Photoshop Manipulation - Learn From A Pro

1. Class Preview: Have you ever wanted to know how to do these awesome Photoshop manipulations, but you're too intimidated by the process? Look no further, I designed this class to be gentle enough where you come into Photoshop, but also be great for those with intermediate skills. We will learn how to do dynamic changes to eye color, hair color, conquer photo retouching, and explore the power of a liquefied to it. We will also cover do atones, gradient, and color transition. Last but certainly not least, we'll design an eye-catching dynamic social media post using some of our Photoshop skills that we've learned in this class. Are you ready to start creating what seems like magic with Adobe Photoshop? Let's learn together. 2. Change Hair Color from Red to Black: Let's do a Photoshop manipulation. I'm going to take this redheaded girl and turn it into black hair. There's a couple of ways we can do this. One way, if I didn't have such a complicated background, you can actually go to Image and there is something called use image Adjustments. We're going to go down to selective color. Let's say she's a redhead, red is going to be very dominant in our hair color. You could actually go and select the red color and be able to edit it that way and change the tone and the vibrance of her red hair maybe even try to make it a different color. But there's a little bit of a problem to this, is her skin tone is very close to the hair color as well. There's a lot of red in your freckles and a lot of red in her hair. When I adjust the hair, everything else is going to adjust as well that's not going to give me the desired effect because I really don't want to wash out these colors, I want to keep her face the same color, but just change your hair color to black, I could simply do that, but everything else changes. This is very handy, but for this case we're going to do it a little bit differently. I had my layer over here, I'm actually going to duplicate this layer, I'm going to click on it and then duplicate layer have two layers. What I want to do is I want to take this top layer and I want to delete everything but the hair. I just want the hair available so that I can be able to isolate the hair and change the color without changing the color on her face and body as well. I'm going to actually do that by using the Eraser tool, I have the Eraser tool selected and I'm just going to use it, I'm going to select a brush, let's make it a little bit smaller at first and then I can get a little bit bigger. Now that I have my brush selected, my eraser tool, I have both of these layers on, the visibility on actually want to take the lower layer and actually turn the visibility off so that when I delete stuff from this layer, I can see what I'm deleting that's a little trick there, don't forget to do that. Now that the eraser tool is on, go ahead and delete everything but the hair on this layer. I'm going to go ahead and just delete, I have a pretty big brush so I can go back and do some details later. Let me select a little bit of a smaller brush so I can select this out a little better. You can also zoom in if you had a lot of times zoom in, you don't have to be exact but the more precise you are, the better result you'll get. There's ways to go back and edit if you messed up a little bit or you may be covered a portion you didn't want to cover, you can always go back and edit this. I'm just doing a really rough cut out. What I think this is a really difficult one, so I'm doing a difficult photo manipulation here when you're just learning, but better to start with something difficult then everything else will seem easy. Just because of that grass, that grass is hard, usually have a single tone sky that helps you cut out a lot better than this grass. Now that I've have some the details cut out, let me go back and cut a little bit of that out, we get a bigger brush and now I can get all the rest, that might be too big. The type of brush I'm selecting is a feathered brush, which you can select at the default brushes, this is a straight edge brush and this is a feathered brush. I feel like feathering gets me a little more flexibility and grace when I'm trying to cut things out. Let me do a little bit bigger, speed up the process here, just erasing everything but the hair. I can always go back and erase the rest of this later because I'm really just trying to grab the hair. Let me drag this over and see if I can get some of these out as well, go back and make the brush smaller. Do a little bit around here, just get in the hair, perfect. Well, one more step, do it a little bigger, there we go, I feel like little too much there. So I feel like I've isolated the hair pretty good just for this example, I can go back and do all that later, I've got the hair out. Let's go ahead and make our lower-level visible again. Now, as you can see, we have the hair isolated on its own layer. Now we can go ahead and edit this layer. I want to make it black hair, what I want to do is I want to take my hair layer and just desaturate it. It's going to take all the color out. We can now go ahead, we see other areas that we didn't delete, we can delete those, that's fine. There's a little red here, we can go back in and edit that a little bit later. I'm actually going to go in and I'm going to zoom in a little bit, I'm just going to fine tune this layer, I'm going to delete, make it a smaller brush. I'm just going to delete little areas of the skin that we don't want to make black. Those are just areas of the skin that that brush was big, it makes it brushed more than we wanted, going back in and editing a little bit, great. Let's zoom out, let's see how we can make this hair look a little bit more realistic. What I want do is you rarely see a redhead with freckles and black hair so I'm going to go actually go to my base layer and do some adjustments. Let's do something called Selective Color. Adjustments, Selective Color. I'm going to take the reds, all these reds and freckles and I'm going to try to reduce that just a little bit. I'm going to go down to the black and just reduce the black notice out there's fading a little bit, you don't want to do it too much because then she starts to look like a ghost. Just enough to bring a little bit of that redness down and bring a little yellow in there, just adjust this, we're bringing a little bit less red, let's do yellows, here we go, let's do some adjustments. Click "OK", go back into history to see if we liked the changes, great, let's do some hair. This looks almost look like gray hair and not black hair. Let's do brightness and contrast lets do some adjustments maybe reduce the brightness a little bit, and maybe increase the contrast, there we go. That's looking a little better, taken a lot of those highlights out of there because those almost look like gray hairs. If we have a lot of highlights and black hair, lets do