In this lesson we're really
gonna use all the tools that we learned, all of the various
menus and tricks and tips that we learned in the previous
lessons, and we're going to edit our own reference. So we're
going to take photography and our own images and use
Photoshop to make our pictures better and to make
them more useful for our drawings and paintings and
reference. Make sure you get your Photoshop fired up. Make
sure you get your workspace ready and we're going to get started.

Transcription not available.

Transcription not available.

So today we're going to talk about adjusting and editing
your reference, basically your photography when you shoot
reference for your paintings, whether you shoot your family,
landscape, still life, whatever you want to draw or paint I'm
going to show you how to bring it into Photoshop and make the
best out of your photos and your reference images.
So that pretty much involves a few things. Basically, we're
going to cover the three main parts, which are first making
selections. So separating the various items and then the
second would be to transforming your items, you know, moving
them around things like that, editing them and the third
would be to making adjustments to the images of adjusting color,
the value, the contrast, and so forth. So first we will
quickly review some of the tools that we need and then
we'll go right into the specifics of the various tools
that you'll be using to edit your reference. So let's get
started.
All right, so I'm going to have just first -
got Photoshop open. There's a couple of ways to open files.
So within Photoshop, all you have to do is go to file, open.
The short key is command O. And then you just browse through it
as if you're browsing for any file like any other program on
your computer, so I'm going into my desktop here. I have a
folder called - full of reference and just you know,
select
which one I think is useful and Mac finder folders have this
thumbnail button here, it's very useful. So here's a bunch of
images and you know, just pick one here.
Let's pick this one.
And it opens directly into Photoshop. So that's one way.
Another way you can do is for example if Photoshop is -
remember you can grab the top bar here and drag it around. One
thing you can also do - let's say your Photoshop is like half
screen sometimes if I have a wide screen like this, I like
to keep half
available for another folder, see part of my desktop. So you
can physically open a folder, let's say you have image images
in a folder like I do here.
So I have images. Let's say one open
this landscape right here. So I can just click, hold, and then
physically drag into the Photoshop space, this open space
right here. And then boom, it opens it as well. Now the
latest versions of Photoshop will tab images together. So
remember the top part is the part you can actually drag this
sort of a handle and then within it are these tabs. So
here's the first image I open. The second one I opened as
well. So I'm just going to untab it and now I have two a bit and now I have two
separate images. One I opened within Photoshop, one I opened
within
by dragging a picture from my finder window into the
Photoshop software itself. So just two ways to open
file.
And you can also minimize one.
And if it's minimizing you want to bring it back you can always
go to window, the drop-down menu up top, window, and then up here
you can see it's unchecked. It means it's not visible, notice
this one is checked as is this image right here behind
the menu, then it calls it back. So you can minimize it and
don't forget also, there's view modes and the shortcut for
view modes is F so if I hit F brings me to one view mode.
Sort of a full screen and I'm able to hold my spacebar and
drag it around. Spacebar is the equivalent of this hand tool, the
hand. And the other view mode is full black screen. So it kind
of gets rid of my Photoshop tools and menus. So if you want
to focus, concentrate on your reference or your photography
you can use this F mode and the other F mode is the one with
the actual window. So I can drag it around my Mac window
as well.
So it's three separate view modes, two ways to open.
So just keep in mind that
this may take practice if it's your first time using Photoshop,
just actually manually moving your images and your
files around the actual software itself.
And if I'm done with the file, I can do - just simply close the
file. So it's file close. That's one way to do it.
Or the shortcut is command W, which I use quite a bit and
there now my Photoshop is back to being empty. I'll bring
it to full screen here to fill up my screen and I'm ready to
go and I can continue on, reopen the file, open a new file. Now
we're going to take a look at the first thing you want to do,
the first tools you want to use which are selection tools and
masking tools and what these will do is help you
separate elements. And obviously if you have for
example a landscape and you want to separate the tree from
the mountain, this is where we're going to do it or if you
want to separate the figure from the background if you're
shooting figure photography. So these set of tools are probably
the first set of tools you will use when you begin to edit your
reference. So, let's take a look at that now.
Okay, first let's look at the various selection tools and using
the layers. So this is a brief review of selection tools and
layers.
And
of course at any time, I highly encourage you to review this
video because I know this is a lot of stuff. That's why I want
to review so often the stuff - when you first experience or
start using it can be quite
confusing so I understand. Definitely review as often as
possible. All right, so I opened an image file. Now
here's my layers window, my layers menu. So the first thing
I do when I begin to edit reference is I first
duplicate my original. That way I have it a fresh version that
I can operate on, that I can transform it, just color in
things and I still have the original. And remember to do
that it's very simple is when you when you open an image
file, typically it'll be a flatten so only one layer. So
what I like to do is click, hold, and drag to the duplicate, to
the new layer right there so duplicates it and you can also
do a hotkey which is command J, you know, so now we have two
versions of it. And if you want to delete a copy, you make too
many, you can just delete or you can hit backspace. So I begin by
making a new layer or duplicating my layer.
And now I have a fresh layer that I can operate with and the
original is still there. You typically want to keep a
version of your original just in case you screw up.
Now
this is true if it's your first time, well, it's
especially true if it's your first time, but it's also true
if you've been using Photoshop for 20-plus years, like I have,
you're going to make mistakes. So
keep this habit in mind whenever you begin to start
editing your references. Try to keep the original file
untouched and that's very simple to do just by simply
duplicating and making a fresh duplicate layer whenever you
start to work.
All right. So now there's
the other practice that I do quite a bit as I begin to
separate the elements. So that's the first part of
this lesson. So for example in this one obvious thing you'd
want to do is separate the figure from the background. In
this case the figure has some drapery.
So there's a couple ways to do that and the first tool we're
going to use, our selection tool. So remember there's two
types of selection tools that you're using quite a bit. The
first or the marquees and the second is the lasso.
The hotkey is M for marquees and L for lasso. It's pretty
obvious. And these are over here. Now remember marquee
have a couple different shapes. I typically like the rectangle
and elliptic lassos come in two main forms, the freeform
lasso and the polygon lasso. So let's take a look at that now.
So what marquee does basically draws a box
or rectangle, just a big square thing, right? You can even do
circular marquee.
And they can make ovals. If you hold shift you can create
uniform
marquee
If you hold shift makes a perfect circle, same with the
rectangular.
And also remember that
you can deselect with command D.
Basically if you want to turn off your selection. So command D.
And
lasso tool
has the free form so you can kind of just draw, once you have
the lasso tool selected. And you'll notice the freeform
is round, has this kind of round lasso-y shape. You can
basically draw using your tablet pen here to draw
free-form organic lasso. Now polygon lasso notice has a boxy
or a square shape. This is a click hold - excuse me lift and
move so to create a polygonal straight hard edge shape.
So click, move, click, move, click, move, click, move, click, move.
That's how you create a polygon lasso. So what are the
advantages or when to use both? Now what I do or what I use
generally
marquee, its biggest advantage is you can draw a big shape
quickly. So for example, if I don't want to wrap around this
this figure, this woman in her dress quickly, I just take a
marquee, a square marquis and then go boom. Now I have a
selection.
Completely around my
figure. I mean, it's rough. Of course if I want to really be
detailed I still have some work to do. So now I have a quick
marquee that I quickly drew and for example, if I want to copy
and paste, you know, the shortcut is command C for copy
and then command V will create - command V will paste it to a
new layer, which is a convenient feature in Photoshop.
And here I've turned off or made invisible the layers
underneath.
So you see how quickly a marquee
can be useful.
So that's the advantage of marquee. The lasso of course is
for detail. Now lasso so if you want to really dig in and
really separate her arm and that perfect contour that's what the
lasso is for.
So typically what I do is
I take either freeform lasso or the polygon lasso. Obviously
freeform lasso is best for organic forms. So figures,
portraits, animals, right? Still life like fruit and objects.
So you can just kind of loosely draw around
your figure in this case. See? And if I do command C, command V,
now I have an organic shape. Remember the marquee was just a member. The Marquis was just a
boom, a quick big boxy shape. Now this is a little bit more
refined and because I have a pen, a tablet, I'm able to
pretty draw a fairly accurate a lasso around it.
And of course polygon is great if you want to do man-made
objects. So for example, there's a man-made object here,
which is a carpet. So let's say I just want to quickly cut out
this carpet or separate this carpet. So I use my polygon
lasso. Click, move. Click, move. Click, move. Click, move. Click, move.
Click, move. And then click and then to connect the two I
just double click, boom boom.
And now I have a polygon lasso and you'll notice that I went
outside the boundaries of the picture itself. And that's
fine. That's just a way that Photoshop allows you to
draw really accurate lines if needed. So if I do command C
and command V.
See, I just have that nice section of the carpet cut out.
So obviously
depending on what you're separating or extracting that
will
let your decision on what tool you're going to be
using whether marquee, square, or round or lasso, freeform or
polygon lasso.
Okay, so I'm going to actually go through this picture and do
a quick example and I'm going to show you some of the tools
to help keep you organized because as you'll see you'll
quickly build up layers when you start editing when you
start really getting comfortable with Photoshop. So
I'm going to teach you some best practices now how to keep
your selections, the things that you separate that you
extract really tight and that's real easy for you to adjust and
and use later.
So quickly the first thing, the first practice that I like to
do besides duplicating, we already know that's useful, is I
like to use
alpha masking. Now remember earlier we did -
and here I'm going to use a quick freeform lasso just to
quickly block in. Remember earlier we did a cut and paste,
right did a command C for cut, command D for paste so it gives
me my image, but you notice if you look at the layer,
my image is gone. Actually, my - the stuff is actually gone it
kind of got erased. This basically got cut out. But what
I like to do is I like to keep
the original there, the pixels there. So what I'll do is
instead of cut paste,
what I'll do is I'll make a mask and remember alpha mask is
sort of like
masking out, but sort of like erasing a file but allows you
to keep the pixels so you can quickly edit your work.
