Transcripts
1. Introduction: hello and welcome to this beginner's course in getting started in Photoshopped. My name is Sean Vulture. I'm a digital artists and I worked with Photoshopped almost every single day. If you're someone who wants Rosia or as row shop and never really got around to using it, then this is the course for you. And even if you've never even opened up photo shop, this course will really help someone who knows a little bit about photo shop. Then this course can still be really great, as it can really reinforce what you already know about the program. In this course, we're gonna be looking at eight specific topics to help kick start your way right in the photo shop. Once you know all of these topics, you can then add them to your vocabulary and expand off of that. I organized this course in a way that will show you everything you need to know. From the moment you launch photo shop to the moment you export your image, you don't need any experience, any skills whatsoever. By the end of this course, you'll be able to navigate and explore photo shop with confidence. You'll be able to know things like tools, layers, deep EI effects, so many things. And you don't need to know what any of those mean yet. So if you're ready to get started, we could jump right into it with the first video. I'll see you there by
2. Window Organization: over a look into the first video and gang starting Photoshopped. Remember, I intend on making this course for people who have never used photo shop or barely used it . I'm also gonna go with the assumption that you've already installed photo shop and you're ready to get going. So in order to get started, I thought the best way would be to ease ourselves into gaining a familiarity with the layout of the program. So when you open up Photoshopped, you should get a screen similar to this. I'm using a PC, but everything should be relatively the same If you're using Mac just to get into it, press create new in select default photo shop size it create, and we'll get more into that section leader and should get this screen. And one thing to keep in mind is my version of photo shop will probably be different than yours. Depending on when you're watching this over, its nothingto worry about it should be all relatively the same. So photo shop is designed in a way that you control how you want your set up to be. Think of it as a desk. You have certain tools at your desk and you get to decide where those tools go. Photo shop is no different from this concept. This is also true for most other adobe programs. So many of the commands and methods I'll be showing you here are going to be universal to all other adobe programs. Okay, let's get into the actual layout of the program. There are four main spaces to be concerned with, so we have this large area in the middle. This is where our image will be and we have the top bar where options are the left and right areas are where we can set up our workspace. Before we go any further, I want to make sure our set up is the same. So let's go to window workspace photography. You can also easily access this in the top right corner off this drop down menu. Now, that should make your workspace similar to this. Okay, so let's look over here at the toolbar over to the left. This bar consist of many different icons that we call tools, and each of them can be left clicked to equip that tool. This toolbar is very important, will be going through some of the important ones throughout the course. But for now, let's stay selected on the move tool right at the top. It would take a look at this top bar appear, which is called the Options Bar. There's also many icons and things up here that we're not gonna worry about for right now. But just know that this bars for tweaking the tool you've selected. So this change is whenever you select a different tool. Now, Like I said, photo shop is designed to work how you want toe work. So left and right windows are actually movable. So, for example, the toolbar if you left click right here on this black bar and drag it out, you can actually move it around and place it anywhere you like. Now, I wouldn't recommend dropping it right smack in the middle. That would be blocking your image and just kind of weird. I don't know why you'd want to do that, but if you want to, you can. And that's just the freedom of Photoshopped. So right now our toolbar is in a state that we call undocked. That just means it's sort of floating in space or you could make the analogy of this as a boat, and it's floating at sea that also works. But anyway, there are two main docks to place our toolbar at the left and right side. If we want to Docker toolbar, we just need to drag it over to the left side and wait for this little blue outline to appear and we can just let go. And now it's docked. Docking just helps of organization. It's not really going to change anything dramatically. Something also dimension is that you can expand and collapse your windows using these arrows right here expanding it will make it bigger. And it may provide more detailed options, especially with these windows on the right side. These windows can also be undocked, and they can actually be docked on top of each other. So I can just take out navigator right here and place. It may be in this tab or up here or wherever. Just know if you hit this top are up here, everything under it will be pulled out as well. But you can take all these out and just put him wherever you want. And if you ever get something really weird like this. You can always go up back to this drop down menu and press reset or select a different one if you want. But for right now we're using photography, so that will reset it all and be all good. Now, with a little bit of experimenting, you can really get anything you want. Someone knows their sizable to like I'm doing here. You you just grab right in between. You can make this give this a little bit more space, but this will be a little bit less. You can drag it out this way, you can bring it back in. Do it. Everyone know if you ever want to get rid of a window, you can always go up to this button right here, and you can go ahead, close it and get rid of that. And you can actually bring it back by going upto window and finding whatever you got rid of and selecting what you want. You can bring in new windows and do all that. But anyway, that's what I have for ah, window organization. Hopefully that really gives you ah familiarity with the program a little bit. You don't have to know what any of these do. Um, but anyway, in the next video, we're gonna be looking at actually bringing in files and working more with size.
3. Importing and Size Part 1: Okay, so now that our workspace is all set up, I think it's time that we get something we can actually start working with and start. We're gonna go up to file and press new and should get this window similar to something like this. And also, if you do happen to Oto, open up photo shop for the first time, you should also get this window. And if you have to get creative So this window is where we're going to be selecting our size for our new file, and we're gonna go ahead and focus on the right area over here where we can make a preset. So what I'm gonna dio is I'm going to name this preset 8.5 by it's but space right there also gonna do at 300 d. P. I don't worry too much about these numbers. Um, well, beginning to that. So what we want to do is go down to with make sure we're in inches and I'm gonna put 8.5, and for height, I'm going to put 11 and then resolution should be at 300 pixels per inch and the rest of the settings should be all right. What we can do is then hit, create, and you can see that our new file has just appeared 8.5 by 11. Now I just want to talk about resolution for just a second resolution. Give me alone complicated, but I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. I'd recommend that you don't fall along for this one and just watch. So essentially, resolution is referring to the amount of pixels in your file. It will always size with your dimensions. So if I take this a and half by 11 file and set the resolution to one press, okay, you'll see that we end up with a very, very small file. If I just zoom in here, even actually see the pixels here. If we count, um, you'll see that it's 11 pixels high, and it's actually nine pixels wide. And the reason it's nine pixels wide because we can't have half a pixel. Otherwise, it would be a and 1/2 pixels wide, but its rounding up so there's going to be nine pixels. If we change the resolution again and make it to you will see that our file has actually doubled in size, and we can actually keep doing this if we do it for for example, um, they'll actually quadruple our size, and we can just keep doing that and keep doing that. It's what's the best resolution toe have them? Well, most people stick to 300 and this is actually a great size to work for anything. The reason why is because not only does it give you plenty of pixels to work with, but most consider it a minimum to have when printing. Now, if you're printing something very large than the resolution should be higher. The general rule of thumb with resolution is that the higher it is, the better the quality. However, your file size gets bigger, which slows things down. Now, this doesn't mean you should just crank up the resolution toe like a 1,000,000. There is a limit to how high rez something can be. If you can't see any pixels, then you should be fine. But if you can, then you should have, ah, higher resolution. I could go a lot deeper into this, but I think this stop there for now, and we're just gonna leave the resolution at 300. Now I think we should actually bring something in now. There's lots of ways to do this. And I think the easiest way is to just drag and drop. So I'm gonna open up my folder right here, and I have an image already prepared. And I am going to just simply take this, drag it over to my work area and you'll see a lack Chua Li get completely highlighted and I'm just going to let go. And as you can see, the image is now there. We can take this, move it around. We can resize it with these anchor points. And once we're done, we can get this check Mark, or we can press enter on your keyboard and that will sort of, ah, lock it into place, you know, officially be there. What's happening here is we actually have a lot of extra white space that we don't need, and what we can do is just crop it out. So what we can do is go over to the toolbar and we're going to hit this icon right here. And this is the crop tool. Now, once you select it, you'll immediately see that the edges of our workspace here is going to have some anchor points. And what we can do is drag these anchor points and it should sort of snap into place right when it detects these pixels. Okay, so we just got ahead and drag that over here, take the bottom, drag it up, And once we have that all good, we can Then again hit the check mark or a press enter on your keyboard, and it will officially be crapped.