exposure. We don't want to bring out, I'm going to reduce the shadow. Let's go and do shadow and highlights and see what we could do about these shadows, here we go. This is just where you just get experiment and have fun. Figure out what looks better, try to reduce the highlights here. The shadow and highlight options seem to have the most effect that's almost too much, I want some highlights, great. I also see there's a little bit of red leftover from where I didn't cut it out perfectly. I'm just going to go in I'm just going to take the saturation tool, which is going to be down here in your toolbar. It's usually on dodge, but just go down a little, it's actually called the sponge tool. But there's an option up here where you can set it on D saturate. I'm just going to go onto my main layer where that red is still remaining and just brush over it. I'm desaturating it just a little bit so you don't see the red. Let's just do that throughout the piece, do a little bit. I didn't mean to do it quite over there as much, maybe a little bit there, any traces of the red hair. This is where we can get really detailed and you could spend an hour probably messing around with this, or I could have just spent a little extra time and cut it out a little bit better. I'm just desaturating that area just enough, you don't see that red as much. There's a lot of different ways to do this method, you don't have to use this methods, this is just what I would do if I was trying to change your hair color dramatically like we did, that was a pretty dramatic change and to try to make it look realistic and as a challenge. You could do selective color up here and image if you wanted to do it with someone who'd had a different skin tone and their hair color but in this case she had the same reds and both her skin and hair, it had to do this method to make it work. There's simple quick, we did this and what about five minutes changing your hair. We can actually do a couple of little adjustments to the main base photo, to her face. See if we can mess around with the color balance, if we could find something that's going to work a little better with black hair, yeah that looks neat. Taken more the red out, I didn't want to look too gloom that looks a little bit more realistic with the cooler tones and the black hair. This is the original and this is what we ended up with, doing some black hair. There's little things that I would go back and do a freckles with. Actually there's a few things I can erase right here on this layer and fine tune it. There we go. 3. Photo Retouching: Now we're going to work on manipulating a person shot. I have a picture I downloaded online and we're going to fine tune a few things on our skin and also make some manipulation adjustments to certain parts of her face, if that's something a client request and they do often. You'll now know how to do it. We're going to go ahead and unlock a layer, I just opened the photograph. There's a couple of tricks that I can do to even out her skin tone and to remove any unwanted little skin marks. One of the things I like to use is the clone tool. It's called the Clone Stamp Tool, so go ahead and highlight that. I'm actually going to make it a little bit smaller of a brush size. I want to make sure it's going to cover up just that little point. I'm going to make the brush size a little bit bigger than the actual mark. Here's how the clone stamp works. You're going to hold down the Option key and if you're on a Windows, I believe it's the Control key. But on a Mac hold down the Option key. I'm going to be able to take a sample, I just click my mouse once wherever I want to take a color sample. I'm going to take something really close to the skin next to it, just to get the right shade and the tone of that particular area. I'm going to click right next to it. Now I have the clone stamp tool. If I go over here and I go ahead and click my mouse and hold and I paint, it actually paints clones from that area. You can actually paint from that whole side. What's great is I release my mouse and I can do it again and it'll continue to do that until I take a new sample. If I hold down Option or Control and I sample her eye, I can come up over here and paint the eye and I can come back, take another sample of the other eye and paint the eye. That's just really quickly how the clone tool works. I'm going to go back in my History to where we were and I'm going to go ahead and take a sample. I'm going to take a sample here and what's great about covering up a small mark on the face. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in a little bit. I took my sample, I just click once and it usually covers up nicely, or sometimes you click again and you're good. You can see how that blemish just disappeared. We do the same thing over here. Hold down, now I'll take a sample nearby, maybe right here, and pop it over there. I'm going to continue to do the same thing. I want to take this lighter, see how her skin's more red here, her skin's more peachy color here. I'm actually going to click and cover it up that way. You can do the same thing with blemishes right here and cover it up. That works for really small blemishes. But there's times if you have to cover up maybe a large scar, or something else that needs to be touched up, or sometimes a clone tool doesn't do the right job. You'll need to actually take the brush tool and paint some skin tone on it. We're going to do that in the next video. Let's say we need to smooth out this redness and freckles on her nose. One way to do that, you can't really clone anything around it because this is exactly the area that we want to change. What I'd like to do is take the eyedropper tool, which is going to be right here in your toolbar. You can sample any color and it'll pop out up here and it'll pop out here in your swatch panel. You can sample any sample lip color. I'm going to sample a color that I think will go good on her nose. It's probably going to be in this area right here. I'm going to try not to select the hair. Maybe right here and you click a couple of times, double-click your swatch to see if that's a color you think would be a nice skin tone. I'm going to create a new layer. This is where I'm actually going to paint on a new skin color for her on her nose. I'm going to go ahead and grab the brush tool and I'm going to make sure it's the right size. I always use feather brushes for a lot of my work. I rarely use the straight edge brush, so you'll see me use that all the time. What I'm going to do is I'm actually come on a new layer, I'm going to be painting over her nose. It looks a little crazy right now, but we're going to end up deleting and erasing a lot of this. I like to create new layers for each section of skin. I do this just so I can have control over deleting and in doing some adjustments. