Lessons

Lesson Info

Paperback Book Cover

I've got a paperback size document here and we're going to start on this particular project and I've got an image in from Adobe Stock This is a typical thing, you'll get somebody who will find some image content for you and provide you that and say this is the kind of thing we want, but can you make it so it's like nighttime, a little bit spooky and can you do some other things as well, just to change it up, make it a little bit scary. Done this so many times on different products and there's so many different approaches, but none are as clean and as quick or as editable as this one is. So because this image is actually in my Creative Cloud library, okay, just here, but then it comes in as a connected smart object. And there's a really big advantage working this way as well especially if you're sourcing the imagery. So if I've gone out and searched from Adobe Stock and bought in another piece of content, I'm just gonna show you what I mean here just by just briefly jumping into a brand...

new document and I'm gonna bring in something that is not yet licensed, I have a separate Stock subscription for this content so let me see, I'll chose this one here I think with this monkey, there we go. I'm gonna bring that in, okay, because it comes in like this, I could use all the techniques that I'm going to use here, okay. And then if it was approved, I can just license the image directly here inside the application and that is a really, really powerful work flow, especially if you're working freelance and you're trying to control the budget on the assets that you're actually using. And of course, unlike just being able to use it in Photoshop, with Adobe Stock you can actually bring that through to all of my other applications as well, even my motion apps just there. So just bear in mind I might want to change this image out and then apply the licensing to that, but this one here that I'm using right at the moment if I just stop that one there, this one has already been licensed, so for argument's sake we'll say this one has already been approved here like so. So, I'm just gonna target that particular layer just here and I can begin. If yours isn't an image from a Stock asset like this or link to a Creative Cloud library, then what you'll need to do for best results here, okay, is to convert that to a smart object. Now you'll notice I've mapped a different shortcut key to that, alt command S here, that's because by default, that's mapped to save as but so is shift command S or shift control S. How many save as shortcuts do you actually need? So I've reassigned that one there, you do that, if you want to do that, you do that via the keyboard shortcut options in edit menu and that's on both Mac and PC, create your own shortcut set and then just modify those like so. But do be aware that if you share your computer with other users, like what you really should do there is make sure that everybody knows that you've made those modifications. Okay, so, here's where this begins. We go up to the filter menu, we're gonna change this to the nighttime. We're gonna come down here to the Camera Raw filter, like so, it doesn't need to be a raw image, this is the same amount of power pretty much as the full on Camera Raw, Adobe Camera Raw software offers but apply to a layer, to a smart object, even to a compounded part of a layer, so you might have a selection within a layer that you can use and you can use this full power on it. And I can do so many different things in here without adding any additional layers whatsoever. So let's get a demonstration of that going on here. So on the right-hand side, I've got all of these controls, now to a photographer a lot of these things will mean something straight away but probably less so to you as a designer, but I think together we can figure these things out. Now we can skip past white balance in the profiles, as useful as they are, actually aren't part of what we're doing today but if you do get a chance, investigate those too. So temperature, what do we think that actually means? Well it's exactly what it says it means, okay, and actually a range in degrees Kelvin, which is how they measure color temperature, intensity of color. Start out by heating up lots of metal and so on. So we're making a nighttime image here, what happens when it goes to nighttime? Well, it gets colder, so we can move that to the left here, making it colder like so, so I'm just pushing that, I'm actually overcooking this slightly, trying to keep an eye on what you're seeing as well as what I've got then on here. Okay and green is one of the last colors who actually disappear anyways, but I'm just gonna push that down there like so, so I'm making it cooler there, I'm letting some of the green still shine through. And now I'm gonna dip down the exposure so you can see here by the slider it's black and white, so lighter and darker so of course at nighttime, it gets quite a bit darker, so I'm gonna make that about this dark, I think that's pretty good, that's more sort of twilight-y. Just go along there to that, so that's