Photoshop Creative Challenge: 15+ Projects to Master Editing, Effects & Compositions

1. Welcome to the Photoshop Creative Challenge Class!: Welcome to this Photoshop challenge course. If you ever wanted to improve your Photoshop skills in a fun and practical way, then this class is just for you. My name is Hosta Kuchui and I'm a graphic designer with over six years of experience working with Photoshop across photo editing, visual effects, and creative compositions. Throughout my work, I've explored both professional workflows and creative techniques. And in this class, I'll be sharing with you the most useful and the most exciting. Instead of just learning the tools one by one, we're going to be doing this via challenges. Each of these challenges is meant for you to practice real techniques and also get a very creative and exciting outcome. Before we get into the challenges, we're going to do a quick refresher on the Photoshop tools just so that we're all on the same page. We're going to learn about all the tools, how layers work, how you can make adjustments, and how your general workflow should be like. Once you're confident with Photoshop, we're going to move on to our three challenges. The first one is photo editing and retouching, where we're going to be enhancing portraits, adjusting colors, and creating cinematic looks. The second one is visual effects, where you're going to be creating things like glitch effects, dapple exposure effects, and many more. Lastly, is the creative compositions, where we're going to be building full scenes such as fire, underwater, and other creative artworks. The end of this class, you will not only improve your Photoshop skills, but you have a wide range of creative works that you can now put onto your portfolio. So let's go ahead and get started with our Photoshop challenge. 2. Create Your First Project & Workspace Setup: Before we get started with the challenges, I just want to give you guys a refresher of Photoshop tools. That way, we're all on the same page about the tools, and we can move along in a more efficient way. So this right here is the homepage, and we're going to be making our new projects via this button. You can also import a photo directly using open or an old project. So you can sort your files here. They're all named, the type of file, how recently you've opened them. There is also Firefly integrated into Photoshop. I'm using the 2025 version. If you have an older version, you may not be able to see this, but you can just kind of create stuff via firefly by just typing stuff in here. I'm just going to create a new file and take a look at the templates that we they are sorted via the names above. We have photos, prints, arts, web, mobile, and film. So basically, those just mean a difference in dimension resolution, and for some cases, artboards. If you go to photo, for example, you have the default photoshop size, we have landscapes, we have portraits, and many more. And you can see that the orientation changes when I go over these different templates. For my first project, I'm going to do a default. You can decide on the width and height in whichever metric you prefer. I'll do a seven by seven, so we get a square. Next, we have resolution, which can be per inch or per centimeter. The more you have a resolution, the more high quality the work is going to be, but your file is also going to be heavier. We have the color space which you can set for print, for screens, for labs and other stuff for different purposes. We have the background of your first layer. You can choose the color, and that's about it. I'm just going to hit Create. I'll just lower this to 150. Then we're going to click on Create. So now we are in the Photoshop workspace. I'm just going to hit Command or Control Zero to make this fit to screen, and we can get started by taking a look at all the stuff that we have around us. So all of our tools are right over here. On the left side, you can always grab these panels and pull them out if you want. Maybe you prefer it to be on the right side. And if you put it back in, it will just snap back in. Over here, you have your Photoshop windows. So think of them as browser tabs. You can work on various projects at the same time. If you hit the X, you're going to close that project. We have all of our panels on the right side, and if you click on either one, you're able to see the options that come with it. Whatever you're doing via the tools will have a property that you get to shift. For example, for a brush, when you're painting, you get to change the size and the hardness or choose a template from here. If you're doing a adjustment, we'll get the sliders like this. So not all of the panels are currently visible. We do have a lot more, and you can see them in the Windows tab. So all of these are different panels that you get to enable. Let's do history. You can see just pops up. And if I don't need it anymore, I could just close this tab, and it gets out of the way. Have some other tabs up here. If you want to save or export, you go to file. You have edits, image adjustments. You can modify your selections, add filters, work with layers, type, and so on forth. We have the Canvas right here, and my cursor currently has the brush tool enabled. If I choose another tool, my mouse is going to be for that tool. You can do any sort of work here in the main canvas. Whatever is white is currently the canvas, the stuff on the outside are just not part of the canvas. So whatever you do here will not go onto the final work that you will export. So to set up your workspace, you first need to figure out what is it that you're doing. If you're doing simple image editing, then the default setup should work for you. But if you want to do something with animations, for example, you do have to change your workspace. So on the top right, you can see the different workspaces. This is essentials, which is the default. But if I go to motion, going to get a timeline, and that's something you're going to need if you want to do something with motion. For photography, we have a longer panel section. We have the core tools, painting. It brings out all the brush and the colors for you over here, and you can even make your own personal workspace. So say I really need to use the let's say, channels panel all the time. I could go over here and make new workspace, call it Channels, hit Inter. And if I go to painting, let's do essentials and then go to channels, I'm going to get that previous setup. You can delete a workspace just like that. So you can set up your workspace. If you know you want a certain panel all the time, you can bring it in, save that or just go with the essentials workspace, which is what you would usually use anyway. Now that we know where everything is and how we can make a new project, let's talk a bit about the different tools that we have. And more importantly, the essential tools that we're going to need for all of these challenges. 3. Essential Tools Overview: Welcome back. Now we're going to be looking at the different Photoshop tools. The most important tool is the first one, which is the move tool. If you're dealing with an image, a shape, a text, you will have to move it at some point across your canvas, and that's precisely the tool that you're going to need. You can easily enable it with V on your keyboard. And the way it works is that, let me just make a shape here, is that you simply click on the thing that you want to move and you move it across your canvas. The move tool, you can do a bunch of other stuff, such as duplicating by holding down alter ruption, holding down shift to move it in a straight line. So if I let go of shift, it'll be free form. If I hold down shift, you can see that it's very precise with the movements. You can copy paste, Commander Control C, Manner Control V, and I'm getting the outline here just like that. Can also align things with the move tool. If I grab this guy, set it to canvas, we can just set it at the center at the top, bottom, left, right, and we are able to play around with the different layers. So let's get rid of that. We'll talk about the layers panel in a separate lesson. Now let's move on to our next tool, which is all these selection tools. I'm just going to import an image to make this easier. So I just imported this image from the resource pack, and we're going to take a look at how we can use the tools to do some very basic stuff. So as we said, the move tool is for you to move things around. So I just converted that and I could move my entire image across the canvas. Let's put it back. With these selection tools, we have a few different ways that you can select. The first one is the Marquee tool, which gives you a very controlled rectangle that you could use to maybe make a copy. I'm just going to move the layers panel here with the marching ants that basically indicates that there has been a selection, and now you have to do something with that selection. So in my case, I will be copying this command and control chain. And now I have that selection in a new layer. Let's delete that. If you long click this, we have another shape for Marquee tool, and that's another controlled shape that you could use. If you hold down Shift, it will be a perfect circle. If you let go, it's going to be an ellipse. So more free form. I could do something like this, make another copy, and you can see that's what comes out. Commander Control Z to undo and to get rid of the marching ants, you can do Commander Control D, and that's going to deselect. We have more free form items for selection, such as the Lasso tool. It's literally a lasso that you get to move around to make your selection. If you go over the same area multiple times, it's going to basically think of the sum of all those lines and give you a result like that. If you don't close your shape, it will automatically link them with a straight line, and that's going to give us a result like this. If you long hold long click the Lasso tool, we have a selection brush tool which is going to detect the subject that you're trying to grab. So this guy, for example, always like this. So I could grab these guys and just select them like that. Go over here, we have a geometrical lasso tool, so you just do clicks, and it's going to be forming straight lines. And you do have to close this, so you will notice a circle appear when I go to the first point, and we get a shape like this, Deselect. Then we have more automatic selection tools, such as quick selection. So I could just go over the area and you can see that it detects and expands when it realizes that this is the edge of the subject, and you can continue going like this. Have Object Selection tool, so that's going to basically separate all the objects in your image, and we can simply click on them. So you can see when I hover over the subject, I'm able to grab him or his shirt, his pants and the same thing with everything else. Then we have the magic one selection tool, this one, you just do one click, and it's going to detect that area automatically. Now, once you have a selection, you have a few options. So let's say this is my selection, you're able to select and mask, add onto the selection, remove from the selection. And the reason why we do selections in general is to be able to add certain adjustments to one part of the image and not the entire thing. So this method goes very well with masking because once I make a mask, I could just do whatever I want to this portion and leave the rest as it was. Let's deselect. So those are the selection tools. We have some crop tools right over here, some Canvas tools. This is just your regular cropping. If you want to do a certain aspect ratio, you can look for it here or type it in here for width and height, straighten your images or do different things with the way you're looking at this canvas right now. So center preview, cropped area, you can kind of work with what you want to see. Now, because we do have AI in Photoshop right now, you're able to use generative AI to either expand or make new things. So say the image is too small for you, you could just expand it right over here. This is done with Firefly. All right. We have some drawing tools. The first one is an eyedropper tool. You get to select any color on the canvas, and you can see the lineup over here. If you long hold this, we have a color sampler, which will give you all the information that you see. I could do multiple and you know, work my way around the design from here. Clear all. With any color, you get to use a brush. So choose a color, and you can immediately start drawing on your canvas. This is not only for drawing. You can also use it to make adjustments. It's used for masking. This is another powerful tool that we're going to look at. During the challenges, we have a pencil, as well. This one is more for drawing. Then we have some other paintbrushes that you could use for blending colors in so color replacement and mixer brush tool. These ones, you may not use it that often because they're for painting purposes. And the challenges, you won't find yourself needing them. We have the clone stamp tool, which is exactly what it says. It clones a certain part of the image. If I do alter uption, I could clone this tree, but it will go over my subject, so we have to be mindful of that, too. We can also clone the pattern. Have a history brush, brings back what you did previously, an eraser tool. There's also automatic eraser, such as the selection. So the magic eraser will magically detect the area that you're trying