Lessons

Lesson Info

Basic Edits and Making Mockups in Photoshop

Alright guys, well it is finally time to edit. We've captured a ton of good photos in this course and now we're gonna sit down and do some editing. So I'm gonna be editing both on my computer using adobe lightroom and Photoshop. And I'm also going to edit a few photos on my phone for those of you that are using your smartphone to edit for those smartphone editors. I do want you to stick around though to see this computer editing session because a lot of the principles I'm gonna talk about here, you can do the same exact thing on mobile. So I want you to stick around so you know um some of those editing concepts. So in terms of editing on the computer here, I have seven photos. I have the basic white background photo which is kind of like a photo scan. We have a flat lay here. Another flat lay we have a straight up shot here. Um one of the outdoor shots, a detailed shot as well as an ipad shot. And I'm gonna show you guys how to open this up into Photoshop and actually superimpose the o...

riginal digital file onto the ipad screen because if you can see here there's kind of some weird discrepancies here but we'll get there. So starting things off with the white background shot and this is for those of you that you know want to capture, like I said a photo scan and you saw how we shot this, it was pretty simple. Now when we're editing this, we basically just want to do a few very basic things and the first thing we always want to do is make sure that our image is nice and straight and cropped. So I'm gonna do here is click this box here, I'm gonna go 1 to 1 that's gonna crop into a square and I'm gonna do a basic straightener and then I'm just going to crop it a little bit. But there's a magical tool in adobe Lightroom and adobe Lightroom mobile that makes this process of straightening your photo. So simple, you scroll down here to transform and you click auto and it will just detect all of the different angles and completely straighten it. It's amazing from there. We can just go ahead and crop our photo a little bit more. If you want to maintain the white background, you can hitting enter or you can, you know, crop it all the way in boom and there we go, that's pretty amazing. Um and then all we really want to do now is just just to touch it up. This is a raw photo which means that um it's not going to be very high in contrast, very high in saturation, so we can easily change that by going to the basics dragging up the white here until we get it to a point that we like and then doing the same thing with the black and that's already some crazy pops of color there. So here's the before, here's the after um and then another thing, I always recommend is to adjust the white balance. So we have white here or if we went back before the crop we have all this white here. What you can do is click this little dropper, select a white area on your image, any pure white area and click and that will basically change the white balance that will detect the colors in your scene and adjust the white balance and actually you should be doing that first before you crop it like this. But we still did it so we're good to go the more crop it. Now we have a good white balance credited the colors boom. And that's basically it, it's pretty simple for editing these white background photos but things might get a little bit more complex when we edit a photo like this here. This is one of the flat layers that we shot which I absolutely love because it has multiple pieces of charlie's work in here. We styled it really well, we did it really well um and for the most part it looks really good but of course you can see that it's not straight, the photo is tilted, my angle was off um but that's okay, we have a few tools to work with us and the first thing I'm gonna do is click this here and I'm going to crop 1 to 1 first, I'm gonna drag it in here so we only have the lines, there's no objects in here. I'm gonna hit enter and that's going to crop it and then I'm gonna go down to transform click auto once again. So we straighten everything and then we'll go back to the crop, go up and then do as shot. So what we did there was we just completely straightened the photo. If I were to click auto transform before we kind of cropped everything out, it would have taken into account the pencil, the ruler, all these different things and it would have made it really on straight so it's a lot easier to crop it first to the photo, then hit transform and then then we'll get a nice even crop first things first. We're going to adjust the white balance here and we do that by clicking the dropper once again highlighting over a white area on the image and clicking and that will sample the colors. So this is, is making it a little bit less warm. I actually think it looks better a little bit warmer. So I'm just gonna leave it, I'm just gonna undo that and leave it back where it was. I think that looks better after that. We're going to move down and adjust the contrast by going to the whites and then going down to the blacks and then I also like to adjust the shadows. Maybe bring those down, enhance the contrast even more. Just kind of playing around with these basic adjustments here. I think the highlights are at a good place. I don't think we need to adjust those too much, but it's amazing what just a few basic adjustments can do to making a photo look so much better. I think that looks really good. But one thing I do notice is that this side of the image is a little bit darker than this side and even if we're trying really hard to get even light, you know, it's, it's kind of difficult to make it perfect every single time. But that's okay. In lightroom, we have this really awesome feature called a graduated filter here in the middle and what you can do is just dragged from the left side over to about. You got right there, midway reset it and then we can just increase the exposure a little bit and that's just going to help balance our exposure on both sides of the frame and look at that now, it looks absolutely perfect and there's not a whole lot else I would do to this product if you did want to change some of the colors, there's something I do want to highlight here and that's the H. S. L slash color sliders here. These are incredibly powerful tools to ensuring that your color in your artwork is exactly how you want it to be. He refers to the shade of the color. So if I click this, click on the shade of yellow here and drag up it'll actually change the hue of the color that I'm sampling, which in this case is yellow and orange. You can see there on the right saturation refers to the pureness of the color. So if you want super pure yellow, you drag up and if you want no