Photoshop Workflows - Dreamscapes

1. Introduction Dreamscape: Welcome to the most hands on photoshop course you've ever seen. This isn't your typical feature tour. We are diving straight into exciting creative projects, and you are encouraged to create completely unique designs. This project is about creating an imaginary landscape or the way I like to call it a dreamscape. Now this time, we will heavily rely on degenerative AI features in photoshop, especially generative fill. Here are just a few examples of what's possible to creating photoshop with this workflow. Again, starting with a completely blank canvas and filling it up, mainly relying on the generative fiel feature. The type of dreamscape that you will create is only limited by your own imagination. Whether you are an aspiring graphic designer, photographer, marketer, or simply an individual with a passion for visual storytelling, Mastering photoshop provides you with the tools to bring your visions to life. This course is perfect for you if you are new to Photoshop, or if you are staff told and you need to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Parkin, a certified adobe expert and instructor with a design background spanning over two decades. Throughout my career, I collaborated with renowned clients such as Disney, Mattel, Cartoon Network, Nilodeon, and BBC. Learn to use photoshops latest features together with the fundamental building blocks, like layers, adjustments, selections, transformations, masking, smart objects brushes, and so much more. Can also future proof your skills by mastering Photoshop's amazing generative AI features. I am not just teaching photoshops. I am empowering you to express yourself, tell your story, and create designs that resonate with your unique style. This is your chance to create work that is truly personal and worthy of your professional creative portfolio. You can follow along with each project and replicate my designs, or you can use the workflows and techniques I show you and create something completely different and unique. So are you ready to revolutionize the way you learn photoshop? Your creative adventure with Photoshop starts right here. O. 2. Establishing the scene: For this project, we will start a blank new document, and I will be using the desktop version of Photoshop. So once we choose new file, the size I will start with is going to be 2000 by 1,500, and resolution set 272 RGB color mode. And once you create this, you will get a blank document. Now, let's select everything, command or Control A, and then using the contextual Taz bar, we will click on generative fill. In case you can find this Taz bar, it's in the window menu all the way here at the bottom. Now, what I would like as my prompt is mountains, but to be more specific, I want it to look like the Dolomites Mountains, which is a mountain range in the north east of Italy. These mountains are just gorgeous. I've been there several times, both in the summer and the winter, and it's always very photographic, scenic, one of those beautiful places that will look great in a composition. Now, this looks epic. I really like this one. And to be honest, all three looks like they could be in the dolomite. I actually like this one as well. This looks really good, too. And it's actually something that probably we would be able to work better with. But let's just generate again. Just to get a few additional options to start with. And whenever it comes to these dreamscapes, which I like to call them, it's important what you start with. So the first image is crucial because everything will be built around that. So it's worth creating a few options before you settle for something. So again, I like this one, and this looks really promising. I also like this one. I think I'm still preferring this one the most. So let's just generate one more time. Give it another shot. It's almost like gambling. You can keep creating and generating more and more until you are happy with it, and it's hard to stop, like in gambling. So let's just see, this is a little bit off. I don't like the colors in this one. And this is not bad, not bad. And that's quite nice, but not specifically what I'm looking for. So I'm actually going to settle for this one. And what I'm going to continue to do is to use the crop tool. Make sure it's cleared, so there is no ratio set for it. The crop tool, by the way, is C on the keyboard shortcut or just select it from the tool bar here on the left. And most importantly, you want to make sure that the fill is set to generative expand. With that, you will be able to extend your canvas. And I want to extend it in both directions. Let's see what happens. If I press enter, it's going to automatically generate details based on whatever is currently in the document. So if you don't type in any prompts, that means it's just going to generate something random, but we'll try to continue whatever is already existing in your composition. And that looks really good. I really like the way we have this curve here in the composition. That is going to give a nice framing to everything. So, yeah, I think that is going to work nicely. I am going to further extend the canvas. Now I'm going to extend it up a bit like that. Let's see. This is probably going to be a fairly easy one because we just have to add some sky or clouds in there. I think that will be fairly easy for photoshop to do. Yeah. Of course, again, we have options to choose from, but there's not much difference