Surreal Portrait Collage in Adobe Photoshop

1. Let's Collage!: If you've long admired surreal, abstract and imaginative collages like these, but you weren't sure how to go about making one of your own, this course is for you. Together, we'll walk through the step by step process for creating not one or two, but three different portrait collages. You'll learn how to combine images, textures and shapes to create surreal portrait collages that are as fun to make as they are beautiful to look at. My name is Cara Pltinich and I've been a photographer, designer, and serial crafter for more than 20 years. I've written books, taught hands on classes, and in person workshops around the globe. From professional photography and graphic design to crochet and papercraft and everything in between. I relish being a creative chameleon, experimenting with new things and sharing what I learn. Your challenge and project for this course will be to work your way through the practice exercises, yes. But then, to use what you've learned to build a one of a kind collage that's all your own. You can use some of the source files that I've pulled together and prepped in the included collage starter kit or curate your own that you download or create yourself. This class is for everyone, and I will walk you through it step by step. But it might be helpful to have at least some very basic experience with Photoshop ahead of time, or at least be a very adventurous beginner. If you've never opened the software before, check out my Photoshop for beginners course here on Skillshare to get your bearings, and then come back to hit the ground running. Whether you're looking to sell prints, offer a unique product to your portrait clients, or you just want to create some cool art for your walls, I'm here for you. By the end of this class, you'll know where to find legally usable source materials, how to combine them in interesting and novel ways, and you'll have the confidence to keep moving forward. Collage art is so dang cool. I'm glad you're here to share it with me, and I can't wait to see what you create. So if you are ready to begin, join me in the next video, and we'll get this party started. 2. Course Files & Resources: To get the most out of this course, be sure to download the included course files so you can follow along with our three practice collage Builds. You'll find the links below this video under the Projects and Resources tab. After completing those step by step examples and getting a feel for how it works, your project for this course is to try your hand at making your own compositions. Super easy way to get started is to use the included collage kit, which includes a curated collection of fun collage elements with the backgrounds already removed. So you can start designing and composing freely without worrying about making selections. To take things to the next level, you'll want to either use images that you've captured yourself or that you've licensed and downloaded from stock sites like Adobe Stock and Unsplash. Both have thousands, maybe even millions of images that you can download and use for free. And it's easy to set filters on both of those sites, so you can just browse free images and license and download them with abandon. Whatever you do, just don't grab images off random web pages or Google, et cetera. Stick to images that you have legal rights to use, and don't forget that you can always create your own. So now that you know where to find source material in the next video, we'll talk more about the process. 3. But HOW? Process Walk Through: Okay. So let's talk about the process because it is a process. I can easily spend 8 hours or more on a single collage. And when I start, I have no clue what I'm going to be making, and that's part of the fun. So because my collages always include portraits, that's always where I start. So typically, I'll pull up splash or Adobe stock and start searching for images with people. And because the images are free, I will license and download pretty much anything that I think is interesting. So I'm mostly paying attention to the pose of the subject or the feel of a portrait. I'm looking for anything that sparks an idea. That spark could be for another object that I might want to include, or it could be for an overall mood. So as I'm looking around, drinking a beverage and downloading and licensing images, I'll usually download maybe 30, even 50 images or more. So yes, my hard drive is always running into issues with space, but that's another topic for another time. So from there, I'll look through what I've downloaded and usually at that point, there's some images that I might have been initially interested in, but I'm realizing that they're not gonna work. So I'll delete them to free up space. But sometimes, if I really like them, then I'll put them in a folder and hang onto them because they may be useful later. So I'll kind of keep them in mind, and then some of those have ended up being used in really cool collages at a later point. So you just never know. Once I choose a portrait that I want to start with, I will bring it into Photoshop and remove the background. Then I'm looking at the portrait and I'm thinking about the shape, the lines that might be created by the pose of the subject, or if there's a particular feeling or an expression or look on the subject's face. Then those ideas usually lead me back to the stock sites with new ideas and new search terms in mind. And the process just goes like that, repeating back and forth and continuing to fill up my hard drive. So I'll search for things, download a bunch, bring them into Photoshop and test them out. Um, and I'll be combining things, and I just keep what works and toss out what doesn't. It's like a rinse lather and repeat situation over and over. And sometimes over and over and over and over again, sometimes I'll find that flipping an image around or adding a texture, maybe changing a color can suddenly pull a composition together. So, unfortunately, I am yet to discover a cheat code for time and experimentation. That's just really what you need is to take time and experiment. And the more that you do that, the better your final result will be. And it's also the same thing when it comes to knowing when to stop. So I'll often pile things and in and in in Photoshop, and I'll move them around. I'll hide the layer and try something else. Sometimes I might even start over entirely. And then as things start to congeal, I'll look at what I've built, and I'll start seeing if I can take anything out, right? And sometimes I can. Sometimes I think, Oh, I really love this piece, this plant or this statue or building or whatever. But I don't know why it's here anymore. So I'll take those things out, and then eventually I'll be left with a finished piece that has not too much and not too little, and it just kind of feels like it's done. And then, suddenly, I know that it's complete. So, what exactly do you search for, right? Well, you can start by searching terms like vintage portrait, which is going to give you all kinds of interesting images of people, especially on Unsplash. There's just a lot of kind of avant garde stuff, especially in the vintage collections. If you search, like, the New York Public Library and entities like that, they have a lot of really cool historical images that are fascinating. That's like a whole rabbit hole unto itself. But when you find something that inspires you, let your mind wander and just see what pops up. So like, maybe a portrait that you find makes you think of other objects. Maybe something vintage makes you think of roller skates or type writers or a disco ball. So then search for those things. And while you're looking at those things, you might find an image that also includes a really interesting plant, and that might lead you to search for more plants or buildings or statues or animals. Whatever it is, the idea is to just follow your imagination. So one image or pose or color or texture might lead you to think of something else, and it just kind of links on like that. So the idea is to just follow your imagination. And this process can be time consuming, but it is super fun. And so when you're ready to give it a try, just settle in and plan to spend some time browsing and letting your imagination roam freely. So for example, when I was creating the course collage with the moon image, I got to a point where I had pretty much everything in place, except the birds and the shoes hanging from the tip. And while I was working on it, suddenly, the idea of something dangling popped into my head. And I think in my mind, I might have been thinking of, like, a mobile or, like, a window charm or something like that. And I think I was thinking about beads hanging from this. But I went back to Unsplash and I searched for the word dangle, which led to the picture of the shoes dangling on the wire. And I thought, I think that's it. So that's how it works. It's just intuition and imagination and time. When you are searching for images to use, you want to think about pose, line, and shape to build your composition. Don't worry so much about things like color because obviously that's very easy to change. But you definitely do want to think about how easy an object will be to select if you want to remove it from the background and pay attention to