- Lesson Details
- Transcript
- References
- Instructor
- Chris Legaspi
- Subjects
- Digital Art
- Topics
- Mediums
- Adobe Photoshop
- Duration
- 2h 34m 36s
- Series
- Photoshop for Traditional Artists
In this series, instructor Chris Legaspi shows you how to use Adobe Photoshop as an artist. This third lesson in the series will go over editing photos– a valuable tool not only for photographers, but for artists to improve their photo reference to draw and paint from. Chris will go over the selection tool, transform tool, adjustment layers, and much more. Later you will have a chance to practice what you’ve learned through multiple assignments. The lesson will conclude with Chris completing each assignment, allowing you to compare your work with his.
Hardware and Software
- Macbook Pro 13″
- Wacom Bamboo, Intuos or Cintiq Tablet
- Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, Corel Painter, Manga Studio or Procreate
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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.
Transcription not available.
learned some of the tools that I like to use to edit reference,
some of the powerful tools available in Photoshop. Now,
we're going to put your skills to the test. So what we're
going to do in this assignment is we're going to take three
different scenarios: a still life, a portrait, and a landscape
photo or image and we're going to use Photoshop to make the
most out of the pictures. we're going to edit the
pictures we use for a still-life the portrait and a
landscape and we're going to make them even better and even
more useful so that we can make drawings and paintings from
them. So if you're ready for the assignment, let's get
started.
assignment, playing around with your images. Now I'm going to
show you how I would have handled this assignment and
edited the images myself.
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.
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.
Transcription not available.
Free to try
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1. Lesson Overview
49sNow playing...
Watch the whole lesson with a subscription
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2. The Selection Tool and Grouping Layers
35m 40s -
3. The Transform Tool
23m 16s -
4. Levels, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance
32m 38s -
5. Creating Sharpness and Contrast
19m 13s -
6. Assignment
2m 15s -
7. Chris' Approach to Assignment 1
9m 48s -
8. Chris' Approach to Assignment 2
11m 25s -
9. Chris' Approach to Assignment 3
19m 28s
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