Visualization Basics: Sketch to Design in Photoshop

1. Intro: Hi. My name is Stephanie. And in this course I'm gonna teach you to take a simple design sketch and develop it into a beautiful atmospheric visualization using only Photoshopped. I've been crafting landscape visualizations professionally for eight years, and I've helped create visions for some incredible public realm projects. During this time, I keep evolving and improving the techniques they use. But I always return to the same basic tools within Photoshopped, and I'm gonna show you how to use those effectively in this course. In my education, I experimented a lot with mixing, drawing, painting, photos and textures to help paint a vibrant picture of my design concepts. I wasn't really good at talking about designed, so I always wanted my visuals to tell the story for me. I honed my skills while working in Berlin on design competitions. So I know very well how to use photo shop effectively and efficiently for the purpose of crafting a visual. So what are we actually going to create? I'm gonna show you step by step, how to take this sketch and develop it into a final landscape image that looks like this. I'm going to give you all of the assets that you need to create this visual. They're going to be available in a download link. If you feel ambitious, you might even try these steps on your own sketches. But be sure to post your progress regularly so I could help you out if you get stuck or show you a different way to do things, be able to take a rough sketch and make it into a clean digital image. Means you'll be way ahead of the game when it comes to creating images for presentations, at work, at school and for your own portfolio. I wasted a lot of time trying to learn different software to achieve the effects I wanted, but ultimately, a lot can happen directly in Photoshopped. Don't get me wrong. It's useful to learn software. But if you're in a crunch, it's great to be able to skip some steps and still be able to get a great image out of it, especially when all you want to do is go home and get some rest. Visuals, air invaluable as a design tool, not just a za final way to show your project. Once you see her design come together with riel textures in perspective, you might even begin to re evaluate some of the decisions he made. This helps pinpoint areas in the project that need more attention that you might not have noticed before. You'll end up with a better design because you can quickly see what's working and what needs improvement. You'll also be able to get more precise feedback from your colleagues and instructors in advance of important presentations. The tips and tricks you'll learn in this course will help you with any kind of photo shop work you need to do not just on perspectives, but on plans, sections and diagrams. You could begin to apply these lessons almost anything you need to get quickly done in Photoshop. If you practise the skills I show you in this course, you'll master the most fundamental tools and Photoshopped and start building your own signature style. I'm gonna cover all of the basic Photoshopped commands and tools that you need to get started thes air the tools I use all the time in every single image that I create. I'll also talk about why we put together the visual in a certain order, how to properly use shadows and light, where to find free assets online and other helpful tips that you can put into practice right away. After this course, you'll be ready to transform your own design sketches and use these principles to build a style of your own. You'll find creating images for your portfolio projects, presentations and competitions will be a lot less intimidating and easier to tackle. You might even decide to revisit some old projects and give them a facelift based on your new skills to get started. Please use the link in the course to download Assets folder. This contains all the background images and the sketch we're going to use to build the visual. We'll get started with loading all of these in a photo shop in the next lesson. Looking forward to sharing was course with you See glass. 2. File Prep: Hi and welcome to the first lesson in sketch to design in Photoshopped. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to set up your Photoshopped file. Get all your folders ready, load your assets and make sure the workspace is prepared for a print file. Open up photo shop and let's check to make sure you're working with the right color settings. I use Adobe RGB. The default is this s RGB color space, and the reason it's the default is because most cameras and digital files you find online use this color profile. The default works just fine if you're only creating digital images. But if you're gonna print a file commercially, say for your portfolio or presentation is much better to use. Adobe RGB. Since it allows the file access, a deeper, richer range of values will printing. You won't notice a difference on screen. We can keep the other default settings. Justus, they are next check your work space. I'm using the one called photography. It has all of the tool bars that I commonly use will working, and it makes it easy for me to find what I'm looking for. We're going to create a new file, a print document and for people who are using the metric system, I'm gonna create this document in millimeters as an A three. For anyone using Imperial, you can create a tabloid document or 11 by 17. Let's change the resolution to 200. Most commercial printers don't actually print images beyond 1 50 unless it's a really special coffee table book or an artwork. So the only time it really benefits you to go higher is if you have vector images or a line work that you're worried about getting jagged. You can really save on follow size when you work at less than 300 d p I. And this makes a big difference when you start creating more complex scenes with lots and lots of image assets. Setting up the 200 also means you have a bit of wiggle room. If you do need to print larger in the future, let's get the folder set up so we can start putting the assets inside. Hm. I always begin with the same five folders that hold the textures I'll be using, starting with a background and moving forward to the very top players, which in this case are the light and atmosphere effects will be using at the end. If you think about the way that layers working Photoshopped, this makes sense because you wouldn't put people on umbrellas and tables and chairs underneath the grass layer or behind the sky. Continue creating the folders just like I have until you have all five. Now is a great time to save your file. I have my photo shop set to auto save every 10 minutes because there's nothing worse than forgetting to save your file and losing hours of work. It's great to get into the habit of naming your files by a pending a version or revision number. After this helps you keep track of important revisions that happen along the way. Let's call this one V one version one. Now that the folders air set up, let's load the brush is go to edit presets. Preset manager. Make sure the drop down list says brushes, then click load. Find the brush preset in the Assets folder and load it. You'll find the newly added brushes right after your default brushes, and this folder contains all of the brushes we're going to use in this tutorial. Next, let's load the auction and action is a series of commands that have been pre recorded so you can play them over and over again on different images. They save time. When you find yourself using the same Siris of tools within Photoshopped toe load in action , press the place symbol in the toolbar. Or, if you don't see this goto window and actions and it should pop up, jump into the menu here and load actions, navigate to the Assets Folder and find the included action. This is one that I downloaded from deviant art quite a few years ago, but it's still up for free download, and it's gonna help. Give us a nice cross processed, warm vintage look to the image after we're done. Everything else, you'll find it much easier to create visuals. Once you have a library of assets that you can refer to, I have provided you with a folder structure that you can continue building off of, just like I have in my own image library. My assets are organized based on categories like textures, vegetation, backgrounds, people, etcetera. Within each of these folders are sub folders, with even more detailed descriptions, such as people sitting cycling, men, women, couples, etcetera. It may seem excessive at first, but if you build a lot of visualizations over time, you're going to collect a ton of these resources. And knowing exactly where to look will save you time. Make the effort to name your files in a way that's descriptive. Instead of leaving things ambiguous, it's going to be a lot simpler to find birch tree Young summer than Tree 25. You can start opening the folders and dragging in the