Lessons

Lesson Info

Step by Step Composite Images

so as you can see these are some of my elements that I was using to create my composite and we're going to go ahead and do this um I'm gonna go and open up my background and what you'll notice is it's square you can extend things if you want okay here's a sibling's extracted do I have the raw file in here I'm gonna go ahead and open up this and well we extract her like it show you how that's done okay so basically I want to put the little girl on this background correct so I need to extract her off the background all right so I'm gonna go ahead and uncheck the one I did and go back to my original background layer which is just the image okay I did retouch it a little bit so I don't apply your style your actions to it you want this just to be retouched but raw imagery so you can play with it later one of the reasons I shoot with soft contrast this is something I learned from joel is because you can always add contrast to an image it's really hard to take it away so if you shoot with sof...

t light that has a low contrast ratio it's much easier for me to use curves and deep in that than it is for me to take a deep image and try to soften it since one of the reasons and your baby's looking and soft light to begin with but that's one of the reasons why I shoot things with such soft light especially when I'm working with composites is because I can always adjust it later should I need teo I came so getting good at extracting is one of the things you're gonna have to d'oh okay when I took richard's class he made us extract subjects within thirty seconds we had to do it over and over and over again and call we could do it in under thirty seconds and do it well okay so practice give yourself a little stopwatch and say okay how fast can I extract because extracting you khun spend a boatload of time on this and sometimes it's not necessary okay I did not spend that much time extracting her if you're going to do something that's like a billboard size and obviously you need to take a little extra time to extract it but if it's just gonna be on the internet and you're never gonna print it who cares okay so I used the quick selection tool for the most part occasionally all going to other things the quick selection tool acts this is this right here and again I'm going to lose some of you warning warning the quick selection tool acts like a brush so you just brush over the areas you want to select the smaller your brush the more detailed it will select now here is where memory is key in your computer because if you don't have memc how it's thinking thinking thinking thinking if you don't have memory it will take forever to extract something so I strongly encourage you teo get an ss tree drive as as a scratched disk okay and use that when you're compositing in fact just period using photoshopped it will really help you teo moved do things quickly and efficiently and you won't get frustrated because there was nothing worse than waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting go get some coffee coffee coffee okay so you just get a quick extraction here do you need some coffee just it's only can you not really I am such a morning person so now I'm just gonna go in and see that little area of the background back there that's oh yeah my computer's going all right I need to press my all too well now I'm just pressing all the option to take away from my selection okay so I don't I want I've selected all this inside but I don't want this part selected does that make sense because I'm trying to get rid of background oh just maybe what you need coffee okay I'm not going to be super um perfectionist about this but what you you do want to try to be as detailed as possible when you when you extract especially if you're extracting for a composite there's just you'll learn as you do this more and more what you need and what you don't um we're gonna go ahead and go in to refine it refine edge is a part of c s six and greater stephen will probably know this more than me is it c s five the let me just tell you the that refined edge tool is like a godsend thank you heavenly father for doing that because we used to have to go into channels and like do all kinds of funky stuff to make an extraction work well especially like and you still do for things like trees and leaves and stuff like that there's a cherry tree right by my son's daycare the other day I was it was like one of those stormy mornings where the clouds are just kind of filtering the light and let me tell you that tree looked amazing and I seriously wanted to photograph it but what stopped me was the fact that I would have to extract all the leaves e just give me a nightmare so all I'm doing right now is just kind of picking out little parts of her hair that I know the refine edge tool will need help with so I'm just kind of this is kind of just experience and knowledge so I'm saying I'm not extracting everything because the refined edge tool is going to come in and help me with this so I just kind of did a quick selection around the little girl then I clicked down here the refined edge tool go ahead and copy my settings if you're interested in keeping this because these settings tend to work quite well for what for extracting a subject off a background okay this edge detection tool is one of the most valuable things in refine it because what I can do is just under that is just paint around my mask I just pressed k to get into black and white mode and it will pick up the hair see that so it's this is why we're fine I just like god's gift to the planet it's extracting the little fuzzy bits of her hair okay to make a mean you khun get peach fuzz off of someone's arm that's how awesome the refined edge tool is okay so I can kind of select I can rub rub the