4. Importing and Size Part 2: Now I'm gonna show you a slightly different way of bringing in images, and we can actually avoid using the cropping tool and skip a few steps just to make things easier. That's just to show you the cropping tool in making a file. But actually, what weaken Dio is, um, re open up our image again on our folder. I can actually take this image and drag it. And instead of dropping it into the workspace, I'm going to go up to my tab section up here and you can see that it will say copy for something like that. And just in this area, in this blank space, you can let go, and I'll actually make ah brand new file and size it accordingly to that image. Now, what's great about photo shop is that we can actually view multiple images at once. Now, think of Photoshopped kind of like an Internet browser like Google or whatever you have. Um, that has tabs. Now, with this new document that we just made, we just made a new tab up here, and we can actually go back to the ones we just made by selecting this tab or the staff now similar to the last video. We can actually take these tabs and drag them out. And as you can see, we now can look at two images at the same time, which could be very useful for preparing things. And what we can dio is we can actually go ahead and doc our image back where it was, and we can continue having tabs like this. So another thing about size is, let's say you realize your image is not big enough or perhaps too big. What we can do is actually go up to image and then press image size. Now you can also do that by pressing control all high and for Mac. I believe it is command all I and this should bring up this sizing menu. So the first thing we want to do is make sure re sample is checked, and then we want to make sure that our units are in inches and then we'll say we want a 15 by eight inch image. For example, Uh, what we want to do is go to with and put in our largest number, which would be 15 and you can see that all these numbers will change. So that it the images still proportionate. Now we want an eight by 15 and this is 8.434 Um And what we What we gonna have to do is we're going to need to crop this. So for now, we just want to hit, okay? And you can see her image got a lot smaller and just zoom in. And by the way, this is the way I'm zooming in is I'm holding down Ault and I'm scrolling with my mouse. Even also zoom in by either pressing command or control and then pressing the plus or minus sign on your keyboard to Zuman incrementally. So in order to make this exactly 15 by eight, we need to do some cropping. So what we can do is go over to this crap tool that we used earlier. Then what we can do is just go to these two bars here and we can enter in how big we want it. So the with was 15 and we want the height to be eight and you can see that the cropping shrunk just a little bit. And if we want Teoh, we can actually just move this to wherever we want and this step right in the middle. So I'm okay, If that's so, we can go ahead and press this check mark. And now, if I go control all too high, you can see that we now have a 15 by eight image. Exactly. So I'm going to stop there for files and sizing. In the next video, I'm going to get more into the toolbar, specifically the marquee tool, which is great for selecting, moving and pasting.
5. Selection Tools Part 1: All right, so now we're gonna be looking a little bit more in depth in these tools. Over here in the toolbar tools are what may Photoshopped photo shop. Not a lot can get done without him. Now, we've already used one of them so far and as the crop tool right here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and talk about the ones that I think are most important. So let's get started. So in this video, we're gonna be looking at a certain group of tools called the selection tools. And a general term for selection means cutting out specific parts of your image and doing certain things with it, like moving or adjusting a part of it. I'll be using this image as an example, and you can pick any image you'd like for this. So arguably one of the most important tools out there on the stool bar is the move. Tool, move. Tool is located right at the top, right here as four arrows intersecting just like this. And this tool is super, super basic, but very handy. And all it does is it just moves your image. Now, if you go ahead in left click and try to move it. You may get this message, and if you do, that's okay. All you have to do is click this convert to normal air. And now we're gonna be able to move that. I can explain that a little bit more later. What just happened? But what you can do is just go ahead and move it back and forth drinks just like this, and we can snap it back into position just like that. Now, speaking of navigation, I just want to play out a really useful shortcut. So if you hold down space bar, you will see that there's now a hand and this makes it so you can move throughout your image while zoomed in. And right now I'm not zoomed in, so it's not gonna work. So I'm just gonna go in, zoom in by holding down Ault in scrolling And now if I hold down space bar, I can left click and drag my way through this image, which is super, super useful. Okay, Next want talk about these three tools right here and I'm gonna talk about all three of them because they function very similarly. Ah, we have the marquee tool lasso tool in the wand tool. These are all the tools used to cut out specific parts of your image, such as a person which will do in a later lesson. Go ahead and look at the marquee tool and select it. We can go over to our image, hold left, click and drag. And then if we let go, you can see we get this box and we get these dotted lines called marching ants. And what that means is this area is now selected. If you didn't get the selection right, you can always move the box around just like this. And if you want to try again, you CA NDY. Select it by either Hitting Command, D or Control D and that will de select the area and you can go ahead and it left. Click drag it out and make another selection. Now I know there's not much you can do with a box, but that's where our other tools get. Come into play with these, you can get any shape you want. Let's like the lasso tool, for example. With this tool, you can draw freeform, so I'm gonna go and draw something just like this. And if you let go, you can see we get the marching ants again in the line that we drew free for in terms of what we can actually do it. This what you do is go over to the move tool. If we go over there and you'll see if we hover in this area, you'll see these scissors, this scissors symbol right in this area and that's, ah, symbol for going to be cutting out our image. So what we can do is hold down left, click drag, and you condone as can see who we are now moving on. Lee. That part of the image and one really cool thing that we could do with this is if you hold down, I won't. And while holding all if you left click, you will actually duplicate that and let go. And you can just keep doing this over and over again and just as many times as you want, and that's it. And if you ever make a mistake, you can always press control Z or Command Z to undo your last action, and you can just keep pressing that over and over and So you get back to what you originally had. One pretty cool thing you can do with the the Control Z is if you press control on Z or command on Z. Well, actually, undo what you did last and then pressing it once more. We'll redo what you did and you can just keep alternating back and forth to compare Ah, your actions which could be very, very useful. I use it a lot. One thing I should point out is that if you come over to the toolbar and if you see a little arrow on the bottom right corner, If you right click on these tools, you will get more options. So with this, for example, instead of getting a rectangle, Weiqing, now get a circle.
6. Selection Tools Part 2: all right. Another selection tool I want to look at is the political lasso tool. And the way we get there is if we right click on our lasso tool, you can see we get more options and we're just gonna hit the political lasso tool and that will equipped it. And with this selection tool some money to the lasso tool, you conducive freeform. But with this, you're creating points. So if I left click right here. You see, we get this line like this, I click again, that sort of locks in place, and we can start creating these points. And this will slowly build up your freeform selection. And we can just this this is really great for slow, really detailed selections. And let's say I'm just gonna finish this up. Um, we can complete this selection by wrapping round, going back to our first point, and we'll get this little circle, uh, right here, uh, and are Pointer. And that means that's going to complete the selection. Just left click. You can see we get our marching ants. And another way, what weaken dio is another way to complete your selection is you can just double click and that will connect the last two points up and you'll get your selection. So let's say you spend all this time making a selection, and then you mess up like that or something. So what I can recommend is that you just keep on doing your selection. Come on right around and let's just finish right here, for example. Um so let's say I just want this little part in and I mess that up so we can refine the selection by holding down shift while you have your selection tool out. So holding on Chef to you can see that I now get this little plus symbol on my lasso tool like that. And if we go ahead and draw in a little bit of selection right here, go ahead and complete it. You can see that is now been added to the selection I originally had. But you have to make sure you're holding down shift now. You can do this vice versa by holding down Alz and you can see that there's a, uh minus symbol right there and we can be drawn a selection. This will actually take away from our selection, So I can really just come here, for example, and that will, uh, carved out the selection like that. Okay, so let's look at this real quick. The one tool. Now, if we look here right click, our first option is the quick selection. So I'm school, and it's like, this Quip it. And then if we start, uh, painting by left clicking and I'm just left clicking and dragging you can see that, um, we are now selecting this re freight here. And what it's doing is it's trying to for shoppers trying Teoh, find contrast with these pixels. If it's assume appear we have a of really, uh, pretty much complementary difference here. So we have really hard edge here. So it is detecting that, and we're getting a pretty smooth selection, and you can see these marching ants going around here and we can just go ahead and keep selecting and select whatever we want. So the other variation, if we go over to go to a bar right click and hit the Magic one tool, this is our other variation. And this sort of sense is it takes all these similar pixels and we'll select it all for you . So if I select this blew up here, it will automatically detect sort of what I may have been looking for. And, uh, it's just finding similar pixels to that and weaken. Adjust the strength of this. So if I to control d, we go up way, appear to tolerance, think of tolerance as your strength. So the higher the number, we can make it higher. And by the way, the way I'm doing this is I'm hovering over the word tolerance, then left clicking and going back and forth to adjust this number. And you can do that with pretty much any number here. That's just that's just a quick tip. But so if we have a really, really high number, it's a to 55 me left click. Now we're getting more selection than we had last time. Some guy had controlled the real quick, and we're going to show you we let's bring it down all the way to zero. If I select here now, now, we're getting very, very small selection, and we can just keep adjusting it to what seems right. So I just want this blue we can do maybe a little bit more. A little bit. War dio maybe 49. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And we can I just that accordingly. So I'm gonna leave that there for now. We'll come back to this later when we get to the video where we're going to be cutting out things and pasting things. These tools are very useful to be familiar with. So I recommend playing around with them a bit. And in the next video were to be looking at some of the drawing tools.