horizon lines and vanishing points so that you can either match perspective in the scene that you're building or that you can knowledgeably and intentionally mismatch. While you're at it, it's also worth searching for some textures and backgrounds and things like handwriting or newsprint to add depth and warmth to your finished collage. Sometimes I will even search for words like surreal or odd or even weird because it leads to all kinds of unusual imagery that can be a lot of fun to play with. So as you work through the practice collages with me, it will hopefully feel very quick and easy, which is awesome. But of course, I've already chosen the images and designed the composition and figured it all out ahead of time. So don't be discouraged when you go to make your own and it feels like it is taking considerably more time. That is normal. You're just not seeing that whole process because you'd be watching for hours. So try to look at the whole process as part of the fun. And for what it's worth, I create a lot of ugly, non working collages, and it's only by continuing to explore and experiment that I ultimately land on something that I'm really excited about. So remember this truth and hang onto it with both hands when you are trying this and it feels like nothing is working. That could be a sign to just take a break and come back to it when you're ready to keep going because the only way out is through. So knowing all of that, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get started. In the next video, we are going to dive into Photoshop and put theory into practice with collage number one. 4. Moonshine: Working with Shapes: Alright, so we're going to get started by creating this moonshine image. The first thing that we're going to do is create our document. So we're going to be building this from scratch. So we're going to want to choose File new and over here, we're going to make sure we're working with pixels, and I'm just going to make the size something easy to manage. But obviously, if you wanted to make something large and print, like, a huge poster of this, you would want to work with a larger size here. But just for this project, I'm going to choose a size of 1,500 pixels by 1,500 pixels that will give us a nice square, and that would be enough to make a small print if we wanted to put this on a card or something like that. We'll set the color to RGB. The background can be white, and we'll go ahead and click Create. Next, let's take a moment to open up all of the other images that we'll be using. So we'll go to File Open, and you can navigate to the moonshine folder in the course downloads, and we want to open up all of the JPEGs and click open. So you'll see that all the images are here now running across our screen in tabs across the top. And you'll notice that because they all have really long names, we're not able to see the blank document that we created that's currently untitled. So to get back to that, we can either come to Window, and down at the very bottom, you'll see Untitled listed here, so we can click that or another option if you see this little double carat, if we click on that, that lists all of our open images, and then we can click Untitled, which will bring us way back over here to our blank document. So the first thing we're going to do is create that moon shape that's going to be sort of the anchor piece that holds this whole composite together. To draw that, we're going to take advantage of one of photoshops built in custom shapes. Which we will get from the Shapes panel. Let's choose Window shapes and your panel may look different than mine. I have a folder down here called Legacy Shapes and More, and I believe that is where the moon shape lives. If you don't see that, all you need to do is go to the shape panel menu and click Legacy Shapes and Moore. See, now I have two. I'm going to get rid of one and just delete it. So rather than digging in here and going through all the shapes to try and find what we want, we can come up to the search bar here and just type moon. And this is the one we want, and adding it to our document is as simple as clicking, dragging and dropping. We'll see that it lands here. It's got a fill color. Yours might be different. That's okay. It's going to land here and it's got this box around it. So the box is going to allow us to size it up, and I do want to make it quite a bit bigger. Now, you may or may not have to hold the shift key while you size this up or down in order to keep it from getting squished like this. It will just depend on your preferences and how you have things set up. Just make sure you're not squishing your moon. Now, when you're happy with the size, before we commit this transformation and get rid of the bounding box, we want to flip the moon the other direction. One way to do that with the bounding box on is to right click and choose flip horizontal. Another option if you have your contextual task bar open, you'll see that there's a little button here to flip horizontally. If you don't see your contextual task bar, you can find it by choosing Window and way down here, mine is great out because it's already on my screen and I'm in a transform box. But right here is contextual taskbar. So once we're happy with the size, we can commit it. And, of course, this is just a vector shape, so we can change the size again later if we need to. From here, we can see in both the contextual task bar and in the properties panel that we can adjust the fill color of the shape or the stroke. We're going to be putting a photo in here anyway, so the fill doesn't matter as long as you can see the shape. We do not want a stroke, so I've got that set to none. And I think that's it. We are ready. Our document is set up. We've got all of our images open along the top of our workspace, and we are ready to start adding the imagery in the next video. 5. Moonshine: Adding and Blending Images: Alright, so first thing we want to do is add the ocean image on top of our moon. So to get to it, we can click through the images here. I don't remember which one it is, this one here. So once we find the image that we want, we're going to select the whole thing by pressing Command or Control A. So we see marching ants all the way around. Now we're going to copy it by pressing Command or Control C. And now we'll click back over to our untitled document and press Command or Control V to paste. You're going to see that it comes in really large, and it's covering our whole document. So to make this image show up only where the crescent moon is, we need to clip this image to the moon. And we do that by simply holding down the option key or Alt on a PC, Alt or option. And you'll notice that as I'm holding that key down, if I hover my cursor between layer one, which is the image of the ocean and the crescent moon shape, do you see this little Gonzo cursor in between, when we see that cursor and we click, that is how we clip one layer to another. So that means that this image now is sort of wrapped around. I like to think of it like being shrink wrapped or something to this moon layer below. And the cool thing is now we can use the move tool and we can move this image around you can see if I go too far, now I'm revealing the moon by itself. So now our moon is naked. But if I drag this image around on top of it, I can position it wherever I want to. So if we want to scale this or rotate this or anything, the easiest way to do that is to press command or control T to bring up free trans form. Now, this image is so large that I'm not even seeing the box around it. So when we press Command or Control it puts the bounding box around the image. And that way, we can scale it, we can flip it, we can rotate it, all of those things. But in order to do that, we need to be able to see the corners so we can just see what we're working with. So once we've got this transform box active, which we know is happening because I can see the little controls right here. Then if I want to scoop back so I can see everything, I'm going to press Command or Control and the number zero. And now we can see what we're working with. So here is our image, and here are the control handles. So if we wanted to scale this down, we can drag inwards from one of the corners. And again, you may or may not need to hold the shift key in order to maintain proportions while you do that. So I'm going to just drag that down a little bit. And then I also want to flip this over. So again, with a transform box active, we can right click and choose flip horizontal, or if you have your contextual task bar open, you can just click right there. So what I'm looking for is I want to see part of the beach, and then I want the water coming kind of from the bottom left corner ish. So at this point, I want to rotate the image. So if I hover my cursor outside one of these corners, it's going to become a double headed arrow. And then I can click and drag to spin that image around a little bit. So I want it something like this. You can also use your arrow keys to nudge it a little bit. So kind of something like this so that it's kind of wrapping around, and then we have the beach part right here. And when we're happy with everything, you can press Enter or Return on your keyboard or come up and click the checkmark to set that transformation. And then to put our image