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to grab the eye dropper tool and then I'm going to select some skin that I think is a nice even skin tone. This is the tricky part, so maybe right here and I'm going to go back and I'm just going to paint. I'm going to do the same. That might be a little dark. Let me go back and grab a new sample, maybe right here and then I'm going to paint. I'm on a new layer. Notice how the light is coming on to the right, I'm actually going to create a new layer, so to do her right cheek. I'm going to take a new sample and do the same thing because this is going to be a much brighter, lighter color. Then on this side where there's shade or shadow on her face. You do the same thing on the new layer. Just paint around. This looks a little ridiculous right now, but we're going to end up screening a lot of this back. I'm going to start with the nose layer and I'm going to reduce the Opacity on it until I'm happy with how it's blending in. Right about there, and I'm going to take the eraser tool, make it a decent size with a feather, it has a nice feathering. But I want to keep the shadow, so there we go. Do the same thing on this side, reduce the Opacity. I'm going to go back with the eraser tool. Now this is the shadow side. You reduce the Opacity first. We're just really smoothing out her skin, we're not really changing her skin or eliminating all. We want her to look realistic. Let's go ahead and zoom out to see what we did here. Let's see if I do 70 percent. Let's go ahead and take out all of these layers. This is before, and this is after. You can see how the nose looks a little better, it's less red. I would even reduce the Opacity even more, because you really want to keep some of the things underneath. You want to have some freckling, you want to have some realism. This is really just a subtle, smoothing out the skin. You're not changing the skin. There it is. You take away all the layers so you can see. Before, after and this may need some adjustment, may need to erase a little bit on this side. Not that much, I want to have a little bit of that shadow there. This just takes time and practice to master. I could do the same thing for the chin, around her lips needs a little bit of work. That's it for evening out skin tone. Now that we evened out her skin tone a little bit, I want to add a little bit of more of a dynamic eye and some more highlights and shadows to bring out some of that with her. I'm going to go over to the Dodge and Burn Tool, which could be right down here, it's already highlighted. Dodge and burn, and I use these quite a bit. The dodge tool is when we want to add highlights to any object and the burn tool is if you want to add shadows to any object. I want to bring out highlights in her eyes. Let's do the dodge tool. I'm going to set it on the highlights so you can actually go up here, and make sure you adjust the range if you're not getting anything you like. Go back and play around with highlights and shadows, different options to figure that out. I like highlights, it's going to be more dramatic. Let's try a 100 percent exposure, of course we can always go back and reduce that exposure if it's too harsh or too bright. Let's go ahead and zoom in on her eye a little bit. We're just going to brush it off just like a brush with a lot of things in Photoshop and the tools. You brush it on, just going around her eye and it's bringing out highlights in the little areas right there. You notice how her eye is much more dynamic. You can overdo this for sure. If I went back and did it again, it starts to look almost alienesque. Let's just go ahead and do that, so that's perfect. That's all we really need to do, we need to add a little bit of the burn tool. This is going to add shadows. If I go along here, it's going to actually add shadows. A lot of times I like to do eyebrows and maybe even bringing out a little bit of the eyelashes, just a little bit deeper, darker, fuller looking eyelashes. I really don't use this too much. Just to bring in shadows, maybe go down to Highlights. Just experiment to see, I always do my Control Z, which is to go back a step with my keyboard. If I go and I don't like how it looks, I can just do Control Z and I can continue to do that. You can see how we can bring out some dramatic effects with this. Let me actually do shadows, let me bring down the exposure. I want it to be very subtle. Just a little darker, just to make her lips look a little more lively. That's all we're doing, we're not doing anything outside of that and we probably even could have backed off doing the eyes a little bit more. But you see that made a pretty big look. This is the original. I'm already seeing this is very wise to do, always go back to your original, which is all the way at the top here in your history and then go back to new and switch back between them. What I'm finding out is I'm not liking how I evened out the cheeks, I'm not liking that at all. I like the more natural look, so that's no problem I have these in different layers. I'm going to take out the cheeks. I like the nose, so let's just take out the two cheeks, or maybe reduce the opacity a lot on those, instead of making them disappear all together. Now when I go back to the original, a little bit better. Let's actually reduce the other layers, make those all more subtle. Now we're going to actually use the liquefy tool. 4. Photo Retouching - Liquify Tool: The liquefied tools, probably what you most associate with photo manipulation whenever you see a magazine, the people complain that they made the models too skinny. They're probably using this liquify tool, so, we're going to try to find ways to use it and not do it so dramatic where people look, and she looks realistic and we're changing her face. We're just going to take in her nose just a little bit. She's already a really beautiful girl, but we're just going to do some tweaks that just show you the power of this tool and what do with it. I'm going to go ahead and select my main base layer, which is this photo here, and I have some separate layers here, we did cut some smoothing. I'm going to go ahead and merge all the layers, so, when we use the liquify tool, it's going to do it on one layer instead of not doing it on these other layers. I'm going to right-click, and I'm merging the layers. They're all going to be one unit now. Once you merge layers, it's done, you can't unmerge unless you go back in your history. Now, I'm ready for the liquify tool. We're going to go ahead and select her "Layer", go to "Filter" and liquify could it be down here in your filter panel and click on "Liquify", and that's going to bring it to a new menu option here, Iit's going to give you a new screen. Let me see if I can collapse this so it's all on the screen here that you can see. Here's the basics of how it works. This is called the Forward Warp Tool. You can change the size of your brush and make it a really big brush, or make it a little brush. The bigger the brush, the more of the