Transcripts
1. Introduction to Photoshop Special Effects Course: Welcome to the photo shop. Special effects and style izing in Portrait's course. In this course, you'll learn how to add contrast made colors pop. Use a photo collage effect a pop out effect, an edible lens flare, a simulated depth of field. You'll add powerful backgrounds and Photoshopped, and also a special effect to clone people in Photoshopped. Some of these methods can be useful for improving photos, but most of them are special effects that you can add to your repertoire of photo shop effects to do for your own photos or for clients. Thanks, and I'll see in the course.
2. Adding Contrast to Portrait Photos in Photoshop: Sometimes we need to add a little bit of contrast in a portrait photo, either on the entire photo or on a specific part of the photo. And, of course, you might think well to add contrast. And we go to image adjustments, brightness, contrast and affect the contracts there. And obviously, that does make a bit more of a contrast in the photo. The darks get darker that let's get lighter if you go the left, he kind of had a more flat looking photo. However, better way to add some contrast that's a lot more customizable is to either use a layer blending mode with a new layer or to use an adjustment layer. So go ahead and open up some photo that you think needs a little bit more contrast. And first step is you just press control J on the keyboard or command D on the Mac control J on the PC Federal. Duplicate the layer, then change a layer blending mode up at the top near the top of the layers panel and change that too soft light and as a lot of contrast throughout, and if you think that's too much, you can adjust the capacity right here. Bring it down a little bit. You can also add a mask. So if you hold Ault on the PCR option on the Mac and click the add new layer mask icon on the bottom layers panel that adds a layer mask. But instead of it being white, it's filled with black by default. So because we held down all or option when we created it, now it we can see through to the bottom layer. However, we want to selectively bring back specific areas. So cheese, the brush tool. And she's a nice, soft edged brush hardness set to zero. And then we want a paint light so it brings back some of those pixels. So if you just click and drag, for example, if you wanted to bring more contrast in the iris, we could do that. The IRS says we could bring back more contrast. Say you want a more contrast in the hair and it would just selectively bring it back, and I can also or option click the mask and we can see what it looks like there says a lot more contrast in the irises of the model. Another way to add contrast to a photo. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that new layer, and I'll still press control. J like to work on a duplicated layer and then create a new adjustment layer on the bottom layers panel and click curves and on curve. Sometimes we do this manually, but there is a preset that can be pretty helpful here when you want to add contrast just on preset, click that and go to strong contrast, and it might be a little bit much. So we can, of course, adjust the A pass ity of this adjustment layer, or we can just the effect itself. So we have by default this kind of s curve here, and we can click and drag it over. So it's maybe not a strong something like that says before. And there's after. And just like with the other technique, we could mask this out and just let specific areas have higher contrast. So let's just say we wanted the irises to have one contrast or even the whole I what we could do. It already has a mass. You can see this adjustment layer, so we need to fill it with black so make sure your foreground color is set to black. If it's not, you compress a D that'll make quite the foreground of black, the background, the press X and it'll flip him. Or just click the foregoing color and drag it to black. And we need to make sure this mask it selected up here, then press all backspace on the PC or option delete on the Mac and that mass out that entire effect. So it's a Ziff defect isn't applied, but make sure the foreground color set to whites a hit x again, and she's a soft edged brush. And then you can paint in specific areas of white, and that will let that effect show through on Lee where we're painting. So if we just click and drag here, click and drag their let's say we wanted more contrast in the entire I area, including the eyelashes or just the iris. Or if you think the lips should have more contrast, Utkan click and drag there and there's before and there's after. So that's adding contrast in a portrait photo, either to the entire photo or selectively, either using a layer blending mode. Such a soft light on a duplicated layer or using a curves adjustment layer and then selectively basking it out so it applies in specific areas.