to remove without you having to go over it yourself. We have the bucket tool, you can paint stuff in. This is I don't think we're going to need that for our course, our classes, Adjustment Brush tool lets you do some local adjustments. So you can see that if I want to do brightness and contrast, only to this area, I could brush it. I like to do this via masking and not so much this tool, but you could use it if you want. We have the same idea with a blurring, smudging and sponge tool. So you're able to darken or brighten a part of the image or blend it in using these three tools. We have the text tool for some text, the pen tool for doing lines like this or a mixture of shapes. It's more free form, and we have the shape tool. So the shape tool and the pen tool lets you create shapes and paths. Whatever you do here, you're able to change the fill, the stroke, the width of that stroke. If you want to do any sort of specialized strokes, you do it right here. And then it goes hand in hand with the swatches panel. We have the hand tool, which lets you move the entire canvas and not the image. Let me just undo this. And then finally the Zoom tool. So you get to zoom into your work. If you do alter option on a certain point, you're able to zoom in. I'm using my scroll wheel on my mouse. So if I do it without any sort of alter option, nothing happens, so use that to go in to a specific part that you're working on. Use the space bar to do the same thing as the hand tool, and a bunch of other shortcuts that we could learn real quick is Command plus to zoom in, Command minus Commander control to Zoom out. If you do brush, let's make a new layer. If you do brush, you can use the right bracket key and the left bracket key to change the size so I could color this in. If you want to do any sort of masking and you want to switch between your colors down here, you can hit X, and you can see I'm switching them as I go. To invert, you do Command or Control I. To delete, you can do backspace on your keyboard. Regarding layers, you can do Command or Control J to duplicate to make a duplicate. And then if you want to merge everything, you can do Command Shift A and E on your keyboard. So four keys at the same time. And that's going to merge all the stuff down here and make you a new layer. There's a bunch of other stuff that you could do with a layers panel. This is another very powerful aspect of Photoshop because it lets you do so many blending and gives you so much more control over your composition. So we're going to learn all about layers and blending in the next lesson. 4. Layers And Blending Basics : Now, let's talk about blending layers and just how the layers panel works in general. So right over here, I have a duplicate of my first image, and as you can see, we're able to build up as we continue making duplicates. So we're making various layers as we go on, and each of these layers, you can think of them as a card stacked on top of each other. So what you see on your canvas depends on what's at the top in the layers panel and what is visible. Next thing that we would have to work with going forward in the challenges is the opacity and fill slider. So the slider for opacity basically tells you how much of that image is there. And if you do 28%, you're going to make the image transparent. You can say I'm playing around with the slider, and that's going to be really helpful when it comes to blending adjustments. Other important thing is blend modes. So this is how your top layer is blending on the blending with the bottom layer. And there's various categories. We're going to be using a lot of blending modes within the next challenges. So this is the darkened category, brightened, a mix of both, and some special cases. It's normal, it's just your regular image as it was. Down here, we have some special effects. So we have bnding options at the top. We have some stroke, inner glow, inner shadow, that sort of stuff. We have the ability to make mask right here for our layers and basically make only a part of it visible. So if I do white, currently for my layer mask, everything is visible. If I do Command or Control I, nothing is visible because the entire thumbnail here is black. Next, we have adjustment layers. These are all various things that you can do within Photoshop. I'm going to go into these a little later. We can turn things into groups for organization purposes. Renamed the group. If you want to, you can make a new layer like this, an empty layer, and use it to add something that's not directly connected to the layer below it. So this is independent. You can use a delete button to delete layers. If you right click on any of the layers, you're able to do a bunch of stuff. You can export that layer as it is. So this layer alone not the entire canvas. You can lock stuff, can copy the styles convert it to a smart object so that you're able to go back to adjustments and change it up. And this is where you make layers visible. We also have the lock feature, which prevents you from accidentally moving that layer. Now, when it comes to blending, one thing that is important is knowing what blend mode to choose. And I'll just do a very simple example here. Going to zoom in onto this person's pants. Let's choose a bright color, such as red. I'm going to go over the pants area. I go to hit X to get red, just like that. Say I wanted to change his pants color to red with this method, and this is just a rough selection of his pants. Now, if I want to blend this just for the color, I can go all the way down to color. Now notice how it did not work with the tone of the color, and it simply just changed the hue of that yellow pants underneath. Let's actually do that in a new layer, so just redo that. Okay. So color, again, it just changes the hue of the yellow underneath, but you can have different types of blending. So if you want the red basically blended into the item below, but really emphasize the shadows, you would use one of these categories from this category. So multiply is usually the one to go with because it's very clean, and you can see how well that red is showing itself in the creases. If you want the red to be brighter above the yellow, you would choose from the next category. Once again, it's blending into the image, but it's a lot brighter than the original. Then we have a mixture of both. So this is going to focus on creating contrast. So like soft light is something you might use often overlay. When it comes to special cases such as skin adjustment, we will use vivid light. And then these are these special cases. So you can see they're not it's no longer red anymore because we're dealing with different properties of that red. And this is just the hue of it, saturation, color, and luminosity. It's going to look at the HSL values of that red separated into these. In various challenges, you will find yourself using different len modes. But now that we know what each of those categories do and what they look like, it might make it a little bit easier. So that's just a quick overview of layers. I hope you guys remember these work. As we move forward, I will be providing step by step guidance. So this is just for you to get a little familiar with it and be ready before we move on to our challenges. The next lesson, we're going to talk about adjustments. So this guy down here, all these different options, what do they do? What's it good for, and when would we use them? 5. Adjustments Layers - Introduction: So with adjustments, you're able to change different parts of the entire image, whether you're targeting light, color, details or anything else. So we still have this image from the previous lesson, and I'm just going to delete these extra elements so that we have our plain image. So this is what we had originally. You go over there, you may find some of these terms to be familiar. If you do any sort of photo editing. These are basically universal terms such as exposure curves levels, and then we have the color section down here. So if you've used any sort of photo editing software, then these will work about the same. What we have at the top group, you can see they're separated by a line is these are for just color in general. So you can start with a solid color. So just red, and then you can turn it into a gradient. So going from color A to color B and then adding a pattern. Next section is regarding light. So this is where you do all your brightening, darkening and that sort of stuff, and it will go to the entire image unless you mask it. The next section is regarding anything with color. So we have some of the classics like human saturation vibrant. But down here, we have a few different things. The most important one is, well, not important, but unique one to Photoshop is color lookup. It's basically a set of three DLUTs or presets that you could use to quickly color grade your image if you choose to. And it shows up as a separate layer that you can adjust as we saw in the previous lesson. Down here, we have some special cases such as inverting the entire image. And these are not your classic adjustments. So you would only do these for maybe special effects, which we will do in a different challenge category. Now you can access adjustments from here, or you could go over to image adjustments, and you're going to find the exact same thing here. We have some auto features as well. If you're not sure which adjustment to choose, you can have it be done automatically. So auto contrast, which is applied that, auto tone, auto color. So it's more blue now. And all your adjustments, as we said, come in as a layer so you could blend it into your image. Let's do one together. Say I do a gradient map, I could blend this into my image to get this like retro look. You don't always need these adjustments to make changes to images. You can create your own by using layers, brushes and different colors. Combining that with the blend mode, you kind of get your own adjustments. And that's something that we're going to look at. It's useful four times where you want to maybe add on some makeup to your human subject. If you want to intensify an element in special effects. So that's another way that you can make adjustments. Now let's move on to the last topic of this chapter, and that's how we can export images within Photoshop. 6. Exporting Your Work: So how do we export in Photoshop? It's actually very simple. You're able to export the entire Canvas artboards or a layer. So say I have a duplicate layer right here and I want to export the top and not the bottom. I could right, click on this, click on Quick Export as PNG or export as a certain format that I want, say a JPEG. I could change the size, take a look at the size here, the dimensions, I could do it here as well. Scale it down if needed. And you can see that's going to update here for me. If you want to export whatever's visible on your canvas, you just go to File Export, either export it quickly as a PNG file, which is going to be a larger file or click Export As, and that will bring you the same window. Now, bear in mind that whatever you export, it's only going to be a collection of things that are visible. So if I have nothing visible, I will get an empty black screen, probably. So make sure that your layers are visible so that you don't run into that problem. Save your project, you simply go to File, Save or Save As. You can also save a copy. And the good thing about Photoshop is that if you're connected to your Cloud account, Adobe Cloud account, you're able to save projects on your Cloud. So you can access it easily from another computer, whereas if it was local, you would have to send it via USB, email, drive, or whatever other method of transfer you prefer. It's very simple to save and export with Photoshop, and now we know just about everything that we need before we get started for the challenges. So let's go ahead and begin with our first set of challenges, which is going to be around photo editing. So that's going to be a good buildup when we go onto more advanced challenges, such as Sx and compositions. So let's go ahead and move on to our challenge. 