areas it going to affect. Let me do an example so you can see, I'm just pressing and holding the mouse button and dragging. Looks a little weird. But watch what I can do with the nose, I can actually click and go to the right, click go to the left, and I'm slowly changing her nose. You can actually make it skinnier, you could do this to make arms skinnier, legs skinnier, I could do people certain components bigger, we could change where the eye shifts around, you can actually use this to make next skinnier. You're going to be very careful with this, and you don't want to do it too much. I changed her nose a little bit just by sucking it in. There's some other tools you can mess with here. There's a spin tool, you can actually warp it that way. There is a pucker and bloat tools, so this is going to be pucker. Let's do this a little bit bigger, so, pucker and click and hold. I can actually make lips bigger and more full. This is going to be, there's pucker and then bloat. I think that was bloat where it made a little bit bigger. If I want to make her lips skinnier, I'm actually going to cancel because I don't like. I'll just do it in some examples. Let's try that again. Let's go back to Filter and Liquefy. Now, we're back to where we were. Let me zoom in just a little bit. Well, actually I don't want to zoom in because I'm going to be changing some things. There's a really neat automatic setting, if you go down here to Face Tool and you may not see this in your version of Photoshop. If you have Adobe Photoshop cloud, then you will have it because your Photoshop will have free updates. You should have this if you have the Creative Cloud. This is an amazing tool, is automatically get a sense where eyes are, where the nose, the lips, and the outside of the face is going to be. In some cases, it can even do the hair. You can go around here and adjust it manually. If you ever played an online game where you had to create your character, you'll be right at home here. You can change your mouth width, height doing that, or you can do it manually by going here in the nose and pulling down, it can make the nose a little longer, you can make it skinnier, do the eyes and they come squint down a little bit more, and this is where you have to be careful because you could change this person too much, like you can make her a lot skinnier. Can make it a little bit bigger, can make it a little skinnier. I don't like that so much, so, I'm going to do some manual updates here on the right. Again the nose, those width, I want to make it skinnier. Perfect. I just did some subtle things. We'll see what we could do with the hair here if it gives us any face shapes, so, forehead, increase the forehead or decrease it, bring up her chin, bring it down make her face, longer, jaw line. There we go. I'm just going to go ahead and click "Okay". You see the changes that we did. If I go back in my history one step before, after, before, after. Let's just zoom in a little bit more. On her face, I feel like I'm done for the moment. I can actually go in and add some more highlights, bring out some of the highlights in her hair. That's probably something I would do by using the dodge tool. I'm going to actually select the "Dodge Tool" here again, make a nice big brush and non highlights. I'm going to reduce the exposure so it's not going to be too strong. Sometimes even splitting the difference and doing mid tones helps you just play around with the settings. Make your brush bigger. Okay. Let's see if I can bring out some highlights in her hair, lets see how this is making it nice. Pop out a little bit. It seem really bringing her here to life, isn't it? I can even do the same thing, the lips. Here we go. Let's go ahead and look at the before, this was when we first opened up the document. This is how it was. Let's go ahead and see some of the stuff we do. We spent what about seven or eight minutes doing some adjustments. Now if we go ahead and zoom out, this is some small retouching, I probably wouldn't have done as much nose work, I would probably keep that because I think we want to keep the person's original characteristics. That's what makes everybody unique. But just going through some tools to show you the potential of what you can do in Photoshop and that liquefy tools so powerful, so, please go explore, see what kind of things that you can create with it. 5. Changing Eye Color: We're going to practice our blending modes and some paintbrush tool today. We're going to make this green brownish eye, we're going to turn this into a blue eye. There's a couple ways we can tackle this. We can always take our Magnetic Lasso tool, and let it select itself as we move the mouse around. The only bad thing about using this, is that it's not cutting it out perfectly. You have to go in there and do a little bit better. What I would do if I did this method, is I would copy my selection, and then paste it on top. Now I have a separate eye layer. Let me unselect this. Then, I would actually change the color. I'd maybe de-saturate, and then I'll add some color back in, by adding a little bit of color balance. I'm just going to see my process in what I would do. But here's the problem with using this method. As I'm changing the adjustment so much on this layer, and even if I reduce the opacity a little bit on my eye layer, make it look a little more natural, you see it's not blending in very well. I can always take my eraser tool and go back, smooth it out a little bit and make it look more realistic. Turn up my opacity all the way from my eraser tool. Make it look a little more realistic. Even better way to do all this, I'm going to go ahead and delete this layer. I'm actually going to create a new layer. I just create a new layer here, and I'm going to take the paint brush tool. I'm literally going to paint a blue eye. I'm taking the brush tool, and you'll notice I have it on the nice feather. A feather brush right here, and let me get the right size. A little bit bigger, makes the feather more dramatic, which I like. I'm going to paint a blue colored eye. The trick is picking a realistic looking blue. We can always go in, and change that. Let me make sure I have everything. My opacity is on 16, I need to change that, to a 100 percent. I want to be very visible, doesn't have to be exact. We can always go back with the eraser tool, and fine tune our selection, or where we're painting. They're rough cut out. I'm going to go back and take the eraser tool now. It works just like a brush. I'm just going back and trimming it just a little bit. I don't want any blue to blending into the areas where we don't need blue. This looks ridiculous, but this is the power of blending modes. I'm actually going to put it on a color blending mode, which is off the screen now, but I'll show you in another pop out to the left of your screen. I'm going to select color, and look at that. Look how that little painted brush now has a