really good just there, I think, I like where that's going there. Okay, now, I might actually dampen down the highlights, here of course the brightest parts. Make the shadows slightly deeper, might skip the whites and just make the blacks here really quite intense. A few other options here. I might just try a little bit of dehaze on it, just to make it really crunchy and a bit HDR. You won't see too much of the effect of that in a moment because of course, it's darkened down quite a bit in here. So that's kind of okay where that is at the moment, you can also get into some of the other controls here such as these HSL adjustments. And on the top that just stands for hue, saturation, and luminesce, say for example, I might wanna make my greens a bit darker, not so luminant, so I might change a few things out of here. So these sometimes help as well, so I might change a few things now, greens here in terms of saturation. I'll just keep to the basic tab in the main just at the moment, so that's doing okay around the general darkness of the image, but I need a bit more, and I don't need it over the whole image, I need a bit more in the sky region because this is a dead giveaway here, and you might have seen this in movies where you think, that looks a bit odd, I reckon they shot that in the daytime and they probably did because it's difficult to shoot at night and you want as much light around as you can, you need to control it. Okay so what we're going to do is we're going to put a gradient across this to make it darker, and we've got access to all of these tools here in gradient form. Across the top here, we've got this strip of tools and we're gonna use a few of these, at least two or three, and the first one we're going to use is the graduated filter. I'm gonna come out onto the image, and what I'm gonna do is start at the top, click and drag downwards like so. Okay, so I'm pulling that down, I'm gonna stop towards the top of the bridge, just about there and just change the angle slightly, this is like one degree, good. Okay and I'm just gonna pull the exposure right the way down, okay, and you'll see that's getting very, very dark there across the top of the image and I'm gonna reduce the contrast as well. That's one of the things that goes in the absence of light. What I'm then going to do is point out these two things here, this red marker and this green marker. You can probably understand this visually, straight away the red marker and there's no effect of the filter beyond the red marker. The green marker, everything before that, the filter is applied fully, so if I just drag the green marker down like so, you can see that's getting a lot darker along the top there and the distance in between the two is the transition between green and the red point there, so it's going to be fully applied and not applied at all just here. Now, that's great, so I'm going to bring it down just a shade further I think on this, and that's really good just around that there, that's kind of a nice, convincing dance across the top there. Again, I'm not trying to overcook it in case you're seeing it on a screen, it might be difficult to see, I don't want you seeing an entirely black screen from where you are and if anybody in the team here notices that it's too dark then just give me a shout and I'll do something to alleviate that. So you can see there I've got an adjustment. Now imagine doing that in Photoshop like that, like what you have to do is you probably have to do that with a gradient, using the gradient tool, changing that density across there and applying a blending mode to it and maybe even a stack of layers. You might have a neutral density layer there and you might have another one on top of that. Okay so there are just things that affect the tonality, blend modes, all sorts of things, just to do that, but here, one graduated adjustment, and you've got access to all of this power. In fact, I'm going to extend that just a little bit more because down here, I've got this color option and I'm gonna click on that, okay, and of course, the sky at nighttime, very, very dark, very very blue. I'm gonna go sort of blue towards purple just there, that sort of way around about there, okay, so a hue of 255, quite a way along. I'm gonna hit okay. So now it's got a blue component there. If I stretch the gradient out across here, you might actually be able to see that blueness. In between the two things, if you can't, what you can do is, I can just change it to an entirely different color, just for a minute and you'll see that. Can you see the kind of magenta in the sky just there? Hopefully you can, just toning that on top. I'm gonna return that back to being that blue like so, okay, and restore these back to where they were. So that's doing the job on the sky there and that's pretty much where the titles are gonna go for the book anyway and generally you want a good amount of contrast so they can be seen on the newsstand, nice and clearly or in the bookstore and people can be interested in them from there. Quite often, (mumbles) they get their name in the top there first but