The Digital Room Makeover - Photoshop For Interior Design

1. Introduction: Welcome to the digital room makeover Photoshop for Interior Design. My name is Amy Everard, and I've been transforming spaces for the past 17 amazing years as an interior designer. Whether it's a cozy home or a chic office, I've done it all. And when I'm not crafting dream interiors for my clients, I'm inspiring the next generation of designers as a professor. I also have a podcast called Soft Landing that's packed with insider tips and design secrets. If you're passionate about interiors and you want to dive deeper, you definitely need to check it out. Let's jump into an exciting preview of our course. In this class, I'm going to take you through how to give any space a digital makeover using Adobe Photoshop. This class is great for beginners because we will learn everything from start to finish. No previous photoshop experience required. But if you have used photoshop before, stick around because you'll learn a specific style to quickly and easily transform any interior photograph to represent your creative vision. We'll start with how to get the best picture of a room to use as a base layer. Then we'll jump right into photoshop, where we'll talk about all the different tools you can use to create a visual for your new space, including how to select an element, using the layers menu to stay organized, how to create special effects through the layers menu, modifying and changing the color and size of different elements, the art of finding the right images to add to your room, how to bring everything together through different collaging styles, and how to share your final vision with friends, family, contractors, and even clients. We'll look at techniques to modify images using both empty rooms and lived in spaces with existing furniture and belongings. To get started, if you don't have a license for adobe photo shop yet, which is critical to use the software, you can go to adobe.com and download a free trial. From there, you can choose to continue the software paying either a month to month fee or an annual fee depending upon your needs. 2. Module 1: Adobe Photoshop Overview: Photoshop is a really wonderful, versatile and in depth tool. It can be used by all kinds of creators from photographers to graphic designers to illustrators. For this course, we're going to put our blinders on and focus on just the tools and workflows that will help us create our three D makeover. I like to think of photoshop as a tool that lets us paint with pixels. We can change the individual squares that make up a digital image by color and size. Many of the creative techniques that you could do by hand like collaging and painting can also be done in photoshop, but it's much more easy to manipulate and save different variations when working in a digital medium. In this course, we're going to create immersive three dimensional pictures that make the viewer, whether that's you or a client, feel like they are in the space when they look at the picture. This is a little bit different than what you might see on pinterest or other interior design focused, social media where you might see a moodboard or a flat lay. Even though these are fun and do help tell the story of what the space could look like, they're mostly two dimensional, and they don't always take into consideration potential elements in the space that are existing that are going to remain, for instance, wood flooring. There are many file types that can be opened in photoshop and many file types that can be exported from photoshop, including JPEGs, HEIC files, gifts, tiffs, PNGs, and PDFs. We will be saving our files with the dot PSD extension, which stands for Photoshop document. This is a file that is unique to photoshop, can really only be opened in photoshop. And it will save all of our detailed information so that our image is easy to go back and edit if we want to make updates or changes. But towards the end, we'll talk about exporting and how to save as a file type that is universally easy to open and easy to share. One of the most important and best tips I give my students when they're learning photoshop for the first time is to save often. So you can go up to the top of the screen and select File Save, or you can use the keyboard shortcut, which is command S if you're on a MAC, and Control S if you're on a Windows machine. And this is because it's not unusual for life to happen, whether the power goes out, you accidentally close your window and you don't remember. Once in a while, photoshop will crash when you get into really heavy files, although nothing we're doing should be quite that substantial. But it is very easy to lose work when you're not regularly saving, and it's very easy to get in flow with photoshop. You can really get into what you're doing and easily forget to save. So if you have to put a little reminder on your computer to save, save, save, I would save every 15 minutes or more, just so you don't have to lose work because sometimes you create a little magic and sure you can always redo it, but it's never quite exactly what it was when you lose it. So get in the habit of saving, it will save you a lot of trouble. For all of the different tools that we're going to learn in this course and the keyboard shortcuts, you can refer to the course download. You'll see where everything is. You'll be able to check in on where to click and what keys to type to get to tools much faster. 3. Module 2: Photography: Every digital room makeover starts with a before or a base layer, and that comes from a picture of your existing space. So let's talk about how to get the best image to use as our base layer for our photoshop, digital makeover. The goal with our base photo is to see as much as possible of the room in a single shot. So you definitely want to be able to see a good portion of the floor, but you want to be able to see the ceiling as well. From there, I like to try and capture two to three walls of the room. Three can be a little tricky. To is usually pretty manageable. But the goal for this is so that we can see all of the different components of the room in one image, so we can understand how the finished product will actually feel. There are a few methods to achieve this. One is to go ahead and use images directly from a real estate website. If you have just moved into a new space or you still have the original real estate photos of the space you're now saved somewhere, those can be absolutely wonderful images to work with because they are usually fairly empty they're not cluttered with personal belongings, and they tend to be taken with a wide angle lens and a good, clear, crisp, bright lighting. But you can also take the picture yourself. This can be very helpful if you have elements in the room that you want to reuse in your digital makeover, like pieces of furniture, maybe even existing wallpaper or light fixtures that may have not shown up in a real estate listing. In order to do this, you'll want to keep in mind two things, the vantage point and the lighting. You can use the camera on your phone to take these pictures, and you'll want to be very careful about how you position yourself to take the image. In order to get a great vantage point, you want to think about being a little bit further out of the room than you might think you need to be. So if it's a fully enclosed room like a bedroom or a bathroom or an enclosed kitchen, stand in one corner of the space, and if you're able to get a wide angle or zoom out on your phone, that can be very helpful to get the most information in one picture as possible. If you use an image that is too close up to the detail of a room, it's generally referred to as a vignette. And these are detail shots that can add a lot of atmosphere and vibe to a space, but it doesn't necessarily help us understand what the entire room is going to feel like. So I encourage you to take a step back when you're taking your pictures quite literally and get as much of the room as possible. If it's an open space that has an adjoining room to the side, like, for instance, a open living room and dining room or a kitchen with an Eden dining room, try to stand in the other space to take the picture so that you can see the full entirety of the space that you're looking to transform. Lighting is key with interior photography, and every space is different in terms of how it is lit and how much natural daylight it gets. You want to be able to see all the elements in the room clearly. I would recommend trying to take a picture at a few different times of day. So one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and you can even try taking a picture at night with the lights on. Although Usually, you're going to want an image that has lots of daylight coming in. I will often turn all of the electric lighting in the space off and let the daylight come into the space to illuminate it in a little bit more of a soft and natural looking way. But some spaces, some spaces may not even have any windows with natural light if you're working in a basement or New York City apartment bathroom. You'll have to test it out a little bit and see which image looks the clerest to you. I would also recommend holding your phone both horizontally and vertically to see which one will give you the best composition and the most information in your picture. 