The Essential Photoshop Class - With Fabulous Projects for You to Complete

1. Welcome to the Essential Photoshop Class: Hi and welcome to the essential Photoshop class. I'm Frank Minghella, professional photographer and media teacher with Perfect Photo Company. Now in this class, I'm going to teach you how to create amazing images using the magical power of Adobe Photoshop. Don't worry if you're new to Photoshop, because I'll be here to guide you and I'll be at your side throughout the class, so to speak. In each module you will learn a new skill and I'll explain every step I take and easy to follow examples. As immediate teacher, I know the best way to learn a new skill is to jump in and have a go. With that said, all the modules come complete, with project files that you can download to allow you to join in. Meaning whatever edits I create, you can follow along and achieve the same results. During the class you'll learn how to use layers, adjustment layers, masks, filters, and the many tools that help you to enhance and transform your images, as well as how to correctly resize your work for print or for web. At the end of the class, you'll be a competent Photoshop editor capable of creating some fantastic images. I'm looking forward to taking you on this wonderful journey through Adobe Photoshop and look forward to seeing you in Module one. 2. Module 1 The Photoshop Environment: In this module, we're going to take a look at the Photoshop environment. I want to take you on a guided tour and show you where everything lives. Then in future modules, we'll use those tools and all those options to create some fantastic edits. Don't forget, you can download all the source files and take part. Now with that in mind, it would be really helpful if your Photoshop layout and your arrangement was identical to mine or at least very similar. Let's do that first and let's set up your Photoshop so it looks like mine. First of all, then let's choose a workspace. Now, to do that, if you go up to the top and select Window, and then navigate across to Workspace and select Photography. By doing that you will have the same layout that I have. Now my layout is also being customized. Now, I'm going to come back to that later because you can customize your own workspace. But I guess you're going to do that when you become more proficient with using the actual software. I'm going to come back to that a little bit later. Next thing you need to do then is to again drop down the Window menu at the top and just make sure that these three are ticked, and they should be by default. Application Frame, Options, and Tools just make sure they're ticked and I'm sure they will be. Then if we go across to View, navigate to Screen Mode and select Standard Screen Mode. Again, I would imagine that's will be set by default as well. They're the three things you need to do. Now, jumping back to this workspace, you can customize your own workspace. I said I'll talk more about that a bit later. As you can see there I have created one called Frank's Photoshop Workspace. I'm indeed going to click on that and now have my own customized workspace selected. Now as I say, as we move through it will become more clear why I've done that. To show at this stage would be a little bit difficult I think. But don't worry by the end of this module you will understand what I've just done there. Let's take this little tour then of Photoshop. On the left-hand side, we have our tools strip and we'll be accessing the majority of these tools as we move forward through each module. Let me select a tool and in this case, I'll select the brush tool. Now, the brush has many parameters and all the tools have parameters, and you can change their parameters on this strip just here, it lives just below the main drop-down menu. Brush, for instance, I can change how hard or soft the brush is, I can change the brush type, I can change its flow, and its opacity. As I say all tools have a range of parameters that you can make adjustments to. If I select the Clone tool for instance, again, there's another set of parameters and we can make changes there. Whenever you select a tool just remember that you will change its parameters on this strip here. Again, don't worry about it because as we go through and I show you various edits all will become clear. Tools here, and you can change the parameters on this strip. Now on the right-hand side, we have our layers, we have our adjustments, and we have at the bottom, effects, mask, more adjustments. There's a whole heap of things that we can do on this side. When we complete in that there's a [inaudible] It's a case of selecting the right tools, making selections, and then using the adjustments and the layers on this side, and they all work together seamlessly. It's all very easy. It may look complicated at the moment but honestly, it's really easy once you get going. Of course, you've got your drop-down menus at the top. This is where you can select filters for instance, the many tool palettes that may not be open at the moment you can access them. As you move through if I select a tool that perhaps isn't open on your screen, you can quite simply just select it from here. Then obviously you've got your Save and your Exports, and many other various things you can do up here. A lot of those things will have shortcuts, and I will mention shortcuts because it's not just about making things quicker, it's just working more sensible really if you can remember some of the shortcuts. I'll highlight as many as I can and they'll become familiar and you will use them, and it will make things a lot easier. Let's take a little recap then. We have tools on this left-hand side, just simply click on a tool. In some cases, if I click on this tool and I keep the mouse button pressed down there's multiple tools. You will see me doing that as well so you can select one source of tool for instance one out of our flyout menu and then you've got options to select various tools within that one selection. Once a tool is selected up here you can change its parameters and we will do that quite a lot. On the right-hand side, we have our layers and adjustments and all that good stuff. Lastly, you can have as many documents open as you like. I have mine arranged in tabs so I have two documents open at the moment. We've got this Monalisa image, and then we have this TV Monalisa image. You can see if I just click on those two tabs, I click between them I can access either one. I can also jump up to the window and navigate to the bottom and I can change them that way too. Some people like to work this way and I'm going to drag that out, and I'm going to drag this one out as well. Some people like to work with floating windows and you may find that really useful. I don't like that, so I have them at the top. When I want to access them I just click on the tab, it just makes things easier for me. It's a way I've always worked but you may find a use for having those floating windows. It's entirely up to you which way you work. But if you're going to follow along and take part in all the modules, it makes sense if you've got your layout exactly the same as mine. Lastly, a quick word. Then I did mention before that you can customize your workspace. Let me just show you what I mean by that. Let's open a tool, let's open the Notepad for instance. At any given time you can have a tool palette floating around the screen. If you use a tool quite often you might just want to leave it on the screen and access it at any time. You can dock that to the side, so that is now docked at the side and that's what I like to do. When you become more familiar and more skilled with Photoshop and you find yourself using more tools than some of the other ones that you don't use as much, you can customize your layout. When you do that you can just simply navigate to the top, select Workspace, and then click on New Workspace and a little dialog box will appear and then you can name that new workspace. Then that is your own personal workspace. Now, at the moment, because you're learning all about Photoshop you perhaps don't know what tools that you won't open that you're going to use more than some of the others for instance, so it's perhaps something you're not going to do. That's why I suggest you simply clicking on to the Photography workspace and that way your layout and your workspace will be in keeping with what you'll see all the way through this course. As I say, if I click on something and that's docked here for instance, as I say my workspace will be slightly different. Always remember that you can just simply click up here and simply select and they should appear on this docked section here. If they don't and they're floating about you can just drag it and dock it just there. That concludes the little introduction then to the Photoshop workspace. I'm super excited to move forward and show you how to create some fantastic edits. Now in the next module, we're going to look at how you open a document, and how you save it, and export it in several file formats, now it's really easy. It's the first module that you can take part in by using the source files provided. As I say, play along, as they say in the quiz games, play along and join in, and it's the best way to learn is to actually jump in and have a go, isn't it? With that said, I'll see you in the next module. 3. Module 2 Open Close and Save: In this module, we're going to start with the basics. They would be, how to open a document, how to close a document, how to save a Photoshop document file, how to save a JPEG file, and finally, how to create a PNG file. It's all very simple, but it's fundamental. To get you going in Photoshop, we need to cover these basic items. Honestly, it's really simple. Let's jump in and take a look. With Photoshop open, you are presented with either this screen or click on the Home button. You may well be presented with this screen. This is just the home screen and you can access previously opened documents or set it to other things here. You can always take a look at that, but what I like to do is go straight into Photoshop. To do that, if you are presented with this window, you just click on the Photoshop logo in the top left-hand corner. There you go, straight into Photoshop. You can always go back to that homepage by clicking on the Home button, which again is in the top left-hand corner. You can toggle between the two, really easy. Let's take a look then at how you open up documents. You have several options. The obvious one is File and Open. The reason I say that is because most software that allows you to open up a document or an ice and more, whatever it is, there will always be File, Open. Photoshop is no difference, File, Open. There is a shortcut there as well, which is Command or Control O for open. You can do it that way as well. If I just click on Open and my browse window or my Finder window will open up, and I can navigate to where the work is or the folder is, all the documents are. In this case, they are in Module 2, opening and saving. I could just simply decide which images that I want to open. There's two images I want to open and its Image 1 and Image 2. I can simply just Command or Control click to select both of them, or Shift click. I can then simply press Open and they will open up. There you go. I have two documents open. I want to close them down. To close them down is easy. Just click in the little corner, where you can see the cross, or you can pop up here and Close All or just close a particular document. I'm going to click Close All, so they're gone. Go back to Photoshop. Command or Control O will, again, just bring up that box, my import box, and I can again navigate to where those folds and files are. The same thing, I can open them that way, I'll cancel off for now. I can double-click in the center. Again, the finder window or browse window will open up, and again, I can navigate to where those two images are that I want to open up. Let's cancel that. The last way is that I can simply open my finder in this case because I'm on an Apple Mac, or you could use your browser, your Explorer, and navigate to where those two images are, in this case, and then just drag them onto the desktop. That's another way of doing it. I'm going to close all of these down, Close All, and what I'm going do is open them in the traditional method. Open, I need to navigate to where they are, and they're in Module 2, and are these two images here. I'm going to open these two up. There you go. They are now on my desktop. That's how easy it is to open documents. Then there are several ways of doing it, but they all do the same thing. It's all very simple, isn't it? Aren't they? Just to keep things fresh. But as I say, it all does the same thing. That's how you open a document. Saving a document is not difficult, but to spice things up and make things a bit more interesting, I'm going to create and add it. Because if you're going to save a document, chances are that you've obviously created some source of adjustment. That's what I'm going to do. Let me just show you. It's going to open this finished file. I'm going to create this design. From this JPEG and this logo, I'm going to put them together and create this finish edit. You can watch me do that, or you can skip to the part in the tutorial where I show you how to save a Photoshop document and save a JPEG, and also how to save a PNG. You can simply jump to that part. I'm going to put the timestamps up on the screen, and you can simply jump to that part of the tutorial. Or you can hang around and watch me create this edit. It's entirely up to you. You can also join in with the project files and follow along. It's going to be a little bit complicated. Actually, I'll rewind there. It's a simple edit. But as you haven't really been shown much yet, it may seem complicated. It's not really simple. By all means, watch me create the edit or simply jump to the timestamps to watch how to save a document. If you decided to hang around, great, get yourself self comfortable because I'm going to create some really simple edits. I don't expect you to understand all the edits that I'm going to create, but as we move forward through all the various modules, I'll introduce you to all the tools and all the fancy edits and beautiful edits that you can create. But to just save a document, to show you how easy that is, it's not going to be interesting. With that in mind, I'm going to create a bit of a design. You can download the source files and follow along. You don't have to, because as I say, this module is all about opening and saving a document. But if you feel adventurous, by all means, take part. I will briefly describe what I'm doing, but don't forget, in later modules I'll going into things in a lot more detail. With that said, let's jump in and I'll show you what I'm going to do. I'm going to create a bit of a design and I'm going to use this particular file to do it. It's currently a JPEG. Once we start creating the design, it's going to turn into a Photoshop document, and that's something completely different. What I'm going to do is, I have a camera on this left-hand side, and it would be nice to have a camera on the right-hand side. If we look over here in the layers palette, I have a layer that's called background. I'm going to double-click on that, and I'm going to rename that. I'm going to call it camera left and click on Okay. That layer is now called camera left. There's many ways for me to make a copy of this camera onto this right-hand side. As we move forward, you'll see all the different options. But for ease and quickness, I'm just going to simply duplicate that layer, but I'm going to use a shortcut, which is Command or Control J. All I need to do is make sure the layer is selected. You always know the layer is selected because it's light gray and you'll see when more layers appear. The active layer is always this light gray color. Command or Control J will duplicate that layer. There you go. I now have two layers. This one I'm going to rename camera right. I'm just going to double-click on it and edit the title, change that to right. I have two layers. In the tool strip, I have the Move Tool selected. With this camera right layer active, I just want to show you that I have indeed got two layers. Two identical layers. Command or Control Z will undo the last command or last set of commands. If I just undo that. It's positioned it back where it was. I need to make this camera appear on this right-hand side. As I said, there's many ways of doing it, but the way I'm going to do is just by flipping it horizontally. A new command then, Command or Control T is the transform tools. Now we're going to do a whole module on the transform tool, so don't worry. When the transform tool is active, we have these handles that appear all around the object or the layer in this case. If I drag any of those handles, I can resize and do plenty of other things. That's pretty cool, and you can see the layer underneath cornea. Again, I'm going to do Command or Control Z just to undo that. Now while the transform tool is active, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to select Flip Horizontal and there you go. The camera is now on the right-hand side, and I'm going to press return. Let's have a recap. Camera right, camera left, camera right is on top and that's why you can't see camera left. If I click on the layer visibility icon, the little eyeball, I can switch off that layer and long behold, you can see the layer underneath. Really what I need to do then is rob away parts of this layer to reveal the camera left layer underneath. Again, there's plenty ways of doing that. But I want to use a mask. Now we're going to do a whole section on masks. Throughout this whole class, we'll use masks quite a lot. If you're following along, and you will be an adventures great and if you not, don't worry, because this module is all about how we save a Photoshop document and why we create a Photoshop documents as well. With that said, I'm going to come down to the bottom here and apply a mask to that camera right layer, and you can see this little white box here. All I need to do is paint onto this box with a black brush. It's like getting a big rubber and rubbing away parts of the layer to reveal what's underneath and to do that, we use a brush. I'm going to pop across the Tool strip and select a brush. I need to make sure in my foreground and background colors that I have the black color selected. Now, if you've got different colors or the black on white here, then all you need to do is press D for Default, and it will Default at black and white. It does that because black and white colors, you will use quite often because we use them to paint onto masks. We can toggle between the black and white by pressing the X key. Now in this case we're painting onto a white mask, so we should use a black brush. With the brush selected, we've selected black, and then we can pop up to the parameters. Remember, in the first module, we learned that you can change the parameters of each tool on this strip at the top. What I'm going to do is make sure I've got a soft round brush selected, and the hardness is on zero. I want a nice, really soft brush to do that. I can change the size here as well. But I want to show you a shortcut for that. I'm going to hit return and move along here, and I want the Opacity and the flow to be both on 100 percent. Now back to that brush size. You can see, if I just move around, you can see the size of the brush. Now to make it smaller, we use the square bracket keys. The left-hand square bracket key will make the brush smaller and the right-hand square bracket key will make it bigger. I want a size of roughly, yeah, that size would be fine. Now, make sure you click on the white box, which is the Mask, and I'm going to paint black onto the white Mask and look at that, that's fantastic, I'm revealing what is underneath. I'm really doing is rubbing away parts of that layer to reveal what's underneath, that's amazing; isn't it? If I turn off the layer underneath, you can see what I've actually done. I've actually removed parts of the layer. If I right-click on the mask itself, I can disable that layer mask. As you can see as non-destructive and that's the fantastic thing about using masks. If you change your mind, you can paint on with the opposite color. In this case, I could paint on white, but more on Masks later. I'm going to Enable Layer Mask. Also, using the Alt or Option key and Click on the mask, it will actually show me what the mask looks like. Anything in white is going to reveal and anything in black is going to conceal. I could in theory just finish off paint in that area there and Alter Option on the mask again, and then we're back to the state where we can see both cameras, that's pretty easy; isn't it? I've now created a Photoshop document that has two layers, camera left and camera right and camera right has a mask on it, all very simple. The last thing I'm going to do is switch over to this document, which is the logo. I will do that by just simply clicking on these tabs. I want this logo. Let me just switch tools and want to go to the Move Tool. I want this logo to appear in the other documents. I want it to appear in Image Tableau 1. There's many ways to do that. I'm going to decide to do it this way. I'm going to drag the layer all the way over to the tab at the top and see what happens. This Tableau 1 image becomes the active image. Then I can just release in the center. That was easy; wasn't it? That is now there. No, I want to undo that and show you another way of doing it. Back to the logo image Tableau 2 and I can Right-Click on the layer and select Duplicate Layer. Then the destination is going to be Image Tableau 1 and I can simply accept that. Then when I go to Image Tableau one, the same thing, there is the logo and others two ways of doing it. It's entirely up to yourself. They both work exactly the same way. There's the logo. Now in the spirits of design, I can move this about and create something quite nice. I can put that logo perhaps there. I think, well that looks quite good. Or does it look better there? Let's put it back over the lens there. If I decide to leave it there, this is now a Photoshop document. You get so far with your designs. It is good practice to save that as a Photoshop document because you may change your mind, or you may want to make further edits. Let's save this as a Photoshop document. File Save As, that is the one to go for in this case, Save As and Photoshop will probably know it will see that this layers there, and it will give you the option of Photoshop. You can see the file extension at the top is.PSD, which stands for Photoshop document. Now I could change this now I don't want to call it Image Tableau 1. I'm going to call it Design Tableau 1. Then I can make a choice where to save it. Now it's good practice to create a folder for your PSDs. You don't have to, but I'm going to create a new folder, and I'm going to call it PSDs. Create that folder, and then save this module 2 design Tableau 1 PSD into that PSD folder and click. Now behold, I've saved a Photoshop document. Now I'm going to close these documents down, Close All, and I'm going to reopen for that Photoshop document. Open Navigate to where? In this case it's already open. Navigate to where the for ship document is. Click on and Click it Okay. It's kept the layers so I can continue, add in this or perhaps make a different design. In this case, I think I'll select the logo layer and I will pop it inside the light bulb instead, and then I can save that. Again, I would select Save As. I'm going to call this Design Tableau 2. Now I've got two versions. I'm going to save it in the same Photoshop document folder that I created earlier. Click on Save and now I have two versions. I'm going to go up to the top open, and you can see I've got two versions. One has the logo on the lens and the other one, which is the current one that's open, has it above the Light Bulb. I'm going to open this one up, and I've got two versions, two separate Photoshop documents. You can see with a Photoshop document, you can open it, you can make further adjustments. That is a great way because you often, when you make an edit, you'll change your mind or you might want to add text. In this case, you could do a whole heap of things, but when it's flat, that's a JPEG, you can't do that. Looking at these two, I think I prefer this one. Let's say I prefer this one and I now want to send that off to the printers or perhaps I want to put on to social media or wherever want to do with, I need to now save this as a JPEG because it needs to be flat. Those layers need to be flat. Let's try "Save As" then, we want to save this as a JPEG "Save As". Then when we look at our options here, Format options, you can see that there is no option to save it as a JPEG, and that's because it's got layers. If I cancel that, and then choose "Save a Copy" instead, I will now have the option to select a "JPEG". I'm going to cancel that and just show you this version again, "Save As" and as I say, there's no option to save as a JPEG. However, if you click on this little box here, "Save a Copy", miraculously, you can save as a JPEG. You can either do Save a Copy from the file drop-down menu or you can do "Save As" and then just click on the box to reveal this option. It's entirely up to you. I want to choose this option and I don't want it to say copy, so I'm just going to remove that. Now, I'm going to step backwards, and I have my PSD folder I created, and I'm going to create a new folder. I'm going to call it JPEGs, and I'm going to save that into there. Module number 2, Design 001.jpg, and hit the "Save" button. This little box will appear with the JPEG options, I always leave it set to maximum baseline. That's fine. Then click on "Okay" and I've now got a JPEG version of that. If I open that up Module 2 Design 001.jpg and open it up, you can see it's now one layer and it's a flat JPEG. I can email it to people. I can pop into social media and, of course, with a Photoshop document with layers, you cannot do that. That is the big difference, obviously. All very easy. Let's just look at one more thing then and that would be to create a PNG file. Now, rather than me explain what a PNG file is, it'd be much easier for me to create a PNG file and then everything will become a lot clearer. Let me do that. I want to start off by creating a new blank documents. That's really easy to do. I'm going to click on "New", so "File", "New", and I'm going to select this size. Now, you probably won't have the options I have here because these are recent sizes that are being used and it doesn't really matter for this particular example. I'm just going to click on that one and I have a new blank document. I'm going to put a nice color, a nice solid color and let's see, I'm going to type in a number here. Again, you don't have to remember any of this, but it's something I've created earlier. There you go. A nice blue color and it's an untitled documents, that's fine. Just remember it's called Untitled document. Let's go to this particular flat JPEG image. I'm going to make a PNG file of this light bulb. Over to material strip and I'm going to select the circular marquee tool, and I'm going to basically copy that shape. It doesn't have to be accurate because it's just to show you what PNG file is. Command or Control C, Command or Control V. Now, that just copies and pastes and as you can see, I've created a copy of that light bulb. Now, back in the layers palette, I'm going to right-click on that bulb layer and I'm going to duplicate the layer. I'm going to call it bulb. I want it to be on a new document and I'm going to call that bulb PNG and then hit "Okay", and there you go. I have the bulb on a new layer. Now, it's still a Photoshop document at the moment, so I need to save it as a PNG. Now, the checkerboard pattern around the object is the most important thing about a PNG because when you see this checkerboard pattern, it means that there's no information there and it's completely transparent. Let me save this as a PNG, and I'm going to save it as a JPEG as well. I'm going to show you the difference. First of all, we don't need all the space around the outside. I'm going to go across to the layers palette and I'm just going to Command or Control. You can see that, but there's a little square box appear and now it's dotted outline. It's indicating that if I accept that, then it's going to create a selection basically of what's on that layer. Now, zoom in a bit. You can see that dotted outline. Now, all I need to do then is to go up to the top and go to "Image", "Crop", and Photoshop or crop this document to the sizes of those dotted lines, that marquee, that selection, and there you go. It's cropped the image. Now, Command or Control D will deselect that outline. There you go, I've got the ball, but it's much smaller and I can now save that as a PNG and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do "File", "Save As", and I can select "PNG". Now, you can do it that way, but I'm going to show you a quicker way of doing it. I'm going to cancel that and I'm going to go across the layers palette, right-click and "Quick Export as PNG". Whenever you guys watching who are web designers, it's a really quick way of creating a PNG and exporting it. Then want to click on the "Quick Export as a PNG" and I need to navigate where I want it to be saved. I'm going to create another folder in here. I'm going to call it PNGs. Create that and it's a Bulb PNG. I'm just going to save that. That is now saved as a PNG. I'm going to save it now as a JPEG and you'll see what happens when you save as a JPEG, it has to make the image flat and the checker pattern, which we know is transparency, will be filled with a white color, it needs to flatten it, and that's what it's going to do. I'll show you that now. I'm going to do "File", "Save As", again, JPEG option isn't there, so it's going to be saved as a copy. Select JPEG and I'm going to call this Bulb JPEG. I'm going to save it. I'm going to put it into the PNG folder. Now, I know it's not a PNG, but let's keep them both together. Bulb JPEG is going into this PNG folder, I want to save that. Again, maximum and baseline. That's saved. We can close that now. Don't need to save it. Let's go back to our blue document and I'm going to open up those two bulbs that I've created. "File", "Open", the JPEG version and the PNG version. I'm going to open both of those up. The first one then is the PNG as you can see here. Now, look at the JPEG. It's actually white. The process of creating that JPEG, it's created that white background. This first one, I'm going to right-click, duplicate the layer and I want to put it on to the Untitled, which is our blue background. Click on "Okay". Now, I'm going to click on the JPEG and we'll do the same thing. Right-click "Duplicate Layer" and I wanted to go on to the Untitled. I guess I should've titled that, but it doesn't matter, and click on "Okay". Now, let's select that particular document and you can see this top one, this one I'm moving here now is the JPEG and it has this white background because remember when we created the JPEG, because it flattens the image, it automatically puts in this white background. I'm going to switch that layer off and jump to the PNG layer and, of course, there's no white around it. This is great for creating all kinds of graphic things and web designs and photographs, and adding things to your photographs. You can do so much with a PNG. It's fantastic. Now, just for fun, I'm going to jump down to the bottom and put on an effect. The one I'll go for is, let's see, Outer Glow. There you go. I've switched the light bulb up and that's fantastic. I can put as many copies of that light bulb as I like. I can just right-click "Duplicate Layer", "Untitled-1", and jump back to that document. I've got another version and as you know, Command or Control T will bring up the transform option and I could make that smaller. You can do wondrous things with PNGs. I can now save that as a JPEG or a Photoshop file as it's got layers, or if I was happy with this design as a JPEG. Now, if you've joined in and you created the same documents that I've created, and you've done really well because this module, as I say, is all about how you open documents and how you save them. If you take away from this module that knowledge, then that's fantastic because that's what it's all about. However, if you did create the files, then you've done really well. If you didn't, don't worry because coming up a whole heap of fantastic modules where you'll learn all about the tools. For instance, in the next module, we're going to discover the wonderful world of layers and you'll have the opportunity to move layers about and bring them in and open documents and do all that good stuff. The module after that, we call that masks. I'll go into masks in great detail as well, and then beyond that, your creativity can run wild. I will see you in the next module which, as I say, is all about layers. 4. Module 3 How Layers Work: In this module, we're going to take a look at layers, and Photoshop wouldn't be Photoshop without layers. You can do so much with layers, you can create campuses images, you can create images built up from multiple photographs blended together.You can add adjustment layers where you can target local adjustments on a specific part of a layer. You can add text layers and so much more, and it's pretty amazing. However, in this module we're going to keep things simple as it's an introduction into layers. What are layers then? Well, quite simply, they are layers and they sit on top of each other and are stack in order to create your finished image. You can, at anytime, change the order of the layers. You can group them together, you can link them, you can blend them together, you can adjust a specific layer, the possibilities are endless. As I say in this module, we'll keep things simple. We're going to create a composite Tabletop image built-up of separate layers and it will look something like this and you can download the project files and join in. What will you learn in this module? Well, you'll open multiple documents, drag layers between documents, move layers within the document, change the order of layers, link layers, group layers, create an adjustment layer, apply a clipping mask, and finally save the final layout as a JPEG. The process of creating this composite image is quite simple, but it will give you a good understanding of how layers work. Let's jump in then and make a start. With Photoshop open, let's begin the process of creating this campuses image. Don't forget, you can download the project files and join in. To begin with, then let's open up the document so I'm going to select File, Open, navigate to where the image is stored to Module 3, how layers work, and I'm going to select the first image and then Shift click, and that will select all of these images here. On also need the bottom two to Command or Control to select those two, or you can open them up individually it doesn't really matter, but I want to open them all together. This Module 3 reference file, if you look in there, you'll see the completed added as a reference. Okay, so we're going to open these images and just simply click on Open, and they will open up and they are now visible in the Photoshop window and they're all on tabs at the top, and you can scroll between them. The image that we need to work on is the Tabletop image. I'm just going to drag that along and I'm going to put it at the beginning. I always know where it is, doesn't really matter, but that's where it is. As I say, all the other items are in these tabs here, accessible there, or you can use this window. If you drop down the window, you can see that at the bottom, you can jump between the different documents, for instance, by just clicking and selecting them that way. There's that way of doing it too, or as I say, use the tabs. Now, I use the tabs, I find that easier. Before we do anything, I'm going to introduce you to one of the first tools then, and that is the zoom tool. Now the shortcut is the letter Z. On the tool strip, it's just here at the bottom, the zoom tool. I'm going to click on that and, again, you have your parameters that you can change on this strip here, I like to have scrubby zoom, checked. Scrubby zoom, when I press the key on my mouse, it allows me to do this, to zoom in and to zoom out. I like that way of work and I could in fact click here where it says fit screen and it would fit into the available screen space. But I like to use I say, scrubby zoom. You will find your own way of working. But for me, initially I never like scrubby zoom, but it's what I use all the time now. You can't just click and drag and do it that way. Let me turn scrubby zoom off. You could just click over in an area and drag and zoom in that way. But I like to use scrubby zoom anyway. That's what I'm going to use. We need to start bringing in the various layers. Now at the moment, if we look in the layers palette, we just have the background image and it's locked, and that's okay. If you ever want to unlock a background image, if we just double-click on it and then we rename it. You don't have to rename it, but I'm going to call it Tabletop. Click on OK, and you can see it's now renamed as Tabletop and it's unlocked. The first layer we want to bring across then is the actual coating mat. If I click on this tab here to access that document that contains the Tabletop, I need to now drag this across onto our wooden table top. I'm going to show you two methods of how to add that coating mat to our Tabletop image. The first one would be to pop over to the layers palette. Click and drag, so I've pressed the mouse key down and I'm going to drag it across all the way to the Tabletop image tab at the top here. Then I've still got hold of it in the center and I'm just going to drop it there. Then with the move tool, which is the shore Causes of a, but it's this tool at the top here. I can now, because this is the active layer, if we look in the layers palette, we now have Tabletop and coating mat. This is the active layer, the coating mat is now the active layer, it's this light gray color and I can move the coating mat round. Let's bring in some more images then. The next one I want to bring across as the toy car. As I say, you can either find here toy car or use the tabs at the top. I'm going to do it that way. I'm going to click on Toy Car and show you the second method of how we can add that image to our Tabletop image. I'm going to pop across to the layers palette, I'm going to right-click and I'm going to select duplicate layer just here.This little box will appear and I can set the destination, I want the Porsche to appear on the Tabletop image and click OK. Now when I navigate over to the Tabletop image, low behold, the Porsche has appeared and it's great I can now move that to wherever I want it to be. If we look in our layers palette now we have our Tabletop, the coating mat and the Porsche, and that Porsche can be anywhere, because it's on its own individual layer. In your design, you can put all these items wherever you want them to be. But I am just going to pop the car just on the right-hand side. Let's add our next image and let's bring across the ball. I'm going to just click on the tab at the top and I will drag it across like I did in the first method, just over the Tabletop image and then release it around about here. As I say, you can put these items wherever you want. But I'm just going pop the ball down there. Next one, let's bring in the clock and the clock lives just there. In this case, I'm going to do the alternative method, duplicate layer. Select the destination document which has Tabletop image and click on OK. Then when I navigate across to the table top image, the clock has appeared and I'm going to put that there. Next one to bring in then, I'm going to bring in the camera. Simply drag that layer across to the tab and drop it. I made a mistake there. Want to go back. If that happens, you've released the actual as you drag in the item across, you've released it too early, so don't worry if that happens. So that was a genuine mistake that by the way. But it will serve to show you that, you just got to be careful when you do it. So now I want to drop it, there it is. So I can put the camera roundabouts here. The last one is the pens. So it's the container with the pens and so that is just here with this one. Just for speed, I'll do the same. I'll just drag that across and then pop it down. There you go, we've got all our items now on the tabletop. If we look in the layers palette, we can see all those layers. Tabletop, cutting mat, Porsche, ball, clock, camera, and pens. Now there's a mistake here because I would like the pen container to be behind the camera. Now that is pretty easy to do. We're just going to change the stacking order of the layers. So if we look in the layers palette, we can see that the pen container is actually above the camera and it needs to be behind the camera. To do that, just make sure it's the active layer, which in this case it is because it's light gray. We need to click and drag it below the camera. So we watch what happens here. I've got hold with a little hand appears, and I'm just going to drag it below the camera layer. This little blue line will appear. It show me where I am about to place the pen container layer. I want to just below the camera layer so I can just release it there. As you can see, it is now behind the camera. That's where I want it to be because it makes more sense, doesn't it? Then I can click on the camera layer, make that the active layer, and I can decide where I want that to be. Maybe I want it there. I've just realized there's one more layer to bring across, and that's the actual book layer. So let's just do that then. So I'll right-click "Duplicate Layer", Destination Document, Tabletop Image. Click on "Okay", pop across the tabletop image and there's our book layer there. So that's it then, we've got all our layers in. So now let's take a look at an adjustment layer. Now, in a future module, we're going to go into adjustment layers in a lot more detail. But as this module is about layers, It's only fair to show you what an adjustment layer is. So imagine looking at this image. I look at the clock and I think it wouldn't it be nice if it was a bluish color rather than this rusty color. So I can do that with an adjustment layer. So let's select the clock layer. So that is now the active layer. I'm going to jump up here and I'm going to select an adjustment. It is going to be the hue in saturation. When I do that, this adjustment layer appears above the clock. We can see on this left-hand side, this is the icon. That allows me to do the adjustments. This little fly out menu's appeared. The right-hand side we have the mask. Now, the next module is all about masks. I'm not going to use the mask here, but obviously in the next module we're going to take a good look at masks. So when I click on the "Adjustment Icon" and pop-up here, and I can start changing the color. I'm going to drag the hue slider. I'm watching the clock and I'm thinking, yeah that bluish color is quite nice. Now, you probably noticed that, that adjustment layer has affected more than just the clock. It's changed the tabletop color. It certainly changed the cutting mat color. The seats inside the toy car have changed color as well. That's because they are all below this adjustment layer, we can see that it's above the cutting mat, the Porsche, the ball, and the clock. They've all changed color. If I switch that on and off. That particular layer, adjustment layer, you can see it's affecting more than just the clock. So how do we apply the adjustment then, just the clock? Now it's very simple. We pop across to the Properties box here and this little icon here, if I just click on top, it clips the adjustment to just that layer. That's what we want to do. We want the adjustment that we've made, in this case, the hue saturation color adjustment we've made. We want it to be applied just to the clock on. All I need to do is click this box here and watch what happens. Having returned to the normal color, and that effect is only being applied to the clock because it has that clipping mask applied. So if I switch this adjustment layer on and off, you'll see it's only affecting the clock. That is an adjustment layer with a clipping mask, very easy. The thing is, with this selected, I can jump back up and I can change the color of that clock to wherever I want it to be. It's only affecting as I say, the clock layer. So maybe that color is quite nice. I would jump on the clock layer to now that's the active layer. As I move that round, it's because that adjustment layer is clipped to the actual clock. The adjustment moves with the clock, if that makes sense. So it's quite clever, isn't it? If we look in the layers palette and imagine that we did that a number of times, then you can see that the actual layers palette could become quite congested. So what we can actually do is group layers together. In this case, this hue saturation adjustment layer and the clock layer, I could put them in their own little group. So that's what I'm going to do. Command or Control click or Shift-click, whatever way you want to do it. You can select both layers and then right-click. You can select a group from layers. Or there is a shortcut which is Command or Control G. But I'm just going to click on this little Group from Layers selection. Then I can give it a name and in this case, I may as well leave the original name as clock and click on "Okay", and that's now a group. I can expand the group and I can look inside and I can see it's got the adjustment layer and the actual image of the clock. As I was saying, as we move forward through the class, we'll be doing more complicated adjustments. The layers palette can become quite congested. So it's a good idea to do these groups. I could indeed make a group out of all of those layers and call them tabletop items. So there's many things you can do. As I say, as we move forward, you will learn more and more about layers. But this is keeping things simple just to get you in the spirit of how layers work. Another thing we can do, very simple. Let's select the book layer for instance. We can always change the opacity of a layer as well. So I can reduce the opacity and you will be able to actually reveal what's underneath. So you will find yourself using the opacity of a layer quite often as well. So that was pretty cool. You can blend layers together. But all of that's coming up in future modules. As I say, this is just to get you in the mindset of how layers work. So have a goal at creating this particular compass's image and see what you can come up with because you can change, as I say, the position of any of these layers because they're all individual, aren't they? When you've completed your design, you need to save it then as a JPEG. That is really simple. By all means, save it as a Photoshop document because you can come back to it and make adjustments. But eventually you're going to need to save it as a final source of completed image. To do that, it's pretty easy. Just jump up to the File, drop-down menu and select, Save As or Save a Copy. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to choose Save As. When I do that, I have to click on this box, save a copy because that will allow me to save it as a JPEG. Then I can name the file up here and save it to wherever I need it to be. It's as simple as that. So as we go forward, we're going to create much more complicated images and much more involved adjustment layers and masks and all of that. But at least now you can see the concept of layers and how easy it is. In the next module, we're going to take a look at masks because masks are fantastic. To sort of port adjustments specifically where we need them to be. I'm looking forward to showing you that module. So I'll see you very shortly. 5. Module 4 How Masks Work: In this module, I'm going to introduce you to masks. As we move forward throughout the class, we will use masks quite a lot. First of all, a mask can be applied to any type of layer, be it a physical layer, a text layer, or an adjustment layer. It allows us to remove parts of that layer to reveal what was underneath. If we look at this newsprint layer, I can simply paint on the mask to reveal the graph paper underneath. It's totally non-destructive and we jump between black and white colors to do this. We use a brush and we just simply select black or white and in this case we want to switch the color and allow me to return all that detail to that layer just by painting on the mask. All very simple. You can also do this as a site to an adjustment layer. Let me apply a black and white adjustment layer just above the newsprint layer and show you exactly what I mean. Now I can simply paint on that adjustment layer because has its own mask and I can actually rip away the effect of the black and white to reveal the color layer underneath. Again, I can switch colors and as I said, it's non-destructive, so I can reinstate that adjustment layer and make it completely black and white again. In this module, I'm going to create a very simple edit using masks and you can join in by downloading the project files and taking part. With that said, let's jump into Photoshop and make a start. With Photoshop open, I'm going to open up the two project files, so File, Open and then I'm going to navigate to where those two files are stored. There they are. They're in Module 4; how masks work. The two images you want to open up are the black and white image and the color image. Shift-click, select both images and open them up. As I said you can download the project files and join in. We have got a color image and as I say, a black and white image. Now what I'd like to do with some of my street shots is convert them to black and white and then add some film grain. If you were to zoom in to this shot, you would actually see the film grain. But don't confuse that with noise. It's there deliberately to create that bit of atmosphere. Now as this is a module about masks, I thought it would be rather nice to have the black and white image. But the actual drinks on the table, the tins and the bottle, why not have them in color? Let me show you what the completed edit looked like. I'm going to open from this reference file and the finished image looked like this. It's almost like your source of commercial, isn't it? Or an advertisement for the drinks. It's a very simple thing to do. Let's make a start then I'll show you how to do it. I'm going to close this reference file. The first thing I need to do then is to duplicate this black and white image and put it on top of the color image. To do that, I'm just going to select my move tool, shortcut V, and pop across to the layers palette. I'm going to Right-click and I'm going to duplicate the layer. Then when the slot box comes up and when I set the destination to be color image and click on "Okay". Then when I jump over to the color image, I now have two layers. If you look in the layers palette, we have the black and white image sitting on top of the color image. Let's rename these layers then. With the black and white layer selected, I can now apply the layer mask. If we jump down to the bottom of the Layers palette and the third icon from the left, and we just hover there, it will indicate that I'm about to add a layer mask. If I click on the icon, and that's what I'm going to do; click on the icon. The layer mask has now appeared on the black and white layer. That's appeared as a little white box with an outline rounding. Now if I jump to the thumbnail next to the mask, that now becomes active. The reason I'm showing you that is that when you work on a mask, it needs to be active. It needs to be selected with this white outline around it. We're now ready to start painting on the mask to reveal what is underneath. Let me show you how that works then. I'm going to zoom in to the back of this plastic chair, get in a bit closer and then what I need to do is I need to select a brush shortcut B, or you can click on the Brush icon. We need the foreground and background colors to be set like this. Obviously, we need the black on the top, and that is the active color. Because we're painting on a white mask, we need a black brush. Just simply make sure that is black, if it's different colors, remember that you can press D for default and then X to toggle between the two colors. With that said, make sure you've got black selected here on the brush tool. Then I'm just going to jump up here and I'm just going to change the brush parameters. I want to put on 100 percent hardness just for now, I will change that shortly. Then I want to make sure the opacity and the flow are at 100. Then watch what happens when I paint. I'll just jump over to the Layers palette first so you can see I do have the masks selected and it is active. I can simply paint on the mask to reveal what was underneath. That fantastic, isn't it? Now but I want a straight line, a complete straight line that I can put one point. I've just dabbed the mouse once then they can move across and then with the Shift key press down and then just dab again with the mouse, I will produce a straight line. That's how that works. Because we're going to do that shortly, we'll produce a straight line. I'm going to undo that a few times just to get rid of what I've done there and I'll change the hardness of the brush to a soft brush, and I will do the same thing. With a soft brush selected, it's hard to see that, you can see now it's got a much softer edge. We're going to use something in-between the two; neither 100 percent hard, neither 100 percent softer produce a 50 percent. I don't know why I did just didn't say 50 percent, but there you go. Lastly, of course, if we make a mistake. Let's go over here for instance and if I was painting in this blue chair and I spilled across into the sign behind, for instance. We can see the yellow color. All I need to do is just toggle between the brush colors. In this case, I would toggle to a white brush by pressing the "X" key and I can just undo that mistake and I just put it back. We toggle between those black and white colors to remove or to add. It's as simple as that. Let's move over to where the soft drinks are. I'm going to zoom in a bit more. Shortcut Z, and I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. If you press the Space bar, you can move your image around. Click and drag with the Space bar pressed down. That is quite good. I could scrubby zoom in a bit more, Space bar and click and drag. That's a good little tip for you. We need to start painting away then. I am going to select the brush tool again, move to the parameters and I'm going to put it in the middle, 50 percent will do. Just accept that. The brush size is a bit too big. If you remember square bracket keys will make the brush smaller and we can start the process then of taking away this layer. Very simple as that. I'm going to start in this corner here, and I'm just going to dab the brush once and then using the Shift, I'm going to dab here, and now I'll produce a nice straight line. I might just do it again and just to try and get as close to the edge as it can. Then on this side, I'll do the same; I'll dab there, and then we Shift. Then when you do it, you can take a bit more time. But yeah and then here I'll probably just do freehand. You're welcome to do all freehand. But thought it would be nice to show you that alternative tip to create a straight line. I'm going to do the same thing there and one roughly there. Then you can paint in. Now I want to change the brush size, square bracket keys again. You can be as accurate as you want when you do it. Now of course, this is a tutorial, so I don't want to spend too long on it. You can go in and you can really, as I say, get every single bit of that tin. I'll let you do that bit more accurate than me. But what I do want to show you is I can now pop across to the Layers palette and with Alt or Option, if I click on the actual mask itself, it will reveal what the mask looks like, and that is indeed what I've just painted. The great thing is I can now make the brush bigger using the square bracket keys and I can just fill in the rest of that mask. It's a great way to ensure you haven't missed any parts when you actually doing this type of procedure. Alt or Option on the mask again and they go, it will switch it all back on and you can see what you've done. Then you can fine-tune that. Now I'm not going to do that. When you do it, I expect you to get a bit more accurate than what I have. Another little tip then is to change the flow of the brush. I'm going to change the flow to very low, something like 10 percent. The reason I've done that is because I want to paint in the reflection. I want to do it gradually, and I don't want to do it harsh as the actual 10 itself. I just want that very slice just come in through. If we look at the mask, Alt or Option, click on the mask, you can see it's a lot less severe, it's lighter if you like. It's only going to reveal slightly less than what is above. Space bar, click and drag. I can bring in the next set of items that I want to reveal. I'm going pop back up and change the flow back to 100 percent and accept that. Then I can do the same thing precisely little bit smaller maybe. Then click here, then click at the bottom, shift. Get that straight line. I can start doing the same thing that I did before. Now again, I can zoom in and be super accurate doing this, changing the brush size as I did it to get absolutely perfect. But you can do that. The more care and attention that you put into your edits, the better they're going to be. This is just the tutorial, I'm not going to spend too long on it. With that said, I'm going to complete this. I've gone completely off the bottle and it's gone into the other parts of the image. What you need to do, if you think about it, we are revealing what is underneath with a black brush painting on the mask. If you think about it, if we change it to a white brush, it will do the opposite. To do that, I'm going to press the X key, which will toggle between foreground and background colors. I've now got a white brush and I can do the opposite just correct any mistakes that I've made. You'll see in future modules will do that to greater effect. I'm going to toggle back to the black brush, increase the brush size, and then just carry on with this. If we think of Gareth Dunne, I could do the same trick before Alt or Option, click on the actual mask and I can see which bits I've missed. I can just go in and fix them. I can also see as well where I've spilled over the edge. But on a view you can see that. But just stop here. I've spilled out over the edge. I'm going to press X to change it to white brush. I can just correct that with just around about there. Alt Option on the mask again and then brings it all back. Now I could've spent more time on that, but when you zoom out, it looks fab, doesn't it? That was pretty easy. I'm going to show you a couple more things than using an adjustment layer to do the same thing. In a future module, we're going into adjustment layers in greater detail. Don't worry so much if you don't understand the adjustment layer part, but at least you'll understand the mask part. I going to apply an adjustment layer over the top. The adjustment layer I'm going to go for is curves. I'm going to click on the curves adjustment icon. I'm going to select this little figure here. That just allows me to move into the image and click and drag a lightened specific parts of the image. For instance, of a thought the background was a bit too dark. I could lighten the background. Just to recap, I've created an adjustment layer that's brighten the whole of the image, but I don't want the whole of the image brightened, it's just the background, isn't it? I could turn that layer on and off, you'll see what's happened. I only want the background. When you create an adjustment layer, it comes complete with a mask. In this case it's a white mask. It's actually revealing the whole of the adjustment. But I don't want that. I only want part of it revealed. This is where I would invert the mask. To do that is really simple. Make sure the mask is active and it's Command or Control I. The mask is now black, which means that you cannot see the adjustment, it's black. That mask is hiding if you like that adjustment. I need to paint on that mask with a white brush this time to reveal the actual adjustment, the curves adjustment. Select an airbrush, make sure it's on white. In this case, I'm going to turn the flow down to about 10 percent. I'm going to make the brush bigger. I can paint in to just lighten the background, just selectively where I think it needs to be brighter. I've always honest, I don't think it needed to be brighter, but why not? To switch the layer on and off, you'll see the adjustments that have made there. I've just brightened the background slightly. They're all very simple. There you go. One more thing. I'm just going to apply another curves layer. I'm going to do the same thing. It's like the little hand tool. I want to put some highlights in the girl's hair. Again, I have lifted the exposure. You can see the curves being lifted. Don't worry about this part because we'll cover all that in a future module. When I invert the mask, make sort selected Command or Control I, make sure I've got a white brush. I'm going to take the size down. I'm just going to paint some highlights into her hair. Now again, I don't have to do this. Nice to show you the source of places where we can use adjustment layers and how they work with a mask. It might not look like I've done a lot there. But if I turn that layer on and off, you'll see exactly what I've done. You can imagine on a complicated image, you can do so many curves, adjustment layers, level adjustments, hue saturation adjustments, and then just target specific parts of the photograph with a mask. That's how they work. This image, as I said, it's really simple, but it introduce you to the concept of masks. As I say, as we move forward, we'll do much more complicated edits. By all means have a go at this one to simple one to get you going. I'll see you in the next module. 6. Module 5 The Selection Tools: Let's take a look at how we make selections. In this module, I'm going to introduce you to three methods that we can use to make those selections. Making selections is really important. As we move throughout the class, you'll understand why, but let's keep it simple in this module. What are the three methods then? Looking on the tool strip at the very top, below the Move tool, we have the Marquee tool. We have the Lasso tool, and then the Object Selection tool. Each tool has a flyout menu and there are more options. You can have the Rectangular Marquee tool, for instance, or the Elliptical Marquee tool. With the Lasso tool, again, you can see you have more options. Let's begin then with the Marquee tool, and the shortcut for that is the letter M. If I use Shift and press M', I can move between the options. In this case, I want the Rectangular Marquee Tool. To create this shape, it's just simply click and drag. You can create a shape as long as it's got a 90 degree angle, you can create any type of shape that you like. It doesn't matter. Also, you can add and subtract any selection with any tool by using the Shift key to add or the Alt or Option key to remove. That's pretty cool, isn't it? Let's press ''Shift M'' and we'll move to the Elliptical Marquee Tool, and the same thing, click and drag to create any elliptical shape. Shift-click, you'll get perfect circle. But you really can create any shape that you like as long as it's elliptical. Again, you can add to that selection with the Shift key and you can remove part of the selection with the Alt or Option exactly the same. Pretty cool, isn't it? To deselect any selection, it's just Command or Control D. Let's just quickly jump back to the Rectangular Marquee. I'm going to create a shape. Let's just create a square shape. I want to fill that with color. I'll use the shortcut Shift-backspace and the fill box will appear and I'm going to fill the contents with the foreground color. There we go, Command or Control D to deselect. I've created a square on its own layer. Here's another thing you can do. I'm going to create another square, but this time, while the pointer is in the center of the selection or within the selection, I'm going to right-click and select ''Feather''. I can put a nice soft edge on the selection. I'm going to do that. I'm going to put 30-pixel feather. Click on ''Okay''. Shift backspace to fill it with color. Deselect. You can see it's got a nice soft feathered edge, and this is great to blend your selection. If you've made some source of adjustment to your photograph and you've used a selection to do it, you can blend it and make it look more realistic. But more and all that later on. They're all very simple, isn't it? Now, when you draw a shape, you have the option to apply the feather as you draw the shape. Now, remember, tools have a set of parameters, so you could always do that at the very beginning. But I like to draw my shape and then apply the feather, is entirely up to you which way you do it. Let's get rid of these two shapes and here's where a selection can come in handy. Because I can select both shapes, hit ''Backspace'', and they'll disappear, so powerful honestly selections they really are. Let's move to the Lasso Tool lens and the shortcut is L. Again, Shift L, I can toggle between the options and the one I'm going to choose is the freehand or free form Lasso tool. With this one, I can create any shape that I like and it's really as free form. This will come in really handy too, and again, I can do the same thing. I can feather, for instance, click inside ''Father'', 30 pixels. Shift backspace, fill it with a color, Command or Control D to deselect. Again, you can see that could be a shape within a photograph that you may want to darken or add more color too. Really useful selections I'll say, you'll use them all the time. Command or Control Z just to step backwards, to get rid of that. Let's press ''Shift L'' again, and this time, we get the Polygonal Lasso tool. With this, we can create any angle that we like. We can create some really sharp shapes. Again, you'll see me in a later module use this to great effect. Again, we can feather the edge on that perhaps if we wanted to, all the same thing. Of course, with all of these tools, as before, as I showed you earlier, we can subtract. I could subtract a shape anywhere. I can also, add and this is the same for all the selection tools, outside the area as well. It doesn't have to be connected. I've added some more to that shape, although it's not connected so you can do that too. That's wonderful, isn't it? Command or Control D to deselect. Now I'm going back to the Marquee tool and I'm going to draw a shape. I'm just going to draw a simple square, and I'm going to fill it with foreground color. Command or Control D to deselect. I'm going to jump to the Object Selection tool, and the shortcut for that is the letter W. We have options here as well, but the one I tend to use is this first one, the Object Selection. I'm going to show you a really nice example of the Object Selection tool in this module as we move forward. But just to give you a heads-up on how it works. If I just draw around that shape, Photoshop will analyze whatever shape is there and do its best to make a selection. Click and drag. Because it's a simple shape, it found it so easy. But you'll see as we go forward through the class, we will make more difficult selections. Imagine if that was somebody's head and they had quite curly hair, then Photoshop would have to analyze all those strands of hair, so you can see it can become quite complicated. That's when we can modify our selection. We can see something up here called Select and Mask. Now I'm not going to show you that in this module, but we will be using that shortly. That's how you can modify the selection and get it perfect. But for now, I'm just going to gently introduce you to the Object Selection tool. Let's move on then. I'm going to open up some images, show you some examples, and of course, you can download the images too and take part. I'm going to close this document down, I don't need to save it. I'm going to open up our first project file for this module. The one you need to open is Module 5, Cut Out Objects.jpg. Let's open up this image then. There you go, we have a selection of items. What we're going to do is we're going to use the selection tools to make selections of these items as simple as that. Let's start off then with this chalkboard and I'm going to press the letter ''M'' to go to the Marquee tool. It is indeed the Rectangular Marquee tool that I need. I'm going to press the shortcut ''Z'' because I need to zoom in a bit, don't I? Let's zoom in a bit, and spacebar to just move across, and again, letter M for the Marquee tool. It's quite simple to just click and drag to select that shape. I'm going to give you another little tip. I can press the spacebar and that will allow me to move the selection while it's still active. I've got the Mouse key pressed down and I've the Spacebar pressed down. I can be super accurate now with my selection that the spacebar go and I'll continue to drag on to create that shape. Something around about there would do. I now have that selected. Let me zoom out, which is a shortcut for that by the way, is Command or Control minus. That helps you to zoom out well, you don't have to change a tool for that. Now, I have that selected. I can press Command or Control C, Command and Control V, and it will paste a copy of the chalkboard. If I go to my Move tool, shortcut V, I can now move that around. It's put on a new layer and I have a perfect copy of the chalkboard. Just for fun, I'm going to nip to the bottom of the Layers palette. The second one off from the left is how we can add a fact. Click on the icon, add a layer style, and in this case, I want to apply a drop shadow. I can put a little drop shadow behind that chalkboard. Now it looks great, doesn't it? It looks more realistic actually than the one above it, doesn't it? I can move that about. I'm going to just turn that layer off. That was easy, wasn't it? M for Marquee tool again and then "Shift" and we now have the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm just going to zoom up in this case, "Command" plus to zoom up and "Spacebar" to move that into position. Now there's a couple of ways to use the Elliptical Marquee tool. I can guess where the center is and I think it's around about there. I can press "Shift" and "Alt" option and drag from that point and it will drag from the center. I can do it that way. Just going to de-select that or you can just click and drag and do it that way. It doesn't really matter. As I've started to do it that way I am going to stick with that way. I'm going to press the "Spacebar" and move that and just keep moving it until I think I've got the selection of that basketball. That looks about right, doesn't it? I am going to let the mouse key go and I now have the selection of the basketball. To make a selection then of the basketball, I need to be on the background layer because that's where the basketball is, isn't it? I'm going to click on the background layer. Then all I need to do then is "Command" or "Control J." It's quite similar to making a command copy and paste, but in this case, it will give us a new layer instantly with the basketball. Again, shortcut V for the move tool and I have indeed a basketball. I'm going to zoom out "Command minus" and I'm going to move the basketball over here. Just for fun, I'm going to jump onto the background layer. I'm going to create a new layer just below the basketball. On the bottom strip, I can click on "Create new layer." Then our shortcut B for brush, D for default, which if you remember, will change the foreground and background colors to black and white. As I've got a brush selected, I'm going to make sure I've got a really soft round brush and I'm going to take the flow down to 10 percent. It was already at 10 percent. I can paint in a shadow behind this ball and bring the basketball to life because it's now on its own layers now. Now, I would spend a bit more time doing that, but you can see. That's quite cool, isn't it? I have a basketball and a shadow behind. I could name those two layers. We look in the layers palette of the shadow at the bottom and the ball. I could shift, click those two. Right-click and group from layers and call that, ball. Shortcut V for the move tool and I can move that ball to wherever I want it to be. Fantastic. It's all very simple. Let's switch the ball layer off then. In the layers palette, let's move back to the background layer and press the letter L for Lasso tool and let's make a selection of this radio. I'm going to zoom in a bit closer and then simply just put points around the radio. There we go. That selection is now done and Command or Control J. I've now got a selection of the radio and shortcut V for my move tool and I can move the radio. You can see there, I could create a shape with any angle or that 90 degrees. Again, very simple to make a selection of that shape. All very simple. Let's switch that layer off. Let's have a look then at the Object Selection tool. I want to make sure the background layer is selected and the shortcut for the object selection tool is the letter W. With that selected, let's zoom in a bit. Zoom in a bit. We can make a selection of the garden land. All I need to do is draw a shape around the garden. You can see it's done a really great job of selecting the edge. It's also taken this area by the trigger, and we don't want that. If I press Shift W," it will change to this tool which is called the quick selection tool. If I just put the brush there, it's really difficult to see. But if I press "Alt" or "Option" it changes between a plus and a minus. With the "Alt" or "Option" key down, it's minus. It's going to subtract from the selection. I can click in this area and subtract the information that I don't want. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit and so you can see that. It's missing a little bit this trigger. I'm going to make the brush size a bit smaller and click there. Now it's selected this bit. It does take a bit of time. Pressing the "Alt" or "Option" key, I can remove this area here and then add bits. There you go. That will do me. That's good enough. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. I've now got the gun selected. What I'm going to do is rather than make a copy, I'm going to remove the gun altogether. Good little tip for you is I need to expand that selection. What I want to do is I want to fill the area where the gun is with the background. Let's do that. This is a little bit complicated, but once you've done it a few times, it's easy. First of all, I need to expand that selection. If I go to the menu at the top to where it says "Select," drop that menu down, and go to modify. Then across, I want to expand the selection. I'm going to click on "Expand." It's already set to five pixels, and that's ideal. I'm going to click "Okay." Now if you zoom in a little bit, so show code set, you can see that it's added about five pixels, exactly five pixels around the selection of the gun. That's exactly what I want. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and we can now fill out with the background color. To do that, I'm going to jump up to the menu at the top, select "Edit," and then select "Fill." Then when this box appears, I'm going to make sure the contents are on the Content-Aware option. Then I'm going to click "Okay". Photoshop will analyze the image and you can see what it's done. Here's the results. It has indeed filled in the gun shape with the gray background. But it is also taken parts of the radio. The reasons still not as because the radio is part of the background images. Although it's done a clever job of doing it, it's just not acceptable as it. Command or control Z to undo that. Let's jump back up to the edit menu at the top again. This time I'm going to select "Content-Aware Fill". This is a bit more accurate. I'm going to click on that. Then this Window will appear. You can see already. If we look at the results on the right-hand side. We just make that a little bit bigger. I just move it across a bit. It's already done a fabulous job. Now I could select that because it's done a wonderful job and has indeed hidden the gone and cognitive over with the background. Sometimes that it does make a mistake, and it may have included parts of the radio, for instance, or parts of the Superman logo. We can always in this Window, just robots parts that we don't want to include in the selection. Now I don't have to do that because it had already done a wonderful job on this side. But that ever happens. That's what this green area is for. For instance, I wouldn't want that sampled. I could just remove that. Every time you do it, it will change the view over here. But as we've seen right from the stars, it done wonderful job anyway. I would just click on "Okay", and command or control D, to deselect. That's fabulous, isn't it? It's really removed, gone by replacing the selection with this gray background color. We will do that to great effect as we move forward as well. Because there's going to be plenty of times where will extract the subject from the background. We will replace where the subject was with for background if that makes sense. There'll be plenty of opportunities to see that in operation as we move forward. But what about the Superman batch then? How would we do that? Well, to do that, we're going to use the pen tool. Now, the pen tool is semi difficult to use. Now, I say that because I struggled when I first started to use the pen tool. Don't worry, if you struggle a little bit too. It is easy once you get to grips with it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up a new document. The one I go for is this one here, Module 5, the path tool. I'm going to open that up and just zoom in a little bit. What we want to do is we want to draw around this letter f. The shortcut for the pen tool is the letter P. On the tool strip, it looks like this. It's a little icon of a pen. We have multiple options here, but more on them later. The one you want to select is the very first one. What the pen tool allows us to do is to draw, freeform, put both curves, and we can click and drag and change the curve. Now it starts to get a little bit complicated because you can anytime press "Command" or "Control" for instance, and you can move these points. But you can also move the handles to change the curve. That's really important. You can also press "Alt" or "Option" to split the curve so you're just moving one side of it. Let me show you over here. If I just alt or option click here. You can see I have now got control of the whole curve. Ever. Click on it again. With the alter or option, I can just click half the curve. It can seem a little bit complicated. But trust me, once you get to grips with it, it's a really useful tool. I'm just going to step backwards to remove that. We'll make a start then at drawer in this latter f. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. We can make a stars. My point here and what I like to do is just analyze where I think the beginning and end of curves are. In this case there's a sweep round here. I would put a point there, click and drag and try and match that curve the best I can. Then continue on. Point there may be an end as a curve that ends around about burps. Click and drag and try and match that curve. Then it sweeps around here, doesn't it? Little bit of a curve there. Then we find ourselves in this corner. Now it's when we find ourselves in a position like this that it's a change of direction. What we do is press "Alt" or "Option". As I move towards the points, you'll see a little angle appears by the pen head. That's indicating that I want to change the angle so I can put a point there. Because I think that's where the start of this curve happens. It probably ends around about there. I can click and drag and then come down here. Then there's a curve that comes around there. Click and drag, point there. Click and drag around about there to get that curve in. Then all the way to there. Now, it's a change of direction. Alter or option that line will appears and I can put a straight line to there, to change of direction again. I'm going to alter or option click there. I can put a point there to make a curve. This has got quite a number of curves or star. You can put points in where you think those curves are going to be, stars and end. That's the way I like to do it. Roughly around about there. Now I've got it wrong at any point. I can add to sit at the end. Now another thing you can do is this line is now going off in the wrong direction. Alt or option, I can drag that back in so it's closer to our next move, and then click there and drag. Do you get the idea? Yeah, all the way to this corner here. Then this a change of direction alter or option to get it to their alter or option again because it's a change of direction. Alter or option again, change the direction, and the same thing there. I can click up here for instance, and then up to there. Then at the end of this curve, for instance, round to there. Maybe one there round here. Sometimes you get absolutely perfect first attempt and sometimes you don't. That's where at the end you can fine tune to get it right. Like any edit that you make, the more time you spend, the more accurate you are going to be. Now to finish the whole path, I've come right back to the beginning and I can just click here, and that closes the path. I've now got that selection made. Now this is where I can go in and fine tune it. Suffice tune, then I would look around the selection and see what really needs change and to make it better. Here, for instance, it's missed. The shape has not. I can press "Alt" or "Option" and split that curve to make it a bit better. I've got hold of this handler at the end. That looks a lot better, doesn't it? The same here I think, if I alter or option click there. Now sometimes it's twisted. You have to pull it back. Let's just get hold of this angle here and I can, there you go. Pull up. That's fixed, that little mistake there. Now I'm not going to do them all, but that's what I would do. Let's just finish with this one for instance, I can make that a little bit better corner and then release alt or option and then click on it again. I can just do this side. Again, same with Mapper. Here as well. Drag that up there, for instance. It's a little bit tricky, but you'll get used to it, and eventually, you'll be happy with the selection. I'll do one more. Let's fix this one here. Again, it's Alt or Option, click here and I can adjust that curve and that looks better, doesn't it? Once we're happy with all the adjustments that we've made, we can pop across to the Paths palette. Now, if you haven't got it open, you can just drop it down and you can find it here. But mine is open. Yours may well be too. I'm going to click on "Paths" and it's a really essential thing to do is to name your path. I'm going to double-click on it and I'm going to call it, because it's quicker to type, I'm just going to type in F, and that now is changed to F. The reason you have to name your paths is because the next time you make a path, it will rewrite or overwrite the previous path and you've lost it. You don't really want to do that. Let me just zoom out then and there is our letter F selected. Now, with that still selected, the path selected, I'm going to nip across to the Paths palette and I'm going to right-click and I'm going to select "Make Selection". This is where I can feather the path. But in this case, I'm going to leave it at 0, and I'm just going to click on "Okay", and it's now made a selection. I'm going to go back to my layers and I'm going to create a new layer. At the bottom of the Layers palette, just click on "New layer", and then with this selected, I'm going to press "M" for Marquee. The reason I'm going to do that is because I can now move that selection. As long as I'm inside, I can move that. I'm going to just pop it over there. I've got a selection and it's on a new layer. I want to do something a bit different. I'm going to jump across to this tool here and this is one we haven't looked at yet, the Eyedropper tool, and it allows me to select colors. Now, what I want to do is select the background color, so I can click anywhere on this background color and it will appear in my color picker just here. There it is. I'm going to fill this selection with the background color. Now, that might seem a bit silly, but that's what I'm going to do. Shift Backspace, make sure it's on foreground color, and click "Okay". Then I'm going to deselect "Command or Control de-select". There's nothing there. However, it is the edges that has the same color as the background. Then I'm going to jump down to the Layers palette and at the bottom second end from the right, I want to add a layer style and I want to select "Drop Shadow". Oop, look what's happened. I've got a fancy letter F. I can also stroke that as well and do whatever I want with it. Make the stroke bigger and there you go. I've created a fancy letter F just by using the Path tool. What I want you to take away from what I've just showed you is how to use the Path tool. Just for fun, I've created this drop shadow and stroke effect, don't worry about that. By all means, have a go, but it's all about using the Path tool. Let's jump back to the other document we have open and we'll draw around this Superman badge, and then we're going to make a little bit of artwork based on that. Let's zoom in then to the Superman badge and press "P" for Pen, and then we can start to draw around the shape. Now, what I'm going to do is something a bit different. I'm just going to put points around the shape, but I'm not going to click and drag in this case. I'm just going to do it this way, which might seem a bit silly. But what I'm doing is put points at the beginning and ending of where I think the curves are. Just around there, finish off there, and then close. Now, I can add the curves. Now, remember I can press "Alt" or "Option" and then click and drag and when I do that, there you go, I can put those curves in. You might find that an easier way of doing it. It's quite good, isn't it? Yeah. [inaudible] little go at doing it that way because that is so much quicker, isn't it? Or it could be quicker, and that's done. I'm going to go to my paths. It says Work Path and I'm just going to type in Superman and I have the outline of the Superman badge. Now, of course, we've got areas and side that we now need to remove too. Now I'm going to make a selection then. I'm going to convert the path to a selection. I'm going to right-click and select "Make A Selection". Click on "Okay", don't want a feather, and I've now got that selection. I'm going to zoom out and go back to my Layers palette, make sure I'm on the background layer, and then Command or Control J, and that will give me a copy of that Superman logo or the Superman badge. Press "V", that's my move tool and I can put it over there. Once I've done that, back to the Layers palette, make sure I've got the background selected and now, I'm going to use this tool down here. I'm going to select a solid color and let's select a nice blue color. Now, it doesn't really matter what you select, but let's go for something like that. That's Superman color, isn't it? Click on "Okay" and then I can select the badge layer, just pop it up there. Now, we can see the gray areas that we need removing and all we do is exactly the same as what we've just done. I'm going to do it. I'll do this first one and then I'll fast-forward because you don't need to see me do it again, but I'll just show you one more time. I'm going to select "P" for the Path tool and then all I would do then is do exactly the same and put these points around here. Actually, that's a change of direction there, is there's a straight-line, change the direction there, and then finish off. We now have a selection made of this area that we want to remove. Simply all I need to do is pop across to the Paths palette and we can see that this selection that we've made with the Path tool or the Pen tool is called Work Path and we don't need to rename it. We just need to select it. Right-click, make a selection, and I don't want any feather, so I'm going to click "Okay", and then now I have this selection made. Back in the Layers palette, make sure I've got the logo selected, which I have, and then just simply hit "Backspace", "De-select", and I've removed that area. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do this gray area, this one, this one, and this one, and I'll do it very quickly and I'll see you very shortly. At this point, you should have a Superman logo that looks like mine. I could say that this module is finished now because I've shown you the selection tools. However, let's create a little bit of artwork. Now, we don't have to do this, but I thought it'd be quite nice. What I'm going to do is open up another document. File, Open, and the document I'm looking for is this one here, Module 5 - Brick Wall. jpg. I'm going to open that one. I've got this nice brick wall. I'll just zoom in a little bit. Then I'm going to pop back to where our Superman logo is. In the Layers pallet, make sure it's selected, right-click and duplicate the layer. Of course, I need it to be on the brick wall document, so click "Okay". Then when I pop over to the brick wall document, there is the Superman logo. If I just move it over there, now, I could just leave it like that, but let's do something a bit unusual then. This is a bit more advanced, so if you don't understand this part, don't worry because I'm going to be going into this procedure and this technique a little bit later on. But just for fun, let's do it with this Superman badge. With the layer selected, I'm going to double-click on the layer. I'm going to do this thing called Blend If and I am going to drag these sliders, and look what happens, it's starting to reveal part of what is underneath. If I press "Alt" or "Option", I can split these two. I can play around and try and get something looking quite different. Now, rather than explain what I'm doing, we'll go into greater detail later on, like a say. But what I've managed to do there is make it look like the actual logo as being painted on the wall and it's faded off over all the years, or maybe it was an old poster that scraped away, some of the papers scraped away. That looks really unique, doesn't it? It's a nondestructive app by the way. As well, I can double-click on that and then play around and remove it if I want to, just going to cancel that. Lastly, Command or Control T, which will bring up the Transform tools. Put my finger on the Shift key so it does it in proportion. I can just accept that return and I've got this Superman badge living on this brick wall, and that looks great, doesn't it? Let's jump back to there, when we initially started off. I'm just going to turn that off and turn that off. We just had this, didn't we? We just had this Superman badge on this gray background, and we've managed to extract it using the Pen tool and we've popped it onto this brick wall. I would urge you to download those project files and have a go. It's only by having a go that you get better at doing things. As we move forward, we can use these tools quite a lot to create some fantastic images. But you have to start off with the basics. But even with the basics, you can see that you can create some really unique images, can't you? I'll see you in the next module. 