7. Challenge 1: Photo Editing And Retouching: Change The Color of an Object : For the first challenge, we're going to be working with photo editing and enhancing. So basically, for the rest of this chapter, it's going to be images that we're going to take one component of and edit via the tools in Photoshop. So by now, you should be a little bit more confident with using the tools. If not, feel free to go back to the previous chapter. And get familiar with what tools is used for what. But we're still going to be going through each of the effects step by step in the challenges. So don't worry if you feel a little bit intimidated by the titles of the lessons. So I just imported the first image in the resource pack. You can go ahead and download it, then hit open on the home menu and import it from your computer. Right here, we have this couch with little cushions and like a carpet at the bottom. Using some very simple techniques and selections, we can change the color of these into anything we want. And we're not going to be slapping on a solid color and trying to blend it in. We're going to be working with the hue and saturation of the couches color itself. The first thing you want to do is open up your layers panel. If you can't see this, go to window and make sure layers is turned on right here. So once you do that, you should be able to see the layer an. So this right here is the background. I'm going to unlock it and then make a duplicate. We're always going to be creating duplicates in case we need to go back to the original or start over. It's always a good idea to do this so that you don't have to start all over. Command or Control J, and now we have a copy. I'm going to name this base, hit Enter, and we're just going to select the things that we want to change the color. Going to move this here with a space bar, zoom right in. I think I will change the color of the cushions and the couch itself. So first, you can grab the select tool or the Lasso tool, whichever you prefer and just make some selections. The reason why this picture is perfect for this is because there's a clear contrast between the couch color and the cushion. If you had a couch with a similar color as the pillow, it may be harder for you to separate the two. So this is a very good example for this lesson. With the plus selected, we're just going to go over the cushion and grab it. You can do both or just one. It's up to you. I think I will do both and then make another selection to separate them. Zoom in right here. I'm using my track pad and just go over the edges. So you see here, we have some extra bits inside. I'm just going to switch to the minus up here and remove from this extra bit. Then go back to plus. You can do Shift and Alt to switch between the two. Hold down shift for plus, and I'm going to reintroduce this section. If you see that it's a tricky part for you to use these guys, you can use the brush. So right now, if I go back and forth with this, it can't really tell the difference between the white bit of the cushion and the bright part of the couch. Simply hit Q while you're seeing the marching ants, and you should see this red overlay. Then hit B on your keyboard, right click, adjust the size, and as well, do the same thing for the hardness. Click away. And then using the color white to introduce black to remove, just simply go over the edges to make it perfect. I want to remove this section, so hit X until you see black here and just go over it like that. Also have this part. I'm going to use the bracket key, left bracket key to minimize, right, and increase the size off and just go over the smaller sections. We have the same issue here, so I will hit X to get white, introduce this X for black to remove this. Anything in red is not going to be part of the selection. Okay, once we're done, we can hit Q again, and the red part should be gone, but now you can see that we still have the marching ants. With this selected, I'm just going to hit Command or Control J on the base layer to make a copy. And now we just have the two cushions. Now to separate the cushions, although they are pretty much the same color, you just need to hide everything else. Go on the cushions layer and then do the same thing. So with the select tool, we're just going to select the first cushion with alter option or the minus one, remove this extra piece. If you're having trouble doing that, you can just hit Q and use the brush with the color black. Okay. Hit Q again and do another duplicate. So I'm going to call this thing front cushion. And if I only bring that front, you can see that that's the only cushion available. But if I bring back the previous layer, you can see that we have both of them. So to remove this front cushion from the cushions layer, using Command or Control, we're going to click on the thumbnail for front cushion, and you should see the marching ants. Now, go to the cushions layer, which has both the cushions and just hit on the mask and do Command or Control I. So now we have everything but the front one. We are getting this halo effect, which you could easily remove with the mask. So make sure you're clicking on the mask. Use the color black, just get rid of this. Okay. And now when you put both of them together, they should look like a normal situation. So I'll call this back. Bring the base back and everything should look normal. Now, we could do the same thing with the pillows here or just leave them as they are. I'm going to leave these to B, but now we're going to grab the couch itself. So select base. And once again, I'm going to go to my selection tool and just click on Select Subject. So this is automatically going to grab the subjects of your image. You can see that it grabbed a bit too much. So we can easily correct that with the minus brush. Just go over the curtains. Command or Control Z, if you want to exclude something or undo something, actually. And you can hit Q just to make this a little easier. Go in with the color black, and then we can fine tune it once we zoom in. Okay, so now that we're here, we're just gonna zoom in and try to remove the curtain from the edge of the couch. Don't worry too much about the cushions, because we're going to make a copy of those anyway. We already did for this side. We're gonna have to do the same thing for the other side. We also got this table, and we lost part of the couch, so switch to white. Go over this with a bigger brush. Gonna exclude the table. Don't need that. And if you don't want to color every part of the couch, for example, the legs, remove that, as well. Even though, technically, it is part of the couch. Alright, so I made my selection. Sometimes when you have a less firm surface, such as a fluffy object or hair, you may want to feather the edges or use some of the refined hair tools. So for my case, I don't need to do that because it's a couch. But you could go to select, modify, and then feather the entire edge in one go. So you would just choose the pixels and it will get applied. But for me, I don't need to do that, so I'm just going to hit Command or Control J on the base and then call it Couch. So now we have the couch without the legs. If you see some problems like this, you can just use the eraser tool, where is it right here and just make a very easy correction. Okay. So now we're going to exclude the cushions. We already did that for the left side, but we need to do the same thing on the right because it's gonna end up changing the color of that, as well. And these shades are not the same, so we can't really do that. So let's just do the same thing. Grab the select tool, and using the plus, we're going to select both of the pillows or cushions. I'm not going to separate the two, as I mentioned. I'm going to do that for the right side. So just focus on grabbing both of them at the same time. So let's refine that and then do Commander Control J. So these are separated. I'm going to be changing the colors of these two separately, and then we have the couch right underneath. If we bring back all the layers, they should look pretty normal. So if you're seeing something weird like this, make sure you are fixing that before we move forward. So now all you have to do is grab the object that you want to change the color off and then go to adjustments, hue and saturation. Clip this onto that layer with alter option, and you're simply going to grab the hue slider and change the color. So we could do maybe this blue color. You can play around with the saturation if you'd like. And then the lightness. There we go. So in one go, I use the same original color, but simply change the hue. Same thing for the cushions, so we can just do hue and saturation, clip it, and change the color. Oops. This is the wrong one. We'll do one for this, which is the back cushion. So I could do like a blue color for that and then we'll do another one for the front. Make sure you clip it, and you can see that we're able to manipulate the colors of the original image. Just like that. Now, if you'd like, you can also apply a solid color if you're dealing with a white background, such as a white base color. So that's another method that some people prefer. You just go to adjustment, solid color, choose something, clip it the same way, and just change the blend mode to color. And then when you go back in here, you can kind of play around with I'm just lowering the fill to make it like pastel color. And for this guy, I think the saturation is too much. So you can combine the two, keep one of them. Either way, they will look good. And there we have it. We have completely changed the color of our couch. I'm going to group these together. This was before, this is after. You can repeat the same process for the curtains, the basket, the carpet, anything else within the image. So that was the first challenge. I hope you guys were able to achieve a similar result. In the next lesson, we're going to be enhancing a portrait using some photo editing techniques. 8. Enhance a Portrait (Makeup / Skin): M Mm hmm. For this challenge, we're going to be enhancing a portrait. So right here, this is another image in your resource pack. I just imported it, and I'm going to once again make a duplicate so that we can refer back to the original if needed. So right over here, if you zoom in on our subject, we're dealing with a little bit of imperfections. You know, this is optional, of course, but say you want to get rid of texture on skin, that's something that you can easily do within Photoshop. Sometimes the subjects makeup or, you know, preparations don't really stand out in the photo than they do in real life. That's something else that we could focus on. And then, of course, there's the overall mood and coloring of the image. So we're going to always start from the smaller details and then move on to the bigger ones. So that means we're going to start with the face and then finally do the little coloring on the outside, make those greens pop more, brighten up the image a little bit, and see what else we could get done. The first thing is the face. I'm just going to zoom right in, and then using the Lasso tool or hit L on your keyboard, I'm going to use the generative fill feature to just get rid of these textures. Select area on that first copy where you're going to click and hit fill. You could use artificial intelligence for this or just the regular fill feature. It is completely up to you. Now you can see if I bring this back. We got rid of the first detail. And do the same thing. If there's a lot of details you want to remove at the same time, you just make your first selection, hold down shift until you see a plus on your cursor, and then make another selection. So you could have two selections at the same time and then fix those together. It's not really a good idea to do it on different parts of the face because we're dealing with different lighting. So even though we do have some imperfections down here, I start from the forehead, and then I move to the different areas. Once you're done, Commander Control D, and we're just going to move on. When it comes to makeup, sometimes you're going to get smudges on the subject's face. Like here, we have some miscia. For this, you could use the Clone tool as well or the other field tools. I prefer this method just because it does a really good job of recreating the textures that we might have missed. So we got a few of these. Got some clump over there, but that's fine. Going to see if we have anything else. Maybe down here. Just make sure you're holding down shift because if you just click, you're going to undo all the other selections. All right. Right, click, fill, and then hit Okay, Commander Control D. Now, for parts like this, you can't really do the fill because it's going to remove the eyelash. What you can do is use the clone tool because we're just going to clone what's on the bottom and then bring it up. So make your brush. With the left bracket key using alter option, sample the same area that you're going to copy and just go upwards. So I'm going to do it here, actually. So we could get that same lighting and everything and just kind of make that eyelash a little bit less clunky. There we go. We could go back on it with a lower flow and just kind of smooth out the edges. But I think we're good on that. Just make sure that your hardness is zero or else you're going to see the edge of that correction. Same thing on the other eyelash. And then because I got rid of the hair here, I'm just going to go in with that same idea. All right. There we go. We do have some stuff down here. We could try to grab a similar part and just make really close click. So just click click click so that you get a more precise correction. Alright, so far, the eyes looking good. This is one side of the eye. We have the other side as well. I'm just going to use the Clone tool going forward just to show you that you have the option of doing other stuff. Just make sure that you're sampling a relative area. Here we got some I'm not sure what those are. I think they're glitter, but they look a little weird. So I'm going to remove them. If you want, you could add separate glitter yourself, but I'm just going to leave what we have up here. Okay, the rest is not too bad. Going down, we do have some more spots that I'm gonna clean up in the same exact way. Don't worry too much about the little bumps on the face. We're going to use a different technique. For now, we're just gonna focus on, you know, bigger bumps, things that we could easily remove with a brush. For this area, because it's rather large, I'm just going to use my fill technique, make sure you grab more than the area itself. Right, click, fill. Click Okay. Then I think we do have this guy. Just go to fill it as we go. Okay. So the face is a lot cleaner in terms of the makeup, and we got rid of the bumps that we don't want to see. So what we're going to do now is rename this, I'll call this face, and we're going to work to smooth out all those textures just by a little