4. Module 3: Selecting: So here we are in Photoshop. I've launched Photoshop 2024, which at the time of this recording is the most current version. And what we're going to look at in this section is selecting things. And with photoshop and collaging and creating three D images, selecting is really the bulk of the work. And there are multiple different tools that you can use to select an item. Some of them you may develop a personal preference for, but all of them have their uses depending on how you're going to work with your selection. So I'm going to start by opening up my base image, and you can do this by going to file and then open and navigating to wherever you have saved your images. So make sure if you've taken your pictures on your phone that you have somehow shared them onto the computer or machine that you're going to be working on Photoshop with. I have mine in my recently opened files here, which Photoshop has for your convenience. I'm just going to go ahead and click on that. So here is my base photo. And there are a lot of things that I want to change and add to this. But I can't start changing and adding things until I'm able to select the individual items that I want to change. So on the left, you'll see your tool bar. And these are all of the various tools that Photoshop has to offer. This is kind of a home base for you, and you can click and drag and move it around, but it will definitely be on the left side typically. And all of our selection and move tools are here. Many of our modification tools, coloring tools are here. If you ever don't see this window, if you close it by accident, there is a little x in the upper left hand corner, and you close it and you say, Oh, no, where's my tool bar? You can go up to the top where it says Window. You have lots of drop down menus up at this top bar, and this is true whether you're using a windows machine or a mac. I'm on a MAC. So if you're using windows, you might see slightly different menus. Some of this might look different. You're certainly not going to have the Apple logo, but you should have the window pull down menu, which is almost all the way over to the right of the top menus. And from there, these are all of the different windows that you can have open in your photoshop session. And down almost at the very bottom is the tools window. And you can see that anything that has a check to the left of it is an open menu. Anything that isn't checked is not open right now. So since I closed my tool bar, it doesn't have a check. But to bring it back, I just click right on it. And there she is. She's back in action, ready to help us do everything that we want to do today. On the right side, you will see lots of different menus, and there's a lot of great information that you can find here. We're going to come back to this in the layers module. But for now, you can just leave them open. You don't have to do anything with them just yet. If I want to zoom in on my image, I can hold down control on my keyboard, if I'm on a windows machine and command, if I'm on a MC, and then do either the plus sign to zoom in or the minus sign to zoom out. If I want to see my whole image fit in my window, I can do controller command zero. So that's really great if you zoomed in a little bit too far and you want to jump back to the full image, command orchitrol zeros, one of my favorites. And then as you zoom in, you can use the pan tool to move around. And that is the little hand shaped icon here, the hand tool. And its shortcut is the letter H, so you can activate it by either clicking on the button or just tapping the letter H on your keyboard, and you can click and drag with your mouse to move around. And see different elements of your image close up. Over here on the toolbar, you will see there are a few different icons. If you hover over these icons, it'll tell you exactly what the tool is. It'll even give you a little animation sometimes of how to use the tool. So at the very top, you have the Move tool, which is how you grab and move something around. Right below that is referred to as the Marquee tool, and you can either right click or Control click on it to see that there are different Marquee tool shapes. We're going to start with the rectangular Marquee tool, and that will be the one that you use most often, I would imagine, This is a fairly simple way to select. And when you have the Marquee tool selected, you can also activate the Marquee tool by typing, just hitting the letter M on your keyboard. There is some information up at the top that helps us calibrate and fine tune this tool. We'll talk about that in just a second. But for now, what you can do and you can pause the video to practice this. Is click and drag. I'm holding down my mouse this whole time, and I can move my mouse up and down and select any area that I want, and then when I let go, I will have that rectangle there, and that is now a selected item. You will see these little wiggly lines around the area that is selected. And that's photoshops way of communicating that there is a selection happening. If you'd like to make a new selection, you can do control D or command D if you're on a MC, and that will deselect what you've just done. And you can make a new selection. Now, let's look at these settings at the top. So the default setting is a new selection. Every time I click and drag, I will deselect automatically the selection that I had before, and it will select a new square. If I decide to choose additive selection, which is this little icon of two overlapping squares, that will allow me to select multiple things at once. So if I click that little icon, Now I've got one little rectangle here. When I go to make a new rectangle, it will just keep adding to my selection, which is very helpful because in photoshop, it can be hard to select everything all at once that you want to get to. The additive selection tool is very helpful. If I went a little bit too far, the icon right next to additive is subtractive selection, and that's the square that is an outline on top of the filled in square. I click that. And now I can actually remove parts of my selection. So if I need to fine tune and scrape a little bit off of what I have selected, I can do that. Again, if I want to start over, I've selected something I don't want to do, I can always do control D or command D to deselect the whole thing. And we do have our rectangle tool. There's the elliptical Mark que. If you right click or Control click, if you're on a Mac, on the Elliptical Marquee tool, you can get a circular shape, which is really fun. It's not super useful, but it is available to us. And one other thing I didn't tell you, guys, is that if you want to get a perfect square or perfect circle while you're using the Marquee tool, you can hold down shift the whole time that you're clicking and dragging. Here I'm clicking and dragging and getting a perfect circle. If I let go of shift, it'll hop into an ellipse and really respond to exactly how I'm moving my mouse in both the height and width format. But if I hold down shift, it'll stay a perfect circle. The same is true for the rectangular Marquee tool. If I click and drag and hold down shift, I will have a perfect square. That's a fun little thing to help us. Now, the Marquee tool is very easy to use because it's really just a click and drag format. However, it's not very precise. But if we want a more precise way of selecting, there are a few other tools that we can use. Right below the Marquee tool is the Lasso tool, and you can shortcut to activate this tool by just punching the L on your keyboard once that will quickly activate this tool, or you can click directly on the button. There are a few different types of Lasso tools nested within this button. If you right click or Control click, if you're on a Mac, you can see that there is the Lasso, the polygon lasso, and the magnetic Lasso. Let's start with the Lasso. So here, we can click and drag and draw really any free form shape that we want. This can be really cool if you're drawing or you're an illustrator. It can be a little bit too dependent on the strength of your hand for my use. So I tend to not use this one as much. If you have a stylus or a whacka tablet, this can be really, really great and really fun. And again, we can use our additive and subtractive selection buttons. Those are still up at the top here. So the first one is just new selection. The second one is add to selection. So here I can create a little squiggle. And then maybe I want to start selecting this chandelier. So I could draw Right around it and keep adding. I could keep outlining different shapes in this image. But again, it's very dependent on my hand not being shaky, which is great, but I prefer. I'm going to do control or command D to D select. I like the polygonal lasso, and this works a little bit differently. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in on the chandelier a little bit more closely. Use the hand tool to get it centered on my screen so I can see the whole thing, and I'm going to practice using the polygonal Lasso tool to try and select this whole thing. So I've got my polygonal lasso tool selected. And it's different from the regular Lasso tool because this is going to be a series of clicks. I've clicked once, and I'm not holding down my mouse now. I can continue to click and make a series of short lines around the object that I'm trying to select. I prefer this selection tool because it allows me to be precise. And I don't have to worry about if my hand shakes a little bit or if I'm not 100% perfect. It just gives me a little bit more control over how I select, when I select. I can always let go and take a break if my hand gets tired with, you know, more elaborate objects like this. It can take a little bit of time. I really love to put on a podcast or some nice light music when I'm doing this kind of work because it requires a pretty high level of concentration and patience. I think that my students tend to get the most frustrated at this step because you are going through and selecting something quite meticulously. Now, I think that the folks over at Adobe realize that this is definitely one of the major complaints about photoshop is the tediousness that's required to select an actual item, and they have been working on creating AI tools, artificial intelligence tools that will help you select things faster. And although they are not completely bug free, they can be quite helpful. So we're going to look at those next. We're going to do this the hard way first and then look at the AI option. Um, I will say that it's important to know how to do this by hand because there are going to be many instances where the AI tools may not work. They are still very dependent on a high level of contrast in the image. And what I mean by that is that if you are trying to select an object and the background is similar in color to the object. For instance, this picture here where I'm working with a glass chandelier. The actual color of the chandelier and the ceiling beyond it are very similar in color. They don't have a lot of contrast. The AI tools will struggle to select it. They're not quite as sharp as the human eye just yet. You're still going to need to be able to know how to go in and select something in this more manual flow. Okay, so I have the main perimeter of the selected. And what I'll need to do next is select the subtractive option and go in and take out some of these voids, so I can go in and remove that the ceiling is. So that'll take a bit of time. Not bad. I could keep going and maybe take out some of the selection here in between this cording. But what I'm going to do right now is because I'm veryly happy with what I have selected, I'm going to save this selection because there's nothing quite like the disappointment of doing all the selecting and then accidentally going Command D select. Oh, no, where did it go? And you can always just do do which is up at the top here, you can do undo D select, which, of course, the shortcut for that is either Control Z or command Z, and it'll bring back the action that you just did. So I'm going to go to our pull down tab here, the select pull down tab, and about All the way down, not quite all the way down, but almost all the way down. There's an option here that says Save Selection. I click on that, and I will basically create a selection menu. I can name each selection that I have, and then I can easily bring it back up whenever I need to use it. This one, I will name C chandelier. Click Okay. Then if I do deselect this, I can go back up to the select pull down menu and choose