transparency, which that's all blending modes are transparencies. Just putting it on color really made a nice dramatic pop. Let's continue to trim. Let's take our eraser tool. There's a little bit too much on the outside, and let's go back up in this right side. That looks a little more natural than the other way I started off with. I want to show you both methods, because there's many ways to tackle this same modification, and there's not always a right way, there's sometimes ways that look better. That's all the same color, and no one's eye is all just straight blue. Sometimes there's a little bit of brown, or green inside, this ring of the eye. We're going to create a new layer, and we're going to paint again, and we're going to add a little bit of brown. Let's find a nice brown color. Now that I have my brown color selected, and I have my new layer, I'm going to go ahead and start painting my brown. Let's make it a bigger brush. Let's go all the way around the eye just like this. This got a much bigger feather, because for a much bigger size is the feathering, is more dramatic on the bigger brush sizes, and that's what we want. We want to have a nice subtle transition. I'm not going to do the same thing with this layer that I did with the blue, and I'm going to put on a blending mode of color, color blending mode. That's nice. What I want to do is go back and adjust the color of my blue eye just a little bit. I want to tone down the blue and bring in a little bit more green, because no one's eye is that vivid blue. Just doing some adjustments, and it might even help if I made the top layer disappear there, for visibility, and now I have the blue eye underneath. Now I can make some adjustments. Let's see. If I go to hue saturation, and see if that'll help me here with my eye. It reduces saturation just a little bit, and that's going to look a lot more realistic, has a little more gray in there. Let's add back our brown ring. No one has an eye that has a transition that harsh. Let's actually take our eraser tool, and let's see what we can do to erase certain portions of it. This is the effect you see in people that have blue, not all the way blue eye, they have a little bit of brown maybe, in the middle. I might need to go back and increase my brush size, a little bit. This is just tricky, trying to get this effect to work. I might even need to try different sizes, do a small size that comes in, and we'll go back one step, there we go. I actually want to reduce the opacity on this brown portion of the eye, make it blend in a little bit. I don't like that. I come in, I like the vibrance there, but I want to blend in more naturally. Let me see if I can take this. I'm selecting the brown layer, and I wonder if I can blur a little bit. I'm going to go down to the blur filter, blur, and there's something called Gaussian Blur. This evenly blurs a certain layer object. This is not giving me a preview, I'm just going to click on a random point and see how much it blurs it. Let me see if I need to go back in, blur, Gaussian blur. Let's do quite a bit more. There we go. It's blending really nicely, but I think I need to go back and blur it a little less. Gaussian blur, maybe cut in between these first two selections. There we go. I'm going to color balance, check it out and see if I can modify the color just a tad. Trying to make this as realistic as possible. There we go, and maybe reduce the opacity. All these little things is just experiment to see if I like it or not. It's not really an exact science. That's one way to do the eye. Maybe I can go back and adjust the blue part of the eye again, see if there's anything I can mess around with. Will do vibrance. That looks more realistic when I reduce the vibrance, saturation, there we go. Probably you could take the eraser tool and mess with the eye a little bit more. Maybe just make it a little ring, instead of such a large ring. See if I can do the blur again. I just wanted to blend in a little more evenly. Let's blur even more. That's a little too much. There's the previous showing up right here, [inaudible] can. Let me see what I think will look good. Let me take my eraser tool. I don't want any of the colors from any of these layers to show up on the black. I'll erase it in that area. I can actually go back on this blue layer. I'm just going to clean up this. I see a little bit of blue that got onto the white part of the eye, and there we go. We change night color. That looks pretty good. Go back here. Fine tool have this eye, that's the pattern there. Let's go ahead and zoom in, and then zoom out, and have our eye there. 6. Duotones and Gradients: Now it's time to go over Duotones. I found this beautiful image online, but I want to create a single or Duotone for this piece to be able to use as a background on a flyer. The first thing we want to do to do any Duotone, is we need to change the mode to Gray-scale. You need to remove all the existing colors on the document. Just go to "Image," "Mode, " and "Gray-scale." You're just getting rid of all the current colors so that we can apply that single or two-ink-toned effect to this. Now we need to go back to the mode. Before, Duotone was grayed out because it wasn't converted to Gray-scale yet. Now we have this option available, so we're going to go ahead and click on Duotone. You'll notice this has a really cool effect already. This default, it's this purple and a black. I'm going to go over Monotones first. Monotone will be a single-ink-tone. This is going to be black but you can do quite a wide variety. The lighter you get or the whiter you get, the lighter you get, and the darker you get, the darker the ink show up. You can do something in between. Have a washed outlook if that's what you want to go for. It has a screen printed look. A screen printing is when you print with one single ink color on like a t-shirt for example. This has a very similar look where it looks like just one ink is being printed on this image. It has a neat effect. But the great thing about Duotones is I'm going to actually go click on here and go down to Duotones. Now I have Duo, which means two, so now I'll have two ink colors. The trick to adding rich Duotones is to have one be a lighter color, and one be a darker color. Let's go ahead and do a black and see how the black brings out all the rich shadows and the light color brings out all the lighter highlights. Just play around with these options. There's no wrong or right look for this. Just play around and we could do a bright color. Let's do kind of a red and we can make our shadows a deep red too, instead of just black. That has a very emotional response with that beautiful dark colors. We can actually do what's called a Tritone, which adds a third color to the mix. I rarely use this, but you can continue to keep going. There is even a Quadtone. You can add four different ink colors to everything to really add some neat effects. Let's