Lessons

Lesson Info

Extraction with the Pen Tool

If you have ever tried to extract most people try to extract with the magic wand, which could be pretty hard and a little bit rough around the edges, so we're going to learn we're going to start tackling the pencil this segment so let's talk about first what's included in the downloads that you get there's two different sets of downloads for our svp ing you get two templates, and of course we're going to be tackling templates in, um, on the introduction are sorry layout design in a photo shop, but I wanted to show you the templates that we have in the downloads because they are the exact same layouts that I am demonstrating today. So at home, if you want tio, follow along and you want to start practicing your shadows, they are exactly the same, so you can either use them as they are and just use it to practice the shadows, or you can start filling him in with your own digital scrapbooking products and your own photos and playing along with that. Now, if you want tio, add your own digit...

al scrapbooking products. There is also a thirty percent off coupon for sweet shop designs, which is where I sell its for storewide, though so you can use it for any digital scrapbooking product you can buy the product that I'm using, which is, um the popular december collection by myself and also for the baseball lay out I'll be using the three up, three down digital kit, which is a baseball themed kit s so if you want to, if you have a child in baseball and you want to do a baseball layout and follow along the segment, you can so let's get started let's, open up that baseball layout that we're talking about you okay? So this baseball layout that has a few common shadowing issues and we're going tio talk about the shadowing issues, the typical regular shadowing issues in photo shop, we're going to reiterate the things that we learned last lesson up here in this top class stir, but we're also going to learn how to extract, which is the process of cutting out ah person or an object out of a picture it's not azizi, is with scissors in real life, but it's not too hard either, and then we're going to learn what kind of shadow you need for that kind of extraction. It's it can be a little bit confusing because you actually don't use the shadow palette, so if you're not using the shadow palate than what do you d'oh well, we're going to talk about that so let's start um yes, let's start with extracting, yeah, scary who let me open up this picture so this could be a rather daunting, especially if you are trying to use the magic wand tool because there's so much variation in the background of this photo, especially that if you're trying to use the magic wand tool and you can hold down shift just like more than one thing, it can get pretty dicey and pretty harry and you start selecting things you don't want to and look at how little of a selection is's and I personally think it's a pain and I don't like using it the magic wand tool has its uses, but extraction is not one of them in my opinion, unless you have a really great photo that has a really solid background and it's really easy, but I don't typically have those photos because my kids are wild and they're always everywhere, and I can't get him to stand still in front of a solid background. So instead of the magic wand tool, what we're going to use the pentacle and to do that you have to zoom in real far because you want to really be able to see the edges of your what you want to extract. So and this I'm going to extract um him and just him I don't want any of the background stuff, so we do is you click on the pencil, which is right here on your palate and you want to make sure that you have path selected most of time I'll have shaped selected, so make sure you go up there and check path and what you're going to do is you're going to start drawing around the outside edges of your extraction using point so the pentacle creates points which you if you have more than one point you click and it creates a lying, which is a path and between the points so if you I'm just going to pretend that there's the edge right here if you click with the points you can see, it creates kind of a linear hard edge which isn't going to work when you start getting into curved things like this so consume and even farther we want to start me back up, we want to start being able to curve our path around our object so you click to create a point and you don't release your clique and instead you khun drag around to curve the path in any direction that you want. So we're going toe curve it that way because I'm trying to imitate the outside of the shell even though it's blown out in the highlight and then what happens is because I have this path curved in these handles or going wonky if I try and continue my path right here well it's going to curve up because of this handle so to adjust the handle you hit alter option and you can just just the one handle down the way that you want tio so you can curve it segment by segment if I did not hit ault, then I would either go to this delete selection point or if I come in here tio the convert point tool it will adjust both ends and that's not what we want, so we want to stay on the penn tool and hit all tio adjust the curve of the line and very carefully and very slowly we work our way around drawing curved edges, and I know that it seems tedious and, um, it can be a little bit especially you have really complicated images that you're extracting. However, it is also the most effective way to extract you don't get all of the strait pixels that are a problem with the magic wand tool. You can get perfectly linear lines, hard edges and I think that that is important when you are extracting from photos because if you have a blurred edge or really pixelated edge, you're not going to get that really crisp and clean extraction image you're gonna have kind of a blurred image and when you try and shadow it or when you try and um uh when you put it against a background paper, you're going to see all those funky edges and so the key to extracting and using extractions in your layout is to have a really clean edge, and the best way to do that is with a pencil, so I'm going super slow. I normally would be able to do this faster, and once you practice, you'll be able to do it a lot faster, too. But it's really important to see how, especially if you've never used a pen total for to see how it works and how you can curve it so subtly that it matches perfectly. Now you can see that these two handles conflict, and right up in here, this is really nit picky, but right up in here would cut off the pants a little bit, so you can just even go back to ones that you're not currently working on, and you can adjust the handle down. So we're gonna work our way around the layout, making sure that we stay kind of on the highlight of the pant. But if you go inside the pant leg a little bit, you go inside. Your image is not that