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Compositing: Swimming in Cereal Part 2

If you remember we were kind of like picking up back making sure that transition between the milk in the actual pool and the milk and a cereal bowl look right and already you know, just looking at this right now I mean especially from the pink innertube over to the right side of the bowl like it looks really already we did what do you guys think pretty goodjob right? Blending in there's really not a whole lot that we have to do some of the areas they're going to be a little bit tricky but that's part of the fun is knowing what the tricky areas are and how to take care of these tricky areas all right let's just zoom in here I'm gonna hit full screen and we're gonna go ahead and get this so again our main focus is on getting to be sure that this is actually fitting like the milk and everything like that do fit if we have time in the end I'd love to add more cereal and things like that those are going to be a little bit simpler elements but let's go ahead and see what we can do in the tim...

e that we have okay now here we've got another area that's not quite fitting we can see that this area is just like it's just you know the waves and everything like that we've got a still bowl of cereal here below so this is another case when we've got something that it doesn't fit, and most people I think would probably try to mask it out, they would probably try to use a regular brush or now use a pen tool. Not everyone understands a little bit better and try to mass it out instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to actually match it to the milk that we have there, and that means you just don't have to be that good at masking things out. Not only that, but you get that extra little bit of detail that's going to make a little bit more realistic in the end. So how are we gonna match this? Well, you can see I've turned it back into black and white because first best easy way think to match it's a turn things black and white and you can see if they're too light or too dark that's going to get you ninety percent, they're arrested just a little bit of work with color, okay, so let's, go ahead and create another curves adjustment layer and see what we can do this here's our just lay there and let's go up to curves I mean his option command g and remember that's going to clip out our terms adjustment there, it's just doc get right on the side there. Perfect. Okay, so what we've got, we've got some area that's a little bit too bright were just basically comparing this on the left here. So what's going on here on the right, we've got a little little bit areas too bright, so we're going to take our brightest point and I'm just going to bring that down, all right? That's looking good now, keeping my earlier. What we said is that when you have something in shadow, you have less contrast, so think get darker when they go into shadow, but you also get a lot less contrast in shadow, so a great way to create less shadow is to bring your lightest point down, but also your darkest point up so let's see about that let's bring our dark point and we're going to bring that right back up, all right? And we can keep going this a little bit more let's, bring our life point down even more. There we go and we're gonna bring our dark point up and all I'm trying to do is I don't really you know, I know it looks horrible on his face. That's not exactly my concern right now. All I'm trying to do is make sure that it looks pretty good right over here and let's just changes a little bit more I do want to get some of this detail I'm not looking to make it completely flat if I were to do that would be better to just mask him out there we go and something right about there we could see and we're starting to get something like this basically is starting to match quite well from this area over to that area looking pretty good, right? So what I'm gonna do is hit command I on the layer mask and then we're just going go ahead and mass this in so I'm painting this area in and it's just changing the luminosity of our of our actual milk that's right there in a way that's going to make it fit with everything that we everything else that we've got all right, there we go and we can see it's already looking much better pretty amazing right? Here we go let's see what it looks like they're in color still it's not exactly the right color, right? Because earlier remember we've created this huge saturation layer that actually colorized everything so let's try putting this above the layer that we just did pulled down the control of command key and use it close bracket that's going to put it above there that's going to help out quite a bit right there. And we got let's go back to your going to turn our channel mixer back on, which is going to make our black make this layer of black and white. And they were going painted him so it's. Still not perfect one hundred percent. But we're getting a lot closer and that's. The whole thing is like, once you're pretty dang close. It's really not hard to do the finishing a couple steps. There we go. Now. Maybe we can allow this to kind of, like, come into the side of the of the floaty and things like that. The reason is, this area would in fact, like color that a little bit. If it's, you know, if you have a lite bit of pool that's going to reflect onto the surface, if it's a darker, you're going to see that difference between highlight and shadow there as well. All right, let's, go ahead and make that a little bit smaller and then I can go ahead and do things like, you know, work on my later masks. There we go and we can clone stamp and everything like that. So that's the sort of thing that we can do after the fact. Let's go ahead and work on a layer mask here down in our down in our later we're going to take care of this area so I'm going to seize my brush tool and we're going to paint black right over here there we go and we can see that really does start to blend in quite well there we go and it's only depends on how much detail we actually want right here if I decide I want more detail or less detail, this is actually a pretty good area for either using a brush tool or your clone stamp tool or something else like that all right and just black and white except for this area here you know, up in the shadows there we go let's just paint that up except for those areas there is actually looking really, really good so let's make this go ahead and turn it back to color and see what we've got, so if it looks good in black and white, we can see and it does look pretty good there it's still not exactly right let's see if we can just make it like maybe just a little bit brighter hair right up there so I'm just going to grab on adjustment later we're going to go up to our curves again and we're going to take our dark point we're gonna bring it up just a tiny bit there we go and we're going to bring this back down just a little bit just so we can match that little bit better up on the top all right so you can see you can do this over and over again you don't have to get it all one hundred per cent right in one layer you khun make it right you know you could get this area right in that area right in that area right? You take your time and make sure you get everything right it's it's not something that you're going to be able to do all in one layer okay, now we do have a hugh such saturation adjustment layer which is colorizing our milk that's one way to do things here's another way I'm gonna hit a new layer shift option command and for that option command gt clip it I can also just use my brush tool someone be for the brush tool sample this color holding down alter option is goingto bring up our color picker and then I'm just gonna paint right over here now we're gonna change the layer blend mode from normal down to color so that's going to do a pretty dang good job matching this color right over here because it's actually choosing color that you know the color that is right next to it and forcing it to be that color so it's a lot like that few saturation trick except this time we're actually choosing the color that we wanted to be so a little bit different of a technique but the same and goal there we go and I'm also going to kind of bring this right around make sure I'm using a larger soft edge brush right now and I'm painting in even over top of our over top of the