Photoshop Workflows - Mixed Media

1. Introduction Mixed media: 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 mix Media project. We will mainly be using the Photoshop brushes. So I decided to use Photoshop on the iPad this time and relying on the Apple pencil. However, if you don't have an iPad, you will be able to follow along using photoshop on the desktop or even photoshop on the Vab. You will be able to complete this project even if you don't have any experience in drawing or painting, but it's going to be a great introduction to the amazing world of digital art. 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 stelf told and ey to get more confident and effective using it. I am Martin Purina, 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, Nickelodeon, 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. You 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. 2. Workflow Mixed media: This mixed media project, we will mainly be using the Photoshop brushes. So I decided to use Photoshop on the iPad this time and relying on the Apple pencil. However, if you don't have an iPad, you will be able to follow along using photoshop on the desktop or even photoshop on the ab. In case you are following along on the desktop, you will be able to work with a Musk. However, once again, it is recommended to have a stylus like this small vacum intos pen tablet that I'm working with. Because similarly to the Apple pencil, these devices allow you to control aspects of your brush like opacity and size with the pressure that you apply on the pen nib. Like I said, it's not a requirement to have any of these to complete this project. They can just increase your productivity and make the whole drawing experience more intuitive. Just to show you what we will achieve in this project, we will start with this cool image, and we will keep adding layers to it until we get to the final composition that you've seen before. You will be able to complete this project even if you don't have any experience in drawing or painting, but it's going to be a great introduction to the amazing world of digital art, if you are new to it. So without any further delay, let's get started. 3. Removing the background: For this project, we will start off with an existing image, so we will open that up as a new document. To be able to do this, you have to choose the import and open option here and choose photos. Now, first of all, you will have to download whichever image you want to work with onto your iPad. You can use airdrop for this if you are using a Mac computer, or you can just simply use the links from the course and download them directly onto your iPad. If you are working on the desktop, of course, you can just open any of the images directly into Photoshop. But here, I am going to pick this image. I feel like this is going to be a really cool pause for the composition that I would like to create. And the first thing I am going to do is to separate this from its original background. For this, I'm going to use the selection tools. And within here, we will find the select subject option. Now, you can also choose the removed background. They pretty much do the same in this case. And once you do this, it will take a while, but eventually you will get a selection, which then you can turn into a mask with this icon here. So just tap on mask. And then you will see that we have a fairly good mask. Now, if you double tap on the mask icon here in the layer spanel, which, by the way, you can hide if you want with this icon here on the right, or again, show. And then there's also the layer properties, which we will be using later, which you can turn on. But as you can see, we have the mask view here just like on the desktop, and we can take a closer look at all the details around the edges, I believe, Apart from most of the edges, there's some mistakes here. But the easiest way to see these would be to actually place another layer underneath this one. So as you can see, I just tapped on the mask again just to reveal what we have, and to create a new layer, all we have to do is to just tap on this plus cyc on here, and then choose new layer. So this is just an empty layer, and now we will drag it underneath the other layer, which has the image, and then use the paint bucket tool, and a color. I'm just tapping on the foreground color. And in this case, I'm just going to use something like a very strong vibrant color like purple or pink and tap on the background. So this way, I can really preview my selection. And I noticed that there are actually quite a lot of issues around the hair as well, here around the arm. So these definitely we have to fix. Now, let's select the mask here, the black and white thumbnail, and then use the brush tool. With the brush tool, make sure that you have the default brush selected. So tap again on the brush icon and go up and select the hard round brush. With this one, we will be able to paint with black and white. Black hides white reveals details. And here on the left side, we can control the size of our brush. I will make it a little bit smaller like that, and the hardness should be set to 100%. So now if I draw, it looks like that. And to quickly switch between black and white, you can just drag up and down these two icons here, so that's a quick way to flip back and forth. Now, to