they actually want that, they want it to be against the field of something fairly neutral and by that I don't mean gray, I mean any of the neutrals like black or white, as long as they're very, very big contrast for their name, because we're using an engraved gold effect for the lettering, very, very common and that actually normally is an embossing on paperback covers, you don't have to do that in Photoshop, that part. But that kind of effect, this is a proposal cover, let's put it that way. Okay so I've got that going on just there between those two things. Now I'm going to need to lift the tones, okay, around the bridge because we need to kind of indicate something here with the bridge, let's do a couple of different things here, right, what I'm going to do is, I want the back there 'cause that's still too light in back. In reality, that would be much, much darker back there. I've got a couple different ways I can do it. I've got a gradual or a radial adjustment here which I can apply, if I click here and drag outwards like so so I'm just kinda lining that up to the side. Okay, bring that out like so. Now if I just move away from that for a second, I'm just gonna go back to the hand tool here at the top, that kind of hides all the little widgets. You can see that's much, much darker in the background there, it's kind of leading off into darkness. That might work, so I'm gonna go back to the radial adjustment and you'll notice the widgets for the gradient are hidden, let me just turn, I'll go back to the gradient, you can actually see that's there, if we go back to the radial adjustment, it comes back to that and I can reactivate it by clicking on it. If I need to see a mask of where it's actually affecting, then that's down in the bottom right here and turn that on like so, so see how it's working. Now that's feathering off way too early. Now these are things I can change here, I can drop the feather in, can you see that? Solid shape, much too harsh there, but I'm gonna get that to feather off a little way because I want the effect of the feathering down here on the ground. Okay we'll turn the mask off now. Look at that, nice and dark, just there. We'll go back to the hand tool, but of course, too dark in a few places, it wouldn't go to absolute blackness like that, so, how do we get around that? Well the answer is actually up at the top here, when you've got a radial filter on as I have just now, okay so notice I reactivated that. Then I've got these three options, create another one, you can create multiples of these and add them together. Okay, edit the existing one which is the state I was in already, and brush. And brush is kind of interesting because when I switch into that mode, now I've got a really big brush here so I'm just gonna hold down. Actually I'll use my bracket keys or the sliders here, let's bright the slide down. We should have a chance to set this up. I should have gotten myself a bit more time to set that up, but I'm just gonna bring down this slider just here like so, gonna change the feathering to about halfway and bring the flow up a bit like so. And what I can do now is tap, remove, two buttons at the top here, add and remove. And now I can work around the bridge just here, so I'm just gonna remove that, just brushing into this region here and maybe I need to make a couple of passes over it like so, just to get rid of the edges around the brush, I'm gonna do a tiny bit of brushing here in the leaves at the bottom of the bridge, I kind of want those bits there, they're kind of important. Much, much smaller brush. Now this is like a value of one just here, I might just increase that to two. Okay, and then just brush in, whoops, let me just get rid of that, so I can just delete that, just hit delete to get rid of that. I need to activate this one here. Notice you can move it around as well, by the way. If it's not in the right position, you can move it to another location. And there's going to be a tree coming down there, 'cause you can tell from here, and so I'm just gonna make some tiny marks here, make sure I'm in brush mode, which I wasn't, and come in here and just bring in some little bits of that content, there you go. There's the odd trunk, just a suggestion that there's something more and it's fading off into the darkness. Now I'm just wobbling a small brush around here just to get some, bring out some tiny leaf shapes, around there like so, a bit more trunk. That's enough suggestion with that I think, that's kinda nice and dark, starting to look super, super creepy, which of course is the idea of this, that's what sells a lot of books. Okay so moving through those things. That's good, I'm happy with that so far, if I needed to add anything in, I could switch to add mode and restore it just there, different size brush for that, of course, just they're super massive. There you go, and I can bring that in, and you can change the flow, which of course, is just like modulating the opacity. So I'm kinda happy with that, I'm just gonna tap H on my keyboard, that gets me back to the hand tool which is how you preview this without any