7. Module 6 Select and Mask: In this module, we're going to take a look at how we can refine our selections by using the Select and Mask feature. We're going to take this skull image and this background and combine them together to create this image. A bit later on, we're going to take the photograph of Anastasia. I'm going to change the background by making a selection and pop it onto this wooden background. Stay tuned and we're go through all of that. Don't forget, you can download the project files and join in. Maybe watch me create all the edits first and then have a go yourself. I think that's the best way to do it. But certainly, join in because it's the best way of learning how to do things. With that said, let's jump across to the skull image and we'll make a start. The first thing we need to do then is to extract the skull from the background. To do that, we're going to use the Object Selection tool. The shortcut for that is W. It's the fourth tool down if you've got your configuration the same as mine, but it's this little icon here. Now we used it in the last module, so I'm sure you can remember where it is. Then simply draw around the shape. Now Photoshop will do its best to find all the edges. Switching to the Zoom tool, I'm just going to zoom in over here and just show you that Photoshop, although it's not a great job, it's missed some areas, and we need to refine that. Before we jump into select and mask, we can change our brush, Shift W. We want to change it to this tool here, which is the Quick Selection tool. It gives us a brush. We can brush in or brush out areas that we don't want included or we do want included in the selection. Let me put the brush here, make it a little bit bigger so you can see. Alt or Option, IT will jump between plus and minus. With the "Alt" or "Option" key pressed down, it's negative and that's going to remove from the selection. If I take my finger off, it's positive and that's going to add to the selection. It's just a case of making the brush size bigger or smaller, and basically adding or selecting to the selection. In this case, I'm going to hold down the "Alt" or "Option" and just click there to remove that part because we don't need that. The same up here. It's a little bit tricky. You will find yourself changing brush sizes and constantly pressing on the "Alt" or "Option". It doesn't have to be 100 percent perfect, but the better you get it, the better your selection's going to be. We'll just have a quick look around. I can remove parts or as I said add parts. I'm pressing the "Space bar" down, which as you know, allows me to drag the image round. Let's try an Alt or Option there to get that a little bit better. Switch to the zoom tool, shortcut Z, and I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. Now make sure that you have the "Object Selection Tool" pressed. The shortcut's W. Any one of those tools will do because when you click on this little box will appear up here, Select and Mask. Just simply click on that option. There you have it. A new window opens up. It's the Select and Mask window. This is where you can refine your selection. I can zoom in and take a look at how good that selection is. It's not bad, is it? Have a little look round and we can look for any mistakes. Now one of the things I think is that these curls in the hair of the skull, that makes sense. They are a little bit more pointier if I remember rightly. It's stuff like that that I can fix. But first of all, let's start over here on this right-hand side. I have my cut out, the skull on this blue background. You can decide which background that you want and you can experiment with them. I like to use overlay. In this case, I've selected this blue color, but it could be any color. I could change it. But I'm going to leave it on blue. Then moving down, we have more options. We have this edge detection. If I just pull that across, you'll see that it's having a little think about it and it's beginning to bring in these points. If I just take that back to zero, you'll see that they were missing. Then it will just bring them back in. They'll come back. Now it's pretty good, isn't it? You've got to be careful if you do it too much, it will start removing, as you can see, parts of the image and you can see the blue coming through. We needed it reducing to say about there a bit more, something around about there, maybe just a little bit more. Then I can look around the image and see if it's missed parts. I can see here, it's actually taking away some of this white color. But I'm not too worried about that because I can put that back in with the mask. The same here. It's taken some out here and over there too. But that's okay. In this particular example, it doesn't matter because you'll see in a second or two how I re-introduce that using the mask. Now I could smooth the outline a touch, but I'm not going to in this case because it's a nice hard edge and that's what I'm going to go for. You can play around with all these tools. You will get familiar with them and you will know what is the best thing to do rather than me go through it in too much detail because as we go forward we'll be using this technique quite a lot. Now over here, it's spilled slightly, and I can see some white there I don't want. We have these tools on this side. I'm going to pick the second one. That's R, it's the Refine Edge and I can make the brush size a bit smaller, square bracket keys and just try and remove that part there. First you all may find that a bit difficult to do it but we can have a go. Now you'll see that used to greater effect in the next example when we extract the model from the background. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with that. It's a gentle introduction into Select and Mask. As I say in the next example, it'll be a bit more complicated. What I like to do then is come down to the bottom. We have this option here, Output To and I always select this one "New layer with a Layer Mask". I'm just going to click on there and then click on "Okay". Then we'll go back to the image and Z for zoom. I'm just going to zoom back out and put it in the center. There you go. What we've got is we have the skull is now on a new layer if you look in the Layers palette, and we can see that it has its own mask. We can now take a look at the mask and see if it needs refining. That's the beauty of doing it this way. Also, as you know, this checkered pattern around the outside indicates that there's no information there at all. It's completely transparent and that's what we want. The next stage then is to click on the "Mask" and then just refine it. Let's do that then "Alt" or "Option" click on the mask itself and it will reveal the mask. Now what I can do now is zoom in, and I can paint in these areas. Select a brush and make sure because we're painting on the mask, the color needs to be white. So make sure you've got the white color. I'm going to make the brush size a little bit bigger. I can then start painting in these areas. All I'm doing is filling in the mask and as I say, make sure we have a nice, clean selection. I would go round and I would do that to all these areas that we missed with the actual Select and Mask procedure that we've just completed. Take your time doing that and as I say you'll get an absolutely great selection. Now, you can "Alt" or "Option" click just to make sure you're actually painting in the right areas. There you go. It really is easy, isn't it? That will make sure I've got that perfect. Now where it's spilled, you can see these areas here, I can change now. I press the "X" key. I've now got a black brush. I'm going to make the brush size a little bit smaller. I can just touch those areas up too so I'm taking out that bit spill. Now as I say when you do it, you can probably take a bit more time. But you can zoom in really close, get your brush size really small and get it absolutely perfect. White brush. Let's just toggle, make the brush size a bit bigger and carry on. I am going to do the rest of this image and just fill in all these little bits. Yeah, I'll be a bit quicker. I'm sure you don't need to watch me do all this, so I'll fast-forward and when you rejoin me, I will have this mask all painted in. I've completed the mask. I'm just going to zoom out, Command or Control Minus then Alt or Option click on the mask and then here is the result. We now need to put that onto the stone background, it needs to be sitting on top of this document here. It's the stone background JPEG. To do that easy, isn't it? Off to the Layers palette, right-click and then simply select Duplicate Layer. Then the destination document is the actual stone background. Click "Okay" and then when it go across to that document, there we have our skull. If we look in our layers palette, we've got our stone background and we've got our skull complete with its mask sitting above the stone. Our cut tout journey is complete but we could add a few extras. Let's do that then. I'm going to introduce you to the blend modes. As we have two layers, we can blend them together. To do that, we have this little box here, so just above where the layers live, and you'll see this little box that says normal. right-click on that. We have a whole bunch of blend modes and you can go through them and in real time it will show you the results and you can decide which one you like. You can go wild here and just pick whichever you think looks good. Overlaying soft light we use quite a lot, hard light and you can go through, and I will have a play around with those. I think I will select dark in this case, and you can see the stone is now coming through in these areas. That looks really good, doesn't it? The next thing I was thinking is, wouldn't it be nice if this skull is a different color? To do that, I'm going to pop across to the layers palette, make sure the skull is selected, and come down to the bottom and click on this icon here, create a new fill or adjustment layer. Click on that and select solid color. When you do that, this color box will appear and it is indeed given you a solid layer color and you can choose whatever color you want, I'm actually going to type in a particular color and don't worry about that. That's just something I had prepared earlier. But just to let you know that every color has a x number, you don't have to remember the colors there'd be no way you can remember all these numbers. But I used this color earlier on, so that's why I know what numbers to type in. I'm going to click on "Okay." Now, that gave me a blue layer. But I don't want the blue everywhere. I just want it on the skull. Jumping back to the layers palette, if I pressed "Alt or Option" you can see this little box appear with a little arrow and it's indicating that the effect will only be applied to the layer that is below this color fill layer. Alt or Option. Let's click in the middle of the two layers and I just press it, that color now is clicked as it's called, to just the skull layer. Now, it still doesn't look right because it's actually covering all the detail. Of course, we go back to our Trusty blend mode and we can change that and there you go. You can see that color coming through and there's loads of different effects and things that you can do. Now, I do like the lighting, so I'm going to do that. That looks quite nice, but the skull has gone a bit pale, hasn't it? I'm going to click on the skull Layer, and I'm going to change that to Multiply. That looks great. I'm happy with that. It's almost like it's being done on ink, isn't it? Onto the stone. With the skull layer selected, I'm also going to put a drop shadow. Down to the bottom of the layers palettes, add a layer style. The one I'm going to go for is Drop Shadow. Now, [inaudible] we have a drop shadow behind the skull. Now, we can make loads of adjustments here. We can make it darker or lighter, change the distance, all of that stuff you can have a little play around with that. We will be using that tool more extensively later on, but for now that looks great. I'm going to click on, "Okay." This module is all about making selections as you know, but I thought, why not introduce you to the text tool? Now, later on we're going to be doing a whole module on the Text tool. But for now I'm just going to show you how to put some simple text onto this image. The first thing you need to do is to click on the Color Fill Layer. Now, we're not going to do anything on that layer, but we need to put our text layer above. It needs to be the top layer in this case. Just make sure you do that and then hit "T" for text. Now, I want to click on this little box here and open this fly out menu to access the character and the paragraph and you may not have this. If you haven't, you can find them up here, character and paragraph. But mine are on this little fly out menu at the side. You can see I've got Arial selected and its 12 millimeter. Also you've got our paragraph box. I want the justification to be on the right-hand side, so I want to make sure that's active. Go back to character. I know you know that the fonts I want to use is called London L-A-N, and there is London regular. I'm going to use that. I know my size as well. I've come prepared 130 millimeter and the spacing I want it to be 110 and the color I've already selected. But you can change all of those things. Now, when I come back into the image, I can just click anywhere and it will produce some text. I'm going to select the Move tool. Now, at this point, if I pressed V for sure cause it would type in a letter V, I don't want to do that. I have to physically select the move tool and I'm just going to pop it over there. It doesn't really matter where it is for now because it's going to change anyway. Then if I double-click in the layers palette on the text box here, that will make this text active and I can now type and I'm going to type in the art of great design. Then I'm going to select my move tool again, physically let's move this little box out of the way. There's my text, just popped into there and that looks really good, doesn't it? Now, you may not have London, but you can use any font that you want. If I just open this box up, I can scroll through all the different fonts, not-so-good wave seeing which font that you like. You can do that. But I like London, so I'm going to choose that one. I can also do a blend mode on the text as well. Let's try dark, no I don't like that. Maybe overlay. Overlay looks great, doesn't it? I'm going to pop that into there. Looks great. Now, one more thing to do, because there is shadow on this side, then surely this side should be darker than this side, to do that, I'm going to use an adjustment layer. The one I'm going to use is this one up here levels. I'm going to click on that and I have the levels selected. Then we'll go into levels cares and all open the adjustment layers in a future module. But for now, if I pull this way, it's going to darken everything and if I pull it this way, it's going to lighten everything. I want it darker, so I'm going to pull it that way. Now, that is dark in the whole image, but I only want this half of the image darkened. Now, as you know, this levels box or any adjustment layer comes complete with a mask. I could literally just get our brush now and paint on the mask, but I'm going to do something a bit different. I'm going to use this tool over here, and it's called the gradient tool. I'm going to click on that, I'm going to make sure I've got black and white selected, and I'll put the white on the top, and then in the premises at the top, make sure you've got this one active here, which is linear gradients. Then all I need to do is come into the image. Maybe start morale about this I, and just pull it across and let it go around about there. There you go I've darken this side. Alt or Option, I'm going to click on the mask, you can see what happened. Remember white reveals, so the adjustments is only being revealed where is white and in this dark side, the adjustment will be visible because it's black. Alt or Option click on the mask again. Then I can jump back to the actual layer itself. The actual adjustment, just double-click on that to reveal this little fly out menu and if I want, I can darken it even more. Maybe have it something like that. Now, it's only subtle, but it makes a difference. If I switch that layer on and off, you can see. The half of the source of image is in shadow. Now, in the next example we're going to do with the model, you'll see how that works on a human face because it looks fab when you start putting source of light and shade into your photographs. But this was just a simple introduction. Have a go at this one and we can move on to the next one, which is going to be extracting a model and partner against a wooden background. Moving on then let's take a look at that and model shot. Here is Anastasia and I photographed this many years ago and she went on to be an international supermodel. Would you believe? She was very young when I took this shot, and she just arrived from Russia. We're going to take Anastasia out of this yellow background and we're going to place her against this wooden background. With the "Select Object" to selected. That is "Shortcut W". All I'm simply going to do is pop up to the top on this parameter strip up here and click on "Select Subject". This is another way of doing it. Photoshop will analyze the image and there you go, it's made it absolutely brilliant selection of Anastasia. If I zoom in over here, you can see it's done it's best to get all these bits of hair but there's quite a lot more hair, isn't it? That it's difficult for photoshop to do that. Now, I'm going to press "W" again and then just "Shift W", "Quick Selection Tool" and I can just add some little bits that photoshop has missed. Now, I don't want to do too much but that's about right. Now, I could try and paint in these bits here I suppose but that is really difficult. We're going to let the "Select and Mask" do its magic. To do that, just click on this icon on the perimeter strip on the top "Select and Mask", and there you go. We now have Anastasia against this blue background. Unlike before, the background is blue, because I've got it set here. Now I could change the color, but I want to leave it at blue. It's fine. Now, this is where we have to try and reclaim some of the hair. First of all, let's try some edge detection. Maybe go up about, say, five pixels and switch on smart radius and see what it does. Not a lot so far. I'm going to go across the left-hand side and select this tool, the "Refine Edge Brush Tool". Now, we did use it slightly in the previous example and I'm going to make the brush size a little bit bigger and the idea is to stay out of the image. You want to be around the outside and just click and drag and photoshop will bring in those bits of hair or it will analyze and do its best to bring them in. That it's doing a pretty good job, isn't it? Of selecting the hair. You just have a little go around there. That's pretty cool, isn't it? It always amazes me the way it can do this. That's just amazing, isn't it? Now, remember, we're going to create a mask for this, and let's just see if we can get it up there. There you go. That looks pretty good, doesn't it? As a selection. I'm quite happy with that. Let's even get a bit more hair up there. When you do this type of thing, you have to remember or think ahead and think about the background that your going to place the subject against, and in this case, it's a wooden background and the wood is of not too dissimilar color to her hair and that means that you don't have to be super accurate if it was placed against a white background well, that's different. It's fine the way it is. I think that it has done a wonderful job there. Let me just go around here because it looks a bit untidy there and see if I can tidy that out. That might be something I have to fix in the mask. Once you're happy with that, I don't want to smooth it but what I do want to do is come down here. Let me try and find something where I can show you this next little thing we have to do which is "Output Settings" and to decontaminate the colors because the yellow background, the original yellow background is shinning onto her clothing and slightly onto her face as well. We can click on this box and you can save a switcher on and off the difference it makes. It's put a line down there, I've just noticed but we can see we're on 100 percent. I'm going to back that off to roundabout there. It's done a little bit but hasn't done much but to say I didn't really want to put in that line down there. It will vary between images and that looks like a pretty good selection to me. Unfortunately with stuff like this, it's only on the edge basically where it tries to do that. Right, we've done that and now all we need to do is to save it. Again I always choose "New Layer with Layer Mask" and just click on "Okay" and there you have it. So "Z" for zoom, I'm just going to zoom out, and there you go. We've made the extraction. That looks pretty good and it comes complete with its layer mask. Now I could actually go in now and fix this area, for instance. So "Alt" or "Option-click" on the mask and I can tidy up these areas. Of course to do that, I need a brush, so "B" for brush, make sure it's on white and then just make the brush size a little bit bigger. I can go in and fix these areas here. Now, again like before I'm not going to do all of it because I want you to do it. If you look at the hair detail, It's amazing, isn't it? That is a pretty good selection, isn't it? To "Command" or "Control minus" to zoom out and we have our selection. Like always we now need to duplicate this layer and put it onto the wooden background layer. In the layers palette right-click "Duplicate Layer" and select the "Wooden Background". Click on "Okay". Then when we jump across, there is Sophie against the background. Now, how do we get rid then of this yellow cast? It's been reflected onto Anastasia from the previous yellow background. Well, this is really exciting. What we're going to do is make sure we have Anastasia layer or the model layer selected and I'm going to come down to the bottom, and I'm going to create a new layer. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to clip this layer to the model layer. Now, remember to do that. We press "Alt" or "Option", and this little icon appears and then we just press the button and that is now clipped to this layer. Anything we do to this layer will only affect the layer with the model on. Now we need to change the "Blend mode" to "Color". You with me so far? That's all very easy, isn't it? I'm just going to zoom in over here to this particular area and then I'm going to press "B" for brush. I've got a nice brush to make the precise a little bit bigger and then what I'm going to do is with the brush tool selected, if you hold down "Alt" or "Option", it will change to an eyedropper and it will select a color when you click the mouse. Let's select this blue color here and then when I paint here, I can take away that yellow area. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Do the same over here. Just sample. Now, I forgot to mention that I have my flow set to 10 percent. That's pretty important because you want to build up that color and stages. You don't want to apply it too thick, just like painting really, isn't it? If I switch that layer on and off, you'll see the difference is pretty amazing, isn't it? You can take as long as you want doing that to get it perfect. There's a major piece over here, isn't that? Press and down the "Alt" or "Option". I'm going to sample that blue color there and just paint over there just to get rid of that there and you can just keep pressing the "Alt" or "Option" just to change the color and a let's have a look at that. That's pretty good, isn't it? I would spend some time going around doing that and there are some bits up here. It's not too bad, is it? I might just leave that for now. The hair would be another one that you could do. You have the song around here as well, isn't it. You would take all of that out. I'm just amazed the way it does not. That will do me for now I think. Let's just zoom out to the next thing is that I want to put a shadow behind Anastasia. To do that, make sure we have the model layer selected and then jump down to the bottom. We go to the Add Layer Style and choose drop shadow. Straight away we can see we have the shadow behind. Now I'm going to make it a bit darker. Possibly let's say that distance is 417. I've selected these numbers here. I've just dragged across there. I'm going to press Shift and then the arrow key upwards. That will change it in 10 pixel movements. I think that looks okay. Now you can change the size. You can have a harsher. Well, I think that source is soft sorts of shadow looks quite nice, doesn't it?. Let me just back the distance alphabet. Maybe something around about that maybe really careful. That's why I use the shift and then the arrow keys upwards and you can do it in those stages like that. That looks quite good. Someone will accept that. Now behind in the shadow, we've created a tiny bit of a problem just over here, where the hair is a bit too light. Now one of the ways to fix that is to make sure the model layer is active. I'm going to use a new tool. On the tool palette, we want to go over to this one, and it's the Burn Tool. Select the Burn Tool, and then in the parameters, let's pop it onto mid tones. You've got a choice that I want to select mid tones. That's just take the exposure down slightly to say around about 70 percent. Then I can just paint on this hair just here so I can darken that part of hair. Again, you can take your time doing this spot. It's only slit, and that looks better. Just by using that Burn Tool. It's only what photographers have done for years in the dark room. It's the same thing we can just darken in bits. That looks quite good, doesn't it? Let's just zoom out. That looks a bit more realistic. Let's apply another effect then. I'm going to click on this layer that we've used to bring the blue back to the jumper because we want to put a layer above that another adjustment layer. This is a new one. It's this one here, the color look up. I'm going to click on that and you can choose a look from this list. You can also add looks to the list as well. But the one we're going to go for is this one is Fuji Kodak lookup table as it's called. Which was what look stands for look-up table. I'm going to click on this one, and it's going to emulate a film style. I click on that. There you go we've got this lovely film style. Now it's a bit too harsh. I'm going to dial up back to about say 40 percent. Back to the Layers palette, and then the opacity slider, just bring that back to round about say, 45, maybe a bit less, 41 seems to be quite good. We switch that on and off, you'll see the difference it's made. It's quite nice, isn't it? It's applied it to the whole of the image. That looks really good. One final thing to do is to add a bit of light and shade. Am going to do that using another adjustment layer. Let's choose this one again, levels. In this little box here, I'm going to drag this way to dark and the image now of course it's dark in the whole of the image, and we don't want that. Now am going to oppress M for the Marquee Tool. Make sure I've got the Elliptical Marquee Tool selected. You can use Shift M to solve the toggle between the different sentence. Then I'm going to drag this shape. I'm going to drag a shape around about there. I'm going to use the space bar to move that shape across. Something round about that. We should do it. Maybe a bit bigger and just drag it down There you go I would too. What I'm attempting to do then is to darken this area, but keep this area in the light. Of course the shadow is behind the model. To do that now, all I need to do is hit Backspace and then Command or Control D to de-select. Why I've actually done there as we look on the mask, so Alt Option, and then click on the mask in the layers palette. You can see that the effect is only going to be applied to the white area and not to this black area. Alt Option click on the mask again. Now it looks a bit silly because it's a solid line. But with the mask selected, I have an option to change the feather of that mask. That's what I'm going to do and watch this, this will start to come to life. Look at that. That looks amazing, doesn't it? If we switch that layer on and off and see, it starts look even more realistic now because we've added that light and shade. We know light is coming from this way because we can see it in her eyes. Also we can see the shadow behind. It looks so realistic, doesn't it? That brings us to the end of this module and it's fairly exciting, wasn't it? As we move forward, we want to be creating some fantastic edits, just like this one. Download the project files and have a go and experiment with the different lots when you get to the final stage and try and produce something that looks similar to what I've produced. I will see you in the next module. 8. Module 7 The Transform Tools: In this module I'm going to introduce you to the wonderful world of the transform tools, and you can do some amazing things with the transform tools. I've gone ahead and opened up all the documents that I need to create the finished image, and you of course can download the project files and join in. The image I'm going to create looks like this. I know what you're thinking that is a complete random set of items all placed into one source of document and of course it is, but it will give me the opportunity to show you how the transform tools work and the particular facts that you can create. Let's make a start then. I'm going to select the background image to start. First of all, I'm going to navigate to the tabletop image. I can't see it on my strip here because there's not many documents open, so I can drop this window down and just select it from here. So it's the Tabletop.jpeg. With this document opened, I'm going to nip across to the Layers palette, duplicate the layer and obviously I needed to go onto the background image. Just click "Okay". Then when I navigate over to the background image, there is the wooden table top and it's rather large, isn't it? I'm going to zoom out, Command or Control minus. You can see that purple outline is indeed the size of that wooden table top, so what can I do to make it smaller then? Well, this is where we start to use the transform tools, and the shortcut is Command or Control T and you will get this box outline. That indicates the whole size of that wooden table top, so I can make it smaller. Just by dragging those handles, I can make it any shape I want. I'm just going to undo that Command or Control Z. If I use the Shift key while I pull the handles, it will change the size but will keep the same proportions. That's pretty cool, isn't it? I don't want to do any of those things at the moment, what I want to do is to create a tabletop effect and I'm going to use a bit of perspective to do that. I'm going to place it roughly around about there, I can always move it later. While the transform tool is still active, if I right-click I get more options. Make sure that you click in the actual document. If I clicked here for instance I wouldn't get anything, so I have to click in the actual document and within the confines of the transform tool box as well. So right-click here and I can select "Perspective". Then when I drag in these corners or a corner, you can see what happens. I'm now getting this effect where it's narrower at the top and wider at the bottom, so I'm just going to use Command minus just to zoom out a bit. I know the image has gotten really small but don't worry, it's so I can get all of this information in. Again, I'm going to right-click. This time I'm going to select "Scale", and I can push this up to about there. I'm going to zoom in; Command or Control plus, and we can see what are results so far. I'm going to right-click again and select "Perspective" because I can make that effect even more effective. How about something that would do? Wouldn't it? That looks pretty good. I can hit "Return" and accept that. I've now got this table top and it has a better perspective. It is a good idea to rename your layers as you add new layers because the Layers palette can become quite confusing if you don't. With that in mind, I'm going to rename this layer Tabletop and I'm now ready to bring in the next item. Let me just zoom in a little bit then. Top up there, there you go. The next item I'm going to bring in is the actual cityscape, and it's over here. I'm going to right-click and do the same thing "Duplicate Layer" and the destination document is the background image. Click "Okay", navigate over to the background image, and there is the cityscape. I'm going to select the move tool, shortcut V, and just pop that there and rename the layer. With the layer selected I'm going to press "Command or Control T" and we can make some adjustments then. What I'd like to do is to just change the width of the cityscape so it goes from one side to the other without pressing the Shift key, because remember if you press the Shift key it will constrain the proportions and I don't want to do that. So I'm actually stretching this layer, and then they're going to move up slightly. Something around about there would be ideal, so I'm going to accept that. Just hit "Return". Just looking here it would be nice if the tabletop matched the horizon, so I'm going to click on the table top layer and just use the up arrow. Make sure you've got the move tool selected and just move the up arrow just to match the horizon of a cityscape. There you go. I'm not happy with the look of that cityscape, so I'm going to change the blend mode to make sure the cityscape layer is selected. Let's try some blend modes, dark; it's lost some of the details. Hasn't it? Multiply looks quite good. You can play around with these. That's quite nice too, isn't it? But I want to go from multiply in this case. Yeah, that looks great. Ready to bring in then the next item, and that would be Batman. There he is there. In this case, I'm going to do the alternative method by just dragging up to the background and then just drop in the image there. There you go, we've got Batman in the center. First of all let's rename that layer, and then Command or Control T to access the transform tools and we have our box around the side. Of course, as you know, we can make him bigger or smaller by holding the Shift key and just constraining those proportions. What else can we do then? We'll right-click inside the box, I have some other things I can select. Let's have a go at Distort. We can indeed distort Batman, we can make him look more aggressive, reactive. It looks like he's put a bit of weight on his knee, so let's undo that. But we're going to use the distort tool to great effect coming up shortly. What else can we do then? Well, we can rotate Batman which we don't want to do. What we could do, we can flip him horizontally. Again, I use that quite a lot; the Flip Horizontal option, but in this case I don't want to do that so I'm going to put that back. Let's have a look at this one then. This one is really interesting, the warp tool. I'm going to click on the warp tool and I can warp just part of the image. Look at that, that's naughty. Isn't it? We can do that and I'm going to undo that. With the warp tool still selected, I want to put in a vertical line. Why would I do that? You ask. Why put a vertical line in there? When I pull this handle, what will happen is I will only affect anything that is in this part of the transformation box, and this part should stay static. If I pull that; there you go, I can make his cap bigger if I really wanted to make his cap bigger. At Anytime by the way, you can press "Command or Control H" and it will hide the box. The box is still there, it's just hidden from view. Then Command or Control H to get the box visible again. When you use the warp tool you get these little handles as well, and you can make adjustments that way. In this case I don't want to do that but that is the warp tool, so I'm just going to step backwards and escape from that tool. To escape from the tool at anytime, just press the Escape key. There you go, the tool isn't active anymore. Let's bring in two more images then. The one I'm going to bring in is this one, so let's just drag that across to the background image. Let me pop that around, about there I think. Then the other one is the blank magazine cover, and I'm just going to drag that across and I'm going to pop that over here. What I want to do is I want to put this magazine design on top of the magazine cover. Let's rename the layers first then. This one is the Batman cover, and the one above is the Batman magazine. With the Batman cover selected, make sure you have that selected. The move tool; shortcut V, we can move this across. There's a problem straight away, isn't it? The actual cover design is underneath the magazine, so back to the Layers palette and we can just drag that layer above. Now, I'm going to press Command or Control T to get the transform tools around the Batman cover. Then I'm going to right-click inside and select distort. Then I can track these corners to the corner of the magazine on the table. Of course, once I've done that, I need to zoom in and get a bit more accuracy. Let's get that right onto the corner. Try and be as accurate as you can. We can always adjust it as we go along, but it's a good little start point, isn't it? You may zoom out now. You may think, well, that's that, finished, but it isn't because if I zoom back in, you can see that the magazine is actually got a curve. It looks more natural, doesn't it? At the bottom here, it curves and you can see the pages we will do once I perform the next step, which is going to be the warp tool, so right-click and select ''Warp''. Then I'm going to choose split Warp vertically. I'm going to put a line in about there because I can now drag this part up, I'll utilize this one. I can create that curve because the magazine curves and then sweeps down, doesn't it? I'm just going to pull it across a little bit more roughly around about there. Have a little play with that and get that curve. Then at the bottom, it's the same thing, isn't it? I can move this upwards because I can see the pages below. Same thing there. I'm just going to pull that up. Do I need one over here? I think so. That little handle, I'm just going to pull up there, possibly just there as well. That will reveal those pages. I do have this little curve created now. I'm going to go back to here and choose distort. I can just pull and make sure I've got them right in the corner. I think that looks okay. The same thing there, that looks fine. This needs to come up a little bit because I can see a bit of the white underneath. That looks okay. Just hit "Return" and then zoom out. There we have Batman cover on the table. Now going back to the Layers palette, I would then select those two layers. I've just shift clicked to select the two layers, and then right-click group from layers and just call that magazine. That is now on one layer, so if I select the Move tool, I can move that and put that magazine wherever I want it to be. You'll see that using the Transform tool, in that case, I used the distort feature first and then I used the Warp tool. Honesty, the things you can create are endless. That was quite simple, but have a go with that one because the Warp tool is a bit tricky to use sometimes, but that's a good little stamp point for you to make that attempt. Always ready before we move on, we should re-size the magazine, so Command or Control T, and we'll just resize it. I want to hold the Shift key down and just do that. Then it makes more sense, doesn't it? If it makes any sense at all, you might be thinking. Let's move on to the next one then. We want the gymnast. I'm going to navigate over to where the gymnast is. Then same thing. I'm just going to drag that to the background image, and we'll put her over there. She's a little bit too big, isn't she? Let's rename the layer first and select the transform tools, Command or Control T, and then we'll constrain the proportions with the Shift key. We'll put around about there, that will do only just for now and hit "Return." Now, let's have a think about this. What can we do to this young lady? Wouldn't it be nice if her leg was completely straight? That would be quite good, wouldn't it? That's what we're going to do. First of all, I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to draw a circle. To do that, I'm going to press the M for Marquee tool and then Shift M to get the Elliptical Marquee tool. I want to point about here and I'm going to press Shift Alt or Option, and I can draw a circle from around about there. I can do that. I'm going to do that. Then I'm going to hit Shift backspace. I'm going to fill that with a color. It doesn't really matter. I've got gray selected, any color will do, and then just hit "Return" and then Command or Control to de-select. Now, that layer needs to be below the gymnast when I do that. You might think, why have you done that? Well, when I move this leg round, I want to make sure it's the same length. Otherwise, it will just be wayward and she might look really silly. This is a temporary layer that I've put in. Let's go back to the gymnast layer and let's try and straighten this leg. If I tried to use the Warp tool, so let's do command or control T, select the Warp tool. Let's put a point in, then split Warp horizontally, and let's put a point there. Then if I tried to move this leg, you can see what's happening. It's getting distorted. I could try and do this type of thing and then the rest of the body is moving, and it doesn't really work. There's another thing that we can do, and it's called Puppet Warp. You can find it up here. Drop down the Edit menu and select ''Puppet warp.'' A wire-frame is put around the layer, and in this case, it's the gymnast. I could now put a point there and drag. No, I couldn't. What you have to do is put numerous points to lock your subject into place. If you can see here, I'm just clicking around. I'll put one on the hands, one on the force. I'll put one on the face and I'll put one on the top of the leg there. I've put one on the knee and let's just put one on the toes there as well. What happens now is that when I drag this top point, it makes more sense, doesn't it? There you go. I could put a point here and just drag that straight as well. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Now, I can refine that and spend more time on it, but I'm just going to hit ''Return'' to accept that. Then just I can delete this temporary layer. Just select the layer and hit "Backspace." There you go, she's got a nice straight leg. Now, when you do it, spend a little bit more time, but that was how you would use the Puppet Warp. That's pretty cool as well, isn't it? You can honestly change and distort any shape and make it look realistic too, and that's the most important thing, isn't it? Have a go at all those things I've showed you in this module. You've got the project files and have a little play around. You can try different blend modes. As I said, have a bit of fun. That is how you use the transform tools. I'll see you in the next module. 9. Module 8 Adjustment Layers: In this module, I'm going to teach you all about adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are a fantastic way of editing your photograph and it will create over a million different results. Now as always, you can download the Project Files and join in. Before I start, a big thank you to Jennifer Coffin Gray. I found this photograph on unsplash.com and it's a lovely photograph captured by Jennifer. As it is, it looks fantastic but as I say, there's a million ways to add as a photographer. I'm going to create this version. To me that's more pleasing. Honestly, it's all subjective, isn't it? I'm sure there'll be some people watching that would actually prefer the original. But that's the beauty of photoshop, you can create so many different versions of the same photograph. Also, you will develop your own style and your own look. I do like this, and this is the version that we're going to create then. I'm going to take you through all the steps that I used to achieve this finished result. Let's make a start then. The first thing I'm going to do is to go to the Layers palette and I'm going to duplicate the background layer. Now it's a good practice to always do that because then you can refer back to the original and check on your results as you move along. To duplicate the layer, as you know, it's command or control J. Now I'm going to rename this layer and I'm going to call it original. Then I'm going to convert it to what we call a smart object. Let me do that first and I'll explain what that is. Right click on the layer and then simply select "Convert to Smart Object". This little graphic will appear in the right-hand corner to indicate that is indeed a smart object. There are two ways to make adjustments to your photograph. You can actually adjust the layer itself or the photograph itself or you can use adjustment layers. Now we're going to use adjustment layers, but we're also going to make adjustment to the actual photograph. Now when you do that, it is totally destructive. If I changed the exposure of this photograph and then move forward, I couldn't return and then correct whatever adjustment that I had made. But when you convert it to a smart object, you can go back to it at any stage and re-adjust. Let me show you how that works then. With this original layer selected, and it is a smart object, I'm going to go up to the top, and I'm going to go to the filter section, and I'm going to choose Camera Raw Filter. Now, a bit later on we're going to do a whole module on Camera Raw because it is a really, really powerful filter. But for now, we're going to keep things simple. These windows opened up, so we're now in the Camera Raw section of photoshop. I have a bunch of things I can do on this side, but we're going to keep things basic. With that in mind, I'm going to go to the basic tab. Looking at this photograph, I think we could improve it by lifting the shadows. It's quite dark in these areas. To do that, I can simply go across while I'm in the basic selection and I can lift the shadows. I'm going to lift the shadows to about, let's see, around about 60, 64 and I brought a lot of detail back into the shadowy areas. Now while I'm here, I'm also going to lift the whites slightly. Now when you do it, you can play around with the other sliders. Bear in mind, we are going to do a module to cover Camera Raw in greater detail. I'm happy with that because all I really want to do is to lift those shadow areas and I'm going to click on, "Okay". There you go. What I can do now is turn that original layer off and just look at the difference. There's a massive difference straight away, isn't it? Also, it is a smart layer. Although I've put the adjustment on the layer, the photograph itself, I can simply double-click on the Camera Raw Filter and it will re-open in the Camera Raw Filter window. I can carry on making adjustments or I might think that I've lifted the shadows too much, for instance, and I could back them off. But I don't in this case, I think it looks really good. I'm going to click on "Okay". That's the benefit then of using a smart filter. Convert it to a smart object and as I said, that smart filter is accessible at any time. You can also collapse the layer just to create a bit more space and then open it up like that. Oh, very easy, keeps it nice and neat when you do it that way. Let's move on then and add some adjustment layers. The first one I'm going to add is a color lookup table. It's this icon here. Now, we have used it before. Create a new color lookup adjustment layer. I'm going to click on that, and then in this flyout menu, there's a bunch of lookup tables that I could use. But as I have done this image before, I'm going to select, believe it or not, HorrorBlue because it works really well on this shot. That is the effect it's created. Of course, because it's on its own layer, I can switch that on and off and I can also change the opacity. That is what I'm going to do. I'm going take it down to around about 50 percent. That's probably around about 53 percent. It's non-destructive. It's an adjustment layer. I can change the lookup table to a different lookup table whenever I want. I can change the opacity. It even comes with its own mass. As you know, I can paint out areas or paint back in areas and do all of that stuff. Now I don't want to do that on this mask, but just know that every adjustment layer comes complete with a mask. So far this is what we've done. I'm going to go back to the very background layer to Jennifer's original photograph, and I'm going to come across to the visibility eyeball, press alt or option. When I do that, it will turn off the other layers and just leave the original. That's the original photograph. Then again, just alt or option, click on the eyeball and it will bring those layers back. You can check your progress as you move forward and that's really key when you are creating an adjustment to a photograph. Let's move forward then. What can we do next? The next adjustment layer I'm going to add is a curves adjustment and curves are really powerful. Up here, it's this icon. Click on there and you're presented with a histogram and this diagonal line. In the bottom left-hand corner, or where the blacks live and then at the top right-hand corner, where the whites live. The exposure is along this line. If I lifted this I would be lifting up all the blacks. I'll be dropping the highlights if I did this. You can add contrast to your photograph using as I said curves. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lift the black slightly because I want the photograph to look less digital. Now, I'm assuming it was shot on a digital camera. I'm just going to do that and then I'm also going to drop the highlights slightly. Remember, this is non-destructive. I'm going to add a little bit more contrast with an S curve and something like that looks really good. Now if you switch that layer on and off the curves layer, it's only subtle. But I think it's taken it away from looking too digital. Maybe just lift the blacks a little bit more. Let's have a little look on and off. As you add it to photograph, that's what you find yourself doing, is switching on the layer on and off and just check your progress and make sure that you are getting it to look exactly the way you want it to be. Of course at the end, you can just nip back to that particular adjustment layer and just make some further adjustments. That's what we do. It's a little game we play by adding adjustment layers until we get the image to look exactly the way we want it to be. So far so good, I like it. What can we do next? Looking at the photograph, I think the actual path that the lady is walking along is a bit too orange. What I'm going to do is change that orange color. To do that, it's another adjustment layer and I'm going to use this one, selective color. When you do that, you present them with all these options. Now, we're going to keep it simple. I'm going to adjust the reds and I'm going to use the cyan to do that. Now, I could do a whole class just based on the color wheel. But trust me, I'm just going to take some other red out by doing that, round about there. Then the yellows, I'm going do the same. I want to lift the yellows as well to round about that. It's still got that orange look to it but is not severe. If I just click on that on and off. You can see I've kept the color in but it's not as vibrant and it looks a bit more realistic. I'm happy with that. Now, by all means, have a play around with this select of color. We will be using that later on on other photographs. You'll see me use it to create different effects. But you can really target specific colors within your image by using the selective color. It's really powerful tool. The next thing I want to do is, I've noticed that on the back of the woman's sweatshirt, we've got some cooler spell. Now, if a check on the original photograph, Jennifer's photograph, there is indeed some spill. Because I've made some adjustments, it's annoying me to be honest, so I'm going to go in and I'm going to fix that. I'm going to zoom in first, so you can see. Now to get rid of it, I'm going to create a new layer, someone who's click at the bottom of the layers palette. Created a new layer. I'm going to switch the blend mode to color and then I want to select a brush. Pop up here and make sure we've got a nice soft brush. Let's put it in the middle. Then make sure the flow is on about 10 percent. I'm going to zoom in a little bit more. Then all I need to do is press the Alt or Option key while I've got the brush selected. It will change to this eyedropper which will sample colors. I can just click there and I can start to paint away that orange spill. Now again, this is just to taste because maybe it wasn't offender new but it was for me. I just prefer without to be honest. Now again, I could take longer to do this. A little bit more care, sample a bit more. But it looks better already; doesn't it? To my eye anyway and as I say it's all subjective now I could spend more time because there is more little pieces of orange here in the. [inaudible] turn that layer on and off. You can see what I've done. You can probably also see I've missed bits but it doesn't matter as long as you get yours right. Then I'm just going to click here. Because I've put some blue into the hair. That's what happens when you don't take your time. But anyway, you won't notice that when I'm zoomed out and there you go. So on and off. It's just taken that orange out of the sweatshirt. That is just subjective as well as not because maybe you hadn't even noticed that. Just look in there, there is something there; isn't it? Maybe it's something in the hair or something in the trees behind. Now, I would take that out. The reason I'm not going to take out now it's because we haven't looked how we remove unwanted items in the photograph yet. I don't want to jump too far forward. But maybe you could complete this edit. Then when we do the module about how you remove unwanted details, you could go in and do that. But for now I'm going to leave it the way it is. All good so far. When you get to a stage where you think, yeah, I like this artist and I'm just going to jump back to Jennifer's original shot which is there. This is the one we've created. If I think yeah, I'm happy with that. What we'd like to do or what I like to do is create a stamp layer. Now what a stamp layer is, it's going to take all of these layers that we've created and it will merge them into one layer. Now, we're not flattening the image which is creating a layer that is flat, that is different. Now to do that, all I need to do is press, "Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control and the letter E." You have to press those three keys, Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control, and then press the letter E. It will create a stamp layer of everything that's below. In doing that, I can retain all those layers that I've created. But I have a flat layer above with all those adjustments flattened into one layer and it becomes really useful. I'm going to show you why now. First of all, I'm going to rename this layer stamp. With the layers still selected, I'm going to jump up to the top, to my filters and I'm going to select Camera Raw Filter again. Now, honesty, I could do so many things to this but I'm going to keep it simple. I'm going to go down to the Effects section. I'm just going to add some green. Now to do that, I'm going to zoom in first, so you can see the effect of the green. Here it comes, know that it looks like it's snowing; doesn't it? You got to be careful and maybe take the roughness down. But I do like applying green. It just takes the photograph away from looking too digital. Now, I'm just going to cancel out. Cancel the changes, yes. Why I'm I going to cancel it? Because it was a mistake; wasn't it? What I needed to do, first of all, was to right-click and change it to a Smart Object and then go to Camera Raw Filter. Now, I'm not saying I did that on purpose. I leave you to ponder that. Yeah. Let's do the same thing, bring the green in and mess around with these sentence here until you get something that you like. I'm going to leave it somewhere around about there. Again, it is a very subtle but I do like that effect. I can turn the camera raw, filter off with this little visibility eyeball. Yeah I can see the difference. I can see the difference when I do it. But when you do it, you will notice it more on your computer screen. I do like it. Can we do anymore? Well, there is a point that you reach when you think, yeah, I like it the way is. You can then play around a little bit more, for instance I might put another curves adjustment and maybe just brighten the image slightly. Does it need it? Maybe part of it more contrast in the shadows. How does that look? I like that it's a little more contrasty, isn't it? Trust me you can go on and on doing it. One more little adjustment then and I promise you, this is the last one. The reason I'm going to show you this is because it's all about masks. I'm going to click on another curves adjustment and I'm going to zoom in, and I am going to pick this little finger here. When I do that and move over here. It samples, the luminosity from that particular area. So you can see if I'm over here, it's near the top where the highlights and the whites are. When I say it's over there, by the way, I'm alluding to this little box here. You can see highlights and if I go into the dark areas it's close to the bottom, isn't it? I can just pull up there and it looks awful I know, just hang in there. I've created an overall adjustment. Now if you remember back to the masks module, I can invert this mask and that is indeed what I'm going to do so Command or Control I and it's now a black mask, which as you know, conceals so I can't see the effect. But this is where I can now choose a brush and I can just paint in with a white brush, a little bit of effect just here. I'm just putting a bit of a highlight on the top of her hair. If I switch that on and off, it's only subtle, but it's quite nice, isn't it? That bit over there. Really, it didn't, I guess need that. But I just wanted you to be aware that all these layers that we've created all came complete with a mask and I didn't actually use them. I didn't need to but it's there or they're there for when you do want to use them. If you just turn the hair adjustments on and off it just looks so much better, doesn't it? Crazy really isn't just one or two or three little strokes of a brush. Do you think is renaming layers, I haven't because I'm conscious that it's a tutorial and I don't want to spend too much time. But for instance, this one, I would most definitely call hair because as I move forward if I carry-on I completely get lost. That is why you're renaming layers. But I guess going forward here, I didn't really need to do it. But you'll see again as we move forward with all the adjustments on different photographs, it gets a bit more complicated. Let's go full screen on this shot and just zoom in a little bit. That was my completed adders and I think it looks great. This is Jennifer's shot and Jennifer's shot looks fantastic too. As I said there's no right and wrong. It's just creating your version and that's what it's all about rarely. If you follow the steps that I've just showed you, you will probably get a similar result. But there is no reason really that you have to follow the same steps. Try your own version. It's only by trying tools and adjustment layers that you'll get to grips with how things work when I press F to come out of full screen, of course, it's at this point, you would save it as a photoshop document or if you're completely happy with the image as a JPEG. But don't forget, you always best save a copy as a photoshop document because you can always go in and re-edit it a later date. Let's move on then to the next image. I've gone ahead and I've opened up the two files. This is the image we're going to work on and it's a great image. Again, I got it from unsplash.com and it was captured by and I will put his name on the screen or her name because it's a foreign name Anuj Yadav. Thanks very much because it's a great image, it's a great winter images isn't? But I'm going to do some adjustments and eventually it will look like this and its got more of that cinematic look to us, doesn't it? That's what I'm going to do. Let's go back to the JPEG and don't forget, you can download the project file and you can join in. As always before we begin, duplicate the layer. So Command or Control J to do that and then rename it. What are my thoughts then with this photograph? Well, I think I would like to introduce some orange and teal. Now it's been done a million times before. But that orange and teal look really is popular. Let's start off then with an adjustment layer and I'm going to choose selective color again. This time, I'm going to target the yellows, if I click on the yellows, and what we're going to do is drag this slider all the way to the left. You can see what it's doing to the trees. Putting that lovely warm color. In this case, the orange color for the orange and teal and then the yellow I'm just going to take it to around about there should do it so on and off. You can see the orange that I've added. It puts the effect everywhere, but that's fine. Then I'm going to select the neutral colors because this pathway, it's gray isn't it? It's a neutral, the neutral part of the selective color adjustments is really powerful. Again, as we go through the class, we'll use this quite a lot. But for now, what I want to do is change the cyan. I'm going to pump in quite a bit of cyan into a pathway so we can see now we've got back teal effect and perhaps a little bit yellow as well. That's the result we've got so far and if I switch that on and off you can see there's quite a difference, already we've got that orange and teal look starting to emerge. Next thing to do then is I'm going to apply a lookup table. Now we've done this previously too. The one I'm going to choose is the crisp winter look, which is this one here. I'm going to pop that on. Now when I do, it's too strong and I know it's too strong because visually I can see it's too strong, but also it's blown out all the detail here. I need to back the opacity down. I'm going to take the opacity down to about halfway, something like 55 should do it. That looks quite good. Now do you think I'm going to do is because we've got this mask. I would like the effect applied at the top, but not so much at the bottom. To do that, I could indeed paint on the mask, but I'm going to use a gradient to do that. The gradient tool lives over here and it has a short quote G so I'm going to click on that. Make sure I've got black and white selected and up here we have this linear gradient option. Then all I need to do is make sure the mask is selected in the layers palette and then just drag down. Now hold the Shift key there will be a perfectly vertical line and there you go. We've just applied that effect to the bottom of the image. Now I could reverse that and try it the other way. Do I like it that way? No, because I think the sunlight is coming through the trees, isn't it? That's the effect I want to give anyway so I'd rather have it like that and of course, we've got that lovely orange effect at the top now. Really that crisp winter look is mainly being applied to the bottom of the image and that looks much better, doesn't it? So an on and off, you can see that's really come to life hasn't it. Now as always, pop across to your layers palettes, go across to the original at the bottom. Perhaps I should have named the something [inaudible] down to the original photograph as well I meant background and also Option click, switch that on and off and you can see your results so far. That is looking pretty good, isn't it? The next thing I'm going to do then is to add a curves adjustment layer. That is now at the top of the stack where it needed to be. I'm going to lift the blacks and again to stop it looking so digital, I'm just going to do that. Create a little S curve and as you do it visually just check that you're happy with what you've done. It's non-destructive like I say, so you can always go back to it. On and off it's just very subtle at the moment, isn't it? Let's just try a bit more. Something like that and I'm happy with that. Like we did before, we can create a stamp layer when we get to this part and to do that, shift Alt or Option, Command or Control, and then hit the letter E and you've created the stamp layer. I'm going to rename that. Like before all those layers below and I'll merge together onto one layer and I can always access these layers, if I need to, but for now, I'm happy with the results so far. So the next thing I'd like to do is to apply a vignette. A vignette really is just a dark section around, oval liked section around the outside of your photograph and it will always draw the attention of the viewer to where the subject is. So, that is what I want to do. I'm going to select the Marquee Tool, shortcut M. Make sure I've got the Elliptical Marquee Tool selected and I'm going to draw a shape just here. Now hopefully you can see that shape source around about there. Then I'm going to select a levels adjustment and when I do that, watch what happens. The outside of the image stayed the same. What did I do wrong? Well, all I need to do there is to click on the mask and then just invert it. So now we have it the other way, that ever happens, just invert the mask. Now the effect is being applied to the outside and if you just click on the mask itself, Alt or Option, you can see that any area black, as you know by now, is not being affected, it's just the white area. It looks awful because we need to add the feather. So make sure you got the mask active and then just drag the feather across until you're happy and that doesn't look too bad, does it? Another thing you can do is Command or Control T, as you know, is the Transform tool, but you can actually transform a mask, would you believe so, Command or Control T and there's our box and I can pull that down because I think it needed to come down a bit more and perhaps it needs to go off with it. You can even rotate it and have a common through the trees a bit of an angle. Remember, you can press Command or Control H to hide the box. So you can have a little idea of how it's going to look and I'm just going to accept that and switch it on and off. Perhaps it's a bit too strong or maybe the feather needs to be. That's better, isn't it? So the feather just needed to be a bit more feathered for a better explanation. On and off, it's a dramatic differences isn't it? I think, I'm just going to pull that down a bit. Maybe make it a bit taller, then just hit "Return" and oxybate better, doesn't it? Maybe just increase the feather. Mandel Control T may be make it a bit wider, for instance. Press "Return" and then I think I've just reduce the opacity may be down to about 70 percent, that's about rise as new. But all those little small changes make a difference, you're being drawn in now to where the guy is about to walk to. So one more step, promise you just one more step to me. Photography is all about exposure, light and shade and if you can put degrees of that light and shade and it starts to bring your photograph to life, so better think about. I'm going to do is make sure the Marquee Tool selected Shortcut M and we have the Elliptical Marquee and I'm going to draw a shape just here because I want to put a bit of light in this area and somewhere around about there. Now once you let the mouse key go, you're not restricted to that shape. In other words, you can actually re-edit that shape. This is something new for you, if I got to select, dropped the menu down, I can choose Transform Selection, so now I can re-edit that Marquee Selection and that's pretty cool, isn't it? Important round about there and then just hit "Return" to accept that. Then I'm going to choose an adjustment layer. I'm going to choose curves and then the curves adjustment box, I'm just going to lift the shadows slightly, it doesn't look so good at the moment, I'm going to click on the mask and I'm going to increase the feather and yeah, I like that. It's just something a bit different, it's never switch it on and off. The more it's doing is it's draw in your eye over to that area to where the man is. So if I just press "Command or Control T", I can move that anywhere I want. Somewhere around about there and it's just something a bit different. Now to click on the actual adjustment, I can lessen that maybe something like that a bit better. So that would be my completed edit, certainly for this module anyway. But if you could go on and you could do so much more. But the original image looked like this and it's a lovely image, there's nothing wrong with it. But like I say, you can create so many different looks just by using adjustment layers and it's all very simple as that. So have a go at this one and see what you come up with. Like I said adjustment layers are so powerful. The non-destructive that's the great thing, isn't it? You know it's to go back and start adding new layers off as well, rename them and all that stuff, which obviously I didn't do. Lastly, Save it again as a Photoshop document because you may change your mind when you might want to do something else or creates a different look and when you finally happy with your image Save As a JPEG and then you're ready to print. I'll see you in the next module. 10. Module 9 Blend If: In this module, we're going to take a look at how we can blend layers together. Now I know what you are thinking, we've already done that, Frank. But this is a different way of blending layers together where you can be much more selective. It's called Blend If. More will be revealed as we move along. Now what we're going to create is we're going to take this robot image, and we're going to add some flames, we are going to add some rust and we're going to selectively blend those three things together to create this finished image where we have a rusty robot emerging through the flames. Before we get on with that address, let me show you how the Blend If tool works. I have created this graphic on the screen and it's a circle that moves from wise anti-clockwise to black, and this will help me show you how the Blend If tool works. Now to you access the Blend If tool just simply double-click on the layer that you want to apply the effect. In this case it's the circle layer and I'm going to double-click. When I do that, the Layer Style box will appear. The Blend If options are located at the bottom of the Layer Style box. You can see that we have two options, we have this layer and underlying layer. Let's start with the top one, this layer. It is really simple honestly. We have the dark areas and the blacks to the left-hand side, and to the right, we have the white areas and the light areas. If I drag this slider watch what happens. The white areas will start to disappear, and it will reveal the layer that is underneath. If I press "Alt" or "Option", I can split these two triangles, and I can make that transition smoother. That's how that works. Let me reinstate that and do the same with the blacks then. As you see, as I pull this slider, it's revealing what is underneath by removing the blacks. I can make that transition more gradual, as I say, by pressing the "Alt" or "Option" and splitting those two triangles. Of course I can do from both sides. We're not restricted to just black or white. That is a great way of blending, lays together and being really source of specific way you want that change to happen. The bottom option is a little bit more tricky to understand. It does say underlying layer, which you may think that we are going to affect the layer underneath. Well, we're not going to do that, it's how we reveal the layer underneath. Let me show you if I dragged this across, what will happen is only light areas from underneath will appear. Just lighter areas and you can see there was light areas appear in just here. If I click on "Okay" and just turn that layer off for a second, you'll see there are the light areas. The sunlight paint that was being left on this rusty background. I click that back on. You can see by using the Blend If tool and dragging the light slider, it's just going to reveal the light areas from the layer underneath or as the Photoshop call it, the underlying layer. I'm going to return that to the start and I'll just drag the black side. You can see only dark areas now are being revealed. There's quite a lot of dark here, isn't it? Over here. Again, if I accept that and turn the layer off, it's these dark areas of rust that are actually coming through with the blend. Now of course you can do the same thing. You can just bring the white through. You can do the same thing again, Alt or Option. Split those two triangles and make it softer. The transition is a bit more softer. Now it varies between the images that you're working on obviously. But you will be able to see that when we begin the edit. That's how Blend If works. Let's move on then to our robot image. The first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to add a solid color adjustment layer. At the bottom of the Layers palette, I simply select solid color. The color I want to use is this nice blue color. You can use the same color, 30556f as the color I'm going to use. Now, we can change that color anytime. At the moment, we've got a solid blue color and obviously we need to use a blend mode. The blend mode I'm going to use is soft light. That part of this address is optional. I just really like that nice blue color and it lock nice against the flames. But we can change that color later and I'll show you that. The next thing to do then is to bring in the robot. Now what I've done is I have actually created an outline of the robot using the Pen tool. Now you can do that too if you want to. To be on a practice using the Pen tool, we need to make a selection of the robot, or to speed things up, what I've done, this obviously I've gone ahead and done that. You can download this already cut out robot and use that. It's entirely up to you. Use the Pen tool have a little bit practice or just simply use the one that I'm going to supply you with. I'm going to go to the Layers palette and I'm just going to simply drag that on to the top of the image that we're working on and I'll just drop it there. Now I have to line it up. A good tip to line up two identical objects in your images is to do this, change the blend mode to difference. I can see they are not lined up. If I used my arrow keys, I can move this across, and it's perfectly lined up. You can jiggle it about left to right, up and down. Just by changing the blend mode to difference, it will allow me to line up perfectly those two objects. Then I can just switch the blend mode back to normal. We now have our robot on a new layer, so we should rename it. The next thing we want to do is to bring in the Rust layer, so I'm going to navigate across to where the rust layer is. In this case, I'll just right-click "Duplicate Layer" and I'll put that onto our robot image. Click "Okay" and then simply navigate to our robots image, and we have this new rust layer. Let me rename that layer. Of course, we only want the roast applied to the robot. To do that, obviously, we need to clip the rust layer to the robot. You remember how we do that is in the Layers palette. If I hold down "Alt" or "Option" between the two layers, the rust layer and the robot layer. A little arrow will appear to indicate that I'm going to clip this rust layer to the robot layer. If I just click that rust layer is now only applied to the robot and that's what we want. Time to add some magic then with the "Blend if" option. The first thing we need to do then, is to double-click on the "Rust layer", as you know that will bring up the layer style box. Looking at our two options then we have this layer, and underlying layer. What I want to do is drag this light slider to the left. You can see that I will remove all the light areas, so track it back to the right. The light areas in this case is the green paint. We only want the rust really, don't be so. I'm going to drag to the left-hand side to round about. Let's see, keep going round about there should do it. Then I'm going to split it, Alt or Option to split the two triangles. I'll put this around and about, there you go. We have that rust now visible on the robot and that looks great, doesn't it? I'm going to click on "Okay". I'm ready to bring our next layer in, which is the Fire layer. Now, before I bring in the Fire layer, I'm just going to change the layer and I'm going to click on the Color Fill layer. I'm doing that because I want the fire to be behind the robot. Let's navigate to where the fire is. Flames, and I'm going to right-click "Duplicate layer", and we want that to go to our robot image. Click on "Okay", navigate over to the document and there is the fire. Now is really small. What we need to do is make that fire bigger, so I'm going to drag it to the bottom left-hand corner. Then, Command or Control-T, to bring up the transform tools. I'm going to put my finger on the Shift key to constrain the proportions and we'll put the fire around about there. The next job then is to make some flames appear above the robots, and to do that we're going to use Blend if again. This time I'm going to select the Robot layer, and I'm going to double-click and bring up the layer style box. I'm going to use the Underlying Layer option, to achieve the effect. Dragging the lights to the left-hand side, we will start to reveal the flames and that's really cool, isn't it? And again, I can split them, let's take it to around about. Just play around and let's see, i think you've got it looking good. I think round about there, and just need to split the two and make it a bit softer, so maybe round about, let's see. Looks rather go, doesn't it? But you can have a play around with that and you can vary the amount of fire, the amount of flames, possibly put some more in, that looks rather good, doesn't it? Have a little play around and that looks fab, doesn't it? Click on "Okay", so we now have the flames above the robot. But what we've really done is, we've blended the robot with the underlying layer, which in this case is the flames. One more step to make then, and this is optional. I'm going to click on the Rust layer, because the next layer I need to be at the top of the stack. Select your Marquee tool, so shortcut M and make sure it's on the Elliptical Marquee. I'm just going to draw a shape just around the robot. Because what I'm going to do is apply a vignette to the outer areas, so with the Marquee Tool selected, I'm just going to select this adjustment layer which is levels. Just click on levels. Now, where Alt or Option-click on the mask itself. You can see that any effect I apply will only be applied to the white area. Now, I obviously want it applied to the black area, so to do that, I need to invert the mask. That is Command or Control I, to invert the mask, and now all I need to do is click on the effect itself and just drag the slider to dark on the outside area and click on the mask. Because as you know, we need to apply a feather, so let's apply something like that, and that looks rather good, doesn't it? I'm going to switch it on and off to see if it's too strong or perhaps the feather needs to be a bit bigger. In this case, Command or Control T, and I'm just going to make the actual area that's being dark and a little bit smaller, and then just hit "Return", and there you have it. Now looks great, doesn't it? When you think that we started with this layer, and we now have this composite image, all put together with the Blend if option and it looks fairly realistic, doesn't it? Not that I've ever seen a rusty robot on fire, but it's all a bit funny, isn't it? Now Blend if could be used in so many situations. I'll just show you one quick situation, which is this photograph I captured of Liverpool. I just put some text into the sky and used blend if to give the appearance that the actual text is in amongst the clouds, and that was all achieved using Blend if. Download the project files and have it go. It's a lot of fun and I'll see you in the next module. 11. Module 10 Camera Raw Filter: In this module, we're going to take a look at Camera Raw and the Camera Raw Filter. Extremely powerful selection of tools. We can create some amazing edits. First of all, I'm going to open up a raw file. As always, you can download the project files and join in. With Photoshop open, if you open a raw file, this is what happens. I'm going to open this document here, this one. It's a little Module 10-RAW 001.dng. Now, the DNG extension is the universal file format for raw images if they've been taken into Lightroom, you don't need to worry about all that. All you need to know is that if you've taken a raw photograph on your camera, it will be exactly the same. It will have a different file extension. They vary between cameras. Don't worry about that. Simply going to open up a raw file. When I open that image up, I'm presented with this new window, and it's a floating window, but we're still inside of Photoshop. This is the Camera Raw interface. What do we have then in this interface? Well, we have a great selection of tools and we can make some amazing edits using these tools, and I'm going to take you through each one. We also have this tool strip on the right-hand side, and I'll take you through that also. Now it's at this point I should mention that if you are familiar with Adobe Lightroom, then you will be more than familiar with all these tools because it's pretty much the same. Now I can't lie, I make all my corrections to exposure using Adobe Lightroom. However, Photoshop gives you the opportunity, as you can see, to open a raw file and perform pretty much the same task. Now I prefer to use Lightroom because Lightroom will catalog my photographs and I can keep them all safe in the one place. Now if you're interested in Lightroom, I've got a whole class devoted to that. But asked us about Photoshop, I'm going to take you through the Camera Raw options that you have, and trust me, it's exactly the same as Lightroom. You may decide to always stay within the Photoshop environment and never use Lightroom. But of course, if you subscribe to get the Photoshop package, they come together, there'll be Lightroom, comes with Photoshop, vice versa, so it's entirely up to you. Now we've got that out of the way. Let's have a look at what we can do with this image and how you use all the options available. You can choose to edit your photograph in any order you like. But this is what I like to do. I will go to this tab here and select "Optics". I will always have this box checked, remove chromatic aberration. We're not going into too much detail. Chromatic aberration, if it's in your image, you will see it as a pavel outline. Now, I've checked this image and there's no chromatic aberration, but it won't do any harm to have this box checked. The next one then, use profile corrections. What that means is all lenses at the front are curved, and the wider angle that you use, the more curved it will be. The two things it does, it will distort your image with [inaudible] curve the front. It will distort the image and it will also put a vignette or a darker area around the outside of your photograph. You can correct that by just checking this box. I'm going to check the box. Nothing's happened. Now when you do it, it might detect what lens that you've used. Now in this case, it hasn't. I am going to have to go in, and I know I used a Fuji Camera. I'm going to click on "Fujifilm". Now, what I want you to do is watch the actual photograph and watch what happens. You will see that the distortion will be removed and also around the outside of the photograph will become lighter. Let me just do that. There you go. I'm just going to undo that just in case you missed it. I'm going to select "Fujifilm", and there you go. It's corrected that distortion and did indeed take away that darker area around the outside. That's the first thing I do, optics. The next, added tool I would use then would be geometry. I can use this to straighten the image. Now, if I look at this building, it is an angle and that's because I appointed the camera upwards. If I clicked on "A" for automatic, it will try and fix the vertical and horizontal lines and it will probably make a massive end. Let's have a look. It's not too bad actually, is it? But it's cropped a lot of the image out and ruining the whole composition. I don't like that. I'm going to undo. Now, you may find that it works for you on a specific image. I use it quite a lot to be fair. But in this particular case, it doesn't work, so I'm not going to use it. But that's generally the second step that I make. Now to the basic set of tools. Now, it does make me laugh because it's called the basic set of tools, but they are the most powerful. Let's expand the tab and take a look. We're presented with a whole host of options and things we can change. Let's go through them one by one. I'll show you the procedure that I generally follow. Now, it does vary from shot to shot, of course it will, but at least you'll understand how they all work. The first thing I'd like to do in the Basic tab is to take a look at the white balance. Now as you know, white balance is measured in degrees Kelvin on a temperature scale. We can drag these sliders, the temperature and the tint, but we also have this little drop-down menu here where we can retrospectively change the white balance that was set on the camera. Let's try that first then have a click on "Auto", has indeed changed the white balance. If I just put it back to our shot, you can see the temperature was 5,400. When I click on "Auto", it's jumped up to seven-and-a-half, so it's really warmed the shot, and I can see that. It's gone a bit reddy, and I don't really like that, to be fair. Daylight, let's try that. Daylight's jumped down to 5,500. Don't need to remember these numbers by the way. But now it's gone a bit too blue for my liking. Now, looking at the weather conditions, I can see it's cloudy. If I click on the "Cloudy" setting, I like that. I think that's about right. Now you can also use this eyedropper just here. You can drag that into the image. If you've got an area of neutral gray, and over here in this bottom left-hand corner, it appears to be gray, and I can click on that area of gray and you can set the white balance that way. Now to my eye, I preferred cloudy, so I'm going to leave it there. Now, every time you make a change in any of these tabs, there's a little eyeball here and you can change the visibility. If I just hold down this little eyeball, I can see that before I made the white balance changed, it looked like that and now it looks like that, so you can see it warm the image. Although it was cloudy that day, the sun was actually out. I'm happy with that. The next one then is exposure. Now, unless there's a dramatic problem with exposure, I tend to stay away from this because it's so powerful, as you can see. It's very powerful. Now, to return these triangles to dead center, just double-click on the triangle and it will go to the center. If I was to take a look at the histogram and I could see the histogram was incorrect, let me just do this and show you. All the information was on this left-hand side. I would know the image was underexposed. Of course, I could use the slider to fix that and the same if it was all on this side. Always take a look at your histogram and just let's have a quick run-through the histogram, by the way. In the left-hand side, we have blacks, then we have shadows moving to the center general exposure. Then we have highlights. Then far right we have the the whites. Now, that's how the histogram works. The actual shape doesn't matter because that will vary from photograph to photograph, but that's how the histogram works. With that said, I'm not going to touch the Exposure. I'm going to skip Contrast, but I'm going to jump straight to Highlights. Now, it probably will come back to Contrast. But in this image, I think there's a lot more detail in this cloud area. If I drop the highlights, hopefully, that information will come back. There you go. You can see that coming back. We use the eyeball again. That's what it looked like and that's what it looks like after the highlight correction. That's pretty good, isn't it? Shadows. Well, it's quite dark where the trees are. If I lift the shadows, you can see I can bring the detail back in a tree area and that looks rather good, doesn't it? Now, whites and blacks, quite important. I'm going to introduce you to a little technique I use. Hold down the Alt or Option key. While you've got that pressed down, start to move the slider. I like to just have the information coming through. There's the blacks. I don't want that much. Just where it starts to come through, which is roundabout there. Actually, lifted the blacks by 14. The same thing with the whites, hold down the Alt or Option key, and then drag until you can see white coming in, which is in that top right-hand corner. That's pretty much corrected. Then I can move down texture in this case. I don't want to apply any texture. Clarity is good sometimes, but let me just show you what happens if you put too much clarity and the image goes unrealistic in my opinion. The opposite direction, it goes really soft. In this case, I don't want any clarity, but what I do want to do is apply some dehaze. If you watch the clouds as I do that, it's put a bit more detail in. Now, as a consequence of dong that, it's gone a little bit too contrasty so I can just drop the contrast to somewhere around up there. I'm happy so far. The last two slides is we have Vibrance and Saturation, which I guess are self-explanatory. If I put in too much saturation, it looks silly. The other way it will go grayscale. I'm going to pop back into the center because I think five does a much better job. You can make your photograph more vibrant. It's less aggressive and just attacks and adds color where it thinks it should be and it does a pretty good job. If you take always to the left, you can see there's still color in the image. It's more subtle. I'm not going to put more [inaudible], probably about plus 10. Now, all of that will vary from shot to shot, but that is a technique that you should follow. Use the eyeball again. That's where it looked like before those corrections and that's what it looks like now. Now, you can also come down here and press this compare cycles between before and after views. Let's click on there. There you can see that was the original and this is after the corrections we've made so far. You can just press on that button a few times. It'll show you a couple of different views till you get back to the main window. I'm going to close down the Basic set of tabs and then we'll move on to the next one, which is Curve. Now, we've used the Curve tool several times so far, and this is no different. We can use curves in the Camera Raw window as well. Now, it's something that I would add in Photoshop, but I guess it should show you that it's pretty much the same. I put a couple of points here. I can create an S curve and use the eyeball to switch on and off to see if I like it. I'm going to reset this because I don't want to add a curve, but at least now you know you can add a curve adjustment inside of the Camera Raw interface. I don't want to do that. I'm just simply going to reset the channel. But as I say, you can add a curve here, but I think it makes more sense to add the curve if it's needed when the image is open in Photoshop. That's curve. In the detail, we've got the option to correct any noise that's in the shot and to sharpen the image too. Let's zoom in and see if there's any noise. There is noise, but it's so far into the image. You just wouldn't see it pause. In the spirits of showing you how it works, let's correct this noise. All I need to do is to drag this slider to the right and that noise should start to disappear. Now, if you pull it too far to the right, the image will start to go too soft. Let's use the eyeball. You can see with the mouse key pressed down, that's how much noise was in that particular area of the shot. Then release. You can see it's done a pretty good job. You can also move these sliders around to fine tune, but that's the way the noise reduction works. The sharpened side, make sure you have some Sharpening added. Then you can hold down the Alt or Option key and then drag the Mask slider. You will see where you are about to apply sharpening to. In this case, I just want outlines. I don't want sharpening in anywhere else. Generally, you just want sharpening around the outlines of objects in your photograph, and I'm going to let that go. Now, eyeball, and it's done a really good job, isn't it? Let's zoom back out. That's the Detail tab. Next one is Color Mixer, then this is really cool. We have three options. We have Hue, Saturation, and Luminance. If you click on all three, we open at the same time, which I can do on my screen because it's rather large screen on a laptop. You might be stuck for space, but it's up to you. What I'm going to do is do it this way. Let's take a look at the Hue then. We can drag the sliders to change colors, or we've also got this tool here. If I put that on the end of my mouse, I can come across into an area. Let's look at the sky, for instance. If I click and drag, I can change the color of the sky. That's amazing, isn't it? I like that color. I'm happy with that. Have a look here. You can see it's just altered the blues. An alternative to drag and within the image would just be to simply pull that slider and I put the tool away. Let's have a look at saturation. Again, I can do the same thing. I can just use the sliders or grab the tool again. In this case, I think the trees are a little bit too vibrant, so I can take out some of that and take it quite a lot out of the move all the way to the left, but I don't want to do that around about there. I Don't want much. But again, it will vary between photographs. It's a really powerful thing that you can do. Put the tool away. Lastly, luminance. I can make the sky perhaps a bit darker. Again, I can pick the tool and just drag to the left. Now, all of that is non-destructive. I can go back to hue, for instance, and say, well, I corrected the blue of the sky. Do I want it more cyan or more blue? I do like that color, so I'm going to stick with that. That's the Color Mixer, and you can have tons of fun with that. The next one, then, is color grading. Now, I have to be honest color grading is the domain of the video editor. But let's put some blue into the shadows and then compensate that with some orange into the mid-tones, and perhaps a bit of yellow into the highlights. It looked like that, and then after the color grade, it looks like this. I'm going to leave it on for now, and I might come back later and switch that off. Now, we've got optics which we've looked at, and geometry which we've looked at. In Effects, we can add grain, which we may do later, now you've seen me do that in previous modules. Vignette, and you've seen me do that in previous modules as well. Calibration, we don't really need to look out just leave it on the core invasion, and that will be fine. Now, just looking at the image. I want to be honest. I don't like that color grading at all. What I can do is if I press "Alt" or "Option" you can see what happens, and I've got an option now to