Visual Storytelling: A Beginner's Guide to Photoshop Composites

1. Introduction: welcome to visual storytelling, a beginner sky to focus shop composites. In this class, I will teach you how to create convincing and powerful image composites in Adobe Photoshopped. My name's Mary Ann. I'm a visual merchandiser by profession, a product styling and visual storytelling expert and a passionate photographer. I love combining and blending images together in Adobe Focus Shop because this lets me take my visual storytelling toe an entirely new level. This class can be watched as a standalone plus or as the second part off how to take your visual storytelling to the next level. In this first class, I've talked with the power official storytelling and chaired all the different steps that I take in order to create my own photo shop composites. I've taken my students behind the scenes off this image and reflected everything from storytelling, over sketching gear and the use of space and light to styling and shooting. I've shared everything but the actual editing because the class, but have become too extensive. Instead, I decided to create a standard room editing class. This class, at Beginner's Guide to Photo Shop Composites, is aimed creatives who are beginners at Photoshopped Composites but who already know their way around Adobe Photo Shop and are familiar with this powerful editing tool. At the end of this class, you will know how to select images that can be combined, how to use layers and mosque to blend these images together and how to apply local and global adjustments in order to make all these images sit together and fit together perfectly Before we get started. Let's quickly talk about the class project. Your assignment for this time is to create your very own Photoshopped composite and shared with us in the project section. Off this class, you're completely free in your choice of topic. I really can't way to see your creations and admire your application off the skills that I'm teaching in this class, and now let's dive in. 2. The Principles of Compositing: Let's start by looking at five basic principles off compositing. Because you can't just combine random images, there are certain rules that you have to follow in order to end up with something that looks realistic and convincing. If you don't follow these principles, you will end up with something that just doesn't look quite right. The first principle is liked. The quality and the direction off the like in your images has to match up when I talk about quality, I mean whether the light is harsh and direct, like office Sunny day, where the shadows are doric and half well and clear defined edges, or whether you light is soft like it is on a cloudy and rainy day, and your shadows are hazy and a lot brighter. You can't combine these two different types of shadows. The light also has to come from the same direction you can't sometimes half your shadows on the left and other times on the right. Sometimes you can fix this by simply flipping your inventory, some pally. But be careful not to mirror things such as text. The second principle is about perspective. The angle off your images have to match up to mention an extreme example. You can't combine a front view image with Affleck Taliban, But even if your angles are not that far off, it is something that will be visible to you view us that it will disturb them and make your composite just look wrong. Light and perspective or Richard rules. They can hardly be manipulated and have to be right from the very beginning in order to create a realistic composite. Your free principles are a bit more flexible, that is, they absolutely have to be taken into account, but they don't need to be right from the very start, but you can manipulate them during the editing process. The third principle is about color. The tints and tones off the images that you want to combine have to match up something that can easily be done with adjustment layers. And this is something that I'm going to show you how to do in one of the upcoming lessons. Now, the fourth principle is about brightness. Brightness is not the same as light. While the direction and the quality off the light have to be spot or from the very start, you can adjust the brightness off the individual images during the editing process, and the fifth and last principle is all about texture. Depending on how, when and with what gear your images have been shot, it will have a different texture to them. One might be clearer with the other. One might be hazier. One might be soft and young with might be sharper on. They will have different types off grade to them. If you want your images to sit together nicely, which is something that you want, we need to adjust the texture in our images, and this is something that we can do with filters. The easiest way off selecting your images is the way that I do it as your most off two photos myself and this way. Light, brightness, tone and texture are all identical from the start, and I can also easily adjust my camera angle in order to make sure that the perspective is correct in my entire composite. In the end 3. Planning & Preparation: in order to make sure that my composites are convincing in both the technical sense and in the story I want to tell. Preparation is key if you are interested in my entire process. And in the story behind this composite, I recommend that you watch my previous class how to take your visual storytelling to the next level. However, as you might already be familiar with this class and with my process, let me only give you a very short and