of those things, I think that's working out all right there. Now I'm going to lighten the edges of the bridge nearest to the viewer, okay, so I'm just gonna come on here and get an adjustment brush. So this is how you can put in an adjustment, but actually paint it in so you can create your own mask. You don't have to make a selection or anything here. And before I use it, it's using all of the existing settings, I'm just gonna reset these just to the right of adjustment brush, I can choose reset local correction settings and it neutralizes all of these sliders. So I need this to be brighter so I'm gonna push up the exposure just a bit there, in fact, I'm gonna overcook it for a minute 'cause it's completely adjustable and then just brush in around the edges of the bridge here, let's try and suggest a bit more of those size, nice and creepy. I never used to get the good ones, by the way, the nice, happy novels that my wife likes to read. Well actually they seem miserable but on a different level. (chuckles) Just to get anything like that in terms of this work or album work, it's got the stuff that was a bit iffy (chuckles). I'm gonna switch into erase mode here so the adjustment brush has three modes, new for a new adjustment and an erase from that, so my eraser here is set quite small, so I'm just removing the effect of this particular brush on the background there, especially here I'll get sort of a halo in that ballpark. I just wanna get rid of that, and in a minute, we'll come out of this and we'll start working on adding some radiant beams in here and it's sort of a sneaky, sneaky way. Okay I think that looks all right. Let me show you where the mask is, if I turn the mask on for that, you can see that? Okay so that's sort of actually brushed here. Now I like doing this on layers in Photoshop full, I'm not saying layers are something you don't use. Of course you do, all right, but there are some things you can do without having stacks and stacks of layers in front of you, just makes it much more flexible. But one of the things I can't do though is if I make an adjustment like this on a layer, I might involve two or three different layers to do this, in fact, almost certainly what I'm doing here. And I might have a problem editing it, but here, this is really easy. If I think, you know what, the exposure is a bit rich, yeah, then hey I can just drop that down, you can see it changes and I can tune it just by pulling the exposure slide there. If I think maybe that stone work, it looks great and it looks very blue, it is very, very blue, so I just wanna introduce a little bit of warmth in there, so I'm adding just a small amount of heat with pushing to yellow and I might actually add to that with a bit of magenta. Gonna move that more towards sort of an appearance of white, I think that's looking okay so far. So I apply that, now if I need to make any changes to that, let's have a look at the layers panel just for a minute and for your viewing comfort, I'm just gonna zoom in on that panel, okay, and you can see here, okay... How that's applied, so here it is, as a smart filter, the Camera Raw filter just there and I can double-click here to go back and edit the filter, because it's a smart object, I can do that as many times as I like, and here I've even got a blending option so I can change the way that that filter is blended in the result. So that's kind of okay where it is at the moment, I've got a layer mask just here. That's the thing I'm gonna focus on right now, so if I click on that, we're going to give the indication that there's some light on this side of the bridge. So just bits of light, we're gonna make some nice little radiant beams in there, we're gonna indicate first of all some bits around the tree trunks. So painting in a mask, of course there are only two actual colors and several tones in between, and those colors, the black and white, so black to conceal, white to reveal, so wherever the mask is white, you're seeing the full effect of this. Wherever the mask is black, okay, then it's hidden away. In fact there's no easier way for me to demonstrate this than by getting the marquee tool, so I'm gonna get the rectangular marquee tool here and I'm gonna do you a quick washing soda, how do you refer to washing powder here, detergent. Yeah so I'm gonna quick detergent commercial just here, so I've got a marquee, I'm focused on the layer mask, so I can't affect the pixels there anyway because it's a smart object. And I'm gonna hold down alt or option and hit backspace to fill that with black. So we washed this half in regular Photoshop and this half in Camera Raw assisted Photoshop. Can you tell the difference? (chuckles) Of course you can, it's crazy, crazy different on there. Great news is, all I need to do now is because white is the background color in my toolbox here is to hit delete like so and it goes back to being white in the mask, so white is revealing what I've done in Camera Raw. So I'm just gonna deselect that, come on D control, D, and now get my brush, so I'll pick up a brush and let's go and choose an appropriate brush for