Lessons

Lesson Info

Building the Layout with Extracted Images

So once we have them completely expected that's when we move on to the layout now with this layout it's kind of hard sometimes to know what to do when you haven't extracted person because it's like ok, I've done all this work and I have him extracted and he's on the layout now what? But I love tio just act like it's a regular picture and clustered around it so I have all of this extra stuff here that needs shadows so let's have a little bit of ah refresher on shadowing in photo shop so let's add our paper shadows and you can see you can see that they still pretty much work for the shot or this layout even though this layout has a white background and the other one had a pretty dark background but because it had a white background the linear burns sometimes isn't going to show up a cz well so this is when you might want to switch to multiply instead of linear burn on I will show you the difference that's why I said that there's no hard and fast rules some layout you're gonna need linear...

burn suddenly as you're going to need multiply so I don't really set a set of setting either a permanent default so because the background is white it's going to have a little bit of a harder time showing up but if you make the shadow too dark it's going to look muddy so it's a delicate balance but see that it's gone now and I don't like that so I'm going to keep it on linear burn just for continuity sake and then just make it a little bit give it a little bit more distance not too much just so you can see it a little bit better on the white and then I'm gonna copy that shadow style to all these things now you're not going to want to shadow this it looks like it's a digital like an alfa there but because it has the outline around the edge it's really muddy so if you really want to act like it's an alfa instead of it's a stamp you can drop down the distance super low s o u you dropped this distance down really far but I just don't think that it's necessary I think that it's fine to act as a stamp instead now these stars um the way that they're bent they float away from the page of it are in real life they would cause they're kind of stuck in the middle and not their stitch down in the middle and then they fly up but for now we will before we warp you can make it look right but the stitching is going to be a problem on a normal layer style because it'll start shadowing the stitching too so if we zoom in a little bit you see that it's a problem not kimmy fixed with the warp tool and will want to take the take the layers, the shadow and push it out and squish it down in the middle. So unfortunately, the, um, shadow palate is very limited when you have things that are have a lot of depth to them and or have a lot of difference, like we did with the bracket and the scribbles it's the same concept with the stitching because the stitching isn't gonna float away from the page. So let's, talk about thiss extraction, and if we were to add a drop shadow to carson, just a normal drop shadow, we probably were meant to be high and floating away from the page, which is not bad. I mean, it depends on the look you're going for, but it's not realistic either. Um, so what? Instead, what we're going to d'oh is we are going tio duplicate carson, and we're going to turn the bottom layer black, and then what happens is if you could, you could see the one underneath is black. So now this is his shadow, but kind of peter pan shadow, just like in the peter pan show how he says his shadow back to his feet, that's what we're going to do is we're going toe so the shadow to carson's feet so I'm going to hold down ault and I'm going to change my point of rotation, which is always gonna start default in the middle to his foot right here and you can just click and drag it when you hit command td to transform you can just click and drag the center of rotation down because what would happen if I don't change it and I try and, um, adjust the shadow is that since the center of rotations right there, it doesn't do anything it's still behind him, but if I drag it down to his foot now, the center of rotation is this foot and you can see me dragging yes, now I'm going tio drag it really blew and then we'll move him up so we can see better so we wanted to have kind of a long shadow and you can see in the photo that I chose that the sun is coming from behind him so it's coming from this direction, which happens to one hundred twenty degrees and so the shadow is going to go in this direction, so now we want to rotate the shadow we'll hold down um there you hold on shift so that nothing is distorted and since the center of rotation is still his foot, we can make his feet match, okay, so we have his cast shadow now and it's still not realistic yet but I'm going to move it up so that we can see the whole thing so now ah we want tio rast arise the layer style just so that we don't have to mess with it later so it's going to make it permanently black and then we want to add a blur to it so we go to ah filter fuller and I like the gaussian blur and we don't want it to be too blurry because that doesn't make any sense s o we just want to do about a sixteen pixel blur so that it's just blurry around the edges not too much because your shadow is still going to be pretty hard around the edges but it just softens up the lay out a little bit and then drop down the capacity to fifty percent or lower depends on the color of your background paper on what you want to do with it but fifty percent works in this one and now ah the last thing that even do to make it really um realistic is you can add ingredient to it and I'm going to add a radiant on the new on any layer so I'm going to command click the shadow layer so that I get the marching ants around the outside and I'm gonna add ingredient layer so down here on this um phil layer you can add grady in and let's just accept that for a second and we're gonna turn this one off and because the shadow is closest to him at his feet that end of the shadow is going to be black and then we're going to fade out to not completely transparent but we're going to do about fifty percent so but this is the wrong angle so we want to just, um change it the angle that's a little bit too way change this area so that's a little bit too transparent it fades out too much so we can um drop