So one way to make a mess kit is I'm going to duplicate this
image. And then when I have my selection active notice that
these little marching, white marching kind of things is
called this kind of the slang name for it the marching ants.
So you see they're moving right? That means that selection is
active. So with the selection active around the part I want
to extract, I just simply click this button right here, which
is this square with the black circle in it. And that's the
layer mask button. So I click that and then boom now
it makes a
a cutout but the pixels are still there what happens is
it's just made into a mask. So basically whatever is
black becomes transparent, whatever is white is still
opaque, and if I hold shift and click on my map Ask you can
turn it off. Notice the X that's just a quick shortcut to show
hide the mask you shift and click on the mask.
So it's still there and the advantage of that is now I can
fine-tune. So for example, let's say
I want to separate her shoulder from the background, right? Now
I can do that with my lasso tool
and I'll show you another way too with the brush. So let's say
I come in my lasso tool and
I go too far.
Like that.
And I'm going to use a
paint bucket here. I'll show you I'm going to use a brush.
And we're going to use a hard edge brush.
So notice I went a little too deep right a little too deep.
So all I can do what I can do is turn my brush go from black,
change the color to white and remember the hotkey to flip
your foreground and background color is X. See that X flips it
and we'll go back to white then I can reverse, come back in and
bring back some of the arm that I cut out. So that's just one
advantage of using a mark because if this wasn't a mask
if it was just a cut and paste or an erase those pixels
would be gone.
Now, of course you have them in your original so you could
recreate but that'll just, you know, just you'll have to redo
your work. So that's why I really enjoy masking.
And just like you saw there, there's two ways to mask an
object or there's multiple ways. But the way I like
to use is
a combination of the paint bucket, selection tools paint bucket
and manually brushing. So just quickly that the first way is
with
the selection tools. So for example, let's say I want to
cut out this piece of fabric from the carpet and the
background, right? What I would do is use my lasso tool. I like
to use polygon lasso when I do my tighter more refined and
I get you know, kind of get pretty close to where I'm at, to
the contour of the thing that I want to extract or
separate.
And then close my lasso by double-clicking.
Then what I'll do is I'll bring up a paint bucket, which is
hotkey is G, it's over here. And I'm going to select black, pure
black. Remember pure black and pure white is what you want to do to
erase and to bring back and then what paint bucket's active
I just click and you see that? It basically made a mask over
what I did. Now the pixels are still there. pixels else are still there.
If I switch my color back to white see it brings back the
pixels, go back to black pixels are gone. Or they're hidden.
They're masked out and then
I like to zoom in and then use a brush and the brush I like
to use is
it's just a plain old hard round. And remember you can
change the shape to give it some detail. A hard round with a
shape dynamics on to give it a fine point. And if you remember
your thumbnail shows you what your brush will look like and
make sure my opacity and flow are 100, make sure
hardness is at 100 and spacing is at 1% as low as it can get,
no transfer. Because we want basically a hard fully opaque brush to
give us the tightest pixels possible. And then what I like
to do is I like to come in,
zoom in, remember Z for zoom
and then start to use the the brush my hard edge detail brush
and then really get a nice tight selection. So you see
that?
See how nice and tight that got? And of course at any time,
let's say oh, oh crap. I went too far. Anytime you just
switch the color from black, pure black to pure white and
then boom you can bring it back. So that's the beauty of
masking, huge advantage of masking. Which is why nine out of
ten times if I have to extract something from a photograph I
prefer to use masks versus cutting and paste or erasing
because it gives me the power redo my work at any time.
That's a wonderful feature.
Really nice and tight around the fabric there
and that's pretty much what I would do to go all the way
around our figure.
Make a selection,
get pretty close,
as close as you can get, you know.
use a paint bucket to quickly fill it with black or hide mask
out the shape, and then zoom in
and
use my fine hard-edged hard round brush to get me the
fine detailed mask around my object. And remember that keep
in mind too that you want to make sure when you're operating
on your mask, when you're extracting your images
or cutting out your images,
you make sure to operate on the mask itself. Remember that if
you the layer now has two parts. It has the image itself
and the mask. And notice that white box, when I click on the
picture the white box moves to the picture, here white box
moves to the mask. So this means I'm operating on the mask,
which allows me to use pure black and pure white. The
moment I'm on the picture now actually operating on the
picture so, you know,
you may think oh, I'm masking out, cool. Just like what
Chris showed me but actually what's happening is you're
actually drawing and painting right on your picture because
notice the white box, so just keep that in mind. You want to
keep your eye on this. If something's not working while
you're trying this masking technique, it may be this. Just
something to keep in mind here. Keep your eye out for that.
And of course, I don't like this. I'm just going to simply
undo and undo is command Z.
So the last thing I want to quickly review or go over is
just how to keep your layers organized and let's do that
now, so I'm going to - I'm kind of going to go through the
extraction, the separation quickly. I'm going to separate
the figure from the background and the figure from her - the
head from the figure. Just to quickly
have some layers that we can organize.
All right, so I'm going to quickly
extract our figure so
I don't mean to scare you intimidate you, I'm going to go -
go pretty fast here.
And with practice, of course, you'll get fast, too.
And it's going to be a little bit sloppy, little bit. It's
not going to be a perfect extraction. Perfect cut.
It's sort of a rough cut.
I'm using
pure black with my hard edge brush. Just quickly mark out,
refine my mask.
And to be honest, I can't see her hair right now in
this picture so I'm just kind of I guess I kind
of got to guess as to what her hair is shaped like.
I'm gonna mask out my figure. What I'm tying to do is try to do fairly clean
mask around my figure.
And this transparent background you see is just the kind of the
default transparent background. That's because my background
layer is turned off that little eyeball is there so that's what
you're looking at.
So you can make layers visible or invisible simply by
clicking this little box to bring that eyeball. The eyeball
means it's visible, the empty box means it's not.
Okay. So just a rough extraction here.
And when I say extraction I mean extract something from
something else. In this case I'm extracting the figure from
the background in my photo.
Okay, so there's my figure and I'm going to name this figure.
Okay.
I'm going to name this background. So just call it BG
for short.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the figure and
I'm going to separate -
let's see. I think the dress would be a nice thing to
separate. So let's do that now.
Again, I'm going to quickly
just draw a mask around that.
So this is great. For example, if you shoot a picture, let's
say you shot this model and then you were like
wow that dress is - whoops - that
dress is too pink. It's too saturated. You can definitely
adjust it and we'll talk about that later of course.
Actually, I'm going to
just take a copy
and then because the selection's active the moment I click this
button boom, creates a mask for me.
Then
I'm just going to clean it up a little bit. Kind of don't want
her feet.
I don't want her feet showing there.
I just want the dress and of course, you know, you can - I can
go through and tighten it, tighten the contour of this
mask. I just want to quickly rough it out.
So I'm going to call this dress.
I'm going to call this figure.
This one I don't need - oops, actually deleted my layer so
dress, figure.
The last thing I would want to separate is
let's just say I want to separate her head.
Not literally but in the photograph.
So you make a creepy kind of creepy looking thing.
So I'm just going to duplicate the full image. I'm going to
move this one up top.
And then we're going to - while the selection is active
just do that.
What I did here was I realized that I already had the head a
nice clean mask around the head. So one trick you can
do is if you already did some work, let's say you separated
the figure, now I just want to separate the head.
Actually, this would be a better way. Is so since I
already separated the figure from the background, if I want
to separate the figure or the head from the figure I just
duplicate the work that I did, also duplicate the mask, and it also duplicate the mask and
then
I'm going to quickly draw a big selection. So I can use
any number of my quick selection tools, bring up my
paint bucket and just make sure that I'm using pure black and
then -
oops.
See I painted on the layer. It's on the image itself not
the mask. Once I go to the mask boom now it's gone and
then I zoom in and then I fine-tune using my brush as
needed.
So separate the head and I'm going to call this head.
And you know we can keep going. We have the head, we have the
dress. We have the whole figure itself and we have the
background. So one thing I wanted to show you too quickly
is a grouping. Let's say
I
really like the figure.
I want to keep these things together, the head and the
dress, but I want them separate from the background. So what
I'll do is I'll make a group and one way to do that is to
select the layers you want into a group and to do
that you hold shift. So select, I click to select the layer, hold
shift, click on the second layer you want, in this case dress, hold
shift, continue to hold shift, click on the next layer you
want to include, in this case figure. So it's kind of like
selecting items in a folder, you hold shift to do that, very
similar to using the computer. And then I'll click this folder
button to create a group. And now all those items are in a
group.
And I'll call it
FG or foreground. I'll just call it foreground.
So that creates a group and if I expand the group, clicking on
the arrow, you'll see all my items are there and what that
will do is now I have my element on a background and
let's say I just I really I just want to change this
background completely. I'm just going to fill it with a nice
just generic grey tone. So you see that?
And then I have my foreground and because it's in a group,
check this out.
I can operate on all three because the group selects
all three and the masks are linked, notice the link so that
keeps my cut out, my extraction ready to move around.
And remember move is simply this top tool and the shortcut
is V.
So that's groups. And also don't forget adjusting the
layer order
for example, my foreground folder, my folder full of
extracted images is above the background. If I move it on
accident now, I can't see it. So if you're at a stage in your
work and your like oh crap, where's my -
where's all the work I did. Oh my god. Oh, no. It may just be
a layer order problem. So just simply keep in mind that the
layers can be simply moved around up and down just by
clicking, holding, and then dragging you can drag it up.
You can drag it down.
So just keep that in mind and that's also true within the
group.
Like for example, if I -
let's say I'm going to
make her head a different color,
make the dress
grey. So and we'll talk about that
in this lesson as well. So we want to make sure that you
know, if you did some work on the head and you're like, oh
crap, I can't see - I just did the work where'd it go, it
disappeared. Oh, no. Oh no. I'm in trouble. Well, it's just a
layer order. Notice the head's on the bottom of your layer
stack. So just simply move it back up and then there it is.