pink fuzzy just a little bit I'm gonna call it a pink fuzzy it's apparently hard to photo shop and think of words at the same time this is not a pink fuzzy it's a floaty there we go okay, now we're going to do is what we're going to do is use our layer mask here to just paint this is invisible right there just towards the edge all right and we'll paint it about forty percent capacity with black forty percent flow apologized I used flow usually capacity we went over that in the last section there we go perfect looking good so let's take care of some other areas. This looks pretty good over here down here needs a little bit of help now we have a couple options we've done a really good job let's just by the way when we give it up for clipping masks look at that we started off with this this is no clipping masks at all and this is just like working I'm not I didn't mask it like these have not changed the actual masking like this is this is not the greatest masking job, but what we're doing is making it blends of that to that without changing our layer mask like that's pretty amazing, right that's just these clipping mask and that's just allowing it to blend back in makes their job so much easier you don't have to be a king and cutting someone out because it looks like they were cut out well, even if they're not. So what we're going to do, I'm gonna go ahead and close this group out because we can still work on our layer masses if we want to. Sorry in our clipping last, but I'm going to take it over and we're just going to do some painting around with our brush tool. Now, something like liquid is just a great place to go ahead and take over with the brush tool. The reason is it's, like soft and his, you know, large, sweeping patterns of things like that it's something that you khun you don't have to be perfect with painting with your brush tool in order to make it look good. So let's, try it. I mean, it being for the brush tool and we're going to start off on a little bit of a simple area here on the left, we'll see if we can kind of carry this highlight over. So the only thing you have to know with brush tool and when you're doing this type of painting is use your sample, so hold on walt or often to sample a color and then just kind of paint there we go, so alter or option and then I'm using a flow of about ten percent here, and I'm just kind of paint a little bit. Now our goal here is to paint from the inside out and the outside it, so we want that to really flow together pretty nicely. Here we go and we can see, like, really minimal effort I'm just trying to like you something that might look like, you know, a little bit of wave. I'm just if you wanted to move this over here, if you could see, like, that's what I'm actually painting on, let me see if I can move it down here. So like, that's, what I'm painting it's just kind of like, well, I'll just I know what I'll do, I'll make a new layer I'll fill it with white and I'll move it down so that you can see that's what I'm actually painting on there's like a blob here, some little things over there let's just go back in time and put that in place. There we go, but we could see already it starts to make a difference. We have, like, what is the edge of a mask here and now? It's like, oh, cool, it extends out all those highlights do extend out even over the side of the pool is not pretty cool. Yeah, e, I think is really cool to thanks for agreeing with me. You feel obligated to because you're the live studio audience like wait here and I'm just going to do the same thing here, so I'm holding alter option, sampling these colors and painting them in great, we couldn't even do the same thing here with jasper. Now, the reason is I don't want to just mascots out the reason, because that should be a little bit darker, right? He's got his arm and there is reflecting the dark hair on his arm and like this should be darker, so if I were to just mask this out and like, try to cut it around right in his arm. It wouldn't look like he was in milk it would look like he's like sitting right above the milk so because there was a pool there we don't have the option would have been blue right there, so this is also a perfect opportunity to take your brush tool sample right here she was like a slightly larger brush and just start painting that in we can extend that on a little bit farther now I'm using a route rather large brush here and when you do something like that it's going to cover areas of his arm you can see it's covering that area too. I want to use a large brush in this case because we wanted to make sure that it's like a nice soft adjustment from one area to another run like we don't you know you wouldn't want it to look like this like okay, that looks good, it looks horrible so what you want to do is use a let large soft edge brush and then just go ahead and put a layer mask on top your layer and then just layer mass get away from the area you don't want it to be visible, we're gonna let him ask it right away from this area, so now we've got a transition that looks like smooth and really, really nice see there we go and we can see what you've got there as well so if you wanted to get super artistic within you could continue to like paint ripples and things like that if you wanted to but you don't really need to go that far but we can see this is with a brush tool guys so there's the before and the after just with a simple brush tool holding down alter option simply colors looks pretty good right that's like you guys could probably do that it's not really that hard I'm not that a magician over here thie other area when I was zoomed in I saw that we colored his arm just a little bit so I'm gonna go back into our group here find the layer that we actually painted that on whichever one of these is and I'm just going to just my lame asks that's that's that guy right there I'm just going to adjust my lame ass to make sure that that doesn't really include his arm there it's just going to make it look a little bit more realistic all right here we go and make sure we get it nice and all the way up to the edge perfect so we've got all these areas basically like wave masked him out okay we didn't do a great job we use those clipping masks to make everything kind of blend in a little bit better in anywhere we needed it we just added a brush tool and started painting around a little bit see, I'm gonna brush in just a little bit more maybe we can create like, a little bit of a ripple or something like that here. All right, there we go. And the cool thing about this is like you been totally pain around with ripples or anything like that just think about highlights and shadows like all this is that ripple right there it's a highlight and then a shadow and then a highlight in the new shadow if I wanted to make that continue to go, I would just paint a shadow there and then I would grab a highlight color and I would pay to highlight there and then I would grab a shadow color and painter shadow there and then I would grab a highlight color than picked the highlight there and you can see let's just grab another shadow there. Pretty soon we've got even more ripples in our milk describing a racer to really quick and race that away so you want more ripples in your milk? Cool. Oh, I like shadow highlight shadow it's really not that hard that's basically how everything works if you have, you know lines under person's eyes and you want to get rid of him it's just highlight shadow highlight shadow you just clone stamp out the highlights or the shadows airfield make the shadows darker in the highlights lower and things even out so the same principles for making making ripples or wrinkles or anything like that on I like shadow highlight shadow pretty easy if you want to give this a little bit of a thousand blur just like blended in together you can do that as well pretty cool ok now the other area we want to make sure we take care of is what's going on here behind the all right behind you just for feet now this doesn't really look that good we're actually going to do a couple of things I do want to use the area in which excuse me I do want to use the area in which we can actually see the shadow of his feet so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate this layer I'm gonna click on this layer and I'm goingto click command j and that's just going to duplicate this layer and then I'm gonna bring this all the way up