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Lesson Info

Combine Images In A Composite In Photoshop

So let's make a simple composite, and this is going to give me an opportunity to show you two things that I think you should go to photo shop to do. One is make composites because you must go to Photoshopped to make composites Impossible to do in light room light room does not have that capability. Second thing that you will often want to do in photo shop rather than light room is select an area toe work on. Maybe you want to change the exposure of just a particular area. Or maybe you want to make. Maybe you want to cut out a particular area. Whatever you want to do to a particular area, you can get more precise about selecting it than you can in light room. Now you can do some sort of selection work in light room before we go over there. I'll just mention let's bring up an image to work on and then I'll show you what I mean. I'm gonna go back to the library module and go into this, uh, here, right here. So we'll take this squirrel guy in here now. There is a tool in light rooms develo...

p module under the hissed A gram called Well, there are three tools actually that use this technology, But let's talk about the adjustment brush. If you select the adjustment brush and you want to do something that affects only the squirrel, you can go scroll down, down, down in the panel under the adjustment brush. Let's make it so you can see more of that panel. See right here, Let me do that again for you. I'm gonna close the adjustment brush. Now. I want to affect only the squirrel or part of the squirrel. So I get the adjustment brush and light room. It drops down a panel, all kinds of changes. You know, you could maybe increased the exposure of a particular area by dragging the exposures lighter. And then you gotta paint over that area before you do. Here's the kind of selection tool you might call it that's in light room. It's a check box called Auto Mask, and if you check this and then you come in and you try to work on a just a particular area without kind of going over the boundary of where you don't want to be, then auto mask will try to stay within the boundaries because it kind of looks at color and tone. See, here now it's just picking. It's just moving around on the brown and it kind of works, but it's nothing like making a selection in photo shop in photo shop, you have multiple selection tools, some that work best in some situations, some in others. You have new feature in the latest version of photo shop called Select and Mask that allows you to refine the edges of a selection and get really the most perfect selection. You'd even be able to select my hair on a bad day when it's really here in New and William what it does. Whereas you're not gonna have that capability here in light room with just this simple auto mask. So when we do want to effect just part of a photo for one of many different reasons, possible reasons we go to photo shop. So we're gonna go there for both the reason of selecting and compositing. So let me get rid of that pin that's there by selecting it and pressing the delete key or the backspace key on the keyboard and let's go back into the library module where we have these two images Now, I'm not going to bother fixing them up in light room. You've seen me do that several times now, but when you get the drill, you probably would fix them up. Is you want them to have their initial photo, edits here and then select them both. So I have one selected. I clicked on it, and so get the frame. That's a little bit lighter, meaning it's selected, and I'll hold down the shift key and click on the other photo to you can hold the command key shift key. The shift key If there if the photos air next to one another, the command key. If they're not next to one another in the library panel now they're both selected. I could do Command E, and that would open each separately in Photoshop, and then I would have to go through the process and photo shop of combining them, dragging one into the other. The good news is you can get them both over to photo shop in a single file, and you do that by going to the photo menu and going down to edit in and looking over here in the menu look further down than we've looked before. Go all the way down to the bottom where it says openess layers in Photoshopped. Well, that's nice. That saves me a step. I'll try that. So photo edit in open his layers in Photoshop and in just a second photo shop should switch. There it is, and it's building a single file with both those photos in it will be close, these others, so we're not distracted by other things that aren't relevant. So we have a single photo. It takes its name from one of the two photos that I included in in that command open his layers in Photoshopped. It happened to pick the squirrel could've picked the other one just as well. And it's opened as a J peg because both those photos happened to B. J pegs. And so, in this case, we don't have to go through that little box or we decide, should I open with light room adjustments or not, it just doesn't open his layers in photo shop, get some open, whether they're raw or J pic, and you can see in the Layers panel on the right