refined edge tool around the edges of her hair I could even do it on the edges of this little scarf because the scarf is a little bit see through okay so I'm gonna go ahead and just do it really quick and then once you like how it works you just put on a new layer mask like that oh my poor computer and there you have it she has been extracted off the background and you can see all these little details in her hair has been preserved okay that refinish shoal is just such a blessing so now I'm gonna press my wiki grabber and put her on the scene okay doesn't quite fit does she size is key so I can oppress command tea and command zero so I can see everything here and I'm just going to start dropping her down to the size that I think is a pro po it's about right don't you think a little smaller this is where you just have to touch and feel okay so I've dropped her in obviously she doesn't fit okay she's the wrong color the scarf looks like it's flying off into nowhere there's no shadow okay this is a bad composite this is where the artistry begins okay and this is where everybody gets hung up there like how do I proceed from here now what you'll notice is when you bring in a mask you see that little fine white line right there that's the edge of my mask here so you typically have to go in and fix that with your brush tool it's just part of what I'm asking is all about and painting in that to get rid of it otherwise it will show up on your print oh look she disappeared um it will show up on your prints so be wary of that as you as you do your mask and sometimes I'll just go ahead and paint in the entire thing you could also apply your layer mask if you wanted to um you can go up to your layer and right click on your mask and set applying layer mask and that'll apply it I'm getting complicated stephen's going are you confused nervous because you can never go back to come back later and see something like oh I missed this totally so I you're absolutely right scares me he's like I'm scared to do that but as you know I'm just talked to senator let's just destroy this thing that is absolutely right and I am going to go back so I don't lose my mask but you can't and there is a reason to do this and I'll show you later okay so I'm gonna go and press command z how I blend her into the background is interesting it has to do with art okay I'm going to go ahead and command j that layer so that I preserve my mask okay now I'm going to apply the layer mask okay so this is no longer part of my composite I have applied the mask and she's just sitting here on the on the foreground okay so to get her to look good I am going to treat this like a painter would treat a painting when you first paint you draw your outline with your charcoal right then you go in and you shade and black and white to get your shadow and shading correct right just think about painting a painting of a person then you go and you do your initial color blocking then you go in and you pay the details right that's how a painter paints from from back to forward so that's what we're going to do we're going toe paint her into the background and this is a richard start of aunt technique okay he's the one who taught me how to do this he does it huggable it better than I do but it still works was a way I do it okay so I'm going to make a couple copies of this three of them and unchecked them all this is going to be my charcoal drawing my charcoal shading my color blocking in my color detail okay my losing yet he's only got one trait this layer first thing that's gonna happen command shift you turn into black and white okay now I'm going to go up into image adjustments shadow highlights I want to create a drawing so I'm gonna start playing around with my shadows really making them intense upping my mid cone cone contrast to create that kind of drawn look and this is just playing around with stuff sometimes it's more sometimes if less okay I'm just kind of trying to create that chalk or that charcoal outline so I just this is totally feel thing just spots with kind of just wanted to get that high definition look that hr look in black and white is all I'm going for okay color christian is doing what you doing joyce okay so that's okay it's pretty decent I could play around with it some more and sometimes I spent hours doing this yeah it's kind of relaxing we're after awhile okay so then I press ok and put this layer in soft light mode there's my little charcoal outline drawing of her okay now she's in black and white I could easily apply a color effects on an effects mode to that a color overlay to her okay in a color that's from the background my going too fast I'm probably losing some stuff on the internet so I apologize if I'm losing you so now she's more like the background correct press okay put this in soft light mode again so now my black and white has more of a c p a tone to fit with the background I'm not really liking the color it's a little too brown for me I'm going to go more with a deeper richer tone and here that's to me is a little bit better hey just slightly darker and play around with this stuff that's my initial black and white shadow highlights layer this second layer I'm going to do it again okay shift command you shadow highlights same thing creating that sense of tonal shading teo just just play with this I mean this you want to bring up the shadows okay you want teo make sure you can see the detail and everything and you don't want your highlights too bright you just want him enough to create some definition there okay suppress okay and again put it in soft light mode see how we're building now what you can do is mask this layer I love how their office in your forward going this is awesome and start taking out too much let's go thirty percent and start removing some of this layer