3. Making Colors Pop in Photoshop: we can make colors pop in portrait photos using photo shops, hue, saturation adjustment layers. We're gonna use adjustment layer so we can edit after the fact. And this effect is pretty cool in that it can really make the colors pop in our portrait's and also selecting certain color ranges and making them more noticeable and pop out more. So go ahead and open up, princess dot j Peg. If you want to follow along with this support file and on the bottom of Layers panel, do you go ahead and click? Add a new adjustment layer icon and go to Hue. Saturation knows we have saturation here and where, says Master by default, it's gonna affect every single color so we can bring all the way the left and it be gray scale all the way, the right to be overblown, and we want to want to do that much saturation. But for this technique, we actually want to just make the red pop out more in her hair. So upwards, says Master, Go ahead and click that and go to reds. And then if you click and drag to the right, it will start to make that hair pop out more. You notice that also the rosy cheeks there also becoming a little more saturated. We can adjust the lightness if you want, but by default it chooses this arranged down at the bottom of these sliders. So look down there and a lot of people are not aware these. But we can adjust this range and what is affecting. So let's say we wanted toe select more reds or fewer read. What we could do is just temporarily bring Hugh all the way to the right. So it just does this effect that's noticeable. So we'll know what we're affecting. What we're not. Then you see these four sliders down here, the ones on the outside you can drag, and it's not gonna affect the base area that is being sampled for this example. The Reds. It's just gonna affect kind of the feathering of the adjustment. You'll notice the colors out here are affected, but the middle range here is not being affected them in the main area. Same thing for the right hand side. So it's not affecting this primary area. That's me. In fact, it is just affecting how it does. Like if I bring it over to the right Morsi. It does start to effect some of the pixels, but if you click in, drag that middle area now, we're actually moving the entire Aaron. If I let go now, it's actually changed it up here. Where says yellows. And if I drag it here, you can see yellows. It's actually change it to yellows up there. If I click and drag over here eventually it becomes greens because this middle area is actually under the greens. So if we go over here changed the blues, so you want to keep under reds. But I want to just bring it out a little bit. So we're selecting more of the Reds and you'll see what's being affected here. So we use this technique to select more of a color range than what was originally included in there. I think that's good. Now let's bring Hugh back to zero because we don't want that effect and then saturation. We can bring to the left or the right just a pain in what look we're going for. And there we go. There's the colors popping out a lot more. Now. The cool thing about this is if we close this out, we're like, you know, maybe it's a little bit over done. You can double click on it in the layers panel and still adjust it. Just go to you reds and then adjust it there so it's alive. Effect. You can also adjust the A pass ity of this entire adjustment layer. So if you think it was too strong, you could bring it down bed and we can mask out certain areas. Say, if you didn't want this area back here affected, you can see the before and after it is affecting in the background there and you just paint with a soft edged brush. Some black here, and then there's before and then there's after so the colors are popping out a lot more show you. One more example. This one's depth the field to dodge a peg from another technique that we're in this course , so cover more things to consider. Let's go ahead and at a new hue saturation adjustment layer. Now what? Saying this one? We want the green to pop out more well, we would go to master and then green, and then we'd puppet out more But of course, maybe it's not selecting everything we want. Maybe want some of the darker greens as well, just a wider range of greens. We can just click and drag it there, and then you can see what's being affected. I need to select even more. I think spring that way. Over there we go, Really, We have all the grass. We don't want her skin tone. Really. Any on her selected are affected, But we do want all the grass affected here. So now that we have that must bring back the huge zero. That's just to see what's being affected and then bring the saturation up. Don't want to do too much. So there's before and there's after before, after one more thing to check out the me create another one. Gonna show you a cool thing right here If you click that hand. If you have Robert should say, click and drag an image to modify saturation control. Click to modify Hugh, so if I click that and I just click somewhere in the image here it Wherever I clicked, it clicked in the yellow area of the grass. And now if I click and drag left and right. While I'm on the image, it's affecting the saturation. It's kind of a scrubby zoom. If you click and drag, it will change the saturation by default. If you hold control on the PC or command on the Mac, it will actually change with you by default. So that's a couple shortcuts to be familiar with in this hue saturation technique. Again, hue saturation. We want to choose a color range over here. Let's say we didn't want to just choose some kind of color range preset here. We just want actually selected in here. Well, again, we can click that and let's just like the red here cheeses, the Reds by D phone. We can still adjusted here, and I can click and drag, and it will just the red. So it makes the Reds pop out more. It begins to affect her, though we wouldn't want that if we just want to read of this first, beat a pop out what we could do. Well, cool thing is, is thes hue. Saturation adjustment layers come with a mask so we can use the brush tool again. Soft edged brush black is a foregone color and just paint because you don't want any area. Let's say affected. Other than that Frisbee. All right. We had some on the Rufus. Well, so there's before there's after. So there we go. Ah, that is the hue saturation adjustment layer. It can be used to make colors pop in your portrait photos.
