. If I just pull this up, it looks just like new because we have two separate removal layers. That is pretty much it for the remove tool. What we're going to do now is move on to a different tool which allows you to blend images with the use of AI. 20. Upscale and Sharpen: M All right, so we have this image that we first imported and then we modified with the help of AI. I'm now going to merge whatever I have so far and we're going to upscale our image to a larger dimension. I'll call this base just so it's clear. All you have to do is grab that layer, go to image, and then click on Generative upscale. We're going to get this panel, and this is in collaboration with Topaz AI, which is a very famous tool for upscaling images without losing quality or any of the other details. We have our model here, two of them, you can also use Firefly, but these tend to do a better job. So you can choose between the two options. One of them is going to add new items, creative details, as they call it, while the other one will only work with what is in the image. So that's what I want. And then you can turn on face recovery, but we don't really have any faces. And then the output is where you decide how much of an upscale you want. So two times or four times, and you get to see the output dimension here. So right now I'm seeing that my image is already pretty large. So let me actually kind of minimize the image, and we're going to pretend like that's how we started. So I'm going to go to image size, and we can kind of lower the pixel. So just grab the width and height and go until it's like 25 or something, something smaller. We could actually go down to ten. So we have a very low quality image, comparing to what we had before. So I'll do like six. So it was 41 megabytes but now it's six. Click Okay, and already our image is pretty small. Command or Control zero. Let's now upscale it to bring it back to a better size. Same thing, Gigapixel two times, and I'm going to show you what the dimension is right now before we do that. If you go to image size, this is our current dimension. So 1110, and then we can upscale it easily using these settings. Now it's going to be two times. You do four times, it's going to be four times. Now, this is going to use credits. If you do a bigger upscale, it's going to take more credits. I'll do two times, click upscale and we can see how our image is going to be enlarged. There we go. Commander control zero. I could see the before and after. So I could go back to image size, and now it should be two times. And you can see that it is. It used to be 6 megabytes. Now it's 25, and the dimension is a lot larger. So you can use this feature whenever you have a old image. So you can see it even made as a new document. If you have something low resolution, you can use this, and the same thing can be applied for human faces. So I'm just going to get a blurry image that has a human face in it, and then we're going to do the same. We have this photograph. It's a regular image, but it's a little blurry. What we're going to do is combine the upscale feature and the sharpen feature to upscale this further. I have my layer right here. It's currently locked, and we're going to start by making a duplicate just so we have the original and I'm going to do the same thing. First, let's make the image smaller. It's really big right now. We're just going to take this down. Let's go to 2000. You can see it went 69-7 and then we're going to click Okay. Already, it's pretty tiny and the same thing was applied to the original. Now we're going to upscale and then sharpen. You could do the other way around, but essentially when we're using the sharpen tool, which uses AI, you want to give it enough room to analyze the image and then sharpen it pixel by pixel. If we give it a small area to work with and then upscale it, we may get some glitches in the details. So first, let's go ahead and upscale our image. Say, this is something we took with our camera and it's just not it. So make sure you have face recovery on this time, and then we're going to upscale. This is going to give us a different document. And over there, I could also sharpen, edit further, use harmonize if I want to add another image, and proceed to use other AI tools. So already, it's pretty big. We're going to zoom out. So this is what we had before. This is after. When you look at it, it doesn't really look that different because we worked with the size and dimension. Now I could work with sharpening this image because some of the details are pretty blurry, and you could do this easily by going to Filter. Let's scrap the image. Make sure you're selecting the image, not the mask, and go down to filter AI sharpen. So this is using the same provider. And all you do is click on Sharpen. So there's not a lot of options there, and it's very straightforward. So it worked with sharpening the image. You can see that there's a little bit of light in there, and I could just build on top of this layer, so I could just go into AI Sharpen again. Have it sharpen it for me one more time. There we go. We now have a sharper image compared to before. I did have to do this twice, so we actually ended up introducing some noise. But no worries regarding that because Photoshop also introduced an AI denoise tool, but we're going to look at that a little later. For now, we learned how to upscale our images and then use AI sharpen to make them more crisp and show those details in our image. Now let's move on to masking with AI tools and how we can improve our current portrait. 