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Day 27: Finishing Touches

hey there day twenty seven wow time is flying fast isn't it and today we're talking about another favorite topic in mind seems like they're all favorite topics of mine but well they are because I love photo shop in all of suffolk and do this one in particular is a topic I call finishing touches which to me is anything that you do to an image after your pretty much done to kind of finish it off whether that's at a border effect or overly a texture on it or give it some color tweaks or anything like that but one thing that doesn't change is I'm still going to try to do this in the most flexible nondestructive way possible shouldn't surprise you there because if I create some really cool effect I don't wanna have to do it over again to some other document trying figure out how the heck I did it so as we talked about before that's one of the reasons why we work now destructively so that weaken change our mind about things and I'm going to show you a few examples here and my intention in al...

l these cases not necessarily to spend go every single step and create this perfectly finished image but to kind of show you the structure of my documents of how I overlay a texture and then do that in such a way that I can keep blending things and trying and how we can use later massive paint on them and smart filters on all the toppings we've talked about but with the end goal of creating these kind of finishing touches as we go so let's look at this first example here this case what I want to do is I have a photograph that I like it's it's okay it's a decent photograph it is a camera smart object so if I double click on it that means of course I can adjust it in any way that I want and let's just say I want to go with that but now I want to overlay some texture on top of it I just want to do with a slight bit mohr of texture to this photo and I won't show you bother showing you up sorry get to the right place there we go I won't bother showing you my entire collection of textures but I have a whole folder full of textures like this where it's just rusted metal and sidewalks and cracks and wood and all kinds of things and even cases like this I'm not going to use this right now what I'll show you shortly what this isn't just a fence with a whole bunch of branches all over and it struck me that this might be interesting to use in some other ways with our finishing touches so let's say that for the sake of argument I want to start off trying to overlay this texture on top of our photograph so in bridge I can choose place in photoshopped this texture is also a raw file so for now I'll just leave it however I last used it it will place it in I'll just rotated around so it's tall and stretch it up to fit then hit enter so now we want to say well how can we blend these things together to make the texture overlaying with the photograph and one of the first places we'd start generally is with thes blend modes and as you talked about in the session that we did on that included blend modes you have the choice of either just jumping to a particular one that you think might work or you khun kind of just go through them and look and if you're on the windows platform again you can just click here and use the up and down arrow keys on either platform with a non painting tool you press shift plus and it starts scrolling through the different blend mose when we try and find that was kind nice what's that overlay so what I'm doing is I'm looking at the image not the menu and kind of seeing different examples that was kind of interesting there saturation mind shift minus goes back the other way if you see one a couple of ago that you think might have some interesting possibilities and what I'm doing is kind of making mental note here is not just about the blend mode in terms of does it looked perfect like that darkened mode it just looks weird to me because it almost like just put it in the sky but I think well that's interesting possibility and kind like multiply but I think colored dodge linear dodge these ones air mawr in the realm of what I was looking to find out with here's overlake well I love like the way this looks but it still needs some help right now it's on overlay and I've got the opacity set one hundred percent I could lower the opacity a little bit but one of things that I like to do most with when I'm doing this kind of idea with a textured overlay as I double click on the layer and use those blend if sliders we talked about in a previous session and I mean look at this one and say this building has some darker areas so if I drag this dark triangle aiken take the texture out of most of the street then I'll hold down option or ault and dragged this triangle and I'm trying to get it so that I'm getting on ly certain areas having the look that I want in on this layer I might decide that some of the texture I want just to see through completely we'll take the light end and move the sliders maybe a little bit here too and a certain point when I think I'm happy now I could do a little more experimentation with blend most because I've done a little bit of those blend of sliders I think in this case I'll stick with overlay the thing we have to remember is both of these layers are camera smart objects so right now the reason this is reacting the way it is because of the colors on this layer and the colors underneath but if I double click on this and go back to camera aw I could for example say what if I just want to see what it looks like if it's a grey scale and I'm going to make it eight more dramatic gray scale and click okay then it takes the color out of the equation and is going dramatically changed the impact now there's no color in there it's just having this impact if we get close you can see pretty interesting looking what it's doing here the other option would be to go the other way around keep this the same but then see what happens if you make variations too the underlying layer for example make it weigh more saturate like almost over saturated and make it really kind of a high clarity kind of thing and then see what that does so now we've got both of these things to play with knowing that in any time I can look back and kind of ok here I have a blend if things so I can always turn that off in effect by putting these all back to kind of square one and I've got a blend mode here I've also got the camera smart object that I could go back and edit a cz well now the fun never stops because of course you could decide for example I'm just playing here let's go back to the background layer and make a quick selection of the sky it's not perfect