4. Photo Collage Effect Photoshop: everyone. This is another special fight to you can benefit from having in your toolbox as a portrait photographer, I call it Photo Collage. Effect is basically taking one photo like this and then doing a couple techniques that I'm gonna show you to create this look where it looks like a bunch of photos have been kind of thrown onto a table and chairs basically parts of the same photo. This works with a portrait of one person, but I think it works best with two or more people. So if you've got, say, a family portrait or some kind of group portrait, even a band portrait, a couple portrait, any kind of portrait of a group of people this really works well with. And it's something that you can add as a portrait photographer on your portfolio in your website that people can pay you a little bit extra toe ad this effect to their photos that they assigned to you to take. So to get started, I don't have a support fall for this one because you can really use any photo, that of a group of people to more people. It could be one person, but I had suggests a group of people, so go and open that up. J Peg PST file doesn't really matter for this. And you'll see I have a couple layers and then some layer styles and then added background . So let's get started. First thing we want to do we have this just one layer J peg, right, Just the background. We want to make a selection of the marquee selection tool. So select that on the Tobar. It really depends on your photo whether or not you want to do, like, say, six or eight photos. Or just do three like I did in my example, I've done you know where you have one here, one here, one there. When there they can overlap a little bit, but we're gonna be selecting this in quadrants or ah, group of six. If you want to be specific, you can actually click and drag from the ruler on the side and just know the areas. But you still want toe. It's OK to overlap a little bit. If you can't see your rulers just go to view and then rulers, I don't really need those in this example because I'm just going, Teoh, do three columns kind of just longer photos like that. So depending on your photo, it might be better actually to do six kind of areas like that. All right, so once you select one area so I'm gonna choose about 1/3 of this photo. It's not exactly third, that doesn't matter. Just just an area with the marquee selection tool Press control J. On the PC or command D on the Mac. And we've done that a lot in this course and usually just duplicates later. But we have a selection. Made it on. Lee duplicates what was selected onto its own layer. See, hit the icon of the bottom layer and you'll see this is a new layer. Now this is very important. Click the background layer on the layers panel. Make sure the top players not selected before we do our next duplication. So now click and drag, and this is the one that's gonna have the people in it. So I'm going to do something like that again. Make sure you're not on this new layer, because that's not going to duplicate much. Only the area where they overlapped it would duplicate so make sure that background layers selected in the layers panel press control J then click on the background layer again and make 1/3. I'm gonna have to overlap a little bit. It's a little bit wider, maybe a little bit more control J. And now we have three new layers, so let's add a layer style to this top one. So goto with that top one selected layer layer style, and you can choose any of these. But I'm gonna add a stroke, which is a border and also a drop shadow. Choose either of those and it will pull up to style log. So with stroke selected, I want to put position outside. I like to do a white border because it kind of looks like photos that you print out sometimes, and we'll bring this size up. This is a high risk file that I have, so the size is going to be about maybe 16 pixels or so. If you have a lower rest file and the size proportionately to the rest, you know it could be smaller, but, uh, do actually about 24 pixels, some around there, a little bit more like 30 all right blend mode. Normal capacity, 100% changing color here, Phil type color. Now I also want to add a slight drop shadow. So select there it is on the bottom to do normal, and I like to exaggerate the drop shots to know which angle it's going. If you click and drag this top left and you'll see it's actually the drop shots going bottom right? Say it real exaggerates it. I want this one going to the left or to the right and down. So I want to be super obvious Drop shadows or one of those things that you can really overdue, and it just looks kind of cheesy. So I want to just make it. There's a high risk file that some using like about. I'm a deal. I can say 40 for everything that be too large for smaller file, but is the higher is. So, uh, that's maybe we were doing it. I'd say about 35. All right, so we have a slight drop shadow for some depth look looking like it's coming off the back of the page there and then a stroke for the border. All right, click OK, Now, you might be thinking, Well wise ended up there it is there, just outside of that area that we had selected that later. All right, we're gonna fix that first thing we want to do, though, You know, we could take a long time and just do those steps over again for these two layers. Or if you have six layers, 60 layers, then you'd have to do that five more times. Well, here's a shortcut. Hold down all on the PC, your option on the Mac, and then click and drag that where it says effects. Click and drag that onto the next layer. Make sure you're not clicking and dragging the actual layer. If you do that, just gonna duplicate the layer. So all or option click and drag effects. And that's gonna bring that effects with the stroke in the drop shadow toe layer two and layer three. So now we've got the effects on all three. Now we needed Rotate them a little bit. I like to just go to the move tool. Make sure show transform controls of selected hover off the corner and just click and drag . All right, we're just meant it needs to be, Look a little bit kind of haphazard or like you've thrown it onto a desk. These photos, So some, like that is fine. Press enter or return to apply that select the next one, like did bring them left, right, left, right, enter. And this layer three, it's rotate the other way. All right, so you better effect. Noticed this one. It's kind of making her arm look kind of weird. So what you can dio is move this one over. So who's to say we can't just move them over right? So they looked like separate photos now so you can move them around. If you wanted like that, you can also rearrange them. So, like this top one, it's on the top. Just drag it below the other right? Then it's behind it. That's even better, I think. Maybe center this one little bit more. Some like it. All right, so now we need some breathing room around the edges. They're getting cut off by the edge of the campus, so we need to go to image and then canvas size, not image size that will just resize the image. Canvas size. All right, I like to do this more than what we need, and we can always crop it back. So I'm going to, like, 12 inches and I'm gonna go from six. I'm gonna go upto, like, nine inches on height and so I don't need the background layer. Right? But now we just got these transparent pixels in the background, so create a new layer on the bottom of layers panel drag it below. These two are these three new layers and then choose a foregone color bottom of the toolbar . You could pull a color out from this photo like in the close if you wanted to. I think in the example, I got some things blue here or you could just cheese, custom color, whichever you want. Click OK on the PC, hit all backspace on the Mac. It's option delete. And then that's our background. And now we can crops. Use the crop tool. Make sure there's no presets numbers up here, and we're just going to crop. There's a little bit of reading around the edge, but not so much a background double. Click inside anywhere or just hit the enter, and we can still move these layers around you know if we find okay on a move that around, you know, with this here. And you can still rotate him too. Like so just press enter to apply that. And that is the photo collage effect. It's just a good thing to offer to clients that you can just add a little more personality to their photos.
