Lessons

Lesson Info

Building a Dress in Photoshop

So this is our main shock that we talked about, and I thought she looked wonderfully powerful in this picture. So I'm going to bring her into photo shop and we'll go through this a little bit faster because some of them are pretty similar techniques to what we've just done with a little bit more blending involved. So we've got our main shot, and now we're going to find the others. So that was a failure. Then we have this one. Great. So I'm going to use that and that's going to cover part of the dress, and now I'm going to find the rest. So we had this one. I liked that one a lot. So pulled that one in. And I just like to start by pulling in the images that I feel I will need in the final image. Okay, on the other side, I think that one was really great. That one was crazy, but we're going to use it anyways, so let's go with these two. So what we're going to do is if we have enough time to blend, all of them will blend each one of these images and warped them into place and then start t...

o blend them. Now. The reason why I wanted to do this with the white facing how it Waas is because this is how it's a little bit more difficult to work with an image like this, because the white ISS so harsh on one side of that frame versus the other. We have a lot of shadows to deal with in terms of blending, maybe a highlight into a shadow and how to overcome that. So let's start with our first initial image here. This is our main shot, and this is where we want to decide a couple of things like, Are we going to play with her waistline, for example? Because I had a dress on her that was not really address. She didn't have as defined of a waste as she would if she were in an actual dress. So this is where I might go in tow, liquefy and start to just give her her shape back. I don't like to distort people's bodies in terms of like making people skinnier and stuff like that, but I do like to give people their shape back because obviously a model would not appreciate me taking that from them. So I'm going to duplicate my layer, just duplicate you, and then I'm going Teoh, go ahead and liquefy. That now liquefy on my computer is a very intensive program. So I always like to section it off with the rectangular marquee tool and say, OK, this is the area that I'm working in. So I'm going to just liquefy that portion that way. Don't worry about the whole image loading. So I'm going to use this on the forward warp tool and the forward warp tools going to allow us to click and drag pixels around the frame very much like the warp tool, except that we're in liquefy now. And so what I want to do is I can make the brush size bigger, and we know things like that. That was too big. I can still use my square brackets within liquefy, so I can just sort of nudge this in just just a little bit. I just want to make sure that she does have the figure that she was meant toe have here. I can hardly even see it on that side. I don't even don't even know what I'm doing. Oh, yeah, that was okay. And say OK, so we're just giving her a little bit more figure. And now I want to start to add the fabric. So I'm going to start with the left hand side because that's the easiest for blending because of how light it is on that side. So now I'm going Teoh gonna select this area of the fabric. And again, I am never I mean, I don't think still you've ever seen me select right along the edge of something to cut it out. I mean, I don't know who has time for that, but it's not me. So I'm going to do a big selection just like that and copy it going the wrong way and paste it. Okay, so let's see how this matches up. Remember, we talked about the anchor point and where exactly that fabrics going to go and how it's going to blend. So if I were to put this down on the bottom, you know, right along the edge of the bottom of the frame there and move it over, I think that would actually be a really good point for it to blend. So Let's try that. We might need to work that we might need to move it a little bit. Maybe we crop the frame up a little bit just to make it sit on the edge. Whatever we need to dio, let's go for it. So we'll create a layer mask, be for our brush tool. Take that opacity up, size up. And now we can do a really quick eraser here. Okay, well, that worked out way better than I thought it would. All right, so we've got that done nearly perfectly there, Um, with little to no effort. But I still think that it's not exactly where I want it to be. I would rather this portion blend with where her hip comes outs than she has a princess figure instead. So I'm gonna warp that into place. So I'm going to click on that image and then transform and warp. And now, just with this little top point here, I'm just gonna stretch that up and blend it a little bit higher, maybe to their and we can play with the overall shape a little bit leader. But I really like how that looks. I think that it blended perfectly. And the only reason why it blended perfectly is because I'm using such a big fuzzy brush. If I hadn't been than it would not have blended perfectly. Let's pretend like it didn't I would take my opacity down on that brush, and I would just go ahead. And now I'm just painting black on my layer mask. I would just erase a little bit at a lower opacity so that it all blends perfectly together. All right, let's do one more piece because now we're going to get into different shadows happening. Each of the pieces of fabric had a much different flow to them, so let's find a way already opened it, didn't we? So let's find in here this one. This is our problem, child. So let's take our piece of fabric and lend it by copying it. No, been there and paste it. So with our move tool, we can move that into place. Now we have a lot of latitude here. It's not like we have to match up the background like I'm following this thing, and this has to go here and won't a black seamless backdrop. Not only that, it's a piece of solid fabric that we can easily cut out. So