reference images directly to the Photoshopped file. One good thing about doing it this way is that Photoshopped automatically names the layer the file name so you don't have to worry about 50 images, all called layer one or two or whatever. Having descriptive titles will really help you out when you have a lot of layers and are trying to select that one tree in the background. I'm gonna speed this up, But please note that I'll be creating some sub folders within the folders to help keep things organized. - Great . So now that we have the file all set up, we're ready to get started with the background in lesson to 3. Build the Background: open up this guy background folder and let's resize the background sketch that this is all based on. It's a really tiny image because I actually lost the true sketch file when my hard driving computer was stolen a few years ago. But the truth is, you don't really need a high quality sketch for the background because we're just using this as a compositional element to help us know approximately where to place in size things . I'm using the transform Command Control T to resize this now. When we loaded the images into Photoshopped, you'll see that they all came in as smart layers. That's what this little icon in the bottom means. That's great for some things. For example, if you have a rendered background that you'll likely switch out at a certain point, smart layers air. Wonderful for that. But in this case, we don't really need the smart objects, so we'll just rast arise the images as we go. Transform this to the size of the page and keep the existing aspect ratio by holding down shift, turn on the high rise glass layer and place it approximately where the building outline is in the background. We don't need to be too precious about re sizing this. It's a high enough quality image that weaken distorted a bit without worrying about the image quality. Rest. Arise it and you shift control you to convert to grayscale. Put that on 50% opacity. Let's cut off the edge here, press em for a rectangular marquee and select the edge of the building. Press delete, and this just gives it a bit of a frame. Let's turn on this composited image that I put together from Google Street View is not very high quality, but we're looking for speed here, and because this is going to be faded back, we really just need to give the impression of the context. Instead of worrying too much about the exact accuracy and pixels. Let's just check the image placement compared with the final image and see where everything should be Okay, so I'll put this back to about 35% opacity and also just size it down a bit. I'm going to create a layer mask by clicking on the layer mask icon down here. Control click on the building Lear to select it, then making sure that black is your background color. Delete this election from the layer mask. By pressing delete, you can press control de to de select the building. Click onto the layer mask for the Google Street View image and press E for eraser right click and set the hardness down to zero. Increase the size so that you have a big soft eraser and erase along the bottom of the layer to create a bit of a faded edge. Let's make a new layer called F Underscore Road, the F stands for Phil, indicating that it's a filled layer that we've created. I like to make sure I name all of my layers so that it all makes sense. Trust me, it's a way better to do this from the beginning than to go back afterwards and try to figure out what every layer is, especially if you're working at a firm, you may have to hand this fell over to someone else to work on, and you don't want your colleagues secretly fuming that they can't understand your layer structure. Let's use L for rectangular last sue to create a little road shape here and then shift F five or edit fill with 50% gray. Now, if we double click the layer, the layer styles panel pops up, and we're going to give this a pattern overlay just for a bit of texture. I have a bunch of my own patterns loaded, but this is a photo shop default noise, texture. Let's just put that on soft light at 60%. We can also give this a tiny bit of ingredient from the background color to foreground, keep it at 90 degrees and just faded back. Put that one on overly 30% so that's just going to give us a bit of a road in the background. And, um, let's put this layer on capacity 65. Okay, we have this beautiful watercolor splotch, and I'll show you how to transform it into the sky. Let's control T transform this and rotate it until the bottom is at the top, resize until it fills the sky behind the horizon. You don't need to keep this with the right aspect ratio. You can kind of shift it around so that it fills the background. Now let's press m for the Marquis and select the upper portion that we want to keep then press the layer mask that cuts away all the parts of the image that are outside of the selection. Let's put this behind all the other layers. We can see the nice texture coming through. Um, let's just check the finished one. Looks like what I've done is sized this a bit bigger to fill the background completely, So click on the layer mask press E and with a big soft brush, erase some of the hard edges. Let's do the bottom two. We can press G for Grady Int, then press X to switch the background and foreground colors. We want to make sure we see the background fading. Too transparent. Make sure you're still in the layer mask and then click and drag to get give a bit of a fade. Let's change the color. It's a bit too grey and stormy for me. Press control all you to access the hue saturation panel and click colorize. Let's pick a lighter aqua blue. Just like this, I'm noticing there's a bit of the sky that's angle behind the trees. So let's use the content aware healing to dab in some extra sky press of E to get back to your cursor. Okay, we have this car. And because the background is all black and white, let's press shift, control you to convert to grayscale, then resize it so that it makes sense for the scale. We don't want it to be perfectly crisp because back around there's always a little bit hazy . So let's use a Gaussian blur at 0.5 to make this a little less sharp and faded back to about 65 so it doesn't stand out so much. We also have this bus, and first we're gonna flip it horizontally and then isolate it. One option for cutting out is to use quick selection to click and drag over top of the bus . And this makes a smart selection based on the image. If you want to de select something, just drag will pressing Ault. And to add to the selection, just keep clicking and dragging control, and the plus sign will zoom in. And if you want to pan, just use this space barn. Click over. Let's refine this election a bit and see what we've got by using a quick mask, Press Q. And you'll see this election more clearly You can then use a couple of tools to refine the selection. The last suit can add in regions that you haven't quite selected yet, or you can use the brush an eraser to get the last remaining edges. Make sure your eraser and brush tools are hard and small to get the edges. You can also use the brush to brush back in the edges that you might have accidentally selected before. Okay, so we have this election Press Control J. To duplicate the selection onto its own layer, you can erase the previous layer. The bus is a bit off kilter, so let's distort it so that it fits the elevation. All view a bit better. Used, transformed, distort and grab the edges to move them down or up to change the slant so that it's straight on. Just like the car. We're going to de saturate this, add a little bit of a blur and resize it down for scale. Let's put it on 65. Let's give it a layer mask and use ingredient. So press X until you see the Grady Int switch to the one we want and then give the bus a fade at the side in the bottom. Let's bring this glass layer in front. The only part we really want is the top part here, which is going to be a glass handrail in the background of the building. Use the last new tool to cut that out and then use controlled J to duplicate the layer, rename it F handrail and put it on multiply. We need to give this a bit of distortion, so let's do that and resize it down to scale. Press Ault Shift and click To duplicate this over, select both layers and press command e to merge the layers you see, they lose their blend mode when we do this so we can just pop them back on to multiply. Do this a couple more times until you've got the entire handrail. We'll probably add an extra piece here later once we get the plaza built up. But for now I think the background is pretty much done, so let's move on to paving and vegetation 4. Paving: starting with the Paving Group in the photo shop file. We can go ahead and turn on all of these layers and rast. Arise them. Click the 1st 1 and press shift. Click the bottom one that selects all of them. Then right, click and go Rasta rise layers. We can