5. Pop Out Effect in Photoshop: as a portrait photographer. Sometimes your clients might want you to add some special fixture photos after the fact. For example, a popular method is this pop up effect or pop out effect so you can have people pop out of photo sideways like this or from below. I'll show you how to do this with a couple quick and easy steps. So go ahead and open up a photo that you want to work with, and we need to duplicate this layer twice. So on the PC Press Control J twice on the Mac Press Command J Twice. Now we have three identical layers. Let's go ahead and make this background layer of solid color so she's some kind of foreground color and then press all backspace on the PC or option delete on the Mac. Now let's add a new layer, so creating new layer icon on the bottom layers panel and drag it so it's second from the top. So if it's on the top, just drag it down. Blow that layer. So now we have to photo layers and then a transparent for now layer and then a background layer that has a solid, filled color make sure you have this transparent layer selected, and let's go ahead and make a selection with a rectangular marquee tool where you think the photo would be something like that. You can, of course, hover and click and drag an after the fact. Now let's go to edit and then stroke and set the color. I would do white for the border of a photo, but we can choose whichever color then for with is going to depend on how big your photo is . If you have a very large photo with high resolution, very large dimensions, you want more than this. Maybe, but I'm just going to do 30 pixels. If you have a smaller photo like, say, 100 by 600 pixels, A 72 pixels per and she could even like 10 pixels or 12. 15 seem like that. But I'm to 30 kind experience with the size. Make sure blending motor set to normal on opacity. 100% click OK, hit the icon of this top layer so that we can see Bruges with an invisibility to the top layer for now and then what we need to do is distort this a little bit, so it has more perspective. So what? They're still selected with this layer to still selected, go ahead and go to edit and then transform and then perspective. And what we're going to do is click and drag that in a little bit. If you just click and drag one edge, one corner, it'll pull the other quarter in and in the bottom one click and drag it out a little bit. Something like that. Now, if this is to hire low, you can't really edit it. Right now. I need a press entered, apply this changes and then go back to go to edit than free transform. Then you can move it up and down with that top run there. Something like that and for this example, may well just pulled down even more and press enter sort of looking a little bit different than the example already did. And this one, too. Harsono weaken de select. If you If you still have it selected, that's great. If you don't let's say we clicked off somewhere. We don't have it selected. Just hold control in the PC, your command on the Mac and just click that layer that has the picture frame on it Weaken Rename it to to keep it straight can just double click on that name. Just gonna pin type and picture frame. So now we need Teoh Select this area around here and kind of group it with with this area. So how we can do that is actually going to select and then in verse or shift control I on the PC shift command on the Mac Now press cue to enter Quick mask mode in this area can turn just red tint right. Then choose the paint bucket tool, click and hold onto the grading tool. It's like paint bucket, which won't click out in this area here. All right, so should look something like that. Now press Q again and you'll notice now just this area selected. We could had de selected all that. Also, by holding all on the PC year, option the Mac and using maybe the public in a lasso tool and just clicking, dragging around it. But that was just faster way to use the quick mask. Now click on the layer one right here, this bottom photo layer, and we need to add a layer mask Because when we click this add layer mask on the bottom of the layers panel is gonna mask out everything but this area that selected. So go ahead and click. Add layer mask and you'll notice we have the photo inside this border here and we can adjust this. This is a mask, remember? So if you want to paint in white, you'll kind of see what would happen if I painted in white. It would come in, but we don't have really the edge there, right? And also that picture frames still is in there. So I just did at undue just kind of giving 90. These these mass or not really erasing their nondestructive are racing. We can bring back the pixels by painting, wait in painting black and will will mask out the pixels. So the next step is to go upto layer one copy, and what we need to do there is actually make a selection. So just bring back the visibility. And depending on your photo, we just need to make a selection of this area up here and then add a layer mask. So I'm gonna use the quick selection tool and click and drag up here something like this. And you compress the left and right brackets on the keyboard as we pain to resize, or you can change it upon. The options panel appears well, of course. And so you see some of here here, we can do better job. If you hold on all on the PC or option on the Mac, you can subtract from an area. If you hold shift, it won't add to orders the default. He also had the options appear on the options panel. Okay, so that painted on too much So all or option click and drag it back there. All right, That should be enough, basically, as long as it is going down to the level of the top of the marquee selection, all that we've done. So this part's not such a That's fine, because the tough it's about there. But if you wanted to do