yet but it's not bad so I could go here and then add a layer mask and now I'm deliberately on lee doing the blend mode in the sky and not on here not sure if I like that causes a little bit odd tohave crazy texture in the sky and nothing on the building so remember this is a mask we look at it it's got that black eye is hiding white is showing but if I go to the properties panel which I will see here I have a couple of options for the mask one of which is density so if I pull this back it's actually changing layer mass to gray so the lighter and lighter graham make it a little more of the texture is poking into the building and if I drag it far enough down then you can start to see even more so that's yet another option that's available to us is to make a layer mask and then change its intensity and or blur this a little a bit so that the edge gets all softer let's just fill that with white completely saying white isn't shows me gray there we go so what else could I try with this well a couple of options what if I just said ok let's actually I'm gonna put this uh back to normal for a seconds I want you to see better the effects of what I'm doing here okay so let's put this here and let's change this too multiply motors way more dramatic and I'm only doing that so you can see what happens when I start playing with this layer mask of course I could just paint on it but one of the other things I think it's kind of interesting is there is a filter called render clouds and it takes my foreground background color and makes this kind of cloudy pattern but it's still on the layer masks so white will show completely grey will hide completely or she's mean partially I should say so now if I keep doing this each time it will render a different set of clouds if you go to the one called difference clouds it gets much more dramatic again let's make sure we have our foreground and background colors white trump's white he said and chose fred by mistake and if I do command option or control all if I get really angry crazy clouds and I can invert them and you get the idea part of the problem here is I still have my density set really low I just realised that's more what I was picturing so now you can see that I have this crazy layer mass it looks like this which is having an impact on the way this blend mode is affecting and the colors in here so now once again go back here let's take out the color back updates now it looks much different and I can take this layer and maybe do a bit of a blur on this was not quite as crazy with thes lines but you get the idea that's just playing with two layers a layer a smart object camera all air I should say and another camera is part of it and I'm doing things on the mask and let me do one other thing just to get your mind working and strange mysterious ways let's open this just another photographs happens to be a crack in the pavement select all copy that I'm going to go to this layer mass I can'tjust paste because if I pace it would make a new layer neto option or all click on the mast to view it now I can paste my texture directly on top so I'm using a texture as a mask of a texture yeah so now once again we could go back to properties and play around with it density of the mask or what would happen if we took this mask and inverted it so it looks quite different or I could get carried away here look at the layer masking go well I really like it but I wish this was a little darker in some areas so I can use levels on the mast to say let's dark in that and late in this middle part something like that now once again it's gonna have to get another impact and now I go back to try a blend mode or try different blend mode see what happens if I do that and also start playing with splendid sliders again so just in this one example the possibilities are quite endless and so I'll be back in about half an hour I'm just gonna go play no I am not but that's that's what I love about this aspect is that I don't have a specific plan I'm not saying well I know if I put this texture using this blend mode it's not like a recipe it's like cooking when you've got some ingredients you're never quite sure what's going to happen because you're kind of throwing things into the mix and trying things here at least we have the benefit that if it looks horrible unlike tasting bad we can't just step back okay that didn't work but frankly one of the ways that we at least I believe the ways we discover the most interesting techniques is just being willing to try it you talked about way back at the beginning I said fuel feel free to experiment because you can if you structure document in the right way you're never stuck with that feeling of oh well now I guess I can't change my mind about that one so that's just our first example of overlaying a texture but to me that's an awful lot of fun to do that kind of thing and many different possibilities and like I said anywhere you look you will find there are textures all over the place all right let's open this image here another raw file just open this up and want to try a couple of things here in terms of I want to create an edge effect so we want to try a couple of different options here one of the first ones that I try especially when you have a raw file I'm going to add a new layer below and I showed this a little bit when we were I was talking before about things like actions so I'm just gonna make a selection and fill it with some color doesn't really matter what it is says me something and then we're going to convert this to a smart object that's simply to allow me to try different filter options so at this point now I just use that clipping mask idea to say on ly show the photograph inside here and I usually just for my own amusement put a layer of the bottom filled with white just because I'm trying to simulate what will this look like eventually when I put it on a piece of white paper so now go back to this later whenever I do to this layer he's going to show this part of the photograph so for example we could dough go into our filter called displace and try some numbers and click okay now this would be example remember this crazy photograph that was like a close up of some crazy bushes let's try it see what happens interesting that's actually not exactly what I expected but it's kind of cool at the same point so let's go in and try the exactly the same thing but much lower numbers in this case just to see what that does not think I like somewhere in between so let's go on the twenty and I don't have to use the same number for both I just happen to be in this case and now we've got that happening which is pretty cool now on top of that I could build on this I