to bring back the other layer at the bottom so it looks like she's heading down in the in the background does that make sense okay then I go up to this larrys is one of my color layers here okay this I will put you can either you can play around with us you can either put this one in soft light mode see how she's starting to blend you can start decreasing the capacity to get your colors the way you want it again you can mask this out and brush back to bring that tonality in then you can put this one in normal mode decrease the opacity and boy she looks like she's blended in with that background lot better doesn't she now there are no shadows at her feet yet we need to look like the light like she's gotta shatter their feet okay so what I would do is come back down below this layer add in a new layer beneath her and you set my history state remember we learned that yesterday I would set my history state on this layer using their art history brush I would go in and start at around twenty or thirty percent painting out I'm in screen with my multiple screens painting in my shadow where to go I think it's because I'm in art history freshman oh that's because we're not pulling through okay the other way to do this would be to go into brush mode regular sorry guys I lost my track through the other way to do this would be going a brush mod but put the brush in multiply this is regular brought good old fashioned brush but the brush and multiply mode pick a deep dark color it's it's my mike has my keyboard things that's wonderful something he's popping up on my screen used to um pick a darker tone from the image and then start painting in shadow oh for crying out loud stop it I'll move it up so it doesn't happen like that okay I'm not really worried about where it's going at this point because I can always mask it back out all right so I'm going to make the shadows deeper and richer down this is totally like there's a thousand ways that's going to cat and this is a very rudimentary way to do it so just keep that money but I just kind of wanna paint in shadows they're obviously notice how when I meet a few camera guys are gonna freak out on me right now but if you look at the shadows at your feet I have too much light on me right now but the shadows on your guys his feet are darker as they get closer to your feet do you see that like if you put your foot close to the ground you will see the shadow is darker right next to your feet then it kind of fades away as it goes away from your foot you will study these things okay so that's kind of the look we're trying to come up with here and the reason I'm doing it behind her is so that it goes underneath her body does that make sense so you can literally just kind of paint in shadows and obviously this is way I'm just scribbling right now you can scribble as much as you want nice and dark next tour and then slowly faded out as they go away from her okay then you can mask that layer out then you can start just kind of slowly taking it away where you don't want it to be obviously it's going to be darker right underneath her there's not gonna be any shadow over here right I messed that up a little bit the joys of doing things and when you're not used to doing them a certain way can't go away go away go and it's going to start to look a lot more real like she's grounded she still looks like she's floating do you see that because the shadows aren't dark enough near her feet so I would go back to my layer in brush mode and start just painting in close darker darker darker underneath her to make it feel like she's really grounded next to that earth okay then what I did and obviously I'm not spending nearly as much time as I should on this because there are issues with it and problems that I but this is I'm just trying to teach you the basic techniques of this that you've been going to play with it things are happening here colors or getting funky on me I'm not liking it so I would go back and try to fix all that okay the scarf here I would do this with the puppet warp tool okay I could go into a huge feeling the puppet work tool but it's a really advanced techniques so I'm going to kind of not do that at the moment but you can use just the forward you can use liquefy to do this you can use free transform and warp to do this okay there's all kinds of ways you can make this go downhill because you can see in the image I made the scarf actually go down the hill ok she is still not quite the color tone that I want her she's not quite warm enough for the scene so one of the ways to fix that is to you know put in effects on her another way to do it is to change the overall scene okay you can add a solid color to the image in whatever color you want was just too brown okay and then put that in soft light mode to give it that deeper richer darker everything fits kind of feel you can reduce the opacity of it okay now she's starting to fit a lot more into our background isn't she most of compositing is making whatever you want the images that you want to put together to make one making them fit color light atmosphere in size if you think of that acronym every time you do a composite you're well on your way to success like I said a lack of technical skills is going to drive you up the wall you'll say you don't want to do that I don't know this I know I want to do this I know I want to do this in the shop but I don't know how I strongly encourage taking a photo shop class studying with someone like richard or tom rouse or joel grimes who really understands and will focus on a class entirely on photo shopped for you to build these skills okay but what I'm showing you is pretty basic compositing skills the other thing we could do is if we liked the way the background looked on and we didn't want to apply the color effect of that I