Lessons

Lesson Info

Game Poster

Alright so a few different things in here, a few different stock images and this is what we're gonna build out. A bit of fire and some buildings there and so on. So this is a 1080p project, it's landscape because it's for screens as they typically tend to be so I'm just gonna open that out like so and bring in the background and working pretty much from back to front in this so if I click my library here, you can see I have another asset from Adobe Stock here, this weathered road just there let's bring that in. I'm gonna resize that in a second if I close the library, here's a top tip for you right. So I've aligned that to the center, I have not yet placed it 'cause you can see the boundaries are across it. Rather than reaching for the handles on the sides and resizing that, what I'm going to do is this, between the width and height fields in the control strip, I'm gonna click that link, hover over that H until I get what I like to call stapler accident finger, that small icon there, m...

ouse down and drag to the right and you can see there how I can change the size of that really quickly and because those two things are linked together, yeah, then they'll move together. Now I just wanna bring that down a bit because I need that more, a bit more sky in there always the horizon line under the middle of the image, never exactly on the middle, dull dull dull. Yeah, you don't want that at all. So I've got that there, I don't think I need to do too much tuning in that, I don't think I did in the previous image either, if anything I brought a bit more green out of it nope, that's exactly as it is, natural as it would be. Let's get some more stuff on here because there's no foreground or mid-ground interest in there so let's get something that leads our eye up the image so here's a nice fragmented, nice is a subjective term in there but I'm just gonna change that, slightly bring that out like so and I'm gonna right click on it, okay, and choose to flip that horizontally 'cause I want this to lead me down the right hand side, this one not yet licensed because I'm not sure if I'm going to use it or not. The double click on there, so you can see that, here behind the fire, at least part of it. I've used bits of it in here. So let's pick up a selection here on this. The easiest thing I think here to select this, okay, is to use my quick selection tool and parse across here, I could try the subject, not worried about the fact there are gaps in there that might actually help this particular piece of content. I could try actually going similar on this and seeing if that picks me up any of the other bits and that didn't work too well so I'm gonna undo that and just leave that as it is. Let's add a layer mask there to that and invert the layer mask, I'm all backwards for my layer mask today and now brush out some of the content I don't need. So again, back to the brush here, let's start to attack some of this content here so come along like so, soft brush, right, fairly low opacity, 40 percent is what I'm going with here I don't want any of this stuff on the side there I'm gonna soften that out. This will have characters in front of it so at the moment, don't need to go too far on there softening those edges, almost looks like I'm weathering them actually, there, I'm not I'm just really really taking that, allowing them to blend a bit with the background and also, on things like this, you can pretty much go for broke right because it's a toxic atmosphere, it's kind of fogging into the thing. I'm actually gonna whack up to full opacity there and just get rid of some other bits of this like so, there we are. Let's bring some of those in and that stuff right there, not worried about the people in the foreground. So let's jut pretend I'm working in my studio and the phone suddenly starts ringing now, I think I should bring that up to the horizon line you know. Let me see what I did here, I kinda did bring that up, I'm gonna do that. I'm actually gonna, gonna improve where that sits, just gonna tap V on my keyboard. Let's pretend I'm in my studio and the phone's ringing just there I'm kinda lining up the horizon line between the two images there. Might need to just shift that down a little but I am gonna do this one manually. There we are, something like that, you can see the asset number on stock. In fact I'm gonna do even further than that, in and then I'm gonna completely hide that right hand side of that image there, that I think is a much yeah that's quite a lot better there so I'm gonna leave that as it is. Let's just jump out to the lasso tool here and quickly target some of this stuff on the side, you can fill that with black, alt delete or backspace, option backspace and command d to deselect that, back to the brush and some quick stuff in there. Right it's time for a bit more camera raw filter and then we're gonna pretend that I've shared this particular project via Creative Cloud with the art director working on it and they're cool with the stock image so what I'm gonna do is go to, go to the actual stock image, click on that asset there and choose to license it from here, okay, it's gonna check that I've got a valid