limited inside here. Not too much for those a few who already know my previous class, but enough for my new students to follow along for composites as complex as this one. It's very important for me to sketch out both the final composite as well, ste individual shots that I need to take in order to build it. My sketches are usually rather rough, but I've made a more detailed one off the final composite this time to make it easier for you to follow me along and to see where I'm going. You will see this sketch pop up again once I started taking you through the actual compositing. But that's enough theory and preparation because while all the preparation is key and incredibly important, the true magic happens during the editing process 4. Basic Edits in Adobe Lightroom: If you use stock images to create your composite, you can skip this step and opened your images up right in Adobe Photo Shop. In one of the upcoming lessons, I'm going to teach you how to make their local adjustments in brightness, color and texture right in Adobe Photo Shop for me, because I take most of my focus myself. My attitude process starts by processing my role files in Adobe Light Room. I'm here in that developed tool off a Derby light room, and you can see all of my photos down here because I shot them all in one session with the same gear. I don't need to add it them all individually, but I can make the adjustments in just one off them and then copy it over toe. All of the others I usually start in the lens correction, tap and select. Both remove chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections. The 1st 1 removes the green and pink color fringes that sometimes occur in images, and the 2nd 1 corrects the distortions off the lens that light room has detected in the meta data. After photo, you can see how the image becomes a lot flatter and brighter on the actress when I enable it. Then I moved on to the basic adjustments. I increased exposure to make image brighter, increase the contrast. And then I like to add dynamic by increasing the highlights, decreasing the shadows, and also by increasing the whites and decreasing the blacks. Now, if the whites and blacks, you have to be careful because you can create clippings. These are areas which are pure wiper, pure black and lose all off the Arctic details and to check for them. You just hold down your option key while you're moving the slider. Now with the whites, when these first things start to pop up, you want to stop now? I'm not worried about this section down here because this is not on me, not on the subject. This part will be erased later on on with the Black Sea. Do the same and you want to drag it down on a soon as you have a little sprinkling off black in here. You want to stop now with this image because my pants up your black, I lose a lot off details in this area, so I'm going to increase the shadows in order to make this area brighter again and gain back some details. That's better. The next step is to tone curve Here. I create a classic ask Earth, but adding three points, dragging the up one up and the low one down just a little bit to add a bit more dynamic to damage. So far, so good. But I don't like this yellow is shadow cast off this late dream. No, I'm not concerned about the background because I have said before, we will erase all of that. But I don't like the yellowish cost on my left foot because it looks so yellow in comparison to the more bluish right foot to fix this un, selecting the Grady Int filter up here and drag it from the right corner to the end off the shadow cast. And because it's yellow, a direct the slider war towards the blue, I also increase the exposure and then decrease the saturation. I don't worry about what happens here. Just look at the foot. If I toggle this on and off, you can see how much better this foot looks. Now. I'm not entirely happy with the green off the blouse as I wanted to match the color off months reliefs. I could make adjustments in the HSE l color tap, but I'm going to make adjustments later in photo shop. Once I've put everything together. I'm happy with how the image looks now, and the only thing that I want to do is get rid of some of the grain. To do this, I go to the detail, tap and drag up the Luminant slider in the noise reduction section to keep the hatches and saw off the details well defined. I increase the sharpening slightly and then mosque it so that it only effects the areas I want to cedars areas once again hold down. The option key was dragging the slider. All the white areas here will be sharpened, but the black ones will not be affected and done unless of start. In the beginning. I don't need to add it all the images individually, but I can just copy the settings. I select all the images by clicking on the first holding shift key and thank licking on the last one, and not I have to do now is click this sync button, click sink rise in the window popping up and light umed us. It's magic. We are ready to move on to photo shop before the images selected. I click right and select, add it in and then open as layers in photo shop. This way there will open up and Photoshopped as different layers off one single file, and I will not have to tediously and time consuming. Lee dragged him all in individually. 