back so it fits on our screen, we'll press command or control, and again, the number zero. Let's take a moment to name our layers in the layers panel. I'm going to double click where it says layer one, and let's call this beach and press Enter. And here is our moon. That's looking pretty great. The next thing we're going to do is add the printed type overlay that goes on top of the beach. I just love that for texture. I'm going to find that by clicking back through here. Here it is. So I'm going to do the same thing. Command or Control A to select everything, command or control C to copy. Then we'll go back to our untitled image and command or Control V to paste. Again, it's huge and large and covering everything, believe it or not, we can also clip this layer so that it also is clipped to the moon. So again, we're going to hold Alt or Option and hover till you see the Gonzo cursor and then click to clip it. And again, we're going to scale this so that it fits nicely. So we'll press Command or Control T to bring up that free transform box. And then to fit the image on the screen, including the enormous image that we just pasted in, we'll press Command or Control zero. And drag in. Again, you might need to hold Shift till we have something that is fitting and covering the moon like so. We'll press Enter or Return to set the transformation, and then to fit the image back on our screen without the big control box, we'll press Command or Control Zero. Next, we're going to blend this image into the other by taking advantage of something called Blend I. So here in the Layers panel, let's rename our we'll call it text. Alright, so we've got our text layer. So we want to blend this layer into this one. We can change the blending modes, of course, and we get some cool effects by doing that. But what I really want is for the text to disappear from the water parts and just show up on the sand. So to do that, we're going to use blend I. So in this empty area of this type layer, we're going to double click, and that brings up our layer style dialogue. So here you may be familiar with all the different styles and effects we could add. But one area that often is overlooked is this area here called Blend If, and we have two ways of blending. We can blend based on the current layer, in this case, the text or the underlying layer. And in this case, what we want to do is blend based on the properties of this underlying layer. So for example, if we take the shadow sliders of this underlying layer and we drag it inward, look at that. The water starts to creep back through. But if we go too far, we also get the beach back, and we're missing the actual white parts of the water. So we don't want to blend too far. So maybe just till about right before we start seeing the sand show up. So I'm looking at a value of 158. But now we also want to blend the image in the areas where the water is white. So we're also going to grab this slider here and drag this one to the left if we go too far, again, we are going to start seeing the sand creep back. We'll position this at about a value of 220 or so and we'll click Okay. We have a rough look here, but it helped us see where the edges are and then we can easily just add a mask to blend this a little bit more. So with that type layer or text layer selected, let's come down here and click to add a mask. And a mask is going to allow us, just like on Halloween, you might wear a mask to hide your face. Here, we're going to use a mask to hide parts of this type layer from the areas where we don't want to see it. And the way we do that is with the paint brush. So I'm going to press B for brush. And here's my brush right here. Now, we can change the size and hardness of our brush using our keyboard. But if this is new to you, you might also just come up here and if you click this little drop down, you get a slider to adjust the size and the hardness. So in this case, I want a soft brush. I'm going to drag the hardness to zero, and the size can be 68 pixels, whatever. And I want to make sure I'm painting with black. And then look what happens when we paint over these areas were painting with black. So that's kind of like putting on a Halloween mask, and then it just hides those parts of the image. Now, if you go too far, if you do something like that, all you need to do is switch to painting with white paint. So you can click this little button here or you can press the letter X on your keyboard, and then you just paint back over that. So I like to think of it as painting with black is like turning the lights off on whatever layer you're on. So if we don't want to see this layer, we paint with black, and it goes away. If we do want to see the layer, we turn the lights on and we paint with white, and it comes back. So this is what we call masking, and it makes it really easy to blend images together in lots of different ways. This is looking great so far. Join me in the next video, and we'll add our main subject. 6. Moonshine: Arranging Our Subject: Alright, so next we're going to go find our main subject, and we can actually close the images that we are done with. So that would be this text image, so we can press Command or Control W, and that will close those images. Makes it a little easier to manage all this. And here is our beautiful portrait subject. The first step is to make a selection. If you have your contextual task bar open, you can just click Select Subject. Or what I typically end up doing is I press W for any of the wizard like selection tools, and then we'll see a button that shows up in the Options bar up here that says select subject. There's a little drop down here where you can tell Photoshop if you want it to process that selection in the Cloud or on your device, the Cloud is going to give you the best results. So if you have an Internet connection while you're doing this, I recommend processing it in the Cloud. Then you just click Select Subject and Photoshop nails it. Now we're ready to copy Command or Control C, and come back over to our image here and command or Control V to paste. So I can see that she's landed in our image because I can see her in my layers panel, but we don't see her in the image, and that's because she came in so large and kind of off to the side that we don't see her. So before we scale her down, let's convert her to a smart object in case we end up wanting to change the size later. So that is as simple as right clicking somewhere in the empty area of her layer and then choosing Convert to Smart Object. What that does is it takes all of her pixel data and it stores it in this little suitcase right here. And that way, we can scale her down and we can scale her back up, and we won't lose the pixels that would otherwise be thrown away. So that is one of the advantages of Smart Object. Now that she's a smart object, let's press Command or Control and we don't see a lot happening yet, but we do see the top left corner of a giant bounding box. To see the whole thing, let's fit it on our screen by pressing command or controls zero. And now we can see why we weren't seeing her because she is large and in charge, and we're going to scale her down. And again, you may or may not need to hold the shift key while you drag in order to maintain proportion. In some cases, holding shift will actually distort the image. So if you are using the current version of Photoshop with no modifications, you shouldn't need to hold shift in this case. Alright. So something about like this, of course, I can't see now because I've zoomed back so far. So to fit it back on my screen, now that we have a smaller bounding box, we'll press Command or Control Zero again. Alright. So I want something about like this. So things that I'm looking for are I want to make sure that she's at least reaching to this curve of the moon. So we're going to put her behind there in a minute. I also want her elbow to overlap just ever so slightly right here. And then I would scale up as needed. So maybe something about like that. That looks good, I think. So when we're happy with that size, we'll either press Enter or return on the keyboard, or you can click right here to commit that transformation. Now, putting her behind the moon could be as simple as dragging her like this behind it. But if we want this elbow in front, we're going to either need to mask the moon or to mask her while she's in front. So I'm going to leave her here on top of the moon, but we are going to add a mask to hide her legs down here, so it looks like she's coming out from behind the moon. So to do that, we're going to add that layer mask by clicking down here at the bottom of the layers panel. This little button here adds a mask. Now, right now, the mask is blank. So if we want to draw a perfect moon shape, then we're going to load the moon as a selection for our blank mask by holding down command or control and clicking on the thumbnail of the moon. So we're still on her mask, which is currently blank. But we've basically loaded the moon shape as a stencil. Okay. Now we're going to go grab our paint brush, B for brush, and we want black paint because we're going to turn the lights off on this part of her layer. We're on her layer, but we're not on her. We're on the mask. We've got a selection around the moon. We've got our paint brush with black paint, and now we can just paint right like this and it's perfect and we don't have to try and perfectly draw a line there. And that's it. Now we can get rid of our selection by pressing command or control D to deselect. Isn't that awesome? I just love it. Let's do a simple levels adjustment. So we want to move from the layer mask to the actual layer by clicking on her thumbnail. And let's just brighten her up just a smidge by pressing command or Control L to bring up levels. And because she's a smart object, this will actually get applied as a smart filter. So we don't have to worry about any destructive editing. I'm just going to grab this midtone slider and pull it to the left a little bit and the highlights slider and drag both of those in just a bit, just to get a little contrast boost here, and then we'll go ahead and click Okay. I think that looks great as it is, but I do like to add some sparkle to my images. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to use the Quick Selection brush. So that is over here in the W family. Whichever tool is active here. You want to click and hold on it, and then release on Quick Selection Tool. The keyword shortcut is W. So if you ever can't find what we're looking for here, just press W, and then whatever tool you see, click and hold on it, and release on the Quick Selection tool. Now, we're going to select her outfit. So it's hard to see my brush is so tiny. So I'm going to make my brush bigger using my keyboard. To make it bigger, I'm going to press that right bracket key. Next to the letter P, there's two brackets. The left one makes the brush smaller and the right one makes it bigger. So with an appropriately sized quick selection brush, I can just paint over her shirt, and then making sure I have this add option selected in the options bar. Then I can come over and paint over her bottoms, as well. Now, we can see that I got a little too much here. We got her arm and her hand. So to subtract that, I'm going to hold down the Alt or option key, and you'll notice that the plus inside of the brush cursor, the circle, the plus turns into a minus, and then I can minus the areas that I don't want. Now I do want this area, so I'm going to try to paint that in a little more carefully. So it's a little bit of a dance, right? You're like, adding and then you're subtracting, and then you're adding, and then you're subtracting. But it only takes seconds. And it doesn't have to be perfect. So I think that is going to be good enough. Alright, so we have an active selection. Now we're going to go get the sparkly image to paste into this. So that is this one right here. So we're going to select all Commander Control A, copy it, Commander Control C, come back to our untitled image. And rather than just paste it, we're going to do a special paste. So we're going to choose edit, paste special. Paste into and check this out. Now, it pastes our image in, so it selected that whole image and put it in here, but it came with a mask. And you can see that the mask is based on the selection we drew, and the mask is hiding. So all of these black areas, the lights are out, hiding this image, and the lights are on just in this area covering her outfit. And these things are not linked. We can see that down below on our layer with her and her mask, there's a link between them, which we can toggle on or off. But this one by default does not have a link, and what's great about that is we can now scale this image within the mask so we can scale them separately. So with this selected, not the mask. I want to make sure this white outlines around this layer here. We're going to press Command or Control T, followed by Command or Control zero, and now we can see everything, and we're going to scale this I like so. And then you can, you know, position it in a place where you like how it looks and then press Enter to commit it, and I'll put this back on my screen by pressing Command or Control Zero. That is looking awesome. And if we want to add a little bit of blue color overlay to this, let's come down to the effects option at the bottom of our Layers panel, and we're going to choose color overlay. Let's set the blend mode to hard light. And this color swatch here, if you click on it, you'll get a color picker pop up, but also your cursor will turn into an eyedropper, and then you can eye drop, you know, a color from the image. So I'm just sampling something from the water, and I've got the blend mode here set to hard light and the opacity set to 50%. So you can play with this. First, we'll have to dismiss the color picker. And then if you want to play with these settings, you can. You don't have to use a hard light. That's just what mine was set to, and I think it looks good. Oh, but linear light is also good. So whatever you like. Play around here to choose a combination of blend modes and opacity for the color that you chose until you're happy with it, and then click Okay. At this point, we should make sure we save our work. So let's go to File and choose Save As, and we'll call it moonshine collage. We want to choose Photoshop for the format and then click Save. Oh, that looks so good. In the next video, we'll finish this up by adding some birds, a pair of shoes, and a background color. 7. Moonshine: Adding Final Details: Alright, so let's add some shoes to this. I don't know why I liked this so much, but, um, I do. I like how it turned out. So we're going to go over here to this image with these shoes dangling on a wire, and we'll again press W for any of our wizard like selection tools. And then we'll choose, again, select subject. And Photoshop will do a pretty good job. You'll notice it included the wire, which is nice, but we don't want it. So because I've got my quick selection tool, I can make my brush bigger using that right bracket key. And I'll just hold down Alt or Option and brush over the wire. To get rid of it. Make sure I didn't miss any spots. Okay, we can see that the selection may not be perfect. So to clean it up just a little in the easiest way possible, let's come up here to our family. So you can press L on your keyboard. And if we click and hold on the L family, we'll notice there's one tool here called the selection Brush Tool. So the difference between the selection brush and the quick selection brush is that the quick selection brush is kind of a wizard like tool, right? That's why it's with the W family. So it's kind of automated and it kind of figures out what you're trying to select based on contrast and color and things like that. But sometimes we want to be able to just paint our selection, and that's when we want to reach for the selection brush tool. So here we can see the areas that we've selected are filled with this pink overlay. It's a ruby lith overlay. So if there is pink in any areas we don't want or there's not enough pink, like, right here, we can just paint it in. So because this is a brush, we can make the brush bigger or smaller using the left bracket keys and the right bracket key next to the letter P on your keyboard. So I'm going to make my brush little, and I'm just going to paint. And you'll see there's no wizardry about it. Like, in this case, it is just painting. So we want to paint in that area, and I can see these areas need to be removed. So in that case, I will hold down Alt or option and then make my brush tinier, hold down Alt or option, and then I'm just going to paint out the areas where there shouldn't be a selection. And it doesn't have to be perfect. This is just a learning exercise. But this is how we would go about it. So just moving around, using a combination of just painting or alt option painting, just going to kind of clean this up. Really, I'm not gonna lose sleep over it. So I'm zooming in by pressing Command or Control and plus key. That'll zoom you in, and then Command or Control minus will zoom you out. And once you're zoomed in, you can pan around by holding the space bar while you drag. So it's an easy way to zip around your image and just clean up any selection bits that you need to. Okay. So I think this is good enough. I'm not gonna lose sleep over it. I just mostly didn't want a bunch of sky coming along for the ride from this area. So once we're happy with it, if you want to see it as a selection again, you can just switch back to one of the other tools like the Wizard family by pressing W. There we can see our selection. We're going to copy it by pressing Command or Control C, and we'll come back over here and paste Command or Control V. We can see it's rather large. So let's make it a smart object by right clicking and choosing convert Smart Object. That way it packs up all the pixels into the little suitcase right here, and now we'll scale it by pressing Command or Control And if you can't see the corners of the bounding box, you can press Command or Control Zero. I'm just going to scale that down. Going to position it A here. So when we're happy with it, we'll go ahead and commit it. And you can play with the positioning. Like, maybe you want to hang it right on the tip, but I kind of liked it being here. And then what I did, I'm going to zoom in. So in this case, I'm holding Command or Control Space Bar, which you'll see that toggles to the Zoom tool. And then we can click and drag across to Zoom in right here. And what I did was I drew a little like a nail type shape