21. AI Mask and Denoise : M Mm hm. So we left our portrait at this stage. We upscaled it, and then we sharpened it twice. So now what happened is that we have a lot of noise to deal with. All these little dots are noise, and you could kind of work around with the top layer, lowering the opacity or using a blend mode. But an easier fix could be using AI again to work with the noise. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a duplicate of our sharpened layer. I'll call it that, and I'll call this the denoise layer. So this way, we could have a before and after. The denoise layer, I'm just going to go down to filter and use AI denoise. Again, same provider, you just click on denoise. There's not a lot of options, so it's very straightforward again. The denoise is fairly inconsistent with maintaining the subject space. You can see right now she looks like a cartoon character rather than an actual person, but a workaround until they improve their model is to simply lower the fill. Until it kind of blends in with the previous image. So you can see that just with 32% fill, it's better. And you can do the same thing with sharpen just to get less of an obvious noise. So the two together can kind of help hope that they could give us more control when using the AI denoise in Photoshop. As you saw, there was no slider or anything, and I was just given the end result. But for now, doing this should help. So we looked at the denoise and the sharpen, but sometimes you want to make your own adjustments and turning around to the traditional Photoshop tools, you can now make mask layers a lot easier because of AI. I'm just going to merge everything in this layer. We can just right click and do merge visible. I'm just going to make a duplicate of my original and then merge the following Commander Control E, and I'm keeping the original just so we can see it before and after. If I want to make her face pop, I would have to make a mask of the face and not really work with the background. So when you click on any image, there is this option at the bottom where it just generates a mask layer for you. Well, first a selection, and then you can refine it before making a mask. That was pretty instant. It just grabbed the subject for me, and it's a good thing that it doesn't make the mask layer because for the hair, I need to do some refinements myself. So I'm just going to go to Select and Mask, refine hair. And there we go. So I'm getting more of those finer details. Click Okay, and I could make my mask right now. There we go. So now with the mask, let's actually make a background as well. So this guy is just the mask layer. I could do some additional adjustments that are only going to affect my subject. So let's say I want to make that portion a bit brighter. I could go on to image adjustments and maybe curves. And work with the face only. You can see that the background is not being affected, so that's perfect for my use. Get some highlights in there, create some contrast as well. And when we're done, we can click Okay. Another thing I could do is introduce more colors to my subject. Go to vibrans and we're just going to increase that a bit just to make her skin tone pop, her eye color, and all of that. Now, if you want to do other masking, you can turn to the selection tools, but some of the older ones do use AI for a faster turnaround, like the Object selector tool. I could quickly grab the eyes and make some adjustments there or refine them further with the other tools. So let's grab the eyes for now, and I'm going to make an adjustment layer with levels just to make the eyes a little bright. And then I could hold down Commander control on the mask layer, make a hue and saturation slider if I want to change the hue or add more saturation to her current eye color. So we have all of those options as well. Going to bring this up so that the contrast is still there. And now we have a selective adjustment using a quick masking option. That's how you can denoise and mask with the AI tools in Photoshop. Very straightforward, not a lot of options to work with. But when you're working with a image and you don't have a lot of time, you can see how they could come in handy. In our next lesson, we are going to completely shift to a different editor in Photoshop. So you may have noticed that on the top left, we are currently on the pro editor, which is your usual Photoshop interface. But now there is the AI assisted editor where everything is connected to Firefly, which is Adobe's own AI model, and you get to do everything with artificial intelligence. And the cool thing about this is that you can switch between the pro editor and the AI assisted one so that you don't lose your core workflow. You're only adding to it with this new option. So let's go ahead and explore this as well. 22. AI Assisted Editor : Alright, so I have my image right here. We use the pro editor to make some adjustments. Switching over, we're going to need to create a copy for this new editor. So let's click Okay, and we're brought into this whole new interface. So this is very similar to Adobe Firefly. If you have used that tool before, everything here should look pretty familiar. And if you haven't used Firefly, no worries there because I'll show you exactly what these tools are and what you can do here. So first of all, notice that you can still switch back to the pro editor, and we did make a copy for this AI one so you don't lose whatever you made in the traditional Photoshop interface. But on