here, so I'm going to go with this first one. Now I'm going to drag the canvas down. I want to have a little bit more details here at the bottom as well. This should add some more forest details for us. And then I am going to actually extend it again both to the left and the right, just to change the aspect ratio a bit, make it more of a landscape shot. Let's generate one more time. Okay? That looks quite nice. Now, what I would like is to have a lake in the foreground. For this, I am going to actually make a selection now. So I will use the less tool. And with this, I am just going to draw a selection here in the foreground. Something like that. And holding down Shifke, if you missed any parts, you can just draw over it again, and let's type in Lake in the mountains. And we got one result. Here is another one, and here's another one. Now the main problem is that there are lots of people here, and I don't actually want anyone to be in the image. So I'm going to write Lake in the mountains without any people. This one is looking better or ready. But let's just move on. Maybe check this one. This is looking quite nice. Although there are still some details here, but we can easily tidy them up by creating a new layer and just using the remove tool. So I select that. It's a brush, so we can increase the brush size with the square brackets on the keyboard and just paint over any details we wish to remove. There's one there. All of this here, I would like to remove. The edge is not nicely aligned here, so I'm going to paint over this one more. That's better. Paint over this and that some more details here. Just very quickly tidy this up. Yeah. That is looking already much better. So that's our composition so far. I like where we got from the original image. So we extended it quite a lot. If you use the alter option key, when you click on the icon over layer, you can turn off everything else, and then using the same shortcut again, you can bring them all back one more time. Now, if you want to add more mountains, we could use the less tool one more time and just over here and maybe down there. Let's see what happens if I type in mountains. And again, we have a couple of options to choose from. I feel like I want to have a little bit more mountains, and also, I want them to be in the suns of mountains lit by sun. Let's see if we can generate some more interesting details here. Okay. So we have 123. That's quite a nice detail here. I like this one. Then I'm going to use the rectangular market tool and make a selection of all of this part here, maybe even higher, something like that. Come all the way down here, and then just type in mountain peaks in the sun. I would prefer to have a little bit more sun in the image. I like the details here on the left side. And I also like this detail here on the right. But I guess it's good to have some contrast. So some details are in shade, some details are in the sun, since we have an overcast day clearly. There are some clouds here. Okay, so this is quite interesting. This is quite nice. There's even one where the sun is behind the mountains that doesn't really make sense because the sun is actually more towards us the way it's lit currently. So yeah, this is better. So what we can do is now build on top of this and just make more mountains here, rocky mountains. Let's see what happens. That is quite nice. We have some more sun detail here, and we can just add a little bit more mountains on this side here as well. Just type in dolomites, maybe, again, it's good to vary your prompts. You will get different results, of course, depending on what you type in. So it's always worth experimenting a bit. And yet, that looks really good. Let's see what else we have. Okay, I quite like this one. So we already have three distinct shapes here. Again, if we go back to the original image, it had something similar, but now we have more sunlit details. So it's really a good variation between shade and light. I think we are ready now with the main details. So what we can do is to refine it with the top of the mountains. I'm going to create a new layer, and I will use again, the removal tool and just paint over the top here. With this, we can refine the edges. So if there are some details that don't look good, we can refine it. And again, that did a really good job refining those edges. Again, here, I feel like there is an edge which we can remove in the clouds, and that looks already much better. 3. Building a castle: So now it's time to add some exciting details. First of all, I would like to have a castle here in the middle, so I will make a selection using the rectangular market tool. If I hold down the space bar, I can reposition this selection. I think maybe somewhere around here is going to be a nice place to start and then hit generative fill and type in castle, maybe medieval castle. L et's see what happens. Sometimes, the wording could be different, maybe fortress would work better for the style that you need. But it's really hard to tell at the beginning, so you have to explore different options. I actually quite like these two. This is close to what I wanted. Let's see. The first one is clearly not what we need. Yeah, I feel like this one could work quite nicely. So let's just keep adding to this. So if I keep this here and I make another selection next to it, I will again just type in castle. Since we already have some detail there, it's going to try to resemble that most of the time. So it's always