here. So if you would like to do that, it's very simple. I'm going to press D so that I have black as my foreground color. And I'm going to press P for the Pen tool, don't panic. It's okay. And up here, we want to set this drop down to shape. The fill should be this black color. If not, you can change it, and we don't want a stroke. And then all I'm going to do is come back here. So I'm imagining the nails here and it's kind of going down this way. So I'm just following this line, and I'm going to click, and I'm going to come here like that and like this and like that. So I just drew like a kite shape. And as long as you come back and click at your original point, when you come here, you'll see it's really hard to see. But to the right of my pen tool is a little circle. So that indicates that I'm about to close my path by clicking on the original starting point. And that will close the shape. And then I can just drag it behind the shoe layer. And if I switch to my move tool and click away, now there's, like, a little nail there. So really simple stuff. I'm going to rename this nail and press Enter. We'll rename this shoes, press Enter. Alright. That looks great. Let's add our birds. Here we have a whole flock of birds, and let's just press W for the Wizard family, and then we can click Select Subject. Photoshop's gonna get all the birds. Pretty well. I might use my Quick Selection tool only because I just noticed that it didn't get some of these little tail bits. But I'm not worried. Some of the wings aren't perfect, but that's okay. If you're losing sleep over it, this is the one that seems to be trouble. So I'll just hold down Alt or option and make my brush super tiny and get in there so we don't have webbed wings. Okay. Oh, boy. See, now I've opened a can of worms. Oh, I didn't I didn't want to get that caught up about it. Okay. Now we'll copy Command or Control C. Come over here and choose Command or Control V to paste. Let's make these guys black and white by pressing Command or Control Shift and to automatically desaturate them. We can make them a smart object too by right clicking in the open area here on the Layers panel and choosing Convert to Smart Object and pressing Command or Control T to bring up free transform followed by Command or Control Zero to scooch out so we can see. And then we'll drag it inwards till we have something like so. Oh, love it. Press Enter to commit. The things that I look for when I'm placing this stuff is I'm watching so I like the curve of the moon coming behind this bird somewhere. I like the wings crossing the front of the moon there. So something like this, I think, is good, a good position. That looks awesome. And then let's add a background fill behind all of this. So down at the very bottom, I'm going to click on what says background. And let's just add a solid fill color. So I'm going to click the adjustment layer button at the bottom of the layers panel. That's the one that looks like an Oreo dunked in milk. So it's the one right in the middle. And we're going to choose solid color. And I'm going to just sample something from the moon. So with the color picker open, if you hover over the document, you can suck up colors. And so I've got this kind of newsprint color, and then I'm just going to maybe click a little bit darker so that we have greater contrast between the background and the moon. So whatever color you think looks good, when you're happy with it, you click Okay. And then because we've already saved this once, all we have to do is press Command or Control S to update our saved image. And let's save a copy as a JPEG, so you can post on social or send it to print or what have you. So we'll choose File, Save a copy. And this time, insta of Photoshop, we'll choose JPEG. Choose where you want to save it, hit save, and in the options that pop up next, we will leave it set to the highest quality JPEG, so that will have a quality setting of 12 and then click Okay. Wow, that looks good. Pat yourself on the back and then join me in the next video for collage Number two. 8. Carhop: Grounding Our Base: Alright, so next up, let's create another new blank document by pressing File New or Command Control N. And again, I'm just going to make this 1,500 by 1,500 pixels, RGB color, white background, create. And then we'll go to File open. And let's go to our car hop image. And we'll open up all of these JPEGs. So we have everything ready. And yes, we have the same image again. So one of the things I thought would be fun would be to include a few things the same in every image, which is birds and also this paper type texture layer. So you'll see that in all three folders. So we're going to start this image with the picture of this car right here. So let's navigate over to this, and we'll press W for the Wizard family, and then we can choose Select Subject and Photoshops. G to do a pretty perfect job. Bang and job. Awesome photoshops. So let's copy it. Command or Control C, and let's go back to our untitled image, which I can't see because Oh, so many tabs. Alright, so I'm going to click this little arrow here, and then we can go to Untitled and paste Command or Control V. Let's make this a smart object by right clicking on it and choosing Convert to Smart Object. And now we can scale it down by pressing Command or Control T. And I'm going to scale from this top left corner while also holding Alt or option, and that will scale it from four sides at once. And it just makes it a little easier. Okay, so scale this and position it maybe about here. When we're happy with it, we'll press Enter to confirm it. All right, so this image is going to have the woman coming out from behind the car. It's going to have a big sunset circle behind her, palm tree in the corner, birds, of course. And then the car is kind of like the base of the whole image, but it would be weird to have the car just like this. So we need to give some grounding to the car. We're going to do that by using one of the shape tools to just draw a smashed circle. An oval. We're going to come down to the shape tools here. You can press U on your keyboard. And there's a bunch of them. The one that we want, if you click and hold on whichever family member is active, you're going to release on the Ellipse tool. And up here, we want to make sure this is set to shape for a fill color. I'm going to click here, and then that's going to pop this open. And then we can click right here. That will pop open our color picker. And then I'm going to select this dark blue or aqua from the inside roof of the car. It's this really dark color right here, and then I'll click Okay. That's the color that I want. Then I'm simply going to click and drag to put a little circle like this. It's not technically a circle, it's an oval. But I'm still holding my mouse down, and then if I decide I want to scoot it up a little bit, I'm going to keep holding my mouse, and I'm going to also add the space bar. And now I can reposition it. So I just I want it to basically be right here. So I want it to fully cover the areas where the wheels are. And let's see. In our layers panel, we'll need to drag this below so we can see. If I zoom in, you can see that the wheels are included in this circle. But also the circle is not so short that it's just like this. We want it to be about here. It's for the whole car. This is basically a cheat for a drop shadow or a cast shadow from the car. All right, so we'll leave this here. Let's rename this layer car. Oops. Spell it right. There we go. And this one we can call shadow. All right, and then we can press V for the move tool, and then if we click away in the layers panel, we just click off that layer, then we won't have to look at the outline. So see when the layers active, we see this blue outline, and I know it makes a lot of people bonkers, so just click away and then that will go away. But doesn't that look great? So that is how we one way that we can ground things in our images, and it's nice. It really helps a lot. While we have the Ellipse tool, let's go ahead and draw where we're going to put the sunset. I'm going to make sure I have that ellipse tool active and the fill color doesn't matter anymore, so whatever color is fine. And this time, I'm going to hold Shift while drawing to create a big circle like this. Now remember that you want to keep holding your mouse down basically until the very end. So I'm still holding my mouse. But if I want to resize the image, I can just click and drag holding my mouse. But if I want to pick it up and move it, then I'm going to hold the space bar, and that lets me reposition it rather than resize it. So you can switch between resizing and repositioning by just adding the space bar. So I'm going to position this about here. So it's going to be like slightly to the left. And then when I let go, it's going to fill in, and we want to also put this behind the car like Again, I'm going to click away from it so that we don't have to look at that blue outline. Now, let's go get our sunset image to put in there. That is this image right here. So I'm going to select all of it by pressing Command or Control A, copy it, Command or Control C, and then come back over here, and I'm going to click on top of the ellipse layer to just select it. And yes, it's going to pop up all the stuff. That's okay. But with this layer active, we can now paste the sun in, and because this layer was active, when we did so, it will paste the sunset into a new layer directly above it, which makes it easy to Gonzo clip it. So we're going to press or in hold Alt or option. Hover till you see Gonzo's big old nose, and then click to link those two things together. And, of course, now we can use the move tool to reposition this. I don't even have to really resize it. I think something like that is actually just about perfect. How cool is it? Oh, I love it so much. Okay, so let's rename this our Sunset layer. And that's fine. We can leave that as Ellipse. Wow, this one is shaping up fast, isn't it? Let's save our work. Before moving on, we'll choose File, Save As, and we'll call it car hop. Oh, I should probably just call it Joy Ride. Looks like a joy ride. Anyway, car hop collage. We want to make sure we choose Photoshop for the format and hit Save. Perfect. Join me in the next video, and we'll add our portrait subject. 