reveal the details that we lost here, I'm going to paint with white and just paint over this part here quickly. And until we have all the details necessary, then switch back quickly to black, reduce the size of my brush, and then paint over the edges. Now, don't forget that on the iPad, you can easily rotate your view. And that way, you can have better access to these angles, So, let's just rotate around. I like always to have a left to right motion with my brush because I'm right handed and going up instead of going down. That's always the easiest way to create these nice smooth lines that you can see on my screen. And I feel like that looks already much better. Now, let's take a look at the other side. I feel like here we can also reveal more details. So once again, switch back to drawing with white, make the brush a little bit bigger and start painting. I think around the edges we can go over these parts that already looks better. Let's paint over some more details here, and maybe a little bit more here as well. And this is why I like to use a strong color because it's always easier to spot the mistakes. I feel like that looks quite good now around the shoes, I would like to hide some details, so I set it back to black. And this is actually the original reflection of the shoes, so we can get rid of that. It's okay if you lose a little bit of the detail of the original shoe in some parts. I don't think that matters much. Like even this whole bit here, we can remove. You can judge whether you need detail or not. Now, this is shadow which we can remove. Again, I'm trying to draw these nice smooth lines. But if you feel like you would like to have more smoother lines, you can also tap on the additional settings here for the brush, and you can increase the smoothing. So when I do that, While I'm drawing, it automatically creates a more smoother result. So with that, I can draw over this part here, and I feel like that looks already better. I can leave a little bit of this black detail or I can decide to remove even more of it. Something like that. Now let's move on to the other foot. Again, I keep rotating my view, make it always comfortable to paint over. Again, I'm just going to paint over this section here, and you can see how the smoothing really helps to keep my line smooth. I can paint over this part a little bit further. And then all of this, I would like to remove. So I will just reduce the size a bit and then paint over this part. Like, so and I feel like that looks quite good. Now on the right side, there's a lot of little details here, which I'm just going to quickly tidy up. I don't actually need this in my composition. And by the way, if you are using an iPad, of course, make sure that you have the pressure sensitivity turned on. So this togo should be set to use pressure for size. You can also use it for opacity, but in this case, most of the time with hard edges when it comes to masking. You don't need the opacity to be affected by the pin pressure that could work when you have soft edges like hair, and I'm actually going to remove all of this. I don't think this is necessary. We will have lots of interesting details in the composition without this, so we can just get a nice and even line here. Of course, I want to keep it more organic, so the creases and folds in the trouser, I still would like to maintain, which works quite nicely. And then here on the left side, again, I'm just going to go over the edge very quickly, take off this as well. I don't think we need this trap, and I think that looks already quite good. Now, the hands need to be tied up a bit. Again, I'm just going to paint over that quickly. Here. There were some details here that were unnecessary like that bit there. We also have a few details here. Let's just make the brush a little bit smaller. So I can go over this. Okay. Let's get rid of these white bits. And then here a little bit more. Yeah, I feel like that works quite nicely. Now, the right hand, which is here on the left side, is the clear indication that this has been created with AI. Usually, the hands are the most obvious mistakes that generative AI tools make. So in this case, we will have to hide this somehow or at least improve it a bit. So I'm going to paint over the fingers, make it look like it's actually a human and not just a mess here. So I am going to separate the fingers a little bit like that. And then actually, we can remove this finger here. So that's a tell tail sign of AI whenever you have have more fingers than necessary or more hands in some cases. So okay, that feels a little bit better already, something like that. That's the thumb. And then I'm just going to switch back to white. Just bring back a little bit more detail here. And maybe we can hide this finger completely. And just have a little bit more detail removed from there. Let's try. Make this to bit bigger. I feel like from a distance, this is going to work. Of course, if you have a little bit more time, you can refine it even more. But what we still need to fix is the hair for which I'm going to make sure that the most omal is still selected in the layers panel, and then click on these additional options here and choose refine edge. Once you select that, You can change the view mode on black or on white, whichever you prefer. In this case, I feel like on black would work