So that's the work you did. So just keep that in mind, layer
ordering is important. So you want to always be mindful of
your layers order, the order of your layers, especially the
more you build that. Right now, we only have four, we have the
figure separated into three layers and the background. So
imagine if you had multiple layers, 40 layers or even
400 layers, we definitely want to be aware of
your layers and their order.

Okay, the next important tools, set of tools we're going to be
using are transforming tools. Basically moving your images
around scaling them, rotating them, and adjusting them using
the tools in Photoshop. So let's take a look at transform
tools.
Okay, so I'm just going to open another file, open another image
that I could use.
Let's see.
Here's one.
So here's a photo
that I'd like to use in a painting.
So first thing I want to do is
of course separate
the figure from the backgrounds to obvious choice, so just
going to duplicate my layer there.
And what I like to do is
make a quick
selection around it. So I'm going to use freeform lasso and
one cool tip with freeform lasso is that - the round lasso -
is if you hold alt, if you hold alt and click see that, it
becomes a
rectangular lasso. So I can quickly draw a selection.
That's just one quick tip.
I'll show you that again.
So it's L for freeform lasso and hold alt and then click and
then move to draw your rectangular lasso. Just one
one quick tip. I could have done it also free form as well
simply by doing this.
Either way, whatever way you're comfortable with
and then while selection is active instead of erasing the
background I'm going to mask it out, just in case I want to
call it back up.
And then of course I can come in and tighten as needed. I'm
not going to go too tight. I don't want to spend too much time on it. one spend too much time on it.
And
what I want to do now is mask out this grey background, but
my selection is around her. So I just invert my selection
which is command - shift command I. I
It's also under here selection,
modify -
excuse me, inverse selection, inverse shift command I. So now
the selection inverse and I can use my paint bucket to
paint out with pure black groups again. Remember you saw
that it doesn't - it's not working because I'm on the
layer so control Z, boom. Now I'm on the mask, notice the white
box. There it is. All right.
Okay, so let's say
I'm just going to fill this layer with grey. I don't like
this plain grey background. Just going to fill it in my own
dark grey, that just a flat dark grey.
Make it a little darker so you can see it. Okay.
Now I have my objects, my foreground separated from the
background. Now we saw earlier that the move tool is great if
you're - let's say I want to move this figure a little bit to the
right. I can just whoop, use the V tool to move or to the left
or up or down.
Use the V tool to move. That's one way to do it and it
preserves my pixels because it's a mask the other way.
Let's say
what I'm going to do is,
let's say I want to move
her -
this arm and shoulder. Let's I want to move it up quickly,
draw a selection around that another way you can do it is
actually within the layer. So if I have my own, let's say I
want to move this arm, but I want to - I want to move it
within the picture. I can operate within the same
picture. So basically I'm going to affect these pixels. I can
just use the move tool and move it around, but see what
happens? It kinda leaves a space because there's no pixels
there.
Then if I let go
and hit command D now that this has become permanent, but
there's a big hole here, but that's using the move tool.
Another way to do it would be, again, what I like to do is to
duplicate.
And in this case I'm going to just do a delete.
I inverted the selection and deleted the pixels because it's
already here underneath.
So now I have the arm and I can just nudge it up. There's still
some pixels underneath. So that's the advantage of moving
within the layers. So typically
any time I make an operation. I'll make a brand new layer and
then operate.
And then let's say - let's say I liked it. I say, oh I like the
shoulder here a little bit higher, of course I'll still
need to do some work here to make this seamless. If I like
it I can just simply merge the two layers. Just do command E
and now
it applied the mask and the item is still -
the figure is still selected.
Or
if you want to keep the pixels, keep them fresh
you can do a group. You can click the group button.
This folder makes a group or do command G with the two layers
selected
and now
everything is still there and the layers are still there. So
if I do need to adjust the arm, a little bit is still there. So
that's typically a good way to work. So generally this is one
habit that I find the most useful, a lot of other Photoshop
professionals as well tend to use this kind of habit. If
you want to do anything new, if you want definitely if you want
to experiment make a fresh copy layer because it's cheap, you
know, you can make as many copies as you want and it
allows you to edit on the fly and of course to undo and redo
your mistakes and you still have the original picture. So
keep - try to practice that and use that habit yourself when
you're working in Photoshop. Duplicate a layer or make a
fresh new layer every time you want to do an operation.
Okay, the next thing is scale. So there's a couple of ways to
do scale.
What I like to do is bring up the transform tool and the
quick shortcut for transform tool is command T. Let's say I
have my figure here and let's say I want to make her
smaller so I go to command T, in this case I'm doing it
around the whole layer of the whole group so I can operate in
the group.
Or what I could do is I'm going to copy. I'm going to merge this
group into one thing. So I have my figure here. I just simply
duplicated the group and then merged the group.
And you can do that with command E, same as merging down.
So now I have my figure separate in a layer. So if I do
command T, it brings up this transform tool and now I can
scale. I can do a free form scale just by grabbing a
corner
like. Because I just want to make her a little bit more
narrow, more skinny, just just kind of
grab the corner, bring it in, and then to apply it hit enter.
I'm going to undo that.
Now if I want a perfect uniform scale
either bigger or smaller, I'll grab a corner. See the icon changes,
the cursor changes when it's on a corner, just little double
arrow thing. I hold shift and then now I can scale uniform.
So perfect uniform scale.
Either smaller or larger, of course larger will make it more
pixelated. So smaller make it tighter. Let's just make it
smaller.
Like so.
I'm going to undo that. And the other way is with the numerics.
So if I go to command T
to bring up my transform tool notice up top my options bar,
remember the options bar has different options for the
various tools. Right now I'm in transform tool and the options
bar shows all kinds of different things. This is
translation Y and W and
this is scale and this is rotate. So for example, let's
say if I want to make it 50% more narrow,
I just type in 50 here
and hit enter to apply so now it's more narrow.
Or if I want it uniform, let's say I want 50% both width and
height.
I make sure to click this link button. So now width and height
the same. So it's a uniform 50% shrinking or scale down.
So that's just a couple of ways to scale. Typically what I do is
bring transform tool and then
use a corner and drag it, click, hold, and drag. That's typically what
I do or use these guys the left one if I want to make it more
narrow, the bottom if I want to make it shorter or taller.
That's typically what I do and then when I want to apply just
hit enter and then boom, that's how it would transform.
The next thing that's quite useful is
cropping and cropping can be done with selections as well.
So let's say I want to get rid of a lot of this background.
Right? This background is just a little too big. Let's say I
want to go tighter. What I can do is take my marquee tool.
Remember M is the shortcut kind of draw a rectangle around her.
And then I can do image crop.
And what it does is it crops the canvas to the size that I
wanted. So this gives me a lot of control about how tight I
want to make the crop. So let's say I want it even tighter
around her around her knees and her lower legs here. So I just
draw a marquee and kind of get as tight as I can right there.
Then I go to image, crop, and there it is. So nice tight
circle.
A nice tight square around the model. That's one way to crop
it or make your canvas smaller.
And you can also - I'm going to undo that so control Z
or command Z. Command Z. You can also make your canvas - change
the color so you can see it better. You can also make your
canvas bigger. You don't have to - you can expand the size of your
canvas. There's a couple of ways to do that. But then the
way that I like to do it is with the file menu under canvas
size. So go to image, canvas size.
And you can set it to inches, you can set it to pixels. I
like pixels or inches, even percent.
Right you can make it two hundred percent wide. Let's say I'm
going to
pixels, let's say I want to I want to make a nice image for my
Facebook thing. My Facebook cover or something like that or
it's social media.
I
want to make it wider. So I just take 982 and let's say
just type in 1800, double -almost double the width. Boom.
And it makes my canvas wider.
And because
my item is on a layer separated, right, if I do commend A.
Command A is select all and just fill it with a
color, fill this layer with a color, this new layer that I
created.
And I have my thing on a more wide canvas. So this is two ways
to crop. Let's say I want to bring it back, it's a little
too wide so I can just draw a marquee
and then hit image, crop. Boom. And of course you can do that
with canvas size as well. Image, canvas size, same exact thing.
Let's say
this, you know, it's a little bit harder to control but let's
say I just want to make it even 900 by 900 square, I can
just type it in. So I'm going to crop it. It's going to give
you a warning. It says the new canvas is smaller. It's saying
are you sure you want to crop. Just hit okay, see now it's a see it? Okay, see now. It's a
little bit tighter. So that's perfect. Perfect. 900. So two
ways to resize your canvas.
Okay, the last things we want to use are rotation and warp.
So for example
let's say I want to -
she's leaning a little bit. Let's say I want to make her
more upright. So I bring up my transform tool, which is command
T. And then what I'll do is grab a corner and then I will
turn to warp and now it's a little too big so bigger than the
canvas. I'm going to hit enter to apply the rotation and then
command T again to
shrink or scale down. So now my figure is little bit
rotated, you know. If I don't like it, I can always bring it
back.
You know I want the opposite direction so I can
just rotate it backwards.
And you can also rotate here.
Let's say I want a perfect 45 degrees, just type in 45 here
and then hit enter twice to apply. So nice. So as long as
your transform tool is active, hit command T and notice I'm
operating on the layer. I can definitely
rotate it,
scale it, transform it.
So that's rotation and rotation happens when you -
when your transform tool,
instead of see these six points
or how many points is that - eight points?
Hover your your mouse or your cursor not on the transform
points, but a little bit over, see that the icon changes to to see that the icon changes to
like a curved arrow? You notice that? Let me see if I can zoom in
so you can see a little bit bigger. See the icon change
right here? On the transform node outside of it.
See that? So rotate is a little bit outside of the node, that
goes for all of the nodes. So all the corners and the middle.
Okay, that's rotation.
And the last thing you want to look at is warp. So what warp
does is kind of what it sounds. Now, you probably won't be
using warp that often, but it's pretty useful.