9. Carhop: Adding Texture to Our Subject: Come back. Next, we are going to add our portrait subject. And she is somewhere. She is here. So we're going to go over to this image, press W for our Wizard family of tools, and then click Select Subject. And Photoshop nailed it. So we'll copy Command or Control C, and we'll come back over here and Command or Control V to paste. Let's make her a smart object by right clicking in this empty area of her layer and choosing Convert to Smart Object. We'll give her a name like portrait. Portrait subject. Alright. And let's scale her down by pressing Command or Control T, and we can alt or option drag from a corner. If you need to scooch back so you can see everything, just remember that you can press Command or Control and the number zero. All right, so we're going to be having her pop out from behind the car. Oh, I love it so much. I want to have this elbow inside the circle and then this arm is going to break the circle, and that's about perfect. Just like she's on the passenger side of the car a little bit, and we'll go ahead and click to Commit. That actually looks really great. And of course, I wanted to add in our text newsprint collage paper texture layer. So let's yet again, we're going to select her turtleneck sweater that she's wearing. So for that, I'm going to use the Quick Selection tool. It's a member of the W family. And we'll make sure we're on the right layer, and then I'm just going to draw over her turtle neck. And it looks crazy, but when we let go, it kind of sorts itself out. But I don't want her wrist, so I'm gonna hold alt or option to subtract all of this. I don't want her face and her neck and all of so it takes just a second. And there we go. And it might not be perfect. We can always fine tune it by brushing it later if we want. Okay, so now we're going to go get the text. I'm gonna close that. Here we are. We'll select all Commander Control A, copy Commander Control C and come back over here where we will paste special again. So because we have this active selection, we can choose edit, paste special, paste into, and that's going to paste in the layer and generate a mask that will turn the lights out everywhere except our selected area. And it will not automatically be linked, so we can scale and adjust each one independently. So I'm going to press Commander Control T, followed by Commander Control zero, and then I'm going to scale this in and fit it back on my screen. So that it looks something like this. Love it, and then we'll commit it. And then we can play with blend modes here. So I'm going to play with maybe multiply blend mode is good. That will bring back some of the shading from her underlying sweater. Also, linear burn is a good one. Maybe you like this look. You pick whichever one you think you want to go with. I'm going to go with, I think I'm going to choose linear burn, and then instead of reducing the opacity, I'm going to reduce the fill. Just ever so slightly to, like, 76%. What? Are you kidding me? This looks so awesome. Okay, let's go get a palm tree. Palm tree palm tree. We can close this image two of the car. Here is our palm tree. So, same thing. We'll press W for the Wizard family and then select subject. Now I can tell you that photoshops gonna not degrade on this one. So before we move on with our active selection, we're going to click here to select and mask. And that is going to bring us to this workspace, and yours may look a little bit different, so let's talk about it. Over here in the properties for this workspace, we can view our selection in different ways. So right now, I'm viewing the selection on a black background. It doesn't look super black because the opacity is only 50%. So you can see if I drag this up. Now we can tell what we're looking at. So this is helpful to view your selection different ways, depending on your image, so you can just really see what a bad job is going on here. Okay, so that's great. We can now see it. And now we're going to come down here and bump our edge detection radius up a little bit, and now we're going to clean up these edges. So I'm going to hold Command or Control Space Bar so I can just zoom in and then Spacebar drag up. And what we're going to do is come over here to the second tool on the left. So this is the refine edge brush. And now I'm just going to paint. Look at that. I'm just going to paint over one leaf at a time. And then when I let go, it kind of bakes in. See that? And then I'll do this one. And this is just saying, Hey, Photoshop, you need to have another look here 'cause this is not good. So Photoshop's gonna recalculate. Look how much better that is. So I'm so easy, right? The reason I'm not doing the whole thing at once is I just think it kind of processes better that way. So I'm just working my way around. And this is a brush like any other, so you can adjust the size using the left and right bracket keys next to the letter P. Just 11 thing at a time. A, how good is that? Down here, we're going to tell it to output two, and we can choose a number of things. I just want a selection. So we'll click Okay. Now we have a better selection, and now we'll copy it by pressing Command or Control C, and we'll come over here and Command or Control V to paste it in. Well, right click, convert it to a Smart Object, rename it palm tree. Press Enter, and let's scale it down by pressing Commander Control T, followed by Commander Control zero so we can see what the heck we're doing. And I'm going to scale it down. Oh, I love it so much. I want it off to the side. I don't want it to look like it's in the car, so I'm putting it off. I like to see the trunk of the tree separated from the circle a little bit. A here. I think that's perfect. Then I like this palm coming over the circle like that. Now I can see, I think a piece of it is sticking out down here at the bottom below the car. So I'm just gonna add a mask and grab a brush with black paint and get rid of it. Looking good. In the next video, we'll add the birds and the final background color. 10. Carhop: Finishing Touches: Alright. Next up, we have our birds. So I'm going to just again press W for my wizard like tools, which gives us access to the select subject button. We can see that they are selected. I'm going to copy Command or Control C, pop back over here and Command or Control V to paste them in. They are huge. Let's make them a smart object. And Command or Control T. Can only even see one bird. And look at this. They just kind of fit in here. I did not plan that. It just worked out that they fit, like, around her and her hand and everything. It's just awesome. So once we are happy with this arrangement, and scale and everything, we can commit it. Oh, my gosh. Now, I'm realizing that I kind of set everything a little bit high in the document, so I want to take everything and move it down. So to do that, before we do all that, I want to look through here and make sure that I link up any masks that are unlinked. So, like, when we pasted this in here, because we had an active selection, it automatically did not link the mask. But now that means if I try and move this I'm moving this but without the mask. So we want them to move together. So I'm going to click to put a link there, and then I'm going to click the top layer being in the car, and I'm going to shift click the shadow layer. So everything is selected. All the masks are linked, and then I can use my move tool to just reposition everything a little bit lower, like that. Okay, and then let's click the background layer. And again, we'll click the adjustment layer here to add a solid color. And I'm going to sample the yellow this really pale yellow from inside the sunset and click. Okay. I love it. I think I might grab the sunset layer, and I'm going to press Commander Control T and Commander Control zero and just scale it a little bit because I want the sunset kind of right in here. That's perfect. Like, between her and the tree. Right about here. So it's like midway and her neck and the sun. It's right there. And that wave is a little bit above this branch on the tree. Oh, my gosh, you guys. Which one is your favorite? It's so hard to choose. I love them all. Let's make sure we save our work by choosing File, Save to update the PSD. And of course, we want to export a JPEG, so we'll choose File, Save a copy, and choose JPEG, save quality of 12 and Okay. All right, two down, one more to go. I'll meet you in the next video for collage number three. 