quite nicely. And then make sure you have the plus brush selected here on the left side and start painting over any details that you feel like need to be improved. So some parts where you still see white the details of the hair, just paint over that. So that's obviously still parts of the original background. There's a bit there, a bit more here, a bit more there, and maybe a little bit more here. Okay. I feel like that looks already much better so we can just press done. And then just using my brush tool, I'm going to quickly paint over these parts here closer to the top where we had the strong highlights. I feel like the hair needs to be visible all along here. Let's just take a look if I recover that whole section there. Yeah. I feel like all of that should be visible. And once it's revealed, I can switch back to black and just paint over it, and I'm going to actually simplify this edge a little bit, something like that. Let's zoom closer, maybe make the brush a little bit smaller as well, and then try to keep it more organic here on the top, but still nice and smooth. Okay, that looks much better already. Now, the rest of these dreadlocks that we have here could be improved further. But for this example, I think this is already good for the selection. And it's time to change the background color now, so I select that, go back to the paint bucket tool, and I'm actually going to use a gray color for the background. Something like this. So let's just tap on the background now. That's a good starting point for us. 4. Painting: From this point on, we will do everything on separate layers. And this is where the real fun begins, because we are going to start painting. So I'm going to tap on the new layer icon, create that layer, and choose the brush tool again. But this time, we are going to switch to another brush. So double tap will reveal the brushes. And I'm going to use only the default brushes available in Photoshop on the iPad. But of course, if you ever want to add more brushes, you can just tap on the plus sign here and choose discover new brushes. There's loads of amazing brushes that you can import. But like I said, to make things easier, I'm going to stick to using the default set. And the first brush that I'm going to use is called 60s background. Just select that. And I'm going to change my color to something like a nice vibrant orange. Now let's see how this looks. I quite like the way this looks already. And with this, we can start painting. But to make this work better, don't forget to change the smoothing back to probably somewhere around 10%. Okay. Now let's draw some more brush strokes, maybe a little bit bigger brush, something like that, let's keep drawing. I want to keep drawing these brush strokes upwards, so create like a triangular composition already with my brushtokes. Something like that, almost like a cape for this dancer. Then let's find a nice complimentary color. So I'm going to click on the foreground color and maybe get this scan color. Now with this one, we can draw a few more lines. I'm just going to make this a little bit darker blue, something like that. So let's just draw a few more lines. See how nicely these two work together. By the way, as you can see, we are drawing behind the dancer. So the layer I create is underneath it. That just makes it easier to have this composition come together. I think that already looks quite good, so it's time to choose another brush, and we can actually do this on a new layer. So I'm going to tap on plus new layer. And here again, I'm going to switch to another brush, and this time I'm going to use the mixed splatter. Now, if I paint with this one, you can see it creates the slats, but I actually like to use this in a very large size like this. Let's switch the color to a darker purple like this. Maybe make it even darker, and let's try it. Okay? So that looks quite cool. We can add this here on the corners, and also at the bottom. Okay. So we just add a little bit of this texture here. We can make it even larger and then just add a few more blobs on the top. Then let's switch the color to yellow. I want to use a nice vibrant yellow. With this one, again, we can paint over the top. You can see I'm just doing very random brush strokes to place these down on the image. That looks quite nice. Let's see without this layer. And with, you can see how much it added already to the composition. Maybe I'm going to use the eye dropper and pick one of these blue colors that we used before. And going back to the brush stroke, we can paint a little bit more with that. Be one here at the bottom, one on the corner, on the top as well. And I feel like that is coming together really nicely. So now it is time to create yet again another layer plus new layer. And this one I'm actually going to put on top, so above the dancer. And I'm going to change my brush this time to be either natural edge or brush pan, whichever you prefer or even the Sumi tilt is good. Let's just see the difference between them. I will demonstrate this zooming a little bit closer, maybe make the brush a little bit smaller as well. So that one is the natural edge. This is the brush pan. It's much cleaner. So it's a nice calligraphic brush. As you can see, I can vary the intensity But I want something with a little bit more edge. So I'm going to use this Sumi tilt, and