easier. Once you establish one detail that you like, you can extend that. And yeah, we can see that it did a really good job extending that. I like this detail. I like the ruin wall. But I will still stick to this one first. Let's move on and make a selection further out. But always make sure that you keep some details of the existing castle selected as well. That way, it's more likely that photoshop is going to continue those parts. Now, we'll actually extend this selection all the way out here and then type in again castle. We got the first one, second and third. This looks really interesting. I like this one. So let's see before and after it change the structure of the mountain a bit, but I like it. There is some interaction between these hills in the foreground and the mountains in the background. Yeah, it feels like a very big fortress now. So we can add some more interesting details here. Maybe just type in again towers or fortress. Fortress with Towers. Let's see what happens. That's the only ique part of the composition at the moment, in my opinion. So let's see if we can improve that and make it more interesting. So that's one, two, and three. Okay. Yeah, I feel like that looks the most realistic. Yeah, I like this. It's a very strong line of wall here. And we can just add the new layer, use the removed tool and paint over this flag that it created. We don't need that one there. Instead, I would like to add some interesting details like a tower somewhere here. So I am going to make a selection, maybe something like that, and then type in medieval tower. So we got this. I quite like this one. That one is a little bit messy. This one is good. However, it interrupted our structure quite a lot. So in cases like this, what you can do is instead of using the whole layer that was generated, you can just use parts of it. So select the layer mask, this thumbnail here, and then choose the brush tool. And I'm going to use 100% opacity soft edge brush, so the hardness of the brush, I leave on 0%, and start painting over with black as my four ground color. So that way we are hiding details. And that means we are bringing back the original wall. Like so. Now here we can maybe change the hardness up to 100% and paint over the wall again until we get it like that. And then press x on the keyboard. We can switch back and forth between the white and black colors. We can actually create a perfect transition between the wall and the tower we added. So, yeah, that looks quite good. So you don't always have to sacrifice all the selected area that you initially had when you're using generative fill. You can just use it partially. And this looks so good that I'm even tempted to increase the height of this tower by having another detail edit on top of it. So let's just do another generative fill and say tower. And let's see the three options that we got. It's not bad, but not the best results, so I'm going to just generate one more time, and we got again a bit weaker results. So I actually prefer it without. I'm going to press back space to delete this detail, go back to the way it was, and maybe just try another tower somewhere around here. I'm going to again make a bigger selection and type in medieval tower. And I think the second one looks quite good. Yeah. The second one I really like. Although it blends a bit too much into the background. Not sure if that's going to work for us, so not again, maybe we can select the mask and using the brush tool, we can paint over this with black until we get back down here. So I'd just make this tower a bit shorter and just draw over it to add some interesting detail until it feels more aligned to what we wanted to create here. Like here, we can just cut into it a bit. And also here, maybe we can cut into it, make it more like a ruin. Okay? That looks quite nice. So let's see before and after. That certainly adds some character to the castle. And last but not least, I would like also to have a point of interest here on the top right. So I will make a big selection here. And I'm going to type in ruined medieval tower. Now even though this is a bit further away from the existing castle details, it should still pick up the style of the castle and should be able to resemble that somehow. So that first one is quite cool. Let's see the next one. That's much smaller than what I expected. This is not really in proportions, quite like this one, but let's give this another go. This thin column is quite cool too. So let's just generate. Whenever you see something that is close to what you wanted, but not perfect, it's always worth generating another time, at least one additional round. Okay. Yeah. I think I mean, that's quite nice detail. I'm not sure about the colors on it. I feel like this is probably still the best or this one. It's more subtle, but that fits the composition better. This feels almost like a drawing. Let's just do another generate. Maybe we will be more lucky next time. Okay. So we got again a few additional results. Okay, this is good. I like this one, so I can just use the mask, and I'm going to paint over the flag. Definitely, that's something I don't want. Going to use a soft edge so we get a better blend between the sky details and what we have in the composition. And let's just take a look. Okay. I think I would like to keep this as well. So I will use the white brush with a hard edge, and I'm going to paint over this part here and trying to make it feel like it's in the right perspective. If you have a tablet, it can help to add more details faster. But I am going to try to just use the mouse this time and create some interesting details here. Just simply by masking over it. And I feel like that works quite well, let's see without this layer and with this layer. Yeah, that certainly added some interest there. 