could just clip mask I'm just pressing option between the two layers and I can clip it into just her so if I put up the a passing on this you can see her changing see how much that blended her into the background okay so now all of a sudden things were starting to look better I still think I want the background to be a little warmer so I am going to go ahead and duplicate this layer okay and then um apply it in soft light I'm gonna move it down beneath her so that it's just on the background do you see what I did and then reduce its opacity a little bit and things were starting to blend I'm dealing with color now making sure the color tone of everything fits and works let's get our little raccoon shall that's how good he was pretty straightforward where is he there is did I extract him already I did okay so this little guy I literally did that I didn't do anything fancy I drew a little lasso tool around him and just remember I liked it and and drug him over okay that was it so too just to show you that briefly again I took this tool went and I like this okay let's just go right along there like that papa okay good command j does like that that's all I really did okay I'm gonna go ahead and take what I did use my wiki drag him over hold it over the image that I'm working on and pop him in he's a little big just a little bit getting zoom in so I can see him fire away questions at me as I'm talking here I'll try to answer as I work you're free transform I'm in free transform yeah I should I should talk as I go huh sorry did you say you want to take a question while while you work I can tell you the question while we can okay I have a question from mike the french guy mike the french guy yeah does he have a french accent he doesn't know who is the french name and a french accent mike wants to know what license you by further to stock photos and went on to say that he was looking last night did not want to spend two hundred dollars on a stock photo yeah that's expensive I wouldn't spend two hundred dollars on a stock photo either especially one personal work just just do personal license you know if you're doing it for a client you'll probably need a commercial license if that makes sense you're selling the work you're going to need a commercial license does that follow if you're not selling the work it's personal ok okay so basically all it is I took little mr raccoon here and shoved him behind my color overlay so that he has the same color tone as the background all right so now I'm just going to mass came off a little bit and this is probably giving sweets stephen over there a little bit of a heart attack because he's like you know your mask group but this guy is a little different okay this guy I can I'm not really worried about him because he's going to be so buried in the background that it's not gonna matter to me okay but the same techniques apply to him as faras blending him in a cz faras blending him in that apply to oh I want wrongly it's totally what happens is you will be in photoshopping something happened like what just happened it makes you a stud or any like look atyour layers make sure nothing selected preska mandy and that I like get whatever selected un selected because nine times out of ten we're trying to work with a brush or something and it's not working it's because you have some area of your image selected and photoshopped all it wants to do is brush in that area so your brush won't work anywhere else so just keep that in mind is can be quite frustrating okay well mr raccoon here I'm this is it just goes to show that you could be very rudimentary about how you blend a subject into your background if you want it doesn't have to be this amazing perfect rendition every single time okay so he still doesn't look like he belongs he's a little too much isn't he so I would do the same technique that I did with the little girl through the black and white layer the shadow highlights do the second one soft light mode mask it in just a faded in okay and then start making sure his color tone is correct and then what I did with him is I actually faded him ah lot okay it's looking better already isn't it just by fading him in the background then I confront with my mask a little bit more it's already working isn't it and I'm not doing like him a lot ok this is basic stuff here it's very destructive actually it's not quite as photoshopped gurus who were watching are probably going e but I guess what I want to say is you don't have to be an expert I am not an expert at photo shop at all happened to a few skills enough to be dangerous and I make it work okay I guess hopefully that inspires you that you could be dangerous too and make it work and the whole point of this workshop is for you to not be afraid to be creative for you to just grab hold of what you want to dio and let your heart take you where it wants to take you okay so to finalize this image or at least get it in a more final state what I did was add fog and the grasses okay so literally grasses are actually really fun I have a bunch of brushes um we're on my brush pre sets her there I have a bunch of brushes did I load them maybe I didn't load my grass brushes of those those are in bridge I think I put them in this folder I always work on my other computer at home so I had to like move everything over leave brushes here's my spoke brush we're gonna need that and we're also going to need my let's do specialty brushes and then you can make brushes in photo shot just so y'all know um a lot of people get like oh how do you how do you you know you know how do you do that how do you make smoke or how do you do a grass in richard's class he taught we've went out photographed a bunch of grasses out a field and we brought them back turn into black and white and turn them into brushes that