Lessons

Lesson Info

Compositing Clouds Behind a Bottle

Now what we need to do is I would love to be able to go ahead and get some clouds in here intermingling with the bottle. Okay? If you've ever worked with clouds before, clouds and reflections and reflective surfaces are so, so, so difficult to be able to work with. So I need to get my clouds here, and there's my clouds, and I'm gonna copy this and bring this all in here on the pace those in Here's my clouds. And now I want to make it so the clouds intermingle with the bottle. Well, okay, again. Seriously, there's absolutely no way you're gonna get a selection tool. Get a pair of scissors, snip out the cloud. You know, peel a little bit of the front, pasted the back. No way. Not gonna happen. So what we're gonna do with clouds here? I'm gonna knock the opacity backs. We can kind of see where our position of our clouds are going to be over the top of this, and I kind of want to have them kind of billowing up near the top here. We're gonna mask out the bottom because, of course, we have t...

o have this sitting in water, you know? Yeah, right. Of course. So my clouds air in the position that I'd like them to be in. And I would just love to have that kind of interaction mingling with the white clouds in front and behind. Well, I'm not going to go in and do a layer of clouds behind and then copy a layer of clouds and put them in front. Kind of do like a cloud sandwich here Know is it's just going to completely intermingle with the actual water itself. I know who wants a cloud sandwich. Okay, so a couple things that were going to run into right now the water bottle is still completely solid. There's a white background behind it. So how do we get the clouds toe look like they're gonna fit behind there? We have to address that issue because this is just solid blue. There's no opacity to it. I mean, we know in real life there's opacity to it, but this is Photoshopped. We all know what Photoshopped does to our mind. And of course, something like this doesn't help either, does it? No, of course not. It just makes it that much more tricky. So I'm gonna go back to you My bottle here and I want to go. And I want to make this whole thing translucent. There's one thing that I don't want to make Translucent is the bottle cap, but everything else I want to make translucent. So when I use my blend, if command I cannot go into the layer and isolate anything for the blend if it's the entire layer So I'm gonna do something that I don't normally do And I'm actually gonna select a bottle cap here. I'm gonna put that bottle cap on its own layer cause I want this just as a separate piece. An easiest way to do this. I could just select on the layer to a copy paste and then I'd have to move it in there. But doing a command J will go in, and it will give you an exact copy of that in the exact same location on its own layer. And if you really interested, that's new layer via copy Command J. OK, I don't understand it, but it takes what you give you a new layer. So that's my bottle cap right there because I know that highlight on the bottle cap is going to disappear when I do my blend. If I'm gonna go to my water model layer with double click on this and I'm gonna use my blend if command here and I'm gonna move that so it goes and need to shut off my white background so you can actually see what's happening. Click on that, my bland If I lose that background and now I'm gonna option click and split this and I'm going to begin to get this kind of translucency with the file. See that how it goes and actually get that. And now that's working pretty good. If I had that bottle cap and it wasn't on its own layer, it would not. It would just also lose the highlight there. So this is why we do this. So there's my blend. If right there, I've got that, and I put it on the white background looks exactly the same. But now if I put something behind it like my clouds or something, and I were to take this and put my clouds behind it is my left bracket to put my clouds behind there, Right there you could see that the clouds would actually start to show up behind this. But of course, I don't want to go ahead and have my clouds behind this. I want to have them intermingling in there. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to put my clouds in front of my object here, and it's like, Okay, that doesn't look very good. Get this big opening in the clouds. But we're gonna try this, so I'm going to turn off all of my layers, but my cloud layer, by option, clicking on that eyeball. Just isolate my clouds. I'm gonna go back into my channels here because I would like to go ahead and select a portion of the clouds that are going to make up the clouds basically the shadows of the clouds. So as I go through my channels, you'll see that when we have anything that's a color, you're going to have three very different sets of channels, and each one of these is going to be the makeup, the red green, the blue ingredients that make up the actual file. When I go in and I look at ones that have really high contrast the ones that have really high contrast to the ones that are going to give me the best definition because they're going to give me the strong difference between my highlights and my shadows, knowing that my shadows are going to be the things that define what it ISS. So if I go when I go to my blue layer, it's very soft and there's going to be very, very little information going on with that. So if I make this and turn this into a selection, I'm going to get just a little bit of difference. So if I go to my read layer, I can see that I get lots of contrast with this, which is great so I can take this red layer on. I'm going to duplicate this layer here, and if I would like to get some really good contrast, I could go in and I