bit because if you make it too smooth, it's going to look unrealistic, and that is not the point here. So now we're going to hit Commander Control J on the face layer, and we're going to invert this. So commander Control I until you see this. Then we're going to change the blend mode to vivid light, and you can see that sort of flattens out everything. We're going to go to image, actually filter, blur. First, actually, let's do the high pass. There we go. We're just going to add a little until it's fully smooth. Something like that. You don't want to go overboard. Make sure you're adding in small amounts. For me, that's going to be like ten pixels or so. To make this even more smooth, we're going to go to filter and blur it out with gaussian blur. So again, a very small amount. You want to basically see the edges of the eyelash without being, you know, too much like the original. So I think something around this much. And now we're going to hold down Alter option, click on mask. Using the mask, we're going to hit B on our keyboard. Make sure hardness is set to a small amount, adjust the brush. And then switch the colors so that we have white over black. And again, we're selecting the mask and not the layer itself. Going in, we're just going to start from the forehead. I'm going to remove the flow of my brush so that it could look a little bit more natural, and we're just going to paint on the face. Be careful of the hairline. You don't want to smooth that out as well. And don't worry for the way it looks right now because we're going to fix it afterwards. Just go over the areas that are a little bit too textured and if needed, adjust your brush. Avoid the areas that need details such as the nostrils, the lips, the eyelashes. You don't want to go over that area at all. Okay, so right now it looks a little weird, but as we said, we're just going to fix that by making further adjustments. Just go to fill and reduce this to about half or until it looks and it should look something like this. Before after it's a very subtle texture adjustment. You could add on to this if you want it to be, you know, very smooth, but I like to keep it somewhat natural. The goal here isn't to completely flatten out the face because then it will look really, you know, unnatural. We do have pores on our faces. We just want to make it look a little bit more cohesive across the entire face. There is the smoothing aspect. I'm going to call this smooth skin. The next thing we're going to do is go over the makeup and just kind of enhance what the model already has. So first the eyes, I'm going to make a adjustment layer for brightness and contrast, and we're just going to flip the mask. So right now it's white. So like that, commander control I. So with the brightness and contrast, I'm going to call it eyes. We're just going to increase the brightness and decrease the contrast. Just pay attention to the eyes right now, not the rest of the face, since we're going to flip the mask layer. So Command or Control I, hit B on your keyboard with the color white and softness introduced. Go over the eyeballs. Just like that. Right now it's too extreme, so we're just going to lower the fill as we did with the skin. So around 21, and this is before, this is after. Just a little bit of glow in the eyes. This is optional. The next thing is regarding color on her face. So we have colors coming from the blush and the lipstick. This one is rather easy to do. You could use a couple different techniques, but I like to go in with a photo filter. Choose the color red. You can actually choose it from here, click on Red and we'll come back for the density. But I'm going to once again flip the mask using the color white, introduce that to the areas that needed. So again, it's too much for the blush. Don't worry about it. Just go on that area, and then we're going to you can either lower the density before you make your brush selections, like brush on, or you can reduce the fill. Now we get a little bit more color from that blush. Next is the lipstick. Here, we could kind of change the color or just use some hue and saturation. So I'll do that, make a new hue and saturation adjustment, and then play around with the hue. So first, let's make our selection Commander control I until it's a black mask with a color white and a soft brush, which is going to go over the lips. Okay. So now when I change this, you can kind of see what we're dealing with. I'm just going to have it on this random color so that I could go in and fine tune my selection. Okay. So now we could go for, you know, something a little bit more red. If you don't want to change the color at all, set hue to zero and just increase the saturation or decrease it if the original model had too much lipstick. So this is completely up to you. And right now, I just dealt with whatever the model had. If you went outside of the lip area, you can always go in with the black brush and just fine tune the mask, especially around the edges. You don't want it to look like a sharp line. I will call this lips and this one Bush. Okay, so far, we're looking pretty good. If you want, you can also darken the, you know, eyebrows a little bit, but for me, I don't think I want to do that. I will just leave it as it is right now. The last thing I want to do is sort of brighten up the under eyes just by a tiny amount. So go to brightness and contrast, lower that contrast and add on to the brightness. Then we're going to flip this, change the fill to 40 or 30. We'll fix it later. With a white brush on the mask, we're going to introduce a little bit of brightness. And because our brush is on a low flow, you can build up on your selection. There we go. And now I'm pretty much done with the retouching of my subject. This is regarding the smaller details on this subject. In the next lesson, the next challenge, we're going to focus on how we could color grade an image and basically turn something like this into something more cinematic and more moody. So that's going to be our next challenge. Make sure that you were able to follow along until this point, save your project, if needed, and then we can continue this in our next challenge. 9. Create a Cinematic Gradient Map Look: For the next challenge, we're going to be turning an image into something more cinematic and moody. So this is where we left off in the previous challenge. We added some makeup and some enhancement, remove things that we didn't want and more importantly, made the colors pop out from the model's face. So now that we're done with the more detailed part of our image, we're going to move on to the big picture. So first, we're going to get started with the lighting aspect of this and then move on to the color. Please go ahead and make a brightness and contrast adjustment. You can also do exposure if your image is too dark, but this guy just needs a little bit of brightness. So let's do that. And at the same time, I'm going to increase the contrast. With one adjustment, we made a big difference, and that's just how we're going to build up from here. Now that we have the brightness and contrast, I'm going to add in some curves. This will let me work with the lights and shadows in a bit more flexible way, so I could use the go upwards for brightness, go down for more darkness, and so on. Just going to darken the shadows a bit, lift the highlights, and I just worked with the shadows down here. So this is before and after, we're adding onto that moody atmosphere. Now we can go ahead and use some adjustments for the colors. We do have a lot of green here, so I'm just going to go to vibrance and increase that amount. Then we could add in some human saturation. And this is the part where we get to kind of manipulate colors. So the green, we can easily target it here by clicking on this, and you can just change the hue and saturation. So I will be going towards the warmer side. So that's our green. You can also pinpoint the colors with the eyedropper tool. So maybe this green. We just select it, and now I'm able to directly change the hue. This is optional. You can leave it green if you like, but I'm going to keep mine like this. You can see we did not work with the colors on the human subject, only the greenery. For an overall color adjustment, just for aesthetic purposes, I could use gradient maps and just blend it into the image. So go down to Gradient Maps, all the way at the bottom. Just go over to adjustments right over here. If you're not seeing this, go to Window adjustments right here and we're going to click on Gradient Map. Then go to properties, and we're going to choose one depending on the colors of the shadows and highlights that we want. So there's tons of options here. I think I will go for red and green. Trying to see if there's a template. Let's just make our own. Click on the gradient itself. This right here towards the left, that's your shadows. You can see that the hair, which is one of the darker parts of the image is currently white, and the highlights is now set to green. So we're going to kind of switch this the other way around. I'm going to dabble click on the white color and bring in green. So dark green, something like that. Then we're going to set the bright part to red. Something like this, if you go towards a dark end, you can't really see the effect. So I have this red chosen for my highlights and the shadows have that green. Once you're done, click Okay, and we're just going to change the blend mode. Soft light, and then use the fill and opacity to kind of make this less intense. And now we got this overall moody filter for our image. If at any point you want to go back to an adjustment, you can just double click on the icon. And in the properties panel, you're able to further adjust whichever adjustment you go over. So I'm just going to boost up the brightness so that the subject is not, you know. And now we're pretty much done. If you want, you can also explore the color lookup. These are basically pre made three D LETs, so there are different filters that you could try. And they're just like any other adjustment, meaning you can change to get the opacity and the blend mode if you wanted to. Gonna delete that. But other than that, we are pretty much done with our color grading. As you saw, it wasn't that complicated, especially if you know which sort of mood you're trying to achieve. I'm just going to group everything and show you a before and after. So you can easily color grade your images into any mood that you like. 10. Add Light Effects: Let's go ahead and add some light effects onto this very simple image. So with the light effects, you're able to either enhance some sort of lighting onto your subject or just create artificial ones. It's just like if you're standing in a dark room and there's little peaks of light coming through the window, that's the effect that we're going to be recreating. First I have this image. I'm just going to darken it so that the light can stand out more. I could make some adjustments from the previous lesson as we saw or I could just use one of the color lookups, something quick. So let's see, candlelight. That looks good. And at the same time, I'm just going to add some let's do a brightness and contrast one. Something to darken the image, increase the contrast, as well. Very dark, very moody, very dim. And I was able to achieve that with two layers. Now we're just going to make a selection with our Lasso tool. If you long click and click on this one, you're able to make more geometric shapes. So seeing the direction of light from the original image, I could tell that it's somewhere over here. This part is in the dark. So using the Lasso tool, I'm just going to grab this portion of the face. So let's start from here and just make our way down. Try to follow the natural light path that the original image has and just close your selection. So that's what you should see right now. With the marching ants visible, we're going to make an exposure adjustment. Let's bring this up, increase the exposure and then remove some of the Gamma corrections. Next, we're going to dabble click on the mask just until you see this part in the properties panel, and we're just going to feather the edge quite a lot. Something like that, you can play around with this. You want the edges to look very natural. So for me, that took 147 pixels. If you want to further adjust this, you can kind of remove the fill and make this more natural looking. The next thing you could do is add some sort of coloring over this light. So if you just go to solid color, I could grab, like, a warm orange color, something like this, maybe. Click Okay. Pull down alter option and just clip it onto the exposure adjustment, and we're just going to change the blend mode, soft light, and then remove the opacity. If you want to change the color, you can still do that. So you just click on it once. If you want to go for, like, a bluish color, you can. But I think I'm going to leave mine as the orange. Okay. And there we have it. So this is what it looks like without it. This is what it looks like with the light path. So it's a very simple effect that you could do, but you can see how it immediately enhances the mood that you're going for. It makes it more dramatic, and it makes it look like you had a light source coming onto the subject's face, even though it's completely artificial. So that's a very simple technique that you can apply to any sort of portrait or even pictures where there is no human subject. You just select a path, add your adjustments and feather it. Our next