Let's say I have -
well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a mask and
I'm going to kind of tighten around her hair a little bit.
Let's say I want to change the perspective and this is kind of
useful too obviously for -
for man-made objects. Let's say I want to make her head, the
top of her figure a little bit bigger than the bottom,
you know, for example, if you shoot photography and the lens
you use is kind of the wrong lens, the wrong focal length. So
things get distorted. So if you bring up your transform tool
and hit - right click inside. If you're using a mouse or if
using a pen hold control and then click and it brings up this
submenu, see that free transform is what we were doing
earlier, scale, rotate which we also did. Now I can do
perspective and warp will quickly show you perspective.
Perspective what that does is allows you to grab a point and
mimic the perspective,
mimic transforming and perspective. So for example to
make the top of her head bigger, I'll just grab the
bottom points and then drag them in. So notice the top
points don't move. This kind of - there's this is kind of weird focal this is kind of weird focal
length looking thing. So you can do that or you can do the
inverse, create the opposite look. I kind of like that, kind
of the inverse. Makes it feel like we're looking up at her.
So I like that. That's perspective. So I'm going to
hit enter.
Now for warp, let's say I want her hair to come out more. One
thing I could do is
make a selection around her hair.
Actually I'm gonna use my free form lasso. So I'm just going to grab this
section of hair and a little bit of her skin right here.
Then I'm going to duplicate it because I'm going to do a crazy
operation. So I'm going to duplicate it. So I have the
pixels.
I'm gonna bring up command T
for my transform, hold control and click to bring up the sub menu
and I'm going to select warp. Now warp brings up these cool
little handles and now you'll see what these handles do.
You see that?
Now what's happening is it's not affecting the mask.
So I'm probably going to do a -
just cut out those pixels.
And I'm going to apply this mask.
So basically cut out these pixels. You could also do
control C, control V cut and paste. So now I'm going to do
command T and notice it's going to only going to be drawn
around the pixels because it's on its own layer, this
part of the hair. And do a warp, it brings up my transform.
And now I can kind of warp her hair, make it feel like it's
kind of flowing. Now, of course, there's other things I need to
clean up, but that's one use of warp. I can even do it here.
Just quickly - I'll
show you a review. Go back to my original image.
I'm going to do a cut and paste.
This part of her dress. Let's say I want this dress to be
more
more blowy. Looks like maybe some wind picked up her dress.
So cut and paste that part of her dress.
Make sure the white boxes around the image. Do command C
command V. So it pastes it on its own layer, right? I'm going
to call this hair warp, just so I know what's going on.
I'll call this
fabric warp just so you know, so I know what the heck it is.
So bring up command T.
Right - hold control, click inside, select warp from the submenu,
and now I can whoop, whoop, whoop, kind of just do all kinds
of neat flowy things. And you know, that's just one tiny
example, you can see how you can use this many different
ways.
And then if I like my work,
I'll group it. I'll call,
you know, select all the layers, hit command G to group and then
I'm going to name it warped just to keep myself organized.
So that was a lot of stuff. I know. Definitely review this
section. The warps look fancy, but they're not. The scales look
fancy, but it's not. Really the main thing to keep in mind is
that anytime you want to change, make a new layer
and then whatever you want to change, draw a selection,
use the transform tool, command T, and take it from there. Remember
within the transform tool you have scale, you have crop, you
have
warp, and you have translation, moving it all over the place.
Lots of things. You can do - depending on what you want to
do it all begins with that first step. Separating your
thing, your objects, your items with selection and then calling
up the transform tool. The hotkey being command T. So
please don't get scared. We'll review this over and over and
over and over again in this lesson and all throughout
Photoshop. What you just saw you'll be using probably your
entire career or as long as you're using Photoshop these
editing set of tool and we just covered. So with practice you'll
get it. Don't get intimidated, review this as often as needed
and we'll continue to review as well as we go through the
lessons.

Okay. Now we're going to go over one of my favorite parts
of editing images is adjusting the color and the contrast. I
really really love as a painter and as a draftsman I adjust
color a lot and it's a lot of fun. It's a great way to really
get a lot of variety out of your reference, how to clean up
your reference, tighten up your reference, and to really make
your reference as best as possible for your drawings
and your paintings and also just, you know, if you want to
show off your photographs in and of themselves, this is
going to be a lot of fun. So let's take a look at how we can
adjust the images, color, and contrast. All right, let's
begin by opening an image. So remember two ways to open just.
I'm just going to drag
my image in. Sometimes I like to do is to have my image
library open and then
I drag it into Photoshop. So I'm looking at these little
thumbnails.
Here's a nice little birdie. Let's grab this little birdie
shot.
Boom. And drag it into Photoshop. And now it's open. So now I'm
going to expand Photoshop. I change my view mode by hitting
F. Boom, good to go.
Okay. So there's basically
two ways to call up your image adjustment tools. The first is
within the file menu. So I'm going to duplicate, remember
duplicate when you're about to do some work. It's a good habit.
Can either go to image, adjustments and remember all
these various adjustments we're only going to use We're only going to use
the two big ones hue saturation, color balance, and levels. Well
technically for or you can bring them up as
layer adjustments using this like half circle item here,
click and hold and you will call up all the various layer
judgments. These are exactly the same as what's up here.
And
the advantage
for one and the other
to me is
one advantage is quickness and file size. So for example,
let's say I quickly want to increase the saturation of
my photo here. I just want to quickly do it, do a subtle
change and get it over with.
That I would use the file menu. So go to image, adjust, hue
saturation and the hotkey is command U. You will be
using that hockey quite a bit hopefully, it's my favorite
hotkey. And then just quickly turn up the saturation.
Okay. Yeah, so I've just brought it up plus 25.
Right? Then hit ok. Now it applies it.
And it looks pretty good, right? If you see you make it
invisible you can see the old version underneath.
Invisible,
pretty cool, huh?
So that's - I'm going to name this layer
saturation.
Now
the advantage of using a layer adjustment is
and remember going to call it up going this layer adjustment
at the bottom. I'm going to move it. Do the exact same
thing. We did the exact same thing. But now it's on the
layer and the advantage of that is I can turn it on or off at
any time.
On or off.
And I can also change it on the fly. Let's say - it's a little -
plus 18 is not enough. I could bring it to plus 50. Oh and if
I go plus 50 is too much. Say I want to turn it down if I
decide to grey it out. I can change it all on the fly. No
matter what I change
the layer adjustment is still there. See? Change it at any time,
play with it at any time.
Still there, and I can even apply it by merging down. So if
I select this, hold shift and click this layer underneath
and hit command E which merges down. Boom.
I applied it. Call this saturation.
So they're both did the exact same thing. Now, you may be
wondering when should I do, what's the difference?
Well really the main difference is
speed and
file size. Because
if you're working, obviously if you just want to make a quick
image adjustment, adjust your image quickly and you're sure
of what you're doing, if you like you okay, I'm positive
that it needs to be more saturated for example, just
quickly use the file menu and now you have a layer that has
the correct saturation in this case. Now
you can do the exact same thing with layer adjustment, but the
disadvantage of this and I would say most likely may not
be even a disadvantage is the file size. So what this does is
now you have this thing, which creates a layer, kind of makes -
it makes your file size bigger. So if you have a slower
computer, that could be a problem. Most likely the stuff
you'll be working on won't be massive, you know, two gigabyte
files or anything so you should be okay. And then of course the
other disadvantage is that it can get quite confusing. Let's
say you have 30 or 40 of these adjustment layers. You can kind
of lose your mind trying to figure it out. So it does
simplify it a little bit. If you use file menu. But to me, I
almost use this or whenever I can because I like
to have full control, I like to be able to go back and fine-tune it.
So definitely play with both.
I would say the more comfortable you get with
Photoshop you'll probably be using more layer adjustments
versus the file menu calling up image adjustments.
Okay. Now I'm going to quickly go over three of the main or my
favorite, the most useful, probably the most common image
adjustments and how we can use them for photo reference.
Alright, so like I said earlier, my favorite favorite
favorite of all time is hue set, hue/saturation. It's just
so useful and powerful. So let's do a quick example of
that.
Now what I like to do,
let's say I just quickly want to bump up the saturation
overall. This looks like a fairly overcast day or at least
the time this photo was taken. Just bring up
command U, same as calling it up the file menu. Brings up hue
saturation image adjustment menu and it's going to quickly
bump up the saturation to 10, plus 10%.
So I like that, hit okay. And I'm also going to brighten it
just a little bit.
Plus five, so plus ten plus five. Boom.
Now I can undo that of course. We command Z and I can
do that with confidence because it was a duplicate. I have my
original underneath, you see that?
Pretty cool. That's one way to do that. Now a cool way to
combine the masking techniques, remember earlier we talked about member earlier we talked about
masking techniques is to do this. So watch this. So I'm
going to mask out our friend real quick here. I'm going to
start with a fairly tight
selection. Now
the selection won't be perfect.
But it's fairly close and you know with practice you'll be
able to draw quick selections as well.
So I got my bird here. Now let's say
I'm going to call the hue saturation,
adjustment menu,
and notice it already drew an alpha mask. That's because the
selection was active. Remember when you bring up selection
and you call it a mask and makes it active and image
adjustment layers have masks built into them. So it's a very
powerful feature. So now this thing has a mask, this adjustment
layer's a mask and let's say I want to turn my friend here a
little bit brighter - excuse me little bit more saturated. A
little bit brighter and we change the hue a little bit
more pink. So you see that?
If I turn I invisible you'll see the changes.
If I hold shift on the mask part of the adjustment layer,
it makes it invisible.
It makes the mask invisible. So that change went across the
board.
So that's one way to work. Now
I can also bring up multiple image adjustments or hue
saturations if I want to let's say make the background
grey. What I'm trying to do is get my friend here, this
foreground bird, to really stand out. So what I could do
is make the background
little desaturated
and darker.
Now what's happening is that it's showing - it's
because there's no - the mask is empty.