5. Getting Started in Adobe Photoshop: editing a Photoshopped composite off. This dimension usually takes me a few hours, and it's not a linear process. But for this class, I have three broken down my entire process in the individual steps to make it easy for you to follow along. Generally, I added from big to small, from the overall composition to the small details that will bring everything together. We are here in photo shop, with all the images open as individual layers in one file. Before we start editing, we need to do some housekeeping. Photoshopped composites are big files, and I have had Photoshopped crush on me during the editing process. So the very first thing that we want to do is go to file safe as and then safe it in a place off our choosing. Next we have to name and organize all the layers. Photoshopped composites usually accumulate a lot of layers, and it's very easy to lose track. So I'm going to name all the individual layers for the body parts and objects I'm going to take from them. The easiest way is to move through them one by one. If you hold the option key were clicking on the icon off the layer. Only that layer will be visible. For example, I'm going to take the legs from this one. I double click and name it, Lex. While I'm all about nondestructive editing, we also don't want to keep the entire background in all of the images. So I'm going to take the rectangular marquee tool and make a rough selection not too close , especially on the body, because you want to keep some options when blending the parts together. Then I click right and select. Select in verse now everything but my desired image part is highlighted with the marching ends with the layer selected. Hit the backspace on your keyboard to erase it, then click Command plus D to remove this election. This one is going to be my right arm. I name it right. All right, Then I once again select the arm roughly with the rectangular marquee tool and then invert selection. You can also do this by hitting command shift, and I, with the later selected, hit the back space key to delete the part of the image that you don't want. I'm going to do this with all my layers and as I don't want to bore you to death. I'm going to speed the process up now you and finish naming and propping the layers. And now I'm adding even more structure by creating folders respectively groups and sorting the layers into does for this composite. I have one folder for all my body, my body parts and a 2nd 1 for all the objects before we move on. I also want to add a background layer in your composite. Your background might be substituted through one of the images, but for me, I want to have myself floating on a pure white background. So I'm creating this white back from layer. I do this by clicking on the new layer Aiken down below. Then I dragged this layer to the bottom and name it back ground. Then I go to add it. Phil, make sure that what is selected and then hit. Okay, I'm also going toe luck it by hitting this little luck, I couldn't to make sure that I don't edit it by mistake. 6. Layer Masks: now, how do we combine these images when creating composites? You always only need certain parts of your image. When I first started creating composites, I took the eraser tool and completely eradicated everything that I did not need, not just a little bit off the background, like we did in the last lesson. It was not a good approach because the eraser tool is destructive and it's not easily reversible. Not at last. You want to undo a lot of other stuff in the process as well, but there is a magical tool. At least that's how it felt to me when I was first introduced to it. It's called At Layer Mosque Layer. Mosques like you hide certain parts of your image, while the image underneath remains absolutely intact. It's totally non destructive. And now let me show you how to create and use your own layer mosques. You add a layer mosque to an image by selecting its layer and then clicking this I can. A white rectangle appears next to the image layer. Masks work in black and white. Everything that is white is visible. Everything that is black vanishes now that the mosque is white the entire image is visible . But if I take a brush, select black as full wrong color and paint over some off the parts. Those parts start vanishing. This not only works with hard actress, but also have soft ones and with different capacities. For example, a brush with 50% capacity makes the image 50% transparent. If you want to reverse it and make something appear again, just changed to foreground color to white and paint over that area again. A little word of caution. Make sure that you always have the layer mosque selected. Otherwise, you're painting black and white areas directly onto the actual picture on. We don't want that because that's not really reversible. If you want to see how your mask looks. For example, to check if you filled in everything in an area that you want to hide, hold, option and click on the Layer mosque. You can also deactivate a layer mask by holding the shift key and clicking on it on. If you want to delete it, just click right and select Delete layer mosque. Your image will be totally undisturbed 7. Selections: the most important, but also the most tedious part off. Creating a composite is creating good selections. Now that you know how to hide those parts off the images that you don't want to use in your composite, let me show you three different ways off creating actual selections. The 1st 1 is the quick selection tool. You can find it here. If you have well defined edges against a uniformed background, it can work pretty well, but you usually have to make some corrections, as you can see. In my case, the selection is not very exact. And its struggles, especially with the hair quick disclaimer selecting hair is a science off its own and way too extensive a topic to cover in this class. Check the class resources for some links to