subscription and that I've got enough credits on there. It's gonna tell me that it's gonna remove one of my licenses by doing that, but that's started to work now and you'll see here where it says Adobe Stock backwards, as it retrieves the full res asset, there you go, done. Yeah really really fast that I'm able to do that and nothing I've done so far is damaged, all preserved, all beautiful. Shift command A, shift control A on Windows is the way to actually get the camera raw filter here so again this is going to be a bit of an exposure thing, down a bit, contrast up 'cause this is illustrative really more than anything else, bit of yellow in there. Okay I might go the whole shooting match there, this is where a bit of de-haze might may that crunchy, I'm gonna hit okay, click back and edit that in a bit. I think that's alright, I'm gonna add a solid color layer over the top of that so let me just come here to these, solid color and I'm going to, I am actually going to hit okay just for the minute, double tap on that, that shouldn't be, just hang on a sec, I know why, I went wrong there, so let me just bring in the foreground coloring and I'm gonna tap eye to get my eyedropper and pick this color from the background. Any one of these tones here will do for this, now I'll add that solid color like so, you can see it's picked up that tone, that's okay and I'm gonna bring that down so it's only affecting that particular layer there and just change the blending there to something like overlay, that should do that's quite there and I'll tune that maybe a bit further, bring it down the opacity, that layer down a bit. There we go, good. Right so we need some other things in there, we definitely definitely need some fire so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna let this burn, yeah, we can put a truck and that in later on on the other side and here's how we do that, how do we get some fire? Do you go out to stock and get some fire and blend it in? No I do not. What I'm gonna do is tap P on my keyboard to identify where the pen tool is in the toolbox, I'm then gonna long press on that and here I'm actually going to use the freeform pencil which I can draw with. So I'm now gonna pretend that I am fire and I'm gonna make some fire-like shapes up here, don't go crazy with this because it's going to give you a big big result, right but it's very easy to go wrong. Sometimes do this with single stick paths yeah so by that I mean I draw them with a curvature pen tool and just draw a bunch of different sticks on there but here I'm drawing an array of paths because this needs some path information. I'm gonna go up to the filter menu, I'm gonna come down to the render sub-menu here and choose flame, okay. And it tells me it's not editable, that's because I didn't add a new layer which I'm doing right now, so there you go I've done it so I've just added a new layer, I used the shortcut, shift alt command n, shift alt control n on a PC or you can click the icon down here. We'll try that again, this time with feeling. So render and flame. Tells me that it's a long, a long path. Several different presets you can, sorry here, from the flame types that you can use. One flame along the path, multiple flames along the path, could try that see the preview that's going on here. I've actually got the one that I wanted in the first place, so multiple flames different angles so you can do that fire text thing. My good friend Jesus Merirez who Jim knows very very well and you will have seen here on Creative Live he actually knows the engineer that built this, I think he's in Oakland I think. Yeah, so, which is awesome. There you go, you can use a custom color if you want, I'm gonna stick with traditional oxygenated flame just there, you can change the quality, I'm just gonna use medium just for now and boom, big big big fire. I told you, you see it's really easy to go crazy on that which I've totally done, way too much fire just there, but that's fine, I could always have a do-over on that so what I'm gonna do is for now though is just actually mask out where I don't want that. So I'm just gonna add a layer mask here, okay, and switch to the brush tool and get myself a nice big brush and by big I mean, like big, right, 70 percent opacity and start to paint some of this stuff out and soften that edge. I could also go to the paths panel and actually get rid of that path so I could delete that there. I could also hit delete to do that but it wasn't anywhere near as much fun. So great news is by doing it this way, I've got the flame effect on the side, you can do other things to make that more convincing when you've got big shapes like that, several different things you can do but for game work, that's kind of, kind of gives the idea that it's actually a game, how's that looking Jim? It's looking good. Alright? So what we need to do now is add a character into this, now I could and have gone to my favorite stock vendor and picked out images there and blended those in but I'm gonna use something else and this is very common in jobs with games companies, games work right where they will actually provide you with content. Now I don't have that content, but fortunately as a