Lesson Info
11. Full Moon: Adjusting Layer Elements
Lessons
Class Intrduction
05:40 2Milky Way Image: Combining Exposures
04:32 3Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
06:37 4Star Stacking: Combining Layers With Lighten Blending Mode
09:09 5Star Stacking: Layer Masks
05:06 6Car Trails: Merging Multiple Exposures
09:19 7Car Trails: Fixing Uneven Sky
08:38 8Light Painting: And Layering
03:12Lesson Info
Full Moon: Adjusting Layer Elements
now, of course, it looks very fake. And we have to ask ourselves, why does it look fake? Because until we can answer that question, we can't figure out how to fix it. Well, number one, there's a black edge around. Okay, Number two, the moon is actually darker than the white area around it. That doesn't look really. The moon is always gonna be brighter. And the things surrounding it's gonna be equally as bright or a little bit darker, so that looks fake. Um, so let's take care of those things. One at a time. Number one will create a curves adjustment layer and just clip it to that moon. So I'm gonna click right on here and clip it to the moon, and I'm gonna lift the bottom part of this up and what that's going to do. It's start to brighten up the moon, the shadow part of the moon. But it leaves the brightest part alone. What that's doing is it's lowering the contrast, and it's also making it much brighter feeling already. You can see the big change that looks much better there. Um, I'll...
leave that there for now. Okay, Now the other thing I'm gonna dio is maybe make the moon a little bit more around, shall we say So it looks a little flattened out, and that's probably just because of the atmosphere that it was going through. So I'm gonna grab my circular marquee tool and put my mouse roughly in the center of the moon and hold down my Ault key and my shift while I drag a selection out that will give me a nice round edge. And I just used my up and down arrow to move that, um, at any point, you could always go up and transform your selection. So if I wanted to make it a little bit bigger, I could do that, which I think I'm going to dio and hit return. And now what I'll do is I will create a mask on that layer itself so you can see what happened here by making that round selection and then creating the mask. I have just created that mask right there. Now the moon itself is a little bit smaller than that bright area, so there's several different things I can do at this point. I think probably the easiest thing would be to click on this layer and hit command t to transform and hold my shift and all key down and make the moon just a little bit bigger. So it bypasses that white Corona. So now, at this point, it's bigger than the actual white in the sky around it, and therefore we're getting the more realistic look. Now I do not like making my moon a lot bigger, and I think that it's somehow just tends to look fake. This was shot with a wide angle lens. I can kind of tell that moon looks a little bit fake. Um, but for the case of these, that would be the easiest way to do it. If I wanted to do it another way, what I could do would be to command click on command, click on this layer right here that loads the selection and then hit command. I, which is invert now everything but the moon is selected right? And if I was to create another layer here by going down to this new layer, what I could do would be to take my clone stamp tool, and I could all click and just drag some color in that coming out there. Am I on the wrong layer? Let's see here. What have I done? Stamp Normal opacity. 100% current layer outset current layer. So I'm gonna choose all layers, so I all click and you can start to see how that's not gonna do it either. All right, so let's go back and take that layer off and let's try it on this layer. This is one of the reasons that I do this up front because I often get confused with these little selections and exactly where they are at the time. All right, So what we're gonna do for the final part of this is we are going to take all of these layers and blend them together. Merge them together using that command Ault Shift E. Except I'm gonna throughout that moon layer, for starters, So select that layer and this layer control Ault shift and e. And that puts one big layer on here. So now all we have is the moon and that bottom layer. Now, if I go on to this layer, I will be able to grab that color and bring it over into here. So I all click on the moon to get that selection command shift I And now on this bottom layer, I should be able to blend that in just a little bit better. Take a little bit from there, and it's coming out a little bit dark, and I'm not quite sure why. So I'm gonna use a lighter rapacity of about 20% and that's not quite working. All right, so in this case, I think the best way would be if I had more time. I would certainly figure that one out for you guys. But I think in this case, the easiest thing to Dio would be to take this moon and hit command tea and just make it a touch bigger than the white itself. And once we make it so much bigger Well, then, um, readdress our adjustment layer up here just to make sure it's just a touch brighter but still showing some detail in that moon. And you get a slightly more satisfactory moon rather than just a bright white spots. All right, so just a way to finagle your moon a little bit to make things a little bit more realistic, So I hope that help you guys out and hope you found as much enjoyment at its out of working with night photography as I have. And, um, thanks again for joining.
Ratings and Reviews
Constantin Simion
Very good!!! Mr. Cooper presents simple Photoshop tools that can make a substantial improvement of the pictures in a way that everyone can understand.