good tutorials on YouTube. If this election works for you, hit the layer mosque Aiken in everything outside of it will vanish. Now this selection is very harsh. No object in real life looks like it's cut out with a knife like bands around every object and always makes the edges a bit soft. You can add the softness by painting the actress off your selection with the blur tool. You might want to hit, option and click on your lay a mosque in order to see the outlines directly on your layer mosque and blur them there. This second selection method is the pen tool. You can find this down here. It's a great way when you have a clear outline. Like, for example, here on my blouse, trace the outlines with the pen tool. I'm going to make this very fast and not very exact. But just to show you once you have finished, click right and choose makes election. Now, if you add some father, this makes the outline soft, like the Blur told it before and makes it more realistic. Experiment with how much feather looks good on your image. Now, if this actually works for you, just hit the layer mask. I can everything outside off it will vanish again. My favorite method is the 3rd 1 using a brush to paint the mosque. It requires a bit of practice and a steady hand on a find it to be the most accurate and in the end, the fastest. In order to gain the soft edges, I use a brush with 80% hardness. - Yeah , 8. Compositing: Okay, That was a lot of theory and technical advice, but now we finally get to work on the actual composite. As I've said a few lessons back, I'm working from big to small, from the rough aspect to small details that make everything come together. And it's also not a really out linear process. Instead of making all the selections and then arranging and assembling, all the pieces are usually jump back and forth between those two. Editing process is on the one hand, this is much more interesting. I don't really have to. Patience, too, spent five hours straight off making selections, and on the other hand, this way the image comes to life piece by piece, and if problems arise, I see them from the very start. And don't spend all those hours making the selections, only to get stuck. Realized that things are not working out way. Did I imagine them to do in the last lesson I have shown you and talk to you how to create selections, and in this lesson, I'm going to teach you how to assemble and arranged individual pieces. Once you have made those selections in order to make it easy for you to follow along and see where I'm going and how I'm planning on arranging the different pieces. I've undulate my sketch. I want to create my own floating body out of thes four pieces. We have my upper body and left arm, my right arm, my LAX and a part of my back. I've already created the selections and have masked the parts that I don't want or need in the final image. You can see that this elections are not perfect in some areas. These areas where the images are going to overlap and where I will sometimes literally blend them together with a soft brush. Let's start arranging. As you can see, some rotating is necessary to line the pieces up nicely. The part of my back has to be mirrored in order to fit. I click on the layer hit Command T to enter the transform mode that click right and choose flip vertical. Not if we have arranged to pieces roughly. Let's zoom in and start looking at the details. Here. Everything is completely wrong because the layers are not in the correct order. Let me blend out the sketch so that it doesn't distract us. Let's see. We have the back and relax that fit together nicely. And then we have the arm here in between. Let's take the arm layer and drag it to the top. Not that looks a lot better, but as you can see, it's not properly aligned. Let's move it here and rotate it a little bit. Okay, that doesn't look too bad, but we have a small problem. Don't here. I haven't made a very clean selection. I want to plan the back layer and my lacks later together. To do that, I select the layer mosque off the back layer, take a brush with the foreground, color black and then just paint over these areas to make white fringe vanish. There's not a little problem with this stand here and fixing it by just smoothing the hatch off the lax layer out of it. That looks perfect. We have some more issues up here because the back player peeks out under the arm layer. Again. I'm selecting the layer mosque off the back clear. Choose a brush with the foreground, color black and paint along the actress to smooth it out. That's a lot better There's not a problem area up here where the arm meets the body. Let's move the arm layer a bit up and back. This looks natural, unsolved. So problem last check with the sketch to see if it still works before I have planned. Yes, the pot will still fit and it looks good. This will set for this part. I'm not going to add my foot down here, and then I'm also going to bring in all of the objects like the parts and the monster. The technique is going to be the same as the one that I've just used to assemble my body. But I'm going to speed up everything so that you only have to watch me added for a few minutes instead of a few hours. I will see you in the next lesson where we'll talk about adjustments in brightness, tone and texture, and how they will make everything fit together even more perfectly. - No 9. Local Adjustments: in the introductory lesson about the principles off compositing. We have talked about the things that we have to take into account when creating a composite . We have determined that light and perspective or things that