turn off the bottom three. It will deal with those later. First we're gonna work with the wood deck and we don't need the whole would duck. So use the marquee tool to select approximate square region. Then press shift control I to select the inverse and just delete it. Control t to transform and hover your cursor over the corner and you'll see it turned into this curved cursor. That means you can rotate, so rotate the file and let's change the opacity just so we can see through it a bit. I'm gonna move it to the corner of the deck, zoom out a bit, using control minus. Then we'll go to edit, transform, distort, start manipulating the corners to match the perspective. Just like I've done here. I'm gonna move it a little higher than where it actually is in the drawing just so that I have a bit of an area to select. To cut out, use the lasso tool and select this deck area based on the sketch. Then go back to your wood plank layer, turn it on and create a layer mask that cuts away all the extra bits that you don't need. Click back on the texture file and press control you to access the hue saturation. Turn off color eyes and let's just de saturate this wood deck a little bit. Okay, next, we're going to draw in this edge. Here we will use the political loss. Ooh, again to create a selection area that matches up with E edge, created new layer and name it F deck edge. Using Edit Phil or Shift F five, you can fill this region with 50% gray. Now we have a bit of a shaded edge here. We want to put a concrete texture on, so turn on the plaster. Barely. Er, just duplicate it because we're going to be using it again for something else. Control to transform, to reduce the size, move it in place. And now let's use the distort command. Teoh, get this into the right perspective. You could move that layer up and let's use control. Click on the F deck edge lier that will make the selection of the edge, and then we can create a layer mask on top of the concrete layer. Put that down to 65 and overlay that will put the deck edged down to 85. I think we'll pop that into a group called Deck that's gonna make it easier for us to manipulate the deck as an entire entity if we need to. Later on. Okay, let's work on the background plaza. First turn on the airplane hangar, paving layer. Let's cut out the background that we don't need with the political last you. I like this texture, but I don't like thes stains and the wheel marks that are on the concrete. So I'm going to use the content aware healing brush. To fix this up, all you need to do is click and drag, and the healing brush automatically selects the content to fill the area with. You can resize your brush by pressing the open and close parentheses, so just keep doing that until you're happy with the way that the texture looks. Let's duplicate it because we're gonna use it again in the future. I'll pop the A pass ity down so we can see through resize it so that it fits the Plaza area in the background. And now I'll use the political last suit to cut out the shape of the plaza, then create a layer mask on top of that concrete layer. Now you have the plaza I could see along the left edge there that I want to add in a little bit, So just make another selection. Make sure on the layer mask. Press the B for the brush tool. You can just brush in the extra concrete, and we want to make a little wall that's going below the concrete. Let's turn on this plaster barely. Er resize it. We're not going to use it for anything else, so we don't need to duplicate it, even in place so that the East rations on the concrete kind of match up with the wall. Pop that down to 65 so we can see through. And just like the Plaza will use the political last suit to draw in the shape of the wall and use that as our earlier mask. So put that back up to 100 so that we can see it bring it right underneath the plaza. Then I'm going to duplicate it, pressing controlled J and put the top layer on multiply. I'm gonna erase one side of this so that it looks like we have a bit of contrast in shadow . All they have to do is click on the layer mask after making a selection and press delete. Now we have a shaded side and a lit up side, and I'll reduce that to about 65%. So now let's make a group for the background plaza again, just so we can keep everything organized and we know where it ISS. Finally, let's create the path that's going through the site. Here's the political last suit to create a selection roughly over top of the path that you can see from the background sketch Double click to finish off your selection. And now let's go up to select save selection and right in path. Make sure it's a new channel and press OK any time you want to refer to this path shape exactly as it is in the future, you can go to select load selection, and it will bring up the path. So let's turn on the airplane hangar concrete layer again. Resize it here so that it fits the entire path area that we have. Great. So now we can go to select load selection from the drop down list. Choose path, and you see that our selection pops up right there. Click on the layer mask, and now we have a past plus turn on the last concrete layer. Let's go to edit, transform, distort and distort this into an approximation of the perspective that we want control. Click on the layer mask of the path below and click layer mask on the other layer. Now let's set this to overlay at 65%. I think that these striations here need to be lightened a little bit, so let's just put that down to 85%. I think that's pretty much it for the paving. Let's put these two into a group called Path and save our file 5. Planting: All right. Next up is grasses. So open up the grass folder in photo shop. And just like we did with the paving, Let's rest arise all these layers. I'm going to go through some of these layers. The top ones are all the flour layers. We might not use all of them, so I'm just gonna pop them into this foreground Grasses folder. These will be the last grasses we work on. This grass texture here is one that I use quite a lot for background grass. It's just got a nice coloration to it. And if you have some rolling hills, it's a great look. We'll use the resize tool to size it up for the background and then use the Marquis to select the non grassy part of the photo and delete it. We'll go up to select load selection and grab the path. Then we're gonna press shift control I to select the inverse and create a layer mask. Now we'll go in with an eraser and just cut out some of the parts of the background grass that we don't need. Let's pull in this long background grass layer and cut out the trees that we don't want to see. I'm gonna rotate and transform it in place. Said it fits the angle little bit better. And now I'm gonna put a layer mask on it and just erase the parts that we don't really need to see. Right now, we're going to really refine thes background grasses and meadow grasses later so it doesn't have to be too precise. All right, let's work with this short grass layer. I'm going to cut away the background using the last few tool and then I want toe place it so that the perspective makes sense with this angle, but also so that it's covering all of the parts of the grass that we need to see. So we checked the reference image. We have thes areas next to the path here and back here next to the wall. Those the parts we want to make sure we keep. So let's pop this capacity down to 50%. Then, using thier lasso tool, I'm just going to draw in all of the spaces that we want to keep Click layer mask and now we will select the path and get rid of that from the grass Lear select load selection path . Then we can just delete it from our layer mask. We have a little piece here next to the deck that's overlapping, so I'm just going to go down to the paving layers again. Grab the Dax, select it and delete it from the grass layer. A little too much got deleted because the selection wasn't quite precise. All just going to the last two tool. Re select this press. Be for brush and just brushed this beckon. That's the power of layer mask. I'd like to refine this background edge a little bit, so I'm going to go down to where we built the plaza wall and select it and then remove it from the layer mask of the grass Lear that's looking better. And I'll just refined this edge a little bit to fit the perspective better. Let's move that layer down. We have this shadow layer, so we'll cut away the background that we don't need. Place it over top of the short grass layer. I'm going to flip it horizontally you can control. Click the layer mask of the short grass layer press layer mask on the shadow grass layer, and now they have the same Lear Mass. I'll put that on soft light and erase a little bit of the background here just to soften it up. Let's make the grassy slopes using the last two tool and overlapping with the short grass a little bit. Draw in a slope. Now let's go to select, save selection and name it foreground