Creative Cloud subscriber, I actually have access to Mixamo. Now if you don't know what Mixamo is, okay Mixamo is something that was acquired by Adobe a few years ago and if I just open up a browser here for a second, if I just open up Safari and if I type Mixamo in here okay so this used to be used for rendering characters for games and so on and you can see here, log in and sign up and all of those different things along the top here, okay. But what this gives you, if I just scroll down the page right, it will rig your own characters okay and there are a bunch of characters that you can use. If you've got fill Creative Cloud, you can actually use Adobe Fuse up here in your applications so I'll just scroll down for you to build out characters as well, there you go Fuse CC just there and then you can rig them and they come in so you've got lots and lots of different options for what you use, okay. But, I'm going to use one that I bought down from Mixamo already, okay and I'm gonna load that in. So I'm going to go to my 3D menu at the top of the screen here I'm gonna choose a new 3D layer from file okay and I'm gonna add in this character which is in the COLLADA DAE format and it's really important that particular bit because it opens up various other options in Photoshop, so I'm gonna bring that in like so, I'm just gonna go with the 3D scene size that's there already, okay, that comes in like so. Now I might get a dialog, I haven't got it here but I might get a dialog that says do you want to switch to a 3D workspace? And I could elect to work with that. But it's fine, it's already here and everything's on it. So you can see, here's the character this is in a T pose, I wonder if you can guess why it's called a T pose. Right, so if I've got that character there and down here at the bottom left-hand corner I've got some controls. So the first thing I'm going to do is to orbit the 3D camera, now you can see the planes vanishing off into the distance here, I'm gonna bring these down, so I'm just changing the camera so that meets the horizon on there and you can see how much more convincingly, okay that character fits in there. Then I've got this pan which allows me to move left to right along that pane and also dollying which is like a way of saying wheel the camera towards me. There's tons of dollys in here, there are lots. Yeah so I'm gonna do that and then I'm gonna pan down a little bit like so to bring the character in. Exciting isn't it? I'm then gonna click on the character and in my properties panel, built into Photoshop, you've got a whole load of different things here and you can actually search through this list of things so combat, dance, I think it'd be cool if he was dancing, yeah? Let's have a bit of dance in there, why not it's Friday afternoon, well it is here. You might be watching this at a different time but now you can get that Friday feeling right by making your apocalyptic scary scary character get a bit of a groove on. So let's see, there's a samba dance just there and if you hover over it, really difficult for you to see that that size, let me say if I can change the screen zoom in here and hover over that, can you see that? You get a little preview. There you go. Samba dance so that's what a samba dance looks like, when I click on it, okay it, look at that, and that almost actually could be combative, you can see that now he's adopting that pose. I can change the lighting here as well so these are some really great little effects that I can add to this, so we'll add some more poses and effects so that, how we doing on time Jim and do we have any question while I grab a quick glug of coffee? We are good on questions as far as time, we're an hour into the segment so we have about a half an hour yet to go. Oh we are bang on. And are we enjoying it? That's what I wanna know. I wanna know if everyone is enjoying themselves. Oh yeah. Yeah? Fascinating. So up here this little widget here, this is the lighting for this model. If I click on that, I get this widget so now I can move the lighting around. So there's a big big fire burning next to this chap so the chances are, right, there's gonna be quite a lot of illumination coming from that point there. I'm scrolling around all over the place with that at the moment, probably 'cause I'm switching over and using dual inputs so I'll just bring that across and can you see how that's changing the model? Look at that, yeah, so moving that around. Now I might also want to change the quality of that lighting and my 3D panel will have opened automatically and there is infinite light one, that's the light I'm currently using and when I click on it in the properties panel, it gives me some additional things so here I can change the intensity of the light, look at that. And if I click just here, then I can choose the color picker for the light, now there's a load of text stuff in there that you really don't need to know as a designer, we're making pictures here not producing beautiful beautiful photographs. I've got an eyedropper, it makes sense to me to click something from that range, let's see what that orange looks like, that's not warm enough, I'm gonna go to that light color there like so, hit