Load selection. And I can choose whichever ones I have right now, I only have one and say, Okay, and it'll come back to me. There is a third type of Lasso. If you right click or Control click on the Lasso, you will find the bottom option is called the Magnetic Lasso. And this is a tool that's been with Photoshop for a long time. But it reminds me of photoshops first attempt to have like smart or AI tools. The magnetizing that happens with this type of lasso tool is it will try to snap to an object. So I can click once. I don't even have to hold down my mouse. As long as I move nice and slow, the magnetic lasso will attempt to follow the shape of the object. And it's fairly sensitive The slower you go, usually, the easier it is, and you can click to help it along if it's not grabbing these points. You'll see that it is creating little points as we go that are noted with these tiny squares. I find that I have to go sometimes even slower with the magnetic lasso tool than I do with the polygonal Lasso tool. So I don't use this a ton, but I definitely have friends, artists, designer friends who swear by this, and it can be in a fun tool to use, but I'm a polygonal lasso person myself. Our final set of tools that we're going to cover in this module are the Wand tools, and you can select the wand tool by tapping the letter W on your keyboard, or you can head on over to your toolbar, and the wand is right below the Lasso tool. If you don't see the little wand shaped icon right away, you may need to right click or Control click if you're on a Mac directly on the icon. There are a few other wand tools nested within this. You may have the object selection tool or the quick selection tool already selected, but we're going to look at the basic magic wand tool right now. So in order to understand exactly how the Wand tool works, we have to have a little bit of a better idea of how photoshop sees images. Photoshop is a raster program, which means that it sees every image as a constellation of tiny squares or pixels. And what I mean by that is, if you zoom in on your picture as far as you can go, you will eventually start to see a grid of tiny squares. Each one of these tiny squares is a single individual color. Anytime you see something with lots of shade and shadow and definition, it's made up of many single colored pixels. The way the Wanda tool works is it will select pixels in the area that you click that are of a similar color. So if I select a flower, it will kind of guess and estimate all of these little pixels that are about the same color. And it's not a perfect process, right? Because that's not the exact shape of the flower. But it's really following the color that it sees in the image. If I click on a larger surface like this window pane, It will select the whole thing because the window panes are basically all white, and it will see and sense where the color changes and not select that area. Now, this is very handy for images that might be like a piece of furniture that's on a solid white background or a solid black background, where it's all one color. Where the Wan tool has its limitations is for photo realistic images like this one, where everything is made up of 1 million different colors and all of these different pixels. So clicking on any one individual area might not give us the selection we want because photoshop is guessing. Well, these pixels look like they're the same colors where you clicked, so I'm going to include them. And they all have to be touching, too. That's the other caveat. It's not like it's going to pick up all the colors in the picture. So, good for white backgrounds, good for black backgrounds, other things, not so much. But we love the Wan tool, and we use it a ton. Now. Here's where things start to get really exciting because a lot of what we were doing with the Lasso tool was time intensive. Recently, Photoshop has developed a tool that is meant to incorporate some sense of AI or a smart tool that will help us with our selection process. That is nested here in the Wand tool. We have the object selection tool. The shortcut is also W for that. If you want to specify between the Wand tool and the object selection tool, you do have to go into the menu right click or Control click and select the one you want. So the object selection tool will pick up, look at that. It gives you a little pink preview. It picks up objects within an image, and it's a lot more advanced and smart than just the Wand tool or even the magnetic Lasso tool. You get a little preview in the pink, and then if you click, it will go ahead and select the object that it thinks you want. For the most part, this tool is very helpful. It doesn't always do a perfect job. So we can't rely on it 100%. However, If we look at it here, now, this is a really tough object to select, I have to say, because it's a glass and silver chandelier that is above a cream colored ceiling. Everything is very similar in color. The fact that the object selection tool was able to even differentiate between these glass lanterns and the ceiling is amazing. Did it do a perfect job? No, because if you look at the area here, we're going to have to go back in and add this preferably for me with an additive Lasso tool. Now, that's not really that bad compared to how long it took us to select this by hand with the Lasso tool. Go in and touching up a little bit. The object selection tool saves us a ton of time. But it's important to know how to select things by hand because the object selection tool still has its limitations. There are some objects in different pictures that it just won't recognize. And there are some pictures where you might want to select something that isn't necessarily an object, which you'll actually see me do in the collaging module, where it really doesn't want to pick up a countertop and I have to go in and select it by hand. But when the object selection tool works, it saves us a ton of time, and it's really, really great. High contrast is key. Here I am hovering over the floor, and you can see that because the floor is so much darker than the rest of the room, the object selection tool has no issue picking it out. There it is. Now, I probably need to touch it up a little bit. There are some highlights here that I can just add in with my Marquee tool, and I'd probably want to go in and do a little perimeter, clean up and probably add this saddle as well. But for the most part, it saved us a ton of time, which is really fantastic. But between the Marquee tool, the Lasso tool, the wand, and the object selection, you should be able to select any object in any image, and then we can start to modify it in the next process. 5. Module 4: Layers: L ayers in photoshop will help us stay organized and help us manipulate objects in a specific way. So we're going to take a look at the layers menu and how to use it and how it can be a really helpful tool when we're creating our digital makeover. So I mentioned that there were some menu over on the right hand side of the screen, and one of those is the Layers menu. Mine is showing up automatically. If for any reason, you don't see your layers menu. You can always go down to the window pull down tab and find it right about in the middle of the selections. And you can just go ahead and hit that and have it either disappear or appear. If it's checked, you should be able to see it. I'm going to go ahead and pull my layers menu into the center of my screen so we can look at it together. Every object can be put on an individual layer, and objects that are on separate layers will not interact with each other. We can also apply different effects to layers as a whole, which will help us create more photo realistic images for our digital makeover. Right now, because I have a flat image open, I opened a JPEG file, which is what came out of my camera. I only have one true layer, and right now, that is the background layer, which is locked, and I can tell that it's locked because there is a little padlock icon all the way over to the right in the menu. If I want to manipulate this in any way, I will need to change it from being a background to an actual layer. In order to do that, I can simply double click with my mouse right where it says background. And this window will pop up that says new layer. Now, this is not creating a new layer, really. We're just converting our background image to its own layer. So here, it's going to automatically name it layer zero. And if you want to keep that the name, you totally can, I like to rename my layers, things that make sense to me so that when I'm moving things around later on in my project, I'll remember what they are because it's easy to forget. So I'm going to go ahead and name this original photo. And then I'm just going to click Okay, and now I've got my original photo layer. With all layers, I'm able to toggle them on and off in terms of visibility. If I want to hide a layer at any point in my process, all I have to do is click on the icon that's shaped like an eyeball right to the left of the layer, and that layer will disappear. Now, what we're seeing here on the screen in place of that layer is the iconic gray and white photoshop checkerboard. Anytime you see this in photoshop, it's just indicating a sense of nothingness. Basically, if I printed this out right now, it would be a completely blank white page. If I saved it as a different file type, it would be a white square. If you ever see this, just know that that means there is nothing there as opposed to an actual color or a pixel. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it back on. And so now I can add additional layers to my image to start building up my digital makeover, and we'll look at how to do that and how to add some really cool features to our layers. So the first thing I'm going to do is open up a couple new images to bring into my file. So I have a sofa that I and a light fixture that I e earlier. And we're going to look at a more detailed process of how to choose the right photos for your collage later on in the course. I'm going to start by using our handy dandy Wand tool. I'm going to click the W on my keyboard. If I zoom in here on this image, I can see that the background for this image is mostly white. I want to isolate just the light fixture itself. I don't want to bring in the white background. The easiest thing for me to do is to click this white background. And you can see that with the wand, it's selected most of the right half of the background, but it needs a little help. I'm going to make sure that I have add to selection, clicked here up at the upper left hand corner, and I'm going to continue to click around this white of the lamp. So I've got most of the outside of the lamp selected. I'm going to click in some of these little void areas, because I don't want to bring that white over. Then it looks like we've overstepped the bounds a little bit here on the left side, I'm going to go ahead and take the Lasso tool, the polygonal lasso tool, and put it in subtraction mode, and just go through and trace away some of these areas that I don't want to delete out. This will take just a minute. Okay. So now that I'm happy with my selection, I'm going to go ahead and in this image, this has a background type layer, so I'm going to double click on that and just say, Okay, I don't need to really name this. I'm not going to be continuing to work in this file. It can be layer zero, I'm going to say. And now I'll be able to actually delete out the background. So I'm going to t the delete or backspace button on my keyboard. And that white goes away and is replaced with the photoshop checkerboard that we were learning about earlier. Now I'm going to deselect everything by hitting either Control D or command D, if I'm on a Mac, which I am. And now I'm going to select the move tool, which is right up at the top of our toolbar. And I'm going to click and drag this image into my house, into my little picture here. Now, I can see that we've brought this in and obviously, there's no white background around it, so it looks like it's floating in our image. It has its own layer and I can now toggle my light on and off. I'm going to double click on where it said Layer one and just rename it to new Light. I can move this around by clicking and dragging on it. And I can turn it on and off, which is really cool. Let's do that again. I also have a sofa image here that I like, and I'm going to use the Wand tool again. And just click. That did a pretty good job because there was a nice high contrast between the sofa and the white background. The wand tool is great for selecting when there's a good contrast between an object and the background. You really don't have to do a lot of extra work. Then I'm going to double click on my layer, where it says background, say, Okay, it's just going to convert it to a regular layer and it unlocks it. Delete that background, and now I see my photoshop checkerboard again, so I know there's nothing behind it. I'm going to click and drag it into my new picture. So now I have, I can see I've got my new light, I've got my original photo, and I've got this sofa that has been auto named Layer one. I am going to double click on the Layer one. And name it Pink sofa. And as I start to layer up new images onto my base image, it may start to matter where in the layer menu these items are. So the order that a layer is listed is how it will be visible in the image. So it's very important that my original photo is at the bottom of the list. I can reorder things in layer menu by clicking and dragging. See, I'm just clicking and dragging. If I click and drag and put the original photo on top, I won't be able to see any of the new objects I brought in because the original photo is on top of them all. So I'm going to go ahead and click and drag and bring it down again. And I can turn any of these layers on and off any time. Right now, the light fixture and the sofa aren't really interacting that much, but if I were to move my new lights down for whatever reason. It is below my pink sofa in the layer menu. And so it's always going to be behind the pink sofa. If I have them interact in any way. And if that's the way I want it, great. But if I want my light to be in front of the sofa, then I will need to drag it up above it in the layer menu. And now my light will always be in front of it. And as you move things around, you may notice that photoshop is usually set to default to auto select the layer that you click on. So I don't need to necessarily click on the layer of an object in the menu before I move it, I can simply just click and drag to move it around. If you have a layer that's a little bit pesky and in the way as you're trying to move things around, for instance, the original photo, if I keep accidentally clicking and dragging on the original photo, it's going to slide around in place, when really, all I want to do is Move my light fixture around. I can either turn my layer off or I can go back and either right click or Control click and say lock layers, and I can just click all at the bottom here and say, Okay, I can always unlock that just by clicking on the lock icon there. So you're able to do that. You can turn it on and off quite easily, and that will stop things from moving around. Now that I have my objects in place here, I can start to add different effects to the objects based on the layer that they're on. The first thing I'm going to do is for my sofa, It very much looks like it's floating in place. And it doesn't look like it has a visual presence on the floor. You can still see that the light from the window is shining through past the sofa, which it wouldn't be doing in real life. So I'm going to add a drop shadow to this layer. If I add any other objects to this layer, they will also have the same drop shadow. So here at the bottom of the layer menu is the FX menu, which is FX. And if I drop this down, just clicking on it, there are a lot of different things to choose from. We are going to go all the way to the bottom and choose drop shadow. And from here, there's a menu with a lot of bells and whistles and levers to pull. What I recommend doing is always uncheck, use global light. And then the main three levers that will help you define your shadow is the distance, spread and size dials. So I can pull these out. They're usually all the way over to the left. The further to the right that you move them, the more dramatic they become. If you watch my self as I do this, you can see that there becomes a very dramatic shadow that's coming out all sides of the sofa. And I can play with this really to my heart's content. This is very much an artist's choice in terms of how dramatic you like your drop shadow to be. One thing that can be really helpful is also to click on the wheel above those levers, which is the angle. And wherever you just click and drag on this little one handed clock and wherever the dial ends up is where the light source or sun would be from. If I want my shadow to be on the lower right hand side, I would move the lever to the upper left hand side. As I move that around, I can see my shadow move around in place a little bit. I don't want too much on the top there, just a little bit at the bottom. And once I'm satisfied with how that looks, I will say, I can see in my layer menu that I've applied this effect. If I have been working on a file, maybe I put it away for a couple of weeks, a couple of days, when I come back to the file, it will always be there, and I'll remember, right, I put a drop shadow on that layer, speaking of which I am going to save. I mentioned this before, but saving in photoshop is a great thing to do as much as possible. And I can still move my sofa around, and the drop shadow will go with it. Alternatively, I can make something glow. So if I want my chandelier to glow, I can select that layer, go back to the effect tab in the layer menu. Pull that down, and just above drop shadow, I can choose outer glow. And this works very much like a drop shadow, but instead of projecting darkness, we would be projecting lightness. So there are two little levers here, size and spread, and I can move these out as much as I want. Spread will make things a little bit sharper. Size will be how far it goes out, and you can make it as dramatic or as subtle as you like. I'm going to say, Okay. And now I can see the effects that are on that layer. If for any reason as I'm working, I bring an element in, and it's not to my liking. I don't want to see it anymore. I can always turn it off and I won't have to see it. But if I'm really deciding I'm done with that layer, I can go ahead and delete it by selecting it and then clicking the little garbage can icon at the bottom of the layer menu. It will ask you if you're sure, and you can say yes, if you're sure. Then that light will be gone. If I wanted to bring it back, I would need to drag it back in from the original image. But that can be very nice when you start to build up a lot of layers, your layer menu can get a much to sort through. So having a limited amount of layers can actually help you work a little bit faster. Now, this is all very helpful for images that we might find that are on a white or solid black background, but not all of the images that we want to use are going to be that simple. So I'm going to open another image that has a little bit more of a complicated background. This is a chair that I want to show in my design. So I'm going to go ahead and bring the whole image into my new photo just by dragging and dropping and here, I might want to use that blue chair later on, so I don't necessarily want to delete it out. What I am going to go ahead and do is select the white chair that I definitely know I want to use. Then we're going to use something in the Layer menu called a clipping mask to hide the rest of the image but not delete it. So I'm going to click on Layer one. Let's just rename this armchair. And I'm going to use my object selection to select that white chair. Let's zoom in a little bit and see how good of a job it did. All right, not too bad. I'm going to cut out a little bit on the bottom here just so it's a little bit cleaner. Okay, pretty good. Now, with the armchair layer selected, I'm going to go ahead and hit the button that's actually right next to our F X menu. It's a little rectangle with a circle in it, and it's called the layer mask button. When I tap this, what it's going to do is hide everything in that image, except for what was selected. Now I can move this around like any other layer. I have this in front of my sofa, so that is going to be the most visible thing. But if for whatever reason, I wanted to get the rest of that image back, I could just say either disable or delete the layer mask, and the image would come right back. If there's an image with multiple things that you might want to use, you can use a layer mask to hide certain elements, which can be very, very helpful. It's also very helpful if you're combining two images. For instance, if you have multiple existing photos that you want to combine certain parts of, layer masks are very, very helpful. It's like a very elaborate way to crop an image. Now, I want to add a drop shadow to my chair, and I could go through and add it manually the same way I did for the pink sofa, but I would like it to be the exact same drop shadow. I don't want to have to eyeball it again and have one be slightly different than the other. So I can actually use the layer menu to copy and paste the exact same drop shadow from one layer to another. So in my layer menu, I'm going to select the pink sofa layer that already has the drop shadow applied. And I'm going to either right click or Control click, if I'm on a Mac, directly on the name of the layer. And all the way almost down at the bottom is the option that says Copy layer style. So I can click on that. Then I can click on my armchair layer, and again, right click or Control click, and I'll get that same menu up again. Here down