could say what happens if I lower the opacity of this so we're still seeing a little bit of the original line I'm not big fan of that quite a cz much but it would be an option or try to change the blend mode in this case again it has effect that's probably not exactly what I'm picturing overlay doesn't really help it all so let's give up on that concept but I could also try other filters on top of this displace one so for example let's do ah motion blur and I want to do look at the edges of this to see what happens if I do this notice how it's not blurring the photograph because all I'm doing is blurring this box which is clipping the photograph so I can go pretty dramatic here because I'm not worried about blurring any detail I'm trying to create an interesting edge that's drawing your attention into the middle of the photograph so that's kind of intriguing and let's take that motion blur double click on it and see what happens in this case if we lower the opacity maybe not or maybe a blend mode I don't think so but we'll try it no but I'm showing you my thought process when I go through that say what would it look like if that's what's gonna give me this kind of result I might do all of this and then say you know what now that I look at all this let's take our eye drop for tool and pick up some color I think maybe instead of putting on a white background might be more interesting if it was on a brown background out's kind of the same color as the bricks is not quite as dramatic but still giving us an interesting kind of a possibility so that's one option that we could certainly try and kind of like that so that's one ofthe time is gonna undo the mask that clipping mass so it's still their case in even try another option on here so I'm going to make a selection and then keep doing this do you like hold down the shift key and I'm trying to do is make the edges not quite so uniforms I don't want to necessarily create just simply a rectangular selection but one that's a little more unusual then I'm gonna go use refine edge now this is an interesting possibility because refine edges you saw the lesson on selections it does a great job of finding edges that's if you use it for its intended purpose but the case like this I'm trying to use it for a creative purpose of saying what happens if I want to create some weird unusual edge so let's give a try refine edge was over here on this case I'm going to keep it as is just like this because I want to be able to see what's happening but I won't take this smart rays and pull it way the heck up here and all of a sudden right away pretty interesting I'm liking that happens if I played with the contrast that's kind of interesting too and of course we're gonna output to a layer mask so we can see it right now course it's on that same black or dark brown background but if we at another layer in here and just fill it with whites and I have a couple of options to see that's kind of need a kind of like that and that's this is what the mask that it created and I can see a bit of the brick texture in here and of course in all of these cases like in this case right here that's just could be viewed as the starting point I mean you could be quite happy with that and say I'm done I love the way that looks or you could say I like that start now let me try something else now we play a filter now let me do some more brushing on there or do something you know anything you want I could even take this layer mask and do the displaced filter on it uh I'm not sure about that no but again this is just sort of the experiment and we're doing trying to try different things and see what happens so all as I'm doing this the things that don't change our I'm still making sure I'm clicking on either the layer or the mask I'm still preserving layer so even this clipping mask is still there so if I decide to throw that in the mix I could not going to really do much in this case so I'm preserving all these pieces so I can try all kinds of different things now in many of these cases these are what I was talking about when we mentioned before about the benefit of one of the benefits of working non destructive is that whole reuse and recycle kind of concept so are really like the way that this refined edge mask looks and it came out looking great because it was on a brick wall let's see what happens if I took a different photograph and tried the same thing on it let's just make a very rough selection using our polly gonna lasso tool and then did refine edge and again did smart radius up really high in this case the edge isn't anywhere near is interesting because it's just blue sky there's really nothing for it to try to select so with that in mind this might be a case where it would make better sense to say you know what I have a cool layer mask over here now you can't drag just the layer mask over so I take this whole layer temporarily drag it over here and it's a little too small but that's ok because ultimately this is gonna be a mask and all I do is drag this mask down here delete this layer now we can free transform second make sure we first of all d select the toots I want transform just the mask to make it the size that I want and I got cool border effect on this other photograph and that was easily done because back in this document it's just a mask it's just part of a layer so I didn't have to do anything other than and in this case the size was too small but normally you don't want to scale things up but scaling up a mask because it's just sort of pixel information that's vague and kind of looking this way anyway that's perfectly fine all right so let's uh we're going to I'm gonna keep this here bye copying onto another layer I don't actually want to mask this but I want to experiment one other option on this layer before I continue so I wanted to see what happens if I do this so we're going to add a layer mask we're gonna add the layer mask and fill it with black and do that by holy down option or ault and clicking on the adl airmass button and that's gonna hide everything and I touched on this a little bit with when we talked about brushes but I want to go over but mohr because I think there's this is a very interesting way of working in photo shop so all I've done is I've got my entire photograph I've hidden the whole thing using a changing the layer master black is what was trying to say now we go to our brush tool and we're gonna find one of our brushes let's see what we have in here not a whole lot apparently so when I saved brush before I currently apparently didn't do a whole lot with it maybe this will be a little better not so much either okay so we'll go back to our regular regular