4. Adding more interest and depth: And I feel like now it's time to move on to the foreground. So I actually want to have an island here. But for this, we might need to extend the composition a bit more. So let's see what happens if I add a bit more space here with the crop tool. So I just press C on the keyboard, dragged the bottom of the canvas down, and there should be more water detail added, but that will just give us more space to add some lake in here. Yeah, so we have more water. And I'm going to create a fairly large selection. Like that. And let's see what happens if we type in island. This actually added a castle, even though we didn't ask for that. These ruins are interesting, so I might actually keep those in there. To have space for our island, I'm actually going to use a new empty layer and use the Clone tool. Which is more of a manual retouching tool, but this will help us to direct the generative fill in the direction we want. So I'm going to paint over all of this section here and get rid of all of this darker detail in the water. Alt or Option click to sample, and then simply just paint over the water. So we have that detail there. Now I'm going to old click again to sample, maybe from here, paint over a bit more these details. And I feel like that already looks better. Maybe a little bit of that wall or structure we can have here on the left side as well. Now, it's important to mention whenever you use the Clone Stem tool, you should set the sampling to all layers that way you can use it non destructively on a separate layer like I did in this case. And if you feel like the details that you created don't blend perfectly, you can switch back to the remove tool. And with that, just paint over any details that you don't like, and it should help you to blend them or align them to each other. I feel like this wall can be adjusted a little bit, so I'm going to paint over it just so it doesn't look repetitive. Maybe even completely remove it, and maybe just go over this side as well. Again, just trying to avoid any repetition. And I feel like that looks already quite good. Now, maybe we can add some rocks in the lake instead of an island. So I'm going to make a selection here. Actually, the whole part of the water can be selected, and just type in rocks in lake. This is just to break up that big surface of water, just to add some interest to it. This one actually looks quite good, although I don't really like the right side of it, so I'm going to use the mask and just paint over this with a soft edge brush. So let's get rid of these details. I only need the ones on the left. Really like those, and maybe we can try to paint on top of this. So if I make another selection, and just maybe also include a bit more at the bottom. I will just type in island. Let's just give it a shot again. Maybe it's going to help now that we have some rocks there to turn this into a small island. And yes, it starts to look better already, so this is without, and this is with. There's some soil here and some plants. So we can just extend on that, maybe at some bushes. Yeah. That's looking more interesting. Okay, I quite like the way this looks. But on the previous layer here, I feel like the backdrop changed quite dramatically, so I'm going to use the mask and just remove a little bit of that. I actually preferred the shore originally the way it looked. So let's just see a few of my layers before. And these more recent layers after. Yeah, that definitely edit some visual interest here in the foreground. And I can see a visible edge here. So let's just check which layer was that? I think the most recent one. So I will just paint over that again in the mask with a soft edge brush until it's blended in perfectly. Now, what I feel like is still lacking interest is this left side of the composition. So I'm just going to make a big marquee selection here, and I will just type in cliffs. This is what we got. It is quite good. There's even a cave inside there, and that's also interesting. This is actually quite nice. This last one, a bit more subtle. First one is a little bit too dominant, maybe. Let's see without it and wid, and then the third option again without and wid. I'm actually going to keep this once again before and after. I like the way this looks. Now, just to add some more visual interest. I will see if I can add a dead tree here in the foreground. So something that is growing out of this piece of land, a couple of rocks. So I will just type in dead tree, white dead tree. That would give us good contrast from the background. So let's see if it can be generated. Yeah. That looks perfect. It's exactly what I had in mind. Uh, yeah, I like this first one the most. And then to make it even more interesting, we will add the bird here on one of these branches. So maybe right here is a perfect spot for a bird of prey. It could be an eagle, a hawk, or maybe an owl. Might be even more interesting. Let's try that. Although owls would go out hunting at night, as we know, it might be an interesting bird to see on this tree. And I really like this one. This looks perfect. It has a good contrast from the background as well. And