at the bottom is paste layer style. When I click on that, the exact same drop shadow shows up on my chair. I can toggle this drop shadow on and off by clicking the little eyeball right next to it. But it's the exact same drop shadow, and that saves me time because going in and manually adjusting the exact drop shadow takes a second. And I like to save time where I can. So we love the copy and paste feature. Being able to copy and paste the layer style from one layer to another will save us a lot of time, especially as we start to add more and more objects to our makeover and get going with our dream space. Another thing you might want to do. This is actually a very popular client request is to change the color of a wall, a ceiling, a door, some element in your photo. And we can do this in our layers menu. So what I'm going to do is select something. Let's change the color of our floor. So I'm going to use the object selection tool. I'm going to hover over my floor. Make sure I'm on my original photo layer. Select my floor. I'm going to use my additive marquee to make sure a couple of those sunspots are still added and then go in with the Lasso. Make sure that's an additive mode as well. Just add a couple little detailed elements that got left out with the object selection. Then of course, there is, let's pan over with the hand tool. Going to add the saddle. No. Now I have my floor selected, and I'm going to adjust the color of my floor. Next to our layer mask option. There is a little circle that's half filled in, half open. I always call it the black and white cookie. If I click on this, I have the option to make adjustments, add colors, and this is a really helpful tool for us. I want to make this wood floor lighter. So I'm going to go to Hue saturation. And now my hue saturation sliders have popped up in my properties window over on the right here. And I'm going to slide my lightness up, and I'm also going to desaturate a little bit because I like that sun faded look that we see on wood sometimes. Okay, cool. I can turn on and off this hue saturation. It's not permanently affecting my original photo. If I decide to change it, I can always just select the layer and move these dials around. I could also click the colorized button here. Now, just to go over the basics. Lightness, that's pretty straightforward. You move the slider towards the white, it gets lighter, towards the black, it gets darker. But saturation is referring to the intensity of the color. The further I push it towards the red, the more intense that color will be, and the further I push it towards the gray, the more black and white it will be. If you want something to feel a little bit more sepia toned or just a little bit more subdued, you can pull it lower in saturation. The hue, of course, will change the actual objects color based on how you move that around. Ast but not least, I want to change the color of one of my walls. I love a good accent wall. I'm going to go ahead and select the back wall with my polyono lasso tool. I want to see the whole wall, so I'm going to turn this furniture off. Now that I have my whole wall selected, I'm going to click the layer adjustment button down at the bottom of the layer menu, and I'm going to choose Hue saturation again. This time, I am going to click Colorize, and oh, pretty pink. Let's turn on these other layers, so I see what I'm working with. Let's do a nice dark forest green. I'm going to move the hue slider to the green range. I'm going to kick the saturation up a little bit, but I'm going to pull the lightness down so that we get a really nice, deep rich color. I can change the name of this layer. It says Hue saturation to, but I can also just name it green accent wall. So that I remember exactly what it is. And now my digital makeover is really starting to have a little bit of umph. I can start to visualize what this will look like just through using our layers menu. 6. Module 5: Transforming: Transforming in photoshop is an amazing effect that allows us to change the size, the rotation, even the perspective of an object, and that helps them look like they belong in our collage. It's actually pretty easy once you know how. So let's get into it. The first thing we want to do is select our object. If that object is on its own layer, you can go ahead and click right on the layer in the layers menu. You can also use the move tool to select the object in the image. Either way works, it's really personal preference. But either way, once you have it selected, you should see that there is a thin blue frame that surrounds the object. If we zoom in a little bit here. We will see that that frame has eight white nodes. There's one in each corner, and then one in the center between the corners. These nodes are for our use. If you hover over them with your mouse, you'll see that your cursor changes shape a little bit. It might change into a diagonal arrow if you hover over the corner or an up and down arrow, if you're on the top or a left to right arrow, if you're on the side, and we can click and drag on any of these nodes to resize our object. Which is really fun. If for any reason, you don't see this frame with the white nodes around it automatically, you may need to activate the transform mode by clicking Control T, if you're on a windows machine or command T, if you're on a MAC, and this will automatically bring up the transform mode. You'll need to do this when we get into further more advanced transforming techniques, which will come in a minute. Control T or command T. I can also hover over the corner of one of these nodes, and I can look for my arrow to change into a little curve with an arrow on each end, and I can then rotate my image. I can also adjust the perspective of an image. And this can come in very handy for things like area rugs. So I'm going to place an area rug in this space and show you exactly how to adjust the perspective to match your image. When I'm teaching graduate students how to sketch in three dimensions, we have a whole lesson on perspective, whether it's one point perspective or two point perspective, and I'll try and give you a very easy summary of that here. Every image has a vanishing point. That is to say, if you were to trace all of the lines in your image and add a line that extends out past that. If I do that even just with the lines that make up our walls, I can follow the bottom, extend that out, and even over here, I can see that all of my lines come together in one little point, and that is referred to as the vanishing point. Right there. Some images have two vanishing points and they're often over to the sides. This is a very straight on photo, and it's referred to as a single point perspective. This is all to say that you want the images you bring into your photo collage to align with the perspective as much as possible. We're not going to be super technical about it, but understanding this idea that visually all the lines connect together at some point can be very helpful as you make these transformations. So I'm going to open an image of an area rug that I found that I want to use in my space. And I am going to do the same process we were doing with our other images. I'm going to double click on the background layer, change it to a regular layer, and I'm going to select the white around the area rug and delete it out. D select by doing Control D, and then using my move tool and dragging and dropping it into my image. And here, I can see that the way the layer has placed itself automatically, it's above my sofa, but behind my chair. I want it to be behind the sofa as well, so I'm going to rename my layer area rug, and then I'm going to drag it below my sofa layer. Now, I can automatically resize it just by having it selected, which is great. But if I want to do a more complex transformation, what I'll do is either right click or Control click if I'm on a MAC, and you will see that there are some options that come up for different types of transformation. What I'm going to choose is the distort option. What distorting allows me to do is to grab the corners of any image and move them independently. As we've been resizing the sofa, it stays proportional to its original size. But distort is going to allow us to drag the corners and echo the one point perspective I drew earlier. I'm just going to drag these corners down. Oftentimes, I will eyeball and look at an adjacent wall and try to get the angle to match up and follow along with that adjacent wall. You can move the corners in the back down a little bit. And then move the corners in the front out a little bit. And it's okay if it goes off the screen because that's what it would be doing in real life. And then when I'm done, I can just press enter or return on my keyboard. And now I have a area rug that fits the perspective of my image, which is really fun, and it's a great way to really start to understand how a particular piece of furniture would look on top of an area rug. An important thing to keep in mind when transforming and distorting images to fit within our collage is to not overdo it. We can skew and adjust things a little bit within the two dimensional realm, but it's important to remember that we're still creating a flat two dimensional collage, so we can't rotate a view of an existing image. So it's important to find images of the pieces that we want to use that are somewhat at a similar angle of our base photo, and that is what the next module is all about. 