old brushes and what I want to do is paint something that has a texture and so looking at the pictures of the brushes doesn't really help this is where I would rely more on this brush panel because as you can see is you look through you can see the ones that have some interesting texture kind of options here including ones like this now these brushes and you see ones like this this is actually a style of brush called in a row doble tip which means the more I press on it the more it will get blood just like using a pencil I think I'm gonna keep looking down though and try this looks kind of interesting here so let's see what happens if we just do some quick painting and this has some texture in it so because it's so light I'm having to kind of go over the key areas more than once and let's make it really big and start painting feels like I'm scribbling a lot because I have to be because this is such a a light kind of a brush but I'll show you the second where I would at a certain point say okay that's probably enough of that and then I could switch to make it look a little bit better but that's kind of interesting options look att tthe e laywer mask and you can see it has all this kind of texture built into it well with the properties and mass I can't put the density any higher because already as high could go however if I did levels and said I want to make whatever is white even whiter and gray even lighter that's how we're going to make the mask a little more effect but still preserved some of that texture that's in there so depending on what texture type of thing you apply to the layer mass will get a very different result that's kind of need I kind of like that but let's look at another couple of possibilities so we'll start over again my filling with black and hiding this completely and go back to our brushes let's take a look back here a ts some of these and uh see all I want to do is create something is going to introduce a little bit of texture and it's so it's probably something like this I think is probably my best choice and this one you can see as I told my pen it's gonna have a very different effect on it so I want to do is create a few random brushstrokes going to get most of the detail that I want something like this I would probably also lower my capacity to a much lower percent so I'm painting with shades of grey and trying to power them up on top each other to make it more like one hundred percent and once I'm close to saying okay kind of like the way that looks this is what my layer mask looks like I might also decide toe fill into some of these gaps this is where I might go to properties and lower the density a little bit but that's not gonna help me because I needed to be more grey like that so I need to use levels you can they density is really affecting the black marta's the white okay so now back to our image I still want a view the photograph but I want to make sure I'm working on the mask so then I switched to this tool called the mixer brush tool which is I mentioned earlier that's almost like saying all of this paint is now wet all of I should say all of this paint the white gray and black paint is now wet so if I once again take one of these brushes and I'll first show to you out here on the layer mass you can see what's happening if you imagine all of this is wet if I start with my brush out here and push this way it's taking the black paint onto the white and the grey if I go this way goes the other way around so as I start to move this tool around you can see it's really mixing up the paint while if we look at that in the context of our photograph and the edge that it creates weaken get some interesting kind of almost painterly effects because we're not again affecting the photograph directly were saying what part of the photograph do you want to have visible or not based on this whole same theory of masking black grey white now we're just adding into the mix a lot more gray because of the way we're blending these together and any time I can always go on look at and decide whether I like it or not I could decide now I kind of like it but what would happen let me show is in the context of our finished photograph if I apply a filter and for example in the filter gallery one of these texture filters this one looks not too bad a tall that's actually do canvas and click okay and now you see we got some of that in fact there if I wanted to so let me take a step back and show you what happened you kind of go back before I did that because I started down one path and realized be easier if I show it to a different way okay so I want this to stay black and I only really want the texture on the white but by nature when I go to the filter gallery and do something like texturizing her this is what it's going to do is going to affect the black as well when I click okay you can see that it's affected everything now I can't do anything from a smart filter standpoint because you can't make a layer mask into a smart filter unfortunately however there is a command under edit that we haven't talked about up until now we talked about undue and step backwards but there's also one called fade now here's before I'm keeping my finger on the mouse it will move before I show it to you fade only works right away other words once you do the filter you have to fade you can't do the filter do sumar operations then go away I should fade the filter so fade is we'll always be whatever you just did so might say fade levels or fade filter gallery or fade whatever it is in this case it's saying fade filter gallery if I choose it I could just lower the opacity but I could also say I'm going to change the blend mode to darken and now you see what's happening is the texturizing is on ly affecting the areas it can make darker and says you can't make black darker that's going to give me the effect that I want so now when I look at I'm getting that nice texture where I want it but not on the background yeah that's pretty cool now it's up to you to decide for example when I look at it I overall like the way the texture is looking I think I might take a regular paintbrush so let's get to my regular old brush tool with a regular old brush like this and a very low opacity and just kind of I don't want her eyes to be just a little clearer to me because I don't want don't be quite so texture but that's me I like to see the eyes little better still subtle and I still want to make it look like I've done something with texture in it and once again not to you're probably so tired of me saying the same things over and again I do apologize but I really want to make sure this all is clicking with you the way that I hope it does that