11. Birdcage: Creating Our Focal Point: Friends, collage number three, coming up. We're going to once again go to File New. Enter your desired size. I'm going to use 1,500 by 1,500 pixels, RGB color, white background, click Create. Then we'll open up the images for our birdcage collage by choosing File Open, navigate to the course files to the birdcage folder and open up all those JPEGs. All right. All right. This time, we're going to start our build with the picture of the flower. This right here. Per usual, I'm going to press W for my Wizard tools and then choose Select Subject. You can also just click right here. Select Subject. If you like your contextual task bar, go for it. The results should be the same, which is going to be this great selection. And the only thing it's missing is right in here. I'm going to use my quick selection tool to Alt or Option, click to get in here and clean this up. That looks good. We'll copy Command or Control C, go back over to our untitled document and Command or Control V to paste. Right click and make this a Smart Object. Let's rename it flour Command or Control T and scale it down. If I am looking up in my Control panel, I have scaled this to about 24% of its original size. And because it's a smart object, we can always adjust that later. So I'm going to go ahead and commit it. All right. Next, let's go get our subject. So she is. Well, first, I'm going to go in and close this picture. So I'll press Commander Control W to wave goodbye and close it. I always hesitate to do that right away because sometimes I think I've copied it, and for whatever reason, it didn't take, and then I have to go open the image again. So I like to actually get it in there, and then we can close that image. Alright, so next, we're going to navigate over here to this portrait, and again, I'll press W for my wizard tools and then select subject. And again, copy Commander Control C, and we'll go back to our image and Command or Control V to paste it in. Right click, Convert to Smart Object, rename portrait subject, and Command or Control T, scale it down. And before we commit it, we want to flip her around the other way. So here's that contextual task bar that I love to not love, but I do appreciate now and then. So we'll click right here to flip her around and drag her behind so we can see where she's shaping up here. I think this is good. So what I'm looking for is that she is behind the flower. Um, and that looks great. So we can just mask off. Whoops, we can mask off all of this. So on her layer, we're going to add the mask, press B for the brush tool, black paint. I've got a soft brush, so I'm going to change that so that it's hard edged and it can be a little bigger. And then I'm just going to paint paint away everything beyond the flower here. So she's kind of coming out. And now I'm realizing I want to move everything down. We see a link here already, so I don't have to worry. So I'm just going to shift click the flower layer so that they're both selected. I'll press V for the move tool and then pull her down. So she's more like here ish. So a little bit to the left and about like so. Bravo. So before we move on, let's put in that text again. So we can close this file. So Command or Control W to wave it goodbye. And Hey, let's go get this image one more time. Commander Control A to select everything. Commander Control C to copy it and come back over here. Before we paste it in, though, let's click on her, not her mask, but her to select her. And then I'm going to press W for my Quick Selection tool, make my brush a little bigger, and I just want to select, like, the top or dress that she's wearing. It's going to be all kinds of confused over here by her arm. So that's okay. We'll just have a rough selection, and we can paint it in more if we need to in a minute. But with this selection active, I'm now going to choose Edit, not paste, but paste special, paste into. That again, adds the image in here with an unlinked layer mask, and now we can press Commander Control T and scale this all kinds of down so that the text is small enough that we can see it in such a tiny area and commit. That's looking pretty good. We're going to clean up this mask in a minute. But let's take this flower, and I think I want to actually move it down a little bit and maybe make it a little bigger. There we go. Alright, so that's a little better. Now I'm going to target this mask here, and I'm going to zoom in. So that's Command or Control Space Bar, and then you hold those two while you click and drag to the right with your mouse. And I'm just going to use my brush tool, making it smaller using my left bracket key next to the letter P, and I'm going to turn the lights back on on a little bit more of it here. So I'm just painting around where I want this to go. And then I wanted to change the blend mode of this layer. So I'm going to come up here to where the blend modes are, and I'm going to choose Divide. And so in that way, we're going to still be using this image to help connect all of our series of images. But it's going to look a little bit different. In this version, it's going to be reversed. So it's going to appear to have white type on a black background, and I just think it looks really classy with this whole thing that we're building. Alright, we're off to a great start. Join me in the next video, and we're going to add in not one, not two, but three cool, funky shapes to provide the bulk of the rest of this composition. 12. Birdcage: Adding Shapes & Patterns: Okay, so let's go back to our Ellipse tool, and we want to make sure that we've got it set to shape. We want some kind of fill that we can actually see. So I'm going to just choose black. And I'm going to hold Shift and then click and drag out a circle that's like something like this. And we'll drag it behind our portrait subject. And because it is vector, we can fine tune that as much as we want later. So let's go get the image that we're going to put in here, which is this picture of the palm and the sky. So we'll select all Command or Control A, copy Command or Control C, come back over and Command or Control V. So in this case, we're not pasting it into the shape. I mean, we could have just drawn a circular selection and then pasted into it, but I don't know, when I'm working with stuff like this, I like to have the shape and the image separate. I don't know why. It just is how I like to work. But you could have done it that way. Alright, we're going to clip this. Remember our friend Gonzo will hold down Alt or Option till we see Gonzo's little face and then click to connect those two things. I'll switch to the move tool by pressing V, as in move Viva. And then we can drag this into place, and I'm going to scale it because that's too big. So I'll press Command or Control T, followed by Command or Control Zero. And then I'm going to hold Alt or Option to scale from all corners at once and then put this in place. About like so, something like that, and then press Enter. That is looking good. Now, to add some fun color to really saturate this and give it some pop, I'm going to add a color overlay to this photo layer. So I'll choose Effex and let's actually do a gradient overlay, and I'm going to set the blend mode to color. My opacity is set to 76, but, you know, play choose your settings that you like here. And then for my gradient, I'm going to click this dropdown, and you'll see that Photoshop comes with a bunch of preset gradients, and I'm going to look down here under the orange section, and I'm just going to click through and see which ones I like. Ooh. I mean, it's tough. They're all really great. I think I'm going to go with this one and yeah, maybe just tone it down a little. Maybe I'll drop the opacity to, like, 62%. You do whatever you think looks good. You can also adjust the scale of the gradient. So it's hard to see what's happening, but over here in this preview, basically, when we drop the scale down, we're dropping the blend between the two colors so we can see we're getting one color up here, and then the split is happening here. So I'll smooth that out a little bit. Oh, I think that looks great. And we can go ahead and click. Okay. Next, we're going to add two more shapes. The next one is a triangle. So there is a shape tool for that. So again, we'll click that, and I'm just going to click and drag. I'm going to hold Shift so that I don't get this kind of triangle. I just want an isosse triangle. And then we'll go get another image to paste in there. And the one that I found again, on Unsplash is this fun, iridescent glittery texture. Before we do that, let's do a levels adjustment on this and see if we can give it a little more pop. I'm going to press Command or Control L for levels, and I might bring the right slider in and the left slider in just just a bit like that. We'll click Okay. Now we'll select all Command or Control A, Command or Control C to copy, and we'll come back over here and command or Control V to paste, and then we'll gonzo it again by holding Option or Alt and hovering in the space between the glitter layer and the triangle. And then I'm going to press Command or Control T, followed by Command or Control zero, so we can