slope. We're going to do the same with the background. Just take the last you dry in the slope and then go to select save selection. Call it the background slope. We're going to use the short cut grass for these slow P layers, so go to the cut grass layer and duplicate it. Bring it over top of the other layers and then right click on the layer masking Go delete layer mask control T transformed this and rotate it so that it makes sense with the slope moving in place and then go up to select load selection foreground slope and create a layer mask will do exactly the same process with the background soap. Let's bring these opacity is back up to 100 now we can start working on the Upper Meadow platforms. So first I'm going to create a selection of the background and foreground metal platforms using the lasso tool. Then I'm gonna save it as a selection called Meadow Platforms. Let's turn on this long grass background layer and moving into place. I'm going to scale it a little bit. Then we're gonna load the meadow platform selection and create a layer mask. Don't worry about all these hard edges. Were gonna soften all of those up really well with the grass brushes will do exactly the same process with this other grass texture. Great. So now Oliver grass layers are ready and in place. Let's zoom in and take a look Here. We can see that the edges air really unrealistic and flat looking there too sharp. Let's turn off all of the layers and just focus on this short cut grass layer. We're going to click into the layer mask press, be for brush right click to access the brush panel and then scroll down to the visualization brushes that you've loaded. Let's select this grass brush, and now we'll just start re sizing and rotating the brush so that we can brush in these edges. So just as a reminder. You can use this tool to rotate the brushes, and you can also increase or decrease the size of the brush by using the open and close parentheses while you're working on screen user variety of brushes and a variety of rotations. And let's just speed this video up a little bit so that we can get through the grasses cool . So all those edges air done. And now let's put our shadow layer back on. I want the shadow layer to have the same layer mask as the one that we just worked on. So I'm just gonna delete the one that's there right now and go to the short grass layer mask control, click it and then click on the shadow layer. And now it has the same. Let's move on to this background slope, and we're just going to go through the same process as we did before, so let me speed this up. We want to make this long wrestler a little bit more visible, so let's work on it. Let's go into the layer mosque and just erase some of the parts that we don't need, and now we'll use the brush palette to brush in some of those edges again so that they look more realistic, like long grasses And not just like a soft, fuzzy edge. I'm noticing a little edge in the back. Um, I'm just gonna erase that. I think it's on the short grass layer. All right, let me work on this foreground slip. Now and now, looking at the image, I think I'm just gonna cut back this top a little bit. And now I'll go into the layer mask and use the brushes to refine the edge. Thank you. Moving on to the top part, which is the longer meadow grasses. And since I refined the slope edge, I'm just gonna fill in this with another brush. Yeah. Now, just like with the other grass textures, Let's go in with e grass brushes and refined the edges. That's looking really good. And now I think I'm just gonna take this background grass layer and duplicate it and put it on a soft light. Now we have our final meadow grass layer, so let's go ahead. And I'm just gonna erase this one from the background, cause I don't think we need it now. We'll just go in with the brush tools and start refining the edges on this one, too. Okay, we're almost done with the grasses. I'm just thinking that I'd like to add a shadow to the slope, so let's select both of the slow players Control J to duplicate them. Let's put them on, multiply at 45% then go into each one with the eraser and just soften up some of the edges . Last grass texture. We have this beautiful, isolated field texture. I'm gonna resize it, and then let's go into the hue saturation panel that's controlled you and give it a sort of a light green color click. OK, now let's put this on screen, and I'm gonna duplicate it all over the field just by pressing Ault and clicking and dragging, and you can flip it horizontally, resize it. Just try to use the texture in an interesting way and trying to make it look too perfect. We really want this to look like a beautiful wild meadow. All right, let's make a group for these and call it grass overlay. Then we're gonna put all of the's files into that group, has put a layer mask on that group and then used the eraser tool with one of the grass brush shapes to make the edges a little less uniform. Great, I think these background grasses air looking really, really good. Let's select all of them and put them in the background grasses folder and close that up. And now we can look at the foreground grasses, which are all of the EU's beautiful wildflowers. I probably won't use all of these textures. I have a few that I think work really well. So let's take a look at them. I'm gonna start with this one, and I'll resize it and then put it on soft light. Then I'll just put a layer mask on it and use the eraser to erase the parts that we don't need. I want to use the nice, bright red poppies from this poppy field. So first I'll cut away the background and then I'm going to transform the poppy field over top of the meadow. I'm gonna put this on dark in because I want to keep the color of the poppies. I don't want it to be too light, and I'm just gonna go into my layer mask with the brushes and the erasers and erase the parts that I don't need. Finally, let's resize this beautiful bright flower field. I think I will put it on hard light because I wanted to really stand out against the rest of the grasses and, of course, earlier mask on it and use the eraser to erase the parts that we don't need. Let's make a new layer and call it grass brushes. Put it on screen here. We're gonna use the brush tool over top of all of these other image textures and just add a few extra brushes to the foreground. Play around with different colors and sizes of brash and types of brush. Just go wild and remember, at the end we're just gonna put a layer mask on it and erase the parts we don't want. So you don't have to worry about doing too much or too little. Okay, I think our grassy field is pretty much done, so let's close up these layers and remember to save your file as a V four 6. Trees: open up the trees folder in photo shop and let's rest arise. Thes layers. We have way more trees than we actually need to create this visual, but usually I start with a large variety of textures, just in case some of them don't work with the coloring. In light of the visual, you can just delete the ones we don't use. I'm organizing these layers just a little bit, thinking of the ordering of the visual from back to front. Obviously, the street corner would be the very foreground layer, while the plaza trees go in the middle and the other trees just kind of sit in the background. Let's begin with this plane tree. I'm going to start by using hue saturation, control you to de saturate this coloration a bit. That's because it's in the background and we don't want it to stand out too much. The rest of the background is pretty much gray scale, so let's slowly reintroduce color. As we move forward in the image, I'm going to use just a few trees to create a line back here, alternating the trees and flipping them horizontally while re sizing slightly larger as we move forward. I flipped trees around when I'm using multiples of the same cut out so that it doesn't look too uniform. A telltale sign of a real beginner visual is when all of the trees Aaron the exact same position and opacity. The furthest tree should be the lowest opacity, maybe around 60% and then move forward until the foreground trees get up to 85 to 95 or even 100%. This gives the image depths. We'll introduce this larger, darker tree here as a device to lead. The eye forward is darker than the other, so we'll bring focus to itself. The I reads an image from left to right, so we want to lead the composition towards the major design elements. I'm gonna put these background trees in a folder and then use the eraser tool with a grass shape to give the tree bases of feeling that they're planted within the grasses instead of just hovering on top. Now let's move on to the plaza. I'm just gonna transform this tree and move it in place onto the plaza in the background. Let's clip away this uneven tree trunk. We don't need it so we can just delete it. Instead of using a layer mask. I want to make the lighting of this tree more dynamic, so I'll use