we have to name from the very start, but the brightness, color and texture off things that we can't adjust during the editing process. In this lesson, we're going to look at two different ways off making these local adjustments With adjustment layers, you can easily make local changes in brightness and color. Let's start with color. When you are working with images that were not taken in one session or not, even by the same photographer, it's very likely that they don't have to say white balance. One might be a bit more bluish, while the other one is a bit more yellow. And this imbalance is something that we can super easily fixed by just applying a quick adjustment layer. To do that, you click and hold this circle symbol and then select color balance. A new window pops up off the properties, and you have sliders between side and red, magenta and green and yellow and blue. Let's say we think the monster out was to blue. We position the adjustment layer above monster layer, and then we click this little symbol with the rectangle and the arrow. This creates a clipping mosque, which means that the adjustment will only affect the monster layer and not every single layer that lies below it. Now I contract a slider and make the monstro more yellow or more green or more red. This looks totally off now, of course, because the white balance off the monster was the same as the one off the surrounding images To begin with. What you got? The concept. We can do the same with brightness. Let's click and hold the circle symbol again and this time select brightness contrast again . We clip it to the monster layer because we only want to affect this layer. Dragging up the brightness lighter looks really nice, but as I want the entire composite to be brighter in the end, not just the monster, I'm going to wait with disinterest mint until the lesson where we look at global adjustments. As you can see, there are a lot off other adjustment layers here. Feel free to experiment with them and have fun once like perspective, color and brightness. So much up. There was one last thing that we have to take care off the texture. I repeat myself. But depending on how, when and with what gear, your image has been shot, the texture of the image will be different. One might be clearer, the other one a bit hazier. One. My fee. Sharper. Yeah, one softer, and they might have different amounts off grain to them. And if you want all your images to sit together very nicely, which you absolutely do, you need to take care of this difference in texture. You can manipulate textures through filters a little pro tip before you apply any filter to any off your layers. Always convert them into a smart object, because this way, you can make adjustments later on. Let's say we think our monstro had too little grain in comparison to the rest of the components. We click right on the layer name and select convert to smart object and little symbol with a page, and rectangle will show up. Now we go to filter noise, add noise. A new window opens up, which lets you select the amount off noise and preview it once. I'm happy. I confirmed with okay, if I now realize that I have added too much grain, which of course I have. As the amount of praying was perfect. To begin with, I could easily make adjustments through the smart filter. I just double click on add noise and the window will show up again. Now I can make my adjustments or if I don't like but to fill to his done at all, I can also just grab it and drag it down to D trash can. Filters don't only let you add noise, but if necessary, also reduce it through blur filters. If you want to make something softer, I recommend you take Goshen Blur for a spin. 10. Shadows: At this point, you might find yourself looking at your composite and being puzzled, because somehow things don't really look quite right. Despite all of the different steps that we've already taken and all of the different things that we have taken into account, the reason is that we're still missing one key factor, and this is the shadows. Look at your composite and determine where you light source is. Mine is somewhere here, slightly in front and to the right. I'm now going to create a new layer and name it shadows. I'm choosing a soft brush with the color black, and I sat the capacity to 10% on flow to 20%. And then I'm starting to paint in the shadows. I'm deepening certain shadows that are already there to create more dynamic, and I'm adding in you once that would have resulted out of the new positioning off the components. For example, here, under my arm. If you paint too much, just grab that race or tool and undo it. I'm continuing like this around the entire composite, always checking where the light is coming from and where shadows would appear in real life . Jack, your progress from time to time by toppling the shadow layer on and off. This way, you can easily see if what you have done really brings a composite to life or if you have to go easier on certain parts. As I'm using the same technique to apply all of my shudders, I'm going to speed by process up now, - Last but not least, I want to add a drop shadow off the entire composite so that it looks like I was floating in front off the wall on which I cast my shadow. I do this with the help off a later mosque. First, I put both the body and the objects folder into one single folder named Composite or whatever you choose to name it. Then I hold both the command and the shift key and click on every single layer mosque in thes folders. You can see the marching ants expanding until they run around the entire composite, then