challenge, we're going to be looking at artificial intelligence and how you could use it inside Photoshop. So we're going to create some adjustments and see how we could maybe add onto an image or remove s that we don't need. 11. Create AI Photo Enhancement: For this final challenge, we're going to be taking this image and only use artificial intelligence to make our adjustments. So this is going to be whether we're adding something, removing something from the image, and then using some of the techniques that we've learned so far within the challenge to just help blend those new things in. So I have this image of this person baking some croissants, and I'm just going to quickly show you how you could add things using AI. Photoshop uses firefly when you try to do generative fill, and it's really simple to use. You just let me just make a new copy. You just simply grab that area you want the new thing added or removed until you see the marching ants and just click on Generative fill. There's going to be a prompt bar appearing, and you can just type in what you want. You can see fireflies right over here, and I will say strawberry. Like a strawberry slice. Let's see how it's going to add that onto the croissant. There we go. We got some adjustments down here, some variations. And I think the first one looks the best. Once you're done, we can click away, and you can see that it sort of blurred the strawberry into the image to make it fit in more. I could try other things. So let's grab the base layer, and we'll do powdered sugar on this one. So let me just make a new adjustment. Let's grab this guy because it's easier. Put powdered sugar on top. We're just decorating the croissants using a few selections. There we go. We have some variations down here. I think the first one looks the best. It did kind of push down the height of the croissant, but that's okay. And there we go. We now have two croissants that are not plain. You can also add some stuff onto a human subject. That's what we're going to look at next. So our subject has a lot of tattoos. And say I want to add in some more, I could easily grab a portion of her skin, one that has space, and just write a tattoo that I want. So tattoo of a butterfly. Generate, make sure you're not selecting anything else within here. We have a few more designs here. You can make some more, but I think this guy looks pretty good with the rest of the designs. And if you found that the generation isn't really fitting into your image, you can always use some of the adjustments that we have. So for this, I'm just going to blur it a bit using Gaussian blur just so that it could look similar to the other tattoos. Click Okay. And now she has a butterfly tattoo. Let's see what else we could do here. We could replace the pendant with something else. So let's do a heart pendant. This one is cute. I'm going to let that be. And finally, let's try to change the design on her cap. So make your selection. First, I'm going to remove it completely, so hit remove the one on the other side. It's going to remove and clean up the area, then we could use generate a fill to fill it in. So now, on top of this, we're going to add another design. So let's go for a turtle design. Turtle embroidery, in my case. I generate make sure you're within that selection or else it's going to have a weird cutout. This one is cute. It's kind of like a frog, but I think this one looks better. Let me just generate some more. I feel like they're kind of smudging the top. We got this weird frog looking turtle. So I'm just gonna go on the three dots and generate similar. And hopefully we could get a creature that's, you know, well in the center, and it's not like squishing in the base. Okay? Now we got a different design. This one looks more like a turtle. I'm going to let it be. Actually, I think I like this thing. I'm not sure what it is, but it looks pretty cool. You could generate more precise with your prompt, so a turtle facing this way, it has a shell like this and that. So you could describe it here, but I'm kind of liking this bird crap situation, so I'm going to leave that. So far, we have decorated the croissants. Two of them, we have a tattoo. We changed the pendants, and we added a new design. I could also make the tray look a little bit more populated. So let's grab the Lasso tool, and I'll add one more cisant here. So add croissant, generate. Let's see what we get. There we go. I think this one looks the most realistic. I'll leave that be. The last thing I want to do is maybe switch out something that the model currently has. So, for example, she has, I think that's a hair tie. I could switch it out for a watch or a bracelet. So let's make our selection with the Lasso tool. I'll grab the bracelet, as well, and I'll ask for another bracelet. Okay, we got some interesting stuff. If you want something more unique, you could describe it in your prompt. But I think I'll leave mine is this blingy looking one. So we just kind of switched out what you had for this new bracelet. And you can just keep going. So as long as you are selecting the right amount of surface and you're blending it in afterwards if needed, you're able to adjust your images to the way that you want. Did not have to do a lot of adjustments here, and that's because Firefly within Photoshop, it's currently very advanced that it knows that it needs to change the lighting. I should add some shadows like the croissant you can see here, and it basically recreates the surface underneath to make it look like the rest of the board here. So that's the end of our photo editing challenges. In the next set, we're going to be looking at some visual effects. 12. Challenge 2: Visual Effects: Make a Glitch Effect Poster: Now we're moving on to special effects, and we're getting started with the glitch effect, which is very simple to do, and it's really cool. So here we have the base image of this person. It's very colorful, but we're going to isolate them first and have them set in front of a synthetic background. So first, go ahead and select the subject. I'm going to use the quick selection and the option right here. Command or Control J, and we can hide the base video. I'm going to call this subject. Next, we're going to scale the subject with Command or Control T, hold down ultra option and then drag the edges and position the subject right in the center. Now we're going to desaturate the subject and get rid of all the colors with Command Shift U or Control Shift U until you see a black and white image like this. Now we're going to add a background, so something on the darker side, maybe a dark gray. You can do any other color you prefer. And I'm just going to call this background and put it underneath. So you should be left with this base to get started with the glitch effect. Now, what we're going to do is duplicate the subject layer two more times Commander Control J, and I'm going to basically separate the channels for each of these images. So the first one, we're going to double click. This window should pop up. Down here, you can see we have the RGB channels, and that's basically when put all together, the result of images that you see on a digital screen. When you remove those, you're just isolating certain channels. We're basically going to have each of the layers represent one channel and not all. This one will be blue. The second one that will click, where you're going to have green and the last one is going to be red. Now, when I click Okay, everything looks normal because we still have RGB stacked on top of each other and that's making the final image that we see. But now if I offset any of these layers with Commander Control Team, use my arrow keys, you can see that I'm creating that chromatic aberration. As I move my subject. So you can kind of play around with the direction if you want. Going to do red on the right side, blue on the left side, and then green somewhere in the middle. So basically on the areas where they intersect, the subject looks normal. But when they're separated, it's just, you know, that channel on its own. So this is green, this is red. All together, we get the glitch effect. Now that we have this, I'm going to add some texture. The first one being a VHS effect, which you could do with a solid color. Make sure it's white. Click Okay. We can get rid of the mask, and then simply convert this to a smart object. Now, with your four colors set as white and the background is black, we're going to go to filter gallery, and add the halftone effect. So it should be in the sketch folder. Half tone pattern, set the size to something smaller and contrast to five and set this to line. I think by default, it's a circle, but we need a line here. Click Okay once you're done, and then we're going to set the blend mode to soft light. So now when we zoom in, we have this, like, VHS effect, which looks pretty cool. We're going to make another layer or solid color. But this time we want, like, a gray. I think actually a better ways to make a new layer. Make that new layer. I'm going to call it green. Then go to edit, fill, and I'll do 50% gray. Okay. Now we can add in some green by adding some noise. So filter, noise, add noise. Set the monochromatic option so we don't get extra color, and you can kind of play around with the amount of noise. Let me actually make this a smart object so we can come back and make some adjustments. So let's add some noise again. G to go for maybe 50%. Click Okay. And then we're going to change the blend mode. You could do overlay or soft light. I think I'll keep mine like this. We can play around with the opacity as well for both the lines and the grain. Just like that. Now, I'm just going to group all my subject layers together, Command or Control G. So I'm just going to group them so that everything is organized. Once we're done, we could make a layer that merges everything together. So hold down Command Option Shift E or Control Alt Shift E, all at the same time until you see a new layer like this. Now we could go in with a rectangular marking and just make lines across. So make that selection, Commander Control J. Then with Command or Control T, we can kind of offset that portion. So it looks like this, and do as many as you want, maybe somewhere like this. You can make them vary in heights or just keep them all the same. That's up to you. I'll do one more where it goes the other way. And there we have it. Once I group everything together, we're able to see a before and after. So this was before. This is after. So it's very easy to get this effect. You could use this for posters or any other compositions and play around with the amount of offsetting that we did right here. You can add more green stuff. You can add more grain and textures with overlays, as well, but I'm just going to keep this as it is. In the next lesson, we're going to look at a horror effect, and we're going to give our subject some demonize. Let's go ahead and see how we can do that. 13. Create a Horror Effect: Welcome back. We have this scary picture that's available for you guys to download. The only issue is that they have normal eyes and we want to make it look like demonize. So there's two images that we need. This is the first one, and this is the second one. We're going to use the veins here. This is of a leaf and just basically blended into their skin to make it look like they were either possessed or infected, whatever story line this subject has. First thing we're going to do is zoom in, and we're going to isolate the pupils. So you can use the Lasso tool, the quick selection tool, whichever you like, and just simply go over those areas. It's a little hard to see, but it should grab the edges for you perfectly. The same thing over here, this part is harder because of the shadows, but it should be something like that. There we go. Once you're done, Command or Control J, and call this pupils. Now, right above our base layer, we're going to make a black solid color. So just do that. Then we're going to invert the mask, Commander control I, get your brush, and we're just going to color in those eye whites. Let's add a little bit of hardness. And don't worry about the pupils. You can paint over those as well because we already made our copy. Just zoom in and out let's hide the pupils. Take out any whites that you see. This image does have a lot of shadows, so this should not take too long. Okay, once we have that, just make sure that the water line is pretty normal. When you zoom out, everything should look scary. Bring back the pupils, and we're just going to change the blend mode to hard light. So that's going to give it that shine that the original image has. We could also enhance that shine with some brightness and contrast, clip it onto the pupil's layer and increase that amount. So maybe like 17. Can use contrast here. And I'm just going to blur out the eyes because it's a little too sharp for me. So go to filter, blur gauge and blur and add a smaller amount. Maybe two. That really helps. Got the pupils going, and that's pretty much how you do demonize. Now, what we're going to do next is add in that win. From the leaves. So use the Lasso tool to select an area that does not include the main stem or wing. Maybe this part. Just do this roughly. Then do Command or Control J to make a new copy. You can do multiple cuts or use the same copy. It's up to you. I think I will do only one here, so I will delete the rest. Manner control T on this new layer, and we're just going to fit it and warp it onto the skin. So first, let's flip it, rotate it, and gonna click, warp it so that it's kind of, you know, going with the pattern of the face. So the nose is right here. We know that it has to duck down, stretch this like that. So here the skin is tighter. Just go to add it on like this. Okay. Then we're just going to change the blend mode to multiply, or maybe darker color is better. Next, we're going to, you know, do some masking, but before that, I do want to blur it out a little more. So go to blur, gaussi and blur, and we're going to add a tiny amount, maybe less than one pixel, Alteruption, click on the layer, and we're going to slowly introduce this with zero hardness over the eye. Okay. Looking good. The next thing I want to do is create some dark rings around the eye. So we could do that with an easy exposure slider, bring down the exposure, and we can decrease the gamma correction. Commander control eye to invert, and then using your soft brush and a low flow, slowly introduce that, you know, darkness around the eyeballs. You can also do, like, a dark red if you want, but I think the dark color is going to help with the demonized. There we go. And there we have it. If I group this together, this was before, this is after. So that's another quick effect that you can do with Photoshop. Let's move on to our next challenge. 