any time you get to this point of going wow I love the way this photograph looks just pretend you love it whether you do or not let's pretend for now we love that effect and as soon as in my mind of saying wow that's exactly what I want to my mind this layer mask immediately becomes a reusable resource because I know as we saw a moment ago I can drag that into a different photograph and tried out there so let's try it I want to see what that looks like on this other one we did before and I'm going to take this layer mask dragon on top that's going to say do you want to replace yes I do delete that unlike these two make sure I'm clicking on the mask free transform and now I'm getting the effect that I want painterly kind of effect let's see what happens if I add a new layer below and what color should I use I could use white that looks pretty interesting what if I took my eye dropper and sampled kind of that blue color and filled this with blue and you can't see it quite as much that probably probably needs to be a lighter blue than that to see that would actually work or not yeah possibly what if I took and added a some kind of a layer style like maybe an outer glow orry drop shadow I want this texture edge to pop up a little bit more so let's figure right about there and change the spread on this size whoa that's too much maybe below the capacity way down and what if I picked a different shade of blue I got the blues going on here hmm interesting yes every so often as I'm doing this I almost forget except that I'm sitting in an environment where clearly I hadn't being filmed that I have lights on I almost forget sometimes that I'm doing this to show you things because I just get caught up on going in my mind is going or I could move this and try that in effect this and that's why this part of photo shopped to me is so extra interesting because we can just do all this fun stuff all right let's take that away delete it and try another effect on this photograph I want to do some other kind of edge well let's try I'm going to go back to bridge and open let's see which homeless you try let's try this one just out of curiosity I want to make it that little exclamation mark by the way didn't mention for as I last opened this in a much older version of cameron much older and older version of camera and I'm deliberately trying to create a very obvious texture here so I'm pushing things in ways that I might not otherwise I'm trying to see something getting the facts I need this to be a little bit bigger prominent that big but let's make it twenty five hundred pixels just to make sure and I had open object one of the adjustment layers that I didn't tuck talk about before because frankly it's not all that useful is called threshold although this is the one place where we might find a place to use it threshold says I will take whatever you have is a photograph and turning either black pickles or white pixels that's it no gray just black and white so as you can see is I can move this back and forth I can get a different kind of effects and what I'm looking at here this general areas can I find a spot here that has an interesting bit of texture in it that I might be able to use as a border so I take my rectangle tool and I make a selection now because I have this adjustment layer and the photograph in order to be able to use it I have to use the command copy merged now we can go back to our photograph and I could paste it on there and maybe free transform and kind of squish it down a bit and it doesn't look like much yet we're gonna put that on there and make that that's gonna be part of our border and I'll repeat that operation a couple times with the benefit that I could go back and make things either darker or lighter and I certainly don't have to pick the same spot I can pick a different area and I'm just looking for areas look interesting copy merged switch too this one hit paste and again may be transformed even more this is one of these again wait for things when you see the final results you'll get an idea of what we can do with this that's kind of interesting okay back to this one now in this case I want teo I'm gonna look up and down this time and I usually select more than I need because as you saw him gonna squish it down I'm trying to find a kind of a nice spot there's okay let's do that again can't be merged paste you transform and ultimately this is still going to be a form of mask so we still have to think the same way in terms of black white and gray in this case we're only doing black and white no great at the moment but there may be added later moment so now one last one let's move this over here I kind of like the look of this part so once again we will be merged one last time paste let's start it again I thought I had done copy merged but let's just make sure he emerged paste there we go and transform the whole bit okay so now I've got these elements and I wantto just command control clicking to make sure you get the correct one and I'm moving these out to the edge like that now I suppose I could just try making that an edge it's kind of well somewhat interesting but let's do this let's take these four edges and convert them to a smart object so I can try a couple of things first of all I could try overall do some blend mode that may or may not like as a border it's possible but I don't think I really like that what I'm more likely to try is commander control click on this to select it all copy then I can hide it now I go to my layer click on the ad lear mass button and choose paste but sorry one more step optional click remember that because I want to view the layer master aiken paste on it and now I can position this where I wanted to go and now I'm creating this effect now here I still have that blue layer less receives you can see if I make a white layer so it's just a different effect now this is still I've done this deliberately because I preserve this in case I want to edit it but on the mask mace basically we have a lot of choice but I could now paint on top of this I don't really like the way this edge is quite so clear cut so I'm going to take my paintbrush on the mass scheer and let's use find a brush that's gonna service well here and let's see what we got something I want something with a bit of movement in and maybe something like that makeable bigger and I'm gonna do is click once up here hold down the shift key and click again they're don't like that quite so much on let's try a different brush as you can tell I did not come into this with a big checklist saying to myself make sure you use this brush in this setting on just trying stuff to see what it does so let's try this one maybe