that, we could just click and drag it in there. All right there. As far as the hair up here we can go to, we could really zoom in and just fine tune it, or we can go to select and then refine edge and then click on Smart Radius, which you ever find radius tool. Bring the radius up a little bit and you can experiment with that. But you can also paint in. If you hold down all or option, it will kind of remove it from If you click and drag it in here, just click and drag without holding anything on the keyboard. It'll really improve the edge. Here. You'll see. But again, if you will, all it'll subtract from as well. So I think that does a pretty good job bringing in a little bit. We'll see what it looks like. Uh, so depending your photo experiment with that and the radius, you can bump up and bring back and forth accordingly. Then just click. OK, all right, then add layer mask to this and you'll notice you can actually go in and change this paint a little bit more black in with the brush tool. Like so. So it's an edit herbal mask, which is pretty cool. And then we can actually paint white and to bring it back to get Mrs Spot there. All right, so that is the pop out technique, all right, and this top if you'll see down to the bottom. I actually need to bring. I need to mask out this area so that the frame comes through. So it's like that area you could actually select more, because it's gonna show through down to there. So there's gonna click and drag up to there. I need to fill that with a black, so make sure the foregoing colors, black press, all backspace. And there we go. And you can all click the masks and see what they look like for both of those for both of news layers. All right, so that's the pop out technique it uses just perception, distortion, re sizing of border there and a couple of masking techniques. And so you can use this on different Portrait's. If you want to do this from the side like this, the only difference is that you would click and drag when you goto edit, transform perspective, just click and drag this down, and then we're gonna mask out from the side instead of from the top right there where they come out from the bottom. So have fun with that technique. This is Chad from good creative academy. We'll see in the next lecture
6. Editable Lens Flare Technique in Photoshop: lens flares often happen in portrait photography. Naturally, for example, in this photo, there is just a natural lens flare from the lens coming in from the sun being behind the subject. Sometimes we want to add one after the fact, though. And so here's how to do that. And here's a tip. How to create a customizable lens flare going to open up some kind of photo, even a photo you took inside as long as there's a light behind the subject pointing toward the camera at some kind of angle, starting from the left, the right or any angle behind the person pointing forward toward where the camera's located . Then it would make sense. Toe. Have a lens flare. We don't want to Adeline Slur to a photo where the light is on Lee coming from behind the photographer toward the subject and no light source behind the subject or even to the side or a little bit over here. So in this example, I wanna had a lens flare, and so if I just go to filter, render blends flair and then I was standing right here, and you can choose what kind of lens type you want 5300 millimeters zoom. 35 millimeter, 100 5 million in your movie prime, and you can also just the brightness. So let's just say that some like that click OK, and then we have our lens flare. The problem, though, is that it's now part of this background layer. It is not creditable unless we just want to add it. All the pixels. So I'm gonna go to edit, undo and what we do. Let's say we created a new layer and try to add a lens slur to that So filter render blends flair. We can't because it's an empty layer. We can add a lens. Flare it an empty layer. So what we need to do is Phil this with the color, add the lens flare and then adjust the layer blending mood. First, let's go ahead and add the lens flare that we're gonna undo will show you why. So go to filter, render lens flare, and we can see where we would want it to be located. Probably just about here somewhere with a light would be coming from, and I think that looks pretty good and click OK and now let's go to at it. Undo. I'll show you why In a second go to layer one, make sure foreign color is set to black. If not, you can just press D that'll do the default, foreground and background. Then press all backspace in the PC or option delete on the Mac fills it with black pixels. Now let's get a filter than lens flare. We do this right here. Don't go to filter and then render than the lens flare again. We just need to go to filter lens for cause that's gonna put that lens flare with the same settings in the same location that we just did earlier. So filter lens flare re does that effect, and now we needed to show through. So the black pixels don't show up when combined with lower layer. So go to layer blending mode and go to screen. And now, if you hit the icon next to this top layer, there's the effect without the lens flare and there's the effect with it. Now you might be thinking all looks kind of fake, you know, it's a little bit overdone. This is why we make this on a new layer. We can adjust the capacity, bring it down a little bit. We can also go to filter, blur Gaussian, blur and weaken. Blurred a little bit like a little bit more realistic, more subtle. And let's say you just didn't want some of the length, so you can also add a mask. So if you add a layer mask, bob in layers panel, choose a soft edged brush. Make sure the foregoing color set toe black hardness set to zero. And let's say you just didn't want this one right here. It just click and