It's affecting the entire image. So what I could do is
apply a mask that only affects the background. Well, how do I
do that? Luckily I already have a mask made, this guy right
here. So if I hold command and click on the mask it draws the
mask because it's already been created.
And now I can go to the second hue saturation image adjustment
and do a shift command I to invert the mask or invert my
selection. Now I'm going to go to paint bucket, which is G
and then fill it with black.
Pure black, boom.
And that's not the effect I wanted, the mask is actually
reversed. So I'm just going to make sure that the mask is
selected, do command I, boom. Invert the mask. So now
look how cool that looks.
Here's the original.
I -
I made a mask around just our bird and then I brought up a
hue saturation and then I turned down - I made the
background a little bit darker, a little bit desaturated. Right
now it's a little bit too dark, huh? So I'm just going to
play with it. See that's the advantage of that's the advantage of
adjustment layer. I can play with it. I can even make it
brighter if I want it.
I decided that brightening it makes it better so actually
making it brighter but still desaturated and I want to change saturated and I want to change
the tone a little bit. The hue, you got to be careful with the
hue.
We'll talk about colored balance later. And then the
second huge adjustment just on our friend the bird. And
because the mask only affects the bird,
what you're seeing is two different Hue saturation
adjustments on the exact same image underneath
but because of the mask you only - it only affects the area
that's been masked, in this case the background has been
masked, in this case the foreground bird has been masked.
So we can totally play and because it's on a
layer we can go crazy, we can play with it, tweak it as much
as we want. That's a beautiful thing about using adjustment
layers. And that's one simple way to use hue saturation.
Okay, next is levels and this basically adjust the contrast.
That's typically what you can use it for.
So I'm going to call it up a levels. levels.
And remember you play with these top two sliders, top three
sliders to adjust levels. The bottom, this middle section with
the gradient bar makes it generally lighter or darker. So
right now I feel this image is a little dark. So I'm just
going to pull
this bottom one over just to make it brighter.
And then
I'm going to play with this - the top three to adjust the
contrast. Notice how it gets really more contrast. Let's say I
want to make it super contrasty.
Of course the colors become more contrasty as well. Really
pull out the darks, make the darks really dark and the lights
really light.
So that's that, that's levels.
And then curve sort of does the same thing.
Except curves you use,
right you use -
it's more of a curve you can add points. I pretty much
use curve levels eight out of ten times, but depending on how
comfortable you are, what you think is most useful, it's
really a personal preference thing
to use curves or levels. The curves does that as well. So
that's really contrasty.
And then
there's also brightness contrast, just a third way to
do it. Say I'll make it brighter and more contrasty.
That simple, it's only two knobs. I really like this one a lot. I
love brightness contrast for black and white images.
So there's levels.
There's curves.
There's brightness contrast. So three different ways to adjust the
contrast. I would say play with all three
because they're all there and you know, because they're on an
adjustment layer you really can't make a mistake. Your
original image is untouched, but they're on adjustment
layers. So it's really powerful feature. Even if you were to
use the file menu, all you have to do is duplicate it and then
call up your image adjustment and that's it.
It's still - the original is still there and you have it. So those
are three ways to adjust the contrast. I definitely like
curves and brightness contrast the most of all the three.
And one quick way
to combine
selection with adjustment layers, let's say for example,
I just want our friends head to have more contrast than the
rest of the bird, quickly draw a selection around the area you
want to operate on.
Call up a - while the selection is active I'm going to call
up levels.
And then I can make our friends head little bit brighter, little
bit more contrasty.
And of course
just like we did earlier I can turn down
the rest -
the rest by calling up another adjustment layer, in this case
hue saturation, which is what we did last time.
So very powerful tool, the contrast tools.
Okay. The last thing is color balance. So color balance is
just a fun little tool.
So let's say I have my - let's say I want to operate on
the whole image. I'm going to start by going to image, adjust,
color balance. And
has these three beautiful sliders and what's cool about
color balance is you can effect - you can choose affect the
shadow, the mid-tones or the highlights. Let's say I want to
affect the whole thing overall. I'll keep it at Overall. I'll keep it at
mid-tones. And right now it's a very cool scene, very cool sort
of overcast light. Let's say I wanted to make it closer to
like a warmer light. All I'd have to do is
change the color balance to a little bit less blue, some more
red, more yellow.
See that image became warmer. I'll show you side-by-side
real quick.
What I did was I cut and pasted into a new document.
So hopefully you can see that.
So you see the original it's very subtle, still a lot of
blues and cools. This one
a little bit warmer. I can push it even more just by
bringing up image adjustment,
color balance. Let's say I want even more green. Notice it becomes
more green, more red, sort of this more brown kind of brownie
orange tone. So that was a color balance over the entire
image. I'm going to close that. Save that.
And of course you can
use combination of selection tools to operate
let's say this area of blue
of his tail is just a little -
the blue is too blue. So I drew a selection around the
blue and you know, you could probably make the - it's going to
be a hard edge selection and we'll talk about softening your
selection as well, making it more of a soft edge. Call up a
color balance.
Let's say I want to warm up the blue. I make it a little bit
more green. So just move away from the blue. Turn it to
green. So pretty cool, huh? You saw that. I'm going to turn the
mask off so you can see looks
before, fairly reddish blue, more like an ultramarine blue, after
now it's more like a phthalo blue or phthalo green. little blue or phthalo green.
So shifting the color balance of just an area using
selection. So remember combining all different elements
and different tools. So color balance is a lot of fun. It's
very very powerful. Definitely play with ways that you can use
it in your reference and ways you can mask out items while You can mask out items while
keeping the original intact.
Okay, the last thing we're going to look at is how to
manually adjust your reference photography or images
sort of by hand. So instead of using image adjustments. I'm
going to show you how to use brushes and gradient tool. So
this is - if you're already a pretty experienced painter and
you want to kind of mimic traditional ways of working,
which I love to do myself as a painter, this will be a lot
of fun for you to do.
Okay. So one thing
that we can do or I like to do is adjust the contrast using
a combination of color and layers with blending modes. So
for example, let's say
I like -
I like this image the way it is, but I want to push the
darks, like the darks of the trees really dark and I want to
push them towards a warmer dark. So what I can do is make
a new layer. Well first I'm going to duplicate my original.
Make a new layer. Just a blank layer. Remember this button
makes a new layer you command new. new.
And then I'm going to hit - I'm going to make -
use a brush. I'm going to use a big soft airbrush and I already
have one made. Remember soft airbrush has 0% hardness and
transfer set to a pen pressure will give you that really
really soft airbrush. So I'm going to for example, so I have
some colors on my canvas already. Let's say I'm going to
color pick a brown. So I can either make just a nice neutral
brown, you know, using the color menu here or I can pick
one from my image. So I just while brush is active I hold alt
and it brings up eyedropper. You can also call it here.
Hotkey's I I believe. Yes.
And then color pick
a brown thing. This is good. Like a nice neutral dark brown. We
play with the saturation a little bit. So I have a nice
neutral greenie brown. I'm going to make this a little bit
warmer actually, just move the hue.
And then
with my new layer, I'm going to set this layer to multiply and
multiply makes things darker. So this is going to help me
increase the contrast and look at what happens. I just kind of
lightly brush on the tree area.
The logo starts to get dark and I'm just kind of dabbing. I'm
not trying to be too precise. I just want overall the picture
to be darker around a character.
So you see that it's basically all the shadow areas. I'm
adding a little bit of warmth and making it darker because I
use multiply, layer set to multiply. So if you
set it to normal just change it back to normal you can see right,
it's just a big fuzzy mess of blobs, but because it's on
multiply
it actually darkens what's underneath and you can still
see some of the stuff underneath. So if I kept it at
normal and let's say I paint it a little bit thicker, right now
it's fairly thin, right? I just duplicate it to make it thicker,
right? Now you can't really see the trees underneath but if I
set it to multiply you can kind of see what's underneath. It's
still dark. So what I would do is play with the opacity
to make it more subtle. So that's one way to brush in a nice
color and dark value to increase the darkness and let's
say I want to make the background even brighter, like
maybe push this bird's face. Push this area brighter. I can
make a new layer and turn that to - too.
there's two main ways to lighten.
Well overlay does as well but I like screen and color dodge.
Let's play with screen. Screen is the opposite of multiply it
makes things brighter. So I'm going to color pick a nice
bright cool color. Let's say this, the color of -
this nice leaf, little pixel right there of a nice leaf, so
it's fairly bright, fairly saturated.
Here's the color, the numeric value of the color. And
now I'm going to brush wherever
I want things to get brighter. And even on this secondary
bird's face push him back so you can see it really helping
to adjust the contrast, right? Went from a super
sort of neutral image to really contrasty, right? And this is
set to screen. So it's making things is touches brighter.
If I change it back to normal notice, you know, and if I make
it thicker, right, it's just a bunch of blobs of this light
light blue. But the moment I turn it to screen
it makes it a brighter. Now you can also use You can also use
color dodge but color dodge is really strong and notice it
creates these kind of crazy color accidents, really hard to
control, right? Notice the color changes. I'll zoom in a little
bit, color dodge. See before after because I brushed in
color it kind of interacts in a weird way. So typically use
color dodge very very sparingly on a small area.
And that's if you want to get a really bright highlight, but
if I just want more subtle I use screen and then play with
the opacity, play with the opacity, my multiply.
That's it. Then I'll group the work I just did, I'll call it
contrast.
Contrast light shadow.
And you can see before, after, before, after. I'm going to
double my canvas so you can see it real quick.
And one way to do that is to do of course image, canvas size.
Turn the width to two hundred percent.
There it is. And then I'm going to take the work that I did,
it's in a folder just sort of move it across.
And the - if you hold V and shift you can drag things across, up
and down, perfect left or right. And notice the difference.
Right before, after, brushed in, multiply, brushed in screen to
brighten, to really increase the contrast.
Let's undo that.