7. Drawing Tools Part 1: So now that you have a basic understanding of how the toolbar works, I'm just gonna go a little bit faster through this section. The drawing tools. If you're not already in painting, you can go up to this top right corner right here. Select this icon right here and select painting. Or if you're already in painting and you switched around some windows for some reason, you can always go to reset painting. Let's get started with the brush tool. So this is a really basic but powerful tool, and you can find it over here on the toolbar. Looks like a brush like this. There are some other brushes, too, but those are a little different. So just go ahead and select this tool right here. Now, if you left, click it and come over to your canvas. You can go ahead and left, click and drag, and you will start to paint. Now we can do just about anything to modify this brush. Change the color Opacity, shape, size, Simor, start of color. First, down here in the bottom left corner, there are two squares when should be black and one should be white. If we press just select left. Click this black square right here, the one rain front. This should bring up a color picker menu. Now, this menu you can select any color you'd like going down is gonna make it darker. Going up is going to make it lighter. Going to the right is going to make it more saturated, and this bar is going to change your hue. Now, once you're happy with a color, you can go ahead and press OK, and that will change the square to the color you selected. If you try to paint, it should be that color you picked. Now back to this squares. You'll notice that there's also a square underneath the square that for the color you picked, there's also another square underneath this square. Think of these squares is like a mini color palette where you only have two colors to select from right now, the color we have underneath the screen color is white and to get to this color if we want select it. All we have to do is press the X button on our keyboard and that will swamp our colors so now will be painting in white, so How is this useful? Well, let's see. There's a color I really like and I don't want to lose it. I can select that color, swap it and then choose another color and choose any other color I'd like. This is useful for blending and retaining certain colors. The most common two colors to have on these squares is black and white, and in fact, it's so common that photo shop has a little button right above these two big squares. We have two smaller squares right here. And if you just go ahead and press that, that will automatically make your two colors black and white. No, let's take a look at size. Uh, the easiest way to change your size of the brush is to press the brackets on your keyboard , and that will increment the size of your brush. Now, if you want to do it manually, you can always come up right here and change the size with this slider right here. Or you can go over to this tab and change the size right here. Now let's say you want your brush to be more transparent. No problem. You can go up to this bar right here, opacity, and you can go ahead and lower that. And now you'll get a more transparent brush. OK, so let's take a look at some different presets you can use in order to change shape and dynamic scattering Really fun stuff that will get into. So over here on the right, there should be a tab called brushes, and you should see some folders like this. Some general brushes, dry media brushes, things like that. So you can open anyone you'd like, and you should see that there are some different presets you can use, such as, say, hard round, for example, that's going to give you a hard round edge and soft, for example, is going give you a soft edge. I'm gonna have some presets that are going to be a little different from years as I've download some custom ones, which you can do to. If you want some custom brushes, I'll leave some links in the about section where you can get your own if you want your brush to be a little bit more interesting. These air pretty basic. It's just a circle. If we want to make it more interesting. Weaken, go over here to this button right here. If we left, click it. You should get this menu like this. Now you should see all these checked boxes here and what these air going to do? Think of these as effects that you can put on your brush. And each of these checks boxes will do something different to your brush. And in here we can change all these settings. So let's get scattering. For example, going unchecked these real quick and make sure scattering is checked in here. We have some options. Let's let's just put this ad scatter at, um, about 900% and we'll just leave these like this. So if I go ahead and draw, you will see that we are now gang this crazy scattering effect with our brush and that is pretty cool. Ah, I would recommend it experimenting with all these or some of these are whatever. Um, once you know how to use one like the scattering, you can go ahead and to use all of thumb or as many as you like because they all function the same. So one last thing that's really useful is if you hold down, aren't while you have the brush selected, you will get this color picker. And if you left click anywhere, I'm just holding it down. You will see that we can now select a new color and we'll slit. Go. You can see here in these squares that we now have that color I just selected.
8. Drawing Tools Part 2: So I'm gonna leave that there for now with the brush tool, and we're actually gonna go back to the toolbar, and we're gonna look at the eraser tool, which is pretty self explanatory. It's right here, and she's right clicked right here. If you're not already on the eraser tool, you can select that right there. And it does pretty much the opposite of the brush tool it will take away. And right now, I below opacity. So there's gonna bring that up 200 how you can see that I am a racing. I don't typically use Theirry Acer tool that much. But there is one really useful variation that we can use. And if we go over here and right click on the eraser tool, you will see the magic eraser tool, which is very, very useful. Now I have an image right here that is going to work very well for this example. If you remember how the magic Wand tool works right here from these selection tools video, you will know how the magic eraser tool will work. So right now I have an image that is surrounded with white, and it would not be effective at all. If I went in with my eraser tool and tried to erase these white lines like that, that just wouldn't really be effective, as you can see. So what weakened Dio is use the magic Eraser tool and similar to the magic wand tool. If I select praying with white, you will see that it all gets erased and we're left with a transparent background right here so I can move this around and it could be very useful. The way it works is that when you select an area with a certain color and value, Photoshopped will detect pixels around the pixel you selected and will decide whether to erase it or not. If it's similar color and value, it will erase it Now, just like the magic wand tool, we can adjust the strength of it with tolerance right here. And the higher the number is, the more sensitive will be and the lower the number, the less sensitive ill be. And while I have this tool out, I might as well show you the paint bucket tool, which is also very self explanatory. It's located right here, and it should be under the Grady in tool. So if you right click that and select the paint bucket tool, it works exactly like the magic eraser and you just fill it all in. And now we're back where we started. So that's pretty much it for drawing tools. I'm actually going to go ahead and move on to, um, tool. That is very, very useful. Few tools. Um, now, if you're into photography, you're really gonna want to know about this tool. Okay, this is calling the spot healing tool. And to find this tool, you'll have to come down here where there's three dots. If you right, click it, you'll see a whole ton of tools and you want to go over to the spot healing brush tool. Not the healing brush tool, but this spot healing brush to also view, go and select that you should get this circle like this, and this tool is was really made for getting rid of certain spots that you don't really want for example, a pimple which I have prepared an image to demonstrate. So to use this tool, all we have to do is line up where, where we want to get rid of and I'm just going Teoh adjust the size so it fits just in the circle just outside the circle. And all we have to do is just left click And just like, magic hits con and we can just do it on these other ones right here. And it could use a little bit of work here, but they're gone just like that Super simple and easy to use. Essentially, the way it works is that right now we're using content aware which pretty much, uh, it takes the pixels around the area you selected and sort of fills in the gap. And it does some calculations and some things in the computer or whatever. And it will do what you think, what it thinks that you want. And unfortunately, you don't always get what you want. And so, for example, if I just click here with something like this, we get something kind of kind of weird. Now there is a way of doing this sort of manually, and we can actually select an area of the image of what we want. And we can clone that and bring it to the other side, which is essentially with spot healing tool does just in a little bit different way. So I'm gonna show you how to do it, sort of manually using the clone tool and to find the clone tool is on appear underneath the brushes and it looks like a stamp right here called the clone stamp tool. So to use the clone stamp tool, what we need to do is select in area of what we want. So to do this, you need to hold down Ault. And you should get this kind of target Simple symbol kind like this. And if you just left, click just once and let go, you can come over to a different area and you should see a little bit of a preview. But if you just start painting, you will see that is taking the area from over here and is just cloning that area and bring it over here just like this. And you can really work this in so I can hold down all again and maybe come over here with a little darker and do something like this, and you can really just start working. I just did that super super quick, but you can already see that it's sort of working already. So go ahead and play with that. And don't worry if it's if it stresses you out or whatever, this tulleken definitely be one of the harder ones to use. But it will most certainly come in handy in certain situations, especially when trying to fill gaps in certain photographs. So yeah, but I think I'm gonna stop here for now. And in the next video, I'm gonna talk about layers which is so essential to understanding photo shop.