go back to Duotone and play around with what I think, I'd like to do a blue, purple. Let's do a deep purple. Let's do black ones that look like, oh, that's great. Let's mess with this a little bit. Kind of a cooler tone, maybe. There we go, a little bit more of that brightness there. Just go and play around with Duotones a little bit. I'll have to name them before it will let me save it. Click "Okay." This is our original and this is our Duotone. A much higher emotional impact-type photo when you strip the colors away and you only add one or two inks. Open up the photo and play around with Duotones, Monotones, and even Tritones. Now we're going to cover gradients and color transitions with this piece. This is just a photo, another photo I found online and I thought it looked really neat with a color transition, which is just a fancy name for Gradient. Let's play around with the gradient tool a little bit. The gradient tool is right here in your toolbar. I'm going to go ahead and select a gradient I think would look cool. Let's click this nice rich purple gradient. Of course you can make your own gradients. So let's do that to have a little practice. I'm going to double-click on this bar up top. This is our gradient tab. We can change how it transitions to one color to the next. We can actually make our own. I'm actually taking this existing gradient, and I'm going to pull down on these tabs until I only have two colors left. Now, just to make it simple, you can have as many transitions as you want. But I'm going to keep it just to two to show you an example. Let's do a blue to green. Let's click a blue, maybe like a light blue, and have it transition to well, we could do a purple too, that might look neat. Let's do a blue to a purple because that's a nice subtle change and that's a popular color transition right now. It can change where it switches from the left color to the right color by adjusting this middle option. You can do that. Just play around to see what kind of affects the gradient will end up looking like. We click, "Okay." Now I have my grading tool selected. I'm going to create a new layer, and this is going to be my gradient layer. I am just going to click and hold the mouse any direction you want to. You can have it go across, transition from left to right. You can have it go from top to bottom. But one of my favorite ways to do gradients is from left to right, diagonally or the other direction because I feel like it has a more natural look. It doesn't look like a gradient that just goes across. It has a natural flow. What I'm actually going to do is make this a little bit of a darker, different color. That can make it really popped out a little more. We can see the transition a little better. There is our gradient slowly coming together here. Great. So our base layer is actually going to become our gradient layer. We're actually going to make sure that the gradient layer is at the very bottom, that's our base layer and here's our image. The image, we're actually going to change the Blending Mode on the image which we covered a little bit. We're going to change that so that the gradient behind it pops through. So we're changing that blending mode to allow some of the pixels to let the color through on this bottom layer. That's the technical, what we're doing here. Right now it's at normal. I'm going to change it to Luminosity. You'll notice you'll see the gradient come through, but it doesn't fade the image very much, which is kind of a neat effect. Normally when we would apply a gradient layer over top and maybe reduce the opacity, it wouldn't have the same effect, it would look faded. That's what's great about using this Blending Mode, is you can have everything be sharp, the contrast be nice. You can always play around with different blending modes. But I know Luminosity is really great for. Oh, that's a really cool hip effect. I like that. Let's keep going. Color Burn. Darker color. But Luminosity is the one I use when I do gradient transitions like that. I just feel it has the best effect. What we can do now is I like this gradient, but we can load another one. Just go to our gradient layer, click on our gradient tool and let's pick a green one just to try it out. I'm just applying effect on my gradient layer, over top. That looks cool. Let's keep playing around so you can see the wide variety of effects. Let's see if we can get one with higher contrast like this blue. Let's see what else we got. I got a tonne, I found these online. You can actually download gradient packs and load them into Photoshop. Over the years, I've collected quite a bit. Let's go back, we can do a black and white as well. [MUSIC] That looks exciting. It's quite a different transition. Oh, that's neat. That's cool looking, I like that one. Let's double click, see how it has a lot of different transitions that slowly gradients. You can add more and change at different points and change the color. You could do metals as well. Click on the metal. We'll create a few metals, and illustrate a little bit later. I can go back in my history and see which gradient I like better. I think I like my original one actually. That is back here. There it is. I like that. That's great. You can really spice up all your images for your Facebook ads or anything. Other reason you'll need to kind of apply this effect to advertising and branding. 7. Design A Dynamic Social Media Graphic: Let's create a real practical project. We're going to create a Facebook post. That's going to be the most attention-grabbing post we can come up with, because that's what matters in social media as grabbing people in your news feed. I'm going to go ahead and open up a standard Facebook document size. It's 1,200 by 628. Let's go ahead and do a resolution of 300, because usually you would do 72 for digital, but it's always better to do higher resolution because it can always downsize later. Here's our Facebook post size and actually let me, so to be good practice, let me go to image size and make sure I have the right settings, and if you don't, you can always go to image size and change it. I believe I'm correct, 1,200 by 628 is the Facebook size. If you ever needed to noodle around, let's go ahead and go to image in the image size before we start working. Let me just unlock my background layer and let's go ahead and get started with something. We need a really attention grabbing color. Let's go ahead and go to our Gradient Tool and let's grab the most attention grabbing color we can find any red. That stops everyone attention on social media. Let's do like a red gradient. This is just one I found. But you can always just do create your own gradient or just create two swatches and have a light color and a dark color. You don't have to have all these small transitions between if you don't want to. This is simple gradient I'll just do it on our base layer and let's just have a nice gradient. What I like to do when