drag mass it out. There's before there's after they're still a subtle brightness coming to the back. You can also move it around with the move tool. If you just click and drag, you can see it right there. You can move it around. You can rotate it, click and drag over the corner. Make sure we stretch it out a little bit if you want it to look realistic. Doesn't matter if you stretch it out compared to other pixels. I mean, it's not gonna really picks late per se like it. Regular photo would. It's just this. It's already blurry cause we've added a blur just wins Flor effect. So and then just double click to apply those changes. There's before there's after. And so that's why we created this on a new layer. We can mask it out. We can adjust capacity, we can rotate it, we can move it around. We can add a little bit of a blur. And so that's the secret of creating a lens flare that's more edit herbal.
7. Simulated Depth of Field in Photoshop: when you're taking a photo. One thing to consider is if it's a portrait or even a future photo is the background blurry , and then the subject in focus That would happen if you had obviously a wide open aperture Load up the field Low number f Stop. Now, if you took a photo and you had more of a mid range F stop or longer debt the field higher number more closed aperture. You can go back in voter shop and add what I call a simulated at the field. So to follow along, go ahead and opened up the field. Want order up the field to either one. First thing we want to do is press control J on the peace here, Commander on the Mac that duplicates a layer. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna blur one of these layers and then we're gonna use masking and let her pop through tack sharp as well as the foreground area the grass, so that should be tack sharp. Then the mid range will just have a gradual effect where it may paint some gray in there we could use ingredient to, but regardless we want to really blow out the background, so it's less distracting and just a better photo overall. So after you've duplicated this layer, let's blur this top layer. So go ahead and go to filter blur. Gaussian blur, and it really depends on how much you want blur the background out so just ignored or of the four grand area in the subject. Just look at the background and just think about how blurred we want it, so that's probably pretty good. So I got about 4.8, but paint on the photo you're using and really, how blurred out the background we want it to be someone as a reminder of just call this blurred backgrounds a double click that name just called a blurred layer and then the bottom. When I'm in a double clicking, just call it original layer. So get the blurred layer and the original air, so there's two ways to do this effect. We can add a mask to the blurred layer when it's on top and then mask through where she is and also the foreground color, and then slightly a mask through the middle ground and leave the background blurry. Or we could put the original air on top and just mask through this background area either way, so I'll probably the second methods. So the original layers on top the one that's in focus blurred layers on bottom. Go ahead and add a layer mask, so we're gonna click that at the bottom of the layers. Panel creates this mask here, make sure your foreground is set to black. If it's not just press D on the keyboard, that'll do default, foreground and background waiting black and then press X, and it will flip those. She's a nice, soft edged brush on the toolbar and make sure hardness is set to 0%. You can change the size there, or he compress the right and left brackets to resize it. We would really create a selection around her if we wanted to be really detailed. But I'm just gonna blur out this area here. So you see that it's blurring at the background but not blurring at her. So something like this. So we do have a soft edge. We could do hard edge brush all right, 100% and go right up to the edge of her and then left bracket to make it smaller. The problem is, as we get pretty close, we really need to zoom in. So if we want to make a selection for this example, we could use the quick selection tool and just click and drag on the It's just like that and then flip back to the brush tool and just brush. And if you think it's too harsh oven edge, you can go to any of the selection. Select modify feather Add like maybe a to pixel feather. That actually looks pretty good. There would probably doom and just really modify those with more of a selection. But for the purposes of this lecture, I just wanted it pretty quickly. See, left bracket. So I do selection there. But I think that should be fine for our purpose. Is must switchback Teoh A soft edged brush. All right, whatever. I create a mask like this. So we're racing through to the bottom layer, right? Whenever I create one like this, I like to hold on all on the PCR option the Mac, and then we can see areas we missed. So over here, I need to paint some black in over here as well. You could select that, of course, and fill it in. But all right, so don't click it again, and obviously that we could improve this edge a little bit more. But just for the purposes of time, just don't want to spend the entire time just doing the selections. But you get the idea so the background is blurred out. The problem is, there's this harsh edge to it, even with a soft edged brush. So really, we needed paint in some grey. So cheese, the foregoing color just picked kind of a midtown, and we're gonna paint in gray here instead of black. And here's well, and this is the middle ground, maybe a little bit farther up, and you can all or option click and see that we've got some gray. The gray is gonna partially show through to the bottom layer, which is the blur