pure yellow, basically black and white, you drag down and then luminous refers to the brightness of the color. So the brightness of the yellow and the darkness of the yellow, they're yellow and orange in this, in this current image. I think the colors look pretty spot on, so there's not a whole lot I would do, but I just wanted to highlight those because that is a really good resource, but that's basically how I would edit this photo. It's pretty simple, just kind of following these basic adjustments here, um and then at the end, if you just wanted to crop it a little bit more, so you want to crop it into a square for social media, you can certainly do that as well. Now, before we jump onto this next photo, I wanna show you guys an editing hack and that's where you basically copy the settings from a previous, edit and paste it onto a new one. So we'll go back to this image. I'm gonna hit command C and that's going to bring up this copy settings panel. I'm gonna select every single thing except transform crop. And I'm also not going to select local adjustments. I'm gonna hit copy. I'm gonna go to the next photo and I'm gonna hit command v which is gonna paste those settings right onto our photo and it looks great. Everything looks really nice. Once again we have this side a little bit dark so I'm just gonna drag over a graduated filter here and just increase the brightness there. Good to go, hit enter and then we're done and then if you wanted to crop it, you totally can. Um I think this image will look better with a slight crop maybe right around there and I think that looks pretty good. Now you don't want to be copying settings too much if you're shooting in dramatically different lighting environments. But because these were shot in the exact same place and the camera settings are pretty similar. We can just copy the settings over and pace time and chances are it's going to look pretty good. Now moving on to this next photo here, this is a straight up shot that we took in charlie's room and I really love this image. I love the way we styled the scene. I love that the beds in here, it's just a realistic lifestyle environment. So for an edit like this, what we're gonna do first is straighten the photo doesn't need a whole lot, but just do a little bit of straightening here that looks about right and I'm using the grid lines here to kind of make sure I'm that this image here is nice and straight after that we're gonna go into the basic adjustments here and make sure our white balance is on point by selecting this right here. All right, then I'm going to go into the whites, I'm gonna drag those up a little bit, drag the blocks down, add some nice contrast and that already looks pretty amazing. It's amazing what just a bit of contrast can do to an image. I do want to brighten a little bit, I wanna, I wanna make sure this is nice and well lit looks nice and then just fine tune once again these basic adjustments. But for the most part, these edits are really simple. We just want to make them pop a little bit, you know, the camera already does such a good job of detecting all the colors and representing them in an accurate way, but just by enhancing the contrast a little bit, maybe increasing the vibrance or even sometimes, you know, lowering the saturation, whatever that might look like for you. It's just kind of finding that balance in your edits going from there. So I think this looks pretty good, there's the before, there's the after before and after. So now let's move on to this outside shot here and I really love this shot, love the colors, love the composition. It's pretty simple, but it's it's really nice. So first thing I'm gonna do is crop to a four by five ratio. This is the best aspect ratio you can use for instagram because it allows you to take up the most real estate On someone's screen. I'm gonna crop four x 5, I'm going to enter and then we're just gonna go through our basic progression here. I think the white balance looks good. I'm not gonna edit that, gonna increase the exposure a little bit, increase the whites a little bit, go down with those blacks a little bit and then the shadows here. And I like to really bring the shadows down here because we have this area and I think it would look good if it was dark. So I'm gonna drag this down quite a bit. But now I want to highlight this future here called the tone curve and it seems a little bit confusing because it's basically dictating all the different tones in your image and it's a line and you can really go crazy and come up with some really crazy lighting scenarios here. But I'm just gonna show you a really basic formula here that's going to add contrast to your image. And it's also going to make some of the black areas nice and soft and I use this in pretty much all of my photographs. First thing I'm gonna do here is create a point. I'm gonna drag it down next. I'm gonna come into the middle here and just put that back where it was. Then I'll drag the highlights up a tad here. So basically looks like an S. Here and I'm gonna go to the corners and I'm gonna drag this left hand corner up and you can see what that's doing to the blocks here, it's really softening out those blacks and that's what I want. I think it looks really good and then we'll do the same thing on the highlights here, we'll drag that down and that will help soften out those highlights. So once again this is what you call an S curve because it looks like a little s and it really does work well on a lot of photos. It kind of softens out the tones but it increases the contrast in the mid tones. Um And then it really softens out the blacks and the whites, so it looks really good after you adjust the tone curve, I always like to come back to the basic adjustments here and just once again kind of fine tune things. Bring those whites down a little bit, bring the blacks down, increase that contrast And just kind of jumping between the two for the most part. I think that looks pretty good. So we'll leave that there now I'm gonna come down to the H. S. L. Sliders here and I want to play with the colors a little bit because I think we can adjust these greens maybe to a different shade or something like that. So we'll click you here, we go to the green slider and then we'll just kind of adjust it. I think it looks cool if it's a little bit warm, a little bit warmer by dragging it to the left and then maybe you can also de saturate it or saturate it if you want to, if you really want to go for the saturated look. Um one thing I want to mention with with this, this editing here is you know, it's so subjective and you can really take the lead here and do whatever you want with your photos. If you want to super stylized look, you can go for that, but if you just