Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
Lesson 3 from: Snap The Perfect Night ShotTim Cooper
Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
Lesson 3 from: Snap The Perfect Night ShotTim Cooper
Lesson Info
3. Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
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
Milky Way Image: Simple Selections And masking
So here we are. The blue one ended up on top. That's the sky I want. But yet I want the bottom parts of this image to show through. So the way that we're gonna do that is by using selections and masks. So what I'm gonna do first is select the bottom part of this image. When I go to make a selection, I'll often choose the easiest thing to select, even though it may not be the thing I want to select. Case in point. I want the sky here, but I think it's gonna be much easier to run the quick, select tool through this bottom portion and then invert the selection. Let's do that. We'll grab our quick selection tool, remembering that the bigger the tool is, the more it will grab, and we don't want the tool to go outside of the lines. Here are also start to pick up some sky. So by clicking here and dragging through and Unclip King, that's it. It's that quick of a selection in this case, but it's the foreground that selected and I need the sky selected. So what I'll do is go up to select in vers...
e and now my sky selected. All right, Perfect. Now what I'm gonna do is to apply this selection over to this image and mask it out. All I need to do is click the add a mask icon, which I call my front loading washing machine. So I'm gonna go down to that and I'm gonna click. And while this selection is active, clicking this button will turn it into a mask. And immediately you can see exactly what happened. I am now able to see into this foreground area. Okay, well, that's great. But what it doesn't do is show me this one. So remember this layer here is the one with the car on the right hand side and the layer below it is with the car illumination further to the left. So I want both of those to be blended together. So if I click on this layer and change its blending mode to something called lighten, it will allow the lighter parts of this image to come through into this upper image. So let's change that to lighten. And there you have it. Now you can see there's this little bit of a glow and here, and I'm getting my car trail. That's on this layer. So, in essence, thes two layers air now coming together, showing the brightest parts of each image. All right, now, at this point, there's a few things that I don't like. I'm actually able to see the edge of this building that was very close to the top of the past where we were. And that is on this layer. No, it's on that layer. So what I want to dio is I want a mask that out. I mean, just take that one off to make sure. Yes. All right. So what I want to do is I want to mask that out. So I'm gonna click on this layer itself and then just apply a mask. Now, there's no selection active, So when I apply a mask, I'll just get a white mask. Now, wherever I paint with black, it will remove this from the overall photograph. So I'm gonna grab my brush tool, and I'm going to use my left bracket to make my brush tool smaller and shift and left Brack Brackett to make it nice and soft. And I'm gonna ensure I'm painting with black here and maybe make my brush just a hair smaller than that left bracket key. And I'm gonna paint that out. All right, Now, that building is a little bit less obvious, and you can see the black area that I painted and what I did here was I all clicked on the mask. And, um, by all clicking on the mask, I'm able to see the mask. And in this case, I can actually see where I'm painting as well. And this is the area that is now obscuring that building down there. So what we've done is we've added a blue sky, and we've masked out that the bottom portion so we could see through to the mawr illuminated portion of the mountain down here. And then we change the blending mode toe lighten to allow this later part to come up through. And I think that's probably pretty good. Not this case, you know, I might want to de saturate that blue because, as I said before, it might be just too saturated. And let's see what other kind of changes we can make. I'm gonna create an adjustment layer over this, so you'll notice that went up and I clicked on that layer itself. And I'm gonna create a hue, saturation layer And because I want this you saturation layer on Lee to go to this layer below it, I will hit this clipping icon and that gives us this little arrow telling me that this adjustment is on Lee going to work on that layer. So if I d saturated, all's it is is the top layer. All right, so I'm just gonna de saturate that a little bit, and that kind of gives it kind of more that night sky feel. And then I'm going to do the same thing over this layer. I'm gonna click on that layer and create a hue saturation layer. No, I changed my mind. I'm gonna actually create a color bounce layer. And this time I'm not gonna clip it. I'm just gonna allow it to adjust everything below it. So without clipping it to this layer, it will adjust this layer and that layer, and that's what I want. I want to have this be a little bit more of a yellow glow. So by using the color balance, what I can do is push this towards yellow a little bit and maybe even a little bit of red and magenta to kind of make it feel orange. Kind of like that glow we would expect from the city are from car trails. There we go. So before the hue saturation, layer lips before the color balance, layer concedes subtle change, kind of pushing it a little bit away from that greenish and more toe in orange yellow, and I think we have a pretty realistic blend there. So when you're out making your Milky Way shots, you can think about that foreground and making other photographs to blend in to that foreground to make the image more complete.
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.