9. Layers Part 1: all right. In this video, we're going to look at some layers. You've probably heard of them. Or maybe you've tried to work with, um but you just can't wrap your head around it. Well, either way, I'm gonna be explaining exactly how they work. And I'm gonna point out some advanced features as well, such as effects. There are layer masks, but let's start with the basics. Your layers should be located over to the bottom right, and you should see something either labeled as background or layer zero. This layer will always be here, and it's sort of acts as a If you had a canvas or a blank piece of paper, it's like a default layer. So you're not working on nothing. So right now this is all we have, but weaken Ada's many as we want. So let's quickly add three new layers to set up just for this and to add a layer. All we have to do is come down here and find the button that looks like a folded piece of paper and view over over it says, create a new layer. Let's just go ahead and click that three times 123 And as you can see, we now have three new layers. So let's go ahead and select layer one that just left click. You'll see that gets highlighted. Now that we're on layer one, I'm going to go over to my brush tool, This one right here and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna just draw put something down like that. So what I just drew here is located on layer one, and you can actually sort of see it in this box here. What? I drew just a very small preview. I could see it right here in layer one. We haven't touched layer to earlier. Three. We're in a void. Layer zero for right now and think of layers as glass pains. If you take three glass panes all stacked up on top of each other and think of them each as a layer, then we have three layers with each glass pane, weaken, draw or put something on it. Stacking these pains up again will give us one whole image and we can edit these layers individually. The layer on top will show everything on that layer. Every layer blow, it will be covered up by what I true On the top layer, this works exactly the same in photo shop. Think of these three layers as our three glass panes. Right now, these two layers have nothing in them. So if I go ahead and select layer two and draw something, you can see that now in this small box right here, we only have that red area and I'll just go ahead and do layer three as well with a different color. Draw over this and you will see that we only get that blue area. Okay, so remember how I said we can edit these layers all individually? Well, let's say I go back to layer one school and select it layer on the bottom as being covered up. If I want to isolate this layer, what I can dio is go over to this little I over to the left on layer two and three. And if I just press that they will go invisible, it will hide those layers. So now, right now, I'm only looking at layer one. I can then select layer one and then continue working on it. Thes eyes are a toggle, so we can turn them on and off. So let's go ahead and turn them all on again. And as you could see, there they are. Ah, and lets go focus on layer three. So I'm gonna go in, select a layer three, and then I'm going to select my move tool up here, and I'm just gonna go ahead and just move my image round. And as you can see, I'm only moving layer three around and I'm not touching any of the other layers there. Just staying right there, just moving around. Layer three. This is just like moving the third or the the top glass pane around. That's really if you want to think about that analogy again and if you want Teoh move, you can move your layers of brown. So if you want to bring a layer from the top to the bottom, let's look at layer one. For example. We can select layer one, and then we can left click, hold in, drag it right. We get this little, um, ghost layer one sort of deal. We can drag that up and you'll see this blue bar right here. And if I let go, that will put them in between layer two and layer one. So just let go there and you see our image change. So now layer one has now on top of layer, too. So that means layer one is going to come through past layer to if that makes sense. So if I bring it all the way the time we get that blue bar again put on top of layer three and now everything on layer one is going to be shown first. And we can always start drawing again on any layer we could start editing on any layer we want. So if I do want to go back to layer to, for example, I just go have to select it and I'll just start drawing on that one again. And now if we hide that, you can see that only layer too was affected. And yeah, and also, if you remember from the selection tool video where we multiplied things, we can do that with layers to. So if I select the move tool, hold down the ault button and off click end drag out, you can see that it multiplied. And now we have another layer layer to copy because it's a copy of that layer. Just hide these two so you can see and now we have another layer that we can move around. That's exactly the same.
10. Layers Part 2: So that's the basics of layers. But there's a few more things I want to look at involving layers. First thing I want to show you is effects. Uh, let me, ah, unhygienic the these layers Let me go to layer three and down here on the bottom right, you'll see a button that says F X, which is short for effects. And so if I just go ahead and click this, you will see a bunch of options And let's go up to blending options. And you should get this menu pop up like this. This menu is very similar. If you remember back worth the brush presets, it's gonna be very, very similar, but a little different. It is the same in that we have thes check boxes here, and these are our effects. So what I can do is go ahead and, um, stroke, for example, if I just check that you could already see something happened. But if I just check it and then left click to look at more options, I can adjust these parameters right here like size, for example. So if I start bringing that up, you will see some things starting to happen on our yellow preview over here, and we can just adjust, play around and do all sorts of things. Now, I'm not gonna go over all of these ends just like the brush presets. If you know one, you will know the rest. But just go ahead and play around with them. Adjust some things and you will catch on pretty quickly. But once you're happy with your effects, just go ahead and press, OK. One thing to keep in mind is, if you're now in this layer, you can see all of our effects right here, and we can actually hide them if we want Teoh with these high toggles right here. And what's really cool is if we start drawing again on this layer, you will see that those effects are going to stay there. And that's pretty cool because it happens in real time. And we can just keep drawing just like this with all those effects on. And if you ever want to go back in a just on in effect, we can always go ahead and double click this FX button. Just go and double click and you'll get that many again and you can go ahead and just what you want to adjust and you just press okay again. Just like the brush tool. We can change the opacity of the whole layer or how transparent it is. Just go ahead and select the layer. You new layer three. For example, Go over to opacity right here. Make sure you don't press this opacity because this is for your brush tool. It's gonna be this opacity and this will just the whole layer. So I'm gonna hover over the text, hold down left, click and going to drag left and right, and that will bring down the transparency or opacity of this entire layer. And you can see that happening right here. OK, so moving on, there's one last thing I want to talk about. And it's a little trick. A little nice, cool thing to know can be a little advanced, but I think you'll pick up on it real quick. So what if I have some text and I want an image to fill up the text instead of color and get something like this? So what's happening here is I have an image like this and I have text over here, and it's just filling it in instead of a solid color. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab pulled my folder. I'm gonna grab something out of it. So just left, click and drag. Come over here to this bar and trap drop right there, and we will get our image like this the next We're going to need some text and we can get text by using the text tool. And it's right over here. It looks like a T, and we just go ahead and select it. You can see that we get our options up here. And for this example, um, we can come over here. This where we're going to select our font. And if you just type in impact, this is the text that's probably going to work. Best SCO. Go ahead and select that. And over here we can select our font size. And for this image, we have a really large image, and I'm just gonna set that to 800. I have it set there, and if we go over to the middle, we get this kind of text prompt, um, pointer here and you just left click right in the middle, and we get this huge thing going on. And for this, you can write anything you want. I'm just gonna right text to keep it real simple. And once I'm done, I can just hit this check mark or press enter on my keyboard. Now I want to re center this so it's not going off this edge here. So what I'll do is just select the move to will and just drag it into the center, and it should. You can get these lines like this, and Aiken go, um, vertically in. Now it's centered just like go. It should snap right into place. And if you look over at our layers, you'll actually see that a new layer has automatically been created, called text or whatever you wrote down. Whenever you use that the text tool, it will automatically create a new layer. Now you should see that in our layers we have our background layer, which is our image, and we can't move it. It we get this kind of X out symbol. That's cause it's locked, and the best way to unlock it is too Double click. Just double click that layer you'll get this window and then just press okay And then I will say layer zero. And now what we can dio is move it around. So to do this, we need to hold down, left, click, then drag it up until you see this blue bar. Then you'll let go. And then now our layer here is now on top of our text layer. So now there's just one super easy last step, and all we need to do is come over here in between our layers right here. If you go ahead and hold down the Ault button, you will see you will get this kind of arrow end a Sweitzer square. All you have to do is left click. And as you can see, we get our image inside of our text. What we've just done is we've created something called a clipping mask. And a clipping mask just means any layer above this text layer with a clipping mask will be restricted into the area with markings in the text layer. So anywhere it says text with these words or anywhere I make a mark, for example, I can show you here. I just like my brush tool. And if if I just left click, you'll get this kind of message. Just hit, Okay? For now, I just start. Ah, drawing here. You will see. And it's very cool. You will see the image actually appearing through my brush strokes. And it's pretty much being anywhere it sees. Marking is we look really, really closely. You'll see that red here in anywhere in that red area. It will show through into this layer right here. If that didn't make too much sense, don't stress out about it too much. You can always go back and take another look at it. But anyway, that's enough for layers. In the next video, I'm gonna guide you through how to cut something out of an image separated from the background and put it into a completely new background.