14. Make a Duotone Poster: This is going to be a very simple effect, but it's very stylistic and you could use it for your designs. Similar to the previous lesson, we're going to utilize the different channels within our image. So head over to the channels panel, which you could get from window channels right over here. And once again, if you hide each of these, you're able to see the colors that make up the image. So we have RGB. And what we're going to do is basically select whatever's in the blue channel and then whatever's in the green channel and assign a color to. Let's hide everything except blue and then hold down Commander Control and click on the thumbnail. So that's going to tell you where that blue is. Seeing that it's not mostly on the face, I'm going to do Commander Control D and try a different channel. So this one we get a little bit of highlights, but I think the majority is red. So I'm going to grab it. Okay. Once we have that selection, we could go ahead and do a solid color. So you can see that I'm applying the colors to the mask. Dapple clicking it. It shows me what I have currently. If we do it with one of the other channels, let's try green. It's gonna look a little different. So like blue. That's what it looks like. I'll do red. On the original image, do red. And this time we could do like an orange and then build those upon each other. So you can see we have that separation. We just need to choose two colors that work out. So if you want to do that, an easy way is to grab the gradient tool and see what sort of templates you have already. You can also use a color matcher online. But I'm just going to scroll through and see which gradient I want to apply here. Let's say this gradient, double click on the first one. So double click on the first color and just copy the hex code with Command or Control Stein. Double click here, and then paste it like so. Then going back, I'm going to grab this lighter blue, copy go here paste. I'll go for a green color because it goes better with the red. Maybe a bright green like that. And there we go. We have the pink and the green making up this duo tone effect. And there we go. So like I said, this is a very simple effect that you could do, but we're basically coloring certain channels within the image. Let's move on to our next challenge, which is going to build up on this idea, but we're going to be adding some textures. 15. Create a Halftone Effect: So we're back with this image. This is in your resource back, and we're going to do a little bit more intense look compared to what we did in the previous challenge. So I'm just going to make a duplicate as always and hide our original layer. I'm going to call this one base. Let's turn this into a smart object and then make a new layer. Go to edit, fill, and we're going to do 50% gray, 100% blending mode set to normal. Now going over to let's actually make this a smart object as well. I'll call this green. Go to filter camera raw filter. Over here, we're going to do effects and then increase the green to 80, we could play around with the roughness to get a desired outcome, and we'll do a smaller size and increase that roughness. Let's do green all the way. You could add texture as well, and just play around with this until you're happy with what you see. Click Okay once you're done, and it's going to apply that green effect for us. We're going to change the blend mode to overlay. And you can see we have that green immediately on the subject. Next, we're going to make a new black solid layer like soap. We can delete the mask and then make this a smart object. Make sure your four color and background color are as follows, white over black. Then go to filter, and we're going to do a sketch filter from this category, this guy between plaster and stamp. And that's kind of like it's similar to the grain effect, but it adds on to that grain in a different way, if that makes sense. We're going to do a bit more for density. G to reduce the foreground color and background, we could keep it low, as well. So as you can see, that's a different type of grain. Once we're done, we can click Okay and make another overlay. So you can see the difference between the first grain and the second one. So I'll call this grain too. Next, we're going to make another layer, and I'll call this halftone. Just do let's do the same thing. So make another solid layer with the color black or actually white. Make this into a smart object. Go to filter, filter gallery. And we actually have a halftone pattern right over here in the sketch category. Just change this from line to dot. And you can kind of play around with the size here. So maybe two for size and increase the contrast. Click Okay, and change this to overlay. So we have that dotted look, and it's looking pretty good so far. Next, we're going to merge all the layers. So on Mac, that's Command Option Shift E or Control Alt Shift E on Windows, all at the same time. And we're going to add the threshold effect. Like, so you can play around with the slider here. Get the desired outcome. I think I will do a little bit more maybe around this part. And finally, to bring back the color, we're going to add a gradient map. So just go down to gradient map and we could do a different set of color. So if you go on each one, you can see that it looks very different. So I'm just going to choose one for now. So I'm going to change the color to linear Dodge. You can also do another blend mode if you prefer. To do that. Now if you go back, you can kind of see the preview a lot better. I think I'll do this. Now, because the background color of our subject was white, we're getting a lot of white here, but if you have another image, you may get a different result. There we have it. That's the halftone effect. Let's group all this together. This was before, this is after. If you want more detail here, you can just go back to the threshold and play around with the slider here. That's completely optional. I think actually, I'll keep mine around this much just so I could tell what I'm dealing with here and there we go. Before, after.This is great for posters, for any album design. It's a lot of different layers, but ultimately we're just adding some greens in different ways. The final challenge for this category is going to be the Dapple exposure effect. It's very popular and it's actually really easy to do. 16. Make a Double Exposure / Double Face Effect: So this is probably one of the easier effects that you could do within Photoshop. You just need image like this of a subject and some sort of element to get blended into that subject. The first thing you want to make sure about your image is that there's a lot of contrast, so a lot of dark color over white color. And over here, we have that going. The only thing is that the background is kind of grayish and not fully white. So I'm just going to make a levels adjustment and make that difference a lot more potent and also increase the contrast so that the darker colors become more dark. Bring over this element, and we're simply going to change the blend mode. So you can do screen, and you can see how well it shows up in the darker parts of our subject, which is the clothing, the hat, and even the lipstick. I'm going to scale this up so that we don't get any cuts just like that. Click Okay. Next, I will just desaturate everything, so just make a black and white filter, and this will kind of make it more intentional because there's no mix of colors. Some people like to use the mask. I'll use the mask to remove the elements from the outside, but you can easily remove the visibility of these by playing with the levels adjustment. So you can see the more I pull this, the more I get rid of the elements on the outside. As long as we're able to see the subject perfectly, we should be fine. So I'll just keep mine around that. And now we have this effect. If any element is going over important parts of your subjects such as their eyes, you can just mask that out by making a layer mask, the color black brush, and just go over that important area. But that's pretty much it. It's very simple. This is before, this is after. You could use this for posters and any other sort of graphic design work where you just want to transform an ordinary image like this into something more stylized. That concludes our second category of challenges. Let's move on to the third one, which is a little bit more advanced. 17. Challenge 3: Creative Compositions: Make an Underwater Scene: For this challenge set, we're going to be focusing on compositions. And just to define what compositions mean, it's when you combine different types of images and you blend them into make one artwork. And that's precisely what we're going to do. We're going to go over different scenes. The first one being right here, underwater, and then we're going to move on to different elements and see what else we could do with different types of overlays, some filters within Photoshop and some blending options. So this right here is the two files that are available to you guys in the resource pack. They are labeled as per the chapter and lesson. So just download them in and import them into Photoshop. So we have this image of underwater. We have the bubbles and everything, and the color here is something we could use, as well. So not only are we using this for the, you know, underwater bubbles and the waves over there, but also for the blue that's going to help make it look like the subject is underwater. Regarding the picture, I have an image of this woman. The hair is kind of flowing in the air, and that's going to help make the composition more realistic. So I'm just going to hide the water layer for now. Let me just rename it as such. And this is our base layer. As always, we're going to make a duplicate so that we can take a look at before and after. So I'll call this original and that one base. First, let's bring back the water picture, and we're going to scale it so that it covers the entire canvas. You can put it in the middle via these tools and then do Command or Control team. Hold down alter option, and then drag one of the edges, scale up until it, you know, fits the entire image. I'm just going to move this to the side so I get less of this light because I think the light source somewhere over here, and we could actually flip this horizontally so that, you know, we get that same pattern. If you scale it further, you could get less of that light. So just play around with it until you're happy with the placements. So the first water layer, we're going to use it for the coloring that I mentioned. So we're just going to duplicate it. I'm going to call this color and just change the blend mode to overlay. So already you can see we got that dark blue color, which is perfect. And we also get all those little bubbles on the edges. We're going to take the second duplicate and we're going to turn this to hard light. So that's just going to intensify that blue, but also give us a lot more of the bubbles, which would really help sell the idea that the subject is underwater. Now the problem here is that the bubbles are now too detailed, taking away from the subject. So we're just going to blur this with some Gausenblur. Go to filter blur, Gaugenblur and we could do a small radius, maybe around five, then click Okay. Let's take the base, and we're going to make a duplicate command and control Jame. And I'll call this face. Drag the face layer above everything, and we're just going to make a layer mask. Now we're going to go to Image, Applyimage, put this over here, blending, multiply, play around with the opacity until you're happy with it, something like that. Click Okay. You could go back to the layers underneath and play around with the opacity there as well. Like, water copy is a little bit too intense, so I'm just going to lower that. Color is fine. I do want it to be more intense, so I'll duplicate that one more time, and we could even move this so that we get a different shade of blue different on another side. So I'm just going to drag it towards the center and we get this effect. Now, the final thing that I want to do is blur the image as a whole, because, you know, she is underwater. So what we're going to do is hold down command option, shift and