7. Module 6: Collaging: The right images will help your digital makeover come to life and finding them is a labor of love? There is no shortage of furniture companies with robust catalogs, all of which are available online. Use this as a resource library. Most furniture manufacturers have multiple pictures of every piece they sell, all at different angles. Look for images that match the angle of your base photograph. That's the most important thing. Would you see more of the top of the piece or maybe just one side? If you're not sure, you can save all the views and try placing them in your collage to see which one looks best. Stay organized by saving all of your images in one folder on your computer. I even like to rename the files that I save with the manufacturer and model name. This will make the process go faster once we start opening each image in photoshop and adding it to our main collage. Now that we have a basic understanding of all the tools that we're going to use, we can begin the art of the collage. I'm going to go ahead and open up all the images that I saved for this project, and that includes lighting, curtains, furniture, all the fun stuff. And I've chosen a couple of options for different things, as well, especially artwork, or I'm not 100% sure exactly what I want to use. That's actually the beauty of photoshop. We can look at different pieces in our space and decide which one is right. For each of these pieces, I'm going to use the same method that I have been using for the pieces I brought in earlier. I'll double click on the layer, convert it to Layer zero. Use my wand tool to select The white background, tapped delete on my keyboard, Control D to D select. Use my move tool to drag that image into my composition. And I can resize it by clicking and dragging on one of the little squares around the image. And I'll close each file as I enter it into my collage so that I don't have 1 million files open at once. Here's a great example of an image that might not be as easy to select. It is not on a white background, but this was the best image that I could find of this product. So I'm going to try the object selection tool and see if it helps out at all. We'll try our luck It's certainly selecting something, but I'm going to have to go back in and de select a lot to get a clean version of this. I'll use the Lasso with the subtractive feature selected, and I'm going to zoom in really close and take out what I don't want. As you're doing this kind of detailed work, make sure to take your time and zoom in and out as much as you need. Now that I have what I want selected, I'm going to double click on the layer to convert the background to a regular layer and click and drag with my move tool and look a cuts it right out like a stamp. I want this floor lamp to go behind my sofa. I'm going to approximate its height and name the layer floor lamp and drag it behind the sofa in my layer menu. As you continue to add pieces of furniture and accessories to your collage, you'll need to resize them so that they're proportional to one another. I'm doing this here by eye because I've had many years of practice doing this, but you can do this by looking at the actual furniture dimensions, either on the product website or by measuring the actual piece in person if it's available to you and then sizing accordingly. If my sofa is 36 " high and my side table is 18 " high, then I want my side table to be half the size of my sofa. Here the angle of my desk is just a little bit off from the angle of the back wall. I'm going to do control T to enter transform mode, right click on the desk and choose Distort. From there, I'm just going to adjust the angle ever so slightly to better match my photograph. I also think that right now the side is visible for this piece. Based on the angle I'm standing at, I think that we would actually be able to see the right side. What I am going to do is right click right on my desk and choose flip horizontally all the way at the bottom there. That will mirror the object, and that makes it fit the perspective even better. As you can see with this view, I have two rooms that are visible, one that's closer to the view of the camera and one that's further away. I'm using the basic principles of perspective to help things look more realistic. The further away something is, the smaller it is, and the closer it is, the larger it is. The desk that I've placed closer to the front windows in this house is smaller than the sofa, which is closer to us. Now I'm going to copy my layer style and paste it onto my desk and desk chair so that they each have a little bit of a shadow. I'm actually going to go in because we were just talking about perspective, that shadow might be a little bit too heavy handed for something that's that far away. I'm going to double click on my drop shadow and adjust its spread size and distance. It's a little bit more compact. Much better. And now I can copy that and paste that one onto the desk chair. Keeping in mind the principles of perspective will help your collage to look more realistic. And the main thing to remember is that the further away an item is from where the picture was taken, the smaller it is, and the closer it is, the larger it is. You can see I'm resizing here to help maintain that principle. I want to use a new light fixture in this space, but I can tell by looking at the image that this light fixture is not going to completely cover the existing one. So what I'll do is I'll take the original photo. And use the Marquee tool and select an area directly adjacent to the chandelier. I'm going to make sure to unlock my layer so that I can work with it, and I'm going to hit Control C and Control V. Now I have an additional piece of ceiling that's going to help cover up some of the extra bits and pieces of my chandelier. I can do that on the other side as well. I can also take the erase tool, reduce the opacity up at the top to around 50 adjust the brush size to be a little bit larger, and I can gently erase the edges so that the image looks a little bit more blended in with its surroundings. I'm not going to worry too much about the center line there because that's where my new light fixture is going. I can consolidate these two layers into one by holding down shift, selecting both of them, and hitting control E to merge the layers. I'll just name that layer ceiling patch. Now let's bring in the new chandelier. I'm going to try using the object selection tool first. That doesn't really seem to be giving me what I want. Oh, look at that. It's not terrible. Let's try up here. I'm always open to being surprised by the object selection tool. That is for sure. Let's zoom in and use the Lasso tool to take out a few things that it may have grabbed by accident. Intricate items like this lamp can be very challenging and time consuming to remove the white background. Here you can see I've missed a few pieces, so I can only really see that once I've brought that into my main collage, and I can keep editing it. And then from there, I'm doing the exact same thing I did to the accent wall where I'm changing the surface color of the baseboards, the trim, the doors, and all of the walls. And then I'm bringing in some art pieces. And I've chosen more than one piece of art, and I can look at each one in the space to use this as a helpful tool to make decisions. Okay, Wow. We got all the way through with the digital makeover is complete, and we changed almost every surface in the room, and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I hope you're happy with the way yours turned out as well. Now, we started with an empty room for this photograph. And that is in many cases the easiest way to work because you don't have to cover anything up. But that's not always realistic for everyone's situation. You might be living in your home that you're thinking about giving some kind of a renovation or makeover to. So the picture you have is just going to have your stuff, your furniture, your belongings in it. And so we're going to look at an example of an image like that and how to make it a little bit more of a blank canvas for us to work with. Here is an image of a real working livable kitchen with some pieces of furniture that we probably don't want to keep for our makeover. There are many different ways actually in photoshop to remove unwanted items. We're going to look at a few of them just so you have a choice in which type of tool you want to use because different tools work better in different situations. Half of the work in patching something in photoshop is being able to visualize what will be there when we're finished as opposed to what is there now. The technique we're going to do first is very similar to what we were doing with the chandelier in our first image, where we're using a piece of the photograph to cover up another piece of the photograph. So I'm going to start with the floor for this table because the majority of it is happening on the floor here. There is a decent portion that is along the wall and the window and the cabinets, but the majority of it is on the floor. So if we start there, we're going to get a good portion of the table covered up. Using the polygonal lasso tool, I'm going to select as much open flooring as I can. Flooring that doesn't have furniture on it, ideally, flooring that doesn't have a strong reflection on it, although that's a little bit hard to avoid with this picture. But this is going to be my source for new flooring underneath my table. So now that I have that all selected, I'm going to hit Control or command C to copy this. Then I'm going to hit Control or Command D to deselect it. So I've got it copied to my clipboard, and now I'm going to select where I want to place it. So same process with the polygonlaso tool, I'm going to select the floor area around the table. And I'm going to include the floor beyond the table as well just so it looks a little bit even and consistent. And then I'm, of course, also going to include the shadow and reflection from the table because if the table is not there, it can't cast a shadow, right? So I've got this whole area selected, and now I'm going to go up to the edit pull down menu. And I'm going to choose paste special. And paste special is a really cool menu. It allows you to do a lot of different kind of custom effects and tricks, but we're going to use the paste into selection. And what that's going to do is it's going to take what we have copied on our clipboard, which is our wood flooring and paste it into the frame of our selection. So you'll see once we do this, we'll actually be able to move the image around, and it won't show up outside of the area that we've selected. In photoshop, we call this a mask, and you'll see this reflected in our layers as well. So here we go. Paste into, and now I'm going to use my move tool and move this guy around. You can see that as I get to the edge of where I had selected, the wood stops being visible. In my layer menu, I can see that there's a little black and white thumbnail that shows the boundaries of my selection. So this is actually a pretty advanced photoshop technique, but it is so helpful. As I move my wood floor around, I can try to match up the graining if I want, although that can be a little tough. And I'm going to do this in multiple sections as well. So another great way to copy an item in photoshop is actually to hold down option if you're on a Mac or Ault if you're on a Windows machine and click and drag with your Move tool. And this will create a copy for you. And when you're holding down Alt or Option, you should be able to see that your cursor does a little mirror image letting you know that it's ready to copy. So now I can move this copy around. And adjust exactly where the wood graining is showing up. If I want to adjust the angle of the wood graining, I can go ahead and do control T, hover over the corner of my image, and just rotate it slightly so that the graining doesn't look too skewed. Not bad. Okay. Then this new section of wood automatically became the top layer. I want to pull it down under the first section of wood just so that the line is a little less obvious between the two sections of wood. I'm going to do that again. I'm going to hold down option on my mac. You can do alt if you're on a windows machine, and I'm going to bring in my next piece of wood flooring. I can adjust the rotation just a little bit, and I'm going to pull this down below my other layers. I'm actually going to put it below the first piece of