to the top never go we're going to make that invisible real quick the reason why I'm going to use just the shadows on that in just a second that's what I'm going to do is go ahead and just mask thes away from this layer remember we do have a copy that we just made so I'm going to mass the shadows away from this later because I really don't I don't want him to interfere with what I'm about to do. All right, there we go and we're just masking that away and again if we needed to I could just grab a brush to paint that up darker a little bit too so I'm not too worried about that right now but I do like the nice ripple effect there all right? So we're gonna paint those away all right and as I do this does anyone here or on the internet no what layer blending mode makes things would make the whiteboard disappear and make the shadows that are on his feet show up close multiply would definitely do it exactly multiply blending mode is going to make the lighter parts of an image go away and the darker part show up darkened will also work as well so that way what we can do is I'm not trying to like, you know, paint or like figure out or fake a shadow or something like that what we're going to wind up doing is actually using the real shadow from his feet and you could spend a little bit more time asking that if you wanted to we're going to use these rial shadows from his feet and apply them to our cereal bowl all right, so we mass that out a little bit better let's get these real shadows I can shift click on this layer mass because I don't I don't really need to apply it actually I'm just gonna fill it with white and then I don't really need all of it to be visible either, so I'm just going to select out this area and then I'm going to duplicate that to a new layer, maybe a little bit larger duplicate this to a new layer, all right? And then we're gonna hit the lead, so basically I just want the shadows I don't really care about anything else right now I've got that on a different layer, right? That's you know, over there, so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna changes from normal down here to multiply, all right? And what we have now or just the shadows now it might be hard to tell because the feeder there and it's a little bit to darken our levels aren't correct, but this should be if this was completely white, it would it would not be visible let's try darkened and see what that does looks okay, it's getting there there's still a lot of weird things going on, so we do want to use multiply, but we're going to have to use some clipping my ass to make sure that I actually like does what we wanted to do let's grab one, I'm gonna grab an adjustment layer and we're going to go up to curves option command g's going to clip that and I just want to bring my white point out and as I bring my white point up, what it's going to do is it's going to make those you know this like medium gray is going to make it a little bit lighter which is going to make it disappear because that's exactly what this layer does if it's set teo sorry if it's set to multiply and anything that's white is going to go away so it's put a layer mask on here and what we're gonna wind up doing is just putting this exactly in the same place as the other feet we could probably and pull it down just a little bit up just a little bit because I do want things to look like they're you know actually on the side of the cereal there we go pretty cool now let's shift like the two of those and hit comanche the other thing is we did a good job cutting his feet out well okay job anyway cutting his feet up so he jasper's on this layer the shadow we can go ahead and bring under this so I'm gonna hit the control of the command key and bring that down a little bit there we go and now what we've got if we do mass this out pretty well is we've got just this area which is proving to be basically just his shadow is now on top of the cereal bowl how awesome is that pretty dang cool. Now, it's the wrong color. I know that it's not it doesn't blend correctly exactly just yet. So we're going to zoom in and we're going to make it right. I'm going to make it right. Every gun, let's, just layer mask it back out there and if I need to mask it back in there, I'm going to use a brush to adjust second. So what we're going to do maybe I want to make it just a little bit lighter. You could look at this color and look at that color kind of like, see if there is a difference that we need to do. Okay, let's, government adjustment later I'm gonna go to curves option comanche so it's a little bit too yellow, right? It's, just like looks a little bit weird. What we're going to do is go down to our blue channel blue and yellow were the opposites and I'm gonna pull the blues up a little bit so we could see from yellow upto blew you can see it starts to fit quite a bit better, right? So just taking that yellow away which is making it look a little bit less real there we go and let's, just zoom in here. These are all like, you know, little details which you khun either include or not include what I'm going to wind up doing is still we're going to need to take the brush tool kind of like blend all this to get sorry all of it together which is not really a big deal but we didn't do one hundred percent perfect job masking all this out just now I think that there are other important things that we need to do as long as it looks good from like right here for this tutorial I'm totally okay with that all right, that looks decent let's go ahead and we need to take down the hue and saturation so I'm gonna grab human saturation option command ji and let's just pull our saturation down as well we don't want like a very saturated shadow needs to come down just a little bit okay? And these are the things that I want to make sure that they do like somewhat match what we've got what we've got going on here with our spoon all right? So we've got our shadow going on and we've got our subject right over here and now right above it but we're going to do is so these are the areas where we've been painting with our brush fool we're going to continue that trend and I'm gonna go in here with our brush tool and just kind of pain he's in okay, there we go or brush toole grab that color by holding cult or option and basically we're just gonna paint a shadow we're gonna paint that highlight right back over there and hold down alter option I'm going to try to like you know do all kinds of like funky little things with you know make it I'm just kind of like doing this with the brush it's going to make it look like it's got ripples in it you know something that's not you know, not incredibly complex but you know just keep that sort of thing in mind because shadows they're not constant I even grab some of the highlight color painted back over top of their to make it look like yeah okay cool it looks like there's a little bit of highlight in the chateau where the highlights reflecting some something else over there. Well, what do you think that looks pretty good, right? Not bad we've got a couple questions if you want I love want to I'm gonna continue painting but I can answer absolutely on dh these were fairly simple wender full says do you ever flatten your layers? No good news? No ah that's a good question but the answer really is no I don't fight my layers I don't think that the the only reason I would really flat my layers is because of I was trying to save file space and in my opinion, it's gotten so cheap, like memory on, you know, free computers and things like that are drives and whatnot. They've gotten so inexpensive recently that to me, I would rather I would rather have those layers that have gotten rid of them and wanted them back on the other. The other reason to be totally honest, I teach photo shop for a living like that's kind of my job, so if I go around flattening layers and then, like three months from now, I want to bring up a file to show what I did, and I've flattened all the layers it's like, well, I can't really do my job now, so but if you do really wantto, if you really do want to save some space now, sometimes I work in a very non destructive manner, and I would just like to show why are working on destructive manner and what it gives you is everything that I've done I can undo very quickly and easily like I can go all the way back down to the original sarah group. See, we've got original file where we added her