the Dodge and burn tools to bring out the highlights and shadows of the tree. Dodging and burning is a traditional darkroom technique for regulating the exposure of an image by either exposing it to more light or withholding light from the image. In voter shop, the Dodge Tool lightens while the burn tool darkens. Let's start by lightning the trees mid tones using a dodge brush at 6% you can select whether you'd like to lighten the highlights mid tones or shadows by using the drop down box and then selecting a percentage. This is a strong tool, so we don't usually need to go more than 6 to 10%. Take the highlights next at 8%. Finally, let's start the shadows by 15 to lighten them a bit. Usually I like to have ah, pretty strong contrast between light and dark. But this tree has really dark shadows, and I'd like to see some of the trunk details. I want the tree to have a better color, so let's duplicate the layer and put it on soft light. Now use control you to access hue, saturation and colorize with a worm yellowy orange tone. Make sure you have preview on so you can see how the sliders affect the tree coloring. Once you're done, reduced capacity of the layer to about 35%. I'm gonna put a layer mask on the colorized layer and erase some of the yellow tone from areas we don't want it, like the dark shadows and along the trunk. I'll also put a layer mask on the tree layer and soften up some of the branch edges. Just add some liveliness to the texture. Finally, all link thes layers so they don't get lost from each other. I'm gonna duplicate both layers by selecting them in pressing control. J. First thing I'll do is flip the tree horizontally, then scale up using the transform tool and straighten out the tree a bit. Since I worked on the trees coloration in the first instance, I don't really need to do much, but let's adjust the transparency of the tree in the rear of the plaza to about 75% and 45% respectively, with the foreground tree at 95% and 45%. What's that in this last full tree to the middle ground? It's not actually a part of the plaza, but it sits on the same plane, more or less. I'm duplicating it because I'm going to use this tree again in the foreground. So let's work with a copy. For now. Move it in place, resize and find a good spot for it to live. I'll duplicate the layer, put it on soft light and then open up you saturation to get the coloration in line with the other trees. We want this to be a warm but still very green looking tree, so find a combination of color and saturation that works. I'll put that on 65 then use a layer mask to get rid of the coloration over the trunk. I'm gonna soften up the edges slightly and reduce the trees opacity to 85 45% respectively . I'm just gonna add a layer mask to this background tree and use the radiant tool to reduce the opacity on the right hand side. Let's move on to the foreground tree, which is the same as the true we just worked on. Not much needs to happen here, will transform it and move it in place and give it almost the same. Coloration is the previous tree, except let's make it a little bit darker, since we want this one to have more contrast. A link these layers and put the opacity to 85 65% Put them in a folder and populaire mask on the folder. Now I'm going to use the greedy int tool to fade out the edge of the tree at the top, where the light would highlight it. Let's clean up these plaza tree layers and put them into a group folder. I forgot to erase the bottom of the tree in the meadow, so let's use a grass shaped eraser and soften up the bottom edge. There. Finally, let's work on this foreground branch that's overhanging in framing the scene over Tate and move it in place and pop it down to 85. Now let's duplicate it, put it on soft light and use hue saturation to give it a warmer tone. I'll put that down to 65 then duplicate both layers so we have two sets of branches. We can emerge the layers by selecting them and pressing control. E. Do this for both sets, named the top layer foreground branch sharp and the bottom layer foreground branch blur. We're going to make this branch look like it's got a motion blur on it from the wind shaking. Believes will blur the base layer by going to filter, blur, motion blur and then select an angle and distance that works. You can play with the sliders and direction to see the effect on the leaves. Now, using layer masks on both their sharpened, blurred layers were going to use the Grady Int tool to fade back the sharp layer to reveal the blurred layer below. We never want to have a layer like this be totally blurred. That doesn't look realistic. The tree itself would be mostly stable, and only the outer branches would be really moving. So that's why we keep part of it sharp. Now let's link thes and put them in a folder called Foreground Branch. Close up these layers and let's get rid of the trees we didn't use. Save the file is a B five and let's move on to the furniture 7. Furniture: opened the furniture folder and let's rest arise thes images. I'll turn off all the layers except the umbrella, which will start with resize using the transform commend. Move in place and let's just adjust it for scale until it looks about right in the context . When you're deciding on scale of furnishings, it's good to consider what else is around the size of the paving, the size of the grasses trees. And in the future, people, you can always go back and re size if you need to. We'll get a feel for this as you do it more and more, I'll duplicate this layer and go to hue saturation to overlap with a rich golden yellow orange color. Oh, put a layer mask on the colorized layer and delete the color from the pole. Make sure your black is in the background to insure your erasing from the layer mask, duplicate the yellow umbrella file again and re size for the foreground. When it comes to this furniture, we have a few options for blending it. First option is to isolate the table by deleting the white background. One of the easiest ways to do this is to select a color range, then use the color picker to select the white color. Change the localized color clusters to a value of 20 so that the color ranges more restricted. We don't want light greys to get into this election. Pick from all four corners and nearby the table to make sure you've got all the bases covered. Then click. OK, let's go into a quick mask by pressing que to review the selection in a quick mask. The UN selected regions are highlighted in red. Use the brush and eraser to refine the selection, increasing and decreasing hardness and size of the brush as you go along. We'll use the brush first to make sure all the table reflection areas air highlighted in red. Then use the eraser to get rid of any extra shadows. We don't want to see exit the quick mask by pressing que again and then delete the white area by pressing delete. There's a little bit of weight left over at the bottom. Just use the eraser to delete that. Now we have the table isolated, but there's a white range of the shadow at the base to blend the table. Let's put it on darken. I'll move the layer up and resize it to place it on the deck. I missed a bit of the film here, but you should duplicate the layer and put it on multiply just so that the table has more of a presence. The second and more simple way to blend in this furniture is either to use, darken or multiply to simply eliminate the view of the white background. There's only works when the background is absolutely white. Otherwise, you'll see a little bit of a shaded area. If it's even a little bit colored resize placed by the table and then duplicate the layers and link them up. We're not going for a perfect realism. In this view. The important thing is to give an impression of a seating area without having to worry too much about the fine. Details. Duplicate both layers to create another chair, flip it horizontally and scale up to sit a little in the foreground. Move the chair layers over top of the table, since in space they'd be in front on. Let's take a look at how we might use the other furniture included. If you're really pressed for time, you might find an asset just like this, with tables and chairs already set up together to come in handy. In this case, we can again just use, multiply or darkened to blend the image, and I think that the saturation is a bit too high in this would color. I want it to look more like the wood deck, so let's see whose hue saturation to reduce the saturation and increased brightness, resize and place on the deck under the umbrella duplicates so that the furniture looks darker and then link the layers. Let's do the same process with this square table set, reducing the saturation and then flipping horizontally. We don't want the background table to mix with the foreground table so you can put each of these layer sets into a group, call them cafe, sat one in two and then put a layer mask on the background one and used the eraser to eliminate