11. Cutting Someone out of a Background Part 1: All right, Welcome to the next video. The next topic up I'm gonna be talking about is how to smoothly cut out something out of an image and paste it over a new image convincingly and set up for this. I have an image of a person and a image of a flat background on two different tabs. I'll be providing these images for you. If you want to follow along and to make this work, we're going to need to work with our selection tools and a little bit of layers. And now, since you hopefully now have sort of an idea of how to use these, that should be a whole lot easier. First thing we need to do is carefully select this person. So what I would do is come over to the lasso tool and right click and then select the political lasso tool. So I just go ahead and quit that, And to start, I would zoom in a little bit by holding down all and scrolling in. And once you start selecting, you won't be able to zoom in using that Alton scrolling. But you can zoom in and out by holding down control and then pressing the plus or minus keys on your keyboard to zoom in and out. So if you're going to use the political lasso tool, I would suggest starting outside the image first, like here or something, and then just start making points just like this in work your way around the whole body. It's it's gonna take Oh, quite a bit, but not too long. But just take your time with it. And don't worry. If you mess up or anything like that, we can always refine it and everything will be fine. So I'm gonna go ahead and speed this up a little bit. Just to be things I should point out is that when you're using the Polina Lasso tool, try not to, uh accidentally DoubleClick. Otherwise, that will complete the selection. You can undo that buying control Z, but just be mindful of that and also the way I'm moving around like this is I'm holding down the space bar and just left clicking and dragging and that will you can see that my selection is still kind of locked to their, But once I let go, I can continue doing this and I've gotten to a point where I'm at the hair and I just want to talk about that really quick. Um, obviously, very air is a very tricky thing to select. You could see, obviously I'm not gonna go all around here and select these little little hairs for now. What I would suggest is that you just go past it just like that. And don't even worry about that, because we are going to refine it in a way that will we will be able to capture these hairs . All right, I'm now nearing my the end of my selection. I've gone around the entire ah body right here, and all I need to do is either double click or connect it once I see that little circle in my pointer. Once they do that, we will see the marching ants. And I'm just gonna go ahead and go up here because I actually started to mess up here. And if you did, if you did mess up to it can be very hard with this background white background, and it's it could be misleading. There. There's, um some of the arm is right here that I missed. So what? I conduce do to fix this is if I just hold down the shift button with my political lasted whole equipped. I just hold down the shift button. I can, uh, start inside my selection. I can just start in, select that area again. So I'm just going to do something like this. Just follow that arm, and then once I have that, Aiken just do any sort of shape and here and that will fill in that selection right there. And also, I mentioned this in the selection tool video I'll mention again if you had kind of an opposite problem. Like if you had something like this or, um, something like this where you kind of went out of the selection like that, you condone do this vice versa. By holding down the ault button, you'll get that little minus sign, and then you can do some, uh, make a negative shapes, sort of say, and just come around here, get that all in there. I just double clicked and it's gone away.
12. Cutting Someone out of a Background Part 2: Okay, now that that's done, believe it or not, that that was actually the hardest part. And the next step is going to be, Ah, While you have the political last tool equipped, you're going to see some options up here. Specifically, this button here, select in mask. Just go ahead and click on that, and you should get sort of like this window menu. I'm kind of like this. So essentially, what this menu is is this is a way to refine our selection, get it all nice and smooth, or get those little hairs that we miss right now where a little zoomed in. So I'm going, Teoh, hold down. Control and it Theme minus button. Zoom out a little bit and you can see that now, instead of white background, we have a transparent background and if you you can see a different background if you'd like just to help make the make it easier to see what you're fining. You go over to view right here, and then you Congar ahead and select something else. Like overlay, for example, that will change background to read. Now, this doesn't actually change your background. It just makes it easier to work with. So I'm gonna leave it on overlay for right now, and we're gonna go focus on the right side, right here and all this is all these sliders and all that is going to be where we're going to be fine tuning our selection. So, actually, I'm going to zoom in a little bit more. Maybe just like that, you can see that we have, like, some white right here, some edges here, and but I just go over to radius Aiken, start adjusting this to the point. You can see that it is that we have some changes happening in real time. Radius is going to essentially change sort of how far or in inner out the selection was. And I like to have smart radius checked. Seems to be a little bit more accurate at detecting certain pixels. But with that, you can actually see we assume up a little bit more. We're actually getting these hairs, and I didn't even select, um and that's pretty cool. So just go ahead and set the radius to something that sort of seems just right, but it should be should still have, like, some weird white spots or whatever they call your background was. If you're using a different image and we're going to focus on these four sliders right here smooth feather contrast and shift edge and I like to go down the line, I will start on smooth. And if I just go ahead, if I just lower this, you can already see that the pixels air now changing. You can actually see that. It's since I have smooth on zero. The edge is not so smooth Now, I'd only put this up just a little bit. If it's completely off, it seems way too rough. So you don't have to go overboard on this. Just put it up just a little bit. Um, maybe seven will dio and we'll just go ahead and go down the line and then we'll go back up in, see if we need more adjustments. So feather feathering is I just do this. You can look at the, um, our image here, how it's changing pretty much. What this is doing is, um, getting a Grady int from the are edges in, uh, kind of pulling it out. Right? So when I put up the feather and you don't want to do it too much. You can see that it starts to pull out right here. But Rosa being that white. So this is way too much. So I'm going to just put it down. We really don't need that much. Feathering can get a little blurry if we do it too much. Now let's go ahead and move down. To contrast. Contrast should be fairly high, just like that. And the edges will be less faded. Hence contrast You get ah, Mawr, more definition like that And that should be pretty high to get that nice hard edge, but still not too hard. Um, yeah, so 84% That's pretty good. And we'll move on down to shift edge now shift edge similar to feather, but a little different. Pretty much. This is either shrinking or extending your selection. So, for example, if I bring it up, you can see my selection eyes now increasing like that and I can still see white. If I go down, I'm shifting the edge inward and you see now all that white is starting to disappear. But we don't want to go too much because this red right here is starting to come in. And that is, um that is going to be transparent. So we're gonna bring it to just about there, and I'm gonna assume out just a little bit so I can see a little bit better and, ah, in this image, there was some rim lighting. So, like, along the face, so can be a little hard to tell, but I think that's looking pretty good now. One last thing we have down here is called decontaminate colors, and I usually like to have this checked, and I'll just show you what that does. I just zoom in here a little bit more, and I'm just uncheck in. Recheck it so you can see what's happening. It's mostly happening with the realm lighting or getting a lot of that out of there, and that seems to be pretty good. You condone change. This it pretty much is it's getting rid of sort of unwanted pixels that, uh, it thinks that you want to get rid of, and I usually have that around 50%. I like to have that checked, just gets rid of certain pixels that were part of the background sort of tense decontaminating, uh, those out of the selection in one last thing I'm going to change. Um, well, it's already set their, um, output to make sure that is on new layer. Just hit that right there. Um, and if you're happy with your selection, you can go ahead and press, OK.