Another way
is to use
gradation tool. I love this way. So gradation too is great for
covering big areas. So let's say this whole area right here
I want to make the left side of this image I just want to make
it darker and let's say I want to make it darker and
and bluer. So I'm going to take just color pick a nice dark
blue. I'm going to grab a flat gradient. Remember gradients
have different shapes. I like flat, circular, and reflective so a
flat gradient and then I'm just going to hold shift and drag to
the right. Create the sort of flat gradient. You see what that
does right there? Now
I can turn it to multiply, right? To really push the darkness.
But what I'm going to do is keep it at normal. I'm going to
make it a little bit darker. So make it darker.
Turn on the saturation a little bit. And then I'm going to drop
the opacity.
So it's subtly, you see that? It's subtly
makes the left side little bit darker and more blue. And if I
don't want it on my friend here, on the bird, what
I could do is I could - because it's on a layer I can like move
it if I want to move it to the left I can do that. Or I can
call up a mask
and then I'm going to either brush pure black with a soft
airbrush or I'm going to use the gradient tool in this case.
Then
just use a circular gradient shape. That way
these pixels become masked out. That blue I just -gradient I
just put on becomes masked out on the bird so that you only
see it on the left side of the canvas. So that's a quick way
to do that.
And then let's say I want to make this area bloom
behind the bird so I just color pick that. And say I want a
little bit more color, I'm going to take a circular
gradient and go like that. So make that area brighter. I can
repeat it in certain areas just to give me a nice little bit of
bloom and instead of using the color or blending mode screen
or color dodge, just keep it at normal. That way the edges stay
nice and soft and fuzzy and drop the opacity to make it
more subtle.
So that's one way you can use
the same process but instead of with a brush you use a gradient
tool. And what's the advantage of both? I would say gradient
tool is great for making big areas. So you saw, if you
quickly want to make the area
dark
or brighter just take a gradient tool and make a
quick pass, use circular gradient to make a round shape.
So gradients are using for big spaces and fast actions.
Brushes, obviously for finer adjustments, finer shapes, and
smaller shapes. So
yeah, use both, play around with both and you'll see they'll
both be useful.
And if I like my work I can either merge it or keep it in a
group.
That way if I want to play with the layers, I still have them.
So that's
using
the
manual ways to make adjustments. Your image color and value to your image color and value
and so on. You can even
manually brush.
Let's say I want to bring some of this red down into my
painting. Let's hide this.
Or
bring some of this yellow down. I can just use a soft airbrush
to make that yellow.
Maybe bring the yellow up. Now, of course, the pixels will
cover up the details and won't be a sharp
if you just want to quickly do it and I can also erase.
So lots of different ways
to use brushes both with image adjustments and masking and
manually brushing and painting. And we'll cover more painting it will cover more painting
techniques later in these lessons.

Okay, the final
adjustment we're going to make is sharpness and contrast. So
there's a couple really powerful ways to do that, really
fast, really powerful. Let's take a look at that now.
So sharpness and contrast.
One quick way to make your pictures a little bit sharper is
to make them more contrasty.
So obviously we saw earlier lots of ways to do that. I like
levels and brightness contrast. So let me just adjust the
sharpness
contrast to make a picture a little more contrasty and
punchy.
Go before, after, little bit more contrasty, it looks sharper.
Another way to do that - and I'm going to just name this folder.
Another way to do that is with
a sharpness filter. So if I go duplicate my original image, go
to filter, sharpen. now there's a few options, but what I like is
unsharp mask. So filter sharpen, unsharp mask. And it brings up
this little sub menu and what unsharp mask does is it allows
you to fine tune your sharpness. So first the top
slider's amount, the bottom one is radius. So radius means how
much of it is applied
and amount is how strong it is. So for example, if I can turn
up my amount to let's say 200 percent, just a big number
and then increase my - double my radius. So it's
tripled 3.7. It's a little too sharp. I'm just going to make
it
a two, around two just to show you what it looks like.
You can see before, after. Now it looks really sharp. But of
course, it looks a little unnatural right, looks a little
unnatural because I probably cranked it up too far. So
call it
sharpen one.
And now I'm going to do one
filter,
sharpen, unsharp mask. And I'm just going to make it a little
bit more subtle. Little bit more subtle. So I'll go to 1.5. So
I'm going to type it in this time and
my sharpness was set to 90 percent so almost almost double.
So this is before and after and let me - let's look at these
side by side.
I'm going to go to
image, canvas size. I'm going to make the canvas double in size.
Click this relative button.
Whoops a little too big now actually.
Doesn't matter.
So this is my original
to the left.
Adjusting the contrast
to the bottom is the first sharpening
and this one is the more subtle sharpening. So let's take a
look.
So remember starting with the left
is our original image then we went here and I just adjusted
the levels. So this is just levels. Made it a little bit
sharper, right? a little bit. Notice the leaves stick out
more from the background, the light and shadows little bit
more contrasty. So very subtle way to adjust to make your
pictures sharper with more contrast using this case, using
levels here. I applied the sharpness filter, the filter
sharpen,
unsharp mask, but I made it a little too high. Made the levels a
little too high. So it feels a little unnatural if you compare
this one the top, the original to this bottom left, right? Much
much sharper, but little - it gets crazy around here, right? a
little unnatural. Now, if you go here this looks great.
This looks great. I'm going to move this over just so you can
really compare.
You can better see it turn off.
Let's take a look at that side by side, right? Before, after,
notice the little branches here, little reeds, and
the rocks look, sharper his face looks sharper. So it's a really
quick and powerful way to sharpen your images with
unsharp mask, I use that a lot.
Now we can combine selection of course.
We can combine selection tools
with sharpening.
Well first -
actually, yeah, let's do that. So I'm going to show you how we
can
create really cool effects by using sharpness and also blur.
Okay. So one quick way to do this
to get your picture sharpened is - let's say I don't want to
use a sharpness filter. Let's say my original picture is
pretty sharp.
My cat. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to separate my cat and the
foreground. So, let's see. I'm going to draw a quick mask.
This mask is going to be pretty rough.
Won't be a perfect mask but it'll it'll be enough so you can see
the result.
And I don't like this rock actually.
Okay.
So I made a selection around
our cat and these foreground rocks. So I'm going to create a
mask. So now I have the cat masked out from the background.
My original pixel are still there. I'm going to duplicate
my background again, call this BG
softened. And I'll show you why in a minute. Now I'm going to
take this layer BG soften, and I'm going to blur it. I'm going
to purposely blur it, do the exact opposite of what we just
did and that's under filter, blur. Now there's all kinds of
different ways.
There's regular blur, Gaussian blur, motion blur. I typically
only use Gaussian in motion. So let's quickly take a look at
Gaussian.
A Gaussian blur is just it's just sort of this overall blur
and you can play with the parameter. You can see the
preview window here and it's also previewing live. Look what
happens. I crank it up to 4.8. Look how blurry it point eight. Look how blurry it
gets.
Even at like 2.0. I'm going to leave it at 2.0 pixels just to
blur it out. You can see wow. Look how blurry it got. Now what
this does is because of contrast now -
because of contrast now the cat and the rocks appear to be
sharper because the background has been so - it's been so
blurred out. So you see that? That's another quick way to
make sharpness and that was with Gaussian blue. I'm going
to undo that real quick. I actually don't have to undo it,
BG softened Gaussian. I'm going to name it. So, you know
what it is. Now let's take a look at motion blur. I'm going
to call this BG softened motion or for motion blur. So we'll go
to image - excuse me filter, blur, motion blur. And motion blur has
a direction so notice right now it's at left to right. I'm
going to crank up the distance. So you see it looks like a -
looks like wind blowing. This is a really cranked up. You can
change the direction to any direction. You can go crazy
angle. It looks pretty cool,
kind of like speed lines in a comic book.
Or you can go up and down.
Let's say I want it to go up and down, but I want it to be a
little bit subtle. So right now I want - going to crank it up to
about
15 pixels and that's up and down. So that's pretty cool.
So again, let me expand the canvas.
Image, canvas size.
Make it wider.
Image, canvas size.
Okay.
There's my original.
Okay, just want to quickly show you the comparison. So up here on the
upper left that's our original image.
Here we separated the cat from the foreground and use Gaussian
blur to soften the background. So that makes the cat and the
rocks feel sharper, more contrasty. And here we use the
exact same technique but instead of Gaussian blur which
is a uniform overall blur. We use the motion blur and this
one was set to up and down. So you see it's also softened
has little bit of movement now too so, this is pretty cool. So
very powerful and you saw how simple that was. Just go to
filter blur. Boom, right as long as you have your things
selected, it looks good.
So now I'm going to show you
the obvious powerful technique.
The obvious technique would be to -
I'm going to do the side by side so you can see it.
The obvious technique would be to soften the background and
sharpen the foreground, do a little bit of both. So what I'm
going to do here is first I'm going to soften the background.
So here's my background layer, right? I made a duplicate of my
original. So I'm gonna go to image or excuse me filter, blur. I'm
going to use, let's try Gaussian blur, just a nice
overall blur.
I'll make it pretty subtle like a one.
Let's say 1.0.
Well, let's make it obvious 1.5. A little bit obvious. Right? So
like we did earlier now the cat and the rocks appear sharper
and the background has been softened. So it's really
blurred out.
Now I'm going to do this. So check this out. I'm going to
sharpen the cat but only his face so watch this. So right
now my cat is separated. I have a mask. So I'm going to draw my
mask and then I'm going to use -
I'm going to
to edit my mask by using the lasso tool and my alt and shift
keys. Remember alt subtracts from the mass. So if I hold alt you
see the icon changes to a minus. Shift adds. See the icon changes to a
plus? So I'm going to hold alt and I'm just going to go whoop,
see that just
cut away the rocks. Whoop,
whoop cut away the rocks, cut away the rocks, cut ,edit my await the Rocks cut edit my
mask, remove the selection around the cat around his body,
around his head. And what I want to do
is
now going to invert it
and fill it with black.