arm, we can bring this back. I can bring in just for each one of these groups, aiken, turn off and on. Even the layer mass everything like that so for me to be ableto lose the ability to go back and be able to turn these things off for on it's not worth flattening files if I did have like fifteen layers where all I did was paint doodles with a paint tool, I would probably be all right flattening those but anything more than that, I usually don't another question j vincent and the doc is that they're both wanting about the angle of the the shadow of his feet and vince j vincent says should the shadow b worked a little too fit the angle of the bowl the white card was straight up and down and the bull is on an angle the ball is on a really good point yeah, that is a really good point I'm definitely not opposed to doing something like that a tte this point because we have for this foot I don't think that you would really see it, maybe for that one you would wind up seeing that let's see at this point I will try it and I'll try it I'll do it the fast way uh just because we're teaching here if I would have thought of it, I would have walked in before but now basically all this painting and everything like that, but I just did I would have to repay that so just to save time because we want to get to a lot of other stuff what I would do is just grab some of these colors here and I would just yeah, paint a new shadow foot shot over here which if you did if you never captured a foot shadow these things, they're not that hard to do, you know, just, you know, grab a color and start painting there we go the the key is really to just do it in steps and you know, not to make it like not to make it one one layer that just has one thing you want to make sure that you add some, like, density to the core of the shadow like you could see the shadow gets darker over there it's going to be lighter in some places it's going toe, you know, have a little bit of a court to it that's that's usually how shadows work so that's the basically the idea when you're creating a shadow, just try to do it. You know, in a couple different steps you can see I'm like adding a little bit over here, adding a little bit over there great, and it looks like a more fish football right here that maybe the toe detail would have been nice but that's kind of covered up by that piece of milk good question yeah, we have another question will you be working on the weight kind of border around jasper's feet the white board around just for speed yeah I can totally do that good question so that's you know a very quick admittedly actually that's just looks really bad but if you didn't want to take the time yeah that what they suggest it probably would have been a good time good idea. All right let's take care of the border of the on his feet I just want to make sure we can do as much as in the time that we have if we wanted to spend hours and hours and hours on this and most definitely we could we could warp everything okay the border on his feet you can see it is it does have a slight white border on it. We've taken care of this before when we were done the changed the selection on the layer mass and we're going to click on the layer mass that cuts just for out we're going to go to select and I'm going to go down too refined ask there we are and what we're gonna do is I'm going to pull up feathering just a little bit you can see it gives it a little bit on edge and then I'm going to shift this edge in just a little bit and just like that we're able to get rid of that so really doesn't take too long, but you can see I'm trying to save time by not using a pen tool here really? I should have just taken the time I mean look at his angle it looks horrible like I'm trying to save time by doing this the fast this is not the wrong way to do it. I just did a relatively quick job on it, but usually you would want to use some of the cutout techniques that we've learned earlier things like that, but as long as it looks decent from here, I mean you know, keep in mind that this image is going to be viewed like this so sometimes it's worth spending a lot of time sometimes it's not as we're spending that time we have any other questions, so dale, our photo is wondering whether there's an advantage to using the blend mode on the layer over setting the brush to color mode. Oh, that's a really good question sometimes when you do set like so we've got a a new layer here I'm gonna set you consent a layer blend mode to color. You can also set a brush blend mode color sometimes these blend modes that are going to affect your brush or your clone stamp tool or whatever have you will only affect what's on the current layer, so if I changed my layer blend mode the color and I chose this color, it will do the same thing, but sometimes with, like dark and things like that, it will only wind of perfecting what's on that current layer. So in general, I prefer to do I prefer to have it be let's, just I'll show you what I mean here like it's, like lighten its not going tio it's not going to lighten you can see what's happening down below it's, not lightning in the layer that the girl is on, but if I created a new brush sorry, a new layer and I set the layer blend mode to lighten every guard. Oh, I guess it was lightning! There we go! I'm not proven my point very well, but they will they will wind up interacting differently sometimes, so generally I prefer to do I prefer to do it on the actual layer first brush, but again, there's so many ways to do everything in photoshopped that like if you like one way and you're convinced within you're happy with it, like don't change just because it watched one tutorial that's that's my aaron about how long do you spend on the average composite image and photoshopped? Good question, it really depends on what type of composite like the composite we did this morning, which is a framed composite all the compositing was done you know, within a relatively short period time from there it would be basically like editing the image and enhancing it a little bit some mohr composites take twenty thirty hours to dio I would say on average the time that I spend editing just about every one of my photos is anywhere between three to five hours if it gets more complex something between five to ten hours that's a good question it takes a while but what we're doing here is it's just slightly different from you know taking a taking a snapshot or something like that so you saw that all the time and energy and prep work that went into actually like doing the photography part of it it it only makes sense that you would put his much energy and you know, care into the photo shop in post production as well in my opinion keep taking questions yeah I'm gonna keep taking questions I'm gonna grab from froot loops from a different file and we're gonna bring him in fruit loop ese yeah be with photos and a couple of people were wondering if and how often you save while working on your image good question with cs six which is really great there's an auto save feature and if you guys are on a computer that is relatively relatively fast and has a good hard driving it I would recommend keeping that on so I usually will save after I make it make a large change but with that feature you know, in csx I said it to save every five minutes eso every five minutes it's doing something um yeah that's a really good question and pretty much just let photoshopped do the work for me most of the time that being said I did I work on like a fairly fast new computer and it's never crossed on me, so if you were working on maybe like an older computer or something like that, I would recommend probably saving more often right here in seattle is asking if you wouldn't mind explaining again why you're doing in thiss tiffs instead of ps d's okay, great question it's really just a preference thing psd is in my mind or photoshopped documents that are used for, you know, having having layers I've never really exported out psd that just had one layer on it in my mind it's a little bit tiffs work when you have one layer because you can actually like send like they're a little bit more universal p s t s to me or always when you have more than one layer let's ask what do you guys do? It's there's not a right or wrong answer in here with this question it's it's just what do you guys answer that I usually work with p s tease but in the past I have worked