that'll have a little better for us like that a little better and I'm just gonna go up and down the edge it'll bed each time it's gonna paint a line in between this way I'm just trying to make that edge just not quite so sharp I could even paint myself manually saying let's just make this a little less obvious time to get that kind of effect and what's interesting to me about this particular effect is it still started from just a photograph of a texture that I liked but I wanted to turn it into some kind of border so did it using this threshold adjustment layer making a selection on using copy merged to get the basic pixel information now of course in all of these cases these can all be multiple possibilities as well let's open up this other photograph and I'm trying to go for a kind of a crazy vibrant look open that up and let's see what else we got in our bag of tricks here we've got some different kind of textures let's take this one and get it into their by choosing place into photo shop to begin with I was going to go really high clarity and lower the exposure I don't exactly yet what is gonna look like but that's why they're smart so I have the opportunity of changing my mind enter to finalize that and make it smart now in this case I think what I want to do is just simply take the underlying layer and start toe push it through a little bit like this I'm actually already liking that a lot I think that's just kind of cool and that was not exactly what I was picturing but it's kind of interesting at the same point and what happens if we also try some kind of a blend mode may be soft light now to subtle maybe one of these that's ok that's kind of needed very high dramatic high key okay let's go back to just kind of dissolve one any time you have dissolved nothing will happen until you lower the opacity a little bit and then you'll start to see the dissolved function so already I'm kind of liking that the direction this is taking conceit it's got it's a little too harsh in some areas and I need to pull that back a bit so we'll lower the opacity even mohr and probably do something like this and again I'm just trying things out to see what happens overall I kind of like it but I think it's a little too much so I'm going to click back on this background layer select all and cops then add a layer master this layer optional click on it and paste our photograph on there so now we're basically saying do all that stuff you're doing with dissolved mode and everything else but put this mask in here if I take this mask and inverted you can see it's becoming even clear what's going on here so let's get away from dissolve now and try another one like multiply or overlay that's all too subtle again let's go multiply and softened this up a little bit and also let's look at it we want to go invert it back the other way again and then do levels again to try toe make it even more the way I want and that's kind of the closer the effect I want us lower the blend mode and finally in a case like this and again this is just me experimenting there are parts of this I don't really like the fact that it's going on her face completely so I would just take a regular paintbrush and just paint on the areas of the mass to say actually with black would be the one I want to say I don't really want weird stone texture on her forehead and her face or her arm so I could just go in and kind of tweak this even more so this effect isn't frankly quite as interesting as I was imagining it when I was playing but I still think it has some potential because I can always go in and tweak it to try something different so all of these are just sort of different variations on playing with texture on top of this what if I said all right well I'm not one hundred percent convinced on that let's try doing something like a black and white adjustment layer so we're gonna do that and then fade it completely in one I know that the whole everyone has their own feelings about black and white with the touch of colors to whether that's really a good idea or not but I think it still has places where it might work so let's just try this and see what happens we're going to go to the background layer on going to select color range try and get a lot of that red something like that like okay and then come back here let's temporarily put it all the way back up to one hundred percent I'm going on this layer mass fill with black so now I'm basically saying shade in some of those areas that I want to be somewhat more reds when I lower the opacity it brings back a bit of color everywhere but it brings back even more color in this area right here so an interesting thing happened a few minutes ago I was working on but we were just talking about that selective color thing and I went toe open other document and photoshopped decided it would just close I'm unexpectedly without any warning and the reason I'm telling you this is because this is a reason why you want to make sure and your preferences you have that save recovery information turned on because much to my delight it opened all three documents that I was working on at the time with preserving everything I've done even though I hadn't saved them yet because I was just kind of experimenting so just a sight no to say make sure you have that recovery preference turn on because it can be a real life saver that doesn't change the fact that of course we should be saving our document on a regular basis but in this particular instance it kind of saved my bacon because I didn't want to have to try and build these things because especially in this case when I was just experimenting with finishing touches I probably would have made it look the same so let's try to kind of pick up where we were we had this selective color thing going on if I optional click to look at the mask that's what I've got once again this would be a case where if I want to try to accentuate that applying levels too the mask is goingto darken it up so we'll have a bit more color in certain areas and I think I would back off this a little bit and of course I won't in this case while I could but you could of course include other textures and everything else in this as well but let's go back in fact let's just delete these out of here to say that was an experiment that didn't work now for this next example we need tohave a shape this shape khun come from various sources that could be something that you paint on a piece of paper and physically take a photograph of or it could be a piece of some paint on the wall that you see or you could use a separate program in my example I'm going to use adobe illustrator because it has the advantage of creating this two way