this, so I actually want a soft, round brush, okay, that will change its opacity and flow as I'm working on maybe, I think I'll just go for soft round pressure opacity just there so I'm just gonna double tap on that to pick it up, gonna hold down control and alt or option on my keyboard over the image itself and drag to the length to change the brush size and then up and down to change the hardness. So wanna go to about 20% hardness, just here, so that if I can get to there, something like that, nice, that's a fairly soft brush, then I can just get (mumbles) as I want. I'm also going to tap three on my keyboard just to change the opacity of this brush or the flow, whichever one it's changing I'm gonna change four, here you can see this one is changing the opacity. Some other brushes change the flow, so you can just hit, hold down shift to change those ones, whichever ones it will change the alternate one here. So I tend to work at about 30% opacity here, some of the brushes actually drive their opacity settings, and I wanna pick out some of the trunks on the side here. Now they're kind of difficult to pick out at the moment because it's nighttime in my picture. This is the other benefit of working like this. I can turn off those filters, I can still target the mask. This is a little bit tricky 'cause you're kind of painting almost blind here, but, I'm just gonna get it started so I know where they are, I'm just gonna paint up the side of this trunk. On there, be a bit more on that curve, so just watch where the cursor's going here, down that side. Now to the bottom there, I can fix all of this one so I can see the mask, up to here, and I think the light starts to tail off just as it went up that trunk. I don't want it to go any further or any higher than that. I might introduce some light down here as well, so I'm just marking these things in with the brush. So it's a bit of a trunk here, that might pick up just a little bit of light there. Might add a couple of extra bits on the uneven part of the bridge. Let's turn the filters on here. So now we can see what I'm actually doing there and if I go back to the mask here and continue painting. This is at 30% opacity, making successive strokes, not pressing very hard here at all. You can see how it's picking out the edge of that tree trunk. If I've gone into an area that I don't want to paint, then I just tap X to swap my colors out and then just paint that bit back in. Nice and easy, X to go back to black here, so this curve and this actually probably needs a slightly smaller brush there, that curve there, that's gonna pick up quite a lot of light I think. 'Cause the light's gonna be coming from down below. Let's move along there, I'm gonna tap X now to paint along this bit and I can go quite rapidly there. This is the point where I'll actually probably change the opacity so I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna go up to 80% there, so it's not completely committed, but close enough. So you can see I'm starting to bring back those things, I'm gonna get some light in the bottom here. Now just the regular brush there is probably a bit much, even if I'm dabbing at it. What I might try and do is actually pick up a bit more coloring there, just some variation, that was a mistake, just that bit you get at the top there. Bring a bit of this trunk in and some more lights just here adds to the overall spookiness. I'm actually painting out the Camera Raw filter across parts of the bridge now just to change that, I'm gonna swap colors back to white to kind of reveal the effect but I'm gonna drop this down to 30% again and push across there just a few times just to soften that out gradually. Starting from the outside one pass, moving in, so overlaps with that a little bit more and then just bring that out to the side like so. Okay, groovy. On occasion, what I'll actually do is get another brush, now I've got some of the Kyle Webster brushes just here such as the spatter brushes. I do use some of these, in the concept set, there's some leaf patterns and whatever, but you need to make sure you've got one with an actual paint brush on it. You have access to these with your Creative Cloud subscription, but if I choose, let's try the viral brush there, that might be pretty good. Let's try that and let's go into these, it just randomizes the texture and I was gonna spot that out and hide, we're going to black again so I'm actually removing the effect of the filter. Can you see that? As I brush into this corner towards the bottom right-hand corner, nice, soft, less obvious effect there I think, so some creepy light going on there. So let's get some of those beams in our (mumbles) and this is a neat, neat trick. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tap G here to get the gradient tool, actually at the moment mine's picked up the paint bucket so I'm just gonna long press on there or actually just shift G a cycle through those things. Okay so I've got the gradient tool here. Okay, my tool box is actually modified slightly here. I've used the little ellipses to change out the tools I don't need. I'm gonna click here in the gradient, so at the moment any one of the preset gradients. I want something that gives me randomized beams of dark colors and gray, okay. Let's change the gradient type to noise. And that gives me a gradient like so. You can randomize that, you can keep cycling through those things, you can make some great effects with these. I'm gonna tap on restrict colors here and add transparency, so it allowed gaps inside of there. So I'll just uncheck restrict colors for a minute and I'm gonna drag these RGB stylers, and if you want to, you can use other models just there. Okay but I'm gonna make sure that in our GMB ranges there that they're all down towards black. And then gonna change the roughness here, gonna push that up a little way. Can you see that I'm getting all of these tiny little black lines appearing in there, I can randomize that so change it out, that was actually a really good one there, let's get past it, (chuckles) go backwards. All right but there you are, that's kind of a good one, that's a really good one just there, I like that. So I've got that. Because I might want to keep it, I always tap new. And so I save that gradient like so. Normally give it a name and tap new but you can always name it after it's in in a preset mojo. So I tap okay, all right, got on the mask, that's where I'm focused right now. Got my gradient tool active, now at the moment if you look at the control strip at the top of the screen, okay, I've got those little five icons for the different five kinds of gradient there so linear along a line, radial, radiating outwards, and then I've got the angle gradient just there. Well what I'm gonna do is tap my right bracket key twice because that focuses me out onto that particular tool. Let me just show you in a new document, just super, super quick. I'll keep a new document part, what this actually does. See that? When you apply that to a mask, (mumbles) come along here like that, can you see? And black reveals, white conceals. Now I'm not a fan of doing this full on, so I'm gonna drop the opacity for my gradient down to about 60%, okay, like so, focused on my mask, I'm gonna point downwards like that. Whoa, you can see there how it adds those radiant (mumbles), that is way, way, way, way too strong. And in fact, because that's actually revealing too much, I'm just gonna undo that. I'm gonna set the gradient to reverse and I'm gonna drop it down to 30% there and that's much, much better. Still a little bit strong so what I might do is actually add in some black here with another linear gradient, so I'm gonna go from foreground to transparent, my foreground color being black and I think I'll just drop linear gradient here down to, whoopsy daisy, I meant white (chuckles). I'll just tap X there to go back to that, so I've got (mumbles) like so. And it's a 30% tone of course and reversed, so we'll bring that out just there. And if I need to, I can even brush in here, get a big, fat, chunky brush and brush across the top. Just make that really big, whoops, make it really big, like that, make sure we're white so we're revealing all of that and there you go, that's just one of the effects you can use there to build out sort of radiating beams and they've got sufficient randomness for you to be able to not have to do it all manually. We need another image now so I'm gonna go up to my Creative Cloud library here and I should have a nice picture of a black cat. Because we're gonna bring this in so it's gonna involve us doing a bit of subject selection here, if I drag that in like so, there's my black cat, it's isolated against the white background, double tap on that to apply it. Again, another small object there. I need to quickly select it so here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go to the select menu, come down to subject and let the AI powered tech inside of Photoshop analyze that and provide me with a result like so and you can see the marching ants around the side. I'm gonna tap W or L, either of those would work, to get me a selection tool. Okay, in fact a couple of others besides and I'm gonna tap for select and mask. You know what, that's a pretty good mask, I'll go here to view it against an overlay. I'll choose that against black 'cause I wanna kinda see how that works and you've got this opacity slider here. If I push that up a ways, you can see it's quite a halo around the cat, so I need to introduce a bit of an edge for Photoshop to analyze. I'm gonna tap J on my keyboard so that I can show the edge or enable the check mark here and then let's just push this edge up, and I just want an edge there. I think around about five pixels would be really good, I'm just gonna give it a small radius so it can work out where it needs more or less. Let's turn show edge off. Okay maybe need a bit more there in terms of radius. There you go, as I push that up that's getting better and better and I've got the refine edge brush here as well which I can go around, and that's actually got more light on the cat than I actually really need, so I might have to just do a couple of things with that after. That's