okay. So now our light is actually more like the stuff that's coming from that flame. It actually looks like he's fending off the flame just there, I can change the shadow if it's casting a shadow on how much shadow is on there. These are all things you can play with, get used to this technique then you can actually use it okay. So I've got that like so. Do you know what that pose, while it's fun, not the exact pose I wanna use. I wanna see what else is there 'cause, it's doing a samba dance right? So must be something else in there. So what I'm gonna do is double click my timeline which should've opened, okay while you had the image open, if it didn't go to the window menu and choose timeline, double click that and look at this, all of my layers here, okay, have got a little timeline and if I drag this along, COLLADA is actually an animation, there you go look really getting his groove on. Now I think that, actually works really really well, yeah. Yeah alright so it doesn't need to be doing a full samba but, look, let's get him back to there, looks like he's warming his hands by the fire now, let's go with that for the purpose of this but you can see that I can go along that whole timeline and change it. That's a good pose, look at that. That reaching out again, I'm gonna turn the model around using this orbit 3D camera, ooh that's much better and then if we get that light widget and just move that around. There we are. So if we can get some of those, there would be though, there's shadows in there from that fire, the moment that this was an actual photograph, then that's what you'd get. So I'm gonna go back to the layers here okay I don't need all of my different 3D bits in this, there's tons for you to explore but probably more than you actually need right now. I'm gonna switch my workspace back to something like the essentials workspace here so I don't get all of the 3D oojamaflips in there, so technical term again. Okay and now what I need to do is to tone this down a little bit because I've got lots and lots of different colors in there. I think you can see they're not all from exactly the same space. Here's how I do that. I select all, right, so command a, control a, I'm then going to do a merged copy which you can do from the edit menu but it's pretty much command c but with a bit of shift key added in so command control plus shift and c gives me a merged copy, I can then deselect that command or control d and then paste command v, like so. So you can see hopefully there in the layers panel that I've actually got a merged copy of everything underneath. In fact if I turn those off momentarily, you're still seeing all of that stuff right so it's all still there. Target is on this particular layer and there are ways you could actually do this as a Smart Object but there for another day, I'm gonna go up to the filter menu, I'm gonna come down to blur and I'm gonna choose this command, average and that returns me the average value of all of those pixels. (coughing) like so. Then gonna change the blending mode of this layer to color. Now I can do that over in the layers panel but here's another little tiny trick. If you hold down shift option or shift alt on your machine, okay, there are some keys you can press to change the blending modes. The essential ones to learn are shift alt m, that changes it to multiply, shift alt n, changes it to normal, shift alt o, changes it to overlay, shift alt s, changes it to screen, those are the ones you need most of the time. Now if you've got a painting tool active, it will change the blend mode of that painting tool so just be careful. What I'm gonna do is make sure that I've got the selection tool active or the move tool, sorry not the selection tool, the move tool active here as I have at the top of the toolbox which means it'll focus its attention on the layer, so I'm gonna do shift alt c and that changes that to color. Now at the moment, that's changed that into an old timey photograph which is not exactly what we're after, yeah, but I need another component here to make that work and that component is layer opacity. So I'm gonna drop that down to about 30 percent, that's dead easy while I'm here because I've got the move tool selected so I'm just gonna tap three okay and that drops that down, starts to harmonize the colors now it might need a bit of tuning in there, in fact I think that needs to go a little bit further up on there, that's much more like it. And all those movie posters you see where you've got lots, there you go, if I switch between the two. Yeah now sometimes, color doesn't quite cut that as a blending mode, okay, sometimes you switch to something like overlay or soft light turn the layer off and on again to see it. Hmm not too bad, but that perhaps needs to come down a shade there but all of those movie posters you see where you've got lots and lots of different sources, okay, and they're all combined together into one kinda set of tones, most of the time this is how that's done, yeah with a bit of blur, an average blur on top of there and changing the opacity of that layer starts to harmonize those tones, brings them in like so. So there it is off and there it is on okay, nice and done.