street between illustrator in photo shop but I'm mention this only because I don't want you think this on lee works with illustrator this is kind of the idea of just creating using a shape with the added benefit if you have adobe illustrator if you were maybe create a cloud member you have access to this this is kind of interesting way to work so we're going to switch over to illustrator and if you don't really use illustrator or know it very well this is an example of the kind of thing that's fairly seat simple to do I'm just going to make a new document in here and let's make it just a standard letter size tall document I'm gonna go to the window menu and way down at the bottom there's a combination of things called cymbal libraries and one of them that I like to play with in particular is called dot pattern vector pack and it opens up this little panel here and these are all different effects that it has it's kind of hard to see them this small but if you were to drag one onto the page you see that's what one of the effects look like and what I'm doing when I'm dragging this on is I'm thinking about it in the context of photo shop black is going to hyde white is going to show if I use it on the mask or if I use that as a clipping mask it's more the shape that's going to have the effect that I want so I'm looking through to see what these look like that's too vague wanna have something that's think I might go with this one at least to start with so I'm gonna do all I've done at this point is just dragged it onto the page nothing else copy it switch to photo shop and choose paste says asked me what how do I want to paste this I'm gonna paste it as a smart object and the reason for doing that again so that I can create a link back to illustrator now if you were doing those other examples of scanning something in or taking a photograph you were just open this and bring it into photoshopped as an object so all I need to do in this case is I'm going first try see what happens if I drag this down underneath and create that clipping mask idea by optional clicking in between and once again we're gonna add a layer below and fill it with white to see what it looks like well clearly that's way too grey that's raymond toe look on it yes we know so double clicking will take you back to illustrator so that shows what it looks like maybe it's just too little information so if I option or old drag several times I'm kind of piling them on top of another and making some parts dark like this so let's close and save that and we go back the photo shop it will update and now I have a much better idea of what it wants to look like still got this kind of nice edge going on and we could still apply a layer mask to this so if we wanted to make it look a little more vague or paint eeyore something like that I could do one of the things you mentioned before for example which would be to put difference clouds on here just press that commander control f to try difference clouds that's a little strong so let's go properties and lower the density back again and this is just my personal opinion but when I'm looking at something I wantto kind of trying to position thing so I'm not cutting off like her face this isn't too bad but if I that was the case this is still just a separate layer so we can still kind of reposition it so we're make sure that we're not losing any information so that's one way to use the shape the other way would be to at a layer mask and as we've seen before any time you want to paste onto the mass we have to view the mass first by option all clicking on it now I can pace this as a mask our onto the mask and the only difference here is this is a one shot deal because you can't create smart object link between a mask and illustrator so you'd have to be fairly certain this looked the way you wanted sure I'm viewing the mask so apparently huh that's interesting I clearly haven't tried this before because it's still just painted it are pasted it on to a new layer so in that case I would have to copy it and then option click on the mack on the mack on the mask and paste it so that's kind of an odd one not sure why that happened but that's why we try things and we don't need this here and this probably needs to be a way around and once again we could do levels to make the white whiter because you want to reveal more of her make sure that's up there maybe feather and a whole bunch to soften it and again my intention of going through some of these exercises I deliberately didn't try all these ahead of time and write down a series of steps to go wow look at how cool this is I wanted to show you the process of this is one of the ways you can experiment just try things and very often like in this case I might get the point of going not really a big fan of this combination I might go back to this case of doing the clipping mask and don't have the layer mask what's this on top when we do something with that maybe but that's kind of the point is it's just this process of going ok if I set myself up this way with all these layers smart objects smart filters vector smart objects whatever it may be adjustment layers it means you khun go down the path of trying for five or six experiments and you may well like a heaven this case fine not so big a fan of those particular options so I may step back a bit and go all right let's try something different but that's why I'm showing you these is to get your shall we say creative juices flowing to go and wonder what what happened if and that's when you're willing to try some of these things so let's just get rid of some of these things uh the other option that I've kind of touched on a little bit but just to mention if I just want to do a little bit of a border effect on here I'm just going to make let's check your settings dave should have a regular marquis I just want to make kind of a basic selection like this and then click on the ad lear mass but which will initially just give us a normal looking mask then we go to our paintbrush and again this is where I would use this option toe look att my brushes because I want to see one that's going to give me more of a kind of interesting brush edge thing going on so let's try this one I'm gonna press the right bracket to make it bigger and I've got white as my foregone color so as I paint on my mask and see it's not a whole lot happening yet but you can see as I start to go around the edges a little bit this point all I'm trying to do is kind of make it not quite so perfectly rectangular and then let's try a different brush maybe we need to try something more like let's see just try this I usually take these brushes that are quite small and you