the left side, we have our tools. Below, we have our prompt box and where we can choose our model. Over here, we have our main canvas where the images, and we can move it around at a different image and work with bettering our final product. The top right, we have our download option. So when you're done, you can download it. But if you just want to save the project, you can go over to the homepage. On the bottom left is our history. So whatever action you do, it's going to show up at the bottom. All right, so let's take a look at what these tools do. First one is the prompt box, right now, this image that I have is put in as a reference. What I could do is ask this model, currently nano Banana two to either edit this image or create a whole new one using it as a reference. Your model is here, your ratio is here. We have the resolution here, and then you can turn this on if you wanted to affect your output. Have the credit usage at the bottom, and, of course, the reference images. So you could just type something in here right now to make her eyes blue, one command. We definitely need that reference image, and when I'm done, I could hit generate. So it's looking at the image, and I ended up making two. But here is the final product. It's currently being edited, and it's fun to watch. So there is her blue eyes. It's definitely blue, a little intense, but notice how the subject did not change at all. So the AI AI assisted editor, did help us out with changing one aspect of our image. And we have some version control here. This is our original. This is one version, and this is the other one. So we can choose either one or generate a whole different one. If you want a certain color, you can attach a reference here or have it use a certain hue by adding a specific color code. But that's the prompt box. And you can do a whole different image here, as well if you remove that person. So I could do blue eye blue eyes. Same model, let's generate. And this is my brand new image. So whether you apply a reference or not, you're going to get some pretty good results. And bear in mind that your models are going to give you a different output. So it really comes down to which one you choose, because if we choose Firefly, for example, with the same prompt, go to remove the reference, we're going to get a whole different person. So as you can see, they have blue eyes, but it's nowhere close to the quality of realism with the Gemini version. We have this kind of low contrast image with the image five Firefly. You models are very important. But I'm just going to go back to this image. And if you're not seeing this bar, you just click on the History panel. Going back to our old image, we can make further adjustments here, maybe at pink clips, sick for her or whatever. You just put in whatever command you have and this will apply it for you. With markup, you can do more specified images inside the final product. I have this image already. I have something to work with. I'm just going to switch over to this one so it's fully AI. With the markup tool, I could either use the text boxes to guide the next edit that I want. I could use a brush to define an area for this model to work with. Similarly, I could use a Marquee tool to select that area, or I could give it a reference image. You can think of markup as a post edit after you have that base photo from prompt. I could use the text to maybe add freckles. I didn't hit generate so I could do a bunch of things here and then something for the brush, I will define the area that I want the freckles on. Something like that. And then we can say add freckles down here as well. If I want something with the region, I could select a larger area, but it's the same idea as the brush, and I'm just going to hit Generate. Again, you can choose your model, but because I started with Gemini, I only have the Gemini options. And we have two annotations so far. Let's click Generate and see what our model is going to look like. There's the first version, and this is the second version. So you can see how the brush really helped the final result to be contained in one area, and the text prompt only helped that transformation. I could continue working with this visa region to add, like, a flower or something, so I'm just going to do it on this side or here. Add red flour. Like, okay. Let's remove the freckles and we're going to generate one more time. You don't always need multiple annotations. It could be one. You just type in the box right here what you want changed and not use any of these. These are only guiding tools. So it ended up having an error. Let's use the region again. I'll add a parrot here or a bird, whichever. And then we're going to try this one more time. This is still in the Beta mode, so it may have some faults, but for now, we're going to see what we could do. Is the bird. So the region really helped keep the bird in one area, and we even got our subject to bring up their hand. Now, the tune is going to be the general work over lighting or visual style. We're again given some options. You can work with a selection, maybe her only or the background. You can work with a brush to really draw that area. Or you could work with the entire image. So I'm going to go with the entire image, and I'll go for studio lighting. We have the edit strength, so I'll just bring it down because already it kind of has that studio look to it, and then we're going to click Generate. So there is the studio lighting kind of look, and it's perfect. We even have more intense