I'm gonna blend it over here. Now you can see the major problem that's happening. We have We have such a gap in between our fabric. If we have a gap in our fabric than how will it ever blend? Well, we can rotate this fabric slightly. We can work this fabric down if we need Teoh. Let's do a little bit of both. So I'm going to go to free Transform, which is command or control T and on the corner edge here, I'm just going to wait till his two little rounded arrows pop up and then rotate this to pull that down here. I'm just matching it up generally with her waist and say, OK, and then we'll warp it. So transform, warp. And I want to just move this out. Look at that suddenly works, even though it doesn't, we're making it. Okay, I'll say all right to that. And now I'm creating that layer mask with our brush tool capacity back up, and I'm going to start to blend. Okay, now, this is where we hit the problem. Like I mentioned where we have the dress. First of all, there's still a gap. That's something I need to address. But now we have a shadow going into a highlight. This is where dresses don't blend. The first piece is always the easiest because it's the most neutral piece of fabric coming in here. However, we have this problem, we're gonna fix it in a couple of different ways. One is to lower the opacity on this layer and just brushed that away just so we can start toe see the rest of the dress through. Okay, we've got that done. But now we need to make a decision. Are we going to pull the shadow up or pull this highlight down now? I personally don't prefer to pull shadows up because then you're looking at a lot of noise if you have to pull it too far. Making something darker, however, is pretty easy to dio If you haven't blown your image out and again a really good reason to work with the raw images. Well, that way you're not working with a J peg and having a loss of quality there. So I'm going to go in and I'm going Teoh on layer one not on my layer to because I don't want to make that darker. I'm going to either paint in the darkness on that dress, which is an option where you can just use a blank layer, paint in the black, and then you have that, or I'm going to do my usual method here of selecting where this area might want to be a little bit darker. Just through there, right Click, refine edge and father Quite a bit. I think that looks good. 101 130 pixels there. And now I can create my curve. And we're gonna do one more thing after this to blend it a little bit more. Ah, yeah, Look at that shadow popping in there much butter. So now that's going to blend a lot nicer. We're gonna do one more thing to blend this, which is to use the heel brush tool for blending. I love to use the hill brush tool for something like that, especially for a dress. So first, I think I actually wanna warp this piece of fabric up because I don't want to keep stretching the other one. If I don't have Teoh so we'll split the stretching, and I will warp this underlying piece of fabric over that way. I'm gonna end up cutting this dress off over here, so I'm not gonna worry about this portion, but yeah, I think I like that a little bit better. So now we've got all these things happening in this area of the dress. We have lines and shadows and craziness happening, so I want to fix that. Now. I'm not going to composite the whole dress on because I know that I don't have enough time at this moment to do that. But this process will be the same for every piece of fabric that I would add on at the end of the once. The whole dress is composited. That's when I would go ahead and duplicate my layers and merge those layers. And I would do that. So now I can use the heel brush tool across all of my layers without having to worry about sampling from one layer and using it on another layer and all of that. The shortcut for duplicating emerging your layers is command option shift E or control. Ault, shift E for a PC shortcut and now I'm going to use the heel brush tool. So the hell brush tool healing brush tool. I never knew that difference, though. The healing brush tool is just on your left hand toolbar gonna make that size bigger, and I'm gonna take the hardness down. And this works the same way as the clone stamp tool in that you will option or ault click to define your source point when I choose a source point that's saying that these pixels that I choose instead of cloning where you're replacing pixels with, um, you're choosing those pixels and in blending them into what already exists in the fabric or in the image. So I'm gonna choose from a very neutral spot. I'm not gonna choose a point over here where there's highlight and shadow happening right next to one another. That wouldn't make a lot of sense. So instead, I'm going to go from the shadow portion where it's really, really blended, all to click. And now this area here is bothering me. We have a really bad shadow happening, so I'm just going to start to click and drag to blend, and I just start to kind of color over it. Just paint, paint, paint, and it's OK if it looks bad to start because it will keep blending. So there we go, but not together. And we're just working with all those shadow and highlight variations that don't look so good. Cover that up a little bit. Okay, so now we're starting to blend that area. Maybe this little dots too bright, and that's how I would continue on. And this is how I get rid of wrinkles in my fabric and my dresses because I definitely don't iron anything ever. So I always rely on the heel brush tool to get rid of that. And the great thing is that if you use the heel brush tool over and over again and you are continuously, he'll brushing something. It's going to give your image quite a painterly luck. And I started doing that a long time ago to create sort of a smudging brushstroke effect, and I really like how that looks just as a stylistic choice. Okay, so I'm going Teoh, um, end, but there, um and we'll do a little bit more of this kind of thing in the next editing segment as well