we could young use so there's totally e do any photo shop tutorials online I mean you've shorts on youtube somewhere how to do that these are just things you need to we don't want black smoke um these are just things you need to little techniques you need to learn and photoshopped that will get you where you need to go so I'm gonna go ahead and pick for this brush a background color of the fog ok and right now I'm about forty percent which is too much I'm gonna go down to twenty and then I could just start in effect that's too light I think are too dark I need to go lighter I'm gonna go with white and start you see the fog coming in okay I want you to I want you to see that so I'm gonna go up to forty percent see how I can paint the fog in now all of a sudden that little raccoon is starting to look much more real okay I can reduce the opacity that layer if it's too much just make it blend a little bit more at some more fog over my little guy all of a sudden now I'm creating the sense of depth I can create a new layer of fog above the little girl no clipping mask please that says this is the kind of stuff and photoshopped it'll drive you crazy and be like why am I only doing fall over my kid because it's clipped okay I can do fog in front of her too much drop it down to ten percent just a little bit of fog and front make it blend and voila now we can start adding our grass layers go back to brushes let's see here I have some cool grass is in here somewhere where they mmm not load those ofus italy okay I'll just use someone's laughing at me in the background I can hear it is it because I said so if italy okay this is the grass brush that actually comes with photo shop I'm not actually sure that I brought my grass bushes which is kind of a shame that's okay yeah I don't think I did shoot um you could just start so pick a color from the grass is okay and at one hundred percent I'm just going to start layering in grass changing the size but changing the color okay I mean I'm getting very very second grade about this right now but this is pretty much what I did with my grass brushes to create the grass in the foreground ok lots of different colors okay clamp it altogether make it blend by um putting a layer mask on it going back to my soft brush and just very lightly says officer the grass is too little too dark for the uh foreground but I guess I think you see my my drift here I think you understand where I'm going with us and then so I just started clumping grass in front of her and helps blend into the background helps those shadows as well and it helps her look like she belongs in the environment it's that sense of size and perspective okay so what I can do is now that I mean this is obviously not finished but I'm just in the nick of time I'm gonna go and move on I would save this as my little girl alone salone sample we'll just do that okay then I would make a new layer on top that's all the other layers combined shift command d we'll smash that's sorry shift shift option command is that what it is yes will preserve your layers underneath but create one layer of everything on top that makes sense now is the fun part filter oil paint bring the shine down to zero up your style and just make your cleanliness how you want it was even close to this up your scale play with these and what you'll see is her and her brother start to look like an oil painting now see the grass and now how everything is starting to blend and look like an art piece it's two uniforms okay photoshopped does though it's a filter is just going to make it all uniform and in the algorithm that it's supposed to be in okay so keep that in mind but this is fantastic prepped for painter okay so if you do this with your image I overdid it a little bit with this one but now all of a sudden you can see it has a painted quality to it if I want to bring back some details in the face had I duplicated this layer even so with all the other layers beneath it I can go ahead and mask back the details in the face just a touch to bring back the face so we don't lose that and maybe the hands and feet okay do you see what I just did so now all of a sudden it's starting tohave an art painterly feel and I can save a smashed layer of this so now I'm gonna compress the whole thing save it to be pain already now I can take this into corral and start making magic with it but I have a base layer the whole thing is painted now all I have to do is go in and really give it that spark with painter okay which is what we're going to do next not a story with this image we're going to play around decide which image we want to use and then we're going to also talk about putting gel mediums on your printed campuses that you order from your lab do you have questions yeah stevens got questions one of the techniques I used to kind of pull everything together and combine it is put a texture on top of a great idea but would you do that if you're planning on painting it because it seems like I not inflict probably not um the texture will get lost and once you start painting but for photo composites yeah we could have totally left this is a photo composite I mean obviously I'm in a hurry it's not quite as finished as I would as I wanted it to be this took me about two and a half to three hours to complete and so here I am trying to cram it into an hour but if you we left it as a photo composite a texture would totally blend it together and make it look have it that pulled together look and it's a great idea so thanks for that that's a great recommendation if you want to paint it chances are the textual just get lost in the painting any other questions internet questions I'm sure a lot of people are lost and confused so I apologize in advance for that but like I said in the beginning it's so hard to appeal to all every