see they just do a little bit like this and make them quite a bit bigger than my first thought this brush is automatically kind of semisi through so my first thought would be to start in here click once hold down the shift key and click again and see it's got just a bit of gray going or I could just drag myself now I'm painting on the mask so you can see what's happening but generally I want to see this in the context of my actual photograph so this is kind of similar to what we did with that flower example but I'm painting mohr so that's that's you know just give me another idea but let's do one more idea that will go back to the idea of when we were creating our own brushes so I'm going to make a new document now here take my type tool and let's get a nice big word here and I want to use something that's fun and a little different once try and think of the name of that there's the one problem with having too many fonts on here that's kind of interesting let's use that but I need to this like that okay and hopes I wanted to be black on white then I choose to define a brush preset now in this example I'm just going toe define one word brush or one brush made out of a word but you could of course make ah whole bunch with different expressions or different words whatever it might be then I'm gonna come back here and we're going toe in verse the mask so it's filled with black now we take our paintbrush and go on get our word brush that we just made and see if we hire flow everywhere where I click it's going to paint with white on the mass of those parts will be see through now unable to say this would take a long time if we were doing this just clicking so instead we're going to do this we're goingto change our spacing and then shape dynamics would undo things actually probably yeah we'll do a little bit of shape dynamics is we want the size to change slightly maybe angle it and also scatter a little more this so now as I paint just goes love love love love love love and what what I'm really paying attention to is thie outer edges remember when we talked about when you change some of these brush settings one of the small frustration might be you want to paint right here and when you go to paint it goes somewhere completely different so at this point I'm just trying to get the edges looking the way that I want I could also change the overall size of the brush so it's going to vary that little bit more and once again once I look at the masque I can see that in the middle part where she is I definitely need just some regular old white so I'm going to go back control or right click just to get back to a regular white paint brush because I want you to be able to see her so let's do a little bit more there unnecessarily everything but at least we wanted you to see oh it's a girl on the phone and of course we always have options to do things like add some kind of effect like a drop shadow so we see it more this is similar to other techniques that we've used where we make just earlier session on brushes we just made a square brush and then change some of those overlap and scattering options to make kind of interesting mosaic edge affect this is another variation of same theme so imagine you were instead of using the word love it was like senior class off fourteen all the things that senior fun uh classmates yea all the words that you would think of making each one of those a brush and then do the same effect but now that you've done this you actually have this mask that could be used over and over again so here's an idea that once you have created some kind of finishing touch like this if you say this file is a psd file unable to say this um this mask becomes a reusable factor but maybe you just want this so go to the mask select all copy it and then make a brand new document and just choose paste and then save that as a file on this case it's not the great example because of course I painted where she existed in some other photos it might not work but the main thing I wanted to show you is that if you have created some mask whether it's something like this or some of the other edge effects were created or applying smart filter to a shape each of those khun b elements you can reuse so you could actually paste them into a new document in fact I haven't least one document that looks like this and has three or four layers each one of them is another special effect shay one last example of that idea don't need my love brush anymore let's go back to this example is turned everything off and let's say I want to okay so it wouldn't be the great atlantic means this one status was going to say what I was about to show you probably wouldn't be the best example in the world so try and be a better one if I want to apply the lens flare filter in photo shop which is an interesting little effect we run into a problem because if we just go to a blank layer it's not gonna work so we have two usually the best plan is to fill with black you kind of saw this in our lesson on video but I want to show you how we can take advantage of it so let's go reading her lens flare and I'm just gonna position this in the middle and all I'm really worried about is the positioning between the flare and its little reflective properties there click okay when you now change the blend mode to screen now we have a movable lens flare that we can put anywhere that I want so that would be another example of I might take that player and duplicate the layer and create a new document and just save this as a lens flare now perhaps an even better way to do it is before you create the lens player turned this into a smart object then do your lens flare and now not only can you drag this into a different document but you can also edit thie settings for the lens flare in the position and someone so part of the idea I'm trying to show you is not just follow these steps and create this exact look in fact the likely it is you probably wouldn't want to create some of those looks that I did in this lesson but that's I didn't really worry about that because my job here was to say here is a bunch of ideas now you go and run with them so in this particular instance your homework if you will your assignment is to take one or two of your photos and just used these kind of methods to try an experiment and come up with some border or edge effect or finishing touch that you like but make sure you do it in a way that's flexible so my challenge to you is to creating the fact that looks really good on one photo and then figure out the simplest way to move that over and tweak it so it works equally well but doesn't look exactly the same on another photograph so we shall see you tomorrow