that you've got the forest on top of the squirrel. Is that right? No. You need the squirrel on top of the forest. You won't see the squirrel, the poor squirrel. He's being buried by the forest. So we click on the squirrel in the layers panel. We click, hold and drag up and above the forest in the layers panel. And now Mr Squirrel is on top of the background. But there's problem. Squirrels got white stuff around him on his layer, and it's that white stuff we want to get rid of by selecting it away. So I'm going to try to use the now. One of the things about selecting it really is an art. There are a 1,000,000 ways to make selections in Photoshop, and you kind of have to know what's gonna work at what's not gonna work. I often when I see something like this where there is a big contrast difference between the outside and the thing I want to select, often go for the quick, select tool, which is really such a nice fast tool. And it goes and looks at the edges of things it tells were edges are based on the color and tone, So here, I'll give it a try. The quick selection tool is right up here in the tools panel in Photoshopped. It's this tool right here, and I'm just going to click and drag with a very small brush over this squirrel. And I'm not going to sweat, you know, that's all I'm gonna dio. Obviously, it's not a perfect selection yet. That's OK. I just want this tool to get what it can and notice. It's left out all the little really fine hairs around the edge of the selection. Now we're going to deal with those using the brand new select and mask feature. If you're not familiar with this, even if you're polished photo shop, he's or you may not know about it. So I'd love to show to you. You can access this option from any of the selection tools, the lasso tool, the Marquis tools, in this case, the quick selection tool by going to the Options bar for that tool, or you can get to it from the select menu at the top of the screen. I'm just going to click, select and Mask, and that opens a brand new interface where you can refine a selection. And what's cool about this is that it's sitting on top of photo shops. I'm not on top, but it's like it's like separate from photo shop. And it's got all the tools and capabilities that you need to get this selection looking good in one place over on the left. It has an abbreviated toolbar of just the tools you might need, like a zoom and a hand and some selection tools to including another quick selection tool just like the one that we have out in the regular tools panel. And over on the right. It has what you may recognize if you know Photoshopped as something it looks like the old we find edge properties, but they work better now. And so what we're gonna do here is we're not gonna go through every single thing because it's not a class on selections. But I will tell you that when I have fuzzy edges like this often, what I'll do is I will just go for the second tool in the tools panel in this select and mask workspace called the Refined Edge Brush tool, and I will kind of move over the area where I know that there are extra hairs now. If you can't tell whether it is because you just don't remember, then what you can do is go where it says view mode on the right and choose a different view mode. You could choose onion skin, which is a new view mode, which kind of me show what that does with onion skin. If you move the transparency slider to the left, it starts to show through whatever is on the layer you're working down to the layer below. So if you kind of see both layers at the same time, if I go to the right, I'm sorry if you go to the left, you see all white on the squirrel layer as I move over. This way, you start to see through. The squirrel layer makes sense just like a piece of onion skin. And the old think anybody ever used to work in an office where they had onion skin. You put in the typewriter for a second copy. So there's that view, and I kind of like that one. I also like this view overlay. This has been in refined edge for a long time. Same idea. It's got a slider where you can sort of see through more or less, and it lets you see where those little fine hairs are, so you can just go over them very quickly with the refined edge brush. And look how, as I do that, how it's really bringing into my selection of the squirrel, all the hairs on his bushy tail. Not all but a pack, a lot of really fine detail that would be just so arduous to try to do manually. Some appear at the top of his ears, and I think that's a very nice little result. Here's some more down here now, of course, that breast doesn't work as well. Is this on every single photo? But I urge you to give it a try on animal for on currently here and anything of like, fine leaves on the edge of a tree. That sort of a thing. There's another brush see down here where it's between his paws. I think when you zoom in, you can see a little better. I think I'm gonna have to paint that away. And so the third brush here is just like a paintbrush, and it paints the selection in or out. So if I come with that, too will see it's got a plus and a minus, I'll leave it at plus. Sorry. Here we go. I'll leave it at plus, and I'll paint away some of this red stuff on his for here when