reset anything I've changed. But the only thing I want to reset is color grading. I'm just going to click just here, and it will remove that grade. You can see the eyeball is now being grayed out. I know there's no color grading applied to that photograph. You can do that with any of those tabs to reset them back to where they originally were. Let's jump over then onto this right-hand side. This tool strip here. Now, we're currently in this section, which is all our adjustments. The next one would be cropping. I can crop the image and use, or have some options here. I like to crop within the Photoshop environment. But by all means, you can do it here. Why not? Let's just pull that across, maybe, and then just hit Return. There you go. I've cropped the image. Easy. The next one is this one which is Spot Removal. Now, coming up in a later module, we're going to look at how to remove unwanted items from a photograph. It's not something I would do within the camera roll interface because it literally, is telling you what the tool does, it will remove a spot. If I wanted to remove this telephone line, I think it is I would most certainly do that in Photoshop. I wouldn't do it in this camera roll interface using spot removal because it isn't a spot. You could try, but I think it's much easier and much more accurate to do it in Photoshop. Let's move on from that one. We'll look at this next one which is the adjustment brush. Now, the adjustment brush will give you all the same editing options that the basic set of tools give you except you can apply them locally with a brush. Let me give you an example of that then. I'm going to zoom in to this sphere over here. I'm going to use the brush to paint the top part of the sphere. Over here, I've got overlay switched on, and mask options is now switched on. The mask, I'm going to use this green color. You can pick whatever color you want, but green works in this situation. Density on 100, flow on 50. Feather, I'm going to keep it low, around about 10. The brush size you can change here, or you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse. It's entirely up to you. I'm just going to take the Feather up a little bit. There's one more thing to show you, and that's to make sure that we have this little box checked, Auto Mask. We just hover there, toggle brush edge sensitivity. What the auto mask tries to do is to find an edge. I want to paint the top of the sphere, but I don't want to paint the sky. Let's see what happens when I start painting. I'm keeping the little crosshair in the center, and making sure that it stays within the sphere. I can paint away. Because there's a lot of contrast between the sphere and the sky, it's not bleeding out over the edge. Now, I've deliberately bled there because I'm going to show you what you do if that happens. Obviously, on the bottom of the sphere, I don't want to make any adjustments. Now, you know your selection is active because you'll see this pin. I'm going to go cross and change it to the eraser tool. I can erase parts that I don't want. If I've spilled over the edge, I can erase them out. Now, as I've always said, your edits will look fantastic if you spend the time. You zoom in, and you do it correctly. Of course, this is a tutorial. I can't spend too much time because I will need to get you guys working. There you go. I've removed that spill area, and I just have to top it selected. Now, once I've done that, I can switch the overlay off and the mask option. It's still selected. It's just that I need to know what the correction is doing. What we did do with that then, well, I can change now, any of these items here, exposure, make it lighter, darker wherever I want to do. In this case, I could change the color, and I could make it more vibrant. Now, I don't really want to make it purple, but I do want to make it a bit redder and boost the saturation. Let's have a look at the eyeball and see what's happened. There you go. I've just boosted the color there. I could boost it a bit more, I suppose, and possibly make an adjustment to the exposure, just lighten it up slightly. Let's have a look before and after. You can do loads of stuff like that and go crazy. But it's great because you can target your adjustments locally. It's great. Honestly, it comes in so handy. All I can do now is click on create a new adjustment brush. I'm not adding to the selection that I've just created. I could switch these guys back on again, and I can paint the bottom part. Once I've done that, switch off the Mask option. That is pretty much ready for me to edit. I'm going to lift the exposure and maybe just dial back some of the saturation so it's completely white underneath. Maybe do that. Let's zoom out then and take a look at that. That's something a bit different, isn't it? Use the eyeball. Maybe I have brightened that too much, so I can dial it back. Now nothing's happening. Why is nothing happening? Well, let's use the Mask Overlay. Nothing is selected. I need to click and make sure it's active. Now I can make the change. There is a lot to remember there. I don't want to go into too much detail because if you do find yourself using this particular tool, then I would suggest you watch my Adobe Lightroom video, because I cover this technique in much, much greater detail, the adjustment brush. I would popover to that class and just hone in on that module about the adjustment brush. The next tool then is this one, which is the graduated filter. When I click on that, I'm presented with the same adjustment options that I can find in the basic sensor tools and also in the adjustment brush tool. It's exactly the same thing, but this time I can apply the effect with the graduated filter. Let me just show you how that works then. What I'm going to do is pop across into the image. I'm going to click and drag and you can see. I'm going to add an adjustment just here, then we switch on the Mask, so you can see it. I am indeed going to apply an effect to just this area. Moving back to the Adjustments, I'm going to switch off the Mask. I'm also going to switch off the Overlay but it's still active, just that I have switched it off. I could perhaps make that area a bit darker. I don't really want to do that, but just in the spirit of showing you how it works and that effect is just applied to that area. If I switch the Overlay back on, I can adjust where it's applied too, so maybe around about there. I've got a gradual decrease in exposure on this side. We use the eyeball. Again, you can see what I've done. I've just darkened over in that corner. Optional, that comes in really handy in so many photographs and in fact, the next example I'll show you when we complete this one, you'll see me use that to great effect. That's what the Graduated Filter does. In this case, I am going to get rid of it because I don't like it but it was just to show you how it works. The next one is the Radial Filter. Again, you are presented with the same set of Adjustment Options. I'm going to draw up here a shape. I'll pop that shape and I can rotate it. I'm going to rotate it, put it about there, make it a bit smaller maybe. Again, nondestructive, want to pop that over there. I am going to switch off the Overlay. What I'm going to do now is just increase the Exposure. You can see, I'm popping a Shine on the top of that sphere. That looks rather cool, doesn't it? Eyeball again, that's what it looks like with ours. That's what it looks like with and of course, switch on the Overlay. You can see here, I can move that to where I want it to be. Switch the Overlay off. Of course you've still got the Erase option and you can brush in as well to add to that shape. You've got a whole heap of things you can do, but I think that looks quite nice. In this case, I'm going to keep that and move on. The next option is Red Eye Removal were we got no people in the shot. But trust me, at the stage you're at, I'm sure you're a fantastic photographer and you never take a photograph with red-eye were you shouldn't do. I don't think you do. That, for me is a redundant tool, which I'm not going to show you. Then Snapshots, again, I'm not going to show you about Snapshots. If you want to know about that, again, it's in my Lightroom Video, and you can find out all about Snapshots. This guy is Presets. We're going to look at that in the next example that we had us. Presets are really useful as well. Let's go back to the basic set of tools then. Let's have a look at the before and after. I'm going to zoom out so you can see. This is the image that I've corrected and this was the original image. They are chalk and cheese aren't they? Night and day, completely different. That was my take on that shot. That was my version and I could have had to do it so many different ways and of course, if you download this project file, you can annotate it and make it look completely different. That's the beauty of editing photographs. What I need to do now is still in that cameral environment. I need to get it into Photoshop. To do that, I'm going to go to the bottom right here and where it says Open, I'm going to make sure I've got this selected Open as an Object. I'm going to click out of there again. You just navigate to this little Drop-down arrow and select ''Open as Object.'' When you do that, it will open up in Photoshop as a Smart Object. There we are now, in the Photoshop environment and I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. If we look in the Layers Palette, there is our little icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the thumbnail to indicate that it is indeed a Smart Object. Why is that important? When I double-click, it will open up in Camera Raw and all those edits that I made are still there intact and I can carry on editing that image. It goes up let's see, Color Mixer, for instance. I change the hue of the sky and then I can see the adjustment is still there. I could change my mind and say, no I actually prefer it more blue and I just click on ''Okay'' and then it will do its magic. There's the sky, less cyan, more blue. It's fantastic, isn't it? Of course, you can always use Presets. Let me open up another document, and it's this 002 file here, and of course, when I open that document, the cameral interface will appear. I'm going to bypass all these corrections. But by all means you could do that, but I just quickly want to show you presets. You'll have a bunch of Presets. I've got some extra ones, but you can always purchase them. But we're going to go straight to the Black and White section. I'm going to select ''Black and White Punch'', and there you go, I've got a Preset applied and that's how quick it is. I would then just maybe crop that image. Let's see, let's do that. Let's bring that across to maybe there, lift that up a bit and then just hit "Return". I'm just going to zoom in a bit. It's going to put a Graduated Filter just over here. I just want to darken that area a bit. Take the Exposure down, maybe pull up back a bit, something like that, and then hit ''Return''. That looks great. Then I could just open that up then as I did previously, Open as Object. Now of course you can use the Camera Raw Filter as a stand alone filter. I'm going to open up a JPG, and it's this one here, and it's an identical image to what we've just worked on, except it's a JPG. I want to duplicate the layer, and then I'm going to convert it to a Smart Object. I'm going to pop up to the top and select ''Camera Raw Filter''. The interface will appear and I can do the same thing, so quickly, just going to apply that Black and White punch. Then the Graduated Filter, I'll just drag that across and darken it like I did previously. You'll notice there's no option to crop the image, but that's okay. I'm going to go down to the bottom I just click on ''Okay'' in this case. Then I can crop the image using the Crop tool. Now we haven't used this tool yet, but don't worry, there's a module criminal on the Crop tool. I would do that and then just accept that. Switch into the Zoom tool, if I just zoom in. That is now being edited using Camera Raw Filter. It's a JPEG, as you can see, because I changed it to a Smart Object. I can access that Camera Raw Filter, just double-click on it. It's pretty much the same as the way we had to sit the raw version. Just going to cancel that. If I jump back, this is the raw file that we edited. Let me just double-click on the hand. That was the raw file, and this is the JPG, and it's pretty much the same. If you are a photographer that shoots in raw and really you should be, then you can just open the photograph in Photoshop and the Camera Raw Interface will open up automatically. Or if you shoot in JPG or JPG photograph that you want to add it, then you can just convert it to a Smart Object and then just apply that Camera Raw Filter. Both work identical and it's a brilliant way, non-destructively of edit in your photograph. I'll see you in the next module. 12. Module 11 Changing Colors: In this module I want to teach you how you can change the color of anything by using an adjustment layer. The adjustment layer we're going to use is the hue saturation adjustment layer. Now as always, you can join in by downloading the project file which is this photograph here, Module 11, the Lamborghini. Now, remember caption this image, join a DSLR class I was teaching in the center of Liverpool and it will be ideal to use in this module to show you how you can change colors. We have a bright yellow Lamborghini. Let's change that. All we need to do is pop over to where our adjustments are and select this one, hue saturation. As you know, an adjustment layer will appear above the photograph of the Lamborghini complete with the mask which we'll look at later and this properties box will open up. Let's take a look then what we have in this properties box. We have a way of selecting colors, specific colors, as well as a master, and then we have a hue saturation and a lightness slider. We have this color range area at the bottom which is really important. You'll see as we go along how important that is. Now, if we left it on master and we pulled the hue slider, the Lamborghini is indeed changing color, but so is the background because it's an overall adjustment that we're making to the master and we don't want to do that. I'm just going to double-click on the word hue and that will return this little triangle to the center. Now, I could drop this menu down and select yellows. Now, two things happen when I do that. The first thing is when I pull the hue slider, it will only affect the yellows. But more importantly, it's given me a color range here at the bottom and that's quite important. I'm going to put it back to master. The next way of selecting colors then is with this little finger. If I click on there, on the end of my mouse now is an eyedropper tool. I can select that color range and it's more accurate to do it this way. I'm going to click on there and I have a color range and Photoshop is determined that that color is yellow but we know that. But I said the important thing here is that color range. Now, with that selected, I can move the slider to change the color of the car. As you can see, some of the background is changing too but we'll come back to that later. Yeah, I can indeed change the color. You can see here a column actually get it to a proper blue color. This is where the color range option comes into play. I'm just going to double-click on that to return it. Let's take a look at this color range area. Let's try and get that blue color then by just changing this color range area here. Blue was over there. if I now drag this, there you go. It's all about this color range. Now, I can see bits of blue here. We can fine tune this color range by dragging this outer slider and there you go, those bits have disappeared. Low and behold, now it's not accurate enough at the moment. I would need to just keep pulling, no, that's a little bit better, isn't it? It's all about moving the inner two points and the outer two points to fine tune that range and now I have a blue car. Now, I can see another little problem in this photograph because it's not full proofed this method. If we look the occupants of the car are actually blue. But as you know, each adjustment layer comes with a mask and I could just simply paint away the blue color from the occupants. That's easy, isn't it? In fact, let's do that now. With the mask selected, B for brush, 100 percent flow, and there you go. I can just reinstate the color now, ideally as always, I should zoom in. But for speed, I can reinstate the driver and the occupants to the right color. That's pretty easy, isn't it? How would B be more specific than the actual color choice? I'm going to turn the color of the Lamborghini into an official green Lamborghini color, all will be revealed. With the Lamborghini, return back to its yellow color. I'm going to show you this little file that you can download also. What I've done is I have nipped across to the Lamborghini website and I've downloaded this little graphic of this green Lamborghini and then I've sampled the color. Once you do that, I've used the eyedropper tool over here, show of course eye. I've clicked here and if I just look in this box now, I can see what the exact color is of this car. I'm looking at these three values here, the hue, the saturation and the brightness. We have 81, 94, and 59 and I've just made a note of those colors there. Hue 81, saturation 94, and brightness 59, and that's the exact color of the green Lamborghini. Back to our yellow Lamborghini. I brought that little graphic across so you can see what I'm going to do. What I need to do is change the color, the hue, saturation, and brightness color of the yellow area to match these numbers. Let's make a start on how you do that. Of course you do it with an adjustment layer and that is hue saturation. With the background layer selected, I'm going to just add a hue saturation adjustment layer just above it. Like we did before, I'm going to use the little finger in the properties box, come across this image and click onto the car. That will give us our color range just here. Then I'm going to change the hue at scale left I think. Maybe choose a red color and then just bump up the saturation slightly. You can see these areas outside of the car that have been included and this is where we can change the actual color range until that disappears like that. Now, make sure you've got everything selected and that looks pretty good. I think we can pull the inner sliders or the outer sliders but the main thing we're looking for is that complete selection of the car. There's a little tiny bit in the background, isn't there? Now, be careful because you still want the car selected. There's a little bit over here I think. I think there is anyway, but we can get rid of that with the mask later on. Then make a note of what Photoshop has done. It's retitled this area here as reds 2. The selection is now reds 2. I'm going to double-click on the hue, double-click on the saturation, and I've made a note of that reds 2. What we need to do now then is get the information up on this yellow color. To do that, we use the eyedropper tool but in this case the color sampler tool. Make sure you have that selected and then the sample size, 11 by 11 average should be fine. Then just simply click on the car. This little one will appear with a target. Now, I'm going to drag this info box across here so you can see on the properties box too. Number 1, if we look in this area here we have number 1, and they are the color values for that yellow area. But unfortunately they are in RGB and we need them to be in HSB, hue, saturation, and brightness so that's easy. The little drop-down menu here, we can indeed change that to HSB color, so that's what we do. Now I can see that the hue, the saturation, and the brightness obviously not the same as the green color. We have to match these numbers with the numbers that we sampled from the green Lamborghini. To do that, we use the sliders in the properties box. Now, don't forget that we need this to be on Reds 2. When Photoshop renames that particular selection, make a note of it and in my case it was Reds 2. The first thing we need to do then is change the hue. Now, looking at the sample green color, we're looking for the number 81. To match that figure of 81, I need to pull the hue slider on what's the little box to the left-hand side. I'm watching my figure all the time and I'm going to try and get it to 81, a choice of 80 or 82. Now, I could play around with that a bit longer but it's a bit fiddly. But yeah, ideally that would be on 81 but it's on 80, it's okay. Saturation 94, it's currently on 99. I want to back that off to 94. Then brightness 59, currently on 85. I need to take the brightness down to 59. We have 81, 94, 59, that is good enough for me. That's close enough. I'm happy with that. We've matched the colors absolutely perfectly. I'm going to put these two guys away over here just to put them back in the dock. To get rid of this little guy here because he is annoying, we do need to get rid of him. Make sure that you have the color sampler tool still selected and then when you hover around here, press Alt or Option and a little pair of scissors will appear and you can just click on there to remove it. I'll also turn this layer off. Then finally, like we did previously, I'm going to click on the mask, select a brush, make sure it's black and I'm just going to paint the driver and the passenger back in. Again, you could zoom in and get that a bit more accurate. There we have then a perfectly green Lamborghini. There's a reference car there. It looks the same, doesn't it? Which is great, let me turn it off. When you think about it, it's one adjustment layer. If I switch the adjustment layer off, there you see the original yellow color. It's really convincing, isn't it? Very easy to do. Now, I can carry on and add more stuff as you know. If I go full screen and zoom in a little bit, it looks fab, doesn't it? In that lovely Lamborghini green color. Back to the image. Zoom out a bit. Have a little go at that and you can see it's really easy to change colors using the hue saturation tool. Download the files, have a go, have a better phone and maybe change it to a different color. Maybe not use the Lamborghini green color but just always make a note of the HSB color. Then follow the same procedure and you should get a perfect match. I'll see you in the next module. 13. Module 12 Remove Unwanted Items: In this module, I'm going to show you how you can simply remove objects or unwanted details from your photograph, and there's many ways to do it. I'm going to take you through all your options. Now as always, you can download the project files and join in. It's a lot of fun. Let's take a look at those tools then. We will look on the tool strip on the left-hand side. The first one we have is this one, and this is the spot healing brush tool. Then we have the healing brush itself. Then we have the patch tool, and then a bit further down we have the clone stamp tool. We're going to use all of those plus the Content-Aware Fill tool. Let's take a look at this image then on I'll take you through some of the options you have. Let's begin with this beach scene, so Module 12, beach scene.jpeg, and I captured this image very close to where I live. The first thing I'm going to do is duplicate the background layer. To do that Command or Control J, and then I'm going to zoom in. I'm going to look at some areas that perhaps I may want to remove. We have some items on the beach and something in the sea. The first tool we're going to look at is the spot removal tool, now the shortcut for that is J. Now as with all the tools, we can change the parameters on this strip up here at the top. For instance, we can change the hardness or the softness of the brush, and I'm going to pour it roughly in the middle or exactly in the middle. Then moving along, I'm going to select "Content-Aware" and make sure that this box is checked, sample all layers. The great thing about this tool is Photoshop does all the work for you. If you look at this item in this sea, I can just simply click on it and it's disappeared. Let's try this item on the beach over here and I'll just click and drag, and that will disappear too, and the same with this person here, and you can just dab or click and drag. It works exactly the same, and you can just as a said delete anything you want. That's amazing, isn't it? All Photoshop is doing is analyzing the spot that you clicked on and filling in with adjacent pixels, all very easy. I'm going to step back and put all those things in place, and we'll move on to the next tool, which is the actual healing brush. Now to access that, it's just Shift J, and it toggles between all the adjustment brushes that you have. The same thing, we've got our premises at the top, and I'm going to make sure roughly in the center. Know you can vary that, it doesn't really matter but I'm going to put it in the center and sampled and current and below. They're the ones you're interested in. The healing brush allows you to sample from an exact area. Let me show you how that works. If I hold down Alt or Option, you'll see a little target will appear. I'm going to make the brush size a bit bigger, and I'm going to come over here, and I'm going to click here on the shoreline, probably around about there, and you can see, I now have that area on the end of my brush, and I can make it bigger, square bracket keys, and I can come across and I can just put that sample there. That's great, isn't it? Then maybe I could come over here and place the target there, Alt or Option click sample from there, and then just drop that sample on top. That's fantastic, isn't it? The same over here then I'm going to make the brush size a bit smaller, and I can just click anywhere. It doesn't really matter, but you can use it to line up perfectly to that piece of sand is now lined up perfectly. Now let me move over here, it's a bit more difficult. Let's try and sample. If I sample from the sea, for instance, because that's what I want to replace this little guy on the rocks. If I now did that, it looks a mess, doesn't it? Because what it's done is it's merged pixels from the rocks and pixels from the sea together, and it hasn't worked, so we want to step backwards. But what I can do is sample from there. We now have that, and I can drag that across and put it there. You just have to give it a bit of thoughts about where you're actually sampling from but it works fantastic. You'll see later on the clone tool works in a similar fashion. That is the spot tool and the healing brush tool. Let's move on then and take a look at some other options that we have. I'm going to switch to a different photograph and we're going to use this one, and this was supplied from unsplash.com. This is Module 12, threes a crowd.jpeg, and what we want to do is we want to remove this gentleman here. How would we do that then? As always, the first thing to do is to duplicate the background layer so that's Command or Control J. Let's try some of the options that we just use then. I'm going to select the healing brush tool and we use the square bracket keys to make it bigger. It's still got the previous sample. But anyway, Alt or Option, click on the horizon, and I could come across and I can start to replace and overwrite the pixels where the guy is on the beach, and that's just how it looks, and there you go. But would I do it that way? No. I'm going to step backwards. I would select the lasso tool and I would make a selection. When you make your selection, try and keep it as close as possible. Now all I need to do now is drop down the edit menu and select "Content-Aware Fill. " When I look on the right-hand side, I'm just going to zoom in and it's done a reasonable job. However, it may be including the two other people on the beach in the selection, and I can see that so I can just paint them out, and it may give me a better selection. I'll paint them are first. Let's have a look on the right-hand side, and it's done a reasonable job, and I'm pretty happy with that. I would just click on "Okay," Command or Control D to deselect, and yeah, it's pretty good. Now, I can fine-tune that by using the clone tool, and I'm going to look to clone tool in a bit more detail later on but it's pretty much the same procedure as with the healing brush tool. I'm just going to go up to the premises up here, and I'm just going to change the flow and I'm going to make it something like 25 percent. That just means that when I make this copy here and I copy the pixels across, it's more blended or more faded if you like, and I can build that or until eventually it looks more realistic and the same here. I can just dab a few times, build out more gradually until I'm happy with it, and that looks great, doesn't it? That's the way I would sort of remove a large item, and we're going to do that in a fair the module, often the future to great effect. But yeah you would never think that guy was sort of on the beach with these two lovely young people and there are probably three great friends who knows. But let's move on then to this next image then, which is this one I captured in Liverpool. He has a lamppost coming out of the top of his head so what can we do to fix that then? Some I'm going to zoom in and we'll have a look at the options then. One of the options we haven't looked at is the patch tool. Let's select "Patch tool. " I'll show you how that works. If I draw around the top of the lamppost, for instance, I can select a clean area, and that clean area will now replace where the lamppost was. Now, I am not a great fan of the patch tool, and I'm going to be honest, I never use it, but I can try to remove the lamppost by drawing around it and then select in a clean area. Now it's very difficult because there's a lot of things in the way, and let's just have a look. Then if I drag it up to here, for instance, that's fairly clean. I'm looking at the selection, it looks fairly clean and I'm going to drop it and then deselect, and it hasn't done a bad job but round about here, the top of the gentleman's head is not quite right, is it? Up here as well, where the top of the lamppost was is not good so I'm going to step backwards and deselect. That's not the way I would do it. I could use the healing brush, and I still got the ocean on the end of it, which is funny, isn't it? I can try and do it this way then, and sampling from here. Paint away the lamppost. No, whoops, I could spend more time doing it. That was being a very cavalier than most night. Make the brush size a bit smaller, and yeah all the way down. But I'll have the same problem when I come down here and I get to the gentleman's head because it will try, and merge those pixels together, and there you go. It hasn't really worked, has it? I'm going to step backwards and I'm going to select the Lasso tool. I'm going to do what we did previously. I guess it should zoom in a little bit. Let's zoom in, and I could probably zoom in a bit more actually. That way I can get the top of the gentleman's head exactly where I want it to be, and then just do this, and I'm just using the space bar to move the image up. Always be as close as you can to the object that you want to remove. All the way down there, and then just finish off there. I'm going to zoom out, and then all I need to do is drop down the Edit menu, and then select Content-Aware Fill. As you know, our little box will appear and it's done a fantastic job straightaway. Don't have to do anything. I could rub these areas are because I don't want them included. But looking at the result image on the right. It looks fine, doesn't it? I would click on that. As you'll see, there are tools so far that you would use the Healing Brush tool, the Spot Removal tool, fantastic. I generally use the Spot Removal tool on faces to remove blemishes and the Healing Brush tool in a nice wide open space. When I want to be accurate, I can use the Content Aware Fill, but there's no right or wrong. You just simply try, experience, and will get you to where you need to be so just try them all is what I'm saying, right? Let's move on to the next image now this one's really exciting, and it's this image here. What we want to do is remove the lady in the background. I want to show you how I do that. The first thing we need to do then is to duplicate the background layer. Command or Control J. What I want to do is to say, there's two areas. There's this area here where the lady's head is and then there's this bit in-between where you can see a green jacket. Now what I did was just zoom in so you can see it. Zoom in. What I did was I drew a path around here. Let me show you that, and I named that selection inner arm. It's all around here. I'm not going to do that now because you've already watched me draw a path. But this will be a good little source of exercise for you to recap your skills using the pen tool. Moving back to the layers palette, I'm going to create an empty layer. I'm just going to click here to create, as I say, a new empty layer and then go back to paths. Then once you've drawn your path, as you know, all you need to do is right-click on it, and make a selection. I'm going to make a selection, and I'm going to apply a one pixel further. Click on Okay. I'm going to go back to my layers palette, and I'm going to zoom out a little bit. I need to now fill this area with part of the red door that was behind the blue gentlemen. We're going to use the. Stamp tool to do this. The shortcut is S for Stamp tool or Clone tool. It's called a number of things and I'll show you what I'm going to a do. I'm going to come over here, make the brush size smaller, yet probably about that big should do it. Then Alt or Option click, and I'm going to sample from here. I now have that on the end of my mouse. Before I do, I just noticed something and this might happen to you. I forgot to change the flow back to a 100 percent. Always check the parameters when you switch tools. It's a good practice to do that. Again, I'm going to come over here, Alt or Option click here, and then try, and guess where that's going to be in. It's going to be roughly around there. Then just click and drag. I've painted in that area there. Now above it is just going to be red. Let's see if I can just sample this red area over here. Maybe make the brush size a bit smaller actually. Alt or Option click here, and I can paint in red. Now as I'm painting on the right-hand side, you can see the little crosshairs, and they are telling me where the sample is being taken from. As I move the mouse to paint the area, the crosshair is constantly moving in time with when I move the mouse. As I move the mouse, it's following the linked basically. That's where I've taken the sample from. Now if I think I've made a mess here, I can just simply Alt or Option click here, and just reintroduce that. Maybe we should have done it t hat way round first, but hey, it's worked perfect, hasn't it? Command or Control D to deselect. I have indeed got rid of the lady. Let's go back to the Paths palette, and I'm going to select the head. Now, again, in your case, you will have to draw the path. Anyway so I'm going to make a selection, and again, I want to further it by one pixel, and then go back to the layers. Make sure I'm on the right layer which I am. I can do the same thing. I'm going to zoom in a little bit for this I think, and make the brush size a bit smaller, and start to do the same thing. There's red here, and I can just re-sample as I do it. As I'm moving, and going back to re-sample the red, otherwise I'll start to include like a [inaudible] there things that don't want. That's why you have to watch where the actual sample is common from. Always watch those cross hairs and there you go. Again, I keep taking bits I don't want. But that's Okay. Now here I need to line that up, and just drag it down. There is still a bit of a nose left. Line it up, take your time and there you go. That looks good, doesn't it? Command or Control D, so D select. Looks like there is a bit left there. I'm going to undo that D selection, and just re-sample a bit there. I think a missed a bit there. You'll get there eventually. As I have just. There you go, I want to zoom out, and there you go, perfect. Now if I switch that layer on, and off. You can see how easy it was to do that. I could make it slightly better because I added this part here, and maybe I should have added one here too. I'm quickly just going to go to the inner arm, make a selection like I did earlier, back to layers. Make sure I'm on the right layer. I have the stamp tool already selected, and I'm just going to sample from here. I'm just going to guess where that is roughly around about there. I'm just going to put that in as well. Command or Control D to de-select, and that looks a bit better, doesn't it? You know, when you had to photograph, honestly, there's so many things you can do so many things you can miss, but if you take your time, you'll spot all these things. One more little tip that I want to click on the background copy layer that we made, and I'm going to select the marquee tool because I don't like this white area here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a box just here, and I'm going to further that box by two pixels. Then I'm going to press Command or Control J, and it will make a copy just to that area on a new layer. Then I'm going to select the move tool shortcut V, I'm going to pop that there. Simple as that, now it looks a bit silly, doesn't it? But I'm now going to use Command or Control T to bring up the transform to put my finger on the Shift key, and I'm just going to drag that down, and hit Return. Then I'm going to use the crop tool. Now we haven't looked at the crop tool yet, but don't worry, we will do in a future module. I'm just going to bring that across, zoom in a little bit, and bring it across to about there. Then hit this little except box up here. I've just added that extra little bit of darkness there. That's it, that looks great, doesn't it? So we switch off those three layers that I created, that's the way it looked and that's the way it looks now. Have a go at that one, it's a lot of fun. As I say you'll be able to polish up your skills using the pen tool as well as learning the new skill of using the clone tool. Let's move on then to the next image and it's this one. This one is a lot more difficult, and you have to use your imagination because we're going to remove this guy here who kind of takes my eye away from the subject matter, so we need to remove him. It's not as easy as it looks because we're going to have to rebuild and use our imagination because there's nothing really we can clone. I'm going to show you the technique to do that. As always, the first thing to do is, to duplicate the background layer, so Command or Control J. Now what I need to do to remove this gentleman is to hide him, and to hide him I need to recreate parts of the bus that's in the background and place it on top of the gentleman and he'll be hidden. It's a technique that you may have to use in tricky situations like this. It's going to involve copying this window, copying bits of the window across to here as well, and also copying some of this bottom area here. Let's make a start with that area first. So I'm going to select the Marquee tool, shortcut M, and it's the rectangular marquee tool. I want a copy of this area here, that is the area that needs replacing, so I'm going to right click on the center, and I'm just going to further that selection by three pixels. Then with the mouse in the center or inside the selection, I'm just going to move across and I'm going to make a copy of this area here. All I need to do to do that is Command or Control J and it will copy that area and paste it onto a new layer. That looks like this. Just click on the eyeball, that is the layer I've just created. Now I'm going to press "Command" or "Control T" to bring up the transform tool and I'm going to drag that across with my finger on the Shift key. I'm going to drag it all the way to there and then hit "Return". That is the first step. I'm going to apply a mask to that layer. Down the bottom of the layers palette, add a layer mask. Make sure I've got a brush selected and it's black and the flow on about 30 percent, and I can just tidy that area up there. As you know I should be zooming into do that, but you can do that. I can just crack that area there. So let's switch that on and off, that's the first thing we've done. Next thing to do is to name that, so I'm going to call that, bottom. Then click on the "Duplicate Layer" because we now need to make a copy of the window. Again, I'm going to press "M" for marquee, rectangular marquee, and I'm going to select the window. Be careful when you're doing it. It will include parts of the gentlemen, but don't worry about that because we can get rid of that. So sorts of round about there. That looks about right, right click in the center and we're going to further that by three pixels as well. Then simply, same thing, Command or Control J and it will make a copy of that window on a new layer. So Alter Option, click on the eyeball, that is what I have copied. Now V for the move tool, and I'm going to move that new window across and I need to line it up the best I can, so it need to come across to the left. Use your arrow keys to do that, and that looks okay. We now have a new window. It's just not very convinced at the moment, but don't worry, it will do. I want to turn the layer off. Most of this area is okay, it's just this area. So what I'm going to do is, press "M" for marquee again and I'm going to draw a rectangle just here. I'm going to adjust, there you go, round about there. Switch the layer back on. Once I've made that selection, I'm just going to right click in the center, and I'm going to further that by, lets say five pixels in this case, click on "Okay". Then I'm going to pop down to the bottom of the Layers palette, and I'm going to apply a mask. I want to put my finger on the Alt or Option key because it will create an inverted mask. There you go, so I've removed part of that new layer. So if I just Alt or Option, click on the eyeball, that is now what we've got. Basically I've removed half of the window by using a mask. As I have got a mask applied, I'm going to make sure the mask is active, click on "B" for brush, make sure it's black and I am going to paint up here just to blend that in a bit more. I want to take the flow down a bit lower, round about 20, and I can paint in those areas because they were okay. I can blend in a little bit more and make it look a bit more convincing. That looks a bit better, doesn't it? Blended in, in fact I can take all of that top area and just blend that in. So that is that side of the window done, so let's rename that layer then. The next thing to do then is to do this quadrant here, this little quarter piece. So select your marquee tool, rectangular marquee, make sure we're on the duplicate background layer, and then I am going to select this quarter here. Now maybe I've selected a bit too much there, it's probably round about there. Right click and further that, I'm going to further that by three pixels. Then Command or Control J as you know will duplicate that little section, I'm going to move it up here. Then I'm going to press "Command" or "Control T", which is the transform tools, right click and I'm just going to flip that horizontally, press "Return" to accept that, and then move it down into position and let's see what that looks like. It doesn't look too bad. That's not too bad at all. Possibly, let's add a mask, I'm going to add a mask to that. Let's call this quadrant by the way, lets call it a quarter so we know where it is. Now with the mask selected, I'm going to select a black brush. Let's take the flow down to about 10 percent because I just want to try to blend this in a little bit better, and just blend that in. That doesn't look too bad. It's a little bit too dark here, but I think we'd get away with that. The other option there would be to try and clone some of this with the stamp tool and I think that's just going to be a bit too difficult. I would be happy with that if I zoom out. There you go, it looks really convincing. We've got three layers then. The first one we applied was this one here, we had the bottom first, and we did the window and then we did this little quarter. That looks fab. As you can see, you have to use your imagination. Quite often I'm presented with a situation like this and I'll have to rebuild parts of a building, add a window. You might take somebody out of your photograph and then behind them is some structure, but you can copy part of that structure and pull it over where the person was. But I think in this example, it's been a good example to show you how it all works basically and how we fool people, whether it's right or wrong to do that, I don't know. But in this case, I love the composition. Now, we have the lady sort of contemplating life, she's an elderly lady. I love this shadowy figure here of somebody about to get off the bus basically, I love that. With that guy there, you could look at that and say, well, he is part of that scene, but just removing him puts all the attention on this woman who's contemplating life. That's my view anyway. But the main thing is, I've taught you how to rebuild an image. Have a go of all the examples I've shown you. All the project files are there, have a go, have a bit of fun, and I'll see you in the next module. 