fine for now and it will need something so it shows it inside of the actual image. I could have clicked invert while I was in there but I forgot so out to the select menu, and choose select inverse just there, and then hit the mask icon at the bottom and in fact I should have done that the other way around, so fortunately because the mask is focused, I can just do command I there to invert that mask like so. Okay, that's pretty good and I could actually come in, I'm just gonna brush these out, for the sake of time, gonna switch out to a brush, make that really small. So fast to change that, make sure that I'm painting with black here to hide that content at 100% opacity, so just tapping zero there. Do you know how you set the brush to zero opacity, Jim? Is it zero? Well if you click zero, you see, it sends it to 100% opacity, so one sets it to 10%, okay, zero actually sets it to 100%. How do you make it actually zero? I'm actually just blending this in just to soften the edge just there, zoom in a bit so you can see. Tap zero twice quickly, zero zero, see? And that should actually set the opacity to that. Am I still on the brush? This doesn't seem to be, anyway, that is the trick, it's supposed to do that. But it's not doing it right, anyway. So swap out to white, so inadvertently painting out some of the cat's, whoopsy daisy. Some of the cat's leg there. Let's just get that fixed. Great thing is working with masks in this way is that you really, really struggle to go wrong. I mean I'm unable to do it 'cause I've got skills in going wrong. Just ask me about saving and sharing libraries. (chuckles) So round the edge there, for the purposes of this in terms of comping that in is just fine, what I need to do thought is a little bit of work on the cat here just to make it a little bit darker so it's more sympathetic with the surroundings, so what I'm going to do is, wow, that cat's really big there. I thought it was a big smaller than that. Let me just get that and bring that down. It's a small point but I just wanna do it anyway, change it. If I just grab that and then I'll chat to you all in a minute, there we go, that's much better. And the great thing is, art editors or publishers will, these are the kind of things they'll say, make the cat bigger. Marketing is make the logo bigger. Paperbacks, make the cat bigger, make the scary thing bigger, make whatever. So what I'm going to do is add an adjustment. Now I think what I might do here, I can kinda use levels to this, levels or curves or exposure, all of those would work. I think I'll use levels so I've got levels adjustment going on, I only want it to apply to the layer beneath, so I'm gonna use alt command G, that would be alt control G on Windows. You can also hold down the alt or option key and click in this region between, it'll do the same thing, in fact, if I do that for you, so I've got the option key held down. You see when I click that, it brings that in two, so you've got both ways of doing it. The adjustment is here in the properties panel, so what I'm actually going to do is just tune that down by pushing that slightly to the right, just there, and I'll just bring that, levels underneath. I actually want the glow of the eyes and that edge there around the cat, that's working out. Let's add the title to the top of that. And how's that looking? I made it so dark as the other one. Because I need people to see it (chuckles) from there. That's something else you need to look out for, especially if you're printing it. Remember it looks nice and light on here. Trust me, when that prints, that's gonna be dark. Yeah, you're looking at something that's projecting light to your eyes rather than being modified as light passes through the ink and is reflected up to your eyes. Really important thing to gauge and you'll learn that when you first get a muddy, muddy proof back that looks really, really dark and terrible. There are a few things you can do to check that before you actually do it but trust me, that's as dark as that really needs to get for print. Now that Camera Raw work that I've done there, that might be something that I'm going to use on another project if the publisher comes back and says, kind of like the darkness but we've changed our mind on the image, can we have something else? Then there's something I can do about that. If I double-click here for the Camera Raw filter to go back into that, I could tune any aspect of this I want to. This area here with the sliders on the right, if I click there, presets, okay, I can click and add a new preset, so if I just call this one spooky, just there like, okay, so spooky nighttime. These are the things that will add all of those other things will be added, you can deselect ones you don't want just there, okay, it will save into my user presets like so, and then I've got something, I can just come back to here. You can see I've got a dark and gloomy one, look at that. Is our mouse over it, switches between those two, so that will be better for screen, that one will be better for print. There like so and I could even tune those things out for that, so.