the opacity fifty percent and now you can see it kind of fades as it gets away from him and dropped the opacity down again to fifty percent or because it phase now you might want it a little bit darker so eighty eighty percent and you don't have to go in here in a just ceo pass this letter you could just hit numbers on your keypad and it all adjust the capacity for you ok, so now we have a realistic shadow that's in the direction that the lights coming from and makes sense I still add a little bit of a shadow to him because he's still um he still blends in and it looks weird and floaty right here so what we're going to d'oh is we are going tio um at another shadow so we're gonna have a drop shadow and we want it to be going one hundred twenty degrees and what we want is I just want the shadow to go over the letters basically so that he's kind of separated from the letters so I'm goingto dragged the distance up a bit so that it's a little bit more visible going over the letters and you can see that it kind of messes with him right here also it's on multiply which is gross lennier birth when you're burned linear brand lydia burn okay, so you can see it kind of messes this doesn't look right to me but it does look right over the letters so what I'm going to dio is I'm going tio right? Click on the fx and I'm going to create a new layer from the shadow there and they'll warn you and then you can it don't show again because it doesn't matter and now I have his shadow on a separate layer from him and I'm going tio drag it down until it's just on top of the fall word really they're really fall and then you can hit um you could hold on altar in between these two layers and clip them together so that it just clips to the fall and now I'm going to add one more layer of shadowing just to bring him out from the background a little bit so this is going to be a really big size and a really small opacity we'll change it to linear burn going to change the distance a little bit just to give a little bit of definition around the outside edges so he doesn't look like he's sitting directly on that background paper three step process but you get a super realistic shadow it's fun so are there any questions about this process or something new that you've learned normal thing e I want to try it all yeah yeah right it's fun once you you stop and really think about it you're like ok, I can totally understand this because if he was I mean if you saw in the original picture um athlete this mask his shadow was going that way so why would you not want to replicate that on your lay out? I mean, you can just add the stock shadows and call it good but it's kind of fun to replicate that and added tio it's such a nice touch to add it to your layout. So here is who asked me about office. Debra okay, so let's shadow these alphabets. So this is a just a paper alphabet and you can see I have them overlapping some so I'm gonna apply my paper layer style if you hold downshift and click on each of these letters on the baseball it'll select all of them together so then I can just click my paper layer style and it'll apply the paper later all of them and I like to have a little bit of of funkiness with my layouts, right? I adjust the letters a little bit. Okay, so, um we have the's stars here still so let's add some drop shadows to them would drop shot that was that. Oh, chip board actually that's really pretty good jumping off point because we are going to be working them we want kind of a high shadow to start with so it's more rule breaking you can use your chipboard shadows for paper stars, but we want these two have a lot of depth to them and really pop off the page that works. So, um sorry host my train of thought coming from tracy because one of our audience was clear, I think its policy girl so you're using a mouth, but she actually uses a digital tablet for scrapbook, and do you think it makes any difference? Is it again just a personal scrap? A personal preference? I think it wouldn't make a difference if you know how to use a tablet for scrap booking. I mean, it might be easier for you to draw than with a mouse, so when you're adjusting the points of the path with the pen tool, it might be easier for you to draw I don't think that at this point, I would switch to a tablet if you're using a mouse or switch back to a mouse if you're using a tablet, I think that, however, works for you, and whatever you're used to is what you should stick with for sure, I'd love to answer some questions if there are any anything from our studio audience, and this has been really exciting, I think learning how to do this because it always look so intricate and tricky. In fact, you did that very, very quickly, and it was very simple to follow. Yeah, it's just it's a matter of really making sure that you that you just go slow and you're really precise with your points, like, if you start moving place it's really far apart, it's harder to control, um, it's harder to control the angle and the path that it is taking. So if I if I clicked here and then tried to click here, well, I'm gonna have a hard time making this meet up without getting some of that background in there. So it's really just about making sure that you have small segments in between your points and the starting with a good photo, you have to start with a photo that's totally extractable if there are feet cut off if, uh yeah, I think that it would be quite funny looking if there's be cut off if you have things that are blurry, probably not going to make a good extraction. If you have a photo where the background it's hard to tell the background from the foreground not going to make a good extraction. And also there's just I mean, sometimes it's just would be silly to extract something like this where it's a full body. And you're really pulling him out of it and making him the star of the layout looks looks really cool, but a head shot would be funny. Yeah. So you know that clearing the mask? I always have problem in part of the faces in the shadow and another parties. And then it has light. And if anyone to highlight the picture and you know it doesn't work right way so you can just create the mask, only edit that part of the photo. You can't do that. So if you have, like, if your face is half in shadow, you can yeah, you can use the pen tool and making create a mass so you can just adjust that. Yeah.