13. Cutting Someone out of a Background Part 3: you look over at your layers tab, you can see that we now have a new layer with just our selection. And the layer we had before should be background. Or if you brought in a different way, could be layers here or whatever it. Anyway, that layer is now toggled off and we can see the background that we got rid of. If we unhygienic like that, we had her white background again and then turn it off. We have are now transparent background. So all we need to do now is get heart background right here. Or any background you'd like any will work and get it over to this image. Or you can do vice versa. But I'm going to do it this way. I'm going to select our tab over here for background and select our move tool And I should be able just to left click in drag. Don't let go and come over to this tab. Make sure. Still holding down left, click Then come back into here and you should get this kind of drop pointer right here. If I just let go, we get our background right here. Okay, so right now our blue background layer or layer one is on top of our selection. So all we have to do is go over to the, uh, layer that we output it with the ah, selecting mask. Um, selection. We just have to left. Click it dragon upwards. Still see that blue bar and drop. And then, as you can see, we now have our selection now in front of our blue background. Now, there is more we can do to make this a little bit more convincing if you remember from the last video. If you remember the effects, we're gonna go ahead and use that in this. So I'm going to have our selection layer ah, selected in their layers, and I'm gonna go down to the F X button. Just go ahead, click that and I'm gonna go blending options. I should get this window, and I'm gonna go down to drop shadow. If I just select that like this and I, um, going to the settings like this, I'm going Teoh up the distance and you can see this happening. Um, on our image here. We're getting this drop shadow, and you can put it, um, you can set the distance. Anyone, anywhere you like? Um, that just makes it well, more distant from your image and you see around there and now it sort of looks like we have a shadow. Um, now on our background and we can still just things like, for example, spread, um that can make it wire. Lower thinking, keep it low size size is going to sort of feather that out like that. That makes it much better like that. Um opacity, dark shadow, light shadow, that sort of thing. And think that's gonna look pretty good just like that. And once I'm happy that just prettiest press, OK? And you can see the before and after after with this toggle right here and that looks, that looks much better. Zoom out. And as you can see, it looks pretty convincing. Now, of course, this is a really simple, flat background. It's not. It's not like there's a mountain scene or something really crazy. You would not use a drop shadow and that I'm sort of making this act as like, a wall or something. Each scenario is going to be different, so just keep that in mind. So now that you know how to select something completely manually. I'm going to show you this awesome shortcut tool that you can use that will make your life so much easier. And if there's ever a situation where you have a lot of contrast between your subject in the background, sort of like this right here. Um, but in this original image, there wasn't that much contrast, but it will still work pretty effectively. Uh, I just hide these layer and go to our original layer. Um, What you can dio to slight this very, very quickly, even with no tool you can go up to select right here and then go down to subject. And if you just do that, you can see that now. Our subject has been selected very, very simple, just like that. Now, of course, it missed some of the arm right here. And that's because there is not a lot of contrasts right now. Photoshopped thinks this is a part of the background. Um and so did I. I made that same mistake doing it manually and damn really awesome. I didn't want to show you that until you've learned how to do it manually. First because you won't be able to use this in every image, and you need to know how to fine tune selections. So that's the absolute basics of cutting someone out of a background with more tools in practice, You can really make it look like they are really, really there. Anyway, I hope you can see now how some of these tools can be put to use. We use the selection tools, move tool layers and effects all to make. Ah, this happened in the next video. We'll be looking at some adjustments filters in blending loads you can use to help enhance your image.
14. Adjustments, Blending Modes, And Filters Part 1: Hello there. And welcome to the next video and this segment were in me looking at some adjustments, filters and blending modes thes they're gonna be used for enhancing our image. Does that for this? I have an image right here. I'll be working on and I'll provide a download link below so you can fall along if you'd like. Okay, let's get started. The first thing we'll be talking about is adjustment layers. These are for changing things like contrast, brightness, saturation and much more like that. First, let's change our workspace to photography. And to do that, we need to go up to this window in the top, right? Just select that. Hit the drop down arrow. Um, it photography and should get this window over here on the right called adjustments. If you don't see adjustments, what you can do is go up to window and you can go ahead, find adjustments and just click that. Okay, so in this adjustment, you know, I'm just gonna go ahead, uh, bring the sound just a little bit, and, ah, you'll see many different icons and each icon is going to give us a different adjustment to work with So just to show you if you just go ahead and click this icon with the plus and minus symbol, just click that we will get an exposure adjustment. So right away a few things happen. If you look at your layer window, you should see a new layer called exposure one, and hopefully a tab should have popped out called properties. This properties tab is going to be where we adjust the image. So this image is a little dark so we can take this exposure slider right here. And if we just drag it up just a little bit, you can already see that our image is now getting brighter. And if you want to see what it looked like before we could go down to this layer and it's hit this eye icon and that will show you what it is like without the adjustment. So essentially, what's happening here is we have an adjustment layer here. So what that means is, um, with this layer, any layer adjustment layer that is above our image layer right here is going to have an effect down below each layer down below, so we can keep adding more and more adjustment layers and that will give us more and more effects. But it has to be on top of your image layer. So now what I would do is start going through these adjustments and experiment with them, see what they dio and weaken keep stacking them up. As I said and we can as many easily we like, uh, let's go ahead and add a vibrance adjustment. Kind of like this triangle. So I just pressed that Ah, we'll get if we look in the property, said we have a new adjustment, um, effects here we can now take the slider. And if we just take vibrance weekend up, the vibrance appeared, um, in you might not see in effect right away. But we hide this, you can see that is much more saturated and just for reference. Here, think of vibrance. Um, if I just put up saturation, you see, they kind of do the same thing. But I would think of vibrance as sort of a fine adjustment and saturation as a corsage. Um, adjustment. And of course, that is going to make your colors more more saturated. So let's just look at one more and this one is called levels, and it's right here. Kind of looks like spikes on a graph or something. Just go and click that, and we'll get kind of this going on. We get a sort of a history grams ordeal, and this is very similar to exposure. But this is this allows us to control various parts or various lights and darks. So, um, for example, if we take this slider right here, and I just bring that up just a little bit, um, or I'll bring it up a lot so you can see what's happening. Pretty much our darkest darks are, um, being brought up. And so I don't like having like a really dark blacks. Like, um, if I just bring it up a little bit, we get more of a softer tone. It's really a preference, but that's just how I like that. We can also do here kind of as Ah, little different effect brings our mix, our darks darker. They bring that up. Um, but you know, just go ahead and play around with it, see what things dio and yeah, So just some tips on editing photos. Ah, what I would say is tried who frequently hide in unhygienic your layers. And I like that. See before and after, and just keep doing that over and over until you see what you like. Uh, another tip is you don't need every adjustment on here, but sometimes you might. It depends on what you're doing. And if you want a nice, clean, simple image than keep it simple and try not to overdo it, I tend to see a lot of photos out there that are heavily oversaturated. It's not realistic and easily. Bruna Fort Photograph. One other thing is that if you ever want an adjustment less potent, you can always lower the opacity off that layer. So I selected the exposure layer, and I could go to opacity right here. And I just bring that down like this. Um, I'm at zero right now. It's pretty much the same as hiding that layer. You could see how much darker got, but I just bring it to 50% in 200. You can see the difference right there that it's changing. Um, it's making this layer more see through, so it's having a less potent effect. However, if you do want a more powerful exposure. For example, you can go ahead and click this layer, then on your keyboard. If you press command J or controlled J, it will duplicate your layer, and then you can adjust the opacity from there. If it's too much weaken, lower it, or if it's still not enough, you can always add another layer. And you can just keep, uh, doing that over and over again. And if you're not sure how bright something should be, I would say Make it overly bright, kind of like this, then inch back from there. So this is obviously a little too bright. So I'm gonna go and, um, hide some of these layers like this. Um, go back and forth, see what I like. Um, and then that might be maybe a little bit. No, that's that looks good about their and one more thing. If you're ever unsure about really anything, stand back, take a break and come back to in a few hours with fresh new pair of eyes. Better yet, let someone else take a look at it and let them give you their opinion on it. One final thing about adjustments, I just want to show you my favorite adjustment. This one is called color. Look up, And it kind of looks like a grid right here. And if you just press it and go to properties over here, um, and it should be selected on three D luck file. And if you go to this drop down menu right here and see, you'll see candlelight cube, and you'll get this beautiful CB effect. Usually, this is way, way too much. So what I like to do is, um, use that potency, um, technique and lower the opacity to at least 50. And we can start to see some of the differences. Sometimes the lights can be to start hurt your eyes. This gives a really nice soft tone. Um, again, it's just a personal preference is just one of my favorite adjustments.