could take this red layer here, and I could create a lot more contrast, make the dark darker and the lights lighter here and get a lot more contrast. Don't need to. I think it looks really good and I'm going Teoh Command. Click on this duplicated layer to select those pixels. Always make sure you go back to your composite here and click on that or else when you try to work in your file, nothing is gonna happen. A lot of things don't happen unless you click back on your composite because we're actually working on a specific channel. Got to make sure you click back on RGB. So I'm gonna go back to my layers panel here and I'm going to go back and I'm going toe option or I'm going to go back and turn on my water bottle here. I can turn on my cup and my white background and begin to see all this stuff here. And I've got this totally bizarre selection going on. Okay, Whatever. I select I always want the opposite. So when I've gone in, I've selected everything. So I go under my select menu and I'm going to go, we in and I'm going to choose the inverse here. And there's the inverse of by clouds right there so we could do a couple things on this. That could be quite interesting. One If I was on my cloud layer right here, I could go in and I could apply a mask to that. Pretty cool, huh? And what we're doing is we're masking out certain portions of the cloud right on top of the cloud which is now giving the cloud instead of this flat. Look, this real depth. So looking at the mask right here, if black conceals and white reveals what we're doing is we're actually going in and we're masking the clouds using the clouds themselves. That makes sense. It's kind of weird, you know? I know it doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but trust me on this one. Okay? So now I've actually created a mask using the clouds, so the darker areas will then mask out certain portions. And when I see this, I could actually get some really cool kind of ethereal looks here. Even though this layer is just sitting right there. Now, it just There's nothing going on with it. Pretty interesting. Now, another thing that I'm gonna dio is this. I want to see how this mask looks on my water bottle. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn off this mask. I'm just gonna shift click on this mask right here. turn this layer off so we can see. And I'm gonna take this mask and I'm gonna put it on my water bottle. And if I want to take a mask and put it on another layer here, I can literally copy the mask from one layer to another. Okay, I can copy anything in Photoshop, so I'm gonna option click and drag and copy that mask to my image and overwrite that mask which now kind of gives me this kind of cloud a mask on here. And if I go and I turn on my cloud here, it kind of gives me this, you know, softer look of this whole bottle. It's really weird because I'm asking this out. This cloud layer out and you can see I'm actually hiding certain portions of the cloud. And then I can come to my water bottle, and I could mask that out as well. I'm going to invert my mask just by doing a command. I, which will give me different looks of the clouds getting over my water bottle. You'll see what I mean with this, but I just want to show you that. So I have my clouds here and there on my mask, and I could then experiment with some blending modes to see how these clouds can actually blend into the bottle. Because right now it's just sitting right on the top, and all I've got is I kind of got it dialed in so that certain portions of the cloud you can just kind of see through, But it would really be nice if you could see through it but haven't react with a glass in a way that's going to give us a lot more interest. So we'll zoom in here and I'm gonna select that layer and use my shift plus to run through. And I can actually see all the different ways, and I'm doing this to my clouds, and I can actually see how my clouds react to sitting over my water bottle, and I create some kind of interesting things. I mean, that looks pretty good right there to make it look like the clouds air kind of coming in behind, or that right there that could be kind of interesting as well. Again. It's just a layer with him. Ask if I turned the mask off. It just looks a whole lot more normal. Yeah, but the mask allows me to kind of blend those things together. Now, of course, I don't want to have, you know, this mascot a very hard edge. So I could take this mask with the brush, and with the brush here, I could go in and I could create a very soft edge painting with black and a very large soft brush here. I could go in. I could just paint on my mask to kind of get rid of that edge. So it just fades. It all lost painting right on the mask right there. Black is concealing that soft brush. Gives me a very soft edge. Now I kind of have my clouds. It looks like it's billowing in behind there. We're gonna have the clouds in the front very shortly. Remember that camp? It looks like it's completely faded. Well, that's why I put the cap in there. Because now with the cap, I'd have to go in here and I'd have to select my cap here and make sure I get my cap so that I can put a mask on it. Do my quick selection tool. So I can just get just white edge around there so I could mask that portion good enough. And invert that selection and make a mask of that. Here it is on. Then make sure on my mask, paint out all little areas that I don't want. I just simply hide those areas like that. And now my cap looks normal. Okay. Couldn't do that if I had that on that layer. And I did the blend. If because I cannot isolate anything on there, there's my camp looking pretty good right there. When they zoom in, zoom out. Looks like I got a little bit of an edge right there. Make sure you paint on your mask and not on your layer.