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Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

Lesson 112 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

Lesson 112 from: Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp

Blake Rudis

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Lesson Info

112. Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Bootcamp Introduction

16:22
2

The Bridge Interface

13:33
3

Setting up Bridge

06:55
4

Overview of Bridge

11:29
5

Practical Application of Bridge

27:56
6

Introduction to Raw Editing

11:00
7

Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface

07:39
8

Global Tools Part 1

16:44
9

Global Tools Part 2

20:01
10

Local Tools

22:56
11

Introduction to the Photoshop Interface

07:13
12

Toolbars, Menus and Windows

25:07
13

Setup and Interface

11:48
14

Adobe Libraries

05:57
15

Saving Files

07:39
16

Introduction to Cropping

12:10
17

Cropping for Composition in ACR

04:44
18

Cropping for Composition in Photoshop

12:40
19

Cropping for the Subject in Post

03:25
20

Cropping for Print

07:34
21

Perspective Cropping in Photoshop

07:11
22

Introduction to Layers

08:42
23

Vector & Raster Layers Basics

05:05
24

Adjustment Layers in Photoshop

27:35
25

Organizing and Managing Layers

15:35
26

Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes

21:34
27

Screen and Multiply and Overlay

09:15
28

Soft Light Blend Mode

07:34
29

Color and Luminosity Blend Modes

12:47
30

Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes

07:43
31

Introduction to Layer Styles

11:43
32

Practical Application: Layer Tools

13:06
33

Introduction to Masks and Brushes

04:43
34

Brush Basics

09:22
35

Custom Brushes

04:01
36

Brush Mask: Vignettes

06:58
37

Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn

06:53
38

Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation

07:52
39

Mask Groups

05:52
40

Clipping Masks

04:11
41

Masking in Adobe Camera Raw

07:06
42

Practical Applications: Masks

14:03
43

Introduction to Selections

05:42
44

Basic Selection Tools

17:41
45

The Pen Tool

11:56
46

Masks from Selections

04:22
47

Selecting Subjects and Masking

07:11
48

Color Range Mask

17:35
49

Luminosity Masks Basics

12:00
50

Introduction to Cleanup Tools

07:02
51

Adobe Camera Raw

10:16
52

Healing and Spot Healing Brush

14:56
53

The Clone Stamp Tool

10:20
54

The Patch Tool

06:38
55

Content Aware Move Tool

04:56
56

Content Aware Fill

06:46
57

Custom Cleanup Selections

15:42
58

Introduction to Shapes and Text

13:46
59

Text Basics

15:57
60

Shape Basics

07:00
61

Adding Text to Pictures

09:46
62

Custom Water Marks

14:05
63

Introduction to Smart Objects

04:37
64

Smart Object Basics

09:13
65

Smart Objects and Filters

09:05
66

Smart Objects and Image Transformation

10:57
67

Smart Objects and Album Layouts

11:40
68

Smart Objects and Composites

10:47
69

Introduction to Image Transforming

04:34
70

ACR and Lens Correction

09:45
71

Photoshop and Lens Correction

14:26
72

The Warp Tool

11:16
73

Perspective Transformations

20:33
74

Introduction to Actions in Photoshop

09:27
75

Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface

05:06
76

Making Your First Action

03:49
77

Modifying Actions After You Record Them

11:38
78

Adding Stops to Actions

04:01
79

Conditional Actions

07:36
80

Actions that Communicate

25:26
81

Introduction to Filters

04:38
82

ACR as a Filter

09:20
83

Helpful Artistic Filters

17:08
84

Helpful Practical Filters

07:08
85

Sharpening with Filters

07:32
86

Rendering Trees

08:20
87

The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters

15:08
88

Introduction to Editing Video

06:20
89

Timeline for Video

08:15
90

Cropping Video

03:34
91

Adjustment Layers and Video

05:25
92

Building Lookup Tables

07:00
93

Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type

15:11
94

ACR to Edit Video

06:10
95

Animated Gifs

11:39
96

Introduction to Creative Effects

06:08
97

Black, White, and Monochrome

18:05
98

Matte and Cinematic Effects

08:23
99

Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades

12:20
100

Gradients

04:21
101

Glow and Haze

10:23
102

Introduction to Natural Retouching

05:33
103

Brightening Teeth

10:25
104

Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool

08:07
105

Cleaning and Brightening Eyes

16:58
106

Advanced Clean Up Techniques

24:47
107

Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization

14:47
108

ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits

21:27
109

Portrait Workflow Techniques

18:46
110

Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization

12:17
111

Landscape Workflow Techniques

37:36
112

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

06:59
113

Composite Workflow Techniques

34:01
114

Landscape Composite Projects

24:14
115

Bonus: Rothko and Workspace

05:15
116

Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos

07:05
117

Bonus: The Mask (Extras)

05:18
118

Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR

04:54

Lesson Info

Introduction to Compositing & Bridge

Everything comes together in this very last course, this last lesson of the course, which is the Adobe Photoshop CC Bootcamp. We're gonna talk about compositing. Compositing is basically taking one image and putting it on top of another image. So you can see how all of the things we've learned about layers, masking, selections, Blend If, everything, it's all gonna come together right now. So really if there's certain things that you're not quite sure on, go ahead and review those things in the past lessons before coming to this because this is where it's all gonna come together, okay? So what is a composite? The combination of two or more images of different scenes, or environments, to create a story. I like to do this to create a story, but there's many different things you can do. It's not necessary to create a story. Sometimes it can be just replacing a background in an image, or replacing a sky in an image. But typically when I do composites, I think about things from, I guess I do...