15. Adjustments, Blending Modes, And Filters Part 2: Okay, so that there's enough for adjustments. Feel free to play a round of the other ones in experiment. So Okay, Next. I want talk quickly about blending modes. Blending modes are essentially a method for blending one or more images together. I've loaded up a new image in another tab right here, which I'll also include in the course downloads. So I'm just gonna take our image right here. Uh, I'm going, Teoh, have our move. Tool equipped. Um, left, click and hold drag over to this tab. Don't let go. Then come down here and to your point changes to this and let go right in the middle here and right away. When you drag it over, it should brain or change color. And this is because it's under our adjustment layers. So if we move it to the top, just left, click and went. Is that blue bar bring all the way to the top? You can see that now. Our adjustment layers are no longer affecting our image here and looks exactly like this one over here. So in order to blend this, we need to have make sure this layer is selected and then you'll see this drop down menu right here. It should say normal. And if you go ahead and click it, you get a whole ton of options and you can already see I'm skinning over this and you're going crazy effects. But for now, let's go ahead and press lightened, for example, and you can already see that we're sort of getting this kind of blending image together. Now all these options here are different blending modes, and they're all going to do something different there. Take sort of an element from your image and somehow blended in with your other image. So with lighten essentially, what's happening here is it's taking hold the darks and sort of getting rid of it in just keeping the lightest parts like this. So if I go back here, you see, we have all this, these dark parts, so it's just gonna get rid of all those now. There's no really great way of finding out what blending mode is right for you. So the best way I condone recommend it's just go through all of them in The easiest way to do that is if you open up the drop down menu on just select normal. Uh, if you go on your keyboard in hit the up or down arrow, what's it the down arrow? Because we're at the top, you will start to scroll through. You can see that's changing here, um, scroll through all these blending modes and see what they do. So, for example, darker color is the opposite of lighten, keeping the dark colors and removing the lighter colors. So we're just gonna go down until we find something interesting. Just keep going down. They're all different. And, um, let's let's take color color. This is giving it. We're definitely going to a more abstract area and now, but it's to color. It gives a pretty interesting effect now. You probably won't use this often, but if you do, it really can make some interesting affects. And again, you can use opacity here. You can lower it, and it will start to take away from that fact. So I put zero. This is what we had before and start to bring that up and put it where I like, um, and I can also move it around. You can see something's happening there again. You won't use it often, but it's just good to know that these air here to create some more interesting effects
16. Adjustments, Blending Modes, And Filters Part 3: Okay, so finally, I want to talk about filters. This is a really fun part photo shop that completely change her image. So first, let's select this layer right here, background s so we can put a filter on it. So to apply filter, what we have to do is go up to our menu up here and select filter, and then you can go to filter gallery dot, dot dot and you should get this sort of huge menu pop up. So this is the part of photo shop where you can make your photo look like a drawing if you wanted to. So right now we're kind of zoomed in little, so I just want zoom out a little bit, um, in the bottom left corner. Just that the minus bun. We can zoom out like that and you'll notice that it's actually really dark right now. That's because we're on Lee adjusting this layer and not any of the adjustment layers. Ah, when we apply the filter, it will. The will go back into the other window right here. You could see that we saw the effects right here. If I just moved out of the way um, but once I'm done applying the filter, the adjustment layers will come back. So over here, you should see some folders, and you can open them and look around. And if you this is this really the fun part you condone, if you just click any of them, you can see that some crazy things start to happen. That's a really cool on, um, so palette knife for whatever Watercolor. Um, these are all going to really dramatically change your image. Um, and you can look through there's more folders, toe Look at, um, let's try angled strokes or example that that's kind of cool. Um, if you look over to the right over here, this is sort of like the Properties tab where we can adjust our effects, and it's no different here. Um, it will be different for each one. You can see they're changing, uh, go back to angled strokes and we can start to change these, and it will change in real time. And this is pretty cool. So stroke length. You can see how you like that. That definitely makes it blurrier. Um, maybe keep. It's a link that sharpness. And if you want you can always zoom in, see what that's doing in detail. See, a lot of things were changing like that. You can soon back out. And once you're happy, I think I'm gonna leave it like that. You can go ahead, impress. OK, and then there we go. It will be applied to that layer with all of our adjustment layer is still there. And we get this image and also weaken. Keep doing this so I can go back up to, ah, filter gallery here and now it's going to adjust. Um, according to what we had before, So I can just keep doing this over and over until we get something rial real crazy. Don't say we want something a little less crazy. Well, fellow shop has that too. If we go to filter real quick, for example, um, you'll see that we have this whole other segment right here and all these air going to give a little bit. Not as crazy effects as the filter gallery, but it will definitely provide something else more subtle. So blur, for example, there's lots of blurs you can blur your image with, um let's go to sharpen. And we're gonna go, Teoh. Smart sharpen. Um really? Doesn't matter. Most of these do the same thing. Um, so I just like to use smart sharpen, and you can see that zooms in here. And we can enable preview on and off to see what's going like before and after. And you see, it definitely gets a lot more sharp. So in sharpness, we can change how sharp we want it. That might be a little crazy, but also its abstract. At this point, um, Radius is going to make it mawr even mawr sharper. More contrast, that sort of thing and reduce noise is going to get rid of, um, noise and noise is just little speckles that aren't really They're usually not meant to be there, so you can just leave that there. Um, that looks pretty good. Once we're done off that we compress, okay? And from one, see what looked like before we can press control z and you see, that's what looked like before the press control all Z, depending on what your settings are. Ah, you'll go back to what you had before. Okay, so that's really it for now. Um, I highly recommend that you experiment more with filters, adjustment layers, blending modes. You can really do pretty much anything. Uh see what you can do with your images Now that you know how to use these processes and that's gonna be it for this video and the next one, we're gonna be looking at some saving in exporting your file. There's so many different formats to use, and I'm gonna be describing some important ones.