And then I'm going to bring up my brush. Remember I like to
start with a big broad selection and then fine tune it
with a brush and that brush is too soft. But that's
okay. It's fine. It should work.
Normally, I would use a hard - I'm going to use a hard edge
brush. I don't like this one
because I really want a tight mask around the cat's head.
Look at that. Okay.
I'm going to call this head.
Now I have the background. It's the original color background.
I'll call this foreground and now I have the cat's head masked out.
So what I'm going to do is because I'm going to do a new
operation, I'm going to duplicate the head, right? I
don't want to make an operation and kill my pixel so I have
fresh pixels there and then I'm going to just make the
original invisible by turning off the eyeball. Then I'm going
to take my layer that just has the cat's head. Right? And what
I'm going to do is make that sharper. So go to filter, sharpen,
call up unsharp mask, boom. And play with it, play with the
parameters, play with the radius. I'm going to make it
pretty strong. It's just so it's obvious. Obviously when
you're at home, you can make it a subtle as you want.
So look at that. Look at that. And now I can take the
foreground. I'm going to blur the foreground just a little
bit, so filter, blur.
This one, let's put -
I was going to say put a motion blur but just put a little
Gaussian blur and we'll make this super subtle like .5.
It's too subtle, point three.
Well, let's make it point five. And then I'm going to do filter
blur. I'm going to put a motion blur in the background. So a
second blur just to make it obvious. Let's try the - let's
try left to right and see how the - oh, that looks cool. You
see that looks cool, left to right.
All right. So I like what I just did. I'm going to delete
the copies.
Very cool. So now let's take a look. The original image,
look at what we did here. Look how the cat's head shoots
forward. And obviously this is a lot. It's not subtle. It's
obvious. Right? We made the background super blurry. We
made the foreground a little bit blurry and added motion
blur and then we made the cat's face, which is, you know, it's
going to be our focal point really really sharp. We
exaggerate the sharpness using a filter and it's all on three
layers so that we have the original if we want to go back
and operate.
Just one tiny way to use filters to both soften and
filters to both sharpen. And of course again, another review of
the selection process using selections and alpha masks.
Okay, that pretty much wraps up all of our editing tools. There
is a lot to look at, especially the last part, this the last part that filled
the filters with the sharpening and the blurring don't sweat
it, don't get intimidated. We're going to review these probably
every lesson, you're going to be using it every time, and this is
just a tiny little window. So please don't get intimidated at
all, review, review, review, review. Practice, practice, you know
practice the first chunk, you know, maybe just practice
selections and then move on from there but these tools
you'll be using quite a bit. And, you know, we really didn't show
a lot. We just made the most of the few tools that we use. So
just keep that in mind, don't get intimidated, we'll be going
back to this over and over again. So that's the end of
this lecture. Next we'l actually go over some examples
and how I'll go through some examples with you and how you
can actually apply these tools yourself.

Transcription not available.

Okay, first I'm going to open my first image, which will be a
still life. So go to file, open.
Then browse for it in my folder using finder. Here's my folder using finder, here's
my image folder here. And open my little still life.
And
first thing I want to do is crop it. So there's a lot of
negative space. So I'm just going to start with the marquee
and just draw a marquee around. Kind of estimate the size that
I want.
That feels pretty good. I'm going to go to image, crop.
That looks pretty good. Now I kind of like the bottom but I
want to cut a little bit more of the top but I want some
control so I'm going to go to image,
canvas size and now I can fine tune it. So typically I
use pixels. So I like my height.
Let's say I want to make it even two thousand two hundred even two thousand two hundred
pixels, and I'm only going to - I want to cut off the top. So
what I'll do is I will move the center of my thing to the
bottom. Notice I just click in one of these quadrants. So move to
the bottom center, call it 2,200
pixels and what it'll do is it'll give me a warning say yes, the
canvas is smaller and just cropped little bit of the
bottom.
And let me crop a little bit of the side to image, canvas size.
Same thing I'm going to move my center to the left because I
want to cut to the right, switch it to pixels, and let's say I make
this 2900.
It's a nice even number.
Yes, it's smaller you see, there? So now I got a tight crop. So that's
step one.
Now what I'm going to do is adjust the contrast now, I'm
actually going to turn up the contrast a little bit because
actually the contrast is good. This is a really strong
spotlight. But what if I want a little bit more of the shadows?
So more of a - more of a naturalistic look. So I'm actually
going to do the reverse and turn up my levels.
At least on the fruit.
So that brings up more shadow.
So that brings up more shadow of there. And now what I'm
going to do is bring back that vignette.
And to do that I'm going to bring up an adjustment layer,
call it hue saturation.
I'm going to make it really dark
and desaturated.
And then if I want to show off the fruit,
I'm going to take a
gradient, circular gradient using pure black and then mask
out the center, which is where the fruit is and look what
happens there? Look at that. It creates this beautiful
vignette. So now I have a little bit less contrast. You
can see more of the bounce light, see more of the color,
which is what I wanted when I go to paint, but now I still
have that beautiful vignette and the last thing I want to
do is adjust the saturation because the fruit is nice. I
want the fruit to be nice, but the background, the cloth, is
just as saturated as the fruit. So - or even more saturated
so what I'm going to do is first draw a selection
around the fruit because I want to separate the fruit. And just the
fruit. Not the shadow. I know this is a little bit tricky.
We're going to make this subtle.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate my original
image.
And then I'm going to apply the work I did.
So I'm going to merge down, so this is
adjusted, just call it adjusted one because the original is my
adjustment. Now we're going to duplicate the work I just did,
make a mask. Right? Now I'm going to kind of fine tune the
mask a little bit using
my tools here.
Remember pure black and pure white.
And you can also
use
the lasso tool is well.
Let me just do one section at a time.
So first this section of the banana
and fill it with
pure black.
this section of the fruit.
What I'm doing is sort of a working on the negative space.
There's really two ways to make a mask. Either you mask out the
positive space or the objects, the items that you want,
including your mask or you mask the negative space. That's
what I'm doing here.
It's a little bit quicker.
And if I want to make this mask even tighter or make it less
chunky, you know right now I'm using
the rectangular tool, it's super chunky.
I can use a brush. That's what I would do. This is kind of like
drawing. This is kind of the way I draw. I draw with a lot
of straights and then I come in and around the straights, of
course
and that part of the banana the stem is in shadow.
So for example, I can just come in and whoop see that? Clean up
that, clean up that, clean up that. It's a lot like drawing
for me.
Okay.
So now I have the fruit
on a mask. And then what I'm going to do is call up hue
saturation.
And I'm going to turn up the saturation
of the fruit.
Right now it's affecting the entire image.
Make it a little bit warmer. So I'm going to call up the mask so
command click on the mask and then fill this mask.
And then invert it, so now see the fruit changes? Then we do
the exact opposite, call up a hue saturation
and I'm going to make it a little bit desaturated and
brighter and a little bit darker.
And change the tone to more of a cool blue just a little bit.
And then I'm going to make a mask.
In this case I duplicate, so make - or
hold command and click to draw a selection, fill it in.
And you see how it only operates on the blue layer,
the background. So that's pretty cool. So now
this is ready to go.
And I'm going to make a layer. Gonna put all the work I just did we put all the work. I just did
in a group, you can see before and after.
So this is the adjustments I made, the original photo, the
adjustments I made wow, what a big difference. If you go to
image canvas size. Let's take a look at the canvas size.
Just so you can see before and after. Wow, look at that. It almost
looks like two different photos.
Here we brought up more light into the shadow, so more color,
more light, and then we made it a little bit brighter and also
turned up the saturation while simultaneously creating a
vignette and turning down the saturation of the background.
And of course, don't forget to save your work.
Okay, first we're going to open the reference image and here I
have my reference folder open. So I'm just going to drag it
into Photoshop.
And I'm going to hit F2 change the view mode. So first I'm
going to crop it. I just want the portrait. So I'm going to
make a fairly nice tight crop.
Nice square.
Okay, gonna go to image,
crop. Looks pretty good.
Make it a little bit tighter.
Do the same thing image, crop. Okay.
Alright next I want to separate the figure from the background
because what we want to do is
make the background lighter
and change the color.
Making my mask tighter using a brush. This is manually.
And here I'm going to use a
combination of things. I'm going to use
hue saturation
first.
And I'm going to add a little bit more blue
to the background, click colorize see what that does. Yeah, I
like that.
Little bit darker and bluer.
And then I'm going to use the -
set this to screen, nice. Turn down the opacity.
So I used combination of two things, just a
gradient tool set to a blending mode and the hue saturation
image adjustment to play with the background. And of course
our foreground figure has been marked out.
So I can even merge my work here, duplicate it, merge my work.
Call this VG,
so this'll be my original so I don't touch that.
Next I want to
adjust the color of the fabric.
So first mask out the fabric.
And I'm going to mask out her hair. Remember holding
alt
will subtract from your
lasso or you marquis, your selection tool where shift adds
to your selection, right? Now I'm cutting out this little
section of hair.
Then I'm going to call up - while the selections active call it
hue saturation.
And I'm going to make it a little bit darker, little bit
less saturated,
and make it closer towards pink right there.
And then what I'm going to do is
I'm going to use a
duplicate the mask, hold alt, and move it to the new layer to
duplicate the mask. And then what I'm going to do is on the
same layer I'm going to take a
little bit of a warmer color, just color pick that warmth adjust color pick that warmth
on her
and set that to screen. Let's try overlay. Overlay adds some
nice warmth. Let's try screen.
Oh I kind of like screen actually it's a little bit less
colorful but brighter.
So screen gives me that nice
bit of brightness at the light spot on her chest, but everything partner chest, but everything
else goes darker, can even make it more dark.
See what happens if I change this to overlay?
Yeah, kind of like that better overlay creates a little bit
more color versus screen, which is more of a value.
Okay. So the fabric has been changed, especially in the
shadow goes greyer and more bluer. It's shifting towards a
purple and then a little bit of that warm light and drop the
opacity to make it subtle.