n't really, they are composites if you're taking two images and putting 'em together, but replacing a background to me, or replacing a sky just doesn't feel like the storytelling type of composite that I'm talking about. And I want you to think like a painter. So if you look at this painting and you see how it's a series of events that are creating this entire story. But then you also have things that are totally different that you wouldn't see in normal everyday life kinda happening over here in this corner. Parts of the story are happening down here that are then being brought up into here. So the whole thing is coming together as one big story. And painters, they don't necessarily have to care about what reality looks like. They just paint whatever comes to their mind and then put it onto their canvas. The things that brought me into Photoshop were not necessarily compositing, but it was putting the pictures together that I had within the spaces that I would shoot. So I didn't even know what a composite was. I was just going to the zoo and I was shooting a rhinoceros. And then this is a building in San Francisco that's like a dome that has these lights. It's actually shooting up this way. It's like a greenhouse, but to me it looked like this other worldly type of, I don't know, collection of things that could blow up the world if I put 'em all together. This big silver ring right here is actually a part of a sewing machine. And then these are just little nuts and bolts that were sitting around my house. This is not a little seismograph that will predict the end of the world. It was a seismograph in a museum that I had taken a picture of and then put into this. Adding some text here to basically tell a story that maybe we're in this ship looking at the destruction of Earth, trying to find our new place that we're gonna live in. Just a story that's being told here. What's the story being told in this? I don't even know. I was just playing around and I was learning Photoshop. I was making a lot of bad rasterize decisions. (audience laughs) But it ended up teaching me a lot about Photoshop by just going off on my own, having fun with my images, and putting them together. As I was developing composites like this, I started to get a little bit better at photography, so I started to enjoy photography and kinda separate myself from these composites. This one was a challenge to myself to say, okay, how many layers can you use to make this image? And I think it was 115 layers that built this one composite. Here's another composite that we've seen before. I was at a little da Vinci exhibit in Kansas City. The Mona Lisa was at the end, and all of his drawings were throughout the whole exhibit. So I took a bunch of pictures of all his drawings and then I composited at the very end onto the wall to make it look as if all of it was somehow unified. It's really cool. It makes a really nice canvas print. There's the before. There's the after. So kind of a boring, just picture of the Mona Lisa, but compositing other images on top of it to make it more appealing. This is a really fun one. This is a cannon that's actually in Platte City, where I live. This is a howitzer cannon that actually just hangs out in Platte City at the end of our street. It doesn't, like nobody even cares about it, but it's so cool, the history behind this howitzer cannon just blew me away. So I composited together to make it look like search lights were going throughout the sky and make the image look a little bit older, almost some border edge on here, which I typically don't use borders. I don't really care for them, but this made it look like an old, maybe Polaroid or something like that, that was peeled off from a print. Here's what it looks like if you actually go to that scene. It's kinda boring. But when you add paratroopers to the sky and searchlights all over the place, it starts to tell a story. And the history behind this cannon starts to come out, almost as if it's shooting something over here. This is shaving cream. It's shaving cream spilled in my hand and then take a picture of it to make it look like smoke happening over in the distance, whether it's smoke from this cannon, or smoke from the war that's happening in this image. The paratroopers, as we talked about before, was a brush that I just brushed along the sky to create a bunch of different paratroopers really quickly. Christmas cards. Our family Christmas cards are the bomb. I challenge you to try and beat us on our family Christmas card, okay? There was another side to this, where here we are looking like this, and then on the other side we were all LEGO characters. So it was a two-sided card. But each one of these pieces to this is a different picture. It's very difficult to get my family to do what I need them to do, especially with three boys, to get them to do exactly what I say to do all at once and then take one picture. So I take them over a series of pictures on a white seamless, it's not actually seamless, it's actually, you know what that is? I'm like the total budget studio guy. I went to like Jo-Ann fabrics or something like that and bought the long piece of material that is typically used for like swimsuit liners so that I could stretch it out and then put weights at the bottom and kinda make it appear like it's a white seamless. But that way I don't have to worry about all of the crinkling of things and buying a white seamless all the time. So when we put that together, we take all of us off of our white backgrounds, I can very easily put a Christmas card together with a background behind us and make it look seamless and then also add text. This takes everything that we've learned throughout this course, puts it all together onto one Christmas card, so to speak. Every year I do these for our family and our friends. And they're the ones, they actually, people tell us that they keep these on the refrigerator all year-round, which I think is kinda crazy. But we have a lot of fun with our Christmas cards. But this is a composite. This is a practical composite. Before I was telling a story with some of those elements being pulled together. This is more of us just putting together a Christmas card that doesn't necessarily tell a story, but it is a composite of images. Instead of it being one image, it's a bunch of images with a backdrop behind it and make it look like it all fits together. So let's go and jump into Photoshop and do some compositing.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Photoshop Bootcamp Plug-In
Textures
Clouds
Painted Backgrounds
1 – Intro to Photoshop Bootcamp
6 – Intro to Raw Editing.zip
11 – Interface and Setup
16 – Intro to Cropping and Composition.zip
22 – Intro to Layers.zip
26 – Intro to Layer Tools.zip
43 – Intro to Selections.zip
50 – Intro to Cleanup Tools.zip
58 – Intro to Shapes and Text.zip
63 – Intro to Smart Objects.zip
69 – Intro to Image Transforming.zip
74 – Intro to Actions.zip
81 – Filters.zip
88 – Intro to Editing Video.zip
96 – Custom Effects.zip
102 – Natural Retouching.zip
107 – Intro to Portrait Workflow.pdf
110 – Intro to Landscape Workflow.zip
112 – Intro to Compositing.zip
115 – Rothko and Interfaces (Bonus Video).zip
33 – Intro to Masks and Brushes.zip
106 - Frequency Separation.zip

Ratings and Reviews

Robert Andrews
 

Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.

a Creativelive Student
 

Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.

Esther Gambrell
 

WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!

Student Work

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