17. Saving and Organizing: All right. Welcome to saving and exporting. In this video, we're gonna be talking about different file formats and the best way to stay organized with it. Okay, so what? We save a file, we need to store it somewhere. And I suggest you don't save everything to one folder. If you're artists, especially a photographer, you're going to be saving thousands of files. If you save all them to one location, it will get messy and completely unorganized. So I'm gonna show you how I stay organized when dealing with all these files. If you have your own way of organizing things, that's great. You can skip ahead. Ah, and a little bit. Or you can keep watching to see how I do it. So I've just opened up my files here and right here. You can see I have a folder called Data Base. This is where I keep all my files related to art. And I suggest you make ah folder like this on a drive that has plenty of space inside this folder. I have some sub categories related to different mediums. So since we're working with a photo, I think when a place this under photography in this folder. I've made more sub categories that have to do the year wearing. So since we're in 2020 or depending on when you're viewing this video, um, if we just I'm gonna go ahead and click on this folder Photography 2020. And in here I have some more folders. And this is where we get to start to work with something more specific photography. When I take photos, I usually have a lot of photos from a certain event. When I import them, I create these folders that I call batches and they all go into one batch. So when I need to find them again, I give them a batch number and what season it happened in and a small 1 to 2 word description of what's in that batch. So I've already created a batch for the sake of this video. Batch three in here we have some unedited photos that have to do with this batch, including the boat photo we worked on. And I also have another folder called Picks. And in this folder, this is where I store my edited photos. So what I want to do is get the photo we worked on on the last video and save it to this folder. And also in this folder, I just have one more folder called PSD. In PSD is a photo shop file format where I can open it up and it will open up photo shop with my image in all my layers. We'll get into that in just a bit. But now remember, you don't have to follow this guide exactly. You can alter in any way you'd like it. Just keep in mind. It's important to stay organized. Okay, Back to photo shop. We have our image here, and we need to save it as a different file format. So to do that, we need to go up to file, go to save as and a window should pop up sort of like this. And we need to find ah where we need to put it. Photography photography 2020 batch three. And I need to save it. Two picks. Gonna open that up. Um, give it a name if you'd like. And now we need to worry about the save as type. So let's ah, click this right here. And Ah, look at this drop down menu in here. We have four really important file formats that you should worry about. The rest aren't to two important, the really for specific scenarios. Ah, what we should worry about right now is J peg P and G, P s D and tiff. So thes four formats do certain things. The most commonly used format is J. Peg. Be sure not to use the one right under it. J Peg 2000. Ah, that one is different. So when would you use J Peg? Well, Jay Peg is going to be the file that takes up the least amount of space. However, quality comes at a cost when you do this. So J Peg is the best when you have a photo you want to share on the Internet or just want to have any computer. Uh, not taking up too much space. Uh, quality doesn't go down too much, but it's usually a great option. However, if you're looking for a little more quality at the cost of space than PNG, might be a good option for you. This is great when you have something you've spent a lot of time on and you don't want to lose a lot quality and even more. If you want the my highest quality out there, you're probably gonna want to choose the tiff file. But keep in mind, this is going to take up the most amount of space. This file is commonly used when you want to print something. And finally we have the PSD file, which again is a Photoshopped file where I can open up my image in photo shop with all my settings, layers and effects, and I can still at it. This is good to do when you want to keep coming back and working on an image. So to make things simple, I'm just gonna go ahead and select J Peg. Give it a name if you want, and go ahead and hit. Save. You should get ah, little window kind of like this. This is where you can make your file smaller, but also, your quality goes down. When you do that, I would always keep it at 12. It's still gonna be a really small file, but if you need it even smaller, you can put it the quality down to save space. But keep in mind the quality really really starts to go down when you do this. So I would just keep it at 12. Leave this where that is, and you can go ahead and press. OK, now I want a PSD file. So I'm gonna go ahead and go up to file, go to save as and go back to where I waas photography 2020 and picks. And I'm gonna open up my PSD files where I'm going to save my PST file and it's usually it's it's by default. It should be P s a d. So just make sure that selected if you want to save a PSD and I'm just gonna hit save, and that will save it. So now if I bring up my folder, you will see that in her folder we have R J Peg file. I just double click that we have our image and in our PST file will have you'll see like a little icon. That's just a photo shop, the same file. But it's PSD now, so if I double click of that, nothing's really gonna happen because I still have this open. But if I were to minimize that, for example, and open it it will just automatically open up photo shop with the image right here in all my layers. So now that I have my PSD file saved, whenever I make an additional change, I can hit control s and it will save it right to that file and a little trick if I just make a change here. Um, I just make a new layer real quick, draw something. Obviously that looks terrible, but we made a change. So a little trick to know And this is in pretty much a lot of programs. Um, if you go to it, your tab right here, you'll see the small, small little star symbol right here. And if you see that symbol, that means you have unsaved work. So if I just press control s, it goes away. And now I know that this is saved, but you should be saving pretty often anyway. Just keep saving, like every 15 minutes or so if you just. If you've been working on an image for a long time, you really don't want to lose that. So make sure you're saving often. It really sucks to lose an image and then start all over. I've been there. Trust me, it sucks. But, um, that's just how that is. And yeah, but anyway, that is all I have here for this video. Uh, this is the last in the series. Um, there is one more video, and I'll just be recapping some things, wrapping things up and things like that, and Yeah, All right. Thanks for watching.
18. Closing Remarks: hello and welcome to the final video. In this course in this video, I want to conclude on some things recap and explain why I created the course in this particular way. I think if you understand why I organized the course this way and chose the subjects like shows, then hopefully it'll give you a better understanding as a whole. This course was made for beginners and for people who have never really even opened up photo shop. The first thing we talked about was window organization. And this is where we went to photo shop and looked at how we can manipulate the space specifically how we can move in, expand the windows. The reason that I wanted to start with this is because if you know how to manipulate and walk through your space, things can get done much quicker. I didn't want to start looking at the tools or menus until we know what this space is in, how to move through it. With this, we can have more freedom and a better understanding of how far we can take something. So next we looked at some importing and sizing, and this is where I showed multiple ways of getting images into photo sha, whether that meant dragging them in or creating a new document. Also in this, I started to ease into some of the menus in ways we can use them to change our work specifically size. This is where we get something we can start to work with. I still straight away from most of the menus and buttons train to get a good foundation. The next two videos were about the toolbar, and I separated them into selection and drawing tools. I didn't cover all of them because I didn't want to overwhelm anyone, and I feel that would be ineffective. So I looked at the ones I felt were most import. Selection tools are very important in Photoshopped. Maybe not so much for a photographer, but absolutely for an illustrator or graphic artist, you'll find yourself using them over and over again, and eventually you'll find more ways they can be used. The toolbar itself is also important. Not unlike can get done without them. As I have said before, Ah, lot of the tools are similar, but a little different. That's why I group the selection and drawing tools into separate videos. So after diving into some of the tools and menus eyesight, it was time to take a look at layers, which are super important. And I made it the fifth subject to talk about, um because, um, at this point, you should have gone some familiarity with the program. See that there are menus, tools and your workspace. And if you know all of those than understanding layers is going to be a whole lot easier, as involves all those subjects in layers make your life a lot easier. You're still working with one entire image, and the layers are just there to help you stay organized an ally in make certain changes you wouldn't normally be able to do if you were working on one layer. Next, I decided to take on a more specific subject. Cutting out a person of a background in replacing the background of the new one, and this example is pretty common, and I wanted to show you how you can put the tools you know to use. I use the selection tools, the effects menu in layers, just like the videos before this one. By this point, you should have a much better understanding of how photo shop uses tools and menus to manipulate an image, and the next video talks more about post processing and the menus that are used. For that, you'll notice that I don't talk about every single slider. That's because once you know one, you can experiment with the rest. I could show you how to use every single one, but I feel that would just be redundant. The fact is, anyone console, I'd sliders, and it's just up to you to see if you need it or not. The last video was amount saving in creating an organization system in your files. And if you already have one, that's great. Ah, we all have our own way off working and remember that you only have to really worry about four file types when exporting. Then that is J. Peg PNG, PSD and the tiff file and the other ones you will probably never, ever use like I've said before, So that's all I have left in this course. These subjects were meant to kick start your way into Photoshopped. The rest is really just little tips and tricks, and apart from some other advanced processes, that's really it. In photo shop, if you're interested in editing photos more subtly and in bulk, then I was just taking look at Adobe Light Room, which I also have a short course on if you want to take a look. But anyway, if you want to call me on skill share or look at any other courses I've made, that would be great. My name's Shawn, vulgar, and thank you so much for viewing this course, and I wish you the best of luck in photo shop.
Sean Voelger, Digital Artist