you have square or rectangle ads is to add angles to your design. I'm going to do that right now. I'm just going to just draw, and I'm just taking the Polygonal Lasso Tool right now, and I'm just creating a simple triangle shape. I'm going to close up my shape. We're going to create a new layer and I'm going to add another really crazy grab your attention color. Let's do this green. That green, and red. Yes, you can't get any more attention-grabbing than that. I want to add a complimentary angle on the other side. I'm going to go to Image, and I want to actually go to Layer, I'm going to duplicate the layer. I'm just going to duplicate the layers and I have two layers. I'm just going to drag and let's see if I can just rotate this and go at the corner and I can rotate it really easily. See if they match up. You could do this by transforming it 180 degrees, but I'm just doing it manually because I'm stubborn. Cool. Let's get some type. I'm going to go ahead and click on my Type Tool. I'm just going to type in, bold ads get noticed. It's a generic headline. Let's find a nice font because I don't like whatever that is. Let's do railway, but let's do bold. Let's do a different weight. The thickest weight that railway has is black. Let's do black. I like how this is all caps, and this is not all caps. That has a nice balance. But we need to balance the size. I'm just going to reduce the size of the text here and you can reduce it right up here in this area. But I'm just doing a little keyboard shortcut here. Look at the lettering. The lettering has a very large gap. We can change that in our paragraph settings. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more on my ads so you see more what's going on. Let me take this into a new window. Perfect. Let's reduce the lettering. I'm going to go to my character and paragraph settings and I believe it's a new character. There it is right here. Let's reduce the spacing to maybe 30. Maybe do 28. I'm just typing it in until I get the lettering that I like. We need to have some balance even more. Let's reduce the weight on this bottom text. The most important thing is the word bold here, that's what's going to grab you. Then you'll read ads get noticed. Let's go ahead and reduce the weight to maybe even light and maybe even light italic. We're even changing up, making it italic and then non-italic and then we have all caps, and then we don't have all caps. As much variety as you can think of. I also want to angle my text to match the angle that I created here because I think that has a nice look and it's very different. Not a lot of people do angle text. Once again, that's going to be attention-grabbing. I might want to change my angle just ever so slightly. I don't want the angle to be two angled if that makes any sense. I'm just going to change my little triangles here. Expand them up. Make sure this matches, I'm just changing that. Perfect. I think this has a nice layout. I want to have a nice photo, really attention-grabbing photo here. I'm going to reduce my text a little bit. Maybe right there. I can always adjust that later. Also I want to add a drop shadow to my text. I just have my layer styles, which I double click right here in this area, but not my layer styles to a drop shadow. Let's do one that has black dark shadow, a drop shadow. Let's just mess with the settings. There we go. I don't want it blurred too much. I really want people to see the drop shadow, and reduce the opacity. Let's reduce the text a little bit more. I think we have a great basic layout. You can always adjust a little bit later, like maybe with the text down here to give more room for our photo. Now I'm going to go find a photo online that I think will match with this overall concept and I'll be right back. I was able to find this photo on Pexels, P-E-X-E-L-S is where I find a lot of my free stock photography. I found this photo, I thought that would go perfect with the colors and the attention grabbing theme I have for this ad. This is super high resolution. When I drag it into my much smaller web ad, it's going to be so huge. I'm dragging it in, it's huge. I'm actually going to do a little trick. Let me delete that. I'm just going to reduce the image size on this. I'm just going to go to Image, Image size. I'm just going to reduce this down to 1,000 pixels, or actually let me make it a little bit bigger, 1,500 pixels, that's fine. Now when I drag it in, it won't be so atrociously big. Here's our photo, and we're going to mess around with blending modes a little bit to see how it can best get this photo. I'm going to go in my layers and I'm not going to drag this little boy. I'm going to drag him below by little triangle angles here so he could see the triangles pop out. He's all the way down at the bottom here and I want this to pop out. I want it to have a little bit of color. I'm actually, I have this red I want to show underneath. I'm going to select my photo above it and I'm going to put a blending mode on it, so that you can see this red gradient down below. I'm going to try the color. That doesn't work. The color blending mode doesn't look good. Let's try luminosity. Perfect. Luminosity always is really good for showing a photo through as we tried earlier in the video in another lesson. I think that looks great. Let's get our overall composition. I'm going to zoom out and it really helps to zoom out on the piece so can take a look at the overall size and balance to see if you like it. You make the kid just a little bit smaller. Tried to get the right size in here. Perfect. I want people to be able to see the hands. They can see the full expression of this kid. Perfect. We can tweak. I don't really like how he looks angry because of the red. That's no problem. I'm going to go back. I'm going to go ahead and reduce the visibility here so you can see your gradient. This is what we're going to go and edit real quick. I have our gradient selected. I'm just going to go to Image, Adjustments and go to color balance and tweak that red and maybe make it a little more purple. I don't want it to be red angry, I just want it to be attention-grabbing. I'm just bringing out some purple. That's really cool. I love that. Reduces the anger a little bit. I want to sharpen the photo because I really want it to be intense. Let me select the boy and I'm actually going to go to filter. Let me see where Sharpen. There it is, down to Sharpen. I got to do sharpen more. This is going to sharpen the photo twice as much as just this regular sharpen will. I'm going to do sharpen more. That adds a little bit of sharpness to that photo, which I think works really well. Another cool thing you could do is layering. What I'd like to do is have this D tack behind this boy's ear. It almost looks like the boy's head is above the text, while his fingers remain behind the text. It almost looks like he's interacting with the text. A way to do that is I'm going to need