wood but above the second one. We've got almost all of the table covered up, so I'm just going to do one more section to cover up that last little piece, rotate it just a little bit. The grains all going in the same angle. And then drag this to the bottom of all the sections of wood. Okay. So we've got a floor covering that looks fairly decent. It's not perfect, right? And I could go through and blur these lines out with the erase tool the same way I did with the chandelier. And depending on how much patience I have, I may want to take the time to really make it look super realistic, but I will eventually be putting furniture on top of it. So how picky I want to be with that is up to me. Now, that is one way to cover things up in photoshop. Obviously, I would need to go in and do that for the back wall and the window and the cabinet as well, so we don't see these chairs in the tabletop. But because what's behind the chairs in the tabletop is so much more elaborate than what's on the floor, it can be a little bit tricky and time consuming. So I'm going to show you another way to do this that is actually quite amazing. So recently, Photoshop has created these AI tools, these AI generative tools, and they are actually quite great. They're not perfect yet, but they can help us out so much in situations like this. What we need to do as photoshop users is be careful with selection and with how we prompt these AI generators. So I'm going to show you some things to keep in mind when doing this. I'm going to use my polygono lasso tool to select not just my table, but the area around the table as well. And I'm giving a good, I don't know, half inch border. And this is so that when the AI goes to delete the table, it'll have some elements to work with and cover up the table with. So I've just selected the table, and all the area around it, the shadow, the whole thing, right? Nothing too fussy, nothing too time consuming. And now I'm going to go up to edit, and a little bit less than halfway down our edit menu is the fill menu. I'm going to choose generative pill. And I'm going to type my prompt here. So you can be very simple in your language. You don't need to speak in full sentences. You really just want to be direct about what you want done. So I'm going to say remove table and chairs. It helps when you spell it right, too. And then I'm going to click Generate. Wow. Isn't that amazing? And not only does it look pretty good. It gives us three different variations to choose from. So depending on some of the details, that one's a little weird with the dishwasher. I can choose which one I think looks best. For me, I think it's between Oh, yeah, definitely the middle one. Middle ones better. I remember when I was a student studying, design, I would spend hours using different patching tools to copy little sections of an image to cover up areas like this. So as a long time photoshop user, I am in a lot of awe with this new feature. As skeptical as I was at first about how well it could actually work. It's quite wonderful. So now, We have this whole patch on a layer, and it's named the layer based on my prompt. The layers remove table and chairs, and I can toggle it on and off and you can see the extents of the layer. It's really quite impressive. Let's do this again with the light fixture above the table. So I'm just going to use the rectangular marquee in this instance and select the whole area around the light fixture. Go to my edit, pull down menu, and choose generative fill, and I'm going to say, remove pendant light. I want to be as descriptive as possible without being too wordy. But if I just wrote Remove light, the A, I could think I mean the light coming in from the window. So I want to make sure it understands I mean the actual light fixture. So I wrote pendant light, and I'm going to click Generate. Wow. The great options, again, and I can click through them and see the wallpapers a little different in each one. I think for me, the first one is the best option. Is there anything else that's changing? Yeah. Number one. So now I have that as a layer. M I can go through and do this as much as I want to. Let's do it again with the other pendent light. One thing is I want to make sure that I'm always on my base layer when I do this so that it has that information to pull from rather than one of the additional layers that I added. Edit, generative fill, remove. Let's try light fixture this time and see how that goes. Gone. Like magic, it's amazing. Here are other two options. That one left something behind. This one, this one versus this one. That one's cleaner. Okay. Done. And I could keep going. There are some other elements that I do want to get rid of that I think will cover up quite easily, like the border wall paper that I can cover up when I apply a new material over top of it. But this is a great way to go through and edit elements out and get the blank slate that you need to create your digital makeover. So from here, I'm going to start adding pieces in. Ironically, the first thing I want to do with this kitchen is change the flooring. For me, I've never been a big fan of wood flooring in kitchens. It's totally personal preference, but I want to change this floor to stone. And a lot of the makeover choices we're going to be making for this kitchen are more architectural finishes rather than furniture. We'll add a little bit of furniture at the end, but we're going to change the flooring. We're going to change the countertops, the tile, and all of the paint colors. And that's a slightly different process in terms of collaging. So let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is open up the image of the flooring that do want to use. And I would recommend finding an image, if possible, that's completely flat, rather than something that is a picture that's in perspective, a picture that someone took of an installation in the room. You want to get a totally flat two D image. Now, this is not totally perfect because there are some legs on this image. So I'm going to choose, I only need a small section of this tile because I'm going to make it a pattern. But I want to make sure that the edges match up. So I'm going to have half of a white diamond on each side of the left and right, and then half of a pink diamond on the top and bottom. And then from there, I'm going to go up to the top, pull down the image menu and choose crop. And now I'm only going to see what I wanted to see of my image. From there, k, another advanced photoshop technique, but you're ready for it. We're going to go to edit, and we're going to go to define pattern, which is a little bit more than halfway down. And here we can just name our pattern. So I'm going to name this Marvel checkerboard. Say, Okay. Now, I'm going to go back to my kitchen image. I'm going to select my floor. I'm going to start with my object selection tool on my base layer, none of the new layers that we've created. And that we'll select most of the floor. Of course, the table and chairs are technically still there, so it's selecting around them. I'm just going to grab my lasso tool, make sure the additive property is checked and add that area in. It looks like I also have some little sections to delete out as well. I'm going to do that. Okay, I'm satisfied with my floor selection. Now I'm going to add my new floor. At this point, I have the full floor selected, and I'm going to save this selection the same way we did in the selection module. I'm going to go up to the select pull down menu. I'm going to selection almost all the way down at the bottom. And name my selection floor. We will need this later, but we have to do a couple other steps first. I'm going to hit Command D or Control D to D select. Now I'm going to create a new layer by tapping the plus sign on the layer menu. From there, I'm going to hit the layer fill button, the little black and white cookie. I'm going to choose pattern, which is the third from the top. Now, this is Photoshops pattern library, and there are some predetermined ones. You can see that photoshop defaults to this nice leaf green pattern. But since we saved our pink and white checkerboard, it is also in our library. You can see there's a nice thumbnail of it right there, so I'm going to go ahead and select my thumbnail. And I'm going to increase my scale a little bit because I know I want a big chunky checkerboard for my flooring, and I'm going to say, Okay. Then I'm seeing some of the nice generative fill layers that I created earlier, so I'm going to go ahead and drag my checkerboard above those in my layer menu. Now, right now, this is a mask and in order to manipulate it with the transform tool, I need to convert it. I'm going to right click on my layer where it says the name of my layer. I'm going to choose Convert to Smart object. A smart object will allow us to manipulate the image in a semi permanent way. Now you can see we have our eight white dots at each corner, and I'm going to go ahead and tap Control or command T to activate transform Right click, and I'm going to choose Distort. Let's get my layer menu out of the way. Now I'm going to pull my top two corners down and in. I want to try my best to have the checkerboard cover all of the floor area and follow the perspective that's established in the image already. I might need to zoom out to really see that. But the main idea is that the two top corners will be in and down and the two outer corners will probably just come out a little bit. If you have a perfectly square room, you can just match the corners of the corners in your room. But because I have this bay window and some cabetry, I have to kind of imagine what this room would look like as a perfect square. I'm going to hit, return or enter to complete my transformation. F here, I can bring back my floor selection. If I go to the select pull down menu and choose load selection. Under the channel pull down menu, I choose floor, the one that I saved, and I click Okay. And then making sure I have my marble floor layer selected, I'm going to create a layer clipping mask simply by clicking on this nice little button that says layer masks. It's a rectangle with a little circle in it, and it's going to crop everything that's not selected. And there I have my floor. Now I have a great base to put some additional furniture on. This is very exciting. I want to do some more surface modification before I bring my furniture in though. I want to change the countertop and the tile. We're basically going to do the same process with each of those surfaces. Let's start with the countertop. I'm going to open a really great marble image that I found. I'm going to crop out any texts that I don't want to see. And then I'm going to say edit define pattern. This is blue marble. I'm going to zoom in on my countertop a little bit and see how well I can get the object selection tool to recognize it. I'm not getting much from the object selection tool, so I am going to use the polyonso tool to go ahead and trace this whole