scale this so we can get some of that color in there. See this gradient. So there's a bit of a rainbow happening here, and I want to be able to include that. And then I'll press Return. And finally, there is another really fun squeggle shape that I thought would work nicely here. So when I was composing this, one of the things I was looking at when I did this is I started with the flower. That was the first thing. Just like in this exercise, that was the first thing we put in here. And that was the first thing that I put in before I knew what I was going to build. And then I added her, but I hadn't yet flipped her around. So I was kind of thinking that I would create something where she was looking away, which is kind of unusual. But I was kind of liking it. So the flowers kind of looking this direction, and I wanted her looking away. And it looked really good until I got to the part where I put the birdcage in. And then I was like, She's got to face the rest of the composition. So I flipped her around, and I like it. Another thing that I like is all these organic curves, like in the flower petals are nice and rounded. We have this nice round shape. We have, of course, the round shape within the round shape. But we also have these like V shapes here. And so I wanted to contrast all of these round shapes and echo the V shapes here, which is why I put in the triangle. And then I just thought, we need one more thing, and I felt like waves would be good. So let's go to our shapes panel once again. If you don't have it on your screen, you can find it by choosing window and shapes. And then this time, this is also part of the legacy shapes and more. So if you missed that part earlier, you've got to load this folder from the shape panel menu by clicking the panel menu and then choosing legacy shapes and more. This time, we're going to just search wave, and we'll get this guy. So we'll just click and drag this onto our document, and I'm going to position it about like, so and click to set it. And I want to drag it on top of the triangle and maybe on top of her. Now we're going to add a pattern in this. And in order for the pattern to show up, we do want to change the fill color to white. So with that shape layer selected, either in your properties panel or in your contextual task bar, we want to change the fill to white. And then in the bottom of the Layers panel, we're going to click Effects and we'll choose I don't know if everyone has this in by default. Let's, cancel. Let's cancel that because I don't remember if this is there for not. So let's go to Window, and we'll choose patterns. And just like we did with shapes, we're going to come to the pattern panel menu and choose legacy patterns and more. Once we do that, now these patterns, the legacy patterns and more will be accessible from the layer style menu. So with this waves shape layer active, now we can come down to effects, and we can choose pattern overlay. And now you'll be able to click here where it says pattern. And now we'll be able to drill all the way down. There's no search here. So check this out. You got to click in this little drop down, and then you want to open that legacy patterns and more folder. And you'll see two folders. We want to open the legacy patterns folder, and then there's a bunch of folders, including something called web patterns. And within the web patterns are all these little tiny little snippets. And so these are going to create these stripes. And what we need to do is pick one. I can't tell what's happening. And when we click out of there, we'll see the scale slider here. So I'm going to set that to 100% and that way, you have a better idea what you're clicking on. So I'm just going to pick this one. So this is called diagonal line two. And then we want to make sure that we are in multiply blend mode. And now I might scale this up a little higher. You don't want to go too high because these are low res patterns. They're intended for the web, so it will start looking gross. But we can get away with like 120 or something. Scale. Just so we have a little stripes to kind of be a little funky there. Alright, so the shape fill color was white. The blend mode for the pattern overlay is multiply 100% opacity. And if you want to choose a different pattern, go ahead. I mean, choose whatever you like. It doesn't have to even come from this collection. You can choose something from any pattern or no pattern. It's up to you. But I am going to put this to, like, 180. Whoo. Actually 200. You'll notice that at some percentages, you get sharper a sharper image than with others. So I'm going to stick to 200 and then we'll click. Okay. And finally, I'm going to just click away in the Layers panel so I don't have to look at the blue outline. This is looking so great. Join me in the next video where we will add our bird with a bird cage to this image and a fabulous background color. 13. Birdcage: Working with Blend If: Before we go any further, we should make sure we save our work by choosing file, save as, and we'll call it bird cage, collage. We want to choose photoshop for the file format and save. Okay, that way, we'll have all of our layers and everything waiting for us if we need to walk away and come back to this. Next, let's go get our birdcage. We can close this image. So I'm just pressing Command or Control W to close images that we are done with. And here we have our birdcage. So once again, I'm going to press W for the Wizard family of tools and then select subject, and it's going to select the birdcage and the little hole here. So using my quick selection tool, I will hold down Alt or Option and just brush over that little hole, and then we'll copy this Command or Control C, and we'll come over here and Command or Control V to paste. Let's desaturate this by holding Command or Control, Shift and pressing the letter U. And then we'll turn it into a Smart Object by right clicking and choosing Convert to Smart Object. Now, you're going to notice if I press V for my move tool and I move this, you're going to notice that it did not do a great selection. All of these little holes are still filled. So if this was properly selected, we would see through all the little chain link here and we would see the background, but it did not do. But we are not going to mess with it because we're going to use blend I to fix it really quickly and easily. But before we do that, let's just scale this by pressing Command or Control T and scaling this down. And we're going to have it, so it's kind of hanging here off the top of the document. All right, then we'll commit it. Once we're happy with the placement and the size and positioning and everything, now we're going to use Blend If to fix that by double clicking on the open area of the birdcage layer to bring up our layer styles. And this time, we want to blend the current layer if where the highlights. That means we can drag this highlight slider, and we can bring it inwards like this, and look how it just opens up all those highlights. Now, if we go too far, it's going to obviously eat up the whole image. So we don't want to go too far, but we can go to a decent space, maybe around, like, 1180 or so. And then to really get the finesse of a really smooth, clean blend, we're going to split this little handle by holding Alt or option and clicking on the left half of this little slider and then dragging that one in further. And you see how we were able to open this up, and now we can see through the mesh. And it looks amazing. We'll click. Okay. Oh, my goodness. Love it. Next, we're going to add in a background color. So let's go all the way to the bottom of our document. We'll click the background layer, and we'll add in a solid color fill. And let's see. I think I'm going to choose, like, I'm just hovering my cursor over this flour to get sort of this yellowy color, but I think I want something a little more mustardy I don't know why I'm liking mustard for this so much. Kind of like this. This color here, C, D as in dog, B as in boy, six, six, eight. So if you want this exact color, you can punch in those letters and those numbers right here and then click. Okay. And let's update our saved work by pressing Command or Control S to update our saved PSD file. And, of course, we want to export this to share on social or send out for print. So let's choose File, Save a copy. And this time we'll select JPEG, hit Save, choose a quality of 12 and hit Okay. Oh, my gosh, I just love all three of these so much, and I hope you are proud of all this hard work you've done. 14. Your Project & Next Steps: You did it. Thanks for being here and pushing through what I hope was a really fun challenge. Now you're ready to create a collage that's all your own. Just remember that it's a process. And like it or not, processes take time. So be patient with yourself. Follow your intuition. And please, please, please post your finished projects down below so we can all be inspired. I can't wait to see what you create and how this class helped you grow. And now that we're friends, please feel free to reach out anytime. You can find me online at cara pletnch.com and on social as app K Pltnich. If you're up for additional creative adventures, check out my other courses here on Skill Share and beyond. I can't wait to create with you again. Until next time Happy Photoshopping.