blurred layer, and part of the top layer will show when I completely mask out these pixels appear. Then it's going to show through to the blurred layer and then the area that I just have white. It's just gonna show the top layer. So that's our assimilated up the field. We could also do kind of a greeting effect. Someone get rid of this mask and creating new one. Delete it. Credit new a mask here. And if I choose the Grady and Tool and upon the options panel, just make it from foreground background. So it's white to black and make sure your mode is set to normal and hold shift for a straight line and just click and drag from the top down to the bottom while we have this mass elected. And that's another effect. The problem is, we don't want her to be blurry, all excitement reading that bring it a little bit further down. Okay, so we need to paint white back in there so we'll flip that. Make sure foreground is white will paint on top her, so she's tack sharp again. I do a selection if we're gonna be really precise, and that's more of a gradual look. So if we look at our mask here, it's gradually going from mast out to not messed out. And then I'm making sure the foreground, but also paint this foreground to make sure it's white because we want this to be tax trouble went her and the four going to be tack sharp, the middle ground to be gradually going into massed out area, which will show through. So that's assimilated up the field to methods, whether used the Grady in or whether you painted in the ideas that were blurring out the background. So it looks like we used a load up the field wide open aperture after the fact.
8. Adding Powerful Backgrounds in Photoshop: What time's in studio portrait photography? The photographer would use kind of abstract background. Ah, that adds a little bit of texture and interest but doesn't really distract from the subject . However, sometimes you can add backgrounds using Photoshopped. Wanna go over the basics of adding a background photo shop and some of the example backgrounds that you can create using layering in photo shop. So go ahead and open up any kind of portrait photo that has a simple background that's delineated from the subject. If you need to add a little bit of contrast or just the curves weaken, do that. I'm gonna work on a duplicated layer. So oppressed control or command J on the PC or Mac And then I'm gonna go Teoh Image adjustments, curves. I was gonna pull us down just a little bit, just so that's a little bit darker in the foreground here. Okay, so what we're gonna do is cut out the subject from the background. So depending on your photo, you might have to use a manual selection techniques. If there's not really a clearly delineated difference between the subject in the background and this one, there is a difference for the most part, so we can actually use the quick selection tool. And I'm just going to click and drag around the subject like so that does a pretty good job . Oh, went too far. Try again. So I'm a de select. I'm actually select this subject instead, and you can adjust Ah, some of the settings up at the top with the quick selection tool we want. Sample all layers unchecked for this example. Me, unless you especially if a bunch of other layers. But if you have add to that's gonna add to the selection camp subtract from is going to subtract from it. Or you can just hold down all on the peace here. Option on the Mac and that will subtract from like in this area here. When you does, subtract from press the left bracket on the keyboard to resize and subtract from this area , and we need it Oh, or option. Click and just subtract battery and then hold shift and add to an area. And if you find you know it's not really working well, you can also use, say, the polygonal lasso tool. Have a straight line chairman hold shift it was going to use that for that edge there. Double click to bring him back around in this year. Here. Mina shift click. So now added that to it. I'm gonna hold down all all clicking. There should be good. I'm gonna control or command minus looks pretty good so far. Need this area here subtracted from the area. So do some like that. Okay, so we see right here. We need to add that I can actually just again with, uh, quick selection tool. It looks pretty good. Was looking ever makes you don't have any areas in here that need to be selected. Like, for example, if I had this year like that, make sure we have that all selected like, so. All right. So that looks pretty good. We can actually adjust this, though, with our finance. If you get a select and refine edge and the smart radius find radius, Tillman is gonna paint around just a little bit with this hair. Make it a little bit more delineated. Bump of three is just a little bit. I got 1.2, but depends on your photo and click. OK, and so that looks pretty good. Oh, notice right here. Need add that to it. Miss that. Okay. All right. Much better. So once you haven't air selected, we can. Also, if you want to feather the edge, you can go to select Modify, feather. Just sort of softer edge. I don't like to feather too much, but I was gonna do one pixel. They were press control, J. What that does is press the icon of the other two layers. Now we have them on its own layer. Right? So the next step is to add a background. If you had a layer by clicking the create new layer I kind of bomb layers panel and your basic layer, you can set your foreground color to some color. Kind of a subtle color. Set your background toe analogies, color that would be next to it on the color wheel or a complimentary color, just depending. What kind of look you're going for? So if you do analogies, then you can choose the radiant tool in the first selection. Here's foreground. The background. Click and drag. Let your kind of your