with tiffs and I don't really see a difference, so I haven't really met any switches, but um I mean, I guess you could do either one, it doesn't look that much different yeah, and in the end, I don't really think they are that different. While while miguel was answering, I did think of another reason why I do it and that's because pretty much any commercial job that I've ever been on, you know, working with other clients, they just always say, tiff that s so I believe it's kind of an industry standard because I've never heard someone say like, I'll send you over the ps tease if it's, you know, single images it's in my experience, it's always been tips, so that's probably another reason why I do it, but some of this stuff is just having a really good question. I can answer another question were just cutting out some cereal here great, the pencil pen tools from spain, the name's pento yeah, love it once you finish the composite, do you delete the photos that you don't like and the photos that you don't use? Okay from the actual from my library? I don't know the reason I don't is just kind of same reason it's pretty inexpensive to keep to keep that sort of stuff also being said like I run my company is about teaching photoshopped in photography and oftentimes we'll have to go back and refer to, you know refer to photo shoots or files that I took years and years ago and bring them back so I tend to not really delete things if there's like a misfire and something is like, you know, completely under exposed and there's an obvious like big problem with the image itself then in that case I'll delete those files out immediately but if it's just saving space I tend to not that's probably because by the time that happens I'm probably pretty busy with a new thing and I don't want to spend an hour to like going through into leading files I'm just like next one hundred bucks every three months to buy a new hard drive rather save that like a couple hours a week to go through into leading files but just because I hate spending type of stuff like that, a lot of people would probably rather save one hundred dollars but for me I hate spending top of this stuff we can take more questions awesome well marcus just lor and sweden asked if you will flirt forever if I will flirt forever marcus I will I will flirt until you can't handle fun anymore yeah, you know I think that I was really fortunate because I stumbled into something that I love in photography's it's just amazing fun and how could it how could it not be and that's that's another thing that I was kind of thinking about maybe like a little little bit of encouragement, you know, when someone when you decide to be a photographer like there's there's really no rules out there and there's no nothing that says you have to do this type of photography or you have to do that type of photography so you know, do this do something that you love and I've chosen to do you know, this wacky stuff and I've loved it every day since, so I really don't plan on ever I never stopping its fun people asked me what my hobby is and I'm like my job doesn't count because it's it's pretty much true, right? That's awesome jack greener what movies are thirteen year old friend says, does aaron every use lasso and trace your subjects than the race trace then a race I usually don't use if it's race in this question is referring to like an eraser tool all usually use a layer mask instead of using the eraser tool just because it doesn't wind up giving you quite a bit more flexibility down the road, but I will use a lasso to like we did earlier when I cut that shirt out and then I just did a refined selection if something like really doesn't matter that much you want to use the last tool in general I think you know the pento is a really great tool I don't think that anyone should be afraid of using it but if it's the tool that's going to take twice as long as another tool and it's going to be just a cz good and result I don't do that twice as long tool like I don't have anything to prove is a photoshopped person especially from sitting in my house alone right like I want to get done with that so I can go have a life right like so I'm all about doing whatever you're comfortable with and whatever's fastest what gets the job done all right question from smart photo from earlier today asked do you ever work with your zoom over one hundred percent question often not and that's actually really great question because I work a lot of the time and this doesn't make sense but when I first started working in photo shop I would zoom in quite a bit I would say I'm zoomed in now because we're working on a very small part of the image but for the majority of the editing that I do I found that if I zoom if I'm like too far resumed in you lose like the feeling of the whole image so I actually worked way more zoomed out than a lot of people so quite the opposite of that question but when I first started, I worked zoomed in and I find that I was able to get all the little perfect details, right? But I miss like, the feeling of the image I wasn't ever like editing the feeling of the image. And I think, you know, a couple of weeks ago, like brooke shading is just a wonderful example that she gets she edits in photo shop to get a feeling and cross and I think zoomed out you can see the images, the hole and you can you can do a better job for that whole feeling so yeah, that's why I had it zoomed out. What do you think are some of the biggest mistake this dvd? Nine, six seven what do you think? The biggest mistake or mistakes people make when creating fat? Fake shadows are when element compositing, okay, it seems like shadows or something that's really hard to get right. So what are some easy mistakes that people make? They're totally hard to get right, and you just saw earlier we tried to make a shadow foot that looked horrible. They're hard to get right no matter who you are, if you look at it, you know, like classical paintings like they miss shadows up all the time, like these renaissance painters who everyone you know, like appreciates, like there they're just they're inherently hard I'm not good at creating like every single shadow that I come across like it's you know it's not something that like all of a sudden one day you figure out the trick and you can just do it every time the reason is because there's just there's a lot of depth in shadow but I think the one big quote unquote people mistake people make when creating shadow is they try to do it with like either one layer or one effect on I'll just do like a really really quick example here of a I'm just gonna make a shape and fill it with fill it with color and you try to make a shadow for it all right so we're going to fill this shape with like a orange color and then if I wanted to I could grab a highlight color and then kind of you know paint on their little bit and whoa I just hid photoshopped completely okay command age will hide either a selection or photo shop and it will always ask you the first time you use photo shop which you want to do and it seems like someone else has chosen the option for me to hide all of photo shop so if you do command h you can hide a selection but in this case it hit all photoshopped so there's a there's a ball of warren shoes whatever that I just created um, we're going to create a new layer, and I'll put it under it. Now this is gonna have, like, a a shadow maybe something like that I can hit, right, click and go to transform selection kind of rotate that around. Now, the big the big thing here is that this is the selection has, like, sorry, the shadow is goingto have depth, it's goingto have layers let's, just grab a brush, you'll weaken, grab this color here and just paint under there so that's, you know, that's that guy. I mean, I created this ball, so don't look at the ball it's not supposed to look that great, but the shadow itself it's flat, and it doesn't have any depth right now. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna work on creating it. I'm going to create a couple layers of the shadow and out each time I'm going to give it a little bit more depth. So I'm gonna hit command j again twice, so we're going to three different shadow layers. This first one is going to get a blur and it's getting pretty large blur so option shift option manji is the keyboard shortcut I made earlier that's going to create a, uh how similar? There we go now in this blur it still doesn't look right because all the sun in the bowl isn't sitting on a shadow anymore, but this is like the outer blur something like you would see out here from here to here you got a blur and then from here to here we got a little bit more of a solid line, so let's bring us in I'm going maybe transform this out just a little bit smaller. Now this is going to be on the inside there and this is going to get a blur, but it's going to get a slightly smaller blur and this is going to give it a little bit more of a let's just lower the capacity a little bit, maybe to like seven percent seventy this is going to give it some core some structure and then I want to do the same thing again. We're going to hit command t we're going to make that quite a bit smaller, we're going to bring that in there and this is just gonna be like the heart of our blur were even to change our blend mode something like multiply there we go let's change our passes something like twenty or thirty percent and this isn't really going to get that much of a blur it all there we go waken make that just a little bit bigger all right maybe change our past a little bit more and then I'm going to create another one and really just put that like right down right down there let's bring our ball up just a little bit so we'll be able to see basically turning these layers off and on so we have a shadow now that it's made up of multiple cores so turning this off you can see that shadow doesn't look riel on its own this shadow doesn't look real on its own this shadow doesn't look real and that chatter doesn't look real but adding these altogether gives you something that has much more depth and feel to it and I think that's the biggest mistaking creating shadows is trying to do it in one layer I hope that answers your question I think that's great well as I was answering some questions will notice that I composited it in some of our froot loop is here and there weren't incredibly hard to do as long as you can see that I did wind up using some of our clipping mess so this area of the milk is just a little bit too bright too dark so we brighten it up here this area of here was a little bit too dark too light so we darkened it down there as well and these are just using curves and levels adjustment layers so gonna shift click all those and group them together so like this you know, doing this sort of stuff doesn't have to be that hard I was able to do it while answering questions means it's totally brainless because I'm not that good at multitasking so that's a really good question so if we're happy with what we've got here in in our image as far as our composite goes if jasper does look good we've got about twenty minutes I want to see if this time it looks good if we can't make it look good in a short amount of time what I would probably do find up doing is re shooting but we're going to try to we're going to do what we can to make it look good and then we're gonna edit the images a hole I want to make sure this area's a little bit brighter we did talk about brightening up some of these areas in the photo shop in the end so let's go ahead and do that perfect let's go ahead and get our towel in there and I'm going to bring this fifty percent visible so the number five and then I'm gonna hit command tea to kind of transform it and we're going to bring it right back down now if I wanted to get relatively accurate I could actually like bring this and it command t rotated around scale it where it's actually about the size of this foot right? Because these air things that are supposed to fit on his feet so if I want to size and my you know there's probably no better way than to actually like make it look like they're the size of his feet right? So if you do have like little hints it's pretty good you guys think yeah, if you have little hints like that in your image like you know don't don't really bother guessing with things just like scale it down and match it to his foot like there's you know it's just there to help you all right let's let's see if we can put those right about there now I'm gonna hit the wiki and the number zero and that's going to bring our rapacity back up to one hundred percent next we're going to put a layer mask on there and we're going to go ahead and later mask out everything I do want this wood in there you know the wood is supposed to be there that's why we photographed it on a wood table because hopefully some of this wood grain is going to wind up transferring over there we go and we wanted to make it look like it becomes the wood grain of the table itself remember also that we wound up putting a phil card right next to it which is blocking the light coming from the window because here things aaron shadow they have much less contrast than anything that's going to be in highlight here we go we didn't have a whole lot of space because if you remember at the time when we photograph this there was a giant pool of milk on the floor as well if we didn't have that giant pool of milk on the floor I would have probably I would've probably photographed this on the floor I'm going to rotate around so it looks like it is is flowing with our wood grain there is well ok now we're not looking one hundred percent there just yet let's see let's figure out if that's the placement does that look like a displacement or you know if I put it in something like this oftentimes with composite it's kind of cool because then I could I could bring the ladder back in over top of it so we got that like a little bit of depth and then it's gonna look pretty cool let's try that okay so let's zoom back in and now we need to make this a little bit when you make it look like it's fitz I'm going to turn this back on wide adjustment layer back on we're gonna grab a curves or levels adjustment layer really they're pretty similar sometimes I like curves sometimes like levels but they do just about the same thing let's take our bright point and let's just make that a little bit darker remember this is supposed to be in shadow so we don't want it to look like it's too bright there we go so that's looking quite a bit brighter better already now is our color off yeah it's kind of like not really there what would you guys does anyone have any suggestions? I'm gonna layer mass this a little bit more but does anyone have suggestions on what we could do with our color? Oh I guess I should make that visible huh? Tell me what I should do with my color what? You can't see anything well here it looks like it may be a bit blue a bit blue in the shade it would be obviously totally it looks a little bit blue and maybe it's not as saturated as it could be earlier but we turned this channel mixer on this is like a pretty good way to see if things are too light or too dark but how do you tell if something's too saturated right that's a tough one? So what we're going to do instead I'm going to create something that's going to make everything the same hugh across the board and then we can compare relative saturation sze so to do that we just want to create a new layer and I'm going to hit shift elite and we're going to fill this with a color let's just go ahead and fill this with this nice red color and then I will change this layer from normal down to hugh so what we've got now is everything is the same hugh across the board, all we're seeing is saturate, right? So it's this is supposed to be red that's supposed to be red this is just less red than that, which means that this is in fact less saturated that it's got less of that red in there. All right? Is everyone following me? Very cool. So what we're going to do now is I'm gonna grab our adjustment layer we're going to go up to hugh slash saturation I'm gonna clip this option command ji and I can just bring up my saturation and pretty soon we should start to see especially over here that's actually starting to match like, wow that's really cool let's turn this back off and we can see that in fact it is matching in saturation are here's a little bit off, so we just want to change that a little bit over and pretty soon we have a ground that matches the other ground that's pretty stinking pool that is free dang cool! They're our woes and it's cool for a couple of reasons it's cool because we're not just guessing on that, you know, and anything in photo shop for photography where I don't have to just guess or be inherently good at some technique