to duplicate the boy's photo. I'm just going to go to Layer, Duplicate. I now have two copies. I'm going to take the top copy and I'm going to bring it all the way to the top. Now you could see it above everything. All I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in and I'm just going to cut out the portion that overlaps this D. I can use the Magnetic Lasso Tool to cut that out. Let's cut this little section. Maybe include a little bit of the hair. I don't need to grab all of him. I just need to grab what's going to go above the D. Now I'm going to actually copy by selection, I'm going to make sure this very top layer is selected. I'm just going to copy and then paste right where it is. You can see that new portion we just copied and pasted. We no longer need this copy of the layer because we already grabbed that ear sample that we needed. Let's go ahead and delete that so we don't get confused. Now what we need to do is go ahead and take our layer and apply, let me drag it back down. It needs to remain above the text. Right now if I drag it below the text, there is no point having it because I really want this to be above the text. But we need to be able to apply the same filter effect that we have here or the blending mode. Right now this is set on luminosity. Let's see what happens if we set that ear on luminosity. If you'll notice right here, is messing up because it's doing a blending mode over this D as well. We're going to be able to address this in the next video. 8. Design A Dynamic Social Media Graphic Part 2: Okay, so how to get past that? You're going to run into these issues when you use blending modes, when you have lots of different players and you're trying to accomplish all these things. Blending modes don't always act right when you have all these different layers and you want things to overlap. So we're going to try something a little different. So I'm going to go back and I'm actually going to change this original. I'm just toggling the visibility. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to keep my ear, I'm going to keep the boy. But I'm just changing the blending mode on our main base layer of this boy and I'm not going to put any blending mode. I'm just going to make it normal. I'm going to go back on my ear that I have cut out here and I'm also going to do the same. No blending modes. Everything's back to normal. So that has the effect that I like, but I really miss having that gradient, that cool gradient effect that the blending mode afforded us. So I'm actually going to do something a little different. I'm taking the gradient layer that I had at the bottom here and I'm dragging it to the very top. I'm actually going to do a blending mode as the top layer. So instead of being the bottom layer, it's actually going to be on the top layer and then I'm going to set a blending mode on here. I'm just messing around with some blending mode options, color. Ooh, that's perfect. So that's giving me the same effect I need, but it's at the very top of the stack here. That's the difference. It could be at the bottom here or the top. But it needs to be on the top to show through. So I'm losing my little green triangles, but that's no problem because I can always take the Polygonal Lasso Tool and just draw these triangles and cut it out. Just cutting out the gradient layer right here so I can reveal my green triangles or even better. So many different ways to skin a cat. I'm going to take my two triangle layers and bring them up above at the very top. So they're above the gradient. Perfect. Let me actually select the ear here and select my boy. Now I have all this selected and I'm going to move this around. It's getting it perfect here. Oops. I may need to lock that gradient layer. So whenever you try and manipulate things and a layer keeps automatically getting selected by accident and you keep shifting it, you could always lock a layer so it doesn't bother you anymore. So now I can select some things. There we go. What I did is, I selected the ear and I held down shift and I'm selecting the boy layers. So you could see the two layers that are selected and I'm just shifting it around so that you have just a little overlap. It's not so dramatic. Perfect. You also notice how the photo ends right here. This is a very small detail that most people don't notice, but designers. You see how the photo ends here, and you're seeing the background of the gradient, it's this harsh transition. I'm actually taking the Eraser Tool. I'm going to get a nice feathered brush. Not a very big one and I'm just going to go in and just soften that a little bit, which is basically erasing the edge so you don't see the transition. I can even go down here and erase a little if I want to have a little faded in look like that. If that's what I want to go for, which looks cool. I'll go with it. Just experimenting and playing around. So now we're just going to finesse a little bit. I'm going to finesse the Drop Shadow. So I'm going to double click my type layer to get my Layer Styles panel. I'm going to go back to Drop Shadow and maybe intensify the Drop Shadow a little bit, change the distance, the size. There we go. We can even double-click on the text here. I'm just going to highlight this portion. Maybe make it a little bit smaller, let's do 22. No, I like it big like that, maybe just a little bit smaller. So let's do- This is just very small little adjustments where if you didn't change it, it would probably be just as effective. But as a designer, you just want to fine tune things until you're completely happy with them. Just changing the lettering here and my character option. If you don't see that, just go to Window and you'll be able to bring up your character and your paragraph options. If you don't see that. That's too tight, spacing. I'm just going to noodle around with this a little bit and increase the spacing. Maybe 21 is probably perfect. I also want to take this sentence and close the gap a little there. I'm just highlighting this sentence and adjusting this ever so slightly. Perfect. I think I'm done noodling around. I can even add a Drop Shadow to this layer. So I'm just adding a Drop Shadow. Notice the Drop Shadow coming down here. It looks really nice. I'm going to extend the distance and the size. So that just adds more to the 3D type characteristics that I'm trying to go for here. Doing the same thing to the other triangle shape that we have. Let's zoom out a little bit to see our overall composition. I think that's great. If you're scrolling through Facebook right now and this popped up in your feed, I would definitely take notice and check out what the description said and see what the heck this was advertising. So if you're advertising your services as a graphic designer or a designer, or a marketer, or a virtual assistant, whatever you do, this is the stuff you need to be able to create to really grab new clients and get new attention.