the bits that overlap with the foreground. Personally, I prefer the other cafe set for this view, but you can use whichever combination you like best. This feels pretty light on furniture, so let's give this a safe I'm using. The same name is previous, since this is a pretty incremental safe and will tackle people next 8. People: open the people folder and rest arise the layers. These people are going to be pretty easy to put in there already cut out, and all we need to do is resize them and place them around the image. It's gonna be helpful to turn off the trees and grass folder so we can see the placement of the people better. I'll speed this up, but feel free to take your time and place people where you think they make sense in the image. We want to make sure that the heads of the people line up across the image. That's how we know that the scale of the people is correct. Throughout the perspective. This Cotto texture has three different groups. If you want to separate them, we can easily do this by using the marquee tool to select one of the groups. Then press control X. To cut the image, use shift control V to paste the image back in place and renamed the layer. Do this again with the other group. Now let's place them around the image this bird images going into this guy at the background. As you see it has a nearly white background So let's see if we can multiply or dark and instead of taking the time to cut them out, Darkened works well. Let's put them on 50% back here. All pop these down under the tree layer just to make sure we don't confuse them with the people selections. Let's put a layer mask on the entire people folder and use a grass shaped eraser to blend back the textures into the scene. Lastly, will select all the cutouts and put them on blend mode. Multiply to blend them back into the scene. If we were using riel images of people, this would be a lot more complicated. But for a quick visual, it's sometimes better to go more abstract. You could always replace the people later if you wanted to develop this into a more finished render. Save this as a V six and in the final few videos will get to the sweet stuff shadows, atmosphere, texture and lighting. Your just about done. Take some time to post a progress image. Once you've reached this point, 9. Shadows: when we were growing shadows. We want to think about the source of light in the image in this visual so far have been pretty quiet on lighting and pretty liberal about flipping trees, which clearly have a bright on a dark side around to suit the needs of the image. Because this is a quick visualization, I didn't worry too much about consistency within the image, but this is definitely something we want to consider now. The major trees do have lighting on the left side, indicating the light source coming from the upper left corner. The foreground tree is lit opposite to that, but because it's cut off and we can't see the lighting on the trunk, this doesn't make a big difference. The umbrellas have shade along the bottom edges, which could work with the lighting, since depending on the height and angle, those are just very well may be shaded in this direction. Overall, however, was going to matter is at the angle of the shadows that people see on the ground matches throughout the image. I'll demonstrate two ways to create a shadow. The first is to generate it from a tree. You already have in the visual. Let's go into the tree folder and right click on the background tree. Here we can see it come up in the menu, so select it and it'll take us directly to that in the folder. Let's. Unlike these two layers, will duplicate the original tree and bring it above all the other layers. Let's just make sure we go back and re link these two. Then we'll begin working on the shadow to start. Let's erase the trunk and de saturate using shift control. You shadows tend to be blurred, so let's go. To blur Gaussian blur and reduce the size to eight pixels. Double click the layer to open the layer styles panel and check off color overlay. Selecting a grayish blue color. Let's set it to multiply around 60% now will transform this to stretch a layer using the Transform command. If you're in the most recent version of Photoshopped, hold down shift while you pull the side handle over. If you're in an older version of photo shop, it's the opposite to this holding down shift will constrain the Transform Command to retain the aspect ratio. If you don't know what version of photo shop you have. Just try transforming with her without holding down shift to see how your textures behave. Now we'll use the distort Command to shift this shadow over as if it's a long, shadow stretching way over the grass. I tend to play around with blend modes for shadows because every material reacts differently but for this will use overly around 45%. One challenge to this particular shadow is that we haven't angled slope here. That's no problem. Let's select the grass at this point and control X to cut it, then shift control V to paste back in place. You'll notice that the blend mode reverts to normal after this operation, but we can just right click on the original shadow. Select copy layer style and then right. Click on the new shadow and select paste layer style. Rotate the texture to fit with the angle, then put a layer mask on and soften the overlapping shadows. Using a big, softer Reaser. For the final portion, do the same operation again. Select the texture, cut it, paste it and copy paste the layer style, put a layer mask on and soften the overlapping edges. with the eraser. The second way to do a tree shadow is to cheat and use a pre made texture. I downloaded this one a long time ago and have used it in almost every rendering sense. It's a pre made, semitransparent blurred shadow that I distort and readjust to suit the needs of the image. I'm going to speed the video up, but we'll be using the shadow, which should be included in your assets for the remainder of the tree shadows around the site. Okay, okay, let's put all of these shadows into their own folder and name it tree shadows. They can live underneath all of the trees here in the folder. Let's go down to grasses and create a new layer called grass Shadows. Set the blend mode to color. Burn at 65% and let's use the color picker to select a dusky blue. Select a grass brush and make it the right angle for this cut grass edge here, then brush along the edge to create light. Shadows will reduce that even further to 45%. Make sure you put this layer underneath the rest of the grasses, make another new layer and call it long grass. Shadows will do the same process here, except let's use a variety of shapes and sizes along this upper edge of the slope. Okay, I'll put a layer mask on this and erase the edges a little to randomize the shadows. To make people shadows, select their layer and created duplicate. Move the duplicate underneath the main layer. Then go edit, transform. Flip vertical moved the texture down so that it matches their feet. And let's set that to multiply at 45% and put a bit of a blur on it. I'm going to use a color overlay within the Layer styles panel with the same settings as we use for the first tree shadow. Now we have a nice, soft blue shadow. Let's see if the angle by using edit, transform perspective. We can drag these handles over and back to match up with the general angle of the view. Use the transform command to squish it down if you like, and rotate a little to match their feet. Better now, let's put a layer mask on top and use ingredient making sure black is in the foreground to soften out that edge. We compress X to switch black back to background, then use an eraser to fix up the small details here. We're not gonna worry about their shadow stepping up over the patio. But if you want to get specific, you're welcome to do so. I know that we have some background shadows we could fix up, such as the plaza edges and maybe the tables and chairs. But for now, let's close up these layers and save over the V six file. 10. Lighting + Atmosphere: Let's just clean up some of the background info now that the entire composition is in place . Of course, we laid out this guy in context and all the other background buildings and information before any of the other items were added. And now is a good time to review the composition and see if we can make some improvements. First, we'll place the glass handrails properly along the Plaza Edge, then create a little fountain. And after that, I'll show you how to clean up shadows and transparency is that you don't want to overlap. We'll do a bit of tweaking on the sky and background context, and then we'll tackle the lighting, texture and atmosphere. Let's start by duplicating the F handrail layer and moving it over to the side. Here we'll use the Marquis to select about half deleting it. Then let's use edit, transformed distort to align the left edge with the plaza edge and move these handles to