I love those because they give everyone a chance it evens the playing field you don't have to be like you know the moat sort of photoshopping something to create these good images so something like that what it does is let's just bring the lights down I'm going to fix this well a talk something like bringing all the hues of the same color but that does basically is just kind of like it levels the playing field it makes everything the same hue and then you can see okay I'm just looking at saturation right now is it right or is it wrong that's what I'm doing here with with it being dark and light is it right or is it wrong just like what we did with jasper earlier I'm not trying to do a perfect layer mass job this is not it's not even a good layer mass job but all the sonnets blending in quite a bit better I'm going to continue to do a little bit better of a lame ass job but the whole point is here you know you don't have to be an expert layer massacre you know you don't have to know all the cool tools I mean how many? How many content aware fills or like you know, puppet warps or anything like that? How many? How much of that did I use today like zero, I'm using the brush tool and curves, you know, like all of these tools that have been in there since, like photoshopped five that's, that's what I've been using all day long so, you know, you can really do a lot with with just the basic tools. All right? Let's, go ahead and make this invisible. I'm just going to do a very quick, very quick job cutting this out. We're gonna use our pencil gonna click here and we're going to cut out each one of these will stares real quick. I'm not going to go all the way down the ladder that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. We're going to right click and say, make that a selection, alright, and feather it a little bit or not. There we go and honor later masking and hit shift elite and we're going to fill that with black every government that's just gonna make sure we don't cover that area let's make that invisible as well bringing click up here and right or down there it's going to make a little bar, they're all right. There we go and right back up there and hold down the control of command key and just kind of match that bar. Pretty cool right click in there make that selection it okay so that's the selection now and we're going to cut that out pretty easy just click on the layer mask we want to make it invisible rights we're gonna fill it with black on the layer mask and it's like wow we're making like a very accurate selection of this letter because now we know how to use the pen tool and it is incredibly powerful there we go and even these like subtle curves of the ladder like were able to just nail them which is so cool I can bring this out and then right back in there we go right click in here make that a selection it okay let's just bring this back in here and I'm going to get in shift elite and fill with black there we go we got one more ladder to go so one more letter wrong just click one time two times here we go aaron since those rungs on the ladder are made of plastic and their semi see through if you filled it with medium gray would they become transfer semi transparent you were just the man today I love it I love it let's do it all right here we go let's fill this and I'm gonna hit the sorry what do I want to do you fill that with black first I'm gonna fill with okay now what I'm going to do I am gonna wind up doing your suggested but I'm gonna do it a little bit different way because I've spent time creating these on the layer mask and what I don't want to do is destroy the work that I just did uh so what I'm gonna do instead of going in here in painting this with semi transparent what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go and I'm going to create the all these layers they were in a sari they're in a group right there in a layer mask s so what I want to do is I want to paint this I can't do that right I was going to paint it invisible but I have to actually painted back visible so what I'm gonna do now is these air completely invisible but I'm gonna do is click on my lame ass grab my brush to paint white I'm gonna change my float about ten percent and I'm just going let that let those through just a little bit there we go cool so now we can see through nice attention to detail brilliant yeah, that really does sell it doesn't it? You can see through the latter runs what so cool and I do think, you know anytime you guys are doing a composite or something like that, being able to see through like have that depth in your image it makes it believable like it looks like those flip flops are behind the ladder. Now, if they were just hanging out over here, we wouldn't really have have that bit of detail. All right, I'm just gonna grab a cue saturation adjustment layer let's just do this option command. Gee, I'd like to get that green just a little bit less saturated. Somebody quick on the greens click right over here and just pull down our saturation just on that a little bit. It looks like that's. The tough part is like it looks like it's getting darker, right? But it's not it's, just getting less saturated and that's like that's the hardest thing and that's where I create these layers because it's so hard to tell isn't too saturated or too light like your mind plays with you in those ways because it looks like it's getting darker, but we're just taking away the saturation from it. So that's that's the whole thing why we create these layers so now looking at this, all I see is light and dark. I don't worry about saturation with this one. All I'm seeing is the saturation I don't need to look at the lights in the dark, so pretty cool and if you do have any things that you know, look right in one excuse me? Like if we had anything that, like, really stuck out here like, oh, that doesn't look right it's not a saturated something like that. We would see it here much more easily than without this layer. All right, here we go, let's just make sure that we're looking good. This is just a little bit too, like right there. So that's something we could totally wind up going back in fixing we have anymore questions. By the way, I guess we're coming pretty close to anand. Your huh? Wait, I just have one more for you there's a part of a few people over the last couple of days of while you were photographing and coming up with really cool concepts to shoot. Where do you get your imagination and creativity? Where do you get that inspiration to create these stories in one image? That's a really good question. Well included with the purchase of this course is an eight minute brainstorming video where actually talk about how I get my ideas. I go through several different ways of how I get my ideas and how I come up with these crazy things that being said, I'm just a pretty weird guy to be totally honest, I talked about it yesterday embracing the weird, but you know, the wonderful thing is I can't get inside everyone's mind, but when you spend a lot of time with some people like you figure out deep down like everyone's a little bit weird everyone has those quirky ideas I know they really do they might not have this idea, but they've got their own quirky ideas and I think like trusting yourself and allowing yourself to actually go with those instead of saying no, no, no people will think I'm stupid or that's too silly or the world's not ready to accept it or like, you know, like, I don't think people will like it just go with it. I've created a lot of horrible images that no one liked even myself, but those were still important because they got me to where I am today, where I'm able to like now I know like should I go one way with some of my crazy ideas or a different way with some of my crazy ideas? And in this case I want to do is crazy, but I also wanted to make these images really fun and so how do you do that? Well, you keep things like bright and cheery and happy and you put a guy in a pink innertube in a bowl of cereal, how do you not have fun with that good good questions? All right, that looks pretty dang riel, I'm just I'm digging it what do you guys think it's pretty amazing right? The fact that the towel was just composited jasper's completely in there as well as all that serial really a really cool job oh, maybe too just a little more we could create a shadow right there on the edge of jasper I'm gonna show you guys