E, all at the same time, so we get a merged layer of everything underneath. Now, over here, I'm just going to turn this into a smart object, call this draft, I guess. Then we're going to move on to filter, blur, Gaudenblur, give this a little bit of blur. There we go. So you can see that it kind of takes away from that sharp look. So it gave it a little bit of softness, and that's what we need. The last thing you could do, this is optional, but if you go to filter gallery, you can add a very slight ripple effect. Let me just zoom out here. O. So there's a bunch of stuff that you could choose from here. I think we would have to go to distort. So we get this ocean Ripple, for example. I think we do have something. Okay, so there's Ocean Ripple, and you could also do one of the color ones in the artistic. But with the ocean ripple or glass, whichever you prefer, if you play around with a distortion, you can kind of recreate the waves. So this is the ocean. We can play around with the ripple size. You know, if you want it to be larger or smaller, it's up to you. I'm going to go for something a little smaller, and then we can play around with the magnitude. So if you go really big, we're kind of pushing it towards ourself. Think something like that. Click Okay. Once you're done. Again, this is optional. You can leave it beam. But because we have a smart object, we could always go back here and just dab a click and you'll go back to the options that you chose. The last thing I want to do is bring more light to the subject's face because now it's very dim. So let's just duplicate the base layer one more time, bring it all the way up. And we could do linear Dutch and then lower that opacity quite a lot. I am seeing a little bit of because we added the ripple effect. Should have done this before the ripple effect, but if you just scale it up by a little bit, you will find it lining up perfectly. So we just kind of added that light. Hold down alter option, click on mask, get your brush, soft round, adjust the size, and then with the color white, we're going to introduce that light to the face only because I get enough light coming from the overlay picture. There we go. So just kind of brings her out a little. You can hit X to enable the black color and just remove if you went over areas that you didn't want to. And then you could add in more blue coloring or some filter adjustments down here. But I think I will leave mine as it is. So let's group all this together. So we turned this image into one like this underwater, very simple. We just used an overlay and some of the adjustments within Photoshop. So that was the first challenge of the category. Let's move on to the next one where we kind of build up on this idea but with glass. 18. Create a Foster Glass Effect: For this lesson, we're going to be turning this portrait and make it look like there's a glass wall in front of the subject. The first thing we're going to do is just unlock this, and if your image is brighter than this one, this is in the resource pack, but if you chose to do it with another image, try to make it a little bit more dim, add more contrast. As you can see, we have some shadows over here. We got some nice lighting. Try to recreate that because the glass effect is going to look nicer that way. First thing we're going to do is make a new document with the exact dimensions of this image. If you go over to Image image size, you can see the size of this image and you just want to have that written down for that new document that we're going to make. Bear in mind these width and heights or at least the ratio, and then just make a new document. Same resolution and everything, I'm just going to hit Create. So we have the image and then we have this document. To make that glass effect, we're basically making the texture that's going to be fed into the filter gallery. The filter galleries is where we were in the last lesson for that ocean effect. So just grab your rectangle and make long shapes. The width depends on how detailed you want the glass to be. So if it's like this, it's going to be very small lines, close lines, but you could make them expanded like that. That's up to you. I will do somewhere in the middle, and we're just going to turn this into a gradient. Make sure it's white to black, so hit this. And then we're going to turn this to zero. Oops, zero, and then click on that. So it's white to black, as you can see, linear, 0%, scale and everything is the same. Okay, once we're done, we're going to exit that and just make duplicates. Oh, and we do have a stroke. Make sure you don't have a stroke. So when you click away, it should look pretty uniform. Make sure that you're not, like, outside the canvas like this. Now just hold down Alt or option. Click on this rectangle, hold down Shift, and just duplicate until you build the page. Make sure there's no extra space between them. They should sort of snap on their own, just like that. So if you zoom in, they should be perfectly aligned without any spaces. Our texture. Again, if you want it to be further apart, now is the time to do it. I will leave mine like this. Go to File, Save As. So we're going to hit Save As, make sure it's a Photoshop file, and I'm going to call this texture. So texture dot PSD, make sure it's not PDF or anything else, because we needed to import it into Photoshop again. Going back here, we're now going to add that glass effect. All you have to do is go to filter, filter gallery, go over to glass, and down here, you can Oops, let me zoom out here first. Down here, you can load a texture, and that's going to be what we just made. So just go over to this button, load texture, and just import the texture. As you can see, we have that line. Currently, it's a little bit spaced out, so we can just play around with the sliders here. So if you want it to be skied in, you can see that we're able to do that. And now I'm getting smaller lines. If you want bigger lines, just go over here. Invert that shape, and I think I'll go for a smaller scale, maybe 50%. So 11 for distortion, three for smoothness, and then 50 for scaling. Play around with it and see which one you prefer. But we pretty much have this very simple glass effect. I go to zoom in here. So it's very easy to add that effect. Click Okay once you're done, and it's going to go right over our model. Now one thing you can do is turn this image into black and white. Now you can also combine this with the other glass effect if you prefer or add in more textures as you go on. So I will do another texture. I'm just going to delete most of these guys. You could do, like, a smaller one. So I'm just going to clear my screen, get the same rectangle tool. But this time makes smaller cuts, and that's going to go above what we had initially. So make sure you don't have any stroke, black to white. It should save the settings that you used previously, eruption and just duplicate it as you go. You can also speed this up by grabbing, you know, the new bunch and duplicate that. I'm going to save this again, but save it as a different names a texture too so that you don't replace what we have active in the document. Alright, same thing. Could also turn this to a smart object, so you can go back to any of the filters, filter gallery, same idea. I'll do texture two. Now you can see the distortion is more potent, but you're able to manipulate that within the scaling slider. So if it's too distorted, you can kind of scale it up. I'll keep it around like that, leave everything else as it is. Click okay. So now we have a more intense glass effect. If you want, you could turn this into a black and white image, just to make this more dramatic. You go to adjustments, you can turn it into black and white. Play around with the sliders if you want, but usually it should do the job. Click Okay once you're done. There's our glass effect. Just to make this a little bit more populated. I'm going to select my subject. Just like that, and then make a copy. Commander Control Jain, go to the original and just put a text. So I'll just put a text just to show you an application of these compositions. You could use it for posters. So class effect. Let's put it in white in bold and just scale that up. And it goes behind our subject because we made a copy. So glass effect. I'll just work with the Where's my properties panel. There we go. Work with the spacing of D paragraph. Just click on that. And I think it should be here. Okay. I want it to be a little bit closer so that people are able to read the effect part. And then we're going to add a shadow from this top layer. So go to FX. Drop shadows all the way at the bottom, and then the distance will help it stand out a bit more. So I'm just going to make this shadow go this way, play around with these, and then click Okay. So now we get this shadow. So that's our glass effect. Very easy, very cool. You can use this in posters, something like this, or do any other design that you prefer. In the next lesson, we're going to look at the fire element and make it look like our subject is throwing out fire. 19. Make a Forest Fire Scene: We have our subject reaching their arm out, and this is the perfect place to put in a little fire effect and make it look like she has magical powers. So download all of the resources and import your base image into Photoshop. I'm now going to import all the different fire elements overlays that we have in the resource pack as well. So we have three images. The first one is the spark. This is another one for the flame, and this is like the ball that we're going to use as a base of that ball. So I'm just going to name them as such. I'll call this ball. We'll call this intense, I guess, and then spark. This way, we have everything ready. The first thing you're going to do is take all of these fire images and turn their blend mode to screen. Because we have elements on top of a black background, we could easily separate them with screen. And you can see that already does a great job. Hide spark and intense for now and just keep ball. And we're just going to separate the two because we need one at a time. So just grab the Lasso tool or any other selection tool and just grab one of them. I'll just duplicate that and then just duplicate the second one. Commander Control J, delete ball because now we have them separated. I'll call this ball two and ball one. You can name them whatever you prefer. Now, we're just going to hide everything except ball one and put that right over her hand. You can scale that down so that it fits because we have all the other images to intensify the fire. So that's going to go right over here, and then the second one ball two, you could use it to kind of merge it with the first ball, maybe a little smaller, just to create that going out effect. Like, Okay. And now I'm just going to hide these for a second and darken this image even more just to make the fire stand little better. So let's convert our base image. I'll call that base. The base image into a smart object. So right click, convert. Then using the adjustments, we could do some stuff. So maybe levels for this. Just increase that. More contrast, more shadows. And now you can see the fire is a lot more bright. Okay, now bring the intense layer. You could do multiple things with this, but I'm just going to use it on her arm still. A little bit larger than the ball images and position it right over there. The last thing is the spark that's going to go around, you know, everything. And I'm going to mask this later. So just put it in the center. Then we're going to click on mask. Hold down Alter ruption, click on mask, use your white soft brush. Switch it here to introduce the spark only around this fireball. So we don't need it to go everywhere. I have a very low flow. Let me increase that and get that going. So we have all of our fire layers. I'm just going to group them together just so that we're organized. Call that fire. What we can also do is play around with the individual fire layers, so you could add in some wevels. For example, and I'm actually going to do this clip to this collection of images. So alter option, clip it to the group, Dapple click, and, you know, you can intensify or brighten up anything that you want. I'm going to add a little bit more to the highlights just like that. So that's going to help it look more natural. Speaking of glow, let me just reduce that amount a little bit. Speaking of glow, because there is a fire right over here, it does need to reflect on her arm, her shirt, a little bit on her face. So we're going to use a new layer. I'll call this glow. Then we're going to sample some of that fire color using alter option. So you should get the eyedropper tool, and I'll grab this guy, maybe this orange first, get my brush, get a smaller brush and just go over areas where there should be a glow. So definitely on her arm, and I'm just going to turn this to color dodge so you can see. What we're dealing with here, I think this is a little bit too red. So let me just start over. I still have that blend mode, but we're going to sample another part, maybe. So something a little brighter. This yellow is nice. Make this smaller and lower the opacity. So we can create that look just like that. It's a little bit too yellow, so maybe I'll go over that with my um, my orange. I have an orange and red. Let me try this darker color. I'm just experimenting to see what works. Okay. I think this color works better. I sampled it from the darker area, and we're just going to go over any part where there's a highlight on her body. So look at her shirt, a little specs. So here, as well. And because we have color dodge selected, it's going to look a bit more natural. Okay, so let's undo that for the face because the face is at a distance. We're just going to lower the flow, increase the size, and then go over that area. So it's not as dark as the one on the arm. There you go. If you go out of the area, just use the eraser tool with 0% hardness, go around the edges. So there shouldn't be any glue on the background trees. That makes no sense. It should only be on the subject. So you can see how that really helps sell that idea. To make this blend in more, we are going to lower the flow of our brush, the same color. Just make little clicks around this area so that it doesn't look like one ball of color. And once again, use your eraser if you went outside the areas. Okay, looking pretty good. Another thing that we could do is just merge all of our fire layers now that we're happy with it. Right click and merge them like that. It's going to give you back the overlay, so just switch it back to screen. It should look normal. I'm just going to use a little bit of gaujmblur to make this more natural. And there we go. So that's how you can add a fire effect for your subject. I'll just show you before and after. This was before, this is after. A very simple design you could do. Using Photoshop tools. I do see that we went outside DRM here, so I'm just gonna go in with my eraser and fix that. Very nice. So that concludes our third challenge of the category. Let's move on to our next challenge where we do a paper cut effect. 