14. Module 13 Sky Replacement: In this module, we're going to take a look at sky replacement. I'm going to use the sky replacement feature within Photoshop. I'm also going to show you how you can change the sky using brushes. Now as always, you can download the project files and join in. Also, there's some actors that you can download, but more about that later. Let's begin with this photograph then. It's Module 13, sky replacement 001. This photograph was captured by Jared Vice. Thanks very much Jared it's a great photograph. To add the sky, it really is simple. Just navigate up to the edit menu and simply choose Sky Replacement, there you go there is a new sky. If I start here, then in this little window, this thumbnail window, I expand that window. You can see I've got three groups of skies, blue skies, spectacular, and sunsets. Also, you can add your own skies, which we'll do shortly. But for now, let's choose spectacular, for instance. Just simply choose a thumbnail. There you go, that is absolutely fabulous, isn't it? Click out of there. We have a selection of tools here on the left. We can zoom in. We can move the sky, and we can also paint in more or less sky. Then we have the shift edge and the fade edge. Now you can play around with these and let's see what happens. There you go. We're revealing more of the original sky. I'm just going to undo that. We can fade the edge. It's a matter of playing around with that. If I fade the edge, more of the background is coming in, isn't it? It's a matter of playing around those sliders is because every photograph is different. There could be buildings here, for instance. Of course, Photoshop has created a mask. That's how it's working. Using these sliders, you can adjust that. Then we have brightness, which of course is self-explanatory, isn't it? You can brighten the sky or you can darken the sky. Then we have temperature. We can cool the sky, go into the left, or we can warm the sky, go into the right. Scale is great. We are currently at 100, but I can make that bigger. Because Photoshop's created a mask, it will expand and obviously won't bleed into our image. This is where we can use the Move tool and we can position that sky where we want it to be. That's fantastic, isn't it? We can flip the sky. Maybe have the clouds go in the other way. It's already simple, isn't it? Then down here we have multiply or screen. I would suggest you always leave it on multiply. Now the lightning adjustment and the color adjustments. What has happened in there is to make things look more realistic. Photoshop is analyzing the color of this sky and is putting some color into the main image. You can switch that off. That was Jared's original photograph. As I say, just move in that slider across, then some of the colors and the tones from the sky are actually being placed onto the original image and that will make it look more realistic. Then finally, we have outputs and you can choose new layers or duplicate layer. I always choose new layers. If I just click on "Okay", you'll see what happens. I've got a new group containing the layers that actually make up the sky replacement. If I alt or option-click on the sky mask, you'll see that is the mask that was created to pop the sky. As you know, white reveals so, the sky is living in that white area though. You have the opportunity to paint on the mask, which is really cool as well isn't it?. I'm going just delete that group and we'll start again because I want to show you how you add your own clouds in. You're not restricted to the clouds and the skies that are included in the Photoshop package. You can actually add your own skies. Let's do that next. I'm going to navigate up to the Edit drop-down and select "Sky Replacement" again. Then I'm going to expand the thumbnail box. Down at the bottom here, we've got the option to add a new folder. I'm going to do that. I'm going to rename that. Then I'm going to click on this plus icon here, imports guys from images. Click on there, and then just navigate to the PPCo Clouds folder. And then shift-click to select all those different skies and clouds. Then click on "Open". They'll be imported into the sky replacements box. Then I'm going to shift-click to select them all and pop them into, the my skies folder. I now have that new collection of skies in here. These skies that I've found on the Internet and you can do that. You can just simply click on them to add them it's fab, isn't it? That's the one I'm going to use. I'm going to click out of there and then I'm going to use the move tool, and I'm just going to drag that down. Now you can see you've got to be careful because it's been resized specifically for this image so you have to be careful. You're not including this straight line here, it sorts of extends of the actual image. I want to just make that a little bit bigger. To do that, I'm just going to scale it up slightly, something around about there. Then I'm just going to lift it up. That looks very good, doesn't it? Play around with those new skies that we've imported. But this is the one I think I like. I'm going to choose that one as a say. Do I need to flip it? You can experiment with all that. I don't need to do any of that. The temperature and the brightness, I'm happy with, the fade edge let's just have a little look. Now I like it where it is. The shift edge let's have a look. Maybe shift the edge a little bit just to bring in this detail over here. Color adjustments is fine. All of that, I'm happy with it. I would just simply then select "Output to new layers". Click on "Okay". There you go. I've got a new group with that new sky in. I'm going to do a few more things to this image just to make it look a bit more realistic. The first thing we're going to do is I'm going to apply a lookup table. Make sure you've got the sky replacement group selected. I'm going to click on the lookup table icon, adjustment layer. I'm going to choose the crisp warm look, which is that one. Now it's a bit strong. I'm going to back it off to about maybe 75, something like that. Then I think I'll apply a curves layer. Now, this is all to taste. You don't have to do this, but I'm going to lift up the blacks and drop the highlights a bit and just add in a little S curve, something like that. We'll just turn off those two layers that I've just added. I've just added a bit of warmth and I've just adjusted the contrast. Then finally, I would add some film grain. Now to do that, I'm going to create a stamp layer. That's Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control, and then the letter E. I've created this stamp layer, right-click, and then just convert it to a smart object. Then from the filter section, select "Camera Raw Filter" popped down to effects, and I'm going to put about 40. Let's try something like that. It would just zoom in. You can see the grain that I've applied. Now that's to taste. I like to put grain in. You may not, but I think that looks really good. Click on "Okay", and that image is complete. Let's look at the original image then without the sky replacements. There was additional steps that I made. It looked like that. Now it's a great photograph. Once you've added the sky and there's adjustments, it looks like that and it looks wonderful, doesn't it? All very easy to do. So have a go with that one. Of course, you don't have to put in the same sky that I decided to use. Choose another one and you don't have to put those additional steps on either, but I think it helped in it to make that image look rarely sorts of punchy and stopped to looking too digital as well. Let's move on to the next image then, which is this one here. Module 13, Sky Replacements 002.jpeg. Now I captured this in Liverpool summer, and it's a skater along the Liverpool Waterfront. Let's do the same thing as what we did before then. Added Sky Replacement and pops the Window and it will analyze, pop the sky and we can decide which sky to use. Let's try this one. That looks fantastic, doesn't it? I'm going to pop that one in. Do I need to do anything to it? Just have a look at what it's done. Do I need to perhaps shift the edge or fade the edge? In this case, and in most cases it always seems to do a great job. If you look here as well, the way it's masked all these areas to include sky inside this light fitting here. It's pretty cool where it is, isn't it? Maybe look at the color adjustments and perhaps put some more color in. Now it looks rather good, doesn't it? Something like that. I'll put new layers. Click on "Okay". That's how quick it can be. Now, I think that's a little bit too strong. I can back that off with the opacity to make sure the layer is selected. I'm just going to drop that down to maybe something like 75 percent. Maybe a little bit more yet roundabout there, 79 percent. That looks fantastic. Do I need to do any more to that image? Now, this way you can play around and have a little go. Let's pop in one of these filters here. I'm going to put in a new photo filter adjustment layer. I'm going to click on that. Then I can choose which particular filter I'd like to use. Maybe, let's put a red one and then deep red. Now it's a bit strong. We can play it with the density. But I'm going to leave that and pop down to the opacity. Make sure that photo filter layer is still active and I want to drop there to maybe about 40 percent, 35 percent works great. Again, before and after then, this is the original image and this is with the sky replacements and that photo filter added. Again, all optional, perhaps didn't need to add that photo filter. Because the sky is red and orange, that photo filter has applied some red and orange into the pavement. That looks fab, doesn't it? Again, have a go with this image but by all means, pop in a different sky. Now in both the two examples I've showed you, I've used my own clouds and sky. Of course, you don't have to do that. Play around with the skies and clouds that Photoshop supply you with by all means, you've got loads of choice. But I just thought it was nice to show you that you're not limited to the skies and clouds that come bundled with Photoshop and you can certainly add your own. Let's move on to the next one, which is this image here that I captured at night in Liverpool. I'm going to show you how I can add some sky detail by using a brush. It's a special brush and all will be revealed. How would we add sky detail with a brush? Well, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this icon here, the brush icon, and this box will appear. Now, if you haven't got the brush icon docked here at the side, you can always drop down the menu and just click on here, "Brushes". With this selected, I've got quite a lot of brushes that I have downloaded or created as I've moved along my Photoshop journey. But what we're going to do is impose some brushes. The way to do that is just to click on this little drop-down menu in the top right-hand corner. If I click on that, and all I need to do is select "Import Brushes" and then navigate to where the brushes are. What you're looking for is PPCo, Clouds, Stars, and Lightning.abr. Abr is just a file extension, adobe brushes. Click on that and then select "Open." If I move down to the bottom of this menu, I can see those bushes have been imported, and there they are. PPCo, Clouds, and Stars and they're all in this little menu here. Let's just choose the first one. Once I choose that, it's now on the end of my brush. Look that. I just dab that, I've put a cloud in the sky. It's amazing, isn't it? Now I don't want that. I'm going to undo it. Command or Control Z. The one I want to use is Clouds and Stars 001. When you click on that and then come up here, and I'm going to place it roughly around about here. I want to do, it will look amazing, trust me. I'm just going to click here. How good does that look? It looks fantastic, doesn't it? Now I've made a mistake. You might make this mistake. I'm going to undo that. Have a think, what mistake did I make? This new sky area is on the background layer and it should be on a new layer, so I'm going to undo that. The first thing you need to do then is navigate to the bottom of the Layers palette and click on the Add New Layer icon. I've got a new blank layer and I can just rename that. Now I can go back to the brushes, make sure I've got the PPCo clouds, and stars selected and now I can do it. There we go, and it's now on its own layer and that's what we need. I am now going to duplicate that layer, so Command or Control J. I've now got a copy of that, I'm going to move the copy below sky layer and I'm going to rename this. This is going to be the reflection of the clouds. I'm going to change my tool to the move tool and I'm going to drag this down. If I hold the Shift key, it will move completely vertically in a straight line, and that's what I want. I'm going to put it there, then I'm going to press Command or Control T and then click inside the box and I going to flip that vertically so it is a proper true reflection. Now to let a bit too strong, I'm going to change the blend mode to, let's try maybe soft light and soft light works and that looks good, doesn't it? No. Do I need to move it down a little bit, perhaps here. That looks fantastic, doesn't it? Now, of course, because those two sky layers are on their own individual layers, I can always change the opacity. I think I will do in the main clouds in the sky, I think I may drop that down. Let's just have a look, possibly too bold, let's try 60 percent. Yes, it's somewhere around about 65 I think. The reflection, do I need to take that down? Maybe just a touch, then all just helps to make it look a bit more realistic. So B for brush, click on the bush box and we're going to put something else in. Will try a lightening bolt. Now again, I was about to make the same mistake there and you need to create a new empty layer first. Let's call this lightning and then select this one here, PPCo lightning bolt to blue warm and it's now on the end of my mouse. Now, another thing you can do is obviously change the size because it is a brush, so I use my square bracket keys, I can make it bigger or smaller. Don't forget you can do that as well. Where will I put the lightning bolt, I should put it around about there. Let's leave it round about there because I can always move it. Then I'm going to drop the opacity for the lightning bolt too, and I might drop that by quite a bit I think. Let's try something like 30, I think around about 45. I'm going to switch to my move tool because of course, I can move that wherever wanted to be. Just play around until you think it looks realistic. I can move that up a little bit maybe with the arrow keys, something like that looks quite good, does it? Now that needs a reflection too. I want to make sure the layer is selected still, Command or Control J, drag that layer below, rename it, let's call it reflect. Then use the Move tool, drag that down, and of course we need to do the same thing, Command or Control T, click inside the box and then just flip that vertically and hit return. We now have that reflection there and we need to change the blend mode to soft light. There you go. That looks pretty cool, doesn't it? It's optional with the lightning bolt, maybe it looks better without, but I thought I'd show you just for a bit font. Next thing to do then is maybe to apply some look over the top. I'm going to go for a lookup table, so click on the little adjustment layer icon for lookup table, and I'm going to choose Crisp_Winter.look. Now that's a bit too strong, so I'm going to dial up back by quite some amount, about 20 percent would do. Then over the top of that, I think I'll put another lookup table. Click on the icon and I'm going to select a Fuji, let's see which one we're going to use. Let's try this one, it's much too strong, let's back that after 20 percent as well, something like that. Now these two adjustments, I'm going to group them together and call that adjustments. Then the lightning bolts and the reflection group them together, and finally the sky. Now I've done that because it keeps things really neat. I'm just going to take the lightning bolts below the sky layer because that's where it should be. Let's look at the before and after then with this shot, it came in and it looked like this. Now it's a great photograph. I'm a bit biased because I took the photograph, but I think it looks great anyway. But just to add that new sky and the lightning bolt look fantastic. Now as I say, you can always remove that lightning bolt and in this case, I don't really like it, but it's just to show you how it all works. That is three images where we've added a sky, we've used the sky replacement feature in Photoshop, and we've also used the brushes as well. So you can download all the project files, you can download the new clouds and pop them into the sky adjustment box and you can also download the brushes as well. Just be aware that you can go online at any time and get new brushes. Very easy to import and there are thousands of brushes that you can choose. Also, obviously, if you've find an image online and you like the cloud structure or the sky, you can simply download that too and then include that in your image. Is [inaudible], of course, it's [inaudible], but we don't mind doing it because if we can create an image that looks as good as this, we don't care, do we? Have a go, have some fun and I'll see you in the next module. 15. Module 14 The Blur Tool: In this module, I'm going to introduce you to the blur tool and the amazing effects that you can create just by blurring parts of your image. Now as always you can download the project files and join in. Let's start with this simple image. Now I've gone ahead and I've converted the background layer to a smart object. Now I would always recommend you do that because when you apply a filter, you can always go back and readjust your adjustments because it's non-destructive. With that said, I want to pop up to the drop-down filter menu at the top, and I'm going to select the blur section, move across and select Gaussian Blair. When I click on that, and behold, I've got a blurred layer, and I can adjust the intensity of that blur with the radius slider. I'm going to cancel out because we don't really want to blur the background. Now let's introduce another object, and it's this scooter. It's a cartoon of these people on a scooter. I want to make it look like they are moving really fast, and this is where we can use another blur tool. Again, with the background layer selected, I'm going to drop down the filter menu. This time I'm going to choose Motion Blur, and straightaway, we've got the effect of a moving background. Now of course that's too strong, so I'm going to back that off to around about 100 should do it, and that looks really good to snip. I'll click on, "Ok", and it gives the illusion by his movement. Now of course it doesn't look real. It is a cartoon to be fair, but it doesn't look real, so we can add some shadow, and to do that, below the scooter layer, I'm going to create a new empty layer, B, for brush. Make sure I've got black selected and a flow of 10 percent, and I can just paint in some shadows. Now, I'll never make this lock real because it's a cartoon, however next example, I'll show you, we may have to apply a shout out to make it look more realistic, so there you go. Now, it still doesn't look real because the wheels aren't spinning round. Now as to cartoon, I can't really spin those wheels round, so I want to introduce another object, and it's this wheel here. I'm going to select the wheel layer and then convert that to a smart object, now I've already gone ahead and done that. Up to the filter menu and this time I'm going to go to the Blur gallery and I'm going to choose Spin Blur, and I can place the spin in the center. It's just a circle, and I'm just going to place it in the center. We have two wheels, If you'd like to circles an inner one and an outer one. If I drag that you can see that the extent of the blur is only up to this first circle and then it gradually tapes off. Now, I don't want [inaudible] want the whole wheel to be blurred, so I'm going to drag that up there and now got spinning wheel, and I can increase the intensity by using the blur angle, and I'm going to take that up to around about 50. Should do it, and then just click appear on "OK", and I've now got spinning wheel. That's a few types of blur I've showed you there. I've showed you the motion blur and the spin blur. Let's move on to something a bit more realistic then let's move on to this image here and as always, you can download this image and join in. Now using the two techniques that I've just introduced you to, we're going to make this sports car appear to be moving and it will eventually look like this. To do that then, we need to make a selection of the car. I've already gone ahead and done that and I use the pen tool to make a selection. By all means you can practice with the pen tool and have a go yourself or you can use the file that I will supply you with. It's entirely up to you. Let's get rid of this speed and posh group. We don't need that now, and then I'm going to duplicate the background layer as always. Here I have created the cost out of the car. We've got to only switch that layer off, and what we need to do now is on the background layer, we need to remove the car, so we need to fill the area where the car is with the background and the easy way to do that is on the car layer. I'm just going to press "Command" or "Control", and this little icon will appear over the thumbnail, which indicates I'm about to create a selection. I'm going click on that and behold, we have the selection. The next thing to do then is to drop-down menu to top select, and then we're going to modify that selection and we're going to expand it. I'm going to expand it by 10 pixels, and click on, "Ok". Then we're going to move up to the Edit drop-down and select Content-Aware Fill, and then take a look on this side, we can review how well it looks. Now, bend among the car is going to be placed over here. I think it's going to be okay, It looks a mess but don't worry about it. Then just click on "OK", and then Command or Control to deselect. Then I'm going to right-click on the layer and convert it to a smart object. Then I'm going to pop up to the top, to the filter section and across the blur section and I'm going to select Motion Blur, and then we're going to change the distance. Now, I think something around about 750 may be, and that looks great, so I'm going to accept that. Now let's switch the car on and see what that looks like. It looks pretty good, It looks pretty convincing. The next thing to do then is to make the wheel spin, so I'm going to select the car layer. Now I've gone ahead already and converted that to a smart object. All I need to do, is drop down the filter menu again, and this time go to the blur gallery and choose spin blur, and just like we did previously, just drag the circle, drag the outer circle, and then maybe this circle as well. Then you can play around them with the blur angle. I'm going to choose around about 50 again. Something right about there, and then just click on "OK", and there you have it convincing, isn`t it?. Let's have a look at the before and after then. This was the before and this is the after, so simple isn`t? and so effective. Let's move on to the next one then, which is this one. Now as always, you can download this project file to and follow along. What we want to do with this image then is to blur the background. Now to do that, we need to extract the man from the photograph. Now I've gone ahead again and created a path around the guy. Again, you can practice with the pen tool or just simply use the file that I will supply you with. Back to the layers then. As always, duplicate the background layer to start off with and let's make that selection of the guy then, when you right-click on the path, make selection, and further buy it one pixel. Back to the layers "Command" or "Control" J will copy that. Now I have the man on a separate layer, and I'm just going to rename that. I want to switch that layer off, and we need to now fill in the area where the guy is occupying with the background, and to do that, just like we did in the last example, command or control click on this layer that contains the man and [inaudible] icon will appear and I can just make that selection or I could've have done it from the past to again, I guess. Now switching to the background copy layer, I'm just going to jump up to the top and modify the selection. I'm going to expand it by five pixels in this case, and then jump on up to the Edit menu. I'm going to select "Content-Aware Fill". He's gone. Just click on "OK", and then Command or Control D to deselect. Then we can re-introduce Sandman back into the shot. Now this background copy layer, I'm going to right-click on it and convert it to a smart object. Then pop up to the filter drop-down and goes to the blur gallery and the one we want to use as tilt-shift, and a new interface will appear. Now, I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. We have a circle in the center, and then we have the first two lines. Now, between these first two lines indicates where there's absolutely no effect happened. There's no blur effect there. Then gradually it will get stronger and stronger. We can adjust these lines to suit. Now, I only want the background blurred or I don't the foreground blurred. What I can do is I can pull this down, and this particular line here, I'm going to take that all the way to the bottom because I don't want any blur. The blur would be happening here off-screen. We're not going to see it. That's pretty cool. I'm going to drag this down to roughly around about here. Then we can play around with this line here. What I'm looking at all the time is how much blur is happening. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. Across here, I can change the strength of the blur. I'm going to drop to about 56. The warm conscious of is we have a blur starting from the top. I want the graduation from blur to what is in-focus to be quite gradual. This is where you can play around with this Snyder and this one also, and now looks pretty cool. Now, you can also press Command or Control H, and it will hide those lines and it will give you a better idea of if it's looking good enough and I think that looks fine. I'm going to pop up to the top and click on "OK". That looks marvelous to snap. Now, we could leave it as it is. Or as always, I like to add more things, so I'm going to do that. I want to apply a lot and I'm going to do this really quickly. Crisp_warm_ look, that's a bit strong. When a dialog back to about 40 percent, then I'm going to add a selective color adjustment layer. This is where you can just play around with the colors. I want to make it look like it's a nice source of awesome style feel to it. Now, take a look at the image, I can see that selective color adjustment has been applied to the guy walk in, and I don't really want that. I'm going to go down to the layer that contains the man and Command or Control click just to make that selection. Then I'm going to click on the mask of the selective color and just hit Shift backspace and fill up with the foreground color, or black has to be black. That then is then removed from that selective color. If I just Alt or Option click, you can see that the mask, Command or Control D to deselect. Then they're going to apply a curves adjustment layer. I'm going to crush the blacks a bit, bring down some of the highlights. Maybe just put a bit of contrast and perhaps this is all to taste. You don't have to do this of course. But something like that would be good. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Then I'm going to create a stamp layer. So Shift Alt or Option, Command or Control, and then the letter E, give me a stamp layer. Right-click on that, convert that to a smart object. Then I'm going to pop up here and select Camera Raw Filter. I'll show you the reason why now when I Zoom in. You can see that the blurred area that we created with the tilt- shift blur, it's really smooth as new. We don't want it to be that smooth that's on realistic. I'm going to add some grain, and you can go crazy with grade, come on around about 30 or think something like that we'll do. Then click on "OK". Then I'm just going to close that. That's the finished image. Now I could add more to it as you know, I'm going to leave it as that. Let's look at how it started off then. It started off looking like this. It's a great photograph. There's no doubt. But with the power of Photoshop and the tilt-shift filter, it looks like that. It's just got a bit more atmosphere as new bit more energy, and he is now walking into the wilderness and create an app layer effect has helped us to create that illusion. Moving on, we're going to attack this one. This one is a little bit more difficult. We're going to make this car appear that's moving fast and it will look like this. That looks amazing, doesn't it? This one is a bit tricky, so strap yourself in because we're going for a bumpy ride. Let's make a start on this one then. Let me just delete this group then. What we need to do is make a selection of the car, so I've already gone ahead and done that with the Path tool, and bought by all means, you can use the Path tool to create your own selection or just simply use Y supply you with entirely up to you. I'm going to right-click there and make a selection feather it by one pixel. Back to my layers palette, and I'm just going to click on Command or Control J. I've now got the car on its own layer. On the background layer, Command or Control J, it's just to make a copy of the background. Then I need to fill in where the car is, I need to fill it in with the background, so to do that, I'm going to make a selection of the car. Now again, Command or Control, click on the little thumbnail for car will give me that selection. Then I need to pop up to the select drop-down and modify the selection. I'm going to expand it, and in this case by 10 pixels, click on "OK". Then a need to pop up here, track down the Edit menu and select Content Aware Fill. It should look really messy as it is if the car has gone on fire and disappeared. But that's okay because remember the car is going to be placed on top of that, so that looks fine. Click on "OK" to accept that. Then I'm going to pop up to the top drop-down the filter section. We're going to go to the blur gallery and I'm going to select Path Blur. A new interface will appear. Now wants it settled down, because it will take awhile, when it first opens, I like to switch off the preview. Now, one of the reasons to do that is because it takes such a long time to render, it can slow you down. You make have this as well. I'm just going to show you what we do with that. We need to drag these points. What we're trying to do is we're going to create a bit of movement. We want more movement at the front than we do at the back. The ways to achieve that is by adding these lines. I want to add them like so about five and I think. Just from the back of the car, they're at sea and we'll get one more and I think, and again, it varies from photograph to photograph, but that's the thing I want to do. Now, I can apply a speed to the rear of the line and to the front of the line and that's what I'm going to do. Click on the little circle at the front and the end point speed, I'm going to type in 400. Then click on the next one and do the same. All of these endpoint speeds will be on 400. Speed at the rear needs to be on zero, so I'm just going to click on all of these circles and put the speed to zero. Just to recap then, the speed at the front, all these little circles or clicked on them. I jumped to this endpoint speed and I, typed in 400, and then speed at the back. All of these circles here, I've clicked on them and I've typed in zero. Nothing's happened because I've got the preview switched off. Let's see what happens then when I switch the preview on. Using Command or Control H, I can turn off the guidelines and we can take a look at the results and it's not too bad. But of course we can now start to change the speed, the overall speed. Let's take it up to about 200. That's looking pretty good. You may have to wait some time for the image to render. I waited about two minutes then I think felt like much longer. Anytime you make an adjustment to the speed, as I say, the render time, when you think about it is doing a lot of processing. But I'm going to click on Okay for now because I can always come back and change that speed, but for now it looks okay. I'm going to click on Okay at the top and we've got that movements. Now it doesn't look real because the car looks like it's floating. Over in the layer's palette, I'm going to create a new empty layer. I want to select the brush. I want to make sure it's on black and the flow is on 10 percent. I'm just going to paint in some darkness just to make it look a bit more realistic. That looks better already. Maybe a bit up the side. Make the brush a bit smaller and just paint this area here. All just starts to the illusion, really. Otherwise, we'll have a floating car. Though something like that looks fine. Now the next thing we need to do is to spin the wheels. I'm going to select the car layer. Now, I should have named these layers rarely. Let's do that now. Select the car layer and right-click and convert to smart object. Then when I pop up to the filter menu at the top, and this time we're going to go to the Blur Gallery and choose Spin Blur. The interface will open up and we have our circle in the center. Let's drag the circle then to the wheel. One of the things we can do is turn off the preview because that will really speed things up. I'm going to turn the preview off and then I'll probably speed the video slightly because it does take a while to match the shape perfectly to what you want. I'll speed this part up. I think I've got the shape more or less right and I'm going to switch the preview on just to check what it looks like. I have the blur angle is set to 20. That looks reasonably okay. I'm going to create another shape at the back for the back wheel. Now, you can't see much of the back wheel, so it's not too much of a problem. But I'm going to just do the same thing here. If I just click, it will add a circle and I can do the same thing. Again, I'm going to turn the preview off and I'll speed the video up because as I say, it just takes time to get it right. Switch the preview back on. I can have a look at the results. Obviously, we don't have to remove the unwanted spin using the mask. Let's click on Okay, and go back to our main image. Zoom out and let's take a look at what it looks like. So far, so good. All smart filters come complete with a mask. I'm going to click on the mask and we can start to paint away these unwanted areas. To do that, I need to select a brush. B for brush and a need a black color because I'm going to be painting on a white mask. Let's take the flow down to, say, 50 percent. Then I can start painting in parts of the car. Now I'm just going to change the hardness to about 50 percent as well. I'm just painting away just to reveal. That looks quite good. I think there's some at the back as well, so I'll just do that. Now, you should be ready super accurate and zoom in. If it did zoom in, let's see if I've missed any. I've probably missed a bit there. Now, don't forget, you can switch between black and white brushes to add or subtract. You can always do that. Now I'm just going to click on this image here. The background layer because I can get an idea if I'm getting this right. Black brush again, because I think this's a bit more bumper. I need to include, there you go. I can just pop that back in. I say take your time. Now, here, I'm not too happy with that, so I'm just going to soften that area there. That's the great thing about masks because they're non-destructive. Let's zoom up then and have a look at that. That looks really good. I'm happy with that. Now to make it look even more realistic, I think if part of the back of the car was also blurred, add a bit of movement in it that could look really good too. What we're going to do is click on the background layer, and then I'm going to select my path tool because I want to make another selection. I'm going to feather that by one pixel, back to my layers, then I'm going to click on Command or Control J. That'll create another layer with the car on. I'm going to drag that to the top. I'm just going to Alt or Option-click just so that is visible and then I'm going to create a mask. I'm going to get a black brush. I'm going to take the flow right up to a 100 and make the brush a lot bigger because I just want to remove that. I only need the back of the car to be seen. We just need the back of the car, I don't need the aerial either. Let's just take this part of the car. Alt or Option-click on the eyeball, all the layers will come back on. Then I'm going to pop up to the filter menu and go to the Blur Gallery and select Path Blur again. That looks good. Maybe it's a little bit too much, a little bit too strong maybe. We can always take the speed down. A touch maybe to about 26. That looks really good. I'll click on Okay. Also, because we've got a mask selected, I can paint some of that effect out. Now to do that though, I'm going to drop the flow down to about say 20 percent. With a black brush with the mask selected, I can just paint out bits of that. It literally is just the back of the car. Actually, I'm going to take the flow down to about 10 percent. The softness or hardness, we're going to make it soft. Just dab some of that out, so it's only subtle. I don't think it works on the aerial, you see. It's just there. That looks good. I already like that. Now after doing all that, I will just apply some adjustments over the top. I'm going to create a stamp layer. To do that as you know, it's Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control E. We've now got a stamp layer. I'm going to convert that to a smart object. As always, I'm going to put a tiny bit of grain into the shadow as well. I just zoom in a little bit. Let's pop some grain in round about 30. Something like that. Click on Okay. Then I'm going to put curves adjustment layer in and I'm just going to lift the highlights a bit. Maybe just drop the shadow, a touch. I'm just adding in a little bit contrast. Then I'm going to put an adjustment layer in a look-up table. The one I'm going to go for is the Fuji. Let's see. This is Fuji F125. That's a little bit too strong. It looks nice though. I'll back that off to about, say, 50 percent, maybe a bit less. Let's try about 40 percent. That looks really good. Then I can add some hue saturation. I'm going to use the little finger icon and click on this green area here. That way, I can just adjust that green to taste. That's quite good, round about there maybe. I think we're a complete army. I think we've done it. I think that looks fantastic. Let's go full screen. I'll just zoom in a bit, so it fills the screen. That looks fairly convincing. Let's come on to that and zoom back out and just look at the before and after. We started with this image here. It's a really nice photograph, but as I say, using the path blur, the spin blur, and adding a few effects, it looks like that. It's a completely different photograph. Now I'm not going to lie, It's difficult to do. A lot of it is down to process and power of your computer because using the path blur does eat up a lot of processing power, so remember to switch the preview off when you're doing it. But have a play around, try different speeds and just have a bit of fun. I'll see you in the next module. 16. Module 15 Cropping and Resizing: In this module we're going to take a look at cropping and resizing. Why would we crop or resize an image? There are a number reasons. One could be composition. We may crop a photograph to improve the composition. Another one might be lens choice. Perhaps you used a wide-angle lens, but you want to get closer into the action. The third one may be specific requirements. You may want to resize an image to fit into parts of a website. You may want to resize an image to pop into a picture frame. We're going to look at all those things, and as always, you can download the sample photographs and join in. Let's start with this image them. To access the, crop tool, the shortcut key is C, and it's this icon here on the tool strip. As always, when you select a tool, you can change its parameters on the tool strip just above. Currently I can see the crop tool is set to original ratio. We'll take a look at different ratios as we move along. What the crop tool gives us is a set of crop marks around the image. If I drag that corner, for instance, I can resize. You can see the image is being constrained to the original proportions because it's set to original ratio. I can also drag from these points in the center, and if I put my finger on the Alt or Option key, I can resize, and the crop box will stay in the center. Let's just leave it there for a second. Currently, at the moment, I would be cropping the image to this size. The grayed-out area surrounding the crop box are the pixels or parts of the photograph that would be cropped out of the image. Let's return to the original ratio, so just command or Control Z. Dropping down this menu, you can see that we have a choice of different ratios. We can type in our own selected width, height, and resolution. We can use these preset sizes here. We can create our own presets, and you can see here I've created one called, "Resized for Facebook." Let's select a ratio. I Want to select 4:5. Now, Photoshop has given me a portrait orientation. In our premises box here, I can switch the orientation. It's currently a 4:5, and using these little arrows, I can swap those numbers around, and that will give me a landscape orientation. If click and drag, I can move the image inside that crop box and place it where I need it to be, and of course, I can pull the crop marks to create a new composition. Let's say I was happy with the way that looks. Pop and backup to the parameters strip, we have more options. Now I'm going to skip a few and go straight to this one here. We have a choice of deleting the crop pixels or keeping the crop pixels. Now the crop pixels are just the area surrounding the crop box. The rest of the photograph in other words. In this case, I'm going to on check that box, and keep the crop pixels. Then pop across to here, and this little check box here commits the crop. I'm just going to click on there. With the crop made, I could carry on editing the photograph. In this case I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to pop in a fluffy white Cloud. I don't want a fluffy white clouds rarely purchase to show you how it works. I'm going to pop that Cloud into that, and then reviewing the image. I might decide it would look better with two cranes rather than one. I can press "C" for crop, and I can drag the crop mark, and I can reintroduce the second crane because that information that was surrounding the crop box when I made the crop hasn't been deleted. I can recrop, commit the crop with the little check box here. I've still got the Cloud, and I don't want the Cloud, but just to show you how that works. Let me step backwards and do the same thing, but this time I will use the, "Delete Cropped Pixels" option. I want a pop up here. This is the history palettes, and I'm going to click on the "Thumbnail", and everything will be returned to the way it was. Let's do the same thing then. C for crop, click on the "Image". Let's drag this point up here. Let's get it similar to what I did before, something like that will do. But in this case, I'm going to select Delete cropped pixels, and then commit the crop. Let's create a layer. Let's do the same thing. Let's put a fluffy little white Cloud in. Again, I don't want the Cloud but its a chance to show you how it works. Put the clouds up there to get rid of that. The same thing, I would like another red crane on this side. Let's press "C" for crop, drag the crop mark, and there's no information there at all. That's because we deleted that information by selecting the, "Delete Cropped Pixels" option. The moral of the story is, you have to be certain when you commit the crop, if you're going to use the "Delete Cropped Pixels" option, you have to be certain that that is the final way that you want that image to look. If not, then leave that box unchecked. You can always go back, and recrop your photograph. Both work fantastic, and you've got both options. Let's jump up to the History Palettes. Click on the "Thumbnail", and return everything to the way it was. Let's have a look at some more options that we have then. In our parameter tools at the top, we have this one here, "Content Aware." I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to change the ratio this time, I'm going to select the word, "Ratio." In this box here, you can clear these numbers just by pressing the "Clear button", which is what I'm going do. That means now I can freely crop to any size. I'll show you how that works. I can crop anyway I want. It's not constrained to any ratio or any proportions. Imagine, I would like the image. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. If I wanted more step detail to the right and a bit more Cloud, so I can drag this over here, and I can drag upwards. Now of course, there's no information here because the photograph actually ended obviously here. This white space is now going to be filled by Photoshop with pixels and information that it can find in the original photograph. I say we have to make sure we have this "Content Aware" box checked. It doesn't really matter whether you have this box checked or not. In this case, I'll just uncheck but it doesn't make any difference. Then here I'm going to commit the crop, and my Photoshop will do as I say with a fill in this transparent area with new information. Let's see how well it does. It's having to think about it and now it's filling in the information. There you go. Does it do a good job? It's not bad, the sky looks okay. The steps not so. But you know that if I press S for stamp and I make that a little bit bigger, I can easily go in and fix those steps. It's a lot quicker than trying to do it from scratch. Come across, fix the steps I'll take a bit more time doing it obviously. The crane, there's a bit of detail missing here. Again, I could just use the, "Stamp Tool" just to fix that area there. There you go. It missed the top of the crane as well as net, so I could easily do that as well. All the tools that I've introduced you to those file, they get used time and time again. Although I've used the, "Content Aware Crop" option, I still jump to the Stamp Tool just to add some more detail. Now sometimes using the "Content Aware" option in the "Crop Tool" creates an absolutely fantastic results sometimes it doesn't. In this case, it wasn't too bad, but you can see how easily I could fix that. What other features do we have in the parameter strip then? Return to the Crop Tool, and I'm going to click on the image. We can see we've got the rule of thirds grid overlaid on top of the image. We can change that. We can have a general grid, or we can have the goals and spiral, for instance, but that may help you to create a better composition. I always leave mine set on rule of thirds. That's pretty cool, isn't it? This little spirit level here, this straightened option, we'll use that on another image coming up shortly. Let's switch to another image then, and I'll show you some more options. We're going to look at this image here. It's an image I captured in Liverpool. I had to be very quick with the camera, I do like taking street photographs as you know. It was this lady here, that is the interesting parts of the photograph. I need to crop and make a selection here. Let me show you what I'm going to do. Jump into this image here. I have an IKEA frame and I want to pop that photograph of the lady with the ice cream. I want to pop it inside the frame. I want to print on a piece of A4 paper. A piece of A4 paper is 297 millimeter by 210. This is where I have to apologize to people for using the imperial system. But I will show you that everything that day was identical. It's just the units that changed, so don't worry about that. What I've done is I've measured the aperture size, in other words the open and in the mount that comes with the frame. I've deducted 10 millimeter all around because I like some white space around my print. The size that I got was 180 by 270. The photograph needs to be that size. Jumping back to the image, I can now crop that image to that exact size, 180 by 270. Selecting the crop tool I'm going to change to width, height, and resolution. Then I type in the size and it was 180 millimeters by 270, and 300 is the industry standard for the amount of pixels. As you know, I can drag that and get my composition to exactly what I want it to be. Every time I change this crop box size, the eventual image will be 180 by 270. It's quite clever the way I does it. Let's leave it round about there. Then up here, this is the important part. I need to check this box delete cropped pixels, that's really important. Then I want to commit the crop. I'm going to zoom out a bit. If I drop this menu down here, image and then go to image size, you'll see that it is exactly 270 by 180 at 300, maths fantastic, isn't it? I'm happy with that. I'm going to come out with the crop tool and I'm going to show you another little trick. You don't have to do this, but I like to do this. Back up to the image drop-down. This time I'm going to choose canvas size. The size of the canvas I want is a piece of A4 paper, which I know is 210 millimeters wide by 297 high. The canvas extension color white. What that will do is it will put extra information. It will extend the canvas size basically to an exact A4 size piece of paper. Click on, "Okay" and there you go. It's fabulous, isn't it? I can now send that across to the printer. That's what I do. Jumping back to here, imagine I am sitting at my table now and I'm about to put that photograph inside the frame, because I've worked out the exact dimensions, I could bring the photograph in and there is printed to a piece of A4 paper, and I could just pop it into the frame. That 10 millimeter I measured around the outside is this white space here? I like to leave about white space. That's an example of how you would resize using the crop box to get a specific dimension for a specific situation. Jumping back to that image and lets step backwards and zoom in a bit, to show you that you can indeed with the crop box, you can select any dimensions you like. I could change that to 10 inches, for instance, by seven inches. As long as you put the units at the end, that's all you need to do. You can literally use any size you want and you can also, as I say, choose between millimeters, centimeters, inches, and pixels. That's fabulous, isn't it? Let me show you a good example of that then I'm going to clear that. In this case, I am going to type in 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels. I'm going to change this to 72. This is a typical Internet size. I could perhaps pull that down. For Instagram, for instance, this could be a photograph that's going on Instagram. Also I could pop down here and choose this option here, new crop preset. I'm going to call this 1080 by 1080 Instagram. Click on "Ok". Then commit that crop. Let's zoom in a bit. Check on the image size. Image size is indeed, if I go to pixels 1080 by 1080 by 72. I could do that to, load the photographs now, because if I select the crop tool again and drop this menu down. I have the option 1080 by 1080 Instagram. I have a resize for Facebook as well. You can create your own presets if you're using the size quite often. If you are big on Instagram, then it would be an idea to do that. Create your own little preset there of different sizes for social media. It's crazy, isn't it? What I've shown you there is how to resize for a frame and how to resize for social media. Just using the crop tool, that's how easy it is. Let's move on to our next image then, which is this one here. I'm just going to start from scratch on this one. This image again is another street photograph I captured in Liverpool. Because you have to capture these shots really quickly, I can see that the image is on an angle and it needs fixing. With the crop tool selected, I'm just going to click on the image and return it to the original ratio. What I need to do then is to use the straighten tool. I'm just going to pop back up here and just switch that to ratio and make sure these boxes are clear. Then I'm going to select the straighten tool and it's a little spirit level and I need to find something that's completely vertical or completely horizontal. Now, in this case, we have this edge of the wall. I'm just going to click and drag and match a line and straighten the image. That's really good, isn't it? Now let's look at the composition. I want the top of this guy's head in. I don't want so much on this side so probably to the shoulder, maybe round about there. On this side to this guy's shoulder. Then a little bit more detail at the bottom. Kind of like that, maybe a bit more on this side. That looks quite good. Delete cropped pixels. In this case, yes. Content Aware, yes, because I need these areas filled in. I'm happy with that and I will commit the crop with a little checkbox. Photoshop will do its magic and fill in the missing spaces. Let's see how well it does. It's not too bad, is it? It's actually not too bad. This sign doesn't make any sense now because it did say open. But nobody is going to notice that. You can always fix it if you wanted to be really picky. But no one's going to notice that. Down here, it's not so great. You know I could fix that with the stamp tool. Now I'm not going to do that. But you can actually go in and fix that, of course. Now I can resize it another way. This is another way of resize in your image, and I use this a lot too. Drop down the image menu and just select Image Size. I can type in any size I want into this box here. Let's have a little look. To people that are using parallel I'm going to choose inches in this case. Let's say I wanted the width to be 10 inches and I would just click on 10. It's now going to be 10 inches, industry-standard 300 pixels per inch. Always make sure you have these two sizes linked otherwise it won't constrain to the right proportion. You'll get stretched a photograph. Make sure you've got those two linked. Currently, I've got as 10 by 7.555. That's not bad. That's okay. I can just click on "Ok". Just be aware of this box here. If Photoshop is going to make the image bigger or smaller. Now in this case it's making it a lot smaller because the image was 59.4 megabytes and now it's only 19. It's going to make the image a lot smaller. You could then, for reduction, Bicubic sharper reduction, you could perhaps choose that one. What I do is I like to zoom in and let me just have a little look. You might see a difference when you select these different options. That has actually gone smoother. I spotted that then. Hard edges, you'll see it go a bit sharper. It's put a bit of noise. Only you can decide which is best there. Photoshop is trying to help you. It also has an automatic option. I like to use this one, Bicubic smooth gradients. But our variant it just depends between images. I'm just going to click on "Ok". I have now resized that image and it's now exactly ten inches in this dimension here. What that shows you is there are two ways to resize your image. If you know the exact sizes, why not use the crop tool and just type in the dimensions? But you are not fixed to that because you can always jump to the image drop-down and just select Image Size and do it that way too. You have two ways of doing it and to be honest, I use both. Let's look at another image then, which is this one here. Again, it's another street photograph that I captured in Liverpool. This is one of those situations where I had the wrong lens on my camera. Now I was using the Fuji camera that has a fixed 35-millimeter lens. I wanted this bridge detail here. But unfortunately, the bridge I was taking the photograph from and using the lens that is hired included all this extra detail that I don't want into the photograph. Let's have a look at the crop tool and see what I can do here. I'm going to press "C" for the crop tool. In this case, I want to make it square. I want to select a one-by-one ratio. Then I'm going to drag in the crop points and just remove any detail that I don't want. That's the source of the image. You can move it around and decide what is the best, but I think something like that would be ideal. Then just click on the "Commit button". Now what I also could have done, is renewed the exact size that I wanted rather than selecting the one-by-one ratio, I could just simply type in those sizes. If I wanted five inch by five inch or 150 millimeter by 150 millimeter. Wherever I wanted to do. I could just put it onto width, height, resolution and just type in those figures into the box at the top. Either is fine. As I say, I do a combination of both. It doesn't really matter. I'm just going to commit backdrop. I made sure that the Delete Cropped Pixels option was checked there too. I've now got this square image. Let's have a bit of fun then with this photograph. I'm going to resize the image. Now again, I could have done it with the crop box, but I'm going to do a here and we're going to change that to millimeters and the size I'm going to go for is 160. It is now 160 square and click on, "Okay". Now I'm going to put some white area around the outside, have a nice white border. To do that, it's Canvas Size and I like to switch to pixels to do this because it's much easier to work out. I'm going to select pixels, I'm going to add a 100 pixels around the outside. To do that, It's 1890, I guess it should be 1990. I'm just going to put a nine in there and the same here, this should be 1990. Just click there and add a nine, and that will put a white area around the outside of the photograph. Let's take a look and there you go. Let's zoom in a little bit and that looks great, doesn't it? Now as I say, just for a bit of fun, I'm going to right-click on the image, duplicate that layer and I'm going to pop it onto this wooden background here. Onto this wooden background, JPEG, let's say you can download the wooden background JPEG tube and I'm going to click on "Okay", then I'm going to navigate over to where that is and there you go. Switch to my move tool and I've got this photograph on a wooden background. I'm going to show you something that's a little bit more advanced, but it's a bit of fun. What I'm going to do is pop down to the bottom width, this photograph layer selected, let's call it Photo. With this photo layer selected, I'm going to drop down to the bottom and put an effect on that layer. The effect I'm going to choose is Drop Shadow and that has indeed put a shadow behind the photograph. Now it's a bit big, I'm going to take that off. The whole size, it's now got a hard edge, 70 percent is okay. The distance, let's that make it round about there and then we can change the angle. The angle will be fine because I'll show you why in a second. I'm just going to soften that with the size, something like that'll be fine and click on "Okay". Wherever that photograph goes, the shadow because it's an effect we've added to it, it will always stay underneath. Now this is the advanced part. If I right-click on the word Drop Shadow, this little menu will appear and what I want to select is this option here, Create Layer. This little box will come up, you can ignore that, just click on "Okay". What's happened is the shadow has now been separated from the photograph, we'll just turn the photograph off. We just have the shadow, it's not linked anymore and that's quite good because I can move it across a little bit. Select the right layer, select the shadow layer I'm just going to use the arrow keys to do this and I'm just going to move it across a little bit. Why have I done that, why have I separated it? It's because I can now select the transform tools. Command or Control T, right-click and then select "Warp" and then I can drag in these points here, what I'm doing is creating a curved shadow. Now it's just optional, it's a bit of fun. Let's try that and then just press "Return" to accept that. The shadow is now curved and it gives the impression that the edges of the photograph a slightly bent upwards. It's a bit fun, you don't have to do it. Now, the shadow is on its own layer, I can shift click to select both of those layers, then right-click and I'm just going to link those two layers they're now linked. Wherever one goes, the other one will always follow. That's just a bit of fun isn't it? Then I could put some text in. Now, we're going to look at text in an upcoming module but just for fun. I'm going to select the Text tool and I'm going to check what sizes I've got. I've got American typewriter 15 millimeter. I don't really want that, let's pick Arial, let's try something like nine and all of this has been set from another piece of work or being creating. White text, nine millimeter, 10 millimeter spacing you don't have to remember any of this because let's say we're doing a module on text very soon. I'm going to draw a box and there you go. I have text in the box, let's select a bold and if I just escaped from that, I have text. You can create so much once you precise your image and you can drop it into any document and you can create multiple millions of different ideas. It's unbelievable the things you can do, that's why I love Photoshop much. When I drop shadow behind the text, that's probably a bit too far, the distance, bring the distance back maybe make that a bit softer. Click on "Okay", now I said we're going to look at text in a whole module coming up very shortly, but that's amazing isn't it? I resize the image, made it square using the ratio then I changed the size of it. I could've changed the size in the Crop tool, I just wanted to show you both options and then I've dragged it across to this image and created something a bit different. If I looked at the image size of this, by the way and again, I apologize to anyone that uses in parallel but this is indeed 297 by 210, almost anyway, and that's a piece of A4 paper. I can now print that, that could be part of a document that I'm creating. For instance, it's endless the amounts of things you can do, resize for social media, resize for websites, resize for print and it all happens using the crop tool and the drop-down Image Size option here. Have a go with all the images, download them, and have a play around and I'll see you in the next module. 17. Module 16 Adding Text and Logos: In this module, I'm going to introduce you to the text tool, and we're going to add text to a document. There are several methods that we can choose to do that. I'm going to show you all the options that you have. We're going to create four documents. In this first one, I'll show you the options you have for applying text, the size, the space, all of that stuff and we add effects. In this document, I'll show you how to add text to a path and to a shape. Then we'll move on to add text to this poster design and then finally we'll finish with the big one, which is this magazine layout. Now as always, you can download the project files and join in. Now, the fonts I'm going to be using in all the examples you may or may not have them on your computer, chances are you won't have them. I'll list each font in the project description and you can go online and do a search, it's really easy. I'm sure you'll find the fonts. When you do find them, you need to place them into your font folder. Look for your library, look for the font folder and you simply drop the font in. It's as simple as that. With that said, let's jump in and make a start. We're going to start with this particular blank document here. The shortcut key for the text tool is quite simply the letter T, T for text. The icon on the tool strip looks like this, it just has a big letter T. Now, as always, you can change the parameters of any tool using this tool strip just located at the top. Now, I don't like to use that, and what I would prefer to do is drop the Window down and let's select character. The little character box will appear, and also paragraph. I generally have these two open and you can dock these two together. I'll just drag that little folder. I can pop it and group them together. Now, I prefer to work that way. Very simple to do, as you could see, you simply dropped the Window menu down and select both and then put them onto your desktop. Now, I often have them docked over here at the side. That's another thing I do. Then when I want to use them I can just drag them across. It's entirely up to you which way you do it. What do we have in the box then? We have our character and we have our paragraph. Let's start with the character box. In this little drop down menu here, you've got access to all your fonts. I'll say you have different fonts from the ones I have. The one I'm going to go for first is called Bitter. I can either search for it and there it is there. But let's just select a random text just to share what else you can do, is you can actually just type in B-I-T-T, and there you go straight away, and just click on it. In this box here, fonts often have a choice of styles, and in this case there's italic and bold. I'm going to leave it on bold. Then you can select the size. Now, I have mine set to millimeters. Let me just show you this. If I go to preferences up at the top and select units and rules, in this box here, I've got the option to have the type displayed in points or pixels. Now, my preference is millimeters. Now you can select points if you like, because that's a popular way in desktop publishing to have the units displayed. But I prefer millimeters, so I'm going to leave it in millimeters. I click on "Ok". We went across, then we have this one here. This is the landing as it's called, and it's just the space between words. If you type out a paragraph, you can adjust the space in between words. If we look here, text size is 18 millimeter, and the space between the words is only nine millimeter. There will be a clash there, it needs to be at least 18. But we'll look at that later. I'll show you how that works. This is the space in between letters. We can make the spacing bigger or smaller between the letters, so that comes in really useful. Just ignore the rest, it's okay. Then you can change the color to whatever you want and just drag that color around, drag the slide up or down. There is millions of different colors that you can choose, cancel that. Then you have these options here. Now, the ones we're really interested in are the first three. If I just hover there, it will say Faux Bold. If I hover here it will say Faux Italic, because as I say, some fonts come complete with options. In this case we've got bold and we have italic. Now, if it was not showing either those two, I could instruct Photoshop to give me a Faux Bold. We'll make the text bold, but it's a Faux Bold if that makes sense. It does a reasonable job actually on the same with italic. This guy is really good all caps. You can type in lowercase and just click on this button here and it will set your text to uppercase much really cool, isn't it? That's what you need to know there. What we should do now is type some text. I've selected the Bitter font. I'll say you can select whichever font you like, and perhaps go off and find the Bitter font. I'm sure you'll find it. Now, as I've done this document a few times before, I know that the size I want is 75, so I'm going to type in 75. In the lading it doesn't really matter because I'm only going to type one word, so I'm not too worried about that. The color, let's just have a little look at the color. I'm going to type in a color here because I know the exact color that I want, but it doesn't matter, I could just drag the color around here. But I know the specific color that I want. Then just click on "OK". I'm going to leave all these boxes unchecked. Before I type any texts I'll just introduce you to another option that you have. If I drop down the View menu, I'm going to select "New Guide Layout." Click on there. I have this set to number of columns two, number of rows two. Just click on "Ok". When all that is done it give me the center point. I've got a line down the center, vertically and one horizontally. You don't have to do but, why not? That's something else for you to learn, isn't it? With that said, I'm going to jump to the paragraph tab and switch to center justified so the text will be in the center. Just to recap, I've got 75 millimeter text, again, when you type one word, so it doesn't really matter about this. I've selected the color, I'm ready to go. I'm just going to click here. When I do Photoshop puts in dummy Latin text, but I obviously can type in my own texts now. I'm going to type in the word wood. That's perfectly in the center because I used the guideline. To escape from that I just press Escape, I'm out. Now, you can't switch tools and new shortcuts while the text tool is active. Again, it's active. If I press V for the move tool, I'll literary type, the letter v. Be careful of that. Just press the Escape key. Also, what I'm going to do is press Command or Control H, and it will just hide those guidelines. There you go. I have the word wood. I can also now pop back to the text box and play around with the text. In this case, I want uppercase, so I'm just going to click on this little box here and it will convert the text to uppercase. The spacing in between the letters, I can adjust that. Now, it's very close to the edge of the document, so I'm going to go to this box here, and I'm just going to select the zero. Then using the down arrow key on your keyboard, you can reduce that number. Let's see, minus 40 is fine. At this stage I could change the color, I could change the text. If I dropped the menu down, selected Alpha ruler for instance, or always wherever, it doesn't matter. I can have whatever text I want. That's really cool, isn't it? But I'm going to stay with the Bitter font. What else can reduce that bullet? Well, I can add effects. Let's add some effects. Hover in the layers palette, make sure you have the text layer selected. Drop down to the bottom, and just select the layer style. In this case, I'm going to choose bevel and emboss. I've now put a bevel and an emboss on this word. Now, have a play around with these. I'm not going to go through it in too much detail, but you can change a lot of the settings here. I could have it much harder, chiseled, hard, but I'm going to just stick with the smooth. While I'm there, I've got access to the other effects. The one I'm going to choose is this one, drop shadow. Now I've put a shadow behind the word too. That looks great, doesn't it? At anytime I can go in, I could change this to italic, for instance. Now, I don't want to do that, but I could do. It's non destructive and you can honestly have so much fun with text. With that said, wouldn't it be nice if this word was actually made of wood? To do that I'm going to apply a wood text here over the top. I'm going to navigate to where I have the wooden JPEG, which is just here, and then when I just drag the layer, place it over the top of the double 01 document, switch then move tool, and just pop that there. Now, we can't see the word. I'm going to pop over to the layers palette and create a clipping mask. Now, to do that, I just hold down the Alt option key and this little box will appear and just simply click. There you have a lovely wooden texture over the word wood. Very simple. I'm just going to group those two layers together just to keep things nice and neat. Group from layers, just type in the word wood. Let's introduce another word then. I've popped my guides back on. I'm going to jump over here, I'm going to change this to Helvetica and we're going to go for the condensed bold. I'm going to change the size to 84. Then I'm going to pop over here and select T for text, and then click on the guideline and just type in the word rust and there we have it escape from there. I've got the word rust. I'm going to just add the lines, the letters would be close together so I'm going to go over to where we can adjust that and type in zero and it would just put that little bit of extra space in between the letters. Now here is another little tip. I'm going to expand the wooden word group that I made and here where we've applied the effects to the word wood, I'm just going to put my finger on the Alt or Option key, and then drag the effects up and put the same effects onto the word rust. That was easy, wasn't it? That's just like a little short cut. Again, with this, it would be nice if it had some rust over the top, so I'm going to navigate to where the rust file is. Drag that across to my double 01 document, just pop it on the top and then do exactly the same thing over in the layers palette, Alt or Option, and create a clipping mask and now I've got rust on top and you can vary that rust as you know by using blend. If I could drag this across. I just have the dark parts of the rust coming through. That's to taste. Have a bit of fun doing that. Again, Shift-click those two layers, right-click, group from layers and just name that rust and it just keeps everything nice and neat and then switch into the move tool I can move them about. Let's add some more texts then. This time we're going to use a text box. Firstly, I'm going to change the font on this one. This time I'm going to use Arial, Arial regular will do, and I'm going to change the size to 12. I do need to change the actual leading to 12 as well in this case. Also, I'm going to select a white font. I'm just going to drag that to there and I want to switch that off. All I need to do now is to select T for text. In this case, we draw a box. You can draw the box any shape, it doesn't matter, and Photoshop will put in some dummy text. There you go. I just escape from that. I've got text. How easy was that? However, I may want it left-justified so I can just go to the paragraph tab. The text may look a little bit too close so I can adjust the leading just by using the arrow keys. That looks a bit better, doesn't it? I can also make it uppercase, and I can also change the font and I think Anton could be quite good. Anton regular and there you go. That looks great. Then jump across to the Layers palette and let's add a drop shadow. When you do add to Drop Shadow, you've got all of these controls and have a better fun using them. There's no right and wrong. Just do what you think looks good. Click on "Okay." That looks great, doesn't it? I could also, while it's still selected, jump to the paragraph and try this justification here, and that is a bit neater, isn't it? To operate in a box. That is an easy way to create a document just by using the textbox. As I say it just simply as selecting the text tool and then just draw a box and the text will be in the box. There is a lot more text in that box, but you can't see it because the box is too small, so be mindful of that. If I did that and then escaped, there's a lot more text but I can't see it. What I could do there is in the layers palette, just double-click on the thumbnail of that particular layer, and it will select all the text. Obviously, I could change the box eyes, but I could make the text size smaller, six for instance, and let's see what happens, and then you can see the spacing is wrong then. Perhaps something like seven and just hit return and all that text is in the box now or as I say, you could have just extended the size of the box and then there you go, you can move that about. Fabulous, isn't it? We don't want that. Have a look at that one and let's move on quickly to the next one, which is this double 02 document here. I'll show you how you can add text to a path and to a shape. To add text to a path, lets' simply first draw a path. I'm going to just select this part here. Basically, I'm just going to draw a curved line, like so, then press T for text. Over here, I'm going to change this to Distro Regular, and let's have a font size of 20. I don't want it uppercase so I'm going to switch that off. When I move my I-beam, as it's called, the text I-beam close to that path, you can see the little curve appears to indicate that I'm going to type onto a text path. Now I'm also going to just jump to the paragraph tab and make it left-justified and I'm going to click here and I'm going to type. There you have it how to type on a path simply explained and it's just beautifully following the curve. That's great, isn't it? Let's do another one then another quick one. Path tool again, and then again select the type tool. We'll see the little curve appear. This time, let's just change this to center justified and then just type here. Now if I wanted to move that text along the path, this gets a bit tricky. We switch to this tool here and it's this first one, the path selection tool. If I come over here, I'm looking for a little arrow and there's an arrow there. You can see it on the end of the I-beam and it allows me to move that text about on the path or flip it. If I pulled it underneath, I could flip the text so it's underneath the line. Now it's a little bit tricky to get used to but you'll master in the end and there's another point over here on the end as well. If I drag that too far across, we'll start losing words as you can see, so that happens. That means the endpoint isn't in the right place. It does get that bit tricky, but you'll get used to it. It's not that difficult to be fair. Lastly, I'm just going to come out of that, just escape and I'm going to select this tool here. Click on here and the shape I'm looking for is this one, the Ellipse Tool. I'm going to click on that and make sure I've got it set to path in the parameters box. I'm just going to draw a circle. I'm going to hold down Shift Alt or option, so I can drag it from the center. I have that. Then select T for text tool and just click anywhere. Low behold, I have text going around the outside of the circle. You can do the same thing with the path selection tool and you can move that text around. Now, I've actually made a go inside by mistake, but you can spin that round and get it to the position that you want it to be in. Maybe I'd like it's something like that. Then just escape from there. Also, Command or Control T and you can make that smaller. As I said in a previous module, all the tools that I have been showing you throughout the class, you can use them on so many different types of situations and they all work together seamlessly. Have a go at that because that's going to set us up for the next one, which is this poster. We're going to recreate this poster design. The first thing I'm going to do is drop down the View menu and I'm going to select a new guide layout and put two lines in. It's just 2 and 2 like we did previously. Then I'm going to jump down here to the Ellipse Tool shape. Then in the parameters, we need it to be set to shape. We don't want to fill color to make sure we got that diagonal red line. The stroke I've selected, this nice creamy color, but again, you can choose whatever color you like. I have the line thickness set to 12 pixels, and I've selected the dotted line option here, and that's all I need to do, and then I'm just going to come to the center Shift Alt or Option, and I'm just going to draw a shape, and I'm going to put it round about there, and then just press V, and there you go. I've got a dotted line, now if your dots are closer together you can in the Properties tab, you can change that. Just change the gap size. I have mine set to five. Now if I think that's a bit strong, I can jump across to the layers palette and just decrease the opacity. That's our first step done. The next step then is to add the main banner text around the outside. To do that, I'm going to jump across the text box and I have selected Schwarzenberg text. Now you may not have that, but if you want to go and search for it or indeed use a different font, it's fine. The size needs to be 41, and it doesn't matter about that. This, however, I want to put on to naught, and the color's fine, and I don't think I need that. Now I'm going to jump down here and I'm going to select the ellipse tool again. This time though, in the premises box, I'm going to change this option to path. Then click in the center and draw our shape. Let's pour it round about there. Then let's press T for text. In the paragraph box I want to make sure it's center justified, and then pop up here, we can see our little curve, and I'm just going to click here, then I'm going to type in the words wonder cameras. So just come out of there, and we have our first bit of text in. We're now ready to introduce some more text. Now what I like to do is to just click out of these layers. What I mean by that is, make sure that no layers are selected, and the reason for doing that is because I'm now going to change the information in this dialogue box here for the text and it will, or could change the font and the size up here on the layer I've already created. Over here, I want the same font, Schwarzenberg, but I'm going to select a font size of 12 for now, and I'm going to leave everything else set the way it is. Then I'm going to drop down here and select the ellipse tool again. Now it's a good idea as well to switch off the layer that we've already created. I'm going to switch that off, and the reason for that is because I'm going to add another shape and I'm going to put text on it, Photoshop can get a bit confused if there's too many shapes. So Shift and Alt or option and select another shape like so. Then T for text, and then I'm just going to click here, and I'm going to type in vintage cameras and equipment. With that typed out, I would like to put more space in between those letters. I need to select all the text, double-click on the thumbnail in the layer, and then just come up here and in this box, I'm going to type in 200 and then hit return, and we've got our text spaced out. Now I don't want it upside down. So I'm going to choose the path selection tool. I'm going to look for the little arrow which is just here, and I'm going to drag that inside and then move it round to where I want it to be, which is probably around about there. It's currently clashing with this dotted line so Command or Control T, as you know, transform tools, I'm going to put my finger on the Alt or Option key because that will constrain the dimensions from the center, and then hit Return, see what that looks like, and that's fine, and then we can switch back the Wonder Camera layer and there you have it. Just a couple more things to do then. I want to add some stars at the top. Again, I'm going to turn those two layers off, make sure there's no layer selected, and I'm going to draw another shape. I'm going to change the font, and I know that I want to select a font called Seeing Stars, and the size of the font, I'll make about eight millimeter. Then come up here, press T for text, and I can now type in, and look at that, I've got loads of stars. All I want though is four little stars, and I've worked out that it's the letter A will produce these little stars. You can choose whatever stars you want, now it's a good font to download actually. I'm happy with that. So I'm going to switch the Remove tool and then switch on my other layers. Finally, let's add some text in this film strip at the bottom. I'm going to switch off my guides because I don't need them now. Press the zoom tool, let's zoom in a little bit, and over in the layers palette I'm going to make sure no layers are selected. Because again, hue might change some of the texts that's previously been done. On the font I'm going to select is this one. Intro Head R. I'm going to change the size to four and the color, I'm just going to pop this number in here. Again, you can choose any color you like, it doesn't matter. The space in and between each line, let's make that five, and then I can just simply press return, and then T for text, and I can put a text box in there, and there we go. Let's change the justification, and I think there may well be more text down there there is yet. Well, obviously, you type in whatever you want it to say. But on this case, it's just an example. I could put that text into there and that sits nice. Now that could be an address, it could be details about an event. It can be anything you want. With that done, I can just press Command or Control J to make a copy of that, and with the move tool, I can put more text in there. Now I could type in more details there. Again, Command or Control J. Pop that into there. Maybe I want that a different color, so I could easily just click here, sample a color, maybe, maybe we have this creamy color, and that will change the color of the text. Again, moving along Command or Control J, or draw a text box, it doesn't matter honestly. Whichever way you want to do it, is a bit simpler to do that, and then if we zoom out. We have in decreases a poster and I'm going to put that back over there, close that down and double-click on the hand which will fill the screen and that looks great, doesn't it? Now, there's more work I can do on that. If I turn off all of these layers that we've just created and just switch on my original version. You can see that I masked out over here on the words Wonder Cameras so the strap looks like it's coming through the letters. That was easy to do. I also applied some roast. We did that in the previous example, didn't we? Where we applied roast to a text and I put some drop shadow and I can see that. Have a lot to play around with all of those things and create something similar change the font and change what it says maybe as your brand details, or your name to it. More than welcome to use the background image supplied in your own work it's fine. Let's move on to another one then and this one is a lot more involved so I'm going to have to work a bit quicker and let's see which one it is. It's this one here "Adding Text to a Magazine" and eventually it's going to look like this. Now, I'm not going to do all of that I just do parts of it and it be great if you finished it off and perhaps send it to me. Change the word and do whatever you want. Let's make a start on this one then. I'm going to expand the group and switch off all these layers so we've just got this layer on the top and I'm just going to zoom in and we'll take a look and you can see I've got the font, sort of, behind Sophie's head. But if you look in the stack order of the layers, it's actually above Sophie's head. It's got a mask on too. I'm going to "Disable Layer Mask" and you can see that the so letters here. I'm going to double-click and I have actually used "Blend If". If you follow the same procedure here you'll reveal Sophie's hair. Just show you a simple as that, drag that across until Sophie's hair comes through then I just use "Alt" or "Option" to split that up to make it look a bit softer and a bit more realistic. Something like that play around with it until you get it right. Then I added the layer mask, which I've just disabled, let me right-click on that "Enable Layer Mask" and that was just to remove these areas from Sophie's face. "Enable Layer Mask" and I just painted them away. That was the first thing I did and the font that I used was "Madegra". If you search for Madegra online and then use the same size you're on your way just follow what I've gotten on that box there. That was the first thing that I did and then I created little text groups. Each of these little text boxes contains text in their own little group so I can position them wherever I want them to be. Let's switch those off collapse that group and I also created this lay here and previously. This is what I decided my text colors would be. I just put two little spots of color which I can turn on and off when needed. Let's make a start then so I want to click on the "New Group Icon" and I'm going to rename that "Text 1" then switch to the type two. "T" for text, and then I'm going to drag this box out like I did previously so I can see what I'm doing. I'm going to use the same font Madegra, and I'm going to change the size to 33. The spacing I will have a look at in a minute. The color I'm going to change this goldie cream color and I don't want capital letters and the justification are on the left-hand side. I'm going to come over here and just type in Sophie's name "Sophie Mcsween". Now, as you can see on here there's a clash. To fix that, I'm going to physically click on the "Move Tool" rather than use the shortcut and then I can pop up with this box here in the "Character" box and then just use my up arrow key just to fix that clash. I like that. Now, you've got to be careful with this dropped P it may well hit some of the text. But deliberately I've left it that way because that looks quite nice and you can see that the actual laden is smaller. The dimension than the actual font size but I like that so that's okay. Let's add some more text. Now, I'm going to pop over to the "Layers" palette and I'm going to select the "Text" group and the reason I'm doing that as if I stay on that Sophie Mcsween layer when I started just in the details in the character box it will actually change the Sophie Mcsween text. Make sure you've got the actual group selected, and then I'm going to pop up here. I'm going to change the size to 20, and I want the color to white make sure that justification on the left which is. Then I can come over here press "T" for text tool and then just type in some more words. Changes to the "Move" tool and I can pop that up to there. That is now all in the one group and we can move that wherever I want it to be. Let's just pop it there for now. Now, I'll move forward creating the other groups. I'm going to stop talking and you can just watch what I do. I've created that group and that was pretty easy, wasn't it? Then we can position that wherever we want to select to create the next one then. Okay, and that's that group done and just one more to do. Okay, and that's that one done. Now, I can't really see that text so I'm just going to apply a drop shadow to that and change the angle a bit, and maybe just change the size to something like that not a bit strong actually. I'm just going to back that off and that that's group done then so we can position that way we'd like it to be as well. I think it looks better around about there. Now, we've lost some of the Kate there. Again, it's like the Kate Moss layer, and I'm just going to pop drop shadow on that too. I only needed to be really subtle, just so it stands out. Something like that will be fine, wouldn't it? You can play around with that there's a million different ways of doing things and that's that done. Let me just tidy up a bit put that back over there and then we can switch this text color layer off and also there was a bar code as well. I'm just going to copy that up to the top, put that there, we have the little bar code down the bottom. That looks great, doesn't it? Now, I know it sped it up. But I think the method I showed you to create this first text box follow the same thing and also follow what you've learned in the early part of the module and it's really easy. If you struggle with this image, then just get in touch. I guess there are enough people asked me, "How do we create the steps and slow it down and go through it in a bit more detail?" But I'm sure you'll be fine. Go ahead, download all the project files and have a go. It's a lot of fun and I will see you in the next module.