thing on the island and on the main counter. Okay. I'm not including the backsplash because I'm actually going to change that to be full tile. So I'm just going to do the blue marble here. And I'm going to save this selection. Create a new layer, it Control D to D select. Add a layer pattern to it. I can see my floor is above it. I'm going to drag this above all of my other patterns. I'll right click on it and say, convert to smart object. And then I'll hit Control T or command T. Right click, choose Distort and start bringing this in a little bit. Now, I don't have to go as far with this as I did with my flooring. I don't have to pull it off the edge of the image. I just have to make sure it's covering all of that nice counter area. That looks pretty good. I'm going to hit. Then I'm going to go to select load selection in the channel Man, I'm going to choose counter, say. Then I'm going to create my layer mask here with the layer mask button at the bottom of the layer menu. I want to add tile to a few places where it does not exist right now. I want to bring this out onto this wing wall and really carry it out throughout the whole kitchen because I love tile. I am going to need to select this all by hand because it isn't one specific object that I'm selecting. I am covering overtop multiple objects. I'm even going to cover up this microwave here because I don't really like the way it looks. So I'm just going to keep adding and slowly clicking going around objects that I still want to see. I know I'm going to add a new facet later, so I'm going to go ahead and just cover up the existing one. Let's save this selection as tile, create a new layer, Control D to D select. I'm going to open the tile image that I want to use to make it a pattern. I'm going to crop out just the top and left edge because I can see a little white there and I do feel like it will show up when we tile when we tile the tile. It, define pattern. Now I'm going to add a pattern to this new layer and I can go ahead and shrink this a little bit because I don't think it'll be very large just a little. Okay. Now I'm going to right click and say convert to smart object, it Control T. Right click or Control click, choose Distort. Now I'm going to need to do this a few times because I have multiple surfaces that the tile will go on. I'm going to match this wall with the tile. Then I'm going to use my copy trick by holding down option and creating another layer, it Control T, right click for distort and cover the other wall. I'm covering more than I need just so that I'm able to easily match the perspective points. I like to line up my edges of my image with where the wall is. It's just a little easier to do visually. Okay. Now I can combine these two layers by shift clicking, selecting both of them, and doing either Control E or command E. And I can bring up my selection of my tile wall, say, hit my mask button, and bam. Our tile is in place. Let's save the sky while we've got a minute. So I've done my floor, my tile wall, and my countertop. And from here, I'm going to make adjustments to paint color on the walls and the cabinets. And this is the exact same process we did in the previous photo where I'll be selecting the wall. Adding a mask to change the hue and saturation of each object and seeing what colors I like. Collaging allows us to experiment with different ideas and visually understand the relationship of elements in a room. Interior design hinges on coordination. Make sure to look at the sum of all parts, not just the individual items. Photoshop is a tool for you to use your creativity, and once you get a feel for using it, you can spend hours testing different schemes. So settle in, get comfortable, take breaks, and have fun. I've added a solid color layer fill to my ceiling and the bay window, but I don't want to cover these up completely. So here I can change the blending mode of the layer to let some of the photo behind show through. This can be really helpful when you're just trying to change the color of a multi surfaced object. There are a lot of different blending styles that respond to different amounts of light in different ways. I would suggest going through and seeing which one looks best. I would suggest using multiply in a lot of instances, it often looks the best. But if you're not satisfied with that, you can try some of the others as well. Hue saturation and color are often good options. I think for mine, I am going to choose color. So I've changed all of the surfaces in my room, and now it's time to start bringing in appliances, plumbing fixtures and furniture in the exact same way that we did in the first image. 8. Module 7: Saving: Congratulations. You've gone through all of the different tools that you need to create your very own digital makeover. And now the last step is being able to share this amazing image with whoever you want. Right now, we have our file saved as a dot PSD document, and you can see the extension up at the top here. That, of course, stands for photoshop document. This is a file type that can really only be open in photoshop. Not everyone has photoshops, so we want to be able to save this as a file that anyone can open, like a PDF or a JPEG, TIFF, PNG, et cetera. We also want to preserve this file because we have all of our amazing layers here, and all of our selection saved all of these different things, and if we ever want to come back and make adjustments, we need these things to remain. Oftentimes, when you are saving as a different file type, the layers will get compressed and that information will go away. Typically, you're going to have at least two variations of your file, one with all the layers, and one that is a little bit more compressed, that's easy to share. Let's look at the first option. We'll go up to file and save as. If you've worked in other types of software before, using File and Save As is fairly familiar. But there are some different processes here in photoshop to keep in mind. If you're on a PC or a Windows machine, your save as window might look a little bit different from mine because I'm on a mac, but the fundamentals are the same. You can name your file up at the top and you can navigate to where you want to save it. Down at the bottom is where you're able to choose the file type. Under the Save as option, there are a limited amount of file types to choose from. We of course, have our photoshop document, which is the default selection. Then there is the Photoshop PDF. I am a fan of this because this will save our layer information. And it's the type of file that you could potentially send to someone else. We might not always want to do that, and we'll look at that in a minute, but it allows the flexibility of still being able to edit the file and send it out in all one file, which is great. So I'm going to save this as a PDF. And what will happen is the file that I have opened in Photoshop now is going to change to the file that I save it as. Right now, it's kitchen one dot PSD. I'm going to save it as kitchen one dot PDF. I'm just going to click save it. Then here we have some options to choose from. I can change the quality of my PDF here if I want. If I'm trying to compress it and make it very small, if I want to send it in an e mail and there's some a file size limitation, I could choose smallest file size. However, I want to preserve the quality and beauty of my photo. I'm going to keep it at high quality print. Click Save PDF in the lower right hand corner. Click ys. Now, My file name is kitchen one dot PDF. Kitchen one dot PSD still exists where I had it saved. I just don't have it open in photoshop right now, and any changes that I make from here on out would be made to kitchen one dot PDF, and kitchen one dot PSD is preserved from this point in time backward, basically. This is a good option. We can see that we still have all of our layers. However, the file size of a PDF and the file size of a dot PSD file, is quite large, typically, especially when we have a lot of layers. All of that information is stored as memory in the file and makes the file be hundreds of megabytes sometimes. So if we want to e mail something and not jam up our friends and families in boxes, we can export this image as a different file type that will compress all of the layer information, and you'll really just see the image with no editing capabilities. So to do that, we'll go to file and we'll choose export. The second option is export as, and that will open up a menu here for us. So the first option that we have is our file type. We can choose PNG, JPEG, or Jiff. All three of these work well for e mailing or even sending through text message. You're welcome to experiment with all three and see which one you like better, but they do all work for these purposes. And if I want to adjust the quality for whatever reason, I can. I can keep it high, high quality, will create a crisper image. Low quality will create a smaller file size, and you can have the slider anywhere in between for a little bit of both. From there, I'm going to hit export, and it will ask me where to save my file, and I'm going to save it in my folder. Now, one thing you'll notice is here at the file name, it has stayed Kitchen one PDF. The JPEG has been saved to the location that I specified, and my PDF is still open. That's the difference with export. It's not changing the file we're working with. It's making basically a copy of it somewhere else for me to open another time. Now, why would you want a PDF versus a JPEG? Here in my file folder, I have a few options saved. I have kitchen one dot jpeg and kitchen one dot PDF. Remember, kitchen one dot PDF has all of my layer information. If I open kitchen one dot jpeg in photoshop, My layer menu is blank. It's all just background. So all of that information has been compressed, and if I want to edit anything further, I can't. That's really important to know. However, when I look at my file size for kitchen one dot jpeg, it is 5.7 megs. Kitchen one dot PDF is 152.5 megs. So if I'm trying to e mail that or even send that via text message, I might have issues. I might have my e mail returned to me rejected, depending on how much room someone has in their inbox or how big a server is. So typically with e mailing, you want to keep it smaller. But for our own records, we want to keep the larger file so we can always go back and edit it. So as long as you have two versions of your file, you'll be able to both edit it and share it. And if you make a change in your main file with your layers, you can always re export the image with any new changes and updates. 9. Thank you!!: I hope you enjoyed this class and leave with an amazing image of your dream space. Thank you so much for letting me be your guide through this photoshop lesson, and be sure to post your class project. I love seeing your work. I'd love to stay in touch. You can follow me on Instagram at Soft Landing Studio and be sure to check out my podcast soft Landing, wherever podcasts are available.