20. Make a Paper Cut Out Style: We're going to take the subject and make it look like she's a paper cutout and put it in front of a paper background. So this is a good idea for collages or any fun video thumbnails that you want to do. So I have one image and three paper overlays. Go ahead and download them, import them into Photoshop. So what we're going to do first is hide all the paper layers, and I'm going to select my subject. Let's make a duplicate. As always hide the first layer. I'll call this base, and we're going to select subject. Like the subject, make sure it looks good. Once you're done, click on layer mask, and we should have a cutout of our subject. But it's not really looking like paper. So we're first going to adjust the colors of this to make it look more flat and more retro like and then bring in those overlays. So first, let's add in, let's make this a smart object. There we go, then go to filter image adjustments, and I will go to curves. We're going to lift the shadows like that, just to make it a little flat and increase those highlights. That is the first effect. Go to adjustments again, and we're going to grab vibrance, increase the vibrant, but lower the saturation. The second thing, third one, we're going to go back here. And I'll add an overall photo filter, something warm like this, warming filter. You can go for cool if you want. We also have some stuff down here. Let's do sepia. The last thing I do want to make some colors pop out more to go to hue and saturation or actually do color balance. And I do want this to be a little bit more retro. So more towards the red yellow side. Click Okay once you're done. So all these filters were added. Now we need to make her look like she was printed from a piece of paper. So we're going to use this overlay. I'll call this subject paper. We're going to rotate this. So right click, rotate it, so it's vertical, increase the size, and just blend it onto the subject. Something with I'll do multiply for this. And if you find that it darkened your image, you can just go back to image adjustments and we'll add some exposure here. If you found that your image became a little too dark, you can go to image adjustments, brightness and contrast, and just increase the brightness. There we go. That's going to help out. Next, we're going to only limit the subject paper layer to the subject itself. So just hold down Commander control, click on base until you see the marching ants and just make a mask on subject paper. So now that paper effect is only on the subject. All right. Have the subject all nice like this, Let's hide that for a moment and bring our next image, which is this brown paper background. I'm going to rotate this like we did with the other one and just increase it until it fits the screen. Just like that, bring back our subject. Let's bring this layer actually underneath everything. Bring base, and now we have this effect. But now it's not really looking like a paper cut out. So what I'm going to do is use this design that we have and use it to kind of make it look like it is a paper. Out. But first, we need that white separation. So hide that layer for a moment. Go underneath base and make a new layer with solid color white. If you don't want your paper to be fully white, you can just sample one of these colors, but mine is white. If I sample it like this, it might be a little off white, actually. Okay. So just sample whatever color you have here and then hide that again. Now we're going to make a mask. So just disable or delete the layer mask that it comes with. Then I'll call this background paper. Then using the Lasso tool, the polygonal Lassa tool, we're going to just make very rough cuts around our subject. So start somewhere here and try to match what's happening and make a very rough outline as though someone cut this out with scissors. The more pauses you have, the more detailed this is going to be. And the goal here is to make it look imperfect. Use your spaceboard to move up and just make clicks as you go around. Okay. Now, we're here at the start point, but I don't want to leave this area as it is. So I'll just go outside the canvas and continue going in just to make my cuts look more intentional. Then we're going to close that selection. Now, we have the same problem here, so we're going to zoom in and then using Alter option until you see a minus on your scroll wheel, we're going to make that same cut. So we can exclude a little bit of this area. There we go. Now we're going to make a mask and we have that paper cut effect. Once we have that, we can start using these and, like, position them in the edges. I'm going to separate each one by using the Lassa tool to just go over it and make duplicates. Command and Control J. That's the first one, second one. You could use the Marquee tool as well if you want. And then the third one. We can delete the original and position these where we want. So if you have something that's a little flat looking like the legs, we can put this on the side. Just go in like that and put it, try to, like, line it up, and we're going to use our subject. Just bring it up like that. So these paper things should be underneath your subject. We have different types of paper cuts. Can't really see what this is. Okay. So for this, we could use it over here. You can do commander control T and then use your arrow keys to make very small movements. I'm going to leave that there, but if you don't like it, you could just erase it because it's a regular layer. Oops. Just make sure your hardness is all the way up. So we're getting some areas with these paper mistakes like maybe the hand slipped and we couldn't use our scissor properly. It's going to make it look more natural. Flip this guy and I could kind of position it around the head. And I'll delete this extra part. There we go. So this is great if you want to do a poster or any sort of design where you want to give it back to school feel or this retro feel. It's pretty easy to get done. I'm just going to show you guys a before and after, group everything. This is what we had before. This is what we have after. Now let's move on to our final challenge of this category where we make a human glow effect. 21. Human Glow Effect: For the final challenge, we're going to be turning this person into a completely glon person. So they're going to be like this magical creature and hence why these people are staring her direction. The first thing we're going to do is just make a duplicate. As always, I'll call this space, and we're going to select the subject that you want to turn into the human glow effect. So I'm just going to use maybe the Object Selection tool to make this easier. Click on it once. Once we have that, we're going to go to select, modify, expand. And perhaps by two pixels, we're going to expand that selection. Click Okay once you're done. And just to check and make sure I have all of the subject, I'm going to hit Q and zoom in. I don't want to bring in anything extra. A, so this is good, hit Q again, and we are going to make a duplicate. Now we're going to select subject, go to FX, do the color overlay and choose the color white. Make sure there's no blend mode, and the opacity is 100. Once we have this, we can turn this into a smart object and begin building upon that glowing effect. So we're just going to duplicate subject four times. Just do command and control J. So you should have until subject copy four, and we're just going to basically add blur from the bottom up and increase the blur by two times. So it's a very simple effect. Grab the second layer, so not subject. Go to filter Gaussian blur and start from maybe 40. So 40 for this one, the first layer. For the second one, we're just going to add 20. You could also do it multiply it by two. It really depends on what you're going for. So here, I'll do 60. And then here we could do 80. Just type that in. And then we could do the last layer. You could try to do 100 to give it that fully glow effect. And now you can see that we get this person just sitting there and they look magical. So if this is too much and you're losing the details around your subject, you could just go back to the Gagen blur and reduce the amount or just lower the opacity. This guy, I could do something less extreme. Actually, I think I'll do the opacity method. Okay, so now I can see the edges of my subject a little better. The last thing is to take the first copy, the one without any Gaussian blur to this guy. We're just going to add a motion blur. So go to filter blur, motion blur, and we could just work with the angle. So I'll do an 80 degree angle. So I went with the following for angle and distance. And now we have, you know, something a little bit more natural looking. The last thing is to add some overall mood to this. I do want her to stand out a little bit more and make this look like a horror movie. So let's go all the way up and add a brightness and contrast adjustment, and then we could group all of the subject layers. So there's some brightness and contrast. You could play around with the saturation. The last thing I'm going to do is add some glow to the wall behind her because she is sitting down. So just grab let's actually do this with exposure. Increase the exposure and then flip the mask, Command or Control I, introduce some of that white color with a soft brush with the color white. So just go around the subject and increase your flow. I'm going to track this underneath my subject so I don't add on to the the glow of the subject itself. This is before, this is after. 22. Class Project: Create Your Photoshop Creative Design: Now, it's your turn to take on the challenge. For your class project, you're going to be creating your own Photoshop composition using all the techniques that we have learned. You can choose any of the styles that we went over. If you do something like a portrait, glitch effect, or a composition where you put in a few images and then blend them together. If you'd like, you can also combine some of the techniques from the different challenges such as adding Seffcts to your creative compositions. Start by selecting your idea and then take the resources that you need. You can find various images online or your own images, but you're just going to be putting them inside Photoshop, building it from the layers, starting from the base, moving your way up, and then blending everything together so that it looks cohesive. The goal here isn't just to follow along one of the lessons that we did, but for you to explore your techniques and see how you can apply what you learned into a practical outcome. So you have a creative and original work that you came up yourself using the stuff that we've learned. Once you're done, export your work and upload it to the class project gallery. You can also add a description where you talk about your idea, some of the challenges that you faced or any unique techniques that you came up with. This is your chance to be creative and show your style. So have fun with it. 23. Congratulations! What’s Next?: Congratulations on completing the Photoshop challenge course. You've now worked with multiple creative techniques, starting with photo editing and retouching to visual effects, and to full creative compositions. And that on its own is a huge step in your Photoshop journey. The key now is to keep on practicing. You can try different techniques, blend them together, or see how you can make something work by using a unique approach. So keep on experimenting with new ideas and see how you can finalize or fine tune your style. You haven't already, be sure to upload your class project to the Class Project Gallery. I would love to see what you guys have built and provide you with some feedback. And if you enjoyed the class, feel free to drop us a review as it really helps us better our courses and see what else you guys want to see. Thank you again for joining us, and I'll see you guys in the next class.