basic added background. Let's create another one, though Hit. The icon of that was creating the layer. I always try another one, so you can also add a filter bigger. Some ideas filter render clouds, and that's kind of like that abstract background. He's seen some portrait studios, but you can customize a lot mawr. If you think it's too strong or too detailed, you can go to filter, blur, Gaussian Blur and its board a little bit. Maybe not too much. Create a new layer good a filter. Render clouds again, and you can adjust the layer blending mode of that one so it interacts with the one below it makes it or lightened overlay. You can also rotate it if you wanna have different effects. If you think it looks better, you could make it larger, so you have a larger photo. Just enter over, laid on top of the other one. So there's with or without it adds a little bit more texture to it. And if you think these air too strong, you can bring the opacity down of one or both of them like so you can also have them interact with this Grady int. So, for example, this one here lets make this say soft light and make this one a soft light as well. And then you got a nice mixture of that abstract textured background with the Grady in. So that's adding a textured background that you've seen a lot of studio portrait photography just after. The fact is, just rendering clouds. You can also try rendering fibers doing those kind of things in there. You can also go to let me do creating new layer here. So we're kind of new layer press all backspace or option delete on the Mac all back backspace on the PC. So you fill it with the foreground color on this new layer and then go to filter render lighting effects. Wait for this to come up, and you can, you know, add some kind of lighting effect so you can adjust the intensity. How large is the hot spot? Is all these different settings on it in the properties panel? What we have that open up and enter that applies it. Obviously, no, we can't see the room to the bottom. So what, You can dio and then change the opacity of the top layer, maybe adjust the you can do normal. Some of these aren't gonna work, too well with because you know the lighting ones. Ah, the ones that lighten it a little bit. You're not going to see much. And then if you darken it, you could multiply. But really, you just do normal. Bring the A passerby down that it does add a little bit of lighting to that background. So there's without the lighting effect with the leading effect. So that's adding a abstract background to a photo after the fact and voter shop.
9. Meeting Your Clone Effect in Photoshop: one fund technique and portrait. Photography is the cloning technique, where you take a camera on a tripod or some other stable source and take multiple photos and put the person in different parts of the scene and then stitch them together afterwards . Go ahead and open up, Clone one and clone to dodge a peg from the support files. So we have two photos here, my friend Chris, and you could use the move tool. Click and drag one to the other and bring the opacity down on the top and try to stitch it together perfectly. You know, if we had it, ah, actually pretty close. And then he brought the capacity up like so. And then we'd want to add a layer mask on the top layer here, and he's a brush. Soft edged brush with blank is the foreground color, and we just paint in the other Chris here. Promise. It's slightly off. You can see there. There's some distortion in the leaves of that palm tree there, so here's a better way to do that. So I closed out this edited one and reopened it so it's not an edited photo, and so this technique I'm gonna show you is usually used for landscape photography to make panoramic, but we can use it in portrait photography to do this clone technique. So go ahead and go to file. Automate. Vote, emerge Then, if you don't have anything open, you can click, browse and find these photos. Otherwise, just click. Add open files. If you have more files open, just remove those from this list. So we just have clone one Dajae peg and clone to dodge a peg. And there's some options here like perspective cylindrical, spherical. I'm just gonna leave it on auto and just have blend images together, checked and just press okay, and it's gonna go through and mask out and combine these two together like So The problem is, now we only have one person, right? And you can see on this one. He's messed out. And on this one he is not right. So if I click this or option, click this on the Mac, you can see the two masks. So what we need to do? There's just one more step. Is this one where you can see in the thumbnail? He's on the left. We need to paint some white in there, so make sure the foreground color set toe white cheese, a nice, soft edged brush with the brush tool hardener set to zero and just click and drag, and we can bring him in here now. The important thing. And that's our technique. The important thing to consider when you're taking these photos if you want to use your own , is to make sure the phone the camera does not change in between shots, so you need to use a tripod or some other way to stabilize the camera in between shots. Also, we don't want to change the focus in between the shot. So after it, auto focus is just said it to manual focus. We also don't want to change the white balance the I S o the film speed, the shutter speed or the aperture because you don't want a different depth of field between the two shots. All right, you can try it just set to auto, but you might end up with different settings between shots, depending on if it has the same settings. All right, so that's the clone technique. It's pretty fun. Another portrait technique to add your toolbox
Chad Neuman, Ph.D., Professor, Graphic Designer, Digital Media Expert