how to do that because that's you know the cereal bowl would maybe create like a shadow line right there that's gonna help it make a little bit more real so let's bring him back up again we're going to be using a clipping mask there we go let's grab a levels adjustment layer option command ji so this is what's going to help us out working zoomed out we talked earlier about working zoomed in quite a bit now we're zooming out because that's going to show us like maybe you could use a little bit of a shadow there I'm gonna take our bright bright level and just kind of like bring that down just a little bit there we go and I'm gonna hit command eye and then we're just gonna paint this white just right over here and what did you have a question? Well no it was just a suggested and we also discuss the front of the box bringing that up yeah we sure did let's go ahead and take care of that normally I would probably spend more like twenty to thirty minutes doing these things but weaken we can spend our time so lets try this I'm going to grab a curves just one layer let's go ahead and group those we'll just call this final occured adjustment later we're going to brighten this up now I'm clicked right here in the middle and kind of brighten it up now I'm not too worried about is this only visible on jazz for the rest of things because if we get him looking right in, you know the base image that's just the same thing is like starting with a straight at the camera image so you get all that stuff right? And then you're global adjustments on top of it now I'm gonna go to image and then then down to apply image and that's going to be on the lake house to make sure you're looked click on her lame ass go teo image and then down to apply image what we're going to do here is I'm gonna choose merge rgb multiply opacity I'm gonna click on this invert button there we go and what this is going to do is it's going to flatten out our image quite a bit because what is basically doing is taking an inverse snapshot of our image and applying it onto a lame ass this is what our lame ass looks like now that's pretty weird right? Basically this is saying anywhere where this image is light don't have this layer be visible anywhere where it's dark make sure this layer is visible so in the case where we're trying to make our darks brighter and here's our curves adjustment making a brighter so this is old this basically only affects our darks so we can make our dark starker we can make our lord's lighter but this is cool because notice it's making our darks lighter but it's not blowing anything out anymore we're not affecting our light so even if our curves adjustment later and I'm cranking away up here look at all this like nice shattered detail I'm able to fill in but I'm not making her over exposed really really cool way all right so we're gonna bring that up right about there generally you don't want this visible on people's basic it's kind of like makes him look weird but I'm gonna hit command ji group that itself put a layer mask on there and then you know these details like that writing up this this side of the cereal box I could totally do that and this just looks like yeah all right maybe we got some feel like going on that we can do that here is well there we go I'm gonna choose a different method back there bright in this area as well cool good question so that's just kind of like it's kind of like the film light function there in my room well, they changed the name of it didn't they knew my room, the shadows or whatever all right let's grab another curves doesn't later and I'm just gonna bring the general brightness of everything up just a bit and this time I'm gonna grab a lasso tool I just can create something really weird shapes over here onda reason why I'm doing this is because like just it's not perfect so I really like you know, creating things that you are not perfect like if it's hard to say but like you probably created like a light area in a photo before and it just looked like too perfect right? It looked photoshopped it was like, oh he's got a perfect bright halo right around his head like doesn't really do that like like bounces around travels so by creating a totally random pattern like this by scribbling around, you know and then making that's what's visible on your layer there we go and now I'm just going to give it a blur someone hit option shift command g because we've made that earlier and then you go ahead and give this nice blur then what we went up getting is we get it brighter in the areas that we wanted but is what our layer best looks like now it's just a big blur of light and that's kind of like how what works so you can see it is in fact lightning the areas that we wanted it we wanted to lighten but doesn't look like we did it in for a shock, it looks a lot more real and that's that's the whole point is to make it look a little bit more real. If you do one, you can take a large brush, maybe paint black maker face just a little bit darker, so I'd like that contrast between light and dark in her face, let's break let's, carbon curves, adjustment layer and we're just going to pull this down here just a little bit and we could basically do the same thing here, and I'm just going to give it a little bit of and yet, but it's going to be like a weird shaped vignette, all right, so it's going to be just visible there on the edge and then let's give this a gal singular, all right? And that looks pretty good just make sure you don't have it visible over people's faces because it's going to make him look really dark and kind of kind of weird. All right, so a little bit of a vignette is going to help a draw attention to your subject, and if you do, did wantto work with any of your colors and things like that, you could totally do that normally, I don't like to do that sort of stuff if I do, you know, if I wanted to be warmer, cool or something like that, I would usually use gels on my life, but if this is supposed to be a warning morning shop, we could maybe, like, bring our rides up a tiny bit and our blues down a little bit and that's just gonna warm up the shot a little bit. There we go that's a bit too much saturation. So on top of that, we might grab a huge saturation adjustment layer and pop the saturation down. Yeah, well, we're kind of like looking like a vintage style image, aren't we? My kid's not yeah, it's just lower the passing down there. This is also the time in which I would, like, seriously, take some time to, like, make sure you're doing exactly what you want because this is the time that really will affect an image. All right, so let's, look at our before and after with that so there's the before, just a couple of different layers of adjustment layers a little bit of warming this image up, a little bit of fill light and the after we've got something that looks a lot more like a finished ad. We're going to lower the capacity that just a bit down so it looks a little bit more natural and yeah I think that looks pretty good maybe we can brighten up that orange juice a little bit so grab records justin layer great writing that up and then I'm gonna describe with my brush tool and paint they're kind of like in the highlight area grow a large paint brush and paint that dark there just a bit all right everybody and then let's grab a cue saturation adjustment there and I want to make sure that we grab our pinks just like that or reds too if you want to go and let's pump for saturation back up in there especially we can let later mass this out to make sure that he is saturated because again we want to make sure that this is a focal point of the image so let's make sure we bring that in there and then we can paint it a little bit on her shirt as well on some fruit luby's all right and then I would paint this but earlier we talked about zooming in and all this sort of work I usually would do zoomed out just like this because you get you get a really good feeling the asshole so we can see you know we did a lot of work on this image on small little details but here in the end it went from this to that in, like almost no time. And it really is quite a bit big difference. And that that's. Why I really love spending that time. So we're not too unlike anything like crazy, sharpening or hdr or anything like this on this image. This is, we're going to keep it a little bit more on the simple side, but I think it came together really, really great.