versions. So we have one from zero and one from, I think, one is the full capacity, and this is at 0.5. So I'm just going to apply this guy, and now I have a completely different background. Next, we have fill and remove. This is something we already looked at. The only difference is that now it's here. So it's the same idea. You can select an area and then have something be filled or you could expand the background. So it's just the same idea where you have your brush size, and then you have the add or remove from the mask, and then we have only one model to work with. Same thing for remove, nothing different here. We have our expand feature brought into the AI assisted editor. Again, it's the exact same thing that we looked at only it's here, and we have the same thing with upscale. I'm not going to go over this one because we did this already. And then we have our remove background option. So this is automated. You can remove the background to add something else instead. And if we go back to the tune mode, we can add a background now. I could select my subject or the background, whichever works, and then we do add forest background. We need to work with the subjects lighting and color as well because she will be in a different environment. There we have it. We have more options to look at as well. Then I'll go with this one and I could hit Apply. That is the AI assisted editor. If you want, you can download the image now to if you need to. But the version, the history panel is pretty helpful on its. Could start a whole new image using this option, and you can always switch back to the pro editor to work with this image. So as you recall, I started with this image, and this is where we ended up. So if I stayed with our main subject, I could have used some AI additions to that, but I could now take this photo and do some other stuff using the pro editor. If you want to switch back, it's only going to take another copy, but then bring it back to the same project. So these two can work together for you to achieve better results when editing with Photoshop. Additionally, the generate image option is also brought into the pro editor. So you can just click on this, Generate Image and you have your model, the prompt box, you generate and then edit that into the image. So those were the AI tools within Photoshop. They are already a huge improvement from what we had a couple of months ago. And as you saw, some of them are still in Beta mode. That means that there's going to be new updates on that. So be sure to check with your program, make sure it's updated so that you can see the full potential of these new AI assisted tools. Oh. 23. Class Project: Create a Photoshop Composition: Now that you have worked your way through Photoshop, it's now time to apply your knowledge for the class project. For your class project, I would like you guys to use the tools and at least one AI tool to create a composition from scratch. You have a lot of freedom as to what you can create. So take some time, think about the layers, the lighting, the masking, and anything else, and see how you can integrate that AI tool to speed up that workflow. It could be an edited photograph, a simple advertisement, a creative social media post, or something completely different. Start with an idea or an image that interests you. Then use the Photoshop fundamentals to start building your composition. Then use at least one of the AI tools that we learned about to help with your composition. The important thing here is not just to use AI because it's available, but see how you can use it as an assistance to build that final product. Can change the images, the colors, the type, or anything else that you want to make this piece your own. Once you're finished, you can upload the final image to the class Project Gallery. You can also upload the original so that we can see before and after. And you can also include a description as to how your workflow was. What were some things you found challenging and what was very interesting for you. You can also list out the Photoshop tools that you used and how AI assisted you to get to this final image. Good luck with the project, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys make. Mm hmm 24. Congratulations! What’s Next?: Congratulations. You have made it to the end of the course. When we started, Photoshop was a lot to take in. But now you have worked with many of the tools and concepts that you're going to use again and again in real projects. Getting comfortable with Photoshop comes from using it often. So try editing your own photographs, design some posters, combine images that normally wouldn't go together, experiment with brushes, typography, and AI tools. The more small projects you make with Photoshop, the more comfortable you're going to feel at the end. And remember, AI is not going to replace the fundamental concepts that we learned in this course. Knowing how layers work, how to make selections, how to mask, and how to use the different tools is something that needs to go alongside these newly introduced tools because the core function of Photoshop is not really going to change. If you haven't already, be sure to upload your project to the class project gallery. I would love to see what you guys have made and what your before and afters look like. If you enjoyed the course, feel free to drop us a review as it really helps us improve our content for future students. Thank you for joining me. Keep experimenting and creating, and I'll see you guys in our next course.