big of a deal what's going to be a problem is, if you go way out here, then you're gonna get artifacts and things that you don't want to be a part of your extraction, some of speed up a little bit. You can see how I just go through every point and oops I did on the outside so I'm gonna move it back I go through every point and just kind of work my way in small sections around the extraction and I know it seems tedious but it's really important for having a clean layout hope you can also if you do move this year and say you didn't notice it right away so you can hit controls the like say you've finished your path altogether and then you notice okay, I'm way on the outside of the line you can choose the direct selection tool and just take this one little point and move it up two so that's the fun thing about working with paths is that they're completely editable whereas with the magic wand tool you're gonna have a hard time editing or without, you know, messing it up later on down the line so he's him out a little bit so I can go a little faster for the purposes of this I'm not going to be too crazy because I already have them extracted on the layout so we're going a little faster so I can show you how to cut out portions as well so you can see that as you go around the extraction there's pieces right here like right here where you're not going to want that background but because you're going around the hole selection? Um, the whole outline of this is carson, my oldest. I'm just going to use his name because I'm going around carson. Um, this part gets included in the path of the whole actually wait, I'm going to show you is that you can adjust the path so what you have to do first, you have to finish, they thiss completely so that's why I'm going a little faster, my extraction isn't gonna be perfectly clean. My son played baseball the only season he'll ever play baseball because he hated it, but I wanted to make a layout that really celebrated the fact that at least he tried it because I'm pretty sure he knew he was going to hate it and got peer pressured into it. He's not good with pressure and standing up to bat his way too much pressure, okay, almost there so you can also, um, if you have a point where it makes a sudden turn, you can also just hit ault and click on the point and it'll get rid of that second handle. And so now I can turn it instead of having to worry about the handle uh huh. So when you're adding the angles, are you pressing down fault each time are you holding on down the whole time you're going around? No, you just hold on all when you need to edit a point so I'm not holding down anything. I had my hand on the keyboard though. Um, yeah, you don't have to hold down all the whole time just when you need to edit something. It's alter option on a mac. Yeah, see now this one's annoying because it's way too long so we're gonna move it up. Well, I'm finishing this extraction. Is there anyone in the chat room that has any questions about extracting god's? Going to general questions that this is a good time to take some of them? Tracy, I think and extract that that's what's for you there centrally. Usually you seem to use a linear burn as your go to two for blending on dh, but you've not said that as your default on the bottom of the screen. Is there a downside to doing this to setting it is default or not having a default? Um, no, I just I don't know, I think it's just more of I've never done it before because I never thought about making it a default. I do use linear burn a lot for my shadows, but I don't I don't always use it in the drop shot of palawan and designing, so I've just never said anything as the default because I use multiply a lot in other ways but when I'm shadowing on layouts I definitely use linear burned the most but there are some instances in which she would want multiply like the linear burn is way too dark or um or maybe you have a pre designed shadow our element that has a shadow that is using obviously using multiply and so you need to match that that kind of stuff so I just have never said a default but that is a good idea if you do use linear burn all the time now rodal is asking should you use the pentacle on a duplicate copy of the image or is that not necessary? It's not necessary because the pentacle is not going to damage your image in any way um what I end up doing and I'm almost there what I ended up doing is, um grating a new layer from the selection so you'll always have the original photo later anyway. Okay, just hurry this one up to you know not that crazy I may be gearing up but I'm still a perfectionist. Okay, so you can also see in here there's a part of the background around the loop which will be distracting when he's all by himself on the layout it just blew up around here but goodbye cleat okay, so once you are done with e pendel extraction, you will come back tio your original point and to close the path so here's the original point so to close the path it's beautiful you just click on the original point and it will close the path and make it a complete path which kind of turns it into a whole shape and the problem is is that now that it's a whole shape if I were to hey let's duplicate this layer and show you if I were to create a new layer from this path you can see that now we have these places in here where we still need a race background and we need to a race problem areas so with your path still selected so if your path this appears like it did here all you have to do is go to your past layer or your past palate and click on it and it'll come back so you can see that it showed back up once the first subtract front shape because we wanted to subtract from this election not add to it so with its elected you want to just go in here and start drawing just like you did around the initial extraction and now it'll start taking out parts of thie extraction so I'm gonna do it sloppy and there was another part with the shoe lace so now we have them all extracted and teo you can see now that when I select it has the part with the background gone so there's two ways that you can work with this now. Um, you can double click the background layer, which I already did, but you can double click the background layer and unlock it, or on then you can make it a sorry, then you can make it a layer mask. What is down here? So what this still selected? If you click this button down here, it'll mask it off so that everything else disappears, and then you can go in. If you still noticed that there's some problem spots which there's some problems spots around his feet, you can actually go in with a brush. He wanted to be kind of hard, actually completely hard, because otherwise it'll get fuzzy around the edges. Um, and then click on the layer mask, and with your white selected, you can go in and paint a little bit. If you're having paths are problems that you can't fix with. The path tool is just too complicated, so you can start painting stuff back in.