in terms of proportions, it feels right. It might feel a little bit too big, but I think it will work for what we have here. And by the way, as you can see, I positioned this point of interest, which turned into a focal point in the composition to the third of the composition. So if we use the crop tool, we can turn on the rule of thirds overlay, by just simply start dragging the edges around a bit. And we can see that if it was placed here, it would be even closer to that third point. But I'm still happy with this. So as long as it's not all the way in the center, it helps to create a more dynamic composition. So now we have a lot of exciting things both in the foreground, midground, and the background. And maybe one thing that we could try is to have something even further in the back. Maybe have a selection here on the left. And then just type in snowy peaks. Let's see what happens. Maybe we can add some additional layer in the composition that would help to get some more depth. And again, just more interest on the left side of the image. And this first one and the second one actually connected more into the mountain that we have there doesn't really look realistic. While this one is perfect. So this feels like it's connected and it's continuing that mountain range. And because it's getting higher, there's actually some snowy peaks there. This is beautiful. This is exactly what we need it here. I feel like to balance everything out. Once again, without it, and with it, I really like that. Although I also like this detail what we had here. I feel like it's worth sacrificing for this. And maybe since we have this new area here, we can also add some ruins here on the top, maybe just add it here, so there's enough contrast. I I just type in ruins. Let's see what happens. Might be a little bit too small to have those details, but I feel like photo show should be able to generate something there for us. And I feel like the second one is perfect. It's in the sun. It has some details that we can notice even from a distance. And yeah, now I feel like we have a really cool composition. It's really came together. It's a good time to stop adding more details because it can get overwhelming. And again, I would be able to spend hours refining every little detail. But I feel like it's a good composition or good enough. 5. Final touches with a Smart Filter: I wanted to make sure we add one final thing here, and that is to apply a smart filter to the whole image. And the best way to do this is to sect all your layers. So click on the top and then shift click on the bottom, and then right click somewhere in the layers panel and choose Convert to Smart Object. This is going to generate a single smart object from all your layers. Don't forget that you can always double click on this thumbnail to access the layers themselves. But while you work with the smart object like this, you can apply any filter as a smart filter that will keep it non destructive. And it will apply on the whole composition. And my favorite filter to use is the camera row filter. So I'm going to select this. The first thing I'm going to do is to go to the light section and increase the shadows because I felt like the trees in the mid ground were a little bit too dark. So I want a bit more visibility there, then maybe we can increase the intensity of the blacks. That just adds a bit more contrast. So if I temporarily turn this on and off, we can see it's a subtle change but already made the mid ground of the composition more interesting. And what we can do is to go into detail and maybe increase the sharpening a bit. We can also go into effects and increase the texture a bit. It's going to make it feel like there's more details in the composition. It's quite subtle, so it will show better when I zoom closer, and there is the detail again with that sharpening. It's very subtle, but helps to again make the image better. And then going back to the light section, maybe we can also increase contrast just a little bit more once again before and after, yeah, I feel like that helped Overall, maybe exposure can also be increased just ever so slightly, and the highlights can be reduced also slightly together with the whites. So let's see now before and after. Yeah, I think that helped to make the composition work even better. Now let's click Okay, and here we can see again without and with the filter. So I hope you had fun with this dreamscape, and of course, your result will be very different from mine, because every time you are using generative fiel, it's going to randomly create details. So don't feel disheartened if you feel like my composition turned out better. It's all about experimenting. And as the LOB Firefly engine, which the generative field feature relies on is going to get better, the results that you will get with this type of workflow will also improve. So like always, keep exploring, keep experimenting, and have fun with everything that we covered in this project. 6. Skillshare general conclusion 2024: Well done for finishing this course. I hope you had just as much fun going through it as I had recording it. And of course, don't forget about the class project. Because remember, practice makes perfect. I can't wait to see your work, so make sure to submit it. And in case you like this course, and you would like to learn more from me, then there's plenty of other courses that you can find here. Go ahead check them out now. I can't wait to meet you in the next one.