recede into the background perspective. Let's again used to sort on the original layer, aligning the bottom edge and receiving the right side. Put a layer mask on the F handrail layer and let's select these people in the foreground. We confined their layer in the structure by right clicking on them and selecting their name . Let's control click the layer to select it, then go down to the handrail layer mask and delete the selection. We do this so that the people appear to be in front of the handrail. Let's repeat this with this seated person here. Now we want to give the impression that the glass barrier has some coloring to it and fade the people behind it. First, find these layers by right clicking and selecting them from the list, then add a layer mask to them. Select both Henry layers by control, clicking them and pressing downshift. Then go to the people. We just put layer masks on and use the eraser at 50% to reduce the A pass ity of the people where they coincide with the glass handrail. I mentioned at the very beginning that there was gonna be a water fountain on the plaza. Let's create that now. Go to the water fountain layer and turn it on, resize it and let's move it in place and use hue saturation to reduce its saturation and increase the lightness Now let's put this on. Multiply at 50% then duplicate the layer and put it on. Overlay at 65 will link the layers and then duplicate them. Make sure both are selected and press control J. Reduce the size a little. Flip the layers horizontally. Then let's squeeze the layer by using control. T transform and pressing shift while bringing in the left handle will duplicate the original set of layers once more and bring it on top of the others and complete this road. Three. Let's make a folder to keep this organized. Now let's create a base for these. Using the last suit. We can create a new layer and then just on a rectangular pool and use edit fill to fill it with a blue. I'm color picking one from this guy here. If we want to enhance the color of the blue, we can select the fill layer and then go to the plaza concrete, appear in the paving layers and delete the pool from the plaza. We again want to make sure the people appear to be in front of the plaza and fountain. Let's select the watercolor family once more, then go down to the fountain with a layer mask and elite. Let's just this guy in the background a bit. I'm gonna size it down and move it over so that there's a bit more white space showing. Now I'm going to select the building layer by control, clicking it, then go to the layer mask of this guy and use the eraser at 50%. To erase the texture behind. I'm tweaking the opacity, location and orientation of the background context. Now I'm gonna move the bus forward, flip the car and brush back in some of the background details on the context. I think it would be better to size the context up a little, but you're welcome to play around with it in whatever way you think looks good. I think the bus needs a tiny bit of distortion to make it more elevation. All so use the transform, distort tool and pull these handles down slightly. I just remembered that I wanted to switch the shaded side of the background plaza to make more sense with the shadows, so let's go to the multiplied plaza wall layer and brush back in the side we formally erased. Now we can use the last Sue to select the opposite side and delete it from the mask. Instant sunshine. I'm thinking that this shadow could be a slightly less extreme angle, so let's select it and then use transformed distort to bring that texture more in line with the other shadow angles. I'll use the brush in the race. Tools on the layer mask toe. Blend the shadow in a little bit better. I think that's looking a lot more natural. We're on to the final fund part now, which is adding in some texture and lighting effects. Turn on the grunge texture here, and let's resize it to fit the canvas. Once resized, you can rast arise it. Now let's put that on overly a 25%. As you can see, that already worms the drawing up a bit and unifies the color a little. It also adds a vignette around the edges, which helps to focus the view towards the center. Now let's run her action. We just need to select it in the action panel and click play except the dialogue boxes that pop up and you can see we're left with a very worm almost flat coloration. No, it's interesting, but we want to reduce some of the filters within the folder. Lets start by putting the entire folder on 60% opacity. All of the following adjustments are things that I customized for each visual I do. I've played around with all of these settings over the years and settled on a few standard adjustments. If it seems random to you, feel free to try out your own combinations or look for other actions you might want to try out. So first will select the CPI layer, move the A posse to 50 and the filled to 65. This reduces the monochromatic warmth of the tone. You can see the greens and blues start to come back here. Now let's take cross processing down to 75 75 in both fields. Across processing is a film processing technique where you process film into developing fluid intended for another type of film. There's a vignette and also an accompanying central light here. Let's reduce the vignette to 85 85 then double click inside this panel. Here we can control the angle of living, yet I'll put it to 35. Let's go back to the central light and set the angle to 35 also, then reduce the opacity to 35 the filled to 50%. We'll leave the other color settings as they are and renamed the folder Vintage Film Coloring. Sometimes I find the warmth a bit too consistent, and it makes the image look a little flat. So let's put a layer mask on the light and color folder and do a bit of tweaking. Press G for Grady Int and go up to the type of radiance here in select radio. Set the opacity to 50% and make sure black is in the foreground. Click and drag from the center out. You'll see a light fading of the color effects. I'm finding this background building a bit intense, so I'll just duplicate the layer and put it on screen, taking another look over the image. I'm just looking for things that stand out to me. I want to bring up the A pass ity of the background to 65 the fact that you can still see some of these textures through the watercolor people is bothering me. So let's fix that. Go to the layer and control click to select. Now Press shift control I to invert the selection. Find the tree shadows layer and press layer mask. Repeat this process for the plaza grasses and deck folders. Let's say this as a V seven and then return to the drawing to see what else we might do by way of lighting. I'm going to select all of the layers, duplicating them by pressing control J and then merge them into one image by pressing control. E. Let's call it render total and use the Dodge burn tools to heighten some of the highlights and shadows. I'm starting with dodging the highlights at 8%. Just shoot the brush over the lighter areas of the drawing. Now let's do mid tones at 6% and finally will go in with the burn tool for the shadows at 6% and dark in the shadows. Overall, you can see the difference. This makes if you turn the layer on and off. The before seen looks almost flat compared to this, while the Dodge burn layer looks way more dynamic, let's put this on soft late at 25%. We don't want it to overwhelm the image. Just add a bit of extra range. Another technique weaken. Uses brushing in light rays from the sun. This is especially effective in low, angular afternoon light and where you have overhanging branches like we do in this scene to enhance the effect of light. Let's create a layer underneath the main foreground tree here called light brushes. One presby for brush right clicked. Access the brush panel, then go down to the folder and select one of these light brushes. I've included size it up and change the angle so that it's coming from the same angles or imagined light. Source. Make sure you've selected a light warm white color is your foreground color. I already had one selected and then brush onto the corner of the image so that the rays hit the meadow. We'll put that layer on overlay, create a new layer and call it light brushes, too. This one will go between the four grown tree and the foreground branch. We want to create a multi layered light effect here, using the light brushes again. Brush in some race. Let's put this on screen at 65% finally will create one last light brush layer and put it over the foreground Branch folder. Let's use a brush right here where the sun would poke through between the branches, and I'll put it to screen at 65. Now I'm going back to the second light brush layer. I'm gonna put a layer mask on and use the same light brush, but in the reverse angle and as an eraser to reduce some of the edges up with that final layer on again and adjust it slightly. And I think that pretty much finishes this image. Please