level of audience because some people are going to really advance this so people are going to be I'm sure there's people who are way more advanced in photoshopped than me out there so you know I think people are at least in the chat rooms air following along well correction no well had a question actually about the tablet that you're using she said can you change can you use it to change the a pass ity you're the pen that you're using instead of changing it in the in photo shop yeah I mean you can you can set your tablet to do a mary out of functions if you want this tablet is actually a screen like when I'm painting I will look at my tablet to paint it's a sin teak tablet it's the next line up in the pro line of tablets that lets you actually see what your painting as well talk about next you have tohave a welcome talent to pain you can't paint with a mouse I mean you can try but it's going to be a disaster is going to drive you crazy so what comes there are very important but yeah you can set up your functions and you're welcome tablet under the welcome driver to do anything you want okay do you have do you want to do some more content or we have just a couple more minutes or should we just questions yeah take questions like somebody wants to see something else any questions you guys have I have a question here from trish picks who said when you're doing a fine art piece for a client do you have a deadline on it or what if they don't like the crop and wanna crop it or what is the process can you talk us through that a little bit yeah do more paintings for clients than I do composites actually I mean most you know most of my composites air just done for personal work if someone did commission me for uh composite the these air on display all over my studio so they kind of know what they're going to get and they see something they love like oh I want to do that and so we'll do something similar for them and you know if a client told me that didn't like it I'd be devastated honestly I don't know what I do I try to change it and that's one of the reasons not to be quite so destructive in your editing so you can go back and change things should the client not like it like for for you know joel grimes is a commercial photographer and art directors are notorious for being like no I want you to change this I want to change that so hee is very particular in keeping everything intact so he can go back and fix what the art director doesn't like so if you're a commercial photographer it's something to take into account with if somebody wanted something different I would certainly try to change it to their liking usually it's minor things they know what I produce they know the kind of art that I like to create so chances are they're going to want me to create something similar that I'm used to creating so like when someone I have a client who commissioned me for a painting and they came back to review the painting and dad's hair is really curly and so I kind of accentuated that in the painting and she's like no that's too much I don't I don't like that so I had to go back and re paint the hair a little bit to tone it down and then they loved it so they'll be minor things like that but if a client came and said they didn't like it all that I would wonder why the heck they hired me do you know I'm saying yeah ali your paintings do you show them the digital file before you produce a canvass for them or yes yes I show them the original image and then the painting so they see the difference because sometimes they can't see everything you've done because the digital version it's harder to see the details with an actual print you can walk up to it like look at all the little details but with a painting in a digital format sometimes that's not easy to dio so what I'll do is open up pro select and show the original proved image that we chose to paint and then I'll show them the painting let that fade in and that creates the most impact yeah yes before I print it I want to get approval on it to make sure that they like it on like I said that same client had she just wanted the hair tone down a little bit so we tone it down I sent her a digital proof of it and she approves like oh yeah that's much better then we went to print yeah just a technique on doing that if you do have highly complex file I mean they get upto two gigabytes easy and just taking your system down so what all generally do is kind of versions so have a build file take a snapshot bringing into another one then you just have that shot so if you ever have to go back you're not using the whole file at once great and you khun kind of have these virgins to go back to where you need to this is why I love teaching because I learned so much to that's awesome that's a great idea and it's something that you're like well yeah dog but you don't think of it unless somebody tells you so that's the hardest part thank you that's a that's a great idea and would save you a lot of time and energy and memory on your system um you just when you have a problem in photo shop ask yourself what if what if I did this what tool can I just go down your tulips and say ok would that work with it okay blending mod's okay without work without the list I gave you sometimes that list a layer maskell work or a layer blending mode or an inner shadow and inner glow something like that will work for what you needed to dio so just think through that about what the tools and photoshopped do photo shop is basically like a tool kit it's like your husbands or girlfriends or whoever's tool chest in the garage there's a wrench there's a screwdriver there's a drill there's all kinds I mean the drill in the phillips screwdriver to the exact same thing just in different ways so you just have to figure out what tool works for the problem you have