I feel like that has that grungy feel to it that I wanted to achieve in this composition. And with this one, I'm going to draw a few motion lines. So I'm just going to emphasize the motion almost like in a cartoon. So have some lines around the shoulder, something like that. We can just have a few scribbles as well on the composition, which later is going to come together. There's some lines here at the bottom, maybe, few additional lines here. Okay. That's nice. And now let's switch to white. So I'm going to revert back to white color, make sure that that's my full ground color. And then once this is selected, we can actually start painting around the edges, almost like painting the details of the image, painting over these creases, maybe a few of them. We can also draw ad the edge here. Just to emphasize these details. Some scribbly lines. Almost make it feel like it's partially like a drawing. Again, we can have some details there. Even the hair, we can have some details coming out just like extending these dreadlocks. And you can see this is why it wasn't that important to have a perfect selection on the hair, because we will be messing around with it anyway. Yeah, that looks quite nice. We can have some lines around the arm as well, maybe here. Okay. Just don't go over every detail because then it will be too much over the top. We can have some lines around the foot. Make it feel like there's some motion there also around here. Just draw very loosely and have fun. Nothing has to be exactly the way I do it. Now it's actually time to add some texts. This is completely optional. You don't have to do this, but I quite like to have some text in the composition. So still using the same brush, I'm going to type move up here, then write your below the arm. And then on the right side, I'll just turn my canvas a bit. I right body. Down here between the arm and the body. I will right and sole. Yeah, something like that. I feel like that looks quite good. I maybe just draw a few arrows pointing here, pointing there. Again, trying to emphasize the motion and even some motion lines leads the text. This bit of perspective as well with these lines we can achieve. That's nice, and then let's do the same here. I'm using a very subtle pressure here. I want to keep these lines very thin. That looks quite nice. Then maybe we can add a couple of thicker lines as well just to have contrast. A couple of thicker lines on this side as well. In between the thinner lines. Yes, I feel like that looks good, and then we can just do a couple of additional little scribbles, like a few Xes here and there, a few little scribbles. Just some random stuff to make it more interesting. And then last but not least, I would like to add one additional layer again on top of everything else. And for this, I'm going to switch back to that other brush we used before, the mixed splatter. Select the eye dropper and pick one of these colors maybe this purple from the background. And then with a large brush, I'm going to paint over the image. But this time, we will change the bland mode of this layer. And this is why we need the layer properties. So this icon, once you press on it, you can find the bland mode options. And I will probably use color dodge for this, which looks really cool. But again, you can experiment with the other options here. Linear dodge is nice, overlay is also good, but I think I will stick to color dodge. So that really adds a lot of vibrancy to the image, and we can just paint over a little bit here. P as well down. And then let's use the eye dropper again. Pick this orange color for a bit. With that one as well, we can paint over some parts, maybe around the hair around the bottom here or even around the edges, you can use this. Again, use the eye dropper and pick a nice vibrant blue. And again, just paint over some parts with that. And maybe another brush stroke around here. That looks really cool. Whenever I don't like something, I just use two finger step on the iPad to undo. Let's just do some here. Yeah. That looks nice. And yeah, I feel like that is enough. So let's see before and after. This layer, as you can see, just really helps to bring all the details together. So it creates this more vibrant, high contrast composition. In case you you can also use this around the edges, just to add some interests there. And I feel like we've done a good job. It's already looking quite strong with all these layers that we added, we built up all these effects on separate layers, so it's easy to go back and make adjustments, changes if we wanted to. But I think we can stop at this point. 5. How to export your work: In case we want to export this work from the iPad, we could click here on the top and choose publish and export. But don't forget that since this is automatically saved into a cloud document, the next time you open up the desktop version of Photoshop, you will be able to pick it up exactly where you left off. So you will have all layers, the mask, and you can just add some additional changes or adjustments using your desktop computer. That's the great thing about cloud documents that you can jump back and forth between different devices and even in different locations, wherever you are logged in to your Adobe Creative Cloud account. 6. Conclusion: 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.