[MUSIC] 18. Module 17 Retouching and Sculpting: In this module, we're going to create this fashion photograph. I captured this in my studio and it's a really good friend of mine, Sophie. She is a bundle full. As you can see, a really attractive young lady. The whole process will be split over two modules. In the first module, we'll look at skin smoothing, face sculpting, I'll brighten the eyes, I'll add highlights to the hair. I'll make some corrections to her lips, I'll add lip color, so we'll create all of that. Then in the next module, we'll look at how I replace the background. In this module, it will finish looking like this. As I say, we'll add the background in the following module. Before we start, let's take a look at our before and after. Then I'll show you the steps. There's 10 steps that we need to follow to create this version. This is the original image that I captured in the studio. After the corrections, it will look like this. Before and after. As I say, 10 simple steps. Let's take a look at those steps, then in a bit of detail. Here is the original image. First thing to do is to take away any blemishes. Now, nobody has perfect skin. Sophie's got wonderful skin but there is a little blemish or there are a little pimple. The first thing we did was to remove that. This is an after, here's the before, and there's the after. Let me just isolate that layer. You can see that's how much work I did to remove any of those little imperfections. Next thing I did was, I took a look at the photograph and I thought to myself that Sophie's face when I see it in real life, it doesn't appear as wide as what it looks in this photograph. Maybe it was the focal length I used. Maybe it was the lighting on the day but I know Sophie's face to be slightly slimmer and her nose to be slightly slimmer too. I use the liquefy tool to make her face a bit slimmer. It's only subtle, but I just took it in slightly. Then the next thing to do is the skin smoothing, and I kept it nice and subtle. If we just zoom in a little bit and that is with no skin retouching, no skin smoothing. This is what it looks like with the skin smoothing. Now again, it's only subtle. I like to look at skin smoothing this way. It's more about unifying the tonality of the skin. This is a before and there's different shades of skin color. Skin-smoothing when it's done properly, just unifies all those tones and makes it look more natural. Then after that, I applied some film grain. Now to me, the film grain just makes the skin look a bit more realistic. Then this is to taste. I like the powdery skin effect on a portrait of a woman. I've just applied some film grain. I've switched it on and it's barely noticeable but to me, it looks better. That was the next thing I did. Then I decided to add some light sculpture. All I did was darken some areas of the shot and just to give it up enough contrast if you like. It's only subtle again, so that's with the light sculpture applied. This is without. Then this is with the light sculpture applied. Very easy to do. Next one was eyes, and you can go crazy with the eyes you can change the color, you can do all stuff. I decided to brighten the eyes and just to increase the color and put some detail in. Again, I'll zoom into the eyes, and we look at before and after. This is the before and this is the after. I'll put detail to the eyes and as I said brighten them and put more coloring. Then I did a general adjustment because looking at the photograph, I think it still looks too detailed for my liking. Using some adjustment layers, I'll soften the image. It's different with a portrait of a man, but with a portrait of a woman, you want to keep things nice and soft. Then I added some highlights into her hair and that looks like this. Again, it's only subtle and you can go crazy with that but with Sophie having wonderful curly hair, I decided to just accentuate that with some highlights. Now take a look at the lips, they're not symmetrical. Now I could possibly have left the lips exactly where way are but I decided to make them more symmetrical and just change the color slightly. That correction looked like that. Again, that's a before and that's an after. Then lastly, I just warmed the image or slightly so an overall warm effect. That looks like this. That's after the correction. This is before, and that's after. Ten simple steps. It's funny as now as I move through then each step was barely noticeable but they all add up to create something that's completely different. As I say, we just take a look at the before, there's the before and this is the after. Of course, download the project file and join in. Let's make a start then. I'll collapse this group. As always, make a duplicate of the background layer. Now to get rid of the blemishes, we need to create a new empty layer, and I'm going to call that blemishes. Then I need to select the spot healing brush. The shortcut for that is J, and you can cycle through Shift J until you get the tool selected. Then I'm going to go up to the parameters at the top and make sure I've got a nice soft brush. Then make sure this is set to content-aware. Now I'm going to zoom in and I'll show you what you do. I want to make the brush size a bit bigger, square bracket keys. All you simply do is paint on and Photoshop will do the rest of the work for you. Just paint over these little blemishes and they will disappear. Very simple. Then the Trish after make is for marks like this, this is a little fractalness and there's another one just here on a nose, and there's one on the cheek. You have to make a decision whether you going to leave them in or take them out. But just be mindful always for a client. They might object to you removing parts of their face. Just be careful. Then the other thing is you've got to make decision how much hair you going to leave on the face because as you can see, there's little stray pieces of hair. Do you leave them in? Do you take them out? It's only you can decide that. I will now move forward quickly and you can watch the process. That is the blemish removal done. I'm just going to double-click on the hand and then before and after. The next thing to take a look at is the face sculpture. Now to do that, I want to create a stamp layer, so Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control and the letter E. I'm going to rename that layer. Then I'm going to right-click on the layer and convert it to a smart object. Then pop up to the top, drop-down the Filter menu and select liquefy. A new interface will appear, and you have all these controls on the right-hand side and some tools up on the left-hand side. Let's start with the jawline. If I drag this slider, you can see I'm really bringing that jawline inwards. But I think somewhere around about minus 25 would be fine. Then let's jump up to the nose with, and I'm going to take that down to about minus 25 as well. In this little box at the bottom, I can preview the changes I've made. That's looking good. Now, Sophie's nose looks a little bit too round. To fix that, I'm going to use this tool here, the pucker tool. With the pucker tool selected, it's just a matter of just clicking and dragging to try to reshape the end of the nose. Let's bring in a little bit there perhaps, and just a little bit here, and a little bit there, and maybe a little bit more there. You can make a mistake, Command or Control Z, because I wasn't too happy with that. It just seems a little bit wide here, doesn't it? We can bring that in. Again, I wasn't happy with that. Something like that. Let's see it before and after. That looks fine, doesn't it? All I would do then is just click on "Okay" to accept that. That's the face sculpture complete. The next job then is the actual skin smoothen. There are a number of ways that you can skin smooth. The professional way is to dodge and burn. But I think that's beyond the scope of this class. To be honest, the method I use, which is the old-school method of frequency separation, it works fine for me. I have edited a portrait using both methods, and to be fair, dodge and burn is better, but by how much? Not that great. When you consider frequency separation is a really quick procedure, dodging and burning takes a long time. I tend to stick with frequency separation. That's what we're going to cover in this tutorial. Let me jump in then and show you how to do that. The first thing I'm going to do is create another stamp layer, so Shift, Alt or Option, Command or Control E, and then I'm going to duplicate that layer, so Command or Control J. I've got two layers above this face sculpture layer. Let's double-click on this first one, and I'm going to call that skin. The layer above, I'm going to call detail, so two layers. This one will be the skin softening, and then this one will be the detail. If I zoom into Sophie's face, what we're going to do is to make the skin smooth, if we can unify all the skin tones and make them nice and smooth, and because we'll separate the detail and the detail is all the skin texture and the skin pores, that'll be on another layer which we just created called detail. On all of those textures and skin pores, all that type of stuff is overlaid over the smooth skin and that's what makes it look convincing. To do it, we're going to first of all turn off the detail layer and select the skin layer. Let's zoom out then. The first thing we need to do is we need to blur the skin. With the skin layer selected, drop-down the filter menu, select "Blur", and then we want to select "Gaussian Blur". What we need to do is pull this slider until all the skin detail disappears. Let me show you how that works. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. As I pull the slider, I want the skin detail to completely disappear, so you just keep pulling it until it happens. Now it's going to vary from photograph to photograph, obviously. I think roundabout at say, around about 12, I think all that detail has disappeared. Now don't worry about eyes and hair and stuff like that, because that'll be tackled with the other layer, which is the detail layer. But for now, all that skin tone is unified and I can't see any texture at all. In this case, a radius of 12 works fine, so I would click on that to accept it. Double-click on the hand. Then we're ready to work on the detail layer. Select the detail layer. Now before I move on, I'm just going to delete these layers because we don't need those and if I don't, the Photoshop will get confused in the next step. With the detail layer selected, I'm going to drop down the Image menu and select "Apply Image". We need this effect to be applied to this layer, so just navigate to this part here, and we need to select "skin". Now, I deleted those layers previously because there would be a huge list of layers if I didn't, so you don't have to worry about that. But what you do need to do is select skin. In this little drop-down here, just select Skin, and then in the blending option, select "Subtract". When you do in the scale and the offset, it should read two, and 128. Now we will default at those numbers. They are magical numbers, they're Photoshop chooses, and it works every time, so two and 128. What's happened is, when we look at the image now, it's all texture, it's all detail, and that's quite sharp, and we can't see any real skin, it's just all the texture. If I click on "Okay", and we zoom into that image, you can see that all that skin detail is there, all the pores, and all the source of texture that make up the skin is visible. That's what we're going to apply on top of the smooth skin area. I'm going to double-click on the hand. Now it looks stupid because it's gray, so we need to change the blending mode. The one we choose is Linear Light. Now, nothing's happened because we need to complete the next step. The next thing we need to do then is to switch to the skin layer itself and select the "Lasso tool", so that's L for lasso. What we can do now is we can change the feather of the lasso tool. Now normally we would draw a shape and then we would click inside and select "Feather", and then we would select "a feather". But we're not going to do that in this case, so I'm going to de-select that. What we're going to do is, in the parameters box up here, I'm going to change the feather to 30. Now I'll just make things quicker because it's permanently set now to 30. Later on we'll have to remember that we've done that and switch it back out. I want to switch to the zoom tool, and I'm going to zoom in over here. Select the lasso tool again. What we do is we select areas of skin of similar luminosity and then we blur that skin. Let me show you how that works. I'm going to select this area here because it looks similar, and then pop up to the drop-down, filter and select "Gaussian Blur". Then I need to blur inside this. Never go too far, it will look silly. You have to just use your eye. It's only experience really that will get you there. But as you are following along, just follow the steps. I think somewhere around about 16 for there, click on "Okay", Command or Control D to de-select. Then this area in the center looks quite similar luminosity-wise. Again, Gaussian Blur, and let's take a look at that. I think around about the same and de-select, and then this area over here. Then Filter, Gaussian Blur, and around about the same seems to work. Click on "Okay". We move around the image doing that, selecting areas of similar luminosity. Now if we look here, and we can dial stuff back if you think it's too strong, just keep an eye on what's happening. I think around about 12 for the nose, and then all around here seems to be roughly the same. I can select an area around there and then filter. Just keep doing the same thing, and possibly I could move that upper torch to around about 20 maybe. Click on "Okay". Then there's an area here as in that dark area, and 20 looks okay for that too. Then this area here, it's a huge area I can select. Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, let's have a look. Twenty looks quite good for that too. Maybe about 26. I'll carry on doing that, but I'll speed up and as I say, just follow the same procedure. That looks rather good does name. If I just switch on a before and after those two layers, That's the before, and that's the after. Now it's very sort listener. We've kept all the texture in the face, and that skin smooth and looks great, doesn't it? It's funny how she's doing it, you don't think here have a much of an effect. But as you can see, it's quite effective, isn't it? The next thing to do then is to add some grain. I'm going to create a stamp layer and call it a grain. Convert that to a smart object. Pop up to the top and select camera raw filter, and then jump to the effects tab. Let's add some grain. Let's try it at around about say 40. Molap the size of 25, let's take the roughness down as well to about 25. Just zoom in. I blocked, that looks fine and it's just given that dusty finished, the skin candy unifies it and puts a bit of texture, and so I like that. That stage's done. That was a quick stage, wasn't it? The next thing to do would be to do the light sculpture. To do that, I'm going to add a curves adjustment layer. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to drop the mids. I'm just going to pull that slider to round about there and change the blend mode to luminosity. Then on the actual mask, I'm just going to invert the mask. Command or control I to invert the mask. B for brush. Make sure we've got a nice soft brush which you have, and the capacity we want to around about 10 percent. All I need to do then is just paint in some dark areas. Let's just make the brush a bit bigger. I'm just going to paint in there with a white brush. Because remember white reveals. Just a little bit. Let's try some cheek detail as well. The brush a little bit bigger. I'm just going to dose down there once or twice round here as well. It just adds to that shape of the face. [inaudible] and off. It's very soul. Maybe a little bit more around the eyes. Just take your time doing there. I'm rushing here, but you can take time when you do it. Let's have a look at that before and after. It just shapes the face a little bit better, doesn't it? That stage done, let's move on. It's time to take a look at the eyes then. I'm going to zoom in a fair I bet. I'm going to introduce you to a new tool, and it's called the Quick Mask, and it's just over here on the bottom of the tool strip. I'm going to double-click on it. I want to make sure I've got selected areas selected. You can change the color here, but I want to leave it on green, that's fine. Then I need to select a brush. Let's have a look at the hardness. Going to put that in the middle, that would be fine. We want the flow to be on 100 and the brush size to be a lot smaller. All I'm going to do is paint on the eye and that will give me a selection. I'm going to paint both eyes. Just make sure you get all of the eye color. We don't want the pupil be as accurate as you can. I'm going to do both eyes. Then that will allow me then to create a mask and I can put some effects on to the eyes. Take your time and as you can see I have painted both eyes. All I need to do now is go back to the bottom of the tool strip. Just click onto the quick mask icon again, and it will create this selection. I have a selection of the eyes now. Now you could use the marquee tool to do it, but the quick mask just thought it'd be nice to show you another tool. Now I have that selected. All I need to do is add an adjustment layer. The one I'm going to add is the selective color to just click on that. I can now change the color of the eyes. Now, I've created a mask by using the quick mask selection by alter option, click on the mask, you can see. Whatever fact I apply now with the selected color, just be the color of the eyes. Let's do that. Then I'm going to click on neutrals. That's the one you need to select. I'm going to drop the cyan down to about minus 30. I'm going to lift the magenta up to about seven. Let's lift the yellow up to about 50, and then the black, I'm going to take the opposite way to about minus 22, and there you go. I've changed the eye color. Now have a play around with that because you may well find that you might want to change the eye color to blue, for instance. Next thing to do is put some detail into the eyes. Now to do that, I'm going to apply a curves layer. I'm going to lift off from the mids to round about there. I'm going to invert the mask to command or control I. Then I'm going to select a brush B for brush and take the flow down to about 10 percent and the actual hardness, let's leave it at 50 percent for now. I'm going to zoom in quite a lot to the eye. I'm just going to paint in some lines now the brush size needs to be a bit smaller. That this is where you can be really creative. Now make sure you've got a white brush and start painting in these lines. Now I can't really see them, so I want to take that up to say 20. I say, follow the contour of the eye. You can put all that detail that you see in an eye as much as you want in right to the edge. Again, it's one of those things where you might not think you've added much to it provides switch that layer on and off. You can see just how much detail I put in there. I'm going to do the other eye exactly the same. After you've done that, I'm just going to zoom out and take a look at what that looks like and that looks great, doesn't it? Now again, you can spend a bit more time doing that, but that looks fab, doesn't it? We now have two layers there for the eyes. If I switch them off, that's what it looked like before I made the corrections, and that's what it looks like now. I can group those two layers together and just call that group eyes. So far so good. Let's zoom out and have a look at the whole image so far. We've taken it from this to this so far. Let's put some more steps, I'm just going to add a few adjustment layers. Then someone put a curves and just a general curves. I'm going to just drop the mid tones just to put a bit contrast and probably around about there, don't want too much. Then I'm going to add a level, so just one layer. I'm going to drag this in to about, let see, round about there, and maybe this side as well. If I just switch those two layers off. It looks digital to me, but just adding those two adjustment layers as soften the image. I think that looks marvelous. I just grouped those two layers together and call that adjustments. We're ready for the next step. Now I'm going to add some highlights into the hair. To do that, it's another adjustment layer, the curves layer. I'm going to pull from the bottom where the dark tones are lifted up to about there. Make sure the mask is selected. Invert the mask. Select a brush B for brush, let's make it a bit bigger, and the flow, let's take it to about 10 percent. What they'll do, and then we just need to brush on where we see highlights and just move around the image. I am now hair dresser, by any means. Hopefully important highlights in the right places, and it all it will do is accentuate the curves. It just creates a bit of depth. Don't forget any adjustment layers, non-destructive server, and have done it too strong. For instance, I can back the effect off and make it less severe. Let's have a little look, and that's looking already good, isn't it? You can spend a bit more time doing that. I'm sure of, you could think of more places ever spent time where to put those highlights or table look. That we'll do. I like that. That's the highlights done. I'm just going to name that layer highlights, and then we can move on to the next step. I'm going to jump down to the grain layer. This is the main flat image that we have of Sophie. I'm going to have a look at the lip area, so I'm going to zoom in to the lip area. I want to select the lasso tool. Now remember before, hereon we change the feather appear to 30. I'm going to put that to zero. I'm going to make a selection. I think if I make it from around about here, that should do. I'm going to further that by say, three pixels will be fine. Command or Control J will make a copy of the lip area. Then I'm just going to move that, so we have that here. Then I'm going to press the transform tool. Command or Control T, right-click in the center and I want to flip the horizontal, and then I'm going to accept that, and then I'm going to move it into position. It looks like it needs rotate and slightly so Command or Control T, the transform tools and I'm just going to rotate it. Hardly anything, just a tiny little bit. Something like that should do. It already looks okay, doesn't it now? I can use my up and down arrow keys to get it into the right position and also switch it on and off just to see how that's looking. That's looking pretty good. Double-click on the hand. The next thing we can do is paint the lips with the quick mask tool and we can change the lip color. Let me zoom in, and that's what we'll do next then. Remember it's this tool here. I'm just going to click on that and select a brush, and I will indeed paint the lips. Once I have the lips painted, I'm just going to click on the quick mask tool icon again, and that gives me the selection of the lips. Then I'm going to choose a selective color adjustment layer. Then make sure I've got it on neutrals, and I'm going to I lift the magenta slightly. Now this is where you can go wild with the lip color, which I'm not going to do that. I want to lift that up slightly, and the black as well, I'm just going to lighten the lips slightly. It's just that minor adjustment. But it was just to show really that you can change the lip color to anything you like. But you've got to be careful because you can create some really strange results. That's the way it looked, and I've just made them slightly more pink, and that's all I've done. Now that's just to taste, but just to show you how you do that. Finally then, let me just close that down. Let's go to full screen. Finally, I will just select an overall adjustment. I'm going to click on the top layer and I'm going to select this selective color adjustment layer again. I'm going to pop to the reds because what I want to do is just warm the image up slightly. I'm going to drop the cyan down to about 31, I think, went about 30 and with the yellows selected, I'm going to lift the yellow to above 50, to that adjustment layer that's it off, and that's where they are on and it just put that bit of warmth into the photograph. That is now complete, ten steps, I've taken a step. Now what you should do, prefer speed or haven't done it, is rename the layers as you go along. But finally, what would do is do a Shift, Alt option, Command or Control E. That's the finished edit. Now what I can do, switch off all of these layers that we've used to create the image all the way down to the bottom, and then I can have a look at the progress. This is our finished edit. Started off looking like that. Those ten steps, if you follow them correctly and maybe put your own interpretation on it, but try and stick as close as you can to after showed you, and you'll get an edit that looks like that. All ready for the next module where we will replace the background behind Sophie.So I'll see you in the next module. 19. Module 18 Tricky Hair Select and Mask: In the previous module, we created this retouched photographs of Sophie. In this module, we're going to replace the background. Hopefully, you managed to follow the steps in the previous module and you will have this completed document. Don't worry if you didn't because you can always download this project file and start at this stage, it's entirely up to you. Now looking back, the photograph started like this, and the eventual finished document when we've added the new background will look like this. I'm going to take you through all the steps that you need to follow to replace the background. With that said, let's jump in and I'll show you how we extract Sophie and pop in that new background. Let me just delete these two groups because we don't need them now. I'm going to make a copy of the background layer, so Command or Control J and that will be the layer that we'll use to extract Sophie. Next, thing we want to do is just going to locate where the new background is. I have it just here. If you've downloaded the file, you are looking for Module 18 Bokeh Background.jpg. I'm simply just going to drag and drop it on top of the document and it should be resized. Perfect. I'm just going to hit ''Return'' and of course that needs to be behind Sophie so I'm just going to track that layer behind the new layer of Sophie that I created previously. Now we're ready to extract Sophie. The reason I brought in the new background before I made the extraction is because it may well help in the process. All will be revealed as we move along. The first thing we need to do then is with the new layer of Sophie selected is to press the shortcut ''W'' and the tool we're looking for is this one here, which is the object selection tool. Now with that selected, I'm just going to jump to the top and I'm just going to click on ''Select Subject'' and let Photoshop work its magic. Now I can already see that it's made a pretty good selection. The next stage then is to click up here on ''Select and Mask'' and when we do that, this new interface will appear. Now we have used this before, but let's go through it again in a little bit more detail. On the right-hand side, we have a bunch of controls, and on the left-hand side, we have some tools. Let's start on this right-hand side and we have our properties box. At the very top, we have our option to change the view. I have a mindset to color. If I drop this down here. I have it set on this overlay and I've selected a color and in this case, it was green. I'm adding a green background so why not select green, but you can choose any color you like, any color that will help you. You can also select this option on layers and the Bokeh layer that we've introduced to the document is now visible. That could be quite helpful and that was one of the reasons that I brought in at the very start. Now it's entirely up to you. I am going to stick with overlay. The whole purpose of using Select and Mask is to refine the selection and to make sure that we have everything concluded. Looking at the photograph, it's done a pretty good job so far at selecting Sophie's hair, and there's a lot of stray hair. To make the image look more realistic when we pop in the new background, the more detail we have the batter. Jump back to the properties palace. I'm going to jump to edge detection and I'm going to change this to about three pixels and you should see a change in the amount of detail that Photoshop now finds in the hair. I'm also going to switch on Smart Radius, so far, I'm fairly happy, but it can be better. The next stage is to select this brush here on the left-hand side, the Refine Edge brush tool, short cos r. I'm going to make the brush size a little bit bigger. What we need to do is to paint close to where the hair is missing. In this case, in this corner here, there is missing strands of hair and we're trying to replace them or trying to inform Photoshop that we need more detail in this area and this brush will help. If I just brush there, you'll see that more hair will be revealed. It will do that all around the image. Although I'm clicking on this part. For instance, over here on the right-hand side, have an effect all around the image. It is pretty amazing the way it works. There's so much more detail now in these loose strands of hair. There is some missing off here, but we're going to look at that later, how we fix that. Now another problem that I can see is that I can still see parts of the gray background in Sophie's hair. To remove that, I'm going to make the brush size smaller and I can actually paint. You're going to be really careful putting paint in those areas and it will actually remove those gray areas. Spend some time assessing where those areas are. It might take you a bit of time to do it, but it is worth doing because it will just look so realistic when you do it. Now if you make a mistake, which I did here, it's taken too much hair. I only wanted the gray removed and it's actually selected some of the hair. Command or Control Z to undo that and just try again, but be less aggressive when you do it. I think that's okay if I've missed any I can always come because it's non-destructive. I'm happy with that. The next thing I'm going to do is try this option here, Output Settings, and I'm going to click on ''Decontaminate Colors'' and let's see what that does. It sharpens things up even more so I'm really pleased with that. Once you're happy with what Photoshop has done jump down to the bottom. What we're looking for is output to, new layer with layer mask and then just simply click on, ''Okay''. I think you'd agree that the whole select and mask procedure has created a really great result but canopy better. Well, let me just show you if I zoom more into this top left-hand corner, a roundabout here, and switch on the original image. You can see there is more hair detail, especially around here, that strand. Now this is being really picky, but in the spirit of showing you how Photoshop works, I can actually brush in more hair and I can add more hair, let's have a look on this side. It does look great, but as I said we can add more hair. Now it's fried some of the hair as we call it here, so I could fix that. Now to do stuff like that, what we use is a brush and it's a hair brush. Now don't laugh, I've created a selection of brushes that will allow you to draw in additional hair and you can download these brushes. Now one of the things about painting hair in is that it works so much better if you have a tablet. Now if you haven't got a tablet, you can use your mouse, but it is better with the tablet. I'm going to use a tablet to do this. The first thing I need to do is to create a new empty layer. Over in the layers palette, just simply click on New Empty Layer. Then I'm going to zoom to this area up here. I want to add some extra hair just here. Now I want to switch from my mouse to my Pen tool. It's B for brush, and then over here where the brushes are, I have a selection of brushes here, and you can download these. It's PPCo Hair Brushes. The first one I'm going to select is this one, Tight Hair strands. I'm going to click on that, and then over here, I need to select a color. Now, if I press Alt or Option, it will change to this little eyedropper and I can select a color. I'm going to select that color there. Then if I start painting, it will indeed add extra hair, which is amazing. Now it does take a bit of time, and sometimes you, I'm not too sure whether it's working or not, it's only when you switch the layer on and off that you can see that it has indeed worked. Now while you're doing it, pick different colors because that's going to make it more realistic. I could pick a lighter color maybe, just to add some texture, and I say make it look more realistic. All the way down there. The great thing about using a tablet is it's pressure sensitive. Of course, a Pen is so much easier to use. If I switch that layer on and off then you'll see what I've actually done. That piece of hair that was fried, as we call it, has now been fixed. I'm going to jump back over to the brush palette and I'm going to select Single Hair, and I can do the same thing. Now with this, I can add single bits of hair and build it up. The more time you take as well, the more realistic it's going to be. This technique is rarely helpful if you've had a really busy background and it hasn't selected the hair properly. You can take your time and say add more hair. That's how you do it, and that's the before and that's the after. Now it's quite effective, isn't it? When I zoom out, it looks great, doesn't it? Let me show you then another option that you have, let's go to this right-hand side up here. What I'm going to do is select the layer below Sophie. Anywhere below it doesn't matter and I'm going to come back over here. Before I do that, I'm just going to change the color. I'm going to use the Eyedropper tool and I'm going to select maybe this dark color here. Then B for brush, back to the brush palette, and I'm going to choose this one, Hairball and create a new layer. There we have a little hairball on the end, and I'm going to make that a bit bigger, square bracket keys, and I'm just going to drop it there. Switch to the Move tool and I have this additional hair and that's amazing, isn't it? I can put that wherever I want it to be, so before and after. We can also use Command or Control T, and we can rotate their hair and position it where we want it to be. Now I don't really think this image needs it, but it's just a little extra for you, if you like. I could hit Return and I have this extra hair just here. Of course, I could move that around, I could say no, it actually looks better over here. Let's do another one of those then. If I select a different color, let's choose this brownie color here, create a new empty layer, select the Hairball again, let's just close that. We have got another Hairball, I'm just going to make it a bit bigger and then just drop that anywhere it doesn't really matter. Use the Move tool and I say we've got more hair and that looks a bit more realistic because it matched the color. Just be careful when you pick colors. Now over here for this part, I would switch back to the Tight Strands brush, and create a new layer. Again, use the Pen and tablet, and let's see if we select this color here maybe, I think it needs to be a bit darker and I can paint in these missing bits here. If we switch that layer on and off, you see I'm just fixing those pieces there and then perhaps switch to, let's say the Single Hair and let's pick a color, maybe this color here, and again, just painting some loose hairs just to make it look more realistic. There you go. Now I won't do anymore because I think you got the idea, that's how you do that. Let's take a little look then overall of what it looks like. It looks great, doesn't it? Now I could work around the image now, adding hairballs and painting in new hair. It does make a difference and a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well, isn't it? There was additional bits, if you switch those three hair layers off, the image still looks great, but I think with the addition of the extra hair, it all adds to the illusion, doesn't it? It looks really good. Now over here, for instance, let's have a look. I'm still so impressed with how Photoshop handled that extraction, it's really good, isn't it? Here, for instance, we could add more hair in and fix that area. Have a little go with that and see what you come up with. I'd love to see your results. But anyway, that is how we add a new background and how we deal with hair that's a little bit difficult, just simply paint hair in. Now if you haven't got a tablet, let's just select the hair brush again, let's go for this one here and let's zoom up into the corner there. I'm going to do the same thing with a mouse rather than a tablet. All I would do is take the flow down. If I put it on say, 50 percent and let's jump onto the hair layer, you can see how harsh that is. You would need to take the flow down. Let's try five percent. Five percent would be great, wouldn't it? You can put hair on with the mouse. But as I said, it's so much easier with a tablet, and I use a really inexpensive tablet. It cost me 30 pounds, so I would imagine it's about $30, and it honestly does the job great. Best of luck with this and I will see you in the next module. 20. And finally...: Hi. Now before you jump is the final lesson. I would like to ask if you can leave a review when you've completed the class. Now you can simply choose one of the four options provided by Skillshare. Or perhaps if you've got the time, maybe you could leave a short review. Now, either would be really appreciated because your inputs rarely will help others have the confidence to take the class. Okay, Thanks, Best wishes. Now let's go back to the class. 21. Module 19 The Neural Filters: In this module, we're going to take a look at the Adobe Photoshop Neural Filters. Now the neural filters are artificial intelligence filters. Photoshop uses the Adobe Sensei, artificial intelligence learning machine that lives in the cloud. What the neural filters help you to do is to reduce your workflow. That's the idea, but how good are they? In this module, we're going to revisit some older photographs that we've already completed. But this time we'll use the neural filters and take a comparison to see how good they are. Let's take a look at this first photograph and as always, you can download this project file and join in. Now in a previous module, we took this image and we used the tilt shift blur and we created this lovely out-of-focus, shallow depth of field effect. Now can we do the same thing using the normal filter? Let's take a look then. To access the neural filter, we just simply navigate up to the drop-down Filter menu and select Normal filters. The filter we're looking for is this one here, Depth Blur. To apply the neural depth blur filter, I just simply need to click on this little switch here. Now when you open the Neural Filters, you may be presented with this little Cloud here. In this particular one, Makeup Transfer, you can see I need to download that filter first and you may see the same thing here. Now in my case, I've already done it, so I don't need to do that. All I simply need to do is to click on that little switch. Let me do that and I'm going to time how long it takes. That process took 2 seconds, which isn't too bad, is it? Now of course, I have a bunch of controls here that I could select. But all I'm going to do is to set the focal point on the gentleman's heart, and then I'll drop the blur strand to about 50 percent and I'll just time that and see how long it takes. That took 13 seconds, which isn't too bad. Take a look at the image. I think it looks fine and he has indeed give me that lovely out-of-focus area behind the subject. Where it transforms from being out-of-focus to in-focus could be a bit better. I think back graduation could be a bit smoother, but overall it is pretty good. Now, of course, I can play around with the sliders and maybe I get better results. But let's go with this and let's just compare it with the version that we created with the tilt shift blur tool, so I'm just going to simply click on "Okay". Now I'm going to zoom in and we'll take a better look. Straight away, I can see artifacts around the hat. It hasn't done a particularly grace selection, has it? We can see these are artifacts. It has got slightly confused around this arm here, and over here, and around here. But that is not really grace, is it? If we look at the version that I created using the tilt shift blur tool, you can see because I used the pen tool to create an accurate path, then the results are much better, aren't they? However, it is pretty amazing that It's managed to do that. But as I say, for me, that's not acceptable. Let's just zoom out then and take a look at the two together. This has being created with the neural filter and as I say, it's done a pretty good job. How good is the out-of-focus area? How pleasing doesn't look compared to the tilt shift? I think the tilt shift looks better in my opinion. Then as I say round here we have the artifacts and the selection is not so grace. Whereas with the pen tool, we're able to create a really accurate selection and produce a much better job. Also, the graduation between the out-of-focus area and the in-focus area is nice and smooth. It's nice and gradual and that's because we could take our time using the tilt shift filter to get a more pleasing graduation. Whereas with the neural filter, it stops here. It's almost like a harsh line, isn't it? Is it any good for a quick and dirty added? Yes. As this was going on social media, it would be fine, wouldn't it? But for something more professional, then obviously taking your time using the pen tool, making an accurate selection, and then using the tilt shift blur it gives you a much more please and results more accurate and more professional. However, for neural filter, I think did a fantastic job when you consider its analyzed in the photograph and doing all that work for you. Even though it's not perfect, it's still pretty amazing isn't it? You've got to make that choice for me. It's a no-brainer. I would always use the professional way as I said by creating a selection with the pen tool. Let's move on to the next one then. That would be this photograph of Sophie. Now let's see how neural filters handle skin smoothing. Again, I'm going to drop down the Filter menu and select Neural Filters. The filter I'm looking for is this one here, Skin Smoothing. Now again, you may see the cloud icon, which means you have to download the particular filter. In my case, I already have it. I'm just going to select it. As you can see, what it does is it posed a blue box around the face. Currently it only has the ability to skin smooth a face. It won't do arms, legs, that type of thing, torsos. Help just do the face, but in our case, that's great because we only have a face. To initialize the skin smoothing then I'll just click on the little switch. Photoshop work its magic now, it did it instantly. It's quite impressive how quick it does it. We can see that we have, again slides one for blur, one for smoothness and I want to leave them in the center. I'm just going to click on "Okay". We can take a look at how good that is, so I'm going to switch the zoom tool, I'm going to zoom in. It's done a really good job. The skin is smooth and all the detail, the pores and the texture are all in place and it looks fine, doesn't it? Let's compare it though to the edit of Sophie space using frequency separation. Let's take a look at that. That's this image here. Now, to me, the skin looks very realistic. If we jump back to the neural skin smoothing, it's still fabulous, but it looks almost like plastic, doesn't it? Don't get me wrong, I'm really impressed, but it looks a bit plasticky, and if I go back to the frequency separation, you can see it looks a lot more realistic. The texture is much better, especially around this cheek areas here where there's highlights. Jumping back to the neural filter, this area here, it looks synthetic, doesn't it? To me, to my eyes anyway and I'm sure you'll agree. The frequency separation is much better. Now I guess, if I'd played with the sliders and changed some of the sentence, you have two options. It might have produced a better version. But as you know, when I applied the skin smoothing using frequency separation, there was a lot of steps involved to create that smooth-looking and authentic-looking skin. Whereas with the neural filter, it was super-quick, wasn't it? Again, for a quick and dirty skin smoothing operation, it's ideal, isn't it? Of course, when you zoom out, this is the neural filter and this is frequency separation. Now even zoomed out, I can see this is much better but I am still super impressed with the neural filter. Oddly enough, it creates a little mask that looks like this, and that's crazy, isn't it? If I zoom in, you can see that this part of the eye, the semi-brown or some lip, switching the layer back on, all added up together, it works. No, I don't think it's a 100 percent there. I don't think this frequency separation is much better, but, as I said, for a really quick edit, the neural filter, which is this one, is pretty good. If you can put up with the fact that parts of the face look a bit synthetic, then that's fine. For me, I would always go down the professional route. But I say in the spirit of teaching you how to use Photoshop, we should indeed look at the neural filters. Have a little go and play around with the sliders, maybe you'll get a better result. Finally, let's move on to the next image, which is this one here. We're going to do something a bit special with this one. One of the options that the neural filters gives us is the ability to colorize a black and white photograph. Imagine you have a black and white photograph, perhaps it's an old photograph, or perhaps you shot in black and white. I know you always shoot in color and convert later. But let's, for instance, say that you just have a black and white photograph. Again, I'm going to pop up to the top, drop-down the Filter menu and select ''Neural Filters''. The one we're looking for is this one here, colorize. Now when I activate it with the switch, Photoshop will analyze this photograph and apply some color. Let's see how well it does. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? It is indeed now a color photograph. Now there's a bunch of sliders that you can adjust. Now I'm not going to do that, but you can have a go at doing that. I'm just going to click on ''Okay'', to accept that. There we have it, a color photograph. How accurate that is, I don't know. Now I could open the original color photograph up and take a look, but that would be a bit unfair because why would I colorize the photograph if I already had the color version? So I'm not going to do that. I know there's mistakes around this photograph. There's a lot of magenta, for instance, on the lady shoulder, in the building as well. Certain parts of the building has got magenta added. Now maybe adjusting the sliders, I could make that better. But to be fair, it is pretty amazing that you can take a black and white photograph and convert it to color. Now you may have lots of old black and white photographs and you can scan them in and quite simply colorize them. Now I know to colorize a photograph manually step-by-step takes a hell of a long time, so to be able to do it with a neural filter is pretty amazing. Before we finish, I'm going to show you the bad side of neural filters. Because I think at the moment, there's good and bad and I believe they will get better but some of the neural filter options are a bit stupid. Let's take a look and have a bit of fun just before we finish. Let's jump back to the image of Sophie. I can use a neural filter to change her facial expression. Let's take a look at how good that looks or how bad that looks. Up to the Filter section, drop-down and select ''Neural Filters''. The option we're looking for is Smart Portrait. I'm going to activate using the switch. Then I've got a bunch of options here, Be Happy, Surprise, Anger, Facial, Age, etc, and you can adjust the sliders to adjust the effect. Let's make Sophie happy by plus 10. It does take a while to do it, so let's popper on plus 10. That took about 25 seconds and it looks ridiculous, doesn't it? It really does. I would never use this set of filters. Now maybe they'll get better over time, but I doubt it. I'm going to put that back to zero, and let's try another one just for fun. We'll pop in anger. I'm going to make her angry by, say, 30, just for fun and let's see what that does. That looks ridiculous, doesn't it? It really does. She does look a little bit angry but it doesn't look realistic. Her whole face, shape, and the shape of the eyes, well, everything basically, it just doesn't work. I'm going to cancel that. I'm sorry, Sophie, I'm going to put you back to your beautiful self. Now, there's Makeup Transfer, there is Super Zoom, and Style Transfer. Have a go with those neural filters and see what you can come up with. I think the neural filters are trying to emulate what apps do. On your smartphone, there's a whole heap of apps that you can use to change facial expressions, etc, and I think Photoshop are trying to keep up with that. But the reality is, the professional and fantastic way to edit any photograph is with Photoshop, with the tools, and all the options, and all the filters, adjustment layers, masks, all of that stuff, that is the way to do it. If you want to be professional and you want professional results, that's what you do. Neural filters who knows for the future, they could be the way forward, but I doubt it somehow. Spend on that care and that attention, and also creating something that's personal to your taste and not allowing a set of filters, in this case, neural filters to do the work for you. For me, it's always going to be the professional route, and as I say, using all those options that you have. Download the project files and have a go, have a little play around with the neural filters. If you've completed the previous steps, the tilt, shift, blair for instance, and the portraits of Sophie using frequency separation, just compare them side-by-side and I'm sure you'll agree that the neural filters are great, but they're not quite there yet. I will see you in the next module.