you make it bigger with the right brush. Kate, the right bracket key. Paint some stuff away here, paint paint, paint and then I'll switch to minus and I get in there just between his paws and paint the red mask in that area. Now here I goofed it up a little, so I'm going to get the refined edge brush again and fix that. And refine edge brush is like an automatic painting tool. The brush tool itself is like a manual painting toe. Were you control where it goes? So that's a real quick and dirty of how you can work on fine detail in the new select and mask. I'm gonna do one more thing with this guy. I'm gonna come down to the bottom of the right hand side, and I'm going to choose to decontaminate colors. I think you'll see this a little better. If I put this in another view, I'll choose the on layer view. So with on layers, you're seeing my selected squirrel against the backdrop and see others gray stuff around the edges of his. For often. When you see that sort of thing, if you check mark decontaminate colors, it takes care of it as it did there. Big difference. You know, we're still not perfect. What we find the edges. Maybe a little bit more. But if we got our decontaminate colors, I think he's looking pretty good. And now we'll just output. This will output to a layer with a layer mask. That's fine and click OK, now what do we have? We have Mr Squirrel on his own layer. He's defined by the selection we just made. Did you know that selections and masks are the same thing? Really, They're just different way to represent to us human beings. What's going on behind the under the scenes so that selection is now Representatives layer mask on the squirrel layer, and I think he needs to be a little smaller. Let's zoom back out by double clicking the hand tool. Yeah, he's like giant squirrel, right? So to make him smaller, um, I could make him into a smart object, which is something you might want to do. When you're changing the size of something and you're not sure you might want to go bigger, you might want to go smaller. You want to futz with it, But we won't take that time right now. We'll just go to edit, transform, or we could use command. T for that command puts little bounding box around him. I hold the shift key to constrain the proportions, and I make him a little smaller and then click inside the bounding box and put him where I want him. Now let's put him sort of in the shadow here. Then we don't have to fool around making a shadow. Just use a shadow that's already there, there, and we'll click the check mark to accept that transform and, you know, not perfect. It needs some work, obviously, but it is a very good start to the process of making a composite and getting a good selection. Two reasons to go from light room to photo shop with your images. So now what do we want to Dio. Well, now, actually, what I want to do is go back to light room and you know how to do it. You save so Command s control s on the PC. It's going to save my composite. And when I return now, we have 1/3 image in that same folder. This image right here. Let's see, Let's make a bigger It's the squirrel and the backdrop put together in Photoshopped back in light room. So that's pretty cool. And we have our two original photos to the original forest and the original squirrel right there in light room. So the beauty of this is Yeah, you say, G. I don't really Why do I need leg room? I could have done all that in photo shop. Yeah, but you wouldn't have a program keeping track of all these for you. You would have to if you did this just straight and photo shop. If you want your composite in light room, you would have to manually import it. And when you're working with a lot of photos, that can really be a pain. So that's why we like to do it the way I've shown you using that hook between light room and photo shop and going back again, I would like to show you what I promised, which is how you can go and make more than one round trip the photo shop and back. And this is really useful in the example I gave you where we added text on top of that photo of Paris and we say later on, huh? I don't like the color of the text or my boss wants me to make it say something different. Well, the good news is you can take the file that you edited from Photoshop and go back. And here's how you do it. Where did we save that one? I think we saved it up here in the workflow. We did. And so here's our photo that we had already taken once from light room to photo shop, you remember we edited it in light room, making our initial photo quality adjustments in the basic panel. Maybe did a little sharpening things of that nature. Then we moved it over to Photoshop and added the text. Then we saved in photo shop, and this version appeared as a tiff file back in light broom in the original of this one happened to be a raw file. So now I want to go back to photo shop. How do I do it? Pretty much the same way we go up to photo. We go to edit in and edit in Adobe Photoshopped. Remember, we're gonna have to deal with this dialog box because now we're starting with a tip. This is the tiff that came back from Photoshopped. So it's like starting with the J Peg. It's a non raw file, so because it's not raw, we get the dialogue bucks.