Now the next thing I want to do is I kind of want to blur the
outer part of her hair, the outer part of her hair and
actually this background as well.
So let me start with the hair because what I want is I want
her face to be really sharp and kind of want the back part of
her hair to be blurry. So it goes even further in the
background. So let's do that.
So first, I'm going to grab
the work that I just did. We'll call this foreground layers.
Keep it in a group.
Then I'm going to merge it. So now I have
foreground
and its own thing.
So then I'm going to
first soften
the hair so just going to select a rough
selection
around the hair here. Well actually I only want this part. So first
I'm going to go to filter.
I'm going to put a mask on it first.
I'll go to filter, blur. Let's try a motion blur. Let's try it
vertical. Can't really tell.
So it creates kind of this fuzzy look.
And I'm going to change
the layer into the background. So now the blurry part is in
the background and then so I can get it to show I'm going to
make a mask.
Or actually I can just take this layer
and because it has a mask on it you notice if I turn the
mask off
I'm going to use a soft air brush
and brush back white. So now I'm going to reveal what's
underneath, what's underneath is this still very sharp. And
then I'm only going to reveal the eyes
a little bit.
See, you see that? See the hair as it gets further away looks
really fuzzy.
So I like that.
And then the last thing I'm going to do is sharpen her
features to really push the face.
So I'll make a copy of the layer I just worked on.
I'm going to go to filter,
sharpen, unsharp mask.
Then what I'm gonna do is put a mask on it and then invert it.
So now the sharpened part is hidden and then I'm going to
paint white and to call upon the parts that I want sharpen,
look what it does to her features. Wow.
Also some of this foreground fabric and light basically
helps anything in light will become sharper and come forward
or anything in shadow will kind of sink back.
So it's a little subtle.
So, let's see.
Now I'm going to merge the work I just did so
before, original sharpness, after. Beautiful. And now let's
compare before and after.
Wow, look at the big changes, very cool. So before original
photo,
after, adjusted the background, adjusted the color, created
more of a vignette effect, creating a light spot here,
blurring her hair,
changing the color and the temperature and saturation of
the fabric and then making her features nice and sharp. So it's
just one of many ways to to totally transform, adjust, and
make your reference as exciting and as useful as possible for
your drawings and paintings.
okay, this final example, we're going to take a landscape and
fine-tune our landscape so that it can create a better
reference for us to draw or paint from.
Okay, first I'm going to open my reference image.
So drag it into Photoshop.
First thing I want to do is adjust my layers.
Excuse me separate the layers. So I'm going to separate
foreground from background.
So first, I want to separate these two foreground trees.
I using my polygon lasso.
Call this trees or FG.
The next - the mid-ground will be our friend here, little peacock.
Okay.
And of course
the background can stay background. So
mid-ground it's our friend, foreground trees, and the
background is just everything else. So the first thing I'm
going to do is adjust the color
and
we could do this over all.
So I'm going to go to image,
color balance.
And what I'm gonna do is play with
not the midtones, but the shadows and highlights. So
first, I'm going to take my highlights and I'm going to
slightly warm up the color.
And as this looks like it was shot sort of this overcast day.
So let's warm it up as if the sun is a little bit more
intense.
And then I'm going to take that same adjustment, go to shadows
and shift my shadows a little bit towards the blue.
Okay, now I'm going to take -
I'm going to go ahead and merge the color balance adjustment
layer with the background. I was pretty happy with it.
Now I'm going to take it and separate what that the work I
just did in two separate layers. So now this is
foreground, middle ground, and the masks, selections I already
made so I don't need to delete these.
There's my original, adjusted the color temperature of the
lights and the shadow.
Cut out the middle ground, which is our friend, cut out the
foreground
which is our trees, but because our masks the pixels are still
there.
Okay, now I want to add
more of a vignette. So make this guy more special. So first
I'm going to -
what I'm gonna do is actually I'm going to use manual brush
technique. I'm going to take a gradient and I'm going to color
pick a warm color. It's already on my canvas just as orange
right there, and I'm going to go -
whoops forgot to make a new layer.
I'll call this BG. Now this layer
let's take it to overlay. Wow it's nice and hot, beautiful. So
then I'm going to change the shape right now. It's a perfect
circle would make it more of an ellipse. So it feels like it's
in perspective. Look at that. That looks so cool, love that.
And then it's a little subtle.
Just drop the opacity or you can play bring up command U
to play with the color saturation temperature.
So I'm liking that, I'm liking that.
That's my background.
Now what I want to do next is
put some of that on my little bird, some of that same light is
shining on him. So what I'm gonna do is make a new layer, put it
as a clipping mask over the middle ground, right?
This is just a bird itself, right here. This clip mask will
only affect what's underneath. And then I'm gonna take the exact same
color and do the exact same technique, but in this case I have a lot
of control. I'm going to call it overlay. Wow, that looks so
cool.
And then I'm going to mask it out where it goes into shadow,
look at that. It's beautiful.
Look at that, love that.
And I'm actually going to kind of manually brush it in
to his head there. So his head in light is receiving some of that
light. Yeah.
And let me do it a little bit on the foreground trees. I'm
going to make these kind of darker in a moment as well, just
to have that color in here. I'm going to use reflective
gradient. Oops.
Change the overlay, drop the opacity quite a bit just to
make it a little bit more subtle.
And there it is.
So we've adjusted the lights.
Now I want to adjust the darks. So I'm going to start
with the foreground first.
So actually what I'm going to do is instead of using hue
saturation going to use
manual brush. I'm going to color pick like a dark kind of
blue. It's already in my picture.
And just kind of use the gradient tool to brush over it.
I'm going to turn it into multiply.
That looks pretty cool.
Kind of creates this illusion of the trees coming forward.
Then we do the same thing in the background actually.
Actually what I'm going to do in the background right below
our turkey
is fill the whole canvas with that color. I'm going to hit
multiply,
drop the opacity, and then I'm going to put a mask on it.
And then
mask out this section.
And of course you can transform your mask as well
by unlinking it first.
Notice that link there. Because if I didn't link it, if it was
linked and I hit transform see it affects the whole layer, but
if I unlink it now I can only affect the mask. See that?
And I've created this really nice dark vignette. So that's
wonderful.
And next of course the last thing to do would be to
sharpen
our friend the bird and sort of turn down everything else.
Actually I'm going to do one more pass
on the trees there.
So clip this hue set to the tree.
So this is -
so if I'm pretty happy with this work I did here what I'm going to
do is I'm just going to go ahead and merge it.
And when you merge it, it applies the mask.
So now I'm basically going to take the - our friend the bird -
filter,
sharpen, unsharp mask.
I'm gonna sharpen him.
I'm going to take the background.
I'm going to -
well first I'm going to sharpen the background around our
friend. So go to filter, sharpen, unsharp mask.
Keep it a little bit less intense.
Put a mask on it,
invert the mask.
And invert the mask because the mask - when you put a mask on it
defaults to white which makes it transparent, the black opaque,
the black makes it all transparent and then use the
gradient tool
to see how it just sharpens a little area. If I turn it off
see how it sharpens the whole thing, which I don't want. I
want - I want to hide most of it with the mask except for this
little area around our friend. And I'm going to transform that
so it's more of an ellipse. So the perspective feels a little
better.
And I can even lightly brush with an airbrush
some more areas around him. Pretty cool, huh?
And then
the layer underneath
I'm going to call this BG sharp,
and I'm going to call this BG blur.
So go to filter, blur.
And let's try motion blur.
That's a little to motion-y.
Actually left to right looks pretty good.
That's a little too strong.
Yeah 12 pixels just exaggerate it and then see I
don't like this. So I'm going to mask that out.
Make sure that I - remember I made a copy so my fresh layer
is still there. And then I'm going to use a gradient tool to
sort of bring back some of the foreground sharpness with the
background still super super blurry. So that's pretty cool.
And I can play
with the opacity because underneath it's still sharp
or sharper then I play with the amount.
Going to duplicate this.
So now I have sharpened foreground, blurred background.
And then the last thing I want to do is blur the trees finally.
So filter, blur, I'm gonna do a motion blur again. I'm liking
motion blur. Let's do vertical in this one.
Motion blur. And same thing I kind of want to keep the
foreground of the tree
looking good.
And there it is.
And the last thing I want to do is create a vignette and I'm
going to do the vignette
by hand with a brush and I'm going to use a textural brush.
Let's see how this looks. Remember we made our own
texture brushes earlier. So just going to color pick a nice
cool purpley dark tone.
And return the layer in to multiply and we'll kind of brush
it back here.
I think this brush is a little too texturey.
So I'm going to play with you opacity a little bit.
So I'm basically manually brushing some cool dark darkest
shadow tone.
Drop the opacity a little bit.
And then come back with
the custom brush I made.
You definitely want to review that lesson.
Just give me a little bit of texture
and a little bit more of a vignette
around our friend.
Our friend the bird.
So there it is. Now let's take a look before and after.
And voila. Wow, look at the difference. That's amazing.
Look at the difference. You can see before the light was fairly
cool. We totally transformed the light into a warm light and
then we added this nice vignette. We blurred the
background. We sharpened our friend, we made the trees darker
and less interesting and created some really cool
new light. Color is here. It kind of exaggerated the colors
of light using the blending mode in the overlay and also
exaggerate the color of the shadow by using a blue, dark
blue with multiply mode. This creates a really nice
effect in our reference. So it's a wonderful way to to work
with landscape reference as well. Okay, so that was all Well, okay, so that was all
three assignments, you get to see me go through it how I
would have handled assignments. I know it was very very quick.
So please again review as much as you can. And probably I'm
very confident as soon as you do this assignment and play
with it a few a few more times you'll be just as fast, just as
quick because it's the same tools. Remember the five major
tools over and over and over and over again. If you use the same
few tools over again, you'll become fast and more proficient
too. So that's the end of the assignment and please, please review and
keep practicing.