select the composite folder and hit the layer mask. I can. What we have created is the perfect outline off our entire composite, and we can use it as the basis for our drop shadow two at the drop shadow. Go to this F X symbol, click and hold and select Drop shadow. If you don't see anything at first, don't worry. Just increased capacity off the shadow on the distance. This shadow here is way too harsh and too dark for my image. So let's start making adjustments. I start by determining the position off the light source. My is, too, to write on a little bit above the floating me. 30% is a good value here. Then I tackle the distance and increase it. I don't want my image to look a so I was glued to the wall. But I want to float in some distance from it. Spread changes how much detail there is in the shadow. I usually leave it unchanged because I don't want my shadow to be a huge dark blob. But I wanted to retain some detail. The next point is size. The further your subject is away from the place to shadow appears in my case, the further I'm away from the wall. The softer and more diffused to shadow is my shadow has to be even softer and more diffused because of the light situation in which I shot my photos. This shadow is still two prominent in too dark for my life situation. So I'm going to lower the capacity to a level that looks natural With the slider down here , you can also adjust the noise in your shadow to make it look really natural. Match it with the noise off the rest of your images. Around 10% works for me and that was it for the shadows. I'm going to see you in the next lesson where we will put the final patches to our composite. 11. Global Adjustments: Once you're finished with your composite, it's time to add the final touch on day at one or several global adjustments to it. This way you will make sure that your image looks as though it was one from the very start . This is the point where I decide on the final mood of my image, sometimes the global adjustment that I Addis, where the subtle and our times it really changes the dynamic off the entire image. I like to experiment in this step and don't want to destroy any off the work I've done before, so I create a new layer that consists of every layer that I have created in the process to do so I hold option plus command plus shift Plus E. Make sure that all the layers you want to be included are visible. If you talk all this new merch layer on and off, you should see no difference. With this layer selected, we go to filter camera raw, filter the layout and set up look very similar to what we have already encountered in Adobe Light Room. And we have indeed the same powerful tools at our disposal as we did in that program. First, I'm going to really take up the brightness. I generally loft bright and airy images that are a bit de saturated. And for this one, I want to create a very light, ethereal fairytale light look, after all and floating. And I want to emphasize this magical component through the added off the composite. After increasing the exposure, I'm going to do the same things that you have seen me do in light room. I'm generally adding more dynamic to the image. First, I create a slide s curve and drive the lowest point up to bring a bit off detailed back into the blacks. I increase the highlights. And I also increased the shadows because I want to gain back even more detail here in the trousers. I'm also increasing the vibrance of it that to really get the look that I want, I decrease the saturation and then, at some haste to the image to make everything look really soft to add some final touches, I'm going to play a bit with the greens. To do that, I opened the H S l adjustment tap and select the targeted adjustment to lower here by clicking and dragging with this to you can adjust hue saturation on luminant off the colors . I want the blouse to be a bitch more green and the monster rock a bitch more blue. I also de saturate Andi brighten the monster up a bit and saturate and dark in the blouse. On the other hand, by playing around of the sliders like this, I've managed to make the green off the monster A and two green off the blouse, more off a similar shade. And now I think the entire image can do with a bit more vibrance. But even last saturation. Okay, Perfect. That's it. Let's have a look at the before. Very moody, dark and a bit under exposed. The after is Theo Entire opposite, very bright, soft and delicate. I love Hamas skin looks really translucent and how it has this ifthere own fairy life quality. And that's a wrap. What started out with this rough sketch has turned into this fully flashed magical creation 12. Final Thoughts: congratulations on finishing visual storytelling. A beginner sky to photo shop composites. In this class, you have learned how to create a technically convincing and realistic looking image composite in adobe. Focus up by paying attention to light, perspective, brightness, color and texture. You know how to create a basic added in adobe like room. Have to set yourself up in Adobe Photo Shop in order to added a composite. How to make selections and work with flay your mosques. How to arrange a blend individual layers together and how to apply local and global adjustments to these individual layers in order to make them fit together perfectly. If you've enjoyed this class, please don't forget to give my teacher profile follow and to leave me a review every year is the highest price that you can give me as a teacher on. They help me to improve your learning experience with every new class. Thank you so much for watching and see you soon.