want to get some really basic edits and make the colors pop like I'm doing here, you can do that as well. But overall I think this is an edit that looks really good. Of course, you know, you can spend more time on it but for the most part, I really like how this photo came out. So now we'll do a quick edit of a detailed shot and this is pretty self explanatory. I just wanted to put one in here because I just wanted to, you know, highlight the importance of cropping here. I'm gonna go to the crop panel here, I'm gonna go to 1 to 1, I'm just gonna drag this in maybe on her her glasses and her bubble here, just highlighting those pieces because I like them detailed shots of digital work. You know digital printed work. You know they might not be as interesting as say if your hand lettering or you're illustrating on an actual piece of paper a piece of canvas or something like that. But it is still really interesting. Now we've we've cropped it and then we'll just go ahead and do some basic contrast adjustments. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. Not a whole lot you need to do here. But nonetheless I did want to put this in here and the most important thing is just making sure the colors and the lighting is nice and on point. So that looks pretty good. But now I want to show you guys how to superimpose an original digital file onto an ipad screen here. So we shot charlie's ipad screen here and this is actually not a mock up. This is the actual L. C. D. Screen and for the most part it looks pretty good But that's actually because I went through and I edited this screen here you can see I elected the screen and then I increased the exposure. I increase the temperature a little bit, highlights the shadows and the blocks and it it does look pretty good. But Trust me when I say that a mock up will look a million times better and I'm just gonna show you how to do that real quick. So what I'm gonna do here is right click this image and I'm going to click edit in Adobe Photoshop 2020 what that's gonna do is just open this image here which I've already pre edited by the way. I've edited all the different tones just to make sure the ipad and the surrounding area looks nice and good and looks the way I wanted to and then we'll open it up here in Photoshop. Once we have the image here in Photoshop it's actually pretty simple to do this. And the first thing we're gonna do is make a selection so I'm gonna zoom in on this screen here as close as I can. I'm gonna slide down here right click this lasso tool and then click the polygonal lasso tool. I don't know if I said that correctly but that's okay. And then I'm gonna scroll up here to the corner and I'm going to make a click right where the black meets the image here. You could go all the way to the end but I find that this black border just looks better when it's included in the image. We'll click there and then we're gonna drag all the way down here to the bottom, make another click here and we'll just do that for all four corners here. Alright there's the 4th corner. Now we've made this selection here of the screen and it's not perfect but we'll get there so after we've made this election, we're gonna go to our finder here, we're gonna find the photo that we want to superimpose which is our original digital file that charlie sent me. And we're gonna hit command c we're gonna copy it. Or you can just go edit copy here and now we have our selection here, we're going to click edit paste special paste into just ignore this. What this is going to do is paste our original file into that selection that we made, which is awesome. Now that we have this in here, we can command T. Which is transformed. You can also just go to edit, transform free transform. And then we're just gonna resize it to make sure it fits the dimensions of the screen. So I'm gonna hold shift and drag this corner up here and then I'm gonna even it out with this side here and shift. Just basically keeps your aspect ratio true, you're not distorting the work and then I'll hit enter and then I can just drag it to where I want it to be. But I think it looks really good right there. Now for the most part this looks really good already, we don't really have to do too much because we made a really good selection earlier on. But if you did want to refine it and you wanted to make sure it's nice and even you can do that by simply clicking this layer here, this little layer mask and then once once again hitting command T. And that's going to bring up the transform module, then you can right click and hit warp and warp is going to allow you to adjust all the different parts of the image without adjusting the other parts of it. So basically it allow us to adjust the corners and make sure they're all nice and perfect. So we can just move between all these different areas here, the corners and there's also points on the side here that you can adjust but this side looks pretty good. So we'll go up here to this corner, make sure it's nice and straight nice and even we just want to make sure the black border is even all around the image and yes, there is a little bit sticking out here but I don't think it looks bad, I think it looks totally fine. So if the original image is sticking out a little bit that's totally okay. And this is also a slightly easier process if you don't photograph the screen with the image on it. So if you just photograph a blank ipad, this process becomes pretty simple but I just wanted to show you guys the difference of photographing an image on the ipad versus doing a mock up like this. So now that we've done this and for the most part it looks pretty good, we could probably spend more time on it but I like the way it came out, we can just hit file save and that will just save it right back into Photoshop here next to our original. So you can look at the difference here, this is the photo that I tried to edit um and this is the original digital file. So charlie's colors are just so much more accurate here. So that's why I always recommend doing a mock up instead of just trying to edit the L. C. D. Screen because cameras just don't photograph L. C. D. Screens. Well there's a lot of weird frequencies going on. It just doesn't look that good. So I highly recommend you guys get Photoshop and just do these mock ups. If you are a digital artist you can get Photoshop and lightroom for $10 a month. And there's some of the best editing programs. I use them for basically every photo that I ever edit. And you can't go wrong with these software's especially if you're gonna be using them together. But now that we've done these basic edits here in Lightroom and Photoshop, let's jump onto our iphone here and edit some of the shots that we captured earlier using the iphone