save your image again as a V seven and make a J pack to share in the Project folder . I'm really looking forward to seeing the results. If you're interested in creating more visuals and experimenting further with your own assets, please watch the final video where I'll talk about some places to find resources online for visuals and wrap up some of the concepts we've learned. You've done a great job following along, and hopefully you've picked up a few tricks along the way. See you in the final lesson 11. Additional Resources: So I hope you guys have had fun in this course, and I hope that you picked up some new tricks in photo shop and have it Anderson you're proud to share. I thought that now I would just take you through some of the websites that I frequent in my work where I find my stock images, cutouts and other textures that he used my visualizations. I'm gonna start with stock images. So I think the best site for getting free stock is on Splash. I'm a contributor myself. It's just a great place where you can find high quality photos and you can do anything with , Um, ideally, you're going to be giving credit, especially if you were using these, for example, on a website or a graphic document where you're just using the image. But for the purposes of using these for compositing within Photoshopped, often times, you know, Once you've used a texture, it's unrecognizable from its original image in the first place. So it's not necessary, Teoh specifically give credit for each image that you use just to show you an example of what you might find here. If I look up aerial field, I'm going to come up with ah, whole bunch of images and I can immediately see a few that I would love to use just to have his textures. So I'm splashes, one that I definitely recommend. Another one I use quite often is flicker. Um, when I use liquor, I usually just go to the home page, which is also called the Explore page and type in a search term. I'll just use the same one when you search on flicker. Just make sure you go over to this license dropped down and choose either no known copyright restrictions, commercial use and mods allowed one of those two so that you can be sure that the people who have authored the images are allowing you to reuse thumb. This is just a lot better than going to Google images where the images can come from anywhere and you follow links into the abyss of unknown authorship. There's another one I sometimes use, called stocky. Oh, they also have a lot of free images on all of these websites. I'm showing you you have to create accounts, but for the most part these images are free. Okay, I think that this Hopper is one of the best paid sites that I found. They do have a few free materials as well, but most of them you have to register and pay for. However, they do have an excellent plant library and they have a really great way to sort the plants also, which I find really, really helpful. But I'm looking for something specific, so they have people, plants, ground skies and some other textures also, So if you're looking for a really high quality excellent cutouts, this is the place that I would recommend to go to. There's another site called mr cutout dot com. This also has a lot of free and paid textures. I think that you get a certain amount for free with the basic account, and then you could pay for an account that allows you a certain number of downloads per day or week. This one has also really good vegetation. It has a little bit less options when you're looking for specific types, but it still works really well, and the cuts themselves are are really, really great, high quality and beautifully lit. Everybody knows about immediate entourage for cut out people, but they also do have some trees and plants here, which can come in handy, especially because they are all free. I believe so. They come in PNG format and they're displayed here pretty nicely. It's, um, not really possible to sort them in any category. But you can just easily take a look here at the website and try to find what you're looking for. There's a cycle viz people, which I use for cut out people and objects. And sometimes I look here for three D models. They also have HDR and skies, which can be useful for rendering and three D models. They have some free cut out areas here where they offer freebies, and I'd encourage you to go and just like, check out the collection and see if there's anything here that you think might be useful. This site is another site that also has a lot of different types of things on it, from render materials and three D stuff to cut out people, and the site is a little bit different, so they wanted to introduce diversity into the people that we use in our renderings, which is a great, great concept in a great idea and something that's definitely needed throughout the architecture and landscape architecture industry. What they have done, though, is kind of pixelated or triangulated the faces of the people here. And that's because they've used images of people and don't have license agreements with them. So technically, anybody that you find online and cut out and use in your picture so say, for example, you go to Google and you cut out a picture of a person they haven't specifically agreed to be part of your commercial property and your advertisement, which is what a rendering is in the end. Technically, you shouldn't be using people that you cut out from images that you find online. Now this group of people who put together this website have made a bit of an information package about why they've altered the appearances of these people and basically is to protect their identities while still using the sort of look and feel of people. You do have the option to download them with their faces, as they normally are. But ah, you have to be aware that you're using a likeness of somebody, and it's not licensed. Moving on to textures. This site used to be called cg textures dot com. I have been using it for over 10 years, and I have probably most of the materials in my library for concrete glass buildings, stone bricks, vegetation. I've gotten it from this website. I've had a free account for a long time, but I also had paid accounts when I worked at different firms, and I have a paid account now. So I think it's worth it to pay for an account because it means there's no limit on the downloads that you can do, so you can always be sure to find what you're looking for. Um, but also it supports these websites so that they can keep producing these high quality textures. Within the nature category, for example, you can find all kinds of things branches, um, flowers, flowerbeds, frozen grasses, hedges, leaves. They do have trees and plants and all kinds of things here and there already cut out, which is really, really great. So you also have the option to just use like general textures, which I found very handy for all kinds of render situations. This is a great site to use. There's a site called Tony textures dot com. This guy also has a ton of really great free textures, and this one just happens to be featuring water on the home page. Right now, if you go to free downloads, you can see that he's featuring a few different textures on the site. So, um, for example, a cyclist, which is has already a blur motion on it. Ah, collection of trees and plants and silhouettes and backgrounds on the individual plants and trees in plan view. So I would encourage you to go to this website and support it also because he has some great textures. If you're planning on getting more into rendering itself, like in V Ray or Lumi on or something else, there's a whole host of different types of websites we can take a look at, but this one is one that I have often referred to in the past. It's called Flying Architecture. This person uses fear A and Rhino, which is what I used almost solely for six years when I worked at firms. So he has a lot of free textures and models and also tutorials and how to use things you can find all kinds of really helpful rendering stuff. Here is the focus on textures and models and materials, which is great because it can be quite difficult to find high quality materials, especially for V, Ray and Rhino. So these are the websites that I use quite frequently in my work, and I would encourage you to go visit them and support them if you can definitely download some of the free stuff and start building your library so that you will have assets available when you start building visuals. One of the things that takes the longest when creating a visual is actually searching for the right assets. So if you already have a library that's filled with good assets that you I know intimately and have categorized well, you will be able to save so much time. The more you have in your library, the better it is for your efficiency. I really want to thank you for following along with these lessons, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next course